Dirk couldn’t speak. The blood was luscious until it matted the cloth, then it turned the color of dirt. “I’ll kill that axe,” the boy finally said.
“Help me up.”
But the old man couldn’t stand. He collapsed with a cry of pain. “The bone may be fractured. Find me”—a wordless moan—“find me something to use as a crutch. A staff, Dirk, a cane.”
“I’ll hold you up.”
“You’ll falter. Look for something to the height of my underarm—something up to your chin would be the right height.”
Dirk scrambled. The undergrowth supplied only spindly wands, too supple to provide support. “There’s nothing near.”
“If you can fell me, you can bring down the damn tree. It’s time to do it. Take your old friend the axe.” The old man was beginning to fade from loss of blood. “Finish off the tree I chose, then trim a straight limb from it.”
The old man closed his eyes and opened them again. “Aim for the center of the trunk. First stroke, chop straight in, next, downward from above. Let the chips fly. You’re making a gap in the tree so it will fall on itself, of its own weight.” His eyes closed again.
Dirk went to work with an energy born of terror. He was sorry to have hurt the old man, but he was more concerned with not being abandoned in the woods.
He hoped the mouse and her babies were safe somewhere else.
After a time he turned to ask Papi how he was doing. The old man had slipped sideways. Only a fainting spell, wished the boy, and not the final sleep.
Perhaps what was needed wasn’t a crutch but a sledge of some sort, so the boy could pull the old man along slithery dry needles toward—
But Dirk had no idea how to get back.
For the first time, he struck the tree with the axe with anger. He didn’t want to be hanged for murder.
He struck it a second time. He had nowhere to go for help. He’d never met another living soul but the old woman and the old man.
The chips flew. The trunk of the tree groaned. A mouth opened wider and wider, eating the blade each time the blade rode home. The living wood was pale, even ghostly white, the color of the skin of Schneewittchen, the girl who ran away to live with the seven little men, as the old woman had told it. The wedge-shaped scraps that flew away among the shavings were like smiles scared from the tree and discarded on the ground.
Disturbed by the commotion, a small brown bird came down and landed on the breast of the old man. Papi didn’t brush it away, which filled the boy with a greater sense of dread than before.
He struck the tree. Again, again.
The bird hopped along the old man’s chest and made a comment or two. Dirk let the axe fall still for a moment and listened. “Are you giving me counsel?” he asked the bird.
The bird flew up. Dirk thought the airy rush of her wings sounded like an army of birds. Or an army of angels, bearing the old man’s soul away to heaven. It was no such army, but the falling tree, which had had enough, and crashed upon the boy, killing him.
6.
It wasn’t that he was falling—was he falling?—so much as that the trees rose up against him. Pale branches ripped into him. Blood rose to the surface of his skin in buttons. He pumped with his feet the way he once had done when jumping into a pond deeper than reckoned. His thighs met swirling arms of long-needled conifer. As if the trees were circling on their stems, crowding in to slow his descent. Finally he was heels-down on somewhere. Underneath the dead leaves and dry needles, the ground writhed. The offended roots of these trees.
He didn’t take in that he was dead. He just didn’t want to be crushed. He struggled against the forest, lunging forward in small steps, tipping down a slope. Sap stung his eyes. The trees seemed to be shifting out of the way to either side. Making a path, an only path. He was naked. His skin seethed. Now one of his eyes was glued closed. Sap or blood.
At last the slope leveled and he landed on his knees, his face in the soil. The trees lashed at his buttocks and his spine and the back of his neck. The top side of each stroke was punishing and the return, apology.
“You’ve come so far and you’re going to crumble like morning cake?”
He rubbed his eyes and straightened up. A small brown bird perched on a branch above him. A bird can only look at a boy one eye at a time, and her eye was cold and temperamental. Her beak was shut.
“You’ve come for a crutch, you’ll need to work for it,” continued the voice, not a bird’s voice. The boy looked down.
