What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

  The street was quiet. I twisted the pink glove in my hands, staring at the phone number as though it might give me a glimpse into Matthew’s other life. I gained no insight, though the handwriting was soon branded onto my mind. I thrust it back into the glove box. The car’s digital clock had turned off with its engine, so I did not know how long I had been waiting. I felt it had been too long; maybe something had gone wrong. Just as I steeled myself to open the car door and step outside, prepared to blame Marlowe if questioned, Matthew emerged, carrying a handful of pamphlets and some sort of dangling charm. I yanked my hand from the door handle and tried to look innocent.

  “Well?” I asked as he clicked in his seat belt. “Did they have good advice? What did you find? Come on, now take me step by step. What happened?”

  Matthew turned to face me. “I went inside, they asked what they could help with—”

  “They?”

  “An elderly couple. A woman and a man.”

  “They were the only ones there?”

  “Those two and a customer. And someone in the back, unloading boxes.”

  “And the elderly couple told you what, exactly?”

  “Calm down, you’ll disappoint yourself. It’s not at all exciting. They know your father, though not well. He came in years ago before your mother died, but has barely been seen in the village since. They suggested I speak with my aunt . . .” He bit his lip. “They hadn’t realized . . . For such a small place it’s amazing how slowly word gets around here.”

  “The maps?”

  “I didn’t ask about the maps. Only the spirals, which, I was told, mean either the holy trinity or phases of the moon. Or the movement of the stars. Or life, death, and resurrection. Or a triple goddess. Or the interconnection of everything. Or mind, body, and spirit. Or a mother and her child. Or a whole host of other options, spelled out in these booklets, which I think they must have printed off some website that we could have found ourselves.”

  “So much to work with!”

  “No,” said Matthew, starting the engine, “not so much to work with. We have nothing. If the spirals mean everything, they basically mean nothing. We’d do better to forget it all and stick to what we know. We’d do better, in fact, to head back to your house and wait for Peter.”

  “Just because something can be interpreted in different ways doesn’t make its meaning useless,” I said. “You must see some value in having gone into the shop.”

  “Yes,” said Matthew. “The single useful thing they mentioned is the cemetery just outside Coeurs Crossing. Apparently it’s got your spiral symbol carved into some of the gravestones. If you still insist on spending the afternoon searching, it seems like the place to start.”

  The Wedding Band

  Imogen, 1486

  Miles and Imogen married for love, neither family rich enough in property or title to object to the union, and for a few halcyon months following their wedding in the spring of the year 1484, the two were happy. Miles had steady work chopping and delivering wood to the neighboring village, and spoke of taking an apprentice. Imogen was busy with her duties as wife, excited by the novelty of keeping her own house. She had been taught by her mother to find joy in life’s daily patterns—sweeping the floors, treating the stains on Miles’s shirts, churning the butter. She sensed herself building a life out of these patterns, and took comfort in the fact that through them she could glimpse her future just as well as any oracle or seer. She would bear Miles’s children, wash their clothes and cook their meals, she would go to church on saint’s days and Sabbaths. As the children grew, they’d learn to do the same, and one day Miles and Imogen would have grandchildren to coddle.

  A proper wife, Imogen worshipped her husband second only to her God. She tended to the livestock: their two plump pigs, the bony cow her father had given as her dowry. She tried to have a proper supper ready for Miles when he came back from the forest, conjuring hearty meals from nothing even when meat was scarce. She went to his bed happily, holding her tongue when he twisted her body too roughly or his beard scratched her cheek. She prayed for him daily.

  And Miles would come home to his wife with wildflowers in hand, with tales of wolf kits he had spotted in shaded glens, bright cloth he had bought in the village. His smile would widen upon seeing Imogen there in the doorway of their cottage, and together they would thank God for granting them such happiness.

