How can I find your city now
by the alone way?
It was a game of invention, with the tickle of un-tasted pleasure-
Back into the brush smiling, scared, naked,
like a trout to his safehold under a stone,
but it was the trout I hunted.
They’re gone.
My fish-line hangs limp-silly in the stream.
The girls are all gone.
What am I hunting?
Once he had indeed come on girls bathing in a pool in the woods, sparrow-voiced and delicious, but it was Bruno who had hidden. No matter: words can drive one thing into another, flow everywhere, pierce all mysteries at least once. Bruno was often not unhappy.
Anyway Bruno had a girl. His fertile loneliness had created her out of the visible figure of Janet Bascom, daughter of the baker, great-granddaughter of Elder Bascom. Janet as the village knew her was a modest mouse soon to be married to the farmer Jed Homer, who held his land directly from the monastery of St. Benjamin on Mount Orlook; Jed’s second wife had died and he wanted to collect Janet and her plump dowry before he or she became any more overripe. She had smiled pleasantly at Bruno once, perhaps for no reason except that she felt like smiling, and had forgotten it ten minutes later. Henceforth Janet as Bruno knew her was a woman-spirit of air and fire. In the sun her hair became as the halo of the blessed St. Jacqueline in the stained-glass window in the south wall of the church. Her voice rang in his brain, gently, as sometimes the church-bell music reached him across two miles of fields when he was at the forge. Her hands—oh, surely kind if only because such beauty dwelt in them whether they moved or rested. Sometimes Janet even glanced at him again. Should he have known that he did not want her any nearer than she was?
Sometimes when he woke whispering in the dark, especially if the moon was riding clear and jubilant, especially in this sixteenth year when he was beset by the troubles and wants that all youth knows (especially if youth must remain silent) Bruno might go wandering.
He would close the door of his cabin softly. No other house stood near, but he felt such a night as a state of being perfect in itself, not to be marred by noises that are no better than blundering, and heedless. He would slip away across Hurley’s pastureland by routes his feet could follow without requiring thought: Sometimes toward the village, where all the dogs knew him and did no more than snuffle a greeting as he drifted along the sleep-filled streets and marveled to see what broad rivers of moonlight pour from slanting roofs: or sometimes into the woods, under the hemlock and maple and pine. His night vision was a little better than the human norm. He liked to follow the happenings of moonlight where its pattern lay broken on the ground. Now and then when the soft air itself became a challenge he would walk silently for a mile along a certain wood-road, a passage that made him think of the church aisle leading toward Father Clark whom he feared and loved. At the first turn of the wood-road stood a massive rock; here he would leave the road to follow the tunnel of a deer-run that led into the open at the base of a grassy mount. No tree grew on this knoll. Ancient thoughts quickened here about a broad flat rock at the summit; merely one of Earth’s bones breaking the skin, but a sense of human presence clung.
In the night that followed Baron Ashoka’s appearance at the Store, Bruno came here, moonstruck. Along the wood-road the white light created legions of night thoughts driving—where?
Even through the dense growth of the deep-run he heard the music.
* * * *
Baron Ashoka meanwhile had ridden from the Store up the twisty Mount Orlook road to dine with the Abbot of St. Benjamin’s. A dainty small dinner for the two of them, served by one of the Abbot’s many discreet servants, who vanished as soon as the Abbot and his guest had dealt with roast goose and delicacies from the monastery garden—green peas for instance, and strawberries in thick Jersey cream. The wine was a sauterne from the province of Cayuga, unaggressive, but the Baron played safe and drank in more moderation than did the Abbot. The meal ended with a subtle golden tea. Penn merchants, the prelate confided, got it by caravan from Albama, wherever that was—another Penn monopoly. “But I thank the good God,” he said with mischief in his ancient voice, “that my concern is entirely for affairs spiritual. Enough for me my little sheepfold in the hills.” Over the wine he crinkled a smile at the Baron, who seemed gloomy behind that ruddy handsome face under the ostentatious white hair. The Abbot of St. Benjamin’s was entirely bald and sensitive about it, also beleaguered by a host of old-age pains and frets—acid stomach, shortness of breath, swollen ankles, a vindictive prostate. Occasionally he imagined that if only his dignity allowed him to consult Marta the Cure-Woman instead of pigheaded Brother Walter he might feel better; most of the time he merely admitted that old age is like that, a necessary last trial before the tranquil joys of Heaven. “By the way, my dear Baron, I always try to make sure my Cellarer purchases wine from non-slaveholding establishments.”
Baron Ashoka bowed. “It’s a matter close to my heart, Father.”
