by Kelly Link
A house had once stood in that place and had fallen to ruin. There was a story told of that house at night on the green. A man and a woman once lived there together. The woman loved the man more than her life, but of what good was such love, thought the woman, if death proved the stronger. She could not rest for this thought and harried her husband until he came with her into the yard. She laid two stones on a stump, a white stone and a black. She laid too her head on the stump and held her hands just above the two stones. She said to her husband, now strike my neck with the axe. If I grab the white stone, I yet love you. If I grab the black stone, I do not. The man struck with axe and his wife’s head rolled to the ground and she grabbed neither stone. The man married again and when he sat by his bride on the green at the long, laden table, before he could eat one bite of the feast, he put his hands to his neck. He fell from his chair, kicked his legs and was dead. The bride’s brother reached into his mouth and pried a stone from his throat.
Luma Muns was also soon to be married, to Iver Lomm, the shopkeeper’s son. She led the girls around the ruined house, the blocks and the beams.
A girl cried: It’s the stump! Always, on such visits, in the night, one girl made this cry. But all had been by day to that clearing, and there were no stump, just the house lying ruined, and the well by the larch.
Luma Muns drew a pouch from her skirt and shook out two stones, white and black. She dropped them both in the well and pulled up the bucket. She reached in and pulled out a stone.
White or black? said the girls, and Luma Muns smiled and kept her hand closed. Druisilla Clive went to the well and dropped two stones of her own and pulled up the bucket and lifted out the white stone. Luma Muns pressed stones then into Sara Kasp’s hands. The woods were quiet, and above, the moon had the raw, unburied look of limestone just quarried, pulled up high on black chain. Sara Kasp went to the well and she heard the girls laughing and she let go of the stones. As the bucket came up, she saw the moon floating in the water it held, the moon like the limestone she quarried, and she thought, the stone will be white.
Her wedding was in one week and one day. The stone would be white, and why not? Why not love Gravin Dammersen? Was he worse than any other?
Sara Kasp reached in the bucket and her fingers brushed the bottom and sides. She poured out the water. She felt in the bucket. There was no stone at all.
White or black? said the girls, and she held her hand closed, and she did not smile. The bell rang in the town and Luma Muns turned. The girls sang as they followed Luma Muns from the well. Sara Kasp did not follow, or sing. She sang only when turning the winch, when she thought if she didn’t her strength would fail and her arms would both break. The girls disappeared in the pines. The song that they sang sounded thinner and thinner and soon Sara Kasp couldn’t hear it at all.
At the edge of the clearing, like a pine between pines, stood a tall, thin man, black haired, in green, Carrick Cark, and then he was almost beside her.
Sara Kasp, he said. I have something to give you, something you lost.
He held out his hand.
She thought of the stones, white and black, in the well, and of Gravin Dammersen’s pendent, the sledge, in the odd quarry water. But in his hand, Carrick Cark hadn’t either. He had a piece of white felt, cut and folded and stitched into the shape of a hare, with long felt ears and eyes and nose of black thread. It was Sara Kasp’s plaything, lost long ago in the woods.
She took the felt hare.
She said: There were no boots small enough for my feet when I first went down to the quarry. My father bought the smallest boots that he could and packed the toes with wool. My mother made me this hare with the wool that was left.
Carrick Cark said: I found this hare in a nest.
Sara Kasp nodded. He would have, yes. She had taken the hare with her to the quarry one morning, tucked safely inside her shirt pocket. But the hare had hated the quarry, and he had hated the close dark of the pocket and she had felt his displeasure like a pain where he lay against her chest, near her heart. When the midday bell rang, she crept between the cranes and into the woods and put the hare in a nest in a crabapple tree’s lowest fork. That evening, she went back, and the hare and the three young birds in the nest were all gone. Had Carrick Cark taken also the birds?
Carrick Cark said: I watched the nest for hours, the birds and the hare, and at sundown they all flew away. I saw you come and look for the hare, in the nest, on the ground just below, but you never looked up.
