Little, Big

II.

Hours and days and months and years

go by; the past returns no more,

and what is to be we cannot know; but

whatever the time gives us in which

to live, we should therefore be content.

—Cicero

Jolly, round, red Mr. Sun lifted his cloudy head over the purple mountains and cast long, long rays down into the Green Meadow." Robin Bird read it out in a proud, piping voice; he knew this book almost by heart. "Not far from the Stone Fence that separates the Green Meadow from the Old Pasture, a family of Meadow Mice awoke in their tiny house in the grass, Mother, Father, and six pink, blind babies.


Robin Bird's Lesson

"The head of the household rolled over, opened his eyes, twitched his whiskers, and went out to the doorstep to wash his face in the dew caught in a fallen leaf. As he stood there looking out at the Green Meadow and the morning, Old Mother West-wind hurried by, tickling his nose and bringing him news of the Wild Wood, the Laughing Brook, the Old Pasture and the Great World all around him, confused and clamorous news, better than any Times at breakfast.

"The news was the same as it had been for many days now: the world is changing! Soon things will be very different than you smell them today! Prepare yourself, Meadow Mouse!

"The Meadow Mouse, when he had learned as much as he could from the coy Little Breezes that travel in Mother West-wind's company, scampered along one of his many paths through the long grass to the Stone Fence, where he knew of a place he could sit and see hut not be seen. When he had come to this secret place, he settled back, thrust a grass-spear between his teeth, and chewed thoughtfully.

"What was the great change in the world that Mother West-wind and all her Little Breezes talked of these days? What did it mean, and how was he to prepare himself?

"To the Meadow Mouse, the Green Meadow could not have been a better place to live than it was just then. All the grasses of the meadow were pouring forth their seed for him to eat. Many plants that he had thought were nasty had suddenly unfolded dry pods of sweet nuts for him to gnaw on with his strong teeth. The Meadow Mouse was happy and well-fed.

"And now was all that to change? He wondered and puzzled and thought, but he could make no sense of it.

"You see, children, the Meadow Mouse had been bom in the Springtime. He had grown up in the Summer when Mr. Sun smiles his broadest and takes his time to cross the blue, blue sky. All in the space of that single Summer, he had grown to his full size (which wasn't very great), and had married, and had babies born to him; soon they too would be grown.

"Now can you guess what the great change was, that the Meadow Mouse couldn't possibly know about?"

All the younger children called out and waved their hands, because unlike the older children they thought they were actually supposed to guess.

"Okay," Smoky said, "everybody knows. Thank you, Robin. Now let's see. Can you read for a while, Billy?" Billy Bush stood up, less confident than Robin, and took the battered book from him.


The End of the World

"Well," he read, "the Meadow Mouse decided he had better ask someone older and wiser than himself. The wisest creature he knew was the Black Crow, who came to the Green Meadow sometimes in search of grain or grubs, and always had a remark to make to anyone who would listen. The Meadow Mouse always listened to what the Black Crow had to say, though he stayed well away from the Black Crow's glittering eye and long, sharp beak. The Crow family was not known for eating mice, but on the other hand they were known to eat almost anything that came to hand, or to beak you might say.

"The Meadow Mouse had not been sitting and thinking for very long when out of the blue sky came a heavy flapping of wings and a raucous call, and the Black Crow himself landed in the Green Meadow not far from where the Meadow Mouse sat!

"'Good Morning, Mr. Crow,' the Meadow Mouse called out, feeling quite safe in his snuggery in the wall.

"'Is it a good morning?' said the Black Crow. 'Not many more days you'll be saying that.'

"'Now that's just what I wanted to ask you about,' the Meadow Mouse said. 'It seems that a great change is coming over the world. Do you feel it? Do you know what it is?'

"'Ah, foolish Youth!' said the Black Crow. 'There is indeed a change coming. It is called Winter, and you'd better prepare for it.'

"'What will it be like? How shall I prepare for it?'

"With a glint in his eye, as though he enjoyed the Meadow Mouse's discomfort, the Black Crow told him about Winter: how cruel Brother North-wind would come sweeping over the Green Meadow and the Old Pasture, turning the leaves gold and brown and blowing them from the trees; how the grasses would die and the animals that lived on them grow thin with hunger. He told how the cold rains would fall and flood the houses of small creatures like the Meadow Mouse. He described the snow, which sounded rather wonderful to the Meadow Mouse; but then he learned of the terrible cold that would bite him to the bone, and how the small birds would grow weak with cold and tumble frozen from their perches, and the fish would stop swimming and the Laughing Brook laugh no more because its mouth was stopped with ice.

"'But it's the End of the World,' cried the Meadow Mouse in despair.

