This story has been illustrated by a marvelous artist, David Aronson:

www.alchemicalwedding.com

for Andrew Rebhun
 

The love that loves you in return
has found you out, as you will learn…
 

The old boxcar was our favorite place to play house, and it was also my secret place because the opening looked away and I could dance and cast circle-spells and nobody need know.  My brother had to go with me and wait outside when I was magicking, as I was responsible for minding him, but he said he did not look and I believe him.  We were strictly forbidden to play near the boxcar, for clearly superstitious reasons that hid behind the excuse that we could get hurt.  The truth was kept concealed, but we were children and used to that.

One other person sometimes came with us.  Andrew was a sort of cousin of ours, a city boy whose parents sent him to stay with us in the country because he was having problems.  He mostly stayed in his room in the attic, but when his head did not ache and he was not lost inside an old book, he wandered around outside where my brother and I kept house and watch.  Strange children, Andrew always reading, my brother content to gaze off into space, and me—we were all somehow occupied with powerful works which we could scarcely have described.  We took it for granted, but now I am glad that the grownups around us were tired and incurious.

Picture one house with trees behind it across the way, a farm-pond and a rutted road in between; our little house and barn and barn-yard and kitchen garden; and then the orchard out back and beyond that, the torn-up railroad tracks.  That was all our world.  Andrew had been to other places, but for my brother and me, those tracks led into a deep unknown.  It found us there beside them, sometimes—how many times, I could not say, but there was once I will never forget.  We had to find the first word….

I had been circling when I heard a sound and looked and there was Lia.  That was what she told me her name was, after I came back.  At first I ran away.  I wondered, Am I awake or dreaming?  She looked impossibly strange.  Her hair was long and moonbeam pale, so pretty, but the rest of her was thin and drawn, like a stalk of grass.  Her legs and arms were like blades on the stalk, and around the places where they joined her body were gnarls of leaflets that almost looked like little points of wire.  She was a fairy girl, I knew beyond all doubt.  Yet how could a fairy remind me of anything made of metal?  They hate the touch of iron.  They cannot bear it near them—that is what I have always heard.  She told me she is not like one of us.  She did not grow from a baby body, like human beings; she grew out of memories.  She said she didn’t know how to live with the touch of what she remembered.  She said it burned her mind like red-hot iron on her skin.

I want to tell it plainly—and I can, if only I try.  My brother and I have gone to play in the boxcar, and we are standing in front of its open door, and I hear a sighing sound.  My brother seems to hear nothing; he is looking up into the blossoming apple trees.  I look to where the sound is coming from, and see her soft floating hair, long hair that whirls about in the darkness.  Then I see the rest of her.

She isn’t really frightening, and I am not the sort to run away, but something overtakes me.  My brother runs because of me, as far as the apple trees, but then we turn and look at each other.  Andrew, who, as we did not know, was hanging about outside within sight of the boxcar, seems to catch it from both of us and runs when he sees us run, then stands and stares at me and looks cross.  I can tell he feels ashamed of himself because I saw him run away, and he has no idea why.  He wants to be first to say something, so I wait for him.  He says, ‘I want to go back.  I want to see whatever it was that you saw.’  We return, and Andrew and I climb up and inside.  Again I hear the sighing sound and see the gleaming hair.  We peer far into the darkest corner and there I see her, that thin strange fairy girl.  ‘Please don’t run away,’ she says.  ‘I have something I am so tired of knowing.  I cannot bear it until I have shared it with someone else—someone human.  That is where I got it from, and I want to give it back.’

Andrew says, ‘There’s nothing here.  You two were spooked by a shadow.’  He leaves, but I stand waiting.  A shiver goes through me, thinking of what she has said.  What she knows is bad, but I cannot think she is trying to get us in trouble.  She is hurt; she is not being naughty.  I feel—I feel a changing feeling, one I know from somewhere else, but that was so long ago.  She will tell me something terrible, and I will never be the same.  Who am I this moment, I ask myself, that I will never be again?

I still shiver, but look directly at her.  I ask her, ‘What is your name?’  ‘Lia,’ she tells me.  I tell her our names.  ‘What is wrong with your brother?’ she asks.  I know she means Andrew.  He is tired all the time and it makes him difficult.  ‘He is afraid to sleep because of his dreams.’  ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘Then how can I tell you?  I cannot do him harm, for then my story will grow darker still.’  ‘He cannot see you.  I have not yet told him what I see,’ I explain.  She pauses; her eyelids flutter and close for a moment, and then she looks long at me.  ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘I can cast a spell of song that will help him dream other dreams so that he can rest.  Anna, he is the one who must hear my story, and you must help him remember.  If Andrew cannot hear me himself, let him hear my story through you.’

