PAT MacEWEN

THE MACKLIN GIFT

My father is an ugly man. He stands six feet three in his stocking feet and his
nose is an overgrown bread hook that leans to the left when he frowns, which is
often enough. It's further marred by a rounded hump across the middle, something
like the bridge in a Japanese Tea Garden.

Gram says it came from a mallet belonged to a carpenter, French Canuck, from
across the lake, that my Mom would've married instead if he'd ever come home
from the Marne in '18, but how true that is, I couldn't say. Gram never mentions
it when he's home. More only tells me, "Don't grow up too fast, Will, Fifteen
only feels like forever."

But then she's the one stayed in bed of a morning, unwilling even to look at her
husband's cadaverous face, a lean, dark, bony thing, built like a wall thrown
together from odd lots of leftover bricks.

That last morning, I studied him over a wordless breakfast, cold bread, bacon,
and hot black coffee, strong and bitter, brewed in Gram's old, battered blue
enamel pot. She moved slowly, serving us, heaving the weight of her
eight-months-swollen belly around the table.

Dad ate like a ravenous bear, growling deep in his throat while he tore at the
bread.

I remember the way he looked up at me suddenly, jet black eyes full of
speculation. "Eat up, boy," he told me sharply, his bull's voice startling in
the near silence.

To Gram, he said, "We'll need a lunch box, woman. We're headed for Chapin today.
There's a farmhouse about to be pulled down. A piece of the salvage is ours."

"But Will can't go!" she said, her faded voice as startling for its
unexpectedness as Pa's had been for its depth. "He's got school."

"Not anymore," he said, and stuck his chin out at me. "You're done with that,
boy. No use to you, anyhow, now when you've already got your trade."

"And what kind of trade is that?" Gram demanded, raising her reedy voice to the
rafters. "Rag-picking? Junk? That's a living for old men and no-account tramps,
not for boys with a mind and a future!"

He rose up and swung with one motion, catching her low in the left ear. Her
false teeth popped out of her mouth as she fell against the stove's hot water
tank and then down to the gray slate floor.

"What's good enough for me," he said, his dark voice gone even deeper with rage,
"is damn well good enough for him!"

To me he said, "Let's have those books, boy." Cautiously, I shoved my pack
across the table. He upended it, spilling them out, then opened each in turn. My
homework he crumpled and flung at the tinder box. Then he tore the flyleaf out
of each book, removing the school's stamp of ownership. Even the library copy of
Faulkner. He ripped out the sleeve for the library card and then flung the thing
down again.

Satisfied, he shoved them back at me, saying sharply, "Mind you bring those
along today. They'll fetch something at Whittaker's."

Then he flung himself into his worn wool jacket, and stomped out into the dawn.

"Help me," Gram said, wheezing, and I rushed to lend her an arm as she struggled
to her feet. Her face had gone a soft transparent white with a hint of yellow,
like old ivory. The forming bruise was a darkening puffiness.

Leaning heavily on me, she made her way to the bench and collapsed, then sat for
a moment, her face hid away in the crook of her arm. At length, she drew a
shuddering breath and raised her head to look at me.

"I'm too old for this," she said, resting one hand on her pregnancy. Then she
smiled faintly. "And you're too young. Don't worry so, boy. I'll be all right."

Outside, the truck's engine clattered to life, protesting the hour with groaning
pistons and tap-tapping valves. Pa treated it like an old horse, said you had to
get its blood to moving of a morning.

I rushed around, gathering sandwich makings, throwing some red apples into a
sack. As the clock struck six, I hurried out, casting a single guilty backward
glance at my grandmother's worn, weary face. For a moment, she looked like a
ghost out of one of her own fairy tales.

We headed first for the docks at Ogdensburg, where Dad did business with men off
the fishing boats and barges. All manner of things wandered up the St. Lawrence
and off of those boats and climbed into the back of our truck, things a revenuer
might've liked to lay his hands on. This time, there were black-labeled cartons
of cigarettes, calf leather shoes, and a case of Gordon's gin, not to mention a
fat green sturgeon.

In spite of them repealing Prohibition last year, Limey gin's still scarce
enough to bring a handsome price, and so that was our best piece of work for the
day.

Afterward, we skipped our usual rounds, turning southeast to drive past a half
dozen houses where we might have stopped on another Monday. I saw women's faces
in most of their windows, wives, girls, and grandmothers, all of them watching
us pass them by, with never a smile or a wave of the hand.

Instead, Pa pulled in alongside the Franklins' tired clapboard house, out along
Old Creek Road. Jackie Franklin'd finally gotten a spot at the chocolate works,
which meant his wife, Annabel, was home all alone.

It was her bought the sturgeon. She wore a green dress, I remember. An
old-fashioned ribbon the same color wound through her hair. Bright yellow hair,
buttercup yellow my mother would call it, all tumbling loose down her back. She
was pretty enough to warm my face when she grinned at me.

I remember too that she had a high spirit, a willfulness that sparkled in every
word. She argued with Pa like she would've a passing tramp. Hand on her hip, she
scorned his price, then complained of the sturgeon's size, and finished up by
calling him a liar and a thief.

I heard him laugh softly in answer to that and I felt a cold fist of dread
closing around my heart. I knew what came next and I wanted desperately to be
somewhere else, but like Annabel, I was helpless, caught up in his presence. So
I stood there, stupid, aching, my cap in my hand, and watched him take her.

He laughed again, louder this time, and her head came up. She met his black eyes
evenly, not flinching.

Then something flowed through the air and her eyes went moist and flat, widening
out into ice blue plates. An invisible energy slid from my father and snaked its
way round her in fat smoky coils. She shuddered once, licking her lips, a pink
flicker of tongue, and her face lost all expression, becoming no longer entirely
Annabel.

Shivering, she beckoned to my father, her hand trembling, yet curiously
lifeless.

