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LAGADEME III

A basket-work arch proclaimed the place in big wicker letters:

BOZZM OF BUTTERCROCK BYRE
CHEESERY & CHURNERY OF RENOWN

The farmstead thus announced, by its appearance, only half remembered the sign's prosperous optimism. The house and barn were of ample scale and proudly gabled; the milking and shearing pens' posts and railings were all marblewood notched and mitered. But all this was now badly weathered, the flowerplots were weedy, and the barn's sheddings of shingles added to the barnyard's litter of bent pails and broke carding paddles.

The widow Bozzm was milking a momile in that yard, absorbed in the work and oblivious of us. She was an opulent woman, hugely breasted and haunched, and the poise of her bigness on the tiny milking stool seemed a minor miracle. She was not grotesque. A charm auraed her lavishness, and she was as innocently, wholly female as the beast whose udder she eased. Indeed, the pair of them in their tranquil absorption, sitting long-shadowed in the dying day, made a charming tableau of feminine harmony and peaceful mutuality.

Then she saw us, and surged up, crying, "Dulcetty! Sleekey! She's here! Cousin Pompidor!"

From a low dome of timbers between house and barn—one of those thick-roofed, half-sunk structures in which the Hagish cellar their dairy and fruit for the coolth—a slant-laid door banged open and two red-cheeked young women as lavish as their mother burst out and charged towards us, arms flung wide, pouring out questions and greetings and laughter, seizing our hands, petting our shoulders, begging the tale of our journey and swearing we were all welcomer than fly swatters at a honey-pie bake-off.

They seemed more easy hugging us than embracing Pompilla, with whom they seemed awkward, exclaiming simultaneously, "Sweet Auntie!" "Dear Granny!"—the titles mere affectionate honorifics, apparently. What we already knew of Dame Pompilla's volatility made their hesitance towards her easy to understand.

Widow Bozzm smilingly scolded them, "Girls! Leave dear Cousin Plumpbelow be to talk business with me, and take our dear Nuncio and her friends to the buttery for some refreshment!"

The two widows walked barn-ward in close conversation, and we were led down into the coolth of the cellar, a bath of appetizing aromas. Plainly they passed much time here. Central in the circular chamber were couches and settles and big lounging cushions, though the perimeter of the room was all business: larders, storage crocks, the churns and cheesing tables, racked cutlery, wash basins, egg-shelves and flour-sacks, even a pastry oven. The amiamble girls insisted we sit—nay, sprawl with feet indolently propped.

Once we were settled, the sisters set up a great buxom bustle, their breasts jostling like pink shoats in their burdened bodices as they ground ginger for tea, ladeled jam on current crumbkins, decanted bumpers of buttermilk—and, through it all, poured forth conversation as abundant as their provender.

Dulcetty: "Such a slyboots is Auntie in leeching that she'll soon set our poor little fleecies aright! How she can physic 'em, costive and purge, they've got teat-rash you know, our precious wee woolies, and trotter-gall grieves 'em sorely!"

Sleeky: "No Dulcy! Kooters! It's kooters they have, and Granny's a prime leech for Kooters—and the grunties too, which tortures the dear little bleaters as well!"

Dulcetty: "Kooters, yes, kooters too, a whole muck of ills they have but we don't want to weary you with 'em, dear noncials."

"Not at all," I said. "Our client, Dame Pompilla, mentioned shank-rot as well. What makes your gleets so sick-prone do you think, my dears?"

"'Twas Daddum did all the pasturing," Sleeky mourned. "All the up-pasture down-pasture, the dipping and shearing . . ."

"Dadum," smiled Dulcetty sadly, "was right lean and tight o' shape like yourself, Dame Nuncio."

"Yes, `You female folk for the milking,' he'd say," (Sleeky too was tenderly sad here) " `and me for the stumping and shepherding up-dale and down!' That was our dear Dadum's saying."

Now we had done some up-hill-and-down-dale-ing, it occured to them. We'd done some stepping about, they squealed, brightening. Had we been to Kolodria? Lulume? The Great Shallows? What did the Sea of Agon look like in those tempest one heard of? Had we ever viewed the Glacial Maelstroms?

