by Laird Hunt
“I will tan you for that, little devil!” I said. “I’ll tan you then send you to live at the bottom of a staircase I know!” All in a fury I flew across the room toward him but stopped short when I saw he had crawled up into his sleeping father’s lap. He had crawled up and, after smiling sweetly at me and tucking the bark into his shirt, he closed his eyes and fell back asleep. Or pretended to. They looked like peas in a pod then, did my son and my man, except that one was smaller and had a bulge of black bark in his shirt and the other was snoring and had a great filthy beard. I watched, with our house ticking in the cold, as my man leaned back a little in his chair, wrapped one of his arms around my son, and pulled him snug.
It was when my man shifted that I saw the grease-smeared knife on the table next to my two sleepers. Now this was a knife to be reckoned with. Much larger and longer than Captain Jane’s. I had often stared at it so wherever it lay. It seemed to travel around the house, to turn up under pillows, upon the lintel, sunk up to its handle in the garden’s dark earth.
The light of the guttering lantern played along its greasy length and I thought of sending my burning breath through the air with Captain Jane and how a fire was a kind of knife and could take so many shapes and forms. I found now that it was before me again that I had missed this knife of mine and longed to use it, as I had longed to in the dark beneath the stars before I had taken up my berry basket and left on my walk. I had swum down a well and flown through the air and set the world to roasting, but a sharp blade is its own sweet journey. There is nothing like your own knife, nothing in this world, and as I stood there, I even squeezed at the air as if I were grabbing it. I reached out again, felt the cold air touch the wound on my hand, noticed the slick blood on my thumb and fingers. Stay where you stand, deary, I thought, but I crept right to the edge of the table, leaned over, and peered closely at the knife.
Peering at it, I thought to take it up and plunge it quickly into my two sleepers as I had plunged it into my mother again and again for having danced on my father’s grave and later laughed about it. Danced, then laughed after she had all but put him in his hole for suffering too loudly from a cough. She had not used her switch on that occasion; she had used the broken leg of the chair she had years before used me to break. My father had always promised to fix it and never had. She had made him stand though he was sick, and she had made him run though he could not, and then she had caught him with a laugh and beaten him and left him lying on the cold ground. She had done this and I had done nothing even though by then I was grown enough to have tried at least to stop her. I had sat fixed as the frost on our windows as she chased him from the house. She had called him back in afterward and told him not to whimper so and finish with his coughing and made me tend to him. This was not long after our return from his plan for us to climb aboard a ship and sail away to the place where kings still lived. She had sniffed it out, I thought. Or he had told her. Probably he had told her. “See what you have wrought for us, dear Father,” I whispered to him.
Near the end he called me close. He said he wished to speak about my mother, our great love. I expected strong words at last, some curse. Instead, through the porridge in his chest, he croaked, “You must be the kind one now, as I have always tried to be.”
He wept. I have never since known a man or a woman so weak, unless it were myself, and later wondered, as I plunged the knife into my mother, who it was I truly wished to stab. I had not stopped plunging the knife, which I had taken from my mother’s own kitchen as she sat herself coughing next to the fire, for some good while. She had stood the moment before to show my small son the dance she had made on my father’s grave. “Don’t show him that!” I had said. She had shown him then the bits and shreds of cloth she had taken with her to the churchyard to taunt him, who could no longer hear, and me, who stood by weeping, for our foolishness in imagining we might run off. “Don’t show him those!” I had said. Then she had made my son smile by flinging them, as she had on that day at the cemetery too, over and over, into the air. “Goody!” she said to me, though she knew I hated to be called it. “Goody, see how he smiles! See how he likes my treasure.” I watched as she caught up pieces of the cloth and made a trail of bits and shreds on the floor. “He’s like you, Goody, and your poor fool father!” she said. “See how he follows the path I have made; see how he comes to me! See how he knows his place! See how he belongs first to me and then to heaven. Just like you!” With these words, her cough caught her and brought her down again into her chair and she began straightaway praying and I thought, This is one prayer too many. I had been preparing spring berries to eat with milk from my mother’s cow. I fed my mother a berry. She spat it out, said it needed sugar. I told her I would fetch her some. When my man came home, we buried her in the barley field. I kept her old treasure and other things I thought she should have long since given to me. I told my man it was all mine now. He said after prayer that night that the dark one must have come to call. He held me with one hand and cuffed me with the other until I could barely stand and then said they’d have us both for the murder and that we must go far away. The next day we packed and left. We came here.
Where I stood, staring at the greasy knife. I didn’t touch it. Instead, I set the pail of milk on the table, returned to the words carved by my husband above my pallet, and, using the blood on my hand for ink, made my fingertip into a quill and made it mean what now seemed true. Then I returned to the table and emptied the contents of my pocket into the pail.
“There’s breakfast, boys,” I whispered. “I’m sorry it took me so long. I thought of you often when I was away. I thought of you when I was in the water. I thought of you when I was in the sky. I thought of you when I sat in a cellar. I thought of you when I did not die.” I spoke to them both but leaned ever closer to my little boy as I whispered these things. His breathing was soft but clear. “Don’t be weak, my boy,” I whispered. I know he heard me. It was something I had told him many times. But what did I mean? For I did not want him to be strong either. Not like his father, who could fling his cousin through the air. Not like my mother, who could chase the husband, who so loved her, with a switch. I meant some other thing. Something like Captain Jane in her wolf cloak. Something like Eliza when the metal was in her voice and she had set her jaw.
