by John Plotz
“She?” If Ed hadn’t asked it, I would have.
But Granny was lost in the story already. “For a while she just sat there by me, doing the things a second pair of hands can always do at a loom—tying off the dangling weft, sliding the beater in as the heddle is raised, all those little things.” While she was talking, her arms had gone into a peculiar crooked position they often fell into when she was thinking, or telling a long story, or even napping. Her left arm came straight out from her body, while her right moved in slow sweeps from her hip across her body, bouncing smoothly back when it struck, then starting its motion again.
“‘I have something to give you, Georgie,’ she said, ‘and something to ask you.’
“I only nodded, I was that scared.” (“That scared,” I muttered to myself, “that scared.” I try to collect all the phrases Granny uses in her England stories.)
“‘It’s winding up now, winding up any day,’ Miss Morris said.
“I wanted to cry out that it should never end, that there was no reason Morris and Company couldn’t go on weaving fabric and printing wallpaper until I had grandchildren myself.
“I only nodded, head down—I was a good girl in those days, a quiet shy girl. I couldn’t stop myself, though, from blurting out, ‘But I hope it’s not quite over.’
“She chuckled, then grabbed my chin. It was an affectionate touch, but she made sure she could look me in the eye before she went on.
“‘There’s a present I want you to have before it ends,’ she said flatly.
“She gave a short laugh. Looking back now I think it was a sad laugh, and maybe a bitter one. But I was only a girl. I remember thinking it was nice for May that she could laugh—but oh, how my mother was going to cry when she learned our last wages were gone.
“Miss May Morris went on, her voice sounding oddly brittle to me, vibrating a bit up and down like the pitch of the wheezy organ at church. ‘You’ve been a good worker, Georgie; it’s always a pleasure to weave with you. I can tell, I can always tell, just by watching the fingers, the ones who know where the pattern should go, who even know where the story should go … Do you know what I mean?’
“She gave me a sharp glance that caught me by surprise; I expect I’d just been gaping up at her like any foolish fifteen-year-old.
“‘Oh yes, Miss Morris, I do,’ I said nervously, before she could explain. I wish I’d let her say what she meant about how the story and the pattern go together. Even now …” Granny trailed off and sat staring up at the Tapestry. Ed and I shot nervous glances at each other, watching her fingers weave and unweave on top of Mr. Nazhar’s letter.
“‘I have a Tapestry that should stay with someone who understands it, who knows it with her hands as well as her head,’” Granny said finally: it took us a minute to realize that she was giving us May Morris’s voice again.
“‘You’ll find it by the side door there, Friday week, properly bundled up. Bring your father to help you carry it; can you do that?’
“I nodded when she asked me that: Hadn’t my father come over from Cork as a stevedore, loading and unloading ships in Liverpool and then down at the London docks as long as there was work? He could have carried three of her tapestries, I thought but didn’t say.
“‘There’s another thing you’ll carry with you,’ she said, and I could hear the iron in her voice when she said it. ‘Let’s call it a task, or a chore, or, well, the proper word for it, Georgie, is a geas.’” It was a strange word: I turned it over and over on my tongue as she kept talking.
“‘When you look at that Tapestry, you’ll see that it’s undone.’ There was something funny in how she said that word: Did she mean that it wasn’t finished? I couldn’t quite say what undone would mean, if not that.
“‘The Tapestry will be done, Georgie, it will be done in time. I can’t tell you anything more than that.’ I thought she was done speaking, but as I opened my mouth to agree she went on: ‘But I can point the way with a poem.’”
Granny turned quickly to see if she’d surprised us. I don’t know about Ed but I hadn’t seen this one coming, and my face must have showed it. Satisfied, I guess, Granny gave a small smile, turned her eyes back to the Tapestry, and went on.
“There was plenty of poetry in that factory. Somebody often read to us as we worked: from The Earthly Paradise that William Morris himself had written, or from poems by John Keats, John Milton, Shakespeare. I even read out of some of those same little Kelmscott books Mr. Nazhar likes so much. But I’d never thought of poems as, well, guidebooks.
