The Moon by Night

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Oh, no?”

  “You think just because a person has a church, for heaven’s sake, they can’t have any fun.”

  Zachary’s face kind of got whiter and little spots of pink showed just above his cheek bones. “What’s fun got to do with it? Religious guys are phonies, that’s all, phonies, every crumby one of them.”

  I stood up. “My grandfather is a minister. My uncle is a minister. I bet you don’t know any ministers half as well as I do. And they’re not phonies. They’re the realest people you’d ever want to meet. If they tell you anything you can trust them. One hundred percent.”

  Zachary reached out with one skinny hand and took my wrist. He had a lot more strength than I’d have expected and he took me by surprise. I sat down hard on the picnic bench. He stood leaning against the shiny black hood of his car (I bet they have that darned car washed and polished every other day) and talked with withering scorn. “My eye. Pie in the sky. The best of all possible worlds.” He began whistling the tune he’d whistled the night before, then said with ferocious intensity,

  “What nature doesn’t do to us

  Will be done by our fellow man.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” I asked impatiently.

  “They’re our fellow man, aren’t they? Ministers? What’re they doing about war and stuff except coming to your bedside in the hospital and praying over you and if you weren’t going to die anyhow you’d do it right then and there with embarrassment.”

  “Well,” I said, “we obviously know different kinds of ministers. Maybe they’re like that in California, but they aren’t at home.”

  “I thought you said your zuggy uncle used to be in California!”

  Now. Take my mother. She’s the daughter of a minister and all. But when she and Aunt Elena were in boarding school in Switzerland (that was when Grandfather was in Africa and Mother got sick and had to be sent out of the climate) the worse thing anyone could be was pi. Pious. You know. The kind who pray loudly on the street corner instead of quietly in their closet, the way it says in the Bible. People who don’t really mean it. It’s all on the outside. Whited sepulchers.

  If there’s anything I’m not it’s pious. I’m proud of not being pious. But it got me, the way Zachary talked. I didn’t like it. So I said, “What’re you so scared of ministers for? What do you think they’re going to do to you? You sound as though you thought they were some kind of witch doctor just waiting to surround you, muttering evil incantations, and if they can close the circle you’ll turn into a handful of dust with a small puff.”

  “You’re a card, Vicky,” he said. “You really are. That’s cool.”

  I thought he was being sarcastic, but he reached over and patted my knee, and I saw he really meant it.

  He said, “If I had somebody like you around maybe I wouldn’t go getting kicked out of schools all the time.”

  “Why do you?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, you know. The usual reasons. I get bored, so I goof off on a couple of subjects. Or I get caught smoking. Or trying a new kind of cheating on exams. If I needed to cheat of course I wouldn’t do it. I mean that kind of cheating’s phony. I do it because it’s an art, and the teachers are all squares. Most of them. There’s usually one or two who come close to being human beings.”

  “I know what you mean about teachers,” I said. I was feeling more relaxed, now that Zachary hadn’t had a spazz attack over what I said about ministers. “Lots of them are muffins. But it isn’t just teachers. It’s people.”

  “Muffins?” He sounded kind of interested.

  “Well, at home we have this kind of club. The anti-muffin club. Very exclusive. I mean you have to be really unmuffiny to belong.”

  “Yah?”

  “You know my little brother, Rob? He really started it. It was about a year ago, and Uncle Douglas was up for the weekend.”

  “He a minister, too?”

  “He’s an artist. He came up that weekend without a girl, but the weekend before he came up with a girl. He wasn’t married, then, and he used to bring his girls up for us sort of to look over. We used to like some of them, but this one was a real stinker. I mean a real snob, asking questions about the family, I mean Mother’s and Daddy’s families. You know, wanting to know all about grandparents and things.” I started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Zachary wanted to know.

