The Dulcimer Boy (6 page)

U
NTIL ALMOST ONE
in the morning Drake listened to the music in the distance. Then he went inside to his hammock.

The next evening he went to The Tumble Inn early and joined the fisherman at his corner table. The fisherman's face darkened at the sight of him. But Drake asked how he would have felt if he had had a strange woman in his lap and then suddenly heard the song he himself had made up on his wife's death.

“In ever could…talk proper,” Drake said in his sad, broken voice. “But I could always sing.”

The fisherman began to understand. When
William came out for his first show, Drake stared at the dulcimer with the inlaid gulls, and the fisherman looked from the scruffy seaman's curly brown hair to the boy's.

The next evening he went to the Tumble Inn early

After the first show the two men began to talk about the boy. The fisherman confided that something the young performer had said to him had led him to wonder if he was really content.

When the second show was done, William saw the fisherman beckoning from the corner table. He went over.

“Take a seat, mate,” the fisherman said.

“Thank you, sir.”

The fisherman managed to get the attention of one of the harried waitresses.

“What are you having?” the fisherman asked William.

“A cup of tea, please.”

“A cup of tea for him, and another Irish whiskey for my friend Drake. What's your name, lad?”

“William, sir.”

“William, shake hands with Drake here.”

William shook hands with the scruffy seaman. The fisherman took out a bit of scrimshaw and began to work on it. Drake, however, stared down into his empty glass in silence.

When the drinks came, the fisherman murmured, “You know, I could listen to you play till the last tide. But says I to myself, how can he play such sad songs when everyone's wild about him and he must be so happy?”

“Oh, but I'm not so happy!” William cried.

Given this rare opportunity to confide in someone, William spoke in too great a rush. His words came out in a jumble.

It was time for the ten o'clock show. William played his saddest songs, thinking only of Jules. After the show he glanced hopefully at the corner table. But the two men did not beckon him over.

Aided by Irish whiskey, Drake was revealing
his own history. He described how, being good for nothing but shipping out, he had taken his two young sons to his wife's sister when their mother had died.

“A fine old New England family, the Carbuncles.”

“But why didn't you tell him?” the fisherman asked, shifting his eyes from the father to his son on the stage.

“I'm half a drunk,” Drake said, staring into his glass again. “Sometimes I think I never should have given them up. I've been…thirsty ever since.”

“But you've no reason to be ashamed, mate. And he has a right to know who he is.”

Drake gave the fisherman a sober look.

“He doesn't need my name. He's making one for himself.”

After the midnight show the two men joined in the clamorous applause. Half an hour later,
when the inn had finally emptied, they made their way over to the bar, behind which the innkeeper was tallying the night's receipts.

“One more for the road, men?” the innkeeper asked.

“No,” said the fisherman. “Just a look at the lad's contract.”

“Now, that's a popular item this week.” The innkeeper smiled at his faithful customer. “Don't tell me you want to make a bid?”

“Nope. Just want to look it over.”

Eyeing the fisherman's disreputable companion, the innkeeper turned the key in his cash register.

“I'm afraid it's locked up for the night, gentlemen.”

The fisherman shrugged.

“The lad signed it?” he asked.

“Naturally.”

“How?”

“With his signature, William Carbuncle. How do you think?”

“'Tisn't his name,” the scruffy seaman murmured.

“Come again?”

“'Tisn't his name,” the seaman repeated, holding the innkeeper's eye. “His name's William Drake. So that contract of yours doesn't…hold any water.”

The innkeeper looked a little shaken. While he stared at the speaker of these words, the fisherman went around the bar and through the swinging door.

In a moment the fisherman returned with the boy in his arms, the astrakhan coat and the dulcimer piled on top of him.

“What!” said the innkeeper. “You don't suppose you're going to kidnap my—”

“Shhh, he's asleep,” said the fisherman.

The innkeeper, now genuinely alarmed,
turned and found the shadow behind the doorway empty.

“Tonight, of all nights, for him to be laid up!” he muttered.

He began to pull on his moustache, shifting his eyes to the fisherman.

“You've got a day trawler, worth a few hundred. I'll let you have him for—Wait!”

The two men walked out of the inn onto the deserted street. It was a moonless night. The fisherman transferred the boy and the dulcimer into the arms of the sailor.

“He half woke upstairs,” the fisherman said softly. “He was fairly conked out, but when I ask if he wants to get back to those Carbuncles, he smiles. So good luck to you, mate.”