We were fed and rapturously inquisitioned. Their sheer sociability was irresistable. Even laconic Shinn and Bantril, men as a rule only slightly more communicative than cobblestones, uttered entire half-sentences. But then the door thrust wide, and in burst our truncated, intrepid apparition of animated black gauze. "To work! Night draws near!" our Dame trumpeted.

The sun was now two spans from its setting, and the smallest barnyard debris cast long bands of shadow. Whatever the two widows had been about—I only noted a vague heap of small implements just inside the barn door—all was haste and clamor now to beat the dark. The sisters, with Shinn and Bantril loping by them like hounds—toiled upslope where the gleets were scattered (and a hungry, scruffy, skittish lot of gleets they looked). The four of them began herding and driving the beasts down towards the barn, though it was really my pullers doing the actual running and rounding up, while the sisters provided helpful shouts of encouragement and the Widow Bozzm, too stout to attempt the climb, helped from down in the barnyard with even more vigorous arm signals, and encouragements and counsel bellowed at earsplitting volume.

Meanwhile our own widow—looking in her billowing flurry of veils like a small boil of smoke—thrust at Olombo and me mallets and spikes, and set us to work in the barn: "Board the windows and gaps in the barn wall, and the hayloft bays, and find wood to dog the main doors shut on me as you leave!" She was tacking up potshards and trashed scraps of pails and pans in nooks all over the barn's interior, and sprinkling in them a crumbly stuff which she lighted from a taper. Olombo and I planked and hammered in a fever we must have caught from hers, while vile, sweetish, slightly dizzying fumes coiled everywhere off the punk she'd lit.

We finished just after the sun set. The barn, once the main doors were shut, was tightly sealed. And here came the driven gleets, clattering and bleating into the barn. They looked even more hungry and draggle-fleeced near at hand than they had from afar.

Dame Pompilla came out with us, and with her back held shut the barn doors, behind which the stampede gradually quieted. "I will thank you, my friends, to observe my directives most precisely tonight. When I'm back inside, spike shut these doors securely. My unique blend of leeching employs odorific fumes, vigorous intonations, and other somewhat clamorous procedures. Disattend utterly! Whatever the uproar, I and my little charges are secure. Dine! Repose! Leave me quite undisturbed until sunrise, I beg you. And so, good night!"

As our hostesses led us back to their opulent cellar, Olombo and I merely agreed in undertones that amateur "barnyard leeches and rural physickers" were common enough since Squanderdabble's Agriculturalist's Index of Salubrious Fumes and Tinctures came into wide circulation, and that our widow's arrogant air of authority was typical of such dilettantes. Olombo confirmed my own odd impression: the widow's little heap of implements had included a number of quirts, riding crops, carriage whips and suchlike goads and stimuli, as well as my impression that there were scarce half a dozen gravid ewes in the whole flock. It seemed improbable that six ewes with kid could raise the sum our employer sought for the raft, but she had seemed unconcerned, and we found it easy to feel likewise.

That this was the extent of our observations and reflections, we were soon to recall with vivid shame. Privately I concluded—with no greater perspicacity—that if our employer's present scheme, now too plainly that of an addled enthusiast, failed to yield Clummock's rent for a stern-paddle raft, I would make up the deficit from my own pocket so that we could be off on our commission, and have done with this odd, abrasive woman.

It did not escape me that if she was seriously addled, our mission itself might be a fool's errand, concocted of bereavement and mental imbalance, and one that could well be perceived by the spidergods as impertinence, if not outright blasphemy. But as I could never consider withdrawing from a sealed contract, what was the point of brooding on what could not be helped? So I banished further thought of it.

Had I not, the Bozzm women would quickly have done so—would have driven off any dark notion, such a sweet, savory commotion of hospitality they set going! Such a flutter of table linen, such a clatter of honeypots, bread trenchers, and cheeseknives, such a warble of chatter and laughter. So recently fed, we were soon sated with supper, and forced to decline further offerings.

