And Go Like This

by John Crowley

  Fxx brought the socks. Trxx pulled them on.

  “Shoes!” Trxx shouted, like a general in a war. “Shirt! Pants! Coat!”

  Pxx and Fxx found a sort-of clean shirt and the shoes and her old pants. Trxx pulled her shoes on.

  Then she tied them.

  “Trxx!” said her mother. “You tied your shoes!”

  Everybody looked down at Trxx’s shoes.

  “You did it,” said Pxx. “Wow.”

  Trxx looked down at her shoes too, and they seemed a little bit farther away than they had been the day before. Maybe she was getting taller.

  “You did it,” said her father.

  “Sure,” she said. “Mom, I’m late!”

  She grabbed her bag and Pxx grabbed his bag and they ran out (they didn’t need to open the door, because there wasn’t any door) and ran across the field.

  Qxx and Fxx stood in the doorway waving to their children.

  “I forgot to get a kiss,” said Fxx. “Shucks.”

  Qxx saw Trxx stop and bend down to tie her shoe again. When she bent over her hat fell off. She picked it up and jammed it on her head, and then ran after Pxx.

  Qxx thought of the dream she had dreamed, where everyone in the world had no fur, and wore clothes.

  If everybody had to get dressed every morning, Trxx wouldn’t be last: not every time. Somebody else would forget their socks or their hat or forget how to tie their shoes.

  “Tough job,” said Fxx.

  “You’re wrong,” Qxx said.

  “It’s not a tough job?”

  “I mean what you said yesterday. About Trxx.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s not true.”

  “What did I say?” Fxx asked

  Fxx had said that Trxx was the same as everyone else, except that she had a handicap—something taken away or held back from her, something normal people had but she didn’t have, something she had to get along without.

  But that wasn’t true.

  Trxx wasn’t the same as everyone else.

  No one is the same as everyone else.

  Trxx was Trxx, and the way Trxx was was normal for Trxx.

  “Life isn’t whackball,” she said to Fxx.

  Fxx looked surprised. “I never said it was,” he said.

  “Well don’t forget it,” said Qxx. “Trxx isn’t a normal person with something missing. Trxx is Trxx. She’s being all she can be, and that’s as much as you or me or Pxx or anyone on this planet can be.”

  Qxx put her furry arm through Fxx’s furry arm. She watched her daughter as she ran out of sight.

  “It’s all that anyone can be,” she said. “On any planet anywhere.”

  * * *

  “There she is,” said John. “There she is.”

  “There she is,” the kids said, who had never doubted she would come, did not yet need to wonder whether she might not. Silently she’d entered the driveway, the car’s sound swallowed with all other sound by the snow, but the searching lights sweeping over the dark lawn as she turned in to the driveway and then illuminating the closed door of the garage, they could see the light from the kitchen, sign of homecoming. Once, you left a light burning for the returning one; now the returning one’s own lights brought her home, announced her arrival.

  O You Kid. I Love You. Way to Go. What A Babe. Love Life. Page Me. U R Mine. Lily and Perry followed him to the door out to the garage, welcoming committee; Lily watched her father and Perry go to pull up the door, watched the car creep forward through the drift by now as high as the bumpers, chewing the snow as it came forward, coming breathing hotly into the bright space.

  “Hi, hi.”

  “God, some night.”

  “Yes. We were worried.”

  “I’m all right,” Meg said, climbing out. The car’s underparts were thick with clotted snow like a wintering buffalo’s.

  “Did Anne-Marie like your book?” Perry asked.

  “Not much,” Meg said.

  “Uh-oh,” Perry said.

  Of course she was all right. She was all right all along, or at least now it was evident that all along she had been all right. John Nutting felt a spasm of recapitulatory relief of a kind he was becoming familiar with, though he hadn’t known it in his life, or at least he hadn’t noticed it—until the day Lily first got out of the hospital.

  “Mom!” Lily cried to her from the door. “Come see what we made! Dad made a heart! We made valentines!”

