A Green and Ancient Light (7 page)

I wasn't sure exactly what she meant. But since she seemed to be in an answer-giving mood, I asked, “Did the fauns carve the statues?”

“No. The monsters in the grove were commissioned by a nobleman—a duke—nearly four hundred years ago. It took many years as the garden grew, piece by piece—his life-long project. He employed the finest sculptors in the land, the ones whose work is still to be seen in the cathedrals.”

“Why did he make them?”

The kettle boiled, and Grandmother laid aside her quilting to brew a pot of tea. “No one knows for sure, though there is more than one version of the story. Some say the garden was a tribute to the duke's beloved wife, a woman named G ——. But some say she took one look at it and fell down dead with fright. Not very long after she died, the duke simply vanished. No one knows what became of him. The garden was left abandoned, and in time, it was overgrown by the woods. Even the duke's castle up on the mountain is gone now; not so much as a foundation remains. I read what I could about it all years ago in the national library, on a trip to the capital. You won't hear many facts around here.”

I wasn't happy with my drawing: the winged creature's mouth wasn't right. Erasing it, I tried yet again.

“People talk as if the monsters were real,” I said. “Do they know they're only statues?”

“A few of the brave ones have been up there to see them—enough to keep people reminded that there
are
monsters. There's always been superstition about the place—the duke wasn't around to defend himself after he vanished, and there were all the ugly rumors of what might have gone on in the garden.” Grandmother sighed and listened as a truck motored past.

“And now this—” She tipped her head vaguely toward the truck sound. “These times, and the world all upside down. The current regime forbids any celebration of our glorious past in art or music or books. We're not supposed to have spirits; we're supposed to be good children and obey. For most people, it's easier to be afraid of monsters that are safely off in the woods.” She smirked. “The haunted woods.”

“They call it haunted; you call it sacred.”

Grandmother chuckled, placing a cup of tea on a saucer beside me. “When your father took you to the Great Cathedral, how did you feel? Frightened, or full of holy awe?”

I thought of the gargoyles, the soaring stained glass and colored light . . . the vast space and dim heights . . . the joyous and fiendish and suffering faces, carved in high places and in low, in brightness and shadow. “Both,” I answered.

“There you are, then. Haunted and sacred. Maybe they
want
to mean the same thing, but neither word is big enough.”

I darkened my monster's eyes and began adding the teeth. “Did Papa go to the grove?”

“Of course he did, though he learned not to speak of it in front of your grandfather. The forest was forbidden, even then. Funny . . . I always felt as if the place were
calling
me.”

I nodded, tapping my pencil against my lips, planning how I would ask my father about his time in the garden—what he thought of it, and what he did there. Setting aside my sketchbook, I got out letter paper, but Grandmother frowned.

“You should wait a few days, until things settle down,” she said. “Unless you want your letter opened and read by the Army right there in the post office.”

I didn't want that, so I put the paper back in its box.

When the hour grew late, Grandmother announced that she intended to sleep on the couch, in case Mr. Girandole rapped on the door too lightly to be heard from the bedroom. I joined her in the vigil, dragging my mattress and bedding out of my room and arranging them on the floor before the wood stove.

“Don't worry,” Grandmother told me when she blew out the oil
lamp. “We've done what we can for now.” She seemed to take her own advice; in minutes, she was softly snoring.

I lay awake for a long time in the glow of the embers behind the stove's grill, listening to the frogs and crickets, and to the rustle of leaves when the wind picked up.

At last I slept, but my dreams were a repeat of the day: rags soaked in blood, planes flying low, trucks full of soldiers . . . and the grove of monsters. In my dream, the monsters blinked and shifted when I wasn't looking directly at them, and I could hear them whispering together in the far parts of the garden, the parts I couldn't see behind the leaves.

*  *  *  *

In the morning, Grandmother bustled and clattered, going to and from the summer kitchen by the side door, complaining about how the couch had given her a stiff back.