“Yes yes.” The Abbot reflected on the loneliness of important people. He supposed the Baron believed in God and the Church rather cynically if at all, but quite strongly in the freeing of the slaves, whereas he himself believed deeply in the unshakable Tightness of his Church and thanked God there was no other, but very little in what certain well-meaning visionaries were calling a Free Society. How can you have such a thing? Any society includes and therefore surrounds the individual, cutting off freedom on all sides. Men don’t want freedom anyway, thought the Abbot—look at their panic when they get a little of it! All they want is to dream about it, and talk. Since he liked the Baron, and since they must remain on good terms if the affairs of Maplestock were not to degenerate into a sticky mess-after the Baron the monastery was the largest landholder in the township—these differences of view required solicitous tiptoeing among the teacups. “Yes yes, let us hope the—ah—joys of freedom become happily extended —ah—year by year. And now do tell me!” Spectacles gleaming, little nose twitching like a rabbit’s, he leaned his plump eminence toward the Baron across the table. “Our news of the world is so scant,” he lied, “you must forgive my old-womanish curiosity. What is the latest on this—ah—this absurdity, this Tiger Boy nonsense?”
“Father MacAllister, I am afraid there really is such a person.”
“Oh dear! I had hoped—assumed—it was no more than a country fantasy or a practical joke.”
“I’ve ordered a standby posse at the village, with some of my men to help. We can stop the thing. We’ve always had good hunters here—good hunters and good poachers.”
“It’s really that bad?”
“Father, I got some information the village doesn’t have, through an acquaintance in Grayval, a trustworthy man. Tiger Boy appeared there last month. It’s hardly twenty miles from here, but as you may know, a very shutaway place, not much news coming out of there. He appeared—it was in the full and wane of the moon, I believe, as it always has been. His music was heard in the woods; cattle were killed, everything the way they say it’s happened in other places. Then he showed himself in an open field near the village—played and sang, although my friend said it was more like reciting an outlandish poetry, and he felt he could understand some of it, almost. And the tiger stood by him like—shall I tell you how my friend described him?”
“Oh dear! Your friend is an—ah—imaginative type?”
“Not in the least. My friend says the tiger stood there beside the youth like a river of fire made flesh. And when he roared, once, the village people fell on their faces, and my friend did not hear them pray to Abraham. After the youth had done singing and turned away into the woods, an old woman hobbled after him, and that was when my friend could still see the brown and gold of the tiger slipping away under the trees.”
“How it repeats! An old woman. Always the old or the halt or the sick. Oh dear! The children were kept indoors, I suppose?”
“Yes. One thi
ng was a little different, Father—at least I haven’t heard it in accounts of the other appearances. At Grayval it seems the old woman not only wished to go, but was encouraged to do so by her own people—days in advance, when the music was first heard in the woods. My friend couldn’t discover that they had any spite against her; on the contrary she seems to have been well liked. And he says, Father—he says she wore a garland of May flowers.”
“How’s that? A garland?”
“A garland of May flowers, and when she tottered off into the woods they saw her smile like a girl going to her bridegroom. . . . Father MacAllister, it is on the way to becoming a cult.”
“My God! Yes, I begin to see. Well, Baron, it won’t do, it won’t do. We must eliminate it before it grows.”
Baron Ashoka murmured: “It seems that even in Old Time it was found very difficult to eliminate a cult—any cult.”
“Old Time? Don’t give me ancient history!—we’ll have trouble enough as it is. It’s got to be stopped. Oh dear! Just when everything was so peaceful—but really, Baron, who ever heard of a man walking around with a tiger? It’s not in nature.”
“My mare shied twice coming up the road this evening. She’s a very steady little thing—hardly ever known her to do it.”
“My God, Baron, you’re not suggesting this monster would venture near consecrated ground!”
“Well, she did quiet down as soon as we were inside the monastery walls. Noticed the difference right away.”
“What’s Father Clark doing about all this? It’s his parish. I hope there’s no implication, Baron, that toe are supposed to—ah—take measures? We are a contemplative order.” The old man was up and pacing the room, making the sign of the Wheel on his chest. “You’re aware, Baron, it’s our prescribed duty to remain retired from the world so that we may praise God and the works of his son Abraham, and live by the Ancient Rule that comes down to us from days far beyond Old Time itself, a most holy thing. Eh? Well, what’s Father Clark doing?”
“I’ve talked with him about it only once, Father. He seemed—I would say, resigned.”
“Now I know that man!” the Abbot cried. “He’s a do-nothing. He’ll let that tiger thing move right in on you. He ought to be ready to go forth against it, exorcise it with the power and in the name of the holy Wheel whereon Abraham died for our sins! But not Father Clark. Not that I have a word to say against him, of course—very faithful to his flock, yes yes.” The Abbot sat down clumsily, short of breath, and reached for the wine. “We are, by tradition, by our own law and the wish of the Church, a contemplative order.”
“I have it in mind to ask one thing of you, Father MacAllister. I intend to be with the posse when the confrontation comes if it does. There’s been idiot talk about this beast turning arrows, about arrows passing through the youth without harming him. Soon we’ll be hearing of other—huh!—miracles. I haven’t patience for that sort of thing. It’s a betrayal of human intelligence.”
“Baron, is human intelligence so mighty?”
“I do not say it is. But I think this is an occasion when we must defend it.”
“I’d be happier, my son, if you had said that enthusiasm for evil miracles, whether fraudulent or of the Devil, is a betrayal of God.”
“Oh, that too, Father, that too, certainly.”