  “I’m coming, hon, I’m coming.”

  It had been snowing that day too on their planet, the day Lily got out, but only a few flakes blown around out of an iron sky, almost too cold for snow. Lily was nearly a month old and had yet to see outdoors, yet to be outside the hospital where she’d been born. Meg had gone to the parking garage to get the car and told John to bring Lily out to the curb and watch for it. So it was he who took her out. He lifted her from the hospital bassinet at the exit door and wrapped her in her own blanket, bought for her by her grandmother before she was born, hope against hope, and he tugged her hat down; made her a papoose inside the blanket, pressed her to him, and (tugging down his own hat) he just walked out into the day, a con walking free after having finished his sentence, or con-man having pulled off his scam. Don’t look back. Lucky, he’d felt so damn lucky, knew they were all lucky, though what he and she and Meg from now on would mean by “lucky” might not be what everyone else meant. They weren’t the same as everyone else: no one is. You’re out he’d said in exalted wonderment to her small face. You got out, Lily. You got out. And of course she had, because here she now was, Jumping for Joy as her mother came into the house on a gust of cold air. That’s how it is, how it would be, for them all: when they had come through all right, it would be seen that of course, all along they must have: all along.

  Flint and Mirror

  [Editor’s note: The following pages were recently discovered among uncatalogued papers of the novelist Fellowes Kraft (1897-1964) that came to the Rasmussen Foundation by bequest following his death. They comprise thirty-four typewritten sheets of yellow copy paper (Sphinx brand) edited lightly in pencil, apparently intended to be a part of Kraft’s second novel, A Passage at Arms (1941), now long out of print and unavailable. In the end these pages were rejected by the author, perhaps because the work had evolved into a more conventional historical fiction. The mathematician and spiritual adventurer John Dee would appear in later Kraft works, both finished and unfinished, in rather different character than he does here.]

  Blind O’Mahon the poet said: “In Ireland there are five kingdoms, one in each of the five directions. There was a time when each of the kingdoms had her king, and a court, and a castle-seat with lime-washed towers; battlements of spears, and armies young and laughing.”

  “There was a high king then too,” said Hugh O’Neill, ten years old, seated at O’Mahon’s feet in the grass, still green at Hallowtide. From the hill where they sat the Great Lake could just be seen, turning from silver to gold as the light went. The roving herds of cattle—Ulster’s wealth—moved over the folded land. All this is O’Neill territory, and always forever has been.

  “There was indeed a high king,” O’Mahon said.

  “And will be again.”

  The wind stirred the poet’s white hair. O’Mahon could not see Hugh, his cousin, but—he said—he could see the wind. “Now cousin,” he said. “See how well the world is made. Each kingdom of Ireland has its own renown: Connaught in the west for learning and for magic, the writing of books and annals, and the dwelling-places of saints. In the north, Ulster”—he swept his hand over lands he couldn’t see—“for courage, battles, and warriors. Leinster in the east for hospitality, for open doors and feasting, cauldrons never empty. Munster in the south for labor, for kerns and ploughmen, weaving and droving, birth and death.”

  Hugh look
ing over the long view, the winding of the river where clouds were gathered now, asked: “Which is the greatest?”

  “Which,” O’Mahon said, pretending to ponder this. “Which do you think?”

  “Ulster,” said Hugh O’Neill of Ulster. “Because of the warriors. Cuchulain was of Ulster, who beat them all.”

  “Ah.”

  “Wisdom and magic are good,” Hugh conceded. “Hosting is good. But warriors can beat them.”

  O’Mahon nodded to no one. “The greatest kingdom,” he said, “is Munster.”

  Hugh said nothing to that. O’Mahon’s hand sought for his shoulder and rested upon it, and Hugh knew he meant to explain. “In every kingdom,” he said, “the North, the South, the East, and the West, there is also a north, a south, an east, a west. Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes,” Hugh said. He could point to them: left, right, ahead, behind. Ulster is in the north, and yet in Ulster there is also a north, the north of the north: that’s where his mad, bad uncle Shane ruled. And so in that north, Shane’s north, there must be again a north and a south, an east and a west. And then again . . .

