The Book of Tobit

“I had half a mind to make up some story. Wondered if it might make this easier. For you, for me. But it seems wrong to lie about things like this.”

The clatter of cicadas fell like a soft rain. Past the slouched shoulders of the man perched on the kitchen chair, the boy could see poppies blooming in the yard. They were early this year, and he’d had a mind to pick some to bring to Jenny McLaughlin after chores, saying his mother had asked him to. He knew she’d see through the ruse, but figured it was the only way he could bring himself to talk to her.

But chores came first, and he was sweeping kitchen scraps for the chickens when — over the cicadas — he thought he heard the old spring on the back door screen. The stranger in the mud room seemed so unconcerned at being confronted that Toby assumed at first that he was one of those relatives he was supposed to remember having met once, years ago, when he was small.

“Hello, Toby.” The man addressed him in a soft, avuncular voice. “Or do you prefer Tobias?”

“Can I help you?” It seemed the polite thing to say.

“May I sit?” The stranger gestured toward the kitchen, and Toby nodded.

He fetched the man a glass of water from the tap, the tall straight glasses reserved for guests, and set it on the table.

“Mother’s at the shop until noon.” He glanced back at the clock to confirm. It was almost an hour away — more than enough time to finish chores and still make it to Jenny’s with the flowers. More than enough, if he didn’t have to attend to…who was this man?

The stranger nodded but said nothing. He seemed to be studying Toby, eyes darting as if to compare a half-remembered photograph with the reality that stood before him.

A faint unease soured in Toby’s stomach. Far beyond the back door, Jenny’s smile beckoned. What if she asked him in? He shuddered at the thought.

“If you’ll excuse me…” He had set the pail of chicken scraps on the counter when he went to fetch a glass for the man, and scooped it up now.

The man was on his feet, effortlessly and improbably fast, and now stood in the passageway that led through the mud room to the back door. He surveyed the kitchen, studying it the way he had studied Toby, but his eyes now asked sterner questions.

But there was a note of apology in them, too. Toby had always been good with eyes. Afternoons when he was young, he’d do homework by the window while his father revised surveys in the County office. “Careful when you look at that boy,” his father would tell visitors. “He’ll see right through you.”

They’d play the eye game while waiting in line on errands: “What’s she thinking?” Toby would consider the skittish young woman who kept glancing over her shoulder and say, “Her boyfriend is planning to rob this bank, and he’s asked her to come case it for him. She doesn’t think he can pull it off.”

He didn’t believe it, of course — didn’t believe he had any special powers of perception. But the game taught him how much you could learn by paying attention. And he’d been paying attention when school let out and Jenny McLaughlin lingered just a moment at the top of the stairs.

The bucket hung by Toby’s side now as he traced the dance of the stranger’s eyes: the window, the pantry door. Unease curdled to a distinct dread. He backed toward the counter and cupped his hands to the edge behind him, sharing an unspoken conclusion: the mud room was his only way out.

He drew in to yell for help, to scream, but something on the man’s face gave him pause at the top of his breath. It was that tinge of apology, and foregone conclusion. Toby had been four when the cicadas last came, too young to really remember, and when the first of them began singing this year, he thought they might be tiny birds. Within days the chorus had risen to a low din. No, yelling would be pointless.

“What do you want?”

The stranger seemed to contemplate the question more than he would have thought necessary. Toby offered an out.

“Is it money? Do you need money? Mother’s jewelry — it’s upstairs.” His heart raced. “I could show you.”

Truth was that if this man was here to rob them, Toby was more than willing to help. His father had always said that there was nothing really worth defending but your life, and that if the choice came down to it, he should always run. Toby supposed that’s what his father had done last year. But his mother wouldn’t talk about it.

The man in the doorway leaned back and peered down the passageway to where the staircase lay, then leaned back in and shook his head.

“Is this about my father? Did he do something?” The thought came to Toby out of nowhere, and a flicker of doubt in the stranger’s eyes betrayed recognition.

“I had a boy like you, once.” The stranger’s eyes rested on the counter, his voice almost melancholy.

“What happened?”

“They teach you about Otto von Bismarck in school?”

Toby shook his head.

“German guy, late 1800s. Wanted to avoid war with Austria. Came up with something they called the Triple Alliance. Thirty-five years later, you had American teenagers getting gassed and machine gunned in trenches along the Dutch border because of it. Tens of thousands of them, every day.”

Toby squinted.

“And you ask anyone what those kids did to deserve it? Nothing. Nothing at all.” The man closed his eyes, as if straining to remember something far away.

Beyond the screen door, poppies swayed and beckoned.

“They call it ‘unintended consequences,’ and we’re all victims, in a way,” he said. “All of us.” There was unmistakable sadness in the stranger’s eyes when he opened them again. “Go to church, be as good as you want — it doesn’t matter. Somewhere in the world, two strangers are going to quarrel about some line on a map, and that’ll be the end of you.”

“I need to pee.” Toby did, really, now that he thought about it.

The man considered his words and nodded gently. That would be fine. He took a theatrical step back from the doorway to let Toby pass, but held one finger up: Wait.

