by John Crowley
“I don’t know if I got this far,” Rosie said. “I don’t remember this.”
Perhaps it was this inadmissable sadness inside, whatever caused it, that made so many of them so fond of jewels. Jewels seemed to represent to them something longed for, they seemed to be completion itself I think. Poems and stories are full of tedious catalogues and descriptions of them. And yet no single jewel ever really healed them or stilled their restlessness, and so they were always looking for others, spending fortunes on them, little cold promises of fullness.
They were believed to grow, like living things (as indeed some crystals do grow), deep inside the mountains, bound up in a matrix or womb of base earth and stone; such jewels had grown up (from pebbles or clods I suppose) to become, finally, perfect, or almost perfect: changeless, as nothing else beneath the moon was changeless. In effect they had achieved eternal life. And perhaps what those hungry collectors thought was that one day one might be found in the mountains, or forced in the alchemical furnaces, or discovered in the plundered collections of their enemies, one fabulous something that would convey its immortality right into the heart of him who wears it.
“Well,” she said, lowering the book, not understanding still his urgency. He pointed to the book.
“There’s a note,” he said.
She looked at the page, thinking it bore a written note, from Kraft. No he meant a footnote, in small secretive type at the right-hand page’s bottom:
Of course if one knew the location or the provenance of such a jewel, one would want to be wise enough to spurn it for oneself, and not offer it or reveal it to others either. We have all read the stories. We are wiser now, or ought to be, and satisfied with our three score years and ten—extended only by the lapis lapidarum of scientific medicine. I at any rate will let my sleeping toad lie, and not take foolishly the jewel of his head.
Rosie lowered the book. It was evident that Boney was genuinely stricken, but it was not possible (Rosie thought) that it could be because of what this note of Kraft’s said.
“Well so,” she said gently.
“So he knew,” Boney said. “He did. Even then.”
“Knew what, Boney?”
He looked away then, unwilling to say. His open mouth sought for breath. Rosie thought: maybe he’s going crazy. Senility. She should ask Mike. She felt a hot grief, at the unfairness of it: to have been allotted such a long life, so long that finally it goes bad.
“Did you sleep okay?” she said, fatuously, trying to fool him into dropping the subject, as Sam sometimes could be fooled.
“I don’t sleep,” he said. “Afraid I won’t wake up.” He was trying to climb from the chaise, unable to lift himself; Rosie came to help. He took her hand. No matter that he had lost mass over the last two weeks: he was heavy if you had to get him upright.
“Look,” he said. “Look here.”
He got to his desk. Three piles of papers covered it, and Rosie recognized Fellowes Kraft’s hand, the small neat letters and long descenders. Boney rested his hand on one pile as though he meant to swear an oath on them. “There was supposed to be, somewhere there, over there I mean, some something: Kraft said he knew what it was, where it was anyway. Something made, or found, or. And it was that thing.”
“That thing?”
“The jewel. Or something like it. He said.”
Rosie watched him stare down at the piles of blue onionskin and torn envelopes. “I’ll leave these here,” he said. “Look at them. You’ll see. He said he brought it home with him.”
“Boney,” Rosie said. “It’s just a story.”
“I’ve tried and tried, Rosie, but I just can’t anymore. I hate to burden you with it, honestly. But I just.” He held himself up with the desk’s edge, and his arms trembled with the effort. He seemed near tears. “Why did I wait, why. Why.”
“Listen,” Rosie said. “Boney. Even if he really thought he’d found something. He was wrong.”
Boney raised his head to look at her, a wild hope or fear in his eyes, good grief what should she do with him. “Because he’s dead,” Rosie said. It seemed obvious to her. “He got sick and died.”
He laughed, and Rosie laughed too, glad to join him. He turned away from the letters on the desk, and she helped him back to the couch.
