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By Root 694 0

up! Anything, I said, could get down inside it and the flue handle came off in Matthew’s hands two years ago—” Andrew followed her out of the room, shielding the baby, and Peter rose but had nowhere to go. He didn’t feel up to helping out. He could imagine how cold and heavy a locust must be, slithering down the back of his neck, and he was relieved to see that Gillespie seemed to have the situation in control. She crouched before the fireplace with a rolled-up magazine. George stood by with the poker, scratching the front of his grimy T-shirt and looking bored. “Here, buddy,” Gillespie told the locust. She poked at the ashes. “Come on, come on.” The whirring grew louder. The magazine rattled as if a fan blade had hit it and then up swooped the locust, evading Gillespie, zooming toward the ceiling with an angry buzz. Mrs. Emerson screamed again. She ducked behind Andrew, clutching him by the sides. “Will I survive this summer?” she asked.

Andrew said, “There, Jenny, there, Jenny,” although Jenny was happily gnawing his shirt collar without a care in the world.

“I will never get used to these creatures, never,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I haven’t stepped out of the house since they arrived. Gillespie? Why are you just standing there?”

“I’m waiting for him to come down,” Gillespie said.

“Down? Where is he? Oh, on my damask curtains, I’m sure of it.” She stepped back and sank into one of the dining room chairs. From the table behind her she took a bottle of vitamin C, uncapped it and gulped two pills, like a man downing a glass of whiskey. Her hands were shaking. “They’re everywhere,” she said. “Chattering all day, bombing into people, and at night it’s no better. They’re silent then but it’s a planning silence, they hang from all the leaves plotting how to get me in the morning.”

“It’s the oak trees,” Gillespie said. “They favor oaks.”

Her voice was calm and unemphatic, reducing monsters to mere scientific fact. But then the locust whirred up from the curtains and lit on the lampshade, and when George swung at it with the poker all he did was knock the lamp over. “Damn,” said Gillespie.

“We’re like in jail,” Andrew said. “Matthew and Gillespie and George are the trusties, they get to go out for mail and food. Mother and I stay inside.”

“I spend a summer in the house every seventeen years,” said Mrs. Emerson. She thought that over a minute. Then she said, “The next time they come, I’ll be dead.”

“Oh, Mrs. Emerson!” P.J. said.

But Mrs. Emerson only looked at her as if she wondered where P.J. had come from. She said, “Peter, do you remember when they were here before? You were, oh, twelve, I suppose. You were hopeless. You made a necklace out of the shells and wore it everywhere. You had bottles in your closet packed full of locusts. Black with them.”

“I did?” Peter said.

“You kept one on a string and took it for walks down Cold Spring Lane.”

He still couldn’t picture it. Like most youngest children, he had trouble remembering his own past. The older ones did it so well for him, why should he bother? They had built him a second-hand memory that included the years before he existed, even. He had a distinct recollection of Melissa’s running away from home with a peanut butter sandwich and a pomegranate, two years before he was born; but he himself, with his locust on a leash, had vanished.

There was another whir. George leaped straight up in the air, as if he were catching a fly ball, and came to earth with his hands cupped tightly around a rattling black shape. “Ha!” he said.

“Now, when I open the door,” Gillespie told him, “throw him outside. Far out, Georgie. Don’t let him fly back in or Grandma will have a fit.”

They all went to the hallway—even Mrs. Emerson, hanging back a little. Gillespie opened the door and stood ready with the magazine. When George tossed the locust up it seemed to hang in mid-air a minute, and then Gillespie reached out and batted it on its way so violently that she lost her balance. It was Matthew who caught her. He was just crossing the porch with a folded newspaper.

“Not another one,” he