  “It’s Rob. The way he goofs up on words. The more syllables they have the more he likes them. He’s really bright, but he gets all tangled up in words. And this girl kept talking about her ancestors and Rob went up to Mother and said, ‘Her aunt must have had an awful lot of sisters.’” Zachary looked blank, so I said, “Aunt’s sisters. Ancestors. Get it?” He gave a kind of grin, and I realized the only time I’d ever heard him really laugh was over that ghoulish song. It must be awful never to laugh. I felt sorry for him, and at the same time curious. I didn’t think the reason he never laughed was that he didn’t have a sense of humor, even though he’d been kind of slow about the joke about aunt’s sisters.

  “I still don’t know about your lousy old muffins,” Zachary said. But he didn’t really sound sore.

  So I explained.

  What happened was that Uncle Douglas came back the next weekend and told Mother and Daddy—and all of us—that he and the girl were through. And then he gave us a lecture, as though we were the ones, about how we shouldn’t worry about where people were born, or what kind of people they came from, whether they had important families or lots of money; you should like them or dislike them for themselves. He said that people like his ex-girl thought that where people were born made them what they were. He said it loud and clear.

  Well, that afternoon Prunewhip, our sort of funny-looking, mottled-brown cat, had kittens. We knew she was going to have kittens, and Mother had fixed her up a nice place in the cellar to have them in. So when Prunewhip didn’t come around for supper we were sure she’d gone to have her kittens, and we ran down in the cellar to her bed, but she wasn’t there, so we looked in the garage and under all the beds and in the closets and everywhere we could think of. Then, when Mother was making muffins for breakfast (she usually makes them the night before) she noticed that the oven door was part way open, and she opened it all the way, and there was Prunewhip with five kittens! We’d had kittens all over the place, but never in the oven before. Prunewhip looked very pleased with herself, and Mother said, well, we’d have to do without the oven for a while.

  Rob asked, “Mother, would Uncle Douglas’ ex-girl think the kittens were muffins because they were born in the oven?”

  So that’s how our muffin club got started.

  Zachary thought it was all very funny. He almost laughed, and you could see the idea really appealed to him. He didn’t even ask what was the point to the club or anything. I mean, he got that it wasn’t just being born in an oven, but you shouldn’t go around wanting to be like all the other muffins in the pan, either.

  Mother and Daddy came strolling back around then, and John and Suzy and Rob came up from the ball field, so Zachary said good night. As he drove off he leaned out the window and yelled, “See you in Laguna Beach, Vicky-O.”

  “I wish he wouldn’t call you Vicky-O,” Suzy said in an annoyed sort of way.

  “Anyhow he won’t see us in Laguna Beach,” John said. “He wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to find us.”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  By the time we were in our sleeping bags and Mother and Daddy had switched out the lantern it began to pour, a real cloudburst with great flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder. Rob wiggled his sleeping bag very close to John’s, and Suzy and I held hands for a while, but the tent stood up to the storm nobly and didn’t leak a bit.

  The next day was sunny and clear and all our laundry that had got soaked by the storm was dry. We got up about half an hour earlier than usual in order to get going as soon as possible.

  It was by far the longest drive of our w
hole trip. I suppose we’d have done it anyhow even if I hadn’t had the feeling we were sort of fleeing Zachary, because Daddy said Aunt Sue and Uncle Nat were expecting us, and it wasn’t as though we’d have to set up camp when we arrived, there’d be beds and food waiting for us. More thunderstorms kept being forecast, too, and we were kind of tired of wet wood to cook dinner on.

  We all got pooped, and it got hotter and hotter, and we just kept on and on and on, with Mother and Daddy and John switching the driving. Once Suzy said, while John was at the wheel, “Hey, John, couldn’t you just tesser us there?”

  It would have been nice if he could have, like Meg and Charles Wallace Murry, but that, as Kipling would say, is another story.

  Arkansas was flat and hot and had long stretches of wet rice fields, which took me completely by surprise. I’m sure I must have learned in Social Studies some time or other that Arkansas produces rice, but in my imagination I saw rice growing only in the Far East, with people in coolie hats paddling about.