"'So it would seem,' said the Black Crow gaily. "For some folks. Not for me. I'll get by. But you had better prepare yourself, Meadow Mouse, if you expect to stay among the living!'

"And with that the Black Crow flapped his heavy wings and took to the air, leaving the Meadow Mouse more puzzled and much more afraid than he had been before.

"But as he sat there chewing his grass-blade in the warmth of the kindly Sun, he saw how he might learn to survive the awful cold that Brother North-wind was bringing to the world."

"Okay, Billy. You know," Smoky said, "you don't have to say 'thee' every time you say 'the,' t-h-e. Just say 'the,' like you do when you're talking."

Billy Bush looked at him as though for the first time understanding that the word on paper and the word he said all day were the same. "The," he said.

"Right. Now who's next?"


Brother North-wind's Secret

"What he thought he would do," Terry Ocean read (too old really for this, Smoky thought), "was to go around the Great World as far as he could go and ask every creature how he intended to prepare himself for the coming Winter. He was so pleased with this plan that he filled himself full of the seeds and nuts that were so sadly plentiful all around, said goodbye to his wife and children, and set off that very noon.

"The first creature he came to was a fuzzy caterpillar on a twig. Though caterpillars are not known for being clever, the Meadow Mouse put the question to him anyway: What would he do to prepare himself for the Winter that's coming?

"'I don't know about Winter, whatever that may be,' the caterpillar said in his tiny voice. 'A change is certainly coming over me, though. I intend to wrap myself up in this lovely white silken thread I seem to have just learned how to spin, don't ask me how; and when I'm all wrapped up and stuck well on to this comfortable twig, I'll spend a long time there. Maybe forever. I don't know.'

"Well, that didn't seem like much of a solution to the Meadow Mouse, and with pity in his heart for the foolish caterpillar, he went on with his journey.

"Down at the Lily Pond, he met creatures he had never seen there before: great gray-brown birds with long graceful necks and black beaks. There were many of them, and they sailed across the Lily Pond dipping theirdong heads beneath the water and eating what they found there. 'Birds!' said the Meadow Mouse. 'Winter's coming! How do you intend to prepare yourselves?'

"'Winter's coming indeed,' said an old bird in a solemn voice. 'Brother North-wind has chased us from our homes. There the cold is already sharp. He's at out backs now, hurrying us on. We'll outfly him, though, fast as he is! We'll fly to the South, farther South than he's allowed to go; and there we'll be safe from Winter.'

"'How far?' the Meadow Mouse asked, hoping perhaps he could outrun Brother North-wind too.

"'Days and days and days, flying as fast as we can,' said the old one. 'We're late already.' And with a great beating of his wings he arose from the pond, tucking his black feet neatly against his white stomach. The others rose up after him, and together they flew off honking toward the warm South.

"The Meadow Mouse went on sadly, knowing he couldn't outrun the winter on broad strong wings like theirs. So absorbed was he in these thoughts that he nearly stumbled over a brown Mud Turtle at the Lily Pond's edge. The Meadow Mouse asked him what he would do when the Winter came.

"'Sleep,' said the Mud Turtle sleepily, wrinkled like an old brown man. 'I'll wrap myself in the warm mud deeper than Winter can reach, and sleep. In fact I'm getting sleepy now.'

"Sleep! That didn't sound like much of an answer to the Meadow Mouse. But as he continued on his way, he was to hear the same answer from many different creatures.

"'Sleep!' said the Grass Snake, the Meadow Mouse's enemy. 'You'll have nothing to fear from me, Meadow Mouse.'

"'Sleep!' said the Brown Bear. 'In a cave or a strong house of branches. Sleep for good.'

"'Sleep,' squeaked his cousin the Bat when evening came. 'Sleep upside down, hanging by my toes.'

"Well! Half the world was simply going to go to sleep when Winter came. This was the oddest answer the Meadow Mouse heard, but there were many others too.

" 'I'll store nuts and seeds in secret places,' said the Red Squirrel. 'That's how I'll get by.'

"'I'll trust the People to feed me when there's nothing left,' said the Chickadee.

"'I'll build,' said the Beaver. 'I'll build a house to live in with my wife and children, down beneath the frozen stream. Now may I get on with it? I'm very busy.'

"'I'll steal,' the Raccoon with his burglar mask said. 'Eggs from the People's barns, garbage from their cans.'

"'I'll eat you,' said the Red Fox. 'See if I don't!' And he chased the poor Meadow Mouse and nearly caught him before the Meadow Mouse reached his private hole in the old Stone Fence.

"As he lay there panting, he could see that during his travels the great change called Winter had grown more evident in the Green Meadow. It was not so green now. It had grown brown and yellow and white. Many seeds had ripened and fallen or flown away on little wings. Overhead the Sun's face was hidden by grim gray clouds. And still the Meadow Mouse had no plan to protect himself from cruel Brother North-wind.

