My father left me with a kiss to the span of freckles on my cheek and the backpack heavy with the ash-wet bones, a stolen knife, wool sweater, a brace of dried persimmons, my mother’s moleskin gloves, a big deerfat candle, almonds. Special things, all. The Fool who would not stay behind; who said his hares were luck, his shoulders narrow; who took nothing with him but those seven jackrabbits, dancing, was at my side. Together the Fool and I crawled into the hole where a fish and a little saint had been dredged up that morning, a lifetime ago. Behind us, my father held up a burning lantern and could not get a word out, only watched until we had vanished into the ground.
From above, it probably seemed that the hole in the earth had eaten us, a swallow of dirt. A wriggle and squeeze, and then it widened. The hares ran ahead, sniffing.
“How do you know it comes up again?” I said to the Fool, afraid in all the close dark.
“I know nothing. It’s the hares who do. I only listen.”
Ahead of us, the seven jackrabbits moved, quick and sure as stars. Their black tails began to glow then, just like embers. The Fool looked at me, and grinned.
LIGHT CAME PALE GREEN AS LICHENS THROUGH MY GLASS. I COULD still smell the sloes and brambleberries of melomels once fermented in it, but they were so faint they might only have been my dreams. The human smell lingered: nail clippings, a scrap of brown hair, a scab. I had pushed the pieces themselves out the bottleneck centuries before, but the scent crept near, still pressing itself to the glass. It was hard to shake, the smell of humankind. We cling to the world like ticks. Only way to get us off is to wrench and turn counterclockwise, until our teeth loose their grip in the great skin of things.
Whatever the words of the charm, it worked. I was a witch caught in a glass jug, and the light came in like the green of new vetch. A letter stuffed, nose first, into a bottle made for distilling fruits, sent out onto the waves, all white-lipped and roaring. It was the binding of hair and nail and blood, an old earthen animal magic, that kept me there so long. That sort of thing always works. I couldn’t get out.
A family does not like to leave behind their witch bottle, their demons all caught in a single place. It made them feel safer when I was there, stoppered in with the nail clippings, even though they couldn’t see me. I was buried under a hearthstone in southern Wales, near the sea, for two centuries. Toward the end, I could hear the picks and blasts, the ponies dying from dark and strain and soot. The coal nuggets moaned their chants of dead sun and the rotten leaves of eons past, when trees were soft-barked and birds and fish were the only creatures with bones.
I wasn’t guilty of anything too serious, to get caught in that bottle. I’m a simple witch, always was. I lived down by the sea in a house made of worn stones. I cooked kelps and crabs for my luncheon. I was called Ffion. I brewed small vials of sea otter heart-blood for love charms, salmon skins for wisdom, the feet of pelicans for grace. I was a very tidy business-woman, really, keeping neat logs of my sales, my recipes, my stocks of pelican and kelp and rare driftwoods which I carved into small dolls. I did keep a hare as a pet, which gave the townsfolk some unease, though in truth she was a rabbit, an angora, expensive thing. A sailor, anchored near my beach and eager for a woman’s arms, had left her as a gift for me, from the burnished ports of Istanbul. She slept always beside me, needy creature, and I brushed her daily to gather the soft, gently crimped fibers of her fur. I spun and knit all manner of neck cowls and gloves with that wool, softer and warmer than any round shaft of sun. Good for the wet and salt-streaked sea air.
It is true, I also spun her chestnut wool into cords, dunked in sea water and singed with smudge bundles of dry saltgrass, and journeyed upon them from house to house, as on a tight-rope, knotted between chimney pipes. I could make my bones pelican-light, and waltz. There is a certain power tucked in rabbits, moon-changing and wise.
They had a right to call me a witch, for I did deal in vials of herb; I did tend the bodies of dead seals, all speckled when they washed to shore; I did now and then cause a toothache, a broken leg, intestinal cramps, bright rashes, but only to those who deserved them. Only once did I cause a man to die, and it was for the sake of his small daughter, to whom he did unspeakable things. Him, I choked and hung with a cable of angora wool, left him dangling from rafters.
