The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  “But not too busy for the old witch,” Sam said, swinging his legs over the edge of the counter and standing up. He zipped his chinos, then watched, interested, as I zipped my jeans. “Although I guess I ought to thank you.”

  I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. The last time I’d seen Helle was at the school Christmas concert. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow, as I reminded him. Mrs. Sprague’s punch and cookies.

  Sam dipped his chin toward his neck, regarding me intently, suspiciously, from over the pinkish rim tops of his glasses. “Helle moved out four days ago. Moving in with you, she said. A suitcase, a tape deck, a brown paper grocery bag full of notebooks and tapes—granted she’s small, but not so small that you wouldn’t notice. It’s been my experience,” he added, “that for a small woman she takes up an enormous amount of room.”

  “What do you mean,” I asked, “with me?” I hadn’t seen her. I felt angry, alarmed. With me? “Maybe we should call the police.” I was just sliding off the counter when all of a sudden it caught my eye, a little circular smear of yellow light leaping sporadically from window to ceiling, from ceiling to ax handle, from ax handle to watering can, from watering can to rabbit, from rabbit to Sam’s guilt-stricken face.

  “You folks find?” asked Mr. Bidwell, dressed exactly like Mr. Shank in a crisply ironed pale blue smock, although in the case of Mr. Bidwell it was his body which was long and flat, and his head which was short and round. “The light must’ve but lucky for us batteries.”

  “No problem,” Sam said, holding aloft a little cellophane-wrapped package of lantern mantles, white silky things like doll socks. “Right where they were supposed to be.”

  Mr. Bidwell bowed his head and raised the flashlight in an odd gesture of resignation. “Wiring left a lot to someday if both ain’t dead.”

  Sam put his lips to my ear. “Do you think when they’re together,” he whispered, “they make complete sentences?”

  THE TWINS, as I found out soon enough, had been aware of Helle’s plans for almost a month. She’d sworn them to secrecy and promised them a fabulous reward if they didn’t break the pact. Nor had any specific event—an especially heated fight with Sam, for instance—precipitated her decision. According to Helle, one fine day as she was walking past the open laundry-room door on her way to the kitchen, she heard the washer rhythmically chanting, apparently as a result of an imbalanced load, “Move out of the house, move out of the house, move out of the house …”

  Initially, however, she merely put on her army surplus coat and went for a walk, her usual route up West Hill, although not at one of her usual times. It was in fact two in the afternoon, a bright winter sun shining in a cobalt blue sky. The snow had a delicate crust on it, and with every step she heard a familiar sound, the same sound you hear when you apply the butter too roughly to a piece of toast. Such a thin layer of snow, not yet deep enough to cover the red, thorny suckers the blackberry bushes had sent up last summer in the middle of the path—they made Helle angry, so that she stamped them down under the caramel-colored rubber bottoms of her boots, dislodging the small drops of melted snow which hung suspended from the tip of each thorn. By the time she got to the crest of the hill she was breathing heavily and she felt dizzy, as if there were a hole in the top of her head into which the surprisingly hot winter sun was pouring its confusing yellow liquid. She leaned back against the trunk of one of the leafless apple trees and closed her eyes.

  Then it began, a sensation she knew from childhood: Donkey Man, she used to call it, because the first time it started with a dream in which a tiny man sat blowing a tiny brass horn as he sat on the back of a donkey; under the donkey’s hooves was a pile of bones. An auditory disturbance, Donkey Man—the whiskery sound of the apple tree’s naked branches and twigs rubbing against each other, the sound of her pulse, the sound of the world revolving in its socket—all these sounds mixed together until they became a faint piping of voices, wordless, accusatory, and mean. Over the years Helle had come to understand that what she was hearing was the sound of biological inevitability; the fact that it involved a man with a horn merely served to reinforce her belief that most Christian iconography—as, for example, the Last Judgment—had its sources in the human body.

