It was like the old man on Church Street. He was on the other side of Church Street across the alley; the alley was really a lane with bushes; the bushes ran up one side to the street where Miss Macmullen who had the kindergarten lived, past the Williams’ house. It was the Williamses who said that Papalie was our grandfather.
I was running along the other side of the street with Gilbert and some of the cousins and some of the boys that Gilbert played with. We all stood outside the iron rails where the old man lived. He was with his gardener, the young man who had a knife or a pair of garden scissors in his belt. The old man looked at us. The garden was narrow with a path between the wall of the next house and his own house.
He was a tall old man with a white beard. He said, “Let the girl in.” I was the only girl in the crowd of Gilbert and the cousins and the other boys. So I stood at the gate and looked at the path and felt strange, but I was the only girl so I stepped across the gate-stone to the path in the garden.
The old man said, “What do you want, you can have whatever you want from my garden.” I looked around and I saw a tall lily plant; I said, “I want a lily,” so the gardener or whoever he was, the young man took a knife from his belt or his pocket and cut off a white lily.
Then I went back, but the boys had all gone, Church Street was empty. I went in our front door and Mamalie and Mama were sitting in our sitting room like they did, talking and sewing. I showed them the lily, it was just the lily with hardly any stem; they said, “But it would be lovely on Papalie’s grave,” so I stuck it in the earth that was not yet grown over with grass, on Papalie’s grave.
Then the old man said he would send his sleigh whenever the girl wanted it, so the gardener who was the coachman, came with the sleigh. The streets were all empty, but we drove round the town. I sat with my back to the driver and Mama sat with one boy on either side, under the fur rugs. “Whenever you want the sleigh, just ask me,” said the old man. “It is because the girl asks; if she asks, I will send the sleigh.”
One day I said to Mama, “What has become of the old man on Church Street who sent me a sleigh?” Mama said there was no old man on Church Street who sent us a sleigh. I said, “But don’t you remember, I sat with my back to the driver who was the young man who cut off the lily for me that you and Mamalie told me to put on Papalie’s grave, that I did put on Papalie’s grave.” Mama said no, she didn’t tell me anything like that. Anyhow … when I came to think about it, this was the odd thing; the lily was flowering and the streets were full of snow. It could not be worked out. But it happened. I had the lily, in my hand.
Now Papa’s hand was in my hand.
He called me Töcterlein and I couldn’t help it. It made a deep cave, it made a long tunnel inside me with things rushing through.
There was another book with a picture; Mama cut it out. Because Mama cut it out, it was there always. People do not cut out pictures from their books; sometimes the pictures work loose, but they can be pasted back with that sort of paper that Uncle Hartley showed us that Papalie had for his special plates that had to be put in the book when he was making up the book he wrote about water-things that grow in water, that he showed us under the microscope. You could see what Papalie showed you. You could not see what it was that Papa went out to look at.
The picture was a girl lying on her back, she was asleep, she might be dead but no, Ida said she was asleep. She had a white dress on like the dress the baby wore in the photograph Aunt Rosa sent Mama, that Mama tried to hide from us, of Aunt Rosa’s baby in a long white dress in a box, lying on a pillow. The baby looked as if it were asleep, the girl in the picture looked as if she were dead, but the baby was dead and the girl was asleep and the picture was called Nightmare.
The book was about Simple Science, someone gave it to us when we could not read, but Ida told us what the pictures were about. We knew about the snow anyway, we knew the snow was stars, that each snowflake had a different shape; we knew that and we knew about the kettle, at least we had seen the kettle in the kitchen with steam coming out. It seemed a funny thing to put in the book, but it was, Ida said, to explain how the steam happened, but I did not care about that. What I wanted to know was, what was a nightmare, was the nightmare real?
