Red Riding Hood

by David Leslie Johnson; David Leslie Johnson; Catherine Hardwicke Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

  It was said that Claude had been dropped on his head as an infant, and that was why he was strange. Valerie thought that notion was ridiculous. He was a beautiful soul.

  The trouble was that instead of rushing to get in his own words as everyone else did, he really listened. And that made people think he was slow. But he was kind and good, a lover of animals and people.

  He never washed his socks. And no one washed them for him, either.

  Both he and Roxanne were freckled, but Claude more so, even on his lips.

  Everyone called Roxanne and Claude redheads, but Valerie never knew why. She thought it must have been for lack of imagination. She would call them six-o’clock-in-the-evening-sunset-heads. Bottom-of-the-lake-tendrils-of-algae-heads. Valerie grew up feeling envious of those heads of hair because she felt they were something special, a mark from God.

  Claude and Valerie listened as the other girls chattered about the boys from neighboring villages who would be coming to help with the harvest. Claude lost interest and ambled back toward the center of town.

  Something changed in the air, though, as the girls passed a temporary outdoor blacksmith shop that had been set up on the path to the harvest. A sense of self-awareness set in. A quickening of breath. A loss of focus. Valerie narrowed her eyes in disappointment at her friends; they were too smart for this. Losing it over a boy. Henry Lazar.

  He was lanky and dashing, with cropped hair and a relaxed smile. The girls saw him at work outside with his equally handsome father, Adrien, repairing axles for the harvest wagons. The way some people loved to cook or to work in the garden, Henry loved the intricacies of locks, the process of the planning, the designing, the making. He had shown a few he made to Valerie once, square and round, one shaped unwittingly like the head of a cat, another like an upturned house drawn by a child, or a family crest. Some black, some gold, some gold underneath blackened tarnish.

  Valerie waved easily as her friends went mute, smiled shyly at their feet, and shuttled past. Only Lucie curtsied politely. Henry shook his head, grinning.

  Rose hung back at the last moment to make very sure her eyes met Henry’s and held his gaze long enough to make him feel uncomfortable.

  Other than that, the girls pretended that Henry hadn’t affected them at all, and self-consciously continued with their conversation. Close as they all were, they felt that admitting their attraction would make themselves vulnerable. Besides, this way, each girl got to feel as if she were keeping Henry to herself. Valerie couldn’t help wondering why her own reaction was so different from theirs. True, he was good-looking, charming, tall, and kind, but he did not leave her feeling girly and giddy.

  “I hope you guys haven’t forgotten who’s coming today,” Valerie teased them.

  “Some of them have to be handsome,” Lucie jumped in. “By the rule of ratios.”

  The girls looked at one another and reached for each other’s hands, jumping up and down in unison. They would be free for the night.

  And in Daggorhorn, a night of freedom meant everything.

  3

  It was still so early that the morning light cast a hushed pink glow on the hay fields, and they looked almost too beautiful to be touched. Valerie and her friends watched as the first men out from the village hovered, not speaking. The men felt foolish, but no one wanted to be the first to hack into the even sheet of hay. Work was work, though, and so they set to it.

  The men were just laying the first blows when they heard the rumbling of wheels. A wedding in the village a week earlier had made a big impression on Valerie’s friends. Now the girls couldn’t help but wonder whether the foreign wagons’ cargo would change their lives. But the older men of the village, already hard at work, held a sad knowledge: No matter how good the boys were, they would never be able to live up to the girls’ expectations.

  The wagon lurched to a stop; the horse pulling it was so inky black that it looked like a silhouette against the light wheat background. As the guest laborers from other villages began to pour out, the girls rose from the haystacks where they sat, shaking out their skirts in preparation. The boys were energetic, young, and strong, and Valerie was happy for her friends, who were light-headed with excitement. Somehow, though, she knew there wouldn’t be anyone for her—not among these village boys. They just lacked… something.

  The men, stepping out, shaded their eyes against the sun. They carried blankets rolled into packs and jackets slung loose over their shoulders.

