by Margi Preus
I stare out at the dark wall of trees that circle the farm, opening my eyes as wide as I can, trying to peer past the darkness.I could walk away right now, and just walk downhill. Eventually I would come to something. A farm, a village, a river …
If I’m going to go, I should go now. Once it snows for good, I’ll be stuck here for the winter.
But, oh! It is so dark. And quiet in a way it never is in the daytime. Tonight is the quietest yet, so hushed that there is nothing to be heard at all. Nothing but a soft whirr, like the thrumming of my own heart, yet somehow far away.
I hold my breath, listening. Where is it coming from?
“Girl, what are you doing out here?” It’s the goatman, standing in the doorway.
“I hear something strange,” I call back to him.
“You hear me telling you to get back inside, is what you hear, or your backside will smart!” he says with a snort.
In I go and climb into my bed. I unwrap Mama’s brooch from its cloth wrapping and trace my fingers over it. It’s covered in depressed discs like tiny silver spoons. You’d think it would make me remember Mama, but nothing comes of it. I don’t even remember her face. Mostly, I remember Papa and the stories he told of Soria Moria and the castle that lies east of the sun and west of the moon. In the story the girl dreamed of a golden wreath that was so lovely she couldn’t live unless she got it.
If I could have any wish, I wouldn’t squander it on a golden wreath. I might wish for a pair of shoes not so worn out or stockings not so full of holes. What I really want most—well, it’s impossible, so there’s no use wishing it, or even thinking of it, though sometimes I can’t help it. To have my family all together again, whole and complete, that’s what I dream of, and I guess that’s sort of like a golden wreath. At least, it’s as impossible a thing to get as that.
Usually I’m so tired at night, I collapse and dream of nothing. And it’s a good thing, too, because nothing is exactly what I get from old Goatbeard.
“You’d best be careful out there at night,” he says from the gloom of his corner.
“Why?” I ask.
“Why!” he snorts. “You know yourself the forest is full of huldrefolk, the invisibles. ’Tis said they are the children Eve was so ashamed of that she hid them from God. And God said, ‘Let those who were hidden from me be hidden from all mankind,’ and so they and all their children stay so, even to this day.”
“And so they are invisible,” I add, “and we can’t see them, and they can’t see us.”
“There are times when the veil parts, and it’s possible to see into the other side,” the goatman says. “There’s no wall that separates us from them, ’tis just the barest veil.” He lowers his voice to a dark whisper. “And there are times those folk live side by side with us, whether we know it or not.” He grunts and rolls over. “Don’t think it can’t happen!” he says, and after a few moments, begins to snore.
I touch the log wall by my bed. Are there really hidden people out there? Are they real? Or just made up to keep girls like me from running away?
The Drop of Tallow
n the morning, the first thing out of Svaalberd’s mouth is “Have you stolen the knife again, mus?” He calls me that—mouse—when he’s being friendly. Otherwise it’s “dog” or “cow” or “rat” or “pig.” I doubt if I am human anymore, by the names he calls me.
I hand Svaalberd the knife, and he slices off some dried mutton, thin slices you can see through, and he carves off a curling slice of brown cheese. He hands me two slices of bread, one for the cheese and one for the meat. This is my breakfast.
It’s better than I got at Aunt and Uncle’s.
There was no mutton there, and sometimes we had cheese, but often we didn’t. And the bread was sometimes made of bark.
There, I’ve said it. That’s how poor we were. We had to eat bark bread. Still, I’d rather be back at Aunt and Uncle’s starving with Greta.
Every Sunday morning, old Goatbeard drags his oak chest over to the table, where he fumbles for his keys, puts a key in the lock, and with a click, unlocks the chest. He digs down inside it, and I hear the rustle of paper and an enticing clinkity jingle.
“There’s some fine things in that chest, I shouldn’t wonder,” I say one morning.
“There’s more than you think,” he says. “Inside this box, girl, lies prodigious power.”
I mouth the word he says: prodigious.
