Little, Big

Book Two - BROTHER NORTH WIND'S SECRET

I.

The shepherd in Virgil grew at

last acquainted with Love, and found

him to be a native of the rocks.

—Johnson

After John Drinkwater's death in 1920, Violet, unable to bear or even believe in the thirty years and more of life without him promised her by her cards, retreated for a long time to an upstairs room. Her thick dark hair, turned prematurely white, and her elfin thinness, grown more pronounced because of a sudden distaste she took in that year to most food, gave her the appearance of great and fragile age, though she didn't seem aged; her skin remained unlined for many more years, and her dark, liquid eyes never lost the infant, feral innocence which John Drinkwater had first seen in them in the last century.


Retreats and Operations

It was a nice room, facing in several directions at once, In one corner, half the interior of a dome (all the interior it had, though its exterior was whole) made a windowed retreat, and she had a big buttoned chaise there. Elsewhere, her bed, hung with the gauzy curtains and covered with the eiderdowns and ivory-colored laces with which the mother she had never known had clothed her own sad marriage bed; a broad oxblood-colored mahogany table, piled up with John Drinkwater's papers, which she had at first thought to put in some order, and maybe publish, he had loved to publish, but which in the end she only left piled there under the gooseneck brass lamp; the humpbacked cracked leather trunk from which they had come and into which, years later, they would go again; a couple of splayed velvet armchairs, napless and cozy, by the fire; and those small things—her silver and tortoiseshell combs and brushes, a painted music-box, her strange cards—which her children and grandchildren and visitors would later remember as being the chief furnishings of the room.

Her children, except August, didn't resent this abdication of Violet's. She had not often been wholly present anyway, and this seemed only the natural continuation of her daily abstraction. They all, except August, loved her deeply and uncritically, and would contest with each other over who would bring up her frugal and as often as not uneaten meals, make up her fire, read her her mail, or be the first to bring her news.

"August found a new use for his Ford," Auberon told her as they looked together through some pictures he had taken. "He took a wheel off, and hitched it with a belt to Ezra Meadows' saw. Then the engine will turn the saw, and cut wood."

"I hope they don't go far," Violet said.

"What? Oh, no," he said, laughing at the image she must have, of a tooth-wheeled Model T tearing through the woods, felling trees as it went. "No. The car is put up on logs, so the wheels just go around but don't go anywhere. It's just to saw with, not to drive around."

"Oh." Her slim hands touched the teapot, to see if it were still warm. "He's very clever," she said, as though she meant something else.

It was a clever idea, though not August's; he had read of it in an illustrated mechanics magazine, and persuaded Ezra Meadows to try it out. It proved to be a little more laborious than the magazine described it, what with leaping in and out of the driver's seat to alter the blade's speed, cranking each time the engine stalled out on a knot in the wood, and shouting What? What? back and forth with Ezra over the racket it made; and August had little interest in the production of sawn wood anyway. But he loved his Ford, and anything it could be made to do, from bouncing obliviously down railroad tracks to skimming and whirling like a four-wheeled Nijinsky over a frozen lake, he made it do. Ezra, suspicious at first, at least didn't have the airy contempt for Henry Ford's masterpiece which his family or people like the Flowers had; and making such a to-do in Ezra's yard brought out from her chores more than once his daughter Amy. Once with a dishclout in her hand, abstractedly wiping a white-speckled black tin frying pan as she stared; again with her hands and apron floured. The belt of the saw broke, and went flapping wildly. August cut the engine.

"There now, Ezra, look at that. Look at that stack." The fresh yellow wood, rough-cut and burned in brown arcs here and there by the blade's insistence, gave out its sweet odor, resin and pastry. "That would have taken you a week by hand. What do you think of that?"

"It's all right."

"What do you think, Amy? Pretty nice?" She smiled, and looked shy, as though it were she he was praising.

"It's all all right," said Ezra. "Gwan, git." This to Amy, whose expression changed to a hurt hauteur as sweet to August as her smile; she tossed her head and went, slowly, so as not to appear dismissed.

Ezra helped him bolt back the wheel of the Ford in silence; an ungrateful silence, August thought, though maybe the farmer was afraid that if he opened his mouth the subject of payment might come up. He was in no danger; for August, unlike the youngest son in all the old tales, knew he couldn't demand, in return for the accomplishment of an impossible task (the sawing of a couple hundred board feet in a single afternoon), the hand of his beautiful daughter.

Rolling home along the familiar roads, raising the familiar dust, August felt sharply the congruence (which everyone else saw as a contradiction) of his car and this deep summer. He made a small, unnecessary adjustment to the throttle, and tossed his straw hat on the seat next to him; he thought that if the evening were fine he might drive to some spots he knew of, and do some fishing. He was conscious of a bliss that stole over him not infrequently now, had first stolen over him when he had first acquired his car, first bent up its bat-wing hood and seen the engine and drive-train, humble and useful like his own internal organs. It was a sense that at last what he knew of the world was sufficient to his being alive in it: that the world and what he knew of it were one. He called this feeling "growing up," and it did feel 'like growing, though in moments of mad elation he would wonder if what he was growing into weren't a Ford, or perhaps Ford: there was no other instrument, and no other man, so serenely purposeful and complete, August thought, so sufficient to the world and so self-sufficient: it would have been a destiny he could welcome.

Everyone else seemed bent on thwarting it. When he told Pop (he called his father Pop to himself and to Amy, though he had never said it to John's face) that what was needed in this area was a garage, which could dispense gas and make repairs, and sell Fords, and had laid out the literature he'd got from the Ford company about what it would cost to set up such an agency (he hadn't proposed himself as agent, he knew he was too young at sixteen for that, but he would be happy just pumping the gas and making repairs, very happy), his father had smiled and not considered it even for five minutes, had sat nodding while August explained it to him only because he loved his son, and loved to indulge him. And then he said: "Would you like a car of your own?"

Well, yes; but August knew he had been treated like a boy, though he had made his proposal as carefully as any man; and his father, whose concerns were so weirdly childish, had smiled at it as though it were a child's mad desire, and bought him the car only to allay it.

But it was not allayed. Pop didn't understand. Before the war, things were different. Nobody knew anything. You could go walking in the woods and make up stories and see things if you wanted. But there was no excuse now. Now knowledge was there to be had, real knowledge, knowledge of how the world operates and what must be done to operate it. Operate. "The operator of a Ford Model T will find setting the spark simple and convenient. The operation is performed in this way. . . ." And August drew these knowledges on, reasonable and close-fitting, over the mad muddle of his childhood, as one draws on a duster over a suit of clothes, and buttoned them up to the neck.


A Swell Idea

"What you need," he told his mother that afternoon, "is some fresh air. Let me take you out for a drive. Come on." He came to take her hands, to lift her from the chaise, and though she gave him her hands they both knew, for they had enacted all this several times the same way, that she wouldn't rise and certainly wouldn't ride. But she kept his hands in hers. "You can bundle up, and anyway with the roads around here you can't go more than fifteen miles an hour. . . ."

