The Everlasting Story of Nory

4. Littleguy Had a Sensible Fear of Owls

Nory was a day student at Threll Junior School, where she used a medium-nib fountain pen with a kind of blue ink that you could make disappear completely from the page with a two-ended instrument called an ink-eradicator. Even when the ink had had a chance to dry for three weeks, the ink-eradicator still had the power to make it disappear. Threll School was started by a kind-looking person with a fur collar whose picture hung on the stairs going up to the dining hall. Pamela Shavers, who was a girl in Nory’s class, said he was called Prior Rowland because he lived prior to Henry the Eighth. The dining hall used to be the barn for the monk’s cows, another older kid said, but Nory couldn’t understand why the monks would have wanted to drag cows up and down stairs twice a day. Then her mother explained that they had built in a second floor when they shipped out the cows. There was still sometimes a slight barny smell about the place, though. The wood had twisting beams, like driftwood, but no Death Watch Beetles that Nory could see; of course she couldn’t possibly have heard them banging their heads since kids at lunch make tons and tons of noise.

Prior Rowland began the school to honor the memory of Saint Rufina, something like two thousand years ago, or ‘early this morning,’ as Nory’s brother used to say. Littleguy he was called, although his name was really Frank Wood Winslow. To Littleguy ‘long ago’ and ‘early this morning’ meant pretty much the same thing, because his head was still basically a construction site, filled with diggers and dumpers driving around in mushy dirt, and it was hard for him to tell what were the real outlines of his ideas. He knew how to say ‘construction site,’ and ‘traction engine,’ and ‘coupling,’ and ‘level crossing,’ and ‘hundred-ton dump truck,’ and ‘articulated dump truck’ and ‘auger driller,’ because he loved those sorts of things. But he sometimes held up a very simple object, like a fork or a candle, and said, ‘I forgot the word for this.’ And he still called a pillow a pibble. But that was a normal thing to expect, Nory thought, because you have to spend your whole life learning more and more about how to draw a difference between one idea and another idea and how to keep them separated out rather than totally dredged together in a sludgy mass. For example, if you say that you’re doing something to the honor of someone’s memory, say to the honor of Saint Rufina’s memory, you don’t mean that you’re honoring the wonderful memory they might have, as in they can dash off the names of every kid in the class by heart, because they don’t have any memories at all, since they’re dead. And you don’t mean that they have wonderful happy memories of picnics and chicken sandwiches and feeding the ducks that you’re honoring, because they don’t have those, either. You can’t mummify a nice memory in someone’s head — no magic herbs will do it. And you don’t mean you’re honoring any particular other person’s memories of the person that is being honored, because the people who are honoring him may not even have known him or met him. Or her, in the case of Saint Rufina. You’re just simply honoring the basic idea that this person once lived her life and you’re trying to convince the world not to forget her. But any person who remembers her is going to die also, obviously, so you have to keep convincing people from scratch—‘Remember this person, remember this person, remember this person.’ It isn’t easy, but it may be satisfying work.

Littleguy liked having Nory read books to him. However, she had to be careful about certain books. He was not frightened of spiders so much. But owls were a different bowl of fish! To him the nighttime was full of owls rustling and blinking their huge staring eyes. In Nory’s house, they couldn’t even say ‘owl,’ they had to spell it out. When Nory read Littleguy a book like The Country Noisy Book and they came to the page with an o-w-l sitting in a tree at nighttime, she would bustle to the next page. If she tried to casually cover the owl up with her hand, it never worked, because he knew it was under there. Sometimes Littleguy would try to be brave. ‘I like owls very much,’ he would say. ‘But I don’t like just that owl.’

