The Wood Wife

by Terri Windling

  Crow grinned. He rattled the copper on his wrist. He said, “Which do you think?”

  Tomás was silent.

  Crow frowned at this. And then he smiled again. “Today I stew and then I’ll bake, Tomorrow I shall the Queen’s child take, Ah! how famous is the game; there’s nobody here who knows my name is Rumplestiltskin…”

  But Tomás didn’t know that story. He still sat silent, listening.

  Crow grew annoyed. “You must guess,” he growled. “It’s a riddle. You must guess my name.”

  Tomás stirred the embers of the fire with his usual careful, unhurried movements. “Brother,” he named the other at last.

  “Wrong.” Crow laughed. “I’m no relative of yours.”

  “The fire is my brother. And the stones below, and the trees and the cactus on this hill. You’ve entered the circle. You’ve smoked the tobacco. And I name you Brother,” Tomás said.

  Crow’s laughter stopped. His smile died. He looked at the other uneasily. He rose, took off a copper band, and flung it down before the other man. Then he disappeared, melting into the dark of the night and the mountainside.

  ❋ Davis Cooper ❋

  Redwater Road

  Tucson, Arizona

  M. Tippetts

  New York, New York

  May 9, 1949

  Dear Maisie,

  I no longer know what to do. Anna has gone away from me, into some private grief of her own. What has happened? Can you tell me this? Anna won’t tell me. The paintings won’t tell me. The stones are strangely silent now. All I know is this: There was a night when Anna did not come home at all. I roamed the hills, calling her name, knowing that on the vast mountainside I had no prayer of finding her. At dawn I stumbled home again. She was sitting there in the shadows of the porch, clothes torn to rags, breasts bared, spirals of blood and red oil paint on her skin. A man sat beside her—with long black hair, a womanly face, tattoos on his cheeks. He smiled, and his teeth were sharp—like a predatory animal.

  Anna looked at me sadly. She did not speak. She rose, she took my hands, and collapsed. I carried her into the house; when I looked back, the man, her creature, was gone. I bathed her, put her to bed … and in the morning she laughed the whole thing away. But something changed that night, I am certain. She does not leave the studio now; she no longer walks in her beloved hills. For the first time since we came to this dream-haunted place, I fear for her sanity. I am at my wit’s end. She won’t speak of this. She wants nothing now but to paint.

  Maisie, I know she has written to you. You must tell me, will Anna be all right?

  Cooper

  Chapter Seven ❋

  I do not fear the dark, or sleep, or death.

  The knife. The teeth of hounds.

  I only fear the fool in the wood,

  the water, the mirror glass…

  —The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

  Maggie stepped from the bathtub, dried herself off, and put on an old white shirt of Cooper’s, a big black sweater that used to be Nigel’s, a pair of tight black jeans. She’d slept late, after a night of heated dreams that she’d rather not think about now. The sun was already peeking over the distant purple hills. Soon heat would fill the canyon again, but now the house was cold and the bathwater steamed in the chilly morning air.

  She brushed wet hair back from her face, put on ivory earrings shaped like little dangling hands, and a silver ring with an amber stone. She’d had the ring since she was a child; the earrings had been a gift last year from the man she’d been seeing in Mendocino. A guilty look crossed over her face in the old-fashioned bathroom mirror. She hadn’t called Mendocino, or sent a card or even, she admitted, thought about him all that much since the day of her hasty retreat. Instead of heartache, all she felt about the end of that chapter of her life was guilty relief.

  It was possible he was feeling the same way, she reflected as she put on her socks and then her new black cowboy boots. It was hard to imagine he’d found her to be a satisfactory person to love. No one had claimed her heart since Nigel. She’d tried to be with men since then, but no one else quite touched the place that Nigel had reached so effortlessly. She tried, but sooner or later she always started feeling those “itchy feet” again.

  She sighed as she went into the kitchen. Romance was definitely not her forte. Last night, with Crow by Redwater Creek, was proof again of that—as if she needed more proof. She swung open the refrigerator and took out two of Tomás’s eggs, hot salsa, and flour tortillas. As she heated oil in a frying pan to make huevos rancheros, she made herself think about the meeting with Crow instead of flinching from it in her mind.