He smiled, nodded silently and took her arm. Leading her inside like a puppeteer
stringing his marionette, he turned at the door and told me to wait outside, his
voice gone hoarse.

I nodded and drove the truck into a sunny patch next to a leafless elm in the
yard, as far from the house as I could get without actually leaving.

It didn't help. In my mind's eye, I could have pictured the whole damn thing,
down to the last detail, even if I'd been struck stone deaf. And dear God, I had
not.

I sat on the running board, knotting my fingers together until my knuckles went
white and the blood stood out in bright pink bands across each nail. A red
current of heat flowed through me, as though an invisible wire connected my face
with a stirring reaction my britches could barely contain. From the house, of a
sudden, I heard a harsh clatter, as if metal tools had been brushed from a work
table onto the floor. They hadn't bothered to close the door.

There followed a longer bit of silence while I gnawed my lip. It was followed by
a low animal kind of snarling. More sounds, high and childish cries of pain, of
eagerness scattered amongst others darker, more guttural, then the sharp stutter
of wooden legs scraping across a stone floor.

I stuffed my thumbs into my ears, trying to shut them out, knowing it was
hopeless. My body, hot and throbbing, would have betrayed me anyhow, since even
stopping up my ears would never wipe away the memory of things I'd heard every
night of my life through walls too old and thin.

It didn't take long, thank God. It never did. Fifteen minutes later, Pa
reappeared, thumbs hooked under his belt as he sauntered across the yard.

Through the doorway, I glimpsed Annabel. She was tugging at her skirt, then
buttoning down a sleeve to cover dark red marks on her arm, her fingers keeping
busy while her eyes watched his back with the joyless bruised look all of Pa's
women shared.

I looked away, hot blood flooding my face as I scrambled across the seat, Pa
climbing into the truck.

"Let's be off," he said. "That house in Chapin won't wait forever, nor Whittaker
neither."

I didn't move, just sat there glaring at a crack in the windshield's lower
corner.

"Will'am?" he said. I didn't answer. "Boy, what's the matter with you?" His
hand, as rough and gnarled as old oak, reached out, taking me by the chin. He
pulled me around to face him, then shoved his other hand into my crotch, where
he squeezed me, painfully. I yelped and punched him in the arm till he let go
and caught my fist.

But then, to my complete surprise, he simply sat there a moment, watching me,
thoughtful-like.

He said, "Like that, is it?" He let go of my hand and nodded to himself, then
chuckled. He started the truck with a roar, over-gunning the engine, backed into
the road and got us moving.

Once under way, he even grinned. "I was beginnin' to worry about you, boy," he
told me. "Now me, it come on me when I was twelve, like it come to my father
before me. What you'd call the first flower of manhood." He laughed at his own
wit.

"You, though, you're a good three years late. I was starting to wonder if you
were my son at all."

I shot him a hard sharp look out of the comer of one eye, breathless, a wild
surge of hope sweeping over me, but he was watching the road up ahead where a
hay load had pulled out and didn't take notice.

"Oh, I understand how you're feelin', boy. Don't you worry about it. As time
goes by, the call gets louder, but the answer gets better, ya know what I mean?
It'll grow on ya."

God, what did that mean? "When you're grown," he continued, expansive, his
sudden talkativeness uncharacteristic, unsettling, "you'll find it's a fever in
your blood, a thirst that'll swell your tongue and crack your mouth. A fine heat
-warms your whole body."

He leaned out the window, hawked and spat. "Only thing to do when you're thirsty
is drink. Find yourself a woman. Won't be hard. That's the gift of our line,
Will'am. The Macklin men've always had a way with the ladies."

Again that dry, hard laugh. "With a little practice, you'll see. Women'll fall
at your feet, beggin' for it."

I thought of Annabel Franklin with her trembling hands and her bruises. I
thought of Gram, forty-three years old and eight months gone with a nameless
child that might be her death. I thought of my mother, the pain, and the lost
look I saw in her face every morning, as though she'd misplaced her soul
overnight. Had they all begged for that?

Did its like lie in my future? An endless parade of unhappy women with emptied
faces? What pleasure could any man take from a gift that is never returned?

I shuddered. My father went on heedlessly. "And you'll never have to worry, boy.
A girl who's been laid by a Macklin'll never go crying to Mamma, nor tell her
old man. No shotgun weddings, or bastards, either."

He nodded, full of self-satisfaction. "Fact is, Will'am, the Macklin seed runs
thin. If you want any kids of your own, you'll have to plow the same field, over
and over again. Or your crop'll be damned thin as well."

How many times did you plow your acre, I wondered, begetting your three and a
half?

Something curdled deep in my belly, raising a sheen of sweat on my face, as if
summer had suddenly skipped ahead of spring, delivering out-of-season warmth.

"There's one thing I will tell you," Pa said. He was looking at me now. "I've
said I understand your needs. I do. But there's same I won't stand for, and
you'd better know it."

He glared at me, intent. "Don't ever touch your mother. Ever. Is that clear?"

I choked on a sudden gush of bile, kicked open the door and flung myself out of
the truck. I landed on the dirt shoulder, rolling away and down into the ditch,
then scrabbled up and out with the best speed I could manage, plunging into a
thicket of sumac and thrashing my way through it like a wild animal.

"Will'am!" he shouted. I heard a short agonized screech of old brakes. "Come
back here, boy!"

I didn't, couldn't, was too busy being sick. He shouted again, louder. I heard
the door slam as he climbed down off the truck. The sound struck me like a spur
in the flanks and I fought my way free of the brush. On the other side was a
field of burnt corn stubble, not yet plowed for spring planting. I lit out
across that like a scared rabbit two licks ahead of a coon hound.

I never looked back. Don't know whether he saw me or tried to follow. Right
then, the only thought in my head was escaping him. I was terrified, more of
those jet-black eyes than of facing his rage and his fists and his boots.

