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The Girl who Pulled Down the Sun

Kevin Phillips

    Soft as a snowflake
    A feather in my bed
    Soft as a snowflake
    The skin of the dead

    Once upon a—
    “Wait! You can’t just start like that and move on. You’ve got to explain yourself.”
    It’s only a nursery rhyme.
    “If it’s only a nursery rhyme, why haven’t I ever heard it?”
    It’s an old one, before your time. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
    “Nursery rhymes aren’t true. That’s why they’re nursery rhymes. And anyway, how do you know how soft dead skin is?”
    “Yes, how do you know? Have you touched it? Where? When?”
    It touched me. It touched all of us. Are you going to let me tell my story? It deserves to be told.
    “So you admit it’s a story?”
    It’s God’s honest truth.
    “I don’t think God has anything to do with it.”
    “Just let him tell it. I’m in the mood for a good story.”
    “Fine. Tell on, old man. But I reserve the right to stop you when you’ve gone too far.”

    Once upon a tower there was a girl who pulled down the sun.
    “The Roxbury Tower?”
    The Tower. Trust me this will all make sense before the end. Her name was Ellie, and she was the first beautiful girl in the world.
    This was seventy years ago, a time of ash pits and quarries. A time of toil and dust, and a coldly distant sun. The Turning Eye of God, the old timers then called it. As in turning away from us. All the seasons were winter, our skies as pale as ice. We had no love—at least not in the way you young people understand it, with its sweaty thumping passion—we had no beauty. We had our work.
    And that was enough for us.
    But then she was born. Elena Shepaug. Ellie, to her family. The Black Hand, to the rest of us.
    “The Black Hand?”
    The Black Hand of the Devil. It was what we called her then, for that was what she was. Of course that was before she pulled down the sun. That was before we understood what beautiful things the Devil’s hand could grow in God’s hard earth.
    But until we understood, we despised her. And because we despised her, she had to die.
    And how our world would suffer if she hadn’t.

    She was born backwards and upside down. I know, for I was there. It was a cold winter’s day, and all the men were at work. Lydia Shepaug, my mother, lay beside the fire, panting her prayers up the chimney. The midwives were tending to others, and I, well, I was a boy. What good was I?
    I stood in the vine-covered doorway, open-mouthed and useless, as the heels of the newborn pushed out, like two round potatoes, like the meal I’d eaten just last night.
    By the time my father had returned, my mother had grown two twitching feet between her thighs, a pair of delicate ankles, and shins so brittle I could snap them with a glance. At once he grabbed the child’s feet and pulled, but his hands, oily from the pumps and slick with birth, could find no purchase. He hollered for me to fetch help, and it was only when I was out the door, into the cool hard stone of the day, that I wondered if there was a reason the baby was being difficult. I couldn’t help but think it was ashamed to show its face
    I returned with Mr. Sparry and his six months pregnant wife, but they too had trouble removing the child, for all its slip and squelch. After a few valiant moments, they muttered, “Such is life,” and stood in the shadows, waiting passively for the child to die.
    For my part, flattened against the front door as I was in fear, I knew I had to do something. My baby brother or sister was dying! I couldn’t allow that to happen.
    But try as I might, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t run. I could only stare into my mother’s wild eyes as her half-born child turned to stone between her legs.
    No one moved, no one said a word. Perhaps we were used to such tragedies, perhaps we knew the trouble the child would one day bring. Either way, for several long beats of our hearts, the only thing stirring was the sun, a single white spot, crawling like a dog across the floor.
    All eyes watched it move, amazed that something so remote from our lives, something so cold, should be right here, right on this floor, in this very house, a living presence of heat and light. It crept onto my mother’s body, and there it remained, her blanket of white against the cold blackness of death.
    Until—and bear with me; this may seem strange to you, as it did to me then, but it happened as sure as I am sitting at this table—the vines left the door at my back, twisted and curled across the floor, and wrapped themselves around the baby’s ankles. A single rotation, an anklet of green each, and onward they crawled with the west-moving sun.
    And with them both went the child, straight from my mother’s thighs, born in a tangle of ivy. The sun fled the western window, the vines retreated back to their walls, and there was my brother or sister lying face down on the bloody boards.
    “Hold on. Are you saying the ivy came to life and yanked your baby sister from the womb? That’s absurd! Ivy doesn’t do that.”
    Of course we thought the same as you. And we didn’t know she was a girl. Not yet. But they say ivy is attracted to light, that it can, should it choose to, reach for the sun. That’s what we told ourselves then; what choice did we have? Admit the miraculous? It was the sun’s fault my sister was born at all. The ivy could not be blamed; it was simply following its nature.
    My father was the first to respond. He knelt beside the baby, and with a trembling hand, wiped away the after birth. Then all of us gasped, including my poor spent mother. For the baby wasn’t right. Upside down and twitching with new life, but indescribably, heart-breakingly wrong.
    Pale she was. As pale as a sheet, as pale as a mineshaft ghost. But it wasn’t just that. Where other children were born as lumpy and misshapen as discarded ore, she was delicate and thin, fashioned to perfection. Worked over by skillful hands, smooth as a kiln-fired pot.
    We had no words for what she was, not yet, not for many years. But if you had seen her you would have called her beautiful, radiant, exquisite, out of this world.
    My father turned her over then, and what had been a confusing sight from the back became a terrifying one from the front. He took a step back, as did we all. I remember because, until that day, I had never seen him back up from anything. But there he was, as pressed to the walls as we were, staring aghast at his newborn daughter.
    I know what we all saw in her deep green eyes, her wisp red hair of flames, her thin, grasping fingers, and her belly of pure quartz white. In all her parts, we saw the coming years of jealousy and anger and greed and gluttony. We saw the sins a more present God would condemn and which, until then, we had never known. We saw a future of trouble.
    This girl would inspire and destroy. This girl would be the ruin of us all. We knew this without a doubt. I don’t know how we knew it, but we did.
    She seemed to be taking us all in then, her green eyes looking from one to the other to the other. Such intelligence, such awareness! Then, as if she knew very well what we were thinking, she opened her lips with a delicate smack and giggled in our faces.
    We shivered where we stood.
    Such was the birth of my sister. Born into the world with giggling beauty, to one day leave in screaming pain.
    All because of us.
    “Can we take that as your confession?”
    I confess nothing. I’m a storyteller.

