This is only one story. Others say Wheel and her child Anja were never seen or heard of again. Not a peep. That Wheel died in childbirth alone. That Anja caught pneumonia and never reached her first birthday, despite the frantic nursing of gray foxes.
It has been many, many lifetimes, and I do not know.
This, my sorry sweet souls, is all I’ve got. Ask Boots. Ask Perches. Upturn our carts, you will find that this is the end of my tale.
IN THE JUNIPER TREE, I WATCHED AS THE THREE TATTERED TALE-TELLERS, all wisps of starry smoke, sank back into the silent bark. There was the sound of a bell, ringing, the stamp of a boot, the shriek of a kestrel. My head felt strange, full of too many people’s loves, too many sorrows. We were alone again, just the Juniper woman and I, sitting with my coffeepot between my knees.
“So, what is it that really did happen to Anja?” I asked at last, into the silver quiet. “She didn’t just die, did she?”
“Death is never so simple as all that,” said the Juniper with a crinkled sad smile. “But there’s one more thing, little child, before Anja. There’s one more thing and it’s you. Who is Poppy, whose mother dug him out of the earth? Do you know that tale?”
“Well, yes—I mean—not all of it. It was a long journey, she said, and something to do with a needle, and then I was there in the earth.”
“Your mother is a moon,” said the Juniper. “Your mother is her own dusty constellation, her own galaxy of stars. What mother is not, whose womb is a cosmos?”
Suddenly she was very near me, quick and spry, with a sharp flint knife, cutting a thin line along my forearm. Blood welled, but when she reached out her knobbed fingers, she pulled a long thread of red from my skin, a cord of my blood. It stopped beading against my skin then, but my arm smarted and my head felt strange, to see a part of myself separate and glinting like that. I watched the Juniper tie three knots in that thread, then hitch it to three creases in the bark above her, where flecks of gold still glinted like stars.
“Blood is always a pathway back to the start,” she said quietly. “The parts of you that have lived in the past are ghosts too. They live everywhere, and nowhere at all.”
A form coiled and unfolded itself from the bark, a final star-hemmed ghost. It was my mother, Molly. Like the other starry ghosts, she didn’t look at me as she spoke, didn’t see me at all; her eyes stayed with the Juniper woman, who was as old as time. But I, little pup of a boy that I am, I felt I was seeing my mother fully for the first time, standing there inside her own story like she stood inside her skin. She was so beautiful, my mother, because she was her own; because when she spoke, the place the Juniper had cut my arm throbbed, and I knew that she was also mine.
I CAN’T DESCRIBE TO YOU WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO HOLD YOUR OWN death in a needle in your hands. I got used to it, though, a woman walking alone all those miles through the grassland, the marsh, the evergreen wood, following the pricks of that needle against my chest, where it hung from a string. It was comforting, in a way, to see it there, silver and glistening, no mystery, just sharp and in my care. But the cost of slipping and falling was high. My feet became steady and very slow. I stepped each foot like it were a precious load, reading the gravel, the roots, the dust, through my worn out boots, to keep my balance. At night, I took it off so I wouldn’t roll onto it and placed it inside a folded brush-rabbit skin, inside a sweater, inside the basket I carried each day on my back with my knife, my corner of flint, extra socks and the necklace my Sam had made for me seven years before, when we first met. Each bead was different, polished scraps he had found on the beach and carved round like dozens of planets: blue worn glass, mussel shell, whorled driftwood, orange plastic. In the center, my favorite thing: a tiny glass cow with a hole already through it, worn to plain white by the ocean, like it had been waiting for me, he’d said, and kissed the place just behind my ear as he fastened it.
