Ensemble

by S. P. Elledge

this before, though the librarian had already told him what to expect; she had heard tales of them since she was a child, but she had never seen them in all her eighteen years. With a glissando of little bells and a rhythmic stomping of hooves, the Old Ones marched by, oblivious to the village people, to the very village itself. The way they shuffled alongside their horses, the way their eyes stared straight ahead into nothing, they might have been blind. Undoubtedly a few of them were. What was clear was they were not wild Indians, come to reclaim their lands; neither were they true Gypsies, as some called them. Their skin was dark enough, but no darker than that of any farmer or farmwife who spent every day of every summer under the sun. Their clothes were not the Oriental costumes of stereoscope cards; they were threadbare and homespun and dusty, that was all. They were, indeed, very old—not one looked under seventy—but their faces were as angelic and anonymous as the faces of old, withered people anywhere. The two young people might have even been a bit disappointed if it weren’t for their horses, who seemed tired and almost as old as their owners–but whose manes and tails were done up in elaborate braids laced with faded silver and gold ribbon, and their wagons, gaudy as a carnival’s, ornamented like a carnival’s, with elaborate signs and symbols painted silver and gold on their high varnished sides. The symbols might have been Egyptian–or they might have merely been Masonic. Horses and wagons alike were hung with tiny tarnished bells which glinted in the sunlight. It was almost like a circus promenade, albeit a circus you might find in a hobo kingdom. But there was one last wagon, long and low, black as coal tar, topped with hemlock garlands almost as black, whose two gaunt mules tarried behind the rest. Some in the crowd outside bowed their heads. Now it seemed the bells had been muted. There, an imperious crow had paused to preen on one mule’s back! The coachman, a man whose face was shadowed under the broad brim of a parson’s hat, did not bother to flick the crow away with his whip. Perhaps the crow was one of them. Next to the coachman sat the woman who might be the matriarch of the whole clan–unlike the rest, she had a crown of hair scarlet with henna, and she wore a tattered velvet gown from another era, of some sun-blanched shade of blue or violet or gray. Around her neck, she bore chains of blackened silver, bead necklaces, cameos on pendants, rusty silk ribbons, all swaying with the rhythm of the mules. She must have been a hundred and ten or more, but her face was painted and powdered, and she fluttered a moth-eaten fan before her sunken bosom like an ancient courtesan. There was also something about her akin to an Egyptian empress, at the prow of a long black ship like a galley, about to row into the afterlife. The two young people were among the most schooled in the village, but they had never seen such a bizarre old woman, nor such wagons and hex-signs and baroque equipage, not in any book or opera house or magic lantern show. Was this a funeral procession or were these backward people from far upcountry merely looking for somewhere fresh to pasture their horses? The schoolteacher found that he had placed his hand over the librarian’s smooth cool hand as they stood at the windows, but once the procession had passed and the spell was broken, he shied away and hurried from her and the library without even remembering the books for which he’d come.

  Noon on the last day of June. The schoolteacher was standing outside the tavern, wondering if he should go in for lunch or save his meager pay and go back to eat a meager cold meal with the farmer. But it was better for now to wait here, watching the world, even a very small part of it. He wanted to know things about the world beyond this cluster of white houses, the secret things which might only be revealed where no one else is looking–in an empty storefront, for instance, or in a village almost deserted in the heat. If he were a true poet, if he could paint the day in a poem . . . It was somewhat cooler under the tavern’s front awning; within the tavern, he could see the sad fat funny mayor sitting alone at a little table, a slice of molasses pie and a glass of beer before him. Even at this distance, the schoolteacher could see the dark whorls the mayor’s fingerprints had left on the side of his sweating glass. The tavern table looked like a child’s plaything, cowering before the bulk of the mayor. There was something in the mayor’s hands–an envelope, creased and greasy, sweat-stained. The mayor had still not brought himself to open it. Instead, he used it for a fan. The mayor looked out the window, not noticing the boy standing right in front of him, but admiring his blue-ribbon mare hitched across the road, beneath the umbrella elms outside the barber shop. The mare’s tail never ceased switching flies. Its head was down, though, as if the mare were sleeping standing up. Inside the barber shop, the schoolteacher and mayor both watched the barber shaving yet another grizzled beard. It was very quiet inside the shop, but for the gentle scratching, the lapping sound of razor and occasional scrape of blade against the leather strop. The Old Ones of course did not speak to the barber or to anyone else in the village; it might have been that they did not speak at all, or at least not in any language anyone here understood. They did not buy lemonade at the tavern or any biscuit-flour or tinned meats or sorghum from the general store around the corner. Each of the Old Ones paid the barber with gold coins left over from the last century–worn, odd coins most people seldom if ever saw these days. The barber could not resist keeping a few of the coins each time the Old Ones visited; they were not worth anything more than their face value, but often he liked to look into the pie safe where he kept them–they were something to remember these long summer days by, gleaming in their cupboard like preserves in a winter pantry.

