If I Told You Once. Judy Budnitz

mother returned two days later, with the child asleep in her shawl. She was pale and resolute and my father did not question her. He held her in complete awe. Also he was glad to relinquish his responsibilities. My father could kill timber wolves with a wooden club or face down outlaws, but the cries of a three-year-old child drove him to distraction.

      People said Ari seemed unchanged by the excursion, except that he had grown three teeth. My mother never offered an explanation but resumed her work and nursed the child without a word. No one dared confront her; she was known throughout the village for her fierceness. Rumors spread that she had marched into the forest and demanded an audience with the goblin king himself, then haggled with him relentlessly, as if he were a shopkeeper, until he agreed to exchange the goblin child for an identical human one.

      Ari was quick to crawl but slow to walk. As he grew he loved to watch dancing and the fall of my father’s ax. He loved hair—he liked to pluck out bits of my father’s beard or the hair on his arms. Ari early developed a taste for raw meat. He infuriated my mother by sneaking raw scraps from the storeroom, and trying to sink his teeth into chickens before they had stopped twitching.

      I grew up slowly. In that place many things grew slowly, the cold caused plants and people alike to shrink, contract, conserve their energy. My brother Ari soon grew taller than me, but his size was a liability; he was constantly hungry and cried through the night. My mother nursed him until the third child was born, and then she put him to sleep with me. At first I let him suck on my fingers, for comfort, but I soon discovered the sharpness of his teeth. He gnawed in his sleep. So I went down to the river and found smooth stones for him to suck, and he liked that. I gave him stones that I thought were too large for him to choke on, but I would sometimes wake up late at night and hear him crunching and swallowing them, his baby face smooth and serene.

      As Ari grew older his forehead lost some of its knobbiness; he had my father’s strength and black hair. He was quick in his movements, but slow in speech. When people spoke to him, when he demanded explanations, I was the one to help him. He seemed to understand the words better in my voice.

      My parents were constantly on the lookout for the soldiers who tried for years to catch my father and force him into the army. He was older than the usual conscripts, but famous for his strength. My parents knew that if he were taken away it was likely he would never return. Whenever soldiers came into the village searching for him, he would have liked to meet them with his fists, but my mother subjected him to her methods instead. She hid him: under the eaves, in a feather bed, in a rain barrel, once in her own voluminous skirts. When the soldiers came to call that day they found her placidly sewing beside the fire. After they left my father rolled from beneath her skirts gasping for air. He was flushed and embarrassed by his proximity to her legs; he fled the house, shamefaced. In those days people were intimate only at night, in darkness, under the covers and in the strictest privacy.

      So my father evaded conscription year after year, and my mother produced more children, at yearly intervals. Practiced at labor, she learned to predict the time of birth and would lie darning stockings, peeling potatoes, until the last possible moment. My father had to add on to the house to make room for the children. He built us a kind of shed in the backyard, as if we were livestock. We slept on hay.

      My mother taught me to knit and crochet, she taught me her knowledge of roots and herbs: plants for sickness, for cleansing, for visions. Ari was my constant companion. He was monstrously strong for his age, but thoughtless; he crashed into walls, tumbled down wells. Wherever he went in the village I had to accompany him to keep him from damaging our neighbors’ property. When I saw him reaching out to touch geese or lambs I had to grab him by the ear and pull him away. Soon he grew so large that when I did this he could jerk me off my feet by shaking his head.

      People in the village whispered that he had a tail like an ox rolled up inside his trousers. I had seen no such tail when he was a baby; but then perhaps it sprouted when he entered adolescence, which began early in him. The villagers’ gossip did not affect him, but when my mother scolded he buried his head in her skirts and howled.

      He often went on rampages in the forest. We did not know what he did there; he would disappear for hours and return with his hair full of burrs, his clothes in shreds, a brown crust on his lips, peaceful.

      Only once did I lose my temper with him. It was one evening as I sat mending his padded jacket for the tenth time in as many days. The fire was low, and I pricked my finger again and again, and the hay padding was full of the small creatures my brother liked to collect, they rustled and squeaked horribly. Finally I flung the jacket at him, as he squatted humming in his usual corner, and cried: What is wrong with you? Have you no sense at all? Why can’t you act like other people?

      He hugged the jacket to him, rocked back and forth on his heels humming in the back of his throat and staring glassy-eyed into the fire. My mother looked up sharply from the child she was nursing and said: There’s nothing wrong with him, he’s perfect, he belongs here. The look on her face, as she stroked Ari’s hair and held the child to her breast, made me feel I was the strange one.

      

      When I was twelve my father killed a she-wolf and my mother sewed the hide into a cape for me. The wolf’s head made the hood, with the ears still intact; the front legs draped my shoulders, the tail dragged on the ground. It was a heavy, coarse thing with a rank smell, but it was warm.

      That winter my mother sent me out often to gather the medicinal plants that grew under the snow. She could not go herself, she was expecting her fifth child and could not bend. So I put on the fur hood and spent hours in the woods. The trees there were dark skinned, broad limbed; even without their leaves they blocked the sunlight so that the forest was dim even at noon. The air was always deathly still except for the hush and slide of shifting snow, the trees moaning softly in the wind.

      Each time I went I pushed deeper into the forest. I kept my ears pricked for the muffled crunch of footsteps in the snow. I hung a drawstring bag around my neck, crawled on my knees, and dug through the snow with my bare hands to find the plants my mother requested. My fingers grew red while my back and arms ran with sweat. I dug, warmed my hands in my armpits, dug again.

      One afternoon as I knelt resting with my hands inside my blouse I heard a branch snap. It was early yet, but the light in the forest was like dusk, the snow glowed intensely blue. I had the sense of trees crowding around on all sides as if watching.

      Ho there, young lady, said a voice.

      I glanced around, pushed back my hood, and looked up. I saw dangling boots. A man sat perched on a branch high above my head. I wanted to run, but my knees were locked from kneeling in the cold so long, and I couldn’t move.

      He said: It’s a lovely day, isn’t it? and smiled.

      I stared. I knew he was a bandit, I could tell by his clothes, and the soft leather boots that came to his knees. The people in my village swaddled themselves against the cold, they wrapped themselves in layers of wool and burlap. But this man was dressed in clothes that cleaved to his body, tight trousers and short jacket, leaving his arms and legs free. He lounged there loose limbed and catlike.

      You’ve been quite busy, haven’t you? he said.

      I managed to stand up. Now I could see his face more clearly. It was a clean-shaven, sharp-featured face, blotched red and white from the cold. He smiled; there was something strained in the smile, in the way the sore-chapped lips stretched back from the teeth. His eyes were extraordinarily bright and piercing, I had never seen anything like them, little chips of ice in his face; even from that distance I could feel them drilling at me. His hair lay over his brow in long heavy tangles.

      He looked so foreign to me; I had seen so few young men in my life. In my village adolescent boys were forced into the army the moment they began to lose their boyish figures, and the older men were like my father: bearded and barrel-chested with hair in their noses.

      He tossed his head like a horse to shake the hair from his face. I saw the hunting knife in its sheath slung across his chest. I longed to run, my throat ached with it; but I could not look away from him, I was painfully fascinated by him, as by a mad dog, so that I