by John Plotz
I tried to sound stern anyway. “Mead, I need to know what happened to me back then. And that means you have to tell me more about Morris and his family.”
Mead gave no sign he’d heard me. Instead, he kept an eye on Ed’s scribbling pencil and said, “All their printing and bookmaking and photographic friends lived nearby. The house was a center for everything exciting in the world of design. Stained glass, for instance.”
By now we were crouched on a steaming basement windowsill. Industrial sounds—cutting, punching, shifting of heavy machinery—came from inside.
“Mead! Cut it out! We really need to talk about Morris and his woe.”
“Their gorgeous stained glass,” Mead went on doggedly, “was a revelation to American makers like Tiffany. Somehow they managed to combine storytelling with beautifully abstract designs, with patterns that came out of nature and yet crystallized in the furnace …”
I stamped my foot so hard, I almost lost my footing on the ledge. “Mead! I’m not talking about stained glass now!” Ed looked up from his notebook with the same vacant stare he gets when he’s calculating batting averages.
I kept my eyes steadily fixed on Mead, who was now giving me his undivided attention. “What’s going on? There’s something I don’t understand. Morris is making art and writing poetry by the bucketful—everybody loves it!”
I broke off, frustrated, tried to think about what grown-ups needed to be happy. I decided to be systematic. “I mean, okay, his work is good, right?” Mead nodded. “His wife is beautiful, right?” Mead looked at me sideways, as if that wasn’t quite the right question. “Sad,” I added, “she always looks sad, too.” Mead nodded gravely. I filed that away. “Okay, so Jane is beautiful, but …” Jane still reminded me of someone, and I couldn’t think who.
I shook my head and tried to focus. What else was I missing? “And his children? Mead? How about his children?”
For answer, Mead pointed his good left claw toward an open window. Inside, I could see a cheerfully manic girl, probably about twelve, with curly red hair that gave her an unmistakable mini-Morris look. She was busily grinding glass shards with a massive industrial-sized pestle and chattering away nonstop to Burne-Jones—his beard grayer and wispier, but otherwise unchanged.
“So, that’s May?” Mead nodded. Then he swiveled his head toward a window to our left, which opened onto a different room. Craning my neck, I could see two adults kneeling by a bed. Morris and Jane. Over their crouched backs I could just make out a thrashing form, limbs moving and head tossing in a way that simply could not be right. My stomach gave a lurch. “Jenny?”
Mead didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said slowly, “Imagine discovering that your oldest child will fall down in fits for the rest of her life. That when the seizures come she can’t speak, can’t think straight, that her eyes roll back in her head—”
“Epilepsy,” said Ed immediately, “grand mal epilepsy; right, Mead?”
“It’s an easy diagnosis, perhaps, in an age when there’s a pill for everything. For Morris, in an age of bloodletting and guesswork …” Mead clicked his beak sharply and looked away.
“Why?” It was Ed who spoke up now, twisting his hands nervously together as he watched Morris spread his arms over Jenny in the bed as if he could cover her like an umbrella. “It’s not as if Morris gave her epilepsy. He loved her. He, he …”
Ed trailed off, but I jumped right in. “Don’t you get it? He had those crazy fits his whole life, those red rages when he’d scream at anyone who came near him.” I glared at Mead, even though I was pretty sure it wasn’t him I was mad at right now. “So is that it, Mead? He blamed himself?”
Mead gave an impatient tssk. “Come along,” he said abruptly, back in Mary Poppins mode—though he looked a lot scruffier than Mary Poppins ever did. “Come have a look at the stained glass Burne-Jones has just finished. It’s for Trinity Church in Boston.”
Ed obediently moved back to the window, looking down into the glass foundry. So quietly that only I could hear, Mead whispered, “Morris gets sick when Jenny does, simple as that. When times are good, he writes her silly letters, puts on a puppet play, spends all day cooking her an absurd feast. When the seizures don’t leave off—” Mead paused. “—it’s as if both of them are seized at once.”
Meanwhile Ed was giggling, eyes glued to the window. Morris had just come into the room and was standing absolutely slack-jawed, staring. Meanwhile Ned, in front of the biggest stained-glass window I’d ever seen, was explaining something to Morris.
