Lucy’s Way
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.
-- John Donne
Johnny ran away from his Dust Bowl home, not just because he hated the work. He couldn’t stand the sky anymore, so he went to the Oklahoma town to hide.
The sky in the West is bigger than the sky in the East. You can see a storm loom up a hundred miles away and when it comes, it’s as if the whole universe tipped up on edge and looked as though it’d come crashing down on your head like a thousand trains. The dry burned out summer storm carried killer, driving dirt, black as the grave and screeching like a city of demons.
In winter, the sky blasted ice and dust, scouring the earth of anything green. Between the storms, it was worse, Johnny thought. The sky turned a terrible pale blue and stretched out deep into outer space, infinite, and the frost-white moon just hung there in deep-frozen speech, saying you were just going to die some day.
The sun, in winter, was just a faraway dim white-gold light in the always howling wind.
So one night Johnny got up and ran off to town, leaving his family high and dry. “The old man can take care of those mangy animals himself,” he scoffed, feeling brave and with a little angry satisfaction heating up his chest as he stepped out on his own. “Ma and Lucy will get along just fine without me.”
He rounded past the one scrawny pine tree -- more a bush than anything -- that survived the dust bowl winds, that marked the place where home ended and the world began. Right then a little chill whiff of regret blew threw his heart as he remembered that he didn’t leave a note as he had intended. “Never you mind,” he whispered to himself, “they’ll figure it out. They can just look me up in town.”
Besides, he went on thinking, this time quietly, I’m not putting up with those devotions anymore, no more prayers, no more of those creaky hymns that nobody can sing on tune, no more of that crazy Bible-reading every night. I’ve had it with all that stuff.
“I’m modern now,” he said with an eloquent huff, to no one.
His feet crunched on the dry old snow on the night road with an echo that confirmed sheer isolation. Tattered clouds gusted under the waning quarter moon, and as he looked ahead toward the scattered lights of Centerville, he stopped course with a shudder.
Three hunched-over horsemen, shrouded in blankets against the cold, came up riding at a slow ambling walk, their old mares plodding closer to the still young man, closer and closer, up to his side, and continuing past with barely a sigh ...
… except the last one slowed and pulled his rough cowl back from his head, showing a mostly bald crown with long skeins of silver hair flowing down his back. His eyes fixed on Johnny, peering into the face of groundless confidence, and he shook his head, slowly.
“The sky is not your enemy.” The voice was low and a little foreign and not a little threatening, but the three horsemen continued on their way west, as Johnny shrugged and went his way east into the electric lights of Centerville.
* * * * * * *
Johnny was dazzled by electricity. There was none of that where he came from. “Now this,” he exclaimed, “is just something!”
The first place he walked past on Main Street was shabby compared to the blazing spotlights in the rest of town. There were no lights on the first place on the end of Main Street. It was a dingy, clapboard structure: even in the dim shadow it was obvious that it needed a paint job and a new window.
There was a sign by the door, hand-painted in rough strokes: “Centerville Bible Mission.” A paper handbill flapped in the wind underneath the wooden sign that said: “Christmas Play with live humans and animals. Sometime.”
“Sometime?” Johnny scoffed with a chuckle, glad to be rid of such nonsense. He continued down Main Street, feeling a little cold, a little hungry.
The gas station glowed in splendor from the big electric bulbs hanging bare on lines around the place. Two red and white pumps stood tall, with a motorcar getting filled by a station attendant clad in a thick coat and white pants.
Next door there was a silver all-night diner. Neon lines in pink and blue wrapped the metal-clad restaurant, and on top of the roof, the neon tubing spelled out, in bright cursive, “Centerville Skyliner.”
It looked crowded. Waitresses scurried from table to counter and back again, and the diners dined and talked at one another without waiting to listen. When the door opened to let someone in or out, a hubbub mix of voices, laughter and loud puffs of music outgassed like steam into the freezing night air.
The door also let out a whiff of french fries and chicken, a whiff that stole up into the nostrils of an increasingly hungry young man, who was getting famished. The warm supper, the night before, was drawing further away.
