The Boxes

The aeroplane came in out of the dark over the lake with its lights on, and every insect in Mayes County came to meet it.

He had not known there was an airstrip until Tuesday. It was on the other side of the highway from the cove, beyond the café, a long strip of tarmac in a field of cut grass with a windsock at one end, orange, hanging straight down, and a hut with a light over its door, and a fence; and at nine o’clock on Wednesday night he stood by the fence beside the grey car, in the dark, in the heat, with Castellanos beside him, and watched the lights come down the sky towards them out of the east, two white ones and a red one and a green, very slowly, like a star that had changed its mind.

“It’s a small one,” said Castellanos. “Two engines. From Tulsa. The Household charters it.”

“Every day?”

“Every day there are boxes, sir.” Castellanos watched the lights. “Which is every day.”

The landing lights came on, two white beams, enormous, reaching down out of the dark onto the strip ahead of the aeroplane; and the beams were full of insects. Thousands of them. Millions. He had never seen anything like it. They whirled in the light like snow in a headlamp, white and gold, moths and beetles and things with wings that he had no names for, so thick that the beams looked solid, like two white pillars standing on the grass; and the aeroplane came down between them, through them, and touched, and ran along the strip with its engines roaring and the insects pouring off it in clouds, and slowed, and turned, and came back towards the hut.

The engines stopped. The propellers went round more slowly, and more slowly, and stopped. In the silence after them he heard the insects again, in the trees, breathing.

A door opened in the side of the aeroplane and some steps came down, and a man came down the steps, carefully, with a red box in each hand.

---

He was a young man, thirty or so, thin, with very short fair hair and spectacles, in a dark suit and a white shirt and a tie, and he came across the grass towards the fence in the heat of a Mayes County night in July, at ninety degrees, with the insects round his head, holding the two red boxes out from his sides a little, the way you hold something you have been told not to let touch anything; and when he reached the fence and saw who was standing beside the car, he stopped, and put the boxes down on the grass, very carefully, one on each side of him, and bowed.

“Sir,” he said. “Lowther. Messenger of the Household.” He straightened. He was sweating. It was running down his face from his hair, into his collar, and he did not seem to notice it. “The boxes for the twenty-fifth. And a letter from the Private Secretary, sir, in the top of the first. I’m to wait, sir, and take them back to Tulsa on the six o’clock.”

“You’re to wait all night?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where?”

Mr Lowther looked at Castellanos. Castellanos looked at the dark.

“There’s the trailer,” said Castellanos, after a while.

“The trailer,” said Mr Lowther, with gratitude, and something in his face, behind the spectacles, behind the sweat, said that he had heard about the trailer, and about its air conditioning, and had been thinking about it since Tulsa.

Frederick picked up the boxes.

They were heavier than they looked. They always were. Red leather, the old kind, worn pale at the corners and along the edges where hands had carried them for a hundred years, with the cipher on the lid in gold, rubbed nearly away, and a brass lock, and a brass handle, warm from Mr Lowther’s hands; and he stood by the fence at the airstrip at Ketchum in the dark with one in each hand and the insects coming at his face, and he thought: they found me.

He had known they would. The Private Secretary had said so. They will reach you wherever you are, every day. He had said I’ll do the boxes, and meant it, and the boxes had come every day since Saturday, in a car from Tulsa with a driver from the Household who did not get out, and he had done them on the porch in the evenings in an hour, and they had gone back. Small boxes. Summer boxes. Letters, mostly, and a list or two, and the Private Secretary’s note saying nothing pressing, sir.

These were not small. These were heavy. And they had come in an aeroplane, at night.

“Sergeant,” he said. “What’s in them?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Castellanos. “I never know. That’s the point of them.”

---

It was Hanover.

He knew it as soon as he opened the first box, at the kitchen table, under the lamp, at a quarter to ten, with the box fan roaring and the others upstairs; before he had even taken out the Private Secretary’s letter, which was on the top, in its cream envelope with the crest. Underneath it there were three long documents, on heavy paper, stiff, folded once, with ribbons, and the white horse on the seal at the foot of each, and the German on them in the Crown Office’s old black type. Acts of the Landtag. The ones that waited for him, and for nobody else, because in Hanover the King has no representative and signs everything himself, wherever he is, and his acts travel to him by courier, and always have.

He opened the Private Secretary’s letter.

