Against A Crooked Stile

By Nancy Kress

In 1978 the TV show “60 Minutes” broadcast a segment about super-high-voltage power lines. A group of Midwestern farmers, concerned about the possible effects of the lines on human electrochemical responses, were mounting protests against the power companies whose lines crossed their farms. In the Soviet Union, the broadcast stated, such voltage lines were considered dangerous enough that exposure to them was limited to no more than five minutes by any worker not shielded by a Faraday cage.

I had just begun to write, and I thought that the situation might form the basis for a story. Research at a university library proved frustrating—the articles I wanted were only available in Russian. I decided to go ahead and write the story anyway.

AGAINST A CROOKED STILE was the third story I sold, and the tenth or eleventh I had written. I no longer like the first two, but I’m still fond of young Jorry. Fondness, however, did not make the memory grow less absent; five years later I named another child “Jorry,” in my novel THE WHITE PIPES, and never realized the duplication until I chose the stories for this collection.

Down under the new cast, somewhere near the immobile crook of his elbow, Jorry’s arm itched. Surreptitiously he tried to fidget his cramped muscles against the inside of the heavy plaster, but the itchy prickling only grew worse, and the sudden pain that shot through his broken elbow was sharp enough to bring tears to his eyes. Quickly, before his father could notice, Jorry raised his eyes and gazed across the heat-shimmered field, trying to make it look as though the tears had come from staring unblinkingly into the sun. Neither of the two men facing each other in the thigh-deep, uncut hay noticed him.

“Two days,” his father growled in his heavy, rusty voice, a voice that scraped across the words like an unused file. Tiny drops of perspiration rolled from the black eyebrows that were joined in a single fierce line, and down onto the bridge of his nose. Jorry took a step backward, away from them both.

“Two days she just sat there, now. Hay only halfways cut, burning up in this sun—who’s gonna cut it?” He spat, the spittle sticking to a stalk of hay in a wet glob. “Not me. So you just tell me that, you that’s got all the answers—who’s gonna get up on that there death trap and cut the hay before the crop’s lost for good?”

The power-company man gazed at the tractor squatting in the middle of the field. Sunlight reflected blindlingly off the tarnished yellow metal, and he put up one plump, pale hand to shield his eyes. Bits of hay clung to his dark suit where it bulged outward at the waist.

“But I’ve told you several times, Mr. Whitfield, there’s no danger now that we’ve grounded the machinery and the other—”

“I know you told me. I heard you.” Whitfield spat again and the stranger hopped back a little, glancing down at his shoes. “You come in here and put chains on my barn and my tractor and even on my boy’s swing, and that’s supposed to fix ev’rything, trade it all out nice and even. It don’t mister. Not by a goddam sight. How’d you like to be the one who—”

“Look, Whitfield,” the stranger said. He leaned forward a little, and Jorry saw a hard line of bone suddenly jut forward under his soft jowls, as unexpected as the teeth in the pink baby possums Jorry had once found in the woods. The boy almost whimpered, but caught himself: trading silence for not being noticed.

“I’ve spent all the time here that this situation calls for. Minor shocks such as you experienced are common near 1,000 kV lines; we get ‘em all the time. But if conducting objects near the right of way are properly grounded, there’s no danger. No one has ever demonstrated—”

“Now see here, you can’t—”

“—ever demonstrated, I said, harmful effects from exposure to electrostatic fields—”

“I’ll sue you bastards for—”

“—of any strength; and, believe me, the power company will dismiss your threats of a court suit with nothing more than ‘exposure’ to trade on as so much nonsense. Have I made our position clear to you? Because I’ve heard all I intend to!”

Whitfield took a step forward, his fists clenched at his sides. The stranger stood his ground squarely; and suddenly it seemed to Jorry that the man grew as tall and black as the line towers themselves, thrusting darkly 150 feet above the baking field, like menacing giants stalking the sky. In sudden terror Jorry moved to jerk his right arm up to cover his face, but the sling held the cast immobile and pain again tore through the shattered elbow. Giants—

“All you’re going to hear, eh?” his father was shouting. “You think so? Well, listen a goddamn minute to that!” He thrust a trembling arm backward.

Caught off guard, the stranger blinked stupidly in the fierce sunlight before turning and looking over the hay. The scrubby pine at the edge of the field seemed to waver a little in the blanket of heat, but the girders of black metal slicing the sky above it were etched hard and clear. For a moment the two men were still, bent slightly forward, straining to listen. Over the drone of summer insects came a low crackling hum, fitful and unceasing, punctuated with an occasional louder snap that fizzled out slowly. The sound was insistent, edgy, like the mutter of buried embers under a banked fire.

