A Green and Ancient Light (28 page)

“Well,” said Mr. Girandole, “every other path looks worse.”

“The war can't last forever,” said Grandmother, settling back in her chair. “If it would just
end
 . . .” She heaved a sigh and appeared to study the ceiling. “Suppose we
could
hide him in this attic . . .”

I nearly choked on a mouthful of tea, and Mr. Girandole set down his cup so abruptly that I thought it would break.

“All right, all right,” said Grandmother. “I guess it wouldn't work. Mrs. F —— would hear him playing his flute, or he'd go tromping across the boards when I had company.”

Mr. Girandole nodded, his eyes round. “You absolutely cannot harbor an enemy soldier here, M ——. Promise me that.” He lowered his voice to a whisper on “enemy soldier.”

“I withdraw the suggestion,” she said. Then, seeing that he still wasn't satisfied, she added, “I promise, I promise.”

“But
you
could,” I said, and they both looked at me.

Mr. Girandole shifted uneasily. “I could what?”

“You could harbor him in your cave, couldn't you?”

Now Mr. Girandole looked slightly ill. Grandmother failed to suppress a smile.

“I don't relish the idea. But . . . if it comes to that, I suppose . . .”

Grandmother touched his wrist. “The better alternative is finding that fairy door. It's what R —— wants, and it's what you need.”

*  *  *  *

The next morning, it was Sunday again, and I didn't feel like getting out of bed. I was to leave the village on the following Friday. Though I wanted to see my mother and sister, and I longed for the day when my father could come home, I was already missing Grandmother and Mr. Girandole . . . and even R ——. I had reached a way-marker on the path to adulthood—the first dividing of my heart. To live in this world, I realized, is to leave pieces of your heart in various places; and to move
toward
any place is to move
away
from another.

I groaned, covering my head with the pillow. I didn't want to get dressed up and sit among people and mind my manners—it was too much like going to school again. I asked Grandmother if I might skip church, since this was my last Sunday here.

“Skip church!” she cried, dragging off the pillow. “Shall we just cancel Christmas and next Easter while we're at it? Look,” she said, prodding my back: “we're asking God to help us get
Girandole back to his people and keep R —— from a firing squad. You want two miracles, but you can't be bothered to pay God a visit?”

I blinked up at her. “Do you think God stays in the church more than in the woods?”

She dragged off the light summer blanket and began to tug on my arm. “I think He sends us messages in both places. And I think we need to start this week in the best way we can.”

So, I tamed my hair and put on my starched shirt with the strangulating collar; I jammed my feet into the shiny, pinching black shoes that made me think of beetles' carapaces, and all the while, I wondered why showing respect to others required physical discomfort. When I grumbled about this to Grandmother, she reminded me that we lived in a sin-dark world.

On sunny days such as this, the small stained-glass windows blazed with their rich colors high in the gloomy vaults, telling stories of Heaven that we could just glimpse if we stood on tip-toes and squinted. I liked the glowing patches of color they cast on the old stern pews and the dank floor.

There was a traveling guest organist this morning, a pale young man with his hair combed straight back, who seemed to know things about the organ that usual organists did not. I imagined him learning to play in some towering castle-college, where all the turrets and corridors reverberated with sound. He unleashed some exceedingly low notes that drew a strange ringing from the altar area; he played a wild introit with crisscrossing scales that evoked stairways in my mind, endless stairways going up and down. I craned my neck to stare at the ranks of organ pipes, dull and glinting in the shadows behind the empty choir box. The pipes stood like a
forest there, like many forests growing on slopes, and the organist seemed determined to use them all. At one point, I was sure I saw plumes of dust shooting from an obscure bank of pipes on the side wall.

At the end of a hymn, Grandmother cupped a hand to my ear and whispered, “Do you suppose his playing is for deception or merely for art?”

Grandmother's church was not much accustomed to music; it had no choir, and I could barely hear anyone singing, even beneath the subdued playing of the regular organists. Today, I saw some frowns when the music got too loud, or when the organist would pause between hymn stanzas to deliver thunderous interludes that scattered the melody, as if the hymn had been snatched up by a whirlwind. During one such magnificent interruption, I heard a lady behind us mutter, “He should have done his
practicing
at home.”

I sensed relief all around me when it was time for the sermon, and the little priest ascended to the pulpit, gave us a kindly gaze, and delivered his soothing, mostly inaudible message. His whispery voice ebbed and swelled like the rhythms of the sea, and it was to such rhythms that the people here awoke and slept and spent their days. Today, the sermon was entitled “The Long and the Short of It.” I gathered, mostly from reading the Scripture text, that he was telling us how all the Commandments boil down to just two, that we are to love God and love our neighbor. But the only words of the priest's that I was sure I understood were those of the title. After a susurrus of explanation, he would hold up a finger or throw his arms wide and announce, just within the range of hearing, “And
that
'
s
the long and the short of it!” Near
the beginning, when he was presumably telling us the Law, the sentence came out severely: we fall short, we are found wanting, we deserve to die—that's the long and the short of it. By the end, when he got to the Gospel, he was declaring it with joy, bouncing on his toes: we are redeemed; eternal life is ours—that's the long and the short of it.

Then the organ storm began again, and the congregation hunkered down like mountain-climbers on a bare saddle.

Afterward, people drifted out of the sanctuary, greeting one another and chatting. Mrs. C —— appeared from across the aisle and latched onto Grandmother, and their conversation gave me plenty of time to wander over to the neglected choir gallery.

