He kept the medal with him always, only transferring it, as the year went by, from his summer to his winter breeches. But anything you carry about with you in your pocket you are bound to lose sooner or later. Jack had an errand to do in Hending, but there was nothing on the road that day, neither horse nor cart, no hope of cadging a lift, so after waiting for an hour or so he began to walk over by the hill path.
After about a mile the hill slopes away sharply towards Watching, which is not a village and never was, only a single great house standing among its outbuildings almost at the bottom of the valley. Jack stopped there for a while to look down at the smoke from the chimneys and to calculate, as anyone might have done, the number of dinners that were being cooked there that day.
If he dropped or lost his keepsake he did not know it at the time, for as is commonly the case he didn’t miss it until he got home again. Then he went through his pockets, but the shining medal was gone and he could only repeat, ‘I had it when I started out.’ His brothers and sisters were of no help at all. They had seen nothing. What brother or sister likes being asked such questions?
The winter frosts began and at Michaelmas Jack had the day off school and thought, I had better try going that way again. He halted, as before, at the highest point, to look down at the great house and its chimneys, and then at the ice under his feet, for all the brooks, ponds, and runnels were frozen on every side of him, all hard as bone. In a little hole or depression just to the left hand of the path, something no bigger than a small puddle, but deep, and by now set thick with greenish ice as clear as glass, he saw, through the transparency of the ice, at the depth of perhaps twelve inches, the keepsake that Mrs Piercy had given him.
He had nothing in his hand to break the ice. Well then, Jack Digby, jump on it, but that got him nowhere, seeing that his wretched pair of boots was soaked right through. I’ll wait until the ice has gone,’ he thought. ‘The season is turning, we’ll get a thaw in a day or two.’
On the next Sunday, by which time the thaw had set in, he was up there again, and made straight for the little hole or declivity, and found nothing. It was empty, after that short time, of ice and even of water. And because the idea of recovering the keepsake had occupied his whole mind that day, the disappointment made him feel lost, like a stranger to the country. Then he noticed that there was an earthenware pipe laid straight down the side of the hill, by way of a drain, and that this must very likely have carried off the water from his hole, and everything in it. No mystery as to where it led, it joined another pipe with a wider bore, and so down, I suppose, to the stable-yards, thought Jack. His Desideratus had been washed down there, he was as sure of that now as if he’d seen it go.
Jack had never been anywhere near the house before, and did not care to knock at the great kitchen doors for fear of being taken for a beggar. The yards were empty. Either the horses had been taken out to work now that the ground was softer or else – which was hard to believe – there were no horses at Watching. He went back to the kitchen wing and tried knocking at a smallish side entrance. A man came out dressed in a black gown, and stood there peering and trembling.
‘Why don’t you take off your cap to me?’ he asked.
Jack took it off, and held it behind his back, as though it belonged to someone else.
‘That is better. Who do you think I am?’
‘No offence, sir,’ Jack replied, ‘but you look like an old schoolmaster.’
‘I am a schoolmaster, that is, I am tutor to this great house. If you have a question to ask, you may ask it of me.’
With one foot still on the step, Jack related the story of his godmother’s keepsake.
‘Very good,’ said the tutor, ‘you have told me enough. Now I am going to test your memory. You will agree that this is not only necessary, but just.’
‘I can’t see that it has anything to do with my matter,’ said Jack.
‘Oh, but you tell me that you dropped this-or-that in such-and-such a place, and in that way lost what had been given to you. How can I tell that you have truthfully remembered all this? You know that when I came to the door you did not remember to take your cap off.’
‘But that—’
‘You mean that was only lack of decent manners, and shows that you come from a family without self-respect. Now, let us test your memory. Do you know the Scriptures?’
Jack said that he did, and the tutor asked him what happened, in the fourth chapter of the Book of Job, to Eliphaz the Temanite, when a vision came to him in the depth of the night.
‘A spirit passed before his face, sir, and the hair of his flesh stood up.’
‘The hair of his flesh stood up,’ the tutor repeated. ‘And now, have they taught you any Latin?’ Jack said that he knew the word that had been on his medal, and that it was Desideratus, meaning long wished-for.
‘That is not an exact translation,’ said the tutor. Jack thought, he talks for talking’s sake.
‘Have you many to teach, sir, in this house?’ he asked, but the tutor half closed his eyes and said, ‘None, none at all. God has not blessed Mr Jonas or either of his late wives with children. Mr Jonas has not multiplied.’
If that is so, Jack thought, this schoolmaster can’t have much work to do. But now at last here was somebody with more sense, a house-keeperish-looking woman, come to see why the side-door was open and letting cold air into the passages. ‘What does the boy want?’ she asked.
‘He says he is in search of something that belongs to him.’
‘You might have told him to come in, then, and given him a glass of wine in the kitchen,’ she said, less out of kindness than to put the tutor in his place. ‘He would have been glad of that, I daresay.’
Jack told her at once that at home they never touched wine. ‘That’s a pity,’ said the housekeeper. ‘Children who are too strictly prohibited generally turn out drunkards.’ There’s no pleasing these people, Jack thought.
