If I’d thought about my next course of action, I wouldn’t have taken it. Pure instinct prevailed, and the searing impression of the woman’s eyes. My father, I like to think, would have smiled upon me for meddling. In the dark shadow of Tenny, I took off my jacket. My silver button, brass buckle, and spectacles went intothe jacket pocket. I stuffed my jacket behind a shrub. Then, as Sam, I went back inside Tenny.
The two servants looked up at me. “They sent me over from Pebbles to help,” I said, realizing in that moment that I had no idea how many servants were employed at Commonwealth. How likely was it that someone new would appear out of nowhere? But they seemed unsurprised by my arrival. The male servant, about my age, handed me a rag, and the woman my mother’s age went back to scrubbing without comment. I worked alongside them for another half hour, picking all the glass from Flint’s beer mug out of the carpet, then soaking the rag in soapy water to wash the floor and carpet.
We worked without speaking, and I watched many students walk by me through the common room, and in that half hour I experienced a change that would be lasting. A sense of peace settled upon me, despite the degrading work and the insult that had made it necessary. I didn’t realize it then, but the sensation I felt was the unalloyed pleasure Cris described of being in my own skin. There was no pretense. There was also no false, precarious safety. I cut my hand more than once on the glass, and I felt the cold stares of classmates, the indifference that rendered me insignificant. And yet, despite these pains, I had the comfort of being Sam.
Something had changed.
As we finished cleaning, I thought the two servants would make conversation, and I looked forward to it. But to my astonishment, the woman took the rag from me, dropping it in her bucket, and then she placed her hand on my shoulder in a gentle gesture of benediction. “Thank you, young man,” she said. “You can go back now to who you were.”
I stood there, mute, as she and the other servant disappearedinto Tenny. A knot of tears hardened in my throat, and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to go back to Saddle Street and see my mother and Cris.
She was wrong, however. I couldn’t go back to who I was—not wholly.
In particular, I couldn’t go back to the selective ignorance granted to me by the tokens that I wore. Somehow, they’d not only made aspects of me invisible to others; they’d also made aspects of the world ignorable to me. No longer. A crack had opened in my careful armor, and the realities kept at bay for so long crept in.
That weekend, I felt an overwhelming desire to visit my mother and Cris at home. I made the trip to Saddle Street and surprised them, though it meant that I would fall behind in my studies. My mother was happy to see me, and I thought Cris was pleased to see me also. He had, by then, established himself on the other side of the shop, carefully arranging on the shelves around him beautiful clockworks that he had saved from the rubbish heap and restored to their former, functioning glory. Cris was beginning to acquire a reputation at Cristóbal’s Clockworks, and during my visit I saw evidence of it in the well-heeled customers who sought him out, traveling well beyond their usual commercial circuit to patronize an obscure shop on Saddle Street.
For a time on that Saturday afternoon I kept them entertained with stories of my classes. Both of them bent their heads over their fine work—the needlework and the clockwork—while I described the folly of an arrogant classmate who’d attempted to make snow fall in September (succeeding only in a sputtering of rain) and the eccentricities of a professor who insisted on teaching class in the university cemetery. They both chuckled along, my mother with more genuine mirth and Cris with the unbendingskepticism that he reserved for all things relating to enchantment.
When my mother disappeared into the upstairs apartment to make some tea—I’d brought cakes with powdered sugar from a Salem bakeshop—a customer came into the store to collect a clock he had left with Cris. The man, whom Cris addressed as Mr. Sullivan, was wealthy. It was evident in every inch of his clothing—the quality, cut, and cleanliness all spoke of money and labor expended. The silver buttons on his jacket shone brightly, and the silk of his shirt fell in elegant folds. Such things could be achieved with artful tokens, I suppose, but the immaculate black coach outside the shop, the perfectly groomed horse, and the two servants couldn’t.
Mr. Sullivan bent his blond head over the clock—an English antique—to examine my brother’s handiwork. “Very nicely done,” he said, smiling. My brother showed him the repairs he had made to the inside, which had required him to customize three parts. “Excellent,” Sullivan acknowledged, nodding along.
