by John Crowley
And other things. But these of course are always happening, whether the world is ending or is not. What was less noticed was that, here and there, effects were appearing before their causes. Not often, not consistently, or life would have become unintelligible: just here and there, now and then, and trivial mostly. Hummingbirds ceased suddenly to visit a flowering hedge by a path of the Sunset Nursing Home, saddening one of the women within, who loved to watch them; not long after, a fool handyman following what he thought were his instructions went and cut down the hedge. A mother hanging clothes to dry saw her little daughter, plastic backpack on her back, going down the road—out of her eye’s corner, just disappearing over the hill’s brow; and later that day the daughter decided secretly to run away from home.
If such things could be gathered and counted, how many would there have been? How many should there be, in a normal year? Can a sudden rise in pointless coincidences—say a briar springing up just here where last year I lost my briar pipe, or all the mothers and daughters in Fair Prospect happening to say the word “honey” at the same moment—be charted? Is there a secret unfolding in unnoticeable things, that might if we could reckon it give us warning of ends, and of beginnings?
“When two people say the same thing at the same time,” Rosie Rasmussen told her daughter Sam, “they do this. Look. Hook your little finger around mine. No like this.”
Sam, tongue between her teeth, succeeded in hooking her little finger around her mother’s.
“Now answer,” Rosie said. “‘What goes up a chimney?’”
Sam thought. She shrugged.
“Well what does?”
“Smoke,” Sam said.
“Right. ‘What goes up a chimney?’”
“‘Smoke.’”
“‘May your wish and my wish never be broke.’ Hold tight.”
She tugged with her finger, and Sam with hers, until the strong link parted.
“There,” Rosie said. “That’s what you do.”
“To get a wish?”
“Yup.”
“What did you wish?”
“Well you’re not supposed to tell,” Rosie said. “It might not come true.”
What had her own wish been? There had long been but one wish Rosie could formulate: a wish for something to wish for, something to fill the empty and unfeeling space where (it seemed) her feeling heart had once been. But then last fall she had gained something new to wish for, something to wish for on every evening star, to toot her horn for in every tunnel (hand on the car’s roof as her father had taught her). And never to tell.
“I made a wish,” Sam said.
“Good.”
Sam slid across the broad smooth leather seat of the car, which was a Tigress, her mother’s lawyer Allan Butterman’s car. Allan up front alone drove, and Rosie and Sam played in the back, in the richness of the tinted windows and the honeyed music of the rear speakers.
“I’ll tell you.”
“It might not come true, though.”
“It might.”
“Well what is it?”
“Not to take medicine anymore.”
“Aw Sam.”
That was, in one form anyway, exactly Rosie’s wish. In August Sam had first experienced something that her doctor thought might be an epileptic seizure, though for a month she’d had no more. Then, just past midnight on the autumn equinox—a night of wild wind—Sam had her second seizure, a worse one than the first, taking hold of her small body and all its contents for nearly a minute, and no doubt about it then. And next day in the splendor of the blue morning, amid a pageant of fast-moving white clouds and the trees still softly gesturing with their turning leaves, Rosie drove Sam again to the doctor’s, and talked long with him; and then went to the drugstore in Blackbury Jambs. So now Sam took a small dose of phenobarbital elixir, three times a day. Too young at barely five to swallow pills. Rosie had the bitter liquid with her, and a little plastic syringe without a needle to draw it up with and squirt it into Sam’s mouth, after a battle, always a battle.
“There it is,” said Allan.
“Look, there it is,” Rosie said to Sam.
They had been driving down the Blackbury River road toward Cascadia, and now at a turning there had come into view an edifice out on the river, piled on a little island whose pied sycamores were turning to yellow.
“Ha!” said Sam, kneeling on the maroon leather seat, fingertips on the sill of the car’s window. “Ha ha!”
It was a castle, comically dour and yet not uninviting, with three irregular towers rising from the corners of its walls and a sort of central keep with a machicolated top. No one could think it was really medieval, but by now it was certainly old, shaggy and squat and gripping its three-cornered island in midstream like a great black vulture in sullen molt. The wall facing the river road had tall letters carved in it, letters in that square plain style Rosie knew was called Gothic though she didn’t know why. The letters said BUTTERMAN’S.
