Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell Page B

first stair, beneath the clock. The cat had somehow gotten hold of the stop screw—it must have fallen out of his pocket—and was batting it around.
    The feeling of arrival Nal was after kept receding like a charcoal line on bright water. This was not the time or the place but he kept picturing the gulls, screaming and wheeling in a vortex just beyond him, and he groaned and sped up his motions. “Don’t stop,” Vanessa said, and there was such a catch to her voice that Nal said, “I won’t, I won’t,” with real seriousness, like a parent reassuring a child. Although very soon, Nal could feel, he would have to.

Proving Up

    “Go tack up, Miles!” says Mr. Johannes Zegner of the Blue Sink Zegners, pioneer of the tallgrass prairie and future owner of 160 acres of Nebraska. In most weathers, I am permitted to call him Pa.
    “See if your mother’s got the Window ready. The Inspector is coming tonight. He’s already on the train, can you imagine!”
    A thrill moves in me; if I had a tail I would shake it. So I will have to leave within the hour, and ride quickly—because if the one-eyed Inspector really is getting off at the spur line in Beatrice, he’ll hire a stagecoach and be halfway to the Hox River Settlement by one o’clock; he could be at our farm by nightfall! I think Jesus Himself would cause less of a stir stepping off that train; He’d find a tough bunch to impress in this droughty place, with no water anywhere for Him to walk on.
    “Miles, listen fast,” Pa continues. “Your brother is coming—”
    Sure enough, Peter is galumphing toward us through the puddled glow of the winter wheat. It came in too sparse this year to make a crop, wisping out of the sod like the thin blond hairs onPa’s hand. My father has the “settler’s scar,” a pink star scored into the brown leather of his palm by the handle of the moldboard plow. Peter’s got one, too, a raw brand behind his knuckles that never heals—and so will I when I prove up as a man. (As yet I am the Zegner runt, with eleven years to my name and only five of those West; I cannot grow a beard any quicker than Mr. Johannes can conjure wheat, but I can
ride
.)
    Pa kneels low and clasps his dirt-colored hands onto my shoulders. “Your brother is coming, but it’s you I want to send to our neighbors in need. Boy, it’s
you
. I trust you on a horse. I know you’ll tend to that Window as if it were your own life.”
    “I will, sir.”
    “I just got word from Bud Sticksel—you got two stops. The Inspector’s making two visits. The Florissants and then the Sticksels. Let’s pray he keeps to that schedule, anyhow, because if he decides to go to the Sticksels first …”
    I shiver and nod, imagining the Sticksels’ stricken faces in their hole.
    “The Sticksels don’t have one shard of glass. You cannot fail them, Miles.”
    “I know, Pa.”
    “And once they prove up, you know what to do?”
    “Yes, Pa. This time I will—”
    “You take the Window back. Bundle it in burlap. Get Bud’s wife to help. Then you push that Inspector’s toes into stirrups—do unto others, Miles—and you bring that man to our door.”
    “But what if the Inspector sees me reclaiming the Window from Mr. Sticksel? He’ll know how we fooled him. Won’t he cancel their title?”
    Pa looks at me hard, and I can hear the gears in his head clicking. “You want to be a man, don’t you, Miles?”
    “Yes, sir. Very much.”
    “So use your wits, son. Some sleight of hand. I can’t think of everything.”
    Increasingly time matters. I can feel it speeding up in my chest, in rhythm with my pounding heart. A flock of cliff swallows lifts off the grassy bank of our house, and my eyes fly with them into the gray light.
    “Hey,” says Peter. He comes up behind me and shovels my head under his arm—he smells sour, all vinegary sweat and bones. “What’s this fuss?”
    So Pa has to explain again that when the sun next rises, we’ll have our autographed title.