“It doesn’t do to inquire into some things too deeply,” Doc said. “Into what’s given. What can’t be changed.”
“No,” Smoky said, with less conviction.
“We,” Doc said, and Smoky thought he knew whom of them that “we” included and whom of them it didn’t, “have our responsibilities. It wouldn’t do just to run off on some quest and pay no attention to what others might want or need. We have to think of them.”
The Meadow Mouse in the midst of his wonderings had fallen asleep, but awoke with a start as the two great creatures stood and collected their inexplicable belongings.
“Sometimes we don’t entirely understand,” Doc said, as though it were wisdom he had arrived at after some cost. “But we have our parts to play.”
Smoky drank, and capped the flask. Could it really be that he intended to abdicate his responsibilities, throw up his part, do something so horrid and unlike himself, and so hopeless too? What you’re looking for is right in your own backyard: a grim joke, in his case. Well, he couldn’t tell; and knew no one he could ask; but he knew he was tired of struggling.
And anyway, he thought, it wouldn’t be the first time it ever happened in the world.
Harvest-Home
The day of the game supper, when the birds had hung, was something of an occasion every year. Through that week, people would arrive, and be closeted with Great-aunt Cloud, and pay their rents or explain why they couldn’t (Smoky wasn’t amazed, having no sense of real property and its values, at the great extent of the Drinkwater property or the odd way in which it was managed— though this yearly ceremony did seem very feudal to him). Most of those who came brought some tribute too, a gallon of cider, a basket of white-rayed apples, tomatoes in purple paper.
The Floods and Hannah and Sonny Noon, the largest (in every way) of their tenants, stayed to the supper. Rudy brought a duck of his own to fill out the feast, and the lavender-smelling lace tablecloth was laid. Cloud opened her polished box of wedding-silver (she being the only Drinkwater bride anyone had ever thought to give such to, the Clouds had been careful about these things) and the tall candles shone on it and on the facets of cut- crystal glasses, diminished this year by one small heartrending crash.
They set out a lot of sleepy, sea-dark wine that Walter Ocean made every year and decanted the next, his tribute; in it, toasts were made over the glistening bodies of the birds and the bowls of autumn harvest. Rudy rose, his stomach advancing somewhat over the table’s edge, and said:
Which that year included his own grandson Robin, and Sonny Noon’s new twins, and Smoky’s daughter Tacey.
Mother said, glass aloft:
Smoky began one in Latin, but Daily Alice and Sophie groaned, so he stopped, and began again:
“ ‘Abating shadows’ is good,” said Doc. “And ‘conscript dust’.”
“Didn’t know you were a smoker though,” Rudy said.
“And
“I’ll say one I learned as a kid,” said Hannah Noon, “and then let’s get down to it:
Seized by the Tale
After dinner, Rudy sorted through some piles of ancient records as heavy as dishes that had lain long disused and circled with arcs of dust in the buffet. He found treasures, greeting old friends with glad cries. They stacked them on the record player and danced.
Daily Alice, unable after the first round to dance any more, rested her hands on the great prie-dieu of stomach she had grown and watched the others. Great Rudy flung his little wife around like a jointed doll, and Alice supposed he’d learned over the years how to live with her and not break her; she imagined his great weight on her—no, probably she would climb up on him, like climbing a mountain.
Smoky, bright-eyed and loose-limbed, made her laugh with his cheerfulness, like a sun; a sunny disposition, is that what was meant by that? And how did he come to know the words to these :razy songs, who seemed never to know anything that everybody else knew? He danced with Sophie, just tall enough to take her properly, footing it gallantly and inexpertly.
