The Hanged Man: Part 5: Imbolc
Post #37: In which the power of choice is reclaimed ...
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Summer waned. Vasilisa and Rose Red would still enjoy their time together in the winter. They planned to go to the dwarves’ stone cottage if the weather prevented them being outside. As leaves began to turn colors and farmers harvested their fields, Vasilisa brought a friend to meet Rose Red.
Her name was Jenny. Rose Red’s first impression was of brown and gold. She wore a plain dress of natural linen and her hair was plaited in a thick tail down her back. Her eyes were a soft brown and warm with her smile. She embraced Rose Red with quick affection, as if they’d always been friends. A thin thread of gold wove through her hair, and she wore a belt of braided leather with the same gold thread.
Jenny was visiting the dwarves. Her companion was kin to them and went by the odd name of Rumpelstiltskin. Her father had been a miller and Rose Red thought she resembled a sheaf of wheat herself, earthy and quiet, brown touched with gold. She possessed a quality of deep rootedness and steady confidence, as though nothing in life could ever disturb her for long.
The year turned towards winter sleep. For several weeks, bitter weather forced the three girls to spend their days together in the stone cottage. The dwarves’ work was unaffected by weather, as it took place underground, but they often took a day off and joined the girls in front of the fire. Rumpelstiltskin was nearly always there, sitting quietly in a corner listening, but so silent Rose Red often forgot his presence.
It was in front of the fire Rose Red heard her friends’ stories.
One day snow flew outside, large, feathery flakes filling the grey air and clinging to every branch and twig. Rumpelstiltskin sat in his usual place in a corner with a large basket of apples at his feet, cutting them into pieces for drying. Rose Red watched him, enjoying the deft brown hands wielding the sharp knife. He weighed each apple in his hands, smelling it and turning it over. Some went into a smaller basket whole and others he cored and cut.
“How do you decide which ones to keep and which to dry?” she asked him.
He looked up from his work, knife stilling. His eyes were dark moss green. He smiled at her.
“Everything has itself to be,” he said. “Each apple, like each creature, is important and has some place in the scheme of life. Part of what we do in a life well lived is learn what we’re for and where we belong. Some of these apples are for eating whole and sweet. Some are for drying. I hold them in my hands and they tell me what they’re for.”
Rose Red thought about this. “In the woods,” she said slowly, “every separate piece is part of the whole thing. Birds, trees, ferns and flowers, deer, streams. They’re each themselves and each a piece of something larger. Is that what you mean?”
“Yes. A bird is not a flower. A leaf is not a berry bush. A doe is not a trickle of water.”
“I wish I could be a part of the woods,” said Rose Red in a low voice. “I wish I could be some beautiful small thing like a leaf, or a berry or a snail.” She looked down, twisting her hands together.
“I had a teacher who taught me to know one thing from another,” said Vasilisa. “It wasn’t apples, though!” She laughed, remembering. “Shall I tell you about it?”
“Yes!” Rose Red turned to her eagerly, relaxing her hands.
“When I was a child my young mother died. At the end, she beckoned me to her side as she lay in bed.
‘This is for you, my love,’ she whispered, and gave me a tiny doll dressed as I was, in white apron, black skirt, and vest embroidered with colored thread.
‘I must leave you soon. When you need guidance after I’m gone, ask this doll what to do. She’ll help you. Keep her with you always, but keep her secret. Give her food when she’s hungry. She’s made with blood and tears and my love for you.’ With that, Mother’s last breath left her body and she died.
My father mourned for a long time but life always begins again, and after a time he chose another wife, a widow with two daughters. In the beginning, they were nice to me and always smiled.
I missed my mother. For Father’s sake, I tried to please my new stepmother and stepsisters, but I often disappointed them and sometimes they were cross with me. My father was frequently gone and I didn’t like to bother him with my troubles.
One evening the fire went out. My stepmother and stepsisters sent me into the forest to beg Baba Yaga, the witch, for fire for our hearth.
Do you know Baba Yaga? She travels in a flying cauldron, steering it with a pestle-shaped oar and sweeping out her tracks with a birch twig broom bound with human hair. Her white-whiskered chin curves up and meets her down-curving nose, so nose and chin hairs knot together. Iron claws tip her hands and her teeth are iron, too.
Baba Yaga’s house sits on huge chicken legs that walk around and sometimes dance. A palisade of bones guards the house, and fiery skulls sit atop the palisade. Pointed teeth and finger bones lock and bolt the doors.
