by Laird Hunt
“And also of course I have told them our good news. It made them so happy! Can’t you see how excited they are?”
I looked over her shoulder at the pigs but could not see their excitement. They stood close to one another, rubbing flank and shoulder. One of them gave a soft grunt.
“What is our good news, Eliza?” I said.
She looked at me as if she were astonished. She said, “Why, it is the best news in the world!”
“What is?” I said. I laughed a little, though it was no true laugh, for she was looking at me so queerly.
“We spoke all last night about it, Goody. Don’t you remember? Has a return of the fever robbed it away?”
“I remember nothing of any talk,” I said. “We had no talk. I remember our game with the mirror, then my bath, and afterward my strange dreams.”
“What strange dreams, Goody?”
“Now it is your turn not to remember.”
“How could I remember your dreams?”
Eliza took a step away from me, straightened her skirts, let some of the curve of her smile fall away from her lips. “What did you dream, Goody?”
I started to speak but found I could not tell her. Eliza felt at my forehead and touched at my pulse. She looked me up and down and, though she seemed satisfied, sighed again. There was something in this sigh and in her strange words about news that made me angry.
“Don’t call me Goody,” I said sharply.
“But why?”
“Because it’s not my name.”
“Of course it’s not. What should I call you? I’ll call you whatever you like.”
“You know my name. I wrote it down.”
Eliza’s smile did not waver when I said this but I saw her eyes flick up and down the length of me and I realized I had clenched my fists. I could feel a pounding pulse in my neck, and my legs were shaking. I brought in a breath but it would not take. I took another and held it, then let it go with a gasp.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“But it does!”
“Never mind what I wrote. Call me Goody. It’s what the world calls me. For I am a wife.”
“But I am not the world…”
“Call me Goody. I don’t mind when you call me that.”
“Because we’re friends, Goody?”
I nodded. One of the great pigs grunted. I looked over Eliza’s shoulder. It grunted again. “Were you called Goody? Before you came to live here in the woods?” I asked.
“I think so. Yes. I must have been.”
“And did you like it?”
“I don’t remember.”
I nodded. For it suddenly seemed such a silly thing to be wasting words or anything else on. The silliest thing in the world.
“Forgive me,” I said. “I have an anger that runs away with me.”
“Like a volcano.”
“Or a crashing wave.”
“Or an avalanche of earth and rock.”
“It always passes.”
“But comes back.”
“You understand everything.”
“Of course I do.”
“Say you forgive me.”
“I forgive you.”
“What is this news you spoke of and that I can’t remember?”
Eliza smiled, dipped her chin, took my hands in hers, and lifted her shoulders. “Our news,” she said, “is that you have decided to stay here. With me,” she added. “With us,” she said, pointing back at the pigs.
“I have what?”
“You have decided to stay.”
“I said I would like to play at Change About with you and with Captain Jane. And this morning that I would like to see your lovely garden and the water you spoke of. You are my friend and I have not had another in many a year. But I never said I wanted to stay, Eliza. I cannot stay. I must keep my promise. I must go home.”
“But it was decided!” she said.
“It was not!” I said.
The anger I thought had left me had only been resting a moment. I dropped to my knees and, dragging my nails and knuckles, made the word no in the yard’s packed dirt.
“Can you read, Eliza?” I asked. The venom of my words carried clearly across the yard. For when they heard them, the pigs shrieked and began to turn circles and bite wildly at each other and run at the sides of their pen.
Chapter 14
Eliza made no shriek of her own but would not speak to me for all of the next few hours, and when finally she came to me where I had gone to sit and drowse beneath a sugar maple on a bed of breeze-worn mosses, it was to hand me a cup of the healing tea she had kept me filled with all the days and nights I had spent with her, even when I had not been able to lift my head alone to drink it. Once the cup was in my hand she walked quickly away.
“I will need shoes this time if I am to make it safe to my man and son,” I called after her.
“I have no shoes but the ones for my own feet and may soon need them myself,” she called back.
