First Light by Charles Baxter
She does not take animals apart and will not stand to see any once-living thing opened, as her father opens fish to clean them in the basement sink. He says he is “eviscerating the catch.” She will not go out with her brother and aim an arrow in Five Oaks Park at a squirrel or a tree. She does not want to see the guts and brains of frogs, though she has studied them on transparent pages in a biology book she has found in the basement, the animal’s pictured insides looking to her like wet gray tubing smeared with a kind of living water. The tubes make sense, but liquids that live, like blood or phlegm, make her turn away and close her eyes. “Queasy,” her father says. “Squeamish.”
She takes the binoculars down from the library shelf, where they are kept within reach for quick identification of backyard birds, and she unscrews the lenses one by one, examining the prisms with the frightened pleasure she feels whenever she sees some object through which light has traveled and been transformed. The binoculars are a challenge to put back together: the prisms have to be aligned perfectly, and she must spend all afternoon on the project before she has reassembled them so that a bird once again looks like itself rather than an indistinct double-imaged shifting of color disturbing the air.
In the living room on summer afternoons the sun shines through the front window and breaks apart on another prism, a piece of glass her father has given her and which she has placed on a side table directly in the sun’s path. First on the wall and then on the ceiling, the light separates into household spectra, ribbons of color more beautiful to Dorsey than any man-made object in the room, any object anywhere. Her mother has told her that some people think that rainbows are a promise, the curved colors of peace. It makes sense. She sits in the living room’s high-backed chair, her legs dangling down and almost reaching the floor, and she watches a strip of all the colors of light move across the ceiling, stretch, and fade. Sometimes she stands next to the prism and holds up her hand so that the colors tremble on her palm.
She holds her ear to the ground outside. She’d like to hear something from down there, but the earth has nothing to say to her, not a sound. She walks out barefoot on summer nights in her pajamas when everyone thinks she’s asleep, and she stands in the still-warm grass of the front lawn, watching the stars and the moon, finding the constellations of summer. The grass feels simple and obvious against her feet, a friendly tickling pressure, and she gazes up to where her father has told her the constellation of Hercules lies, Hercules with his left arm stretched out. She likes Lyra better than Hercules, because it has Vega in it, the brightest star of summer, and because she likes to pretend that she can hear music coming from the strings of the imaginary lyre. Once she turned around to go into the house, and there, up in their bedroom window, were her parents, leaning out on the windowsill, watching her. She waved at them, and they waved back, without expressions, neither smiling nor frowning, just there, observing her, dim moonlit adults.
When she is sick—“You caught a chill watching the sky,” her mother says, and it sounds like a description rather than a criticism—she lies in bed watching the afternoon sun split into colors on the prism her mother has brought in from the living room and placed on the windowsill. As Dorsey starts to feel better, she takes apart a broken wind-up alarm clock, and, unable to fix it, puts it back together, still broken.
As soon as he is home from his office, her father comes in to sit on her bed, and he asks her how she is, and Dorsey tells him, but then her father is quiet as he absentmindedly smooths her hair and holds out a glass of water for her to drink from. She’s not that sick but she drinks it anyway. He smells of tobacco smoke and hair oil and shaving cream. She likes these moments when her father says nothing. Her father, she believes, is not quite like other people, but is that so because he is her father? She’s not sure and doesn’t know how to find out. He is never angry with her. She doesn’t think he knows how to shout, and what he likes to do the most is sit with her, like this, the two of them being quiet together. It doesn’t feel strange to Dorsey. It feels like medicine, a kind her brother never gives her and never seems to get himself, sitting in his own room with the radio on. He never needs medicine because he’s never sick.
What she knows is that her parents watch her and let her do what she wants. Even when she’s out there in the dark, by herself, they don’t call her inside.
27
“Hugh. Hugh. Rise and shine.” His father bends over him and rubs his shoulders gently.
He can hardly open his eyes. “Huh?”
