Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  “No. I live up there,” she said again, but then she realized that wasn’t actually true anymore. She didn’t live in Dead Hollow any longer. She lived in the forest. “I live here,” she said, knowing that she was probably confusing him as much as he was confusing her.

  “But who were your parents? What is your last name?”

  She didn’t understand. She had already told him her name. She thought she knew the Eng-lish words of the day-folk, but she realized now that she must not.

  “Well, in any case…” He turned very slowly this time and carefully gestured for her to follow him. “Come on into the house and get something to eat.”

  It had startled her before, but this time she held back her reflex to blend. When he walked, she walked with him, not quite at his side, but a few feet away from him. And the dog crept along with them, eyeing her with quick tilts of his head, but not biting her or even growling. He seemed to understand that the man Nathaniel did not want him to attack her.

  As they went up the steps and through the front door, she paused, remembering the night she’d come here—the blasting noise of the killing-stick, the chomping teeth of the dog, the pain and blood of her wounds, her desperate escape out to the barn—it all started coming back to her.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “You and I have made our peace and buried the hatchet.”

  “The hatchet?” she said, pretty sure that this was a kind of small, sapling-killing ax of the hand.

  “It’s just an old expression,” he said. “Come on inside.”

  Willa stepped into the house and gazed around at the eating room and the main room beyond. Everything seemed so different from what it was when she had been crawling on the floor through the darkness.

  “What do you have a hankering for?” he asked.

  Willa knew immediately what she wanted, even before she could recall its name. She tried to remember what the Cherokee prisoner-boy had called them. The word felt wrong on her lips, garbled, like it couldn’t actually be a real word, but it made her mouth water just to think about it.

  “Cook…” she said. “Cookies. I have a…” She tried to remember the words he had used. “I have a hankering for cookies.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I thought maybe somebody besides me and Scout had been into that jar.” The man Nathaniel started to smile. He was trying to be kind to her—“welcoming,” as he called it—but as soon as he said these words, he seemed to be suddenly overcome: his expression contorted and he turned away from her, rubbing his forehead with his hand.

  “I’m afraid my supply of cookies has run dry,” he said soberly, his voice shaking with emotion.

  After a few moments, he regained his composure and turned back around. “But I’ve got some good, fresh cornbread from the latest batch from the mill, and I can cook up some venison if you want a proper meal.”

  “What is venison?” she asked.

  He looked at her in surprise. “You know…meat.”

  When he saw the confusion in her face he said, “Deer meat.”

  “I sleep with deer, I don’t eat them,” she said.

  “Ah…” he said hesitantly. “All right…No venison, then. What do you eat?”

  “Shoots, berries, nuts, rock tripe lichen…”

  He tilted his head, as if he wasn’t sure if she was being serious with him.

  “I’ve tried that sort of thing,” he said, “but never been too partial to it. I’m afraid sticks taste like sticks, if you know what I mean. And I hate acorns in particular. My papa used to tell me you can eat ’em, but I think you’d have to be full-on starving to do it. Well, listen, let’s try some of this cornbread over here and see how you like it.”

  “What animal did you kill to make the cornbread?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him.

  “It’s made from corn flour from the mill,” he said.

  “The wheel in the water.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So it’s called a mill.”

  “Yes, that’s right. People bring me their corn and their wheat and I grind it. I take one sack out of every eight in the way of payment. I figure, why plant and harvest crops, digging in the dirt for somebody else all day, when I can sit and watch a wheel go ’round on my own sweet time.”

  “You weren’t watching the wheel go ’round on the day I first saw you,” she said, trying to say the word ’round like he did.

  “No, that’s true,” he said. “Somebody did me a bad turn, shoved a hammer in the machinery, knocked everything all catawampus, trying to break the teeth off my main gear. Looking to put me out of business, no doubt. But I stopped it in time and got the gears lined up proper again.”

  Willa listened as carefully as she could, trying to understand all the confusing words he used, but she couldn’t understand how the mill could have teeth.

  “I’m competing with half a dozen other mills down in Cades Cove,” he continued on. “So I need to keep working.”

  “Is that who damaged the mill?”

  “No, no, those are good folk down there,” he said. “We’re competitors, sure, but they’d never do anything underhanded like that.” He looked out the window toward the forest. “I know exactly who did it,” he added bitterly. “And those are the ones you gotta be careful of.”

  This man Nathaniel talked in a peculiar fashion, and he talked a lot. It was as if for years he had been used to talking all day long, but lately he had been alone, and all the words pent up inside him came pouring out, like water splashing down through the buckets of his wheel.

  As he continued, she didn’t speak as much as he did, but watched him and listened to him. He fascinated her. He wasn’t anything like what the padaran had told her the day-folk were. He wasn’t violent or hateful. He didn’t attack her or beat her or try to capture her or kill her. She’d seen other homesteaders only from a distance—small families building their log cabins, tending to their little farms, traveling on their carriages—but this man, this man who called himself Nathaniel seemed so different from the padaran, the jaetters, and the other Faeran of the clan. Were all the day-folk as evil as the padaran described other than this one man?

