Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  “Look,” said Niss. “Give me those eggs.” I wanted to squeeze her between my hands, then. I know such a thought is some kind of blasphemy, now, but I felt it. I lifted the basket.

  “If I told you,” she said softly, taking up each egg, placing her cheek and ear to it, “that there is a way, but it’s very dangerous, very old, and very strange, would you take it?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t hesitate.

  “Indeed. I thought so.” She lifted all twelve goose eggs into her small house before continuing, seated again on the stoop, knitting. “I have two eggs deep in the crannies and lofts of my home. One has in it your death, preserved in the tip of a needle. The other, a life that you could carry. You must pick an egg without knowing which it is. Then you must crack it. If it is the one full of new life you must swallow it whole. You’ll grow like any other pregnant woman, and give birth to a child with ten fingers and ten toes, though his nature I cannot speak to, nor to the possibility of a tail. If you crack the egg and find in it a needle, you can either politely return it to me, and go back home, and forget all of this business, or you can follow it. That needle with your death in the tip is a compass needle and can be followed to a baby that must be dug up from the ground, a birth from the roots, perfect and growing as a seed. If you break the needle, you will die, right there. You will need to carry a shovel, which have been banned and lost for centuries. No digging stick will do. Only a shovel. And don’t ask me how to follow such a needle. I’ve never been so stupid as to try.”

  I didn’t ask what a baby dug up from the ground would be like—a bulging root, a dark and wrinkled demonic little thing? I didn’t ask about the tail of the baby if I swallowed it, or who its father and mother really were. I only nodded and tried to look capable. I set my empty basket on the ground.

  “I am ready,” I said. I smoothed my red-brown hair flat. Niss looked at me, sharp, over her spectacles, and a wind passed us both, full of ocean and the opening of trillium flowers. Then she turned and went into the hen-roofed house. She seemed to stay inside for hours, rummaging through halls and closets and tunnels coiled into that hut like miles of old lace. I thought about babies dug up, roots dangling from their feet. I grew afraid, wondering if the sharp and deep highways made by tears should always be followed. Niss emerged again before I could run away, with two eggs, each as big as her head and balanced on her palms.

  One pale green, one pale brown with a spray of tiny brown freckles. Simple, unassuming eggs, like a hen lays, not the delicate beauty of a hummingbird egg, the scrawled heft of a murre, gathered from sea cliffs.

  “You can go home still, you know.”

  I reached for the pale green egg. It was too perfect, smooth and gentle to hold the needle of my death, I thought. Only a soup of child could be curled there, waiting. It was warm in my hand, as if freshly laid. Niss’s expression didn’t change. I couldn’t read her. She only produced a small wooden teacup, bowl-sized in her hands, and held it out for me to crack the egg into.

  The white and yolk slid out softly, like any fresh egg, yolk the shade of a sunrise, a goldfinch, a fine ember. I reached to drink it, shaking with a joy that whisked suddenly through me as strong as those winds off the ocean.

  “Wait,” said Niss. “Look closely.”

  I swirled the bowl in my hands. The yolk shifted, and there in the center of it glinted a silver needle, intricately wrought with an arrow at one end.

  I couldn’t tell you the names of the roads I took with that needle around my neck, nor the way my Sam looked at me when I told him, and left just as it was getting light, the barn owls still flying against the fading stars. He tied the string with the needle woven to it around my neck, kissed the knot against my skin, and wouldn’t look at me again. I began my walking, first on the deer trails out of the village, through a stand of firs, then onto the cracked, hard road called the One, with the chips of yellow paint still flecking the center here and there.

  I didn’t know where to look for a shovel. I didn’t know where they’d been buried, unmarked, years and years ago. My feet did the walking for me. I just went forward, and the needle scratched my chest when I turned down the wrong dirt road, the wrong rabbit-trail, the wrong old highway.