“And that’s prett’ near 400 feet away,” Whitfield said grimly. “You walk closer with a fluroescent light from the bathroom, the bulb lights up. I know. I did it myself.” Suddenly he shivered, a quick unexpected spasm shaking his thick body but not rippling the stained denim overalls covering it. “And I ain’t gonna do it again. You say that’s not dangerous?”

“I do,” the stranger said. His intent stare had vanished; and now he appeared bored, amused, and impatient. “People are not light bulbs. I’ll find my own way back to the car.”

A few steps into the uncut hay, however, he stopped, paused, and then turned with obvious reluctance, his plump face annoyed. “Uh … just one more thing, Whitfield. You don’t wear a pacemaker, do you? From heart surgery? The company is … uh … advising all residents with demand-type cardiac pacemakers to remain outside the right of way. Purely as a precautionary measure.”

Before Whitfield could answer, the stranger turned again and hurried across the field, the stalks closing behind him with a soft swish. Jorry took another step backward, his eyes too big as he watched his father’s face go from red to a dull mottled purple. Jagged red lines sprang out around the nose and mouth. Holding his breath, unable to move, the boy cowered dumbly in the tall hay, waiting.

—the belt falling and he threw up his arms to shield— for the moment his father would turn and the fierce blue eyes with their watery, red-lined whites would fall on him, fall on him and then …

But Whitfield didn’t turn around. He kept staring across the hay at the dwindling black spot that was the power-company man, and slowly his hands curled into fists. Behind him the line crackled in the empty hot sky.

If you lay with your eyes half-closed, Jorry thought, and sort of squinted up the left one, you could make the clouds change shape even faster than the wind could. If you squinted up both eyes, the shapes dissolved and ran together and you could start all over again, make a new world all over again… .

Lying on his back with the shoulder-to-knuckle cast propped up on his stomach, breathing in the dry warm smell of the Sandersons’ hay, Jorry made shapes out of clouds. The Sanderson farm joined the Whitfields’, but was much larger; and in its back field already dense with the second hay crop of the summer, Jorry was seldom disturbed. He had left off the sling because he couldn’t figure out how to tie it around his neck with only one hand; the laces on his dirty blue sneakers were untied for the same reason. A grasshopper bounded onto the cast, watched the boy from shiny multi-faceted eyes, and leaped off again. Jorry didn’t stir.

Small shapes, that’s what you wanted—nothing too large, nothing too dangerous. Rabbits, and marbles, and over there one of those fluffy white dogs, the kind that looked like a mop, like old Mrs. Reynolds used to have with all that shaggy hair all over its—

“You’re scaring the mice,” a voice said above him.

Jorry’s eyes flew open and he scrambled to his feet, already backing away, hastily cradling the cast in his good arm. The flapping sneaker laces tangled in the hay and he pitched forward, throwing up his

—arm to shield his face from the buckle coming down and the smell of whiskey and—

“Hey,” the voice said. “There, I’ve got you—take it easy, fella. Hey, it’s O.K.—I’m not rabid. Really. Haven’t been for years.”

Caught by his shoulders, Jorry stopped struggling and tried desperately to blink away his panicky tears and get a clear look at his captor. The man wavered, watery at the edges and streaked with blurred silver, then came into focus as the pain in Jorry’s elbow subsided and the tears rolled out of his eyes and down his thin cheeks.

The man was wearing jeans, a blue cotton work shirt, and boots—a new hand at the Sandersons’, then. But no—the jeans were patched and clean, not whole and dirty, and there were no traces of manure on the boots. So not a farm hand. His leather belt was foreign-looking, intricately worked, with some sort of silver buckle

—coming down and the smell of whiskey and his own voice screaming just before— shaped like the sun.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” the man said, releasing Jorry’s shoulders. “I didn’t mean to scare you. You all right? I just wanted to ask you if you’d mind moving, because you’re scaring the mice. That’s all.”

Jorry wrenched his eyes upward from the buckle, and then it was better. Above an untidy beard were good eyes, warm and young and brown, the color of fresh toast. Some of Jorry’s panic ebbed, sliding away in long slow waves; and he sniffed and swiped at his nose with his good hand.

“What mice?”

The man rocked back and squatted on his heels. “Up there—under the line. You’re upwind of them, and they smell you. Makes ‘em jumpy. Jumpier.”

Jorry craned his neck; he couldn’t see over the low ridge swelling with half-grown hay.

“Come on up and look,” the man said, and started off in such an off-hand matter that after a moment Jorry found himself following.

Under the line, on the uneven stubble of weeds that had remained after the power company had mowed its right-of-way, was a jumble of equipment. Four large glass boxes, elevated on wooden blocks and screened on two sides with plastic mesh, held piles of shredded newspaper full of burrowing mice. Two of the glass boxes were surrounded by a double shell of parallel wires, one inside the other, which were joined together and anchored firmly into the ground. Squares of metal standing on edge and facing each other in pairs had been placed on the grass, or on high poles. The metal squares had been hooked up to odd-looking meters and to dials that looked to Jorry like plastic warts. Parked over the ridge was a small, sturdy red truck near the remains of a ham sandwich already being carried away by the boldest of a watchful flock of crows. On the warm air rode the nose-wrinkling smell of mice.