“I’ll wrap it for you,” my brother said. I could see that he was pleased to have accomplished such a challenging repair, and he wrapped the clock tenderly.
“What sort of name is May anyway?” Sullivan asked casually, his hand resting on my brother’s worktable. “I thought it was English, but obviously not.” He didn’t drop his cheerful air while asking this question, but I felt a tremor of tension, and I grew still.
Cris didn’t look up from his task. “It’s my father’s name. He was from Yucatán.”
Sullivan seemed surprised. “He’s a Mexican?”
After a small pause, Cris replied, “While he was still alive, he thought of himself as Yucatec.”
This subtlety was lost on Sullivan, but it didn’t matter, forCris had finished wrapping the clock and now he passed it to Sullivan. “Lucky coincidence for you, then,” Sullivan said, grinning.
Cris looked at him steadily. I was coiled as tight as a spring by now, but Cris, somehow, seemed calm. “Lucky in what way?”
“That a Mexican’s name sounds so English.”
Cris didn’t say anything to this. He looked into his notebook, where he kept the record of all his expenses, and found the entry for Sullivan’s clock. “Two dollars and eighty cents, Mr. Sullivan.”
Sullivan reached into the pocket of his inner vest and withdrew a single coin, which he placed on the table. I saw then that it was a penny. He grinned. “I’ll be sure to mention to my acquaintances that your shop is both reliable and economical.”
Cris’s face grew stern. “Mr. Sullivan, this is not a bartering business. The cost of the materials is fixed, and I’ve charged you fairly for the labor.”
“A recommendation from me is worth more than a couple dollars, and you’ll be good to remember that.” Sullivan tucked the clock under his arm and made to walk out of the shop. I uncoiled and rose from my seat.
“Sam,” Cris said to me in a warning tone. The door opened and Sullivan stepped out. “Don’t make trouble for me,” Cris said. “It’s not worth it.”
I gave him a withering look as I walked out after Sullivan. He was standing on the dirt road, lighting a cigar. I cast my eye over Saddle Street quickly, considering what materials I had to work with. A small crowd of children, grown men and women had gathered around the beautiful horse attached to Sullivan’s coach. The driver stared on impassively as the children petted and admired the horse. Underfoot, the dirt road was surely a degree worse than horse, coach, and driver usually frequented. It was grooved and pocked from horse travel and frequent flooding.Piles of horse manure lay about here and there, gathering flies. As Sullivan took a puff from his cigar, I cast an enchantment, hiding the manure and making the road appear suddenly clear of obstacles. Then, remembering my first encounter with the marvelous in Salem, I gave speech to the horse.
The children around it burst into laughter, and the driver stared in plain astonishment. Sullivan couldn’t yet hear the horse’s words, but he took a step into the road, drawn by the unexpected laughter of the children. Now the horse, who’d started by complaining about the heavy coach, looked up at Sullivan and snorted. I waited a moment so that Sullivan would be sure to hear. “And that one,” the horse whinnied in a plaintive voice, “stinks so badly, I can smell him against the wind.” The children laughed even more, and even the adults standing with them chuckled faintly, though most of them knew better. Sullivan was nearing his coach, and now I dropped the first enchantment so that the horse manure was visible, both on the road and on the elegant boots that Sullivan wore. He’d stepped in it twice, even more than I’d hoped for, casting fine, dark splatters all the way up the side of his trousers.
Sullivan reached his coach, and though he was too dense to grasp quickly the mechanism that had brought it about, he understood that his clothing and boots were filthy and that a cluster of children stood laughing at him. Angrily, he handed his package to the driver and stepped into the coach. As he did so, he turned to look back at my brother’s shop. His eyes settled on me for a moment, and I gave him an easy wave. He scowled.
Cris wasn’t happy with me. When I came back into the shop, chuckling, he looked at me darkly. “That will cost us, Sam.”
“He doesn’t even know it was me! Men like us aren’t enchanters, Cris,” I said wryly.
