Early Warning

He had five students. Whether they would get through all thirty-two hundred lines of Beowulf by May, Henry had no idea — that was sixteen weeks. Two hundred lines a week might be a lot. But anything was better than nothing. They looked at him expectantly, and so he opened a large book to a marked page and pushed it to the center of the seminar table. He said, “See that mound? I wish the picture were in color. It’s a beautiful grassy green. It is Eadgils Mound, in Uppsala, in Sweden. When it was excavated in 1874, it contained a corpse lying on a bearskin, with his sword and other precious possessions, indicating that he was a king. He seems to have died in the middle of the sixth century. When you are translating this poem, I want you to think of it as not only a monster tale, but also a historical record. This poem is considered to be about Eadgils, the king in the grave.” The students’ heads went up and down.

Class lasted two hours. They got twenty-five lines translated — from “Hwaet! We Gardena” to “man geptheon” (“What! We learn of the Danes of the Spear…” to “a man shall thrive”). It did not make much sense, but the students seemed to enjoy the puzzle. That’s what Henry said at the end of the class: “Think of the poem as a puzzle, not only a translation, but a jigsaw puzzle that will only become a meaningful picture when you’ve put all the pieces together. That means we have to be patient.”

He ate his supper at a café near the campus, then trotted all the way home, which took a single invigorating hour. Once home, he put off reading Sandra’s letter by working on his last chapter, a consideration of “The Battle of Maldon” and the monk Byrhtferth.

Finally, he picked up Sandra’s letter, slit it open, and got into bed with it. He was so sleepy that he hoped he wouldn’t really understand a thing that she wrote. The letter was surprisingly short. It read, “Dear Henry, I have only one thing to say. I no longer think that our engagement failed because you are American and I am English. I know I said that, and it made sense at the time, as Americans are known for their enthusiasm which then falters as novelty and amusement give way to commitment and familiarity. My sister told me about a fellow she went for at University who treated her as you treated me — always kind and more and more distant. He came up queer as a nine bob note. You might think about it. Yours truly, Sandra Boulstridge.”

The interesting thing to Henry was that he wasn’t offended. But he also decided to complete his dissertation before thinking any more about it.

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HER MOTHER AND FATHER could not afford to buy her a horse. No plan or scheme that Debbie had managed to come up with (including sending Uncle Frank and Aunt Andy a letter, asking very respectfully for a loan of a thousand dollars, to be paid back in ten years, at 5 percent interest) had worked. But now that Debbie had met Fiona Cannon, who was a year ahead of her at school, she didn’t care about a horse of her own. Fiona had two horses — or, rather, a horse (Prince) and a pony (Rufus) — and riding with Fiona was far more fun than any camp or lesson she had ever experienced. She rode Rufus, who was a pinto and very low to the ground. She had fallen off Rufus dozens of times — she was expected to fall off Rufus. She was also expected to watch Fiona, who rode Prince. Debbie knew the expression “He rode rings around her,” but she had no idea that it was so much fun to have rings ridden around her.

Fiona lived three stops farther on the school bus. She was an only child, and she kept Rufus and Prince at home, but home was not a fancy place with a stable and a riding ring — home was a two-story house with a wraparound porch down by the road, and a big fenced field that dipped, ran up the hillside, and ended at the trees. Rufus and Prince lived together in the field, and all of Fiona’s equipment and tack was stored in the garage. Fiona’s mom was a teacher at the high school, and her dad had a diner in town that served breakfast and lunch but not dinner. Debbie had been there; she liked the waffles.

When Fiona invited her — not every day, but lots of days — Timmy was supposed to tell Mom that she was going to Fiona’s, and most times he did. They dropped their books inside the house, changed clothes (she was just a little shorter and thinner than Fiona), and went out back, where Fiona stood at the gate with a bucket of oats and a lead rope, smacking the chain of the lead rope against the bucket and shouting, “Come in, come in!” And then the best thing happened — Prince and Rufus came galloping down the hill, exactly as if they were happy to see them, Fiona of course, but also Debbie, it seemed. While Prince ate from the bucket, Debbie fed a couple of handfuls to Rufus. Then they brushed them and picked their hooves.