Strange Seed Read online

  She closed the door, went into the living room and stood by the couch, her gaze on the child. She supposed he was sleeping. His large, oval, pale blue eyes were lightly closed; his firmly muscled chest—how like a man’s it was, except that it was totally without hair—moved almost imperceptibly, his rhythmic breathing incredibly shallow. His body, Rachel saw, was in precisely the same position Paul had forced it into forty five minutes ago.

  She noticed the blanket folded at the child’s feet and chided herself for not having the good sense to cover him. she unfolded the blanket and brought it slowly up over his ankles, over his knees, his thighs. She paused. Yes, she thought, how like a miniature man he was—a miniature, yet strongly developed man whose body bore no traces of hair, except lightly, on the forearms, and lavishly, on the head, but nowhere else, not even around… She quickly finished covering him, stepped back and stared at him silently, wonderingly.

  “Where did you come from?” she whispered. She smiled. The words were part of a poem she’d learned as a child: “Where did you come from baby dear?” she said aloud. “Out of the everywhere, into here?”

  Chapter Eleven

  It was past ten when Rachel, trying unsuccessfully to nap in the wicker chair, heart footfalls on the back steps. Paul, she realized. But he was moving so slowly and heavily, as if in pain.

  “Rachel,” he called, “open the door.”

  Rachel bolted from her chair. “Paul?” she yelled as she ran through the kitchen. “What’s wrong?” She threw the back door open.

  In the dim light, Rachel couldn’t see who it was that Paul carried, fireman style, on his shoulders, but she knew that it was Lumas. She hesitated, confused, then—as Paul stepped awkwardly to his right—she pushed the screen door open. Paul moved past her, into the kitchen, and looked about anxiously. He nodded at the table. “Clear that off, would you?”

  “Paul…is he…”

  “No, he’s not dead. Just the clear the table off, please.”

  “Our bed, Paul—put him on our bed.” She hurried past him into the living room, stopped, looked back: “Well?”

  “Yes,” Paul said. “Of course,” and he stepped sideways through the narrow doorway and followed Rachel into the living room: he hesitated a moment at the couch and nodded: “How’s the boy?”

  “Asleep,” Rachel answered quickly, “ever since you left.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  He followed Rachel into the bedroom and quickly scanned the bet. “Get the goddamed cat off it, okay!”

  Rachel pushed at the fat’s flank a couple of times. “C’mon, Mr. Higgins,” she said. “Shoo!” Mr. Higgins meowed in protest and moved slowly off the bed.

  Paul shifted Lumas’s body around so he carried it for a second in his outstretched arms, then carefully lowered it onto the bed. He straightened, took a deep breath. “My God”—on the exhale—“I don’t ever want to go through that again!”

  “What’s wrong with him, Paul?”

  “Damned if I know.” He took another deep breath, then knelt on one knee beside the bed. Rachel switched on the lamp on the dresser. It didn’t work. “It’s that fucking generator,” Paul told her. “Just get the kerosene lamp, I guess. And some cloth for a bandage.”

  Rachel nodded and went into the living room.

  Paul took hold of Lumas’s left hand and tried to examine it. “Can’t see a goddamned thing,” he whispered. “Rachel,” he called, “the lamp! Please!”

  “I’m trying to find a bandage, Paul,” she answered peevishly.

  “Well, bring the lamp first!”

  “How am I going to find a bandage in the dark?”

  “For God’s sake, we’ve got more than one lamp in this house, don’t we!”

  “I’ll only be a second…” She rummaged about in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. “Here’s one,” she called. A moment later, she reappeared in the bedroom doorway, lantern dangling from one hand, a white strip of cloth from the other. She held the lantern out. “Here,” she said.

  “No, hold it over him.”

  She moved closer to the bed and held the lamp over Lumas.

  “That’s right,” Paul continued. “Now give me the bandage.”

  She handed him the bandage. He glanced at her: he had Lumas’s left hand cradled in his hand. “Pretty messy, huh?” he said.

  Rachel’s face tightened. “What happened to it, Paul?”

  “He put a thorn through it,” Paul said.

  “A thorn?”

  “From a honey locust.” He started to wrap Lumas’s still-bleeding hand with a bandage.

  “Oh,” Rachel said. “That’s a tree, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. A tree with thorns on it.”

  “Like a rosebush,” Rachel whispered.

  Paul glanced confusedly at her. “Yes,” he said. “Like a rosebush.” He tied the bandage into a knot over Lumas’s palm and studied the results of his work. “This is no good,” he said. “His hand’s still bleeding. Don’t we have anything else, some cotton or something?”

  “Let me do it,” Rachel said, and handed him the lamp. “You’ve got that bandage all wrong. And you’ve got to clean the wound first.”

  Paul stared blankly at her a moment, as if he intended to give her an argument, then straightened. “I’ll get a pan of water,” he said, and stepped away from the bed.

  “Yes, good,” Rachel said. She leaned over Lumas. “And see if you can find another strip of cloth and a thin piece of wood so I can fix a tourniquet. He seems to have lost a lot of blood. Has he been bleeding ever since you found him?”

