In the House in the Dark of the Woods

by Laird Hunt

  I thought of all this while I strode away from Eliza’s house and it struck me, taken entire and after all I had seen or not seen, as a good thing to think of, that quiet work on those laces and looking into the murky water with my son. Still, even if some of it was good, my memory of that day before I went to find berries was also a twisty thing. An hour after I had given him his cleaned and prettied shoes, my son was dancing in the mud again and this time waving the bottle of faded flowers above his head. “Those are your grandmother’s colors and you look just like her, dancing and waggling your arms around,” I told him. When my man came home and found him howling in his muddy shoes, it was my turn to get a scolding.

  Evening found me walking far from the good road. I had taken up a stick and though at first I had used it for walking, I had long since left off leaning on it and now dragged it behind me, leaving a ragged line, like the ones I had made on Eliza’s paper, through the leaves and dirt. I made my line past leaning oaks and lonely wood lilies, many of them already dried and dead, then up a slippery trace that took me, as darkness fell, through a thicket of damp, branchless birches, where in a small opening in the ghostly trunks I came upon a well.

  It was lipped in mossy stone and wore the tattered remnants of a roof. As I was thirsty from all my walking, I thought I might steal a drink from its depths but though there was rope, no cup or bucket hung from its end. Yet even had there been a bucket I would not have drunk from those waters, as the smell that came up from the well made me shudder to my bones. I had smelled a fouled well before. If this wasn’t death, it was death’s dear cousin, and had my lips been three times as dry I’d never have let them touch it. The surface of the water resembled old porridge. Or a slurry of soiled ice. If my stick had been long enough I could have written upon it, but what would I have said? Perhaps I would have tried—and this time succeeded—to make my name again. When I looked up, there was an old woman standing on the other side of the well. She was aged and bent and staring down at the water as I had been. I saw behind her the opening of a path that dropped down a slope into the trees and thought she must have crept up from there.

  It took me a moment to stop being startled and realize I had met her before. She had come one morning to our door selling rags and trinkets. My man had not stopped in his work in our field to see her off, so it was left to me. I told her we had no need of her wares and little to offer even if we had. She pulled prettier things then from the deepest reaches of the sack, which I might have looked at carefully and asked to hold had my man not been at hand and watching even as he fought the stony earth. Seeing her here in the woods, I grew excited, for I knew that as a tinker and traveler of lonely roads, she must know the way out of the trees.

  “Greetings, mistress!” I said.

  She looked, in the slant of what was left of the day’s light, like a figure cut from fine parchment, and indeed she seemed to crinkle when she heard me. She wore a necklace of dried leaves and flowers that sounded when she placed her hands on the well’s edge and lifted up her head. Even straightened, she seemed bent almost double, as if by special corset, and her hair hung in fatty clumps from a blotched, brown skull. I saw a tooth in her mouth when she called out a kind of whispery greeting, but only one, and it was black. The eyes she peered up at me with were wet with brine and yellow as mustard plucked and spat on and mashed in a gourd. Her wrists were thin, and wrapped around one of them was a length of dark and tattered string.

  “I am lost from my road, mistress,” I said. “Will you set me on my right way? You have been to my house and we have met before.”

  “Lost from your road, you say?” she said.

  “I am come from Eliza’s, across the wood.” I pointed off into the dead birches behind me as if I hadn’t been walking for such a while and what I was pointing at was only over the rise I had come down.

  “Then you are just the one. Yes, just the one,” she said. She reared back a little as she said this and continued to look at me through the cake of age on her eyes.

  “The one for what, mistress?”

  She leaned forward again, narrowed her gaze. “I have had things stolen and you are come from Eliza’s and so can help me.”

  “Stolen! Of course I will help you if I can.”

  “I am searching for them. I slept and woke and saw that I had dug into my sleep too deeply, for first one, then the other was gone. Now I have come out to see where they can be.”

  “Were they lost in these trees?”

  “They weren’t lost—they were stolen!”

  “I meant only that they were lost from you. It is I who am lost. Or turned about. We have met before, don’t you remember? At my house? I have been lost and stayed on too long at Eliza’s and must now go home.”

  “Home?” she said. “That’s not what I lost.”

  She appeared for a moment to grow confused. Her breathing came harder and louder and she lifted up one of the hooked hands I remembered now from her visit to my house and touched it against the chain of leaves and flowers around her neck. She said something I could not hear and I asked her to say it again but more loudly. She did this and I heard her this time but she spoke in a language I did not know and did not like, for it sounded as though she were speaking through a long, hollow reed, or letting the words drip from her nose.

  I asked her if she had come from far away, as I knew others living like her in the woods had, and if she had grown up speaking the tongue she had just used or if she had learned it in her later years, perhaps from a traveler like herself. Instead of answering, she pointed down into the well, cleared her throat, and said, “I’d like a drink.”

