What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

  The road to death seemed obvious to Lucy, a constant if meandering journey already begun. But back again . . . For a cloistered young woman long past her predicted expiration, “back again” was a raft to cling to on a sea that threatened to drown her more each day. Understanding the book became Lucy’s obsession.

  JOHN WATCHED HIS sister study the manuscript, pore over charts and runes, whisper incantations. Lucy had a particular red chaise longue she’d curl up on, accompanied by her favorite of the family hounds. The library fire cast her face in flickering shadow; all was quiet but for its popping, the heavy wheezing of her chest. She had always, John sensed, been angry, but her frustrations had simmered below the surface, directed at her failing body, only an occasional flash of fury in the eyes that suggested her displeasure was with him. Now Lucy seemed finished with hiding, with obedience. More than any new scientific paradigm, this book had changed her.

  Imperious, Lucy informed John that she’d no longer be joining him for dinner. She would not perform at the piano, or help the cook map out the menus, would not even change from her thin nightdress into the proper attire in which to greet his guests. She had other matters to attend to, exercises more important than arpeggios, plans more imminent than meals. At first these refusals escaped from Lucy’s lips like belches, her eyes wide with her own impertinence, her hand flown up after to cover her mouth. Her brother laughed at her, belittling. When his scorn failed to persuade her, John swore mightily, and threatened to lock Lucy in her room, refuse her dinner. Still, she continued. She would not return to the girl she had been. As Lucy studied her new text, she grew more sure of each decision, more attuned to what she wanted, what she knew. There was a promise in the pages of this ancient tome; a promise, and a secret.

  Eventually Lucy opened the French doors that surrounded the ballroom, disregarding the wind’s bellow and bite. She knelt amid lit votive candles, arranged in a triangle. Muttered and wailed. Scratched her arms until they bled. Lucy preserved a tooth she’d lost as a child in a small sphere of amber, and held it to the light, humming a low-throated tune.

  The servants whispered about her. The postmaster spread gossip. When John hosted a hunting party at the house, the guests remarked upon Lucy, her flights of fancy, her rituals, demands. It was humiliating. They asked John what, in good conscience, he planned to do about his sister. Suggested an institution in the city that was known for resolving just such hysteria, run by revered men of science.

  It was the fashion, then, to declare one’s woman hysterical. John liked to appear fashionable. He announced his decision once his final guests had left, told Lucy very brusquely over cold sausage and tea that she had one hour to ready her things and settle minor household matters. He went out to smoke a cigar on the back terrace.

  Lucy heard the doctors approaching, the horses’ whinnies, the patter of the carriage wheels on the drive. She ran upstairs, bolted her bedroom door from the inside, and stepped out onto the roof. Once there she crept across the cupola, the turret a tightrope, shingles scratching her palms. When she jumped she landed strangely on her ankle. From the lawn Lucy could hear the men yelling and pounding, the angry demands that she stop all this silliness and let John and the doctors in at once.

  It was quiet for a moment, before they realized she was missing. Then it was chaos. The servants were enlisted to spread out and search the grounds. Lucy remembers John’s voice bellowing, the doctors’, disguised, calling in deceptive treacle tones. She’d been so young then, cold with fear, struggling to catch her breath. She’d limped through the forest, looking for the proper place to pause in supplication, praying the old stories and her own interpretations of the book’s symbols were true. Skittish at the shrill cry of an owl. Shivering.

  The last light drained from the low autumn sky.

  Now, Lucy pleaded, now. Now it must happen.

  She heard the heavy steps of one of the city doctors lumbering toward her, wrestling through a thicket. One hundred steps away, then only fifty, twenty-five. Her ankle throbbed. There was nothing else to do. Now! Lucy squeezed her eyes shut, and held very still.

  The doctor walked past her.

  She could smell the whiskey on him, feel the ripple of his body in the air. His overcoat snagged. He swore, turned in place. And as he wandered back in the direction of the house, cursing a wasted evening, Lucy opened her eyes on an entirely different wood. Trees seemed taller. The breeze she felt was warm. Even the birdsong had changed keys into a sharper legato. Lucy raised her arms skyward, letting out a yelp of joy—and found six women, watching her.

