The Kingdom of Childhood Read online

  They turned onto a smaller road and came to a very old church. Her father parked not far from it and opened the trunk to retrieve his walking stick—a shining length of knotty wood covered in the small souvenir medallions collected by German hiking enthusiasts. They set out in the direction of the church and then hiked into the woods, where the thin trees grew straight and dense toward the sun, some burdened with lush bands of clinging ivy. Ahead of her Kirsten walked in her boxy, methodical way, skirt swinging like a cowbell. The fabric, white and sprigged with flowers in Easter-egg colors, was the same as the dress her friend had been wearing in the barn. Kirsten wore an apron over hers, knotted demurely on the left side, to indicate she was single.

  “Here we are,” her father said, as they arrived at a large block of granite covered in moss. “This marks where the castle used to be.”

  Judy screwed up her face. “You mean there’s no castle?”

  “Hasn’t been since the year 1209. But this is where the foundation was. Don’t pick at the moss, Judy.”

  “Why’d they take it down?”

  “Because Count Otto murdered King Philip of Swabia,” he told her, and Kirsten nodded. “Then Count Otto tore it apart and used the stone for other things. Probably to build his own castle someplace else. Or to throw over the walls at people who liked King Philip better.”

  She ran her fingers over the German script carved into the stone. Behind the rock sprouted a crowded assortment of trees, their trunks fanning out at angles, all vying for the light. Other than the marker, there was no sign that this place had ever been anything but woods. In a way it was a gravestone, no different from the ones she and Rudi had played among the past winter, but for a place instead of a person. A gravestone for a home.

  “Well, I guess we ought to go take a look at the church,” he said. His walking stick thumped against the dirt. “Another day, another plaster Virgin Mary. Lead the way, kiddo.”

  “We can skip it. I don’t care about it.”

  Her father shot her a disbelieving look. “Are you kidding? You love that stuff.”

  She shook her head. She would never be able to explain it in a way that made sense. Lately, during meals, her father had begun to make optimistic small talk about her mother’s condition, how much better she would likely do once she was moved to a civilian hospital back in the States, how glad she would be to know Judy was being well taken care of. Kirsten, now, she has been invaluable, he would say then. And thus would begin a long segue into Kirsten’s virtues, his voice enthused, verb tenses muddied enough that Judy understood he had no intention of leaving the girl behind. At one point she might have confided her fears to Rudi, but now to approach the barn was as daunting as her own home. She had muttered a shy, stammering Ave Maria, and the universe had only twisted the blade.

  “Well, I want to see it,” he said. “How can you choose to skip a four-hundred-year-old church? You know you’ve been in Europe too long when those have gotten routine.”

  He started toward the church, with Kirsten falling in line behind him and Judy, in turn, behind her. As they walked Judy picked red currants from the bushes along the path, and Kirsten gazed up at the trees, pointing out birds and naming them for Judy. Rotkehlchen. Spatz. Krähe. Her wandering reminded Judy of the story in her schoolbook about the little boy who walked around with his nose in the air, never paying attention to where he was going until he fell into the river. Das ist ein schlechter Spaß, warned the book. That is a bad game. The illustration showed the half-drowned child being dragged from the water with poles, mocked by a trio of fish. Merry Rhymes and Funny Pictures.

  “You’d better pay attention to what you’re doing,” Judy warned her in rudimentary German. “If you don’t, you might have an accident.”

  The girl cast a nervous glance at her and hurried ahead to where Judy’s father strode onward, walking stick pressing him steadily forward through the forest. The word for accident was so simple in German: Unglück. The opposite of luck, the kind that nobody wished for you in pink icing. It could mean accident, but it could also mean curse. Or catastrophe.

  “Come on, kiddo,” called Judy’s father. “Pick up the pace.”

  Kirsten looked over her shoulder at Judy, and Judy smiled. Three at a time she popped the red currants into her mouth. She was the cavechild, eating the food the primeval garden offered her, following the tribal king. Speaking the language that winnowed words down to their simplest terms, forcing them into meanings that were foggy yet dense, like the morning.