"Oh, August."

"Don't 'oh, August' me," he said, allowing himself to be drawn down to sit by her, but turning his face away from her lips. "There's nothing wrong with you, you know, I mean nothing really wrong. You're just brooding." That it should be he, the baby, who was compelled to speak sternly to his mother as to a mopey child, when there were older children who ought to be doing it, annoyed him, though it didn't her.

"Tell me about sawing wood," she said. "Was little Amy there?"

"She's not so little."

"No, no. She's not. So pretty."

He supposed he blushed, and he supposed she saw it. He found it embarrassing, almost indecent, that his mother should see that he regarded any girl with other than amused indifference. In fact toward few girls did he feel amused indifference, if the truth were known, and it was known: even his sisters plucked lint from his lapels and brushed back his hair, thick and unruly as his mother's, with knowing smiles when he mentioned ever so casually that during the course of an evening he might drop in at the Meadows' or the Flowers'. "Listen, Ma," he said, faintly peremptory, "now really listen. Before, you know, Papa died, we talked about the garage, and the agency and all that. He didn't like it so well, but that was four years ago, I was very young. Can we talk about it again? Auberon thinks it's a swell idea."

"He does?"

He hadn't put up any objections; but then he had been behind the darkroom door, in his dim red-lit hermit's cell, when August had discussed it with him. "Sure. You know, everybody's going to have an automobile soon. Everybody."

"Oh, dear."

"You can't hide from the future."

"No, no, that's true." She gazed out the windows at the sleeping afternoon. "That's true." She had taken a meaning, but not his: he drew out his watch and consulted it, to draw her back.

"So, well," he said.

"I don't know," she said, looking into his face not as though to read it, or to communicate with it, but as though it were a mirror: that frankly, that dreamily. "I don't know, dear. I think if John didn't think it was a good idea .

"That was four years ago, Ma."

"Was it, was it four. . . ." She made an effort, and took his hand again. "You were his favorite, August, did you know that? I mean he loved all of you, but . . . Well, don't you think he knew best? He must have thought it all out, he thought everything all out. Oh, no, dear, if he was sure, I don't think I could do better, really."

He stood up suddenly and thrust his hands into his pockets. "All right, all right. But don't blame him, that's all. You don't like the idea, you're afraid of a simple thing like a car, and you never wanted me to have anything at all anyway."

"Oh, August," she began to say, but clapped her hand over her mouth.

"All right," he said. "I guess I'll tell you, then. I think I'll go away." A lump rose to his throat, unexpectedly; he had expected to feel only defiance and triumph. "Maybe to the City. I don't know."

"What do you mean?" In a tiny voice, like a child just beginning to understand a huge and terrible thing. "What do you mean?

"Well really," he said, rounding on her, "I'm a grown man. What do you think? That I'll just hang around this house for the rest of my life? Well, I won't."

The look in her face, of shocked helpless anguish, when all he'd said was what any twenty-year-old might say, when all he felt was the dissatisfaction any ordinary person might feel, made confusion and frustrated common sense boil up in him like a lava. He rushed to her chair and knelt before her. "Ma, Ma," he said, "what is it? What on earth is it?" He kissed her hand, a kiss like a furious bite.

"I'm afraid, that's all. . . ."

"No, no, just tell me what's so terrible. What's so terrible about wanting to advance yourself, and be, and be normal. What was so wrong"—it was spilling out now, that lava, he neither desired to stop it now nor could if he chose—"about Timmie Willie going to the City? It's where her husband lives, and she loves him. Is this such a swell house that nobody should ever think of living anyplace else? Even married?"

"There was so much room. And the City's so far. . . ."

"Well, and what was so wrong when Aub wanted to join the Army? There was a war. Everybody went. Do you want us all to be your babies forever?"

Violet said nothing, though her big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently; and out of him would come then the advice, warnings, notions, the clever decisions she could never have made. She ran her hand through August's matted, elf-locked hair, no comb could conquer it, and said, "But you know, dear, you know. You remember, don't you? You do, don't you?"

He laid his cheek in her lap with a groan, and she continued to stroke his hair. "And autos, August—what would they think? The noise, and the smell. The—the boldness. What must they think? What if you drove them away?"

"No, Ma, don't."

"They're brave, August, you remember the time, when you were a little boy, the time with the wasp, you remember how brave the little one was. You saw. What if—what if it angered them, wouldn't they plan something, oh something so horrid. . . . They could, you know they could."

"I was just a little kid."

"Do you all forget?" she said, not as though to him, but as though questioning herself, questioning a strange perception she had just then had. "Do you all really forget? Is that it? Did Timmie? Do you all?" She raised his face in her hands to study it. "August? Do you forget, or . . . You mustn't, you mustn't forget; if you do . . ."

"What if they didn't mind?" August said, defeated. "What if they didn't care at all? How can you be so sure they'd mind? They've got a whole world to themselves, don't they?"

"I don't know."

"Grandy said . . ."

"Oh, dear, August, I don't know."

"Well," he said, extracting himself from her, "then I'll go ask. I'll go ask their permission." He rose. "If I ask their permission, and they say it's all right, then . . ."

"I don't see how they could."

"Well, if they do?"

"How could you be sure? Oh, don't, August, they might lie. No, promise me you won't. Where are you going?"

"I'm going fishing."

"August?"


Some Notes About Them

When he was gone the tears rose again to her eyes. She brushed away impatiently the hot drops that rolled down her cheeks, rolled down because she couldn't explain: nothing she knew could be said, there were not the words, when she tried the very saying of it made what she said into lies or stupidities. They're brave, she had said to August. They might lie, she had said. None of that was true. They weren't brave, and they couldn't lie. Such things were true only when said to children, as it's true when you say "Grandy's gone away" to a child, when Grandy is dead, when there is no more Grandy to come or go. And the child says: Where did he go? And you think of an answer a little less true than the first, and so on. And yet you have spoken truly to it, and it has understood, at least as much as you have.

But her children weren't children any more.

So many years she had tried to form what she knew into language with John, grown-up language, nets to catch the wind, the Meaning of it all, the Intention, the Resolution. Oh great good man! And he had come as close to understanding it as intelligence, unwearying application, orderliness of mind and attention to detail could get.

But there wasn't any Meaning, or any Intention, or any Resolution. To think that way about them was like trying to do some task while you looked only in a mirror: force them as you might, your hands do the opposite of what they are told to do, away from not toward, left not right, forward not back. She sometimes thought that thinking of them at all was just that: was looking at yourself in a mirror. But what could that mean?

She didn't want her children to be babies forever, this country seemed full of people furious to grow up and though she hadn't ever sensed herself growing up she didn't care to prevent it in others, only she was afraid: if her children forgot what they had known as children, they were in danger. She was sure of that. What danger? And how on earth was she to warn them?

