The Moon by Night

by Madeleine L'engle

  “‘Eddystone Light,’” Rob said promptly.

  So Mother started, and we all joined in,

  “My father was the keeper of the Eddystone light.

  He married a mermaid one fine night.

  Of this union there came three,

  A porpoise and a porgy and the other was me.

  Yo ho HO! the wind blows free.

  Oh, for a life on the rolling sea!”

  Mother kept us going from one song to another. But we missed Daddy’s and John’s nice, deep, masculine voices. We were used to having the bass stronger than the melody, and while we were singing I kept straining to look down the road for the first glimpse of light pushing through the rain ahead of the car, to listen through our voices and Mother’s guitar for the sound of the motor. I forgot all about not thinking so much of togetherness. All I wanted in the world was for the family to be together again.

  Finally it came, the headlights steaming through the rain, the chugging of the station wagon almost drowned by the shrill voices of the scouts. Daddy stopped by the platform, and he and John had really packed that car! The scouts started pouring out, and they kept on and on coming until it looked like one of those little cars in the circus that look as though they wouldn’t hold more than two people at the most and seem to go on disgorging clowns forever. Daddy told us that John and the ranger and the scout leaders and the rest of the scouts were already up on high ground; there wasn’t anything more to worry about; and the rain was beginning to let up, anyhow. We’d have got our feet good and wet if we’d stayed down in the canyon, but we wouldn’t have drowned.

  Daddy turned the car around and headed down the canyon again. The sky began to get white around the edges, and the rain stopped as suddenly as if had begun. While we were waiting for the rest of the scouts we played games to try to get everybody dry, and soon the kids were over their scare and all laughing and having a wonderful time. When the second batch arrived and were reasonably dry and warm we all sat down on the platform and sang. I guess scouts sing the same songs everywhere, though we each taught the other group a couple of new ones. The scouts all said it was the most exciting Overnight they’d ever had, and, when summoned by the ranger, the school bus which had brought them to the canyon came to pick them up, they didn’t want to leave. Their leaders and the ranger and Daddy herded them all in, and they drove off, their heads and arms out the windows, calling and waving good-bye.

  We repacked everything in the car, a little more tidily this time, though it still took up more room than usual, and drove to the ranger’s headquarters. He had an old-fashioned black combination coal and kerosene stove, and he made an enormous pot of coffee, and even Rob drank some, with lots of milk in it. The ranger got flour and eggs down from a cupboard and Mother made pancakes for everybody, and while we gobbled them the ranger told us stories. The sun was quite high and bright and hot when we left. We certainly felt as though we’d been there more than one night, and it seemed that the ranger was an old, old friend. We promised him that we’d come visit him if ever we were back in Texas, and he was full of plans to come stay with us if ever he came east. We all shook hands solemnly with him, and he gave John a snakeskin belt as a token of thanks for helping with the scouts. The belt is one of John’s greatest treasures, and he never wears anything else. I mean that he never wears any other belt.

  Daddy said we’d have to stop early that afternoon in order to get the tent thoroughly dried out. We left Texas and drove into New Mexico, which was very different country. It was much wilder, and we saw our first buttes, which are cones and peaks of stone sticking up out of the desert. It was also lots more touristy than any place we’d been, with strings of motels and gift shops and snake farms. Suzy wanted to go into one of these, but Daddy said they were just expensive tourist traps, and she’d have to find her snakes in their natural habitat.

  In Santa Fe we did our marketing and drove around a little, but couldn’t really get out and sightsee because it was starting to storm again. We felt we’d really had our quota of wind and weather, but the skies didn’t seem to agree with us. Santa Fe, with its Indian and Spanish atmosphere, was fascinating, but I won’t describe it because anybody can look it up in the National Geographic or the encyclopaedia or someplace.

