Moses LeShirley
– THE GOOD PEOPLE

I must say it all before I forget it. That will happen soon; such things happen when you’re old, and somewhere along the way I seem to have gotten old. There is a thought children have, that getting old must be some sort of mistake. Maybe you’ve thought it too—maybe, like me, not even so long ago. Some people hold onto this thought very late in life, right up until they realize they have themselves somehow made that very mistake.

But I am often mistaken, and about much more than that.

*    *    *

My eyesight was very poor when I was a little child: a mysterious problem, for no spectacles fixed it. I was always mixing up one thing for another: up-close and faraway things, plants and animals, strangers and friends. I’d like to say that my other senses made up for the lack, the way such things are supposed to go, but it wouldn’t be true; I was no more one for hearing than for vision, and even less for understanding. When I was very young, I mistook my mother for a happy woman; later in my boyhood, I believe I managed to mistake her for an unhappy one.

The disappearance of my father from our lives, or of us from his, was the event that held place between these two cases of mistaken identity. He was called off to the war—the Second World War, which even those who had called the first one The Great War couldn’t call anything good. When he went off to Europe, my mother fled with me from the city to the town of Stevens, in New England, many miles away from him and everything I might have come to mistake him for.

Stevens was then a quiet place, on the edge of the great forest that men call by the same name; and the simplicity of the town was in stark contrast to the forest neighboring it. Stevens Wood was a weird, mythical-seeming place—a place where you would not be surprised to hear snatches of laughter or strange sorrow from out of the dark behind the giant trees, or see little Cheshire grins flashing in the high leaves. Indeed there were sounds you often heard from inside the forest: never the voices of animals or men, but low groans, like the deep creaking a tree might make before it falls; and it was part of the lore of that place that first the forest, and then the town, had taken their name not from any man called Steven, but from an old word for voice. Even the trees themselves appeared to change a little every time you saw them—but that was an impression which, at the time, I was able to put down to my eyesight too.

To any eyes, our new house was not so pretty. It had bits of patchy, underwatered yard both in front and behind, and three floors: a ground floor in the middle, the top floor above it, and the basement below. The top floor was where my mother’s bedroom was: a lofty and open expanse. The ground floor opened out onto our front entrance and front yard, but the whole house was built on the slope of a hill, so though the front half of the basement was underground, the back end stood aboveground, and opened onto the backyard. This yard, as ugly as the front one, went about thirty or forty feet downhill from the house, and ended at the edge of Stevens Wood, and that was very black, for past the first row of trees, you couldn’t see ten feet in front of you.

Such was my regular view, if you want to call it that. My bedroom occupied the back half of the basement, and I had two windows that looked out onto the backyard and the forest. The hallway that terminated with our back door lay just outside my room; and just outside of that on either side were two great bushes of frowsy grey lilacs, which to my eyes looked like crowds of people draped all over with drab, holey cloth. I always hurried past those bushes to get in and out, though it was not so much from fear that I did so.

These details I provide for a reason, though I don’t expect you to remember them.

*    *    *

I was not afraid of much then, you know. Many times when I thought I was afraid, I’d soon realize that what I was afraid of was in fact some very normal object, and so I had come into the habit of assuming, whenever I saw something off-putting, that I was simply seeing something ordinary in a wrong way. The case was otherwise with my mother, who was terrified of my father finding us, and saw him around every corner. I think that must have been why she always forbid me to go into Stevens Wood. But it was a silly, selfish fear, for it never called her outside of her own concerns. She certainly never gave a second thought to the Good People, though I found out about them early on.

That happened when I was about eleven. I say about eleven because my age in those before-times is another of the things I am no longer able to remember; but I believe that’s how old Iris was too, and I met her the very same day. That day, I can still remember pretty well.

I had, at the time, a largish doll called Bun. I had set Bun down somewhere the night before, I did not remember where, and I was looking for him in my room when I heard a sound outside, in the backyard. It was late morning then, and my mother was nowhere to be found. When I looked out the window, I saw Bun lying in an odd position on the far side of the yard, by where the grass sloped down to meet the first row of trees. He was sort of crumpled on the ground, with his head turned away.

I went to open the door, but then stopped, having had the sudden realization that I had not left Bun lying there—that I had never brought him to that spot to play with at all. Perhaps my mother had thrown him out there, I thought; but rather much seemed to be wrong with that idea, too.

