Da Vinci's Bicycle Page 5

  We damned the inlet with what we dug out, adding rocks for strength. The sea could not slosh in.

  That is my shield against the Gorgon stare when the drums beat and the awful trumpets blow for the day’s work in this monster of a ditch. I slog off to the latrines, to the messline, clanking in step with my brothers along the chain, to the great gully the sides of which are deep enough to make twilight of its bottom. For I am Rufus.

  We found water.

  I DO NOT KNOW where I am. I live in the oak Volscna, who is a thousand years old. Trees are people I have learned. There is too dark a difference between me and the animals. I cannot understand what they are doing, so busy all the time.

  But trees like me, I think. I can hang from their boughs like a pear, an olive, an apple. They eat light. Volscna tells me tales, old, old tales. He remembers when elks were the kings of the world. He remembers the Etruscans, who watched the lightning with him. He has seen the sun black at noon. He calls me one who moves in winter.

  I have been with ships on the sea, so far that the horizon is water all the way around, I have flown with the kestrels to their nests, I have been down to the bottom of the sea and watched spiders frail as hairs walking through forests of coral. The Consiliarii have abandoned me. I go by feel. I long to know the animals, to whom I am a stranger, perhaps forever.

  In the oak Volscna I can lose myself in leaf after leaf, where light is fermented and all smells of a sharp green, in the mellow brown acorns, in the mistletoe. I can get close to the owls when they are asleep. At night we watch the stars, Volscna and I, the moon and the planets.

  The Wooden Dove of Archytas

  INTO THE EYE of the wind it flew, lollop and bob as it butted rimples and funnels of air until it struck a balance and rode the void with a brave address. We all cried with delight.

  My name is Aristopolites, called Trips. One of a wheen of tanlings enrolled in the gymnasium, where we learn to double the volume of a cube, chart harmonic proportions, wrestle, saltate, construe Homer, and sing, we also learn that the universe runs by strict laws which are at the mercy of chance.

  The wooden dove was culver trim and very like, no gaudy anywhere about it. Its eyes were painted on, a circle with a dot inside, larger than natural, so that it goggled like an owl. It even had cronets made of byssus of the penna that splayed between its toes. It was the gazingstock of Taras for days before it flew. When important people came to see it, our handsomest oxboy would bring it on the flat of his hands, like Cora with the pomegranate, padding with his toes turned in. We littles, whose pizzles are no bigger than the gaster of a wasp, as the lizards tease us, were not allowed even to touch it.

  When its works were explained to us at school, I told at table that Archytas the Pythagorean had made a wooden pigeon that could fly. Mama said I was neglecting my squash, Pappos crinkled his eyes, which is his way of laughing when his mouth is full, and Pappas asked how, by the cullions of Hermes.

  — By steam, I said.

  — By steam, Pappas said, to himself, the way you repeat something you want to remember.

  — Out its bung, I suppose, he added, wiping honey from his beard and licking his fingers.

  — Not only that, I said. The steam is going to be compressed inside, and will turn cogs with ratchets that will flap the wings. Most of the steam, it is true, will hiss out from under the tail and shoot the dove forward.

  Pappos grinned with his eyes shut.

  — I once saw a philosopher, he said, who had just left his house one morning, get wedged between two fat men who were walking deep in conversation, so that he was rolled right around to the opposite direction in the squeeze, and soon found himself at home again. Short day! he said to his good wife.

  Pappas covered his face with his hands.

  — Who was this? Mamma asked.

  Krousithyros, our steward, fixed his distant look on his face, his whole thought on the elk of Thessaly.

  — Order and chance, I said. But before I could explain myself Pappos was off again, and nothing takes priority over a grandfather except the drum of the militia in time of invasion.

  — Then, he said, there was the philosopher who boiled his waterclock in the pot and timed it by the octopus he had bought for his dinner.

  — Whatever! Mamma said.

  Krousithyros whisked Pappos’ eel pie away and gave him a compote of figs and curds, thinking even harder of elk.

  — Pappas ka’ Pappos, I said, will you come see the dove when it flies? It will go whoosh, and circle, they say, and then nobody knows what it will do. What if it flies out of sight, like a real dove?

