Horrific: well, not quite, or not usually, though there were times when, as she laid out a Rose or a Banner or some other shape, she felt afraid: felt that some secret might be revealed which she didn’t want to know, her own death or something even more dreadful. But—despite the weird, minatory images of the trumps, engraved with dense black detail like Durër’s, baroque and Germanic—the secrets revealed were oftenest not terrible, oftenest not even secret: cloudy abstractions merely, oppositions, contentions, resolutions, common as proverbs and as unspecific. At least so she had been told the fall of them should be interpreted, by John and those of his acquaintance who knew card reading.
But the cards they knew weren’t these cards, exactly; and though she knew no other way of laying them out or interpreting them than as the Tarot of the Egyptians was laid out (before she was instructed in those methods she used just to turn them down anyhow and stare at them, often for hours) she often wondered if there weren’t some more revelatory, simpler, Somehow more useful manipulation of them she could make.
“And here is,” she said, turning one up carefully top to bottom, “a Five of Wands.”
“New possibilities,” Nora said. “New acquaintances. Surprising developments.”
“All right.” The Five of Wands went in its place in the Horseshoe Violet was making. She chose from another pile—the cards had been sorted, by arcane distribution, into six piles before her—and turned a trump: it was the Sportsman.
This was the difficulty. Like the usual deck, Violet’s contained a set of twenty-one major trumps; but hers—persons, places, things, notions—were not the Greater Trumps at all. And so when the Bundle, or the Traveler, or Convenience, or Multiplicity, or the Sportsman fell, a leap had to be made, meanings guessed at which made sense of the spread. Over the years, with growing certainty, she had assigned meanings to her trumps, made inferences from the way in which they fell among the cups and swords and wands, and discerned—or seemed to discern—their influences, malign or beneficent. But she could never be sure. Death, the Moon, Judgement— those greater trumps had large and obvious significance; what did one make though of the Sportsman?
He was, like all people pictured in her cards, musclebound in a not quite human way and striking an absurd, orgulous pose, toes turned out and knuckles on hip. He seemed certainly overdressed for what he was about, with ribbons at his knees, slashes in his jacket, and a wreath of dying flowers around his broad hat; but that was for sure a fishing pole over his shoulder. He carried something like a creel, and other impedimenta she didn’t understand; and a dog, who looked a lot like Spark, lay asleep at his feet. It was Grandy who called this figure the Sportsman; underneath him was written in Roman capitals P I S C A T O R.
“So,” Violet said, “new experiences, and good times, or adventures outdoors, for someone. That’s nice.”
“For who?” Nora asked.
“For whom.”
“Well, for whom?”
“For whomever we’re reading this spread for. Did we decide? Or is this only practice?”
“Since it’s coming out so well,” Nora said, “let’s say it’s for someone.”
“August.” Poor August, something good ought to be in store for him.
“All right.” But before Violet could turn another card, Nora said “Wait. We shouldn’t joke with it. I mean if it didn’t start being August—what if we turn up something awful? Wouldn’t we worry it might come true?” She looked out over the tangled spread, feeling apprehensive for the first time before their power. “Do they always come true?”
“I don’t know.” She stopped dealing them out. “No,” she said. “Not ftr us. I think they might predict things that could happen to us. But—well, we’re protected, aren’t we?”
Nora said nothing to this. She believed Violet, and believed Violet knew the Tale in ways she couldn’t imagine; but she had never felt herself to be protected.
“There are catastrophes,” Violet said, “of an ordinary kind, that if the cards predicted them I wouldn’t believe them.”
“And you correct my grammar!” Nora said, laughing. Violet, laughing too, turned the next card: the Four of Cups, reversed.
“Weariness. Disgust. Aversion,” Nora said. “Bitter experience.”
Below, the ratchety doorbell rang. Nora leapt up.
“Now, who could that be?” Violet said, sweeping up the cards.
“Oh,” Nora said, “I don’t know.” She had gone to the mirror hastily, and pushed her heavy golden hair quickly into place, and smoothed her blouse. “It might be Harvey Cloud, who said he might stop by to return a book I loaned him.” She stopped her hurry, and sighed, as though annoyed at the interruption. “I guess I’d better go see.”
“Yes,” Violet said. “You go see. We’ll do this again another day.”
But when, a week later, Nora asked for another lesson, and Violet went to the drawer where her cards were kept, they weren’t there. Nora insisted she hadn’t taken them. They weren’t in any other place that Violet might absentmindedly have put them. With half her drawers turned out and papers and boxes littering the floor from her search, she sat on the edge of the bed, puzzled and a little alarmed.
“Gone,” she said.
Anthology of Love
“I’ll do what you want, August,” Amy said. “Whatever you want.”
He bent his head down onto his upraised knees and said “Oh, Jesus, Amy. Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, don’t swear so, August, it’s terrible.” Her face was as misty and tearful as the shorn October cornfield in their view, where blackbirds hunted corn, rising at unseen signals and settling again elsewhere. She put her harvestchapped hands on his. They both shivered, from the cold and from chill circumstance. “I’ve read in books and such that for a while people love people and then they don’t any more. I never knew why.
“I don’t know why either, Amy.”
“I’ll always love you.”
He raised his head, so flooded with melancholy and tender regret that he seemed to have turned to mist and autumn himself. He’d loved her intensely before, but never so purely as now when he told her he wouldn’t be seeing her any more.
“I just wonder why,” she said.
He couldn’t tell her it was mostly a matter of scheduling, nothing to do with her really, only the most pressing engagements he had elsewhere—oh Lord, pressing, pressing… He had met her here, beneath the brown bracken, at dawn when she wouldn’t be missed at home, to break off with her, and the only acceptable and honorable reason he could think of for that was that he didn’t love her any more, and so that was the reason which, after long hesitations and many cold kisses, he had given her. But when he did so, she was so brave, so acquiescent, the tears that rolled down her cheeks so salty, that it seemed to him that he’d said it only to see how good, how loyal, how meek she was; to animate with sadness and imminent loss his own flagging feelings.
“Oh, don’t Amy, Amy, I never meant…” He held her, and she yielded, shy to trespass where he had only a moment ago said she was forbidden, not wanted; and her shyness, her big eyes searching him, afraid and wildly hopeful, undid him.
“You shouldn’t, August, if you don’t love me.”
“Don’t say it, Amy, don’t.”
Near to weeping himself, just as though he truly wouldn’t ever see her again (though he knew now he must and would), on the rustling leaves he entered with her into new sad sweet lands of love, where the awful hurts he had inflicted on her were healed.