by Laura Ruby
I already know what I would wish for, I said.
Percival or Reginald?
Percival, definitely, I said. He wore much tighter trousers than Reginald.
She snorted, surprised, and covered her mouth. Then she dropped her hand, said, I have a story too.
What’s his name?
Not that kind of story, she said. A ghost story.
You’re joking, I said.
Once upon a time, there was a cruel miserly man who lived in a castle at the very top of a hill.
Was he a banker? I asked.
Shhhh! This is a library and you have to be quiet. As I was saying, the cruel miserly man lived in his castle with nobody but a bear and a bobcat.
A bear and a bobcat?
He’d trapped them as cubs, kept them chained up in the house just because he could. He liked the idea of taming wild things. He also liked counting his money.
One dark and snowy winter’s night, while he was checking that there was the same number of silver pieces in his safe that there had been the night before, there was a knock on the door. The cruel man was far too miserly to keep a butler, so he answered the door himself, along with the bear he called Crunch and the bobcat he called Tear. On the doorstep stood a young woman in a threadbare cloak, shivering in the chill. She was on her way to her auntie’s house, but she had lost her way in the storm. She begged for the chance to warm herself by the fire. She didn’t seem to be afraid of Crunch or Tear.
Now, this cruel and miserly man never would have allowed just any wandering urchin in his castle. But through the holes in that threadbare cloak, he could see glimpses of the purest gold going all the way from her hand to her shoulder. And this miserly man knew real gold when he saw it. He realized that she must be a clever girl, to hide so much jewelry beneath a tattered cloak and disguise her riches.
So he let her in the castle. Sure enough, when she removed her cloak and sat by the fire, her gold gleamed bright. But it wasn’t jewelry that gleamed in the light, it was her arm. Her whole arm, in fact, was made of gold. And not just any kind of gold, a malleable sort of gold that let her move the arm, wiggle the fingers—the sort of gold that gleamed brighter than any sun. She explained that she had lost the limb as a child. Her mother had had this one made especially for her, with gold and with magic. She wept just a little when she told the cruel man how her mother had died, penniless because she had spent every single one of her coins and every ounce of her magic on her girl child’s beautiful golden arm. Some mothers do things like that, you know. They sacrifice for their children, because they know how much their children will have to sacrifice.
Some mothers do perhaps, I said. But I’ve never met any.
She put a finger to her lips, continued. The cruel and miserly man couldn’t take his eyes off that arm. He knew it was worth a fortune, perhaps more money than he’d ever had in his life. This seemed outrageous to the miserly man. What use was such a thing to a girl? Girls were ridiculous creatures, good for nothing, easily led, easily finished. She would simply give the arm to the first liar who told her he loved her. Look how she trusted him so quickly!
The miserly man convinced the girl that it was far too dangerous to go out again and offered her a bed for the night. She eagerly accepted, but after she had fallen asleep, he smothered her with the bedclothes. Crunch and Tear growled and howled, refused to help him, refused to even go near him, so he dragged the body alone out into the woods behind the castle. He stole the golden arm right off the body, and then buried the girl underneath an old pine tree.
When he arrived back home, he decided to chop off his own arm and replace it with the golden one. It was messy work, but soon he was done and the golden arm and hand gleamed in the early dawn light. He wiggled the fingers, admiring. Now, instead of merely possessing riches, he was a rich man in the flesh. The richest man alive.
The next evening, the man was sitting by the fire, the bear and bobcat eyeing him warily from across the room. The castle was still and quiet, with only the crackling of the wood in the fireplace. But then the man heard a strange sound, like the hoot of an owl.
Whooo
He got up and peered out the window, but saw nothing. When he sat again, he heard:
Whooo whooo whooo
Stupid creatures, owls, he thought. Go catch a mouse!
But Crunch growled. And Tear shivered. They pulled against their chains.
Who has, the owl said.
