Part 17 (1/2)

Unlike some others she could name, though, she would have patience. She would hatch once again from her pebbled eggs a brood of quilly young. She would step with dignity among the weeds of the Lily Pond and slay for their sakes a generation of frogs. She would love her current husband, a dear he was, patient and solicitous, a great help with the children. She would not long: longing was fatal.

And as they all set off on the long and dusty road of that year's summer, Alice was brought to bed. She named her third daughter Lucy, though Smoky thought it was too much like the names of her two others, Tacey and Lily, and he knew that he at least would spend the next twenty or thirty years calling each of them by the others' names. ”That's all right,” Alice said. ”This is the last, anyway.” But it wasn't. There was still a boy for her to bear, though even Cloud didn't yet know that.

Anyway, if Generation was the thing they wanted, as Sophie had once perceived as she sat huddled and dreaming by the pavilion on the lake, this was a gratifying year for them: after the equinox came with a frost that left the woods dusty and gray but let summer linger, spectral and SO endless that it summoned distrait crocuses from the ground and called the restless souls of Indians from their burial mounds, Sophie had the child which was attributed to Smoky. Compounding confusion, she named her daughter Lilac, because she dreamed that her mother was coming into her room bearing a great branch of it heavy with odorous blue blooms, and awoke then to see her mother come into her room bearing the newborn girl. Tacey and Lily came too, Tacey carrying carefully her three-monthold sister Lucy to see the baby.

”See, Lucy? See the baby? Just like you.”

Lily raised herself up on the bed to peer closely into Lilac's face where she lay nestled now against cooing Sophie. ”She won't stay long,” she said, after studyihg it.

”Lily!” Mom said. ”What a terrible thing to say!”

”Well, she won't.” She looked to Tacey: ”Will she?”

”Nope.;: Tacey s.h.i.+fted Lucy in her arms. ”But it's okay. She'll come back. Seeing her grandmother shocked, she said. Oh, don't worry, she's not going to die or anything. She's just not going to stay.”

”And she'll come back,” Lily said. ”Later.”

”Why do you think all that?” Sophie asked, not sure she was yet quite in the world again, or hearing what she thought she heard.

The two girls shrugged, at the same time; the same shrug, in fact, a quick lift of shoulders and eyebrows and back again, as at a simple fact. They watched as Mom, shaking her head, helped Sophie induce pink-and-white Lilac to nurse (a delightful, easefully painful feeling) and with her sucking Sophie fell asleep again, dopey with exhaustion and wonderment, and presently so did Lilac, feeling perhaps the same; and though the cord had been cut which joined them, perhaps they dreamed the same dream.

Next morning the stork left the roof of Edgewood and her messy nest. Her children had already flown without farewell or apologya”she expected nonea”and her husband had gone too, hoping they would meet again next spring. She herself had waited only for Lilac's arrival so that she could bring news of ita”she kept her promisesa”and now she flew off in quite a different direction from her family, following her beak, her fanlike wings cupping the autumn dawn and her legs trailing behind like bannerets.

Little, Big Striving like the Meadow Mouse to disbelieve in Winter, Smoky gorged himself on the summer sky, lying late into the night on the ground staring upward, though the month had an R in it and Cloud thought it bad for nerve, bone, and tissue. Odd that the changeful constellations, so mindful of the seasons, should be what he chose of summer to memorize, but the turning of the sky was so slow, and seemed so impossible, that it comforted him. Yet he needed only to look at his watch to see that they fled away south even as the geese did.

On the night Orion rose and Scorpio set, a night as warm almost as August for reasons of the weather's own but in fact by that sign the last night of summer, he and Sophie and Daily Alice lay out in a sheep-shorn meadow on their backs, their heads close together like three eggs in a nest, as pale too as that in the night light. They had their heads together so that when one pointed out a star, the arm he pointed with would be more or less in the other's line of sight; otherwise, they would be all night saying That one, there, where I'm pointing, unable to correct for billions of miles of parallax. Smoky had the star-book open on his lap, and consulted it with a flashlight whose light was masked with red cellophane taken from a Dutch cheese so its bightness wouldn't blind him.

”Camelopardalis,” he said, pointing to a dangling necklace in the north, not clear because the horizon's light still diluted it. ”That is, the Camelopard.”

