Little, Big Read online

  “What?”

  “Spark was a dog we had. The Park is, you know, the grounds around. There was a breeze blowing, and it felt like the rain was going to end. We were all wet. Then I looked west: there was a rainbow. I remembered what my mother said: morning rainbow in the west, then the weather will be best.”

  He imagined her very vividly, in a yellow slicker and high widemouthed boots, and her hair finer even and curlier than now; and wondered how she knew which way west was, a problem he still sometimes stumbled over.

  “It was a rainbow, but bright, and it looked like it came down just—there, you know, not far; I could see the grass, all sparkling and stained every color there. The sky had got big, you know, the way it does when it clears at last after a long rainy time, and everything looked near; the place the rainbow came down was near; and I wanted more than anything to go stand in it—and look up—and be covered with colors.”

  Smoky laughed. “That’s hard,” he said.

  She laughed too, dipping her head and raising the back of her hand to her mouth in a way that already seemed heartstirringly familiar to him. “It sure is,” she said. “It seemed to take forever.”

  “You mean you—”

  “Every time you thought you were coming close, it would be just as far off, in a different place; and if you came to that place, it would be in the place you came from; and my throat was sore with running, and not getting any closer. But you know what you do then—”

  “Walk away from it,” he said, surprised at his own voice but Somehow sure this was the answer.

  “Sure. That isn’t as easy as it sounds, but—”

  “No, I don’t suppose.” He had stopped laughing.

  “—but if you do it right—”

  “No, wait,” he said.

  “—just right, then …”

  “They don’t really come down, now,” Smoky said. “They don’t, not really.”

  “They don’t here,” she said. “Now listen. I followed Spark; I let him choose, because he didn’t care, and I did. It took just one step, and turn around, and guess what.”

  “I can’t guess. You were covered in colors.”

  “No. It’s not like that. Outside, you see colors inside it; so, inside it—”

  “You see colors outside it.”

  “Yes. The whole world colored, as though it were made of candy—no, like it was made of a rainbow. A whole colored world as soft as light all around as far as you can see. You want to run and explore it. But you don’t dare take a step, because it might be the wrong step—so you only look, and look. And you think: Here I am at last.” She had fallen into thought. “At last,” she said again softly.

  “How,” he said, and swallowed, and began again. “How did I come into it? You said someone told you …”

  “Spark,” she said. “Or someone like him.”

  She looked closely at him, and he tried to compose his features into a semblance of pleasant attention. “Spark is the dog,” he said.

  “Yes.” She had become reluctant, it seemed, to go on. She picked up her spoon and studied herself, tiny and upside down, in its concavity, and put it down. “Or someone like him. Well. It’s not important.”

  “Wait,” he said.

  “It only lasted a minute. While we stood there, I thought—” guardedly, and not looking at him “—I thought Spark said …” She looked up at him. “Is this hard to believe?”

  “Well, yes. It is. Hard to believe.”

  “I didn’t think it would be. Not for you.”

  “Why not for me?”

  “Because,” she said, and cradled her cheek in her hand, her face sad, disappointed even, which silenced him utterly, “because you were the one Spark talked about.”

  Make-Believe

  It was probably only because he had nothing at all left to say, that in that moment—or rather in the moment after that moment—a difficult question or delicate proposition which Smoky had been mulling over all day tumbled out of his mouth in a far from finished form.

  “Yes,” she said, not raising her cheek from her hand but with a new smile lighting her face like a morning rainbow in the west. And so when the false dawn of the City’s lights showed them the snow piled deep and crisp and even on their window-ledge, they lay with the deep crisp bedclothes up around their necks (the hotel’s heat had failed in the sudden cold) and talked. They hadn’t yet slept.

  “What,” he said, “are you talking about?”

  She laughed and curled her toes against him. He felt strange, giddy, in a certain way he hadn’t felt since before puberty, which was odd, but there it was: that feeling of being filled up so full that the tips of his fingers and the top of his head tingled: shone, maybe, if he were to look at them. Anything was possible. “It’s make-believe, isn’t it,” he said, and she turned over smiling and fitted their bodies together like a double s.

  Make-believe. When he was a kid, when he and others found some buried thing—neck of a brown bottle, tarnished spoon, a stone even that bore half an ancient spike-hole—they could convince themselves it was of great age. It had been there when George Washington was alive. Earlier. It was venerable, and immensely valuable. They convinced themselves of this by a collective act of will, which at the same time they concealed from each other: like make-believe, but different.

  “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.

  Life is Short, or Long

  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.

  Trumps Turned at Edgewood

  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.

  Junipers

  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 hay-barns 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 earth-brown 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, rose-covered 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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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: