The Heavenly Tenants Read online

  The children made themselves comfortable, Tom with his head in Heather’s lap, and Tim and Roger leaning against their father. Then Mr. Marvell began:

  “Once upon a time there was a man who borrowed a ladder from his next-door neighbor to clean his well. He stayed down the well a long time and when he came up he was very thoughtful. The next morning he went down again and stayed all day. ‘What do you find to do down there all that time?’ his wife asked him that night at supper. ‘Oh I don’t know exactly,’ the man said. ‘Lots of things.’ ‘You’ll catch your death of cold,’ his wife said. Actually what the man did when he reached the bottom of the well was to settle himself comfortably on one of the rungs of the ladder and look up. From the bottom of the well the sky was no longer light but a deep blue in which the stars shone faintly. He knew that in the wintertime he would find Orion over the parlor chimney at nine o’clock and over the kitchen chimney toward morning, but this was the first time he realized that there were stars in the sky in the daytime also. There was so much going on in the sky during the daytime that the man kept going back down the well, and that way he discovered that the sun’s journey across the sky was never exactly the same. It was attended by one cluster of stars for a while, and then by another. He went down the well every day for months, and by the end of that time his wife was nearly frantic. She was sure he had discovered gold down there, or else that he was making a tunnel which would come out half a mile away on their neighbor’s property and get them into trouble. She knew there was no use saying anything though, and so she waited until one day the man said, I’m going into town. I’ll be back before dark.’ No sooner had the front gate closed behind him than she slipped out behind the house and started to climb down the well. When she got to the bottom she saw that there was no gold and no tunnel, either—nothing except the moss-covered bricks her husband should have been cleaning all this time, and hadn’t touched. While she was scrubbing away at the bricks with a wire brush, the neighbor came for his ladder because it was time to prune his apple trees. He looked around the place and nobody seemed to be home. He saw the end of the ladder sticking out of the well so he pulled it up. The woman had been standing with her feet braced on two stones. When she saw the ladder disappearing, she cried out, but the neighbor was deaf as a post and he balanced the ladder on his shoulder and went home with it. The woman’s husband had gone to town to talk to the village schoolmaster about what he had seen down in the well. The schoolmaster said yes, there were stars in the sky in the daytime as well as at night, only people couldn’t see them because the sunshine was so much brighter. Late that afternoon, just as it was beginning to get dark, the man came home with a large book the schoolmaster had given him. He opened the front door and called to his wife; no answer. He went out to the kitchen; she wasn’t there and the stove had gone out. He went all through the house calling her name and there was still no answer. The man didn’t know what to make of it. He had never come home and not found her there waiting for him. The house seemed very strange and empty without her. Along about bedtime he went outside for a last look at the sky and heard a sound no louder than a cricket. Somebody else might have thought it was a cricket, but he could tell his wife’s voice anywhere, even down a well. He ran right away and got a rope and hauled her out. The poor woman’s teeth were chattering so, she could hardly talk. She went to bed with five or six comforters and two hot water bottles and stayed there for a week trying to get warm. In the evening when the man had done the chores and cooked his own supper he would sit by his wife’s bed and read to her from the schoolmaster’s book. It was about the movements of stars and their names and about their influence on the earth, and especially about the constellations of the zodiac. The book said they were star clusters that look like people and animals. When the man came to this part, he put the book down and he said, ‘But they are people and animals. I saw them.9 ‘Saw who?’ his wife asked, because she hadn’t been listening very carefully. ‘I saw all of the constellations of the zodiac—the Ram, the Bull, the Twins, the Crab, the Lion, the Little Girl, the Scales, the Scorpion, the Archer, the Goat, the Water Carrier, and the Fish. I saw every last one of them, I give you my word.’ ‘Mercy!’ said his wife, ‘Where on earth did you see all this?’ ‘They weren’t on earth, they were in the sky. I saw them when I went down the well.’ ‘Don’t talk to me about wells,’ the woman said, and so he went on reading. The book told how, thousands of years ago, certain men became so interested in the stars that they devoted their lives to the study. They were called astrologers and their neighbors never did anything without consulting them. When the moon was passing through the sign of the Goat, the astrologers told people to plant potatoes and radishes. When it was passing through the Water Carrier, the astrologers said for the farmers to go out and kill the mice and rats that were eating up the grain. When the moon was passing through the Fish, the astrologers advised everybody to plant flowers.”