I ran, on and on, until lightning had stitched its way up my right side and my
lungs had burned up in my throat, till I tripped on a rock and fell flat on my
face in the mud.

Cold mud, like a sharp, wet slap in the face. I lay there panting for a while.
When I could sit up again, I found I'd left the corn field far behind. I was
almost back to Henderson, north of the river. I could see the kiln at the
glassworks that'd been shut down ever since the bank went bust.

I picked myself up, brushing off the worst of the mud, and went on at a slower,
saner pace. All the while I was walking, I tried to think.

My father (unbelievable!) had sounded proud of me. Like a farmer bragging on his
prize bull's get. Like a man who sees himself in his son.

I gagged again, but the thought didn't go away.

Could he be right? Could a thing like that be passed on from father to son, down
through generations?

Some things could, I knew. Feeblemindedness, extra fingers, and sometimes Second
Sight.

I thought of the past few weeks, me boiling inside, full of strange hot flashes,
of dreams and sensations that hadn't made sense until now.

Wool-gathering. I was jarred out of it by a high, tart, almost-woman's voice,
too near to hand. She cried out, "Jeez, Will, is that you?"

I stopped, and found myself faced with the one thing I didn't need, not right
then. Hot, female curiosity blazing away in a pair of wide-eyed faces.

Mary Kingsley, squinting slightly, wore old-fashioned pince nez. She stared at
me with the air of a puzzled tabby cat, one finger marking her place in a
battered geography book. Her fingernail had cut Kansas in two.

Beside her, atop a low stone wall, Jean Mattington tilted her head back and
stared down the length of her nose. She demanded, "What happened to you?" while
Mary remarked, in her quietly feline way, "What a muddy mess!"

My face flamed scarlet again as I shrugged. I said, "Took a fall, that's all."

Mary nodded wisely, amused, and purred, "You weren't in school this morning."

Jean smirked. "You missed it. Lafferty farted in class, and the front row just
about swallowed their tongues, it was so rank."

The two of them tittered. I thought about telling them how I was done with
school, and with old man Lafferty too, but I found my own tongue had got tangled
up into a knot.

The front of Mary's blouse, you see, was laced with a shiny blue ribbon that
caught up the sunlight and glimmered a little with every breath. Staring, I
noticed the way the white linen had molded itself to her body, and how, at the
side of her throat, I could see the taint, regular pulsing of Mary's heart.

Heat of a different kind flooded my body. I found I was sweating again, like a
horse, and in spite of the willow trees' shade.

Someone tittered again. It was Jean, I think, and I looked up at Mary's pink
face with a start. But the tabby cat smile had disappeared, replaced by a flat,
expressionless, centered look. Her pale, thin lips had darkened too, the lower
one caught between perfect white teeth.

Never looking away from me, Mary put down the geography book. With a sureness
alien to her short stout legs, Mary stood, and then took a step toward me.

Jean said, softly, "Mary?" Mary ignored Jean, the pulse in her throat speeding
up, the white linen and blue ribbon quivering as she came nearer, and nearer
yet, and then she'd got rid of the spectacles. She was lifting a hand to my face
as she pressed up against me and buried her face in the crook of my neck, and
those perfect white teeth began nibbling at me.

I found that my arms had come up to embrace her, as if by their own free will.
My grimy hands were now stroking the length of her back, from the base of her
neck to her hips, and then lower, each time pulling Mary a little bit closer.
She smelled of lavender.

"My God, Mary!" somebody hissed. I looked over her shoulder at Jean, who was
fish-eyed, agog. Again, my hand moved by itself, gently beckoning. Again, that
curious flattening wiped away Jean's outrage, leaving no more than a shell of
the outspoken girl I had known all my life.

She, too, stood up and moved toward me, puzzlement warring with something inside
all her normal desires and needs, while her two clever hands found a way between
Mary and me, one slipping around, in behind me, slowly circling toward its goal,
while the other one slid underneath my belt, cool fingers carefully probing, in
search of the part of me already straining and yearning for freedom.

When she found it, the touch of her fingers was more than my laboring heart
could withstand. All the heat bottled up in me, all of the anger and hurt
running deep in my flesh, like a vein of bright buttercup yellow, came surging
up out of the shadows, a shuddering, wonderfully rhythmic explosion of
exquisite, painful intensity.

When it had passed, like a tidal bore on the river, I opened my eyes. Mary
blinked at me, like an old box turtle wakening from a short nap in the sun. With
a faintly surprised expression, she pulled away, out of my arms, and stumbled
backward, gazing first at me, and then down at her mud-streaked, blue-ribboned
breasts.

With a tentative tug, and a flutter of long, black lashes, Jean pulled away from
me too, and then stood for a moment and stared at her white-smeared hand.

In their faces, as though I had peered at the sun too long, there rose a pale
and ghostly afterimage, empty eyes and a bruised, tight, thin-lipped mouth.

Annabel Franklin's mouth. My mother's eyes. As the ghost image burned its way
into my brain, as the two of them backed away further, I heard myself moaning.
My knees gave way, and I sank to the ground.

Mary stood, shaking her head, while Jean wiped her hand on her handkerchief,
nervously scrubbing away with soft cotton, her brown eyes still fastened on me.

Then, as I began to shake my head, I could see the light dawn in their faces.
Watching, I saw the progression of disbelief, shock, and then horror...followed
close by a kind of wary fascination.

Just like my father'd foretold. But I hadn't done anything! That much, I swear,
is the God's own truth. All I did was stand there and look at them, not even
wanting them, not even thinking of...

No, no, wait. If I'm honest, I'll have to admit to the thought of it, only the
thought, though, when Jean the last few months, had seemed to... but what was
the use, with her father a councilman, someone important, and my Dad a
trashpicker?

