Excerpt of The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue
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It is a commonly held myth that, among the birds and the beasts, the mother
recognizes her young as her own and will refuse a stranger thrust into the den
or the nest. This is not so. In fact, the cuckoo commonly lays its eggs in other
birds’ nests, and despite its extraordinary size and voracious appetite, the
cuckoo chick receives as much, indeed more, maternal care, often to the point of
driving the other chicks from their lofty home. Sometimes the mother bird
starves her own offspring because of the cuckoo’s incessant demands. My first
task was to create the fiction that I was the real Henry Day. Unfortunately,
humans are more suspicious and less tolerant of intruders in the nest.
The rescuers knew only that they were looking for a young boy lost in the woods,
and I could remain mute. After all, they had found someone and were
therefore content. As the fire truck lurched up the driveway to the Days’ home,
I vomited against the bright red door, a vivid mess of acorn mash, watercress,
and the exoskeletons of a number of small insects. The fireman patted me on the
head and scooped me up, blanket and all, as if I were of no more consequence
than a rescued kitten or an abandoned baby. Henry’s father leapt from the porch
to gather me in his arms, and with a strong embrace and warm kisses reeking of
smoke and alcohol, he welcomed me home as his only son. The mother would be much
harder to fool.
Her face betrayed her every emotion: blotchy skin, chapped with salty tears, her
pale blue eyes rimmed in red, her hair matted and disheveled. She reached out
for me with trembling hands and emitted a small sharp cry, the kind a rabbit
makes when in the distress of the snare. She wiped her eyes on her shirtsleeve
and wrapped me in the wracking shudder of a woman in love. Then she began
laughing in that deep coloratura.
"Henry? Henry?" She pushed me away and held on to my shoulders at arm’s length.
"Let me look at you. Is it really you?"
"I’m sorry, Mom."
She brushed away the bangs hiding my eyes and then pulled me against her breast.
Her heart beat against the side of my face, and I felt hot and uncomfortable.
"You needn’t worry, my little treasure. You’re home and safe and sound, and
that’s all that matters. You’ve come back to me."
Dad cupped the back of my head with his large hand, and I thought this
homecoming tableau might go on forever. I squirmed free and dug out the
handkerchief from Henry’s pocket, crumbs spilling to the floor.
"I’m sorry I stole the biscuit, Mom."
She laughed, and a shadow passed behind her eyes. Maybe she had been wondering
up to that point if I was indeed her flesh and blood, but mentioning the biscuit
did the trick. Henry had stolen one from the table when he ran away from home,
and while the others took him to the river, I stole and pocketed it. The crumbs
proved that I was hers.
Well after midnight, they put me to bed, and such a comfort may be the greatest
invention of mankind. In any case, it tops sleeping in a hole in the cold
ground, a moldy rabbit skin for your pillow, and the grunts and sighs of a dozen
changelings anxious in their dreams. I stretched out like a stick between the
crisp sheets and pondered my good fortune. Many tales exist of failed
changelings who are uncovered by their presumptive families. One child who
showed up in a Nova Scotia fishing village so frightened his poor parents that
they fled their own home in the middle of a snowstorm and were later found
frozen and bobbing in the frigid harbor. A changeling girl, age six, so shocked
her new parents when she opened her mouth to speak that, thus frightened, they
poured hot wax into each other’s ears and never heard another sound. Other
parents, upon learning that their child had been replaced by changelings, had
their hair turn white overnight, were stunned into catatonia, heart attacks, or
sudden death. Worse yet, though rare, other families drive out the creature
through exorcism, banishment, abandonment, murder. Seventy years ago, I lost a
good friend after he forgot to make himself look older as he aged. Convinced he
was a devil, his parents tied him up like an unwanted kitten in a gunnysack and
threw him down a well. Most of the time, though, the parents are confounded by
the sudden change of their son or daughter, or one spouse blames the other for
their queer fortune. It is a risky endeavor and not for the fainthearted.
Excerpted from The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue, Copyright © 2006 by Keith Donohue. Excerpted by permission of Nan A. Talese, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
