Engine Summer Part 7

Because no one else found the silver ball and glove - this silver ball and glove. No one else searched for it. No one else followed the series from beginning to end - and then took the last step. Perhaps anyone else could have - but no one did. So it is you that found us. You that I speak to now: you alone who speaks to me. Now: were you going to tell about Plunkett?

I... yes. Yes: I was going to tell how I saw the picture, and what Blink said... Do you know this story better than I do?

Go on. It's not for my sake you tell it.

I had asked Blink about the little house Once a Day showed me, and the four stone dead men. "I know about four stone heads," he said, "four heads that are a mountain; but they aren't the four dead men in the story I know. Perhaps the four stone heads picture the four dead men; or perhaps it's a joke of Whisper cord's. What was it she said of them? 'Are they mad.' Well. Who can follow Whisper? But there is a story: "At the time of the Storm, when at last the lights and phones of the Co-op went off for good, and Great St. Roy led us away to wander, there was a boy, Gary, among us, who would become St. Gary. St. Gary had been raised by his aunt, who was a speaker, and by his uncle, who was named Plunkett. Plunkett's work, secret in nature, was one of those last plans of the angels spoiled by the Storm: a plan for immortality. The secret slipped out through Plunkett's wife, who revealed to Gary that although his uncle was dead and buried, which she didn't dispute, he was also alive in an underground place near Clevelen, far west, near the place the Co-op had been.

"So St. Gary turned back from the speaker's flight to return to Clevelen to see if he could find his supposed uncle still alive, though as he went west he pa.s.sed the grave where he had seen his uncle laid. After a long search, Gary did find the place Plunkett's wife had told him of; and by that time so had others, some desperate to learn what the angels knew of immortality, others wis.h.i.+ng to destroy the work as they were intent on destroying all that the angels had done.

"What they had found, and now kept constant watch over and had fierce disputes about, were five clear spheres without any openings and with, it appeared, nothing at all inside them. Attached to four of these five were angel-pictures, gray and s.h.i.+ny, of four faces. One of them was St. Gary's Uncle Plunkett.

"There was a lot of resistance among the others there to St. Gary taking his uncle away with him. For some time he argued with them, defending Plunkett from those who wanted to smash the spheres, if they were smashable, and from those who wanted to open them, or operate them, if that could be done. Then the Long League intervened there. Women of the League came, and said they would decide the matter - as they were just then deciding so many matters - and that no one should touch the spheres or investigate them further but they. St. Gary wouldn't agree; and by stealth one night he made away with the sphere that was in some sense Plunkett, and fled.

"For many years and through many hazards, Gary kept Uncle Plunkett with him, though the speakers laughed at him and the sphere that was so obviously empty. He became a great saint in his old age, and lived in a beech near the camp the speakers had then near New Neyork in the days of the Long League's power; and he lived with Plunkett all that time. And if Plunkett ever said a word, n.o.body heard it.

"After Gary's death, Uncle Plunkett went into St. Andy's wagon with other stuff, precious and useless; and like so many other things, the silver ball and glove they tell about, the spectacles to see at night with, the dream machine, it was lost eventually, or perhaps sold, no one remembers, as no one then cared much. The Long League indeed did care: rumors came that they were searching for the last of the four dead men, some said to destroy it as they had the others, or to keep it out of the hands of their enemies as others said, but the speakers had little to do with these disputes. And then no more was heard about it."

I had questions, but to all of them Blink only shrugged and shook his head: why were there five spheres, and only four pictures? If the five spheres were all alike, why was it said there were only four dead men? How could they be what they were said to be, alive? "Ask the angels, ask the Long League," he said. "They alone know. All I know is Gary's story; if Whisper cord knows more, it's their secret - but somehow I think they don't, and their four dead men are only a game, like the three dreams of Olive, the seven wandering stars, the nine last words of Little St. Roy. There is, though, one thing; one tangible thing, and by a path I won't describe to you, I come to have it. Look..

