Toad Words (3 page)

Turtle set down her basket, which was growing heavy, and put her hands on her hips, and said, in her very best grown-up voice, “I want to know what is going on!”

“Oh…oh, my dear…” Her grandmother fidgeted again. This was unusual. Her grandmother was not a fidgeter by nature, and she generally had little patience with maundering.
 

The wolf lay down. He did it all at once, with a great
hwwuffff!
and he took up a great deal of the cottage doing so.
 

Grandmother sighed. “Let us have tea. This will be easier with tea.” She got up, stepped around the wolf, and poured herself a very small drink from a small blue bottle on the mantle. She drank it.
 

Turtle tapped her foot. This did not look very much like tea.
 

“The woodsman came here earlier in the season,” said Grandmother, coughing a little on the contents of the bottle. She took down the kettle, shook it a little—water sloshed inside—and she set it on the pot-bellied stove to heat. “He offered to cut firewood for me, and I accepted. He would take no payment, but he seemed lonely, so when he stayed to talk to me, and came back sometimes for tea and to talk, I thought it was the least I could do.”

The wolf set his head on his paws. Turtle sat down on a little three-legged stool and hugged her knees.
 

“He seemed lonely,” Grandmother repeated. She got out two mugs for tea, gazed at the little blue bottle for a moment, then took a slug directly from it. “And odd, but many of the woodsmen are. They live such isolated lives. I thought—perhaps he had simply forgotten some of the social graces. And he said that people had been unkind to him. I felt sorry for him…”

Sarcasm is largely foreign to wolves, and completely unknown in dogs (although coyotes have a well-developed sense of it), but the sound the wolf made was very close.
 

“Yes, well,” said Grandmother. “I should have listened to you.”

“Yes, you should have,” said the wolf. It was a statement of fact that held no censure in it. “But you did not, and now we are here. Perhaps if you had listened, we would also be here. There is no counting the rabbits you did not catch.”
 

“He came more and more often,” said Grandmother, as the tea kettle began to wail.
 
“He wanted to talk more and more. It was not so strange, perhaps. But I was tired of listening to him, because he told all the same stories of people being unkind. It was exhausting to listen to. And he would do things around the house—little things, things I do not mind doing or do not want a stranger doing—and then would be angry when I asked him not to.”
 

“That’s odd,” said Turtle, hugging her knees. Chores were something you did, but getting mad because you didn’t
have
to do them was completely incomprehensible behavior.

Her grandmother shook her head and ran a hand through her iron gray hair. “He would act hurt. He said he didn’t want to be paid, that he was doing it because I was alone out here, and hadn’t he chopped my wood? And asked for nothing in return? It was all very tiring. It was easier to just let him patch the wall or hoe the vegetables than to listen to him complain about it.”

Turtle accepted her cup of tea and chalked this up to one more example of grown-ups being strange.
 

Her grandmother shrugged. “It is a long story, and it doesn’t reflect too well on me. I should have told him not to come here then. My friend here told me as much. But I felt sorry for him. And some of the things were so odd, it was hard to know how
to
react—he would get angry over such odd things—do you remember when you brought me those scones last week, dear?”

“They were cookies,” said Turtle.

“—and they were lovely,” said Grandmother, who was an accomplished liar about the important things. She investigated the blue bottle again, found it nearly empty, and grumbled. The wolf huffed a laugh.

“Well, never mind all that. It was too much. He had been here three days running, and the cucumbers needed pickling and I did not want him in the house again dredging up all those tales of past hurts. I told him to go away, that I was busy and needed time to myself to work. There is something very satisfying about pickling, isn’t there? You get the neat little rows of jars and wax seals and the house smells like dill and vinegar, and I know it’s not supposed to be a nice smell, but I rather like it.”

Turtle nodded vigorously. She loved pickles. Pickles were one of the great unrelenting good things in life, and the highest state that a cucumber, which was otherwise a rather wet and insipid vegetable, could aspire to.

