Little, Big (4 page)

"But see?" she said. "It was all meant to be. And I knew it."

"But why?" he said, delighted, in torment; "why are you so sure?"

"Because it's a Tale. And Tales work out."

"But I don't know it's a tale."

"People in tales 
don't
 know, always. But there they are."

One winter night when he was a boy, boarding then with a half-brother who was half-heartedly religious, he first saw a ring around the moon. He stared up at it, immense, icy, half as wide as the night sky, and grew certain that it could only mean the End of the World. He waited thrilled in that suburban yard for the still night to break apart in apocalypse, all the while knowing in his heart that it would not: that there is nothing in this world not proper to it and that it contains no such surprises. That night he dreamt of Heaven: Heaven was a dark amusement park, small and joyless, just an iron Ferris wheel turning in eternity and a glum arcade to amuse the faithful. He awoke relieved, and never after believed his prayers, though he had said them for his brother without rancor. He would say hers, if she asked him to, and gladly; but she said none, that he knew of; she asked instead assent to something, something so odd, so unencompassable by the common world he had always lived in, so—he laughed, amazed. "A fairy tale," he said.

"I guess," she said sleepily. She reached behind her for his hand, and drew it around her. "I guess, if you want."

He knew he would have to believe in order to go where she had been; knew that, if he believed, he could go there even if it didn't exist, if it was make-believe. He moved the hand she had drawn around her down her long flesh, and with a little sound she pressed herself against him. He searched himself for that old will, long in disuse. If she went there, ever, he didn't want to be left behind; wanted never to be farther from her than this.

In May at Edgewood Daily Alice in the dark of the woods sat on a shining rock that jutted out over a deep pool, a pool made by the fall of water down a cleft in high rock walls. The stream that hurtled ceaselessly through the cleft to plunge into the pool made a speech as it did so, a speech repetitive yet always full of interest; Daily Alice listened, though she had heard it all before. She looked a lot like the girl on the soda bottle, though not so delicate and lacking wings.

"Grandfather Trout," she said to the pool, and again: "Grandfather Trout." She waited then, and when nothing came of this, took up two small stones and plunged them into the water (cold and silky as only falling water held in stone pools seems to be) and knocked them together, which within the water made a sound like distant guns and hung longer than sounds hang in air. Then there swam out from somewhere in the weed-bearded hidey-holes along the bank a great white trout, an albino without speckle or belt, his pink eye solemn and large. The repeated ripples caused by the waterfall made him seem to shudder, his great eye to wink or maybe tremble with tears (can fish cry? she wondered, not for the first time).

When she thought she had his attention, she began to tell him how she had gone to the City in the fall and met this man in George Mouse's house, and how she had known instantly (or at least decided very quickly) that he would be the one that it had been promised she would "find or make up," as Spark had long ago put it to her. "While you slept through the winter," she said shyly, tracing the quartz muscle of the rock she sat on, smiling but not looking at him (because she spoke of whom she loved), "we, well we met again, and made promises—you know—" She saw him flick his ghostly tail; she knew this to be a painful subject. She stretched out her great length on the cool rock and, chin in hands and eyes alight, told him about Smoky in terms glowing and vague, which didn't seem to move the fish to enthusiasm. She took no notice. It 
must
 be Smoky that had been meant, it could be no other. "Don't you think so? Don't you agree?" More cautiously then: "Will they be satisfied?"

"No telling," Grandfather Trout said gloomily. "Who's to say what's in their minds?"

"But you said . . ."

"I bring their messages, daughter. Don't expect any more from me."

"Well," she said, put out, "I won't wait forever. I love him. Life is short."

"Life," said Grandfather Trout as though his throat were thick with tears, "is long. Too long." He turned his fins carefully and with a motion of his tail slid backwards into his hiding place.

"Tell them I came, anyway," she shouted after him, her voice small against the waterfall's. "Tell them I did my part."

But he was gone.

