Fool School (14 page)

"If we returned the money, he'd only spend it," says
Stan.

"And then he might not have enough to pay for the
rest of his schooling. See?"

Nuncle pokes me in the injured bone under my chest,
and I imagine myself passing out, falling backward into the rows of
music stands, getting impaled on the wire spindles. In my
imagination my fallen body has broken straight through the floor
and plummeted through the acrobatics room, end over end, and landed
safely onto the wool Northumbrian blankets below . . .

"Better we keep the money, don't you think?" Nuncle
says. "I think the surgeons of Brystow would agree,
don't
you
?"

Yessir, I tell him, and he shoves me toward the
stairs. I look back over my shoulder like Orpheus, and I expect to
see Eurydice sucked like cream through a clay straw down to Hell,
but instead Stan has a sideways smile, red lips, and I believe
those red lips will haunt me. In my mind I see the sick depths that
are consuming this fat bearded man, a network of evil strands, some
devil spider dragging tiny claws over his plain stolid soul,
spinning webs, spinning so many webs. A sick man, Stan, I can see
it now. Nuncle is Nuncle, but Stan is a squad of devil spiders
dressed in the mortarboard-bereted body of an oboe player. How
strange this world is. I remember Malcolm speaking of weakness and
holes in our hearts, and I begin to see. Stan has a hole in his
heart. I stumble down the stairs.

Luncheon.

Pottage again, you can smell it from the hall, not a
bad smell, but thick. There are crushed soup bones giving the
oatmeal and cabbage a little depth. Malcolm rises when I enter; his
face is turned away from me under the towel. His French tunic and
jacket, embroidered with blue thread, are stained red about the
collar from blood, and his knuckles are crusted black and bloody.
Turning his face to the firelight--there're no windows down here,
not even those glass skylights, I don't know why--he lifts the
towel and I lose my breath, a corpse's face greets me, a leper's
face, a thousand snakebites. I rush to him and desire to put my
hands on his face, as if I could draw the wound out and place it in
a jar like a necromancer, but he hands me my pottage and I have
forgotten how resilient and strong he is. I want him to lie down
immediately, I say so, but he shakes his head and leans into my ear
and whispers that we must show our strength and temperance before
enemies. He nods at Perille, who is sitting far away from us,
actually not paying attention, that girl-looking boy is beside him.
Hero leans in between us, I can smell his little-boy smell, he
smells like dry grain in a grain tower.

I sit on the bench, practically on the floor, dip my
hands in the water bowl and eat pottage. It tastes like gluey
water. Will there be strawberries again? I wonder why Nuncle
brought them to us, if he was going to be so angry at me later.
Hero pushes between us two, but Malcolm lifts the boy into his lap,
then to the other side, so I am beside him instead.

Perille rises, comes across, closes the breach, and
eases himself into the bench opposite us. Perille is at our table.
Invader.

"I had a vision lass night," he begins. His English
is worse than mine, very thickly accented. "A castle stood in a
storm, beaten by rain. Den da rainclouds split open like a woman
and sunlight poured through de crevice onto da castle, and the face
of St. Chrissopher came down on four wings, he bore an amulet, and
when de amulet touched da castle, the castle rose up into the air
and cut through the sky, it entered heaven. What does it mean, do
you believe, Milcom?"

He cannot pronounce Malcolm's name quite right; he's
very French, he doesn't care about other people's pride. I'm
concerned that this Perille desires our thoughts. Does he know I
was in his room? He threw me onto my face last night; will I
forgive him his sin? Is this a sour game?

Despite his misgivings, Malcolm tries to take Perille
seriously. "St. Christopher is the patron saint of travel," he
says. "Four wings could be the four directions--can you describe
the wings?"

Perille says, "Close togedder, straight up, like a
dragonfly's."

"A dragonfly is the child of a dragon and a bird,"
Malcolm says knowledgeably. "Something about flight, flight to the
Lord?" He thinks about this, then shakes his head. "England's the
land of dragons, and dragons live in caves. Something about flight
into a cave, then?"

Hero pipes up and says: "Glamorgan has caves."

I say that many places have caves. Hero looks down,
like I've spit into his eye, and I wish I hadn't spoken. It didn't
benefit anyone.

