For our repast, we seized fish from the pond and drummed variety of nourishing beasts from lair and home: warrens, forestfowl, chipmonques, beavers, skunklings, raccoons and deerettes. For the rest, our victuals consisted of star-violet tea, teal and blackbird eggs, fairy-ring fungus, roots, berries, mouslings knocked senseless by our hands and birds of prey artiously bombarded with pebblings or expertly pierced by our arrows.
Father had the knowing of all philosophy. Notions and lightenments resided in his skull. He knew Earth to be flat and that it is set amidst the skies where heavenly bodies do circulate it as dogs on a chain. He knew that goddess Moon governs the salvation of all live things: bestiary, vegetablish and human; that bodily ailments can be cured through the judicious application of bloodletting and other modern remedies; and that nightmares engulf the mindmarrow via the earholes. Father could likewise uncrypt the comings and goings of the air: from treetop, he espied the distant progress of gust and cyclone, thus foretelling our hazard or haven. His foot seemed guided by compass and instruments, so easy did he circulate under canopy and over path, meeting neither constraint nor disorientation. He fathomed the secrets of the heavens and the stars and had the knowing of their reading. Thus, certain nights, when his eyes ogled the firmament, I would chance to question him on my destiny. Thus spake my voice: “Father, what do you perceive this night of what will become of me?” But Father was not a man of words.
From my tenderest age he taught me all: how to grasp fish, decipher beastcry, trail game, cut brawn, betoast shank, carve felled tree into logwood, prepare corpse of skunkling, broil russole and other fungi, orienteer and occidenteer, deambulate nocturnally, sew apparels, gut deerette and even strangulate viper, when one did slither into our galoshings left nightly at the door.
While choked with an understanding that might readily have earned him ample esteem, Father elected for a quiet, near solitary existence. In truth, I was the sole humanity tolerated in his neighbouring vicinity. Thus his days were free from all intercourse with persons, either townsmen or gentlecreatures, whom he oft termed “rasclets”, “vagabonds”, “tinkers”, “knaves” and “miscreants”. Willingly turning face from crowd, he retreated ever to the forest, where he found ample asylum, collation and kindling. Over discourse, he favoured the melody of beastcrys, the rustlings of breeze in foliage, the crackings of rotted and twisted trees and even the fearsome thundering of breaking squall.
No, Father was no man of words, save, Your Honour, when he parliamented with his folks, as I will presently narrate. For if it now behooves me to open my life’s book before you, I must also turn the pages of my Father’s, so tightly twined is his story with my own. Thus will I betterly convey my tale, and instruct you of the circumstances and events leading me to expunge my fellow man, acquire vocabulary and finally, come afore you and the members of this tribunate to determine my fate.
*
Father was large in flesh. Athwart east and west no soul was possessed of like musculature. Yet most astonishing to me, was the power and nerve nestling in his sinews. In first instance and by way of example, let me expose a most curious feat he did once accomplish. On a day of great frosts, I witnessed Father furnish himself with mittens thusly: shoving arm into burrow, he plucked out two sleepfilled and chubbling marmots. Then, knocking them out with the hammer of his fist, he set about renting and gutting them. This guttage achieved with the sole aid of his fingers, Father apparelled his hands with their hides and continued on his way, now toasty of palm.
As for Father’s legs, they were proportionable to those of a warhorse in brawn, endurance and speed. No soul could hunt for beast better than he, nor escape the threatening cyclone with greater alacrity. His foot likewise imposed by excess of size. When Father set forth with his heavied step, ant trembled, chipmonque fell from branchlet, crawlapillar was loosed from leaf, and in their burrows, hares, marmots, raccoons and weaslings caught skull on ceiling. In short, Father was immense in all proportions of his person.
Yet this body, for all its raw strength, suffered from a strange disorder in its topmost part in order of arrangement and importance: the skull. When fullmost waked and even busied about the day’s tasks, Father was oft times visited, as in dreaming, by folks who did converse with him, and to whom he retorted in vocabulary most uncustomary. Of highest alarm were his devilish groans, gesticulations and agitations as he addressed them. Yet this was by no means the worst of it. Indeed, once they held him in their grips, Father’s folks pushed him to acts and quests of utmost nonsense. At these times, Father, under some cataclysmal spell, would take it upon himself to do their bidding. This led him, Your Honour, far beyond the reasonable limits of human doings. Forced for my part to second him, I oft risked life and limb in such escapades, as you will soon conceive from my telling.
*
They first descended upon him in the hours following Mother’s passing. My birth once complete, Mother, flat on her mat, began forthwith to die, for I had given her ample vexations in my passage to this here world. Meantime, Father had awaited without the cabin for Mother to drop young, making goodly use of light of day to gut a deerette slain by high morning. As fresh-born I wailed, he entered, seized me in his brawnsome arms and precipitated me to the crackling hearth. It was then that Mother, unbeknownst to Father, did slip silently from us. Only once he had returned me to the mat, apparelled in fresh rags, did he finally look to his companion and perceive that Mother, the one he cherished as rarest and most exquisiting pearl, had surrendered ghost.