  “Listen,” O’Mahon said. “Into each kingdom comes wisdom from the west, about what the world is and how it came to be. Courage from the north, to defend the world from what would swallow it up. Hospitality from the east to praise both learning and courage, and reward the kings who keep the world as it is. But before all these things, there is a world at all: a world to learn about, to defend, to praise, to keep. It is from Munster at first that the world comes to be.”

  “Oh,” Hugh said, no wiser though. “But you said that there were five kingdoms.”

  “So I did. And so it is said.”

  Connaught, Ulster, Leinster, Munster. “What is the fifth kingdom?”

  “Well, cousin,” O’Mahon said, “what is it then?”

  “Meath,” Hugh guessed. “Where Tara is, where the kings were crowned.”

  “That’s fine country. Not north or south or east or west but in the middle.”

  He said no more about that, and Hugh felt sure that the answer might be otherwise. “Where else could it be?” he asked.

  O’Mahon only smiled. Hugh wondered if, blind as he was, he knew when he smiled and that others saw it. A kind of shudder fled along his spine, cold in the low sun. “But then,” he said, “it might be far away.”

  “It might,” O’Mahon said. “It might be far away, or it might be close.” He chewed on nothing for a moment, and then he said: “Tell me this, cousin: Where is the center of the world?”

  That was an old riddle; even boy Hugh knew the answer to it, his uncle Phelim’s brehon had asked it of him. There are five directions to the world: four of them are north, south, east and west, and where is the fifth? He knew the answer, but just at that moment, sitting with bare legs crossed in the ferns in sight of the tower of Dungannon, he did not want to give it.

  It was in the spring that his fosterers the O’Hagans had brought Hugh O’Neill to the castle at Dungannon. It was a great progress in the boy Hugh’s eyes, twenty or thirty horses jingling with brass trappings, carts bearing gifts for his O’Neill uncles at Dungannon, red cattle lowing in the van, spearmen and bowmen and women in bright scarves, O’Hagans and O’Quinns and their dependents. And he knew himself, but ten years old, to be the center of that progress, on a dappled pony, with a new mantle wrapped around his skinny body and a new ring on his finger.

  He kept seeming to recognize the environs of the castle, and scanned the horizon for it, and questioned his cousin Phelim, who had come to fetch him to Dungannon, how far it was every hour until Phelim grew annoyed and told him to ask next when he saw it. When at last he did see it, a fugitive sun was just then looking out, and sunshine glanced off the wet, lime-washed walls of its wooden palisades and made it seem bright and near and dim and far at once, heart-catching, for to Hugh the wooden tower and its clay and thatch outbuildings were all the castles he had ever heard of in songs. He kicked his pony hard, and though Phelim and the laughing women called to him and reached out to keep him, he raced on, up the long muddy track that rose up to a knoll where now a knot of riders were gathering, their leaf-bladed spears high and slim and black against the sun: his uncles and cousins O’Neill, who when they saw the pony called and cheered him on.

  Through the next weeks he was made much of, and it excited him; he ran everywhere, an undersized, red-headed imp, his stringy legs pink with cold and his high voice too loud. Everywhere the big hands of his uncles touched him and petted him, and they laughed at his extravagances and his stories, and when he killed a rabbit they praised him and held him aloft among them as though it had been twenty stags. At night he slept among them, rolled in among their great odorous shaggy shapes where they lay around the open turf fire that burned in the center of the hall. Sleepless and alert long into the night he watched the smoke ascend to the opening in the roof and listened to his uncles and cousins snoring and talking and breaking wind after their ale.