Maybe...oh hell and damnation! What does it matter? The look in Jean's eyes as I
fought my way back to my feet, and that horrible, faceless fascination broke...I
can never get past that, now, can I?

Jean made a choking sound, like smothered laughter, only her eyes weren't
laughing. Then she turned, forgetting Mary as well as the books and the wax
paper bundles of lunch that still sat on the wall. The unclean hand clutched
against her waist, she whirled about and ran from me like a woman pursued by a
bull, by a demon, perhaps by the Devil himself.

Mary hesitated, even took a half step toward me, breathing hard and fast, but
then, in her too, something snapped. She turned and ran as well.

My own first impulse, I admit, was born of total cowardice. I'd run away. I'd
find a boat and stow away or I'd grab me a handful of boxcars. I'd go just as
far as I could, California, or maybe Samoa, someplace where Pa'd never find me.

Almost as quickly, I knew that I couldn't. What work could I hope to find in
times like these, me with no trade worth mentioning and grown men standing in
soup lines all over the country?

I couldn't even enlist. Besides, it'd leave Mom at his mercy. Gram too, and
Christine, who's only nine but growing up fast and pretty. Who'd chop their wood
and draw their water? Who'd load and unload the truck every day? My brother
Rick, not seven yet?

I couldn't simply walk away. If I couldn't protect them, I couldn't abandon them
either.

By the time I reached the river, my mind was made up. I'd go home. He'd be mad
about me running off, but I'd survived worse. No, the important thing was the
long haul. How to stay in school, especially. Maybe the law could help there.
Somehow too, I swore I'd find a way to stop him. Maybe not today, but soon, even
if I had to use a persuader.

I got home at ten to one. Dad wasn't there, must have gone on to Chapin without
me. I ignored my mother's questions and Gram too, setting about my chores in
silence. One thing and another, I filled the whole afternoon. I was sitting at
table with Gram and Christine and Rick, digging into a bowl of stew, listening
to one of Gram's hairier fairy tales, the one about Old Redcap, when Dad did
turn up.

"So there you are," he growled, standing arms akimbo in the doorway. I put down
my spoon and stood up, waiting.

In two steps, he reached me. His fist caught me full in the face and the force
of it knocked me back into the wall, overturning the bench. My head struck hard,
with an echoing thunk, and a moment of darkness enfolded me.

When I could see again, I was slumped against the highboy. Dad was sitting at
the table in my place while Mother scurried, fetching his dinner.

He dug in without waiting, and downed half the bowl before looking at me again.

"Well, what are you waiting for? That truck's not going to unload itself."

I stumbled to my feet and then outside. Why he wasn't madder I couldn't imagine
but felt no need of asking. The side of my face was already swelling up. I'd
have a shiner by morning. I sluiced it with ice-cold water from the pump and set
about unloading.

"What happened atween you?" Gram asked when she brought me the rest of my
supper.

I ate without answering. She watched me finish in silence, then took the dishes
from my hands. Hers were growing gnarled with age, I noticed, toughened by
constant housework. Mom being sick so much, it's Gram who really runs our
household.

"All right, Will," she said. "If you won't say, I won't badger you." She mussed
my hair gently.

She eased herself down on the chopping block beside me and we sat watching the
night fall while she rubbed her swollen ankles. A thick white mist had risen at
twilight and there were no stars to be seen.

Gram sighed, waving vaguely at the fog. "Be a full moon tonight," she said. "A
night like this, with the fog and all, my Gram used to call it an asrai night.
Used to tell us kids all kinds of things about the Fairy Folk, and how they like
to travel in the mist. A night like this'n can open doors atween the worlds, and
sometimes you can step right through, to the other side."

I nodded, trying to think what she must have been like as a child. Hard to
picture, unless you thought of Christine, sitting on her Gram's lap. That gave
me a queer feeling...I don't know. Like a connection, a leap-frogging back to
this great-great-grandmother I'd never known, except for her reflection in Gram,
an old woman who also spun fairy tales all about brownies and elves, about water
maids and fishermen who met them on the lake on misty nights.

She shifted again, and I couldn't help throwing a look at her belly. A
grandmother. Too old to be having babies, I knew, and the thought of us living,
of going on here, but without Gram....

No, better not think of that, drawing it down on us. Anyhow, I could see
something else was chewing on her.

Finally, she said, "Your father's going to pick up a load of Jake Sullivan's
hootch tonight. He'll likely take you with him."

I nodded, waiting, still puzzled. "If he does," Gram said, and she paused, then
rushed through the words, "you be careful, boy. Don't you start nothin', hear
me? Don't fight back, whatever happens."

I stared at her. "Gram?" I asked, uneasy. "No," she answered, harsh and hateful
all of a sudden. "That's all I can say."

A small shiver ran right up the back of my neck. To hear Gram talking like that
-- it scared me some.

Especially when she said, almost to herself, "We can manage without him, Will,
but we can't without you. And you can't do without your schooling. You're better
than junk-dealing, better than bootlegging, boy. You can learn a good trade, you
can use all that stuffing you've put in your head. You can take up most
anything, if you've a mind to."

I stared at the ground. Small chance of that, if Pa had his way. "Your
grandfather, now, if he'd lived, if he'd been here...." but she broke off, her
faded blue eyes suddenly bright with tears in the lamplight. I reached for her
shoulder, but she wouldn't have it. She brushed me away with a sharp, short
shake of her head.

Then, clasping my arm, she pulled herself upright. "Whatever comes tonight, be
careful, Will," she warned me again. "He's a dangerous man, your Pa. More guts
than brains."

With that, she turned away, vanishing into the kitchen, and left me there,
worrying, wondering.

It was full dark before I came in. I'd taken my time with the truck, but the
darkness brought a biting chill, hard to ignore.

