Little, Big

by John Crowley

  “Hey,” Smoky said through the open double doors. “What are you doing frowsting in here?” The word was Cloud’s. “Have you been outside? What a day.” He got no response but a slowly turned page. From where he stood Smoky saw only the back of his son’s cropped head (Smoky’s own haircutting) with two pronounced tendons, a vulnerable hollow between them; and the top of the book; and two crossed big-sneakered feet. He didn’t have to look to know Auberon wore a flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists—he never wore any other kind, or unbuttoned the wrists, no matter how. hot the weather. He felt a kind of impatient pity for the boy. “Hey,” he said again.

  “Dad,” Auberon said, “is this book true?”

  “What book is that?”

  Auberon held it up, waggling it to show the covers. Smoky felt a dense rush of feeling: it had been a day like this one—perhaps this very day of the year, yes—on which long ago he had opened that book. He hadn’t looked at it since. But he knew its contents very much better now. “Well, ‘true’,” he said, “ ‘true’, I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘true’.” Each time he said it the invisible doubt-quotes around the word became clearer. “Your great-great-grandfather wrote it, you know,” he said, coming to sit on the end of the sofa. “With some help from your great-great-grandmother—and your great-great-great grandfather.”

  “Hm.” This didn’t intrigue Auberon. He read: “ ‘There, is a realm by definition precisely as large as this one, which should not be—’ “ he stumbled “ ‘—reducible by any expansion, or enlargeable by any contraction, of this one, Here; and yet it must be that inroads have been made on that kingdome of late, that what are called by us Progress, and the growth of Commerce, and the enlargement of the bounds of Reason, have caused a flight further within their borders of that people; so that (though they have—by the nature of things must have—infinite room in which to retreat) their ancient holdings have been reduced by much. Are they angry at this? We cannot tell. Do they plan revenge? Or are they, like the Red Indian, like the African savage, now so debilitated, made so spiritless, so reduced in number, that they will at last be—’ “ another hard one “ ‘—extirpated entirely; not because they have nowhere left to flee, but because the losses, both of place and sovereignity, which our rapacity has inflicted on them are griefs too great to be borne? We cannot tell; not yet …’ “

  “What a sentence,” Smoky said. Three mystics talking at once made for a thickish prose.

  Auberon lowered the book from before his face. “Is it so?” he said.

  “Well,” Smoky said, feeling the trapped embarrassment of a parent before a child demanding to be told the facts of sex or death, “I don’t know, really. I don’t know if I really understand it. Anyway, I’m not the one to ask about it ….”

  “But is it made up,” Auberon insisted. A simple question.

  “No,” Smoky said. “No, but there are things in the world that aren’t made up but which aren’t exactly true either, not true like the sky is up and the ground is down, and two and two make four, things like that….” The boy’s eyes regarding him took no comfort from this casuistry, Smoky could see that. “Listen, why don’t you ask your mother or Aunt Cloud? They know a lot more about that stuff than I do.” He grasped Auberon’s ankle. “Hey. You know the big picnic’s today.”

  “What’s this?” Auberon said, having discovered the chart or map on onion-skin paper tipped into the back of the book. He began to unfold it—turning it wrongly at first so that an old fold tore—and just for a moment Smoky saw into his son’s consciousness: saw the expectation of revelations which any chart or diagram promises, and this one more than any; saw the greed for clarity and knowledge; saw the apprehension (in all senses) of the strange, the heretofore-hidden, the about-to-be-seen.

  Auberon at last had to climb off the couch and put the book down on the floor in order to open the chart fully out. It crackled like a fire. Time had punched tiny holes in it where folds crossed one another. To Smoky it looked far older and fainter than it had looked fifteen or sixteen years ago when he had first seen it, and burdened with figures and features he didn’t remember, complex as it had then seemed to him. But it was (it must be) the same. As he came to kneel beside his son (who was already intently studying it, eyes alight and fingers tracing lines) he saw that he could understand it no better now, though in the intervening years he had learned (had he learned anything else? Oh, much) how best to go about not understanding it.

  “I think I know what this is,” Auberon said.

  “Oh yes?” Smoky said.

  “It’s a battle.”

  “Hm.”

  In old history books Auberon had studied the maps: the oblong blocks labeled with little flags, disposed across a zebra landscape of topographical lines; gray blocks facing a roughly symmetrical disposition of black blocks (the bad guys). And on another page the same landscape hours later: some of the blocks bent aside, penetrated by the opposing blocks, pierced by the broad-arrow of their advance; others reversed entirely and following the broad-arrow of a retreat; and the diagonally-striped blocks of some belated ally appearing on one side. The great pale chart on the library floor was harder to figure out than those; it was as though the entire course of an immense battle (Positions at Dawn; Positions at 2:30 PM; Positions at Sunset) had been expressed here all at once, retreats superimposed on advances and orderly ranks on broken ones. And the topographical lines not squiggled and bent along the rises and declivities of any battleground but regular, and crossing: so many geometries, subtly altering each other as they interlaced, that the whole shimmered like moiré silk and led the eye into mazes of false appraisal: Is this line straight? Is this one curved? Are these nested circles, or a continuous spiral?