  2

  For a time, my father, my books, and Mrs. Blott were my only companions. I supposed that other children existed in situations much like mine, and assumed that at a certain age, once we’d all been sufficiently tested and deemed ready, I would meet them. I imagined a kind of cotillion, prepubescents in taffeta dresses and miniature tuxedos parading about the ballroom of a castle, attempting awkward pas de deux. We might discuss the weather, how regal and foolish we felt in our costumes, how thrilling it was to take another child’s hand, as the children in the fairy tales we read did so easily. Their hands, I thought, would feel soft, like my bed sheets, the fingernails cold and smooth as metal. Or else we would burn one another with blistering early touches, before our skin cooled to a more comfortable temperature. Perhaps we’d fuse together momentarily, flesh melding into flesh, and come away with peeled pink palms. Then, sufficiently welcomed into the tactile adult world, I believed we’d return to our homes, where the boys would grow up to be Peters, the girls Mrs. Blotts. And so on, forever, as new children blossomed with springtime, as old Mrs. Blotts and Peters returned to the earth with the fall.

  The logistics of such ritual did not trouble me. I was eager to be grown, too young to understand much of the world—and by the time I was six the fantasy had shattered. I realized that I was to wear no ball gown; that there would be no ball.

  IT HAPPENED LIKE this: I was wandering Urizon’s front lawn, dressed in long pants and sleeves, an old pair of gardening gloves fastened at the wrists with twine and a large sun hat tied under my chin. I would have been a sight to anyone unfamiliar with my affliction, and in the mid-May heat I was sweating terribly. Mrs. Blott’s initial treatment of my condition involved much what you would expect for someone with extreme sun sensitivity: she’d make me lather myself in lotion and shade all visible parts. Peter would laugh when he saw me done up for the outdoors, but I paid him little mind. I liked to be outside. I enjoyed the vast, untraveled landscape and the lushness of our grasses and the sky’s strange sometimes-blue. The sun’s caress was warmer than my father’s, more direct. The wind was a truer companion than the girls I met in books, who I loved dearly but I knew would never know me. I felt larger out of doors, where my life seemed wider and more meaningful, as if any minute I’d be called upon to fulfill some great destiny, if only I was patient and could learn to bide my time.

  On this particular day I had decided to take action against a worrisome patch of ivy that was smothering two great oaks at the front of our property. I was not sure if ivy choking really could kill oak trees, but it troubled me to watch the plant devouring the trunks. I felt that I could not stand idly by and watch them suffer, and thus attempted to remove the climbing vines by attacking each singular root. The work was frustratingly slow. A family of rats had nested in the ground cover, and as I struggled to yank ivy down off one of the oak’s branches, I could hear them twittering.

  “Quiet, you,” I muttered.

  The gloves I wore were bulky and prohibitive. I longed to take them off; Mrs. Blott had told me I mustn’t.

  As I paused to lick a bit of sweat from my upper lip, the squeak of the rats was overwhelmed by a different sort of chatter: high-pitched voices like my own, giggling and singing and calling. I straightened my shoulders, shook a string of ivy off me, and went across the yard to peer around a hedge that hid the main road from my view. We did not have many travelers in our parts
, just cars speeding by on their way to the city (a full day’s drive away), or the university and its accompanying town (approximately thirty minutes), and the occasional wayward tourist drawn in by the local fables.

  It was unusual, then, to see a group I later learned to be the village schoolchildren walk by me, fifteen of them, a teacher as their lead. Peter would not like it. I was about to run back to the house to alert him when I noticed a small, troubling detail: though barely older than I was, the children were all holding hands.

  They walked in a line, bodies not quite facing straight, for their arms were stretched forward and back, like elephant’s tails clasped by trunks. Little freckly hands touching pale ones, dirtied hands touching clean. I shook off my hat so as to get a better view, and my forehead hit topiary, killing a clump of leaves.