  The human body, she thought. Feh. Dr. Kinglake was a nice enough man, dauntingly healthy himself, and reasonable rather than fatuous in his concern. But what could Dr. Kinglake tell her that she didn’t already know? Helle opened her eyes and looked around. Briefly, she was surprised to find herself where she was, at the crest of the hill, surrounded by trees. She reached into her pocket for a cigarette, then remembered that in a moment of misguided resolution she’d thrown the pack away. Was it possible, she wondered, that these trees were older than she was? And if they were, then how could it be that every summer they continued to put forth fruit, hard little green balls, sour and wormy, but fruit nonetheless? Whereas her latest opera was less a blossoming than an evulsion, and what was being wrenched out of her was like what came out of the front lawn the time Sam pulled loose the elm stump. Chickadees and finches were flickering in and out of the branches all around her, their bright small bodies landing and taking off; thrushes were rustling among the thick growth of dead bedstraw and blackberry bushes. The world was certainly a very lively place! Okay, she thought, have it your way. And then she began to feel as she had, when she was seven years old, standing with her mother at the doorway to the bog; all at once Helle Ten Brix realized that she was strangely exhilarated. Instead of returning to the house she decided to follow the footpath that led off to the right, winding steeply down among the trees of a complicated, dense woods until it met the Branch Road.

  This was a chilly spot, this intersection, for the Branch Road cut through a narrow valley between two steep ridges thick with pines, and even on the hottest summer day the dirt surface of the road remained dark and moist. The sun might be shining, but its heat was absorbed by millions of pine needles high up on the ridges, so only cold scraps and rags of light fell into the valley. Nobody who had any choice in the matter lived on the Branch Road; poor people like me lived there, the houses becoming increasingly decrepit and small the further you got from town.

  By the time Helle came out onto the road, it was about four o’clock. She hesitated for a second or two: Maren seemed to be an easygoing woman, but it drove her crazy when people were late for supper. That was what happened to you when you decided to believe in comfort; you became despotic. If you discovered an ant walking across your kitchen countertop, you imagined your house being devoured by termites. Not like Buggy Moore, Helle thought, whose house she could now see a short distance down the Branch Road, the larger pieces of litter in the yard around it—the rusting sap buckets and sets of bedsprings, the dismantled pump, the front end of an aquamarine Chevy—positioned on the white sheet of snow like objects on display in a museum. When she got closer, Helle could see Buggy Moore himself, sitting on the porch smoking a cigarette, a sight which caused to surge through her the addicted smoker’s wild desire for that first inhalation, that first intake of smoke, that reminder of how there’s at least one way in life of getting down to the bottom of things. A cigarette, she thought, reaching into her pocket, which was, of course, empty.

  “Evenin’,” Buggy said, taking a long drag, forming his lips into a neat O; he filled the cold blue air around his head with smoke rings and then tossed the still-lit cigarette into the snow at his feet, where it glowed bright orange for a moment before going out. Rumor had it that Buggy Moore had at one time been a great ladies’ man, that he was the one responsible for burning down Cecil LePan’s house after he found out that Cecil had been “sniffing around” the door of the town beauty, Aggie Bent. But now Aggie Bent was dead—as was Cecil LePan—and Buggy Moore was sitting on his porch in a black-and-red-plaid hunting jacket, buttoned wrong, so that one side of the collar was lower than the other, revealing a wedge of shirt, the fabric faintly luminous.

  Helle asked hi
m if he could spare a cigarette, and he moved over a little on the porch, patting the splintering gray boards with a speckled, rachitic hand. Through one of the two front windows she could see a table, its chrome legs and rim fuzzy with rust, a big, shapeless white cat pooling out on it around a roast pan, batting with its paw at whatever was inside. Buggy told Helle that when he was a boy, girls didn’t smoke. No offense, but that’s the way it was. He held out a crumpled pack, and although Helle was dismayed to see that it was blue-green, signifying menthol, she took a cigarette anyway. “Allow me,” Buggy said, striking a match. Maybe Helle would like a little something to wash it down with? His face was sprightly and full of suggestion, reminding her of how the habits of youth, left to languish during the dispassionate, busy middle years of a person’s life, tended to reappear in old age. Buggy Moore, she realized, was flirting with her. No thank you, she said, she’d already presumed on his hospitality; it was getting late and she still had to walk back to town. Across the road, where a little stream trickled down among mossy rocks and frozen ferns, the rocks were no longer sparkling, the snow was no longer white, and obviously this was because the sun’s light was no longer poking through the now-black needles of the pines growing along the ridge at their backs.