There were no answers, none. All that was within the power of mind and speech was to become more precise in how the questions were put. John had asked her: Do fairies really exist? And there wasn't any answer to that. So he tried harder, and the question got more circumstantial and tentative, and at the same time more precise and exact; and still there were no answers, only the fuller and fuller form of the question, evolving as Auberon had described to her all life evolving, reaching out limbs and inventing organs, reticulating joints, doing and being in more and more complex yet more and more compact and individuated ways, until the question, perfectly asked, understood its own answerlessness. And then there was an end to that. The last edition, and John died still waiting for his answer.

And yet there were things she knew. On the oxbloodcolored mahogany table stood John's tall black typewriter, bony and carapaced like an old crustacean. For August's sake, fcr all of their sakes, she ought to say what she knew. She went to it, sat before it, rested her hands on its keys as a pianist might, thoughtfully, before beginning some soft, sad, almost inaudible nocturne; then realized there was no paper in it. This took a while to find; and her notepaper, when she had rolled a piece within the typewriter's jaws, looked small and shrinking and unready to receive the blows of the keys. But she began, using two fingers, and spelled out this:

violets notes about them

—and beneath this, the word Grandy had used to write on the desultory journals he kept:

tacenda

Now what? She advanced the paper, and wrote:

they mean no good to us

She thought about this for a moment, and then directly under it, she added:

they mean us no harm either.

She meant that they didn't care, that their concerns weren't ours, that if they brought gifts—and they had; if they arranged a marriage or an accident—and they had; if they watched and waited—and they did, none of that was with any reason to aid or hurt mortals. Their reasons were their own—if they had reasons at all, she sometimes thought they didn't, any more than stones or seasons have.

they are made not born

She considered this, cheek in hand, and said "No," and carefully x'd out "made" and wrote "born" above it, then x'd out "born" and wrote "made" above it, and then saw that neither was truer than the other. Useless! Was there any thought about them she could have whose opposite wasn't true? She skipped a space, sighing, and wrote:

no two doors to them are the same

Is that what she meant? She meant that what was a door for one person wouldn't be a door for another. She meant also that any door, once passed through, ceased to be a door ever after, could not even be returned by. She meant that no two doors ever led to the same place. She meant that there were no doors to them at all. And yet: she found, on the topmost rank of keys, an asterisk (she hadn't known the machine carried one) and added it to her last sentence, so it read:

no two doors to them are the same

And beneath that she wrote:

but the house is a door

This filled up her little notepaper, and she drew it out and read over what she had written. She saw that what she had was a sort of precis of several chapters of the last edition of the Architecture, deprived of the billowing draperies of explanation and abstraction, nude and frail but no more help than ever. She crushed it slowly in her hands, thinking she knew nothing at all and yet knew this: that the fate that awaited her and all of them awaited them here (why was she dumb to say why she knew it?), and so they must cling to this place, and not stray far from it, she supposed that she herself wouldn't ever leave it again. It was the door, the greatest of doors, it stood Somehow, by chance or design, on the very edge or border of Elsewhere, and it would in the end he the last door that led that way. For a long time it would stand open; then for a time after that it would at least be able to be opened, or unlocked, if you had the key; but there would come a time when it would he closed for good, not be a door at all any more; and she wanted none of those whom she loved to be standing outside then.


What You Most Want

The south wind blows the fly in the fish's mouth, says the Angler, but it didn't seem to blow August's well-tied and tempting examples into any. Ezra Meadows was sure that fish bite before rain; old MacDonald had always been sure they never do, and August saw that they do and don't: they bite at the gnats and mosquitoes settling like dust-motes over the water, driven down by altering pressure (Change, said John's ambivalent barometer) but not at the Jack Scotts and Alexandras August played over them.

Perhaps he wasn't thinking hard eno,ugh about angling. He was trying, without exactly trying to try, to see or notice something, without exactly noticing or seeing it, that would he a clue or a message; trying to remember, at the same time as he tried to forget he had ever forgotten, how such clues or messages had used to appear, and how he had used to interpret them. He must also try not to think This is madness; nor to think that he did this only for his mother's sake. Either thought would spoil whatever might happen. Over the water a kingfisher shot, laughing, iridescent in the sun, just above the evening which had already obscured the stream. I'm not mad, August thought.

A similarity between fishing and this other enterprise was that no matter where along the stream you stood, there seemed to be, just down there, where the stream spilled through a narrow race around stones, or just beyond the tresses of the willows, the perfect spot, the spot you had all along intended to go to. The feeling wouldn't diminish even when, after some thought, you realized that the perfect spot was one where, a few minutes ago, you had been standing, standing and looking longingly at the spot you now stood in and wanting to be amid the long maculations of its leaf shadows, as you now were, and yet; and just as August did realize this, as his desires were so to speak in transit between There and Here, something seized his line and nearly snatched the pole from his abstracted hand.

As startled as the fish itself must be, August played him clumsily, but had him after a struggle; netted him; the leaf-shadows were absorbed into evening vagueness; the fish looked up at him with the dull astonishment of all caught fish; August removed the hook, inserted his thumb in the bony mouth, and neatly broke the fish's neck. His thumb, when he withdrew it, was coated with slime and cold fish-blood. Without thinking, he thrust the thumb into his own mouth and sucked it. The kingfisher, making another laughing sortie just then, eyed him as he arrowed over the water and then up into a dead tree.

August, fish in his creel, went to the bank and sat, waiting. The kingfisher had laughed at him, not at the world in general, he was sure of that, a sarcastic, vindictive laugh. Well, perhaps he was laughable. The fish was not seven inches long, hardly breakfast. So? Well? "If I had to live on fish," he said, "I'd grow a beak."

"You shouldn't speak," said the kingfisher, "until you're spoken to. There are manners, you know."

"Sorry."

"First I speak," said the kingfisher, "and you wonder who it is that's spoken to you. Then you realize it's me; then you look at your thumb and your fish, and see that it was the fish's blood you tasted, that allowed you to understand the voices of creatures; then we converse."

"I didn't mean . . ."

"We'll assume it was done that way." The kingfisher spoke in the choleric, impatient tone August would have expected from his upshot head-feathers, his thick neck, his fierce, annoyed eyes and beak: a kingfisher's voice. Halcyon bird indeed!

"Now you address me," the kingfisher said. "'O Bird!' you say, and make your request."

"O Bird!" August said, opening his hands imploringly, "Tell me this: Is it okay if we have a gas station in Meadowbrook, and sell Ford cars?"

"Certainly."

"What?"

"Certainly!"

It was so inconvenient speaking in this way to a bird, a kingfisher seated on a branch in a dead tree at no more conversational a distance than any kingfisher ever was, that August imagined the bird as seated beside him on the bank, a sort of kingfisher-like person, of a more conversable size, with his legs crossed, as August's were. This worked well. He doubted that this kingfisher was a kingfisher at all anyway.

