We would have asked him more, but it’s better not to have things like that explained; Papa does not explain them. Mr. Evans made it seem clear and simple like that Simple Science that said everything in the wrong way. We do not have to have a book with a picture of a kettle on a kitchen fire to tell us what steam is.
But there are things that we must know. We must know why a nightmare is called a nightmare, but no one has yet explained it. He neighs like a horse when he laughs, he had a horse to ride when he was on the northern boundary which is that straight line on the map that separates us from Canada that he helped draw, that he had a dog team and Indian guides to help him with.
There was a dog with a barrel on his collar and a person asleep in the snow in our animal book; that was a Saint Bernard dog; the person was not dead, it looked like a girl with hair blown on the snow, but they said it was a boy who was asleep, not dead. You must not let yourself get warm in the snow; if you are terribly cold and then want to lie down and sleep because you feel happy and warm, you will freeze to death. The barrel had wine for the man in the snow. When he took us out to get that present, it was snowing. We walked down Church Street, then we turned down Main Street. Ida had put the top of the box down on the table and Gilbert was reaching in the box.
If the animals are there, then it did happen, then we did walk down Church Street, we three together, and we chose the animals.
Gilbert unwrapped the top animals; they were the Swiss wooden goat and the Swiss wooden bear that really were not for the putz but Mama kept them; then he said, “Here’s your bear, Harold,” and there it was.
It was the polar bear, and Gilbert of course remembered that it was Harold’s. How could you forget how we had laid them all out on the floor, then had put them back in the box so as to see them all together, then had begun to choose?
Gilbert unwrapped the lion, he unwrapped the striped lynx that looked like a cat. He said, “I don’t remember if this leopard is yours or Harold’s.” I said, “It’s a lynx, it’s mine.”
I wondered if Papa remembered how he had bought the box of animals. Papa said, “Well, I must be off, tempus fugit,” which were the letters written on the sundial that was still partly wrapped in its old sacking in the empty library. He let go my hand. I looked at him and saw that he was going.
* A Moravian missionary
BECAUSE ONE IS HAPPY
Miss Helen let us draw on our slates, provided, she said, the drawings were not too silly.
Was a Christmas tree drawn on a slate, in and out of season, silly? It appeared not. Straight up, like the mast of a ship, then the branches in stark silhouette, a skeleton of a tree that looks bare; it looks really like a tent set up, with the down-sweeping branches for the tent folds or the crisscross of the twigs like the pattern on the tent, like Indians paint patterns on their tents. The tree indeed has come from the forest in which long ago there were Indians. There was an Indian who said the music coming from our church was the voice of the Great Spirit. That was when the Indians were coming down from the mountains one Christmas Eve. Everything happened — or should happen in our town — on Christmas Eve. Anyhow, this is all in a book; there were books with old pictures and drawings and photographs of our town. The Indians said, “It is the Voice of the Great Spirit,” so the Great Spirit who was the Indian’s God was part of our God too; at least they went away. You draw the down-sweeping branches carefully, for if you make just silly scratches, Miss Helen says the drawing is not serious enough.
The thing is that you draw this tree, you rub it out with your damp sponge and polish off your slate with your bit of old towel that Ida has given you to keep in your school desk for your slate. Once in a while, Miss Helen tells whose slate-rags are too shabby. You get the sponges at John’s, where you get slate-pencils and valentines and false faces for Halloween. You keep the sponge in a little saucer and make excuses to go to the washroom to wet the sponge, till Miss Helen says you must all do your sponges first thing in the morning or at recess. There may be a branch of chestnut, in water on the schoolroom windowsill, that has burst into heavy furry leaves. We do not draw the branch of the chestnut, but with the slightest lift of branches, this pine tree on a slate may be or could be a chestnut tree with its candlesticks of blossom.
This is magic against the evil that stings in the night. Its voice wails at two, at three (it is called the “siren” or the “alert”) but safe, “frozen” in bed, there is magic. It is simple, innocuous magic. But sometimes through sheer nervous exhaustion, we drop off to sleep. We are not so safe then.
The serpent has great teeth, he crawled on Papa-and-Mama’s bed and he was drinking water out of a kitchen tumbler, the sort of tumbler that we put our paintbrushes in. Then, I wonder why he is drinking water out of a common glass tumbler on Mama-and-Papa’s bed. He does not spill the water. His great head is as wide as the tumbler but he drinks carefully and does not spill the water. Now I know there are three of us, I do not see their faces, but of course it is Harold and Gilbert.
The thing is, there is another snake on the floor, he may want water out of a glass, too; there is nothing very horrible about this until the snake on the floor rears up like a thick terrible length of fire hose around the legs of the bed. Then he strikes at me. I am not as tall as the footpiece of the bed, I could rest my elbows on the bed, like on a table. We spread out the Arabian Nights on Mama-and-Papa’s bed and I said, “This is a girl,” but Gilbert said, Aladdin was a boy. Was he? He wears a dress, he has long hair in a braid and a sort of girl-doll cap on his head. “Yes, yes,” Ida says, “Aladdin is not a girl.” Is it only a boy who may rub the wishing-lamp? I try it on the lamp on the stand in the parlor, but my wish does not happen, so maybe it is only a boy who may have the wish.
The snake has sprung at me and (though I know that Gilbert has been resting for a very long time, in a place called Thiacourt in France, and that Mama went to sleep too, in the early hours of the first day of spring long past, and did not wake up again) I shout through the snake-face, that is fastened at the side of my mouth, “Gilbert; Mama, Mama, Mama.”
The snake falls off. His great head, as he falls away, is close to my eyes and his teeth are strong, like the teeth of a horse. He has bitten the side of my mouth. I will never get well, I will die soon of the poison of this horrible snake. I pull at Ida’s apron but it is not Ida, it is our much-beloved, later, dark Mary. She looks at the scar on my mouth. How ugly my mouth is with a scar, and the side of my face seems stung to death. But no, “You are not stung to death,” says dark Mary, who is enormous and very kind. “You must drink milk,” she says. I do not like milk. “You must eat things you do not like,” says Mary.
There is coal in our cellar and we have a washroom and Ida puts the washtubs on the bricks in the little outer-room that opens on to the garden. There is a great pear tree that has two kinds of pears because it has been grafted, and it has different kinds of pear blossoms. There is wisteria that grows up the side of the wash-kitchen.
“Can I help you wash clothes, Ida?” This is Ida, this is that mountain, this is Greece, this is Greek, this is Ida; Helen? Helen, Hellas, Helle, Helios, you are too bright, too fair, you are sitting in the darkened parlor, because you “feel the heat,” you who are rival to Helios, to Helle, to Phoebus the sun. You are the sun and the sun is too hot for Mama, she is sitting in the sitting room with Aunt Jennie and they are whispering like they do, and they hide their sewing when I come in. I do not care what they talk about. They leave me out of everything. Ida does not leave me out, “Here take this,” says Ida. “Now squeeze it harder, you can get it drier than that.” I am helping Ida wring out the clothes. Annie is wiping the soap from her arms from the other washtub.