The Dollmage

Chapter 5

As I said, Annakey ran away when Renoa led the other young people to taunt her. Now I will tell you where Annakey ran. How do you know, Dollmage? you ask with your eyes. How can you tell us the truth about Annakey, where she went and what she thought? The children know, but I forbid them to tell. Believe me only when I tell you that the Dollmage is the storymaker. Listen to me then, as the children do.

Annakey ran alongside the river until the houses were all past her. She ran until there were no more bridges, until the fields turned to thorn and thicket, and on until the underbrush turned to saplings and the saplings to shadowed forest. She ran until she came to where the river comes fast out of the mountain. It is a feared place. Here the bear and the cougar come to water and the wolves come to howl. Here the great trees have spirits and hang down their long branches to pinch and scratch. Here there are eyes in every hole. Annakey did not care that cougars and bears had lapped at the water, nor that there were bones in the shallows.

Annakey is afraid of only one thing, and that is not it.

Look into her eyes now. Though you keep your stones hard by your sides, though you wish to have my tale over so you can execute her, there is no fear in her eyes. No, Annakey is afraid of only one thing.

What is it, the children ask. I will not tell you now. Later. My temper is frayed from sleeping in the open last night. It is a wonder you do not wear out your voices, snoring all night. So many snores! It is useful for keeping the bears and wildcats away at night, but hard on a Dollmage’s temper.

As I was saying, Annakey sat on a rock at the riverbank and listened to the sound of the rushy water. I will tell you what Annakey learned as she sat upon that rock.

First, Annakey learned that morning to be alone. That is a great power.

Second, she learned that there is cruelty in the world. She did not yet understand that those who hurt others do so because they believe that people desire to hurt them. She did not know yet that such people suffer more than the ones they hurt, for they must live in their own skin, in a world of their own making, a world full of enemies. Annakey would be years older before she learned this, but today she had learned about cruelty. That lesson in itself was valuable.

Annakey did not appreciate the lesson. Her throat and chest ached. The flat rock she lay on absorbed the heat of the sun, but Annakey felt the cold of its heart. Icy water slicked the rocks in the shallows. After a long time she noticed that in the river shallows was a patch of clay. It was clean and slippery, pale green in color. She dug at it with her fingers, retrieved a handful, and began to work it. She made a sheep.

The pain in her throat and chest began to diminish.

For the first time Annakey looked at her surroundings and found that it was a wondrous place. The trees were thick all around, but had backed away to make a small, round clearing by the river. The grass was thick and soft here, not too high, and scented with bee-lace and mud orchids. The trees hung their branches over the clearing protectively. Even the water was tamer here, eddied into a quiet little bay at the foot of the large, flat rock that Annakey was sitting on. It charmed her. It was like a little room in the woods just for her. There was even a hidey-hole, for one of the trees had a huge knot in its trunk. She put the clay sheep in the knothole, but there would be enough room to hide more treasures if she were to come here again.

When Annakey returned to the village and learned that Roily the cow had drowned, she came to me, her face the color of the pale green clay under her fingernails.

“I drowned Roily,” she said. “I will pay.”

“You made the doll, but Renoa threw it in the river. It is prideful to think you did it, to think you have the power.”

Annakey looked down at her hands, relieved that they had done nothing appalling and without her permission. Only then did she think to blush under my rebuke.

“Nevertheless,” I said, “you must promise me that you will not make any more such animal dolls. I have told the villagers I will watch you.”

She nodded. A nod is as good as a promise.

After a few days, she noticed that some people would no longer speak to her as she went about her work, and those who did spoke to her differently than before. Still Annakey smiled, but oh, such tucking away of bitterness there must have been.

At the end of the day, Annakey returned to her hiding place. She brought with her an old wool blanket so dense it could keep out a morning’s rain. She brought dried fruit and a fishhook, a spoon, a pot, a small box of oil, and salt. Carefully she took her clay sheep out of the knothole and laid it on the large, flat rock by the river.

She gathered moss for a lawn for the clay sheep to eat in. She found pebbles for boulders and bits of pine for bushes and small-leafed twigs for great trees. She fashioned a shallow bowl of clay and filled it with water for a pond. She broke bits of her hair to float in the pond for fishes. Tiny bluebells and baby’s breath that she found growing wild on the river-bank were sweet flowers for her sheep in his meadow. She kept her promise to me, however, that she would not make any more animal dolls. Her sheep had the meadow to himself.

