I cannot abandon Adam. Jake watches every move I make and besides has taken to carting the boy with him when he is out of my sight. When I protest he says I am unfit. Says I don’t take precautions against hungry predators. I am housebound. I am good for nothing except weaving and sewing. I see that Jake has sharpened his knife. We have not eaten meat in weeks. I’ve noticed Jake holding the walls for guidance and patting the ground in the garden to locate plants.
Is this a weed, Alma?
Yes, Jake. Plantain.
For bruising.
Yes.
He wraps his fingers around the stalk and wiggles it until it is loose enough to yank. Instead of hunting, he has taken to sharpening his weapon. It is part of the inertia of his identity and suffices. I’m hungry, but out of kindness, I do not mention the lack of meat.
The latest panel is bordered with diamonds and features a woodlouse and a lively little fly. I have begun to sew the pieces together and I’m pleased with the result.
Two years passed and Burchard was sick again. No one lives forever, though some seek to. He was ill. His natural time had come. His body became wasted, a skeleton housed in gossamer skin. The illness had progressed until Burchard lay upon his deathbed, but still the end would not approach. It awaited him like a shy maiden, tormented him. He could not move without searing pains shooting through every piece of him.
Agony. He coughed up blood mixed with some black horror he had no energy to hide; he spat it on the floor by his bed, where it lay for one of his servants to clean up. Unceasingly, the countess prayed for him. But Burchard beckoned death, calling out in the night for an end to his earthly bonds. Death maintained her own schedule, and he lived on.
Let me die! Take me.
Renelde’s loom sat idle in the hut. The shroud cloth, which was that close to completion, sat under two years of accumulated dust, dust mixed with the remains of moths and other insects — mosquitoes, midges, June bugs — which had been drawn into the hut by day, or by the occasional flicker of a candle by night. These small creatures perished above the halted work in such a way that the intricate weaving was hidden; the entire story that Renelde had so cunningly portrayed, picture by picture, was buried beneath them. No one went into that corner of the hut anymore. It was as if a taboo emanated from it; it was a sepulchre.
The idea of it, of the nearly finished winding sheet, rose up like a ghost and grew meaningful in the mind of the dying man — how could he be dying but never dead? An esoteric connection came to him, and he signalled to the servant standing closest to him, grabbed the man’s leg, in fact, and almost toppled him over.
Tell the girl to finish the shroud, he muttered. Do this now. He collapsed onto his bed and would have slept if the cough had not caught him first. The room stank.
To convince Renelde to begin, it took a visit from the countess — she who abhorred the notion that Renelde could possibly control the hand of death. It was superstitious, a deception, a sinful thought. But she couldn’t stand to see her man suffer, couldn’t stand any sort of suffering. In truth it made her sick to her stomach.
Will he consent to the marriage? That was what the girl dared to ask. How quickly worldliness gave wisdom. The countess missed the perplexed expression on Renelde’s face, saw only her duplicity.
For me, Renelde, for God’s sake, I plead. For the sake of your poor mother’s grave. And Renelde had to acquiesce. She would do anything for the countess, well, anything but alter the story. And since she was not asked to do this, she sighed and consented. She did not dust the cloth for fear the stratum of dead bugs and dust mites would penetrate and damage the material, and, of course, she could not disengage the shroud from the loom until completion, could not shake it out at all. So she worked carefully so as not to disturb the small corpses lying there, the new cloth reflecting the little light cast by the hearth fire, growing next to the old, its surface dull and invisible beneath the debris.
The cloth was wet with her tears as she worked the final little stories into it. The entire process took but a week, and as she cut the cloth from the loom, sewed up the ends, she felt an urgency to her work. The two guards, who had not so very long before tied her to rocks and sought to drown her, escorted her to Burchard’s bedside to present the strange sheet and receive a final kiss and watch life slip away. The bells began immediately to toll for the man’s demise. The last woven tableau was hidden as she stood there, clutched in the smooth adolescent skin of her fingers. It was a full self-portrait, one of her hands holding the cloth of her dress up, the look in her eyes an ambiguous mixture of fear and love, the other hand over her belly. This tableau represented a recent event, one that had transpired a week before Burchard the Wolf had taken ill the second time.
She had moved so casually in the thicket beneath his horse that he might not have seen her and would not have had the sighting not been intentional. She gasped when their eyes met, suddenly unsure why she had let herself be seen. He slid from the stallion.
Well, what have we here?
He kissed her; she let him. She ran her fingers down the lappet of his brocaded vest and around the silk-covered buttons and further down, unexpectedly down the cool of his breeches, the silk enticing her. Under the canopy of the hundred-year-old beeches and oaks, the cloth of his richesse, slippery and luxurious against her skin. She found the laces on his breeches easily undone. She pulled the cloth of his shirt, tearing it along the warp, destroying it simply because she wanted to hear the sound of cloth ripping. Creatures unable to find their age-old paths climbed over their legs but they did not feel this. The bower of the forest provided her with this one secret.
Upon his death, his last words were, Let Renelde marry her stupid woodcutter.
Renelde’s story decayed quickly beneath the earth, nettle cloth being far more unstable than the seemingly more fragile silk. Small animals bored minuscule holes through it to get at the cadaver, but in so doing they slowly obliterated the story until only remnants of it were left, and these disintegrated too until not one thread could ever be unearthed. Of course Guilbert came back. He was there before the funeral-day vespers, claiming what was his. As soon as the bells began to toll for the death of Burchard the Wolf, Guilbert emerged and took his place beside Renelde, well back from the throng of revellers who hid their joy in solemn faces and sidelong winks. Her stomach jumped at the sight of him yet she wasn’t unhappy. The stench of two years in the bush gave him a beastly reek, but his presence assured the future legitimacy of the other worry that lurched within her.