The Oakthing

Gregory Maguire

Though the sky was a peerless blue, there had been thunder since dawn. Low thunder, ground thunder, leaving an acrid odor in twists of gray gauze that the wind pushed across the fields. As if a hand had rubbed a rod of graphite against the horizon, sketching vertical shafts of ghost in the warming day. It was the foot soldiers pushing, though, pushing the line, and it was the artillery behind them and flanking them that made such persuasive thunder.

The farm was not quite in their way. Not yet; it was off to one side.

A family had lived there for many generations. The place was called—with a light mocking of the habits of gentlemen farmers to name their estates—Sous Vieux Chêne —under the old oak. To the villagers of Remigny, three miles east, it had been known only as the Gauthier place.

But at this point, there were few left in Remigny to call it anything. Most villagers, sensibly, had fled. The Gauthiers, capable farmers with farmers’ stout common sense, were less practiced at dealing with invading armies. Though they did discuss the problem.

“We can’t leave. There are the crops to bring in.” The father was stubborn.

His wife more or less agreed, though pointed out, “Your main crop is not wheat.” She’d glanced sideways at their lovely child, their slightly dim, affectionate Dominique. Quite old enough to attract the eye of war-maddened soldiers. “Might it be silly to risk her safety for the sake of our wheat?”

It was a topic of discussion they had played with all summer, as one by one their farmer neighbors and the villagers of Remigny had fled to points south. Surely the line would shift? The Huns would not dare to drive their war machine through Gauthier fields!

That the Gauthiers held onto their convictions with such tenacity indicated a certain sort of family insanity. Neighbors had tried to reason with the Gauthiers, but the Gauthiers, back as far as any could remember, had not been a reasonable line. They had laughed and drunk their coffee with cow’s milk and said, “But what means this Schrecklichkiet, this German frightfulness, to a Gauthier?” And said it over and over until there was no one left to hear it.

But with the dead and the starved animals all around, and the ruination of sugar-beet fields, and the 42-centimeter howitzers pounding the center of the market town eight miles further east… It was hard to concentrate on wheat.

Finally the Great Panic came home to the current crop of Gauthiers. They were interrupted at their praying of the Angelus by a cloudburst of cannonfire nearer than ever. At last they came to their senses, or lost their nerve, or both at once.

They cobbled together what they could. An agricultural wagon suitable for the transport of hay, a smaller cart that a donkey could pull. They spent the morning piling what supplies were left, and a few pieces of the better furnishings, as if, meeting a caisson on the road, they could barter for safety with a choice armoire or a nice tureen boasting swan heads for handles.

In the end, the thunder leaning more heavily upon them, the artillery nearing, their exit was undignified, disorganized, and incomplete. Madame Marie-Laure Gauthier and docile, sentimental Dominique had hitched up the team and left with the wagon, toweringly overloaded. Around its bulk and over the noise of the invasion they shouted revised plans for their rendezvous.

Hector Gauthier followed a few minutes later in the cart, taking the last of the cheeses. The cow had been dead for a week, likely of terror, and so no milk to sprinkle on the doorstep, to sour and keep the little people out.

And thus good-bye to Sous Vieux Chêne, good-bye, good-bye. Au revoir, we hope! A demain,with luck. Good-bye. The German armies, which had romped through Belgium and showed every likelihood of tromping through the boulevards of Paris, had managed at last to scatter even the stubborn and mentally giddy Gauthiers. Incroyable.

All of them, that is, except Mme. Mémé Gauthier, the grandmother.

She had left her seat in the wagon because of an urge to use the outhouse. Her daughter-in-law had bawled around the edge of the sacks of bedding that Hector would need to take his own feeble mother, she could not wait any longer, Dominique would not be safe! But the thunder of cannon had smudged the sound of her voice. Hector Gauthier hadn’t heard the full message, nor could he see around the worldly Gauthier goods heaped high in the wagon. When Mme. Marie-Laure Gauthier left, her husband assumed his mother was safely on board, cursing and praying the rosary simultaneously.

