All the Days and Nights (57 page)

Around her cottage Canada lilies grew, and wild peppermint, and lupins, Queen Anne’s lace taller than her head, and wild roses that were half the ordinary size, and the wind brought with it across somebody else’s pasture the smell of pine trees, which she could see from her kitchen window. Here she lived, all by herself, and since she had no one to cook and care for but herself, you might think that time was heavy on her hands. It was just the contrary. The light woke her in the morning, and the first thing she heard was the sound of the running stream. It was the sound of hurry, and she said to herself, “I must get up and get breakfast and make the bed and sweep, or I’ll be late setting the bread to rise.” And when the bread was out of the way, there was the laundry. And when the laundry was hanging on the line, there was something else that urgently needed doing. The stream also never stopped hurrying and worrying on to some place she had never thought about and did not try to imagine. So great was its eagerness that it cut away at its banks until every so often it broke through to some bend farther on, leaving a winding bog that soon filled up with wild flowers. But this the old woman had no way of knowing, for when she left the house it was to buy groceries in the store at the crossroads, or call on a sick friend. She was not much of a walker. She suffered from shortness of breath, and her knees bothered her a good deal. “The truth is,” she kept telling herself, as if it was an idea she had
not yet completely accepted, “I am an old woman, and I don’t have forever to do the things that need to be done.” Looking in the mirror, she could not help seeing the wrinkles. And her hair, which had once been thick and shining, was not only grey but so thin she could see her scalp. Even the texture of her hair had changed. It was frizzy, and the hair of a stranger. “So long ago,” she said to herself as she read through old letters before destroying them. “And it seems like yesterday.” And as she wrote out labels, which she pasted on the undersides of tables and chairs, telling whom they were to go to after her death, she said, “I don’t see how I could have accumulated so much. Where did it all come from?” And one morning she woke up with the realization that if she died that day, she would have done all she could do. Her dresser drawers were tidied, the cupboards in order. It was a Tuesday, and she did not bake until Thursday, and the marketing she had done the day before. The house was clean, the ironing put away, and if she threw the covers off and hurried into her clothes, it would be to do something that didn’t really need doing. So she lay there thinking, and gradually the thoughts in her mind, which were threadbare with repetition, were replaced by the sound of conversation that came to her from outside —
rill, you will? You will, still. But fill, but fill —
and the chittering conversation of the birds. Suddenly she knew what she was going to do, though there was no hurry about it. She was going to follow the stream and see what happened to it after it passed her house.

She ate a leisurely breakfast, washed the dishes, and put a sugar sandwich and an orange in a brown paper bag. Then, wearing a black straw hat in case it should turn warm and an old grey sweater in case it should turn cold, she locked the house up, and put the key to the front door under the mat, and started off.

T
HE
first thing she came to was a rustic footbridge, which seemed to lead to an island, but the island turned out to be merely the other side of the stream. Here there were paths everywhere, made by the horses in the pasture coming down to drink. She followed now one, now another, stepping over fallen tree trunks, and pausing when her dress caught on a briar. Sometimes the path led her to the brink of the stream at a place where there was no way to cross, and she had to retrace her steps and choose some other path. Sometimes it led her through a cool glade, or a meadow where the grass grew up to her knees. When she came to a
barbed-wire fence with a stile over it, she knew she was following a path made by human beings.

First she was on one side of the stream and then, when a big log or a bridge invited her to cross over, she was on the other. She saw a house, but it was closed and shuttered, and so, though she knew she was trespassing, she felt no alarm. When the path left the stream, she decided to continue on it, assuming that the stream would quickly wind back upon itself and rejoin her. The path led her to a road, and the road led her to a gate with a sign on it:
KEEP THIS GATE CLOSED
. It was standing open. She went on, following the road as before, and came to another gate, with a padlock and chain on it, but right beside the gate was an opening in the fence just large enough for her to crawl through. The road was deep in dust and lined with tall trees that cast a dense shade. She saw a deer, which stopped grazing and raised its head to look at her, and then went bounding off. The road brought her to more houses — summer cottages, not places where people lived the year round. To avoid them she cut through the trees, in the direction that she assumed the running stream must be, and saw still another house. Here, for the first time, there was somebody — a man who did not immediately see her, for he was bent over, sharpening a scythe.

“I’m looking for the little running stream,” she said to him.

“You left that a long way back,” the man said. “The river is just on the other side of those big pine trees.”

“Is there a bridge?”

“Half a mile upstream.”

“What happens if I follow the river downstream on this side?”

“You can’t,” the man said. “There’s no way. You have to go upstream to the bridge.”

Should she turn around and go home, she wondered. The sun was not yet overhead, so she walked on, toward the trees the man had pointed to, thinking that he might be mistaken and that it might be the running stream that went past her house, but it wasn’t. It was three times as broad, and clearly a little river. It too was lined with wild flowers, and in places they had leaped over the flowing water and were growing out of a log in midstream. The river was almost as clear as the air, and she could see the bottom, and schools of fish darting this way and that. Rainbow trout, they were. Half a mile upstream and half a mile down made a mile, and she thought of her poor knees. The water, though swift, was apparently quite shallow. She could take off her shoes and stockings and wade across.

Holding her skirts up, she went slowly out into the river. The bottom was all smooth, rounded stones, precarious to walk on, and she was careful to place her feet firmly. When she was halfway across she stepped into a deep hole, lost her balance, and fell. She tried to stand up, but the current was too swift, and she was hampered by her wet clothing. Gasping and swallowing water, she was tumbled over and over as things are that float downstream in a rushing current. “I did not think my life would end like this,” she said to herself, and gave up and let the current take her.

