A Green and Ancient Light

by Frederic S. Durbin

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  FOR MY AUNTS, AND UNCLE LES,

  WHO BELIEVED FROM THE BEGINNING;

  FOR EVANGELINE, WHOSE BOOK THIS IS;

  AND FOR JULIE, ALWAYS.

  I

  remember the plane hurtling above the village. It left a trail of thick gray smoke, and its engine roared and coughed. Grandmother and I were working in the garden, digging potatoes. We could see the plane was an enemy fighter, part of the squadron we’d heard earlier as it growled north, heading up the coast. Now alone, skimming the mountain slopes, the plane dove toward us like a sorrowful, stricken angel. I was on my feet by the time it careened right over our heads. Its shadow made the sun above me blink.

  Grandmother uttered a reproachful sound, her digging-fork across her knees as she tipped back her hard brown face, shielding her eyes from the glare. She didn’t spring to her feet as I did. Nothing about the war ever made Grandmother dash to the window or pace the floor or otherwise put herself out. She didn’t watch caravans, and she pretended not to listen to bulletins on the radio; she clucked her tongue when they interrupted the orchestra broadcasts, though she never actually switched them off. But neither did she stop snapping beans or darning socks. And I never saw anyone draw her into speculation on how things were going for the troops.

  We could see the enemy insignia on the wings, and a row of bullet holes ran the length of the fuselage. There was an ­explosion; black smoke billowed. The engine sputtered out entirely, and flames rolled back over the cockpit. I dashed to the corner of the house to continue watching. With an eerie silence, the plane cleared the orchards and the front street; it missed the fishing boats in the green harbor, and it missed the rocks. Out where the sea deepened to blue, it smashed into the waves, throwing up a tower of spray.

  I turned to look at Grandmother. My eyes must have been wide, and I think my mouth was open. My feet were tugging me into the side yard. Grandmother began scratching in the soil again, with a little grunt that meant, “Well, that’s that.”

  But seeing that my knees wouldn’t bend, my feet wouldn’t be still, she said, “Go on, then. Run down and see.” There was no disapproval in her tone. She was talking to a nine-year-old boy for whom a great many things were intriguing: moths on the screen, moss, the squirming life beneath rotted logs, and planes that fell from the sky.

  Quite a crowd had gathered on the front street: people on ­bicycles, fishermen knee-deep in piles of nets, three sisters from the abbey clutching their rosaries and looking paler than usual—and of course children from near and far, wriggling over fences, pounding along the dusty lanes—everyone pointing and talking at once.

  “It exploded,” someone said. Indeed, a last, thick plume of black smoke hovered over the waves, at the end of the gray swath across the sky. “I thought it was coming right down on the street!”

  “Rattled the cans on the shelves,” said Mr. B ——, the grocer. He had white hair and black sideburns, which seemed to me the opposite of how most men’s hair turned white.

  “Woke me up from a nap,” said someone else. “I was sure they were dive-bombing the cannery!”

  “Don’t like it this close. Don’t like it at all.”

  “Nothing left of that plane. Went straight to the bottom, I guess.”

  “He’s a goner. That’s no way to die, theirs or ours.”

  A woman in a green print dress kept smoothing her hair, as if the wind from the warbird’s passing had left her in hopeless dis­array. Two boys jabbered about how they’d thought the plane would hit the boats. They glanced at me but were more interested in the plane for now; children in the village generally seemed curious about me, but we rarely crossed paths—boys my age kept busy helping their elders on the docks or in the vegetable gardens, and I wasn’t out of the cottage in the evenings when they might have been free. I wasn’t opposed to making friends here, but mostly I missed my two closest friends back home.

  The wind picked up, scattering the smoke. A little yellow dog ran through the crowd, barking and wagging its curly tail.

  Climbing over the low stone wall, I stepped out of my battered shoes and padded across the wet sand, right to the water’s edge between piers. At this end of the village, the land sloped down gently to the shore, and there were no cliffs. The sea-smell washed over me, huge and fishy and humid, with that dank hint of all that it hid, ancient wrecks and monsters that made whales look like minnows. Gulls screeched, riding the wind currents. Beside me, a tiny crab scuttled across a rock, and a raisin box bobbed, its sides puckered and bleached nearly white. Sand oozed between my toes; a wave rolled in, and soon my pant legs were drenched to the knees.

  I could look right out through the harbor mouth to where the plane had gone down. There was not a sign of it now. Only the waves rose and fell, their edges dazzling in the light.

  * * * *

  I won’t tell you my name or that of the village where I spent that spring and summer when I was nine. I won’t because you should realize there were towns just like it and boys just like me all around the sea—and in other countries beyond the mountains, and all over the world. We awoke in our nights to the growl of trucks, the barking of loudspeakers. (I was one of the fortunate, for whom the guns were a rumble in the distance.) The men in our families were soldiers now, regardless of what they’d been before; many were already dead. The women worked in factories, in hospitals, or stayed at home to care for the very young.

