Little, Big Part 10

"First I speak," said the kingfisher, "and you wonder who it is that's spoken to you. Then you realize it's me; then you look at your thumb and your fish, and see that it was the fish's blood you tasted, that allowed you to understand the voices of creatures; then we converse."

"I didn't mean a"

"We'll a.s.sume it was done that way." The kingfisher spoke in the choleric, impatient tone August would have expected from his upshot head-feathers, his thick neck, his fierce, annoyed eyes and beak: a kingfisher's voice. Halcyon bird indeed!

"Now you address me," the kingfisher said. "*O Bird!' you say, and make your request."

"O Bird!" August said, opening his hands imploringly, "Tell me this: Is it okay if we have a gas station in Meadowbrook, and sell Ford cars?"

"Certainly."

"What?"

"Certainly!"

It was so inconvenient speaking in this way to a bird, a kingfisher seated on a branch in a dead tree at no more conversational a distance than any kingfisher ever was, that August imagined the bird as seated beside him on the bank, a sort of kingfisher-like person, of a more conversable size, with his legs crossed, as August's were. This worked well. He doubted that this kingfisher was a kingfisher at all anyway.

"Now," said the kingfisher, still bird enough to be unable to look at August with more than one eye at a time, and that one bright and smart and pitiless, "was that all?"

"I a think so. Ia""

"Yes?"

"Well, I thought there might be some objection. The noise. The smell."

"None."

"Oh."

"On the other hand," said the kingfishera"a laugh, a raucous laugh, seemed always just beneath his wordsa""since you're here, and I'm here, you might ask for something else altogether."

"What?"

"Oh, anything. What you most want."

He had thoughta"right up until he had voiced his absurd requesta"that he was doing just that: but, with a terrible rush of heat that took his breath away, he knew that he hadn't, and that he could. He blushed fiercely. "Well," he said, stammering, "over in Meadowbrook, there's, there's a farmer, a certain farmer, and he has a daughter a"

"Yes yes yes," said the kingfisher impatiently, as though he knew well enough what August wanted, and didn't want to be bothered with having it spelled out circ.u.mstantially. "But let's discuss payment first, reward after."

"Payment?"

The kingfisher c.o.c.ked his head in short, furious changes of att.i.tude, sometimes eyeing August, sometimes the stream or the sky, as though he were trying to think of some really cutting remark in which to couch his annoyance. "Payment," he said. "Payment, payment. It's nothing to do with you. Let's call it a favor, if you prefer. The return of certain property thata"don't get me wronga" I'm sure fell into your hands inadvertently. I meana"" for the briefest moment, and for the first time, the kingfisher showed something like hesitation, or trepidation "a"I mean a deck of cards, playing cards. Old ones. Which you possess."

"Violet's?" said August.

"Those ones."

"I'll ask her."

"No, no. She thinks, you see, the cards are hers. So. She mustn't know."

"You mean steal them?"

The kingfisher was silent. For a moment he disappeared altogether, although that may only have been August's attention wandering from the effort of imagining him, to the enormity that he had been commanded to perform.

When he appeared again, the kingfisher seemed somewhat subdued. "Have you given any further thought to your reward?" he said, almost soothingly.

In fact he had. Even as he had grasped the fact that he could in some sense ask Amy of them (without even trying to imagine how they could make good on such a promise) he had ceased to desire her quite so intenselya"small presage of what would happen when he did possess her, or anyone. But what one could he choose then? Was it possible he could ask fora""All of them," he said in a small voice.

"All?"

"Any one I want." If sudden horrid strength of desire hadn't whelmed him, shame would never have allowed him to say it. "Power over them."

"You have it." The kingfisher cleared his throat, looking away, and combed his beard with a black claw, as though glad this unclean bargaining was done.' "There is a certain pool up in the woods above the lake. A certain rock which juts out into the pool. Put the cards there, in their bag in their box, and take the gift you find there. Do it soon. Goodbye."