I watch her as she is talking.  She is wearing rags of gauzy cloth, like bandages loosely bound.  They barely cover her body, which is more plantlike each time I look.  Her face is lovely in a fragile way, but it wears an expression that seems like that of pain until the slightest shift—then it seems like joy.  I am feeding on the sight of her.  What else can I call it?  I am looking, and I am growing somehow, into a different being.  All I can do is draw her in as I move closely toward her.  I might not want this after it comes, but for now I am here and have chosen.  Lia stares calmly into my eyes.  ‘I am tired now,’ she tells me, ‘but come back tomorrow, alone, and I will tell you.’

Andrew passes a sleepless night.  He is too afraid to close his eyes.  He never tells me what he dreams, but when he does, sometimes he cries out loudly enough to wake me.  By this morning he is so exhausted that his head is splitting and he doesn’t care about the boxcar or anything.  I slip outside by myself and walk through the orchard until I see it.

When I step up over the high metal threshold, all I see at first is a blur, a tiny whirlwind in the dark far corner.  Out of its spinning mist, in a moment I see little Lia’s face.  Slowly it winds around to a stop, its distant sad joyfulness gazing its greetings at me.  ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘for returning to me.  I have been hoping—I have been seeing, and what I see is that, if I tell you my story and tell it precisely and memorably, somehow my own kind will hear me and they will help me go home.’

This makes me very lonely for her.  I have felt that way at times, lost and strange among strangers, but for her I can tell it is larger and worse.  ‘Please tell me all you can,’ I ask.

I think she will begin, but no.  ‘How is your brother today?’ she asks me.  ‘Not good,’ I tell her.  ‘He never slept last night.  He says he would rather never sleep again than dream the way he has lately.’  Lia sighs.  ‘Listen to me,’ she says.  ‘I am trying to find the dream-spell, but I feel it must come with the terrible telling.  Where does it begin?’

As I wait for her, the whirling begins again.  Soon she is a blur, like a bright smudge of sun-struck motes in shadowy air.  Again she winds to a stillness, her eyes closed, her real self a long way away.  I am the one who finds the beginning.  I tell her, ‘Lia, the story begins with the word—the first word that comes starts the telling.’  I don’t know what I mean by that; it is just a thought, but I tell it out loud.  She understands.  She says, ‘The first word is ‘train.’

‘I was sleeping,’ she tells me.  ‘It was in the early spring, or really still winter, but it was a mild and clear day.  It was morning, still half dark, and I was lying among briar vines.  Did you know there was once a settlement here?  Not right here, but very close by; nearer that where you live.  A surge of human noises woke me.  I jumped up, but tangled my hair in the vines and before I could get free, the humans had come.  A number of them were being driven by men with guns, and somehow they caught me up among them.  Such things never happen; you see, we know more than you about slipping—nearly all there is to know.  But nothing worked as it should have that day.  The air itself seemed disturbed.  They drove us onto a car like this, then they barred the door behind us, and the train began to move.  I cannot tell you more today; if you come back tomorrow, I will try not to lose the thread.’  As she says this, I see that her face is wet.  I wonder—I never heard of fairies crying, but then I never met a real one before.  ‘I am sorry,’ I tell her, but I think of how she said that this telling might help her go home.

Our house is like a haunted village.  Andrew sleeps for awhile that night, but wakes the whole house with his shouting.  My little brother, Michael, is always an odd one; he is not afraid of anything, but often, when he is playing peacefully, he will fall so quiet that we finally look over and see him gazing out into nowhere with a rapt look on his face.  When I look in on him late at night, he is lying silent but wide awake.  I am looking ahead with too much wary anticipation to rest.  Our parents work so hard that they barely notice us some days, but now even they can see that something is happening.  Nothing is to be done for it, though.  They go back out to work in the morning and leave me to care for the others, even though Andrew is older than I.

Today I must trust him again with Michael.  ‘Please,’ I say to him, ‘I know you are tired, but please take good care of him and don’t let him out of your sight.  I will be back in a little while.  I know someone who might be able to help you, if we can be patient and wait.’  How I hope my fey friend Lia has found the working spell.

