To the soundless voice the seed,
To the silent singer the flower.
Rouse the fruit
And draw the sleeper to light.
Sitting on her bed the day after her visit with the weavers, Nell recited the poem in her head, trying to make the words stick:
Grayfleck stone to the tammery,
For open-palm hint of sea.
Silverwhite to the urlis,
Firesand for the redlace tree. . . .
She’d thought of it all day after the weaver had mentioned it, and because the woman had named the small pink-tinged flowers open-palm. Another long night with Susan’s silence and no sign of Max had given her time to think again about the color blossoming in the weaver’s hand, about the songs that had seemed to her, until then, to mean nothing. The next morning, when the girls chanted the seeds, Nell had listened to the poem with a different ear. To her surprise, she found she knew the words already, having said them often enough now without thinking. At dinner in the garden, she’d plucked an open-palm, and now she sat on the edge of her bed with the delicate thing cupped in her hands. Evening flamed outside, and clouds like red coals burned above the western mountain, but Nell kept her eyes on the flower, wondering what Iana had meant by “an aid to the mind.”
For open-palm hint of sea.
She had never heard of silverwhite or firesand, but the sea she knew. She remembered the sky hard as polished brass over the water, the rush and slap of the surf, the hot sand gritty beneath her feet. And the air — there was that, too — the salt-and-sour tang the wind carried as it blew chilly against her wet skin.
Was all that hint of sea?
To the soundless voice the seed . . .
She’d gone over it so many times the song ran on its own inside her head tonight, a soothing rhythm, something like the sea itself, the long sibilant inhale and exhale of the tide.
She lifted the flower and examined it closely. Five flat rosy petals surrounded a creamy center attached to a long, firm green stalk. Unlike a rose or a tulip, the flower opened flat to the sky, which Nell guessed was the reason for its name. But what of the sea? She brought the flower to her face and breathed. Beneath the faint smell of vanilla was an even fainter edge, the brisk aroma of air blown from the ocean.
To the silent singer the flower. . . .
After Max had made peaches, and Susan had drawn water out of nothing, Nell had tried to think of something for long enough, and with enough concentration, to make it take shape in the air. Max said that Susan had the knack of thinking of things fully, without distraction. But if this was the key, it was one Nell could not seem to find. She noticed things. In the forest, she had often forced herself to sit and try to forget the sharp odor of the barren ground and the calls of hawks and the shadows cast by leaves in the dirt. She tried not to see Kate drawing with a stick and Jean swinging her filthy doll and the way Max’s hair stood up in wild lumps after he ran his fingers through it. And yet she was drawn to it all, no matter how she tried to quiet herself and shut the door to the world so she could think of one thing alone.
Despair began to edge in on her as she sat on the bed, thinking all this. Hunched over, she stared unhappily at the flower. All her life the twins had run just ahead of her, telling her to keep quiet and keep to her place, reminding her of how much she didn’t know. She’d never listened to them before. Remembering this, Nell shoved aside the dark, useless thoughts. Forget Susan! she said to herself fiercely. Susan was even now walking the library blindly, listening so hard to one thing that she couldn’t think! And Max — where was he? So taken with the one thing that he had forgotten them these past two nights. She straightened in disgust. There were other ways — always other ways — and she would be better at them. The best!
Abruptly, she stopped pushing aside all the things she saw and let herself look at them, unworried. There was the golden tapestry above the desk, and there the window, ablaze. And here the pink-palmed flower, open in her hand and smelling of the sea. She gazed at it and thought, I see all of it; I won’t be blind. But I can see it like I do sitting on the front porch, letting the world go by. I can collect it and hold it, to think about later. Like I did with the chant of seeds, listening and not knowing I’d heard.
She cupped the flower and thought of the sharp tang of the sea and hands open to the sky. Still on the wall was the golden tapestry, and outside she could hear a group of girls running in the high corn, and in the hall, the footsteps of people moving past the door. But shining in her hand was the flower, and she saw it like a candle’s flame, burning bright in a room crowded with shadows. She felt a tug of heat that slipped down her arms and tingled in her fingertips. Beside the open-palm, the air wavered, like an image reflected in water. Her hand shook. There was weight in the air, and now texture. A moment more, and a second flower glimmered and took shape beside the first.
Nell nearly dropped it.
Two flowers, identical, sat in her cupped hands. Shakily, Nell ran a finger over the silky petals of the new one, then brought it close to her face. It smelled of vanilla and salt. She smiled.
Immediately, she sat back and opened her mind to flowers. The
