Afternoon of the Elves Read online

  “You’ve got a perfect yard for elves,” Hillary said to Sara-Kate wistfully. “Nobody in the whole neighborhood has a yard even close to this.”

  Sara-Kate pushed her nose up in the air. She said, “I know. I’ve been knowing it for a long time.”

  “Do elves eat regular flowers?” Hillary inquired. “We’ve got a whole lot of pretty ones growing in our yard.”

  “They hate them,” Sara-Kate answered. “Regular flowers are poisonous to elves.”

  “I thought so,” Hillary muttered. “I’ve been noticing that about elves.”

  “What?” Sara-Kate said.

  “That what’s poisonous to people is healthy for elves. And what people think is pretty is not at all what elves like to live near.”

  “You’re getting to understand elves pretty well,” Sara-Kate allowed. Then she found two caps off the tops of acorns that, filled with water, looked exactly like the sort of cups elves would drink out of. These they left on a leaf near the village, surrounded by all the food.

  “Will it be safe?” Hillary asked, standing back to admire the banquet. “Shouldn’t we cover the food with something? A dog could come along and wreck this in a minute. And it’s getting so cold and windy out here,” she added.

  The afternoons had grown progressively chillier during the week. September was nearly over and there was a feeling of changing seasons in the air. On this particular afternoon, the wind had a nasty bite to it that now caused Hillary to turn up the collar of her thin jean jacket. Sara-Kate looked at her and shrugged.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I always check things before I go to bed. And then I come look in the morning before school. It takes a lot of work to keep elves, but it’s worth it.”

  “What will they do in winter?” Hillary asked. “They’ll get pretty cold out here.” Her own feet felt icy suddenly, and looking down she saw that her sneakers had gotten rather muddy.

  “Elves don’t get cold,” Sara-Kate said.

  “Everybody gets cold.”

  “Not elves,” Sara-Kate said proudly. “They like being outside. They have thick skins. They never go inside until they have to. Houses are too hot for elves. They can’t breathe right.”

  “Then why did they bother to build all these houses?” Hillary inquired a little sharply. She could not quite believe it about the elves’ skins. Even furry animals got cold, she knew. In winter, they burrowed into caves and nests and went to sleep.

  “Why don’t elves just live in trees or underground like other animals?” Hillary asked Sara-Kate. “It would be so much easier for them.”

  Sara-Kate shook her head. “You can be pretty stupid sometimes,” she scoffed. “The reason they build houses is to have a village so they can live together, of course. Elves keep together. If they lived in trees or holes, they’d be all scattered out.” She squinted at Hillary. “And anyway, elves aren’t animals,” she added. “For one thing, they’re about a hundred times smarter than any animal. They’re about ten times smarter than most people and about twice as smart as a human genius.”

  Sara-Kate stopped suddenly and looked around toward her house. There, some signal invisible to Hillary must have caught her eye, because she began to walk rapidly in the direction of the back door.

  “You’ve got to go home now,” she told Hillary over her shoulder. “My mother wants me to come in.”

  When Hillary stared after her in surprise, Sara-Kate flung herself around again and bellowed, “Go on! Get going!”

  She disappeared into her house with a slam of the door.

  Hillary sighed. She glanced a last time at the elves’ banquet to see that all was in order. She shivered. The wind had stopped coming in puffs and now blew in one long, cold stream.

  All of a sudden, one of the leaf roofs came detached at one side and was blown up straight by the wind. It was a deep red color and had the curious look of a hand, fingers and thumb outstretched, waving at her. It appeared so real that Hillary wondered for a second if the elves were behind it, playing a game with her.

  She smiled at this thought, and had bent down to fix the leaf when another flutter caused her to straighten up quickly and look toward Sara-Kate’s house.

  She saw right away what it was. A shade in one of the upstairs windows had been flicked up, and now, as she watched, a thin face rose where the shade had been and stared down at her with wide eyes. For a moment, Hillary stared back. Then she stepped away and ran for the hole in the hedge that led to her own yard.