“You see, Topsy, it’s King David giving his son Solomon final instructions about the building of the First Temple in Jerusalem. There are the beautiful attendant lords and ladies you designed, and over here on the right we see scenes from David’s boyhood.”
“And Daddy,” May broke in with an exuberant wave of the arms I recognized at once as her father’s own gesture. “What’s more important in David’s life than the moment he killed Goliath?”
There was a long pause while Morris took it all in. “So naturally,” he said, “naturally you had to show David bearing Goliath’s head back in triumph?”
“Oh yes,” May said, with some of the same coolness of Ned. “And naturally for Goliath we needed to draw a very, very impressive head, didn’t we?”
“So what you’re saying,” roared Morris, “is that you’re actually paying me a compliment by decapitating me and sticking my head up there on the window?”
May giggled delightedly and clapped her hands. “See, Neddy, I just knew he’d understand.” Then all three of them threw back their heads and laughed like banshees, Morris loudest of them all.
When the tears had come and gone, and everyone had pounded everyone else’s shoulders at least a dozen times—May only got knocked down once—Morris said, “Well, let’s only hope they get the joke in Boston. It’s a pity we won’t be there to see it.”
“Of course not. You’ll be right here with us.” Ned shot Morris a quick look. “Right here, isn’t that so, Daddy?”
“Well, well, May, here’s how it is,” said Ned finally. “Your mother is taking you down to see your new house in Oxfordshire. Your uncle Gabriel will be there to look after things and keep you company. But your father has decided to accept an invitation from his friend Erik Magnusson to visit Iceland.”
“Eiríkr,” said Morris promptly.
“Yes of course, Eiríkr,” Ned continued hastily; May was looking dumbfounded. “It’s the land of the Viking sagas. And the dragons. And the volcanoes. And, the, ah, ah …” He gazed appealingly at Morris.
Morris, though, didn’t see him—because he and May were staring at each other gleefully. Both of them shouted together, “The tölting Icelandic horses!”
With a huge smile, Morris pulled out of his pocket a furled piece of paper, tossed it over to May. “I’ve got a puzzle today that’s too hard even for you, May, let alone Neddy. So I’ll give you a hint: a goddess in verse.”
With a practiced hand May uncurled the sheet and looked at him sharply—this was obviously a game they’d played many times. A rebus? A riddle? I glimpsed a female figure perched atop what from this distance looked like a wavy rectangle of green.
As May’s eyes lit up in pleased recognition, I suddenly felt a switch go in my head. Again that feeling of being somehow connected (plugged in, maybe) came over me. Only this time it was May’s place I took, her eyes I suddenly saw out of. I knew this one by heart!
I mouthed along with her:
Therefore Venus well may we
Praise the green ridges of the sea.
I turned away then, my head suddenly spinning. The moment had passed, and I still could make no sense of it. I turned to Mead for an explanation, but he held up a commanding claw for silence. May had turned to Morris and asked, with an impish grin, “Only Daddy, don’t you think your Venus could use something to carry? Maybe, oh, I don’t know, an enormous disembodied head?”
As they turned to go, all
still giggling, May furled the paper up again and, not even looking our way, tossed it in a high smooth arc toward the window we were camped behind.
Mead, as if he’d known all along it was coming, caught it with a precise claw-snap. Ed and I just stared at each other. “Mead?” I finally ventured, “Did May … Was she aiming that at us?”
Mead only stared back with blank yellow eyes. I wasn’t going to be the first to drop my gaze. Finally he looked away, and har-rumphed into speech.
“It may be that May has more in common with you than you guess. Have you noticed she’s always drawing along the edges of her father’s sheets?”
I had, now that he said it. “Birds,” I said suddenly. “And sheep, goats, even the occasional pig. But with—”
“Yes,” Mead broke in, “animals with real expressions. Brooding pigeons. Irate pigs. Embarrassed chickens—how does she manage that?” He looked away again.
Finally he stared me straight in the face again and sniffed. “Well, it did occur to me that if I let her get a glimpse of me, she might feel”—he paused, took a breath,—“she might feel sorry for me. Even sorry enough to toss me something she thought I might want.”
