In the House in the Dark of the Woods

by Laird Hunt

  He came home from that ride in a good humor, which could be seen even at a distance and, when he was closer, through his thick beard, and took up our boy and set him on his lap. He said as I put gamed fowl before him that he had been God’s soldier that day. When I asked him if it was being God’s soldier that had earned him the bracelet of string and seashell he now wore tied around his wrist and that I had last seen decorating the tallest woman’s arm, he did not strike me, as he might have, or instruct me to pray for having doubted him, only took the bracelet off his wrist and tied it around our boy’s leg and said it had been sent back with him as a gift for our little man. It was a gift earned, he said, for his good service in guiding those three lost souls down the road. Which was surely what, it seemed to me, Captain Jane must be doing with the souls I had seen in her care.

  Though Captain Jane, I thought, would have straightaway made sure any people in grave peril had food to eat and roots to chew and a good path to follow as they went along their way and not let them stand there as my man had. Captain Jane would not have tied a favor from one of them onto her wrist after having made them wait so long for her help. No matter how pretty the favor might have been. I felt sure of this.

  Later, as I sat with pig meat in my hands, leaning my aching back against a wild plum whose blossoms glowed heavy and white above me, Captain Jane came to me, wearing her magnificent cloak of black wolf skin. At first she seemed a drift of mist and then a double yard of crepe or silk, and both things I readily believed were before me, for every wood after dark bears the blooms of our bright fancies.

  “You have gone out walking again, my poor dear,” she said. I could see now the string she wore on her wrist was faded red. I reached out my hand weakly, touched at it, and nodded.

  “And look at you now.”

  “Others have been walking and running in the woods this day and night. I’m not the only one.”

  “I help those I can. Those who stray into the wood and deserve helping.”

  “Do I deserve helping?”

  “Of course you do, poor thing. How could you even ask?”

  “It seemed easy to ask.”

  “You are tired.”

  “Some I saw this day were not helped.”

  “Not all deserve it. And need to be shown they don’t belong here. That it is no longer their woods. Not anymore.”

  “I saw the swarm that chased him.”

  “I love a swarm. Was it grand?”

  “It was very large.”

  “I well expect it was.”

  Captain Jane pinched the fingers of one hand together and made them fly, buzzing, through the air. The fingers of her other hand soon came to keep them company. She looked at my hands and gestured that they should join her too but I kept them in my lap.

  “I have never seen such a thing. I could never have dreamed it,” I said.

  “Ah, perhaps I’d have seen it too if those poor souls hadn’t come along. What was it made of? Wasps? Dragon-wings? Beetles? There is nothing in these woods like a swarm.”

  “There was another could have helped them in your place. A little girl.”

  “You saw her?”

  “I thought I did.”

  “Did she run this way and that and in circles like a pretty dog?”

  “Yes, just like that!”

  “I know the one. I know her well. She came to tell me about the swarm. She made me stop and bend down and she said, ‘Bzzzzzz!’ in my ear.”

  “Where are they now, the souls you helped?”

  “Well on their way.”

  “I was on my way. I was on my path home.” My voice sounded odd, too bright by far. As if another had put it on like a mask to blow a trumpet through my mouth and sound a farce. I felt like my husband had looked when he had come back with the bracelet.

  Captain Jane came close and crouched down beside me.

  “You will never make it home on those poor feet. I must take you again to Eliza, I fear.”

  “Couldn’t you take me to your house? Just for the night? Just until dawn? Perhaps it is closer?”

  “You are already in my house. But not all find it as fit as I do for rest and sleep, play and work.”

  “This wood is your house?”

  “This wood dark and fair.”

  “Then yes,” I said. “Please take me again to Eliza. For fair as it may be, your house scares me.” My strange, bright voice cracked as I said this, no doubt because I had gobbled too much meat and was tired and the wolves were howling in the reaches and, though Captain Jane kept her hands at her sides, the swarm in my head was flying around and around.

  Chapter 10

  I was several days and several nights in Eliza’s small room this time. I had caught a chill in the damps by the river, perhaps as I lay in the mud as the swarm swept by, and my feet had worsened and the invisible swarm of a fever flew in through the cracks in the walls and took me far away. More than once as I drifted above the house in the wood surrounded by mud and pigs, I soared over the surrounding treetops and thought I could spy, far off in the distance, the very furnace at the center of the sun. It was so beautiful, so wondrously clear, that I told Eliza of it when I woke and found her dabbing at my brow with a shadow-cooled rag or working her nimble fingers on my feet.

  “Have you flown up and seen the sun of the world, Goody?” she said.

  “I have never seen anything of its kind before. It was brighter than a dream of heaven. It was the sun within the sun!”

  “That’s a gift, that is, to see through shadows.”

  “Oh, yes, I can see through shadows!”

  “And through the night?”

  “I can see through the bone to its marrow. I can see through life to its harrow. Once I dreamed my mother was a king and my father a queen and saw straightaway upon my waking I was not wrong. I made them each a crown of daisies but when I told them what my dream had been, only my father would put his on.”

