Little, Big

by John Crowley

  On a day when Daily Alice and Sophie were digging happily in the dirt around the back front, as much for the feel of the cool, reborn earth under their nails and in their fingers as for any improvements they might make in the flower beds, they saw a large white bird descend lazily out of the sky, looking at first like a page of wind-borne newspaper or a runaway white umbrella. The bird, which carried a stick in its long red beak, settled on the roof, on a spoked iron mechanism like a cartwheel which was part of the machinery (rusted and forever stopped) of the old orrery. The bird stepped around this place on long red legs. It laid its stick there, cocked its head at it and changed its place; then it looked around itself and began clacking its long red bill together and opening its wings like a fan.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it building a nest there?”

  “Starting to.”

  “You know what it looks like?”

  “Yes.”

  “A stork.”

  “It couldn’t be a stork,” Doc said when they told him. “Storks are European, or Old World, birds. Never cross the big water.” He hurried out with them, and Sophie pointed with her trowel to where there were now two white birds and two more nest-sticks. The birds were clacking at each other and entwining their necks, like newlyweds unable to stop necking long enough to do housework.

  Dr. Drinkwater, after disbelieving his eyes for a long time and making certain with binoculars and reference-works that he wasn’t mistaken, that this wasn’t a heron of some kind but a true European stork, Ciconia alba, went with great excitement to his study and typed out in triplicate a report of this amazing, this unprecedented sighting to send to the various bird-watching societies he more or less belonged to. He was searching for stamps for these, saying “amazing” under his breath, when he stopped and grew thoughtful. He looked at the memos on his desk. He dropped his search for stamps and sat down slowly, looking upward at the ceiling as though he could see the white birds above him.

  Lucy, then Lilac

  The stork had indeed come a great distance and from another country, but remembered crossing no big water. The situation here suited her very well, she thought; from the high housetop she could see a great distance, looking with her red-rimmed eyes along the way her beak pointed. She thought she could even see, on clear hot days that brought breezes to ruffle her sun-heated plumage, almost as far as her own long-awaited liberation from this bird-form which for time out of mind she had inhabited. Certainly she once did see as far as to the awakening of the King, who slept and would sleep some time longer within his mountain, his attendants asleep too around him, his red beard grown so long in his long sleep that tendrils of it twisted like ivy around the legs of the feast-table whereon he snored face down. She saw him snuffle, and move, as though tugged at by a dream that might startle him awake: saw this with a leap of her heart, for surely after his awakening, some distance farther on, would come her own liberation.

  Unlike some others she could name, though, she would have patience. She would hatch once again from her pebbled eggs a brood of quilly young. She would step with dignity among the weeds of the Lily Pond and slay for their sakes a generation of frogs. She would love her current husband, a dear he was, patient and solicitous, a great help with the children. She would not long: longing was fatal.

  And as they all set off on the long and dusty road of that year’s summer, Alice was brought to bed. She named her third daughter Lucy, though Smoky thought it was too much like the names of her two others, Tacey and Lily, and he knew that he at least would spend the next twenty or thirty years calling each of them by the others’ names. “That’s all right,” Alice said. “This is the last, anyway.” But it wasn’t. There was still a boy for her to bear, though even Cloud didn’t yet know that.

  Anyway, if Generation was the thing they wanted, as Sophie had once perceived as she sat huddled and dreaming by the pavilion on the lake, this was a gratifying year for them: after the equinox came with a frost that left the woods dusty and gray but let summer linger, spectral and so endless that it summoned distrait crocuses from the ground and called the restless souls of Indians from their burial mounds, Sophie had the child which was attributed to Smoky. Compounding confusion, she named her daughter Lilac, because she dreamed that her mother was coming into her room bearing a great branch of it heavy with odorous blue blooms, and awoke then to see her mother come into her room bearing the newborn girl. Tacey and Lily came too, Tacey carrying carefully her three-month-old sister Lucy to see the baby.