It was like an old witch on a broomstick, it was a horrible old woman with her hair streaming out and she was riding on a stick, it was a witch on a broomstick, but the book was science, they said it was to explain real things. Then a witch was real; in Grimm it was a fairy tale but a witch in a book called Simple Science that someone gave us must be real because Ida said that was what science was. Papa and Papalie were working at real things, called science; the old witch was riding straight at the girl who was asleep. It was a dream; Ida said, “Nightmare is a dream. That picture is to explain what a nightmare is.”
We did not like that book, we did not notice when it was lost or given away. It was only the one picture. Mama said one of the children had screamed in the night that a nightmare was coming. It must have been Harold, for I do not remember that I screamed. But somebody screamed, it could not have been Gilbert, Harold said it was not him.
It was only a picture, I cut it out,” she said; you could see how she had cut it, the picture was gone.
“What is a nightmare?”
“It’s a name for a bad dream.”
“Why is it a mare? Uncle Hartley said a mare is a mother horse.”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it a night horse?”
“Well, no, I don’t know, it’s only a dream anyhow.”
A nightmare is a mare in the night, it is a dream, it is something terrible with hooves rushing out to trample you to death. It is death. It is the child with the ruffles on her nightgown who they say is asleep, but she is dead. Or is it Aunt Rosa’s baby who they said is dead, but maybe it is asleep?
He goes out in the night.
“What does he do there? Why does he go across the bridge to his observatory?”
“I’ve told you and told you and told you, he goes out to look at the stars.”
“Why?”
“Because that is his work, it is his—work—well he is a professor, isn’t he? They give him money for teaching students, if he did not make money, where would you be, you wouldn’t have a house, you would have no clothes to wear.”
That is what he does. He goes out to look at the stars. Of course, now we are so much older, it is very simple; anyhow his transit house is here just across the field that will be a lawn next spring and they will put up the sundial that says Tempus Fugit which Mama says is time flies. Time flies. He goes out to look at stars that have something to do with time flying, Mr. Evans said, that has something to do with winter and summer and the way the earth goes round the sun. “The earth goes round the sun,” said Mr. Evans. As if we didn’t know that. If people tell you things like that, they talk to you as if you were in Sunday school.
We would have asked him more, but it’s better not to have things like that explained; Papa does not explain them. Mr. Evans made it seem clear and simple like that Simple Science that said everything in the wrong way. We do not have to have a book with a picture of a kettle on a kitchen fire to tell us what steam is.
But there are things that we must know. We must know why a nightmare is called a nightmare, but no one has yet explained it. He neighs like a horse when he laughs, he had a horse to ride when he was on the northern boundary which is that straight line on the map that separates us from Canada that he helped draw, that he had a dog team and Indian guides to help him with.
There was a dog with a barrel on his collar and a person asleep in the snow in our animal book; that was a Saint Bernard dog; the person was not dead, it looked like a girl with hair blown on the snow, but they said it was a boy who was asleep, not dead. You must not let yourself get warm in the snow; if you are terribly cold and then want to lie down and sleep because you feel happy and warm, you will freeze to death. The barrel had wine for the man in the snow. W
hen he took us out to get that present, it was snowing. We walked down Church Street, then we turned down Main Street. Ida had put the top of the box down on the table and Gilbert was reaching in the box.
If the animals are there, then it did happen, then we did walk down Church Street, we three together, and we chose the animals.
Gilbert unwrapped the top animals; they were the Swiss wooden goat and the Swiss wooden bear that really were not for the putz but Mama kept them; then he said, “Here’s your bear, Harold,” and there it was.
It was the polar bear, and Gilbert of course remembered that it was Harold’s. How could you forget how we had laid them all out on the floor, then had put them back in the box so as to see them all together, then had begun to choose?
Gilbert unwrapped the lion, he unwrapped the striped lynx that looked like a cat. He said, “I don’t remember if this leopard is yours or Harold’s.” I said, “It’s a lynx, it’s mine.”
I wondered if Papa remembered how he had bought the box of animals. Papa said, “Well, I must be off, tempus fugit,” which were the letters written on the sundial that was still partly wrapped in its old sacking in the empty library. He let go my hand. I looked at him and saw that he was going.