"'What will I do?' he cried aloud. 'Shall I go live with my cousin in Farmer Brown's barn, and take my chances with Tom the cat and Fury the dog and the mousetraps and the poisons? I wouldn't last long. Shall I start off to the South and hope I outrun Brother North-wind? Surely he'll catch me unprotected and freeze me with his cold breath far from home. Shall I lie down with my wife and children and pull the grasses over my head and try to sleep? Before long I'd wake up hungry, and so would they. Whatever will I do?'

"Just then a glittering black eye looked in at him where he sat, so suddenly that he jumped up with a cry. It was the Black Crow.

"'Meadow Mouse,' he said, as gaily as ever, 'whatever you do to protect yourself, there's one thing you should know which you do not.'

"'What is it?' asked the Meadow Mouse.

"'It's Brother North-wind's secret.'

"'His secret! What is it? Do you know it? Will you tell it to me?'

"'It is,' the Black Crow answered, 'the one good thing about Winter, which Brother North-wind wants no living creature to know. And yes, I know it; And no, I will not tell it to you.' For the Black Crow guards his secrets as closely as he guards the shiny bits of metal and glass he finds and saves. And so the ungenerous creature went laughing off to join his brothers and sisters in the Old Pasture.

"The one good thing about Winter! What could it be? Not the cold or the snow or the ice or the flooding rains.

"Not the hiding and scavenging and deathlike sleep, and the running away from enemies desperate with hunger.

"Not the short days and long nights and pale, absentminded Sun, all of which the Meadow Mouse didn't even know about yet.

"What could it be?

"That night, while the Meadow Mouse lay huddled for warmth with his wife and children in their house in the grass, Brother North-wind himself came sweeping across the Green Meadow. Oh, what great strides he took! Oh, how the brown, thin house of the Meadow Mouse rattled and shook! Oh, how the grim gray clouds were ripped and torn and flung from the face of the frightened Moon!


"'Brother North-wind!' the Meadow Mouse cried out. 'I'm cold and frightened! Won't you tell me the one good thing about Winter?'

"'That's my secret,' Brother North-wind said in a great icy voice. And to show his strength he squeezed a tall maple tree till all its green leaves turned orange and red, and then he blew them all away. Which done, he strode away across the Green Meadow leaving the Meadow Mouse to tuck his cold nose into his paws and wonder what his secret was.

"Do you know what Brother North-wind's secret is?

"Of course you do."

"Oh. Oh." Smoky came to himself. "I'm sorry, Terry, I didn't mean to make you go on and on. Thank you very much." He suppressed a yawn, and the children watched him do so with interest. "Um, now could everybody take out pens and paper and ink, please? Come on, no groaning. It's too nice a day."



The Only Game Going

Mornings it was reading and penmanship, the penmanship taking more time since Smoky taught them (could only teach them) his own Italic hand, which if done right is supremely lovely, and if done even a little wrong is illegible. "Ligature," he would say sternly, tapping a paper, and its frowning maker would begin again. "Ligature," he said to Patty Flowers, who through the whole of that year thought he was saying "Look at you," an accusation she couldn't reply to but couldn't avoid; once in a fit of frustration at this she drove her pen-point through the paper, so fiercely it stuck in the desk like a knife.

Reading was a pickup affair with books from the Drinkwater library, Brother North-wind's Secret and the rest of Doc's tales for the younger and whatever Smoky thought appropriate and informative for the older. Sometimes, bored to tears with their halting voices, he simply read to them himself. He enjoyed that, and enjoyed explicating the hard parts and imagining aloud why the author had said what he had. Most of the kids thought these glosses were part of the text, and when they were grown, the few who read to themselves the books Smoky had read to them sometimes found them lean, allusive and tightlipped, as though parts were missing.

Afternoons was math, which often enough became an extension of penmanship, since the elegant shapes of Italic numbers interested Smoky as much as their relations. There were two or three of his students who were good at figures, perhaps prodigies Smoky thought because they were in fact quicker at fractions and other hard stuff than he was; he would get them to help teach the others. On the ancient principle that music and mathematics are sisters, he sometimes used the anyway somnolent and useless butt-end of the day to play to them on his violin; and its mild, not always certain songs, and the stove's smell, and the winter foregathering outside, were what Billy Bush later remembered of arithmetic.

He had one great virtue as a teacher; he didn't really understand children, didn't enjoy their childishness, was baffled and shy before their mad energy. He treated them like grown-ups, because it was the only way he knew of treating anyone; when they didn't respond like grown-ups, he ignored it and tried again. What he cared about was what he taught, the black ribbon of meaning that was writing, the bundles of words and the boxes of grammar it tied up, the notions of writers and the neat regularity of number. And so that was what he talked about. It was the only game going during school hours—even the cleverest kids found it hard to get him to play any other—and so when they had all stopped listening at last (it happened soonest on fine days, as when snow came tumbling hypnotically out of the sky or when sun and mud came together) he just let them go, unable to think of any way to amuse them further.

