If I Told You Once. Judy Budnitz

my back on him even to run away.

      What have you got there, young lady? he said. His voice was the strangest thing of all, as if what he said was not at all what he meant. My knees creaked. I showed him the dirt-colored mushroom in my palm.

      Give it here, he said. I gave it a toss; he swung out and caught it. I looked at him in that moment, stretched against the sky. I saw the straining cords of his throat, the delicate underside of jawbone.

      I thought: he should wear a scarf, he will catch cold.

      He held the mushroom between thumb and forefinger, inspected it with disgust.

      What’s it for? he asked.

      I could feel myself flushing.

      Speak up he said, what will happen to me if I eat it?

      It is for easing your birthing pains, I whispered.

      He barked a short laugh, then said, I’ll keep it, since you found it near my tree. It’s my favorite tree, you see, because it has a face like my old granny. Do you see her nose, where that branch is broken off, and these two knotholes are eyes, and the rotted hollow down below just like her pruned-up mouth. Come closer and look. Come closer, I said.

      I had never thought about things in such a way before, but suddenly when he described the face I could see it, as if something hidden had been swiftly revealed by his words, and I realized with a kind of sickening jolt that there was more than one way of seeing the world.

      Since you gave me this, I should give you something in trade, he said. He slipped his hand into his shirt, pulled something out, and dropped it carelessly in the snow.

      I should not have picked it up, but I did. It was shaped like an egg, but covered in stones that glittered like fire and ice, and shiny metal etched with tiny curling designs like lace. It glowed there in my cupped hands. I had never seen such colors before in my life.

      Look inside, he said.

      I peered into the peephole at the small end of the egg and saw a walled city with turnip-shaped towers, a garden, a sparkling frozen fountain, a domed sky full of stars.

      Oh, I said. I raised it to my eye again. Such green, such gold, such unearthly blue. When I looked up at him once more the outside world had gone dull.

      You like it, do you? he said. He was cleaning his nails with a knife as long as his forearm.

      I nodded. His eyes moved in his face like insects.

      Aren’t you a pretty girl? he said.

      No, I said. I was not being insolent. I did not understand what he meant. In my village we knew only big and small, strong and weak, alive and dead. Any further distinctions were unnecessary.

      Ha, he said. The pink tongue curled around his teeth.

      Suddenly he straightened and slid the knife in its sheath. He reached into his shirt for the mushroom and with one smooth movement threw it far into the trees, so far I could not hear it land.

      Look at that, he said. I seem to have lost your mushroom.

      I saw the muscles tensing up beneath his trousers; the branch creaked a warning.

      I suppose, he said, to be fair, you ought to give me something else.

      I saw him preparing to leap. I spun and ran.

      I staggered wildly, panting, limping on my stiff knees; I ran in a nightmare, the air thick as water, the afternoon light dying moment by moment. My breath crashed so loud in my ears I could hear nothing; I stumbled, fell, gathered up an armful of skirts and flailed on. I glanced over my shoulder expecting to see him just behind me, laughing with his little pointed teeth.

      But he was not. I was light enough to run on the hard upper crust of snow, but the man had broken through it with his leap. I could see him far in the distance, wallowing and thrashing waist-deep in soft snow. Faintly I could hear his curses.

      I ran home breathless, dragging my heavy soaked clothes. My mother looked at my slick face and asked what was the matter. I told her about the man in the forest, the tree like a face, his leap from the sky.

      I did not tell her about the egg.

      The egg! I should have flung it away when I ran, but I had been too frightened to think. So I kept it in my pocket, told no one; it was my first secret.

      My mother knit her brow. She warned me not to tell my father. His solution would be to go bellowing off to the bandits’ camp in the woods, swinging his fists, cursing and brawling until they cut him to pieces.

      She told me she would take care of it and said nothing further. Late that night I heard a stirring in the house. I crept to the window and saw her in the moonlight, waddling heavily toward the dark trees.

      A week later she told me to go back to the forest to finish gathering the plants she needed. Her time was near. I did not want to go, I looked at her pleadingly, but she brushed me away and told me it was all right.

      So I dressed as before and trudged back to the forest. The sky was dark and lowering, thick clouds scurried across the sky as if fleeing something just over the horizon. I jumped at every noise; darkness seemed to tease at the corners of my eyes. I did not want to go there, and yet I went there, I was drawn back to the same place I had been before, drawn by a kind of dread and a dreadful curiosity.

      I approached the familiar tree. I saw a dark shape in the snow at its base and hesitated. It did not move. An abrupt hush fell over the woods, no wind stirred. I paused in my tracks and then a horrible cawing rose up all around me as hundreds of black crows launched themselves from the surrounding trees and took to the air. There were hundreds of them, flapping in their clumsy way like black rags jerked aloft on strings, beaks open with their harsh croaking. I felt droppings splatter on my cheek. I knew crows liked to travel alone or in pairs, they were not flocking birds.

      Their cries faded away. I reached the tree and there, in a trampled place beneath its branches, lay my bandit. I knelt beside him. His throat was torn open. The blood had frozen before it dried; bright red smears colored the snow. I could study him closely now. His eyes were open and congealing; the irises were green, they looked crystallized, faceted, hard as glass. The skin on his face was smooth. I could not have said how old he was.

      His hair fell back from his brow as if he had tossed his head back a moment before. His body lay stretched out loosely, as if he were napping, but all was cold and hard. His lip turned up; he seemed to be smiling. I could not be sure that he was dead. In that winter country the cold slowed the dying just as it slowed the living.

      I learned later that my mother had gone to the forest at night carrying the scent glands from the she-wolf my father had killed; she had used them to leave wolf scent on all the trees in the area. This drew the she-wolf’s grieving mate, he came following the smell and seeking her; and as he nosed about whimpering like a child at the roots of trees, smelling her scent and unable to find her, he must have looked in the uncertain dusky light like something he was not. Perhaps to someone sitting in the trees above, he might have looked like a girl, kneeling, dressed in fur. Perhaps he had looked like me.

      Imagine him jumping down.

      The man and the wolf must both have been disappointed to see each other.

      I sat a long time in the snow, looking at the face, holding the sparkling cold hand of a man preserved in ice; and for the first time I saw that I was not of that country, I did not have my mother’s fierceness in me, I did not have that fierceness of love that had kept my family alive for generations in that harsh place. It was a blind devotion, a vicious bloody animal love, and I wanted no part of it; for the first time I knew that I would leave.

      I feared my mother, who pushed out child after child with her athletic loins, and seemed to grow stronger with each one, and clung to her children more tightly with each passing year. I grew in secret. I waited.

      

      There were three of them.

      They were always there, in the village where