by Laird Hunt
Eliza was clearly not offering me a look at the ocean, even if I imagined for a thrilling moment that she was, but just the sight of a lake, grand and rippling, cool and fresh, would have been welcome. Still, I had been gone from home too long. Perhaps, I told her, someday I could come back to visit her again.
“Then you can see it when you come back. You must come back. You will come back. There is so much to see. I can show you my herbs. I have herbs for everything. I have herbs enough in my garden to cure the whole sick world!”
“Is it your herbs that are on my feet?” I asked.
“They feel better, don’t they?”
“They do! Thank you. Which way shall I go?”
“I don’t know, my darling.”
“Then perhaps you can point me to Captain Jane’s. She can lead me.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“But why not?”
She shrugged. I said I wished I could follow the first-folk man who had come to me that morning with my bonnet and basket, that perhaps he could have helped me find my quick way home.
“A man of the first folk, you say?” said Eliza, her voice darkening.
I nodded.
“I wish you had told me.”
“Aren’t these first-folk woods?”
“Not in many a year.”
“But I thought all this country was theirs.”
“Not this woods.”
“He was hunting berries like I was and only meant to help.”
“I’m sure he did. Perhaps you will meet him again as you go. Perhaps he can guide you to your home. Perhaps hope will bring him to you. Hope brings many things.” Eliza’s voice lightened as she said this, like some dark bird had lit upon it then lifted away again. She smiled more brightly than ever, then leaned over and gave me a kiss. She kissed me on the mouth and made a loud smacking sound as she did so.
Chapter 7
I went straight off in the direction it seemed to me Captain Jane and I had come, and although I moved slowly, I was soon deep among the trees. It was a fine old forest of box elder and red maple and hornbeam and black birch. For shrubs there were speckled alder and smooth sumac swaying its sharp, frondy fingers in the breeze. There were cardinals and jays aswoop between them to preen and eat at mosquitoes, and wrens sat calling out early-spring songs in the pepper bush. I could see from its leavings that a fox had been at work in the night, and I couldn’t take more than a few slow steps before a black squirrel would poke out at me and scold, which reminded me of the first-folk man and his insistence. It was nice to be off and on my way at last with my stomach full and more food at fingers’ reach if ever I felt it wasn’t. Only my feet hurt badly and with every step I took, they groaned. I did not like to look down at them but I did sometimes. Eliza had wrapped them in her herbs and rags. Blood was seeping from the deepest cuts. It looked from the height of my eyes like a rat or weasel had been gnawing at them. My toes peeping out were yellow and blue. I could not believe that a simple walk through the woods without my shoes could have done this. How could it have hurt me so?
I had walked bad-hurt before. Once in my middle girlhood I was kicked in the ankle by a gelding. The blow was halfhearted but it cracked my bone just the same. My father, who was not well that day and could not lift me, had me hold an ash stick and hop and struggle with his help all the five miles home. I had not walked easily for some months after that. Often as I lay resting, my father would come and sit beside me and tell me stories about dancing in the woods or sailing on the sea. He died some years later of a cough that clambered up into his chest. Not so long after, my mother caught her own end. We all go to our ruin. We are all the same in this.
I gave a shiver there among the trees at the thought of my mother lying still at the end of her story. She had been just as big as my man. Just as heavy. Just as strong. Once I had measured the thickness of her arm with a piece of twine. I looped it around the fattest part. By the shoulder, near the socket. I used the same twine to measure my man’s arm in the same place after our wedding night when he lay in his snores beside me and it fit just as snug. One day I would measure my son’s arm. How thick would it be? Often my man said that when he was my son’s age he had been twice as tall. I did not doubt it. I had never tried my father’s arm with twine but knew, as with my own scrawny bone sticks, I could have wound it more than twice around.
After what felt like many minutes of walking, I stopped. I thought of calling out to Captain Jane or the first-folk man or anyone at all but could not make my lips move. Instead, I settled myself with my legs crossed beneath a sweet spire and put down my bundle, which had grown warm with all my traveling. I had been taking my course from the sun and its shadows, but the sun had gone to hide behind the clouds. Thinking of my father and my mother, the weak and the mighty, had soured my mood, so I whistled a little and found a tune I liked. I realized it was one of Eliza’s, from just after my arrival, when she had stood singing quietly in her front room. It was a tune we all of us with ancestors born far away knew in the world of those days, a simple thing as you would have thought, but its words came to me in a jumble. “As I step forth…A garment fair…A dagger bare…Her golden hair…” As I whistled and tried to call up its words, a cheeky little robin redbreast dropped onto the ground some few feet from me and began to hop and dance and chirp so happily I thought he must be some glamour of the woods. He pleased me so much that I opened up my bundle, thinking to break off a piece of biscuit or some bread. But no matter how far I unwrapped my bundle all I found in it was pig, slices thick and thin. Haunch meat and loin. Trotter and tongue. A kingly gift of meat, but a queer idea for a traveler’s lunch.