And went home himself then through the front gate of Edgewood (the schoolhouse was the old gatehouse, a gray Doric temple with ftr some reason a grand rack of antlers over the door) wondering whether Sophie had got up from her nap yet.


The One Good Thing About Winter

He lingered on this day to clean out the smaller stove; it would need lighting tomorrow, if the cold kept up. When he had locked the door he turned from the tiny temple and stood in the leaf-littered road that ran between it and the front gate of Edgewood. This road hadn't been the one he had taken to reach Edgewood at first, nor this the gate he had gone in at. In fact no one ever used the front gate any more, and the sedge-drowned drive that led for half a mile through the Park was now only kept a path by his diurnal journeys, as though it were the habitual trail of a large and heavyfooted wild beast.

The tall entrance gates before him, green wrought-iron in a '90's lily pattern, stood or leaned eternally open, lashed to earth by weed and undergrowth. Only a rusted chain across the drive now suggested that this was still the entrance to somewhere, and not to be entered upon by the uninvited. To his left and his right the road ran away down an avenue of horse-chestnuts heartbreakingly golden; the wind tore fortunes from them and scattered them spendthrift. The road wasn't used much either, except by the kids walking or biking from here and there to school, and Smoky wasn't sure exactly where it led. But he thought that day, standing ankle-deep in leaves and for some reason unable to pass through the gates, that one branch of it must lead to the cracked macadam from Meadowbrook, which joined the tarred road that went past the Junipers', which eventually joined the traffic-loud fugue of feeder roads and expressways roaring into the City.

What if he were now to turn right (left?) and start off back that way, empty-handed and on foot as he had come, going backwards as in a film run the wrong way (leaves leaping to the trees) until he was where he had started from?

Well, for one thing he was not empty-handed.

And he had grown increasingly certain (not because it was sensible or even possible) that once on a summer afternoon having entered through the screen door into Edgewood, he had never again left: that the various doors by which he had afterwards seemed to go out had led only to further parts of the house, cleverly by some architectural enfoldment or trompe-l'oeil (which he didn't doubt John Drinkwater was capable of) made to look and behave like woods, lakes, farms, and distant hills. The road taken might lead only back around to some other porch at Edgewood, one he had never seen before, with wide worn steps and a door for him to go in by.

He uprooted himself from the spot, and from these autumnal notions. The circularity of roads and seasons: he had been here before. October was the cause.

Yet he stopped again as he crossed the stained white bridge that arched the sheet of water (stucco had been broken here, showing the plain brickwork beneath, that should be fixed, winter was the cause). Down in the water, drowned leaves turned and flew in the current, as the same leaves turned and flew in the busy sea of air, only half as fast or slower; sharp orange claws of maple, broad blades of elm and hickory, torn oak inelegant brown. In the air they were too fast to follow, but down in the mirror-box of the stream they did their dance with elegiac slowness for the current's sake.

What on earth was he to do?

When long ago he had seen that he would grow a character in the place of his lost anonymity, he had supposed that it would be like a suit of clothes bought too large fur a child, that the child must grow into. He expected a certain discomfort at first, an illfittingness, that would go away as his self filled up the spaces, took the shape of his character, until at last it would be creased for good in the places where he bent and worn smooth where it chafed him. He expected, that is, for it to be singular. He didn't expect to have to suffer more than one; or, worse, to find himself done up in the wrong one at the wrong time, or in parts of several all at once, bound and struggling.

He looked toward the inscrutable edge of Edgewood which pointed toward him, windows lit already in the fleeting day; a mask that covered many faces, or a single face that wore many masks, he didn't know which, nor did he know it about himself.

What was the one good thing about Winter? Well, he knew the answer to that; he'd read the book before. If Winter comes, Spring can't be far behind. But oh yes, he thought; yes it can; far behind.


The Old Age of the World

In the polygonal music room on the ground floor Daily Alice, hugely pregnant for the second time, played checkers with Great-Aunt Cloud.

"It's as though," Daily Alice said, "each day is like a step, and every step takes you further away from—well, from when things made more sense. When things were all alive, and made signs to you. And you can no more not take a step farther away than you could not live through a day."

"I think I see," Cloud said. "But I think it only seems so."

"It isn't just that I've outgrown it." She was stacking up her captured red men in even piles. "Don't tell me that."

"It'll always be easier for children. You're an old lady now—children of your own."

"And Violet? What about Violet?"