Evening was dense yet clear, presage of a storm; the confusions of sunset were over. The pools of the stream were black, with steady gla.s.sy ribs raised by the continuous current. A black flutter of feathers in a dead tree was a kingfisher preparing for sleep. August waited on the bank till he had been returned, by an evening path, to the place he had started out from; then he gathered up his gear and went home, eyes wide and blind to the beauties of a stormgathering evening, feeling faintly sick with strangeness and expectation.

Something Horrific The velvet bag in which Violet's cards were kept was of a dusty rose color that had once been vivid. The box had once held a set of silver coffee-spoons from the Crystal Palace, but those had long since been sold, when she and her father wandered. To bring those strange huge oblongs drawn or printed centuries before out of this cozy box, with a picture of the old Queen and the Palace itself done on the cover in different woods, was always an odd moment, like the drawing aside of an arras in an old play to reveal something horrific.

Horrific: well, not quite, or not usually, though there were times when, as she laid out a Rose or a Banner or some other shape, she felt afraid: felt that some secret might be revealed which she didn't want to know, her own death or something even more dreadful. Buta"despite the weird, minatory images of the trumps, engraved with dense black detail like Durer's, baroque and Germanica"the secrets revealed were oftenest not terrible, oftenest not even secret: cloudy abstractions merely, oppositions, contentions, resolutions, common as proverbs and as unspecific. At least so she had been told the fall of them should be interpreted, by John and those of his acquaintance who knew card reading.

But the cards they knew weren't these cards, exactly; and though she knew no other way of laying them out or interpreting them than as the Tarot of the Egyptians was laid out (before she was instructed in those methods she used just to turn them down anyhow and stare at them, often for hours) she often wondered if there weren't some more revelatory, simpler, Somehow more useful manipulation of them she could make.

"And here is," she said, turning one up carefully top to bottom, "a Five of Wands."

"New possibilities," Nora said. "New acquaintances. Surprising developments."

"All right." The Five of Wands went in its place in the Horseshoe Violet was making. She chose from another pilea"the cards had been sorted, by arcane distribution, into six piles before hera"and turned a trump: it was the Sportsman.

This was the difficulty. Like the usual deck, Violet's contained a set of twenty-one major trumps; but hersa"persons, places, things, notionsa"were not the Greater Trumps at all. And so when the Bundle, or the Traveler, or Convenience, or Multiplicity, or the Sportsman fell, a leap had to be made, meanings guessed at which made sense of the spread. Over the years, with growing certainty, she had a.s.signed meanings to her trumps, made inferences from the way in which they fell among the cups and swords and wands, and discerneda"or seemed to discerna"their influences, malign or beneficent. But she could never be sure. Death, the Moon, Judgementa" those greater trumps had large and obvious significance; what did one make though of the Sportsman?

He was, like all people pictured in her cards, musclebound in a not quite human way and striking an absurd, orgulous pose, toes turned out and knuckles on hip. He seemed certainly overdressed for what he was about, with ribbons at his knees, slashes in his jacket, and a wreath of dying flowers around his broad hat; but that was for sure a fis.h.i.+ng pole over his shoulder. He carried something like a creel, and other impedimenta she didn't understand; and a dog, who looked a lot like Spark, lay asleep at his feet. It was Grandy who called this figure the Sportsman; underneath him was written in Roman capitals P I S C A T O R.

"So," Violet said, "new experiences, and good times, or adventures outdoors, for someone. That's nice."

"For who?" Nora asked.

"For whom."

"Well, for whom?"

"For whomever we're reading this spread for. Did we decide? Or is this only practice?"

"Since it's coming out so well," Nora said, "let's say it's for someone."

"August." Poor August, something good ought to be in store for him.

"All right." But before Violet could turn another card, Nora said "Wait. We shouldn't joke with it. I mean if it didn't start being Augusta"what if we turn up something awful? Wouldn't we worry it might come true?" She looked out over the tangled spread, feeling apprehensive for the first time before their power. "Do they always come true?"

"I don't know." She stopped dealing them out. "No," she said. "Not ftr us. I think they might predict things that could happen to us. Buta"well, we're protected, aren't we?"