  When Imogen told Miles that she was with child, he kissed a trail across her stomach, and with tender, calloused hands he cupped her breasts. He marveled at the elasticity of his wife’s skin, the pop of her navel. He wanted her more once she was no longer simply herself, once he had claimed her so completely. Their lovemaking, for Miles, became a sort of onanism. When he thrust he’d imagine himself and not his wife as the recipient, himself in small, pure form, slowly devouring her. He could not explain the sudden onset of such solipsistic desire, nor did he understand the void left in its wake once the baby was born. He was no longer content with just Imogen, once he had known her as an embodiment of himself.

  The day of his son’s birth, Miles paced the trees outside their cottage. His own mother had died several hours after bearing his brother, and Imogen assumed this initial anxiety stemmed from the fear of a similar loss. Yet even after both the child and Imogen were declared healthy, Miles remained anxious. Imogen watched him for signs of the sweating sickness that had swept a nearby town, but his apprehension was not trailed by shivering or fever. Was he worried that the child was not his? He had no reason to suspect her of unfaithfulness: the boy had his gray eyes, his father’s auburn hair. Still, Miles would not hold his baby. He would not look at his wife. He took to frequenting the far side of the village, returning late, smelling of ale and other women’s bodies. Imogen prayed for him, but no saints seemed to hear her.

  In the night, when the child cried and Imogen rose from the bed she shared with Miles to feed him, she might catch her husband watching her nurse. Lit by the dying fire, he looked gaunt and old and jealous. Jealous of what? Imogen wondered. If anyone had cause to be jealous, it was Imogen herself, raising Miles’s child while he found comfort with others. And yet she did not feel jealousy, rather sadness at Miles’s new affliction, at her own inability to please him. She felt she must not have tried hard enough, that it was not Miles to blame but her own failure to excite him. Imogen saw no other way to reconcile her husband’s behavior with his previous elation, could not otherwise understand such disdain from a man she thought she knew, her own simple woodcutter, who’d wooed her with sweet words and gentle smiles.

  As time passed and Miles grew more distant, Imogen felt she had to act. She attempted to seduce him, but their lovemaking was wooden, passion drained. She tasted other women on his breath. She was afraid to tell Miles of the second child, whispered the news late at night, hoping he might be asleep. But Miles was not, and to his wife’s surprise, he was thrilled at her announcement. He leaped up and kissed her, smiling his old smile for the first time in months. He swore to be faithful. He cried in Imogen’s arms, and she promised to forgive him.

  THEIR LAST WINTER together was a harsh one, early snows destroying crops, blocking passages for trade. Firewood was in demand and Miles delivered, but many of his usual customers were unable to pay. Their small family kept warm, but went hungry.

  Imogen heard no more rumors about Miles. She was pleased with his renewed attentions, to herself and to their son. Still, the dark season seemed endless, and Miles was often gone. In the house, one son crying at her feet, another sucking life inside her, Imogen grew restless. She imagined Miles kissing the neck of another, imagined him dry in the whorehouse while his own roof leaked.

  One night it grew increasingly late; it grew unbearable. Be patient, she instructed herself. Have faith in him, faith in the Lord. The hours passed. Miles did not return. The drip of melting snow through the crack in the roof grew ever louder. Her son’s whimpering increased. The child within her womb twisted and writhed. Imogen could no
longer be patient. She bundled herself and her child into their warmest clothing and set out to hunt for Miles.

  ALL IT TOOK was a single moment: Imogen’s feet cold in the snow, her son pulling her skirt, her husband off with another village whore. They were hungry, there’d soon be another mouth to feed. The child tugging. Her husband gone. Who does he think he is now, getting his fill of that woman— The cupboard at home, bare. Wind blasting, ice in Imogen’s bones. Her child whimpering. If only—

  Imogen squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head, tried to banish sinful thoughts. She reached back for her son, who she’d brushed off her skirts in uncharacteristic frustration. There was no one behind her. The wind had softened; the snow had disappeared.

  “I didn’t mean it,” Imogen said aloud, sinking to her knees. “I didn’t mean any of it.”

  But the only response was the low whisper of trees.

