by Lauren Groff
When all is cleared and clean in the Bread Truck, Abe deposits Bit at the Pink Piper to sleep in Cole’s hammock. He kisses him gravely and leaves.
The metal roof clicks with tiny icy snow. Astrid’s children breathe lightly. Sweetie’s boys snore and shift, Cole jabs at Bit with his heels. The pile of Family Quonset kids tangle together under the blankets.
Bit turns and sees Helle’s eyes are open, yellow, in the dim. Tadpole of Handy, he thinks, bulby and strange. She looks at Bit, her mouth swelling with information. She is nosy, a listener at doors, a tattletale.
She whispers, They’re making a Critique tonight. Of Hannah. Of your mom.
Bit hears Marilyn downstairs talking to someone, Saucy Sally it sounds like. He gets out of his hammock and creeps down the stairs. They’re smoking funny stuff out the window, even though Sally is pregnant. They gab, are not watchful. He goes out the door.
Ice glazes on the grass and his feet are bare, his legs cold under the thin pajamas. His soles burn until he can’t feel them anymore, and he must pump his arms to be sure he is still running. The wind smacks his face with a cold hand. When he longs to lie down in the sinister rows of the apple orchard, he thinks of Hannah and goes on.
Up the slate stairs to Arcadia House, up the stone porch. He can’t reach the doorknob, but he pushes and the vast door swings open.
A powerful stench: varnish and polyurethane and paint, beeswax and vinegar and sweat, sawdust and copper and cold nails. The stairs are finished but dark because there is no sky above them, only plaster and ceiling. The grand chandelier has been pieced together, and it hulks overhead in half shadow.
Over the still-tacky floorboards, to the stairs, curving up. Halfway there, he hears voices. Another corridor, paint sticky under his hand. Another stairway. The voices are louder. When he reaches the doorway to the back of the Proscenium, the voices are very loud.
He crouches and puts his eye to the crack. His feet come alive again, and he would cry with the pain if he didn’t first bite the inside of his cheek to blood.
From there he sees the silhouettes of bodies, some shiftings, the shadow of a hand that rises to a face, heads that move together then apart. Beyond, elevated on the stage, uplit by three kerosene lamps, there is Hannah.
She is tiny, shriveled, so distant from him. She is alone. Her hands are folded in her lap, and she looks down and nods. Someone, a man, says: . . . mean, Hannah baby, we love you and want you to feel better, man, but it’s just such a drag, you’re like bringing down all our energy and we’ve got a shitload more work to do before Handy and them get back and we need all the energy we can get for the planting, you dig?
Hannah nods, nods, nods.
Now, someone else says in a calm cold voice, . . . Mahayana, big boat, caring for everyone, but you’re manifesting pure Hinayana, small boat, taking care of yourself . . . Hannah nods.
And someone, a woman, says, Listen . . . when you’re good, there’s nobody better . . . in the fall know you had that accident . . . sad to lose a baby . . . over it by now?
And Hannah’s hands clench at her skirt and her face contracts, then smoothes out, and still she nods.
Now a familiar voice, Titus’s. He roars. He says, . . . fucking nuts, man, it’s like taking someone whose leg is broken and jumping on the fucking leg, we’re not doing anybody any favors here, I’ve been there, Hannah, I’ve been where you are, I’ve been down so low the black dog is at my neck, man, I know what it’s like so don’t listen to these hypocritical assholes . . .
An uproar, voices shouting over Titus’s. Hannah looks out into the audience, finds a face to fix on, and stares at it. In this moment the whole of her is present. His mother, so wispy, so far away.
Bit can’t hold himself: he leaps up from where he is crouched and begins to run. Down the endless aisle, down past the people who sit on the benches, down past the folks sprawled on the floor, to the stairs, up. Out of the shadow and into the shallow pool of kerosene light, with Hannah alone in the center. He thrusts himself onto his mother’s lap and cradles her head in his arms. He can feel all the others’ eyes heavy on his back. For a long moment, nothing, silence.
Briefly, a wet warmth on his belly, his mother’s face pressing into him.
Briefly, her mouth moving against him, kissing him through his shirt.