His hand slipped inside the breast pocket of his coat and slowly withdrew a folded knife. He grasped the spine between his thumb and middle finger and extended its blade with a dull, definitive click.

He contemplated the knife, afternoon sunlight playing off the polished steel, then returned his gaze to Toby.

“So no running, okay? And — sorry — the door stays open.” The man sounded almost paternal, concerned that there be no misunderstandings.

Toby couldn’t bring himself to turn his back to the bathroom door. Couldn’t turn his back to the stranger in the hallway. So he’d edged to the side of the toilet, standing wedged against the where the chipped yellow wainscoting met lavender wallpaper. Raised the seat, unzipped and drew himself out, then waited for nature’s urging to complete the ritual. And waited.

“I can’t.”

“Take your time.”

The window was a narrow rectangle, set high in the wall. Toby supposed that, given enough time, he could make his way out through it by balancing on the toilet’s holding tank. But not without making enough noise to tip off the man with the knife.

He looked back to the door, felt the distance around the corner in his mind, counting the steps between them. Maybe he could still run?

“You didn’t answer the question about my father.”

A floorboard in the hallway creaked under shifting weight.

“I never met your father.”

“Did he do something?”

The floorboard creaked again.

“I suppose he thought he was protecting you. Protecting all of you. Didn’t understand it doesn’t work that way. Try running your hand under the tap.”

“What?”

“When you’ve got to pee, but can’t. Warm water. Does something. I don’t know why.”

“I mean about my father. What doesn’t work that way?” He’d turned on the tap, more to listen to the sound of the water running than out of any intention of following the stranger’s advice. The rush and burble made sense, gave him something he could hold onto. But he couldn’t hear what the man was saying. He shut it off.

“…guess he thought that would be the end of it. But a deal is a deal. Folks have to understand that that there’s more than just their own life on the line. So, thank you, Mr. Bismarck. Did it work?”

“What?”

“The tap. The water.”

Toby had tucked himself back in and stepped back into the hallway. He shook his head.

“Wash up anyway.” The man pointed with the tip of the blade and waited as Toby retreated back into the bathroom. “Always wash,” he said. “And you’ll want to get that zipper, too.”

They were sitting in the kitchen again. Toby protested that he needed to feed the chickens — “Mother won’t take any excuses…” — but knew it was an empty ploy.

He’d already decided that he would warn her. The moment he heard her key in the front door, he would yell for her to run. She wouldn’t, of course — grown-ups always thought they knew better than you did. But he had to do something.

“What?” The man had been uneasily contemplating something, and had seemed about to speak when Toby’s muted snort threw off his step.

“Just…” Toby had been imagining the two of them, he and his mother, tied up in the back of the stranger’s car, while he gave her his best “I told you so.” But it didn’t seem right to say. He shook his head and said nothing instead.

That was when the stranger said the thing about making up a story.

Toby didn’t understand.

“The flat truth this: a man you don’t know and never met has decided that it’s my job to end you. And your mother too. No point in arguing whether it’s right, or whether it’s fair — it’s not. No question. But it’s the truth.”

The stranger’s words seemed impossibly far away, speaking of someone else’s world, like a story half-overheard on a crowded bus. Toby grappled with the sentences, trying to pull them closer, lay them out where they could see how they made sense in his own life.

He was six when his grandmother died, looking right instead of left as she stepped off the curb coming out of Walgreens. He’d seen death before that, too, in the twitching jay that threw itself against their kitchen window and broke its neck, and the desiccated remains of a stray cat that found its last refuge under the porch. But he was unable to square those memories with the thought of his grandmother, her body in the casket that day, surrounded by flowers. Wouldn’t she get restless and want to get out?

The idea had stayed with him for a long while after, long after he understood the finality of death well enough to just smile silently whenever Sister Kettering drifted into talk of heaven and angels on Sundays after church.

A breeze had come down in the yard, and the poppies bowed and swayed, beckoning. The cicadas were deafening. How could he bring flowers to Jenny if he were dead?

The question circled in his head, then made its way closer, like footsteps creaking across the kitchen floor. And with them came sickening realization.

“Stop.” The voice in his ear was unreasonably calm, a broad arm across his chest unyielding as he struggled for the hallway.

The man said it again: “Stop. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

Toby flailed, screamed, in spite of himself..

“Stop. I’m going to let you go, okay?”

Toby tried to turn, tried to bite, tried kicking, found air, and found himself dangling like a bundle under the man’s arm, hands still pinned at his side.

“I said: stop. If you stop, I’m going to let you go.” Toby stopped. “Do you understand?”

Toby didn’t, but nodded and stopped. Somehow, words wouldn’t come. The pressure on his chest eased and the man tilted him so that his feet reached the floor again, then stood him facing the screen door, its bowed aluminum handle scantly out of arm’s reach.

“Take a deep breath.” Toby did as he was told, bracing taut against the weight of the hand still on his shoulder. The breeze was gone, but it had left the air sweet with the warmth of a fresh-cut lawn. The cicadas, the poppies, his mother. Jenny.

“Go.”

The hand half pushed him forward, and the door was now in reach. There was a tug from somewhere; the cicadas roared, and poppies bloomed everywhere in bright reds and golds.