When Mémé Gauthier emerged refreshed, the wagon was gone. The cart was gone. Since the cow was still dead, Mémé Gauthier was glad her sense of smell was largely gone, too. And her hearing was not what it had once been, so the cannon noise wasn’t objectionable.

She was well into her eighth decade, and frightened by little. She’d been born in the 1830s, when this was just the Gauthier place, not Sous Vieux Chêne. The old oak was old even in her childhood, and just a tree, just an oak, not the name of a headache or a property. Still, though, she’d cocked an eyebrow at news of uprisings in Paris, continental upheavals, even the invention of a steam engine to power a locomotive (she’d seen one once, too!), her life had been lived solely on the farm.

She was only mildly disappointed to have been forgotten by her son and his family. Indeed, she’d likely have forgotten herself, had she been in charge of the exodus.

Mémé Gauthier collected her walking stick—a nice bit of thorn with a smoothly knobbed head—and made her way through the forecourt of the barn buildings and around to the house’s front door. Her son had locked it, but he’d likely have left the key in its usual place: a hollow in the eponymous oak. She had to think a bit about how to reach that high.

Finally she went and found a milking stool and dragged it from the barn where it was doing no one any good anyway. When she got to the oak, she saw that a number of its limbs had given up and fallen to the ground, like the spokes of a blown-out umbrella. What was left was a spiky pillar of old dead wood, knobbed with woody warts a century old.

But the hiding place was intact, and the stool afforded her enough height to grope in the hollow. Sure enough, she secured the key, an oversized iron thing from the days of her own father.

So she opened up the house that had just been closed against the invading armies. She invaded it herself. Well, why not, it was her own house. And she sat down on a chair with a rush bottom, to think about what to do next.

Likely she dozed. She napped a dozen times a day. Sometimes she thought she must doze even while she walked, for she didn’t always remember where she was, when she came to think about it, nor where she was going.

When she opened her eyes, the trapezoids of sunlight had shifted across the terra-cotta tiles. Their lines were more acute, the patches of light more slanting.

She squinted and rubbed her eyes. Was that a house cat in the sun? Surely not. All the house cats had long ago run out and drowned themselves from terror, so far as anyone could tell. Even the mice had gone en vacances.

The thing made a kind of a curtsey. Or perhaps it was a rude gesture. At any rate, neither cats nor mice stood nine inches tall on hind legs. Unless some distant zoo in Louvain had been bombed and its monkey population scattered across the border into la belle France, this was a visitation by a little creature.

Where were her spectacles? She had given up needlework in her 70’s, and the more ripely adolescent her granddaughter had become, the less often Mémé Gauthier had wanted to look closely at her. “You wait right here, you,” she said, and went to look in the chiffonier. But the chiffonier was gone. What a cretinher son was! Fleeing from an invading army with a chiffonier! Anyway, her spectacles were gone with it.

When she came back, the creature was still there. Mémé Gauthier took considerable pains to get down on her knees, the better to see. While she was there she prayed for peace, and then she prayed she’d be able to get back up again. First, though, she looked to see what manner of mischief this thing might prove to be.

It was, she decided, a tree sprite of some sort. In sorry shape. Sorely in need of succor, or attention, or perhaps concealment; she couldn’t tell. It seemed an angular knot of twigs, from one angle; and then again there were tines of thorn and froths of densely clumped root. Like pubic hair, or the hair in armpits, rangy, airy, and with a vegetable odor strong enough that even Mémé Gauthier could appreciate it. It was matted with mud that little by little was drying and falling in small clods on the floor.

But the thing—male, female, or neither, or both, or something else again, she couldn’t tell—seemed to be, in the term used by those who practice the art of war, shell-shocked. It shook gently. If it had hands, it rubbed its elbows; if it had knees, or fetlocks, they knocked together. It did have something of a chin, and a yawp for a mouth, but its eyes were slitted closed like a newborn infant’s, and its ears hung low, as if they’d died two separate deaths.

“And so a bit of company for Mme. Mémé Gauthier,” she said courteously. “It’s thoughtful of you to call, when my kin have seen fit to abandon me.”

The creature’s shoulders, or high-slung hips, or airy ribs, shook, perhaps not at the actual sentiment but at the sound of a voice sent so obviously its way.

