Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

The woman wore red spectacles and pantaloons and stilted shoes, and her hair was short and starched. She spoke quickly to herself whilst holding a little box to her ear, and if Newman had not been looking at her, he would have wagered that there had been another person wholly present to receive the words, so conversational was her tone. Here is one of the things that the woman said into her box: “If I actually can get twice what this tumbledown is really worth, Century 21 oughta award me ‘Realtor of the Year.’”

Most fascinating to Newman was the fact that the woman arrived and departed in a chariot only marginally similar to the horseless steam fire engine which served the West End of Milltown, being largely a self-propelled box on wheels (and where the steam came out of this Outland vehicle Newman had no earthly idea). It was clearly a horseless conveyance, and every now and then there appeared others like it racing up and down the gravelly road outside the house, making loud and impertinent rumblings and roarings that frightened and excited the boy at the very same time.

It wasn’t until all of his travelling victuals had been eaten and Newman had grown tired of sleeping upon the house’s thinly carpeted floors and had grown unhappy with himself for hiding so long here and suspending his engagement with the world-at-large (which included a possible ride in one of the speeding conveyances) that the hungry, frightened, and now exceedingly bored eleven-year-old Dinglian boy threw his knapsack upon his back and his nomad’s bindle stick over his shoulder and ventured out and away from his craven’s refuge.

In so doing, Newman Trimmers was promptly assaulted by heavy rain and pea-sized hail that doused and pelted him and finally so slickened his tread that in no time at all he had slid directly down a muddy embankment and into a flooded stream. Young Newman would have been swept completely away (as was his knapsack) and been drowned by the strong, tugging current were it not for the rescuing offices of a fast-thinking man by the curious name of Dean Ryersbach and his twelve-year-old son, who was possessed of the equally-curious name of Chad. The two succeeded in dragging the boy up and out of the swollen creek and onto its bank. They waited for him to take breath and rest himself, and then transported his shivering bones by foot to their home, perhaps a quarter mile away.

It was in this room— Chad’s bedchamber — that Newman spent his very first night beneath an Outland roof in the company of tangible, fleshand-blood Outlanders. And now with a knock at the door, he was suddenly being invoked to partake of his first breakfast in their company as well.

“Are you drest?” enquired a maternal voice coming from the other side of the door.

“Yes. Do come in,” replied Newman, who could be quite polite given the proper circumstance.

“I have breakfast on the table,” said the woman, whose head poked into the room from behind the half-opened door.“Do you feel up to joining us?”

Newman nodded. It was a tentative nod, as if he were wondering for the moment if “having breakfast” carried the same meaning outside the Dell as within.

“Let me see how you look in Chad’s clothes. Well, they’re a little big on you, but your own clothes were so filthy, I’m going to have to put them through another cycle. And they’re really very silly looking — like you ran away from a little stage play. Did you run away from a little stage play, Newman?”

Newman shook his head. He had never heard his clothes called silly before, especially by a woman who looked altogether ridiculous in her own Outland morning attire.

At table, all eyes considered the strange boy who had just the previous day been nearly drowned in a rushing brook, and had come into the Ryersbach family manse begrimed with mud, and tired and hungry, and saucereyed and largely uncommunicative, though now he was more willing to speak for himself.You see, Newman was feeling quite relieved to have passed the night unmolested, with his skin retaining its present healthy red hue in contradiction to the oft-told tale of the more mischievous inmates of the Chowser school that Beyonders took especial delight in draining the blood of Dinglian children and quaffing the sanguine liquid in a spiced punch.

“Did you rest well?” asked the mother, whose name, when it wasn’t “Mrs. Ryersbach,” was “Evelyn.”

“Yes, very well, thank you,” answered Newman in his most courteous tone.

The young girl — perhaps seven-years-of-age — who sat at the right hand of her mother and whose name when it wasn’t “Cindy” was “Pumpkin,” chirped: “Chad says he and Daddy found you in a ditch. Do you live in a ditch? Do you have fish gills?”

Newman shook his hand and withheld his opinion of the question.

“You retard,” said the girl’s brother, insultingly.“Only Aqua-boy has gills.”

“ He could be Aqua-boy,” said the little girl with a look of hopefulness that would make one think that this was her greatest wish in the world.

“He isn’t Aqua-boy,” shot back Chad.

“Shut up! The both of you,” said the father, chewing toast.

Newman could not help himself; he gave the father a strongly quizzical look. Dinglian parents seldom addressed their children in such sharp and rude tones. Even workhouse fathers generally shewed good manners unless there was gin present.

“Well, whoever you are, Newman, we’re happy to have you,” said the mother. “Take some eggs.” She pointed to the bowl of whipped eggs on the table. Newman nodded, picked up the bowl, and began to spoon the whipped eggs onto his plate.

“It looks like rain again to-day,” said Mr. Ryersbach, glancing out the window. “Chad, turn on the radio. I want the forecast.”

Newman suspended his spooning and watched as Chad rose from the table and went to a shelf where there sat a dark box with little buttons and knobs upon it, and a thin, metallic staff rising from the top. The boy did something to the box that Newman could not quite see, and suddenly a voice could be heard — a tiny, reedy voice, which seemed to be coming straight from inside the box.

Newman started at the sound, dropping the bowl of eggs upon the table and sending some of its clumpy contents into his lap, some onto the table and some onto the floor. The bowl struck a jar of honey which sat upon the circular dumb waiter in the centre of the table, popping open the lid and dispatching a sluice of slow-moving, viscous bee jelly toward his place at the table.

“Jesus Christ!” cried Mr. Ryersbach.

“Oh God,” blurted Mrs. Ryersbach.

“Spaz,” joined in Chad Ryersbach smirkingly.

Mrs. Ryersbach bolted up from her chair to clean up the mess as a man said from inside the box, “… are mourning the loss of their native son, Army Private First Class Timothy Baxter, who was born in Danville and spent most of his life in Milton. Baxter received fatal gunshot wounds while on guard duty at a propane distribution centre in Baghdad. He was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.”

“The radio is a little too loud, Chad. Turn it down. Dean, it’s going to rain again to-day. Look up in the sky. That’s a rain sky. Newman, would you like me to make you some more eggs?”

Newman shook his head as the tiny voice proceeding from the box got even tinier and almost indiscernible.

“You’re a strange child,” noted Evelyn Ryersbach as she deposited the bowl and the eggs she was able to rake into it, into the sink.

“Creepy weird,” Chad added.

“Shut up, Chad,” said Mr. Ryersbach whilst glancing at the front page of his newspaper, which Newman noticed was called the Williamsport Sun Gazette .