Nervous y'all
I don't know why.
So I just want to say thank you to the Poetry Center
for inviting me.
It's a big honor.
I love it here, and teaching here also
is just a magical thing.
I also want to note that Mary has
been here writing and facing her writing demons for three weeks
alone in that little room, and so we really want
to honor you for your work.
Thank you.
What I'm reading tonight, my class--
my plot classes this week we were
talking about The Hero's Journey,
Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey.
And so the piece I'm reading tonight
is a Hero's Journey piece.
And I'm very interested in that, and the different ways that we
move through our lives, and the ways that echoes
all over cultures and worlds.
And this, "The Baker's Daughter,"
is the story I'm going to read, and it came out
of a larger novel that I was working
on called Dr. Porchiet's Dream, and the narrator of this story
just kept insisting, insisting, insisting
that she have her own story.
So here is her story.
I was a baker's daughter, and this baker, my father,
dreamt of sunny fields.
He fed me stories of a farming life
until he died in one of those fields,
alone under a burning August sun.
Then I was raised by my mother, who can't
be blamed for her thin heart.
I'm sure there is much comment in town
as to how these details made me what I am,
but this is not the whole story.
After my father's accident, his red loam in the soil,
my mother became a shadow.
After my father's accident, my mother
merely said, no more lessons for you then, now you are a baker.
That was the end of school and of being
with other children my age.
My father, too, had been raised a baker
despite his dreams of farming.
Forced into baking as he had been
was my only connection to him.
And after his accident, I twisted dough, spooned jelly,
and sprinkled sugar fervently, hoping
that it would bring him, or something good,
back into my life.
Alone with the rising bread most mornings,
I was aware of the building's decay.
Mice nod in the corners and skitter on pink feet.
The walls spiraled mold.
The barrels shifted inside like old maids.
For the first 15 years of my life,
my father had talked of sun and farming, of change and growing
things, but in the year after his accident
the land he'd bought was left to go wild, and my mother
and I plunged into flour, scratching out
a living in bread and rolls.
I wanted my father back so desperately.
I was blank and half blind for weeks.
My mother closed the bakery for one day only,
the day we buried him, and one day after that she insisted
that I come down and sell the bread no matter
how red my eyes were.
Months passed with no conversation between us,
and then mildly, we began to talk of baking.
We never spoke, not ever again, of my father.
One day, I over-yeasted a set of loaves.
When I took them from the oven, their golden bulk
dwarfing the paddle.
The curved edges beckoning touch.
I was struck by their fat, enticing shapes.
I felt a bubble of sorrow burst inside me,
and I hurled the loaves to the floor.
I saw how it would go.
My mother and I would stay in the bakery fighting
the mice and the weevils, and we would grow thin
and crack and mold while we baked
the plain breads of a village.
Would there be no time when I would tempt
touch like those comely loaves?
I swore there would.
With the courage of this decision,
I picked up each dirty loaf from the floor, tore it in half,
and threw it away.
It was around that time that the squire's son
began to visit the bakery.
We knew stories of him, of his gluttonous ways.
Not just for pastries and bread, but beer, wine, meat, gambling,
tobacco.
For fast strong horses barely broken.
His gloves were made of fine kid,
and his manner with my mother and me was genteel.
But the squire's son never made it through a visit
to our bakery without cramming an apple tart in his red mouth,
or a sugar knot, or a hunk of bread.
He was the kind of man who would satisfy his urges, regardless.
I began to wait for each visit and watch
as crumbs littered his vest and fell to the floor around him.
I piled the items he ordered up to be
sent to the estate with a sense of building anticipation.
The squires son had uncommonly blue eyes and one morning
when those eyes followed me as I held
a tray of jam-filled muffins, I could feel them
as if they were a hand.
The hair on my arms rose at his glance.
It was those eyes that firmed my decision.
People said it was shameful, a squire's son
ordering his own goods from the bakery,
and indeed, it was rare.
My mother tsked over it.
It is unfavorable, she said, to appear as though we're
getting special attention.
What does it matter, I asked her.
We don't have any friends.
Besides, I said, I like that he comes here.
This caused my mother to glare at me
and then look away with a sniff.