  SHE HAD COME UP to the house past the pigpen and the barn, past Scissor whisking out the buckboard for Uncle Billy, through the kitchen garden, and stood at the back steps, her moccasined feet together, her red hands crossed on her stomach. She wore a black derby with a jay’s feather stuck in its band, a fringed shawl, a polka-dot dress over a blue gingham dress, the inmost skirts hanging lowest down her stout shins, which were wrapped in military leggings.

  — How do, Breadcrust! Hanna said to her.

  House niggers were on speaking terms with the Indians down to the creek, but that was all. Didn’t they sit around the skillet in the middle of the floor, Tillman the dog and Okra the cat shoving in as members of the family in good standing, Anne and Jack and Tommy, all eating a stew maybe of squirrel poured piping hot over the hoecake, maybe of rabbit or even mush rat? And whatever it was, you could be sure it was as salty as brine. Or if it was hominy, they would have muscavados over the lot, and Dovey at it too, best she could.

  — Hearn the hickwall, Anne Breadcrust said to Hanna, who was dashing slop over the hollyhocks.

  — Hearn the ile.

  — Do tell, Hanna said, putting her apron up over her mouth.

  — Body die.

  — Jesus take care of his own, Hanna said. I pay no tention to peckerwood. Huhu talk, she added.

  Then she glanced over her shoulder into the kitchen, to see who might be listening, and leaned over the bannister. Anne Breadcrust stepped closer.

  — Mpatabiribiri wulisa kpang kpang! Hanna said quickly, and showed her blue gums in a falsetto laugh.

  Anne Breadcrust stood motionless, displeased.

  — Huh! Hanna grunted, and went with dignity into the kitchen.

  — Miss Fanny, Anne said, you reckon she come out?

  She was speaking to whoever might hear her in the kitchen, where she saw the Medusa on the oven door, a churn, a safe with pitchers and bowls wrapped in cheesecloth. She put her feet together. She would wait.

  — You say you hear an old owl? a voice came through the door.

  — Hearn the peckerwood, too.

  She would speak as they spoke, in their words. The voice was that of Aunt Amanda, a woman with more sense than Hanna and a witch to her people.

  — Missy Manda, Anne Breadcrust called, I have a word for Miss Fanny, do you not mind.

  She heard Hanna laughing, and a ringing of skillets. That comfortable, chucking sound was the meal sifter, and that slide and tap was the big knife cutting fatback for the whippoorwill peas, the hulls of which she could see in a dishpan on the porch.

  And then there was Miss Fanny, six tortoise-shell combs in her hair. She had been transplanting cuttings, as it was time for the porch flowers to come inside, some to the root cellar, some to the dining room. She carried a cane geranium in one hand, a bent spoon in the other. Her hair was as black as a Cherokee’s, she was fond of Dovey, and had often kindly asked how she did.

  — Anne? she said, looking through the top of her gold-rimmed bifocals. Fall’s coming on right fast, don’t you think?

  — A hard winter, Miss Fanny, she said quietly. See it in the stinkweed.

  — Jack say so?

  — See it in the squirrel tail.

  Miss Fanny waited patiently for Anne to get around to what she had come to say. The silence was long.

  — If you could let me have it, Anne said at last
, I’d thank you for the matchbox.

  — The matchbox! Miss Fanny said. What matchbox?

  — The matchbox on the shelf in the kitchen.

  — Whatever in the world for? Miss Fanny laughed, resettling her specs.

  — Dovey dead.

  She said it as if Miss Fanny ought to have known.

  A ringdove, this Dovey, Miss Fanny knew, the kind that chimes before a shower and ruckles afterwards. Dovey had been presented to Miss Fanny on Jack Frost’s finger, and it had cooed in her face. She had seen it looking out of the bib of Tommy’s overalls with its button eyes. Silk Deer fed it from her hand with chickenfeed that she had given her.

  — Did the dog get it? The cat?

  — Tillman and Okra never bother Dovey, Miss Fanny.

  She did not try to explain that Rattlesnake had been paid to take hunger for a dove from the dog and the cat. Those who were not the people could not understand.

  — Wind blow the door to on Dovey, Miss Fanny. She die in my hands. Most pitiful sight you ever see.