I swallowed the tea in a single gulp, stood, and brushed off the bits of fluff and grass that had settled lightly upon me as I sat. It is one of the oddest things about the world, that it wants constantly to drop something onto you, some small reminder of itself, branch or stone or seed or dust. You might think we were born to become midden heaps and not engines for hosannas and hard work. I followed Eliza with the idea of pursuing the matter of shoes and leaving. She walked faster than I could manage, slow as still I was, but once she had passed the pigpen, whose residents stood in their straight row again but this time only glowered at me, I could see that she was heading in the direction of the gardens she had so lovingly described. So I slowed my step and then, feeling well foolish after my rest for having done it, stopped a moment to kick away the no I had written on the dirt. “I never told her I would stay,” I felt compelled to say to the pigs as I did this, but they had become interested in some slop in the corner of their pen and ignored me. Leaving them behind, I listened to see if the sound of other, finer animals or the lapping of water would lead me. Animals I could hear, but they were animals of the air and trees. Wrens and cardinals and large red squirrels who clicked and scolded. Still, my man had always told me to walk through the woods with the deep part of my eyes and not the shallow, and by and by I felt I could see before me a path. It ran on through a stand of old spruce whose drooping arms seemed to touch hungrily at me as I passed.
The way turned sharply when I had moved beyond them and as I stepped around a great rock covered in brown moss and orange lichens, I came upon Eliza. She stood, with some light breeze lifting her hair, facing away from me on the grassy banks of a great and lovely lake. There was many a handsome reed around her and red-eyed ducks afloat, and the sight of the clear water, rippled and deep, made me forget for a moment to breathe. In the foreground, paddling back and forth before her, was the goose from which she plucked her quills. It was a great heavy thing and gave a happy honk as it paddled, as if it were glad to see her. Farther off along the banks in one direction were the pleasant pens and peeping heads of all the animals she had described, and the most enchanting beds of early herbs and plants stretched out as far as I could see in the other. I didn’t know which way I wished first to turn and so thought I should run to Eliza and take her hand and see where she would lead me. It was all a marvel and I wanted more than anything I could remember to forget our silly quarrel and visit this place with her. And visit it I might have and even stayed for a swim in its fragrant waters only the wind changed or I shifted and felt the press of the child’s bark in my pocket. Before I had even a moment to think, I had brought it back out into the air and had lifted it to my eye.
Gone immediately were the gardens, gone the lake, gone the handsome pens. A crow much like the one I’d met in the woods but with half its old, foul feathers plucked was pecking at its own feet, and Eliza was standing, arms outstretched as if in greeting, up to her ankles in a swamp. She still faced away from me, and her hair, which only those min
utes before had seemed shiny and sun-filled, now hung dark and damp, and the part of the teeth I could see her give welcome with were a blighted brown. There was a nasty bruise on her cheek. Her nose looked swollen, as if it had been struck, and her clothes were filth-covered and torn almost to rags.
“Come now, even if you are grown weary of me, come to me one last time, for I need to feel the warmth of you for courage,” she said, opening her arms even wider, and when her arms moved, it seemed to me, as I peered through the black bark, that there was someone or something just beyond her that her rags and frail body blocked from my view. Worse was the feeling that came over me that whatever thing it was, it was not looking at Eliza; whatever it was, it was looking straight through her at me. I pulled myself back behind the boulder, took two quick steps, stumbled, and came down hard to the ground. As I fell, I flung my arms forward, and far away from me toward the heavy trees flew the little bit of bark. I gave a cry when it did but heard footfalls behind me and dug my fingers into the dirt and stood and half slipped again and staggered sideways and hit hard against the orange rock.
“You will hurt yourself galloping around like that, Goody,” came a cheerful voice. It took me a moment to understand that it was Eliza’s. A moment longer to dare to look up and see her standing before me, as I knew her, in her smart dress, with her bright, fresh smile, unbruised face, and beautiful hair. Behind her was the grand lake of lapping water and next to the lake were the gardens and beyond the gardens a cow chewing its cud next to other animals housed in sturdy sheds.
“I didn’t know you had followed me, silly thing! Come and take my hand and let me show you all that’s here,” said Eliza.
