A drift of soldiers came up and over the hill, babbled into their radios, and then vanished.
The tortoise, untroubled, looks up and slowly says, the disappearances have happened before, and will happen again. The truths of the universe are so profoundly concealed. The mother and child hung on to his every word. You’ve no need to worry. And with that, its great liquid eye shut.
EXILED FROM CHILDHOOD, but in the constant presence of it, the mother felt covetous of the child sometimes because the child still had childhood, and to the mother, childhood was no longer accessible.
Even the mother’s mother, the Grandmother from the North Pole, was not young anymore. The light was bright late into the night in summer at the North Pole. When the North Pole Grandmother came with a platter of fish preserved in vodka and lingonberries, the fish had a face on it and the children ran and hid. The candles were lit then and there was juniper and holly.
The child was busy in the corner making a sculpture of a rabbit out of a carrot. Next she was sculpting a boat. On the table sat the Red Book of Existence. Even the child will one day die. It takes three cups of salt to cure a fish. The mother tries to remember being small, not as an adult remembers, but as a child, though it is hard. She would like to fit inside a thimble, and someday she probably will.
There is a casket the size of a walnut shell that waits in the garden. There is a husk. There is always the sorrow of the last morsel of fish to consider. Many of the children are still hiding in the garden. When she was little, she remembers going into the sewing box and taking out her favorite thing: a pincushion encircled by Chinamen. When she was small, she remembers the bright thimble and the way it looked like a castle on her thumb. The Grandmother from the North Pole was there then in the next room where she could hear her preparing the fish.
Lingonberries are something else she remembers. While the mother reaches to remember, the child wishes she had a picture phone so that while she talked to the Grandmother from the North Pole she could see her face and watch her white hair blowing in the wind.
The lifespan of a North Pole Grandmother is eighty-three, the child reads.
THE MOTHER HAD no use for computers and could not accompany the child as she entered the world of ciphers and shadows and glyphs, but the Grandmother from the North Pole, who loved nothing more than the future, gladly went wherever the child took her and was always happy to be able to learn something beautiful and new. The child put her grandmother’s hand on the cursor, and enigmatic, translucent fields were revealed.
It was marvelous, she thought, floating in the digital universe. At these times, above all, the Grandmother from the North Pole thought it was wonderful to be alive.
A blue multitude of children huddle around her. They’ve just come in from the blueberry patch. See them now as they dose off with their full buckets: Lars, Bibi, Ingmar, Anders, Sven. Baby Inga must be at home, or maybe she is not born yet.
Before the screen’s deep glow, the Grandmother said, I should like to write the Book of Wonder before I die, and her eyes sparkled.
IT WAS A privilege to live so near the river, that is what the mother always said. Silt passed through them some mornings and the mists worked themselves into the ways they thought about things. The child found fish in her pockets and river rocks in her pockets, and the sense of weight and immensity filled them, and many days they walked immersed in water and water-song.
There was swell and verge in the world. In spring, the banks surged. In the winter when the river froze, the mother and child read about how once cakes of ice were cut from it and stored in small icehouses. The river fed their notions of spaciousness and hope. They imagined carrying great cakes of ice in the shapes of hearts to the neighbors.
They would put the cakes on a baby’s feverish head. Or preserve a fish for the Christmas Eve dinner.
The child was thankful that the mother treated the river like a god. Some Sundays, they would spend the whole day lazing on its banks. They found fossils and slate and shale, and trains went by, and people from the city could be seen blinking in the windows. Then all was quiet again, and the train, sleek and fleeting, was gone. The child grew sleepy. The river made everything in the Valley radiant, even at night.
At night, the mother said, the river crept into their beds, and they could wade out until it was over their heads, and at that very place in the river there would be a birch canoe waiting to meet them. The child loved this part most of all, floating in the boat, and waving to the people on the other side who waited. She thought she could even see a girl about her age.
Before the mother and child arrived, the Indians had already lived here for thousands of years.
THE MOTHER WOKE the child before dawn and told her that she was to quickly dress because they would be going with the elders today on a bird-watching expedition. The child liked the sound of it: a bird-watching expedition. The mother loved bird-watching because it fostered the things she valued most: attentiveness, patience, care. What should have been a white stripe on the head of the smallest bird in the deepest wood, if one looked carefully and was very quiet and did not move, was actually orange because of the abundance of berries in the bird’s diet at this time of year. So much, the mother thought, depends on this. This watchfulness. The mother liked standing there in the dew in the sweet fleeting early hours of the day. What could be held could be held only for an instant — all the rest was held in the mind. A sighting, then a flitting away. And then the linger. That dream. It was a beautiful, prolonged instant, this being prepared, ready to let whatever flew into the field of vision be caressed by the eye.
When the child awoke that morning, the mother had handed her a bird atlas in which to make notes and record the names of the birds she saw. Standing in the meadow, suddenly and with great force the child was overwhelmed by the desire to fill the entire bird atlas. She was taken aback by the feeling — she had no idea where it had come from. She tried to quell it, for otherwise she would have to run around and shout with glee, which might scare away the elders and the birds.
Mostly they were very quiet, but sometimes the elders made sounds — phisshhhhhhh and phoshhhhhhh — and this seemed to call the birds to their sides. The child liked the sound, and she thought she would try it at home when their cat Bunny Boy was in the house.
There! Over there! a woman said in a hush — a momentary silhouette on a dark branch — there! It was the Ovenbird. You could tell by its song, teacher, teacher, teacher, it said.
Where? Where?
So little so drab so gray — or green, impossible to see.
Later when they were out of the forest, she would hear about the enclosed nest that the little bird would build. I should like to see the covered nest of the Ovenbird, the child said. Someone else spoke of the courtship rituals of the Woodcock.
In a great and mysterious turn, one of the elders took the child’s head and pointed it upward and to the left. The mother gasped, remembering how round and perfect the child’s head had been when she was born. It had seemed to her like a planet. One of the elders spoke of the Sphinx Moth. It was very quiet, and when someone spoke, it was always in a whisper, and what was said sounded like a secret. Another bird flew by. There! someone said. But she could not rescue the bird from the distance.
One of the elders, a woman without binoculars who led the way for a while, had fallen behind.