John Crowley: Little, Big

“All right,” Smoky said, throwing up his hands like a man under arrest, “all right, all right.”

“Oh good,” Sophie said. “Oh Smoky.”

“It’ll be fun,” Lilac said. “You’ll see. You’ll be so surprised.”

Defeated in his last refusal, as he might have known he would be. He really had no arguments that could stand against them, not when they could bring long-lost daughters before him to plead, to remind him of old promises. He didn’t believe that Lilac needed his fathership, he thought she probably needed nothing and no one at all, but he couldn’t deny he’d promised to give it. “All right,” he said again, avoiding Sophie’s radiantly pleased face. He went around the library, turning on lights.

“But hurry,” Sophie said. “While it’s still day.”

“Hurry,” Lilac said, tugging at his arm.

“Now wait a minute,” Smoky said. “I’ve got to get a few things.”

“Oh, Smoky!” Sophie said, stamping her foot.

“Just hold on,” Smoky said. “Hold your horses.”

He went out into the hall, turning on lamps and wallsconces, and up the stairs, with Sophie at his heels. Upstairs, he went one by one through the bedrooms, turning on lights, looking around, moving just ahead of Sophie’s impatience. Once he looked out a window, and down on many gathered below; afternoon was waning. Lilac looked up, and waved.

“Okay, okay,” he muttered. “All right.”

In his and Alice’s room, when he had lit all the lights, he stood a time, angry and breathing hard. What the hell do you take? On such a trip?

“Smoky…” Sophie at the door said.

“Now, damn it, Sophie,” he said, and pulled open drawers. A clean shirt, anyway; a change of underwear. A poncho, for rain. Matches and a knife. A little onion-skin Ovid, from the bedside table. Metamorphoses . All right.

Now what to put them in? It occurred to him that it had been so many years since he had gone anywhere from this house that he owned no luggage whatever. Somewhere, in some attic or basement, lay the pack he had first carried to Edgewood, but just where he had no idea. He threw open closet doors, there were half a dozen deep cedar-lined closets around this room that all his and Alice’s clothes had never come close to filling. He tugged at the light-pulls, their phosphorescent tips like fireflies. He glimpsed his yellowed white wedding suit, Truman’s. Below it in a corner—well, maybe this would do, odd how old things pile up in the corners of closets, he hadn’t known this was in here: he pulled it out.

It was a carpetbag. An old, mouse-chewed Gladstone carpetbag with a cross-bones catch.

Smoky opened it, and looked with a strange foreboding or hindsight into its dark insides. It was empty. An odor arose from it, musty, the odor of leaf-mould or Queen-Anne’s-lace or the earth under an upturned stone. “This’ll do,” he said softly. “This’ll do, I guess.”

He put the few things in it. They seemed to disappear in its capacious insides.

What else should go in?

He thought, holding open the bag: a twine of creeper or a necklace, a hat heavy as a crown; chalk, and a pen; a shotgun, a flask of rum-tea, a snowflake. A book about houses; a book about stars; a ring. With the greatest vividness, a vividness that stabbed him deeply, he saw the road between Meadowbrook and Highland, and Daily Alice as she had looked on that day, the day of the wedding trip, the day he was lost in the woods; he heard her say Protected .

He closed the bag.

“All right,” he said. He took it up by its leather handles, and it was heavy, but an ease entered him with its weight, it seemed a thing he had always carried, a weight without which he would be unbalanced, and unable to walk.

“Ready?” Sophie said from the door.

“Ready,” he said. “I guess.”

They went down together. Smoky paused in the hall to push in the ivory buttons of the lights that lit the vestibule, the porches, the basement. Then they went out.

Aaaah , said everyone gathered there.

Lilac had drawn them all after her, from the Park, from the walled garden, from the porches and parterres where they had gathered, to this front of the house, the wooden porch that faced a weedy drive leading to stone gateposts topped with pitted balls like stone oranges.

“Hi, hi,” said Smoky.

His daughters came up to him smiling, Tacey, Lily and Lucy, and their children after them. Everyone rose, everyone looked at one another. Only Marge Juniper kept her seat on the porch stairs, unwilling to rise till she knew steps must be taken, for she didn’t have many. Sophie asked Lilac:

“Will you lead us?”

“Part way,” Lilac said. She stood in the center of the company, pleased, yet a little awed too, and not sure herself which of these would keep on till the end, and having not enough fingers to count. “Part way.”

“Is it that way?” Sophie asked, pointing to the stone gateposts. They all turned and looked that way. The first crickets’ voices began. Edgewood’s swifts cut the air, air blue and turning green. Exhalations of the cooling earth made the way beyond those gateposts obscure.

Had that been the moment, Smoky wondered; had it been that moment, when he had turned in at those stone gateposts for the first time, that the charm had fallen on him, not ever after that to release him? The arm and hand with which he held the carpetbag tingled like a warning bell, but Smoky didn’t hear it.

“How far, how far?” asked Bud and Blossom hand in hand.

On that day: the day he had first gone in at Edgewood’s door and then in some sense never again back out.

Perhaps: or it may have been before that, or after it, but it wasn’t a matter of figuring out when exactly the first charm had invaded his life, or when he had stumbled unwittingly into it, because another had come soon after, and another, they had succeeded one another by a logic of their own, each one occasioned by the last and none removable; even to try to disentangle them would only be the occasion for further charms, and anyway they had never been a causal chain but a series of removes, Chinese boxes one inside the other, the further in you went the bigger it got. And it didn’t end now: he was about to step into a new series, endless, infundibular, utter. Apalled by a prospect of endless variation, he was only glad that some things had remained constant: Alice’s love chief among them. It was toward that that he journeyed, the only thing that could draw him; and yet he felt that he left it behind; and still he carried it with him.

“A dog to meet us,” Sophie said, taking his hand. “A river to cross.”

Something began to open in Smoky’s heart as he stepped from the porch: a premonition, or the intimation of a revelation.

They had all begun to move, taking up their bags and belongings, talking in low voices, down the drive. But Smoky stopped, seeing he could not go out by that gate: could not go out by the gate through which he had come in. Too many charms had intervened. The gate wasn’t the same gate; he wasn’t the same either.

“A long way,” Lilac said, drawing her mother after her. “A long, long way.”

They passed him on either side, burdened and holding hands, but he had stopped: still willing, still journeying, only not walking.

On his wedding day, he and Daily Alice had gone among the guests seated on the grass, and many of them had given gifts, and all of them had said “Thank you.” Thank you: because Smoky was willing, willing to take on this task, to take exception to none of it, to live his life for the convenience of others in whom he had never even quite believed, and spend his substance bringing about the end of a Tale in which he did not figure. And so he had; and he was still willing: but there had never been a reason to thank him. Because whether they knew it or not, he knew that Alice would have stood beside him on that day and wed him whether they had chosen him for her or not, would have defied them to have him. He was sure of it.