“Miss Morris chuckled suddenly; my skepticism must have showed. ‘Well, it may be there’s more to poems than you think, Georgie.’
“‘I expect so, Miss Morris. At least, I hope so,’ I couldn’t help adding. She gave a tiny smile at that.
“‘This is not a poem for writing down, Georgie. You’ll learn it with me as we sit at this loom together, and it’ll be written up here’—tapping her forehead with a straight, stiff forefinger. After a moment, she also reached over and touched my forehead with the same finger—smooth, dry, and soft.”
Granny stopped speaking, though her right arm still kept up a slow, almost invisible back-and-forth.
“And did you learn it, Granny?” I asked.
“I did,” Granny said. “May Morris herself sat with me the next day and taught me as we worked. In fact, the very the moment I’d finished reciting it, I had the strangest dream …” Her voice trailed away slowly.
“A dream, Granny?” I said eagerly.
“Yes,” Granny answered in the same absentminded voice, “a waking dream, real as life it seemed, about a flying girl and a boy, and a blackbird as big as a roc …” Her voice trailed down into silence.
“But it was all just some nonsense,” Granny said suddenly, in the dry efficient voice I associated with bedtime, or the lessons she gave us with woodworking tools. “Soon enough, the end did come. When the factory closed the next week, I looked in my final pay packet and what do you suppose? Along with my usual sixteen bob, there was just an enormous check. The most money I’d ever seen—the most money anyone in my family had seen, back in 1934. With a little note in May Morris’s most elegant handwriting: For the guardian of the Tapestry.”
Granny suddenly lowered her head to stare at me unblinking. “I doubt you can imagine, children, what that kind of money meant in London, especially in a poor little corner like Pimlico. Charity was a terrible thing my father always said, a terrible thing. But as things were then, well, we couldn’t say no. And I am certain”—she paused to give us a surprisingly fierce stare, as if she were looking back through time at her parents—“certain that it was not charity. That something was expected for it, something was to be given back.”
Granny shifted in her seat, and her eyes again floated up to the ceiling as she put the pictures from the past in their proper order. “That money got us through a decade no one likes to remember too closely. Then eventually, the terrible times ended, the war ended, and one night at a dance up popped your grandfather, fresh from what he called ‘the Wild West’ and looking smart in a uniform.”
“Granny!” Ed said in shocked tones, but I snickered, loving the idea of Granny marrying a man for his beauty. When I think back to Grandpa, he’s only a pair of blue eyes and gray hair standing straight up. But back then he was a mechanic for the Army Air Corps, and Granny (this is the one thing I do remember him saying) was his “stolen GI bride.”
“Well, he married me in a fortnight,” Granny went on, “and took me off to America. And it turned out that nothing in Boston was wild—save the things that taxi drivers would yell at you. Still, I don’t think you ever heard me complain.”
I didn’t say anything, thinking about Grandpa Theo the inventor—“only tinkering,” he called it. Ed had a list of every little device that he’d made for Granny over the years, and it was pages long. I loved hearing about the shuttle-rest he’d fastened to one end of her loom, and the little fixed-angle
sharpener he’d rigged up for her engraving tools.
“Oh, Theo loved every machine.” Granny went on dreamily. “He was always thinking of ways that gears could mesh smoother, or switches fall snug into place. So, between his tinkering and his steady work on the boilers and furnaces downtown, and taking into account my weaving and the classes I taught down at the Bennett Street school, we eventually earned all May’s money back, and more.
“Miss Morris herself was long gone by then, but it was as if a voice was speaking to me—I knew just where the money had to go. So, we set out to put every penny of it into collecting all those Arts and Crafts things—some of them English, some of them made over here in Massachusetts, or California. And there was a summer collecting in Norway once, under the midnight sun.”