“You’re in need of some comfort, but of what sort?” she asked. “And whatever enticed you to come in?”

The house had been vacated for no more than an hour. But then, because the cow was dead, she’d been unable to splash on the doorstep the customary sour-milk prohibition against intruders.

“I suppose you’re welcome,” said Mémé Gauthier. “But I can’t sit around and play a hand of cards with you. It may take a day or two for my feckless relatives to realize they’ve misplaced me. And the Lord alone knows whether one of them will be able to retrace their steps to collect me, considering the advancing armies. I’m on my own—present company excluded—and must fend for myself.”

It had been some time since she’d been able to say that, and the prospect gave her some pleasure. Let’s see, what was needed first? To lock the doors, to secure the valuables, to tend to the animals, to water the vegetables, to clean the baby, to bank the coals?

There was no need to lock the doors, as it turned out, as there were neither valuables, nor animals, nor babies, nor coals, nor much by way of vegetables, for that matter. The kitchen garden offered some carrots, some kale in the act of bolting, potatoes in their secret graves, no doubt, and various herbs for savor. Though herbs were a bit difficult to savor on their own.

Mémé Gauthier scraped together what she could. The farm had never been electrified and the portable oil lamps were gone. As the afternoon dragged on Mémé Gauthier’s knees began to hurt, so she didn’t trust herself to scale a chair and light the fancy ceiling lamp in the salon. She’d make just a small fire in the hearth, to lend some comfort and take the worst chill out of her fingers, and then she’d burrow under a blanket and wait till the gray dawn.

The creature’s eyes hadn’t yet opened, quite, but she thought it sensed her movements. When she went to the herb yard, it wandered toward that part of the property; when she went back to the pump, it retreated. But if she went farther—to the gate, to see if dim Hector or his Marie-Laure were hurrying back to save her—the oakthing was uncomfortable, and fidgeted like a dog or a worrying child. Having gained the house, it didn’t want to leave, and it didn’t want her to go either.

That’s what it was, she decided, an oakthing. Evacuated from the battered tree that gave the farm its name.

“Scared out of your own home, you,” she said to it, “just as Hector and Marie-Laure are scared out of theirs! Everyone packing up like tortoises and moving on. Well, I’m staying put, and let the Hun have it if he must. I’m too old to be of interest to a young soldier, in that certain way, I mean, and I’m too tedious and insignificant to detain an army in its mission. I’ve no food to steal and no virtue to protect, so I’ve nothing to lose. But what’s your excuse?”

The oakthing collapsed into something resembling a sitting position, and put what it had of a face into what it had of hands.

“If it’s the tree you’re mourning,” she said, “the old black umbrella that gives this farm its name, you’re wasting your time. In its day it has sent out ten hundred thousand emissaries on its own behalf. Maybe more. Every spring, the seeds spiral and the wind catches at them, and the oak tree has ten thousand cousins across Normandy and Flanders alone. If your particular hideyhole has collapsed, well, the tree doesn’t care. Its roots are in the future.”

She peered down at the oakthing. “Its roots are in the future. As are mine, you thing. Dominque has loins as ripe as any old oak tree in springtime, and she will litter the future with her issue, which will be mine, too, if you look at it a certain way.”

But perhaps the oakthing had no issue.

What should she do for it? Given that she could do little for herself, had she an obligation to put out more effort for an ambulatory clot of vegetable matter? If it were a baby or a cat, she would give it milk.

“The cats are all gone,” she told it.

And that, she saw, was part of its problem. It may have lived in a tree, but it lived near a farm, and all farms had mice. so all farms had cats. And all cats drank milk.

In a desolate summer, even the mice were gone, and the cats were dead, and the cows were dry or dead or gone, and the farm’s slender economy no longer afforded a saucer of milk at the door for the cat. And while milk souring would keep an oakthing and its cousins away, the fresh milk put out for a cat was probably the oakthing’s primary diet.

She would think about it in her sleep, and dream up a solution if she could.