  10

  Regarding the disposal of bodies, I knew more of ancient practice than modern. A picture I remembered from one of Peter’s books displayed a burial mound, a small hill like a tumor squatted green upon a meadow, marked by rings of upright stones. These mounds were man-made, though I could not imagine how a man might mold the earth in such a way. I could not imagine how a king, upon his death, might ask his retinue to follow, to crawl into his cave, close their eyes, and take their own last breaths. Voicing my disbelief to Peter, he’d explained that mine was a concern that stemmed entirely from the culture I’d been raised in. There were still, today, societies, he told me, where a wife might end her life with loss of husband, strap herself onto his funeral pyre and embrace his flames.

  “But not a husband’s loss of wife?”

  “Besides,” said my father, ignoring the question, “your conception of a life is fully Western, fully modern. We’ve lost that innate sense of service, no longer need to see our kings as gods. What need was there, back then, to live on without your maker, your captain, your light?”

  Burial in itself was a difficult concept to me, though I supposed dark ground was preferable to being wild beasts’ vittles. In the graveyards, I knew, the buried waited for salvation, revelation, words that meant their lives would become more. What if, I once said, giggling, I was to dig them up and fulfill this desire? Would the dead wander, brittle-boned and fleshless, through the village? Would they take to their shrunken patellas and pray? Peter had not laughed, and told me not to belittle what others believed, which seemed contrary to other things he’d said to me. I could only assume that he was thinking of my mother, her own grave site, the life he had lived in her wake. I had asked him where she was buried, if we could make a visit to her grave. His only response was to shake his head and sigh. He seemed so lost, so dejected, so unlike the Peter I knew, that I did not press him further.

  COEURS CROSSING’S GRAVEYARD was a jumbled collection of stones, a menagerie of styles and faded colors. A marble angel stood watch at the gated entrance, arms spread wide, her eyes closed, moldy wings whitewashed with bird droppings. The hill beside her had once been a sacred landmark, ravaged by raiders some centuries back, and among the neatly ordered graves the stubby foundations of a ruined church burst from the grass like old, worn teeth, its only lasting wall covered in moss, a reminder that the whole place was a palimpsest, dead buried upon other dead, the past never erased.

  Matthew explored a small chapel at the cemetery’s center while I walked the rows of tombstones, looking for the spiral pattern, squinting to read names of the deceased. My mother’s grave I found in the far corner, surrounded by her fellow dead Blakelys—MARIAN JEAN, 1810–1852; JANE PATIENCE MULHOLLAN, 1690–1772; EMMA CORDELIA, 1812–1817. This last was just a child, and I pictured her miniature toes, her tiny fingers, her compacted skull decomposing under my tennis shoes. Below her name, carved in her stone, was a crude rendering of Peter’s triple spirals. Life, death, and resurrection. The interconnection of everything. A mother and her child.

  And then I saw it, LAURA ANN, engraved in curling letters, a hairline fracture splitting the top of her stone. No spiral for my mother, no angel, no rose. No words of comfort, written mainly for the living, which might grant her guidance from her first life to the next. Marlowe settled by her side, curling himself into a fluffy ball, and I noticed that his coat was precisely the shade of the soil on which he lay.

  “Mother,” I whispered, testing the word, bending to touch the rough granite.

  What need was there to live without your maker?

  At ten years old, in my princess-print pajamas and an old pair of rain boots, I had snuck out of the house a good four hours after my bedtime and used my touch to bypass the padlock on the door of our wooden garden shed. Peter found me rifling through broken flowerpots and tangled hoses.

  “What is this, Maisie? It’s past midnight.”

  I was looking for a shovel.

  “And why do you need a shovel?”

  “I need to dig up a grave.”

  Peter, in his bathrobe and slippers, sank down next to me onto the floor of the shed. He sighed and adjusted his glasses.

  “You need to dig up a grave,” he repeated.

  Of course I did not dig up a grave, not that or any other evening. Peter patiently explained that it would take more than a child with a shovel to unearth my mother’s coffin and lift it from the ground. Even with the right equipment, if it were opened, I would not look on my mother, just a dry tangle of bones.

  “How do we find her, then?” I asked him.

  Peter tapped the side of his head with a finger. “In our memories,” he told me. He tapped the left side of his chest. “In our hearts.”

