A Green and Ancient Light (20 page)

The men in the background exchanged glances again. One turned and paced off toward the others, batting his hat against his leg.

“Please,” said the captain, shaking off Grandmother's arm. “Yes, I'll look in your attic. But it's not the ——.” (He used an epithet that was less kind.) “What the dogs smell is you and the boy. Are you the only two living here?”

“Yes, just the two of us, and he's only here for the summer. My grandson. Oh, I do hope you're right! Would you care for tea, Captain? Or perhaps something cold?”

Captain S —— declined any hospitality. He informed us that he would bring one dog into the garden and watch its reactions. At his orders, a soldier came with a single hound, which barked furiously and pointed at Grandmother and me. The dog showed no interest when led up to the back door of the cottage, but he pulled his handler in agitated circles around the garden, following his nose from the flowerbeds to the clothesline pole and back to the fence. This puzzled the soldiers, since the hound had located us but wouldn't give up on our backyard. I guessed the truth: that the dog had caught the lingering scent of Mr. Girandole. I was grateful that dogs couldn't talk.

“The enemy hasn't been here, Madam,” said the captain when the dog had been withdrawn again. But at Grandmother's insistence, the officer came in through the back door (first carefully scuffing his boots on the mat outside). He climbed the narrow stairway, pushed through the trap door, and had a look around the attic. The steps of his boots thumped slowly here and there over our heads, and the boards squeaked.

Clumping back down to us, Captain S —— reported that all was clear. “There are no signs,” he said, “that anyone has been in your attic for a long time.”

Grandmother's acting façade slipped a little because the comment piqued her. “I do my best to keep the
entire
house clean,” she said. “But it's much harder for me to get up those stairs than it used to be.”

He mumbled an apology, saying he'd meant only that nothing had been disturbed, and that the single window was securely locked.

“Well, that's a relief,” said Grandmother. “I do feel much better. Thank you ever so much, Captain S ——.”

“There's some lovely furniture up there,” he remarked.

“Thank you. My husband was a carpenter.”

He stood for a while in the back garden, scowling at blossoms, looking as if he still had a grievance against us but wasn't sure how to frame it in words. Clearly, it annoyed him that he'd spent the day tracking us. But when it came down to it, Grandmother was a very difficult person to scold.

The captain was spared the need to say anything by the arrival of a car in front of the cottage. A soldier in the side yard waved to someone. Car doors slammed, and in another moment, Major
P —— himself stepped around the house, flanked by two more of his men. All the soldiers behind the cottage saluted him.

“Well,” said the major, “this is quite a party.” He looked weary and bemused, but I also thought I saw a dangerous flicker in his gaze as he eyed Grandmother and me, then strolled past us, examining the garden.

“Major P ——,” said Grandmother carefully, “I am deeply sorry our fondness of the woods has inconvenienced you all.”

The major laughed by expelling air through his nose. “It's been good exercise for us, hasn't it?”

He was looking at Captain S ——, who said, “Yes, sir!”—though I doubted the captain would have called it “good”—nor did I think the day had brought much “exercise” to the major.

“Lovely,” said Major P ——, admiring Grandmother's bougainvillea. “Mrs. T ——, if we continue to meet like this, people will begin to talk.”

“Oh, believe me, Major, they already are.” Grandmother settled onto a bench. “Won't you sit down?”

The major handed his hat to his aide and sat facing Grandmother across the garden table. Captain S —— and the men who had arrived with P —— stood at attention nearby. Though I didn't want to be anywhere near the major, I couldn't leave Grandmother without support, so I perched beside her on the bench.

“Oh, dear,” said Grandmother, making a quick count. “I'm afraid I don't have enough teacups for everyone. But would you care for something, Major? Returning your hospitality is the very least I can do.”

“In a moment. First, I should like to know a few things, and you must pardon my directness.”

“Of course.” Grandmother laid the stick across her knees and folded her hands on the table. “When I think that we've unwittingly drawn time and manpower from your work . . .”

