The Giant-Slayer Read online

  It came into Laurie’s mind to say, They were just trying to help you. But, still stung by Carolyn’s reaction to her tonsil story, she was careful not to say anything wrong. “How did it start?” she asked.

  The machine pulled air through Carolyn’s mouth. The rubber collar that sealed her neck vibrated very slightly. Talking slowly, keeping time with the iron lung, she sounded like a poet with a breathy chorus in the background.

  “When I was a kid Daddy called me ‘kitten.’

  “Wherever we went, he leaned sideways. Bending down to hold my hand.

  “We went to the store and the zoo. To the park and the pool.

  “We were always alone. Just me and my dad. That’s the way I wanted it.”

  Her eyes were red and wet. She rolled her head against the pillow, trying to blot her own tears.

  “I was six years old. Dad took us to a cabin on a lake. There were cottages all around. Everybody swimming all the time.

  “There must have been a thousand people,” she said. “Maybe more. But no one else got polio. I was the only one.”

  In that way, in little sentences or phrases, Carolyn told her story. It was the first time that she had done it, from beginning to end.

  “One morning,” she said, “I felt sick. Hot and creepy. My mother said it was too much sun. She made me stay in bed.

  “The sheets hurt me. Just the weight of the sheets. When I cried, Mom said, ‘Don’t make a fuss. You’re barely even sunburned.’ She waited three days to call a doctor.”

  Carolyn described the doctor as a smelly old man with white hair in his ears. “He had lollipops in his shirt pocket,” she said. “I could see the little sticks poking up. He pulled out a purple one and held it toward me, and he was disappointed when I didn’t want to eat it. ‘Well, I’ll leave it on the table here,’ he said.

  “Then he opened his black bag. He took my temperature and tapped my chest. He looked in my ears with a flashlight on a stick. He told my mom, “It’s a summer cold. Nothing to worry about.’ He said, ‘Let her rest a few more days. She’ll be as fit as a fiddle.’”

  That afternoon, said Carolyn, her arms stopped working. When the sun went down she was having trouble breathing. Her father flew into a rage, ranting about the doctor. “He seemed twenty feet tall,” she said, looking up at the mirror above the iron lung. “His voice shook the room. I thought my bed was whirling round and round.”

  She didn’t remember clearly what happened after that. “I was in an ambulance. We were rushing along gravel roads, shuddering over potholes. There was a little bump when we came onto pavement.”

  Soon, said Carolyn, the darkness of the country gave way to city lights. She remembered the coolness of the air as the ambulance doors were opened, and looking up to see people looming all around her, frightening figures in gowns and gloves, with masks on their faces. “All I could see were their eyes.”

  Beside her now, Chip was silent. No one made a sound as Carolyn talked.

  “The next thing I knew, I was sealed in an iron lung,” she said. “There was a hole in my throat, and a tube stuck inside it. Air was going in and out with horrible whistles and gasps.”

  The next days seemed hazy to her now, she said. She had slept and woken, and slept again. And then a priest was standing at her side, clothed as black as a crow. He was holding something above the iron lung, moving his hand in the sign of a cross.

  “It was the last rites,” she said. “I was dying.”

  She described how he muttered the strange Latin words, how his hand moved up and down, back and forth. “I thought when he finished I would die,” she said. “I wanted to signal to him that I was still alive. But I couldn’t call out. I couldn’t move a hand to warn him. I could feel my fingers, my toes, my arms and legs, but couldn’t make them work.” Every muscle in her body was burning hot, she said. But her skin was all prickles and ice.

  “Then it was morning. There was sunlight in the room, and a bird was singing somewhere,” said Carolyn. “A nurse in white was moving round the iron lung. Her shoes were squeaking.

  “When she saw me, she smiled. It was the most beautiful smile.”

  Now Carolyn too smiled up at her mirror. She told how the nurse ran to the hall, shouting, “She’s awake! She’s awake!” and then ran back again to hold the girl’s face in her hands, to stroke the blond hair that was then nearly as short as a boy’s.