"Oh, yes. Well. Violet."

"What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?"

"Everybody always wonders that. I don't think, really, anyone could feel the world grow older. Its life is far too long for that." She took a black man of Alice's. "What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old—very old. When you're young, the world seems young. That's all."

That made sense, Daily Alice thought, and yet it couldn't explain the sense of loss she felt, a sense that things clear to her were being left behind, connections broken around her, by her, daily. When she was young, she had always the sense that she was being teased: teased to go on, ahead, follow somewhere. That was what she had lost. She felt certain that never again would she spy, with that special flush of sensibility, a clue to their presence, a message meant only for her; wouldn't feel again, when she slept in the sun, the brush of garments against her cheek, the garments of those who observed her, who, when she woke, had fled, and left only the leaves astir around her.

Come hither, come hither, they had sung in her childhood. Now she was stationary.

"Your move," Cloud said.

"Well, do you do that consciously?" Daily Alice asked, only partly of Cloud.

"Do what?" Cloud said. "Grow up? No. Well. In a sense. You see it's inevitable, or refuse to. You greet it or don't—take it in trade, maybe, for all you're going to lose anyway. Or you can refuse, and have what you've got to lose snatched from you, and never take payment—never see a trade is possible." She thought of Auberon.

Through the windows of the music room, Daily Alice saw Smoky trudging home, his image refracted jerkily as it passed from one old rippled pane into the next. Yes: if what Cloud said were true, then she had taken Smoky in trade—and what she had traded for him was the living sense that it was they, they themselves, who had led her to him, they who had chosen him for her, they who had plotted the quick glances that had made him hers, the long engagement, the fruitful and snug marriage. So that though she possessed what she had been promised, she had lost in return the sense that it had been promised. Which made what she possessed—Smoky, and ordinary happiness—seem fragile, losable, hers only by chance.

Afraid: she felt afraid: yet how could it be, if the bargain had been truly struck, and she had done her part, and it had cost her so much, and they had gone to such trouble to prepare it all, that she could lose him? Could they be that deceitful? Did she understand so little? And yet she was afraid.

She heard the front door close, solemnly, and a moment later she saw Doc in a red plaid jacket come out toward Smoky, carrying two shotguns and other equipment. Smoky looked surprised, then shot up his eyes and smacked his forehead as though remembering something he'd forgotten. Then, resigned, he took one of the guns from Doc, who was pointing out possible ways they might take; the wind blew orange sparks from his pipe-bowl. Smoky turned away with him outward toward the Park, Doc still pointing and talking. Once, Smoky looked back, toward the upstairs windows of the house.

"Your move," Cloud said again.

Alice looked down at the board, which had grown disjunct and patternless. Sophie came through the music-room then, in a flannel gown and a cardigan of Alice's, and for a moment the two women stopped their game. It wasn't that Sophie distracted them; she seemed oblivious of them; she noticed them, but took no notice. It was that as she passed they both seemed to feel the world intensely around them for a moment: the wind, wild, and the earth, brown, outside; the hour, late afternoon; the day and the house's progress through it. Whether it was this sudden generality of feeling which Sophie caused, or Sophie herself, Daily Alice didn't know; but something just then became clear to her which had not been clear before.

"Where's he going?" Sophie said to no one, splaying a hand against the curved glass of the bay as though it were a barrier or the bars of a cage she had just found herself to be in.

"Hunting," Daily Alice said. She made a king, and said "Your move."


Unflinching Predators

It was only once or so an autumn that Doctor Drinkwater unlimbered one of a number of shotguns his grandfather had kept in a case in the billiard room, cleaned it, loaded it, and went out to shoot birds. For all his love of the animal world—or perhaps because of it—Doc felt he deserved as much as the Red Fox or the Barn Owl to be a carnivore, if it was in his nature to be so; and the unaffected joy with which he ate flesh, chewing the bones and gristle and licking with delight the grease from his fingers, convinced him it was in his nature. He thought however that he ought, if he was to be a carnivore, to be able to face killing what he ate rather than that the bloody work should always be done elsewhere and he enjoy only the trimmed and unrecognizable products. One shoot or two a year, a few bright-plumaged birds blasted mercilessly from the sky, and brought home bleeding and open-beaked, seemed to satisfy his scruples; his woodcraft and stealth made up for a certain irresolution at the moment the grouse or pheasant thundered from the brush, and he usually managed to supply a good harvest-home, and thus to think of himself as an unflinching predator when he tucked into the beef and lamb the rest of the year.

Often these days he took Smoky along, having convinced him of the logic of this position. Doc was left-handed and Smoky right-handed, which made it less likely that they'd shoot each other in their blood-lust, and Smoky, though inattentive and not very patient, turned out to be a natural shot.