  She touched on those thoughts gingerly, like a sore tooth, waiting for the sting to come. And it came. She was angry with the man, yes, but just as angry with herself, for she’d been acting like some naive schoolgirl. All he’d been doing was amusing himself, and she’d gone right along with it, obsessed with a man she didn’t even know just because he was so lovely to look at. And because, she admitted to herself, it was romantic, and wild, like Cooper’s poems. She shuddered, remembering the dreams she’d had, so starkly erotic. Thank god things had never gotten that far in real life. If they had … She didn’t finish the thought.

  She broke the eggs into the pan and made herself think of less mortifying scenarios. All right, so she got a bit carried away, but she wasn’t a total fool. She thought instead about the queer vision she’d had of her own face staring back at her. And all the strange things that he’d said to her. And the oddest thing of all, which was the fact that Crow seemed to have stepped from one of Anna’s paintings.

  So many of the paintings had their counterparts in Cooper’s later poetry, but there was no man named Crow in the “Wood Wife” poems, or any of Cooper’s other work. And yet there were images that reminded her of him. The mythical Trickster, wild and unpredictable. Compelling in one breath, sinister the next—wise and foolish both at once. Puck was a Trickster in English folklore; Hermes or Loki in Europe. She recalled there were Tricksters in both Mexican and Native American legendry, and she resolved to look through Cooper’s library today to see what she could find…

  Maggie took her breakfast to the table, laughing at the route her thoughts had taken. She poured some coffee. Dora was right. The mountain was rubbing off on her. She was becoming as loco as the rest of them here. She had come to do biographical research, and now she was chasing down fairy tales, half-convinced that Cooper or Anna had conjured Crow from the desert air. “It’s just a metaphor,” she said out loud, but she didn’t really believe this.

  Then you’ve been seduced by a metaphor, said an ornery, contrary voice in Maggie’s head. She recognized that voice; it sounded like Cooper’s. It made her smile to herself.

  “That’s right,” Maggie said aloud to the empty room. “And it won’t be the first time either.”

  She finished her breakfast and went back to the study she’d made in Anna’s studio. She had all of Cooper’s collections in there, and what notes she could find toward the unpublished poems. She’d just found another of his notebooks wedged between two Victorian fairy-tale books: “The Moon Wife” and “The Moon Wife’s Daughter,” two volumes that Cooper had loved. She opened the notebook and began to read, skipping old memos and grocery lists. In between these things were notes for poems, phrases, lines, an occasional whole verse-nothing complete, just enough tantalizing information to let her know what she was missing. She read the calligraphic handwriting with pleasure, and a bit of envy for the old man’s imagination. Perhaps she could go over these notes with Dora; there might be something here that the other woman would recognize. Then she found something she recognized herself, and it jolted her to the bone:

  NOTE. Remember that A. handed him stone. Jade? Lapis? No, turquoise. “For protection,” she told him. Turns to powder in his hand.

  C: “I can’t be protected. It’s too late for that. But now I must give you a gift in return.”

  There is always a
return, a cycle, a gift exchange. The breath in, the breath out. This is what I’d forgotten. Did she? Would that have made a difference? This question seems important. This is the question the poem must answer.

  Maggie sat and stared at the words on the page. The notebook was dated 1958. How could Cooper have forseen her own experience in words written over thirty years before? But it was not Maggie he wrote about at all; it was “A.”—probably Anna, and “C.”—another C., or was it Crow?, saying the very same words to each other. Perhaps she had read these words before somewhere, and then unconsciously repeated them?

  She quickly flipped through the other pages. More lists. Phone numbers. Car parts information. More notes for poems, but none about C., or turquoise, or gifts again. One poem was about the mountain, simple and naturalistic. In the second, an old man thinks about death. The third was about birth. She read this note twice, and then she read it over once more, bent over the water-stained page, chewing the end of her pencil.