Sara Kasp looked up. She threw the hare as high as she could, but she couldn’t track his arc against the bright and black sky and he was too soft to make a noise on the ground when he landed. She felt afraid, and Carrick Cark said: Do you think I’ve come here to harm you?
She thought, and she thought he had not but that, regardless, harm would come and was coming, that with some it is like that, and she thought maybe there are others who welcome all harm, who hope for the towers to topple, and with her this was the way.
She said: My father used to say, finish your supper or Carrick Cark will nose round for the scraps. But this is what I imagined: that you had taken a vow. You would not eat a morsel of food from the town. When people said, Carrick Cark was just here and he stole this or that, the pie from the sill, the milk in the jug by door, I thought, it was not Carrick Cark. Carrick Cark’s parents were killed in the road and no one lifted a finger to help him. People said, better the child dies too, and the few who wanted to bring a basket up the long road were stopped at the first bend and sent back. I thought, Carrick Cark lives up there in the pines. He lives on pine nuts and bark, on acorns and cattails. He grinds these all into flour and bakes from it bread and this is all that he eats, this coarse bread, with pine sap and jam. He does not need what no one will give him.
Carrick Cark said: And when, in town, a kitchen garden is trampled, or a baby gets a dot of blood in its eye as though the eye were pricked with a pin, is that Carrick Cark?
Sara Kasp said: People call those things by that name.
And you? asked Carrick Cark. What do you call by that name?
Sara Kasp touched the sleeve of his coat. She traced a line in the palm of his hand. Then for a time they sat on the edge of the well, hip to hip. There was silence and the moon floating above on the sky.
Carrick Cark said: I was with my parents that day on the road.
I know, said Sara Kasp. It’s a story everyone tells.
I felt the stones strike, said Carrick Cark. But the stones had no weight.
A stone is all weight, said Sara Kasp. That’s all a stone is.
Then: How did they feel? Those stones without weight?
Carrick Cark seemed to consider and she thought, of course, they felt like many things, and he is wondering which thing to tell. He said: Like spinning. Like spinning so fast you see the back of your head and then your own face.
Sara Kasp looked at Carrick Cark’s face. She tried to imagine a stone with no weight. If the quarry could spin, she thought, you would see a wall and then a wall, wall after wall. There was nothing beyond, nothing to reach. She rose to her feet. There was her father waiting, her mother waiting, work in the morning.
She said: I must go, but Carrick Cark was already gone.
For three days, Sara Kasp worked harder in the quarry than ever before and ate nothing her mother prepared, not a morsel of food. On the fourth day, she could not move from her bed. Her father shouted and her mother pleaded, but she put her cheek on the pillow and closed her lips tight. Her father brought Gravin Dammersen into the room and he sat on the chair by the bed in the way of one unaccustomed to sitting, one who worked on his feet or collapsed on his back with hard snores. Gravin Dammersen spoke to her, the longest speech he had made. He said this: Once he had been bitten in the night by two spiders, bitten on the lid of each eye. In the morning, the swelling was such that all he could see was the red of
his own swollen skin. But even so, he went to the quarry. He worked at the stone. He had to touch the stone over and over, with the tip of his nose and his tongue, to feel what it was he should do, but then he knew, and he did it. He could work without eyes, and if he had too, he could work without hands. He could drill a hole and fit in the wedge with his teeth. Sara Kasp said nothing at all, and soon Gravin Dammersen and her father and mother had no choice but to go to the quarry and leave her.
Sara Kasp got up then and tied her hair in a braid and dressed in her dusty work shirt and pants and went out into the street. The Kasps lived in the center of town, where the quarrymen lived, house close upon house. Sara Kasp did not turn at town hall to go up the path to the quarry. She went on, past the shop, and Herda Lomm, the shopkeeper’s wife, was sitting on the step in the shade nailing together a box. Herda Lomm was well liked in the town for the shows she put on with paper cutouts and strings, and for her light hand at the scale in the shop. She was sister to Sara Kasp’s mother, though every year saw them further apart.
