If I Told You Once. Judy Budnitz

about your age. My mother and I were wringing wet clothes, hanging them out to dry in the cold air, my mother hugely pregnant as usual. Snow gritty as dust stung our faces. I saw her pause, sniff her fingers, then inhale deeply. She looked around wildly and ran. She had smelled the gunpowder stink of approaching soldiers.

      We followed, my brothers and sisters and I. We were all so occupied with helping our mother hide our father that we neglected Ari.

      We forgot Ari, so the first thing the soldiers saw when they entered the village was my brother tearing a live sheep apart with his bare hands, not for sport but simply out of his rough love.

      The soldiers on their recruiting mission had heard rumors of a boy with impossible brutelike strength, and they had searched far and wide for him. Though nothing was said about it we knew it was our disgruntled, worm-racked neighbors who must have told them where to find him.

      The soldier captain watched Ari rip the sheep piece from piece, till it was nothing but bloody meat, and then Ari laid the pieces out, carefully lined them up. He was trying to put the animal back together, licking his fingers and crooning, cramming the limbs back into their sockets, breathing into the nostrils, trying to divine the clockwork that made it all move and bleat.

      The captain watched, and his eyes gleamed; he clapped his hands, one of which was made of wood. His company of soldiers circled, and they wrapped my brother in iron chains which on his massive wrists and throat looked like flimsy jewelry, and they loaded him bawling into a cart to take him away to hone his special skills for the grand art of war, or so they said, and they tossed the chunks of sheep in after him, hoping to quiet him.

      My mother ran from the house and chased after the departing cart, flinging curses at the soldiers, heaping them tenfold on their heads. The soldiers leaned down and jeered at her, with her swollen belly and waddling run. She spat at them, and one leaned down and dealt her such a blow that she fell in the mud and went into premature labor, right there in the street, before the eyes of all the men in the village.

      For a single man to witness a birth was bad luck; for all the village men to witness it was such a bad omen that all the ensuing trouble that later befell the village was heaped on my mother; everyone said she was to blame for all that happened after and the village women never spoke to her again.

      When all these things happened I knew it was time to leave.

      

      Once upon a time, on a night when the houses lay buried to the eaves in snowdrifts and bits of ice danced on the wind, I left my village intending never to return.

      Earlier that evening I had gone to bed in the back room with my brothers and sisters as usual. The others sighed and slept. I felt the warmth leave my fingers and feet.

      I listened to my parents in their room. The bed frame creaked as my father sank down on it. I could picture him, his feet hanging off the end of the frame, head tipped back and the coarse beard sticking straight up.

      Light seeped through the crack beneath their door. My mother was awake, I pictured her finishing some mending or nursing the latest child. She kept her hair covered during the day, and at night she put it in a single tight braid that reached past her waist in a thick, vicious-looking rope.

      I listened to the sounds of the other room, my ears yearning toward the door: the whisper of candle flame, the creak of her chair, the chilling click of teeth as she bit off the thread. I hoarded the warm patch I had made in the sheets.

      A strip of moonlight slanted through the window. I could see arms, fingers, ears: my younger brothers and sisters, sleeping in a heap like puppies. Some sucked their fingers as they slept; some sucked each other’s fingers. I could not distinguish between them in the dimness.

      Ari had been my dear one, my favorite. He had absorbed my attentions, and now he was gone. I missed his rank warmth. When he was restless in the night I used to stroke his head, his hair so thick I could not see his scalp when I parted the hair with my fingers. He always slept with his eyes half open, the whites glowing and shifting like iridescent fish. His back made a graceful curve as he lay on his side, he clenched his teeth in what might have been a smile; in the dark you could not see how the thick hair grew down low on his neck, ending in a point between his shoulder blades. He roamed in his dreams, legs twitching like a sleeping dog’s. In the mornings when I drew the sheets back to air them I often found dry leaves, night crawlers, double-tailed insects waving their feelers in the sudden light.

      I wondered where he slept now.

      The wind thrashed around the house, the boards creaked; I heard the softest of breaths as my mother blew out the candle. One of my brothers cried out in his sleep: Look out—the fire! and then subsided. My father let out a businesslike grunt as he hoisted himself over my mother and began the task of creating yet another child. There came a sound I never heard from my mother during the day: a cooing, like mourning doves. The dim light from the window grew even softer; it began to snow.

      It was falling thickly and steadily. It was the sort of snow that could hide a person’s tracks completely in a matter of hours.

      It was time to leave.

      I dressed in underclothes, flannel petticoats, skirts, jackets, woolen stockings. My mother had knitted the stockings so tightly they could almost stand up by themselves. Last I put on the boots, which would have fit half the people in the village. The local cobbler made boots in only two sizes, for the sake of convenience.

      I wrapped my head in a shawl. My brothers and sisters were quiet, their faces blissful in sleep. They lay in a tangle of curves and bulges, whorled shapes, like vines in the garden patch. I suppose they looked like me, their hair, their eyes, but I had never bothered to notice. For too long I had thought of them only as annoyances that asked impossible questions and demanded breakfast.

      I dug beneath my mattress and pulled out my secret, the egg I had kept warm under my body for years. It was still as deep and glittering as ever, with the city inside: the pointed towers, the starry sky, the carriages pulled by white horses with feathered headdresses, footmen with velvet trousers and mustaches like wings. I thought I saw them move. Perhaps it was my breath.

      I left by the window and set out, the air prickling my face, the snow swirling around, white clouds against a darker sky. I tried to step lightly, but my footsteps crunched rudely in the snow, like cows chewing.

      I did not look back.

      It was the only home I had ever known. I could feel it behind me, hunched and glowering, its shoulders frosted with snow.

      I felt a cold breath on the back of my neck, a sharp twinge that ran down my spine. I tried to run, but like a dream my steps seemed to grow even slower as my heart raced.

      I knew my mother was watching from the window.

      Standing with her arms folded beneath her breasts, chin out, her braid swaying pendulously behind her. She was at the window, or perhaps she was in the yard, heedless and barefoot in the snow, her eyes raising the hairs on the back of my neck.

      I could feel her drawing me to her; like a spider she was sending out her threads, I could feel their tug in the small of my back. They drew tauter with every step I took. I knew if I paused, those threads would tighten, they would snap me back, I would be pulled home gliding so smoothly over the snow like an errant sled.

      Oh, how she pulled at my hair. My scalp smarted.

      I knew she was rolling up her sleeves, stretching out her arms; she was pursing her lips kisslike to draw in such a breath that my clothes streamed out behind me; she was undulating her fingers in the entrancing way she used to hypnotize the chickens before she chopped off their heads.

      I kept walking, I knew not to look back. My mother had taught me nearly everything she knew, so I knew what she was up to, I was wise enough not to look at her face.

      And yet if she had called out my name then, I think I would have gone running back to bury my face in her lap. The warmth of her body through her clothes, a smell like fields of wheat. Her voice could do that.

      But she did not call out. Perhaps