The hours passed. The light shifted. Everything nearby looked the same, but the depths of the forest were growing blacker. When Dirk approached a newly fallen tree that spanned a river, a little brown bird emerged from the greyed, papery leaves that still clung to its branches. You’ll have to cross eventually, said the bird.
Birds don’t talk, he said, trying his foot on the muddy roots to see how stable the tree might be.
Of course we don’t, not to humans, said the bird, cheerily enough. You’re probably just lonely. Still, watch your step. Keep to the trunk and take your time.
Oh, she added, when Dirk was about halfway across, you might drop that knife in the river if you wanted. It will do you no good, and water is efficient at rusting mettlesome items.
Beware advice you haven’t asked for, snarled the knife-head.
Both of you, be quiet, said Dirk. I must concentrate or I’ll end up washing my clothes with me in them. I’m still learning the one-eye skill.
Coming off the tree involved a run through tangled branches. His feet got wet in the far shallows. The bearskin dropped in the water, and there it stayed. Sodden, it was too heavy to lug along.
The knife and the bird fell silent. Beyond the bank, a clearing. Dirk scaled the slope to see what he might see. A wooden fence and a small stone house. A woman hunched on a bench in the westering sun. She was winding a ball of yarn. She didn’t look at the sun or at the yarn. Her eyes seemed to be settled upon something invisible in the yard, halfway between her lap and the gate.
She was an old woman, but not the old woman that Dirk had left behind. Perhaps older. Dirk had no practice at making distinctions.
The brown bird, who had fluttered about Dirk as he lumbered along, hid herself in the hood of an oak tree. She sang sweetly as the light and the shadows both lengthened. She commented on her own song as she sang it.
From far enough away, the piccolo is like a bird.
Far enough away, the bird a piccolo.
From long enough ago, the sharpest joy you ever heard
Cuts like a knife, if long enough ago.
So childhood gets stronger as we age
And haunts and taunts the venerable sage,
Till childhood itself from wherever it had seemed to go
Returns, and takes up note by note and word by word
The word we heard when bird was piccolo.
The leathery old woman shuddered, though the air seemed warm to Dirk, and the breeze refreshing. She cried out. A man came through the door and settled a bonnet upon her head, tying the strings under her chin. He wasn’t old the way she was. Though older than Dirk.
“What’s ailing you, Mutter?”
She flapped a hand in dismissal, and didn’t look at him. He went away and came back with a shawl. She pulled it over her shoulders with a kind of angry greed.
“Sunset can make the sweetest fig taste a little tart.” The man sat on the doorsill and pulled a long pipe out of a vest pocket. Crouching in the shadows, Dirk examined this enterprise of family. “Having one of your days, then?”
“Achh.” She spit on the ground. “God’s blood in a thimble.”
From the cottage came the smells of plenty—warm bread and sizzling meat, perhaps a joint of venison. Carrots in honey. Dirk’s mouth went so wet he wanted to spit, too, but wiped it out on his wrist, so to keep silent and watch how other people talked. He heard chairs scraping on wooden floorboards, so he knew someone was inside, working on supper.
Then, inside, a woman sang something nonsensical, and a child went laughing at it. The words were indistinct, but the exotic performance crowded out the bird’s song from Dirk’s mind. Such lightheartedness sounded dangerous if not insane.
The man struck a safety match upon the stone and lit his pipe. “Do you know who I am today?”
“Saint Jerome the scholar,” replied the elderly woman after a time. An effort at being canny.
“Hardly that! You always said I had noodle pudding in my skull.”
She crossed herself, apologizing for her mistake perhaps.
“Try again,” he said. “Bring yourself home, Mutter. Who am I?”
She turned the ball of yarn in her lap but didn’t look down at it. Perhaps her sight was gone. “You are the king who has a virgin daughter to marry off.”
“That’s a good one. You’ve walked sideways into one of your own stories that you used to tell me when I was a lad! But really, I’m the great king of nothing, Mutter, and I don’t have a virgin daughter but a virgin son, whose sausage hasn’t yet filled its casing. Come now. Do you really not know who I am?”
“A pest, with all your nonsense!” In a rage, she swatted at him and nearly fell off the bench. He paid her no mind.
“Who are you then? Do you remember that?”
“You tell me, if you know so much,” she snapped.
“You’re old Dame Mitzelhaupf. Agathe Mitzelhaupf. You have lived your whole life in this parish. Your husband was Gustav—do you remember Gustav? He was good to you and built you this house. Here you raised me and my sisters, till they all went off to get married.”
“Good riddance to them,” she said; and, “But I never had daughters. Too expensive.”
“And now you live here with your son, Hans. That’s me. And my wife, that’s Berthe. And our boy, your beloved little Torsten.”
“Ah, Torsten.” She sat up, as if this was the only part of her life she could identify. “Where is he?”
“Helping his mother lay the table. But it is time for him to bring the cow from the pasture. Torsten!” called Hans. “Come at once!”
A young boy appeared, smaller than Dirk. “Here is Torsten,” said Hans. It was the first child Dirk had ever seen. “Torsten, your grandmother has been vague in her mind again. Give her a kiss.”
“Come, child.” Imperiously she pointed to her withered cheek. Little Torsten planted a kiss there and backed off.
“Now to your chore. The cow is just beyond, in the pasture, wanting to come home. Go open the gate.” Hans pointed. Dirk turned his head. A cow was indeed regarding the domestic scene, chewing through the drama of it.
As Torsten scampered down the track that led to the pasture, Dirk retreated into the woods and followed him. Torsten in light and Dirk in dark.
Hans had been curiously jocular. The grandmother had seemed regal and difficult. But Torsten was only a boy in lederhosen, with plump pink knees and soft flyaway hair. Dirk found him easy to follow.
As Torsten fussed with the rope that tied the gate, Dirk squatted down among the ferns. When he found a smooth stone the size of a robin’s egg, he threw it at the boy to get his attention.
At the impact, the boy whipped around. It seemed to Dirk that Torsten was staring straight at him. “Who’s there?” he cried.
Another stone to speak with. Dirk threw it.
The boy fled, leaving the gate wide open. The cow followed through without complaint.
Again Dirk paced beside the boy’s path, keeping deep enough in the cover of woods that he couldn’t be seen. By the time Torsten was in his father’s arms, the little lad was weeping. Blood made a prettiness on his cheek.
“Did you fall?” asked the father.
“What’s wrong with the child?” asked the grandmother.
“Something in the woods!” cried Torsten. “I was struck five times with stones! I turned and looked.”