DORNAL’S HARP
by Andrew Marr, OSB
Chapter the 1st
Kevin Rosskill shifted his school books to his left arm and dug into his pocket for the house key. The key never fit easily in the front door. That made him think the lock and key were against him, the way everything else in life was. Finally, his wrangling led to the click that signaled the door's opening up. With his freckles wrinkled in a frown, Kevin let himself into the house.
It was empty, as usual. He didn't bother to call out for his mother or his sister Karen. He knew they were not around to answer him. The living room was disgustingly neat. Nobody had been there long enough to mess anything up. At least the kitchen showed signs of human habitation. The breakfast dishes were piled up in the sink except for the cereal bowl which Kevin had left on the table. He put the offending bowl into the sink and filled it with water. Karen had hinted several times that it would be nice if he did the dishes a few times when Mother was out on an emergency, but Kevin was never in the mood for being nice. He opened the cupboard to look for a Granola bar. The last one was gone. He was not too disappointed. He took a few coins from the drawer next to the sink his mother left for such small emergencies. He was free to buy an unhealthy candy bar without his mother or sister giving him a lecture about it.
Kevin's mother knew so little about his life it wasn't funny. She was always working long hours at the hospital, not only to support her two children, but because she was considered the best neural surgeon in the Monangahela Valley. Karen was proud of her mother, but Kevin missed her too much to feel the same pride. He didn't like being left alone with a quarrelsome sister at breakfast time because the phone had rung at five in the morning. Even so, Kevin had to admit to himself that at least his mother was aware of her son's existence, which was more than he could say for his father.
Kevin ran upstairs to his room, dropped his schoolbooks on the bed, and picked up his sketching pad. If nothing else, he was the best sixth-grade artist in the Monangahela Valley school system. A first prize ribbon from the student art fair hung over his bed to prove it. He won the reward for his painting of a lion with flames bursting out of his mane so that he looked like the sun leaping over the world. He called the painting Goldfire. It was the best Kevin had done. With a stab of grief, he remembered the smile on his Grandmother's face when he returned to his seat after receiving the award. Now, if Kevin should win another prize, she would not be around to share the thrill of it. Her absence from his life was almost enough to make him lose interest in art. Kevin was beginning to wonder if his mother would ever see him get an award, even if he won a hundred prizes. Right on schedule, she was called to the hospital for an emergency, just when she was almost out the door to go to the ceremony. When Kevin's painting of the lion was held up before the audience, Kevin felt a sharp wish that the lion would pounce on his mother and eat her up for not coming.
Kevin leafed through his most recent drawings. There were several animal pictures which he had drawn from a zoology book and then transformed each into a monster of his own devising. Kevin looked at his prize-winning masterpiece, all framed and hanging on the wall. It gave him a chill to look at the lion's eyes. At such moments, it was hard to believe that he could have created that work. The beast stared at Kevin as if he knew all his secrets. Kevin closed the book and ran downstairs with it.
He was almost out the door and on the way to library, when he remembered that his mother was expecting him to call in and report on his well being. He picked up the phone and dialed the number he knew better than his home phone.
"Milton General Hospital," said the answering voice.
"It's Kevin. Can I speak to my mother?"
"Who is your mother?"
"Good question," Kevin snapped. "Who do you think?"
"I don't have a crystal ball to tell me who you are or who your mother is," said the operator.
"Oh, you're not Ms. Prentice."
"No, I'm Ms. O' Kelly. I'm new here."
"Sorry. My mother is Dr. Rosskill."
"One moment please."
Kevin heard a click, and then a hum. Kevin slammed down the receiver. That was his effort for the day, and he wasn't about to try again. He heard the back door open. Karen made her entrance through the kitchen. She didn't look happy.
"So, you think I'm the only one who should do the dishes around here?" she asked.
"No. It wouldn't hurt Mother to do them once in a while."
"She's busy."
"So am I. I'm supposed to create a couple of masterpieces this week.”
"And your sculpture in the kitchen sink is one of them?"
"You have a great future as an art critic."
"Thanks. You have a great future as a human being."
"Same to you."
Kevin opened the front door to a blast of the cold March wind.
"And where do you think you're going?" asked Karen.
"Where do you think? And since when do I need your permission to go to the library?"
Not only did Karen look like her mother, being tall and blond, she acted as if she were already commanding an army of doctors.
