Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Before us a wall of sod bulges and heaves — every inch of it covered with flies. Doorless and stolidly black, studded through with reddish roots; there is not one thing this heap of earth has in common with a home. The snow stops abruptly fifty yards in every direction from the structure’s foundation. No grass grows on it or near it; no birds sing; the smell of death makes my nostrils burn and my eyes stream.

Dear Bailey , I write in my mind, if you thought our sod house was difficult to understand, you’ll find it impossible to imagine this one. Bailey, I might not make it out of here alive .

“Gosh, sir” is all that squeaks out of me.

“Now, would you like to see my crops, Miles? The acres I have cultivated? They’re behind the house.”

“And what crops might those be, sir?”

I want his words to give me the familiar pictures. Say: corn . Say: wheat, milo, hay, lucerne . But he only smiles and replies, “Come take a look.”

I let the man lead me by my elbow, and when we turn a corner I shut my eyes. I wonder if he’ll pry them open — like I did Nore’s.

“Quite a harvest, eh?” he’s saying. “And I grew them without a drop of water.”

Sometimes I dream that dark rains fall and my sisters rise out of the sod, as tall as the ten-foot wheat, shaking the midges and the dust from their tangled hair. Like rain, they thunder and moan. Their pale mouths open and they hiss. Their faces aren’t like any faces I know. Stay in the ground , I plead. Oh, God, please let only wheat rise up .

Even when my eyes open, I can’t stop rubbing at them — I feel like I’m still held in that dream. The scene before me is familiar and terrifying: white crosses, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, rolling outward on the prairie sea. A shovel head glints in a freshly plowed furrow, where a yellowish knob the size of an onion sticks out of the sod. And I see now why Pa was so troubled by their milky hue, because these trees aren’t made of wood at all, but bone. My sisters go on hissing in my mind.

“So you see,” the man says, as brightly as any western noon, “as soon as the Inspector comes, I’ll own the land — a hundred and sixty acres, and not one yard less.”

No, you are mistaken, sir. The land owns you .

He takes my arm and guides me back toward the sod mound. “Now, if you’ll just kindly help me put the window in—”

“And when do you think the Inspector is coming?” I ask in a mild voice.

The man smiles and rakes at his black eyes.

As we unpeel the snowy burlap from the Window, I find myself thinking about my home: Once, when I was nearly sleeping, a fleecy tarantula with a torso as thick as a deck of cards crawled across my mouth, and Peter laughed so hard that I started laughing, too. My father took three months to finish a table and paint it lake blue, just because he thought the color would be a relief to Ma. My mother pieced a quilt for each of her daughters in the dark. Often, at night, I wake into the perfect blankness of the dugout and watch our dreams braid together along the low ceiling. It would take lifetimes to explain to this wretched creature why our Zegner soddy is a home, even without any Inspector’s stamp, while this place is a … tomb.

I step back and let him do the last work to widen the aperture meant to frame the Window. He grunts and scrapes at the pegs holding the shape of the breach and snows sod down all around us. He spits sootily on the glass and rubs in broad strokes with his sleeve.

“When the Inspector comes and sees my window—” he begins prattling, and a quagmire opens up in my chest, deep in its center — a terror like the suck of soft earth. And like a quagmire the terror won’t release me, because the man is speaking in the voice of my own father, and of every sodbuster in the Hox River Settlement — a voice that can live for eons on dust and thimblefuls of water, that can be plowed under, hailed out, and go on whispering madly forever about spring , about tomorrow , a voice of a hope beyond the reach of reason or exhaustion ( oh, Ma, that’s going to be my voice soon ) — a voice that will never let us quit the land.

“Give it back.”

“It’s too late for that, Miles.”

“I have money,” I say, remembering Pa’s envelope. “Give me the glass, take the money, and I’ll be on my way.”

The man looks down at me, amused; he fingers a dollar bill as if it were the feather of a foreign bird, and I think that he must be even older than our country, as old as the sod itself. “What use would I have for that ? That isn’t the paper I require. And anyway, this window isn’t yours. You stole it.”

I reply in a daze: “You’re acquainted with the Yotherses?”

“I was, in a way, but only at the end.”

“I didn’t steal the Window.”

“No, but your father did.”

“You know my father?”

“Where do you think I was coming from when I happened upon you?”

My eyes swim and land on the clover glow of his hay knife.

“When the Inspector comes and sees my window—” he’s saying again, in the tone that sparkles. His back is to me, and I watch the knife bob on his hip. My legs tremble as I spread them to a wide base and get ready to lunge. In a moment, I’ll have to grab his knife and stab him in the back, then reclaim the Window from the wall of his tomb and run for the Florissants’ place. I can feel the nearness of these events — feel the tearing of his skin, the tug of his muscle tissue as the knife rips between his twitching shoulder blades — and I powerfully wish that I could crawl through the window of my Blue Sink bedroom, where such apprehensions would be unimaginable, and drift into a dreamless sleep in my childhood bed.

As I crouch stiffly into my soles, the stranger says gently, “I thought you said you weren’t a thief.”

“Excuse me?” I look up — and find my image reflected in the glass.

“That’s the thing with windows, isn’t it, Miles?” he says. “Sometimes we see things we don’t want to see.”

He turns to me then, and his eyes are bottomless.

MRS. STICKSEL PEERS through the hole in her wall at a tall shape coming on a long trot through the wheat — the complex moving silhouette of a horse and rider. She breaks into a smile, relieved, and moves to stand in the doorway, the children fluttering around her. It’s only then that she notices the soreness of her jaw, tense from all the anxious waiting. She waves a pale arm beneath the black night sky, beneath the still-falling snow, and thinks, That Zegner child sure did shoot up this year , as the rider’s profile grows. The face is still a blank mask.

“Well, look who made it!” she calls. “Oh praise God, lost lamb, we’ve been so worried about you. We had just about given you up—”

A slice of moonlight falls across the horse’s flank.

“Say, isn’t that the Florissants’ mare? What happened to Nore?”

When the Zegner boy doesn’t answer, she loosens the grip on her smile and tries a hot little laugh.

“That’s you, ain’t it, Miles? In this weather I can scarcely see out—”

And just as the children go rushing out to greet the rider, she has the dark feeling she should call them back.

The girl

The girl is back. She stands silhouetted against the sunshine, the great Barn doors thrown open. Wisps of newly mown hay lift and scatter. Light floods into the stalls.

“Hi horsies!” The girl is holding a cloth napkin full of peaches. She walks up to the first stall and holds out a pale yellow fruit.