  Buggy Moore asked if she knew the way, then yawned and looked around; the coming of darkness, for him, meant bedtime and, with luck, the chance in his dreams to kiss Aggie Bent on the porch swing of her mother’s house, screened from the street by a wall of morning-glory vines. It was like the song, Buggy said—you could take the high road, you could take the low road. The important thing was not to get lost, although people always did. Mostly women. Well, women and cats. He held out his hand and Helle could feel his fingers—the metacarpals smooth and distinct within their sheath of dry old skin—closing around her own dry old fingers. “Don’t be a stranger,” Buggy called after her, as she started walking off down the Branch Road. “Fat chance,” Helle replied. But she said it softly, the words blowing out softly ahead of her into the cold cold night, in the direction of the cold cold town.

  What time was it? Helle hated watches, and although she admired the way the moon and the sun paraded across the sky, she never bothered to figure out how their movement might help her orient herself in space and time. Tonight, an almost full moon gave off a thin, sharp light: the trees’ shadows fell onto the snowy road like troughs, and Helle found herself stumbling a little, compensating for dips where there were none—it was like climbing an unfamiliar set of stairs in the dark, thinking there was one last step and coming down hard on your foot, having the wind knocked out of you. The wind, she thought. The wind. She envied Buggy Moore the dark snowy pocket of his yard, the severity of his junk, the dispassionate gaze of his shapeless white cat. Even a little money, she was thinking, is a dangerous luxury. You get yourself a little money, and with it you buy curtains for your windows. The wind coming through them loses its force; it becomes aesthetically pleasing. How beautiful, you think, and then you start making up metaphors. A breeze draining through the meshes of the fabric like whey through cheesecloth. A breath like a hand stroking a loved one’s face.

  Our greatest illusion, Helle thought. As if we ever live anywhere but under a bog. As if there’s any reason to think that breathing should be easy. She began to walk faster. The Branch Road, which had been proceeding in a more or less straight line between the two ridges, suddenly curved to the right, to make room on the left for a wide moonlit meadow, at the near end of which, Helle realized, although she’d never approached it from this direction, was the twins’ trailer. Of course this is where she’d been headed all along. Far away, at the other end of the meadow, shone the boxy yellow lights of my house; even farther away, the tiny round white lights of the first stars. She knocked first, to be polite, although the trailer was clearly empty. Then she pushed open the door and went in.

  Moonlight poured through the louvered windows, moonlight and moon shadow unrolling like a bolt of banded fabric across the narrow drain board, draping into the sink. The moon-striped floor appeared to have been recently swept by the small red-handled broom propped up in the corner; on the folding table Flo’s yellow plastic tea service was set for two, and when Helle opened the moon-striped cupboard doors she found a cellophane package of Oreos and a jar of apple juice. At first she had trouble seeing, but once her eyes adjusted she discovered a box of candle ends on the counter, beside a box of kitchen matches. She lit a candle and dripped some wax into a clam shell that obviously was used for this purpose; then, when the candle was firmly stuck in position, she poured herself a teacupful of apple juice, took four Oreos from the cellophane package, and sat down on one of the beach chairs to eat. The truth is, Helle was extremely hungry. As she told me later, she’d never tasted anything so delicious as that juice and those cookies.

  After she’d finished eating, Helle reached into her pocket and took out her white notebook. For the first time in a long while she felt a song—a small, inconclusive burr at first, then rigidly spoked like an asterisk, its spokes extending outward at varying rates of speed—jumping around in the place between her ears. “The bog is a tannery,” she wrote, “the Bog Queen alone can turn flesh into leather, can alone give the bones to her three starveling daughters; so her wrath was unloosed when down through the water came two human shoes with human feet in them. Such beautiful shoes!”

