A Green and Ancient Light

by Frederic S. Durbin

  “I have no idea,” she said. “Girandole might.”

  Mr. Girandole and R —— vanished around opposite sides of the trunk, picking their way into the brush. After several moments, by R ——’s wild whooping, I knew they’d found something. Soon, they came hurrying back, R —— elated and Mr. Girandole quiet and serious.

  They’d discovered, at about waist height on the tree’s far side, a keyhole.

  “It’s not framed by any metal,” Mr. Girandole explained. “Not carved. It’s just right there in the wood, as if it grew there. It has to be magical; most holes in tree trunks will swell shut or change shape.”

  R —— spoke earnestly in his own language, and Mr. Girandole translated for us.

  “R —— wants to go through the door. He knows that I plan to wait. Obviously, R —— can’t wait for years, and shouldn’t have to. He can be a test pilot, he says—he’ll establish for us that the key works, and that I can use the door when I need to. He says he’s no good at prolonged good-byes, so he wants to leave soon.”

  “No want good-bye,” R —— said. “But here, can’t stay. No place. No want good-bye, but tomorrow and tomorrow, more, more hard. I go today.”

  Mr. Girandole drew a long breath. “R ——, there is a place for you here, if you’d like to stay. You can live in my cave for the winter, and through next year . . . for however long it takes until the war is over. Then you can go or stay as you please. You’re our friend. My friend.” He reached for R ——’s hand and clasped it.

  In a breaking voice, R —— said, “Thank you, Girandole.” He pronounced the name badly, but it was the first time I’d heard R —— call him anything other than “Mr. Satyr.” Again he spoke in his native tongue, and at the end, Mr. Girandole gripped R ——’s arms before turning back to us.

  “He’s resolved to go.”

  Grandmother nodded understanding.

  “But R ——,” said Mr. Girandole, “Noon is the worst hour to do this. You want to cross the border into Faery quickly, because the border is the most dangerous. It’s thinner at dawn and dusk. Can you wait until gloaming this evening, when you won’t have far to go?”

  R —— agreed.

  Mr. Girandole took off his hat and placed it over his chest as he faced me. I knew he was searching for the words to thank me, trying to take care of all the things that needed to be said. We’d found the door for him—we’d done it together. I shook his hand.

  For lunch, we had a picnic on the terrace. We ate the food Grandmother and I had brought: crackers, sardines, cheese, plums, tangerines, and a few early grapes. Mr. Girandole fetched his jug of sun-brewed tea; we had no way of cooling it, but its flavor was summer itself. The long, warm afternoon stretched around us as R —— played fairy melodies on his flute, Mr. Girandole kept his tireless lookout, and Grandmother settled down on a bench for her nap.

  “I’m not going all the way down the mountain and then back up before evening,” she told me. “But if you have the energy, it would be good for you to make a trip down there and gather up what you can find in the kitchen. R —— ought to have supper before he goes.”

  “I can go hunting for the main course,” Mr. Girandole offered.

  “Then we’ll have a proper feast,” Grandmother said.

  I was glad for a mission. The waiting was unbearable, and I was already missing R ——. His music filled me with an indefinable emotion that was part sadness, but it included a yearning for something I could not name.

  “What if some of your friends are looking for you?” I asked, thinking that it was unusual for Grandmother to be away from the cottage all day.

  She eased her head back, using the carpet bag as a pillow. “Tell them we’ve switched today, and I’m off playing while you mind the house.”

  * * * *

  As I descended the meadow, I caught sight of Mrs. F —— taking down laundry in her back garden. She looked toward me between billowing sheets, and I waved. She may have tipped up her chin in a dour greeting, but it was hard to tell. I let myself in at our back door with Grandmother’s shiny brass key. I was so used to village life that I was thinking of the ice man, who made his deliveries twice a week; tomorrow, whether we were home or not, we would have to leave the door unlocked for him. It was such a different world from the city . . . the city to which I’d be returning in only four days.

  I collected what transportable food I could find and stuffed it into the other rucksack. Slinging it over my shoulder, I pulled the door shut and locked it. I bounded off the mossy step and raced toward the gate. But halfway there, I stopped so suddenly that I pitched over forward, landing on all fours.

