Red Riding Hood

by David Leslie Johnson; David Leslie Johnson; Catherine Hardwicke Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

  “Let’s go!”

  Lucie looked up at her foggily. “What’s the rush?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. She knew her sister well. Too well.

  “Because…” Valerie thought quickly. “We’re wasting time. We need to cross the river now, before the tea wears off.”

  The girls looked at one another and then at the cool river lapping insistently at the shore. Valerie was right.

  It was time.

  6

  As the rowboat slipped downstream, the paddling girls never suspected that Valerie was steering them in the direction of Peter’s candlelight signal. The light had disappeared, but she had kept her eye on where it had flickered and knew just the spot in the darkness they should head to.

  Roxanne leaned nervously over the side of the boat, eyeing her fractured reflection in the passing water. She felt the river looked like inky blood, but she tried to convince herself that it was closer to blackberry juice.

  Prudence seized her opportunity. Hands on either side, she rocked the boat, sending Roxanne lurching back onto her seat, crying out.

  Prudence laughed in a mean way, a savage playfulness lighting up her eyes.

  Roxanne glared and splashed some water at her.

  The girls could see three different campfires buried between the trees up from shore and began rowing competently toward them. These were girls who knew how to do things other girls didn’t. They pulled at the oars, and the boat glided across the river like a solitary bird.

  They considered briefly the possibility of getting caught but were able to put it out of their minds easily. They were young and free—and the risk seemed worth taking.

  Seeing Peter’s flashing light again, Valerie hooked the boat left. As it veered, Lucie lost her oar. Stretching out to recover it, she shifted her weight too quickly, causing the river to rush over the lip and into the boat.

  The girls screamed as water came gushing in. Immediately they knew they had probably blown their cover.

  “Jump in and flip the boat over! Hide underneath!” Valerie tried to shout and whisper at the same time.

  The girls took in great surges of breaths and plunged into the water, pulling the boat upside down as they went. Reaching for each other underwater, they made their way under the boat. They rose up, skirts trailing behind them like shrouds, to meet in the air pocket underneath.

  No one was happy. Their hair was dripping wet and their dresses soaked through, after all they’d done to be pretty for the boys.

  They were here now, in the dirty blue underworld of a rotting rowboat, kicking their legs furiously and yet utterly invisible to anyone watching, even to each other. All at once, it struck them as riotously funny, and together they convulsed with laughter, trying to hold it in. Then they buckled, letting their laughter spill out into the night in a few shrieks, but trying, too, to keep quiet. It sounded like they were inside a seashell.

  Valerie was starting to enjoy her role as leader.

  “We do need to deal with this,” she said, stating the obvious. “And quietly,” she shushed them. They strained to hear if there was any movement at the shore.

  Roxanne nodded seriously to herself, as though Valerie had said something insightful. Prudence rolled her eyes, exasperated at Valerie’s newfound tyranny.

  After a moment of hearing nothing but the water swishing against the boat, Valerie decided they were still safe.

  “Okay, here we go. One, two, three—lift!” Valerie said in a voice that was more commanding than it needed to be. The rowboat landed with one great plop, right side up. The girls waded through the shallow water onto shore, helping the boat along and feeling silly, the weight of their waterlogged skirts making their every step more slow and humiliating.

  “Up here,” came a loud whisper. Peering into the dark, the girls couldn’t see who had spoken. They looked at one another, each privately trying to discern whether it could have been her own self-appointed boyfriend, before fastening the boat to a tree.

  Valerie looked for Peter as they waddled up the riverbank. The fires danced up into the sky, and they moved to the one closest to them, feeling grubby, dirty around the edges. Lucie raced up first but veered away, whispering, “It’s Rose’s dad!”

  “Hello? Who’s down there?” came a voice from the circle of men crouched around the fire.

  “Excuse us,” Lucie said, putting on the voice of an old woman. The five girls tried to look huddled and shrunken, desperately repressing giggles.

  The boys must be at the next fire.