  “There’s a legend,” Smoky said, feeling weary.

  There was. There were also, Auberon saw, blocks of minute type placed explanatorily here and there (lost allies’ regiments), and the hieroglyphs of the planets, and a compass rose, though not of directions, and a scale, though not of miles. The legend said that the thick lines bounded Here, and the thin lines There. But there was no way to be sure which lines on the chart were truly thick, which thin. Below the legend, in italic type underscored to emphasize its importance, was this note: “Circumference = nowhere; center point = everywhere.”

  In deep difficulties, and in what suddenly seemed like danger as well, Auberon looked up at his father. He seemed to see in Smoky’s face and downcast eyes (and it was this face of Smoky’s that in after years Auberon would most often see when he dreamt of him) a sad resignation, a kind of disappointment, as though he would say, “Well, I tried to tell you; tried to keep you from going this far, tried to warn you; but you’re free, and I don’t object, only now you know, now you see, now the milk’s spilt and the eggs broken, and it’s partly my fault and mostly yours.”

  “What,” Auberon said, feeling a thickness in his throat, “what … what is …” He had to swallow, and found himself then with nothing to say. The chart seemed to make a noise over which he couldn’t hear his own thoughts. Smoky gripped his shoulder and rose.

  “Well, listen,” he said. Perhaps Auberon had mistaken his expression: as he stood and brushed rug lint from his trouser-knees he looked only bored, perhaps, probably. “I really really don’t think this is the day for this, you know? I mean come on. The picnic’s on.” He thrust his hands in his pockets and bent slightly over his son, taking a different air: “Now maybe you don’t feel terrifically enthusiastic about that, but I think your mother would appreciate a little help, getting things ready. Do you want to go in the car, or bike?”

  “Car,” Auberon said, still looking down, not sure whether he was glad or the reverse that though for a moment, just a moment, his father and he had seemed to venture into strange lands together, they now resumed their distant relations. He waited for his father’s eyes (which he could feel on the back of his head) to turn away, and for his father’s footsteps to sound on the parquet outside the library,
before he looked up from the chart (or map) which had grown less compelling though no less confusing, like an answerless riddle. He folded it up again, closed the book, and instead of replacing it in the glass-fronted case with its forebears and cousins, he secreted it beneath the chintz skirts of a plump armchair, where he could retrieve it later.

  “But if it’s a battle,” he said, “which side is which?” “If it’s a battle,” Lilac said, crosslegged in the armchair.

  The Old Geography

  Tacey had gone on ahead to the place that for some time had been decided on as this year’s picnic grounds, flying down old roads and new paths on her well-kept bike, pursued by Tony Buck for whom she’d begged a guest’s place. Lily and Lucy were coming from another direction, from a morning visit of some importance which Tacey had sent them on. So in the aged station wagon were Alice, at the wheel; Great-aunt Cloud, beside her, and Smoky at the door; in the back Doc and Momdy and Sophie; and yet further back, legs crossed, Auberon, and the dog Spark, who had the habit of pacing back and forth endlessly when the car was in motion (unable to accept, perhaps, scenery flying by his face while his legs did nothing). There was room also for Lilac, who took up none.

  “Scarlet tanager,” Auberon said to Doc.

  “No, a redstart,” Doc said.

  “Black, with a red …”

  “No,” Doc said, raising a forefinger, “the tanager is all red, with a black wing. Redstart is mostly black, with red patches …” he patted his own breast pockets.

  The station wagon jounced, squeaking protests from every joint, over the roundabout rutted road that led to their chosen site. Daily Alice claimed it was only Spark’s back-and-forth that kept this antiquity in motion at all (as Spark himself also believed), and for certain it had done service in recent years that would have affronted most vehicles its age into silence and immobility. Its wooden sides were as gray as driftwood and its leather seats as wrinkled with fine wrinkles as Aunt Cloud’s face, but its heart was still strong, and Alice had learned its little ways from her father, who knew them (despite what George Mouse thought) as well as he knew the habits of redstarts and red squirrels. She’d had to learn, in order to do the Brobignagian grocery-shoppings her growing family required. No more semi-monthly shopping lists. These had been the days of six-legged chickens, of cases of this and dozens of that, of giant economy sizes, of ten-pound boxes of Drudge detergent and magnums of oil and jereboams of milk. The station wagon lugged it all, over and over, and bore it about as patiently as Alice herself did.

  “Do you think, dear,” Momdy said, “you ought to go much further? Will you be able to get out?”

  “Oh, I think we can go a ways yet,” Alice said. It was mostly for Momdy’s arthritis and Cloud’s old legs that they drove at all. In former days … They passed over a rut, and everyone but Spark was lifted somewhat off his seat; they entered a sea of leaf shadow; Alice slowed, almost able to feel the gentle strokings of the shadows over the hood and the top of the car; she forgot about former days in a sweet accession of summer happiness. The first cicada any of them had heard sang its semi-tune. Alice let the car drift to a halt. Spark stopped pacing.

