Ragnar's brown homespun suit lay in a rumpled heap on the table. The old woman emptied the canister into the big pot on the stove, added water, and fed the suit into the mixture. Soon the simmering liquid resembled thin brown tar.
The old woman fished up a sleeve of the suit on a wooden spoon and shook her head. She took the coal bucket and a small shovel from behind the stove. In a few minutes, she came back, straining under the weight of the bucket.
"Ragnar—your suit," she called.
He emerged from the bedroom, his eyes puffy. Had he lain too long silently in the dark? Some people were like that. He picked up the bucket and emptied the black clay into the pot.
The old woman peered into the pot. Occasionally she stirred the suit with the spoon. When the bubbles in the thick black soup began to pop, she sat down, crossing one leg tightly over the other, wrapping a gray-socked foot around an ankle.
Charlotte placed her hands on her chest as if to protect herself from the old woman's scrutiny. A foreigner, was she good enough for her son? Later, the black suit frolicked on the clothesline like an imp out of hell. The bits of fleece on the barbed wire blew horizontally in the wind. Nothing was ever still here. Between shifts in the wind, she'd said yes. Now her dread deepened.
The old woman looked sideways at Charlotte. "And what will you wear?"
Not the black dress she'd worn the first time, so many years ago. Later, in the bedroom, Charlotte held up a wrinkled black skirt and a hand-knitted red sweater. The old woman batted the air and disappeared upstairs.
Minutes later, she returned, unfurling a yellowed bed sheet.
"This is what you need."
The old cloth smelled musty.
But the old woman hopped around the kitchen, chattering about sleeves and waists. Even on the hillside, mothers went funny about weddings. Holding the sheet against Charlotte's chest, she pinned the fabric and cut it with the same scissors they'd used to shear the sheep. Then, wedging herself between the stove and the kitchen table, she began to sew. Under her breath she sang about a blunt sword named Dragvendill:
My teeth solved my troubles
And tore out his throat.
***
Next day the sheet resembled a garment. "Try it on," the old woman said through the pins between her lips. Charlotte shivered in the dusty fabric. Her armpits hurt. The old woman stepped back. "Sleeves too tight?"
Then Charlotte saw the stains across the front of the dress. How old was the sheet? Had the old woman and Ragnar's father come together on it in the ancient ritual of love? It was a fertility gown, the earth goddess's cast-off skin. The old woman dropped the gown into the big pot, took a handful of lichens from her jar, and strewed them over the liquid.
She looked up. "Yellow or red?"
Charlotte recalled Petronella, the top can-can dancer in Berlin, how the audience had sung Take it Off, Petronella as her red dress whirled. In the same show, a young woman, perspiring under the watchful eye of a stormtrooper, had struggled to keep her crotch cover from slipping off. "Red" The old woman went to the cowshed and brought back a jar of urine. She placed it next to the bowl of lichens. Later that evening, she poured off the lichen brew, added the urine, and set the pot on the floor to soak. For two nights in a row Charlotte woke up to the sound of the old woman pouring off the urine, adding more, and setting it to soak again.
Three days before the wedding, the old woman left the farmhouse early in the morning. When Charlotte got up, Petronella's earth mother gown hung like a scarlet flag on the clothesline. By the time the fog had burned off the hillside, the old woman returned with her apron full of leaves, roots, and berries. A pink spot colored each of her thin gray cheeks.
"Makes good babies," the old woman said, pushing a bowl of grass milk at her. Her eyes crinkled in laughter.
Charlotte was warm with desire for Ragnar. But a baby? She'd done that already and misplaced it.
Singing to herself, "headache, rheumatism, bladder, and liver," the old woman minced motherwort, raspberry leaves, and seaweed then scooped the plant scraps up from the cutting board in her small, dry hand and dumped them into a pot of water simmering on the stove. A smell like sweet fish oil filled the room. Leaning over the pot, she washed her small, sunken cheeks in the steam. At last she poured the light brown liquid over a cloth filter into a jar.
At dinner, three envelopes lay on Charlotte's dish. Picking up the first one, Charlotte met the old woman's shy smile. On the back of the envelope was a drawing of a hand covered with warts. Inside were dried daisies, tree bark, and dandelions. The second one featured a freckled woman and contained a rosette of reddish basal leaves. The last one bore a sketch of a wrinkled old woman with scraggly hair. Inside she found a stalk of dried yarrow.
The old woman's eyes twinkled. "Everything you need for married life."
Free of warts, freckles, wrinkles, and thanks to this fragile knower of mysterious things, she'd be happy on the farm. Charlotte almost fell over her chair as she reached for the old woman. Embracing her thin shoulders, she caught a smell of moist earth.
It was the day before the wedding. When Charlotte went to the cowshed for more milk, she saw the flicker of an oil lamp in the window. Inside, she discovered the old woman stripped to the waist and leaning over the washtub, her hair loose, her shoulders bare. She was pouring urine on her head and rubbing it into her hair. A row of empty jars stood on the shelf. Remembering how the old woman had reached for a jar each time a cow peed, Charlotte filled her pitcher from the milk canister and hurried out.
Later the old woman sat at the kitchen table. Her long, gray hair shone under the lamp.
The Sound of a Horse Neighing
The church stood halfway up the hill above the village. Cream-colored with a red roof, it stood out against the mossstreaked rock. Inside, six carved wooden pews bore traces of green and blue paint. Christ in a red robe prayed in Gethsemane on the gold-rimmed pulpit. A miniature cathedral, Charlotte thought, recalling how she and Max had sat on folding chairs and eyed a potted plant in the lobby of the bank on Pariser Platz on their wedding day. Her mother hadn't wanted to attend. Bank lobby? Should she bring a deposit slip?
The hillside religion always confused her—Ragnar raising his head to the sky and the old woman singing to birds or conjuring powers up from the earth. And here was the familiar Lamb of God preparing to sacrifice his life for the old woman. Charlotte felt she'd known Christ from the start—all those paintings of the annunciation featuring the holy spirit riding a golden ray, directed between the Virgin's breasts. But that mystery no longer enticed her the way the secrets of the old woman did.
She ran her hand over her hip, as if the old sheet were something she'd just bought at Bernstein's, Max's department store. The hillside people sat in the pews—rubber-shoed farmers and their strong, pale wives, silver brooches rising and falling on their bosoms. The minister had a christening on a farm deep in the end of the valley. The wedding would have to wait.
A farmer in the back row was explaining bovine fibroid tumors to his neighbor in a loud voice. Nonni from Butterdale's wife placed a hand on each of her thighs and turned toward the back of the church. Charlotte withdrew into the shadows. It wasn't too late. She could still flee. The daily bus to town would leave in half an hour. She'd scramble to the back, keep her head down so they wouldn't find her—just another runaway bride.
Rubbing