Now, Abe is on the stage and lifting Bit, and Bit floats halfway down the aisle in Abe’s steely hands. Abe is whispering fiercely into his ear; Bit twists and fights to return to Hannah. In silence, Bit struggles, desperate, and when they go down the third-floor steps, down the curved entry stairs and out into the night, he hears what Abe is saying, . . . I know, little one, I know you’re in pain, I know you’re holding it in, monkey . . . Abe presses Bit against him and Bit hangs on to his father, his warmth, his one solid ground in the spinning awful world, his gravity. He presses against Abe and tries to push him away, tries to fly back toward Hannah, clutches his father; pushes him, clutches. Abe is saying . . . don’t have to let it out yet . . . It is only when they are halfway home, as Abe begins to trot over the hard ground, that Bit’s internal scream lurches and burbles and emerges in a sour rush of vomit.
In the night, he hears: Now or never, baby. I left a Bug outside, keys in the ignition.
A silence so long Bit almost sleeps. Then a whispered No.
Then you have to try. You have to begin to try. You have to. You have to.
His father’s voice is thick and shuddery, and it makes Bit go thick and shuddery inside.
A very long silence. Bit is almost asleep. Then it comes, soft, soft: I’ll try.
He wakes, gnawed. He breathes with Hannah until Abe gets up, feeds them, drops Bit off at the Pink Piper. Before he goes, Abe kneels before Bit and brushes the hair out of his eyes, and says, Whenever you want, you talk to me, okay?
All day long, Bit is being eaten inside. The nameless bad pushes in his legs, makes his shoulders ache. He longs to rip up the pillows and send the hammocks a-scattering over the Quad.
His silence isn’t working alone. He will need a Quest. And if he doesn’t go on his Quest soon to find the thing to save Hannah, he is afraid what he might do.
Sweetie tries to talk softly to him, but he runs away. The Kid Herd is quiet today. Dorotka takes time from starting the seeds in the solarium and now leads the kidlets into the forest to tell them about trees. He trails the other kids, stomps his boots. He must do. What? His longing twists and flicks in him.
The Kid Herd moves across the meadow and into the bitter woods. Bit lags five steps, ten steps behind.
Mud has dried into pocks and pits here. Pussy willows velvet the banks; other willows are awash with gold buds. Sweetie and Maria take the babies back to the Pink Piper with the wagons. Jincy and Muffin and Fiona roll down the tender-grassed slope. The boys stop smacking things with sticks to listen to Dorotka: Look, she urges them, Ulmaceae, elm. It has simple alternate leaves that are just coming out, look! It comes from Asia, originally. It seeds with a kind of samara, let’s see aha, aha, here’s one from last year.
She lifts a seed and it flutters down, a propeller.
She beams. They beam. Springtime, she says, a letter from a loved one.
Dorotka hugs the trunk, and one by one, the children do, too. They move deeper into the shadows. Dutchman’s-breeches! she calls. Look, miterwort. Look, hobblebush.
There is a crack in the gray sky and the sun sifts through, falls over the ground, powders the new buds. This is it, Bit understands with a great pulse in his throat where his words used to live. This is where his Quest begins. Bit crouches behind a rotten log where a fern grows in a bed of moss. He watches the others go. Soon, he cannot hear them at all.
Below the log, a cold spot, snow. Up through the snow push tiny wild strawberries that he eats and lets the bright sweet juice stain his hands. This is good, a sign to go deeper, to find what he needs to find.
He pushes off the path and into the woods. He is alone and everything is sharp, ful
l of hungry life. Two chipmunks chase each other from branch to branch, and one falls, bounces on the ground, runs off again. The thickets grasp at him and only reluctantly let go. A stream sings in the distance: he turns a corner and almost stumbles into it. He goes onto his belly and leans over, and with a smooth stick he has found, he can almost touch the surface. His head is a splotch in the white sky, rimmed by the black reflected trees; his clothes are full of burrs. He knows he has a gash in his face only when he sees a drop of blood fall and be sucked down into the water and fade like smoke.
Now it will come, he thinks. Out of the water, probably. He hopes for a golden swan or a water nymph, but he would take a troll, an ugly little man Bit’s size, a monster. He waits. Nothing happens.