One morning, she tapped a fresh loaf
and said, as bread is not done until it has a crust, so it
must be the heart of a woman.
I stared at her without speaking until she
rose and left the room.
I was shocked to understand she believed a girl's life was only
a vessel to be filled and scorched, broken or ruined.
She knew nothing of hearts, nothing of love.
Baking when she should be mourning her husband.
I would never listen to advice from such a woman,
her own heart charred black.
On bad days I was haunted by a vision of my father dying, not
how we found him, in a pool of Black blood, the gashed leg,
flies on the buttons of his jacket,
as well as his eyes, currants on a gingerbread man.
This I tried not to remember, but sometimes I
couldn't help but imagine him before they found him
after the accidental swing of the ax.
The thunk of the blade and the leg.
The hours he spent dragging himself
from the wood pile across fields and through thickets
seeking help, while the blood flowed down from him.
I thought about how he died alone in the sun that day.
It was something I could not forgive.
Just as purpose grew in me, I felt a hardness also,
the crust, my mother mentioned.
Also, I baked.
I helped the squire to my buttered knots,
letting him know that their feathery lightness,
their delicious crisping had everything to do with me
and only me.
With shy compliments and inquiries,
I encouraged him to unfold his dreams for his own squirehood.
His unrealistic plans for the land.
His grandiose ideas for the people.
He gobbled down meat pies, shortbread, lemon tarts,
while I drew him ever nearer.
Outside the shop, I heard the lady
scold and fluster over the squire's neglect
of their eligible daughters.
They cruelly enumerated how poor and young I was,
but I did not care, even when they called me a temptress.
I could feel my success rising.
One day my mother said why must you
be the one to use up all the dearest ingredients
in your foolish goods.
Can I not have a jot of butter for my own baking.
I see, and let that question.
hang.
Who was she to stand in my way.
The pale skin around her face bagged like melting wax.
The gray hair on her head pulled into a bun too tight.
She was a portrait of forfeit joy.
In that moment, I saw she would keep me as I was forever,
and I hated her for it.
Fine, I said coldly, keep your ingredients.
I will find my own.
That very day I went out to the woods.
I carried a basket and a cloth bag,
not even sure what I sought.
Mushrooms, I thought vaguely.
Something green.
Something for savory pies.
My father had been teaching me things about the woods, things
we could and could not eat from the land,
so I knew there were finds to be had.
I entered the woods and they were dark, much cooler
than a sunny field I spent all day crossing.
Moss licked the trees.
It was beautiful and quiet and clean
in a way the bakery could never be clean.
I climbed over knobbed roots on the ground.
I pushed past thin saplings.
I was surprised how close I felt to my father there.
Abruptly, I came upon a pool of water
reflecting the forest light.
Large green cabbage leaves crowded the banks,
and the sun streamed down in vivid quills.
I knelt and began cutting the leaves
of their wet stems, surprised at the quick cut of my knife.
I imagined chopping, boiling, draining them.
I could see them twirled in dough, a rich green.
I caught sight of movement in the waters of reflection
and saw myself.
I smiled.
She surprised me in there, looking
so much older than I felt. Was even my reflection's hair
whiter, not blonde, but white?
Was my face not bonier, sharper?
A shiver came over me and I stepped away.
Looking around, the cove came alive with possibility.
Buds, berries, fat onion stalks.
I began gathering, piling my finds into the gnarled roots
of an oak tree.
There were hazelnuts for chopping and roasting.
I gathered these in my hands and dumped them in heaps.
I found a bundle of dirt ringed mushrooms, a clawed branch
dangling with berries.
Hours passed.
I climbed a small pine tree and found a nest of speckled eggs.
When I finally went to the base of the Oak tree
to pack everything, even when the basket and pouch were full
there was still too much.
I refused to leave any knobby root or tasty leaf behind.
I tied the rest of the goods into my skirts in fat bulges.
On the way home, I planned the order
of stewing and roasting, frying and baking
that would need to be done.
I was startled at the edge of the village
when I encountered a group of children on their way home
from lessons.
I smiled at them.
One of them, an older boy I remembered from school
for his lovely tawny curls, stared back.
This boy turned to the others and said, stay out of her way
she's a harpy.
The younger children regarded me with wide startled eyes.
