“A giraffe, in fact,” Smoky said. “A camel-leopard. A camel with leopard’s spots.”
“Why is there a giraffe in heaven?” Sophie asked. “How did it get there?”
“I bet you’re not the first to ask that,” Smoky said, laughing. “Imagine their surprise when they first looked up over there and said, My God, what’s that giraffe doing up there?”
The menagerie of heaven, racing as from a zoo breakout through the lives of the men and women, gods and heroes; the band of the Zodiac (that night all their birth-signs were invisible, bearing the sun around the south); the impossible dust of the Milky Way rainbow-wise overarching them; Orion lifting one racing foot over the horizon, following his dog Sirius. They discovered the moment’s rising sign. Jupiter burned unwinking in the west. The whole spangled beach-umbrella, fringed with the Tropics, revolved on its bent staff around the North Star, too slowly to be seen, yet steadily.
Smoky, out of his childhood reading, related the interlocking tales told above them. The pictures were so formless and incomplete, and the tales, some at least, so trivial that it seemed to Smoky that it must all be true: Hercules looked so little like himself that the only way anyone could have found him was if he’d got the news about Hercules being up there, and was told where to look. As one tree traces its family back to Daphne but another has to be mere commoner; as only the odd flower, mountain, fact gets to have divine ancestry, so Cassiopeia of all people is brilliantly asterized, or her chair rather, as though by accident; and somebody else’s crown, and another’s lyre: the attic of the gods.
What Sophie wondered, who couldn’t make the patterned floor of heaven come out in pictures but lay hypnotized by their nearness, was how it could be that some in heaven were there for reward, and others condemned to it; while still others were there it seemed only to play parts in the dramas of others. It seemed unfair; and yet she couldn’t decide whether it was unfair because there they were, stuck forever, who hadn’t deserved it; or unfair because, without having earned it, they had been saved—enthroned—need not die. She thought of their own tale, they three, permanent as a constellation, strange enough to be remembered forever.
The earth that week was making progress through the discarded tail of a long-passed comet, and each night a rain of fragments entered the air and flamed whitely as they burned up. “No bigger than pebbles or pinheads some of them,” Smoky said. “It’s the air you see lit up.”
But this now Sophie could see clearly: these were falling stars. She thought perhaps she could pick one out and watch and see it falclass="underline" a momentary bright exhalation, that made her draw breath, her heart filled with infinitude. Would that be a better fate? In the grass her hand found Smoky’s; the other already held her sister’s, who pressed it every time brightness fell from the air.
Daily Alice couldn’t tell if she felt huge or small. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminishing. The stars wandered in and out of the vast portals of her eyes, under the immense empty dome of her brow; and then Smoky took her hand and she vanished to a speck, still holding the stars as in a tiny jewel box within her.
So they lay a long time, not caring to talk any more, each dwelling on that odd, physical sensation of ephemeral eternity—a paradox but undeniably felt; and if the stars had been as near and full of faces as they seemed, they would have looked down and seen those three as a single asterism, a linked wheel against the wheeling dark sky of the meadow.
Solstice Night
There was no entrance but a tiny hole at the window corner where the solstice-midnight wind blew in, piling dust on the sill in a little furrow: but that was room enough for them, and they entered there.
There were three then in Sophie’s bedroom standing close together, their brown-capped heads consulting, their pale flat faces like little moons.
“See how she sleeps away.”
“Yes, and the babe asleep in her arms.”
“My, she holds it tight.”
“Not so tight.”
As one, they drew closer to the tall-bed. Lilac in her mother’s arms, in a hooded bunting against the cold, breathed on Sophie’s cheek; a drop of wetness was there.
“Well, take it, then.”
“Why don’t you if you’re so anxious.”
“Let’s all.”
Six long white hands went out toward Lilac. “Wait,” said one. “Who has the other?”
“You were to bring it.”
“Not I.”
“Here it is, here.” A thing was unfolded from a drawstring bag.
“My. Not very like, is it.”
“What’s to be done?”
“Breathe on it.”
The breathed on it in turns as they held it amidst them. Now and again one looked back at sleeping Lilac. They breathed till the thing amid them was a second Lilac.
“That’ll do.”
“It’s very like.”
“Now take the…”
“Wait again.” One looked closely at Lilac, drawing back ever so slightly the coverlet. “Look here. She has her little hands tight wound up in her mother’s hair.”
“Holding fast.”
“Take the child, we’ll wake the mother.”
“These, then.” One had drawn out great scissors, which gleamed whitely in the night-light and opened with a faint snicker. “As good as done.”
One holding the false Lilac (not asleep but with vacant eyes and unmoving; a night in its mother’s arms would cure that) and one reaching ready to take away Sophie’s Lilac, and the third with the shears, it was all quickly done; neither mother nor child awoke; they nestled what they had brought by Sophie’s breast.
“Now to be gone.”
“Easily said. Not the way we came.”
“Down the stairs and out their way.”
“If we must.”
Moving as one and without sound (the old house seemed now and again to draw breath or groan at their passing, but then it always did so, for reasons of its own) they gained the front door, and one reached up and opened it, and they were outside and going quickly with a favorable wind. Lilac never waked or made a sound (the wisps and locks of gold hair still held in her fists blew away in the quick wind of their passage) and Sophie slept too, having felt nothing; except the long tale of her dream had altered, at a turning, and become sad and difficult in ways she hadn’t known before.
In All Directions
Smoky was wrenched awake by some internal motion; as soon as his eyes were wide open, he forgot whatever it was that had awakened him. But he was awake, as awake as if it were midday, irritating state, he wondered if it was something he ate. The hour was useless four o’clock in the morning. He shut his eyes resolutely for a while, unconvinced that sleep could have deserted him so completely. But it had; he could tell because the more he watched the eggs of color break and run on the screen of his eyelids the less soporific they became, the more pointless and uninteresting.
Very carefully he slipped out from under the high-piled covers, and felt in the darkness for his robe. There was only one cure he knew of for this state, and that was to get up and act awake until it was placated and went away. He stepped carefully over the floor, hoping he wouldn’t step into shoes or other impedimenta, there was no reason to inflict this state on Daily Alice, and he gained the door, satisfied he hadn’t disturbed her or the night at all. He’d just walk the halls, go downstairs and turn on some lights, that should do it. He closed the door carefully behind him, and at that Daily Alice awoke, not because of any noise he’d made but because the whole peace of her sleep had been subtly broken and invaded by his absence.