by Laird Hunt
She grew quiet. I had come almost to the bottom of my broth cup when she spoke again. Her words took me by surprise.
“You must see my cellar!”
“Your cellar?”
“You know what that is, don’t you, silly?”
Eliza didn’t give me time to answer, just took me gently by the wrist and pulled me up from the bench and out the front door and around to the side of the house that looked not onto her pigs but onto what appeared to be a copse-worth of neat-stacked wood. Not just the maple and oak she had in the house but elm and hemlock and half a cord of ash. I wanted to pause a moment to inspect it, to consider the dusky grain, feel the weight and wetness of the fresher logs, judge the older, drier splits for their readiness to burn, but offering me cut wood and its wonders was not Eliza’s aim.
“Come now, Goody!” she said and lifted the heavy door of a root cellar that lay beneath the house. She told me to mind my head and be careful on the stone steps for tricky mosses liked them very much. It was true that the mosses were slippery but the steps felt cool on my still-sore feet. The smell of stone and earth and what I thought at first must be rotting leaves that rose around me as I went down behind Eliza made me feel strangely calm. The low roof was hung everywhere with hard, dried meats and strung apples and pears and bunches of sweet marjoram, dill, and sage. There were trays of dried turnips and carrots and casks full of brined squash, beans, and cucumber. There were sweet potatoes, peas, and pumpkin and, on shelves along the far wall, the stripped, stacked bones of chicken, deer, and pig.
“For broth like the one you’ve just been sipping!” Eliza lit a candle stuck to a barrel of salted eggs and made me sit upon a stool.
“We’re just below the fire here,” she said as if in answer to a question I had not asked, “so it’s warm in winter and cool in summer and it’s quiet and the pigs don’t call out to me when I’m down here. With my candle lit, I can close the door when it rains and stay snug.” Eliza looked at me and I at the room. I thought that emptied of all its great stores, it would seem quite large, larger and finer by good measure than any root cellar I had seen.
“But what do you do in here, Eliza? Why do you come?”
“Ah!” she said. She stood up straight, pressed her thumb and her forefinger together, and began wiggling them through the air. I thought immediately of Captain Jane and of the swarm and looked fearfully into the deeps of the cellar to see if there were hidden hives. I saw a crack in one far corner and worried for a moment that the whole house was a hornet’s lair but all was quiet, there were no winged comings or goings, and Eliza made no sound of buzzing as she moved her fingers as Captain Jane had.
“Can you guess, Goody?”
I shook my head.
“Try!”
Her hand moved once more through the air, but she made larger movements this time and then I knew what it was she was doing and caught my breath and thought that if she only moved more slowly, I might follow her lacy loops and lines.
“What am I doing?”
“I dare not say.”
“That it’s letters I’m shaping in the air and that it’s writing I do down here? Of course you can say that.”
“In my house, writing is forbidden.”
“Reading too?”
“My man sometimes reads to us from the Holy Book.”
She gave a laugh, then turned and opened a great chest I had guessed might be full of potatoes but was not. I had never seen anything like this. The chest was brimming with unbound pages.
“But whose writing is on these sheets?”
“Mine!”
“On all of them?”
“No, not all, but why shouldn’t it be?”
“There are so many pages here.”
“So there are!”
“Writing is for work and God, Eliza.”
“Writing is for many things, Goody.”
She dug deep in the chest and pulled out pages I saw after a moment were marked differently each from the other and held them up.
“Listen.” She read aloud. “‘After that, I was not let to eat for a week and then it was only old cabbage leaves.’ And here.” A whole page of names was written over and over. “‘Mercy. Faith. Glory. Welcome. Thomas. Mercy. Faith. Glory. Welcome. Thomas. Mercy. Faith. Glory…’ and so on. And this too: ‘I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love…’ It goes almost all the way down to the end. Then, see, it says, ‘I love the world. I do not love the world. I hate the world. I do not hate the world. I do not hate the world. I do not hate the world. I hate the world. I do not love the world.’ It’s almost like a song. Or a riddle. Though I’ve never solved it. What do you think it means?”
I shook my head. I had shut my eyes, for when she had started reading I had grown warmer with each word and now felt so warm and strange I feared I might light the walls around us.
“Open your eyes and look, silly. Otherwise these might just be things I am saying.”
First one of my eyes crept open and then the other. Eliza was smiling at me.
“Some of these pages are fouled and some are fair. They’ve been left behind in the box for scrap to scribble on. Or brought after.”
“After what?”
“After it all. Some can’t stop once they’ve started and keep up their scribbling for many a year.”
“Who brings them to you?”
“Captain Jane. She leaves them at the edge of my clearing. If I catch her at it we have a chat. Sometimes she says she’s found them on the forest floor.”
“Marked pages just lying on the floor of the woods!”
Eliza nodded. “Other times she says that she’s had them from Granny Someone. Who knows where she gets them. She might write them herself. Or steal them from others. I’ve read every word, every page. Can you read?”
I started to nod but then, not sure if I should answer, stopped and pursed my lips. Eliza put her hand on my shoulder and smiled. I took a deep breath.