  In the years following, I’d tried not to think much about my mother. In part, this was because it seemed she did not think of me—not now, where she lay buried under layers of soil in the Blakely plot, nor years ago at my conception. Had she felt me, there inside her? In those first few weeks of life, as I’d curdled to creation, had she sensed the small sprout of me suckling? A secret, Peter called me, a grand surprise she had been waiting to unveil. But he could not know that. We could not know she’d been aware of my existence at all.

  Your mother waits for you. Ever since I’d first heard Mother Farrow’s tale of the mother whose love rescued her child, I had dreamed of our reunion. I’d imagined, despite myself, that one day I would wake to find my mother leaning over me, stroking my forehead, whispering her forgiveness, assuring me of her love. This fantasy required a sort of mental balancing act, a recognized delusion that sat opposite the scale from practicality. I had to cast aside all logic to even entertain the possibility, yet I knowingly found myself wondering: Was the murmur of the trees beside Urizon proof of Mother Farrow’s story, or merely the swagger of the wind trying to make itself known? In the indifferent light of day I knew my mother was not waiting for me, watching me. She’d never once come to offer me rescue from the prison of my body, nor the stifling confinement of the house. Hoping for her was foolish; it would only lead to heartache. And still, late at night, I would wake in my room in the darkness, and wish, despite myself, its walls might be her womb.

  UPON ENTERING THE graveyard, Matthew and I had been alone, but now I saw that we’d acquired company. Several yards to my left, Matthew was making conversation with a stocky woman carrying an elaborate, ribboned wreath. To my right a figure crouched beside a headstone, uncomfortably close, having slipped in beside me and Marlowe without catching our attention. As he stood I could see that he was a young man, tall and handsome, with dark hair and a strong, dimpled chin. He had thin lips, a straight nose, thick, shapely eyebrows. The same man I’d seen speaking with the workers by the van, who had gone into the souvenir shop after Matthew. Up close he was undeniably handsome, reminding me of the figures on the covers of some of Mrs. Blott’s more torrid romance novels.

  Marlowe followed my gaze and scrambled up, displacing dirt, catapulting two muddy front paws onto the young man’s chest and nearly knocking him over.

  “Marlowe!” I said.
“Naughty!” In such a place I should have had my dog on a leash, and now I silently blamed Matthew for not making the suggestion. To this new young man: “I’m sorry, he’s generally calmer. I hope he hasn’t disturbed your . . .” Was mourning the appropriate word to use? The stranger was far more self-possessed than the blubbering woman still speaking with Matthew, calmer than I was as I appraised my mother’s headstone, but why else would he have come to a graveyard if not to pay respects to the deceased?

  “Not at all,” the young man said, stooping down to ruffle Marlowe’s ears. “You’re a pretty boy now, aren’t you?” He straightened and held out a hand for me to shake. “I’m Rafe.”

  Flustered, I bent into a semblance of a curtsy, almost tripping on a partially concealed grave and grabbing a statue to steady myself. A bit of moss brightened. I took a step closer to Rafe, trying to hide its transformation.

  “A fascinating family, the Blakelys,” Rafe said, gesturing toward the stone that had stopped me. “A sordid, tragic history, theirs. There’s a woman in the village that keeps up their old estate, though I’ve never heard of anyone visiting. Some remarkable rumors surrounding the family, as recent as that gravestone there, for Laura.”

  “What rumors?” The question fell out of my mouth at mention of my mother’s name, but Rafe just smiled at me, offering no answer. He pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket and uncapped a ballpoint pen. I hoped I hadn’t somehow offended him. My pulse quickened, my whole body buzzing with curiosity. I felt as if my mother, long imprisoned, was now crying to be freed. I bit my lip. “Are you a historian?”

  “You could call me that. Certainly a student of a history as interesting as this.” Rafe grinned again, apparently unfazed by my awkwardness. He cleared some dirt off the headstone beside him, jotted something in the notebook, then looked up at me. His eyes were very blue, a shade I’d only ever read about in books.