A Swiftly Tilting Planet (17 page)

The spring sun went briefly behind a small cloud, veiling the old woman’s eyes. “It tells me of time past, when the valley was a lake, your pa says, and a different people roamed the land. Do you remember the arrowhead you found when we were digging to plant tulip bulbs?” Deftly she changed the subject.

“Beezie and I’ve found lots of arrowheads. I always carry one. It’s better’n a knife.” He pulled the flat chipped triangle from his jeans pocket.

Beezie wore jeans, too, thin where her sharp knees were starting to push through the cloth. Her blue-and-white-checked shirt was just beginning to stretch tightly
across her chest. She dug into her pockets like her brother, pulling out an old Scout knife and a bent spoon. “Grandma, blowing the dandelion clocks—that’s just superstition, isn’t it?”

“And what else would it be? Better ways there are of telling the time, like the set of the sun in the sky and the shadows of the trees. I make it out to be nigh three in the afternoon, and near time to go home for a cup of tea.”

Beezie lay back on the warm ledge of rock, the same kind of rock from which the arrowhead had been chipped. “And Ma and Pa’ll have tea with us because it’s Sunday, and the store’s closed, and nobody in it but Pansy. Grandma, I think she’s going to have kittens again.”

“Are you after being surprised? What else has Pansy to do except frighten the field mice away.”

Despite the mention of tea, Chuck too lay back, putting his head in his grandmother’s lap so she could ruffle his hair. Around them the spring breeze was gentle; the leaves whispered together; and in the distance a phoebe called wistfully. The roaring of a truck on the distant highway was a jarring note.

The grandmother said, “When we leave the village and cross the brook it’s almost as though we crossed out of time, too. And then there comes the sound of the present”—she gestured toward the invisible highway—“to remind us.”

“What of, Grandma?” Beezie asked.

The old woman looked into an unseen distance. “The world of trucks isn’t as real to me as the world on the other side of time.”

“Which side?” Chuck asked.

“Either side, though at the present I know more about the past than the future.”

Beezie’s eyes lit up. “You mean like in the stories you tell us?”

The grandmother nodded, her eyes still distant.

“Tell us one of the stories, Grandma. Tell us how Queen Branwen was taken from Britain by an Irish king.”

The old woman’s focus returned to the children. “I may have been born in Ireland, but we never forgot we came from Branwen of Britain.”

“And I’m named after her.”

“That you are, wee Beezie, and after me, for I’m Branwen, too.”

“And Zillah? I’m Branwen Zillah Maddox.” Beezie and Chuck knew the stories of their names backwards and forwards but never lost pleasure in hearing them.

Meg opened her eyes in amazement.

Branwen Zillah Maddox. B.Z. Beezie.

Mrs. O’Keefe.

That golden child was Mrs. O’Keefe.

And Chuck was her brother.

* * *

“Zillah comes from your Maddox forebears,” the grandmother told the children, “and a proud name it is, too. She was an Indian princess, according to your pa, from the tribe which used to dwell right here where we be now, though the Indians are long gone.”

“But you don’t know as much about Zillah as you do about Branwen.”

“Only that she was an Indian and beautiful. There are too many men on your father’s side of the family, and stories come down, nowadays, through women. But in Branwen’s day there were men who were bards.”

“What’s bards?” Chuck asked.

“Singers of songs and tellers of tales. Both my grandma and my grandpa told me the story of Branwen, but mostly my grandma, over and over, and her grandma told her before that, and the telling goes back beyond memory. Britain and Ireland have long misunderstood each other, and this misunderstanding goes back beyond memory, too. And in the once upon a time and long ago when the Irish king wooed the English princess, ’twas thought there might at last be peace between the two green and pleasant lands. There was feasting for many moons at the time of the nuptials, and then the Irish king sailed for Ireland with his wife.”

“Wouldn’t Branwen have been homesick?” Beezie asked.

“And of course she’d have been homesick. But she was born a princess and now she was a queen, and queens know how to mind their manners—or did in those days.”

“And the king? What was he like?”