He looked down at his country shoes, and his country patched pants, his homespun and sewn-up jacket and his dirty cap, and he realized just then that people must have been looking at him funny, and must have know that he was just a sod-buster, clearly out of place.
He couldn’t go into the diner. He wasn’t going to fit in. He couldn’t go into the next place, either, the Centerville Mall -- “The Mall that Never Sleeps!” -- which the almost blindingly bright billboard proclaimed on both sides (“the same message to hit you coming and going!” the ad man had promised). The windows showed pretty mannequins wearing dresses and suits for bigger cities. Other windows were stacked with toys for bigger toyboxes, and the walls were plastered with pictures of people always smiling, always happy, always warm and full.
He stopped, stood still, his hands thrust into his pockets, downfaced onto his beat up old clod-hoppers, his stomach cramped and a shiver crept up his spine.
A rolled up piece of litter blew onto his shoes and fluttered against his ankles. He picked it up: “Christmas Play with live humans and animals. Sometime. At the Centerville Bible Mission.” He stared at the words. They seemed so familiar. Maybe …
“Hello young man,” a clownish voice broke into Johnny’s concentration. He looked up, and there was indeed a clown face attached to the clown voice. Grinning at him was an odd fellow dressed up in a tuxedo but made up with a white face, black nose and black lips.
“Cat got your tongue, or are you afraid of talking mimes?”
Johnny just stared, blinked, and couldn’t speak.
The dapper talking-mime clown chuckled: “Oh don’t mind me, just a private joke you see. It seems here that you’re offended, and quite rightly I might add, by the litter that has been infesting this pretty little town of late …”
He plucked the handbill out of Johnny’s hands. “Dear me, these religious folk can’t ever do advertising right. They’ve got the ‘where,’ with that squalid little property at the dark end of town, but they haven’t got the ‘when.’”
He began to laugh loudly. “I mean, look at this, young man. ‘Sometime’? Can you believe it? Just when is one to show up if he wanted to see this pageant of ‘live humans and animals’? Dear me, I think we can safely relieve ourselves of this waste,” he said, still chuckling, as he crushed the paper into a ball and dropped it onto the street where it skittered away with the wind..
“You look a little worse for wear. It is a cold night to be traipsing about, and maybe a little peckish? Hmmm?”
Johnny couldn’t keep up with his words, and just stared.
“Are you hungry? Cold?”
Finally, he nodded his head slowly.
“Well then, why didn’t you just say so?” The laughter came again, not so pleasantly. The tuxedo’d shoulders took the boy by the arm and moved him on in the way he was going. “Let’s see if I can provide some assistance at a certain little establishment of mine, just a slight way down the street. I’m all dressed up for our Annual Happy Holidays Celebration Bash. I’ve been looking for some appropriate help, and since you look like a young man of sound mind and body, I will offer you some employment that I think you’ll will find … hmmmm … very profitable.”
They passed other shops and businesses, all open, all very busy, and they approached a great glaring set of lights that seemed to blaze at the center of town, a sort of yellow-orange burnt and harsh light that baked out the color from faces and made them look anonymous, like a mass of dust motes in an otherwise dark room.
They stood in front, now, of the massive granite Bank & Security LLC of Centerville, also open, also very busy. The talking-mime chuckled: “Money, it's a gas, grab that cash with both hands and make a stash,” he sang to himself, and then turned to Johnny: “And here we are!”
The Magic Mountain Saloon burned bright like fireworks sitting still. Johnny blinked and felt dizzy, but the strange man ushered him in through the large glass door. The inside was much darker, and for now this was a relief. “Now that’s more like it,” his host said, “We turn those lights on to turn off the sky, but in here it’s as cozy as sin.”
The large dark room into which Johnny had entered was warm and certainly did drive out the cold. The long bar on the other side of the room faced an enormous mirror that ran down the whole side of the building into other rooms. He heard many voices from these rooms, sometimes cheering, other times not. His shivering stopped and now he looked wolfishly at a plate being speedily dispatched by a large gloomy well-dressed man at the bar. “Pearl,” the talking-mime sharply called the young barmaid, “get this fine young man a hamburger and anything else he wants.”