"I just want to know so I know where to find you in case I have to call you home to dinner."
"Cold macaroni and all?"
"Maybe I'll make a low-calorie salad to make sure you don't get too much cholesterol."
"Then I'll never come home. Why don't you fix your life instead of these stupid salads that are supposed to save me from having a heart attack when I’m forty-five?"
Kevin closed the door behind him before Karen could shoot off another retort. Arguing with her was fun for about two minutes, but no more. Outside, snow was beginning to fall. Kevin felt something soft hit him in the face. Looking down, he saw a copy of the Milton Gazette. Looking up, he saw the paper carrier, Michael Bullinger, casually walking on to the next house.
"You brat!" Kevin called after him.
"What's the matter?" Michael asked with no trace of concern in his voice.
"You threw the paper at me!"
"So?"
"It wasn't exactly nice of you."
Michael looked at Kevin with as much sympathy as a lamp post.
"Show me your scars."
The reply tied up Kevin's tongue.
"You're still alive, aren't you?" Michael asked.
"I guess."
"You're not so sure? Better look in the paper. It might have your obituary."
"As if anyone cared if it did," Kevin blurted out.
Michael turned half way round and looked at Kevin, his face changed.
"That bad?" he asked, looking surprisingly sympathetic.
Kevin opened his mouth, but didn't know what to say. He looked down at his feet as his face turned red.
"Well, at least a newspaper landing in your face hasn't sent you to your reward," said Michael. “Try not to die right away. Milton will look a lot better if you live long enough to paint a mural of a burning lion or something for our downtown district."
Kevin's jaw dropped. He had never thought that a boy like Michael would look at a children's art exhibit, let alone remember anything in it.
“You—liked it?” Kevin asked, his voice weak.
“Sure,” Michael replied with a shrug as he sauntered off to Mrs. Lear's house next door. There, he took the trouble to put her paper inside the door.
Kevin stopped to unroll the paper and glance at the headlines, heedless of the snow forming wet splotches on the paper. It seemed there was always violent riot somewhere and peace negotiations breaking down somewhere else. Kevin leafed through the rest of the paper and found a postcard in front of the Arts and Leisure section. To his surprise, the card was addressed to him. Had the paper gotten confused with the mail? Kevin stuffed the paper inside the door where his sister or mother would find it if they wanted it, and then started down the street towards the library, postcard in hand.
Michael, having now finished his paper route, was walking towards him. As he passed, Kevin felt a gentle tug on one arm. He looked back, but Michael was already walking on, disappearing in the snow that was falling harder. Kevin's eyes lingered in that direction, taking in the steeple of St. John's Episcopal Church. It felt strange to live under the shadow of a church and never enter it. The priest and his family were good neighbors, but Kevin didn't go out of his way to see them. Fr. Clement had been kind enough never to urge him to go to church, but there was no telling when that might change.
Kevin turned his eyes to the postcard. It was written in a fine handwriting such as he had never seen before. Curious, Kevin flipped the card over and read:
Dear Kevin the Weaver Painter,
Please accept this invitation to come to Carelin and paint a mural for our City Hall. I am thrilled with the work you are going to do. But don't lose yourself in your art or you'll lose your best work. If you don't understand what I mean, just remember what I said when you need to. Please pick one or two nice monsters to include in the painting.
The card was signed “Amarilla.”
Kevin’s first thought was that this was Michael Bullinger’s idea of a joke. He had never met a person named Amarilla in his life, so how could she be sending him a postcard out of the blue? And where was Carelin? If Amarilla wasn’t even willing to tell him where Carelin was, he could hardly be expected to go there and paint the mural for their city hall. Kevin stuffed the card inside his pocket and continued his way to the library. On the way, he bought a couple of candy bars and devoured them for his supper.
With several hills in Milton to climb on the way, and the snow falling harder by the minute, Kevin was out of breath by the time he reached what was becoming his home, an old Carnegie library built soon after the turn of the century. The building was almost enough to make Kevin forgive Carnegie for earning so much money. The east side of the library was still covered with scaffolding where they had started and then stopped building a new wing. Kevin was beginning to wonder if the scaffolding was the only new wing the library was going to get. With high unemployment eroding Milton's tax base, the city had run out of money for financing the project and it had been put on hold, along with everything else worthwhile.