  “But there is no bucket.”

  “No bucket?”

  “And I fear the water is fouled.”

  “Smells sweet to me,” she said. “But you’re right. There is no bucket. I’d forgotten that. If you want to drink from this well, you have to bring your own.”

  “Do you sometimes bring a bucket?”

  “I was Eliza once.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I said to you, good child, that I was Eliza once.”

  A smile grew on her crooked face and then a frown and her hand dropped again to hang at her side like its fellow.

  “Your name is Eliza, mistress?” I said.

  “I have had first one thing and then another stolen and you can help me,” she said.

  “Will you show me my path? For I must not delay. I went to pick berries for my man and my son, after we spoke at my house, and became lost,” I said.

  “Lost?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then your path, Eliza, lies down and down and down this hill.”

  “I am not Eliza, mistress. I am come from Eliza, who lives in a stone cottage in the woods some way from here. Do you mean down the hill behind you? Or back the way I have come?”

  “Yes, Eliza,” she said.

  My father spoke once to me of the fools who serve kings and queens. He spoke of them long after the juggler had played his angel/devil trick on our rain barrel, though I thought as he spoke that it must have been on his mind. He told me that for all their flips and cartwheels, japes and juggling, it was their tricks of the tongue that led you to laugh until you could not breathe and perhaps began to grow tight in your chest and sometimes even died. I said to my father that I did not believe you could die of a laugh and he looked over at me and said, “Poor daughter, you can die of nearly anything.” I asked him if he could tell me some of what they had said, these jesters, and he told me he had only heard of them in stories and did not know just what they might have said, only that it was all twists and riddles and wouldn’t it be grand to stand off in a corner and, while the king or queen took their entertainment, just wait there quietly, with nowhere else to be and no one to trouble you, and listen? What a journey that would be, to hear such jokes and stories!

  That was the end of our talking that day and, until the very end, perhaps any other, and soon after he
had left on his own journey and was in his grave.

  “I remember you, young farmer’s wife, who sharped a blade and stole a life,” said the old woman and as she said it she began waving her arms beside her as if they were tentacles and we were in a tide pool or at the bottom of the sea. “So I will take you through the trees, I will take you through the ground, I will take you through air and water, Eliza, I will take you all around.”

  “Call me Goody, if you like. I just want to go home, mistress,” I said.

  “Yes, go home,” she said, letting her old arms fall.

  “Will you show me the way?”

  “I’ve dropped something in this well.”

  “I thought it was thirst brought you to this place.”

  “I am always thirsty for what’s in this well.”

  “What’s in this well? I thought it was things stolen that were troubling you.”

  “Dropped and stolen both.”

  She beckoned. I came around and stood beside her.

  “Fetch it for me.”

  “Fetch what, mistress? What have you gone and dropped into this gray water that smells like death?”

  “Bring it to me and you shall see,” she said.

  “But what is it?”

  “You’ll know it. I know you will.”

  She stretched out a long, bent finger. “There it is! Can’t you see it? There at the very bottom.”

  “What is it?” I said. I leaned over the edge to look. The fouled water gave back no reflection. She shoved me in.

  Chapter 16

  “Swim, now, my darling, swim, swim.” It was my mother who first took me to the shore, who hitched up her skirts and mine then waded out into the water with me, who held me in her strong arms before she let me go. My father would sit and watch in the grassy sand or rove about and hunt for clams like his mother before him. He could not swim. Nor could my mother but she was not afraid, not of water, not of waves, not of currents that could make you drown. “Swim now, child, and it’s never you will need saving.” Soon I could swim like a silvery fish. I swam deep. I swam far. I could have lived, and very well it seems to me, in a water vase. As soon, though, as my mother saw I could do it she dragged me out by my ear because I didn’t come back to her quickly enough and was yelling and splashing in a manner she found unseemly. I said it was only that I was so very happy. She said that happy meant less than nothing in the house of the Lord and never took me down to the water again. But my father did. By moonlight in the warm months he would tap my shoulder when my mother growled deep in the caves of her dreams. We walked out through whispery warm breezes and forests of feathery water grasses so that I could swim in the milky dark. My father spoke but little as we walked for he did not like, he said, to interrupt the songs of the frogs and crickets. He would not come into the water but sat always near me where I swam. Swam and swam. Until my mother followed us out one night with her switch.

