Little, Big (23 page)

"I think I see," Cloud said. "But I think it only seems so."

"It isn't just that I've outgrown it." She was stacking up her captured red men in even piles. "Don't tell me that."

"It'll always be easier for children. You're an old lady now—children of your own."

"And Violet? What about Violet?"

"Oh, yes. Well. Violet."

"What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?"

"Everybody always wonders that. I don't think, really, anyone could feel the world grow older. Its life is far too long for that." She took a black man of Alice's. "What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world
is
old—very old. When you're young, the world seems young. That's all."

That made sense, Daily Alice thought, and yet it couldn't explain the sense of loss she felt, a sense that things clear to her were being left behind, connections broken around her, by her, daily. When she was young, she had always the sense that she was being teased: teased to go on, ahead, follow somewhere. That was what she had lost. She felt certain that never again would she spy, with that special flush of sensibility, a clue to their presence, a message meant only for her; wouldn't feel again, when she slept in the sun, the brush of garments against her cheek, the garments of those who observed her, who, when she woke, had fled, and left only the leaves astir around her.

Come hither, come hither, they had sung in her childhood. Now she was stationary.

"Your move," Cloud said.

"Well, do you do that consciously?" Daily Alice asked, only partly of Cloud.

"Do what?" Cloud said. "Grow up? No. Well. In a sense. You see it's inevitable, or refuse to. You greet it or don't—take it in trade, maybe, for all you're going to lose anyway. Or you can refuse, and have what you've got to lose snatched from you, and never take payment—never see a trade is possible." She thought of Auberon.

Through the windows of the music room, Daily Alice saw Smoky trudging home, his image refracted jerkily as it passed from one old rippled pane into the next. Yes: if what Cloud said were true, then she had taken Smoky in trade—and what she had traded for him was the living sense that it was they, they themselves, who had led her to him, they who had chosen him for her, they who had plotted the quick glances that had made him hers, the long engagement, the fruitful and snug marriage. So that though she possessed what she had been promised, she had lost in return the sense that it had been promised. Which made what she possessed—Smoky, and ordinary happiness—seem fragile, losable, hers only by chance.

Afraid: she felt afraid: yet how could it be, if the bargain had been truly struck, and she had done her part, and it had cost her so much, and they had gone to such trouble to prepare it all, that she could lose him? Could they be that deceitful? Did she understand so little? And yet she was afraid.

She heard the front door close, solemnly, and a moment later she saw Doc in a red plaid jacket come out toward Smoky, carrying two shotguns and other equipment. Smoky looked surprised, then shot up his eyes and smacked his forehead as though remembering something he'd forgotten. Then, resigned, he took one of the guns from Doc, who was pointing out possible ways they might take; the wind blew orange sparks from his pipe-bowl. Smoky turned away with him outward toward the Park, Doc still pointing and talking. Once, Smoky looked back, toward the upstairs windows of the house.

"Your move," Cloud said again.

Alice looked down at the board, which had grown disjunct and patternless. Sophie came through the music-room then, in a flannel gown and a cardigan of Alice's, and for a moment the two women stopped their game. It wasn't that Sophie distracted them; she seemed oblivious of them; she noticed them, but took no notice. It was that as she passed they both seemed to feel the world intensely around them for a moment: the wind, wild, and the earth, brown, outside; the hour, late afternoon; the day and the house's progress through it. Whether it was this sudden generality of feeling which Sophie caused, or Sophie herself, Daily Alice didn't know; but something just then became clear to her which had not been clear before.

"Where's he going?" Sophie said to no one, splaying a hand against the curved glass of the bay as though it were a barrier or the bars of a cage she had just found herself to be in.

"Hunting," Daily Alice said. She made a king, and said "Your move."

