small presage of what would happen when he did possess her, or anyone. But what one could he choose then? Was it possible he could ask for—“All of them,” he said in a small voice.
“All?”
“Any one I want.” If sudden horrid strength of desire hadn’t whelmed him, shame would never have allowed him to say it. “Power over them.”
“You have it.” The kingfisher cleared his throat, looking away, and combed his beard with a black claw, as though glad this unclean bargaining was done.’ “There is a certain pool up in the woods above the lake. A certain rock which juts out into the pool. Put the cards there, in their bag in their box, and take the gift you find there. Do it soon. Goodbye.”
Evening was dense yet clear, presage of a storm; the confusions of sunset were over. The pools of the stream were black, with steady glassy ribs raised by the continuous current. A black flutter of feathers in a dead tree was a kingfisher preparing for sleep. August waited on the bank till he had been returned, by an evening path, to the place he had started out from; then he gathered up his gear and went home, eyes wide and blind to the beauties of a stormgathering evening, feeling faintly sick with strangeness and expectation.
Something Horrific
The velvet bag in which Violet’s cards were kept was of a dusty rose color that had once been vivid. The box had once held a set of silver coffee-spoons from the Crystal Palace, but those had long since been sold, when she and her father wandered. To bring those strange huge oblongs drawn or printed centuries before out of this cozy box, with a picture of the old Queen and the Palace itself done on the cover in different woods, was always an odd moment, like the drawing aside of an arras in an old play to reveal something horrific.
Horrific: well, not quite, or not usually, though there were times when, as she laid out a Rose or a Banner or some other shape, she felt afraid: felt that some secret might be revealed which she didn’t want to know, her own death or something even more dreadful. But—despite the weird, minatory images of the trumps, engraved with dense black detail like Durer’s, baroque and Germanic—the secrets revealed were oftenest not terrible, oftenest not even secret: cloudy abstractions merely, oppositions, contentions, resolutions, common as proverbs and as unspecific. At least so she had been told the fall of them should be interpreted, by John and those of his acquaintance who knew card reading.
But the cards they knew weren’t these cards, exactly; and though she knew no other way of laying them out or interpreting them than as the Tarot of the Egyptians was laid out (before she was instructed in those methods she used just to turn them down anyhow and stare at them, often for hours) she often wondered if there weren’t some more revelatory, simpler, Somehow more useful manipulation of them she could make.
“And here is,” she said, turning one up carefully top to bottom, “a Five of Wands.”
“New possibilities,” Nora said. “New acquaintances. Surprising developments.”
“All right.” The Five of Wands went in its place in the Horseshoe Violet was making. She chose from another pile—the cards had been sorted, by arcane distribution, into six piles before her—and turned a trump: it was the Sportsman.
This was the difficulty. Like the usual deck, Violet’s contained a set of twenty-one major trumps; but hers —persons, places, things, notions—were not the Greater Trumps at all. And so when the Bundle, or the Traveler, or Convenience, or Multiplicity, or the Sportsman fell, a leap had to be made, meanings guessed at which made sense of the spread. Over the years, with growing certainty, she had assigned meanings to her trumps, made inferences from the way in which they fell among the cups and swords and wands, and discerned—or seemed to discern—their influences, malign or beneficent. But she could never be sure. Death, the Moon, Judgement— those greater trumps had large and obvious significance; what did one make though of the Sportsman?
He was, like all people pictured in her cards, musclebound in a not quite human way and striking an absurd, orgulous pose, toes turned out and knuckles on hip. He seemed certainly overdressed for what he was about, with ribbons at his knees, slashes in his jacket, and a wreath of dying flowers around his broad hat; but that was for sure a fishing pole over his shoulder. He carried something like a creel, and other impedimenta she didn’t understand; and a dog, who looked a lot like Spark, lay asleep at his feet. It was Grandy who called this figure the Sportsman; underneath him was written in Roman capitals P I S C A T O R.
“So,” Violet said, “new experiences, and good times, or adventures outdoors, for someone. That’s nice.”
“For who?” Nora asked.
“For
“Well, for whom?”
“For whomever we’re reading this spread for. Did we decide? Or is this only practice?”
“Since it’s coming out so well,” Nora said, “let’s say it’s for someone.”
“August.” Poor August, something good ought to be in store for him.
“All right.” But before Violet could turn another card, Nora said “Wait. We shouldn’t joke with it. I mean if it didn’t
“I don’t know.” She stopped dealing them out. “No,” she said. “Not ftr
Nora said nothing to this. She believed Violet, and believed Violet knew the Tale in ways she couldn’t imagine; but she had never felt herself to be protected.
“There are catastrophes,” Violet said, “of an ordinary kind, that if the cards predicted them I wouldn’t believe them.”
“And you correct my grammar!” Nora said, laughing. Violet, laughing too, turned the next card: the Four of Cups, reversed.
“Weariness. Disgust. Aversion,” Nora said. “Bitter experience.”
Below, the ratchety doorbell rang. Nora leapt up.
“Now, who could that be?” Violet said, sweeping up the cards.
“Oh,” Nora said, “I don’t know.” She had gone to the mirror hastily, and pushed her heavy golden hair quickly into place, and smoothed her blouse. “It
“Yes,” Violet said. “You go see. We’ll do this again another day.”
But when, a week later, Nora asked for another lesson, and Violet went to the drawer where her cards were kept, they weren’t there. Nora insisted she hadn’t taken them. They weren’t in any other place that Violet might absentmindedly have put them. With half her drawers turned out and papers and boxes littering the floor from her search, she sat on the edge of the bed, puzzled and a little alarmed.
“Gone,” she said.
Anthology of Love
“I’ll do what you want, August,” Amy said. “Whatever you want.”
He bent his head down onto his upraised knees and said “Oh, Jesus, Amy. Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, don’t swear so, August, it’s terrible.” Her face was as misty and tearful as the shorn October cornfield in their view, where blackbirds hunted corn, rising at unseen signals and settling again elsewhere. She put her harvestchapped hands on his. They both shivered, from the cold and from chill circumstance. “I’ve read in books and such that for a while people love people and then they don’t any more. I never knew why.
“I don’t know why either, Amy.”
