Mercedes Lackey - Lamma's Night (anthology)

"It will be all right now," I said, looking around me. Already the clouds were blowing eastward and the world was suddenly full of sunshine, refracting back from grass and leaves in a crystal dazzle of light. A great peace began to fill me, and I realized that I had spoken truly. This harvest would be a good one, and not only for the village. I had come home.

Note: For more information on the traditional folklore of Lughnasa I recommend The Festival of Luginasa , by Maire MacNeill, Oxford University Press, 1962.

Publisher's Note: The sometimes strange syntax and editorial elisions are intentional in this homage to Faulkner.

Gael Baudino

All this happened before you were born.

The intersection of Jefferson and DeWitt, unpaved from the beginning and not likely to see brick or even common concrete in the near future, sent up a haze of dust in the late July heat, though it would have sent it up even in the first blush of April, when everyone knew that spring was coming, and the women and girls were looking at Easter dresses and hats, and there had been rain maybe—not ice, not sleet, but real rain—the kind that made the tautness of one's skin let go not so much from humidity as from simple relief that winter was past and soon there would be flowers: bulbs coming up, and apple and peach and dogwood blooming outside of town in the forest that Vinty White had never been able to develop for that mill he had wanted (though his son, working more nocturnally, had been much more successful when he had showed up at her bedroom window and scratched just like her cat wanting in).

But this was July, and when old Mrs. Gavin (childless throughout her sixty years, and everyone thought that she should have had at least one in there somewhere, seeing as how Clinton Gavin, her husband, dead and gone now ten years, was known to have been as randy as a stoat) pulled her old DeSoto somberly along the street, stopping at the stop sign more out of condescension to than fear of the law, then driving on through as though she were steering not a heavy green car but a black-clad and sable-bedecked hearse, she left behind her a white pall that must have cloaked the intersection, stop sign and storefront alike, for five minutes or more, and it made Greta turn away from the big plate glass window that Willie McCoy, the owner's son, had spent twenty minutes cleaning that morning because his father had thought that a clean window might attract more customers to the soda shop than a dirty one, even though, in her opinion, the heat would bring customers enough whether the window was clean or not.

She turned away because the whiteness of the dust outside the window reminded her of the whiteness in her mind that she had struggled to maintain for considerably longer than five minutes, struggled to maintain, in fact, for almost four months now, being partly but mostly successful, save for times like this when she was reminded not so much of the presence as of the maintenance of the whiteness by some external event, in this case old Mrs. Gavin's DeSoto and the pall of dust it raised.

No. And something else, too.

Out of that pall, appearing gradually, as he had appeared out of the silver of that moonlit April night, came Jimmy White, cruising up Jefferson in his Ford pickup, slowing down hardly at all at the stop sign and then, swinging left on DeWitt with a scratch of rubber on dirt without even waiting for the car coming the other way (which had the right of way), and it was a good thing for Jimmy that Sheriff Wallace was not around that day, but then again it really did not matter whether he was around or not, for Sheriff Wallace was a first cousin of Vinty White, Jimmy's father, and Sheriff Wallace would have had no more luck writing Jimmy a traffic citation than Greta would have had convincing anyone that Jimmy had come to her bedroom window scratching like her cat wanting to be let in. But she had not tried in any case.

But with another scratch of rubber on dirt and another cloud of white that reminded her of a different white, Jimmy slewed his truck around like the flap of a hand so that it faced in the opposite direction and in the opposite lane; and then he pulled over, parked, and came into the soda shop where he lounged up against the wall by the door, looking at her (there were no customers in the soda shop just then, and Willie, having finished his useless cleaning of the front window, had gone in search of a boy's adventure while his father was away down the street buying cigars at the tobacco shop), appraising her from beneath his dark hair, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans so that his fingers pointed at and echoed the pubic saddle that lay beneath the blue cloth, and

"Mornin', Greta," he said, and she looked up from the rag she had been using to polish the countertop, but not really, because she had been looking up all along, though not so that anyone would have noticed (or so she had hoped), and she said

"Can I get you anything, Jimmy?" And he, thumbs still hooked, fingers still pointing, shook his head.

"I jus' come to check on my little one."

"You don't even know there is a little one."

"My father would've had a little one, and I'm like my father, girl. We's all magic men in my family. My father was a magic man, my grandfather was a magic man, and I'm a magic man, too. Just like in the song."

She turned her head away. That was what had been playing on her radio when he had come to her window that night, silently, like a cat, and scratching like her own cat waiting to be let in, except that when she had unlatched the fastening and slid the lower sash up, standing in her nightgown with her hair all loose around her shoulders and not even underwear on, she had seen, instead of white cat paws, a man's hands reaching for the sill and she had not had time even to think (though she was still not sure, between the forced episodes of whiteness, what she should have thought at the time, or what she could have done except say no, and even that would have been as nothing since it had been Jimmy White coming in through her window, and everyone knew who his father was and how his father had, in his prime, like his father before him, sired child after child upon any number of women scattered throughout Oktibushubee County, sired them perhaps in just this way [the shameful births hushed up and secret, families raising the cuckoo birds as their own so that by now no one knew who might be related to whom], just as everyone knew—just as she knew—that her father worked at the bank that Mr. Gavin had left in trust to his wife until she died and then to the faceless and nameless group of investors and backers in Chicago who administered that trust, who, upon her death, would acquire ownership of it, and that Mr. Gavin and Vinty White had in common a great-grandmother somewhere up north) before Jimmy had been in her room.

"You puttin' on weight?"

"Maybe I am, and maybe I ain't. None of your business, anyway." And he, still lounging at the door, his thumbs still hooked in his pockets and not having moved an inch, said

"It's my business, all right. That little one, boy or girl, is mine , and you'll take care of it." And she, not looking at him, or rather, keeping herself from looking at him with anything more than the corner of her eye

"There ain't no little one."

And he laughed and said

"Sure there ain't."

"There ain't ."

"You jus' take care of it. Boy or girl, it's mine. And I'll tell you, it's a boy, too. I know, 'cause I'm a magic man. All the men in my family are magic men. I know it's a boy, and I'll know if you don't take care of him."

And before he left, he went to the jukebox at the side wall, stuck in a quarter, and paid for three repetitions of the Heart song so that she would have to listen to it again, and again, and again, the engine of his truck roaring behind the music, his tires scratching and sliding on the unpaved street as he pulled out, slewed around, and headed on out of town toward the highway and the house of his father.