Boy, Snow, Bird (7 page)

“Wouldn’t come?” The farmer was big and tall, at least twice the size of the magician. He must not have tried very hard to persuade his wife to travel with him.

“Somehow I couldn’t lay a hand on her,” the farmer said, unable to hide his anguish. “I moved to seize her arm, and found I’d seized my own arm. I snatched at her hair and ended up pulling my ear. And if you want to know how I got this black eye . . .”

The magician was interested. He’d met several stunning witches, but none of them had married farmers, and none of them practiced this particular kind of passive resistance. He agreed to accompany the farmer home.

Mia dropped the pen and nodded at me to continue. “You do remember how it goes, right? I mean . . . we’re not just . . . ?”

“Sure,” I said. “I mean—no. Sure I remember.”

I made my handwriting much smaller than usual, in case I was wrong.

The magician found the farmer’s wife kneeling, planting cassava, setting the cuttings up inside little hills of soil. There’s no use trying to describe her in detail; all that can really be said is that she had the kind of beauty that people write songs about and occasionally commit suicide over. The type who seems a very long way away even when she’s right there in your arms. She wiped her hands on her apron, looked up at him, and said: “Hello.”

As a test, he said to her: “Come, woman, be more beautiful.” (Her husband groaned at that.) But nothing happened. The farmer’s wife went on planting. The magician felt uneasy—was it really impossible for her beauty to be any greater? Could she really be first among women, hidden away here on this farm?—and so he told her, “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” in the strongest tones possible. The woman didn’t raise her eyes from the ground. Her hands continued to plant cassava, and she remained exactly the same. “Don’t disturb my life, magician,” she said. “Just leave me be.”

The magician took her chin in his hand and turned her face up to his, though her gaze and the feel of her skin made his flesh crawl. “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” the magician said again. The field itself heard him this time, and three scarecrows appeared at the perimeter. But the farmer’s wife didn’t change. She said: “All I’ve ever wanted is to make things grow, and to feed people. I’ve been doing that for some years now, and I’ve been happy. I don’t want anything more or less than what I already have. I beg you: Don’t disturb my life.”

“But your husband is frightened of you,” the magician told her.

“I’ve given him no cause to be,” she replied.

“And yet he can hardly bear to look at you . . .”

“It isn’t necessary for him to look at me.”

Mia read that part over three times, and for a moment I thought I was busted. But she continued writing in silence, cupping her hand over the page as though she were the imposter and not me.

“Grow wings,” he told her. “Bear fruit.” She did neither. He pursued her for miles of farmland, got in the way of all her daily tasks, issued command after command, whatever came into his head. “Become a walking stick!” She didn’t. His voice grew hoarse. At last he admitted that she was a formidable witch, and that he was willing to learn whatever she could teach him.

“It isn’t magic,” she said. “It’s just that I’m well dressed. You men who try to tell me I’m a scarecrow or try to grab my arm but can’t manage it, don’t you understand that you’re not really addressing me? It’s more as if you’re talking to a coat I’m wearing.”

She was sat on a low chair, shelling beans, and he sat down at her feet and began to help her. “I don’t see what you mean,” he said. “Teach me. Show me.”

“What can I teach you?” she said. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth wide. She stayed like that for one minute, two minutes. He thought she was sleeping and forced himself to place a hand on her shoulder. A snake’s head glided out from between her lips, bright as new chainmail; he saw that its golden coils wound down her throat.

“You’re wrapped around her heart,” the magician said.

“I am the heart,” the snake replied.

He left the farm without looking back. There are few things in life more unpleasant than the laughter of a snake.

“Maybe that isn’t the version you read,” Mia said, watching me. She bit the end of the pen a few times. “I think I read it in Italian, so . . .”

“No, this is pretty much the version I read,” I said, because it felt too damn late to back down. I imagine that from time to time some similar situation has led governments to declare war.

I had to be up early for a trial shift at a bookstore, so I sent Mia home right after dinner.

“Hey,” she said, on her way out of the door. “Maybe this bookstore job is the one.”

I said: “Maybe!” But I thought:
Probably not
.

The best line of work for me would be roadside sprite. I’d live quietly by a dust-covered track that people never came across unless they took a wrong turn, and I’d offer the baffled travelers lemonade and sandwiches, maybe even fix their engines if they asked nicely (I’d have used my solitude to read extensively on matters of car maintenance). Then the travelers would go on their way, relaxed and refreshed, and they’d forget they’d ever met me. That’s the ideal meeting . . . once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.

5

t
he next morning Ted took Webster on a trip to Wachusett Mountain. He said it was “just because,” but we decided between us that he was either going to propose or he was going to call the whole thing off. I hoped he would propose. She’d been so sad that he hadn’t proposed on Valentine’s Day. She’d asked me if I thought some women just weren’t meant to be married. I said: “Yes. But not you.” I meant it too.

She swung between hope and despair. She rehashed old conversations with Ted until I told her she had to stop it before she made herself ill or something. She was hopeful because she’d caught Arturo Whitman looking thoughtfully at her fingers, sizing them up, as it were. She despaired because long ago Ted had told her he didn’t believe in marriage. She’d asked him how he could say that when there were so many real, live married people walking around, and he’d called her a wise guy. I told her she was born wife material whether Ted Murray realized it or not. She smiled at that. “And what about you?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m nothing but a pack of cards.” I echoed Mia to protect myself. Not that it was necessary. Webster asked questions only out of politeness. Pursuing answers wasn’t her style.

She knocked on my door just before Ted picked her up. It was six in the morning.

“Just wanted to say good-bye,” she said, sitting on my feet. (When had we become friends?) “This could be the last time I speak to you as an unengaged woman.”