*****


    The day after, the sun once again retreated to the top of the sky and turned away, ashamed of what it had done. My mother, in the cold shadows of the front porch, accepted her child to bosom for the first time. Revolted at first to clasp such a strange, otherworldly face to her breast, she was still a mother, and her instincts were strong. For our parts, feeding time was the best time of the day. It was when my sister buried herself in my mother’s blouses. It was when she was hidden. It was when we could almost forget.
    Unfortunately, the town could not. Inspired by whispers and rumor—it’s unfair to blame Mr. and Mrs. Sparry too harshly, for it was the first secret either of them had ever had to keep—our neighbors thronged the doorstep at all hours. A glimpse of the Pale Child, as she was first called, was all anyone needed. We tried to accommodate them, parting the shutters and gathering candles around little Elena’s crib, to emphasize her paleness, but the commotion soon overwhelmed us.
    My father and I had grown up work to do. We couldn’t waste time with childish displays.
    So we did the next best thing. We built a manger in the front yard, piled it full of blankets and pillows, dragged out the crib and a rocking chair, and propped my mother and little Ellie up inside. All the curious had to do on their way to the mines and fields was glance over, get their fill of our misfortune and be on their way.
    Mother was less thrilled with this arrangement than we, but it was either that or hundreds of feet trampling through her gardens. She quickly gave in. Besides, since the birth she had grown melancholy and seemed indifferent to the world’s curious movements.
    All that changed the day Agnes Wilton, the wife of Roxbury Mine Works president, Boss Wilton, came to view the baby. She stood staring at it for a long time, an adoring expression on her face, then she spat at my mother’s feet and hissed, “Blasphemer!” before whirling away in a tornado of gray skirts.
    No one in our town was religious. At least not then. If God was anywhere He was underground in the mines, as elusive as silver in the rocks. He, like his Turning Eye, was a distant presence in our lives.
    Which made Mrs. Wilton’s remark all the more strange. I tried to laugh it off, telling Mother what stories of the old woman I could recall. How once, after a night of potato wine, she dunked herself seven times in Roxbury River, then climbed naked to the top of Seeker’s Rock, in order to catch the moon between her legs. How another time she sewed a coin inside a roast pheasant and swore she’d sleep with whoever, man or woman, bit into it first—she bit into herself, of course, which accounts for the chip on her front tooth.
    None of the stories was true, mind you, but they made my mother feel better while I was telling them.
    Afterwards, in the dark hours, she got to thinking maybe Agnes had a point. It made no sense to parade around a child like that. Ellie was Nature’s mistake. How else to explain such delicate fingers, and those green eyes, and who had ever seen eyelashes so long? No, better to hide her from view until she grew out of whatever illness she had.
    Those were the days my mother still had hope.
    In this spirit, she retreated indoors, where she refused to take visitors of any kind. She would incubate this child, she would nurse this child, on her own terms and without distraction. If the revulsion still showed in her face on occasion, that was okay, only Father and I were there to see it.
    But it wasn’t enough to dismantle the manger, nor was it enough to hide. Agnes Wilton would not let the matter go. She roamed the town gathering disciples for a march on Town Hall. These matters could not go unspoken, she said. The safety of everyone was at stake.
    She was rich and bored and had nothing better to do, or so it seemed to me.
    Still, for all her ravings, she made a certain sense. Ellie was different from any other child. Besides, we couldn’t dismiss the old woman entirely; her husband owned us all.
    As I sit here thinking back on all that Mrs. Wilton did, I harbor no scorn. She did what she thought was right. And what’s more, no matter what role she played in my sister’s death, it was no greater than my own.
    “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
    “Shh. Don’t interrupt him. Please, go on.”

