The Grand Tour

by E. Catherine Tobler

  “Pomegranate pear?”

  The voice at the window draws her attention. The young man there is tall, for his eyes meet Beth’s over the sill. His eyes are the color of the bottle just above the window, its label a scrawl that only Beth knows: Co. Kerry, morning mist, November.

  Pomegranate pear was a flavor she didn’t want to make, but she still did, turning the golden pears into a smooth chocolate-brown butter, dribbling in the crimson seeds. Beth had allowed herself one spoonful before jarring it, admitting to herself it was one of her best. She reaches for the jar now, fingers knowing where it rests, but her fingers close around nothingness.

  Amid the cluster of jars upon the counter, there is a vacant space, a jar-shaped space, a space pomegranate pear should occupy but doesn’t. She looks past the marmalades, beyond the canisters and knotgrass, the jarred yeast and dormouse footprints. The deep opal bowl which houses dreams is still near to overflowing and she drapes a soft towel across it before she moves to the bell jar, fingers printing the lid before she works up and up, past jarred breaths and bottled cities; past boxed fields and ribbon-bound supernumerary rainbows. No pomegranate pear and when she comes back to the window; no young man.

  It is easier to move a single person than it is the entire train and its company. Beth can and does move the train when necessary, even enjoys the challenge, but takes a different kind of pleasure when it’s just one person; when it’s just herself.

  She opens the jar to find herself on a Himalayan plain, in a time before humanity has discovered this place. The air here is cold, pinks her cheeks. She picks her way toward the pomegranate trees which line the foothills and opens a wide-mouth jar. Two pomegranates will fit inside, little else. She twists the lid into place then sinks into the dark soil at the base of the trees. If she keeps still, the sunlight sinks through her and she hears only the wind.

  She doesn’t keep still. She hears the faint beat of a heart and pushes up from the soil. It cannot be her own, she refuses the very idea, but then she sees the shadowed figure on the hill before her. The heartbeat lurches.

  She runs. Clutching jars against her sides, she runs toward the figure that shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be here and she screams. He’s not supposed to be in this place—she broke all the jars he ever had claim to, removing those places and years from her reach. (But you didn’t, oh you didn’t, whispers a distant voice.) Still, he leaps into motion, long legs and flailing arms and that shock of curling black hair. She knows the color of his eyes even if she cannot see them now.

  He evades her advance. The pomegranates jostle in their jar, making a solid thumping rhythm against her ribs. The empty jar in her other hand slips and she tightens her hold. Don’t drop it, she tells herself. Don’t. Don’t be stuck here with this shadow-creature. Her feet come down hard with every stride.

  “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”

  The word comes with every fall of her right foot. And then: “Don’t go.”

  But he goes; vanishes through another stand of pomegranate trees as a breath of wind, pulling her after, turning her heel over head until she does not know which way is up. If the ground is blue, then so be it. She feels as though something precious has been taken from her yet again, even though it was lifetimes ago. Once, she could have counted the time on her fingers, but not now. Even so, she remembers the feeling; it remains a broken place that never healed straight. Staggering, she turns from the trees and runs.

  She reaches for the train, pulling caboose walls tall around her, patching in every jar she knows by touch in the dark. She pictures the rusting Ferris wheel under the gleam of the glass and the sugar bowl with its chipped edge and paired dormice curled inside; she draws the taste of sour dough into her mouth, swallows it down, and lets it consume her. Himalayan air slides down her arms, summer sunlight taking its place. Eamonn and Ichabod come into slow focus and she allows the jars to slip from her fingers. Eamonn startles, then moves to the broom.

  She doesn’t think she will ever grow tired of the sounds of the carnival. When night comes and the jars fall to darkness in their nooks, Beth closes her eyes and listens.

  Even from a distance she names the lions by the sound of their voices. If the train stays in one place long enough, she comes to know the voices of the children who frequent the rides in the same way. The tightropes creak under Pasha’s feet, while the cotton candy machine buzzes like an angry bee and the filaments in the electric lights hum higher and brighter. A soft moan runs below it all, something old and fluid like a river and Beth’s toes curl inside her shoes, as though she were dipped in up to her ankles. The heart of the circus, dark and wet and cold and pounding.

  “Miss?”

  The boy standing outside the caboose is lit by the clear glass bulbs, his hair like spun gold curling into his open collar. It's warm enough that’s he’s barefoot and clutching two dollars in his shaking hands. Beth leans across the counter and holds to the feeling of that ancient sound at the base of all she knows. Eamonn leans, too, against Beth’s shoulder as he looks out at the boy.

  “My ma said—” He swallows hard, thin throat working as if he has an apple lodged there. His eyes skip to the dwarf, then back to Beth. “She said you have jams, or jellies, or summat?” He offers the money up, the bills trembling.

  Beth reaches for a crate. “Did you want to spend the whole two dollars?”

