A Small, Twisted Woman of No Importance
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. — W.B. Yeats*
She is given the youngest children, to guard them from the trickster folk of the hearth. Imps are a heartless lot, curious and capricious, known to flick sparks from the fire onto a swaddled infant. A mother returns home after a day in the cold fields to find that babe burned in the cradle. There are many sorts of cradle death, and one is to be charred on the very hearthstone where the child is left for warmth. It happens seldom, but it happens, so a family with a bit to spare at the supper table may take on a cripple or a simpleton to sit with a small child while the others work.
She is a small, twisted woman, blemished, brokenly made. Right for this task, she is shared from one household to another as there is need, as babies come new-born and then grow or die. The tiny fussy creatures are not much better than imps, inconstant and unpredictable, like weather when it blows in from nowhere and out again, useful or not, wanted or not.
“Is it true, Quiddy?” whispers the oldest boy of the house where she stays now. “Is it true what they say? What you did in the womb?”
She sleeps with the nanny goat that is brought in at night for warmth. The cottage has but one low-roofed room. Quiddy and the boy sit together in the fire-lit dark, pillowed against the nanny, and digest their suppers. The goat has been milked. She no longer cries for her kid, given in trade two days ago. She kneels in straw bedding while the boy rests against her and Quiddy holds her head. The raw, hot smell of her feels good in the middle of winter.
“What did I do in the womb?” Quiddy asks, knowing well what the boy means.
“They say you had a brother in the womb.”
“So said the old midwife when putting her ear to my mami’s belly. She suffered, did my mami, a devilish torment inside her, from blows and kicks and slaps. The quickening caused her such grief that she called on the midwife who declared, ‘Two souls battle in you. There is room for only one.’ My mami was a small woman, as I am a small woman.”
“They say…” The boy hesitates. “They say you talk to Death and Death hears.”
“At my mami’s lying in, the midwife brought out but a single babe and that was me. The midwife said, ‘Here is one where there started two. The girl fought for her life, and she will have scars from it.’”
“They say… they say…” The boy quiets his voice to the lowest whisper. “They say you ate him up, that brother.”
“They say. They say. As the snake devours the hairless pup of a mouse. My mami could not look at me for hearing that. My papi, though, my papi was a strong-willed man. How the world would be different had he lived. Papi rebuked the midwife, called her a hag. ‘Confess,’ he demanded. ‘There is no twin and was none. Confess you are a teller of false prophecy.’ Now hear this, boy, and remember. Never insult an old woman, no matter her shabbiness.”
“They say Death marked you.”
“And crossed and twisted me. Never say aloud what’s in your heart, boy, not to demons nor gods. Papi boasted on me for some few years: I was his bold baby daughter. His greatest prize. The day he died my eyes parted ways, one east, one west. The winter he died a scabby crust grew over my skin, and Mami gave me as chattel to the midwife. The year he died my back commenced to turn so now I bend like a windblown tree.”
Quiddy lets the boy rub the bones of her curled spine. He pokes with his finger the warty mass under the neckline of her shift. He looks into her crooked eyes. Days later he will tell about it to the children.
“She was a snake in the womb,” he says to their open-mouthed wonder. “One eye sees you. One eye sees Death. A witch grows mushrooms on her skin. My finger touched a morel fruit on her shoulder.” The boy threatens to touch in turn the younger children and chases them as they shriek. That afternoon the boy and his friends throw rocks at Quiddy when they find her on the road.
She is a woman of no importance, and when there are no babies to tend she sleeps in a ditch or a stable. The Immortal appears to her on such a midsummer night. The woman has tucked herself into the washed-out hollow beneath an ash tree. Its leggy roots grow out of the side of a steep bank and support the trunk like stilts do a carnival clown.
“Here. Take it,” commands the Immortal voice from within a flaming blue-white radiance.
Quiddy sees nothing to take.
The cold dazzle burns with the brightness of ice, hard and slick and smoking around a shadow being, perhaps with wings, perhaps masked. “Here,” insists the voice, perhaps female. The visitor stands in or on the little brook that runs at the bottom of the slope. Trickling water eddies in gusts around what, perhaps, are feet or hooves or even, possibly, the three toed talons of a hawk.
The small woman has no vanity about the value of her life and, as a consequence, has neither fear nor dread of this apparition. She squints into the glare and sees that, no, those are not wings but rather a ring that orbits the Immortal’s upper body, a field of floating, glinting scraps and shards and bits, as if the being is a great planet encircled by the debris of shattered moons. Of course, the woman observes this without naming it because in her day planets are no more than wandering stars, and moons are but the one known moon that remakes itself monthly.
“Small mortal, take it now,” orders the voice. “I don’t have all night.”
“My, You are an overweening one,” says Quiddy. “Take what?”
A broken piece of black glass appears, magically hovering, perhaps suspended from invisible hands. It tilts toward Quiddy and she peers into the surface. Her own face looks back, made dim and wavery.
Quiddy turns her gaze to the flaming nimbus. “I don’t want it.”
“Oh, for Heaven’s Sake, wanting has nothing to do with it. It’s your fate, and I have 38,941 other pieces of this mirror to distribute, so just take it.”
The glass falls to the dirt near Quiddy’s left hand.
“Where do all you tiresome mortals come from?” the Immortal says, perhaps rhetorically. “How does the world hold all of you?”
Then the celestial vision is gone, the light extinguished.
Night seems suddenly darker, so when Quiddy looks a second time into the mirror she sees nothing. She keeps looking. Her eyes readjust and images form inside the glass, shadows fly below the surface, pinpoints of light flicker deep within its murky well. Quiddy sighs. She recognizes this place called eternity, already knows it. She doesn’t need a bit of mirror to scry it further.
She doesn’t need it, but the mirror needs her. It is very much of a kind with her — a scrap of trash beneath notice, a reflective surface on which the busy world sees only itself. Quiddy will keep the broken glass for a season, then pass it on to another like herself, an unassuming child in one of the households the small woman serves.
Quiddy dies, as do we all. Death knows each of us by name for eternity. But aside from Death, no one else remembers her — not the girl to whom she hands the mirror nor the boy who throws rocks, not the kitchen maids at back doors who give her crusts, not the groomsmen who overlook how she shelters in their masters’ stables. She most certainly is not remembered by the Immortal tasked with dispersal of a ruined mirror.
Old Quiddy is remembered by none — not by the stones on which she walks nor the doors through which she passes, not by the ash tree nor the nanny goat, not by firelight nor moonlight nor the winking lights in her black mirror. And in the end, even the dust as it holds her bones has no recollection of her being.
She vanishes so thoroughly that I have to invent her for this story.