  The girl Rudi liked so much couldn’t stay there forever. The following week Judy returned to the barn, because she harbored a dogged hope that things might return to normal, but also because time was getting away from her and she wanted to cherish what remained with Rudi. At the gate that marked the edge of his yard she turned and caught a glimpse of her own home. It stood in the near distance at the rise of the hill, cheerful and half-timbered with geraniums in the window boxes, the lovely cottage which Kirsten had turned into a jack-in-the-box of primal fear. It was Judy’s mother’s tidy domain, but while she sat by the window in a sanitary room and waited for her senses to come back to her, the natives back home were throwing a party. To her father, the topography of Germany was a thin surface of charming, sportsmanlike, well-organized modern life laid over the deep crackling roots of a barbarian land. The hardy knots of the old ways still broke through, and must be negotiated: the peasant good cheer of their festivals, the pagan earthiness of their Christianity, the temptation to cradle the cheek of a subservient virgin and see whether she would dare say no.

  The old green station wagon belonging to Rudi’s family was missing from their gravel driveway; they all appeared to be gone except for Kirsten, who was at the Chandlers’, but Judy checked the barn anyway. Rudi’s black rubber boots rested beside the pile of hay bales. The cow, large-eyed and full-uddered, swished her tail at Judy. The barn was dim in the late-afternoon light, smelling more strongly than usual of manure. She looked up at the crucifix on the back wall, witness to numerous sins. She thought about the puffs of crinoline on either side of Rudi’s hips, how he must have pulled the girl against him to make them flare wide open like flowers in a time-lapse filmstrip. The barn had that effect on people. They stay warm by their own body heat, he had told her, his back to the counter and his rough hands resting against it on either side. In embarrassment her gaze had fallen to his suspenders loose at his waist, his navel that seemed an odd reminder of infancy on his grown male body. You can eat it for a cookie, and there is no sin.

  She walked through their yard to the shed, as she still occasionally did, to look in on the family of hedgehogs. The gasoline fumes gave her a mild headache, but it was worth it to play with these little animals Rudi agreed were precious. Yet now they were gone; where they had been there was only a fluff of dry grass interspersed with brittle brown leaves. She crouched on the hard-packed soil beside it and poked with the end of a trowel, but it was useless. The family had disappeared, and she could not guess where they might have gone.

  She stood and set her hands on her hips, digging the toe of her saddle shoe into the ground. The shed was small and close. The tractor fit into it but left little space for anything else. Along the far wall rested a cluster of tools, hoes and spades and a rake with rusted tines; beside it sat a pile of rotting baskets and a stack of milk pans. A sack of fertilizer sat near the door, its top gaping open. She turned a basket upside-down and sat on it, then took from her skirt pocket the little stack of matches she had been hoarding from the box in the kitchen. They were so much larger than the small ones people used to light cigarettes, and the strike-anywhere feature still amazed her. When she moved too skittishly, either the match snapped in half or nothing happened at all. But when she snapped it decisively, nearly every surface became a runway for the most forbidden thrill she had yet encountered. Snap: the split-willow side of the basket became a co-conspirator. Snap: the sole of her saddle shoe brought a second flame roaring to life. Snap
. Snap. She let each burn down almost to her fingers, then dropped it on the dirt floor. The humid ground offered no fuel to the fire, and every match burned itself out. A little pile of wood ash formed beside her, and she thought of the illustrations in the story about the girl who played with matches, the cats’ tears pouring like an open spigot beside the little volcano of ash that had once been Pauline.

