That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  How long it took I do not know, but eventually I grew drowsy, and slept.

  When I woke the house was silent. Rising, I went through to the other room to look for my mother, but the room was empty, the fire low. Thinking she must have gone to fetch wood, I went to the door and looked out, but she was not by the woodpile either.

  I had never been afraid of the forest before, but standing there I felt something shift inside me, and so I called out to her, my voice echoing through the silent trees, over and over.

  On the ground I could see her footsteps, leading away into the snow. Thinking to follow, I stepped out, but after a few steps the chill of the icy ground under my feet drove me back.

  I am not sure how long I stood there, looking out. Long enough for the heat to escape from the house. Long enough, too, for me to realise I could no longer hear my father’s axe in the distance. Long enough for me to understand I was alone and to begin to cry.

  In my memory the time that followed seems to stretch on forever, though in truth it can’t have been more than an hour or two before my father returned home.

  Who knows what he thought at first? Aware the fire was dying, I had tried to push a log in, something I was expressly forbidden to do, but all I had succeeded in doing was spilling the pot and spreading ashes across the floor. And so all he saw as he stood silhouetted in the door was the empty hut and the spilled food. Standing there he called my mother’s name once, and then again more urgently.

  It was only as he came closer that he saw me huddled by the fire. I remember the way he dropped his axe and grabbed for me, the pressure of his hands on my arms as he searched my body for signs of injury.

  Perhaps because he was so absorbed with me, he did not hear my mother at the door behind him until she was already in the room. She did not greet us or offer any explanation, just shook off the blanket she wore, hung it by the door, and, taking the knife up from the table, began to carve at the hank of bread that lay upon it.

  Placing me on the floor, my father stood to face her.

  “Where have you been?”

  When she did not answer he moved closer. “Where have you been?” he asked again.

  Although he did not raise his voice, something in his deliberate calm frightened me.

  My mother looked up. “Out,” she said.

  “And the child here, alone, unattended?”

  She looked at me for a moment, then shrugged and went back to her work. “She was asleep.”

  “All the worse. Did you not think about what would happen when she woke? About what I might think?”

  Turning, she took down the pot by the window. “I’m not responsible for your thoughts.”

  He did not move. “She could have wandered off and gotten lost, the house could have burned, anything could have happened.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  There was a long pause, and when my father spoke again his voice was low, trembling.

  “You’ve been there again, haven’t you? To see her?”

  My mother did not answer. She stood close to the fire now, the pot in one hand.

  “Haven’t you?” my father said, his voice sharp, and as he did my mother spun.

  “And what if I have?” she hissed. “Who are you to stop me?”

  My father took a step towards her. He was not a big man, or a cruel one, but in that moment I was afraid of him.

  “It shouldn’t be me who stops you, it should be the child. You’re her mother.”

  My mother did not flinch, just stood, staring at him. When she spoke again, her voice was hard. “I’m her mother as well,” she said.

  At this my father faltered, and for a long moment the two of them stood, staring at each other. So it fell to me to speak, my voice clear in the silence.

  “Whose mother?”

  Like any child I only knew the life I was born to. Yet even before that day I think I understood all was not right in our home. It wasn’t just my mother’s silences or the unspoken tension between her and my father, it was that there seemed to be an absence in our lives, a space that could be neither identified nor acknowledged.

  And so, when the sound of the door jolted me from a shallow doze a week or so later, I did not simply roll over and go back to sleep. Instead I took rags and bound my feet, and slipped out after her.

  Outside it was cold, the snow luminous beneath the bruised sky. At first I thought she had gone, but then I saw her footprints in the snow, her shape moving in the distance through the trees.

  The snow was deep, and she moved quickly, so I had to run, my feet slipping and sliding beneath me. After a mile or so it became difficult, until at last I lost sight of her altogether.

  With only her footprints to follow I struggled on, fear rising in me. But then, just as I began to wonder whether I should turn back, I saw the dark shape of the tower through the trees ahead.

  I had seen it before, of course: it was visible from the road to town, and from the stream where I sometimes walked with my father. Yet, because I had always been forbidden to leave the familiar area around our hut, this was the first time I had come close enough to see it properly.

  It was older than any building I had ever seen, its jagged shape rising high and strange out of the trees, moss and ivy growing in the cracks between the stones. At its base stood a hut, a small plume of smoke coiling upwards from its roof; above it the remnants of a wooden staircase still clung to the side of the tower. Although the ground between the tower and the wall was lined with gardens, the base of the tower itself was surrounded by wild bushes, the thorns on them thick and cruel.

  Slipping behind a stone, I knelt down. Ahead of me my mother moved stealthily from tree to tree, her eyes fixed on the tower, until at last she came to a stop behind an elm, and stood, staring upwards.

  I am not sure how long she stood there. The forest was quiet beneath the snow, the only sound that of the crows in the distance, and the occasional rustle and thump as a branch released its load of snow. Beyond the wall the tower and the hut were silent as well, and were it not for the smoke that rose from the chimney of the hut, it would have been easy to imagine them empty.

