“Yes,” said Cecy before anyone else could speak.
He placed his lips to the strange mouth. He kissed the strange mouth and he was trembling.
Ann sat like a white statue.
“Ann!” said Cecy. “Move your arms, hold him!”
She sat like a carved wooden doll in the moonlight.
Again he kissed her lips.
“I do love you,” whispered Cecy. “I’m here, it’s me you saw in her eyes, it’s me, and I love you if she never will.”
He moved away and seemed like a man who had run a long distance. He sat beside her. “I don’t know what’s happening. For a moment there … ”
“Yes?” asked Cecy.
“For a moment I thought—” He put his hands to his eyes. “Never mind. Shall I take you home now?”
“Please,” said Ann Leary.
He clucked to the horse, snapped the reins tiredly, and drove the rig away. They rode in the rustle and slap and motion of the moonlit rig in the still early, only eleven o’clock spring night, with the shining meadows and sweet fields of clover gliding by.
And Cecy, looking at the fields and meadows, thought, It would be worth it, it would be worth everything to be with him from this night on. And she heard her parents’ voices again, faintly, “Be careful. You wouldn’t want to lose your magical powers, would you—married to a mere mortal? Be careful. You wouldn’t want that.”
Yes, yes, thought Cecy, even that I’d give up, here and now, if he would have me. I wouldn’t need to roam the spring nights then, I wouldn’t need to live in birds and dogs and cats and foxes, I’d need only to be with him. Only him. Only him.
The road passed under, whispering.
“Tom,” said Ann at last.
“What?” He stared coldly at the road, the horse, the trees, the sky, the stars.
“If you’re ever, in years to come, at any time, in Green Town, Illinois, a few miles from here, will you do me a favor?”
“Perhaps.”
“Will you do me the favor of stopping and seeing a friend of mine?” Ann Leary said this haltingly, awkwardly.
“Why?”
“She’s a good friend. I’ve told her of you. I’ll give you her address. Just a moment.” When the rig stopped at her farm she drew forth a pencil and paper from her small purse and wrote in the moonlight, pressing the paper to her knee. “There it is. Can you read it?”
He glanced at the paper and nodded bewilderedly.
“Cecy Elliott, 12 Willow Street, Green Town, Illinois,” he said.
“Will you vist her someday?” asked Ann.
“Someday,” he said.
“Promise?”
“What has this to do with us?” he cried savagely. “What do I want with names and papers?” He crumpled the paper into a tight ball and shoved it in his coat.
“Oh, please promise!” begged Cecy.
“… promise … ” said Ann.
“All right, all right, now let me be!” he shouted.
I’m tired, thought Cecy. I can’t stay. I have to go home. I’m weakening. I’ve only the power to stay a few hours out like this in the night, traveling, traveling. But before I go …
“… before I go,” said Ann.
She kissed Tom on the lips.
“This is me kissing you,” said Cecy.
Tom held her off and looked at Ann Leary and looked deep, deep inside. He said nothing, but his face began to relax slowly, very slowly, and the lines vanished away, and his mouth softened from its hardness, and he looked deep again into the moonlit face held here before him.
Then he put her off the rig and without so much as a good night was driving swiftly down the road.
Cecy let go.
Ann Leary, crying out, released from prison, it seemed, raced up the moonlit path to her house and slammed the door.
Cecy lingered for only a little while. In the eyes of a cricket she saw the spring night world. In the eyes of a frog she sat for a lonely moment by a pool. In the eyes of a night bird she looked down from a tall, moon-haunted elm and saw the light go out in two farmhouses, one here, one a mile away. She thought of herself and her family, and her strange power, and the fact that no one in the family could ever marry any one of the people in this vast world out here beyond the hills.
“Tom?” Her weakening mind flew in a night bird under the trees and over deep fields of wild mustard. “Have you still got the paper, Tom? Will you come by someday, some year, sometime, to see me? Will you know me then? Will you look in my face and remember then where it was you saw me last and know that you love me as I love you, with all my heart for all time?”
She paused in the cool night air, a million miles from towns and people, above farms and continents and rivers and hills. “Tom?” Softly.
Tom was asleep. It was deep night; his clothes were hung on chairs or folded neatly over the end of the bed. And in one silent, carefully upflung hand upon the white pillow, by his head, was a small piece of paper with writing on it. Slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, his fingers closed down upon and held it tightly. And he did not even stir or notice when a blackbird, faintly, wondrously, beat softly for a moment against the clear moon crystals of the windowpane, then, fluttering quietly, stopped and flew away toward the east, over the sleeping earth.
“Oh, the Good Time has come at last”
It was twilight, and Janice and Leonora packed steadily in their summer house, singing songs, eating little, and holding to each other when necessary. But they never glanced at the window where the night gathered deep and the stars came out bright and cold.
“Listen!” said Janice.
A sound like a steamboat down the river, but it was a rocket in the sky. And beyond that—banjos playing? No, only the summer-night crickets in this year 2003. Ten thousand sounds breathed through the town and the weather. Janice, head bent, listened. Long, long ago, 1849, this very street had breathed the voices of ventriloquists, preachers, fortunetellers, fools, scholars, gamblers, gathered at this selfsame Independence, Missouri. Waiting for the moist earth to bake and the great tidal grasses to come up heavy enough to hold the weight of their carts, their wagons, their indiscriminate destinies, and their dreams.
“Oh, the Good Time has come at last,
To Mars we are a-going, sir, Five Thousand Women in the sky, That’s quite a springtime sowing, sir!”
“That’s an old Wyoming song,” said Leonora. “Change the words and it’s fine for 2003.”
Janice lifted a matchbox of food pills, calculating the totals of things carried in those high-axled, tall-bedded wagons. For each man, each woman, incredible tonnages! Hams, bacon slabs, sugar, salt, flour, dried fruits, “pilot” bread, citric acid, water, ginger, pepper—a list as big as the land! Yet here, today, pills that fit a wristwatch fed you not from Fort Laramie to Hangtown, but all across a wilderness of stars.
Janice threw wide the closet door and almost screamed. Darkness and night and all the spaces between the stars looked out at her.
Long years ago two things had happened. Her