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

“Ah, make wine from the fruit. Drink till you puke,” the old woman answered and the two women laughed. “Very good purgative.”

He carried the pot of tea to the porch. His mama stubbed out her cigarette as Maggie took a notebook from her bag. “María,” the younger woman said, “what I’d really like to talk to you about is Davis Cooper. Fox told you I’m here to write a book about Cooper, didn’t he? It would be very helpful, and I’d be grateful, if you could tell me some stories about your life with him.”

His mother folded her hands on her lap, looking like a good little schoolgirl. She nodded, her eyes round and dark in her face. She didn’t volunteer anything.

Maggie shot Fox a look.

“Mama, what if Maggie just asks you some questions?”

She nodded again, retreating back into the shyness she usually presented to strangers.

Maggie took a breath. “All right. For instance, when did you first meet Cooper?”

“Oh,” María said, in a hesitant little voice, “years ago it must have been.”

“Where, Mama?” Fox prompted.

“Oh,” she said, “on the mountain.”

Maggie said, “Now, what I’ve been told is that Cooper advertised for a housekeeper, and you saw the ad and you answered it. Is that right? Is that what happened?”

Her head bobbed.

“Well, when would that have been? What year?”

“Umm. Nineteen seventy-three?” María guessed, as though she were reaching for an answer on an exam she hadn’t studied for.

“Mama, I was born in fifty-eight. It was the year I was born, wasn’t it?”

“Yes!” she said, and a smile lit her face.

“But where were you before then?”

The smile left. She looked confused. “Well, I was here.”

“Here, where?”

She sketched the air with her hand. She could have meant this spot, she could have meant Tucson, she could have meant the United States.

Maggie tried another tack. “When I was reading Cooper’s work today, I came across some notes for his poems. Perhaps you’ve seen this one before? He wrote it in 1959. I think it must be about Fox.”

María looked at the notebook. She sat very still. Then she put her two hands on the page, and touched the letters gently, a strange expression on her round, wrinkled face. A look of wonder, and tenderness. Then she rose abruptly, and she went into the trailer, and shut the door behind her. She did not come out again.

“Oh dear,” said Maggie. “I’m not doing very well at this at all, am I?”

“It’s not you. It’s my mother. She never talks about the past like this. Or to people she doesn’t know. Actually you’ve done rather well.”

“Have I upset her?”

“Not exactly. But she won’t come out again now, I’m afraid.”

But Fox was wrong. When they finished their tea and got back into his pickup truck, the trailer door opened and María came out, a lidded basket under her arm. She came to the window and gave it to Maggie. Maggie opened the lid. There were herbs inside.

“Thank you,” said Maggie. She sounded touched. “May I give something to you then?”

The old woman gave her a shy, delighted smile. Maggie took a turquoise stone from her pocket and put it in his mother’s palm. María clutched it tightly with the sweetest of expressions breaking over the sun-browned face. She waved at them as Fox turned the truck around, and then she struck out into the desert. As the truck pulled away, she was bent down in the dirt, absorbed in her plants once again. Fox knew from past experience that she’d soon forget all about them.

“Your mother is a doll,” Maggie commented. “She and Lillian must get along famously.”

“You bet,” Fox said as he steered the truck back over the broken trail.

He turned onto the graded dirt road, and headed east for the Interstate. The afternoon sun was a blaze of light behind them, throwing long shadows.

Fox looked at Maggie. “So what was that page of Cooper’s you showed my mother, anyway?”

She turned to him, her eyes opaque. When she spoke, her voice was hesitant. “I think it might be about your birth.” She read the passage to him.

Fox was quiet for a long while.

Then he said, “She told me I was born on the mountain. I knew that part of it before—that she didn’t go to a hospital. I knew Cooper or someone had to have been there. But to tell you the truth,” he added, swiftly braking for a pair of coyotes crossing the road, “I always thought Cooper was our father, and those two would never admit it.”

“Cooper?” Maggie’s voice was startled.

“Well, not that he ever acted like he was. But it made a kind of sense—more sense than Mama’s story. Now it turns out Lillian actually met my father. And here’s Cooper wondering about his Christian name. It seems,” he said with remarkable calm, “that Mr. Foxxe was a real man after all.” He put the truck back into gear, stepping hard on the accelerator.

She said quietly, “I’ve seen a man who looks like him. Like the man in Anna’s painting. I’ve seen him in the Rincons, wandering around the hills.”

“The man in that painting would have to be as old as Davis Cooper now,” Fox pointed out.

“I know,” she said, her voice husky. He could not read her expression.

“You think I’ve got a brother I don’t know about or something?”

“A brother? Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Or do you think Anna’s paintings are coming to life?” He said it in a teasing way, and then was sorry, for Maggie’s shoulders tensed.

“What do you think?”

“Me? Well shoot, I don’t know,” he said lightly, trying to smooth the tension away. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be making sense of Cooper. So you tell me when you find out.”

She was silent then, her face serious, lost in private thoughts of her own.

Fox flipped the Desert Wind tape over. The music began with a whisper of flute—the copal flute he’d had from Tomás. And then the low chanting of Begay’s Navajo