  — The door! Miss Fanny said.

  — She was about to fly out, got out of Tommy’s hand, flying up near the top and the door come to and catch her. Tommy cry and cry.

  Miss Fanny raised her hands in sympathy.

  — I hate it that it had to happen, she said.

  Anne was shocked at the Presbyterian phrase but dismissed it as so much ignorance.

  — The matchbox, she said, would make her a coffin. Such a pretty box. She would fit right in.

  Hanna came out of the kitchen on the march, sifter in hand.

  — Dove sat on Jesus’ head the day He was baptize in the stream of Jordan, she said in her testifying voice. Norah sont a dove out from the Ark, and no place found hit for the sole of hits foot. Sont a nother, and hit brought back a live branch in hits bill. Scripture words, Scripture words, ever one I say. A bird sweet to Jesus is any dove. You must believe I’m truly sorry. Dovey with Jesus, Breadcrust.

  — You welcome, Anne said. The ile sing all our death, in time.

  WE GATHERED OUTSIDE our gymnasium where Archytas the Pythagorean was going to launch his dove from the courtyard. The steam it ran by was to come from copper kettles on a stove. Pappas came with me. Pappos showed up later, explaining that he might just see if the wrestlers and javelineers were in anything like shape for the summer games, but assured us that he did not expect to see any play-pretty of a wooden bird fly around whistling Sappho.

  Two philosophers from Athenai had arrived in Taras a week before, still green from the crossing. One of them, Archytas told us, knew Aristophanes. The other remembered from childhood being shown a hale bald man with big feet and flat nose. Sokrates himself! We were all told from our first days in school that Archytas had letters from Plato in Sikilia, kept in their own jar.

  Harp and flute signaled the arrival of the archons and the priests of Demeter and of Hermes Tree. Archytas almost didn’t greet them, and paid them scant attention when a boy reminded him by tugging at his cloak. As it was, they had to accept a quick salute, ran through a prayer, and stood with the rest of us while the dove was brought out to the kettles.

  Around us I heard charms against the eye of all lucklessness, the opinion that Archytas would scald himself and half the school, a hope that if the automatic bird did fly there would be rich travelers to Taras, Sicilian envy, Sidonian merchants who would ask us to supply them with wooden doves for their markets, the kindly regard of the gods.

  On a grooved ramp pointing at a steep angle to the sky an oxboy set the dove and tested its wings by jiggling a mechanism that made it flap frantically, like a bird shooed from a roof.

  Order and chance, I said to myself.

  Archytas pointed now to this boy, now to that, and as his finger fell level Damos pulled a lever down and Karabion connected a tube to a kettle, Pantimos ran oil down a stick into the works of the dove, Babax fell to pumping the bellows. The archons and the priests began to step back, everybody stood on their toes, the better to see. The eyes of the dove stared, as if full of interest and hope, like a snake that has lifted its head to flick its tongue and listen in stillest silence.

  MISS FANNY, TOO, went down to the creek beyond the bottom field where Anne Breadcrust and Jack Frost lived in a cabin that had been part of the slave compound, all that had survived. Only Indians would live in it now. The niggers had two-room cabins on the road, with newspapers on the walls, kerosene lamps, chickens, and a fig tree. Uncle Billy went as far as the edge of the field, explaining that he’d never been to the funeral of a game bird before, didn’t expect the opportunity to arise again, and wanted some sense of what it was like.

  Hanna and Miss Fanny went together, in Sunday hats. Hanna said she was going because there was something to everything an Indian did.

  — There will be power, she said, and Scripture teaches that a dove is a bird close to the Lord.

  She had a rabbit’s foot on her person, a buckeye, and a horseshoe.

  They found them sitting cross-legged with their backs to the cabin, Silk Deer and Tommy together, Anne and Jack Frost. Their red hands were on their knees. Before them, on a washtub turned upside down, lay Dovey in the matchbox, which was slid half open, so that one could see the silvery brown shoulder of a wing and the dull circle of a blind eye. Her beak was gaped, as if stilled in a last breath.

  Miss Fanny nodded to each. Hanna stood behind, reticent.

  —Dovey about to fly, Anne said to them. Her soul go up. It be happy where she go. It would be a good place to be.

