The Wood Wife

by Terri Windling

  Black Maggie let go of her wrist. Thumper stood, legs splayed, her hands on her belly, waiting to see what would happen next. Then the fur rose on the back of her neck. Thumper began to tremble again. Outside, the Hounds had begun to bay. They sounded very close, and she was afraid. If she left this house they would find her, and now that she had failed him she doubted that Crow would give her any protection.

  But Black Maggie couldn’t hear the Hounds. “You’re cold,” she said as Thumper stood shivering. “Here, come have a blanket then.”

  She climbed up on old Cooper’s bed. She was less than half the size of the woman, and thinner, more loosely stitched together. Her long, boney limbs were human in shape but covered with a pelt of soft grey fur. The bed was warm where the woman had slept. She took the blanket and curled at its foot, her head nestled up against Black Maggie’s knees. She sighed deeply. Tonight she’d sleep safe. Perhaps she did well to be caught after all. She had safe haven, she had a name, she had a bit of warmth in the dark. She smiled then and she closed her eyes. In an instant, she was fast asleep.

  ❋ Davis Cooper ❋

  Redwater Road

  Tucson, Arizona

  Anaïs Nin Guiler

  Acapulco, Mexico

  August 2, 1949

  Dear Anaïs,

  I knew you of all people would understand that the line between dream and reality is a thin one, a fragile membrane easily ruptured by a poet, a painter, or a drunk’s clumsy hand. Yes, I am drunk. It doesn’t matter. The edges of the world are softer this way—for life has been sharp as a cactus spine since Anna fled back to the family bosom and refuses to see any of us again.

  I am learning patience. It is only a matter of time before she returns. It is not possible, it is not conceivable that she will stay away for good. Anna loves these hills, this sky, this house. She’ll come back for the land if not for me.

  In the meantime, I am gathering her paintings, or at least as many as I can reach. I know that this is important to her—I don’t know why, but I will honor her wish. She was buying back every canvas she could from the Rincon series painted in the last two years. Will you part with the one she gave to you, for Anna’s sake if not for mine? I can send you one of the earlier pieces instead—The Highwayman or The Star Blower, which I know you have always liked.

  The one you own now, The Trickster, is a portrait of one of the creatures I told you about. Anna calls him Crow. I don’t trust him. They were often in the hills together in the days just before everything went wrong. You’ve asked me what these creatures are, and I must admit, I do not know. Spirits, phantastes, fairies, ghosts … no single word seems adequate. They are not supernatural beings, they are as natural as the land itself. I believe them to be an essence, a rhythm, a language, a color beyond the spectrum of our sight. They appear in the shapes we clothe them with—and at first I thought it was only Anna who had the power to do this, but now I’ve seen creatures from my own recent poems, flickering like moths in the mesquite groves. Perhaps it is art that gives them these shapes, or belief, or our own expectations. You once told me that art is a mirror, reflecting each new face that we wear. So are these creatures. Right now the faces that they show me are of my loneliness.

  I am pathetically grateful for your words about the new poems I am writing. My agent hates them, the idiot. He says if I want to write fairy tales I should stick to children’s books. Pat at Scribner’s is telling anyone who’ll listen that I drink too much, I’ve lost my edge, I’ll never write another Exile Songs. He is right of course—but that doesn’t mean the poems I’m writing now are no good. Pat will publish them regardless of his doubts—the Pulitzer has earned me that at least, even if I still have a readership that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The hell with Pat, and Frank, and the critics. The hell with the entire literary world. I am writing down the language of this land as I hear it, and what poet can do more?

  So how is Hugo’s film coming? Your own new story is enchanting and strange and I am disgusted you can’t find a publisher. If my name counted for anything these days I would tell you to go ahead and use it—but then your own name would be tarred with the same sour brush that Pat uses on mine. The critical avant-garde insists that there are no boundaries that the artist may not cross, yet it seems the mythic world is as taboo to our colleagues as the sexual world is to the censors. Look at how Richard St. Johns savaged Anna in his last review, as though she were some idiot savant painting ‘an unfortunate choice of subject’ (I quote), ‘albeit with consummate skill.’

  Outside, the coyotes are howling in the hills. I shall finish this bottle and howl myself. I hope you will send The Trickster soon. And one more favor: this is between you and me, this is not for the damn diary.

  Yours as ever,

  Cooper

  Chapter Eight ❋

  The Drowned Girl leaves wet footprints,

  plaits her hair with pond weed, fingers

  white as milk, as death, as loneliness,

  upon root, wood, black stone…

  —The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

  When Maggie awoke she was alone in the bed. But she did not for a moment think that she had merely dreamed. The girl, the creature, whatever she was, had left the room not long before. The featherbed still held the indentation where she had lay sleeping, curled against the back of Maggie’s knees the way her cat once had.

  Maggie dressed, made herself toast and coffee and eagerly got back to work, sitting in the little studio with her feet propped on Anna’s table. There were references to a Jackrabbit Girl in Cooper’s notes, she remembered. She flipped through the computer files, cross-checking. Yes. He had used the image seven different times in the rough drafts of the Saguaro Forest poems. And once even in the Wood Wife poems; a rabbit-child. She’d forgotten about that. Maggie looked it up.

