Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

Marly Youmans

“ Out gathering tufts of wool on some slope below the crags? Picking bits from the laurel?” Startled, Alexander Prince — Xan to his friends — let a handful of ramps scatter onto the metal table.

“Hey, you’re all right,” the farmer said, clapping a hand on his shoulder and letting loose a laugh that had all the bounce and mounting roar of barrels rolling merrily down an incline. A robust fellow of in-between age, Charlie Garland had coarse, rumpled hair and an oddly pretty mouth inherited by the daughters who helped him at the open-air market.

“Sorry.” Xan laughed back at him. “Maybe I was wool gathering: groping for wisps of a dream, listening for echoes. When I woke this morning, I heard the most bewitching music, like glass chimes—”

“You’re a real glassman, for sure.” Garland tweaked the bill from his fingers and filled his palm with silver. “Your kind would’ve cut down a myrtle tree and made a salamander in the olden days.” He held out a sack of ramps and another of lettuce and radishes, far more than Xan had picked out.

“You’re giving it away,” he protested, but the other only laughed and waved him on, saying that it wouldn’t be spring in the Carolina mountains without a fresh mess of ramps. What do you mean by ‘making a salamander’?” Xan asked the farmer. “You don’t mean the kind like a little wet lizard, do you?”

Garland sold more ramps and a bag of spinach before he answered. “You’re right, it’s not a lizard, it’s a creature of fire. In the Talmud, when King Ahaz tried to sacrifice Hezekiah to Moloch, the boy’s mother saved him from the fire by daubing him with blood from a salamander.”

“I’ve never heard of any such thing!”

Garland shrugged. “A glassblower like you ought to know the lore of fire.”

“So how do you know this stuff?” Xan asked.

“Oh, I was a strange kid. When chores were done, I’d lie in the clover and read volumes of my grandfather’s encyclopedia of marvels. Still have it — if you come by after lunch, I’ll have my wife bring S to T .”

“All right, I’ll do that. Look for me.” Xan tossed the bags into his pack and moved off, glancing over his shoulder when he heard the farmer’s laughter and thinking that Garland hadn’t told him what the salamander was, not really.

The rest of the morning was spent in driving to Black Mountain. An elderly glassblower had died, leaving him a marver and a crate of straight shears, diamond shears, tweezers, and paddles. Although accustomed to rolling hot gathers of glass on a sheet of steel, Xan would now have a marver of marble.

The other glassblower’s studio was strangely cool and empty.

“Russ thought the world of you,” his wife, Eva, told him.

It was a funny saying. The world was a blue-green ball too big for any gaffer to cut and tweeze into shape. Tears pressed at his eyes and Xan blotted them away. At the burial, after the others had flung their roses onto the coffin in the grave, making a bed of petals, he knelt and let fall a trillium of glass.

“My first husband was thoughtless, but Russ was tender.”

“You two had a long go of it.”

“Yes, there’s that.”

“He and Harold taught me the mysteries.”

“They were such friends, one from the coves and the other from the city. Never jealous, always glad to see each other’s work.” Eva caressed the marver, snow-white with bolts of darkness. “There’s a phrase, lacrimae rerum , in Virgil. This calls ‘the tears of things’ to mind. See?” Her fingers brushed the side of the slab where three owners of the marver had written their names and birth dates. In other hands, two dates of death were marked.

“Amazing that it’s still intact.”

“Here,” she said, bringing a bottle of India ink and a dip pen, “add your name to the others. Just promise it to a young gaffer some year when you’re getting older. Are you twenty-five now, Xan?”

“Just twenty-four.” Saying it made him feel ashamed, as though it were somehow his fault that Eva had grown old.

“When he was twenty-four and I was twenty-six, we lived on an island near Charleston. Now all that’s gone to condos and hotels. The world changes until it’s not ours.”

She dipped the pen and added a gleaming date to the marver. Afterward, Xan bent to scratch his name in ink below his friend’s wavering inscription.

“You’ll be the fourth to use this marver.”

“Yes.”

“You need a wife who’ll mark the stone when you come to dust.” She gave him a quirk of a smile that discomfited him.

“I hardly have time for a wife.”

“You’re married to the glass,” Eva said.

The absence of Russ had disarranged the space between them. They both felt it. Xan was glad to ease the marver onto his dolly and load it through the hatch of the car. He felt distressed for Eva — there was something he had failed to say or that simply could not be said. Yet she was the last scrap he had of anything approaching family. Prince was a common enough name in western North Carolina, but he hadn’t tried to find kin, not even up in Little Canada. He swept a hand across the marble and slid the box of tools on top.

“Good-bye, dear Eva.” In his embrace she was as brittle as a green man in winter, all snapping twigs and dry stalks.

Then he climbed in his truck, and Eva diminished as he pulled away on the familiar drive that curled around the studio before slinging itself downhill. After that there was nothing but highway and mountains and an occasional flare of flame azalea until he reached the turnoff that led toward Sylva, Cullowhee, and Dillsboro.

Xan checked his watch: almost time for the market to close. Hoping Garland hadn’t already left, he headed straight for the farmer’s rickety table.

Garland waved him over.

“My wife brought the book you wanted. See here—”

He turned the volume so that Xan could see the heading, SALAMANDER, FIRE (NATURAL AND LEGENDARY). The farmer tapped the gilt-edged page with his thumb.

“Right here: ‘If a glassblower will stoke the furnace with myrtle wood for seven days and seven nights, the great heat will give birth to a creature called the fire salamander . The glassblower should not let the cunningness of the form dissuade him, but cut until it bleeds plenteously. If he smears a hand or any part of the body with blood, he may become proof against fire.’ ”

“You don’t—”

“Believe it? My young friend, wonders are all around us and we see them not. The world is a tangle of mystery, rolled into a ball, and soaked in the tears of things—”

“What?” Xan was startled, remembering Eva’s words about the marver.

He thumped the book. “I learned that from the encyclopedia. It’s a kaleidoscope made from splinters of wisdom and craziness. Here Pliny says that a salamander resembles ice and puts out fire. Aristotle talks about a fire moth: ‘Winged creatures, somewhat larger than our housefly, appear in the midst of the fire, walking and flying through it, but dying immediately on leaving the flame.’ And here’s our boy the China traveler, Marco Polo, touting cloth-of-gold woven from salamanders.” He slapped the page. “This is a dream hoard for artists. If you like, borrow the book — so long as it comes back — the encyclopedia’s all I have from my grandfather.”

“Garland, what a character you are!” said Xan, smiling at the other man’s excitement. “Whoever heard of a farmer like you?”

He grinned. “There are plenty of oddballs in the farming trade. The encyclopedia forced me to be an outdoorsman — showed me nature packed with the sublime.” He tucked a leaf in place as a bookmark and shoved the volume across the table. “Just don’t thrust it into one of your ovens, all right?”