My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (4 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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They
were
beautiful.
Herons and ibis and egrets and roseate spoonbills and storks feeding or flying or resting in their nests with their young or gliding above water that sparkled, so great was the gentleman’s skill, sunlight pouring through their perfect wings.
Let us retire to your home and lay these pictures on the floor inside so you can study them and they won’t be blown about by the wind, he said.
Indeed, a violent wind had come up as though it were trying to tell Baba Iaga something but she ignored it.
So the chicken legs obediently swung the hut around and Baba Iaga and the gentleman, whose name was John James Audubon, entered.
Well, put out some tea and biscuits for our guest, Baba Iaga snapped at the cat, but the cat said, We have no tea or biscuits. The dog growled, but Baba Iaga said to Audubon, Oh, pay no attention to him. This deeply hurt the dog’s feelings.
It’s quite dim in here, Audubon remarked. Would you have another lamp so that we can see the drawings better? I so want you to approve of them so you will allow me to draw your beautiful daughter.
I do have another lamp, Baba Iaga said gladly.
And please, grandmother, he said, could you be so kind as to lock the dog and cat away? The dog does frighten me a bit and I’m allergic to cats.
Baba Iaga put the dog and the cat in the closet and followed them in, looking for the other lamp. Oh, wouldn’t you know, she muttered, I put it on the highest, most-difficult-to-reach shelf. Audubon slammed the door shut and bolted it. Baba Iaga and the dog and the cat were so stunned that for a moment they were completely speechless. Then they heard their beautiful pelican child say, Oh please sir, do not take me from this bright world! and then a sharp crack as though from a pistol, then terrible sounds of pain and surprise, and then nothing. The dog began to howl and the cat to hiss. Baba Iaga beat on the door with her bony hands and feet, which were sharp as a horse’s hooves but the door was old and strong, the wood practically petrified, and they could not break through it. But the dog flung himself against the door again and again and worried a sliver loose with his teeth and claws, and then another sliver. He did not know how long he tore at the door. He had no conception of time. It seemed only yesterday he was a puppy hanging onto Baba Iaga’s sock as she limped across the room, or pouncing at moths, or grinning with joy when he was allowed (before he got too big) to accompany Baba Iaga on her flights across the sky. It seemed only yesterday that his fur was soft and black, his paws so pink and tender, his teeth so white, or it seemed as though it could be tomorrow.
Finally, he had made a hole in the door just large enough for him to crawl through. What met his eyes was a scene so horrific he could not understand it. He began to tremble and howl. The beautiful pelican child was pierced through with cruel rods and was arranged in a position of life, her great wings extended, her elegant neck arched. But her life had been taken away, and her eyes were fathomless and dark. A
specimen
, the cat screamed behind him. He has made of our sister a specimen! And then he felt the tears of Baba Iaga striking him like hail.
He left. Outside he ran and ran through the forest. He could see the man running, too, clutching his wretched papers and pens. Often the dog stumbled and twice he fell, for his hips had been bad for some time and his poor old heart now pounded with sorrow. At last he gave up the pursuit for the evil one had far outdistanced him. After he rested and caught his breath, he smelled the dreadful scent of cruel death. Audubon’s abandoned campsite was nearby and a fire of green branches still smoldered. Many were the trees that had been cut down, and on their stumps were colorful woodland birds, thrushes and larks and woodpeckers and tiny iridescent and colorfully patterned ones whose names the dog did not know. Long nails thrust through their small bodies kept them erect and thread and wire held their heads up and kept their wings aloft. Even more horrifying was the sight of birds dismembered, their pinions and claws severed for study. Whimpering, the dog fled, and after he had gone a short distance or a long distance, after a long time or a short time, he came to the little hut on chicken legs. The legs were weeping and Baba Iaga and the cat were weeping. Baba Iaga had enfolded her daughter in her arms and her tears fell without ceasing on the pelican child’s brown breast.
In the morning, the cat said, We must do something.
I will go out again and find him and tear him to pieces, the dog said wearily.
I don’t give a rat’s ass about Audubon, the cat said. We must bring our beautiful pelican sister back.
Perhaps we should call for Prince Ivan, the dog suggested.
Useless, Baba Iaga said. He has his princess and his castle. He never calls, he never writes, he is of no use to us.
We will put the beautiful pelican child in the oven, the cat announced.
I couldn’t bear to put my daughter in the cold cold oven, Baba Iaga said.
Who said anything about cold, the cat said. We will preheat it to oh say, two hundred fifty degrees and we will put her in for only half an hour.
Half an hour? the dog said.
That stove hasn’t been used in years, Baba Iaga said.
But they did what the cat suggested for what else could they do?
Carefully, they lay the pelican child in the oven which was no longer cold but not too warm either. Oh her beautiful face, Baba Iaga cried, her beautiful bill, take care with her bill.
Then they waited.
