Clang.
The pure note: pure and angelic.
The dress was all wrong. She screamed.
The child vanishes.
Later they sit, the mother and the three sisters, in the shade on the back porch, sipping sour, diluted ruby: raspberry vinegar. The dressmaker refuses to join them and leaves, holding the dress to her heart. The child is visiting the blacksmith.
In the blacksmith’s shop things hang up in the shadows and shadows hang up in the things, and there are black and glistening piles of dust in each corner. A tub of night-black water stands by the forge. The horseshoes sail through the dark like bloody little moons and follow each other like bloody little moons to drown in the black water, hissing, protesting.
Outside, along the matted eaves, painstakingly, sweetly, wasps go over and over a honeysuckle vine.
Inside, the bellows creak. Nate does wonders with both hands; with one hand. The attendant horse stamps his foot and nods his head as if agreeing to a peace treaty.
Nod.
And nod.
A Newfoundland dog looks up at him and they almost touch noses, but not quite, because at the last moment the horse decides against it and turns away.
Outside in the grass lie scattered big, pale granite discs, like millstones, for making wheel rims on. This afternoon they are too hot to touch.
Now it is settling down, the scream.
Now the dressmaker is at home, basting, but in tears. It is the most beautiful material she has worked on in years. It has been sent to the woman from Boston, a present from her mother-in-law, and heaven knows how much it cost.
* * *
Before my older aunt had brought her back, I had watched my grandmother and younger aunt unpacking her clothes, her “things.” In trunks and barrels and boxes they had finally come, from Boston, where she and I had once lived. So many things in the village came from Boston, and even I had once come from there. But I remembered only being here, with my grandmother.
The clothes were black, or white, or black-and-white.
“Here’s a mourning hat,” says my grandmother, holding up something large, sheer, and black, with large black roses on it; at least I guess they are roses, even if black.
“There’s that mourning coat she got the first winter,” says my aunt.
But always I think they are saying “morning.” Why, in the morning, did one put on black? How early in the morning did one begin? Before the sun came up?
“Oh, here are some house dresses!”
They are nicer. Clean and starched, stiffly folded. One with black polka dots. One of fine black-and-white stripes with black grosgrain bows. A third with a black velvet bow and on the bow a pin of pearls in a little wreath.
“Look. She forgot to take it off.”
A white hat. A white embroidered parasol. Black shoes with buckles glistening like the dust in the blacksmith’s shop. A silver mesh bag. A silver calling-card case on a little chain. Another bag of silver mesh, gathered to a tight, round neck of strips of silver that will open out, like the hatrack in the front hall. A silver-framed photograph, quickly turned over. Handkerchiefs with narrow black hems—“morning handkerchiefs.” In bright sunlight, over breakfast tables, they flutter.
A bottle of perfume has leaked and made awful brown stains.
Oh, marvellous scent, from somewhere else! It doesn’t smell like that here; but there, somewhere, it does, still.
A big bundle of postcards. The curdled elastic around them breaks. I gather them together on the floor.
Some people wrote with pale-blue ink, and some with brown, and some with black, but mostly blue. The stamps have been torn off many of them. Some are plain, or photographs, but some have lines of metallic crystals on them — how beautiful! — silver, gold, red, and green, or all four mixed together, crumbling off, sticking in the lines on my palms. All the cards like this I spread on the floor to study. The crystals outline the buildings on the cards in a way buildings never are outlined but should be — if there were a way of making the crystals stick. But probably not; they would fall to the ground, never to be seen again. Some cards, instead of lines around the buildings, have words written in their skies with the same stuff, crumbling, dazzling and crumbling, raining down a little on little people who sometimes stand about below: pictures of Pentecost? What are the messages? I cannot tell, but they are falling on those specks of hands, on the hats, on the toes of their shoes, in their paths — wherever it is they are.
Postcards come from another world, the world of the grandparents who send things, the world of sad brown perfume, and morning. (The gray postcards of the village for sale in the village store are so unilluminating that they scarcely count. After all, one steps outside and immediately sees the same thing: the village, where we live, full size, and in color.)
Two barrels of china. White with a gold band. Broken bits. A thick white teacup with a small red-and-blue butterfly on it, painfully desirable. A teacup with little pale-blue windows in it.
“See the grains of rice?” says my grandmother, showing me the cup against the light.
Could you poke the grains out? No, it seems they aren’t really there any more. They were put there just for a while and then they left something or other behind. What odd things people do with grains of rice, so innocent and small! My aunt says that she has heard they write the Lord’s Prayer on them. And make them make those little pale-blue lights.
More broken china. My grandmother says it breaks her heart. “Why couldn’t they have got it packed better? Heaven knows what it cost.”
“Where’ll we put it all? The china closet isn’t nearly big enough.”
“It’ll just have to stay in the barrels.”
“Mother, you might as well use it.”
“No,” says my grandmother.
“Where’s the silver, Mother?”
“In the vault in Boston.”
Vault. Awful word. I run the tip of my finger over the rough, jewelled lines on the postcards, over and over. They hold things up to each other and exclaim, and talk, and exclaim, over and over.
“There’s that cake basket.”
“Mrs. Miles…”
“Mrs. Miles’ spongecake…”
“She was very fond of her.”
Another photograph—“Oh, that Negro girl! That friend.”
“She went to be a medical missionary. She had a letter from her, last winter. From Africa.”
“They were great friends.”
They show me the picture. She, too, is black-and-white, with glasses on a chain. A morning friend.
And the smell, the wonderful smell of the dark-brown stains. Is it roses?
A tablecloth.
“She did beautiful work,” says my grandmother.
“But look — it isn’t finished.”
Two pale, smooth wooden hoops are pressed together in the linen. There is a case of little ivory embroidery tools.
I abscond with a little ivory stick with a sharp point. To keep it forever I bury it under the bleeding heart by the crab-apple tree, but it is never found again.
* * *
Nate sings and pumps the bellows with one hand. I try to help, but he really does it all, from behind me, and laughs when the coals blow red and wild.
“Make me a ring! Make me a ring, Nate!”
Instantly it is made; it is mine.
It is too big and still hot, and blue and shiny. The horseshoe nail has a flat oblong head, pressing hot against my knuckle.
Two men stand watching, chewing or spitting tobacco, matches, horseshoe nails — anything, apparently, but with such presence; they are perfectly at home. The horse is the real guest, however. His harness hangs loose like a man’s suspenders; they say pleasant things to him; one of his legs is doubled up in an improbable, affectedly polite way, and the bottom of his hoof is laid bare, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Manure piles up behind him, suddenly, neatly. He, too, is very much at home. He is enormous. His rump is like a brown, glossy globe of the whole brown world. His ears are secret entrances to the underworld. His nose is supposed to feel like velvet and does, with ink spots under milk all over its pink. Clear bright-green bits of stiffened froth, like glass, are stuck around his mouth. He wears medals on his chest, too, and one on his forehead, and simpler decorations — red and blue celluloid rings overlapping each other on leather straps. On each temple is a clear glass bulge, like an eyeball, but in them are the heads of two other little horses (his dreams?), brightly colored, real and raised, untouchable, alas, against backgrounds of silver blue. His trophies hang around him, and the cloud of his odor is a chariot in itself.