While I stood there at the window, wondering how Bun had come to be in the place he was, suddenly his back straightened and he turned his face toward me, and at once I was aware that it was not Bun I was seeing at all, but a real person. This gave me quite a surprise. But that was not all; for I then saw that the person was very strange-looking too, not quite like anyone I had ever seen before. He was small, almost as small as I was, but even to my poor eyes his face was very old-looking, with lines all around his eyes and mouth. Once we’d had a good look at each other he got up to his full height, such as it was, and seemed to say something very quickly before he moved away, again very quickly, the way a child moves. When he did, I saw that he was wearing a mismatched and soiled outfit of child’s clothing, which again, was a startling thing; but I did feel sorry for that little boy, that he should look so old. Then he went off into the forest, and I returned to my search for Bun, though I never found him.

Later that afternoon, when my mother was there, I wanted to tell her about what I had seen, and ask her where Bun was. But my timing was very bad, for she was welcoming over a good friend of hers, a man friend whom, as it happened, I had never heard of. The man friend arrived with his little daughter Iris, who was no more interested in being introduced to me than I was in being introduced to her. But this, of course, was our fate.

Iris is your age, my mother confided to me.

And Oliver is your age, said Iris’s father to Iris, as though we were in separate rooms, and not two feet from one another.

Iris’s father and I will talk over some grown-up things this afternoon, my mother explained. Why don’t you go and show Iris your toys? This, however, made me remember Bun; and already being hopelessly embarrassed in front of pretty Iris, I blurted out the whole tale of my encounter. When I had done so, my mother and her friend both laughed, though the man had something else to say afterward.

It sounds as though you’ve seen one of the Good People—doesn’t it? he said to Iris, whose blue eyes were very wide.

Who are the Good People? my mother asked.

It’s what Iris calls her imaginary friends, the man friend explained. They have something to do with Mr. Lockwood—though he’s real. I wonder if he’s who your son saw.

When I proved unable to satisfy them on this point, my mother told her friend she was as yet unaware who Mr. Lockwood was; and he explained that it was a very old man called Florian Lockwood whom everyone knew of, and who went around near the woods here. He was harmless, the friend said; only, his age was frightening to some of the children, and he was a bit out of his senses—though God only knew he had every reason to be that.

And then my mother asked him what had happened to Mr. Lockwood, and her man friend smiled, and asked if I wouldn’t be bothered by it. And when she said I was very adult for my age, and very brave, he smiled again and said it wouldn’t bother Iris either, who had her own theories about the whole thing. But the long and the short of it, he said, was that a few years ago, Mr. Lockwood had had a little son, even younger than we were, and one day Mr. Lockwood was away somewhere late into the afternoon, and someone else had come up out of the woods who looked just like him, and offered to give Mr. Lockwood’s little boy a piggy-back ride; and when the boy got up onto his back, the person went off with him into the woods, and he was never seen again. My mother said that was a terrible thing, and the man friend agreed; in fact, he couldn’t see how the old man had stayed in Stevens, after experiencing something so terrible.

The whole thing disturbed my mother. I don’t like to think of him traipsing through our yard, she said; Oliver, point out where you saw him—and the four of us went downstairs to my bedroom and looked out the window, and Iris and I gasped; but my mother and her man friend only laughed again.

There, out on the grass, exactly where I thought I’d seen him before, was Bun.

*    *    *

The sequel can be imagined, but I will not make you imagine it. Once Bun was retrieved, with many a comment on my credibility, I was left to entertain Iris while the adults took their visit upstairs. Her eyes were bright and keen, and made me nervous; but when her father had gone, she was friendlier. While I was showing her around, I asked her what her father had said she called them, the people we were talking about, and she said they were called the Good People.

And they aren’t my imaginary friends, she said. They’re neither of those things, in fact. But I believe you did see one, she added.

After my disgrace with the adults, this was comforting to me, and I wanted to talk to her more. So I asked her why that name especially, and what was so good about them.

Nothing, she said; it’s just what they’re called. I think it’s only something to call them that won’t make them angry.

I asked her if that was why they took the old man’s son—were they angry with him?

Maybe, she said. You never know, with them. But that wasn’t what happened anyway. My dad’s stupid to say that. Think about it, she went on. If they’d carried off Mr. Lockwood’s son, and he was away when they took him, how would he have known that the person looked just like him, or that they carried off his son on their back, or any of that?

Iris, it seemed, was much brighter than I. But when I asked her what then had happened with Mr. Lockwood and his son, she only looked around my room.

Do you have any animals to play with? she asked.

Of course I did, and we played together a while, only once interrupted by a noise upstairs. It was a sound I’d never heard, and could not understand; to me it sounded closest to shouting, as though our parents were arguing heatedly about something, though I could not make out any of the words in their peculiar vocalizations. Worried, I mentioned this to Iris, and she snickered.

You are simple, she said. Let’s go outside.

