4. Now Shouting
NOW: SHOUTING
Ilsit, disobeying me and Jade, found me there when she returned to the farm hours later. “What’s all this mess?” she cried, storming into the yard.
Feebly, I explained and then let her ensuing tirade, mostly directed at Gerard, bring me some cold comfort. She pulled me to standing, propping me up, and half carried me to sit on the lone front step, then squeezed herself to sit next to me. “And they didn’t put hands on you?”
I shook my head, thinking that telling her of Bertram would serve no purpose.
We both looked up at the sound of a lone horse’s hooves to see Tessa riding towards us down the road. She was in such a hurry, she secured the gate behind her and didn’t even bother to tie up or stable her horse.
As he wandered around the yard, Ilsit said, “If Jade catches that beast in her cabbage, she’ll spank you with a switch, Tessa.”
“What happened?” Tessa asked, looking at the heap of charred books in the yard. “Kate, the wheelwright’s woman, came to my house—said the priest, the lord, and guards were coming out here to raid your house.”
While my sister-in-law sat down on the other side of me, Ilsit informed her of what I had just relayed. None of the three of us were small framed, and there was hardly room for all of us on the step.
“At least they didn’t find the moss or any of the other medicinals.”
“That’s what I said,” Ilsit agreed. “I know you love your books, Robbie.”
I remained silent, a numbness having descended on me. All I could think of was The Life of Una flickering and disintegrating before my eyes.
“They won’t box you for this, I don’t think,” Tessa offered.
“The destruction of your belongings alone is a punishment. Starling will enjoy the idea of you being afraid of boxing rather than actually doing it again. That’s how his head works.
And it really is better than being found with mother’s moss. ”
“Better the books than something that might save a woman’s life,” added Ilsit. “Sorry. I do feel for you. I’m just not much of a reader.”
Despite my exhaustion and despair, I huffed. “You’ve read The Warrior’s Lady about ten times since you got here.”
“Well, he puts his head under her skirts for a whole . . . four pages at least.”
“Oh! I like that one too,” said Tessa.
“You don’t even like men,” I exclaimed.
“I don’t have to eat pig to know bacon can smell good.”
Ilsit burst out laughing. “Men are pigs.”
Inside the house, I sat in the old rocking chair, my hands folded in my lap, nearly unable to move.
I let the two of them tidy the house, put cast-about tools and dishes away, sweep up all the twigs and leaves spread by the guards having torn down our drying herbs and ferns.
I let them refold and rehang all of our clothes.
I let them straighten and reposition all the furniture that had been pushed over and aside. I wanted to help, but I could not move.
Ilsit assured me that Jade and Fox were spending the night in the forest with the medicinals to be safe.
They made me go to bed, said I needed to sleep.
Ilsit went to bed on her mattress in the front room, and Tessa took Jade’s mattress beside it.
In the morning I rose early, having slept little, and told them I was going to let Jade and Fox know it was safe to come home.
On my way into the forest, down a footpath I knew would lead to the old warden shed that Jade had once lived in, I heard her voice through the trees.
“We’ll leave all of it in the forest for now,” she was saying to Fox.
I squinted through the trees and could barely make out their figures in the cloudy morning’s mist. They were on another footpath, returning to the farm.
Knowing I could not withstand seeing their faces when they saw the burned books, knowing it was perhaps cowardly, I kept on.
I craved the solitude of Nyossa, the first place that had ever felt like home.
I rambled for a time, knowing I had about an hour before their search party would come for me.
More and more, our home had gotten cramped—by Ilsit’s moving in, though I did welcome her, and by Tessa’s frequent overnight stays, her saying she felt lonely now without her wife or stepdaughter. After this loss, I craved solitude.
There was a clearing to which I often returned.
In wetter springs, it was like a marsh, a runoff from a part of the river that seeped into the land, providing a perfect home for dragonflies, turtles, and frogs.
When the summer sun hit, it dried out. Nests of snakes and rats lived there then, birds of prey flying overhead and eyeing their dinner.
I liked to stand at its edge and see how many living beings I could pick out before one of them noticed me and scurried away.
“Today is my fortieth birthday,” I cried out, flinching when I heard the resounding rustling of creatures hiding themselves from me. I loved the gods of Tintar, but I felt like yelling today. I had yelled at them before without reaping a punishment.
