The Adventures of Anatole by Nancy Willard

Author:Nancy Willard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-07-03T12:27:20+00:00

9.

The water was so cold that it took Anatole’s breath away. The next instant he got it back again, and he found himself on the stairway he had seen from the shore. He was quite dry, even his clothes, which smelled as fresh and clean as on the day his mother had bought them. Through the skin of water over his head, he saw his friends peering anxiously down at him, and he waved encouragingly.

“Come in! It’s all right!” he shouted. But he could tell from their faces that they didn’t hear him. He waved once more, then turned and started down the stairs. The darkness would have frightened him if the stairs had not reminded him of the ones that led to the fruit cellar in his grandmother’s house.

“I wonder if there’ll be old fruit jars and canned pears and boxes of Christmas ornaments,” he said to himself. He listened for an echo but heard none, and it relieved him to know that the passage was not very large and that he was not likely to meet anyone in it. The stairs turned and ended abruptly at a wooden door, under which a yellow light shone on the stone landing. Anatole knocked twice. Nobody opened the door.

“Perhaps she’s asleep,” he said, and he lifted the latch and, finding it unlocked, went in.

The room into which he stepped was not at all like his grandmother’s cellar but more like his mother’s sewing room. A long worktable in the middle of the room was heaped with mending, and the young woman seated there was sorting, just as his mother did, and talking to herself.

“This is usable. This can be saved. But this is worn clean through. This I can use for patching. This I can piece together. But nothing can be done with this one—it’s all holes. Well, nothing I mend lasts forever.”

She did not look like his mother. She wore a brown robe made of dead leaves stitched close together, one on the other, and at first glance, she seemed to be wearing scales. Her hair was tucked out of sight under a lace scarf, cut and stitched from leaves that had been eaten away by insects so that only the veins remained. And now he noticed she was not sorting old clothes. Through her hands passed skins, feathers, claws, horns, antlers, fins, bones. They littered the floor. They covered the table. She ran her fingers over them, rubbed them, and held them up to the lamp. The lamp made Anatole shudder. Three serpents, twisted into a knot, hung from the ceiling, and the mouth of each serpent held a candle.

“A little more light over here, please,” ordered the lady, and the snakes shifted obligingly, and lit up, briefly, a huge fireplace on the far side of the room, where a large soup pot hung, not over the fire but over a phosphorescent log, such as one occasionally finds in very damp forests.

“No, over here,” urged the lady, and again the snakes shifted.

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