But it didn’t sound like an owl anymore. The sound was as dry as the tearing of paper, the crunching of leaves beneath heavy, lurching feet.
Who . . . has . . . my
Crunch growled louder. Tear pawed at the floor and howled.
Who . . . has . . . my . . . golden
The man’s hair stood on end. Something scratched on the other side of the door, like the scrape of broken fingernails.
Who . . . has . . . my . . . golden . . . arm.
Get back! the man shouted.
Who . . . has . . . my . . . golden . . . arm.
Go away! the man bellowed.
The voice wailed: WHO . . . HAS . . . MY . . . GOLDEN . . . ARM!
The miserly man leaped from his chair and ran upstairs to his bedchamber, where he huddled under the covers. He heard a terrible booming sound, a crack and a splinter as the front door gave way.
Crunch, whispered the voice.
Tear, whispered the voice.
RUN!
The man heard the snap of the chains and the scrabble of claws on the floor as the animals fled into the night. The man pulled the blankets all the way over his head. He couldn’t see anything in the dark but he knew it was there, he knew she was there, climbing the stairs, stealing down the hallway, stepping into the room. She moved, getting closer and closer to the bed, her footsteps creaking on the floorboards. And then she was on the bed, creeping up the bedclothes until her face hovered over his, her breath the smell of a new grave.
Who . . .
has . . .
my . . .
golden . . .
ARM?
The man screamed, You don’t need it! You’re dead!
She said, That’s true. And so are you.
Some say she took back her arm and then tore him limb from limb, leaving nothing but scraps behind for the animals. Others say she swallowed him whole and spat out the golden arm like a bone. Either way, no one ever saw the man again. But to this day, if you travel down a certain lonely road, stumble upon a certain hill, and make the trek up to the castle at the top, and you knock on the door, you’ll hear howling and growling, and a woman’s voice will whisper, Crunch, will whisper, Tear, before opening the door. You will be blasted by a beam of golden light, and you’ll wonder if you are in heaven or hell.
I was so lost in her story that it took me several moments to register that she was done telling it. Let me guess, I said. She was some sort of witch, or avenging angel?
The girl in the golden dress shrugged. Mark Twain told this story a long time ago, she said, but he got it wrong, turned it into a cheap scare, so I fixed it. The girl with the golden arm was a woman like every woman. Sooner or later, someone always tries to take what’s yours. She just got mad enough to do something about it.
I said, Well, that’s silly.
Pardon me?
There’s nothing you can do to stop it. Getting mad doesn’t help.
Anger can be righteous.
I said, Are you angry?
She lifted her chin. Sometimes.
I thought about visiting the babies, I thought about the girls, about poking their feet.
I’m not angry, I told her. There’s no one left to be mad at.
She laughed, a trickle of honey. Look at how you lie to yourself.
Now I was mad. I said, I do not lie.
Yes, you do.
I’m the only person I’ve never lied to, I said, but even as I said it, the world pitched and buzzed. A strange static filled my head, a voice barely audible, You lie to yours
elf, don’t lie to yourself, don’t lie to ME.
Above us, a light bulb blazed hot and bright. Then it burst, showering patrons with glass.
The girl in the golden dress glanced up, then at me with her huge brown eyes. Did you do that?
No, I said.
I think you did that, she said. What else can you do?
Nothing, I said, watching the library patrons brush glass from their shoulders, blink frightened eyes. I can’t do anything. I’m dead.
So?
So? What do you mean, so?
She stared at me long and hard. Then she sighed, said, Never mind then. She turned and walked away, waving one hand over her shoulder. Enjoy all the little men with the hairy feet, she said. She drifted into the stacks, leaving me with the startled patrons and the hobbits and the blanket of shattered glass.
