Fire Watch by Connie Willis
She looked up at me. “I sent it home with her,” she said.
“What?” I said blankly.
“He won’t … leave us alone. He—I sent Daughter Ann home with her.”
No. Oh, no.
“Henra’s good like you. She won’t save herself. She’ll never last the two years.” She looked steadily at me. “I have two other sisters. The youngest is only ten.”
“You sent the tessel home?” I said. “To your father?”
“Yes.”
“It can’t protect itself,” I said. “It doesn’t have any claws. It can’t protect itself.”
“I told you you didn’t know anything about sin,” she said, and turned away.
I never asked the dorm mother what they did with the tessels they took away from the boys. I hope, for their own sakes, that somebody put them out of their misery.
Even when I was little, I was bothered by the endings of fairy tales. It was not that I disbelieved the happy ending. It was just that there were so many loose ends that never got tied up. Like, did the prince ever miss being a frog? And what about the talking horse’s head that gave the goose girl advice? Surely they didn’t just leave him nailed up there! On the other hand, you could hardly take him down and bury him when he was still alive.
And what about all those servants and horses and cooks in “Sleeping Beauty,” thrust willy-nilly into the next century?
The Father of the Bride
I should be happy. Everyone tells me so: my wife, my daughter, my brave new son-in-law. This is the happily ever after for which we have waited all these long years. But I fear we have waited far too long, and now it is too late to be happy.
My wife tries to jolly me out of this dark mood. “The roads are better,” she says. “There is a new bridge at the ford.”
“The better for armies to pass along, burning and killing,” I answer. There are English already in Crecy; a story I would not believe at first, and they are carrying weapons I never heard of—a bow as tall as a man, a ribaud that spits black smoke and sudden death.
“You never liked the forest at our gates,” she says. “Or the wolves.”
“Nor do I like the town. And there are still wolves at our gates,” I say. “Merchants and pedlars.”
“They bring you the cinnamon and pepper for your food.”
“That give me the bellyache.”
“And medicines for the bellyache,” she says, smiling to herself. She is embroidering on a piece of linen. Do women still do that, sitting with their heads bent forward over their work, pulling the fine stitches taut with their white hands? I do not think so. Embroidered cloth can be bought by the length in the town, I suppose. What cannot be bought in that town? Beauty, perhaps. Repose. I have seen nothing of either in this new world.
“This is a beautiful coat,” said the insolent tailor they sent me to. Nothing would do but that I have a new coat for the wedding. The tailor shouted in my ear through all the fitting and did not once call me “my lord.” “A beautiful coat. Brocade. From the east.”
“Gaudy you mean,” I said, but he did not hear me. How could he? The water mill runs night and day, sawing the forest into shops, houses, bridges. Soon the whole world will be town. “The coat is too short,” I shouted at him. It showed what God intended decent men to hide.
“You are old-fashioned,” he said. “Turn around.”
The coat is too short. I am cold all the time. “Where are the servants?” I say to my wife. “I want a fire.”
She looks up from her sewing as if she knows the answer will grieve me. “Gone,” she says. “We are getting new ones from the town.”
“Gone? Where?” I say, but I know already. Hardly awake, the cooks have run off to be bakers; the chamberlains, burghers; the pages, soldiers. “I shall catch my death of cold in this coat.”
“The pedlars have medicines for chills,” she says, and looks sideways at me to make me smile.
“It is all so changed,” I say, frowning instead. “There is nothing about this world that I like.”
“Our daughter has a husband and a kingdom,” she says. “She did not prick her finger on a spindle and die that terrible day.”
“No,” I say, and have to smile after all. She is so beautiful, so happy with her prince. She would not have minded sleeping a thousand years so long as he kissed her awake. She thinks the forest parted when he rode to find her, and I do not tell her it was not she he came to find, but land for his fields, land for his new town, land to clear and settle and tax. He was as surprised as any of his woodsmen to find us drowsing here. But he seems to love her, and there is no denying he is a brave young man. He moves through this strange time as if it held no terrors. Perhaps the forest does part for him. Or perhaps he has only chopped it down.
Only a little of the forest remains to the east, and even it is not so dark as before, so full of guarding briars. I went into it one day, looking, or so I said to myself, for the good fairy who saved my daughter, though she had never lived in that part of the forest. I found myself instead near the tower of the old fairy, who by her spite brought us all to this pass.
“I have come to ask a question,” I shouted into the silence of the trees. “Why did you hate us so? What had we done to you that you should have come to our christening bearing curses?” There was no answer. “Had you outlived your time so that you hated all things new, even my infant daughter?” Silence. “Do you hate us still?”
In the answering silence I thought I could hear the town, builders and rumbling wheels. As I came nearer, I saw that the tower had been knocked down, the stones heaped into piles and carted away. I followed the tracks of the wheels and came to a sunny clearing and to men in a holy habit I did not recognize. They told me they are Cistercians (are there new saints as well? Is everything new?) and that they are using the stones to build a church.
“Are you not afraid of the fairy who lived in this tower?” I asked them.