So we went outside, and down to the edge of the trees. As we walked toward them, she put a hand on my arm and whispered: Don’t go in there.

Oh no, I said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world; and in truth, though I hadn’t thought of it until that moment, I had never taken even a step into Stevens Wood—not even the little part of it that our property bordered upon. The two of us stood looking into the shifting darkness of the forest, two little lighthouse-keepers staring out at a raging sea, and its low groaning was like the roar of waves.

Have you ever noticed the trees here never look the same? Iris asked.

And of course I had noticed that. But in my usual way, I had always assumed my eyes were to blame; and so it was a very strange mixture of emotions that I felt when Iris asked me this question, and I could only nod in response. Perhaps out of consideration for me, perhaps listening for something else that only she could hear, Iris remained silent also. But after a minute, she’d had enough looking.

Come on, she said, I think our parents may be done arguing.

*    *    *

Iris came over many more times with her father over the following months, and we became very close. I think she was the only person I knew who didn’t make me feel lonely to be around. We often stayed over at one another’s houses; hers was much nicer, and nowhere near the woods, though as much in absence of a mother as mine was of a father. Sometimes we were even left alone, to keep each other company for the better part of an evening while our parents caught up somewhere, as the two of them always called it. They certainly had a lot of catching up to do, those adults in their second spring; and often we would be asleep by the time they came downstairs to rouse us, with barely the energy to say goodnight to one another as Iris’s father carried her out over his arm.

The Good People were the ever-present backdrop to our friendship. I never saw them in those days myself, but Iris did; and it was when she and I were together, as she told me, that the signs of them became most frequent. She described their silhouettes among the trees, strange in the cast-off clothes they had stolen from whatever corner of our world they had last ventured into: swimming trunks, pajamas, baggy suits and uniforms. Mostly the clothes were children’s clothes, which hardly fit them; and more than once, Iris and I left out some of our parents’ things that we felt sure would not be missed. She told me other people left other things: a boy in our school left out cat food for them; an elegant old lady gave them jewels. If the Good People appreciated or even understood these offerings, we never knew it; but that didn’t matter to us.

Still, I wanted to know more about them than Iris could teach me, and so I turned to books. Oh, books! There I learned that Good People was what is called a euphemism—a nice nickname for something, used to avoid calling it what it is, and saying something nasty about it. Euphemisms were a part of many beliefs; the Furies had been such a thing to the Greeks, who called them the Kindly Ones to avoid making them angry. As for the Furies, so for the Good People; though what disaster the name averted in their case, neither Iris nor my books could tell me.

Nor did Iris and I ever tell our parents about what we knew. They would only have said we encouraged one another’s belief, and that would have been true; only, no more than the two of them encouraged one another’s belief in whatever they had to catch up on. But we didn’t resent them that, for whenever they were enjoying their pastimes, they left us alone with ours—with the sights Iris saw, and described to me, and with other games and explorations besides, which, nearsighted as I was, we were able to discover together.

*    *    *

One night, past bedtime, there came a noise outside my window.

What was that? Iris hissed with a shiver, pulling her nightdress down to cover her knees; and we sat up in the dark, and listened. Outside the window, as it seemed from within the lilacs, there came a rustling, and I thought of the grey faces I’d seen crowded there—the wide eyes and enormous grins of people who may or may not have been there.

Is it them? I asked. And just then we heard an urgent whispering outside, a breathy sound like the voice of a man, who was then pushing out of the lilacs like I imagined, and walking toward the treeline. I could hardly believe I was seeing him, but I could hear him too. It wasn’t, he was saying apologetically; it wasn’t, it wasn’t—and this unmeaning phrase, spoken to himself in a tone of almost childish explanation, frightened me more than anything I had heard or seen so far.

It’s him, said Iris, it’s Florian Lockwood—and I squinted out the window to see; though as it happened, I did not need to squint. Now out of the lilacs, he was gigantic in the window, grey-haired and bearded, the matted hair like leaves around his teeth. His back was mostly to us; and his face, the little part of it I could see, had the same odd appearance as that of the boy I’d seen in the backyard, both youthful and old, with wet staring eyes. Around his shoulders was draped a very large blanket, whose ends were trailing on the ground behind him. His legs were bare beneath it, and on his feet were two different kinds of shoe—but though I might ordinarily have laughed to see someone looking like that, there was nothing funny about him.

Iris only looked a moment, then ducked down from the window, hissing to me again. It’s all right, I whispered, he hasn’t seen us, he’s going away. For the form of Florian Lockwood was moving away toward the forest edge, his nonsensical it wasn’t echoing over his shoulder.

The others, Iris said simply.