    You want a confession? Here’s one: I loved my sister. It didn’t matter what Agnes Wilton said, it didn’t matter that, in her eyes, Ellie was a freak. She was my sister. She was my blood.
    Of course, she disturbed and frightened me, and I tried to avoid her as much as possible, but there were times, particularly after she had been weaned and my mother was off avoiding her twice as much as I, that I felt drawn to her.
    Rocking her to sleep—she never cried; she cooed, which was even worse—I would stare down into her shuttered, rolling eyes, and I would feel a pull. A pull to places I’d never been. In those eyes I could imagine rich green forests where now existed only granite hills and machine-made trenches. I could see fields of tall grass and swaying colors, soft fields, fields that produced bright sweet things. I could dip my toe into lakes that reeked of springtime, not sulfur. In my baby sister’s smiling face, I remembered good times I never had, sifted through experiences that were not my own.
    It was enthralling to be so near to her, but then I’d remember. I’d remember what Agnes Wilton said, I’d remember the jibes of my friends, I’d remember that my own mother found her revolting, I’d remember that step back my father took, and...
    But then my eyes would brush across her hair. How red it was! Redder than a furnace flame, as fiery as a dead deer’s blood. Maybe it is fiery, I’d tell myself, reaching out to see. Would it burn my fingers? Oh, how I wanted it to! Heat I could understand. Beauty I could not.
    Then I’d remember something someone else had said, and I’d glance at the flickering candles in their holders. A careless hand, a clumsy knock, and her pristine cheek would gobble up the scalding wax.
    I loved my sister, you see. But she conflicted me.
    “Enough to kill?”
    Sometimes, I suppose, yes.
    But before we get to that, I should tell you a little about us. So you don’t think we were entirely crazy for what we did.
    “There’s little danger of that.”
    The Mine Hill you know is not the one of my youth. When you look out these windows, you see rolling hills and deep green forests. You see a crystal clear Roxbury River galloping down between the maples. You see a sweet pure lake full of bathers and boaters. You see forests an old man like me could get lost in. You see a blossoming little town of antique shops and galleries, a weekend getaway for the city folk.
    You see a quiet country place where nothing ever happens.
    I see granite cliffs and tumbling boulders, and not a tree around for miles. I see a river choked with industrial debris and fish flopping dead on its banks. I see a sulfurous lake for livestock drinking and dinner tables that smelled of eggs. I see a thousand people in town, all dirt and grime and stone hard faces. I see storefronts painted black with soot and snow the color of night. I see hardness everywhere I look. I see death.
    Of course it wasn’t death to us, not before Ellie was born. It was only after, as the years passed and she grew even more beautiful, that we came to realize how dead our world was. It was in her smiling, shining face that we understood our perpetual night.
    But, we thought, why be awake to the sun when we, in all our grimy blackness, could never shine like that?
    That’s why she had to go, you see; she was being selfish with the light. That’s why we sent her to pull down the sun.

    Perhaps you are wondering where God was in all this, why He didn’t pull the sun down himself.
    “I must admit I was not.”
    I can only say that, as yet, God wasn’t present in our lives. But he would be. Agnes Wilton was seeing to that. But before He came, little Ellie, the Devil’s Black Hand, was free to grow out of her crib and step onto the floor, a tottering tower of white.
    How swiftly she grew! How slender! We knew we had to do something. Give her a week and she’d be up and out through the ceiling.
    So it was, in Ellie’s third year, Mother took her to town. “It’s unfair to the house,” she said, “to keep such a girl inside.”
    Ellie had become quite a handful by now, smiling at everyone for no reason, cooing rather than crying for her supper, humming rats out of the pantry from her high chair in the kitchen. The very house itself was alive with her energy. Every morning we’d awake to find bugs and vermin nestled snuggly in her bed, beneath a fresh blanket of vines. We’d shoo the bugs and beat the rats and clip the ivy back to the walls. But the next morning there they’d all be, seekers of her warmth and energy.
    “What if those vines choke us in the night?” I remember Mother saying. “Ellie will be left all alone!” She didn’t say this as a mother, I knew, she said this as gardener. Leave a single weed untrimmed and in time it will destroy the lot.
    In response, Father grumbled, “Leave the vermin alone. We must learn to live with what we made.”
    Mother agreed, only reluctantly, but slept for five years in a collar made of iron.
    So off to town we went. The air might do Ellie good, we thought. The air might snuff her light, as it had long since done ours.
    For the outing, Mother cut off Ellie’s strange red hair, gave me the clippings to stuff under the hens’ bottoms outside, and wrapped her daughter up tight in a black cloak and hood.
    “Don’t take this off,” she said, tying the hood beneath her chin. “The sun is not good for your skin. You will burn.”
    Whether or not Ellie understood, she nodded as if she knew very well what the sun could do.
    We walked down Roxbury Lane, like any mother and her children. Except that neither of us reached out to hold little Ellie’s hand. She was a shadow to us, a sidelight, nothing there to hold...
    It was a thriving town. At that time it was. There was the post office, which is still there, as you know, a general store, a hattery—we all wore hats back then, not just gentlemen like yourselves—a tailor, a dressmaker, a blacksmith, a hardware store, one school each for young children and old, the Great Town Hall, a cigar shop, and many other shops besides. There was an old church too, but it was derelict, empty as a tin drum and twice as hollow.
    No one had used it since before any of us could remember. But it would be used again, and soon.
    Ellie stopped walking beneath the shadows of the steeple and could go no further. I picked her up, put her chin upon my shoulder, and carried her the rest of the way. She was light as a hen, I noticed, her breath as soft as cream butter. And her heart! Her heart thumped so strongly into mine that by the time we arrived at the store, I couldn’t tell the two apart.
    I was relieved to finally set her down. I was relieved to pick up my own beat.
    At once Ellie ran inside the store, a cloaked raven pecking at my mother’s heels. Mother put up with her and reminded her to keep her hood down tight, even inside. The sun has a way of seeping through things, she said.
    Ellie nodded and did just what she said. Until she discovered the mirror. Perhaps she’d seen her reflection in the soup broth or floating in her weekly bath, or maybe she knew it from dreams. However little of her beauty she knew before, she knew it all now.
    While my mother bartered for the sugar, Ellie gazed at her reflection and wept. These were the first tears I had seen my sister cry, and I was moved.
    “What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked, not daring to reach out for her. Her hood was down and I didn’t want to attract attention.
    Ellie stared at me for the longest time, her eyes loose as green yolks. Then she opened her mouth and whispered a single word, her very first. “Richard!”
    “Who is Richard?”
    I am.
    “But it says right here your name is—”
    My new name, yes. But I was Richard back then. Anyway, it might as well have been a gunshot. Mother whipped around with a stricken look on her face. This is the beginning of conversation, she must have been thinking.
    Rebecca Mayfair, the store clerk, looked over too, and her mouth fell open. “Get that curse out of my shop!” she bellowed, pointing a nasty long finger at her.
    Curse? Mother hadn’t heard this rumor, nor had I, and for our parts, we didn’t know what it meant anyway. A curse was something that happened to the crops. A curse was a cave in at the mines. A curse was something natural. Ellie was something else.
    That something else ran out of the shop, not in fear but in delight, shouting, “Richard, Richard, Richard!” over and over again. She seemed to have forgotten her image in the mirror, prompting me to look back on my way out, half hoping she’d left it in the glass.
    She hadn’t. She’d taken it with her. Along with my name, which she was shouting all over town.