It was only once or so an autumn that Doctor Drinkwater unlimbered one of a number of shotguns his grandfather had kept in a case in the billiard room, cleaned it, loaded it, and went out to shoot birds. For all his love of the animal world—or perhaps because of it—Doc felt he deserved as much as the Red Fox or the Barn Owl to be a carnivore, if it was in his nature to be so; and the unaffected joy with which he ate flesh, chewing the bones and gristle and licking with delight the grease from his fingers, convinced him it was in his nature. He thought however that he ought, if he was to be a carnivore, to be able to face killing what he ate rather than that the bloody work should always be done elsewhere and he enjoy only the trimmed and unrecognizable products. One shoot or two a year, a few bright-plumaged birds blasted mercilessly from the sky, and brought home bleeding and open-beaked, seemed to satisfy his scruples; his woodcraft and stealth made up for a certain irresolution at the moment the grouse or pheasant thundered from the brush, and he usually managed to supply a good harvest-home, and thus to think of himself as an unflinching predator when he tucked into the beef and lamb the rest of the year.

Often these days he took Smoky along, having convinced him of the logic of this position. Doc was left-handed and Smoky right-handed, which made it less likely that they'd shoot each other in their blood-lust, and Smoky, though inattentive and not very patient, turned out to be a natural shot.

"We're still," Smoky asked as they crossed a stone fence, "on your property?"

"Drinkwater property," Doc said. "Do you know, this lichen here, the flat, silvery kind, can live to be hundreds of years old?"

"Yours, Drinkwater's," Smoky said, "is what I meant."

"Actually, you know," Doc said, cradling his weapon and choosing a direction, "I'm not a Drinkwater. Not by
name
." It reminded Smoky of the first words Doc had ever said to him: "Not a
practicing
doctor," he'd said.

"Technically I'm a bastard." He tugged his checked cap further over his forehead and considered his case without rancor. "I was illegitimate, and never legally adopted by anybody. Violet raised me, mostly, and Nora and Harvey Cloud. But never got around to going through the formalities."

"Oh?" said Smoky, with a show of interest, though in fact he knew the story.

"Skeletons," Doc said, "in the old family wardrobe. My father had a what, a liaison, with Amy Meadows, you met her."

He plowed her, and she cropp'd
, Smoky quoted, almost, unforgivably, aloud. "Yes," he said. "Amy Woods now."

"Married to Chris Woods now many years."

"Mmm." What memory tried to enter Smoky's consciousness, but at the last moment changed its mind, and withdrew? A dream?

"I was the result." His Adam's apple moved, whether from emotion or not Smoky couldn't tell. "I think if you sort of spread out around that brake there, we're coming to some good spots."

Smoky went where he was told. He held his gun, an old English over-and-under, at the ready, the chased safety off. He didn't, like the rest of the family, much enjoy long aimless walks outdoors, especially in the wet; but if they had a token purpose, like today's, he could go on in discomfort with the best of them. He would like though to pull a trigger at least, even if he hit nothing. And even as he was dwelling absently on this, two brown cannonballs were fired from the tangled thicket ahead of him, pounding the air for altitude. Smoky gave a startled cry, but was raising his gun even as Doc shouted "Yours!", and as though his barrels were tied by strings to their tails, followed one, fired, followed the other and fired again; lowered his gun to watch, astonished, both birds tumble through the air and fall to earth with a crackle of brown weed and a definitive thump. "Damn," he said.

"Good
shot
," Doc cried out heartily, with only a small pang of guilty horror in his heart.

Coming back in a wide circle toward the house, with a bag of four and the evening growing cold as winter, they passed a thing that had puzzled Smoky before: he was used to seeing the ruins of half-started projects around the place, greenhouses, temples, forlorn yet Somehow appropriate, but what was an old car doing rusting away to unrecognizability in the middle of a field? A very old car too: it must have been there fifty years, its half-buried spoked wheels as lonesome and antique as the broken wheels of prairie schooners sunken on Midwestern prairies.

"A Model T, yes," Doc said. "My father's once."

With it in view, they stopped at a stone wall to pass back and forth, as hunters will, a warming flask.

"As I grew up," Doc said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, "I started to ask how I had come about. Well, I did get it out of them about Amy and August, but you see Amy has always wanted to pretend it all never happened, that she's just an old friend of the family, even though everybody was well aware, even Chris Woods, and even though she used to cry whenever I went to visit her. Violet—well. She seemed to have forgotten August altogether, though you never knew with her. Nora only said: he ran off." He passed the flask back. "I eventually got up the courage to ask Amy what the story had been, and she got, well, shy and—
girlish
is the only way to put it. August was her first love. Some people never forget, do they? I'm proud of that, in a way."