  When she reached it, she looked again but the face had vanished. The shade was already drawn back into place.

  “Silly,” she murmured. “It was only Sara-Kate’s mother.”

  But the face had not looked as if it belonged to a mother, any mother. It had been too white and too thin. Too frightening.

  Five

  The weather turned warm again. Indian summer, Hillary’s mother called it, and she was happy because “I wasn’t ready to close all the doors and windows yet. It’s so lovely to have the fresh air! And you’ll need a new winter coat,” she said, measuring Hillary’s ever-lengthening legs with her eyes. “Now we’ll have time to shop around for the best one.”

  Hillary’s father was happy, too. On most evenings, he left his briefcase in the hall, changed from his business suit into a pair of jeans, and went out to work in the yard. He weeded and watered and planted daffodil bulbs, whistling to himself and addressing remarks to the garden at large.

  “Hot enough for you?” he’d ask if the day was a warm one. Or, after a heavy rain: “Well, we had a regular drowning party out here, I see.”

  “You are a nuisance,” he said one evening to a group of fall roses that were beginning to shed their petals. “I just raked you out yesterday and here you’ve gone and dropped your underwear all over the place again.”

  From the hedge at the bottom of the yard, a series of muffled snorts erupted. Hillary and Sara-Kate had been crouched behind the bushes building an elf bridge across a boggy section of ground. Now they looked at each other and grinned.

  “Has your father always been crazy or is this a recent problem?” Sara-Kate asked Hillary, gravely.

  This brought on a second round of snorts, and a number of giggles and coughs besides.

  “Everything all right down there?” Mr. Lenox called unhelpfully from the garden. It made them crack up again.

  Everything was all right, of course. It couldn’t have been better, in fact. Strange as it might seem, Hillary and Sara-Kate were putting together a sort of friendship. They met in Sara-Kate’s backyard every afternoon to work on the elf village. Hillary’s mother disapproved, but she hadn’t actually forbidden the visits, so Hillary was able to slip through the hedge with the understanding that no questions would be asked.

  “If you could tell me which is the poison ivy, then I can keep away from it,” she’d said to Sara-Kate at the end of the first week, during which she had hardly dared venture farther than the village and the Ferris wheel. “My mother’s just waiting for me to catch something down here so she can stop me from coming.”

  “Don’t think I don’t know,” Sara-Kate said. She took Hillary around the yard and pointed out the worst patches, and she showed her how to recognize the poison ivy plant, with its distinctive three-leaf cluster and green sheen.

  “I used to get poison ivy all the time when I was little,” she said. “Then I got wise.”

  “Why doesn’t your mother do something about it?” Hillary asked. “My father said she could get a spray to kill it if she wanted to.”

  “Well, she doesn’t want to,” Sara-Kate answered quickly, in a voice that told Hillary not to go on with the subject. It wasn’t the only subject that Sara-Kate wouldn’t discuss. There were many others. She was always backing out of conversations, pulling up short, telling Hillary to mind her own business. Sometimes Sara-Kate simply turned her back and walked off without explanation, as she’d done on the day when Hillary had seen the face in the window. Being friends
with Sara-Kate was a complicated business. But sometimes ...

  Behind the hedge, Hillary looked over at Sara-Kate, who was still laughing about the roses’ underwear, and thought what a nice person she was when she let herself relax. She was really no different from anyone else, Hillary decided. She even managed to look rather pretty at times, after one got to know her and could ignore her boots and the strange clothes she wore.

  The project underway at the elf village that afternoon was the construction of a network of roads or paths leading to different parts of the yard. The elves were a quick, energetic people who needed to be able to move around easily, Sara-Kate had explained. But they were not, by nature, road-builders, preferring to follow the trails made by other animals. There were no animals living in Sara-Kate’s backyard, just a few squirrels whose roadways ran overhead, along the branches of two ragged trees.