  A cane-bottomed chair had been placed for Miss Fanny, and beside it at a correct distance a keg for Hanna. Before each was a clean glass jar containing a feather.

  Jack Frost began a kind of mumbled chant once they had taken their places. He kept time with a gourd rattler that he took from inside his Confederate greatcoat, causing Miss Fanny and Hanna to look at each other briefly, in recognition of their utter ignorance as to how Jack Frost came to be wearing part of Captain Mattison’s parade uniform.

  Anne joined the mumble, motionless as a statue except for her lips, and at some signal which they could not detect, Silk Deer and Tommy crept forward to the washtub and hunkered there, watching Dovey in her matchbox intently. Silk Deer cupped her thin long hands around her mouth.

  — Tell her, Anne Breadcrust said, to find good medicine where she be. Tell her peck bitterweed and never mind this world no more. Take goldweed in her craw, for sunshine on her journey, sip springwater for the light of the moon.

  — She bout to go, Jack Frost said, and shook his rattler the faster.

  — Tell her, Anne said, snake been told, coon been told, jay been told.

  — She going! Jack said with his eyes closed.

  — Tell her, Anne said, Rabbit dance tonight. Tell her we dream.

  Tommy looked up, Silk Deer looked up. The rattler ceased.

  — We kick the door, Dovey! Anne cried. We kick the door!

  — She gone, Jack Frost said.

  ARCHYTAS FELL on his knees and looked at something under one of the kettles, signaling with a waving arm to Damos on the other side. There was a whomp and hiss in the air, and Pappas lifted me up so that I could see the dove leaking winter breaths of steam slide up the ramp, unfold its wings, and shoot upward. It whistled up like an arrow from a bow, fluttered with the stagger of a bat, and banking into a long high wheel, soared over the chronometer tower, the fane of Asklepios, the armory, the hills. We all cried with delight.

  John Charles Tapner

  A LANTERN held to his face showed which of the exiles in the weave of the waves was the one who had insulted the Queen. Their longboat had touched into the shingle and they jumped from her prow, wet to the hips, to hand out women and boxes and trunks with hummocked tops. They’d come across from Jersey in a fog, calling on a tin trumpet that had the one flat ugly note breaking into the music of the gannets and gulls, the bells of the buoys, and the ruckus of windwash rolling the ocean at half dawn.

 
; It was a grand thing to see them all remove their hats and bow from the waist as the old one came from the boat. I had their names on a list from the constable: Bachelet, Dessaignes, Fruchard, Thomas, under proscription the lot, exiles living from pillar to post.

  Well over thirty years ago the first Napoleon died, in a rage they say, on some island no bigger than this half the world around, and the dust he raised will not settle in our time. But then the French love a drum and adore a scarlet sash. Give them a snail to eat, a tall bottle, a book with things ungodly and wild in it, and they will follow a general with a moustache from shoulder to shoulder and a brass band into heathendom and beyond, heel-deep in their own gore.

  He came across the brown sand, enlarged by the mist that had bedeviled the island for days, a hank of vraic around one boot, he never minding the hamp of it, his grizzard beard runched out from the lappets of his redingote. The bonnet and frogged cape behind him was his wife, fashed and tottering, flapping like a sea mew. And yet another fluster of ruffles, wet and squealing gaily, was his daughter.

  — A very Beethoven of a wind! he cried into my ear.

  Holding the lantern aloft, I bade him welcome to the Bailiwick of Guernsey. I did not ask for papers. The peelers would remark upon that later.

  His cunning eyes looked out of silken wrinkles, the eyes of a man easy with books and talk, restless and attentive, no rat’s jinking from a hole more awake.

  The daughter had a beauty which was, at that hour and mauger the blore, wearying toward length in the tooth and a sharpness of nose. She would later run away to the new world after a red sash of her own, but that’s another story. From under her drenched cape she took two great oblong books. Shakespeare.

  — Monsieur Martin, he said, pronouncing it French.

  He took my hand in both of his and looked into the backrooms of my soul, my God what eyes! A knitch more on the fire and we stood in puddles before a blaze, swapping politenesses in a desperate sort of way, until madame said she would scream if she did not have a chair, a posset, and camphor on her temples.