    We stored her in the silo after that.
    “You stored her in the silo? You have an odd choice of words, old man.”
    Odder still what happened inside. Ellie grew up. Not overnight, of course, but over the long years of her banishment.
    “When you say long years...”
    There were ten.
    “Ten years!”
    Ten years. Please understand we did what we thought was best—in with the sunlight, out with the shadows. And she didn’t mind. I swear to you she didn’t. She was a princess in a tower, the sun a fire-breathing dragon. There was nothing to do in the world but burn.
    That’s what we taught her and that’s what she learned.
    As time passed, our lives almost returned to normal. Ellie’s vermin fled the house and took shelter in the silo—spiders, rats, bats, and fleas...gone, gone, gone, and gone. The ivy too crept from the walls to the outside world, a train of green from our white bride house. In the absence of creeping, crawling things Mother, Father, and I went about the business of our lives with peaceful hearts and minds.
    It’s not that we forgot about Ellie; we could never quite do that, particularly years later when her red flame hair was cascading out the silo window and pooling on the ground. But we could pretend it was just the three of us again. We could pretend the pure white girl in the tower was a figment of our dreams.
    It was a dream the whole town shared. Out of sight, out of mind. Even Agnes Wilton’s eyes turned elsewhere for a while.
    For three years I fed my sister and cleaned her, and cut her hair to her scalp. But then the animals took over, and I was no longer needed.
    The squirrels brought her nuts
    The birds brought her worms
    The spiders webbed her bluebottle flies.
    Her existence was a poem in those days, a fairy tale. In the stories I told myself, I saw my sister at school, learning letters from a treetop owl. I saw hummingbirds at her lips, to sip her sweet kisses, and robins nesting eggs in her palms.
    In my stories, Ellie pressed one dirty thumb into the white bright of the moon, claiming possession of the night.
    In my stories, Ellie was a princess and I her brother, the prince.
    “Oh brother,” she’d holler down on my way to the mines, speaking to me every day the same. “Could you pull down the sun for me today? It’s frightfully cold up here.”
    I’d nod at her once and holler back, “If it is in my power to do so, I shall. But there’s little sun where I’m going either.”
    There’s little sun where I’m going either. Truer words I never spoke, yet I spoke them every day.
    Years passed just like this. The town was quiet. My mother and father were happy. And I, well, I secretly fell in love with my sister. Oh no, not in the way you are thinking. I fell in love as a brother to his kin, as a prisoner bound for life.
    “Oh brother. Could you pull down the sun for me today?”
    If it had ever been in my power, I swear to God that I would have.

