Keeper of Dreams (47 page)

Stray children, that is. Runaways. Beaten children. Orphans. They didn’t take all—no, by no means, they were quite selective. For they knew that only a few children would respond to what they had to offer, and why waste time and effort with those they could not help? So they’d take a child in for a day or two, and if things weren’t working, they’d pass him or her along—bathed, fed, with new clothes on their back—to the social workers who would find them the ordinary sort of foster care.

There were always a few children, however, whose eyes lighted up when they were given costumes to wear and lines to say, and now the occasional theatricals in the basement of the Old Dragon’s House were performed mostly by children and teenagers playing all the parts, with local kids joining in, and an audience consisting of parents and friends. The lost children thrived in that company. Most of them did well in school; all of them went on to do well enough in life. For when you’ve been in good plays, you know how to work together with others and do your own part as well as you can and trust others to do theirs, and that’s all you need to know in order to do well enough in a job or a marriage.

Harty had never married, but stayed on in the house with Herry and his wife, Cecilia. And when Cecilia died of breast cancer, Aunt Harty became surrogate mother to the four children and soon thought of them as her own. They were already teenagers before the transformation of the house to theatrical orphanage, but they loved what their home had become and didn’t mind that when they came home for a visit there was rarely any room for them in the bedrooms. They might have slept in the big old bed in the front of the attic, but Harty didn’t like to have people traipsing through her papa’s train room to get to it, and so they’d end up sleeping on couches here and there—and, eventually, as their own families grew, in the nearby Holiday Inn.

But Michael was not one of the grandchildren—the grandchildren always had homes of their own in faraway cities and came to Mayfield only to visit. Michael did call Herry and Harty “Gramps” and “Granny,” but it wasn’t true. They were actually his great-uncle and great-aunt.

Michael’s real grandmother was Portia Ringgold, Lolly’s daughter by
her third husband, a soldier who died of the flu after World War I. Portia was killed by alcohol in her fifties, though technically the cause of death was listed as “falling in front of a subway train.” Michael’s mother, Donna, was beaten to death by one of the “uncles” who came and went in her short, drug-addicted life.

Michael wasn’t there for that sad day, however, for Herry and Harty had got wind of what was happening in their niece’s life, and had offered to take care of Michael “for a while” so Donna could “recuperate.” That was why Michael had no memory of calling anyone Mother. He knew only Gramps and Granny, and his only home was the little room at the back of the attic. They put him there because, as Gramps said, “The kids on the second floor come and go, but you’re with us forever.”

And that was why Michael Ringgold grew up in the Old Dragon’s House.

At first, of course, he didn’t know that was what the house was called. To him, it was simply “home.” That’s what Gramps and Granny called it. “I’m home!” “In our home we have certain rules.” “We try to help these boys and girls feel at home.” “This is a home, not a gymnasium!”

He wasn’t aware yet that other people’s homes didn’t have theaters in the basement, or sad and angry children coming and going from time to time on the second floor, or locked doors in the attic from which strange sounds emerged at odd hours of the day or night, or a warm place on the backstairs where, when he sat very still, he could feel the throb, throb of a beating heart.

He did know, however, that Granny didn’t like him to sit there in the warm place. Every time she saw him there, from earliest childhood, she would say, “What are you doing, boy? Why aren’t you
playing
?” She would assign him some errand or, once he had learned to read, make him get a book and read something aloud to her—which was nice, he was proud of being a reader, he didn’t mind that.

What he minded was the interruption. So when he heard someone coming down the narrow hall toward the back stairs that led to his attic room, he would scamper up to his bed and pretend to be sleeping. It never seemed to fool them. He tried pretending to be just waking up, but it was
no good. “You were sitting there again, you dreamy dreamy boy,” said Granny. Or, “He was in that
place
again,” one of the visiting kids would call out.

Finally, when he was four, one of the visitors took pity on him and told him how they knew. “It’s a wooden staircase, you moron,” he said. “They can hear your feet when you run up to your room.”

Oh.

Michael learned then to take his shoes off before he went to sit in the warm place. Then, when he heard someone coming, he walked up the stairs very slowly, stepping only at the outside edges of the steps so there were no creaks. It worked. Now the only time he was ever caught in the warm place was when he fell asleep there, and that hardly ever happened.

Because even though it was, as Granny assumed, a place for dreaming, it wasn’t sleeping dreams he went for. And it wasn’t because sleeping dreams were scarier—no, he had no nightmares as frightening as some of the dreams he had in the warm place. It was that the dreams in the warm place always seemed to make sense. They didn’t just go from one thing to another in the silly way dreams did.

They felt like memories. Like he was thinking back on things he had done before. And whereas in sleeping dreams he always saw himself as if he were watching his own body from outside, in these memories he only
felt
himself. His own body. Stretching, taut, exhilarating dreams of having enormous strength and yet being amazingly light and being on fire inside, all the time. Dreams of flying. Dreams of falling down, hurtling toward the ground so fast that his vision went white and he came to himself gasping, as if he had just woken up, only he knew at the end of one of
those
dreams that he had never been asleep, for through it all he also remembered seeing the faded wallpaper and the part of the heavy-curtained window that his eyes were focused on even as he was moving through or over another world, in another body.

He knew it was another body because when he was walking around in the house, toddling on his little legs and falling down or bumping into things, it was definitely
not
the body he had in those dreams. In real life he was not strong and he could not fly and he never, never felt the fire inside.

