Miss Edie

Christopher Rye

Summer had come late, and the ground felt airy and clinging, neither soil nor leafmould, as if compounded of dust and bonemeal and the dried husks of thunderclouds. Click ran homewards, his soft bones proud in the flesh he would carry into the earth and give back to the land by sleeping.
The house was a grounded ship, its timbers powdered and ashen. When the sun was at full mast, you could hear them creaking above the porch light, while his father tested the winds with his forgotten hands, naming the season Good Weather or Bad.
Click shook his thatch of hair and threw himself down by the rain-barrel. He was slower than the other boys, for he had lived in this house, and the house in him, with its astrolabes and sextants and bottles to trap wandering spirits. For one day his father had tasted the wind and named it Winter.
A ghost! Click jumped at the sound of moth-wings and taffeta in the window above. Click spat then ran upstairs, accepting the summons like birdsong.
- Miss Edie? You there?
She lay all sepia and windfallen. Click was sorry... sorry she had lost her bloom and fallen. Some days she wore daisies. Then, as morning swooned towards noon, she added bluebells and violets and Click would dance around her as if she was Winter disguised as Spring. From her bed, she put up her hands to feel him there, supposing he was her spirit come wandering back from the hills.
"Click, my Click? You chosen Summer yet, my boy?" Sucking her teeth with his name on her lips and her hair brushed pearly and beautiful.
- I'm here, Miss Edie. And I brought your Bible too.
It was a seamless, cloud-borne day; a glassy round where warm winds blew. Miss Edie was old and speaking freely all at once, and Click swayed as he listened. He was a ghost at her bedside - an essence and the sum of all his parts - suspended above her in the clear-moving green afternoon. Entering, he thought: Who would be here in years to come to grieve for her that had gone before? And would storms form in these rafters, scaring birds away into all eternity, to rain on his father with the winter-cracked face and the dim white wings that failed behind his eyes?
"Read," motioned Miss Edie, knowing all this but still smiling. "Read me The Good Book."
- Mother was like a grapevine, planted near a stream. Because there was plenty of water, the vine was clothed in leaves and fruits, and its branches were strong and grew to be royal sceptres...
"Ezekiel! Nineteen."
- Miss Edie? That was beautiful, Click whispered.
"Memory often is, child," she preened.
Outside, summer winds held the moon aloft like air in the hollow of a wave. Father sat on the porch, lost on some long voyage of thought. It was here they had waved him off, he remembered, tossing goodbyes after him for as long as they could see his back. He had sailed on alone into the cold country, then; an isthmus between worlds where he had grown old. Speak, he thought. Speak if you can hear me, all my old friends... Click heard his father cry out, once, and turn three times in his sleep.

"Saturnus, Illyricum, Cloth of Gold... That's a pretty one! Lutea, Zonatus, Maiden's Blush!"
Miss Edie knew the heart of the forest; knew that it might send a snake pricking at your heels; knew when to be quiet as if she were in love; knew to name the flowers under her breath as she curtsied through the tangles, spangling her rusty parasol. She did not see what lay ahead, only that she must tend and collect and prod and fuss and, if she turned back at last with a sense of her place in things, that she would reveal not herself but the glory of the forest.
Click had come to the Place of Two Worlds. Down at the jetty, the centre of the forest widened above the water. Miss Edie picked her way among grasses that might tease a sleeping lover. From here, thought Click, a bird might fly to all things - to river, sky and treasures of the sea - fly with drops of light to bathe herself and administer to her plumage.
- Now, he thought. Here.
And, sucking a deep breath into his lungs, he threw back his head and cried out the name. But silently, so as not to disturb his father whose eyes were heavy and adorned with sleep. He called secretly; inwardly.
- Prima.
He could not summon her at first; it was as though the forest held too many ghosts for her. But as he held his breath her momentum gathered and filled his eyes with gold. The swift came in a shrieking black arc to scythe the treetops with a dry fluttering of wings and call Click deeper into the forest.
"That boy needs discipline," his father mumbled, the land beneath his eyes. On the porch at his feet, a grey cat mewled about and stood up graceful.
"Let him be," said Miss Edie at the old man's shoulder. "You have done what you can. Discipline? Discipline is fifty acres of barren land."
The river ran wrinkled and sweet to breathe with a half-drowsy smile. Click ducked and jumped and hunted footprints smaller than a bird's while the turning sky descended, hung with clouds and darkening. He said the words over and over to himself, tenderly, until he had them refined: Mother was like a grapevine planted near a stream. Because there was plenty of water, the vine was clothed in leaves and fruits and its branches were strong and grew to be royal sceptres.
And the dream was divided among the forest, until he stretched out his arm like a child's in sleep, and he fell down and wept for the father who rarely spoke and who had never said 'goodbye'.

For Edith Skilton, who taught me how to be a child.

Copyright © Christopher Rye 2000

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