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

for she’d been acting like some naive schoolgirl. All he’d been doing was amusing himself, and she’d gone right along with it, obsessed with a man she didn’t even know just because he was so lovely to look at. And because, she admitted to herself, it was romantic, and wild, like Cooper’s poems. She shuddered, remembering the dreams she’d had, so starkly erotic. Thank god things had never gotten that far in real life. If they had … She didn’t finish the thought.

She broke the eggs into the pan and made herself think of less mortifying scenarios. All right, so she got a bit carried away, but she wasn’t a total fool. She thought instead about the queer vision she’d had of her own face staring back at her. And all the strange things that he’d said to her. And the oddest thing of all, which was the fact that Crow seemed to have stepped from one of Anna’s paintings.

So many of the paintings had their counterparts in Cooper’s later poetry, but there was no man named Crow in the “Wood Wife” poems, or any of Cooper’s other work. And yet there were images that reminded her of him. The mythical Trickster, wild and unpredictable. Compelling in one breath, sinister the next—wise and foolish both at once. Puck was a Trickster in English folklore; Hermes or Loki in Europe. She recalled there were Tricksters in both Mexican and Native American legendry, and she resolved to look through Cooper’s library today to see what she could find…

Maggie took her breakfast to the table, laughing at the route her thoughts had taken. She poured some coffee. Dora was right. The mountain was rubbing off on her. She was becoming as loco as the rest of them here. She had come to do biographical research, and now she was chasing down fairy tales, half-convinced that Cooper or Anna had conjured Crow from the desert air. “It’s just a metaphor,” she said out loud, but she didn’t really believe this.

Then you’ve been seduced by a metaphor, said an ornery, contrary voice in Maggie’s head. She recognized that voice; it sounded like Cooper’s. It made her smile to herself.

“That’s right,” Maggie said aloud to the empty room. “And it won’t be the first time either.”

She finished her breakfast and went back to the study she’d made in Anna’s studio. She had all of Cooper’s collections in there, and what notes she could find toward the unpublished poems. She’d just found another of his notebooks wedged between two Victorian fairy-tale books: “The Moon Wife” and “The Moon Wife’s Daughter,” two volumes that Cooper had loved. She opened the notebook and began to read, skipping old memos and grocery lists. In between these things were notes for poems, phrases, lines, an occasional whole verse-nothing complete, just enough tantalizing information to let her know what she was missing. She read the calligraphic handwriting with pleasure, and a bit of envy for the old man’s imagination. Perhaps she could go over these notes with Dora; there might be something here that the other woman would recognize. Then she found something she recognized herself, and it jolted her to the bone:

NOTE. Remember that A. handed him stone. Jade? Lapis? No, turquoise. “For protection,” she told him. Turns to powder in his hand.

C: “I can’t be protected. It’s too late for that. But now I must give you a gift in return.”

There is always a return, a cycle, a gift exchange. The breath in, the breath out. This is what I’d forgotten. Did she? Would that have made a difference? This question seems important. This is the question the poem must answer.

Maggie sat and stared at the words on the page. The notebook was dated 1958. How could Cooper have forseen her own experience in words written over thirty years before? But it was not Maggie he wrote about at all; it was “A.”—probably Anna, and “C.”—another C., or was it Crow?, saying the very same words to each other. Perhaps she had read these words before somewhere, and then unconsciously repeated them?

She quickly flipped through the other pages. More lists. Phone numbers. Car parts information. More notes for poems, but none about C., or turquoise, or gifts again. One poem was about the mountain, simple and naturalistic. In the second, an old man thinks about death. The third was about birth. She read this note twice, and then she read it over once more, bent over the water-stained page, chewing the end of her pencil.

NOTE. She would not leave the mountain, even now. It is the midnight hour. The air is cold but she is warm, even hot to the touch. The river, dry. Moon, full. Image: she lies in the sand of the wash, silver light, legs spread. There is no blood. This disturbs me. I am frightened. But the baby slips from her legs like a stone through water, and into my hands. Cold. Crying. Tiny, but alive. At last she is persuaded to go back into the house. She will not tell me the father’s Christian name. She will not name the baby. He is only The Baby for many months, but a child must have a name I tell her. She is surprised. I have begun calling the boy after Gutiérrez, and she accepts this.

Gutiérrez. The name was half-familiar to Maggie. She looked it up on her computer, where she had been making notes of Cooper’s references. She quickly found the name in her file: Johnny Gutiérrez, of the Emergency Rescue Committee. The man who had gotten Cooper out of France during the war, and saved his life. She could double-check that with Maisie Tippetts, she thought. She wrote a note to herself: Johnny—

Johnny. She repeated the name and sat back in her chair, eyes narrowed as realization dawned. Cooper had written, or had been planning to write, a poem about Johnny Foxxe’s birth; the woman in labor on the mountain was clearly Cooper’s pregnant housekeeper.