In time, he moves on. His bones are weary. The day has gone cold and the sky above the greening branches is a deeper blue. Out of nowhere a doll’s-eyes plant, googly with great white eyeballs, watches him. Through the hole in the trunk of one tree he sees a whole and early moon, and it reminds him of a pie. But when he looks closer, he sees the face embedded there. Why has nobody ever told him that the man in the moon is shouting in alarm?
He is so very little. And the woods are so black and deep.
His feet have gone numb when he finds the hiccup in the woods, the clearing. He feels an airlessness here. Stones stick out of the snow-burned grass, and Bit thinks of Astrid’s teeth, the way they are haphazard and yellow.
He sits to gather himself, and finds his fingers tracing words carved in the stones. Minerva, one says. Whose Name Is Writ In Air.
1857, another says.
A tiny one, a milk tooth, says simply, Breathed once, then lost.
He doesn’t know how long he sits. The trees whisper among themselves. Dusk falls, and the stone under him grows chill. There is a sense of gathering, a hand that clenches the center of a stretched cloth and lifts.
From the corner of his eye, he sees a white movement. He watches it obliquely for ten breaths, then turns his head to look. He expects to see one of the stones crawling off into the darkness, but it is not a stone.
An animal stands there, pointy and white and tall, fringed. It is graceful as a white deer, but it is not a deer.
The beast fixes Bit with its yellow eye and sniffs. At its side, the shadows thicken. The texture flows vertical and becomes fabric. Bit holds himself tiny and still, and looks up the dress to find a face. A woman stares at him, a very old woman. It is the witch, the one he has dreamed of. But she is not ugly: her hair is a soft white with a black streak, and she has roses in her cheeks. Though her lips are set in deep wrinkles, the lips themselves are plush. The way she looks at him, Bit feels pinned.
They gaze at one another, the woman and Bit.
This is it, the nut of the Quest, what he was meant to find, the moment where everything will turn. He waits for her to speak or give him a sack of gold, to give him the curse or the antidote, a vial, an apple, an acorn to crack and spill, a silken dress, a horseshoe, a feather, a word. She will tell him, give him, help him. He feels his body, so tiny in the great, twilit world, but he knows he will do what she asks of him. Even if he has to live with her forever and ever in a small stone tower in the woods and never get to see Arcadia again, he will do it.
He thinks of Hannah, a shape in her bed. He thinks, Please.
He wishes he could shout but fears the old curse that may befall Hannah if his lips split and his longing pours out.
He waits, but the woman only steps backward and becomes the woods again. Then the beast lifts its thin front leg and, with a snort of steam from its nostrils, it, too, trots away. Their sounds fade. He is sitting in the blue dusk alone. His hands are as empty as ever.
His heart settles again into its rhythm, and he trusts himself to move. His jeans are wet in the seat and down the insides of his thighs. The forest pushes down so hard on him he can hardly breathe. He cannot cry, not now.
Bit begins to run, crashing over the sticks, stumbling in the sudden gouges in the ground. Trees loom like dreams in the dim before him, and it is all he can do to swerve around them. Something scatters the dry leaves behind him, something catches up, something will grasp him with its bony fingers. He runs harder, and it runs harder, pressing on him, and he can smell its terrible breath, and at last he hears the lap of water and bursts out onto the stony edge of the Pond. It seems vast tonight, and he realizes he is on the side opposite where they usually swim. Up the long black lawn, he sees the outbuildings hunched, the Soy Dairy, the Bakery, the Octagonal Barn; he sees Arcadia House, lit in some windows by the new generator the Motor Pool liberated from somewhere. Even from the lonely side of the Pond, he can hear the roar.
A glow warms a window upstairs where Bit imagines his father, good bearded Abe, rehanging a door. It calms Bit to imagine Abe in the lantern light, fixing, building, making better. This is what Abe does: he is steady, calming. There is a golden warmth also in the arched windows of the Eatery. Tonight, he remembers, is their first collective supper in Arcadia House, cooked in the stainless-steel kitchen ripped from an abandoned restaurant in Ithaca. He hopes his mother has been drawn to the light and warmth and food. It hurts him to think of the others, laughing, in the Eatery while she is alone in bed.
The ice along the border of the lake is thin as a glass ornament. He crunches it as he runs. When he reaches the path where the snapdragons will grow in the summertime, he begins to sprint. In the distance, people move in a line lit by lanterns and flashlights up the path from Ersatz Arcadia.
