Peace, p.6
Peace, page 6
Like some of the trees, the rocks remain; they are the soldiers, the Knights Templar, of the country, who if they were unable to save all the forest at least saved some of it, and the land itself, from the plow: three-foot rocks like humble infantrymen buried and half buried in the poor soil, tall columns of stone like generals and heroes visible for miles, crowned with hawks. I have seen a lovely pine tree there embracing a stone with her roots as though she were kissing the gallant who was going to war for her, and on her own time scale she was. But among these stones (as Professor Peacock would remind me, were I still a boy and he—whom I never remember as other than a young man—still alive) “there are others, Alden. Projectile points and hand axes, and even others—like this.”
His long-fingered, knobby hand pushed to one side the coil of of rope slung across his shoulder and rummaged in a trouser pocket, jingled coins, and at last produced a long, narrow, and very thin flake of hard brownish gray. “Do you know what this is?”
I took it and held it between my fingers, feeling suddenly and foolishly that it was a feather from a bird petrified. I shook my head.
“Have you ever seen a man plane a board? Do you remember the long curly wood shavings, Alden, that come out of the plane? Once someone was shaping a stone, to make a flint knife or an arrowhead. To do that, he had to—”
My aunt Olivia called from upstairs, “I’ll be down in just a moment now, Robert. Is Den entertaining you?”
“Oh, yes, we’re having a fine time.”
I said, “There’s a picnic lunch. Aunt Olivia made us a picnic lunch.”
“That’s quite an honor. She never cooks, does she?”
“Sometimes, just for me and her. There’s turkey. She made the lady that comes in to clean pluck it. But she cooked it herself. Sandwiches.”
“Are you hungry? Shall we raid the basket before she comes down?”
“You’d better not.” Aunt Olivia was on the stairs, wearing the old pink dress that, as she had explained to me the night before over a supper of tea and cheese, she always wore on these expeditions “because it isn’t good enough for anything else but it still looks nice,” and on her small feet a pair of very fashionable, high-laced lady’s hunting boots. The dress was not, as I saw now, nearly as worn-looking as those she put on to dust in—or wore when she was expecting no company—when there was and would be no one in her house but myself. “Ready to go, Robert? Den’s been ready for hours, I know.” Suddenly (it was something I was still unused to) she whistled piercingly, and Ming-Sno and Sun-sun came bounding, panting with pleasure, their deformed heads seeming almost split by their wide “kylin” mouths.
“Are you going to take both of them?”
“Why not? I’ll hold Ming-Sno, and Den can hold Sun-sun. You hold the picnic basket, Robert.”
We went by trolley across the bridge, and rode—the farthest I had ever ridden it—to the south end of the line, a place of a few stables built upon hillsides, and some cow sheds. Professor Peacock asked my aunt Olivia if she wanted to go to Eagle Rock.
“You are the master today, Robert. It’s a beautiful day, and Den and Ming-Sno and Sun-sun and I will accompany you wherever you wish, provided our poor, weak legs will bear us thither.”
The Professor laughed at her. “You could walk the legs off me if you wanted to, Vi, and you know it. But there’s a spot I’ve been wanting to look at.”
And so we walked by strange, bent little paths, the dogs romping around us, and my aunt Olivia pointing out wild flowers and coining, quite straight-faced, fantastic names for them, so that the dogtooth violet and the lady’s-slipper found themselves mingled, for that passing instant (as though they had attended an enchanted ball by mistake), with empress’s tears, duchess’s hat, and lavender star of George Sand.
“That’s phlox,” Professor Peacock said.
“Robert, how hopelessly mundane you are. Of course it is. It is also star of George Sand—I just renamed it, and you should know that the folk names of flowers aren’t scientific, and that some of them have three or four. Marguerite, poor lady, is also the oxeye daisy, not to mention the white-swan and the memorial daisy.”
