The Moon by Night

by Madeleine L'engle

  “My dear girl,” Zachary said, “I’m not rubbing anything in. I picked you, didn’t I? Not your sister.”

  I shone my flashlight down on the pebbles of the path. “There’s the little matter of age.”

  “Age!” His black eyebrows shot up. “You’re years younger than that golden-haired kid. You’re an innocent little babe in the woods. Hey, I know what, let’s lie down and cover ourselves with leaves and let the robins bring us berries like in the song.”

  “Are you a babe in the woods?”

  “You got me there. Guess we can’t do it. Anyhow what I really had in mind was something else again.” He turned around there on the path between the amphitheater and the campgrounds and kissed me. My heart began to pound as though I were the one with the heart condition. I wasn’t sure I wanted my first real kiss to be from Zachary. But he gave it—or took it—without so much as a by-your-leave and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

  “Well!” he said. “That was very nice. I think you’re going to be okay, Vicky-O. Very okay.” He took my hand and we walked slowly along the path again. He intoned,

  “I grow old, I grow old,

  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  T. S. Eliot. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of him.”

  “We did Murder in the Cathedral in church,” I said.

  He stopped and kissed me again. Longer, this time. “You’re a funny kid,” he said afterwards, “a mixture of goody-goody little Miss Prunes, and quite a gal. I look forward to knowing you in five years.”

  —You’re a funny kid, I could have said right back at him, but I didn’t. One minute he was talking about dropping dead any day, and the next he was making plans into an indefinite future.

  “Here we are, Victorinia,” he said. “I brought you safely home. I won’t see you again till Laguna. But expect me there, sweetheart. Expect me there!” He called out good night to everybody and walked off down the path, whistling that darned melody.

  We were in bed a little after nine, and it was cool enough so that the sleeping bags felt very comfortable. I was just about to drift off to sleep when I heard the Indians singing again from wherever it was they sleep. It scared me. It sounded raw and primitive and I felt that they hated us and it wouldn’t take much to make them work themselves up to the point where they’d take their tomahawks (did Navajo’s use tomahawks?) and come around to the tents and scalp all the audience that had displeased them that evening.

  They must have sung for half an hour, this weird, high singing with its strange “hau!” and they got me thoroughly waked up. Maybe it was partly Zachary, too. And getting kissed. Anyhow, I kept bouncing about in my sleeping bag, getting wider and wider awake every minute. I let some air out of the mattress but that didn’t help and I decided I’d let too much air out, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that, except be uncomfortable.

  So finally I decided to play my alphabet game to get to sleep. Grandfather taught it to me. He plays it when he can’t sleep, but most of his are prayers and psalms and stuff like that, and most of mine aren’t. What you do is think of a song or poem for each letter of the alphabet, and you never get to XYZ without falling asleep first. So I’ve learned all kinds of things. Most of them I’ve learned during sermons. I write what I want to learn on a slip of paper and then stick it in my hymnal at church. Our minister at home is a very kindly person, but he preaches long and dull sermons. He’s nothing like Grandfather. Grandfather is short and to the point and exciting and you can’t help listening to him.

  I had a perfect A for a camping trip, Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.”

  “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

  Healthy, free, the world before me,

  The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose … .”

  Maybe that was true for our family, for me. But it wasn’t for Zachary. I went on to B. My favourite B is “The Blessed Damozel.” I love that one. It’s all mysterious and golden and like music.

  “The blessed damozel leaned out

  From the golden bar of heaven;

  Her eyes were deeper than the depth

  Of waters stilled at even;

  She had three lilies in her hand,

  And the stars in her hair were seven … .”

  It’s about this beautiful girl who’s in heaven, but heaven doesn’t mean a thing to her because her lover is still on earth, and even though she’s in heaven she can’t keep from weeping for him.

  Well, that didn’t put me to sleep, even though it’s quite long. I went on and on and still I was wide awake and scared, which doesn’t usually happen. I got up to I, and I’m usually asleep long before then. There are quite a lot of nice ones for I. There’s “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which is best for around Christmas. And there’s the poem painted on the wall of the loft at Grandfather’s. But this night for some reason I used “I will lift up mine eyes.” I guess I used it because of the hills around me, and because I thought it would be comforting. I said it slowly, trying to relax into its promises.

  “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills

  From whence cometh my help.

  My help cometh from the Lord

  Which made heaven and earth.”

  Oh, it’s a very comforting thing, that, particularly at the end, where it says,

  “The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.

  The sun shall not smite thee by day,

  Nor the moon by night.

  The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil;

  He shall preserve thy soul.

  The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in

  From this time forth, and even forevermore.”

  The moonlight had been beating against our tent and coming in through the windows, but now as I said these words it didn’t seem to be smiting, it was just silver and beautiful. I didn’t even get to my J, but drifted down deep into sleep.

  About three thirty I was wakened by a loud, barking wail. It kept on and on, and I didn’t know what on earth it could be, because it didn’t sound like anything I knew. But I was still too sleepy and comfortable to get nervous again, and I went back to sleep. In the morning the campers in the tent next to us told us that it was a coyote.

