Cat in Glass (7 page)

She knew full well that she oughtn’t travel at night, but she was loath to camp in the closeness of the forest, which clung to her and made her feel as if she walked through invisible cobwebs. She ached to reach the lake and the wide sky above it. As the light waned, color seeped out of the
woods until at last Jacinth saw only gray shapes everywhere, some deeper in shadow than others. Huge dusty moths flew out of the ferns as she passed. Mist hovered near the ground. She stumbled frequently, splashed through hidden puddles, and stirred up ashlike swarms of stinging insects. At first she slapped at them, but there were far too many. Before long, her face was swollen and tender from their venom. Still, she pushed on with as much speed as she darèd, stopping only to cut marker notches in the trees, for there were noises everywhere in the brooding darkness around her. Wherever the forest drew back enough to admit the sky, she saw the first stars twinkling. Sometimes she heard the calls of the loons as they flapped across the violet evening to the safety of the lake. Just a little farther, she thought. And she forced herself onward.

Though she could not yet see the lake, she could already smell its rank dampness, hear the splash of fish and loons on its wide surface, when she realized that something was tracking her. She stood still and listened. In the underbrush to her right, leaves crackled for an instant, then stopped. Jacinth felt her blood, like hot oil, surging through her knees and wrists, boiling in her throat and in the knife cuts on her hand. She took the bow from her shoulders and nocked an arrow slowly, as if in a long, uncomfortable dream. She squinted into the darkness, straining to discern the creature that must be lurking there. With only one eye, she was not certain that she could hit her target even if she could see it. Images of huge black bears and slavering wolves leapt through her mind. The bow and the ashwood
arrow trembled in her hands as if they had nerves of their own. The woods seemed choked with the silence of waiting. Then she heard it again—the crackle of dead leaves under the weight of something large.

She whirled blindly toward the sound. Almost with surprise, she heard the twang of her bowstring, felt the sting of the wobbly arrow as its shaft and stiff feathers rushed past her left wrist. With a sharp thunk the arrow hit something substantial—either tree trunk or bone. It shivered musically in its unseen mark.

From the deep shadows came a cry of indrawn breath. And an instant later a quavering voice called, “Don’t! Don’t kill me! I’m alone.”

Jacinth lowered her bow in astonishment. “Show yourself,” she shouted into the gloom, half relieved and half furious.

With great crashing and crackling, a man emerged from among the trees. By the light of the stars and the rising moon, she could see that he held his hands out at his sides, palms up and empty. When he stood within a few steps of her, she recognized him as the arrogant lily hunter who had confronted her on the road. He had no arrow in him.

“I’m … I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I … we’ve found hardly any lilies where the elders told us to look. Only two or three. There’s not enough food. The hunting’s been bad, and today a bear killed the baker’s son. It was my idea to follow you. Because of what you said … that you make your own roads. I thought … I thought you might …”

His voice trailed off into self-conscious silence. By the faint, cold light of the moon, she saw that he was nearly
weeping with fatigue. His face and hands were covered with dark scratches, and mud smeared his clothes.

Jacinth stared at him dumbfounded. She felt as she had when, as a child, Noa had blindfolded her and forced her to walk across a narrow, bouncing plank. They were playing in the rafters of the mill. Noa told her that the plank stretched high above the grinding stones, and that if Jacinth slipped, she would fall to a grisly death. Jacinth had started across the plank, her knees quaking and fear clawing at her insides like a wild animal. Midway she had fallen, and in the moments after she realized that Noa had lied, that the plank was only a few hands above the floor, she had felt just as she did now—betrayed, foolish, and ashamed of her gullibility.

All her life she had revered the lily hunt, connecting it with the mystery of that summer dusk when Sten had come for Wynna, attributing to it all the magic of hard-earned passage from a child’s thralldom into the independence of maturity. But now the blindfold was ripped away. So this was the lily hunt! The old men of the village told the young men exactly where the prizes were to be found and what to expect along the way. If it had ever been a true test of courage and resourcefulness, it was no longer. The brave lily hunter who stood before her was just a boy, whining because he’d had an unexpected taste of manhood and didn’t like the flavor. If he found a lily tomorrow, he would think of it as something he deserved, and probably sulk because it hadn’t come more easily. If he ever became a man, what happened in these woods would have precious little to do with it.