  “Why do you cut the trees?” she blurted out suddenly, looking for his evilness.

  “Ah…” He hesitated, unable to find the words to explain his actions.

  “Why do you kill them?” she pressed him.

  “I cut down trees to…make my house, to warm my home, to make tools…There are many uses for wood. I could not live here without it. Why are you asking this question? Are the trees friends of yours?”

  She knew he had meant this as a joke, but she answered with the truth. “Yes, they are,” she said. “And when you cut them they die.”

  He studied her for several long seconds, not saying a word.

  “Yes,” he admitted finally, quite softly. “The trees die. But I only cut what I need. We all have to survive.”

  “Do you need that wall?” she asked pointing toward the wooden wall. “Do you need the wooden wheel that turns in the water more than those trees needed their lives? Do you need the meat of the deer more than the deer needs her life, more than the fawn needs her mother?”

  “I never looked at it that way,” he admitted. And then he repeated, “I just take what I need.”

  “Like the wolf,” she said.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said, bristling. He didn’t like to be compared to a wolf.

  She could see he had no love for wolves. He was a kind man, but a fool, too.

  She watched as he pulled out a sharpened blade of steel with an antler-grip, cut a slice of cornbread, and handed it to her.

  “Have some of this and see how you like that mill,” he said, smiling a little. “You want butter on that?”

  “No,” she said. She didn’t know what butter was or what he killed to make it.

  As soon as she put the bread between her lips, it began to melt in her mouth. It was unlike anything she had ever tasted befor
e.

  “You like that,” he said, nodding and smiling. “You like it a lot. You see, I’m not all bad.”

  That first day, when she was watching him from the forest, he had seemed so sad, and then his melancholy shifted like the wind into a deep anger. And when he returned from his journey down the river earlier that afternoon, he had seemed so exhausted, not just in body but in spirit. But now he seemed to have forgotten a little bit of what had stormed through him a short time before, and she could feel the same thing happening to her. Their words and their smiles were affecting her, changing her in little ways, like the river shaping the stone.

  In the days that followed, it was one strange incident after another.

  She ate with the man Nathaniel while sitting at something he called his dinner table.

  She sat with him and the dog by the warm glow of the fire in the evenings.

  She watched him work in his mill in the afternoons, with the turn, turn, turning of the millstone grinding the wheat into flour while they talked.

  Sometimes they walked together in the forest, teaching each other the way they saw the world.

  She learned many new Eng-lish words, like that he called his killing-stick a “rifle” or a “gun.” And she taught him the Faeran names of many of the plants and animals in the forest. When he showed her how to operate the mill, she taught him the songs of the birds flitting in the trees above their heads.

  “There’s something that has always confused me about the Eng-lish language,” she admitted one afternoon, as they walked in the forest.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She stopped and pointed to the needles of a pine tree. “What color do you call that?”

  “Green,” he said.

  “In the Faeran language that color is called erunda,” she said. “So, if the pine needles are what you call green, then what color is that?” She pointed to fresh grass growing in a small patch of sunlight.

  “That’s green, too,” he said.

  “But that’s finlalin,” she said in confusion. “They are totally different colors.”

  “Light green?” He shrugged. “It’s still green.”

  “What about that color there?” she asked, pointing to the shiny, waxy leaves of a rhododendron bush.

  “Green,” he said.

  “No!” she said in exasperation. “That’s a different color. You can see the difference with your eyes, right?”

  “Looks like green to me,” he said. “Maybe a slightly different shade, but it’s still green. How many words do you have in your language for the green colors you see in the forest?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. They’re all different colors to me. But at least forty or fifty.”

  “I’ll stick with regular old green, thank you,” he said with a smile, bumping her gently with his arm.

  As they continued through the forest, she couldn’t help from taking a quiet, contented sigh. There was something about spending time with this unusual human that felt surprisingly like her soul was swimming in the warm water of the sacred lake of the bears.

  But every morning, the man Nathaniel grabbed his killing-stick and trudged into the forest in the direction of the river with his dog Scout at his side. He did not tell her where he was going or what he was doing, and it was clear that he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Curious to know what he was doing, she slipped through the undergrowth and watched him from a distance.

  He followed the bank of the river downstream, close along the jagged, moss-covered rocks, many of them towering over his head, others low and tumbled, with the water flowing between them.

  The dog ran up and down along the bank, his nose to the ground looking for scent, working with the man Nathaniel, seeming to understand what he was looking for and as anxious to find it as he was.

  The man and the dog came to a shallow section of the river where it was clear the man wanted to cross, but the water was running strong even here. To her amazement, the man slung his rifle by its leather strap over his back, picked his dog up in his arms, and began to wade across.

