took him under his arms.
She didn’t really feel like seeing his slobbery cryface, so she put him on her lap on his still-diapered bottom. She held him with his back against her chest and curled herself over him like an oyster shell over a pearl. No, she thought, Marcus is more like a slimy oyster than like a pearl.Softly she started to sing the lullabies she’d heard Kitt sing to her all her life at bedtime—Brahms’s Lullaby, “All the Pretty Little Horses,”“Good Night, Irene,” and a pretty Russian one about a little birch tree sleeping in a meadow.
“Na polye beryozhaya stoyala . . .”
"наполеберйожаястояла
наполеберёжаязасыпала. . ."
Marcus’s breath got softer, less ragged. Without needing to look, Edith could feel that Kitt and her stormy rage had gone back inside.
Sometimes at night in bed, if she glazed over her eyes and made the ordinary world get thin like a photograph, and then breathed softly to create a dizzy feeling beneath her breastbone, she was able to float effortlessly off her bed and fly all around her room and in and out the windows. She liked to fly this way when everyone, all the people, birds, and animals, was asleep. She’d never tried to fly outside, unless she counted the time the tornado took her, and had never tried to with Marcus in her arms, but just now she really wanted to. So she pressed her nose and lips softly but firmly into the tender, tangy-with-baby-sweat back of Marcus’s neck. He had stopped sobbing and was merely snuffling. She began to hum softly so that the sound made an ever-so-slight buzz in her nose and in his neck. She could feel her bones and her brother’s bones begin to resonate together. The tune she hummed was a song she had heard on a Mahalia Jackson record of Kitt's:
When I die
Hallelujah bye and bye
I’ll fly away.
Edith didn’t think that dying was required for flying away. You just half-closed and unfocused your eyes and hummed. Soon shapes began to dissolve in the air, and she and Marcus still looked the same but they were as weightless and translucent as the puffballs on dandelion stalks that she liked to blow away after she made a wish. She and Marcus lifted into the air light as bubbles. They floated gently up from the Crying Rock, up above the big ash tree where her swing was, and soon they were high up among the spinning stars of the young summer evening.
“Star bright, star light, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might have the wish I wish tonight,” she said under her breath. Edith was tempted to make a wish to be turned into a fairy, so that she could fly whenever she wanted to, and so she could go live in fairyland, which was located, she believed, near Neverland, beyond the sea, first star to the right and straight on till morning. But just before she flew out over the sea toward Neverland, she started to feel scared. She started to worry that Kitt and Arthur would be terribly sad— heartbroken—if she didn’t come back. The picture in her mind of their sad faces was too painful to bear. So instead of asking to be a fairy, she wished for a pony again and wheeled away from the sparkling stars in the now black sky. Holding Marcus securely in her arms, she swept them down through the cool evening air, following a lonely raven looking for its nighttime roost, toward the farmhouse. The gray cedar-shingled roof looked the same as always, but it was somehow as perfectly transparent as a soap bubble or an invisible shield, and she was able to look right down into the kitchen. Kitt was stretched out on the old brown couch by the pantry, lying with her head on Uncle Edwin’s lap, her clasped hands holding her drink on her bosom. She looked only a little bit sad. She might not have realized yet that her children had flown away. Arthur was playing his fiddle and singing “Kevin Barry gave his young life in the cause of liberty” in his clear baritone voice. His Chesterfield cigarette was propped at the edge of the table, a long ash on its end. The table’s enamel edge had many scorch marks from forgotten cigarettes. Uncle Edwin softly rubbed Kitt’s ear between his thumb and forefinger in time to the music.
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