She is there in the corner again, still dancing, but very slowly, like a skittering wind full of dry little leaves just as it loses its breath and dies down.  ‘Train,’ I remind her.  She nods her bright head.  ‘Yes,’ she says.  ‘The train goes fast.  ‘Flying West, behind the Sun, to help the work of this world come undone.’  That is part of the spell of sleep for your brother.  The train we were on was heading east.’  Lia pauses.  ‘Anna,’ she says, ‘There are many ways to tell a tale.  I have started out the wrong way.  Memory is like a dream; it does not move through the same channels as daylight thought.  A better telling will come to me, if I dream as I speak out loud.  Will you be able to follow?’  What can I say?  I can only try.  I tell her as much, and she sighs as if to draw breath to begin again.

‘To draw the breath, to draw THE BREATH’—now I am the one who is dreaming, and I am hearing her sing.  This comes as I wake in the morning.  It is mild outside, and my brother wants to play in the empty boxcar.  Andrew has had an easier night, although he is still melancholy.  I puzzle until I find away to divert them from Michael’s idea.  The answer only arrives as we are passing through the barnyard.  On one side I see a likely board and on the other a length of sturdy rope.  I ask my companions, ‘Would you please find a way to make those into a swing for me?  And hang it from a high enough branch to use the whole length of rope?’  Michael is too small to be of much help, but Andrew takes it as a challenge and finds a ladder and drags it with the board and rope to a tree in a shady corner of the orchard.  Not an apple tree but a chestnut, with a few fading blossoms of white, is my new swinging tree by mid-day.  It is my swing, because it was my idea, but I leave Andrew and Michael taking turns there and slip through a few tall trees away to where I hope Lia is waiting.

No-today I neither see nor hear her.  The empty boxcar is silent as the grave.  I walk back to where the boys are swinging and I study Andrew’s face when he is unaware of me.  I wish I could imagine what makes him so unhappy.  His sadness is unlike anything I have ever known before.  Asking him is of less than no use; it only drives him further away.  He seems to like the swing, though.  He almost seems to be losing himself on it.  For a moment I catch a glimpse of the almost-joyfulness of Lia.  Then I turn and walk home alone. I hope no one there will feel like talking.

Twice more I go alone to the boxcar and see no trace of Lia, but then, when out of discouragement I let a few days go by, I try again and she is waiting.  She is spinning, dancing, her pale hair flying.  She is also singing.  I shiver inside—the shivers go through and through me.  I can hear her words, and the moment I do, by grace of some miracle, they are locked in my memory forever.  Lia, with her eyes closed, sings:

Twin starry eyes here rise above
an ever-glowing wheel:  Oh heart,
how fair you are—how passing real
our dreams of dawning darkness-art….

Hers is a true song, with music, but I can tell that if the words will stay with me, the melody will not, unless I begin this moment to play it over and over in my mind.  Even now I suspect that I will have to make up a few bits to fill in the parts that are slipping away.  Something inside just tells me that I must not ask her to sing it again; knowing that being able to sing it once in such a way that I could understand her says to me that this has been hard for her and I must work with what I have now.  ‘Thank you so much,’ I whisper to her.  She never stops dancing.  I run home, singing her dream-song softly inside me, under my heart’s circling breath.

Aye, I try hard to keep it with me, but even as I run through the doorway of my house, I know the tune has gone.  Like lightning, I rush to the little chest beside my bed and take out the paper and pen I keep there and write down the secret words.  Oh, she never needed to tell me to keep them a secret, but I understand that I must show them to no one but Andrew.  When they are written and I have calmed down, I think about going to him.

Something makes me wait, however, and soon I am glad I did, for there was a further part to her message.  At night, Lia appears in my dreams.  She tells me to caution Andrew that he must not make a dreadful mistake to be joined with his one good dream.  ‘See that he understands,’ she pleads, ‘he must not try to shorten his time.  The meeting will come in the daylight-land; this is not for the afterlife.  If he goes there out of season, it will prolong the wait for us all.’

On the following day, when we gather for dinner, he is not at the table; my mother says he is ill with a terrible headache and is taking his meal in his room.  She has already carried it up to him, but when I have eaten what little I can, I offer to go up and get his dishes, knowing she would have sent me anyway.