Sir. The Landtag at Hanover rises on the twenty-seventh, and the Minister-President has asked that three Acts which completed their passage this week should be signed before it does, so that the money in them can be spent in the season it was voted for. They are an Act on the navigation of the Weser and the maintenance of its locks, the third supplementary budget for 2029, and an Act amending the school holidays. The Crown Office has examined each instrument and I have put its English note on each. In the second box are a hundred and twelve replies to children who wrote to you for your birthday, which you asked to sign yourself, and which will keep until Monday if they must, and a letter from the Prime Minister, which will not. I am sorry it is so much, sir, and so late. It is July. It is always July. Mr Lowther will wait.

It was signed with the Private Secretary’s initials, small, in the corner, the way he always signed.

Under the initials, in the same hand, smaller still:

The screen door, sir. I have been told about the screen door.

Frederick looked at the screen door.

He did not know who had told the Private Secretary about the screen door. He thought about it for a moment, and then decided that he did not want to know, and that it had probably been Kimura, and that it had probably been the first thing she had put in her report on Saturday night, before the well and the cellar and the law, because Kimura knew what mattered.

The screen door was shut. On the other side of it, in the dark, there were moths.

---

There were a great many moths.

They had come to the lamp. It was the only light for half a mile, the lamp on the kitchen table, apart from the window of the trailer by the barn, which had its blind down; and they came to it out of the whole dark country round the farmhouse, out of the trees and the grass and the fields and the lake, and found the screen door between them and it, and hung on the mesh. Dozens of them. Then a hundred. Small brown ones, and grey ones, and white ones like flakes of paper, and one enormous one, pale green, with long tails on its wings, as big as his hand, that came at nine minutes to ten and settled on the mesh in the middle of the door at the height of his face and stayed there, opening and closing its wings very slowly, and looked at him.

He looked back at it.

Then he took out the first of the Acts, and unfolded it on the kitchen table under the lamp, and smoothed it flat with both hands, and read it.

He read all of it. He always did. He had been told, when he was twelve, by his father, that the King signs nothing he has not read, and he had been told, when he was fourteen, by the Private Secretary, that this was not in fact required, that the Crown Office examined every instrument and the King could rely on it; and he had thought about both of those things, and decided, at fourteen, at the kitchen table at the Hartigans’ on a Tuesday, that he would read them anyway, because if he did not read them then one day he would sign something he had not read and it would be the wrong thing, and it would be his name on it.

Gesetz zur Änderung des Feriengesetzes. An Act amending the school holidays. Four pages. He read it slowly, in the German, with the Crown Office’s note beside it, the way he had been taught to read German at eight, out loud under his breath, so that the long words came apart into their pieces. It moved the end of the summer holidays in every school in the Kingdom of Hanover from the fourteenth of August to the twenty-first, from next year, because the summers were getting hotter and the schools had no cooling, and the Landtag had sat for two days and divided four times about it, and the teachers were for it and the farmers were against it, and the parents, the note said, drily, were divided according to whether they had children.

He sat and looked at it for a long time.

He thought: I am on my summer holidays, at a kitchen table in Oklahoma in a hundred degrees with no cooling, and I am about to give a week more summer holidays to every child in Hanover.

He thought that nobody in Hanover would ever think about who had signed it, or where, or what the kitchen had been like. He thought that this was right. That was all a signature was for: to be underneath a thing, and not to be the thing.

He turned to the last page.

He took the pen out of the first box, the one that always came in the first box, black, heavy, with the cap that clicked, and uncapped it. And there, at the foot of the last page, in the space that had been left for it, below the old German words, he wrote, as he had written it a hundred times since the second of May, and practised it a thousand times before that, on the backs of envelopes, at the kitchen table at the Hartigans’, until Mrs Hartigan took the envelopes away:

George R.

---

At eleven o’clock the moth died on the Weser.

He did not see it happen. He was reading. He had read the Act, which was about the locks on the river and who paid for the dredging, and was dull, eleven pages of dull, and which he had read all the same, all of it, to the end; and he had gone back to the Crown Office’s note on it, to see whether he had missed anything, and when he looked up from the note at the Act on the table in front of him, there was a moth on it.

It was a small one. Brown. It was lying on its back in the middle of the last page, just above the space for his name, with its legs folded up, quite still.

He looked at the screen door. The screen door was shut. He did not know how it had got in. He thought that perhaps it had come in when he went out to the porch at half past ten to get his breath, and held the door, and let it bang; or perhaps it had come in through some gap in the mesh that he could not see; or perhaps it had been in the kitchen all along, all evening, hiding, waiting for the lamp, and its moment.

He picked it up. Carefully, by the wing, the way you pick up a moth.

It left a mark.