It wasn’t easy to make myself light as pelican bones, ready my rabbit-fur roads, and breach the stone walls around the town of Tenby, or Dinbych-y-pysgod, as we said in our tongue. It made my joints ache and my wrists bruise for weeks. Those stones were laid to keep invaders out, to protect the furs, the oils, the orange-crates, the velvets—all the goods of trade.
Of course, those stones could not keep out the rats, who carried the Black Plague in their dark and patchy fur. More than half the town died, then. The bells of the chapel rang out each day, until every last man in the church was dead too, and no one had the courage to enter the wooden doors and carry on that ringing. I couldn’t save a soul. My medicines were too humble. Pigs ran wild in abandoned houses, rooting through vegetable gardens and closets alike.
Naturally, those left alive blamed me, since I had survived, and saved no one. The next time I walked my ropes of angora, to make a man go bald who had skinned a fox out by the high road and left his body to rot, he was ready with the green glass bottle full of rusty nails, his hair, a scrape of skin, a puddle of urine. Wedged it right in the hearth. In I went, with the sound of an orange being squeezed from its peel. Already pelican-light, I crumpled like a linen, then shook myself, and could find no way out.
I remained under that hearth for two hundred years. More, maybe, I can’t be sure. The only benefit of being stuck in a bottle is that I, like a jam or a pickle, was preserved, suspended in time, ageless. Eventually I was dug out and wrapped in a spruce-wood trunk with the bed-sheets and a rosary—dreadful sweet-smelling thing—and put on the ship with the rest of the family, grandchildren or great-great-grand children of the man I tried to curse. They were heading for the place called New South Wales, where the eucalyptus grew with smooth bark and hooked green leaves.
I was only a short time there, and all the while, it seemed the eucalyptus trees were crying, filling up the air with their spice. The family to whom my bottle belonged, they barely settled down in a cabin made all of eucalyptus wood when I was snatched up again and placed on another ship, this time heading for California, for the city of San Francisco, grown elegant on gold and entrepreneurs.
We never arrived. The ship went down. I became a letter in a bottle, bobbing on the sea, waiting to be read. Sounds got caught inside. They bounced off the glass for weeks, sometimes an entire winter. The sounds on the ocean were all new. Before, the chunks of coal, mined out with picks and ponies and carts, they had screamed for darkness, for the weight of the earth above them. To be free-standing, and then lit on fire; this was terror, and they had songs for it, those compressed pieces of darkness and of time. The songs echoed in my bottle where I lay, curled beneath the hearthstone; they came up mole tunnels and through the foundation, travelling all that way in the veins of the underground. I have sharp ears. A witch must have. Then it was the eucalyptus, their green and spire eulogies, as they were cut and milled, smoothed, planed, processed for oil and fiber, making the houses in which people lived. Their songs caught in my jar like the banshee cries of my homeland, shrill; they splintered around me like shards of light.
But the sounds of the ocean, these were the most beautiful and also the most difficult to bear. For centuries after the ship tipped, cracked, filled with water, I heard the sea and her lament. I bobbed and drifted. I saw the gray whales hunted for the oil in their bodies, the elephant seals for the same; I saw the sea otters shaken and razed from kelp beds for their furs; I heard the murres and cormorants shrieking out overhead for their stolen eggs, taken by the barrel-load. I heard the chinook and the coho salmon, all silver and black and red, dwindle. Ships fueled with steam came, then went, and ones filled with petrol, big as cities, replaced them. Plumes of p
oison now and then streaked the water. And I saw the whirlpools of plastic begin, big enough for a thousand pelicans to stand on, every color in the world you can imagine, but lodging in throats or around necks.
Floating on the ocean, I saw cities collapsed like churchstones. I watched scraps drifting overboard on the sea. Time and ruin, like two black cormorants, airing their waxen wings. A cello, buoyant and warped. A city made all of silver thread and urchin-spines: the ghost of San Francisco.
