A Green and Ancient Light (23 page)

And speaking of the monsters in the grove: there's a surprise I've been saving for you, G ——, an interesting mystery of sorts. The monsters' garden seems to be a big puzzle, which I was always trying to solve when I was a boy. It's full of words and images that make you think. There's something I remembered a few years ago that I'd completely forgotten for a long time. I'd hoped we might visit Mama together and have another crack at the riddle, and we may still be able to do that, but I wanted to give you a head start, since you're there now.

When I was about your age, I found something in the grove that I kept secret—I didn't even tell you, Mama, because I felt in a way that I was stealing, and I was afraid you might tell me not to fool around with property that wasn't mine. You see, I rather thought that the garden and all the monsters were mine, because no one else seemed to want anything to do with them. They were all alone in the woods, covered with vines and overgrown by bushes.

Reading those lines, I felt sorry again for my papa: he'd had neither Grandmother nor Mr. Girandole with him in the garden, not ever. How different—how lonely—it would be to have no one to share it with.

In the grove, there's one statue that's scarier than all the others—a terrible angel with a ring of keys and a chain. The keys are held against the angel's side, touching his robes. Why I tried this I'll never know, but I discovered that when I fiddled with those keys, one of them slid sideways. The statue's stone key was a kind of lid, and underneath it, in the robes, was a key-shaped depression. And in that depression was a
REAL KEY
made of brass.

I looked high and low in the garden for years after that, all over the walls, the arches, the statues and their bases, but I never did find a keyhole that the key might fit. Nor do I have any idea what a locked door in such a place might conceal, but I was always intrigued by what the words on that frightening angel's base said:
The path beyond the dusk.

As your father, I'm not sure if I should be telling you this or not. But I know Mama is with you, and she won't let you do anything too dangerous.

At this point, Grandmother laughed aloud, and pretty soon I joined her, until we were both wiping our eyes with our sleeves. When I got control of myself, I continued:

In fact, the key is still there at the cottage. In the sitting room, you know the funny little corner beside the built-in bookcase? Level with the bookcase's top, there's a strip of trim cut to fit that odd, short wall in the corner. If you slide that strip upward, you'll
find a space behind it, inside the wall. (I guess I was always pushing and pulling on things to see if they opened.) In there, you should find the key hanging on a nail.

I figured this was a good time to tell you both about it. Think of it as my summer present to you. If you're of a mind to try solving a puzzle, perhaps you'll do better than I did. Just be careful. And please don't go anywhere that you can't come back from!

Well, duty is calling me to stop writing now. I'll write again as soon as I get the chance.

I love you both very much. Mama, I'm wearing the socks you sent me. They're holding up well, and a good thing—we're on our feet a lot. Thank you!

I remain your adoring son and father,

A ——

Intrigued as we both were by the last part of the letter, neither of us sprang up at once to run to the bookcase. We wanted to read and re-read the letter's first half, with its talk of trees and sunlight and how we were all together in the same wood, and how he thought of us day and night.

“He writes good letters,” I said at last.

“He always has,” Grandmother answered.

Grandmother had me hold the lamp, and she handled the exploration; it was her house, after all. Sure enough, the narrow board in the bookcase corner popped out of place with a bit of tugging. It slid upward as if in a track and then came loose. Behind it was a cobwebby gap between joists, a vertical shaft formed by the rear
wall of laths, the upright braces, and the paneling of the sitting room. And straight before our eyes was an ancient-looking key, suspended on a nail by its ornate head. Grandmother let me get a close look before she touched it. Then she reached in and carefully lifted it off. We both knew that if she dropped it, it would fall behind the wall.

I breathed again when the key was safely out in the room. Grand­mother carried it over to the table, and I brought the lamp close. “By all the saints in glory,” she murmured. “I never dreamed this was hanging back there all these years. That little rascal! What if we'd remodeled the room, as your grandfather talked of doing?”