“What’s that?” Jorry asked, in spite of himself. “Around the mice?”

“Faraday cages,” the man said promptly. “Keep the mice in that box from being exposed to the electrostatic field from the line.”

Involuntarily Jorry glanced upward. The cable above him stretched like a long black road, a road curving and diminishing over the far horizon. A road for giants …

“What about these other mice?”

“They’re exposed to the field. The idea is to see if they behave any differently after a long while near the line.” Slowly, his brown eyes never leaving Jorry’s face, he came around the boxes of mice and held out his hand. “My name’s Tom Crowell.”

Jorry took a step backward. “You from the power company?”

“No—no, I’m not.” He lowered his empty hand. “I work for the Environmental Study Association. We want to see if these new 1,000 kV lines affect the wildlife hereabouts. Want to hold one of the mice, son?”

“I can’t,” Jorry mumbled, looking down at his untied sneakers. He could feel the back of his neck growing hot. “ ‘Cause of my arm.”

“I broke my arm once,” Tom said cheerfully. “Healed clean as a whistle. Before the cast came off, I’d collected the autographs of the whole fifth grade.” He glanced at Jorry’s cast, bare except for a rubbed-in catsup stain. “ ‘Course, school’s out just now. What’s your name, son?”

“Jorry.”

“Well, Jorry, I’ve seen you before, walking in the fields. You’re about the only kid that does come up here. You interested in electronics? Is that why you like it here?”

Jorry kept his eyes fastened on a glass box behind a Faraday cage. Two bright eyes peered out from beneath a pile of shredded Sunday comics. Finally, as though it were an answer, he said, “My pa doesn’t like the line.”

“And who’s your pa?”

“Clayte Whitfield.”

“Oh,” Tom said. “Oh—yes.” He looked at the boy more closely, a sudden sharpness in his brown eyes. “He know you’re up here, Jorry?”

Jorry traced a circle on the grass with the toe of his sneaker. “Pa never comes up here.” After a long pause he added reluctantly, “He says the line’s dangerous.”

“Well, he’s probably right,” Tom said. The boy looked up quickly, his eyes wide with astonishment in his hollowed face.

“There’s enough of a field up here to cause all sorts of body currents in a human being and set off God-knows-what trigger phenomenon—especially in the brain organelles. Not to even mention the geophysical effects. Just smell the air—go ahead, move away from the mice and take a deep breath.”

Jorry had been going to ask what brain organelles and trigger fins on men were, but instead he obediently moved away from the glass boxes and sniffed. The air smelled faintly acrid, a dry elusive odor that reminded him vaguely of freshly-ironed cotton.

“Ozone,” Tom said. “If we get a storm, you watch the line during the thunder, Jorry. It’ll glow reddish-blue.”

Again Jorry glanced at the huge metal towers. Giants …

“But Mr. Crowell, if—”

“Tom.”

“Well—Tom.” He stumbled over the name, not used to this freedom. “If you think the line’s so dangerous, why are you up here? Why aren’t you joined up with the folk who stay away and want the line tore down and write letters and talk about …” Jorry trailed off. Talk? Talk was cheap, Pa said, and Jorry had watched while Pa carried in the tightly-sealed box from the Country Agricultural Agency, the box that was so heavy in the big hands that trembled all the time now except when they held the bottle steady to pour …

“Why am I up here?” Tom was saying. “Because I think the line’s dangerous, but I don’t know. Do you know where the line comes from, Jorry?”

He shook his head. No one ever said; they just wanted it gone.

“From the lignite coal mines up north. Energy is a valuable thing for everyone, Jorry, although not if the cost is too high in other valuable things. You have to weigh both sides, make the best trade-off. The people here want the line down because it’s a scary unknown. But I think it’s a better idea to get to know it, and then decide. What do you think?”

Jorry shook his head, embarrassed again. That wasn’t the sort of thing adults asked him, except in school; and even then they didn’t talk to him the way this Tom did. It didn’t seem right, somehow. Not fitting. He was only Jorry Whitfield, Clayte Whitfield’s kid, and everybody knew the Whitfield farm hadn’t had a decent cash crop in three years, couldn’t even bring much produce to town to trade anymore. And you had to trade for things, Jorry knew; even this Tom talked about the line as a trade-off. You didn’t get things for free. Not hay, not chicken feed, not canned stew, not friendship.

“I got to go,” he said abruptly.

“O.K.,” Tom said. “But it was nice talking to you. Come back if you feel like it.”