  She already knows he does; his mother is a bright star in his head, fully formed in a white dress splattered with blue flowers. Twelve buttons run between her breasts, from waist to throat where her own spun gold hair tangles in a knot. At present she is screaming and laughing to be let off the Ferris wheel. This woman tasted the marmalade before—three years ago?—and with it the memory of a boy she kissed when she was but twelve. A small peck, standing barefoot at the end of a lake-wet dock; the gangly boy fled and she never saw him again. Lakes and docks always make her wonder where he is. He’s in New York, Beth could tell her; he tasted the marmalade five years ago and remembered that kiss as well. He never married.

  “She said you would know, see.”

  “I know,” Beth says.

  Beth fills the small crate with six jars: two orange, two lemon, one lime, and one cherry jam. The cherry jam doesn’t sell well, but the crew likes it—Manny says the lions like it especially well. Still, she knows this woman (Lila, the wind says) and knows these cherries will remind her of her husband. Though it is a small jar, Lila will savor it over the course of a month, remembering the warmth of his fingers and the way he held her hand when their golden-haired boy was born in a field of wheat. After, there was the sweet taste of cherry cola.

  The boy runs back to his mother and Beth leaves the caboose, knowing Eamonn can sell the marmalade well enough without her for a bit. She seeks the main tent, where a cacophony of sound spills. Shards of light escape the tent flaps and vents; screams and laughter come in bursts like thunder. Inside the tent warmth, Beth keeps to the outer edge of planked bleachers, unseen as she steps past a young boy and girl who have found more to enjoy in each other’s lips than they have in Rabi’s center-ring show.

  Vanquisher and vanisher, sink me down into this dirt and let me rest. Beth wants to speak the words to Rabi, but doesn’t and won’t ever. She knows too well how his talent weighs on his mind, how it’s not such an easy task to make someone or something disappear. She has been asked to open a jar she would rather not; she has crossed that line, and will again. They are almost in the same business, she and he.

  Beth disappears through the shadows, fingers trailing along the bleacher supports. Paper cups dot the landscape here, dropped from careless hands; she finds a wallet amid the soft dirt but leaves it there—perhaps its owner wishes to be someone else. Under the tent, everyone should be given that chance.

  The Kerry-eyed boy is not within the tent. Beth knows this from the moment she enters, yet still she looks for him, an automatic response like a leg jerking when tapped. She finds instead Eamonn, at the end of the curving
bleachers. He claims her hand and drags her from the tent, into the wash of yellow-white light outside. It’s the parked caboose he pulls her toward and to the second empty space within it.

  The bell jar is gone, a perfect faded circle in its place where the sun has worn around it all these immeasurable years. In its center sits a silver coin with an owl upon it.

  In the beginning, darkness lay upon the face of the deep. When this darkness roused itself, it was the great lifting wings of a raven who was Mother Night. From her crawled doom, fate, sleep, and dreams. From her fingertips spilled the aether, the madness, and the ancient river’s boatman. All things would come to an end, she decreed, even night herself as dawn crept over her wing’s edge to spread warmth where there had been but cold.

  To see that all things would be kept in their place, that all things would end, Mother Night divided fate, bestowing her daughters with tasks they might never finish. Every night, a breath would be stilled even if another came into being. Every night, a love would be confessed as another fell to ash.

  Into her eldest daughter’s hands, Mother Night placed the scissors to cut the thread, forgetting that fingers might also tie knots in severed lines. What was torn asunder might yet be joined again.

  Beth remembers her name, even if no one uses it. She wishes that it were a lost thing moved elsewhere by Rabi’s clever fingers; that years from now she might come across it in a corner (huddled and dusty and reaching for her) and say “oh yes, that.” “I don’t remember,” would be a comfortable lie, the way carpeted with sugared rose petals.

  In her name lingers the blade her mother gifted, a thing meant to cut so people might be at final rest. But this cutting takes its toll and, when confronted with the one thread she realizes she cannot cut, makes Beth search for other ways a thing might be ended. Gather it up, wrap it tight, seal it with a lid. Every jar becomes a knot in a thread, a way to stem the tide.

  In the middle stands the discovery: that what is sealed away tends to leach into the ground no matter how hard one tries to control it. Water is meant to run; earth is meant to shift. Threads, if not cut, often fray on their own. Better then to control these things, parcel them out so that a thing doesn’t end but somehow goes ever on. If a thing must end for one person, surely it can continue for another.

  Yet here rises the absurdity: Beth wishes the thread she cannot cut would fray, but it is stronger than any one thing she knows. Stronger than he knows, too, and though his own sharp name cuts the strand once and twice and he walks away, meaning to go forever, there is yet that thread, spooling out through dark labyrinths. Wherever he walks, there is a trail in his wake, a trail she can trace no matter how she tries not to. She wishes to end it, slip it in a jar and hide it away, give it to another person so that she might at last be ended and rest, but she cannot.

  She is bound as surely as everyone else is, to her own spooling thread. She cannot cut it. She has tried to tie it in knots so that she might run elsewhere, but she comes always again to the main line.

  The thread makes a whisper as it goes, a soft hiss that reminds her of an egg in a pan. She breaks the jars, letting time evaporate—ending all Mother Night said should be ended—and even that becomes not enough. Not enough, for there he is, stealing through pomegranates, and there, in her own caboose, leaving a token for the bell jar.