If I’d had a wing to pat Mead on the back at that moment, I would have used it. Instead, I leaned forward as if to get my balance, arms tight around Mead’s neck. I don’t think there were any words to make my feeling plainer.
CHAPTER TEN
Fresh and Fell
As we started what I guessed would be a long flight eastward to Iceland, I settled in to count how many more feathers Mead had lost. I was just about to open my mouth to ask Mead about the patches of white skin peeking through his glossy feathers when I felt Ed’s pencil poking me in the back.
I turned around and saw that he had written on his notebook:
Approximate Feathers Lost per Jump: 3 6 12 24 48 96 192 (384) (768)
As I studied it, Ed vigorously underlined the 192 to make sure I got the point: That was the count right now.
I shook my head vigorously. No way! I mouthed to him, certain that I would have seen that many feathers fall off. Ed nodded solemnly and pointed behind him toward Mead’s tail. He could be right, I realized with a lurch; I hadn’t had a view behind Ed, and I’d have to trust him with the numbers. Now he was whispering something to me, leaning low so Mead couldn’t hear: “This is not molting—this is balding.” The word didn’t scare me at first; it was almost a comfortable one, reminding me of my dad, or of Ed’s cheerfully clueless English teacher. But then I got the drift. Bald men walk around with baseball caps; bald birds plummet to the ground.
I didn’t like what I saw on Ed’s page; I was a decent enough math student to know a geometric progression when I saw one. The feathers that Mead lost doubled every time. Two more trips and Mead would have lost more than fifteen hundred feathers. I tried not to think about what Mead must be suffering, what every little bump and sudden midair adjustment meant to his body. What if we hadn’t come with him? If this had been his geas alone, I thought with a spasm of intense self-loathing, he’d probably be home and done by now. (Probably? a little voice said at once. Do you really think he could have done alone what you all did together?)
The important question now was, how many feathers could Mead lose and still be able to get where we needed to go? Ed was watching my face intently, so he could tell right away (brothers are like that) when I started asking myself that question. He flipped the page over and tapped again with his pencil, importantly.
The next page had fewer numbers on it.
Blackbird Feathers (educated guess): 750 1,250 1,500 2,000 (?)
Feathers required to fly—?
I grabbed the pencil and, calling the poem back to mind, jotted quickly: dragon, birds, hawthorn, Thames(?). The math seemed hopeless, but I went through the mental motions anyway. If there were four jumps left, not to mention whatever getting back home might take, then Mead was going to lose 3,072 feathers.
I reached up impetuously, scratched out Ed’s 2,000 and wrote 5,000 in heavy black strokes, and underlined it for emphasis.
Ed looked at me silently and shook his head. Staring back at him, I nodded fiercely. Had to be. What other chance was there?
I lost track of the hours, waking and dozing, but Mead had eaten both those shriveled apples by the time we dropped through the clouds. I swallowed hard. We were gliding down toward the eeriest, wildest place I’d ever seen, floating above a wide green plain with a wind sweeping wildly across it, blowing two stunted trees nearly flat. That wasn’t grass down there, it was some kind of soft mossy stuff, like a mix between Velcro and wool. At first, that was all I could make out.
“Where are we?” I couldn’t help saying in awe.
Mead harrumphed weakly. “Summer glacial outcroppings,” he began, “make it clear we’re near the Arctic Circle.” The crabbiness sounded unconvincing, almost scary in his newly faded voice. Still, I wasn’t going to insult him by talking to him like an invalid.
“Oh thanks, Mead,” I said tartly, hoping Ed would follow my lead. “So the Faroe Islands, maybe? Svalbard?” But Ed was staring around him like a madman, and I couldn’t blame him. Close by on our left, a steep craggy mountain with a conical top gloomed over us; long daggers of ice shimmered down its sides the way melted ice cream drips down a sundae glass. After a minute, I spotted a pack of incredibly woolly sheep, baaing mournfully, huddled under an outcropping at the base of the mountain.