I heard the ocean, finally, grow quiet. That was the worst thing. I felt ill in my glass bottle for days, wishing for a sound, any lament. I wanted desperately to reach land, but the currents wouldn’t let me. Nothing is worse than silence where there once was a hum of chaos, lovely and green: seal, plankton, kelp, coral, shark, tide and salt. A sheen of petrol, iridescent as any dragonfly, clung to the surfaces of waves. I saw the blueprints of cities in it, odd-shaped to my eyes. They were unlike any I had ever seen, those centuries ago on the south coast of Wales. Then, I knew only London, and it was a spired net of stone and wood, a dense and winding grid, all tapering tower and dome and gabled rooftop. The blueprints I saw on the sea were strict rectangles and lines, drawn up with straight edges, everywhere an angle. In the oil-sheen, these cities perpetually shuddered and split apart from within. They crumpled and smoked and all the edges went soft. I watched them as the tides pulled me.
It was another century, at least, that I floated in the quiet. It must have had something to do with my strange crumpled weight in the bottle—I never thought it took a thing so long to fall out of a ship and meet land. It could have been two centuries more, even, after I began to see those cities of petrol, after the ocean went silent, only one whale to be seen in every twenty-five years, and then none at all, that I was swallowed down, glass and all, by a large elephant seal.
She didn’t bite, just swallowed, so I passed through the red soft muscles and passages of her digestion. The size of me killed her, a glass barricade. I was impermeable. As she died around me, keening into the salt, and a thick darkness descended where once there had been blood moving in veins, her flesh above me filled with stars. It was like watching constellations appear after the sun has set, one by one and then all at once. What’s more, these were stars I knew, mirrored in her body: Cygnus, the Pleiades, Orion, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Scorpio. They speckled her stomach lining and her ribs like nubs of candle-light, eons away. In the middle of all those death stars, I saw one constellation I could not recognize. It looked like Cetus, the great whale, only inside was a mad clustering of stars shaped like those horrid sharp cities, fallen to splinters.
I knew then, all at once, that this was the last whale. There are things a witch comes to know, quickly, in her blood, particularly a witch raised on seaside tides, bound to bob the Pacific for centuries. This was the last whale, and all the creatures of all the oceans knew it in the fibers of their beings. They grieved. This was the last one, a humble gray whale, not the biggest or the fattest, but hardy. He had taken all the cities and their rifting poison, their new-fangled bomb-lances of every conceivable making, right into his body like a brand, and died of it. All the poison of my kind: it went first into the seas, the Place it Began. Then it seeped outward and made its way toward the land.
I cried then. The tears slipped against the glass. I had not cried yet in my cage, for all those centuries. I had kept calm and quiet, venturing far away each day into my mind to stop my self from madness. But I cried then, in the dark of a seal belly, over the runes, star-sharp, of the Last Whale.
Night came. I knew it without any way to see. I would know it without eyes. Night, the shadow of earth, fallen. Stars opened up their eyes, crystalline and hot. It’s my ears, my hands, that know, catching at the sound of dark carried on owl wings or the moon. A silken feeling along the palms, soft, a slight pressure, as a handshake. I’m not called a witch for no reason, after all. A regular woman would not have been caught in a glass bottle to begin with. She wouldn’t fit, for one thing. It would have no power to pull her inside. And if anyone tried to force her, well—it would break all the bones in her body, quick as twigs.
Night, it came rustling overhead, it came sweeping at my palms, and the elephant seal, she stopped, suddenly, her drifting. I felt resistance against her, the slight buffet of tide, the hiss of pebbles. Land. Through the dark, the waves pushed her further and further up the beach, rolling.
By dawn, gulls were picking at her belly. Then a coyote. She chewed at the abdomen in big toothy bites to get at the heart, the liver. She peeled back that skin tougher than any leather with patience, using her mouth as precisely as a seamstress’s scissors. Eventually, I saw her black nose, the spikes and tapers of her quick whiskers. When she had eaten her fill, closing up that hunger which made her single-minded, she sensed me there. She nosed at the bottle, pushed partly through the purple-white stomach sac, made an opening. She whined and fixed her golden eyes right on my face.