  The younger ones’ eyes scanned the girls. They knew this dance well. An especially eager harvester stopped in front of a stunned Roxanne, who held her breath, afraid to disrupt the air around her.

  “Hi,” he said, flashing all his teeth, trying hard.

  He didn’t see Prudence pinch Roxanne’s thigh.

  “Hello,” Prudence said for her.

  Lucie looked down, demure, while Rose scooted her breasts higher up into the corset of her blouse. Prudence’s eyes flickered, darting from one boy to the next, weighing their cons (this one had the gangliest limbs) against their pros (but also the nicest leather bag). The choosing seemed a matter of utmost importance.

  As soon as they had gone, the girls ran toward one another into a huddle, narrowly avoiding collision.

  “So many!” Roxanne cried, blowing at a stray wisp of hair.

  “Just the right amount.” Prudence caught her breath, having singled out the good ones.

  “One for each, with a few left over for me.” Rose sashayed in her skirt.

  “Valerie, are you sure you have the tea?” Lucie interrupted, putting a momentary halt to the excitement.

  “Yes.”

  Lucie gave her a look, knowing her sister’s forgetfulness.

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure,” Valerie said, patting her pack.

  They resumed staking their claims without even considering that the boys might like to have a say in the matter. Prudence felt she deserved the harvester who’d come up to Roxanne, as she’d been the one to actually speak to him. Valerie thought it was a bit grabby, but Roxanne didn’t argue, as she had her eye on a quieter, less forward one anyway.

  Lucie pointed to a passing harvester, portly in his breeches.

  “There goes your husband now, Rose!”

  “At least I don’t have a crush on a sheep shearer who could be my grandfather.” Rose’s angular face made her seem angry, even when she wasn’t.

  Roxanne felt compelled to mention the person missing at the scene. “Oh, who cares?” she said, smoothing a lock of her red hair. “Henry is better looking than all of them.”

  “You know he’s not going to marry any of us village girls,” Prudence snapped, as she sometimes did. “We’re all too poor.”

  The girls saw the village authority and harvest overseer, the Reeve, coming toward them, so they trudged out to the fields and set to work, swaying on their slender legs as they raked the grass into rows for drying. Valerie wished she didn’t feel so divorced from her friends’ excitement—it must have been wonderful to feel dizzy with joy, as they did. Try as she might, love had never been a topic that had much interested her. Now Valerie felt the dejection one experienced after a holiday had come and gone.

  Seeing Valerie’s disinterest, Prudence was pleased. More for me to choose from, she thought, surveying the men in the fields. Just then, her eye caught another wagon coming in, so unexpected that she didn’t even have a chance to meet her friends’ eyes before its big wheels rolled to a stop. They saw, too, though. Lucie lifted her head but pretended to work, picking up and setting down the same small heap repeatedly. Rose blotted her face with the inside of her skirt, and Roxanne swiped at the hair clinging to her forehead, already sticky with sweat from the muggy air.

  The horse slowed to a stop, the cart’s wheels lurching forward one last time and then rocking back into a rut. Valerie watched as a few older men toddled out of the wagon, but then went back to work with her wide-toothed rake as the rest of the harvesters drifted out. She could sens
e her friends scrutinizing the new arrivals.

  She wasn’t sure what made her look up again—years later, remembering this morning as the one that forever altered the course of her life, she always said that she’d felt something out of the corner of her eye, compelling her to look, almost as if someone had tapped her on the shoulder to make her turn. Looking up, she saw a heart-stoppingly handsome, dark-haired young man.

  He looked wild and haunted, wearing all black, like a horse that could not be tamed.

  Valerie felt her breath empty out of her.

  Peter and I had spent the day chasing each other around the fields, collecting huge white mushrooms, whose layered, dusty, charcoal bottoms were soft and crumbling. We’d collapsed upon reaching the square and begun playing a game of riddles, charades, something I was never good at. I became hopelessly lost, never able to keep track of whether we were on the third syllable or the second of the third word or the fifth, and, wait a moment, how many words were there in all?