"We're still," Smoky asked as they crossed a stone fence, "on your property?"

"Drinkwater property," Doc said. "Do you know, this lichen here, the flat, silvery kind, can live to be hundreds of years old?"

"Yours, Drinkwater's," Smoky said, "is what I meant."

"Actually, you know," Doc said, cradling his weapon and choosing a direction, "I'm not a Drinkwater. Not by name." It reminded Smoky of the first words Doc had ever said to him: "Not a practicing doctor," he'd said.

"Technically I'm a bastard." He tugged his checked cap further over his forehead and considered his case without rancor. "I was illegitimate, and never legally adopted by anybody. Violet raised me, mostly, and Nora and Harvey Cloud. But never got around to going through the formalities."

"Oh?" said Smoky, with a show of interest, though in fact he knew the story.

"Skeletons," Doc said, "in the old family wardrobe. My father had a what, a liaison, with Amy Meadows, you met her."

He plowed her, and she cropp'd, Smoky quoted, almost, unforgivably, aloud. "Yes," he said. "Amy Woods now."

"Married to Chris Woods now many years."

"Mmm." What memory tried to enter Smoky's consciousness, but at the last moment changed its mind, and withdrew? A dream?

"I was the result." His Adam's apple moved, whether from emotion or not Smoky couldn't tell. "I think if you sort of spread out around that brake there, we're coming to some good spots."

Smoky went where he was told. He held his gun, an old English over-and-under, at the ready, the chased safety off. He didn't, like the rest of the family, much enjoy long aimless walks outdoors, especially in the wet; but if they had a token purpose, like today's, he could go on in discomfort with the best of them. He would like though to pull a trigger at least, even if he hit nothing. And even as he was dwelling absently on this, two brown cannonballs were fired from the tangled thicket ahead of him, pounding the air for altitude. Smoky gave a startled cry, but was raising his gun even as Doc shouted "Yours!", and as though his barrels were tied by strings to their tails, followed one, fired, followed the other and fired again; lowered his gun to watch, astonished, both birds tumble through the air and fall to earth with a crackle of brown weed and a definitive thump. "Damn," he said.

"Good shot," Doc cried out heartily, with only a small pang of guilty horror in his heart.


Responsibilities

Coming back in a wide circle toward the house, with a bag of four and the evening growing cold as winter, they passed a thing that had puzzled Smoky before: he was used to seeing the ruins of half-started projects around the place, greenhouses, temples, forlorn yet Somehow appropriate, but what was an old car doing rusting away to unrecognizability in the middle of a field? A very old car too: it must have been there fifty years, its half-buried spoked wheels as lonesome and antique as the broken wheels of prairie schooners sunken on Midwestern prairies.

"A Model T, yes," Doc said. "My father's once."

With it in view, they stopped at a stone wall to pass back and forth, as hunters will, a warming flask.

"As I grew up," Doc said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, "I started to ask how I had come about. Well, I did get it out of them about Amy and August, but you see Amy has always wanted to pretend it all never happened, that she's just an old friend of the family, even though everybody was well aware, even Chris Woods, and even though she used to cry whenever I went to visit her. Violet—well. She seemed to have forgotten August altogether, though you never knew with her. Nora only said: he ran off." He passed the flask back. "I eventually got up the courage to ask Amy what the story had been, and she got, well, shy and—girlish is the only way to put it. August was her first love. Some people never forget, do they? I'm proud of that, in a way."

"Used to be thought a love-child was special," Smoky threw in. "Very good or very bad. Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Edmund in . . ."

"I was at the age when you want to be sure of all this," Doc went on. "Just who you are, exactly. Your identity. You know." Smoky in fact didn't. "I thought: My father ran off, without leaving, so far as I knew, a trace. Mightn't I do the same? Mightn't it be in my nature too? And perhaps if I found him, after who knows what adventures, I would make him acknowledge me. Grasp his shoulders in my hands—" here Doc made a gesture which the flask in his hand kept from being as poignant as it ought to have been "—and say I am your son." He sat back, and drank moodily.

"And did you run off?"

"I did. Sort of."

"And?"

"Oh, I didn't get far, really. And there was always money from home. I got a doctor's degree, even though I've never practiced much; saw something of the Great World. But I came back." He smiled shyly. "I suppose they knew I would. Sophie Dale knew I would. So she says now."

"Never did find your father," Smoky said.

"Well," Doc said, "yes and no." He contemplated the pile in the field. Soon it would be only a shapeless hillock where no grass grew; then nothing. "I suppose it's true, you know, that you set out on adventures and then find what you've been looking for right in your own backyard."

