Vigilantes of Love (9 page)

She stood up, shaking her head in agreement. “I’m glad you think so. I feel the same way.”

She walked over to her shelves, and pulled a jar from the top. “Your mother gave me this today,” she said, holding it out in front of her, as if to catch the light to see something hidden inside.

“She asked me what I thought about adding it to the display of two-headed calves and conjoined twins and all the rest of the twisted mutants they have jarred up over there in the Freak Show. I told her I thought so, but I said I’d ask you. What do you think?”

Reind took the proffered jar and stared deep within its yellow, formaldehyde waters. Inside, a tiny Tom Thumb floated, umbilical waving like a wrinkled, severed worm. Its eyes, barely the size of a pinhead, were black, and open. Despite its size, Reind could make out every finger and toe. It was perfect.

“Some things just can’t be said,” she murmured. “And some things just shouldn’t be born.”

Reind could see a tiny drop of blood hanging like smog near the tiny cord, drifting in the preservative. He choked, and nearly dropped the glass.

Erin rescued it from him, and flashed a sad, weary smile. “So what do you think?”

“I think it’s going to be hard to walk for awhile,” he said.

“Yeah,” she answered. “Yeah, it looks that way. But you’ve got me to take care of you. We’ll all take care of you.”

She paused and met his gaze, her eyes hard. “We’re all family, remember? The circus takes care of its own.”

Then she took the tiny child and left the tent, leaving Reind to cry in dry, empty sobs over the loss of his son, and his lover, as he stared into the other jar left behind on Erin ’s traveling shelves. Reind stared for hours into the deep, brown, floating eyes of Melienda, who would never see again.

“You like to plant things, don’t you?”

Bellinda looked up with a start from her digging. A moment before she’d been alone at the edge of the creekbed, plotting out her chrysanthemum garden in silence, with only the birds for company. Now an old woman stood nearby, her eyes cutting sharp as steel through the overcast of the chill spring day.

“Yes, ma’am,” she answered, but offered no more. Mom had warned her not to talk to strangers. Mom didn’t let her talk to
anyone
.

The woman stepped closer, then stooped to be at face level with Bellinda, dragging her thin black coat in the rich loam of the creek dirt.

“You know the creek overflows here ’most every year,” the old woman warned, trailing a long red-painted fingernail through the dirt. “Your seeds may wash away.”

“Dad said so, too,” Bellinda retorted, “but my seeds are strong. They’ll keep the creek away. And when they’re big and have flowers, I’m gonna build a fort here and everything.”

The woman smiled, her lips a thin pink scar across her weathered face.

“I could give you strong seeds to plant that would grow right in your house,” she offered. “Then you could watch them every day, even when it was raining or the creek was high.”

A light broke in the young girl’s eye. “Really?” she asked in spite of herself.

“Sure,” the old woman said. “What’s your name, child?”

“Bellinda,” the girl said. “I’m seven!”

“Well, Bellinda,” the old woman said, reaching into a deep pocket of her coat. “My name is Penelope. And I have seven different kinds of seeds you can choose from.”

She pulled her hand from the coat and opened it. The hand was wrinkled as a raisin, but in its palm were purple seeds pointy as a porcupine, grape-sized seeds red as hearts, sunny yellow seeds with pits like pecans and grass-green seeds that looked withered and sickly. But Bellinda’s eyes lit when she saw the blue seeds. They were shaped like teardrops and glinted with the hue of a summer sky. She knew she shouldn’t take candy from strangers… but seeds would be okay, wouldn’t they?

“Those,” she pointed. “I like those!”

Penelope nodded, and carefully extracted two blue teardrops from her hand. The rest of the seeds went back into her pocket.

“All right,” she said. “You can have these. You have a root cellar in your house, don’t you?”

Bellinda nodded.

“Plant them in the dark dirt in the cellar, then. But you must promise me two things. You mustn’t tell your mom or dad that you’ve planted them, because they wouldn’t like you digging down there. And when they’ve grown up and bloomed, you must bring me their seeds.”