“It has just occurred to me that the prior of St. Henry’s at Nupal, somewhat a friend of mine though I can’t altogether approve the extent of his secular activities, often goes hunting with the local nobility—it does, I suppose, help to maintain good relations between two estates of the realm; anyhow, it so happens that he maintains a small pack of northern wolfhounds some of which, I dare say—ah—at a word from me, he might be willing to lend, with their trainer, in a good cause. I do not urge it, I do not altogether approve, but—but—”
“They’d be very handy to have, Father. What I wanted to ask of you was something else. I think I must be the one to lead the posse against this—monstrosity, with spear and sword and bow; also, I hope, with the blessing of the Church and the aid of your prayers, Father Abbot.”
“But of course, my son.”
“It is long since I have confessed. My sins are many, and heavy on me. Cleanse my soul, Father Abbot, and bless me before I go.”
* * * *
Bruno moved toward the music with the confidence that may waken when the heart commands and the mind waives protest. A music such as Bruno had never imagined, pure-toned yet with a hint of reediness that bound it to the earth of grass and forest and stream. The melody’s intervals were not alien to music he had heard in his village, and in the church where Janet’s voice was clearest and truest of the choir—indeed if this music resembled any other it might be Janet’s soprano when it went skylarking above the imperfect dull singing of the rest. But Bruno was not thinking, not making comparisons. He moved toward the music, to the summit of the knoll, to the flat rock where Tiger Boy sat playing and the tiger lay out beside him, tawny gold turned to black and silver by the moon, a river of fire made flesh.
Having come so far, standing by the rock under the other’s regard and observing the tiger’s lifted head, Bruno understood he ought to be afraid. But Tiger Boy finished the air he was playing—it had not wavered when Bruno appeared; and when it ended he patted the rock beside him: who could be afraid of that? The pipes idle in his hand were of a design unknown to Bruno, slender tubes of graded length, hollow reeds, Bruno thought, bound together with vine. The youth with the long locks and clever hands was asking him, no such unwanted questions as Who are you? or Why have you come? or What do you want? but only: “Do you like my music?”
Bruno nodded. Then slowly and carefully, wishing only to be understood and not required to go away, he whispered: “I have no voice. I can speak only this way.” The tiger swung its enormous head to study him more intensely, perhaps disturbed by the uncommon small sound. “But sometimes I think poems.”
“Tell me one,” said Tiger Boy, and laid a quiet arm over Bruno’s shoulders. Tiger Boy was naked and brown, dark like Bruno but with hair lighter than his-skin, and he smelled of leaf mold and wild thyme.
He is white under this moon as sand
where waves have gone over it
on the sea beaches.
He is black under this moon as the mold
that pleased me when I pushed away the pine
needles
and lay breathing the spice of forest noon,
thinking of the friend who had not then come
to me.
Surely the stripes are shadows cast by marsh lilies
when the sun smiled on him:
surely in the day he is a child of the sun
and plays delighted at the foot of the rainbow.
“I like that,” said Tiger Boy, “and it’s easy for me to understand you. A voice isn’t everything. Tell me one more, Poet, and then no more until tomorrow, for I want to think about them, these first poems of yours I’ve heard, and taste them again, and have them go on speaking in me when I’m sleeping and when I play my pipes.”
Bruno whispered: “I’ll be with you tomorrow?”
“If you desire it,” said Tiger Boy, and smiled. “I hope you do.”
I am a stream in flood
with all the weight of thoughts, the fallen leaves
that pile in confusion if the stream is dammed
by the stone of your absence, as just now because
you looked away from me.
See how the flood runs free!
And all my thoughts have caught a thousand colors
not of my common day, because you turned
facing the flood and welcoming my presence
and looked again on me.
“Is there anything in the village, Poet, you would not want to leave behind you?”
The question troubled Bruno for a truthful answer. There was much in the village that he loved: Janet’s voice escaping from the choir like a breeze rushing for the clouds; Fath
er Clark who (he sometimes dreamed) might have begotten him in some fierce .uprising of passion of a kind that married people apparently lost or never knew. There were the village gardens sheltered by lilacs from the dust of the street; the dogs and cats and goats and chickens who never acted afraid of him when he happened by (perhaps these animals are not as delighted by the human voice as we sometimes suppose); the paths and good hidden places of the woods and pastures; and he thought of the red and gold and purple body of Mount Orlook in the autumn under a late sun. There were the white small beaches of the Hudson Sea less than an hour’s journey from the village, where he had once ventured alone at night, when younger and reckless with ignorance of the dangers, in order to watch moonlight on the water. There were all these, and many other pleasures and little loves. But then he considered Tiger Boy’s question, in the manner of one who loves words and cherishes the life in them that they will not show forth to those who do not care about them, and he understood: he would want to leave any place, however familiar and dear, where he would not be in the company of Tiger Boy. Therefore Bruno shook his head, and the transitory smile appeared on his mouth, remaining there longer than at any time in the past.
“Then my search is over,” said Tiger Boy, “if you will go with me and be my friend forever.”
Universe 2 - [Anthology] Page 21