“It's a fine morning,” she said. “Let's have breakfast at the garden table. Then we'll go on a spy mission to the market and hear what we can hear.”

The ideas of breakfast and market made me think. “What if R —— wakes up and is hungry?” I asked. “He'll need food and water.”

“Girandole will take care of him,
if
R —— is alive. You mustn't get your hopes up about that. But even if he's alive, I doubt he'll be in any condition to eat yet.”

Grandmother had made it a point to tell me the names of everyone she knew—and she seemed to know the whole village. She was forever introducing me to people, and we could rarely walk down the street without running into someone who wanted to stand and talk.

Today, the village buzzed with nervous tension and a wild excitement that no one would have admitted to. A single enemy lurking somewhere, possibly injured, and most likely trying to stay hidden, was just dangerous enough to be thrilling without presenting a cause for real alarm. In the bakery, Mrs. P —— said that she'd discovered her garden gate inexplicably unlatched, and the large footprint of a man's shoe in her onion patch. Mrs. C —— had heard someone trudge past her bedroom window at half past three this morning, but as the nearest telephone was at the corner ­grocer's, she'd had no way of notifying the police. Mrs. D —— could afford me no more than a beaming glance, and none of the usual exclamations. She was eager to show us all the stamped-out end of a cigar­ette she'd found in her lane—a slender, exotic sort of cigarette that had most definitely not come from anywhere around here. She had folded it in paper and was on her way to deliver it to the police.

“What about you, M ——?” she asked my grandmother. “The woods practically touch your back fence. Did you see or hear anything?”

Several pairs of wide eyes turned toward Grandmother, who held the silvery baker's tongs and had just put a fig-loaf into the shopping basket. “Now that you mention it, there was something,” she said, “though I dismissed it as my imagination at the time.”

I peered at her with as much interest as everyone else.

“Around midnight I woke up,” Grandmother said, her voice just above a whisper. “I'm not sure why, since I usually sleep like the Lord in the back of the boat. I think it was too quiet. There was a small sound which I thought was the cottage settling—old houses do that, you know. But as I remember it now, it could only have been the sound of someone
trying the front door
.”

There was a chorus of gasps and exclamations.

Grandmother accepted Mrs. C ——'s praise for keeping her door locked and Mrs. P ——'s adjuration to be extremely careful, and she smiled amiably at what looked like a glance of envy from Mrs. D ——.

When Grandmother had swept out of the bakery and I'd made sure no one could hear us, I said, “Isn't lying a sin?”

“Yes,” she answered soberly. “But that wasn't a lie. That was camouflage.”

An Army truck was parked outside the police office, and a group of four soldiers stood in front of the building, chatting and smoking. My chest fluttered whenever I saw the uniforms—every single time, for the first instant, I expected to see my father among the soldiers. But he wasn't here. These were men I didn't know. Two of them tipped their cloth hats to Grandmother as we passed.

We completed our grocery shopping, then paid the electric bill. Grandmother wasn't fond of electricity, since it didn't come in tanks like the lamp fuel or in blocks like the ice, and no one delivered it in a truck; she thought it was a mighty suspicious thing to be paying for. She'd allowed the workmen to hook it up, she said, only so that she could listen to the radio.

Our morning's investigation confirmed, from snatches of conver­sation here and there, what we already knew: that patrols of soldiers had been combing the forest but had apparently found nothing except the parachute—if they'd found the pilot, they wouldn't still be searching.

As we came out of the public works building, Mrs. D —— passed us on the sidewalk, on her way into the grocery store. I saw that she still held the folded paper containing the dubious cigarette
from her lane. She'd come right past the police office but had apparently not stopped in there yet.

Grandmother looked sidelong at me. “Ignorance multiplies itself better than yeast. If we could make bread out of rumors, no one in the world would go hungry.”

