by Laird Hunt
“Eliza?” I said.
“It is a common enough name!” The voice that said this came from the house. It was high and handsome. I turned and saw the front door had opened. A woman stood just inside it. She was lit from behind so I saw only an outline of long, buckled hair. I paused and thought of leaving.
“Don’t be afraid, Goody,” she said.
“But I am afraid,” I said.
“Of what?”
“I left to find berries for my man and boy, that’s all.”
“And what did you find instead?”
I shrugged. I shuddered. The woman beckoned and I went to her. She put a hand on my shoulder and I stepped through her door.
Chapter 4
I had wandered in the night for such a time that it took my eyes longer than I liked to adjust to the light of this Eliza’s fire and candles and lanterns full of oil. It would be dawn soon and she liked to greet light with light, she told me as she bade me sit at a bench by the fire where a small black pot bubbled and steamed. Just as, she said as she ladled water from the pot into a basin and instructed me to place my feet in it, she liked in the evening to greet dark with dark and, fires for heat and cooking excepted, wouldn’t suffer any flame to be lit until a day had gone completely to its grave. The water was more hot than warm and my feet were so badly bruised and cut that I cried out when I put them into the basin.
“That’s a pretty cry, Goody,” said Eliza. “I cry like this.” She gave out a sharp sound that made me think first of a fox then of a hawk. Then she put the backs of her hands against the waist of her skirt and said, “No, I think it must be more like this.” This time the sound seemed to come from the back of her throat or the root of her tongue, and it was deeper and louder both, like heavy cloth taken in the teeth and torn.
“Make your cry again, Goody,” she said.
But I was tired and shook my head, and she said she understood, that it was only a bit of play, for she was in high spirits to have a visitor and had slept well and not walked away the long night without any shoes as I had. She put a woolen throw over my shoulders and said I should rest and she should be quiet and soon the night would slink away to count its accomplishments and day would come.
“It will come again,” she said.
I started to answer then didn’t because I realized I didn’t know whether she had meant the day or the night, or in truth what she had meant at all.
While I soaked my feet, Eliza chopped then mashed a smart pile of fragrant herbs she had pulled from pegs on the walls. She did not speak or make strange cries any longer, just sang quietly a little, and, as my eyes had grown accustomed to the light, I was able to look around. The front room of her house was large and neater by far than my own front room with its pile of shoes and my man’s gun and the toys he had carved for our son. My man often complained about the state of our front room and about the size of the webs the spiders built in its corners and of the size of the spiders themselves. He had often enough made us both kneel in the dust and beg forgiveness for the sin of my sloth, but there would have been no cause for kneeling and begging here. Here everything glistened. Everything gleamed. There were no cracks in the sturdy stone walls, no dust on the well-laid wood-plank floor, no work-worn clothing and soiled rags heaped on the backs of the three chairs. No old food in buckets and bowls. Often I did my cleaning, when I did my cleaning at all, in the night when my man and my boy were asleep and the fire was but a bit of glowing ash and glistening ember. I could work loudly as I liked, for my man’s snores filled the house to bursting and there was no one to tell me I had missed a spot and so must beg God’s mercy when I hadn’t even started sweeping yet. Sometimes I spoke aloud to those snores he made. The answer was always one I liked. “Have you finished with this bit of meat that fell from your beard?” Snore. “Have you brought at last the gold cup and the silver plate you promised I would have when you carried me so far away from my home by the sea?” Snore. More than once I came to stand beside him as he slept and pick crumbs from his beard and stare into his open mouth. He did not like me to do this. He did not like this at all. My son never snored but I stood very close to him in his sleeping sometimes too.
“There!” exclaimed Eliza and I started a little because I had dozed. She was crouched beside me, sprinkling her herbs into the basin with one hand and ladling in fresh hot water with the other. She must have been out in her gardens to work while I dozed, I thought, for there was black at the tips of her fingers and under her nails. I started to tell her that since she kept everything so neat, she could use the water in the basin to wash them, then stopped because I couldn’t remember if they had been like that when I arrived.
