acolytes.
(In one thing all three were alike: they each had only one eyebrow, running over their noses from outer eye-corner to outer eye-corner without a break. Of Smoky and Alice’s children, only Auberon was without it.)
Auberon’s memories of his sisters would always be of their playing at the mysteries, birth, marriage, love, and death. He had been their Baby when he was very young, chivvied around from imaginary bath to imaginary hospital endlessly, a living doll. Later he was compelled to be Bridegroom, and finally Departed when he was old enough to be pleased simply to lie there while they ministered to him. And it was not only play; as they grew older, all three seemed to develop an instinctive grasp of the scenes and acts of quotidian life, of the curtains rising and rung down in the lives around them. No one remembered telling them (they were aged four, six, and eight then) that the youngest of the Bird girls was to be married to Jim Jay over in Plainfield, but they appeared at the church in jeans with bunches of wildflowers in their hands and knelt decorously on the church steps while inside the bride and groom took their vows. (The wedding photographer, waiting outside for the couple to appear, took a whimsical picture of the three darlings which later won a prize in a photo contest. It looked posed. In a sense, it was.)
From an early age, they had all three learned needlework, becoming more skilled and taking up in turn more difficult and esoteric branches of it as they got older, tatting, silk embroidery, crewel-work; what Tacey learned first from Great-aunt Cloud and her grandmother she taught to Lily, and Lily to Lucy; and as they sat together expertly doing and undoing with thread (often in the many-sided music room where the sun came in at all seasons) they kept up among themselves a constant calendar of the passings, pledges, partings, parturitions expected (announced or not) among the people they knew. They made knots, they snipped threads, they knew all; it came to pass that no sad or glad occasion was unknown to them, and few went forward without the three of them present. Those that did seemed incomplete, unsanctioned. Their only brother’s departure for his appointment with destiny and lawyers was not to be one of those.
“Here,” said Tacey, plucking from her bike’s basket a small package done up in ice-blue paper, “take this, and open it when you get to the City.” She kissed him lightly.
“Take this,” Lily said, giving him one wrapped in mintygreen, “and open it when you think of it.”
“Take this,” Lucy said. Hers was wrapped in white. “Open it when you want to come home again.”
He gathered these together, nodding, embarrassed, and put them in his duffle. The girls said nothing more about them, only sat for a while with him and Smoky on the porch, across which dead leaves blew unswept, gathering up under the seats of wicker chairs (whith ought to go in the basement, Smoky thought; an old chore of Auberon’s; he felt a chill of foreboding, or loss, but thought it to be the somber November gloaming only). Auberon, who was young and solitary enough to think that he might have escaped his house without anyone being the wiser, that no one paid much attention to his movements, sat constrainedly with them watching dawn grow; then he slapped his knees, rose, shook his father’s hand, kissed his sisters, promised to write, and at last stepped off southward into the sounding sea of leaves, striking for the crossroads where a bus could be hailed; he didn’t look back at the four who watched him go.
“Well,” Smoky said, remembering his own journey to the City at an age near Auberon’s, “he’ll have adventures.”
“Lots,” Tacey said.
“It’ll be fun,” Smoky said, “probably, possibly. I remember…”
“Fun for a while,” Lily said.
“Not much fun,” Lucy said. “Fun first, though, at least.”
“Dad,” said Tacey, seeing him trembling, “you shouldn’t sit out here in your ’jammies, for God’s sake.”
He rose, pulling his bathrobe around him. This afternoon he would have to get in the porch furniture, before snow piled absurdly in its summery seats.
A Friend of the Doctor’s
Shifting focus, George Mouse watched from a niche in the Old Stone Fence as Auberon came across the Old Pasture, short-cutting his way toward Meadowbrook. The Meadow Mouse in that niche, grass blade between his teeth and gloomy thoughts in his mind, watched the human come toward him, crunching great twigs and dead leaves by the hundreds beneath his boots. Ah, the great and clumsy feet of them! The shod feet, larger and harder even than the Brown Bear’s of ancient memory! Only the fact that they had only two each, and came around rarely and singly near his home, allowed the Meadow Mouse to feel somewhat more kindly toward them than toward the house-wrecking Cow, his personal behemoth. As Auberon came closer, passing indeed very close to the niche where he huddled, the Meadow Mouse had a surprise. This was the boy—grown huge—who had once come with the Doctor who was the Meadow Mouse’s great-great-grandfather’s friend; the very same boy that the Meadow Mouse as a tiny mousling had once observed, hands on his bare and scabby knees peering intently into the familial home as the Doctor took down Great-great-grandfather’s memoirs, which were so famous now not only among generations of Meadow Mice but throughout the Great World as well! His natural timidity overcome by a rush of family feeling, the Meadow Mouse put his nose out of the niche in the wall and attempted a greeting: “My great- great-grandfather knew the Doctor,” he called out. But the fellow went right on.
The Doctor could talk with the animals, but the boy, apparently, could not.
A Shepherd in the Bronx
When Auberon was standing by the crossroads ankle-deep in golden leaves, and Smoky was standing abstracted before his tribe who puzzled that he had fallen silent, chalk to board, between noun and predicate, Daily Alice beneath her figured quilt (yes! George Mouse gasped at the breadth and length of his own Mental Sympathies) dreamed that her son Auberon, who lived in the City now, had telephoned to tell her how he was getting on.
“For a while I was a shepherd in the Bronx,” the disembodied and still secretive voice was saying, “but when November came, I sold the flock;” and as he told her of it, she could see the Bronx he spoke of: its green, cropped sea-hills, a space of clean, windy air between those hills and the low wet clouds. It was as though she had been there herself when he shepherded, and had followed the delicate prints and black droppings along the rutted ways to pasturage, her ears full of their complainings, nose full of the smell of their wet wool on misty mornings. Vivid! She could see her son when (as he told her) he would stand staff in hand on a promontory there and look off to the sea, and to the west from where the weather came, and to the south across the river, to the dark wood that covered the sea-island there, and wonder…
In the fall then he changed his leathers and gaiters for a decent suit of black and his crook for a walking- stick, and though he had never decided on it in so many words, he and the dog Spark (a good sheepdog whom Auberon could have sold with the flock but couldn’t part with) set out along the Harlem River till they came to a place where they could cross (near 137th Street). The aged, aged ferryman had a beautiful great- grandaughter brown as a berry and a gray, flat, knocking, groaning boat; Auberon stood up in the bows as the ferry drifted along its line downstream to a mooring on the opposite side. He paid, the dog Spark leapt out before him, and he stepped off into the Wild Wood without looking back. It was late afternoon; the sun (he could glimpse it now and then, a dull yellow glow behind gray clouds) seemed so cold and cheerless he almost wished for night.
Deeper in, he retracted this wish. Somehow he had turned the wrong way between St. Nicholas Park and Cathedral Parkway, and found himself climbing stony uplands written on by lichen. The great trees clinging to the rocky places with their knuckled toes groaned and chuckled at him as he passed, and made bole-faces in the twilight. Panting on a high rock, he saw between the trees the gray sun go out. He knew he was still far uptown, and now night had come; he was cold, and how many warnings had he always had about night in this place? He felt small. In fact he was growing small. Spark noticed it, but made no remark.
The night as it will do brought forth creatures. Auberon began foolishly to hurry, which made him stumble, which caused the creatures to come close, thousand-eyed in the complex darkness all around. Auberon collected himself. Mustn’t show them your fear. He took a grip on his stick. Looking neither right nor left, he toiled downtown; he walked, didn’t walk as appropriate. Once or twice he caught himself gawking up at the immense trees scraping