"Now," said the kingfisher, still bird enough to be unable to look at August with more than one eye at a time, and that one bright and smart and pitiless, "was that all?"

"I . . . think so. I—"

"Yes?"

"Well, I thought there might be some objection. The noise. The smell."

"None."

"Oh."

"On the other hand," said the kingfisher—a laugh, a raucous laugh, seemed always just beneath his words—"since you're here, and I'm here, you might ask for something else altogether."

"What?"

"Oh, anything. What you most want."

He had thought—right up until he had voiced his absurd request—that he was doing just that: but, with a terrible rush of heat that took his breath away, he knew that he hadn't, and that he could. He blushed fiercely. "Well," he said, stammering, "over in Meadowbrook, there's, there's a farmer, a certain farmer, and he has a daughter . . ."

"Yes yes yes," said the kingfisher impatiently, as though he knew well enough what August wanted, and didn't want to be bothered with having it spelled out circumstantially. "But let's discuss payment first, reward after."

"Payment?"

The kingfisher cocked his head in short, furious changes of attitude, sometimes eyeing August, sometimes the stream or the sky, as though he were trying to think of some really cutting remark in which to couch his annoyance. "Payment," he said. "Payment, payment. It's nothing to do with you. Let's call it a favor, if you prefer. The return of certain property that—don't get me wrong— I'm sure fell into your hands inadvertently. I mean—" for the briefest moment, and for the first time, the kingfisher showed something like hesitation, or trepidation "—I mean a deck of cards, playing cards. Old ones. Which you possess."

"Violet's?" said August.

"Those ones."

"I'll ask her."

"No, no. She thinks, you see, the cards are hers. So. She mustn't know."

"You mean steal them?"

The kingfisher was silent. For a moment he disappeared altogether, although that may only have been August's attention wandering from the effort of imagining him, to the enormity that he had been commanded to perform.

When he appeared again, the kingfisher seemed somewhat subdued. "Have you given any further thought to your reward?" he said, almost soothingly.

In fact he had. Even as he had grasped the fact that he could in some sense ask Amy of them (without even trying to imagine how they could make good on such a promise) he had ceased to desire her quite so intensely—small presage of what would happen when he did possess her, or anyone. But what one could he choose then? Was it possible he could ask for—"All of them," he said in a small voice.

"All?"

"Any one I want." If sudden horrid strength of desire hadn't whelmed him, shame would never have allowed him to say it. "Power over them."

"You have it." The kingfisher cleared his throat, looking away, and combed his beard with a black claw, as though glad this unclean bargaining was done.' "There is a certain pool up in the woods above the lake. A certain rock which juts out into the pool. Put the cards there, in their bag in their box, and take the gift you find there. Do it soon. Goodbye."

Evening was dense yet clear, presage of a storm; the confusions of sunset were over. The pools of the stream were black, with steady glassy ribs raised by the continuous current. A black flutter of feathers in a dead tree was a kingfisher preparing for sleep. August waited on the bank till he had been returned, by an evening path, to the place he had started out from; then he gathered up his gear and went home, eyes wide and blind to the beauties of a stormgathering evening, feeling faintly sick with strangeness and expectation.


Something Horrific

The velvet bag in which Violet's cards were kept was of a dusty rose color that had once been vivid. The box had once held a set of silver coffee-spoons from the Crystal Palace, but those had long since been sold, when she and her father wandered. To bring those strange huge oblongs drawn or printed centuries before out of this cozy box, with a picture of the old Queen and the Palace itself done on the cover in different woods, was always an odd moment, like the drawing aside of an arras in an old play to reveal something horrific.

Horrific: well, not quite, or not usually, though there were times when, as she laid out a Rose or a Banner or some other shape, she felt afraid: felt that some secret might be revealed which she didn't want to know, her own death or something even more dreadful. But—despite the weird, minatory images of the trumps, engraved with dense black detail like Durër's, baroque and Germanic—the secrets revealed were oftenest not terrible, oftenest not even secret: cloudy abstractions merely, oppositions, contentions, resolutions, common as proverbs and as unspecific. At least so she had been told the fall of them should be interpreted, by John and those of his acquaintance who knew card reading.

But the cards they knew weren't these cards, exactly; and though she knew no other way of laying them out or interpreting them than as the Tarot of the Egyptians was laid out (before she was instructed in those methods she used just to turn them down anyhow and stare at them, often for hours) she often wondered if there weren't some more revelatory, simpler, Somehow more useful manipulation of them she could make.

"And here is," she said, turning one up carefully top to bottom, "a Five of Wands."

"New possibilities," Nora said. "New acquaintances. Surprising developments."

"All right." The Five of Wands went in its place in the Horseshoe Violet was making. She chose from another pile—the cards had been sorted, by arcane distribution, into six piles before her—and turned a trump: it was the Sportsman.

This was the difficulty. Like the usual deck, Violet's contained a set of twenty-one major trumps; but hers—persons, places, things, notions—were not the Greater Trumps at all. And so when the Bundle, or the Traveler, or Convenience, or Multiplicity, or the Sportsman fell, a leap had to be made, meanings guessed at which made sense of the spread. Over the years, with growing certainty, she had assigned meanings to her trumps, made inferences from the way in which they fell among the cups and swords and wands, and discerned—or seemed to discern—their influences, malign or beneficent. But she could never be sure. Death, the Moon, Judgement— those greater trumps had large and obvious significance; what did one make though of the Sportsman?

He was, like all people pictured in her cards, musclebound in a not quite human way and striking an absurd, orgulous pose, toes turned out and knuckles on hip. He seemed certainly overdressed for what he was about, with ribbons at his knees, slashes in his jacket, and a wreath of dying flowers around his broad hat; but that was for sure a fishing pole over his shoulder. He carried something like a creel, and other impedimenta she didn't understand; and a dog, who looked a lot like Spark, lay asleep at his feet. It was Grandy who called this figure the Sportsman; underneath him was written in Roman capitals P I S C A T O R.

"So," Violet said, "new experiences, and good times, or adventures outdoors, for someone. That's nice."

"For who?" Nora asked.

"For whom."

"Well, for whom?"

"For whomever we're reading this spread for. Did we decide? Or is this only practice?"

"Since it's coming out so well," Nora said, "let's say it's for someone."

"August." Poor August, something good ought to be in store for him.

"All right." But before Violet could turn another card, Nora said "Wait. We shouldn't joke with it. I mean if it didn't start being August—what if we turn up something awful? Wouldn't we worry it might come true?" She looked out over the tangled spread, feeling apprehensive for the first time before their power. "Do they always come true?"

"I don't know." She stopped dealing them out. "No," she said. "Not ftr us. I think they might predict things that could happen to us. But—well, we're protected, aren't we?"

Nora said nothing to this. She believed Violet, and believed Violet knew the Tale in ways she couldn't imagine; but she had never felt herself to be protected.