  “So we must take over the job of making roads,” Sara-Kate informed Hillary. “And what I was thinking was, we could make a really good system. First we could design a plan for where the roads should go, and then we could carry it out.”

  “If you want me to make a map, I’m good at that,” Hillary replied. “I studied maps in school last year. I know about scales and ledgers and things.”

  “Good,” Sara-Kate said.

  So, as official map-maker, Hillary had walked the boundaries of Sara-Kate’s yard with a pad and pencil. She had marked the position of the overturned washing machine, of large bushes, trees, tree stumps, and of such smaller landmarks as derelict tires, rusty pipes, oil cans, and ash heaps. She noted the placement of the back porch and discovered the swampy area near the hedge, which was too soft to support a road and might be dangerous to a small being like an elf.

  While she walked, watching her step for fear of broken glass or poison ivy, Hillary kept half an eye on the blank, shade-drawn windows of Sara-Kate’s house, especially the upstairs windows. For there, at times, some tiny movement, an almost imperceptible flutter, seemed to catch her attention, and she would whirl around to look with a leaping heart.

  But whether it was her imagination or a reflection trick of the window glass, she could never positively identify what had moved, or where. And she did not dare ask Sara-Kate about such things. She would only have laughed or become angry. She might even have ordered Hillary out of the yard for good, a possibility that worried Hillary far more than the feeling that she was being secretly observed.

  Short of being ordered away, Hillary wouldn’t have stopped coming to the yard for anything. The place fascinated her, and she liked the idea that she was beginning to know its parts: the stumps, the rocks, the junk heaps, and the hidden places where the tiny weed flowers bloomed. She liked knowing how to get around and between obstacles—how to steer clear of thorn bushes, for instance, by walking the trunk of a fallen tree. She had a feeling of belonging to the yard, even of owning it a little.

  The Lenoxes’ tidy yard belonged to her father and mother, Hillary saw. It was under their order and grew according to their laws. But Sara-Kate’s yard was wild and free, and that was how Hillary felt there, tramping among the bushes, poking into shadowy dens. Anything might happen in Sara-Kate’s backyard. For that matter, anything was happening.

  The elves might keep themselves hidden. They might even be invisible to the human eye, as Sara-Kate believed. But everywhere, everywhere! there was evidence of their small, exotic lives.

  A cache of acorn cups would turn up in the hollow of a tree root, leading Hillary to imagine an industrious band of little workers moving and storing goods throughout the garden.

  Several odd, circular dirt clearings appeared in the weedy underbrush. The earth of these places was packed firm and level, and, though no footprints or marks showed there, it seemed obvious that these were meeting areas of some sort.

  But why? What did the elves discuss? What language did they speak? Did they talk in words, or did communication take place through some form of silent sign language? After all, there was never a mutter or a cough in the yard, not during the day and not at night either, according to Sara-Kate. There was only the sound of the wind moving through bushes and tree boughs.

  “If I were an elf and wanted to speak so that no one would hear me, I would make up a language that sounded like ordinary natural sounds,” Sara-Kate had said.

  “What sounds?” Hillary asked.

  “Be quiet and listen for a minute.” They had stood still until the tiny noises within the boundaries of the yard began to distinguish themselves from the louder noises of the town: from traffic passing in the street, the shriek of brakes, the cries of children and yapping of dogs.

  Underneath these town noises, Hillary heard tiny chirps and squeaks. She heard a faint vibration or buzz coming through the air. She heard pecking and tapping noises, little creaks and scratches, groans and gushes, clickings and drippings. Finally, she heard the clear notes of a bird, very close by.

  “Is that an elf talking?” she whispered in amazement.

  Sara-Kate shrugged. “It could be. Who can tell?”

  Hillary had nodded. It might very well be. But of course, with elves it was impossible to be sure of anything. One might suppose that certain things were happening, that the elves acted in a certain way, but who could really tell? Facts can be understood differently, they can add up to different answers depending on how they are viewed.