  But Peter’s father appeared from out of nowhere and yanked him up, saying, “We need to leave. Now.”

  Shouts echoed behind him: “Con man! Scoundrel! Thief!”

  Peter had looked back over his shoulder as his father dragged him away by a hand. Villagers gathered in a mob, waving weapons. An angry farmhand chased after them with a lit torch outstretched: “That’s right, get out of here! And never come back.”

  They’d left town immediately, and it was the last Valerie had seen of Peter. From the looks on the villagers’ faces that day, she’d assumed he was dead.

  But now…

  I must be crazy, she thought. It had been ten years. She had given up; she had stopped searching for his arrows. He couldn’t be the same person… could he?

  Also seeing the boy, her friends eyed each other worriedly. He looked like no one else, like the purple glow at the base of a flame, the most beautiful and the most dangerous. He kept his head down as he made his way through the fields, his eyes locked on the ground. He avoided meeting the eyes of the villagers; clearly he answered to no one.

  Seeing Valerie’s transfixed gaze, Lucie tossed some hay into the air in front of her. But Valerie did not awake.

  Valerie edged closer to the figure. Is it him? But the Reeve swooped in, pushing through a hefty patch of reeds, and instructed her to stay in her line. Valerie wondered fleetingly whether the Reeve suspected something, whether he had noticed the way she reacted, the way her skin had flushed and her eyes had softened, and was separating them purposefully. She felt shamed but regained her common sense. He would have no reason to. She was only curious, nostalgic for her childhood friend, for the fun they had once had together.

  He was just a boy she’d played with, older now. Right?

  The Reeve continued, barking an unbroken string of orders that, with time, came to sound like a narrative. She watched as the person who might be Peter set down his bag, a worn piece of cloth, the opening drawn together with a piece of fraying string. He began to swing his massive scythe, brandishing it expertly across the grass. He glued his chin to his chest, burying his face in work.

  Valerie tried to watch him, but the largest of the harvesters came between them, shirtless, his upper arms dimpled like cauliflower. When the monolithic harvester wasn’t in the way, the Reeve was weaving between the rows. Valerie could only see the object of her attention in flashes. A hand gripping the handle of the rake… a smooth olive calf… the set of a jawbone. He was lashing with a rhythmic motion. Pounding. Sweating. Muscles working.

  Finally, she caught a good angle. It was Peter. She was sure of it. Her heart clapped against her chest, even now, so many years later. Back then, it had been an innocent infatuation, something between children, but now… she felt something else.

  Valerie thought back to when she and Peter used to lie on their stomachs, nestled into the sprawling roots of the Great Pine. Then they’d climb to the top to see all the other towns they would leave their village to visit one day.

  Only Peter had actually gotten out.

  Now Valerie longed to be near him, to know him again, to know whether he was still the same. She was lost in these thoughts, and her eyes were resting on him when he looked up. His gaze met hers through the hay-flecked air. He paused in the flow of his work, his brown eyes still and opaque. Then he looked away.

  Did he not know her? Had he forgotten? Or perhaps he belonged to someone else….

  Valerie’s rake stilled in the air, suspended.

  Should she go to him?

  But, then, as though nothing had happened—swoosh, swoosh, swoosh— swinging his scythe hard and fast, Peter was back to his work. He did not look up again.

  4

  Valerie.”

  Kneeling on the ground, tying up a sheaf of the honey-tinted hay, she heard a strong male voice above her. He remembers. She was still, frozen, unable to look up.

  “Valerie?”

  She slowly raised her head—only to see Henry Lazar holding out a battered jug of water.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought maybe you’d gone deaf from working too hard.” His dark brows were lifted into curves with the question.

  “Oh. No,” she stumbled, shaken.

  She ignored the water and reached for the thick copper mallet he was holding in his other hand and lifted it to her cheek. The metal was deliciously cool.

  She looked around, the movement of the harvest softened in the golden haze of dust. She tried to angle past Henry for a better view. The trouble was, though, that Henry followed, blocking Peter from sight.