“Of course. Oh of course.” He lay back again into his pillows. “Why should one old man, one old man of no special merit, why. When everyone, everyone else has gone over, as far as anyone knows. Only a fool would think there might be some, some.” He lifted Kraft’s book again, and it began tap tapping in his lap. “Oh I can say it, I can. But.”
“But it’s …”
“But I have to know what he meant. I have to know. Just so I can…”
Die, Rosie thought. She sat down in the chair beside his couch, took the book from his lap and closed it.
A jewel to fill the hollow of your heart. How could it be that Boney could want life, just life, so much when she wanted it so little? There was the story of the woman who agreed to go down into the underworld in her husband’s place, just because he didn’t want to go. Once upon a time the woman’s willingness had astonished Rosie, but maybe there was a story untold within the story, maybe she hadn’t really minded all that much: stay, go, no difference, not so much difference anyway that she couldn’t be kind to someone who cared a lot.
He spoke, not to her, too low for Rosie to hear. She bent closer. “Sorry?” she whispered. “Boney?”
“I just don’t want to die,” he said, and Rosie could see that tears had formed again in the reddened cups of his eyes. “I don’t want to. I don’t know why I have to.”
He had taken her wrist in a strong grip, as though to keep himself moored on the planet. Succor. “Well are you afraid?” she asked, not knowing what else to ask, what the right question was, if there was one, that would ease him; appalled and fascinated that he should want it from her, that he didn’t know it himself, that it was possible to come so close to the end of the story and still be able not to know.
“I just don’t,” he said, “I don’t want to,” and a shiver crossed Rosie’s shoulders; his voice was eerily, terribly, like Sam’s, saying she didn’t want to go to Beau’s, didn’t want to go to sleep. All compact of hurt and desolation, and for no reason, none.
He had not released her wrist. How could she tell him to be brave? Would she be? Her own father had slipped out of life as though he were getting out of something unpleasant, doing the dishes maybe, sorry, got an appointment I can’t break.
The cruel thing was that to everybody else it seemed Boney had already acquired whatever it was that kept you alive forever; it was as though he had made a deal long ago with life to avoid all that used up other people, children and marriage and a job and everything that might consume him, take up his time, so that in return his time would stretch out indefinitely; maybe he had, and like Midas had got what he wanted, and couldn’t unwish it now.
He said no more. Rosie sat with him a long time in the advancing morning, holding his hand when he began to weep again or fret, until at length Spofford’s truck turned in at the drive.
FIFTEEN
Three peaks ascend above the low green Faraway Hills, organizing and lending scale to them, Mount Merrow to the northeast across the Blackbury, Mount Whirligig to the west sundered by the valley of the Shadow from Mount Randa, greatest and oldest of the three and pleasingly central, like a castle keep amid its towers.
Rosie Rasmussen was born in the Faraways, though she had been taken away when she was ten to live in the Midwest, in a place where there were no mountains and even “hill” was largely a courtesy title (Hillcrest Mall, Greenhills Estates). She was still not always aware of standing on a mountain’s slopes, or ascending one, and was surprised sometimes, at a turn on a rising road, to find herself high up. Spofford always knew: where he stood, where the next valley ran and what road ran through it.
“Well, you live here all your life,” he said, turning the truck’
s wheel with both hands through a sharp turn upward.
“But you were gone,” Rosie said. “Those years.”
He had spent time away: two years in the Army, two in Southeast Asia (other peaks, other river valleys), two in New York City. One or part of one (Rosie could never fit it into the bio exactly) in an institution of some kind, somewhere more drastic maybe than The Woods, but not quite a madhouse: his allusions to it were rare, and invited no questions.
“It was one of the things I found out I could do that used up the time,” he said, and Rosie guessed what the time to be used up might be. “I could say All right, standing at the upper end of my orchard, what’s behind me to the north, what’s east, where does the road run, where does it meet another. That kind of thing. You get a map in your head. The area’s still full of surprises though. Places I’ve never been.”
They had left the tarred road upward and entered onto a dirt one.
