looking for the spirits or listening for their voices as I was, he did a lot more pretending than I did. Mommy often complimented him on his imagination. I used to think that maybe his inventions, space creatures and the like, made him more capable of eventually hearing the spirits, but that wasn't so.
All we had were our books and our
imaginations anyway. Mommy wouldn't let us watch much television, and we had never been to a movie. She believed television and movies could muddle up our brains and make it harder for us to be good students. Daddy couldn't oppose her when it came to our education. He would say. "You're the expert when it comes to all that. Sarah, but it didn't do that much damage to me,"
"How do you know? How do you know what more you could have been?" she fired back at him, and he shrugged.
"I guess I don't. I just don't want them to be odd. Sarah. Its going to be hard enough for them to attend school when you finally let them attend, as it is."
"They'll be so far ahead of the other students, it will be easier for them," she assured him.
He backed off. but whenever he could. whenever Mommy wasn't home, he would let us watch children's television shows. Only we had to promise we would never tell Mommy.
We promised, but shell 'mow. I thought. The spirits will tell her.
That was the way it had always been in our house. We couldn't keep secrets from Mommy. There were too many ears and eves around us, ears and eves friendly only to her. I think there came a time when even Daddy began to believe it.
"I didn't see anything again," Noble told Mommy when darkness had stolen the last rosy glow of dusk and was all about our home now. Another time on the chintz sofa had proven to be a failure. "I wanna go out with my flashlight and look at the ants," he whined, squirming under her embrace.
Mommy looked at me. and I shook my head. How I wished I could say otherwise, tell her I had seen or heard something. but I hadn't. She closed and opened her eyes with that patient confidence that told me I would, Don't worry.
"Can I. Mama? Can I?" Noble cried. "You promised if I sat still. You promised."
"All right, We'll all go out and look until your father comes home," she relented, and Noble leaped off the sofa, out of the living room and down the hallway to fetch his flashlight, a present Daddy had given him on his last birthday. It was a long blackhandled one, almost as long as his little arm, with a powerful beam that reached the tops of trees bordering the lawn and meadow. He liked to surprise awls.
Mommy and I followed him out, walking slowly behind him. It was a warm, relatively cloudless early spring night. Stars were twinkling so brightly they looked like they were dancing. Noble rushed around to the east side of our house. The half moon was already behind it so that the lunar illumination stretched the shadow of our home into the darkness.
Mommy's great-grandpa Jordan had built a house that drew a lot of interest from passersby. We had a long driveway off one of the main highways.
Sometimes. when I was alone or Noble was off doing something that occupied him completely. I'd look toward the highway to see cars. It was just far enough away so that I couldn't make out the people well, only shapes I imagined to be families, husbands and wives and children who surely wondered who lived so far off the road in that grand old house. These were people I longed to know. children I wished were my friends, but whom I knew I never would know. Even then I knew. Sometimes people would stop and look at our house. Occasionally, I saw some take pictures of it.
It had a steeply hipped roof with two lower cross gables, but it was the tower at the west corner of the front facade that drew the most attention. I thought. The round attic space was used only for storage, but for Noble especially it made our home into a castle and a setting for his pretending,
"Look!" he screamed, shining his flashlight on the anthill.
Lines of them were marching up and down, in and out, busy and determined, carrying dead insects and pieces of leaves.
"Ugh," I said, imagining them getting into the house as they did from time to time. Daddy had to spray and set traps.
"You shouldn't reject Nature." Mommy chastised. "Noble's curiosity is healthy and leads to learning. Celeste," she told me.
It seemed to me that she proudly pointed out Noble's best qualities whenever she could, but merely acknowledged mine or leaped upon my shortcomings.
She went into her schoolteacher voice, as I liked to call it.
"What you see, children, is cooperation at its peak. Every ant contributes to the success of the hive. They don't think of themselves as separate. They are like cells in our bodies, interacting, building, existing for the success of the whole and not themselves. When we're like that, we do the best work. A family is a team. too.
"In fact," she said. "don't look at the ants as ants. Think of the whole hive as one living thing, and you will understand them better. Can you do that. Noble?"
He nodded, even though I could see in his eyes that he had no real idea about what she had been saying. Nevertheless. Mommy ran her hand through his hair and squeezed him against her. Whenever she embraced him without embracing me. too. I felt as if I was floating in space. lost.
We stood there watching the ants work. Mommy holding Noble's hand and I standing beside them, tears waking under my eyelids for reasons I didn't quite understand. I swallowed against a throat lump and took a deep breath.
Mommy turned and looked at me. A long, thick cloud began to block out the moon, and the light on her face went out as if someone had turned it off in the sky.
Mommy spun and gazed out at the now thickening darkness, her arms locking, her body so still. My heart began to pound. She hears something, sees something, I thought. The invading cloud had almost completely covered the moon. "Mommy?" I said.
She waved at me to be silent,