And like Mbaba going to her chests to prove a story of when-we-wandered, Blink got up and searched among his belongings, and from a cranny in the wall he took out the cracked angel-picture of Uncle Plunkett which Gary had found attached to the clear sphere, and taken away with him when he took Plunkett. In the picture, Plunkett wore a s.h.i.+rt with b.u.t.tons and had almost no hair, only a gray burr all over his head. Under his shaven chin he held a card with writing on it. He wasn't looking right out, but a bit to one side, as though he had heard someone call to him. The crack in the picture made white seams across his face like the scars of a terrible wound; he was smiling a big smile, and his teeth shone like the fitsall teeth. For some reason the picture made me s.h.i.+ver violently.

"Maybe," I said at last, "they had it all wrong. Maybe the spheres were something else altogether, and there never really were four dead men; they'd got it mixed up with some other story, or got it wrong somehow. Probably."

Blink smiled at me and patted my cheek. "Probably," he said. "Let's go look for mushrooms."

I didn't think that a man as old as Blink would spend the winter in a place as exposed as his house in the oak, but though autumn came on faster now he showed no signs of moving. He pottered around working in Book or staring glumly at the gla.s.s which covered his crostic-words, as nights grew colder and cold mist filled the house in the mornings so that we sat wrapped to our ears late in the Three Bears, as Blink called the sewn-together s.h.a.ggies and skins we kept warm in. We wrapped up early in them too, and smoked and talked through the long evening while we watched his little charcoal fire go out. "That fire," I said, "won't be much help soon."

"No," he said. "Good thing we won't need it."

The woods became transparent. From the windows of the house you could see now all the way out to the pasture and nearly to where the brook ran chilly between its frosted rocks. Blink and I worked at making the house secure: we c.h.i.n.ked cracks with mud and moss, hung the walls with thick rugs he had stored all summer. We closed up the fire's mouth and blocked its chimney. We made a new front door to fit over the old one, and bickered over how the two could best be fitted together to keep out the cold. On a day when the stillness and the curdled darkness of the clouds all day suggested a heavy frost, Blink drew out from where they were stored several thick sheets of plastic, unclouded, great treasures; a thickness went over the outside of each small window, and another on the inside. When this was done, he arranged the two bed-chairs so they faced the windows. "Is Jug filled right up to the top?" he said.

"Yes."

"Then I guess we're ready."

In a little brazier he lit twigs and started small lumps of charcoal going; while these caught, he found a small jar made of angel-silver, tightly sealed, and opened it. From it he took a big pinch of black powder, looked at it, frowning, and shook some back in. The rest he scattered on the glowing charcoal. It didn't smoke, but the smell was p.r.o.nounced, a dense and penetrating odor like no other I have ever smelled. We made some last preparations; Blink carefully resealed the jar and put it by him; he looked around, finger to his lips, satisfied that all was ready. I had begun to feel deliciously warm and sleepy, but alert as well, as though I could go to sleep and stay awake at the same time. That seemed to be Blink's idea too, and we crept into the Three Bears, made even warmer with silver cloths Blink had attached around them, made ourselves comfortable, and sat there for three months.

On the evening of that first day we talked little; we grew silent and still as though asleep, but watching the clear cold sunset fade behind the fuzz of black trees on the mountains beyond the pasture. Later, that month's full moon lit the bald, still earth and we listened to the cracks and snaps of its freezing. Clouds gathered, moving fast over the moon's white face. By morning the year's first snow was falling, dusting the ground with a fine cold powder which the bitter wind blew around like dust.

Jug kept water as warm in winter as it had kept it cool in summer. Once a day perhaps, I would fill a pipe with St. Bea's-bread, all flaky with cold. At full moon time, St. Blink would climb complaining from his Bear, and light charcoal, and burn more of the black powder. When there was a warm spell, we would sometimes crawl out and open the two front doors and climb down the ladder, moving with careful gravity like two ancient invalids; and then back up in a short time utterly exhausted, though having seen a great deal.