* * * * * * *
So began Johnny at the Magic Mountain Saloon. He got out of his country clothes and put on a rather dapper suit as an employee of the establishment. He began running errands, busing tables, sweeping the floors. As time went on, his position moved up and a while later, he found himself running some of the operations of the Saloon. His suit was fancier now.
He was helping Pearl one day behind the bar. And he noticed something for the first time there: the people did not talk to each other, nor did they move or do anything else. They just stared … at the huge mirror behind the bar. Then he saw why: they looked, on the outside at least, better than what they were. The mirror smoothed out blemishes and wrinkles, took off some extra weight, darkened the hair, made them handsomer or prettier (“like the windows at the Centerville Mall,” he thought).
Pearl noticed him looking back and forth from the people to their reflections in the mirror: “They see themselves for what they wanted to be,” she muttered. “It’s like the mirror fixes up your past.”
He noticed another thing, too.
The mirror people at the bar never left. They had gotten too attached to their other self to ever go away.
* * * * * * *
Sometime later, Johnny was helping Pearl at the bar again, and in walked a new face that Johnny wasn’t used to. Her blue dress was old and patched up, a country girl for sure, he thought to himself.
“Johnny.”
He shook with surprise. “Johnny, come home.”
He looked at the girl closer and he finally recognized her. “Lucy, it’s you!”
Pearl came up from the other side of the bar: “Do you know this poor girl?”
Johnny was shaken. It was like the day had been turned inside out. “No … well, yes, I know her.”
“Who is she?” And meanwhile, the girl’s eyes began brimming with tears.
“Someone I knew from before.”
And the tears streamed down the white face, her deep wide eyes pouring. But Lucy held her composure and placed on the bar a little round parcel, wrapped carefully in the remnants of a linen flour sack.
She unwrapped it. It was a small round loaf of homemade bread, the light brown crust so familiar, so redolent of the warm proofed dough-rise and the baking aroma of a bread perfected, in the hearth of home, driving the cold and hunger away for his whole childhood everyday. It was home, always, and smelled of memory.
“Ma was afraid you were hungry. She baked this for you. Johnny, come home with me.” She didn’t need to say it, because he knew already. Her words barely broke out of whisper.
He looked at his shoes. But they were shiny now, and he looked at the cuffs of his shirt which was clean and new now. He looked all around him, which was comfortable now, and he looked up at the ceiling, where there was no sky.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, softly at first, and then a little spark of indignation set in: “What would I want with just this plain homemade bread? I get store-bought wonderbread everyday here, white and square, and I get a lot of pop and hamburgers and cake and ice cream and everything really great.”
He looked down and clenched his fist. “I don’t want to go back.”
“Johnny, you’re so meanhearted,” Pearl said in disgust, and she turned to Lucy, taking her hand. “You poor, poor girl, you’re so cold! Can I get you some water to drink? Why don’t you sit down and get warm?”
Lucy shook her head and wrapped up the bread, and walked away.
* * * * * * *
Later that evening, the darkness fell onto the outside window, despite the artificial light blaring from the rooftop sign. Johnny had been out of sorts all afternoon, and Pearl wouldn’t talk to him. The customers at the bar kept staring into their reflections.
He had made his decision to stay. He had said no to his family and his past. He had broken his sister’s heart. So where was he now? Who had he linked up with? Who was his family now? Did he know?
“Pearl, what is the boss’s name?”
“Huh?”
“You know, the owner of this place: what’s his name?”
“You mean the owner of this place and every other place in Centerville? and all the land around here?”
She was obviously still upset. “He owns all of this?” Johnny asked incredulously. “He’s just, you know, a nice regular guy.”
Pearl straightened up, stiff, a sadness darkened her face, and her voice quavered: “Are you that naive? Do you always go around with your eyes wide shut? You know what, you little man? He hasn’t got a name, he never had one!”
Johnny stepped back in shock. Pearl went on: “Because you may have noticed that he hasn’t got a face. He is a black hole that light doesn’t get out of.”
“He’s got a face,” Johnny stuttered, “I see it every day.”