Like a cave dweller who has climbed up through bleak caverns and seen the sun for the first time rising at her door, Jacinth now realized that the thing she sought had been there all along. She had convinced herself that without the flower talisman, she could never be a woman. She had spent her life in bitter longing because her peers had judged her by her eyeless cheek and found her wanting, and so, she thought, withheld from her the thing she desired most. All along, the lily had been inside her. And Joth, dear Joth, who had always known, waited patiently while she found her own road to it.

In the forest night, Jacinth threw back her head and laughed, more freely and joyously than she ever had before. The lily hunter shuffled his feet and watched her nervously as if she had gone mad, which only made her laugh even more. Her ribs ached, and her voice was hoarse by the time she stopped.

She smiled at the disheveled young man and shook her head. “All right then. If you’d like, we can share a fire tonight,” she said, wiping the tears of mirth from her eye.

She looked up into the starry sky. “Do you see those loons?” she asked. “They live on the lake that lies just ahead of us. Stand still a moment and you can hear the water lapping at its banks. It’s the kind of place where lilies are likely to grow. I plan to camp there.”

Without another word, she turned and started through the dark woods again. The young hunter breathed deeply, dragged the back of his hand across his forehead, and trotted after her.

Before another hour had passed, the trees suddenly gave way to open meadow. Jacinth stood at the edge of the clearing, silenced by its beauty. The stars and the full moon hung like pearls in the deep sky. The surface of the lake shivered with cool light. Loons laughed softly from the safety of the cattails, and frogs and crickets warmed the night with their songs. But most wonderful of all were the lilies.

Mingled with the grasses, the lilies grew in rich abundance, their blossoms waving in the soft breeze like the bright faces of a throng.

“Silver!” the young man murmured beside her. “They’re silver!”

And indeed it was true. Even in the moon’s chilly light, Jacinth could see that the graceful lily trumpets bore no hint of orange or yellow. She laughed once more, softly this time, with wonder. She had made her own roads indeed. And they led to lilies such as no one in Aranho had ever seen before.

Jacinth and the young hunter made a fire, caught fish and roasted them without speaking, for the lake and the lilies and the light of the moon cast a spell that words would have broken. When the fire had died to red coals and the hunter lay beside it, twitching in his sleep, Jacinth rested in the soft grass and looked up at the stars. Dearest Joth, she thought. I will be home soon, and I will bring with me greater treasure than I had ever hoped to find.

In the morning, Jacinth left the hunter where he slept. She broke off a piece of journey bread and laid it in the grass
beside him, as a sign of goodwill. Then she went about the happy business at hand. First she wove a basket from cattails. Root and all, she dug a single silver lily decked with two blossoms and several buds. This she planted in the basket with good loamy earth and water from the lake. With her bow slung across her shoulders and the lily cradled in one arm, she set off through the forest again, back the way she had come, following the notches she had cut into the trees.

By afternoon, she reached the main road. Her heart was light as thistledown as she strode along, humming a tune and wondering idly what kinds of dyes could be made from the unfamiliar flowers she passed.

Once, she heard voices. She crouched behind a boulder as two lily hunters trudged up the road toward the forest.

Jacinth kept silent until they had passed. Then she continued toward home, whistling.

She reached Aranho on the evening of the eighth day. Though she was tired and hungry and her body ached, she stepped proudly along the main street. The lily, snug in its basket of soft, moist earth, glowed softly in the dusk, still as fresh as it had been on the morning when she dug it. As she passed, curious citizens thrust their heads from windows or walked out onto their doorsteps to whisper with their neighbors. It was not the usual greeting reserved for the first returnee from the lily hunt. Nevertheless, she noticed the onlookers much less than she noticed the familiar stone houses and straw roofs. Whatever its shortcomings, Aranho was her home, and she was glad to be back.

Through the purple twilight she marched to the door of the cobbler’s shop. Joth opened it as she raised her hand to knock. His face was as luminous as the lily.