Sara, she said. Tell your mother I have the cloth for your dress.
She passed the bakery and the baker, Josep Hoit, was standing in the doorway. He was big as a quarryman and the flour in his beard might have been dust from the limestone.
He said: Sara Kasp, give this to your father.
He gave her a list of figures and sums, the prices of all the pastries and cakes for the feast.
She passed the lime works and Gravin Dammersen’s mother just then came out and she stared and she said: Is that Sara Kasp? And by day on the street? Is something the matter?
When Sara Kasp tried to pass, she blocked her way, and said with a smile that narrowed her eyes: My son told me that nothing could keep you away from the quarry. He said you have stone in your soul, and that’s why you’re well suited.
Again Sara Kasp tried to pass, and the time Gravin Dammersen’s mother stepped aside. She called to Sara Kasp’s back: I’ve heard it said that your father sent you too young to the quarry, but my son said to me, mother, when you know Sara Kasp, you know she has never been young.
On the long road through the fields, Sara Kasp saw the farmer Hayden Bost coming toward her, his mules pulling a cart partway filled with beets.
He said: You’re Jorn Kasp’s girl. Do you see in this cart? These are all of my beets. That’s it. There’s not a single beet more. Since your father led the council last season in their vote to seize my south field, I can’t even fill this one cart. Tell your father I hope my soil won’t scrape. I hope it sticks to the stone and keeps growing beets. See who bids on it then, see who wants a tower of beets.
After that, the pines drew in close to the road, and she passed the two iron posts. She remembered the day when Broc and Dell Kasp were killed right there on the road. She was just four years old. She stood in the crowd by her mother on this very spot, and all she could see were the quarrymen’s legs and the fine white dust in the air as they shoved one another and shouted. There was a kind of high screaming she had never heard, not then and not since. There was the sound of stone hitting flesh and stone hitting stone. She had covered her ears and knelt down and felt the warmth of the road and felt the road shake.
She reached the top of the valley and the road ended in weeds and Carrick Cark was in front of the tall wooden house. She hadn’t realized the long road was so quick to travel, that it wasn’t so far from her house to his. There were hours before the day’s work in the quarry was ended. The air had the sharp smell of pine and the sweet smell of baking.
She didn’t know how to say what she felt. She couldn’t look fully at Carrick Cark, not in the day, in front of his house, not yet. She looked back down the road. She thought she would see the whole valley: the pastures dotted with sheep, the green rows of beets in dark fields, the slate roofs and white houses of the town, and partly screened by thin trees and the arms of the cranes, the cliffs of the quarry, the piled blocks, the mounds of loose stones. But all she saw were the pines.
She said: I’m very hungry.
Behind the house, there was an untidy garden, with lettuce all in flower. The wind blew and Sara Kasp could see the thin black seeds of the lettuce carried off into the woods. From a clay mound on top of a stump, Carrick Cark pulled a loaf the color of bark, and as rough. They sat at a wooden table covered with moss, and they ate the coarse, hot bread, the whole loaf.
Sara Kasp said, and now will you show me the house?
There were three floors and each floor was one room with a staircase winding through the middle. Lettuces were growing in pots on all the windows. In the top room, there was a narrow bed by the wall and a green coat on a peg.
Sara Kasp said: I’m going to be married.
She sat down on the bed. She untied her hair. Carrick Cark watched her closely. When the story is told at night on the green, Sara Kasp unties her hair on the bed. Carrick Cark watches her closely. The light in the little room shudders as though something is passing between the earth and the sun. They go down the winding stairs and out into the woods. Carrick Cark shows Sara Kasp how to find a black mushroom that looks like a leaf, and at the stream he skips stones. His stones go on and on down the stream and for the first time in the story, Sara Kasp laughs. She thinks of a wooden house like a tower, and of a tower of lettuce, and of a tower of beets. She thinks of a thin black seed flying into the woods, how that too can be a day’s measure. She thinks of the thin stone skimming the top of the stream, faster than the water, lighter than air.
