The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

only strange thing about the unfamiliarity of this kitchen was the knowledge that it was hers now, these pans, these plates, this old dented kettle, this mug decorated with petroglyph paintings. For years she’d been travelling light and making herself at home in other people’s houses. Having an entire house of her own was going to take some getting used to.

She made the coffee, grilled some toast, and sat down at the kitchen table with yesterday’s edition of the Arizona Daily Star, too unsettled to actually read it. Davis’s kitchen was the heart of the house, with a rough wood table in the center that could have easily seated a family of twelve and not just one elderly poet. The kitchen hearth held a woodstove—the winter nights were probably cold up here. Fat wicker rockers were pulled close to it, covered by faded old serapes. The walls were a mottled tea-colored adobe with shades of some brighter tone showing through and wainscotting up to waist-height stained or aged to a woodsy green. The window frames were painted violet, the doors were a rich but weathered shade of blue. Mexican saints in beaten tin frames hung among Davis’s pots and pans; folk art and dusty tin milagros hung among strings of red chili peppers, garlic, and desert herbs. The windowsills were crowded with stones, geodes, fossils, clumps of smoky quartz, and Indian pottery shards.

The rest of the house was less colorful and cluttered, with plain adobe walls and simple, old Mission furniture made of oak. There was a small living room with a beehive fireplace and an old-style ceiling of saguaro ribs; the side bedroom where Maggie had slept on a lumpy feather bed with a tarnished brass frame; Davis’s study in the front of the house; and one other room at the back of the house that seemed to be firmly locked. The wood plank floors were strewn with Navajo rugs in patterns of brown, black and red. Every straight wall held bookcases packed with books in English, Spanish and French. Indian drums hung over one case, a Rincon trail map over another, but otherwise the walls were bare, studded with nails as though recently pictures had hung there and been removed.

The electricity, Johnny Foxxe had told her, came from a generator she shared with her neighbors. The water was from her own underground spring and tasted of rust. She wondered if her phone was hooked up yet. As she got up to test it, it began to ring. It was probably Nigel. Who else would phone her before dawn?

“Hey Puck,” he said, “how’s life in the desert?”

“Nigel, I’ve been in Tucson for exactly,” she looked at her watch, “twelve hours. It’s a little soon for a progress report.”

“So what’s it like? Is it hot there? Did you meet any cowboys or Indians yet?”

“Not unless you count the kid who rescued my car from a ditch. He had a snazzy pair of cowboy boots on, but no chaps or spurs, I’m sorry to disappoint you. It’s early, Nigel. Go away. I’ll call you when you get back next week.”

“Car? Ditch? Did you have an accident?”

“No, mother. I’m hanging up now. Have a good time up in Ottawa.”

“Toronto,” he said as she hung up the receiver.

She poured herself another cup of coffee and ignored the phone when it rang again.

It rang and rang and eventually stopped as she stood in the door of Davis’s study. She had peered into the room last night, but had hesitated to enter it. It had been a disturbing room by moonlight: the desk with the poet’s papers still on it, as though he had just stepped away. If the old man’s ghost was haunting the house, this is where it would be.

The room was now bathed in blue pre-dawn light filtered through the french doors and two small windows set deep in the adobe wall. Through the glass of the doors was a view of the Three Graces (as he had once named the three tall saguaro cactus in a letter to her) and a yard full of ground-hugging prickly pear, scrubby wildflowers and hard-packed earth. In the distance, beyond the long dirt drive, was the wash, a fugitive river that ran only after the heaviest rains. Its banks were edged by cottonwoods with the mountains looming behind them, black against the purple sky. It was a dramatic landscape, harsh and vivid. She did not find the desert beautiful. The air felt parched; her skin felt dry; the color of the sky looked unnatural. Already she missed the deep and abundant green of the Pacific coast.

She sighed, turned on the lamp by the desk, and sat in Davis’s desk chair. She picked up an ink-stained Monte Blanc pen, covered with a thin layer of dust. In the unfinished letter below it he’d been declining a request for an interview, in the acerbic epistolary prose that Maggie had known so well. The rest of the house was a stranger’s house, but here was the man Maggie knew: in the pictures pinned above his desk; in the calligraphic handwriting; in the books on the shelves—books that he’d discussed in his long, cranky, occasionally drunken and often hilarious letters.

The desktop was full of letters and envelopes postmarked around the world. This had been his work these last years, this voluminous correspondence. There were no poems on the old man’s desk, except the poems other writers had sent. Davis Cooper had not published a book, or a single poem, in over thirty years. Instead he drank. Legend had it that it was alcohol that had fueled his early brilliance, and alcohol that had destroyed it. An occupational hazard, he had called it; in his day, it was normal, almost expected.

Maggie picked up a pipe from the corner of the desk and breathed the scent of stale tobacco, trying to catch the lingering essence of a man she would never meet. Goddamn him, he’d kept putting her visits off and