tears (can fish cry? she wondered, not for the first time).
When she thought she had his attention, she began to tell him how she had gone to the City in the fall and met this man in George Mouse’s house, and how she had known instantly (or at least decided very quickly) that he would be the one that it had been promised she would “find or make up,” as Spark had long ago put it to her. “While you slept through the winter,” she said shyly, tracing the quartz muscle of the rock she sat on, smiling but not looking at him (because she spoke of whom she loved), “we, well we met again, and made promises—you know—” She saw him flick his ghostly tail; she knew this to be a painful subject. She stretched out her great length on the cool rock and, chin in hands and eyes alight, told him about Smoky in terms glowing and vague, which didn’t seem to move the fish to enthusiasm. She took no notice. It
“No telling,” Grandfather Trout said gloomily. “Who’s to say what’s in their minds?”
“But you said…”
“I bring their messages, daughter. Don’t expect any more from me.”
“Well,” she said, put out, “I won’t wait forever. I love him. Life is short.”
“Life,” said Grandfather Trout as though his throat were thick with tears, “is long. Too long.” He turned his fins carefully and with a motion of his tail slid backwards into his hiding place.
“Tell them I came, anyway,” she shouted after him, her voice small against the waterfall’s. “Tell them I did my part.”
But he was gone.
She wrote to Smoky: “I’m going to get married,” and his heart turned cold where he stood by the letter-box, until he realized she meant to him. “Great-aunt Cloud has read the cards very carefully, once for each part, it’s to be Midsummer Day and this is what you have to do. Please
Which is how Smoky came to be walking not riding to Edgewood, with a wedding-suit in his pack old not new, and food made not bought; and why he had begun to look around himself for a place to spend the night, that he must beg or find but not pay for.
Trumps Turned at Edgewood
He had not known how suddenly the industrial park would quit and the country begin. It was late afternoon and he had turned westerly, and the road had become edgeworn, and patched like an old shoe in many shades of tar. On either side the fields and farms came down to meet the road; he walked beneath guardian trees neither farm nor road that cast multifold shadows now and then over him. The gregarious weeds that frequent roadsides, dusty, thick and blowsy, friends to man and traffic, nodded from fence and ditch by the way. Less and less often he would hear the hum of a car; the hum would grow intermittently, as the car went up and down hills, and then suddenly it would be on him very loud and roar past surprised, potent, fast, leaving the weeds blown and chuckling furiously for a moment; then the roar would just as quickly subside to a far hum again, and then gone, and the only sounds the insect orchestra and his own feet striking.
For a long time he had been walking somewhat uphill, but now the incline crested, and he looked out over a broad sweep of midsummer country. The road he stood on went on down through it, past meadows and through pastures and around wooded hills; it disappeared in a valley near a little town whose steeple just showed above the bursting green, and then appeared again, a tiny gray band curling into blue mountains in whose cleft the sun was setting amid roly-poly clouds.
And just then a woman on a porch at Edgewood far away turned a trump called the Journey. There was the Traveler, pack on his back and stout stick in his hand, and the long and winding road before him to traverse; and the Sun too, though whether setting or rising she had never decided. Beside the cards’ unfolding pattern, a brown cigarette smoldered in a saucer. She moved the saucer and put the Journey in its place in the pattern, and then turned another card. It was the Host.
When Smoky reached the bottom of the first of the rolling hills the road stitched up, he was in a trough of shadow, and the sun had set.
Junipers
On the whole he preferred finding a place to sleep to asking for one; he had brought two blankets. He had even thought of finding a hay-barn to sleep in, as travelers do in books (his books), but the real haybarns he passed seemed not only Private Property but also highly functional and crowded with large animals. He began to feel, in fact, somewhat lonely as the twilight deepened and the fields grew vague, and when he came on a bungalow at the bottom of the hill he went up to its picket fence and wondered how he might phrase what he thought must be an odd request.
It was a white bungalow snuggled within bushy evergreens. Roses just blown grew up trellises beside the green dutch door. White-painted stones marked the path from the door; on the darkling lawn a young deer looked up at him immobile in surprise, and dwarves sat cross-legged on toadstools or snuck away holding treasure. On the gate was a rustic board with a legend burned on it: The Junipers. Smoky unlatched the gate and opened it, and a small bell tinkled in the silence. The top of the dutch door opened, and yellow lamplight streamed out. A woman’s voice said “Friend or foe?” and laughed.
“Friend,” he said, and walked toward the door. The air smelled unmistakably of gin. The woman leaning on the door’s bottom half was one of those with a long middle age; Smoky couldn’t tell where along it she stood. Her thin hair might have been gray or brown, she wore cat’s-eye glasses and smiled a false-toothed smile; her arms folded on the door were comfortable and freckled. “Well, I don’t know
“I was wondering,” Smoky said, “am I on the right road for a town called Edgewood?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” she said. “Jeff? Can you tell this young man the way to Edgewood?” She awaited an answer from within he couldn’t hear, and then opened the door. “Come in,” she said. “We’ll see.”
The house was tiny and tidy and stuffed with stuff. An old, old dog of the dust-mop kind sniffed at his feet, laughing breathlessly; be bumped into a bamboo telephone table, shouldered a knickknack shelf, stepped on a sliding scatter rug and fell through a narrow archway into a parlor that smelled of roses, bay rum and last winter’s fires. Jeff put down his newspaper and lifted his slippered feet from their hassock. “Edgewood?” he asked around his pipe.
“Edgewood. I was given directions, sort of.”
“You hitching?” Jeff’s lean mouth opened like a fish’s to puff as he perused Smoky doubtfully.
“No, walking actually.” Above the fireplace was a sampler. It said:
“I’m going there to get married.” Ahhh, they seemed to say.
“Well.” Jeff stood. “Marge, get the map.”
It was a county map or something, much more detailed than Smoky’s; he found the constellation of towns he knew of, neatly outlined, but nothing for Edgewood. “It should be somewhere around these.” Jeff found the stub of a pencil, and with a “hmmm” and a “let’s see,” connected the centers of the five towns with a five-pointed star.
