Jesse Ball - The Village on Horseback - Prose and Verse, 2003-2008

Won’t you help me? she cried.

But I love another and she is gone into a far country from where I cannot retrieve her.

Pheasants and scatterguns, alphabets, charms, phrases, curses, naysayers, nickel machines, mistaken identities. It was all too much for little Alphonse, who cluttered his brain with anything anyone happened to say to him. He went about in a little blue suit rather worn at the knees and a little paper satchel stitched with his initials.—

Hello, he would often say, whether anyone was there or not. — Hello, I am with the name Alphonse and I am so lucky I can’t tell you. Would you believe more than one woman fell for this trick and got right into bed with him? Well, yes, it is true. They properly waited no more than five or ten minutes upon making his acquaintance to take him across the doorstep, etc. But did this please our Alphonse? We shall say rather that he delighted in meat pastries and thought foremost of this gluttony above and beyond all others. He was, it is said, a fixture at the shop of Baker Morton, who despised him and beat him relentlessly whenever the poor boy came into reach.

Has not the geometry of comparison, the superimposition of another land on this present land, become a bit wearisome to you who travel in our good company? One cannot go on using it in place of the eyes.

— Pieter Emily, said they one to another in the furrows and fields.

— Pieter Emily, whispered they the children beneath the wooden boards of the raised village.

— Pieter Emily, said Elsbeth Grinner, beneath her breath.

And she left her loom and went out into the street.

It was a clear day and dry. Marla Kranth was standing speaking to the mayor’s wife. Both wore long dresses and heavy shawls made from the cloth that was the village’s trade.

— Marla, said Elsbeth, is it true?

— True and more, said Marla. He’s breathing the same air as you or me.

The mayor’s wife interrupted. Her face was narrow like a shrew, and it was said by some that she bit the mayor in his sleep to weaken his brain.

— Jasper spoke to him, face to face. Pieter Emily. Out on the low road, and Jasper looking for a sheep that had strayed. Pieter was there, behind a tree, just watching him.

— Pieter? On the low road?

Both women nodded in a dark, disapproving way.

— What did he say? asked Elsbeth.

— Pieter reminded him of the green book. He said it was late in the year for anyone to be out on the low road.

Marla whistled a long whistle.

— But what did he look like?

— Like a boy in a wooden-coat, said Marla. Just like he always looked. Jasper said he hasn’t aged a day.

A week passed and a week. On the fourteenth day, Elsbeth closed up her shop early and sent the other weavers home. She was, it was generally agreed, the best of Forsk’s weavers, and that meant she was one of the best in the world. For there is nothing like Forsk-cloth, and there never has been.

She was born with a feel for the thread. The day she touched a loom she knew it was a beast akin to her and that if only she would speak it would give her whatever she desired. So slowly and quickly, slowly and quickly she learned to speak to the loom, and when she was fourteen, she was given a shop, and given the charge of many weavers below her, and people who came to the town would sit on chairs in the corner of the room and watch her as she worked.

Since then, her skill had only grown. She could do in an hour the work of days, and in days, work that no one could do in any quantity of time. At the age of fortythree, she was thin like a reed, with a wicker strength. She wore only the simplest clothing, made from her own cloth and sewed in the closeness of her rooms.

She lived with her sister and her sister’s husband, in a tall house set away at the edge of the raised town. It was not an outbuilding, as the farmhouses in the fields beyond. But it was thought less of, for once it had been a freestanding structure, and only during her childhood had the village grown to reach it with its tight wooden streets and walks.

She and her sister had been the same at birth. They had had the same dream every night of their common childhood, and would recount it anew each morning. But when Elsbeth was taken away to the loom, Catha took up the needle and thread. As a seamstress Catha had no match in Forsk. Her husband, Jaim was a trader, one of those who took the cloth through the mountains for sale. He was a large man, and of a wonderful quality. Catha loved him as a wife, and Elsbeth as a sister. For Jaim was sullen and ill-mannered in all save his speech with them. We should all be lucky to have such a one for a friend, and they knew his worth.

To that house, then, Elsbeth went, out her shop door and along the street. She passed shops where the people were crouched in rows before looms, or others where men and women were set to carding or spinning. The wood of the town was like a box, she often thought, with all that was needed laid out within it. Well, that and the fields beyond.

— Pieter Emily, she said beneath her breath.

They were the same age, she and Pieter, the same age to the day. His father had been a hunter, his mother, a weaver in the town. Their houses had stood side by side, looking in on each other, listening to each other’s secrets in the long winters, the brief mists of summer.

It had been Pieter who’d shown her the way up trees. She in turn had taught him to lie. For Elsbeth Grinner was an expert liar and always had been. She had, in fact, never been caught in a lie. Not once. She was most certainly the soul of truth.

In fact, she had not lied in many years. There was no reason to. Her life was all seriousness, all cloth and candles, all evening.

As she went her way, a man came out from beneath the eaves of the grocery.

— Elsbeth, he said, have you seen this?

A handbill had been printed, and he gave it her to look at.

The MATTER of PIETER EMILY

Village Meeting

Third Bell from Dusk

Elsbeth nodded to the man.

— Harfor Locke, thank you. I shall see you there.

He retired again below the roof, leaving her with the handbill, as the other shops too closed and the street began to fill. Yet no one jostled her as they passed. Many looked to her and looked away, and those who met her eyes nodded respectfully. What the town did was what she did best, and strange as she was, she was admired by all.

An hour and she stood again with the handbill in the doorway. Her sister’s shadow could be seen in the kitchens beyond, moving here and there.

Since Pieter Emily had been seen, a rash of trouble had begun. The farmers on farms closest to the low road had found animals dead, their throats cut. A house had even burned. Jerome Liddel vanished one day from his fields, and his wife was in tears in the streets asking for justice. Old Caleb More swore he saw a fox carrying a child in its mouth, but no child was missing.