Time and the Tapestry

by John Plotz

  When I looked up at last, though, the shouting had died away. There was only Ed looking down at me. And next to him, with late-afternoon light streaming in behind, her red hair loose so it glowed like fire, was the only person I could bear seeing me at that moment.

  I reached toward her with a sob. My arms were clutched tight around my sweet mother’s waist, and my head was buried in her shoulder. Then I heard Ed saying, “Jen, this is Jane Morris, Jane Burden Morris. I think she’s going to help us.” And I felt an arm go around me tightly and hold on. I felt the way a toy must feel when it’s picked up, dusted off, and put back in the box for the night.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Journey’s End

  I woke up on smooth warm hay. Prickly and dry, smelling like grass but packed solid under me: had to be hay. Which meant—my eyes shot open; a hayloft. Yup, morning sun was lighting up one side of the barn below me, and above were only the crisscrossed timbers that supported a high-pitched slate roof.

  I could feel the dried tears all over my face even before I opened my eyes. I lay there for a second on my side, preparing an apology to Ed, ready to tell him anything he needed to know. He had a right to understand why I’d gone to pieces when Mead died.

  I gave a deep sigh and rolled over into a kneeling position. Tried to, anyway; there was something blocking my way. Something big and dark and warm against my body. As I opened my eyes to figure out what it was, someone said irritably, “I beg your pardon.” Not just someone, but a huge, largely featherless bird wedged right up against me.

  “Mead!” I shrieked. “But you’re …”

  “Very, very tired,” Mead broke in gently, “and so I still am.” The wing that reached out to tap me had barely a feather on it.

  I was still trying to take it all in. “You said ‘Journey’s end,’ Mead. And I thought—”

  “You thought that Mead was giving a deathbed soliloquy, like a knight from a romance,” broke in Ed suddenly. “Let me see, Jen, have you ever been wrong …? Hmmm, let me get back to you on that.” Pointing out my mistakes was as close as Ed ever came to teasing me. And I didn’t have the slightest desire to argue the point.

  “Oh, Mead,” I said, and it sounded so good I said it again. “Oh, Mead.” Nothing could be better than a living Mead.

  Still, I couldn’t help turning the phrase over and over in my mind. Journey’s end, okay, so our journey was ended. But there was still “Thames runs chill …”

  “So journey’s end means …,” I said cautiously.

  “That my flying days are done,” said Mead promptly, in a tone as final as he’d used when discussing his bent claw. “Anything you gather from now on will not rely on a flying bird.”

  “But how …,” I started again, uncomfortably aware that I’d somehow gotten in the habit of starting sentences I was counting on other people to finish.

  “Because we’re here, Jen, at ‘the old house by the Thames to which the people of the story went.’” Ed said it fast enough that I knew it must be a quotation from something, but at that moment my head was too muzzy to place it.

  “This is it,” he added, “Kelmscott Manor. Don’t you get it?” he went on excitedly when I kept staring at him blankly, my mind whirling pointlessly like a machine that’s slipped a gear. “We can do the rest on foot, because sooner or later everybody comes here. We just have to wait—”

  “But Ed,” I broke in gently, “we can’t wait. This place may seem almost perfect.” I took a second to smell the sweetness of the hay, to look up into the big loft and listen to the Thames chuckling nearby. “But Granny needs us back home.”

  I could tell Ed was getting ready to argue about what “now” meant exactly, so I switched gears. “Besides,” I said, rubbing a hand shyly along Mead’s side where a few glossy feathers still clung, “how could we stay here anyway? It’s not as if Morris and his family are going to—”

  Ed interrupted me again. “But that’s the great part, Jen! Who do you think helped me get you and Mead into this old barn? Jane did it; she sent everyone else off on some crazy herb hunt in the meadows so they wouldn’t spot you. You should have seen Morris leading the procession, the poor sap! He didn’t suspect a thing. Then she set us up here, where nobody ever goes, and showed me where the apple barrels are, and a well we can sneak out to at night. She even found a little wicker cage for those birds I had tied up in my hoodie—I mean, the two who were still little enough not to fly away—the ones I’m still”—he blushed—“hand-feeding with crickets and worms.”