I- I- I was so shocked, I didn't know what to say.
Beside him, a tall girl I remembered for her tears
when she had gotten an arithmetic problem wrong
whispered to the children, she'll get a lock of your hair
and cast a spell on you.
This was too much for the children,
who ran screaming with delight, followed
by my one time classmates who hissed
a few taunts as they left.
I stood speechless, my skirt sagging with the woods bounty.
I looked down at myself, and I saw how strange
my appearance was, dirty and smeared and freighted
with who knows what.
I was shaken by their words, knowing
why I'd gathered these things.
Certainly it was a kind of witchcraft, what I intended.
When I got to the bakery with my bundles, upset,
my mother watched me.
I began unfolding my skirt, spilling my goods
onto the tabletops.
Suddenly, she said, what's that dirt you're bringing in here?
Goods for my baking.
That's not baking.
I turned to her and said, cooking then?
Is cooking allowed?
My mother stared over her thin nose at me.
Carefully, I lifted the speckled eggs
from the little nests of grass I'd wrapped them in.
Ha.
My mother sniffed.
That's not baking.
If I had flour, will you leave me be?
Her lips pulled back from her teeth and a hard grin,
more sorcery than baking, she hissed,
and hunched over a bowl of farm eggs to whip them,
I tried things.
Some of them failed.
Some of them are stringy, baked hard or gamey or muddled.
I kept adding, trying bits from the farms and ponds nearby.
I found that the ugliest mushrooms tasted the best.
The duck fat made a rich binding.
The pearled fish eggs added salt and texture.
Encouraged by the taunts I'd received, I tried a few words.
Quietly over the mixtures, I thought hard
on the squire's son, picturing him
not as he was, gobbling and crumbed,
but as I imagined he could be, noble and handsome.
I said things about affection and marriage and prosperity,
things too silly to remember in detail.
I did not know what I know now about incantations,
and though these were awkward attempts,
I could not say that they didn't work.
No spell ever works exactly the same way twice.
This is the secret of all sorcery.
My savories began to draw more and more customers
to the bakery.
Not only the squire's son, but other great houses of the land
came to us for my goods.
Soon we had to store our coins in empty flour barrels, hidden
in our rooms.
Not once did my mother congratulate me.
She merely kept all of her own work to one table,
never tasting a single thing I made, and continued
to churn out her own dull loaves,
even though half of them never sold anymore.
We tossed these leftovers out on a heap
for the children who scavenged our bins.
Of course, such plenty drew mice and rats, too.
My father had told me ways to rid the bakery of vermin,
but my mother ignored such trouble.
When I came down one morning and found the flour torn
in two and speckled with black droppings,
I remembered a stand of pink foxglove I'd seen.
I couldn't remember what torment my father warned,
but he told me not to touch them with my fingers.
I went to the field and picked some of their leaves
with a small towel, carried them to the bakery,
and tore them into a bowl.
I baked the leaves into the tiniest rolls,
crescent fingernails I set the rolls like dust balls
into the dark corners of the bakery.
Entering the quiet room alone the next morning
to build the fire in the ovens, I
found a hundred dead mouse bodies, frozen in grotesque
gestures, white with the flour they thrashed and expired in.
Four rats with blood at their lips
were curled like sweet buns in the corner.
I didn't feel sorry for them, but it disturbed
me to have that power of death, and all those bodies sprawled
across the floor like language.
I plucked the bodies up by each tail,
dropped them in a flour sack and took them down the alley.
It felt like I'd been told a secret.
Oh, I baked.
Savories rolled from my kitchen in sheets and baskets and pans.
The smell of my goods floated out to the street,
and demand continued to grow.
I fed the squire's son until he came three times a week,
mesmerized.
I fed him until his belly swelled
and buttons bulged from his silken patterned vests.
One
Day, when we were alone in the shop
with only the sound of my mother's flowery pounding
in the room beyond, the squire's son
asked me if I would like to accompany him
on a family picnic.
I blushed.
His face was so sincere.
And despite my hope after so much effort,
I really hadn't expected to be flattered by his attention.
I brought a basket with quail eggs, scones, and lamb rolls,
onion turnovers and wild strawberry tarts,
enough for all.
