In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt

Author:Laird Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

“Swim, now, my darling, swim, swim.” It was my mother who first took me to the shore, who hitched up her skirts and mine then waded out into the water with me, who held me in her strong arms before she let me go. My father would sit and watch in the grassy sand or rove about and hunt for clams like his mother before him. He could not swim. Nor could my mother but she was not afraid, not of water, not of waves, not of currents that could make you drown. “Swim now, child, and it’s never you will need saving.” Soon I could swim like a silvery fish. I swam deep. I swam far. I could have lived, and very well it seems to me, in a water vase. As soon, though, as my mother saw I could do it she dragged me out by my ear because I didn’t come back to her quickly enough and was yelling and splashing in a manner she found unseemly. I said it was only that I was so very happy. She said that happy meant less than nothing in the house of the Lord and never took me down to the water again. But my father did. By moonlight in the warm months he would tap my shoulder when my mother growled deep in the caves of her dreams. We walked out through whispery warm breezes and forests of feathery water grasses so that I could swim in the milky dark. My father spoke but little as we walked for he did not like, he said, to interrupt the songs of the frogs and crickets. He would not come into the water but sat always near me where I swam. Swam and swam. Until my mother followed us out one night with her switch.

“Swim now, Eliza,” cried the old woman as I splashed and gasped and cursed, for the water she had shoved me into was not just foul, it was fearsome cold and gooped thick with the gray muck I had seen from above. It fell across my face and spilled in splotchy clumps from my arms when I lifted them. I tried to grab for the rope but the old woman yanked it from my reach. She told me it would be waiting when my errand was done. There was no other way up. I pounded at the water around me. I called the old woman a dog’s tongue and a tart’s dead daughter for the trick she had played. She said she was better and worse than either of those things, much better and much worse. I could not see her face for water was dripping over my eyes and the dim light of the sky was behind her but I could feel her black-tooth smile. “I’ll see you down the hill, my darling,” she said. As she spoke she tore a leaf from her necklace and let it drop. Back and forth it fell no more quickly than a fleck of down.

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