My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (23 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Ladies and gentleman! Ruthie will say, Welcome to the show! And the man with the cape will pull back the curtains and everybody will be so surprised by what they see, they will put their hands over their mouths and scream. But Ruthie’s own surprise is already turning into something else, not a beautiful secret anymore but just a thing that she knows will happen, whether she wants it to or not, just like she knows she will have an accident in the barn and her giraffe will be lost and her mother will keep looking at the tags hanging from the dolls’ feet, looking closely like she’s reading an important announcement, looking closely and not seeing the puddle getting bigger on the floor. When it happens her mother will be holding her hand, she is always holding and pulling and squeezing her hand, which is impossible actually because Ruthie, clever girl, kind girl, ballet dancer, thumb sucker, brave and bright Dorothy, is already gone.
I first encountered the Erlking in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” and then later in the Schubert lied “Der Erlkönig,” set to the text of Goethe’s poem. In both incarnations he is a seductive and deadly figure—in Carter’s story, a pipe-playing forest dweller who transforms young girls into caged songbirds, and in Goethe’s poem a malevolent spirit king who pursues a boy traveling with his father through the woods late at night, and who promises the child untold delights. Apparently the Goethe poem is often memorized by German schoolchildren.
Anxiety about school is what inspired my version of the Erlking story: not a child’s anxiety, but a parent’s anxiety. I belong to a generation of parents who tend to feel rather anguished over the choices they are making for their children. Among the more charming and radical of these choices, I’ve always felt, is a Waldorf education. (And being a literal thinker I immediately returned, when asked to write a “contemporary fairy tale,” to the last time I saw some contemporary fairies, which was at the annual fund-raiser held by the local Waldorf school.) I liked the possibility that something quite menacing could occur in such a lovely, protected place. Only later did I learn that Rudolph Steiner, the founder of the Waldorf approach, was enormously influenced by Goethe’s work.
—SSB
BRIAN EVENSON
Dapplegrim
THERE CAME A TIME WHEN I, THE YOUNGEST OF TWELVE SONS, EACH of whom had imposed himself upon me in turn, could bear it no longer and fled the house. I left one morning without awakening either my parents or brothers, carrying only the clothes on my back. I traveled for many days, begging food where I could, until I came to a spacious castle of white stone lying in the lee of a mountain. It was the exact converse of the house in which I had been raised, the fourteen of us crammed into narrow rooms and someone’s elbow always gouging someone else’s eye. Here, I thought, I would be able to breathe freely and fully.
“Who lives there?” I asked the old woman who had shared her table with me.
“A king,” she said. “But he is unfortunate and a little mad and has lost his daughter to a troll upon a mountaintop. You would do better to stay far from him.”
“Mark my words,” I said to her, “I will find a place for myself with him,” and though she laughed at me this is exactly what I managed to do, entering into the service of the king.
 
The king was a dour man, nervous in his opinions and surrounded by a dozen advisors and councillors deft at making their thoughts and opinions his own. I could see this from the first, but what was it to me? I served him faithfully and strictly to the letter. As his servant, I occupied a position for him somewhere midway between a living, breathing human and a piece of furniture. I flatter myself to think I did my task well enough that he had no cause to take notice of me until the moment when, at the end of the year, I approached his throne on my knees and begged his leave to return home to visit my parents.
“What?” he said, confused and surprised. “And who are you?”
I told him my name, but though it was he himself who had accepted me into service, it seemed to mean nothing to him. I explained to him my duties and there came a flicker of recognition.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “The candle holder. You have held it well, lad. Yes, by all means go.”
And so go I did.
 
So often it is the case that Death chooses to take to the road before we do, and so it was that I returned to find my parents dead. Of what cause my brothers claimed not to know, but I saw enough in their furtive glances one to another to suspect that they had helped my parents on their way.
“And my inheritance?” I asked.
They admitted to having already divvied the inheritance, thinking, so they claimed, that they had no reason to think me alive.
So they wished me dead
, I thought,
and perhaps still do. I must proceed with care.
I unsheathed my knife, using it to section an apple, and then afterward left it beside my hand on the table, blade winking in the light like a living thing.
“Shall I, then, receive nothing for my inheritance?” I asked.
They conferred and ended by offering me twelve mares living free upon the hills. This was, as they well knew, much less than my proper share, but with only one of me on my side of the table and eleven of them clustered on the other, I knew better than to protest. I accepted their offer, thanked them, and left.
When I arrived in the hills it was to find that I had doubled my wealth. Each mare had come to foal, so that where I had thought to see one dozen I now saw two. And among this second dozen was a big dapple-gray foal much bigger than the others and with a coat so sleek it shone bright as a shivering pane of glass. He was a fine fellow, and I could not help but tell him so.
And it was there that things began to go odd for me, that the world I thought I knew took a dark turn, and I began to see that all I had thought I knew I knew not at all. For that dappled horse, staring at me with its dark eyes, snatched me outside of my body. And when I returned to myself again, I found myself standing in the midst of the eleven other foals. I myself was awash in blood, and all of the foals were dead and by me slaughtered.
But that dapple-gray foal, still alive, moved now from mare to mare, suckling off each in turn. Both foal and mares acted as though nothing had happened, while I stood there bloody, the flies already beginning to swarm around me as if I were Death himself.
 