“That’s a clown face, not a real one. He’s a mime. He doesn’t really talk: he performs. You are just part of the audience in a show that never ends.”
Johnny stammered, trying to think of some argument against her cold words. The air was pounding in his ears, and his thumping heart told him she was right.
She didn’t let up: “You boy, are in a hall of mirrors, and that little sister of yours is the bravest, most beautiful person I’ve ever met. It takes Beauty like her to cut through this mirage.”
A dull, slow handclap sounded behind them. Johnny turned to see the smiling mime, leering, chuckling. “Bravo, my sweet little Pearl, you have initiated our handsome young man into our little den of mysteries.”
Johnny stammered: “Do you own this place?”
“Do I own this place?” His laugh became a gleeful shriek and then stopped on a dime, for effect. “Look around you, my young servant, I own everything in this happy little Dust Bowl for hundreds of miles around, the gas station, the diner, the mall, the shops, the bank and all the mortgages … and …”
He bent down to peer, hideously, into Johnny’s face. “… and all those mangy, dusty patchwork farms, every single one of them, even those sodhouses with all those strange, irritating ways -- how did you say it? -- oh, yes: no more devotions, no more prayers, no more of those creaky hymns, no more of that crazy Bible-reading.”
“You said this, didn’t you Johnny? I’ve made it possible for you to be modern, just as you wanted. I bought out every farm and sent them all away. You’ve traded your home for the Magic Mountain, and I think,” he chuckled again, “you’ve made a profitable choice.”
Johnny couldn’t stop the sob in the back of his throat. “You sent them away? Where did they go … I’ve got to find them!”
“That was a long time ago, my young friend, you’ve been here longer than you think.” Then the laugh came, sour and sardonic. He started singing, in the creak of a damaged melody: “Well it blowed away, it blowed away, all the crops that you’ve planted blown away. Well you can't grow any grain if you ain't got any rain, All except your mortgage blown away.”
“I just adore that song, don’t you?” he chortled. “And that would be a mortgage that I hold, of course. This Dust Bowl is a great, great business plan!” he slapped his knee, for effect.
“Pearl, dear, take our young employee down to the basement and open the black door. Let him take a peek inside at our operations. It’s high time he did.”
“No, boss, he’s too young.”
He turned to her, long and slow, and stared, his painted smile hung like a gallows. “Look in the mirror. You owe me. I own you.”
Johnny saw her shake. She almost fell down, but he steadied her. And as he did he glanced outside, through the glass door.
Despite the artificial light, there in the night, was a girl across the street, holding a candle, a candlelight that despite its smallness defeated the glaring dark light of the town. It was Lucy.
“I chose the wrong house,” he thought. He decided. “I have to go home. I have to fix things.”
But Pearl clutched at his shirt sleeve and pulled him after her. “Where are you taking me?” he asked, his panic starting to swell.
“It’s a door we’ve all had to step through, and once through you can never get out.”
They were going down the basement stairs.
“But you’re outside now, Pearl, you must’ve got out somehow!”
“No, you dimwitted little boy, I’m still in that tiny dark room. So afraid of the sky, beaten down by everything. I'll always be stuck in the dark room, and so will you.”
They were on the basement floor. Across the dim room was a rusted, solid iron door.
“Pearl,” he said, looking into her real human face, and he started to cry.
She looked at the tears, and his youth, and let back in her mind what she’d been keeping out of her thoughts since Johnny had started at the saloon. He looked like another little boy from before, another boy in her own time before, before everything went wrong, before she stumbled toward the false lights, staggered into Centerville one night and crawled into the Magic Mountain.
There was another boy she had lost.
She would not lose this one.
“Look at me Johnny. I am going up the steps. You are going to crouch down behind me and keep quiet. When we get back to the bar, I’m going to do something, and then you’re going to get out of here. Run and never look back.”
“But Pearl, what about you?”
“Shut up, Johnny, and for once, mind someone who cares about you, instead of kissing up to someone who just wants to eat you alive.”