* A Moravian missionary
BECAUSE ONE IS HAPPY
Miss Helen let us draw on our slates, provided, she said, the drawings were not too silly.
Was a Christmas tree drawn on a slate, in and out of season, silly? It appeared not. Straight up, like the mast of a ship, then the branches in stark silhouette, a skeleton of a tree that looks bare; it looks really like a tent set up, with the down-sweeping branches for the tent folds or the crisscross of the twigs like the pattern on the tent, like Indians paint patterns on their tents. The tree indeed has come from the forest in which long ago there were Indians. There was an Indian who said the music coming from our church was the voice of the Great Spirit. That was when the Indians were coming down from the mountains one Christmas Eve. Everything happened—or should happen in our town—on Christmas Eve. Anyhow, this is all in a book; there were books with old pictures and drawings and photographs of our town. The Indians said, “It is the Voice of the Great Spirit,” so the Great Spirit who was the Indian’s God was part of our God too; at least they went away. You draw the down-sweeping branches carefully, for if you make just silly scratches, Miss Helen says the drawing is not serious enough.
The thing is that you draw this tree, you rub it out with your damp sponge and polish off your slate with your bit of old towel that Ida has given you to keep in your school desk for your slate. Once in a while, Miss Helen tells whose slate-rags are too shabby. You get the sponges at John’s, where you get slate-pencils and valentines and false faces for Halloween. You keep the sponge in a little saucer and make excuses to go to the washroom to wet the sponge, till Miss Helen says you must all do your sponges first thing in the morning or at recess. There may be a branch of chestnut, in water on the schoolroom windowsill, that has burst into heavy furry leaves. We do not draw the branch of the chestnut, but with the slightest lift of branches, this pine tree on a slate may be or could be a chestnut tree with its candlesticks of blossom.
This is magic against the evil that stings in the night. Its voice wails at two, at three (it is called the “siren” or the “alert”) but safe, “frozen” in bed, there is magic. It is simple, innocuous magic. But sometimes through sheer nervous exhaustion, we drop off to sleep. We are not so safe then.
The serpent has great teeth, he crawled on Papa-and-Mama’s bed and he was drinking water out of a kitchen tumbler, the sort of tumbler that we put our paintbrushes in. Then, I wonder why he is drinking water out of a common glass tumbler on Mama-and-Papa’s bed. He does not spill the water. His great head is as wide as the tumbler but he drinks carefully and does not spill the water. Now I know there are three of us, I do not see their faces, but of course it is Harold and Gilbert.
The thing is, there is another snake on the floor, he may want water out of a glass, too; there is nothing very horrible about this until the snake on the floor rears up like a thick terrible length of fire hose around the legs of the bed. Then he strikes at me. I am not as tall as the footpiece of the bed, I could rest my elbows on the bed, like on a table. We spread out the Arabian Nights on Mama-and-Papa’s bed and I said, “This is a girl,” but Gilbert said, Aladdin was a boy. Was he? He wears a dress, he has long hair in a braid and a sort of girl-doll cap on his head. “Yes, yes,” Ida says, “Aladdin is not a girl.” Is it only a boy who may rub the wishing-lamp? I try it on the lamp on the stand in the parlor, but my wish does not happen, so maybe it is only a boy who may have the wish.
The snake has sprung at me and (though I know that Gilbert has been resting for a very long time, in a place called Thiacourt in France, and that Mama went to sleep too, in the early hours of the first day of spring long past, and did not wake up again) I shout through the snake-face, that is fastened at the side of my mouth, “Gilbert; Mama, Mama, Mama.”
The snake falls off. His great head, as he falls away, is close to my eyes and his teeth are strong, like the teeth of a horse. He has bitten the side of my mouth. I will never get well, I will die soon of the poison of this horrible snake. I pull at Ida’s apron but it is not Ida, it is our much-beloved, later, dark Mary. She looks at the scar on my mouth. How ugly my mouth is with a scar, and the side of my face seems stung to death. But no, “You are not stung to death,” says dark Mary, who is enormous and very kind. “You must drink milk,” she says. I do not like milk. “You must eat things you do not like,” says Mary.