The seaman stared over the dulcimer at the fisherman's wind-weathered face. Unable to find the right words, he gave the man a nod and then carried the boy away up Pawn Street.

The fisherman listened to the seaman's footsteps recede in the stillness of the sleeping waterfront. In a moment the innkeeper came out the door. He did not burst or stumble out, but walked out, strangely composed.

“Gone?” he said.

“Yup.”

The innkeeper nodded. His eyes were moist, his shoulders stooped.

The seaman's footsteps receded into silence. Slowly the fisherman lifted his eyes. An unearthly rushing sound was stealing over the darkness.

The innkeeper sighed.

“I turn down seven hundred and fifty dollars, I give up my performer for nothing, and now it's one of those hurricanes coming in to get the inn.”

But the fisherman, who knew the sea, shook his head.

“Birds,” he said.

All he could think of was the boy in his arms

T
HE SEAMAN HEARD
the same noise overhead but paid it no mind. Nor did he really notice the steepness of the road leading up from the seaboard, nor the nip in the night air, nor even, when he had followed a river for many miles, the weariness in his legs and the heaviness of his breath on the dulcimer. Although he had been away from the salt sea air only once before in his life, he did not give it a second thought, never casting a backward glance. But when, after many hours, a shark-colored light began to seep over the sky and he saw that a great flock of dark and light birds was flying directly
overhead, he realized he was inland, where things were unaccountable.

The sun rose at his back, and Drake picked up his pace. All he could think of was the boy in his arms, yet he dreaded the thought of William's waking before he got him home. The road finally veered off from the river. It skirted a vast pine forest. After passing through a boggy region, it picked up another, more stagnant river, eventually leading him to the outskirts of a town.

By this time the sun was well up. Drake, remembering his other visit, carried his bundle through the sleeping town and up the road winding onto the hill above it.

He stopped outside the gate of the first house after a blaze of maples. It was a grand old house with a linden tree in front, its leaves just turning gold, and brand-new cedar shingles on the roof. As he stared in over the picket fence,
he thought how the boy and his brother had grown up there, going to bed every night in some snug room with white curtains, and he was reassured of having done the right thing by them all those years ago.

Drake set the sleeping bundle under the fence with care, placing the coat over the boy and the dulcimer beside him, then started off down the hill. But recollecting something, he stopped and walked soundlessly back. He slipped a card from a frayed pocket and placed it in the sleeping boy's hand. Then, before leaving for good, he bent down and kissed the boy's temple, on the place where it was a little black-and-blue.

William opened his eyes

W
ILLIAM OPENED HIS EYES
and realized he was having his usual dream of waking outside the Carbuncles' picket fence. Reclosing his eyes, he tried opening them again to wake up properly.

This time he noticed slight variations on his dream. In the others there had never been birds perched on the pickets of the fence. Nor had the fence been freshly painted, nor the roof of the house newly shingled. Nor had he been holding a card in his hand.

He read the card, gave a dubious shrug, and slipped it into his pocket. He wound a finger in his hair. His hair was dewy.

He decided to play the dulcimer. If the birds started to sing, it would be like the time in the forest, which had not been a dream.

Leaning back on the fence, he took the dulcimer in his lap. A faint smell rose from it, the smell of Irish whiskey. He began to play. The birds on the pickets joined in like an orchestra.

He leaped to his feet and rushed through the gate to the front porch. As he knocked on the door, he decided that, whether his aunt and uncle had forgiven him for breaking the antique secretary or not, he would rush straight in and head for the attic.

“Why, good morning. I haven't seen you in a long time.”

Smiling in the doorway was a plump gray-haired lady in a dressing gown. He recognized, to his amazement, the wife of the town grocer, who in the past had taken her turn working behind the counter in the store.

William glanced left and right. But there, unmistakably, was the linden tree, its roots rivering over the lawn.

“Ma'am?” he said. “Is Mr. Carbuncle home?”

“Mr. Carbuncle? Why, I'd give my eyeteeth to know where that man's got to. But I haven't seen hide nor hair of him since May.”

William stared at her.

“The roof was in a shocking condition,” she went on, “when he sold. First rain we had, it leaked into the attic by the—”

“The attic?” William burst out. “You've been in the attic?”

“If I had the mop up there once,” she said with a sigh, “I had it up there a hundred times.”

“Have you ever seen Jules? He has golden hair, and he can't talk, and he's even smaller than I am.”

The lady shook her head and went back into
the front hall. Returning, she handed him a bundle of letters.