Jorry started home without answering. Pa might be back from town, might be looking for him. It was bad to be in the house when Pa came in, but worse not to be.

Moving slowly so his untied shoelaces wouldn’t tangle in the hay, the boy trudged through the green stalks, holding the plaster cast close to his body. He took a long oblique route that kept him downwind of the mice.

But he went back, again and again, first hanging around the edges of the mowed stubble, observing as Tom worked and puttered and whistled off-key, then later moving in closer. Each time he came he brought something: a handful of chives from the plant that came up each year behind the barn, some wild strawberries from the hill by the creek, a sharpened pencil in case Tom lost his. Tom accepted these offerings gravely, putting the chives in his sandwich and the pencil in his shirt pocket, so Jorry felt it was all right for him to stay. He helped, too, whenever he could. He fed the mice, careful to measure each cupful with painstaking exactness, adding and removing single pellets until he was sure each cage received the same amount. After a while Jorry got used to Tom’s talking to him as if they were friends; sometimes he pretended to himself that they were. Jorry seldom said anything, but Tom talked all the time: talk poured out of him as relentlessly as sunshine, as unceasing as the crackle of the line. Jorry, unused to such talk, listened to all of it with cloistered intensity, his head bent forward, watching Tom through the sideways fall of his untrimmed bangs.

“The thing is, Jorry, that electrostatic fields set up currents between different parts of your body. There you are, Jorry Whitfield, a real live wire.”

“You, too,” Jorry said, astonishing himself. Tom leaped into the air, thrusting out his arms, legs, and tongue in a frenzied parody of every cartoon animal that ever stuck its finger in an electric socket on Saturday morning TV. The mice scuttled for cover.

“So the question is—what do all these currents do, coursing through the body beautiful?”

“What?” Jorry asked breathlessly.

Tom shrugged and dropped to the ground. “Dunno. Nobody knows.”

Jorry stared at him a fraction of a second before again ducking his head. His hair fell forward over his face.

“We can guess, though. We can guess that it’s probably affecting the brain, because brain organelles are most sensitive to voltage differences. And the brain is where perception takes place, where you experience things, so perception’s a likely candidate for residual effects. You notice yourself seeing the grass blue, Jorry, or pink?”

Jorry frowned. The grass looked the same as usual to him, a dusty green fading to brown under the hot sun.

“Ah, well,” Tom said, “Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Goodyear Rubber. Did you know that Goodyear— the first Goodyear, I can’t think of his name—that he discovered how to vulcanize rubber by accident, while he was cooking some sulphur gunk on the stove? Fact. You just never know what you’ll get with science. The whole thing might just as easily have exploded in his face. But it didn’t.”

Jorry hadn’t known. Sometimes it seemed to him that he didn’t know anything, hadn’t ever thought about anything except how to stay out of people’s way, until the coming of the line, and Tom. Now at night he lay awake in bed, listening to the shutter that had been banging in the wind for over a year now, and thought about their talks. Each remembered word became a smooth stone to turn over and over, running his thumb over the texture and curves of the surface, squinting at the hidden lines. At such times he always had a picture of Tom standing gigantic against a clear empty sky. In his picture, Tom was still talking.

There was a daily period, however, when they both sat silent and observed the mice for an uninterrupted hour, while Tom made notes in a large black folder. First he removed most of the shredded newspaper, and even the mice behind the wire Faraday cages could be seen clearly. As the weeks slipped by, it seemed to Jorry that the mice were increasingly jumpy and nervous, nipping at each other or fidgeting along the mesh, then dropping into periods of sudden sleep. He wondered what was going on in their brain organelles (he knew, now, what the words meant). Sometimes he touched his own head with one questing finger. It just felt like his head.

The weather turned rainy, a warm, off-again on-again drizzle. Weeds grew lush and green in the vegetable garden, choking the feathery carrots and the string beans straggling up their sagging poles. Jorry tried to fix the bean poles, but the wood was old and rotten, and he couldn’t find the key to the storeroom where there may or may not have been fresh lumber. The uncut hay in the back field gave off the pungent smell of decay. As his father spent more and more time in town, Jorry slacked off on his chores, unable to find the needed supplies or equipment. He took care, however, to keep the few animals fed; when the chicken feed ran out, he gave the hens popcorn and Rice Krispies. They seemed to like it just as well.

The reduced chores gave him more time to hunt for things to take to Tom, necessary things, things that would earn him the right to visit the site under the line. He brought fresh eggs—Pa had stopped keeping egg tally—wild sumac for tea, blackberries, an Indian arrowhead, a four-leaf clover ironed between two sheets of waxed paper so it wouldn’t shrivel up. Tom made a face when he tasted the sumac tea, but he carefully put the four-leaf clover in his wallet, on top of his health insurance card.

