“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 sixlegged 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.