“Let your sad feet soak a little longer, then I will rub and dress them,” she said cheerily. “Perhaps when I do you will cry out again.”
Chapter 5
When I woke I was no longer in Eliza’s big bright room but on a raised pallet in a small room at the back of the house, and I could hear an unhappy pig squealing somewhere beyond its thin walls. I lay still a moment to remember where I was and how I had got there. I made it in my mind as far as Eliza’s bench and fireplace but could go no farther. It filled me with wonder to imagine Eliza lifting me up and carrying me into this place. She was slighter by some sure measure than I was. Perhaps I had woken enough to help her guide me here but not enough to remember it. Sometimes my man carried me to our bed, but he was half a giant and despite everything I had always leaped up into his arms. Once at our old home by the sea, to show a cousin that he could, he had carried me in one arm and our son in the other all the way out to the water, where he had dropped us both in. Our son had sunk straight to the bottom. He sat there waving at the emerald weeds with his hands until I plunged down and pulled him up. Not content to let the show stop after the first part of his play, my man made to haul us, wet as we both were, back up under his arms. I said dunking me and drowning our boy was game enough for one day.
“He’s not drowned!” said my man, and though I protested, and our boy bit and scratched, my man soon had us back in his clutches.
We all had palms full of sugar when we returned to the house, even our son, though he was very young. Most of his sugar went down his chin and onto his wet shirt, where it glittered. My man’s cousin had brought the sugar to us from town. He had brought a pair of chickens in a wooden box and wax for candle-making too. He and my man had fought before the evening’s end. They had moved on from sugar to tasting the cider and telling tales with my mother, and the cousin had been whittling the end of his tongue. Ever sharper it grew. My man begged my mother’s pardon, then dragged his cousin out the door, said he’d had enough of his gifts and glances in my direction, and threw him off of our property. As I watched, the cousin seemed to go sailing through the air, arms and legs flailing, straight toward me. I saw it clear as that. I started because even when I opened my eyes, I did not think he would stop.
“You have made your cry again, Goody!” said Eliza. She had unlatched my door and come in to stand beside my bed. She was wearing a bright blue dress. There was mud spattered across its hems and there was mud mixed with red under her fingernails and on her wrists.
“Have you been hunting berries?” I asked.
“Berries, dear? Were you traveling in your sleep? Is that what made you cry?”
“I was dreaming of home.”
“I dream of home too.”
“Is this not your home?”
“Were there mountains in your dream?”
“We lived for a long time by the sea. Often I dream of it.”
“In my dreams there are the mountains.”
“Tall mountains?”
“Tall enough.”
“I heard a pig earlier.”
“Yes, I have just killed one.”
“But it’s not the time for pig killing.”
“Is there a time? I wanted to be sure we had fresh meat for a feast. I have leave to kill as many pigs as I want.”
She had become ever so slightly vexed or a little worried or both, it seemed to me, as she spoke.
“Leave from whom?”
“You must come and see him.”
I sat up at this and stood and, though my feet were bandaged and hurt terribly, hobbled out on her arm. For if there was a host I must thank as well as this hostess, I wanted to do it straightaway. My mother had always taught me to give thanks as nicely as I could, to do it well and quick and to make a curtsy as I spoke. I thought of all the thanks I had given and all the curtsies I had made when I lived still with my mother and even afterward and it irked me—even there on Eliza’s arm—some small amount to do so. I had never liked much to bob and smile as my mother had made me do for tinkers, bakers, toothless goodwives, blacksmiths, and even the nameless men who had sometimes helped us with our cows. Still, I put a broad smile on my face as we came around the side of the house and I prepared to dip my head and pull at the side of my skirts. The world has its ways and we do well to abide by them. But there was no host or any sort of a man of the house waiting for me when we got there. It was only a little pig Eliza wanted to show me. Out in the mud of the yard. Still dying of its cuts and not full grown. The knife she had used lay on the dirt beside it. There were half a dozen more pigs of various sizes crowded together in a pen nearby. All of them watched us. I had never seen pigs standing so neatly in a row and barely blinking their eyes. My feet felt like the little pig looked, but I went over to it on my own, took up the knife, and quickly put an end to its loud panting.