“It’s five-thirty,” his father says. “If you don’t get up, you’ll miss it.”
In the morning dark, Hugh finds his clothes in a massed heap piled on the floor, near his tattered stuffed gorilla. It feels as if he’s put his underwear on backwards and his undershirt inside out, but he doesn’t care. Across the hall he can hear his sister singing as she gets dressed. He had been dreaming of summer, baseball and dogs, or dogs playing baseball—he can’t remember now. The light of sunrise stands in two parallel orange lines on each side of his window shade. He clumps out into the hallway, puts his hand up on the sticky bannister, and walks downstairs, where the lights are all burning. He looks into the dining room, where the table is set with mats and silverware and glasses of orange juice but where no one is sitting, and then into the kitchen, where he smells coffee from a freshly brewed pot standing on a hand-painted porcelain trivet on the side counter. Someone has brought the bacon out. There’s an opened package near the stove, and five eggs lined up next to it, and a large black frying pan on a burner, but no one is here to cook it. For a series of separated moments, Hugh can’t remember why he is here, why his father shook his shoulders to wake him, why his sister has come downstairs at a run and rushed out the back hallway to the yard. Then he remembers. They’re all up this early summer morning because of what’s going to happen to the sun.
His mother, father, and sister are standing on the sloping green back lawn, facing east, where the sun has now risen. “Good morning, Chief,” his father says, handing him a pack of several black-and-white photographic negatives. “Look through these. There may be more than you need, but just take a few away until you can see it.” His father holds on to a piece of smoked glass in his right hand; his mother has a square of glass also, but his sister has another set of negatives. “It should start in about five minutes,” his father says, looking at his watch. Hugh takes one of the negatives out of the pack and holds it up to the blue of the sky, and there he is, Hugh himself as a baby, held in his mother’s arms underneath a whitened tree. On negatives, all trees appear as if they’re covered with ghost snow, and his own face as a baby is gray, with white eyes.
On a second negative, his grandmother Welch, his father’s mother, whom Hugh remembers through his sense of taste—he can remember his grandmother giving him powdered-sugar doughnuts from a white bag—stands on a sidewalk, waving. Waving good-bye. On a third negative his grandfather, whom he never knew, wears farmer overalls and sits on a tractor. Hugh has never been able to believe it: his grandfather was a farmer! He worked with his hands! He was successful so he could send his son to college to get him off the farm. And here, on another negative, he and Dorsey are holding hands; Dorsey was just two years old. In the negative his sister’s white dress looks like a Halloween costume.
Another negative: the next-door neighbor’s dog, Ruby, before she was hit by a reckless man, Mr. Lesh, driving his big De Soto. In the negative Ruby’s mouth is open and her tongue hangs out in a friendly manner. And here’s a negative of his mother’s mother, Mrs. Hooker, the big granny whom Hugh never knew, also a farmer’s wife, sitting on a front porch rocking chair, holding a glass of something, probably lemonade. She is laughing, her white hair black, her dark mouth white. Last: a picture of his mother, outside, facing the camera and the sun, smiling, her hand raised to shield her eyes.
Hugh looks over at his mother and sees that she is shielding her eyes now, just as she was doing in the picture. “Look,” she says, an
He sees the big round image of the sun, darkened by the seven negatives through which its light has traveled, with a small bite of the sun missing on one side. This, he has been told, is the moon, which is about to block out the sun completely but temporarily. Very interesting, sort of, but Hugh is not yet convinced it was worth getting up this time of the morning for. He puts the negatives down and squints at Five Oaks Lake and the amusement park to the south mostly obscured by the trees in Five Oaks Park. “Hmmm,” his mother says, but otherwise it’s very quiet, so quiet, in fact, that Hugh can hear an early-morning fisherman gunning his motor out there somewhere on the lake. He looks harder at the lake and sees a dot crossing it, a dot dragging a funnel of waves.