    But I had no power, at least not yet, and Rumor was a hawk.
    A naked girl had been spotted up at the mines. Long past an October midnight, when the ghost mist swirls above the shafts and moonlight glitters in the granite, she was there, white and free, frolicking among the stones.
    It was unheard of behavior, dangerous and wild. Rumor swept down into the valley at once and whispered into Agnes Wilton’s ears. In response, she summoned God to the church, told Him what she had in mind, and gathered her brothers for a march up the hill.
    “Come down from there this instant!” she cried when she got to our house, standing shin deep in my sister’s red hair. The town’s only Bible lay open in her palms.
    Mother and I were out of the house by then, straining against a wall of Wilton chests. “Stay back!” one of the men commanded, and we did just that, waiting to see what unfolded. Ellie hadn’t come down from the silo in ten years, so we wondered what she could possibly have done.
    “I said come down here, you beautiful little...!” The old woman was at a loss for words.
    But Ellie wasn’t. Her curtain of hair parted and she stuck her head through. “What’s the matter Agnes?” she asked down brightly, her face even more beautiful than yesterday.
    I had seen that face every day for years, but it still made me swoon. As did it the Wilton men, who up and down the line gasped and sighed at the sight of her.
    Agnes Wilton, for her part, maintained her dignity and fainted dead away.
    When she finally revived, the Wilton men dragged her off to the church and stored her in the rectory, where it was said she muttered, “The Devil knows my name!” for three long days in a row.
    I remember something else about that day. The way Ellie waved at the Wilton men as they left and called them each by name. How those coal black miners blushed!
    My face, however, burned. She was my princess, not theirs. Their names had no business on her tongue.
    “So now we come to your motive.”
    Motive? It wasn’t a motive; it was a weakness.

    “Stay away from those men,” I told her one evening as she braided her hair out the window. By then I thought I knew what men like these could do.
    But she said, “Don’t be silly Richard. Their hearts are pure as glass.”
    “It’s not their hearts I’m worried about. Besides, what do you know about hearts? Or glass for that matter? And how did you know their names? And were you really naked at the mines?”
    “Oh, Richard!” she scolded. “Look.” She draped a finger out the window and pointed to where Mrs. Wilton’s Bible was already half-buried by roots and vines and her own flaming curls. “Do you really think I could break free of this tangling earth and fly away to the mines?”
    She gave her hair a tug to show that she was rooted to the spot.
    But it didn’t matter. I did think so. For she had been flying in my dreams for years.

    A week later the town commissioned The Tower. It was an audacious project, an odd project, since most of the building I had ever seen went into the earth, not above it. We were miners. What did we know about towers?
    Still, the work went on, on top of Roxbury Hill, under the supervision of Boss Wilton himself, and I played my part, pulling ore from the ground for its construction.
    If I had known what it was being built for, if I had heard Mr. Sparry—the Mr. Sparry—declare, “My little Libby was born blind from Ellie Shepaug’s sun! I say we spit her on a tower and let her roast!”—I probably would have done things differently.
    But I didn’t know, and I was blind too, so I did my duty best.

    Weeks passed, months, during which the Tower slowly rose, in beams and scaffolds, into the pale blue sky. Maybe someday, I thought, it would stand higher than the sun itself. Maybe Ellie would sit above it in the end.
    If I worked extra hard, I figured, I might, someday, in someway, save my sister.
    Of course, that was not meant to be. I was young then. And stupid.
    “Richard!” she would holler on my way to the Tower, “I’m still waiting for that sun!”
    I’d holler back, “Why don’t you get Ed Wilton to pull it down for you? Or maybe you’d prefer strong Fred, or stupid Frank, or handsome Carl...”
    “Don’t be silly,” she’d say when I got like this. “Only you can do it. Do you think I’m beautiful? I had a dream about a mirror.”
    I’d scoff at her, “I do not,” and go on my way.
    Ever since Agnes Wilton had come, Ellie ended all our conversations this way. Do you think I’m beautiful? Of course I did, but I couldn’t tell her that.
    I couldn’t bear to see her cry.

    Soon enough, the men came. Young men, old men, married men, the men of town, the men of the mines.
    Ellie’s behavior toward them hastened her death, even though she did what she did out of love. She was innocent. If anyone is to blame, it is I, for never managing to pull down her sun.
    They became her knights. I was just her brother.
    “Daniel Clingingsmith,” I’d hear Ellie call down. “The robins told me there were fresh blueberries in Southbury. Could you fetch them for me?” And poor, besotted Daniel would spend the next three days trekking across the rivers and fields.
    “Robert Taylor,” to another. “I’ve grown ever so tired of my black hood and cloak. Do you think you could find me a red one?”
    “William Ruscoe. I do so long for a telescope.”
    “Books, Mr. Pennoyer!”
    “A comb, Stephen Betts!”
    “A map of the world, Samuel Redding!”
    “That tree over there, Philip? It blocks my view!”
    Each command she gave was like a jackhammer to my heart. It wasn’t that they were unwarranted or petty—we had locked her in a silo for ten years, after all—it was that they were given to other men. Even to Father, who spent a full week in New York City tracking down a copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a story one of the crows had told her about, and which, for her, held special appeal.
    But it was worse than all this. A mining town without active mining is only a town. And towns without a purpose die. With so many men off on Ellie’s missions, or standing swooning beneath her window...well, it was only matter of time.
    And what’s more, Ellie’s missions had created competition and chaos where before there was cooperation and harmony. There were fights over them and burglaries in the course of them and, if Rumor could still be trusted, murders to end them once and for all.
    Ellie, of course, knew none of this, and the one time I told her, she simply answered, “I knew a wolf spider once, but he died too.”
    The chaos didn’t end there. Women brought their daughters to the silo, for honest comparison, only to realize that the faces in their little ones’ mirrors were but earth to Ellie’s shining sky.
    In short, my sister had no idea what she was doing to the rest of us. She pricked and reminded and goaded and shed light and irritated and angered and broke hearts, and she did it all with a smile.

