Fairy Tale Review: The Red Issue #6

Nevada

TRANSLATED BY MARIA TATAR

The Story of Grandmother

¹

There was once a woman who had made some bread. She said to her daughter: Take this loaf of hot bread and this bottle of milk over to granny’s.

The little girl left. At the crossroads she met a wolf, who asked Where are you going?

I’m taking a loaf of hot bread and a bottle of milk to granny’s.

Which path are you going to take, asked the wolf, the path of needles or the path of pins?²

The path of needles, said the little girl.

Well, then, I’ll take the path of pins.

The little girl had fun picking up needles. Meanwhile, the wolf arrived at granny’s, killed her, put some of her flesh in the pantry and a bottle of her blood on the shelf. The little girl got there and knocked at the door.

Push the door, said the wolf, it’s latched with a wet straw.

Hello, granny. I’m bringing you a loaf of hot bread and a bottle of milk.

Put it in the pantry, my child. Take some of the meat in there along with the bottle of wine on the shelf.³

There was a little cat in the room who watched her eat and said: Phooey! You’re a slut if you eat the flesh and drink the blood of granny.

Take your clothes off, my child, said the wolf, and come into bed with me.

Where should I put my apron?

Throw it into the fire, my child. You won’t be needing it any longer.

When she asked the wolf where to put all her other things, her bodice, her dress, her skirt, and her stockings, each time he said: Throw them into the fire, my child. You won’t be needing them any longer.⁴

Oh, granny, how hairy you are!

The better to keep me warm, my child!

Oh, granny, what long nails you have!

The better to scratch myself with, my child!

Oh, granny, what big shoulders you have!

The better to carry firewood, my child!

Oh, granny, what big ears you have!

The better to hear you with, my child!

Oh, granny, what big nostrils you have!

The better to sniff my tobacco with, my child!

Oh, granny, what a big mouth you have!

The better to eat you with, my child!

Oh, granny, I need to go badly. Let me go outside!

Do it in the bed, my child.

No, granny, I want to go outside.

All right, but don’t stay too long.

The wolf tied a rope made of wool to her leg and let her go outside.

When the little girl got outside, she attached the end of the rope to a plum tree in the yard. The wolf became impatient and said: Are you making cables out there? Are you making cables?

When he realized that there was no answer, he jumped out of bed and discovered that the little girl had escaped. He followed her, but he reached her house only after she had gotten inside.

NOTES

1. Told by Louis and Francois Bnffault en Nievre, 1885. Originally published by Paul Delarue, in "Les Contes merveilleux de Perrault et la tradition populaire," Bulletin folklorique de l’Ile-de-France (1951): 221-22. Translated and reprinted by permission of Maria Tatar. Copyright ©1999 by Maria Tatar

2. Yvonne Verdier ("Grand-meres, si vous saviez . . . le Petit Chaperon Rouge dans la tradition orale, Cailiers de Litterature Orale 4 [1978] 17-55) reads the path of pins and the path of needles as part of a social discourse pertaining to apprenticeships for girls in sewing. In another region of France, the paths are described as the path of little stones and the path of little thorns. An Italian version refers to a path of stones and a path of roots.

3. Local variations turn the flesh into tortellini in Italy and into sausage in France, while the blood is often said to be wine.

4. Many oral renditions of the tale presumably drew out the story by dwelling at length on what happens to each article of clothing.

GREG BILLS

Before the Red

Your papa was good, a saint among men. And brave? Don’t get me started.

Her mama praised her papa as she moved his fishing creel to reach the basket behind it. Both sat on the topmost shelf in the kitchen, and the basket was taken down each Sunday while the creel was never used. It would make sense to exchange their positions, to push the creel to the back, but Sylvie understood why this would never be. The creel could always be seen as they stood near the stove, its flip lid resting flush against the warm brown weave of its bucket, concealing the contents, or the lack, that lay within. Each Sunday, to reach the basket, her mama would lift the creel, hold it just longer than it took to move it aside, then tell Sylvie some small something about her papa, his goodness, his bravery his laugh, his loss.

