Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  Melissa sighs; the pink plastic rabbits bob and disappear. A moment later, I catch sight of her in a knot of trebles: April, Gwen, and Morton’s friend. Jess. Troublemaker. The straw that breaks the camel’s back. The feather that unbalances the scale. She isn’t really doing anything wrong, but I can feel her in every piece we sing, coloring it with her uncertainty. I frown at her through the straggle of bodies returning to their seats. Catching my eye, she smiles back. I want to kill her.

  Henry leads the first hymn after break, and April and Ben the two after that. I’m not stupid. I know they’re all out there hating me right now, like a bunch of teenagers who’ve been told that they’re not working up to their potential.

  They work really hard to show me that it’s all my fault, and they make a pretty good job of it. I mean, they’re almost on pitch, and their entrances are reasonably solid, and since break, they seem to have learned how to count. Maybe it’s the O.J. or the hard candy. Or maybe they’re right, and I’m a bad musician and a worse leader. Maybe they’d be better off if I just walked out of here and never came back, took up clog-dancing or something where I could make a fool only of myself. They seem to like that Jess woman; maybe they’ll elect her chairman, once she’s learned the names of the notes.

  I wish they’d all go to hell.

  I’ve set “The Weary Pilgrim” as the next hymn, but I change my mind and call “Melancholy Day.”

  The words to shape-note hymns come in four main flavors: praise, resignation, entreaty, and admonition. By secular humanist standards, they’re pretty unenlightened, and “Melancholy Day” is one of the most unenlightened of the lot: “Death, ’tis a melancholy day to those who have no God, When the poor soul is forced away to seek her last abode. In vain to heav’n she lifts her eyes, for guilt, a heavy chain, Still drags her downward from the skies, to darkness, fire and pain.” It has a good, rousing melody, too, and a bitch of a running fugue.

  Nobody’s cutting anybody any slack. I beat out a brisk pace and they leap after my hand like hungry dogs. They’re mad and on their mettle and all warmed up, and by God, they’re singing the hell out of “Melancholy Day.” The basses roar deep in the shadows; the trebles, brightened by a clear, full-throated voice that has to be Jess, highlight each curve of the fugue with high Gs and B-flats. Everyone’s looking more cheerful. As I release the final note, I catch sight of Jess. Her cheeks are red, her eyes are unnaturally bright, her bad haircut is standing straight up in front, and she’s grinning like the village idiot. I feel the corners of my mouth twitch. What the hell, I think, and say, “Want to try one, Jess?”

  Melissa, who has gone back to her usual cow-like placidity, bristles up again. Behind me, in the tenor section, I hear Morton go, “Oh, shit.” I get mad again.

  “I don’t know what you guys want from me,” I say. “I’m making an offer here, in good faith, and you act like I’ve come out for shooting baby ducks. If Jess wants to lead the next hymn, she can. If Morton wants to lead it, or Melissa, or Fred or Ben or April, they can. They’ll have to. Because that was my last hymn. You guys give me a swift pain. You don’t care about the music or how hard I’ve worked or anything but your Tuesday night get-togethers. Well, now you can get together all you want and talk about what a bitch I am. Have fun. I’m quitting.”

  I close my hymnal and snatch up my coat and my boots and my scarf and my clipboard and my Xeroxed sheets and stalk out of the hall to the church porch, where I dump everything on a bench. Outside, the wind herds sleet noisily around the corner of the building. I may be mad enough to cut my own social throat, but I’m not mad enough to walk out into a winter storm without a coat. It’s cold in the porch, and I’m shivering as I pull on my boots, cram my watch-cap down over my eyebrows, wrap my muffler up over my mouth, and button myself into my gray down coat that makes me look like the Michelin Tire man. I tamp my papers even and go to put them in my backpack.

  No backpack. Not on the bench, not on the floor. I’ve left it in the church hall, and if I don’t want to trudge out to my car in blowing snow with my arms full of loose papers and risk the cover of my hymnal bleeding all over my gray down coat, I’m going to have to go inside and get it.

  I wish I was dead.

  And I go on wishing it as I open the door and stalk back into the hall I left so melodramatically five minutes ago. Nobody’s moved except Melissa, who is standing in the middle of the square with her hymnal in her hand. On my side, my ass.