“Don’t be weak,” I said again and kissed my son on his soft cheek. When I did I saw my man’s eye twitch, just a touch, so I knew he was awake too. I did not touch the knife. I breathed in deeply. I had smelled fear on my man before—of course I had—when I had walked our house in the dark, but rarely like this. I looked at the side of his great, filthy head.
“Ask me to stay,” I told him. His eye twitched again. I brought my face very close to his. “Ask me nicely to stay and see how I answer.” I waited. I told him I had held a quill and used it to write. I told him I had fed my name to a pig. I told him that if I stayed, he would have to dig me a deep cellar to do my scribbling in. That he would have to give me baths and scrub my nails because, devil’s blood or not, from now on they would always be black with ink. My man said nothing but his great arm on the table began to tremble and his giant’s hand to jump. “Is that your answer, husband?” I said. I thought I heard them both sigh when I went over to the wall and took down my coat. It was only unlined cow skin but sturdy enough, now that my dress was near dry, to see me through the cold.
Chapter 24
It was a long walk through the deep snow and then the dark of the woods where the snow did not fall. My hand hurt and my legs were weary but soon the sun rose and shone weakly through the trees. Many times I wished that Captain Jane would come and whisk me up and away but then night fell and I still had not come to Eliza’s house. Once I thought I glimpsed Granny Someone’s cottage and began to breathe quickly but I calmed myself by remembering how deeply Granny Someone now slept.
Near dawn I saw a lonely glow a way off through the trees and before long the little girl in her yellow dress slid out from behind a stand
of mulberry. Her eyes shone brightly in the light of the candle she was holding and she laughed prettily at my expression of surprise. She came over to me, gave a curtsy nice as you like, planted the candle she was holding in the ground beside us, and untied the laces of my shoes. She helped me slip them off, then picked her candle back up, stood, and offered me her hand.
“What is your name, child?” I asked her. “Do you have a strange name like the others who live in this woods?”
She would not answer. So we left my shoes behind and as we walked along holding hands I told her that I had a boy much her age and that I had given him the black bark. This made her nod exactly as if I had told her something that surprised her not one bit.
“Did you already know that I gave that piece of lovely, tricky bark to my son?” I asked, tugging playfully at her hand. “He’ll stare through it until it gobbles up his eye, he will. Who knows what it will teach him.”
She said nothing to this either, though now and again she smiled at me and her smile there in the woodland moonlight was a bright and beautiful thing.
“Are you a witch, like Captain Jane? Like Granny Someone? Do you belong to Red Boy?” As I asked this I saw Eliza’s stone house, beaming brightly through the trees.
“I am Hope and belong only to myself,” she said, looking sweetly up at me.
I laughed then and tousled her hair for it seemed most marvelous that there should be this little bit of hope here at the end of my long journey. I told her this and she smiled and said that it was just so, that even in a wood as dark as this one, there was always hope. She said that once I was settled in my new home she would come to see me. If ever I grew lonely I could call to her from my window or from the edge of my clearing into the trees. If I could not call I could bang on my window frame with a cup. I said that it wouldn’t be my window or my clearing or my cup and that I could never be lonely with Eliza there, but I would call to her for it would please me always to see her and to think of her, like Eliza, as my friend. I also said, for it came quick upon me, that I wished my boy would speak, and speak when he did as nicely as she did, instead of scratching and biting when I only wished to hold him or help. I might never have left my house, I said, if it were her I’d have had to leave behind!
“I am not always sweet,” she said. “Sometimes I sting.”
“Hope’s sweet sting. There’s a song could be found in that. Perhaps I’ll make you a song. Would you like that?”
She nodded. I felt when she did that she was starting to lag and saw now that there was a glaze over her eyes such as children who have stayed up too long are burdened with.
“Your feathery feet have turned to lead!”
“I have run too much of late.”
“And now you’re tired.”
“Yes.”
“And wish to sleep.”
“I do.”
“And what will you dream of when you’ve shut your eyes at last, dear Hope?”
“Of you.”
I liked this answer and apologized for having gone on and on and told her I could carry her if she liked, that I would bear her carefully in my arms and help her in any way I could and try to be a good friend to her, but she just smiled wanly and looked back into the woods. When I saw that she would come no farther, I bent and kissed her soft forehead, just as I had kissed my son’s. As I took my lips away and leaned back, she held her candle out to me.
“I can’t take your candle, my darling.”
“I brought it for you, Goody. To light the last of your way.”
“But you’ll need it, won’t you?”
“I see well in the dark. I see perfectly.”
“Stay with me and I’ll make a song for you.”
She shook her head.
I found a little tune and tried to make the song, but after “Of Hope’s sweet sting / In dark night sing,” nothing came, and she told me I could sing her the rest of my song another time.
“Good-bye, then,” I said.