Chapter 6
Eliza butchered better than she killed and so pleased was I to watch her at her work that when she said she would set the offal bucket outside so that she could later rinse it, I stood up quick and took it from her. She laughed kindly as I hobbled off and told me not to hurt myself, but I have ever been sturdy and even with my aching feet I managed. She had told me to set it under a tree in the yard’s middle and when I had it there I stood up straight a moment to stretch and knead my back. There was sun and fine thick shadow all around and larks were singing loudly in the trees. What a surprise I had, as my eyes sought to spy one, to find them land instead on my fellow berry hunter, the first-folk man I had seen just after entering the woods. In one of his hands he clutched my basket and in the other my lost bonnet. He held them both up as if he meant for me to have them, then pointed with the blue bonnet into the trees. When I didn’t move, he set the bonnet in the basket and gestured with his other hand so that it was clear he meant for me to come.
“Bring them to me, silly, for my feet are sore,” I said.
“Bring what?” said Eliza from the doorway of the house behind me. “Tell me and I’ll fetch them quick.”
I turned toward her when she spoke, then turned back again to the trees and saw that the first-folk man was gone.
“What is it, Goody? What is it you see? You have such a queer look on your pretty face.”
I started to speak, but then it seemed so queer indeed to me that he should have been there and then so quickly not that I didn’t tell her, said it was nothing, nothing at all.
“It’s a funny sort of nothing brings eyebrows fine as yours together so. You would think they were kissing! Come back inside where at least you’ll be warm and sitting comfortably if you spy your nothing again.”
Eliza cooked even better than she butchered and by the middle of that morning we were eating oatcakes and neat-cut pork steaks rubbed in coarse salt and sage and drenched in honey. I had more appetite than I had realized and whenever she refilled my bowl I ate it down. When I remarked with a kind of laugh on my own gluttony and said my man would have scolded me for such great gobbling, Eliza said it was natural that I should feel so hungry as I had slept straight through the day after I arrived and straight through the night that had followed.
“Put fresh pig in front of someone who hasn’t eaten and he will eat until even his teeth grow tired,” she said. “I once placed food before a woman who hadn’t eaten in a week and she ate at my table until she cried.”
I was interested in the woman who hadn’t eaten for a week and wondered if it was young pig Eliza had put in front of her too, but this news about my long slumbers made me pause.
“I must go home as soon as we have finished. My man and son will be mad with worry,” I said.
“Do they worry about you when you are gone?”
“I have never been gone.”
“Never once?”
I shook my head then paused and scratched at my scalp to think if it could be true. It was. My son had woken every morning of his life under our roof to find me near.
“My man travels away from time to time,” I said.
“Most men do. Though not mine.”
“Why not yours?”
“He likes his land. Its folds and fields suit him. He’s like a raindrop that strikes a pond. There, to be sure, but you’ll never see it again.”
I looked around the room as if her raindrop man might be somewhere sitting quietly. If she saw my gaze and gleaned my meaning she gave no sign. He’s ill abed or off away on some work in the near woods, I thought.
“My man is happy too. At least sometimes,” I said.
“And well he must be, with you for his lovely goody. How old is your son?”
“Six in summer.”
“He is young still.”
I put another bite in my mouth. Then another. The honey was delicious, heavy gold with marks of comb and only here or there a leg or wing or who knows what else that had been pulled into the trickling swamp. Eliza said she had gathered it from a hemlock hive not far from the house. I knew she must keep a cow somewhere because the feast came with cool, creamy milk. This made me think again of my berries. And of my promise, called out loudly to my man and son as I had left with my basket: “I will soak your mouth in sweetness when I return!”
“You are young yourself,” I said.
“Not as young as you, Goody.”
“I must go home when we have finished our meal together.”
“Straightaway home?”
“I cannot linger.”
