Below the log, a cold spot, snow. Up through the snow push tiny wild strawberries that he eats and lets the bright sweet juice stain his hands. This is good, a sign to go deeper, to find what he needs to find.
He pushes off the path and into the woods. He is alone and everything is sharp, full of hungry life. Two chipmunks chase each other from branch to branch, and one falls, bounces on the ground, runs off again. The thickets grasp at him and only reluctantly let go. A stream sings in the distance: he turns a corner and almost stumbles into it. He goes onto his belly and leans over, and with a smooth stick he has found, he can almost touch the surface. His head is a splotch in the white sky, rimmed by the black reflected trees; his clothes are full of burrs. He knows he has a gash in his face only when he sees a drop of blood fall and be sucked down into the water and fade like smoke.
Now it will come, he thinks. Out of the water, probably. He hopes for a golden swan or a water nymph, but he would take a troll, an ugly little man Bit’s size, a monster. He waits. Nothing happens.
In time, he moves on. His bones are weary. The day has gone cold and the sky above the greening branches is a deeper blue. Out of nowhere a doll’s-eyes plant, googly with great white eyeballs, watches him. Through the hole in the trunk of one tree he sees a whole and early moon, and it reminds him of a pie. But when he looks closer, he sees the face embedded there. Why has nobody ever told him that the man in the moon is shouting in alarm?
He is so very little. And the woods are so black and deep.
His feet have gone numb when he finds the hiccup in the woods, the clearing. He feels an airlessness here. Stones stick out of the snow-burned grass, and Bit thinks of Astrid’s teeth, the way they are haphazard and yellow.
He sits to gather himself, and finds his fingers tracing words carved in the stones.
Minerva,
one says.
Whose Name Is Writ In Air
.
1857, another says.
A tiny one, a milk tooth, says simply,
Breathed once, then lost
.
He doesn’t know how long he sits. The trees whisper among themselves. Dusk falls, and the stone under him grows chill. There is a sense of gathering, a hand that clenches the center of a stretched cloth and lifts.
From the corner of his eye, he sees a white movement. He watches it obliquely for ten breaths, then turns his head to look. He expects to see one of the stones crawling off into the darkness, but it is not a stone.
An animal stands there, pointy and white and tall, fringed. It is graceful as a white deer, but it is not a deer.
The beast fixes Bit with its yellow eye and sniffs. At its side, the shadows thicken. The texture flows vertical and becomes fabric. Bit holds himself tiny and still, and looks up the dress to find a face. A woman stares at him, a very old woman. It is the witch, the one he has dreamed of. But she is not ugly: her hair is a soft white with a black streak, and she has roses in her cheeks. Though her lips are set in deep wrinkles, the lips themselves are plush. The way she looks at him, Bit feels pinned.
They gaze at one another, the woman and Bit.
This is it, the nut of the Quest, what he was meant to find, the moment where everything will turn. He waits for her to speak or give him a sack of gold, to give him the curse or the antidote, a vial, an apple, an acorn to crack and spill, a silken dress, a horseshoe, a feather, a word. She will tell him, give him, help him. He feels his body, so tiny in the great, twilit world, but he knows he will do what she asks of him. Even if he has to live with her forever and ever in a small stone tower in the woods and never get to see Arcadia again, he will do it.
He thinks of Hannah, a shape in her bed. He thinks, Please.
He wishes he could shout but fears the old curse that may befall Hannah if his lips split and his longing pours out.
He waits, but the woman only steps backward and becomes the woods again. Then the beast lifts its thin front leg and, with a snort of steam from its nostrils, it, too, trots away. Their sounds fade. He is sitting in the blue dusk alone. His hands are as empty as ever.
His heart settles again into its rhythm, and he trusts himself to move. His jeans are wet in the seat and down the insides of his thighs. The forest pushes down so hard on him he can hardly breathe. He cannot cry, not now.
Bit begins to run, crashing over the sticks, stumbling in the sudden gouges in the ground. Trees loom like dreams in the dim before him, and it is all he can do to swerve around them. Something scatters the dry leaves behind him, something catches up, something will grasp him with its bony fingers. He runs harder, and it runs harder, pressing on him, and he can smell its terrible breath, and at last he hears the lap of water and bursts out onto the stony edge of the Pond. It seems vast tonight, and he realizes he is on the side opposite where they usually swim. Up the long black lawn, he sees the outbuildings hunched, the Soy Dairy, the Bakery, the Octagonal Barn; he sees Arcadia House, lit in some windows by the new generator the Motor Pool liberated from somewhere. Even from the lonely side of the Pond, he can hear the roar.