  A man was standing just outside the gate. He leaned with his arms folded on it, watching me from beneath the bill of his hat.

  A policeman.

  “Whoops,” he said, commenting on the tumble I’d taken.

  I floundered and scooped up two bread rolls that had bounced out of the bag.

  “Good afternoon,” said the policeman, and I returned the greeting as best I could, picking myself up, wondering what to do. It felt as if the air were being squeezed out of my chest.

  “Where are we going?” He raised his head and sighted along his nose at me.

  “Not, uh, far,” I mumbled. “I mean . . .”

  A second policeman strolled toward us from out by the arbors.

  “What’s that? Speak up,” said the first. “Where’s Mrs. T ——?”

  I opened my mouth with absolutely no idea what I was going to say. I hadn’t been thinking about a thing except getting back up the mountain as quickly as I could.

  But at that moment, Mrs. F —— appeared from around the corner of her back hedge. Her sharp glance took in the two men and me. “P ——!” she cried pleasantly, calling the policeman by his first name and waving to his companion. I’d never heard such a cheerful tone from her. “A fine day, isn’t it? What brings you here?”

  Both men tipped their hats. “Making the rounds, Mrs. F ——. Keeping an eye on things, now that the Army is gone.” The man at the gate turned back to me. “Well, boy?”

  I looked down at my shoes and sideways at the purple blossoms of the germander.

  “Look up here, and answer my question.”

  Just when I thought I might faint, Mrs. F ——, the last person from whom I’d have expected help, came to my rescue. “P ——, you’re scaring the boy. He’s not a burglar. That’s M ——’s grandson, staying with her. He’s been here since April.”

  Of course, the policemen knew I belonged here. They must have seen me with Grandmother a hundred times. But how was I going to explain where Grandmother was now, or where I was running to with an armload of food?

  Mrs. F —— continued. “I’m watching him today, because M —— has an appointment.”

  I felt my eyes widening, but I kept my face averted.

  “He just went over there to collect some things from the kitchen. I told him to hurry.”

  “Oh.” The policeman straightened and patted the top of the gate. “Right, then.”

  His partner chuckled, thumbs stuck into his belt. “Burglars generally don’t have keys, do they?” he said as if to me, and winked.

  The first man unlatched the gate for me and held it open as I hurried over to join Mrs. F ——.

  “Take it on inside,” she told me, and with a nod, I let myself into her back garden, where the laundry billowed like sails and circus tents. The hedge was dense, but I found a place to peep through. She stood and chatted with the two policemen for a long while.

  Not wanting to go into her house alone, I sat down and pulled up my knees in a shady corner of the yard. A white stone cherub held a basket that sprouted pink fuchsia, its blossoms like lanterns.

  Eventually, Mrs. F —— entered the garden and looked around until she spotted me. With a gesture she t
old me to stay put, and she went into her kitchen. She emerged soon after with a glass of cold tea that clinked and rattled with chips of ice.

  As she handed it to me, I blurted my thanks. I was almost as afraid of her as of a policeman or soldier. I remembered Grand­mother saying that Mrs. F ——’s boys had been hellions. I wondered what exactly that meant, what kind of mischief they’d pulled. I still didn’t know how to explain myself.

  She held up a hand to cut me off. “The thanks will suffice,” she said. “Whatever you’re up to, I won’t have M —— thinking I wrung the story out of you.”

  Mrs. F —— certainly knew my grandmother well. Crossing her arms, she peered down at me from beneath her straight hair—it was as gleaming white as her linens on the clothesline. “You’d better sit there and take your time with that tea before you go scampering up the field again.” She glanced toward the hedge, indicating that I should give the police plenty of time to move on. To spare me the anguish of conversation, she turned her back, adjusted one of the sheets, and hobbled up the path to her door.

  I clutched the sweating glass, sipping at the frosty, aromatic tea, and listened to the birds chirping in the trees and hedges. Slowly, my heartbeat returned to normal. The largest sheet above me inflated with the breeze, tugging at its clothespins, and it was like being on the deck of a ship; the colorful handkerchiefs and skirts were flags and pennants, and the vine-covered clothesline pole was the mast.

