The Wood Wife

by Terri Windling

  Maggie let out her breath. The stag looked up, dripping water from his muzzle. Then he gathered himself and he leapt for the hills, crossing the water in one great lunge. His hooves seemed to spark flames where they struck, and something rattled down the mountainside. She looked down. There was a trail of bright blue stones where the stag had been.

  Tomás bent down and gathered several stones. “Turquoise,” he said. He put them in her hand. “You keep them. Turquoise is for protection.”

  “What do I need to be protected from?” She looked at the raw chunks of blue rock in her palm.

  “Ask him,” said Tomás, nodding in the direction the stag had taken. “It’s getting darker. We should go back, but now you can find your way here again.”

  She nodded, and followed him down the creek. Six blue stones made a bulge in her pocket. The seventh she clutched tightly in her hand.

  • • •

  She stood in the bedroom doorway, her long ears cocked, her nose twitching at the pungent, unfamiliar smells. If the Spine Witch hadn’t been there beside her, she would have fled back into the night. Not from fear, as when the hounds had come. But from a sharp and deeply rooted shyness … of the house, of the woman, of the scent of humankind. She whimpered, standing with one foot inside the door. It was almost too much for her to bear.

  The Spine Witch showed no such emotion, but only a cool curiosity as she looked at the woman fast asleep in Cooper’s bed. She touched the dark hair and smooth, white cheek. She poked the warm flesh covered by sheets. The woman moved and the Witch jumped back, her useless, tattered wings fluttering and her long, boney feet splayed on the ground.

  The stones were on a table by the bed. Seven blue stones, in a shallow yellow dish. The Spine Witch scooped them into her hands. Then she studied them, and she put one back. The rest she tucked into a flap of fur that covered her belly just like a pocket.

  When the Spine Witch turned to go, the other one hissed and shook her head. “You took. You took. Now you give something back.”

  The Spine Witch paused. She’d forgotten that. She looked at the woman in Cooper’s bed. She bent close and kissed one closed eyelid, and then she kissed the other. Then she looked at her small companion and grinned, flashing milky, sharp white teeth.

  They crept out of the poet’s house again, leaving the blue front door ajar behind them as they went.

  ❋ Davis Cooper ❋

  Redwater Road

  Tucson, Arizona

  H. Miller

  Big Sur, California

  October 11, 1948

  Henry,

  I didn’t send poems in the last letter because I have no poems to send you. I have not written a poem in half a year—not since Exile Songs. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to need a wordless time of gestation while the next poems slowly form.

  I don’t yet know if I even have the skill to bring them to the page. The mountains have overwhelmed me, Henry. Their raw beauty has struck me dumb. Anna has learned to capture their essence in oil paint, and I must do the same with words but I don’t yet know that I can.

  I am reading, reading, devouring books. Natural history, the works of Jung. Myth, folklore, and fairy tales. I came across a story that my Irish granny used to tell: A midwife is summoned to a grand house to deliver a wealthy man’s child. She’s given a salve to put on the babe, but some of it gets into her left eye—and then she can see that the man and his wife and the child are faeries, all ragged and thin. Through her right eye she can see a big room, a four-poster bed, and white linen sheets. Through her left the room is just roots of a tree and the bed but a pile of leaves.

  For Anna, the paint is a salve in her eye. I want to see as a painter sees. We spend whole days out in the hills. The nights are dark and growing cold. I am learning to wait, to watch, to listen. I have never been a patient man. I’ve never been so empty of words, and never felt so full.

  Yours as ever,

  Cooper

  Chapter Six ❋

  The year has turned. Slim girls are

  shedding leaves, preparing for winter,

  while I push backwards, shoulder hard

  against the wheel…

  —The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

  Dora dumped the contents of the bottom dresser drawer onto the bed. “It’s all sweaters in here,” she said. “What do you want me to do with them?”

