Some Sweet Mystery

Photo by Jordan Graff on Unsplash

I don’t know how old I was.  I know only that I still slept in a crib.  That doesn’t say much, though, because I slept in that crib until I was seven. Mommy said there was plenty of space in the crib for me but not much in the tiny bedroom in our four-room house for a bigger bed.  Anyway, I didn’t mind.  Cribs were for babies, of course, but my mother loved babies.

My crib sat tight against one wall, my brother’s big-boy bed on the wall opposite.  Will’s blue desk stood against the wall at the head of our beds. 

On this particular night, our mother had tucked us in, but instead of being good children and going right to sleep as we usually did, we began talking and giggling across the room.  (Willis, two years older, rarely honored me with his attention, so how could I resist?)

The door snapped open. “Go to sleep!” Mommy ordered.

Too enticing this fragile connection across the dark room. 

She loomed in the doorway again. 

The third time she was very cross.  “Turn over!  Both of you!” she commanded.  “Face the wall, and go to sleep!”

A spanking would have been far less cruel.  My mother had no way of knowing, but I never turned toward the blackness that was my wall in the daytime.  In the dark, it wasn’t even a wall.  In the dark, it became a vast open space that, if I so much as peeked into it, would suck me in and hold me forever.  Her order left no room for argument, though, so I turned toward the dreaded dark and squeezed my eyes shut.

Then I waited for the void to swallow me.

I don’t know how long I lay there, rigid, barely breathing, but I remember what happened next.  Every detail.  From across the room a sound … a clip-clopping … a rumble of wheels. 

Remember, I was a good girl, a truly good girl.  I always did what Mommy told me.  Almost always, anyway.  But you’ll understand, I’m sure, that I had no choice but to turn away from my punishment to peek.  And there they were, two enormous dapple-gray horses stepping through the window at the foot of Will’s bed! 

I knew those horses.  I loved those horses!  They were the ones I always ran to watch when they plodded by at the end of our mill street, pulling an old gray wagon, an old gray farmer hunched over the reins.

And here they were, horses and wagon and farmer, coming into Will’s and my room!  At first, they stayed along the wall behind Will’s bed, then along the wall at the top of the room, behind his blue desk, but once they passed the desk they turned and clip-clopped solemnly out onto the linoleum rug in the middle of the room … and pulled up right next to my crib! 

I wasn’t frightened.  Not even a little bit.  They were my horses, my farmer, my wagon!

But as wonderful as all that was, there was more.  The wagon, the entire wagon, was filled with children!  Lots and lots of children!  I had never seen children in the wagon before.  And would have noticed because I had few children in my life.

The children called to me.  “Come on, Marion.”

I came.  Whatever your mommy had ordered, wouldn’t you have done the same?  I climbed over the railing of my crib and, not even noticing that I was disobeying, I clambered into the wagon to join the calling children. 

Then came the best surprise of all.  The old gray farmer clucked to his horses, and they pulled the wagon around the end of my crib and into—straight into—the deep, deep dark of my wall. 

Which wasn’t a void at all! 

Tucked away inside the darkness I had thought only a vast hole, a playground waited.  Swings and teeter-totters and merry-go-rounds and a long glider that Will and I called a choo-choo. 

The farmer tugged the horses to a halt—“Whoa,” he said, “whoa!”—and all of us, all those children and me as well, scrambled out of the wagon and tumbled into the playground.

We played and played.  We played until the stars began to blink out and the first glimmer of light sifted through the trees.  Then the old farmer called, “Come, children,” and we came.  We climbed into the wagon, and the great, gray horses clip-clopped out of my wall and around the end of my crib and pulled to a stop in the middle of the linoleum rug. 

“Goodbye, Marion,” the children called. “Goodbye!” 

“Goodbye!” I called, and I climbed out of the wagon and over the railing and right back into my crib.

Then the gray horses and the gray wagon and the gray farmer and the children drove along the wall behind Will’s blue desk and along the other wall behind his bed and out the window, just as they had come in. 

And I lay down in my crib and went to sleep.

In the morning, I didn’t say a word to Mommy about where I had been.  Perhaps I didn’t want to confess to disobeying her command. Or maybe I knew she would disapprove of escaping my crib, running off with strange children, leaving her behind. 

Or it might be that I needed the horses, the children, the playground to be mine.  Only mine.

In any case, I never told a soul. 

Did I understand the concept of dreams?  Probably.  But I didn’t once think of what happened that night as a dream.  The horses and the wagon and the farmer, the children and the playground, all were as real to me as anything that ever happened in the world my mother fashioned to hold me close.  As real as the breakfast she set down in front of me in the morning, poached eggs, her favorite. As real as the fierce tugs of a comb in my thick hair, the hair she had decided to grow long.   As real as the velvet bonnets and ankle-high shoes, the kind babies wore, that she dressed me in year following year.

From that time on, though, once Mommy had tucked me into my crib and shut the door, I never giggled and whispered across the room with my brother.  Instead, I took a deep breath, steeled myself, and turned to face into the blackness that was my wall in the daytime.

It was terrifying still, that night wall.  But how else could I hope to see the horses and the wagon and the farmer …  and the children again?  Often, I woke the next morning to discover I had spoiled their coming by falling asleep.  But sometimes … sometimes they returned. 

And then I escaped once more into the playground in my wall.

Will it surprise you to know that, in all my long life, walls have never felt quite solid to me?  Or that, in all my long career, story after story has tumbled out in which some sweet mystery lies just on the other side of a magically permeable wall?