When Annakey returned home she did her work with a song and a light hand. Even when the work became heavy and long, when the other children played while Annakey must weed and clean and cook, she had a meadow for her mind to live in.

Because of her pet deer, Renoa’s desire to do the work of a Dollmage left her again. She would stay all day upon the mountain and come home only at dark. At times she slept in the woods. She took her friends from the village to places no one had seen. She became respected for her knowledge of the wilderness and all things in it.

I prayed for the day the deer would go wild again and leave her. Once I tried to take her clay deer from her pocket as she slept. I would put the doll over the mountains, far away from the Seekvalley village doll. But she woke, and her eyes glowed in the darkness like a wild animal’s.

“What are you doing?” she whispered in the dark. Her voice hissed low and piercing as a serpents. I felt a chill between my shoulder blades.

“It is time for you to be a woman and do the work of a woman,” I said, my voice just above a whisper.

“I will do my own work,” she said.

“You will work here, with me.”

“No.” She was not arguing with me. She was explaining. “You suck the magic out of me, old woman. I feel my power only when I am far away from you.”

“Renoa.”

“Someday, when I am Dollmage, I will make new valleys and new mountains, and I will go there.” Then she dressed herself and ran out of the house into the night.

She was fearless, and all my efforts to tame her only made her vicious.

I ceased to worry about Annakey. She grew out of my sight and largely out of my mind. Over the next three years, her mother became weaker of body and mind, and rarely went out of doors. She did sewing and mending in exchange for the things she and Annakey could not provide for themselves. Annakey had to care for the cow and the pig and the chickens; she had to plant and weed and harvest the garden. She was too busy to trouble me. I did not know that whenever she could, she would run away to her secret place where the mountains’ toes are bunched, where the sheep do not wander for fear of wolves and mountain cats. I did not know she would add to her meadow, putting in hedges and bees, and dew on the leaves, and all manner of wonders. I did not know what made her happy. I did notice that Oda Weedbridge’s field was lusher that year, and that in it the wildflowers grew more abundantly than anywhere else in the valley. I spread dust over her field in the Seekvalley doll so it would not excite envy among the villagers, but it remained green and thick with flowers as ever. I could not know that already Annakey was stealing my story.

Vilsa had a secret of her own. Whenever Annakey was gone,Vilsa had taken to spending her time in the root shed where she could think about her husband without interruption. She spoke to him while she was in there, laughing over old jokes they had shared and quietly swearing her love forever. Her grief had become madness. One day I listened at the window and heard her carrying on a conversation with her husband.

I looked in the window. “Vilsa,” I said, “who are you speaking to?”

“My husband,” she said.

“He is not here,” I said.

“His ghost, then.”

I looked all around. “His ghost is not here.”

Vilsa looked around the room groggily, as if coming out of a trance. “No,” she said. “He is not dead.”

“If he is not dead, he does not love you enough to return to you. It is not my fault.”

Of course it was my fault. I chose not to think of it, to delay the day of my repentance.

One day not long after that, Annakey summoned me to the house. She was dough-colored, and her eyes were swollen.

“Dollmage,” she said. “Mother is ill.”

“She is always ill.”

“This time it is different,” Annakey said.

“It comes of spending too much time in the root shed,” I said sharply, but I followed her to the house.

When I arrived, I saw everything as usual. The windows were polished and the stoop swept. The laundry was hanging fresh, the lamp was trimmed, the butter churned and molded.

I looked at Vilsa and knew at once she was dying.

The woman looked away, staring at the mountains through her sparkling windows as if her husband might come for her even yet. She knew also.

“Take care of my daughter,” she said weakly. “Teach her to use her gift.”

“Renoa is the true Dollmage,” I said. “It is possible that Annakey drowned a cow, but to tame a deer is the work of a Dollmage. You know the law. There cannot be two to a village.”

Vilsa got up on one elbow. The effort made her forehead and chin glisten with sweat. “Listen, Grandmother Hobblefoot,” she said. “You think my promise doll drained me of my happiness so that Annakey might have it. You are wrong. It is her promise doll that did it. She has great power to make the story go how she wills it. Teach her, Dollmage.” She lay back on the pillows. “Care for her until her father returns for her.”

She was again telling me my own art.

“If you insist her father lives, she will be denied an orphans portion. But I will do my best to see that she is cared for.”

Annakey knelt beside her mother. She was not smiling now. Her face was full of astonishment, as if she had never seen death before.