  He plowed slowly through the current with forceful, deliberate steps as the water crashed against his thighs.

  “Be careful,” Willa whispered as she watched from the trees, the palms of her hands sweating.

  She could imagine the powerful current pulling the man Nathaniel off his feet, and sweeping him and the frantically swimming dog down into the rocky rapids below.

  When they finally reached the other side, the dog leapt from his arms and shook himself dry, and then the two of them continued on their way, receding into the distance farther downstream on the opposite bank of the river.

  She thought the man and his dog must be going out to hunt for their food, and that he wasn’t talking about it because he knew it would bother her. But when they returned later that afternoon, the man wasn’t just empty-handed but solemn and exhausted, like he’d gone to the ends of the earth. His boots and trousers were soaked, his hands roughened by the abrasion of stone, and his clothes were torn.

  Willa’s brows furrowed in confusion. Where was he going every day? What was he doing out there?

  She watched from her spot in the top of the sourwood tree as they came up from the river. The dog ran into the house, his tail wagging, excited to be home—maybe looking for her, she thought.

  But the man Nathaniel didn’t go in.

  He walked in silence to the meadow near the house, where the rays of the setting sun were shining down. He stood there alone, unmoving and unchanging for a long time, except for the glisten of light trickling down his cheeks.

  As she watched him, she felt as if the world was being held still, held in that moment, as if she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, her heart slowing to a low, steady thumping beat, as if in that moment she could reach out across the distance between them, and without any knowledge or understanding or words, know what the man Nathaniel was feeling.

  Later that evening, with the feeling of that moment still in her heart, she went down to the river and sat by herself, listening to the water flowing between the stones, and remembering the sound of her grandmother’s Faeran voice.

  She remembered the look in her grandmother’s eyes and the warmth of her touch, the way her mamaw had wrapped her in her arms, as if she were encasing her in a cocoon that would protect her forever.

  And Willa remembered playing games of hide-and-seek with her sister, Alliw, in the dappled shade of the wooded dells—the two of them blending from one place to another as they took turns hiding from one another. She remembered the smile that lit up Alliw’s little spotted face whenever Willa found her. They played through the sunlit days and the moonlit nights, running and blending and searching and laughing, over and over again.

  Sitting there by the river on her own, she could see it all in her mind. And she could hear the soft sound of Alliw’s voice as they explored the forest together with their mamaw and their parents. She remembered Alliw talking to a nest of frightened sparrows that had fallen from a tree, the way she cupped the little birds in her hands and reassured them that she would put them back where they belonged.

  Willa remembered it all, but as the sound of the Faeran words drifted from her memory, it was like the whispers of the water flowing down the tumbling river.

  And as the moon rose from the darkened peak of the Great Mountain looming in the distance, the man Nathaniel came down to the river, and sat beside her in the quiet, and seemed to understand not just her sense of silence, but her sense of loss.

  He seemed to know, as if from his own experience, that there were parts of her life that he could not understand, words from her past that she longed to hear, but he could not speak.

  The next day, while the man Nathaniel was away down the river, Willa remained in the forest near the house.

  Every day, wherever she was and whatever she was doing, she had been practicing her woodland skills. Her mamaw had taught her the long history of
her sky-reaching friends and the other plants, and all the ancient words and whispers she needed to converse with them. But now that she had begun to learn more and more on her own, she realized there was so much more she wanted to understand and do.

  She practiced lying on the ground in a patch of ferns and vines, and then asking the plants to grow across her body until she disappeared, not just by blending the color and texture of her skin, but by physically covering the entirety of her body with the growth of the plants. She was able to achieve the growth she wanted. But it turned out to be surprisingly difficult to actually get out of the ferns and vines once they’d grown over her. The plants seemed to like holding on to her, with their tiny, sticky stems and their curling tendrils adhering to her skin.

  As she was climbing out of the vines, she noticed a small slug slithering over a nearby rock. That was one of the few creatures of the forest she didn’t like, but this time it repulsed her even more than usual. The slug’s mucus-coated skin reminded her of the padaran when he caught his foot in the jaws of the trap. She still couldn’t figure out exactly what she had seen when she glanced back to look at him. But the image had stuck in her memory. The padaran had always had deep bronze skin that seemed to be filled with light, but for that single moment when he was in terrible pain and distress, his skin had turned as gray and slimy as a slug.

  Back when she was a jaetter stealing for the clan, she thought the padaran was a great leader, feared and respected by all, the wise father to her struggling people. But now that she had left the lair, she wondered why he had hated the old ways so deeply, why he had been trying so desperately to wipe out the last remnants of the woodwitches and their forest powers. What harm had they been doing?

  She hated the dark memories of her old life. She didn’t want to think about the Dead Hollow lair or the padaran. But questions kept sneaking into her mind like little worms: Where did he come from? Who was he?