And then I saw them too: the shapes of a handful of other people, who had crowded at the edge of the trees and stood watching the old man walking toward them across the lawn. They were too far away for me to see their faces well, but I could see enough to tell that they were all talking quietly too, and one or two of them were staring out in my direction. But what an odd look that little party seemed to have!—as though they were all in separate rooms, talking to themselves.

And then something else happened, which I must tell before I forget.

As Florian Lockwood got near the trees, the other Good People moved absently to one side to let him pass, and one of them accidentally stood on one end of the blanket he was wearing, and it began to pull back from his shoulders. Apparently not understanding what was happening, poor Mr. Lockwood did not stop walking, and for an instant there was a little tug-of-war as he held onto the other end of the stretched blanket. Then he stepped into the shadows beyond the first tree, and I blinked, for it was as if he’d disappeared: the shadows seemed to have swallowed him up completely. But whatever happened to him, he must have released his end of the blanket soon thereafter, for it snapped back out like a rubber-band, falling to a heap at the feet of the one who had stepped on it.

The other Good People looked foolishly down at the blanket, each with his own concerns about it, and I ducked down to join Iris; and she and I hid under my bed, expecting any minute to hear their quiet, rustling talk at the window. They never came, but neither of us slept a wink that night either. And in the morning, when we went out to get rid of the blanket, we found one corner of it brown with moss and mushroom-caps.

*    *    *

After that, Iris was uneasy in my house, and we always made certain to lock the basement door and draw the shades down over the window at night. She wasn’t conscious of any ill designs on the Good People’s part; she said they never seemed to know what they were doing, much less to plan ahead for it. But then, that was the trouble with them. Wolves and bears aren’t bad either, Iris would say, very sagely. They just want what they want, and it sometimes happens to be something other than what we want.

But now there is only the one thing to tell, and I will be happier when I have forgotten it.

It was one of those chill nights in the early part of the year, when spring strangely resembles winter. Our parents had left us alone again, and though we were meant to be asleep already, we had stayed up talking as we often did. Our talk did not always turn to the Good People and their mysteries; but on this fateful evening, it had.

What kind of a name is Florian Lockwood, anyway? I had asked her; for this question had been on my mind for some reason.

What sort of a name does it sound like to you? she asked back, with a yawn.

I said it sounded to me like a child’s name, and I heard Iris’s yawn turn into a soft laugh. But everyone is a child sometime, I added, feeling foolish.

Mr. Lockwood isn’t everyone, Iris said.

I asked her what she meant by that, and she sighed. Back when we saw him, she said, did he seem to you like a man who had ever had a son?

No, I admitted, thinking of the oddly childish tone of his voice, so distant from even my vague idea of fatherliness.

Well, that’s because he never did have a son.

She seemed very certain of this. What was it that made him so crazy, then? I asked.

Going into the forest, she said. Being around them. I don’t know how it works. All I know is, Mr. Lockwood never had a child who was taken away.

What makes you so sure of that? I said.

She turned her back to me under her covers. Because, she said, Mr. Lockwood is the child who was taken away.

I lay for a while, puzzling over that. How could he be, when he was so old? It didn’t add up to me. But by the time I finally asked her, Iris was already falling asleep, so I lay staring at the blackness for a while.

After I don’t know how long, I heard the sound of our front door upstairs, opening and closing. My mother was home—which I knew when, after some poking around in the kitchen, her footsteps could be heard ascending the stairs to her room. I waited for her footsteps and Iris’s father’s to come back down the stairs as always, but they never did. The two of them must be catching up, I thought; perhaps with one of their night-caps. But more time passed, and nothing. I thought of waking Iris, but by now she was sleeping so peacefully; and anyway her father would soon be down to carry her away, and so I left her alone. But the thought of our parents drinking made me thirstier and thirstier, and anyway I was nowhere near sleep; so eventually I crept up the basement stairs to the kitchen, leaving Iris where she was.

I’d got my glass of water and was about to head back down the stairs again when I heard a stirring above, followed by the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs. It only sounded like one person, but I felt sure of the drinking now: the footsteps were moving down the stairs quickly, and behind their rapid thudding I could hear my mother babbling something in a high voice to her friend. It was not usual for me to be upstairs at this time of night, and I was worried I’d surprise my mother and frighten her when she came around the corner into the kitchen. So I opened my mouth to announce myself. But this never happened, for the figure that came around the corner was not my mother.

To this day I don’t know who it was. The limbs were too long for the bathrobe it was wearing, which anyway was not my mother’s bathrobe. It had a wide, ratty wig on, and was wearing it the wrong way, so that it covered the wearer’s face. From under this covering came the voice I had heard, strangely small for the size of the person, and saying nothing I could understand. It groped in front with its hands, shoving the basement door open and pausing at the top of them; and then, with sudden decision, it rushed down the steps and out of sight.