"There are catastrophes," Violet said, "of an ordinary kind, that if the cards predicted them I wouldn't believe them."

"And you correct my grammar!" Nora said, laughing. Violet, laughing too, turned the next card: the Four of Cups, reversed.

"Weariness. Disgust. Aversion," Nora said. "Bitter experience."

Below, the ratchety doorbell rang. Nora leapt up.

"Now, who could that be?" Violet said, sweeping up the cards.

"Oh," Nora said, "I don't know." She had gone to the mirror hastily, and pushed her heavy golden hair quickly into place, and smoothed her blouse. "It might be Harvey Cloud, who said he might stop by to return a book I loaned him." She stopped her hurry, and sighed, as though annoyed at the interruption. "I guess I'd better go see."

"Yes," Violet said. "You go see. We'll do this again another day."

But when, a week later, Nora asked for another lesson, and Violet went to the drawer where her cards were kept, they weren't there. Nora insisted she hadn't taken them. They weren't in any other place that Violet might absentmindedly have put them. With half her drawers turned out and papers and boxes littering the floor from her search, she sat on the edge of the bed, puzzled and a little alarmed.

"Gone," she said.


Anthology of Love

"I'll do what you want, August," Amy said. "Whatever you want."

He bent his head down onto his upraised knees and said "Oh, Jesus, Amy. Oh, God, I'm so sorry."

"Oh, don't swear so, August, it's terrible." Her face was as misty and tearful as the shorn October cornfield in their view, where blackbirds hunted corn, rising at unseen signals and settling again elsewhere. She put her harvestchapped hands on his. They both shivered, from the cold and from chill circumstance. "I've read in books and such that for a while people love people and then they don't any more. I never knew why.

"I don't know why either, Amy."

"I'll always love you."

He raised his head, so flooded with melancholy and tender regret that he seemed to have turned to mist and autumn himself. He'd loved her intensely before, but never so purely as now when he told her he wouldn't be seeing her any more.

"I just wonder why," she said.

He couldn't tell her it was mostly a matter of scheduling, nothing to do with her really, only the most pressing engagements he had elsewhere—oh Lord, pressing, pressing . . . He had met her here, beneath the brown bracken, at dawn when she wouldn't be missed at home, to break off with her, and the only acceptable and honorable reason he could think of for that was that he didn't love her any more, and so that was the reason which, after long hesitations and many cold kisses, he had given her. But when he did so, she was so brave, so acquiescent, the tears that rolled down her cheeks so salty, that it seemed to him that he'd said it only to see how good, how loyal, how meek she was; to animate with sadness and imminent loss his own flagging feelings.

"Oh, don't Amy, Amy, I never meant. . ." He held her, and she yielded, shy to trespass where he had only a moment ago said she was forbidden, not wanted; and her shyness, her big eyes searching him, afraid and wildly hopeful, undid him.

"You shouldn't, August, if you don't love me."

"Don't say it, Amy, don't."

Near to weeping himself, just as though he truly wouldn't ever see her again (though he knew now he must and would), on the rustling leaves he entered with her into new sad sweet lands of love, where the awful hurts he had inflicted on her were healed.

There was no end to Love's geography, apparently.

"Next Sunday? August?" Timid, but sure now.

"No. Not next Sunday. But . . . Tomorrow. Or tonight. Can you . . ."

"Yes. I'll think of a way. Oh, August. Sweetness."

She ran, wiping her face, pinning her hair, late, in danger, happy, across the field. This, he thought, in some last resisting stronghold of his soul, is what I've come to: even the end of love is only another spur to love. He went the other way to where his car, reproachful, awaited him. The mist-sodden squirrel tail that now adorned it hung limply on its staff. Trying not to think, he cranked the car into life.

What the hell was he to do anyway?

He had thought that the ardent sword of feeling that had gone through him when he first saw Amy Meadows after acquiring his gift was only the certainty that desire was at last to be fulfilled. But he proceeded to make a fool of himself over her, certainty or no certainty; he braved her father, he told desperate lies and was nearly caught out in them, he waited hours on the cold ground beyond her house for her to free herself—they had promised him power over women, he realized bitterly, but not over their circumstances—and though Amy acceded to all his plans, his nighttime meetings, his schemes, and matched his importunities one for one, not even her shamelessness lessened his sense of not being at all in charge here, but at the beck and call of desire more demanding, less a part of himself and more a demon that rode him, than he had been before.

The sense grew, over the months, as he wheeled the Ford around the five towns, to a certainty: he drove the Ford, but was himself driven, steered, and shifted without let.

Violet didn't inquire why he had dropped the notion of building a garage in Meadowbrook. Now and then he complained to her that he used almost as much gas getting to and from the nearest garage as he put in his tank when he got there, but this didn't seem to be a hint or an argument, in fact he seemed less argumentative altogether than he had been. It might be, she thought, that his almost haggard air of being concerned quite elsewhere meant that he was hatching some even more unlikely scheme, but Somehow she thought not; she hoped that what appeared to be guilty exhaustion in his face and voice when he lounged silent at home didn't mean he was practicing some secret vice; certainly something had happened. The cards might have told her what, but the cards were gone. It was probably, she thought, only that he was in love.

That was true. If Violet hadn't chosen to seclude herself in an upstairs room, she would have had a notion of the swath her younger son was cutting through the young girls, the standing harvest of the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood. Their parents knew, a little; the girls themselves, among themselves, told of it; among them a glimpse of August's T, with the bright jaunty squirrel tail flying from a whippy rod at the windscreen, meant a day's consternation, a night's hot tossing, a wet pillow in the morning; they didn't know—how could they guess? All their hearts were his—that August's days and nights were spent much as theirs were.

He hadn't expected this. He had heard of Casanova, but hadn't read him. He had imagined harems, the peremptory clap of a sultan's hands which brings the acquiescent object of desire as quickly and impersonally as a dime brought a chocolate soda at the drugstore. He was astounded when, without his mad desire for Amy lessening in the slightest, he fell deeply in love with the Flowers' eldest daughter. Ravened by love and lewdness, he thought of her continually, when he wasn't with Amy; or when he wasn't thinking about—how could it be—little Margaret Juniper, who wasn't even fourteen. He learned, though slowly, what all great harrowed lovers learn: that love is what most surely compels love—is perhaps, except for brute force, the only thing that does, though only (and this was the terrible gift he had been given) when the lover truly believes, as August could, that when his love is strong enough it must surely be returned—and August's was.

When, with shame in his heart and trembling hands he had laid down by the rock pool what he had tried to deny to himself was his mother's most precious possession, the cards, and picked up what lay there for him, only a squirrel's tail and probably no gift at all but only the remnants of an owl's or a fox's breakfast, this is madness, it was only the dense weight of virgin hope that had allowed him to tie it to his Ford, expecting nothing. But they had kept their promise, oh they had, he was on the way to becoming an entire anthology of love, with footnotes (there were a pair of step-ins under his seat, he could not remember who had stepped out of them); only, as he drove from drugstore to church, from farmhouse to farmhouse, with the hairy thing flying from his windscreen, he came to know that it did not and had not ever contained his power over women: his power over women lay in their power over him.