“Old man,” said one of them, clapping his hand to my shoulder, “there are no fairies. Only God and his angels.”
So I came away with the answer to my questions after all. We have outlived our old enemy, and the only curse upon us is the cruel spell of time.
“We have lived through the worst of our days,” my wife says, trying to comfort me.
“I hope so,” I say, looking out the window of my castle onto the town, the fields beyond, the sea, onto a world without forests or wolves or fairies, a world with who knows what terrors to replace them? “I hope so.”
“There is not a spinning wheel in all the kingdom,” she says tearfully “Not even in the town.” She has pricked her finger on her embroidery. There are drops of blood on the linen. “I have not seen a single spinning wheel.”
“Of course not,” I say, and pat her shoulder.
There is at least no danger from that direction. What need have we of spinning wheels when every ship brings velvets, silks, cloth of gold? And perhaps other cargoes, not so welcome. English soldiers from the west. And from the east, tales of a black spell that kills men where they stand and moves like a curse toward France. Perhaps the old fairy is not dead after all but only biding her time in some darker forest to the east.
I have dozed off. My wife comes to wake me for yet another feast. I grumble and turn on my side. “You’re tired,” she says kindly “Go back to sleep.”
Would that I could.
Of all the joys of reading, the best is the surprise. The awful moment when you realize who really killed Gatsby, the almost funny moment in Murder on the Orient Express when, having announced, “They can’t all have done it!” you think, Good Lord, and then sit back to try and figure out exactly how you were set up, the silly-grin moments when heroines from Jane Austen’s to Mary Stewart’s finally recognize their true loves, and all the unlooked-for moments when you realize suddenly who the villain is or what the mysterious woman was trying to tell you.
I could not wait to become a writer and learn to do that-
A Letter from the Clearys
There was a letter from the Clearys at the post office. I put it in my backpack along with Mrs. Talbot’s magazine and went outside to untie Stitch.
He had pulled his leash out as far as it would go and was sitting around the corner, half strangled, watching a robin. Stitch never barks, not even at birds. He didn’t even yip when Dad stitched up his paw. He just sat there the way we found him on the front porch, shivering a little and holding his paw up for Dad to look at. Mrs. Talbot says he’s a terrible watchdog, but I’m glad he doesn’t bark. Rusty barked all the time and look where it got him.
I had to pull Stitch back around the corner to where I could get enough slack to untie him. That took some doing because he really liked that robin. “It’s a sign of spring, isn’t it, fella?” I said, trying to get at the knot with my fingernails. I didn’t loosen the knot, but I managed to break one of my fingernails off to the quick. Great. Mom will demand to know if I’ve noticed any other fingernails breaking.
My hands are a real mess. This winter I’ve gotten about a hundred burns on the back of my hands from that stupid wood stove of ours. One spot, just above my wrist, I keep burning over and over so it never has a chance to heal. The stove isn’t big enough and when I try to jam a log in that’s too long the same spot hits the inside of the stove every time. My stupid brother David won’t saw them off to the right length. I’ve asked him and asked him to please cut them shorter, but he doesn’t pay any attention to me.
I asked Mom if she would please tell him not to saw the logs so long, but she didn’t. She never criticizes David. As far as she’s concerned he can’t do anything wrong just because he’s twenty-three and was married.
“He does it on purpose,” I told her. “He’s hoping I’ll burn to death.”
“Paranoia is the number one killer of fourteen-year-old girls,” Mom said. She always says that. It makes me so mad I feel like killing her. “He doesn’t do it on purpose. You need to be more careful with the stove, that’s all,” but all the time she was holding my hand and looking at the big burn that won’t heal like it was a time bomb set to go off.
“We need a bigger stove,” I said, and yanked my hand away. We do need a bigger one. Dad closed up the fireplace and put the woodstove in when the gas bill was getting out of sight, but it’s just a little one because Mom didn’t want one that would stick way out in the living room. Anyway we were only going to use it in the evenings.
We won’t get a new one. They are all too busy working on the stupid greenhouse. Maybe spring will come early, and my hand will have half a chance to heal. I know better. Last winter the snow kept up till the middle of June and this is only March. Stitch’s robin is going to freeze his little tail if he doesn’t head back south. Dad says that last year was unusual, that the weather will be back to normal this year, but he doesn’t believe it either or he wouldn’t be building the greenhouse.
As soon as I let go of Stitch’s leash, he backed around the corner like a good boy and sat there waiting for me to stop sucking my finger and untie him. “We’d better get a move on,” I told him. “Mom’ll have a fit.” I was supposed to go by the general store to try and get some tomato seeds, but the sun was already pretty far west, and I had at least a half hour’s walk home. If I got home after dark I’d get sent to bed without supper and then I wouldn’t get to read the letter. Besides, if I didn’t go to the general store today they would have to let me go tomorrow and I wouldn’t have to work on the stupid greenhouse.
