Free Shortest Day by Jane Langton Page A

Master. He stood on the stage with spotlights playing over him. “No, not the yellow,” said Sarah. “Wait, I like the blue one.”
    Then Walt began to sing. Mary Kelly, listening from the mezzanine, understood once again that everything in the Revels hung on the thread of Walt’s voice—all the singers and dancers, all the mummers, all the Morris men with their sticks and swords. Even the rising tiers of seats in Sanders Theatre seemed spellbound, and the great bulk of Memorial Hall itself. Whatever was foolish in the Revels, whatever was artificial, vanished as he sang—
    The moon shines bright and the stars give a light
    A little before it is day;
    Our Lord our God He called on us
    And bids us awake and pray .
    It was a voice that summoned the ghosts of men and women who had sung in village streets in Scotland and England and Wales, in Kentucky and Tennessee—men black from the mines of Northumberland or West Virginia, girls crowned with flowers in the Cotswolds, hunters in Abbots Bromley blessing the deer, lusty men in Ireland singing for pennies at cottage doors. He sang them into being without antiquarian fuss, without the pedagogical moralizing of Dr. Box. He sang simply, and the years rolled back and all times and places were one—
    Awake! O awake, good people all ,
    Awake, and you shall hear:
    Our Lord, our God was born on this day
    For us whom He loved so dear .
    The song came to an end, and Mary glanced up to see if Morgan Bailey was still up there on the second balcony keeping an eye on his wife.
    No, he was gone.

CHAPTER 13
    The lord rode forth to hunt the fox
    Before the next day’s beams .
    â€œSir Gawain and the Green Knight”
    M organ drove out to Concord with relief in his breast. Tom Cobb was not going to be with Sarah, not today, because he was sick. Morgan grinned to himself. Sick from eating candy bars! Poor self-indulgent bastard.
    Smiling, Morgan turned off the Concord Turnpike and headed through the town of Lincoln in the direction of Route 117. It was a good day for winter fieldwork. The weather was surprisingly warm. All those homeless people on the mall outside Mem Hall had been standing around outside their tents or sitting on folding chairs in the milky sunshine. But the tent city couldn’t last long. A little more bitter weather like last week, or one big snowstorm, and they’d be gone.
    The geese too would enjoy the balmy winter day. In weather like this they’d be unlikely to leave for good. Of course, if they did, if they flew south on a day like this, it would mean something important. It would mean that the amount of daylight was more important than the temperature.
    The question was complex. Why did a flock at last make up its mind to leave? Morgan was keeping track, comparing notes from year to year, trying to associate the migration with the weather, with the food supply, with human interference, with disasters of one kind of another.
    As he approached the cornfield, he began to worry. What if they had flown already? But they were still there, the same big flock, moving slowly around the field, gleaning the detritus left from the harvested stalks.
    Morgan had a sheltered parking place in the woods. He left his car and approached carefully, moving among the trees beside the field, looking for the path that led to the river, keeping the birds in view.
    But suddenly they took off. With a wild croaking and shouting and a flapping of great dark wings, they lifted from the ground and flew away, making a hoarse clamor over the river.
    What had disturbed them? Surely it wasn’t his fault? Was it somebody else, blundering too close?
    Then Morgan caught a glimpse of the marauder. A fox was running off with a goose in its mouth. It was heading straight for Morgan.
    He yelled as it went by, and the shocked fox dropped the goose and ran away, skimming through the cornfield, a floating flash of color, the white band on its tail visible after