They observed the mice from under a leaky tarp rigged like a lean-to, and Tom shielded his notebook with an old plastic bag labeled “Marino’s work shirts.” Rain dripped off his beard into his coffee cup.

“Ah, well, it’s still not as messy as reading chicken entrails,” Tom said as he wiped the rain off his thermos before pouring them more coffee. No one else had offered Jorry coffee. “Although sometimes Dame Science seems just as capricious as the rest of that Olympian crew about bestowing her mixed offerings and benedictions. Still, you have to be ready, in case she spreads her wings and gets generous.” Jorry looked bewildered and Tom laughed.

“I mean that science gives both benefits, like tractors and medicine and this remarkable-unbreakable-new-improved-temperature-controlled thermos, and also problems, such as the power line. Starting off with a first step, you never really know what you’ll end up with. Surprise, folks! A cosmic poker game, new deals hourly, step right in and play!”

“Like Charles Goodyear,” Jorry said. Tom stared at him, surprised, and Jorry added in a sudden rush, “I’m gonna be a scientist, too, when I grow up, and discover important things like rubber.” He reddened and ducked his head.

“Where’d you learn Goodyear’s first name?” Tom asked. Jorry didn’t answer. One day when Pa had inexplicably ordered him to ride to town in the truck, and then just as inexplicably forgotten all about him when they got there, Jorry had slunk into the library and read what he could about the vulcanization of rubber, puzzling over the unfamiliar words until footsteps approached and he had fled before any librarian could demand payment in the form of his non-existent library card.

Tom sipped his coffee. “I do hope you get to be a scientist, Jorry,” he said gently. “I really do. Tell me—you ever have a dog?”

The boy shook his head and dumped three spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee.

“Well, I did. A black Labrador retriever. Used to show her. I remember talking once to a farmer about a dog that had gone wild, up north this was, and was killing chickens. It might have been part coyote. Anyway, the fanner was determined to shoot it, and took to hanging around the farmhouse with his rifle all loaded; but the dog always slipped by him; time after time. It got to be an obsession with the guy. He took to neglecting his farm, ignoring his family. All sorts of financial and legal tangles developed, about mortgages and such, and then about bad checks and diseased stock—and the guy blamed it all on the dog killing those chickens. Just an excuse, of course—and a pretty shoddy one. Some men aren’t afraid of anything except their mirrors.”

He looked at Jorry with a sudden intensity, his eyes sharp and kind over the red plastic rim of the thermos cup, and Jorry wriggled his feet in embarrassment. Often he had the hazy impression that Tom was trying to tell him something, offer him something, in the same way he offered him the coffee. Why should a grown man be afraid of a mirror?

Just now, however, Jorry had something that needed saying. Carefully he kept his eyes on the generous amount of artificial cream dissolving in swirls in his coffee.

“Tom—there’s a meeting. Friday. Today. This afternoon.”

“A meeting?”

“Of people who live here.” Abruptly he looked up and offered the rest in a rush: “They’re all mad. Real mad, Tom. They’ve made up their minds to get this line tore down!”

“And you thought I ought to know about it.” Tom’s brown eyes warmed with amused affection.

“Yes!”

“Well, Jorry, I’m not sure they’re not right. These figures we’ve been collecting …” He dumped out his rain-diluted coffee and poured himself some more from the thermos. “But we won’t really know anything until Monday, when the mice go into the lab for testing and mating and dissection.”

Tom frowned. “The thing is, the behavior changes in the mice are negative, all right—jumpiness, decreased sexual interest, interrupted sleep patterns: all indicate stress. But they’re not dramatic changes, not something that makes you sit up and take notice. Not, anyway, if you’re on the State Power Commission. Without something more theatrical to offer, any appeal on this line will just get lost in the lobbying. The bureaucratic tendency to not shut the lion’s cage till the beastie’s loose. Now if the mice had done something really stagy, like grow three-inch fangs or invent espionage warfare … well. But I think all our hard work here may end up just another overlooked scientific study, a dull and ineffective witness for the prosecution. And thanks, Jorry, for the information about the meeting, but I already knew about it. Oh, I’m up on all the local gossip. I board at the Sandersons’, you know.”

Jorry didn’t know. He hadn’t ever thought about Tom boarding somewhere, eating breakfast, brushing his teeth. Every day Tom just appeared, like a part of the huge black towers and crackling hum of the line itself. Jorry tried to picture him watching TV with Jeanine Sanderson, who had been in his class at school last year, and a queasy feeling twisted in his stomach. Once he had overheard Mrs. Sanderson tell Jeanine that she “shouldn’t play with that Whitfield boy, because with a pa like that, you never knew.” The feeling twisted harder. Jorry stood up.

“I got to go.”

“You sure … it’s not your usual time yet. Here—wipe off your cast with the towel. There’s coffee on it.”

“No!”

“Hey, Jorry—what’s wrong?”