  … curled in a twist of root,

  the face of a girl, the long limbs pelted,

  the rabbit-child lies dead

  or sleeping

  dreaming this day into nonexistence.

  Maggie sat back and sipped her coffee, thinking about the night, about Thumper’s pointed face, those wide eyes dark against the soft fur of her pelt. As supernatural visitations go, it had been about as frightening as taking in a stray pussycat; and like a cat, Thumper had left fleas behind her when she went. Maggie would have to do something about that. She’d been scratching ever since she got up.

  It was curious to her that it didn’t alarm her more to have her vision of reality so abruptly expanded to include the surreal, the supernatural—although it now seemed the most natural thing of all. But it was the only thing that made sense of it all, the notes, the poems, the packet of letters from Anna to Maisie Tippetts. Thumper. Crow. There were probably more of them, out there on the mountainside.

  She found that it neither frightened nor unnerved her to think of Cooper’s images walking the hills. Anna’s images, she corrected herself. Perhaps because she’d lived with those images for years—ever since she’d been at university in England, reading The Wood Wife and walking in the Devon woods for the first time. Such was the power of Cooper’s language that his world was already real to her; she’d always half-expected to glimpse it in the mossy hollows of Dartmoor. It was not hard now to abandon more rational solutions to the puzzle of Cooper’s life in favor of the mythic, the surrealism that had tinged his life, and his later work, with the colors of Anna Naverra’s palette.

  She felt a rush of excitement as she finished her coffee and got back to work. At last she felt she was getting somewhere with the thorny mystery of Cooper—even if the path that had opened before her was not one she would have predicted. She smiled to herself, thinking about Nigel and his film sales and his six-figure deals. Nobody was going to publish this story, unless she gave herself a Brazilian name and called it magical realist fiction. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t pursuit of a big book deal that had brought her up here. It was the chance to finally have what Cooper had long denie
d her, the chance to really know him and his work.

  She wished she could talk to Dora about this—it was a pity the other woman had become so uncomfortable when Maggie had broached the subject. But perhaps if Dora read Anna’s letters she would begin to understand what was happening here.

  Maggie flipped through the letters once again, postmarked half a century before. Anna had met the young Maisie Tippetts at Cafe Jazz in Mexico City, a favorite haunt of European exiles, just down the street from her school. Maisie had introduced Anna to Cooper, confiding his romantic story to her: he’d fled from a French detention camp to New York, marrying a wealthy young socialite there; then he had fled to Mexico City to run from the disastrous marriage.

  At Cafe Jazz, Anna found herself surrounded by artists she’d only read about before—including a group of women Surrealists who encouraged her desire to paint. In one short year she had gone from being a good Catholic girl in a well-to-do family, to living with Cooper, a married man, and moving in avant-garde circles. By the time Maisie left for New York and the steady correspondence between them began, Anna’s family had already disowned her—a situation she referred to with humor as dry and as sharp as the desert.

  But scratch the surface of the bohemian young woman, and a proper Catholic schoolgirl still lay beneath. There was pain beneath the protective wit, and a desperate dependency on Cooper who was required, it seemed, to fill up the space where an entire extended family used to be. And yet to go back to her family, Anna had written Maisie with heartbreaking simplicity, would require that she give up painting. And that she could never do.

  So many people lost family during the war that Anna Naverra did not consider her own loss to be exceptional. But her letters were tinged with unhappiness that never lifted during the rest of her brief life. Maggie’s picture of Naverra had always been of the strong-willed, fiery, creatively fecund woman that Davis Cooper’s reminiscences portrayed; and she was those things, but those qualities were increasingly cloaked by a veil of depression. By the time she and Cooper left Mexico City and settled here in the United States, she had turned her back on the rest of the world, retreating into her own private place of myth, symbolism, and dream.

  September 9, 1947

  Dearest M.,

  I have had another visitation. You’ll laugh again at my ‘stories.’ Very well. You may call them my stories if you wish, but one day you’ll come west once again and then, my dear, you’ll see. I’ve been experimenting. It has been my theory that I have been creating these ethereal beings. Yes, how very arrogant of me. I am not God. Now I believe I merely create the shape they wear, like clothes, which they put on in deference for my modesty, not theirs. They have no modesty. They do not think like us. They are clearly amoral beings. I do not yet know where they fit in the heavenly hierarchy I was taught as a child. They are somewhere between us and the angels, I think. Or perhaps between us and el diablo.

  Cooper’s cold has not gone away. That horrid man brought it here with him, that hard little journalist friend of Henry Miller’s, with a hard little heart in his hard little breast. He pestered Cooper for an interview and finally Cooper gave in to him. It was a mistake. Now he’s lost a whole week of work on Exile Songs. Ah, but the card from you has cheered us up. Sweet Maisie, you will still be welcome here even when we build a wall of sparkling quartz eight million, trillion, zillion feet tall to shut out the rest of the world.