Harrowed was that moment. Every last forest-dwelling beast and bug must sure have had its heart broke to hark his weeps afore the cabin, and heed his howlings and lamentations, born far beyond the great beech. “Why? Why?” he bewailed, sobbening, his great fist pounding trunk, his feet afflicting variety of spurns and blows to environing trees. But no beast, plantling nor stone, nor even the goddess Moon could find answer to his question.
That same day, as the sun’s journey across the sky was ending, Father, defeated, purged of his tears, took up his adze and began to craft some wooden planks. He built a casket to Mother’s proportions and, taking her one last time in his arms, placed her gentlingly in the coffin. Finally, carrying Mother on his back, embeddened in her death-box, he traversed forest until, as I learned much later, he reached the great hemlock tree. Thereunder, with his massive hands, Father did deepen a pit for Mother’s enduring rest. He then retraced step to cabin to find me comfortably settled on the straw mat, sagely awaiting my succour.
Still red of eye, Father set about nourishing me. I saw him step out briefly and return presently with corpse of female hedgehog, from which he drew a little milk. This was my first earthly pittance: the milk of a dead beast, killed by Father. Thuswise was it also my first true encounter with death, true inasmuch that it entered and nourished me. Having thus traced its path within me, as inexoringly as words inscribed on a page, death must surely have remained etched in my entrails my entire life. Yet I swallowed this repast with gusto, never suspecting what would befall me in this world, nor all I would shortly suffer at the hands of Father.
I'd soon be in for it.
*
Mother thus enearthed and me thus slaked with milk, Father then stretched out for the night. Although ground down with sorrow, he did not forget firstly to well stuff my straw mat and establish me thereupon. The following dawn, his folks made their first apparition in his skull. Our morning repast of houseleek gruel was barely swallowed when he began gesticulating and altercating with his visitors, though they were no more visible than fart of smallfly. On and on and on it went. Sweat trickled neath Father’s tunic as he paced the cabin in great agitation, groaning, remonstrating, scolding and threatening. Then came a lulling, and Father placed himself on stoolet, but all the while the discourse with his folks never ceased. Though of tenderest age, I was heretofore most keen of eye and agile of mind. Thus did I readily interpret the substance of this riot: somewhere between Mother’s grave and the cabin door, Father had mislaid his mind. The full measure of this fact will appear to you when I relate the quest his folks did then impose upon him, in which I was to be the chief ingredient.
Taking possession of my person, Father bore me overyonder, through the forest to the field of Mr Bramble. There he did stuff me in a shallowing marmot burrow. Abandoned, I was left to rot for a full sun’s journey, wailening in utmost torment and suffering keenly from thirsts and appetites. Gravel scraped my spine. Dusts and sands poured into my earholes, eyes and mouth. Straw tangled in my whispening hair. Maybeetle grubs dropped from overhead onto my shanks, stomach and countenance, and ants, worms and mosshoppers did swarm tremendously neath and over my vestments. Yet no townsman nor gentlecreature came to my aid. My plaint was but that of a feebling thing, and doubtless did not reach human ear. A marmot leastwise did appear. At first highly intrigued to find me in its abode, the creature swiftly accepted this mystery and settled down on a corner of my rags to drowsen. Thus we remained for some time, huddling and warmening together. Bunkered in his manner, I felt a sliver of calm regain my flesh and I stationed my snout against the animal’s own soft, warm muzzle.
The tranquil comings and goings of its breath brought me reminiscence of my mother’s belly, and I began to think on her laying lastingly in her tomb. Though I was live and she dead, I did yet conceive we were alike in circumstance: resting neath the world, each in our own fashion cut off, stranded on opposing edges of life. Had we the knowing, we might have found each other in that moment and exchanged a friendly smile. This thought led to another that I did thusly ponder: Who knows if the deadones do not somehow make their way back to the land of beginnings, as tiny people in their freshest bud of youth? And who can tell if newborns do not bear entire lives bundled up in their inner satchel? For such is the afterlife: full of riddles and inexplicabilities.
At times, the marmot’s slumber seemed troubled by frightsome dreamings, then did it huddle closer to my person, as though consolation there to find. Once in a while, flinching in its sleep, my host did place a paw gentlingly on my face or arm, in the manner of a kindly companion. Thus in the black of the hole did we exchange succour. As time spanned, I thought mayhap my destiny was to live as the beasts, or at least among them, rather than with busy, fretting humanity, deaf to my subterranean cries. Gathering these events close to mind, only now do I see that it was there, in that hole, that I received my most prolonged cherishing. I also conceive that this marmot lavished me with more warmth and aidance than Father would proffer in his entire lifetime.
For Father did at last return to undig me.
An instant prior, the sun was at its journey’s end, and I began to construe that death was nigh. “I will have remained on this earthly plane the space of a day” I thought, as I eyed a faint clustering of stars through the mouth of the hole. I brushed an ant from my face, took the marmot’s paw in mine, and prepared to die. I felt myself to be already halfway to the other side when I heard Father’s roughing tread without. Lifting gaze, I saw his galoshing appear, and soon Father’s whole countenance eclipsed the opening. In the end I was ripped from my refuge and carried out beneath the stars.
Fate would have me restored to the living. Installed on Father’s back like a sack full of bulblings, face turned to Mr Bramble’s field, I watched the first real home I had ever had, and abovemost, the only true friend I would ever know, fade into the night.
