Toad Words (2 page)

I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.
 

I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.
 

But I can make more.

I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.
 

Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.
 

It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words s
queak
and
squill
and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.
 

I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)
 

The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.
 

My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit sapphires and rubies. I am grateful.
 

I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.
 

Here. Listen.
 

I’ll tell you a story.

Listen.

Once upon a time there was a girl. She was probably about twelve or thirteen, but that was an age when children were older than their years and expected to do real work and help with the harvest, so perhaps she was only nine or ten.
 

Her hood wasn’t red. Red dye is expensive and doesn’t hold well, and nobody who had to dye it themselves would make a red cloak for a child who could be expected to outgrow it by autumn. That was added later because it alliterated. It wasn’t a riding hood, either—the only horse she ever rode was the broad-backed giant that drew her father’s plow.
 

Still, we make do.
 

Her name was Turtle. Probably that wasn’t her name, probably she had a perfectly normal name, like other girls, but everyone in the village called her Turtle. There is undoubtedly an amusing story about this, possibly involving a pudgy five-year-old and a suspiciously good-natured snapping turtle, but time is short and dawn comes earlier every year.

Turtle loved to bake.
 
I am sorry to say that she wasn’t very good at it. Her scones were like rocks and her cinnamon rolls weighed more than the crookback iron stove they were cooked in.
 

Children are odd creatures. If they are thwarted, they tend to do one of two things—they refuse to ever do whatever-it-is again as long as they live, or they grit their teeth and throw hours and days and weeks at it, like a general throwing soldiers at a wall until they can stand atop their piled dead.
 

Turtle was one of the piled-dead variety, at least with baking. She brutalized flour and butter, she visited wartime atrocities to milk and yeast. She committed acts of crumpet. She developed the sturdy forearms that come from punching dough, but since all the other children had the muscle that comes from milking cows and wrangling goats and digging potatoes, no one noticed.

One day Turtle had savaged an innocent bowl of batter into something that almost (but not quite) resembled muffins. Her mother, who had a great deal to bear on other fronts which do not enter the scope of this story, except to say that Turtle had three older brothers, each more reprehensible than the last, opened the back door and told Turtle to take herself and her regrettable muffins to her grandmother, and if she had to stay the night, so much the better, as there was going to be a great deal of screaming presently, and Turtle was a bit young to be hearing all the words that Turtle’s mother planned to be using.
 

Turtle, not being a stupid child, swept her muffins into a basket. They went
glop
, which is not an appropriate sound for muffins to make upon contacting wicker, but Turtle was pleased by this, because the last batch had gone
clonk
and
glop
was progress of a sort.

She set out of the backyard and into the woods. Why did her grandmother live a good half-hour’s walk into the deep dark woods, and not in the village? An excellent question. Very likely it had a lot to do with the aforementioned brothers, and the fact that her grandmother loved her mother very much and would chew her own leg off at the hip before she lived in the same house with her. Families are complicated that way.

Turtle set out on the forest path, with her hood thrown back and her basket swinging and the muffins jostling and sloshing inside.
 

She had gone only a little way—just far enough for the bustle and frolic of a woodland edge to give way to the deeper quiet of a wood—and a wolf stepped out on the path and said “Where are you going, my child?”

He was not standing on his hind legs, as he may be in some illustrations you have seen. Wolves are more dexterous with their paws and mouths than you would believe, but walking on their hind legs hurts their hips. He was not wearing clothes or jewelry or anything else. He was just a wolf, a big, rangy grey-furred beast with a deep chest and narrow hips, and that meant that he was leaner and taller and longer-legged than Turtle, who was used to dogs, would have imagined.

Also he talked.

Turtle was not as surprised by this as you or I would be. In that part of the world at that time, talking animals were not completely unheard of. The problem was figuring out if they were a wicked fairy or a cursed prince—royalty was very bad about being turned into animals, and there were quite a few noble houses who still kept Great-Grandfather’s hide nailed up over the fireplace for a conversation piece—or just an ordinary talking animal. Fairies and princes tended to get you mixed up in unfortunate doings, but there was nothing wrong with a talking animal, who were usually more polite than most people you would meet.
 

That it was a wolf was somewhat comforting. Wolves talked occasionally. So did bears. Foxes talked all the time, particularly if you caught them in the hen house, where they would do their best to addle you with fine nonsense until they could slip out the door, and it was generally believed that all cats could talk and simply refused to do so for inscrutable reasons of their own.
 

Talking stags, on the other hand, were nearly always bespelled royalty, and fairies, who could theoretically choose to look like anything, nearly always picked white cats or black horses. Fairies are very beautiful and very vain and they haven’t got the imagination to fill a thimble. And they never learn from their mistakes.

So Turtle was not terribly frightened of the wolf, but she was wary. She gripped her basket in both hands and bobbed a curtsey to the wolf and said “I am going to my grandmother’s house, Master Wolf.”
 

The wolf looked at her for a little while. He had big gold eyes and he smelled strong, like a lathered horse or a cat in heat, one of those rough animal smells that humans do not like and cannot drive out with soap or candles.
 

