by Layla Lawlor
"I know that it is not something outsiders are supposed to share." For once he was serious, not laughing at all.
"But why? What does it mean?"
"Not everything has a great mystery behind it, Heddy." It was the first time I could remember him calling me by name. He unlatched the gate and held it for me. "The festival is in just a few days, isn't it? You'll see many interesting things then, and you can write it all down in your book."
I latched the gate carefully behind us, telling myself it was to keep the village's many stray dogs out of the henyard, and nothing to do with supernatural beings at all.
From the girls, who were still my best informants, I learned that the autumn harvest season was bracketed by the two festivals of Shaking Out and Bringing In. The latter one was, I thought, roughly analogous to my village's late-autumn week of festival and feasting that culminated in Closing Night. When the days grew cool and the nights began to freeze, so that meat would keep without spoiling, we gathered the stock in and slaughtered them for the winter. The week was as hectic and busy as spring lambing season, and we were up to our elbows all week in blood and sheep guts and sausage-making. Yet still there was time to heap wood on bonfires all night long, keeping the flames leaping skyward—partly, yes, so we could see to do our work, but it wasn't only that. We kept up a constant chatter of song and story and laughter, while blood froze on our skirts and frost crept down from the mountains to rime the water buckets with ice. The children were busy running back and forth, bringing in the last of the late crops from the fields, gourds and whatnot. And the fields were lit with bonfires too. Across the valley that lay below my village, we could see the glimmer of fires marking the neighboring villages of Het's Crossing and Little Millstream. (Our village was known to outsiders as Upper Millstream, though no one I knew ever called it that. It was just The Village ... as were most of those I'd visited since.)
As a child, I had never needed to ask what the bonfires and songs were for, because I'd always known. They were to keep things away. For the year came undone in the autumn; the boundaries between worlds grew thin. I had a cousin who swore she'd had a whole conversation with her dead father while standing half-asleep chopping goat meat for sausage. Another cousin had met a handsome, smiling man at the gate, who helped her carry in her burden of firewood, but when she turned around, he was gone.
I, too, had glimpsed things sometimes, seen faces of strangers out of the corner of my eye, heard snatches of eerily beautiful song and forced my raw throat to sing louder to drown them out.
Don't listen to the voices, Heddy; it might be the mountain calling his lost daughters home ....
After I moved to the city, it was easier to disbelieve in such things. We were all asleep on our feet and running ragged; of course we sometimes saw things that weren't there.
But even city people had their ghosts and gods and dreams. There were Mysteries in the temples; there were urban shrines to our old mountain gods, where displaced mountain migrants left garlands of flowers and crumbled bits of flatbread. I had left my share.
And here, where every rock and tree had a story, where people swore they'd seen the otter-women who lived in the pool at the base of the waterfall or glimpsed a Skobanick skipping down the lane under the moonlight ... who could say? I knew I'd doubt again when I got back to the University and flipped through my notes. But I also hoped I'd remember what it felt like to believe in it, just a little bit. I plucked an oak leaf and pressed it between two pages of my notebook, in the hopes that opening it, years later, I might smell again the sharpness of autumn, remember the way I shivered when I walked into the shadow of the mountain that hung over the valley, sentinel-stern.
Back in my village, our wooden Barley-Men had been prepared for that end-of-season festival. We carved them late in the summer. For us, it was not a mystery for men alone, but a community project that even children helped with. Then we stood them up around the village and draped them in wreaths of flowers and shocks of grain. They always faced out, never in. "Keep good watch, old man," we would say, and "Defend us with courage, grandfather." We tended them with care and oiled them when it rained. Finally, on Closing Night, we carried them through the village in a great procession. Everyone wanted to help carry them, and when we couldn't, we trailed our hands along their sides for luck. In the bonfires, they went up with great showers of sparks. All fires in the village were extinguished that night, and in the morning, we took heaping baskets of coals from the burnt-down bonfires to rekindle our hearths for the new year.
I had always thought the world felt different on the morning after Closing Night, too. Walking home gritty-eyed with sleep and leaning wearily on one of my cousins or aunts, I always felt as if the world had a grayness to it. The festival atmosphere had vanished with the dawn, along with the haunting magic of those long autumn nights, and now the houses of my village looked small and shabby; the muddy lanes were scattered with trampled garlands and other discarded mementos of the night's parade. The light was clear and harsh, and it always seemed a little colder, somehow.
Here in the village that outsiders (but not the locals) called Rowan Grove, I was coming to the understanding that, for whatever long-forgotten ancient reason, they'd pulled that one night apart into two. The first of the two festivals, Shaking Out, was for women and girls; the second, Bringing In, was for the men, who tended the flocks.
And, as we drew nearer to that night, the women's camaraderie with me grew warmer. I worked side by side with the village girls, twisting garlands of grain-straw laced with apple-dollies and draping them over windows and doors and garden fences. Though it had been years since I'd made one, my fingers still knew how.
