Black Glass (19 page)

All of Scotland was hoping to see Charles Edward Stuart on the throne, and from hopes they progressed to rumors and from rumors to sightings. Then came the great victory at Falkirk. Naturally, Ian wished to do his part and naturally, being a man of influence and standing, his part must be a large one. It was the sin of ambition which gave the witches an opening.

This time the woman they sent was not young and beautiful but old and sweet. She was everyone's mother. She wore a scarf on her hair and her stockings rolled at her ankles. Blue rivers ran just beneath the skin of her legs. Out of her sleeve she drew a leather pouch.

“From the end of the world,” she said. “Brought me by a black warrior riding a white elephant, carried over mountains and across oceans.” She made it a lullaby. Ian was drowsy when she finished. So she took his hand and emptied the pouch into his palm, closing it for him. When he opened his hand, he held the curled shards and splinters of a unicorn's horn.

Ian had never seen a unicorn's horn before, although he knew that the king of Denmark had an entire throne made of them. A unicorn's horn is a thing of power. It purifies water, nullifies poison. The witch reached out to Ian, slit his thumb with her one long nail, so his thumb ran blood. Then she touched the wound with a piece of horn. His thumb healed before his eyes, healed as if it had never been cut, the blood running back inside, the cut sealing over like water.

In return Ian gave the witch what she asked. He had given her his godliness, too, but he didn't know this at the time. When the witch was gone, Ian took the horn and ground it into dust. He subjected it to one more test of authenticity. He mixed a few grains into a hemlock concoction and fed it to his cat, stroking it down her throat. The cat followed the hemlock with a saucer of milk, which she wiped, purring, from her whiskers.

Ian had already put down a very fine single malt whiskey, many bottles, enough for the entire McBane clan to toast the coronation of Charles Stuart. It was golden in color and 90 proof, enough to make a large man feel larger without incapacitating him. Ian added a few pinches of the horn to every bottle. The whiskey color shattered and then vanished, so the standing bottle was filled with liquid the color of rainwater, but if you shook it, it pearled like the sea. Ian bottled his brew with a unicorn label, the unicorn enraged, two hooves slicing the air.

Have you ever heard of the American ghost dancers? The Boxers of China? Same sort of thing here. Ian distributed his whiskey to the McBanes before they marched off to Culloden. Ian assured them that the drink, taken just before the battle, would make them invulnerable. Sword wounds would seal up overnight; bullets would pass through flesh as if it were air.

I don't suppose your Disney says very much about Culloden. A massacre is a hard thing to set to music. Certainly they tell no stories and sing no songs about the McBanes that day. Davie McBane was the first to go, reeling about drunkenly and falling beneath one of the McBanes' own horses. Little Angus went next, shouting and racing down the top of a small hill, but before he could strike a single blow for Scotland, a dozen arrows jutted from him at all points. His name was a joke and he made a big, fat target. His youngest brother, Robbie, a boy of only fifteen years, followed Angus in, and so delirious with whiskey that he wore no helmet and carried no weapon. His stomach was split open like a purse. An hour later, only two of the McBanes still lived. The rest had died grotesquely, humorously, without accounting for a single enemy death.

When news reached home, the McBane wives and daughters armed themselves with kitchen knives and went in search of Ian. They thought he had lied about the unicorn horn; they thought he had knowingly substituted the inferior tooth of a fish instead. Ian was already gone, and with enough time and forethought to have removed every bottle of the unicorn brew and taken it with him. This confirmed the women's suspicions, but the real explanation was different. Ian had every expectation the whiskey would work. When the McBanes returned, he didn't wish to share any more of it.

The women set fire to his home and his brewery. Ian saw it from a distance, from a boat at sea, exploding into the sky like a star. The women dumped every bottle of whiskey they found until the rivers bubbled and the fish swam upside down. But none of the whiskey bore the unicorn label. Ian was never seen or heard from again.

“Whiskey is subtle stuff. It's good for heartache; it works a treat against shame. But, even laced with unicorn horn, it cannot mend a man who has been split in two by a sword stroke. It cannot mend a man who no longer has a head. It cannot mend a man with a dozen arrows growing from his body like extra arms. It cannot give a man back his soul.”