At some time in the church's past, its congregation must have been wealthy and dedicated to musical splendor. Those long-ago people would have appreciated the pale young organist. The organ pipes towered over me, ranging from huge ones like factory smokestacks to some as tiny as a pocket whistle—and every size in between. I didn't know at first why they captured my interest. Perhaps it was because I'd been thinking of R ——'s reed flute and hearing its voice hidden in the hymns, drifting behind the voluntaries. Maybe I was looking for that flute now, half-expecting to see it—or one like it—tucked among the proper metal pipes, abandoned there by some goat-footed piper who'd been lurking in the shadows, accompanying our worship with a wink and a dancing step. As I crept closer, I thought about how the organ pipes were like the statues in the sacred woods: the pipes occupied that great dark alcove behind angels and saints—once built with highest craft, now mostly forgotten . . . and frowned at when they thundered out their ancient music.

*  *  *  *

In the heat of the late afternoon, Grandmother was taking a long nap and I was moping and drowsing on my favorite shady bench behind the cottage. A bee buzzed nearby; in the middle distance, a squadron of our country's planes followed the mountains. I sighed, feeling sluggish, and watched clouds floating in the endless blue.

With a suddenness that would have startled anyone seeing me, I sat up, and the notebook on my chest flopped to the ground. As clearly as if the priest had been beside me, I heard his voice say:

“And that's the long and the short of it.”

Snatching up the notebook, I flipped it open to the latest, most complete list of inscriptions from the statues. Pressing a hand over my mouth, I stared at the transcription, not reading now, not seeing words—but seeing instead lines of gray pencil marks on the page.

A fact about the lines had always nagged me like a thorn in my sock, but it had never risen to my conscious mind. Some of the lines were very short; some were very long; and they ranged in all lengths between, like the organ pipes. But, unlike the pipes, my lines were not arranged in a neat, graduated rank.

My heart pounding, I began counting the words in each line. I leaped to my feet. Counting, I paced to and fro, unable to sit still. I collided with a wrought-iron chair and knocked it over. Ignoring the pain in my shin, I counted.

The shortest line,
Narrow
, had a single word. The next longest,
Reason departs
, had two. Sure enough, there was a three-word line:
Behold in me
. Then came
I am a gate
, with four. And so it went.

Kneeling at the garden table, I fished the pencil from my pocket and, in shaky letters, copied out my discovery:

1—
Narrow

2—
Reason departs

3—
Behold in me

4—
I am a gate

5—
The path beyond the dusk

6—
I am it is very true

7—
My steps fall softly like the rain

8—
Yet one by one a herd may pass

9—
You have we have all have though perhaps home

10—
Hurry now to find me draw near but not inside

11—
Or walls or ivied garden porch or doorstep have we none

12—
All is folly and you search both high and low in vain

13—
Or a thousand cheeses times a thousand if you give me days enough

14—
Round and round the dancers go and my answer is in three and seven

I could scarcely breathe, but I hit against two problems: one was that there came next a leap to twenty-six words in the inscription from the main gate. No, that was not a problem, I told myself—it was so different in count that it was clearly meant to be separate, an introduction to the garden.

A more troubling matter—the only thing that ruined the perfect pattern—was that I had an extra inscription of two words:

2—
The Mermaid

How could there be two twos? If one or the other were not there, I would have the fourteen I'd been seeking all along.

But I was too excited to think any further. Nor could I keep this discovery to myself. For the first and only time that summer, I intruded on Grandmother's nap with an exuberant calling and hammering on her door.

“What?!” she cried back, probably thinking the cottage was on fire or that I'd hurt myself. “Open the door!” she shouted next, which certainly was quicker than waiting for her to struggle off her bed and across the room.

She'd managed to sit up by the time I raced to her side and thrust the notebook into her hands. It took her a while to comprehend, because I think she'd just been awakened from a deep sleep, and I couldn't stop babbling.

“But there are two twos,” I said at the end of my breathless explanation. “See? Why are there two? Maybe one's not important, but which?
The Mermaid
is only a plaque in the ground. It just tells us what the mermaid is—maybe the statues all used to have plaques, and most are gone now. But
Reason departs
is in the leaning house, not out in the garden—maybe that's the one that doesn't belong with the fourteen.”

At last Grandmother saw the pattern I'd found, and she'd counted enough of the words to convince herself it wasn't just wishful thinking. For a long time, she looked at me, and her eyes shone. Then she hugged me and said, “Very good. It can't be by chance.”

I was giddy and happy, and my thoughts still hadn't stopped spinning. “It has to be the numbers, right? The numbers from the stairway!”

Grandmother nodded, locating the page where I'd written them. She flipped back and forth between the numbers and the last page, where I'd numbered the words per line. “Well,” she said, “there's
the solution to your ‘two' problem.” Taking my pencil, she made an X after five of the lines:

The Mermaid
—X

Reason departs
—X

My steps fall softly like the rain
—X

All is folly and you search both high and low in vain
—X

Round and round the dancers go and my answer is in three and seven
—X

She was grinning, but I hadn't caught up yet.

“Why did you do that?” I asked. “What are the X's for?”

“We can forget about those lines. Toss them out. That rascal! He had us scrambling all over to hunt for threes and sevens, but that was all sleight of hand. Three and seven mean nothing at all.” She turned to R ——'s poem and read aloud:

Heed the words among the trees in stone

Though not all words are true.

I blinked at her, still not quite getting it. “The X lines aren't true?”

“False clues,” she said.

“But how do you—?”

The moment she turned back to the list of numbers from the stairs, I had it: the 2, the 7, the 12, and the 14 were upside down. She pointed at those inverted numbers one by one, her gnarled finger moving down the page. It had to mean that the inscriptions of those word-lengths were lies, added simply for mischief.

“That's how there can be two twos,” Grandmother said. “They're both horsefeathers. And since we're rid of that twelve, we know that all is not folly, and our search is not in vain.