A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories

by Robin McKinley

  Her mother was already cleaning cupboards, the air harsh with the smell of Pine Sol and Comet. Annabelle picked up two Dunkin’ Donuts from the box on the kitchen table (her father would have made a point of finding the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts before he signed the papers on the house) and went out through the back door onto the porch. Across one end there was a dusty old canvas hammock with a fringe. She sat on it gingerly, listening to the old ropes creak, and ate a doughnut which tasted slightly of canvas dust. “What are you doing?” said her mother, her head suddenly emerging from a window.

  “Going down to the river,” Annabelle said, instantly jumping to her feet and starting down the porch steps.

  “Don’t get lost,” said her mother in a milder tone, and Annabelle waved a sugary hand.

  She ate the other doughnut on the way and then washed her hands in the quick cold water. The river—more of a wide brook—was shallow here, with green weed streaming along its bottom: trout, she thought. She’d find someone to ask if there were fish in the river, and if so, if you could eat them.

  Now that she was out of easy recall distance of the house she no longer had to walk purposefully, and she ambled, looking at the reeds on the riverbank, and watching small brown birds she couldn’t name hustle through the undergrowth, and others dart through the trees farther up the bank. There was a sort-of path which she followed, going uphill till it became quite steep; and then there began to be the backs of people’s lawns, mown down to the river, and the sort-of path became gravel and then tar, and ended at a low brick wall. On the other side were a road, and the kind of little shops that a year-round village with heavy summer tourist trade had on its main street.

  She turned left at random, toward what looked like the center of town: an unsquare square with grass and small, relentlessly tidy beds of pansies and petunias around a statue of some local worthy on a horse. The town hall was on the far side, and the town library was beyond it. Annabelle could always recognize a library.

  She wouldn’t be able to get a library card yet; she’d need her parents, or an envelope that had obviously been through the post office that had her name and new address on it, or both, or something else. But she could ask. Maybe they’d give her an application to take home. And it would give her the excuse to look the library over. If it was a good library, that would be two and a half things about the move that were okay. (Was it Bill or the view from the attic that was the half? Bill, she decided, after a moment’s thought, but it might have been guilt that made the decision.)

  They gave her the application and pointed, with some pride, toward the new wing, and did not merely offer but encouraged her to go look. “The children’s and young adults’ room was just finished this spring,” the lady who’d handed her the application said.

  It was too big and too glossy; the doorway was huge, and she felt, walking through it, that a laser beam would skewer her and a voice out of “Star Trek” would ask her what she was doing there and that her answer wouldn’t be good enough. But there were reassuringly full shelves once she got through. The picture books were segregated, grouped to make a little room within a room around tiny plastic chairs and tables in bright primary colors; the rest of the books were in a delicious muddle, from The Reluctant Dragon, which Mom had first read her when she was not quite four, to The Last Unicorn, which she’d read herself out of the adult science fiction a couple of years ago in her old library. She browsed along, backing up and jumping forward through the alphabet, as she thought of authors she wanted to look for. She was following the D’s around a corner when she came abruptly to the end of the bunched shelving, and found herself walking into a big empty space, sunlit both from the sides and overhead, and with big low ugly chairs of the well-meaning public rec room variety sold to town councils with more spirit than money. There were half a dozen kids of about her age sitting there: four girls and two boys. She stopped as if she’d walked into a wall.

  They stared at one another for a moment; or they stared at her, and she stared at the fact of them without being able to take in much about any of them. After a few long seconds one of the girls smiled slightly; Annabelle saw the smile but couldn’t tell if it was friendly or scornful. “Hi,” she made herself say. “Hi,” said the girl who’d smiled, but she didn’t say anything else, and the others said nothing at all. Annabelle realized she was clutching the application form painfully against her stomach. She turned away and, trying not to look as if she were fleeing, left the library.

