A Green and Ancient Light (17 page)

The soldiers moved closer, looking stern. Both were young. The one speaking had sharp, angry-looking features. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Playing,” I said. “I went up there.”

“What have you got there? Show it to me.”

Having no choice, I handed over the notebook. Like a fool, I showed them the pencil, too, but they weren't interested in that.

They slung their rifles onto their shoulders, but the quiet one kept a close eye on me while the other opened the notebook.

I'd copied out R ——'s poem, but I hadn't labeled it.

“What is this?” asked the soldier, turning a page and frowning at what he saw.

“The g-garden. I wrote down the words from the statues.”

“Why?” he asked, looking at me.

“I . . . I like the monsters.”

“‘A duke the secret knew'—what's this poem?”

I took a breath. “My grandmother and I wrote it. We like to write things about the woods.”

“Is this your grandmother, M —— T ——?” He was looking at the name and address inside the cover.

I told him yes and explained how I was staying with her. He passed the notebook to the other man.

The second soldier flipped through the pages and looked up. “Is this for school?”

“No, sir,” I said. “School's out for the summer.” It might be out for longer than that, the way things were going in the city.

My stomach squirmed as I thought of the carpet bag. It was full of empty tins and dirty dishes to be taken home and washed. That wasn't bad—I could say we'd had a picnic. It held the kitchen shears. But far worse, I couldn't remember what Grandmother had done with the bottles of medicine. Had she left them in the leaning house, or . . . ?

“Are you out here by yourself?”

I nodded. “My grandmother was here earlier, but she went home first.”

“All right. Now, listen: you can't be up here. It's dangerous. You tell your grandmother that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We're putting you on report,” the soldier said. “You tell your grandmother that, too. Do you understand?”

I said that I did.

The second man looked at the first and held up my notebook. “Are we taking this?”

The first soldier considered. “No. He can keep it.” To me, he added, “Go home now. And I mean it. Don't come up here again.”

I accepted my notebook, skittered past the two men, and ran for the archway. If I could get far enough ahead of them, I hoped to scoop up my things from the terrace before the soldiers had a chance to find them. I kept listening as I went, though, and I just barely heard the first man say, “Let's take a look up there.”

Good. They were going up to the temple. That bought me some
time. I raced past the bear and the sleeping woman, through the arch, and past the Angel of the Bottomless Pit. This time, I had the presence of mind to look around. Seeing no one in the lower glade, I galloped up the steps to the foot of the leaning house.

I skidded to a halt, my eyes widening. My bundle, hatchet, and the carpet bag were gone. I looked under the benches—nothing.

Panic rising again in my chest, I glanced over the rail at the green shadows all around. There must have been more soldiers. I imagined them fanning out, doing a sweep of the grove, and two had found me. The carpet bag was likely on its way to the major right now.

Thinking I'd better warn Mr. Girandole, I was just about to duck into the house when something small and hard tapped me on the head.

An acorn—I saw it roll across the stones at my feet.

Looking up, I saw Mr. Girandole: not in the window, but on the roof. The sight of him brought some relief. “Are you all right?” he whispered.

I nodded.

“Your bag is inside, hidden,” he breathed. “Soldiers in the upper garden.” He waved me away. “You'd better go.”

With a wave, I was off at a run, overwhelmed with thankfulness for Mr. Girandole's acute hearing. When he'd first heard the patrol coming, he'd popped down to the terrace, retrieved what I'd carelessly left there, and locked it all away with R —— in the secret compartment.

My knees felt like water. I'd have to be a lot more careful from now on.

*  *  *  *

I had to sit through the second half of a neighborly visit from Mrs. D ——, and it became clear to me that Mrs. D —— had harbored no intention of leaving until she'd seen me return alive from the woods. She didn't approve of my forays there any more than Mrs. F —— did, but Mrs. D —— also seemed to be a little in awe and kept comparing me to Papa regarding my bravery and my handsome looks. At last, she went on her way, and if Grandmother might never truly forgive her for finding out about the setcreasea and fuchsia through legerdemain, at least she praised the garden so highly that Grandmother later said, “I wonder what enthusiasm she has left for the gardens of Paradise.”

I told Grandmother about the soldiers as we weeded, with milli­pedes and grasshoppers darting away from our fingers.

“You had a close call,” she said. “Thank Heaven for Girandole. No harm was done. And this is the best kind of work to calm you down.”

“We're on report,” I reminded her.

“I think we'll survive that,” she said, pulling up a long root. She looked sidelong at me. “You told them we wrote that poem?”

“Camouflage,” I said sheepishly, and focused on weeding.

