Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he’s exotic, almost appealing. Where once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it’s been tamed and cultivated (or set aside and preserved); the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives “the wild” a different kind of power; it’s something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods — they come from a place we’d almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, and limitless. Likewise, tales of Beastly Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within each of us — and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us — cat and mouse and coyote and owl — and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live. Those lines, however, are drawn in sand; they shift over time; and the stories are always changing. Once upon a time a white bear knocked at the door. Today Edward Scissorhands stands on the porch. Tomorrow? There will still be Beasts. And there will still be those who transform them with love.

Viewed from the dock, the old tree of the island appears to be a woman, branches curving down, as if she holds a child. Everyone calls it the Madonna tree, though it only looks like such from our dock. From the opposite shore of the lake, it looks like a tree caving in on itself.

Father used the Madonna tree to teach me and my sister Laura about perspective, about how something looks different from every angle; different too depending on whose eyes are doing the looking.

My sister looks at the tree and sees a jumping fish, mouth pointing north, evergreens as mad, frothy water. She calls it her Madonna fish. I look and I see the Madonna but wonder if I see her because I honestly do, or because I have been taught to.

Laura’s teeth left long scores across the apple’s golden flesh, juice dribbling down her chin. She wiped it away and narrowed her brown eyes upon me.

“Perhaps today, wee Lizzie,” she said.

I stretched in the afternoon sun, the splintered dock beneath me warm. My feet dangled in the lake water next to Laura’s. I splayed my toes and for once could not feel how small my left foot was. In the water, both feet floated weightless.

“Today,” I said and stretched my arms above my head. Hands, free of cane or guide rail, reached until they found the edge of a dock board. I slid my fingers between the boards. The underside of the wood was damp and warm, fragrant as I rubbed my fingers over it. Like velveteen rubbed wrong.

It was a perfect day, with the clouds building into foamy castles in the mid-August sky above. No ordinary sky this, but one under which Father should return to us. We had not seen him for four years, but it seemed longer than that, longer since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I was ten and Laura twelve when he last scooped us into his arms.

He was missing one of those arms now, Mother told us, and would be escorting Uncle Eugene’s casket home. Two brothers gone to war and only one returned to us. I closed my eyes to the castles and said silent thanks that it was our father come home. In the house behind us, our cousin did not have this luxury.

“Have you thought about what Uncle Eugene meant to you?” Laura asked.

I opened one eye to peer at her. She looked across the lake, still eating that apple. More juice dotted her chin, but she had not wiped it away.

“I don’t know what he meant to me,” I said.

Granny had bid us that morning to think on our uncle and what he meant to us. She wanted each of us to share this with the family at his funeral.

I could not remember his face without the aid of a photograph. There were many photographs of us prior to my illness, some taken by the pond that robbed me of my health.

What I remember of my uncle is this: large hands hidden under a dry, rough towel, the rotting smell of stagnant water, the gruff admonition to “damn well never do that again.”

“Aunt Esme made peach pie,” Laura said.

She had eaten the apple to its core and flung it into the lake. It landed with a plop, and I rose on my elbows to watch it bob in the water. Soon enough, a silver fish head glided up and swallowed it whole.

As children we spent summers with our aunt and uncle, so I was told. Laura could recall more than I could; remembered pie and picnics and the pond. She didn’t like to talk about the pond.

In the distance, I heard the slam of a car door, followed by another. Laura turned her head to listen.

“Father!”

She leapt up, her yellow and white daisy-print skirt brushing my face. She jammed her wet feet into her sandals and was halfway up the lawn before I had even sat up. I drew my feet out of the water and reached for my shoes.

But Laura came back for me. She lifted me into her arms, an action made easier from years of practice, and carried me up the lawn when I could not run with her.

Part of me didn’t want to see Father. I wanted to remember him as he was, broad shouldered and striking enough to challenge the moon to a beauty contest. I didn’t want to see his sorrow at the death of his brother, or the ways the war had likely changed him.

Laura carried me up the sloping lawn, and up the thirteen steps that brought us to the second-story back porch. There she made a grab for the towels Granny had left us on the rocking chairs. We were to come into the house dry or not at all. Laura gently deposited me into a chair, and I rubbed at my wet legs and feet.

“My shoes.”

This wasn’t at all how I wanted Father to see me. I cradled my withered left foot in my lap and listened to the sound of him — of Father after all these years — greeting Mother and Granny, Aunt Esme and Winnie. While they cried as my father came out of the car, I longed for my usual skirts, not these short pedal pushers, and for the thick and sturdy sole of my shoe.

“Walk or ride?” Laura asked. She offered her arms and I shook my head.

“Walk.”

My cane had been left at the dock as well, but there was a spare by the back door. I took up the length of pale wood and silently praised its smooth grip. Our grandfather certainly knew how to make a fine cane. He wouldn’t thank me if the fish carried off the one I had left behind.

I hobbled my way into the house after Laura, who ran with fluid strides. She burst through the open front door and hurled herself into Father’s arms.

The empty left sleeve of his shirt had been rolled and neatly pinned to stay out of his way. But it was the same shirt I remembered, the pale blue that was the color of Mother’s favorite vase. It was worn at the right collar and the left elbow. It would smell like Burma-Shave. It would smell like my father.