  But there was no concern for that. Pauline jumped for joy and ran about, while Judy sat still. When she dropped her last match onto the ground, she fed the small flame with a leaf from the hedgehogs’ nest. It fluttered and rose to a high peak, and the effect pleased her enough that she sprinkled it with a bit of grass from the nest; next, a broken bit of twig from a basket. Now she had a very small campfire, a doll-sized one, suitable for her imaginary journeys into the land of the cavechildren. Onto it she dropped another tuft of grass, then looked around for steadier fuel. The bag of fertilizer gaped beside the door; she took a handful of the gray granules and fed one to the little campfire. Snap: but instead of a flame, it popped and gave off a flash of light. She fed it a second one, then a third.

  The shed door creaked open, and Judy swung her head around in alarm. She quickly dropped the fertilizer onto the ground and stood, setting the basket like a cap over both the fuel and the small fire. Standing at the door was Kirsten, her blond braids crossed demurely over the part in her hair, her green flowered apron neat at her waist and Rudi’s big boots on her feet. She took a step inside and said, “Oh. Hallo, Judy. Was machst du?”

  “Playing,” she replied in English. She saw the incomprehension in Kirsten’s eyes, and she stood taller and straightened her skirt. The girl looked nervous, as though she meant to inquire further but lacked both the nerve and the English skills to do so. Judy moved toward the door, and Kirsten’s gaze followed her. There was that look again: the one of a girl with her pockets turned inside out. The mute plea. When Judy reached the doorway, Kirsten squeezed past her and headed toward the milk pans at the back of the shed. She stopped halfway and looked around, raising her face as though detecting, now, that whatever she had suspected was wrong was indeed very wrong. Observing this, Judy felt a twist of fear. She did not want to be caught and reported, banned from Rudi’s property. And she did not want to see her father and Kirsten taking sides together against her. That could not be borne.

  And so she did a simple thing. She banged down the latch, and she backed slowly away.

  A chicken behind her heel squawked and fluttered. She turned, then hurried back toward her house. Closing her eyes, she tucked her hands into the small pockets of her skirt and walked into the burgeoning wind, to where the house awaited, calm and empty, to where the thistles were beginning to bloom.

  22

  Zach caught up with Scott at the side door to the multipurpose room. The bazaar was in full swing, with kids running rampant on the playground and drivers with “Visualize World Peace” bumper stickers flipping each other off in the parking lot.

  “Dude, it is crammed in there,” said Scott. “And about four hundred degrees.”

  “Is anybody else here?” asked Zach. Scott, he knew, would understand this to mean any of their friends, since otherwise the question was profoundly stupid.

  “Everyone. Even Tally’ll be here in a while.” They made their way into the hallway, where Zach got jabbed with the stick end of a little girl’s ribbon wand. To the left, a teacher’s demonstration of wool felting was attracting a huge crowd.

  “Do you know who won the auctions yet?” Zach shouted over the noise.

  “No. They don’t start until four.”

  They squeezed into the multipurpose room. The fifth-grade teacher was guiding a group of enthralled children in making beeswax gnomes. Zach guessed they were kids from the larger community and not the school, since by the time he was seven he had made enough beeswax gnomes to populate Middle-earth. At another table, the first-grade teacher was selling handmade soap. The smell of calendula oil drifted out gently from her stand, and Zach felt a wave of nostalgia. His mother’s remedy for nearly every scraped knee or boo-boo: calendula cream and a Band-Aid. It was the scent of a mother’s healing.

  Across the room, Fairen and Kaitlyn jumped up and down and waved. They were directly behind the bake sale booth, working with Judy. Temple grinned beside them and held up a hand in greeting. Zach restrained the urge to roll his eyes. There was nothing more singularly uncomfortable than being in the company of both Fairen and Judy at the same time. At the moment he didn’t feel like dealing with Judy at all, but it looked like Fairen would be there for a while, and he wanted even less to make her feel slighted. Scott had walked ahead and was already beside the table speaking to Temple. As Zach approached the group from the side he made his entry by executing a judo hold on Scott, who, with his pathetic green belt karate skills, disengaged himself and whipped around into a fighting stance.

  “No karate in the bazaar,” called a teacher.

  “Busted,” said Temple.