His whole story had to be gone through again, and then again when they got among the servants in one of the pantries. Yet really there was almost nothing to tell, the only remarkable point being that he should have seen the keepsake clearly through almost a foot of ice. Still nothing was said as to its being found in any of the yards or ponds.
Among all the to-ing and fro-ing another servant came in, the man who attended on the master, Mr Jonas, himself. His arrival caused a kind of disquiet, as though he were a foreigner. The master, he said, had got word that there was a farm-boy, or a schoolboy, in the kitchens, come for something that he thought was his property.
‘But all this is not for Mr Jonas’s notice,’ cried the tutor. ‘It’s a story of child’s stuff, a child’s mischance, not at all fitting for him to look into.’
The man repeated that the master wanted to see the boy.
The other part of the house, the greater part, where Mr Jonas lived, was much quieter, the abode of gentry. In the main hall Mr Jonas himself stood with his back to the fire. Jack had never before been alone or dreamed of being alone with such a person. What a pickle, he thought, my godmother, Mrs Piercy, has brought me into.
‘I daresay you would rather have a sum of money,’ said Mr Jonas, not loudly, ‘than whatever it is that you have lost.’
Jack was seized by a painful doubt. To be honest, if it was to be a large sum of money, he would rather have that than anything. But Mr Jonas went on, ‘However, you had better understand me more precisely. Come with me.’ And he led the way, without even looking round to see that he was followed.
At the foot of the wide staircase Jack called out from behind, ‘I think, sir, I won’t go any further. What I lost can’t be here.’
‘It’s poor-spirited to say “I won’t go any further”,’ said Mr Jonas.
Was it possible that on these dark upper floors no one else was living, no one was sleeping? They were like a sepulchre, or a barn at the end of winter. Through the tall passages, over uneven floors, Mr Jonas, walking ahead, carried a cand
le in its candlestick in each hand, the flames pointing straight upwards. I am very far from home, thought Jack. Then, padding along behind the master of the house, and still twisting his cap in one hand, he saw in dismay that the candle flames were blown over to the left, and a door was open to the right.
‘Am I to go in there with you, sir?’
‘Are you afraid to go into a room?’
Inside it was dark and in fact the room probably never got much light, the window was so high up. There was a glazed jug and basin, which reflected the candles, and a large bed which had no curtains, or perhaps, in spite of the cold, they had been drawn back. There seemed to be neither quilts nor bedding, but a boy was lying there in a linen gown, with his back towards Jack, who saw that he had red or reddish hair, much the same colour as his own.
‘You may go near him, and see him more clearly,’ Mr Jonas said. ‘His arm is hanging down, what do you make of that?’
‘I think it hangs oddly, sir.’
He remembered what the tutor had told him, that Mr Jonas had not multiplied his kind, and asked, ‘What is his name, sir?’ To this he got no answer.
Mr Jonas gestured to him to move nearer, and said, ‘You may take his hand.’
‘No, sir, I can’t do that.’
‘Why not? You must touch other children very often. Wherever you live, you must sleep the Lord knows how many in a bed.’
‘Only three in a bed at ours,’ Jack muttered.
‘Then touch, touch.’
‘No, sir, no, I can’t touch the skin of him!’
Mr Jonas set down his candles, went to the bed, took the boy’s wrist and turned it, so that the fingers opened. From the open fingers he took Jack’s medal, and gave it back to him.
‘Was it warm or cold?’ they asked him later. Jack told them that it was cold. Cold as ice? Perhaps not quite as cold as that.
‘You have what you came for,’ said Mr Jonas. ‘You have taken back what was yours. Note that I don’t deny it was yours.’
He did not move again, but stood looking down at the whiteish heap on the bed. Jack was more afraid of staying than going, although he had no idea how to find his way through the house, and was lucky to come upon a back staircase which ended not where he had come in but among the sculleries, where he managed to draw back the double bolts and get out into the fresh air.
‘Did the boy move,’ they asked him, ‘when the medal was taken away from him?’ But by this time Jack was making up the answers as he went along. He preferred, on the whole, not to think much about Watching. It struck him, though, that he had been through a good deal to get back his godmother’s present, and he quite often wondered how much money Mr Jonas would in fact have offered him, if he had had the sense to accept it. Anyone who has ever been poor – even if not as poor as Jack Digby – will sympathize with him in this matter.
Agnes of Iowa
Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore (b. 1957) is an American writer, known for her humorous and poignant short stories. Moore has published three collections: Self-Help, Like Life, and Birds of America, which was a New York Times bestseller. She has contributed to The Paris Review and The New Yorker and published three novels, one of which, A Gate at the Stairs, was shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Her mother had given her the name Agnes, believing that a good-looking woman was even more striking when her name was a homely one. Her mother was named Cyrena, and was beautiful to match, but had always imagined her life would have been more interesting, that she herself would have had a more dramatic, arresting effect on the world and not ended up in Cassell, Iowa, if she had been named Enid or Hagar or Maude. And so she named her first daughter Agnes, and when Agnes turned out not to be attractive at all, but puffy and prone to a rash between her eyebrows, her hair a flat and bilious hue, her mother backpedaled and named her second daughter Linnea Elise (who turned out to be a lovely, sleepy child with excellent bones, a sweet, full mouth, and a rubbery mole above her lip that later in life could be removed without difficulty, everyone was sure).
