The Stone Giant (3 page)

He sat down at a table against the wall and smiled at Leta when she looked up at him. She pulled a pocket watch out of her leather apron and gave it a look. ‘It’s an hour before we open,’ she said.

‘Of course,’ said Escargot, taken aback. Did she think he was after a glass of ale at that hour? This is an unfortunate start, he thought, and realizing as he did so that he
had
been after a glass of ale at that hour and that he hadn’t ought to be intending to ‘start’ anything. He grinned – foolishly, it seemed to him. ‘I was just wondering how you liked the book. I was passing by and saw you through the open door, so I thought I’d come in out of the fog and keep you company.’

‘Which book was that?’

‘Harvest Moon
, by G. Smithers. From the Professor’s. Remember?’

‘I remember having told you I liked it very much, just days ago. Next to the melon bin at Beezle’s market.’ She looked at him strangely, as if beginning to suspect he was either stupid or up to something.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course. I’ve been a bit ... upset, I suppose is the word for it.’ He started to go on, to explain things, but he caught himself and stopped. There was no use boring anyone. ‘I’m about halfway through it. I always have a hard time with Smithers. I can’t tell what’s true and what’s not. A few years ago, before the Professor took over the library, old Kettering had Smithers filed under history. The Professor says that Kettering was an idiot, that Smithers is full of tall tales. But that wasn’t the way Kettering saw it. I figure that half of what anyone says is nonsense, including Professor Wurzle –
especially
Professor Wurzle. And including G. Smithers, for that matter.’

Leta scattered one last handful of shavings under a corner table, hefted the half-empty sack onto her shoulder, and set out toward the back of the tavern. Through the leaded glass of one of the front windows, Escargot could see that the fog was thinning. Pale sunlight shone through it, turning the mist white, as if the windows were glazed with milk glass. The appearance of the sun, for some reason, made him feel almost contented for the first time in two weeks. He pulled his pipe from his coat pocket and pushed tangled tobacco into it, wondering idly if it wouldn’t be a good idea to mix a few shavings of aromatic cedar into the tobacco, just to give it a try. Probably not, he decided. It would likely blaze up like a torch and burn the whole pipe. Leta would be certain he’d gone mad.

She appeared again, rolling up her sleeves. ‘So which half is true and which half is made up?’ she asked, pulling a handful of pint glasses out of a sink full of clear water.

Escargot shrugged, eyeing the glasses. ‘Have you read the Balumnian books?’

‘Only one.
The Stone Giants
. Do you know it?’

‘Yes,’ said Escargot. ‘That’s just the one I want to ask you about. I’ve been having the most amazing dreams. Foolish, of course, like all dreams, but different too. There’s this sort of face, you see, watching the dreams.

And it’s not my face. That’s the peculiar part. Take a look at these.’

Escargot removed his coat. Slung around his left arm and neck hung his pouch on a long leather thong. He yanked his arm through the thong, and without pulling the bag from around his neck, emptied into his hand agate marbles – blood-red and big as cats’ eyes.

‘Marbles?’ asked Leta, raising her eyebrows at Escargot as if she didn’t share his peculiar enthusiasm.

‘I’m not at all sure. There was a bunjo man through a month or so back. You might have seen him around the village hawking whales’ eyes. I bought one of those too. Massive thing in a jar. When I saw it I told myself, this is just the thing you’ve been waiting for. They weren’t cheap, but my wife’s got a pile of the gold stuff. She’s pretty much swimming in it, though it’s precious little of it that she lets me on to.’ Escargot caught himself. Here he was speaking in the present tense. As if he
had
a wife in any real sense. Leta had gone back to washing glasses. ‘Anyway,’ he said, gazing out the window at the dwindling fog, ‘ever since then I’ve had these dreams, like I said. I don’t think the whale’s eye had anything to do with it, because I traded it away to Gilroy Bastable a week later for Smithers’ White Mountains books. All twenty-five of them. The first volume is signed and there’s a page of manuscript laid in.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Escargot proudly, noting that mention of the Smithers books had seemed to warm Leta up a bit.

‘Would you like a pint?’ She asked, raising a glass, it’s close enough to eleven to warrant it, I suppose.’