It was dark when I set out and I was terrified, but I reached down and patted the doll in my pocket and felt better.
The doll guided me through the dark forest. Sticks broke under my feet and twigs scratched my face. The forest was full of footsteps and shadows and peering eyes, but I fed the doll some bread as I walked and followed her direction, trusting my mother’s love.
After a long time, I came to the hovel of Baba Yaga. The fence made of skulls and bones surrounding the hut began to blaze with an inner fire as I came near, so the clearing glowed with eerie light.
As I stood hesitating outside the fence, the dark trees groaned and tossed as though in a fearsome gale, and Baba Yaga in her cauldron suddenly descended on me and shouted, ‘What do you want, frogling?’
She was a terrible sight and I trembled, but I tried to be polite.
‘Grandmother, our fire is out. I’ve come to ask for a coal for my family.’
Baba Yaga snapped, ‘Why should I help people stupid enough to let their fire go out? Good riddance, I say! You’re too useless to live, toad spawn!’ She sucked loudly on a tooth, glaring at me. Then her expression softened and she grew coaxing, and I was more frightened than I’d been when she was nasty. ‘I know who you are,’ she said. ‘Why not leave your stepmother and stepsisters to die in the cold dark, hmmmm? They’re no friends of yours. Walk away! Leave them to their fate!’
‘My father—‘I began.
‘Oh yesss, I know, you couldn’t let down dear daddy, could you? Though he’s made your life a little hell, hasn’t he? Well, if that’s the way you want it…’ she trailed off, mumbling, then shot out, ‘So you want my help, do you?’
‘Yes, please, Grandmother.’
Baba Yaga said, ‘If you want a coal, earn it! I’m a poor old woman and I need some help around here. If you do your work well, which I doubt, you’ll have fire. If not…’ Baba Yaga’s eyes were like red hot iron, and I shuddered.
So, she lay down on her bed and ordered me to bring her breakfast. I cooked meat and eggs and more meat and more eggs until she’d eaten everything except a crust of bread I found on a shelf.
I shared the bread with my doll and fell asleep against the kitchen wall while Baba Yaga snored, but soon she woke and pulled me up by my hair.
‘Wash my clothes, sweep the yard and the house, prepare my food, and separate mildewed corn from good corn. I’ll be back to inspect your work later.’ She flew off in her cauldron, cackling.
The clothes lay in a fetid tangle in the yard, each garment big enough for a giantess. It would take three women a day to wash even one. The floor of the house was littered with gnawed bones, mouse tails, hairballs, toenail clippings, beetles, clumps of earwax, gobs of mucus and greasy soot. The yard was worse than the house. Next to the bone fence a pile of corn stood as high as my shoulder, mildewed mixed up with wholesome.
As soon as she’d gone, I took out my doll. ‘What shall I do? How can I do this work with no food and no sleep?’ The doll told me to do my best with the laundry, so I chose a pair of stockings twenty feet long, striped in purple and green, heated water, found the washboard and soap, and began to scrub. I changed the water and scrubbed, changed the water and scrubbed, rinsed and rinsed and rinsed, and when I was finished the stockings were a lovely violet and pale green. By then I felt so tired I staggered. The doll told me to sleep, and I crawled under the table and did so.
When I woke the work was done except to cook the meal, and I found fresh provisions in the kitchen. I cooked, and when the Yaga returned she found nothing undone. Pleased, in a way, but not pleased because she couldn’t find fault, she sat down grumpily to eat. She ate and ate and ordered me to again clean the house, sweep the yard, launder her clothes and separate a pile of wheat from chaff the next day. When I looked around me, it seemed as if these tasks had never been done before.
Night fell and she began to snore. I lay down on the floor under the table and slept, but it seemed I’d hardly closed my eyes when I woke to find her pulling me to my feet by my hair and it was morning again.
Off she went in her cauldron, screeching as though to split the sky. I took out my doll. ‘What shall I do now?’ I asked it. It told me to sweep the floor and I found a rake and shovel, a broom and a scrub brush and set to work, pushing trash and litter out the front door and into the yard below. When the floor was bare, I tucked up my skirt and scrubbed it with a stiff brush on my hands and knees. While I worked, the doll did the laundry, swept the yard and separated the wheat from chaff. Together, we made a meal.
