Little, Big (21 page)

"How long?"

Before Violet could answer this, if she could, or would, the door of the library, which they could see through the fat banisters, opened a crack, and a wan face looked out, and withdrew.

"Who's that?" Violet asked.

"Amy Meadows," Nora said, and blushed.

"What's she doing in the library?"

"She came looking for August. She
says
—" Nora now clasped her hands and shut her eyes "—she says she's going to have August's baby. And she wondered where he was."

The Seed. She thought of Mrs. Flowers:
Is it the Tale?
Hopeful, astonished, glad. She nearly laughed, giddily. "Well, so do I, she said. So do I. She leaned out between the banisters and said, "Come out, dear. Don't be afraid."

The door opened, just enough to let Amy pass, and though she shut it behind her softly, it boomed resoundingly as it latched. "Oh," she said, not having at first recognized the woman on the stair, "Mrs. Drinkwater."

"Come up," Violet said. She patted her lap, as she might to attract a kitten. Amy mounted the stairs to where they sat halfway to the landing. Her dress was homemade, and her stockings were thick, and she was even prettier than Violet remembered. "Now. What is it?"

Amy sat on the stair below them, a miserable huddle, with a big loose bag in her lap, like a runaway's. "August's not here," she said.

"No. We. . . don't know where he is, exactly. Amy, now everything's going to be all right. You're not to worry."

"It's not," Amy said softly. "It's not going to ever be all right again." She looked up at Violet. "Did he run off?"

"I think he did." She put her arm around Amy. "But he'll come back, possibly, probably . . ." She brushed Amy's hair aside which had fallen lankly and sadly over her cheek. "You must go home now for a while, you see, and not worry, and everything will turn out for the best, you'll see."

At that Amy's shoulders began to heave, softly and slowly. "Can't," she said, in a small high weeping voice. "Daddy's put me out. He's sent me away." Slowly, as though unable not to, she turned and put her sobbing head in Violet's lap. "I didn't come to bother him. I didn't. I don't care, he was wonderful and good, he was, I'd do it all again and I wouldn't bother him, only I got no place to go at all. No place to go."

"Well, well," Violet said, "well, well." She exchanged a glance with Nora, whose eyes had filled too. "Of course you have a place. Of course you do. You'll stay here, that's all. I'm sure your father will change his mind, the silly old fool, you can stay here as long as you need to. Now don't cry any more, Amy, don't. Here." She took a lace-edged hanky from her sleeve, and made the girl look up and use it, looking levelly into her eyes to stiffen her. "Now. That's better. As long as you like. Will that be all right?"

"Yes." Still a squeak was all she could manage, but her shoulders had stopped heaving. She smiled a little, ashamed. Nora and Violet smiled for her. "Oh," she said, sniffing, "I almost forgot." She tried with trembling fingers to undo her bundle, dabbed her face again and gave Violet back her sodden hanky, not much help for storms like Amy's, and managed to work open the bundle. "A man gave me something to give you. On my way here." She rooted among her belongings. "He seemed real mad. He said to say, 'If you people can't keep your bargains, there's no use dealing with you at all.' She drew out and placed in Violet's hands a box that bore on its cover a picture of Queen Victoria and the Crystal Palace, done in different woods.

"Maybe he was joking," Amy said. "A funny, birdy man. He winked at me. Is it yours?"

Violet held the box, whose weight told her that the cards, or something like them, were within.

"I don't know," she said. "I really don't know."

There were footsteps climbing the stairs of the porch just then, and the three of them fell silent. The footsteps crossed the porch, with a squishy squeak as though sodden. Violet took Amy's hand, and Nora Violet's. The screen-door spring sang, and there was a figure against the cloudy oval glass of the door.

Auberon opened the door. He wore waders, and an old hat of John's stuck full of flies. He was whistling as he came into the hall, about packing up your troubles in an old kit bag, but stopped when he saw the three women huddled on the stair, inexplicably, halfway to the landing.

"Well!" he said. "What's up? Any word from August?" They didn't answer, and he held up to show them four fat speckled trout neatly strung. "Supper!" he said, and for a moment they were all motionless, a tableau, he with the fish, they with their thoughts, the rest only watching and waiting.