Darker Before It Lightened

The Flowers came on Wednesdays, usually, bringing armloads of blossoms for Violet's room, and though Violet always felt somewhat ashamed and guilty in the presence of so many decapitated and slowly expiring blooms, she tried to express admiration and wonder at Mrs. Flowers' green thumb. But this visit was Tuesday, and there were no flowers.

"Come in, come in," Violet said. They were standing, unwontedly shy, at her bedroom door. "Will you take some tea?"

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Flowers. "Just a few words."

But when they were seated, exchanging glances with one another (though unable apparently to look at Violet) they said nothing for an uncomfortably long time.

The Flowers had come up just after the War to take Mr. MacGregor's old place, "fleeing," as Mrs. Flowers put it, the City; Mr. Flowers had had position and money there, but just what position wasn't clear, and how it had made him money was even less clear, not because they chose to hide it but because they seemed to find commonplaces of daily life hard to converse about intelligibly. They had been members with John of the Theosophical Society; they were both in love with Violet. Like John's, their lives were full of quiet drama, full of vague yet thrilling signs that life was not as the common run supposed it to be; they were among those (it surprised Violet how many there were, and how many gravitated toward Edgewood) who watch life as though it were a great drab curtain which they are sure is always about to rise on some terrific and exquisite spectacle, and though it never did quite rise, they were patient, and noted excitedly every small movement of it as the actors took their places, strained to hear the unimaginable setting being shifted.

Like John, they supposed Violet to be one of those actors, or at least to have been behind the curtain. That she couldn't see it that way at all made her only the more cryptic and entrancing to them. Their Wednesday visits made matter for a whole evening's quiet talk, inspiration for a whole week's reverent and watchful life.

But this wasn't Wednesday.

"It's about happiness," Mrs. Flowers said, and Violet had to stare puzzled at her for a moment until she reheard this as "It's about Happiness," the name of their eldest daughter. The younger ones were named Joy and Spirit. The same confusion happened when their names came up: our Joy is gone for the day; our Spirit came home covered with mud. Folding her hands and raising eyes that Violet now saw were red from weeping, Mrs. Flowers said, "Happiness is pregnant."

"Oh my."

Mr. Flowers, who with his thin boyish beard and great sensitive brow reminded Violet of Shakespeare, began speaking so softly and indirectly that Violet had to lean forward to hear. She got the gist: Happiness was pregnant, so Happiness had said, by her son August.

"She cried all night," Mrs. Flowers said, her own eyes filling. Mr. Flowers explained, or tried to. It wasn't that they believed in worldly shame or honor, their own marriage bond had been sealed before any words or formulas had been spoken; the flowering of vital energies is always to be welcomed. No: it was that August, well, didn't seem to understand it the way they did, or perhaps he understood it better, but anyway to speak frankly they thought he'd broken the girl's heart, though she said he said he loved her; they wondered if Violet knew what August felt, or—or if she knew (the phrase, so loaded with common and wrong meaning, fell out anyway, with a clang, like a horseshoe he had had in his pocket) what the boy intended to do about this.

Violet moved her mouth, as though in answer, but no answer came out. She composed herself. "If he loves her," she said, "then . . ."

"He may," Mr. Flowers said. "But he says—she says he says—that there's someone else, someone with, well, a prior claim, someone . . ."

"He's promised to another," Mrs. Flowers said. "Who's also, well."

"Amy Meadows?" Violet said.

"No, no. That wasn't the name. Was that the name?"

Mr. Flowers coughed. "Happiness wasn't sure, exactly. There might be . . . more than one."

Violet could only say "Oh dear, oh dear," feeling deeply their consternation, their brave effort not to censure, and having no idea how to answer them. They looked at her with hope, hope that she would say something that would fit all this too into the drama they perceived. But in the end she could only say, in a tiny voice, with a desperate smile, "Well, I suppose it's not the first time it ever happened in the world."

"Not the first time?"

"I mean not the first time."

Their hearts leapt up. She did know: she knew precedents for this. What could they be? Krishna fluting, seed-scattering, spiritincarnating—avatars——what? Something they had no inkling of? Yes, brighter and stranger than they could know. "Not the first time," said Mr. Flowers, his unlined brow raised. "Yes."

"Is it," said Mrs. Flowers, almost whispering, "part of the Tale?"

"Is what? Oh, yes," Violet said, lost in thought. What had become of Amy? What on earth was August up to? Where had he found the daring to break girls' hearts? A dread came over her. "Only I didn't know this, I never suspected. . . . Oh, August," she said, and bowed her head. Was this their doing? How could she know? Could she ask him? Would his answer tell her?

Seeing her so lost, Mr. Flowers leaned forward. "We never, never meant to burden you," he said. "It wasn't—it wasn't that we didn't think, that we weren't sure it wasn't, or wouldn't be, all right. Happiness doesn't blame him, I mean it's not that."

"No," said Mrs. Flowers, and put her hand gently on Violet's arm. "We didn't want anything. It wasn't that. A new spirit is always a joy. She'll be ours."

"Maybe," Violet said, "it'll be clearer later."

"I'm sure," Mrs. Flowers said. "It is, it is part of the Tale."

But Violet had seen that it would not be clearer later. The Tale: yes, this was part of the. Tale, but she had suddenly seen, as a person alone in a room reading or working at the end of day sees, as she raises her eyes from work that has for some reason grown obscure and difficult, that evening has come, and that's the reason; and that it would long grow darker before it lightened.

"Please," she said, "have tea. We'll light the lights. Stay awhile."

Outside she could hear—they could all hear—a car, chugging steadily toward the house. It slowed as it approached the drive—its voice was distinct and regular, like the crickets'—and changed gears like changing its mind, and chugged onward.

How long is the Tale? she had asked, and Mrs. Underhill had said: you and your children and your children's children will all be buried before that Tale's all told.

She took hold of the lamp cord, but for a moment didn't pull it. What had she done? Was this her fault, because she hadn't believed the Tale could be so long? It was. She would change. She would correct what she could, if there were time. There must be time. She pulled the cord, which made the windows night, and the room a room.


The Last Day of August

The enormous moon which August had taken Margaret Juniper out to see rise had risen, though they hadn't noticed its ascent. The harvest moon, August had insisted this was, and had sung a song about it to Marge as they sped along; but it wasn't the harvest moon, amber and huge and plenteous as it was, that would be next month's; this was only the last day of August.

Its light was on them. They could look at it now, August was too dazed and replete to do anything else, even to comfort Marge who wept quietly—perhaps, who could tell, even happily—beside him. He couldn't speak. He wondered if he would ever speak again, except to invite, except to propose. Maybe if he kept his mouth shut . . . But he knew he wouldn't.

