by Jesse Ball
Pieter poured the water into a tea-pot, and brought out two thin porcelain cups.
— Where did you get all these things? You did not return to the town.
— Where did I get all these things? asked Pieter, lifting a saucer. It has been a very long time I have lived here alone, with no use for porcelain.
His eyes looked out as if through the wall.
— I will tell you a story, he said. A dog passes along the street. It sees a child. The child turns and looks in through a window, seeing a woman. The woman cuts herself with the sharp arm of a scissor, and cursing the scissor, sees her husband on a ladder at the far window, sees him and watches as a wind rises suddenly, inexplicably, and casts him off the ladder down into the street where the first person to reach him finds him dead.
Elsbeth narrowed her eyes.
— What do you mean?
— I will tell you a story, he said. A bird circles in the air, and sees with its length of sight a child crossing a stream, hopping from stone to stone. Someone is calling to the child, calling it back, but it reaches the far side, a field of tall grass. In a moment the grass is turned and grows into the shapes of some procession, a vast procession of dancing shapes that overtake the child and carries it away deeper and deeper into the field, until the procession vanishes and the grass is as it was, grass, standing grass, and the child is gone.
— I have been so long here, he said. With no one to speak to.
Elsbeth poured the tea, and tasted the cornbread. She finished the first and took another. Pieter smiled.
— What is that? Elsbeth asked.
For set in one wall there was a tiny bed, three feet long and two feet wide. It was made up with a quilt and a pillow, and even a small doll of rope and feathers lay on one side.
— There was a little boy, said Pieter, and he was born in the town. I came one day, keeping to the sides of things so no one could see me. I felt that if I brought the boy away with me, I could raise him as well as anyone. This was ten years ago.
— Cameron’s child? exclaimed Elsbeth. Mora Cameron’s child?
— I took him, I crept in the house and took him and carried him away. He was just born then, and I raised him myself. I took him everywhere with me through the wood, and carried him on my back. I taught him the songs of the morning, the long tales of night. I raised him as well as anyone could, as well as anyone. And he slept here, in the wall opposite my bed, where I could look in the night and see that all was well.
— But where is he? asked Elsbeth.
Pieter stood and a shadow passed over his face.
— He grew sick, he grew sick one day, and there was nothing could be done. He was dead by nightfall. I buried him out on the hill, with a stone for a pillow, and a name scriven on the stone and set beneath the ground.
— There was grief too in the town, when the child disappeared, said Elsbeth.
Pieter looked up and an unpleasant smile grew on his face.
— I think less of grief in the town, he said. Shall I tell you another story? A man goes walking in the woods and he meets another man, who he vaguely knows. He is guarded in his manner, perhaps even frightened. He has a weapon of some kind in his coat. He longs to have it in his hand, but there is no time for that, the strange man would see him reaching in his coat, would wonder why. And so they stand there talking and talking. I must get back to the farm, says the man. There is much work to be done. But the strange man lifts his hand. No, he says. No. No work now to be done, but you shall come walking with me. And so the men go walking further and further into the wood, and the wood changes. It changes from being of this year to being of another year, of no year. Do not leave me here, says the one. For I do not know the way back. But already the other is gone.
Elsbeth drank from her cup and the tea was hot and filled her with the far scent of oaks and trees in the deep wood.
She felt at once glad and safe, and also as if standing on a thin rope high above a flat country.
What am I doing here? she asked herself.
— I am sorry, she said, that I was no help to you when you fled the town. No one knew where you went, or even if you lived.
— Too long, he said. Too long ago to speak of.
— But they are speaking of it now in the town, said Elsbeth. They will come and take you. Don’t you understand? It’s not safe.
Pieter reached out his hand and touched her face.
— You can’t worry, not here.
And the worry fell away.
THEN MANY THINGS BETWEEN THEM WERE SAID.
Yes, in the day then there was the sitting in the house, the drinking of tea. There was the telling of stories, Elsbeth telling of her life, Pieter telling of his. There was the rising up, the out-of-doors, a walking in the woods.
— I was weaving, said Elsbeth, one day, a bolt of cloth, and there was no red in the thread, none at all, yet again and again, a red shape grew on the loom, small, here and there.
— I dreamt once, said Elsbeth, of a sea at the bottom of which our country lies. Those who live above take boats upon the sea and wonder at its depth, a depth so inconceivable that they dare not attempt it. They have myths and stories about the sea floor, but they know nothing of it. And here we think ourselves upon the highest plane, yet we stand only between things. There are seas here beyond the plains, and lands in the depths of those seas, just as we may look up through the slanting light and see the passing of ships in the heights of the sky.
— Have you, asked Pieter, seen this passing of ships?
— I have not, said Elsbeth.
