Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  I looked back the way I had come, the trees turning their leaves in the evening breeze, and regretted missing the journey. You lighten a load, I saw then, which you have carried a hundred times before; or to go a journey you must make but would rather not. It wasn’t for new journeys or new saints. There’s a lesson, I thought, and spun the little pot so that it skipped across the brown swollen river and sank.

  Across That River the sun still lit the tops of the hills, but down amid the weeds and roots at the water’s edge it was growing dark and a little cold. A frog plunked. I put my hands in my armpits and watched the current go by; I was tired’?I really had come a long way—and I wondered if I had put match to more than I could smoke. There was a gurgle and splash of water then, and out on the river a man strode by. Strode: the water came up to his chest, and his shoulders made the vigorous motions of a man striding; a wake flowed out behind him. He shot on past me without seeing me in the shadows; he was moving quickly on the current.

  Amazing! Without exactly knowing why, I ran along the riverbank following him, stumbling on roots and plunging my feet in mud. I lost sight of him, then glimpsed him through the trees floating away serenely, a fair pigtail and his wet white shirt flapping. I was some time crashing through the willows and vines at the river’s edge, the mud sucking at my boots, till I saw him again, standing up as ordinary as any man, on a wooden wharf built out over the water, laughing with a woman who was toweling him vigorously as he squeezed water from his pigtail. Just as they turned to see what was clambering through the bushes, I lost my footing and slithered like an otter into the muddy river.

  They helped me out, laughing and wondering how I came to be there, and it was a moment—a spluttering moment—till I realized they were truthful speakers. They took me up onto their wharf, which connected by a set of stairs to a house built into the bank of the river. And tied up to the wharf, riding high out of the water without his weight on it, was what had allowed him to walk the river: two big cylinders of light metal, with a seat attached between them, and handholds, and broad foot pedals to make it go. He was Buckle cord, I knew then. I was going to tell him about my amazement at seeing him on the river, but just then a boy burst through the door that led out of the house, stopping when he saw me. He was a couple of years younger than me, tanned already, and his hair sun-streaked. He carried a stick and was naked except for a blue band around his neck.

  I was thinking how I might explain myself to him, but at that moment a boy came out the door behind him, stopping when he saw me. He was tanned, and his hair sun-streaked; he carried a stick and was naked except for a red band around his neck.

  They were the only twins I have ever seen. It was hard not to stare at them as I wrung out my wet clothes. They stared at me too, not that there was anything remarkable about me; they stared with a look I didn’t understand then, but know now is the look of people who don’t see strangers often.

  “This is Budding,” said the man, “and that is Blooming.” I couldn’t help laughing, and he laughed too. “My name is Sewn Up, and she is No Moon. Come in and get dry.” Buckle cord, as I supposed; and the woman must be Leaf; the two boys were harder to tell, maybe because there were two of them.

  Inside the house, the sunset over the water glinted and glittered on the ceiling and across the dark, rug-hung walls so that it felt as though we were under water too. The gurgle of the river made me sleepy, and sitting with the water-walker and his family made me feel like a fish visiting fish friends. Sewn Up talked as he lowered and filled a glass pipe; his voice was a good one, with odd insides that made me laugh, and made No Moon laugh even more. I asked him why he didn’t live in Little Belaire.

  “Well,” he said, motioning to the two boys with a spoonful of bread, “they liked the water, and the stream that runs through Little Belaire wasn’t enough water for them. Their Mbaba said they moped a lot, so I said if they liked water, they should come back and stay here; and if they liked people—other people besides us, anyway—they should stay at Little Belaire. Well, they get along best with each other, so here they stay.”

  “We were born here,” Blooming said, and Budding said, “This is our spot.”

  “I took them back, you see, for a while,” No Moon said; “it’s their home, in a way, as it was mine and still is. But they like it here.”

  “Aren’t they going to be truthful speakers?”

  “Well, if we’re truthful speakers, so will they be, won’t they? There are two truthful speakers in the river house and no river in Little Belaire, so it all works out fine.”

  And it was better for them, too, Sewn Up said; people would always make much of them, there were people who came a great distance just to see them, and he didn’t want it to go to their heads; he had pointed out to them that there was nothing really so remarkable about them. They said nothing to this, only smiled the same smile; they knew there was something very remarkable about them, and so did we.

  There was a thick, dry smell of smoke in the cool room, easier to breathe almost than air. When Sewn Up talked, puffs of smoke mimicked his words from his nose and mouth. “Odd you should find it odd to leave Little Belaire,” he said, sprinkling new bread onto the blue ashes. “It seems you’ve made the same choice yourself, and younger than we were by quite a bit.”

  “Oh no,” I started to say, but thought that, yes, I had, and had no intention of returning, not for years and years; yet I had been feeling sorry for Budding and Blooming, who couldn’t stay there in the best place in the world all the time. “I’m just, well, ranging; I’ll go back, one day. It’d be terrible if I couldn’t ever go back.” And terrible it did seem to me for the first time.

  “Well,” No Moon said rising, “stay here anyway as long as you want. We have room.”

