Zel (15 page)

She agreed on a late March day, as the snow began to melt. That night she stored her needles and threads, her embroidery hoop, her linens and silks, in a wooden box. She went to bed and lay looking at the ceiling.

In the morning she was outside before dawn, picking at the half-frozen earth, but not in the area of her old garden. Oh, no. Now she knew just the right slope to plant a garden on, finding the most fertile soil exposed to the most sun rays without even knowing how she had gained the knowledge. She went to town and bought seeds of every type, even ones from other lands. It was a
short walk to town, and the day was suddenly warmer. Farmers talked about perhaps planting early this year. The woman went home and planted that very day.

The peas sprouted first. Then the radishes, cabbage, cauliflower. Then the lettuce. So many kinds of lettuce. The woman’s fingers now knew how to thin the seedlings as expertly as the farmers who sold their harvest in the market. She knew which would thrive best in which parts of the garden. Carrots, lima beans, potatoes. As things grew, she smiled in wonder. She interspersed flowers with the vegetables for added color. The asters came in silly profusion. The geraniums made a fine border. She never realized before how much she enjoyed flowers, perhaps because flowers were always on distant hillsides or in other people’s gardens, never in hers. But now she let them bloom and she didn’t feel frivolous—for the eye deserves its part, too. She planted vegetables from the south—zucchini and cucumbers, admiring their hairy stems and bright trumpet flowers. She planted vegetables from the New World—especially tomatoes, thinking ahead to the heat of August. People came from nearby towns to see her foreign eggplant and broccoli. Near the house the rhododendrons flourished. She wondered if this was evidence of her promised new gift or if this garden’s abundance was the product of an early, unusually warm and sunny spring. But she didn’t wonder much. Mainly she let herself rest in an inexplicable calm—a kind of contentment
that she’d been denied since she had come of age. She didn’t know if she was damned or not, but for now she was at peace. Eternity didn’t matter.

The lettuces came ready for harvesting in May. Bushy and green and tasty. A neighbor woman had her eye on the lettuces, a pregnant woman. The barren woman knew that. She saw the pregnant woman peek out her window in the house that backed onto the garden. The pregnant woman asked to buy lettuce, the kind with the small, round leaves known as rapunzel. The barren woman said none of her vegetables were for sale. The pregnant woman peeked out the window day after day. Only the wall between the garden and that house kept the pregnant woman from entering uninvited and stealing the rapunzel. The wall was beginning to crumble in one spot. The barren woman didn’t repair it.

One night the pregnant woman sent her beery husband on an errand of thievery. He climbed the wall and stole rapunzel. The barren woman watched him from the shadow of her home. She didn’t stop him. She knew that in the house on the other side of the wall the pregnant woman was dining on her rapunzel. The pregnant woman was finding the stolen rapunzel more delicious than any other food she had tasted in her whole life, more delicious than any other food she could imagine. The barren woman closed her eyes and watched the pregnant woman eat.

That first time she saw with her eyes closed, she was frozen to the spot. When she opened her eyes at last, she sank to the floor, weak with awe. Was this her imagination or was this another gift—a gift the devils hadn’t bothered to mention, it was so common among lost souls? For several days she didn’t sleep. She allowed herself at most to blink. When finally she fell in bed, she was relieved to find just darkness behind her eyelids.

A week passed, and the pregnant woman craved rapunzel more each day. She nagged at her husband. And she was excellent at nagging, as well as loud at it. The barren woman heard and waited, her eyes open.

The man hesitated, though not from scruples. He did not understand why the barren woman would not sell the lettuce in the first place. If she was going to be so stubborn, she deserved to be robbed, for she clearly grew more than she could ever eat alone. No, the source of his hesitation was the fear of being caught. For thievery was not treated lightly. The man knew that well; he had stolen before and been caught before. Never again did he want to stand in the town square, locked into the stocks. He told his wife as much. The barren woman heard and waited.

