The Kingdom of Childhood

Kirsten’s lathery ones, the way his fingertips lit against hers like a bee landing on a foxglove petal. She had made his favorite strudel. She had worn her best dress.

Only gradually did the understanding unfold in her: that it was not the shaking, the counting, and the lithium that were conspiring to ruin her family. It was the girl.

The psychiatrist decided what Judy’s mother needed was an in-patient stay, and so not long before Easter she packed two suitcases and went away until some future date when the doctors would decide she was better. Judy was told she might visit on Sundays, and her father hired Kirsten to work five days a week. Rudi’s presence in the barn had become less reliable, but despite this, Judy often slipped in with her rucksack full of schoolwork and sat on a bale that faced the crucifix and tried to feel, if not peace, then the possibility of comfort. How this tortured man had supposedly redeemed her soul was a mystery to her, but she hungered for any morsel that might ease her pangs of anxiety.

“Why so sad?” Rudi asked her one day, on an occasion when he strode into the barn and found her already there, sitting and watching the cow, her paper and colored pencils discarded beside her. She had been using the Struwwelpeter book as a lap desk. The miserable boy stared up at them from the cover, bowlegged and sallow-cheeked, his clawlike hands spread uselessly. He appeared to be shrugging.

“I want my mother to come back.”

“She will. The doctors will make her better, and then there will be no more flick-flick- flick with the light, bop-bop with the cat bowl. You will see.”

Judy shook her head. “Every time they try to make it right, it goes wrong in a different way. She wasn’t like this back home. She was just neat, and liked things to be in order. Now she falls to pieces if they’re not. And she’s fat.”

Rudi laughed. “Fat?”

“Like somebody filled her full of air. She had to get all new clothes. My father says it’s from the medicine.”

The door creaked open, and Kirsten stepped in. “Hallo, Judy,” she said, and gathered up the white enamel milk pans that sat in a row near the window. Their clatter broke the somber mood, but when she left, Judy pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, pressing her forehead against her knees.

Rudi squatted down beside her and smiled. “Come with me,” he said.

She followed Rudi to a shed at the far corner of the property. When he opened the padlock, she looked back over her shoulder with an edge of nervousness. From the barn she could see her house, but from this shed she could see only the barn and Rudi’s house and that of his neighbors, an elderly couple whose names Judy did not know. Rudi swung open the door on its crumbling hinges and stepped inside. With hesitating steps Judy followed him past the threshold. The shed smelled of muddy soil and a haze of gasoline, stored in a dark red tin beside the old tractor. The air within the shed was cold, with only the narrowest slivers of light knifing off the rusted ends of garden tools. Rudi waved her inside and stepped into a corner.

“What is it?” she whispered.

The door thudded shut behind her. Rudi made a shushing noise and, with a crooked finger, gestured her toward him. She followed and sank to her knees beside him, hiking her skirt to keep it from the moist ground. A movement caught her eye; she pulled in her breath. And then Rudi carefully lifted from the quivering pile a tiny animal no larger than a chipmunk. He held it toward her in both palms.

“Go on, hold it,” he said in a quiet voice.

“Is it a mouse?”

“No. Igel.”

“Eagle?”

His hands pushed toward her again. “Go on.”

She curled her fists against her stomach, afraid. It didn’t look like a bird, but in the small light it was difficult to see. Rudi extended his hands almost to her stomach and by reflex she reached out, not wanting this strange creature to crawl into her dress. At that moment he eased the animal into her hands and, sliding his hand beneath hers to support them, crouched behind her. With an arm on each of her sides, and both of his hands now beneath hers, her fears eased. The little creature snuffled, lifted its face, and she realized it was a hedgehog.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh! Will it bite me?”

“No, no.” His breath was warm against her ear. “Very gentle. Very soft.”

She supposed he was giving her instructions. The animal itself was not very soft. Its tiny spines tickled her palm, and its squirming body seemed on the verge of sliding from her hands. But Rudy anticipated its small wiggles and kicks, tipping his hands beneath hers to ease it back to safety. Despite the need for quiet, she laughed aloud.

“Shhhhh,” he reminded her.

She looked up at his face and saw the peace that farmwork always laid over his features. When speaking of family or school, he was always animated, comical even; but the work of nature seemed to pull him back to the peace of the center, the windless sea that did not move.

She cupped the hedgehog in her hands and nestled back into Rudi’s chest. She felt the quiver of his ankles finding their balance, and smelled the hardworking scent of him, of the earth around roots and the bristled fur of animals, the copper tang of the tools he held, the rugged sweat of a grown man.

Easter passed and the daffodils bloomed, sending up green shoots suddenly to displace the crocuses that had endured the last snows. Judy was glad for the warmth that allowed her to leave her itchy tights at home, and walked home from the bus stop with her rucksack tight against her back, her skirt swinging gently against her knees. The broad fallow fields sprawled in all directions, their rugged brown soil glazed with rain; in the distance rose the smoky blue silhouette of the eastern Alps, Jagerkamp and Miesing, where her family had hiked the summer before. Through the vivid sky flew American fighter jets on practice exercises, engines whistling, leaving slim contrails in their wake. When she turned onto her own street she saw her father’s car in the driveway. Kirsten would be there, too, but Judy needed to change clothes before hurrying off to the barn, so the discomfort would have to be endured.

As she walked up the path toward the back door she ran her hand over the heads of the bright yellow daffodils that lined the walk; they bobbed and waved alongside her. She pushed open the door and stepped into the tidy living room with its maize carpet freshly vacuumed, brightened here and there by shards of sunlight from the spotless windows. The Supremes belted out a song on the radio, their voices as smooth and flawless as the ribbon of cream Kirsten poured from the pitcher onto her father’s strudel, and the whole house smelled cheerfully of pork