  New Mexico was gorgeous, though, and at the same time a little depressing because, except for Santa Fe, it seemed so poor. At home in Thornhill nobody is really poor, and it was awful to see the shacks and shanties and the poor, foreign-looking people along the roadside. No wonder D. H. Lawrence wasn’t really happy in New Mexico. The non-people part of it was wonderful, though. Mostly the mountains. I do love mountains. There were mountains of all shapes and sizes. In color everything was mostly tan, spotted with the darkness of juniper. I had never seen tan mountains before, or even realized that there could be tan mountains. At home at this time of year everything would be a soft, young green, with occasional touches of red or yellow from the early leafing of the maples. There would be a sense of birth, of gentle and fragile newness, so that, looking at the faintly wrinkled leaf of a spring maple as it slowly unfurled, I would touch it almost as timidly as I did Rob’s cheek and soft, fuzzy head when Mother first brought him home from the hospital. But in New Mexico there was no sense of spring. Everything seemed ancient, pre-historic. Or maybe I mean post-historic. This was the kind of landscape, austere and terrible, that I could imagine on a dying planet.

  Once Daddy pointed to a river bed coursing with turbulent brown water, with waves seeming to go in every direction. The water wasn’t more than three feet deep, I don’t think, but it was rushing so wildly that no one could possibly have stood up in it; they’d have been thrown down and sucked under and drowned. This, Daddy explained, was a flash flood, and was what the ranger had been afraid of the night before down in the canyon. Looking at that wild water, I didn’t wonder he’d been scared. In this untamed country a river bed can be caked, dry mud one minute and a thunderstorm later it can be a raging torrent. As we looked at the mad waters we understood why campers were warned never, never to set up their tents in dry river beds.

  That day we got our first glimpse of snow-capped mountains, the first we had ever seen, mountains whose peaks stay white all year round. At home we are anxious, each spring, to have all the snow go from the shadowy places in the orchard, because then we knew that spring is really there. I suppose if you lived in New Mexico all year round you’d have ways of telling spring, but I had a feeling only of great tumult and great age. I felt very far from home, and that these mountains must have been formed very differently from our gentle Litchfield Hills, with wild, flaming upheavings.

  Then, suddenly, as we got into Colorado (“Two states!” we always yelled as we crossed the line) the face of the earth changed. The mountains were less wild and more like those at home. And then we saw fresh green trees leafing, and lilac in full bloom, and the wildness of the sky changed to a soft, pearly gray, from which came a gentle spring rain.

  “I think we’ll stop at a motel tonight,” Daddy said. “We’ve done enough battling with the elements to last us quite a while, and we need a good night’s sleep and a chance to dry the tent. My only complaint about sleeping bags is that they’re a little bit short for Mother and me.”

  “I think we’ve had quite enough weather for some time,” Mother said firmly.

  Rob asked, “If we didn’t have weather, what would we have instead?”

  The next day we just had a morning’s drive to get to Mesa Verde. Zachary had said maybe he’d see me in Mesa Verde. I knew enough not to say anything, but I couldn’t help thinking.

  Ten

  The drive to Mesa Verde, with Zachary lurking in the corners of my mind, was through terrifically mountainous country, one staggering view after another. Colorado is completely unlike New Mexico, and I’d never realized before how each state differs from the other in terrain, flora, and fauna, to be scientific-sounding about it. In New Mexico the mountains are bare, and suddenly in Co
lorado they’re green. It’s like two different worlds. We didn’t see any animals for Suzy’s notebook in New Mexico except lizards, but in Colorado there were lots of sheep. One lovely thing about having started our trip so early in the season was all the adorable babies: lambs, ponies, piglets, fledglings. One funny thing was that every day we would see at least one white horse, starting with the one Rob won Animal Rummy with the first day. It began to be a good luck sign with us, to see a white horse, though I think I took it more seriously than the others, dope that I am. I wish I didn’t worry so much about omens and things. I don’t do it aloud because Suzy and John are both scientific and they think I’m nuts. If we hadn’t seen a white horse by near to camping time I’d begin to peer anxiously out the window, pretending I was just looking at scenery, but we always found one, and Suzy would jot it down in her book.

