Old Lady gathered wood in the deep forest, feeling his eyes weaseling on her spine. She wanted to babble: «Oh, I see you, I see you! I was only fooling about invisible boys! You 're right there!» But she swallowed her gall and gummed it tight.
The following morning he did the spiteful thing. He began leaping from behind trees. He made toad-faces, frog-faces, spider-faces at her, clenching down his lips with his fingers, popping his raw eyes, pushing up his nostrils so you could peer in and see his brain thinking.
Once she dropped, her kindling. She pretended it was a blue jay startled her.
He made a motion as if to strangle her.
She trembled a little.
He made another move as if to bang her shins and spit on her cheek.
These motions she bore without a lid-flicker or a mouth-twitch.
He stuck out his tongue, making strange bad noises. He wiggled his loose ears so she wanted to laugh, and finally she did laugh and explained it away quickly by saying, «Sat on a salamander! Whew, how it poked!»
By high noon the whole madness boiled to a terrible peak.
For it was at that exact hour that Charlie came racing down the valley stark boy-naked!
Old Lady nearly fell flat with shock!
«Charlie!» she almost cried.
Charlie raced naked up one side of a hill and naked down the other — naked as day, naked as the moon, raw as the sun and a newborn chick, his feet shimmering and rushing like the wings of a low-skimming hummingbird.
Old Lady's tongue locked in her mouth. What could she say? Charlie, go dress? For shame? Stop that? Could she? Oh, Charlie, Charlie, God! Could she say that now? Well?
Upon the big rock, she witnessed him dancing up and down, naked as the day of his birth, stomping bare feet, smacking his hands on his knees and sucking in and out his white stomach like blowing and deflating a circus balloon.
She shut her eyes tight and prayed.
After three hours of this she pleaded, «Charlie, Charlie, come here! I got something to tell you!»
Like a fallen leaf he came, dressed again, praise the Lord.
«Charlie,» she said, looking at the pine trees, «I see your right toe. There it is.»
«You do?» he said.
«Yes,» she said very sadly. «There it is like a horny toad on the grass. And there, up there's your left ear hanging on the air like a pink butterfly.»
Charlie danced. «I'm forming in, I'm forming in!»
Old Lady nodded. «Here comes your ankle!»
«Gimme both my feet!» ordered Charlie.
«You got 'em.»
«How about my hands?»
«I see one crawling on your knee like a daddy long-legs.»
«How about the other one?»
«It's crawling too.»
«I got a body?»
«Shaping up fine.»
«I'll need my head to go home. Old Lady.»
To go home, she thought wearily. «No!» she said, stubborn and angry. «No, you ain't got no head. No head at all,» she cried. She'd leave that to the very last. «No head, no head,» she insisted.
«No head?» he wailed.
«Yes, oh my God, yes, yes, you got your blamed head!» she snapped, giving up. «Now fetch me back my bat with the needle in his eye!»
He flung it at her. «Haaaa-yoooo!» His yelling went all up the valley, and long after he had run toward home she heard his echoes, racing.
Then she plucked up her kindling with a great dry weariness and started back toward her shack, sighing, talking. And Charlie followed her all the way, really invisible now, so she couldn't see him, just hear him, like a pine cone dropping or a deep underground stream trickling, or a squirrel clambering a bough; and over the fire at twilight she and Charlie sat, him so invisible, and her feeding him bacon he wouldn't take, so she ate it herself, and then she fixed some magic and fell asleep with Charlie, made out of sticks and rags and pebbles, but still warm and her very own son, slumbering and nice in her shaking mother arms… and they talked about golden things in drowsy voices until dawn made the fire slowly, slowly wither out….