Still his wife nagged. Her pregnancy was nearing its end. By early July the child would be here. If the man could steal a little rapunzel now and then just for another month, the cravings would end. And how likely was it
he’d be caught on those few excursions into the forbidden garden? The woman with the garden was a reclusive sort. She probably went to bed early at night. She’d never catch him. And if the rapunzel was eaten quickly, there’d be no evidence of a theft anyway. The pregnant woman pleaded. The pregnant woman goaded. The pregnant woman ranted. The barren woman heard and knew the waiting was at an end.

Hours passed. The barren woman could bear it no longer. She closed her eyes and saw.

The man drank many beers. Then he climbed the wall in the moonlight and picked rapunzel.

The barren woman stood behind him when he got to his feet. “Thief.”

The man held the rapunzel tight. His face in the glow of the moon said it all: The woman was alone, and as long as she didn’t scream and no one else saw him in the garden, it was her word against his. His voice was testy: “It’s just a few leaves. What do you care?”

The woman stepped back. She wasn’t sure why. Her feet moved of their own accord. Yet she knew she wasn’t giving up. Her senses told her that.

The man wasn’t about to hesitate. But before his feet could move, he found his path blocked with waist-high thistles. He turned in a circle. The thistles were on all sides. They grew higher by the moment. “Help!” he called. “Help me.”

The thistles stopped growing. They were now up to the man’s chin. They pressed against his bare arms. He writhed from the sting. She knew he wanted nothing more than to jump from his own skin.

The barren woman watched, fascinated, breathless. “Take the rapunzel,” she said when she could speak at last. “Take it with my best wishes. And in return give me one thing. One thing, and then . . .” She paused, for she did not know the extent and limit of her powers. But she said what she hoped: “Then I will let you go home, your path clear and your hands filled with rapunzel.”

“Name your price,” hissed the man, hunching his shoulders together, trying his best to shrink away from the crowding thistles. “Anything!”

The barren woman saw the welts rise on his neck. She knew they were rising on his arms and legs. She was almost sorry for him. Almost, when she saw the revulsion in his eyes as he looked at her. She spoke coolly. “When your daughter is born, bring her to me. She will be mine.”

The man blinked. The barren woman could see the effort in his eyes: He was trying to think of his round wife; he was trying to think of the child within her. He tried and tried, but the thistles stopped him. The thistles tortured him. And now they grew again. They ate at his cheeks. They would be at his eyes within seconds. “Yes!” he screamed. “The child is yours.”

He went home, as the barren woman had promised, safely and loaded down with rapunzel.

The barren woman went home, as well, exhausted for no reason she could fathom, for surely she had done nothing strenuous. She sat on the floor of her bedroom and thought about what had happened in the garden. What she saw with her eyes closed was still a matter to be analyzed. But the thistles were not the result of an early spring, of an unusually warm spring. The thistles did the bidding of a separate force. The woman put her left hand to her mouth and bit a small chunk from the cushion at the base of her thumb. Cold water ran down her arm. The water of her veins.

Who would have thought it? Heaven and hell, the unbelievable, were true. Divinity was true. She had bargained away much, after all.

But there would be an eternity to contemplate her choice. For now she should think of the immediate future. Of the child twisting in the woman’s womb. Her own child. Dare she close her eyes and try to get to know the child? Not while the babe was in that other woman, no. The barren woman would wait till the child was free.

She slept outside that night, in her garden, near her rapunzel. Would the man keep his word? She remembered his eyes and thought he would. Still, she had to make sure.

In the morning the barren woman closed her eyes and
saw the man putting on his shoes, telling his wife he was going to the town square to warn everyone about the witch in the house on the other side of the wall, to rally them against her, to hang her or burn her, to rid the world of the scourge that was her. He walked to the door of his house and opened it to find grapevines, thick and gnarly, blocking the doorway. He closed the door and ran to the window. The room was suddenly plunged into darkness. Grapevines blocked every window. The man and his wife clung to each other in the dark. Finally, the man called out, “I will not mention the witch to anyone.” And the vines receded.

Every hour on the hour the barren woman closed her eyes and saw the man wherever he was, the woman wherever she was. Once the man passed his priest and hesitated. When he opened his mouth to speak, the thistle poisons revived, and his body was suddenly covered again with welts. His tongue was thick with infection. He covered his mouth and ran.

