In the House in the Dark of the Woods

by Laird Hunt

  “What is it?” said the man. “What is it you see now? More of your goblins and fairies of the wood?” The man spoke kindly but with more than a flicker of worry. I called out a greeting to him but he neither looked in my direction nor responded.

  “I see Eliza of the woods,” said the boy.

  He was looking through his piece of bark toward me.

  “I am not Eliza, child,” I said. “I dropped my coin and story in the well and left.”

  “I see Eliza and she is all bloody,” said the boy.

  “I am not Eliza, not any longer. My daughters are with me; they are in the wagon, and you see only what you wish and want. That bark plays tricks!”

  “I see Eliza and she is all dark and she is pointing to the stream where lie two slaughtered pigs,” said the boy.

  “Your mother is Eliza, not me, not anymore. It is her turn now to dance a long day with her Red Boy, not mine!”

  “Come now,” said the man, stepping full out of the house and looking carefully around him. “Speak if there is something that troubles you. I know you can do it.”

  “He has spoken, Goodman!” I said. “Did you not hear him? Can you not hear me?”

  The boy slowly let the piece of bark fall away from his eye to hang once more from his neck, jumped again into his puddle, sent glittering drops flying through the air and almost to me, then ran to his father. He took his father’s hand and they went into the house.

  “I am not Eliza, you have not seen her this day,” I shouted after them. But neither turned so after standing there awhile, I walked away. The horses had found their path with the wagon to the muddy banks and were drinking as deeply as if they meant to drain the stream. My daughters would not wake. They were not pigs. They were not slaughtered. They were just great, glum girls grown bored with the day. I must have had the winds of the spell that had brought us so quickly down from the mountains still wrapped around my shoulders for the father not to have seen me and for the boy to have mistaken me so.

  “I am not Eliza,” I told my sleeping girls, and I found as I did, perhaps because they were not looking at me, not listening, that though I could not quite have said aloud what had happened to me, I could remember the rules I had long lived under, remember and speak them both.

  “Eliza lives in the house in the woods. Red Boy lives there with her. She has long grown the image of Red Boy in the bloody soil of her heart and now he is sitting next to her and now he is ready to play. How he loves to play! How Eliza screams! In the beginning, Hope pays her visits, but then those visits slow and soon she doesn’t visit anymore. Eliza lives a long time with her Red Boy without Hope. Some days and nights cost less than others, but Red Boy, even as he slowly grows smaller and smaller, is there for every one.

  “Then Goody comes to the woods. Goody is young. Goody is clever. Goody has been bad. Only if Goody agrees to stay in the stone house may Eliza leave the game. Not all Goodys stay. Some learn what lies in store for them and flee. Some leave and return, leave and return, then leave and don’t come back. Some are gobbled up in the wood by Granny Someone.

  “When Goody finally takes her place, Eliza drops the tale of her long days down the throat of the woods to feed another scream. She becomes Faith, or Charity, or Virtue, or Prudence again and leaves the woods. She hurries home. She does not want to go back to the trees. If she goes back, she becomes a spirit and belongs to the woods forever. A spirit may become Captain Jane and help. Captain Jane may, if she is fierce, become Granny Someone and hurt and help as she likes. Red Boy is always Red Boy. Hope is always Hope.”

  I shook my girls by their thick shoulders. They did not wake. “I will not go back,” I said. I did not say this to my sleeping daughters. I said it to the dark trees in the distance. After the horses had slaked their thirst I got them moving again, but they would not roll near so fast on returning. Once we hit a bump and my daughters’ eyes came open. “Where does her Red Boy go when Eliza leaves the woods?” one of them asked me. “He vanishes,” I said. “Like Hope,” said the other. “Not like Hope,” I said. “He stays much longer. It’s only at the very end when Goody’s Red Boy takes his place that Eliza realizes he’s gone.”

  I looked up and off to the side as I spoke. I curled my lip. I squinted my eyes. I told them to lean close and have a listen. To see if they could hear him, to tell me if they could, that the heart he had sprung from had ever been his favorite place to rest and hide. When my daughters made no answer I looked down at them and saw that their own eyes had closed again and so deeply were they breathing I wondered if they had ever truly woken. The horses clopped on. Once upon a time there was and there wasn’t a woman who came home from the woods. It was a long and wearying ride indeed before we saw our mountains again.

  Chapter 27

  When we were home at last and had put the horses to stable and splashed away the dirt of our journey and had eaten well of good cheese and meat, I sent my daughters away and went into the house and called my husband and bade him lie down upon our bed. I found my quill and tickled his cheek a little with it when I told him that if he obeyed me from now on all would be sweet between us. I tickled his chest too. I tickled his temple and left only, in each of these places, a very little bit of blood. I told him that if I had been strong before I left, I was stronger still now that I had returned.