Marge raised a moonlit hand, and stroked the moustache he had begun to grow, laughing through her tears. "It's so handsome," she said. He twitched his nose like a rabbit under her fingers. Why do they always rub it wrong, turn it uncomfortably underside-over, should he shave it so they can't? Her mouth was red and the flesh around it flushed from kissing and from weeping. Her skin against his was as soft as he had imagined it would be, but flecked with pinkish freckles he hadn't expected, not her slim white thighs though, bare on the sweat-slick leather of the seat. Within her opened blouse her breasts were small and new-looking, capped with large changeable nipples, seeming to have just been extruded from a boyish chest. The little hair was blond and stiff and small, like a dot. Oh God the privacies he had seen. He felt the strangeness of unbound flesh strongly. They ought to be kept hidden, these vulnerabilities, these oddities and organs soft as a snail's body or its tender horns, the exposure of them was monstrous, he wanted to recase hers in the pretty white underthings that hung around the car like festoons, and yet even as he thought this be began to rise again.

"Oh," she said. She hadn't, probably, got much of a gander at his engorgement in the rush of her deflowering, too much else to think about. "Do you do it right away again?"

He made no answer, it had nothing to do with him. As well ask the trout struggling on the hook if he liked to go on with that activity or cease it. A bargain is a bargain. He did wonder why, though one knows a woman better and she has picked up anyway the rudiments, the second time often seems more difficult, more illfitting, more a matter of inconvenient knees and elbows, than the first. None of this prevented his falling, as they coupled, more deeply in love with her, but he hadn't expected it to. So various they are, bodies, breasts, odors, he hadn't known about that, that they would be as individual, as charged with character, as faces and voices. He was surfeited with so much character. He knew too much. He groaned aloud with love and knowledge, and clung to her.

It was late, the moon had shrunk and grown chill and white as it climbed the sky. With how sad steps. Her tears fell again, though she didn't seem to be exactly weeping, they seemed a natural secretion, drawn forth by the moon perhaps; she was busy putting away her nakedness, though she couldn't take it back from him any more. She said to him calmly: "I'm glad, August. That we had this one time."

"What do you mean?" A hoarse beast's voice, not his own. "This one time?"

She brushed the tears from her face with the flat of her hand, she couldn't see to fasten her garters. "Because I can always remember this now."

"No."

"At least remember this." She threw her dress into the air, very agilely causing it to settle over her head; she wiggled, and it descended over her like a curtain, the last act. "August, no." She shrank against the door, clasping her hands togeher, drawing up her shoulders. "Because you don't love me, and that's all right. No. I know about Sara Stone. Everybody knows. It's all right."

"Who?"

"Don't you dare." She looked at him warningly. He wasn't to spoil this with lies, with coarse denials. "You love her. That's true and you know it." He said nothing. It was true. A collision was taking place inside him of such magnitude he could only witness it. The noise of it made it hard to hear her. "I'll never ever do it with anyone else, ever." Her bravery exhausted, her lip began to tremble. "I'm going to go off and live with Jeff, and I'll never love anyone else, and just remember this always." Jeff was her kindly brother, a rose gardener. She turned her face away. "You can take me home now."

He took her home, without another word.

Being filled with clamor is like being void. Void, he watched her climb down from the car, watched her shatter the moonshadows of leaves and be shattered by them as she went away, not looking back, he would not have seen her if she had looked. Void, he drove away from the shaded, shuddering crossroads. Void, he drove toward home. It didn't feel like a decision, it felt like void, when he turned off the gray pebble-glittering road, bounced through the ditch, climbed a bank, and steered the Ford (dauntless, unfazed) out into the silvered pond of an uncut pasture, and then further on, the void slowly filling with resolution that felt also like void.

The car sputtered out of gas: He choked it, prodded it, urged it a little further, but it died. If there was a God damn garage within ten miles of here it would be convenient as hell. He sat for a while in the cooling car, imagining his destination without exactly thinking about it. He did wonder (last lamplit window of common thought, flickering out) if Marge would think he'd done it for her. Well he would have, in a way, in a way, he would have to put stones in his pockets, heavy ones, and just relax. Wash it all away. The thunder of void resolution was like the cold thunder of the falls, he seemed already to hear it, and wondered if he would hear nothing else through eternity; he hoped not.

He got out of the car, detached the squirrel tail, it ought to be returned, maybe they would Somehow return the payment he had made for it; and, slipping and stumbling in his patent-leather seducer's shoes, he made for the woods.


Strange Way to Live

"Mother?" Nora said, astonished, stopping in the hall with an empty cup and saucer in her hands. "What are you doing up?"

Violet stood on the stairs, having made no sound coming down that Nora heard; she was dressed, in clothes which Nora hadn't seen for years, but she had the air of someone asleep, somnambulating.

"No word," she said, as though sure there would not be, "about August?"

"No. No, no word."

Two weeks had passed since a neighbor had told them of seeing August's Ford abandoned in a field, open to the elements. Auberon, after long hesitation, had suggested to Violet that they call the police; but this notion was so far from anything Violet could imagine about what had happened that he doubted she even heard: no fate August was resefved to could possibly be altered, or even discovered, by police.

"It's my fault, you know," she said in a small voice. "Whatever it is that's happened. Oh, Nora."

Nora rushed up the stairs to where Violet had sat down suddenly as though fallen. She took Violet's arm to help her rise, but Violet only grasped the hand she offered and squeezed it, as though it were Nora who needed comforting. Nora sat beside her on the stair. "I've been so wrong," Violet said, "so stupid and wrong. And now see what's come of it."

"No," Nora said. "What do you mean?"

"I didn't see," Violet said. "I thought . . . Listen now, Nora. I want to go to the City. I want to see Timmie and Alex, and have a long visit, and see the baby. Will you come?"

"Of course," Nora said. "But . . ."

"All right. And Nora. Your young man."

"What young man?" She looked away.

"Henry. Harvey. You mightn't think I know, but I do. I think—I think you and he should—should do what you like. If ever anything I said made you think I didn't want you to, well, it's not so. You must do exactly as you like. Marry him, and move away . . ."

"But I don't want to move away."

"Poor Auberon, I suppose it's too late—he's missed his war now, and . . ."

"Mother," Nora said, "what are you talking about?"

She was silent a time. Then: "It's my own fault," she said. "I didn't think. It's very hard though, you know, to know a little, or to guess a little, and not want to—to help, or to see that things come out right; it's hard not to be afraid, not to think some small thing— oh, the smallest—that you might do would spoil it. But that's not so, is it?"

"I don't know."

"It isn't. You see"—she clasped her pale, thin hands together, and closed her eyes—"it is a Tale. Only it's longer and stranger than we imagine. Longer and stranger than we can imagine. So what you must do—" she opened her eyes "—what you must do, and what I must do, is forget."

"Forget what?"