It was very small. A faint brown smudge, the shape of a moth, the dust of its wings, on the heavy cream paper of an Act of the Landtag of the Kingdom of Hanover on the navigation of the Weser, just above the space where the King was to sign; and he looked at it, and rubbed it, very gently, with the side of his thumb, and it did not come off. It got bigger.

He stopped rubbing it.

---

“Mr Lowther,” he said, at the screen door.

Mr Lowther had come across the yard from the trailer as soon as the door opened, because he had been watching it, from the trailer’s window, all evening, with the blind up an inch. He stood on the porch on the other side of the mesh in his shirtsleeves, which was the first time he had taken his jacket off since Tulsa, and looked through it at the King, and then at the kitchen table beyond him, under the lamp, and at the document on it.

“Sir?”

“There’s been an incident.”

Mr Lowther opened the screen door and came in, with great care, sideways, shutting it behind him so quickly that it did not have time to bang. He came to the table. He looked at the Act. He looked at the moth-shaped smudge above the space for the King’s name. He looked at the moth, which Frederick had put on a saucer beside it, on its back, with its legs folded.

He did not say anything for a long time.

“Sir,” he said at last, “the instrument is to be returned to the Crown Office unblemished.”

“I know.”

“It’s in the Crown Office’s rules, sir. In German. Unbefleckt.”

“I know it is. I’m sorry.” Frederick looked at the smudge. “Is there a precedent?”

Mr Lowther looked at it too, for a long time, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and his face very close to the paper, the way Mr Vollmer had looked at the map.

“There is a precedent for wine, sir,” he said slowly. “Ernest the Second, who was Georg the Fifth in Hanover, sir, like you. 1871. An Act about the brewers. A glass of claret, at dinner. They sent it back to be engrossed again and it missed the session.” He thought. “There is a precedent for a dog. Ernest the Third. Somewhere in the twenties. The dog was on the table.” He thought harder. “And there’s one for a child, sir. Ernest the Fourth, as a boy, with a crayon, on a commission, in the King’s study. The commission was cancelled and reissued. The crayon is in the archive.” He straightened up and put his spectacles back down onto his nose. “There is no precedent for a moth.”

“Then there is now,” said Frederick.

He said it without thinking, the way he would have said it to Theo; and then he heard himself, and was going to say sorry, again, and stopped, because Mr Lowther was looking at him with an expression he had not seen on Mr Lowther’s face before, or on any Messenger’s. It was very nearly a smile.

“If it goes back to be engrossed,” said Frederick, “it misses the Landtag.”

“Yes, sir. The Landtag rises on Friday.”

“And the money for the locks isn’t spent this year.”

“No, sir.”

“Is a moth a blemish?”

Mr Lowther thought about this very seriously.

“It’s not a stain, sir,” he said at last. “A stain is a substance. Wine is a substance. A crayon is a substance. A moth,” he looked at it on its saucer, “is an accident of nature. It would be for the Crown Office to say. But I don’t think, sir, that the Crown Office would wish to be the first Crown Office in its history to delay an Act of the Kingdom of Hanover on account of a moth from Oklahoma.” He paused. “They’d never hear the end of it, sir. Not in Hanover.”

Frederick looked at the smudge, and then at the space below it.

Then he uncapped the pen, and signed. Just below the moth. George R.

“There,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Mr Lowther.

“Will you tell the Crown Office?”

“I’ll write a note, sir.” Mr Lowther took a notebook out of his shirt pocket, and a pencil, and wrote in it, standing at the kitchen table, under the lamp. Frederick could read it upside down. Weser Act. Mark above signature: moth. Mayes Co., O-S. 25.vii.29, about 11 p.m. Not a substance. Mr Lowther underlined not a substance, and put the notebook away.

“The moth, sir,” he said. “Shall I take it?”

“Why?”

“For the archive, sir.” Mr Lowther looked at the saucer. “They’ll want it. With the note. They kept the crayon.”

Frederick looked at the moth on the saucer, small and brown and dead, on its back, with its legs folded, and thought about the basement under the west wing, and the boxes in it, and his first shoes, and the crayon of Ernest the Fourth; and about C. W. Mayfield of Bluejacket, and his whole house in a cattle trailer, at three pounds a box.

“No,” he said. “Leave it. It’s Mrs Sixkiller’s moth.”

He picked up the saucer and took it to the screen door, and opened it, and put the moth outside on the porch boards, in the dark, where the others were.

---

Theo came down at a quarter to one.

Frederick heard him on the stairs, which creaked on the fourth and the seventh and the ninth, and did not look up, because he was in the middle of the letters; and the creaking stopped, halfway down, and there was a silence, and then Theo’s voice, from the stairs, with his back to the kitchen.

