Little, Big

by John Crowley

  “He does?”

  He hadn’t put up any objections; but then he had been behind the darkroom door, in his dim red-lit hermit’s cell, when August had discussed it with him. “Sure. You know, everybody’s going to have an automobile soon. Everybody.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “You can’t hide from the future.”

  “No, no, that’s true.” She gazed out the windows at the sleeping afternoon. “That’s true.” She had taken a meaning, but not his: he drew out his watch and consulted it, to draw her back.

  “So, well,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking into his face not as though to read it, or to communicate with it, but as though it were a mirror: that frankly, that dreamily. “I don’t know, dear. I think if John didn’t think it was a good idea …”

  “That was four years ago, Ma.”

  “Was it, was it four….” She made an effort, and took his hand again. “You were his favorite, August, did you know that? I mean he loved all of you, but … Well, don’t you think he knew best? He must have thought it all out, he thought everything all out. Oh, no, dear, if he was sure, I don’t think I could do better, really.”

  He stood up suddenly and thrust his hands into his pockets. “All right, all right. But don’t blame him, that’s all. You don’t like the idea, you’re afraid of a simple thing like a car, and you never wanted me to have anything at all anyway.”

  “Oh, August,” she began to say, but clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “All right,” he said. “I guess I’ll tell you, then. I think I’ll go away.” A lump rose to his throat, unexpectedly; he had expected to feel only defiance and triumph. “Maybe to the City. I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?” In a tiny voice, like a child just beginning to understand a huge and terrible thing. “What do you mean?”

  “Well really,” he said, rounding on her, “I’m a grown man. What do you think? That I’ll just hang around this house for the rest of my life? Well, I won’t.”

  The look in her face, of shocked helpless anguish, when all he’d said was what any twenty-year-old might say, when all he felt was the dissatisfaction any ordinary person might feel, made confusion and frustrated common sense boil up in him like a lava. He rushed to her chair and knelt before her. “Ma, Ma,” he said, “what is it? What on earth is it?” He kissed her hand, a kiss like a furious bite.

  “I’m afraid, that’s all….”

  “No, no, just tell me what’s so terrible. What’s so terrible about wanting to advance yourself, and be, and be normal. What was so wrong”—it was spilling out now, that lava, he neither desired to stop it now nor could if he chose—”about Timmie Willie going to the City? It’s where her husband lives, and she loves him. Is this such a swell house that nobody should ever think of living anyplace else? Even married?”

  “There was so much room. And the City’s so far….”

  “Well, and what was so wrong when Aub wanted to join the Army? There was a war. Everybody went. Do you want us all to be your babies forever?”

  Violet said nothing, though her big pearly tears, like a child’s, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn’t understand them really, he would receive reverently; and out of him would come then the advice, warnings, notions, the clever decisions she could never have made. She ran her hand through August’s matted, elf-locked hair, no comb could conquer it, and said, “But you know, dear, you know. You remember, don’t you? You do, don’t you?”

  He laid his cheek in her lap with a groan, and she continued to stroke his hair. “And autos, August—what would they think? The noise, and the smell. The—the boldness. What must they think? What if you drove them away?”

  “No, Ma, don’t.”

  “They’re brave, August, you remember the time, when you were a little boy, the time with the wasp, you remember how brave the little one was. You saw. What if—what if it angered them, wouldn’t they plan something, oh something so horrid…. They could, you know they could.”

  “I was just a little kid.”

  “Do you all forget?” she said, not as though to him, but as though questioning herself, questioning a strange perception she had just then had. “Do you all really forget? Is that it? Did Timmie? Do you all?” She raised his face in her hands to study it. “August? Do you forget, or … You mustn’t, you mustn’t forget; if you do …”

  “What if they didn’t mind?” August said, defeated. “What if they didn’t care at all? How can you be so sure they’d mind? They’ve got a whole world to themselves, don’t they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Grandy said …”

  “Oh, dear, August, I don’t know.”

  “Well,” he said, extracting himself from her, “then I’ll go ask. I’ll go ask their permission.” He rose. “If I ask their permission, and they say it’s all right, then …”

  “I don’t see how they could.”

  “Well, if they do?”

  “How could you be sure? Oh, don’t, August, they might lie. No, promise me you won’t. Where are you going?” “I’m going fishing.” “August?”

  Some Notes About Them

  When he was gone the tears rose again to her eyes. She brushed away impatiently the hot drops that rolled down her cheeks, rolled down because she couldn’t explain: nothing she knew could be said, there were not the words, when she tried the very saying of it made what she said into lies or stupidities. They’re brave, she had said to August. They might lie, she had said. None of that was true. They weren’t brave, and they couldn’t lie. Such things were true only when said to children, as it’s true when you say “Grandy’s gone away” to a child, when Grandy is dead, when there is no more Grandy to come or go. And the child says: Where did he go? And you think of an answer a little less true than the first, and so on. And yet you have spoken truly to it, and it has understood, at least as much as you have.

