“Yes,” I said. “I’m willing.”
9
The Mother of the Woods
The next time I saw her, my grandmother was sitting by the fire as usual, tracing designs in the dirt with a burnt stick. I’d been away four days. I was in clean clothes—and had brought others with me, too, thinking ahead, for once in my life—but the earth was getting undressed, the leaves falling thick and fast and the air growing nippier with every passing day.
Grandma ignored me at first, letting me know that she was in no mood for questions. I guess she might have thought I wasn’t coming back at all, and now she was trying to figure if she’d misjudged me. It wasn’t an easy thing to change your mind about someone. She just sat there tracing her designs in the dirt, her knobby knees sticking out through her skirt and making her look oddly childlike. I knew better by now than to try and get her to talk—if she had something to say, she’d say it. She drew circles within circles and straight lines to either side. Then she spat into the middle of it and erased the whole mess with her feet.
A spell? I wondered. Some kind of magic ritual?
But still she didn’t say anything. I was busting with questions, but I was also now more afraid of her than I’d ever been before. It had taken a lot of courage on my part to come back. If she really was who Miz Powell and Letty said she was, then she was some kind of otherworldly figure, supernatural, maybe even a spirit. I didn’t want anything to do with spirits. Grandma had always weirded me out a little, but now she just plain spooked me. I wasn’t going to be the first one to talk, in case she decided she was going to cast some kind of spell on me and turn me into a bug, and then eat me. I’d let her start when she was ready.
But she didn’t say anything to me that day, or that evening either. We ate in silence. Night came, and I was so tuckered out from my long hike that I lay down on my nasty little bed of stinky blankets with leaves underneath, tucked away along one wall of her shanty, and fell asleep without any thought of bad smells or bugs or anything. I slept like a log and woke up as sore as a crash-test dummy, and it took me the better part of an hour to work the kinks out of my legs and back. By then Grandma had already been up for hours, and was well into the day’s work.
This work seemed to consist of gathering lots of dead leaves, huge piles of them. She gathered them up in her apron and carried them to the side of the little house, dumping them along the perimeter. Since I could see full well what she was doing, though I didn’t know why, I just started helping. I was still keeping my vow of silence.
This went on all day, with breaks only for meager meals, until by sunset we had scoured most of the surrounding area for fallen leaves and there was a great big heap of them running all the way up around the walls of the little house. We kept it up the next day, until most of the roof was covered too. You had to pick the right weather for this, because the slightest breeze would carry them away and you’d have to start over again. Miraculously, or maybe not so miraculously, we got lucky, though when my grandmother was involved I knew better than to think luck played a part in things. But this was not as much work as it sounds—it was a tiny house, with the roof no taller than my own head, and I had to stoop or sit whenever I was inside. All in all, it was smaller than most people’s tool sheds, if you can imagine living in a space like that.
Then she started cutting saplings, fresh ones with their branches still on, and laying them on top of the leaves, all the way around the house. This took another day and a half. When that was done, we rested—and we still hadn’t spoken a word.
Funny thing, when you go that long without talking. Your mind kind of goes through stages. First, you think, Well, all right, I’ll just concentrate and it won’t be so hard. So you do that for a while, and you manage to stay quiet. Then you kind of forget about it, and you catch yourself starting to say something and stop just in time. Then you start to feel like you’re going to bust if you don’t get to say something, but still you hold out, kind of like holding your breath underwater.
And then, finally, you abandon yourself to silence. And it’s not so bad. Soon enough, it starts to seem normal, and you realize how much talking people do that isn’t really necessary—talking for talking’s sake, which never really hurt anybody but doesn’t do anybody a bit of good either. That’s how it is to be quiet; and frankly, I think it’s a lesson more people could stand to learn.
Finally came the mud, and now I had a pretty clear idea of what Grandma was up to. She was getting ready for winter. The leaves would form insulation, and the branches would hold them down. Mud would be plastered over the whole thing, and that was how we would keep warm. We started hauling mud up from the banks of the creek by the bucketful; good, clay-filled stuff that stuck firmly to the branches and didn’t fall off even when it dried. We must have carried hundreds of loads up, possibly even thousands, and smoothed it over with our hands. This took days, which were filled with a fatigue and ennui so constant that I simply stopped thinking. I just worked. It was important, after all—you could tell that winter was coming early this year, and it was going to be a bad one. We had to be ready. I already knew I was going to be spending the whole season out there with her. There was no discussion, no making of plans—I had fixed on the idea, and I knew she was going to let me do it. We were wintering in, bear style. We were going to hibernate.
And still we hadn’t said a word.
When the house was ready, and the skies were darkening up for the first big storm of the season, I heard what sounded like a pickup truck in the distance. Alarm filled me, but when I looked at Grandma she gave no sign that she was perturbed, though I knew she must have heard it long before I did. I knew the truck wouldn’t make it all the way in, so I started heading out in the direction it was coming from, sneaking up so I would see whoever it was before they saw me.
