KIT DENTON
Though not specifically national in setting or character, this story somehow captures the essence of the Australian autumn. A brief fantasy with psychological overtones, its atmosphere is both calm and threatening. The image of the boy picking up sunlight is memorable, but its integration into the story’s structure makes it only one of the many striking experiences which “Burning Spear” offers.
Kit Denton is well known in Australian television and radio circles as a writer and commentator, and has been active for many years as a free-lance journalist and author. This is his only published work of fantasy fiction. Source: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1964.
* * * *
“I don’t think you could call him a fanciful boy,” she said. “Imaginative, yes, but not fanciful. And then he comes up with this weird idea.”
“The business of picking up sunlight?” He was only slightly interested, the interest of a not-too-close brother. “I don’t know…kids do get ideas in their heads, don’t they? And I suppose the more you tell them they’re silly or wrong or mad, the more likely they are to hang on to them.”
She made an odd grimace. “Oh, it’s not that I think there’s anything wrong ... I’ve told him a hundred times I don’t mind his making up stories, as long as he realizes that’s all they are. But I won’t take lies, and he’s handing them out wholesale! And then, he gets so wound up and intense over things, and he won’t let go. Last year it was model ships! Did I tell you I found him working on one of them at three o’clock one morning? And the only word he’d give me was that it was necessary for him to finish the job! Necessary! For a twelve-year-old boy? As though there was nothing else of importance in the world.”
“Perhaps there was nothing else of importance.” His tone was less casual, more abrupt. “After all, he doesn’t see much of you, does he?”
The colour crept up her face and drained back again, a spring tide of anger. “Look, don’t throw that up at me again. The fact that I spend my days working has nothing to do with you, and the boy’s not alone ... he’s at school during the day, and I’m with him in the evenings. He’s not lonely.”
Upstairs, Tim sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on knees, wrists slack, hands swinging. He was lonely.
The brother, the uncle, snorted. “You don’t have to work, you’ve enough money and to spare. You don’t have to be away from the house. If you want my opinion, I think the kid’s starved for a bit of old-fashioned mollycoddling, a bit of love. But of course you don’t want my opinion. You only got me here to listen to yours.”
Now her anger was open, dull-red and spiked. She knew he was right, of course, but she was damned if she was going to admit it! “Perhaps you think you could do better? You haven’t got a grain of imagery in your thick head, and you’d never come within worlds of really understanding a boy like Tim…He’s a dreamer, sensitive. But he has to have a man’s hand every now and then. I’d thought perhaps you were the one to speak to him, but I can see I was terribly wrong. I’m sorry I even thought of asking.”
His hand slid through an accustomed weary movement, cancelling what she had said, refusing what she had implied, denying the need for further talk. “All right,” he said, “all right... if you’re going to hit that old trail again, I give in. I surrender. I’ll talk to him.”
The noise of the footsteps walked up the stairs ahead of the man, and Tim moved from the bed to the table under the window so that when the door opened his hands were busy about the balsa wood of a small-scale aircraft and his dark head was bent. The afternoon sun fell slantwise across his face ... snub nose, brown eyes, mouth compressed and the tip of his tongue edging from his lips as he concentrated on the sliver of wood in his fingers. Only when the neat cut was done did he look up, brown eyes, wide-set and deep in shadow.
“Hello uncle.” That was all. The mouth shut as the open eyes were shut on the inside.
“Hi, Tim. Your own design?”
“Uhuh.” Nothing. No conversation, no lead, no spark.
“Will it fly?”
“I expect so.” Flat statement.
“Even without wings, Tim?” He was interested in spite of himself. “It’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?”
“We-e-ell . . .” The boy eased the word out. “Well, maybe I only think it’ll fly. Maybe it won’t do anything but look good.”
The uncle stood a moment longer, then folded himself onto the bed. “Tim, what’s this stuff about picking up sunlight? Your mother’s worried…She says it’s becoming an—an obsession with you, that you refuse to give up the story.”
“It’s not a story!” The boy’s face had darkened. “It’s the truth, but she won’t believe me because she doesn’t understand! Nobody does, except me!” He stopped sharply, afraid that the sob would leap out of his throat and quiver in his mouth. He swallowed and went on, “I told her because I thought she’d be glad to know, because I was glad and I wanted her to be pleased with me. I thought it was pretty terrific, but all she would say was ‘Yes, dear’ and then ‘You must stop making up these strange stories, dear’. She doesn’t understand. Nobody does, except me.”
In the still room the last words bounced off the walls, off the furniture, the ceiling, the walls, dismal and alone. Nobody ... except me.
The man felt cold; no child should be this sad, this grown-up lonely. His voice was quiet. “Look, Tim . . . would it help if you wrote it all down and made a real story out of it... something that we could sell perhaps and have published in a magazine? I’d help.”
Tim looked at him and through him and all round the inside of him, and he was glad that he’d meant what he’d said. But then, “No, uncle. You see, people would think it was just something I’d made up, and it’s not. It’s true.”