Below and beside them, unmoving in his secret place in the stone wall, a Meadow Mouse observed them. What were they about? He smelled the reek of their slaughter, and their mouths moved as though consuming vast provender, but they weren't eating. He squatted on the coarse pad of lichen he and his ancestors had squatted on for time out of mind and wondered: wondering made his nose twitch furiously and his translucent ears cup themselves toward the sounds they made.

"It doesn't do to inquire into some things too deeply," Doc said. "Into what's given. What can't be changed."

"No," Smoky said, with less conviction.

"We," Doc said, and Smoky thought he knew whom of them that "we" included and whom of them it didn't, "have our responsibilities. It wouldn't do just to run off on some quest and pay no attention to what others might want or need. We have to think of them."

The Meadow Mouse in the midst of his wonderings had fallen asleep, but awoke with a start as the two great creatures stood and collected their inexplicable belongings.

"Sometimes we don't entirely understand," Doc said, as though it were wisdom he had arrived at after some cost. "But we have our parts to play."

Smoky drank, and capped the flask. Could it really be that he intended to abdicate his responsibilities, throw up his part, do something so horrid and unlike himself, and so hopeless too? What you're looking for is right in your own backyard: a grim joke, in his case. Well, he couldn't tell; and knew no one he could ask; but he knew he was tired of struggling.

And anyway, he thought, it wouldn't be the first time it ever happened in the world.


Harvest-Home

The day of the game supper, when the birds had hung, was something of an occasion every year. Through that week, people would arrive, and be closeted with Great-aunt Cloud, and pay their rents or explain why they couldn't (Smoky wasn't amazed, having no sense of real property and its values, at the great extent of the Drinkwater property or the odd way in which it was managed— though this yearly ceremony did seem very feudal to him). Most of those who came brought some tribute too, a gallon of cider, a basket of white-rayed apples, tomatoes in purple paper.

The Floods and Hannah and Sonny Noon, the largest (in every way) of their tenants, stayed to the supper. Rudy brought a duck of his own to fill out the feast, and the lavender-smelling lace tablecloth was laid. Cloud opened her polished box of wedding-silver (she being the only Drinkwater bride anyone had ever thought to give such to, the Clouds had been careful about these things) and the tall candles shone on it and on the facets of cut-crystal glasses, diminished this year by one small heartrending crash.

They set out a lot of sleepy, sea-dark wine that Walter Ocean made every year and decanted the next, his tribute; in it, toasts were made over the glistening bodies of the birds and the bowls of autumn harvest. Rudy rose, his stomach advancing somewhat over the table's edge, and said:

"Bless the master of this house

The mistress bless also

And all the little children

That round the table go."

Which that year included his own grandson Robin, and Sonny Noon's new twins, and Smoky's daughter Tacey.

Mother said, glass aloft:

"I wish you shelter from the storm

A fireplace, to keep you warm

But most of all, when snowflakes fall

I wish you love."

Smoky began one in Latin, but Daily Alice and Sophie groaned, so he stopped, and began again:

"A goose, tobacco and cologne:

Three-winged and gold-shod prophecies of Heaven

The lavish heart shall always have, to leaven,

To spread with bells and voices, and atone

The abating shadows of our conscript dust."

"'Abating shadows' is good," said Doc. "And 'conscript dust'."

"Didn't know you were a smoker though," Rudy said.

"And I didn't know, Rudy," Smoky said expansively, inhaling Rudy's Old Spice, "you were a lavish heart." He helped himself to the decanter.

"I'll say one I learned as a kid," said Hannah Noon, "and then let's get down to it:

"Father Son and Holy Ghost

You eat the fastest, you get the most."


Seized by the Tale

After dinner, Rudy sorted through some piles of ancient records as heavy as dishes that had lain long disused and circled with arcs of dust in the buffet. He found treasures, greeting old friends with glad cries. They stacked them on the record player and danced.

Daily Alice, unable after the first round to dance any more, rested her hands on the great prie-dieu of stomach she had grown and watched the others. Great Rudy flung his little wife around like a jointed doll, and Alice supposed he'd learned over the years how to live with her and not break her; she imagined his great weight on her—no, probably she would climb up on him, like climbing a mountain.

Dunkin' donuts, yubba yubba

Dunkin' donuts, yubba yubba

Dunkin' donuts—splash! in the coffee!

Smoky, bright-eyed and loose-limbed, made her laugh with his cheerfulness, like a sun; a sunny disposition, is that what was meant by that? And how did he come to know the words to these :razy songs, who seemed never to know anything that everybody else knew? He danced with Sophie, just tall enough to take her properly, footing it gallantly and inexpertly.

