Spindlefish and Stars

by Christiane M. Andrews

  Tucked deep in the pocket of a spare apron, she found it. The final drawing in her father’s notebook, the one the old woman had taken, the one of her mother spinning, there, in the firelight.

  Spinning.

  For Clothilde.

  Clo looked at the hazy portrait of her mother—at her gaze fixed on some distant point, at her dress stretched over her middle, at her hands holding a spindle and thread. The sketch alone wasn’t enough to know for sure. Could she find this moment in the tapestry? Would it show what she thought it might? Clutching the paper, Clo crossed to the weaving, following again the fish-gut thread in the mirror.

  She skimmed again through the lines of her father and mother, their marriage, their housekeeping, their time waiting for Clo to arrive. She looked at the evenings they spent together, the shortening days of autumn, the fires lit on chilly afternoons. And then, not long before her mother hesitated on the threshold and decided not to leave, not long before her own birth and her mother’s own passing, Clo saw her mother spinning, just as she was in her father’s sketch. The spindle turned in the light of the fire. Nearby, her father hunched over his notebook, chalk in hand.

  Half holding her breath, Clo drew closer, wishing she could make the reflection clear; the details—colors, lines, form—were lost in the smeariness of the rot and the dim light of the room. Everything seemed washed in gray. Even her parents’ voices were soft and indistinct. Almost smudged.

  “Such a vibrant color,” her father was saying. “The thread you spin—such a rich shade.”

  “Yes, it is,” her mother said. “I haven’t spun thread quite like this before.”

  “What will you make with it?” her father was asking.

  “Oh…” Her mother spoke hesitantly. “I think I spin this for our daughter.” She watched the spindle turning. “I would like to give this to her one day… so she might make something beautiful in the world… something that’s all her own.”

  Still sketching, her father smiled. “Daughter?” He glanced at his wife.

  “I think, yes,” she said. “I think a girl.”

  Her father was quiet. Beaming. “How I look forward to seeing that day,” he said at last. “Seeing our child create something beautiful and all her own.”

  “Yes.” Her mother’s voice was soft as wool. “How I would like to see that, too. Would like you to see that, too.”

  They were quiet after that. Her mother continued spinning; her father began readying his brushes for painting. But Clo could not tear her eyes away from the spindle.

  This thread had been meant for her.

  She glanced ahead in the tapestry—yes, there was the moment when her mother had almost left. She had placed her spinning—the skein of yarn—in her basket; she had nearly returned with it to the island.

  Would her mother have given the thread to Clo here on the island? Given it to her so she might visit the world one day?

  But her mother hadn’t returned to the island. She had made the choice for Clo to be born in the world. To know her father. So what had she done with this thread she had spun?

  Trembling, Clo scanned the smeary fish-gut thread, rushing over her mother’s days, but she couldn’t find an answer. There was her mother working with her hands—but she was embroidering a tiny nightgown. Or there, mending her father’s shirt. Or there, shelling peas. Clo could not find her with the thread again.

  Clo returned to the fireside spinning, cursing all the hazy reflected details. She tried to see what else her mother had done that evening, but she had simply sat, spinning quietly, until she had taken herself off to bed. And her father, while her mother spun, had turned to painting. He had rummaged through his pots and jars and papers, had searched in vain for a clean canvas on which to paint. Finally he had given up and, with a shake of his head, taken a finished painting from a stack on the table and flipped the canvas to its unpainted side on his easel.

  Clo’s eyes widened. Her breath slowed.

  She brought her face as close as she could to the mirror, staring at the image of her father as he took the used canvas and flipped it over. It was just a moment, and the canvas was so small, and the images were so cloudy, but still… she could just see… yes.

  “Grapes!” she exclaimed, standing so abruptly that she sent the stool tumbling and the weaving swaying against the wall. She rushed from the old woman’s room and into her own.

  Grapes.