  The movers arrived earlier the next day than anticipated, and then serious chaos began. Annabelle helped sweep and scrub and restack boxes and unpack and put away—and then put away somewhere else—without too much grumbling. She didn’t have anything better to do, and she didn’t mind physical labor. The third okay thing about the move was that they were going to have a proper garden here, room for vegetables and flowers, and she could do some of the digging and weeding.

  She took the library application back and got her library card, and the library really was okay, she just stayed away from the rec room chairs at the end of the young adults’ room and went around the shelves at the other end. She explored the adult section too, which was older and grimier and not as well lit, and didn’t have any chairs at all, so if you wanted to try a paragraph or a page of something, you had to sit on a step-stool or the floor.

  About a week after the movers had come, she let herself notice that she was still sleeping in the attic. Or rather her mother noticed for her. “I like it up there,” she said. “I like the view.”

  “You said that before,” said her mother. “It’s still low and dark and far away from the rest of the house—I mean the part we’re living in; it’ll take a while to reclaim all of it.”

  “And then we’ll open a bed and breakfast,” said Dad from behind his book.

  “Um,” said Mom, who preferred to tackle her challenges one at a time. “I’m not sure I like you that far away. The view’s the same one you have from downstairs.”

  “Not really,” said Annabelle. “Come up and see.”

  So her mother did, and saw what Annabelle meant, but wasn’t going to give in yet. “Maybe when we’re a little more unpacked and moved in,” said Mom. “Maybe when it’s not such a disaster area downstairs.”

  Annabelle knew she was feeling guilty. The room she was going to use for her office and workroom had turned out to be infested with something or other, and the smell of the stuff the exterminator had used really hung around, so its door was closed and its windows were open, and meanwhile Mom was using all of the dining room, not just the end of the table, and it really was a disaster area. Not to mention that the stinky room was next to what was supposed to be Annabelle’s bedroom. Although it really didn’t smell in Annabelle’s bedroom, or even the hall outside.

  “Maybe,” said Annabelle. And they left it at that.

  Annabelle spent a lot of her time reading, upstairs in her attic. She reread all of E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, L. Frank Baum, Eleanor Farjeon, from the library, feeling a little bemused by the strange copies of her old friends, in their plastic protectors, someone else’s fingerprints on the pages. Hers were still lying in a box downstairs somewhere, and dusty with several years’ neglect. She’d gotten on the junior high yearbook staff in seventh grade—rather a feather in her cap, you didn’t usually get picked till eighth—and from then on she’d had less time for reading, and told herself she was outgrowing the fantasy and fairy tales that had been her favorite escape through childhood. When she got into high school and started taking advanced English courses, she kept herself busy with stuff on reading lists; she’d read War and Peace for extra credit over the summer last year, and the rest of the time had been taken up with Bridget and Poll and Bill and the rest of them. She told herself she didn’t need books about imaginary places and things that weren’t real. But she knew she wouldn’t have had to go on telling herself this if it were really true. So another sort of okay thing about the move became that she let her
self read anything she wanted, and didn’t even look at the “classics for young adults” reading list hanging on a chain by the librarians’ desk. But it was a little scary, too, because she knew she was older, and wondered if she was going backward somehow, and the stories sometimes looked different from what she remembered, and some she liked better than she had and some worse.

  Bill wrote her every five days or so, just as she’d expected, bland good-guy letters studded with unconscious arrogance, just like Bill in person. She answered faithfully, talking about the house and the river and the town; she didn’t mention that she was reading fairy tales, and she didn’t mention that she didn’t have anyone to talk to except Mom and Dad, although she closed each letter by saying that she missed him. It was true, in a way. She missed having friends.

  When Bridget’s first letter came and she saw her old friend’s big sprawly handwriting across the envelope—handwriting that looked almost the same as it had in third grade, when they first learned cursive—she’d burst into tears, amazing herself and distressing her parents. “Oh, honey—” said her mother, putting her arm around Annabelle’s shoulders.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” sobbed Annabelle, and went upstairs to her attic again.