There is coal in our cellar and we have a washroom and Ida puts the washtubs on the bricks in the little outer-room that opens on to the garden. There is a great pear tree that has two kinds of pears because it has been grafted, and it has different kinds of pear blossoms. There is wisteria that grows up the side of the wash-kitchen.
“Can I help you wash clothes, Ida?” This is Ida, this is that mountain, this is Greece, this is Greek, this is Ida; Helen? Helen, Hellas, Helle, Helios, you are too bright, too fair, you are sitting in the darkened parlor, because you “feel the heat,” you who are rival to Helios, to Helle, to Phoebus the sun. You are the sun and the sun is too hot for Mama, she is sitting in the sitting room with Aunt Jennie and they are whispering like they do, and they hide their sewing when I come in. I do not care what they talk about. They leave me out of everything. Ida does not leave me out, “Here take this,” says Ida. “Now squeeze it harder, you can get it drier than that.” I am helping Ida wring out the clothes. Annie is wiping the soap from her arms from the other washtub.
Mary came later, in the new house, with her little boy, James.
But house is accordion-pleated on house and the dream follows simple yet very subtle devices. We put Mary in the old house and we can not reach beyond the band of her apron where it is fastened round her waist. Mary, help us. We must go further than Helen, than Helle, than Helios, than light, we must go to the darkness, out of which the monster has been born.
The monster has a face like a sick horrible woman; no, it is not a woman. It is a snake-face and the teeth are pointed and foul with slime. The face has touched my face, the teeth have bitten into my mouth. Mary, pray for us. It is so real that I would almost say an elemental had been conjured up, that by some unconscious process my dream had left open a door, not to my memories alone, but to memories of the race. This is the vilest python whom Apollo, the light, slew with his burning arrows.
This is the python. Can one look into the jaws of the python and live? Can one be stung on the mouth by the python and utter words other than poisonous? Long ago, a girl was called the Pythoness; she was a virgin.
“What is a virgin, Mama?”
“A virgin is—is a—is a girl who isn’t married.”
“Am I a virgin, Mama?”
“Yes, all little girls are virgins.”
All little girls are not virgins. The python took shape, his wings whirred ove
rhead, he dropped his sulphur and his fire on us.
“Why did you cut out the picture from this book, Mama?”
“I—I—is it cut out?”
“Mama, someone cut out the picture from this book.”
“What book, Sister?” She calls me Sister, but I am not her sister. She calls Aunt Aggie Sister, but Aunt Aggie and Aunt Laura are really her sisters. There are sisters in the Sisters’ House and if I sing in the choir when I grow up, I will wear a cap and be one of the real Sisters. The Sisters open the big doors at the end of the church, when the church is dark on Christmas Eve and Papalie says I am the light of the world and the Sisters come through the two open doors with candles on trays. Then each of us has a candle with a different colored paper cut-out ruffle around the candle so that we do not spill the wax, which is beeswax and is made from the wax the bees get when they are getting honey from flowers.
I have not forgotten that she has cut out the picture, for no one else would dare cut out a picture from our book, from any book, with a pair of scissors.
“Why did you cut it out, Mama?”
“Oh—I—I thought you would forget.”
Listen—it was a picture of—it was a picture of a nightmare. It was a picture of a little girl who was not married, lying on a bed, and a horrible creature that was like an old witch with snarling face, was riding on a stick, like a witch rides on a broomstick. She was going to stick the little girl right through with her long pointed stick and that was what would happen in the night if you went to sleep and had a bad dream which the Simple Science (which explains things like why does a kettle boil, which we do not have to have explained) calls a nightmare.
Look at its face if you dare, it is meant to drive you crazy. It is meant to drive you mad so that you fall down in a fit like someone in the Bible and see a light from heaven. It is terrible to be a virgin because a virgin has a baby with God.
The Gift: Novel Page 6
