This was a sweet corner of the world all right, the valley that cradled Moonbow Lake, with its red-siloed barns tucked like so many play-farms amid the softly rolling countryside that unfolded among the Jurassic outcroppings of schist and shale, and its thickly shaded forest glades, the tall, dark fir trees whose tips pointed like village church steeples toward the heavens. Until now, for Leo “the country” had meant only the hot, insect-teeming tobacco fields of upper Connecticut, arid, dusty acreage enclosed by endless miles of suffocating mosquito netting that was worse than a winding sheet for those unlucky fellows destined to spend their years sweating breathlessly beneath it, while so-called fresh air was the stuff you got in the cement-floored, rusty-fenced playground at the Institute, with its jail-like steel-pipe jungle gym and oil barrels to play on.
But this – this was Longfellow land, the forest primeval and its murmuring pines and the hemlocks, and the sweet green meadow where Leo lay was as close to utopia as he was likely to get – his own private domain, as he’d begun to think of it. It was almost as if he had been drawn to it, he decided, because getting here wasn’t easy. This is how you did it: You left Jeremiah and walked up the line-path to the cow-crossing, where the sagging rack of mailboxes defied the force of gravity, then turned left down the Old Lake Road, passing along the northern flank of Indian Woods, laced with a confusing network of paths, a maze that – if you knew its secrets – eventually brought you out at the Wolf’s Cave, where the Senecas held their sacred campfires (and where the uninitiated didn’t dare venture). But if instead of entering the woods you walked on a little farther up the road, past Pissing Rock, you came upon a pair of decrepit posts and, bisecting them, the beginnings of an old trace, a grassy track that ran between two rows of tall pines to form a wide, shaded lane covered with fallen needles, a soft, luxurious carpet under your feet. At the other end of the lane lay the meadow, contained on one side by the pond, and on the others by a palisade of dark fir trees, their apexes piercing the bright-blue sky, seeming now to impale the fleecy clouds, shepherded east to west by a light breeze. The blue-green grass, dotted with buttercups and daisies, grew tall, so that, on his first foray to the meadow, he had almost missed the pond altogether – a body of water no more than five hundred feet in length, half that across, still as glass at the near end, at the far stirring itself and falling into rapid motion where its outlet crossed a weir to fret its way in a noisy babble some fifty yards to the ruins of Kelsoe’s icehouse and the small cove called the China Garden, filled with lotus-like water lilies.
There was another feature of this place that made it special, however, that in an odd way made it seem to belong to him, to be his personal property. Off to his right, on the far side of the meadow, partly hidden by the stand of sentinel pines, he could make out the bay window in the “tower” of the old Steelyard place, the Haunted House. The house had struck a profound chord in him that first evening when Hank Ives had driven him past it in the jitney. And afterward – there had been something to do with the house in his dream, something connected with Pa Starbuck’s story of the Moonbow Princess, only Leo hadn’t been able to figure out what it was.
What he did know was that there had been just such a turret window in the house over Rudy Matuchek’s butcher shop on Gallop Street. Leo had hated that house – his house – but the window was different. The window had belonged to her, to Emily, his mother – and as he looked over to the Steelyard property now, it was almost as if he' expected to see her sitting up there, just as she used to when he was a child, waiting for him to come home from school, with Butch beside her, waiting too.
Now Butch was buried under a tree behind the garage, and Emily, she was buried – well, Leo didn’t know where, because he’d never seen her grave, or Rudy’s, for that matter; though he knew they were buried somewhere together, somewhere at Saggetts Notch – Mrs Kranze had told him so – hadn’t she? Funny about Mrs Kranze, whose face he’d known so well, but could no longer remember -along with all the other things he had trouble recalling.
He turned from the house and his eye fell on his violin case. The sight of it prodded him: he had promised Miss Meekum that he would practice every day. Carefully he opened the case and lifted out the violin; then, seated there beside the pond, he began to play, softly, for no other ears, his bow moving and angling as it coaxed sweet notes from the hollow heart of the instrument.
