Mother Box and Other Tales

by Blackman, Sarah

  The boy was larger than both the girl who was a student and the girl who was a teacher. His father raised red deer which he slaughtered for Christmas feasts and the boy had grown among the deer and taken up some of their aspects. He had a broad brow and round, black eyes. He sometimes craned his neck forward, as if to clear an obstruction in his throat, and when he wrote he held the pen pressed between his thick rough fingers as if it were wedged in the cleft of an overgrown hoof. As he made his low empty noises, he looked out the window spangled with frost, but the girl could tell he was neither observing the patterns nor looking beyond them to the busy street.

  “Oh ho Oh ho,” sang the boy who was her student. The girl found herself incapable of imagining either him or the girl as they were when they were alone. What face might they make when there was no one to see their faces? What future passions might they feel that did not involve the care and comfort of their bodies? Both of them inhabited the lunging sort of bodies possessed by people who have never been denied their fill of meat and both of them, as they made their noises, were aware of the other, of the shape made by the space where they were not. All this the girl could tell.

  Yet, though she knew outside of her kitchen that boy and that girl came together in the field, in the loft, under the sacks of bloody jute stacked freezing next to the butcher's side door, she could imagine neither the pleasure they found in each other nor the pain. The girl was as blank to her as a bar of soap. The boy as empty as a pot in which the stew has been allowed to dry and stick. She had never thought about her students this way, never imagined them outside the confines of her own house. It had been as if they sprung into existence when they opened the door and faded out of it when the door latched behind them, but now that she had begun, she found she could not stop. Every face presented to her its blank possessions: two lips, two eyes, a nose, two shifting brows. But she found what she saw instead was a wavering tumult of objects. Here a child's face was obscured by a bridle; there a child's hands drifted in and out of the belly of a steaming teapot. That girl shuffled her feet and her lips seemed to blur into sheets of stiff cotton. That boy propped his chin in his hand and his shoulders squared into the blocky beam of a yoke. Slowly, as the children sang, the girl came to a terrible realization.

  That evening, the girl sat at the window and watched as the boy left by the side door of the butcher's shop and locked it behind him. He waited at the corner for some carriages to pass and crossed the street in a quick trot, leaping over puddles with exaggerated spring. She lost sight of him for a moment as he rounded the fence and came in through the gate, but when he opened the door to the cottage and stood before her, she saw he was just as she had expected: breathless from cold, blood on his smock, his hair standing up from his head in a crest that made him look both impatient and like a child.

  When the boy asked the girl about her day, she told him nothing about what she had thought and answered instead with all the usual details. When the girl asked the boy in turn what he had done at work, he smiled at her and chewed at her and waggled his fingers as he mocked the customers who provided them both with bread and meat.

  “But what does he think?” thought the girl.

  “Fat as a toad,” the boy laughed. “She is round as a hat.”

  “But how will he taste?” the girl found herself humming and she reached across the table and held the boy's hand as he fished a lump of gristle from his mouth and laid it wet on the rim of his bowl.

  Later that night, the girl banked the fire and followed the boy into the back room. As he took off his shirt, her eyes wandered over all his familiar scars. As he took of his pants, she noted his stiffening and his thatch of hair, the hollow of his thigh's socket, the lopsided swing of his purpling sac. She pictured the little book, which she had not gotten down from its shelf in some years now, and what it might have to say about the valves in him that were opening and those that were shutting, the plush and thud of his blood, the intricate flame of his nerves. But that is not what she saw, and that is not what she imagined. When he pushed her back on the bed and fit himself inside her, the girl envisioned her interior spaces as a forest, a field, a marsh, stinking with peat, over which the grey water slid thin as a mirror. Try as she might, she could not see the picture of her ducts and her glands, her flushing secretions, her channels, her folds. Try as she might, the sound in her ears was not a regulated measure of fluids rushing and receding, but the wind in tall grasses and the weird, high call of a hunting bird.