“Oh, and handsome he was, as the Irish can be, as was my own sweet Pat, who bore well the name of the blessed saint, with black hair and blue eyes. Branwen knew not that he was using her to vent his spleen against her land and her brethren, knew it not until he trumped up some silly story of her sitting in the refectory and casting her eye on one of his men. So, to punish her—”

“For what?” Chuck asked.

“For what, indeed? For his own jealous fantasies. So, to punish her, he sent her to tend the swine and barred her from the palace. So she knew he had never loved her, and her heart burned within her with anguish. Then she thought to call on her brother in England, and she used the rune, and whether she and hers gave the rune to Patrick, or whether their guardian angels gave it to each of them, she called on all Heaven with its power—”

The children chanted the rune with her.

The grandmother continued, “And the sun shone on her fair hair and warmed her, and the gentle snow fell and made all clean the sty in which the Irish king had set her, and the fire burst from the fireplace of his wooden palace and the lightning struck it and it burned with mighty rage and all within fled the fury. And the wind blew from Britain and the sails of her brother Bran’s ship billowed as it sped over the deep sea and landed where the rocks were steep and the earth stark. And Bran’s men scaled the rock and rescued their beloved Branwen.”

“Is it a true story, Grandma,” Beezie asked, “really?”

“To those with the listening ear and the believing heart.”

“Chuck has the believing heart,” Beezie said.

The grandmother patted his knee. “One day maybe you will be the writer your father wanted to be. He was not cut out for a storekeeper.”

“I love the store,” Beezie said defensively. “It smells good, of cinnamon and fresh bread and apples.”

“I’m hungry,” Chuck said.

“And wasn’t I after saying before we got into storytelling that we should get along home for tea? Pull me up, both of you.”

Chuck and Beezie scrambled to their feet and heaved the old woman upright. “We’ll pick a bouquet for Ma and Pa on the way,” Beezie said.

The narrow path was rough with rocks and hummocks of grass, and walking was not easy. The grandmother leaned on a staff which Chuck had cut for her from a grove of young maples which needed thinning. He went ahead, slowing down when he saw Beezie and his grandmother lagging behind him. A bouquet of field flowers was growing in Beezie’s hands, for she paused whenever she saw that the old woman was out of breath. “Look, Chuck! Look, Grandma! Three more jacks-in-the-pulpit!”

Chuck was hacking away with his arrowhead at a strand of bittersweet snaking around a young fir tree, strangling it with coils strong as a boa constrictor’s. “Ma used to have us looking for bittersweet a year or so ago, and now it’s taking over. It’ll kill this tree unless I cut through it. You two go along and I’ll catch up.”

“Want my knife?” Beezie offered.

“No. My arrowhead’s sharp.”

For a moment he stared after his sister and grandmother as they wended their slow way. He sniffed the fragrance of the air. Although the apple trees were green,
the pink and white blossoms were still on the ground. The scent of lilac mingled with the mock orange. He might be able to hear the trucks on the road and see the planes in the sky, but at least here he couldn’t smell them.

Chuck liked neither the trucks nor the planes. They all left their fumes behind them, blunting the smell of sunlight, of rain, of green and growing things, and Chuck “saw” with his nose almost more than with his eyes. Without looking he could easily tell his parents, his grandmother, his sister. And he judged people almost entirely by his reaction to their odor.

“I don’t smell a thing,” his father had said after Chuck had wrinkled his nose at a departing customer.

Chuck had said calmly, “He smells unreliable.”

His father gave a small, surprised laugh. “He
is
unreliable. He owes me more than I can afford to be owed, for all his expensive clothes.”

When the strand of bittersweet was severed, Chuck stood leaning against the rough bark of the tree, breathing in its resiny smell. In the distance he could see his grandmother and Beezie. The old woman smelled to him of distance, of the sea, which was fifty or more miles away, but perhaps it was a farther sea which clung to her. “And you smell green,” he had told her. “Ah, and that’s because I come from a far green country and the scent of it will be with me always.”

“What color do I smell?” Beezie had asked.

“Yellow, like buttercups and sunlight and butterfly wings.”