"The rain," says Malcolm, "that could be key. Now the
rain is beating down on the castle--could the Fool School be the
castle?--and now the rain has stopped. What changed in between,
Perille?" I take pride that Malcolm bothers to pronounce the
Provençal's name correctly.

"Nothing," says Perille, "nothing changed. Only de
arrival of St. Chrissopher."

"Then it is with the beginning of a journey that
you--or perhaps the school--makes its journey up to heaven," says
Malcolm.

"There's an annual fair outside Brystow," says
Perille. "I've been twice, it's wild with dancing."

"Glamorgan has a fair," mutters Hero.

"And Glamorgan has a fair," Malcolm repeats
obligingly. "Perhaps you should ask to visit the Glamorganshire
Fair. It's not so far from here, it's on Brystow Channel as
well."

"Take a boat," I add, because this is just
so
useful for everyone to hear someone say aloud. I hate myself. I
should never speak. I hide under my face.

Unceremoniously Perille stands and returns to his own
table. The boy-girl stands and together they leave the lunch
area.

The fire is low, and Maliface saunters out of a back
room, his clothing and forearms sodden with oatmeal and scalding
water. From a wall of split logs he takes firewood and fills out
the fire. Repeatedly his eyes curl around their corners to peer at
me, and it strikes me all of a sudden that he was the one who
jammed the door shut. Of course he was. He and Dag must be close. I
visualize a pellet of poison hidden in my pottage, its killing
fumes seeping into my food, poisoning my innards or my breath, but
I realize Nuncle would never stand for dead students, I've seen
that already today.
Avaritia vincit omnia
.

Stan and Nuncle wait for us in the music room.
Neither displays any sign that I'm in any more trouble. They've
said their piece. The music room retains an aura of threat,
however. Stan asks whether Malcolm and I have shawm oboes. I do,
not a good one like my good recorder, it's a sixpence oboe with no
mechanisms, just finger-holes, I run down to get it downstairs,
because of course I've neglected to bring it with me, and this time
I don't make sly detours, I go straight down and come back with my
oboe case. As I come up the stairs I hear a regular clunking, like
stone on stone, like an old woman working a sticky quern, but it's
Ab'ly, or Abramopouli I guess I heard Nuncle call him, standing in
his foreign blouses and throwing the juggling stones against the
wall of the acrobatics room. I stand briefly in the doorway, and I
see that he's hung a large piece of white flint on the wall and is
chucking the rocks at the flint sheet. Pieces break off the balls
at each impact, sparking, and the stones are increasingly round.
Soon all three will be perfect spheres. Sharp eyes meet mine and I
hurry up the stairs.

My Malcolm is sucking on reeds, Nuncle has a
whittling knife and dried cattails and has arranged a pile of four
or five fresh flat oboe reeds. I imagine him slipping with the
whittling knife and slicing that growth off the end of his nose. I
wish he'd do it.

Nuncle looks up from his whittling and flicks two
reeds at me. I don't catch them both, only one, and the other falls
to the floor, where it will make my cheap oboe taste like dust for
the day. I bend down and pick it up, then assemble it into the
oboe's mouthpiece. I see that my oboe has a split halfway down. It
won't last much longer. Malcolm has a modern oboe with levers to
hold down unused holes, so you don't have to squeeze all your
fingers down all the time.

Nuncle leaves his snippings and comes over and looks
up and down my shawm oboe. "Hardly acacia wood," he hisses through
disapproving teeth. He is a snake, I decide; slippery. Devilish. I
desire to say that it wasn't my oboe that's acacia, this is just
pine and has a split, it's my recorder that's good, but I am a rat
in the eyes of this snake, and I am silent.

Stan comes to the front of the class, standing like a
pile of rejected bricks, his legs wide-set beyond the width of his
shoulders, his knees clutched inward, and he speaks:

"There are four styles of shawming. I'll describe
them. In high heraldry, you strive to make as much noise as
possible." With his eyes bent straight up, facing Hamlin's library
of scrolls, Stan huffs a big breath and makes a sound that, if you
hadn't seen him blowing through a wooden oboe, you'd swear came out
of a silver trumpet, announcing the arrival of King Henri and his
entourage. I prefer to imagine that Hamlin rose somewhat out of his
chair before finding himself caught on his belly table. The thought
gives me some pleasure.

