A Green and Ancient Light (34 page)

When we'd cried all we could for the time being, we carried the cups of milk into the sitting room. Grandmother settled me on the couch with my head on a pillow, and she stroked my hair. In a soft, husky voice, she sang an old song about a wanderer on a long journey. The wanderer rested on a mossy stone and longed for a maiden back home, with skin pale as snow and hair dark as the raven's wings.

I knew without asking that it was a song she'd sung to my father when he'd been small. At some point, while the crickets sang to us both, I fell asleep.

*  *  *  *

On Thursday morning the visits began again, and I could take no more of it. I asked Grandmother if I could go to the monsters' grove. She hugged me and said yes.

Everything seemed different in the sacred woods—the bird song,
the light, the sighing of the leaves. A moment that I'd known would pass had passed. I was seeing the garden's statues now with older eyes. The leaning house stood empty and sad.

I climbed the precarious stairs and, armload by armload, ­carried outside all the debris of R ——'s stay: the branches, leaves, and blankets; some dishes and cookware of Mr. Girandole's; the pan and the bucket; and the rags we'd used to wash the mirror. Before I left for the final time, I made certain the sliding floor was locked against the back wall, giving easy access to the ladder. Then I ascended to the roof for a last look around. “Good-bye,” I whispered to the garden.

I scattered the leaves and branches and tied everything else up in a blanket. Before I took it home, I dropped it on the terrace and went to the upper garden, where the door into Faery had been.

As I drew near, it occurred to me that my father had died before we opened the door. He'd been there, somewhere on the portal's other side . . . maybe no more than a few steps away. Mr. Girandole had seen him—remembering the faun's reactions, I was sure of it.

Seeing the great, limbless tree, I drew a sharp breath. It had withered as with the passage of a hundred years or more since the other night. Caverns of rot yawned in the trunk. Any day now, it would crash down into the thicket or across the glade. I went no closer.

I headed west through the upper clearing. As I passed the stairway leading to the temple, I heard a noise. I froze and turned to my right. I didn't want to meet anyone here in our private, sacred place, but there was no time to run.

A man emerged between the bushes, coming down the steps. Tall, lean, and baked by many years of the sun, he was not a soldier . . . but not a villager, either. He reminded me somehow of an orchestra conductor. Around his neck hung an expensive-looking camera.

“Hello!” he called cheerfully. “So, your kind do come here! This place was made for you!”

My kind? Was this man another denizen of Faery? I glanced quickly at his legs, but they seemed human.

He laughed, striding nearer. “Your kind—children! This is the place for you, isn't it?”

“No one comes here, sir,” I said. “People say the woods are haunted.”

“You're a serious little fellow,” he said. “Haunted? Are you a ghost, then?”

I didn't tell him that my father had just been killed. He offered his hand, and I shook it.

“‘No one,' you say—but
you're
here. Do you play here?” he asked.

I explained that I'd played here for months, that I was visiting my grandmother. He nodded and said it's exactly where
he'd
play if it were him. We strolled past the Announcing Angel, past the centaur. I still didn't like finding a stranger here. But then . . . the garden had belonged to others before it was ours.

“Doesn't it spark your imagination, this place?” he asked me.

“Yes. I like to sketch it.”

He stopped and shook my hand again. “A fellow artist! I draw pictures myself. And paint. And sculpt.”

I suppose I still wasn't thinking straight, and that's why the realization had taken me so long. This was the friend of Major P ——'s, the artist he'd spoken to about the statues.

The man paused before the sleeping woman, shaking his head in admiration. “That's why I'm here, you see. I had read something of this place, but I had no idea . . . But a soldier friend of mine was here recently on some sort of patrol—looking for a lost person, I believe—and he told me how truly remarkable it was.”

A “soldier friend” . . . but this tall man seemed nothing at all like the major—I suppose because he was an artist. For starters, he had much kinder and warmer eyes.

