My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (26 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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A log in the fire collapsed with a sound like a hiss. “You’ve heard of the king’s marriage? To the witch-queen?” he asked.
Maura knew only that the king had married.
“It happened this way,” he said, and told her how his sister had woven shirts of nettles and how the archbishop had accused her of witchcraft, and the people sent her to the fire. How the king, her husband, said he loved her, but did nothing to save her, and it was her brothers, all of them swans, who encircled her until she broke the spell, and they were men again, all except for his single wing.
So now she was wife to a king who would have let her burn, and queen of those who’d sent her to the fire. These were her people, this her life. There was little in it that he’d call love. “My brothers don’t mind the way I do,” he said. “They’re not as close to her. We were the youngest together, she and I.”
He said that his brothers had settled easily enough into life at court. He was the only one whose heart remained divided. “A halfway heart, unhappy to stay, unhappy to go,” he said. “A heart like your mother’s.” This took Maura by surprise. She’d thought he’d slept through her stories about her mother. Her breath grew thin and quick. He must also remember, then, how she’d slept beside him.
He said that in his dreams, he still flew. It hurt to wake in the morning, find himself with nothing but his clumsy feet. And at the change of seasons, the longing to be in the air, to be on the move, was so intense, it overtook him. Maybe that was because the curse had never been completely lifted. Maybe it was because of the wing.
“You won’t be staying, then,” Maura said. She said this carefully, no shaking in her voice. Staying in the house by the sea had long been the thing Maura most wanted. She would still have a mother if they’d only been able to stay in the house by the sea.
“There’s a woman I’ve loved all my life,” he answered. “We quarreled when I left; I can’t leave it like that. We don’t choose whom we love,” he told Maura, so gently that she knew he knew. If she wasn’t to be loved in return, she would have liked not to be pitied for it. She got neither of these wishes. “But people have this advantage over swans, to put their unwise loves aside and love another. Not me. I’m too much swan for that.”
He left the next morning. “Good-bye, Father,” he said, kissing the old man. “I’m off to find my fortune.” He kissed Maura. “Thanks for your kindness and your stories. You’ve the gift of contentment,” he said, and as soon as he named it, he took it from her.
 