  That there was a reason, perhaps not a good one and kept secret from him, why on this visit he should be put first ahead of older cousins, given first choice from the thick stews in which lumps of butter dissolved, and listened to when he spoke, Hugh felt but could not have said; but now and again he caught one or another of the men regarding him steadily, sadly, as though he were to be pitied; and again, a woman would sometimes, in the middle of some brag he was making, fold him in her arms and hug him hard. He was in a story whose plot he didn’t know, and it made him the more restless and wild. There was a time when, running into the hall, he caught his uncle Phelim Turlough and a woman of his having an argument, he shouting at her to leave these matters to men; when she saw Hugh, the woman came to him, pulled his mantle around him and brushed leaves and burrs from it. “Will they have him dressed up in an English suit then for the rest of his life?” she said over her shoulder to Turlough Luineach, who was drinking angrily by the fire.

  “His grandfather Conn had a suit of clothes,” Phelim said into his cup. “A fine suit of black velvet with gold buttons and a black velvet hat. With a white plume in it!” he shouted, and Hugh couldn’t tell if he was angry at the woman, or Conn, or himself. The woman began crying; she drew her scarf over her face and left the hall. Phelim glanced once at Hugh, and spat into the fire.

  Nights they sat in the light of the fire and the great reeking candle of reeds and butter, drinking ale and Spanish wine and talking. Their talk was one subject only: the O’Neills. Whatever else came up in conversation or song related to that long history, whether it was the strangeness—stupidity or guile, either could be argued—of the English colonials; or the raids and counter-raids of neighboring families; or stories out of the far past. Hugh couldn’t always tell, and perhaps his elders weren’t always sure, what of the story had happened a thousand years ago and what of it was happening now. Heroes rose up and raided, slew their enemies and carried off their cattle and their women; some were crowned high king at Tara. There was mention of Niall of the Nine Hostages and the high king Julius Caesar; of Brian Boru and Cuchulain; of Shane O’Neill and his fierce Scots redlegs, of the sons of Shane and the King of Spain’s son. His grandfather Conn had been the O’Neill, but had let the English call him Earl of Tyrone. There had always been an O’Neill, invested at the crowning stone at Tullyhogue to the sound of St. Patrick’s bell; but Conn O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, had seen King Harry over the sea, and had promised to plant corn, and learn English. And when he lay dying he said that a man was a fool to trust the English.

  Within the tangled histories, each strand bright and clear and beaded with unforgotten incident but inextricably bound up with every other, Hugh could perceive his own story: how his grandfather had never settled the succession of his title of the O’Neill; how Hugh’s uncle Shane had risen up and slain his brother Matthew, Hugh’s father, and now called himself the O’Neill and claimed all Ulster for his own,
and raided his cousins’ lands when he chose with his six fierce sons; how he, Hugh, had true claim to what Shane had usurped. Sometimes all this was as clear to him as the multifarious branchings of a winter-naked tree against the sky; sometimes not. The English . . . there was the confusion. Like a cinder in his eye, they baffled his clear sight.

  Phelim tells with relish: “Then comes up Sir Henry Sidney with all his power, and Shane? Can Shane stand against him? He cannot! It’s as much as he can do to save his own skin. And that only by leaping into the Great River and swimming away. I’ll drink the Lord Deputy’s health for that, a good friend to Conn’s true heir . . .”

  Or, “What do they ask?” a brehon, a lawgiver, asks. “You bend a knee to the Queen, and offer all your lands. She takes them and gives you the title Earl—and all your lands back again. You are her urragh, but nothing has changed . . .”

  “And they are sworn then to help you against your enemies.”

  “No,” says another, “you against theirs, even if it be a man sworn to you or your own kinsman whom they’ve taken a hatred to. Conn was right: a man is a fool to trust them.”

  “Think of Desmond, in prison in London these many years, who trusted them.”

  “Desmond is a thing of theirs. He is a Norman, he has their blood. Not the O’Neills.”

  “Fubun,” says the blind poet O’Mahon in a quiet high voice that stills them all:

  Fubun on the gray foreign gun,

  Fubun on the golden chain;

  Fubun on the court that talks English,

  Fubun on the denial of Mary’s son.

  Hugh listens, turning from one speaker to the other, and frightened by the poet’s potent curse. He feels the attention of the O’Neills on him.