For the rest of the way home, we talked little but kept our eyes open. In front of the barber shop, one soldier was speaking into the handset of a portable radio strapped to another soldier's back. There was so much code in what he said that we couldn't make sense of it, but his tone sounded weary and annoyed. A mili­tary launch chugged through the harbor, and an Army staff car was parked outside the three-story inn. Grandmother deliberately crossed the street so that we could walk past the wide glass windows of the inn's dining room and peer inside. I glimpsed only a blur of reflections, dark spaces, and lamplight, but Grandmother murmured, when we'd turned the corner to climb Bridge Street, “That was the major, all right.”

“At the inn?”

“Mm. From the garrison.”

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“Not personally, but I know his face.” Grandmother turned a critical eye on a poorly weeded herb garden to our left. “He is not the sort of man your grandfather would have liked.”

I expected her to say more and was puzzling over why she'd brought Grandfather into it, but she stood still, her attention now on a group of five soldiers tramping down out of the arbors.

They'd clearly come from the woods, their shirts dark with sweat, their trousers covered with burrs and prickle-seeds. In no particular hurry, they had nearly made it to the road when they
seemed to think better of it, and all flopped down in the shade.

“Nothing to report,” said Grandmother under her breath, walking again.

I watched a moment longer as the men leaned rifles on a fence, pulled off hats, and poured water over their heads. One had a receding hairline, and aside from his hair's color, he looked rather like our patient, R ——. Yet this man and R —— were enemies. Another man, who perhaps looked like them both, had shot down R ——'s plane. There were trucks full of men, ships carrying them on the seas, squadrons of planes with more men inside, and all together they made up the war. And my father was somewhere among them.

This was Papa's second war: he'd had to fight in one when he was young, and now he had to fight in this one. He'd been summoned back into service nearly four years ago, and had been home only twice in that time; already I had trouble recalling the exact sound of his voice. I would stare at his photo and re-read his ­letters, striving to recapture a clear echo of his laugh. I wondered if he was patrolling today, joking with his fellow soldiers, pulling burrs out of his trousers, and drinking warm water from his canteen. I prayed he would never be wounded like R ——.
Please, God, keep him safe.
I wished a letter from him would come.

Grandmother's next-door neighbor on the side toward the village center was a fearsome old woman named Mrs. F ——. That's what Grandmother called her, never her first name. Mrs. F —— was white-haired, as tall and hard as a dead tree bleached by the sun. Her garden was a dark cavern, overrun by juniper and laurel and myrtle, covered in vines, and she seemed not to care for flowers. When Grandmother had first introduced us, Mrs. F —— glared at
me from her wrinkled face, and she had not spoken a word to me since. Every time I passed in front of her house alone, I hurried; when I was in our back garden, I was glad for the stone wall between the properties and Mrs. F ——'s high hedge immediately on the wall's other side. Once, though, late in the afternoon, I'd been reading in my sanctuary beneath the fuchsia, and feeling an uneasy prickle in my scalp, I'd looked up. Mrs. F —— had been standing at a side window beneath her gable, staring down at me. I'd given a timid wave to be polite, but she had not returned it. She'd continued to watch me, motionless. I'd closed my book and gone indoors.

As Grandmother and I crossed in front of Mrs. F ——'s gate, nearly home, I saw Mrs. F —— crouching beneath a cypress tree, clipping the vines. Grandmother said a bright hello.

“What's the news?” asked Mrs. F ——, not looking at me.

“Everyone's got a story,” said Grandmother. “No one knows anything.”

Mrs. F —— gave a bark that might have been a laugh and went on with her trimming.

When we were inside with the door shut, I asked, “Why doesn't she like me?”

“She doesn't dislike you,” Grandmother said. “Her own boys were hellions, and I suppose she suspects any child of being the same.”

The ice man had been by on his twice-weekly rounds: a fresh chunk sat in the top compartment of the ice box, which was a boon to the milk and cheese. Grandmother had me take down the diamond-shaped ice card from its hook in the front window—a device that fascinated me, since it looked like something a magician
would use in a trick. It had a number at each point; the number you turned upright told the ice man how heavy a chunk of ice to bring. I spun it in my hands, watching the numbers go around, always one right-side up.