* * * * * * *
Pearl made a lot of unnecessary noise going up the steps. He heard the clown chuckling, low and hungry, who asked: “Well, is our little friend enjoying himself down there?”
He could sense Pearl stiffening. Here it comes, he thought. She announced, cool and fearless: “The word ‘friend’ died in agony the first time it dripped from your lips!”
The clown laughed uproariously, “That’s a good one, wench! But you’ll have to pay for that joke!”
Fear shot through Johnny’s limbs.
Her voiced sounded higher now: “I’ll have a lot more to pay when the bill comes for this!”
Johnny could sense Pearl curling her arm back and heaving something forward. An instant later, he heard a horrendous crash and a lot of screaming. Somehow the lights went out inside the saloon.
She had smashed the mirror with a pint glass.
“Run you idiot,” Pearl hissed, and she kicked him for emphasis.
He ran out the door and did not look back.
* * * * * * *
He saw a light up ahead in the street … a real light, a candle-flame. It was Lucy, lighting his way.
He hurried back up Main Street, the way he came. Always, the light was a little ahead of him, hurrying him on.
Finally he reached the edge of town, and there he stood at the entrance of the Centerville Bible Mission.
“Please come in!” called out a distantly familiar, slightly foreign-sounding voice. Johnny looked, and it was that silver-haired Indian Chief, or whatever he was. He couldn’t think of a better place to hide, so he went in. The Indian smiled at him this time, and held out his hand. Johnny shook it, and he seemed to get a little calmer.
“The sky can be beautiful, son.”
It was a ramshackle old chapel, with a few rough wooden benches set up for the paltry audience. He sat down in the darkness of the chapel, and the Christmas play of “live humans and animals” began. The Indian Chief was the narrator, reading from his big pulpit Bible, from the second chapter of Luke, in the King James speech. The parts were all acted out by children. The angels wore bedsheets and paper wings, and cellophane halos. The shepherds wore burlap bags for tunics and flour bag linens for their headdresses.
Two sheep and a lamb were led in for the “in the fields, watching their flocks by night” part. A calf was led in by the manger. And a donkey rode in, preceded by an older boy.
On the donkey rode a girl, playing the Virgin Mary. He could see, as he watched behind her, under the ruddy horse blanket (probably furnished by the Indian preacher), an old worn and patched, and familiar, blue dress.
The whole procession moved slowly up to the manger, and beside it was a little Christmas tree, festooned by a solitary paper star, colored gold by chalk and cellophane.
“And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.” The chief closed the large book. He looked up at the audience, his eyes gently resting on Johnny, who felt older than he had thought because, after all, he had lost a lot of time. “Listen to the Christmas words of the Harp of the Holy Spirit: ‘Blessed be the Child that gladdened Bethlehem today! Blessed be the Babe that made manhood young again today! Glory to the Beautiful, Who conformed us to His image! Thanks to that Good One, the cause of all that is good!’”
The blinds were taken down from the window, and light streamed in. Johnny could see the audience. They were the mirror people ... now, for once, having left the bar, with their attachment to their reflection broken, now un-cursed. The evil eye -- which had been their own mirror image -- was cancelled forever.
One of them, the first he had seen, recognized him and approached, holding out his hand. “My name is Mr Peppercorn,” he said softly. “And on behalf of my fellows, I want to thank you for the part you played in getting us out of that prison. Here,” he looked up at the star on the tree, “we see through the glass darkly, face to face … finally.”
Johnny didn’t want to stay for pleasantries, though. He was looking for Lucy to come back with the rest of the children actors.
“Please excuse me,” he said to Mr Peppercorn, “I have to find my sister.”
He ran out to the gate of the Mission. He saw the familiar silver-headed Indian waiting. “She went back home,” he explained, “You might be able to find her there.”
“Which way?” Johnny asked, ready to go.
“Look over there,” the chief preacher pointed, “You can make out her candle.”
Johnny saw it, and started to move. Then he stopped.
“But what about Pearl?” he asked quietly. “What happened to her?”
“I don’t know, Johnny.”
“She was the one who got me and all the others out of the Magic Mountain.”
“Yes, I know. She did a brave, brave thing.”