  And then, without warning, a voice began to sing, pure and clear. Behind her tree my mother stiffened, her hand tightening on the bark.

  Seeing her pain, I wanted to run to her. Yet something held me back, which meant I had time to see the way her face changed when the window at the top of the tower opened, and the girl looked out.

  It is the hair most people imagine when they think of her, that impossibly long skein of gold, but it was not her hair I noticed that day. Rather it was her face, its openness and beauty. That and her resemblance to my mother.

  I thought for a moment my mother might lift a hand to wave or call out, but instead she just stood, her body straining upwards and out from behind the tree slightly, as if hoping the girl might sense her presence and look her way. But the girl did not: instead she just sat, staring out.

  Then all at once I heard a noise, a creaking sound, and a woman’s figure emerged from the hut at the tower’s base. Overhead the singing stopped, and with a start my mother dropped back out of sight.

  Nestled behind my rock I let out a little gasp. I knew who she was; how could I not? On our visits to town I had heard the other children use her name as they might a devil’s, calling her down upon their enemies, threatening her ministrations in the night. Some said that in the full moon her house rose up and danced beneath the trees on chicken’s legs, others that her eyes were rubies and her teeth cold iron.

  My heart beating fast, I lay as still as I could, praying she would not see me. Yet as I lay there I did not see the monster I had heard described. Instead I saw a smallish woman dressed in black, a cloak clutched about her against the cold. As I watched, she tucked a bundle under her arm and, moving with a quick, almost reptilian motion, hurried over to the base of the tower and called up to the girl at its top.

  “Rapunzel!”

  That
was the first time I saw Jinka scuttle up the rope to the tower, but it was not the last, for as winter turned to spring I followed my mother to the tower many times.

  Whether my mother noticed I was following her, or whether she knew and did not care, I do not know. There was something occluding about her anger, a sense in which it shut out all else: certainly there was no place in it for me.

  The trips to the tower were not the only journeys we made in those months. For, as the weather grew warmer, it became easier for us to travel the three miles to town.

  These trips were not always necessary: we had little money, and the forest supplied most of what we needed. Yet still my mother liked the clamour of the marketplace and the company of her friends, and so, as the snow began to melt, she would call me to her two or three times a week and we would walk out onto the road and into town.

  At first I avoided the children of the town on these trips. At some point it had become their custom to scream and run away if I looked at them, or to call my name from behind walls. It was nothing, really, just a child’s game, but it made it difficult for me to play with them. Then one spring day the baker’s daughter Hettie saw me coming and cried out, but as she did her mother heard her, and, grabbing her arm, asked her what she was doing.

  “Nothing,” Hettie said, straining away. Her mother looked at me, then back at her daughter.

  “Have you been tormenting this child, Hettie Prynne?”

  Hettie shook her head, but her mother snorted. “Good. Then you won’t mind taking her with you to play.”

  That Hettie was not pleased by this turn of events was clear, but with her mother’s eyes on her, she had little choice but to comply.

  At first Hettie and her friends did their best to ignore me, but as the morning passed they began to snipe at me again, making private jokes and glancing at me and laughing behind their hands.

  Yet it was only when one of them said something I didn’t quite hear about the witch that I retaliated, and, smiling coldly, said I had seen her for myself, and not just once but many times.

  At my words the girls fell still. Looking around, I could see the way they stared at me.

  “Liar,” Hettie said, but her speech lacked its usual vehemence. I smiled.

  “You think?” I asked.

  I do not remember exactly what I told them that day, but what I do remember is the way my words held them. Later I would learn to use this glamour, to weave it close about myself to strike fear into them when it suited me. But that first day it was enough just to see the way they turned to me, to feel that shiver of delight, of power.

  I understood it was wrong, of course, even then. Yet as I felt the way my words bound them to me I began to forget the trespass I was committing, to set aside the knowledge that I was violating some trust between my parents and myself. And as I did, I began to add details conjured from my child’s mind: a crack of lightning, Jinka’s hideousness, Rapunzel’s hair.

  Whether my parents noticed anything in my manner that day I do not know, but, regardless, it did not take long before my story of the tower spread and came at last to their ears. It was my father who heard it first; he arrived home from the forest one evening and entered the room, his face dark.

  “What is it?” my mother asked, but he ignored her, grabbing my arm instead and bending down so his face was close to mine.

  “What have you been telling the children in town?” he demanded.

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Are you sure?”

  Behind him, my mother stood, watching.

  “What is it?” she asked, but my father only shook his head, releasing my arm and stepping away.

  “Ask her. Tom says she’s been telling the children stories, about the tower, and your visits there.”

  My mother looked shocked.

  “Did you even notice her following you?”

  Looking up, I saw my mother’s face change, saw the anger I knew so well return. But this time I saw something else in my father’s face, not anger, nor despair, but exhaustion.