“Nothing! I got to go.”

“But—”

“I got to go!”

Tom watched him intently. Around the boy’s eyes were the beginnings of moist trails streaking the dirt on his thin face.

“Jorry,” he said quietly, “Jorry—how did you break your arm?”

The tear trails paled, and the boy made an aborted half-gesture in the direction of throwing up his arm. Then he blinked dully and mumbled, “I fell out of the hay loft.”

Tom put an arm around Jorry’s shoulders, speaking in a low serious voice so unlike his usual self that Jorry was startled into listening. “Jorry, you know this is the last day for this project. After l pick up the mice on Monday I won’t be back. I don’t believe you fell out of the hay loft—no, wait, don’t squirm away, listen to me—you’re a bright kid, and a damn nice one, and if you stay here … Jorry, there are arrangements, laws, for making sure that nothing like that happens to kids. You can leave here, stay with some nice foster family; and I could even visit you on weekends. We could go to a ball game, mess around in my lab. All you have to do is let me take you to Social Services, and then you’ll have to be willing to tell them—Jorry wait, listen to me—wait!”

“You’re crazy!” Jorry shouted, already backing away. Crazy, crazy, crazy! Tom didn’t even need Jorry’s information about the meeting—he already had it, already had everything. Let Tom take him away? When Jorry could give Tom nothing but sumac tea he didn’t even like, could be worth nothing to Tom, to anyone except Clayte Whitfield, doing farm chores, and even mere mostly a useless nuisance—”goddamn nuisance!” his father roared. To be always in the way, always in need, always someone other people’s children shouldn’t play with? To be always with nothing to trade for the impatient charity of strangers who traded taking care of you for money from the Welfare—to live like that? Crazy!

“Go take Jeanine Sanderson to a ball game!” he shouted.

“Hey, Jorry—”

“Just leave me alone!” And then he was running, clutching his cast awkwardly against his stomach, running with a lopsided lope over the ridge, through the rain.

By the time Jorry reached home, still running, his elbow ached from bouncing against the inside of the cast. Water streamed into it from his shoulders and hair; with each heaving breath he smelled soaked plaster mingled with damp earth and the wind-borne smell of wet cows. Leaning against the house, Jorry tried to catch his breath, to stop the silent sobs that shook his whole body, before he pushed open the screen door and went inside.

“Where you been, boy?”

Jorry snapped his head upward. Pa, who should have been in town, should have been still at that meeting, was never in the house at this time anyway—Pa was sitting behind the kitchen table, a glass in his big hand. Over the rain smells came that other smell. A pool of it had spilled on the table and one amber drop slid lazily over the edge, hung suspended for a long second, then plopped softly to the floor. Funny about that plop, Jorry thought crazily—you should hardly be able to hear it over the rain, but it filled the room like thunder.

Slowly he reached behind him for the latch to the screen door.

His father’s hand caught him at the shoulder and spun him across the kitchen and into the table. The glass shattered on the floor.

“I asked you where you been!”

“Ou-out, Pa!”

Fighting for balance, Jorry twisted his head and gazed at his father in terror. But Whitfield was nodding, a drunken heavy nod that made his head bounce like a dropped sack of grain.

“Out. You been out, and I know where—you think I don’t know where, I know where. I been out, too—out with those namby-pamby bastards who don’t give a damn if their farms go to hell on account of some fat-assed power company, ‘thout doing a damn thing about it but givin’ the farms away!” He nodded over and over, repeating the phrase: “Givin’ away. Just givin’ away.

“And you know what they’re gonna do—what got decided at their big angry meeting—they’re gonna send a delegation up to the Congressman … up to the Congressman, tiptoein’ all polite up to the Capitol, where nobody gives a damn anyway—but not me, boy! Not me! I know the only way to set the bastards to rights!” He shoved his face close to Jorry’s and hissed again, “Not me!” Rheumy yellowish liquid oozed from the corners of his eyes. “What do you say to that, boy?”

“N-no, Pa.”

Whitfield laughed loudly, straightened up, and groped behind him for the missing glass. Jorry edged around the table, numbly eyeing his father’s face, until his foot struck something hard. Glancing down, he saw the box from the Country Agricultural Agency, open now, spilling out the cylinders that could blast out a stubborn stump no tractor could dislodge, could send it spraying wood chips ten feet into the air. One stick of the dynamite lay half-puddled in amber whiskey. A stump, or a rock—or a truck. ‘You been out and I know where.’

“Hey!” Whitfield yelled, and snatched at air. Jorry had barreled across the kitchen and through the door, his cast striking the screen with such force that bits of plaster flaked into the dirty mesh. He stumbled as the rain hit him in a solid sheet, but picked himself up and ran, zig-zagging across the barnyard and around the edge of the barn. Behind him he heard the door bang again and then his father’s hoarse yell, the words blown away by wind and rain. Jorry leaned against the barn, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment before peering around the corner.