”And what,” Daily Alice asked indulgently, ”is a camelopard?”

”A giraffe, in fact,” Smoky said. ”A camel-leopard. A camel with leopard's spots.”

”Why is there a giraffe in heaven?” Sophie asked. ”How did it get there?”

”I bet you're not the first to ask that,” Smoky said, laughing. ”Imagine their surprise when they first looked up over there and said, My G.o.d, what's that giraffe doing up there?”

The menagerie of heaven, racing as from a zoo breakout through the lives of the men and women, G.o.ds and heroes; the band of the Zodiac (that night all their birth-signs were invisible, bearing the sun around the south); the impossible dust of the Milky Way rainbow-wise overarching them; Orion lifting one racing foot over the horizon, following his dog Sirius. They discovered the moment's rising sign. Jupiter burned unwinking in the west. The whole spangled beach-umbrella, fringed with the Tropics, revolved on its bent staff around the North Star, too slowly to be seen, yet steadily.

Smoky, out of his childhood reading, related the interlocking tales told above them. The pictures were so formless and incomplete, and the tales, some at least, so trivial that it seemed to Smoky that it must all be true: Hercules looked so little like himself that the only way anyone could have found him was if he'd got the news about Hercules being up there, and was told where to look. As one tree traces its family back to Daphne but another has to be mere commoner; as only the odd flower, mountain, fact gets to have divine ancestry, so Ca.s.siopeia of all people is brilliantly asterized, or her chair rather, as though by accident; and somebody else's crown, and another's lyre: the attic of the G.o.ds.

What Sophie wondered, who couldn't make the patterned floor of heaven come out in pictures but lay hypnotized by their nearness, was how it could be that some in heaven were there for reward, and others condemned to it; while still others were there it seemed only to play parts in the dramas of others. It seemed unfair; and yet she couldn't decide whether it was unfair because there they were, stuck forever, who hadn't deserved it; or unfair because, without having earned it, they had been saveda”enthroneda”need not die. She thought of their own tale, they three, permanent as a constellation, strange enough to be remembered forever.

The earth that week was making progress through the discarded tail of a long-pa.s.sed comet, and each night a rain of fragments entered the air and flamed whitely as they burned up. ”No bigger than pebbles or pinheads some of them,” Smoky said. ”It's the air you see lit up.”

But this now Sophie could see clearly: these were falling stars. She thought perhaps she could pick one out and watch and see it fall: a momentary bright exhalation, that made her draw breath, her heart filled with infinitude. Would that be a better fate? In the gra.s.s her hand found Smoky's; the other already held her sister's, who pressed it every time brightness fell from the air.

Daily Alice couldn't tell if she felt huge or small. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compa.s.s of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminis.h.i.+ng. The stars wandered in and out of the vast portals of her eyes, under the immense empty dome of her brow; and then Smoky took her hand and she vanished to a speck, still holding the stars as in a tiny jewel box within her.

So they lay a long time, not caring to talk any more, each dwelling on that odd, physical sensation of ephemeral eternitya”a paradox but undeniably felt; and if the stars had been as near and full of faces as they seemed, they would have looked down and seen those three as a single asterism, a linked wheel against the wheeling dark sky of the meadow.

Solstice Night There was no entrance but a tiny hole at the window corner where the solstice-midnight wind blew in, piling dust on the sill in a little furrow: but that was room enough for them, and they entered there.

There were three then in Sophie's bedroom standing close together, their brown-capped heads consulting, their pale flat faces like little moons.

”See how she sleeps away.”

”Yes, and the babe asleep in her arms.”

”My, she holds it tight.”

”Not so tight.”

As one, they drew closer to the tall-bed. Lilac in her mother's arms, in a hooded bunting against the cold, breathed on Sophie's cheek; a drop of wetness was there.

”Well, take it, then.”

”Why don't you if you're so anxious.”

”Let's all.”

Six long white hands went out toward Lilac. ”Wait,” said one. ”Who has the other?”

”You were to bring it.”

”Not I.”

”Here it is, here.” A thing was unfolded from a drawstring bag.

”My. Not very like, is it.”

”What's to be done?”

”Breathe on it.”