Agnes herself had always been a bit at odds with her name. There was a brief period in her life, in her mid-twenties, when she had tried to pass it off as French – she had put in the accent grave and encouraged people to call her “On-yez.” This was when she was living in New York City, and often getting together with her cousin, a painter who took her to parties in TriBeCa lofts or at beach houses or at mansions on lakes upstate. She would meet a lot of not very bright rich people who found the pronunciation of her name intriguing. It was the rest of her they were unclear on. “On-yez, where are you from, dear?” asked a black-slacked, frosted-haired woman whose skin was papery and melanomic with suntan. “Originally.” She eyed Agnes’s outfit as if it might be what in fact it was: a couple of blue things purchased in a department store in Cedar Rapids.
“Where am I from?” Agnes said it softly. “Iowa.” She had a tendency not to speak up.
“Where?” The woman scowled, bewildered.
“Iowa,” Agnes repeated loudly.
The woman in black touched Agnes’s wrist and leaned in confidentially. She moved her mouth in a concerned and exaggerated way, like a facial exercise. “No, dear,” she said. “Here we say O-hi-o.”
That had been in Agnes’s mishmash decade, after college. She had lived improvisationally then, getting this job or that, in restaurants or offices, taking a class or two, not thinking too far ahead, negotiating the precariousness and subway flus and scrimping for an occasional manicure or a play. Such a life required much exaggerated self-esteem. It engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart. Her days grew messy with contradictions. When she went for walks, for her health, cinders would spot her cheeks and soot would settle in the furled leaf of each ear. Her shoes became unspeakable. Her blouses darkened in a breeze, and a blast of bus exhaust might linger in her hair for hours. Finally, her old asthma returned and, with a hacking, incessant cough, she gave up. “I feel like I’ve got five years to live,” she told people, “so I’m moving back to Iowa so that it’ll feel like fifty.”
When she packed up to leave, she knew she was saying good-bye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with, which most people in Cassell, Iowa, she felt, could not claim to have done.
A year and a half later, she married a boyish man twelve years her senior, a Cassell realtor named Joe, and together they bought a house on a little street called Birch Court. She taught a night class at the Arts Hall and did volunteer work on the Transportation Commission in town. It was life like a glass of water: half-empty, half-full. Half-full. Half-full. Oops: half-empty. Over the years, she and Joe tried to have a baby, but one night at dinner, looking at each other in a lonely way over the meat loaf, they realized with shock that they probably never would. Nonetheless, after six years, they still tried, vandalizing what romance was left in their marriage.
“Honey,” she would whisper at night when he was reading under the reading lamp and she had already put her book away and curled toward him, wanting to place the red scarf over the lamp shade but knowing it would annoy him and so not doing it. “Do you want to make love? It would be a good time of month.”
And Joe would groan. Or he would yawn. Or he would already be asleep. Once, after a long, hard day, he said, “I’m sorry, Agnes. I guess I’m just not in the mood.”
She grew exasperated. “You think I’m in the mood?” she said. “I don’t want to do this any more than you do,” and he looked at her in a disgusted way, and it was two weeks after that that they had the sad dawning over the meat loaf.
At the Arts Hall, formerly the Grange Hall, Agnes taught the Great Books class, but taught it loosely, with cookies. She let her students turn in poems and plays and stories that they themselves had written; she let them use the class as their own little time to be creative. Someone once even br
ought in a sculpture: an electric one with blinking lights.
After class, she sometimes met with students individually. She recommended things for them to write about or read or consider in their next project. She smiled and asked if things were going well in their lives. She took an interest.
“You should be stricter,” said Willard Stauffbacher, the head of the Instruction Department; he was a short, balding musician who liked to tape on his door pictures of famous people he thought he looked like. Every third Monday, he conducted the monthly departmental meeting – aptly named, Agnes liked to joke, since she did indeed depart mental. “Just because it’s a night course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t impart standards,” Stauffbacher said in a scolding way. “If it’s piffle, use the word piffle. If it’s meaningless, write meaningless across the top of every page.” He had once taught at an elementary school and once at a prison. “I feel like I do all the real work around here,” he added. He had posted near his office a sign that read RULES FOR THE MUSIC ROOM:
I will stay in my seat unless [sic] permission to move.
I will sit up straight.
I will listen to directions.
I will not bother my neighbor.
I will not talk when Mr. Stauffbacher is talking.
I will be polite to others.
I will sing as well as I can.
Agnes stayed after one night with Christa, the only black student in her class. She liked Christa a lot – Christa was smart and funny, and Agnes sometimes liked to stay after with her to chat. Tonight, Agnes had decided to talk Christa out of writing about vampires all the time.
“Why don’t you write about that thing you told me about that time?” Agnes suggested.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 64