  Ed looked up excitedly, and the blush faded from his face. “Plus we can start looking for that place by the Thames, where Mead can—”

  “That’s quite enough of that,” said Mead, with a flash of his old sharpness. “There’s no spot that will do any good before this quest is done.” Ed’s face, glimpsed briefly over Mead’s shoulder, though, told a different story. We were going to find it, or go crazy trying.

  And after a minute, I had to admit that Ed was right. At least, I made the mental reservation, he was right for now, until I could come up with something to get us home faster. I could see from the way different emotions flitted across his face that Ed still had something else on his mind. After a minute he circled back to it. “She’s so nice, Jen,” he said finally. “I was always scared of her when we were spying on her, because of how sad she looked. But up close, she …” He paused, puzzled.

  I knew exactly what was coming. The Ed who climbed trees without looking down and figured out how to care for baby birds was not the same little boy I’d protected from all conversations about our dead parents. Still, I didn’t want to talk about it right now. There would be time enough, later.

  “She, she reminded me of—”

  “I’m going to tell you who she reminded you of someday,” I said quickly. “I promise you that.”

  Mead broke into the conversation now, his voice deeper and slower than before, but recognizably himself. “Ed’s come up with the only plausible plan. If I can’t fly, and there’s no clear way home, what can we do but wait and see what comes to us?”

  He inclined his head toward an appetizing bushel basket near at hand. “And really, Jen, there’s no point in visiting England if you don’t take advantage of the excellent apples. These are Bramleys, I believe, and Cox’s Orange Pippins.”

  I looked at the two of them, smiling at each other; Ed was already munching noisily. “Oh, I give up,” I said, reaching for one myself. “Just tell me when you two gourmets are ready to get back to some good honest thievery.”

  It took me a day or so tucked away in the lower barn at Kelmscott to realize it, but I was happy now. Happier than I’d been since I turned fourteen, happier maybe than I’d been since … since we came to live with Granny. But why? Hadn’t I decided that my feelings about the Tapestry made me a bad person? Here we were hunting high and low for the details we could use to prove the Tapestry really was by Morris—but I’d somehow made up my mind that it really belonged to me after all. Didn’t that make me a hoarder, too? As bad as Lexus guy? Trudging down the Thames one afternoon—we were still hunting for that perfect spot by the willows, whenever Mead wasn’t watching us—I tried to understand what I’d been feeling about the Tapestry, and going home to Granny, and even about Eva.

  I had a new kind of possessive feeling about the Tapestry now. It’s all mine, I said over and over, but it didn’t make me feel gross and guilty, the way I’d feel if I stole a dessert from Ed’s plate, or if I got to watch a movie at night without him. This was different. I definitely had the Tapestry now (nobody could be closer to it than this, right?), but I wasn’t robbing anybody. It was like owning it without depriving anybody else of it; as if it belonged to me in the same way that it could belong to anybody at all, if they decided to think about it the same way. But how could that be? Only one person I knew could explain that.

  “Mead,” I said that night at the barn after Ed had fallen asleep, “do you remember how I knew what Morris was feel
ing when he was making wallpaper?” Mead grunted faintly. Not an encouraging noise, but I plowed on.

  “And you said of course I knew.” Another grunt.

  “But that’s all you said,” I finished awkwardly. Silence.

  “Well,” I finally went on, “I want to talk about why I would have known.”

  Had Mead fallen asleep? Or did his silence mean, Well, it’s a free country; talk away?

  I took a deep breath. “I was trying to figure out why I don’t feel guilty for feeling so—” I paused, looking for the right word. “—so possessive about the Tapestry. When I think about these meadows, or about the dragon, or even little things like the ship with shields before the sun, I get this feeling they belong to me the same way my arms do. That’s weird, right?”