“Vi, you—”
“And so when this darling boy is grown and someone asks him what a certain flower is, he will tell them; and eventually the name will pass into general use, and eventually some idiot will be writing something like, ‘The name ”star of George Sand,“ by which this flower is often popularly known, cannot have originated much before 1804, the year in which Miss Sand (nee Dupin) was born.”“
“Now you’re talking like a book, which is what you always tell me I do, Vi. I was going to say that you also make up most of your Chinoiserie—you do, you know. But when you talk about George Sand you sound like that fellow Blaine.”
“Stewart? Oh, no. He’s all for General Wallace, and that kind of book. That hamper isn’t getting too heavy for you, is it, Robert? Den and I could carry it between us for a bit.”
“No, I’m fine. But the rest of the way is going to be steep. Up this hill and then down the other side, which is worse, then around the next and up. Think you can make it?”
“Of course. Anyway, we’re nearly to the top already.”
“How about you, Alden?”
“I thought we just came out to look at the flowers.”
My aunt Olivia said, “Robert never asks me to come out here unless he has something to show me—do you, Robert? He comes here by himself and prowls about, and has all the fun of finding something, and then comes to get me to admire it. The last time it was a dinosaur’s skull.”
“A sloth,” Professor Peacock said. “Manville, at the university, has identified it now. A giant sloth.”
“At any rate, I thought it was going to be very frightening, but it was only a big piece of bone and a tooth—you are a deceiver, Robert.”
“Only an enthusiast,” Professor Peacock said.
I asked him what the sloth was doing here. “Eating leaves,” he replied shortly. “That’s what they did, mostly.” The ascent was sufficiently steep for him to be a little out of breath, as indeed all of us were except Sun-sun and Ming-Sno, who panted constantly whether the way was easy or abrupt, but never seemed to lack for wind.
I pointed out that the sloth could have gotten those anywhere, and my aunt Olivia told me to be quiet; but nonetheless it seemed to me that my objection was just, that no animal would have had to come to this remote and rugged area just for leaves. Not knowing what any sort of sloth was, much less a giant one, which sounded both clumsier and more exciting, I pictured an immense cow, and then Babe, Paul Bunyan’s blue ox, of which I had read somewhere, and then the giant himself, ax in hand, a giant who almost immediately became myself magnified, stalking across the hills by stepping from hilltop to hilltop, and I thought of the fun it would be to fell the trees, sending them crashing down into the gorges, into the narrow valleys, so that more could grow where they had stood.
“When I grow up,” I said, “I’m going to have a ax, and I’m going to come here and chop down a bunch of these trees.”
Professor Peacock said, “Take my advice, Alden—when you’re grown up, a pretty woman is a more pleasant companion than an ax.”
“Oh, Robert!”
“Aunt Olivia, if Ming-Sno dies, or Sun-sun, can we bury them here?”
“What a thing to say, Den. They’re not going to die.”
“When they get real old.” Actually I would gladly have killed them on the spot for the fun of the funeral. Sun-sun, who had been sniffing at a woodchuck hole, had dirt on his nose already.
“Why do you want them to be buried here?”
“So somebody a long time from now will find their heads and be surprised.”
Professor Peacock said, “He’s right, Vi. Look at their skulls—no one would think that they were dogs.“
My aunt Olivia said, “Don’t be silly, Den, nobody would find them.”
“Years from now,” the professor said, laughing.
“Years from now they would know what they were: big Pekinese.”
“You misunderstand me, Vi. I am on Alden’s side, and we mean thousands and thousands of years.”
“There won’t be anyone then,” my aunt Olivia said. She was pulling herself up the slope, and Professor Peacock stopped to give her a hand. We were nearly at the top.
“You don’t know that,” he said.
“It’s not difficult to guess. You know the history of species. Each starts as an obscure new animal, inhabiting a small area, and rare even in that. Then, for some reason, conditions become favorable for it—it spreads and spreads and spreads and becomes the most common creature of all. If it is a grazing animal like us, it will increase until the plains are black with its kind.”
“Men aren’t grazing animals, Vi,” the professor objected.