He holds his packet of negatives up to the sun again. More of the sun has been circled out by the moon. Hugh removes one negative from the pack, the one of his mother, and the disappearing sun shines through the other six, and instead of looking at the sun, Hugh sees Ruby superimposed on his big granny, and himself as a baby over the two of them, and his grandfather on his tractor superimposed on top of himself holding hands with his sister, all of the separate images piled on top of one another, one large distinct collection of the past, and, in the middle of it, the darkening sun, now shaped like a burning three-quarter moon, shining through them.
Holding the negatives, he lowers his arm and looks at his parents. They are standing on the lawn, holding the squares of smoked glass out in front of their eyes. His father is wearing an old white shirt, a soft hat, and stained pressed trousers. In his left hand is a cigarette, burned down to within a half-inch of his father’s fingers. Behind him, Hugh’s mother also holds the glass in front of her eyes. The early-morning breeze blows against the front of her skirt, so that it seems almost to billow out behind her on either side of her legs. The morning breeze rustles the leaves on the old elm near them, its branches held together with support cables. Near his mother, his sister gazes through all her negatives at the sun, her face almost glazed with happiness.
“Are you bored, Hugh?” his father asks him. “Go look under the trees. Go look behind the vines.”
He does as he is told. He walks over to the elm’s huge trunk and looks down at the shadows its leaves are casting: half-moon shadows! Hundreds of them. He runs back to the house, where the vines are clinging to the exterior wall beside the kitchen window, and he checks the shadows: more half-moons, bits of half-moon light jumping on the house.
He returns to where his parents are standing and holds up the negatives again, but instead of watching the sun’s eclipse, he gazes again at the collection of negatives: his grandmother and grandfather, his neighbor’s dog, himself, his sister, and his mother, all crowdedly occupying the same space and each one distinct, and the sun being blotted out behind them.
At the moment when his father says, “Now it’s almost total,” Hugh looks at the world of his family’s backyard: the trees, the house, his mother, father, and sister, standing in the gray stillness of the false night, no one and nothing moving, the sun blanked, shadowed. “Yes,” his father says, before he drops his cigarette butt onto the gray-green of the lawn. Then Hugh notices that the birds have stopped singing, and in the bad quiet of this moment, when his parents seem unable to move and the light on the lawn makes him think of the sun sick and dying, Hugh walks backwards, away from them, and he sits on the dew-covered grass, and no one notices him there for several minutes, until the sun starts to come back, and his mother turns around and says, “Hugh, darling, what are you doing down there? Why aren’t you watching?”
28
Hugh carries his sister up the stairs, down the hall, and into his room, where he has started his steam engine five minutes before. Its flywheel sets up a chattering rattle, and Dorsey looks down and says, “Machine.” She holds her fingers out to the whirling wheel, the heated boiler, and the bright steel piston, and Hugh says, “No.” He covers the heat source and eases Dorsey down to the floor. He intends to show her how to draw a car. She’s not interested. She wants to wander around his room, take his books off the shelf and open them up. She points to a picture of a space ship and says, “What’s this?” He explains to her that it’s a rocket, and that someday people will go in rockets to the moon, to Mars, and maybe meet outer-spacemen. His sister gazes at him closely.
Now she has his box of crayons and is taking them out one by one, naming the colors. “Pink,” she says, holding it up, then tossing it aside. “Orange. Lavender.” Hugh stares at her. “Lavender?” he says. “Where’d you learn about lavender?”
She shrugs. “From Mommy.” She pulls out another crayon. “Silver,” she says, holding it up to the light, then dropping it onto the floor, where it rolls underneath Hugh’s dresser. “Velvet.”
“Velvet isn’t a color,” Hugh says, picking up the crayon and reading the label. “It says here it’s called ‘burnt umber.’ ”
“It’s velvet,” she says, as if he hadn’t spoken.
