by John Crowley
At the Littleville post office, to which Pierce made his way on foot along the glistening highway, there was a letter from Rose Ryder, postmarked Indiana on the same day Pierce left for Florida.
This post office is something of a local attraction, often pointed out to tourists; there is even a postcard of it itself on sale inside it. A puddingstone pile with fairy-tale peaked roofs covered in varicolored shingles, it was created to be a trolley stop on an interurban rail line that was never built; the station was too pretty to tear down, and the Postal Service was at length persuaded to buy it. Pierce, standing at the cage with the letter in his hand and the rest of his (valueless, unintelligible) mail in his arm, asked the postmistress if he might, please, use the john.
She looked at him somewhat doubtfully; there was a glittering chain on her glasses. “Well it’s not really a public, um. Is this a.”
“Yes it is. It really is.”
On the cold seat, his clothes unsoiled thank God or chance, Pierce held the letter before him.
Pierce I have to apologize first for running out like that so suddenly but I got a sudden call to come out here and I really couldn’t say no. I don’t really understand why they have to make things so mysterious and everything but anyway here I am in a place in Indiana and there is so much to say. I won’t have time to really explain. This is the center of this group here and it’s rather unimpressive in some ways compared to what I thought, but the buildings and things aren’t what’s important and they say that bigger and better headquarters are in the offing and you wouldn’t believe how fast things are growing. Well the weirdest thing I’ve found out, and again I don’t quite understand the reason for the secrecy, it turns out that Dr. Walter is [here there was a line heavily marked out, one or maybe two rejected ways of saying what needed to be said] is not alive now. I don’t exactly know when he passed into sleep, as they say, but it wasn’t like yesterday. I don’t get it exactly why they don’t want everybody to know but they don’t. Here everybody knows. I guess that makes me some kind of insider. Well I don’t really feel like one and I know I’ve got so far to go. But the real thing I need to say is. For a while I’m leaving the country. I am going, you won’t believe this, to Peru. The Powerhouse International, you know, is opening a they don’t say a mission but an outreach there, and I speak Spanish (it all came back to me, just rushed out of me) and so. Pierce I never expected this and I’m afraid and I’m happy. Of course I won’t be alone.
There were, Pierce noticed, bars on the miniature window of the toilet, but why. The place happened to be (and Pierce would remember this when he saw it) just the size and warm buff color of Giordano Bruno’s cell in the Castel St. Angelo in Rome. There are a thousand prisons to be stuck in, a thousand deaths after death; and for each one a liberty.
I hope you’ll write to me, Pierce. You’ve been so important to me this year, which was quite a year for me. Whatever happens you’ve got to admit it was interesting.
At the bottom of the page, below her rapid signature:
PS I gave up smoking here, really this time.
He walked home, the cuffs of his pants snow-wet, her letter crushed in his pocket. He supposed that there would come a day when her name on an envelope would not have the power to loosen his bowels; when he would see that the saddest thing was not her capitulation to the Powerhouse, but that she had never had power over the world, and still didn’t; and neither did they.
He took a pot from his kitchen, scooped snow with it, took it inside and set it on the stove. Fire versus water. He would have coffee at least.
A weary wanderer who had lost his way in a part of the world strange to him came at last to a great house, and asked the lord of that place for shelter in exchange for labor. Yes, the lord said, you may stay in this small house here as long as you like. There is only one thing you must be sure to do: you must keep the water flowing in the freezing weather. But how am I to do that? asked the wanderer. The lord explained how a certain key had to be turned to exactly the right degree, and the water would flow and not freeze.
All went well. When winter came the lord told the wanderer: I am going away on a long journey to the South. I won’t return until the winter is over. Remember what I have told you about the life-giving spring and how it flows, for if you do not tend to it there will be no water for you to drink …
Pierce laughed aloud, skirts of his coat parted and his rump toasting at his stove. King Winter had fooled him, patient and gullible ass, and lashed him to this unworkable system, no it had never worked and never would.
We live in tales, he thought, and tales have endings but no exits, except into their frame tales. He had failed; and yet there was no right thing he could have done, not with his water, not about Rose, not with anything, that was beyond or different from his attempts to do the right thing; there is no right way for stories to come out, only our struggles to make them come out right. Well he wasn’t going to stick around to see how this one came out. He exited now into the unimaginable frame tale of this tale, which held who knew what, another city and another dawn. He wondered what he should write to the Winterhalters. He felt, like Rose, afraid and happy.
Of course frame tales too have endings, endings of their own; but from them, too, you can exit only into further frame tales. Yes, Pierce thought: yes, so we figure that out, maybe, finally, about our tales; and maybe we conceive the ambition to make our way—to think or hope our way—out from the tale we find ourselves in into the frame tale of that tale, where its terms were first set and its reasons for being told were given; and not to stop there, either, but to make it all the way out, tale into frame tale into frame tale to the authorial origin, the first onceupon-a-time of all.
Well fine. But to believe you really have made it all the way out is an illusion; for the tale has no author.