I always used to talk about cows. Black and white spotted ones, or the beautiful brown ones called Jerseys, with black eyes and long eyelashes. That endless sweet milk. I’d seen them once, as a girl: the four cows that pulled the red cart of Bells, Perches and Boots, when they came to Nettleburn and told the Tales. I don’t remember much about the Tales themselves, because I was so distracted by those cows, and their swaying long udders. “No milk,” Bells had whispered to me after a tale, a melodious hiss in my ear. “No Bulls, no babies, no milk. Except for her.” He pointed to the Jersey, brown as a new fawn, eyes more beautiful and shapely than any woman’s. “Endless. She chews the cud of our words, sweeter than grass,” he murmured, and took me over, let me tug at a teat until cream spilled onto my hands. I lapped it up like a little cat, and Bells laughed. The small bronze bells all along his belt jangled. I was probably the only child who didn’t listen, rapt, to their tellings, to their hands casting dark shadow-puppets all through the trees and the kestrel that perched above them, now and then screeching. I was watching that black-eyed cow, named Hazelnut, and how she, unlike the other cows, did not graze idly, but listened to every word, blinking infrequently.
I told Sam this story the night we first made love—the fir branches above stuck with stars, a dry summer wind sweet as the smell of that cow and her solemn face.
I fell, after that, into loving, into that space that opens between two people, a whole country with its own stars, its own mountains topped with fog, its own endless, cracked tar roads.
In that country I lost my longing for the mystery of cows, the older world they came from, their strange fermenting guts, their wise teats, and grew a new one. The longing for a little baby—the longing I came to walk the hard roads for, needle dangling from my neck.
Really, it all began with Niss, our Wild Folk at the edge of town. She was only the size of my two hands tall, and lived in a small wooden hut, hen shaped, that hung from the branch of a bigleaf maple. She demanded that we bring her, every full moon, seven baskets of a dozen eggs each: ninety-four in all. She demanded that only women bring them, or men that looked like men but were really women in their hearts. Even if they didn’t have eggs coiled up in their wombs, they knew what it was to hold a million breakable treasures safe in their bellies. She got each egg very close to her spectacled face, as if reading the shell. They were big in her arms, like a cradle or a giant melon. We never knew what she did with each, nor how she fit them all into the corners of her little white house.
I was barren. I am barren. The eggs in my basket were pieces of my longing. I gathered them with great care, always from the nests of beautiful birds when they were laying in spring—snowy egrets, great-horned owls, hummingbirds. I followed Niss’s orders carefully, only taking one egg per nest, and saying special words I didn’t understand but that she told us let the mother birds know who the egg was for. That this made them honored, and not devastated, if the egg was to be taken in by Niss. We didn’t know what this meant. I only wanted Niss to be pleased, to hum under her breath as she took the egg through her arched door, placed it somewhere unseen and ample. I imagined that place was always warm, like the fire was perpetually lit in a corner. I imagined the corners of her white hut extending and extending, impossibly, like the walls were made of flesh and not neat wooden boards. I imagined each egg hanging from a net from the ceiling, wrapped in rabbit furs, and when she walked through she rocked the dozens of them gently. I hoped she didn’t eat them, though nothing was certain in that regard.
On mornings when the sun was muted by fog, she came to her suspended porch with her cane and her hair coiffed neatly, and told us a story. Sometimes the story was short, a minute long, and we couldn’t make head or tail of what she meant. Once, she sat there in her wool boots with her cane and said: my husband and I took the thorn from the hoof of the goat. When the house finally rotted and fell in, my husband he died with it. Our men, you see, guard the home. I have no red and felted cap. I am not bound to your walls. But oh, yes, we have taken the thorn from the hoof of the goat. I know you all have thorns in your hooves, and that is why
you come.
Or another morning, when doves with their gray coats swayed in the boughs, cooing, she said only: there is an old old story. In it, a man hides his death in the tip of a needle in an egg, in a duck in a hare in a stone chest dangling high up in a tree.
All villages have a Wild Folk at their edge. You have to bring libation, as we call it. It is a kind of unsteady truce, though I don’t think we understand them at all, and they know our every move. You have to bring the sweetest of gifts, or things will not go well—grass roofs will fall in on sleeping children, all the wood won’t light, no matter how dry, fathers will start to desire their daughters instead of their wives.