An elderly man in a tweed jacket, with a full, gray-streaked beard, had ground his truck to a halt about a quarter mile from the shack and begun unloading supplies from the back of it. There were boxes upon boxes of what looked like groceries, and he was setting them on the ground in a neat pile. He looked harmless enough—I figured I could take him if it came to it, that is, if he was a rapist or something, though I’d never heard of any rapists who went around in trucks full of groceries. So I stepped out from the trees until I stood just behind him, and when I willed him to see me he turned around as though he’d been kicked in the rear end, and his face turned the color of a frog’s underbelly.
“Oh, Lord, you scairt me,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said, though I thought I’d made enough noise to let him know I was there. Was I getting woodsier? I wondered. Was I learning more tricks without even knowing it? The single word flopped out of my mouth like a fish, and I felt oddly embarrassed, as though my skirt had fallen down in front of him. It was the first thing I’d said in two weeks.
“You must be her granddaughter,” said the man. “I heard you was staying out here with her.”
“You did?” I said. “Who told you?”
“Oh, everyone knows,” said the man. “Everyone who knows her, that is. Which there aren’t many of us.”
“I guess not,” I said, though I had no idea what he was talking about. “What’s all this stuff?” My tongue was loosening up now, and speech came a little easier.
The man unloaded the last box and leaned on the hood of his truck, out of breath. “Winter supplies,” he said. “Nonperishable, o’course. Canned goods and so forth. There’s enough for both of you this time. That’s a first. She ain’t never let anyone winter with her before, y’know. Which it seems like quite an honor. There’s many who would feel privileged to spend a season out here with her.”
“Is that so,” I said. “Well, I am her granddaughter.”
“Your name Haley?” he asked.
I allowed that it was, though I wondered how he knew that.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” he said, but he made no move to shake my hand. Matter of fact, h
e kept kind of a respectful distance from me, as though I was going to bite him. More likely it was just my personal odor, though. I hadn’t been back all that long, but it was all the time that was needed for it to build up again. My smell formed a kind of personal barrier around me—just like any other animal. Sometimes I wondered what the world would be like if no one took showers. We would know people by our noses first and by our intellect second, instead of the other way around. We were only animals, after all.
“I’m Chester Burgess,” he said. “Live over in Springville. Known her since I was a pup.”
“Is that so? Then how come you keep calling her ‘her’?” I asked.
Chester Burgess gave me kind of a funny look. “Do you know anything else I should call her?” he asked. “Which I mean, do you know her name? Her real name?”
I was about to give him a snappy answer, since I didn’t much care for his tone, but when I thought about it I realized he was right. I didn’t know what her name was at all. It was just Grandma—but if Miz Powell was to be believed, that wasn’t right either.
“No,” I said.
“Not likely anyone does,” said Chester Burgess. “I got to get going. Give her my respects, would you? I always leave the winter groceries right here for her. It’s a deal we made. She doesn’t like folks to come much closer, unless they have a real good reason. Which I don’t. She can see right through a man,” he added, getting back in his truck—a little quickly, it seemed to me. I wondered if Chester Burgess was scared of us. Or of her, more likely. I guessed I wasn’t the only one who found Grandma a wee bit on the frightening side.
“What deal?” I asked.
“Eh?” He started up the truck.
“What deal?” I called, over the sound of the motor.
“She saved my life, when I was just a tadpole,” he shouted back. “Rheumatic fever. I been bringing her things ever since. Good day to yew.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
Chester Burgess backed up until he got to a spot where he could turn around, and then he pulled out of there and I was left with a chest-high stack of groceries in boxes. No need to ask whose job it’ll be to carry these in, I thought. I grabbed the top one and headed back to the shack. Grandma was sitting on her stool, puffing her pipe. She nodded in satisfaction when she saw me coming.
“Chester Burgess dropped these off,” I said, forgetting my vow of silence. “Now I know how you make it through the winter out here,” I added, taking the box into the shack.
Grandma still didn’t say anything, but she laughed again—long, loud, and wheezy, throwing her head back and cackling at the sky, the sky that was so low it seemed like if I just climbed a tree I’d be able to poke my hand through it.
“Zo!” she said, which I think meant “so”—it was one of her favorite expressions, meaning something like, “Everything is just the way it ought to be, and kind of funny, besides.”
Which, in a way, it was—if you knew how to look at things like that.
I was getting a weather nose. The snow came right when I thought it would, not a day after I’d finished hauling all those boxes into the shack, and after we’d gathered as much wood as we could for the fire and covered it over with a plastic tarp, also courtesy of Chester Burgess. It fell thick and wet, a couple of inches at first, then a honking big snowfall that shrouded everything in white and dampened all sound, sending every critter in the forest to sleep, or else southward.