But Mémé Gauthier had no sleep that night, for the artificial thunder of the German advance and the scattershot pebble-rain of feeble French resistance punched holes in her efforts to doze. When there was enough light to rise safely, she did, and rinsed the chamber pot by the pump, and then brushed her hair and cleaned her teeth.

The oakthing, it seemed, was gone, and she felt a sort of pity for it. Had it dried up in the night, or maybe reclaimed what was left of its tree? Had it found her unsympathetic? Had it abandoned her? Had she anything more important to do, as the invasion swept field by field from the northeast, than to worry about a twiggy figment of rural superstition?

Perhaps not, which meant her life had shriveled down to very little, too.

So she was glad when she found it, huddled under the overturned bucket. The overturned milk bucket. It seemed to be shedding more of itself, in scraps of bark and trails of blond dust. “You’re wanting me to find milk for the cat,” said Mme. Gauthier. “As if I haven’t anything better to do.”

But, in fact, she hadn’t. So she put on her rubber boots and took an umbrella, as if its flimsy ribs and taut cotton skin could protect her from shrapnel, and she clutched at her walking stick, and went off down the lane.

There were four farms this way, two the other, and across the ditch and two fields was a one-room schoolhouse that had once had a goat tethered in its yard. The farms were farther but the ditch was a problem; she wasn’t sure she trusted herself to maneuver across a plank. Still, she remembered that the goat had had kids rather late in the season, and though they might have been slaughtered or stolen or died of fright, if the goat had been left behind she might still have milk. And Mémé Gauthier had not lived on a farm all her life without learning how to milk a goat if a goat had milk to give.

“Are you coming?” she asked the oakthing.

It didn’t answer, but spat at her as a child might: wanting the fruits of her expedition but resenting her for leaving anyway.

“Thankless,” she told it, with some satisfaction.

And as she left the yard, she looked again at the sundered trunk of the oak tree. Had one of yesterday’s thunder blasts been real weather from God, accompanied by vengeful lightning? Or had a snippet of bomb gone awry and curled the old wood into lazy scrapes as if it were made of butter? The bushels of leaves still turning in the breeze—still attached to their twigs, poking from branches, dividing from the stems of thick split limbs. The leaves didn’t know they were dead yet.

She closed up the umbrella, enjoying a spit of rain on her brow, and used it as a second cane. Her arthritic wrists ached by the time she was halfway across the plank, edging sideways inch by inch, but the strategy worked, and she didn’t overbalance. The meadow was full of sumptuous hay ready for harvest. And no one to do it. It would die too.

Swarms of summer bugs insensible of the military action made a second weather of droning commotion at her shoulder height. She thrashed her way through, keeping her eyes on the roof of the schoolhouse in its thicket of poplars.

These trees, it turned out, were also splintered, and the east-facing wall of the school, once a rosy pink stone, was scorched with explosives and had buckled into the yard. The shutters were blown off their hinges or straight through the shattered windows. A few sets of uncollected wooden shoes lay marvelously undisturbed beside what remained of the door. No children had been here for a week at least, maybe more. But the goat, crazed with grief and solitude, was still there, bucking against its tethers, its forehead scraped bloody raw in its efforts to escape.

She had a need. She had the goat. The goat had milk. She had fingers gnarled with arthritis. What she didn’t have was a bucket. She’d forgotten that.

“You, stop your barracking,” she told the goat. “I’ve got a little baby at home that needs what you give. I can’t think with all your noise, though.”

She hunted about in the debris, poking with her walking stick and her umbrella. There wasn’t so much as a single tin cup to salvage.

So in the end, with blistered hands, she milked the goat into the largest of the pair of wooden shoes. Then she loosened the buttons on her farm-dress and sank the shoes as best as she could, toe-end down, between what remained of her breasts. She tied herself up as well as she could. The milk slopped as she moved, but she would go slowly, and not all of it would slop, she hoped. It was the best she could do. She was 86, or 84, or something: what could the oakthing expect?

After a few steps homeward, she turned back: why not bring the goat with her? Could she get it across the plank? If it overturned her into the ditch she’d die there, damply.