The women snubbed me as if I were no more than a servant,
but it didn't matter because one set of eyes
followed me all day.
I'd had a pretty dress made with small yellow flowers
all around the collar and hem.
The squire's son saw nothing but yellow that day.
It was a surprise to no one when the squire proposed,
but the townspeople were scandalized.
I was so young, so poor, so unsuitable,
not to mention, I heard one lady whisper to another while I
bagged their savory buns the awful tragedy of her father,
a stain upon the family besides.
At the wedding, I wore a ring of bright, white leather
in my hair.
My groom was well-brushed and handsome, if a little large
in his wedding coat.
My dress was creamy and light as meringue.
We ate the feast prepared in our honor, danced
until my groom was out of breath,
and the townspeople flocked in droves to see our spectacle.
It was a disappointment to many finding
that the squire's son and I seem to be having a fine time.
I had ordered 500 squabs to be served in mushroom gravy
with small wild onions I had gathered myself.
Our wedding table's soup were soon
littered with heaps and heaps of tiny bones, a memory that
once in a while makes me open my jaw and heave a brittle laugh.
At the urging of my husband, I sent recipes down
to the kitchen, rich with cream and meats and butters,
delicate with herbs.
My husband could not restrain himself
and gorged nightly on the feast I
created, along with gallons of wine and port.
Early on he came to my room nightly,
and I liked the weight and heft of him upon me.
These simple acts give so much pleasure.
I was learning new things at last.
I grew to know his skin, his smell,
the thinning blond hair at his temples,
and the moods of those eyes.
I felt that he was becoming mine with this knowledge,
and I imagined I was becoming his.
I learned the rooms of the house, the rituals,
the manners of high society.
I made no friends, but imagined soon I would.
A couple of months after marriage, my husband
began to disappear entire evenings,
and it was then too late that I recognized my terrible mistake.
I had underestimated his gluttonous nature.
Once he conquered one thing, he wanted another and another.
He devoted himself, in rapid succession, to high stakes
card games, mistresses, glossy steeds, acquiring land.
None of his acquisitions made sense,
including his marriage to me.
I did not take this well, though what could I do.
I watched my husband eat.
I watched him lick his fingers, gobble, cough, and chew.
Though the whites of his eyes slowly grew tinged with yellow,
and his neck rolled now like a snake,
chafing at the stiff white color of his ache-- of a stiff white
of his color, on he ate.
Even as he grew fat on my recipes and ideas,
I seemed to vanish from his mind.
I lived in a fine house and had a closet of beautiful clothes.
I could beckon servants and carriages,
but still I was undone.
I had given many of my recipes to the cook in my enthusiasm
for marriage, but as the dishes came from the kitchen,
increasingly watered down in flavor and style,
I regretted these confidences terribly.
What had I hoped?
The things one hopes.
Love, a child, happiness.
I felt my heart salt and shrivel.
When my mother came to visit once,
she wore an old dress, flour smeared at the hem.
I had tea served for us in the parlor,
but she never raised her cup to her lips.
She stared at it, frowned at the dull lemon cakes on the plate,
and said, this is what you wanted so awful much?
She left with no words of advice or encouragement.
I watched her go down the drive, one
against the Green of the garden.
At the time, I comforted myself that at least I
wasn't like her.
Now I wonder what I ever knew of her.
My life seemed a tide flowing against me.
I ceased to exist for all except the servants who
fed and clothed but otherwise ignored me.
Eventually though, I heard rumors.
It seemed that some people believed I was a witch.
When the yellow fever spread among the children in town,
they said I had set it forth, jealous
that I could not conceive.
Later, a young woman drowned, and it
was said I cursed her for the blondness of her hair.
I was forgotten by those I wanted to remember me,
and remembered wrongly by others.
If anyone could have seen the dry hours of my days
alone in the house on the hill reading
every text in the library and endlessly walking the halls,
they would have seen how silly such accusations were.
Time and boredom gnawed at me, and I
began to wonder if such things were possible.
I wanted to punish my husband for not loving me,
and perhaps if I had bewitched him once, I could do it again.
In the village pretending to need medicine
from the alchemist, I mentioned that we'd had a sick horse
and wondered if there were plants in our fields
that might have caused it.