A glow warms a window upstairs where Bit imagines his father, good bearded Abe, rehanging a door. It calms Bit to imagine Abe in the lantern light, fixing, building, making better. This is what Abe does: he is steady, calming. There is a golden warmth also in the arched windows of the Eatery. Tonight, he remembers, is their first collective supper in Arcadia House, cooked in the stainless-steel kitchen ripped from an abandoned restaurant in Ithaca. He hopes his mother has been drawn to the light and warmth and food. It hurts him to think of the others, laughing, in the Eatery while she is alone in bed.
The ice along the border of the lake is thin as a glass ornament. He crunches it as he runs. When he reaches the path where the snapdragons will grow in the summertime, he begins to sprint. In the distance, people move in a line lit by lanterns and flashlights up the path from Ersatz Arcadia.
He bursts inside, into the overwhelming warmth. Here, too, is a thicket of legs like birch trunks, and he almost runs into one. Hey, there, man, someone says. Whoa, where’s the emergency, someone else says. What the hey was that? someone asks, and someone else says, Oh, just your average forest elf, and there is laughter and he screws his fists and pushes harder.
The kitchen blasts with heat, hurts him. It smells so good he wants to cry. It is something fried, vegetable stew. He finds Hannah stirring vinegar into the roasted beets in a huge steel bowl, and clutches her knees. She smiles down at him. She lifts him and washes his face with warm water at one of the sinks. She says Brr, when she touches his hands, and picks the leaves and twigs out of his hair and lifts him to sniff at his rear end, and makes a little face, shrugging. We all have accidents, she whispers. It’s okay once in a while to piss yourself, I’d say.
He puts his face close to his mother’s warm mouth, and like that, the chasing thing in the woods draws away and dissolves back into the night.
Out in the Eatery, under the exposed beams, they sit at newly varnished tables for a moment of thanks. Someone says,
Itadakimasu,
I take this nourishment in gratitude to all beings; then they pile up their plates. Hannah pulls Bit up onto her lap and cuddles him there. She feeds him from her fork, small bits of bread and stew, and his day comes over him in a great wash. The words that others are saying go meaningless in his ears. With a bit of seitan still in his mouth, he closes his eyes and falls asleep.
He has done it, though he is confused, though he doesn’t know what he’s done. There was no key he was handed, no word that he said.
Hannah is not out entirely, but she is emerging. She rises every day. She brushes her hair. She bakes at the Bakery. Only sometimes when Abe isn’t looking does Hannah close her eyes for a long time, and Bit holds his breath. But with an effort that seems to wrench her, she always opens them again.
Though Abe frets at first, Astrid commands the afternoon off. They will play, she says, and dares anyone to protest. They do not. The afternoon is bright and warm. The men go onto the tender green lawn between the porch and outbuildings, carrying the lacrosse sticks that Billy-goat, a real Onondaga Indian, had made one winter out of ash sticks and reclaimed raincoats. The women braid the hair of the men into plaits like their own, and then the men strip down all the way to their cotton shorts, torsos glowing winter-pale. Bit sits with the laughing women, who smoke wackystuff and chat among themselves and drink iced tea from pitchers, who pass around babies and blow tubas on the bellies of the wee ones. The other kids are playing somewhere, but he sits on Hannah’s thin lap, he watches the heaving mass of men chasing down the little ball, colliding and breaking apart, singing and arguing, falling to the ground, sweating. He watches his father drop a ball out of the basket of his stick and blush all down his neck and chest, how Titus’s fat-tire flops at his waistband, how Hiero is so nimble he doesn’t even seem to run, just appears where he needs to be. And Bit realizes as Tarzan shoots an easy goal and his team leaps and shouts and pats and squeezes that none of these big adult men, despite their smells and strength, are much more than boys, not so different from Bit himself. The world contracts in a friendly way around him.
Time comes to him one morning, stealing in. One moment he is looking at the lion puppet on his hand that he’s flapping about to amuse Eden’s russet potato of a baby, and the next he understands something he never knew to question. He sees it clearly, now, how time is flexible, a rubber band. It can stretch long and be clumped tight, can be knotted and folded over itself, and all the while it is endless, a loop. There will be night and then morning, and then night again. The year will end, another one will begin, will end. An old man dies, a baby is born.