I muttered, “Try not to break your neck on the slopes, Webster. I’ve gotten used to you,” and I waved good-bye from my bedroom window as Ted drove away with all their ski apparatus clattering away on top of his car. I even crossed my fingers for her.

—

a couple of
hours later I emptied my purse out onto the windowsill and counted up my coins. I had bus fare, but only one way if I also wanted to eat lunch. I figured I’d take the bus back and began walking along Ivorydown, taking the route I’d so gladly abandoned a few weeks before when I’d changed jobs. It was a windy morning, and the wind pushed me, and the road dragged me, and the tree branches flew forward and peeled back and broke away, and their scrawny trunks hugged each other. I glimpsed—or more became aware of—someone walking on the other side of the saplings. She wasn’t there at the beginning of the walk; I don’t know when she caught up with me. This person was my height, her stride more or less the length of mine, smooth locks of her hair (blond) and flashes of her coat (navy blue)
showing through the leaves. I was wearing a navy blue coat too. She had her hands in her pockets and I didn’t want to speak to her, I’m not sure why, maybe because she was walking so close to me but didn’t seem to notice that I was there. Or if she did, she didn’t find it odd that we stayed neck and neck all the way down the hill. I tried to get a little ahead of her so that I could look back through the branches and see her face, but she chose the exact same moment to speed up and I began to feel as if we were running from somebody. Then she spoke. She said: “Hello? Hello? Is that you?”

My lungs kicked my ribcage, just once. I’ve never heard my own voice recorded, but at that moment I was sure it’d sound like that. It was me, but me played back out of some kind of machine, that was the only way I could understand what I was hearing.

“Hello? Hello? Is that you?”

We stopped walking. “I’m here, I’m here.”

Shards of her face emerged through brown bark and greenish shadows. Her left eye was aligned with mine; we raised our left hands at the same time, and hers was bloody. She said: “I don’t know what to do.”

“Show your other hand,” I said. She didn’t move. “Show me!” She wouldn’t until I raised my right hand too. There was a lot of blood. Dark, dark, red. She had done something, or something had been done to her. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, and took a step back, silently asking me to go to her there on the other side of the hill, but it wasn’t clear what she was or what she’d done and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and I walked faster than I had before, but with a weak feeling in my knees that
almost threw me into the road with the motorcars and buses. A man with a ragged beard honked his horn and yelled that I ought to be ashamed of myself, drunk at eight in the morning. He couldn’t see the other woman; she was well hidden from him. “Come here, come here and I’ll tell you everything,” she laughed, right beside me, not at all out of breath. I wasn’t as scared as I could have been—the main thing was to get away from her—but my thoughts ran with me.

What could you be, what could you be

Some future vision, will I go home this week, next week, the week after, strike suddenly, get the rat catcher back at last

What have you done Boy

Am I going to do the same, do I deserve her, whatever she is, did I call her to me somehow

Please go, go away

The view through the saplings was so calm—miles and miles of crushed green-velvet valley behind her, and a line of telegraph poles marching out as far as the eye could see. And the wires ran between the poles, three lines, direct, direct. I became painfully conscious of my heels tapping the sidewalk a moment before I noticed she’d disappeared, a deafening solo drum roll, and
at the bottom of that hilly road I placed both hands on the top of my head, to check, in all seriousness, if my head was still there. Then I buried my face in a handkerchief because my nose was running. I had that feeling that comes after days of fever—the beginning of recovery, the memory of how things worked before the cold flame ate away at you. The solution seemed simple to me.
Forget this road. Don’t come here again. I never did like it.

“You okay?” Arturo asked. He was sprawled out on a bench a few steps away, huffing from his run. I wondered what he’d seen, but not enough to ask him. I said I was fine and sat down next to him. He had a knife, a napkin, and a pear, and he was dropping peel for the birds, whose reaction seemed to be that he could keep it.

“Well, White Rabbit,” he said. “Where do you lead me?”

“Who are you calling a white rabbit?”

“You can take offense or you can take it as a reference to your hair.”

“I’ll reference
your
hair,” I said. Then I got mad at myself. I mean, I was two seconds away from fainting and “I’ll reference
your
hair” was the best I could come up with. Meaningless. If you’re about to fall to the ground like a frail creature in need of smelling salts, you owe it to yourself to at least say something fantastically vicious beforehand. But all I did was make him laugh. I pinched my temples, seeing the blood on her hands again. “Look—I’m going to have to ask you for a bite of that pear. I’m . . . dizzy. Think I’d better eat something.”

“You didn’t eat yet?”

I didn’t have the money for breakfast, but I’d rather have died than admit it. I said I was slimming. “Hmm . . . let’s see . . .” He cut a slice of pear, the longest, thinnest shaving, near transparency, and he fed it to me bit by sweet, grainy bit, his thumb brushing tiny, wary circles across my cheek. I cut the next piece for him, and I held the knife until he’d eaten all the fruit off the tip of the blade. He licked the juice away afterward, and I kissed his mouth because of the way he drank down that one drop.

—

i was an hour late
to the bookstore, and as soon as I stepped inside, Mrs. Fletcher jumped up from her seat behind the till with her hair all standing on end and yelled at me to get out. I didn’t waste any time arguing and was halfway down the street when she bawled after me: “Just where do you think you’re going?”

She prowled around the shop floor, slapping price stickers onto books, and I trailed her, removing duplicate stickers. Her prices looked very high to me and I didn’t see how she made any money, but I quickly learned that there was no real point to her pricing her books—she preferred to haggle. Popular paperbacks and required reading for college classes were sold out front, but her main business was in the back room, where she dealt in antique books and first editions. She sent out catalogues and people drove cross-country to take a closer look, and even then she wouldn’t let customers go home with the goods they’d paid for until they demonstrated an ability to open a book in the correct and proper way.