  The last painting her father had stolen still hung on the wall where the woman had fixed it. The frame was now nearly empty of its decorations—most of the gems had been plucked and rolled to the cat—but the painting… the cluster of dark-skinned grapes, yes, this was the same small canvas she had seen him overturn on the easel.

  Wrenching it from its hook, Clo rapped it soundly against the stone floor a few times until she heard a crack and the joints loosened. Working the frame open, she pulled away the backing board to reveal the underside of the canvas.

  There was the painting her father had worked on that night. Still unfinished, it was only a wash of color patches—no details—just soft amorphous forms. Even so, Clo could see—the image was of her mother spinning. It was the same image he had sketched in his notebook.

  In the painting, the colors suggested the glow of firelight. The shadows on the floor. The rosy hue of her cheek. The dark whorl of her spindle turning on a long blue thread.

  Her spindle turning on a long blue thread.

  Clo, her knees suddenly weak, sat on the bed.

  A long blue thread.

  Clo looked at the chair beside her bed. Her father’s cloak lay draped over it. Reaching, she pulled the cloak onto her lap.

  She held the paper ripped from her father’s book next to the cloak.

  The title: Spinning.

  The words beneath. Hasty, inked, almost a smudge: for Clothilde.

  Clo brought a corner of the cloak onto the canvas. She held it next to the image—next to the shape of her mother spinning, soft and indistinct, next to the spindle turning on a long blue thread.

  The blue of the thread—the blue of the cloak.

  Spinning.

  Blue—the same blue.

  For Clothilde.

  Spinning for Clothilde.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTY-NINTH

  PERTAINING TO THE RECOGNITION OF NIGHT AND DAY

  SPINNING FOR CLOTHILDE.

  Clo stood and spread the salt-stained cloak over the bed. Her father had worn this her entire life. It was part of all her earliest memories. She had never wondered who might have made it or how it might have been made, whether it was knit or woven or even cut from heavy cloth… but now, peering closely, she could see the threads that overlapped, see the knitted loops and legs of yarn that formed the heavy material.

  Clo traced her fingers all along its bottom edge but could find no seam, no stray thread to pull. Even at the corner she had cut so long ago to get to the wheel of cheese, the fabric was tight; the wool hem had felted and the cut stitches had sealed after being dragged, still damp with seawater, across the rocks.

  Along the top edge, there were a leather strap for a button and the button itself, worn at the neck. Clo pulled at the strap—it was nothing remarkable. Just a piece of leather pushed through the fabric and tied into a knot.

  She looked at the button, a flat stone disc, black, with a single hole through its center. She had looked at it countless times, seen her father fasten it countless times, but now it seemed to have a different familiarity—its color, its shape, its size…

  Sea coal, Clo realized, shaking her head, amazed she had not noticed before. The stone was the same sea coal spread over the beach here. It was sewn onto the cloak with the same blue thread.

  Carefully, Clo pulled back the fabric to see the underside of the button, to see if she could unknot the thread that held it. Yes… the thread… There was a little extra.… She could just catch it with her fingernail.…

  As she caught the thread, pinching it more firmly between he
r thumb and forefinger, she felt a loosening: the button came undone, rolling into her palm on its long line of blue.

  It landed upside down. Its underside, the side she had never seen, was not plain, matte black.

  Its surface was carved. With fish. With stars. With a single scratched word: Clothilde.

  As she raised the button to look wonderingly at its design, the thread that had fastened it unraveled… unraveled and unraveled and unraveled… the cloak was unwinding itself, turning itself into a long line of unbroken thread… unbroken blue thread her mother had spun for her.

  Clo pulled and pulled and pulled. The yarn piled, a kinked and crooked web; the cloak grew smaller and smaller until only the very edge of the hem, felted from the rocks and the damp, remained. Clo tugged, and the salt-crusted edge broke away, leaving her with a sea of crinkled thread spread all around.

  So much thread. She stared at the waves of rumpled yarn. So much more than Clo had ever wound onto a single bobbin, it cascaded over the mattress and onto the floor. Unwound, it no longer appeared uniformly blue; instead, it held a darker shimmer, the unsteady color of starlight in water.

