«Aren't you?» he said.
«Wait! Let me ask myself: Are you dead? Are you? Or nearly, all these years?»
«The day and the night you turned eighteen,» said the young man. «Think it over.»
«It's so long ago!»
Something stirred like a mouse by a coffin-sized window.
«This will bring it back.»
He let the sun wash through the elixir that glowed like the crushed sap of a thousand green blades of summer grass. It looked hot and still as a green sun, it looked wild and blowing as the sea.
«This was a good day in a good year of your life.»
«A good year,» she murmured, hidden away.
«A vintage year. Then there was savour to your life. One swig and you'd know the taste! Why not try it, eh? Eh?»
He held the bottle higher and farther out and it was suddenly a telescope which, peered through from either end, brought to focus a time in a year long gone. A green-and-yellow time much like this noon in which the young man offered up the past like a burning glass between his serene fingers. He tilted the bright flask, and a butterfly of white-hot illumination winged up and down the window shutters, playing them like gray piano keys, soundlessly. With hypnotic ease the burning wings frittered through the shutter slots to catch a lip, a nose, an eye, poised there. The eye snatched itself away, then, curious, relit itself from the beam of light. Now, having caught what he wanted to catch, the young man held the butterfly reflection steady, save for the breathing of its fiery wings, so that the green fire of that far-distant day poured through the shutters of not only ancient house but ancient woman. He heard her breathe out her muffled startlement, her repressed delight.
«No, no, you can't fool me!» She sounded like someone deep under water, trying not to drown in a lazy tide. «Coming back dressed in that flesh, you! Putting on that mask I can't quite see! Talking with that voice I remember from some other year. Whose voice? I don't care! My ouija board here on my lap spells who you really are and what you sell!»
«I sell just this twenty-four hours from young life.»
«You sell something else!»
«No, I can't sell what I am.»
«If I come out you'd grab and shove me six feet under. I've had you fooled, put off, for years. Now you whine back with new plans, none of which will work!»
«If you came out the door, I'd only kiss your hand, young lady.»
«Don't call me what I'm not!»
«I call you what you could be an hour from now.»
«An hour from now…» she whispered, to herself.
«How long since you been walked through this wood?»
«Some other war, or some peace,» she said. «I can't see. The water's muddy.»
«Young lady,» he said, «it's a fine summer day. There's a tapestry of golden bees, now this design, now that, in the green church aisle of trees here. There's honey in a hollow oak flowing like a river of fire. Kick off your shoes, you can crush wild mint, wading deep. Wildflowers like clouds of yellow butterflies lie in the valley. The air under these trees is like deep well water cool and clear you drink with your nose. A summer day, young as young ever was.»
«But I'm old, old as ever was.»
«Not if you listen! Here's my out-and-out bargain, deal, sale — transaction betwixt you, me and the August weather.»
«What kind of deal, what do I get for my investment?»
«Twenty-four long sweet summer hours, starting now. When we've run through these woods and picked the berries and eaten the honey, we'll go on to town and buy you the finest spider-web-thin white summer dress and lift you on the train.»
«The train!»
«The train to the city, an hour away, where well have dinner and dance all night. I'll buy you four shoes, you'll need them, wearing out one pair.»
«My bones — I can't move.»
«You'll run rather than walk, dance rather than run. We'll watch the stars wheel over the sky and bring the sun up, flaming. We'll string footprints along the lake shore at dawn. We'll eat the biggest breakfast in mankind's history and lie on the sand like two chicken pies warming at noon. Then, late in the day, a five-pound box of bonbons on our laps, we'll laugh back on the train, covered with the conductor's ticket-punch confettiyblue, green, orange, like we were married, and walk through town seeing nobody, no one, and wander back through the sweet dusk-smelling wood into your house…»
Silence.
«It's already over,» murmured her voice. «And it hasn't begun.»
Then: «Why are you doing this? What's in it for you?!»
The young man smiled tenderly. «Why, girl, I want to sleep with you.»
She gasped. «I never slept with no one in my life!»
«You're a… maiden lady?»
«And proud оf it!»
The young man sighed, shaking his head. «So it's true — you are, you really are, a maiden.»
He heard nothing from the house, so listened.
Softly, as if a secret faucet had been turned somewhere with difficulty, and drop by drop an ancient system were being used for the first time in half a century, the old woman began to cry.
«Old Mam, why do you cry?»
«I don't know,» she wailed.
Her weeping faded at last and he heard her rock in her chair, making a cradle rhythm to soothe herself.
«Old Mam,» he whispered.
«Don't call me that!»
«All right,» he said. «Clarinda.»
«How did you know my name? No one knows!»
«Clarinda, why did you hide in that house, long ago?»