  “Her hands were warm,” said Carolyn. “She kept saying, ‘I knew you’d pull through. I just had a feeling you would.’ I tried to talk, but no sound came out. Then the nurse put her finger on the end of the plastic tube, and suddenly there was air passing through it, into my mouth, over my lips and gums and teeth.” Sucked with lovely coolness down her throat, it filled her lungs, and as the bellows pumped below her machine, Carolyn spoke for the first time in ten days.

  “I asked, ‘Where’s my daddy?’ That’s all I cared about. He was out in the hall. He had been there every night,” she said. “When he came in, he looked as old and worried as Rip Van Winkle. All he did was cry. He just stood beside me, crying.”

  Laurie asked, “Was your mother there?”

  “No, but she came right away,” said Carolyn. “She was in a hotel down the street.”

  Laurie looked at Carolyn with a new understanding. Chip had turned his head away, and little Dickie was staring up toward his comic of the Two-Gun Kid but not reading the words or seeing the pictures.

  “That was more than seven years ago,” said Carolyn. “They moved to a new city. They moved again. Dad bought a company, and that took them even farther away.

  “I have a sister now. She’s three years old. I only saw her once.

  “They went to Niagara Falls. To the Grand Canyon. To California.

  “And I haven’t left this room. Not once in all that time.”

  Dickie tipped his head toward her. “They couldn’t take you,” he said.

  “Think I don’t know that?” asked Carolyn. “Think I couldn’t figure it out?”

  “I mean, you shouldn’t be mad. Boy, it’s not their fault.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Carolyn.

  Laurie stepped away. “Do they still come to visit?” she asked.

  “Oh, they did at first.” Carolyn talked about it as Laurie moved along the row of iron lungs, to Chip’s and then to Dickie’s, taking down the magazine and comic book, flipping mirrors over.

  For a week, said Carolyn, her father and mother had come every day to the hospital. Each time they brought a tiny bunch of flowers, or candy that she couldn’t eat. They always asked how she was doing, as though they couldn’t see that she was just the same. Then they had to go home; Mr. Jewels had to go back to work.

  “Dad started coming by himself. All that summer, he came every weekend,” said Carolyn. “In the fall it was every second week. By the end of winter it was once a month.

  “And now …” She sobbed and sniffed. “It’s maybe once a year. He came last month, and stayed for less than an hour.”

  “Were you mean to him?” asked Dickie, piping up above the huff of the respirators. “Did you get sore at him?”

  “Mind your beeswax,” said Carolyn.

  But Dickie kept on, with the serious expression that made him look so much older. “Did you shout at him? Then not even talk at all? Boy, I bet he looked so sad.”

  “Well, good for him!” she snapped. “Why shouldn’t he be sad?”

  “’Cause he came to see you,” said Dickie.

  “You stupe. He didn’t want to come. He had to,” said Carolyn. “He hates coming here.”

  She looked mean now, not pretty at all. Her face had set into hard lines, her forehead into rows of wrinkles.

  “You should be nicer to people,” said Dickie. “Then they’d be nicer to you.”

  “You should shut up,” said Carolyn.

  She and Dickie might have argued all day if not for the boy between them. Chip lay for a while with his eyes closed, his teeth gritted, as thoug
h he hoped to block out the sound. Then he tossed his head back and forth; he slammed it up and down. He did it so violently that one of the photographs shook loose from the front of his iron lung and drifted in zigzags to the floor. “Quit it!” he said in an angry voice.

  Right away, the others stopped.

  “Okay,” he said, more quietly now. “I want to hear Laurie tell her story.”

  “Me too,” said Dickie.

  “But no splints on the baby.”

  Fingal wouldn’t think of harming his baby. Jimmy was now the most precious thing he owned, as good as a golden goose.

  In the basement, Fingal had barrels full of money. He had coins of silver and coins of gold. He had round coins, square coins, coins with six or eight sides. He loved to pour them like grains of sand through his fingers. His only fear was that his new wealth wouldn’t last, because Jimmy was growing bigger.

  On the day of the first snowfall, when it was bitterly cold, a stranger arrived at the inn. He was older than any traveler who had ever come before, older than the inn itself. He looked like an ancient oak in a woolen cloak, twisted and wrinkled and gnarled, his skin as rough as bark, his fingers like so many twigs.