  She understood—faintly—in the way that the piles of yarn still faintly resembled the cloak they had unraveled from—that this was her thread. Thread her mother might have given her had she decided to return to the island.

  With more certitude, Clo understood that she was never supposed to have known her father. That the tapestry thread that held her life—her wall-jumping and corner-skulking and forest-trekking—should never have been placed for her. But how she could link these two pieces of knowledge… she was not entirely sure.… The idea she had, how she envisioned the way forward—it was not pleasant. It set her teeth on edge. She felt again that spark of blackness across her tongue.

  Still thinking, she began winding the blue thread, wrapping it around itself, over and over and over. A ball of yarn grew in her palms; the crooked web around her shrank gradually, and when she had finished, she stared with surprise at a gleaming sphere. Though it had shaped an entire cloak, wound, the ball of yarn fit easily into her hands. As she turned it over wonderingly, feeling it warm, almost prickling in her fingers, she heard a surge of sound. Mmm! Ef! Mischief! MIS-chief! Mis-CHIEF! Someone had opened the front door: the clamor outside came rushing in.

  “Mischief! Mischief!” It was the old woman, wailing the cat’s name. She hastened through the house. Clo heard first one chair, then another knocked to the floor in the front room.

  “Mischief!” The old woman was searching the room with the tapestry. Another thud.

  Clo, dropping the ball of yarn into her pocket, stood facing the door.

  “Mischief!”

  The door flew open. The old woman, red-faced, damp-skinned, stood at the threshold. “Granddaughter! Mischief! Have you seen him?”

  Had the missing creature been anything other than the savage, piggish cat, the helplessness wrung through the woman’s cries would have moved Clo to sympathy. As it was, she answered with as kind a tone as she could muster. “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Mischief!” On her hands and knees, the old woman crawled, searching under the bed.

  The sight of the old woman so distressed made Clo uncomfortable. “Perhaps… it’s better?” she suggested. “Because Mischief destroys so much of what you weave, perhaps… it’s better?”

  The old woman stood and drew herself up. Though she was smaller than Clo, her gaze, imperious and severe, seemed to come from some great height.

  “Mischief is necessary.” Her voice now carried no distress or trembling. “He creates as much of the tapestry as I do.”

  “But—”

  “No. You fail to understand. You fail to understand the purpose of Mischief. Think, granddaughter. How do you know joy?”

  “I… don’t understand what you are asking.”

  “You do. It is a simple question. How do you know joy?”

  Clo tried to think of the feeling of joy. She thought of her father smiling as he offered her a pastry he had pilfered from the kitchens. She thought of tramping with him through sunlit valleys and shadowed forests. She thought of their evening fires, the sparks rising into the dark. She thought of the nightjar churring her to sleep, the blackbird whistling her awake in the dawn.

  “I feel…”

  “No. Think more. It is not just about feeling. Or—another question. When you were in the world, how did you know it was day?”

  Clo looked out the half-shuttered window at the endless gray sky.

  “It was not dark. The sun rose, the sky was blue.”

  “And how did you know it was night?”

  “The sun went down. There was no light.”

  “Then you understand the necessity of Mischief, granddaughter.”

  “No, I…” Clo hesitated. She understood the answer the woman wanted, but she could not bring herself to say it. Surely Mischief was not truly necessary.

  Her gaze fell on the canvas she had wrenched from the frame: the little bowl of grapes her father had painted. This painting is beautiful, she thought. Mischief had nothing to do with this.

  But—Clo frowned—did he? She looked again at the plump painted grapes. Why had her father painted this bowl of fruit? Why was it beautiful? Why did she, Clo, feel its beauty?

  Clo understood.… But she wished she did not.

  It was beautiful because it would not stay. It was beautiful because the fruit—which just then, just at that moment he painted, was so ripe and lush and full—would rot. Would shrivel and sink and grow foul and rank and pale with mold. Peering closer, she could see, even, how her father hinted at this, hinted that the decay was already beginning: just there he had touched a single orb with wrinkle and mold.