“The bread in that basket you’re carrying was ground from the seed of a grass, Robert, and the turkey was fattened on grain. The Chinese, who constitute a quarter or more of the world’s population, exist almost entirely on the seeds of a swamp grass.”
A moment later we were at the top; while the professor and I sat down to rest, my aunt, facing into the wind, took off her wide hat and loosed the jet-headed pins that held her hair. It was very long, and as black as a starling’s wing. Professor Peacock took a pair of binoculars from a leather case on his belt and said, “Do you know how to use these, Alden? Just turn this knob until whatever you’re looking at becomes clear. I want to show you something. Where I’m pointing.”
“A dragon,” my aunt Olivia said. “The claws of a dragon, imprisoned in an antediluvian lava flow. When Robert cracks the rock, he will be free and alive again; but don’t worry, Den, he is a relative of Sun-sun’s.”
“A cave,” the professor said. “See the dark spot on the side of that bluff?”
I was still looking for it when my aunt took the glasses, saying, “Let me see, Den.”
“Only about fifteen or twenty feet down from the top. I think they reached it by a trail from the other side, but part of that’s fallen away now. Look off to the left.”
My aunt nodded. “I saw Altamira while I was in Spain, Robert. I told you about it, didn’t I—yes, I know I did. The name means ‘to view from a high place,’ I think, and you go down into a cave.”
“I don’t imagine we’re going to discover another Altamira four miles from Cassionsville,” the professor said, “but I thought it might be interesting. I’m going to let myself down from the top with this rope.”
My aunt looked at him speculatively.
We made our way down the farther side of the hill we had just climbed, and splashed across a small, stony stream edged with moss-trunked trees whose limbs, stretching across the noisy water, muted it within a few feet to music, a sound that might have been the notes of a syrinx played to one who, by turns, laughed and wept.
Through smaller and more closely set trees, through blackberry brambles and thickets, the five of us passed around the shoulder of the hill; then, over grass now drying in the first summer sun, to its top. This was a higher hill than the first, though the ascent (on the side we had chosen) was easier, and I recall that when I looked from its summit toward the hill from which we had seen the cave, I was surprised at how low and easy it appeared. I asked the professor where the town lay, and he pointed out a distant scrap of road to me, and a smoke which he said came from the brick kilns; not a single house of any sort was visible from where we stood. While my aunt and I were still admiring the view, he tied a large knot—which he told me later, when I asked, was called a “monkey’s fist”—in one end of his rope and wedged it between two solidly set stones. Then, with a sliding loop around his waist, he lowered himself from the edge, fending off the stones of the bluff with his legs much as though he were walking.
“Well,” my aunt said, standing at the edge to watch him, with the toes of her boots (this I remember vividly) extending an inch or more into space, “he’s gone, Den. Shall we cut the rope?”
I was not certain that she was joking, and shook my head.
“Vi, what are you two chattering about up there?” The professor’s voice was still loud, but somehow sounded far away.
“I’m trying to persuade Den to murder you. He has a lovely scout knife—I’ve seen it.”
“And he won’t do it?”
“He says not.”
“Good for you, lad.” .
“Well, really, Robert, why shouldn’t he? There you hang like a great, ugly spider, and all he has to do is cut the rope. It would change his whole life like a religious conversion—haven’t you ever read Dostoyevsky? And if he doesn’t do it he’ll always wonder if it wasn’t partly because he was afraid.”
“If you do cut it, Alden, push her over afterward, won’t you? No witnesses.”
“That’s right,” my aunt Olivia told me, “you could say we made a suicide pact.”
Frightened, I shook my head again, and heard Professor Peacock call, “There is a cave here, Vi!”
“Do you see anything?”
He did not answer, and I, determined to be at least as daring as my aunt, walked to the edge and looked over; the rope hung slack, moving when my foot touched it. Trying to sound completely grown up, I asked, “Did he fall?”
“No, silly, he’s in the cave, and we’ll have to wait up here forever and ever before he’ll come up and tell us what he found.”
She had lowered her voice, and I followed suit. “You didn’t really want me to cut the rope, did you, Aunt Olivia?”
