Chapter Three

The Forêt de Mormal was a vast expanse of greenery; trees sprouted easily and grew like weeds. There were hedge beeches, the bark growing so rapidly year by year that it broke open into a series of rough parallelograms to allow for new growth, moss green framed with an almost skin-like pink. The beeches were monolithic, immense, their roots heaving out of the ground to drink the very air, itself almost as humid as the earth in which the roots sought stability. Shelves of shaggy-hair moss and glossy ivy edged up the north side of each tree, even the little new-growth trees. Parasitic mistletoe formed ethereal spheres, strange nest-like structures in the upper branches, as many as five or six in a tree; these grew up the oaks, the poplars. And little streams cut through the forest in meanders, switching back erratically over the years, as if they too were alive, pulling saplings into their intention, creating roadways and bridges over which small animals crossed.

The peasants were free to glean tisanes and medicinals, but the wild boar, the pheasant and grouse, the deer were the property of Burchard and off-limits to anyone but him. Hunting was Burchard’s only activity; otherwise he lounged in boredom, listening to his advisers reel off the taxes levied on imported wool bales, the productivity lists regarding flax and hemp cultivation — in short, the dull banality of wealth easily accrued. That day at the edge of the forest, his dead roe bleeding on the ground at the hooves of the palfrey, when he first saw the white, unblemished cheek of Renelde, Burchard was given something he never expected to have outside the fantasy of old women’s fairy tales — a quest.

He settled his horse and yelled at her, What is your name, girl-child? She did the worst thing she could have done under the circumstances; just as the deer had before her, she turned and ran away. Oh, Burchard was skilled in the art of venery! He relished the chase. Renelde was a flash of brown cloth, an unformed child, there was a line of freckles along the bridge of her nose, her hair was brown going to black. Burchard laughed at her apprehension and the anxiety, the animal fear she displayed in fleeing. He reined his wife’s horse in (his own had ringworm, had been sequestered in the stables and salved with a walnut compress). At a slow trot he pursued the little girl, followed her home and was satisfied only when she turned and stared at him, up so high upon that damp horse. She slipped over the threshold of the cottage and shut the door. He dismounted, grinning.

It was the old woman who answered his rap. She was stooped from sitting at the loom so many years. Her skin was pale from lack of light, like a leek mounded up in the soil, white like a leek. A vague acrid smell wafted off her, the smell of noxious dye; her hands were criss-crossed with wrinkles, etched and accentuated with madder, cochineal when it could be obtained, and nettle green.

Who is the girl? Burchard demanded.

The old woman’s hand was clutching the door. She had dandled Renelde in her arms only yesterday, so it seemed. She was not rancorous. It was not to be considered an affront when the count of the land came calling on a peasant girl. It wasn’t that she didn’t like or approve of Guilbert the woodcutter, Renelde’s betrothed — he was a fine and honest individual — but if the child was of interest to a man of means, then so be it. Burchard puffed out his chest to make himself more substantial.

Has she misbehaved? the old woman asked.

Send her out; I want to be alone with her.

Jake brags occasionally about his prowess as an obstetrician. Doctor, he says, tapping his chest and winking. It is a lie. He was howling like a coyote outside the door, in rhythm with my tortured, moaning contractions. Okay, I’ll give him that last, he did make a lot of noise. Though I can’t see how it could have helped. I was more or less alone. It’s not the sort of thing one should do alone, give birth, but the boy came early and I was unprepared. I had a sense that my self had abandoned me, and this feeling did not give way when the boy arrived. For all he is beautiful and pleasant, these details only exacerbate my fury. And to add insult to injury, I also love him, cannot help but love him, in some chemical bond that nothing seems to sever. Through the spring, I try leaving him behind at the pit, but his little momentous trills bring me running back. I am his hostage just as he is mine.

He hasn’t any teeth yet and is too young for mashed burdock, but he’s hungry. He sucks at me with the ferocity of someone uncertain of his worth, with a furrowed brow, with a presentiment of my distaste. Jake walks by chuckling, as usual, a dead rabbit, skinned and gutted, hanging by a leather rope down by his side, flopsy ears skimming the ground. He’s eyeing my tit and stops to poke the boy with his bloodied finger. The child breaks suction. Jake does it on purpose so he can expose my nipple and get a good look. The baby pushes a bit of blue-white milk out his mouth as he approximates a laugh. Jake’s mouth opens empathetically and pulses a bit as if in a dream; missing teeth, he is the baby suckling. I cover myself quickly.

