Ensemble

skirts short to her calf, pigskin gloves, and vasculum. She showed all her pretty teeth when she laughed. Today, whenever he glanced through the luminous library windows, he saw her pacing one end of the reading room to the other, back and again, as if she could not decide to join him or not. Perhaps it was because she feared where he wanted to take her. Even though he had never said a word about it, perhaps she realized what he was planning, and that was why it was nearly three-thirty and she hadn’t left the library yet. So the schoolteacher sat on his bench, not really waiting and not really watching. Boater in his lap and sometimes in his hand but never on his head, shiny with pomade.

  Sitting on the edge of his bed, the mayor held the letter up to the nearest window, to the light. He could make out the dark legalistic penmanship within, even the swoops of certain capital letters and slanted signatures, but could not yet bring himself to open the letter. His wife– no, it must be the new cook–dropped a heavy pot in the kitchen below. His wife was dead, his wife was dead, he must not let himself forget that his wife was dead. Even, perhaps most importantly, as he did mundane things–untied his shoes, unfastened his shirt-studs. The mayor lay back down, half undressed. Minutes passed. They might have been hours. A handkerchief he’d dampened with gin swathed his brow, like a war bandage, as if covering a wound. The bed was only half unmade, for he could never touch her side. The rowboat revolved and revolved, but eventually he slept a little. Meanwhile, the barber had awoken with a start–faraway thunder or a gunshot–and arose, dipped his fingertips in rosewater, and set about tidying his shop for the next day, empty as that day might be. He swept the hair into several neat piles in several corners, humming something with a rhythm but no tune. Outside the wind was picking up, but that did not bother him. Today he had much gold jingling in his apron pockets. Was there ever a happier sound? Outside his shop windows, it was getting gray enough to be dusk already, though this would be one of the longest days of the year. He watched himself in his big mirrors, waltzing with his broom, and was reminded for a moment of real dances in real dancehalls, long ago and in another country, when he was young, when he was very young….

  Late afternoon on the last day of June. The schoolteacher was walking up the abandoned road toward the hollows, thinking of the librarian as he kicked up the gray dust, watching the dust hang there in the sultry air. The schoolteacher hoped the librarian, even if she seemed to love wildflowers more than books, might be the one person in this place to understand him. If he could only dare to tell her, if only she would stop puttering among her card catalogs and journals and potted plants and allow him to tell her, he would talk about how he had never expected to be teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in this little village far from his own hometown, which was a place not much bigger than this but on the other side of the mountains far to the west. He had hoped, still hoped to wander the world, to see the sights he saw in encyclopedias–the seven wonders of the world, dead cities and lost cities and cities filled with the babel of foreign tongues. Once, when her eyes brightened when he asked if she knew a good book of poetry, he had almost said all this right then and more. But quick as she had clapped a musty volume of John Greenleaf Whittier in his hands, he surrendered to muteness and left the library without even remembering to sign the card inside the book. Only later did he discover there were pressed flowers between the pages of her favorite poems: buttercup and Queen Anne’s lace, snapdragon and bachelor’s button and forget-me-not.

  The schoolteacher had been walking this way, dizzy in a whirlwind of thought and desire, for a quarter of an hour before he realized he’d been followed. It was the librarian, after all, her pleats hitched up so she could walk faster in her high-buttoned boots, the top two clasps of her linen shirtwaist unclasped (this humidity!), the ribbons and silk flowers of her summer bonnet flying in the wind which swept so hard down the barren cliffside here. He stood and waited for her to catch up, looking out over the edge of the ridge they were on, out across the black pinewood and a moraine like a ruined aqueduct that sloped past old, overgrown quarries into the deepest part of the hollows. A flock of crows circled the deepest part of the hollows, where the rutted wagon-trail led, and from where now the smoke from several fires rose to meet as one in the steel-gray air. Everywhere was the gabble of crows, coming into the pines to roost before the storm. That was a sound, an omen, which always preceded the thunder here. A little further on, a mingled, musky scent like attar of civet, or valerian of heliotrope, or appoponax oil, rose on the wind, and there was the sound now not only of bells, but of mandolins perhaps or Andalusian guitars, and silvery laughter ringing off granite ledges. The librarian, hatless (had she lost her hat?), hair becoming unpinned, was at his side, and held onto his arm as if it were the most natural thing on earth to do–as indeed it was–and they began their descent toward the sound and smoke.