“Is it true, Mother? Did I take your happiness for my own? I will give it back.”

Vilsa touched her daughter’s hand. “Things have been as they were meant.”

“I will make things to be as I wish them,” Annakey said. She was weeping openly now.

“Someday you will understand about daughters, how their happiness becomes your own,” Vilsa said.

“Are you afraid to die?”

“A little.You can help me to be less afraid.”

“Tell me, Mama. I will do anything.”

“Take your promise doll in your hand.”

Annakey did so.

“Promise me, now, that you will be happy, that you will make your life good.”

I gasped. “She will do no such thing. That is for God to decide.”

“Promise me, child,” Vilsa said. “It is my dying wish.”

“I promise, Mother,” she said.

Vilsa closed her eyes and her hands were still. “Tell your father,” she whispered, “that I died speaking of my love for him.” She looked out the window and I saw her smile for the first time in years.

Then she died.

Annakey moaned as if her stomach were in pain. She laid her head on her mother’s chest.

“Come,” I said.

“Dollmage Hobblefoot, I feel I am going to be sad forever,” Annakey said, and in her face was real fear.

So. Finally. The promise doll I had made her was not without power after all.

“Come. I have an idea of someone who will take you in.” She closed her eyes. After a time she stood up. “No. I am not an orphan. I have a father yet, and I am old enough to live here on my own until he returns.”

The way she said it made me look at her differently. I was astonished to realize how grown she was. She was as tall as I, and with the breasts of a woman. My Renoa was the same age, of course, but she seemed younger to me. By the time I was this age I was doing all the work of a full Dollmage. Renoa still dabbled and played, and had no taste for the labor.

“You’ll get no orphan’s portion unless you raise your father’s tombstone along with your mother’s,” I said.

“My father promised my mother that he would return,” she said. “If I give up on the promise he made, it will kill him. My faith will keep him alive. I will do extra work for my keep.”

I thought of the smashed valley doll, its pieces long since broken beyond recognition, and I was sick with guilt.

“What will you do for work?” I demanded.

“I — I do not know. . . ”

“Have you manure shovels? Buckets?”

She shrugged, defeated.

“Come. I know who does.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the house.

The truth is I believed I was God’s defender. Was it not for him to decide who would be happy and who would not? Was it not for him to send the fruitful field, the long-milking cow and good health? If we lacked for anything, was it not God’s Fault? Capital F? He it was who had given Annakey a frowning promise doll. I encouraged her promise doll to keep its promise by taking Annakey to work for the egg-woman.

The egg-woman was Oda Woodbridge. She was a spring berry, small and bright red, but so sour as to bring tears to the eyes. She lived at the far end of the village, in the last house, in fact, that Annakey would run past on the way to her secret place. She was a spinster who refused to accept the help due her from the village. She burned dried cow dung for fuel, saving for rainy days the little wood she could forage for herself.

She had worn the same dress for five years, and to cover it had made herself new aprons out of the scraps that others could not use. She ate from her own garden, and grew her own grain. What she could not grow or make herself, she bought with money she earned as the egg-woman.

Though everyone had their own chicken coop in their yard, few people looked forward to the task of entering the smelly coop to search for eggs. Oda did it every morning for people, and in return they let her keep an egg or two. Of course she could not consume that many eggs herself, and so she sold the rest to those whose chickens were not laying at the time. Oda was a proud woman even though she had great ugliness to keep her humble, and she became prouder as year after year she refused her due as a spinster. When I asked her why she would not take her spinster’s allotment, she replied, “Because then I would have to be grateful, and that is more exhausting than work.” She was wise in a sour sort of way.

“What have you brought her here for?” Oda said to me when I arrived at her door with Annakey.

“Vilsa died,” I said. “She needs work.”

“Give her the due of an orphan,” Oda replied. “I have no work for her.”

“She is not an orphan. Her father is alive, or so her mother claimed. She must work for her living.”

“Again I ask: Why do you bring her to me? There are not enough eggs for two of us.”

“Think, Oda, how much more money you could make if you could clean out the chicken coops for people.”

“I am too old to clean out chicken coops,” she said. She was an insufferably stubborn woman, but before she finished her sentence she understood what I was proposing. “Oh,” she said. She looked at Annakey with interest.

“She needs the use of your shovels and buckets. You arrange the work with those of the village who are happy with your work as egg-woman. Make sure she does well, and take a portion of her pay.”

Oda nodded, and that is how Annakey became the chicken-coop girl.