The last pine plank fell away. Timothy and I gasped. Agatha, between us now, gasped, too.
For inside the immense raw pine package was the most beautiful idea anyone ever dreamt and built.
Inside was the perfect gift for any child from seven to seventy-seven. We stopped up our breaths. We let them out in cries of delight and adoration. Inside the opened box was … A mummy. Or, first anyway, a mummy case, a sarcophagus! “Oh, no!” Happy tears filled Timothy’s eyes.
“It can’t be!” said Agatha. “It is, it is!” “Our very own?” “Ours!” “It must be a mistake!” “Sure, they’ll want it back!” “They can’t have it!” “Lord, Lord, is that real gold!? Real hieroglyphs! Run your fingers over them!” “Let me!” “Just like in the museums! Museums!” We all gabbled at once. I think some tears fell from my own eyes to rain upon the case. “Oh, they’ll make the colors run!”
Agatha wiped the rain away.
And the golden mask face of the woman carved on the sarcophagus lid looked back at us with just the merest smile which hinted at our own joy, which accepted the overwhelming upsurge of a love we thought had drowned forever but now surfaced into the sun.
Not only did she have a sun-metal face stamped and beaten out of purest gold, with delicate nostrils and a mouth that was both firm and gentle, but her eyes, fixed into their sockets, were cerulean or amethystine or lapus lazuli, or all three, minted and fused together, and her body was covered over with lions and eyes and ravens, and her hands were crossed upon her carved bosom and in one gold mitten she clenched a thonged whip for obedience, and in the other a fantastic ranuncula, which makes for obedience out of love, so the whip lies unused …
And as our eyes ran down her hieroglyphs it came to all three of us at the same instant: “Why, those signs!” “Yes, the hen tracks!” “The birds, the snakes!” They didn’t speak tales of the Past. They were hieroglyphs of the Future.
This was the first queen mummy delivered forth in all time whose papyrus inkings etched out the next month, the next season, the next year, the next lifetime!
She did not mourn for time spent.
No. She celebrated the bright coinage yet to come, banked, waiting, ready to be drawn upon and used.
We sank to our knees to worship that possible time. First one hand, then another, probed out to niggle, twitch, touch, itch over the signs.
“There’s me, yes, look! Me, in sixth grade!” said Agatha, now in the fifth. “See the girl with my- colored hair and wearing my gingerbread suit?”
“There’s me in the twelfth year of high school!” said Timothy, so very young now but building taller stilts every week and stalking around the yard.
“There’s me,” I said, quietly, warm, “in college. The guy wearing glasses who runs a little to fat. Sure. Heck.” I snorted. “That’s me.”
The sarcophagus spelled winters ahead, springs to squander, autumns to spend with all the golden and rusty and copper leaves like coins, and over all, her bright sun symbol, daughter-of- Ra eternal face, forever above our horizon, forever an illumination to tilt our shadows to better ends.
“Hey!” we all said at once, having read and reread our Fortune-Told scribblings, seeing our lifelines and lovelines, inadmissible, serpentined over, around, and down. “Hey!”
And in one seance table-lifting feat, not telling each other what to do, just doing it, we pried up the bright sarcophagus lid, which had no hinges but lifted out like cup from cup, and put the lid aside.
And within the sarcophagus, of course, was the true mummy!
And she was like the image carved on the lid, but more so, more beautiful, more touching because human shaped, and shrouded all in new fresh bandages of linen, round and round, instead of old and dusty cerements.
And upon her hidden face was an identical golden mask, younger than the first, but somehow, strangely wiser than the first.
And the linens that tethered her limbs had symbols on them of three sorts, one a girl of ten, one a boy of nine, one a boy of thirteen.
A series of bandages for each of us! We gave each other a startled glance and a sudden bark of laughter. Nobody said the bad joke, but all thought: She’s all wrapped up in us!
And we didn’t care. We loved the joke. We loved whoever had thought to make us part of the ceremony we now went through as each of us seized arid began to unwind each of his or her particular serpentines of delicious stuffs!