“Good-bye, Goody.”
“I’m not Goody. Not really.”
“That’s true,” she said.
I watched her leave, then, holding my fingers cupped around the candle’s fragile flame, I walked the last small distance to Eliza’s to see what it was I would see and learn how it was I could help.
Eliza’s house, lit as always to greet the coming sun, grew brighter as I approached. I felt my spirits, already buoyed by Hope’s company, rise into my chest, into my throat. Higher. Higher still. With Eliza’s tidy home at last before me, I thought not of my man or my boy but of my terrible mother in a moment of kindness and calm. Returned home the evening I escaped the handsome man, my mother carried me about our house, insisted I sleep in her lap, said I must never leave her arms. In the morning, after our breakfast, she took me up again and carried me into our yard in time to see a troop of soldiers in their bright red coats come past.
“Do you see how they march in a procession?” she asked. “Do you see how they march all in a line? This is God’s good work before us. For that is how you hold the shape of your soul in its parcel. That is how you keep the pendulum swinging straight as you wind your clock.”
“But we have no clock, Mother,” I said.
“I had a clock before I came to live with your father. I had so many things and they are all gone.”
“Except your treasure.”
“Except my treasure.”
“Where is Father?”
“He is off weeping for his sins.”
“Do I have a soul, Mother?”
“Yes, of course, but it’s not yet wrapped neat like the soul of those fine red soldiers walking by. We’ll see it wrapped soon.”
“I would like to hear a musket, Mother.”
“And so you shall, my darling.”
“I would like to hear a cannon, Mother.”
“And so you shall.”
“What will it sound like?”
“Like God’s mouth opening at the start of your greatest day.”
And here is the day set to dawn at last, dear Mother, I thought. Thinking of her and of all the burden I had now left behind and the black that would soon be always under my fingernails, I did skip and I did dance. I should cry out, I thought, for Eliza loved it so, and if I cried she would know I had returned and come out to greet me with her arms held open and a warm kiss at the ready. I will help her, I thought. And repay the fault I earned in running off.
I cried out. The cry caught in my throat, so I cleared it and tried again. It was not much of a cry and I thought Eliza would not think it fine or even recognize who had made it, so I stopped and closed my eyes and clenched my fists and took in my breath and kept taking it in until my shoulders were like wings for my ears, and when I opened my mouth I heard my own cry and thought it was the sound of the night and of the woods, of moss groaning and feet bleeding and the air burning.
I opened my eyes. And now all that had been bright was dark, as if my cry had robbed the world of its light. Bats and night birds moved through the air around me. There was a smell of death and a large lump in Eliza’s yard. When I stepped closer and held out to no purpose the extinguished stub of candle in my hand, I saw it was the gutted corpse of one of Eliza’s pigs, the great brown sow that had stood and turned to dance with her fellow. I did not need the bark nor even little Hope’s light to see things clearly. What was left of the pig’s entrails lay strewn about like the veins of a monstrous leaf let to fall and then to rot. The ground was slippery and warm. I felt my bare feet grow sticky as I walked across it. To Eliza’s door. I put my hand on the latch and—softer this time, more gently—made my cry once more.
When I had my answer, which was nothing more than a quiet “Come in, Goody,” I pulled on the latch and pushed open the door. It was dark when I started to push and bright when I stopped; the house had lit itself again with its roaring fire, its merry lanterns, even the stub of Hope’s candle. I saw Eliza first, sitting at her table, small and kind and all that
I had hoped for—a friend for this earth, for these long days—then pushed open the door farther and saw that she was not alone. Sitting beside her was my friend the robin. My friend and Hope’s. Only grown great and hulking with the arms of a human creature, arms as large as my man’s, as my mother’s. His beak was sharper and his feathers redder than they had been when he was small. Before him, dropped directly onto the table, was raw meat from the pig. He let his thick arms hang heavily at his naked sides as if he did not yet know how to use them. I gasped but did not otherwise flinch and my little friend grown great sent his head down hard at the table to peck at the meat, to lift and—gurgling, showing me his huge red throat—swallow down gobs of it.
“I am happy you came back, but you should run away, Goody, my love,” said Eliza. She smiled at me. In all my days since, I have never seen a sweeter smile. Nor a sadder, except in those rare moments when I have been brave enough to look in the mirror and gaze upon my own face.
“But I have come to help you,” I said.
“You would help me?” she said.
“I have left my home now of my own desire, for having kept my promise I quickly saw that home was not what I wanted and I feared what I would do if I stayed. Captain Jane has shown me the kinds of things you can learn if you live in the woods. I have walked through the night and the day to come back to you, Eliza.”
I put my candle on the window ledge by the front door, where it winked happily away. Eliza smiled her smile again and gave a small sigh that ended in a shiver.
“You must run home, Goody,” she said. “For this is not a game one joins in lightly.”
“I will not go home. I will never go home again,” I said.
“You say that now,” she said.
“I will say it always.” As I told her this, I saw my husband’s hairy face. I remembered the stench of him after he had been at the cider and the stench of my former home. I did not think of my little boy with his sharp teeth and soft cheek, though, for I knew despite all, if I did I might weaken in my resolve.