“It must be very pleasant where you live. You must miss all that you have made there.”
“My husband has said that one day we will ring our house with roses and take our drink from golden cups.”
“And does he keep his promises, your good man?”
“As much as any other. We both do.”
“Then of course you can’t linger, Goody,” said Eliza. “Of course you can’t.”
We ate more then, in silence, and after we had finished I sat again on the bench by the cooking fire, which was banked low against the warmth of the afternoon to come, and watched as Eliza packed food for my long walk home. From time to time, I pressed at the floor to see how it felt against my feet but doing so made my eyes water so I stopped. The woods would have softer floors and I could pick my path carefully in the daylight and so the rocks and roots would not hinder me, I thought. I would cross the stream and gather up my shoes, if they had not been gathered, and, latch or no, my man would scold me then smoke his pipe and listen as I told him of my adventures in the woods. My son of course would cry and cry. For fear. For love. For fury. He was not yet traveled far into the journey of words. Indeed, I had never known or heard of a boy to arrive at speech more slowly. Sometimes my man would grab him hard and see if he could shake free any smart-shaped sounds. I was glad enough that this made my small son laugh even though it was perhaps not meant to. Often these shakings ended with both of them fallen on the floor and our small house raw to its roof beams with laughter. I did not join them as they laughed. I sat silent. Still, it did not much matter if my son was quick or dull, as he would work the rest of his days in the stony fields. He would work bent to the plow and walk bent with his weapon for hunting in the woods. He would gather up the ages and plant and reap what he and his father had sown. All the while I would watch. From my chair. From my window. From my garden. Watch until my eyes died at
their roots and I fell cold silent in my skirts and could watch no more.
“Here is food for your walk home,” said Eliza, handing me over a fat bundle.
“But that is far too much for the journey of a few hours and I have only just feasted at your table,” I said.
“Then you can share it with your lovely man and your lovely son when you have joined them.”
There were, it seemed to me, a few fine flecks of metal in her voice each time she said the word lovely, and I did not like to be rude, so I pulled the bundle in close and nodded and Eliza let the metal flecks fall away and smiled kindly and said, “Now, let’s see you out on your way.”
“Will you share the start of my walk with me?” I asked as she helped me up and I hobbled to the door.
“Oh, I never leave this house and its fine gardens,” she said.
I looked at her because I had been outside and seen no gardens, only yard and pigs.
“You keep your gardens elsewhere?” I said. “And your cow too?”
“They are down the path and near the water, where I’ll take the sloppy bucket when you leave. How clever of you to know I have a cow!”
“Perhaps it’s tending her each day turns your nails so dark.”
She looked at her nails and laughed.
“What sort of water is down your path?”
“Would you like to go there now, Goody? I would be most happy for you to see it.”
I hesitated, for I had always loved the water and had missed it since we had come away from the waves and into this land of streams and woods where the first folk kept their kingdom. They came sometimes to our door and gave my man tobacco in exchange for cider. One of them gave my son a doll made of corncobs. My son took the doll and straightaway tore its head off and the first-folk woman who had given it to him beamed so I did not have to punish him as I had thought I must. We had known first folk, of course, by the great waters of the ocean, but they had not been numerous, as our soldiers had chased them and many of them had taken ill in recent years and died. They had not died in any great number here, though. We could often smell the smoke of their fires when we worked the field or gathered wood for our own. Sometimes we heard their cries in the woods, and my man said he found their tracks and traces all about. My man said we smelled their smoky tracks and traces because they wanted us to. It meant, said my man, that we had both the Lord’s leave and theirs to live where we did, so close to the great wood. I often liked to think where their tracks might lead, what fine secrets burned at their farthest reaches. I told my man one night when we were all three happily eating a pheasant I had cooked quite well that I would like to follow them and see where they led, and he said firmly that if I did such a thing it would be the end of me and that we should all three pray, and so we did, that such a thing would never come to pass. Well, wise husband, I have seen one of them at work with berries and had him come again to see and help me, and here I still am, I thought.