“It's a magical place,” the man said. “One can easily envision fairies dancing here—or just there, behind that arch!” He grinned at me. “Have you ever seen a fairy here?”

“No,” I said. “Only a faun.”

“Only a—” He raised his eyebrows and laughed with delight. “You know,” he said in a conspiratorial tone, “I'm going to bring a crew and a moving-picture camera and make a film about this place. People should know about this garden. The poets, the historians, the seekers of mystery, the spiritual, and those in love—definitely those in love. And those like you and me. The artists.”

We descended the root stairway and walked beneath the arch. I almost told him there was a whale hiding in the brush to his right, but decided against it. If he was serious about the garden, he'd find it himself.

On a sudden inspiration, he asked, “Would you like to be in my movie? You and—your grandmother, you say?”

I thanked him, but told him I had to leave the village tomorrow, to go back to the city.

“Oh—a pity,” he said. “This grove seems to like you. Some people clash with the lighting of a place, you know. They throw back a place's light and don't fit in at all. But you—this is your home!”

I remembered how the major had looked on his visit here, and I thought I knew what the artist meant.

“Shall we take a picture at least, then? Help me take a picture or two. There, perhaps? With that grim Angel of the Bottomless Pit?” He knew Apollyon.

I shook my head. “Not that one.” I glanced over his shoulder.

He followed my gaze. “Ahhh,” he exclaimed. “A much better choice! You do have the eye of an artist.”

And so, we went over to the square pool, and I had my picture taken next to an unclothed lady with a water jar.

“Can I trouble you to shoot a couple of me?” asked the man, and he showed me how to work the camera. I did, and for the first photo, he stepped up onto the rim of the pool and brazenly put his arm around the woman's waist. He had me take three. Two were more serious.

Some months later, when I visited Grandmother again, she gave me prints of two photographs—one I'd taken of the man, and the one of me. That artist had interviewed Grandmother as the local authority on the sacred woods, and I suppose he received her unique blend of the truth with prudent camouflage. Of course she'd seen me in one of his pictures and identified the serious little fellow as her grandson. In the photo, I looked shy and sad, standing there with my hands in my pockets. Grandmother showed me a portrait of the same man in a book from her shelf. Though I hadn't known it, the artist with the camera—the last acquaintance I'd made that summer, at the last possible moment—was none other than the great artist D —— S ——. He was known all over the world; I'd seen his work in museums. He'd signed the backs of both photos for me. One of his inscriptions read: “For G ——, with thankfulness for chance meetings.” The other: “For G ——, who has an artist's eye.” I kept the photographs in an old travel-­case of my mother's with my notebook from that summer, and the shells from Wool Island, and R ——'s flute, and the letters from my parents.

But that day in the garden, the man and I parted ways. He was
going to take more pictures of the statues, and I picked up my clanking bundle and trudged out of the grove by the way I'd come in. The last glimpse I had of it was the dragon rearing out of the bushes, forever keeping the dogs at bay.

*  *  *  *

And that was the end of my spring and summer in the village. Grand­mother and I talked a lot more that night, when the house was quiet again. She let me read a letter that a soldier had delivered that afternoon, a report from my father's superior officer commending Papa and telling the same story the major had told us. Grand­mother gave me the letter.

“Shouldn't you keep something?” I asked.

“I'm keeping everything,” Grandmother said, and pointed at her heart, “in here. Besides, I have all the letters he's sent me for years, which will belong to you someday.
Also
besides, you need these things more than I do. You have a much longer way to go before you're done.”

“You should never talk in absolute terms about the future,” I reminded her.

“That's right,” she said. Except, she added, there was one thing we
did
know for sure: that the paths joined up again, somewhere ahead. Bringing me a large, soft cloth with a pattern of sea horses and starfish, she helped me wrap up the seashells so they wouldn't break. “This cloth is part of a dress I wore when I was a baby,” she said. “They named me after the sea, you know.” I picked out the best shell for her to keep on the bookshelves beside her chair. Those seashells were always a treasure, for in the years afterward, whenever I put one to my ear, I could hear, amid the voice of the
sea, all the sounds of the village—the waves and breezes, the gulls, the distant engines, and all the voices of Grandmother's friends.