When Baba Yaga returned, she found nothing undone. Pleased, but not so pleased, she settled down to eat, throwing bones on the clean floor and belching. When she was finished, it was nearly dark. She pointed to a pile of dirt inside the bone fence. ‘That pile of dirt contains poppy seeds. In the morning, I want a pile of poppy seeds and a pile of dirt, all separated out from each other.’
I knew I could never complete such a job, especially in the dark, but the doll reassured me. Baba Yaga fell into bed and began to snore, and I went out and started to pick poppy seeds out of the dirt as best I could in the light of a fiery skull on the fence. I fell asleep there, in the Baba’s yard. When I woke in the morning, I found a pile of poppy seeds and a pile of dirt.
‘Well,’ sneered the Yaga after she’d woken up, ‘it appears you’re not so stupid after all. Tell me, my sticky sweetling, how is it you accomplished these tasks?’ She smiled unpleasantly under her down-curving nose. ‘Someone has given you power!’
‘Grandmother,’ I replied, ‘my only power is the love of my mother, made of blood and tears.’
‘Love?!’ screeched Baba Yaga. ‘Love?! How precious!’ She spat on the ground. ‘We need no stink of love in this house, girl. It’s time you were off!’
She took a skull with fiery eyes from her fence and put it on a stick. ‘Here! Take this home with you. There! There’s your fire. Be off!’
I began to thank her, but the doll in my pocket pinched my leg, so I took the stick and skull and left without another word. Once again, my doll guided me through the forest. I walked all day and it was night again when I returned home. The fiery skull blazed with light. My stepmother and stepsisters ran out to greet me, saying they’d been without fire since I’d left. We kindled a fire with the skull and I left it in the corner of the room and went to bed.
In the morning, I found three piles of burnt cinders on the floor. My stepmother and stepsisters were gone, and the skull was cold.”
Rose Red came slowly out of the story to her place in front of the fire in the dwarves’ stone cottage. She’d never heard anything like it before. Questions bubbled up in her mind, but she was reluctant to leave the spell of Baba Yaga and the fiery skull and the doll, and didn’t break the silence, letting the story ebb out of corners and shadows, leaving them in the firelit silence of the present moment.
“Do you keep the doll safe?” asked Jenny.
Vasilisa patted the pocket of her apron gently. “Right here,” she said. “It’s my way of keeping my mother always close by me,” she said to Rose Red in explanation, “but the doll is only a symbol for what I carry in here.” She laid a hand on her chest. “This is where I hear the voice that tells me what direction to go and this is the place that tells Rumpelstiltskin which apple to cut and which to keep whole.”
Rose Red suddenly felt her friend was a stranger. She’d faced a terrible, monstrous figure and somehow accomplished impossible tasks. What would she say if she knew Rose Red couldn’t even love her own mother properly?
Shame swelled within her, making her feel as though she would vomit. Her hands felt cold and she swallowed hard, trying to control herself. She wanted to run away, to disappear. She didn’t belong with these people. They were brave and wise and…good.
In her distress, she lost track of the conversation around her, but the sound of her name recalled her from her private misery.
“…Rosie home before the snow is worse,” said Rumpelstiltskin, putting aside his knife and board. “The others will be home from the mine and workshop soon, hungry as hunters. They probably don’t even know it’s snowing.”
“Next time I’ll tell how to spin straw into gold,” said Jenny, smiling. “Much more useful than separating poppy seeds from dirt!”
“Oh, never mind!” replied Vasilisa, tossing her head in mock disdain. “I’ll bet Rosie will do something even better than that!”
Rose Red gaped at her, pausing as she put on her outdoor clothes. “Me! But I couldn’t…I don’t…I could never be like you! I couldn’t do what you’ve done! I’m not brave! I’m not…I’m no good at all!”
The raw pain in her voice vibrated in the room. The smile slipped off Vasilisa’s face. Jenny stepped swiftly to Rose Red’s side and put her arms around her. “You’re wrong,” she said, stroking the dark curly head. “You are like us and you are brave. Don’t you see, your story is now! You’re living it now. You can’t tell it yet because you’re in the middle of it!”
Rose Red shook her head, a sob catching in her throat. She pulled up her hood, letting it shadow her face, wrapped a scarf around her neck, pulled on mittens and went out the door past Rumpelstiltskin, stumbling. He shut the door firmly, leaving Vasilisa and Jenny in the apple-scented warmth of the stone cottage behind him.