  She didn’t read the letter till the next day. Bridget sounded just like Bridget, too, even more than Bill sounded like Bill, although that might just be because she found Bridget more interesting. It took her a long time, because her eyes kept filling up, reading the ten pages of Bridget’s letter: what would be three or four in anyone else’s writing, and with fewer exclamation points and dashes. Between paragraphs Annabelle looked up and sniffed, staring mostly out across what she now thought of as her view down to the river; but occasionally she looked down the length of the attic, admiring the way the heavy beams met in the center, the smoothness of the laid boards; there was something about the organization of it (perhaps she was her mother’s daughter after all), about the deliberate purposefulness of the roof of a house, this house, now her house. This purposefulness was comforting in a way that the river view wasn’t; the charm of the long grass and the water was the motion of it; the comfort of the shape of the roof, the straight lines and angles of it, was that it was motionless.

  The new people had moved into their old house, Bridget wrote, and they had three little kids; the bunk beds in the attic that Annabelle’s dad had put in for the teenage Averil and Ted must be in use again. And they’d put up a new swing from the same branch of the oak tree that Annabelle’s old swing had hung from; and they’d asked Bridget to babysit, but she couldn’t bear to, she thought, though she was curious to know what the inside of the house looked like now.…

  Annabelle got up from the pile of mismatched pillows that made her two-dollar armchair comfortable (the same flea market where they’d bought the white-painted iron bedstead for fifteen dollars, last summer), and went to rub her hand down the beam nearest her. It was a little darker than the one matching it on the other side of the peak, and there was a big knot in it, and knots were often particularly lovely under the fingertips.

  She was concentrating on the feel of the knot, her eyes half closed and not attending; but it’s when you’re not thinking about noticing, and therefore don’t have it in your mind what you expect to see, that you’re likeliest to see something unexpected. And Annabelle saw a long thin straight crack in the beam, meeting another long thin straight crack in the beam at a right angle.… She dropped her hand, widened her eyes.… Hinges, looking like thin blackened splinters of wood. Now she raised both hands and began to feel along the cracks.… Hook. Just a simple flat black iron hook in a tiny bulge of eye. No, two of them. She might have slept and read and worked and mooned around in this attic for years without noticing if it hadn’t been for the misery-inspired desire to rub her fingers across that knot.

  She pulled the hooks free. Nothing happened. Her fingers investigated again, looking for something to pull on. Still nothing. She could get no purchase on the hooks themselves. Letter opener on her bureau. She slid it into the crack and jiggled, ran it the length of the crack, down its two sides, and then back to the should-be-freed crack opposite the hinges. Wiggle. Wiggle. Wiggle.

  A faint creak, like the sorts of ghostly noises old houses are supposed to make; but it was bright sunshine, and for the first time in weeks Annabelle was too occupied to be lonely. And with the creak, the two edges slipped apart, just a little—but enough for Annabelle to get her fingers against the freshly revealed margin and pull till her joints hurt. It gave a little more; her fingers crept up the edge again, and this time the width of the door or wall or whatever it was came free, and she could hook her fingers over it (into the blackness on the other side—she wouldn’t think about that) and pull properly. More creaking noises, rather louder now. Annabelle tugged and tugged, in little jerks, then more positive ones, trying to use the full weight of her body against the stubbornness of an ancient, stuck-shut hidey-hole; then in little jerks again as she tired. Leverage, she thought, and went out to the landing halfway down the attic stairs, where she had left a broom and a dustpan, and brought the broom back. Stuffed the broom handle in the opening, leaned on it—and the broom handle broke.

  “Hell,” said Annabelle, and stopped, letting her excitement cool enough for her to think about the situation. Crowbar, she thought. There was a crowbar at home—she still thought of the old house in her old town that way when she was talking only to herself, but she was careful not to say it aloud in her parents’ hearing—in the garage; would it have been unpacked yet? Only one way to find out.

  She didn’t see it, but she got the tire iron out of the back of the car instead, hoping her parents wouldn’t see her and ask what she was doing; it was mysteriously desirable for her to solve this puzzle, make this discovery by herself. No one saw her. The tire iron wasn’t ideally shaped, but at least she couldn’t break it, and the old wood of the house was granite-hard, and the iron’s pressure left no mark.