  So when I could think of no more news of the warren to give them, and the lights No Moon lit were growing low, I followed the two boys up a winding flight of stairs to a room with glass windows all around, open to the clear night which Little Moon sped across. But sleepy as I was, it was a long time before we were quiet under our shaggy blankets. I lay amazed and listened to Budding finish Blooming’s words and then Blooming Budding’s, as though they were one person. Giggling and laughing at things I didn’t understand, they rolled over each other like otters; they had looked tan in the sun, but in the pale night light they were white against the dark covers.

  They had treasures to show me, tucked away at the bottom of the bed and in boxes, an empty turtle shell, a twitch-nose mouse in a nest of grass. And, taken carefully from its hiding place in the wall, their best thing. It was a little cube of clear plastic; inside the plastic, poised for flight, a fly. A real fly. A cube of plastic with, who could tell how, a fly right in the middle of it! We turned it in the moonlight, our faces close together. “Where did it come from?” I asked. “Is there a story? Where did you get it?”

  “The saint gave it to us,” said one, and the other was drawing out something else for me to see, but I stopped him at hearing that.

  “A saint gave you that? What saint?”

  “The one we know,” said Budding.

  “You know a saint?”

  “The one who gave us this,” said Blooming.

  “Why did he give it to you? What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said one. “It’s a lesson, he said. The fly thinks he’s in the air, because he can see out all around, and can’t see anything that holds him back. But still he can’t move. And let that be a lesson, he said.”

  “It was just a present,” said the other one.

  “Can I see him?” I asked, and they must have been surprised at the urgency in my voice. “Is he far away?”

  “Yes,” said one.

  “No,” said the other. “He’s not too far. Walk all morning. We can take you. He might not like you.”

  “He likes you.”

  The two of them looked at each other and laughed. “Maybe that’s because,” said Budding, and “there are two of us,” said
Blooming, and they stood with their arms around each other, grinning at me.

  With true Leaf cord politeness, they let me choose where I would sleep, but I lay awake a long time, listening to the gurgle of the brown river, with a saint to see tomorrow, already, so soon!

  THIRD FACET

  In the morning, Sewn Up ferried us across That River on his contraption, laughing and making jokes: I’ve never seen anyone as happy to be up in the morning as he, except maybe myself on this morning, off to meet a real saint. Budding and Blooming wore thick shirts against the morning chill and the mist that lay thickly over the river and its fragrant tributaries, and I shivered. No Moon had given me more bread, and a nice plastic bottle full of grape soda she’d put up in the winter, and a kiss.

  “I’ll go to the warren in the fall,” she said. “I’ll tell them I saw you, and that you were well.”

  I thought of a thousand messages she might bring for me—gone only a day!?but I kept quiet and only nodded, an adventurer’s uncaring nod, and climbed behind Sewn Up.

  The twins and I followed a rushing tributary of the river for some time till it ran quietly between its wooded banks; when the sun was high and hot and the mist gone, we came to an inlet where a little dish of a boat was tied up among the saplings at the water’s edge. It was something angel-made of white plastic, and (like so many things in the world) put to a use the angels surely never intended; certainly, with its odd ridges and projections and strange shape, it had not been made for a boat. So hot and still it had become that Budding and Blooming threw their warm shirts into the bottom of the dish, and I sat on them and watched the twins pole along. Some white water-flowers came away with the boat from the inlet, and the twins pulled them out of the water to wear for hats; naked, they poled upstream, the leaf shadows flowing over them, wearing flowers in their hair.

  When the stream became shallow and poured fast over shadowed rocks, we tied up the boat and followed the stream up its narrowing rocky bed. The breath of it was cold in the warming woods, still fed by snow melting in far-off mountains. When we had tramped through the new ferns at its side for a long way, Budding and Blooming signaled me to be quiet, and we climbed the bank. Past the trees that bordered the stream was a small sunny pasture full of small white flowers; and on a slope amid them lay the saint.

  He was fast asleep. His hands were crossed over his bosom, and he snored; his feet, clad in big boots, stuck up. His white hair lay all around him on the ground, and his beard spread out around his small brown face so that he looked like a milkweed seed. We crept up on him, and Budding whispered something in Blooming’s ear that made him laugh. That woke up the saint, who sat up suddenly, looking around confused. Seeing us, he sneezed loudly, got up grumbling, and stumbled off toward the woods across the pasture. Budding cried out and started chasing him as though he were a bird we’d raised; Blooming followed after, and I hung behind, embarrassed at how they approached him.

  When they had been some time crashing around in the woods into which the saint had gone, they came back to me panting.

  “He’s in a tree,” said Blooming.

  “We’ll never find him now,” said Budding, licking his finger and wiping a long scratch on his thigh.

  “Why didn’t you just leave him alone?” I asked. “He would have waked up, we could have waited.”

  “Blooming laughed,” said Budding, “and he woke up …”

  “Budding made me laugh,” said Blooming, “and he ran off.”

  “He saw you, is why,” said Budding. “He’s not scared of us.”

  I wished I could have approached him alone; now I could never get into his good graces. The twins didn’t really care about saints; they chased a grasshopper now with the same enthusiasm they had chased the little old man. They sat for a while poking each other and whispering together, and then came to the log I was sitting on.