Animals can always see where humans cannot. No one ever noticed me in there, you see, curled up like a fetus in my green dress, nettle-dyed, with my auburn hair still in its coiled braids, just the same as the morning I left the house by the sea, tiptoed my way on sea-witched strings of angora right over the walls of that port town, Dinbych-y-pysgod, and into the bottle of the fox-killing man. It is extraordinary, all the things that people don’t see. It is a matter of honed senses, I suppose, of the reliability of scent, light, rustle. Animals use these signals, these signs. People tell themselves stories of what they are meant to see, of what is expected, of how the world works, and so they see their own stories, and not the world. Not the rage of a fox, dead and skinned in the road, rotting. Not the grief of whales as one by one they died until they were gone. Not me, curled in a bottle made of green glass, trying to be patient, watching it all, holding back my own tears.
The coyote nosed and pawed at my bottle until she had partially dislodged it from the elephant seal’s stomach. I could see better then, though the fluids and fibers of that pinniped streaked the glass. Waves, foam-fringed and rough, broke in gusts on the sand. The cliffs, a crumbling ocher stone, rose up steep behind me. It was like my home, my shack on the strand facing into the Atlantic those ages past, only bigger, wilder. No people, only the changes made by tide and wind, only the twisted pine trees up the lips of rock.
There was a silence in the air, under the waves falling in thunder, under the spray and the breeze. A stillness. The world had changed so much and so quickly while I lay curled in my bottle. I was part of that change only in fragments, a feeling and a sound coming now and then through the bottleneck, standing in for the things themselves: war, power-plants, coal rising up from the smokestacks, cell-towers, oil rigs leaking, cement over the prairies, the marshes, the old graves. The wind carries sounds off the skin of the world, town and child and hearth, and drops some of its load on the ocean. I heard enough, bobbing for centuries, preserved like a lemon in brine, to grieve. No witch, I’m sure, has lived as long as I, nursed on salt water and suspended in glass. No witch, I’m sure, has listened to the death cries of the last whale, has seen the cities fall inside the grime and petroleum floating for eternity in the waves, spelling out stories. No witch has had to endure so much, and I was never even ambitious.
I didn’t desire adventure, only my seaside home, the secrets that the kelp leaked out on the shore. I only wanted to brew up vials, to right the small and everyday wrongs, walking the tight-rope cables of my angora fur: men who wantonly killed foxes or beat their wives, women who stomped the herbs in the lanes and weren’t sorry, who thought only of their own beauty. I think, as I floated, that the world became full of more wrongs, big ones and everyday ones, than I could ever have faced. I’m glad I only drifted, glass-bound, and caught it in small pieces.
By the time the woman with birds in her skirts found me there on the beach amidst that dead elephant seal, it was all over. The lines made by my own species had been broken. The wind and wild and wave had come in ag
ain, even if the wind still held the poisons from cities, the waves all the plastic bits of decades, the sadness of all that melted ice, even if the wild creatures, the old forests, the streambeds and the marshes, were battered and diminished. They still moved in again: dandelion, coyote, barn swallow, spider. They grew in all the breaks. It is amazing, truly, how fast a rubber tire may become overgrown with vetch, and how soon a mother skunk will raise her babies in it.
She was the first person I had seen in centuries, a woman in tattered skirts, long ones that almost trailed in the sand. At her bare feet, a thousand other feet moved. Tiny ones, belonging to ground-feeding birds. I noticed this first, because my vantage was low to the ground. She walked like a young woman, with a slight slouch, head cocked and glancing all around, feet and hips loose. She prodded at piles of kelp, at weathered plastic bottles and tarps, as if looking for something. When she got close, I saw that lines spread across her skin, thick as maps, delicate, more like tattoos than wrinkles. Old age sat regally in her black eyes like a crow, preening and wise.
Those eyes found me. They saw me right through the glass. She smiled, sat down on a driftwood log beside me, and a flood of ground birds seeped from her skirts, covering the seal carcass with small forked feet, poking it for maggots. I will never be able to describe the relief of her eyes—human eyes that met and saw mine, that rested and recognized me. I had looked no one of my own kind in the eye for a dozen lifespans. It felt like a home, her gaze touching my gaze.
A brown bird, simple, all dun, jumped up to the rim of my glass and dipped her beak in. I reached up to touch it, like a handshake, and then the beach and cliffs, bird and woman, spun around me. I reached and touched that smoothed beak and found that I was free.
Tatterdemalion Page 8