“Of course I can read,” I said.
“There’s no shame in knowing how to read, Goody.”
“No shame but God’s.”
“Who told you that?”
I didn’t answer. Certainly my husband had. And my mother. And the reverend at the church we had sometimes gone to. But it seemed to me others must have as well. Farmers in their fields. Shopkeepers in town. Merchants and soldiers stepping down off ships. My father had worked at teaching me my letters for a time when I was a girl but when my eyes had begun drifting over signs on stores and peddlers’ carts my mother had said next I’d be writing letters to the Devil and put a stop to it.
“Never mind and watch now,” Eliza said. She tucked the handful of pages back in the chest and pulled a long small case from atop a pile of popping corn. Inside this case were goose quill and ink and unmarked paper fresh as cream. She took up a sharp little knife that was also in the case and dressed her quill then laid a sheet of the creamy paper on the barrel, where it glowed unaccountably bright. She squeaked open the ink, dipped her quill, and put the quivery thing in my hand. I had never held a quill before. My father had taught me my letters from a book but the only writing I had done was with charred wood and sticks and a fine-tipped brush made of horsehair. When I hesitated she took it back from me, dipped it again, and wrote her name on the paper.
“Now you,” she said and gave me back the quill and this time showed me how to hold it. It took me a moment but soon I too had written Eliza upon the page.
“I meant for you to write your own name, silly.” She took the quill again and dipped it and wrote, Eliza, Eliza, Eliza’s my name! She must have seen my lips moving and the scrunch of my brow as I read aloud, and slowly, the line of marks she had made.
“I couldn’t read well or write any better than you when I first came here,” she said.
“I can do both,” I said and took the quill back, dipped it in the ink, and would have written my name as neatly as I knew how to make it, but I had dipped too de
eply and all that came out onto the page was a great black blotch.
“I can do better,” I said.
“It’s just that you’re tired, my darling Goody. I can see that. We’ll come again later and play together at goosey quills. We can tell each other tales with our quills. It’s what I do. I write my tale. She’s down by the water, the goose who gives these quills. I love the scratch they make. That’s the best thing of all. I sit where you are sitting and I make my inky scratch.”
“But why write down your tale? Why not just tell it? Tell it over cups of tasty broth? Tell it to yourself? What’s wrong with just saying it?”
“Why write it down indeed?” she asked, then took the quill back from me, dipped it, and wrote on the page in big letters beneath my black blotch. It took me some time but I furrowed my brow and moved my lips and when I had worked it out spoke it aloud: “‘It’s only just for fun.’”
“And fun it is!” she said. She closed her eyes as if thinking of things most sweet and none that were dark and so lovely did she look that I thought it must be so and that what she dipped her quill in and marked her pages with was only ink and not the Devil’s blood my mother and then my man had called it. I knew now why her fingernails were always dark. My own were black now too. I shivered and felt my cheeks flush. Eliza opened her eyes and scratched her quill across the page again. This time she was the one who read. “‘Once upon a time there was and there wasn’t a woman who went to the woods…’
“That’s me,” she said.
“It’s also me.”
“Just so. That’s the start of the tale. Now, why did she go?”
“Why did she go?”
“Why did she go and what did she do?”
“Went down to the stream and took off her shoe.”
“And before that?”
“Set off from her house in a bonnet blue.”
“Now, tell me, what did she rue?”
Eliza slapped a fresh sheet of paper on the barrel.
“Is this like the game with the mirror?” I asked her.
She shrugged her shoulders. She handed me the quill.
“What did she rue?”
Chapter 11
That afternoon, as I sat again by the fire fed by choice hemlock chunks I had selected with pleasure from the great piles, and Eliza went back to work with her brush, I thought about the stool and barrel below us, of how it had seemed snug and exciting both as I had sat there, how though the game was quickly finished, for I was very slow, I too had liked the scratching of the quill, I had liked it very much. Making a song to sing to my boy or ease a long hour was one thing, but this was another. The very sound of scratching as I joined my letters had tugged up pictures and memories like great roots from the garden of my mind. Before we had climbed out of the cellar, Eliza had shown me some of her own neat-marked pages and said that when she was writing them it was like being in the middle of a dream that never stopped, a song that never ended, a painting that was never completed and what could be the harm in that? She said she could tell by my clear letters that I had had some practice despite my fears and the scolding of my husband and I had told her it was true. But a quill on paper was different from a stick on the bottom of a stream or a fingertip on my forearm. Its scratch was like the dry sparking of a flint and a page with fresh marks on it like a blazing porcupine. A tale written down must be like that, I thought. It must be like the block of wood of the body sprouting tiny tongues of fire and who knows where the next one will rise and burn.