  As they neared its light, Valerie saw through the swirling sparks rising from the campsite that Peter was not among them. The harvesters who were there were happy to see the girls approaching but also seemed surprised.

  “You girls came all the way over here?”

  “Yeah!”

  “How come?”

  The girls looked at one another. Didn’t they know?

  “Um…”

  Lucie jumped in. “Sorry. We always come over to this side when we camp out.” It wasn’t a lie. They’d never camped out before.

  The boys looked at one another.

  “We’re not complaining.”

  The girls shrugged. The boys were not smart, but they were fun. They laughed when they saw how wet and bedraggled the girls were, but didn’t laugh hard enough to embarrass them. They were gentlemen, even, trying very hard to keep their eyes from straying to Rose’s blouse, which had drooped even lower with the wetness, showing off her full figure. She did nothing to correct the situation.

  As everyone dried off by the fire, Lucie set to work weaving crowns out of grass and clover, working deftly with her prunelike fingers.

  “No flowers here,” she quietly lamented to no one in particular. “These will have to do.” She brightened as her work got under way.

  Before long, one of the harvesters, Rose’s or Prudence’s, depending on which girl was asked, pulled out a fiddle. He wasn’t a good player, but that didn’t matter much. As the girls listened, the fire crackled, throwing up ashy bits that flew into their eyes.

  Rose danced barefoot beside him, her skirt flouncing as she tried to rally the other girls to her side and her dark hair shining as it dried by the heat of the fire. Prudence and Roxanne held each other’s hands and did a halfhearted circle step. It would have been easier, Rose thought, if they’d joined her in having more of the ale. Lucie came up and fitted the rings of clover onto each of their heads. She returned to her seat with one crown, displeased with the way she’d closed the loop.

  “Was that you with the blinking light?” Rose asked the fiddler in a low voice that let him know he could confide in her.

  But he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Blinking light? Where?” He looked around, not wanting to have missed something.

  Rose pouted. Guess not.

  The group was too preoccupied to notice Valerie slip out of the firelight and into the darkness.

  Feeling her way blindly through the dark field, her hands brushed the stalks of grass, dry and scratchy at the tips. When she ran her fingers along a blade the right way, from the bottom up, it felt smooth, but if she accidentally grazed a finger the other way, the blade struck back cruelly, like a thousand tiny knives.

  She waited, scanning the void for Peter, but she saw nothing, heard nothing. She’d never minded being alone—often she preferred it, sought it out—but forlornly waiting for another person made her feel foolish and pathetic. Suddenly she hated herself and hated Peter. She started back toward the campfire, telling herself she’d never put herself in a position to feel so stupid again. It was then, as she trudged angrily through the reeds, that she saw the flickering glow of a candle in the forest. She took in a sharp breath, and her resolve vanished before her heart could pass another beat.

  She stepped into the tangled dark of the forest, and it broke into motion. A few birds and insects were calling out in their separate registers, layering their songs, creating strange parallels and dissonances. She c
ould smell the faint sweet odor of the woods at night, could hear the crinkling of dried leaves underfoot.

  The candle, though, had disappeared.

  “Peter?” Valerie called out in a whisper.

  She stepped cautiously, wondering if she had only imagined his light, and if she really was as pathetic as she’d felt just moments ago.

  But what was that on the ground? A marking? In the shape of… an arrow?

  As she bent wearily down to rule out the possibility, just as she’d done so many countless times before, she felt a weighty, wet nudge at her back. A faint puff of air. Her breath snagged.

  “Get on,” she heard as she turned.

  It was the damp, velvet nose of a horse. Peter was outlined against the night above her, loosely holding the reins.

  A hand reached down for her, and she took it. It was coarse and calloused and warm. It gripped hers strongly, and without even thinking about it, Valerie let herself be lifted up, and she slid onto the horse, her body fitting into Peter’s. She tentatively reached her arms around his waist and then tightened them when the horse moved. It was slow and careful as it stepped through the glade, Valerie’s body dipping forward with Peter’s as he moved to avoid low-hanging branches. They didn’t speak. Valerie found that she didn’t need to know who this new Peter was, that it was all right that she didn’t, that in fact it was better not to.