Before the post office closed, I trotted there with the letter I'd written to my parents and mailed it. I didn't see any soldiers along the route. At first, I was afraid the building was closed, because the front window was covered by plywood. The postmaster looked tired, but he was glad to see me and inquired after Grandmother.

“Have you been well?” I asked, thinking he actually looked haggard.

“Spry as salt, Boss,” he said, reverting to his old nickname for me. Oddly, I felt somehow as if I'd lost ground, as if we were no longer as close. I couldn't explain it, and we only exchanged a few words.

Still, I remarked to Grandmother about how strangely he'd acted.

“I'm sure this hasn't been a good time for Mr. V ——,” she said, chopping an onion. That was the postmaster's name. “The Army all over the village.”

“Why bad for him?”

She sighed. “He was the mayor before. The other party. He was lucky to keep his job at the post office when things changed—lucky not to have gone to prison. We all stood up for him. Mrs. F ——'s husband in particular, God rest him. I wrote some ­letters myself . . . well, we're all fortunate, I guess, that things are no worse. I expect the major has made the last several days very unpleasant for him.”

I felt sorry for Mr. V —— and disliked the major all the more.

Just before sunset, several trucks rolled down the street. Grand­mother and I were finishing supper at the garden table, and she sent me around the house to see what I could see. I reached the corner just in time to glimpse the Army staff car passing. I supposed Major P —— was inside it. The trucks, I could see, were full of soldiers, and they were heading out of the village; I noticed which way they turned at the big road.

“That many of them leaving. I think they've called off the search,” Grandmother said. “We're left to fend for ourselves against the enemy.”

“Do you really think so? They might just have something to do.” I remembered my father telling us how he'd helped turn a school into a hospital.

“They have lots of things to do,” said Grandmother. “Major P —— can't spare the men here, chasing butterflies.”

“Does that mean we can go back to the woods tomorrow?” I asked.

“I think we'd better,” she said. “You're running out of summer.”

With a pang of sadness, I went indoors to consult a calendar. When I'd arrived here, the spring and summer had seemed an endless time to spend away from home with this formidable old woman I didn't know. I missed my parents terribly and my friends quite a bit; I wouldn't mind seeing my sister—I supposed she'd grown a lot. But the thought of leaving Grandmother brought an ache to my chest.

I had just over two weeks remaining.

*  *  *  *

In the peaceful hours before bed, Grandmother sat in her easy chair beside the radio, listening to the symphony. I bent over my notebook at the table, trying to add in the mirror-script, the reversed versions of each line in R ——'s poem. It wasn't easy, and I needed to keep erasing.

Grandmother had her chin against her chest, and I thought she was asleep. But suddenly, she sprang up and hurried to the bookcase. At her request, I brought the lamp closer.

Running her fingers over the spines of books on the bottom shelf, she pulled out a volume of medium size with a dark blue cover. Then she straightened, seized her well-worn dictionary, and carried both books back to her chair. Unceremoniously, she turned the dial and clicked off the radio just in the middle of a crescendo.

“What is it?” I asked in mounting excitement.

“Give me a minute.” As she began flipping through the blue book, she said, “Read me that poem aloud.”

I did so—and then a second time, when she asked me to. With
the first book open in her lap, she turned pages in the dictionary.

I rushed to the arm of her chair.

“Aldebaran,” she announced, and stared at me as if thinking.

I thought I'd heard that word before, but I had no idea what it meant. It sounded like a name from
Arabian Nights.

“It's a star,” she said. “A giant red star.”

I drew a breath. “He said that! R —— kept saying ‘the red star' over and over!”

“It's from an Arabic name,
Al Dabaran
.” She showed me the dictionary. “It means ‘The Follower.' Aldebaran is in the constellation Taurus—the Bull!”

Now she laid the other book on top, and I saw the starry outline of a bull, with lines drawn to assist the viewer's imagination. Grandmother pointed at the bull's red eye. “There it is,” she said. “People say the red star is the eye of the bull. It ‘follows' these other stars in the constellation as they all move across the sky. The others are the Pleiades—also known as the Seven Sisters.”

I looked back to my notebook.

Find twice the number Taurus follows with his eye

Sisters dancing in the water and the sky

I gazed at Grandmother in amazed admiration. She had to be right. It fit perfectly.

Now she pushed past me, set the books on the table, and went back to hunting in the bookcase.

“But ‘dancing in the water and the sky'?” I asked. “What—?”

“The whole poem is a mirror! It's all about mirrors. That's why every line is written forward, then backward. The Pleiades are in
the heavens—the sky—but their reflections ‘dance' on the water below—the sea or a pool.”

Dropping a third book on the table, she peered over my shoulder at the poem. “Five, six, seven!” she said.
“Aha!”

“What are you doing?”

