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“Yes, oh my God, yes, yes, you got your blamed head!” she snapped, giving up. “Now, fetch me back my bat with the needle in his eye!”
He flung it at her. “Haaaa-yoooo!” His yelling went all up the valley, and long after he had run toward home she heard his echoes, racing.
Then she plucked up her kindling with a great dry weariness and started back toward her shack, sighing, talking. And Charlie followed her all the way, really invisible now, so she couldn’t see him, just hear him, like a pine cone dropping or a deep underground stream trickling, or a squirrel clambering a bough; and over the fire at twilight she and Charlie sat, him so invisible, and her feeding him bacon he wouldn’t take, so she ate it herself, and then she fixed some magic and fell asleep with Charlie, made out of sticks and rags and pebbles, but still warm and her very own son, slumbering and nice in her shaking mother arms … and they talked about golden things in drowsy voices until dawn made the fire slowly, slowly wither out....
Come into My Cellar
Hugh Fortnum woke to Saturday’s commotions, and lay, eyes shut, savoring each in its turn.
Below, bacon in a skillet; Cynthia waking him with fine cookings instead of cries.
Across the hall, Tom actually taking a shower.
Far off in the bumble-bee dragon-fly light, whose voice was already cursing the weather, the time, and the tides? Mrs. Goodbody? Yes. That Christian giantess, six feet tall with her shoes off, the gardener extraordinary, the octogenarian-dietitian and town philosopher.
He rose, unhooked the screen, and leaned out to hear her cry:
“There! Take that! This’ll fix you! Hah!”
“Happy Saturday, Mrs. Goodbody!”
The old woman froze in clouds of bug spray pumped from an immense gun.
“Nonsense!” she shouted. “With these fiends and pests to watch for?”
“What kind this time?” called Fortnum.
“I don’t want to shout it to the jaybirds, but—” she glanced suspiciously around—“what would you say if I told you I was the first line of defense concerning Flying Saucers?”
“Fine,” replied Fortnum. “There’ll be rockets between the worlds any year now.”
“There already are!” She pumped, aiming the spray under the hedge. “There! Take that!”
He pulled his head back in from the fresh day, somehow not as high-spirited as his first response had indicated. Poor soul, Mrs. Goodbody. Always the very essence of reason. And now what? Old age?
The doorbell rang.
He grabbed his robe and was half down the stairs when he heard a voice say, “Special Delivery. Fortnum?” and saw Cynthia turn from the front door, a small packet in her hand.
He put his hand out, but she shook her head.
“Special Delivery Air Mail for your son.”
Tom was downstairs like a centipede.
“Wow! That must be from the Great Bayou Novelty Greenhouse!”
“I wish I were as excited about ordinary mail,” observed Fortnum.
“Ordinary?!” Tom ripped the cord and paper wildly. “Don’t you read the back pages of Popular Mechanics? Well, here they are!”
Everyone peered into the small open box.
“Here,” said Fortnum, “what are?”
“The Sylvan Glade Jumbo-Giant Guaranteed Growth Raise-Them-in-Your-Cellar-for-Big-Profit Mushrooms!”
“Oh, of course,” said Fortnum. “How silly of me.”