  Helle put down her pencil. This was a previously unsuspected aspect of the Bog Queen’s character, but it didn’t get at the source of her mounting excitement. She shut her eyes and saw once again the Great Bog at Horns, a soup plate piled full of spongy matter under a starry sky, and somewhere in the middle of it a smaller version of herself, standing there watching as her new pair of shoes began sinking into the reddish-black bog water. What time was it, and what was she doing there all alone? Where was the loaf of bread? Even though the water was cold, the night air was mild, thickening with insects, and the peat was imperceptibly sinking and rising, sinking and rising, as if under the touch of a wide, consoling palm. Meanwhile, the smaller version of herself was gasping—how slyly the bog wicked the air out of you, so you felt you’d do anything for just one deep breath, though if you succumbed you would carry the bog inside your body wherever you went, and you would grow the way the mosses did, alive at the top, dead at the bottom. “Air on top, sponge below,” Helle wrote. “A stage divided horizontally?” But what she really wanted to convey was the sense of an absolute boundary being violated. One minute you could see the black and boundless sky pricked with stars, and breathe the sweet night air—for the air above a bog is unbelievably sweet, since the decay occurs so far below its surface—and the next minute your eyes and nose and mouth would be plugged shut. That was what excited Helle. An opera conducted in a place apparently without air, indeed without space of any kind. And what, exactly, did she mean by such a thing?

  She looked up from the notepad and there was a girl, her hair coiled around her head in thick yellow braids, a stalwart figure in a long red dress and dark green boots, seated in the beach chair on the opposite side of the table. “Where did you come from?” Helle asked. “Here and there,” said the girl, as if naming actual places. This wasn’t a ghost, Helle knew. This was a figment of her imagination, conjured by the notion of the story Inger, plucked from the great blue beyond. The real Inger, lacking the necessary restless fixation on the future, would never have turned into a ghost. “What are you doing here?” Helle asked, and Inger cocked her head to one side. “A cookie would be nice,” she said, and Helle thought tenderly, Just like you—always hungry. “A cookie would be pointless,” Helle said, and when she took a breath she could feel her sorrow, like something heavy making its own hole and then sinking into it. “But the shoes are a ruse,” Helle wrote. She could hardly see the words on the page; the candle had melted down into a white puddle in the clam shell, on top of which the flame ferried about, trembling. “She binds your neck with a sphagnum noose; she steals your breath.” Helle look
ed up, and across the table Inger was frowning. “You’ve gotten so old,” Inger said. “How could it have happened that you’d get so old?” “Because I never died,” Helle said. Then she put her head in her arms and wept.

  By the time she looked up Inger was gone, and Ruby and Flo were standing at the door, Ruby regarding her nervously, Flo with interest. They’d noticed a strange, winking light coming from the windows of the trailer, Flo explained, as they stood together in the bathroom brushing their teeth. Does your mother know you’re here? Helle asked, sniffing, and Flo said I didn’t, I was already asleep. Fireflies, Ruby had suggested; maybe the whole trailer was full of fireflies. But Flo had pointed out that it was winter. Probably a burglar, Flo hinted; if they hurried they could surprise him in the act. A girl who at least in her waking hours knew no fear, my Flo; a girl whose routine disappointments had left her prematurely resigned to whatever life might offer up, thus providing Ruby with an illusion of constant shelter. They’d put on their matching pink parkas and blue snowmobile boots, but there was enough snow in the meadow that when they got to the trailer, the legs of Flo’s pajamas and the hem of Ruby’s nightgown were sopping.

  “This is our house,” Flo said, informatively. Helle sniffed again, and dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve. “I apologize,” she said. “The door was open.” Only it wasn’t really their house, Ruby corrected. She called Flo’s attention to the open package of Oreos and the jar of apple juice. Maybe Helle was just hungry; after all, Ruby observed, she was awfully skinny—whereupon, to the girls’ astonishment, Helle rolled back her sleeve and made a small, egglike muscle. “I’m fit,” she said, “not skinny. As I said, the door was open. Certainly I’ll be happy to replace whatever I ate, although, to be perfectly frank, the cookies were stale and the juice was beginning to turn.” She went on to remind them that she was an old woman, in case they hadn’t noticed. Of course the young rarely took notice of the old, unless they happened to be extremely lonely. Under such circumstances a young person might overlook the decrepitude, and turn an old person into the object of adoration. The whiskery kisses, the frightening aroma of the underclothes—all those things, Helle said, could be overlooked, if you were lonely enough. Ruby tugged at the sleeve of Flo’s parka. “I want to go home,” she whispered, but Flo just stood there. “Who said anything about being lonely?” she asked. Twins were never lonely. Ah, Helle replied, she’d forgotten. Twins. No doubt Castor and Pollux, those famous twins, would have had something to say on that score if their father hadn’t changed them into stars, rendering them effectively speechless. “But we don’t have a father,” Ruby said. “Only a mother and a dog.”