“I wish I could help her.”
Once again, the wise old Indian Chief looked gently into Johnny’s face: and how it had changed from the groundless confidence of a naive childish boy. Now the young face was more grounded, but more open.
“You can help her, Johnny. But you’ll have to go back to see.”
“But will I make it back here? Will I make it back home with Lucy?”
The wise man shook his head gently. “I don’t know, Johnny. You may or may not. But you will do something good.”
“And Johnny, my brave friend,” he continued, “If you go, don’t come back the same way. They’ll be waiting for you here. They already know who to blame. From the saloon, go straight home. Follow the light.”
* * * * * * *
Johnny walked in the morning daylight down Main Street. The artificial lights were off, and nothing was turned on but the yellow-gold prairie sun of an Oklahoman mid-winter. He looked at Centerville in the light, which was shown up now as nothing but false fronts and ramshackle structures, worse than the Mission ever had been.
He walked fast, and ran up to the entrance of the Magic Mountain. The glass door had been smashed. He peered in and saw the shattered remains of the great window, and smelled something burning. Smoke was coming up from the basement stairs.
He looked down amid the broken glass, and under a chair he found an unconscious Pearl.
“Pearl! Pearl!” he whispered, as he bent over her, trying to see her breathe. Her eyes were black and blue, her nose and lip were bleeding.
“My boy, you’ve come back,” she muttered, barely opening her eyes to a squint.
* * * * * * *
They stumbled out of Centerville, off Main Street and onto the frozen prairie. A light snow was falling as he looked for a light: and there it was to the northwest, a small amber light, as if it were a candleflame, out here in the wind and snow.
But it stayed lit. It was slow-going, with Pearl stumbling, unfocused and in pain.
The weather was coming thicker now. The wind swirled the snow in white curtains around them to the point that direction meant nothing: but the light stayed true. Its tiny gleam became the one still point around which everything turned.
And the weary pilgrims stumbled after it.
Finally it stopped.
Softly, the wind calmed, and the snow cleared.
Light from the sun gleamed into the clearing.
There were the Indian Chief and his two companions, sitting astride their horses, their blankets thrown back, barefaced, waiting for Johnny and Pearl.
And on the ground was a tree, with a familiar paper star.
It was the little tree that had marked the boundary between home and the world.
“Greetings, brave one,” the Chief dismounted his horse. “Here, let me take this noble woman to a place where she can rest.”
He and Johnny helped Pearl to the horse, where they lifted her onto the saddle.
The Chief mounted again, and his companions made ready to go
Johnny stood, confused, looking lost.
“Where are they?” he asked the wise men. “Where’s the house, the barn? Where’s my family? Where’s Lucy?” He stared, and looked around the tree. There was nothing but prairie and sky.
“Johnny,” the Chief said softly, “It has been ten years.”
He urged his horse closer to the boy. “Here, you’ll need this.”
He held out a brass cylinder. “This is a spyglass. I use it to study the stars. You will use it to see the way more clearly. That is how you’ll know the sky is not your enemy. The stars are suns, sure, but each one has a name. They are signs of Beauty: so is our star,” he smiled with a quiet laugh.
“Just follow Lucy’s light, Johnny.”
“But I’ll starve out there, and freeze.”
“Look a step ahead of you, my friend.”
Johnny looked down, ahead of his shoes. There was a little piece of bread.
“It’s from the loaf of bread your mother made you. Take and eat. The crumbs will mark your way as you follow the light.”
The three wise men started their horses away, with Pearl.
The Chief turned and called back. “It will be more than enough, brave friend!”
Johnny leaned down and picked up the small morsel of bread, which felt fresh, and even still warm.
He slipped it in his mouth and swallowed. Sure enough, the warmth radiated from his heart to his head and down to his soles.
He smiled, and set the magic spyglass to his eye. He could see the mountains, and the evergreen pines, and the promise of home. The candle burned bright.
* * * * * * *
Over his head, the sky turned pearl blue and stretched out into the beautiful sun and the blessing stars.
The dove-white moon stood watch over him in the speech of stillness that you were going to really live some day.
Sometime.