  “My, my…”

  “I must tell Captain Jane! I must tell my man! I must sing it to my boy. Fire, fire, fire, fire!”

  “And so you shall, my dear Goody. And so you shall.”

  My fever broke and I ceased such babbling, but still my head spun and still I lay without moving from my bed. Eliza came many times each day without fail, most often sitting on a small stool, laughing and talking and rubbing my feet like the sister I had never had. We spoke of sisters, for she had had one, and I had wanted one desperately to soothe the long loneliness that had burned across my earlier days and scorched them still. My mother had carried and birthed and lost five children before me and two after, and when I whined to her that I would like a sister, my mother would say that my father was to blame for the barren row I found myself in, and that all I had to do if I was lonely was go to the graveyard and play with the ghosts. I did not like that suggestion and was as unhappy with my mother as one can imagine for making it, I told Eliza, who nodded and said that in her experience, mothers often said cruel things. Eliza’s mother, for instance, had once told her after she, Eliza, had made a complaint about the size of her feet that she could quickly solve the trouble of their size by chopping off her toes.

  “My mother liked to beat my father,” I said. “She once told me that it gave her greater joy to do so than anything else, that it lit the winked-out stars and set the tilted trees aright. Men who beat their women were as common as hard crust on comfort jars, she said, but women who beat their men were as rare as rubies in the wilderness and must be treasured. She said this at table with my father sitting close.”

  “Was she like you, your mother?”

  “We were nothing alike.”

  “But could she see things clear like you can? Could she see straight through you? See through your hair and skin to your blood and bones? Did she ever give your cheek a lick to see how you tasted and tell what you would become? Did she have a scar on her chest like a door? Did she ever leave you for long periods? Did a squirrel ever come and sit on her shoulde
r and whisper in her ear?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “And I’m only having fun, dear Goody. My mother never beat my father, nor could she have if she had cared to, at least not in front of me, for he was dead of a quail bone in his breath pipe the week before I was born.”

  I told Eliza I was sorry she had never known her father for he might have been a good man, like mine had been, even if he was so weak. She said that her own mother had never spoken of her father, beyond occasional mention of his inconvenient dying, and would not answer any question about him put by either herself or her older sister, Glory. Glory had been pleasant enough—though like many sisters she had sometimes held her down and pulled her hair and scratched her and spat upon her face—and they had often played games together. I told Eliza I would like to hear about the games, and Eliza said that we could play. I said I did not yet feel entirely well, but Eliza said there were games that could be played without much thought or moving. When I said I would very much like to try, she clapped her clever hands, then ran off to fetch a mirror.

  It was small and round and set in a worn, wooden frame and had a handle carved with leafy growth. I had used a mirror before but not in some great while, for my man could not abide them for the vanity he thought they fueled and had willfully broken the little mirror I had had from my mother who had had it from hers even though he knew it would cost him in fortune and dampen his luck.

  “My luck has already been dampened,” he said, pointing around us at the wilds we had come to, and of course I could not disagree with him.

  The game was called What Do You See? and to play it, Eliza told me, you shut your eyes, took hold of the mirror, then opened them again.

  “But if I hold the mirror before my face and open my eyes, I will just see my face and where is the good fun in that?” I said after Eliza had explained it.

  “You must not speak for a hundred count after opening your eyes,” she said. “After the hundred count is done and if your eyes have stayed on the mirror, you may speak and discover then what it is you have to say.”

  I repeated my doubts about the fun of this game but sat up in bed, closed my eyes, and accepted the carved handle when Eliza touched my palm with it. I liked its weight and took a moment to run my thumb first along the handle then up in a series of swirls over its smooth back. Then I held it in front of my face, lifted my chin a little, and opened my eyes. I gasped a little at first for I did not look at all the way I remembered myself from staring sometimes into pools or polished stone or dark bowls of still water when my boy and man were away from the house. My face was smaller and neater, for all it looked a little worn, and my nose straighter and my forehead smoother. The hair that fell about my face was long and delicately ringed and pleasantly golden in the room’s dim light. I am handsome! I thought, but when Eliza noted that the hundred count was done and I might speak, I found myself telling of pigeons and owls and insects and knives and cords for binding and words of fury and the rabbit skull my man had hung at the barn door with my purple thread.

  “You see, Goody!” said Eliza and clapped again.

  I told her I was astonished for I had meant even until the opening of my lips to speak of my face and how pleased it had made me to look upon it. My fairness as a child had ever worried my mother. If someone remarked upon the sheen of my hair, she cut it off. If someone said my teeth shone lovely, she told me to keep my mouth closed the next time I went abroad or she would reach into the hearth and rub them black. When the dress she had made me came to fit too closely and the eyes around me became too hungry, she tore it off me and made me wear a sack. She had given me the mirror to ensure I stayed plain and said I must never pinch at my cheeks or bite at my lips and I must take in slow breaths whenever my color rose. Once a woman at market in a wide-brimmed black hat to which she had pinned a single deep red rose turned her head to me and told me I was a lovely thing. She held my gaze longer than I could bear and when my cheeks began to burn as red as her rose, I bent my head and thanked our Lord that it was my father and not my mother standing there.

