* * * *
In the morning, Grandmother bustled and clattered, going to and from the summer kitchen by the side door, complaining about how the couch had given her a stiff back.
“It’s a fine morning,” she said. “Let’s have breakfast at the garden table. Then we’ll go on a spy mission to the market and hear what we can hear.”
The ideas of breakfast and market made me think. “What if R —— wakes up and is hungry?” I asked. “He’ll need food and water.”
“Girandole will take care of him, if R —— is alive. You mustn’t get your hopes up about that. But even if he’s alive, I doubt he’ll be in any condition to eat yet.”
Grandmother had made it a point to tell me the names of everyone she knew—and she seemed to know the whole village. She was forever introducing me to people, and we could rarely walk down the street without running into someone who wanted to stand and talk.
Today, the village buzzed with nervous tension and a wild excitement that no one would have admitted to. A single enemy lurking somewhere, possibly injured, and most likely trying to stay hidden, was just dangerous enough to be thrilling without presenting a cause for real alarm. In the bakery, Mrs. P —— said that she’d discovered her garden gate inexplicably unlatched, and the large footprint of a man’s shoe in her onion patch. Mrs. C —— had heard someone trudge past her bedroom window at half past three this morning, but as the nearest telephone was at the corner grocer’s, she’d had no way of notifying the police. Mrs. D —— could afford me no more than a beaming glance, and none of the usual exclamations. She was eager to show us all the stamped-out end of a cigarette she’d found in her lane—a slender, exotic sort of cigarette that had most definitely not come from anywhere around here. She had folded it in paper and was on her way to deliver it to the police.
“What about you, M ——?” she asked my grandmother. “The woods practically touch your back fence. Did you see or hear anything?”
Several pairs of wide eyes turned toward Grandmother, who held the silvery baker’s tongs and had just put a fig-loaf into the shopping basket. “Now that you mention it, there was something,” she said, “though I dismissed it as my imagination at the time.”
I peered at her with as much interest as everyone else.
“Around midnight I woke up,” Grandmother said, her voice just above a whisper. “I’m not sure why, since I usually sleep like the Lord in the back of the boat. I think it was too quiet. There was a small sound which I thought was the cottage settling—old houses do that, you know. But as I remember it now, it could only have been the sound of someone trying the front door.”
There was a chorus of gasps and exclamations.
Grandmother accepted Mrs. C ——’s praise for keeping her door locked and Mrs. P ——’s adjuration to be extremely careful, and she smiled amiably at what looked like a glance of envy from Mrs. D ——.
When Grandmother had swept out of the bakery and I’d made sure no one could hear us, I said, “Isn’t lying a sin?”
“Yes,” she answered soberly. “But that wasn’t a lie. That was camouflage.”
An Army truck was parked outside the police office, and a group of four soldiers stood in front of the building, chatting and smoking. My chest fluttered whenever I saw the uniforms—every single time, for the first instant, I expected to see my father among the soldiers. But he wasn’t here. These were men I didn’t know. Two of them tipped their cloth hats to Grandmother as we passed.
We completed our grocery shopping, then paid the electric bill. Grandmother wasn’t fond of electricity, since it didn’t come in tanks like the lamp fuel or in blocks like the ice, and no one delivered it in a truck; she thought it was a mighty suspicious thing to be paying for. She’d allowed the workmen to hook it up, she said, only so that she could listen to the radio.
Our morning’s investigation confirmed, from snatches of conversation here and there, what we already knew: that patrols of soldiers had been combing the forest but had apparently found nothing except the parachute—if they’d found the pilot, they wouldn’t still be searching.
As we came out of the public works building, Mrs. D —— passed us on the sidewalk, on her way into the grocery store. I saw that she still held the folded paper containing the dubious cigarette from her lane. She’d come right past the police office but had apparently not stopped in there yet.
Grandmother looked sidelong at me. “Ignorance multiplies itself better than yeast. If we could make bread out of rumors, no one in the world would go hungry.”