‘No he would not like a filthy pint!’ shouted a voice from the hack, and Stover, bent and scowling, strode in and slammed his fist onto the first handy tabletop. Stover, who doubled on Sundays as a church parson and tripled on Saturdays as a judge, was taller by a head than anyone else in the village. But he was opposed on moral grounds, in spite of his owning a tavern, to eating and drinking, or at least to eating, and so was astonishingly thin. The weight of his head seemed to have bent him almost double, as if he were always looking along the ground for some lost object – a penny, perhaps. His eyes, to balance things, rolled upward and half disappeared under his eyebrows, which beetled out over his nose like the eaves of a house. He leaned against the table and glowered at Escargot.

‘That
dear
woman ...’ said Stover, wrinkling an acre of forehead and scowling slowly and deliberately.

Escargot thought at first that Stover was referring to Leta, who rolled her eyes, set down the glass she was holding, and walked past Stover toward the rear of the tavern. A door slammed shut. Stover heaved with exertion. What in the world, wondered Escargot, did the nitwit suppose was going on?

‘The great shame of it,’ cried the tavern keeper, raising a finger aloft and twirling it in a tight little circle, ‘is that the law hasn’t a cage to pitch you into.’

Escargot looked over his shoulder, wondering briefly if there wasn’t someone else in the room who had so excited Stover. But there was no one. Escargot raised his eyebrows theatrically and pointed at himself, cocking his head in a questioning way.

‘Laugh if you will!’ shouted the enraged Stover, squinting and pounding again on the table. ‘But let it be known to you, sir, scoundrel that you are, that that dear, poor woman and her precious baby child are a dozen times better off alone than they were two weeks past. It was a charitable thing you did, abandoning them that night. Robbing your own wife blind while she slept. Lying up in a drunken stupor until dawn, then stumbling home, intent, no doubt, on some further mischief. But that sort of charity, sir, will...’

Escargot stood up slowly, interrupting the innkeeper. I’ll have to hit him, he thought, taking a step forward. He was struck suddenly by the notion that there might easily be more to the affairs of the previous weeks than he’d known. Stover trod back, gaping at Escargot in fear and surprise, and groped in his own coat pocket, unearthing a silver flask. He unscrewed the lid, tilted the bottle back, and swallowed three times, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a fishing float jerked by a trout.

‘Medicine,’ Stover gasped, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. He stepped back, fumbling at a chair as if to use it as a weapon. Sweat stood out on his forehead.

A door slammed and Leta reappeared, stopping abruptly at the sight of the scowling Escargot, who had slipped the leather thong from around his neck and was slapping the heavy bag full of marbles into the palm of his hand. ‘Eleven o’clock,’ she said, pulling out her pocket watch and twisting the stem in order to force the issue. Time to open. Put that away,’ she said to Escargot. ‘Don’t turn yourself into more of a fool than you already are.’

‘Listen to the little lady,’ croaked Stover, pulling at the top button on his shirt.

‘Shut up,’ said Leta, giving him a look. She stepped across to the keg and drew a pint of ale, knocking off the head with a wooden ruler and sliding the glass across the bar in Escargot’s direction.

‘I won’t serve his kind here!’ cried Stover, working himself up again.

‘I know,’ said Leta, ‘that’s why
I
did it. But that’s the last pint I draw, old man, so you’ll serve everyone else. You paid me yesterday evening. You don’t owe me a thing for this morning.’

‘You can’t!’ began Stover, but he found himself storming at nothing. Escargot glanced through the window at Leta disappearing through the thin fog, walking briskly up Main Street in the direction of Beezle’s market. ‘You’ll have to pay for that pint,’ said Stover weakly, sliding in behind the bar. He fumbled out his flask one more time and had another go at it. Escargot stared at him, drained the glass, set it on the nearest table, and dropped a coin into the dregs. He turned and walked out without a word – very cool, it seemed to him. Once on the street, though, he set out at a run.

‘Wait!’ he shouted, catching sight of Leta’s red blouse a half block up. She stopped, gazing in through a shop window until he puffed up behind her, ‘Perhaps I can buy you lunch.’ He took off his hat and gave it a nervous twist, grinning at her. Then it struck him that the grin looked foolish, so he wiped it off and looked serious instead.

‘I don’t think that would work, would it?’

‘Wouldn’t it?’

‘Give it a while,’ she said, smiling just a bit. ‘Maybe I’ll see you at Wurzle’s.’

‘Maybe you will,’ said Escargot, watching her fade into the fog for the second time in five minutes, having no idea on earth what to make of her.

Late one afternoon, three and a half weeks after he’d been pitched out by his wife, Escargot caught sight of himself in the big window in Beezle’s store, and realized with a start that he looked like a tramp, that his jacket was torn and his trousers needed soap. His shirt, which he’d owned long before he’d developed the temporary madness that had led to his getting married, had turned thin. The elbows resembled muslin or, worse yet, spiderweb.