I don’t know what it was like Before, when houses were lit by wires and switches, and the water ran from silver tubes, but I imagine it was similar—you go to the edge of the woods, you leave the most beautiful dove egg you’ve ever found to make sure everything keeps running smoothly, you go back home. You don’t linger there, for it is dark, and anything might be lurking, and you’ve never been very clear on Their intentions.
My sister lived with a man named Jonah a few miles away, down by the ocean at the edge of a big marsh. In their village the egret-women stalked the edges at dawn and at dusk. I was told they were gorgeous and it was hard to keep the men from staring, though their heads and necks were a bird’s—from the shoulders to the knees they were women, tawny and with beautiful small breasts that glistened as the sun on the water glistened, as the minnows in their yellow beaks glistened.
The egret-women weren’t interested in baskets of eggs. Every winter solstice when the morning was dark and low they took one man as a lover—all of them, one at a time. My sister always dreaded the year when, through the rain, they would stalk between the huts on yellow strong thighs, white necks moving and wet, and knock their beaks at her door. They said the men came back hot as embers, smelling of salt and mud, but wiser, and tender to their wives in bed, like they had been shown the feather-down secret of her soul.
My sister knew that this was what the other women had said, but she didn’t want to think of him going there, being held by other hands; what if he liked it better than anything he had ever known? I did not feel so sorry for her—she had three daughters, little and spry and toothless girls who smelled of wool and appleblossoms no matter how long it had been since their last bath.
If a woman refused to let her husband go, or if he himself clung to the doorframe and shook his head, the clams vanished right then deep into the mud. The small fish were nowhere to be seen; the roots of cattails and bulrushes shriveled underground into chalky inedible lumps. It rained for weeks and the waters came up to the waist as people walked between huts and everyone had to rebuild. This happened only once, but it left an impression.
If we forgot to bring our lady of the Chicken Hut up in the maple her dozens and dozens of eggs every month when the moon itself was a big hen egg amidst the tiny hummingbird-eggs of the stars, holes formed in everything we’d made or used daily in our houses. Holes in blankets, in sweaters, in the seats of pants, the heels of socks, the fingers of gloves, holes in baskets, in our roofs, even in our rusty pots and pans. Egg-shaped holes that let the cold in, the mud in, the water out.
*
Seven years it was we tried to have a child, my Sam and I. Every month I bled red as I gathered the twelve perfect eggs. From the trees the gray squirrels with their white chests chattered and saw me cry. You’d think, after seven years I wouldn’t cry every month the blood came and no small egg was growing in me, no small planet of life. It was like a ritual. The rhythm of my motherhood was a grief for the barrenness of all things that could not grow. I knew that the grasses and the frogs, the moles, the kestrels, the rare purple wildflowers, had started to thicken again and multiply since the lifetimes of my grandparents and even their grandparents. Some said you could feel it, a fecund stirring since the Fool’s Revolt long ago, when the Edge People and the Wild Folk began again to burst out of moldering apartment complexes overgrown with blackberries, from rusted trucks toppled sideways into creekbeds. But there were so many things that would never bear their children into the world again, ones we heard of in stories but never saw—bears, otters, whales, redwood trees, yellow spotted salamanders and tundra swans. And the wild creatures who were around us—they were afraid still, and did not come near. Perhaps they had learned from their long-ago ancestors what we were capable of. They had not forgiven us. I thought of that final mother, and those final young ones—cubs, pups, seedlings, chicks. The knowledge of being the stopping point of an entire line.
There came a day at the end of winter in that seventh year of childlessness when the wood where Niss lived was still bare but the hound’s-tongue flowers, blue as dusk, and the white trilliums were up everywhere, the coyotes courting out on the estuary strands, and I could no longer bear my own emptiness. I wanted a little one in me, to raise and hold against my breast like a prayer, more than I wanted anything else—my husband, the sight of the ocean from the bare hill, my own life.