Good, Sylvie had no reason to doubt—Papa had always skimmed the cream for her to sip, and brought home the honeycomb and the caps full of berries for her, for her and no one else—but she was given to wonder what made it brave to be crushed by a fallen tree. Brave, she supposed, to put himself at risk, to take the saw and axe against the forest’s giants with the possibility always at hand that a blade could slip or a drop could be misjudged. Brave to face the fear of the worst every day. Even if the disaster had finally come upon him unannounced, while his back was turned, with fate dropping down from the canopy of branches, the thick trunk heavy as God’s thumb, pummeling him to earth.

As she spoke of Papa, her mama would line the oval basket with clean linen and arrange the stores within: the loaves, and rolls, and cakes; the little pots of sweet and savory tastes. It was a pretty basket, finely worked, with a knitted grip around the handle. The knitting was her grandmama’s work, and the basket’s inventory was assembled with the elder woman’s appetites in mind. There was another basket, huge and squared, scratched and scorched, lidded, that her mother used to carry meals to the men in the woods, the seasonal laborers along with most of the bachelors in the village. In exchange for portions kept back for her own larder, she baked their flour into midday bread, churned their butter, and cured their cheese. Then she delivered these finished goods in the basket, heavy-laden, deep into the trees where the cutting was in progress. Most days, Sylvie followed close behind, struggling uphill with a jar of buttermilk. They served the men then lugged the empty jar and basket home.

This was how they lived on the little they had now that Papa was gone, and the routine occupied their attention for six of the seven days of each week (except in deep winter when no cutting was possible). But Sundays were always different. Sundays were for visiting Grandmama. Her mama left time on Saturday to bake some treats and assemble delicacies, and on Sundays, down would come the special basket, the Sunday basket, and after church, Sylvie and her mama would take themselves off down the path to the elder woman’s house.

The path parted from the main road at the edge of the village, stretched before the three last houses (the very last house was theirs), then curved away to follow the bend of the little pebbled creek that flowed along one edge of the meadow. The village sat on a high table in the mountains overwhelmed by forest on all sides, although in some spots a bald peak with its cap of eternal ice could be seen glinting above the treetops. Grandmama’s house was downhill from all this, beyond a ridge of foothills, on the far slope overlooking the big river valley. Sylvie imagined that she could step from their back stoop and march in a more-or-less straight line over the hilltop and down the steep slope to that other familiar doorstep on the far side. But no one travelled that way. She had been warned not to attempt it, and she doubted that she ever would. It was too uncertain, too unknown, and perhaps she lacked the bravery her papa had.

Instead of a simple up-and-down plunge, the path meandered for a long long time by the creek bed, keeping the hills always to the left, with the mountain peak hidden somewhere to the right. Until the curve, the going was the same same same: a brown or gray line of dust, or puddled here and there with rain, or as now in the almost-spring, mucky with snowmelt. By summer, its squiggle of earth would be fringed until almost buried in meadow grass and flowering greens. At the curve, the hills asserted themselves into a sharp point and a steep cliff face, and the path jumped the creek.

There were stones laid there for the crossing—even with the runoff from above, the creek was never fast or deep—and there was a shrine. It was, or had been, a half-sized wooden statue of the Virgin in an open A-frame shelter. The figure’s little house had collapsed, and the Virgin, though she still stood upright and firmly planted, had long ago lost her colored paint. Her face had no eyes, no mouth, no features really of any kind, and it might be possible to mistake her shape for a natural object—a stump, a branch—that somehow happened to evoke Our Lady standing in prayer, arms folded and head slightly bent. It might be possible to mistake the Virgin although no one in the village ever did because they had all, Sylvie included, been told the story of the rockslide from the cliff above, and the little boy who died, and his grieving family, and the memorial they had erected, and the care that must be taken, always taken, when crossing the creek at this spot, or really walking anywhere or doing anything on this dangerous mountain, in these threatening woods. No one forgot the Virgin, crackled and gray though she might now be, but this did not prevent those crossing the creek from reaching out to her to steady themselves and wearing the top of her head out shiny and smooth as the knob of a banister.

The path crossed the creek here because the creek itself turned sharply left then quickly gushed over a lip of rock: a waterfall. It sparkled like a shook silver chain all the way down to a deep and still pool. Sylvie had seen the waterfall many times, not from the top, but from below. The path came around and caught up with the creek that dribbled out again from the pool at the bottom.