She never got the chance to try. The goat shied at the first opportunity and twisted its tether out of her feeble grasp. Into the overgrown fields it disappeared, bleating in hysterical joy, which she imagined would be short-lived, given the panic of the times.

The wind smelled as if it was burning. The sun had gotten high the meanwhile, and it winked brassily now and then, colored by the smoke of gunfire. More of the meadow was thrashed down than she had managed by herself. She imagined stalking ogres with breath like roasting gunpowder, and the stink of hot metal. Feet larger than human boots could hold were responsible for the wreckage. If not gathered immediately, mold would set in, and rot, and the hay go useless, and the animals go hungry.

Only there were no animals, she remembered, so let the hay be stomped upon by ogres.

The return trip took her longer than she’d imagined. Well, she was tired with her efforts. The sun was already weaseling down the western skies, shimmying between big bosomed clouds. One of the farms she’d thought about rooting around was, it seemed, on fire. The rutted track heading that way was muddy, torn up with iron-hooped wheels. Cannon had come through here, and horses, leaving their fresh stink.

But there was nothing at Sous Vieux Chêne for a scavenging corps, surely, nothing worth burning even?

And the oakthing—was it all right? Was it still there?

She couldn’t go any faster than she could go. If the oakthing was going to die in the next four minutes for lack of fresh milk, it would just have to die. She had been inching forward in her life over all these decades at her own pace, and, as she well knew, things on farms died, in their time. Herself included, in her time, whenever that was.

But her breath came faster and, really, despite her farmer’s philosophies, she washurrying.

The door was kicked off one of its hinges and clods of mud were mulishly deposited on what had been a properly clean farmhouse floor. Beyond that, though, the house seemed intact. The advancing army had found nothing to steal, nothing to eat, and no one to rape, and perhaps the oakthing’s need for milk had saved Mémé Gauthier herself. Taking her safely offstage at the right moment.

Not that she cared to be saved, particularly. Saved for what? To starve to death over the period of a week or two, watching the sun rise and fall, and hearing the crickets of late summer crisply gnaw through her last minutes, sounding like the merciless throb of a pendulum, until the pendulum finally wound down for good?

But she cared about the oakthing. After settling the shoes carefully in a dry sink, and propping them up with some towels so they couldn’t slope over and the milk slop out, she went to hunt for it.

She found it clinging to the headboard of Dominique’s low-slung bed. It looked more like a bug now, and its anxious movements were more twitchy than ever. It scrambled up and down the crudely carved post, inspecting the face of the man who lay with his head upon Dominique’s thin pillow, adhering to it in a fracturing skin of dried blood and vomit.

“I oughtto have managed that goat,” said Mémé Gauthier. “But she managed me better than I could do her.”

The man was a German soldier. A wound opened on the side of his neck like a red cabbage severed with a knife. For all her long life as a farmwife, Mémé Gauthier had never seen human anatomy laid quite this open to inspection. She was rather intrigued. The oakthing trembled in revulsion. It skittered down, looked at the wound, at the hideous mess of leakage, at the scorched brows and glossy burned temple, at the long elegant drawing-room nose and neat teeth, perfectly intact and as pearly as baby onions, not a brown one among them.

“It’s the enemy,” said Mémé Gauthier. “It’s the German army.”

The German army breathed in with long breaths, like a bellows with a leak, and when the German army breathed out, flecks of dried blood danced with a copper brilliance in the slanting afternoon light.

The oakthing twisted its fingers and pointed. There was a rifle on the floor, and a leather satchel.

“I know rifles,” she said to the oakthing. “I’ve shot mad dogs in my day, and a horse who had to be done in, too. And I’ve fired over the heads of brigands and priests who had too much interest in the affairs of the household.”

But she didn’t touch the rifle. She pawed through the satchel instead, hoping to find some dried bread, some rations, some identification. There were a few documents in German; she couldn’t read them. Whoever had left the soldier here, however, had already done what foraging there was to be done. She found nothing useful but a long needle and a spool of thread.