I brought my eggs to Niss at dawn, before the others could get there. It was still the time of year when eggs were hard to come by. The women of my town raised ducks and geese for this purpose, docile white ones and mischievous mottled ones. They had pens but we were careful not to cage them—Niss would sour every last store of acorn and seed, rub egg-shaped holes into every last sock and roof, if she were to feel that those geese and ducks were prisoners. The pens were only to keep the foxes away at night—otherwise we herded and followed them. They knew they had a safe bed and roost, water and food, in the little huts we made for them, so they always turned back at dusk, honking, a pattering of yellow feet. That is the sound of the evening coming; it has been since I was a girl.
I had taken the twelve warmest, bluest eggs that morning, each as big as my fist. The walk to the wood where Niss’s house hangs was full of the small watching eyes of gray squirrels.
She sat on her front steps, which dropped off into air, darning a hole in a knitted bag that looked like a large stocking.
“Good morning, Molly,” she said to me, and looked up over her bright spectacles. “You are alone.” She continued to knit, and I watched her for a moment because I didn’t know what to say. The needles, wood on smooth wood, clicked. The yarn, spun from rabbits, flicked in and out with her fingers like the whole effort—hands, knitting, needles—was one moving animal in her lap, like a secret hypnosis, meant to calm even the kinglets to her side.
“I wondered.” Instead of finishing my thought I lifted my basket and began to hand her eggs. She took the first one, greenish and speckled, smiled at its warmth on her cheek.
“Did you, now?” she crooned, stroking the shell.
I lowered the basket again.
“Do you know about fertility?” My body went hot and then cold as I said it, like I’d loosened one thousand muscles and bones at the same time.
Niss laughed. She pushed the egg through her door, set down her knitting, and laughed harder. It was like an old man laughing, the way my grandfather used to, with a wheeze and a snort, and the skin on his round face shaking. He laughed like that after dinner when he and my father had shared some of the mead my mother kept brewing in the kitchen—blackberry, nettle, rosehip, huckleberry, dandelion root. Or when we went to the beach to gather in the winter, every week together, and he was barefoot in the sand and gleeful at every small strange thing I would bring to him in my soft and girlish hands—a tiny plastic lizard, color wearing off to reveal white beneath, a long spiraling cord like the lock of a mermaid, he kept laughing, with deadly strangling hair, a heavy plastic circle with buttons, one embossed with a trumpet, and the letters BMW in shiny colors. “Useless,” my grandfather would snort, and then begin giggling, and then the strong guffaws of hilarity, which only got worse as he aged.
Niss laughed like that. I could see her teeth, pointed as a mole’s.
“Why is it,” she managed, eventually, “you think you’ve been bringing
me eggs these many years? What do you think I do with them? Eat them?” She giggled in her deep snorting way. “Why do you think when you dig for roots, you find them, swollen and sweet? Why do you think, when you gather berries, they are plentiful and dark with their ripest juices?”
“Then why is there no baby in my belly, and we’ve been trying, my Sam and I, for seven years?”
Niss stopped her giggling, straightened her gray bun and the loose wisps of hair, smoothed her hands across her sturdy red dress. Her dark eyes grew darker, and I thought I saw sadness there.
“Sweetheart,” she said, in the tone of my mother. “Your wombs are beyond my ken. There was a time long ago and on another continent when my grandmother might have been able to help you there, quicken the seed and all that, but don’t you know that by now your own kind has blown it? Maybe the alders and the salmon, bless their sorry lost souls, and the geese have had enough of your babies, so many of them. Maybe you’ve had your turn. I’m here to tend the fertility of all the things you’ve damaged, not you yourself. Seems you people still haven’t managed to tend it on your own.” The small old woman pulled a blue-green shell fragment from within the hut, and showed it to me, etched with a single tall rectangle, full of windows, full of faces that turned before my eyes to poppy seedpods. I began to cry. Not like the tears when I was alone and the gray squirrels watched. No, these tears felt hot on my cheeks, like they were making cracked highways. They felt salty and uncontrollable, as if to fill the place in my middle where a little one would never grow. It is hard to describe, to a woman who has not felt it, the need for a small curled being to grow under your skin, fed by your blood. It is as sharp as the need for milk when you are small, only it pushes at each red boundary of your heart.
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