  “If I’d heard it I’d have recognized it from TV,” Suzy said, pulling out her notebook. “Do you think it’s fair if I write it down if I didn’t hear it?”

  We didn’t see Zachary that morning, and I didn’t really expect to, the way he’d said good-bye the night before. John made a couple of cracks about losing my boy friend, but Mother shut him up.

  When we left Mesa Verde we had to go back through a corner of New Mexico to get to Arizona. As we neared the New Mexico border we went into a Ute Indian reservation, and again the whole face of the earth changed completely and spectacularly. John has a book, The Conquest of Space, with illustrations by Chesley Bonestell, of what scientists think other planets and satellites must look like, and this Ute reservation was like one of these illustrations. I began to feel that after we’d finished seeing America no land anywhere would have any surprises for us, even if we should go to Mars or the moon or the slushy frozen ammonia snows of Jupiter. The Ute Indians’ land was dry and tan with dusty-looking grey vegetation. In the background were high cliffs with flat tops and eroded sides. As we drove along, strange, fairy-tale rock formations appeared out of nowhere. Daddy said they were volcanic monoliths. It gave me the feeling of absolutely tremendous age, as though this land had been made so long ago that the Pueblo civilization was only yesterday. It seemed that we could almost reach out and hold hands across time with the people in the cliff dwellings, but this Indian reservation reached so far back into the distant past that there was no way of bridging those hundreds of thousands of years. Were the Indians in the reservation part of that past? Zachary would probably know. How could they, how could anybody live there?

  Arizona. Another state. (Rob finally did it f
irst this time. “Two states!” he cried triumphantly.) Another world.

  It was really staggering. I mean, when your whole world has been a little village like Thornhill you can’t help getting amazed when you see things you never realized even existed. I kept thinking that all these differences couldn’t keep on, that we must have seen everything and the rest of it’d just be more of something we already knew, and then we’d round a bend and there’d be a kind of landscape I’d never even dreamed of before. How can people in all these places be the same when where they live is so completely different? Well, Zachary lived in a different place, and he wasn’t like anybody else I’d ever known before.

  “There should be Bug-Eyed Monsters here, or Little Blue Men,” John said as we drove into Painted Desert.

  Hot, hot it was, and dry. We stopped at a filling station and bought a desert bag, a canvas bag that you fill with water and then hang outside the car. The water in the bag, even when you’re driving in blistering sunlight, keeps cool because of evaporation. I don’t understand this, even though Daddy and John and Suzy all tried to explain it to me. The main thing is, it works.

  The desert was yellow, as though it had soaked up the color of the sun, with red, lava-like cones and pyramids that looked almost as though they had been made by people instead of being something nature dreamed up. The shadows were purple and blue and looked as though they were things in themselves, so that they’d be there, lying on the hot sand, even if there were nothing to cast them. There was a feeling of eternity about it, of being outside time, that must have affected even Rob, because suddenly he asked,

  “Mother, do numbers have any end?”

  “No, Rob.”

  “If I counted all day and night would I come to an end?”

  “No, Rob. You could go on counting forever.”

  “But if everybody counted wouldn’t there have to be an end?”

  After a while the road started to get ugly and touristy again. We went across bridge after bridge over dry rivers, but now we knew how quickly those cracked river beds that looked as though they’d been empty for centuries could become raging torrents. Sometimes at the side of the road we would see Indians with impassive, closed-in faces. They looked unfriendly. It was nothing as active as hate. It was just stolid dislike. I thought of the things Zachary’d said about Indians and I couldn’t blame them. But it still made me uncomfortable.

  Every once in a while Daddy pointed out small dust twisters moving across the barren land. I leaned over the front seat towards Mother. “I don’t think I want to live in Arizona.”

  “We haven’t seen much of it yet,” she said. “Some people think it’s a paradise.”

  Towards the end of the day’s drive we began to climb. We’d been seeing hazy mountains in the distance for a long time, and as we finally reached them the blast of hot air began to get cooler, and at last we did see some green, the light green of grass and the darker green of pines, and then Daddy pulled in to Townsend Campsite, which is near Flagstaff, Arizona. It was by far the most primitive campsite we’d had, not much bigger than the roadside picnic areas at home. No lavatories. Only dirty, fly-inhabited privies. Suzy decided they were highly unsanitary and announced that she wasn’t going to use them, but Daddy told her that she had no alternative, and when she had to go badly enough she’d use the privy, flies or no flies.

  The only thing to remember about Flagstaff, Arizona, is beautiful tall pines at the campgrounds, and strawberry jam.

  There were a lot of kids there around Suzy’s age, and while Mother and I were getting dinner everybody else played baseball, even Rob, who still isn’t very good at it, but John pitched when he was at bat.

  When Mother called out that dinner was ready Suzy came rushing back. The big green box of food was on the picnic bench and she bumped against it and knocked it off the bench with a resounding crash.

  Mother just looked at Suzy, and Suzy cried, “I didn’t mean to!”