I didn’t move. My wrist hurt. I held it hard against my side.
“Why, look at you!” said Eliza. “You look as if you’ve had a fright.”
“I have had a fright.”
“What sort of a fright?”
“I have seen.”
“Seen what?”
“Last night through the lens of sleep and shadow and through the bark just now.”
“What have you seen?”
“I don’t know. You won’t tell me what this is. You speak of hearts and of him. You should weep for the lie of this place.”
Eliza frowned.
“I haven’t wept in years. There are no tears left in my head.”
“What were you looking at when you lay upon the floor last night? What was there with you? What was at the back of that room?”
“Are you well, Goody?”
“When you lay upon the icy floor!”
“What icy floor? My house is warm! What have you seen? And why would it hurt you to see me? Haven’t I been your friend, even if we have had today a small misunderstanding, whose fault I gladly claim?”
“I must go home now. I must go home to my man and my son. They need me. They will do a dance when they see me. I will keep my promise. I will give them berries and feed them cream.”
Eliza crossed her arms over her chest. She looked straight at me a long time, then cocked her head.
“First come and look at my garden,” she said.
“I will not come with you,” I said. “I have looked through the bark and seen what is here.”
“Ah, the bark,” she said. “That little girl is always playing tricks. You were given a gift to twist the light and make you doubt. All you see through that bark is your own portion of sadness, Goody. Nothing more.”
“What it showed me seemed no trick, or less a trick than all this fine world now behind you does. It’s too early for plants such as these to be up!”
Eliza nodded. She smiled. She tossed her pretty hair, and the goose honked and the cow behind her lowed.
“Go, then, Goody. We will visit my gardens another day. Perhaps we will take a swim out into the water. You can swim, can’t you? Sometimes Captain Jane comes to swim with me there, for she loves the water too and has also been granted the use of it.”
“I will never visit your gardens. Or swim in your swamp.”
Eliza’s smile did not waver. In fact, it grew stronger. It grew stronger and she gave her shoulders a hearty shrug.
“Go on, then, my poor, pretty darling. I can see you still need it. Go home.”
I hurried then away from her and that place as fast as my feet would allow me. Now, at every other step I took, the woods heaved into black and deep and drear. The air I moved through went from warm to cold then back again as if summer and winter were battling. I saw a great black wolf with bloody jaws when I took one step and a huge bird with a rotten fish speared on the end of its beak when I took another. I wished I could close my eyes to rub and clear them but didn’t dare as there were roots and sharp branches all about. Whatever had been out on the water beyond Eliza’s welcoming arms followed behind me. I felt sure of it. I could hear it coming, faster and faster. Faster and faster I ran.
Still, the farther away from Eliza’s gardens I got, the better I felt, and by the time I reached her house, just that moment bathed in light from the late afternoon, I felt silly for having taken fright. As a girl I had seen spirits and goblins aplenty. I was not alone in this. When she was young, my mother fell into a hole filled, my father told me, with brilliant-hued birds. A hole in the ground. She told her parents what had happened and that the birds had been kind but now she had climbed out, now she was safe. Her parents hugged her and held her close, but when soon after creditors came calling, and they were forced to flee and find their fortune elsewhere, they said my mother was a slave to the Devil and left her behind with only a few sundries and a chest of cloth too bright to be sold in the gray towns of our coast. Once I asked my mother to tell me about the hole and the birds it was filled with, but she raised her large finger and wagged it before me, then begged God’s forgiveness and cuffed me hard across the face. I did not speak to her of such things after that and standing outside Eliza’s sturdy stone house in the sunlight, I found it was possible to imagine there were no such things, not even those I had just seen. What had I seen? I spoke sometimes in the night to my son about dead things that shivered and twisted in my head. Perhaps these were things like that. I had told him once, with my voice raised, about the hole filled with birds, but of course I could not be sure he understood me.
