Little, Big

strangled reveille of a cock. “Damn animals,” he said aloud, and was again returning to sleep when he remembered where he was. Had he really heard goats and chickens? No. A dream; or some City noise transformed by sleep. But then cockcrow came again. Pulling the blanket around him (it was deathly cold in the library, the fire long since out) he went to the mullioned window and looked down into the yard. George Mouse was just returning from the milking, in high black rubber boots, carrying steaming milk-pail. From a shed roof a scrawny Rhode Island Red lifted his clipped wings and gave the cry again. Auberon was looking down on Old Law Farm.

Old Law Farm

Of all George Mouse’s fantastic schemes, Old Law Farm had had the virtue of necessity. These dark days, if you wanted fresh eggs, milk, butter, at less than ruinous prices, there was nothing for it but to supply them yourself. And the square of long-empty buildings was uninhabitable anyway, so its outside windows were blinded with tin or blackened plywood, its doors stopped with cinder block, arid it became the hollow castle wall around a farm. Chickens now roosted in the degraded interiors, goats laughed and bewailed in the garden apartments and ate orts from claw-foot bathtubs. The nude brown vegetable garden which Auberon looked out on from the library windows and which took up much of the old backyards within the block was rimy this morning; orange pumpkins showed beneath the remains of corn and cabbage. Someone, small and dark, was going carefully up and down the wrought-iron fire escapes and in and out of frameless windows. Chickens squawked. She wore a sequined evening gown, and shivered as she collected eggs in a gold lame purse. She looked disgusted, and when she called out something to George Mouse he only pulled his wide hat down further over his face and galoshed away. She came down into the yard, stepping amid the mud and garden detritus on fragile high heels. She shouted a word after George, flinging up an arm, then tugged her fringed shawl angrily around her shoulders. The lame purse over her arm just then gave way under its load of eggs, and one by one they began to fall out as though laid. At first she didn’t notice, then cried out—“Oh! Oh! Yike!”—and turned to prevent more from falling; turned her ankle as a heel gave way; and burst into laughter. She laughed as the eggs fell through her fingers, laughed bent over, slipped in egg-slime and nearly fell, and laughed harder. She covered her mouth, delicately; but he could hear the laugh—deep and raucous. He laughed too.

He thought then—seeing those eggs break—that he would find out where breakfast was happening. He tugged his wrinkled and spiralled suit into something like its right shape; he screwed his knuckles into his eyes, and ran his hand through his proud hair—an Irish comb, Rudy Flood always called that. But then he had to choose the door, or the window he had come in by. He remembered passing somewhere where food was cooking on his way into the library, and so he took up his bag—didn’t want it inspected or stolen—and crept out onto the rickety bridge, shaking his head at the ridiculous crouch he must make. The boards groaned underhim and drab light came in through the cracks. Like an impossible passageway in a dream. What if it fell under him, dropping him down the airshaft. And the window at the other end might he locked. God this was stupid. What a stupid way to get from one place to another. He tore his jacket on a protruding nail and hunkered furiously back the way he had come.

Out with ruffled dignity and smutty hands through the solid old doors of the library and down the winding stairs. In a statue-niche at a turning a pinch-faced silent-butler in a pillbox hat stood, holding out a corroded ashtray. At the bottom of the stairs, a hole had been knocked in the wall, a brick-toothed rent that led into the next building, perhaps the building George had originally admitted him to, or was he disoriented now? He went through the hole, into a building of another kind, not faded elegance but aged poverty. The number of coats of paint these stamped-tin ceilings had had, the layers of linoleum one over another on these floors: it was impressive, almost archaeological. A single dim bulb burned in the hall. There was a door whose many locks were all open, and music coming from within, and laughter and odors of cooking; Auberon approached it, but was overcome by shyness. How did you approach the people of this place? He would have to learn; he who had rarely seen around him a face he hadn’t known since babyhood was surrounded now by no one but strangers, millions of them.