  “See, Lucy? See the baby? Just like you.”

  Lily raised herself up on the bed to peer closely into Lilac’s face where she lay nestled now against cooing Sophie. “She won’t stay long,” she said, after studying it.

  “Lily!” Mom said. “What a terrible thing to say!”

  “Well, she won’t.” She looked to Tacey: “Will she?”

  “Nope.” Tacey shifted Lucy in her arms. “But it’s okay. She’ll come back.” Seeing her grandmother shocked, she said. “Oh, don’t worry, she’s not going to die or anything. She’s just not going to stay.”

  “And she’ll come back,” Lily said. “Later.”

  “Why do you think all that?” Sophie asked, not sure she was yet quite in the world again, or hearing what she thought she heard.

  The two girls shrugged, at the same time; the same shrug, in fact, a quick lift of shoulders and eyebrows and back again, as at a simple fact. They watched as Mom, shaking her head, helped Sophie induce pink-and-white Lilac to nurse (a delightful, easefully painful feeling) and with her sucking Sophie fell asleep again, dopey with exhaustion and wonderment, and presently so did Lilac, feeling perhaps the same; and though the cord had been cut which joined them, perhaps they dreamed the same dream.

  Next morning the stork left the roof of Edgewood and her messy nest. Her children had already flown without farewell or apology—she expected none—and her husband had gone too, hoping they would meet again next spring. She herself had waited only for Lilac’s arrival so that she could bring news of it—she kept her promises—and now she flew off in quite a different direction from her family, following her beak, her fanlike wings cupping the autumn dawn and her legs trailing behind like bannerets.

  Little, Big

  Striving like the Meadow Mouse to disbelieve in Winter, Smoky gorged himself on the summer sky, lying late into the night on the ground staring upward, though the month had an R in it and Cloud thought it bad for nerve, bone, and tissue. Odd that the changeful constellations, so mindful of the seasons, should be what he chose of summer to memorize, but the turning of the sky was so slow, and seemed so impossible, that it comforted him. Yet he needed only to look at his watch to see that they fled away south even as the geese did.

  On the night Orion rose and Scorpio set, a night as warm almost as August for reasons of the weather’s own but in fact by that sign the last night of summer, he and Sophie and Daily Alice lay out in a sheep-shorn meadow on their backs, their heads close together like three eggs in a nest, as pale too as that in the night light. They had their heads together so that when one pointed out a star, the arm he pointed with would be more or less in the other’s line of sight; otherwise, they would be all night saying That one, there, where I’m pointing, unable to correct for billions of miles of parallax. Smoky had the star-book open on his lap, and consulted it with a flashlight whose light was masked with red cellophane taken from a Dutch cheese so its bightness wouldn’t blind him.

  “Camelopardalis,” he said, pointing to a dangling necklace in the north, not clear because the horizon’s light still diluted it. “That is, the Camelopard.”

  “And what,” Daily Alice asked indulgently, “is a camelopard?”

  “A giraffe, in fact,” Smoky said. “A camel-leopard. A camel with leopard’s spots.”

  “Why is there a giraffe in heaven?” Sophie asked. “How did it get there?”

  “I bet you’re not the first
to ask that,” Smoky said, laughing. “Imagine their surprise when they first looked up over there and said, My God, what’s that giraffe doing up there?”

  The menagerie of heaven, racing as from a zoo breakout through the lives of the men and women, gods and heroes; the band of the Zodiac (that night all their birth-signs were invisible, bearing the sun around the south); the impossible dust of the Milky Way rainbow-wise overarching them; Orion lifting one racing foot over the horizon, following his dog Sirius. They discovered the moment’s rising sign. Jupiter burned unwinking in the west. The whole spangled beach-umbrella, fringed with the Tropics, revolved on its bent staff around the North Star, too slowly to be seen, yet steadily.

