In the Country of the Great King Read online

  When it was Seth’s turn to work he placed himself, as the others had done, near Luke’s feet, and sat with his legs folded, the flute across his knees, his eyes closed, listening to Luke’s hypnotic voice. He was already in the lightest of trances. Luke Sevensons was reciting a poem that had arrived for the boy.

  The music of the reed is fire, not air . . .

  Such longing.

  If I were also touching the lips of someone who spoke my language,

  I would tell all that could be told.

  “A Sufi poet wrote that, Seth. A man named Jelaluddin Rumi, caliph of the Mavlevis, the whirling dervishes. You know about the whirling dervishes?” The boy nodded. “Yes. You would know of the dervishes. They are part of your world. They dance ecstatically to the music of the reed flute. Can you imagine the dervishes? See them in the eye of your mind, whirling there. Just watch them turn in their soaring black robes while I speak to you. They are whirling in order to know God—just as the Shakers shook and the Indians dance, just as the Gregorians chant and the Jews pray and sway at the wailing wall. Now these lines I spoke to you are from the Mathnawi, a poem by Rumi that runs for fifty-one thousand verses, an ocean of wisdom.” Luke could see Seth’s eyelids quivering; eyelid catalepsy, it was called. The trance was now deep enough to begin. “Now tell me, Seth, why do you want to leave your home?”

  “It’s an empty place.”

  “Now, just behind your eyes, I can see that tears begin to form. If your tears could talk to you, what would they say?”

  And the boy’s cavernous loneliness, edged with the sharp, rebellious pain of adolescence, engulfed them. He spoke of the lives of his family: of his mother, Ivy Sue, and her endless war on dust, of his father, Ted, and his continual acquisition for the sake of acquisition; of his sister, Holly, who was desperate for what she called popularity. He didn’t understand the importance of these desires. And his family did not understand that he did not understand. “They don’t care about the things I care for. They don’t read books. There is no poetry in their lives. No music.”

  “Surely your music is in their lives.”

  “Mozart’s.”

  “And Tchaikovsky?”

  “Yes. And the other great composers.”

  “But not your own?”

  “I have no music.”

  “Ah. Will you play me one note on your flute? Not two. Only one.”

  In spite of the trance Seth appeared slightly puzzled, but he dutifully raised the flute and sounded one clear note.

  Luke nodded. “Was that Mozart’s note?”

  “No. I mean it could be. It could be Mozart’s or anyone’s. It’s just a note.”

  “Just a note. Could I hear it again?”

  Again the boy complied.

  “This is a very lovely note. If this note could be anyone’s, then it could be yours.”

  “No.” Again the boy began to weep.

  Luke did not wait for the tears to subside. He spoke with authority, almost with anger, though his natural gentleness robbed the anger of its ability to hurt.

  “Play me another note.” Seth played again. This note a little higher, a little sweeter than the first. “Put the first lonely note with the second, Seth. Put the notes together for company. The emptiness you feel in your home is the space around you where your music should be. The vacuum is not caused by mother or father or sister, but by you, Seth. You are afraid to make your own music because you are afraid that it will not be as glorious as the music of a Mozart or a Bach or a Beethoven or a Tchaikovsky. You are afraid that the great composers, those who went before you, and those who are your real family, will not understand you, or approve of the music you make.”

  He could sense the boy’s tension increasing. “Now, see them here in the room with us, Seth. Can you see these great men in your mind’s eye?” Seth nodded slightly. “I want you to speak to them. You may do this silently or aloud, but speak to them. Ask your questions. They are here to help you.” He could see that Seth was in the awesome presence of his mentors. “Now you must listen to them. They are older and wiser than you. They have lived and died for a long time. They will tell you what you must do. Talk to them, listen to them.”

  Deep inside his trance, Seth spoke with a silent voice.

  I never imagined I could talk to you.

  Mozart chortled. There was no other word for it. Bach glared, first at Mozart, then at Seth.

  It was, surprisingly, Chopin who replied: THAT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE A PRODUCT OF OUR IMAGINATION. WE CREATED YOU.