Bellinda nodded seriously. “Okay,” she said. “How will I know when the seeds are ready?”

“They’ll be ready when they look just like this,” Penelope said, and dropped the two sky seeds into the girl’s eager hand.

“Should I water them?” Bellinda asked.

“Only if you want. They grow on other nourishment. And they grow quickly, so watch them every day. You must bring the seeds back here to me before the plants die.”

The old woman stood up then, her bones creaking with the effort. “Goodbye, Bellinda. We’ll talk again soon.”

“Bye,” the girl said. Picking up her shovel, she abandoned the bag of chrysanthemum seeds and hurried through the long valley of shorn cornstalks that marched across her endless backyard.

Her mom, a thin, sharp woman in a faded pair of jeans and an orange and blue Chicago Bears jacket, waved from the sideyard where she was pulling laundry off the line. Bellinda cowered at the lifted hand, but then raised a small hand in reply. Mom was always slapping her for something, and since they moved out here to the country, she couldn’t go anywhere to escape. She wished her parents could have moved away and left her to live by herself in their old apartment in the city. At least she had had friends there.

Bellinda didn’t risk stopping – Mom would have found some reason to slap her if she got too close. Instead, she hurried up the wooden steps to the back door. Rather than going up the stairs inside, she ran downstairs to the root cellar. She wanted to plant her seeds before Mom came inside to see what she was up to.

She’d get a thrashing for digging in the cellar, she just knew it. So Bellinda quickly chose a spot in the far corner, where the boxes from their recent move were still stacked high. With her peach plastic beach shovel, she scooped away handfuls of sandy earth until she’d excavated a six-inch pit. Any deeper and the seeds would rot, Dad had said that when he’d shown her how to plant flower seeds. She didn’t know if these seeds would make flowers, but she guessed that seeds were seeds and this would do.

The door upstairs slammed shut and steps clunked up the stairs into the kitchen.

Bellinda dropped the seeds into the hole and patted the earth back on top.

“Grow now,” she whispered, and leapt up just as her mother called.

“Bellinda, where are you?”

She ran to her dad’s workbench on the other side of the cellar and dropped her shovel on top. First grade had taught her a thing or two about setting up a lie.

“Down here,” she answered, and then started back up the stairs.

“I was just putting my shovel away,” she explained, when her mother met her at the door.

“Hurry up, then,” her mom said, brushing a wisp of kinked brown hair out of her eye. “Go on and wash up. Daddy will be down for dinner soon.”

Bellinda hurried up the stairs, turning over and over the sky-blue seeds in her mind. What would the plants look like? How long would it take them to grow?

Belinda’s parents were named Brian and Brenda, and like so many of the new residents of Faytown, Illinois, they were young Chicagoans who had moved to farm country to escape the crime of the big city. They wanted a quieter, slower life. And since Brian, an Internet web designer, could telecommute anywhere, they’d opted for this sleepy little corn-belt town. The ramshackle 1920’s farmhouse – three stories tall and seemingly three blocks wide – had been a steal, and its upper attic had made a perfect office citadel for Brian.

The previous owner had disappeared a couple years before and the couple had bought the house from the town for back taxes. That meant that its old furnishings were all still in place, and Brian had just swept the loaded, dusty bookshelves upstairs clean and started piling his own books in place.

But the original occupants’ tomes remained piled high in the corner, along with an assortment of vials, bowls, and small locked boxes. He intended to go through all of it before he tossed it, but their first month in the house hadn’t given him much time for that sort of thing. The antique couches and chairs remained in place in the living room, as the couple hadn’t had much furniture in their small city apartment. But the kitchen table was new, a white-tiled, blond wood-rimmed country table to match the house’s decor. The family gathered around the table at 6 p.m. every night for dinner. If Bellinda wasn’t in her place on time, she got sent to bed without any dinner at all. When that did happen, she thought her mom looked glad to be rid of her.

“You’re always underfoot except when you need to be,” Mom said.

On the night that Bellinda planted her seeds, Brenda served pot roast and mashed potatoes. She glowed with unusual cheeriness as she served it on the cornflower china.

