Responding to a Letter, Part II Alison Umland sighed with satisfaction as she finished folding the laundry in under fifteen minutes and picked up a stack of towels in one hand and a stack of the boys’ shirts in the other, balancing each along her forearms with the ease of long practice. Crossing the living room to deliver the towels to the bathrooms, she paused when she saw John sitting on the sofa, his back in the place where the back of the furniture met the left side, with one of his notebooks in his lap. It was open, with two pages alternating scrawled-on sticky notes and lines of neater handwriting (more sticky notes were stuck carelessly, she noted with some displeasure, to the sofa and the coffee table) but he didn’t seem to be looking at it; there was a pencil in his hand, but he had both hands curled up in fists beneath his chin, his elbows balanced on his heel and knee, evidently thinking furiously.
“Hey, hey,” she said. “No feet on the couch, and no sticky notes on the coffee table, you’ll take what’s left of the varnish off.”
John started and looked almost, at being recalled to the real world she assumed, rebellious for a second before nodding and straightening his legs out, then twisting to put his back against that of the couch. “Sorry, Mom,” he said, leaning over to peel the notes from the edge of her table as carefully as he could.
“Finished with your problems yet?” she called from the bathroom as she slid half of the towels into the open-fronted cabinet on the wall for them.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Alison finished putting away the towels, then handed the shirts to Paul in the boys’ room so he could divide them up between the four dresser drawers and returned to John. “Ready to go over them?” she asked, though by the looks of it, mathematics was not at all what he had on his mind right now. The long division would be attended to before it was all said and done, but she tolerated John’s digressions into fancy a great deal – more than she should, according to Chris – and was prepared to do so right now, given how intent he looked about whatever it was which had caught his attention this time.
“Can we talk first?” John asked, proving her right.
Alison sat down beside him on the couch, crossing one knee over the other and making herself comfortable. “Talk away,” she said.
There was a pause as he decided how to begin his presentation, then he slid a very battered-looking letter out of the front of his notebook. “Julian sent this,” he said. “She wanted me to look up Blackfoot tribal legends and how they personify things. Some guy she goes to school with is from there or something.” He put his sister’s letter down without showing it to her. He turned to the end table and lifted a few books she hadn’t noticed, all heavily bookmarked with what looked like print-outs. “So I went to the library, and I didn’t find what Julian wanted, but….”
He trailed off, and Alison let the silence hang for a moment, knowing that John tended to work out what he wanted to say in his head before he said it out loud and that he got angry when this process was interrupted. She knew he could handle it with reasonable grace when he had to, he’d proved that in public, however reluctantly, more than once, but she did her best to let him work it out on his own especially when he was interested in something. After the silence went on longer than usual, though, she did finally prompt him, “But…?”
“This was the first thing,” he said, pointing to two lines of his shaky beginning cursive on the notebook. Alison read them: The first war death was killed with an aspen stick. The Silver Spears dueling club all had aspen wands.
Beside this were notes on where he had gotten these pieces of information.
Only John, she thought. “You thought it was interesting that aspen is associated with violence in both Europe and a North American Plains tribe?” she asked.
John nodded. “Then – ignore all that, that’s something else – “ he said, waving at the other notes beneath that one and then taking the notebook out of her hands to turn the pages back over – “there’s all this.”
Looking at the new page, Alison recognized John’s annotation method: reading down the list, she saw Orpheus but he won, Grindylows and merpeople?, Not slaves but free subjects old Bruin the bear of the lists, Looks like werewolves, Sounds like me, Like relics, Four days dead – Lazarus, First woman made death, and so on. It was impossible, given her relatively limited knowledge of the subject matter, to follow exactly what he was on about even with the story headings, but she thought she got the sense of what John had stumbled upon.
“Well,” she said finally, after taking her own long moment to collect her thoughts, “the first thing you need to remember, honey, is that this is all from non-magical sources.” Alison disliked the word ‘Muggle;’ she knew the word had a long, long history, but it sounded like something which really ought to become considered a slur in the next century or so. The magical world was, however, very slow to change in many ways and areas, and she could see too an argument that fair was fair, considering the pejorative use of ‘witch’ in non-magical culture. For herself, she preferred magical and non-magical, as the nearest thing she had yet found to purely descriptive words, though the drift of language would eventually render them something else, too. “You know about misinformation, don’t you?”
John nodded. “It’s in the Fantastic Beasts,” he said. “And other places. We make up stuff to confuse the non-magics, so they don’t know we’re all real.” He had a look, almost a smile, and she knew he was about to say something she would have to correct, but then he caught himself and didn’t.
“That’s right,” she said. “Before the time leading up to the Statute of Secrecy, though, more people knew magic was real, and sometimes it was even part of society. Some of that survives in their legends, though it’s not always right.” She pointed to the note on Orpheus. “As far as we can tell, the real wizard Orpheus wasn’t much like the legends, and he never could have gotten his wife back. There is no way to bring back those who have passed on, John. Plato would have come closer to being right than anyone, if anything like the story did happen.”
John looked at her interrogatively. “What did Plato say?”
Alison hesitated. Chris often warned her about pushing John too far, too fast – because he was so intelligent, it would be easy to hand him more than he could really understand yet, or just didn’t need to know yet, and neither of them wanted that to happen. She suspected this was one of those occasions when the conclusions of John’s observations were going to outstrip his comprehension and felt she was treading on thin ice. “That Orpheus never saw the real Eurydice,” she said. “That it was just an illusion.” And that he’d been a coward to try to fetch her back to life instead of dying for his love, implying the love had not been genuine at all, but she was not sure ‘you should die to be with your dead wife if you really loved her too much to live without her’ was really an appropriate message to pass along to a nine-year-old.
“There are stories around the world about not looking back on something which is dead, though,” she offered instead. “Orpheus. This one here. Lot’s wife. There’s a message about obeying authority and not dwelling on the past there, that they have in common.”
“I’d say more ‘obeying authority,’” John muttered. “Without knowing why.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of the sofa. “So – things in this world get scrambled into the other one. Like the lyre on Hades and Grandma’s old music box.”
It took Alison a moment to realize they were on Orpheus specifically again. Her mother-in-law had an old enchanted music box, brought over from Germany in the nineteenth century, which she had offered to Alison when their family abruptly went from two to five children, because when wound and played, it had the effect of making children magically fall asleep. Alison had refused, thinking such things were proper only as heirlooms rather than as tools, but there had been a few times when she’d almost wished she’d accepted. “Right,” she said, wondering where this was going.
“Couldn’t, then – “ he began, his tone rising toward a question, but then he stopped abruptly. “Never mind. I need to think some more.” He closed his notebook. “We can do division now.”
“Are you sure?” Alison asked. He had sounded so intense, it seemed strange to her that he could switch it off so easily.
“Yes,” he said firmly, starting to put the notebook away.
“May I borrow your work there?” she asked. John paused, not straightening or finishing his movement to put his notebook in his bag. “That looks very interesting, and I’m not very familiar with these stories, so I’d like to be better-prepared the next time we talk.”
John straightened slowly, but did hand over the notebook, and then the books, since more than half of it would be of no use without the books to figure out what the notes referred to. “Okay,” he said, shrugging, then going back for his math workbook so she could confirm that he had, in fact, mastered the subtleties of two-figure long division adequately and could move on now.