  As usual, when the boy was done, he knelt naked in the middle of the room and, as usual, she walked naked into the kitchen to fetch his stick. When she returned, she stood over him, but she did not lift her arm to strike.

  “I think I am tamed,” said the girl when her boy looked up at her in question.

  “Oh no,” said the boy. “You're mistaken. You're wild; I'm tame. Remember? That's how it's always been.” But he was wrong and, for the first time, the girl lashed out at him to meet a need of her own. She struck him so hard that his ear filled with blood and she heard something crack in the thin bowl of his skull. He was driven to the side and levered himself up on one elbow.

  “You see?” said the boy, “I was right,” and the girl hit him again: in the mouth, on the thigh. She struck him across the spine and on the hand where she heard his fingers snap. She hit him on the ears, one and then the other, until they lost their shape. When she was done, there was something wrong with the way the boy was breathing. His jaw was off kilter and one of his eyes rolled loose in his skull. He seemed smaller, wetter. “Like a baby,” the girl thought, but, strange as it seems, she had only ever seen a human baby at some distance and did not know why this thought came to her now, so unbidden.

  She helped him into bed and tore long strips from a sheet she had saved for this purpose, soaked them in witch-hazel, tied up his wounds. What she felt before drained out of her. When she was beating the boy, she wanted to run: to jump through the window and race through the cold town, feel the cobblestones slap against the soles of her feet, feel the frozen clods of dirt crumble beneath her weight. She had wanted to stretch the muscles of her legs until they burned, but now, as the boy turned his head to let her dab at his ears, she considered where she would have gone, what she could have taken. Who would then have had her after what she had done?

  “Should I be sorry?” she asked the boy.

  “No, no,” said the boy, whistling through his broken lips. “You've never been better.”

  Still, she was sorry, and after this day something between them was changed.

  Many years later, the boy and the girl had grown old. Their seasons were spent like any seasons: a steady progression of rains and passing beauty. The boy kept his job at the butcher's shop and the girl saw the children of the first children she taught come again into her kitchen, the ghosts of their parents shadowing their faces as they lay their wet mittens steaming on her stove. Some mornings, they woke entwined. Some mornings, they woke culpable and hurt. The girl found herself inordinately irritated by the way the boy sat with his legs apart, his belly overlapping his groin. The boy often criticized the way she chewed, mouth open, or her inability to describe the measurable goals of her day at its dawn. In short, they were unique only in their habits, and even in the performance of these, the girl felt a sameness settling over her. It had something to do with the inside of houses, the preponderance of doors. No matter which of her students' households hosted the annual spring thank-you dinner, they all had curtains to pull over the windows and fences snug around their yards.

  In the town, the layers of the observable world were stacked neatly atop each other. In the forest, they had been fanned in messy overlap. In the town, to truly see, one had to decipher the logic by which the thing had been hidden. In the forest, like on the pages of her book, what was there was laid open in the moment of its working. Nothing was hidden, only unobserved. The forest didn't care how it was apprehended, is what the girl finally concluded. The town hummed
with the constant invention of its self.

  But, after a certain year, the girl had spent more of her life in one than she had the other. After a certain other year, she could no longer remember what had been so important about being different from the boy. More often than not, she felt full and did not suffer from thirst. She could look out the little window in her kitchen and see something that pleased her: a tethered horse twisting weeds from between her fence slats, a man with a red scarf flaring at his throat, a little bird, white-headed, thrusting out its breast in preparation for a song.

  “So. So. So,” the little birds sang and the girl also sang that song. In the evenings, she beat the boy lovingly and explored her vast interior spaces. Each time, she went a little further. Each time, she brought back the same handful of sedge-grass and held in her thoughts the same vision of purling white skies.