— I have killed men, you know. Other than the two for which I fled. I have made the woods my own, and when others come there, I have come upon them and taken them, as I choose. I take animals in the woods, and I use their flesh for my table, their skins for clothing. I use their teeth for tools, their bones to build fences. When I have killed, I make a pile of stones, a cairn, and I set in my memory who it was, what it was that died there and how. My mind is shaped like a map of these cairns. My geography is the laying out of a great flatness peopled with cairns. One a bird, one a farmer, one a girl, one a deer. There are hundred, hundreds in the woods, for I have gone far and with great weight in my hands.
— There have been, said Elsbeth, some lost from the village, and no one knowing why.
But she did not feel any fear.
— Are you not afraid of me? asked Pieter.
— I am not afraid, said Elsbeth, not of you.
— Whether there is a name put to a place or not, still a place has a name, said Elsbeth. What do you call this place, or if you call it nothing, what does it call itself?
— I began, said Pieter, by walking around it twice. I began by discovering a place for a hidden field, a kind situation for animals. I began with winter here, and then spring, then summer, then fall, then winter again.
But I did not think to name it until my house had stood full ten years with no visitor.
Elsbeth smiled.
— That is a fine name, she said, House-Without-Visitors. But now there is a visitor.
— You are not a visitor, said Pieter. Nothing that’s mine is made without acquaintance of you.
Then they stood by the stream at the foot of the hill, where the roots of Lochen trees ran like a bridge here and there over it, and Pieter had made a bed for fish catching with the hands.
There was silver moss there.
Beneath a tree some distance into the forest, she could see a pile of stones.
— Who was it, she asked, died there?
A hare, said Pieter, the father of hares, the son of hares, an old hare, far gone through life. I caught him with a string trap and killed him with a knife.
— If I were to go first into a house of stone, and then into a house of wood, and then into a house of straw, and then into a bare roof set upon poles, and then to lie upon the empty ground beneath the sky with a blanket, and then even to cast the blanket aside and lie in the cold on t
he open ground, would you not think that I was making a grave for myself? For I can tell you that I have descended into what I am by throwing away the false edges of what I have been told. As I passed from house to house, the stone walls stayed with me, the wood supports, the pounded clay ground, the blankets, yet I threw them away. Everything you dismiss that is of use stays in the language of your hands. But I have seen your weaving, and I know you know the language of hands.
Elsbeth smiled and opened her hands looking down over them. They were thin hands with long fingers.
She thought of the darting shuttle that was so fine to hold, and of her shop as it stood now, empty in the town. There would have been no one to unlock it in the morning. Her workers would have come and gone. Someone would have called at her house, and found her absent. Catha would be wondering, where might she have gone. And there would be no answer. In the town there was no other place to have gone, nowhere verging into infinity, no place where one could not be found. Would eyes turn westward, to the wood, to the low road? They would not. No one thought of going on the low road. Only Catha might think she had done it, and she would tell no one.
— How is it that you live? asked Elsbeth. By hunting?
— I keep animals, and a field. I hunt in the long days, and sometimes at night. What you must understand is that when a person lives alone and sees no one, time is not like it is for others. There is so much time, so much time in the day I can’t tell you. I have lived whole seasons in a single afternoon. What can be done in a day can be years and years of work, and in thinking, the end can truly never come. I have sat staring in a pool of water for weeks, and risen, half dead, but thinking only longer on the thought I found in the depths. I have dreamt at night of lives unlived in which I lived, in which I was born and lived full fifty years, sixty years, seventy years before dying and waking back into this life. What wisdom comes from such experience? What light trails back through these thrown-open windows? I become more and more as the objects of my alone-ness grow into extensions of my living.
— And west? Have you gone west? asked Elsbeth.
— I have, said Pieter, and he would say no more.
— Stay here awhile, said Pieter, for I must fetch our supper.
But I am not staying, said Elsbeth. I must return to town.
— You can stay for supper, said Pieter. You must.
And Elsbeth nodded in spite of herself.
When he was gone, she looked furiously around herself. Why had she agreed? She would leave a note, saying she had gone, saying she had had to go.
But there was no paper to be found save in books. And Elsbeth would not write in a book.
She walked about the house. There was another room, she noticed, at the house’s back. She tried the door, but it was locked. She pushed against it, but it wouldn’t give.
I wonder, she thought, what could be in this room? For the house as it was was stocked with all that Pieter might need, and his bed was in the one room, his table, his tools. What could be in the spare room?
But the lock would not turn.
She saw that a bird was at the window. She went to the window, and opened it, and the bird did not fly away, but stood quietly, peering at her.
— What is it you want? asked Elsbeth.
