A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

We had a hot supper that night. He lit his pipe for the first time after I had seen Tarpy with the gypsies but did not offer it to me. His lip was healing. We slept back to back in the bedroll.

Our hikes were like a trial of strength. Except for brief rests we walked all day and fell asleep dead tired every night. We reached woods familiar to me. One afternoon we saw the big house in its valley. We were back.

There were carriages I did not recognize in the drive. I saw Papa through a window and Matilda ran out to fold me in her arms and call me dear soul and say that Grandmama had died in her sleep. I wept horribly. Bitterly.

I wanted to see her. She had been buried a week. Papa took me to her grave at the church. There were flowers in vases tilted at crazy angles on the grave. She shared a tombstone with Grandpapa whom I never knew and the date of her death had already been chiselled in raw and white beside her birth-date as dim as the weathered stone itself.

Florent appeared in the drawing room next day dressed to travel. He would take the stage to the port. He shook hands with Papa and Matilda and Thesmond. He shook hands with me.

I went out to watch the buckboard take him away. Nock was at the reins. I wandered down by the stable and across the front meadow. I crossed the knolls. The stage took up passengers where our road met the turnpike. I began to run for fear that he had timed it all so that Nock and the buckboard would still be there when the stage came.

But Florent was alone with his bags under the oak across from the ostler's house when I came up behind him. He turned when I was near and about to call his name. He walked up to me expressionless and hugged me as tight as he ever had. Forgive me he said so quietly at my ear that I had to think what he had said. Forgive you?

But the stage was rolling to a halt and the guard was sounding his horn. He gathered his bags under his arm and crossed the road. I waved to him as the coach thundered away.

I saw him once afterwards at the university but we did not speak.

Author's Notes

AUGUST BLUE is a painting by Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929) in the Tate Gallery, London. It was painted in 1893.

Yeshua: Aramaic for Joshua, the Greek for which, Iesous, became the Latin Jesus. The source for this anecdote is an uncanonical Gospel of Thomas (The Apocryphal New Testament, translated by M. R. James, Oxford University Press, 1924, revised 1953). I have supplied a lacuna in the text with a poster from Heimish House (1978) depicting an alef. Its text ("A Yud above, the Creator; a Yud below, the Jewish People; a Vav, Torah & Mitzvos, uniting them") is adapted from the works of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi.

Sylvester: I am indebted to L. S. Feuer's "America's First Jewish Professor: James Joseph Sylvester at the University of Virginia," American Jewish Archives, vol. 36, no. 2 (1984), and to the California Institute of Technology department of Mathematics.

As we descended westward . . . Ely Minster: This passage is an amalgam of descriptions by Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe (A Journey Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1724-1726) of the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire where Ludwig Wittgenstein is buried.

Colonel Lawrence: His visit to Tuke at Falmouth in 1922 is unattested except by Tuke's painting of him as Aircraftsman Ross at Clouds Hill.

BELINDA'S WORLD TOUR

Ronald Hayman records in his Kafka: A Biography (Oxford, 1981) that "One day in the street [Kafka] saw a little girl, crying because she had lost her doll. He explained that the doll, whom he had just met, had to go away but promised to write to her. For weeks afterwards he sent her letters in which the doll described her travel adventures." My story is a conjectural restoration of these presumably lost letters.

GUNNAR AND NIKOLAI

punktum punktum: a rhyme by L. Albeck Larsen in Punktum punktum komma streg, a Carlsen Pixi Pege Bog (Copenhagen, 1981).

Conventional psychology . . . life and sensibility: George Santayana, The Realm of Essence, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937.

and A papyrus fragment from an early second-century gospel, published in 1933 by Sir Harold Idris Bell and T. C. Skeat, collected in Appendix I to M. R. James's The Apocryphal New Testament, cited above.

THE LAVENDER FIELDS OF APTA JULIA

A photograph by Bernard Faucon shows the family wash hung against a lavender field, making a pun on the Old French lavanderie (laundry) and lavande (lavender). Another of his photographs is of a playhouse in the form of a boxcar made by children of scrap lumber.

THE KITCHEN CHAIR

The sentence is in Home at Grasmere: Extracts from the Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth (written between 1800 and 1803) and from the Poems of William Wordsworth, edited by Colette Clark, Penguin Books, 1960.

THE CONCORD SONATA

Thoreau did not love nature .. . this beautiful parable in Walden: John Burroughs, The Complete Writings: Volume V: Indoor Studies, William H. Wise & Co., New York, 1924.

J have no new proposal . . . desire itself: Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, North Point Press, 1981.

And yet we did unbend . . . that afternoon: Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, 1849.

Mencius: The passage in Mencius that Thoreau exfoliated into his beautiful paragraph about having lost a hound, a bay horse, and a dove is at Book VI, Chapter XI (in James Legge's The Works of Mencius):

Mencius said: Benevolence is man's mind, and righteousness is man's path.

How lamentable it is to neglect the path and not pursue it, to lose this mind and not know how to seek it again!

When men's fowls and dogs are lost, they know to seek for them again, but they lose their mind, and do not know to seek for it.

The great end of learning is nothing else but to seek for the lost mind.

Thoreau read Mencius in M. G. Pauthier's translation, Les quatre livres de philosophies