  “Did it work out better that way?” Roger asked.

  “The book seemed to think it did,” Mr. Marvell said. “But that was a long time ago.”

  “How long?” Heather asked.

  “I don’t know how many thousand years,” her father answered.

  “Then the Little Girl must be quite an old woman by now,” Heather said.

  “The Little Girl is still a little girl, and the Twins are no bigger than Tom and Tim,” Mr. Marvell said. “In the sky things must not be the way they are on earth. Some people believe that what a person is like depends on the position of the stars at the time of his birth. And maybe that’s right Who knows? Take Roger, for instance. Roger was born in December when the sun is going through Sagittarius,—that’s another name for Archer. Well, Roger is a very good shot with a bow and

  arrow.”

  “Where was the sun when I was born?” Tim asked.

  “Gemini,” Mr. Marvell said. “That means the Twins.”

  “Do you hear, Tom?” Heather asked, poking her little brother gently. Then she turned to her father. “Do you suppose the zodiac people are like us?”

  “I’d put it the other way round,” Mr. Marvell said. “Do you think we could be anything like them?”

  “What happened to that woman?” Roger asked. “Did she get over her cold?”

  “After weeks and weeks,” Mr. Marvell said. “And the first thing she did after she was up and around was to have the well filled with dirt clear to the top. Then she planted flowers in it.”

  “What kind of flowers?” Heather asked.

  “Stars of Bethlehem,” Mr. Marvell said. “By that time, though, her husband knew everything that was in the book, so it didn’t matter that the well was full of dirt and he couldn’t go down it any more to look at the constellations in the daytime.”

  It was quite dark now. Mr. Marvell got up and polished the lens of the telescope with his pocket handkerchief.

  “The first person ever to watch the stars through a telescope,” he said, “was a man named Galileo. He lived about three hundred years ago and he had a lot of new ideas. I wish I could of known him. Galileo’s telescope was probably no larger than this one. He saw that the Milky Way was not a river, like everybody thought, but a cloud of little tiny stars. Now there are telescopes that are — why I saw a picture of one in the Milwaukee Journal that was bigger than our house at home, and astronomers can see millions of stars that Galileo never knew existed.”

  Mr. Marvell bent down and peered through the telescope for several seconds. “Why!” he exclaimed finally. “That’s the queerest thing I ever heard of!”

  “What’s the queerest thing you ever heard of?” the children asked.

  “I can’t find the Crab,” Mr. Marvell said solemnly. “It just isn’t there.”

  The Crab

  The Lion

  The Little Girl

  3

  In Wisconsin that same night, Jim Hickathier was wakened by a light shining in at his bedroom window. It was so bright that he thought his barn was on fir
e. He jumped out of bed and rushed to the window. The barn was safe. Standing at the window, with his nightshirt flapping around his bare legs, he could see that the light, whatever it was, came from somewhere beyond the edge of his farm.

  “Must be Marvells’ place,” he said to his wife, who was also awake by this time.

  He drew his trousers on over his nightshirt, and went into the next room and woke up his son. Leaving the womenfolk wide awake and bewildered, the two of them clumped down the stairs and outside, where the Model T was parked under an oak tree. Jim sat at the steering wheel and young Jim, who was fifteen and very strong for his age, cranked. After ten minutes the engine turned over, wheezed, sputtered, and finally settled down to a steady cough. By that time young Jim had taken off his sweater and coat and was perspiring freely.