He was on his way to Wurzle’s lending library. He’d given up pretending that he was only after a book. He had a stack of G. Smithers – all of the White Mountains books he’d traded out of Gilroy Bastable – hidden away in the Widow’s windmill, and hadn’t half read through them yet. He was going to Wurzle’s to find Leta; that’s what he was doing. So far he’d had no success. Just look at me, he thought to himself, staring at his sad reflection in Beezle’s window. A month earlier if he’d looked like that he wouldn’t have cared. Caring wouldn’t have crossed his, mind. He would have
prided
himself in it, to a degree –laughed at Beezle in his starchy shirt and tie, tiptoeing around mud puddles and dusting off chairs before he sat down. Who in the world did a man like Beezle intend to impress? Grocery shoppers? Old fatheads who complained about spots on the apples and argued about the price of dried beans? A month ago Escargot would have grinned to think about it. He had had no one but his wife to impress, and ... Well, he thought, looking at his ill-shaven face in the store window, perhaps he hadn’t done as well at that as he might have. The door of the market opened and Beezle’s head shoved out, round and grinning and with its pale hair greased up like a fence.

‘Theophile,’ said Beezle, half grinning and half saddened, as if he’d seen his friend looking better, perhaps, or as if he didn’t entirely fancy seeing Escargot at all.

Escargot gritted his teeth. He detested being called by his first name, which no one in the world, apparently, could pronounce. He forced himself to grin at Beezle, though. Nothing would be accomplished by his going about town flying into rages. Heaven knew what rumors had been circulated about his run-in with Stover, especially since Stover was the only one who would have done any rumor circulating. Leta didn’t at all seem to be the sort who would go in for telling tales, even though her version would be closer to the truth.

‘I say, old man,’ Beezle said, screwing his face into a wide grin. ‘This is a delicate sort of subject, I know, but I was watching you there in the window a moment ago, and you seemed ... you seemed ... out of sorts, if you follow me.’ With that Beezle looked Escargot up and down as if contemplating the cut of his coat. Escargot waited, befuddled. ‘What I mean to say, don’t you know, is simply this. Would a spot of work help? Sweeping and dusting? Deliveries? This window, it strikes me now, could use a washup.’ His face brightened, as if he were about to say something really clever. ‘It could well be,’ he finished, eyes widening, ‘that half of what you were looking at is the fault of the window, couldn’t it?’

Escargot began to nod silently, as if in agreement with Beezle’s last comment. But then he shook his head and smiled back. If there was nothing else to be done, at least he could out-smile him. ‘I’m not up to it today, Evelyn,’ he said, deliberately using Beezle’s first name, which was about eight times as foolish as his own. ‘But I’ll keep my eyes open. If I see any of the village lads lounging about, doing nothing, I’ll send them your way. That spot on your tie appears to be strawberry jam, doesn’t it? My wife, bless her heart, used to tell me by the hour about how that sort of thing stains. Soak it in cold water first; that’s what
she’d
tell you. Then smear soap on the stain before you go after it with the washboard.’

Escargot tipped his hat and set out, leaving Beezle to study his tie. He was happy enough with the exchange. Beezle had meant well, to be sure. He was just thickheaded – a blessing, no doubt, in a man who set such lofty goals for himself. At least Professor Wurzle wouldn’t rag him about his fallen state. Wurzle seemed to appreciate the art of doing nothing almost as much as did Escargot. The Professor had turned it into a study. He’d pluck up a lot of leaves when he was out strolling in the forest and pretend that the
purpose
of the stroll was to collect those leaves. Then he’d tack labels on them and put them in a box and mutter now and again about opening a museum of natural history. His lending library was an excuse to sit in a stuffed chair and read and smoke all day.

But when Escargot arrived at the library, the Professor wasn’t, in fact, reading and smoking. He was out with a net after salamanders, said his young assistant. Escargot wondered aloud if the assistant had, perhaps, seen the young lady who was so fond of Smithers books. Not for a week, said the youth, grinning at Escargot as if the two of them shared an unspoken joke. Rumor had it she’d left town. Old Stover, they said, had fired her, and she’d gone back to Seaside. She had been renting a room over the tavern and had left the same night as the altercation. The young man winked familiarly at Escargot, then seemed to take a long look at him, as if suddenly noticing something that he hadn’t seen a moment before. Escargot straightened his shoulders abruptly and gave the youth a sidewise glance.