*****


    Agnes Wilton, however, saw the Devil in Ellie’s teeth. Not only had the old woman’s brothers abandoned her for beauty, but so too had her husband, the Boss. When he wasn’t supervising The Tower site, he was standing beneath Ellie’s window reciting poetry he’d written for her himself.
    Black earth swallows
    The Devil’s in the floor
    Watch those hollows
    Death in Mine Shaft Four!
    He wasn’t much of a poet back then. None of us were.
    In a desperate rage, Mrs. Wilton brought God back to town and locked Him inside the church. For seven straight days she sermonized at Him, and in the end, persuaded Him to act. Round the town He went, turning all from the path of sin.
    And so it was, in this atmosphere of religion and rage, that my sister’s fate was sealed. The Tower was standing tall on Roxbury Hill by now, a narrow post and platform, slicked with grease, ready.
    We had only to vote.
    Mother and Father refused to come that day, not out of general principle, since they too acknowledged their daughter’s disruptive presence, but out of bitterness toward the Wiltons. Ever since Ellie’s birth, Father had been passed over for promotions more times than he could count, and his hatred of the company had grown strong.
    So there I was, my sister’s only hope, ready to cast my stone.
    The conclusion was foregone, of course, but we went through the motions all the same. We weren’t entirely uncivilized.
    First to the dais went Agnes Wilton, but her husband shooed her aside and took it himself. She might own the church, his supercilious look seemed to say, but I, I own the town.
    “There is a Devil among us!” he boomed without preamble. “A—” he nudged his wife for the right words—“a Black Hand you say?” She scowled at him and pushed off into the crowd. “Yes, a Black Hand! And what do we do with black hands, people of Mine Hill?”
    “We read them foolish poetry!” came an angry woman’s voice from the floor.
    “I ask again,” Boss Wilton continued, ignoring the comment. “What do we do with black hands? That’s right! We wash them clean!” There was a round of applause. “And then what do we do with them?”
    “We blue—we bury them,” Daniel Clingingsmith stammered, never having spoken in council before.
    “Bury them where we mine? We most certainly do not!” Boss Wilton said, and there was poor Daniel frowning at the floor. “We’d just end up digging them up again. No, we build the tallest tower in the county and set the wicked on top. And may God have mercy on their souls. But before we begin, is there anyone in attendance who objects to these proceedings?”
    His eyes turned to me, and the crowd soon followed. I was embarrassed by the attention and wanted to slink out the door, but I stared back at him strong. I knew this was the last moment to save my sister.
    If I objected maybe I could stop this, or delay it. And yet I wasn’t sure I wanted to, for I felt certain the will of the town was more important than the will of my sister, or my own. Besides, look at them all sitting there, I told myself. Ellie’s faithful knights. If they could condemn her, so could I. After all, she had condemned me.
    I remained silent.
    And when it came time to vote, I cast my stone with the rest.

    I had achieved one concession, although in doing so I condemned my sister to further humiliation. I convinced the council to let Ellie choose her punishment freely. Given the choice, she would climb, I knew, and she wouldn’t need the town at her back. She deserved to leave this world as she entered it, I told them—bathed in light and full of wonder.
    The council agreed, with the condition that if she were free to climb, she must climb as freely as the day she was born. Freedom came with a price.
    “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to pull down the sun for you,” I told her, this the last conversation we’d ever have, “but I know how you can pull it down for yourself. First, you must strip off your clothes and dunk yourself seven times in Roxbury River, then you must repeat, ‘My brother is my knight,’ until the wind’s blown you completely dry. After that...”
    It was a game I sold her, a fairy tale, and she bought it before I finished pitching.
    She was an innocent soul, my sister, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t guilty.
    “My brother is my knight,” she repeated as I freed her tangled hair from the ground.
    My brother is my knight. These words shall sing me to my rest.

    I hope you’ll forgive me—
    “Forgiveness isn’t our job. Justice is.”
    The rest of the story is based on hearsay. Neither my parents nor I were permitted to the Tower, lest we feel compelled to stop the ascent. Therefore, my account follows what I heard from Rumor, scattered whisper, the wind, the vermin and the birds, and the ivy old women boiled to find answers in the leaves.
    “Well, that should make it reliable.”
    No more or less reliable than Nature herself.