She wrote to Smoky: "I'm going to get married," and his heart turned cold where he stood by the letter-box, until he realized she meant to him. "Great-aunt Cloud has read the cards very carefully, once for each part, it's to be Midsummer Day and this is what you have to do. Please 
please
 follow all these instructions 
very carefully
 or I don't know what might happen."

Which is how Smoky came to be walking not riding to Edgewood, with a wedding-suit in his pack old not new, and food made not bought; and why he had begun to look around himself for a place to spend the night, that he must beg or find but not pay for.

He had not known how suddenly the industrial park would quit and the country begin. It was late afternoon and he had turned westerly, and the road had become edgeworn, and patched like an old shoe in many shades of tar. On either side the fields and farms came down to meet the road; he walked beneath guardian trees neither farm nor road that cast multifold shadows now and then over him. The gregarious weeds that frequent roadsides, dusty, thick and blowsy, friends to man and traffic, nodded from fence and ditch by the way. Less and less often he would hear the hum of a car; the hum would grow intermittently, as the car went up and down hills, and then suddenly it would be on him very loud and roar past surprised, potent, fast, leaving the weeds blown and chuckling furiously for a moment; then the roar would just as quickly subside to a far hum again, and then gone, and the only sounds the insect orchestra and his own feet striking.

For a long time he had been walking somewhat uphill, but now the incline crested, and he looked out over a broad sweep of midsummer country. The road he stood on went on down through it, past meadows and through pastures and around wooded hills; it disappeared in a valley near a little town whose steeple just showed above the bursting green, and then appeared again, a tiny gray band curling into blue mountains in whose cleft the sun was setting amid roly-poly clouds.

And just then a woman on a porch at Edgewood far away turned a trump called the Journey. There was the Traveler, pack on his back and stout stick in his hand, and the long and winding road before him to traverse; and the Sun too, though whether setting or rising she had never decided. Beside the cards' unfolding pattern, a brown cigarette smoldered in a saucer. She moved the saucer and put the Journey in its place in the pattern, and then turned another card. It was the Host.

When Smoky reached the bottom of the first of the rolling hills the road stitched up, he was in a trough of shadow, and the sun had set.

On the whole he preferred finding a place to sleep to asking for one; he had brought two blankets. He had even thought of finding a hay-barn to sleep in, as travelers do in books (his books), but the real haybarns he passed seemed not only Private Property but also highly functional and crowded with large animals. He began to feel, in fact, somewhat lonely as the twilight deepened and the fields grew vague, and when he came on a bungalow at the bottom of the hill he went up to its picket fence and wondered how he might phrase what he thought must be an odd request.

It was a white bungalow snuggled within bushy evergreens. Roses just blown grew up trellises beside the green dutch door. White-painted stones marked the path from the door; on the darkling lawn a young deer looked up at him immobile in surprise, and dwarves sat cross-legged on toadstools or snuck away holding treasure. On the gate was a rustic board with a legend burned on it: The Junipers. Smoky unlatched the gate and opened it, and a small bell tinkled in the silence. The top of the dutch door opened, and yellow lamplight streamed out. A woman's voice said "Friend or foe?" and laughed.

"Friend," he said, and walked toward the door. The air smelled unmistakably of gin. The woman leaning on the door's bottom half was one of those with a long middle age; Smoky couldn't tell where along it she stood. Her thin hair might have been gray or brown, she wore cat's-eye glasses and smiled a false-toothed smile; her arms folded on the door were comfortable and freckled. "Well, I don't know 
you
," she said.

"I was wondering," Smoky said, "am I on the right road for a town called Edgewood?"

"I couldn't tell you," she said. "Jeff? Can you tell this young man the way to Edgewood?" She awaited an answer from within he couldn't hear, and then opened the door. "Come in," she said. "We'll see."

The house was tiny and tidy and stuffed with stuff. An old, old dog of the dust-mop kind sniffed at his feet, laughing breathlessly; be bumped into a bamboo telephone table, shouldered a knickknack shelf, stepped on a sliding scatter rug and fell through a narrow archway into a parlor that smelled of roses, bay rum and last winter's fires. Jeff put down his newspaper and lifted his slippered feet from their hassock. "Edgewood?" he asked around his pipe.

