Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

The girl Rudi liked so much couldn’t stay there forever. The following week Judy returned to the barn, because she harbored a dogged hope that things might return to normal, but also because time was getting away from her and she wanted to cherish what remained with Rudi. At the gate that marked the edge of his yard she turned and caught a glimpse of her own home. It stood in the near distance at the rise of the hill, cheerful and half-timbered with geraniums in the window boxes, the lovely cottage which Kirsten had turned into a jack-in-the-box of primal fear. It was Judy’s mother’s tidy domain, but while she sat by the window in a sanitary room and waited for her senses to come back to her, the natives back home were throwing a party. To her father, the topography of Germany was a thin surface of charming, sportsmanlike, well-organized modern life laid over the deep crackling roots of a barbarian land. The hardy knots of the old ways still broke through, and must be negotiated: the peasant good cheer of their festivals, the pagan earthiness of their Christianity, the temptation to cradle the cheek of a subservient virgin and see whether she would dare say no.

The old green station wagon belonging to Rudi’s family was missing from their gravel driveway; they all appeared to be gone except for Kirsten, who was at the Chandlers’, but Judy checked the barn anyway. Rudi’s black rubber boots rested beside the pile of hay bales. The cow, large-eyed and full-uddered, swished her tail at Judy. The barn was dim in the late-afternoon light, smelling more strongly than usual of manure. She looked up at the crucifix on the back wall, witness to numerous sins. She thought about the puffs of crinoline on either side of Rudi’s hips, how he must have pulled the girl against him to make them flare wide open like flowers in a time-lapse filmstrip. The barn had that effect on people. They stay warm by their own body heat, he had told her, his back to the counter and his rough hands resting against it on either side. In embarrassment her gaze had fallen to his suspenders loose at his waist, his navel that seemed an odd reminder of infancy on his grown male body. You can eat it for a cookie, and there is no sin.

She walked through their yard to the shed, as she still occasionally did, to look in on the family of hedgehogs. The gasoline fumes gave her a mild headache, but it was worth it to play with these little animals Rudi agreed were precious. Yet now they were gone; where they had been there was only a fluff of dry grass interspersed with brittle brown leaves. She crouched on the hard-packed soil beside it and poked with the end of a trowel, but it was useless. The family had disappeared, and she could not guess where they might have gone.

She stood and set her hands on her hips, digging the toe of her saddle shoe into the ground. The shed was small and close. The tractor fit into it but left little space for anything else. Along the far wall rested a cluster of tools, hoes and spades and a rake with rusted tines; beside it sat a pile of rotting baskets and a stack of milk pans. A sack of fertilizer sat near the door, its top gaping open. She turned a basket upside-down and sat on it, then took from her skirt pocket the little stack of matches she had been hoarding from the box in the kitchen. They were so much larger than the small ones people used to light cigarettes, and the strike-anywhere feature still amazed her. When she moved too skittishly, either the match snapped in half or nothing happened at all. But when she snapped it decisively, nearly every surface became a runway for the most forbidden thrill she had yet encountered. Snap: the split-willow side of the basket became a co-conspirator. Snap: the sole of her saddle shoe brought a second flame roaring to life. Snap. Snap. She let each burn down almost to her fingers, then dropped it on the dirt floor. The humid ground offered no fuel to the fire, and every match burned itself out. A little pile of wood ash formed beside her, and she thought of the illustrations in the story about the girl who played with matches, the cats’ tears pouring like an open spigot beside the little volcano of ash that had once been Pauline.

But there was no concern for that. Pauline jumped for joy and ran about, while Judy sat still. When she dropped her last match onto the ground, she fed the small flame with a leaf from the hedgehogs’ nest. It fluttered and rose to a high peak, and the effect pleased her enough that she sprinkled it with a bit of grass from the nest; next, a broken bit of twig from a basket. Now she had a very small campfire, a doll-sized one, suitable for her imaginary journeys into the land of the cavechildren. Onto it she dropped another tuft of grass, then looked around for steadier fuel. The bag of fertilizer gaped beside the door; she took a handful of the gray granules and fed one to the little campfire. Snap: but instead of a flame, it popped and gave off a flash of light. She fed it a second one, then a third.

The shed door creaked open, and Judy swung her head around in alarm. She quickly dropped the fertilizer onto the ground and stood, setting the basket like a cap over both the fuel and the small fire. Standing at the door was Kirsten, her blond braids crossed demurely over the part in her hair, her green flowered apron neat at her waist and Rudi’s big boots on her feet. She took a step inside and said, “Oh. Hallo, Judy. Was machst du?”

“Playing,” she replied in English. She saw the incomprehension in Kirsten’s eyes, and she stood taller and straightened her skirt. The girl looked nervous, as though she meant to inquire further but lacked both the nerve and the English skills to do so. Judy moved toward the door, and Kirsten’s gaze followed her. There was that look again: the one of a girl with her pockets turned inside out. The mute plea. When Judy reached the doorway, Kirsten squeezed past her and headed toward the milk pans at the back of the shed. She stopped halfway and looked around, raising her face as though detecting, now, that whatever she had suspected was wrong was indeed very wrong. Observing this, Judy felt a twist of fear. She did not want to be caught and reported, banned from Rudi’s property. And she did not want to see her father and Kirsten taking sides together against her. That could not be borne.

And so she did a simple thing. She banged down the latch, and she backed slowly away.

A chicken behind her heel squawked and fluttered. She turned, then hurried back toward her house. Closing her eyes, she tucked her hands into the small pockets of her skirt and walked into the burgeoning wind, to where the house awaited, calm and empty, to where the thistles were beginning to bloom.

Zach caught up with Scott at the side door to the multipurpose room. The bazaar was in full swing, with kids running rampant on the playground and drivers with “Visualize World Peace” bumper stickers flipping each other off in the parking lot.

“Dude, it is crammed in there,” said Scott. “And about four hundred degrees.”

“Is anybody else here?” asked Zach. Scott, he knew, would understand this to mean any of their friends, since otherwise the question was profoundly stupid.

“Everyone. Even Tally’ll be here in a while.” They made their way into the hallway, where Zach got jabbed with the stick end of a little girl’s ribbon wand. To the left, a teacher’s demonstration of wool felting was attracting a huge crowd.

“Do you know who won the auctions yet?” Zach shouted over the noise.

“No. They don’t start until four.”

They squeezed into the multipurpose room. The fifth-grade teacher was guiding a group of enthralled children in making beeswax gnomes. Zach guessed they were kids from the larger community and not the school, since by the time he was seven he had made enough beeswax gnomes to populate Middle-earth. At another table, the first-grade teacher was selling handmade soap. The smell of calendula oil drifted out gently from her stand, and Zach felt a wave of nostalgia. His mother’s remedy for nearly every scraped knee or boo-boo: calendula cream and a Band-Aid. It was the scent of a mother’s healing.