    Naked as I instructed her, Ellie climbed to the top of Roxbury Hill. Hidden behind rocks and machines were the men of town, but they dared not stir. She was timid as a deer, or so they thought, and their darting eyes might scare her away.
    She stepped barefoot onto the ladder, took one last look around—looking for me, I told myself ever after—and climbed.
    Up she went, and up again, leaving the earth behind.
    The journey was long, but she did not falter, for she had never learned to fear. For hours she climbed, for days, the soles of her feet turning thick with callous.
    Halfway to the sky, she took her rest, wrapping the rungs like a spider. If she looked, if she squinted, she could just make out the barren hilltop below. The men had long dispersed, bored by beauty that was no longer there.
    But she was not alone. Her vines had arrived, as had her vermin, swarming around the Tower’s base. The ivy was the first to climb, twining itself around the ladder, round and round, spreading slowly into the sky.
    Ellie carried on with her journey, inspired by the nearing sun. She left behind her halfway point, and didn’t look back, leaving blood upon the rungs.
    Yes, my sister became a woman that day, on a ladder between the earth and sky. Down ran her blood, and up came her ants, gobbling all the way. As soon as they’d had their fill, they streamed back to earth and vanished into the mines. Where they gathered in a pile and gave birth to chips of red garnet. We never saw the ants in town again.
    How do I know all this? The ivy said so. It spoke the news into the boiling pot.
    It was midnight when she reached the top. She crawled off the ladder onto the greasy platform and went to sleep at once.
    Far below her on the ground, the ladder was pried loose from the Tower and taken away. It was said that when they broke it down and set it on fire, the wood was so green it doused the flames at once. So they threw the pieces to the bottom of Mine Shaft Four and left them there to rot. They lie there still.
    Ellie awoke with the sun. Sitting cross-legged on the platform, she sized it up, wondering just how she might pull it back down. And there she sat, for one full day, as the sun beat down on her and burned.
    “How long did she stay up there?”
    Five days. It took her five days to die.
    “And you never tried to rescue her?”
    Never. The will of the town was final. Although it wasn’t easy, I must confess, for no matter where I went, her whispers followed. “My brother is my knight. My brother is my knight.” In the deepest, darkest places of the earth they found me, in the far away reaches of my dreams.
    On day two, her pale skin turned red and cracked. She tried to curl around herself, to shield herself from the sun, but the metal platform grew too hot and she was forced to stand and hop.
    She was utterly exposed. And the sun showed no mercy. She could no more stand than sit, and she could only lie down at night. But by that time she was in such pain she could not sleep.
    Three days in, her cracked skin started to flake and fall. She was screaming now, in fits and starts, but no one on the ground could hear.
    Or if we could, we ignored her, preferring our new world of wonder to her terror in the sky.
    It was snowing in springtime! Or so we first thought. But of course it was only Ellie’s skin, soft as petals and filled with the sun’s light, a flurry of rainbow colors. The children of town were the first to notice, eyes so used to looking up. They skipped about, free from their mothers’ hands and unburdened from their chores, catching the skin flakes on their tongues.
    Soft as a snowflake
    A feather in my bed
    Soft as a snowflake
    The skin of the dead.
    But of course you already know that part.
    It snowed for two days, and wonders never ceased. Nurses gathered up the flakes, fed them to the sick, and sat back laughing as their patients rose from their beds, belched clouds of pink, and left whistling songs no one had ever heard. Libby Sparry herself caught a flake each in her eyes and spent the next fifty years forgetting the color black.
    “What ridiculous nonsense! Libby Sparry never learned to see. She had a school for the blind named after her, after all. You try my patience, old man.”
    I am sensing you do not believe me. Perhaps you’d rather I stopped.
    “Don’t listen to him. He wouldn’t know the truth if he took its confession himself. Please finish.”