Green and gold. Good smells. Home smells. His mother was the blue of sky in early morning. His father was the rich mahogany of the highboy in the living room, with the firelight flickering over the polished wood. Comfortable, safe smells.

And suddenly the thought of the odor of cookies and freshly baked bread called to him, and he ran to catch up.

The family lived over the store in a long, rambling apartment. The front room, overlooking the street, was a storeroom, filled with cartons and barrels. Behind it were three bedrooms: his parents’, his own little cubbyhole, and the bigger room Beezie shared with the grandmother. Beyond these were the kitchen and the large long room which served as living and dining room.

There was a fire crackling in the fireplace, for the spring evenings were apt to be chilly. The family was seated about a large round table set for tea, with cookies and bread still warm from the oven, a pitcher of milk, and a big pot of tea covered with the cozy the grandmother had brought with her from Ireland.

Chuck took his place, and his mother poured his tea. “Did you save another tree?”

“Yes. I really should take Pa’s big clippers with me next time.”

Beezie pushed the plate of bread and butter to him. “Take your share quickly or I’ll eat it all up.”

Chuck’s sensitive nostrils twitched. There was a smell in the room which was completely unfamiliar to him, and of which he was afraid.

The father helped himself to a cookie. “This is one of the times I wish Sunday afternoons came more than once a week.”

“You’ve been acting tired lately.” His wife looked at him anxiously.

“Being tired is the natural state of a country storekeeper who doesn’t have much business sense.”

The grandmother moved creakily from her chair at the table to her rocker. “Hard work’s not easy. You need more help.”

“Can’t afford it, Grandma. How about telling us a story?”

“You’ve heard them all as many times as there are stars in the sky.”

“I never tire of them.”

“I’m told out for today.”

“Oh, come on, Grandma,” Mr. Maddox cajoled. “You never tire of storytelling, and you know you make most of it up as you go along.”

“Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.” She closed her eyes. “I will just take a small snooze.”

“You tell me about the Indian princess, then, Pa,” Beezie ordered.

“I don’t know much about her as far as provable facts are concerned. My illustrious forebear, Matthew Maddox, from whom I may have inherited an iota of talent, wrote about her in his second novel. It was a best-seller in its day. Sad he couldn’t have known about its success, but it was published posthumously. It was a strange sort of fantasy, with qualities which make some critics call it the first American science-fiction novel, because it played with time, and he’d obviously heard of Mendel’s theories of genetics. Anyhow, Beezie love, it’s a fictional account of the two brothers from ancient Wales who came to this country after their father’s death, the first Europeans to set foot on these uncharted shores. And, as the brothers had quarreled in Wales, so they quarreled in the New World, and the elder of the two made his way to South America. Madoc, the younger brother, stayed with the Indians in a place which is nameless but which Matthew Maddox implies is right around here, and he married the Indian princess Zyll, or Zillah, and in the novel it is his strain which is lost, and must be found again.”

“Sounds interesting,” Chuck said.

Beezie wrinkled her nose. “I don’t much like science fiction. I like fairy tales better.”

“
The Horn of Joy
has elements of both. The idea that the proud elder brother must be defeated by the inconsequential but honest younger brother is certainly a fairytale theme. There was also a unicorn in the story, who was a time traveler.”

“Whyn’t you tell us about it before?” Beezie asked.

“Thought you’d be too young to be interested. Anyhow, I sold my copy when I was offered an outrageously large sum for it when I … it was too large an amount to turn down. Matthew Maddox, for a nineteenth-century writer, had an uncanny intuition about the theories of space, time, and relativity that Einstein was to postulate generations later.”

“But that’s not possible,” Beezie protested.

“Precisely. But it’s all in Matthew’s book, nevertheless. It’s an evocative, haunting novel, and since Matthew Maddox assumed that he was descended from the younger Welshman, the one who stayed here, and the Indian princess, I’ve followed his fancy that the name Maddox comes from Madoc.” A shadow moved across his face. “When my father had a stroke and I had to leave my poet’s garret in the city and come help out with the store, I had to give up my dream of following in Matthew’s footsteps.”