My mother was, as always, a ghost in her own house, pausing only to touch my
swollen jaw with a silent caress before retiring.

My brother and sister bent over a puzzle while Gram knitted. Most nights, she'd
have been telling a story, describing a vengeful brownie, or maybe a leprechaun
caught by a pair of resourceful children. Not tonight. She sat with the greater
part of a fisherman's jersey spilled over her lap, and brooded silently.

Both kids sneaked a look at me and my battered face but only Christine dared to
grin and give me a quick thumb's up. I winked back at her with my good eye.

My father was whittling, his knife peeling long yellow curls from a piece of
ash. We had no electric wiring, no radio, and he liked to spend his evenings
carving elaborate wooden chains. In a lot of ways, he was a throwback to olden
days, and most of it, I thought, by choice. I think modern things made him
uncomfortable. He stayed shut of them, everything he could, except the truck,
and that he persisted in treating like some kind of stubborn, mechanical mule.

Without looking up, he told me to hunt up his rubber boots and his rain gear.
Foggy or not, we had business to tend to.

I didn't want to. The way Gram'd talked...but I had to. He wasn't the man you
could nay-say, so I kept my mouth shut, and gathered his stuff while he spent
ten minutes in Mom's room, the bed creaking steadily.

Half an hour later, we left. Gram was right. The moon was a full moon, what they
call a hunter's moon, though we couldn't see it. With nightfall, the shimmering
mist had got thicker and clotted, becoming a creamy white color.

The moon's bright shine couldn't pierce the fog, but gave it an unearthly glow,
a queer cold white brilliance. It seemed to me, driving along in it, that there
were strange currents flowing through the mist, a flutter of ghost shapes,
half-seen out the corner of my eye. An asrai night, all right, the kind of night
when white mist hangs like a shroud and the lands of Faerie are supposed to draw
closer, when ancient gateways open for those who move between the worlds.

Pa, too, was affected by it. The queer glow seemed to worry him, though he
didn't say anything all the way out to Jake Sullivan's farm.

A sneaky devil, Jake. He keeps his still on an island out there in the middle of
Black Lake, government land, so it doesn't matter if it's found. They can
confiscate the 'still, but they can't get Jake, because they can't even prove
it's his, unless they catch him working it.

We got down to the lake at a quarter past ten. It was totally silent, the water
as quiet and black as your grandfather's grave. The mist hung a bare inch above
the smooth surface. You couldn't see anything six feet away.

The two of us were quiet too. Climbing into Jake's old, weather-beaten boat, we
poled our way free of the cattails. The boat leaked, but not dangerously so long
as you kept your feet away from a board behind the forward seat. Its worst fault
was the stink of rotted fish that clung to the wood. You had to breathe through
your mouth as you rowed.

That night, my father took the oars and motioned me to the bow. It was my job to
keep a sharp lookout for lanterns, in case the revenuers wandered by.

I was thinking of them, of the warning I'd had from Gram, of how much she hated
Pa. Enough, I was thinking, to do almost anything, especially since she'd gotten
pregnant. But would she go that far, to give us away?

I wasn't worried for myself. The law goes easy on minors, especially when they
get dragged into things by their parents. I knew I'd get no more than a few days
in jail and probation. Pa, though...

Three-time losers go to prison, and men in prison, especially men with
appetites...

I shook my head to clear it, shaking chilled droplets of mist from my hair. I
was so het up, I nearly missed the splash of something struggling in the water.

I thought it was a fish at first, a bass maybe, trapped in a poacher's gill net,
but we were too far out now, nearly halfway across the lake where nets were hard
to anchor and harder to hide.

The splashing came again, louder, nearer. I whispered a quick word of warning to
Pa.

He stopped rowing. We both sat still, listening. For a moment, there was only
the steady dripping of water from the oars, and I began to doubt my ears, but
then it came again. Something thrashing and slapping the glassy water. Something
large, a little way ahead of us and left.

My father reached under his jacket and pulled out an old Colt revolver wrapped
in oilcloth. He laid the bundle on the seat and opened it so that the weapon lay
ready to hand. Then he pulled the gaff from under the seats and handed it to me.

He was hoping for a bonus on the night's work. An otter, perhaps, with a fur he
could sell for a nice quiet profit.

He gripped the oars again and slowly, quietly pulled us toward the frantic
flapping sounds.

It was large, all right. Playing the lantern's beam across it, I guessed it was
a good five feet in length, though I couldn't make out its shape between the
black water and the skittering light. The critter was caught in a tangle of
water weed, that and a section of fish-net, the small-meshed kind some folks use
for hand-seining shad.

It heard us coming and fought all the harder to free itself, but the thing was
plainly hopeless. At last it lay back, floating on the surface, gasping for
breath.

The boat pulled alongside, Pa motioning for me to be ready to gaff it, but when
I saw the thing up close, I nearly dropped the pole instead. The critter in the
net was neither bird nor fish, but a woman. My God, such a woman I'd never laid
eyes on.

The breath gusted out of me. I sat there, stunned by the sight of her long,
white legs, and then by the force of my body's reaction, stronger than anything
I'd ever felt before, stronger even than Jean had called up with the touch of
her slender hand.

"Hey! Give me that!" Pa snapped. He snatched the gaff away from me and carefully
hooked a tattered corner of the net. He pulled her up next to the boat, then
snarled at me again when I still didn't move.

The two of us reached over the side and took hold. One good heave was all it
needed. She weighed almost nothing. For some reason, I was afraid to lay hands
on her, I don't know why. The ghostly mist, or my Gram's fairy tales.

Whatever, I had an idea my hands might pass right through her, so at my end I
was careful to grab only fish net.

Pa wasn't so shy. He took hold of her under the shoulders and pulled her on up
and let her flop into the boat. Then he took the lantern from me and turned its
narrow beam on her, and he sucked air too.