  One day, the town hosted a parade to celebrate the harvest. Every person of the town was expected to march in it, though this was an unspoken rule, and the girl and the boy did not wish to be an exception. For this festival, each townsperson dressed as a symbol of their public life. Those who farmed wore tunics embroidered in rust, moss and gold. They carried wicker baskets overflowing with roots and flowers and the women wove wreathes out of grapevine which they interlaced with their hair. Those who were makers, the blacksmith and the cooper, carried the tools of their craft and their children rolled before them those same tools transformed into instruments of faith or derision. The women who were mothers had built great domes out of melon hulls and straw and carried their bellies once more outthrust before them. The women who stood in the alleys in the late nights when the bars let out wore long tunics pinned all about with bits of ribbon curled like the corners of a scornful mouth and left their own faces bare and clean, pale as mirrors in the bronze light of the day.

  The girl spent a long and careful time composing her and the boy's outfits. For the boy, who spent his days in the service of efficient rendering, enabling the magic that would transform the body of a cow or lamb into the body of a stonemason or fishwife, the girl fashioned an outfit made entirely of folded brown paper. She did not cut a single piece, but from the reams and reams the boy brought home to her, she creased and fanned, pleated and rolled trousers with deep cuffs and wide, shallow pockets, a shirt with soft, loose sleeves and a vest which could be buttoned by means of paper buttons slid through paper button holes. She pressed a belt with a paper prong that lay against a paper buckle and folded shoes with a paper tongue, eyelets and laces. Finally, she fashioned a paper cleaver, deceptively light, which had a warm, worn haft and a wicked paper blade, very thin and sharp. Whenever the boy moved he made a soft rustling like someone idly turning the pages of a book. He examined himself in the mirror and turned to her with a face so filled with pride and gratitude, she felt moved to press her hand against his paper shirt and feel the shifting of his heart.

  For herself, a teacher, a sayer of words, she had made a different sort of outfit. Out from a drawer in the back of their cupboard, the girl pulled the skins of the rabbits she had stripped and dried over the years. Generations of skins, if one thought of it that way. Mothers and fathers, their children and children's children splayed before her headless, empty paws curled on the table. Of these, she made a voluminous dress stitched so the rabbits' furs in black and cream and sand and pure blind white pressed against her skin. The rabbits' own skins, still marked here and there with the line of a tendon or vein, presented to the world a tough, dry outer layer that hung on her stiffly and resisted her movements. All about her, the empty little paws hung down and as she walked the girl felt the furs brush and rustle against her thighs and stomach like the rabbits themselves, reanimate and seeking from her both comfort and warmth.

  Together, the boy and the girl in their parade finery made quite an impression. From their own front yard, they entered the line of the parade as it wound past them and the girl heard the murmurs her friends and neighbors made. Sounds of delight and astonishment, she thought. Sounds of welcome that ebbed around them as she took the boy's hand in her own and walked out under the sun.

  The parade was long. It wound up the town's high streets and dove into the low ones. It circled the town hall and marched to the corners of each of the community fields. All around her, the girl saw the people who had bound their lives. There was the butcher's son, who had taken over from his father, wearing a long, white apron, and brandishing a bouquet of chicken's feet. There was the banker who had loaned them the money for their cottage, bent now double with age and pushing before him a wheelbarrow full of miniature houses and barns, flat wooden disks that symbolized fields and here and there tiny wooden babies with their smooth heads painted gold. There were the other girl and the other boy, her long ago students, grown stouter and duller but essentially the same. They walked together but did not touch each other and the girl's belly was huge with false gravity and her skirt was a labor of green and blue feathers sweeping the ground.

  She turned to her own boy and adjusted the shoulder of his paper suit. He was waving to people marching on either side of them, eyes slatted against the heat of the blacksmith's mobile oven. She saw how his face had fallen, how his nose had grown. She saw how his eyes were pushed deep in his skull now, how his cheeks had caved into a slide of folds. His ears started red and thick from the sides of his head. “We are old, we are old,” the girl thought, but just then the band started up. The boy noted how each of the players were dressed like their instrument and the girl saw a reflection of her formidable dress wavering on the back of the tuba player's helm.