  I step into the square. My backpack is under my chair, grinning a gap-zippered and mocking grin. “Gretchen,” says Melissa slowly. “We were about to sing ‘Rose of Sharon.’ Will you lead it?”

  “Nope,” I say. “I just quit.”

  “It’s your favorite hymn,” she says.

  “I know it’s my favorite hymn. That’s why I don’t want to hear it tortured to death.”

  “If you’re quitting, what do you care?”

  I can’t read her tone, and I can’t read the choir. They look solemn, almost grim, but I’m damned if I can tell what they’re thinking. Probably that I look like an idiot standing there sweating in my Michelin Man coat and my watch-cap and my muffler, and that I’ll look like an idiot whether I take Melissa at her word or walk out again. A lose-lose situation. I’m used to those. The trick is to do the thing they really don’t want you to do, which, in this case, is to stay.

  “OK,” I say. “‘Rose of Sharon’ it is. ‘I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley.’”

  Silence. Silence while I shed my winter-proofing; silence while I find my place and my pitch-pipe; silence while I raise my hand. On the downbeat the trebles come in on Sol, round and clear as a Raphael madonna. Five measures later, the altos join them on the upbeat, Sol and Fa. Our voices blend, tone on tone, layer on layer, shivering with overtones like heat lightning in the desert. We’re one big instrument, an organ piped through forty throats, sending our hymn to heaven. The music swells to bursting, and then it does burst, and the air trembles and explodes into an angel.

  Although I’ve never seen an angel before and I’m not what you’d call a religious person, it never crosses my mind to question what I’m seeing. It’s more beautiful then I could have imagined, with eyes like suns and hair like glory and wings like a thousand rainbows flickering all around it. Still singing, I gawk up at it; our eyes meet, the world inverts, and suddenly I’m suspended between heaven and earth, floating in music.

  The first thing I notice is that I’m happy. Happy? Ecstatic. Blissful. Joy runs through me like blood, burning in my cheeks and pulsing in the soft feathers of my wings. Joy informs my vision, sharpens it so that I can see every scratch in the heavy beams upholding the church tower, every tiny insect living in its cracks and corners, every prayer that has been prayed here. I can see the choir, mouths and throats working, a fourfold unity every bit as mysterious as Divinity. I see each pore of their skin, each hair of their heads, each nail, each eyelash in all their fleshly presence. And beyond and behind that, I can see their souls, their complex, eternal selves.

  I could understand them in a myriad ways, but the clearest to me is paintings and music. Melissa is a mastiff painted by Frida Kahlo and scored by Aaron Copland. Morton is a Monet garden set to Wagner. Jess is a Dürer engraving of a hare twitching its nose to Philip Glass. Each holds one shape for a moment and then drifts as I watch into another form, another mode, another composition of line and spirit different from the one preceding it, but allied. Secure in eternity, I contemplate the multiplicity of the souls and the singleness of the purpose that have called and created me.

  In the center of the choral square a single figure stands islanded. She’s the horse from Picasso’s Guernica, angular and agonized, and the horse from Guernica she remains, petrified in terrified fury. The music that defines her is a shape-note hymn, repeated endlessly. As I focus on her, the melody drops away and leaves only the words, chanted in a voiceless howl: “And must I be to judgment brought and answer in that day / For every vain
and idle thought and every word I say?”

  That’s not right, I think. She’s got it all wrong. And I reach down and brush her cheek with one of my thousand wings. “Rejoice,” I sing. “Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings, thy better portion trace. Rise from all terrestrial things toward heaven, thy native place.”

  Below me, “Rose of Sharon” paces slowly to its end. We end up in a perfect chord, La, Sol, Fa, Fa, so absolutely on pitch that harmonics sound the octaves above and below it, as if the whole heavenly choir were singing with us. The figure in the square—a woman atomized, a Picasso or a Braque—closes her mouth, brings down her hand and the tower is empty, the singers silent, and I’m standing among them, my cheek tingling.

