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 for 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 heavy-footed 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 for a child, that the child must grow into. He expected a certain discomfort at first, an ill-fittingness, 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 cannon-balls 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.”