by Laird Hunt
“But why can’t you? If you wanted to. It seems you do what you want.”
“I have already told you, deary. I am Red Boy’s and could not go a fairy’s inch without his proper leave.”
“What of Eliza? Can she go home?” It felt strange and sweet somehow to speak about Eliza, for it seemed most surely after all that had passed that night, and as we rode now through the snowy skies, that I had left her long ago. Perhaps some of my tender feeling had wormed its way into Captain Jane too, for her tone changed when she spoke.
“Not without your help, my love. That is the sad and sorry truth of it.”
“But can’t you help her? It seems like there is nothing you and your cloak and your boat cannot do. Won’t Red Boy let you help her? You are so strong. You can do what you want. You struck Granny Someone from her chair. You took her place and worked that clever mercy. You are the strongest of all!”
“I have grown strong, it’s true.”
“You could knock Red Boy from his chair as you knocked Granny Someone and the singer from theirs!”
“Silence now, little love. You don’t know what you speak of. Red Boy can’t be knocked from any chair. It’s Red Boy does the knocking. Red Boy already knows my wishes; he knew them long ago. There are rules to follow. Rules that govern all.”
“I thought witches didn’t follow rules.”
“And I told you that I don’t know what witches are.”
“But you are a witch. You howl and kill and fly through the night.”
“And so I should perhaps strip off my clothes and tear at my breast and mutter curses and take up a cat for my friend and go slinking about in the dark?”
“You do know what witches are.”
“I know those stories, yes, for I haven’t always belonged to the woods and I begin now to go abroad again. But they are poor little stories. Chanted in secret in the vain hope of knocking the hats off men. It’s children shake their limbs in tantrum and smear themselves with mud and wander without reason and boil up potions and gibber at the moon and think it answers their call. We in the woods have our Red Boy, and the games we play are grand.”
She said this and then down we plunged like a blunt-nosed shark through the banks of cloud and I saw that we had left the sea far behind and that now we skimmed treetops, then fields, then the stream that ran its quiet way beside my house. Captain Jane brought the boat to settle near our barn. She did it neatly. She asked me had I liked my boat ride and our play together at the house of the handsome singer and our run through the trees and my dive down the well, which was but a taste of what the woods had to offer. I said I had, for it was true, all of it was what I had ever desired. So deeply desired as I walked quickly through the dark with my father, both of us carrying our bundles, both of us spilling color. “It’s a great world lies before us, daughter,” my father said as we went tripping and stumbling and laughing. “It’s deep and dark and grand and we’ll ride the high mast and stitch our names into its sails.” Down the dark road we ran, shouting our names and even screaming them, and it was nothing but fair salt wind to be felt and smelled and tasted until, when the bustle of the harbor could be heard and the ship he had arranged our passage on was in sight, my father stumbled in the swamp of his weakness and began to speak of the liniment my mother would rub into his shoulders when he was weary and the sweets she would sometimes slip into his mouth when it was just the two of them after her visits to town. I yanked up his sleeve and showed him the marks from the switch he still bore from her punishment by the water but he said she always spread ointment upon them afterward, that they always healed quickly and well. We must return to our home, to our great love, he said. We shouldn’t have taken her treasure, which was all she had left from that earlier leaving. We must quickly gather it all back up. I begged him to keep walking. He said we would try our journey another night. Angel, angel, angel. Devil, devil, devil. Captain Jane slid open the boat’s door. Snow lay deep across our yard.
“Who is Red Boy?” I asked.
“Ah, you’re a one for questions, aren’t you?” Captain Jane said. “You must have driven your parents mad.” She gave me a little shove, like the one she had given me in the town and that first night in the forest, only this time it almost pitched me forward out of the boat and into the snow. But the hand that had shoved was quick enough to catch too and it pulled me back toward her.
“‘Who is Red Boy?’ she asks. Do you want to know who Red Boy is, my dear?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She threw her arms wide and her head went back to laugh and, on a fancy, I took that moment to lean in close and put my ear against her chest.
“What are you doing? Have you gone soft? Do you wish now to cuddle with Captain Jane? I would advise against that!”
“I am listening to your heart,” I said.
“Ah, I see, another kind of question. And what do you hear?”
It took me a moment to be able to say, for I had heard such a thing, but only long ago, when we lived by the water and a hurricane roared in to ruin buildings and sink ships.
“The center of a storm,” I said.
“Of a great storm, yes. That’s just right. The kind of silence that will crack your legs and shatter your ears.”
Her arms snapped shut around me and I stood completely covered by her cloak.
“This is yours, love,” she said and pressed something smooth and rough with a hole in its center into my hand.
“It’s the bark! But I thought it was lost by Eliza’s swamp.”
“Eliza’s lake, you mean, for that’s what she calls it and so that is what it is. I told you I have been watching. Captain Jane finds things. Think of all that’s come to you. A dead man’s tear, fresh berries, and now this bit of black bark to help you see clear or crooked as you like. You’ve had a rich harvest with Captain Jane this night!”
I slipped the bark into my pocket, let it lie there with the berries. I touched at my fingertip with my thumb and could feel the tear.