  • • •

  October 23, 1947

  Dearest M.,

  My experiments continue, with intermittent success. I’ve learned I can paint these creatures now if I paint in a particular way, and that seems to bind them more securely to this earth—or at least to the forms they wear. When I walk in the hills I often see them. They seem to be growing more solid. But sometimes I am frightened by what I call up, and then the paintings must be destroyed. Cooper doesn’t like this. He wants to preserve all of my work, the dark and the light. He says that one must balance the other, but I don’t think that can be right. I think the dark will overwhelm the light if I give it half the chance. Look what has happened in Europe after all. I have learned to fear the dark.

  Cooper is often far away, deep within the poems now. Exile Songs is nearly done and I hate the book with a savagery I’d feel for a rival of the heart. Now I know how Cooper feels when he loses me to the paint and the hills. But the place where he goes—into the past, the land of memory, war, regret—is a place I cannot follow him. That dead world is more real to Cooper right now than the mountains. Or me.

  • • •

  March 20, 1948

  Dear Maisie,

  I wish you wouldn’t encourage Cooper with this mad idea of a trip to New York. He says that I should come with him, but I can’t leave the mountains now. There are too many paintings still unfinished. Sometimes I feel there’s not enough time, I shan’t be able to capture them all. My skill feels like a finite thing—the well will run dry and then what will I be? Just an empty woman, searching in these hills for a vision I can no longer see.

  Cooper is recovering his mind again now that Exile Songs is done. I’ve only just gotten him back, Maisie. Don’t take my Cooper away to New York. New York doesn’t need him as I do.

  • • •

  June 29, 1948

  My dearest M.,

  Thank you for the books, mi corazón. How did you know that we have developed an interest in Trickster legends? One of the creatures here is a Trickster. I have named him Crow. He amuses me, but sometimes he can be very trying… And thank you indeed for finding The Moon Wife by Rosa Bete, you have made Cooper happy. He read the book as a child, you see, and has been longing to read her tales again. Fairy tales and myth and legends—they are the meat of his diet now. He has become quite the expert on the subject, dear Maisie—now, aren’t you surprised?

  Our days out here are quiet ones. The harsh summer heat fills the valley below and reaches us even here. The paints have failed me, the images fled, Crow and the others, all disappeared. Or perhaps the heat has driven them away, pushed them farther up into the hills along with the wolves, the coyotes, and the deer. I am lonely without them. I was lonelier still when Cooper was far away from me. I was afraid New York would steal him back—but he belongs to the mountain after all.

  We are together here, and yet we are alone. No one else lives in the canyon now. At night, the desert air is soft. The tall saguaro are crowned with fruit, and the birds pick at the sweet red pulp until it runs like blood. In the hills of Mexico, my grandmother’s people are busy turning it into wine.

  I often think of Mexico. Of my family. Of my sisters, married women now, with growing children of their own. The paintings will be my children since we have decided I shall not bear ones of the flesh. Perhaps this sounds paltry to you, but when they leave me, those children, then I know I am a mother indeed, for it feels as though my heart will break.

  Perhaps I will have to tell Riddley that I simply can’t exhibit anymore.

  • • •

  September 10, 1948

  My dearest M.,

  I have been thinking of you all day. I am sending you kisses and bottles of champagne and a chariot pulled through the New York sky by six white birds and a seventh of black, taking you to your opening night in a dress the color of the Rincons. I know it will be wonderful. You must send us all the reviews—as well as a picture of this new man of yours. He’d better love you as much as we do or I shall place a hex upon him! I could do it. My mother’s mother was a witch, although no one ever liked to speak of that. She was a small fierce Indian woman, from one of the Northern desert tribes. But no one liked to speak of that either.

  I have no news to match your own. My life is quiet, the hours slow. Some days I do not speak at all, at least with the voice you know. I have learned to speak with chalk and paint, to listen to the wood and stone. When you and Richard come at Christmas, you’ll see the paintings, and then you’ll understand. Then we’ll talk about real things, true things—all the
things I cannot speak of here. Then Time will be our pathway, Maisie, and Distance shall never come between us.

  • • •

  November 9, 1948

  My dearest M.,

  I have learned so much. I have learned at last how to talk to the paint, and through the paint to the fire, the water, the stones, the wind in the mesquite. There are seven paintings that must be done, and yet I only know six of them:

  The Windmage

  The Rootmage

  The Floodmage

  The Woodmage

  The Stonemage

  The Nightmage

  Those are their names. I have not discovered who the Seventh is, or even if the Six are true images, or merely the reflection of my own ideas. But I work hard every day. I am thin and strong. I can walk for hours into the hills. I will learn to walk the spiral path and when I do, ah, then how I shall paint!

  Can you send more of those brushes I like? Riddley will give you a check.

  • • •

  December 4, 1948

  My dearest, dearest M.,

  I am sorry about Richard. You say you are past tears now, but I would still give you this shoulder to cry on, or even just to lean on, if only I could step from Here to There, walking on the spiral path. I came across this in a book yesterday, by Dorothy Sayers, and I thought of you:

  ‘The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth.’