She lit the kitchen fire with some kindling and she threw in some wooden spoons to build up the flame, for she couldn’t take the time to hunt for anything else. She held the needle in the heat for as long as she could, to guard against contamination, and when it had cooled so that she could handle it, she settled herself on the edge of Dominique’s bed. She stitched up the wound as well as she could. Without her spectacles, she couldn’t scrutinize her work. The edges didn’t quite match, and the blood began to flow again, but not torrentially. She had a sense, perhaps a false one, that she was doing some good.

She was pleased. She wanted him well enough to be able to sit up in bed and look at her in the face before she shot him between the eyes.

The oakthing came down and settled on his shoulder, for all the world like the parrot on the shoulder of a pirate. “You belong to the oak, and the oak belongs to the farm, and the German Army is a trespasser!” said Mémé Gauthier in disgust. “Get away from there, you. You traitor.”

But the oakthing didn’t attend to insults. It didn’t care. It settled its twiggy apparatus of fingers against the fellow’s wound as if, in the absence of milk, blood might substitute. Or maybe it liked invading armies who blasted its home, drove off the farmers it lived parasitically upon, turned the greens of the world into browns, and the late summer skies into boiling black hellfires.

There was still the matter of food, and Mémé Gauthier now had not eaten for more than a day. Though she was prepared to die of malnourishment, her fairly ample form would require her to starve for a while, first, and she wasn’t eager for that experience. Furthermore she didn’t want to nurse a marauder into some semblance of health and then herself pass away before she had a chance to kill him.

Perhaps she ought just pull the trigger, get it over with? Why exact the vengeance of terror upon him? He was a young thing, and hardly more than a flea on the flank of Kaiser Wilhelm’s brute force. His was a tender and suffering face, in its way. But his was the face of war, his was the presence of the enemy: that was what the war had brought her. And war would be her death at last, at her ripe old age, so he was as good as the Angel of Death. So it gave her a cruel pleasure and a sense of final accomplishment to consider slaying the Angel of Death before he could, in his time, slay her. She hadn’t asked for his company, after all. Who does?

She decided to sleep on the matter, for now she was certain she would sleep. “Come away from him, you,” she said to the oakthing, who pulled a face and—perhaps—stuck out a flaking tongue at her. But obeyed. It scrabbled down. Mémé Gauthier covered the soldier as best she could with a mangy horse blanket found in the stable. Then she settled herself in a chair. She was afraid to sleep lying down for fear she wouldn’t be able to get up.

She hadn’t bothered to pull the shutters to. She’d always liked daylight, and there was precious little of it left for her. The oakthing sat upon the sill of the window. After a while her eyes became accustomed to the dark and she could see the oakthing quivering. She didn’t know if it was sleeping, or keeping guard, or merely waiting for her to get up and do something else. It looked more like a homunculus at night, when the light was poor, more like a little human or a sprite of some sort. She closed her eyes, thinking: It probably hasn’t the capacity to see its own death as well as I can see mine. One doesn’t need spectacles to see that.

She slept better than usual. Well, all that effort expended yesterday, at getting the milk. The milk! It was her first thought upon awakening. She’d neglected to give the milk to the oakthing. By now it would have found the milk, and drunk it, surely?

A warm rain drummed and let up, drummed and let up, against the glass. The oakthing was back on the bedstead keeping watch over the hostage. The soldier seemed no better or worse, though his sleep was even and his smell more foul. The milk, it turned out, was still there in the shoes. She put a finger in it to check. Already beginning to sour slightly.

“If you’re to have this, a little breakfast, come and have it,” she said, and prepared to tip the milk into a shallow dish and set it upon the floor. “Here, thingy.”

Before she could manage, though—complicated movements, to reach down that far without toppling over for good—there was a sound through the windy rain in the yard. It was common enough, a farm sound, no different than any she’d heard any day of her long life in this same home. Simply the sound of someone pushing through the gate of the kitchen garden and coming along the pebbled path. She put her hand to her chest and gasped. So war does this to us, that quickly: It makes the most common of experiences foreign. “Yes, what?” she hissed at the noise. Surely it was the comrades of the soldier come back to fetch him. She would kill them too, if she proved able to get to the chamber in time to get the gun. Damn, why had she left it on the floor by the bedside?

