“Is that all?” asked Father.
“Yes,” Tickie answered.
Mr. Nelson took Father to the house. He (Nelson) wore a green, ill-fitting suit that looked to Father as though it might be slick to the touch, as though even water might slide off it. The house was not in good condition and Nelson knew that it would be difficult to sell — that it had to be sold.
Father was not listening. He looked at the house. It was built from oak trees, cut and gouged out by hand, nailed together as though the square was the only construction pattern and design that the builders knew; worn by the rain and sun, unpainted, fastened together with baling wire and pieces of corrugated steel tacked over the joints and corners that had been eaten away by insects and stagnant rainwater. A windmill to the side of the house pumped water into a wooden storage tank, and due to the weight of the water on itself a bathroom upstairs and a sink in the kitchen worked (as long as the water level was higher than the faucets, of course). The furnace burned coal. Electricity, none — though after World War II Father bought a generator that ran on diesel fuel from an orange tank.
Mr. Nelson told Father where to go to obtain a loan to finance the purchase of the house. Father did this and they, Nelson, Father, and a man at the bank, signed papers and handed them back and forth. Afterwards, they shook hands and Nelson told Father what a good house he had bought. Father asked the banker if the house was his now and the banker said that it was unless he stopped sending money in — in which case it would be the bank’s. Mr. Nelson shook Father’s hand again and Father told him to never come to his house, to never even walk by it if he could help it. Nelson was offended. The banker hurried back into a sectioned-off office, smiling.
Luke and Andrea drove home then. She was pregnant but did not know it. Neither did he. They were anxious to explore their new home. They arrived. Andrea went inside and said that the house had a “good feel.” Luke found some old tools in the basement and felt — though he knew it wasn’t so — that he had swindled Nelson. He looked at the furnace and opened all the doors he could find, looking in and poking around with the wooden handled screwdriver. His wife called him and he went upstairs. Unfamiliar with the house and the way sound moved through its rooms, he wandered for a short time before he found her on the back porch. He came out and stood beside her; she pointed down away from them. “What’s that?” she asked. When he looked (and it was not right away because the porch seemed to Luke a likely place for someone to leave tools behind) he saw a large — very large — cavity, perhaps two-and-a-half miles across, that began in less space than forty feet from the porch steps where the grass ended and the dark sides of the hole began. (I can remember thinking when I was small that a volcano had once lived there and then had sunk down into the ground, leaving the ground around it level.) They walked to the edge and looked down. It was not so steep as it had looked from the porch — not so steep that someone couldn’t walk down; but they were unable to see farther into it than twenty-five feet because of the heavy fog. Luke looked out across the pit. A faint putrid smell seemed to be down there. The same road that passed by the front of his house wound in a circle around the hole. Other houses stood beside the road. The buildings of Des Moines spread out in all directions from them; it was a clear, hot day and he could see all the way around the cavity. At seven places streets, macadam and brick, fled off down into the hole and disappeared in the fog.
“That’s the City,” said Luke.
“The City?”
“There’s a City down there,” he said, and up from the fog came a long sound like a giant boulder dropping several feet into a grass-lined pocket of earth.
“What’s that?” asked Andrea.
“One of the monuments closing,” he said and went back inside to look for more tools.
Chapter II
JOHN CHARLES WAS THE OLDEST. THE PATH THE REST OF US walked to the Independent Public School #4 he had made. The letters SLEDGE had been carved into the wooden desk tops and filled with ink before any of the rest of us had come. What we did as children John C. had done first; not differently, but first. And Mrs. Candlewine had seen us all. She had sat behind her desk and called the name John C. Sledge from a sheet of paper, had looked out across the room and had seen a hand rise, had looked into a pair of dark brown eyes half closed from want of sleep and thought to herself, “Bring the children unto me.” Then she more straightened her wirelike body, tucked a loose fold of dress up under her thigh, caught a glimpse of a strand of once blond, virgin hair, and read Richard L. Stephens. She had seen all of us — John Charles, Mary, Nellie, Walter, Will, Paul, and myself — walk through the first-grade door and raise our hands after our names had been read. She had walked beside us while we stood in line along the cinder-block hall waiting to be let outside, punished us for throwing erasers, and even once had gone in front of the town council screaming, “The children . . . The children . . . What you do to the children,” for us.
Mrs. Candlewine drove to our house one afternoon after school, parked her car next to the windmill (which is not important in itself), and walked around to the back porch, conscious that by doing so she was admitting, assuming, a familiarity with our family. John Charles, then eight, answered the door and pushed it aside for her to enter.
“Hello, John,” she said. “Is your mother or father at home?”
“No,” he answered, still holding the door, waiting for her to come in.
“Do they know you are playing with your father’s pocketknife?”
“It’s mine,” he answered.
“Do you know when they will be back?”
“Dad’s at work and he’ll be home in a couple hours.”
“Where is your mother?”
“She’ll be back, I think, in a little while.”
“Where’s your sister, John? Is she sick?”
“I don’t know.” John Charles had slowly closed the screen door, reasonably content that Mrs. Candlewine had no intention of coming inside.
“How is school going for you?”
“O.K.”
Andrea Sledge came walking up onto the backyard out of the fog. She was five-and-a-half months pregnant. “Here’s Mom,” said John C. Mrs. Candlewine turned to face her and began talking before she had completed the steps up the porch.
“Hello, Mrs. Sledge. I’m Mrs. Candlewine, Mary’s teacher at school, and Mary hasn’t been to school this last week, so I thought I’d come out and see if there was any trouble and if I could help in any way. I’ve brought some work for her to do here at home so she won’t be so far behind when she comes back. She’s such a lovely girl, Mrs. Sledge.”
Andrea sat down on the upper step and put her hands to her head as though to rub something away. “She’s gone . . . Mary’s gone.”
“Gone?” asked Mrs. Candlewine, wondering not so much about Andrea’s choice of word but of what the word had to do with Mary. John Charles had gone back into some farther room in the house.
“Yes,” Mother answered, staring out away from the house. “Into the City. The City has taken my baby.” And she began to cry. Mrs. Candlewine rested a minute against the side of the house and sat down beside Andrea. She did not know what to say but felt guilty just watching, the way it is funny to see someone fall down on the ice and break a leg — but not funny when they are watching you laughing.
“Mrs. Sledge, you’re mistaken. She’s