  They were there: in the sun, on the hill. There was no denying them, either what they had been or this simple thing they had become. The boy leaned over and said something close to her ear. They had reached the top of the highest hill in the town and here the parade disassembled itself, became a crowd pulsing in toward its center and out toward its fringe. The boy and the girl faced their friends and neighbors. Everyone shook each other's hands, gripped each other at the elbow. Some kissed the air behind each other's ears. The tuba bloomed like bubbles rising from the peat and the crowd turned as one to face the town. The trumpet pealed like a tree cleaving in a storm and the crowd sent up a great, booming cheer.

  “To the town!” shouted the townspeople and the girl and the boy shouted with them. From here the girl could see the streets unraveled and the fields unwieldy with fruit in these few days before the final cull. The air was crisp and high—a blue, thin air—and she could see the slate roof of her house like the roofs of all her neighbors. It was so clear and small she felt as if she could reach out and fit it on her thumb like a thimble. Around them massed the forest, patched with sunlight, seeming to stream as the clouds streamed across the sun. The forest like a tide, ascending.

  “To the fields!” shouted the townspeople and the girl and the boy shouted with them. Within her dress, the girl felt the furs shift about her. Next to her, the girl heard the boy rustle as he shifted his weight.

  “To the forest!” shouted the townspeople and a spell that was cast many long years ago suddenly, finally, broke.

  A few hours later, when the crowds dispersed, there was found on the cobblestones a drift of brown paper and a heap of torn rabbit skins. Of the boy and the girl, no trace was ever recovered and, after a short search, the townspeople collectively wrung them from their memories. A minor mystery for the October ghost tour. Nothing more.

  There was only one witness able to tell the story. This was the butcher's youngest grandson who had happened to be crouched at the girl's skirts at the time. He had been fascinated with her dress, had the intention of thrusting his finger into the hard clasp of one of the claws to see if it would grip, and so he was close, very close, saw it all. But, though he was interviewed several times by the magistrate, the tale he told made no sense. Something about their bodies shrinking, their empty clothes falling to the ground. Something about two little birds with white caps and bright black eyes hopping fro
m the garments' loose necks and cocking their heads to peer up at him. The butcher's grandson described the sleek line of their feathers, their trim wings. He described how they blinked, the fragility of their eyelids, the moment of blindness when they were most at risk.

  For a short time, the birds hopped about the cobblestones on their stiff legs, pecking at crumbs, dodging the revelers' heedless feet. They crossed each other's paths, before each other, behind each other, but gave no sign they were working in concert or were aware of their momentous change. Then, as if at an unheard signal, both sprang into the air, pumping their competent wings, and rose above the heads of their fellow townspeople. They wheeled once, the boy saw them, and flew off in opposite directions with no show of sorrow or even farewell.

  “It was as if they didn't know each other at all,” the child said.

  Try as he might, the magistrate could get no other answer out of him and it was observed that this was a child who had come to his mother late in life, who had been born at the end of a long, difficult labor. His head was too large and round, the magistrate observed, and his hair crossed it only sparsely. His eyes were too wide and his cheeks were too red. Hadn't he been born in the light of a dubious moon? the magistrate said. And didn't these things happen? And wasn't it a shame?

  For the rest of his short, baleful life the child was treated with gentle constraint. His bad behaviors were overlooked and his good ones too fervently praised. When he died, his family erected a monument garlanded by lambs, cast a concrete bench for quiet contemplation and fashioned a little fountain to gurgle at his feet. Many years later, when the forest had taken back all the lands of the town, it was still possible to see the outlines of his grave through the tangle of thicket and to apprehend the shape of the bench beneath its coat of moss. Though the fountain no longer bubbled, every storm filled it to running over. In the long dreaming of the season, birds came there to splash and groom. They clung to the fountain's lip and sung their songs. They lived their brief lives and bore no witness.