  Valerie felt her heat rush into the mallet, and soon it was no good anymore. As she handed it back, Henry squinted at her and laughed. Valerie put a hand to her cheek—it came away black. There was a round, soot-stained circle on each of her cheeks.

  “You’re like a tough-girl china doll.”

  In spite of herself, she liked how that sounded.

  Valerie declined his handkerchief and wiped her face on her sleeve. She knew the water was only an excuse for Henry to be out in the fields, to be included in the day. He got left out of a lot of things because of his family’s stature in the town; it was hard for him, she knew, to be in a class by himself. She looked down at his new leather boots, though, which were so shiny that they reflected, and she lost whatever sympathy she’d had for him. To buy boots like those when the people around him didn’t have enough to eat seemed unfeeling.

  “I know they’re stupid,” he said with a quiet smile. Valerie realized she hadn’t been subtle. “Embarrassing. But they’re a gift from my grandmother.”

  Still not okay, she thought, feeling belligerent. She tried to see if Peter had noticed her talking with Henry. But he seemed to have no interest; Valerie could tell he had not looked once.

  Henry muttered that he needed to offer water to others. All the surrounding young women, who had neglected their work to watch Henry, quickly got back to binding the cut hay at their feet. As he continued down the line, though, Valerie could feel his eyes lingering on her, longer than they should have.

  Henry knew Valerie was in one of her contrarian moods. She wanted to be alone. As he moved away, though, he couldn’t help watching her. Rumors had circulated, rumors that she had seen the Wolf as a child, that it had changed her, and that she’d never been the same. When anyone asked, she wouldn’t tell. But it was a small town, and there were no secrets.

  He’d always known she was different, but he’d always felt a little different himself. Henry thought maybe they could be different together.

  The midday sun blazed down from the center of the sky. It had baked the fields so that they smelled burned. Sheltered from the cruel heat, the workers nursed their lunches under a grove of trees at the edge of the fields—as always, the men in one group, the women together in another.

  “Just look at me!” Roxanne twirled, the hayseed dropping like confetti around her. “I feel like a cow.”

  “Yo
u’re covered in the stuff.” Rose frowned, pulling pieces of hay from her hair.

  “Quit twirling like an idiot,” hissed Prudence. “Don’t you want the boys to think you’re a grown-up?”

  As she watched Peter join the men circling the barrels of water, Valerie tuned out her girlfriends’ voices, which sounded to her like the noise of cackling hens. She took a long time wiping her hands on her skirt, careful to keep a distance from him. In line for a drink, Peter was bent over, examining something in his bag. He glanced up and caught her eye again. It froze her. Should she say something? She waited dumbly, watching the way his eyes flickered. Was it with recognition?

  The harvesters in line behind Peter nudged him. He swung his bag over his shoulder and pushed his way past the rest of the hungry men, forgetting his food.

  One of the girls tugged on Valerie’s skirt, and she reluctantly sank to the grass, watching him go.

  At the river’s edge, a few villagers were swinging from a rope tied to an overhanging branch, daring one another into the cold water.

  “Henry, go!” one of them called out.

  Henry hurled his body off the edge of the embankment, holding tight to the rope and letting go at the highest point of the upward arc. Plunging into the water, he swam a few strokes and then emerged, teeth chattering. A dog ran up, barking its objection. Henry called to it. When it refused to come, Henry, feeling stiffened by the cold, rigidly tossed it a stick. The dog was distracted, though, by its owner bending to scoop up a drink of water. One of the visiting harvesters. More appeared lazily at his side—men exhausted by the day’s hard labor, stooping, shuffling. But one approached the water to stand tall and dark in their midst.

  Henry recognized him instantly. It was Peter.

  Henry’s heart pumped. Needing to think, he pulled in a huge breath and sank beneath the surface, making the world disappear. He opened his eyes to the calm of the green beneath. The current was not fast where he was, and he let himself hang, suspended by the water’s buoyancy. He would stay there forever, in a peaceful world where there were no dead mothers. And no mother killers. This is where I will stay, Henry’s submerged mind decided.