"Forget a Tale is being told. Otherwise—oh, don't you see, if we didn't know the little that we do, we'd never interfere, never get things wrong; but we do know, only not enough; and so we guess wrong, and get entangled, and have to be put right in ways—in ways so odd, so—oh, dear, poor August, the smelliest, noisiest garage would have been better, I know it would have been . . . ."

"But what about a special fate, and all that," Nora said, alarmed at her mother's distress, "and being Protected, and all?"

"Yes," Violet said. "Perhaps. But it doesn't matter, because we can't understand that, or what it means. So we have to forget."

"How can we?"

"We can't." She stared straight in front of her. "But we can be silent. And we can be clever against our knowledge. And we can—oh, it's so strange, such a strange way to live—we can keep secrets. Can't we? Can you?"

"I think. I don't know."

"Well, you must learn. So must I. So must we all. Never to tell what you know, or think, because it's never enough, and it won't be true anyway for anyone but you, not in the same way; and never hope, or be afraid; and never, never take their side against us, and still, Somehow, I don't know how, trust them. We must do that from now on."

"How long?"

Before Violet could answer this, if she could, or would, the door of the library, which they could see through the fat banisters, opened a crack, and a wan face looked out, and withdrew.

"Who's that?" Violet asked.

"Amy Meadows," Nora said, and blushed.

"What's she doing in the library?"

"She came looking for August. She says—" Nora now clasped her hands and shut her eyes "—she says she's going to have August's baby. And she wondered where he was."

The Seed. She thought of Mrs. Flowers: Is it the Tale? Hopeful, astonished, glad. She nearly laughed, giddily. "Well, so do I, she said. So do I. She leaned out between the banisters and said, "Come out, dear. Don't be afraid."

The door opened, just enough to let Amy pass, and though she shut it behind her softly, it boomed resoundingly as it latched. "Oh," she said, not having at first recognized the woman on the stair, "Mrs. Drinkwater."

"Come up," Violet said. She patted her lap, as she might to attract a kitten. Amy mounted the stairs to where they sat halfway to the landing. Her dress was homemade, and her stockings were thick, and she was even prettier than Violet remembered. "Now. What is it?"

Amy sat on the stair below them, a miserable huddle, with a big loose bag in her lap, like a runaway's. "August's not here," she said.

"No. We. . . don't know where he is, exactly. Amy, now everything's going to be all right. You're not to worry."

"It's not," Amy said softly. "It's not going to ever be all right again." She looked up at Violet. "Did he run off?"

"I think he did." She put her arm around Amy. "But he'll come back, possibly, probably . . ." She brushed Amy's hair aside which had fallen lankly and sadly over her cheek. "You must go home now for a while, you see, and not worry, and everything will turn out for the best, you'll see."

At that Amy's shoulders began to heave, softly and slowly. "Can't," she said, in a small high weeping voice. "Daddy's put me out. He's sent me away." Slowly, as though unable not to, she turned and put her sobbing head in Violet's lap. "I didn't come to bother him. I didn't. I don't care, he was wonderful and good, he was, I'd do it all again and I wouldn't bother him, only I got no place to go at all. No place to go."

"Well, well," Violet said, "well, well." She exchanged a glance with Nora, whose eyes had filled too. "Of course you have a place. Of course you do. You'll stay here, that's all. I'm sure your father will change his mind, the silly old fool, you can stay here as long as you need to. Now don't cry any more, Amy, don't. Here." She took a lace-edged hanky from her sleeve, and made the girl look up and use it, looking levelly into her eyes to stiffen her. "Now. That's better. As long as you like. Will that be all right?"

"Yes." Still a squeak was all she could manage, but her shoulders had stopped heaving. She smiled a little, ashamed. Nora and Violet smiled for her. "Oh," she said, sniffing, "I almost forgot." She tried with trembling fingers to undo her bundle, dabbed her face again and gave Violet back her sodden hanky, not much help for storms like Amy's, and managed to work open the bundle. "A man gave me something to give you. On my way here." She rooted among her belongings. "He seemed real mad. He said to say, 'If you people can't keep your bargains, there's no use dealing with you at all.' She drew out and placed in Violet's hands a box that bore on its cover a picture of Queen Victoria and the Crystal Palace, done in different woods.

"Maybe he was joking," Amy said. "A funny, birdy man. He winked at me. Is it yours?"

Violet held the box, whose weight told her that the cards, or something like them, were within.

"I don't know," she said. "I really don't know."

There were footsteps climbing the stairs of the porch just then, and the three of them fell silent. The footsteps crossed the porch, with a squishy squeak as though sodden. Violet took Amy's hand, and Nora Violet's. The screen-door spring sang, and there was a figure against the cloudy oval glass of the door.

Auberon opened the door. He wore waders, and an old hat of John's stuck full of flies. He was whistling as he came into the hall, about packing up your troubles in an old kit bag, but stopped when he saw the three women huddled on the stair, inexplicably, halfway to the landing.

"Well!" he said. "What's up? Any word from August?" They didn't answer, and he held up to show them four fat speckled trout neatly strung. "Supper!" he said, and for a moment they were all motionless, a tableau, he with the fish, they with their thoughts, the rest only watching and waiting.


No Catching Up

The cards had altered in their time elsewhere, Violet found, though just how she couldn't at first define. What meaning they had once had seemed to have clouded over, to have become powdered or dusty with obscurity; the patent, even funny quadrilles of meaning the figures had once joined hands in whenever she laid them out, the Oppositions and Influences and so on—they would have none of it any more. It was only after she and Nora had investigated them for a long time that she discovered that they had not lost power but gained it: they could no longer do what they had done, but they could, if interpreted correctly, predict with great accuracy the small events of Drinkwater daily life: gifts, and colds, and sprains; the itineraries of absent loved ones; whether it would rain on a picnic—that sort of thing. Only now and again did the deck throw up anything more startling. But it was a great help. They would grant us that, Violet thought; that gift in exchange. . . In fact she supposed (much later on) that to bestow this diurnal exactness of her deck was why they had taken it from her in the first place, unless they just couldn't help bestowing it. There was no catching up with them, no, not ever.

August's offspring would in the course of time be settled around the five towns, some with their mothers and grandmothers, some with others, changing names and families as they moved, as in a game of musical chairs: when the music stopped, in fact, two of the children (by a process so charged with emotion, and so complex in its jointure of shame, regret, love, indifference and kindliness that the participants would never be able to agree later on how it had happened) had changed places in two different dishonored households.

When Smoky Barnable came to Edgewood, August's descendants, disguised under several names, had come to the dozens. There were Flowers, and Stones, and Weeds; Charles Wayne was a grandson. One though, left out in the game, had found no seat: that was Amy's. She stayed at Edgewood, while in what she called her tummy there grew a boy, recapitulating in his ontogeny the many beasts, tadpole, fish, salamander, mouse, whose lives he would later describe in endless detail. They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother.