An Itch
Before he died, my father made a secretaire from the old tree in our garden. He was an enchanter. And while this did set him apart from most other people, he still rode a bike. Unfortunately, he didn’t wear a helmet.
My parents had an unusual arrangement. They lived in separate houses at opposite ends of their garden. My mother chose to live in a narrow three-story house, and my father had a small cottage with circular windows that smelt of wood smoke. I lived mostly with my father, while my sister, Jane, lived with my mother. Our parents told us they were still in love, and for a time, we believed them.
The tree in the centre of the garden had been there for as long as anyone could remember, so it was a shock to find my father hacking at it one morning, his tan, craggy face dripping with sweat.
“You’re chopping down the tree in the centre of the garden,” I said.
“I am,” my father replied.
As well as being an enchanter, my father was a door-to-door vacuum salesman, who had never chopped down a tree in his life.
“You’ll understand some day,” he said, hefting the axe up onto his shoulder, readying himself for another swing. “I’m scratching an itch.”
“An itch?” I asked, quite certain he’d gone insane.
“Everyone has an itch. You’ll get one too when you’re older.”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Like you’ve left nothing behind. Like you won’t be remembered.”
“I’ll remember you.”
He swung the axe into the trunk and it stuck. Jostling it free, he said: “I know you will. But if you have children, will they?”
“Yes.”
“And their children?”
I thought for a moment, then replied with certainty, “Yes!”
“Well I don’t think they will,” he laughed. “So, I’m going to build something from this tree.”
I saw my sister and my mother watching us from the window of their house and waved at them, but they didn’t wave back.
“I love you, Claire,” my father said.
“I love you too.” I left him to his tree and went back inside the house.
For the next two weeks, I remember my father working nonstop, sawing the tree, sanding it down into smooth planes, locking joints into place, lacquering the soft wood in varnish that hardened like old, smoky honey. I watched him in his workshop, whispering words of enchantment into the wood, words that made the light fall curiously, as if through clear water.
“What are you doing?” I asked one night, peering through the doorway.
“Curing the wood,” he replied. Then, when seeing the confused look on my face, said, “Asking it, very nicely, to behave.”
“Will it?”
“I think so, but there are more words to be spoken.”
“Very nicely?” I asked.
He smiled. “Yes, very nicely.”
Sometimes he would whisper a word to me and I would repeat it in my head until it stuck fast. In sleep, the words would come again and conjure wonderful dreams that vanished with the sunrise but left a warmth in the air that made the winter mornings tolerable.
When he was finished, he called me into the living room, where the fire chuckled in the hearth. There, standing in the centre of the room was the secretaire. He watched me, as I approached, with a vulnerability I hadn’t seen before.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I pulled out the chair and sat at the desk, ran my fingers along the dark grain of the polished wood, flicked through the crisp papers and envelopes he had stowed in the many compartments. I asked him what magic he had given it.
He smiled and placed his palm against the wood. “Let me show you.” Pulling a pen from his pocket, he knelt beside me and gestured for me to pass him one of the papers. I did.
“Close your eyes now.”
“Okay.”
Then, eyes closed, I began to receive the words he wrote without seeing or hearing them. They came like an intuition. A jolt.
Dear Claire,
Please wash up your breakfast bowl.
Love,
Dad
I laughed and said, “What wonderful magic!”
My father grinned. “I’m glad you like it.”
Then, as I washed up my bowl in the kitchen, I remembered to ask, “Is your itch still there?”
To which he replied: “I don’t think so. But there’s no way of knowing when you’ll next get an itch.”
Jane would often come visit the cottage, just as I would visit our mother’s house. On one occasion, I showed her the secretaire our father had enchanted. She wasn’t very impressed, and the novelty wore off after we had written each other about a dozen mind-letters. I promised her I would write her a letter every day and she said “Every day? No thank you!” She was eight years older than me, so whenever she said anything like that, I would feel silly and small.
My sister was the first person to tell me I was an enchantress. Often, I would let her hear one of my father’s words and she would watch in amazement as the ground about us blossomed with flowers, or the air shimmered with strange light. On one such occasion, I created a frog out of our father’s old brown boot and we chased it through the garden, around the stump of the secretaire tree. When Jane caught the frog, it shifted back into the boot. Jane tried to get it to shift back into the frog, but the stubborn leather would not budge.
“I wish I could be an enchanter like you,” she said.
In that moment, I repeated something our father had once told me. “If everyone were special, then no one would be.”
Still holding the boot, Jane looked down and rubbed the corner of her eye, not meeting my gaze. I thought nothing of it then, but it was at that moment something about my sister changed. Something in how she held herself and in how she looked at me when we were together.
Something I had caused.
“Come on,” I said. “Let me show you another!”
