by Jane Yolen
“I know what this is,” he whispered, not even glancing at a flock of bluebirds which suddenly rose up from the grass. He was pretty smart for a prince.
He ran inside with the slipper in hand. He found his parents in the drawing room having tea. “I want to marry the hen who fits this grass slipper,” he announced.
“Glass slippers are more usual,” his mother said.
“Princes marry swans—not hens,” added his father, looking at the queen.
Then they both sighed.
But Prince Junior was adamant.
So he searched high. (Very high.)
And low. (Very low.)
In fact he searched the entire kingdom. But all the eligible girls (and even their mothers) had small feet, tiny feet, five- to seven-and-a-half narrow feet. (Very narrow.) The grass slipper fell off everyone.
At last Prince Junior arrived at Elly’s house, the very last house on the very last block in the kingdom. And there Elly sat among the cinders staring at the soot.
The skinny sisters tried on the grass slipper. They each wadded paper in the toe-end and cotton at the heel. They each put Super Glue on their instep and duct tape around the ankle.
But still the grass slipper fell off. (It was, after all, a slipper and was slippery with the sweat of dozens and dozens of previous girls who had tried desperately to keep the slipper on.)
Reen threw the slipper on the floor and Rhee stomped on it. “If it doesn’t fit us,” they said together, “it won’t be tried on anyone else.”
“Oh no!” cried Prince Junior. “Now how will I ever find my own true love?” Well, maybe he wasn’t much smarter than the average prince. But he’d tried. Indeed, as the king and queen could attest to, there were times he was very trying.
Furious, the skinnies called out, “Elly, come clean up this mess.”
Then they swept out of the room with Prince Junior in tow, while Elly swept the room up by herself.
When she was done, Elly got the other slipper from the windowsill. She was about to take out the fern to show Prince Junior who she really was, when she noticed the bluebirds had used the slipper as a nest. There amongst the curling ferns were three little eggs. So she put the slipper-nest back on the sill and sat down again in the cinders.
Poor Elly.
Poor Prince.
And that would have been the end of that, except the bluebirds flew back to the nest, and upset that it had been moved, began to squawk and scold in bluebird, a dialect that Ella had just about mastered.
“I am truly sorry. . .” she began.
Prince Junior heard the sounds, knew a bit of bluebird himself, plus sparrow, swallow, and—from a January term in the African desert—a few words of ostrich as well. He ran back into the kitchen leaving the skinnies behind.
“Bluebirds!” he cried, and said to them in the High Tongue, “Do not distress yourselves on my account.”
“Sialia sialis,” said Elly, “if you insist on being formal.” It was the scientific name which only bird-watchers seem to know or care about.
Prince Junior turned his field glasses from the birds on the nest to Elly. Close up he recognized her face. “My dear hen!” he cried. “I love you. Every inch of you.”
“My dear prince,” she cooed.
Then they kissed, and all that nonsense about slippers—glass, grass, or good sturdy leather—was forgotten.
Elly and Prince Junior were married of course. Her father and the king took turns dancing with the queen.
Elly and the prince named their children Blue, Green, Goldie, and Owl, starting a fad in bird names for new babies throughout the kingdom, which left a few children with unfortunate monikers like Titmouse, Turkey, Booby, and Loon.
As for Rhee and Reen and their skinny mother, they were often invited to the palace for tea, but they never went. Their lips were too thin to ask forgiveness and their minds too mean to understand love.
Moral: If you love a waist, you waste a love.
Second Moral: Not everyone who loves balls has them.
Third Moral: Be kind to birds. You may need them someday.
Mama Gone
MAMA DIED FOUR NIGHTS ago, giving birth to my baby sister, Ann. Bubba cried and cried, “Mama gone,” in his little-boy voice, but I never let out a single tear.
There was blood red as any sunset all over the bed from that birthing, and when Papa saw it he rubbed his head against the cabin wall over and over and over and made little animal sounds. Sukey washed Mama down and placed the baby on her breast for a moment. “Remember,” she whispered.