  Maggie came out of the closet, carrying another armful. “Just box it up. I’ll have Fox go through it in case there’s anything he wants to keep. The rest I’m going to donate to a homeless shelter downtown. Make sure you check out all the pockets. Don’t throw out any lists or notes.”

  “I won’t,” Dora promised, sorting through the clothes. She thought it was good that Maggie was finally making space for herself here. It was too creepy that the house still looked like Cooper might return any moment. But bits and pieces of Maggie were slowly appearing in the old man’s rooms: Postcards from Europe clipped to the fridge. Juan’s deer man sculpture in the living room. Photographs tucked in the bedroom mirror of her friends, her grandfather, the woods of England, and her ex-husband holding a cat.

  The paintings she had chosen for the walls were different from the ones that Cooper had hung there. In the living room was a picture of a woman stitching the pages of a book into a blanket; a naked young man called The Star Blower hung on one wall in here. Above the bed was an abstract print that clearly belonged to Maggie, not Cooper. Rich with luminous color and texture, it was a lush, exuberant piece of art, unlike the melancholy Naverras.

  “That’s lovely,” Dora commented, nodding at the picture.

  “My friend Tatiana Ludvik did that. It’s of the light in a Tuscan hill town near Florence, where we spent one summer.”

  “You’ve been so many different places,” Dora said to Maggie, her voice wistful. Then she smiled. “Well I think it’s good you’re cleaning out and making this your home now.”

  Maggie deposited a box on the bedroom floor and sat on it, long-legged and lanky, wiping beads of sweat from her brow. She was wearing one of Cooper’s undershirts, and her black trousers were rolled up to the shins. “To tell you the truth, what I’m doing is looking for a missing manuscript. I thought getting the house cleaned out would help. I don’t know the half of what’s in this place. Here. Look at this.” She pushed another box toward Dora. “Old-fashioned women’s clothes. They’re Anna’s, I guess. Ah, look at your face. Well it’s Christmas today. Just take anything you want.”

  Anna had been a small woman, and Dora was delighted. There were long linen skirts, lingerie of old lace, fringed shawls and a good pair of boots.

  “You sure you don’t want them?”

  “Me?” Maggie made a face. “I’m happy with some of Cooper’s old shirts.”

  “Do you always just wear men’s clothes then?”

  “I’m a menace around men’s closets—I’m always pinching clothes off my boyfriends.”

  Dora grinned. “I had a boyfriend in college who used to pinch mine. I got rid of that one quick.”

  “I dunno, I think men look good in skirts. Like that gorgeous lad in The Highlander.”

  “It wasn’t my skirts he was after,” Dora said drily, and Maggie laughed.

  Maggie went into the closet and pulled down another box. “You know what I like?” she said as she emerged. “I like seeing so many men wearing jewelry here in the west, all that beautiful turquoise and silver. There’s something so sexy about a bracelet on a strong, masculine arm.”

  Dora smiled to herself. Fox wore a bracelet; maybe there was hope for him yet. “Perhaps it’s the combination of masculine and feminine together that’s so devastating. I find men with long hair sexy for the same reason.”

  “Like the man in that painting,” Maggie said casually, but there was something in her face that was not casual at all.

  “What painting?”

  “You know. The one that Lillian said looks like Fox’s father.”

  Dora sat down o
n the bed among the clothes. “Shoot, wasn’t that the oddest thing? I wonder if it really is Fox’s father? If it is, he’d be Cooper’s age by now; if he’s even still alive, I mean. It must be weird for Fox not to know. I come from a family almost as big as Juan’s, and I can’t imagine what it’s like not to have one. Oh no, I’m sorry. You don’t have much family either, do you?”

  “Sure I do,” Maggie said cheerfully as she sorted through another box, “spread across half a dozen countries. Good friends, old lovers, Granddaddy Black. Just depends on how you define family.”

  Dora said, “Do you know that whenever you mention your grandfather the West Virginia twang gets deeper?”

  “Hmmm. It’s funny how a place stays in your bones.”