For the rest of the way home, we talked little but kept our eyes open. In front of the barber shop, one soldier was speaking into the handset of a portable radio strapped to another soldier’s back. There was so much code in what he said that we couldn’t make sense of it, but his tone sounded weary and annoyed. A military launch chugged through the harbor, and an Army staff car was parked outside the three-story inn. Grandmother deliberately crossed the street so that we could walk past the wide glass windows of the inn’s dining room and peer inside. I glimpsed only a blur of reflections, dark spaces, and lamplight, but Grandmother murmured, when we’d turned the corner to climb Bridge Street, “That was the major, all right.”
“At the inn?”
“Mm. From the garrison.”
“Do you know him?” I asked.
“Not personally, but I know his face.” Grandmother turned a critical eye on a poorly weeded herb garden to our left. “He is not the sort of man your grandfather would have liked.”
I expected her to say more and was puzzling over why she’d brought Grandfather into it, but she stood still, her attention now on a group of five soldiers tramping down out of the arbors.
They’d clearly come from the woods, their shirts dark with sweat, their trousers covered with burrs and prickle-seeds. In no particular hurry, they had nearly made it to the road when they seemed to think better of it, and all flopped down in the shade.
“Nothing to report,” said Grandmother under her breath, walking again.
I watched a moment longer as the men leaned rifles on a fence, pulled off hats, and poured water over their heads. One had a receding hairline, and aside from his hair’s color, he looked rather like our patient, R ——. Yet this man and R —— were enemies. Another man, who perhaps looked like them both, had shot down R ——’s plane. There were trucks full of men, ships carrying them on the seas, squadrons of planes with more men inside, and all together they made up the war. And my father was somewhere among them.
This was Papa’s second war: he’d had to fight in one when he was young, and now he had to fight in this one. He’d been summoned back into service nearly four years ago, and had been home only twice in that time; already I had trouble recalling the exact sound of his voice. I would stare at his photo and re-read his letters, striving to recapture a clear echo of his laugh. I wondered if he was patrolling today, joking with his fellow soldiers, pulling burrs out of his trousers, and drinking warm water from his canteen. I prayed he would never be wounded like R ——. Please, God, keep him safe. I wished a letter from him would come.
Grandmother’s next-door neighbor on the side toward the village center was a fearsome old woman named Mrs. F ——. That’s what Grandmother called her, never her first name. Mrs. F —— was white-haired, as tall and hard as a dead tree bleached by the sun. Her garden was a dark cavern, overrun by juniper and laurel and myrtle, covered in vines, and she seemed not to care for flowers. When Grandmother had first introduced us, Mrs. F —— glared at me from her wrinkled face, and she had not spoken a word to me since. Every time I passed in front of her house alone, I hurried; when I was in our back garden, I was glad for the stone wall between the properties and Mrs. F ——’s high hedge immediately on the wall’s other side. Once, though, late in the afternoon, I’d been reading in my sanctuary beneath the fuchsia, and fee
ling an uneasy prickle in my scalp, I’d looked up. Mrs. F —— had been standing at a side window beneath her gable, staring down at me. I’d given a timid wave to be polite, but she had not returned it. She’d continued to watch me, motionless. I’d closed my book and gone indoors.
As Grandmother and I crossed in front of Mrs. F ——’s gate, nearly home, I saw Mrs. F —— crouching beneath a cypress tree, clipping the vines. Grandmother said a bright hello.
“What’s the news?” asked Mrs. F ——, not looking at me.
“Everyone’s got a story,” said Grandmother. “No one knows anything.”
Mrs. F —— gave a bark that might have been a laugh and went on with her trimming.
When we were inside with the door shut, I asked, “Why doesn’t she like me?”
“She doesn’t dislike you,” Grandmother said. “Her own boys were hellions, and I suppose she suspects any child of being the same.”