  It was many months of walking to the prick of that needle drawing blood from the skin of my chest, making its own little runes. Moons full and skinny, yellow and white and red. I passed the cracked and collapsed houses from Before, town by town. I did not go in. I met a woman with the head of an egret by the salt marsh, and she offered me a herring made entirely of salt crystals, out of the great pocket of her yellow beak. I declined; you do not want to get bound. I met a tall and skinny man with a skinny and handsome face, a black cap, a slender black pipe which he smoked through his sharp teeth as he took my hand in his, asked if I would come back to the fields of oatgrass with him, show him my soft breasts.

  “You want a baby, don’t you honey? And a shovel too?” He hissed this in my ear, holding my hand against his palm, which felt furred. His arms were impossibly long. Everything about him was, his eyes too, long and golden. “I can certainly give you the latter, and maybe a baby too, if you’ll only come, have a little kindness upon me. Many parts of me are long, you know,” and he pressed nearer. I shoved him off although I was shaking.

  “No thank you, sir,” I said, remembering how you were always supposed to be polite to the Wild Folk, even men like this. “I’m managing fine on my own, no help from strangers.” I kept walking, past him, off the cracked highway, up a hill where a trail full of gopher holes led. The needle pricked and pricked and I found myself in manzanita thickets, so dense I had to crawl. Behind me, I heard a laugh, a yipping howl, and remembered that the eyes of coyotes were long and gold, just like his.

  At a wide stream I lost my boots to a woman, small and translucent as the water. She had mucky hair and flat teeth. It was a toll, she told me and so I unlaced, went barefoot through that water cold as grief.

  Once, in the night when there was no moon, a thickness of stars overhead, an ache growing like a kicking body in my middle, I wished I’d gone and done what the man in the tophat had wanted. I dreamt all night of red shovels made of garnets from the heart of the ground. I dreamt of my mother and my own birth, blood coming out with the placenta like rubies.

  I caught small birds to eat and saved their feathers and their little round skulls. I dug for roots and ate handfuls of the new succulent chickweed. My stomach became a hollow, and I dreamed of babies in it, many of them, not just human ones but dark-headed juncos, raccoons, fence-lizards, and somehow in my dreams my stomach and my womb became the same: whatever I ate I also grew in me like a seed when I dreamed.

  I woke one day after a dream of owls gathering bones in my stomach. I walked shaky all morning, afraid, and toward noon I tripped and I fell while climbing up a fire-road. The dirt was all orange dust, hot and dry, with sticky monkey flowers and manzanitas growing big on either side. The path was full of sharp rocks. I cut my chin and my nose, big splits like claws had ripped me, because instead of breaking my fall I reached and cupped the needle. My knuckles tore open too. The needle pricked into my palm. I lay there for many minutes. I thought of Sam and the old cow bead on the necklace he’d given me, and the way, in the kitchen, he chopped everything so neatly even with a crude stone knife, in such small pieces, patiently, while mine were always haphazard chunks. I felt sick; I wanted to take back things I’d said—that it was him, something in him, that made no baby come. I wondered if I were dying. I could feel my heart racing against the ground and my breasts ached from the impact. I wondered if milk, wanting to come out, felt that way. I un-cupped my hands. The needle, silver and tiny, lay whole. I stood. The blood from my chin and nose and fists spattered the dust.

  When I got my balance, and wiped at the blood on my face with the gray wool of my sweater, I realized that the hill below where I stood was a gentle grassy slope. I thought to myself that cows had grazed there once, a long time ago. I saw pieces
of barbed wire fence on the ground in long rectangular edges. Below those hills, tangled in their old wires and scrubby bushes mixed with wildflower and collapsed drinking trough, streets emerged. Further out, the streets became dense and lined, one by one by one, with square wooden houses. You could see they’d once been cheerful colors—pure white, green, pink, beige, even blue, with brick chimneys and porches and a place for the car to go. I’d never been somewhere with houses one beside another beside another, lined up and shattered. It was like some kind of big cemetery. I felt like I could see all the old lives of people so long ago, kids hanging their heads out the windows and laughing, neat rows of hopes, childhoods, professions, roads. Everywhere under my bare feet was the tar, the whole place cemented over. I felt tight in my chest like the asphalt, thinking of all the things that had died and were smothered down there. I wondered if the people who had once lived here, on Magnolia Street, on Eldridge Avenue, were full of nightmares from the down-below ghosts; if sometimes when they looked out their windows they felt afraid of all the things they were living on top of.