  I told Eliza that she should try it, that we should see what she would speak of instead of her own lovely face, but she grew quickly quiet and would only take the mirror from me to set it aside, then she turned the subject to other games she and her sister had played. I begged her to take her turn, but she told me instead of a game called Change About, a game that we could try when next we saw Captain Jane, for it was best played, this game, with as many players as possible.

  In Change About, she said, each took a part in a common scene and at a given moment switched. There were different ways to play it. In one, you could switch in only one direction so that once you had had one part, you could never have it again. Hansel could be Gretel and Gretel could become the old lady and the old lady could become her oven and bake all the children of the world but no matter how tasty they were she could never be the old lady again. In the version she and Glory had liked to play, they changed back and forth many times. Their favorite had been the game of the wolf eating the little girl. They had gnawed on each other’s ribs and gobbled each other’s entrails and torn out each other’s hearts. Sometimes their mother had agreed to join in and so the hunter—who got to the girl in time, or perhaps didn’t—could be a part of the game. If friends or cousins were available to play, then there could be a grandmother to lie in the bed or rabbits or ravens to look on from the high grass or in the branches of nearby trees and villagers to help the hunter. It was such fun, said Eliza, to be first the little girl getting herself eaten, then the wolf doing the eating, then the hunter the killing, then the rabbit or raven screaming murder, then the villagers going for their torches, and to get to call out “Switch!” when the game was well along. If you grew tired, you left the game and went and sat on the side or the others picked you up and threw you in the bushes or made you climb a tree.

  I said it sounded like a grand game and that I would like to try it when I was feeling stronger. Didn’t she wish, in the meantime, though, to take her turn with the mirror? When I mentioned the mirror again she picked it up, touched a little at its back and handle, put it down again beside me, and left the room.

  I felt enough myself the next morning to creep out of my closet and into the front room. As soon as she saw me Eliza stopped her work with a scrubbing brush, exclaimed with pleasure, and led me to the bench by the fire. She told me to sit and rest for she could see that while I was better, I was not yet full strong. It was true that my head had already begun to turn and the room with it as I had stood there in greeting and I was glad of the bench and the table behind it to lean against. Eliza asked me if I was hungry and gave me a cup of thin broth before I had answered. I hadn’t thought of eating in some long time but sipped a little at the broth while Eliza brought a blanket over to wrap around my shoulders. I was not cold, exactly, there by the fire in her fine front room, but I had been shivering.

  “You are so very kind to me,” I said.

  “Of course I am, silly, for we are friends!”

  “I have never had a friend.”

  “Can that be true?”

  “Only animals and dolls and sometimes my small son.”

  “Well, you have a friend for certain now!”

  She went back to her scrubbing as soon as she had me settled and I drank at my broth and looked at the fire, which was small but tight-packed and hardy, like a springtime fire should be. Sweet fire, I thought. For I realized fire too had always been my friend. How many times had I spoken to it, murmured to it, told it my secrets? My husband and I had always agreed on the subject of fire. If I asked for a fresh log he always knew what size and shape I had in mind. If he asked for kindling I knew what weight of it to bring and what kind would serve the moment best. There is pleasure real to be had in keeping just the right fire. He and I had frequently spoken of it. Often, when he returned from one of his trips abroad, after we had knelt and prayed together, he would tell me first about the fires
he had lit for himself, about how well and long they had performed. Sometimes he stopped at the remains of a first-folk fire and studied them and then told me what fuel they had used and how they had piled it and how brightly it would have burned. It was true that I liked to build the fire in our hearth bigger and brighter than he did, but he never stopped me and sometimes even shared my laugh or smile as I filled our little house with heat. A small fire was just as nice.

  As I sat there, I told Eliza about my husband and the matter of fire and of fires, complimenting her as I did so on how she kept her own. I told her that neither I nor my man would have built ours differently. She had chunks of well-cured maple wood and some of oak at the ready should she need them, I noted. She told me that even when I was down with fever I had a falcon’s eye for things both near and far. She scrubbed at her floor and at her walls and said that her own husband had been no use at all when it came to fires, that he had always waited for her to light them and when he was alone did as often as not without.

  “Is your poor husband dead, dear Eliza?” I said.

  “Dead?” she asked. She stopped her scrubbing and sat up to think, it seemed, about what I had said. She leaned forward a little and wrung out her wet towel over a bowl.

  “My husband isn’t dead. Or at least, not that I know of. Granny Someone says he’s not.”

  “Granny Someone?”

  She shrugged and nodded as if this were the name of a friend she might already have mentioned, one that we had discussed and that I should know. “Our home was far from here. As far as your old home by the sea. Didn’t I tell you I was from the mountains? In my dreams, at least, my man and my home are there still.”