RAPUNZEL
Richard leapt out of bed and lit a lamp. Rapunzel wanted to giggle. She’d lain waiting for him in the darkened room, guessing he lingered in the bar to put off having to get into bed with the ugliest women he’d ever seen. She thought his resolve might fail him and half expected he’d slipped away in the night. Marriage is one thing, but consummation quite another. She was certain Baba Yaga’s spell would not be broken by a runaway groom. When she at last heard his slow reluctant footsteps on the stairs, relief washed over her, along with respect and liking. This man was made of better stuff than Alexander was, and his integrity had given her back her own body.
She knew he shrank from his duty and took mischievous pleasure in presenting various parts of her supple form to his hands and pressing herself, beginning with her lips, against him. He’d bounced out of bed like a scalded cat.
He held up the lamp and inspected her. His stunned look was too much, and she began to laugh.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “What is this?”
“I’m your wife,” said Rapunzel, controlling her laughter, sitting up and letting the sheet fall. “I, uh…did something wrong and my punishment was to take on the appearance I had when you met me until a young man agreed to marry me. When you did so the sentence lifted. But, there’s more…”
“What more?” he inquired cautiously.
“Well, now you must make a choice. You must choose whether I’ll be as you see me now by day and ugly by night or beautiful by night and ugly by day.”
Thinking of the night ahead, he said, “Ugly by day and beautiful by night!”
“Yes,” said Rapunzel, “but think for a minute. During the day, everywhere we go, people will laugh and jeer. Young children will run away in fright. You’ll be shamed in front of others.”
“Oh,” he said, picturing it. “Well then, ugly by night and beautiful by day!”
“Think another moment,” she said. “Every night for as long as we live, you’ll get into bed with the woman you met on the street.”
“Wait,” said Richard. “Wait a minute. This choice shouldn’t be mine. You’ll bear with it more than I. I’ve learned what a woman desires most is to stand in her own power. I think this choice should be yours, and I’ll abide by it.”
“A good answer,” said Rapunzel. “Then I choose to be beautiful by day and by night.”
She hadn’t known she was going to say it, but as she spoke the words, she recognized the Baba had not in fact taken Rapunzel’s power to choose, and the choice of appearance was the least important of the choices before her.
Richard smiled at her and she recognized respect and affection in his face. He was a good friend. He’d kept his word to her.
She didn’t want to be married to him.
“Richard,” she said, hesitating.
He took her hand. “Yes, my dear?”
“Richard, you’ve helped me learn important…things,” she said, picking her words carefully. “I needed you and you were there. I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me.”
He squeezed her hand.
“I know we’re married now, but I wonder, before this happened did you want to be married? Were you looking for a wife?”
He thought about that. “Well, to tell you the truth, no,” he said, “I wasn’t. I’m not very old and I liked my freedom. Of course,” he said hastily, “I’ll do my best to be a good husband to you.”
Rapunzel, impatient with circumlocution, said, “I don’t want a good husband!”
“What?” he said, astonished, dropping her hand.
“I’m sorry, Richard,” she said more gently. “The truth is I didn’t want to be married, either — before. I like you. I like you very much, but I don’t want a husband, good, bad or indifferent!”
“But we’re married!” he said, as though that settled it.
“So what?” she asked. “Here’s a piece of paper saying we’re married, but that doesn’t make a marriage. A marriage is two people building a life together, isn’t it? Is that what you want?”
He grinned suddenly. It made him look very young. “I like you, too. And in a word, no.”
“It’s not what you want?”
“No. I want to honor my word to you, though. Rapunzel, men want what women want — the right to stand in our own power and make our own choices.”
“Then we might choose not to be married?”
“It appears we are choosing that!” He laughed and for a moment she did love him enough.
“Are you sure, Richard?” she asked. “You’re not upset?”
“No,” he said. He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “I think it’s the right thing to do. Or not to do, in this case.”
Rapunzel took the marriage certificate off the table next to the bed, held it over an unlit stub of a candle on a pottery plate and spoke a word of command. The paper burned with an orange flame and in seconds became a few flakes of ash on the plate.
Richard watched, eyebrows raised in astonishment. He looked speculatively at her as she set the plate back on the table.
“Maybe someday you’ll tell me exactly what you did — and to whom,” he said.
(This post was published with this essay.)