“I’m not looking.”

“I know you’re not.”

“I’m sitting on the stairs with my back to you. I’m looking at the wall. There’s a picture of a horse.” A pause. “It’s not a very good horse.”

“It’s Mrs Sixkiller’s horse.”

“I’m not saying anything against it.” A pause. “I couldn’t sleep. It’s a hundred degrees up there. Felix kicks. I can hear him through the wall.” Another pause. “How many have you got left?”

“Forty-one.”

“Of what?”

Frederick did not answer. Theo did not ask again. That was the rule, and had always been the rule, from the beginning, at the kitchen table at the Hartigans’, on Tuesdays, when the boxes came: that Theo did not look, and did not ask, and that it was not a secret between them but simply a thing that was not Theo’s, the way Theo’s mother’s nursing was not Frederick’s, and the way Theo’s father’s bus was not; and that Theo would sit on the stairs, or on the sofa, or at the other end of the table with his homework, and talk about something else, or about nothing, and keep him company while he did it, which was what Theo was for, Theo said, when Frederick had asked him once, at fourteen, why he stayed.

Somebody’s got to, Theo had said. Otherwise you’re just a boy in a kitchen on his own with a lot of paper.

He did the letters. A hundred and twelve of them. Replies to children who had written to him for his sixteenth birthday, from every State in the Realm, each one typed by the Household on a single sheet with the cipher at the top, two short paragraphs, the same two, thanking them; and clipped to each one, behind it, the letter it was answering, in crayon and felt-tip and pencil, on lined paper and drawing paper and once on the back of a menu, with pictures. He read the letters. All of them. He always read the letters. HERNANDEZ, aged seven. O’BRIEN, aged ten. NAKAMURA, aged six, a picture of a dog in a crown. WHITEHORSE, aged nine. LEBLANC, aged eleven, in French. OKONKWO, aged eight. MAYFIELD, aged five, a picture of a house. He stopped at that one, for a moment. Then he went on. He signed them Frederick, because it was Frederick they had written to. A hundred and twelve times, at the kitchen table in Ketchum, with the box fan roaring and the moths on the mesh and Theo on the stairs telling him about a horse in a picture that had legs like a table and a face like Mr Vollmer’s.

At a quarter past two he signed the last one.

“Done?” said Theo, from the stairs.

“Nearly. There’s a letter.”

---

The letter was from the Prime Minister.

It was in the second box, under the letters, in a long white envelope with Charter House on the flap and The King on the front, in a big, loose, sloping hand that went uphill; and it was two pages, handwritten, because Lord Whitlock always wrote by hand to the King when there was no audience, which in the summer there was not, and the Private Secretary said that this was the first Prime Minister in sixty years who had, and that the Private Secretary did not know whether to approve of it.

Sir,

The House rises on Friday, thank God, and I shall need nothing from you before September, I promise, unless there is a war, and I don’t intend there to be a war. I enclose a copy of the Highways (Rural Bridges) Act, which the Governor-General assented to on Tuesday. You don’t need to do anything with it. I wanted you to see it. The bridges are mine. I don’t mind telling you that. I have wanted the bridges since I first sat on the cross benches and shouted at the Treasury about them, and the other four parties wanted other things, and I gave them their other things, and in return I got my bridges. There is a schedule at the back. I hope you think it was a good bargain. I’m never sure.

I am told the Programme was not a success.

Ms Fenner is distraught. She spent six weeks on it. She has asked me to say that the heartland tour remains available, in a shorter form, and that the junior swimming certificates at a resort on the lake are, she understands, still to be presented on Friday. I have said that I will pass this on, and I have now passed it on, and I would ask you, sir, as a personal favour to me, to ignore it completely.

I hope it is very hot, and very dull, and that nothing happens to you at all.

I have the honour to be, Sir, Your Majesty’s humble and obedient servant,

Whitlock.

And under the signature, smaller, squeezed in at the bottom of the second page, uphill:

P.S. I have ticked the bridge. In pencil, on page thirty-four. I am told by my private office that one does not mark a copy of an Act that is going to the King, and I am sorry, and I did it anyway, because I have wanted to tick that bridge for six years.

Frederick took out the copy of the Act. Highways (Rural Bridges) Act 2029. Forty-one pages. A fund, voted by Parliament, administered by the States, for the repair and replacement of bridges on rural roads that had been built before 1960 and had been inspected and found to be beyond economic repair; and at the back, the schedule, of the bridges. By State, and by county. Thousands of them. He turned the pages under the lamp, slowly, the box fan roaring, through Alabama and Arkansas and Kansas, to Oklahoma-Sequoyah, and ran his finger down the counties, and found Craig, and ran his finger down Craig.