  But her children weren’t children any more.

  So many years she had tried to form what she knew into language with John, grown-up language, nets to catch the wind, the Meaning of it all, the Intention, the Resolution. Oh great good man! And he had come as close to understanding it as intelligence, unwearying application, orderliness of mind and attention to detail could get.

  But there wasn’t any Meaning, or any Intention, or any Resolution. To think that way about them was like trying to do some task while you looked only in a mirror: force them as you might, your hands do the opposite of what they are told to do, away from not toward, left not right, forward not back. She sometimes thought that thinking of them at all was just that: was looking at yourself in a mirror. But what could that mean?

  She didn’t want her children to be babies forever, this country seemed full of people furious to grow up and though she hadn’t ever sensed herself growing up she didn’t care to prevent it in others, only she was afraid: if her children forgot what they had known as children, they were in danger. She was sure of that. What danger? And how on earth was she to warn them?

  There were no answers, none. All that was within the power of mind and speech was to become more precise in how the questions were put. John had asked her: Do fairies really exist? And there wasn’t any answer to that. So he tried harder, and the question got more circumstantial and tentative, and at the same time more precise and exact; and still there were no answers, only the fuller and fuller form of the question, evolving as Auberon had described to her all life evolving, reaching out limbs and inventing organs, reticulating joints, doing and being in more and more complex yet more and more compact and individuated ways, until the question, perfectly asked, understood its own answerlessness. And then there was an end to that. The last edition, and John died still waiting for his answer.

  And yet there were things she knew. On the oxblood-colored mahogany table stood J
ohn’s tall black typewriter, bony and carapaced like an old crustacean. For August’s sake, for all of their sakes, she ought to say what she knew. She went to it, sat before it, rested her hands on its keys as a pianist might, thoughtfully, before beginning some soft, sad, almost inaudible nocturne; then realized there was no paper in it. This took a while to find; and her notepaper, when she had rolled a piece within the typewriter’s jaws, looked small and shrinking and unready to receive the blows of the keys. But she began, using two fingers, and spelled out this:

  violets notes about them

  —and beneath this, the word Grandy had used to write on the desultory journals he kept:

  tacenda

  Now what? She advanced the paper, and wrote:

  they mean no good to us

  She thought about this for a moment, and then directly under it, she added:

  they mean us no harm either.

  She meant that they didn’t care, that their concerns weren’t ours, that if they brought gifts—and they had; if they arranged a marriage or an accident—and they had; if they watched and waited—and they did, none of that was with any reason to aid or hurt mortals. Their reasons were their own—if they had reasons at all, she sometimes thought they didn’t, any more than stones or seasons have.

  they are made not born

  She considered this, cheek in hand, and said “No,” and carefully x’d out “made” and wrote “born” above it, then x’d out “born” and wrote “made” above it, and then saw that neither was truer than the other. Useless! Was there any thought about them she could have whose opposite wasn’t true? She skipped a space, sighing, and wrote:

  no two doors to them are the same

  Is that what she meant? She meant that what was a door for one person wouldn’t be a door for another. She meant also that any door, once passed through, ceased to be a door ever after, could not even be returned by. She meant that no two doors ever led to the same place. She meant that there were no doors to them at all. And yet: she found, on the topmost rank of keys, an asterisk (she hadn’t known the machine carried one) and added it to her last sentence, so it read:

  no two doors to them are the same*

  And beneath that she wrote:

  *but the house is a door

  This filled up her little notepaper, and she drew it out and read over what she had written. She saw that what she had was a sort of precis of several chapters of the last edition of the Architecture, deprived of the billowing draperies of explanation and abstraction, nude and frail but no more help than ever. She crushed it slowly in her hands, thinking she knew nothing at all and yet knew this: that the fate that awaited her and all of them awaited them here (why was she dumb to say why she knew it?), and so they must cling to this place, and not stray far from it, she supposed that she herself wouldn’t ever leave it again. It was the door, the greatest of doors, it stood Somehow, by chance or design, on the very edge or border of Elsewhere, and it would in the end be the last door that led that way. For a long time it would stand open; then for a time after that it would at least be able to be opened, or unlocked, if you had the key; but there would come a time when it would be closed for good, not be a door at all any more; and she wanted none of those whom she loved to be standing outside then.

  What You Most Want

  The south wind blows the fly in the fish’s mouth, says the Angler, but it didn’t seem to blow August’s well-tied and tempting examples into any. Ezra Meadows was sure that fish bite before rain; old MacDonald had always been sure they never do, and August saw that they do and don’t: they bite at the gnats and mosquitoes settling like dust-motes over the water, driven down by altering pressure (Change, said John’s ambivalent barometer) but not at the Jack Scotts and Alexandras August played over them.