He had played for half an hour or so when, suddenly, he stopped, his concentration broken by the rapturous trilling of a bird somewhere above his head. Was it a mockingbird? Certainly it possessed an extraordinary repertoire. Leo craned to find it: yes, there it was, feathered gray and white, perched above him, its throat throbbing with song. How was it that such a plain, un-likely-looking creature could produce such a glorious melody?
“No rhapsodies in this house!”
He heard the detestable voice saying the hated words.
“Shut up!” he shouted, sitting up and addressing the air. “Go away! Leave me alone!”
The cry sprang from his lips before he realized it; he glanced around in embarrassment. Then he threw himself back on the ground and covered his head with his arms, lids squeezed tight, while the same voice rang inside his head.
It grew momentarily chilly and, opening his eyes, Leo shivered as an errant cloud swept across the face of the sun, casting an unwelcome shadow. He peered upward, half-expecting to see a large-winged roc, Sinbad’s roc; but there was no such creature, and he forced himself to relax as the curtain of shadow was raised and he was laved again with gratifying warmth. Easy, pal, he told himself impatiently. There’s no one to hear, no one to make fun of you. But they’d heard him that first night in camp all right, when he’d had the bad dream and waked up hollering his head off. Even now he still hadn’t erased the memory of Pa’s gory tale, of the knife of Misswiss glinting in the moonlight and the scream of the dying maiden, which had become his own scream as he fell… fell, down into darkness.
He had come to blinking in the yellow beam of Reece’s flashlight. While the other Jeremians stirred groggily, trying to dope out what was going on, Reece had accompanied him out to the fountain, where he urged him to drink, then he’d walked him around the baseball diamond, talking quietly, the sound of his voice both soothing Leo and distracting him from his disturbing anxiety.
When he was yawning widely, they had returned to the cabin, where, shamed to silence, Leo wriggled in over the sill and flattened himself under his blankets, while several of his rudely awakened cabin-mates gathered out at Old Faithful. Lying in his bunk, Leo heard his name. on Phil’s lips.
“What was Wacko making such a ruckus for, anyways? Only sissies and twerps have nightmares. Cripes.”
“Cripes yourself,” came Tiger’s retort. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Everybody has dreams.”
In the morning Leo had faced queer looks, especially from Phil and his shadow Wally, as well as from some of the Ezekielites and the Hoseans on either side of Jeremiah, whose rest had likewise been disturbed. But Reece behaved as if nothing had happened and evidently he cautioned the boys to do likewise, for by the time they formed for the march to Sunday chapel the incident seemed to have been forgotten. And by the time services were over even Phil had quit grumbling.
Was it the magic of Pa’s oratory that did the trick? Leo had heard from Hank Ives that when it came to preaching a sermon the Reverend Garland Starbuck was possessed of the golden throat and silver tongue of a William Jennings Bryan, that his words, of honey or of fire, “could turn a Moonbow camper to stone” at the first hearing. And Leo had been impressed by Pa, decked out in his Sunday best (a full-sleeved, blousy shirt of snowiest broadcloth, touched up with a small black clip-on bow tie, a pair of gallused black trousers, seat shiny as a dime, and still shinier high-laced boots whose knob-like toes curled right off the ground), greeting his campers and staffers from his place beside Tabernacle Rock, thereafter speaking out boldly in the name of the Lord God Jehovah, entreating, cajoling, coaxing, and commanding these, his sons (and a single daughter) to bow down and make obeisance to the Maker of us all. (The camp schedule, as Leo had discovered in a few short days, left no doubt that Friend-Indeed was a “Bible camp”: morning chapel worship in the council ring was commonly followed by more prayers in the dining hall, more hymn singing, more Scripture reading, more ecclesiastical homilies bandied about, the saying of Grace at noon, too, vespers observed thrice weekly, as well as impromptu sing-alongs, with eager voices raised in praise of both “The Old Rugged Cross” and “The Old Oaken Bucket.”)