  “Swim now, Eliza,” cried the old woman as I splashed and gasped and cursed, for the water she had shoved me into was not just foul, it was fearsome cold and gooped thick with the gray muck I had seen from above. It fell across my face and spilled in splotchy clumps from my arms when I lifted them. I tried to grab for the rope but the old woman yanked it from my reach. She told me it would be waiting when my errand was done. There was no other way up. I pounded at the water around me. I called the old woman a dog’s tongue and a tart’s dead daughter for the trick she had played. She said she was better and worse than either of those things, much better and much worse. I could not see her face for water was dripping over my eyes and the dim light of the sky was behind her but I could feel her black-tooth smile. “I’ll see you down the hill, my darling,” she said. As she spoke she tore a leaf from her necklace and let it drop. Back and forth it fell no more quickly than a fleck of down. When that one had almost touched the water, she let another go. More leaves fell to lie upon the heavy surface, and she said, “Remember your promise, given free, remember your promise, fetch it for me.” I heard these words and watched the leaves in the shaft of the well and floating on the water’s gray skin. I felt calmer as I watched and listened and soon stopped my thrashing and thought no more of calling names. Had I said I would help her? It seemed to me I had. I took a breath, then took another and plunged.

  Of course, I had never traveled to the bottom of a well before nor watched one dug, so I could not know if it was strange that the tunnel dropped straight only a short while before curving into a slope. Nor did I know if it was strange that this well was darker near its surface than in its deeps, but darker above than below it was. As I descended, the water cleared itself of its muck and I began to see smooth stones and coins and bits of bone and teeth and mossy tokens of all kinds caught along its sloping floor. Some of these things I touched at but none of them looked like something the old woman would have missed, so deeper I went. I would have stayed down there and further fouled the well if I had not come at last to a kind of watery chamber lit by a crack above.

  My kicking and paddling had set clouds of muck and slime to swirling and tokens from the slope to tumbling. Still, even through the murk and debris, I could see what the old woman had sent me down to fetch, for it glowed its own silver and I knew it, as she had said I would. It was lodged on a nest of more bits and bones. It was smooth and shaped like an egg. My hand went out. An extra chill met my fingers. As if they had found a deeper well within the well.

  When I reached the surface again, the rope was waiting for me. I slipped what I’d fetched into the pocket of my dress and, hand over hand, shoes fighting for purchase on the slimy stone, dropping clods and clumps as I went, climbed slowly out. I lay chilled and panting in my sodden skirts on the rough ground of the clearing for what seemed like an age until I remembered the root I’d found with my shoes. It lay beneath the old woman’s prize in my pocket. I did not like to think of that cold thing lying atop it but pulled it out and put it in my mouth anyway. Chewing it, even sogged as it was, stopped my shivering and my panting. I was soon neither warm nor cold and a smile crept onto my lips. By and by, I thought of the old woman’s words about going down the hill when I had completed my errand. So I rose and wrung out my hair and dress and went to the place where I had first seen her peering off into the trees. There I found a path and followed it.

  Chapter 17

  The path was well worn, and though it twisted I made good progress and thought to myself that perhaps despite her trick, the old woman with her leaves and rhymes had set me on the right way, some clear road through the wood that would lead me—once she had claimed the prize that bulged now in the pocket of my dress—in an hour or three to my man and my son. They would run out the door to greet me and we would link hands and turn a happy circle and what an ending to my tale it would be. I would be dry by the time I reached them and would not have to squish and squelch as I did now, though such loud sounds as my shoes were making would have pleased my son. His was always a quiet kind of laughing—not the sort it seemed you could die from—but I watched him closely nonetheless and sometimes took him in my lap and held him tight if it went on too long. Even if silence was all that came out of his mouth when he had finished, the laughing lent his cheeks a pretty bloom.

  It was while I was squishing and squelching and pleasing myself with such thoughts that I came after a time of walking to a lightless cottage. Fat, syrupy drops had begun to drip from the sky and the plug of root I chewed was nearly spent and my chill was returning and though I did not like the look of this place I went as straight toward it as I had to the depths of the well. There were holes in its thatch, and its chimney sat askew, and I thought this cottage must be empty of all save rats and foxes, dust and spiders, ash and mice. But the cottage was not empty. When I knocked, a familiar voice rang out. “Come in, my love, come in!”

  She was sitting in a chair by a dead hearth. She was no longer wearing the necklace of leaves and flowers and had wrapped a blanket tight around her.

  “Come
and warm your wet bones,” she said.

  She pointed at an empty chair. I went to it and sat. The old woman opened her mouth as I was doing so and I caught a glimpse of the tooth I’d seen before. I thought now that perhaps it had company, that I could see another rough bit of black at the back of her mouth, perhaps two. Seeing the black back of her mouth made me wish I had the child’s bark again and could look through it and see if it showed better or worse what was before me.

  “There, now, you’re settled, Eliza,” she said.

  “Thank you, mistress,” I said. The old woman turned and looked at the dead fireplace. She leaned forward and nodded contentedly. A heavy kettle with a hole in its side sat unevenly on a pile of ash.