or something; but only Smoky had seen it, and Smoky wondered.
Winters
There was a pan of water on the stove which sat in the old music room, to help keep the plaster of the ceiling from cracking further from the dryness. A big wooden box roughly carpentered by Smoky held logs to feed the stove, and the two together, stove and woodbox, gave a Klondike air to the pretty room. Rudy Flood had cut the logs, and been felled himself doing so; had pitched face forward, chain saw still gripped in his hands, dead before he struck the ground, which (so Robin said, who was much changed by witnessing it) shook when he met it. Sophie, whenever she rose from her place at the drum-table to feed the insatiable Moloch, had an unpleasant or at least odd sensation that it was pieces of Rudy and not of his woodlot that she thrust into its maw.
Fifty-Two
Work consumed men. It hadn’t been so in Sophie’s youth. Not only Robin, but Sonny Noon and many others who in the old expansive days might have given up the farms their parents had worked, now drew in, thinking that if they had not these acres, and this labor, they’d have nothing. Rudy had after all been an exception; the older generation’s experience had mostly been with endless possibility, sudden change for the better, vistas of freedom and ease. The younger saw things differently. Their motto was, perforce had to be, the old one about Use it up, wear it out and so on. That applied all around: doing his part, Smoky had decided that rents would be reduced or in abeyance indefinitely. And the house showed it: it was, or seemed to be, wearing out. Sophie, pulling her thick shawl more closely around her, looked up at the skeleton’s hand and arm drawn in cracks across the ceiling, and then returned to her cards.
Being used up, worn out, and not replaced. Could that be it? She looked at the fall she had made.
Nora Cloud had left Sophie not only her cards, but her sense that every fall made with them was Somehow contiguous with every other, that they made only one geography, or told only one story, though it could be read or viewed differently to different purposes, which made it seem discontinuous. Sophie, taking up Cloud’s view at the point where she had left it, had taken it further: if it were all one thing, then one question continually proposed to it should come eventually to have a whole answer, however lengthy and encyclopaedic; should come to have the whole thing for an answer. If only she could concentrate hard enough, continue to formulate the question properly and with the right variations and qualifications, and not be distracted by the shadow answers to unasked small questions which lurked within the falls—yes, Smoky’s angina will worsen, Lily’s baby will be a boy—then perhaps she could reach it.
The question she had was not exactly the one that Ariel Hawksquill had come to have answered, though that lady’s sudden appearance and importunity had jolted Sophie into beginning to try and ask it. Hawksquill had had no trouble locating in the cards the huge events that had lately been taking place in the world, and the reasons for them, and her own part in them too, cutting them from the trivia and puzzlements like a surgeon finding and excising a tumor. Sophie’s difficulty in doing such a thing had been that, ever since her search for Lilac, question and answer with these cards had seemed to her to be one; all answers seemed to her to be only questions about the question, every question only a form of the answer it sought. Hawksquill’s long training had allowed her to overcome this difficulty, and any Gypsy fortune-teller could have explained to Sophie how to ignore it or evade it: but perhaps if one had, Sophie wouldn’t have struggled so with the question, through years, through long winters, and would not now be as close as she felt herself to be to a sort of great dictionary or guidebook or almanac of answers to her (strictly speaking unaskable) single question.
Being used up, one by one, and not being replaced; dying, in fact, though they couldn’t die, or anyway Sophie had always supposed they couldn’t, she didn’t know why… Could it be so? Or was it just a winter thought in a time of hardship and shortage?
Cloud had said: it only seems as though the world is getting old and worn out, just as you are yourself. Its life is far too long for you to feel it age during your own. What you learn as you get older is that the world is old, and has been old for a long time.
Well: all right. But what Sophie felt to be aging wasn’t a world, but only its inhabitants: if there were such a thing as a world which they inhabited, distinct from them, which Sophie couldn’t imagine really—but anyway, suppose there was such a world, old or young didn’t matter, what Sophie knew for sure was that however densely populated those lands may have’ been in Dr. Bramble’s time or in Paracelsus’s, they weren’t populated at all any longer in any large sense, Sophie thought it would be possible eventually— soon!—if not to name at least to number all of them, and that the total number wouldn’t be a large one; two digits only, possibly, probably. Which (since everyone without exception quoted in the
Or reduced by war. War was what Ariel Hawksquill had determined to be the relation at work, the thing that had made the world or this Tale (if there was a difference) turn so sad and puzzling and uncertain. Like all wars, an unchosen thing, however inevitable, with awful losses on their side at least, Sophie couldn’t imagine what losses they might themselves have inflicted, or how… War: could it be then that all that remained of them was one last forlorn hope, a brave band caught in a desperate rearguard action and going down to the last man?
No! It was too awful to think of: dying. Dying out. Sophie knew (none better) that they had not ever thought of her with love, didn’t in any human sense care about her at all, or any being like her. They had stolen Lilac from her, and though that had not been for any intention of hurting Sophie, it hadn’t been for any love they bore Lilac either, presumably, but only for reasons of their own. No, Sophie had no reason to love them; but the thought of their passing away utterly was unbearable: like thinking of a winter with no end.
And yet she thought she could soon count out the few remaining.
She assembled her deck, and spread it all in a fan before her; then she drew out court cards one by one to represent the ones she already knew of, laying them in groups with low cards for their courts or children or agents, insofar as she could guess at them.
One for sleep, and four for seasons; three to tell fates, two to be Prince and Princess; one to go messages, no, two to go messages, one to go and one to come back again… It was a matter of discriminating between functions, and learning which were whose, and how many were needed for it. One to bring gifts; three to bear gifts away. Queen of Swords and King of Swords and Knight of Swords; Queen of Coins and King of Coins and ten low cards for their children…
Fifty-two?
Or was it only that at that number (with only the Least Trumps, the plot which they acted out, left uncounted) her deck ran out?
There was a sudden clanging noise above her head, and Sophie ducked; it sounded as though a full and heavy set of fire-irons had tumbled over in the attic. Smoky, at work in the orrery. She glanced up. The crack in the ceiling seemed to have lengthened, but she doubted that it really had.
Three for labor, two to make music, one to dream dreams…
She thrust her hands into her sleeves. Few, anyway; not hosts. The taut plastic over the window was a drumskin, tapped on by wind. It seemed—it was hard to tell—that it had begun to snow again. Sophie, abandoning the count (she still didn’t know enough; it was wrong, and more than wrong on an afternoon like this, to speculate when you knew so little) gathered up the cards and put them away in their bag in their box.
She sat for a while, listening to the taps of Smoky’s hammer, hesitant at first, then more insistent, then ringing as though he struck a gong. Then they fell silent, and the afternoon returned.