Summer Hannah will take over from Winter Hannah with a slowly crisping voice and a new pair of dungarees. Not completely yet. But soon.
Sweetie passes, and puts her cold hands under his chin. What’s the matter, baby? she says, wiping his cheeks. Are you hurt?
His secret swells in him, almost bursts; it is good, it is wonderful. But he must be silent, he remembers almost too late, and shakes his head. She carefully dries his cheeks with a clean bit of her sleeve and gives him a cookie she tells him to keep secret from Astrid, whom she calls the Sugar Nazi. Then she kisses him. He would like to stay like this, Sweetie’s soft lips on his skin, but with a long breath he reluctantly lets time flow again.
The dawn of the day that Handy is to return from the concerts, the clouds break their bellies overhead and a surprise snow sweeps down in layers upon them. The forest hushes under the unexpected weight, the green buds startled inward, the birds huddled together in suffering. Late in the night Abe had fallen into bed in his work clothes, supervising the last of the woodwork, the last of the painting, the last varnish and sconces and what curtains they have, thrift-store finds, bedsheets sewn into curtains, curtains made from old Indian bedspreads still smelling of sandalwood. Loosely braided rag rugs, even stenciled oilcloths pretending to be rugs, are scattered everywhere. The house is ragtag, Bit overheard Midge complain; but it is complete, paint and plaster, woodwork and glass. Bit, who has never lived in a house, thinks it’s breathtaking, the most amazing thing he’s seen: the space alone threatens to drown him. Abe’s sweat on the pallet last night, though, stank of anxious incompletion. He tossed, fretted: he sleep-talked of broken window weights, unmatched molding, unpainted doors.
Against the sharp bones of his mother’s ribcage, Bit slept. When Hannah dreamed, the dream was so vivid it entered him; he saw a giant in a charcoal suit, as big as Arcadia House, half the size of the sky. He felt his hand, Hannah’s hand, extend to touch the swollen damp flesh. A nail nicked the giant’s skin, and air began to hiss out like a punctured tire. The man slowly deflated, flabby, shrinking. He was the size of the oak in the courtyard, then the Pink Piper, then the Showerhouse, then the Bread Truck. He was the size of Abe, then Hannah. The face was blank, like those of the Amish dolls Astrid once brought back in repayment for midwifing a baby. The suit the man wore became a pond. He shrank to the size of Bit, then smaller. He became a baby, then a nubbin of a baby, a fleshy balloon in a small red pool.
At last, the balloon popped. The man was gone.
Bit opened his eyes to find Hannah looking at him.
My dad’s dead, she whispered.
Bit put his hand to the pulse of his mother’s throat, and she fell back into sleep.
The sun is shy on the white fields now. Before the coffee is finished, the spring warmth melts the snow on the new Arcadia House roof until it is fragile as lace.
From the window, Bit watches Titus Thrasher come over the Quad with a sad face. A telegram flutters in his hand.
Hannah is red and puffy. But the invisible straps that kept her arms at her sides have dissolved, and her hands now seem to float. Even her breath seems less labored. Her eyes are enormous in her face.
I’m okay, she insists to Abe when he clutches her to him. I’m really okay. He kisses her on the temple, but his face is pale, disbelieving.
They stand again at the Gatehouse, eager for Handy, under sun so hot the snow has vanished. A dozen Newbies wait on the porch, a shoal of Germans unpacked from a hearse painted with passionflowers; two pregnant girls hugging themselves; a matted-haired Trippie muttering angrily to his shoelaces. The Newbie tent is full. Handy will know what to do with all these people.
It seems to circle, this wash of relief, above and through the crowd:
Handy is returning, Handy will know what to do.
The day is splendid, and as they wait, the men toss a Frisbee on the long road. The women stand in loose clumps, touching one another on the shoulder, on the waist. Eden’s baby is the newest and is passed around. They gaze into her walnut face, each in turn sent on the cosmic energy trip of meeting a new soul. Kitty is so keyed up she takes off her teeshirt, and a man somewhere says in a thick voice, Far out, and Kitty shakes her stuff with a little grin, and it strikes Bit with a sudden force that she is beautiful. With her brown bob and pointed chin, she is a chestnut come alive.