Did he know?
Yew tree, said the man without looking up.
Hemlock, which looks like parsley,
deadly nightshade holly.
But your fields, he said, have been cleared for decades.
You needn't worry.
I thanked him and left.
This forethought may speak to you of an ill mind,
and I would not disagree.
The next day I went to the cove.
I hadn't been in some time since there was no longer a reason
to go.
I was overjoyed to be there again
to see the light shafts driving into the water.
I went to work.
I knew a small yew tree to the left of my pond.
Taking a knife from my skirts, I scraped bark from a thin trunk
into a pouch.
I searched for a plant that looked like overgrown parsley.
I gathered it into my silk purse.
In my large closets, I cleared a space behind my dresses
and hung the ingredients from strings.
I did not know what I intended, but I
gathered these vile things with determination.
One lonely night, I ground the hemlock
with a mortar and a pestle.
When that was gone, I ground the yew.
Such small pinches of dried dusty herbs in his morning tea.
That's all it took, a couple of weeks.
How was it that I didn't know the difference between feeding
a man versus poisoning him all in the name of love?
I was young enough that they seemed the same thing to me.
I don't think I meant to kill him.
I was as surprised as anyone.
He looked to be choking.
The cup flew from his hand that morning
and smashed to the ground.
He'd grown so fat that he couldn't rise from the chair,
and he flapped his hands in the air, clawed at his throat,
pitched over, and cracked his head open
on the flagstones of the garden terrace.
The servants and I rushed to him.
While they fluttered and wailed around me,
I watched the blue milked from his eyes.
The doctor came and verified the death as an accident.
He had choked and cracked his head on the stones.
I exulted that it could not seem my fault.
Another bit of foolishness on my part,
for within two nights of my husband's death,
a horde of townspeople swarmed up our fields with fire
and pitchforks.
Imagine when the first scream dug into the evening silence,
I looked out my window and saw the yellow flicker of torches.
First, only two, then many.
They broke the dark with hatred.
I saw shapes turn into figures of men and women, people I'd
certainly known all my life.
They screamed for me.
A single woman's voice broke out above the others high pitched
and frenzy.
Hang her.
Then they took it up, all of them.
They moved in a mass and splintered
apart, spreading towards the house.
I stood trembling with my hand on the velvet curtain,
not knowing what to do.
I was still very young, remember.
I thought, they've come for me.
They've come for me.
Until the evidence of this could not be denied as the villagers
crested the hedges, and I had to heed the words.
I turned and fled the narrow passages
of the house I would never see again,
out into the dark with only the clothes on my back.
I don't remember the first two days.
I ran blindly through the woods.
I was scratched and torn.
I fell down.
Sometimes I sat in the weeds and panted.
I don't remember seeing anything at all.
At some point, I crashed through a valley of poison oak,
and it was this that finally awakened me to my danger.
The burning and bubbling of my skin.
The oozing red welts boiling up as if from within my terror.
There is irony in this poisoning, I see now.
But I was so young.
I was so hungry I broke out in blisters around my eyes
and could hardly see, and the same night it began to rain.
In the middle of that night, I came upon a cottage.
Candlelight glowed in the window and smoke
rolled from the chimney.
I stood wet and shivering staring at this vision.
I had nothing to lose, and yet I hesitated.
Finally, I knocked.
The bearded man who peered out at me
was neither welcoming or unwelcoming.
He said, come in, as if I was expected and not
some half blind swollen girl in the woods.
You got into the ivy, I see.
I did not think for my safety because there
was no safety to lose.
He did not, in any case, enslave or harm me.
He dug in his chest and brought out a dress.
He burned my clothes and gave me a bowl of hot water
into which he added a few drops of oil
and said wipe yourself off with this.
I did as he instructed.
Without a word he filled a bowl of stew,
cut off a hunk of bread, and gave me a mug of milk.
While I ate, he went to a pouch, took out
green herbs to which he added water and ground into a paste.
He showed me how to pat the green paste onto the tender
scabby skin of my arms, and then gestured at my legs.
While I worked on my legs, hardly able to see,
the man shooed a goat from the fireplace.
I patted the paste, wincing and whimpering,
onto my horrible legs, while he piled skins and blankets
in the corner and helped me over to it.