Thinking of my son and my mother and her ideas about dreams and the devils that hid in them, and about my wedding day, when she had locked me in my room while she went to get my man so that we might be married, made me weary, and I had the idea to step inside the stone house and rest a little on my borrowed bed or sit down again on the moss beneath the sugar maple, but at that moment the wind rose, the sun vanished, and the pigs began to squeal loudly in their pen. As I watched, first a great brown sow with black ears stood up on her hind legs, and then another, smaller pink one did the same. They stood staring out at me then turned slowly to face each other and embraced.
“On a day as strange as this, a trick as fine as that deserves reward,” I said. I went around to the far side of the house and pulled open the doors of the root cellar. Thinking I would fetch them some fine treat from Eliza’s rich stores, I went quickly down the steps, slipping a little on the moss. But the shallow cellar was not as it had been when I had sat in it with Eliza. There was no sweet marjoram and sage hanging from its rafters, no brine of egg or bean, no rack of apple or pear, only a mess of husks and bones, which lay cracked and scattered all about. The chest was there but it was shut tight and I did not try to open it. The barrel was there too. It took me a moment to understand what lay now upon it. There was no long goose quill this time. There was just a little feather, the very one tinged fiery orange I had been given by the robin and had had stolen by the crow. Its little end had been sharpened to a point and darkened as if it had been dipped. Beside it, on the barrel board, lay a small piece of dried skin upon whose hazed and hairy surface was the blotch I had made when I tried to write my name.
“Is this treat enough?” I said to the sow with black ears when
I had climbed the cellar steps and was again outside. She shouldered her smaller fellow aside, gave the little piece of skin a sniff, then lifted up her mouth, took it delicately with her tongue, and ate it. She grunted after she had chewed and swallowed, then looked past my shoulder. Following her gaze, first with my eyes, then with my feet, I came to the border between Eliza’s yard and the heavy tree trunks and found my shoes. They were filled with early flowers. Amidst the whites and yellows lay a plug of the same dark root that Captain Jane had fed me on my first journey to Eliza’s, so I knew who had put them there. I emptied the shoes and put the plug in my pocket. My feet had swollen and I feared I would no longer fit into them. It took me some while, but soon I had them on and laced neatly and felt sure they would see me home.
Chapter 15
For many steps it seemed like my good shoes were leading me in the right direction. My man was skilled with leather and had crafted them from supple kid flank. They were sturdy of sole and had long since stopped chafing me. My son had a pair to match, though of course his were softer and smaller. The day before I had left to pick berries, he had worn them into the middle of a muddy puddle, put his arms over his head, and done a dance. He had put his arms down and come over and stood before me upon the completion of his messy dance and I had shaken him so hard that he had wailed. After I had counted to ten, I picked him up and dried his tears, then wiped at his pants and cleaned his shoes. When I saw that he would not stop crying, I told him I would weave a bit of colored cloth into his laces. Wouldn’t that be nice? I had vermilion, I told him, magenta, shredded indigo.
“These have been torn special for you by your grandmother!” I said. This made him wail even louder so I kissed him and told him that they weren’t his grandmother’s colors, though they were, and had him choose one color for each of his shoes. He pointed at magenta for the left and indigo for the right, and I told him that was just the choice I would have made, that those colors went beautifully with the seashell favor he wore always around his leg. My man came in while I worked, looked at my son, then at me and all the colors, shook his head, muttered his prayer, ate something, then walked out again. As soon as he was gone, my son went and sat by the glass bottle of flowers I kept on the table when the weather warmed. He had never cared much to look at the flowers that drooped and wilted in the dim air of our little house but loved to sit with his feet dangling from his chair and gaze and gaze at the stalks in their browning water. Sometimes, as on that day, I would sit with him and tell him stories. In the bottle was a watery country. He and I lived in this country together and we were happy there but were too shy to show ourselves to the giants who peered in at us. We were little eels and so happy. My son took the bottle and turned it around, hoping, I supposed, to spot the little eels at play in the brackish water. “Stop now,” I said. “You will never see them. They are not really there.” But he kept turning the bottle and putting his face ever closer, then he looked at me and back at the bottle and pointed. And it did seem to me when I gazed close that I saw something in the middle of the stalks, bits of color wearing watery shoes.