“Bring me the gun,” she called to the oakthing, though she doubted it could understand her words, much less lift such a heavy thing and carry it.

The morning intruder paused on the doorstep. As if sensing the customs of the farm this century past, the intruder stopped and wiped the mud from boots against the granite stone set just so for that purpose. Then the door swung open and Mémé Gauthier stood up, reared her shoulders back, to face the next consequence of her fate and folly. “You!” she said, nearly spitting with irritation and, perhaps, relief. “You!” It was her granddaughter.

“I told them you’d be here,” said Dominique in her airy way. She whipping a scarf from her head and sluicing the rain from her hair. “You old dog, giving them the slip like that.”

“And they—they sent you back for me!” She trembled with rage at her son and daughter-in-law.

“They did not,” said Dominique calmly, perhaps a bit proudly. “They didn’t know I was leaving. If you could give them the slip, so could I.”

“Girl, you’re mad, madder than the rest of them. If they find out you’ve returned, they’ll have to cross back through these treacherous reaches to rescue you! At least, when it was just me, they could shrug and say, Alors, it was her madness, God bless the bitch. But you have just consigned your parents to taking a terrible risk!”

“I left a note that I was going to Paris,” she said calmly.

“Oh,” said her grandmother. Maybe Dominique wasn’t quite as slow as she always seemed. “Well, that was smart.”

“And it wasn’t all that hard to get through,” said Dominique. “The roads were dry for half the night, and I kept to the shadows. I cut across the fields if I thought I heard the sound of boots thumping or horses. It was worse at the end, with the rain beating down, but that also kept early morning activity down, I think. So I had no trouble.”

“You might have been raped, and beaten, and killed,” said Mémé Gauthier. “Your parents struggle so hard to remove you from danger, and you thwart them. You taunt them. Why did you come back, ma cherie? And furthermore, did you bring any food?”

“You think I had time to market?” asked Dominique. “You think there is much more in the town than there is here? I came back because I didn’t think you’d be able to manage alone, Grandmère. I couldn’t see you foraging about the other farms for stores of dried food forgotten in corners of sheds, and the winter coming on.”

“It’s the highest of high summers!” said Mémé Gauthier. She had no intention of lasting into the early fall; the notion was laughable.

“I didn’t come a moment too soon,” said Dominique. “You’ve lost your mind even more than usual. I see you’ve got some milk from somewhere and stored it in your shoes?”

“I couldn’t reach the pitcher on the high shelf. Don’t be disrespectful.” She was proud of having gotten that milk. “You’ll have some for breakfast.”

“I will, when I’m ready. First I need to lie down for an hour. It was an arduous walk, all the night long, and I’m exhausted from the excitement.”

“No, don’t settle in your room, come out here and lie on the floor, keep me company—”

“You want company, come sit in my room; I need to lie down,” she said, and pushed through to the hall, and her voice went up and up.

Her scream woke the man.

“Now you’ve ruined everything,” said Mémé Gauthier crossly. “He’s not at all ready to kill. He wasn’t even ready to get up yet.”

The oakthing was sitting on the floor with its hands around the rifle trigger. It was unclear to Mémé Gauthier whether Dominique even noticed it. Perhaps it just looked like a scrap of broken branch to her; indeed, in the daylight, that’s what it looked to the old woman.

“You’ve captured the German Army?” said Dominique in wonder. “Grandmère, how capable of you. Rude, though, to give him my bed. Why not yours?”

“He took your mattress for himself, without invitation, and my bedding is all gone to town or to hell or somewhere. Come away, girl.”

“He’s very weak,” said Dominique, who had had a way with the sick ewe and the lamb that wouldn’t suckle. “Some moron of a comrade sewed up his wound with a pretty poor eye for style, I’ll tell you that.”

“You try it, with no lamplight and a spot of arthritis in your wrists!”

“Oh, Grandmère,” said Dominique, “you did it? I’m proud of you.” She moved forward, nearly stepping on the oakthing, stepping over the rifle. The soldier looked neither startled nor even particularly interested, but he was awake enough to track her with his eyes as she crossed the room and sat right down on the bed. “He needs a good washing, first, and then that milk, I think.”