“I’m tired, Claire,” said my sister. “We will play tomorrow.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
Back then, I was fond of binding people to me with promises. They were a kind of half-magic.
While my sister enjoyed my enchantments, my mother always tutted or ignored them completely. She was a teacher, and so had mastered the nuances of scaring children using only her voice.
“That stuff is for your father’s house,” she said once, in her teacher voice, after I had conjured a little blackbird to sit on my finger.
I always preferred it when Jane visited my father’s cottage, where I could speak the strange words without worry. After Jane visited, my father would always kiss her on the forehead and I would feel slightly jealous. I wondered if she felt the same when our mother kissed me.
I saw Jane and Mum a lot more after my father didn’t wear his bike helmet. In fact, I lived with them. When I moved into their cold three-story house, I missed that secretaire; our mother had told me that it was simply too big to haul from the cottage.
And so, like the memory of my father, the secretaire collected dust, down at the other end of the garden.
“Why did you live apart from Dad?” I asked our mother once before school. A few years had passed since Dad’s accident. I was eleven, and curious, and asking about my father was just about the only way I could stop myself sinking under that silent numbing sea. The sea that had been rising since he’d left. Asking questions kept me afloat. Jane and I were eating toast. Jane was in college then, but I don’t think she had ever asked that question, considering our mother’s reaction. “Mind your business,” she said. My mother’s face bunched up more than most people’s when she was mad, and when I asked that question, it seemed as if her features would all squeeze into one great angry blob. She clattered about at the sin
k while I ate my toast, until eventually she turned and stared at me. “You really want to know?” She sat at the table. I could see tears in her eyes. Then she dropped her head. “No … no, you don’t.”
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I got up, put my plate in the sink and caught the bus. I didn’t go to school that day; instead, I got off at the garden store and bought a little sapling. I tried to find one that looked strong, but they all looked the same, so I just settled on the first one I’d seen. With the little sapling on my lap, I rode the bus about our town until three o’clock, when school finished. Then, weary from not eating, I made my way back to my mother’s house which whistled to itself sometimes, when the breeze danced along the window shutters. It was this whistling that hid the noise of my footsteps across the creaky floor (I was wary of my mother catching me and interviewing me about the sapling). I ran out into the garden, where the stump of the secretaire tree still lay, gathering moss and woodlice. It felt like just yesterday I had watched my father chopping, and waved at Jane and my mother peering from the window of the whistling house.
Finding a shovel in the shed, I began to dig a great hole beside the stump where I intended to plant the sapling. It was tiring work: the roots of the old stump were tangled and deep below the earth and made the shovel shudder and buck when it met them. When I stopped to catch my breath, I looked out across the garden and saw my father’s cottage, crawling with ivy, the thatch slowly rotting.
“Why don’t you just go back?” said Jane. Her voice surprised me. I hadn’t heard her coming. She stood behind me, hands on hips. She was very beautiful and had long blonde hair which naturally curled. My hair wasn’t long. Or blonde. “It would be easier if you just left,” she concluded.
I knelt to lower the sapling into the hole I had dug.
“Why did you ask Mum that question this morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can answer it for you, if you like?”
I patted the fringe of earth around the base of the sapling, packing it tight.
“They lived apart because of you.”
“What?”
“After you were born, they moved apart.”
“Did Mum tell you that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Fine.”
We didn’t say much more to each other after that. I brushed the earth from my hands and watched Jane walk back to the house. Then, I sat in my mother’s half of the garden, watching the little sapling sway like a child finding its balance, and cried.
Once the tears had stopped and I was left with a headache, I rose slowly and began to walk over to my father’s cottage. The handle to the door was swallowed by twisting vines and it took all my strength to heave it open. The house was dark, and birds that had flown through the open windows were nesting in the rafters.
Guided by a memory, I made my way to the living room where the old secretaire stood beside the hearth. I sat and wrote a letter.
Dad,
I miss you. I hope you receive this.
Love,
Claire
It was not for another year that I discovered the truth about my parents’ strange living situation. My father, while he was alive, had given his heart to an enchantress. An enchanter’s heart sounds like an old song, and he chose to breathe his into a jam jar and give it to a woman we had never met. When my mother told me this, she spoke like she was writing equations up on a blackboard.
“Did you hate him?” I asked.
“Yes, I hated him.”
“Do you hate me?” I—after all—was an enchantress too.
My mother watched me, her lips set in a thin line.
I left the room before she answered.
More and more, my mother retreated into herself, sitting in her room all day, reading books.
You only realise how unusual your life is when you look back … and by then it’s too late to do anything about it.
Jane was no longer interested in my enchantments, like she had been when we were younger. Now, whenever I said the words she would sigh and make me feel silly and small again. So I stopped speaking them. After a time they vanished, like mist rising from grass on a chilly morning.