  Smoky, out of his childhood reading, related the interlocking tales told above them. The pictures were so formless and incomplete, and the tales, some at least, so trivial that it seemed to Smoky that it must all be true: Hercules looked so little like himself that the only way anyone could have found him was if he’d got the news about Hercules being up there, and was told where to look. As one tree traces its family back to Daphne but another has to be mere commoner; as only the odd flower, mountain, fact gets to have divine ancestry, so Cassiopeia of all people is brilliantly asterized, or her chair rather, as though by accident; and somebody else’s crown, and another’s lyre: the attic of the gods.

  What Sophie wondered, who couldn’t make the patterned floor of heaven come out in pictures but lay hypnotized by their nearness, was how it could be that some in heaven were there for reward, and others condemned to it; while still others were there it seemed only to play parts in the dramas of others. It seemed unfair; and yet she couldn’t decide whether it was unfair because there they were, stuck forever, who hadn’t deserved it; or unfair because, without having earned it, they had been saved—enthroned—need not die. She thought of their own tale, they three, permanent as a constellation, strange enough to be remembered forever.

  The earth that week was making progress through the discarded tail of a long-passed comet, and each night a rain of fragments entered the air and flamed whitely as they burned up. “No bigger than pebbles or pinheads some of them,” Smoky said. “It’s the air you see lit up.”

  But this now Sophie could see clearly: these were falling stars. She thought perhaps she could pick one out and watch and see it fall: a momentary bright exhalation, that made her draw breath, her heart filled with infinitude. Would that be a better fate? In the grass her hand found Smoky’s; the other already held her sister’s, who pressed it every time brightness fell from the air.

  Daily Alice couldn’t tell if she felt huge or small. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminishing. The stars wandered in and out of the vast portals of her eyes, under the immense empty dome of her brow; and then Smoky took her hand and she vanished to a speck, still holding the stars as in a tiny jewel box within her.

  So they lay a long time, not caring to talk any more, each dwelling on that odd, physical sensation of ephemeral eternity—a paradox but undeniably felt; and if the stars had been as near and full of faces as they seemed, they would have looked down and seen those three as a single asterism, a linked wheel against the wheeling dark sky of the meadow.

  Solstice Night

  There was no entrance but a tiny hole at the window corner where the solstice-midnight wind blew in, piling dust on the sill in a little furrow: but that was room enough for them, and they entered there.

  There were three then in Sophie’s bedroom standing close together, their brown-capped heads consulting, their pale flat faces like little moons. “See how she sleeps away.” “Yes, and the babe asleep in her arms.” “My, she holds it tight.” “Not so tight.”

  As one, they drew closer to the tall bed. Lilac in her mother’s arms, in a hooded bunting against the cold, breathed on Sophie’s cheek; a drop of wetness was there.

  “Well, take it, then.”

  “Why don’t you if you’re so anxious.”

  “Let’s all.”

  Six long white hands went out toward Lilac. “Wait,” said one. “Who has the other?”

  “You were to bring it.” “Not I.”

  “Here it is, here.” A thing was unfolded from a drawstring bag.

  “My. Not very like, is it.”

  “What’s to be done?” “Breathe on it.”

  The breathed on it in turns as they held it amidst them. Now and again one looked back at sleeping Lilac. They breathed till the thing amid them was a second Lilac.

  “That’ll do.”

  “It’s very like.”

  “Now take the …”

  “Wait again.” One looked closely at Lilac, drawing back ever so slightly the coverlet. “Look here. She has her little hands tight wound up in her mother’s hair.”

  “Holding fast.”

  “Take the child, we’ll wake the mother.”

  “These, then.” One had drawn out great scissors, which gleamed whitely in the night-light and opened with a faint snicker. “As good as done.”

  One holding the false Lilac (not asleep but with vacant eyes and unmoving; a night in its mother’s arms would cure that) and one reaching ready to take away Sophie’s Lilac, and the third with the shears, it was all quickly done; neither mother nor child awoke; they nestled what they had brought by Sophie’s breast.