"The second style is called waitry," and I know this
word vaguely, it's an English practice, a group of London
nightwatch guards once started carrying instruments to play when
there was no call for policing, I'm told parts of London are very
safe, and the practice of watchmen forming musical performance
troupes caught on around England. It's not so popular in France,
where we expect our public men to dedicate themselves to their
responsibilities; these English are frivolous in our eyes. Stan
says words that confirm this, then says: "In waitry you've got to
blend your sound into that of the flute and drum. Nuncle, would
you?"

Nuncle plays a staccato tambrel beat of some
intricacy, and Stan's shawm begins weaving into the beat, then
across the beat. My estimation of him, despite his spiderousness,
is rising. I begin to see why Stan's been elected to teach the
instrument.

"The third style of shawming is solo minstrelsy, the
entertainer in court. Of course, many times you'll have several
musicians in a court, and then you'll incorporate waitry style into
your minstreling. Other times you'll be alone, but you'll always
need to entertain, with or without accompaniment." Stan plays "Bird
on a Bough," which is absolutely the lowest common denominator of
music, it's hard to get away from in the jesting business. Papa
always refused to play it, he said it was beneath him. While Stan
plays it fine, I believe Stan isn't as much a solo entertainer as
he is a former member of a wait. Nuncle teaches the recorder, I
remember, and I hope he's more talented at teaching solo
performance, which, insofar as I care about music at all, is what I
hope to do. No reliance on other people. Other people can never be
trusted.

"Now," says Stan, "we'll start work on tone, for you
two. Eadmun, Weir, follow along. Perille, feel free to go
downstairs and practice your piece for the fair."

Perille rises and descends the staircase. In moments
we hear an astonishing flurry of notes, I've never heard the like,
it's thousands of notes together, up and down scales and notes
between scales, it paints pictures, it's raw humanity, it becomes a
starlit night in my mind.

"Nay, wait," says Malcolm. "You said there were four
styles."

"Yeah," says Stan, smiling a know-it-all's smile.
"There's also vagina music. You'll figure it out on your own."

Malcolm blinks. "You mean like . . . romantic music?"
he asks.

"Call it whatever you want. I'm not scared of calling
it what I do with it. Now, tone. Begin playing, you two."

We spend an hour and a half listening to Malcolm
squeak. He's far from a natural at music, but then, so am I. I
don't begrudge him his inexperience. Hero, or Eadmun or Weir--I'm
not sure which is his name, but I like Hero best--is able to play a
scale, but he's had a year to practice. Me, I've been playing
mostly recorder, but sometimes oboe, I've practiced maybe once a
month when I need a diversion, I can make nice sounds so long as I
squeeze shut the crack in the oboe. Papa wanted me to concentrate
on recorder, I don't know why.

After some length of oboe practice, Nuncle
intercedes, and Stan instantly gets absorbed by a small chair in
the back of the room. It's like he was never there. Nuncle has
inhaled all power in the room, subsumed the oboe lesson into his
august wiry presence. Now we will practice the recorder, only we're
all exhausted, just fashed, Hero's head sags on his thin neck and
this other Eadmun or Weir person is slumped over a music stand, an
elbow propped, squashing his or her cheek on a palm. Small hands. A
girl, I'm certain.

Nuncle sees our misery. Nuncle is wise. Nuncle asks
nothing of us. Nuncle picks his recorder out of its case, lifts the
jig to his lips, arranges himself, and plays.

It's not "Bird on a Bough," that's for sure. I really
don't know what it is. I hear pictures, not too different from what
I saw when I heard Perille downstairs, only Nuncle's song is very
different. I hear love, a tryst, a highly placed man, a night
window, a face so beautiful that a thousand men would kill each
other for it, a scorned husband, a scurrying of vermin into a--a
ship, I realize, she's stealing away with her lover to far away
lands, and her husband has summoned an army to take his wife back
from the upstart lover. I realize I know the story Nuncle is
telling solely through music: it's the Ilium story, the war over
the lady Helen, whose face brought a thousand warships to her door.
Nuncle tells the first act of the story through music, using all
two and a half octaves the recorder provides, sometimes
flat-bending the notes into full soprano, other times all the way
down to upper baritone, the lowest an English recorder will go.
Mine will go several notes lower without squeaking, someday I'll
show that to Nuncle and he'll be impressed with me and won't
threaten me anymore. As the act of the song closes, Malcolm and I
applaud him despite our feelings about him. It was virtuosity.