  You created me? Why?

  WE LIKE TO HAVE OUR MUSIC APPRECIATED. AND SOMEONE HAS TO CARRY ON, YOU KNOW. IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO STOP COMPLAINING AND MAKE WHAT WILL BE YOUR MUSIC.

  What if it isn’t any good?

  YOU KNOW GOOD MUSIC WHEN YOU HEAR IT! COMPOSE UNTIL YOU HEAR SOMETHING THAT SOUNDS GOOD.

  But I’m not like you. I’m just ordinary.

  Mozart snorted and cut in impatiently: OH, DON’T BE SUCH A BOOBY, SETH. ORDINARY PEOPLE DON’T HAVE EXPERIENCES LIKE THIS.

  This is nuts.

  Unmoving, Luke watched Seth and waited patiently. His back was hurting a little. He spent some time with the pain, getting to know its sharpness, glad when it changed to a numbing warmth. The boy was quiet for the length of a sonata. Then, slowly, he lifted his flute and began to play the plaintive music that Luke had sensed was in the nearby air, caught it on the wing with his silver flute. Sound sent by the gods for the delight of the gods.

  It was in such moments that Luke most loved his work. Maggie Silvernails had loved him because he loved his work, as she loved hers. The work was always the same: to capture the messages. This morning’s messages were carried by soaring black birds wheeling against a yellow-white sky; by a dusty red mesa clotted with restless desert grasses; by a desert wind humming tunelessly in her ears; by brown, fat Fatpaws, doggedly sleeping beside her while the yellow-white-red-green-brown pigments made their oily way along the bristles and down, down, down onto the canvas.

  Man coming.

  Maggie felt his footsteps long before he came into view. There was nothing in the earth’s subtle reverberations to frighten her, but she wondered who was approaching now, treading on her shadow. She turned and waited with her eyes as the distant figure emerged from the horizon, wavy in the heated air, walking steadily in her direction.

  Fatpaws woke up and barked sharply, stopping at her hand signal, then sat beside her waiting with his nose—alert and eager. The man’s stride was familiar. A big man. Not Indian. Not Luke. Callahan! He saw her, and began to trot, his arms outstretched. Joyfully she raced to meet him, but Fatpaws got there first, and so he embraced them both with his mighty Irish arms, and they laughed and cried and barked and slapped each other’s shoulders and stomped the ground and then rolled in the hot sand with the dog until they could laugh no more, and lay spread-eagled, side by side on their backs, exhausted from the twenty years they had been apart.

  “Maggie Silvernails, your beautiful hair is still as black as a crow’s wing.”

  “Jamie Callahan, you have turned as gray as the muzzle of an old dog.”

  “Deerfinder told me that you were dead.”

  “Why didn’t you believe him?”

  “Henry Chang sent me.”

  “That old Buddha! He still breathes?”

  “He still does my shirts. He’ll have a helluva job with this one when I get back.” Callahan sat up and began to slap at the dust covering his clothing. Maggie stayed where she was, flat on the ground, letting the hot sand push up against her back muscles, letting the sun cover her face.

  “What exactly did Henry Chang say?”

  “Well, I went in to retrieve my shirts last Monday morning as usual, and as he passed them over the counter he said, ‘Twenty years of sadness is enough sadness, Carrahan. Time fries. Go find Maggie
Silvernails and smire again.’”

  She laughed, thinking of the short, shriveled Chinaman with his steamy clean face and his head full of wonderful, Eastern, yellow wisdom that was inevitably, exactly, woefully wrong for the rational, Western, white mind. He had sent Callahan here to her. Was that wrong? Time would tell. Henry Chang had seemed a hundred years old when she knew him in Greenwich Village two decades before. Perhaps he was immortal.

  “And what exactly did my friend Deerfinder say?”

  “He put on his solemn face, his reservation face, and said that Maggie Silvernails lived now only in the grandchildren of vultures and her stone-white bones glowed in the light of the desert moon.”

  “Yuk! Must be the result of that unfortunate poetry class he took at The New School.”