  She got it open about a hand’s breadth by lunchtime. She’d lost track of time, and her mother had come halfway up the stairs to call her. Annabelle rushed out to stop her coming the rest of the way, and then stopped herself just out of sight, for she was too dusty and dishevelled (and a bit greasy from the things the tire iron picked up at the bottom of the trunk of the car) not to arouse comment. “I’m sorry. I’m just coming. Go ahead without me.”

  Her mother’s steps retreated, and Annabelle flew down to the bathroom to scrub off and comb her hair. “There’s another reason to get you out of that attic,” her mother said, half teasing and half glad of any other reason, however minor and domestic. “It’s too far to walk when you don’t hear me the first time.”

  “We can get an intercom,” said Annabelle. “I’m sorry. I do usually hear.”

  She went back upstairs immediately after lunch, despite her mother’s trying to persuade her to go outdoors: Mom always thought sunlight was good for you—working in sunlight, that is. Lying on a beach blanket was bad for you, nothing to do with holes in the ozone and skin cancer. But at the moment she had to go back to the attic and the wider—widening—black crack in the low-pitched roof. She quietly raided the pantry on her way, for a flashlight and candles, visible among half-unpacked boxes.

  It took her most of another hour to get it open—open enough. It was a set of stairs, very narrow but steep, built against the other side of the ceiling, and probably supposed to rest on the floor when fully open. She got them down to about six inches of the floor and gave up; the huge black space revealed was plenty big enough for her to walk up … a much less attractive prospect now than the first impulse to find out what the hinged crack was about had suggested. She’d supposed there would be a secret cupboard, something she could comfortably see into from the sunlit attic; or rather she hadn’t thought very clearly about it at all, just that this was an adventure, and an adventure might be fun. She looked back to Bridget’s letter, still lying where she’d left it on the floor next to
the armchair by the window. Flea market furniture had its virtues; you didn’t feel obliged to worry about the sun fading it. She looked out at the bright afternoon and thought about the sun on her back as she stooped in their garden-to-be. Then she picked up the flashlight and turned it on. She put candles and matches in her pockets, and started up the steps.

  The stairs made horrible noises, even more horrible than when she’d tried jumping on the bottom stair to try to open them fully, and she paused to hope that Mom had turned the radio back on after lunch. When she got high enough, there was the screeching sound of chafed wood that suggested that the stairs might touch the floor of the attic after all … in which case how was she ever going to get them closed again? A sudden crash of depression landed on her; she’d ruined her own room, the only room in the new house that she had begun to feel a little at home in; she couldn’t possibly sleep up here with this great gaping maw open virtually at the foot of her bed; and she still didn’t want to move downstairs. She went on up.

  There was a miniature version of the attic she’d just left at the head of the stairs, a long low narrow room. But there was no dormer window here, and the roof was so low she could not stand up straight, and the floor was only about two paces wide. But she forgot her depression, because she had found something worth finding: The tiny room was fitted out as a kind of study, with a table, or table surface, let down from one slanting wall on laths, one end nailed solidly to the beam that supported its farther end. There was a stool under it.

  Annabelle drew the stool out and sat slowly down on it, feeling a little guilty, as if she were doing something she knew was not allowed. It was very hot up here, but not unbearably so, and it crossed her mind that the air was surprisingly sweet and clear for an attic; but the thought did not linger because there was too much to distract her. There were shelves running along the walls on both long sides, with a break for the table, and the shelves were awkwardly deep because of the sharpness of the roof peak. They had to run out so far toward the center for there to be space on them for books that Annabelle would have to walk sideways between them—which, she thought, sitting on the stool, was going to be a good trick, since I already have to stoop because of the ceiling. But she would have to investigate, because there were books on the shelves—books and files and boxes—boxes like the one her foot struck as she stretched her legs out; her bent knees were nearly to her chin as she sat on the stool. She pulled the box toward her, and opened it.