The cards had altered in their time elsewhere, Violet found, though just how she couldn't at first define. What meaning they had once had seemed to have clouded over, to have become powdered or dusty with obscurity; the patent, even funny quadrilles of meaning the figures had once joined hands in whenever she laid them out, the Oppositions and Influences and so on—they would have none of it any more. It was only after she and Nora had investigated them for a long time that she discovered that they had not lost power but gained it: they could no longer do what they had done, but they could, if interpreted correctly, predict with great accuracy the small events of Drinkwater daily life: gifts, and colds, and sprains; the itineraries of absent loved ones; whether it would rain on a picnic—that sort of thing. Only now and again did the deck throw up anything more startling. But it was a great help. They
would
grant us that, Violet thought; that gift in exchange. . . In fact she supposed (much later on) that to bestow this diurnal exactness of her deck was why they had taken it from her in the first place, unless they just couldn't help bestowing it. There was no catching up with them, no, not ever.

August's offspring would in the course of time be settled around the five towns, some with their mothers and grandmothers, some with others, changing names and families as they moved, as in a game of musical chairs: when the music stopped, in fact, two of the children (by a process so charged with emotion, and so complex in its jointure of shame, regret, love, indifference and kindliness that the participants would never be able to agree later on how it had happened) had changed places in two different dishonored households.

When Smoky Barnable came to Edgewood, August's descendants, disguised under several names, had come to the dozens. There were Flowers, and Stones, and Weeds; Charles Wayne was a grandson. One though, left out in the game, had found no seat: that was Amy's. She stayed at Edgewood, while in what she called her tummy there grew a boy, recapitulating in his ontogeny the many beasts, tadpole, fish, salamander, mouse, whose lives he would later describe in endless detail. They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother.

Hours and days and months and years

go by; the past returns no more,

and what is to be we cannot know; but

whatever the time gives us in which

to live, we should therefore be content.

—Cicero

Jolly, round, red Mr. Sun lifted his cloudy head over the purple mountains and cast long, long rays down into the Green Meadow." Robin Bird read it out in a proud, piping voice; he knew this book almost by heart. "Not far from the Stone Fence that separates the Green Meadow from the Old Pasture, a family of Meadow Mice awoke in their tiny house in the grass, Mother, Father, and six pink, blind babies.

"The head of the household rolled over, opened his eyes, twitched his whiskers, and went out to the doorstep to wash his face in the dew caught in a fallen leaf. As he stood there looking out at the Green Meadow and the morning, Old Mother West-wind hurried by, tickling his nose and bringing him news of the Wild Wood, the Laughing Brook, the Old Pasture and the Great World all around him, confused and clamorous news, better than any
Times
at breakfast.

"The news was the same as it had been for many days now: the world is changing! Soon things will be very different than you smell them today! Prepare yourself, Meadow Mouse!

"The Meadow Mouse, when he had learned as much as he could from the coy Little Breezes that travel in Mother West-wind's company, scampered along one of his many paths through the long grass to the Stone Fence, where he knew of a place he could sit and see hut not be seen. When he had come to this secret place, he settled back, thrust a grass-spear between his teeth, and chewed thoughtfully.

"What was the great change in the world that Mother West-wind and all her Little Breezes talked of these days? What did it mean, and how was he to prepare himself?

"To the Meadow Mouse, the Green Meadow could not have been a better place to live than it was just then. All the grasses of the meadow were pouring forth their seed for him to eat. Many plants that he had thought were nasty had suddenly unfolded dry pods of sweet nuts for him to gnaw on with his strong teeth. The Meadow Mouse was happy and well-fed.

"And now was all that to change? He wondered and puzzled and thought, but he could make no sense of it.

"You see, children, the Meadow Mouse had been bom in the Springtime. He had grown up in the Summer when Mr. Sun smiles his broadest and takes his time to cross the blue, blue sky. All in the space of that single Summer, he had grown to his full size (which wasn't very great), and had married, and had babies born to him; soon they too would be grown.