Granny looked around her as if all she’d gathered still sat beneath the Tapestry, instead of tucked away in glass cases in the museum, neatly labeled by Mr. Nazhar. Then she shook herself as if she’d been sleeping,
“Those were the things May and William Morris spent their lives on—and the things they’d spurred others on to make, after them. Putting them back together was what I could do to pay her back somehow. To prove that the Tapestry was safe, and more than safe: that it had a home.”
Granny stopped. This was probably the longest story she’d ever told us. I threw myself back with a huge sigh. But she wasn’t quite done. “Actually,” she began after what must have been a minute, “actually I was young and foolish: Before I let my mother see that check, I slipped back to try to return it, and say a final word to May. But the factory was shut for good. I pounded every door, peeked through every boarded-up window, and found … nothing.”
“What would you have said, Granny?” put in Ed suddenly. He’d been sitting a little way from us scribbling in his notebook as usual; I hadn’t even been sure he was listening. He blushed when we both spun to stare at him. “If you’d found her, I mean.”
She didn’t hesitate. “I would not have needed many words, Edward. I’d have walked right up to her, tapped my forehead, and said, What’s undone can be done again, Miss Morris.”
Granny threw herself back in her chair and laughed, and I heard what her fifteen-year-old self must have sounded like. “Well, I was full of myself those days. I do believe I would have put my hand on Miss Morris’s arm and said, You can trust the future to me.”
The pause in the room stretched and stretched. Mead clicking his beak open and shut and hopping restlessly from perch to perch was the loudest sound in the room. Finally Ed looked up from his notebook expectantly, and I came out with what we’d both been thinking. “So, Granny? Let’s hear it!”
“All I can give you to go by,” Granny said slowly, “is the words of the poem itself. Somehow the secret’s hidden in there, like a set of instructions in a language I don’t know. It’s all waiting to be unpacked, I’m quite sure—”
“Like computer code!” Ed interrupted her confidently. His head was still leaning against Granny slightly, as if he were drawing energy from her. But his voice was clear and, for him, pretty loud. “Until you find the right machine, computer code—Pascal, or Fortran, or even Basic—just looks like a bunch of sentences, or words, or even letters. When you feed it in to a machine that’s set up to listen, though, suddenly it’s like a virus unspooling its RNA.”
RNA? Virus? I tried to recall if our parents had ever taught us a single thing about science. I had a confused recollection of some dusty magazines on a back shelf in their bedroom, and another image of Ed sitting back there recently, dust bunnies on his jeans from where he’d stuck them under the bed. Still, there he was, suddenly making enough sense about the poem that Granny was stiffening, coming into high-alert mode.
“A code?” she was saying now, softly, puzzling it over. “Yes, I often thought it was a code, certainly. But I always thought that meant I’d have to turn it into something else—”
“Not at all, Granny,” interrupted Ed again, jiggling his leg up and down excitedly. “Computer code doesn’t need to be translated, it only needs to be read the right way. All the instructions are actually in there, waiting to be unlocked. You should give it a try. If we can only find the right machine … !” Ed was turning his head this way and that, looking at Mead in his cage, at the walls of the room, at the bookshelves along the far wall, as if some hidden computer was magically going to pop into sight.
I opened my mouth to say that this was not a Star Trek episode, and we weren’t trapped inside one of those crazy comic books Ed read. But I shut it again. There was something in the air, a kind of electricity.
In fact, there really was something in the air. The low rumbling I’d been ignoring was a spring thunderstorm brewing; the air was heavy with rain about to fall. Though it was only late afternoon, the sky had darkened enough that distant lightning flashes made faint flickers across the Tapestry. As the wind stirred it, the animals that hid under its trees almost seemed to be coming to life, winking their eyes and turning to look at us.
I shivered and turned my chair back to where Ed and Granny were sitting quite close to the Tapestry, facing it. As I did, I knocked Mead’s cage down. It fell with its usual crash. I may be the best dribbler and passer on our basketball team, but somehow I still manage to do this about once a week.
