John Crowley - Little, Big

He had made himself useful, less affected as he was than the rest of them. He and Rudy Flood dug the grave, in a place on the grounds where these Drinkwaters lay together. There was John. Violet. Harvey Cloud. It was a fiercely hot day; above the maples burdened with awesome weight of leaves there hung a vapour, as though the trees panted it out with their soft breathing in the fainting breeze. Rudy expertly shaped the place, his shirt plastered with sweat to his great stomach; worms fled from their spades, or from the light, and the cool, dark earth they turned out turned pale quickly.

And the next day people arrived, all the guests from his wedding or most of them, appearing in their sudden way, some wearing the same clothes they had worn for the wedding since they hadn’t expected another Drinkwater occasion so soon; and Auberon was buried without minister or prayer, only the long requiem of the harmonium, which sounded now calm and Somehow full of gladness.

“Why is it,” Mother said returning from the door with a sky-blue Pyrex dish covered with foil, “that everyone thinks you’re starving after a funeral? Well, it’s very kind.”

Great-aunt Cloud tucked her damp hankie away in a black sleeve. “I think of the children,” she said. “All there today, year after year of them—Frank Bush and Claude Berry were in his very first class after the Deci- sion.”

Doctor Drinkwater bit on a briar pipe he really seldom used, took it out and stared hard at it, as though surprised to find it was inedible.

“Decision?” Smoky said.

“Berry et al. vs. Board of Ed,” Doc said solemnly.

“I guess we can eat this now,” Mother came in to say. “Sort of pot luck. Bring your glasses. Bring the bottle, Smoky—I’m having another.” And at the dining table Sophie sat in tears because she had set without thinking a place for Auberon, who always came to eat on this day, Saturday. “How could I just forget ,” she said through the napkin covering her face. “He loved us so much…” Still with the napkin over her face, she went quickly out. Smoky seemed hardly to have seen her face since he arrived, only her retreating back.

“She and you were his favorites,” Cloud said, touching Daily Alice’s hand.

“I suppose I’ll go up and see Sophie,” Mother said, irresolute by the door.

“Sit down, Mother,” Doc said softly. “It’s not one of those times.” He helped Smoky to one of the three bowls of potato salad there were among the funeral offerings. “Well. Berry et al. It was thirty some years ago…”

“ You lose track of time,” Mother said. “It’s more like forty-five.”

“Anyway. We’re very out-of-the-way up here. Rather than trouble the State about our kids and all, we’d set up a little private school. Nothing fancy at all. But it began to appear that our school had to meet Standards. State Standards. Now the kids could read and write as well as any, and learned their math; but the Standards said they had to learn as well History, and Civics whatever that is or was, and a lot of other stuff we just didn’t think was necessary. If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you’ll read. If you don’t, you’ll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway. People around here aren’t ignoramuses; just have an idea—or rather a lot of different ideas— about what’s important to know, and very little of it’s taught in school.

“Well, it turns out that our little school was closed down, and all the kids went outside to school for a couple of years…”

“They said our Standards didn’t fit our students for the real world,” Mother said.

“What’s so real about it?” Cloud said testily. “What I’ve seen lately doesn’t seem so real to me.”

“This was forty years ago, Nora.”

“Hasn’t gotten any realer since then.”

“I went to the public school for a while,” Mother said. “It didn’t seem so bad. Only you always had to be there at exactly the same time every day, spring or winter, rain or shine; and they didn’t let you out till exactly the same hour every day, as well.” She marveled, looking back on it.

“How was the Civics and all that,” Daily Alice asked, squeezing Smoky’s hand under the table because the answer was a venerable clincher.

“You know what?” Mother said to Smoky. “I don’t remember a single thing about them. Not a single thing. ”

And that was just how the School System had appeared to Smoky. Most of the kids he had known forgot everything they learned in school as soon as they left those (to him) mysterious halls. “Boy,” he’d say, “you ought to go to school with my father. He never lets you forget a thing.” On the other hand, when they questioned him about schoolroom fixtures like the Pledge of Allegiance or Arbor Day or Prince Henry the Navigator, he was made of ignorance. They thought he was strange, when they noticed him at all.

“So Claude Berry’s dad got in trouble for keeping him out of the public school, and it became a case,” Cloud was saying. “All the way to the State Supreme Court.”

“Bent our bank accounts out of shape,” Doc said.

“And eventually was decided in our favor,” Mom said.

“Because,” Cloud said, “It was a religious thing, we claimed. Like the Amish, do you know about them?” She smiled slyly. “Religious.”

“A landmark decision,” Mom said.

“Nobody’s heard of it, though,” Doc said, wiping his lips. “I think, the court surprised itself by the way it decided, and it was kept quiet; don’t want to start people thinking, get their wind up, so to speak. But we’ve had no trouble since then.”

“We had good advice,” Cloud said, lowering her eyes; and they all consented silently to that.

Smoky, taking another glass of sherry and arguing from ignorance, began talking about a loophole in the Standards he knew of—that is, himself—and the superior education he’d anyway received, and how he wouldn’t have it any other way, when Doctor Drinkwater suddenly struck the table with his palm, gavel-style, and beamed on Smoky, the light of a bright idea in his eyes.

“What about that?” Daily Alice said to him much later when they lay in bed.

“What?”

“What Dad suggested.”

They had just the sheet over them in the heat, which only since midnight had begun to break apart into breezes. The long white hills and dales made by her body shifted cataclysmically and settled into a different country. “I don’t know,” he said,, feeling muzzy and thoughtless, helpless against sleep. He tried to think of some more pointed answer, but instead fell off into sleep. She shifted nervously again and he was snatched back.

“What.”

“I think of Auberon,” she said quietly, wiping her face on her pillow. He took her up then, and she hid her face in the hollow of his shoulder and sniffed. He stroked her hair, running his fingers soothingly through it, which she loved as much as a cat does, until she slept. And when she was asleep, he found himself staring into the sparkling phantasmal ceiling, surprised by sleeplessness, not having heard of the rule whereby one spouse can trade a restlessness for the other’s sleep—a rule spelled out in no marriage contract.

Well, what about it then?

He had been taken in here, adopted, it seemed not an issue that he would ever leave. Since nothing had before been said about their future together, he hadn’t thought about it himself: he was unaccustomed to having a future is what it was, since his present had always been so ill-defined.

But now, anonymous no more, he must make a decision. He put his hands behind his head, carefully so as not to disturb her still-fresh sleep. What sort of a person was he, if he was now a sort of person? Anonymous, he had been as well everything as nothing; now he would grow qualities, a character, likes and dislikes. And did he like or dislike the idea of living in this house, teaching at their school, being—well, religious he supposed was how they would put it? Did it suit his character?