I always thought the world of Jane.
Once, when the school sent a letter to our mother’s house, mentioning the formal dress code for my upcoming school photo, I asked Jane if I could borrow one of her dresses—white, as the dress code suggested. I didn’t own any because I hated them. Clothes should make you feel comfortable, and when I wear dresses I feel all scratchy. Still, I asked Jane for a dress and she gave me one. It was bright yellow. I asked her if this was what the other girls would be wearing, and she said yes, it would be.
It was not.
They were all wearing white, and there I was in bright yellow. They put me in the back of the photo.
When I came home I found Jane sitting on the sofa watching television. She laughed at me, still wearing the yellow dress, standing in front of the television.
“It suits you!” she said.
“I hate you,” I said.
“I hate you too,” she said. “Always have.”
And that was pretty much how our interactions went from then on.
We lived in our mother’s house until she died. It was a heart attack. We found her in her room with a book on her chest, her mouth parted slightly.
After that, my sister and I barely talked. Like two ghosts we occupied the same space, barely aware of each other, bound to the whistling house.
“I’m taking Mum’s books,” Jane notified me one day. “I’m having her jewellery,” she told me the next.
I didn’t put up a fight and, soon, I was in a house of Jane’s things.
One evening I walked across the garden to my father’s cottage for the first time since I had written him the letter. By then the sapling had grown into a young tree. It was about my height and its arms were spread wide.
I remembered when I had planted it long ago, before I had known about my father’s enchantress. I think that’s why I hadn’t returned until now: I had wanted the memories of my father and the cottage to stay as they were. Now, walking through the rooms that smelt of wet moss, everything seemed marred by this other woman I had never met. I wondered if she had ever visited when I wasn’t there … if she, too, had spun her magic in this house.
Illustration by Jennifer Ober
Dusty blue light crept through the little windows as I moved among the rooms. Soon I had found the magic secretaire again, standing alone in the grey shadows. A sealed envelope lay on the dark wood, leaving an impression in the dust when I picked it up. I held it and brushed it down. The paper was the same as that in the compartments of the secretaire, however, it was mottled and rotten; the ink smudged and faded almost to nothing, as if it had travelled a very long way. I thought it might crumble to dust. After closely examining the envelope, I managed to make out my name, written in spidery handwriting.
Clumsily I tore at the envelope and pulled the letter out from inside. The writing was barely legible, but eventually, it made sense:
Dear Claire,
Now I’m gone, the secretaire’s magic is fading.
I don’t know how or if this will reach you.
I heard your letter, though it was a little fuzzy over here.
I miss you too. I love you and your sister both. Tell her that.
This will be the last letter I can send.
Forgive me.
Dad
After I had read the letter, I walked about the house with it still in my hand, tidying. I tidied for hours until the cottage looked brand new. Then, I used the last of the secretaire’s magic to write a letter to my sister.
Dear Jane,
I want you to know that I forgive you. And I’m sorry f
or anything I’ve done to hurt you.
I hope that someday we can be friends again, as we were when we were children.
Dad sent a letter saying that he loved us both. I think it would make him happy to see us getting along.
Meet me in the garden tomorrow if you want to talk.
Love,
Claire
I decided to spend the night there in my father’s cottage, thinking of Jane, a little walk away, in the whistling house where my mother had once lived. In my head I went through all the reasons she might have hated me—if it had been something I’d done and forgotten, or if it was for the same reason as my mother. I lay in the bed I had slept in as a child and waited for the night to crest into morning.
I prayed she had received the letter. Then, finally, I slept.
There was smoke.
I smelt it as I rose, wrapping myself in a musty blanket and wandering outside.
There Jane stood in the centre of the garden, beside the young tree which was consumed in thick ropes of flame. She watched me stumble out onto the grass, her mouth a hard line.
The tree was already dead; a thing of cinders and smoke.
The blanket fell from my shoulders and fluttered away in the wind as I ran towards my sister. As I ran, the words came to me, words I had never spoken before. Words of protection. Words of rage. They scorched my tongue as I made them.
The burning tree wrapped about itself, stretching out its dark limbs, glittering with embers. It grew and grew, burning the earth between us, crawling slowly up into the sky. A wall. The thing was black and coiled with scorched branches. It tore across the centre of the garden, stretching right to the edges, separating me from my sister.
It took about a day for the burning wall to harden and cool. It writhed for a while, settling into place, grappling with itself until finally it calmed.
There’s not much to say after that.
I thought about writing to my sister again, but never did. We went about our lives on opposite sides of the wall, me in my father’s house, she in my mother’s. It was easier.
L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 35 Page 35