Above them, I could just make out one bearded sturdy traveler leading a heavily laden little horse up a narrow crag, nearly at the mountain’s top. Behind him rode a chubbier figure, swaddled in animal skins. Everything had changed, thirty years had passed, and yet for just a second, struggling on the barrel-backed horse, Morris was a boy again. As we glided over him in the gathering gloom of evening, on a sudden whim I leaned crazily over Mead’s wing and shouted down “Yoicks!” He looked around wildly and pawed at his belt, where the scabbard of his sword would have been.
Mead found us a boulder (“If there’s one thing Iceland has, it’s plenty of useful boulders,” whispered Ed, reading my mind). We were no more than ten yards from where Morris and a companion with the same furs, big belt, and almost the same beard as Morris (Eiríkr, I guessed) were pitching their tent and digging into what looked to me like sides of raw fish. “Splendid! Like being inside a saga!” I heard Morris exclaim delightedly.
Ed was all efficiency now, zipping my bag up tight, fussing with his notebook, and quizzing Mead, as if we were on a Sunday picnic.
“Right! The next thing we need is ‘a fork-tongued dragon fresh and fell.’” Ed was looking around as if he expected Mead to pluck it from the ground.
Mead pretended not to hear. Or maybe he really hadn’t heard; he was getting a faraway look in his eyes now, the sort Granny sometimes got in front of the Tapestry. Which in a way, it suddenly occurred to me, was where we all were right now. My head hurt too much to pursue the thought.
“Do you like the looks of that horse Morris is currying right now?” Mead said in a soft voice; no Mary Poppins in it at all. “He’s named Mouse. At the end of the trip Morris is so fond of him that he brings him home to that new house on the Thames, Kelmscott Manor. I wonder how many of the little gypsy horses you can see there nowadays have Mouse blood in them?”
“That’s very funny, Mead, ha-ha-ha,” said Ed, not listening at all and practically hopping with excitement. “But about the fork-tongued dragon?”
Mead reached out a long claw and snared a greasy fish bone Morris had tossed away. “I think,” he remarked between repulsive bites, “that Eiríkr and William will likely start singing songs of Sigurd, who knew the tongues of birds and beasts. You could wake me when they start.” With that he tucked his head under his wing.
So we waited. No choice—and no fish bones for us, either, I couldn’t help noting grimly. That box of granola bars was a long time gone. Morris, after scribbling for a long time in his diary, went to stand looking out over th
e plain at a range of steep, craggy mountains to the north. One of them had a visible cone on top, glowing red from what could only be lava inside. “Holy Tolkien, it’s Mount Doom!” whispered Ed in awe.
Although it was nearly freezing, it must have been June or July, because as the shadows lengthened the sun stayed stubbornly over the horizon. The breeze smelled like that spongy, bouncy turf, even a little like the ocean. I remembered a trip we’d once taken up the coast of Maine, where gray and black spears of rock dropped suddenly into the Atlantic.
“I’m coming back here someday,” I promised myself.
And just like that, I saw the answer to my puzzle, why I’d felt happy that we couldn’t sell the Tapestry to the museum. When I thought about what my life might be like when I grew up, it wasn’t Eva I thought of, or the school itself. Or even, if I was being honest, Granny and Ed. What I thought about—and this is going to sound really weird—was the Tapestry. What was happening in its forests; what might be behind the mountain you could see in the back left corner; mainly, what kind of life was going on in there.
It was so simple I found myself giggling. I’d felt glad that day because I wanted the Tapestry all for myself. It’s true I didn’t want Mr. Nazhar to take it, but not because I wanted Lexus guy to come and take it away. Somehow, the Tapestry had gotten wrapped so tightly into my life that there was no way I could imagine anyone else standing before it.
“They can’t take a look! No looks will be taken!” I found myself whispering, and I had to laugh at how fierce I sounded. It felt like a scab had given way. Only it still made me a terrible person, didn’t it?
Then right below me (I’d completely forgotten he was there) I heard Morris say meditatively, as if he’d been daydreaming, “Yes, yes indeed, I’m coming back here someday. It’s made me dream as I never thought I could dream.” I tried not to breathe, hoping that Morris would go on talking.