The pale moon was rising above the green mountains

The sun was declining beneath the blue sea

Like a sun: but a small sun, which she had within her, warming her from the inside out. She was conscious of a feeling she had had before, a sense that she was looking at him, and at all of them, from some way off, or from a great height. There had been a time when she seemed to herself to be snug, and small, within the large house of Smoky, a safe inhabitant, room to run in yet never leave his encompassment. Now she oftener felt otherwise: over time it was he who seemed to have become a mouse within the house of her. Huge: that's what she felt herself to be becoming. Her perimeters expanded, she felt that eventually she would be contiguous almost with the walls of Edgewood itself: as large, as old, as comfortably splayed on its feet and as capacious. And as she grew huge—this suddenly struck her—the ones she loved diminished in size as surely as if they walked away from her, and left her behind.

"Ain't misbehavin'," Smoky sang in a dreamy, effete falsetto, "savin' all my love for you."

Mysteries seemed to accumulate around her. She rose heavily, saying No, no, you stay, to Smoky who had come to her, and went laboriously up the stairs, as though she carried a great, fragile egg before her, which she did, almost hatched. She thought perhaps she had better get advice, before winter came and it was no longer possible.

But when she sat on the edge of her bed, still faintly hearing the high accents of the music below, which seemed to be endlessly repeating tin-cup, top-hat, she saw that she knew what advice she would get if she went to get it: it would only be made clear to her again what she already knew, what only grew dim or clouded now and again by daily life, by useless hopes and by despairs equally useless—that if this were indeed a Tale, and she in it, then no gesture she or any of them could make was not a part of it, no rising up to dance or sitting down to eat and drink, no blessing or curse, no joy, no longing, no error; if they fled the Tale or struggled against it, well, that too was part of the Tale. They had chosen Smoky for her and then she had chosen him for herself; or, she had chosen him and then they had chosen him for her; either way it was the Tale. And if in some subtle way he moved on or away and she lost him now, by inches, by small daily motions she only now and then even perceived for certain, then his loss to her, and the degree of that loss, and each one of the myriad motions, looks, lookings-away, absences, angers, placations and desires that made up Loss, sealing him from her as layers of lacquer seal the painted bird on a japanned tray or as layers of rain freeze deeper the fallen leaf within the winter pond, all of it was the Tale. And if there were to come some new turning, some debouchment of this shaded lane they seemed just now to be walking, if it opened up quite suddenly into broad, flower-starred fields, or even if it only brought them to crossroads where fingerboards stated cautiously the possibilities of such fields, then all that too would be the Tale; and those whom Daily Alice thought wise, whom she supposed to be endlessly relating this tale. Somehow at the same pace as Drinkwater and Barnable lives fell away day by day, hour by hour—those tellers couldn't be blamed for anything told of in it, because in fact they neither spun nor told it really, but only knew how it would unfold in some way she never would; and that should satisfy her.

"No," she said aloud. "I don't believe it. They have powers. It's just that sometimes we don't understand how they'll protect us. And if you know, you won't say."

"That's right," Grandfather Trout seemed gloomily to reply. "Contradict your elders, think you know better."

She lay back on her bed, supporting her child with interlaced fingers, thinking she did not know better, hut that advice would anyway be lost on her. "I'll hope," she said. "I'll be happy. There's something I don't know, some gift they have to give. At the right time it'll be there. At the last moment. That's how Tales are," and she wouldn't listen to the sardonic answer she knew the fish would give to this; and yet when Smoky opened the door and came in whistling, his odor a meld of the wine he had drunk and Sophie's perfume he had absorbed, something which had been growing within her, a wave, crested, and she began to weep.

The tears of those who never cry, the calm, the levelheaded ones, are terrible to see. She seemed to be split or torn by the force of the tears, which she squeezed her eyes shut against, which she forced back with her fist against her lips. Smoky, afraid and awed, came immediately to her as he might to rescue his child from a fire, without thought and without knowing quite what he would do. When he tried to take her hand, speak softly to her, she only trembled more violently, the red cross branded on her face grew uglier; so he enveloped her, smother the flames. Disregarding her resistance, as well as he could he covered her, having a vague idea that he could by tenderness invade her and then rout her grief, whatever it was, by main strength. He wasn't sure he wasn't himself the cause of it, wasn't sure if she would cling to him for comfort or break him in rage, but he had no choice anyway, savior or sacrifice, it didn't matter so long as she could cease suffering.

She yielded, not at first willing to, and took handfuls of his shirt as though she meant to rend his garments, and "Tell me," he said, "tell me," as though that could make it right; but he could no more keep her from suffering this than he would be able to keep her from sweating and crying aloud when the child within her made its way out. And there was no way anyway for her to tell him that what made her weep was a picture in her mind of the black pool in the forest, starred with golden leaves falling continuously, each hovering momentarily above the surface of the water before it alighted, as though choosing carefully its drowning place, and the great damned fish within too cold to speak or think: that fish seized by the Tale, even as she was herself.