No and Yes
I TRIED KNOCKING A BOOK off a shelf for hours for days for weeks, but I couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t burst a light bulb either, of course I couldn’t do that, no matter how irritable I got. The world wanted nothing to do with me. I wasn’t the story, my story had already been told. The people I watched, they were the story. Frankie was the story. She moved in one direction, she had a beginning and a middle and a possible painless end. Here she was, in the nuns’ section of the kitchen, lifting the cover from a steamer to steal a few carrots, sweet and garish as candy. Here she was, handing the steamer to Sister Cornelius, who was waiting just inside the dining-room door. Here she was, turning the gig around and heading back down the long hallway toward the kitchen with Choppy.
“How old are you, Choppy?”
“Me? Sixteen. Why?”
“Were you always big?”
“Sure,” she said. “My brothers are big too. Bigger than me.”
“Bigger? How big are they?”
“I don’t know,” said Choppy. “Eight or nine feet tall.” She smacked the back of Frankie’s head the way she always did. “You have any brothers, Fran-ces-ca?”
“One brother. Vito.”
“He’s here too?”
“He was.”
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing. My father took him to Colorado.”
Choppy gave Frankie a look and asked the same question that Sam had asked. “Your father took your brother and not you?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s lousy,” she said.
“Yeah, well.” Frankie didn’t really want to talk about it. “So what do you think you’ll do when you get out of this place?”
Choppy knotted her shaggy brows. “I dunno. Maybe get a job in one of them factories, if the war’s still on. Maybe I could build airplanes.” She stopped the gig to roll up her sleeve and flex a biceps.
Frankie whistled. Choppy did have some spectacular muscles. Must have been that good nun food she “tasted” all the time. “You could lift airplanes,” Frankie said. “Maybe you could fly them.”
“Girls can’t fly airplanes, least not war planes. How about you? What are you gonna do when you get out?”
“I don’t know,” Frankie said. “I don’t even know what ‘out’ looks like, you know?” She trailed off. She wouldn’t know where to go. She wouldn’t know where to shop or where to live or work. She wouldn’t know how to talk to people who hadn’t been raised in the orphanage. What do those people talk about? She thought then of what Vito had said in one of his letters, that maybe she was better off where she was, and she wondered if he was right. If she was so dumb that she wouldn’t even know where to get groceries, wouldn’t know how to talk to anyone, maybe she was better off.
“Well, you’re only a half orphan. Maybe your dad could help you.”
Frankie shrugged. Vito was writing all the letters. She wasn’t sure if her dad would help her do anything. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever see him again. All of a sudden, she felt a sting in her eyes. They were gearing up to cry, and it hurt the same every single time.
“Here,” said Choppy, motioning with her chin. “Get on.”
“Get on what?”
“The gig, stupid. What do you think? You’re going for a ride.”
Frankie looked around. The halls were dark and quiet, even though it was the middle of the day. “We’ll get in trouble if we’re caught.”
“So then, we better not get caught,” she said.
Frankie climbed up on top of the gig and held on as Choppy took off. Choppy really was as strong as she looked, and faster than Frankie thought she’d be. They went flying down the hallway fast enough to blow back Frankie’s hair, and Frankie had to keep herself from shrieking or giggling out loud. Giggling was sure to bring the nuns out of their hiding places. If they were having too much fun, then something was wrong.
They flew past the doors to cottage after cottage, girls’ cottages, boys’ cottages, senior cottages. As they whipped past the senior boys’ cottage, the door opened, and Frankie thought she caught a glimpse of Sam, and she hoped he saw her too, with her hair ruffled and laughing so hard that she was close to bursting. But there was sadness twisting through her laughter, woven into it, a grief she couldn’t name, a fear that the future would never come and a fear that it would, a strange sense that she wouldn’t be strong enough to meet it.
Choppy stopped short right in front of the kitchen, and had to grab Frankie’s shoulder so that she wouldn’t go flying off the gig. They stood next to the gig, trying to catch their breath. Frankie swiped the tears from her face, pretended they were happy ones.
“So,” Frankie said, “are you going to get married?”