  Oklahoma was gently rolling hills with lots of groves of trees. Clean, white cities, because everything is heated by oil. And of course there were the oil wells, which particularly fascinated Rob. We were there over a week, in order to avoid the Memorial Day week-end traffic, and our only disappointment the whole time we were there was that we never saw an Indian.

  I was right about Oklahoma: we had a ball. We hadn’t seen Aunt Sue or Uncle Nat for years, but they were just the way I remembered them, and not the way Zachary would have thought at all. As for the cousins, they were completely different. I knew they’d have gone on growing up along with us, but I kept seeing them in my mind’s eye as little kids, but the youngest, Sukey, was Suzy’s age, and Pete was half way through college. They knew a lot of kids, and especially one family with a swimming pool; we were over there every day, and to other places for barbecues and stuff, and all the girls went mad over John. I’ve mentioned me and boys, but I’ve never mentioned John and girls. At home in Thornhill John usually dates Izzy Jenkins, my best friend Nanny Jenkins’ older sister, but he could have his pick of any girl in the county. John can’t see a thing without his glasses, he’s very near-sighted but he’s tall and good looking and he has this wonderful dark red hair, like Uncle Douglas. None of the rest of us has it. Suzy and Rob are blonde, and my hair’s just plain brown, though lately it seems to me there have been kind of reddish lights, and it’s a prettier sort of brown than it used to be. John doesn’t have that dug-out-from-under-a-rock complexion that some red-heads have, either, and he’s terrifically intelligent, but not a bit of a grind. I mean he just comes home from school and sits down and gets his homework done in half the time it takes me to do mine. He’s good at sports, too, the kind you can do with glasses on, like basketball and track. As far as I can see he’s good at just about everything. I’m proud of him, sure, but sometimes I feel, well, just sort of sad, because I can’t ever hope to be the kind of person John is. I don’t even know what I want to be yet, and Suzy’s always been a beauty and known she was going to be a doctor. That’s always what she’s wanted to be, ever since she could speak. I don’t know what I’d do if it weren’t for Rob.

  Anyhow, we had a blast in Tulsa, and then we spent a couple of nights in Oklahoma City with some people we’d met in Tulsa but who lived in Oklahoma City and insisted we come visit them there.

  Then it was back to the camping routine again, and a trek across Texas. Just the way I don’t think I’ll ever forget Tennessee, I’m not likely to forget Texas, either. None of us is. It’s such a big state that we really didn’t see very much of it. Just a corner. But we’ll always remember that corner.

  Eight

  We drove mile after mile over absolutely flat, treeless land that stretched out and out to the horizon. Every once in a while we’d come to enormous white granaries. The granaries looked like skyscrapers in the distance, stuck way out in nothing, but they shrank when you came up to them. In those great open spaces perspective was all off and we couldn’t tell where anything was or what size it was going to be till we came right up to it. Granaries, water towers, towns, seen on the horizon, seemed much closer than they actually were. Sometimes we would try to guess at the mileage, and we were always way off. One rather unusual thing we passed, and certainly something that didn’t seem to belong in Texas, was a convoy of naval trucks, yet, bearing missiles. I thought of Zachary’s awful song and shivered, but the others were all excited and talking about space probes and sending a manned rocket to the moon and if a space war was really possible or not. It just scared me plain stiff. I wonder if I’m developing a tendency to be morbid?

  But I kept looking at that enormous sweep of land, stretching out to eternity so you couldn’t stay afraid because fears were so small they just lost themselves. The only other place I know where you can see that far and makes you feel the same way is the ocean, which is why I went down to the beach the day of the wedding. In Texas one thing that seemed to make the distance look even distanter was the telephone poles, stretching out and out and out; the only reason you couldn’t go on seeing them forever was that they got so tiny in the distance they finally got too small to see and just merged in with the land. That’s perspective, Uncle Douglas says. It seems very mysterious to me.