At her instructions, I fetched the damp cleaning-rag from the kitchen, and Grandmother found her kit for polishing the silverware. She soon had the key shining like new. It was half again as long as my hand with my fingers extended. There were no markings or writing on the key—just a broad, ornamental head, a strong, heavy shank, and elaborate flanges for a lock. I laid it on a page of my notebook and drew lines to indicate its dimensions, making special note of how big a matching keyhole would need to be. (I saw at once it was far too big to fit into any of the holes in the leaning house—I was glad we wouldn't have to try those one by one.) I'd decided to leave the key here at the cottage until I found a use for it. On the page, I wrote “Papa's Summer Present.” I didn't write anything about a key, just in case my notebook was ever confiscated.

“I'll write a letter to him tomorrow,” Grandmother said sleepily. “You can add a page or two before we mail it. For now, you'd better try to sleep and leave before sunrise again. I'll wake you up.”

So, that's what we did. I put the key into the drawer of my night
table, among the seashells from Wool Island, looked for a long time at our photo, at my parents' happy faces, and lay in the dark, listening to the insects and the trees rustling. I felt deliciously tired. My father had given me two other presents, I thought, both better than the key itself: one was sending me here to Grandmother's house for the summer, and the other was the message that we were together in investigating the garden's mystery. At last, Papa had us to share the garden with. I felt as close to him now as I ever had, though I was here and he was somewhere in a tent or a barracks far away.

*  *  *  *

As she'd promised, Grandmother gently shook me awake in the dark hour before dawn. I covered my eyes at first, not wanting to leave the pleasant dream I'd been having, though already I'd forgotten what it had been about. I thought that if I stayed in bed, I might slide back down into the dream. But I remembered R —— and Mr. Girandole and my eagerness to return to the grove before I ran out of days.

I stepped onto the cool, clean floorboards, checked on the key—to make sure that it hadn't been part of my dream—and stumbled off to the bathroom.

“I don't expect you feel like breakfast yet,” Grandmother said. (The fact that she still wore her nightgown told me she planned to go back to bed when she'd sent me off.) “But there's plenty in this bag for you to eat, too.” She'd loaded a bag with rolls, cheese, crackers, plums, tangerines, and a bottle each of milk and water. “Drink the milk early,” she advised. “It'll be hot today.”

Going out the back door to check the weather, I could see the
last pale stars in a sky of deep blue. A soft wind riffled the hedge. The scent of the tomato vines tickled the back of my throat.

I held my notebook, wondering if I wanted to risk taking it along, tucked beneath the fake one. Yes—there was nothing in my notebook that couldn't be replaced. Grandmother and I knew the poem by heart, and everything else was written in stone, as it had been for close to four hundred years.

As I picked up the bag, Grandmother gave me an appraising look, and I guessed she was considering something with care. “I don't think R —— is dangerous,” she said finally. “But he's ­getting his strength back. Remember that, for one thing, he is an enemy soldier, and for another thing, he's a man we know nothing about. The less he knows about us, the better. Don't feel you have to entertain him. Be wary around him, and if he does or says anything you don't like, you just run away. He can't run after you yet.”

I nodded soberly.

“Be back in time for supper.”

*  *  *  *

Again, I had the joy of watching daylight arrive, tremulous and misty, in the sacred woods. Again, I trekked silently all around the garden to check for strangers or anything amiss. The foul scent was fading from the glade itself, but it was still almost palpable on the stairs. I hoped we hadn't ruined the leaning house forever. Long before I entered it, I knew Mr. Girandole wasn't back yet. He would have heard me coming and met me somewhere outdoors.

R —— was dozing under a blanket, but he opened his eyes at my appearance and struggled to sit up. It occurred to me that
we'd forgotten to move the padding from his old pallet up to the ­chamber floor where he now lay.

“Oof! Ah!” he complained, contorting his face as he slowly propped himself up against the wall beneath the window. “Hard bed. Bad smell hard bed.”

“Good morning,” I said, unpacking the food. Grandmother had sent along two old, chipped cups from the back of the cupboard, and I poured us each some of the milk. I was hungry now, after my hike. Still, the reeking chamber made swallowing anything unpleasant.

