The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season

6. Mercury

THE FIXED STARS 265 6.1 Noctilucence My hands are looking old. That happens whether or not you’ve done anything. It isn’t at all dark. There is a dazzle to the air. It is fall or will be. We haven’t enough daytime. It seems that we have but afterward we see that we haven’t. Then a dazzle masks the dark. The story of the man who milled applesauce. He was an old man. Shall I make his story public? It was I who helped him dig. All of that is well known. But some of it was known only to the man who milled applesauce and now is not known to anybody. That part will not be made public. What is the work the dead do? Anyway there is little public left here; I have not seen them on the paths, nor in the larder nor on the meadows, nor anywhere. Perhaps there will be a public again and they will have forgotten. Now there is nobody to mill applesauce and nobody to eat it. Though the story of this man is known it will please us to know it again. For we may forget it, I do not know how, and then when we know it again it will seem to us a new discovery CHAPTER 6 mERCuRy 266 BRIAN CONN and it will please us. Thus do we recycle wisdom even as all other things. He was very old. I have said that already. He had no occupation but to mill applesauce. We found him most often near the large stone which overlooks the valley, up the hill from the creek. There he sat with his sieve and his scraper, and a cedar bowl beneath. And cedar pails into which to empty the bowl. That was during the bright months. The sauce apples grow higher on the mountain, those apples which ripen soft as mush; therefore if one warm day we did not find the old man sitting under the rock which overlooks the valley, we did not think of it, but only supposed that he was harvesting sauce apples higher up. Indeed we seldom saw him whether he was there or not, for his spot by the boulder was not visible from the path. More often we heard the ruck of his scraper against the bottom of the sieve. The rhythm of it did not vary. Those who approached on the path felt the influence of this rhythm even before they heard it, it seemed; by the time they said to themselves there is that noise their steps had accommodated themselves to it. Then they found themselves marching to a rhythm not their own. At times it did not sit well with them. They felt they had been tricked into the old man’s rhythm. But he was an affable old man and if we did not want to march in step with his milling we had only to throw a pebble against the boulder as we approached . When he heard its tap he knew to desist. He did not mind. Because he sat under the boulder all day, his legs atrophied. Moreover he kept the sieve in his lap and sat bent over it and his back ached terribly. This was the substance of his conversation, when he met us walking at dusk: his legs not well and his back not well. But he had great strength in his THE FIXED STARS 267 forearms. I became grateful for the strength of his forearms when we did our digging. That was under a sky without dazzle. That night the sky was dark. The contagion had affected us both and it caused our limbs and digits to tremble violently and to rebel against our will. Contagion made us its puppets as he with his scraping had made those walking the path his puppets. Unmaliciously . But the contagion had no power over his forearms, nor in my case over my fingers. Thus his forearms were yet strong and my fingers yet deft. And together in one way or another we dug. Now and then we people have a little bit of luck. It was easier for me I think. In any case I was not the one weeping. That old man no longer accepted any sexual partners. He claimed he was too old. There were those who rejected the idea; the aged may...