But you can’t keep scolding when the other person says nothing. For the second mile to Olinger we were silent together. He was pressing, panicked now at being late, passing entire rows of cars and hogging the center of the pike. The steering wheel slithered in his hands when our tires got caught in the trolley tracks. He was lucky; we made good time. As we passed the billboard on which the Lions and Rotary and Kiwanis and Elks all welcomed us to Olinger, my father said, “Don’t worry about him knowing about your skin, Peter. He’ll forget. That’s the one thing you learn in teaching; people forget everything you tell ‘em. I look at those dumb blank faces every day and it reminds me of death. You fall through those kids’ heads without a trace. I remember, when my old man knew he was dying, he opened his eyes on the bed and looked up at Mom and Alma and me and said, ‘Do you think I’ll be eternally for gotten?’ I often think about that. Eternally forgotten. That was a terrible thing for a minister to say. It scared the living daylights out of me.”
The last children were crowding into the doors when we pulled into the high school lot. The bell must just have rung. In turning to get out of the car and scoop up my books, I glanced into the back seat. “Daddy!” I called.”Your gloves are gone!”
He was already some paces away from the car. He turned and swept his wart-freckled hand across his skull and re moved his blue cap. His hair stood up with static electricity. “Huh? Did that bastard take ‘em?”
“He must have. They’re not there. Just the rope and the map.”
He spared this revelation the space of a blink. “Well,” he said, “he needs ‘em more than I did. That poor devil never knew what hit him.” And he was on his way again, consuming the cement walk with generous strides. Grappling with my books, I could not catch up, and as I followed at an increasing distance behind him, the loss of the gloves, the way he permitted my expensive and painstakingly deliberated gift to sift through him generated a clumsy weight where my books were clasped against my abdomen. My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.
III
CHIRON hurried, a little late, down the corridors of tamarisk, yew, bay, and kermes oak. Beneath the cedars and silver firs, whose hushed heads were shadows permeated with Olympian blue, a vigorous underwood of arbutus, wild pear, cornel, box, and andrachne filled with scents of flower and sap and new twig the middle air of the forest. Branches of bloom here and there dashed color across the shifting caverns of forest space that enclosed the haste of his canter. He slowed. The ragged and muted attendants of air escorting his high head slowed also. These intervals of free space-touched by the arching search of fresh shoots and threaded by the quick dripdrop of birdsong released as if from a laden ceiling rich in elements (some songs were water, some copper, some silver, some burnished rods of wood, some cold and corrugated fire)-were reminiscent for him of caverns and soothed and suited his nature. His student’s eyes-for what is a teacher but a student grown old?-retrieved, from their seclusion in the undergrowth, basil, hellebore, feverwort, spurge, polypody, bryony, wolfs-bane, and squill. Ixine, cinquefoil, sweet marjoram and gilliflower he lifted, by the shape of their petals, leaves, stems, and thorns, from their anonymity in indiscriminate green. Recognized, the plants seemed to lift crisply in salute, hailing the passage of a hero. Black hellebore is fatal to horses. Crocuses thrive for being trod upon. Without his willing it, Chiron’s brain rehearsed his anciently acquired druggist’s knowledge. Of the plants called strykhnos, one induces sleep, the other madness. The root of the former, white when dug, turns blood-red while drying. The other some call thryoron and some peritton; three-twentieths of an ounce make the patient sportive, twice this dose induces delusions, thrice the dose will make him permanently insane. And more will kill him.
Thyme does not grow where a sea-breeze cannot reach. In cutting some roots one must stand to windward. The old gatherers maintained the peony root must be dug at night, for if a woodpecker observes you, you will suffer prolapsus ani. Chiron had scorned this superstition; he had meant to bring men out of the darkness. Apollo and Diana had promised to guide him. One should draw three circles around mandrake with a sword, and, at the cutting, face west. Chiron’s white lips smiled within the bronze fleece of his beard as he remembered the intricate scruples he had scorned in his quest for actual cures. What mattered about mandrake was that, mixed with meal, it assuaged gout, insomnia, erysipelas, and impotence. Of wild cucumber the root palliates white leprosy and mange in sheep. Of germander the leaves, pounded in olive oil, dress fractures and spreading sores; the fruit purges bile. Polypody purges downwards; the driver-which retains its virtue for two hundred years- both upwards and downwards. The best drugs come from places that are wintry, face the north, and are dry-in Euboea, the drugs of Aigai and Telethrion have most virtue. All perfumes save iris come from Asia: cassia, cinnamon, cardamon, spikenard, storax, myrrh, dill. The poisons are native: hellebore, hemlock, meadow-saffron, poppy, wolfs-bane. Chamaeleon is fatal to dogs and pigs; and if one wishes to discover whether a man that is sick will live, he should be washed with a paste of chamaeleon mixed with oil and water for three days. If he survives the experience, he will live.
A bird above him released a swift metallic song that seemed to be a signal. “Chiron! Chiron!”: the call sprang up behind him and overtook him and, skimming past his ears, outraced him in its bodiless speed of joy to the ragged cave-mouth of sunstruck air that waited at the end of the forest path. He came into the clearing and his students were already there: Jason, Achilles, Asclepios, his daughter Ocyrhoe, and the dozen other princely children of Olympus abandoned to his care. It had been their voices. Seated in a semi-circle on the warm orchard grass, all hailed him gladly. Achilles looked up from sucking the marrow from the bone of a faun; his chin was smeared with crumbs of wax from a honeycomb. The boy’s fine body had in it a hint of fat. Across those broad blond shoulders lay like a transparent mantle a suggestion of feminine roundness that gave his developed mass a slightly passive weight, and weakened his eyes. Their blue was too beryline; their gaze both questioned and evaded. Of all Chiron’s students, Achilles gave his teacher the most trouble yet seemed most needful of his approval and loved him least bashfully. Jason, less favored, slightly built and younger-appearing than his years, yet had the angular assurance of independence, and his dark eyes declared a calm intention to survive. Asclepios, the best student, was quiet and determinedly composed; in many respects he had already surpassed his master. Torn from the womb of faithless Coronis slain, he too had known an unmothered childhood and the distant protection of a divine father; Chiron treated him less as a pupil than as a colleague, and while the others romped at recess the two of them, old at heart, side by side delved deeper into the arcana of research.