R —— thanked me and ate whatever I pushed his way. He seemed to be faring all right. At least, he hadn't been caught by anyone or eaten by wolves.

“Did the fairies sing last night?” I asked him, suddenly thinking that he'd done something remarkable, something wild and perilous: he'd spent a night in the garden outside the shelter of the compartment. What might have transpired in the moonlight just below his window?

He nodded. “Sing like angels. I want go fairy country. Later, I strong again, I go with them. Yeah? Fairy country.”

His expression held such longing that I felt a pang in my chest. “If you go to their country,” I said, “I don't think you can ever come back.” At least, I thought it worked that way in the old stories.

“No want come back,” he said. “No worry for me. Good there!”

I picked up a cracker but felt my stomach lurch. To eat in this malodorous place . . .

Seeing my plight, R —— showed me a trick: he tore two little pieces from a sheet of waxed paper that wrapped the crackers in the tin. Having wadded these into balls, he stuck them into his nostrils.

I thought it might be worth a try. It was uncomfortable to have
wads of paper in my nose, but it made eating possible. The plugs I'd rolled jutted from my nostrils like tusks. R —— laughed at me, said “Elephant,” and trumpeted, curling his arm in the air like a trunk. I couldn't help laughing and trying to imitate the sound myself.

We ate in silence for a minute or two.

When he was slowing down, R —— studied me. “She . . . grandma?”

“Yes,” I said, pulling the papers from my nose. “She's my grandma. My grandmother.”

“Good. Good lady. Kind.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

“Mother? Father?”

I hesitated, remembering that I wasn't supposed to tell him much. But I didn't see any harm in the question, so I explained as clearly as I could that my father was away fighting the war, and my mother was working hard and taking care of my baby sister.

R —— declared that this, too, was “good.”

He said, “Maybe you father shoot me. Shoot plane.” He made an explosion gesture with his fingers and an accompanying sound, then grinned.

“No.” I smiled back, guardedly. “He's not a pilot.”

“Oh. Good. You, me, we friend, then. Yeah?”

I only smiled and left the food where he could reach it. Then I noticed that I'd better bring him a fresh bucket of water and empty his toilet again.

Pointing at me, R —— pretended to swing something—some imaginary tool, perhaps?—and smacked his fist into his other palm and pretended to catch something. It was a question. I had no idea what he meant—some sort of work?

“I don't have a job,” I said. “I'm a kid.”

“No, no! Baseball!”

So, that was it. I'd heard of it and seen pictures—a game played in other countries, involving funny hats and baggy pants.

R —— waved rapidly at me, as if telling me to back up. I looked around in confusion. Then he curled a hand in such a way that I realized he was supposed to be holding up a ball. He tossed the “ball” up, made a show of swinging with his invisible club, and made a cracking impact sound.

“Go! Go! Go!” he cried, waving me backward. Next, he said “Catch! Catch!” so fervently that at last I put up a hand half-­heartedly, feeling like an idiot.

“Ff-tumpf!”
R —— cupped hands over his mouth and made a catching sound. “Here! Here!” He held up his hands again. “Home! Home!”

Smiling awkwardly, I made a limp throwing motion.

“Out!” he finished in triumph, pulling off his “hat,” throwing it into the air, and giving me a thumbs-up.

I wondered which of us had “won.” It seemed a bizarre game, but I couldn't help chuckling at him as I picked up the bucket and the pan and carried them carefully down the stairs.

When I returned, I established from him that he hadn't seen Mr. Girandole recently, and R —— looked worried about him, too. As I was getting out my notebook and pencil, he had another question for me: he said “grandma” again and made a cigarette-smoking gesture with two fingers.

“No,” I said. “She doesn't smoke.” He wanted cigarettes.

“Beer?” he asked. “Wine? Whiskey?” Those words he knew just fine in our language.

“I don't know,” I said. “I'll ask her.”

He seemed to understand—or else he took it as a promise that I'd bring him some—and again he gave me a happy thumbs-up.