  Every once in a while we would see tumbleweed rolling across the road. At first I thought it was birds, but Daddy explained that it’s a plant that seeds itself by being blown by the lightest breeze across wide sweeps of land. It was really fascinating, and if you looked at it up close it was almost like something you might see by the ocean. Daddy and Mother knew an old song about it, “Tumbling along with the tumbling tumbleweed,” and we all learned it.

  We were heading for Palo Duro State Park, which Daddy said was in a canyon. When we reached it the canyon came as a complete shock, appearing abruptly in the middle of the flat lands. The canyon is eroded, I mean it’s really ancient, so it’s all worn away from wind and weather, and it’s striped in color, lots of reds and yellows and pinks, and even bluish stripes. It’s really spectacular.

  When we stopped at the ranger’s place to get our pass he looked at our license and said, “Yawl from Connecticut? One of these young ladies Miss Victoria Austin by any chance?”

  You could have knocked me over with a feather, but he handed me a note. Everybody was very excited and kept asking me who it was from and everything. I had a very good idea who it was from, but I wasn’t saying, and I wasn’t going to open it with Suzy breathing down my neck.

  “Let Vicky alone,” Mother said. “After all, it’s her note.”

  “Who else but that California crumb,” John growled in disgust. “Is he going to turn up here?”

  But there wasn’t any black station wagon down in the campgrounds. We had to drive all the way down into the canyon to get there. It was by far the most beautiful and by far the worst kept place we’d been to so far. The camping area and the picnic grounds weren’t separated, the way they’d been in the other camps, and picnickers are evidently slobs, not clean like campers.

  “Litter bugs!” Suzy said, and it sounded like swearing, as we went around picking up literally hundreds of bottle caps in order to clear enough ground to set up the tent. It burned me up because I wanted to get camp set up and go off somewhere private to read Zachary’s note. It was the dustiest camp we’d been in, too. Our sandalled feet were filthy in two minutes. The fireplaces had been all mutilated and the grills stolen, so cooking wasn’t as easy as it had been, though we could have used Uncle Douglas’s stove, which Daddy had fixed in Oklahoma by pushing a thin wire through the feed lines to clear them.

  As soon as we finished setting up camp Mother and Daddy dragged us back up the canyon to take a ride on a narrow gauge railway. I said I didn’t want to go but they made me. Normally I might have enjoyed it, but I wanted to read Zachary’s letter. Anyhow, let’s face it, the ride wasn’t really very exciting to anybody except Rob. He was so thrilled that I didn’t mind it as much as I would have
otherwise, and the scenery was kind of interesting, like something out of TV or a book, and not like anything I’d ever really expected to see. There was lots of flowering cactus, and the man who drove the train showed us mesquite trees. I’d read about them, of course, and they weren’t a bit as I’d imagined them, but sort of like prehistoric, overgrown ferns. There were juniper trees, which we’d never seen before either; but when you keep on seeing things you’ve never seen before, one right on top of the other, they begin to lose their excitement, particularly if you have a letter you want to read in your pocket. Suzy had her notebook out and kept putting down birds. The canyon was just loaded with birds, all kinds of birds, especially red, red cardinals which looked beautiful against the reds of the canyon walls. There were also mosquitoes and flies, but Suzy didn’t mark those down.

  Just as we got back to the little station, all scratching our legs and arms, we saw two wild turkeys, and then the guide, quite excited, shushed us up and pointed to a largish bird with a very straight, moving tail, like something in Geometry. He said it was a Road Runner and he’d never seen one so close to the station before. So Suzy had two more birds for her book.

  While we were cooking dinner a whole bunch of girl scouts with very Texan accents arrived for a cook-out and an overnight. Boy, were they noisy! They’d evidently expected to have the whole place to themselves, but they put up their tents quite a way away from us, close to the lavs and the playgrounds. We’d deliberately camped far from the Palo Duro lavs because they were an inch deep in muddy water and stank, even though they had flush toilets. It made me think a lot more of the two camps in Tennessee.