“Mama gone,” Bubba wailed again.
But I never cried.
By all rights we should have buried her with garlic in her mouth and her hands and feet cut off, what with her being vampire kin and all. But Papa absolutely refused.
“Your Mama couldn’t stand garlic,” he said when the sounds had stopped rushing out of his mouth and his eyes had cleared. “It made her come all over with rashes. She had the sweetest mouth and hands.”
And that was that. Not a one of us could make him change his mind, not even Graddad Stokes or Pop Wilber or any of the men who come to pay their last respects. And as Papa is a preacher, and a brimstone man, they let it be. The onliest thing he would allow was for us to tie red ribbons ‘round her ankles and wrist, a kind of sign like a line of blood. Everybody hoped that would do.
But on the next day she rose from out her grave and commenced to prey upon the good folk of Taunton.
Of course she came to our house first, that being the dearest place she knew. I saw her outside my window, gray as a gravestone, her dark eyes like the holes in a shroud. When she stared in she didn’t know me, though I had always been her favorite.
“Mama be gone,” I said, and waved my little cross at her, the one she had given me the very day I’d been born. “Avaunt.” The old Bible word sat heavy in my mouth.
She put her hand up on the window frame, and as I watched, the gray fingers turned splotchy pink from all the garlic I had rubbed into the wood.
Black tears dropped from her black eyes, then. But I never cried.
She tried each window in turn, and not a person awake in the house but me. But I had done my work well and the garlic held her out. She even tried the door, but it was no use. By the time she left, I was so sleepy I dropped down right by the door. Papa found me there at cockcrow. He never did ask what I was doing, and if he guessed, he never said.
Little Joshua Greenough was found dead in his crib. The doctor took two days to come over the mountains to pronounce it. By then the garlic around his little bed—to keep him from walking, too—had mixed with death smells. Everybody knew. Even the doctor, and him a city man. It hurt Joshua’s mama and papa sore to do the cutting. But it had to be done.
The men came to our house that very noon to talk about what had to be. Papa kept shaking his head all through their talking. But even his being preacher didn’t stop them. Once a vampire walks these mountain hollers, there’s nary a house or barn that’s safe. Nighttime is lost time. And no one can afford to lose much stock.
So they made their sharp sticks out of green wood, the curling shavings littering our cabin floor. Bubba played in them, not understanding. Sukey was busy with the baby, nursing it with a bottle and a sugar teat. It was my job to sweep up the wood curls. They felt slick on one side, bumpy on the other. Like my heart.
Papa said, “I was the one let her turn into a nightwalker. It’s my business to stake her out.”
No one argued. Specially not the Greenoughs, their eyes still red from weeping.
“Just take my children,” Papa said. “And if anything goes wrong, cut off my hands and feet and bury me at Mill’s Cross, under the stone. There’s garlic hanging in the pantry. Mandy Jane will string me some.”
So Sukey took the baby and Bubba off to the Greenoughs’ house, that seeming the right thing to do, and I stayed the rest of the afternoon with Papa, stinging garlic and pressing more into the windows
. But the strand over the door he took down.
“I have to let her in somewhere,” he said. “And this is where I’ll make my stand.” He touched me on the cheek, the first time ever. Papa never has been much for show.
“Now you run along to the Greenoughs’, Mandy Jane,” he said. “And remember how much your mama loved you. This isn’t her, child. Mama’s gone. Something else has come to take her place. I should have remembered that the Good Book says, ‘The living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything.’”
I wanted to ask him how the vampire knew to come first to our house, then; but I was silent, for Papa had been asleep and hadn’t seen her.
I left without giving him a daughter’s kiss, for his mind was well set on the night’s doing. But I didn’t go down the lane to the Greenoughs’ at all. Wearing my triple strand of garlic, with my cross about my neck, I went to the burying ground, to Mama’s grave.