“It means a powerful much, is what. In this box lies the power to conjure up and put down the devil and get him to do all that you command. Herein lies the power to cure diseases, remove curses, find buried treasure, and turn back the attacks of snakes and dogs. You stay away from this chest, if you know what’s best for you,” he says. Then he pulls out his Bible.
“Is it the Holy Book I’m to stay away from?” I ask him.
“Nay,” he says, “’tis something else. But nothing for the likes of you.”
He then commences to read aloud from his Bible. I say “read,” but look at him! How his eyes are pretending to move along the paper, and how he now and then turns a page when it occurs to him. I watch the ropy vein in his neck pulse when he starts in to read brimstone and hellfire—the same vein that pops out when he’s about to give me a thrashing. He puts on a good show, but I know he can’t read.
“Where did you learn those stories?” I ask him.
“I learnt them from here!” he exclaims. “I’m reading them straight out of the book!”
“Hmmf,” I sniff, and study the space between the cheese and the bread, wishing there was some butter to fill that in.
He drones on about Esau and Jacob and how Esau was the hairy one and Jacob was the smooth one and how one day Jacob killed a couple of goats and put their skins over himself and went into his old, blind father’s tent bent on trickery of some sort. Meantime, I drift off and start thinking about what sort of trickery I might use on old Goatbeard himself and how to weasel my way out of here.
There are some troubles. It was so dark and snowy when we came from Aunt and Uncle’s, I don’t even know which direction to go. If Greta and I were really to run away, we would need food for any sort of journey, maybe money, too, and how would I get either one?
There’s food in the storehouse, I know, for Svaalberd goes out there with rounds of crisp flatbread I’ve made and returns with hanks of goat. I suppose there’s grain and cheeses and meats, smoked or not, and I don’t know what else, as I’m never allowed inside. He keeps the place locked tight, and the key hangs on his heavy iron ring, all a-clatter with keys.
But even if all I wanted was to run away in general, with no particular place to go, even that would be difficult. All day long Mr. Goat watches me with one steely eye. If he lets up for one minute, Rolf hauls himself up and walks stiff-legged over to wherever I am, plops himself down, and trains his yellow eyes on me.
“Behold!” Svaalberd shouts in a voice like a parson’s, startling me out of my reverie. “Away from the fatness of the earth shall your dwelling be, and away from the dew of heaven on high, and thou shalt…”
I lose track of his preaching and start pondering just what he’s got that’s so precious he has to lock it up. Or is he just a miserly old man who so treasures his moldy cheese and weevil-infested grain that he fears the likes of me?
“… fill the wood box, clean the fireplace,” Svaalberd goes on, “scrub out the copper kettles—till they shine, mind you!” By now I’ve figured out that he has laid off scripture and has moved on to my list of chores. “… I’ll be expecting supper when I get home, too.” He shuts the Bible with a thump and finishes by saying, “Genesis twenty-seven and twenty-eight. Amen.”
The Bible goes back in the chest, where it is locked away with a rattle and a clank. Then he hoists himself out of his chair and takes his ring of keys out to the storehouse. After a while he comes by again, this time with two big bags. With these slung over his shoulder, he proceeds away down the mountainside.
&n
bsp; “Bring me a pair of shoes!” I holler after him. “Or a golden wreath!”
But he’s too far away or else pretending not to hear me.
As soon as he’s gone, I run to the storehouse myself. It’s a far piece from the house, all uphill. Why he built the little building so far away, I don’t know, and by the time I get to it, my heart is beating hard. I stop and press my ear to the door. It seems, for a moment … a sound. Then, nothing. I try the latch again. But of course, the door is locked. He’s probably said a charm over it.
It seems the goatman has a charm and a spell for everything. To keep the fire burning and to quench it, to stanch blood, to ward against fever and snakebite.
You can bet I pay close attention when he mumbles these things, and I’ve been learning a thing or two. To turn back a wasp you have only to say, “Brown man! Brown man in the bush! Sting stick and stone but not Christian man’s flesh and bone!” If you need still more, recite the Lord’s Prayer.