Maybe in a weaker child that might have been an irresistible drug, to
have those dreams in the warm place on the back stairs. But Michael Ringgold was strong without knowing it. Not strong of arm—he was as tough as any kid, but no tougher, and no one would mistake him for a blacksmith’s apprentice. His throw could get to first base and he could chin himself up into a tree, and he didn’t think to try for more. But there was another kind of strength which he had in good measure, without knowing it. Michael loved dreaming that he could fly with the heat throbbing inside him, but he also loved running around outside with the other kids, or lurking down in the theater watching a play rehearsal or helping paint the scenery. He loved trying to steal cookie dough in the kitchen when Granny’s back was turned—he even loved getting rapped on the head with a spoon as he made it out the door with his mouth full, while Granny shouted after him, “You can get a disease from the eggs in that batter, you foolish boy!”

Michael had the strength to do what he chose to do, despite his own desires.

One night when he was seven he heard the sounds from behind the locked door. A humming sound, but with a bit of an edge to it. It sounded like Gramps’s electric razor. Or a shower running somewhere in the house.

It wasn’t quite dark yet, because it was a summer night on daylight savings time, and so even though there were shadows in the room and he had never before dared to get out of his bed when the sounds were there, tonight he decided he had to know, and so—because he was strong—he simply ignored his dread and got up. He only wore shoes for school and for church, but even though his feet had calluses from running across asphalt and climbing trees and scrambling through brambles, his soles felt extremely naked and vulnerable as he crossed the little space between his bed and the locked door that led deeper into the attic.

He turned the handle.

It turned freely, but he still couldn’t open the door.

The sounds did not stop, either. It was as if his little effort to pull the door open were not worth noticing.

The keyhole was the old-fashioned kind, like the one on the door to the basement. But unlike the basement keyhole, this one seemed to have
been plugged with something so he couldn’t see through. Nor could he see anything under the door. Which might mean that it was dark in the locked room, or it might mean that it, too, had some kind of obstruction to keep light from passing.

So all his courage was wasted. He couldn’t get through, and he couldn’t see in.

Only he wanted to see, and this was the time.

What did he have in his dresser drawer? Whatever he had taken from his pockets all summer, stashed in the bottom drawer inside a cigar box. He chose two items: the tarnished baby spoon he had found by the creek behind the house, and the cheap little pocketknife he had got by trading four fine marbles to one of the boys who hadn’t stayed long at the house because he kept making fun of the kids who were serious about rehearsing the play. It was Gramps’s cut-down version of
Macbeth
, but the boy with the cheap knife never cared about it even when he was assigned to play Banquo, which meant he got to be a ghost in the dinner scene. And then he was gone, and Michael suspected he was the only person in the house who remembered him now at the end of summer, and that was only because he had this crummy little knife and somewhere in the past few weeks it had gradually dawned on him that he had been cheated.

Well, the knife wouldn’t cut, and it wobbled in its handle, but maybe it could poke through whatever was blocking the keyhole.

And it did. One punch, straight through, and the blade broke and was stuck there in the keyhole.

Great. Now when Granny came up to clean, she’d see the blade sticking out and know that he had tried to break in. Only he hadn’t, he just wanted to
see
.

Well, no, if he had been able to jimmy the lock, he would have opened the door. That was the truth and if he couldn’t tell the truth to himself then he really
was
a liar like that one visiting girl said he was, when Michael told her that he said his prayers every night without Gramps or Granny watching over him to make him do it.

I want to see in there. And I don’t want to get caught for having tried.

So he used the handle of the baby spoon. It wasn’t the best tool—needlenose pliers were what he needed, and just imagine trying to explain to Gramps why he needed them. But the spoon handle did the job. By
prying with it, he got the broken knifeblade to wiggle and finally come loose.

And now there
was
a hole, so tiny and narrow—thin as a blade, of course—that he couldn’t actually see anything through it, except for one thing: There was light in that room. Bright light. Dazzling light. And all that buzzing, whirring, rushing. What was in there? Why would Gramps and Granny leave a light on in there?

There was a big attic window in the front of the house, and Michael had wondered for a long time whether the locked room ran the whole length of the house. But that wasn’t the light of dusky evening coming through the keyhole, it was like a very bright naked bulb, a hundred-watter like the one in the basement storage room that you turned on by pulling on a chain that Michael could only reach by jumping. If there was always a light in the locked room, it would be visible through that front attic window, and if it were visible, there had been plenty of overcast and stormy days when Michael had been outside and would have seen that the attic was lit.

So the locked room didn’t have any windows.

It’s my brother in there, thought Michael. My secret brother, who already lived here before they brought me. The crazy one who actually killed my mother and they couldn’t tell me about it because it was too terrible. He’s chained in that room only they don’t know he’s broken the chain and he’s just waiting for me to open the door so he can grab me and tear out my throat with his teeth like a wolf.

Or maybe it’s my mother’s body there, like Snow White when the dwarfs laid her out in a glass coffin to lie there looking beautiful till the prince came to kiss her awake, only the prince can’t get there because the door is locked.

Or maybe the attic crawlspace would get him there.

There was a low door in the wall at the foot of his bed that Granny said led into the crawlspace. “We don’t store anything there, it’s just in case we get a dead rat or a bird’s nest in there and we need to clean it out. Don’t you go in there because the floor isn’t finished and you’ll put your foot right through the ceiling in the bedroom below and then we’ll have to saw your leg off just to get you out.” She said it with her I’m-pretending-it’s-a-joke-but-take-heed look, and so of course he tried to get in
there the second her back was turned, but even though he could turn the primitive wooden latch easily enough, when he tried to push the door open, it jammed against something immediately and he couldn’t even see in.

Now, though, standing at the locked door, he looked over at his bed, whose foot was jammed in under the slope of the roof so he sometimes bumped the ceiling with his feet when he turned over too quickly in bed. And in that moment, perhaps because he actually wanted to know it, he understood exactly why the door hadn’t opened. It was bumping into the continued downward slope of the ceiling. The door didn’t open into the crawl space, it opened into the room.