"Used to be thought a love-child was special," Smoky threw in. "Very good or very bad. Pearl in
The Scarlet Letter
. Edmund in . . ."

"I was at the age when you want to be sure of all this," Doc went on. "Just who you are, exactly. Your identity. You know." Smoky in fact didn't. "I thought: My father ran off, without leaving, so far as I knew, a trace. Mightn't I do the same? Mightn't it be in my nature too? And perhaps if I found him, after who knows what adventures, I would make him acknowledge me. Grasp his shoulders in my hands—" here Doc made a gesture which the flask in his hand kept from being as poignant as it ought to have been "—and say
I am your son
." He sat back, and drank moodily.

"And did you run off?"

"I did. Sort of."

"And?"

"Oh, I didn't get far, really. And there was always money from home. I got a doctor's degree, even though I've never practiced much; saw something of the Great World. But I came back." He smiled shyly. "I suppose they knew I would. Sophie Dale knew I would. So she says now."

"Never did find your father," Smoky said.

"Well," Doc said, "yes and no." He contemplated the pile in the field. Soon it would be only a shapeless hillock where no grass grew; then nothing. "I suppose it's true, you know, that you set out on adventures and then find what you've been looking for right in your own backyard."

Below and beside them, unmoving in his secret place in the stone wall, a Meadow Mouse observed them. What were they about? He smelled the reek of their slaughter, and their mouths moved as though consuming vast provender, but they weren't eating. He squatted on the coarse pad of lichen he and his ancestors had squatted on for time out of mind and wondered: wondering made his nose twitch furiously and his translucent ears cup themselves toward the sounds they made.

"It doesn't do to inquire into some things too deeply," Doc said. "Into what's given. What can't be changed."

"No," Smoky said, with less conviction.

"We," Doc said, and Smoky thought he knew whom of them that "we" included and whom of them it didn't, "have our responsibilities. It wouldn't do just to run off on some quest and pay no attention to what others might want or need. We have to think of them."

The Meadow Mouse in the midst of his wonderings had fallen asleep, but awoke with a start as the two great creatures stood and collected their inexplicable belongings.

"Sometimes we don't entirely understand," Doc said, as though it were wisdom he had arrived at after some cost. "But we have our parts to play."

Smoky drank, and capped the flask. Could it really be that he intended to abdicate his responsibilities, throw up his part, do something so horrid and unlike himself, and so hopeless too? What you're looking for is right in your own backyard: a grim joke, in his case. Well, he couldn't tell; and knew no one he could ask; but he knew he was tired of struggling.

And anyway, he thought, it wouldn't be the first time it ever happened in the world.

The day of the game supper, when the birds had hung, was something of an occasion every year. Through that week, people would arrive, and be closeted with Great-aunt Cloud, and pay their rents or explain why they couldn't (Smoky wasn't amazed, having no sense of real property and its values, at the great extent of the Drinkwater property or the odd way in which it was managed— though this yearly ceremony did seem very feudal to him). Most of those who came brought some tribute too, a gallon of cider, a basket of white-rayed apples, tomatoes in purple paper.

The Floods and Hannah and Sonny Noon, the largest (in every way) of their tenants, stayed to the supper. Rudy brought a duck of his own to fill out the feast, and the lavender-smelling lace tablecloth was laid. Cloud opened her polished box of wedding-silver (she being the only Drinkwater bride anyone had ever thought to give such to, the Clouds had been careful about these things) and the tall candles shone on it and on the facets of cut-crystal glasses, diminished this year by one small heartrending crash.

They set out a lot of sleepy, sea-dark wine that Walter Ocean made every year and decanted the next, his tribute; in it, toasts were made over the glistening bodies of the birds and the bowls of autumn harvest. Rudy rose, his stomach advancing somewhat over the table's edge, and said: