5. Marion
Marion
He'd been at the gate since the afternoon before.
I watched him pitch the tent through the kitchen window.
I watched him sit on the stump. Then I turned away and knelt at my son’s knees at the bench, my hand on his shoulder.
Noah asked me what he was. I didn't have the answer.
I told him I didn't know yet and I would find out, and I told him to come to bed.
He slept against me through the night with his body running too hot, and I lay awake against the wall of the back room with his head under my chin and thought about the man ten paces past my gate.
He indicated that he was from Swiftwater, which was already evident by the way he dressed. He rode up the western track prepared to take my son.
He said he wouldn't, but he unbuilt himself in two minutes on a porch. He could sit on a stump for three days. Carve small wooden things. Be the gentlest version of himself outside my gate for as long as it took — and still put my son on a horse and ride west.
Five years ago, I saw a man his height take a boy from the orphanage two ridges south. I never forgot the look of his hand on the boy’s wrist.
I held my son tighter under my arm and didn't sleep.
By morning, my body was running on the current it used when something stood at the edge of the clearing.
I moved through the cottage scanning like I always did — the three vials on the second shelf, the kettle, the door, Noah in the back room — except that for the first time since the morning Theodora left, it was failing me in specific ways.
I put the kettle on twice in an hour and forgot it both times.
I crossed to the workbench and forgot what I crossed for.
I kept finding myself at the kitchen window.
I didn't let myself look long; I let my eye pass over the canvas, well-stone and the herb bed, and each time I told myself I was only taking stock of the yard.
I wasn't.
I was staring at the man outside, camped in a tent.
The man on the stump was whittling. I could see the small movement of his hands from the workbench — the turn of his wrist, the steady push of the blade, the shavings collecting in a neat pile beside his boot.
He didn't call out or approach. He didn't, in the long stretch of the night and the morning, raise his voice once.
It didn't soften me. It made me sharper. A man who knew how to wait believed he had time. And a man who believed he had time thought the thing beyond the fence would come to him in the end.
I gripped the kettle handle tighter. “He could sit there until the snow came.”
Noah came out of the back room at mid-morning with his lore book under one arm and a piece of buttered bread in his hand.
He settled himself at the kitchen table for the thousandth time in five years: book open, chin in one hand, his eyes on the window.
I taught him to read at that table over a winter when he was five and a half. The table was the place we built it.
I took the kettle off the trivet and crossed to him.
"Eat first, Noah," I told him.
"I am eating, Mommy!" He waved the bread in his hand.
"You're holding."
He took a small bite. He chewed it slowly with his eyes on the window.
"Mommy?"
"Mmhmm?"
"Why is he sad?"
The same question he asked on the porch — now in the level voice of a boy asking the kitchen air and letting his mother answer if she could.
I sat down across from him and poured tea into his cup.
"He's lost someone."
"Who?"
"I don't know yet. He'll tell us when he's ready."
"Why was he looking for his son?"
I was waiting for the question. The asking of it now, across my kitchen table, with my son's face turned up at me, was something I had no decoration in me for.
"Because he lost him a long time ago. And he believes you're him." I couldn't lie.
Noah went very still.
His chin came off his hand. The cup in his other hand began, faintly, to shake.
"Am I, Mommy? Why did I make that sound?"
"I don't know."
"Mommy."
"I don't know, Noah. He believes you are. Your body has been telling me something for six months I don't have the words for. I don't know anything yet. But I want you to hear me say this."
I leaned forward and put my hand over his cup. The cup steadied.
"You are my son. You were my son the morning of the fire and you have been my son every morning since.
Whatever else is true — whatever the man at the gate is, whatever your body is doing, whatever your name was the day before the fire — you are my son.
That isn't a thing that goes away because a man rides up the track with a question. "
He didn't take his hand out from under mine.
"The man has the same eyes and hair as me, Mommy."
I sighed. That much was true.
"He may be right. I don't know yet. But you are also mine, and the man at the gate doesn't get to choose between those two things. You and I get to choose. We will choose together. And until we have chosen, no one is taking you anywhere."