  In the end—

  No, this is the part she cannot yet see.

  The young redheaded woman comes to Beth on a warm afternoon, finding her behind the caboose washing the bowls that have overflowed the small inside sink. The bowls make a kind of music as they clink together, water streaming from them as Beth lifts them from the washtub to the rinse water.

  “The little man said you were back here.”

  Beth is about to ask which little man but then realizes she means Eamonn. She straightens to peer through the back window, watching the dwarf and monkey dole out jars of marmalade to customers.

  “Here I am,” Beth says. She gently drops the bowl into the rinse water and dries her hands upon her apron. If the woman wanted marmalade, she would be up front, not back here.

  “I heard that you might—might help me.” She sweeps her jacket back to reveal the small bundle nestled against her chest. “I want to keep her, but can’t.”

  The last two words are only a whisper. Tears spill over the girl’s cheeks then, brightening her brown eyes. Beth clucks her tongue.

  “Sometimes we can’t have the things we most want,” she says, looking at the pair of them long and hard. The baby makes a faint gurgle, seeming to nestle closer into its mother. Sometimes, Beth thought, even though we can’t claim a thing, we are still haunted by it. “Wait here.”

  Beth gestures to the upended crate in the shadow of the caboose and when the girl sits, she steps into the train car. She takes down one jar of orange marmalade, then returns to the girl. The girl who frowns at her.

  “I didn’t come for your mar—”

  “You will hush,” Beth tells her and crouches before the pair of them. She sets the marmalade between her own knees, in the hard dirt, and looks up at the girl. “Stay quiet.”

  Beth slides a hand into the sling, finding warm darkness inside. Her fingers seek out the curve of the baby’s skull, smoothing over that downy hair before settling just above the nape. More warmth floods through Beth’s palm. An unnamed daughter, born seven days ago.

  She ties a small knot in the thread of life, before she divides the thread as neatly as she ever has. She splices this life from that, knowing that no matter what she does, there will always be this point for the mother to look back on. Beth cannot remove the memory of it entirely, so she changes it, infusing the marmalade which sits nearby. Even when given willingly, the loss of a child is no easy thing to bear, but when this young mother looks back onto the knot of the severed thread, she will remember only joy. She will remember the blue of the autumn sky that arced overhead when her child was conceived; she will recall the way the air cooled that night and how sharp the stars looked when they finally came out. With every bite, the young mother will be calmed.

  Even so, she will still have to face the bottom of the jar, when the sweetness is gone and only clear glass remains. Will she break the jar or keep it and the memories it tries to hold? Will she seek the circus out in an attempt to find more? Beth can see all ends coming to fruition—she sees the young mother on an endless search for the train, the train which she never finds again; she sees her making the small jar the center of her universe, as if it might replace the child she gave away. This is the true price to be paid.

  “What do I owe you?”

  The young mother gets to her feet, the crate rocking gently. Beth rises beside her and presses the marmalade into her hands.

  “Thirteen pears,” she says.

  The woman nods and walks away, sunlight gleaming on her auburn hair as she emerges from the caboose’s shadow.

  What of the child? Beth looks only far enough to see this woman walking to the edge of town and the steepled church there. A young widowed man will notice the infant on his way into town, will raise her as his own. Beth could look farther, but she doesn’t, leaving them all there for the time being. Sometimes, she doesn’t want to see where the threads lead.

  In the morning, Beth finds a bag of thirteen pears on the caboose’s back porch. They are bruised and fragrant, and perfect for turning into butter (no pomegranate seeds this time, for they perished when their jar shattered, shot through with glass). This work keeps her busy the morning through, distracting her from the idea of the young man returning, even though the pear butter is meant for him. She refuses to acknowledge the way his name spills from her spoon every time she whisks it around the edge of her pot. It is not about her troubles, no, but those of every person outside these caboose walls. She can think on their miseries, if not her own.

  She saved one pear for eating and slices another bit of it free, savoring the warm grit of it between her teeth and against her tongue. Ichabod,
who perches where the bell jar once did, bends his head down and opens his mouth. Beth feeds him a slice and softly hums until the sunlight brightens the caboose and customers begin lining up at the window. She searches their eager faces yet finds no one she knows.

  The disappointment is still sharp, even after all these years. She glances to the jars and reaches for County Kerry’s morning mist. The jar always feels cold in her hand and weighs more than it should for mist. At this point, she doesn’t even have to open this lid, for she knows the mist too well. She simply vanishes into it and is gone, her bare feet sinking into long wet grass, the scent of heather replacing that of cooking pears. She closes her eyes and turns west, walking.

  She finds him where he always is, in the churchyard where they first met. He crouches at the base of a crumbling statue, scribbling in a book. She is surprised to see him—she always is, for this is how Memory wrote it. She was only searching for clovers when her path crossed his; she had never looked farther down her own thread, for knowing too much about one’s future was a dreadful thing—didn’t everyone agree?

  In this moment, he is young—so young! His brow is not yet creased with lines of worry, for he has not met her. She hesitates. If he doesn’t meet her, how much better off might they both be? She brushes that thought aside as she does every time.