Jesse Ball: The Lesson

Someone was there and speaking to her.

— Are you all right?

— Oh, she said. Oh, I’m okay. I just…

Three young men stood there.

— You don’t look all right, said one.

— She looks like she just collapsed on that wall.

— Not just, said the third. I expect she’s been there for a while.

And she had, she had been there for about an hour, trying to recover.

— I’m all right, said Loring weakly.

— Well, said the first one, it won’t do unless we help her out. Where do you need to go? he asked her.

— I am all right, she said. You don’t have to help me.

— He’s going to help you, said the third. I am also. So’s he.

Loring saw this was going nowhere. She might as well accept their help. Of course, it was quite clear that she needed it anyway.

— Over that way, she said, vaguely waving her arm.

— You really shouldn’t go out so far alone, said the youngest one.

He must have been about twenty. They were all three wearing the same sort of work suit and appeared quite recently to have been mending something.

— Here, let me help you.

The three hoisted her up and so along they went, with them practically carrying her. Of course, being carried a long distance is not always the most comfortable experience, so the three cheerfully gave her an opportunity to rest here and there, peppering her all the while with gentle questions to distract her from the task at hand, and reassuring her with pleasant sounds and the occasional hearty song.

In such a style, they arrived back at Loring’s house, where the young men saw her over her doorstep and went away, promising to return for a supper of some sort which Loring assured them she would make out of gratitude. Although, they did say, they often skipped supper to go to the dance hall in the next town.

There is just enough time, one explained, to get there and back if we leave the minute work stops .

Loring made her way slowly to the chair in the parlor and sank into it. She was not embarrassed by what had happened, but she did feel foolish. Her hands were feathered with little cuts. Her legs hurt terribly, especially by her ankles.

Keep working, she told them. There’s much left for you to do.

Ezra had told her once that speaking to things was never useless. This is not the same thing as believing her legs could hear her. Do you see what I mean?

Why did I begin to cry earlier? thought Loring.

At the same time, she thought: the box is upstairs, sitting in its new place closer to the edge of the table.

At the same time, she thought: the boy does not actually seem to be able to play chess at all. What a silly idea that was — that he might have anything to do with Ezra.

And yet, it might come and go. This is something the old often have faith in — that things come and go. People used to believe such things. A statue in the center of a town: sometimes is a god, and other times, it is something upon which to hang laundry. Anthropologists rack their brains for the way this works, but it is in plain sight. Life’s daily routines can be a cycle like the moon’s phases; when the moon is full, things are different, baldly different, than when the moon is new. Why should a statue not be just the same? Or a boy? Or anything, anything at all.

The next morning early, Loring woke up, ate one piece of toast with the tiniest bit of butter and jam, drank one cup of tea, and set out for the cemetery. She was getting older. She had now, in fact, outlived her husband by five years. It was not clear that she would continue living, or that she would keep her health. Yet to Loring, there was simply the ongoing process of days, the rituals she had made and kept. She loved her husband. He had died. His body was there, in the cemetery, and so she would go there. She would. As much as she might be permitted, she would be close to him. That she was embarked on this idea, regarding the boy, quite literally the way one embarks upon the sea in a coracle, made no difference. She visited her husband in his death in the grass, and sat by the tree day in day out. She had learned the shape of the bark on the near trees. Even the clouds that came and went there, they were familiar to her, and she might have greeted them by name, if she had cared to. Of course, she did no such thing.

Out of the house, she went, taking with her a stick, an old Basque stick. Although Loring did not know it, the end would unscrew to provide a defensive point. Basque shepherds used them for, well, I have never heard a truly good reason why Basque shepherds needed a fancy sword-cane. I suppose it enlivened things, up there in the high pastures. With this accoutrement, Loring set forth.

Someone had put a thin wooden taper with the head of a horse into the ground by Ezra’s grave. Such things existed in the world. Gerard had heard of them soon after Ezra’s death, and thinking that there might be people flocking to the graveyard to pay their respects (a thing that never actually happened), he purchased a store of these horse-head chess-themed tapers, which he kept on sale in a little gift shop which adjoined the house which adjoined the gate which adjoined the cemetery, or which, as we have previously said, was within the cemetery. All of it was within the cemetery.

And so someone had come and bought one, and having bought it, had set it there, but having set it there, had not lit it.

Loring mused on the matter and, after a while, forgot what she was thinking about. At that point it even become possible for her to look at the taper and not see it, to look at it and not think anything at all. Aren’t our minds fragile and terrible? Anything can escape us — no matter how large, how small.

The sky was wonderfully clear of obstacles. No planes, no balloons, no dirigibles, if ever such things came and went thereabouts.

But in the distance it appeared a lone kite was flying, or being flown. Loring’s sharp eyes picked it out. It was a red kite and it moved speedily here and there, darting like a fish.

Where Loring was, there was no wind. All the wind had gone elsewhere, to the kite perhaps. Could it be that kites draw wind to them? Is that why the owners of windmills embrace the pastime of kiting? Or do they despise it? It must be one or the other.

On the way back, unfortunately, Loring was laughed at by a pair of young women. How it happened was this:

She went out the main gate of the cemetery and continued up the boulevard to the place where one branching street would lead to another and to her own eventually at the base of the hill on which sat her house. As she passed by a high house, she saw two girls leaning on the wall, dressed well.

In Loring then the feeling that we sometimes have — to speak to someone and be joined with them for a moment. These girls reminded her somehow of her own youth, or perhaps it was not so — perhaps she simply wanted to know the time. In any case, she to them:

— Do you know the time?

One girl laughed, a short hoarse bark. The other sneered.

— Do you know the time? she parroted, in a nasty imitation of Loring voice.

— Do you know the time? the nasty girl said again.

— Oh, said Loring, slightly distressed.

— What a moron, said the second girl. As if the clock weren’t right there on the church. As if the clock didn’t ring less than a minute ago. As if she herself were not wearing a watch. What a moron.

— What a god-given fool, said the first girl.