  I walked and walked through those straight streets. I used the roads and their sharp angles, not the side yards and back gardens, because I was afraid of who might live there now, what Wild Folk. What they would ask of me. The shapes of the houses were jagged and growing blackberries. I saw big lemon and orange trees with wild branches bowing over backwards with fruit in front yards. So much fruit, half of it had fallen rotten on the ground.

  I saw a rosemary bush that had taken down the fence beneath it and was growing like a tree, its fragrant limbs reaching far out over the patchwork angle of sidewalk, thick under my feet with dandelions. It was blooming everywhere, such blue I had to stop. I reached out to rub my hands in it and smell them. We were always trading for rosemary, that old rare herb, used in everything—dinner, tincture, perfume, a satchel under your pillow.

  I reached to pinch a single leaf, to touch one open blue blossom, and then I saw a woman walking down the path from the front of that house—a salmon pink one, with shingles like scales, the roof a gaping mouth of jagged teeth with a twenty foot angel-trumpet flower growing from the middle, windows with a sharp fringe of glass at their edges. A swallow flew out of one window as she came, then another, until six or seven deep blue barn swallows with their crescent wings were sitting on her head and shoulders.

  Until I die, I’m sure I’ll never see such a beautiful woman as her. I suppose it’s not fair to compare, as she was not a woman like I am a woman, but an Other Woman who happened to look mostly like a woman. No hooves or tail or sharp front teeth, just a fine green fur on the backs of her hands and forearms. When I looked closely I realized this was really a thousand single rosemary leaves, pressing out her pores. Her hair was a big black coil, and it too seemed to grow the thick resinous green branches from its braids, blue and blooming, a mess on the top of her head. She was very round at her haunches, her breasts sat up high and perfect and moving under her dress, so you could see the tops, a golden color like her skin, and freckled. It seemed the kind of body to effortlessly birth babies, easy as lemons on the tree, one after another from those wide hips. She wore a dark blue dress, just a shade darker than the rosemary, and it clung to her as tenderly as if it were made of their blossoms, with green trim. I’d heard of saints, and paintings of them made in old lonely churches. She seemed like one of them to me, like she glowed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, without thinking, watching everything female in me fall away on the rough sidewalk in front of her where the dandelions and burdock grew in riots. I wished to be a she-cat then, so I didn’t have to feel compared.

  “Little woman, looking for babies, always you come and pluck my rosemary.” A raspy voice, rich of course, accented in a dusty way, like the accent had been held onto from a long time ago and was only worn on special occasions.

  “We do? There are many of us?” I felt dizzy, like walking into a story; and I’d always been told you must never walk right into one, or your soul would stay there and walk it over, and over, and over, until you were mad or dead. I had enjoyed the idea that no one before had carried her death in a needle on her neck, looking for a baby; that I had some measure of courage. That I was somehow special and apart.

  “Look,” she said, and was suddenly right before me, leaning over the fence and around the huge rosemary bush. Its branches pushed into her breast. Her breath was a mix of lemon blossom and smoke. This close, it almost hurt. The barn swallows in their dark blue-feathered coats did not take their eyes from me. The woman’s eyes were just the blue of rosemary. Her lips stained dark red. “I know, mamí, what your longing is. Jesus, I do. So many in the world have gone barren and died. Little mice who ate the salt grasses. The whales.” She leaned closer, as close as lovers get. The black and rosemary coil of her hair moved on its own, like a snake. The green fringe of leaves pushing tiny from the pores on her arms and hands was bumpy and fragrant. “It feels like a big tooth in you, mamí, like it’s gnawing and gnawing and sooner or later it will turn on your heart. Fuck, I know it,” she said, and she started rolling a little cigarette. She lit a slim wooden match—I’d never seen one, so perfect—on the side of her bare foot, and began to smoke, gesturing me in through the gate. My hands were on my belly, thinking of that gnawing tooth. “Come in, you need something for those cuts,” she was saying.