  “Like Cooper and England. He never lost the accent, you know? You could always tell he was an Englishman.”

  “But he never went back.”

  “He couldn’t,” she said.

  Maggie put down a fedora hat and looked at her. “What do you mean by that?”

  “He said that this was where the poetry was—the ‘whisper of the stones’ he called it. He said if he ever left, it would all be gone. He was really pretty superstitious about it. At least during the years I knew him.”

  “Did you know that he was still writing poems?”

  “Well yes, didn’t you?”

  “No. I don’t think anyone did—I mean, in publishing circles. I suspected that he was, but I didn’t know for sure until I got here.”

  “Is that the manuscript you’re looking for?”

  “That’s right. There’s supposed to be a whole new collection, called The Saguaro Forest. Did he talk to you about it?”

  Dora put her arms around her knees. “Sure. A little bit. We’d talk about writing sometimes. He read me some of the poems.”

  “He did?” Maggie came over to sit down as well, resting her back against the headboard. “You know, I feel a little jealous. He never said a thing about them to me at all. And I thought we were good friends.”

  “Well, you were out in the world,” Dora pointed out. “I was here in the Rincons. I think maybe he didn’t want those poems to go off of the mountain any more than Anna’s paintings.”

  “But why?”

  She shrugged. “He was an eccentric old guy. Pissed on gin half of the time, you know. Who knows what was going through his head?”

  “I want to show you a letter he left me.” Maggie reached for an envelope on her bedside table, weighted down with a chunk of raw turquoise. She opened Cooper’s letter from the stiff envelope and handed it to Dora.

  Dora read it, perplexed. “April sixteenth. That’s right before he died, isn’t it?”

  “The same day.”

  Dora shivered. “What’s the ‘Night of the Dark Stone’?”

  “I don’t know. Listen to this,” she said, picking up a book. “It’s from Pablo Neruda:

  Return me, oh sun,

  to my wild destiny,

  rain of the ancient wood …

  I want to go back to being what I have not been,

  and learn to go back from such deeps

  that amongst all natural things

  I could live or not live; it does not matter,

  to be one stone more, the dark stone,

  the pure stone which the river bears away.

  “He knew that poem, of course,” Maggie continued. “He referred to it in a letter to me not long before he died. And he’s written part of it here on the wall by the mirror, in ink that looks relatively fresh.”

  “The dark stone, the pure stone which the river bears away,” Dora repeated. “And then he up and died in some dried out riverbed. That’s either ironic or spooky, Maggie, I don’t know which. Are you thinking maybe there’s some kind of connection?”

  “With Cooper there are always connections. His letters were often like that; you couldn’t just read them, you had to mull over them, decipher them.”

  “Like his poems.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The dark stone,” said Dora, musing. “Hmmm. Well here, take a look at this then.” She handed Maggie a scrap of paper from the pile taken from the pockets of Cooper’s clothes. “I found it in the green cardigan. He wore that sweater all the time.”

  Maggie read the words scribbled on the back of a grocery receipt out loud: “It is ultimately stone in you and star.”

  “What do you suppose that could mean: ‘stone in you and star’?”

  “It’s from Rilke. Let me find the poem.” Maggie left the room and came back with a volume of the German poet’s work. She read aloud in her lovely, husky voice:

  The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

  held for it by a row of ancient trees;

  you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,

  one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

  and leave you, not at home in either one,

  not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,

  not calling to eternity with the passion

  of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

  and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)

  your life, with its immensity and fear,

  so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,

  it is alternately stone in you and star.

  She put down the volume, looking thoughtful.

  Dora said softly, “That sounds like Cooper. God, I still miss him. Crankiness and all.”

  “But Cooper’s poems are never that clear; he was always so damn clever and oblique…”

  “That’s like Anna Naverra. Did you ever notice how the titles of her paintings are always puzzling and mysterious … like the punch line of a good story, without any of the rest?”