  I heard the story that night, or most of it. Of my mother’s first pregnancy, her nausea and wandering. Of her glimpse of the green rapunzel in Jinka’s garden and my father’s midnight sortie across the wall to fetch it for her. Of his encounter with Jinka as he made his escape.

  As he told the story, my father would not meet my eye. “I did not hear her until she was there,’ he said, “she was like a devil, close on me. She said she would curse us, curse me.”

  Behind him my mother sat, her face cold and pale.

  “And tell her what you said.”

  “I told her of my wife at home, of the baby in her womb, of her desire for the leaves.”

  “And then?”

  “She smiled, and said that perhaps she might let me have the rapunzel, and let me have my life, if I agreed to give her something.”

  “And what was it you agreed to give her?” my mother asked, her voice cold.

  For a long moment there was silence.

  “The baby,” he said at last. “I said I would give her the baby.”

  Our parents’ lives are always mysterious to us, yet in that moment I saw something of who they had been. I already knew some of it, of course, not just the part about the simple woodcutter who travelled to a village fair and fell in love with the local beauty, or the part about the beauty’s wealthy father, the town miller, who forbade them to wed, but the final part, about their determination to marry against his wishes, and their flight from his house to the woods. But there was more, I now understood. The shared heedlessness that had drawn the two of them together, and led them to marry against my mother’s father’s wishes. The delight in indulgence that had led my mother to demand the rapunzel. The callow, careless confidence that had sent my father clambering over a wall into a witch’s garden in the middle of the night simply to please his vain and sensuous wife. And what their foolishness cost them.

  After that night, I did not follow my mother to the tower again. She still went and so did I, yet somehow it seemed wrong to follow her. And so when I went, I went alone.

  At first I only went occasionally, but as I grew older I began to visit the tower almost every day. Exactly why I am not sure: perhaps it was simply habit, perhaps it was from some deeper need; all I know is that I passed many hours in the trees outside the tower, watching and waiting for a glimpse of my sister, or playing quietly amongst the rocks that rose up to its north. With her golden hair and tawny skin, she was as unlike me as could be, but when I was there it was easy to imagine we might be close, to imagine she knew I existed. Sometimes when she sang, I would close my eyes and rock myself, pretend I was with her.

  Nor was it just about the tower and Rapunzel. Left to my own devices by my parents, I was learning the ways of the forest: coming to recognise the calls of the birds, to know which plants grew where, and when, to recognise the tracks of the foxes and the other creatures who called it their home. Out there, alone, I began to glimpse the force that moves through us all, to sense the way silence lurks in things, to feel the way the trees connect to the wind and the world. Once I saw wolves feasting on a deer, their long legs and silver fur matted with blood; another time I saw a woman’s body half-buried by the autumn leaves.

  I did not share these lessons with my parents, not even my father, whom I sometimes followed as he went about his work in the woods. Not, I think, because they would have been frightened, but because they would not have understood: although we still shared a house, and they a bed, when we were together we seldom spoke, my mother sunk in her anger and pain, my father in some deeper, sadder silence.

  Perhaps it is strange, then, that I was almost thirteen before I first spoke with Jinka.

  I had been in town the day we met. It was hot, the summer air heavy, and, bored with the heat, some of the boys had waded out into the river.

  Seated on a rock to one side, I watched them chase each other through the shallows, whooping and l
aughing as they splashed and fought and fell. The mayor’s son, Will, had stripped off his shirt, and as I looked on he wrestled with Tom, the blacksmith’s boy, his face alight with the joy of it.

  It was Will who won, of course, catching Tom off balance and sending him sprawling.

  On the bank a cry went up, and as it did Will turned to face the girls gathered there, opening his arms theatrically and bowing low, as if he were a knight before ladies.

  It was a playful move, but a teasing one: from their tittering and simpering it was obvious half of them were in love with him, and no less obvious that he understood that fact. But when the noon bell rang, and the children slipped away, Will did not follow them. Instead he approached me.

  “Will you not go home also?” he asked, and I shrugged.

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “They say you do not have a home, that you live in a lair like a badger or a fox,” he said then, and for a moment I thought he meant to wound me, but then he grinned, and despite myself I smiled as well.

  “Perhaps I do,” I said, and he laughed again.

  “You must show me some time,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  The bell rang again. “I have to go,” he said, and, throwing his wet shirt across his shoulder, he again gave a bow.

  With him gone I felt suddenly empty, restless, and so when I slipped away into the forest I walked towards the tower, hoping to lose myself in the quiet there.

  As it often was in the summer months, Rapunzel’s window was open when I arrived, and, after climbing the beech I usually sat in, I looked in, but she was nowhere to be seen. Knowing she was not always visible I swung down again and moved along the perimeter of the wall to the next tree and shimmied up.

  Again I saw nothing, but this time I was closer to the wall, and so, moving quietly, I clambered out along a limb.