And here was the thing: sometimes I wanted her heart in love and admiration. Sometimes. And sometimes I wanted her heart to roast on a black stick.
She answered the back door where they had instructed me to call.
I stood there with my bundle. She looked me up and down.
“All right,” she said finally. “Come in.”
She took my hand. Her fingers were like a bundle of broom straws, so thin and dry, but the strength of them was unnatural. I couldn’t have tugged loose if she was leading me into rooms of white-hot coal. Her strength was a kind of perverse miracle, for she got it from fasting herself thin. Because of this hunger practice her lips were a wounded brown and her skin deadly pale. Her eye sockets were two deep lash less hollows in a taut skull. I told you about the nose already. It stuck out far and made the place her eyes moved even deeper, as if she stared out the wrong end of a gun barrel. She took the bundle from my hands and threw it in the corner.
“You’ll be sleeping behind the stove, child.”
It was immense, like a great furnace. There was a small cot close behind it.
“Looks like it could get warm there,” I said.
“Hot. It does.”
“Do I get a habit?”
I wanted something like the thing she wore. Flowing black cotton.
Her face was strapped in white bandages, and a sharp crest of starched white cardboard hung over her forehead like a glaring beak. If possible, I wanted a bigger, longer, whiter beak than hers.
“No,” she said, grinning her great skull grin. “You don’t get one yet.
Who knows, you might not like us. Or we might not like you.
But she had loved me, or offered me love. And she had tried to hunt the Dark One down. So I had this confidence.
“I’ll inherit your keys from you,” I said.
She looked at me sharply, and her grin turned strange. She hissed, taking in her breath. Then she turned to the door and took a key from her belt. It was a giant key, and it unlocked the larder where the food was stored.
Inside there was all kinds of good stuff. Things I’d tasted only once or twice in my life. I saw sticks of dried fruit, jars of orange peel, spice like cinnamon. I saw tins of crackers with ships painted on the side. I saw pickles. jars of herring and the rind of pigs. There was cheese, a big brown block of it from the thick ilk of goats. And besides that there was the everyday stuff, in great quantities, the flour and the coffee.
It was the cheese that got to me. When I saW it my stomach hollowed.
My tongue dripped. I loved that goat-milk cheese better than anything I’d ever ate. I stared at it. The rich curve in the buttery cloth.
“When you inherit my keys,” she said sourly, slamming the door in my face, “you can eat all you want of the priest’s cheese.”
Then she seemed to consider what she’d done. She looked at me. She took the key from her belt and went back, sliced a hunk off, and put it in my hand.
“If you’re good you’ll taste this cheese again. When I’m dead and gone,” she said.
Then she dragged out the big sack of flour. When I finished that heaven stuff she told me to roll my sleeves up and begin doing God’s labor. For a while we worked in silence, mixing up the dough and poundin it out on stone slabs.
“God’s work,” I said after a while. “If this is God’s work, then I’ve done it all my life.”
“Well, you’ve done it with the Devil in your heart then,” she ‘d.
“Not God.”
“How do you know?” I asked. But I knew she did. And I wished I had not brought up the subject.
“I see right into you like a clear glass,” she said. “I always did.”
“You don’t know it,” she continued after a while, “but he’s come around here sulking. He’s come around here brooding.
You brought him in. He knows the smell of me, and he’s going to make a last ditch try to get you back. Don’t let him.” She glared over at me.
Her eyes were cold and lighted. “Don’t let him touch you. We’ll be a long time getting rid of him.”
So I was careful. I was careful not to give him an inch. I said a rosary, two rosaries, three, underneath my breath. I said the Creed.
I said every scrap of Latin I knew while we punched the dough with our fists. And still, I dropped the cup. It rolled under that monstrous iron stove, which was getting fired up for baking.
And she was on me. She saw he’d entered my distraction.
“Our good cup,” she said. “Get it out of there, Marie.”
I reached for the poker to snag it out from beneath the stove.
But I had a sinking feel in my stomach as I did this. Sure enough, her long arm darted past me like a whip. The poker lighted in her hand.
“Reach,” she said. “Reach with your arm for that cup. And when your flesh is hot, remember that the flames you feel are only one fraction of the heat you will feel in his hellish embrace. ” She always did things this way, to teach you lessons. So I wasn’t surprised. It was playacting, anyway, because a stove isn’t very hot underneath right along the floor. They aren’t made that way. Otherwise a wood floor would burn. So I said yes and got down on my stomach and reached under.
I meant to grab it quick and jump up again, before she could think up another lesson, but here it happened. Although I groped for the cup, my hand closed on nothing. That cup was nowhere to be found.
I heard her step toward me, a slow step. I heard the creak of thick shoe leather, the little plat as the folds of her heavy skirts met, a trickle of fine sand sifting, somewhere, perhaps in the bowels of her, and I was afraid. I tried to scramble up, but her foot came down lightly behind my ear, and I was lowered. The foot came down more firmly at the base of my neck, and I was held.
“You’re like I was,” she said. “He wants you very much.”
“He doesn’t want me no more,” I said. “He had his fill. I got the cup!”
I heard the valve opening, the hissed intake of breath, and knew that I should not have spoke.
“You lie,” she said. “You’re cold. There is a wicked ice forming in your blood. You don’t have a shred of devotion for God. Only wild cold dark lust. I know it. I know how you feel. I see the beast … the beast watches me out of your eyes sometimes. Cold.”
The urgent scrape of metal. It took a moment to know from where.
Top of the stove. Kettle. Lessons. She was steadying herself with the iron poker. I could feel it like pure certainty, driving into the wood floor. I would not remind her of pokers. I heard the water as it came, tipped from the spout, cooling as it fell but still scalding as it struck. I must have twitched beneath her foot, because she steadied me, and then the poker nudged up beside my arm as if to guide. “To warm your cold ash heart,” she said. I felt how patient she would be.
The water came. My mind went dead blank. Again. I could only think the kettle would be cooling slowly in her hand. I could not stand it.
I bit my lip so as not to satisfy her with a sound. She gave me more reason to keep still.
“I will boil him from your mind if you make a peep,” she said, “by filling up your ear.
Any sensible fool would have run back down the hill the minute Leopolda let them up from under her heel. But I was snared in her black intelligence by then. I could not think straight. I had prayed so hard I think I broke a cog in my mind. I prayed while her foot squeezed my throat. While my skin burst. I prayed even when I heard the wind come through, shrieking in the busted bird nests. I didn’t stop when pure light fell, turning slowly behind my eyelids. God’s face. Even that did not disrupt my continued praise. Words came.
Words came from nowhere and flooded my mind.
Now I could pray much better than any one of them. Than all of them full force. This was proved. I turned to her in a daze when she let me up. My thoughts were gone, and yet I remember how surprised I was.