  NOTE. She would not leave the mountain, even now. It is the midnight hour. The air is cold but she is warm, even hot to the touch. The river, dry. Moon, full. Image: she lies in the sand of the wash, silver light, legs spread. There is no blood. This disturbs me. I am frightened. But the baby slips from her legs like a stone through water, and into my hands. Cold. Crying. Tiny, but alive. At last she is persuaded to go back into the house. She will not tell me the father’s Christian name. She will not name the baby. He is only The Baby for many months, but a child must have a name I tell her. She is surprised. I have begun calling the boy after Gutiérrez, and she accepts this.

  Gutiérrez. The name was half-familiar to Maggie. She looked it up on her computer, where she had been making notes of Cooper’s references. She quickly found the name in her file: Johnny Gutiérrez, of the Emergency Rescue Committee. The man who had gotten Cooper out of France during the war, and saved his life. She could double-check that with Maisie Tippetts, she thought. She wrote a note to herself: Johnny—

  Johnny. She repeated the name and sat back in her chair, eyes narrowed as realization dawned. Cooper had written, or had been planning to write, a poem about Johnny Foxxe’s birth; the woman in labor on the mountain was clearly Cooper’s pregnant housekeeper. Unless it was Anna who … No, Maggie answered the half-completed thought. Anna left the mountain in 1949. Johnny Foxxe was born in—hmmmm. Maggie did a rapid calculation. He was thirty-five years old. Yes. 1958, the date of this notebook.

  A knock at the front door interrupted her conjectures. Perhaps, she thought, it was Fox himself. She looked at her watch. It was much too early for Fox. He was going to take her to meet his mother, but not until later in the day.

  When she reached the door she found the mailman, late with delivery this morning. The man looked like an overgrown Boy Scout in his little blue uniform shorts and knee socks, driving a U.S. Mail jeep. She had a bulky package to sign for, along with letters with foreign postmarks, an invitation to Tat’s upcoming show, and a campy postcard from Nigel. His card gave a name and an L.A. phone number and read: Film interest. Call him.

  She took the mail into the kitchen, and put Tat’s invitation on the refrigerator with a howling-coyote magnet. She put Nigel’s card in the rubbish bin, then repented and fetched it back out again. The package, she discovered, was from Maisie Tippetts, postmarked New York City. Maggie had contacted the playwright again, hoping for another interview and help in tracking down Cooper’s old friends. In response Maisie had sent her a parcel of letters from Anna Naverra.

  The letters, written in fluent English, covered a five-year period, in Mexico City and Tucson. At the bottom of the box was a slim copper bracelet. She looked at it closely. It had spiral designs. It was similar, if not identical to, the copper bracelet Crow wore on his wrist. A note in the box read simply,

  My dear Marguerita,

  These are all I have left of Anna, aside from a handful of paintings. I thought you should have the letters, and this bracelet she once gave to me. If you can ever be persuaded to part with any of her artwork, I hope you will tell me. I’ll pay any price. But I’ll understand if you, like Anna and Cooper, feel it shouldn’t leave the mountains Anna loved.

  With warm regards,

  Maisie Tippetts

  Maggie held Maisie’s note and looked at the well-worn bundle of Anna’s correspondence. Then she poured herself another cup of coffee, and took all the letters into her study. She laid them out on Anna’s desk in chronological order. She made a new file on her computer: A. Naverra to M. Tippetts, February 1944–April 1949.

  April. She picked up the last of the envelopes that Maisie had received. It was postmarked in Tucson on April 24th. Seven days after the Night of the Dark Stone. She resisted the strong urge to open it right up, and she began properly at the beginning.

  When Fox arrived for her several hours later, she barely heard the knock on the door.

  • • •

  Maggie seemed distracted when Fox came over to drive her to his mother’s place. Her dark hair was dishevelled and there was a smudge of pencil lead on her cheek. She said, “I’ll follow you in my car, okay?”

  “I thought you were coming in my truck?”

  “I have to stop at the grocery store after,” she explained. “I forgot half the things I needed yesterday. I’m a city girl. I haven’t got the knack of stocking up.”

  “So we’ll stop. You can’t take that,” he said dismissively, nodding at the small rental car. “If you think the road up here is bad, wait ’til you see my mother’s.”