He nodded once.
"Mommy."
"Yes?"
"Is he going to take me?"
"No."
It came out harder than I meant it to. I didn't soften it. I let it sit on the table between us, the small flat no of a woman who had been a mother for five years and wasn't going to start being something else this morning.
"He won't take you, Noah. Because I won't let him. And if he tries — if he ever tries — you and I will be on the road south by nightfall, and we leave the cottage behind. There is no place between here and the southern sea I haven't already mapped in my own head for where we will go."
He looked at me. "You'd leave the cottage?"
"For you. Yes."
He didn't speak for a long beat. Then he took his hand out from under mine, turned it over, and put it on top, his palm flat over the back of my hand. He had not, in five years, made the gesture first.
"I don't want to leave the cottage."
"I know."
"I want to know what I am."
"I know that, too."
"Maybe he can tell me without taking me."
I looked at him. The asking didn't have to be a war.
The man at the gate was a wolf at a gate, and the boy at my table was the clear voice of the only person in the world I built a cottage around, and the boy just told me, without meaning to, the only thing he was asking of me.
I closed my hand around his. The kettle behind us hissed against the trivet.
I got up, took it off, and crossed back to the table.
Beyond the gate, the man on the stump finished the small wonky shape in his hand, stood and walked to the flat rock by my gate, set the thing down, and walked back to the stump. Noah watched him do it. So did I.
I went to the gate after dusk.
I waited until the canvas was lit faintly from the inside and the smoke from his fire died down to slow gray threads, and I took the long way across the yard because the woodpile was between the kitchen door and the yard. I checked it, then crossed the rest of the way.
The thing on the flat rock was a wooden wolf.
It was rough at the edges and the wolf’s ears lay flat against its head, its body crouched as if at a den entrance, watching. I picked it up. The wood was warm from the day's sun.
I almost left it where he put it.
I held it in my hand and looked at the canvas across the ten paces.
I thought about his question — where did you find my son?
— the carving that was warm in my hand, and my chest tightened, all at once, my fingers closing around the carved wolf with something close to anger.
A wolf on a rock would soften me, he thought.
A wooden thing in my son’s hand would do the same.
I brought it inside anyway. Noah would find it in the morning if I didn't, and the table-promise required that the man on the stump not get to give my son a thing without me seeing it first.
I set the wolf on the workbench next to the mugwort, and didn't look at it again that night.
* * *
The basket came on the third morning.
I saw it through the kitchen window — the basket on the flat rock at the half-stretched hour after dawn, the man already back at the stump with his elbows on his knees. I went out across the yard with my apron still on and didn't slow my step.
I knew, before I reached the fence, what the basket would hold — the shape of a loaf under the cloth, the small weight of eggs at one end, the wedge of something wrapped at the other — and I knew, in the part of me I wasn't yet letting speak, that the basket was the second time in eight years I had been given something that way.
Theodora gave it that way. She set things on the windowsill in the back room when I was sick. She laid the small woollen mittens on the kitchen table on the first cold morning of every autumn. She never made me thank her.
It made me angrier.
He didn't have the right to give that way.
He didn't have the right to lay a basket of bread and eggs on the flat rock at my gate the same way a mother left things for a child who didn't yet know how to ask, and he didn't have the right to do it on the third morning of a three-day siege of my fence.
He was a wolf at my gate. He came up the path the day before yesterday, prepared to take my son.
I reached the fence and lifted the cloth — bread, eggs, a wedge of cheese in waxed cloth at the bottom — then drew the basket through the slats as I would have taken a thing from any peddler.
I didn't mean to look up. But I did.
The half-gold I saw on my porch wasn't in his eyes this morning.
The eyes were just steel-grey, a handsome man sitting on a stump and not looking at the cottage, and he lifted his eyes only because my hand closed on the basket handle and his body told his eyes that the moment was the one he was allowed to be present in.
He looked at me.
