After bidding farewell to the dead grandfather, we came through the tunnel, exiting out the far end into the salt white day. There was a creek where women knelt on rocks, washing clothes. Along the wooded bank, children collected sticks. On the other side of the road, men were digging a grave. Even though the surface was muddy from all the rain, deeper down the ground remained hard. You could hear the cold ring through their shovels each time they struck.
We found a massive fallen tree, walked along its horizontal trunk, and perched ourselves there, where we could look over the creek, the washing, the children pretend-jousting with their sticks. We couldn’t see the grave diggers, but we could hear the metal clank of their labor. There was so much everything among these people. That was how I thought of it, so much everything: death and playing and laundry all at once.
I fished the Captain’s eyeglasses out of my pocket and asked Ottla, “What did you mean about these being messenger glasses?”
“Our grandfather had the same ones, didn’t he? And he could see things other people couldn’t.”
“What kinds of things?”
“What kinds of things?” she echoed, incredulous. “Didn’t you just see for yourself?”
“I did?”
“Hello!” She tapped her knuckles upon my head. “In the wagon?”
“The carvings …” All that finery, all those designs. “Did he do it all himself?”
“Mostly. He’s taught a few others, but no one can read the wood like Grandfather.”
I thought how it had seemed to me there were stories in the carvings, if only I had time enough to study them. “What does it mean?”
“Mean?”
“If the carvings are messages. What do they say?”
Ottla looked at me kindly but as if from a great distance. As if it was far too complicated—or perhaps far too simple—to explain.
“Well”—I felt my face grow hot—“anyway, you’re wrong about the glasses.” I told them the special thing about the Captain was not what he sees but what he hears. I told them about the bugle.
Ottla grew excited. “We’ve had a few like that! Isn’t it so, Varda?”
Varda nodded. She nodded like Genoveva, swinging her whole big head. The scratch I’d given her beside her eye had dried to a scarlet thread.
“You mean you’ve known people who heard music that wasn’t there?”
“One, there was,” said Ottla. “He heard—well, not music. ‘Roaring,’ he called it. Like a lion. But bigger. And coming from the sky.”
We all looked up.
Ottla went on: “With another it was smell.”
“Smell?”
“She was all the time smelling apple rot.”
“Apple rot?”
“That’s what she said. Said it was sweet, like cider.”
“Oh.”
“And Dodi,” prompted Varda.
“Just so. Dodi was another.”
“Who’s Dodi?”
“With her it was feel.”
“Feel?”
“She’d feel things for no reason. Like a needle pricking her arm.”
“So, pain.”
“Not only. Other times it might be a tickle. Or breath. She’d say, ‘Someone’s breathing on me.’ But there’d be no one. Nor a hint of breeze. Or one time …”
“What?”
Ottla’s neck reddened. “I never told you this, Varda.” She lowered her voice to a rickety rasp. “One time she said she felt like she was being kissed. Like someone was kissing her there. Where your pee comes out.”
Varda let out a honk. The kitten, asleep in its basket on the ground beneath our dangling feet, twitched its ears.
“But how does that make them messengers?” I asked. “If all they say is ‘I hear a lion.’ ‘I smell apples.’ ‘I carve wood.’ I mean. What kind of message is that?”
Ottla shook her head. “A messenger doesn’t have to understand the message. A messenger just has to receive it.”
“What good is receiving a message if you don’t know what it means?”
“Don’t know.” She looked down, as if making a confession. “I wish I got them, though.”
“How come you know so much about it if you’re not a messenger yourself?”
In a tiny voice: “Don’t really.”
“Then how do you know I’m not one?”
Tinier still: “Don’t.”
“But you told me I wasn’t!”
Her retort to this was unabashed: “You hurt our Varda.”