  And then Peter found what he’d been looking for—a path that cut through the forest. She held tight to him as he put their mount into a canter, and they rode, fast and free, through the woods. His body close to hers, Valerie recalled the electric thrill of being with him when they were young, running through the forest so fast that the air whistled in their ears. That feeling was still there, but it meant so much more now.

  The horse picked up speed, the fast pounding of the hooves replacing the beat of her heart. The wind streaked through her hair, and she and Peter and the animal were so close and so powerful that it felt like they would just keep going forever together, flying.

  But eventually, Peter turned the horse to circle back. Letting the horse walk, listening to its heavy breathing, they still hadn’t broken the heavy silence. A man’s voice suddenly shattered the quiet, shouting, “Hey! That’s my horse! Get back here!”

  Valerie hadn’t registered that the horse wasn’t Peter’s. She smiled disbelievingly in the dark. Peter was dangerous.

  “I’ll wait here while you sneak the horse back.”

  “Don’t go anywhere,” he said, letting her off.

  While she watched his dim outline ride off to return the horse, Valerie’s chest felt squeezed, like there was too much inside, like something was trying to sprout roots and grow there.

  Maybe that was what love felt like.

  She tried to recall Peter’s body, to feel him in his absence. He had smelled like tarnish and leather, this dangerous boy, this horse thief. She awaited his return, wondering what would come next.

  Valerie heard a loud crackling of branches and looked around. Seeing nothing, she looked skyward, to the tangle of branches overhead. There were pockets of night visible between them, and she could see clouds becoming insubstantial in the sky and drifting into nothingness. Two clouds remained, though, and they drifted apart to frame the moon.

  It took Valerie a moment to realize that the moon was full. And red.

  Her mind was bleary with confusion. The full moon had taken place the night before, so how…? Valerie’s blood ran cold as understanding hit her. It was something the elders talked about, but not with much confidence. They quieted down whenever a question was asked, grumbling, as no one knew the answers with any certainty. They just knew it was not a good sign, like a black cat or a broken mirror.

  Blood moon.

  There was an unearthly growl in the distance.

  Valerie sprang into motion, rushing out of the forest and down to the river’s edge, which had been thrown into its own chaos, the swarm of people zigzagging to safety like bumblebees.

  Everyone had scattered and was piling into boats, rowing toward the village. Valerie saw Roxanne and Rose rushing toward a boat just off the shore, sloshing through the water in a panic. A few harvesters had already climbed in—there was not much room left. Valerie hurried down to them, splashing into the water up to her waist.

  “Girls, wait!”

  “Get in!” Roxanne pulled at Valerie’s hand, ushering her aboard.

  “Wait! Where’s Lucie?”

  “She and Prudence went in the first boat,” Roxanne replied, motioning urgently to a vessel already halfway across.

  “Get in or don’t!” one of the harvesters demanded as they pushed off. All niceties had vanished with the threat.

  Once on the water, Valerie looked back to the shore, which was fading into darkness as the harvesters rowed furiously away. There was another boat waiting there and not nearly enough men to fill it. Peter will find a place on it, Valerie assured herself, an anxious sensation fermenting in her chest.

  “The full moon was last night,” a voice protested from one of the wagons everyone was piling into. The Reeve had them ready and waiting as the boats emptied. The wooden vessels creaked as they rushed inside the crumbling town wall. Men jumped out to slam the huge wooden gates of the village shut behind them.

  “We should have been safe tonight.”

  “The blood moon has returned!”

  As the wagon hurtled into the center of the village, everyone talked over one another in perplexed voices.

  A few older men argued vehemently about how often they’d seen a moon like this one—twice or three times in their lives.

  As the wagon made stops along the rows of houses, there were shouts: “Wolf night! Everybody inside!”