She was white all over, milk white, bone white. Her hair was the purest silver
color, falling about her shoulders in a glorious gleaming mane despite the
water. Her skin was the color of sunrise on a clear winter's day, so pale it
seemed transparent, living glass. Her face was a small white triangle framing a
tiny flawless mouth and two enormous watchful moonglow eyes.

She was fine-boned as a meadowlark and delicate as porcelain, perfectly formed,
as we could plainly see for she wore nothing at all but a filigreed bracelet of
silver, set with white shimmery stones and engraved with lines of curious
Arab-looking stuff.

The feyness of her set my heart racing. I found myself clutching the sides of
the boat with a dangerous grip, and I forced myself to let go for fear of
breaking the rotten wood, and drowning us all.

Pa recovered faster. He set the lantern on the seat beside him so that its beam
cut across her, toward me, and he reached out and brushed a stray lock of the
silvery hair from her eyes. She didn't react, but lay there quietly.

He gained something from her inertia. Taking his knife out, he started to cut
away the constricting net and the weeds. Still she did nothing, but shrank from
the wide steel blade in his hand.

I helped pull the strands of cord away from her, one by one, and as I worked her
hair fell down and brushed against the back of my left hand. A tingling shock
made me jerk it away as though I had touched a hot wire, and rub it as much as I
liked, the tingle didn't fade away. It added something, somehow, to the enormous
knot in my groin.

Had she stung me, I wondered? My father had seemed to feel nothing, and yet he
had touched her and held her, like I hadn't dared to.

But the lady paid no mind to me. Her gaze was locked on my father, on the steel
blade he was using, making me think again of Gram's stories, something about
cold iron's power.

Even her bracelet would fade away, losing its sparkle whenever the knife came
near.

Pa grunted once as the last strands of netting came loose. I glanced up to see a
familiar light dance in his eyes. Oh no, I thought, though I admit what I felt
was more nearly a flare of hot jealousy than the sick, wrenching disgust I had
felt over Annabel Franklin.

Confused, afraid of my own emotions, I did nothing either way, but sat there,
thinking, Not her. You can't.

I looked away, toward the enclosing mist, but there was no help to be found
there, only a sense of eeriness, as though we were all being watched, and
judged, by something unseen and far older than men.

I was moved by an almost religious awe, by an urge not to taste, but to worship.

And though I'd accepted, unwillingly, everything else that Pa'd done, the
thought of his touching this woman, this...creature, defiling her, soiling her,
suddenly that was unbearable.

Still she didn't move, not to cover herself or even brush away the wet weed that
still clung to her skin. She watched my father intently, and after a minute or
so of this, I saw him smile the old familiar smile, the one that Annabel had
known so well that very morning.

He knelt beside her, close, the damp air growing colder, musky, unbreathable. As
the Macklin gift began to flow, he slowly stroked her silver hair. It fell in
undulating waves down over her shoulders and onto her breasts, and trailed below
her narrow waist, and his hands traveled over the full shining length of it. As
his dark fingers began to move over her perfect white skin, I waited
breathlessly for some reaction. Surely she would never accept such a thing from
a mortal man...

But she did nothing. She pulled away once from the knife he still held, her
white eyes glowing with strong, unspoken emotion. Was it rage...or desire?

There was no hint of the glazed look I had seen so many times with other women.
Instead, I was suddenly struck by the likeness of her eyes to his. Black and
white, both glimmering, like opposite sides of the same coin, a queer kinship
that left me stunned, and trembling with nameless fear. The infamous Macklin
line, I thought, choking -- just where did its roots lie?

Suddenly, I knew Pa was making a monstrous mistake -- this time he'd go too far,
crossing a different kind of line.

I thought to warn him, afraid of the thing that he might have already let loose
way out here on the lake, and me with no hope of escape and no place I could run
to, but then all the words and the panic got caught in my throat. A croaking
"Don't!" was all I could manage.

I watched helplessly as he smiled and his hand moved to cup one flawless breast.
His fingers slowly traced a circle around the pale nipple and then began to
squeeze soft flesh. She gasped at this and raised one hand, to ward him off or
to tease him, to snare him a little bit deeper...I still don't know. I watched
the bracelet shimmer once in the lantern light but his other hand rose too and
brushed her arm with the knife. She cried out softly, the first sound she had
made, a sound like the cry of a loon on a warmer night, inhuman, full of
suffering and sadness.

"So," he breathed. "What are you, girl, that you're afraid of this, but not of
me?"

He passed the knife across her face, the flat of the blade just grazing her
cheek, and she cried out again, angry this time, closing her eyes and turning
away.

My father grinned, a devil's leer, with a hard cold joy in it I'd never seen
before. It froze my heart. Then he seized her hair and pulled her head back,
forcing his mouth down on hers in cold lascivious invasion while the blade
stayed ever at her throat.

I watched, paralyzed, as he went on. His mouth moved over her neck and shoulders
like a hungry, blinded snake, and he nipped her flesh between huge yellow teeth,
sucking avidly as he came back again to her breasts.

He was panting now, his breath a trail of smoke in the cold damp air, and his
hand left her just for a moment to tear at his clothing. Then his greatest
weapon was freed, rising up like a viper from its nest.

"Pa, no, please!" I begged. "Wait your turn!" he snarled and used the knife like
a magic wand. Just the threat of its touch was enough to part her thighs. Then
he was on her, plunging and snarling, savage as a rabid dog.

She mewed once, the moment he entered her, and that tiny kitten's cry was
enough, at last, to break through my paralysis. I shouted as I leaped onto his
back.

The flat-bottomed boat rocked madly beneath us, but didn't turn over. He shouted
once and flung me off with a single sweep of his arm, throwing me backward onto
the point of the bow so hard that it nearly broke my spine. The wind burst out
of my lungs and it seemed to take a hundred years to pull myself back into the
boat, to suck air back into my burning chest.