“A rich harvest,” Captain Jane said again. She blew on my cheek like she had blown on the face of the handsome singer. My skin burned hot where her breath had touched me. She blew on my other cheek and it burned too.
“If I blew harder, love, your skin would bubble and melt and fall in pieces onto the floor of this boat.”
I tried to pull away from her but she held me tight.
“Now look this way,” she said. We both looked toward my house. She blew in its direction and the air before us fizzed and steamed. She blew again, harder this time, and melted a deep trough in the snow straight up to my door.
“Blow with me,” she whispered. I said I wouldn’t and she said, “But I thought you liked to listen to hearts and play at games? I thought you wanted to know who Red Boy was…blow with me!”
“I won’t,” I said again, but I did. We blew in the direction of my house and more snow melted and seemed even to stop falling from the sky. The front door of my house began to glow and when we blew again, the roof burst into flame. I must fetch my boy and warn my man, I thought, but I didn’t move; I blew. The air itself began to burn then, and soon the house entire and the barn beside it was a ruin of roaring, jagged red.
“Blow now like you mean it, my love,” Captain Jane said and I blew, harder and harder, and the ground itself lit and the trees beyond and the air of the night and the night itself, it seemed, and I knew that Captain Jane had stopped blowing, that it was just me, that I was at the ending of my own great tale, that I had lit the world with its telling and that we would soon burn along with it and make of ourselves a burning, blazing suffix to the sun.
Captain Jane had turned back to face me. I looked and could see the roar of the world’s great fire in her eyes.
“We’ll burn it all, by the end. You’ll see. Whether in a hundred years or three.”
“I want to burn it now.”
“I know you do.”
“I am no goodwife.”
“And never were.”
The air was aflame. The clouds above us had been scorched away; the very blackness that blanketed the stars was roaring.
“That’s a game, is it not?” Captain Jane said.
“Is it a game?” I asked.
“And part of the answer to your question.”
As soon as she had said this, the glow in Captain Jane’s eyes and the glow all around us was gone. The snow fell through the dark air and lay heavily on the ground. My little house sat waiting.
“And now,” she whispered, “if you want to learn more about who Red Boy is, go back to beautiful Eliza, deary. Go back to the woods. But if not, run along and leave us who dwell among the trees to the shackles of our rules. Warm yourself at your own small fire and find your man and your son and eat your berries together and say your prayers and live your life and let it be easy and long.”
“And what will happen to Eliza if I don’t go back?” I whispered in return.
“Oh, you’ll go back.”
She pushed me hard away into the snow then. She clapped her hands and the boat leaped into the dark.
Chapter 23
I picked myself up from the snow and watched until Captain Jane and her boat of bones were gone then turned and, though my house no longer burned and was black but for a faint flickering through the parchment-covered windows, it warmed me to see it. I have twice in my life taken hard spirits and each time they spread heat from the tips of my fingers to the calluses on my feet and for all my house looked small and cold, I felt the same effect as I gazed at it, as if at least at its edges it really had begun to burn. I started forward only to stop a moment later when I caught a glimpse of the rabbit skull still hanging from its thread before the barn door. Seeing it, I felt an urge to visit our milking cow, whose warm cream I would serve with the berries I had brought, and also our sheep and our goat, to stop a moment and stroke their flanks and pat their bumpy heads and talk to them in the quiet of the barn. I stepped under the skull, pushed open the door, and started in. The cow heard me straightaway, as she always did, and started to call. This woke the sheep and soon the goat was bleating too. The noise seemed such a happy one to me that I all but ran to it and didn’t see what was hanging from a rope in the clear space at the center of the barn. I didn’t see it until I had made my way through the noisy gloom to the milking cow and had begun stroking her shoulder and flank.
My man had tied the rope under the dead owl’s wings and stretched them wide and held them apart with a stick. As I stroked the cow’s flank and pulled over a milking pail and began to tease and tug, the owl spun slowly around and I thought of my man’s cleverness. A rabbit skull was nice if it worked some good charm, I thought as I pulled gentle-hard and my frozen fingers began to warm and hot milk to steam and squirt in the pail, but no pigeon or wood bird would roost in a barn with a great owl hanging from its center beam. The owl might rot to its bones, but even those bones would keep the smaller birds away.
“Just a few drops, girl,” I told the cow and gave one last quick tug and squeeze with each of my hands. I had ever been good at milking and was loved by cow and goat both. My man said I had a softer touch than anyone he had ever known. He liked to watch me milk. Sometimes both man and boy would sit and watch. My husband’s hands were far too large and hard for such work. I wondered how they had managed while I was away, for the cow was not in pain. Perhaps my man had found a way to teach our small boy. Perhaps they had prayed together about it. I had tried to teach him but our boy had run off quickly each time. I wondered at the shot my man had used to bring down the owl. How far away he had stood. Half a league away, it might have been. He was as good at shooting as he was at thinking.