Once Nory’s mother found Littleguy in the Art Room late at night trying to color over the yellow eyes of a scary owl with a red marker, because he didn’t like coming across it in his Winnie the Pooh magazine, which he had been flipping through before he fell asleep. Another time he told Nory that two very bad owls were wanting to look in his window, behind the curtain. When Nory heard that, with the frightened seriousness on his face, she also felt a little twizzle of fear down the back of her neck and places like that, because she especially did not like the idea of things waiting outside for her and staring in through blank, black windowpanes at night. The first and one of the few early, early things she remembered about her life was of running down a long hall and stopping at the edge of a window. Then bang: she thought she saw the ugliness of the Tweety Monster with its frown-eyed face, on the other side of the window, and she screamed ‘Mommeeeee!’ The Tweety Monster was just simply a monster version of Tweety-bird in a Sylvester and Tweety tape — Tweety turned into it when he drank a special potion. No reason to be scared of a casual little cartoon. But it was scary, and when Nory screamed and dashed away from the window Nory’s mother said gently, ‘I know, I know, but it’s just drawings. There’s no Tweety Monster out there, no bad thing, only the gentle night and the squirrels all fluffed up to keep from getting too cold, and the raccoons having a pleasant chew of garbage. Everything’s all right.’ Her mother’s eyes were the most soothing, nicest, softest, deepest eyes that any mother could ever have. They were, to be specific, blue. Sometimes instead of two owls Littleguy had a bad dream about two old, old trucks from the scrapyard with huge tires driving around the living room with their bright lights on. And yet in real life, Littleguy loved trucks more than anything, except trains. One time Littleguy even said he had a nightmare about sitting on the toilet and not having a book to read.

That was one thing that Nory really thought was not quite fair about bad dreams, when they went ahead and took something you loved, like trucks, or mirrors, or your mother, or were proud of, like sitting in the bathroom all by yourself, and made them scary. If Nory had a library, she would not allow any Goosebumps books in the children’s department, because just the covers were frightening, never mind the dreadful insides, and kids weren’t even aware how frightened they were sometimes until later that evening. There was one book with a picture of an evil doll that she really thought was a bad idea. Why ruin the idea of something nice, like a doll, by making it so horribly scary that you couldn’t think about it and couldn’t trust it? Your dolls aren’t going to do anything bad to you. Your dolls should be trusted to be in your room with you in the middle of the night. Goosebumps books got kids much more scared than they ever wanted to be, or ever expected they would be, and they didn’t need that help anyway, since their own dreams would do a superb job of scaring their dits off just on their own. But still, Nory’s cousin Anthony and her friend Debbie loved reading Goosebumps books and couldn’t think of a funner thing to do. So not everyone had the same reaction.

Nory especially disliked when she had teeth-dreams. Say, for example, a beautiful graceful fluffer-necked duck that was just sitting away the time in the reeds by a river, its feathers being fluttered by the wind, and when you came up to it in the dream to hold out your hand to it to say hello and give it a piece of bread it would suddenly curl back its beaks and show huge fangy teeth. Or a horse with pointy teeth and bug-eyes with white rims would chase her. Or cows with pointed teeth. But those dreams were mostly ones she’d had long ago and gotten adjusted to. Another fairly old dream Nory had was of being chased through various shades of colors by a queen who was determined to cut off her arm for a punishment. Nory dashed away from her, but the Queen came chugging closer, with some of her men, and Nory realized she couldn’t escape. So she made them a compromise. She said to the Queen, ‘Okay, okay, don’t chop off my arm, you can chop off my head.’ That way, she wouldn’t experience the pain. The Queen said, ‘All right!’ And wham, the ax came circling. ‘Ah, how nice,’ Nory felt. She didn’t have to bow or anything. She didn’t even have to put a paper bag over her head.

The moral of the dream was: Better to be dead than armless in agony. It wasn’t a perfect moral, though, Nory thought afterward, even for a dream — which isn’t too surprising since it’s too much to expect of your dreams that they would end up giving off good morals — but really, you can learn to do almost everything you would need to do without arms: play cards with your toes, and that kind of thing. You might hesitate for a moment if your dentist wanted to work on your mouth holding the tools in his toes, true. That might not be the world’s most raging success.