  The group was passing so close that were I to reach out, I might touch them. I saw patent leather shoes replaced by sandals, a yellow dress become a tartan skirt, a plain earlobe follow a pierced one. I watched as the owner of the last lobe, the final child in the caravan, let go of his classmate’s hand. He turned and looked right at me, gray eyes meeting mine through the shrubbery. He blinked. He was taller than me, and towheaded, his hair curling up around his ears.

  “Hello,” he said solemnly.

  A girl’s voice called out, “Mattie!” The little boy was wanted. He nodded at me and ran off to join the rest of his class. I watched him disappear down the road. I bit the twine off my gardening gloves and let them fall from my hands. Returning to the ivy that had given me such trouble, I touched it with a finger and watched dead gray eat its way across the green.

  THAT WAS THE last time I wore the gardening gloves. I told Mrs. Blott and Peter that they hurt me, itched my fingers, and made me feel odd. Unsure of how I felt, unable to predict their reactions, I said nothing of the children in the road. Peter took each change in my condition as data, and because I did not generally complain, he and Mrs. Blott let me dispense with the gloves and the hat, sometimes even with the pants, if I preferred tights and was careful. I was still forbidden to fuss with the plant life, but Peter turned a patch of garden at the side of the house into a simple plot of sand where I could sit, barehanded or barefooted, and play without obvious effect.

  This act was little consolation. To be given a glimpse of a youth that was not mine had unmoored me; a crack had formed in my formerly smooth world. I grew moody, picked at my food, refused to smile. Having seen myself as one of many, temporarily alone, I’d been excited by my body. That my father was impressed by me—enough to engage in an intense, longitudinal study that mapped my relationship to everything from wooden toys to blueberries—that others were impressed enough to read of what he found, had always been a point of pride. I thought it meant that I was special, better somehow than the other children, who might only be able to sap a flower of its color or curtail a dead tree branch’s decay. Now I saw that I was judged not for having risen above the usual mediocre crowd but for having fallen so magnificently short of them. My guardians hid me away not because I was so very clever but because I was tainted, my existence inherently wrong.

  Unpacking the logic that had made up my world took me weeks, but once I’d dismantled the old ideas and re-formed them, I was left with a terrible truth: not every child possessed my powers, therefore not all children had sapped their mother’s lives while in the womb. Childhood touch was not the silly stuff of fairy tales. I was alone in my deformities, a murderer, a monster.

  Peter, pleased with himself for the sandbox, was oblivious to my change in disposition, but Mrs. Blott was not. “Maisie,” she said brusquely, “stop this moping about. You’ve a roof overhead, you have food on your plate. There are those out in the world who have much worse troubles than you.”

  I nodded, solemn-faced, but made no attempt to move from my place at the kitchen table, where I’d been sitting for hours, staring out the window at our empty, silent drive. I looked down at my hands—the dirt beneath my fingernails, my cuticles chewed pink and pulsing—and I wished myself outside of them. For the thousandth time that week I shut my eyes and hoped I’d open them inside another body: one that was prettier, cleaner, better.

  “She needs company,” said Mrs. Blott to Peter that evening. They were in the library without me but had left the door open. If I stood in a particular spot on the main stairs, I could hear everything they said.

  “Too dangerous,” muttered Peter, “company would not know what to do with her. Nor she with it, I think.”

  “I understand your worries, I agree, but you cannot raise a child in isolation. As the girl gets older . . .”

  Mrs. Blott’s voice lowered, and I pressed against the wall to try to make out the rest of her words. A loud floorboard creaked. The library door closed.

  As a result of this conversation, it was decided I might go with Mrs. Blott to visit old Mother Farrow, an invalid who lived by the river. With no family to care for the old woman, Mrs. Blott brought her food and company whenever she could. I would be allowed to join her on these visits, so long as I followed Peter’s instructions. If ever I did not obey, I’d lose the privilege at once, with no chance of parole.

  The instructions were these, typed and printed and hung in a frame in my bedroom:

  Under no circumstances will you deliberately touch a living thing.

