Little, Big

frail but no more help than ever. She crushed it slowly in her hands, thinking she knew nothing at all and yet knew this: that the fate that awaited her and all of them awaited them here (why was she dumb to say why she knew it?), and so they must cling to this place, and not stray far from it, she supposed that she herself wouldn’t ever leave it again. It was the door, the greatest of doors, it stood Somehow, by chance or design, on the very edge or border of Elsewhere, and it would in the end he the last door that led that way. For a long time it would stand open; then for a time after that it would at least be able to be opened, or unlocked, if you had the key; but there would come a time when it would he closed for good, not be a door at all any more; and she wanted none of those whom she loved to be standing outside then.

What You Most Want

The south wind blows the fly in the fish’s mouth, says the Angler, but it didn’t seem to blow August’s well- tied and tempting examples into any. Ezra Meadows was sure that fish bite before rain; old MacDonald had always been sure they never do, and August saw that they do and don’t: they bite at the gnats and mosquitoes settling like dust-motes over the water, driven down by altering pressure (Change, said John’s ambivalent barometer) but not at the Jack Scotts and Alexandras August played over them.

Perhaps he wasn’t thinking hard eno,ugh about angling. He was trying, without exactly trying to try, to see or notice something, without exactly noticing or seeing it, that would he a clue or a message; trying to remember, at the same time as he tried to forget he had ever forgotten, how such clues or messages had used to appear, and how he had used to interpret them. He must also try not to think This is madness; nor to think that he did this only for his mother’s sake. Either thought would spoil whatever might happen. Over the water a kingfisher shot, laughing, iridescent in the sun, just above the evening which had already obscured the stream. I’m not mad, August thought.

A similarity between fishing and this other enterprise was that no matter where along the stream you stood, there seemed to be, just down there, where the stream spilled through a narrow race around stones, or just beyond the tresses of the willows, the perfect spot, the spot you had all along intended to go to. The feeling wouldn’t diminish even when, after some thought, you realized that the perfect spot was one where, a few minutes ago, you had been standing, standing and looking longingly at the spot you now stood in and wanting to be amid the long maculations of its leaf shadows, as you now were, and yet; and just as August did realize this, as his desires were so to speak in transit between There and Here, something seized his line and nearly snatched the pole from his abstracted hand.

As startled as the fish itself must be, August played him clumsily, but had him after a struggle; netted him; the leaf-shadows were absorbed into evening vagueness; the fish looked up at him with the dull astonishment of all caught fish; August removed the hook, inserted his thumb in the bony mouth, and neatly broke the fish’s neck. His thumb, when he withdrew it, was coated with slime and cold fish-blood. Without thinking, he thrust the thumb into his own mouth and sucked it. The kingfisher, making another laughing sortie just then, eyed him as he arrowed over the water and then up into a dead tree.

August, fish in his creel, went to the bank and sat, waiting. The kingfisher had laughed at him, not at the world in general, he was sure of that, a sarcastic, vindictive laugh. Well, perhaps he was laughable. The fish was not seven inches long, hardly breakfast. So? Well? “If I had to live on fish,” he said, “I’d grow a beak.”

“You shouldn’t speak,” said the kingfisher, “until you’re spoken to. There are manners, you know.”

“Sorry.”

“First I speak,” said the kingfisher, “and you wonder who it is that’s spoken to you. Then you realize it’s me; then you look at your thumb and your fish, and see that it was the fish’s blood you tasted, that allowed you to understand the voices of creatures; then we converse.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“We’ll assume it was done that way.” The kingfisher spoke in the choleric, impatient tone August would have expected from his upshot head-feathers, his thick neck, his fierce, annoyed eyes and beak: a kingfisher’s voice. Halcyon bird indeed!

“Now you address me,” the kingfisher said. “ ‘O Bird!’ you say, and make your request.”

“O Bird!” August said, opening his hands imploringly, “Tell me this: Is it okay if we have a gas station in Meadowbrook, and sell Ford cars?”

“Certainly.”

“What?”

“Certainly!”

It was so inconvenient speaking in this way to a bird, a kingfisher seated on a branch in a dead tree at no more conversational a distance than any kingfisher ever was, that August imagined the bird as seated beside him on the bank, a sort of kingfisher-like person, of a more conversable size, with his legs crossed, as August’s were. This worked well. He doubted that this kingfisher was a kingfisher at all anyway.

“Now,” said the kingfisher, still bird enough to be unable to look at August with more than one eye at a time, and that one bright and smart and pitiless, “was that all?”

“I… think so. I—”

“Yes?”

“Well, I thought there might be some objection. The noise. The smell.”

“None.”

“Oh.”

“On the other hand,” said the kingfisher—a laugh, a raucous laugh, seemed always just beneath his words —“since you’re here, and I’m here, you might ask for something else altogether.”

“What?”

“Oh, anything. What you most want.”

He had thought—right up until he had voiced his absurd request—that he was doing just that: but, with a terrible rush of heat that took his breath away, he knew that he hadn’t, and that he could. He blushed fiercely. “Well,” he said, stammering, “over in Meadowbrook, there’s, there’s a farmer, a certain farmer, and he has a daughter…”

“Yes yes yes,” said the kingfisher impatiently, as though he knew well enough what August wanted, and didn’t want to be bothered with having it spelled out circumstantially. “But let’s discuss payment first, reward after.”

“Payment?”

The kingfisher cocked his head in short, furious changes of attitude, sometimes eyeing August, sometimes the stream or the sky, as though he were trying to think of some really cutting remark in which to couch his annoyance. “Payment,” he said. “Payment, payment. It’s nothing to do with you. Let’s call it a favor, if you prefer. The return of certain property that—don’t get me wrong— I’m sure fell into your hands inadvertently. I mean—” for the briefest moment, and for the first time, the kingfisher showed something like hesitation, or trepidation “—I mean a deck of cards, playing cards. Old ones. Which you possess.”

“Violet’s?” said August.

“Those ones.”

“I’ll ask her.”

“No, no. She thinks, you see, the cards are hers. So. She mustn’t know.”

“You mean steal them?”

The kingfisher was silent. For a moment he disappeared altogether, although that may only have been August’s attention wandering from the effort of imagining him, to the enormity that he had been commanded to perform.

When he appeared again, the kingfisher seemed somewhat subdued. “Have you given any further thought to your reward?” he said, almost soothingly.

In fact he had. Even as he had grasped the fact that he could in some sense ask Amy of them (without even trying to imagine how they could make good on such a promise) he had ceased to desire her quite so intensely—