  The road up to the Mesa Verde campgrounds was a hairpin job that made the road in Palo Duro seem like the infant’s section in a playground. They were working on the darned road, too, and there were sheer drops at the side going down into forever, and I found that looking down gave me a very uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. Mother said this was called acrophobia, or fear of heights, and that I was too young to have it bother me. But Daddy reminded her that the only instinctive fear in a newborn baby is that of falling, so perhaps I wasn’t growing into acrophobia but just had to learn to grow out of it.

  When we signed in at the Park Headquarters the ranger must have seen that we had a Connecticut license, but he didn’t say anything about a note for me, and I certainly didn’t ask. Maybe Zachary was just leading me on when he said he was playing hares and hounds with me all over the United States.

  This was by far the most crowded camp we’d been at, and already, so early in the day, a lot of the campsites were occupied. We found a nice one, though, set up, and had lunch.

  While we were eating there was a familiar sweesh of tires, and then the black station wagon swooping on by us. Then its brakes were jammed on, it was backed up, and there was Zachary, standing by our picnic table and grinning. I grinned back but nobody else looked terribly happy to see him. John looked as though a scorpion had just come prancing up to our campsite. I could have swatted him one.

  Zachary was all very polite about speaking to everybody, though there was a general freeze when he said “hi” to John. It was obvious those two were never going to hit it off. He told us that they were staying in one of the lodges because his mother really didn’t feel like camping and wanted to spend the afternoon resting. “So if you’re going to go on one of those guided hikes to the Pueblo cliff dwellings this afternoon I wonder if I could string along with you? I’d honestly try not to be in the way.”

  “We’d be glad to have you, Zachary,” Daddy said, though rather coolly, “if you really think you want to come.”

  “Oh, I really do, sir. Anthropology’s one of my Things.”

  I knew that Zachary meant what he said, but I think Daddy thought there was an edge of mockery to the words, though all he said was, “We’ll be leaving in about half an hour.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll be ready. May Vicky come for a walk with me till then?”

  “Sorry. She has jobs to do.”

  “Oh. I see. Very well, sir. I’ll just sit in the car and read Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture till you’re ready.”

  I guess he was showing off then. I mean, Patterns of Culture is about American Indians and all, but he didn’t have to say it. I thought John was really going to let loose, but all he did was turn to Daddy and mutter, “Why’d you say he could come with us, Dad?”

  “What’d you want me to do, John? Turn him down?”

  “Oh—I suppose not. As long as he doesn’t hang around me.”

  “I don’t think he has any intention of hanging around you.”

  We got things tidied up and organized, and I sneaked off to the lavs to put some lipstick on. Suzy followed me. Well, maybe she had to come to the lav herself, but she stood and looked at me putting on lipstick, and said, “What on earth are you doing, Vicky?”

  As if she didn’t know. “I got a piece of bacon caught in my teeth.”

  “Bacon, hah. It’s that dumb Zach. I suppose you’ll be wanting to make out with him next. What’ve you got all that lipstick plastered all over your face for?”

  I tried to answer with dignity. “In the first place it isn’t plastered all over my face. I happen to have put a small amount on my lips. In case you’ve forgotten, Mother told me to use it when we were in New Mexico so my lips wouldn’t get so dried out. They were cracking.”

  “Yah, real hot and dry here. I heard the weather report and it’s supposed to turn cold tonight.”

  “So if I want to put on lipstick it’s my own business. I’m older than you and I started wearing it when I went to Regional.”

  Suzy scowled. “I agree with John. He’s a jerk.”

  I stalked out of the lav and went back to the tent.

  At Mesa Verde there are quite a few rangers instead of the single one we’d got used to at other camps, and bulletin boards with lectures and hikes posted. We chose a hike with a lecture that took us on a climb right down the cliff side, down sheer precipices with narrow steps cut in the rock, down wooden ladders that dropped straight over nothing. While we were climbing I couldn’t think of Zachary, who was behind me. All I could think of was not getting acrophobia and getting down in one piece. It was a descent that no elderly person could possibly have managed. About half way down, as we were trotting along a narrow path that for a few yards was almost level, John mentioned this, and Rob asked anxiously, “What about Mother and Daddy?”