“Worry no more about that,” he said. “We'll have our man soon enough. If we don't catch him, then Major B —— will. The trail heads that way, toward —— across the mountains, just as I suspected all along.”

Grandmother did a good job of looking relieved, though she must have felt as worried for Mr. Girandole as I did. “Well,” she said. “At least, I'm glad not all your dogs have been following my grandson and me.”

“But several of them have been.” The darkness had returned to the major's expression. “More than one scent trail leads to your gate. Whenever the situation involves those abandoned statues in the forest, it also seems to involve the two of you.”

Grandmother smiled and touched my arm. “This boy loves the grove . . . just as his father did before him. Just as I did, when I was a little girl.”

“A picturesque place, to be sure,” said the major. “And yet, despite the known danger of this past week—an enemy soldier, likely armed, possibly injured, certainly desperate—you've seen no need to avoid the place. According to a report I received this afternoon, the boy was there, alone, yesterday.” His eyes turned directly upon me. “Weren't you? And I suspect you were there again today, after you left us. Isn't that right?”

I nodded, feeling faint.

“You were there, even though my men yesterday ordered you not to come back. What's so important that you defy common sense and Army orders? What do you do in the grove?”

My head swam, and I feared I might faint. I took a few deep breaths before I managed to squeak out, “M—monsters.”

“What?”

“The . . . the monsters. They . . . There's nothing like them where I live.”

“His time here is all too short,” said Grandmother, coming to my rescue. “Childhood, Major, is all too short. I've shown him the grove because I believe that something of the soul of our village is there—something most people have lost and forgotten—something we've even come to fear. There are things one learns in school, sir, and in life afterward. But there are things, too, that grandmothers must teach, or no one will. I'm trying to do my duty, Major, before the chance is lost. I know he's not in danger. Not in our sacred woods.”

I sat in silence, staring at the medals on Major P ——'s uniform, staring at the shiny black holster of his sidearm. I could hear by her voice that Grandmother wasn't acting now.

The major sat unmoving for a long time. When I ventured a glance at his face, I saw that most of the anger was gone.

“There are qualities that I admire,” he said at last. “And you, Mrs. T ——, possess most of them. Courage. Devotion. A love of the arts, learning, and of our country. But one more virtue this boy must learn is respect for authority. Troubled times demand such, if one is to survive.”

Grandmother nodded meekly. “You are right, Major. Some qualities are best taught by men.”

“Oh, come, Mrs. T ——, there's no need to patronize me. We both know you are quite capable of teaching anything.” He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “Now, if the offer of a drink still stands . . .”

As Grandmother stood up, the major looked at me again. “Have either of you noticed anything strange in that grove of statues lately?”

I thought about it and shook my head.

“The whole place is strange,” said Grandmother. “But what do you mean, Major?”

“Have you seen anyone there? Anything out of the ordinary? Have you, say,
heard
or
smelled
anything?”

I nodded. If I pretended not to know about the bad smell, he'd know I was lying. “I noticed a bad smell,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Grandmother said offhandedly, heading toward the back door. “There are bad smells that come and go all through the woods. It could be geothermal, I suppose.”

“How long has the smell been there?” the major asked.

Grandmother stopped to listen.

“A few days, I think.” I had blurted the lie before I thought about it, wanting badly to distance the smell from today's manhunt.

The major looked to Captain S ——, who shook his head and said, “Lieutenant N —— didn't smell it yesterday.” S —— returned his gaze severely to me.

Grandmother tossed up her hands. “Smells in the woods,” she muttered, and went inside.

The major leaned close to me. “Is there anything you have to tell me, man to man?” I could smell his hair tonic or his shaving lotion. Whatever it was, it was too strong an odor.

“No, sir.”

He peered steadily at me, and his face tipped to one side. “I heard of a curious little notebook you had in the grove yesterday. I'd like to see it.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, glad that none of the men now present were those who had caught me then: they would have seen at once that my decoy notebook looked nothing like the real one. I hurried to my room, snatched up the fake, and took it to him.