  This uncertainty about the elves had come home to Hillary after a particularly interesting conversation with Sara-Kate one day, a conversation about the strange little pool the elves had made for themselves out of an old tin pan sunk in the ground near the Ferris wheel.

  At night in the dark, or perhaps in faint moonlight, the elves bathed in the pool. Hillary knew they bathed because she saw fresh seeds and half-eaten berries near the water’s edge. She saw small, square pieces of wood floating in the water, along with tiny, yellow leaves that seemed to have no source within the yard.

  What purpose did the wooden pieces serve? Hillary wondered. And what about the leaves?

  After some thought, she had come up with an answer. The wooden squares were rafts upon which the elves sat or lay, and the leaves were washcloths, because the elves must have some means of washing, mustn’t they? It seemed most likely.

  But Sara-Kate had laughed when she heard Hillary’s ideas.

  “Why do you think that these elves are anything like you?” she asked. “You play with rafts in pools and you use washcloths, so you think elves must, too. But maybe elves aren’t like you at all. Maybe they’re so different that nothing they do is anything like what you do. Maybe they’ve never even seen a washcloth and these leaves are for something else, for collecting starlight, say.”

  “Collecting starlight! Why?”

  “Maybe for energy to run things, the way we use the sun for solar energy.”

  “To run what?”

  “Well, there’s the Ferris wheel. Suppose the wood pieces aren’t water rafts but power rafts. Maybe the swimming pool isn’t for swimming at all. It could be a power center that collects energy and stores it for future use. I’m not saying this is true,” Sara-Kate added hastily. “I’m just trying to show you what’s possible.”

  Hillary was astounded. Starlight collectors! She would never have imagined such a thing and she looked with respect at Sara-Kate. Not that she was convinced about the power rafts, but she saw that Sara-Kate was right in principle. She must not take anything for granted when it came to an unknown like elves. She must just watch and wait and hope that they would reveal themselves more clearly.

  In the meantime, the road and bridge project went forward in the afternoons until most parts of the yard had been linked with the elf village. But Indian summer soon passed and the days grew shorter and colder, making it less pleasant to work outside.

  Less pleasant especially for Sara-Kate, Hillary thought. She stubbornly refused to put on any kind of coat. While Hillary arrived wearing sweaters and jackets and finally a new quilted parka, Sara-K
ate went on working in her same blue sweatshirt, which by this time was looking rather ragged around the cuffs.

  “Aren’t you cold?” Hillary asked her. On some afternoons, there was a thin layer of ice on the elves’ pool.

  “No,” Sara-Kate answered.

  “Are you trying to act like an elf and have thick skin?” Hillary said, teasing a little.

  Sara-Kate had turned on her in one of her unpredictable bursts of fury.

  “For your information, I’m not trying to act like anything. I happen to be like an elf, that’s all. I don’t get cold. If you think that’s weird, why don’t you go away and tell your stupid friends about it.”

  But, of course, Hillary chose not to go away.

  Six

  In all the time that Hillary had been going to Sara-Kate’s backyard to work on the elf village, Sara-Kate had never once invited her inside her house.

  Never once had she offered Hillary a soda or a snack. She had never asked her in to see her room, or to watch television. When it rained, Hillary went home. When she got hungry, Hillary went back to her own kitchen.

  “Do you want something?” she’d ask Sara-Kate. “We have cupcakes.” Or she’d offer an apple, popcorn, lemonade, for Mrs. Lenox believed in a well-stocked larder and kept many delicious snacks on her shelves.

  But Sara-Kate never wanted anything. Elf banquets were one thing. For herself, she did not seem interested in food. She didn’t like to watch Hillary eating either, or so it seemed, for she would turn away and go off to another part of the yard while Hillary nibbled around the edges of a raspberry fruit pie or a chocolate-chip cookie she had brought from home. It was as if Sara-Kate found the sight of this sort of food disgusting.

  On the other hand, Hillary occasionally caught her tossing a handful of yard berries into her mouth when she thought no one was looking. And she often munched on mint leaves from a patch of mint grown wild near the back porch.