The arrival of the new idols came as a shock. I went to bed one night as usual, and woke up in the morning to find they'd sprung up all over the village and its environs, their fresh yellow wood gleaming in the morning sun. Most startling of all, pebbles had been placed in their carven eye sockets, making me feel as if they were watching me no matter where I went. There was one across the creek from where Meham's family dipped water, staring across the pool as if to challenge all who went there. Another guarded the goat pasture where Liss went each day to take lunch to her brothers. I went with her, and noticed that she ducked her head and walked through a patch of long-stemmed, blue-flowered louseweed, snagging her skirt, rather than cross the stretch of path under its stern gaze. I was not the only one who found them unnerving.
"The men do it at night?" I asked the girls on the meadowside while helping them dig tubers and toss them into baskets. Su sat above us, not offering to help. Here, as in my own village, this was women's work.
"Oh, of course," Su translated, looking more than usually amused. I wondered if he'd had a hand in it this year. "Everyone knows that. But it's more exciting to think they just walk in, you know?"
Liss seemed not at all excited. She'd grown more subdued and quiet by the day. All the other girls were looking forward eagerly to Shaking Out. They spent hours embroidering their festival costumes—the ceremony involved elaborately decorated aprons—and competing to come up with more elaborate and outrageous ways of wrapping their scarves to show flirtatious glimpses of their long hair. Only Liss rarely joined in the fun. I wondered if she might be ill ... or pregnant, perhaps; I'd seen similar unhappy behavior among girls in my home village who were hiding an unwanted pregnancy. But she didn't seem to show a particular affinity for any of the boys, nor did she seem especially sad. She was simply withdrawn.
I couldn't think how to find out what was bothering her. We had no language in common, and it was obvious to me that trying to draw her out with Su acting as an intermediary would be no help at all. She grew even shyer than usual in his presence, withdrawing into herself almost completely. I found myself wondering if Su had bothered her, but if so, I couldn't imagine when; Liss was almost always with the other girls, or me, or her mother, and the women slept in the loft while the men slept down by the fire.
I trie
d bringing up the topic with Meham once or twice, but she was a brusque, energetic woman with little patience for her daughter's slow dreaminess. In Meham's opinion, Liss was merely lazy.
I wondered if anyone had asked my mother what was wrong, or if they'd only said: stop woolgathering, girl; hurry up, get the chores done.
I never had learned who my father was, or if he was the one who was responsible for my mother seeking solace in her head and, finally, among the mountains. My aunts only said he'd died before I was born. I got a more truthful answer out of one of my cousins when I was a bit older. "What I heard is your mother was sneaking off to see a boy down at Little Millstream. She wouldn't ever say who it was. Not surprising, with Grandpapa roaring about going over to kill him when the whole thing came out."
Now that I was grown, more sinister explanations had occurred to me. Perhaps it really was only a tryst between a boy and a girl, too young to know their own minds properly, that had ended badly. But there were other ways, much less innocent ways, an unwed girl like my mother could have ended up with a baby.
It hardly mattered anymore, I told myself firmly. Whether my mother had meant to have a baby or not, whether she'd wanted me or not, whether my father was a village boy or a lecherous old man, I'd had no end of aunts and uncles and cousins to make me feel loved and wanted.
I only wished I understood what was happening to Liss in order to help her, as no one had been able to help my mother.
I was awakened before dawn on the day of Shaking Out by one of Meham's younger children landing on my chest, having mistaken me for her big sister. With all the breath knocked out of me, I convinced the excited but sleepy child to burrow into my body-warm blankets for a little while yet. Liss was not in the bed with us.
I crawled out of the covers into the cold shock of early morning, the bare attic floor frigid under my toes. Outside the window it was still dark, but the stars had wheeled toward dawn, the Ox Star long since vanished behind the mountains. I dressed as quickly as possible, pulled on heavy wool stockings and climbed down the ladder to the main floor. I expected to find Liss stirring up the fire—in most of these mountain families, the eldest child or their mother were usually the first awake to get the morning chores started—but the fire was still banked, the weaving room frigid. Furthermore, Su was not in his customary place, asleep on the hearth. His wool blanket was neatly folded on a chair, waiting to be stowed upstairs when the family was awake.
I knelt and stirred up the fire like a good guest, then went to fetch in water and wood. I thought I heard voices in the yard while I fumbled sleepily with the latch. However, when I opened the door, even the poultry were not awake yet. The yard and the garden, mulched over for winter, glistened with frost. I used a stick from the woodpile to break the ice in the tub under the eaves so I could dip a bucket for washing and cooking until someone went down to the creek.
It wasn't until I turned around with the heavy wooden bucket hanging from my hand that I saw a lumpy shape crouched atop the stone wall around the pigsty.
My heart jumped into my throat. I dropped the bucket, soaking my stockings in ice water—I hadn't bothered to put on my boots just to go out on the porch—and brandished my firewood at the distorted creature hulking against the brightening sky.
Common sense caught up with me then. It was no legendary creature sneaking in to steal milk or eggs; it was only Liss, sitting hunched on the wall.
I went to her quickly, squishing on my wet feet over the frozen ground. I didn't know what I feared, but she looked up at me when I sat down next to her, her face wearing a vacant, lost look. She was wearing only her sleeping shift with a coat over the top of it. Her feet were bare, and purple with cold. I touched her hands and found them freezing.