He bursts inside, into the overwhelming warmth. Here, too, is a thicket of legs like birch trunks, and he almost runs into one. Hey, there, man, someone says. Whoa, where’s the emergency, someone else says. What the hey was that? someone asks, and someone else says, Oh, just your average forest elf, and there is laughter and he screws his fists and pushes harder.
The kitchen blasts with heat, hurts him. It smells so good he wants to cry. It is something fried, vegetable stew. He finds Hannah stirring vinegar into the roasted beets in a huge steel bowl, and clutches her knees. She smiles down at him. She lifts him and washes his face with warm water at one of the sinks. She says Brr, when she touches his hands, and picks the leaves and twigs out of his hair and lifts him to sniff at his rear end, and makes a little face, shrugging. We all have accidents, she whispers. It’s okay once in a while to piss yourself, I’d say.
He puts his face close to his mother’s warm mouth, and like that, the chasing thing in the woods draws away and dissolves back into the night.
Out in the Eatery, under the exposed beams, they sit at newly varnished tables for a moment of thanks. Someone says, Itadakimasu, I take this nourishment in gratitude to all beings; then they pile up their plates. Hannah pulls Bit up onto her lap and cuddles him there. She feeds him from her fork, small bits of bread and stew, and his day comes over him in a great wash. The words that others are saying go meaningless in his ears. With a bit of seitan still in his mouth, he closes his eyes and falls asleep.
He has done it, though he is confused, though he doesn’t know what he’s done. There was no key he was handed, no word that he said.
Hannah is not out entirely, but she is emerging. She rises every day. She brushes her hair. She bakes at the Bakery. Only sometimes when Abe isn’t looking does Hannah close her eyes for a long time, and Bit holds his breath. But with an effort that seems to wrench her, she always opens them again.
Though Abe frets at first, Astrid commands the afternoon off. They will play, she says, and dares anyone to protest. They do not. The afternoon is bright and warm. The men go onto the tender green lawn between the porch and outbuildings, carrying the lacrosse sticks that Billy-goat, a real Onondaga Indian, had made one winter out of ash sticks and reclaimed raincoats. The women braid the hair of the men into plaits like their own, and then the men strip down all the way to their cotton shorts, torsos glowing winter-pale. Bit sits with the laughing women, who smoke wackystuff and chat among themselves and drink iced tea
from pitchers, who pass around babies and blow tubas on the bellies of the wee ones. The other kids are playing somewhere, but he sits on Hannah’s thin lap, he watches the heaving mass of men chasing down the little ball, colliding and breaking apart, singing and arguing, falling to the ground, sweating. He watches his father drop a ball out of the basket of his stick and blush all down his neck and chest, how Titus’s fat-tire flops at his waistband, how Hiero is so nimble he doesn’t even seem to run, just appears where he needs to be. And Bit realizes as Tarzan shoots an easy goal and his team leaps and shouts and pats and squeezes that none of these big adult men, despite their smells and strength, are much more than boys, not so different from Bit himself. The world contracts in a friendly way around him.
Time comes to him one morning, stealing in. One moment he is looking at the lion puppet on his hand that he’s flapping about to amuse Eden’s russet potato of a baby, and the next he understands something he never knew to question. He sees it clearly, now, how time is flexible, a rubber band. It can stretch long and be clumped tight, can be knotted and folded over itself, and all the while it is endless, a loop. There will be night and then morning, and then night again. The year will end, another one will begin, will end. An old man dies, a baby is born.
Summer Hannah will take over from Winter Hannah with a slowly crisping voice and a new pair of dungarees. Not completely yet. But soon.
Sweetie passes, and puts her cold hands under his chin. What’s the matter, baby? she says, wiping his cheeks. Are you hurt?
His secret swells in him, almost bursts; it is good, it is wonderful. But he must be silent, he remembers almost too late, and shakes his head. She carefully dries his cheeks with a clean bit of her sleeve and gives him a cookie she tells him to keep secret from Astrid, whom she calls the Sugar Nazi. Then she kisses him. He would like to stay like this, Sweetie’s soft lips on his skin, but with a long breath he reluctantly lets time flow again.