  I tapped my chest with the quill, then tapped his. I laughed when he winced, or tried to wince, and told him I had long since paid for what I had done to my sister, Glory, after he and I were first married, and she had come to visit us with her bastard child and to wink at my husband and laugh each moment out of jealousy and spite at my clothing, and at my cooking, and at my cleaning, to laugh at me who was well and married while she was discarded and disgraced. They had not departed for their home in the wee hours, as I had told him. They had never departed our land and I had paid for it each day for years in the dark of the woods.

  “You will call me Eliza, not Faith, now, and never Goody, as you know,” I told my husband. “For I was never your goodwife and was only ever Goody to the woods and to my rage.

  “Call me Eliza now,” I said and tapped his jaw with the quill.

  “Eliza,” he croaked.

  I bade him sit up and press his ear against my chest and tell me what he heard.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  I pushed him back down and tapped at his temple and saw as I did so that the teardrop that had been hiding so long under my nail had come loose and slid down the length of the quill to hang dripping from the tip.

  “Say my name,” I said as I tapped the tip of the quill, and the tear slid down his cheek then stopped in its falling and climbed back up and then fell again.

  “Eliza,” he croaked more loudly.

  “And what did you say you heard of my heart?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s right.”

  I tickled him with the quill and kissed him long. When he started to groan I tapped his jaw and struck him silent again.

  Chapter 28

  Captain Jane came to see me in her boat the very next day. She seemed grown larger and grander by great measure and did not straightaway smile at me as she always had before. She told me almost with her first breath that it was not just a new Eliza and her Red Boy in the woods, that she was Granny Someone now. She wore her wolf cloak and floated just above me in her boat as she recounted how she had disposed of her predecessor just after I had earned my freedom. As soon as the old Granny Someone had stepped back into the woods, Captain Jane had stripped her of her last spells and few remaining spirits and set her to run.

  Aged as she was, old Granny Someone led her on a merry chase that kept her busy the day long. Even without tricks and glamour, she knew the woods and its secrets better than any and it was only when Captain Jane pulled her cloak tight and felt her teeth turn into fangs and her arms and legs into engines for endless hunting and all the wolves of the woods press close that she ran her to ground. Indeed, they had corner
ed the old Granny Someone in the very caves below the earth she had been held in, when she was still called Goody, and had just slowly poisoned her overpreening younger brother to death with herbs and roots after he had inherited the house they had both grown up in and turned her out. Captain Jane had been for finishing her there in the cave, slowly, with great care, but the old Granny Someone had been wily and in the midst of all the barking and howling and whining and biting she had slipped free to reach the surface and run a little more.

  Finally, she had sought refuge at Eliza’s and that had put an end to their part of it. For of course they could not set foot on Eliza’s grounds. Red Boy had emerged after a short while holding some of the new Eliza’s bloody hair. All of them then had stood at the edge of the woods and looked into Eliza’s yard and attended the demise of the old Granny Someone, who had clearly held on to her position for too long.

  The new Granny Someone paused in her tale, as we both, I suppose, thought of our earliest minutes as Eliza and tried to remember how they had been. Indeed, she told me, she had stood with her wolf cloak loosened again and looked a good long while at the yard and at the house in which she and I and so many Elizas, including the one that lay in her final ruin before them, had lived. Then they had left that place behind and had all gone to dance and sport in the trees around the well.

  The new Granny Someone asked me, when she had finished telling me this, if I was ready yet to leave my dull family and mountain behind me forever, to put down my pipe and petty tricks and join them at their sport and play along the paths and in the glades. She could see the ink stains on my fingers and knew I was still scribbling out of old habit and wouldn’t it be more fun to set aside my quill and go howling and galloping through the trees? The stains would stay, for dark stories lingered. I would soon weary of the few small conjuring tricks I had learned and wouldn’t it be nice to learn more? Much more? Everything I had learned as I looked so long into the fiery eyes of my own fierce heart was just a start, a glittery shard. The scream had been a gift, Red Boy a glory, for where else in this world of towns and farms and crosses could great hearts roar? Even the smallest spirit who returned to Red Boy’s woods could bunch her fists and bite. Once already I had made a trip in my wagon to look at the trees and pay visits to nearby houses and wouldn’t I like to come back again and this time stay? A new Captain Jane was needed. Perhaps it could be me.

  “You think you’ve lost all that lived in your chest,” she said. “But come back to the woods and you will see. It’ll bang so loudly, you’ll beg me to cut off your ears.”

  She said this with a wink and a grin, and I thought of the boy in the puddle who had taken me for what I no longer was though perhaps still longed to be. I thought of my husband, whom I had not yet released from the bed, and of the tear rising and falling upon his face. I thought of my daughters and, poor conjuring tricks or no, of how much I had still to teach them. More than anything, though, I thought of Red Boy and of his play in the house with Eliza.

  “You’re wearing your red string,” said Granny Someone. It was true. That morning I’d had my daughters tie it tight around my wrist.