For a year I tried not to think on the events of that afternoon. For a year, I served my master the king faithfully and told myself I would not return to that hillside, that I would surrender my inheritance and simply get on with my life.
Yet what sort of life was it? I, a servant, a half-man, always at the beck and call of my liege. Was this who I chose to be? And what in the meantime had happened to the rest of me? Was this merely the resting place on the way to some other self?
And I could hear, too, somewhere deep within my head, the neighing of that dapple-gray horse, drawing me out, calling to me. So that by the time the year had completed its sidelong gait and returned to where it had begun, I knew that I did not want to return. But I knew also that despite myself I would.
 
The first thing I glimpsed in climbing the hill was the dapple-gray foal I had left behind. He was a yearling now, and larger than a full-grown horse, and his coat bright as a burnished shield. His eyes were like flecks of fire and each inch of skin rippled with strength. And there were twelve new foals, one for each of the mares, and I thought,
Well, now, I can lead this dapple-gray yearling away and sell him and have done with him forever.
But when I bridled him and tried to lead him away, he pushed his hooves into the ground and would not move.
And so I came closer to him and whispered in his ear and tried to coax him to follow me, and yet he would not budge, only swung his head toward me and stared at me with his dark, smoky eyes.
And here again a dark turn was taken within me and I was lost to it, as if my soul had fled my body. And when at last I had returned, did I not find, as before, myself standing amid the slaughtered, the bloody business done? So I cursed that horse and with blood christened him Dapplegrim, for grim was his business, and grim he made my own. Yet he paid me no heed and simply moved from mare to mare, and from each of them took suck.
 
And so another year of faithful servitude to my king, all the while in me a growing dread as I tried not to think of what might happen once the year had passed. This time, I told myself, I would not return.
And yet, when the day came, I felt Dapplegrim’s hot breath within the confines of my skull and approached my king for his leave to go. His leave was given and I set out, and so found myself there again upon the hillside. And there was Dapplegrim, grown so big that he had to kneel before I could even think to mount him. His coat shone and glistened now as if a looking glass. His eyes were full of smoke and flame now and terrible to behold. And I saw that he was alone on the hilltop, for either he had driven the mares who had suckled him away or he had killed and eaten each of them in turn.
He turned and stared at me and again I felt myself grow dizzy. Before I knew it I had ridden him bareback to my parents’ old house, where my brothers still lived. They, when they saw him, smote their hands together and made the sign of the cross, for never had they seen such a horse as Dapplegrim. And right they were to be afraid, for as I rode upon his back, Dapplegrim smote them each with his hooves, and though they screamed and fled they could not escape. So that in the end there were eleven dead brothers and only me left alive.
 
More did happen then, but I am loath to speak of it. I still have night-mares of how this monstrous horse forced me, by pushing his way into my mind, to grind my dead brothers into his fodder. All the while I shivered and cried for him to release me, but he would not, for this horse was master of me and refused to free me.
My brothers gone and consumed, Dapplegrim was far from through with me. He forced me to melt all the pots and tools and bits of iron in my family house down and beat them into shoes for him. He showed me where my brothers had buried my parents’ wealth, their gold and silver, and with these I fashioned him a gold saddle and bridle that glittered from afar. And then he knelt before me and compelled me to mount him, and off we rode.
He thundered straight to the same castle in which I had served the last few years of my life, following the road without hesitation as if he had ridden it all his life. His shoes spat stones high into the air as we rode, and his saddle and bridle and coat, too, glistened and glowed in the sunlight.
 
When we reached the castle the king was standing at the gate, his advisors huddled around him. They watched the approach of myself and Dapplegrim as we sped toward them like a ball of liquid fire.
Said the king once we had arrived, “Never in my life have I seen such a thing.”
And then Dapplegrim turned his long neck and looked at me with one fierce eye, and I felt myself leaking away again. Before I knew it I had told the king I had returned to his service and asked him for his best stable and sweet hay and oats for my steed. The king, perhaps himself transfixed by Dapplegrim’s other eye, bowed his head and agreed.
 
I returned to my duties. At the appointed hour I lit the king’s candle and carried it after him. At the appointed hour I extinguished it. It was all just the same as it had ever been, and yet it was different, too. For whereas before the king had seemed to look right through me, to consider me as he might a knife or a chair, now he noticed me and even regarded me thoughtfully.

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