  The schoolteacher pressed his face back to the tavern window. The glass felt good, felt cool against his forehead. He could tell the mayor himself was not feeling well. Indeed, the mayor was not feeling well at all, after his meal. He was certain he was coming down with a fever. He felt what he imagined it must feel like to be seasick. The arrival of the Old Ones was the cause, no doubt. His wife had been sure they were Gypsies of Tatary, abandoned by all the other Gypsy clans up here in these north-country mountains. Or else they were the lost tribe of Israel–either way, they could curse you as soon as they’d look on you with their frozen eyes, and they were at the least robbers who’d steal their silver forks and knives and spoons right out of her trousseau. The mayor swallowed the last of his beer, which was no longer cold, lukewarm now. The tavern was empty but for him. He placed the envelope back inside his breast pocket. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. He scattered coins across the table. The schoolteacher had already backed away from the window, leaving, he noticed, the pale imprint of lips upon the glass. He saw the barber across the street, pulling up an old woman’s long straight hair with one hand, as if it were a length of heavy rope, his longest scissors in his other hand. A smell of Wildroot and something even fresher, like tea-roses in the snow, wafted from the shop. The quarter horse neighed once, eager to get home to the cool of its stable and its straw. Up in the sky, one small pearl-gray cloud, as if on a trapeze, dangled between two blue peaks.

  Afternoon on the last day of June. The mayor lay on his big broad bed, trying to sleep, watching the paddles of the fan revolve above him, a rowboat caught in a whirlpool. Seasick, far from land. He had a fever, it was certain now, and the slim silver flask rested beside him, half-empty. The barber had already fallen asleep, exhausted, in his big cast-iron chair. The door of his shop was open, and a breeze was now browsing the yellowed pages of an almanac lying open on a chair and chasing tufts of gray and white hair across the floor, which the barber hadn’t yet swept. The mirrors reflected only each other, and shadows had dulled the glint of silver. The schoolteacher–back from lunch with the farmer and his hired hand, and now in collar, coat, and tie, a straw boater in his lap–was sitting on a bench in the village square. He, too, might have been asleep, were it not for that distant, enticing tinkling he heard from down the road, down in the rocky hollows. The farmer had warned him to stay away if the Old Ones camped here, that they caused no harm but did not like being spied upon. Part of the schoolteacher was afrai
d, but a large part of him was curious, as well. That was why he sat here, looking up into the clouds rapidly draining all color from the sky, hoping the girl inside would see him from her windows across the street and join him. Normally he would have a book in his hands and read, or pretend to read, until she closed up the library at three. Once recently he had even walked her to the gates of her parents’ dairy farm as she talked endlessly if endearingly about flowers and botany and books he had very little interest in: Bog-Trotting for Orchids, was it, or Among The Flora of the Northeast Kingdom? Someday, she would sail to Sumatra, she had said, to watch the corpse-flower open its stinking petals under a full moon, or to other rainforests where ferns grew tall as oaks–and giant spiders were quick enough to snatch hummingbirds in flight. She wanted to see a fabled desert plant that bloomed but once a millennium, died, and then was reborn like a phoenix. All she would need on her travels were gutta-percha boots,