Kevin set his reflections on the town's economy aside and slipped into the library. Marvella Anderson, the head librarian, sat at the check-out desk, talking with a woman Kevin did not recognize. The silver-haired librarian was wearing a dark green dress that exhibited the simple good taste in clothing that made Marvella such a comfortable person for Kevin. The librarian interrupted her conversation to wave at Kevin. Kevin waved back.
"When are you going to bring your sleeping bag with you?" asked the librarian.
"Don't know. Can I?"
"We'll have to see. I suppose I could let you spend the night here if the police don't think the library staff has kidnaped you and held you for ransom until the city pays for the rest of the building project.”
Kevin almost smiled.
"All right with me—if you feed me chocolate donuts twice a day and let me copy pictures from every book in the library. Mother and Karen can send postcards if they want."
Marvella's face registered some concern.
“Do you promise to send postcards back to them?" Marvella asked.
"Might."
“You know,” said Marvella, “Your mother tries really hard to be a part of your life.”
“Thanks for the news,” replied Kevin.
He thought he saw, out of the corner of his eye, the librarian’s face cloud over, but Kevin was not interested in dwelling on that. He shuffled over to the drinking fountain to wash down the chocolate bars he had just consumed. While there, he overheard a snatch of conversation between Marvella Anderson and her friend.
"Sometimes I wish that some of the monsters in our books would come alive and devour the city fathers who keep all the money to themselves while the new wing waits," said Marvella.
"At least Herbert Simpson got his comeuppins," the other woman replied.
"He was the smallest of the small fry. All his jail sentence accomplished was the deprivation of a father for Scott and a husband for Harriet.”
“I hate to say this, but I doubt if Harriet feels deprived by Herbert’s absence.”
“But I’m sure Scott misses his father. If there's a child in Milton who doesn't deserve to have a father in jail, it's Scott."
“If this snow keeps up, we might all be stuck here,” said the other woman.
“The funny thing about it, though,” said Marvella, “is that no snow was predicted for today or tonight.”
“Then surly that’s why it’s snowing,” said the other.
Kevin climbed up the narrow spiral staircase to the second floor and headed for the history section. He liked the history section of the library, not for the history the books, but because the cramped area gave him the feeling he was exploring a cave. If nothing else, he could count on finding pictures of knights in shining armor or ruined castles to copy. The floor was made of thick opaque glass that cast a dim, weird glow up to his face. The east wall was knocked out for the sake of the new wing and a plastic covering was all that protected the books from the outside elements. When he looked at a book, Kevin preferred to squint in the dark rather than let the harsh light bulbs ruin the effect of being in a cave. It turned out, however that Mark Clement, the priest’s son, was in his way with a trolley filled with books.
"Here, let me pull this over a little more," said Mark when he saw Kevin trying to squeeze through what space was left.
"I can make it," Kevin replied, but the truth was he was pinned against the wall until Mark managed to maneuver the trolley between a pair of stacks to make enough room.
"What do you want to draw this time?" Mark asked.
"Something medieval or something."
"Two shelves down from here," Mark replied.
"I know my way around."
"If you know your way around so well," said Mark, "How come you look so lost?"
"I don't know," said Kevin with a shrug.
He didn't feel much like talking. Mark, a tall, slender, fair-haired youth in the high school, radiated the virtue of a preacher's kid planning on following in his father's footsteps. Kevin found him mildly irritating, yet there was something comforting and solid about the cheerful youth.
Once he had buried himself in the history section, Kevin felt he had left the world behind him. The wind blowing hard against the plastic increased the spooky effect of his little corner. He picked up a medieval book that had inspired some drawings before but this time, he found nothing of interest. He left the book on the end of the shelf for Mark to put away and browsed further.
The light in the library started to brighten a little and Kevin came along an odd-looking bookcase. As for the books, they were unlike anything Kevin had ever seen before. Most of them were oversize with ornate golden lettering on the spines. Some of the books looked so frail that they might disintegrate if Kevin as much as touched them. Most, however, appeared to be in good repair. The floor felt strange to his feet, almost like a cobbled sidewalk. Looking down, Kevin saw a clever floor design that appeared to be another shelf of books. Clever as that was, it seemed to be a hazard for pedestrians. Concluding that this was a new room for storing rare books, Kevin wondered why Marvella Anderson had not said anything about it. Laying such questions to the side, Kevin took one large book bound in leather off the shelf. That’s when he realized that the shelf itself was made up of books. Kevin shook his head, wondering what Marvella Anderson was up to in allowing this state of affairs and lugged the book over to a table. He watched his step to keep from stumbling over the book-shaped floor. The table, too, turned out to be made out of an oversize book. Kevin thought of opening that book but was afraid of what might happen if he knocked it over by a mistake. The wooden chair Kevin sat in fit his body very well, a pleasing contrast to the uncomfortable chairs that were his usual fare in the library. A large chandelier lit the room. To Kevin’s amazement, it was lit by kerosene.