“Velvet’s a cloth,” he tells her, taking down a fifteen-cent glider and flying it past her face. She watches the plane make a loop up to the ceiling, then sail down and land on his bed. “Let’s go outside,” he says.
He bends down so that she can hop on his back. Dorsey puts her arms around his neck but keeps her head above his shoulders so that she can see where they’re going. He carries her down the stairs, Dorsey making a laughing cough sound on each step, before they go out the front door and then around the front lawn to the garage, where he deposits her in his red Radio Flyer. Sitting in the back, in pink corduroy overalls, her legs stuck straight out in front of her and ending in the black-and-white formality of her saddle shoes, Dorsey stares straight up at the parallel wooden beams holding up the garage roof. Then she stares at the two huge cars, then at Ruby, the neighbor’s dog, running toward them up the driveway. The lawn is patrolled by robins, and the branches are thick with buds and blooms. Hugh opens his mouth to make his police-siren howl. He pulls his sister out of the garage, stirring the robins off the lawn onto the tree branches, and, still loud with emergency injury, he pulls her down the sidewalk all the way to the curb at the first corner. Ruby follows them, halfway.
At the corner, Dorsey says, “Keep going.”
“I’m not supposed to cross any streets with you.”
“Turn that way.” She points toward Five Oaks Park.
“That’s the park. We can’t go there.”
“Go that way.”
He pulls his sister to the end of the sidewalk, then stops at the woods.
“Turn around,” she says.
He pulls the handle sharply to the side and drags the squeaking wagon back up the street. His arms ache, and his sister is singing one of her made-up songs. This one is about a pair of scissors. In the song, the scissors go swimming and meet a bad duck. Hugh thinks the song is dumb and tells Dorsey to stop it. She does, but above the squeak of the wheels he can hear the song continuing in a whisper.
Farther up the street, Mr. Forster is dropping grass seed from a brown bag on his lawn, and he waves when Dorsey and Hugh go by. Two doors down, Miss Hagburg is planting flowers in front of her porch, but she’s unfriendly: she never waves. Mr. and Mrs. Polechuck, old people, are sitting on lawn chairs in front of their big, gray house, also elderly and much in need of repairs. “Hellllooo, Hugh,” they call together, raising their old withered arms, so that Hugh has no choice but to wave back. Sometimes Mrs. Polechuck bakes terrible-tasting sour fudge in her high-ceilinged kitchen with the big blue gas range that stands on four thin metal legs. She calls up Hugh’s mother and invites the boy over to have some dessert, and he must sit there in Mrs. Polechuck’s creepy kitchen, being polite and trying to smile as he eats her fudge that tastes like cough syrup, while she asks him, in one of the sweetest voices he’s ev
Beyond the Polechucks’ house is Mr. LeClair’s house, with its perfect lawn, and on this side of the street is Mr. and Mrs. Lesley’s house, the one that always has cut flowers visible on a table just inside the large front window. Where do they get these flowers in the middle of winter? Hugh doesn’t know. It is one of the biggest secrets in town. No one knows. Suddenly his sister opens her mouth and starts to scream out a song from her Burl Ives record. They’ve almost reached the end of the block, where the Brooks house stands. The Brookses are probably Five Oaks’ richest family. Hugh doesn’t want his sister disgracing herself in front of them. He spins around with his finger to his lips and says, “Shush up.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because we’re in front of the Brookses.”
“So?”
“They’re rich.”
“I don’t care.”
“They’ll come out and hit you.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re rich.”
“They can’t hit me.”
“Yes, they can.”
“Why can they?”
“Rich people can hit anybody they want to,” he says.
“I don’t believe you,” Dorsey says, sitting in the wagon, but her face tells Hugh otherwise.
“You don’t ever see rich people being arrested, do you?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Well, that’s why. If they don’t like the way you’re singing, they can come out and hit you.”
“I’ll still sing.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll be bleeding.”
“Where?”
“On the sidewalk.”