“I don’t suppose I really cared a great deal whether you did or not, Den, but I would have stopped you if you’d tried—or didn’t you know that?”
If I had been older, I would have told her I did, and I would —after the fashion of older people—have been telling the truth. I had sensed that cutting the rope was only a joke; I had also sensed that beneath the joke there was a strain of earnestness, and I was not mature enough yet to subscribe fully to that convention by which such underlying, embarrassing thoughts are ignored—as we ignore the dead trees in a garden because they have been overgrown with morning-glories or climbing roses at the urging of the clever gardener. I continued to wait thus, embarrassed and silent, until the professor’s head appeared above the edge of the bluff and he scrambled up to stand with us.
He said, “It was inhabited at one time all right, Vi. There’s signs of a fire, and even some scratches on rocks. Not Altamira, of course.”
My aunt walked to the edge—she had stepped back from it while we had been waiting—and looked over. “I could do that, I think,” she said.
“Vi, don’t be insane!”
In the end Professor Peacock made a sort of sling seat for her and lowered her over the edge. I asked him if she was not heavy, and he said, “Vi? Lord, no. She’s all bird bones and petticoats. Her clothes probably weigh more than she does.” I asked how I was going to get down (having assumed that since my aunt was going I would go, too); while the professor was looking surprised, my aunt, who must have had excellent hearing, called, “Put Den in the seat, Robert. I’ll catch him when he comes down. All you have to do is hang on, Den, and keep yourself from scraping.”
The way down was shorter than I had imagined, and at the bottom, standing on a narrow but apparently quite secure ledge, was my aunt, who took me in her arms and drew me into the cave. After a moment the empty rope rose again, and after another it returned, this time with the picnic basket slung by the handles. “Now,” Aunt Olivia said, “even if cruel Robert abandons us we won’t starve, Den; at least not for a while.”
I asked if he was coming down.
“Of course, or he won’t get any lunch.”
He was there in a moment, his presence backing us slightly into the small cave behind the ledge. “See,” he said, “how black the soil is here? That’s charcoal.” He squatted, sifting it between his fingers until he had a fragment of carbonized wood to show us; a tiny fleck of mica caught the sunlight for an instant and gleamed like a dying spark. “There were hundreds of fires here,” he said, “perhaps thousands.”
My aunt was already unpacking the lunch. “It’s going to get the underside of my tablecloth black,” she said, “but I daresay Mrs. Doherty will restore it for a price.” She stopped for a moment to examine an unintelligible pattern of lines someone had scratched on the wall of the cave. “Could I make a rubbing of that, do you think?”
Professor Peacock said, “I’ll do it for you. I want one for myself, too. Do you think Alden here realizes that this is the oldest house he has ever been in? Probably the oldest he will ever be in, even if he lives to be a hundred.”
Aunt Olivia, having untied the blue thread that had held it shut in the basket, peered into a small milk-glass dish with a lid shaped like a setting hen. “Ah, olives,” she said. “Ripe olives. I’d forgotten what I put in there. Den may realize that, Robert, but it won’t mean anything to him. Not yet. Are you finding treasures in that dirt?”
“A bone.” He held it up—a blackened twig. “My guess is wild turkey.”
I said, “The Indians lived here, didn’t they?”
“Pre-Indians,” Professor Peacock said.
My aunt snorted.
“The aboriginal people,” the professor continued, “who—about ten thousand years ago, according to Hrdlicka—crossed the Bering Strait and eventually settled at Indianola, Indian Lake, Indianapolis, and various other places, at which points they were forced to become Indians in order to justify the place-names. That turkey may have gobbled his last gobble before the pyramids were built.“ My aunt handed him a sandwich; he put it down until he could dust his black fingers on the legs of his trousers. She said, ”This may be the last meal ever eaten here, Robert—that’s what I’ve been thinking while I got the food out. It’s probably the first time anyone has eaten here in at least five hundred years, and it may be the last time anyone ever does. What are you looking at back there, Den?“