It looked so raw against the greening hillside. The dirt was red clay, but all it looked like to me was blood. There was no cross on it yet, no stone. That would come in a year. Just a humping, a heaping of red dirt over her coffin, the plain pinewood box hastily made.
I lay facedown in that dirt, my arms opened wide. “Oh, Mama,” I said; “the Good Book says you are not dead but sleepeth. Sleep quietly, Mama, sleep well.” And I sang to her the lullaby she had always sung to me and then to Bubba and would have sung to Baby Ann had she lived to hold her.
“Blacks and bays,
Dapples and grays,
All the pretty little horses.”
And as I sang I remembered Papa thundering at prayer meeting once, “Behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.” The rest of the song just stuck in my throat then, so I turned over on the grave and stared up at the setting sun.
It had been a long and wearying day, and I fell asleep right there in the burying ground. Any other time fear might have overcome sleep. But I just closed my eyes and slept.
When I woke, it was dead night. The moon was full and sitting between the horns of two hills. There was a sprinkling of stars overhead. And Mama began to move the ground beneath me, trying to rise.
The garlic strands must have worried her, for she did not come out of the earth all at once. It was the scrabbling of her long nails at my back that woke me. I leaped off that grave and was wide awake.
Standing aside the grave, I watched as first her long gray arms reached out of the earth. Then her head emerged with its hair that was once so gold now gray and streaked with black, and its shroud eyes. And then her body in its winding sheet, stained with dirt and torn from walking to and fro upon the land. Then her bare feet with blackened nails, though alive Mama used to paint those nails, her one vanity and Papa allowed it seeing she was so pretty and otherwise not vain.
She turned toward me as a hummingbird toward a flower, and she raised her face up and it was gray and bony. Her mouth peeled back from her teeth and I saw that they were pointed and her tongue was barbed.
“Mama gone,” I whispered in Bubba’s voice, but so low I could hardly hear it myself.
She stepped toward me off that grave, lurching down the hump of dirt. But when she got close, the garlic strands and the cross stayed her.
“Mama.”
She turned her head back and forth. It was clear she could not see with those black shroud eyes. She only sensed me there, something warm, something alive, something with blood running like satisfying streams through blue veins.
“Mama,” I said again. “Try and remember.”
That searching awful face turned toward me again, and the pointy teeth were bared once more. Her hands reached out to grab me, then pulled back.
“Remember how Bubba always sucks his thumb with that funny little noise you always said was like a little chuck in its hole. And how Sukey hums through her nose when she’s baking bread. And how I listened to your belly to hear the baby. And how Papa always starts each meal with the blessing on things that grow fresh in the field.”
The gray face turned for a moment toward the hills, and I wasn’t even sure she could hear me. But I had to keep trying.
“And remember when we picked the blueberries and Bubba fell down the hill, tumbling head-end over. And we laughed until we heard him, and he was saying the same six things over and over till long past bed.”
The gray face turned back toward me and I thought I saw a bit of light in the eyes. But it was just reflected moonlight.
“And the day Papa came home with the new ewe lamb and we fed her on a sugar teat. You stayed up all the night and I slept in the straw by your side.”
It was as if stars were twinkling in those dead eyes. I couldn’t stop staring, but I didn’t dare stop talking, either.
“And remember the day the bluebird stunned itself on the kitchen window and you held it in your hands. You warmed it to life, you said. To life, Mama.”
Those stars began to run down the gray cheeks.
“There’s living, Mama, and there’s dead. You’ve given so much life. Don’t be bringing death to these hills now.” I could see that the stars were gone from the sky over her head; the moon was setting.
“Papa loved you too much to cut your hands and feet. You gotta return that love, Mama. You gotta.”
Veins of red ran along the hills, outlining the rocks. As the sun began to rise, I took off one strand of garlic. Then the second. Then the last. I opened my arms. “Have you come back, Mama, or are you gone?”