On the bed, Sara Kasp lies back and arranges her hair. She says to Carrick Cark: And now will you come even nearer? He doesn’t answer. She sits up and he comes. He sits and they press forehead to forehead and somehow there are hours in the day, even for this, for the pressing of foreheads, and Sara Kasp shuts her eyes. She opens her eyes. She shuts them. The light shudders and shudders. They are still there, on the bed. She puts her arms behind her back. She says: I don’t need my eyes or my hands. Carrick Cark says, no, and he comes even nearer. She says: I will use my nose and my tongue and my teeth. I will feel until I know what to do. And that is what Sara Kasp did.
It was dark when she stole down the long road and back through the streets of the town and climbed through her window. Inside her room a lamp burned and her mother was sitting in the chair by the bed with folded cloth on her lap.
Where were you? said her mother. My sister saw you, Greta Dammersen saw you, Hayden Bost saw you. Where did you go? What were you doing all day while we broke stones in the sun?
Sara Kasp thought of how little she had done and how much.
Her mother’s face paled. She bunched the cloth with her hands, yards of cloth, white as limestone.
She said: I told your father you were sick in your bed. I lied to your father. But tomorrow you must come back to the quarry. There’s work to be done, and it’s harder work with fewer to do it. You know that I lost seven children.
Sara Kasp said: Yes mother, I know. This was a story her mother would tell. She had told it before sitting in that very chair by Sara Kasp’s bed.
Her mother said: Two went blue in the cradle, one got spots, one drank milk and swelled up. One exhaled in my arms and I shook him and shook him. One jumped out of my arms and hit wrong on the ground. One pulled down the stew pot and boiled.
Sara Kasp went to her mother and touched her shoulder.
Her mother said: I used to think I was cursed, cursed by Broc and Dell Cark. The trouble began when we got their share of the quarry. Broc Cark accused your father of buying votes on the council. Your father said that Broc Cark was unfit and the whole town had decided. They fought on the green, until Broc Cark, ran, hissing threats. After, I didn’t know a moment’s peace. One night I couldn’t sleep. I went to the front of the house and opened the door. Dell Cark was standing right there. When she saw me, she smiled. For years, nothing was right. There was fever in town. The water wen
t bad in the wells. It rained for a month and mud slid down the mountain and buried the quarry and we had to dig through the mud. These were dark times in the town, but they were the darkest for us, for your father and me. But then it ended. It ended the day those two were struck down in the road.
You should sleep, said Sara Kasp.
Her mother smoothed the cloth in her lap. Her hands were large, fingers thickened, with knots at the joints, but she could still ply a needle and thread. She stood.
There’s your dress to sew, she said. It’s night work.
Mother, said Sara Kasp and her mother turned in the doorway. With father, said Sara Kasp: at the well—was your stone white or black?
White, said her mother. Of course, it was white.
Sara Kasp went down the next day to the quarry, and the next, and the next. The first night of these days Herda Lomm came to speak to Sara Kasp’s mother. Supper had been cleared from the table and the table piled with cloth.
Sara Kasp’s mother said: I can’t stop sewing to greet you. There’s too little time. Sara, bring your aunt a cup of hyssop tea and bring her your father’s chair. Jorn has taken our cart to the blacksmith. We found just this evening that both axles have broken. It’s as though someone sawed through the iron.
Herda Lomm waved away Sara Kasp, the cup and the chair.
Lisle, said Herda Lomm. That’s strange and now listen: My paper cut outs are gone. I had each readied to the last string and dowel, but they’re missing from the back room of the shop.
Sara Kasp’s mother looked up at her sister, and Sara Kasp looked between the two women and thought for the first time how they had the same face, but her mother’s was blunted, or her aunt’s had been sharpened.