"Now can
you
guess what the great change was, that the Meadow Mouse couldn't possibly know about?"

All the younger children called out and waved their hands, because unlike the older children they thought they were actually supposed to guess.

"Okay," Smoky said, "everybody knows. Thank you, Robin. Now let's see. Can you read for a while, Billy?" Billy Bush stood up, less confident than Robin, and took the battered book from him.

"Well," he read, "the Meadow Mouse decided he had better ask someone older and wiser than himself. The wisest creature he knew was the Black Crow, who came to the Green Meadow sometimes in search of grain or grubs, and always had a remark to make to anyone who would listen. The Meadow Mouse always listened to what the Black Crow had to say, though he stayed well away from the Black Crow's glittering eye and long, sharp beak. The Crow family was not known for eating mice, but on the other hand they were known to eat almost anything that came to hand, or to beak you might say.

"The Meadow Mouse had not been sitting and thinking for very long when out of the blue sky came a heavy flapping of wings and a raucous call, and the Black Crow himself landed in the Green Meadow not far from where the Meadow Mouse sat!

"'Good Morning, Mr. Crow,' the Meadow Mouse called out, feeling quite safe in his snuggery in the wall.

"'Is it a good morning?' said the Black Crow. 'Not many more days you'll be saying that.'

"'Now that's just what I wanted to ask you about,' the Meadow Mouse said. 'It seems that a great change is coming over the world. Do you feel it? Do you know what it is?'

"'Ah, foolish Youth!' said the Black Crow. 'There is indeed a change coming. It is called Winter, and you'd better prepare for it.'

"'What will it be like? How shall I prepare for it?'

"With a glint in his eye, as though he enjoyed the Meadow Mouse's discomfort, the Black Crow told him about Winter: how cruel Brother North-wind would come sweeping over the Green Meadow and the Old Pasture, turning the leaves gold and brown and blowing them from the trees; how the grasses would die and the animals that lived on them grow thin with hunger. He told how the cold rains would fall and flood the houses of small creatures like the Meadow Mouse. He described the snow, which sounded rather wonderful to the Meadow Mouse; but then he learned of the terrible cold that would bite him to the bone, and how the small birds would grow weak with cold and tumble frozen from their perches, and the fish would stop swimming and the Laughing Brook laugh no more because its mouth was stopped with ice.

"'But it's the End of the World,' cried the Meadow Mouse in despair.

"'So it would seem,' said the Black Crow gaily. "For some folks. Not for
me
. I'll get by. But you had better prepare yourself, Meadow Mouse, if you expect to stay among the living!'

"And with that the Black Crow flapped his heavy wings and took to the air, leaving the Meadow Mouse more puzzled and much more afraid than he had been before.

"But as he sat there chewing his grass-blade in the warmth of the kindly Sun, he saw how he might learn to survive the awful cold that Brother North-wind was bringing to the world."

"Okay, Billy. You know," Smoky said, "you don't have to say 'thee' every time you say 'the,' t-h-e. Just say 'the,' like you do when you're talking."

Billy Bush looked at him as though for the first time understanding that the word on paper and the word he said all day were the same. "The," he said.

"Right. Now who's next?"

"What he thought he would do," Terry Ocean read (too old really for this, Smoky thought), "was to go around the Great World as far as he could go and ask every creature how he intended to prepare himself for the coming Winter. He was so pleased with this plan that he filled himself full of the seeds and nuts that were so sadly plentiful all around, said goodbye to his wife and children, and set off that very noon.

"The first creature he came to was a fuzzy caterpillar on a twig. Though caterpillars are not known for being clever, the Meadow Mouse put the question to him anyway: What would he do to prepare himself for the Winter that's coming?

"'I don't know about Winter, whatever that may be,' the caterpillar said in his tiny voice. 'A change is certainly coming over me, though. I intend to wrap myself up in this lovely white silken thread I seem to have just learned how to spin, don't ask me how; and when I'm all wrapped up and stuck well on to this comfortable twig, I'll spend a long time there. Maybe forever.
I
don't know.'