    Roxbury Hill changed almost overnight. With each touch of skin it grew softer. Worms and roots spiraled up out of the earth, on the scent trail of death, only to find life waiting for them on the surface. No bodies to take back with them. None of God’s stricken. So they returned to the dark, unwanted and unfulfilled. But their work was done. In their rummaging wake they had left rocks broken, the clay split, and all the hard earth turned.
    They left Roxbury Hill a garden of dirt. The bees supplied the flowers.
    Swarming the Tower, they collected Ellie’s skin on their legs and bore it away across the barren hills of Litchfield County. Along the way, they dropped and dispersed and scattered and strew, and when they finally found what sprigs of green they could, they pollinated them, showed them the way, and went back for more.
    The seeds were now planted, the army was made, but before the flowers could march the long way from Southbury to Woodbury to South Britain to Roxbury, they needed a day’s full rest in a much softer bed.
    Four days into Ellie’s punishment, ash started to fall from the sky.
    She had done her job. She had reached up with her beauty and pulled down the sun, but what felt comfortably warm to us on the ground must have felt like a blanket of flames to her. Lest you think me indifferent, I felt her pain. I could always feel her pain.
    Still she endured. With the last of her strength, she crawled to the edge of the platform and looked down on a landscape she had made. She couldn’t see it—she was blind as poor Libby by now—but she could sense the beauties unfolding. How she longed to join them! To break free from this vengeful sun and twirl like a feather to the ground.
    But she couldn’t; she knew no other fate than this.
    And so her ash continued to fall. Down the slopes of Roxbury Hill, into the lakes and rivers, and all over town, a thick layer of black. On streets and rooftops, into windows and wells, from the heights of the church steeple to the depths of the mines.
    We were everywhere covered. And we reveled in it.
    And we weren’t the only ones. The earth itself breathed in Ellie’s ash and sneezed back flowers. Up and down the hills, throughout the valleys, across the rivers—on white boat lilies—they bloomed. Posies and irises and roses and tulips, and a million other flowers we hadn’t names for yet, ran wild across the countryside, turning our empty hills into overflowing baskets of color and life.
    But that wasn’t all. Ellie made rivers with her ashes and birch trees with her bones, and when her heart fell into Roxbury Lake? How sweet the water became!
    “Hold on! Give me an example of a river she made.”
    The Ferris.
    “Ha! It was Bridgewater Dam that made the Ferris. Everyone knows that. Ash from a dying girl indeed.”
    It’s a well-known story. A team of Gould Ferris’ workhorses was pulling a load of anchors down to the shipyards when they stumbled through a pile of my sister’s ashes and discovered speed inside their hooves. Off they galloped, forgetting all about their work, their anchors trailing trenches in the dirt. Halfway to the coast, they hooked a thread from Waramaug Lake and pulled it in a swelling stream all the way to New London. And so the Ferris River was born.
    “That’s some story. Although I can do you one better. ‘Once upon a time there was a blue ox named Babe...’”
    That does sound better, but let me finish. Maybe we’ll both change our minds before the end.
    Onto a land covered with soft earth and flowers, Ellie’s bones started to fall. One by one by one, her fingers and toes, two by two by two, her teeth. And where each one hit, a birch tree was born, until, in time, there was a forest of white growing around the Tower.
    But that was not all. Vultures plucked out the rest of her bones—except two—and flew them away, while insects planted eggs in her organs. As a leg here or an arm there fell, and became parts of other towns’ stories, butterflies burst from her stomach, hornets from her spleen, and midges, gnats, and mosquitoes, lightning bugs, locusts, and cicadas, and all the other insects of the earth and sky, emerged from everyplace else and scattered where they would.
    The beasts of the field came next.
    Way across the oceans blue
    Through the desert sands
    High above the mountains too
    Into the tall grasslands...
    Such were the rhymes the children told.
    “Can we get back to what really happened? There are no deserts in Connecticut. And what beasts are there to speak of? A couple of bears, a few deer? Children’s rhymes do not a history make.”
    In five days my sister was gone. From skin to bone to ash to dust...gone, gone, gone, and gone.
    “What about her ankle bones?”
    Those remained, of course. Her ivy made sure of that—a single rotation, an anklet of green each, and then the sun moved on, pulling the vines with it. And with them both went—
    “What happened to Agnes Wilton? Sorry to interrupt, but you’re starting to repeat yourself.”

    I’m an old man and I’m tired. We’ll save Agnes for another day. Now, if you’ll excuse me. There’s nothing left to tell.
    “Are you going to just let him walk out like that?”
    “You heard him. There’s nothing left.”
    “What about the bones?”
    “They’re seventy years old. Maybe they deserve a storybook ending.”
    “A storybook ending? Now you’re talking like him!”
    “There are worse things.”
    “Fine. Let him go then. I don’t care. Justice will catch him in the end.”
    “Justice catches us all in the end. But it can’t touch our stories.”

*****


    The old man pushed his way through the forest, a smile upon his lips. Finally. He was finally finishing what he had started seventy years ago.
    At the top of Roxbury Hill, he stripped off his clothes and scattered them beneath the birch trees. Seventy years ago, he thought, there was nothing here but granite. And now look. Look at what she’d done.
    He shivered and moved on, into the center, where the branches were thickest, where the shadows kept back the sun.
    It was there, where it had always been. The Tower. Standing tall above the hilltop. Only now it was as green as grass, wrapped in vines and leaves. But the platform was still there, he knew, just above the trees.
    Nature had covered it, but she couldn’t take it away.
    He put his foot to the vines and climbed.
    Up he went, and up again, leaving the earth behind.
    It was a long climb, hours it seemed, but in time he reached the top.
    He crawled out onto the platform, his old flesh wobbling, and lay flat on his back beneath the sun.
    She pulled it down, he thought. Maybe I can push it back up. He had grown weary of the heat, weary of softness. He remembered how it used to be, how hard the land was, how cold. Not anymore. Not with so much to be warm for. So he pushed. He pushed and pushed, but the sun wouldn’t budge.
    It seemed determined to burn him. He lay back and let it.
    “My brother is my knight,” he whispered.
    And his old skin cracked and bled.
    “My brother is my knight,” he whispered.
    And his old skin flaked and fell.
    “My brother is my knight,” he whispered.
    And his old lips kissed the sun.
    “My brother is my knight...”
    And as he fell from skin to bone to ash to dust and scattered across the bright green land below, the land she had made, there was only one thing left to say.
    “It’s all so beautiful.”



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