  He pushed the door with all his weight, and a frigid gust set Jimmy’s cradle rocking on the bar. It woke the embers in the fireplace and made them gleam and crackle. The last traveler had departed for the south an hour earlier, so the fire was near its end. The Woman was upstairs, cleaning the emptied rooms.

  Fingal looked up from the bar. “Are you going north, sir?” he asked.

  The old man didn’t speak. The cloak covered him from head to toe, while his face was hidden in the shadows of his hood. He came into the parlor with a heavy step that sounded like the clopping of a horse.

  There was snow on his shoulders, on the top of his hood, and it fell away as he crossed the parlor with that curious sound: clop, clop, clop. He walked right up to the bar and lifted a foot to the brass rail. He was wearing leather boots with wooden soles.

  “You’ll want to tip the babby now,” said Fingal, nodding toward the cradle. He gave it a poke that set the coins sloshing inside. Jimmy made happy, muttering sounds. “It brings fortune, you see. The more you give, the more you receive, if I can offer some advice.”

  “I do not seek advice,” said the old traveler. “I want only a fire, a drink, and a bowl of soup, all three as hot as you can make them.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Fingal, peering into the dark shadows of the traveler’s hood. He could see a chin that was bristled with white hairs, an eyebrow as thick as rope. “You do have the means of payment?” he said.

  Above them, the Woman was moving from room to room, carrying her bucket with a clatter and creak. The old traveler shook the last bits of snow from his shoulders. He reached into his sleeve and pulled out a small leather pouch. “Here is the means of my payment,” he said.

  The pouch made no sound when it touched the bar. There was no jingle of silver, no rattle of gold. “Why, it’s empty!” said Fingal.

  “Not at all.”

  “Then what’s inside it?”

  “The answer to your dreams.”

  “Bah!” Fingal snatched up the little bag before the man could say another word. He crushed it in his fist. “Look there, you old fool,” he said. “I can see there’s nothing in it.”

  “Your eyes deceive you,” said the traveler. The shadows moved in his hood as he shifted his head. There was a hint of hooked nose, of pox-scarred cheeks, of blackened lips. “That pouch contains anything you can imagine. Unless, of course, you imagine too much.”

  “Bah!” said Fingal again. “What do you mean by that?”

  “It’s a matter of fair exchange,” said the traveler patiently. “I will pay well for my meal. But if you ask too much, you get nothing.”

  Fingal laughed. It seemed that no matter what he did he was going to get nothing. But as he pushed the purse across the bar, a phrase came into his mind, words spoken by his mother fifty years before. Flat as a Wishman’s pouch. He could hear her saying it, and the memory suddenly triggered another. Never wish for a Wishman. He had thought, then, that it was nonsense. And in all the time gone by, he hadn’t changed his mind.

  Now he frowned. “Are you a Wishman?”

  “I am,” said the traveler.

  “You bestow wishes?”

  “I do.”

  Fingal leaned on the bar, nearly overcome by surprise. “I didn’t know that Wishmen existed,” he said.

  “Once, you didn’t doubt it,” said the Wishman.

  “I was a child.” Fingal looked suspiciously at the old man, at his worn cloak and warty hands. “Can you bestow wishes on yourself?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Aha!” Fingal held up a finger, as though he had bettered the traveler. “Then why do you walk in such rags?”

  “I choose to,” said the Wishman.

  “Why are you not young and handsome?”

  “If you cannot explain that yourself, then your wishes are wasted, my friend.” The traveler leaned forward. “Now, please, I would like my brandy.”

  There was a keg right behind the bar, but Fingal didn’t want to serve watery brandy to a Wishman. He went down to the basement instead, and brought up a glass as yellow as amber. He warmed it over the red eyes of the embers in his fireplace while the Wishman took his pouch to a chair beside the hearth. Fingal served him the brandy, then fetched an armload of wood and lit the biggest fire that he’d ever lit. The flames reached up and stroked the wood, then stretched again high into the chimney. Air roared through the fireplace. On the bar, Jimmy’s little cradle began to rock in the draft. The boy giggled and laughed.