  “Well, I just didn’t believe that old Henry Chang would send me all the way out here on an adventure ending in vultures, so after I got Deerfinder drunk on some very fine Irish whisky and he still stuck to his dead-Maggie story, I was stumped.” She could see his affection for Deerfinder glinting in his narrowed eyes. “Why is it I believe that red fox even now? When Deerfinder lies, he sounds decidedly more trustworthy than when he’s telling the truth. Anyhow, I was stumped and I decided to get drunk myself. I woke up remembering about how you inherited a shanty somewhere east of Eagle Nest.”

  “Who told you about my cabin? Nobody knows.”

  “You did,” Jamie shot back. “One day when you were sad and full of grass-fire smoke. You said your father’s mother’s brother, who was a contrary, had died all alone in a cabin east of Eagle Nest, and that you had found him and buried him upside down and that made the place yours.”

  “You believe any old Injun blarney you hear?”

  “Not Deerfinder’s.”

  “So you sobered up and asked all around Eagle Nest for a crazy old Indian woman with paint on her face and you found me.”

  “I followed your paintings. They’re all over this corner of the state.”

  “A girl’s got to live.”

  “They’re marvelous, Maggie. Better than before.” He nodded toward her current painting. “That one already shows courage and you’ve only just begun.”

  “Good.”

  “Hey, Maggie.” He leaned over her and looked down close into her eyes. His shadow was cool across her face. “Would you like to make love?”

  “Oh, Callahan. I would like to make a powerful lot of love.”

  “Then let’s go find a bathtub and a bed.”

  They helped each other up, as old people do, though they felt childlike in spirit when they touched. They walked quietly, hand in hand, in the direction of the cabin. Callahan carried her gear. Fatpaws ran ahead, his excited dog-brain spilling over with visions of a rabbity lunch.

  The shack was soon in sight. Maggie could see Callahan’s belongings piled up, weighing down the porch. It looked as if he was planning to stay for a while. Fatpaws gave the luggage only a cursory sniff as he ran into the cabin and emerged with a soup bone to gnaw on under a creosote bush. The two humans who loved each other stopped for a moment, each considering what they were about to do.

  “He’s still alive, Maggie.”

  “I know.”

  “He still works.”

  “Is there a woman?”

  “Only Maudie. He calls her Methuselah now, and claims she is older than Henry Chang’s grandmother. No romantic interests. He gets an occasional crush on someone in one of his groups, but it never comes to anything.”

  “He still heals.”

  “As he still breathes. I don’t think Luke Sevensons could do anything else.”

  She smiled, recalling with pleasure quite a lot of other things he could do. “Do you remember when I gave him that Indian name? Sevensons. Suits him better than his Swede name.”

  “Swenson, wasn’t it? Oh, that was a time, Maggie. We three.” She was silent watching the dog gnaw. He continued: “I’ve never blamed you for leaving us, Maggie. But I’ve missed you like hell and hell again.”

  “Don’t need to miss me now.” He took her in his arms then, and the goodness of it stunned him.

  Jamie Callahan had always made a point to make love as often as possible, mostly with the young art students he met in the Village cafés. He deemed it good for his art and good for his health. He liked making love, but not falling in love or being in love, particularly in the unripe forms that were generally offered up to him. But Maggie Silvernails proved an exception without rules. During their bath she had undone her braids, and later, as they moved in the bed, her hair had covered them like a billowing wave. Now it lay like a spray of dark sea foam across the pillow where she slept. He looked at her brown, taut body, bending slightly toward him as she slept, so little changed from the days he had positioned it, gazed upon it, and made it the subject of his art. He had always judged his series of Maggie paintings as the best of the lot.

  Seized suddenly by a need greater than sex, he sprang from the bed and rummaged about the cabin, finding the assortment of paint tubes that would make up his palette, grabbing a brush of likely form, and reaching for a canvas already stretched and prepared from Maggie’s unused stack. Happily he went to work, finding her again in the most significant way he knew.