The gray woman leaned over and clasped me tight in her arms. Her head bent down toward mine, her mouth on my forehead, my neck, the outline of my little gold cross burning across her lips.
She whispered, “Here and gone, child, here and gone,” in a voice like wind in the coppice, like the shaking of willow leaves. I felt her kiss on my cheek, a brand.
Then the sun came between the hills and hit her full in the face, burning her as red as earth. She smiled at me and then there were only dust motes in the air, dancing. When I looked down at my feet, the grave dirt was hardly disturbed but Mama’s gold wedding band gleamed atop it.
I knelt down and picked it up, and unhooked the chain holding my cross. I slid the ring onto the chain, and the two nestled together right in the hollow of my throat. I sang:
“Blacks and bays,
Dapples and grays . . .”
and from the earth itself, the final words sang out,
“All the pretty little horses.”
That was when I cried, long and loud, a sound I hope never to make again as long as I live.
The Woman Who Loved A Bear
IT WAS EARLY IN the autumn, the leaves turning over yellow in the puzzling wind, that a woman of the Cheyennes and her father went to collect meat he had killed. They each rode a horse and led a pack horse behind, for the father had killed two fine antelopes and had left them, skinned and cut up and covered well with hide.
They didn’t know that a party of Crows had found the cache and knew it for a Cheyenne kill by the hide covering it.
“We will wait for the hunter to come and collect his meat,” they said. “We will get both a Cheyenne and his meat.” It made them laugh at the thought.
And so it happened. The Cheyenne man and his daughter came innocently to the meat and the Crows charged down on them. The man was killed and his daughter was taken away as a prisoner, well to the north, to a village on the Sheep River which is now called the Big Horn.
Is that the end of the story, grandfather?
It is only the beginning. This is called “The Woman Who Loved the Bear.” I have not even come to the bear yet.
The man who carried the pipe of the Crow war party was named Fifth Man Over and he had two wives. But when he looked at the Cheyenne girl he thought that she was very fine looking and wanted her for his wife. Of course his two wives were both Crow women, which means they were ugly and hard. They were not pleased about the Cheyenne woman becoming his third wife. When they asked her name, she told
them she was called “Walks with the Sun,” so they called her “Flat Foot Walker.” But they could call her what they wanted, it did not change the fact that she was beautiful and they were not.
So whenever Fifth Man Over was away from the lodge, they abused the Cheyenne girl. They hit her with quirts and sticks and stones till her arms and legs were bruised. But they were careful not to hit her in the face, where even Fifth Man Over would see and ask questions.
The days and weeks went by and the beautiful Cheyenne wife had to do all the hard work. She had to pack the wood and dress the hides; she had to make moccasins, not only for her Crow husband, but for his ugly wives as well.
Grandfather, I have heard this story before. I have seen a movie of it. It is called “Cinderella.”
Is there a bear in “Cinderella”?
No, of course not.
Then you do not know this story. This is a true story, from the time when children played games suited to their years and spoke with respect to their grandfathers. You will listen carefully so that you may tell the story just as I
tell it to you.
Now, in Fifth Man Over’s lodge there also lived a young man, about a year older than the Cheyenne woman, who was an Arapahoe and had been taken as a slave in a raid when he was a small child. He had the keeping and herding of Fifth Man Over’s horses. He was not straight and tall like a Cheyenne, but limped because his left foot had been burned in the raid that made him a slave. But he had a strong nose and straight black hair and he spoke softly to the Cheyenne woman.
“These women abuse you,” he said. “You must not let them do so.”
“I cannot do otherwise,” Walks with the Sun answered. “They are my husband’s elder wives.” It was the proper answer, but she was a Cheyenne woman and they were only Crows, and so she said it through set teeth.
“Make many moccasins,” the Arapahoe told her. “Many more than are needed. Hide some away for yourself.”