  His grandmother, with her white hair in two braids, leaned out of an upstairs window and said “Boy!”

  “Yes, Gramma?” young Jim said.

  “Put your wraps on,” Grandma Hickathier said severely. “You’ll catch cold.”

  “Yes, Gramma,” young Jim said, and leaving both his coat and sweater on the ground, he got in beside his father. As they drove off, they heard the old woman shouting at them but the car made so much noise they couldn’t hear what she said.

  There was no need to turn the car lights on. They could see every rut in the road, and the fences and fields on either side. At the corner where the mailboxes were, young Jim read the sign: “Briggsville 2 mi” without any trouble. The closer they came to the Marvells’ farm the brighter everything got. The light was not white like daylight, nor red like firelight. It was like an unusually clear starlit night only ever so much brighter.

  The road past the Marvells’ was lined with autos. All the cars in the neighborhood were there. The Wilsons’ old Dodge and the Cornishes’ old Buick, the Ferrises’ Oldsmobile, and the Hubbers’ old Chevrolet. There were cars from Briggsville and from Big Spring and Endeavor. There were even cars from as far away as Oxford. None of them had bothered to put their parking lights on, with so much brightness all around.

  Jim Hickathier pulled the Model T over to the side of the road. He and young Jim got out and pushed their way into the crowd. They met George Wilson, whose farm was on the other side of the Marvells’.

  “Quite a turnout,” he said, and spat a very bright wad of tobacco juice on the road, some distance away.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Jim Hickathier asked.

  “Marvells’re away,” George Wilson said.

  “Know they are,” Jim Hickathier said. “Gone to Virginia.”

  “Well,” George Wilson said, “house is shinin’, that’s all. So’s the barn and the corncrib. People don’t know what to make of it.”

  From far up the road came the sound of a siren moaning, and a brass bell clanging for all the countryside to hear. The volunteer fire department from Montello came in sight Even before the fire truck stopped, the firemen jumped off in their new red helmets and rubber raincoats and began unwinding the hose. The man at the wheel stood up and asked if anybody had been up to the house to see who was there. Nobody had and nobody was anxious to go.

  Two of the firemen started for the kitchen door. They had only taken a few steps when everybody began to smell burning rubber. The two firemen came running back and pulled their boots off as fast as they could.

  There was no place where the firemen could attach their hose after they got it unwound, so they wound it up again. Since the light didn’t change but stayed a pure constant bluish silver, people got tired of making the same remarks about it and began to yawn. One car after another slipped away. The fire truck started back to Montello with the bell ringing faintly and the firemen clinging to the sides. By daylight there was only one car left, the Hickathiers’ Model T. Jim sat at the steering wheel and young Jim cranked. The sun came up before they got started.

  The next night the cars were there again before dark to see if the light would come on, and it did gradually, from every board, every windowpane, every shingle, brick, and stone. The light was reflected in the faces of people looking at the Marvells’ place, and for the first time some of them remembered about August.

  “Where’s August?” they said to each other.

  “Is August lookin’ after things?”

  “Wonder what’s happened to August?”

  All during the next day cars drew up before August’s little shack on the other side of the marsh and came to a stop. The people in the cars sat and waited until August’s wife came out, wiping her hands on her kitchen apron.

  “August is feeling poorly/’ she said each time. “I didn’t have nobody to send word to Mr. Marvell by, but I figured when August didn’t show up, he’d make some other arrangement . . . Yes, August is real poorly.”

  As the car drove away, the curtain behind which August had been peeping fell back into place. He was not in bed but sitting up in a rocking chair. It was his hip that was bothering him, this time. Whenever he sat down he couldn’t get up again, so he just stayed in the rocking chair by the front window and waited for cars to drive by.