Grandma, or whoever the hell she was, moved the fire inside when it got cold, rekindling it in a tiny iron stove that was as full of holes as an old sock and had no chimney to it, just a hole in the top. This meant I had to clear out an old preexisting hole in the roof to let all the smoke out. Snow would fall through it, but it would just hit the stove and melt, so I guessed if she wasn’t worried about it I wouldn’t be either. Then Grandma pulled the door shut and sat herself down on one side of the fire, and I sat down on the other, and it was suddenly gloomy and smoky in the little shack, and I had my first attack of what you might call claustrophobia when I realized that that was how it was going to be until the snow thawed and the earth woke up again. Just us two. Sitting there in the half-dark, surrounded by boxes of food and dried herbs hanging from the walls. Jesus Delano Roosevelt.
Don’t get scared, I told myself. Don’t freak out. Used to be, back in the old days, folks didn’t have much to do but work their tails off all year, and then come winter they’d just sit around and look at each other. That was how it always was, so you know you can make it. It’s in your blood and in your genes.
Yeah, another part of myself said, but people used to hack each other up back then for no good reason, too. Happened all the time. Guy’d just go nuts and chop his wife and kids into flinders, and feed the pieces to the snakes.
Just you shut up, said the other part right back. That never happened and you know it.
But what are we going to do? I wondered.
Grandma, of course, had an answer for that, even though I hadn’t asked her anything out loud.
“Zo,” she said again, “Du vant to learn?”
I nodded.
“You hef kvestions?”
“And how,” I said.
“Tell.”
I had a million “kvestions,” but of course sitting there with her wrinkled, whiskery old face not two feet from mine, most of them began to seem very stupid indeed, and I kind of lost my nerve. Everything Miz Powell told me about this old lady seemed true, and I would have believed it all, except for the fact that it was all so impossible. For one thing, there was no way she could really be as old as Miz Powell said she was. Nobody was that old. So I asked her:
“How old are you?”
She snorted, gumming her pipe—which was empty for the moment.
“Alt,” said. Old.
“How old?”
She shrugged.
“How did you get to be zo alt? I mean, so old?”
She smiled, her leathery face wrinkling even more.
“Prektiss,” she said. Practice. I stared at her uncomprehendingly until I realized that for the first time in memory she was making a joke.
“That’s a good one,” I said. “Here’s another one. Is my mother your daughter?”
Grandma stared back at me, one arm wrapped around her middle, her other elbow resting on it as she held her pipe.
“Vat iss daughter?” she asked.
“What?”
“Vat,” she repeated, “iss daughter?”
She was throwing the question back at me, asking me what I meant by “daughter.” I understood. She was trying to tell me there was more to the meaning of the word than just the sense of a biological child, that there were other ways in which one could be someone’s daughter. Fine. I got that. But if she hadn’t given birth to my mother, then who had?
“Nicht k’no for certain,” she said. “She come leetle.”
Meaning she had arrived when she was very small, perhaps even still a baby.
“Did someone give her to you?” I asked.
Grandma nodded.
“Why?”
“To teach,” she said. “To grow.”
“They wanted you to raise her? To teach her?”
She nodded again.
“But why?”
Grandma laughed once more, a wheezy rattle.
“Because I know and they don’t!” she said triumphantly, which was the longest speech I’d ever heard her make in English.
I was beginning to get a clearer picture now of what had really happened. Some parents, long ago, had decided they couldn’t raise their baby girl by themselves. Maybe they were too poor, or too sick, or too something—who knew? So they left her with someone they thought would be able to give her some advantages in life. It didn’t seem so strange when you considered that lots of other kids ended up in orphanages, or convents, or even stranger places. It was a shocker, though. It meant I didn’t really know who my real grandmother was after all. It meant we were
n’t the people I thought we were. Or were we?
“Does my mother know this?” I asked. “Did you tell her when she got older?”
“I tell,” she said. She began to pack her pipe, though whether with tobacco or marijuana I couldn’t see. “She don’t like. She make forget. Then she leef.”
She pretended it wasn’t true, and then she left. Was that why she left? Maybe she no longer felt constrained by the ties of family when she learned there were none. Maybe she no longer felt duty bound. Maybe she’d always hated it out here, and that was the excuse she needed to leave—you’re not my real mother, I could hear her saying. I don’t have to listen to you!
But why would her parents have chosen to leave her with someone they must have known to be a witch? Because, I presumed, that was precisely why they chose Grandma in the first place. They must have wanted their daughter to learn the old ways that weren’t being taught anymore. They wanted their daughter to be a legithata, too. Maybe there was nothing wrong with them at all—maybe they were perfectly healthy and capable of raising children, but they decided to sacrifice her to the Old Lady of the Woods as part of some weird deal they’d made. That thought gave me the creeps. Maybe they owed Grandma their souls! Cold chills crept over me as I sat head-to-head with this ancient and mysterious crone, and for the first time ever I was seriously afraid of her.
“Who are you?” I asked, very politely.
She smiled, as warmly as it was possibly for her to smile, sending up little thunderstorms from her pipe.
“Alt laty,” she said. “Very alt laty.”
“You’re not really my grandmother?”
She shook her head. “More alt den dat,” she said. “But—same blut.” Same blood.
“So we are related?”
Nod of the head.
“So the people who gave you my mother—they were related to you too? Not strangers? Descendants of yours?”
Once more, a nod of the head.