Pa pumped away, barely distracted by my assault. I caught a single flash of the
lady's eyes, enormous, flaming.

She was making more soft, mewling sounds of pain in time to my father's hard
bestial grunts. It scraped at my very soul to hear her, she who deserved soft
silk and incense. So I took the gaff and I lifted its blunt end. A wordless
shout of anger burst free as I brought it down, square across his shoulders.

It struck with a dull, echoing whack and shivered in my hands. He roared with
anger and surprise but I hit him a second time before he managed to pull free
and turn on me.

"God damn you, boy!" he bellowed. He dropped the knife to seize the pistol,
still lying on the other seat, and brought it to bear on my chest.

"Pa! No!" I cried, sweeping the gaff sideways. The butt end hit his wrist first,
then the gun.

It exploded in my face, a searing blast of sound and light that blew my ears
back and pulled the skin taut across my forehead, deafening me. Something
stitched a line of fire across my left eyebrow before flying into the darkness
beyond.

The pistol followed, kicked from his hand by the gaff and the shot he'd fired.
He recovered quickly, though, and grabbed the gaff. He jerked it out of my
nerveless hands and used it like a quarterstaff, bringing it in underneath my
arm to thump me hard in the ribs. Then the other end came around to catch me
just as hard in the belly. I folded up, falling back against the bow, and looked
up in horror to see the gaff coming back down again.

I flung my arms up over my head. The pole struck the left one first, below the
elbow, and there was a dull double crack as the bones gave way.

I screamed and the gaff came down again. My arm once more took the worst of it
but this time the hook got me, hitting me high on the forehead, slicing
downward. The metal point ripped through skin and muscle alike, scoring
skull-bone, and skipped off the already bloodied point of my brow. Missing my
eye, it nicked my jaw and the hook embedded itself in the fleshy part of my
shoulder.

"Lady!" I cried. "Help me! Please!" Pa snarled, his black eyes gleaming in the
mist. Heaving backward, he tore the hook out of me, hefting the gaff like a
harpoon, aiming.

Behind him, the lady moved at last. She rose and whispered a word, a strange
word, alien, twisting itself in my ear like an angry snake. Then it vanished,
swallowed up in a sun-bright flash of coruscating color, turquoise and amber and
jade green, as she brought the bracelet up between his legs. A jagged blast of
light erupted from that brutal contact, light that framed my father's shock and
agony, moon-white light that clearly showed his body's wracking, spasmic
response, not the shrieking collapse I'd expected, but more a frantic, endless
consummation, thrusting blindly at the dark, as though he were trying to seed
the mist itself, the futile effort shaking him from head to toe and back again.

At last the wrenching spasms slowed, became a rhythmic shiver...stopped.

For a moment he stood like a statue, a stone-cast hero, all his weapons at the
ready. Then the gaff slipped from his hands and he did collapse, in a sodden
heap. His arm knocked the lantern overboard and there followed a moment of
darkness, and a rocking splash as the lady followed.

"Thank you," I whispered, and fainted.

When I opened my eyes again, I was staring up into the jowly face of a
middle-aged deputy sheriff. "Take it easy, son," he said, his feet widespread in
the prow of a shiny white motorboat.

Beyond him was a third boat, full of overcoated revenuers. Overhead, the sky was
the pearly pinkish-red of dawn. The moon had set. The mist had lifted. The lake
itself had become no more than gray and glassy water.

"My...my Pa?" I asked. He nodded to his left, but I was nearly blinded by a
sheet of clotted blood that covered my face and shoulder. My left arm was a
throbbing agony. I peered at a heap of rags piled in the boat's middle, not
really seeing the man-shape at first.

"Pa?" I asked softly. He didn't answer. He lay the way he'd fallen, long legs
doubled under him, his manhood exposed, looking shrunken and old in the morning
light. Only the wild, white rolling of his eyeballs said he'd heard me.

His feet twitched, kicking dangerously at the rotten hull. He tried to rise, to
shift himself, but his hands couldn't take any hold and he fell back again,
making desperate animal sounds of distress. His lips hung slack and a thick rope
of drool hung across his chin.

I stared at him, awestruck. How could a burst of colored light have reduced a
man to this?

Again, I thought of Gram's fairy tales, about the tricks the asrai play on poor,
innocent fishermen. A wildflower of hope sprang up, blossoming in me. I tried
one more time to sit up, but I only succeeded in banging my arm, and I passed
out again.

The next time I woke up in a hospital.

I remember a fuzzy time of questions and peering faces, the whole world rippling
around me, and then, finally, a warm dry bed and gentle hands. Later, there were
queer smells and needles and another black void while my broken bones were set
and plastered.

Afterward, things gradually improved. Within a week, my arm had healed enough
that it only ached and my shoulder began to itch viciously. I insisted on being
let out of bed, over loud protests from Mother and Gram. Pretty soon, I began to
feel human again, though my plastered arm rides in a sling.

Pa wasn't so lucky. He never recovered from whatever struck him down that night.
He's bedridden, helpless, a drooling invalid gripped by periodic, vaguely
rhythmic convulsions, by rather amazing emissions. Dr. Tomlin told Mother he'd
had a stroke, and that she shouldn't hope for improvement.

Dad could live for years yet, given proper care, Doc said, but he'll never be
much better off than he is right now, his hips and hands paralyzed, his face
reduced to a limp rag of flesh. And as Doc gently put it, he'll never be a
husband to her again, nor to anyone else.

When I told him about the white lady, he talked about fever, concussion,
exposure, and shock. All my arguing only convinced him the more, so I learned to
keep quiet about it.

Eventually, I took over my father's rounds. The business is not what it was, but
with Ricky to help me, I started again with the endless circle of docks and
lanes and houses.