There was a way down alongside the waterfall—not a path but a clambering over wet stones and a careful balancing of fingers and toes in crevices. She had seen a goat bound heedlessly over the lip of rock, and last summer some boys from the village had taken the sons of the seasonal woodcutters to the pool for a swim. She and her mother had been nearby when these boys—those she knew and those she didn’t—turned off the path to follow the creek towards its sudden descent. The boys were laughing, and because the cliffs that rose up around them carried their voices, she could hear them joke, the village boys telling the new ones about the witchhouse you could see from the top of the waterfall. It was a strange round house of a sort no one built any longer, half-hidden in overgrowth, and the witch there could sometimes be seen riding through the air crouched on a magic toadstool. She had a coven, and her underwitches would steal babies from the village and carry them in baskets down to the witchhouse to be roasted over hot coals and eaten.

The house was of course her grandmama’s, just visible from the hilltop; the witch was her grandmama; they, she and her mama, were the coven; their basket, full of stolen babies. Sylvie was certain that her mama could hear the boys as well as she could, but her mama had said nothing. There was nothing to be said, she supposed. She herself had nothing to say, and she did not even let herself cry about it.

If a traveler kept to the path, as she and her mama had done on the day with the boys (as they always did), he would find himself skirting the hills in gentle bends and turns just as if there were still a creek to follow, When the traveler had begun to think he would never be finished with open meadow sometimes interrupted by thin stands of trees, the trail switched down into a canyon. The path there cut into the flesh of the bare hillside, following the course, at a high remove, of a larger stream plunging from the heights of the mountain. This stream, at full strength, was used by the men to sluice their cuttings down to the river. There, the logs were bundled and ferried off to the city.

Her travels with her mother never took her as far as the river, however. Before the mouth of the canyon was reached, their path veered off once more and retraced the endless trek along the hills, only this time on the far side, where the slope was steeper, and rocks and scrub replaced the meadow grass. On each trip, they would eventually pass the boulder that, if mounted, would allow Sylvie to see the silver chain waterfall. After that landmark, the trail wandered uncertainly into a marshy trough where the creek must be crossed again on a rough-hewn bridge. Then, at last, the three dead trees, skeleton fingers poked into the sky’s eye, that stood before her grandmama’s. The house itself was round and tight and topped with a wild haystack thatch and, at the crown, a broken wagon wheel on a pole intended, she had been told, to attract some stork or heron to nest, for the purpose of good fortune.

Grandmama lived alone there. Alone in the house and on the hillside. Once a village, a whole village, had spread out below her. But it had been swept clear by a great storm and flood. She told Sylvie how the fleeing survivors had gathered on the hill around the house, building shelters from the rain with their bedcovers. One of the last families to arrive had been able to tie off their boat to the rail of the porch, the water had risen so far. After that, out of superstition or abundant caution, the elders had decided to rebuild the village in the meadow above, in its current location. Sylvie’s grandpapa (a man she had never known in life) had refused to join in the relocation. After all, his had been the only home to survive, and there must be some sign in that. When he died, Sylvie’s grandmama held onto his obstinacy as if it were an inheritance, and even in her dotage, she would not budge. Sylvie’s mama had married a village man and moved around the hill. After both their husbands had gone, neither woman could agree upon how to merge their households, so there was nothing to be done but for her mama to trudge the path each week—often grumbling at the inconvenience—and look in on the old dear infirm one. Sylvie had not yet been permitted to make the journey on her own, but it had been promised that one day she would be old enough.

This morning, as was the custom of the village on the Sunday following a child’s twelfth birthday, she had taken her first communion, the bread and wine engorging into body and blood on her tongue. She had worn a white gown, each pleat carefully starched by her mama so that it stood stiff but fragile like an ice crust over snow. Her mother had scrubbed her so thoroughly and dressed her so carefully in the bleak dawn light that there had been no time even for a crust dipped in milk, and the communion had been her only meal.

At home again, Sylvie had slipped into her everyday, and her mother had moved the creel and evoked her papa’s memory, his bravery and how proud he would have been, as she packed the basket—with extras to celebrate the important day. Sylvie would have liked to eat one of the little blond cakes, but this was never done—a meal before the journey—and they had set out to Grandmama’s as usual. On their way, her mother suggested that soon, someday soon, perhaps even next Sunday if the weather kept dry and warm, Sylvie might take a basket to her grandmama on her own. This possibility was startling enough, but her mama added, as she grasped Sylvie’s shoulder—rather than the Virgin’s polished head—to steady herself on