She laughed and said, “Aethon, you dolt, everyone knows you cannot count to five yet you believe you can count the waves of the sea. You will never fill your eyes with anything more than your own nose.”
“Quiet, hag,” I said, “for I have heard of a city in the clouds where thrushes fly into your mouth fully cooked and wine runs in channels in the streets and warm breezes always blow. As soon as I become a brave eagle or a bright strong owl, it is there I intend to fly.”
“You always think the barley is more plentiful in another man’s field, but it’s no better out there, Aethon, I promise you,” said the crone. “Bandits wait around every corner to bash your skull and ghouls lurk in the shadows, hoping to drink your blood. Here you have cheese, wine, your friends, and your flock. What you already have is better than what you so desperately seek.”
But as a bee hurries to and fro, visiting every flower without pause, so my restlessness…
LAKEPORT, IDAHO
1941–1950
Zeno
He’s seven when his father is hired to install a new sash saw at the Ansley Tie and Lumber Company. It’s January when they arrive and the only snowflakes Zeno has seen before are asbestos fibers a druggist in Northern California sprinkled over a Christmas display. The boy touches the frozen surface of a puddle on the train platform, then yanks back his fingers as though burned. Papa pratfalls into a snowbank, smears snow over his coat, and staggers toward him. “Looks! Looks at mes! I big snowman!”
Zeno bursts into tears.
The company leases them an under-insulated two-room cabin a mile from town on the edge of a blinding-white plain that the boy will only later understand is the icebound lake. At dusk Papa opens a two-pound can of Armour & Company spaghetti and meatballs and sets it on the wood stove. The bottom half burns Zeno’s tongue; the top half is slush.
“This be terrific homes, yes, lamb chop? Tremendous, yes?”
* * *
All night cold seeps through a thousand chinks in the walls and the boy cannot get warm. Navigating the canyon of shoveled snow to the privy an hour before dawn is a horror so grim he prays he will never have to pee again. At daybreak Papa walks him a mile to the general store and spends four dollars on eight pairs of Utah Woolen Mills socks, the best they have, and they sit on the floor beside the register and Papa pulls two socks over each of Zeno’s feet.
“You remembers, boy,” he says, “there is no bad weathers, only bad clothes.”
* * *
Half the children in the schoolhouse are Finns and the rest are Swedes, but Zeno has dark eyelashes, nut-brown irises, skin the color of milk tea, and that name. Olivepicker, Sheep Shagger, Wop, Zero—even when he doesn’t understand the epithets, their message is plain: don’t stink, don’t breathe, stop shivering, stop being different. After school he wanders the labyrinth of plowed snow that is downtown Lakeport, five feet atop the service station, six feet on the roof of M. S. Morris Hardware. Inside Cadwell’s Confectionery, older boys chew bubble gum and talk of lamebrains and fairies and flivvers; they go quiet when they notice him; they say, “Don’t be a spook.”
Eight days after arriving in Lakeport, he pauses in front of a light-blue two-story Victorian on the corner of Lake and Park. Icicles fang the eaves; the sign, half-submerged in snow, says:
He’s peering through a window when the door opens and two identical-looking women in high-collared housedresses beckon him in.
“Why,” says one, “you don’t look warm at all.”
“Where,” says the other, “is your mother?”
Goose-necked lamps illuminate reading tables; a needlepoint on the wall says Questions Answered Here.
“Mama,” he says, “lives in the Celestial City now. Where everyone is untouched by sorrow and no one wants for anything.”
The librarians incline their heads at the exact same angle. One seats him in a spindle-back chair in front of the fireplace while the other disappears into the shelves and returns with a clothbound book in a lemon-yellow jacket.
“Ah,” says the first sister, “fine choice,” and they sit on either side of him and the one who fetched the book says, “On a day like this, when it’s chilly and damp, and you can’t get warm, sometimes all you need are the Greeks”—she shows him a page, dense with verse—“to fly you all the way around the world to somewhere hot and stony and bright.”
The fire flickers, and the brass pulls on the card catalogue drawers glimmer, and Zeno tucks his hands beneath his thighs as the second sister begins to read. In the story a lonely sailor, the loneliest man in the world, rides a raft for eighteen days before he is caught in a terrible storm. His raft is smashed, and he washes naked onto the rocks of an island. But a goddess named Athena disguises herself as a little girl carrying a pitcher of water and escorts him into an enchanted city.