His father was lurching across the barnyard.

A sudden, unexpected flash of thunder lit up the sky and to Jorry his father suddenly looked huge, a giant swelling blackly to fill up the world and no place to hide and

—the buckle coming down and the smell of whiskey and his own voice screaming just before the—

Giants!

He ran the length of the barn and headed out toward the hayfield, bent low, huddled over the cast. Cutting diagonally through the rotting hay, running until his lungs ached, stopping only to wipe the streaming water from his eyes before running again, until he collapsed, heaving and panting, in the one place his father had never yet come. Sanctuary.

But for how long?

Jorry wrapped his good hand around the bottom girder and convulsively flexed and unflexed his fingers over the wet metal. Gradually his breathing slowed and he no longer had to snatch at draughts of wet air. Above him the line crackled and snapped, glowing through the rain with a fuzzy, reddish-blue corona. The line swayed gently, like the smooth surf line of some radioactive sea, but the boy hardly noticed. When he could stand, he began to trudge along the right-of-way, shedding stray bits of hay as he went, and his eyes moved only to jump to the next colossus in the long row of looming black giants safe-guarding his trail.

The truck was gone, and Tom with it.

Only the cages of mice remained. Water slid down the glass sides in smooth, silent trails. The rain had let up, but the sky was darkening, and occasionally thunder drowned out the ceaseless crackle overhead. Jorry stared blankly at the spot where the tarp lean-to had been, and his face twisted sideways.

Gone. Home for the day, home to the Sandersons’, home and dry and in no danger at all. Playing checkers with Jeanine and drinking hot coffee and not needing to be warned, not needing anything, because dynamite fuses don’t light in the rain and even Pa would remember that. Everyone remembered that, except Jorry. And on Monday Tom would pick up the mice and be gone for good, gone beyond the reaches of Jorry’s stupid rescues or bitter tea or anything else he might scrounge up. He wouldn’t see Tom again, couldn’t see him, because things didn’t work like that. You didn’t get things for free, and suddenly he didn’t care if Pa blew up every tower on the whole line, one by one, and Jorry himself along with them. He just didn’t care.

The boy threw himself down on the damp earth in front of the mice cages and buried his face in his left arm, too spent for tears. The right arm stuck out awkwardly at his side, the cast lying stiff and sodden in the mud.

Gone.

Abruptly, the sky shrieked and cleaved into two blinding halves as a bolt of lightning tore from cloud to cloud. Jorry was hurled back down on his face, the mud tingling below him, while overhead the line flamed red-purple and leaped wildly against its moorings. The crackling mounted to a wailing crescendo, for a confused moment sounding acrid and smelling deafening, and then both sound and smell whirled into a jaundice-colored mist swirling with mice and rain and

—the belt falling and he threw up his arm to shield—across the field stay low don’t—more coffee Jorry there’s plenty and put some sugar in your Olympian offering—his face from the buckle coming down and the smell of ozone you watch the line during a storm Jorry it—body currents and brain organelles and the center of perception of his screaming just before the crack of bone in Jeanine Sanderson’s head tingling with the smell of-—

The mist faded into black. The blackness pulsed and then steadied, and out of it slowly emerged the slipperiness of the mud. Jorry raised his head and shook it from side to side, first cautiously and then, when nothing hurt too much, more vigorously. Thunder rumbled somewhere over the horizon, and the eastern sky paled weakly. The boy sat up and swiped at the mud on his face, smearing it into long dark smudges.

The air smelled scorched, like wet laundry under a too hot iron, and mingled over and under and through was another smell, both familiar and unfamiliar, like a dream half-forgotten.

The smell of fear.

Whose?

Jorry wrinkled up his muddy nose and sniffed. It was fear and it was his nose, not in his mind or muscles or stomach. As he sniffed he became aware that the elusive smell—how did he know what it was? but he did—had slid down to the back of his throat and become a taste, chalky and metallic.

Wide-eyed, Jorry looked around. A gray mouse was huddled next to the plastic mesh, its whiskers still quivering. Around the matted fur on its wedge-shaped head was a faint red halo.

Instantly Jorry glanced up, but the reddish glow around the line had gone: the cable lay black and inert against the sky. By the time Jorry’s eyes swung back to the mouse, the red halo was fading and so was the chalky taste-smell of fear. The mouse uncurled itself, stretched, and wandered along the mesh. From under the sodden newspapers at the back of the cage crept another mouse, smaller and white, with pink ears. The head of the gray mouse began to glow again, this time a flickering marigold yellow, and Jorry breathed in a musky, damp odor that brought no word to his mind but did bring a sudden tightening in his belly muscles and a heaviness in his groin and a confused image of Jeanine Sanderson in her gym shorts.