A dark knob on the ground, hardly larger than a walnut, stirred and rotated. The top of it had the face of a homunculus. Ironstone, petrified oak, char of primordial ooze—the boy had no idea of what it was made. Gnarly head hunched over knees drawn up to bearded chin. Squatting old creature with a cranium like a brussels sprout. “What are you waiting for? Is it ever the wrong time to act?”
“I don’t know what to do.” So, yes, his voice still worked. The boy was relieved.
“Take a grip of me, and I’ll befriend you.”
“You’d best think twice about helping him out,” said the bird to the boy. Her voice was pure and high, but thick, like sweet golden honey.
“Don’t listen to Fräulein Thrush. Such a busybody. Always sticking her beak where it’s not wanted. Now you’ve got here, help me out.”
The boy swiveled. The thrush had no more to say, but she rolled her head skyward and let loose with a melodic curse.
The trees began to pull back. While their branches still thrashed, they no longer beat him. The boy was able to lean nearer and look at the knobby figure squatting among dead leaves and needles. If the boy could find the nerve to touch the mouse-size gnome, the creature would fit in his palm.
“You help me and I’ll help you,” said the gnome. “Foundlings united. Where’s the harm in a plain exchange like that?” His small face floated a little toward the scalp of his skull. The boy wondered what was wrong with his petitioner. His arms were fused around his knees. His spine had no give. Only his expression was alive, or so it seemed to the boy. “Why are you waiting?”
“I’ve never met anyone like you before,” said the boy.
“Consider this your unlucky day,” warbled the thrush, hopping from branch to branch.
“I’m a citizen of this land, enough said,” insisted the gnome. “Treat me no different from the way you treat anyone else. Manners, child.”
“I don’t have manners,” the boy explained. “We live in the forest between hither and yon, and no one else lives near us to be mannerly with.”
“So you’ll be wanting to set out for the great town,” said the thrush. “Some call it the Temple of First Desires.”
“More like the Mausoleum of Holy Disappointments,” said the gnome. “You don’t want to go there. But to business. You were a soldier hunting a stout limb to use for a crutch, is that so?”
“Hardly a soldier!”
“A vandal, no less,” said the thrush. “You murdered our sister with that axe.”
“What’s done is done,” snapped the gnome-thing to the bird. “Though it beggars belief, another immortal dame is fallen. Boy, I will help you carve from her corpse a branch suitable for your uses. All you need do is release me from the soil where I am planted, and I promise to help you. Grab me as you would a handle, and pull.”
As the boy’s hand prepared to close around the figure, the thrush shrilled, “Go away! Don’t dig him out! He is a schemer, he is not your friend. It’s his fault we are in such a fix.”
Though a talking bird might be rare, a gnome was rarer still. The boy closed both hands around the gnome and began to tug. The thrush darted and battered, trying to flush the boy away. But having begun to worry the creature loose, the boy wouldn’t stop. The gnome grunted in pain or some private exertion of his own. Before too long, the boy fell backward on his rump. Clots of soil rained down upon his face and chest.
“Aha!” cried the gnome. “Free at last, Fräulein. We shall see what is what.”
“We will never get back now, but be homeless forever,” wailed the thrush.
The boy brushed dirt from his mouth. He studied the excavated object. The gnome proved to be the handle of a short, sharp knife. The squatting figure was like a bitter, glaring vegetable, and the knife below him a single denticle.
“Enough of your moans and premonitions,” said the gnome to the thrush. To the boy: “Beyond lies Dame Ash, whom you murdered. I shall help you carve a cane or a crutch from what is left of her. When I have paid you for my liberty, you will put me down and let me go.”
The thrush said to the gnome, “Haven’t you done enough damage?”
The gnome told the boy how to select a limb, how to flex it to produce maximum stress before slicing into it. Though the excavated knife-blade was short, it was hard and sharp. It made quick work of the job. The boy felt that the gnome himself was pushing upon the blade to force it through the pure wood.