  And then there were those like me: too old to be carried about, too young to work or fight. We were sent off to the countryside where no one thought bombs would fall. We came to know our relatives, old people who had known our parents in another time. In my case, it was only for the late spring and summer, while my mother was getting used to a new job and my baby sister was a newborn. (Schooling in those years was haphazard. Sirens interrupted classes. High-school boys went to war, and classrooms became factories where girls sewed. A season later, my elementary school closed entirely for two years.) I might have been of consider­able help to my mother; I was old enough for that. But my father felt strongly that it was time I got to know my grandmother.

  It is a strange thing to spend your days with a person connected to you only by the link of someone you both hold dear, but the young one they knew is not quite the same as the older one you know. It’s like talking to someone through a hedge. Now and then, you see an outline, the edge of a face between leaves. You can only walk along in search of a gate.

  On the table beside my bed at Grandmother’s cottage, I kept a framed photo of the four of us: my papa in his Army captain’s uniform, his eyes alight with kindness, one arm around my mama and one hand on my shoulder; my mama, cradling m
y newborn sister, holding her so that her little face showed, Mama’s face inclined as if she’d only just managed to turn her gaze toward the camera as the shutter opened. And there I was, looking uncomfortable in my school coat and tie, my hair sticking up though my mama had just combed it down. I looked at the picture so much that spring and summer that I knew every shadow in it, every wrinkle of clothing; I could see our faces when I wasn’t looking at it. In the picture, both my parents were smiling as if there were no cares in the world.

  I loved the letters Mama sent me here, warm and full of the hugs and kisses that embarrassed me in public but that I was glad for in writing. She would give me reports on the castle—Papa and I had built a castle out of wood, complete with turrets and a drawbridge, and I had painted it all; it sat on a table in my room but was too big and delicate to bring here. So, my mother would write to me about the weather over the castle, about the feasts they were having in the great hall. She tried to tell me about the knights and their quests, but she didn’t understand that part very well. It was all right. I was always happy to hear that the King and Queen were well, that no enemies had invaded. I wrote back to her and to my father, though I knew it took longer for mail to reach him. Grandmother didn’t read the letters I wrote or the ones I received. “That’s your business,” she said, which was a new arrangement for me, that I might have “business” apart from that of the grown-ups around me. She taught me once what to say at the post office, showed me the jar where I could find coins for posting letters, and after that, I was on my own.

  I missed my parents, but I had stopped crying for them in the dark hours. After a few weeks in the village, our city began to feel like a distant dream. I knew it was real, that if I rode the train again, it would be there, and its bricks would become the reality once more, and this village would be the dream. One person, I’d come to understand, was actually many people—people of different ages, people who lived in different surroundings; these people all had the same name and knew something of each other, but they lived entirely separate lives.

  * * * *

  It was a wondrous village Grandmother lived in. I was used to straight, level streets, advertising signs and honking cars, puddles and dodging bicycles and people who hurried along with blank faces. There was more sun in Grandmother’s village, and ordinary life seemed half like a festival. People stopped to talk when they met, setting down their shopping baskets. There were benches everywhere that seemed placed for this purpose, often roofed by trellises of flowering vines. Many shops had open fronts all day, the wares spilling out and piled in the street.

  I’d never seen streets like these! They wandered as if a great wave had washed up through the village, its water coursing among the buildings, finding a thousand ways eventually back to the sea; and these runnels had left magical sand that had hardened into cobbles, flint paths, and lanes of hard-packed earth. At its end farthest from Grandmother’s house, half of the village climbed a cliff, so the streets there would turn without warning into steep stairways. There were no posted names, no numbers on doors or lanes. People would emerge from gates beneath ceilings of vines, from doors set right into the rock, and I always wanted to crane my neck and peer past them, sure I might glimpse stairs winding down to kingdoms under the ground where the light came from jewels in the walls.

  Down at the cliff ’s foot, the sea had carved out high-rimmed basins and caves where the waves rushed in through narrow mouths, flooding the rocks with surges of foam. Grandmother had led me there in the first week, and we’d watched the scurrying crabs, our faces wet with spray, our ears half-deafened by the sea’s roaring. “People have drowned here,” Grandmother yelled beside me, her grip fierce on my arm. “Do not ever come back here alone. Do you understand?” I nodded, sensing how important it was to her. She’d wanted to show me these merciless sea-basins before I discovered them on my own.

  * * * *

  A day or two after the trip to the cliff ’s foot, I learned Grand­mother’s other sacred commandment, but this one she didn’t warn me about. It happened like this.