Rose it is authorless. The outermost one too if there even is an outermost one. That’s Ray’s arrogance with his little black book, to believe that there is an outermost one and that he knows what it is. To believe he can stand outside the story, with the Author, the book in his hand. In the beginning was the Word.
All right. But the greater error was the one that had tempted Pierce himself, to believe that we ourselves are the authors of the tales we live within. That’s the ultimate arrogance of power, the arrogance of the gods: for all the gods believe themselves self-created, and believe themselves to be issuing their own strong stories, news to us.
Well we don’t create them, those stories. They are uncreated; they come to us without our willing it, “from a region of awareness beyond our ken,” beyond even where the Powers are at war: countless tales or the same few tales in countless varieties, enough to go around, enough for each of us to have his own, only to learn it’s not his own at all. We have not created them—but we can learn compassion for those who are living and suffering alongside us within them (within the old tales, the old old tales) and trying to make them come out right, or to come out at all; maybe, after many adventures and much suffering, to exit to the frame.
You’re not required to finish it, Beau said; but you’re not to give it up either.
Oh I see, he thought or breathed, his Sagittarian verb, the heart pierced by its own arrow: I see.
He picked up his pen, and on the unfinished page of his journal he wrote a new epigraph, not someone else’s this time but his own, for a book not yet written and now unwriteable:
Will we not, then, find what we seek at last? Will we not be saved? Will we not awaken? Yes, we will; surely we will; and not once either but many times: time after time.
Far down inside the night lands that are Death, down in the dark where Little Enosh is in Rutha’s prison, there is an infinitesimal bright spark of knowing that could dissolve all the worlds, if it were ever to be released. But it might never be released. And just as far outward—farthestmost, out beyond the enclosing circles, where Beau longs to go for good—is the same knowing, a knowing that could fold the great sad mistaken
dark to its breast like a small child and close it up at last in grateful nothingness, the same nothingness from which it came at first; but that might never happen either.
Meanwhile, no matter what, “deer walk on our mountains,” up on Mount Randa for instance nosing in the snow for the withered apples of abandoned orchards, near where Spofford’s new cellar-hole is smothered up; meanwhile flamingoes in their hundreds rise from the waters of the salt marshes in Florida and Africa too, all startled or moved at once by something none of them alone could have perceived; and the stars turn unseen behind the sun, only seeming to be changeless; and Sam and Rosie watch the tiger cubs roll and bite on TV at Arcady, and Rosie waits to hear the phone ring.
It was only Pierce calling, this time anyway, and not the law, or vengeful cultists: just calling to say he was homeless now and so was ready to go do his duty and use his fellowship, or be a fellow, or however it was to be termed. He said he supposed he could sleep there in his house for one night or two on the floor by the fire, drink bottled water and piss outdoors in the snow, but he couldn’t do it long, so he had to get going; and Rosie said not to be silly and come stay with them for a while.
Spofford went out to bring him back (the Steed was deep in the snow of his yard, for Pierce had taken the plane and the bus to his mother’s and had made no provision for it; when just out of curiosity he forced open its door and turned the key in the ignition nothing happened anyway; he would never, though he didn’t know this yet, ride in it again). When Spofford drove up, Pierce was standing in his overcoat and galoshes at the stone gateposts with a large duffel in his hand and a cardboard box clutched to his breast. Behind him a long line of footprints in the snow, going in and then back out.
“You didn’t have to come all the way out here,” Spofford said. “I’d of got in.”
“Well.”
“Chains,” said Spofford. “Four-wheel drive.”
“Anyway thanks.”
They went out onto the river road; Pierce listened to the chink of the chains and squinted his eyes against the awful innocence of the snow in the sun. “Spofford,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“The answer’s yes,” Spofford said. “I know all about it. She told me.” He looked over at Pierce with what Pierce, only daring to catch his eye for a moment, thought to be amusement. “Happens,” he said. “Fortunately she still likes me best. Surprising. But she does. So that’s okay.”
Pierce said nothing. This was not in fact what he had meant to ask his old friend about. Spofford had long ago warned him that the round dance that went on in these parts would eventually lead almost everybody to almost everybody else. His breast filled hugely, and rested. In the rearview mirror he saw the chimneys of the Winterhalters’ mansion, and then their road and the town of Littleville, pass backwards away.
“Do you remember,” he said after a time, “the day I came here, the day the bus broke down?”
“Sure. A year ago. Summer before last.”
“Do you remember anything unusual about that day?”
“Only that. Your arrival. Buswrecked.”
“I remember sitting there,” Pierce said, “in front of the store in Fair Prospect. I remember sitting there and drinking a Coke. I remember that a little breeze sprang up.”
Spofford once again glanced at him. Only after a moment did he realize that Pierce desired to have this detail corroborated. “Uh-huh,” he said.
“You remember?”
“No.”
“A little breeze,” Pierce said. He had sat there and thought of his Three Wishes, the three everyone deserves, and how he would treat them; how he would wish for health or wealth or love and the third wish would be to forget he had ever been granted any wishes. And he had thought that if that were to happen, right then at the moment of his sitting there, then he of course wouldn’t know it; and yet everything that followed would follow from them, from those wishes, whatever they were. Or had been.
