April 6, 1996
Dear EM,
Well here we are again. Last week I drove down to the
place that your mother and father are now living to see you. You
are spending your first days in a dorm on the campus of the
Lawrenceville School. This is a very nice place to have as a
home. Your mother is the dorm head of a girls' dorm. When your
mother first lived in a dorm, the head of her dorm (a Jack -
Bongo - Heath) had been born and brought up in a Lawrenceville
dorm. Where you live is a very important thing, and to know
where you live is even more important, really to know where you
live is perhaps the most important thing of all. It is not as
easy to find this out, as it might appear at first thought. I
will try to tell you how to do this in a series of stories that I
will call the Kuble Kax stories.
KUBLE KAX Story #1
The man without a head
Once upon a time there was a small old farm house where a
wonderful, but strange lady named Haggy Baggy lived. The little
farm was at the bottom of a mountain, and the front door looked
up the hillside pasture in front of the farm. Behind the farm
was a small field encircled by a hedgerow ot trees that bordered
a brook. This brook did not babble, it gurgled; it was a
gurgling brook. The house was peculiar in several ways; I am
not saying that it was haunted, but there were peculiar things.
It had several separate cellars, and several attics, all of them
dark and spooky, one of which had a special hidden sunken room.
This wizened old lady, Haggy Baggy, had a sort of a family,- in
particular she had two granddaughters who loved to stay with her
and usually were not at all afraid to be in the house, and spent
many happy hours with their grandmother working in the kitchen
which seemed to be the main room of the house. It was furnished
with an old pine table, an old iron stove and iron sink and big
old ice chest in the middle of the room which was now used a work
counter, but had been a real ice box in which chunks of ice kept
the food cold. Since it was sort of a central depot, it had lots
of doors, a door to a pantry, a door to an old milk room, now
used for storage, a door to the summer kitchen and sheds, a door
to the front porch, a door to the living room, and a door to the
cellar.
It was here that the little girls first learned the
importance of doors and began to understand that they are bridges
to different worlds. The feeling of the living room was very
different from the kitchen; it was more formal and colder; it
was used as the dining room, where the Haggy Baggy had her
holiday dinners, or 'state' dinners as the less reverent called
them. The pantry was a very special place filled with many
treasures and secret places. The summer kitchen and beyond it
the shed had their own wonders, a old brick oven and chimney,
mostly in ruins and big cupboards. But the most intriguing
gateway to another world was the cellar door. It opened onto an
open wooden staircase leading down into murky gloom, even when
the single electric light was turned on. The floor was dirt with
some planks on it, the walls were hewn slabs of granite, and
there were banks of shelves hanging from the ceiling and filled
with glass jars whose contents gleamed in the dust and dark with
menace and mystery. These were the results of the Haggy Baggy's
efforts ot can and preserve all that the farm had produced over
years; indeed, some of the jars had been sealed decades before.
But while the little girls worked with their grandmother in the
cozy and toasty kitchen, warmed by the wood fire in the iron
stove and the cheerful chatter and their grandmother's bright-
eyed interest and delight in them, they felt very safe and
sheltered in their own world. This is where they wanted to be,
even though both these little girls had other homes with their
parents, which were their real homes, and yet this kitchen will
be in their hearts for all their lives, and that's probably where
they visit their grandmother, though she is dead and though they
will probably never set foot in it again.
Well, Haggy Baggy had several sons, and one of them was a
bit touched (as they say in Maine). As a boy he had lived in
this house, and he had felt presences in those dark attics and in
the cellars, cold writhing shadows lying in wait until he turned
his back. It was on one of these cold winter nights that he
claimed that he had saved his little sister, the mother of one of
the little girls, from one of these horrible presences, the one
he called the Kingman, who had flown through the night on his
chariot pulled by two dark horses and landed on the roof of the
farm. He had come to carry off little Liz, and there was a mark
on her hand where the Kingman had grabbed her before her brother
saved her, or so he said. And he also claimed that sometimes you
could hear old Lady Yaketso wailing in the attic. Of course,
their grandmother said that was just the wind, but Grammie was
old and didn't hear so well anymore, and it did sound like
anguished sobs. It didn't help that the attic door was in the
room where the little girls had their beds, but Haggy Baggy's son
would come up and make sure that the door was bolted and locked.
One of the little girls loved to hear the stories about the
Kingman, old Lady Yaketso, and all the others; the other little
girl, though older, didn't like to hear these stories; they
gave her bad dreams. For some reason this did not stop Haggy
Baggy's son from telling them. He claimed that the Kingman came
from the kingdom of Kuble Kax and was always looking for people
to take to Kuble Kax, especially little girls. He told them that
they were lucky that he was there to protect them, just as he had
protected his sister. He claimed that it was from Kuble Kax that
he learned the full story about the man without a head.
One night while the family was in the kitchen, all warm
and cozy, they heard a strange bumping noise down in the cellar,
that is, down in the cellar reached by that particular door in
the kitchen. Haggy Baggy's sons went down to investigate; when
they came back up, their faces were as white as sheets. They
said that they had seen the Man without a Head. He was bumping
around among the shelves of the old jars of canned stuff; since
he had no head, he could not see where he was going and so he
bumped into anything in his way, and this was making all the
noise. The older son, the touched one, said that the Man without
the Head didn't belong here, not in the cellar, not in our world,
but that he could not get back to his own, because he could not
find the door to his world, because he did not have a head and so
he didn't have any eyes. The littler girl was very interested
why the Man without a Head wanted to get back to the kingdom of
Kuble Kax, but Haggy Baggy's touched son said that was another
story and would have wait, but he did say something strange about
the door to the kingdom of Kuble Kax being in the missing Head.
Not so strangely, after this event, neither little girl was
interested in going down cellar alone. The cellar had become a
very different world, perhaps not as strange as the kingdom of
Kuble Kax, but still very different from the cozy kitchen with
the reassuring presence of Grammy Haggy Baggy. But for a while
that night both the little girls had been transported into and
had lived in a very different world, if only for a short time,
and then they went back to their own homes away from the little
farm house with the view uphill.