I made a face. I met his eye and let him see how unsure I was of what he was, and I held the look. He brought me bread. I had a son in the cottage behind me whose fingers were tight in the back of my apron string two days earlier on a porch. He gave me bread. I gave him the look.
He looked away first.
The heat that arrived in my ears on the porch arrived a second time, and the heat in my cheeks behind it, so I turned my back to the fence with the basket against my hip and walked the long path to the cottage with my ears hot, face hot, and my hands very steady on the handle.
I didn't say thank you. I hadn't said thank you to anyone in five years, and I wasn't going to begin with the man.
I walked back to the cottage holding the basket close, both arms — carrying a thing I wasn't yet sure was mine. I didn't let myself think about the comparison, but I thought about it anyway.
I set the basket on the kitchen table, unwrapped the cheese, broke a piece off the bread, and chewed it without tasting it. I told myself it was only bread, and that a basket of it on a flat rock didn't buy the man the right to anything I had not already decided to give him.
By the next morning, Noah crept out and brought back two more — a wooden bird, the wings carved tight to the body, and later a wooden key, the bow at the top a flat oval, the bit at the bottom shaped like a real key's. He set the bird in my hand at breakfast.
"From the rock?" I asked.
He nodded. "From the rock."
"Did you talk to him?"
"No, Mommy. He wasn't on the stump. He was in the trees, getting more pine."
I turned the bird over in my hand. The wings were tight to the body. The eye was a small notch.
"Mommy?"
"Mmm."
"Are you angry?"
He had the voice of a nine-year-old who could read a kitchen.
"Yes."
"At him?"
"Yes."
"For what?"
I set the bird down. "For coming. For thinking that riding up the path with that look on his face was the same as being allowed onto my porch. For believing he could take you. For the wolf. For the basket."
"He hasn't taken me."
"He hasn't taken you yet."
Noah turned the bird over and looked back at me.
"But you're not going to let him, right?"
"No."
"Then it's all right that he made me a bird."
He set the bird back in my palm and closed my fingers around it. "It's a good bird, Mommy."
"It's a good bird." The smile came before I could stop it — my son had a toy.
I put the wolf and the bird in a row on the kitchen windowsill where the sun caught them in the morning, and the small wooden key came at midday and went on the same windowsill at the end of the row.
The three small wooden things sat on the windowsill — plain, ordinary, the household of a child who was given a toy and decided where to keep it.
I left them where Noah put them. I still didn't soften.
* * *
The peddler came up the path on the fourth afternoon.
I'd known his step for eight years. He had two pack mules and a thin gray face and a tread the mules followed without needing to be led. He had been in and out of my clearing in every season since I was eighteen, and he had never, in any of those seasons, raised his voice at my fence either.
I met him at the gate. He set his pack down. He looked at the canvas tent ten paces past the fence. He looked at the man on the stump, then at me.
"Marion."
"Owain."
He didn't pick up his pack again. He looked at the tent — at the man. He looked, finally, at the flat rock by my gate.
He said it low enough not to be heard by the man on the stump.
"Is that a wolf at your fence, child?"
I had not heard a peddler at my fence call me a child in years. The Owains of the road had called me Marion since I was eighteen. The slip of the word under his voice told me everything about the importance of what he was telling me.
"He won't be there long," I said.
He looked at me a beat longer. Thirty years on the roads taught him to listen. He heard what I said.
He shifted the strap of his pack and looked once at the cottage, then once at the woods to the east — the eastern path Theodora had warned me off after dusk when I was a child — one I'd never taken in the dark, and had been telling Noah all summer to leave alone.
He looked back at me.
"Be careful, child," Owain warned. "There are men asking about a boy in these woods."
He nodded once, lifted the strap of his pack, clicked his tongue at the mules, and walked on.
The sound of their hooves on the dirt path went the long way around the south end of the clearing, and the road took him out of sight at the curve past the elderflower stand.
I stood at my fence with the basket of bread and eggs from a man on a stump in one hand and the warning from a man I had trusted for eight years in the other.
I didn't know which of the two I should be afraid of.
I didn't know that my body had already chosen.