“And he…well, he said a lot of things. Not nice things. I don’t know what he was expecting, but I wouldn’t take that kind of talk from your grandfather, so damned if I was taking it from some crazy woodsman who hung around the place like a puppy waiting for a kick.”
 
She gave an awkward little laugh into her tea. “I am old enough that I should have known better. If I had driven him off early on—well, maybe it wouldn’t have come to this. But I felt sorry for him. Stupid of me, but there you are.”

“Pity is a poor kin to mercy,” said the wolf.
 

“And what do wolves know of either?” snapped Grandmother, nudging the wolf with her foot.

“Of pity, very little,” said the wolf agreeably. “But of mercy we know much, particularly when it comes with teeth. That is what we are doing here tonight, is it not?”

Grandmother sighed. “I suppose.”

“What happens tonight?” asked Turtle, leaning forward on the stool.

Grandmother gazed into her tea.

“Tonight,” said the wolf, “I believe the woodsman is going to come to kill her. And we will kill him first, or not, as may be.”

“Perhaps it would be best if Turtle hid in the outhouse for this,” said her grandmother.

Turtle wanted to protest—if somebody was going to get killed, she certainly didn’t want to be hiding in the privy and wondering what was going on!—but the wolf beat her to it.
 

“Your children are cubs too long already,” he said. “You do them no kindness by teaching them to be fools.” He yawned. “And if she stays out there, what is to stop him from finding her there first? It is better that she stay here. If she is here, we are close enough to help her.”

“The wardrobe, then,” said Grandmother, and bowed her head.
 

“How do you know he’s going to try and kill you?” asked Turtle, whose eyes were so wide that she thought she might never blink again.

“He killed the goat,” said Grandmother. She swiped the back of her hand over her eyes. “That makes me the angriest. That poor goat. She never did anything to anybody. She was a
nice
goat.”

“He killed your
goat?”
Turtle had listened to the description of the woodsman with the general ambivalence of children, but this was something else again.

Like many people who live close to the land, Turtle’s family divided animals into two camps. There were those animals that
created
food—milk cows and laying hens and and plow horses and the better sort of nanny goat—and there were animals that
were
food. And while the latter went unnamed (unless it was “Dinner”) the former fell somewhere between employees and family. They had names. They had personalities.
 

Even Turtle’s mother had to wipe at her eyes when the black-speckled hen had died last year.

So far as Turtle was concerned, killing a goat—particularly that rarest of breeds, a
nice
goat—put the woodsman in a camp of villains that included the devil, her father’s mother, and Attila the Hun.
 

“And the worst of it,” said Grandmother, getting up to pace and gesture with the sloshing tea cup, “the worst of it was that he somehow expected that to make it
better!
Like chopping the poor goat’s head off was going to make me glad to see him again!”
 

“What did you do with the goat?” asked Turtle, who was a practical child. There was a lot of meat on a goat.

“I couldn’t deal with it,” admitted Grandmother. “I was too angry. My friend here took it.”

The wolf grinned and dragged his tongue across the white fringe of his teeth. “We are not sentimental about our meat. To keep live prey about the house is a strange foolishness of humans. But I accept that this is a human thing, and to kill another’s house-prey is a great crime.”
 

He stood up and stretched, and the cottage got a great deal smaller again. “Soon, now. The woods are quieting in the wrong sort of way. Someone is coming.”

Grandmother checked the blue bottle again, stuck her little finger in the neck, and licked the thin film of moisture again. “Very well,” she said, tossing it down. “Turtle, get into the wardrobe. If things go badly—if—well—if something happens—”

“
Something
is going to happen,” said the wolf, amused. “Perhaps we will all sit around like cubs in a den, and frighten each other with what we imagine to be outside, but even that is something.”

“I shall kick you,” said Grandmother with dignity.
 

“I shall bite off your leg,” said the wolf, grinning.

“Very well, then,” said Grandmother. “Turtle, if I am—killed—then go with the wolf. He will see that you get home safe. And if we are both killed, then stay in the wardrobe and do not make a sound until he has left, then run home as fast as you can.”

“That is better,” said the wolf.
 

