The empty bag was heaviest of all.
“That’s all,” said Mrs. Underhill, and the grandfather clock struck sweetly.
“Time you were going,” said Mrs. Woods, and the baby choked impatiently.
“What’s become of Alice?” Mr. Woods said thoughtfully. He turned twice around the room, looking out the small deep windows and peering into corners. He opened a door; beyond it Smoky glimpsed utter darkness and heard a long, sleepy whisper before Mr. Woods closed it quickly. He lifted his finger and his eyebrows went up with a sudden idea. He went to the tall wardrobe that stood on claw feet in the corner; he threw open its doors, and Smoky saw the wet woods he had come through with Alice—and, far off, loitering in the afternoon, Alice herself. He was shown into the wardrobe.
“It was very nice of you,” he said, stooping to enter. “Giving me all this stuff.”
“Forget it,” said Mr. Woods, his voice sounding distant and vague. The wardrobe doors shut on him with a long noise like a far great low-voiced bell. He walked through the wet underbrush, slapped at by branches, his nose starting to run.
“What on earth,” Daily Alice said when she saw him.
“I’ve been in the Woods’,” he said.
“I guess you have. Look at you.”
A thick tangle of creeper had Somehow got twined around his neck; its tenacious prickles tore his flesh and plucked at his shirt. “Damn,” he said. She laughed, and began to pull leaves from his hair.
“Did you fall? How did you get dead leaves all in your hair? What’s that you’ve got?”
“A bag,” he said. “It’s all right now.” He raised to show her the long-dead hornet’s nest he carried; its fine paper-work was broken in places and showed the tunneled interior. A ladybug crawled from it like a spot of blood and flew away.
“Fly away home,” Daily Alice said. “It’s all right now. The path was there all the time. Come on.”
The great weight he felt was his pack, sodden with rain. He wanted desperately to put it down. He followed her along a rutted trail, and soon they came to a great littered clearing below a crumbling bank of clay. In the midst of the clearing was a brown shack with a tarpaper roof, tied to the woods by a dripping clothesline. A pickup truck sat wheelless on concrete blocks in the yard, and a black-andwhite cat prowled, looking damp and furious. A woman in apron and galoshes was waving to them from the wire-bound chicken house.
“The Woods,” Daily Alice said.
“Yes.”
And yet, even when they had coffee in front of them, and Amy and Chris Woods were talking of this and that, and his discarded pack lay puddling the linoleum, still Smoky felt press on him a weight given him, which he could not shake off, and which gradually came to seem as if it had always been there. He thought he could carry it.
Of the rest of that day, and the rest of their adventures on that journey, Smoky later on would remember very little. Daily Alice would remind him later of this or that, in the middle of a silence, as though she rehearsed that journey often when her mind had nothing else to do, and he’d say, “Oh yes,” and perhaps really remember what she spoke of and perhaps not.
On that same day Cloud on the porch by the glass table, thinking only to complete her pursuit of those same adventures, turned up a trump called the Secret, and when she prepared to put it in its place gasped, began to tremble; her eyes filled with sudden tears, and when Mother came to call her for lunch, Cloud, red-eyed and still surprised that she had not known or suspected, told her without hesitation or doubt what she had learned. And so when Smoky and Daily Alice returned, brown, scratched and happy, they found the blinds drawn in the front windows (Smoky didn’t know this old custom) and Doctor Drinkwater solemn on the porch. “Auberon is dead,” he said.
By the Way
Rooks (Smoky supposed) fled home across a cloudstreaked chilly sky toward naked trees which gestured beyond the newly-turned furrows of a March field (he was quite sure it was March). A split-rail fence, nicely cracked and knotholed, separated the field from the road, where a Traveler walked, looking a bit like Dante in Doré, with a peaked hood. At his feet were a row of white, red-capped mushrooms, and the Traveler’s face had a look of alarm—well, surprise—because the last small mushroom in the row had tilted up its red hat and was looking at him with a sly smile from beneath the brim.
“It’s an original,” Doctor Drinkwater said, indicating the picture with his sherry glass. “Given to my grandmother Violet by the artist. He was an admirer of hers.”
Because his childhood books had been Caesar and Ovid, Smoky had never seen the man’s work before, his pollarded, faced trees and evening exactness; he was struck by it in ways he couldn’t analyze. It was called By the Way, like a whisper in his ear. He sipped his sherry. The doorbell (it was the kind where you turn a key to make the noise, but what a noise) rang, and he saw Mother hurry by the parlor door, wiping her hands on her apron.
He had made himself useful, less affected as he was than the rest of them. He and Rudy Flood dug the grave, in a place on the grounds where these Drinkwaters lay together. There was John. Violet. Harvey Cloud. It was a fiercely hot day; above the maples burdened with awesome weight of leaves there hung a vapour, as though the trees panted it out with their soft breathing in the fainting breeze. Rudy expertly shaped the place, his shirt plastered with sweat to his great stomach; worms fled from their spades, or from the light, and the cool, dark earth they turned out turned pale quickly.
And the next day people arrived, all the guests from his wedding or most of them, appearing in their sudden way, some wearing the same clothes they had worn for the wedding since they hadn’t expected another Drinkwater occasion so soon; and Auberon was buried without minister or prayer, only the long requiem of the harmonium, which sounded now calm and Somehow full of gladness.
“Why is it,” Mother said returning from the door with a sky-blue Pyrex dish covered with foil, “that everyone thinks you’re starving after a funeral? Well, it’s very kind.”
Good Advice
Great-aunt Cloud tucked her damp hankie away in a black sleeve. “I think of the children,” she said. “All there today, year after year of them—Frank Bush and Claude Berry were in his very first class after the Deci- sion.”
Doctor Drinkwater bit on a briar pipe he really seldom used, took it out and stared hard at it, as though surprised to find it was inedible.
“Decision?” Smoky said.
“Berry et al. vs. Board of Ed,” Doc said solemnly.
“I guess we can eat this now,” Mother came in to say. “Sort of pot luck. Bring your glasses. Bring the bottle, Smoky—I’m having another.” And at the dining table Sophie sat in tears because she had set without thinking a place for Auberon, who always came to eat on this day, Saturday. “How could I just forget,” she said through the napkin covering her face. “He loved us so much…” Still with the napkin over her face, she went quickly out. Smoky seemed hardly to have seen her face since he arrived, only her retreating back.