I’ll thank you to keep that to yourself.
As the sun is setting, here the goatman comes, back up the mountain with the same two sacks, looking just as full as they did going down. Up to the storehouse he goes and then back down to the house.
“How is it you had all day and still didn’t clean the ashes out of the fireplace?” he asks when he comes in.
It seems the only thing he brought me is a cross word.
In the story of the white bear, one night the girl got up and, when she heard the bear sleeping, struck a match and lit a candle. When the light shone upon him, she saw that he was not a bear but the loveliest prince anyone ever set eyes on!
So this night I decide to look, to see if anything similar happens to the goatman. I creep out of bed and toss Rolf a crust of bread to keep him quiet. There are still enough embers in the fire to light a candle, and so I take the pathetic stub of candle that Svaalberd allows me, get a little flame burning, and steal quietly to his bed, holding the light as near to him as I dare. My heart is pounding. What if? I think. What if he has turned into a beautiful man? What then?
I lean over, closer and closer, and just like in the story, a drop of hot tallow from the candle drips onto his shirt.
“What the devil?” the goatman yelps, jumping up. “What are you doing, girl?”
Of course I have nothing to say to that.
“Lonely, are you? Is that it? Come looking for companionship?” He reaches out toward me, and I slap his hand away.
“Don’t touch me,” I growl, using the tone I learned from his own dog. I snap my teeth, too, and run to my bed—hearing his hoarse breathing behind me. Then I feel his arms wrap around my waist, and he throws me down on my bed, me facedown and him on top of me.
“Foolish man!” I cry. “You’ve forgotten something!”
“What’s that?” he says, his foul breath on my neck.
With my hand under the pillow, I feel the knife handle and curl my fingers around it. In one swift movement, I pull it out and twist around to face him, placing the blade against his neck.
His eyes bulge, and the big vein on his neck stands out, pulsing and pulsing. Just the slightest push from me will slice it clear through.
Straw into Gold
olf whines, and the goatman grunts and stands up, moving away from the knife.
He doesn’t reproach or threaten me as I expect. He says, “Come summer, we will go down to the church and have the parson marry us. Then I’ll take you to my bed.”
“One of us will go to hell first,” I mumble.
“What’s that?” he says, spinning around. He grabs my arm; the knife clatters to the floor. He yanks me out of bed and pushes me out of the house.
“You’re a danger to me and to my peace of mind,” he grumbles as he hustles me across the farmyard. “I won’t have a murderess in the house, waiting till I sleep to slit my throat—”
“I never did! You were the one who threatened—”
“You’re a girl who can’t be trusted, I can see that, all right!” he squawks, dragging me up the hill. He’s rattling the keys, turning the lock on the storehouse door, and then I’m inside, shivering in my shift. The door is slammed, a key is turned, and with a click I am locked inside.
“Here is the place for girls who can’t be trusted!” he yells from outside the door, then stomps away.
I’ll sit right here on the step and weep, I will. I mean to, but I hear something—the same sound I heard once in the quiet of the night. A whirr. A hum. Coming from somewhere nearby. From inside this building.
Up the dark stairs I go. With each step the sound grows louder and the darkness less dark.
The sound is both familiar and unfamiliar—as if I’ve heard it a thousand times before, but never quite like this. It makes a kind of strange music, almost. It calls back memories the way certain smells do, like the way crushed cardamom makes a smell like Christmas.
At the top of the stairs, I stand and gape. Candlelight illuminates the loft—a room meant for storing food, and there is plenty here: Smoked meats and sausages hang from the rafters; there are stacks of flatbread and barrels of barley and rye. There’s a heap of sheepskins, too, and piles of wool.
But it isn’t this that makes me stare. It’s that, in the midst of all this, there is a spinning wheel purring away, and at the spinning wheel sits a girl. Or what looks like a girl, all surrounded by the glow of candlelight.