You've had some bad luck, he said.
What's your name?
He patted the green paste over my eyes, and I lay back.
I'm no one, I answered.
I could hear the fire crackling, and the room
smelled of animal and food and smoke.
I didn't even hear him leave my side.
I began to heal up after a couple of days,
and when I could see again, I did some chores
around the house to thank him.
He showed me a few plants growing in the woods
that I could eat.
He did not ask me where I was going,
and I offered no explanation.
I believe I could have stayed there
with him or with many of the households who offered me
sanctuary in those years.
I never asked to stay and I demurred any offers.
Like the first bearded man, each household
packed me a bag of food, gave me blanket or water,
extra clothes, a pair of shoes anything they thought
I might need and could carry.
I merely took these things, thanked them,
and stepped into the forest with no destination.
I would not stay to become burden,
to wrong them in the way I'd wronged my village, bringing
death to those who only thought to eat.
You may wonder how I could live like this, refusing comfort
for so long.
Perhaps this is why I look so old.
I had many teachers in those woods, people
who knew how to live off the land
and showed me practical recipes, habits,
how to cure wounds, how to hunt, how
to use every piece of animal for food, medicine, magic.
I collected this knowledge as my husband had collected
mistresses and steeds.
I did not know what I was doing there,
but since there was nowhere else I was wanted, I continued.
When I met the crone, though, high and deep
in the mountain range, I stayed.
The crone did not go by any other name that I knew.
It was all they called her, and she didn't seem to mind.
She was the one who taught me rituals and spells.
She taught me how to trap, dry, boil the workings of our trade,
what forces of nature we could combat, and those over which
we bore no power.
She taught me the prayers and the dances and the calls.
She'd said on the first day I stood in her doorway looking up
from a tattered brown book, oh, it's you,
and asked me to build up the fire.
I grew to know the shape of her fingers,
the way her skirts flowed when she marched
through the cottage, her sleep-creased face
in the morning when she rose.
I wished she would speak, claim me as
her own daughter, sister, kin.
Was she not teaching me her craft?
Had she not recognized me as I arrived?
Other men and women came to her cottage
asking to learn the ways.
She always said no and sent them away,
and I loved their jealous glances.
I knew there was something special in me that she'd seen,
but she never said so, and I was embarrassed
by my constant desire for her to speak of it.
Other people came to her cottage, too,
missing legs, flooded out, haunted by dreams,
plagued by fever, losing hope.
She helped those she could but never promised anything.
Some torments are beliefs, she taught me, held in the bone.
Only death will release them.
Death, I exclaimed.
I was sure she was exaggerating, but she only cocked her head
and repeated, built in the bone, the deep of the bone,
and they won't let go of it.
I stayed with her for over a year.
At the end of this year one evening under the stars,
I watched the crone's pipe smoke curl into the dark,
and she told me, you must go back and live.
You must be alive.
I scoffed, am I not alive?
What do you call this?
I lifted my arm and waved it.
Even to me it seemed puny in the air.
You're not alive, she said, not even partway.
I waited for her to say more, but she didn't.
I rose and went inside to my little bed
in the corner of her cottage, and I
crawled in and hid my face, ashamed
of this new terrible flaw.
Later in the night, I woke to the crone standing
over my bed murmuring.
I felt a sprinkle of fine powder dust down onto me.
I held still, but opened my eyes,
and I saw that her eyes were closed
and her face fierce and sorrowed.
I saw that it would hurt her to send me away,
even as she cast the spell that would give me the strength
to do so.
The next morning, I said to her in a trembling voice,
I don't want to go back.
Yes, that's true, she agreed, and we ate in silence.
She tested me for a month on my knowledge,
and packing me heavily with bits of our trade
she sent me on my way.
It took me many months to make my way home.
I came upon a tangle of flotsam in a creek one day
that had flooded its banks.
There were trees living with water swirling all around
and other broken trees snugged up against them.
Rocks hugged between-- rocks hugged between the currents
and the roots.
In this gathering, this motion against the steady patience
of the trees, this accidental village,
I recognized my loneliness.
I stood by the creek and wept.
I had nothing of the tangle of lives.
And it was not my choice to have become so.