  Under no circumstances will you deliberately touch a dead thing.

  If a living or a dead thing is touched, you will immediately return it to its natural state.

  “But number three is a circumstance, which means I’d have to break rule number—”

  “Maisie,” said Peter, “I appreciate your logic. Someday you’ll have a fine career in court. But for now, let’s keep this simple. Do you understand and agree to these conditions?”

  I did.

  AND SO AT age seven I met Mother Farrow, who would live to be one hundred, but was then just ninety-six and almost blind. She sat always in her bed, propped up by pillows, so gaunt she looked already like a skeleton, her remaining hair wispy as a child’s. She had seven real teeth, and was proud to show them to me, refusing Mrs. Blott’s offer to call in the dentist for a new, false set. In place of real feet under her bed sheet, Mother Farrow told me she was rumored to have horse hooves. Mrs. Blott denied the gossip, but I looked once, while she tended to the garden and Mother Farrow dozed, lifting up the heavy blankets at the foot of Mother Farrow’s bed to reveal a pair of yellow knit slippers. They seemed the usual shape, but who was to say what was hidden underneath them? I lay the blanket back carefully, content to let the mystery survive.

  The very old are like the very sick, the very strange, in how they move about the world, how the world treats them. I sensed in Mother Farrow the same disconnect that I knew in myself, a similar longing to be part of a world that had no place for me, and refused to change its pace to accommodate my particular needs. She’d had a long life, and it seemed that in those final years she feared not death itself but the loss of her accumulated decades of knowledge, which, if unspoken, would wither on the vine. While Mrs. Blott made soup or casserole, swept out the kitchen, changed linens, I’d sit at Mother Farrow’s side and listen to her speak.

  She told wonderful stories of princesses, and witches, and monsters in the wood. Coeurs Crossing, the village near Urizon, was a haven for stories, and in her girlhood, before the thrills of modern entertainment, there had been little else for Mother Farrow to do once the chores were finished but listen and tell. All her tales were set in our surrounding hills—a young woman lived in our village, a little girl lived in my house. They were the antithesis of Peter’s more practical assignments, the dark to logic’s light, the remnants, he told me, of a less civilized world. People told stories, he said, to explain natural reactions—the waxing of the moon, an unusual harvest, bizarre psychological behaviors that they witnessed in their peers. These tales, he said, were from an age when people had no understanding of why nature acted in accordance to physical laws.
They were pretty explanations, but disproven. They were no longer vital.

  A wood witch stole a baby from her cradle, left a changeling in her place.

  A young woman magicked herself out of a locked prison and disappeared.

  A naughty little girl hurt her mother and was banished to the forest; now her spirit caused mischief through both village and wood.

  A mother sacrificed herself for her daughter.

  “YOUR MOTHER WAITS for you,” Mother Farrow told me once.

  Mrs. Blott stood by, holding a cold compress to Mother Farrow’s forehead. She looked at me, seated on a stool in the corner, with the expression she used often when we ventured out to care for the old woman. An expression that very clearly told me: Mind your fantasies.

  “Your mother has been watching you turn into such a pretty little girl,” Mother Farrow said. She held her hand out to me, and I stood, ready to go to her, before I was stilled by another telling look from Mrs. Blott. “Mothers are always watching.”

  Even at eight I had questioned how Mother Farrow, childless for almost a century, might be expert on this topic. Yet since I’d met her she had been a source of wisdom, so I listened. A mother, said old Mother Farrow, at least a mother from Coeurs Crossing, was given ways to watch her children. All because there once had been a troublesome young girl.

  This particular girl was especially naughty, eventually jailed for crimes on which, Mrs. Blott interrupted brusquely, they could not elaborate. Her poor mother sat outside her underground cell, without food, without drink, for days on end. She’d hold her hand up to the old stone wall and cry for her child. She’d try to sneak notes to her daughter under the roughly hewn door. The people of the village tried to displace her, for soon her daughter would die, and she should not be afoot when the guards dragged the girl to the pyre. Knowing this, the mother remained at her vigil.