Ghost Boy by Iain Lawrence Page A

hands. The tractor pushed him back, his boots skidding in the mud. The engine roared and clattered, and it seemed the teeth would swallow him whole. He fell to his knees, got up, fell again. And then the roaring stopped.
    The farmer was crying. “She might be gone already. She hasn’t moved or said a word.” Rain hammered on his Stetson and his oilskins, and he hunched over his daughter, shoulders shaking with his sobs.
    Samuel climbed up and took the girl. He didn’t speak; he just lifted her from the farmer’s lap and carried her through the mud and the rain to the Gypsy Magda’s truck. And they all crowded inside it, the farmer in the doorway, as the Gypsy Magda lit her candles. “Open the blankets,” she said.
    Harold peeled them back. The girl was tiny, frail and very thin. Her eyes open, her lips apart, she seemed to be not quite alive and not quite dead, but somewhere in between, staring out from a lonely world.
    â€œOh, the poor thing,” said Tina. “The poor little thing.”
    â€œNo talking!” snapped the Gypsy Magda. “She must hear no words of pity.”
    The Gypsy Magda opened jars and stoneware pots. She ground powders in her palms, working in the candlelight with the din of rain against the roof. She muttered incantations as she stirred the powders into a paste, as she dabbed it lightly on the skin above the young girl’s lips. It smelled strongly, and sweetly, of meadows and trees, of mushrooms and earth. She moved her hands along the small body.
    â€œBreathe the world of the living,” she said, and touched more of the paste to the child’s lips. “Taste the earth, the plants.” She pressed little balls into the girl’s closed fists. “Feel the things you’ve left behind. Breathe and taste and feel. Breathe and taste and feel.”
    The Gypsy’s chant, the rain on the roof, were the only sounds. Her hands were all that moved. Then the child’s nostrils twitched, her eyelids fluttered, and the little fists closed tightly.
    â€œBreathe and taste and feel,” said the Gypsy Magda.
    Thunder rolled, and a gust of wind shook the truck. Rain misted through the doorway, past the farmer’s shoulders.
    â€œTake her hand,” the Gypsy Magda said to Harold. “Hold it tight and wish her better.”
    Harold did as he was told. The child’s skin was cold and dry, the fist like a bundle of roots in his hand. But he held it and he wished. He imagined her playing in a schoolyard, laughing with her friends.
    â€œAnd now we wait,” said the Gypsy Magda.

Chapter
    20
    T he child died, or so the Gypsy Magda said. She died and then returned from the land of the dead to the land of the living. The small eyes closed and opened, and a smile came to her lips. She looked at Harold and asked, “Are you an angel?”
    â€œI believe he is,” the Gypsy Magda said. “Yes, I believe that he is.”
    They settled the child into a nest of pillows, then traveled east, the way they had come, down a road that was thick with mud. The Gypsy Magda drove, with the farmer shouting directions, with Harold squeezed between them. From the back of the truck came laughter as Samuel and Tina and the child lolled on the Gypsy’s cushions.
    â€œTurn here,” shouted the farmer.
    The truck slowed and swung to the left, up a narrow lane toward a farmhouse in a field. Again the child laughed, and the farmer smiled. “She seems well,” he said. “I cannot thank you enough.”
    â€œYou must never talk of what was done,” the Gypsy Magda said. “You must never ask her where she was or what she saw.”
    The farmer nodded. He fiddled with the Stetson that he held now in his lap, bending the brim into curves. “I am a patient man,” he said. “A good man, I believe. But I would not have answered such rudeness as I showed you with the kindness that you gave.”
    â€œIt was