Читать книгу The Book of Colors - Raymond Barfield - Страница 12

The Tooth Fairy’s Castle

A while back Ambrosia lost her first tooth. We were all sitting on the back porch and the train was roaring by interrupting talk about the best ribs we’d had in Memphis. When it passed there was usually a time before we started up again. But this time just before I was about to say something Layla looked down and said, “You lost your tooth.” And sure enough Ambrosia had pulled out her loose tooth and it was sitting by her on the porch. She had just the slightest bit of blood on her lower lip.

I saw that Layla looked like she wanted to cry and I thought I understood. I hadn’t seen her look like this before, but you never know what’s gonna make you cry. Most kids get all excited when they lose a tooth but Ambrosia plucked it out like a piece of grit and set it off to one side.

Then Layla reached down and picked up the tooth and held it up. She said, “You want me to put it under your pillow for you?” and she said it like she was blaming somebody. Ambrosia of course kept rocking and Rose looked out over the tracks with a face that said, How long, Lord, how long?

Which made me think of a story that a woman from the government who used to visit my mother to make sure she took her infection drugs told me when I lost a tooth. It wasn’t much of a kid’s story I can see now and it scared me at the time. “There’s not much to the tooth fairy,” the lady told me. “She got nothing to do with the day and only works when it’s dark and people don’t see, don’t guard what they think about.

“She doesn’t talk. And for her, money is nothing more than a way to buy the bones of children. A tooth is a bone and her castle is made of these small bones that children lose to remind everyone that children grow old like everybody. The castle glimmers with a kind of bluish light over the surface of it. There are no windows. The sun shines silver in those parts. Never red. Never yellow.

“She is tiny. She is so tiny. And each step up to her front door is made of a single tooth. There are a thousand steps to keep away visitors, and twice as many inside, each one from a different child somewhere in the world.

“She lives alone in the daytime and she sits on her tiny throne at the top of all those teeth in her white lace and tiny white shoes and see-through wings, and she cries. She cries all day long, so much that her tears fall from her face down the smooth surface of children’s bones and in summer they form a pool far below so that the whole castle is reflected. In the center of that liquid mirror is the tooth fairy.

“In the winter her tears form icicles and by the time the winter is deep it looks like a long white beard hanging from her high perch down to the smooth floor below.

“She has no one to ask her why she cries because the rule was written that she can only take the tooth of a sleeping child. She has long since had enough bones for her castle with endless empty rooms. So she uses them to build mountains. She has no questions, and she has no idea how happy the children are when they wake up and find the tooth gone and replaced with a coin. She only knows the way things have to be. She doesn’t even know why she cries all the time. But I know.”

That was it. I just stared at the lady while she went back to checking my mother’s medicines and making sure she took them. Which made me wonder why somebody who would take a job doing that would tell a story like that to a kid. But since then I met enough people who do those kinds of jobs to learn that even things that look like kindness can wear on you like anything else if you don’t get a break sometimes. That’s part of what I thought about with the baby because it was just me, and Jimmy was part time at best. I hoped that being a mother made you change somehow so that you can do it all the time without needing a break, but I knew that didn’t always happen. Of course it may be that she just thought it was a good story and didn’t see that it sort of ruined the tooth fairy. Some people don’t know how to tell a story and don’t know when.

But when I thought of the story I thought of where Ambrosia’s mind spends its days. I looked at Layla. She sat there for the longest time looking at that tooth like she was deciding whether or not to eat it. Ambrosia wouldn’t have noticed and wouldn’t have minded if she did notice. She just rocked and turned the pages of her cardboard book.