“Be careful,” said the wolf finally. “There are unkind things in the woods today.”

“Oh,” said Turtle. “Um. I will. Thank you?”

The wolf nodded once, and turned like a cat in a tight space, nose over tail, and trotted into the woods. She saw him slip into a run, and the thick green ferns closed over his trail.
 

She realized that she was gripping her basket very tightly, and pried her fingers loose. There were red marks in her palm and across the pads of her fingers where the wicker handle had bit into the skin.

Still, she was young, and it did not occur to her to turn around and go home. There
might
be unkind things in the woods, but there were very
definitely
brothers and yelling at home.

So Turtle kept walking down the path, and because she was a little nervous, she began to sing to herself. She did not have a very good voice, and she could not remember most of the words, but that didn’t matter, because the point was to make noise and reassure herself that she was not scared, not one little bit.

Eventually she fell back into a lot of “hey fiddle dee and hidey ho,” with the occasional “hey nonny” thrown in. “Hey nonny” is a parasite that attaches itself to folk music, and left unchecked can suck an unsuspecting song completely dry.
 
The infestation of this particular song was not far advanced, but did not bode well for future generations.
 

So Turtle went on, singing badly and occasionally remembering a line or two about crows in the corn and the wee yowes amongst the heather. (It is worth noting that Turtle had a vague image of a wee yowe as some kind of miniature monster, possibly an elephant.) And in such a state, she arrived at the clearing that held Grandmother’s house.

Her grandmother kept the house tidy, and flowers grew all around the front porch. Hollyhocks rose in great columns against the wattle walls and a climbing rose had invaded the thatched roof. Turtle walked under the thorny archway and tapped the door.

It was slightly ajar and swung open at her touch. She took a step inside, holding her basket in front of her with both hands.
 

“Grandma?” she asked, in her wavering child’s voice.

And stopped.

And stared.

There was a wolf in her grandmother’s bed.

Turtle was not a stupid child. The wolf was clearly a wolf, even across the room, not anything else. He lay stretched across the blankets, as long as a human was tall, and he raised his great head and looked at her.

It was the same wolf from earlier. She was almost sure of it.
 

She did not scream. She did not run away. She most certainly did not say anything foolish about her grandmother having very large teeth, because she was not a sarcastic child by nature, and even if she had been, her heart was pounding very loudly in her ears and making it very hard to think.

“Oh,” she said, in a very small voice, and clutched the basket handle so hard that the wicker cut into her fingers.
 

“Turtle?” asked her grandmother. “Child, what are you doing here?”

Her grandmother sat up in bed. She had been lying next to the wolf, with her arms wrapped around his neck and her face buried in his shoulder. Her voice was thick and raw and it did not occur to Turtle until much later that her grandmother had been crying.
 

“Mother told me to come and stay with you tonight,” said Turtle. “Um.” More explanation seemed to be needed, so she flapped her hand in the direction of the village. “My brothers…”

“Ah,” said her grandmother, with all the comprehension that one can pack into a single syllable. She pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “It would have to be tonight, wouldn’t it?”

Turtle’s grandmother was not an old woman, not in the sense of being ancient and crooked down by the weight of years. They had children early in that part of the world, early and often. I would say that she was about sixty-five. The oldest part of her was her hands. Her hair had gone the color of iron. She was still handsome in a tall, haggard way, and there was never any problem with living alone. She hired men to chop her firewood, or dragged her grandsons out to do it, but that was her only concession to age, and the broad vegetable garden she weeded herself.
 

Grandmother swung her feet over the edge of the bed and said “Perhaps it would be better if you went home.”

Turtle fidgeted. She did not want to go home. The woods had frightened her a little, and the best thing she could hope for at the end of the return journey was yelling and brothers.

“If she goes now, she may meet him coming here,” said the wolf.
 

Grandmother inhaled sharply.
 

“Who?” asked Turtle.

Her grandmother fidgeted a patch of quilt between her fingers.

“The woodsman,” said the wolf, when it became obvious that the older woman would not answer.
 

“The woodsman?” asked Turtle, puzzled. “Which one?”
 

For there were woodsmen all through the land in that time, and none of them were precisely alike. They carried axes and cut down trees for houses, most of them, but they were also hunters and trappers and brought fur and pelts to trade, or wild mushrooms, or strange herbs. There was one woodsman who lived up in the hills—no one knew exactly where—who panned for gold in the streams and brought tiny vials of glittering dust to trade.
 

They were odd people. They were welcome in town, of course, and if land needed clearing, you sent out word and a half-dozen would show up with their great pitted axes, but they had territories rather than homes, and they wore furs instead of homespun.
 

“His name isn’t important,” said Grandmother. “I’d rather not…that is…oh,
surely
she can go home!”

The wolf, who had no name (wolves never do) said “She may do as she wishes, but I would not let a cub of mine go down that path tonight.”

“Perhaps he won’t come,” said Grandmother wretchedly.

“Then he will come tomorrow,” said the wolf, “or the next day. But I believe it will be tonight.” He heaved himself off the bed and paced toward the fire.