  Fairen held both her arms high in the air and beamed at Zach. “You’re finally here. We’ve been waiting all day for you.”

  He stepped into her hug, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and let him lift her. Over her shoulder, Judy caught his eye with a glance that held a shimmer of reprimand. He scowled at her.

  Fairen handed Zach a chocolate chip cookie. “Try these. Mrs. McFarland baked them.”

  He held up a hand. “I’m good.”

  “Eat.” She prodded the cookie toward him, and when he took it, poked him in the stomach with her index finger. “You don’t need to be turning down cookies, trust me.”

  Judy lifted a metal tray and tapped it against Fairen’s arm. “Fairen and Scott, could you run to the kitchen and get the other two trays?”

  Son of a bitch, thought Zach. As his friends walked off he narrowed his eyes at Judy and tried to wander away, but Judy grabbed the hem of his T-shirt.

  “What are you doing tonight?” she whispered.

  “I need to work on my history project. What the hell was that about? Don’t act so goddamn jealous. She’s just being friendly.”

  Her laugh scoffed at him. “Oh, please. I’m not being jealous, not of that girl. I’m just making her do the job she signed up for.”

  “Yeah, bullshit. Hands off the merchandise, that’s what that was about.”

  “Don’t be silly.” She accepted a dollar bill for a brownie.

  “The house will be empty between seven and nine, if you want to take a break from your project.”

  “I think I’ll pass.”

  She cut a sidelong glance at him, her mouth set in a lighthearted mom-is-warning-you way. “Don’t you sound indifferent,” she said. “Better watch out. You’re going to need a college recommendation one of these days.”

  “That’s not funny,” he said. He glowered at her.

  “It’s a joke, Zach.”

  “It’s not funny. Don’t you pull rank on me like that.”

  “I’m not pulling rank.”

  “You just did. That’s real shitty of you.”

  “Zach.” She put her palm out to accept a handful of change, but looked at him urgently. “I’m sorry. Don’t get into it with me right now. There’s too many people around. If you’re mad, we can talk about it later.”

  “I’m going to be busy later. Why do you do this shit to me? Talking to me like you’re my goddamn guidance counselor. I was gonna say, ‘where do you get off?’ But oh, wait. I know the answer to that question.”

  She turned to him with an icy glare. “Knock it off.”

  “Can I go now, then? Mrs. McFarland?”

  She turned her back to him to pass a child a cookie, and he wandered off toward the exit doors, passing Scott and Fairen with their trays of cookies along the way. He burned with indignation at her guile. He ought to be the last person on Earth she wanted to piss off, especially after the things he’d let her get away with in the recent past. The slapping incident still loomed large in his
mind; he had dropped it with her only because he understood he had hit a nerve with his crack about the German guy. If she couldn’t take a joke about some guy she knew thirty years ago, she ought to be more cautious about the impulses she could control.

  He headed back out the door and sat on the asphalt, leaning his back against the brick. He watched his chemistry teacher lead a group of children in a cooperative ball game, and tried not to think about Judy.

  “Zach. Hey.”

  He turned his head at the sound of his name and saw Scott, standing with one hand on the doorjamb. Behind him stood a tall, middle-aged guy with glasses. Zach knew instinctively who the man was. His stomach seemed to twist inside him.

  Scott gestured with his thumb to the older man. “Have you met my dad?”

  Zach nodded a greeting. “Nice to meet you.”

  “He’s going to be helping out with the ring toss.”

  Here of all places, thought Zach. The man had never shown his face at a Madrigals concert, turned up at a school function, or given Zach a ride home. The way Judy described it, he only climbed out of his laptop long enough to eat, take a piss, and yell at her before vanishing back into the ether. Since when did the guy volunteer at school fundraisers? How did that figure into his life-or-death reasons for parting from his dissertation?

  Scott was shooting him a strange look. Zach understood that Scott expected him to shake his father’s hand. There was no way around it without being obviously rude. Zach got to his feet and extended his hand.