Still, there was a hungry young bird before me, so I tore off a bit of fried flank and tossed it to him. He pecked it up and chirped for more. That seemed greedy so I called him a greedy guts and told him in jest that if he wanted more, he would have to give me one of his pretty feathers. As quick as you like he pecked hard at his own tail and ripped out one of his feathers with a tug of his neck and dropped it on the ground before me. Amazed, I tore off another piece of meat. Another. The bird ate and ate, then opened his wings and, without any trouble, away he flew. Tearing off the meat had made my mouth water and I put my fingers to my lips and licked at them, but my stomach was still full from my feast with Eliza, so once my fingers were cleaned I closed up my bundle again. The sun was back from its hiding place and I could see my shadow trail. No more whistling. I picked up the robin’s feather, which was edged almost to its dark tip with white and flecks of orangey red, and stood and hurried along after it as best I could.
Up through the woods I went and was happy because I could remember my dark descent of two nights before and knew I must be on the right path. “Little robin, little robin,” I called cheerily from time to time, but he never came. A crow took his place. It landed on a branch before me, and I thought, in my happy mood, to follow along after it, as I had earlier the great gang of his blackbird cousins, for it seemed willing to lead, but after flying before me from branch to branch, it dropped down quickly from the heights and startled me greatly by flapping and cawing in the sunlit air in front of my face. It might have kept this up or I might have struck it away, only I looked down and saw the pretty little robin’s feather peeking out from my pocket and said, “Is this what you want? Is it this that caught your beady eye?” I took out the feather, and indeed the crow flapped its wings once more and landed on a moss-covered rock.
Slowly, carefully, I held out the feather. Sure enough, the crow reached over quickly with its beak and took the feather and when it began flying again from branch to branch, I started following, and I thought that by granting my request as I had granted his, the little robin had not only offered me cheer but given me the gift of good guidance. I thought this happily for some time as I followed the crow but then, of a sudden, the treacherous thing waggled its wings, looked jauntily down at me, and flew off with the robin’s feather tucked safe in its beak. Still, it
was early, and all I did as I watched it fly away was laugh and then, still laughing, I set off once more. Even when the earth began to drop—and I thought it strange for it to do so because this time too I could not remember having done any climbing—I did not concern myself, because we cannot remember everything. Especially not when we have taken a fright and are running. Have left our home and lost our bonnet and berry basket and are flying barefoot through the starlit woods.
My old grandmother, my father’s mother, she of the sweet-fingered grip, had gotten turned around in the mists of age one day and had fallen over and not been able to make her way home. Fit as a sweet-strung fiddle one moment, broken and bow-less the next. Before she fell over, she had often taken me out to dig for clams on the shore. She had laughed and talked and pointed to sails on the horizon. She had asked wouldn’t I like to be on one of those boats and a-roving up and down the coast? Wouldn’t I like to fly over the waves and be scoured by wet and wind? The songs she sang were about knots and nets in the country of her birth, and many times on the sand, after she had filled her buckets, she would take me by the hands and dance. After she fell and could not rise and something like sea foam spilled from her lips, she had sat for many a month in our house until my mother grew tired of the mumbling and drooling and one day, when my father was away, tossed her up over her shoulder and carried her off. I do not know where she took her, nor would either of my parents ever tell me. In the years that followed, it took me sometimes to think I saw her walking ahead of me in the distance, with a bright blue shawl on her shoulders and a long clay pipe in her mouth. She looked—for I saw her striding along with purpose—like she had found her path again and was on her way to the water to dig for clams or board a boat. Because on these occasions I had always seen her in the warm of the afternoon, it came to seem like the right time of day to be walking straight and true.
Chapter 8
Still, it was in the very brightest portion of the afternoon after leaving Eliza’s that I came to a river and felt my hopes sink. For though a stream ran by our house, I had never seen or heard of a river in this country in all the time that my man and son and I had lived there. We did not have many neighbors but there were some and they would come to us or we would go to them so that we could speak to one another of the land and its secrets; of the best season to plant and kill, to sew and breed our stock; of signs in the dirt; and of caves and poison shrubs and ponds and rills and mounds and paths to take and others to beware and the best places to find good honey and where we must never walk alone or unarmed for fear of wolves or bears. No river had ever been mentioned on any of these visits, and yet here, rushing wide and deep, there was one. After a time, though, I thought of the little stream that ran so close to our house, and it seemed plain to me a stream could run into a river and that if I followed the river against its rushing I might yet find my way. That was good thinking, I believed, and my man would be well pleased to hear of it. More than once he had punished me for saying what he thought were stupid or insolent things and more than once he had caught my wrist when I tried to strike him back. My father should many times have struck my mother, if only to pay her in fair kind for all she had dealt him, but I have already told of the size of her arms. When I had come back from our gathering work with my ankle broken by the gelding and no use to the world, my mother had taken the switch to my father for letting me dream of the sea and the wide world beyond it instead of properly minding what I was doing. “She has a right to dream her dreams and fair and many may they be,” my father had said just before the air sizzled and the first blow fell. You could see in my mother’s furious face that it was as if in contradicting her, he had indeed found the strength to raise up his hand. He was brave for a time that day. Perhaps he was thinking of his mother, my old grandmother, and her fine, fierce ways. It was only after beads of blood began to rise that he ran squealing from the house.
