In the House in the Dark of the Woods

by Laird Hunt

  Chapter 20

  The house of my childhood and early marriage by the sea sat a league from the town I have already mentioned more than once, one built fast along the shore. It was a large and ever-growing town with prosperous shops and fine men and elegant women to walk its streets and keep its best houses and offer each other an evening smile or blessing. This was the town my mother had grown up in and the town in which she had been left behind. My father, who came from farther along the coast, did not like the town nearly as much as my mother still did and when she was walking its streets and peering into the windows of the fine shops she had once frequented with her parents, my father would walk me down by the water where the ships sat snug in their moorings. Some of these ships were small and made for fishing in shallow waters and some were large and had come across the ocean with their cargo of all kinds. My father liked to smoke his clay pipe and watch the ships. Sometimes he spoke with the sailors who climbed down off of them.

  On one of the days we came to town, my father assumed I would follow off after my mother and my mother assumed I would wander off after my father and I did neither. Instead, I chased seabirds and stole an oatcake then found my way to a small square, where a woman was languishing in the stocks. There were words written on the stocks but I could not read them. The fun was over and there was no one else around. The woman’s eyes were closed and she was all but naked. Her hair had been shorn close and there was blood on her head where the skin had been scraped. I skipped up close to her and touched at her short hair and when I did, her eyes came open and she snarled. I have not yet forgotten that snarl. Nor those eyes. They were green as a mallard’s plumes. When the snarl was finished, she shut them again.

  I backed away from her then and chewed at my stolen oatcake and saw that the sun was growing weary. The woman was breathing loudly. Breathing and sighing. The air of the square went into her lungs loudly and came loudly out again. I tried to hear if I was breathing loudly too but couldn’t. I wondered if her breathing was robbing my breathing of its own sound. Then I began to wonder if her breathing was robbing me of my breath, as if each time she inhaled, she was sucking away what was meant for my lungs. I was thinking this and starting to feel my chest grow tighter when I heard a heavy noise of swooping above the rooftops and stopped my thoughts of breathing and hid behind a sailor’s cart. It was then I saw the boat, though of course I did not know what to call it. It floated down out of the darkling sky and bobbed a minute before the woman. A hand came out of the boat and touched the woman on her cheek. Then the hand went back into the boat and the boat lifted away. I followed it with my eyes until it became but a fleck in the sea of the sky. When I looked down again, the woman sagged in the stocks and her loud breathing had stopped. The shadows had grown long. I forgot which way I had come and ran off down streets that soon became unfamiliar. At the very moment my tears began to fall, a man with golden curls came up beside me. After we had walked a few steps together, he gently took my hand.

  He was young and handsome and he asked me was I lost and I said I was and so he took me to his fine house and there, with a perfumed handkerchief, wiped the tears from my cheeks and the crumbs of oatcake from my mouth. He gave me hot milk and sugared biscuits and dandled me on his knee. He sang to me with a voice so pure I thought he must be hiding secret wings. I grew drowsy in the heat and he smiled at me and said he would make me up a cozy bed. He set me on a pillowed bench and I drowsed and when I woke, I saw a staircase leading down had appeared in the middle of the floor. The young man was no longer there and I crept over to the mouth of the stairs. The staircase was narrow and dropped away into a darkness deeper than any root cellar’s. Up out of that darkness came a song I can no longer recall.

  It was a day of wonders and I was so warm now, when I had lately been so lost and scared, and weariness had settled on me like a weighty hand. At home I had my bed but it was mean and small. I took the first step down the narrow staircase. I took the second. I began the third, then thought, Father will not know where I am. It was a simple thought but strong. I will go and find Father and tell him and he can tell Mother and then I will come back to sleep in my new bed. So I turned around and went back into the light and left the fine house where candles burned everywhere in painted sconces and went out into the dark and wandered until I could wander no more and fell asleep in the doorway of a milliner’s shop.

  I do not know how my parents found me. I do know that I told them about the woman who had snarled at me and about the sky boat I had seen and how I had been scared, though not about the handsome man who had fed me sweets, for that had seemed one secret too many, one I must keep for myself. I also know that even as we walked along the road, my father was chased and caught and struck by my mother for having let this happen and that he wept for it among the geese and chickens when we had made it back to our home. It was a long time before my mother would allow me to go again to the town, though the unearthly echo of the handsome man’s song stayed with me.

  I told this tale to Captain Jane as we stood before the boat that she had stolen from Granny Someone.

  “A bed for you beneath the floors!” she said when I had finished my speech.

  “Yes. I haven’t thought of it in a very long time.”

  “Now there’s a story that might have had another ending. You have sight uncommon and that you do. It’s seeing that saved your skin more than once. Seeing’s not the gift I came to these woods with. I understand why Eliza thinks it is you are the one can save her and can carry a thing through to its end.”

  I started when Captain Jane said this, sharpened my gaze and looked hard at her, for I had thought only of myself and not of Eliza when it came to the question of saving.

  “‘Goody’s the only one can save me,’ Eliza said when I brought your shoes.”