  Daddy assured him that they weren’t quite that elderly yet. But I couldn’t help wondering what some of the elderly school teachers or people like that who went camping, or even stayed in the cabins or the hotel, would do. It would be an awful shame to miss the Pueblo remains. After all, they’re the reason for coming to Mesa Verde. I was sure Zachary’s parents couldn’t manage it, and wondered what they were doing. Zachary didn’t seem to pay much attention to them.

  As I reached the bottom, just behind John, I let out a “Phew!” of relief, and turned around to Zachary. His smile was somehow very tight, and I thought he seemed even whiter than usual. Also I caught Daddy giving him a sharp kind of look.

  When Zachary spoke he sounded even more winded than I felt. “Let’s stop and talk for a few minutes, hunh, Vicky? We’ll catch up during the lecture. I can tell you anything the ranger can, anyhow.”

  He talked gaspingly and Daddy looked at him again, saying, “Stay with Zach, Vicky. You can come along when you get your breaths.” He and Mother and the others went with the ranger. There were about a dozen people on the hike, all asking the ranger questions about the Pueblo remains. Zachary squatted down on a rock, and I sat by him. He just sat there, sort of panting, and I felt a little funny about it, but I thought it would be best if I didn’t say anything, or seem to be worried, so I looked over at the cliff houses.

  We were on a level now with the cliff dwellings themselves, and Zachary began to talk to me about them, at first breathless, then seeming to relax. Boy, did he ever know about those Pueblo Indians! Maybe he was putting on side when he talked about Ruth Benedict, but I’m sure he really was reading her, and I bet he’s read everything Margaret Mead’s written, too.

  “Look at that honeycomb of buildings,” he was saying. “It was built for about five hundred Indians and it’s as complicated as a New York skyscraper, only everybody in the cliff dwellings knew everybody else, and what you see here was built into a natural cave in the side of the mountain. See, I told you New York was zuggy.”

  “What do you want me to do, go back a couple of thousand years and be an Indian? Anyhow, why don’t you be an anthropologist instead of a lawyer?”

  “It’s all right for a hobby, but there’s no money in it.”

  “Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead did all right.”


  “They’re dames, and anyhow they didn’t make the kind of moola I’m thinking about. Look at this place, Vicky. Look at it. You know what you’re doing? You’re seeing it. You’re not just reading about it in some zuggy school. You know what these Indians were that lived in these caves? They were people. People like us. I can just see one of those Indian braves, sitting right here on this rock, with his quiver of arrows and his bow beside him, sitting here and snowing some Indian girl. Only she’d have shiny black hair, coarse as corn silk, instead of soft silky browny stuff like you. You’ve got very pretty hair, Vicky-O. Whyn’t you let it grow so I can run barefoot through it some moonlight night?”

  He kind of snuck his arm around me then, and I said, “Well, I don’t know much about anthropology, but I do know the Pueblos haven’t lived here for ages. I mean, it wasn’t us moving out west a hundred years ago or anything. It didn’t have anything to do with Americans, the cliff dwellers were history way back then.”

  “They’re the Americans, we’re not. We’re just thieving, murdering, genocidal upstarts.”

  “Yah, I know, but why did they stop living here?”

  “It was drought, Vicky-O, a long and terrible drought that drove them out of their caves.” When he told me this Zachary sounded as sad as though he were talking about people he really knew. He cared more about those dead Indians than he did about anybody alive today. He looked straight at me as though it were my fault. “They prayed for rain in their songs and dances and rain didn’t come, and the crops up on the mesa withered up and there wasn’t enough to eat, and finally they had to leave their homes, the land and the cliffs and the caves that had been theirs for generations, and go find another place to live.”

  When he talked about the Indians Zachary was completely different from when he talked about anything else, that awful song, for instance, and what he had to say scared me, almost as much as the song did. People lived here and had families here and were happy here, just the way we were in Thornhill, and suddenly they were gone, and we were gone from Thornhill, too. Though of course everybody else would be there. It was just us who were being like the Pueblo Indians, driven from our homes.