And she was indeed there.
And, by her voice, she was beautiful…
That was it.
That was, at least, the most of it.
The voice seemed more important than all the rest.
Not that we didn't argue about weights and measures:
She should not be bony to cut us to the quick, nor so fat we might sink out of sight when she squeezed us.
Her hand pressed to ours, or brushing our brow in the middle of sick-fever nights, must not be marble-cold, dreadful, or oven-hot, oppressive, but somewhere between. The nice temperature of a baby-chick held in the hand after a long night's sleep and just plucked from beneath a contemplative hen; that, that was it.
Oh, we were great ones for detail. We fought and argued and cried, and Timothy won on the color of her eyes, for reasons to be known later.
Grandmother's hair? Agatha, with girl's ideas, though reluctantly given, she was in charge of that.
We let her choose from a thousand harp strands hung in filamentary tapestries like varieties of rain we ran amongst. Agatha did not run happily, but seeing we boys would mess things in tangles, she told us to move aside.
And so the bargain shopping through the dime-store inventories and the Tiffany extensions of the Ben Franklin Electric Storm Machine and Fantoccini Pantomime Company was done.
And the always flowing river ran its tide to an end and deposited us all on a far shore in the late day…
It was very clever of the Fantoccini people, after that. How?
They made us wait.
They knew we were not won over. Not completely, no, nor half completely.
Especially Agatha, who turned her face to her wall and saw sorrow there and put her hand out again and again to touch it. We found her fingernail marks on the wallpaper each morning, in strange little silhouettes, half beauty, half nightmare. Some could be erased with a breath, like ice flowers on a winter pane. Some could not be rubbed out with a washcloth, no matter how hard you tried.
And meanwhile, they made us wait.
So we fretted out June.
So we sat around July.
So we groused through August and then on August 29, «I have this feeling,» said Timothy, and we all went out after breakfast to sit on the lawn.
Perhaps we had smelled something on Father's conversation the previous night, or caught some special furtive glance at the sky or the freeway Rapped briefly and then lost in his gaze. Or perhaps it was merely the way the wind blew the ghost curtains out over our beds, making pale messages all night.
For suddenly there we were in the middle of the grass, Timothy and I, with Agatha, pretending no curiosity, up on the porch, hidden behind the potted geraniums.
We gave her no notice. We knew that if we acknowledged her presence, she would flee, so we sat and watched the sky where nothing moved but birds and highflown jets, and watched the freeway where a thousand cars might suddenly deliver forth our Special Gift… but… nothing.
At noon we chewed grass and lay low…
At one o'clock, Timothy blinked his eyes.
And then, with incredible precision, it happened.
It was as if the Fantoccini people knew our surface tension.
All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves.
Well, as if knowing our long wait must absolutely end within one minute! this
At that instant, I repeat, the clouds above our house opened wide and let forth a helicopter like Apollo driving his chariot across mythological skies.
And the Apollo machine swam down on its own summer breeze, wafting hot winds to cool, reweaving our hair, smartening our eyebrows, applauding our pant legs against our shins, making a flag of Agatha's hair on the porch and thus settled like a vast frenzied hibiscus on our lawn, the helicopter slid wide a bottom drawer and deposited upon the grass a parcel of largish
size, no sooner having laid same then the vehicle, with not so much as a god bless or farewell, sank straight up, disturbed the calm air with a mad ten thousand flourishes and then, like a skyborne dervish, tilted and fell off to be mad some other place.
Timothy and I stood riven for a long moment looking at the packing case, and then we saw the crowbar taped to the top of the raw pine lid and seized it and began to pry and creak and squeal the boards off, one by one, and as we did this I saw Agatha sneak up to watch and I thought, thank you, God, thank you that Agatha never saw a coffin, when Mother went away, no box, no cemetery, no earth, just words in a big church, no box, no box like
The last pine plank fell away. Timothy and I gasped. Agatha, between us now, gasped, too.
For inside the immense raw pine package was the most beautiful idea anyone ever dreamt and built.
Inside was the perfect gift for any child from seven to seventy-seven. We stopped up our breaths. We let them out in cries of delight and adoration. Inside the opened box was… A mummy. Or, first anyway, a mummy case, a sarcophagus! «Oh, no!» Happy tears filled Timothy's eyes. «It can't be!» said Agatha. «It is, it is!» «Our very own?» «Ours!» «It must be a mistake!» «Sure, they'll want it back!» «They can't
Agatha wiped the rain away.
And the golden mask face of the woman carved on the sarcophagus lid looked back at us with just the merest smile which hinted at our own joy, which accepted the overwhelming upsurge of a love we thought had drowned forever but now surfaced into the sun.
Not only did she have a sun-metal face stamped and beaten out of purest gold, with delicate nostrils and a mouth that was both firm and gentle, but her eyes, fixed into their sockets, were cerulean or amethystine or lapus lazuli, or all three, minted and fused together, and her body was covered over with lions and eyes and ravens, and her hands were crossed upon her carved bosom and in one gold mitten she clenched a thonged whip for obedience, and in the other a fantastic ranuncula, which makes for obedience out of love, so the whip lies unused…
And as our eyes ran down her hieroglyphs it came to all three of us at the same instant: «Why, those signs!» «Yes, the hen tracks!» «The birds, the snakes!» They didn't speak tales of the Past. They were hieroglyphs of the Future.
This was the first queen mummy delivered forth in all time whose papyrus inkings etched out the next month, the next season, the next year, the next
She did not mourn for time spent.
No. She celebrated the bright coinage yet to come, banked, waiting, ready to be drawn upon and used.
We sank to our knees to worship that possible time. First one hand, then another, probed out to niggle, twitch, touch, itch over the signs.
«There's me, yes, look! Me, in sixth grade!» said Agatha, now in the fifth. «See the girl with my- colored hair and wearing my gingerbread suit?»
«There's me in the twelfth year of high school!» said Timothy, so very young now but building taller stilts every week and stalking around the yard.
«There's me,» I said, quietly, warm, «in college. The guy wearing glasses who runs a little to fat. Sure. Heck.» I snorted. «That's me.»
The sarcophagus spelled winters ahead, springs to squander, autumns to spend with all the golden and rusty and copper leaves like coins, and over all, her bright sun symbol, daughter-of- Ra eternal face, forever above our horizon, forever an illumination to tilt our shadows to better ends.
«Hey!» we all said at once, having read and reread our Fortune-Told scribblings, seeing our lifelines and