  “Now to be gone.”

  “Easily said. Not the way we came.”

  “Down the stairs and out their way.”

  “If we must.”

  Moving as one and without sound (the old house seemed now and again to draw breath or groan at their passing, but then it always did so, for reasons of its own) they gained the front door, and one reached up and opened it, and they were outside and going quickly with a favorable wind. Lilac never waked or made a sound (the wisps and locks of gold hair still held in her fists blew away in the quick wind of their passage) and Sophie slept too, having felt nothing; except the long tale of her dream had altered, at a turning, and become sad and difficult in ways she hadn’t known before.

  In All Directions

  Smoky was wrenched awake by some internal motion; as soon as his eyes were wide open, he forgot whatever it was that had awakened him. But he was awake, as awake as if it were midday, irritating state, he wondered if it was something he ate. The hour was useless four o’clock in the morning. He shut his eyes resolutely for a while, unconvinced that sleep could have deserted him so completely. But it had; he could tell because the more he watched the eggs of color break and run on the screen of his eyelids the less soporific they became, the more pointless and uninteresting.

  Very carefully he slipped out from under the high-piled covers, and felt in the darkness for his robe. There was only one cure he knew of for this state, and that was to get up and act awake until it was placated and went away. He stepped carefully over the floor, hoping he wouldn’t step into shoes or other impedimenta, there was no reason to inflict this state on Daily Alice, and he gained the door, satisfied he hadn’t disturbed her or the night at all. He’d just walk the halls, go downstairs and turn on some lights, that should do it. He closed the door carefully behind him, and at that Daily Alice awoke, not because of any noise he’d made but because the whole peace of her sleep had been subtly broken and invaded by his absence.

  There was already a light burning in the kitchen when he opened the back-stairs door. Great-aunt Cloud made a low, shuddering sound of startled horror when she saw the door open, and then “Oh,” she said, when only Smoky looked around it. She had a glass of warm milk before her, and her hair was down, long and fine and spreading, white as Hecate’s; it had been uncut for years and years.

  “You gave me a start,” she said.

  They discussed sleeplessness in low voices, though there was no one their voices could disturb from here but the
mice. Smoky, seeing she too wanted to bustle some to overcome wakefulness, allowed her to warm milk for him; to his he added a stiff measure of brandy.

  “Listen to that wind,” said Cloud.

  Above them, they heard the long gargle and whisper of a flushed toilet. “What’s up?” Cloud said. “A sleepless night, and no moon.” She shivered. “It feels like the night of a catastrophe, or a night big news comes, everybody awake. Well. Just chance.” She said it as another might say God help us—with that same degree of rote unbelief.

  Smoky, warmed now, rose and said “Well,” in a resigned sort of way. Cloud had begun to leaf through a cookbook there. He hoped she wouldn’t have to sit to watch bleak dawn come; he hoped he wouldn’t himself.

  At the top of the stairs he didn’t turn toward his own bed where, he knew, sleep didn’t yet await him. He turned toward Sophie’s room, with no intention but to look at her a while. Her restfulness calmed him sometimes, as a cat’s can, made him restful too. When he opened her door, he saw by the moon-pale night-light that someone sat on the edge of Sophie’s bed.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” said Daily Alice.

  There was an odd smell in the air, a smell like leaf mold, or Queen Anne’s-lace, or perhaps the earth under an upturned stone. “What’s up?” he asked softly. He came to sit on the other side of the bed.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing. I woke up when you left. I felt like something happened to Sophie, so I came to see.”

  There was no danger that their quiet talk would waken Sophie; people talking near her in her sleep only seemed to comfort her, to make her deep draughts of breath more regular.

  “Everything’s all right, though,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Wind pressed on the house, beating it in fitful anger; the window boomed. He looked down at Sophie and Lilac. Lilac looked quite dead, but after three children Smoky knew that this scary appearance, especially in the dark, wasn’t reason for alarm.