  “Eliza knew you had brought me my shoes?”

  “Of course she did.”

  “But she wanted me to stay!”

  “That’s also true. Truth has many different drawers and shelves.”

  I waited for Captain Jane to go on but instead of saying more she slid open a panel that was neatly built into the side of the boat, split the stretched face in two, then stepped in and made room for me to follow. The deck was a piece of leather above a latticework of bones. As we shifted our weight, it moaned beneath our feet. From inside the boat it was easy to see the stitch work used to sew it all so neat. Captain Jane closed her cloak around me so that it was only the upper half of my head poking out. I told her I was well warm enough as I was and tried to move away but she held me tight and said where we were going it would be colder by far and only wolf skin could keep us warm.

  I said nothing then. She gave a bark and the boat began to move, first far faster and louder than I could bear across the forest floor, then up with the branches of ash and maple and oak whipping hard against us. Then higher still, where there was only the wind.

  Chapter 21

  Up we sailed into the sky. And over the sea of the forest. And through the dark of the clear night. And beyond great tunnels of wind and straight through a banner of ice-filled clouds. When we came out the other side, we found ourselves in the snow of an early-spring storm. The earth lay smothered in its whiteness below. All about us the flakes fell softly. Captain Jane asked into my ear was I warm enough. The wolf cloak had turned white and my face was half frozen.

  “I am,” I said. I was.

  “Then would you like to stay in this fine boat and travel a small way through this night with me? For I have a mercy to perform.”

  “A mercy?”

  “A service of sorts. You’ll see. The boat will take us to it and may tell me more of it as we go.”

  “Does the boat speak to you as well as fly?”

  Captain Jane smiled but did not answer. I said that I did not well follow what she meant about mercies and could not parse her smile but that I would stay with her a little longer if only to ride through the air and skid along past moon and storm,
for doing so was what I had always dreamed. This was what, I realized, I was dreaming when my father came to me the next time my mother was away after that night on the beach and said we were leaving. He had booked us passage. “Passage, daughter!” he said. We were going far from these shores and would stay away forever. And because he said that on such a grand voyage we must go gaily dressed and had nothing but our daily drab to wear, he teased open the lock on my mother’s treasure chest and we stuffed scarlet into our seams, indigo into our sleeves, aqua into our ankles and shoes. We slipped then from the house taking only the bits of color and what we could carry, only what would serve. It was as we walked quickly and merrily away that he told me about queens and fools. He said we were going to a place where we could still see them. “Would you like that, daughter?” he had asked me.

  “Yes, I would like it very much,” I said, speaking to Captain Jane. As soon as I said it, the boat, which had paused in its flight, leaped forward, then curved right and cut a long arcing half-loop through the frozen skies. As we went our way Captain Jane sang or laughed or sometimes howled. For my own part I kept very quiet, as quiet as I have ever been, for there are things in this world that you think will never come to pass that will rob you of your voice for nothing but the joy of them when suddenly they do. I was so happy there in our riding, and so hushed in my happiness, that when the boat slowed and lowered, then came to a stop above the cobbled street in a town, it took me a long time to move or answer Captain Jane when she leaned away from me and asked me was I coming in with her on her errand or would I like to stay outside in the frosty cold.

  “Where have we arrived?” I said.

  “A street in a town whose name I do not know,” she said.

  “Have we come as far as the sea?” I asked with some wonder. For even cold as it was, now that we had stopped moving through the air, I could smell it, as if the waves were washing slowly over the cobbles and splashing on my shoes. There was tar in the air, tar and salt and brine.

  “Distance means little to a boat of the air.”

  “You know a great deal about boats and their habits for one who has just come into possession of one.”

  “I have long enough studied the subject,” she said. “It is not just roots and herbs that I know the uses of. Now, will you come with me through this door and into this house, or will you stay here?” She had leaped over the side of the boat and onto the street and was pointing in a direction I had not looked at a stout oak door set in the side of a grand house. The windows of the house, at least on its ground floor, were brightly lit.

  “Where have you taken me?”

  Instead of answering, Captain Jane clapped her hands, stepped forward, and pushed open the door.

  I gave a sniff. It was the sea for sure. I thought we must be well close to the water, for even a smell as grand as the sea travels poorly through frosty air. I slid open the gate of skin and stepped out of the boat and when I did, it lifted up into the sky as if I had released it and was swallowed by the falling flakes, leaving me to look about myself at the darkened street, where the snow gathered in the cobbles, and where a young elm grew, and where light poured from the fine house before me. I stood gazing at it from the frozen street, but soon my teeth were chattering and the tips of my feet and fingers had begun to hurt, for the world of that night in my damp dress without Captain Jane’s cloak around me was terrible cold.