  Valerie hopped off and dashed to her own cottage, hoping Suzette had slept through the commotion. But her mother was waiting for her up above, pulling her blue shawl tight against the cold. Her candle illuminated the porch, the uneven light falling upon Valerie.

  Seeing her daughter, Suzette breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God.” She let down the ladder.

  “Mother?” Valerie wondered whether Suzette knew yet that she and Lucie had snuck off from the women’s camp.

  “Your father is out looking for you girls!”

  “Sorry.” The news didn’t seem to have reached her.

  “Where’s Lucie?”

  “She went with Prudence.” Valerie was pleased with herself. It was true without implicating them in any wrongdoing.

  Suzette peered down the road a final time but relaxed. “I’m sure your father will stop by there. Let’s get you into bed.”

  Lying in their loft, Valerie’s body missed Lucie’s—it felt strange without her sister there beside her. She heard a rumbling of rain. It turned quickly to hail, which fell in solid stripes to the ground, too fast for the human eye to recognize single drops. Winter was coming, and the thunderstorm was cold, roaring like an angry God. Valerie wondered about Peter. There were flashes of light, after which the dark swallowed itself up again. Enveloped in storm clouds, the moon looked unclean, its red glow staining the sky.

  That night, Valerie dreamed she was flying.

  7

  I remember when I was a girl,” Suzette was saying, seated on a low stool. “Eleven years old when I saw my first blood moon. I was young and crazy about a boy. It was almost romantic.” Girlishly, she twirled a strand of her wavy, shoulder-length hair around her finger. “If it hadn’t been so awful, of course.”

  Lost in her own thoughts, Valerie wasn’t listening. In the morning, with chores to be done, last night’s fears seemed trivial, the panic unwarranted. As she kneaded a mound of starchy, inelastic dough, her mind leapt from one thought to another. She wasn’t worried about Peter, she decided, because he seemed like he knew things other people didn’t.

  She felt he could teach her his secrets and tell her about the world. She felt he could give shape to things, the way he used to carve saints out of shapeles
s wood blocks. But, she reminded herself, he was only there for the harvest… and her family would never allow her to be with him because of his history in the town.

  Valerie pressed all her weight into the dough, irrationally annoyed with the difficulty of the task and the monotony of being indoors on a beautiful day. Yesterday had been the last day of fall, today the first of winter. She’d awoken this morning with the soles of her feet smooth and dry in the cold. She liked that. Now she heard voices outdoors but couldn’t tell to whom they belonged until she heard the laughter. Rose’s brazen laugh. She strained to hear whether Lucie was with her. Lucie was much better at baking than Valerie was, and ordinarily Lucie would have helped her after she finished her own. But she’d gotten off easy, staying the night at Prudence’s.

  “Anyway,” Suzette concluded, realizing that Valerie wasn’t listening, “I’d say we’ve got enough biscuits done now.” She slapped her hands on the table decisively. “We’ll… save your dough,” she added, glancing at the unappealing brick Valerie was holding.

  Valerie was withdrawn as Suzette wrapped the dozen hot barley biscuits and some cheese in soft white cloth and prepared to bring them to the men. Valerie could taste the dream she’d had the night before; it was fresh and sharp, like a lemon she had tasted once at a fair.

  “Valerie, while I take lunch to the men, please clean up here and sweep the floors. And then,” her mother said, taking on a weary tone, “would you please fetch some water?”

  “Yes,” Valerie said, perhaps too quickly. “Yes, I’ll go.”

  At the well, Valerie began to pull the rope, retrieving the pail from the water. She thought of the cool drink she was about to bring Peter, of how his eyes would peer over the cup as he drank, fixed on her. Imagining his penetrating stare, she stopped pulling, letting her body soften and her fingers ease off the rope. The pail plummeted and bashed violently against the stone wall of the well. She gasped and lunged for the rope as the pail splashed, breaking the surface of the water. Calmly and deliberately, she pulled up a new pail of water. Then she set off for the area where the men were clearing trees.