  The barber yawned, straightened the outdated almanacs and gazettes, closed the windows tight. Tonight, he had decided, he would polish his work-tools at home while he waited for the storm. He was a scrupulous man, polishing one thing or another almost every night with the best of silversmith’s paste and chamois cloth. He was whistling again, not humming, as he pulled down a little blind he’d had made to order: TONSORIAL EMPORIUM SEE YOU TO-

  MORROW, and he shut the door behind him. Carefully, he rolled up the striped awning and fastened its braided cords. One last look into the empty shop–nothing askew, nothing amiss. All I need, he thought to himself with a smile, is a bowl of cream for the little people who come in the night to pick up the crumbs and spin their finest cobwebs. Across the street, at the tavern, the awnings were already up, the doors already locked–the only doors to lock in the whole village. The barber was holding his precious tooled-leather valise of scissors and razors against his chest, four silver-handled mirrors tucked under his left arm, another in his right hand. He held this largest one before his eyes for a moment, admiring its shine even in this sepulchral light, admiring the way the mirror so perfectly reflected the bruise-black sky. As he held it there, one drop–perhaps the first drop–of rain splattered on the mirror’s surface and ran down its face.

  The mayor sat at his towering writing desk, with its columbarium of little drawers and recesses, deep in a maelstrom of meaningless forms and absurd documents. His wife, in frame of silver looped with ribbons of black crepe, looked down upon him from one of the recesses, but he tried to avoid her eyes. He had still not opened the letter–in fact, he had lost it now amongst all these useless papers. His drinking flask, long since empty, stood next to the picture frame, but he dared not refill it yet, not under his wife’s watchful eye. Instead, he refilled his mayoral fountain pen with India ink, tried to focus on the facts and figures before him, tried to shake the fever with the purity of thought and concentration. Distantly, he heard his beloved horse whinny for her supper–but, no, seeing rain begin to roll down his study windows, it might very well have been thunder. He could picture the mare nevertheless, kicking restlessly at her clean whitewashed stall, next to the stall where his wife’s toylike little motor car, the only motor car in the entire village, was kept. The mayor contemplated how he could take his hunting rifle, and–if he could get it running without the assistance of the stableboy–stuff himself into the car to drive down to where the Old Ones were probably camping and poaching his deer–and run them off his land.

  Evening on the last day of June. The thunderstorm had cracked itself open at last. It seemed to rise right out of the steep ravine they were entering, like an immense black beast, and soon the schoolteacher and librarian were running, hand in hand, for shelter among the funereal pines. Thunder rolled and bellowed all around them, off the granite cliffs and the gargantuan boulders like petrified shipwrecks which had been flung down into these hollows eons ago. Great webs of lightning spun themselves across the sky in an instant, illuminating the entire high valley their village inhabited, reflecting off the surrounding amphitheater of peaks b
oth bald and forested. The young people clung to one another under what might have been, in this blackness, yews and hemlocks–for all those boulders beyond now were white as tombstones; the valley had become like a vast cemetery. Above the boy and girl, in the sheltering branches, even the bickering crows could not be heard above the wind and rain. It seemed for a few minutes as though the earth might split and the whole forest, all these lightning-blasted mountains, would tumble into the underworld. But then all at once it grew quiet, the pelleting rain ceased, and a pearlescent glow from the hidden sunset lit the hollow like a small beeswax taper brought into a cavernous chamber. The sky to the east was still black as pitch tar, as a crow’s back, but when the schoolteacher and the librarian emerged from behind the dripping curtain of low-hanging boughs, they could see well enough that they were at the edge of the Old Ones’ camp. A small fire burnt before each of the dozen wagons, and a larger fire was being built in the center of them all. Tall, bare-chested