We slept a strange, utter sleep, coming out only past noon as winter truly took hold, and pa.s.sing back in again as evening came; many days pa.s.sed without comment, only glimpsed between one doze and another. Snow choked the woods deeply; we sat all day once absorbed in the progress of a fox across the trackless pasture, and watched the doings of jays and sparrows, falling asleep when they did. Two chipmunks of the oak at last found a way into the tree house, and would run cheerfully over us, breathing our heated breath; they slept in Blink's lap for three days of blind violent storms that sheathed the forest in ice, which seemed to make music in the fine blue morning that followed, music too blinding to look at. The chipmunks slept. We slept, dust and loose bits of moss and spines of leaves blown up around our feet by drafts. We had become a part of Blink's beloved sleeping oak, hearing its branches creak and snap in wind, grieving when a great weight of ice broke one fine limb. Snow fell from its branches to thud on our roof, and then slide from our roof to the ground. I blinked less often, I came to notice; and when I blinked, often I slept. My left hand lay on my right for half a month.

On a white afternoon sometime in that endless season, a warm day when Blink had struggled out to take powder from the jug to steam us into our deep hibernation again, I asked, "Where does it come from?"

"Where does what come from?" he asked, looking around to see if I meant some beast.

"The powder," I said. "And how does it do that?" Already it had begun to do it; the penetrating smell was in the air, sharp and metallic, like the warm breath from a bra.s.s throat, and I felt my haunches wiggle more comfortably into the seat I had sat in so long.

"Ask the angels how it does what it does," he said. "They'd tell you, but you wouldn't understand. Can't you tell how it does it? Listen to it work; you've got time." With great care he worked himself back into his chair as I tried to listen to the powder work. I could begin to tell what he meant; and I knew that by winter's end I would know how it did what it did, though I wouldn't be able to explain it to anyone who hadn't spent a winter with it.

"And where it comes from," Blink was saying, finding a way to sit he liked well enough to stay in, "well... that's a tale..."

I said we slept a lot; but awake, I felt strangely clear and smart, as though everything were taking its time to reveal itself to me with slow precision, to surprise me that it contained more than I'd thought it had: not only the hunting fox's every movement, but St. Blink's long tangled histories, unfolding meantime, twisting but patent, as the peach-colored brook was patent at sunset running through the black and white pasture.

He went on, talking about the powder, and about other powders and medicines the angels had made; about how the angels, not content with altering the world for their convenience, had altered men too to fit the altered world, paving and remaking their deepest insides as they had the surface of the earth. About medicine's daughters: he said, "Medicine is to medicine's daughters as a dry stick is to a tree. Medicine is like paint; medicine's daughters are like the change of color in a crystal. Medicine changes you, fights your diseases, drowns your sorrows; medicine's daughters make you a suggestion that you change yourself - a suggestion that you can't refuse. A medicine lasts as long as a meal; medicine's daughters leave you changed long after they've disappeared from your body."

Four of medicine's daughters are contained in the Four Pots, the first to cause you to throw off nearly every disease, and the last, the bone-white pot and its white contents, was made to solve a strange problem that was caused by the first. "The angels learned to heal the things that kill men young," Blink said, "and hoped therefore that they might live forever. They were wrong in that, but so successful at keeping men alive that it seemed that soon there would be in the world far too many healthy people, as good as immortal, unable to be killed by anything but their own stupidity, flowing from the wombs of women like ants from an anthill, and no food and no room for them all. Think of the fear and revulsion you feel when you kick into a nest of ants and see them swarm: men felt that for their kind, and the Law and the Gummint most of all, who most of all bore the burden of keeping the world man's.

"And so, by a means we have forgotten, a means like medicine's daughters but far more subtle even, they made themselves childless. It took some generations, but at last they made this childlessness permanent: it would be pa.s.sed on then, from mother to child. And they made the medicine's daughter which is in the fourth of the Four Pots to start up again the inside goings-on which their means stopped. When it's taken, a woman can for a while conceive: but her child will be childless, until she too makes the choice to take the medicine's daughter. It's as though we were born without eyes, as though our eyes were not stuck in our heads but pa.s.sed down from mother to child like a treasure, and every child had the choice to take them up or not.

"And it would have worked out, perhaps, if the Storm hadn't come; men would have chosen their numbers as they chose to build Road and put up a false moon next to the real one. But the Storm did come; and who can say it wasn't hastened by this terrible choice of theirs? And in the winters that came after, in the Wars and catastrophes, millions died by all the old means the angels thought they had removed forever from the world, and few were born by this new means of theirs.

"And we are left now, we few, unable to reverse what they did; carrying a part of ourselves outside ourselves, in the white pot; left with their choice still."