Kevin turned his attention to the book. The large gold letters on the front cover were recognizable as letters in the English alphabet with a few variations, but it was printed in a language Kevin had never seen before. When he opened the book, Kevin could not believe his eyes. On each page, he saw colorful pictures filled with swirls that twisted themselves into animal faces. The text was all carefully written out by hand but Kevin could not read any of it. That was no problem. It was the drawings that interested him. He wished he had thought to bring his colored pens, but he hadn't. He wasn't about to run home and take the chance of going through another wrangle with Karen about worthless details in life.
Kevin studied the design on the page before him. Enmeshed in the swirls was a golden-colored lion, poised to leap out of the swirls around it. At first, Kevin wasn't sure if the lion was planning a playful leap or a malicious attack. In such cases, Kevin let his pencil answer the question. He copied the lion carefully, while giving his pencil free reign to define the character of the beast. When he had finished sketching, Kevin looked at what he had done. The lion was ready to pounce on somebody, preferably Karen. Then Kevin thought that the idea of the lion pinning his mother to the ground and making her promise to spend some time at home was appealing. And then there was Kevin’s father. Maybe this lion could search the halls of nowhere and find the father who thought he could hide from his son. Before he knew it, Kevin had sketched the frightened face of his father wrapped inside a lion's paw.
Feeling stronger, Kevin turned the page of the book and saw the most beautiful picture he had ever seen. A harp formed the frame of golden swirls and animal heads. The harp strings exploded the boundary of the instrument and extended into the golden threads surrounding it. Kevin's head was spinning as he filled the next page of his sketch book before he even knew he was drawing it. He stopped a moment to compare his own drawing with the illustration in the book. He could not figure out how the small piece of paper had given him enough room to sketch as much as he had.
Kevin’s head began to feel feverish, as he immersed himself in the design, following each swirl that moved among the harp strings in and out of each animal head. As he drew, Kevin's eyes blurred with the strain until the picture began to swim in his head, but it never occurred to him to stop drawing. When the golden swirls began to look like rivers, Kevin drew little waves to heighten the effect. The swirl Kevin was following wrapped around the head of a boar with long, yellow tusks. As Kevin drew the animal, he added fire to the boar's eyes to make it look as if it could burn up his father just by looking at him. The more he drew, the more the boar's face swelled until Kevin was almost certain the animal was really standing over him on the library table. Dismissing the effect as an optical illusion, Kevin accelerated the pace of his drawing until he realized that the boar's eyes in the picture were now flashing with fire. Startled, Kevin stopped a moment. He could have sworn that the eyes in the book's drawing were not on fire when he started to draw them, but now they were, as if reflecting Kevin's interpretation of the animal.
Kevin decided on a rash experiment. He redrew the pair of tusks to make them much longer than they were in the picture. Gingerly, Kevin looked again at the picture. The tusks in the original had grown as long as Kevin’s own drawing. Kevin's hands began to shake, but he did not stop drawing. He redrew the boar's mouth to give it a more menacing shape. As if reacting to his drawing, an animal grunted menacingly right behind his shoulder. Kevin jumped. There was no optical illusion about it now. The giant boar in the manuscript was pawing a golden harp string and staring at him.
Desperately, Kevin jumped into the golden stream on the page and swam away from the beast as hard as he could. The boar let out a loud bellow and ran along the shore, but it did not try to jump into the stream. Although Kevin felt that he was swimming in something, it did not feel like water and it did not make him wet. Already feeling tired, Kevin began to relax his efforts when the boar bellowed once again. Just when Kevin feared that he would collapse altogether, he realized that the stream was carrying him along, leaving the boar behind to roar in frustration. With his strength giving out, Kevin let the river do all the work. Once Kevin had stopped swimming, the stream became solid underneath his body. Soon he was no longer floating but lying on a moving hard floor as he heard the clickety-clack of train wheels and felt the motion of a train carriage.