He spread it on the table and turned the pages. “The words from the statues,” he murmured in recognition.

“Yes, sir.”

“And this poem?”

“Oh . . . I made that up. I wrote it there, in the grove.”

“H'm. I thought you were an artist. Don't you draw pictures of the statues?”

“I've tried, but . . . I didn't like how they came out.”

“H'm.”

Grandmother returned from the kitchen with a bottle of wine and several glasses. I was certain that it was kept for moonlit nights, when Mr. Girandole came to the garden. At the sight of it, Major P —— brightened.

“Now,” he said deliberately, gazing at me until I squirmed, “now, I will add a part to your education that your father doubtless would, if he were here.” With a swift, ruthless movement, he gathered the three notebook pages on which I'd written, and ripped them cleanly from the spine. As he held the pages between us, staring me in the face, my vision swam. In his eyes I saw the bear's eyes—the bear from my long-ago nightmare, its face slashed and bleeding, watching me from the midst of the fire.

The major tore the pages into pieces no bigger than a postage stamp. He deposited the shreds into a pile on the open notebook, where a breeze stirred them and blew some of the scraps onto the ground. Crossing his legs, he sat back and watched me calmly.

I looked down, breathing through my nose. Around us, the other men stood without speaking or moving. Grandmother paused, motionless, as he was tearing up the paper. After a long moment, she set the tray down and began to pour the wine.

“Good,” the major said to me. “You will make a soldier yet.”

*  *  *  *

That night, the rain came. Flashes of lightning lit the cracks around the shutters, casting stark leaf shadows in the garden when we peeped out through the back door. Thunder crashed. We kept our hands busy since we could think of little else but Mr. Girandole, probably somewhere far from his home, and R ——, huddled in that pitch-black space in the leaning house. Grandmother sewed and I drew sketches. From memory, as best I could, I drew a map of the grove of monsters, labeling each statue. Instead of my sketchbook, I used a two-page spread of my notebook—the real one.

As the rain fell in sheets on the roof, gurgling in the downspouts, we filled the big iron tub and took sponge baths. Grandmother's cottage was old enough that it didn't have pipes and a water heater like our city house did; we pumped the water from a well in the indoor kitchen and heated it in a kettle.

The next morning was Sunday, and even though a drizzling rain still fell, we made the forty-minute walk to the church up near the abbey. We didn't pass through the main part of town—church was the other direction—but we knew the soldiers had gone again. Major P —— had sent most of them over the mountain on Mr. Girandole's trail, and the major was confident his business in our town was finished.

Grandmother's church was a fortress of massive stone blocks, dim inside even on the brightest days. Light filtered through tiny,
ornate stained-glass windows; each window told a story, but they were set so high in the walls that I couldn't see much.

Unlike the priest at my parents' church, who shuddered the pews with his sermons, the priest here was a small gray man with dark circles under his eyes, who flitted about the shadowy altar like a ghost, and whose soft, short messages would never disturb anyone's day. When he spoke, I could hear only occasional words, the ones he would pronounce deliberately, looking suddenly up at us from his notes. These enunciated words of his, followed by dramatic pauses, seemed to be chosen at random—but probably weren't, if you could hear them in context.

Today, I'd brought along a folded scrap of paper and a pencil, in case I had any inspirations about the garden. When the sermon began, I pulled the paper from my shirt pocket and—to give myself something to do—wrote down each word the priest said clearly.

Grandmother eyed me critically, but since I appeared to be taking notes on the message, she left me to it.

“
IF
,” the priest said, nodding solemnly before falling away again into a murmur. “
ONCE
,” he said later, holding up a finger. Over the course of the next few minutes, I collected “
YOU
,” “
BUT
,” “
YOU
(again),” “
WERE
,” “
CONTINUE
,” and “
NOW
.” This “
NOW
” was his parting syllable. I couldn't make heads or tails of the unassuming little cadenza of words that had preceded it, but it sounded more like joyous Gospel than a command.