There was a winter when I was five or six, when I had gone looking for my mother, Speak a Word, and come upon her in a curtained place; I had come up quietly, and she didn't see me, for she was intent on what the old gossip Laugh Aloud was saying to her, which I couldn't hear. I saw then that Seven Hands was with them, and so I came no closer - this was when my knot with him was most tangled. I knelt there and watched them in the winter light. Laugh Aloud had the box of pots open before her, and with one finger she moved the white one across the table to my mother. My mother's nose was s.h.i.+ny with sweat, and she had an odd, fixed smile on her face. She picked up and put down again the fourth pot.

"No," she said. "Not this year."

Seven Hands said nothing. Did he wish it? Did it matter? He said nothing, for the angel's choice was only for Speak a Word. "Not this year," she said, and looked only at Laugh Aloud, who pursed her lips and nodded. She placed the pot in its fourth place in the holder, and returned the holder to its box. The top of the box closed with a little noise.

At my dream of that noise, I woke.

"The angels," Blink was saying, "with their phones and their cars and their Road, they used to say: 'It's a small world. Getting smaller every day.'" He shook his head. "A small world."

He went on, after we had smoked, talking of winter. Of the winters of the Wars, and this black powder that had kept the fighters against the angels alive, and how he came to have it now; and the winter the Long League was made manifest; and the winter Great St. Roy locked the door of the Co-op Great Belaire, and the speakers began their long, hunted wanderings, and about his lost leg; about the rest of the world, beyond the oceans, from which no word came any more...

"His lost leg?" I said.

"From cold," said St. Blink. "Frozen, and rotting from it, and had to be cut off. In years before, the angels' science could have replaced it, made him a whole new one, a real one; but he had to be content with a false one."

Patent as sunset water... "Which is in the warren now," I said.

"So it is." Interminably the snow continued its silent, blind descent. "You cry, Roy said, just after, and brood, and think you might as well be dead. But you get an artificial one, even if it's not like the angels could make, it's wood but it works; and you force yourself to get up and walk, feeling foolish with it as much as hurt. But you set to, and one day you can keep up. You can't dance, maybe, and it's a long time before you make love again, but you get along. You learn to live with it. You even laugh; for sure Roy did. But still he always had one less leg. No matter how good it got.

"And what Roy thought, who saw the Storm, was that from then on we would all be as he was - all legless men. Whether it was the choice of childlessness, or further back, in the angels' decision to hammer the world into a shape convenient for men, no matter what the cost - whatever it was, we lost that terrible race.

"And it left us legless men." Twilight would be forever today, starting almost as morning ended and sliding imperceptibly into moonless night. "And we can laugh. We have our systems, and our wisdom. But still only one leg. It doesn't get better, a lost leg, like a cold. We learn to live with it. We try."

He s.h.i.+fted, ever so slightly. "Well, these are winter stories... See how gray the light is today, the world's as sleepy as I am. Little Belaire's closed up now, they're all close inside, and the old stories told... and spring comes, when it comes."

And we slept again, not having moved. The days went by full of blown snow, the sun's trip quick and cold and veiled. No stars, no moon for days: the fox: the birds.

Sixth Facet

There was a day, after gray rain had melted the last hillocks of black-peppered snow, and many birds had come home, and the woods were filled with new smells as with a stretch and a yawn, that Blink and I crept down the ladder and stood in the new air burdened with odors, looking around blinking and trying to stand up straight.

At the last full moon Blink, after judging the weather and counting something twice on his fingers, had put away his jar of black powder; but the first warm days found us still sleeping out the last of our long sleep, staying in bed as you do on a fine morning when you know you should be up, but perversely roll and toss under your untidy blankets until the sun is high. Now we wandered slowly in the woods, greeting the others who had come from hibernation, a snail and a basking turtle, a woodchuck so lean he seemed to be wearing someone else's baggy clothes, and the trees too; and as Blink and I stopped to watch the woodchuck sniff the air I was filled with grat.i.tude that I had made it, made it through another winter through which many had not, a winter that was over now, a winter which is half of life. Life is winter and summer, a day is half asleep and half awake, my kind is man and they have lived and died; and I have come through another winter to stand here now on the winter-turned earth and smell the wet woods. I thought of Once a Day, I saw her vividly on travels far away. St. Roy had lost a leg to winter, but had lived to see spring. I sat down with the weight of all this, and looked up at Blink, ancient and lined, whom the winter despite his powder had weakened and aged, and knew there were those in Belaire who hadn't lived. I knew that what the powder Blink burned had done was to stop: stop all this that I felt now rush over me intolerably. It had started again as the powder wore off, and it was enormous. I sighed to breathe it out but could not; and wept suddenly, big panting sobs where I sat on the bursting earth.