  “We’re sorry about the saint running off,” said Blooming. “But you saw him anyway, and now you know what one looks like. Let’s go home.”

  He spoke kindly, because he could see I was disappointed; but he said too that even if we left now it would be long after dark when we got back, day was going.

  “I’m going to stay,” I said.

  They looked at me blankly.

  “Maybe he’ll come down from his tree in the morning,” I said, “and I can talk to him, and apologize for waking him and all. I’ll do that.”

  “Well,” said one of them, “I suppose, if you want to. But we brought you here. Do you know how to get back?”

  With a sudden decision that startled me as much as I hoped it would startle them, I said: “I’m not coming back.” I’m not coming back, twins, so go chase your grasshoppers. “I guess I’ll just stay here, and wait for him, and stay and live with him, and I guess be a saint.”

  The twins thought about that for a while, sitting down again and looking from me into the woods and at each other. Then Budding came and gravely kissed my cheek; and Blooming took the cue and kissed the other cheek. They brought my pack to me from where I had left it at the pasture’s edge and put it by me. And without another word they turned back to the brook and disappeared in the aspens at its edge.

  One thing about Leaf cord, they’re very down to earth, but if an occasion comes up, they’ll rise to it.

  Evening gathered as I sat, and a stack of new midges danced in the still air of the little pasture. The more I thought about my decision the more sensible it seemed to me; but the more I thought how sensible it was, the less I felt like getting up and going into the woods that breathed at the edge of the pasture to look for the saint.

  I practiced what I would say in apology to him—no more than “Hello there” or the like, but I practiced till I felt it had enough weight to be convincing. (You practice just by meaning it harder.) But in the end, what got me into the woods were the twins’ kisses burning on my cheeks, and the thought of how I would feel if I went back—if, that is, I could find my way back at all. Of course they’re Leaf cord, it wouldn’t matter to them, they’d just be glad to see me—and somehow that made it worse.

  So I got up in the growing gloom and went into the woods, quietly so as not to disturb him should he be around. It was almost dark already in the woods, and grew darker as I went deeper in, and a breeze whispered and creaked in it warningly, and soon it was impossible to take steps without tripping. I had come on an enormous old oak as wide as a wall, which it seemed the woods must have started with, and sat down amid its sheltering roots.

  Too dark now to string my hammock, but there was a star caught in the web of leaves, and the air was still; I could spend this night here. It was no good thinking of the water house, or of Belaire, if I wanted to be a saint as much as I said, but it was hard not to think of them as I sat with knees drawn up. I rolled some smoke, carefully picking up the crumbs I dropped. I had enough for several days, and there were always roots and berries that Seven Hands had taught me about, though there would be no berries ripe yet; and if I really got hungry I could kill some little animal and toast it over a fire and eat the meat, as they did in ancient times. And, I thought, if he’s a real saint, he won’t let me starve to death, right in his own woods.

  And if I did starve: perhaps something like that was what was in store for me. It would be sad, but maybe in future times people would learn from it; perhaps I would become a part of this saint’s story, and so never die—was that what Painted Red had meant? I thought of Once a Day, and how she might someday come to hear the story; she would know, then—know something. I sat and looked at the blue glimpses of heaven revealed by the moving leaves and thought about being dead.

  “If you’re going to sit there all night,” said a small voice over my head, “you might go and get me some water.” I jumped back from the dead and looked upward into the darkness. I could just make out the whiteness of his beard in the dark leaves of the oak I had been leaning on. I couldn’t remember what it was I had planned to say. The beard disappeared, and a dark
object was thrown at me, and I ducked as it clattered near me. It was a plastic bucket. I stood holding it and staring up at the tree.

  “Well?” said the small voice.

  I picked my way out of the woods and down the hill, and filled the bucket from the black water of the brook, and came back with it, stumbling through the woods. When I stood again at the foot of the oak, a rope fell from its branches with a hook on the end. I attached the bucket and watched it hauled up into the darkness.

  “You’ve gone and spilled most of it.”

  “It’s dark.”

  “Well. You’ll have to go again.”

  The bucket came down again and I went to refill it, trying to be careful. The face didn’t reappear. I stood looking up into the oak till my neck hurt; I heard some splashing and knocking but the saint didn’t speak again.

  In the first light of morning, when I woke stiff and chilled, and looked upward, it was all clear: what had been a massy darkness in the tree was a little house built in the broad arms of the oak with great care, of woven branches and pieces of angel-made this and that, with small windows and a smokestack that leaned out away from the branches. A rope ran from a window to a convenient branch, and from it hung two long shirts.

  It hadn’t once occurred to me, you know, that perhaps the twins were mistaken, and their little old man wasn’t a saint at all; I had just assumed that somehow they knew. And looking up now at his tree house, I had no need for doubt. It was just such houses that the saints lived in so many lives ago, when we wandered; St. Gary’s great beech and the oak of St. Maureen, and the tree whose stump is still marked in Little Belaire’s woods, where St. Andy went to live after St. Bea died. “Saints in the trees!” I said aloud, as old people do when something astonishes them.