  “Wow,” says someone, breaking the mood of exaltation, or at least making it bearable. People start to breathe and move again, fold their chairs, clean up the stage, put on their coats, and drift slowly toward the door. Nobody’s talking a lot, but everybody’s smiling, and there’s a lot of spontaneous hugging. They’re like that around here, even without angels.

  The hall is almost empty when I finally pull myself together. Melissa’s still there, and Morton and Jess, putting on their coats. As I collect my belongings from the middle of the empty floor, Melissa comes up to me. Her plastic rabbits are tucked away under a huge purple knitted tam with a bright green bobble. She shakes my hand.

  “A great singing, Gretchen,” she says. “I look forward to next week.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Me too. You want to warm us up?”

  Melissa smiles, and I think I hear an echo of Appalachian Spring. “Sure,” she says. “Bye.”

  Jess gives my arm a punch in passing. “Thanks,” I say, and she nods.

  “Nice music. I’ll be back.”

  “Good,” I say.

  Morton holds out his arms, offering an embrace. I intercept his right hand and shake it firmly, vaguely relieved that seeing an angel hasn’t turned me into an indiscriminate hugger.

  Outside, the wind has let up and the sleet has softened into snow. Everything’s white-feathered—the gray stone church, the parking lot, the markers in the old graveyard. The ground is cold and slick and treacherous underfoot. But as I pick my way carefully towards my car, I’m humming “Rose of Sharon,” and my face is warm with the touch of an angel’s wing.

  The Printer’s Daughter

  On the morning of All Hallow’s Eve, Hal Spurtle sat at the window of his shop and watched the children play. They were ragged children, as it was a ragged street, their faces and caps smudged with dirt and their petticoats and breeches tattered as old paper. Grave as judges, they linked hands and danced sunwise, chanting the while in their bird-shrill voices.

  Thread the needle, thread the needle,

  Eye, eye, eye.

  Thread the needle, thread the needle,

  Eye, eye, eye.

  The tailor’s blind and he can’t see,

  So we must thread the needle.

  Hal remembered singing that rhyme himself. He’d taught it to his young sisters as they played on a Shoreditch street that differed from this not so much as milk from cream. As he watched little Rose and Ned Ashcroft, Anne and Katty and Jane Dunne winding up and down the cobbles, he told the rhyme over to himself, very soft.

  Hal sighed and turned his eyes back to the trays of type, the compositor’s stick, and the manuscript pages stacked alongside. The collected sermons of the good Dr. Beswick, passed by the Queen’s censor and writ down in the Register of the Company of Stationers. Dull as an old knife, but legal to print and to sell, making a change from the bawdy broadsides, the saucy quartos, the unblushingly filthy octavos that made up the greater part of his stock-in-trade. The great pornographer Arentino himself might have turned color at The Cuckold’s Mery Iest and expired of shame at In Praise of Pudding-Pricks. But it had been a matter of Necessity the son riding before Caution the father, for on being made free of the Company of Stationers, Hal must needs set up shop for himself, though he could scarce afford a press and its furniture. To pay for which, Hal must needs converse with scarcity and rogues, until by chance a country clergyman approached him with a manuscript of sermons and a purse to pay for their printing.

  Hal’s old master, John Day, would have done the job in a week, but John Day had two ’prentices to ink, cut pages, and distribute type, as well as compositors, pressmen, gatherers, folders, and binders to do the other work. Hal, working man-alone, had been at the business two weeks already, with Dr. Beswick threatening to take his sermons and his ten pounds elsewhere, God take the thought from him; for his ten pounds were even now scattered like grain among Hal’s creditors.

  Furthermore, Hal himself was weak and weary with poor feeding, and as like to drop a line of type as bring it whole to the imposing-table. On All Hallow’s Eve, he did that once or twice, and then he transposed two lines of type, the which cost him fifty sheets of best French Imperial, and over-inked a plate with so free a hand that he must pour the piss-pot over it to cleanse it. Not three impressions later, he did the same again, whereupon Hal consigned Dr. Beswick and his sermons to the most noisesome deep of Hell; viz, Satan’s arsehole. For over-inking was such a monkey’s trick as he’d not been guilty of for fifteen years or more.

