The Heavenly Tenants Read online

  August felt his forehead to see whether he had a fever. His forehead was cool but his heart was beating much faster than it ever had before, and he kept wanting to turn his eyes away, as if he were looking directly into a strong light.

  He had about decided to go when a little girl about Heather Marvell’s age came out of the house and ran lightly down the hill and across the bridge. She stopped suddenly and raised her head, as if she sensed August’s presence. But then she went on into the marsh and began to gather flowers. August had not noticed them before, but now he saw flowers growing all along the stream. They were growing between the roots of the marsh grass. They were everywhere. August didn’t know the names of any of them. They might have been wild or, he decided, they might be some that Mrs. Marvell, who loved flowers, had planted out here. When the little girl came back, her skirt filled with flowers, she sat down on the other side of the bridge and began to make a chain of them.

  Without waiting for her to finish, August withdrew quietly and started back across the marsh. There was no trace of his limp now. He walked quickly and happily. On the way he stopped to gather a little bouquet of marshflowers to take home to his wife.

  The Scales

  The Scorpion

  The Archer

  4

  Three weeks after the light first appeared in the sky Jim Hickathier went out to the barn to look after the animals, found himself in pitch darkness, and fell over his own wheelbarrow.

  “Well,” he said to his sister Libby, when he came back into the house for a lantern, “Guess Marvells are home.”

  They were just turning into their drive, as a matter of fact. Their house always looked to them like the most wonderful house in the world every time they came back to it, so nobody thought anything about the faint glimmer that was still over everything.

  They went inside and walked through all the rooms. There was a good hot fire in the kitchen stove and every clock in the house was ticking. Roger was hungry but he couldn’t think of anything he really wanted to eat. Not even crackers and milk would suit him. Heather sat down with her neglected family of dolls but she was too sleepy to play with any one of them for more than a few seconds at a time. And if Mrs. Marvell hadn’t helped the twins undress they would have gone to bed with their clothes on.

  Tired though Mr. Marvell was, he went outside to look at the stars. A moment later Mrs. Marvell heard him calling her and went to the screen door.

  “The Crab!” Mr. Marvell said.

  “Well, what about it?”

  “It’s back in the sky again! All the time we were in Virginia I couldn’t find a single one of the constellations of the zodiac. I looked every night, too, with a telescope. Now I come home and there it is. Something queer is going on in the sky.”

  “If anything queer is going on,” Mrs. Marvell said, “it isn’t in the sky. It’s right down here. Come to bed. You’re so tired you can’t see straight.”

  The next morning when Mr. Marvell went out to the barn he found perfect order, but there was no hay in the mangers for the horses, and the cows had not been milked. Their udders were full, and they were switching their tails impatiently.

  “Confound that August!” Mr. Marvell cried. He looked around for the milk pails. Instead of the two battered ones he always used, there were two new pails, so shiny that it hurt his eyes to look at them. “Now what did that lazy good-for-nothing have to go and buy new milk pails for?” Mr. Marvell exclaimed irritably, for he was not yet wide awake, and after three weeks, everything seemed strange to him, even the old three-legged milking stool. The more he looked at the pails the more certain he became that August had not charged them at Kimballs’ general store in Briggsville. As soon as both pails were filled with foaming milk he emptied one and looked at the bottom to see if there was any store label. All he could find was

  “Why,” he said out loud, “this looks just like the mark that means the Water Carrier!” He sat and looked at the mark a long time, until the cows complained mildly. He turned then and went on milking.

  Before anybody could think of something Roger ought to be doing, he started off through the deep woods. In the path ahead of him he saw a silver arrow and picked it up. It was lighter and more finely made than any arrow he had ever seen. He suspected that he ought to take it and show it to his father, but then his father might say that it was too valuable for him to play with; or his father might try and find out who the arrow belonged to, and Roger didn’t want to give it up. He had never owned anything in his whole life that he loved so much. He held it in his right hand, balancing it on one finger, the way only perfect arrows will balance. Then he got his hickory bow from the woodshed and went through a little patch of timber to the north field, where no one could see him and ask what he was doing.

  He fitted the arrow to his bowstring and drew it as far back as he could. Then with the arrow pointing directly into the sun, he let go. There was a soft sound almost like music. Instead of coming down in an arc halfway across the field, the arrow kept on rising and rising until finally it disappeared in the brightness of the sun.

  The twins’ sand buckets were just where they had left them, in the sandbox under the pine tree on the lawn. Their little tin shovels were lying alongside. When Tom turned his bucket upside down, what fell out was not sand. It looked more like sparks from his father’s emery wheel, or like the smallest stars in the sky. Tim’s bucket was full of them also. They poured water over the dry sparks to make a tower that would shine at night, but, instead, the sparks turned into very fine white ashes. The rest of the sand pile was just sand.

  Heather was not free to go outdoors until she had helped her mother set the table with the breakfast dishes and put the soiled clothes in the hamper. When she pushed open the screen door it was like Virginia. The warm honeysweet air made her want to lean against somebody the way the cats were leaning against her. From the kitchen steps she could see that the apple orchard was in bloom. That meant white violets by the windmill as well. She thought of going up there but then she saw August coming up the hill and waved to him.

  In the end Heather decided to cross over the bridge and see whether any of the marshflowers were blooming. When she knelt at the edge of the path she found what she was looking for. There was a small patch of flowers and they were not like any she remembered from any other spring. They were more like the flowers she sometimes dreamed about. Some had fringed petals and some had petals that were shaped like hearts. Some were as big as her hand and some were no larger than her little fingernail.

  Heather thought at first that the marsh must be full of such flowers and went here and there, parting the grasses and trying to find another patch like the first, but apparently there was only that one. When she went back to it, though, the flowers were gone, or else she couldn’t find the right place.

  August had finished putting down clean straw for the horses when Mr. Marvell came into the barn, picked up the battered old milk pails and put them down again. He opened the door of the harness room and looked in. Then he said, “What happened to the new pails, August?”

  “What new pails?” August asked.

  “Those two new milk pails that were here this morning.”

  August shook his head. “I didn’t see no new milk pails,” he said.

  Up at the house Mrs. Marvell stood in front of the kitchen door and rang the cowbell violently for breakfast. When they had all come in and washed and were sitting at the big kitchen table she turned to August and said, “Did the man from the electric light company come out here while we were away?”

  August blushed a deep red. “No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t think they was anyone here like that.”

  “It’s very peculiar,” Mrs. Marvell said. “There isn’t a thing out of place, but all morning, no matter what I pick up, sparks fly off of it. And I’ve been feeling so light. When I weighed myself on the bathroom scales I only weighed a quarter of a pound.”

  Mr. Marvell, Roger, Heather, Tom and T
im looked at one another. Each saw that the others had a secret which they hadn’t told anybody. None of them realized the whole secret— that while they were away the zodiac people with their animals had come down from the sky and taken care of the farm. The whole secret is something very few people ever discover.

  One by one the children lowered their eyes to their cereal, and Mrs. Marvell, since no one seemed interested in her lightness or able to explain it, went to the oven and took out a pan of corn bread. The oven door gave off a few faint sparks when she closed it.

  “Anyway,” she said, “sparks or no sparks, it’s nice to be home.”

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