“Who else?”
“Oh, friend of mine. Met him in the day-lily patch.”
“Why, Sarah! But who?”
“Don’t rightly know. Tramp, maybe. Nice, though.”
Karen is staring at Sarah. “Why, Sarah Paddyfoot, what have you been up to? A tramp, did you say? Did he have a white beard, and very blue eyes?”
“Friend of yours, too?” asks Sarah.
“Well, no, but I saw him in town. He sure did stare at me.” She goes out with the plates, wondering. A tramp. Could he be the man in the cave, walking through the country? What had Sarah done, asking him here? Well, no sense in fussing. They’d find out soon enough. Too soon, maybe.
She can see Miss McCamley looking out the big loft window with Mr. Tillman and the boys. Abbey sits on her shoulder, tail twitching.
Will she stay? Karen wonders. It would be nice, nice to have her here.
When she looks again they have disappeared, but soon she hears pounding start in the barn, and she goes to see. In the stall next to her own Tom and John and Mr. Tillman are putting together a wood frame for Mary’s straw bed. Karen smiles. “You’ll stay, then?” she asks.
“Of course,” says Mary McCamley, “though I could build my own bed.” She is setting orange crates against the wall for shelves, and on these are her globe and her songbook, and next to them, Abbey, sitting very straight, watching it all.
When the bed is finished the boys scramble to get straw for it, startling Abbey into leaping from the box into the bedframe, where a moment later she is covered with straw and comes out mad, switching her tail. “Be careful, John!” Mr. Tillman frowns. Karen looks at him. She has not seen him cross before. But then he smiles. “Abbey, you must be quick in this house! Quick and nimble!”
Mary McCamley laughs at him as he sets Abbey back on the orange crate. “Have you spoiling her, that cat will,” she tells him. “I’ve known her a long time, takes advantage, she does, every chance she gets!”
Mr. Tillman laughs.
In the yard, beneath the tree, Sarah Paddyfoot straightens the day-lily vase. “To look at, these are,” she says, and beside the tree, in a tilted chair, sits the tramp, blue eyes bright and face and clothes very clean for someone who has been walking over the country.
There are introductions all around, and the tramp, whose name is Roland, bows gallantly to the twins, making them giggle. Then, taking Mary’s hand, he says, “Why, it’s the teacher from the village. How nice to see you again!”
Mr. Tillman goes to the kitchen and comes back with a bottle of amber wine, Sarah Paddyfoot rises to bring the pie on, and soon all are seated, the two guests placed where they can see the red sun descending into the ocean. The crow, very interested, comes down onto a branch to look, but Sarah chases him away. Bo wags mournfully, but has his own plate, and Abbey, on a box, has hers.
“I will make a toast, then,” says Roland, raising his glass.
” ‘Shield my soul from its peril, due
For the sins I sinned my lifetime through.’ “
Mary McCamley laughs gently, her glass half raised, then speaks softly: ” ‘My friend, my Roland, God guard thy soul! Never on earth such knight hath been, Fields of battle to fight and win. My pride and glory, alas, are gone!’”
“What is it, Papa? Is it Shakespeare?” The twins pull at their father’s sleeve, staring wide-eyed at Roland and Miss McCamley.
Jack Tillman smiles. “It is ‘The Song of Roland,’ ” he says. “Listen.
And he smote, with passion uncontrolled, On the heathen’s helm, with its jeweled crown Through head, and cuirass, and body down, And the saddle embossed with gold, till sank The griding steel in the charger’s flank; Blame or praise him, the twain he slew. ‘A fearful stroke!’ said the heathen crew. ‘I shall never love you,’ Count Roland cried. ‘With you are falsehood and evil pride.’”
“Is that you?” Lisa cries, looking across at Roland in amazement.
“I’m afraid not; only I like to pretend sometimes”— Roland winks—“that I might have been that Roland in some long past life.”
“Perhaps you were,” says Mary McCamley. “Ah, perhaps you were!”
Much later, leaving the adults, the children make their way to bed, the twins first, complaining, then Tom and John and Karen. The moon has risen full, and Karen looks longingly at the shore, silvered and quiet, and wishes she could walk along it, hut something makes her go on to bed, leaving the night to the grownups. She glances at them through the barn door as she goes to wash; they are dark shapes against the moonlit water. Their voices murmur contentedly, pipe smoke drifts on the breeze, and Mary McCamley laughs softly. Somewhere a night bird cries.
Karen gets into bed, propping the pillows behind her. There is a light on a cord beside her, and she takes up her notebook from the orange crate, where she has put a pot of mustard flowers and some shells from the sea. She feels snug and content, and in her mind words are going around. “The Song of Roland” speaks to her, the night and the sea sing outside her window, and she begins to think in words, in words of her own. Finally she leans forward and begins to write.
It is not connected writing, just impressions. Words about the sea, the shore, small bright impressions that run through her head. She writes until she is too tired to think, and then she lays the pad beside her on the table, turns out the light, and snuggles down. She thinks of Kippy, but somehow, lately, she has begun to feel that he is all right, that he is as safe and warm as she. She closes her eyes and she is fast asleep.
CHAPTER 16
The grownups have left the table and are walking along the shore, Bo tagging behind and Abbey left to peer after them from the willow tree.
‘This,” says Mary McCamley, “has been the most unlikely day of my life.”
“How?” asks Jack Tillman, looking down at her.
Mary smiles. “Oh, the remodeled barn, and J.L.,” she says, “and, I don’t know, the kids in the village talking about Sand Ponies, the sheriff’s office, eating lilies under a willow tree. And Roland and Sarah Paddyfoot.” (These two are far behind, peering into tide pools.) “Having, suddenly, a room with a bed of hay and orange crates for a desk. I think I’m dreaming it all.”
“Straw,” he corrects her. “Straw, not hay. Well,” he continues, “the way I look at it, nothing’s nicer than a dream. Right kind of dream, that is. I imagine you’ll find more things that are unreal, if you stay here. It’s different, somehow. Sometimes you think you must have dreamed it. Or wished it.” He glances at her.
“Wished on the Sand Ponies, perhaps?” she says.
“Perhaps.”
“I would like to see them, and make my wish.”
“Perhaps you will, Mary McCamley. If you stay long enough, I will take you to see them.”
“When?”
“When you’re ready to wish, of course.”
Much later, when they have returned and Sarah Paddyfoot has made coffee, Mary McCamley thinks again of the ponies. “Haven’t they ever been tamed?” she asks.
“Not that I know of,” says Jack Tillman.
“There’s one in a corral, not far from here,” says Roland. “Don’t know if he’s broke, though. But fat, looked cared for.”
“Where is that?” asks Jack Tillman, and when Roland tells him, he looks thoughtful. “You came by the main road, then?” he asks.
“Yes, I did. Took my time—like to see the country. No sense in walking if you don’t enjoy what you’re looking at.”
“What else did you see?” asks Jack Tillman, leaning back and lighting his pipe.
“Passel of things,” says Roland. “Other wanderers. People. Saw some Sand Ponies once, loose ones. Passel of things.”
“Ever see anything that made you wonder’? That you didn’t understand?”
“Most things on this earth make a man wonder, make him want to know more than he does, more than he can understand, maybe.”
Jack Tillman is quiet. Mighty strange talker, for a tramp, he is thinking.