The door crashed open and Mead darted out. He never gets far: Our house is tiny and our screens are good. Besides, Granny doesn’t really mind his getting a bit of exercise. I tuned out his fluttering—a little more lively than usual, a little frantic even. Granny had taken up her recital position, arms set again for Merton weaving. She cleared her throat and began, her voice light, smooth, and even.
I am the ancient Apple-Queen,
For evermore a hope unseen,
Betwixt the blossom and the bough.
A gourd and a pilgrim shell, roses dun,
A ship with shields before the sun.
Granny looked down at this point, and something about our faces made her burst into laughter. “Never seen someone recite a William Morris poem?” she asked drily.
I gulped and nodded. “We recite a poem in English class every month. But those are sonnets usually. And they, well, they, they”—I gulped—“make sense!”
“So does this one,” Granny answered promptly. “When you hear it all.” On she went.
A man drew near,
With painted shield and gold-wrought spear.
Good was his horse and grand his gear.
Through the cold garden boughs we went
Where the tumbling roses shed their scent.
“I still don’t get it, Granny,” I said, frustration building up inside me and spilling out into my voice, which even to me sounded petulant, like a cold and hungry kindergartner, not like a mature eighth grader (virtually a high schooler).
Granny smiled back at me, patient as if we were talking about homework, as if the sky hadn’t turned black and thunder hadn’t started booming. She went on:
Therefore Venus well may we
Praise the green ridges of the sea.
A fork-tongued dragon fresh and fell
Behold I have loved faithfully and well.
Ed yowled pitifully. “Please slow down, Granny!”
She pulled up short, with a little smile. “Guessed its secret yet, Jennie?” she asked with a smile. I hadn’t, but I wasn’t going to let her see it. Time for a guess.
“It’s a puzzle,” I began. Then suddenly it came to me. “No, not just a puzzle, a mishmash!”
“Correct,” said Granny primly, but I could tell by the corners of her eyes how pleased she was. “It’s made up of shreds and patches. ‘Dark hills’ comes from one of his poems, the ‘town of the tree’ from another.”
She cleared her throat, sat up straight, and went on, her voice rising to give the sense of an ending.
Beside dark hills whose heath-bloom feeds no bee,
All birds sing in the town of the tree.
In the white-flowered hawthorn brak
e
Love be merry for my sake.
And Thames runs chill
’Twixt mead and hill.
I sat whispering the lines over and over to myself, trying to get it all in there; “Queen,” I muttered for the second time, “unseen.” Ed, curled around his notebook, was doing the same. “You might say that poem is woven,” Granny went on musingly, “just like the Tapestry. What I always wondered is why May would have chosen the bits she did.” She trailed off, gazing absently at one of the largest of the Lost Spots, a huge threadless swatch right in the middle of a green wave-tossed sea.
“Again, Granny!” demanded Ed suddenly, not looking up from his notebook. Without comment, she began again at the beginning: “I am the ancient Apple-Queen,” she said, this time almost shouting. “For evermore a hope unseen.” I found it hard to focus. The wind was rising outside almost to a howl, and lightning was flashing every few seconds.
“Ed,” I shouted, trying to break the daze he’d fallen into. “We shouldn’t let Mead fly around in weather like this. He’s acting crazy!”
Instead of banging against the windows as usual, Mead kept circling nearer and nearer to the tapestry, almost touching it. He kept returning to one spot in the lower left-hand corner, where a meadow turned into a hill, and a blue river snaked away into the distance. There was a wagon filled with barrels creaking across the river at that point, so life-like you could almost hear the burly driver roaring at his oxen. One of the Lost Spots was in that part of the tapestry, too, a pair of triangles and a squiggle I’d often puzzled over.
Ed and I usually trapped Mead by spreading our arms wide and finally pinning him against some handy flat surface. As we crept forward now, preparing for the moment when we both lunged at once, I could hear Granny, slow and loud and careful, like someone casting a spell, reciting the poem’s final lines:
And Thames runs chill
’Twixt mead and hill.
And as she finished saying “hill,” three things happened at once.