  “No. I helped him back to his cabin and he seemed okay for a while. We talked—I’ll tell you about it—and then, all of sudden, he was out. His hand must have started bleeding again because of the way I was carrying him.”

  “Yes,” Rachel said, and picked at the tight knot Paul had tied in the bandage. “That’s possible.”

  *****

  Paul leaned forward in his winged-back chair. “That’s the whole story, Rachel. If you can make any sense of it, I wish you’d share it with me. He said you’d understand.”

  “Really? Why would he say that?”

  Paul shrugged. “Who knows. He seems to think quite a lot of you. He said you had a gift.” Another shrug. “You should be flattered, I guess.”

  Rachel attempted a smile. “He gives me more credit than I deserve. He makes me feel like I can’t help but disappoint him. If I do have some sort of gift, it’s certainly not very dependable.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She averted her eyes. “I don’t know. I guess it’s just a matter of knowing something one moment, then forgetting it the next.”

  “’Something’?”

  She smiled a little. “That’s the best I can do. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. Sorry.”

  Paul raised his eyebrows—confusion mixed with gentle admonishment. He felt, Rachel was sure, that she was hiding something from him.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “This is all getting very cryptic, isn’t it? Never mind. Lumas”—he nodded toward the bedroom—“thinks he’s dying, as I told you. And he may be right, for all I know. So anything he says I guess we can chalk up to that…”

  “Do you think he’s dying, Paul?”

  “How should I know? Am I a doctor? No. But he’s been coughing up blood—you saw that.” She grimaced. “It might be tuberculosis, maybe an ulcer—“ He turned his head sharply to the left, his gaze on the darkened bedroom doorway, and put his hands on the arms of the chair, as if preparing to stand. “Hank?” he called. “Stay in bed, for God’s sake! You’re in no condition…” He stood, grabbed the kerosene lamp from the table beside the chair, and held it out so its light fell dimly into the bedroom. He saw that Lumas was sitting up on the bed. “Hank, lie down—you need to rest.” Lumas stood very slowly, right hand to his stomach, the other hand against the bedpost.

  “For Christ’s sake!” Paul muttered. Out of the corner of his eye he saw sl
ight movement on the couch. He looked. The child’s eyes had opened.

  Lumas appeared in the bedroom doorway, his right hand still clutching his stomach. “Hank,” Paul said, “please…go back to bed; you’re a sick man.” He took a few quick steps toward Lumas, stopped, and saw to his left that the child had thrown the blanket to the floor. “Rachel,”—he glanced at her—“cover him, would you?” Rachel nodded, stood, went over to the couch, stooped over, picked up the blanket.

  “Leave him be, Missus!” Lumas demanded.

  Rachel looked up at him, then questioningly at Paul, who said, “Cover him, Rachel.”

  “I said leave him be!” Lumas shouted. A hint of violence had been added to the overwhelming power of his voice.

  Rachel nervously straightened the blanket and looked confusedly at her husband. “Paul?”

  “For Christ’s sake, cover him, Rachel!”

  Lumas’s movements were impossibly quick. In a second he was above the child, and, in the next second, his huge hands had encircled the child’s throat. For an instant, from opposite vantage points, Paul and Rachel watched a trembling, surrealistic tableau—blue veins bulging on the back of Lumas’s hands, and the firm muscles and arteries of the child’s neck bulging above them.

  Then Paul, lantern still in his right hand, threw his left arm around Lumas’s throat and pulled. “Jesus Christ, Hank!” he hissed. “Let go, let go!” But the older man’s strength was immense. Paul held the lantern out for Rachel; she dropped the blanket and took the lantern. Paul threw his freed arm around Lumas’s chest, planted his feet firmly on the floor, and pulled hard. “Rachel!” he shouted. “His hands, get his hands!” But before Rachel could act, Paul broke the man’s grip on the child and the two of them—Paul and Lumas—fell backward to the floor.

  In the moment’s silence that followed, Paul knew that one of his ribs had been cracked or broken. A lower rib, he guessed—his sudden, panicked breathing was agony. “Rachel,” he moaned, “get him off!” But, he realized in the next moment, Lumas was already on his feet and was pointing stiffly at the child, still sitting up on the old couch, his perfect, dark face expressionless.

  And from the floor, Paul could see Lumas’s nostrils flaring, his arms quivering, the great mound of white hair falling over his blood-soaked shirt. “You go back!” the old man shouted. “You go back!” Each word was an abominable, gurgle-filled gasp.

  Seconds later, Lumas turned, crossed through the kitchen, and fled out the back door.

  Chapter Twelve

  Paul was tired, his ribs hurt, he was not, Rachel realized, in the mood for talk, especially for the kind of talk they had almost pointedly avoided in the past week. It had been easy enough to avoid it. Paul would complain that his ribs were bothering him, so he didn’t feel like talking, that he’d rather do some reading, and Rachel, after a feeble protest, would accept that. Or he’d find some small chore to perform when they were in the same room and talk seemed imminent. He had finished putting new screens around the front porch, had sanded down and re-hung the cellar door—with Rachel’s help—had begun patching the back steps, had torn apart and rebuilt the generator, hoping that would effect a repair; it hadn’t.