Sometimes I feel like blowing it up. There’s sawdust and mud on everything, and David dropped one of the pieces of plastic on the stove while they were cutting it and it melted onto the stove and stinks to high heaven. But nobody else even notices the mess, they’re so busy talking about how wonderful it’s going to be to have homegrown watermelon and corn and tomatoes next summer.
I don’t see how it’s going to be any different from last summer. The only things that came up at all were the lettuce and the potatoes. The lettuce was about as tall as my broken fingernail and the potatoes were as hard as rocks. Mrs. Talbot said it was the altitude, but Dad said it was the funny weather and this crummy Pike’s Peak granite that passes for soil around here and he went up to the little library in the back of the general store and got a do-it-yourself book on greenhouses and started tearing everything up and now even Mrs. Talbot is crazy about the idea.
The other day I told them, “Paranoia is the number one killer of people at this altitude,” but they were too busy cutting slats and stapling plastic to even pay any attention to me.
Stitch walked along ahead of me, straining at his leash, and as soon as we were across the highway, I took it off. He never runs away like Rusty used to. Anyway, it’s impossible to keep him out of the road, and the times I’ve tried keeping him on his leash, he dragged me out into the middle and I got in trouble with Dad over leaving footprints. So I keep to the frozen edges of the road, and he moseys along, stopping to sniff at potholes, and when he gets behind I whistle at him and he comes running right up.
I walked pretty fast. It was getting chilly out, and I’d only worn my sweater. I stopped at the top of the hill and whistled at Stitch. We still had a mile to go. I could see the Peak from where I was standing. Maybe Dad is right about spring coming. There was hardly any snow on the Peak, and the burned part didn’t look quite as dark as it did last fall, like maybe the trees are coming back.
Last year at this time the whole Peak was solid white. I remember because that was when Dad and David and Mr. Talbot went hunting and it snowed every day and they didn’t get back for almost a month. Mom just about went crazy before they got back. She kept going up to the road to watch for them even though the snow was five feet deep and she was leaving footprints as big as the Abominable Snowmans. She took Rusty with her even though he hated the snow about as much as Stitch hates the dark. And she took a gun. One time she tripped over a branch and fell down in the snow. She sprained her ankle and was frozen stiff by the time she made it back to the house. I felt like saying, “Paranoia is the number one killer of mother’s,” but Mrs. Talbot butted in and said the next time I had to go with her and how this was what happened when people were allowed to go places by themselves, which meant me going to the post office. And I said I could take care of myself and Mom told me not to be rude to Mrs. Talbot and Mrs. Talbot was right, I should go with her the next time.
She wouldn’t wait till her ankle was better. She bandaged it up and we went the very next day. She wouldn’t say a word the whole trip, just limped through the snow. She never even looked up till we got to the road. The snow had stopped for a little while and the clouds had lifted enough so you could see the Peak. It was really neat, like a black-and-white photograph, the gray sky and the black trees and the white mountain. The Peak was completely covered with snow. You couldn’t make out the toll road at all. We were supposed to hike up the Peak with the Clearys.
When we got back to the house, I said, “The summer before last the Clearys never came.”
Mom took off her mittens and stood by the stove, pulling off chunks of frozen snow. “Of course they didn’t come, Lynn,” she said.
Snow from my coat was dripping onto the stove and sizzling. “I didn’t mean that,” I said. “They were supposed to come the first week in June. Right after Rick graduated. So what happened? Did they just decide not to come or what?”
“I don’t know,” she said, pulling off her hat and shaking her hair out. Her bangs were all wet.
“Maybe they wrote
“It doesn’t matter,” Mom said.
“You’d think they’d have written or something,” I said.
“Maybe the post office put the letter in somebody else’s box,” Mrs. Talbot said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Mom said, and went to hang her coat over the line in the kitchen. She wouldn’t say another word about them. When Dad got home I asked him about the Clearys, too, but he was too busy telling about the trip to pay any attention to me.
Stitch didn’t come. I whistled again and then started back after him. He was all the way at the bottom of the hill, his nose buried in something. “Come on,” I said, and he turned around and then I could see why he hadn’t come. He’d gotten himself tangled up in one of the electric wires that was down. He’d managed to get the cable wound around his legs like he does his leash sometimes, and the harder he tried to get out, the more he got tangled up.
He was right in the middle of the road. I stood on the edge of the road, trying to figure out a way to get to him without leaving footprints. The road was pretty much frozen at the top of the hill, but down here snow was still melting and running across the road in big rivers. I put my toe out into the mud, and my sneaker sank in a good half inch, so I backed up, rubbed out the toe print with my hand, and wiped my hand on my jeans. I tried to think what to do. Dad is as paranoiac about footprints as Mom is about my hands, but he is even worse about my being out after dark. If I didn’t make it back in time he might even tell me I couldn’t go to the post office anymore.
Stitch was coming as close as he ever would to barking. He’d gotten the wire around his neck and was choking himself. “All right,” I said, “I’m coming.” I jumped out as far as I could into one of the rivers and then waded the rest of the way to Stitch, looking back a couple of times to make sure the water was washing away the footprints.