The lawn was soon a mountain of linen. The woman beneath the covering lay there, waiting. “Oh, no,” cried Agatha. “She’s dead, too!” She ran. I stopped her. “Idiot. She’s not dead or alive. Where’s your key?” “Key?” “Dummy,” said Tim, “the key the man gave you to wind her up!”
Her hand had already spidered along her blouse to where the symbol of some possible new religion hung. She had strung it there, against her own skeptic’s muttering, and now she held it in her sweaty palm.
“Go on,” said Timothy. “Put it in!” “But where?” “Oh for God’s sake! As the man said, in her right armpit or left ear. Gimme!”
And he grabbed the key and impulsively moaning with impatience and not able to find the proper insertion slot, prowled over the prone figure’s head and bosom and at last, on pure
instinct, perhaps for a lark, perhaps just giving up the whole damned mess, thrust the key through a final shroud of bandage at the navel.
On the instant: spunnng! The Electrical Grandmother’s eyes flicked wide!
Something began to hum and whir. It was as if Tim had stirred up a hive of hornets with an ornery stick.
“Oh,” gasped Agatha, seeing he had taken the game away, “let me!” She wrenched the key. Grandma’s nostrils flared! She might snort up steam, snuff out fire! “Me!” I cried, and grabbed the key and gave it a huge … twist!
The beautiful woman’s mouth popped wide. “Me!” “Me!” “Me!”
Grandma suddenly sat up.
We leapt back.
We knew we had, in a way, slapped her alive.
She was born, she was born!
Her head swiveled all about. She gaped. She mouthed. And the first thing she said was:
Laughter.
Where one moment we had backed off, now the mad sound drew us near to peer as in a pit where crazy folk are kept with snakes to make them well.
It was a good laugh, full and rich and hearty, and it did not mock, it accepted. It said the world was a wild place, strange, unbelievable, absurd if you wished, but all in all, quite a place. She would not dream to find another. She would not ask to go back to sleep.
She was awake now. We had awakened her. With a glad shout, she would go with it all.
And go she did, out of her sarcophagus, out of her winding sheet, stepping forth, brushing off, looking around as for a mirror. She found it.
The reflections in our eyes.
She was more pleased than disconcerted with what she found there. Her laughter faded to an amused smile.
For Agatha, at the instant of birth, had leapt to hide on the porch. The Electrical Person pretended not to notice.
She turned slowly on the green lawn near the shady street, gazing all about with new eyes, her nostrils moving as if she breathed the actual air and this the first morn of the lovely Garden and she with no intention of spoiling the game by biting the apple
Her gaze fixed upon my brother. “You must be—?” “Timothy. Tim,” he offered. “And you must be—?”
“Tom,” I said.
How clever again of the Fantoccini Company. They knew. She knew. But they had taught her to pretend not to know. That way we could feel great, we were the teachers, telling her what she already knew! How sly, how wise.
“And isn’t there another boy?” said the woman.
“Girl!” a disgusted voice cried from somewhere on the porch.
“Whose name is Alicia—?”
“Agatha!” The far voice, started in humiliation, ended in proper anger.
“Algernon, of course.”
“Agatha!” Our sister popped up, popped back to hide a flushed face.
“Agatha.” The woman touched the word with proper affection. “Well, Agatha, Timothy, Thomas, let me look at you.”
“No,” said I, said Tim, “Let us look at you. Hey … ” Our voices slid back in our throats. We drew near her.
We walked in great slow circles round about, skirting the edges of her territory. And her territory extended as far as we could hear the hum of the warm summer hive. For that is exactly what she sounded like. That was her characteristic tune.
She made a sound like a season all to herself, a morning early in June when the world wakes to find everything absolutely perfect, fine, delicately attuned, all in balance, nothing disproportioned. Even before you opened your eyes you knew it would be one of those days. Tell the sky what color it must be, and it was indeed.
Tell the sun how to crochet its way, pick and choose among leaves to lay out carpetings of bright and dark on the fresh lawn, and pick and lay it did. The bees have been up earliest of all, they have already come and gone, and come and gone again to the meadow fields and returned all