“I've never had a notion where to send the mail on.”

William lost the color in his face. The addresses on the envelopes, all still sealed, were in his own handwriting.

The letters fell from his hands, and he turned and raced down the hill. His first thought was of the school on Elm Street. He flew up the granite steps, down a hallway full of shuffling, morning-faced scholars, and burst unannounced into the principal's office.

“Which room is Morris Carbuncle in?” he asked breathlessly.

The principal clucked his tongue.

“Morris, I regret to say, stayed back and has failed to return for the new year.”

William rushed out of the school and down to Main Street. The shops were all opening for
the day, and he began to go from one to the next, inquiring after the Carbuncles. In one shop a dressmaker stared at him and then exclaimed to her fellow worker, “Jenny, remember how I went to visit my cousin Frank, Jr., for five days and six nights over to the city the third week in June? Remember the musical concert I told you about?”

“Remember!” Jenny sighed.

“Look at this boy, Jenny. He favors the boy in the musical concert something wonderful.”

But when he asked for the Carbuncles, William heard the same refrain in every shop: “Sorry, we don't deliver to them any more.”

He stopped in at the grocery store, unable to imagine the Carbuncles stinting on food. The grocer knew William from his old errands and immediately dragged him into his new fine-foods department.

“Sardines, truffles, Camembert,” he said
proudly in his faint foreign accent. “My son goes all over for me now—once every two weeks he drives the cart all the way down to New York City. Look—knackwurst, smoked herring, pumperni—”

“It's wonderful!” William said. “But the Carbuncles—don't they order food any more?”

The grocer shook his head.

William rushed out of the store and down Main Street. Old people always sat out on the shady side of this street, watching the world go by; William went from one of them to the next. But not one had seen a Carbuncle in months.

He began to wander the streets, the tails of his astrakhan coat dragging behind him. He wondered if the Carbuncles could have left the town entirely. He knocked on doors. A number of people thought he was selling something. The most helpful response he got from those who would listen was that they had heard of the name Carbuncle.

Finally the sun declined below the rooftops. Weary and disheartened, William sank down on a curbstone. The time-polished wood of the dulcimer showed him a vague reflection of his face. He saw himself as a betrayer and closed his eyes.

THINK OF ME
. The words scratched on the old leaves seemed to scratch themselves on his heart. And then it was as if wings were beating inside him, as if that heart were leaving him entirely.

A strange, unearthly cry led his eyes skyward. The cry had broken from the flock of birds over his head. As their cry faded in the twilight, they flew away, deserting him.

He leaped up and ran after them, his shoes clapping on the street. But he could not keep up. Soon they looked like a swarm of gnats in the distance.

As he rounded a corner, he saw the birds settle on the roof of a three-story house at the end of the street. He gained ground on them.
Through the failing light he made out a tiny black silhouette, emerging from the chimney with a bag on its back. The tiny figure crossed along the peak of the roof, descended a long ladder, then started off down another street.

The birds mounted into the air and followed the figure, as did William when he reached the corner two minutes later. But night fell swiftly, moonlessly. The birds were no longer visible.

Through the darkness he heard the cries of children from the orphanage. The road made sucking noises underfoot. He was in the mucky section of town near the stagnant river.

Finally he sat down on a crate in front of the textile mill. When he caught his breath, he set the dulcimer in his lap and began to play. His song was answered by the birds, choiring from somewhere not far off in the night. He set off again through the dismal, slimy lanes, plucking
the silver strings like a minstrel. The birds grew louder. At last he stopped, straining his eyes through the darkness.

And there they were, huddled on the roof of a shack.

The door of the shack cracked open. He stopped playing; the birds fell silent as well. The door opened suspiciously, the slit of candlelight widening little by little until the flickering shadow of light from within crept out over the place where he was standing in the lane.

A narrow silhouette appeared in the doorway.

“I thought that sounded familiar. Of course, we'd given you up for dead, but I see you're not.”

Mixed with the slimy river smell was the sudden, sharp odor of disinfectant.

“No, Aunt Amelia, ma'am,” William said, nearly tongue-tied.

“Oh, well then. So you've come crying back, have you?”

Through the doorway William had a glimpse of a small figure squatting by a bucket of water, washing chimney soot from his shaved skull. William stepped forward.

“Jules?”

The small, shaved figure spun around and stared out the doorway. Then, dropping his rag into the bucket, Jules flew past their aunt and embraced William, covering him with soot.