  But the sun was forever moving, and I was itching to get back to the grove. I walked carefully among the flower beds to the path and carried the empty glass to the cottage door. Before I could knock, Mrs. F ——’s face loomed in a window.

  “You can leave it there, on the step,” she told me. She was chopping some pungent vegetable on a cutting board. I could hear the knife going zak-zak-zak. The strong odor of the juice made my eyes water, even outside the window. It didn’t seem to bother Mrs. F ——.

  “Thank you again,” I said.

  She nodded briskly and turned back to her cooking.

  Pausing only to take a good look around for policemen, I hurried back up the mountain. Before I passed under the roof of treetops, I noticed that the sky was one of the best I’d seen all summer: bottomless, dazzling blue, with magnificent white cloud towers. They formed endless pictures, their shifting so slow that one hardly noticed it.

  Then I followed the now-familiar path up the slopes, in the secret tree world that was like the beds of the deep sea. Mrs. F ——’s laundry had started me thinking about ships, and I imagined having a ship that could glide on the rolling waves of the trees’ crowns, the leaves whispering along the hull, the masts up among the clouds, and the anchor crashing down at times through these limbs to catch among the roots and hold the vessel in place. It would creak and rock up there where only green branches and blue sky were visible, and no village or smokestack could be seen anywhere. And maybe with the anchor keeping it steady in just such a place, the summer for those aboard the ship would never end; the leaves would never turn red; the cold winds would never blow; and there would be nothing but clouds and sun, moon and stars.

  When I returned, I found R —— sitting alone on the terrace. He said that Grandmother and Mr. Girandole had gone for a walk. My first impulse was to run and try to catch up with them, but when I asked which direction they’d gone, R —— motioned for me to sit on a bench.

  I did so, setting down the rucksack, and felt awkward and sad. I’d never said a real good-bye to a person forever. I knew I’d never see R —— again in this life.

  “I close eyes,” R —— said, pointing at his head. “I think . . . I try remember home.” He frowned in concentration, shut his eyes, and sat still for a long time. “I no see, not see Mother, Father, Brother . . . wife, too. Baby, too—not see. You know?” He shook his head and laughed quietly, in a way that seemed sad. “Remember people, not . . .” With a gesture, he indicated his face. “Not faces.”

  I nodded. “I can’t see my mother or my father clearly, and for me, it’s only been about five months.” I couldn’t hear their voices in my head. How quickly those things faded from our memories. But the people were there . . . people without faces, without sound. I stared at R ——, trying to memorize his appearance.

  “I see . . .” he went on. “I see . . . the river. The tree. Old piano of my mother. Old clock, tick tock tick tock tick tock—cuckoo! Cuckoo!”

  He watched me with a smile and brushed back his greasy, unkempt hair. He’d grown a scraggly beard and mustache and looked like a character from a book—a pirate or someone marooned on a desert island. He called me by name, pronouncing it pretty well, and I grinned back.

  “You smart,” he said deliberately, tapping his forehead. “You writing in book. Find fairy door.”

  “We all did it together,” I said. “It started with your poem.”

  “I —— [his nationality]. You help me.”

  I watched him, thinking of what Grandmother had said, that the concepts of war and enemy had no place in the sacred woods.

  “Thank you,” he said, and held out his hand.

  I shook it and answered, “You’re welcome.”

  He handed me his flute and said, “You keep.”

  I felt my eyes beginning to burn with tears that might spill out, so I just nodded and took it.

  But R —— wasn’t content to give it to me; he wanted to be sure I could play it. For the next half hour or so, we had a flute lesson. The instrument was little more than a whistle he’d carved out of the reed. I grew light-headed from blowing and blowing, trying to find the angle at which my breath would coax sound from it. But when I could finally play three notes, R —— taught me the ­simplest of the fairy melodies.

  At last we saw Grandmother and Mr. Girandole returning, and I slid the flute into my shirt pocket.

  “You be good man, future,” R —— said. It wasn’t an order; it sounded more like a prediction.

  During his walk with Grandmother, Mr. Girandole had managed to catch a squirrel, which he now took away to dress and cook. I wasn’t sure exactly how he’d caught it. The image of him pouncing or leaping up to snatch it off a branch was unsettling.