Turtle climbed into the wardrobe. It was a few inches off the ground and creaked a little. There were winter blankets piled on the bottom, under the hanging clothes, and she was flexible enough in the boneless way of girl-children to curl herself up inside.

The keyhole let a little shaft of light inside, and there were gaps under both hinges. By shifting ever so quietly inside, Turtle could see both the door and the bed, though not both at the same time.

She pressed her eye to the keyhole.

The wolf lay down on the bed again, and Grandmother draped the orange crazy-quilt over him. “Loosely,” he said. “It will do no good to draw him near if I cannot escape the blankets in time.”

“I hate this,” muttered Grandmother. She picked up her faded mobcap—Turtle could not remember ever seeing her wear it, but it had lived on the bedpost as long as she could remember—and set it over the back of the wolf’s head. “Don’t wag your tail, no matter how much this amuses you. No, that won’t do. Your ears are too big.”

“The better to hear with,” said the wolf, still sounding amused. “And I hear now that the birds outside the clearing have fallen silent. Truly, if you would let me tear his throat out at the door, this would be much easier.”

“I don’t want to kill him,” growled Grandmother, sounding almost like a wolf herself.
 
“If he would simply go away…” She stuffed the wolf’s enormous ears under the mobcap, and draped it across the side of his face. With the quilt pulled up high and the fire burning down, Turtle thought that perhaps it was not completely unconvincing.
 

“He will not go away,” said the wolf, very softly. “He is coming even now.”

“I know,” said Grandmother, and dropped with grace that belied her age and slid underneath the bed.
 

The steps creaked.

“Amelia?” called a voice from outside the door. “Amelia?”
 

It was a male voice. It did not sound strange or monstrous. It didn’t sound like the voice of a goat-killer, but who knew what they sounded like? Turtle wiggled in the blankets and peered out the narrow notch underneath the hinges.
 

“Go away!” yelled Grandmother. “I don’t want company!”

“Now Amelia…” said the woodsman, opening the door. “Don’t be like that.”

Grandmother groaned. She might have been acting, but Turtle thought that it was a particularly heartfelt sound. “I don’t feel well. I just want to sleep. I don’t have anything to say to you. Go
away.”
 

He stood framed in the door. He was tall and rawboned and his face was lined, except for the skin around his eyes, which was smooth. He carried an axe in one hand, a wicked looking thing with a curved blade, and Turtle’s heart clenched at the sight of it.

“Don’t be like that, Amelia,” he said again. “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well. Can I make you some tea?”
 

“Just go away,” said Grandmother (whose name, yes, was Amelia).
 
“I have plenty of tea. I told you I didn’t want you here. I will feel better if you
leave.”
 

The woodsman took a few steps closer.
 
“I came to say that I forgive you for the things you said earlier,” he said.

“For the love of god, will you just
go?”
 

It was his death she was warning him away from, Turtle thought, and he didn’t seem to be listening.

In fact, he was staring at something by the foot of the bed.
 

“What is
that?”

Turtle slithered around to the keyhole. Had the wolf’s tail popped out? What was he seeing?

“What?” asked Grandmother, and for the first time, Turtle could hear the fear in her voice. She craned her neck to one side, trying to see what the woodsman was looking at. Her left eye ached from not blinking.

It was the basket of muffins.
 

“Someone’s been here,” said the woodsman.
 
His voice was thick and choked. “Someone else came here. We talked about this…”

“It was one of my grandchildren,” said Grandmother wearily. “And you are a fool. I will see whoever I wish in my own house. Leave now, and don’t bother me again.”
 

She knows he won’t do it, Turtle thought. She wouldn’t sound so tired if she didn’t.
 

The woodsman stepped toward the bed. His face had gone red and blotchy. The straw mattress rustled a little as the wolf shifted his weight.
 

“We
talked
about this,” the woodsman said again, sounding almost plaintive, standing beside the bed.
 
Turtle thought that surely he must see through the disguise, surely the shape of the ears must be wrong or a tuft of gray fur would show through,
something.