  If that ripeness never changed, if the fruit stayed always plump and round with dark and burnished skin… Clo glanced toward the window… then it would be no different than the island’s ever-gray sky.

  “I think you see now,” said the old woman, watching her. “Tell me, granddaughter, how do you know joy in the world?”

  Clo stared at the woman, whose blousy cheeks had swelled like full sails. She still could not bring herself to give the answer the woman wanted. Instead, she said, “There is no night or day here.”

  “There is neither.” The old woman nodded.

  “Is there joy?”

  “Not as you know it.”

  “Sadness?”

  “Not as you know it.”

  “But I feel sadness.”

  “You are not of this island.”

  Clo considered this. She thought of how the yarn, unraveled from the cloak, had buzzed warmly in her fingers. “Am I meant to be?”

  “I had hoped you were.”

  For a long moment, Clo turned the words had hoped over in her mind. She thought of asking if the old woman still felt she belonged here, but instead she returned to the cat.

  “I understand that beauty and joy in the world… I understand, well, that everything must end. There must be pain. And sorrow. There must be”—Clo hesitated—“death.… Joy would not be joy if it were always. But Mischief—the world cannot possibly need what he does. Where he claws, he destroys so much. It’s beyond sadness. So many…” She thought of the little boy alone in his bed, hee, calling for his mother. “So many suffer for his actions.”

  “And there, where he claws, where the threads glow brightest, do you not see the opportunity he provides? Mischief enables the noblest actions. The healer who tends the plague victim though she knows she risks herself. The man who shares his bread though he himself is starving. You must take the wider view, granddaughter. The tapestry is most beautiful at the edges of its darkest tears.”

  “But”—Clo’s voice trembled—“surely you must care… must want to help—”

  “For someone who spent her time in the world in the shadows, you are unusually concerned with care and help now. I cannot help. Help and care are for the world. You see what happens when one cares here—wh
at happened to your mother. I care about the tapestry. The entirety of the tapestry. That is all.”

  “You have never—like my mother—worried about the ending of a thread? About a person in pain? Even when you first began the tapestry?”

  “Granddaughter, I began with the tapestry. The island began with the tapestry. The boat, the fishermen… We were called out of darkness, formed out of darkness. For us, there is only the always of the tapestry. It has been my only task, our only concern.”

  “But my mother cared.…”

  “She arrived in the moments after. She was always younger. With younger eyes. Because of that”—the old woman shrugged—“she allowed herself to be swept away by the details of the world… forgetting that the whole is also a fragile thing worthy of care.”

  Clo glanced down at her father’s painted grapes, the sphere just touched with mold. Yes, she could admit that the brilliant edges of Mischief’s tears were beautiful. Yes, the tapestry as a whole was beautiful. She could admit that—for the world to have joy—the woman needed to weave both dark and light. But she did not think she could sit in front of the weaving and close her eyes to the people suffering.

  She thought of herself before, before when she skulked in the shadows and forgotten corners of the villages. She thought of everything she had failed to see then, the shy children, the watchful adults. She hadn’t known. Her eyes had changed here, but not, she thought, in the way the old woman had wanted.

  The woman, having turned away, was now peering behind the door. “Mischief!” she called. She shuffled out of the room.

  “Won’t he come back whether you look for him or not?” Clo asked, following. “This is an island. Where can he go?”

  “He is helpless,” the old woman said, crouching by the table. “A helpless kitten. We cannot have him loose.… What does he know of stones and cliffs and seawater? Should he be lost… Oh, the tapestry—what should happen to it then!”

  Though Clo did not believe that either cliffs or sea could damage that beastly creature, she still nodded. “Yes, the cliffs. The sea,” she repeated solemnly, hoping to convince the woman to search elsewhere. “Let’s look for him outside, then. Find him before any harm comes to him.” She opened the door for the old woman.