“Counting the lines. Seven lines in the poem. Seven Pleiades. Seven Sisters.” The new, very thick tome she'd brought out was a dictionary of classical mythology. I glimpsed entries for “Nestor” and “Polyphemus” as she riffled the pages forward and backward, homing in on “Pleiades.”

We read about them, daughters of Atlas and Pleione, set in the sky as stars. “Atlas held up the sky in his hands,” Grandmother said. “Pleione was the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, who was the queen of the sea and mother of three thousand Oceanids—so the girls in one sense are children of sky and water. It's the mirroring again. Quite a poem, that one!”

I remembered how our mermaid's two sides and two tails were mirrors of each other.

Grandmother gnawed her lip. “Lots of mirrors—lots of division into two. There's an upper garden and a lower—two halves. There are four smaller arches, two on the left and two on the right. Those angels inside the screaming mouth point at each other, one with the left hand and one with the right, like when you point at yourself in a mirror. There are two equal but opposite compartments in the leaning house.”

I paced around the room, unable to sit still, yearning to run to the sacred woods by lamplight and search for more clues. I tried to remember numbers and things I'd counted in the garden. Of course, there were the numbers on the risers of the stairway in the leaning house. I'd have to copy them into my notebook tomorrow.

Grandmother heated milk for me at bedtime, seeing that I was far too keyed up to sleep. I drank it, cleaned my teeth, and crawled into bed—but I lay awake for what seemed hours. It was hot in my room, another part of summer that I loved—hot nights, when the bedclothes clung until you kicked them off, and you lay there sizzling in the blackness like bacon in a skillet. My mother said I was “moon-touched” to relish heat the way I did, but that's simply the way I've always been. But that night, with my head too full of ideas, the damp stickiness of my pajamas began to bother even me.

The poem rolled endlessly through my mind, chased by the inscriptions and the statues themselves—the women with their pitchers, winking their sly stone eyes at me . . . the sleeping woman, who seemed to dream fitfully, nearing a moment of wakefulness when she would sit up on the stone slab, frightening the birds . . . the mermaid, raising her face to breathe the salt breeze off the sea in which she could never swim. And did the tortoise slowly crawl in the moonlight, once around the entire garden and back into place by the first pink glimmer of dawn? And did the dragon gnash its teeth, and did the dogs snap and lunge? Did the sea serpent swim through the bushes? Did the terrible angel shake his keys and chain? And under the light of Aldebaran and the Pleiades, did the vanished statue return, perhaps as a ghost, and stand again on her pedestal? By daylight, only those beautiful feet in sandals remained. The garden's secret might be lost forever with her, into whatever far place she'd been carried by thieves.

Listening to the night chorus in our own back garden, I tried to sleep, sizzling in my fry-pan of a bed. At some point, I did.

*  *  *  *

To my intense frustration, Grandmother had changed her mind about the urgency of returning at once to the woods; instead, she insisted that we go shopping after breakfast. “We can't just disappear every day,” she said. “Not unless you want search parties up there looking for us. Besides, we need supplies, and we should catch up on the news.”

There was no news to speak of in the village, and the resounding lack thereof was music to our ears. The soldiers had indeed gone back to the barracks. Depending on which shop we entered and who was speaking and listening, Major P ——'s men had either been a rude, noisy, disrespectful lot, or they had been bright and cheerful gentlemen, and if they were representative of the young generation, there was hope for our country's future. All in all, life was returning to its drowsy summer pace. There was still talk of the enemy fugitive, but he had to share time now with digressions into fishing and the weather and the ripening grapes.

We saw Mr. L ——, a retired sea captain, standing on the flat roof of the police office and looking through binoculars. But he was looking up toward the orchards and the mountains, not out to sea. The baker told us that Mr. L —— had taken it upon himself to keep watch for the fugitive since we couldn't depend on the Army. He spent mornings up on the cliffs and afternoons on the roofs of the dockhouse or the police station.

Grandmother had some letters of her own to mail—one was to my papa, and she'd let me write a greeting in a margin—so we stopped in at the post office. To my relief, Mr. V —— looked much better, and he called me by name again. He asked Grandmother all about her garden and said he'd been hearing wonderful things from those who'd seen it. Grandmother said he ought to come by for tea.

The postmaster thanked her. “But I've also heard,” he added, “that it's difficult to catch you at home these days.”

“Have you heard that?” Grandmother exchanged a longish glance with him. “Well, we're making the most of summer. I'll have plenty of time to warm my old bones by the stove when the young one's gone.”

Mr. V —— with his long, droopy face, gave me a mournful look. “I'll go out of business!”

“No,” I told him. “I'll write Grandmother a lot.”

“I'm counting on you,” he said.

When Grandmother had received her change and put it away, she gazed meaningfully at the boarded-up window. “You should have let the major's men replace that glass for you.”