  Still nothing from Mead. So I took another breath and continued. “And then there’s this other thing. It suddenly struck me that I didn’t care who believed the Tapestry was by William Morris—like Morris’s signature wasn’t what made it art. You know?”

  “I do know,” Mead said suddenly, and I heard a deep breath as if he might go on. But that was all. After a second, I continued.

  “So, is that what it means to really understand a work of art? That it belongs to you, deep down, it sinks into you so much that it feels like a piece of private property. Except—” I had slowed way down trying to get this right, but even so I was still puzzling it out. “—that even though it feels completely like yours, still at the same time it’s not?”

  Mead had closed his eyes again, but I could tell he was listening, “What I mean is that when I knew, absolutely knew what Morris was feeling and thinking, that wasn’t spooky, that wasn’t magic. That was more like realizing for the first time exactly how art sinks right deep down into you.”

  I found that I didn’t really need Mead to agree with me. I just had to get it out there, like the rhyme word of a poem, like fell and well.

  “Maybe not every time, maybe not everybody, but the thing that art lets you see is things that are inside you that are also inside somebody else. What you’re thinking, what you’re feeling in some part of you that is never going to see the light of day—somebody else must have had just the identical thought.”

  “And so that feeling,” Mead said, suddenly sounding the way he had the first time he’d spoken to us, “that feeling makes you think you ought to keep the Tapestry for yourself?”

  I laughed. “No, not at all, Mead! It’s totally nuts: Now I’m completely positive it should go to a museum. That overwhelming feeling that it should just stay with me forever is exactly what proves it to me! I want everyone to want it the way I did. So I want the whole world to see it. I realize that makes no sense, but somehow my wanting never to let the Tapestry go is what lets me know that it’s better off in the museum. So other people can feel what I did.”

  Mead stayed silent for a long moment. Then he nodded gravely and said, “Perhaps, young Jen, you should consider a new career.”

  “As an artist, you mean?” I said eagerly.

  “Not at all,” said Mead gravely. “In museum security!”

  And to the sound of his chuckle I drifted off to a more peaceful sleep than I’d had in months.

  It was hard to say how time passed at Kelmscott after that. Not quite sure what we were looking for, we stuck together as much as we could, me always toting my overstuffed gym bag, and Ed his birdcage—even when he left it open the two remaining fledglings were perfectly happy to snuggle in there with open beaks pointed accusingly at us, waiting for bits of apple to drop in. I still had it in my head that we’d stumble on some perfect spring along the Thames, in a place well encircled by willows, and that Mead would be mended, just like that. But days turned into weeks, and our nightly explorations (who bothers to lock up a rowboat in rural Oxfordshire?) hadn’t yet brought us to any spot that seemed likely to cure Mead.

  One day, we were all securely tucked into the barn when we heard what could only be Morris trying to ride Mouse; a kind of clip-clop clip-clop punctuated by frequent grunts and the occasional “Tölt, drat you!” As the pair neared the barn, however, something odd happened. I knew we were securely hidden, yet somehow he’d chosen to pull up right beside us, Ed scribbling away, me nervously weaving and unweaving little wreaths of hay, and Mead dozing fitfully. I drew in a sharp breath and then tried not to move.

  After a pause, Morris said meditatively, “Well, old Mouse, would you like it if I told you a story?” I half expected Mouse to respond, but all I caught was the faint sound of his big misshapen teeth chomping at a set of nettles that had grown up just under the edge of the barn floor.

  Morris squatted down so that his back was actually leaning against the wall where we were sheltered. I was no more than the width of a barn slat away from him now. Close enough to hear his breathing and even, at one knothole six inches from my eye, to see a little bulge of brown fabric where the back of his woolen jacket was pushed against the wall.

  “It’s just a piece I’ve been working on for Commonweal, Mouse,” Morris said at last, “a little parable about birds that I’d love to test out on a genuine bird, a strongly opinionated one.” Morris paused, sighed deeply. “If I could only find the right bird.