“Now tell me if this isn’t the best pot roast you’ve ever eaten!” she said as Brian cut into his meat and Bellinda forked up a thick creamy splat of potatoes. Mom didn’t ask about Bellinda’s pot roast. Mom said children should be seen and not heard. Bellinda thought she really meant that children shouldn’t be heard
or
seen.

“I’ve got that Ryan Matthews over a barrel,” Brian said, ignoring her boast. “He knows that he can’t get a site put together without me. Not for the kind of money he wants to pay, anyway. Moving out here was the best thing I ever did. I don’t have to charge Michigan Avenue prices now and they all know I’m the best. So if they want it done right, they can just sign on
my
dotted line.” His chest seemed to expand six inches as he spoke.

“How’s the roast?” Brenda prodded again.  “I am just the
best
cook, aren’t I?”

“Best one I married,” he answered, dodging the question.

Brenda threw the fork down on the table. “What kind of an answer is that?”

Bellinda shrunk down in her seat. Mom was angry. It was best to be small when Mom got that way.

“You know the I-Food.Com site I did a couple months ago?” he said, ignoring her still. “It got an American Food Association award yesterday for best consumer design.”

Brenda stood up. “How is your
roast
, Brian?” she said. It sounded like she was gritting her teeth.

He seemed oblivious to his danger, and started talking about a new javascript he was working on. When Brenda lifted his plate of food to slam it into his still-moving mouth, Bellinda chose that moment to duck behind her mother and tiptoe down the stairs to the cellar. Dinner didn’t seem to be going well.

The cellar was dark and dank, as a root cellar should be. Its only light came from a single dim yellow bulb on a chain at the bottom of the stairs, and it smelled faintly of old apples and vinegar. The floor was hard-packed earth. There were shelves for canned foods all around the room, and they still held some spider-webbed bottles from the previous owners. Her dad’s handful of shiny new metal tools stood out in easy contrast to the old rusted pliers and screwdrivers that littered the battered wooden workbench. Bellinda avoided the bench and shelves and hurried to the far corner of the room  where she’d planted her seeds. She knew it was too early for them to sprout, but she wanted to see the spot anyway.

She was in such a hurry that she almost stepped on them.

Bellinda’s mouth opened in a wide O when she saw the sprouts. Two pale blue tendrils reached up through the earth and yearned towards the plank ceiling above. They were already six inches tall. As she stared, they seemed to grow broader, their stems thickening and stretching taller. There was no breeze, but they shivered slightly. From the kitchen upstairs, Bellinda heard something crash.

“Wow,” she whispered, ignoring the noise from above. “You’re really growing! Do you want some water?”

Bellinda found an old mason jar on her dad’s work bench and went quietly up the stairs and outside, careful not to let her arguing parents hear her. Then she filled it with water from the hose and returned to the basement. As she poured the water slowly over the plants, she could almost hear them sigh with relief. One of them seemed to twitch, and she saw that a palm-like leaf was separating from the stem. Her mother called. “Bellinda!”

She ran up to the kitchen, which was a disaster. The supper dishes lay shattered on the floor. Her dad was nowhere to be seen and Mom was crying.

“You liked your pot roast, didn’t you hon?”

“Yes,” Bellinda lied. “It was the best.”

Her mom smiled at the compliment, sniffing and wiping her eyes quickly. “Go get ready for bed now. School’s in the morning.”

The next morning Bellinda tried to find a way to sneak into the cellar after breakfast to check on her seeds, but there was just no getting past her mom. “You’re gonna be late, now hurry up there,” her mom insisted, forcing a jacket over her sweater before sending her out the door to wait at the gravel road for the bus.

The school day seemed to drag on forever. Bellinda could hardly concentrate; it seemed the 3 o’clock bell would never ring. She wanted so badly to see how her plants had grown over night. Finally, the day was over and she ran to her house from the bus stop. Her mom was staring at herself in a mirror and combing her hair ever so slowly in the living room and never even looked up as Bellinda rushed by her and took the cellar steps two at a time.