In the 1780s his house was disgraced. Their baronetcy forfeit, their fiefdom seized, the petty nobles yet went on living, dazed and landlorn. Not knowing what else to do, they giddily embarked on a dumb show of picturesque fairy-tale peasanthood. They tried begging, but their tattered robes and ineffaceable dignity betrayed them at once. Next they tailed a caravan of Gypsies, who of course set their half-wild dogs on them. They fled across the river, where they tried to join the bargemen, but too weak to do their share, they were pitched from the boats. At last finding a row of crumbling mausoleums on the riverbank, they hid inside without discussion.
“What did he mean?” said the boy.
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The boy dragged the man’s body from the bier to bury it out in the rain. While he tamped back the root-matted clay, a fight began among the swans and he rested weakly on his shovel to watch. A white swan was pecking at a black one’s mate. The flock turned on it, fighting for the black’s mate, and the mad ugly swan reared up, martyred to itself. Suddenly it disappeared–that is to say, it became invisible to the boy, who could see only an empty space at which the birds stabbed mechanically with their beaks, and from which blood poured onto the grass.
“I said hello!” the voice called, feminine. The umbrella approached. Beneath it a snowy pink face framed by caramel hair said, “Ugh. What’s the bloody mess?”
“Would you take them off?”
“No worse than my hometown, I suppose. I’m on my way to the city. Do you want to come?”
“There’s the city,” she said on a scraped suburban bluff. “Can you see anything?”