The ice man had been by on his twice-weekly rounds: a fresh chunk sat in the top compartment of the ice box, which was a boon to the milk and cheese. Grandmother had me take down the diamond-shaped ice card from its hook in the front window—a device that fascinated me, since it looked like something a magician would use in a trick. It had a number at each point; the number you turned upright told the ice man how heavy a chunk of ice to bring. I spun it in my hands, watching the numbers go around, always one right-side up.
We had a light, early lunch. Then Grandmother said, “After I stretch out for a bit, I think we’d better have a look for ourselves up in the forest.”
I sprang up straight in my chair. “Can we do that?”
“There’s no curfew in the afternoon, and I’ve heard of no restrictions on where one can go—well,” she added after a moment’s thought, “there’s some foolish new law about trespassing among ruins, I think. But ruins are as much a part of our land as the trees and the rocks. May as well order us not to walk around on our feet!”
“What if the soldiers see us?”
“We’ll be gathering wood for the stove. We’ll take along the hatchet.”
So, we did precisely that: Grandmother took a nap, and I dozed again on the garden bench—the one beneath the camphor tree, protected from Mrs. F ——’s windows. It was still early in the afternoon when I lifted down the hand-axe from its pegs and Grandmother picked up the binding cords from the wood bin. She poured some milk into a jug with a stopper and packed it, along with a tin of crackers, some fruit, and a wedge of cheese into her carpet bag.
I glanced at the bag. “Did you take out his gun?”
Grandmother nodded. “It’s hidden in my room. Getting rid of it may be our mission tomorrow, if the weather’s good.”
We paused at the edge of the sloping meadow to look around. The grasses waved in a slight, wandering breeze. Like a green cliff, the forest eaves rolled away in both directions, the hollows between limbs full of purple shadows, windows of twilight at midday. I loved this boundary, where the bright world met one full of secrets.
“You live in the best place on Earth,” I told Grandmother.
She laughed, not in a scornful way, and leaned on her stick, slowly studying the distance. A woodpecker knocked somewhere. Off to our right, a vine-tender whistled a tune.
“If there are soldiers here,” said Grandmother quietly, “they’re under one of the arbors, watching with binoculars.” She rested on a bench, examining the grapes on the lattice over our heads. The crop was still tiny, hard, and green, but Grandmother said they would ripen well this year.
“I can carry the bag,” I said.
Grandmother peered at me with one of her appraising looks that ended in the hint of a smile. “You’re a good boy,” she said, and handed the bag over.
I smiled then, knowing that praise from Grandmother didn’t come lightly. “Was Papa like me when he was my age?”
“Eerily so.”
We left the arbors and crossed the meadow then. If any soldiers saw us, they issued no challenge. To give credibility to our wood-gathering ruse, we picked up a few sticks where the trees began. When the forest’s emerald shadows had closed over us, I asked Grandmother about something else I’d heard earlier in the summer, from two elderly men inside the smoky open window of the pipe lounge while I waited for Grandmother outside the apothecary’s—about dancing fires on the mountainside at night, music among the trees, and something called a “procession of souls.”
“There’s an old belief,” she said, “that the souls of those who die throughout the year don’t go to Heaven one by one; on Midsummer’s Eve, they all go together, in a procession.”
“Is Heaven that way—on the mountain, or beyond it?”
“That’s the direction I’d head if I were looking.”
I didn’t ask any further questions, because we both wanted to watch and listen. Birds sang, insects hummed, and we met no patrolling soldiers. Wildflowers shone like droplets of cream and butter and honey in patches of sunlight; some clustered in deep places where the shade was blue and cool. The village sounds grew distant: a carpenter’s hammer, a few motors, the wallop of someone beating a rug. Then once more, we passed into the heart of silence, where the trees stood huge and dark. Shadowed by the thick canopy, the glens became caverns of leaf, trunk, stone, and mossy earth.
Grandmother pointed with her stave at places where boots had trampled the moss and smashed some of the white toadstools. She shook her head gravely.