Well, they countered, in that case, then, it was time for the sweet! For the pasty, the pudding, the pie!

It grew to a game, the rosy Bozzms, mother and daughters, vying to top one another's suggested delights, some of whose mere names watered one's mouth. Then Widow Bozzm gaped as if thunderstruck, the image of inspiration. She breathed her thought, hushed by reverence: "A Lathernog Silk Pie!"

The way this struck her daughters speechless deeply impressed us. The silk pie was forthwith decided on, and we vowed our help in a culinary accomplishment that proved to be of no small complexity.

Many elements exquisite in themselves flowed together in the confection of this Lathernog Silk Pie: egg-whirl marbled with momile butter, sugar-shells farced with nut-mince, momile cream and gleets cream lathered separately and then lathered together. "Help us with the churns!" cried the girls. Churns and mixers of several gauges were needed for the varying butters and lathers and froths. "Buntail! Shank! Help me churn gleets lather!" Sleeky sang.

"Plumbone, the butterchurn's heavy, come help!" trilled Dulcetty.

"Lackadome!" warbled the widow to me, "come help crank the whisker!"

Merry multiple dance-tempos—jigs, frisketts and jump-ups—emerged from the chugging and sloshing of churns and beaters, the partners gripping the staffs with alternating hands. "So much more thrust with you men a-plunging it," cooed Sleeky.

"How silky it gets with you helping slosh it!" Dulcetty tremoloed.

"What lovely lean thews you've got in your wrists and your forearms, dear Lady Lickadame!" Widow Bozzm vibratoed.

Through this lush, liquid commotion, I heard outside a far, muted clatter of hooves on old flooring, with a crisp punctuation of whip-cracks . . . and a strange, faint, fierce hilarity as well? Pompilla at work, of course, though I felt an odd shiver, as if that clamor in the barn were touching me in some subtle way. But I shook off the fancy at once. Pompilla's vigorous nonsense was a waste of my attention, far better directed at the luscious sight of the three fair Bozzms' bodices swelling and straining with the tidal heaves and surges of their breasts in counter-tempo to their churning.

The nog was complete, and crocked to cool and set. "The Costards next!" was then the cry, said costards constituting the pie's silken foundation. Shortly the cellar seethed with new doings. In a great ceramic bowl on the charcol warmer, honey and cream must be scantled, while prooms were simmered and sweeted with the lavender squeezings of the giant sugar-sloth beetle, dozens of whose deflated husks soon littered the floor. The sisters, sharing their grips on their implements with my crew, sang jolly pastie-chanties:

This dainty sweet in mouth once put
Shall make thy tongue as stiffly jut
As spunk-bone doth on ram in rut!

—and other droll indecencies. How warm and flushed and rollicking we had all become!

Once more a faint burst of hooves and whips somehow reached me amid our jollity, and, along with that muffled noise of stampede, a sound of wild cachinnation. And that strange sense of being touched by the doings in the barn returned—touched in the nostrils, it seemed, with a scent of ancient straw, and humid gleets in estrus. Irritated at the interruption, I resumed our delights more ardently, shucking off my tunic, retaining only my light linen shift. The sisters squealed delight and shucked off their own billowy dresses and shirtwaists, so their thin shifts manifested the splendor of globed haunch and bosom.

Were we still confecting? I have a fragment of memory of costard being poured . . . to cool? To cook? But all thereafter was amorous embracing. Shinn and Bantril, bare as weasels, feasted on Dulcetty, each claiming his own hemisphere, while Dulcetty sang:

Oh Dear! Oh me!
Oh Shanky! Oh Banty!

Sleeky sat astraddle of Olombo, who lowed like a contented momile while Sleeky sang:

Upsy-wupsy, Oooohsie-eeasie!
Downsy-wownsy, Slowwww-sie-whoaaaa-sie!

Whilst above me hung doting dame Bozzm, luminously nude and lovely as the full moon, and we set to feasting on each other with such gusto as annihilated us utterly more than once, yet left us miraculously reconstituted each time after. . . .

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Framed