“Today, I turn forty. And today, my most prized possession has been taken from me. Taken from me and destroyed by the hands of men.” I paused and let a tear run down my cheek.
“They took The Life of Una! They took Una from me. My favorite book of all. She is gone!” I paused again, overcome with a sob, a strangled gurgle of a thing.
I went on, saying, “So, I would ask you, gods and goddesses. I would ask you the same thing I shouted to you but five winters past. What am I to do now? Why is this fight even worth fighting, and why am I the one forever on a battlefield? Why me?”
I shook my head and paced a little along the edge of the clearing, watching a turtle slip into a ditch while three nearby butterflies shot up into the air above him, frightened by his escape. I knew I was disturbing the forest. I knew I was treading with clumsiness, but I was at the end of a rope.
I went on. “The thing of it is, I have a god-shaped hollow in me. My church cut that part of my heart out when I was still a little girl, and I have to fill it with something. I think I have spent my life filling it. I thought you were worthy of that spot. Godsdamn it!”
A flock of birds at the other side of the clearing collectively launched themselves into the sky at my last curse.
“I did not lose hope, you know!” I said, spinning from one direction to the other, finger raised to the sky.
“I did not lose hope when they took my mentor from me. I did not lose hope when my lover married my sister. I did not lose hope when my husband died. Nor when my beloved twin did. And even a few seasons past, when my willful, spoiled niece left us to marry the enemy? I did not give up hope. I kept pressing on, gathering the moss and delivering it in the dead of night. I went back to delivering babes when my sister could not, though I was never a talented midwife, though I even dislike that they call me ‘midwife’ now. I never gave up. I never lost hope!”
Needing to breathe, I halted my steps and my words.
Then I said, “They have taken the thing that told me I was not mad, that I was a good-hearted girl despite what my priest told me, the book that told me I was not destined to be a demon’s thrall in the afterlife.
The whole reason I ever had a mind open enough to learn from Magda, to want to care for other women, to be your outlaw? They took it!”
I put my hands over my heart and tried to regulate my breathing.
“I will still work and work on behalf of those other than myself. But you should know, I am utterly, entirely without hope. I labor for nothing that is myself. I work for others only. I—” I cut myself off, truly sobbing again, unable to quit.
“I work for my girl and my friends and the memory of my sister and my man. But I have nothing left in me. There is no well from which to draw water. I have lost all hope. I merely tire on for the sake of duty.”
When I was done weeping at the edge of the marsh, I returned to the house and held a teary-eyed Fox and offered her my condolences.
She had never spoken during the entirety of her life, and though we had designed a system of hand signals that grew more and more complex over time, books had been another way for her to communicate.
Her soundless weeping helped to lessen my own and, over her head, I offered an equally grieving Jade a weak smile.
The five of us spent that day continuing to clean the house, feeding the animals, quietly discussing what we should do next—what would be a hiding place for the medicinals when we returned them from the forest—and burning various candles of Tessa’s at open windows in the farmhouse to get the smell of burning parchment and leather out of our noses.
We were subdued but we were together and, for the moment, safe. No one mentioned that it was my day of birth, and I was grateful for it.
After a dinner of fried potato served with nearly overripe peaches from the orchard, everyone squeezed into their beds, Tessa taking Fox’s bed this time as I asked the girl to join me in mine. She and Daisy the fox crawled in next to me, and we slept more soundly than I would have thought we could.
In the morning, I woke first and gingerly stepped outside to the sit on the front step.
I could smell the fresh air of a night turning into a day, the dew on the grass and in my gardens making everything sparkle faintly as the sun began to rise.
A barn owl’s flat, eerie face peeked out at me from the tree line of the forest. It was as if he was saying, “It is my bedtime now. The day is yours.”
He was right. It was time to start another day, no matter how much I may not have wanted that. I put my hands down to push myself up. When I did, my right hand skidded a little, and I looked down to see I was not touching the wood of the front step but a small, hard thing covered in old leather.
I blinked. It was a book. Transfixed, I picked it up.
I did not recognize it, but many books were without an embossing to mark what they were.
When I opened it, I saw scrawl over the book’s name on the title page.
In what seemed to be a crude ink made of something natural, like berries, in a slanted hand, there were three words.
Don’t lose hope.
It was not a printing I recognized, perhaps a newer version than the one I had always owned, but I knew the title of that book like I knew my own name. The Life of Una.