I soon felt a wet chill spreading around my feet, for I had dropped my water glass. The feeling roused me to a horrible thought, and I ran down the basement stairs, trying in vain to call out to my friend. But the back door was already swinging closed, rattling against the doorframe, and through the gap I glimpsed the sleeping Iris, her hand clutching the back of the figure familiarly as it ran with her toward the treeline. Hers was the trusting hand of a sleepy child, and I imagine she only thought it was her father who carried her. As for who it thought she was, I’m sure I will never know.

But I knew she was my Iris, and so I ran after her, out the door and across the lawn. I felt hands reaching and pawing at me as I passed, and laughter mingled with the deep groaning of the woods ahead; a woman’s voice called out from the lilacs, and I knew it was me she was calling, though she used a different name from mine. But there was no time for that now. The figure was crossing the threshold of the forest, and a moment later I crossed after it.

And here was something else: inside the forest the air was warm, as though I had run into a great lightless house. The soil was soft and warm under my bare feet, too, and I gave chase as best I could. But the figure that carried my friend was much taller and swifter than I was, and soon I could no longer hear the twigs cracking under its long feet, or even the babbling of its voice in the dark, and I gave up running. I walked for a while, listening for any sound of Iris or her taker; and with my eyesight as it was, and the darkness of the forest all around, I was soon lost.

Yet I found it was not unpleasant to walk in that forest, even on and on. The trees were not at all so changeful now, and the low groaning sounds were gone, too. Rather, they had become different sounds altogether; for though I did not understand it at first, I was hearing those noises now as they really were, not yet slowed and deepened in their passage over to the world outside: little bits of self-directed chatter, and every now and then an outburst of laughter, or angry shouting, or a high-pitched squeal of surprise, or a string of feverish questions. They were curious, mindless noises, made by things whose minds had long since left them—the Good People, encountering one another in the darkness of their wood.

I would encounter many of them, too, on my long walk that night: people of all descriptions and appearances, stealing through the trees, running in a panic or simply walking along like I was doing, until they bumped into someone else. Encounters and conversations, how many I couldn’t say! Most of those I met were looking for something themselves, and some of them pressed me into their search, months of misadventure as it felt, before I could get away. I saw people I knew, or thought I knew: my mother was there, riding piggyback on my father, and someone like Iris’s father came along too, in a wide white hat. Once I saw old Florian Lockwood, stumbling along with two others, and I found myself laughing, it was so like seeing an old friend. And more than once I even saw my Iris, running toward me in the darkness or curled up, smiling and bare-kneed, under a shadowed fern.

But like so many things, that was always a mistake of my eyes, and never really her; and though I searched that whole night long, Iris’s face was the first thing I knew I had forgotten.

*    *    *

I walked all night through that forest; and then, when I saw the sunrise through the trees, I began my long walk out.

When I emerged, it was to a part of Stevens that was unfamiliar to me. I walked all morning through the town, too, and most of the buildings were different from what I remembered; I saw a few people, and their clothing and looks were strange to me. But they looked at me as if I were the strange one—much the way that you have been doing—and so I wondered if, as always, it wasn’t me who was mistaken after all.

And when I found my house, it was all-over different too: so much so, I almost took it for another house altogether. The lilacs were gone, and the paint was new, and the front lawn was healthy now, and very welcoming. I felt sure I would find my mother that way too, angry but welcoming; but instead it was a very unwelcoming man who answered the door, whom I had never seen. His family, clustered like mushrooms, peeked out from behind him while he talked to me, peering into my face as if they all saw something very unusual there; and when I told the man I’d only gone looking for Iris all night, he would have closed the door in my face. But then I mentioned my mother by name, and asked where she was, and he caught the door.

She was your daughter? he asked me, and I laughed at that—a strange and innocent mistake, like so many I have made! But my laughter only made him angrier, and he asked me the same thing again; and when I told him I was her son, he did finally shut the door, saying as he did that it was some years ago she had sold the house and moved away, and that I’d better move on too—whoever I was.

I admit that was confusing, but no more so than anything else. I must have made some kind of mistake, that’s all.

And though I haven’t had a look at my own face yet, to see what it is you’ve all been peering at, still I think I have an idea now what I will see, and maybe I won’t find it so confusing when I do. For all I know, it’s better this way: a good thing, if only I take to using those words for it. And that can hardly be so difficult. After all, I’ve always mistaken one thing for another—and there is so little left for me to forget.