“I haven’t gotten the strength to prime the pump yet,” said Mémé Gauthier. “I’m only just awake myself.” She corrected her tone. “Dominique, the man is a soldier of the invading army that scared your family from our home. You can’t wash his wounds and set him out in the sun to heal as if this were a pavilion for invalids. We have to kill him and get rid of the body. For all we know, his comrades will come back looking for him within the day or so.”

“He has nice eyes,” she said. “Good morning, you. Can you hear me? Can you understand me?”

“Imbécile!” Mémé Gauthier didn’t have words ripe enough to express her degree of astonishment. “Dominique, come away from him! I forbid this! Don’t even talk to him! That is aiding the enemy, a crime against your family, a crime against France!”

“He’s a man who has been bleeding in my bed,” said the girl. “I’m not proposing he be elevated to a Monsignor of the Church. Grandmère, please. Guten tag?”

The soldier blinked at the German greeting. His head lurched a bit on his neck as if he was feeling a twinge of pain, and thereby remembering he was alive. “Guten tag?” he mumbled back.

“Give me the milk,” said the granddaughter. “Bring it here, Grandmère.”

“I collected it for the tree sprite,” said Mémé Gauthier, hopelessly.

“What tree sprite is that?”

Mémé Gauthier couldn’t speak any more. She just pointed to the floor. But her granddaughter wasn’t looking. The oakthing lay down against the rifle, lengthening, matching its thorny limbs to the long steel shaft and the scratched and polished wooden handle. “It needs the milk more than we do,” said the grandmother, but she knew her voice was too frail, and that Dominique wouldn’t listen.

The farm is dead, she said to the oakthing.

And so are you, it answered, or nearly. But you have a child here who will find a way to live and keep life going, cost what it will, and I have nothing.

I will get you the milk myself, she told it.

It is not for me. The milk was never for me, it answered. It was for the life around me, and I lived on its edges.

“It’s cold in here; the rain makes everything raw,” said Dominique decisively. “We’ll build up a fire, Grandmère, and drag him into the kitchen for warmth. Don’t worry,” she added, at the grandmother’s grieved expression. “I won’t lose my head. I won’t lose my heart to him, either. I’ll keep my hands on the rifle.” She swept the gun off the floor with one hand. With her other hand, she collected the litter of wood and leaves, for use as tinder.

Mémé Gauthier put her head in her hands and wished to die. But she was of strong country stock and, it seemed, life had not finished with her yet. So in time she straightened her shoulders and went to tend the fire, pour the milk, hector her granddaughter, confound the enemy, mop out the rain that seeped in under the door, and mourn, in a dry-eyed way, the living and the dead.

Gregory Maguireis a novelist who writes for adults and children. Now he lives with his family outside of Boston, Massachusetts, though he has lived in Europe as well. His work for children includes the popular Hamlet Chronicles, the latest installment of which is A Couple of April Fools. For adults, his most recent work is Mirror Mirror.His best-known work, Wicked, is the basis of a recent Broadway musical of the same name. Maguire has published fiction and criticism in Ploughshares, The New York Times Book Review, and other journals. He is also a founder and co-director of Children’s Literature New England, Inc.

His Web site is www.gregorymaguire.com.

Author’s Note

The inspiration of the Oakthing is the drawings of Arthur Rackham, particularly those for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. While I didn’t go back to look again at those color plates, I well recall those spiky, thorn-nosed creatures scrabbling about the hedges and hiding behind the palings of iron fences. They were very Edwardian creatures, those inventions of Rackham and J. M. Barrie. They were related both to the remnants of superstitious rural beliefs and to the Victorian craze for fairies-at-the-back-of-the-garden. For my story, I transposed one of them to the Continent, at the very close of the Edwardian age, when the first of the century’s terrible wars blasted modernity into our faces. What simple rural creature could survive such an onslaught of blood and terror? And yet—look at this collection—in so many strange and clever ways, the small creatures have survived. They are hugely camouflaged, like the cleverest of chameleons. Despite the theme of my story, the fairy creatures have endured—sometimes in the pages of books for children, but elsewhere, too, if you know where to look.