“He said he’d meet us at the what’s-it,” Allan said. “The harbor, the.”
“Marina,” said Rosie.
“Right.”
Allan Butterman claimed that his own name had no real connection to the huge name carved on the castle wall, but Rosie (and Sam) wouldn’t believe him. Well somewhere there was some ancestor, Allan said. His modesty amazed Rosie; he found it more satisfying to pretend he had no connection to the most visible surname in the county than to give any appearance of laying claim to the old pile, or any share in its eccentric provenance. Rosie though didn’t mind claiming her share: for legally Butterman’s belonged to the Rasmussen family, and Rosie was the last twig on the last branch of that family in the county, and today she was going to cross the river and go inside it for the first time. She felt a quick dilation in her breast to think it, and laughed.
Just an old wreck after all.
“Here,” Allan said, and with a pinky flicked the bar that turned on an emerald arrow. Sam watched it blink. Allan turned the car off the road and into the little marina’s lot.
“Here we go,” Rosie said, and pushed open the tombstone-thick door of the Tigress. “Come on, hon.”
But Sam now was of a mind to hang back, either afraid of the place and the journey now that she was so close, or reluctant to leave the rich enclosure of the car. Maybe she was unable to laugh, as Rosie had, at her heart’s reluctance.
Only stop staring in that stock-still way, her mother wanted to say and never would say. Don’t freeze and stare, oh don’t.
“My ode house,” Sam said, not quite breaking her spell over herself.
“Oh yeah?” Rosie said. “Well let’s go see it.”
Her old house. Sam had first surprised Rosie with news of her old house when she was three. At first she had just told tales of it: how in her old house her old family had lived and played. What old house? The house she had lived in before. But then she began to point out places, not many, that reminded her of it: That’s my old house. That? Rosie would ask, wondering why she chose just that place—once it was a two-hundred-year-old barn in the process of being dismantled and shipped to be a rich man’s house in California; another time a caterpillar-like Airstream trailer weeping rust at the rivets, set up on concrete blocks, with geraniums in pots before it and a green fiberglass carport. But Sam always said finally about these places when Rosie asked: It’s like my old house.
“My ode house,” she said now again.
“Really really?” Rosie asked.
“Really really.”
The heat outside the air-conditioned car was astonishing: the Faraways lay under a heat wave, brilliant Bermuda high, motionless for days. Yet Rosie shuddered. Any child, she thought, taking Sam’s hand: any child can seem sometimes like she’s from somewhere else.
The marina offered a few party boats with striped awnings for rent, and berthed a few sailboats and motorboats. Allan in his fine black shiny shoes walked with care down to where an aged boatman fiddled with the outboard mot
or of a pretty little one of varnished wood and shiny chrome. A Chris-Craft, for bearing a child across a river.
“Oh Sam. This’ll be fun.” Sam’s eyes were that drink-it-all-in wide that touched her mother nearly beyond bearing. When Allan and the geezer motioned to her and smiled, Sam walked to them fearlessly and took Allan’s hand and the boatman’s and allowed herself to be boarded.
“She needs a life jacket,” Rosie said. “Okay?”
“Sure,” said the boatman. “You bet.” With arthritic hands, oil-stained and nail-broken, he fixed it on her, her armor. She watched, still and interested. Rosie, her squire, boarded last.
“There’s a dock still standing on the downriver side,” said the boatman, taking up a blunt cigar end from a tin-can ashtray on the seat beside him. “Okay?”
“Fine,” said Allan. The motor started.