At Little Belaire they would be making new rooms from old in honor of spring. Buckle cord would be s.h.i.+fting walls and opening doors all along Path, new dirt would be walked into hard floors, sun would be let in. Belaire opens like a new insect in the warmth, and Leaf cord trims and decorates and invites people to watch it unfold. Insulation is taken down, rooms swept of leaves and winter, favorite chairs lugged along Path to favorite bits of sun; and a new word that makes all the cords hum with thought and laughter.

"And you want to go home to it," said St. Blink.

"What? Go home? Why do you say that?"

"You don't answer when I speak to you, you can't hear what I say. You've been staring out the window all morning when there is a way out of the house, and things to do too, I don't just mean hauling and fixing, there are things abroad now to see and flowers blooming. And you sit instead indoors."

"It's not really indoors here."

"You know what I mean. You itch all over, but there's no place to scratch."

"Well, I can't go back," I said. "Of course."

"Of course."

There would be the bees swarming and the expeditions out beyond Little Mountain to see the new bread, and Mbaba's birds returning; and soon the travelers from the List coming, and perhaps she among them this time, and so much to tell her.

"I suppose," I said, "there are other places in the world."

"Yes," Blink said, "I suppose there are; other places, and just as nice."

I got up from my window and hustled down the ladder, almost angry with him. Because he was right: I went out to sit in the blooming meadow and let myself think Yes, I want to go home, now, in spring, now, I want to go home; my throat was hard and painful with it. I wanted to go home so badly for such a long time that day that I was only a little surprised when my wanting summoned from the leafy trees by the brook two pale boys, lankier than they had been, one with a red and one with a blue band around his neck. Among other more important things, I had forgotten, during the winter, which was which.

They climbed the bank in their dawdling way, stopping to poke into bushes for animals; when one saw me he waved, and I waved back. It was as though they had been waiting all winter just around the turn of the brook for the first hot day of spring.

"h.e.l.lo," said, I think, Budding. "Are you a saint yet?"

"No," I said. "Not yet."

"Well," said the other, coming up behind, "they'd like to see you back in Little Belaire."

"No Moon went in the fall," said the first, "and again in the spring; your mother misses you."

His brother hunkered down on the meadow and ran his hand through his lank blond hair to find a leaf. "Maybe," he said, "if you had a whole year, and you're not a saint yet, you should go home and start again later."

"Maybe," said the other.

"Maybe," I said, thinking of my mother, and of the little that No Moon could tell her, and how easily I had left and how little I had thought of hers or anyone's feelings. A hot wave of shame and impatience made me jump up with clenched fists. "Yes. Yes, I should," I said. "Maybe I should..."

"Where's the saint?" the twins said, almost in unison.

The saint. I turned from the twins and looked back toward the woods, where from the cover of the hawthorns a brown face ringed with white hair peeped out at us like some shy wild thing, and disappeared into the shadows when he saw that I saw him. I stood halfway between the woods and a fallen log where the twins sat absorbed in something they had found. "Wait!" I shouted to the twins, who looked up, surprised. They were in no hurry.

I remembered the spring before, when I had crashed through these trees in search of him; it had been just a wood then, like any wood. Now, like a face you've learned to love, it had grown so familiar that the first wood was gone forever, and I knew this one only, which had a path through it, secret like Path, by the split birches, around the dense evergreens and down the bank to the mossy, ferny places and the black fallen trees where mushrooms grew, up the slate outcropping splashed now with clinging green, and up the sloping, brambly ground to where the old oaks grew, and to the oldest oak. To Blink, who sat at its foot, looking down it seemed in sorrow.

