T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

“I think”—the voice of God from the booth, Domine, dirige nos —“we should just get on with it like we planned or we’re going to be here all night. Know what I’m saying, Johnny?” And then Silver, a thinner voice, the Holy Ghost manifesting Himself in everything: “Keep it up, Johnny, and you’re going to make me pick up the telephone.” Neff’s hand went back to the mike, a sound like rubbing your sleeve over a trumpet mute, and there was more conferring, the two heads hanging there behind the glass like transparencies.

He felt scared suddenly, scared and alone and vulnerable. “Okay,” he said to the room, “okay, I hear you.” And he heard himself shift into another mode altogether, counting off the beat, and there were the strings pouring like syrup out of the corners and the whisper of the brushes and the high hat and he was singing in the unshakable pure tenor that was Johnny Bandon’s trademark, and forget Harvey, forget the asinine lyrics, he was singing here, singing: only that.

Something happened as soon as Johnny opened his mouth, and it had happened to her before, happened plenty, but it was the last thing she’d expected from a session like this. She came in on the second verse— Little Suzy Snowflake/Came tumbling down from the sky —and felt it, the movement inside of her, the first tick into unconsciousness, what her mother used to call opening up the soul. You’re a soul singer, her mother used to say, you know that, little sister? A real soul singer. She couldn’t help herself. She took Johnny’s lead and she flew, and so what if it was corny, so what if the glockenspiel was a cliché out of some fluffy nostalgic place and time nobody could remember and the arrangement was pure chintz? She flew and so did he.

And then the B-side, warmer, sweeter, with some swing to it—“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow”—and they traded off, tit for tat, call and response, But baby it’s cold outside. When Harvey’s voice came at them—“That’s it, kids, you nailed that one down”—she couldn’t quite believe it was over, and from the look of Johnny, his tie tugged loose, the hair hanging in his eyes, he couldn’t believe it either.

The musicians were packing up, the streets and the night awaiting them, the sleet that would turn to snow by morning and the sky that fell loose over everything because there was nothing left to prop it up. “Johnny,” she murmured, and they were still standing there at the mike, both of them frozen in the moment, “that was, I mean that was—”

“Yeah,” he said, ducking his head, “we were really on, weren’t we,” and from the way he turned to her she was sure he was going to say Let’s go have a drink or Your place or mine? but he didn’t. Instead he just closed his eyes and began to sing, pure, sweet and high. Nobody moved. The ghostly heads in the recording booth pivoted toward them, the horn players looked up from their instrument cases and their felt rags and fragile mouthpieces. Even the strings — longhairs from the Brooklyn Academy of Music — hesitated. And then, on the third bar, she caught up to him, their two voices blended into one: It is the night/Of our dear Savior’s birth.

The moment held. They sang the song through, then sang it again. And then, without pause, as if they were reading from the same sheet, they swept into “Ave Maria,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “What Child Is This,” the sweet beat of the melody as much a part of her as the pulsing of the blood in her veins. She didn’t know what time it was, didn’t know when Harvey and the A&R man deserted the booth, didn’t know anything but the power of two voices entwined. She knew this only — that she was in a confined space, walls and floor and ceiling, but that didn’t make any sense to her, because it felt as if it opened up forever.

(2003)

1

During the first hard rain of autumn, when the leaves lay like currency at the feet of the trees and the branches shone black against a diminished sky, a party of hunters from the village of Lacaune, in the Languedoc region of France, returning cold and damp and without anything tangible to show for their efforts, spotted a human figure in the gloom ahead. The figure appeared to be that of a child, a boy, and he was entirely naked, indifferent to the cold and the rain. He was preoccupied with something — cracking acorns between two rocks, as it turned out — and didn’t at first see them coming. But then one of the party — Messier, the village smith, whose hands and forearms had been rendered the color of a red Indian’s with the hard use of his trade — stepped in a hole and lost his balance, lurching into the boy’s field of vision. It was that sudden movement that spooked him. One moment he was there, crouched over his store of raw acorns, and the next he was gone, vanishing into the undergrowth with the hypersensitivity of a stoat or weasel. None of them could be sure — the encounter had been so brief, a matter of seconds — but they unanimously claimed that the figure had fled on all fours.

A week later, the boy was spotted again, this time at the verge of a farmer’s fields, digging potatoes from the ground and bolting them as they were, without benefit of cooking or even rinsing. The farmer’s instinct was to chase him off, but he restrained himself — he’d heard the reports of a wild child, a child of the forest, un enfant sauvage, and he crept closer to better observe the phenomenon before him. He saw that the child was very young indeed, eight or nine years old, if that, and that he used only his bare hands and broken nails to dig in the sodden earth, like a dog. To all outward appearances, the child seemed normal, having the fluid use of his limbs and hands, but his emaciation was alarming and his movements were swift and autonomous — at some point, after the farmer had approached to within twenty yards of him, the child reared his head and made eye contact. It was difficult to see the child’s face because of the unbarbered thatch of his hair and the way it masked his features. Nothing moved, not the flock on the hill, nor the clouds in the sky. The countryside seemed preternaturally silent, the birds in the hedgerows holding their breath, the wind stilled, the very insects mute underfoot. That look — the unblinking eyes, black as coffee poured straight from the pot, the tightening of the mouth around discolored canines — was the look of a thing out of Spiritus Mundi, deranged, alien, hateful. It was the farmer who had to turn away.

That was how it began, the legend brewing, stewing, simmering in every pot throughout the district through the fall of 1797, in the fifth year of the new French Republic, and into the year that succeeded it. The Terror was over, the King was dead, life — especially in the provinces — returning to normal. People needed a mystery to sustain them, a belief in the arcane and the miraculous, and any number of them — mushroom gatherers and truffle diggers, squirrel hunters, peasants bent under the weight of faggots or baskets of turnips and onions, kept watch in the woods, but it wasn’t until the following spring that the boy was sighted again, this time by a party of three woodcutters, led by Messier, the smith, and this time they gave chase. They chased the boy without thinking, without reason, chased him because he ran from them, and they might have been chasing anything, a cat, a hind, a boar. Eventually, they ran him to tree, where he hissed and flailed the branches, flinging things down on them. Each time one of them attempted to mount into the branches and snatch for the boy’s callused foot, he was pummeled and bitten, until finally they decided to smoke him out. A fire was built beneath the tree, the boy all the while watching these three bipeds, these shagged and violent and strangely habited and gibbering animals, out of the deep retreat of his eyes. Picture him there, crouched in the highest branches, his skin so nicked and abraded it was like a hide haphazardly tanned, the scar at his throat a bleached white tear visible even from the ground, his feet dangling, arms limp, as the smoke rose about him.