We come now to the final act. Keep your eyes shut tight, little one. The fire inside is dying and the wind outside. As I rock you, monsters are moving in the deep.
Maura’s heart froze in her chest. Summertime came and she said good-bye to the seaside house and felt nothing. The landlord had sold it. He went straight to the bars to drink to his good fortune. “For more than it’s worth,” he told everyone, a few cups in. “Triple its worth,” a few cups later.
The new owners took possession in the night. They kept to themselves, which made the curious locals more curious. A family of men, the baker told Maura. He’d seen them down at the docks. They asked more questions than they’d answer. They were looking for sailors off a ship called
The Faucon Dieu
. No one knew why they’d come or how long they’d stay, but they had the seaside house guarded as if it were a fort. Or a prison. You couldn’t take the road past without one or another of them stopping you.
Gossip arrived from the capital—the queen’s youngest brother had been banished and the queen, who loved him, was sick from it. She’d been sent into seclusion until her health and spirits returned. Maura overheard this in a kitchen as she was cleaning. There was more, but the sound of the ocean had filled Maura’s ears and she couldn’t hear the rest. Her heart shivered and her hands shook.
That night she couldn’t sleep. She got up and, like her mother before her, walked out the door in her nightgown. She walked the long distance to the sea, skirting the seaside house. The moonlight was a road on the water. She could imagine walking on it as, perhaps, her mother had done. Instead she climbed to the cliff where she’d first seen Sewell. And there he stood again, just as she remembered, wrapped in his cape. She called to him, her breath catching so his name was a stutter. The man in the cape turned and he resembled Sewell strongly, but he had two arms and all of Maura’s years. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Is it Maura?” he asked, and the voice was very like Sewell’s voice. He walked toward her. “I meant to call on you,” he said, “to thank you for your kindness to my brother.”
The night wasn’t cold, but Maura’s nightgown was thin. The man took off his cape, put it around her shoulders as if she were a princess. It had been a long time since a man had treated her with such care. Sewell had been the last. But Sewell had been wrong about one thing. She would never trade her unwise love for another, even if offered by someone with Sewell’s same gentleness and sorrow. “Is he here?” Maura asked.
He’d been exiled, the man said, and the penalty for helping him was death. But they’d had warning. He’d run for the coast, with the archbishop’s men hard behind him, to a foreign ship where his brothers had arranged passage only hours before it became illegal to do so. The ship was to take him across the sea to the country where they’d lived as children. He was to send a pigeon to let them know he’d arrived, but no pigeon had come. “My sister, the queen,” the man said, “has suffered from the not-knowing. We all have.”
Then, just yesterday, for the price of a whiskey, a middle brother had gotten a story from a sailor at the docks. It was a story the sailor had heard recently in another harbor, not a story he’d lived. There was no way to know how much of it was true.
In this story there was a ship whose name the sailor didn’t remember, becalmed in a sea he couldn’t name. The food ran out and the crew lost their wits. There was a passenger on this ship, a man with a deformity, a wing where his arm should be. The crew decided he was the cause of their misfortunes. They’d seized him from his bed, dragged him up on deck, taken bets on how long he’d stay afloat. “Fly away,” they told him as they threw him overboard. “Fly away, little bird.”
And he did.
As he fell, his arm had become a second wing. For just one moment he’d been an angel. And then, a moment later, a swan. He’d circled the ship three times and vanished into the horizon. “My brother had seen the face of the mob before,” the man said, “and it made him regret being human. If he’s a swan again, he’s glad.”
Maura closed her eyes. She pushed the picture of Sewell the angel, Sewell the swan, away, made him a tiny figure in the distant sky. “Why was he exiled?” she asked.
“An unnatural intimacy with the queen. No proof, mind you. The king is a good man, but the archbishop calls the tune. And he’s always hated our poor sister. Eager to believe the most vile gossip,” said the man. “Our poor sister. Queen of a people who would have burned her and warmed their hands at the fire. Married to a man who’d let them.”
“He said you didn’t mind that,” Maura told him.
“He was wrong.”
The man walked Maura back to her rooms, his cape still around her. He said he’d see her again, but summer ended and winter came with no word. The weather turned bitter. Maura was bitter, too. She could taste her bitterness in the food she ate, the air she breathed.
Her father couldn’t understand why they were still in their rented rooms. “Do we go home today?” he asked every morning and often more than once. September became October. November became December. January became February.
Then late one night, Sewell’s brother knocked at Maura’s window. It was iced shut; she heard a crack when she forced it open. “We leave in the morning,” the man said. “I’m here to say good-bye. And to beg you and your father to go to the house as soon as you wake tomorrow, without speaking to anyone. We thank you for the use of it, but it was always yours.”
He was gone before Maura could find the thing that she should say
thank you
or
good-bye
or
please don’t go.
In the morning, she and her father did as directed. The coast was wrapped in a fog that grew thicker the farther they walked. As they neared the house, they saw shadows, the shapes of men in the mist. Ten men, clustered together around a smaller, slighter figure. The eldest brother waved Maura past him toward the house. Her father went to speak to him. Maura went inside.
Sometimes summer guests left cups and sometimes hairpins. These guests had left a letter, a cradle, and a baby.
The letter said: “My brother told me you could be trusted with this child. I give him to you. My brother told me you would make up a story explaining how you’ve come to own this house and have this child, a story so good that people would believe it. This child’s life depends on you doing so. No one must ever know he exists. The truth is a danger none of us would survive.”
“Burn this letter,” is how it ended. There was no signature. The writing was a woman’s.
Maura lifted the baby. She loosened the blanket in which he was wrapped. A boy. Two arms. Ten fingers. She wrapped him up again, rested her cheek on the curve of his scalp. He smelled of soap. And very faintly, beneath that, Maura smelled the sea. “This child will stay put,” Maura said aloud, as if she had the power to cast such a spell.
No child should have a mother with a frozen heart. Maura’s cracked and opened. All the love that she would someday have for this child was already there, inside her heart, waiting for him. But she couldn’t feel one thing and not another. She found herself weeping, half joyful, half undone with grief. Good-bye to her mother in her castle underwater. Good-bye to the summer life of drudgery and rented rooms. Good-bye to Sewell in his castle in the air.
Her father came into the house. “They gave me money,” he said wonderingly. His arms were full. Ten leather pouches. “So much money.”
 
When you’ve heard more of the old stories, little one, you’ll see that the usual return on a kindness to a stranger is three wishes. The usual wishes are for a fine house, fortune, and love. Maura was where she’d never thought to be, at the very center of one of the old stories, with a prince in her arms.
“Oh!” Her father saw the baby. He reached out and the pouches of money spilled to the floor. He stepped on them without noticing. “Oh!” He took the swaddled child from her. He, too, was crying. “I dreamed that Sewell was a grown man and left us,” he said. “But now I wake and he’s a baby. How wonderful to be at the beginning of his life with us instead of the end. Maura! How wonderful life is.”
My son was born with a hole in his heart, which had to be fixed when he was eighteen months old. The operation left him with a curved scar on his back, exactly the scar you’d expect if you’d had a single wing surgically removed. Because of this and because “The Wild Swans” was one of my own favorite fairy tales as a child, I often read it to him. I could see that, same as me, he would have liked to have a wing. Lucky youngest brother!
As an adult, it does bug me, though—those clear instructions to the princess: if you speak before the task is finished, your brothers will die. How could the task be considered finished when the final shirt was not? How did she know it was okay to speak with that wing still in evidence? Isn’t there, at the heart of the story, kind of a cheat? Am I okay with that? (And can I get away with something similar in my own work?)
The image of the single wing creeps into my writing a lot. It’s all over my first novel,
Sarah Canary
. I’ve written poems about it, seen it in dreams. It has a hold on me. If I haven’t read the fairy tale in a while, there are things about it I forget. But, just as it does in the story, in my memory and imagination, that wing persists.
—KJF
RIKKI DUCORNET

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