Nora said nothing to this. She believed Violet, and believed Violet knew the Tale in ways she couldn't imagine; but she had never felt herself to be protected.

"There are catastrophes," Violet said, "of an ordinary kind, that if the cards predicted them I wouldn't believe them."

"And you correct my grammar!" Nora said, laughing. Violet, laughing too, turned the next card: the Four of Cups, reversed.

"Weariness. Disgust. Aversion," Nora said. "Bitter experience."

Below, the ratchety doorbell rang. Nora leapt up.

"Now, who could that be?" Violet said, sweeping up the cards.

"Oh," Nora said, "I don't know." She had gone to the mirror hastily, and pushed her heavy golden hair quickly into place, and smoothed her blouse. "It might be Harvey Cloud, who said he might stop by to return a book I loaned him." She stopped her hurry, and sighed, as though annoyed at the interruption. "I guess I'd better go see."

"Yes," Violet said. "You go see. We'll do this again another day."

But when, a week later, Nora asked for another lesson, and Violet went to the drawer where her cards were kept, they weren't there. Nora insisted she hadn't taken them. They weren't in any other place that Violet might absentmindedly have put them. With half her drawers turned out and papers and boxes littering the floor from her search, she sat on the edge of the bed, puzzled and a little alarmed.

"Gone," she said.

Anthology of Love "I'll do what you want, August," Amy said. "Whatever you want."

He bent his head down onto his upraised knees and said "Oh, Jesus, Amy. Oh, G.o.d, I'm so sorry."

"Oh, don't swear so, August, it's terrible." Her face was as misty and tearful as the shorn October cornfield in their view, where blackbirds hunted corn, rising at unseen signals and settling again elsewhere. She put her harvestchapped hands on his. They both s.h.i.+vered, from the cold and from chill circ.u.mstance. "I've read in books and such that for a while people love people and then they don't any more. I never knew why.

"I don't know why either, Amy."

"I'll always love you."

He raised his head, so flooded with melancholy and tender regret that he seemed to have turned to mist and autumn himself. He'd loved her intensely before, but never so purely as now when he told her he wouldn't be seeing her any more.

"I just wonder why," she said.

He couldn't tell her it was mostly a matter of scheduling, nothing to do with her really, only the most pressing engagements he had elsewherea"oh Lord, pressing, pressing a He had met her here, beneath the brown bracken, at dawn when she wouldn't be missed at home, to break off with her, and the only acceptable and honorable reason he could think of for that was that he didn't love her any more, and so that was the reason which, after long hesitations and many cold kisses, he had given her. But when he did so, she was so brave, so acquiescent, the tears that rolled down her cheeks so salty, that it seemed to him that he'd said it only to see how good, how loyal, how meek she was; to animate with sadness and imminent loss his own flagging feelings.

"Oh, don't Amy, Amy, I never meanta" He held her, and she yielded, shy to trespa.s.s where he had only a moment ago said she was forbidden, not wanted; and her shyness, her big eyes searching him, afraid and wildly hopeful, undid him.

"You shouldn't, August, if you don't love me."

"Don't say it, Amy, don't."

Near to weeping himself, just as though he truly wouldn't ever see her again (though he knew now he must and would), on the rustling leaves he entered with her into new sad sweet lands of love, where the awful hurts he had inflicted on her were healed.

There was no end to Love's geography, apparently.

"Next Sunday? August?" Timid, but sure now.

"No. Not next Sunday. But a Tomorrow. Or tonight. Can you a"

"Yes. I'll think of a way. Oh, August. Sweetness."

She ran, wiping her face, pinning her hair, late, in danger, happy, across the field. This, he thought, in some last resisting stronghold of his soul, is what I've come to: even the end of love is only another spur to love. He went the other way to where his car, reproachful, awaited him. The mist-sodden squirrel tail that now adorned it hung limply on its staff. Trying not to think, he cranked the car into life.

What the h.e.l.l was he to do anyway?