He hunted up a sharp stick and prodded the gray mouse through the mesh. The marigold yellow flashed into red and again the chalky-metallic smell filled Jorry’s nostrils. Slowly he withdrew the stick and gazed at the glass cage, dazed.

Bits and pieces of things Tom had told him vibrated in his head like struck tuning forks. Brain organelles. Body currents. ‘Perception’s a likely candidate for change.’ Trigger phenomenon. And, incongruously, the smell of coffee.

Was it the mice who were different, giving off their haloes and their emotional smells, or was it something different in his brain that made him aware of these things? Jorry put his good hand to his nose and pinched it thoughtfully.

A second later he was scrambling to his feet, his sneakers nearly sliding out from under him in his haste to get to the second cage. It was more difficult to get the stick poked into this one, through the double-wire screening of the Faraday cage and then through the plastic mesh; but he kept at it, his tongue stuck out at the corner of his mouth, until the stick hit something more yielding than glass, less than newspaper. Jorry prodded hard. There was a sudden squeal, and a black mouse head poked out of a pile of shredded editorials. Around the black was a thin halo of red.

Inside the Faraday shield.

Rocking back on his heels and wrinkling his muddy nose against the sudden chalky-metallic smell, the boy stared at his stick, then at the black line stretching overhead, and again at the stick. So it was a change inside his own head; if the change had been in the mice, the ones within the Faraday shield wouldn’t have been affected. What was happening to him?

The fear only lasted a moment, a sickening moment when he wondered crazily if he would see a red halo if he looked in a mirror. A mirror—what had he been told about a mirror? Who had told him? Oh, yes—Tom.

Jorry’s grip tightened around his stick. Another feeling swelled within him, swelled like the breaking of river ice after the winter, splintering the momentary fear and spinning it away in the rush of excitement. Whatever this thing was, this thing he could do now, he had found it. He, Jorry Whitfield. It was his discovery, his first step, his vulcanized rubber spilling onto the stove, his. Like a real scientist, like Charles Goodyear, like somebody.

Like Tom.

And it was important, this thing. Jorry wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did. Important enough, different enough— what had Tom said? ‘dramatic’—so those men on the Power Commission would have to listen about the line. Was it good dramatic or bad dramatic? What would those men think about what had happened to him? Jorry didn’t know, but he guessed they wouldn’t like it when he told them what colors their halos were.

But even when the line was gone—and here he glanced up at it with something almost like affectionate regret—this thing, this Sense, would still be his. His to keep, his to use, his to give to Tom for that scientific report that now was not going to be dull. And if he ‘gave’ this Sense to Tom, offering him the use of it the way he would have with a new bicycle if he had ever had one, then for the first time Jorry could, in turn, let himself think about the dizzying possibility Tom had talked about, the possibility of leaving, of not having to lie rigid in his bed listening to Pa downstairs with his bottle and wonder if this time … he could leave, now. Now that he had earned the right, now that he had this important thing to trade, to swap—

But what had he traded to earn the Sense?

Slowly Jorry sat down in the mud. He had traded nothing; he was even going to help get the line torn down, if that was possible. So the Sense was free, an unexpected gift, an offering, a benediction. But that wasn’t possible: nothing was free, things didn’t go right by themselves, nobody gave you anything without trying to get something greater back, it just didn’t work like that. It never worked like that.

Did it ever work like that?

Sitting on the wet ground, his stick still in his hand, Jorry felt dizzy. An errant drop of water trickled off the back of his collar and down his neck, and he sneezed.

It was difficult fishing the gray mouse out of the cage, using only one hand. When Jorry finally had the damp body clasped around its middle, he squeezed it firmly and started walking over the ridge. At the top he halted abruptly. Far down the line was a dark figure, made tiny by distance, standing motionless in the middle of a wet field of rotting hay. By screwing up his eyes and squinting through the mist, Jorry could just make out the figure of his father, head tilted back to stare upward at the soaring black girders of the line tower. He could make out, too, around the thrown-back head, a thin red halo. On a vagrant puff of wind came the faint smell of chalk.

Jorry blinked and tightened his grip on the mouse until it squealed. His father’s arms dangled at his sides, the big hands limp and empty. He was standing well back from the line, well outside the right of way, and the red fear-halo glowed like a blurred mist through the soft rain.

His father? Afraid? His father afraid; small and wet and powerless by the line, and afraid. Clayte Whitfield. Only a man afraid. Of the line, of his mirror, of the scary confusion in things not always turning out badly, in sometimes ending well, or neither, or both.

Jorry gazed for a long time, his face streaked with mud and concentration. Then he blinked again, turned away, and carried his mouse on his cast, riding in front of him like an unexpected gift, an offering, a benediction, over the ridge toward the Sandersons’. His muddy figure loomed tall as a giant against the rainy sky.

Table of Contents

Start