Lighting a cigarette gave the uncle time to choke back the impatience, the irritation. A long draw, and then, the voice controlled, “Tim, I’m not doubting you, but you don’t give a fellow much to go on, do you? You dash in on a quiet Sunday morning and tell your mother you’ve picked up a piece of sunlight and expect her to believe it—just like that! Look, no one picks up pieces of sunlight... or at least, not little boys. I dare say scientists can do something like it, somehow, but you’re no scientist, are you? And you won’t let your mother see whatever it was you picked up, and you insist on going on with the story. Don’t you see that it doesn’t add up? Either you’re inventing it all, or you’re being pretty silly . . . and if you’re not, then you’ve got to give proof. You can’t just do nothing but be unhappy, and make other people unhappy, too.” It was off his chest; he felt relieved.
Tim sat back in his chair. The outside of him was there and was listening and thinking, but the inside of him was away on a Sunday, morning, three weeks ago. In bed. He knew it was just about six o’clock although he hadn’t a watch or a bedside clock. He just knew, in the same way he’d have known it was Sunday, even without a calendar or the knowledge of the day before. Sunday had a special feel, and six o’clock on Sunday morning had a feel and a taste, like honey and toast and dark chocolate. And a smell . . . iron water and leaves. It was autumn, and that made it feel and taste and smell better, and the long spokes of morning sun turned in at his window and wheeled and angled across the room, bending cleverly up the face of the wardrobe, and neatly folding down the side of the chair. And on such a morning, you just got up—sat up and swung and stood and you were at once part of the morning which touched all your world and all the things in it, right to the edge of some one else’s night-time. Jeans and a sweater and soft shoes. Downstairs to the kitchen and the crisp noise of the frig door snicking open. Milk was white and cold and sweet, and better than a shower for waking you up, and it was thick enough to stay in your mouth for whole autumn minutes. And outside, outside, enough breeze to make all the grass and flowers grow sideways. Enough birds to fill just one corner of your head with chirps and whistles. Enough dew to sparkle, not enough to soak. Enough crisp, singing air to slice up your nostrils and down the back of your throat and into your lungs and belly and feet and make you broaden and widen and get taller and leap! And sunlight ... a great broad plate-glass sheet of it lying on the lawn, and two planks of it leaning up against the side of the house. A cataract of sunlight pouring over the roof and sluicing down the wall, and an empty box of it in the corner between the house and the garage. And all along the path, where the picket fence stood, a catwalk of sunlight, slats of it like a ladder lying down. His feet led him, one-toe, two-toe, along the rungs to the end, jump and spin and back again, and there, where the end of the fence joined the side of the garage, a different sort of space had let through a different sort of sunlight.
A spear of it.
A long shaft with a slim leaf of a blade at its head, lying aslant the path like a great compass needle.
One foot in the air he stopped and looked and admired. He let his foot down slowly so as not to shake the ground, and stepped high and careful round the brilliant spear, toeing the path near the golden blade. And then he bent down and picked it up.
The uncle was saying, “Either you’re inventing it all or you’re just being silly”, and Tim’s outside was listening, but his inside was holding the spear of sunlight that he’d lifted from the ground, holding it out level with his face. An autumn Sunday morning, and he, Tim, had picked up a piece of sunlight made like a splendid spear, the sort of spear Ulysses might have carried, or Hercules or Richard the Lion-Hearted. He felt it in his hands, cold steel sunlight, prickling with heat; he felt his shoulders widen and his chest deepen, and felt the broad leather belt studded with bronze about his waist. He knew his legs were lengthening and knew that packs and knots of muscles were moving on his arms and body, and he felt his eyes go golden as he looked. Striding tall and brown and muscled, he took the spear at the point of balance and went into the house, the hall a box of radiance and the stairway blazing about him. First to his bedroom, the walls coruscating, the ceiling a sky of light, the floor a pool of molten gold. And then to his mother, empty-handed now, but with the strength of the sunlight upon him. To his mother…
Tim realized that his uncle had stopped speaking. He had decided nothing, but he knew what had to be done. Proof, they wanted proof.
“All right, uncle,” he said.
“Good boy, Tim! You’ll cut it out, then? There’s really no need to go on with it, is there, and your mother will be very relieved.”
His eyes swung with the boy’s body as it moved to the closet in the corner of the room.
Tim stopped, his hand on the door. He hadn’t looked in this narrow cupboard since that Saturday morning. He’d lived with the thought in him that perhaps he’d dreamed it or imagined it, but he couldn’t yield the dream, the image. The tears were stinging the corner of his mouth, and a hard-edged sob jerked from his throat as he swung back the closet door.
The uncle saw, briefly, the comet colours in the closet; saw, for one instant, the brilliance and the fire; saw, for a fraction of time, the great burning spear of sunlight. And the last thing he saw before the blaze curtained his eyes with blackness was the boy reaching in to take out the spear and hold it lovingly in his hands.