  The day after that, one of Art Anaker’s geese was found dead right in the barnyard. There was so much talk about what kind of an animal had killed it—whether it was a fox or maybe a mink or a wild dog or just an extra large weasel—that the farmers stopped paying much attention to the light in the sky. It was still there, though, and helpful to do chores by. They didn’t have to carry a lantern around with them, no matter how late at night it was, or how early in the morning.

  After two weeks August’s hip still bothered him, but he grew tired of sitting in a rocking chair, and wondered who was looking after the Marvells’ house and animals. Curiosity finally drove him out of doors.

  It was such a spring day as comes only once a year, and only in the month of May. The air was damp and sweet, and what had been new buds on the trees the day before were now tiny leaves. The sun felt warm and kind, through August’s ragged blue coat. Red-winged blackbirds were singing all around him, and there was one old crow that went “Caw, caw, caw” with happiness.

  August meant to go only far enough into the marsh so that he could see the Marvells’ barns and anybody who might be moving about there, but he saw something shining above the silo and couldn’t figure out what it was. He went a little closer and then a little closer until finally he was standing on the bank of the trout stream that divided the Marvells’ hill from the marshland. From there he could see that the object on top of the silo was a new weather vane in the shape of a golden lion. The old weather vane was a trotting horse, green and rusty with age. Someone must have taken it down and put up this new glittering one that now turned round and round in the spring wind. August was about to go limping back across the marsh when he saw two of the largest fish he had ever dreamed of. They were bigger than a man, and they moved easily, serenely, up the stream, in and out of the water weeds. August’s mouth dropped open. He forgot all about his hip.

  The sunlight, filtering down through the water, shone on the glittering scales of the two fish, on their mild eyes and soft silver mouths. While August was standing there, wondering whether to go home for his fishing rod or jump into the creek, clothes and all, and try to catch the fish with his bare hands, something whizzed by him. It could have been an insect but it was more like the sound an arrow might make. He looked all around and couldn’t see anything.

  The fish were hugging the opposite bank, and as he stepped on the bridge to cross over, the same thing happened that had happened before. This time August saw the arrow. It came quite close to his face and he had a queer feeling that if the person who shot it had really wanted to, he could have sent the arrow much closer still.

  August squatted down in the marsh grass and the wild rice and waited. In a moment he saw, coming down the stream from the other side, a boy who walked proudly but with such a light step that he made no sound. The boy had a silver bow in his left hand and a quiver of arrows slung o
ver one shoulder. He looked like Roger Marvell, from a distance, but as he came closer, August saw that it wasn’t Roger after all. This boy was taller than Roger, and broader in the shoulders.

  “Humph,” he said. “Like to put somebody’s eye out if he ain’t careful.”

  The archer crossed the bridge and went off into the marsh without once looking in August’s direction, but August knew that the archer knew that he was there. From his hiding place he could see all that went on up at the Marvell’s. Apparently whoever Mr. Marvell got to look after the place had brought some animals of their own. In the pasture was a milk-white bull. August had gone to farm auctions all his life and never had seen a bull that could compare with this one. There was also a ram untethered and free to wander over the hillside. And out by the trash pile, munching delicately on whatever he found there, was a goat. August wondered what kind of people could afford to own such fine animals and yet be willing to come and look after somebody else’s farm for a few days.

  The kitchen door opened and two little boys came out, running and shouting. It could almost have been Tom and Tim. The little boys were twins. They sat down in a sandbox under a pine tree on the lawn and began to build a sand castle. Every time they took up a handful of wet sand, they weighed it on a set of scales.

  A man came out of the barn with a pail in each hand, and for a moment August was sure it was Mr. Marvell. Then he wasn’t sure. The man looked so much like Mr. Marvell and yet there was something strange about him. He walked down the path to the pier and knelt there, close enough for August to see that he was a stranger. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow and his skin was white and gleaming. When he turned the pails over, to August’s astonishment a crab slithered out of one and a scorpion out of the other. The man dipped both pails into the stream and carried them, filled to the brim, back up the hill to the barn.