The postmaster laughed, several explosive barks.

Grandmother smiled back, and we left. I didn't understand what was funny or why no mention was made of how the window had gotten broken. But I'd reached the age at which I realized grown-ups didn't talk about everything they might, and I wanted to be grown up.

Because of the war, some things such as coffee, salt, sugar, and flour were rationed, and Grandmother had to surrender little gray tickets for them. But produce from local gardens and orchards was plentiful, as were eggs and chicken and anything from the sea.

Grandmother clearly wanted to make our presence felt in as many places as possible. Instead of buying most items at B ——'s Grocery as we might have done, we shopped all up and down the street, purchasing a fish here, a bag of beans there. It was quite infuriating for me, with my theories and questions about the sacred grove burning holes in my mind. I couldn't help thinking
Grandmother was being a bit obstinate in chatting to the very last word with Mrs. Z —— and Mrs. K —— and Mr. B ——. Precious hours slipped by. It was past mid-morning when we made our last stop—at the grinder's dim little shed, where Grandmother got her kitchen knives and her scissors sharpened. We had stopped in at her house to get them and the brush knife. The shed smelled of oil, and a spider had built a web in one corner of the cloudy window.

“Rain coming,” said the grinder, repeating a prediction we'd heard at least five times since leaving the house. “Won't have to water that garden for a while, Mrs. T ——.” He looked like a huge insect in his goggles, hunched in the half-dark over the spinning white wheel. It had a pedal like Mama's sewing machine, and I admired how the bright sparks flew from the knives' blades.

Grandmother inquired after the grinder's son, who was also away in the war.

He shook his bald head wearily and tested the cleaver's edge. “He don't write; he don't come home. He's not like your boy.”

“Yours is a good boy too,” Grandmother said. “I remember him on that bicycle. Always polite, and a hard worker.”

“Long time ago,” said the grinder. He put Grandmother's money into a cash register with a missing handle and a broken glass pane, its drawer always open.

We came out into the sunlight and the sound of the flapping flag on the post office, and we stopped in our tracks. With a sinking in my stomach, I held my breath and stared.

Major P ——'s staff car cruised toward us down the main street, the sun on its windshield making a blinding glare. Behind it, I counted three Army trucks with canvas sides—troop carriers.

“Why are they back?” I asked.

Grandmother said nothing but slowly lowered her shopping basket to the ground and straightened again, watching with a grim face.

Bicycles braked; people hurried out of the trucks' way; shoppers poured from stores to line the sidewalks. I saw the barber gazing out of his window, and beside him a man with a lathered face, half-shaved. Three policemen emerged from the police office as the staff car stopped there against the curb. On the roof above them, Mr. L —— put down his binoculars and stared.

The driver opened the car's back door and Major P —— climbed out and gazed around with an enormously self-important air. Taking a deep breath of the morning breeze, he placed his hat over his shiny hair, adjusted its angle, and turned to the policemen, who saluted him.

I heard them say “Good morning, sir,” and then I was sure the major said, “Now we'll get somewhere, just when I'd called it off. They took their time, but my request went through after all.”

I felt Grandmother's hand on my shoulder. Her gaze was fixed on the troop carriers.

From the two rear trucks, men and dogs jumped to the ground. Barking, whining, the dogs strained at their leashes and stuck their noses in all directions, taking in the thousand scents of our village's main street.

I looked at Grandmother in horror. I knew that hunters used dogs, that guards used them to track down escaped prisoners. When a man walked or ran across the earth, he left an invisible trail that the nose of a dog could follow days afterward, a trail as clear to it as the beam of a lighthouse. The scent of R —— would lead from
the parachute straight to the grove of monsters and up the stairs of the leaning house. Mr. Girandole's scent would be everywhere, too—as would ours, in an often-traveled line between the cottage and the woods.

Major P —— called out, “Good morning, Mrs. T ——!” Across the street, he waved a hand and tipped his hat to Grandmother.

Forcing a smile, she waved back and gave him a nod.

“What do we do?” I whispered.

For a long time she said nothing but only watched the men lining up and an officer giving them orders. To our further dismay, the major finished his words with the policemen and sauntered in our direction. I could see it in his face: he had time to be at leisure while his men went to work. I envisioned another toast coming, another excruciating chat with this man my grandfather would not have liked. And all the while, the soldiers and dogs would be climbing the mountain. The world was spinning. My heart pounded in my ears.

Grandmother whispered, “You'll have to do this. It's up to you now. Trust Girandole and help him however you can.”

It was the last thing she had a chance to say before the major was within earshot. As her words sank in, I heard her exchanging pleasantries with him. I thought I might be sick on the major's gleaming boots.