When she opened her eyes, she was lying on the farther bank of the river. She must have been lying there for hours, because her hair and her clothing were dry. In the middle of the river there was a young man, who turned his head and smiled at her. He had blond hair and he was not more than twenty, and he had waders on which came up to his waist, and his chest and shoulders were bare, and she could see right through him; she could see the river and the wild flowers on the other bank. Had he pulled her out? You can’t see through living people. He must be dead. But he was not a corpse, he was the most angelic young man she had ever seen, and radiantly happy as he whipped his line back and forth over the shining water. And so, for that matter, was she. She tried to speak to him but could not. It was too strange.

He waded downstream slowly, casting as he went, and she watched him until he was out of sight. She saw that there was a path that followed the river downstream. I’ll just go a little farther, she thought, and started on. She wanted to have another look at: the beautiful young man, who must be just around the next bend of the river. Instead, when she got there, she saw a heavy, middle-aged man with a bald head. He also was standing in the middle of the river, casting, and a shaft of sunlight passed right through him. She went on. The path was only a few feet from the water, and it curved around the roots of old trees to avoid a clump of bushes. She saw two horses standing by the mouth of a little stream that might be the stream that went past her house — there was no way of telling — and she could see right through them, too, as if they were made of glass. Soon after this she began to overtake people on the path — for her knees no longer bothered her, and she walked quite fast, for the pleasure of it, and because she had such a feeling of lightness. She saw, sitting on the bank, a boy with a great many freckles, who caught a good-sized trout while she stood watching him. He smiled at her and she smiled back at him, and went on. She met a very friendly dog, who stayed with her, and a young woman with a baby carriage, and an old man. They
both smiled at her, the way the young man and the boy had, but said nothing. The feeling of lightness persisted, as if a burden larger than she had realized had been taken off her shoulders. If I keep on much farther, I’ll never find my way home, she thought. But nevertheless she went on, as if she had no choice, meeting more people, and suddenly she looked down at her hands and saw that they too were transparent. Then she knew. But without any fear or regret. So it was there all the time, an hour’s walk from the house, she thought. And with a light heart she walked on, enjoying the day and the sunlight on the river, which seemed almost alive, and from time to time meeting more people all going the same way she was, all going the same way as the river.

O
NCE
upon a time there was a girl who told fortunes by the roadside. She did not need to do this for a living. Her father was an entrepreneur who had made a great deal of money and was on the board of directors of so many companies and charities that only his secretary knew the full extent of them, but one day when he came home from his office there his daughter was, with a silk scarf tied around her head, and large earrings, and a long skirt, and looking in every way like a gypsy except her pale, pinched face.

At first people thought it was a game, and were suspicious, and either hurried past her or crossed to the other side of the street, but women cannot resist lifting the curtain of the future just a tiny bit, and so, pretending not to take it seriously, but actually with an open mind, somebody sat down at the card table and offered her open palm. Not for long, though. What she heard was nothing she wanted to hear, and nothing like so comforting as the prognostications of ordinary gypsy fortunetellers: no tall dark handsome man, no sea voyage, no business ventures that must not be acted upon in the early part of the month, but instead a threat to the thing she held nearest and dearest. With a pale, pinched face she hurried home and shut herself in her room and began restlessly to clean out her bureau drawers in an effort to get what she had been told out of her mind.

Many combinations of circumstances can be reasonably dismissed as the result of coincidence, but not all. At some point the combination is so remarkable that it could not occur except by design, by some ultimate cause or Prime Mover. Though the woman made every effort to forestall the thing that the girl told her might happen, the events unrolled exactly as she had predicted, and the steps that were taken to prevent the calamity seemed, in the end, to have actually helped to bring it about.

Meanwhile other women stopped on their way home from the market or from the church or a call on a sick friend — never with their husbands, because they did not care to waste the energy it would require to defend their action, and because, also, a woman who has no secrets from her husband is not a woman but a child.

And what did they hear, sitting at the card table in front of the rich merchant’s house, with their hand lying palm upward in the hand of the merchant’s thin-faced daughter? Miscarriages, misfortunes, death in the family, financial reverses, ill health, ill will on the part of those who were nearest and dearest to them. One would have thought that one experience with so pessimistic a fortune-teller would have been enough, and perhaps it would have been if the miscarriage had not actually occurred, and the misfortune, and the death in the family, and all the rest, exactly as predicted. And thinking always that if they knew what was going to happen they could do something to forestall it, the women went back. They told their friends, in strictest confidence, and the friends came, looking woebegone even as they sat down and before they had heard a word of the fate that was in store for them.

The girl’s father was not able to stop her from putting a scarf on her head and dressing up in earrings and a long Roman-striped skirt and sitting at the card table on the front lawn with a pack of cards ready to be turned up one at a time, in a sequence that was never meaningless and never optimistic. She was of age, and had an inheritance from her grandmother, and was sufficiently strong-minded, as he had every reason to know, that she would simply have set up her fortune-telling in some other place where he wouldn’t even be in a position to know what was going on, or to help her if she needed help. And of course before very long she did. No one can consistently and successfully foretell disaster without being held in some way responsible for it, no matter how much reason argues that it is not the case. The feelings know better. And in time the women who sat down at the card table pressed their lips in a thin line, clutched their purses tightly to their stomachs, and the hand that they extended was not relaxed but tense and in some cases trembled. Or the eyes beseeched a softer, kinder interpretation of what was to come, and when the women did not get it, they fished through their purse for a handkerchief, wiped the tears away furtively, and blew their nose, and heaved a sigh as if their misfortune, the death in the family, the financial reverse had already taken place. As indeed it might just as well have, because take place it did, exactly as foretold, and whether you shed
tears before or after an event in no way changes the event or how it affects you.