Little, Big

seat; they entered a sea of leaf shadow; Alice slowed, almost able to feel the gentle strokings of the shadows over the hood and the top of the car; she forgot about former days in a sweet accession of summer happiness. The first cicada any of them had heard sang its semi-tune. Alice let the car drift to a halt. Spark stopped pacing.

“Can you walk from here, ma?” she asked.

“Oh, sure.”

“Cloud?”

There was no answer. They were all silenced by the silence and the green.

“What? Oh, yes,” Cloud said. “Auberon’ll help me. I’ll bring up the rear.” Auberon chortled, and so did Cloud.

“Isn’t this,” Smoky said when they were on foot in twos and threes down the dirt road, “isn’t this a road,” he shifted his grip on the handle of the wicker basket he carried with Alice, “didn’t we come along this road when…”

“Yes,” Alice said. She glanced sidewise at him with a smile. “That’s right.” She squeezed her handle of the wicker basket as though it was his hand.

“I thought so,” he said. The trees that stood up on the slopes above the gully of the road had grown perceptibly, had become even more noble and huge with arboreal wisdom, more thickly barked, more cloaked in serious garments of ivy; the road, long closed, had fallen into desuetude and was filling up with their offspring. “Around here somewhere,” he said, “was a shortcut to the Woods’.”

“Yup. We took it.”

The Gladstone bag he shared with Alice drew down his left shoulder and made walking difficult. “That shortcut’s gone now, I guess,” he said. Gladstone bag? It was a wicker basket, the same that Momdy had once packed their wedding breakfast in.

“Nobody to keep it open,” Alice said, glancing back at her father, and seeing him glance toward those same woods, “no need to.” Both Amy Woods and her husband Chris were ten years dead in this summer.

“It’s amazing to me,” Smoky said, “how little of this geography I can keep straight.”

“Mmm,” said Alice.

“I had no idea this road ran here.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe it doesn’t.”

One hand around Auberon’s shoulder, the other on a heavy cane, Cloud placed her feet carefully among the stones of the road. She had developed a habit of making a small constant chewing motion with her lips, which if she thought anyone noticed, would have embarrassed her greatly, and so she had convinced herself no one noticed it (since she couldn’t help making it), though in fact everyone did. “Good of you to struggle with your old aunt,” she said.

“Aunt Cloud,” Auberon said, “that book your father and mother wrote—was that your father and mother who wrote it?”

“Which book is that, dear?”

“About architecture, only it’s not, mostly.”

“I thought,” Cloud said, “that those books were locked up with a little key.”

“Well,” Auberon said, ignoring this, “is all that it says, true?”

“All what?”

It was impossible to say all what. “There’s a plan in the back. Is it a plan of a battle?”

“Well! I never thought it was. A battle! Do you think so?”

Her surprise made him less sure. “What did you think it was?”

“I can’t say.”

He waited for at least an opinion, a stab, but she made none, only chewed and toiled along; he was left to interpret her remark to mean not that she was unable to say, but Somehow forbidden. “Is it a secret?”

“A secret! Hm.” Again her surprise, as though she had never given these matters the least thought before. “A secret, you think? Well, well, perhaps that’s just what it is… My, they are getting on ahead, aren’t they?”

Auberon gave it up. The old lady’s hand was heavy on his shoulder. Beyond, where the road rose and then fell away, the towering trees framed a silver-green landscape; they seemed to bend toward it, exhibit it with leafy hands extended, offering it to the walkers. Auberon and Cloud watched the others top the rise and pass through the portals into that place, enter into sunlight, look around themselves, and, walking downwards, disappear.

Hills and Dales

“When I was a girl,” Momdy said, “we used to go back and forth quite a bit.”

The checkered tablecloth around which they were all disposed had been spread in the sun but was now in the shade of the great solitary maple by which they had camped. Great damage had been inflicted on the ham and the fried chicken and a chocolate cake; two bottles lay fallen, and a third canted over, nearly done for. A flying squadron of black ants had just reached the outskirts of the field, and were relaying the message back: great good luck.

“The Hills and the Dales,” Momdy said, “always had connections with the City. Hill is my mother’s name, you know,” she said to Smoky, who did. “Oh, it was fun in the thirties, taking the train in; having lunch; going to see our Hill cousins. Now the Hills hadn’t always lived in the City…”

“Are these the Hills,” Sophie asked from beneath the straw hat she had tilted over her face against the generous sun, “that are still up in Highland?”

“That’s a branch,” Momdy said. “My Hills never had much to do with the Highland Hills. The story is…”

“The story is long,” Doc said. He lifted his wineglass to the sun (he always insisted on real glasses and silverware at picnics, the out-of-doors luxury of them made a picnic a feast) and watched the sun caught in it. “And the Highland Hills get the best of it.”

“Not so,” Momdy said. “How do you know what story the story is?”

“A little bird told me,” Doc said, chuckling, indulging himself. He stretched out, back against the maple, and pulled his panama (as old almost as himself) into snooze position. Momdy’s reminiscences had in recent years got longer, more rambling and repetitious, as her ears had got deafer; but she never minded being apprised of it. She went right on.

“The Hills in the City,” she said to all of them, “were really very splendid. Of course back then it was nothing to have a servant or two, but they had flocks. Nice Irish girls. Marys and Bridgets and Kathleens. They had such stories. Well. The City Hills more or less died out. Some of them went out west, to the Rockies. Except one girl about Nora’s age then who married a Mr. Townes, and they stayed. That was a wonderful wedding. The first where I cried. She wasn’t beautiful, and she was no spring chicken; and she already had a daughter by a previous husband, what was his name, who hadn’t lasted, so this Townes man—what was his first name— was quite a catch, oh dear you can’t talk that way nowadays can you; and all those maids lined up in their starched outfits, congratulations, missus, congratulytions. Her family was so happy for her…”

“All the Hills,” Smoky said, “danced for joy.”

“… and it was their daughter or rather her daughter, Phyllis, you see, who later on, about the time I got married, met Stanley Mouse, which is how that family and my family get connected in a roundabout way. Phyllis. Who was a Hill on her mother’s side. George and Franz’s mother.”

“Parturient montes,” Smoky quipped into the void, “et nascetur ridiculus mus.”

Momdy nodded thoughtfully. “Ireland in those days was a dreadfully poor place, of course…”

“Ireland?” Doc said, looking up. “How did we get to Ireland?”

“One of those girls, Bridget I think,” Momdy said, turning to her husband, “was it Bridget, or Mary? later married Jack Hill when his wife died. Now his wife…”

Smoky quietly rolled away from her discourse. Neither Doc nor Great-aunt Cloud were truly listening either, but as long as they stayed in more or less attentive poses, Momdy wouldn’t notice his defection. Auberon sat