“Just after that,” Pierce said, “you and your sheep came out onto the main road. You with a straw hat on your head and your crook.”
“My what?”
“Crook,” said Pierce, and drew one in the air. “The thing shepherds use.” But Spofford was already shaking his head, amused. “No. No way. Never owned one.”
“Yes sure,” Pierce said. “It’s one of your attributes. Il Pastor fido. You. It’s what I know about you.”
“You got quite the head,” Spofford said. “A thing I have always admired. It’s a privilege to know you, man, in many ways. But you know sometimes a sheep is just a sheep. Most times, in fact.”
Arcady was almost comically appealing, its chimneys and fancywork all capped with sugar snow, the winter-woolly sheep milling at the fence. A fire too burning in the study fireplace. There Pierce put down the box containing the typescript of the so-called novel that he had shepherded from Fellowes Kraft’s house to his own and now to here. On the big desk were laid out all of the letters that Fellowes Kraft had sent to Boney Rasmussen over several years; but most particularly from the last trip that Kraft had taken to Europe, on Boney’s nickel, ten years before: the trip that now Pierce would retake.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Rosie said. “How you’re supposed to wrap this up.”
Pierce had been looking with deep reluctance on the piles of pale blue letters flimsy as ashes. He picked one up, the second page of one, no date, no place.
this Croll or Kroll, by the way (author of the Basilica Chymica) had a famous chest or trunk of some kind, containing I am not sure what, which after his sudden death (sudden for an iatrochemist) was sought for fiercely by the Emperor, who fought off the great noble Peter von Rosemberk, who also desperately wanted it. No mention of this trunk or chest after that. Where is it now? Where for that matter is
“You can have this to take with you too,” Rosie said. She gave him an old leatherbound guidebook of a kind now passé: onionskin pages nearly pictureless, tiny type picked out with stars, arrows, bullets, and other notæ.
“Gee,” said Pierce.
“It’s full of Kraft’s writing,” Rosie said. And so it was, fine spidery penciled annotations that Pierce would need better light to read, much better light.
“And this,” Rosie said, with a gesture of what-the-hell generosity. A little book, also of an old-fashioned kind, privately printed. “His life.”
Written by himself, for who to read? It was called Sorrow, Sit Down. For a moment Pierce’s eyes filled; but they did that now every day, at something or at nothing; every day. He opened to the pictures. Three young men in an open truck or jeep on a mountain track: On expedition in the Giant Mountains, it said. 1935.
“Anything else?” Pierce asked, holding these.
“Well,” Rosie said, and looked around herself. “Oh sure. You should see this.”
She led him out into the living room, to a polished cabinet or commode, he had noted its workmanship before, what was the name of that art whereby pictures were made of bits of different veneers. A violin with a curly ribbon tied to its neck, a peacock, a pen, a book, an hourglass. Rosie reached up to turn the key in the little casket that surmounted it.
“I’m not going to give it to you,” she said, “because I’m pretty sure it belongs here.”
“Good,” said Pierce. “Fine.”
“I’ve told you about it,” she said. “You know all about it already.” She put her hand in, but after a moment’s puzzled groping she took out nothing but a velvet bag, black and empty, limp as a dead kitten.
“It’s gone,” she said.
“Gone?”
“It was right here,” Rosie said.
Gone, thought Pierce, well sure.
Gone, Rosie thought too, wondering.
Gone, dreamed Sam, asleep upstairs in her bed; gone, she dreamed she said, watching it roll purposefully across her bedroom floor and out across the hall and down the stair.
—Gone, said
Doctor John Dee. Gone. Over the hills and far away.
Gone, Fellowes Kraft had written on the last page he would finish of the yellow typescript that lay now in the lamplight on Boney Rasmussen’s desk; gone once more, gone to hide her head where no one knows, until someday somewhere
And then no more.
Pierce Moffett was not cured, no: for he was awake and thinking in the gulf of darkness after midnight, his eyes open and his heart alert. Thinking about Jesus. It was Solstice Night; the snow falling steadily outside could be sensed more than seen or heard, perhaps lightening the darkness a little, perhaps making a sound in all its soundless alightings.
Such a funny contradictory moment in the calendar (the old circular one, not the straight-on one of datebooks and newspapers, though the abstracted members and limbs of the older one could of course still be found in those). For it’s the end of autumn and the first day of winter, which in this northern zone has already well begun, and which stretches on from there deep and crisp and even for many weeks and months: and yet it’s the birthday of the Sun, the day after his long decline and death are over and he begins, weak as an infant, to grow and flourish again; and so we celebrate, in the cold and the dark.
Maybe that’s why Jesus is a solar myth, or so easily could become one, or attract to himself the properties of one. Born, to the rejoicing of the whole cosmos; but little and weak and obscure, in a poor part of town.
Rose had told him that they didn’t celebrate Christmas the usual way, that they made no big deal about its annual recurrence, and why? Because most people act as though it happens every year, the birth of Jesus, and it doesn’t: it happened once, a long time ago. Once and for all.