“Huh? I may be big, but I’m only sixteen,” Choppy said.
“No, I mean when you get out of here. When you’re older.”
“Absolutely,” Choppy said. “I’m going carry my man down the aisle.”
Frankie laughed. “I bet you will.”
“What about you? You gonna get married?”
Frankie thought about Sam, his eyes big and surprised as they raced by on the gig. “Yeah. Doesn’t everyone?”
“Not everyone. There’s the nuns. And my aunt Ethel.”
“What’s wrong with your aunt Ethel?”
“She’s got a mustache. Plus she’s mean as a snake.”
“Your aunt Ethel couldn’t take you and your brothers in?”
Choppy snorted. “Are you kidding? She hates kids. It’s a good thing she ain’t married. I’d feel too sorry for the babies. She’d send that stork packing as soon as it showed up.”
Frankie laughed. “Babies don’t come from storks.”
Choppy smacked her. Again. “I know that, chooch. They pop out of your belly button.”
Frankie didn’t correct her. Lots of the girls believed such things. When they turned twelve, each Guardians girl got a book called It’s Your Day, Marjory May. But the book didn’t explain much beyond how to wash out your rags. And it didn’t help the eleven-year-old who came into her monthlies in the showers and started screaming that she was dying before the other girls could calm her down.
Frankie knew better because Loretta had set her straight about everything—at least, about what went where. But, according to Loretta, people were endlessly creative about their whats and wheres and even whos. She described acts that made Frankie blush—but not Loretta, not anymore.
And maybe not Frankie, either.
Choppy delivered a note, and Frankie met Sam in the greenhouse after hours. Outside the greenhouse, the world was just waking up, green buds just forming on the trees. Inside the greenhouse, however, was riotous with tulips and daffodils. Even the rosebushes were showing signs of life. The sun setting over the glass ceiling gave whole place a soft, warm glow that made Sam’s eyes glitter in the fading light. All her twisted feelings whipped through Frankie at once, and she almost fell to her knees at the sight of him standing there. How beautiful the flowers, how beautiful this boy. How terrible this place that worked so hard to keep them apart, to keep them all from one another. How horrible a war howling across the
ocean that could whisk him away as easily as the wind tears a leaf from a tree.
Her vision blurred again. If he’d asked, she wouldn’t be able to say what she was crying about. I’m scared I’ll be stuck here forever, I’m scared I won’t be, I’m scared you’ll die, I’m scared all the time, and being scared makes me so mad, when I think about the future there’s only smoke and fog and I can’t see my way through it.
His voice brought her back. “Hey,” he said, the faint growl in his tone dancing along her nerves.
“Hey,” she said.
“You looked like you were having fun.”
“Huh?” she said.
“Before, when you were running around on that cart with Choppy. Haven’t seen anyone look so happy since the nuns took us to the carnival a few years ago.”
“Oh, that,” Frankie said. “Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why?”
“You have a funny look on your face, is all.” Quickly, he added, “A funny expression. Your face is pretty as always.”
She laughed. “Yours too.”
“What?”
She shrugged, touched the pink cup of a tulip. “It even smells green in here.”
He didn’t speak, just stared. Then he bent and lifted a watering can. “I need to finish watering.”
“I’ll help you,” she said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Okay.” He set the can under a spigot in the corner and filled it. Then he brought it to her. “Hope that’s not too heavy.”
Her muscles weren’t as big as Choppy’s, but she was almost as strong. She laughed, hefting the can over her shoulder. “What’s too heavy?”
He smiled. “Not much, I guess.”
He filled another can for himself and then pointed to the end of the row by the windows. “You only want to dampen the soil. If you water too much, the roots will rot.” He poured a bit of water into the nearest pot. “Like that.”
She nodded, the scent of the flowers and the earth and the wool of his coat making her just a bit dizzy.
“You start over there, I’ll start here,” he said. “We’ll meet in the middle.”