  The silence, Rachel thought, had begun at the clinic a week earlier. No, she decided, it had actually begun when they had pulled away from the house and Paul, sitting stiffly in the passenger seat, left hand pressed hard to his rib cage, had asked, “Is the boy upstairs?”

  “Yes. He’s in the back bedroom,” she’d answered. “The door’s locked.

  “Good.”

  That had been the beginning of it, she thought—the beginning of their silence.

  Later, in the examining room, it had grown more profound: “How did this happen?” the doctor asked. “You’ve got a couple cracked ribs there.”

  And Paul had answered, too quickly, “I fell. Off our back steps.”

  Rachel had thought just briefly of contradicting him, but not as if it would be the right thing to do, but because the truth had already settled in, and she had been mentally toying with it.

  Just as she had been for the last, silent week.

  Paul, too, she realized, had been toying with the truth—had been turning it over, examining it from all angles, had been trying very hard to accept it.

  Had he accepted it? she wondered. And if he had, was it the same truth she grappled with?

  “Paul?” she said.

  He lowered himself painfully into his winged-back chair. “Got to get a new regulator for that damned thing,” he said, referring to the generator he’d just coerced—with various obscenities and fumbling with a screwdriver and hammer—into noisy and unsteady life. “Going to keep blowing light bulbs if we don’t get a new regulator.”

  “Can we get one in town?” Rachel asked.

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  “Well then…”

  “All in its own good time, Rachel. All in its own good time.”

  Rachel took a deep breath. “Why, Paul?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why ‘All in its own good time’?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She sighed. “Only because you don’t want to understand.”

  An obviously forced chuckle came from him, then ended abruptly. He put his hand to his ribs. “Jesus Christ!” He glanced toward the bedroom. “I’m going to lie down a while. My ribs feel better when I lie down.” He prepared to stand.

  “Please don’t,” Rachel said crisply.

  He pretended a dumbfounded look. “Oh, I understand—you like to see me in pain.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well then, you’ll let me go lie down, won’t you!”

  “Paul, I…” She stopped, obviously uncertain how to continue.

  “Yes?” Paul coaxed.

  “We have to talk.”

  He stood more quickly than she thought he could: “You want to talk about the boy, right?”

  Brief hesitation, then, “There are a couple of things we need to talk about. Mr. Lumas, for instance—“

  “He can take care of himself,” Paul snapped. “He’s done it well enough all these years. He doesn’t need us.”

  “You seem very sure of that.”

  “Listen,”—Paul sighed—“I saw him yesterday morning, when I was fixing the steps, and he looked just fine.”

  “Where did you see him? Did you talk to him?”

  “As if I really want to—you seem to forget what he did. You want to talk to him, you go right ahead. But as far as I’m concerned—“

  “So you didn’t talk to him.”

  “I saw him, and he looked just fine. Now, may I please go and lie down?”

  “And what about the boy, Paul?”

  He sighed heavily. “We’ve been over it a thousand times: the boy—“

  “Over it a thousand times? What in the hell are you talking about? We’ve hardly even—“

  “He’s your responsibility, Rachel. I’ve got myself to worry about. I thought we discussed that.”

  “My responsibility? He’s our responsibility, Paul. I don’t know, he’s probably the state’s responsibility, when you get right down to it. We can’t just—“

  “Well, it seems that that’s what we’re doing, Rachel.”

  Silence.

  “Oh, c’mon, darling,” he continued. “You know very well why we’ve kept him this long. It’s that damned road. The fucking thing’s impassable in all the rain we’ve been having.” He smiled feebly, as if at the punch line of a bad joke. “As soon as the weather clears—“

  “Paul, we’re kidding ourselves. That child…has done something to us… He’s…he’s—“ She stopped, unsure how to continue.

  Paul said nothing for a moment: he seemed to be weighing her words. “Oh?” he said. “What has the child done to us?”

  “You bastard!” she hissed.

  “Precisely,” he said, smiling again. “Now, may I please go lie down?”

  She said nothin
g.

  *****

  It was a small square room, “claustrophobic,” Rachel called it; it had a low ceiling, and its walls had once been white but time and weather had turned them a bilious yellow.

  Over the years, the afternoon sun through the one narrow window in the middle of the west wall had lefts its long, dark, rectangular imprint on the pine floor. Now the window—like the east-facing window in the front bedroom—was boarded up: “We’ll wait on that,” Paul had told the glazier the previous Monday. “We’re not going to be using these rooms, anyway.”

  And so the room would have been dark had it not been for the bare low-wattage bulb in the middle of the ceiling; trailing diagonally from the bulb to the northeast corner of the room, and from to a small hole in the floor, was a length of brown electrical cord. Paul had installed the bulb when he and Rachel had concluded that leaving a kerosene lamp in the room would be foolish, at best.