He had thought that the ardent sword of feeling that had gone through him when he first saw Amy Meadows after acquiring his gift was only the certainty that desire was at last to be fulfilled. But he proceeded to make a fool of himself over her, certainty or no certainty; he braved her father, he told desperate lies and was nearly caught out in them, he waited hours on the cold ground beyond her house for her to free herselfa"they had promised him power over women, he realized bitterly, but not over their circ.u.mstancesa"and though Amy acceded to all his plans, his nighttime meetings, his schemes, and matched his importunities one for one, not even her shamelessness lessened his sense of not being at all in charge here, but at the beck and call of desire more demanding, less a part of himself and more a demon that rode him, than he had been before.

The sense grew, over the months, as he wheeled the Ford around the five towns, to a certainty: he drove the Ford, but was himself driven, steered, and s.h.i.+fted without let.

Violet didn't inquire why he had dropped the notion of building a garage in Meadowbrook. Now and then he complained to her that he used almost as much gas getting to and from the nearest garage as he put in his tank when he got there, but this didn't seem to be a hint or an argument, in fact he seemed less argumentative altogether than he had been. It might be, she thought, that his almost haggard air of being concerned quite elsewhere meant that he was hatching some even more unlikely scheme, but Somehow she thought not; she hoped that what appeared to be guilty exhaustion in his face and voice when he lounged silent at home didn't mean he was practicing some secret vice; certainly something had happened. The cards might have told her what, but the cards were gone. It was probably, she thought, only that he was in love.

That was true. If Violet hadn't chosen to seclude herself in an upstairs room, she would have had a notion of the swath her younger son was cutting through the young girls, the standing harvest of the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood. Their parents knew, a little; the girls themselves, among themselves, told of it; among them a glimpse of August's T, with the bright jaunty squirrel tail flying from a whippy rod at the windscreen, meant a day's consternation, a night's hot tossing, a wet pillow in the morning; they didn't knowa"how could they guess? All their hearts were hisa"that August's days and nights were spent much as theirs were.

He hadn't expected this. He had heard of Casanova, but hadn't read him. He had imagined harems, the peremptory clap of a sultan's hands which brings the acquiescent object of desire as quickly and impersonally as a dime brought a chocolate soda at the drugstore. He was astounded when, without his mad desire for Amy lessening in the slightest, he fell deeply in love with the Flowers' eldest daughter. Ravened by love and lewdness, he thought of her continually, when he wasn't with Amy; or when he wasn't thinking abouta"how could it bea"little Margaret Juniper, who wasn't even fourteen. He learned, though slowly, what all great harrowed lovers learn: that love is what most surely compels lovea"is perhaps, except for brute force, the only thing that does, though only (and this was the terrible gift he had been given) when the lover truly believes, as August could, that when his love is strong enough it must surely be returneda"and August's was.

When, with shame in his heart and trembling hands he had laid down by the rock pool what he had tried to deny to himself was his mother's most precious possession, the cards, and picked up what lay there for him, only a squirrel's tail and probably no gift at all but only the remnants of an owl's or a fox's breakfast, this is madness, it was only the dense weight of virgin hope that had allowed him to tie it to his Ford, expecting nothing. But they had kept their promise, oh they had, he was on the way to becoming an entire anthology of love, with footnotes (there were a pair of step-ins under his seat, he could not remember who had stepped out of them); only, as he drove from drugstore to church, from farmhouse to farmhouse, with the hairy thing flying from his windscreen, he came to know that it did not and had not ever contained his power over women: his power over women lay in their power over him.

Darker Before It Lightened The Flowers came on Wednesdays, usually, bringing armloads of blossoms for Violet's room, and though Violet always felt somewhat ashamed and guilty in the presence of so many decapitated and slowly expiring blooms, she tried to express admiration and wonder at Mrs. Flowers' green thumb. But this visit was Tuesday, and there were no flowers.

"Come in, come in," Violet said. They were standing, unwontedly shy, at her bedroom door. "Will you take some tea?"

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Flowers. "Just a few words."