Big Cabin Creek, county road 4510, built 1931. Closed.

Earl, he thought. Earl said. The bridge that’s out on the way to Big Cabin. And Earl had said it the way he said everything about the roads, as though it were the weather, a thing that happened and that you could not do anything about. And here it was, on page thirty-four of a schedule to an Act of Parliament, on a kitchen table in Ketchum. He did not know whether it would be mended. He knew that it was in the schedule. That was all an Act could do: put a bridge in a schedule. The rest was the State, and the county, and the commissioner, and whether he graded the right roads.

In the margin of page thirty-four, beside Big Cabin Creek, there was a tick. In pencil. Small, and neat, and pressed rather hard into the paper, the way you press when you have been waiting a long time to make a mark; exactly like the ticks Theo made on the back of page fourteen on the refrigerator door, with the short pencil, when a thing was done.

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America had a list.

He sat at the kitchen table at half past two in the morning and laughed until Theo, on the stairs, with his back turned, said what? and he could not tell him, and laughed more, and Theo started laughing too, on the stairs, without knowing what at, at the horse, with his back to the kitchen, until the light came on in the trailer across the yard.

---

Theo made him an egg at three.

He did it without asking, and without turning round any more than he had to: he came down the rest of the stairs with his eyes shut, and felt his way along the wall to the stove, and opened his eyes only when he was facing it, with his back to the table; and Frederick closed the boxes, both of them, and locked them, with the two small keys on the ring that went everywhere he went, and said it’s all right, they’re shut, and Theo turned round.

He made one egg, in the black iron pan, with too much butter, the way his mother did. He put it on a plate and put the plate on the table, on the oilcloth, between the two red boxes, and sat down on the other side of the table with his chin on his fists, and watched Frederick eat it.

“Good?”

“Very good.”

“It’s the only thing I can do.”

“It’s enough,” said Frederick.

On the screen door, the great pale green moth with the long tails on its wings was still there, at the height of his face, where it had been since nine minutes to ten, opening and closing its wings very slowly in the lamplight.

“Luna moth,” said Theo, looking at it. “Mrs Sixkiller’s got a book. They only live a week. They haven’t got mouths.” He thought about it. “They don’t eat anything, the whole time. They just fly about at night for a week looking for each other, and then they die.”

They looked at it.

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Frederick.

“I know,” said Theo. “I read it on Sunday. I’ve been waiting to tell somebody.”

---

At a quarter past five, in the grey before the dawn, he carried the boxes out to the car himself.

Mr Lowther was waiting by it, in his jacket again, and his tie, washed and shaved, in the trailer’s air conditioning, with his face composed; and Castellanos was at the wheel, with the engine running; and the yard was grey, and the oak was grey, and the barn, and the windmill, and the lake beyond the trees was a sheet of pale pewter with a mist on it, lying flat, and the insects had stopped, and the frogs, and for the first time since Saturday there was no sound at all.

He gave Mr Lowther the boxes. One in each hand.

“Thank you,” he said. “For waiting.”

“Sir.” Mr Lowther looked at him. “May I say something, sir?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve carried the boxes for six years, sir. To your father, and then to the Regent, and now to you.” Mr Lowther looked at the boxes in his hands. “I’ve never had them done at a kitchen table before.”

“Is that wrong?”

“No, sir,” said Mr Lowther. “No, sir. I don’t think it is.” He thought about it. “I think it’s probably the most correct thing I’ve ever seen.”

He got into the car. Castellanos took him away down the gravel road towards the highway and the airstrip and the six o’clock to Tulsa, and the car’s lights went away into the grey, and the dust hung behind it, and settled.

Frederick stood in the yard in the grey light.

On the porch, on the boards by the screen door, in a little heap where he had put it, there was the small brown moth from the Weser, still on its back, with its legs folded. And above it, on the mesh, the luna moth, pale green, enormous, with its tails, which did not have a mouth, and had six days left, or five, or fewer, opening and closing its wings in the first of the light.

He went in, and shut the screen door very gently, so that it did not bang, and so that the luna moth did not have to move; and went up the stairs, the fourth and the seventh and the ninth creaking; and lay down on top of the sheet in the hot room beside Theo’s bed, with Theo already asleep in it, all of him at once; and looked at the ceiling.

Interview at ten, he thought. Bring a pen.

He had signed a hundred and fifteen things tonight with a pen, and the pen was in the first box, and the first box was on its way to Tulsa.

He would have to find another one.

He slept.