  Grandmother was satisfied with the kitchen gleanings I’d brought. I told her about my adventure with the policemen and Mrs. F ——. She laughed at the end, at what Mrs. F —— had said about not wanting to wring the story out of me.

  We waited on the terrace; Grandmother and R —— talked more about music, and we played a final game of pitching cockleburs at the cloth target, which I carried down from the chamber above. I found in my notebook a sketch of the leaning house—one of my better drawings of anything in the garden. I added the four of us, doing my best to capture our attitudes and postures with simple lines and shading. It wasn’t perfect, but it was decent. Carefully, I tore the page out and gave it to R ——. He looked at it for a long time, then folded it with great deliberation and put it into his own pocket. “Best present,” he said. “I always keep.”

  When the shafts of light slanted deep golden from the west, and dusk was already gathering in the quiet places, Mr. Girandole returned with roasted meat on skewers. Our feast began with us all bowing our heads. Instead of praying aloud, Grandmother put one hand on Mr. Girandole’s wrist and one on R ——’s. The two of them took my hands, completing the circle. We all looked solemnly at one another, and then we prayed our own prayers in our heads. That was the beginning of a dinner party I would never have imagined when the spring began.

  Grandmother leaned back against the terrace railing with her ankles crossed, sipping her tea. “Girandole,” she said suddenly, “there is something I’ve been wondering about all afternoon. If the duke really went into Faery and never came back, why didn’t he take the key with him? Why was it hidden in the statue of Apollyon? Did he have a second key?”

  Mr. Girandole dusted cracker crumbs fr
om his lap. “Fairy doors also open for certain words—poetry, spells, and the like. The duke probably knew the secret words if he was able to discover the door. If so, he didn’t need the key; he meant it for others to find. We can hardly know all his reasons for making the garden, but two of them seem clear: for one, it points the way to his discovery. I would guess he made that key with magical art so that others who cared enough to find it could open the door. He found a way to go beyond the veil—beyond the shadows—and the garden was his unselfish act of gratitude. He made this place for others. He left hope in the world.”

  “And the garden’s other purpose?” Grandmother asked.

  “It was his tribute to G ——, his monument to love that never dies.” Mr. Girandole gazed toward the pedestal of the beautiful feet.

  Watching him and Grandmother, listening to their voices, I felt my tears overflowing at last. Pretending to brush hair back from my forehead, I wiped at them. My chest ached with the happiness of knowing these two, of knowing I could come and visit on every holiday, and they would be waiting here, together, with their truest feelings confessed. Duties and sacrifices were behind them now; ahead were warmth and friendship. Before this year, I hadn’t grasped the enormity of the gifts we receive through our loved ones. Whenever I came, Grandmother and Mr. Girandole would welcome me, and no matter what was happening in the world, we would have our own special place where the coldest winds didn’t reach. So I thought; I was very young.

  * * * *

  All too soon, the meal was over, and we put the dirty cups and empty tins back into the bag. I rolled up the cocklebur target and offered it to R ——, too. “You can teach the fauns to play,” I said.

  R —— laughed, nodding, and tucked it inside his shirt.

  Fireflies had begun to wink in the dusk around us.

  “Well,” said Mr. Girandole softly, “it will be dark soon.”

  “Yes,” said Grandmother. “We’d better do this while you can still see the keyhole.”

  So, we stood up, stretched, and breathed deeply in the evening’s cool. Grandmother brought the carpet bag. R —— preceded us; Mr. Girandole helped Grandmother on the eastern stairs—but I lingered on the terrace for as long as I could, peering in turn at each of the fantastic figures I could see: the tortoise, the elephant, a glimpse of Heracles, the sea serpent, the boar, Neptune on his throne, and the four women at the pool. Soon, I thought, the garden would be silent again, left to the birds, the small creatures, the leaves and moss, and the changing light. The monsters would all be here, slowly sinking again into the blankets of vines—but we would be gone as the summer passed away, and autumn settled in for a while with a riot of colors and a rattle of nuts. And then rainy winter would steal in like age. But then we’d come back. I had to keep reminding myself of that.