I crept up slowly to him and sat by him without speaking. He didn't look up at me, but now I saw that it wasn't sorrow that made him look down, but something in the gra.s.s at his feet which he watched intently: a black ant of the largest kind. It struggled through the bending gra.s.ses, its feelers waving unceasingly.

"Lost," Blink said. "Can't find his nest, lost the path. Nothing worse than that can happen to an ant. For an ant, being lost is a tragedy."

"What is that? Tragedy."

"Tragedy, it's an ancient word; it meant a description of a terrible thing that had happened to someone; something that, given circ.u.mstances and some fault in you, could happen to you, or to anybody. It was like truthful speaking, because it showed that we share the same nature, a nature we can't change and so cease to suffer. If this ant ever finds his nest again, and could tell about his experience and the suffering he felt, they'd have a tragedy. But he's unable, even if he does get back. In a way, no ant has ever before been in the tragedy of being lost; this one's the first, because ants have no way of telling about such things, and so being forewarned. Do you see?"

"I think I do."

He raised his eyes from the ground and regarded me calmly. "Well. I think my stories are all told, Rush, the important ones; and now that those two look-alikes have come back, you'll be going home, I suppose."

Old Blink! I had learned truthful speaking in that winter with him, and the weight and tenderness in his words made no answer possible. I only knelt by him and waited. He said nothing more, though; only watched the ant struggling through the gra.s.s like a man in the dark.

"Tell me what I should do," I said at last.

"No, no," he said, as though to himself. "No... I guess, you know, all your foolish talk about me being a saint did affect me a little. Enough so that I wanted to tell you a story you would remember, and could repeat. But it's no story, is it, only 'and then, and then, and then' endlessly... A saint, no. If I were a saint, I wouldn't tell you, now, what you should do. And since I'm not a saint, I can't."

I thought of Seven Hands, and the day we had gone to see Road. He'd said: "If you're going to go somewhere, you have to believe you can get there. Somehow, some way." I thought of Sewn Up and No Moon, living at the river house but tied to the warren by strong cords. I thought of Once a Day. No: though Belaire tugged at me, I couldn't go home again. Not yet.

"Blink," I said. "You said, about the four dead men, that if I wanted to know more, I should ask the Long League, or the angels."

"Both gone."

"Dr. Boots's List is a child of the League. And knows things the League knew."

"So they say of themselves."

"Well," I said, and took a breath. "I'll go ask them, then."

He sat silent, blinking at me as though he had just then noticed me kneeling by him, and wondered how I had got there.

"Maybe," I said, "I'm not to be a saint. Maybe not. But there are still stories to learn, and tell." I reached down with a finger and made a path through the gra.s.s for the ant, who stopped his labors, bewildered. I wondered if I would weep. I had wanted to be a saint.

"I know the way there," Blink said. "Or I knew it once."

I looked up. His brown face was creased in the beginnings of smile-wrinkles. He hadn't wanted to tell me what to do; but I had chosen as he would have chosen for me. "I wonder, though, if they'll tell you what you want to know."

"There was a girl," I said, "a Whisper cord girl, who years ago left Belaire, and went to live with them. If I could find her, she'd tell me."

"Would she?"

I didn't answer. I didn't know.

"Well," Blink said, "if you listen now, I'll tell you how to reach them. That's the first thing."

I couldn't think, at the same time, of Little Belaire, of Once a Day, and of the directions Blink would give me, so I held up my hand for a moment, palm toward Blink, as gossips do before they hear a tale, and made myself as much as I could an empty bowl; and Blink told me then how I must go from here to where the List lived; and he told it in such a way that I couldn't forget it: because in a way he was a saint, he was: my saint.

We rose, and linked arms, and walked out into the blinding meadow strewn with new flowers. The twins came to their saint, who patted them and giggled, become again the little old man they knew. We sat and talked, and his eyebrows danced up and down and his tiny hands slapped his knees. The twins supplied news from the warren, what little they knew. He listened, and yawned in the heat; finally he lay down, his feet up, on the slope. "Yes, it goes on there as always... No new thing, and if there were you wouldn't know of it... well. And then, and then, and then. Another spring, and getting hot too... Quick enough it comes and goes..." He was asleep, hands behind his head, breathing quietly in the warming south wind.