We came at last to the parachute. R —— was gone, and we were alone in the glade. The soldiers had not bothered to drag the chute down; it still hung in tangles, the soft earth beneath it crisscrossed with boot tracks. The mound we’d made for R —— to fall into had been flattened out; I supposed Mr. Girandole had scattered it to make our assistance less obvious. I saw no traces of blood. But if one looked, our excavations among the leaf-beds were plain to see.
I picked up the mashed remains of two cigarettes, and Grandmother snickered. “You want to take them to Mrs. D ——?” I didn’t, choosing to bury them instead under a handful of soil.
We found nothing of interest. After a few moments, Grandmother led the way toward the grove of monsters. Without asking, I knew we would go there. We descended the long slope where sunlight fell in occasional golden shafts.
As my gaze settled on one such circle of light, I halted and stared. The sun illuminated the base of a tree with a riot of twisting, overlapping roots. For a moment, I thought I saw a village there, all in miniature among the ferns in the blaze of light: houses of stacked pebbles with mossy roofs; bridges of bark; towers and tiers and petal banners; and galleries stretching into the dim caves beneath the roots. But when I looked closer, I saw that all was merely the forest floor. Its myriad colors and textures had fooled my eyes. A dragonfly like a long green needle whirred lazily across the sun-patch.
Blinking, I hurried to catch up with Grandmother.
“I found the grove from its other side when I was a girl,” she said quietly, “so this has always seemed like the back door to me. But the real front gate is in those bushes down there”—she pointed south, toward the village—“at the bottom of the hollow that holds it all.”
As we threaded through the bushes, I stretched to my full height, trying to catch sight again of the gray dragon. Soon enough, I saw it, still rearing and snarling, its mouth open wide. My heart raced with the same thrill as when my parents would take me to the carnival or a picture show.
I could see the top of a broad arch to the south, which must be the main entrance Grandmother had meant. Trees stood here and there like colossal pillars, roofing the garden over with their impenetrable crowns. Grandmother stopped and put both hands on the head of her stick, listening. I kept still, giving her the chance to hear anything the grove might tell her. But I couldn’t help easing closer to see the dragon.
Dense bushes had grown around h
im as high as his shoulders. This green tangle extended to both sides, a mass of thorny branches that choked much of the ravine. Peering through thorns and a spider web, I examined the dragon’s clawed feet and the pedestal they gripped. Then I noticed why the beast was roaring and unfurling his wings: buried in the undergrowth around him, at least three dogs were attacking him. Carved with the same skill, they bared their fangs, surrounding the monster, one preparing to lunge. It was hard to contain my excitement and curiosity for what might lie hidden just beyond sight in the bushes.
To our left stood a second, smaller arch, about the size through which a tall man could walk without stooping. Vines had cloaked it, but faces were visible all up and down its span, some bearded, some beautiful, some monstrous. They peered out from among leaves and blossoms like spirits of the forest.
This arch had escaped the encroaching bushes. Grandmother led me beneath it, and we passed into a clearing like a vast cavern of viridian light. Randomly columned by trees, the clearing spread from one steep wall of the ravine to the other. To the right I saw again the sea serpent, its long neck rising from the same brake of bushes that engulfed the dragon. On the left, near at hand, sat a crowned, bearded man on a throne. He held a gigantic fork, both weapon and scepter. “That’s Neptune,” said Grandmother. “God of the sea. And I think that’s Heracles.” She pointed at the figure towering over the bushes beyond the sea serpent, near the hollow’s eastern wall—a muscular man with short, curling hair and a mighty club. “I know I’m mixing my Greek and Roman mythology,” she added. “But this looks more like a Neptune than a Poseidon, doesn’t it? And ‘Hercules’ just doesn’t seem to fit that one.”
“Was Heracles that big?” I asked, trying to remember what I’d heard of Heracles—some hero or warrior of long ago.
“Probably not,” Grandmother said. “Maybe it’s just some giant. But he looks like Heracles to me. If he were holding up the sky, I’d say Atlas . . .”
A Green and Ancient Light Page 6