  Perhaps he wasn’t thinking hard enough about angling. He was trying, without exactly trying to try, to see or notice something, without exactly noticing or seeing it, that would be a clue or a message; trying to remember, at the same time as he tried to forget he had ever forgotten, how such clues or messages had used to appear, and how he had used to interpret them. He must also try not to think This is madness; nor to think that he did this only for his mother’s sake. Either thought would spoil whatever might happen. Over the water a kingfisher shot, laughing, iridescent in the sun, just above the evening which had already obscured the stream. I’m not mad, August thought.

  A similarity between fishing and this other enterprise was that no matter where along the stream you stood, there seemed to be, just down there, where the stream spilled through a narrow race around stones, or just beyond the tresses of the willows, the perfect spot, the spot you had all along intended to go to. The feeling wouldn’t diminish even when, after some thought, you realized that the perfect spot was one where, a few minutes ago, you had been standing, standing and looking longingly at the spot you now stood in and wanting to be amid the long maculations of its leaf shadows, as you now were, and yet; and just as August did realize this, as his desires were so to speak in transit between There and Here, something seized his line and nearly snatched the pole from his abstracted hand.

  As startled as the fish itself must be, August played him clumsily, but had him after a struggle; netted him; the leaf-shadows were absorbed into evening vagueness; the fish looked up at him with the dull astonishment of all caught fish; August removed the hook, inserted his thumb in the bony mouth, and neatly broke the fish’s neck. His thumb, when he withdrew it, was coated with slime and cold fish-blood. Without thinking, he thrust the thumb into his own mouth and sucked it. The kingfisher, making another laughing sortie just then, eyed him as he arrowed over the water and then up into a dead tree.

  August, fish in his creel, went to the bank and sat, waiting. The kingfisher had laughed at him, not at the world in general, he was sure of that, a sarcastic, vindictive laugh. Well, perhaps he was laughable. The fish was not seven inches long, hardly breakfast. So? Well? “If I had to live on fish,” he said, “I’d grow a beak.”

  “You shouldn’t speak,” said the kingfisher, “until you’re spoken to. There are manners, you know.”

  “Sorry.”

  “First I speak,” said the kingfisher, “and you wonder who it is that’s spoken to you. Then you realize it’s me; then you look at your thumb and your fish, and see that it was the fish’s blood you tasted, that allowed you to understand the voices of creatures; then we converse.”

  “I didn’t mean …”

  “We’ll assume it was done that way.” The kingfisher spoke in the choleric, impatient tone August would have expected from his upshot head-feathers, his thick neck, his fierce, annoyed eyes and beak: a kingfisher’s voice. Halcyon bird indeed!

  “Now you address me,” the kingfisher said. “ ‘O Bird!’ you say, and make your request.”

  “O Bird!” August said, opening his hands imploringly, “Tell me this: Is it okay if we have a gas station in Meadowbrook, and sell Ford cars?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What?”

  “Certainly!”

  It was so inconvenient speaking in this way to a bird, a kingfisher seated on a branch in a dead tree at no more conversational a distance than any kingfisher ever was, that August imagined the bird as seated beside him on the bank, a sort of kingfisher-like person, of a more conversable size, with his legs crossed, as August’s were. This worked well. He doubted that this kingfisher was a kingfisher at all anyway.

  “Now,” said the kingfisher, still bird enough to be unable to look at August with more than one eye at a time, and that one bright and smart and pitiless, “was that all?”

  “I … think so. I—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I thought there might be some objection. The noise. The smell.”

  “None.” “Oh.”

  “On the other hand,” said the kingfisher—a laugh, a raucous laugh, seemed always just beneath his words—”since you’re here, and I’m here, you might ask for som
ething else altogether.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, anything. What you most want.”

  He had thought—right up until he had voiced his absurd request—that he was doing just that: but, with a terrible rush of heat that took his breath away, he knew that he hadn’t, and that he could. He blushed fiercely. “Well,” he said, stammering, “over in Meadowbrook, there’s, there’s a farmer, a certain farmer, and he has a daughter …”

  “Yes yes yes,” said the kingfisher impatiently, as though he knew well enough what August wanted, and didn’t want to be bothered with having it spelled out circumstantially. “But let’s discuss payment first, reward after.”

  “Payment?”

  The kingfisher cocked his head in short, furious changes of attitude, sometimes eyeing August, sometimes the stream or the sky, as though he were trying to think of some really cutting remark in which to couch his annoyance. “Payment,” he said. “Payment, payment. It’s nothing to do with you. Let’s call it a favor, if you prefer. The return of certain property that—don’t get me wrong—I’m sure fell into your hands inadvertently. I mean—” for the briefest moment, and for the first time, the kingfisher showed something like hesitation, or trepidation “—I mean a deck of cards, playing cards. Old ones. Which you possess.”

  “Violet’s?” said August.

  “Those ones.”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “No, no. She thinks, you see, the cards are hers. So. She mustn’t know.”

  “You mean steal them?”

  The kingfisher was silent. For a moment he disappeared altogether, although that may only have been August’s attention wandering from the effort of imagining him, to the enormity that he had been commanded to perform.