She fetched a crumb of cornbread from the table and gave it to the bird. It took the crumb up in its beak and flew away.
What then could that mean? asked Elsbeth, and she sat out on the front steps in the posture she had seen Pieter assume as he waited for her.
An hour passed, and she felt her worry returning. She must get back to the town. This was no place for her. The man was mad. He must be mad. She would not be here when the town sent men for Pieter.
Up she got, and into the house. From her dress she tore a piece, and she wrote on it,
Gone back to town. I will warn you before they come. E.
She owed him that much at least.
And then she was out the door and across the field and on the road where night came to join her.
Back then by foot to wooden Firsk.
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— Elsbeth! cried Catha, as she saw her sister at the door.
— Elsbeth, she said again. I have been waiting all night.
Elsbeth came into the room. She was filthy from head to foot from walking the dirt road. She was as weary as she’d ever been.
— I know, said Catha. I know where you went. It’s plain on your face.
— It was a long walk, said Elsbeth.
— I will put water on for a bath. Change out of your clothes, and I’ll set out some supper. Poor thing.
And so Catha filled a bath, and made a supper, and when Elsbeth emerged and sat down at table, she ate a little.
— Speak, said Catha, for I’ll wait no more.
— I went to his house. He was there, alone, living alone. He has done. . terrible things. He admitted as much, though he can’t see it. He can’t see what’s wrong with the things he’s done.
The sisters looked at each other as though from far away.
— Do you understand? asked Elsbeth.
— More and worse happened today, said Catha. There was another meeting. Loren, Malin’s son, was out in a field. Malin said the field grew up around him and the boy was gone. Just like that, the boy gone. All the farmhands came, the field was searched clear from one end to the other, but the boy was gone.
— Cran’s boy Levin Mills saw himself in a mirror, turned old, and when his sister found him, she couldn’t comfort him. He’s convinced his body’s withering, and he can hardly draw a breath for fear.
— Dar Stane fell from a ladder, and his wife watching him. Fell to the street and landed on his head.
— Someone set fire to the Oulen’s place. It near burned to the ground, and the barn as well, but the fire didn’t touch the animals. They didn’t even notice it.
— Ann Severn can’t find her husband Tham. He went to gather wood, and hasn’t been seen. There’re a dozen stories, and a dozen more. People are angry. They’re setting out in the morning to take him. Galvin Falk and twenty others. My Jaim spoke against it, but he was shouted down, and there wasn’t much to say anyway, what with all that’s been happening.
— Falk was angry, angry as I’ve ever seen him. He said we could not stand to live with a murderer not fifteen miles away. He said that even if we did not judge ourselves, that our fathers and their fathers, and our children and their children, all these would judge us. There was a great argument, but when the sticks were passed around, most were for it.
— Four people dreamed it the first night, and seven the next. Everyone in town has dreamed the same dream, said Catha.
— What was it? Did you?
— No, said Catha. They dreamed of a wasteland, stretching into distance on all sides. At the center, a thin wooden ladder ascending out of sight through the clouds.
— But there’s this, said Catha. Of all in the town, only one was brave enough to climb the ladder, even in a dream.
— Who? asked Elsbeth.
— Dunough Lark. She climbed it hand over hand, and when she passed through the first cloud, she said there was a world in red, that frightened her. When she passed through the second, there was a world in blue that gave her a sadness she will never dispel. Yet when she passed through the third, she found herself in her own room, made lovelier and stranger than she ever had been.
— And was it true?
— None would have recognized her, but for her voice, which was the same, but quieted.
When Elsbeth woke it was well past noon.
— Have they left? she cried, and she knew that they had, that the mayor’s party had passed out along the road at first light.
Down the stairs she went. Jaim was there. He called out to her, but she ran on. On she went to the stable, where she hired a horse.
— Where is it you’re going, Mistress Grimmer? asked the stablehand.
But Elsbeth rode past him without a word.
Out onto the road and urging the horse on. She was a quarter of the way there, then more, when she heard a pounding of hooves ahead on the road. She drew off, dismounted, and led her horse into the woods.
In the world, there is a time when one feels a confederacy with others. That time may last a short while. It may last through all of one’s life. Elsbeth had felt that twice in this world, once with her sister, in a lasting bond, and once with Pieter. So unlike the others was she that she felt sometimes incapable even of speaking when out in public. The matter of greeting those who greet in the road was a huge complication, and she would go backways through the streets to avoid it. As a child, she had pretended there were two of her, Elsbeth, her parent’s daughter, and Elsbeth-made-of-shadows. Elsbeth-made-of-shadows could do what she liked, and did. It was she who befriended Pieter. The things they did were not good things, not always. Once, they cut off a horse’s hoof for no reason at all, and left it on the steps of the church.