Once, when the Faraway Hills had been filled with tourists, when the hills were just far enough away from Conurbana and Philadelphia and New York to seem a forest fastness and yet easily reachable by train and steamboat, Butterman’s was a pleasure-garden, a sort of tiny and primitive theme park. There were band concerts and Japanese lanterns and fishing from the piers and views taken from the towers. Now the Faraways aren’t far enough, and the word “tourist” (to Rosie’s ear anyway) had a comically old-time sound, an air of small safe excursions undertaken with maximum fuss, Tourist Cabins, Tourist Homes. And Butterman’s has been deserted and decaying for decades. Once briefly, fifteen years before, when Rosie still lived in the Midwest, the novelist and local celebrity Fellowes Kraft had laid plans to reopen the place, use its theater for a Shakespeare festival, plans that were far too large in the end; Rosie knew that a play had nearly been put on, not Shakespeare but old, the one about devils and magic, what was it. Then closed up again, returned to sleep for good.
It loomed, it really did loom over them as they putt-putted beneath its walls around to the dock, their wake lapping against the rocks and the concrete pilings wherein huge rings rusted away. They all lifted their heads to look up. The narrow ogive windows were shuttered, the shutters rotting. Rosie thought of Nancy Drew mysteries. The Secret of Castle Island. She had a flashlight in her bag.
“Last stop,” said Charon the boatman. The boat dock had stairs, still sound-looking, and there he tied up his boat. His passengers got out, but he said he’d stay. Sam looked back at him, studying him, seeming to be deciding if that was all right, that he stay; and then she led the rest of them up to the great shut doors. They were scarred and cut as though in imprecation or beseeching with two decades’ worth of initials, names, obscenities, notices of love-couplings, Greek letters.
“Fools’ names,” Rosie said.
“What?” Allan asked.
“Fools’ names, like fools’ faces, oft appear in public places. My mother used to say.”
How were they to open these doors, swing them back on their huge hinges? They didn’t have to: there was a small door inset in the big door (Pierce Moffett would name this small door for her when later she told him of the visit, it was a wicket), and as Allan approached it he took from the pocket of his suit, absurdly, a rusty iron skeleton key as big as a spoon.
She had been opening long-closed doors ever since she returned to the Faraways: that’s what Rosie thought. This one; and the door to Fellowes Kraft’s house in Stonykill, that had been shut since his death. Doors too to her earliest childhood, lived in these hills, doors that she came upon unexpectedly in odd corners, before which she would stand in puzzlement till the key to their combination locks occurred to her or in her. Doors too in herself that she had found but not opened, doors that might have, she feared, nothing at all behind them.
Lord how sad and strange: stepping over the wicket’s jamb let them into a wide weedy courtyard set with tables and benches, ready for company but gone gray and warped and fallen, littered with leaves and bird dung. Around the borders, cedars loitered, outgrown and shaggy, that had once been neat rows of toy-land topiary. At the back, on a dais, sat a pair of wooden thrones, his and hers.
Sam walked straight through the wreckage as though she were indeed arriving home. “There,” she said, and pointed to the thrones. “There.”
“Yours?” Rosie asked.
“My daddy’s and mommy’s.”
“They lived here too?”
“And I had sisters.”
“How many?”
“One hundred.”
“Wow, a lot. Did they all fit?”
“They are little,” Sam said, and held up a thumb and finger to show the size, a small, a very small gap, she raised the fingers to her eye to squint at the microscopic smallness they measured. “Teeny TEENY tiny.”
“And they all lived here.”
“No,” said Sam with instant certainty. “No, in the ball. Go sit there.”
She pointed to the throne. Allan and Rosie looked down on her. She kept her pointer up, for their information. “There.”
“Maybe we should look around a while.”
“Sit,” said Sam, minatory. And waited while her mother and her lawyer mounted the steps and sat.
Why, Rosie wondered, had they just walked away? The owners, the staff, leaving all this behind. Maybe it wasn’t thought to be worth anything then, old stuff, weather-beaten. It didn’t look worthless now. People in the past had been willing to go to trouble they never would today; not content with a river island, they had gone and built there a whole false place, of real stone and wood though, realer than any stage set. The seat where she sat, as richly detailed as the Queen’s in Snow White or the big cobwebby furniture in a vampire movie.
“I wanted to tell you,” Allan said. He had not sat, stood at her side, minister or wizard or gray eminence. “Just before I came out to pick you up. I got a call from your husband’s attorney.”
“Oh yes?”