Go fuck yourself.

Too old, he says, and rubs the boy’s belly. Milk is shooting out of my nipple and wetting my clothing.

Go get the Findlay going then. Get dinner. Would you?

He does. I can hear the crackle of dry kindling behind me, and it isn’t long before my back is warm from the radiant heat. The rabbit will be a feast. The boy latches on again and drinks me in. I expect his eyes to close but they don’t. I swaddle him and lay him down under the table so Jake won’t accidentally step on him, and I set to weave until the meat can be eaten. I look up from time to time and see Jake peering at me, swaying back and forth. He looks like a fucking idiot. I start to think about Karl, rocking in the back of the orange treeplanting crummyvan, the stink mobile. I must work, I must work to form this, so that will not take hold.

The panel I’m working on has a staggered forest in the background; a girl-weaver, Renelde, stares straight out, in the act of drawing fibre from a bundled distaff down into thread, onto a twirling spindle. I have tried my best to render her without expression but, in fact, she looks like me, skewed hair tamed by braids, skeptical about the eyes. Jake is right, my weaving is a distraction. History repeats itself. I take solace that Jake has not figured out that the weaving is also a compulsion and, like all compulsions, dangerous in its consequences. As I work, I feel myself recede. I am a blur, a swathe of dull, dirty brown, from which a voice projects. I catch a whiff and stop work. There is an unmistakable odour floating through the hut.

What’s that smell, Jake? I say.

Dinner.

No. It smells like shit. Is that ours?

No, wolf, maybe?

They’re hungry, no doubt; they smell the rabbit cooking. I’m looking out the window, scanning the perimeter of the forest; nothing.

It’s the boy they’re after — little, unprotected.

Jake’s at me about my maternal instinct or lack thereof. Fuck him. I count off my fingers at him. Near-blind, I say. Stupid. Inconsequential. Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to go.

He shakes his head at me, the tiniest hint of a laugh on his upper lip. You ought to carry the bastard, he says. He spits this, really. You ought never to leave him alone. It’s sick the way you do that. A real mother doesn’t do like that. You carry him. You should . . .

I stop listening. But I know Jake loves the boy like a father. Like he thinks a father might love a son. When he’s around. Jake is yelling and tossing plates and food onto the table. It’s upsetting. The baby lets out a deep roar of disapproval, pulls its feet into its stomach again and again, and then he craps himself. It resounds as an insult. It resounds as a thwack of thick liquid against a wall.

You see, I say. You woke him up.

Ah, the little bastard. Jake starts to giggle.

He holds onto his own crotch; Jake pees himself regularly when he laughs. The whole hut by winter’s end smells of dried urine. I lean over and grab a square of sheeting, what I use for diapers, and throw it at him, catching him across the face. The cloth shows him in relief as a gauzy stain-streaked ghost. His laughing gasp sucks the material into the cave of his mouth and he closes his teeth around it, still grinning. I see he’s grabbed the boy’s ankle and drawn him closer. He’s waving a safety pin in the air already. The boy’s wide eyes swirl around trying to follow the motion.

Hurry, the meat will be cold.

I watch him slip off the boy’s swaddling and peer into the diaper, making a face. The shuttle goes back and forth, the threads tighten. Jake’s hand wipes the cherubic ass, legs kicking, the earnest expression on Jake’s face, the shuttle opening and closing. I can see the scene on the cloth forming, its rude snubbing, its amateurish representation still pleasing.

Don’t call him a bastard, I say.

Why not? It’s true, he is.

It feels like bad luck, is all.

I have an idea, Jake says, leaning over and rubbing my cheek facetiously with the back of his hand.

Oh?

My idea is this. I’m the father.

I’m laughing only I’m not, I say.

Well, I might as well be. What did he look like?

Who?

You know. The real father.

I want to say, He looked like a dwarf of Hapsburg lineage, the dwarfism manifested through some misrepresentation of a bad-gene-carrying third cousin. A tragedy. I want to say he was a spinner by trade, one who desperately, desperately wanted to pass on the family name. Grimm. But I know he won’t get the reference to Rumpelstiltskin and I’m not in the right mood. I almost tell him about Willem but I feel hurt by that too. It demonstrates my impracticality. The level of failure I’ve attained. Even in failure I am ambitious.

It was dark, I say. I didn’t get a good look.