  Daddy picked up the box and set it on the table. Mother looked in and said, “Oh, no.”

  I looked. We had just bought a brand new king size jar of strawberry jam. It was broken. Very broken. Jam was all over everything in the box.

  Suzy offered quickly, “I’ll clean it up.”

  “No,” Mother said. “Thank you, Suzy. But no.” She pulled out the jar of mustard and it was covered with strawberry jam. Still holding the gooey mustard bottle Mother closed her mouth tight and walked around the table. Then she walked around the tent and the car. Then she came back to the table. “Suzy and Rob, get me water. Lots and lots of water.” She took a paper towel and wiped off the mustard jar. Then she reached in the box and pulled out a handful of broken glass and strawberry jam. “The sugar jar is broken, too.”

  “Be careful of broken glass,” Daddy said, and took out the salt container, though you couldn’t tell what was in the container for strawberry jam. The paper napkins were covered with strawberry jam. The English muffins for breakfast were covered with strawberry jam.

  Mother moaned, “Why did I ever think I liked strawberry jam?” and then giggled.

  Suzy and Rob came back with one small pot of water.

  “What’s this?” Daddy asked.

  “The man wouldn’t let us get any more,” Suzy said. “He says there’s a water shortage.”

  “He didn’t like us,” Rob said. “He sounded mad.”

  There wasn’t a ranger at this campground, just an old and rather crochety man. Daddy said, “I’d better explain that we have a slight emergency. Come along, kids.”

  We used up a whole roll of paper towels on the strawberry jam, putting the dirty towels in the fireplace until the fire smelled of burned sugar and strawberries.

  Suzy, Rob, and Daddy came back with water, which, Daddy said, the man had been very loath to give them, even with explanations, and Suzy asked, and she wasn’t being funny, “What are we going to have on the English muffins tomorrow morning?”

  John said, “Suzy, people have lost their necks for less than that. If you’ll take my advice you’ll just be very, very quiet.”

  The next day was Grand Canyon and we got there around noon. The only trouble with Grand Canyon was that we were already so saturated with beauty that we looked at it and said, “Oh. Pretty.” Which is hardly the word for Grand Canyon. But it just didn’t mean to us what it would have meant if we’d come straight to it from Thornhill without all the other things in between.

  Also, Grand Canyon was crowded and commercial, and it’s a place you should see without any people at all.

  Anybody can read all about Grand Canyon, so there’s no point in describing it. We took a two night stopover there and had a lot of fun. There was a nuclear physicist and his family across from us so another baseball game got started and kept on going, on and off, for two days, with new kids joining in all the time till we had two full teams. John and I were the oldest. Not many teen-agers seem to go camping.

  We went on some guided hikes, went to the campfire lectures, and took hot showers which you had to pay for at Grand Canyon—twenty-five cents.

  We were there over Sunday so we went to the church service, and I’m sorry to say it was the dullest of all the ones we went to, held in a hall instead of outdoors like at lots of other parks. If there was ever a place to have church outdoors Grand Canyon was it. Suzy wriggled and Rob went to sleep and fell off his chair with a thud in the middle of the sermon. We had a terrible time not giggling, and I let out a loud, disgraceful snort, and that sent Suzy off, and it was a relief when it was over. Mother and Daddy were not pleased.

  From Grand Canyon we went to Zion Canyon. Each day we kept thinking that we couldn’t see anything more beautiful than the day before, but the drive to Zion was one of the most strange and beautiful of all. Along the roadside were high grey sand-dunes, only they weren’t made of sand, they were solid and hard. John and I thought maybe they were petrified, but Daddy said no. The desert was spotted with sage and bounded by eroded red cliffs. It wa
s terribly hot and Suzy was whiney and Rob’s chest and back got spotted with heat rash, and Daddy let us have water from the desert bag quite often. Suddenly we climbed into a great and beautiful pine woods, and the air seemed to stretch out, so that it was light and clear. Then, climbing down, the desert lay spread out before us, every shade possible of rose and mauve and blue. This part of Arizona was wild and beautiful and again unlike anything we’d ever experienced or expected. I kept thinking of strange planets in distant solar systems.

  “Turn your space ship around and come down from the stars,” Mother said. “Don’t you realize you’re home?”

  When Mother said “home” I had a vision of our white house with its orderly green lawn, of our elms and maples, of the tree house John built, and the rambler roses coming into bloom on the fence. “Home?” I asked stupidly.

  “This is your country, Vicky,” Mother said. “This is America. A New England village isn’t your only heritage. This is part of it, too.”

  Daddy added, “Your great-great-grandparents came out this way in a covered wagon. They didn’t have road maps or even roads, and they weren’t sure that the desert would ever end or that they’d eventually reach green and fertile land again. When we send our astronauts up, every possible precaution is made to bring them safely home, and the whole nation watches and prays. Your great-great-grandparents were on their own. They lost one child on the way with fever. Their oldest boy was captured by Indians, and they never knew what happened to him. Crossing our own unchartered land took as much courage and imagination as a trip to the moon.”