“Hei!” I say.
She looks up at me but says nothing.
“Who are you?” I ask.
No answer.
“What’s your name?”
Still no answer.
“How long have you been sitting here, spinning?”
Nothing.
“Are you deaf?” I ask. “DEAF?” I shout.
No answer.
“Maybe you’re just rude!”
No response.
A strange-looking creature she is: small but soft and round as rising bread dough, and her hands like white sweet rolls, spinning wool. How old might she be? She looks on the one hand like a child, on the other like a very old woman. She’s a strange one, so silent and unspeaking, with her wide gray eyes and her soft face.
She knows how to spin, there’s no denying that. On the floor to one side of her is a heap of wool, and on the other side is a pile of well-spun yarn, smooth and perfect, all neatly looped into skeins.
“That’s very fine yarn you’ve made,” I tell her.
Maybe there’s the hint of a smile, although it might be just the way the candlelight flickers along her face.
Deep into the night she sits and spins, her wheel purring like a contented cat. While she spins yarn, I spin yarns. I tell her stories of Soria Moria, and the castle that lies east of the sun and west of the moon.
I tell her how I made the same mistake as the girl in the story who dropped tallow on the bear-prince’s shirt. “Do you know that story?” I ask the spinning girl. “And how the prince woke and said, ‘What have you done? Now you have made us both unhappy forever. If you had only held out one year I should have been saved. I have been bewitched to be a bear by day and a man by night. But now all is over between us, and I must go to the castle that lies east of the sun and west of the moon, where I will have to marry the troll princess with a nose three ells long.’”
I tell the spinning girl that I tried the same thing with the candle, and everything happened just like in the story, except that it turns out old Goatbeard is just as goaty and trollish in sleep as he is in daylight. “And it begins to seem that you and I are princesses,” I tell her, “held captive by the old troll himself!” I am being more than nice to call her a princess, for she looks nothing at all like any princess you might imagine. But then neither do I, I suppose.
“In the stories,” I go on, “someone always comes to rescue the princesses. A prince or even a simple boy in raggedy clothes with a spot of soot on his nose. And so shall someone rescue us, I shouldn’t wonder.”
That’s what I tell her, but
as her wheel whirs, my mind whirs along with it, and soon I’ve run out of golden thread with which to spin my pretty stories and I’m left with just the thin thread of truth. And that wiry, rough little thread tells me that if anyone is going to do any rescuing from this place, it’s going to have to be me.
Winter
omething is different. As soon as I open my eyes, I can tell. The tiny square of light coming in the one grubby window has changed; it isn’t yellow-gold anymore. This light is a pale gray-blue, like milk without the cream mixed in. I know before I look outside: It has snowed.
The door bangs open, and I hear the stomp of the goatman’s boots, then catch the whiff of the cold outdoors, of snow wetting down his woolen jacket.
“Get up, you lazy wench. The work doesn’t end because it snows. The goats need feeding.”
I get up and pull on the clothes and shoes he tosses me, then stomp out to the goat shed.
It must have snowed all night long; it’s knee-deep and still coming down. I’m trudging through it when I notice Svaalberd leading Snowflake right into the house.
“What kind of madness is this? Girls sleep in the storehouse while the goats go in the house?” I ask.
“She’s about to give birth, and I don’t want to risk the kid freezing outside,” he says. “Fetch some straw and bring it in here.”
I retrieve some straw, bring it in, and strew it around.
“Who’s that girl in the storehouse?” I ask him as he pats Snowflake’s heavy belly.
“This is what comes of her getting out when she shouldn’t!” he exclaims.
“Who?”
“Snowflake!”
“I’m asking of the girl. Who is she?”
“She didn’t say anything to you, I don’t suppose?” the goatman asks me.
“Why?” I ask back.
“Well, did she?” His eyes shift here and there while he pretends to busy himself with Snowflake.
“You must know yourself if she talks or doesn’t,” I say.
