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The Stolen Child(20)

By:Keith Donohue


of us wiggled under the mat, I suddenly remembered the day. "Merry Christmas!" I said, but my

greetings brought only derision: "Shuddup!" and "Go to sleep." During the long hours before dawn, a foot

hit me on the chin, an elbow knacked me in the groin, and a knee banged against my sore ribs. In a dark

corner of the pack, a girl groaned when Béka climbed upon her. Enduring their fitfulness, I waited for

morning, the letters pinned against my chest.

The rising sun reflected against a blanket of high cirrus clouds, coloring them in a spectrum that

began in brightness on the eastern edge and fanned out in soft pastels. Branches of the trees broke the

sky into fragments, like a kaleidoscope. When the red sun rose, the pattern shifted hues until it all

dis-sipated into blue and white. Up and out of bed, I savored the light growing strong enough for

drawing and writing. I took out my papers and pencil, put a cold flat stone in my lap, and folded the

mortgage statement into quarters. I drew a cross along the folds and made panels for four drawings. The

pencil was at once odd and familiar in my grasp. In the first panel, I created from memory my mother

and father, my two baby sisters, and myself, full-body portraits lined up in a straight row. When I

considered my work, they looked crude and uneven, and I was disappointed in myself. In the next panel,

I drew the road through the forest with the deer, the woman, the car, Smaolach and Luchóg in the same

perspective. Light, for example, was indicated by two straight lines emanating from a circle on the car

and extending outward to opposite corners of the frame. The deer looked more like a dog, and I dearly

wished for an eraser on the yellow pencil. In the third panel: a flattened Christmas tree, lavishly

decorated, a pile of gifts spread out on the floor. In the final panel, I drew a picture of a boy drowning.

Bound in spirals, he sinks be-low the wavy line.

When I showed my paper to Smaolach later that afternoon, he took me by the hand and made me

run with him to hide behind a wild riot of holly. He looked around in all directions to make sure we were

alone; then he care-fully folded the paper into quarters and handed it back to me.

"You must be more careful with what you draw in them pictures."

"What's the matter?"

"If Igel finds out, then you'll know what's the matter. You have to real-ize, Aniday, that he doesn't

accept any contact with the other side, and that woman ..."

"The one in the red coat?"

"He's a-scared of being found out." Smaolach grabbed the paper and tucked it into my coat

pocket. "Some things are better kept to yourself," he said, then winked at me and walked away,

whistling.

Writing proved more painful than drawing. Certain letters—B, G, R, W—caused my hand to

cramp. In those early writings, sometimes my K bent backward, S went astray, an F accidentally

became an E, and other errors that are amusing to me now as I look back on my early years, but at the

time, my handwriting caused me much shame and embarrassment. Worse than the alphabet, however,

were the words themselves. I could not spell for beans and lacked all punctuation. My vocabulary

annoyed me, not to mention style, diction, sentence structure, variety, adjectives and adverbs, and other

such mat-ters. The physical act of writing took forever. Sentences had to be assembled nail by nail, and

once complete, they stood no better than a crude approxima-tion of what I felt or wanted to say, a

woebegone fence across a white field. Yet I persisted through that morning, writing down all I could

remember in whatever words I had at my command. By midday, both blank sides of the paper

contained the story of my abduction and the adventures as well as the vaguest memories of life before

this place. I had already forgotten more than I remembered—my own name and the names of my sisters,

my dear bed, my school, my books, any notion of what I wanted to be when I grew up. All that would

be given back to me in due course, but without Luchóg's letters, I would have been lost forever. When I

had squeezed the final word in the last available space, I went to look for him. Out of paper, my mission

was to find more.

• C H A P T E R 7 •

At age ten, I began to perform in front of ordinary people. In appreciation of the nuns who allowed

me use of the school piano, I agreed to play as prelude to the annual Christmas show. My music would

usher the par-ents to their seats while their children shed coats and scarves for their elf and wise-man

costumes. My teacher, Mr. Martin, and I put together a program of Bach, Strauss, and Beethoven,

ending with part of "Six Little Piano Pieces" in honor of Arnold Schoenberg, who had passed away the