With my man’s cleverness in mind, I licked my lips and brought one of the handsome man’s berries up and into my mouth, then I hefted up the pail and left the milking cow and her fellows with a good pat each and made my way by the horse shed to the house. I passed my early garden as I went, sure that most of the sprouts were still safe in their earth, then I passed the shed and I passed the woodpile. At last, I tried our door but it was latched tight. Thinking I might slip in one of the windows and save waking my man and my son so that when their eyes came open they might beam and leap about in happy surprise, I stepped over and peered in through a crack in the thin parchment and saw my man at the table by one of our lanterns.
He was asleep with his head on his arm so his face was turned toward me. His beard had grown wild in my absence and his mouth hung open and in the shadows of the lantern, it looked as though there were a hole punched deep into the floor of his face. Even with the window shut tight I could hear him snoring. When he had smoked and drunk he could snore loudly enough to break down a door. He did not look, as he lay there, like a man who knew the ways of mosses or like the man who had killed the owl then stretched and trussed it up so neatly. Nor did he look anything like the handsome singer either before or after he had made his acquaintance with Captain Jane’s knife. I tried the window but it too was latched tight. I went around to the back of the house and found the windows closed there also.
There was one window left, on the far side of the house, and this one came open with a push. I put the steaming pail through the opening and climbed in, careful of the bark and berries. I brushed the snow off my dress and tiptoed into the front room. My man lay still and there was a stink in the house, which meant buckets needed dumping and rinsing at the stream. I went to the sundries room, where my man had spread a pallet of straw for me. The rope he used to tie my wrists hung limply over it from the wall post. I crept into our sleeping nook and found our boy buried under the blankets. He had always slept on his own pallet and, apart from the bitterest nights, had never been allowed in our bed before I left. I couldn’t decide if I should thump my husband on the shoulder and ask him what this meant or thump my son. Perhaps I should thump them both. The ropes above the straw pallet in the sundries room had been rigged because lately I wandered in the night. The ropes were there because lately in my sleep I said and did things that my man couldn’t understand. He had found me, for example, up to my ankles in the stream scraping with a stick on its murky floor. When he had asked me what I was doing there in the cold dark I had looked at him without seeing and said I was writing the Lord’s good prayer. Another time he had woken to find me painting my arms and legs with what I told him were letters, using mud and a brush I had made of hair I had cut from his horse’s tail. Often he woke to find me staring down at him and more than once he had found me sitting by our son with my mouth close to his ear.
My man had carved Lie still or He shall smite thee! into the wood above the ropes and, when I wouldn’t obey, had taken our boy and ridden two long days to fetch the holy scarecrow who had married us. My man had paid for the scarecrow’s services with as much cider as he could drink and the promise of a tenth share of our next crop. The scarecrow had slept the nights he spent with us on the floor beside me in the sundries room. I had not slept during his visit for I knew this scarecrow and his wandering hands too well, had known him my whole life. Each time he woke in the night and saw me watching him carefully he had said a prayer of his own making in which God was a shield and Jesus a hammer and the Holy Ghost a heavy, cleansing rain. When after the third night I had still shown no signs of being, in his way of saying it, a horse in the night for the Devil to ride, the scarecrow had bowed and smiled. He had offered up a great, long prayer of parting, then lashed a jug of my man’s cider to his saddle.
My man believed I was cured then, and so the fourth night too I went to bed, though still in the sundries room, untied. This was after my boy had danced with his new shoes in the mud. Into the dark of the house I rose. As asleep or not asleep as I had been in the deep hours at Eliza’s house. I took what was left in my mother’s old chest and dumped it out onto our dusty floor. “Devil, devil, devil,” I made the scraps of cloth say. “Devil, devil, devil!” I yelled at my
son and at my man and, after they had woken, at the whole world. I went on yelling long after my husband had thrown as many of the scraps of cloth as he could into the fire then turned me out of the house. He said I could sleep that night beneath the rafters of the barn like the beast I had clearly become. I slept instead beneath the stars by the stream. It was there I remembered it was the time for spring berries and that I might find some to bring home with me if I looked carefully in the woods.
I’ve kept my promise, I thought. My son’s little hand peeked out from the blanket and I saw there were light scrapes on it, as if he had been in the brambles. He had a thumb’s smudge of dirt on his temple. His hair was wild and his scalp looked raw. I leaned over close and kissed him on his hand, then on his dirty temple. I caressed his cheek and sought the words to sing the song I had made up for him by the stream. I pinched him tenderly so that his eyes came open, and I pulled the little bit of berry-damp bark from my pocket.
“Here’s a present for you, my darling,” I said. “It came from a pretty little girl I met while I was away. I do not need it, for my own eyes are keen, and soon or someday I will learn to see in other ways. When you want to see a thing as it is or it isn’t, you can look out through its hole.”
My son took it from me and held it but not to his eye as I told him he should and instead went to licking stupidly at his lips, and straightaway I thought of how slow he had ever been with any new thing and clicked my tongue and wondered if he had even understood me.
“I just burned you and the whole wide world to a pile of cinders in a game!” I said. “I’ve played so many games since I left!” I pinched him again, not so tenderly this time, but then I thought of my song with its pretty words and phrases and calmed myself and took in my breath to sing it to him. Before I could make the first few sounds, though, he had sat up and bit my hand, then, still clutching the piece of black bark, he ran out past me to the other room. When I got up to follow him I saw that he had drawn blood.