Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“Nore?” Like Pa, I whisper into the pink cone of her ear. “We’ll get the Inspector, but I’ll tell you a secret: I don’t understand why they need that piece of paper. This place has been home for years.”

AT FIRST it is a fine morning. Nore strikes a square trot and I goose her to a canter. Pocket gophers and kangaroo rats scramble in front of our lunging shadow; the horned larks are singing in the grasses, plumping like vain old Minister Fudd back in Blue Sink. Soon nothing but crimson bluestem is blazing all around us. Coyotes go mousing in this meadow but today I count none. Twice I have seen eagles back here. Three miles of dead grass pass, tickling Nore’s hindquarters. Whenever she sneezes I let go of the reins and grab ahold of the Window’s wrought-iron frame, which feels as slender and bony as a deer’s leg through the burlap case. Pa could have a million sons and none would be a better steward.

We sink into the tallgrass, happy to get swallowed and escape the midday sun. But when we emerge the sky is seamless and black, and the last yellow stitching goes dark. Something is shifting, I think. We reach a timber belt of cottonwood and Siberian elms — species not uncommon to Nebraska, yet I’ve never seen examples of such overpowering heights. Atmospheric salts spill through the air as birds scatter in fantastic numbers before us. The charge pucks the horse’s huge nostrils, causes her devil’s ears to cup around. A chill races down her bony shoulders and prickles up my neck. Between noon and one o’clock, the temperature must plummet some twenty degrees. A sound I barely recognize claps in the distance. “Oh, Nore,” I mumble into her ear, sick with hope. The black sky grows blacker still.

Rain?

I dig into her soft belly too meanly, as if the moons of my spurs could burst the clouds, and maybe they can: The miracle sounds again as if the sky’s been shot, and rain gushes all over us. Unstoppably, like blood from a body. I stick out my tongue to catch it. Over my scalp and Nore’s coarse hair it runs and glimmers, crystal clear and clean . Sheets of water hammer the tallgrass flat, and we go whooping on, Nore and I whinnying in a duet:

Rain! Rain! Rain!

Deeper into the storm I begin to get a picture in my mind of water flooding down the Hox glass. Rain shining the Window. “Oh, God, I want to see that, Nore,” I whisper to her. It’s a scene I’ve imagined a thousand times through all the dry years.

I slow her to a stop and dismount. The red stump I use as Nore’s hitching post is boiling with water; she stares at me, her great eyes running. I undo the knot, loosen the burlap. Rain soaks over my trembling hands; I move the scatter rugs and expose a triangle of the Hox glass. The first drop hits with a beautiful plink , and I feel like an artist. Soon this corner of the Window is jeweled with water, and I uncover the rest of the glass, floating the whole blurred world through it.

I close my eyes and see my mother and father drenched outside the soddy, still dancing but joyously now; Louma in the barn rolling her twinkling eyes at real lightning; the sod crumbling from our ceiling; the house turning into a mudslide. We’ll sleep outdoors and watch the wheat growing and leafing, heading out and reseeding. I angle the Window and funnel the cold rain onto my boot toes. Feelings billow and surge in me to a phenomenal height, a green joy that I wish I could share with my mother.

By now a whole river must have fallen out of heaven and into the sod, and I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here. Then I look up and see it’s not only rainfall sweeping over the prairie: a shape slips through the bluestem just ahead of us, disappears.

“Mr. Florissant?”

But the Florissant claim is still an hour from us at a gallop. And if that shape belonged to Daniel Florissant, well, he has changed considerably since the Easter picnic.

Quickly I rebundle and rope up the Window and get astride Nore, wishing for Peter’s.22 rifle or even a pocketknife as I scan the ground for flat rocks, sticks.

“Hello?”

The black figure is moving through the switchgrass. I turn Nore around and try to give chase until I realize it’s not escaping through the rain at all but rather circling us , like a hawk or the hand of a clock.

“Mr. Florissant? Is that you?” I swallow. “Inspector …?”

I wheel inside the shadow’s wheeling, each of us moving against the rotation of the other like cogs, the stranger occasionally walking into sight and then vanishing again; and if he is the Inspector, he does not seem in any hurry to meet me. Perhaps this is part of some extra test — as if our patience requires further proof. Five years, three daughters, half an inch of rain, and no wheat crop last winter — even Cousin Bailey can sum those numbers. “Inspector!” I holler again over the thunder. Nore trembles, and I imagine that she, too, can feel the pull of this fellow’s gaze, the noose he’s drawing around us.

I realize that I’m shivering out of my clothes, my hands raw. Then a cold flake hits my nose. The rain is turning to snow.

Can a blizzard strike this early, in late October? Does that happen on the prairie? Immediately I regret putting the question to the sky, which seems eager to answer, suddenly very attentive to the questions of humans. “Run, Nore,” I tell her. We still have to pass the Yotherses’ place.

ONLY I KNOW where the Hox River Window really came from. Pa told me by accident after a pint of beer and made me pledge my silence. It’s a scary story: One December night, almost two years ago now, we believed the Inspector was coming to visit our farm. We were eighteen months short of the residency requirement, and we had no window. Frantic, Pa rode out to the Yotherses’ to beg for a square of glass and found their claim abandoned.

Tack was scattered all over the barn floor. Outside, three half-starved Sauceman hogs were masticating the pale red fibers of Mrs. Yothers’s dress; piles of clothing lay trampled into the sod — bouquets of children’s bow ties. The dugout was dark. A family of spotted black jackrabbits were licking their long feet under the table. A tarantula had closed around the bedpost like a small, gloved hand. The Window was still shining in the wall.

So Pa took it. He rode home and told Ma that he’d bartered for the Window from a man moving back to ranch West Texas.

What a whopper! I thought, and almost laughed out loud, guessing that Pa must be teasing us. Straightaway I’d recognized our neighbors’ glass.

I waited for Ma to dispute the story, yet she surprised me by breathing, “Oh, thank you —” in a little girl’s voice and reaching out to the Window with dreamy eyes. Peter, too, chuckled softly and touched the glass like it was a piece of new luck, and no one ever mentioned our friends the Yotherses again. As we carried the Window down to our dugout in a Zegner parade — Ma singing and Peter’s smile lighting even his eyes — those thousand kids were everywhere in my imagination, asking me why I kept quiet, asking why I was trying with all my might to forget them.

To me only, Pa confessed to coveting their title, still posted on the dirt wall — but he took the Window instead, not wanting to risk our own claim by squatting on another man’s haunted land. This scared me worse than anything else: Who would leave 160 acres to which they held title? What happened to them? “What’s the difference, Miles?” My father had drunk himself into a moon-squint, his eyes glowing crescents. “Dead is gone.”

Now whenever he mentions “West Texas,” he winks at me, and I think of my sisters under the sod, silently winking back.

“What puzzles me, Miles,” he slurred at the end of the night, “is that before he left, Mr. Yothers had drilled in a new crop. At first I saw the rows behind the wheat and thought, Ah, Henry knows how starved we are for timber, he’s planted trees —dozens of queer little trees, shaped like crosses. Just a single branch right through their middles. Saplings, sure. Only one grew about a foot and a half, and the rest were much smaller. The thin trunks were the funniest shade of milky white, my son, like no tree’s wood I’ve ever seen; and there wasn’t a leaf in that bleached grove. And who plants anything in the dead of winter, in frozen ground? On my knees I discovered that each horizontal branch was roped to its base by a hitching knot, and these white branches were knobby at the ends, almost like animal — or even human …”