  Maggie hesitated, then said, “There’s something else I want to show you.”

  Dora followed her into Naverra’s studio. The room had been scrubbed and swept; the curtains were gone, and the windows overlooked the back porch and the mesquite wood. Maggie’s computer sat on one long table, with a notebook, a half-drunk cup of coffee, an arrangement of wildflowers in a jar. She seemed to have taken this as her office instead of moving into Cooper’s more spacious one, but she shared it with the dead woman whose art, paints and distinctive presence still crowded the little room.

  Maggie showed her a collection of unframed paintings that Dora had never seen before. They were small, like Naverra’s canvases, but painted on thin panels of wood, with dark backgrounds and a rich, diffuse light that made Dora think of old Flemish masters. The paintings were portraits, of a sort. But the figures portrayed were not human ones—or rather, they were part human, and part something else, both beautiful and disturbing. The figures looked like personifications of the desert, root, rock, and thorn.

  Dora said, “These almost look like Brian Froud’s paintings, don’t they? Not the same style, but… as though both of them were painting the same creatures, just filtered through a different … perception.”

  “Anna’s vision is a darker one,” Maggie pointed out. “As though she’s frightened by what she sees, and yet is still compelled to record it. Look at this. This is the one I wanted to show you.”

  The portrait was dark, and so loosely rendered—unlike Naverra’s usual work—that the woman’s features were difficult to see. But Dora could make out her crouched figure, covered with slashes of paint, spiral lines. Like Juan, she thought. At the figure’s feet was a dark oval shape, like an egg carved out of hematite or onyx. She felt her hands shaking and put the painting down, a sick feeling in her stomach.

  Maggie picked the painting up and turned it over. Written in Anna Naverra’s neat handwriting was the title: The Night of the Dark Stone, April 16, 1949.

  “April sixteenth again,” Dora said. “I don’t understand what any of this means.”

  “Neither do I. But I think if we did understand, we’d know why Cooper died. And how. And why his manuscript is missing. And why other things are missing from the house.”
>
  “What other things?”

  “Little things. Drafts of poems that I’ve found in Cooper’s files that have since disappeared again. My Celtic knotwork brooch that I left on the dresser. Some stones I put on the night table. Don’t tell me I’m just losing things, Dora. I’m not that absentminded. And even though I lock the door every night, it’s always standing open in the morning.”

  Maggie’s voice was even huskier than usual, and her face was looking tense and pale. Whatever was going on here had spooked her, no matter what she said. Dora shivered again. She thought about Juan, who was disappearing almost every night now. She couldn’t believe her husband was actually breaking into their neighbor’s house, but she also couldn’t quite banish the thought. His fascination with the work of Anna Naverra trembled on the edge of obsession.

  “Put a new lock on the door,” she said firmly. “If someone has a key, then that will stop them. Maybe you shouldn’t be staying here at all. Maybe you should call the police.”

  “And tell them what? Some stones are missing? A manuscript that I can’t prove was ever here? But you’re right about the door. I don’t want to move out of here, so I’m going to have to lock the place up better.” She attempted a grin. “I know this is the point in horror films where you want to shout at the idiot girl in the dark, ‘Well just get out of the bloody house.’ But whatever’s going on, whoever’s coming in, it doesn’t feel … malign to me. Not like those animal tracks did. I know, I’m sounding as crazy now as Cooper. But that’s the way it seems.”

  “But you’ll get another lock?”

  “I’ll pick one up today when I go downtown for groceries,” she promised. She began to stack the paintings against the wall and said, not looking at Dora, “Do you think it might be Fox coming in? He’s used to having the run of the place.”

  Dora shook her head. “He wouldn’t scare you like that.”

  Maggie looked at her. “But I’m not scared. I don’t know why, but I’m not.” She paused, framing her next question carefully. “Did Fox ever tell you people used to say that Anna believed in what she was painting? That it was real to her, not symbolic or metaphoric?”