Every hour on the hour the barren woman knew the child was hers.

When the child was born, a girl-child, as the barren woman had known she would be, this woman took her and traveled over mountain after mountain. She kept going until she could no longer hear the wail of the woman from whose loins she had taken the babe. Then she kept going until she could no longer remember that
wail. The crying woman would have other children. Of course she would. She was a breeder; one look told you that. But for the running woman, the escaping woman, this child was unique.

She stopped at last on a small, high alm, several hours’ walk from a town. A good place to raise the child, to savor her without the interruptions of others. On her first visit to town, the people eyed her coldly. A woman alone with a child was suspect, of course. Still, they were willing to take her money, that money she had saved from her seamstress days, in return for the land on the alm and a small home.

They became Zel and Mother.

I am Mother.

*   *   *

Zel brought all that I ever hoped for from love. I never intended to name her Rapunzel. I thought of Heidrun, Lore, Annelie. I thought of Brynhild, Gretel, Aurelia—even, in all their irony, Christa and Constance. Yet something within forced the name; something forced me to remember the source of the child. That same thing that forces me to come to town at intervals of no more than six months to touch an iron stone near the well in the marketplace and know its solid coldness. That same thing that turned my blood to water. But even that something couldn’t stop me from shortening the name to Zel, a name that fit the child, for as she grew, she danced and
leapt like the gazelles of Biblical stories, the gazelles I had heard much of in the church of my past.

When the babe was little, she nursed from my own breasts. I drank a brew my hands prepared from herbs my hands had picked, a brew no one had taught me. The milk flowed bluish and sweet, and Zel grew rosy and plump. I was in every way Mother.

Later I fed her lovely things from the garden, ever fresh and abundant. The girl smiled all the time. I rolled in the grasses with her, nibbling at her baby hands and feet; I splashed in the stream with her, tickling her girl tummy and underarms; I scrambled over rocks with her, pointing out the wild flowers—golden crepides, pink silenes, pale yellow saxifrages. And the girl laughed. We talked of the marvel of this world, and I taught Zel of her soul, the only soul I believed was available to us, the spirit of the here and now. Zel never asked for more.

Life was good. I ache with how good it was.

When I brought Zel to the tower that I had never heard of before but that my feet took me to all on their own, I did it to gain time. I needed to figure out how to lead Zel to the choice that would keep us together. I gave up salvation for all time—surely I deserved more than thirteen years in return.

I tried with the seduction of the goose. I remember word for word: “Zel, the gosling’s eggshell has turned to dust.” I leaned against the stone wall of the tower room.

“Poor little thing. I doomed it.” Zel’s eyes filled with anguish, for this was only five months after she’d entered the tower, and her face was still full of expression. Her face didn’t lose expression until this past winter.

“If you had a gift for animals, you could have made the mother goose accept the egg.”

“I’m good with animals, Mother. I tried my best.”

“You’re good with them, yes. But you could do much more.”

Zel shook her head. “You mean like you said before? Talking to them? But even if I could have explained to the goose that the egg was for her to hatch and love, she might have rolled it away anyway. She might not have wanted another goose’s egg.”

I smiled. “But there’s where the beauty of the gift is, Zel. If you had a gift for animals like my gift for plants, you could have made her take the egg.”

“You can’t mean a power that would let me force animals to do as I wished? Who would want such a power? I couldn’t bear to be near an animal whose will I commanded.” Zel’s eyes showed a hint of the revulsion I had seen in the beery man’s eyes thirteen years before.

I didn’t speak. I reeled from the look in Zel’s eyes. What had I done, after all? I hadn’t really ever hurt anyone.

And now the wail of the woman rang out, the woman
whose arms flew over her head as her husband handed Zel to me, the woman who fell to her knees and begged me not to take the child, the woman who rent her clothes in her grief. Would I never be rid of that memory?

Zel looked lost and confused for a moment, as though my silence baffled her. “The gift of understanding and being understood, now that would be a real gift.” She walked to a window and looked out. “Then I could make friends here, animal friends.”