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PROLOGUE
The Beautiful One Is Here
In the attic where the rain touched the roof softly on spring days and where you could feel the mantle of snow outside, a few inches away, on December nights, A Thousand Times Great Grandmère existed. She did not live, nor was she eternally dead, she … existed.
And now with the Great Event about to happen, the Great Night arriving, the Homecoming about to explode, she must be visited!
“Ready? Here I come!” Timothy’s voice cried faintly beneath a trapdoor that trembled. “Yes!?”
Silence. The Egyptian mummy did not twitch.
She stood propped in a dark corner like an ancient dried plum tree, or an abandoned and scorched ironing board, her hands and wrists trussed across her dry riverbed bosom, a captive of time, her eyes slits of deep blue lapis lazuli behind thread-sewn lids, a glitter of remembrance as her mouth, with a shriveled tongue wormed in it, whistled and sighed and whispered to recall every hour of every lost night four thousand years back when she was a pharaoh’s daughter dressed in spider linens and warm-breath silks with jewels burning her wrists as she ran in the marble gardens to watch the pyramids erupt in the fiery Egyptian air.
Now Timothy lifted the trapdoor lid of dust to call into that midnight attic world.
“Oh, Beautiful One!”
A faint pollen of dust fell from the ancient mummy’s lips.
“Beautiful no longer!”
“Grandma, then.”
“Not Grandma merely,” came the soft response.
“A Thousand Times Great Grandmère?”
“Better.” The old voice dusted the silent air. “Wine?”
“Wine.” Timothy rose, a small flacon in his hands.
“The vintage, child?” the voice murmured.
“B.C., Grandmère.”
“How many years?”
“Two thousand, almost three, B.C.”
“Excellent.” Dust fell from the withered smile. “Come.”
Picking his way through a litter of papyrus, Timothy reached the no-longer Beautiful One, whose voice was still incredibly lovely.
“Child?” said the withered smile. “Do you fear me?”
“Always, Grandmère.”
“Wet my lips, child.”
He reached to let the merest drop wet the lips that now trembled.
“More,” she whispered.
Another drop of wine touched the dusty smile.
“Still afraid?”
“No, Grandmère.”
“Sit.”
He perched on the lid of a box with hieroglyphs of warriors and doglike gods and gods with lions’ heads painted on it.
“Why are you here?” husked the voice beneath the serene riverbed face.
“Tomorrow’s the Great Night, Grandmère, I’ve waited for all my life! The Family, our Family, coming, flying in from all over the world! Tell me, Grandmère, how it all began, how this House was built and where we came from and—”
“Enough!” the voice cried, softly. “Let me recall a thousand noons. Let me swim down the deep well. Stillness?”
“Stillness.”
“Now,” came the whisper across four thousand years, “here’s how it was …”
CHAPTER 1
The Town and the Place
At first, A Thousand Times Great Grandmère said, there was only a place on the long plain of grass and a hill on which was nothing at all but more grass and a tree that was as crooked as a fork of black lightning on which nothing grew until the town came and the House arrived.
We all know how a town can gather need by need until suddenly its heart starts up and circulates the people to their destinations. But how, you ask, does a house arrive?
The fact is that the tree was there and a lumberman passing to the Far West leaned against it, and guessed it to be before Jesus sawed wood and shaved planks in his father’s yard or Pontius Pilate washed his palms. The tree, some said, beckoned the House out of tumults of weather and excursions of Time. Once the House was there, with its cellar roots deep in Chinese tombyards, it was of such a magnificence, echoing facades last seen in London, that wagons, intending to cross the river, hesitated with their families gazing up and decided if this empty place was good enough for a papal palace, a royal monument, or a queen’s abode, there hardly seemed a reason to leave. So the wagons stopped, the horses were watered, and when the families looked, they found their shoes as well as their souls had sprouted roots. So stunned were they by the House up there by the lightning-shaped tree, that they feared if they left the House would follow in their dreams and spoil all the waiting places ahead.
So the House arrived first and its arrival was the stuff of further legends, myths, or drunken nonsense.
It seems there was a wind that rose over the plains bringing with it a gentle rain that turned into a storm that funneled a hurricane of great strength. Between midnight and dawn, this portmanteau-storm lifted any moveable object between the fort towns of Indiana and Ohio, stripped the forests in upper Illinois, and arrived over the as-yet-unborn site, settled, and with the level hand of an unseen god deposited, shakeboard by shakeboard and shingle by shingle, an arousal of timber that shaped itself long before sunrise as something dreamed of by Rameses but finished by Napoleon fled from dreaming Egypt.
There were enough beams within to roof St. Peter’s and enough windows to sun
-blind a bird migration. There was a porch skirted all around with enough space to rock a celebration of relatives and boarders. Inside the windows loomed a cluster, a hive, a maze of rooms, sufficient to a roster, a squad, a battalion of as yet unborn legions, but haunted by the promise of their coming.