  Epilogue

  When the snows were gone and the summer had come, a first-folk man brought us my mother’s blue bonnet. When my father asked him where he had found it, he pointed over his shoulder past the stream to the woods. That night I rose from the bed, made sure my good mask of black bark hung safely from my neck, pulled my cloak down off its peg, and crept quietly past my father. Before I reached the front door I turned back, took the knife off the table where my father sat sleeping, and used it to cut free a piece of his beard. The knife was long and sharp and shone like the light of a star wrapped tight around a stick. I was not supposed to touch it. My father did not move when his beard was being cut. An empty jug of cider sat next to his arm. I put the knife back on the table and the piece of my father’s deep brown beard in a pocket my mother had sewn onto the inside of my cloak.

  I was halfway across the garden and out into the world when I turned around once more. I went to the table and took up the knife. I wrapped it in a piece of rag, then tied the rag with string, then kissed my father. The long hairs of his beard tickled my nose. My father did not move even when I kissed him again. There was another, larger pocket on the inside of my cloak. I put the wrapped knife into it and went to the place where my mother had slept her last nights in our house and ran my finger over the s she had added to the carving my father had made, then read it aloud: “‘Lie still or sHe shall smite thee!’” The s was so faint now it was hard to see but I could see it. “Lie still, Papa,” I whispered, then kissed him one last time, walked out the front door, and went across the garden to the barn.

  The cow was in her stall and she lowed when I came in. I told the cow she should be sleeping and eating good grass in her dreams, then gave her a pat on her flank. The cow turned her head and looked at me with one of her great black eyes. The world was still very dark but I could see myself in the cow’s eye. I had often played at pretending I lived in that eye. That I had a house there, and one in the nearby goat’s green eye, and in the sheep’s yellow one. I would move from house to house. No one could find me when I was in these houses. The house in the cow’s eye was the biggest and safest. I did not need it now. “I have a knife and am going to find Mother in the woods and I will bring her home and I will not be weak,” I said.

  I stepped away from the stall and stood on the tips of my toes and took hold of the dead owl my father had hung from the barn rafters to chase away smaller birds. My father had found the owl dead in our field last spring and brought it into the barn. I had helped my father to stretch the dead bird’s wings and strap them onto branches of wood to keep them open. Then I had helped to hang it. I stood tall and took hold and pulled off one of the owl’s feathers. The owl did not smell fresh. When we had hung it, the owl had smelled like moss and softened tree stump and wet wool and the windy heart of the air. Now it smelled like the little animals that sometimes died beneath our house.

  I said good-bye to the owl, then to the cow and to the goat and sheep, who were sleeping in their own stalls, then left the barn and left the yard and tucked the feather in my pocket and pulled my cloak tight and walked toward the stream. The stream was a sheet of stone in the moonless dark and I was afraid for a moment as I came to it that it might have died, that the creatures that lived where my mother had gone had found a way to kill it, as they sometimes came and killed me in my dreams.

  But when I crouched beside the stream and tied my mask of bark tight across my face so that I could look through it with my best eye, I could see well and clear that it was still alive the way I wanted it to be. I touched at its waters with my fingers and felt its cold. Sometimes my father took me to the stream to splash but even then I was not allowed to cross to the farther bank. “I am not weak,” I whispered. I stepped in. The cool, smooth stone of the water’s surface softened and let me pass. Little fish woke but did not bite. My pants became heavy below the knees. The edges of my cloak dragged behind me. A frog sat on the far bank. I thought it might speak, tell me where I should go, point me straight to my mother, give me some good guidance, but it sat silent and closed its eyes, so I opened mine even wider. When day began to break, my way seemed clear. For as it rose, the good sun lit a line down the middle of the long field I found before me and seemed to set the air of the trees in the distance, and the whole wide world beyond them, to burn.

  Acknowledgments

  This novel could not have been written without the sharp edits, sage advice, sustaining encouragement, inspiring conversation, cloth-rending performance, and/or timely reading and viewing recommendations of Eleni Sikelianos, Eva Sikelianos Hunt, Kathryn Hunt, Lorna Hunt, Stephen Hunt, Linda Wickens, Anne Waldman, Ed Bowes, Anna Stein, Josh Kendall, Nicky Guerreiro, Tracy Roe, Karen Landry, Clare Alexander, Lesley Thorne, Claire Nozières, Kate Bernheimer, Selah Saterstrom, Debra Magpie Earling, Susie Schlesinger, Ella Longpre, Nick Arvin, an
d Marion Laine. I thank you all.

  The epigraph quote is from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”

  About the Author

  Laird Hunt is the author, most recently, of The Evening Road, which was a Financial Times of London best book of 2017. His previous novel, Neverhome, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection, an Indie Next selection, winner of the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine and the Bridge Book Award, and a finalist for the Prix Femina Étranger. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and teaches at Brown University.

  twitter.com/LairdHunt

  Also by Laird Hunt

  The Evening Road

  Neverhome

  Kind One

  Ray of the Star

  The Exquisite

  Indiana, Indiana

  The Impossibly

  The Paris Stories

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