“You’ve begun your afterlife with another act of malice,” said the thrush from behind him. Her voice was now low and it hummed with feeling. The boy turned. The thrush was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the bird’s voice issued from a soberly handsome woman. She wore a wreath of woodland laurel. Bracelets of ivy adorned the sleeves of her shift. One hand was lifted to her brow, as if fending off the sight of the hacked branch.
“What you have done,” she said.
“I could do nothing else,” said the boy. “The old man is a woodcutter. It is all I know.”
“I won’t give you comfort,” she said. “You murdered our sister and carved up her corpse. I won’t allow you passage in our realm. Off, back,” said the princess, the queen, the thrush-goddess, whoever she was. She threw her hands out, dismissing the boy.
“So we agree on one thing,” said the gnome to her. “Let him go. Yes, loosened at last, I can now trouble you at my pleasure. It’s been too many centuries of stasis for me to uncoil all at once, but uncoil I will.”
“Scoundrel. I shall be ready,” she said to the gnome. To the boy, she added, “Though it troubles me, I send you back. Exiled. You’ve earned no place among us.”
“Now set me down,” growled the gnome to the boy, “and our transaction is completed.”
The boy put the knife between his teeth as he picked up the severed limb of the maiden tree.
“Not my concern,” cried the queen to the gnome. “That’s what comes of trusting the innocent. They’re as malign as everyone else. Save yourself, if you can.”
She raised her hands, and a chorus of birdsong rose all around them. A maelstrom in the air, of summergreen leaves and pine needles and bits of bark and twig. With both his hands on the newly trimmed staff, the boy closed his one capable eye. It felt as if the forest were retreating, and the Queen of the Thrushes with it. The gnome on the head of the blade swore fiercely, but the boy didn’t open his jaws.
7.
The sound of speaking voices brought the boy around. The surprise wasn’t so much that he was alive again but that the voice wasn’t the old man’s voice. The old woman was talking to a visitor—the first they’d ever had.
Dirk tried and failed to raise himself on his elbows. He wasn’t in his loft but laid out upon the bearskin in the nook that the old woman sometimes called her changing room. The cloth that hung in the doorway blocked Dirk’s view of the main room.
He was so surprised at the novelty of a guest to the waldhütte that he lay his head back down and just listened.
“You are very good at telling these tales,” said the visitor. He had a kindly tone, the sort that seemed to welcome further comment. “They come out of you so naturally. Do you have children or grandchildren to tell stories to?”
“Not a one,” said the old woman. “It’s just me and the old man here, and always was. I wouldn’t have a child about here. I couldn’t stand the bother.”
“Your command of the old folk tale is impressive, given you’ve no youngster to sit agog at your feet.” (Dirk held his breath.) “Tell me another.”
“Come back tomorrow,” replied the old woman. “I have mending to do, and hog fat to render, and I can’t sit in the sunny hours amusing you with tales of the forest. Are you able to find your way here again?”
“Stories have their own pull,” said the guest. Dirk now thought of the visitor as a young man, or younger anyway than the old man. Dirk sorely wanted to see a stranger. Something in the old woman’s tone of voice, however, made him hold his tongue.
“Until the next time, Frau . . . Fräulein . . . ?”
She didn’t supply a name. The door clicked open and clacked shut.
Dirk felt the fur of the bear irritate the back of his neck. He wanted to roll around and collect the bearskin all about him and hide in it. Become a bear, and lumber away. He couldn’t yet move, though. He might be able to speak if he tried, but he didn’t try.
“So he’s gone,” said the old man, coming in. “I hid out in the lee of the shed until I saw him leave. What did he want?”
“Not what you think,” said the old woman.
“Did he ask about Dirk?”
“He wanted stories. He wrote down what I said and then read it back to me. I told him one of the hoary old tales. He couldn’t wait to go back to the village and tell his brother. He’ll be back tomorrow.” She began to cry.
Usually at a moment like this, Dirk would have felt a rise of warmth toward her, but this time he could not.