This picture made me think of a time—soon after I had been kicked and had healed—when I was meant to be working far away with my father and came home to find my mother tearing cloth. She had a chest like the one that held Eliza’s pages but hers was filled with wools and silks and linens. She had always called what the chest contained her treasure and she had taken some of it out to show me before, though never to touch, and now she was tearing it apart. There were bits of red and yellow and green and purple and white and black and orange on the floor around her. She had an untorn bolt of dark blue silk draped over her head and wrapped around her legs. Some of the pieces she picked would not tear easily and so she took them in her teeth. They gave a deep, dented sound when they finally tore. It was like a bone under the ax or a stout nail piercing wood. I can hear it now and could hear it then as I sat by Eliza’s fire. Our house was always brown or gray, so even with the strange sound of tearing, all this color made me happy. “Mother, you are pretty!” I called out to her from the doorway and then again from the middle of the room but she did not answer, nor even flick her eyes at me, and after a time of watching I took up what I had come to fetch and went back to my work.
That evening when my father and I returned, the cloth was again in its chest. I made to run to it, for I had thought of nothing but color and tearing all day, but my mother caught me up and set me on my chair so hard it cracked a leg. Then she scolded me long and loud. “That’s my chest and in it is my treasure and you have broken your chair!” she cried. She shook as she spoke. She slapped away my father when he tried to hush and soothe. Only prayer on the hard floor could calm her. As we knelt with hands raised in special supplication and heads bent so that our chins pressed against our chests, I saw my mother had missed a bit of green cloth beneath the table. I took it up and made to show her but my father’s hand closed quickly over mine. He tucked the cloth in his pocket. He shook his head. My mother put a lock on her treasure and my father said we must never ask her to open it, that it was all she had left of the family she would never speak of.
I wonder what she would have said if she had visited Eliza’s cellar or one like it, I thought. Then I thought, A tale is a funny thing, and even when it’s your own and you have a quill in your hand you must be careful where you touch it. Then I stopped thinking because Eliza looked up from her work and surprised me once again.
“A bath’s what you need!” she said. “Our talk earlier about my fool husband and my long life here and songs and play in the cellar and this scrubbing brush in my hand has made me think of it. For all his faults he would always give me a bath when I wasn’t well. A bath is a wonderful thing. Does your husband give you baths?”
“Never!” I said and almost laughed aloud at the thought of that great brute giving me anything but a scolding or a kiss I hadn’t asked for.
“Such a shame…it is marvelous to hold your knees in your arms and have your back smartly scrubbed and a song sung sweetly into your ear.”
I said that I was satisfied after our time in the cellar just to sit there by the fire and that soon I would need to return to my pallet and sleep, but Eliza said a bath before sleep would make my dreams all the sweeter and that now the idea had come to her she wouldn’t hear any argument. She busied herself then for the next long hour in dragging in a great tub—much bigger than the one she had soaked my feet in—and bringing water and building up the fire with more fresh wood and boiling kettles full. When all was ready she had me step out of my dress.
“No wonder you shiver so, Goody!” she said. “We’ll have to fatten you up! You’re all skin and bones! Look at you!”
I blushed under her gaze as brightly as I had in the cellar and stepped quickly into the tub. I gave out my gasping cry again as I crouched because the water felt so sharp on my aching legs and stomach and hips. Before I knew it, Eliza was pouring water cold and hot onto my back and over my head and down my arms. She scrubbed me then as I had never been scrubbed in my life. She scrubbed me like I was the floor or the walls. Like I was a spoon or a pot. I cried and moaned and gasped as she scrubbed. I protested when she took the brush to my nails, for I liked to see them black, but she said I’d soon have them dark again and for now they must be as clean as the rest of me. She sang some of the time she worked on me. She said her husband had had a fair singing voice, that it was the best thing about him, especially when she was in a tub and wet. He had used it often enough to soothe their children, and it had worked on them like a spell o
r a glamour or a charm.
“You had children too!”
“Girls. Baby things. They’ll have grown now.”
“Did they leave you? Your man and your children? Or you them?”
Eliza, behind me with her brush, did a funny thing instead of answering.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“There is a fine red heart in there and yes, there is,” she said. I could feel her ear and cheek against my back. She pressed harder. “It pounds and thumps and wallops and groans.”
I leaned forward away from her though there was little room, but her head came straight along with me.
“Oh, it’s a merry thing, this heart of yours,” she said. “It’s like a drink in a small glass on the deck of a storm-tossed ship or a shout in a fiery room.”
“Have you heard many hearts?” I said, for with her ear still pressed against my back, my tongue felt heavy and I did not know what other remark would serve.
“Not many.”
“Did you hear your husband’s?”
“Not his.”
“Your babies’?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Your sister’s?”
“Not hers.”
“Then whose?”
“It is a great heart, the one I’ve heard, Goody. It wants the whole world and will have it! It is grand as a castle built with a thousand rooms.”
She said this, then pulled her ear away from my back and fell once more in earnest to her task. I asked her whose heart had a thousand rooms, what heart of this earth could be so grand, but she would not answer this nor any more of the questions I asked her, and ask I did, for I felt there lurking some story of lost and broken love that had brought her to these woods, hope gained and hope abandoned, some tale worth the teasing out—perhaps the one she did her goosey scratching on—and thought she might still tell me. But she only scrubbed without answering and sang about moonlight and after a time told me to stand and step out so she could rub my hair and dry my back and get me to my bed.