  It was indeed a large, fine house with candles lit in sconces that led along a wide, central foyer. My eyes lingered on many a lovely object set quivering by rich wax light as I followed Captain Jane’s glittering wet tracks across its burnished floors. Presently I came to another oaken door, twin almost to the one that looked out on the cold world, only this one was painted red as the sun. I was breathing hard and my body ached and groaned as it warmed, but I could hear over the din of my own ears that someone inside the room behind the red door was singing. The latch was warm and turned easily, as had the latch on the door to Eliza’s small room, and for the briefest of moments I felt sure—even as I knew now where I must be—it was her I would find lying cold and still and near heart-stopped as she stared at something when I stepped beyond. But we were far now from Eliza, and this door, unlike hers, which had creaked, opened without a sound onto the kingdom of my memories, the larder of my dreams.

  Captain Jane was standing before him. He was holding a violin in one hand and its bow in the other. The chair he sat on was high-backed and fine. He must have long since crossed the border of his middle years but was still as nice and more to look upon as I remembered him. He had the same flaxen locks that curled low on his forehead and arched golden eyebrows. His festive linen blouse fit snugly and his breeches were purple and green. As he sang, his elegant lips moved more, and pleasantly so, than it might have seemed they needed to, like they had their own dance and business to arrange. It was a lullaby came from his lips. One I had sung often enough in my own house without ever asking myself where it had been learned, though he made the tune turn differently. “Hush, child…Don’t cry…Sleep now…Don’t die…” His voice was high and sweet and there were tears in his eyes and on his cheeks as he sang. He had held no violin in his hand when I had been his guest before but that was all that seemed different about him. He made a picture, in his beauty—for beauty plain and pure and simple it had been all those years before when I had looked upon him with my child’s eyes and it still was—that I had rarely put a frame on since I had last been in his house. The little table by the pillowed bench stood in its place but now it was a bowl filled past its rim with spring berries that smiled with the will-o’-the-wisp reflection of the candles upon it. There was also, just inside the door, an ink-splattered desk I did not remember on which sat a mess of pages covered in dots and lines that I soon realized were musical notes. The pages were larger by some good measure than Eliza’s and many were rolled and tied with string. Some pages had fallen to the floor. Others had been crumpled into balls and thrown about.

  I stepped full into the room and Captain Jane turned to me and, before I could ask her how she had brought me to this place when I had barely left off speaking of it, shook her head and put a finger to her lips. So I understood that there was a glamour at work, one that had its limits, meaning that if the handsome singer couldn’t see us, he could still hear us. Indeed, as I moved toward Captain Jane, I stepped over a ball of crumpled paper and came down on a poorly joined floor plank that squeaked softly. The handsome man, who had been singing now about babes and wells and breezes, stopped. Captain Jane looked at me.

  “Sing on,” she said, taking a step closer to the man so that she was now at easy arm’s reach from him.

  “That is a different voice than the one that has long spoken to me from the shadows,” said the man.

  “The shadows hold many voices,” said Captain Jane.

  “Yours is not the one I know.”

  “The world is full of change.”

  “The world has not changed for me in a long time,” he said sadly.

  “You chose that changeless place. Now play.”

  The man rubbed his nose, bit at his lips, bowed his head. Then he slid the violin under his chin, crooked his arm, and drew the bow once across its strings. I saw with a thrill when he did this that his fingernails were as black at their smooth edges as mine had been before Eliza scrubbed them. It was one note he played. But it was shaped like a curving crown and dipped deep in the glitter of sorrow. I have never since heard longer or lovelier. Often here I call it to mind. It always comes.

  “I want to stop, I said that the last time, I need to stop,” said the man, yanking the bow away from the strings.

  “Play on,” said Captain Jane.

  “I do not wish to play any longer.”

  “Then sing on, for there is another here who will like the chance to ride the harp of your voice, for she heard it sung snug against her ear when she was small. She heard it but ran away. She heard it and didn’t stay.”

  “Who
is it?” said the man, flicking his eyes nervously about the room. I counted twenty candles burning all about him. They hung from the ceiling; they sat in sconces, dripping their wax onto the polished floor. “Is it a spirit you wish me to sing for?”

  “I am no spirit,” I said.

  He flinched when I spoke.

  “Sing now,” said Captain Jane. “Sing for her. Sing for them. Comfort your little pigs.”

  “I only keep them for our bargain.”

  “What bargain?” I asked.

  “Tell the other voice who has come to me these many years, if it’s still her I must parley with, that I wish to stop.”

  “Oh, I think it’s me now, not her,” said Captain Jane. “And we are not just voices, as I believe you know.”

  At this she pursed her lips, leaned forward, and blew. The man gave out a sharp cry when the air touched him, as if the burst of breath had burned.

  “But you won’t stop, will you, my beauty? For you started long before your bargain was struck.” She turned to me. “Do you think he will stop?”

  I did not answer. In listening to them, my mind had been filled to its own rim with boats and sugared biscuits and the handsome man and hissing women and languages I could not speak.

  “Take your price and go. Take them all at once, though some are not yet ready and may not serve.”

  “What does he mean that some are not yet ready?” I asked.

  “Sing,” said Captain Jane.

  “What do you mean?” I said to the man.

  “Answer her,” said Captain Jane.

  The man gave a smile and then a sob just as small.

  “Have you ever seen a veal calf?” Captain Jane said to me. “Tell your guest grown tall and free what you mean.”