  “Can you walk from here, ma?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Cloud?”

  There was no answer. They were all silenced by the silence and the green.

  “What? Oh, yes,” Cloud said. “Auberon’ll help me. I’ll bring up the rear.” Auberon chortled, and so did Cloud.

  “Isn’t this,” Smoky said when they were on foot in twos and threes down the dirt road, “isn’t this a road,” he shifted his grip on the handle of the wicker basket he carried with Alice, “didn’t we come along this road when …”

  “Yes,” Alice said. She glanced sidewise at him with a smile. “That’s right.” She squeezed her handle of the wicker basket as though it was his hand.

  “I thought so,” he said. The trees that stood up on the slopes above the gully of the road had grown perceptibly, had become even more noble and huge with arboreal wisdom, more thickly barked, more cloaked in serious garments of ivy; the road, long closed, had fallen into desuetude and was filling up with their offspring. “Around here somewhere,” he said, “was a shortcut to the Woods’.”

  “Yup. We took it.”

  The Gladstone bag he shared with Alice drew down his left shoulder and made walking difficult. “That shortcut’s gone now, I guess,” he said. Gladstone bag? It was a wicker basket, the same that Momdy had once packed their wedding breakfast in.

  “Nobody to keep it open,” Alice said, glancing back at her father, and seeing him glance toward those same woods, “no need to.” Both Amy Woods and her husband Chris were ten years dead in this summer.

  “It’s amazing to me,” Smoky said, “how little of this geography I can keep straight.”

  “Mmm,” said Alice.

  “I had no idea this road ran here.”

  “Well,” she said, “maybe it doesn’t.”

  One hand around Auberon’s shoulder, the other on a heavy cane, Cloud placed her feet carefully among the stones of the road. She had developed a habit of making a small constant chewing motion with her lips, which if she thought anyone noticed, would have embarrassed her greatly, and so she had convinced herself no one noticed it (since she couldn’t help making it), though in fact everyone did. “Good of you to struggle with your old aunt,” she said.

  “Aunt Cloud,” Auberon said, “that book your father and mother wrote—was that your father and mother who wrote it?”

  “Which book is that, dear?”

  “About architecture, only it’s not, mostly.” “I thought,” Cloud said, “that those books were locked up with a little key.”

  “Well,” Auberon said, ignoring this, “is all that it says, true?”

  “All what?”

  It was impossible to say all what. “There’s a plan in the back. Is it a plan of a battle?”

  “Well! I never thought it was. A battle! Do you think so?” Her surprise made him less sure. “What did you think it was?”

  “I can’t say.”

  He waited for at least an opinion, a stab, but she made none, only chewed and toiled along; he was left to interpret her remark to mean not that she was unable to say, but Somehow forbidden. “Is it a secret?”

  “A secret! Hm.” Again her surprise, as though she had never given these matters the least thought before. “A secret, you think? Well, well, perhaps that’s just what it is…. My, they are getting on ahead, aren’t they?”

  Auberon gave it up. The old lady’s hand was heavy on his shoulder. Beyond, where the road rose and then fell away, the towering trees framed a silver-green landscape; they seemed to bend toward it, exhibit it with leafy hands extended, offering it to the walkers. Auberon and Cloud watched the others top the rise and pass through the portals into that place, enter into sunlight, look around themselves, and, walking downwards, disappear.

  “When I was a girl,” Momdy said, “we used to go back and forth quite a bit.”

  Hills and Dales

  The checkered tablecloth around which they were all disposed had been spread in the sun but was now in the shade of the great solitary maple by which they had camped. Great damage had been inflicted on the ham and the fried chicken and a chocolate cake; two bottles lay fallen, and a third canted over, nearly done for. A flying squadron of black ants had just reached the outskirts of the field, and were relaying the message back: great good luck.

  “The Hills and the Dales,” Momdy said, “always had connections with the City. Hill is my mother’s name, you know,” she said to Smoky, who did. “Oh, it was fun in the thirties, taking the train in; having lunch; going to see our Hill cousins. Now the Hills hadn’t always lived in the City….”

  “Are these the Hills,” Sophie asked from beneath the straw hat she had tilted over her face against the generous sun, “that are still up in Highland?”

  “That’s a branch,” Momdy said. “My Hills never
had much to do with the Highland Hills. The story is …”

  “The story is long,” Doc said. He lifted his wineglass to the sun (he always insisted on real glasses and silverware at picnics, the out-of-doors luxury of them made a picnic a feast) and watched the sun caught in it. “And the Highland Hills get the best of it.”

  “Not so,” Momdy said. “How do you know what story the story is?”

  “A little bird told me,” Doc said, chuckling, indulging himself. He stretched out, back against the maple, and pulled his panama (as old almost as himself) into snooze position. Momdy’s reminiscences had in recent years got longer, more rambling and repetitious, as her ears had got deafer; but she never minded being apprised of it. She went right on.