  “The Hammersmith League has asked me to speak about socialism,” Morris went on after a pause, “and I had an idea that the best way to speak about the sorry sort of capitalism we all live under now would be to talk about England as if it were, well, what you might call an animal farm. In my story, the farmers stand for the bosses, of course, and the everyday workingman of England, well, he’s represented by a common barnyard fowl. And most of the birds …”

  He trailed off, as if he wanted to see who was listening. Though my heart was pounding, I tried not to give anything away, not a peep.

  “Most of those birds—ducks, chickens, an awful lot of geese—they don’t mind the farm.” Morris was off again; you could hear his lecture-hall voice starting up. “Whatever those owners tell them to do, of course they’ll do it—it’s not as if they own themselves, after all. And so I begin the tale on a night they get together to debate among themselves the question the farmers have asked them, which is …”

  He trailed off. And then spoke again, his voice seeming so sad and low I half expected a tear to roll through the barn wall. “Well yes, here, Mouse, I found myself stuck. What exactly are they debating?”

  “With what sauce shall we be eaten?” The voice was so loud, so firm, that I almost jumped into the air. Mead, more awake than he’d looked in days, head cocked alertly, stared intently at the wall, waiting to see if Morris had heard him.

  Morris roared with laughter. “With what sauce shall we be eaten?” he rumbled, “that’s it! I see it perfectly. After hours of speeches”—now his voice grew louder and fainter, louder and fainter, as he wandered in circles nearer and farther from the barn wall—“yes, hours debating the merits of slow cookery and roasting, all those workers, I mean all those birds, argue themselves into an impasse.

  “At which point,” Morris said in a pleased voice, “an old and fat bird, with bedraggled feathers—”

  “Or perhaps his feathers have all fallen out,” I heard a voice say; mine! I clapped a hand over my mouth. Morris, without a glance toward the barn wall, went on quicker than ever, “Or perhaps all his feathers have fallen out, perhaps they have …” (Did he also whisper “O Girl of the Ledge”? I probably only imagined that.)

  “In any case, he’s nearing his end, but he still has some fight in him. So he takes a breath and he says …”

  Again Morris trailed off, but this time the smile was in his voice and I knew that he had an answer waiting even if Mead had not at that moment rolled into a full standing position and said sharply, with all his old irritation, “In short, I don’t want to be eaten at all!” Morris’s enormous laugh startled Mouse enough that he started trotting away from the barn. Morris followed him, muttering cheerfully, “Not eaten at all! Oh yes, that’ll do nicely, that
’s the old bird spirit.”

  And looking at Mead, I understood with a shock it was quite true.

  “Nobody’s going to eat you, you old roc!” I said suddenly, fiercely ruffling what feathers he had left along his neckline.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Right Good Is Rest

  After that, Ed and I redoubled our secret trips upand downriver, looking for the willows that might mark the spot Mead had mentioned. Mead’s steps, though, when he left the barn at all, always drew us back closer to Kelmscott Manor itself. “It’s like he feels something growing inside it,” Ed whispered to me once.

  We glimpsed Jane often now, at least once a day; I got the feeling she made excuses to roam back near the barn to check on us. But she never came too near; she was afraid, I guessed, of giving our hiding place away—never even close enough for me to risk a wave.

  Never, except that one evening just at sunset (Ed was down sketching some kind of water bug in a river meadow) I came around the edge of the barn suddenly and found her standing beside the sleeping Mead. She was holding what looked like a dead rat, pierced by a couple of long sticks. I sucked in a sharp breath and she turned around suddenly, dropping the rat at Mead’s feet.

  Instantly I was apologizing. “I’m so sorry, M …” and then I pulled up short, because I didn’t even know what to call her. Oh, why wasn’t Ed there?

  After a long, appraising silence, the kind of pause that felt like we’d had a conversation, she held the rat up again for me to see. It was quite clear now: a skein of some beautiful soft gray thread, so thin and shimmery that in this light it almost looked like a bundle of spider silk.

  “I’m so glad it’s you, dear,” she said softly. “Because you see I wanted to write a note to go along with this patching thread.”