“So where does he live?” Rosie said. “In a cave?”
“Not really.”
“I’m a little nervous,” Rosie said. “I guess I’m actually pretty nervous.”
“Why?”
“Well some guy is about to examine my insides somehow. Doesn’t the idea of that make you nervous?”
Spofford laughed. “Well I think you’re imagining it wrong. Hey look.”
At a turning the woods opened to the west, and Mount Randa was framed in the gap, like a postcard view: the new green of its trees, mottled in darker fir; the bald pate of rock on its height. No alp at all, only a nice heap of forested earth; old, old. Between here and there, this mountainside and that one, came the valley of the Blackbury, where the people lived, where she lived herself, with Boney and Sam. Her throat was suddenly thick with sweetness, and tears welled in her eyes. Welled. What is with you today, she asked herself.
“Can’t see the orchard,” Spofford said smiling, for on the slopes of Randa was his own old mountainside orchard, where the apple trees had long gone wild, and where now he was at work building a new house on an old foundation. He almost passed Cliff’s driveway down.
“He built the house mostly himself,” Spofford said.
Rosie felt alone again. Spofford had told her stories of vets he knew who had just opted out, moved into the woods, lived in the rags of their old fatigues and hunted game with an M16 smuggled out of Vietnam. She put her hand on Spofford’s arm as he maneuvered down.
She wouldn’t, herself, choose to live in the woods. So many trees so nearby, crowding up together to stare at you like people at an accident, resentful maybe of their sawn-off buddies in your yard. Tree-fingers coming in the windows. Inescapable damp and rot, the smell of claustrophobia. Today though brilliant and sun-shot and welcoming, and the house a nice one really, ramifying in unexpected directions up a hillside, its unpainted boards and battens turning silvery, tin roofs slanting every which way and ashine, and a big window wall made of—huh, made of a row of old storm doors neatly carpentered into place.
“Nice,” she said, so tentatively that Spofford laughed.
But it was also, unmistakably, uninhabited at the moment. How is it that a house can be read so certainly, some houses anyway. They both felt it, though since they had no good reason to think it, neither said anything; Spofford stopped the truck, got out, called.
“Yo. Cliff.”
Confirming silence. Rosie (arms still crossed protectively before her) walked up to the house and around to the back. A garage beneath the living space where no car was but where the tools of a strenuous existence were neatly racked and hung, huge-toothed saws and a chain saw and a brush hog, axes and long shovels. A motorcycle under a blue plastic tarp. A guru with a motorcycle!
“Phooey,” said Spofford behind her.
“Is it because it’s the Fourth?”
“Christ,” he said. “Hard to imagine.”
For a while they waited in his mossy yard (Spofford said he was sure it was all right to go in, make some tea, but Rosie shook her head) and tossed pebbles at a metal drum to hear it ring. Then they stood to go.
“Well now I’m disappointed,” Rosie said cheerfully. She got in the odorous truck and pulled the door shut. “Now I won’t find out what he was going to do.”
“We’ll come back,” Spofford said, downcast. “I’m sorry. Really.”
“Oh, don’t be. It was interesting anyway.”
He pulled the truck back onto the road.
“So what does he do?”
“Oh. Various kinds of things. Depending.”
“But what kinds of things?”
“Body stuff, mostly. It’s hard to describe what kinds of things because so much of it is just Cliff seeing, or feeling I guess. He says Get into your feet. And you try to do that, with Cliff watching or feeling with you, even though it doesn’t mean much to you at first.”
“Get into your feet?”
“Try it.” Spofford tried it himself, looking inward, breathing softly, and letting go, momentarily, of the truck’s wheel.
“Hey.”
He took the wheel again lightly, with the tips of his fingers.
“We could stop,” she said.
Spofford shrugged, and turned the truck onto a logging road that just then appeared. Tender mosses filled the old wheel ruts, and its long center hump was tufted with grasses and wildflowers that tickled the truck’s undercarriage. He stopped.
