THE CHILD WAS learning French in school and studying ancient Egypt. After Egypt would be the Greeks. And next year there would be Latin. The ancient world was alive and well.
The child thought she might like to try to embalm one of the bunnies and put it in a mummy suit. Now that the snow was melting, certain things seemed clearer. That was not a coyote they saw in the driveway — she opened her book and showed her mother — that was the god Anubis.
The mother remembers now Anubis, one dark night, caught in the car’s headlights, stared at her as she pulled into the drive. She was afraid, and she and the child waited, until it passed.
26
THE FIRST WOMAN to be inducted into the National Society of Thatchers had come to the Valley and proceeded to thatch roofs for the stone houses that were being built. She was a small woman, the people thought, to be balancing such heavy bundles of straw on her shoulder and wielding that legget while going up and down to and from her perch on a biddle. She was always smiling, for she loved the green hazel smell and the rustle of the reed and straw and the connection she felt with all the other thatchers who had ever lived.
What a peculiar sight, the few remaining men in the Valley remarked.
THE MOTHER THOUGHT that when thinking about the lamb or the vanishing men or the bees and the bats, it was best to keep the larger picture in mind and to take the long view. In the furnace of the stars much had happened, and in everyday carbon molecules, there was stardust from the time the asteroids crashed on the planet millions of years ago. Best to think of all five of the earth’s Great Extinctions, or at the very least, the extinction paleontologists call the Great Dying. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, 90 percent of all living species perished.
Someone is finding an unusual chemical signal in an ancient layer of an Italian city. Irradium. So much has happened, and is happening, under the earth and in the oceans and above the earth and all around. The mother takes the child’s hand, and they make their descent. What are space and time to them?
At the K-T Boundary they pause.
At the Boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods they pause. They marvel at the tortoise. When the asteroid came, it killed everything within hundreds of miles. The animals that weren’t incinerated or gassed by fumes either froze or starved to death soon after when the dust stirred up by the impact blotted out the sun for more than a year.
They stand in a trance at the P-T Boundary. The place where the Permian and the Triassic meet. When thinking about extinction, it is best to have some context. History, the mother believes, even at its worst, always consoles. Today, mastodons and mammoths and giant sloths have no living counterpart remaining on earth, though some plants and animals that disappear, stay gone for millions of years and then return.
FOSSILS EXTRACTED FROM the fine-grained mudstone and limestone rocks near the Green River in Wyoming were said to be forty-seven million years old. She made a note to herself to place the Grandmother there, when the time comes.
A WOMAN WHO built stone walls had moved to the Valley. There she was, shifting, sorting, and shaping rocks. How does she manage it? the people remarked. She gathered rocks for the face of the wall, rocks for the heart of the wall, sand, and some stoppers that break up the pattern and create character. She loved doing this ancient work outside to birdsong, she said, as she watched the seasons day by day unfold. On her coffee breaks, she chatted with the passersby.
What an edifying sight, the few remaining men remarked to one another.
THE MOTHER WAS dreaming. If the heart of the deceased outweighs the feather, then the person has a heart made heavy by evil deeds. In that event, Ammit, the god with the croc head and hippo legs, will devour the heart, condemning the subject to oblivion for an eternity.
The Grandmother from the North Pole is certain that the heart of the President, soon to be the former president and a significant contributor to the vanishing world, would be gobbled up, though for the thousands and thousands of dead, this is little consolation.
The Grandmother adjusts her Doghead and walks with the child to the pageant, dragging the President’s heart. Anubis weighs the heart while the Ibis-Headed Thoth, the god of wisdom, records the verdict.
The child, having taken off her Ibis head, reveals malachite eyes.
WHEN THE GREAT Wind came and the electricity went out, and the tree fell on the house and bats poured from the tree and entered the house while the child bathed, the transformation had already begun. What the mother had neglected to say was that the bat had brought clairvoyance, and that she saw in an instant what she had not been able to see before: all that had happened and now all that was to come.
FROM HER PERCH atop the world, she sees a blue horse in the distance. It was a troubling vista, and it exhausted her. She thought of all the things that might appear out of nowhere, unbidden. Seen from afar, but utterly out of reach — its great forelegs rising into the air. It was not approachable; there was no way you could ever get to it, so that when travellers passed it as their plane accelerated, they caught a glimpse of an ominous blue blur as they rose, the last thing they would see. The boy with the toy jet reached for it nonetheless.
The September sky was so blue it hurt her to look at it. Something of the shape of the horse, flickering, fleeting, unable to be grasped entirely, remained in her for a moment and then was gone.
THE MOTHER DID not know why everything had to change — she just knew that it did. Things were changing even though they seemed not to be, and they would continue to change now at a faster and faster rate.
SHE HAD MADE the sparkling snow rabbit a crown of winterberry, which the catbird came to sup on. She put an orange in its paw and thought of the day the Baltimore Orioles would return. That migratory corridor of birds the mother and child were lucky enough to live along. The French called those birds les passereaux. Everything is passing, Saint Paul said.
EVERYTHING WAS CHANGING: the child, the Grandmother. Everything was melting. The child hoped more than anything that before too much longer they could play their Santa game again. She hoped that her grandmother would still remember it. The Book of Wonder, the child thought, would reveal what the reindeer did in the off season, or the stitch Mrs. Claus used to sew the large brown wooden buttons to Santa’s jacket, and what games the elves excelled at during the Winter Olympics. She looked at her twinkling grandmother. Her village at the top of the world seemed to come forward in the mist as the stories unfolded and then to recede again, back into white.
Do you remember when you were a baby and I took you to the top of the lighthouse in Maine? the Grandmother asks. No, the child shakes her head. I don’t remember that.
You were very small.
A BODY AT rest is still accelerating, the Grandmother from the North Pole tells the child. Isn’t that amazing? And she whooshes by on her dogsled. Wait up! the child calls. The child remembered how the mother had shaped the snow into a sparkling rabbit, hoping to call the Grandmother back to her side. Just a minute.
EVERYTHING WAS SPEEDING up now. Soon the child herself would be growing at Girls’ Peak Growth Velocity. They would have to hold on tighter than they had ever held on to anything before. Only the Virgin with her Infinite Patience was in no hurry.