  “Oh, I see. All right then.” She picked up her bag. “I ought to get rid of that car anyway, if I stay up here much longer. Buy a cheap truck or something.”

  “Ask Tomás,” Fox advised. “He’ll find you something, and keep it running for you.”

  “Is he good then?”

  “Best damn mechanic I know. Tomás says machines talk to him,” Fox told her as she climbed into the pickup.

  For a city girl, she was looking rather western today. She still wore men’s clothes, in black and white, but now it was black jeans over Tony Lamas boots, and a white cotton shirt rolled up at the sleeves. Yet there was still something about her, beyond the artsy haircut, that subtly marked her as different. Different, and special, Fox said to himself, although perhaps she didn’t see it that way. People generally just wanted to fit in, and Maggie wasn’t the type who ever would.

  He whistled to the music that was on the tape deck as he rolled the truck back from the drive; Tex-Mex music, with Mexican guitars and songs in both English and Spanish. “Do you mind this?” he asked her. “Or would you rather listen to something else?”

  “No, it’s good. What is it?”

  “Tish Hinojosa. You like this? This is Border music. You’ll hear a lot of it here.” Maybe Dora was right. Maybe she would have liked Diamondback Rattlers after all.

  They bounced down the mountain to Tanque Verde, then on to the traffic of Sabino Canyon. He picked up River Road, which meandered through the city but still had the flavor of an older Tucson, lined with farms, horse corrals, a few old adobe houses. He pointed out the little road signs that marked specimens of desert flora: Agave. Prickly pear. Teddy-bear cholla. At the sign for desert broom, some wag had planted a straw kitchen broom, upside down. Maggie laughed and he loved the way that it sounded, low in the throat, thoroughly wicked.

  The music ended, and Fox said, “Choose another tape. There’s a box of them on the floor there.”

  Maggie picked up the box and set it on her lap, looking through his tapes with interest. “Blues. Reggae. Pearl Jam. Vaughan Williams. Sioux Ceremonial Songs,” she read aloud. “You can always tell a lot about a person from their music collection, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe a journalist can,” he teased her. “What does that tell you except my taste is eclectic?”

  “Well, let’s see now. Here’s tapes of Irish and Hopi flute, three different solo accordion recordings—not exactly Top Ten is it? I could clever
ly deduce that you play those instruments yourself—but in fact I saw them hanging in your cabin, so I reckon that wouldn’t be fair.”

  Fox smiled. “You reckon, do you?”

  Maggie picked up another handful of cassettes. “Beau de Soleil—a Cajun band. Here’s Peter Rowan’s latest. Two Estampie tapes, one Gothic Voices. June Tabor. A harp duo from Scotland—and this is interesting, the price tag on it is in sterling. Hmmm, here’s some European folk music and the tapes were clearly bought over there. Either you’re well traveled, Fox, or you have nice friends who send you things.”

  “A little bit of both,” he admitted.

  “So you’ve been to Europe by the looks of this. And Mexico, no big surprise. And, whoa, Africa?”

  “Africa,” he confirmed.

  “But not Asia. Or else you don’t like Asian music.”

  “I do. I haven’t gotten there yet.”

  “You see?” said Maggie smugly. “That’s more than I knew about you before.”

  “You’re right,” he conceded with amusement. “Someday you’ll have to show me your collection. Now how about choosing a tape to listen to?”

  She looked through the box again. “We’re spoiled for choice here. What about … This looks interesting. Desert Wind, music for flute, percussion and didjeridoo.” She looked more closely. “By Wood, Begay and Foxxe. Hey, this is you.”

  “That was me. Five years ago. Begay and I still play together sometimes, but Wood’s moved back to Australia.”

  “I didn’t know you played professionally, Fox.”

  He laughed. “That’s because I don’t. That recording is from a little local company, now defunct; it sold six copies, to us and our mothers. Begay still has a garage full of them.”

  “Have you recorded anything else?”

  Fox shook his head.

  “Well why not? Look, my first book didn’t sell many copies, or even the one after that. It was only with Low Life and The Maid on the Shore that anyone paid attention. But you have to believe in your work anyway. Keep putting yourself out there. Go after what you want.”