Engine Summer

By

John Crowley

"I've found you, then. I've found the greatest thing that was lost.

Yes. We were lost and you found us. We were blind, and you made us see. Now. You can only - stay - a short time, so…

What is it you want from me?

Your story."

THE FIRST CRYSTAL: Many Lives

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THE SECOND CRYSTAL: The Laughter of the Legless Man

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THE THIRD CRYSTAL: A Letter from Dr. Boots

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THE FOURTH CRYSTAL: The Sky Is Grass

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THE FIRST CRYSTAL: Many Lives

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Asleep?

No. Awake. I was told to close my eyes. And wait, he said, till you're asked to open them.

Oh. You can open them now… What do you see?

You.

Am I…

You're like… a girl I know. Taller. Are all the angels tall?

What else do you see?

This grass we sit on. Is it grass?

Like grass.

I see the sky. Through your roof of glass, oh, angel, can it be?

It is.

I'm here, then. Here. He was right, that I could come here Angel! I see the clouds below us!

Yes.

I've found you, then. I've found the greatest thing that was lost.

Yes. We were lost and you found us. We were blind, and you made us see. Now. You can only - stay - a short time, so…

What is it you want from me?

Your story.

That's all I am, now, isn't it: my story. Well, I'll tell it. But it's long. How can I tell it all?

Begin at the beginning; go on till you reach the end. Then stop.

The beginning… If I am only a story now, I must have a beginning. Shall I begin by being born? Is that a beginning? I could begin with that silver glove you wear; that silver glove, and the ball… Yes, I will start with Little Belaire, and how I first heard of the glove and ball; and that way the beginning will be the ending too. I would have to start with Little Belaire anyway, because I started with Little Belaire, and I hope I end there. I am in Little Belaire somehow always. I was created there, its center is my center; when I say "me" I mean Little Belaire mostly. I can't describe it to you, because it changed, as I changed; changed with me as I changed. But you'll see Little Belaire if I tell you about me - or at least some of the ways it can be.

I was born in my Mbaba's room. My Mbaba is my mother's mother, and it was with her mostly that I spent my baby years, as the custom is. I remember Mbaba's room better than any other of Little Belaire's thousand places; it was one that never changed, whose boundaries stayed the same, though it seemed to move from place to place as I grew up, because the walls and rooms around it were always being changed. It wasn't one of the oldest rooms, the old warren built by St. Andy that is the center of Little Belaire (tiny rooms of porous-looking square-cut gray angelstone, the old rooms where all secrets are kept); nor yet was it one of the airy, nonexistent rooms of the outside, with light translucent walls that change every day and fade into the woods till Little Belaire ends without a sign and the world begins. Mbaba's was on the Morning side, not far from Path, with walls of wood and a dirt floor covered with rugs, and many beetles and once a blacksnake that stayed nine days. And skylights that made it gleam in the mornings as though moist and fade slowly in the evening before the lamps were lit. You can see Mbaba's room from the outside, because it has a little dome, and on its sides red-painted vents that wave in the wind.

It was afternoon, in late November, when I was born. Already nearly everyone had revolved back into the close warm insides of Little Belaire, and went out rarely; smoke and food had been laid up for the winter season. In my Mbaba's room my mother sat with my Mbaba and Laugh Aloud, a gossip and a famous doctor too. They were eating walnuts and drinking red raspberry soda when I started to be born. That's the story I have been told.

The gossip named me Rush that Speaks. I was named for the rush that grows in water, that on winter days like the day I was born seems to speak when the wind goes through its dead hollow stem.

My cord is Palm cord, the cord of St. Roy and St. Dean. A lot of Palm cord people have names about words and speaking. My mother's name was Speak a Word; my Mbaba's name was So Spoken. There are hand names too - the cord is Palm, after all - like Seven Hands and Thumb. Since I have always been Palm, the Little Belaire I can tell you of is Palm's and is like my cord. But ask someone of Leaf cord or Bone cord and he'd tell you about a different place.

The silver ball and glove. I was seven, and it was a day in November; I remember, because this was also the first day I was taken to see a gossip, as that happens in the time of year when you were born, when you're seven.

Inside Mbaba's room, the vents in the little dome made a soft clack-clack-clack above my head. I watched Mbaba climb down the rope ladder that hung from a door set in the dome; she was coming back from feeding the birds. A sparrow flew in with her, fluttering noisily against the skylights and dropping white droppings on the rug below. It was cold this day I am telling you of, and Mbaba looked out from a thick shaggy shawl that ended in clicking tassels, though her feet wore only rings.

My mother had told me that Mbaba was growing solitary, the way old people do; and it was true that as I grew up, Mbaba came to spend most of her time in this room. But she wasn't ever really alone. Because around the walls were Palm cord's carved chests, of which Mbaba was the keeper. The carved chests are like - like honeycombs. What they are most like is Little Belaire itself: interrelated, full of secrets, full of stories. Each of the hundred drawers is marked with signs and carved in a different shape, depending on what's in it: each drawer was designed to hold just what it holds in the chest and to tell things about it: how it came here, what it has done, and what stories it can tell. Mbaba was never alone, because of all the souvenirs in the drawers of Palm cord's carved chests.

I lay naked under the thick rugs on Mbaba's bed, watching and listening. Mbaba, talking to herself, went around the room; she pressed one long finger to her collapsed toothless mouth, as though trying to remember something. She gave it up and came to busy herself about the pipe. The pipe in Mbaba's room is old and very beautiful, made of green glass, shaped like an onion, and hung on chains from the dome above. There are four stems hung around it in loops, woven in bright colors like snakes; and there is a metal bowl at the top in the shape of St. Bea's head, her mouth wide open to accept the chips of St. Bea's-bread.

Mbaba struck a match and held it lit in one hand while with the other she filled St. Bea's mouth with blue-green chips of bread from her barrel. She touched the match to the bread, took down one of the long stems, and inhaled; a dark bubble ascended from the bottom of the pipe to the top above the liquid level, where it burst and let out its smoke. Above the metal mouth ropes of thick, rose-colored smoke twined up around the chains, ascending to the dome; all around Mbaba was a rosy mist, the smoke coming from her nostrils and mouth. The smell of St. Bea's-bread is a good smell, dry and spicy, toasted, warm, a smell with a lot of insides. It doesn't taste like it smells; it tastes… like everything. Like anything. All at once. It tastes like other things to eat: dried fruit sometimes, or sour grass, or hazelnuts. And charred wood too, and dandelions; grasshopper's legs; earth, autumn mornings, snow. And thinking of it then and smelling it made me jump out of bed with the rug around me and run across the cold floor to where Mbaba motioned to me, grinning. I wriggled down next to her; she grunted as she took down a stem of the pipe for me. And so we two, me and my mother's mother, sat and smoked and talked.