  As he brushed her dreaming image onto the canvas he pondered her life. Twenty years had passed, Maggie said, since she had last been in the arms of a man. That man had been Callahan. Or, maybe, Luke. That, Maggie hadn’t said. He wondered what she had found—out here in the wilderness—what inner thing had sustained her through the dehydration of her love life? The Great Spirit? What a terrible waste. Or so it seemed to Jamie Callahan. He knew there were young people today, young people with a little life left in them, who would revere Maggie’s choice, who would badger her for Red Indian wisdom if they could. They meditated and sat zazen and talked to rocks and chanted. They were searching for a meaning to their lives, a meaning that came to Callahan as easily as getting up in the morning. If the young people discovered Luke, he worked with them, trying to keep the flame burning in their culture-dampened souls. Had he and Luke and Maggie ever been as spiritually forlorn as the current rendition of American youth? He thought not. They had had art. They had had life.

  He remembered their life in the Village with a purple nostalgia—all of them brash—talking and writing and sculpting and painting and panting after one another with enormous appetite. Disturbed by life. But not lost. Later, much later, they had gone astray. He and Maggie and Luke had held together in their torturous triangular box for twenty years. Then they had been apart for twenty.

  “. . . All true love must die,” Yeats had written. How did it go next?

  All true love must die,

  Alter at the best.

  Into some lesser thing. Prove that I lie.

  He looked up from the painting and stared at Maggie. He deftly added a soft shade of brown to a nipple that was becoming too pink. He loved her as much in this moment as he ever had done. There had been proof in the bed. There was proof in the painting. His eyes played over her body as the poet’s voice played on in his mind.

  Such body lovers have,

  Such exacting breath,

  That they touch or sigh.

  Every touch they give,

  Love is nearer death.

  Prove that I lie.

  He had wasted twenty years of his life!

  He must not think of this. He corrected the line of her thigh. Opening her a little more. Oh, they would all die soon enough. He, and those who had been his companions in life. The friends of his youth. The bearers of his middle age. He knew that now. But not then. Then death had been a vaporous, transparent idea. They had all been too, too solid flesh back in those early days—immortal, living in an enchanted village.

  Of the others he knew that Marxie, after a checkered love life, had become an alcoholic
and killed himself, and Denise had died of lung cancer. Such a high price those two had paid, for they had all smoked cigarettes and knocked back whiskey until they reeled. There had been drugs, too—but not many, and not for long. Drugs, they had discovered, interfered with their work. They had all worked like donkeys.

  How had they fared for all their work? Eve had married Callahan, which had had about the same effect on her poetry as leukemia; her verse had become paler and weaker, trailing off into meaninglessness until she fled in despair, leaving the ground clear for Maggie Silvernails. Deerfinder had always been and would always be an unknown quantity, living out his life in the shadow of Maggie. George Eliot Isaman wrote banal books and only dreamed of depth. Oakley Klapper had become famous and had stayed famous, though, in Jamie’s opinion, his abstract paintings resembled nothing so much as mud puddles at their best and piles of pigeon droppings at their worst. Callahan himself was what was known as well-known, but foundering, unable to swim against the tide of modernism that had swept through their lives like sewer water. Gone, all of them, the comrades and heroes of his past, altered into lesser things.

  In the early days Maggie Silvernails had been mother to them all. Luke Sevensons had vied with Callahan for the role of father figure and won an incomplete victory. Enigmatic Luke, who was not a painter or a poet or an anything definable—just Luke who helped. On his last visit east, just a few weeks ago, he and Callahan had talked about the current crop of Village artists like two old women comparing cabbages. Luke had shown Callahan a book of poetry written by a woman named Arista Bellefleurs. The book had been dedicated to Luke and said:

  “To my brother and teacher, Luke Sevensons, who as Shakespeare so beautifully wrote, ‘finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stone, and good in all things.’”

  “You in love with this woman, Luke?”

  “No. But she reminds me a little of Maggie.” Their eyes and voices had lowered then, for they seldom spoke of Maggie.

  “I’d like to meet her, your Arista Bellefleurs.”