I renewed my promise to visit soon, and to write often.

She told me to be patient with God. Before long, she said, I'd see that nothing He did was a mistake. And she told me how happy she was that I'd spent those months with her.

*  *  *  *

In the morning, we sat on the bench behind the cottage, waiting for Cousin C —— to arrive in the car. Grandmother said that with all the uproar of the last couple days, she hadn't picked the ripe tomatoes, and they'd be going bad on the vines. So, we went into the patch and hunted for them, their bright orbs peeking out of the spiky, aromatic leaves. Grandmother told me not to get my pants dirty and I said I wouldn't. Soon, she said, it would be grape-­harvesting time, and the villagers would be making the new wine and dancing till all hours. When that happened each year, it was as if there were still satyrs and fauns about.

She said one more thing I recall: that she'd thought she could duck her head and let the war pass over the top, but she'd been wrong. The war wouldn't be ignored. It had come home to us, like it did, in one way or another, for everyone who lived in those times. But the war had brought us R ——, too. We'd never have met him without it, and having known him was a gift.

As I watched her brown hands work, I thought for some reason of Mrs. D —— and of how much Grandmother had been upset when I'd told her about the setcreasea and fuchsia. For all the grief that weighed on me now, a warmth touched me deep inside. “You've always planted the garden for him, haven't you—for Mr.
Girandole? It's why we don't talk about the flowers until they come up. You wanted him to know about them before anyone else.”

I imagined Mr. Girandole deep in the woods, catching a new fragrance in the air each spring as only a faun might, when the first blossom opened.

Grandmother made a sound that was both a “Hush” and a chuckle, and I knew I was right.

So, we ended that visit as we'd begun it, in back of the cottage with our faces close to the earth, and soil under our fingernails.

I remember looking up again at the clouds. Some things were almost always in motion—clouds, laundry on clotheslines, and the leaves of the trees. Some things, like the statues in our woods, were forever at rest. As Grandmother hunted tomatoes beside me, humming now and then, talking to me and to the occasional grasshopper, I sat back on my heels and watched the clouds for a long time. They billowed and stretched in the perfect sky, magical pictures that lingered for a moment and then changed, one morphing into the next.

*  *  *  *

Grandmother lived a long time. I wish I could say that I spent every summer with her after that, or many, at least. But the hard truth was that I had become the man of our house at age nine, with no more of a choice than Papa had been given in his going to the war. The war ended, but summers were no longer carefree. Summer's difference from the rest of the year came down mostly to the heat. I helped at home, worked as soon as I could, and went to school. We kept ourselves together; we always had a roof over our heads and food on the table, which was more than many like us had. My sister grew up to be a music teacher, and my mother was proud of us both.

I wrote to Grandmother and visited when I could, but things had changed for us. There was no mystery to solve, no patient to care for. There was no faun to rap on the back door in the moonlight. On every visit, after Grandmother and I had exchanged news, we had little to say. We would listen to the radio, and I would help her in the garden, digging or weeding quietly beside her. One good autumn, I re-roofed her cottage, which was the talk of the town. Once, I brought her a modern refrigerator, but she made me take it away; she couldn't abide its noise. I think, too, that she disliked how it had no blocks of ice to melt; it gave no water to the garden and thus did not really earn its keep. Usually, I would mend a latch or a fence for her. Then, in a day or two, Grandmother would tell me I should get back and look after Mama and N ——, and I would go.

When in time the little cottage was silent and empty, I was the one who sorted Grandmother's things. My sister would have helped me, but it seemed right that I should do it alone. It was not difficult; Grandmother had lived simply and saw no sense in clutter. There were a few family treasures and some fine pieces of furniture that Grandfather had made.