The story seemed to be over, although Prince Charles had never appeared in it. Bobby had no feeling left in his hand. “I see,” he said politely.

McBean shook him once, then released him. He fetched a pipe. When he lit a match, he held it to his mouth and his breath flamed like a dragon's. “What will I do to you if you tell anyone?” he asked Bobby. This was a rhetorical question. He continued without pausing. “Something bad. Something so bad you'd have to be an adult even to imagine it.”

•   •   •

SO BOBBY TOLD ME
none of this. I didn't see him again that day. He did not come by, and when I finally went over, his mother told me he was home, but that he was not feeling well, had gone to bed. “Don't worry,” she said, in response, I suppose, to the look on my face. “Just a chill. Nothing to worry about.”

He missed school the next day and the next after that. When I finally saw him, he was casual. Offhand. As if it had all happened so long ago he had forgotten. “He caught me,” Bobby said. “He was very angry. That's all. We better not do it again.”

It was the end of our efforts to put a Stuart on the throne. There are days, I admit, when I'm seeing the dentist and I pick up
People
in the waiting room and there they are, the current sad little lot of Windsors, and I have a twinge of guilt. I just didn't care enough to see it through. I enjoyed Charles and Diana's wedding as much as the next person. How was I to know?

Bobby and I were less and less friends after that. It didn't happen all at once, but bit by bit, over the summer mostly. Sex came between us. Bobby went off and joined Little League. He turned out to be really good at it, and he met a lot of boys who didn't live so near to us but had houses he could bike to. He dumped me, which hurt in an impersonal, inevitable way. I believed I had brought it on myself, leaving him that day, going home to a warm house and never saying a word to anyone. At that age, at that time, I did not believe this was something a boy would have done.

So Bobby and I continued to attend the same school and see each other about in our yards, and play sometimes when the game was big and involved other people as well. I grew up enough to understand what our parents thought of McBean, that he was often drunk. This was what had made his nose purple and made him rave about the Stuarts and made him slip in his snowy yard, his arms flapping like wings as he fell. “It's a miracle,” my mother said, “that he never breaks a bone.” But nothing much more happened between Bobby and me until the year we turned sixteen, me in February, him in May.

He was tired a lot that year and developed such alarming bruises under his eyes that his parents took him to a doctor who sent him right away to a different doctor. At dinner a few weeks later, my mother said she had something to tell me. Her eyes were shiny and her voice was coarse. “Bobby has leukemia,” she said.

“He'll get better,” I said quickly. Partly I was asking, but mostly I was warning her not to tell me differently. I leaned into her and she must have thought it was for comfort, but it wasn't. I did it so I wouldn't be able to see her face. She put her arm around me, and I felt her tears falling on the top of my hair.

Bobby had to go to Indianapolis for treatments. Spring came, and summer, and he missed the baseball season. Fall, and he had to drop out of school. I didn't see him much, but his mother was over for coffee sometimes, and she had grown sickly herself, sad and thin and gray. “We have to hope,” I heard her telling my mother. “The doctor says he is doing as well as we could expect. We're very encouraged.” Her voice trembled defiantly.

Bobby's friends came often to visit; I saw them trooping up the porch, all vibrant and healthy, stamping the slush off their boots and trailing their scarves. They went in noisy, left quiet. Sometimes I went with them. Everyone loved Bobby, though he lost his hair and swelled like a beached seal and it was hard to remember that you were looking at a gifted athlete, or even a boy.

Spring came again, but after a few weeks of it, winter returned suddenly with a strange storm. In the morning when I left for school, I saw a new bud completely encased in ice, and three dead birds whose feet had frozen to the telephone wires. This was the day Arnold Becker gave me the message that Bobby wanted to see me. “Right away,” Arnie said. “This afternoon. And just you. None of your girlfriends with you.”

In the old days Bobby and I used to climb in and out each other's windows, but this was for good times and for intimacy; I didn't even consider it. I went to the front door and let his mother show me to his room as if I didn't even know the way. Bobby lay in his bed, with his puffy face and a new tube sticking into his nose and down his throat. There was a strong, strange odor in the room. I was afraid it was Bobby and wished not to get close enough to see.

