Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

Miss Fanny raised her hands in sympathy.

— I hate it that it had to happen, she said.

Anne was shocked at the Presbyterian phrase but dismissed it as so much ignorance.

— The matchbox, she said, would make her a coffin. Such a pretty box. She would fit right in.

Hanna came out of the kitchen on the march, sifter in hand.

— Dove sat on Jesus’ head the day He was baptize in the stream of Jordan, she said in her testifying voice. Norah sont a dove out from the Ark, and no place found hit for the sole of hits foot. Sont a nother, and hit brought back a live branch in hits bill. Scripture words, Scripture words, ever one I say. A bird sweet to Jesus is any dove. You must believe I’m truly sorry. Dovey with Jesus, Breadcrust.

— You welcome, Anne said. The ile sing all our death, in time.

WE GATHERED OUTSIDE our gymnasium where Archytas the Pythagorean was going to launch his dove from the courtyard. The steam it ran by was to come from copper kettles on a stove. Pappas came with me. Pappos showed up later, explaining that he might just see if the wrestlers and javelineers were in anything like shape for the summer games, but assured us that he did not expect to see any play-pretty of a wooden bird fly around whistling Sappho.

Two philosophers from Athenai had arrived in Taras a week before, still green from the crossing. One of them, Archytas told us, knew Aristophanes. The other remembered from childhood being shown a hale bald man with big feet and flat nose. Sokrates himself! We were all told from our first days in school that Archytas had letters from Plato in Sikilia, kept in their own jar.

Harp and flute signaled the arrival of the archons and the priests of Demeter and of Hermes Tree. Archytas almost didn’t greet them, and paid them scant attention when a boy reminded him by tugging at his cloak. As it was, they had to accept a quick salute, ran through a prayer, and stood with the rest of us while the dove was brought out to the kettles.

Around us I heard charms against the eye of all lucklessness, the opinion that Archytas would scald himself and half the school, a hope that if the automatic bird did fly there would be rich travelers to Taras, Sicilian envy, Sidonian merchants who would ask us to supply them with wooden doves for their markets, the kindly regard of the gods.

On a grooved ramp pointing at a steep angle to the sky an oxboy set the dove and tested its wings by jiggling a mechanism that made it flap frantically, like a bird shooed from a roof.

Order and chance, I said to myself.

Archytas pointed now to this boy, now to that, and as his finger fell level Damos pulled a lever down and Karabion connected a tube to a kettle, Pantimos ran oil down a stick into the works of the dove, Babax fell to pumping the bellows. The archons and the priests began to step back, everybody stood on their toes, the better to see. The eyes of the dove stared, as if full of interest and hope, like a snake that has lifted its head to flick its tongue and listen in stillest silence.

MISS FANNY, TOO, went down to the creek beyond the bottom field where Anne Breadcrust and Jack Frost lived in a cabin that had been part of the slave compound, all that had survived. Only Indians would live in it now. The niggers had two-room cabins on the road, with newspapers on the walls, kerosene lamps, chickens, and a fig tree. Uncle Billy went as far as the edge of the field, explaining that he’d never been to the funeral of a game bird before, didn’t expect the opportunity to arise again, and wanted some sense of what it was like.

Hanna and Miss Fanny went together, in Sunday hats. Hanna said she was going because there was something to everything an Indian did.

— There will be power, she said, and Scripture teaches that a dove is a bird close to the Lord.

She had a rabbit’s foot on her person, a buckeye, and a horseshoe.

They found them sitting cross-legged with their backs to the cabin, Silk Deer and Tommy together, Anne and Jack Frost. Their red hands were on their knees. Before them, on a washtub turned upside down, lay Dovey in the matchbox, which was slid half open, so that one could see the silvery brown shoulder of a wing and the dull circle of a blind eye. Her beak was gaped, as if stilled in a last breath.

Miss Fanny nodded to each. Hanna stood behind, reticent.

—Dovey about to fly, Anne said to them. Her soul go up. It be happy where she go. It would be a good place to be.

A cane-bottomed chair had been placed for Miss Fanny, and beside it at a correct distance a keg for Hanna. Before each was a clean glass jar containing a feather.

Jack Frost began a kind of mumbled chant once they had taken their places. He kept time with a gourd rattler that he took from inside his Confederate greatcoat, causing Miss Fanny and Hanna to look at each other briefly, in recognition of their utter ignorance as to how Jack Frost came to be wearing part of Captain Mattison’s parade uniform.

Anne joined the mumble, motionless as a statue except for her lips, and at some signal which they could not detect, Silk Deer and Tommy crept forward to the washtub and hunkered there, watching Dovey in her matchbox intently. Silk Deer cupped her thin long hands around her mouth.

— Tell her, Anne Breadcrust said, to find good medicine where she be. Tell her peck bitterweed and never mind this world no more. Take goldweed in her craw, for sunshine on her journey, sip springwater for the light of the