Some look at me sideways, but others have told me a father who'd do any such
thing to a son deserved what he got, an attitude even my sister Christine has
adopted.

At home, it's different too. Mother's not sick anymore, and Gram's no longer
silent. Once or twice, I've seen them smiling together, chuckling after they've
tended to Pa, though what goes on there, I can't say. Pa gets wild-eyed and
frantic at the sight of me, so I never go into his room anymore.

We've all fallen into new patterns, an attitude fulfilled by the easy birth of
Gram's baby girl, my half-sister. Irene they named her, for the peace she
brought us. Looking at her tiny wrinkled face, and the smiles on the rest of
them, I told myself that our troubles were over, and guided the little ones to
bed with a glimmering candle. One day soon, I promised them, we'd have electric
wires and lights and live like other people. My father's resistance to
new-fangled gadgets was gone with his tongue. He could no longer force us to
live in the past. We'd have a telephone, even a radio.

They giggled at me, but I could see the dream shine in their eyes as we slipped
into nightshirts and climbed into bed, the three of us still sharing a single
room and the single, dusty-smelling feather bed, like always. In minutes we were
warm as toast and dozing off to a sound sleep.

I don't know what woke me. A dream, or a voice, or a strange noise. Sometimes
the roof creaks in the wind.

I don't know. I only know that I came wide awake with a start and found myself
lying on my side. My little sister was snuggled up against me, her back to my
belly. She was snoring in light little puffs.

My good arm was laid across her shoulder, half out from under the covers.
Absently, I began to stroke her long black silky hair. She stirred and flung her
head back against me, and then I was stroking her face. Her neck and shoulder.
Her childish breast.

An eerie heat began to burn in my brain. Something wild and willful and older
than God himself, I think. It scudded through my veins with each beat of my
heart and it carried that pulsing fire through every part of my body. I felt
myself quicken and slid under, panting, overwhelmed, before I had any faintest
idea of resisting.

I moved away from Christine so as to turn her toward me, to pull up her
nightshirt and fondle her innocence. In the pale moonlight, I saw her eyes open,
saw the puzzled look she gave me.

Then the heat seemed to wash over her too. Her mouth opened. Her eyes glazed
over. She wriggled closer to me. I swear, it was her tiny hands that pulled up
my nightshirt, searching till they closed on the swollen evidence of my fever.

We stroked each other then, while my mouth closed on hers, and I knew it was
wrong. I knew, and I ordered my hands to be still, commanding my body to stop,
to pull away from her, to do anything at all but continue this dizzy descent
into madness.

All in vain.

Her small hands teased at me with instinctive skill and I responded like an
animal in rut while my soul grew cold in terror. I felt possessed by something
superhuman, a primeval goatishness that laughed at the laws of men.

She moaned, and I pulled her beneath me. Her slender legs wrapped themselves
around me without any urging and then I was pushing, pushing. Deep inside her,
something gave way with a rush of warmth and I lost all control. Bucking, I
trumpeted like a stallion in triumph. For that endless moment I was not human at
all. I was a stag, a bull, a heaving, battering convulsion of mindless desire.

It went on and on, sensations building on each other until it seemed the whole
world must burst into flame. At last, when I thought my heart would give way,
there came shuddering release. I screamed aloud, and it was over.

For a moment I was boneless, the sweat pouring out of my body, a spent weakness
holding every muscle in thrall. It took tremendous effort to pull myself away
from Christine. She lay limp, unmoving in the depths of the bed, her dark eyes
staring upward.

Oh God, I thought. I've killed her. But no, she was breathing. I turned back the
comforter and there on the sheet saw the dark spreading stain of corruption that
had claimed me.

At a soft sound, I looked up to meet Ricky's gaze. His eyes are black too, like
mine, and in them I saw mirrored all the hatred and revulsion I'd so lately felt
for Pa.

"Bastard!" he whispered. Then the door slammed open and I saw by flickering
candle light the horrified faces of Gram and my mother.

Tonight the moon is full again somewhere above, and a ghostly white mist hides
the lake. I sit on a sandspit along the southern shore, watching the fog as it
gathers and thickens

In the hours since twilight, its color has shifted from sickly gray to
glistening pearly white where the light from my lantern touches it. Perhaps I
should put it out. I have no way of knowing whether or not my lady of the mist
will take offense. I can only sit on the damp sand and whisper my plea to the
darkness.

Come to me, Lady. Can you hear me? I won't hurt you. I'm your friend.

I'm the one who saved you from John Macklin. Can you see the plaster on my arm,
the scars in my flesh? Marks of honor earned when I fought him, for your sake.

Please, I mean no harm. I've come to beg a favor from you. The smallest gift,
nothing, really. If you want, you can think of it as a reward for services
rendered.

Please, Lady. Please understand. I am my father's son. I'm a true Macklin. I
proved it with my sister last night and I can't stand it. I can't bear the
thought of becoming a man like my father. An ugly man. A beast.

And I'm asking such a small thing. Just a touch. One feather touch of your asrai
hand, your silver hair. Surely you know my need. The three smaller fingers on my
left hand are still numb, lifeless where they brushed your hair that night, when
we pulled you from the lake.

My father touched you too, and you made him a neutered ruin. You ended forever
his age of evil. Can't you lend me an ounce of the same sweet justice?

Come to me, Lady. Touch me. Take away this thing, this horror that stains
everything I love. Help me now or I'm doomed. Short of killing myself, I know
only one other way to stop it.

I hear no answer but I'll sit here and listen all night if I have to. I've been
sitting here forever already, fingering my father's sharpest knife, waiting for
you to rise from the water.

How I long to see those silky silvery tresses, the ivory skin, and the moonstone
eyes of my Lady.

Please. If you don't come, I'm not sure I have the strength to do what I must.

The knife is cold as death in my hands and I am so afraid.