He had sores in his mouth, his mother had explained to me. It was difficult for him to eat or even to talk. “You do the talking,” she suggested. But I couldn't think of anything to say.

And anyway, Bobby came right to the point. “Do you remember,” he asked me, “that day in the McBean cellar?” Talking was an obvious effort. It made him breathe hard, as if he'd been running.

Truthfully, I didn't remember. Apparently I had worked to forget it. I remember it now, but at the time, I didn't know what he was talking about.

“Bonnie Prince Charlie,” he said, with an impatient rasp so I thought he was delirious. “I need you to go back. I need you to bring me a bottle of whiskey from McBean's cellar. There's a unicorn on the label.”

“Why do you want whiskey?”

“Don't ask McBean. He'll never give it to you. Just take it. You would still fit through the window.”

“Why do you want whiskey?”

“The unicorn label. Very important. Maybe,” said Bobby, “I just want to taste one really good whiskey before I die. You do this and I'll owe you forever. You'll save my life.”

He was exhausted. I went home. I did not plan to break into McBean's cellar. It was a mad request from a delusional boy. It saddened me, but I felt no obligation. I did think I could get him some whiskey. I had some money, I would spare no expense. But I was underage. I ate my dinner and tried to think who I could get to buy me liquor, who would do it, and who would even know a fine whiskey if they saw one. And while I was working out the problem I began, bit by bit, piece by piece, bite by bite, to remember. First I remembered the snow, remembered standing by the tree watching the cellar window with snow swirling around me. Then I remembered offering to shovel the walk. I remembered the footprints leading into the cellar window. It took all of dinner, most of the time when I was falling asleep, some concentrated sessions when I woke during the night. By morning, when the sky was light again, I remembered it completely.

It had been my idea and then I had let Bobby execute it and then I had abandoned him. I left him there that day and in another story, someone else's story, he was tortured or raped or even killed and eaten, although you'd have to be an adult to believe in these possibilities. The whole time he was in the McBean house I was lying on my bed and worrying about him, thinking, Boy, he's really going to get it, but mostly worrying what I could tell my parents that would be plausible and would keep me out of it. The only way I could think of to make it right was to do as he'd asked and break into the cellar again.

I also got caught, got caught right off. There was a trap. I tripped a wire rigged to a stack of boards; they fell with an enormous clatter and McBean was there, just as he'd been for Bobby, with those awful cavernous eyes, before I could make it back out the window.

“Who sent you?” he shouted at me. “What are you looking for?”

So I told him.

“That sneaking, thieving, lying boy,” said McBean. “It's a lie, what he's said. How could it be true? And anyway, I couldn't spare it.” I could see, behind him, the bottles with the unicorn label. There were half a dozen of them. All I asked was for one.

“He's a wonderful boy.” I found myself crying.

“Get out,” said McBean. “The way you came. The window.”

“He's dying,” I said. “And he's my best friend.” I crawled back out, while McBean stood and watched me, and walked back home with a face filled with tears. I was not giving up. There was another dinner I didn't eat and another night I didn't sleep. In the morning it was snowing, as if spring had never come. I planned to cut class and break into the cellar again. This time I would be looking for traps. But as I passed McBean's house, carrying my books and pretending to be on my way to school, I heard his front door.

“Come here,” McBean called angrily from his porch. He gave me a bottle, wrapped in red tissue. “There,” he said. “Take it.” He went back inside, but as I left he called again from behind the door. “Bring back what he doesn't drink. What's left is mine. It's mine, remember.” And at that exact moment, the snow turned to rain.

For this trip I used the old window route. Bobby was almost past swallowing. I had to tip it from a spoon into his throat and the top of his mouth was covered with sores, so it burned him badly. One spoonful was all he could bear. But I came back the next day and repeated it, and the next, and by the fourth he could take it easily, and after a week he was eating again, and after two weeks I could see that he was going to live, just by looking in his mother's face. “He almost died of the cure,” she told me. “The chemo. But we've done it. We've turned the corner.” I left her thanking God and went into Bobby's room, where he was sitting up and looking like a boy again. I returned half the bottle to McBean.