“Okay,” said Rosie.
“Okay,” said Spofford. He spread his hands on the knees of his jeans. On the back of one a pale fish was tattooed. A kind of tentative inwardness had come into his manner, as though he approached a shy animal, himself, who might flee or might hold still for a moment if he were calm with it. “Okay. We’ll get into our feet.”
Silence and the woods.
“See, I can’t do what Cliff does,” Spofford said after a time. “What he does is to guide you. He’ll tell you if you’re doing what he’s asking.”
“You tell me.”
“I’ll try.”
He paid attention to her, and to the ambient actuality, in the way that Cliff did. Rosie, taking her cues from him, didn’t close her eyes or assume a meditative pose; she only tried to sense her two feet.
“Yes, right,” said Spofford, and in fact Rosie just then felt her appendages begin to wake; far off, across an intervening desert or silence that was the most or the rest of her.
“Huh,” she said.
“Can you get into one, then the other?”
“I dunno.” Left first, then Right, she could in fact make them tingle and swell in turn. Weird.
“Get them down on the ground, on the earth.”
“We’re not on the earth.”
“Whatever. The bottom.”
Her feet, as big now as clown’s feet or bear-paws, rooted her. She laughed.
Spofford looked over at her. “See?” he said.
“I guess.” She lifted her heels, and put them down again. Hello, feet. “Now what?”
“Well you might try this when you feel too light,” Spofford said. “When you feel yourself leaving your body, or feel all of you collected in your head, and disconnecting. See?”
“Um,” Rosie said.
“Then there’s heart,” Spofford said, and touched his breast.
“Oh.”
“Or your back,” Spofford said. “Lower back. That’s a hard one for some people.”
She checked that way. Nothing stirred that she noticed. “Lower back?”
“Well”—he laughed—“yeah. Way low. The end of your tailbone, sort of. Down.” His knees opened slightly, as though to allow his spirit passage. “Down,” he said, or commanded, softly.
How is it we can think we have space inside us? Rosie wondered. When it’s all jampacked with organs, tissues, fluids, who knows what? It feels, it felt to her just then, as she sent out her queries, like a system of caves, branching tunnels, softly alight or dark and unexplorable.
“Hm,” Spofford said.
“Not so
easy,” she said. She backed out of her inward spaces, her Carlsbad Caverns, and returned herself to the sun-hot day and the locusts. She breathed it in, and breathed in Spofford’s big presence too beside her. And at that she felt (not in herself so much as in the woods and the wide world) a shift, an aliveness, a dragon-stirring of some kind. Hello?
“So,” Spofford said. His breast expanded within the T-shirt, and fell again. He scratched at a coral bugbite on his brown arm. Rosie remembered her dream. “We done?”
He turned to her smiling, not exactly embarrassed (she had seen him abashed and ashamed but she didn’t think she’d ever seen him embarrassed) but done with this game.
“I don’t know,” Rosie said. “I think I got too low.”
“Oh ho,” Spofford said. “Big danger.”
“Well,” Rosie said. “Your own fault.”
She shifted on the smooth leather of the truck seat, and slipped her feet (still heavy and warm) from their sandals. He still smiled at her, glad for her, happy for himself too; and Rosie was whelmed so suddenly with the fullness she had felt in her dream, fullness all glee and triumph, that she laughed aloud.
“What.”
“Cmere,” she said. She undid the top button of his heavy jeans, and together they worked them open, thick tough pelt protecting the soft dark parts within.
Big. Not as big though as the dream-fruit she had fed on. “Hey,” he said gently after a time. His warm hands on her cheeks and in her hair. “Careful. Unless …”
“Oh. Oh. Sorry,” she whispered. “Getting carried away, huh.”
O Summer, she thought; O big sweetness for a while, thank God, forget the rest. She let him lift her up, lift her shirt. Succor. She was flowing freely and fully, for the first time in ages.