  I’d made my first trip alone to the post office, mailed letters to both my parents, and was feeling quite happy with myself as I returned toward her cottage down the main street, which at our end of the village was wide and mostly straight. I kicked a series of pebbles, overtaking one and kicking it ahead of me until it bounced too far aside, then choosing another. As I admired the dense, round tops of some orchard trees, I came alongside Mrs. D ——, whom I knew to be Grandmother’s friend. Mrs. D —— had a round face like a china plate and small, sparkly eyes. She laughed pleasantly and often, and she had a way of asking one question after another, so that you could get only about half an answer in for each question and you wondered whether she was even listening. As I got near Mrs. D ——, I saw that she was carry­ing her wicker basket from the shops and a parcel besides, and remembering my manners, I offered to carry them for her. She lived not far from Grandmother’s, and on the way.

  “What a gentleman you are!” she exclaimed, gladly handing them over. They were both quite heavy. “Just like your father. Oh, he was a fine boy, and he is a fine man, and it’s no accident, because you come from fine stock!”

  “Thank you,” I said. I’d only ever heard “stock” in reference to cows, and I wondered how it was that our family had come from cows, or what exactly Mrs. D —— meant.

  “Are you settling in? It must be so different for you here, so quiet, and none of your friends about, just us old folks, and our funny ways, our speaking—it’s the sea-speech. We sound like the gulls, I suppose, like the waves all rolling, one into another. Mumbling like the ocean. The city-folk say they can’t make pails or pitchers out of what we say. Can you understand the people?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, supposing that a “Yes” answered more of her questions than it didn’t.

  “And as smart as white gloves!” she cried proudly, patting my shoulder as if I’d won the races. “But of course you would be a smart one, your father’s son, and M ——’s grandson. Sharp as shears, the whole family! I must tell you, I’m honored to call your grandmother a friend! And a wonderful friend she’s always been.”

  I nodded and smiled, readjusting the parcel.

  “But how about you; I want to know more about you! What do you like about our village? Aren’t the flowers pretty? We take great care with our flowers! ‘You can grow them beautiful only if the heart has good soil’—that’s what we say!”

  She paused expectantly, but I wasn’t sure how to answer. I wasn’t entirely convinced the question had much to do with me at all.

  “The flowers are very pretty,” I said. “And I love the trees. The mountains—it’s all so green. It’s like the woods go on forever.”

  Mrs. D —— looked taken aback, which surprised me. “H’m. Well, yes. The woods go on, but they’re no place to be. There are wild animals, and worse things.”

  “Worse things?” I was suddenly much more interested.

  Her sparkly eyes looked away from me, up toward the endless ranks of the treetops on the mountainsides. “I’m sure your grandmother doesn’t want you going up there, and she’d be a fair sight better than me at telling you. But it’s best not even to think very loud about the forest. Where the sun doesn’t go and the salt breeze can’t blow away the cobwebs, no good can happen, and that’s a fact. Witch-weasels and sickle-winds, and old Mr. Clubfoot with his hollow back—lots of no good in the woods.” She shook herself like I’d seen a friend of my mother’s do when eating a pickle. “Enough of that! You’re safe down here. ‘Mountains for woods, and houses for people.’”

  I nodded, thoroughly intrigued. It was clear to me that Mrs. D —— thought the woods were every bit as deadly as Grandmother told me the sea-basins were. Grandmother’s caution made perfect sense to me, but I believed the best of trees. I wondered at how anyone could be afraid of any gathering of peaceful giants
that grew from nuts over decades or centuries with such patience, such purpose. Granted, I had never been into a deep wood. But this one above the village called to me.

  Mrs. D —— dove back into her comfortable nest of topics. “Did you have a garden in the city? Nearly everyone has a garden here! ‘A house without a garden is a rock in the sand.’ I’m sure you help M —— with her garden, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I was learning to answer quickly, in the instant that Mrs. D —— took a breath.

  “Hers is one of the loveliest in the village, and she uses every inch of it so well, the moss and the shade and the sunny stretches! A greener thumb I’ve not seen. And always a marvel, always some changes every year. We old folks are set in our ways, but your grandmother has a young heart, a young heart, I’ve always said, like the princess in the old story that sees the world new each morning—do you know that one?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. I’d thought I knew all the fairy tales, but I didn’t know that one. Maybe the village folk had different ones.

  “‘Looking-glass, candle, moon on the sea’!” said Mrs. D ——, and I supposed she was telling me a part of the fairy tale. But she raced on, as she always did. “We look forward each year, I can tell you, to what she’ll plant where, what will sprout out of this corner or that! She must be planting now—are you helping her plant these days?”

  I nodded, thinking of the hours Grandmother and I had already spent digging and filling hanging pots, filling window-boxes, transplanting shoots from indoors to outdoors, opening envelopes of last year’s seeds that Grandmother had carefully labeled.

  “And what are you putting into those long boxes under the front windows, where the sun shines so nice?”

  Without a thought, I answered. I’d learned the name from Grandmother, and I’d repeated it to myself over and over because it sounded like a long-ago kingdom: “Setcreasea.”