He is on his bed, staring far out the window.  It faces the same direction as mine, and I know he is seeing the pond by which there stands a lonely tree.  He looks so sick, so pale, his brow damp with a film of sweat.  Even so, he brightens a little when he sees me and gives me a brief glimpse of smile.  ‘I have so much to think about,’ he says, ‘and now you are part of it.  I had a good dream this time, just this afternoon.  You were in it, Anna.  I don’t really know if I should tell you, but I will, before I change my mind.’  Now he smiles a true smile at me, and I feel my heart turn over.  He is the strangest boy I have ever known, smarter than anyone else by far, and it seems to me he has a streak of mischief, but when can it ever show?  He hasn’t been very friendly to me.  Sometimes I am tempted to think that the weight of his troubles makes him feel more important than ignorant girls like me, but then I tell myself no, it’s just that his head aches and he is tired and alone.  Well, he need not feel as alone as he has, and it seems he is starting to know it.

His eyes close and open again.  He looks straight up at me and says, ‘Anna, you and I were talking together about the most marvelous things when a voice, a beautiful shimmering woman’s voice, began to sing a sort of poem, a nonsense rhyme about numbers.  I mean, it isn’t nonsense, she just sang it in a laughing way, and it made no sense on the outside, but I knew it was full of secret meaning.  I wish I could remember all the words; I would have written them down.  What I do remember is that she said it is easier for numbers that end in three to be divided by two than it is for numbers that end in two to be divided by three.  It doesn’t work with ordinary numbers, of course—you can divide twelve by two or three, but any number that ends with a three is odd and cannot be divided by two.  But she is still right, somehow, isn’t she?  Can you hear what it means?’

I nod and say, ‘Almost,’ and I really mean it, even though I have no plain idea.  I say to him, ‘I have learned something very important and wonderful, Andrew, and when we have put it all together I think it is going to come clear.  Did you ever notice the signs of a presence other than ourselves in the boxcar?’  His smile disappears and tears well up in his eyes:  ‘I was so happy today because at last I dreamed a good dream after so many bad ones.  I wanted so often to tell you what the bad ones were, but I was afraid because they just kept coming, and to speak of them might somehow make them realer—I don’t know, lend them power because then two of us would be thinking about them.  Anna, some  other is always present.  Ghosts are everywhere in this place—in the fields, the orchard, and most of all, by the railroad tracks.  I have terrible dreams about trains.  I wait with a lot of other people by the tracks and then we are shoved on board standing up and we ride and ride and so many people are crying.  Sometimes—over and over—I am in a place like a hospital ward, but a bad one where no one gets well.  Those are the very most terrible dreams, Anna.  In them, I am not afraid for myself because I am just looking down, watching, but someone I love more than all the world is in trouble and I can do nothing to help.  She is lying on a table and some unspeakable doctor-torturers are bending over her with shiny steel knives.  She is as white as a sheet of paper.  I think at first she might be dead, but then her sides move—she is clearly still breathing.  Just as I see this with relief, the doctors reach forward and cut her open.’  He closes his eyes.  He says, ‘And Anna, all of the scenes of all of these dreams are surrounded by coils and coils of barbed wire.’

I never knew how much I loved him before this moment.  Now I have to tell him.  The time has surely come.  What I have to impart is thrumming inside me like a burden of woeful joy.  ‘Be a little happy, Andrew.  I have brought a key to your dreams.  First, let me tell you—this was told to me, but it is all for you.  I saw someone in the boxcar.  Not really a ghostly presence, but a fairy girl whose body is long and thin like a grassy blade of barbed wire.  Her name is Lia.  I met her there several times.  She was imprisoned by her memories, and said she would only be free to leave after telling someone her story.  She thought that by telling it, her people would hear her and help her go home.  She started to tell it to me, and Andrew, it started with a train.  Then she made me wait until she could find a better way.  I told her about you, and she was most concerned.  She wanted to find a spell to send you to help you change your dreams.    When I saw her again, she danced before me and sang this song, and I wrote it down.  She sang it—it had a melody—but I’m sorry, Andrew, I lost that part.  The words are right, though, I am sure.’

I let him read the words from the piece of paper, and then I recite them as best I can in Lia’s tones of voice.  As I do, his hand reaches out and clasps mine tightly and it is shaking.  A thought crosses my mind that is wistful, although it is selfish of me:  I know I will never see Lia again in the boxcar.

And I never have.  But I would dream of her, and so would Andrew, until the passage of many years brought the right time to tell this story.

Twin starry eyes here rise above
an ever-glowing wheel:  Oh heart,
how fair you are—how passing real
our dreams of dawning darkness-art
in which a splendid child at play
is borne of love that never dies
by grace of song.  Love-song all-ways
above all other beauty prized,
you are—WE ARE the very stars.
Love, meet my eyes.  Love never dies!

10-19 October 1999

©Judith Griffis 1999