Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(49)

“You can’t stay here, my wife is in knots and the house is too small—take the water up to the chamber and let her hold your hand if she will—”

“You have too much trouble already; we’ll risk the storm,” decided Felix, grabbing Dirk by the hand. But before they could back away, the door opened behind them and a bony-shanked woman came huffing in. Her skirts were tucked into her waistband, as if making allowance for having had to ride on some donkey or broomstick, whatever had come to hand. “Your Frau, she couldn’t have kept her legs closed another twenty-four hours, either nine months ago or tonight? It figures. Country women have no sense of timing,” she snapped. “What are you lads gaping at? Go tend to my mare before she breaks loose and bolts.”

“The wife in a bad condition, and you’re late yourself.” The distressed husband held up his reddened hands. “I’ve been doing what I could.”

“Haven’t you done enough already? Give me a quarter hour to assess the situation and I’ll holler down when I’m ready for the knife.” She lumbered for the staircase. The man paled and collapsed into a chair, which collapsed onto the floor. Dirk and Felix helped him up and Felix lit his pipe for him and stuck it in his mouth.

“Go do as she says, and stable the mount,” said the farmer. “Blankets in the loft. You can stay there. You won’t want to be near this home. If you hear screaming, pay it no mind. I’ve sent the other children to their granny. Grab some food as you go, and don’t come back until morning unless I summon you. The goodwife will sleep on the kitchen floor if there is sleeping in her immediate future. I doubt it.”

The night seemed to have come in. A mangy horse with a disagreeable expression allowed them to lead it around the corner of the house, where a set of sheds and barns, already settled with a white pall, were dissolving into vortices of snow. Inside, several other animals, two cows and two horses and some sheep. As he’d learned to do last summer, Dirk milked one of the cows and then the second, so he and Felix had warm milk to share in the one tin cup. Then they shucked off their sodden freezing garments and hung them to dry on pegs along with the farm implements. They climbed a ladder to a loft where, in the hay, they found several blankets and even a couple of ratty sheets, which, once the mouse droppings were flapped away, were comfortable enough. Felix had stripped to the bone, but for modesty Dirk retained his shirt, which fell to his mid-thigh, and that was something at least.





60.


Dirk had brought to the loft with him what was left of the staff as well as the knife with the gnome-figure handle. The crutch was almost useless now, as the narrower, earth-ended point of it threatened to splinter. The thicker part, though, the bole that fit naturally under the arm, was still solid and good. So Dirk broke the staff across his bare knee. With the old fabled knife of his childhood, he set to scraping at the hardwood knob.

“What are you making?” asked Felix, wrapping himself in a brown blanket and lying on his side, his temple propped up by his curled fist. “Is this another of your secret talents?”

“Another?”

“I mean, besides talking to the spirits of the sacred grove?”

“You ridicule me, you toy with me,” said Dirk in sudden heat. “For certain I’m a superstitious dummkopf, but why must you mock me?”

“You’re anything but that. How many ways do I have to think of to say it? You’re an oddity among young men, Dirkie. Your thoughts are already knitted into your skull, while other lads I know haven’t yet learned that a passing observation is preamble to thought. I admire you. I’m lying here wishing I had a ’cello to play some composer’s heart out, but I don’t. Here you are on your own, and you? You set about to find a knife and a piece of wood and begin to make something out of nothing. If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is. Don’t you see I’m envious as hell? You destroy me.”

Dirk kept to his task. The wood turned under his shivering hands. A shapeliness lived within, a secret he wanted to find.

Felix groaned and rolled over and threw his arm over his eyes.

The door to the barn opened and the farmer came in. “She sent me out here to build up the fire for you,” he called up to them. “Mostly she wants me out of the way for the next little bit. You didn’t even find the stove? I keep it going in the worst of the winter for when the ice harvesters come by to work the lake.”

Felix opened his eyes. His clothes were all down on hooks. He wasn’t going to climb naked down the ladder to help. Dirk sighed and put aside the carving and the knife, and with his shirttails flapping, he descended to the ground level. “It’s the normal stove operation; keep this grate open for air; feed the wood through here. The wind can find a thousand chinks in the roof. Believe me. The wife has sent me out here to think things over on more than one night, so I know what I’m grousing about. But with the stove going you’ll do all right.”

“How is she?”

“The midwife won’t say a word until there is a good word to say. That’s how they work. Bragging can taunt a hex to lurch into the fray and turn it all around. There we go. How is that?”

A small red blaze of heat threaded into the cold. It would be enough.

“If my cape is dry, bring it up to me, Dirk,” called Felix.