“Why did you bring the boy back?” she managed at last to say.
“I thought it would be better to sling him in the hog pen than to leave his body in the wood where hunting dogs might find it. The hog has to eat, too.”
Dirk thought perhaps he wasn’t actually alive, but only halfway, somehow.
“And you with that wound in your leg!”
“As near as I could make out, the boy had cut a useful crutch for me before the tree fell. Once I woke to see his prone form by the fallen tree, well, what was I to do? Better to butcher him here than to have someone stumble across his corpse and start asking questions. We have the only waldhütte in this district. We would be the first to suspect.”
“You can’t do a blessed thing right.” The old woman began to berate the old man with a tongue more foul than the boy had ever heard her use.
As much to silence her as for any other reason, Dirk cried out, “Where have I been?”
The silence in the room was like a heavy ghost pressing all the air down to the rude floorboards.
“And now the saints have deserted us,” hissed the old woman. She meant it as a whisper but Dirk’s ears were alert with panic. “The boy is alive. You ought to have buried him there when he was too far gone to suffer. And so it all starts again. How shall we manage now?”
“He made me a crutch,” said the old man. “What else was I to do?”
“Where have I been, and where have I come back to?” called Dirk.
The cloth in the doorway whipped aside. “Hush you and your mouth,” said the old woman. “You’ll wake the dead.”
“He woke himself,” said the old man, at least a little kindly. “How are you feeling?” He peered over the old woman’s angled elbows. He was leaning on a crutch.
“Why would you lie to that man about me?” asked Dirk.
“You’ve had a bad spell, you’re making up stories in your bruised head,” the old woman said. “You don’t understand.”
He managed to sit up. He pulled the bearskin with him and clutched it around his sides like a blanket. “What happened to me? Where is the Queen of the Thrushes? Where is the fierce little knife-man?”
“You’ve been told too many stories,” said the old man, “and that’s the truth in a nutshell.”
“From what I hear, you were dead,” said the old woman. “I have known it to happen once or twice before. A maiden from Arnhelt was struck by lightning and crumpled to the ground, and the smell was bitumen and sulfur. She had no pulse when they reached her. Her face went that color of plums to
o far gone for jam. Then somehow, she came back.”
“Back from where?” Dirk managed to say.
“From death. But she was never the same. She had been an accomplished young woman, daughter of a wool merchant. The banns for her marriage had been called. After the lightning hit her, though, she wouldn’t marry. She took up the flute and played till—well, the end. Rarely spoke to a soul, or smiled. That’s a bad eye you’ve earned; be glad for what you won’t need to see.”
“Don’t scare the lad,” said the old man.
“He’s witnessed enough to be scared already, I can’t make it worse.” She clapped her hands suddenly, but the boy didn’t start. To the old man: “Do you see what I mean? And now what are we going to do?”
They went outside to talk beyond the far side of the woodshed, for privacy. The dark was falling, though whether this was the dark of the same day or some other day, Dirk didn’t know.
He looked down. He wasn’t naked anymore, but dressed in his same clothes, his only clothes. Cut-downs from the old man.
The old man and the old woman had meant to lose him at best, to kill him perhaps. If he’d truly come back from death, they must be terrified.
He hated them. He also didn’t want to terrify them anymore.
He didn’t know why he was such trouble to them, but he couldn’t wait around to find out.
So he made the effort to pull himself up. He dragged the bearskin with him, turning it around so the black fur was on the outside. He stumped to the table in the middle of the main room. There was a knife with a carved head lying there next to a red, red apple. He left the apple but picked up the knife and wrapped it in a scrap of leather for safekeeping.
The old woman wouldn’t care—she’d wanted him gone anyway. But the old man might follow him. The boy took the crutch so as to slow the old man down should he consider pursuit. Then the boy climbed out the window. He left his life, but in a more conventional way than before. He was still a boy, but he was no longer a child.
A Posthumous Education