Has it been a half an hour yet? the dog asked.
Not yet, the cat said.
At last the cat announced that it had been half an hour and Baba Iaga opened the oven and the pelican child, as beautiful as she had ever been, tumbled out and tottered into their happy arms, alive.
After this, Baba Iaga continued to fly through the skies in her mortar, navigating with her pestle. But instead of a broom, she carried the lamp that illuminated the things people did not know or were reluctant or refused to understand. And she would lower the lamp over a person and they would see how extraordinary were the birds and beasts of the world, and that they should be valued for their bright and beautiful and mysterious selves and not willfully harmed for they were more precious than castles or the golden rocks dug out from the earth.
But she could reach only a few people each day with the lamp.
Once, seven experienced its light but usually it was far less. It would take thousands of years, tens of thousands of years perhaps, to reach all human beings with the light.
Baba Iaga came home one evening—so tired—and she gathered her little family around her, the pelican child and the dog and the cat and said, My dear ones, I still have magic and power unrealized. Do you wish to become human beings, for some think you are under a hellish spell. Do you want to become human? The cat and the dog spoke. The pelican child had not spoken since the day of her return.
No, the dog and the cat said.
When I was doing some research for a book on the Florida Keys some twenty years ago, I discovered that John James Audubon, despite his revered status, was a great slaughterer of birds. (Perhaps everyone was aware of this.) He killed tirelessly for pleasurable sport and would wipe out entire mangrove islands of its inhabitants because . . . well, because I guess it was easy once he got started. I do hope the curse of history will catch up with him. Perhaps Baba Iaga will be the great facilitator in that regard.
Some linguists posit that the
baba
component of her name derives from
pelican
. And the pelican is one of the great birds of legend. Returning to her nest to find her infants dead, she pierces her own breast and revives them with her blood.
Baba Iaga is the most marvelous creature in all of Russian folklore and totally unpredictable in her behavior. In this story, she becomes kind and sorrowful, even, perhaps, tragic.
—JW
JONATHON KEATS
Ardour
YOU MEET FOLKS WHO REMEMBER WHEN THIS COUNTRY STILL HAD A winter, and one year led into another unhindered. Come the first snow, men would leave the fields for fallow, to chop firewood in the forest. Then not more than a day would go by before you’d hear that one of them had seen
her
.
She wasn’t somebody any of them knew, at least not personally, by way of an affair or a mutual acquaintance. But long before, they’d made up a name to use when talking to one another, as men will, about a girl. They called her
Ardour
.
The story was ever the same. Resting alone in a clearing, burning a small flame for warmth, a peasant would sense at first just a breath within the dead trees’ shadows. Then he’d see the sky-gray of two eyes, watching. That was what she was always doing, the girl they called Ardour, and, calling out to her, they’d each compete to draw her closer than any of the others had done. Yet there was a certain distance that she’d always keep.
It was not, evidently, a matter of modesty: Over her bare skin she wore at most a coat of snow, often only a gloss of frost. Nor could she seriously be considered a flirt: Unlike young women in town who hid their flaws by making potential suitors notice only each other’s faults, Ardour had no perceptible imperfection. From behind their fire, they’d call to her, and it was as if she simply wasn’t sure how to respond.
Could she have known their ulterior motives? Each year echoed the one before. As she woke into the first snow, she recalled not what had happened the previous winter, but remembered only an urge that had yet gone unfulfilled.
It had begun as something she’d seen, who knew when, deep in the woods where she’d lived all eternity: A girl like her—breasts as steep as snow peaks beneath a blizzard of hair—came hand-in-hand with a man into an open meadow, where they embraced, and, it seemed, drew into a single skin. Then there were his words, her tears. A rupture, a quiver. They cradled, as if each were the other’s wound.
Had Ardour known the word, perhaps she’d have called it
love
. As likely, had she known
hate
, that term would have occurred to her as she watched the couple wrangle. She hadn’t had language to guide her. So she’d clutched her own numb flesh, and dreamed what it would be to—
To
feel
? To
desire
? How? Who can be lonely, even, if never not alone? After that, each year, under cover of winter, she hovered on the verge of humanity. And men urged her over the threshold.
They beseeched her all season long until at last she came too close to fire. As the frost thawed from her, she melted with it, into clear water. Then the cold brace of winter would follow her, flowing down-river through closed forest into the unknown. Beneath the snow would emerge a new spring. Work would begin again, the cycle of sowing and reaping that consumed everybody most of the year. There was so much to be done, to bring bread to the table. The only able peasant permitted by the king to remain idle was the man who had tempted Ardour from her forest cover. That was the reward for ending winter.
Every year men worked harder to lure Ardour to her fate. They sang to her, played the fiddle or the flute. If once they’d been attracted to her, after a while you no longer heard them at the tavern talking lustily about her blizzard of hair, those breasts as steep as snow peaks. Each man thought only of himself.

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