  Fingal brought soup from the kitchen. He brought a spoon, but the Wishman didn’t use it, choosing instead to drink right from the bowl, lapping it out like a dog.

  When he was fed and warm, the Wishman at last pulled back his hood. Fingal watched with interest, then turned away, disgusted. The old man’s face was as ugly as a troll’s, the skin all pitted and scarred.

  The traveler drank his brandy and sat for a moment staring into the fire. Then a smile came to that terrible face. “I’ll make my payment now,” he said. “What is it you wish for?”

  The question made Fingal’s heart beat faster. He could imagine a thousand wishes, but not how to choose between them. Should he ask for riches? For happiness? Should he ask for the Woman to be young and lovely? Should he ask for youth for himself?

  If you ask too much, you get nothing. But how much was too much? Was he meant to ask only for fair value, for nothing worth more than a splash of soup and watery brandy?

  “Please,” said the traveler. He held up his pouch. “I would like to settle my account.”

  In the fireplace, the flames shifted. On the bar, the cradle rocked. Jimmy laughed, delighted.

  “Ah, the babby!” cried Fingal. He looked into the eyes of the old Wishman. “Would it be too much if I asked for the babby to stay the size that he is?”

  “To grow no bigger?”

  “Not an inch.”

  “That is fair,” said the Wishman.

  “Then do it.” Fingal looked up at the ceiling, trying to tell where the Woman was working. “Do it now.”

  “I should warn you first,” said the Wishman. “It’s been my experience in this business that a wish may not always manifest itself in the manner the wisher intended.”

  “What the devil do you mean?” asked Fingal.

  “If you wish the boy not to grow another inch, he may not live another day. You could bring about his death.”

  “Ah.” Fingal nodded.

  The Wishman studied him closely.

  “Well, everybody dies,” said Fingal. “Not that that’s what I’m after, mind you. If he grows up, that’s fine; that’s well and dandy, as long as he doesn’t grow big. I want him to be the size of an infant forever.”

  The Wishman fiddled with his pouch. “Once done, this cannot be undone,” he
said. “Not without a terrible price.”

  “Fine. That’s fine,” said Fingal. “If you can do it, do it now.”

  The Wishman opened his purse. A draft of frigid air came out, so cold that it rimmed the leather with frost. Crystals of ice formed on the Wishman’s fingers, on the tip of his nose, on his eyebrows and lashes. His breath came out in a steamy cloud that rose, swirling, to the ceiling. Then the Wishman closed his purse again and tucked it up his sleeve.

  “That’s all?” said Fingal.

  “It is done.” The Wishman stood up and lifted his hood. Then out he went, under the dragon’s tooth and through the door, into the cold and the snow. He turned to the north and, head down, trudged along his way.

  Fingal watched the tooth swinging in its chains. Then he looked at the empty brandy glass, at the soup bowl beside it, and wondered who had cheated whom. Anyone could open an empty bag and claim it was full of wishes. Even a fool could move his hand about mysteriously, then say, “There, it’s done.” Perhaps Fingal’s mother was right. There’s nothing flatter than a Wishman’s pouch.

  “You mean the Wishman was a cheat?” asked Chip. “He did a dine and dash?”

  “No. I think he was real,” said Dickie. “He got frost on his fingers. ’Cause wishes are cold.”

  “I guess there was no way to know,” said Chip.

  “That’s what Fingal thought,” said Laurie. “At that moment, Jimmy was about this tall.” She held her hand above the floor, a little lower than her waist. Chip and Dickie and Carolyn turned their heads to see for themselves, and their faces tilted in the mirrors.

  Dickie smiled, then closed his eyes. “Boy, I wish there was a Wishman,” he said.

  “What would you wish for?” asked Laurie.

  “Gee, I wonder,” said Carolyn. “What on earth could he want? A kid in an iron lung.”

  Laurie blushed. She’d known right away it was a silly question. What else would he wish for, but to be healthy and happy again?

  But Dickie was always surprising.

  “Disneyland,” said Dickie. “Boy, I’d wish I could get to Disneyland.”

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