“I’ll tell you a story,” he said as they stepped into the street on their way to Jacinth’s cottage. “About a lame cobbler who fell in love with a one-eyed weaver.”

She laughed. “I already know that one. I’ll tell you one even better. About a weaver who traveled all the way to the sea and back just to find out that all she really wanted was to marry a cobbler and live the rest of her life in the town where she was born.”

Joth gazed at her merrily as he swung along on his crutches, his eyebrows arched in mock surprise. “All the way to the sea?”

“Oh yes. It took that great a distance,” she replied.

And they laughed and sighed together as Jacinth began to tell him all that she had seen.

Later, they lay together on the soft straw of her pallet before a small fire in the house she had built with her own hands. She held Joth close to her as he slept. She gazed drowsily at her warm, familiar room. There was the loom, and the thick window above it, and the baskets of many-colored yarn. There was the lily. She would plant it tomorrow, in the cool sheltered light on the east side of the cottage. In a shadowy corner, the unfinished tapestry stood waiting, as if today were no different from any other.

Quietly, she rose and began to thread it back onto the loom.

I
was once a respectable woman. Oh yes, I know that’s what they all say when they’ve reached a pass like mine: I was well educated, well traveled, had lovely children and a nice husband with a good financial mind. How can anyone have fallen so far, except one who deserved to anyway? I’ve had time aplenty to consider the matter, lying here eyeless in this fine hospital bed while the stench of my wounds increases. The matrons who guard my room are tight-lipped. But I heard one of them whisper yesterday, when she thought I was asleep, “Jesus, how could anyone do such a thing?” The answer to all these questions is the same. I have fallen so far, and I have done
what I have done, to save us each and every one from the
Cat in Glass
.

My entanglement with the cat began fifty-two years ago, when my sister, Delia, was attacked by an animal. It happened on an otherwise ordinary spring afternoon. There were no witnesses. My father was still in his office at the college, and I was dawdling along on my way home from first grade at Chesly Girls’ Day School, counting cracks in the sidewalk. Delia, younger than I by three years, was alone with Fiona, the Irishwoman who kept house for us. Fiona had just gone outside for a moment to hang laundry. She came in to check on Delia and discovered a scene of almost unbelievable carnage. Oddly, she had heard no screams.

As I ran up the steps and opened our door, I heard screams indeed. Not Delia’s—for Delia had nothing left to scream with—but Fiona’s, as she stood in the front room with her hands over her eyes. She couldn’t bear the sight. Unfortunately, six-year-olds have no such compunction. I stared long and hard, sick and trembling, yet entranced.

From the shoulders up, Delia was no longer recognizable as a human being. Her throat had been shredded and her jaw ripped away. Most of her hair and scalp were gone. There were long, bloody furrows in the creamy skin of her arms and legs. The organdy pinafore in which Fiona had dressed her that morning was clotted with blood, and the blood was still coming. Some of the walls were even spattered with it where the animal, whatever it was, had worried her
in its frenzy. Her fists and heels banged jerkily against the floor. Our pet dog, Freddy, lay beside her, also bloody, but quite limp. Freddy’s neck was broken.

I remember slowly raising my head—I must have been in shock by then—and meeting the bottomless gaze of the glass cat that sat on the hearth. Our father, a professor of art history, was very proud of this sculpture, for reasons I did not understand until many years later. I only knew it was valuable and we were not allowed to touch it. A chaotic feline travesty, it was not the sort of thing you would want to touch anyway. Though basically catlike in shape, it bristled with transparent threads and shards. There was something at once wild and vaguely human about its face. I had never liked it much, and Delia had always been downright frightened of it. On this day, as I looked up from my little sister’s ruins, the cat seemed to glare at me with bright, terrifying satisfaction.

I had experienced, a year before, the thing every child fears most: the death of my mother. It had given me a kind of desperate strength, for I thought, at the tender age of six, that I had survived the worst life had to offer. Now, as I returned the mad stare of the glass cat, it came to me that I was wrong. The world was a much more evil place than I had ever imagined, and nothing would ever be the same again.