"How long have you been out here? You're like ice."
She didn't answer—but of course, we had no language in common.
I tried what little of her tongue I knew. "Was Su here?" I asked. I had been so sure I'd heard voices ... "Su?"
Liss shook her head slowly, but whether it was a negation of my question or simply that she didn't understand, I had no way of knowing.
I took her inside and wrapped her up before the fire. While I was stripping off my wet, muddy stockings, the other children came scrambling down the ladder like chattering little squirrels. This seemed to perk up Liss a bit, and by the time I'd obtained stockings for her and dry things for me, she was smiling at the children's excitement and pulling out last night's basket of bread dough to start the morning baking.
But I couldn't help thinking of her hunched on the wall in her shift, and my aunts saying, "Your mother just walked away barefoot into the forest ..."
There was no time for fretting on Shaking Out Day. I soon learned why it was called that, as all the women in the village hauled out their bedsheets, rugs, linens, and even the mattress covers, dumping the old, smelly straw on top of the garden. The men betook themselves out to the fields to stay out from underfoot, Su among them; I was too busy to catch up to him and find out where he'd been that morning. Boys too small to escape were drafted to work along with the women and girls.
And work we did, sweeping the house from top to bottom, beating the rugs, dashing buckets of water on the low wooden porch. I made a few cursory attempts to record my observations, but was always getting called away to help with something or other. Finally I put my notebook on a high shelf among the dishes where it was reasonably safe from being splashed with water in my skirt pocket or accidentally dropped in the creek as I rushed from place to place with the others.
The weather could not have been finer. The sky was cloudless and mild, the sunshine warm on my shoulders as I helped the little girls beat rugs. Still, I did not relish the idea of washing the entire household's supply of sheets in the ice-cold mountain stream, which it seemed we were going to have to do. With our arms laden, we picked our way down the usual path to the water-dipping and clothes-washing place—I averted my eyes from the gleaming new idol as the other women did—but this time, Meham turned and trotted on a path along the stream. I had to hurry to catch up with her.
"We show you a trick now," she said over her shoulder to me.
Hauling our great burdens of soiled sheets, Liss and I followed her to the waterfall below the mill. Here, a small crowd of cheerful, singing women and girls had woven a great cage from willow-withes, like an enormous fish trap, across the creek where it spilled out from the waterfall pool. Taking turns with the others, we threw our sheets under the falls and let the water beat them. Tossed and turned by the churning water, scoured by sand, they eventually fetched up against the cage. We hauled them out and, if they were not clean enough, threw them back in for another go. At the end, we rinsed them in the creek to get rid of residual mud and then wrung them out on the shoreline before traipsing back and draping them to dry in the yard.
"Good trick, no?" Meham said to me.
"Very good trick, yes," I agreed. Come to think of it, I had only ever helped her with small items of household laundry, never anything large. My village would have been lucky to have such a waterfall nearby.
When the mattress covers had aired in the sunshine and we'd beaten the ticks and lice out of them, we brought in armloads of fresh straw, still warm and fragrant from the mild autumn sunshine, to stuff them again.
The whole time, women came and went; sometimes we were joined by some of Meham's friends or relatives, other times Meham or Liss was called away to help haul washwater or carry a particularly unwieldy mattress into someone's house. There was a steady yammer of stories, jokes, and songs that rang in my head like those old work songs from my girlhood. I wished I could understand more of what was being said.
Still, I possessed willing hands and a strong back, and this made me instantly welcome. For the first time, I didn't feel like an outsider; I was an equal partner as we slung mattresses about and draped wet sheets over fences and trees to snap in the wind.
The entire day, every house that had an
oven—whether built into the fireplace like Meham's, or shared in communal yards like some families'—kept it going full blast, baking bread and cheese rolls and doughy cakes stuffed with fruit. Women too old or infirm to participate in the heavy work worked at the baking and kept an eye on the babies. There was an old woman with a club foot tending the hearth in Meham's house—some sort of elderly aunt, I gathered from the warm affection between the two women.
By evening we were all tired and sore. I had blisters on two fingers from mattress-stuffing, and I'd crushed my thumb between bucket and rocks while dipping it at the creek. Still, I'd never made it to Closing Night, either, without having my hands cut up and my legs bruised.
Coming into Meham's house with an armload of rugs, I was startled to find Su slinging his rolled-up bundle over his shoulder. "Are you going somewhere?"
"Ah, story lady, I can't stay." He sounded genuinely regretful. "I've dallied too long already. I must be getting on home."
I dropped the rugs in a pile and dusted off my sore hands. "You dallied all this time but you aren't going to stay for the feast?"
Su's smile was rueful, not mocking this time. "This is a night for women, not for men. And anyway, I have other places to be."
"But you can't possibly travel at night." It was not merely a mercenary concern for myself, bereft of my translator on the very night I'd most hoped to document. The forest was filled with dangers, and I couldn't understand his insistence on heading out just as darkness fell.
"Your concern does you credit, but I will be fine." He hesitated, then, to my surprise and a certain amount of discomfort, brushed my hair back and kissed my forehead. "I have enjoyed our travels, story lady."