"Edgewood. I was given directions, sort of."

"You hitching?" Jeff's lean mouth opened like a fish's to puff as he perused Smoky doubtfully.

"No, walking actually." Above the fireplace was a sampler. It said:

I will Live in a House

By the side of the Road

& Be a Friend to Man.

Margaret Juniper 1927

"I'm going there to get married." Ahhh, they seemed to say.

"Well." Jeff stood. "Marge, get the map."

It was a county map or something, much more detailed than Smoky's; he found the constellation of towns he knew of, neatly outlined, but nothing for Edgewood. "It should be somewhere around these." Jeff found the stub of a pencil, and with a "hmmm" and a "let's see," connected the centers of the five towns with a five-pointed star. The pentagon enclosed by the lines of the star he tapped with the pencil, and raised his sandy eyebrows at Smoky. An old map-reader's trick, Smoky surmised. He discerned the shadow of a road crossing the pentagon, joining the road he walked, which stopped for good here at Meadowbrook. "Hmmm," he said.

"That's about all I can tell you," Jeff said, re-rolling the map.

"You going to walk all night?" Marge asked.

"Well, I've got a bedroll."

Marge pursed her lips at the comfortless blankets strapped to the top of his pack. "And I suppose you haven't eaten all day."

"Oh, I've got, you know, sandwiches, and an apple . . ."

The kitchen was papered with baskets of impossibly luscious fruit, blue grapes and russet apples and cleft peaches that protruded like bottoms from the harvest. Marge moved dish after steaming dish from stove to oilcloth, and when it was all consumed, Jeff poured out banana liqueur into tiny ruby glasses. That did it; all his polite remonstrance with their hospitality vanished, and Marge "did up the davenport" and Smoky was put to bed wrapped in an earthbrown Indian blanket.

For a moment after the Junipers had left him, he lay awake looking around the room. It was lit only by a night-light that plugged right into the outlet, a night-light in the shape of a tiny, rosecovered cottage. By its light he saw Jeff's maple chair, the kind whose orange paddle arms had always looked tasty to him, like glossy hard candy. He saw the ruffled curtains move in the rose-odorous breeze. He listened to the dust-mop dog sigh in his dreams. He found another sampler. This one said, he thought but could not be sure:

The Things that Make us Happy

Make us Wise.

He slept.

You may observe that I do not put

a hyphen between the two words.

I write "country house," not

"country-house." This is deliberate.

—V. Sackville-West

Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, breasts, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers:

O great wide beautiful wonderful World

With the wonderful waters around you curled

And the beautiful grass upon your breast

O World you are beautifully dressed.

Devotions done, she tilted the tall standing mirror that had been her great-grandmother's so that she could see her whole length in it, asked the usual question of it and got the right reply this morning; sometimes it was equivocal. She belted around herself a long brown gown, did a turn on her toes so that its frayed edges flew out, and went out wary into the still cold hall. She passed her father's study and listened briefly to his old Remington click-clacking about the adventures of mice and rabbits. She opened the door to her sister Sophie's room; Sophie was tangled in her bedclothes, a long golden hair in her parted lips, and her sleeping hands closed like a baby's. The morning sun was just then looking in at this room, and Sophie stirred, resentful. Most people look odd asleep; foreign, not themselves. Sophie asleep looked most like Sophie, and Sophie liked sleep and could sleep anywhere, even standing up. Daily Alice stayed awhile to watch her, wondering what her adventures were. Well, she would hear later, in detail.

At the end of a whorl of hall was the Gothic bathroom, the only one in the house with a tub long enough for her. Stuck as it was at a turning of the house, the sun hadn't yet reached it; its stained windows were dim and its cold tile floor made her stand tiptoe. The gargoyle faucet coughed phthisically, and deep within the house the plumbing held conference before allowing her some hot water. The sudden rush had its effect, and she gathered up her brown skirts around her waist and sat on the somewhat episcopal hollow throne, chin in hand, watching the steam rise from the sepulchral tub and feeling suddenly sleepy again.