But he didn’t feel like going in that door just now.

Angry at himself but unable to change his mind, he wandered away down the hall. Daylight showed through the opaque glass imbedded with chicken wire of a door at the hall’s end, and he shot its bolt and opened it; he found himself looking out over the farmyard in the middle of the block. In the buildings around it were dozens of doors, each different, each obstructed by a different sort of barrier, rusted gates, chains, wire fencing, bars, locks, or all of those, and yet looking fragile and openable. What was behind them? Some stood wide, and through one he glimpsed goats. There came out from it then a small, a very small man, a bandy-legged black man with enormously strong arms, who carried on his back a great burlap sack. He hurried across the yard at a quick pace despite his short legs (he was no bigger than a child) and Auberon called out to him: “Excuse me!”

He didn’t stop. Deaf? Auberon set out after him. Was he naked? Or wearing some coverall the same color as himself? “Hey,” Auberon called, and this stopped the man. He turned his big dark flat head to Auberon, and grinned widely; his eyes were mere slits above his broad nose. Boy, the people here get positively medieval, Auberon thought; effects of poverty? He was about to frame a question, sure now the man was idiotic and wouldn’t understand, when with a long black sharp-nailed finger the man pointed behind Auberon.

He turned to look. George Mouse had just opened a door there, releasing three cats; he shut it again before Auberon could call him. He started for that door, tripping in the ruts of the garden, and turned back to wave thanks to the little black man, but he was gone.

At the end of the hall to which the door led him he paused, smelling cooking, and listened. Inside he could hear what sounded like an argument, the clash and rattle of pots and dishes, a baby crying. He pushed on the door, and it swung open.

The Bee or the Sea

The girl he had seen dropping eggs stood at the stove, still in her golden gown. A child of almost visionary beauty, its face streaked with dirty tears, sat near her on the floor. George Mouse presided at a large circular dining table, beneath which his muddy boots took up a lot of room. “Hey,” he said. “Grits, my man. Sleep well?” He rapped with his knuckles at the place next to his. The baby, only momentarily intrigued by Auberon, prepared himself for another round of crying by sputtering tiny bubbles from his angelic lips. He tugged at the girl’s gown.

“Ay, cono, man,” she said mildly, “take it easy,” just as she might have to a grown-up; the kid looked up at her as she looked down, and they seemed to come to an understanding. He didn’t cry again. She rapidly stirred a pot with a long wooden spoon, an action she did with her whole body, making her gold-clad bottom snap neatly back and forth. Auberon was watching this closely when George spoke again.

“This is Sylvie, my man. Sylvie, say hello to Auberon Barnable, who’s come to the City to seek his fortune.”

Her smile was instant and unfeigned, sun bursting from clouds. Auberon bowed stiffly, aware of the blear in his eye and the shadow on his cheek. “You want some breakfast?” she said.

“Sure he does. Sittee downee, cousin.”

She turned back to the stove, plucking from the little ceramic auto where they rode one of two top-hatted figures labeled Mr. Salty and Mr. Peppy, and shook him vigorously over the pot. Auberon sat down, and folded his hands in front of him. This kitchen looked out through diamond-paned windows at the farmyard, where now someone, not the strange man Auberon had seen, was driving the goats amid the decaying vegetation—with a yardstick, Auberon noted. “Do you,” he asked his cousin, “have a lot of tenants here?”

“Well, they’re not exactly tenants,” George said.

“He takes them in,” Sylvie said, looking fondly at George. “They got no place else to go. People like me. Because he has a good heart.” She laughed, stirring. “Little lost squirrels and stuff.”

“I sort of met someone,” Auberon said, “a black guy sort of, out in the yard…” He saw that Sylvie had stopped her stirring, and had turned to him. “Very short,” Auberon said, surprised at the silence he’d made.

“Brownie,” Sylvie said. “That was Brownie. You saw Brownie?”