I had been a daughter.
I had been a wife, and these families
had broken away from me, each in a furious kind of flood that
left me behind.
When I got to the cove, I built a small shack.
I lined the walls with a bounty of herbs and bones
and skins and fats the crone had taught me that I would need
for cures and spells alike.
I set up for business, you might say,
though I never went to town.
The crone told me that the desperate and young have
a nose for alchemy, and soon enough they would come,
and soon enough they did.
The seekers were always petrified, but ready
to risk everything for my secrets.
They would do anything I told them,
and I asked for very little in return.
A little blood, the hairs of a virgin,
the clippings of a greedy boy's fingernails.
They never asked what I needed these things for,
an omission on their part that I counted as permission.
They answered the only question I had about town.
Was my mother dead?
Yes, she was, they said.
She died alone in a room, two days without anyone knowing.
This did not give me any satisfaction
as I might have imagined.
I sent the bringers of this news away with no charm,
as I was seized by a nausea that kept me still for over a week.
But I've done and what I can since.
I've averted family duels, halted mismatched marriages,
cast back a famine, created love in the hearts
of cold men and women, healed deadly illness,
and invented hope.
It is the beginning of what I mean to do.
Today, though, a young girl arrived, crying and picking
her way through the woods towards my cove.
I peered out.
She slowed as she reached the pond and looked around,
nervous.
Her hair was in braids over the crown of her head.
Her face smooth and pale.
I cannot always tell by looking whether they seek love cures,
prevention of a babe, curse on a sister.
All of this work seems so similar to me now,
the ingredients of a human life, and my job to mix the marrow,
boil the possibles, grind the fleshes.
I stepped out when she was close enough and let her see me.
Then I turned and entered my shack.
It gives me the upper hand to be surrounded
by my potions and bones, and it frightens them into honesty.
I'm afraid for them to stay too long.
The girl's cheeks were flushed pink, and her hands trembled.
She had a terrible lonely look to her.
She stepped through the door, only glancing at the shelves
and heaps and dangling things.
I waited.
She lowered her head and spoke to my dirt floor.
I couldn't quite make out what she was saying, at first,
but I understood she's somebody maid.
She paused, and then a flurry of words came running together.
A threat.
A filthy stall and sodden hay.
The master of estate pressing her down,
and the bonies bucket--
and the ponies water bucket going over.
The filthy stall and the master's pants at his ankles
and the ponies spreading water.
She looked up at me then, her mouth shaking and wet,
and she said to me, I want a potion.
I want a poison.
She looked familiar to me in ways
that didn't have anything to do with her face,
but the way that she was in the world.
The crone once told me that this could happen.
You can't do this work without at least once seeing yourself
come in the door, and the magic needed in such a moment
has nothing to do with words you memorized
or what is on the shelves, but must be answered out
of something only you know.
I knew the hunger in this girl's eyes, the hunger
for a simple answer.
For the first time, I didn't sniff or point my dirty finger
at the stool for her to wait.
I didn't turn to the safety of my bowls and bags and jars
as if a life were only made of its ingredients,
as if the mysteries and pains of it
weren't sorcery enough without my tinkering.
I stared at her, and she said, I know you've done it before.
I didn't answer at first.
I sat down on my stool with her looming pink fleshed and young
over me.
She said fiercely, you have to.
She wept quietly into her hands.
I let her weep.
I thought about how weeping is like a dough rising, how
it needs the time and heat to become just so.
After a while, when she kneaded her grief low,
I touched her head.
It startled me.
So damp and hot and small.
She was so young.
I pressed my whole palm down, then gently letting my fingers
cradle her skull.
There are reasons, I said quietly,
why I don't want you to do this.
She slumped to the floor and wept more softly.
I crouched-- I crouched beside her
and took her sweaty fingers in my own, holding them tightly.
I looked into her eyes.
I was a baker's daughter, I whispered.
And this Baker, my father, dreamt of sunny fields.
He fed me stories of this farming life
until he died in one of those fields,
alone, under a burning August sun.
Then I was raised by my mother, who can't
be blamed for her thin heart.
I'm sure there is much comment in town
as to how these details made me what I am,
but this is not the whole story.
[APPLAUSE]