We drove past the turnoff to Mrs. Blott’s cottage, Mr. Abbott’s bungalow, the post office. We rounded the curve that would take us through the village.
WHILE SEARCHING PETER’S office I had come across a letter written by William Blakely, founder of Urizon, to a noble he was courting for his daughter, claiming that the village of Coeurs Crossing hadn’t come to prominence until Urizon itself was erected. William’s assertion was subject to debate, as no one else would ever call the village prominent, and it had in fact existed long before his estate as home to farmers and foresters, families who could trace their roots back thousands of years. In the latter half of the last century, as Urizon fell from favor and fame, the village had fared only slightly better. Its population fell within the low thousands. Coeurs Crossing lacked the charm of some of the quainter locales of similar size, and thus the wealthy had bypassed it when choosing where to build their country homes, leaving us little in the way of municipal resources. The nearest hospital was an hour’s drive away. The university and its surrounding town absorbed most would-be tourists. Back when the modern trade roads were built—the highways that would carry timber and coal and other northern resources to the thriving cities of the south—the villagers of Coeurs Crossing had protested the felling of a certain grove of trees, claiming their spiritual significance more meaningful than the money that would come from steady travel. Thus the grove near Coeurs Crossing was spared, the highways diverted elsewhere, leaving the village in relative obscurity.
This grove, a part of the same wood that bordered my home, lent our region a frightening aura that even the sunniest days could not entirely overcome. Refusing its removal tied the village to the sorts of superstitions Peter studied, reinforced the rumors of a woodland power, the tales of a Blakely family curse. In my mind, the Coeurs Crossing that sat beside the wood was dark and dusty, eerie and empty as Urizon’s shuttered rooms, filled with grim faces and ominous birds circling low skies. The few glimpses I’d been given of the village during my childhood had all reinforced this notion. Before my birth, Peter’s studies had been largely anthropological—he had a keen interest in folklore, in the ceremonies that began as sacred ritual long before the dawn of what we called civilization and had continued in truncated forms ever since. When we were not experimenting, he’d return to these former occupations. Sometimes, if I’d been good, he’d let me join him.
“The early savage,” Peter once told me, biting into a cherry turnover with relish, “believed in sympathetic magic. He did his work on imitations of the object that he wanted to affect. A poppet, for example, or a ripened fruit to represent the sun. In this regard, his ritual had all the trappings of modern scientific theories of cause and effect.”
We were seated at the top of Urthon Hill, the highest point on the Blakely property, which looked out over the dirt road to the village. Mrs. Blott had prepared us a picnic, and I sat on a frayed blanket, nibbling at a biscuit and drinking lemonade. I was ten, and unimpressed.
“Their philosophical model,” continued Peter, “was quite advanced compared to the religious frenzies that followed. To practice our Western religion is to ascribe the cause of everything to the will of some great power, a mercurial creature whose favor we might court. Quite the opposite of scientific methodology. The savage never pandered. He saw himself as catalyst to action, responsible for nature, for the summer, for the rains.”
Below us, villagers were gathering, their outfits brightly colored, their faces masked, knocking each other about like sea-swirled marbles. One man (the Wild Man, said Peter), was dressed all in brown, adorned in leaves and white-budded branches that made him seem born of the hawthorn, wide as its blossoming expanse. He sat atop a stocky piebald horse and waited for the others to ready themselves. From our perch high above them we could not hear his words, just the twittering of voices, his playful growl, bursts of joyous laughter, the cymbal-crash of girls’ delighted screams. Had they thought to look up, they might have seen us: two small figures looking down from our high tower, observing.
“The Wild Man will ride three times around the center of the village,” said my father, “and when he’s finished he’ll decapitate a frog. In the past the people thought that they were having some impact on the season, that they’d chosen this evening and through ritual were asking their gods to make it the longest of the year. As if they were the true cause of midsummer, midwinter. As if they controlled the passage of the time. Today, we’ve abandoned such pretense. Now we simply repeat what has always been practiced, too superstitious, too silly, to question things.”
“Might we join them?” I asked.
We might not.
“So it always is,” said Peter, by way of explanation, “that the layman partakes in his ritual, blind to the true powers that be.”
“Might I don a mask and watch from down below?”
I might not.
“Too dangerous,” I remembered Peter saying, jotting something in his notebook, “far too wild.”
I’d imagined my own wildness was transmuted through these rituals in the village, was the consequence of some mistreated toad or misheard prayer. I’d assumed every villager as chary as Tom Pepper, the solicitor, whose small eyes scanned our sitting room twice over before he would sit down to take his tea. Who knew what spirits could be watching, what ancient impulse lay in wait? Now, in Matthew’s car, counting streetlamps and stop signs, I realized the debauchery I’d witnessed was uncommon, as repressed beneath these carefully paved streets as my own impulse under Peter’s regulations.
The sun was out in full force as Matthew drove past the lower school, the grocer’s, the whitewashed fences and wooden swing sets and neatly parked cars. Coeurs Crossing was pedestrian, comfortable and quiet, with no sign of the savagery that Peter had insisted waited just outside our door. It was all painted picket fences, cozy pubs, well-labeled road signs. Cobbled streets and schools, neatly parked cars. A young boy rode a bicycle. A man in coveralls pruned a flowering bush at the side of a church. I leaned my forehead on the car window, paralyzed by awe.
How was this here, so near Urizon? How had I not known, when I looked down from our hilltop, what it was that I saw? I felt a sudden stab of loss at my discovery—the tangible existence of a modern village that, for me, had shared a space with far-off planets, fairy castles—the existence of a village with playgrounds and blue plastic bins for its recycling, with signs posted on streetlamps advertising a found kitten, with flagpoles and tulips and a stray football rolling down a hill. We drove past the firehouse, the tailor, a little shop called Holzmeier’s proclaiming that it sold “metaphysical souvenirs,” which Matthew and I tried to make a guess at.
“Ale glasses.” I giggled, drunk on novelty.
“Local witches’ littlest fingers.”
“Holy breast milk.”
“Quilts made by somebody’s grandmother.”
Mrs. Blott’s face flashed through my mind, followed by Peter’s. This was not the time for laughter, for indulgence. This was not the time to push my boundaries outward, expand the borders of my own sorry self.
“I think,” I said, all humor gone, “it would be best if we go in and find out for ourselves.”
“What, inside the building?” Matthew shook his head, inhaling sharply as he braked for a young child chasing a ball into the street. He rolled his shoulders, regaining composure. “I’ve been in that shop before. It’s very small—too many things we might knock into.”
“We?”