I was standing in the cool of the river’s edge thinking so deeply of my mother and her regular use of the switch, which she kept ever near her and which she only ever touched my father with, that I neither saw nor heard the man come running until he was almost upon me. At first he looked so like the father running before the eyes of my mind that as he came crashing through the shallows of the broad river, I thought my reveries had brought him back to me. I was even confused when I did not see my mother on his heels with her switch, striking at him and roaring that I must not dream, that dreams would lead me to my ruin, just as they had almost led her to her own. Even so, that it was not my father became clear enough when the man ran closer and I saw that his eyes, open wide with terror, were as black as my father’s had been green. It was the first-folk man, though he held only my bonnet and not my basket now. I took in my breath and opened my jaws to speak but my words stopped short as he went splashing past and, at the sight of me, once again furiously shook his head. He called out something I could not understand then pointed behind him and made it clear that I too should run. I did not run and for a long time after he had gone past I saw nothing, only the rocky shallows of the river beneath the endless trees. In fact, it wasn’t until the man had left the river and plunged dripping into the wood and disappeared from sight that I learned what was chasing him.
I heard a low, thick chattering, like thunder chopped thin, and then saw a dark cloud racing over the water. He has been after honey, pure as Eliza’s, and found the hive full of its angry owners, I thought, stepping quickly back from the water’s edge. If this were the contents of a hive, though, then it was the greatest and grandest one ever raised on this globe, for the cloud grew and grew as if to black out all behind it, and the roar even at a distance was so fierce that I dropped flat with my bundle to the ground and covered my ears with the meat of my palms. I thought then to shut my eyes and hope for it to pass me by and leave me to walk along and find my way, but as I gave what I thought would be one last look at the swarm, the sun passed through it and it glittered more brightly and beautifully than anything I had ever seen. It was so beautiful that my eyes refused to blink and were peeled wide when the air went dark as night and the guts of the great swarm came past. While true enough there were bees aplenty among it, there were also great wasps and hornets and fire beetles and moths and flower flies. There were stone flies and mud daubers and dragon-wings and others that I had never seen. The great swarm flew fast along the river then turned hard left after the running man and went cutting with the sound of terrible saws through the trees. I did shut my eyes then, for they had begun to burn. When I opened them at last and uncovered my ears, all was silent. A digger wasp sat on a lump of water-soaked wood by the river a few feet from me. It chewed for a few moments on the wet, dark wood, then twitched its wings and was gone.
Chapter 9
All the rest of the afternoon I followed that river until I came to a high cliff and a falls and had to turn away. As the dusk crept over the earth, I chose a stony path and wound my way again into the deeps of the woods. Evening birds flashed across the path. I looked as closely as I could but saw no robins, no crows. So I walked and walked and when the light left, I heard crackling and low voices behind a stand of nearby bushes. I froze and as I did four figures came out. They were dressed in rags. One of them wore on his ankle the remains of a shackle. He walked almost as poorly as I did. The one in front let him hold on to her arm. As I watched, they were joined by a fifth figure. This figure whispered to them and led them forward, and as they hurried off away into the dark all together, I saw that the figure was Captain Jane. Too late I thought to call out to see if I might go with them at least some short way. Instead I stood silent and watched them vanish. As I did, it took my fancy that a sixth figure joined them, dashed at them out of the trees to run in a circle around their group: the little girl dressed all in yellow I had seen when I first stepped into the woods.
Two times since we had moved to this wild country and built a house and a barn and raised up pens and fences, we had had folk on the run at our door. The fir
st time it was a small man with white hair who took the egg and cheese I gave him with a courteous nod, then asked me if I would like to hear a song or a story in fuller thanks. I chose a story, for I have always liked to hear them and think afterward on how they are made, but my choice did not please him and he walked off quickly and would not stop even when I called after him that I had changed my mind and wanted the song. The second time it was three women, each one taller and broader of shoulder than the next, the last one almost as tall as my mother had been, though much finer of figure, and when my man, who was there on that occasion, told them they could not stop at our door, they did not move and they just shook their heads and folded their arms over their chests when he reached for his musket. After a time of us all standing there silently, he gave them water and salt meat and a packet of dried beans to boil just to see them off. Still the three strong women would not leave until my man had not only made them a map to follow north and out of this country but had saddled his horse and led them some miles along their road.