John Crowley: Little, Big

He glanced up again, but Alice was gone now; there was only a fanciful housetop painted with sunlight. He ascended to the pillared porch. “I’m Smoky Barnable.”

“Yes. I’m Nora Cloud. Won’t you sit?” She picked up her cards with a practiced hand and put them into a velvet bag; the velvet bag she then put into a tooled box.

“Was it you then,” he said sitting in a whispering wicker chair, “who put these conditions on me about the suit and the walking and all?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I only discovered them.”

“A sort of test.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know.” She seemed surprised by the suggestion. She took from her breast pocket, where a neat and useless handkerchief was pinned, a brown cigarette, and lit it with a kitchen match she struck on her sole. She wore a light dress of the sort of print proper to old ladies, though Smoky thought he had never seen one quite so intensely blue-green, or one with leaves, tiny flowers, vines, so intricately intertwined: as though cut from the whole day. “I think prophylactic, though, on the whole.”

“Hm?”

“For your own safety.”

“Ah, I see.” They sat in silence awhile, Great-aunt Cloud’s a calm and smiling silence, his expectant; he wondered why he wasn’t taken within, introduced; he was conscious of the heat rising from his shirt’s open neck; he realized it was Sunday. He cleared his throat. “Dr. and Mrs. Drinkwater at church?”

“Why, in a sense, yes.” It was odd the way she responded to everything he said as though it were a notion that had never occurred to her before. “Are you religious?”

He had been afraid of this. “Well,” he began.

“The women tend to be more so, don’t you think?”

“I guess. No one I grew up with cared much about it.”

“My mother and I felt it far more strongly than my father, or my brothers. Though they suffered from it, perhaps, more than we.”

He had no answer for this, and couldn’t tell if her close inspection of him just then awaited one, or didn’t, or was merely short sight.

“My nephew also—Dr. Drinkwater—well of course there are the animals, which he does pay close attention to. He pays very close attention there. The rest seems to pass him by.”

“A pantheist, sort of?”

“Oh no. He’s not that foolish. It just seems to”—she moved her cigarette in the air—“pass him by. Ah, who’s here?”

A woman in a large picture hat had turned in at the gate on a bicycle. She wore a blouse, printed like Cloud’s but more patent, and a pair of large jeans. She dismounted inexpertly and took a wooden bucket from the bike’s basket; when she tilted her picture hat back, Smoky recognized Mrs. Drinkwater. She came up and sat heavily on the steps. “Cloud,” she said, “that is forever the last time I will ever ask you for advice about berrying again.”

“Mr. Barnable and I,” said Cloud merrily, “were discussing religion.”

“Cloud,” said Mrs. Drinkwater darkly, scratching her ankle above a slip-on sneaker frayed about the big toe, “Cloud, I was led astray.”

“Your bucket is full.”

“I was led astray. The bucket, hell, I filled that the first ten minutes I got there.”

“Well. There you are.”

“You didn’t say I would be led astray.”

“I didn’t ask.”

There was a pause then. Cloud smoked. Mrs. Drinkwater dreamily scratched her ankle. Smoky (who didn’t mind not being greeted by Mrs. Drinkwater; in fact hadn’t noticed it; that comes from growing up anonymous) had time to wonder why Cloud hadn’t said you didn’t ask . “As for religion,” Mrs. Drinkwater said, “ask Auberon.”

“Ah. There you see. Not a religious man.” To Smoky: “My older brother.”

“It’s all he thinks about,” Mrs. Drinkwater said.

“Yes,” Cloud said thoughtfully, “yes. Well, there it is, you see.”

“Are you religious?” Mrs. Drinkwater asked Smoky.

“He’s not,” Cloud said. “Of course there was August.”

“I didn’t have a religious childhood,” Smoky said. He grinned. “I guess I was sort of a polytheist.”

“What?” said Mrs. Drinkwater.

“The Pantheon. I had a classical education.”

“You have to start somewhere,” she replied, picking leaves and small bugs from her bucket of berries. “This should be nearly the last of the foul things. Tomorrow’s Midsummer Day, thank it all.”

“My brother August,” Cloud said, “Alice’s grandfather, he was perhaps religious. He left. For parts unknown.”

“A missionary?” Smoky asked.

“Why yes,” Cloud said, again seeming newly struck with the idea. “Yes, maybe so.”

“They must be dressed by now,” Mrs. Drinkwater said. “Suppose we go in.”

The screen door was old and large, its wood pierced and turned a bit to summery effect, and the screen potbellied below from years of children’s thoughtless egress; when Smoky pulled its porcelain handle, the rusty spring groaned. He stepped across the sill. He was inside.

The vestibule, tall and polished, smelled of cool trapped night air and last winter’s fires, lavender sachets in brass-handled linen closets, what else? Wax, sunlight, collated seasons, the June day outside brought in as the screen groaned and clacked shut behind him. The stairs rose before him and above him, turning a half-circle by stages to the floor above. On the first landing, in the light of a Iancet window there, dressed now in jeans made all of patches, her feet bare, his bride stood. A little behind her was Sophie, a year older now but still not her sister’s height, in a thin white dress and many rings.

“Hi,” said Daily Alice.

“Hi,” Smoky said.

“Take Smoky upstairs,” Mrs. Drinkwater said. “He’s in the imaginary bedroom. And I’m sure he wants to wash up.” She patted his shoulder and he put his foot on the first stair. In later years he would wonder, sometimes idly, sometimes in anguish, whether having once entered here he had ever again truly left; but at the time he just mounted to where she stood, deliriously happy that after a long and extremely odd journey he had at last arrived and that she was greeting him with brown eyes full of promise (and perhaps then this was the journey’s only purpose, his present happiness, and if so a good one and all right with him) and taking his pack and his hand and leading him into the cool upper regions of the house.

“I could use a wash,” he said, a little breathless. She dipped her big head near his ear and said, “I’ll lick you clean, like a cat.” Sophie giggled behind them.

“Hall,” Alice said, running her hand along the dark wainscoting. She patted the glass doorknobs she passed: “Mom and Dad’s room. Dad’s study—shhh. My room—see?” He peeked in, and mostly saw himself in the tall mirror. “Imaginary study. Old orrery, up those stairs. Turn left, then turn left.” The hallway seemed concentric, and Smoky wondered how all these rooms managed to sprout off it. “Here,” she said.

The room was of indiscernible shape; the ceiling sank toward one corner sharply, which made one end of the room lower than the other; the windows there were smaller too; the room seemed larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn’t decide which. Alice threw his pack on the bed, narrow and spread for summer in dotted swiss. “The bathroom’s down the hall,” she said. “Sophie, go run some water.”

“Is there a shower?” he asked, imagining the hard plunge of cool water.

“Nope,” Sophie said. “We were going to modernize the plumbing, but we can’t find it anymore…”

“Sophie.”

Sophie shut the door on them.

First she wanted to taste the sweat that shone on his throat and fragile clavicle; then he chose to undo the tails of her shirt, that she had tied up beneath her breasts; then, but then impatient they forgot about taking turns and quarreled silently, eagerly over each other, like pirates dividing treasure long sought, long imagined, long withheld.