  “Who are you?” I asked, at the threshold of the ragged, salmon pink house, remembering how I’d been told never to follow such a woman into such a house. Rosemary bushes grew in huge spires around the house and seemed to hold it up. I walked through the door behind her.

  “Didn’t you guess it already? I’m called Rosemary, or I was, when they were here to call me that. My people, they travelled here over this whole land and that sea way way to the east. Brothers who travelled all the way from Siena to this place, they milked the cows you know, so long ago. They brought me you see, in their hearts and their handkerchiefs, in the sprigs of rosemary their mamas put in the trunk beside the painting of the virgin, all blue and gold, in their dusty dreams at night. They planted rosemary to use in the kitchen here in this new land, they gave bundles of it to lovers or picked it and wished for lovers, wished for dark nipples under their fingers even as they made the cross when they passed their Virgin Idol with her rosemary blue cloak, her little babe.” She was grinning, breathing smoke out her nose. “I’m all of that, yes? You see?”

  It was beautiful, the way her words came out. I felt thirsty. I didn’t understand her: the names of places, the Virgin with the child, but it all fell around me, tender and blue as her dress.

  “I’m called Molly,” I said shyly. “It is like teeth, gnawing, what you say. You know about babies, then?”

  Rosemary took another drag on her cigarette, blew the smoke in a ring around my face, and winked. She dabbed the open cuts on my chin with the blue of her skirt, showing all of her thighs.

  “You look sweet, little lady,” she said when we got inside, sitting me down at a wooden table by a series of windows all smashed in and growing with small pink roses. The whole place was like that—tattered holes in walls and the floor, wrapped everywhere with plants or the muddy nests of barn swallows. Blackberry, broom, rose, crabgrass. One tall woodrat nest. Holes all over the ceiling so the light fell in everywhere. Pieces, the kind we collect on beach gather days, decorated all the bare walls—every color of glass and plastic in tiny pieces, glued, it seemed, in intricate patterns: a big whorled shell, a blue dove, a crown of thorns, a blue blossom, huge, labial. Barn swallows were everywhere in the air around us, making small high sounds. “You don’t have much deceit in you. You smell clean.” She squashed the ember of the cigarette butt between her fingers, then reached one out, fire-hot, and pressed it right between my eyes. I gasped with the sear of it. Then she ran her fingers over my bloodied chin, and the pain left. Later I realized that so too had the cuts themselves.

  “There,” she said, “you’ll not forget me now,” and he
r eyes were somber, welling, as if there were tears in them, though they looked dry. She produced a jug from a thicket of rose vine growing inside the window, and two plastic cups. Into them she poured something cloudy-clear and stronger than any liquor I’d ever swallowed, rich with lemon. Then she pulled a smaller jug from the thicket, this time full of some sort of cream.

  “Cow cream,” she said, and I stared, and the memory of that Jersey cow who pulled the cart of Bells, Perches and Boots flushed through me. “Yes, yes, she’s mine, my own, Venus I call her.” She pointed out the window as she poured with her free hand, cigarette now tucked behind her ear. There, a fawn-colored Jersey cow was grazing behind a fat sycamore tree. Her dark eyelashes moved gently as she chewed. I wanted to weep.

  Rosemary mixed the cream in with the lemon liquor, then pulled a tiny pair of scissors up on a chain from between her breasts. She snipped two pieces of the rosemary from the back of each hand, wincing only slightly, a twitch to her eye. In they went, one to each cup, and before I could grow uneasy or move to get up, she’d grabbed my left hand, pricked a finger, held it out, a drop of blood per cup.

  “Now listen,” she said as if I wasn’t already rapt and pale and quivering a little on the edge of my seat, wishing to be outside and walking in the resin of the chaparral, the only blue the sky above, not surrounded by it, cloying close and netted by its sensuality. Netted just as thoroughly as some young boy would be to the blue eyes of that most beautiful, most sad, woman on earth. Black mass of rosemary hair, dark red lips, breasts like tawny moons, her smell of spice, lemon, smoke.

  “Yes,” I managed, knowing I was going to be made to drink that cup, and promise away something vital, maybe even the child I had dropped everything to find.