on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Doctor Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: "There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer." This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said "Years."
Book Two - BROTHER NORTH WIND'S SECRET
I.
The shepherd in Virgil grew at
last acquainted with Love, and found
him to be a native of the rocks.
—Johnson
After John Drinkwater's death in 1920, Violet, unable to bear or even believe in the thirty years and more of life without him promised her by her cards, retreated for a long time to an upstairs room. Her thick dark hair, turned prematurely white, and her elfin thinness, grown more pronounced because of a sudden distaste she took in that year to most food, gave her the appearance of great and fragile age, though she didn't seem aged; her skin remained unlined for many more years, and her dark, liquid eyes never lost the infant, feral innocence which John Drinkwater had first seen in them in the last century.
Retreats and Operations
It was a nice room, facing in several directions at once, In one corner, half the interior of a dome (all the interior it had, though its exterior was whole) made a windowed retreat, and she had a big buttoned chaise there. Elsewhere, her bed, hung with the gauzy curtains and covered with the eiderdowns and ivory-colored laces with which the mother she had never known had clothed her own sad marriage bed; a broad oxblood-colored mahogany table, piled up with John Drinkwater's papers, which she had at first thought to put in some order, and maybe publish, he had loved to publish, but which in the end she only left piled there under the gooseneck brass lamp; the humpbacked cracked leather trunk from which they had come and into which, years later, they would go again; a couple of splayed velvet armchairs, napless and cozy, by the fire; and those small things—her silver and tortoiseshell combs and brushes, a painted music-box, her strange cards—which her children and grandchildren and visitors would later remember as being the chief furnishings of the room.
Her children, except August, didn't resent this abdication of Violet's. She had not often been wholly present anyway, and this seemed only the natural continuation of her daily abstraction. They all, except August, loved her deeply and uncritically, and would contest with each other over who would bring up her frugal and as often as not uneaten meals, make up her fire, read her her mail, or be the first to bring her news.
"August found a new use for his Ford," Auberon told her as they looked together through some pictures he had taken. "He took a wheel off, and hitched it with a belt to Ezra Meadows' saw. Then the engine will turn the saw, and cut wood."
"I hope they don't go far," Violet said.
"What? Oh, no," he said, laughing at the image she must have, of a tooth-wheeled Model T tearing through the woods, felling trees as it went. "No. The car is put up on logs, so the wheels just go around but don't go anywhere. It's just to saw with, not to drive around."
"Oh." Her slim hands touched the teapot, to see if it were still warm. "He's very clever," she said, as though she meant something else.
It was a clever idea, though not August's; he had read of it in an illustrated mechanics magazine, and persuaded Ezra Meadows to try it out. It proved to be a little more laborious than the magazine described it, what with leaping in and out of the driver's seat to alter the