“It was a strange call. She seemed a little hesitant. But what I gather is that Mike wants to reopen some aspects of the agreement.”
“Oh.”
“He wants to talk about custody.”
Rosie’s hands lay queenlike along the arms of her throne. The smell of the sun-warmed gray wood was strong. Why had she known from the beginning that she would hear this? Sam, who had ignored them after she had them enthroned and gone exploring around the litter of the open yard, now stopped. She looked down at her feet, at the ground between her Mary Janes, where she had spied something of interest, and then squatted there to get a better look. The beauty of her bare brown legs, of her attention to earth’s minutiæ. Through Rosie’s soul there blew a wind, an awful certainty of loss.
“We’ll have to talk,” Allan said. “Not here, not now.”
They explored the rest of the place. They pushed open the doors of the small theater that occupied the central tower (THE KEEP it said over the doors, in letters carved to look shaggy and twiggy, like logs) and found it filled with things, chairs and tables, ancient kitchen equipment, canvas awnings, piles of trays and wooden crates of steins and cups; some whole towers of such crates were sunken and the dishes smashed in dust-covered archæological heaps. Rosie’s flashlight reached inward to finger the stage draperies, the stacks of benches. Sam under her arm looking in too.
“Bats,” said Allan, unwilling to go in.
She made him climb to the battlements with her, though, the old stairways still sound, they built so solidly then; the walkways at the top were less certain, but Rosie and Sam climbed up into a belvedere to look out.
“Rosie,” Allan said. “We don’t have to get crazy.”
“Allan, I know what I want,” she said. “I just figured it out.”
“You did,” Allan said, one level below her, a hand on the ladder by which they’d gone up.
“I want to have a party.”
“Not here.”
“Here,” Rosie said. “Really big. On Halloween. For a lot of people. Everybody.”
“Yay,” said Sam.
Allan said nothing. Ros
ie turned to look down on his patient upturned face.
She had come here to see her castle, hers, and to decide about it or begin to think about deciding, before it died of neglect and slipped into the river and was lost. And she had decided, or it had been decided for her as she stood there.
“It ought to be given to the town,” she said. “You’re right. We will. They can have it and fix it up. We can help fix it up, the Foundation can. But I want to have a party first.”
“Halloween?” Allan said. “Halloween night?” He was so patient, so willing to try at least to entertain the things she wanted.
“Witches, Allan,” she said. “Can’t you see it?”
“Bats,” he said.
“And ghosts.” Rosie laughed, at the lands below her, the height of air above.
“Ghosts,” Sam said.
It was a big view, the river winding lordly to the north, to the jambs, disappearing around the bend through David’s Gate, the illusory portal that seems cloven into the mountains, but which widens and falls away as you come close, no gate after all.
Up on Mount Whirligig (which was named, some say, for the winding mists that rise on currents of warmer air from the Shadow River and seem to spin around it or cause the mountain to seem to spin; no one really knows why) was The Woods Center for Psychotherapy, the refurbished summer retreat where Mike Mucho worked as a therapist, where he was this day probably; he’d told Rosie he had been practically living there lately. A lot to do. Rosie couldn’t see The Woods from here, but she knew just about where it lay; someone standing on its roof might be able to see her standing here.
From the beginning she’d told Allan that she would have custody, that there was no question about that, none that she would entertain. And Mike had not raised any question then. What had happened, what was the matter, what was he thinking, of his child only, or of something else?
I’ll bring her here and keep her, she thought, lock that big door behind us. Never ever ever.
An equilateral triangle could be drawn, in that summer, from summit to summit of the three mountains she looked at—Mount Merrow, east of the Blackbury; Mount Whirligig, west of the Shadow; and, tallest in the center, Mount Randa to the north. More exactly, the points of the triangle lay respectively on a bluff on Mount Randa’s western height, where a monument stood, a monument to a long-dead freethinker of the county, once somewhat famous or notorious; on the central gateway of The Woods Center for Psychotherapy; and on a red 1959 Impala sedan submerged in the waters of an abandoned quarry halfway up the wooded slope of Merrow.