  An apprentice would serve the present need, he thought; a likely, lively lad content to live upon pulp and printer’s ink, a lad who never reversed lines nor set them arsy-versy. But Hal well knew that were there such a ’prentice in London, he’d never bind himself to a press where half the texts were unlicensed and the other half unlicensable. His eyes falling upon the twists of paper from In Praise of Pudding-Pricks and Dr. Beswick’s sermons, equally damned by their ill-printing, piled in the corner where an apprentice might sleep, Hal gathered up divers sheets and twisted them into skinny arms and legs, wrapped scraps and wads into a lumpy head and carcass, and bound the whole with thread into human shape. When it was done, he shook his head over the poor, blind face, and taking up ink and pen, carefully limned features: a button nose, doe’s eyes, and a Cupid’s mouth. He thought it favored his small sister Kate.

  The wind, having risen with the moon, came hunting down the narrow street for mischief, the which it found in the shape of Hal’s window shutter. Howling, it pounced upon the latch and tore it open and slapped the wood to and fro against the glass. Hal laid his poppet upon a nest of paper and ran out-a-doors to catch it. He had just put the shutter up and was going in again when a small, straddling fellow clawed him by the elbow and would not be put by.

  “I seek Hal Spurtle the printer’s,” he said.

  “I am Hal Spurtle,” said Hal. “What would you with me?”

  “To go within,” said the man. “My business is not for the common street.”

  Loath was Hal to oblige him, the hour being late and none save rogues likely to be abroad. Yet rogues were the chiefest part of his custom; and so he brought the stranger into the shop. In the lamplight the man proved a veritable Methuselah, with a face like a shelled walnut and a back like the hoop of a cart. His hands and stump-trimmed beard were vilely stained, and there hung a stink about him of sulphur and brimstone. By which signs Hal understood the stranger to be an alchemist, the which he further understood to be a filthy trade and unlawful. So it was with faint courtesy that he demanded of the old man once again why he sought Hal Spurtle the printer?

  “To give him a job of work,” answered the alchemist, and poked and patted in his gown until he found a thick sheaf of vellum tied with tape, the which he handed to Hal, who took it as gingerly as may be.

  “Untie it. ’Twill not eat thee,” said the man.

  Slowly, Hal did so, uncovering a page writ margin to margin in secretary hand, damnably crabbed. Forty pages in quarto, or perhaps fifty, say two weeks to set and print if the edition were not large. He squinted at the tiny, curling letters.

  Liquor conioynyth male with female wife,

  And causith dede thingis to resorte to lyfe.

  Hal dropped the manuscrip
t hastily. “Your job of work could bring me to my neck verse, granddad.”

  “In Praise of Pudding-Pricks could lose thee thy right hand, or any of the bawdry thou dost use to print. This goose is only more highly spiced, and lays golden eggs besides. An edition of thirteen copies, printed as accurate as may be, sewn for binding. Shall we say twenty crowns?”

  Hal’s teeth watered at the sum. Twenty crowns would rid him of his debts and buy him a new font of type, an apprentice, even a pressman who knew a platen from a frisket. Before he could gather his wits to say yea or nay, the old man said, “It must be done by Sunday moonrise, mind, or ’tis no good to me.”

  “Sunday moonrise! Why did you not come to me earlier, pray? I cannot set, proof, print, and sew thirteen copies in two days, not if I worked without stop or let from dawn to dawn. The thing’s impossible. As well ask a cat to pull a cart.”

  “You have no apprentice?”

  “I have not, sir. An had I the two apprentices the law allows, yea, and twenty journeymen, too, still the job would take a week or more. And I’ve another book promised and owing must take precedence.”

  The old man peered shortsightedly into the shadows. “Yet I thought I saw an apprentice as I came in—a lad sleeping on a pallet, there in the corner.”

  Hall followed the goodman’s gaze to the poppet he’d made. It did look uncommonly like a sleeping child. “’Tis naught,” he said shortly. “A pile of paper.”

  The old man heaved himself upright, took up the lamp, and hobbled over to see for himself. “An homunculus, as I am a man! You’d not said you dabbled in the Art, Master Spurtle.”

  Hall crossed himself. “God forbid, sir.”

  The old man’s crow-bright eye pierced Hal’s skull from brow to bald spot. “Art lonely, lad?”