“This happened in a theater, did it not?”
“Rosemary laughed as her father had often laughed, calling a bluff, and demanded to know which one of them was telling the truth. Or which two.
‘The first to speak told the truth,’ giggled the first woman, ‘and so did the last. The second was a liar.’ ‘Now, now,’ remonstrated the second. ‘Let’s have no paradox here.’
‘Certainly we are sisters,’ said the third. ‘But we serve no one and do not know the meaning of mercy. Finally, Little Girl, if you must ask us which of us is telling the truth, then I simply do not understand what we are doing here talking to you, when there is a world full of people just as confused as you are but who frankly have their wits about them.’ ‘I AM NOT AT ALL CONFUSED!’ Rosemary shouted. The old women flinched, ducked, cowered, stepped back, and drew closer together. When they had finished doing all this, Rosemary understood that they were only feigning alarm, and were in fact having some fun at her expense. When they saw that she saw, they left off pantomiming and came boldly around her. ‘You are very bright, Little Girl,’ said the first. ‘It does my heart good to see such warmth of brain in one so young. I believe you will become wise as the years go by.’ A gust of wind blew the hood of her cloak from her head. Her blue eyes twinkled in her wrinkled, grizzled face. ‘You are very brave, Little Girl,’ said the second. ‘It does my mind good to see such warmth of heart in one so young. I believe you will turn away from no fear in the war to come.’ Another gust blew the hood of her cloak back as well. Her eyes were green as emeralds. ‘You are very dark and frightened, Little Girl,’ said the third. She was barely audible in the rising wind. ‘I have never seen such anger, confusion, and recklessness in one so young, and it quite undoes me to imagine how you will make your way in the years left to you. I believe you will find little peace in them.’ The wind was very strong now, and loud, and gusts of it smote the three as if with fists. Their garments fluttered around their trembling limbs, flapped and snapped until finally the hood of the third lifted away from her head, billowing and falling away. Her eyes were black but the look in the old face was one of commiseration, not of hate or malice or fear. She looked at Rosemary in a sad and friendly way too. Then she reached up, putting one withered hand to the side of her skull, the other under her jaw, fitting them carefully, sighed, and pulled her head off. The first and second quickly followed suit. From their sagging old necks rose, like gnarled and crooked arrows from grotesque quivers made from the bodies of trolls, the branches of trees, stripped of bark and white as bone, bare of leaves, and tossing in the wind. She was largely unmoved by this display of witchcraft. She recognized it as something out of a nightmare, but accepted it as yet one more grim aspect of a reality that, it was clear, had infinite powers of derangement and that she would never fully understand. Buds appeared on the branches and this seemed to be a sign of better times just around the corner. From the buds tiny leaves eased forth and grew. The old women nodded and swayed over her and the succulent green leaves grew larger and larger. Rosemary swooned with the majesty of it, and lay down. When we awoke she realized she was staring into the beady but strangely still and calm eyes of a squirrel. He was upside down, clinging to the trunk of the tree among the roots of which she lay, no more than a foot or two above her head. They began to converse about the pleasant weather and the indescribable pleasure of a nap in the afternoon on a day when there was wind in the trees. Then they were silent for a time. Rosemary asked the squirrel how it made ends meet, and the squirrel spoke of life in the tree, of ordinary successes and failures in the familiar places, stories of its vastness, trials and tragedies in its most remote reaches, of proper conduct and good government. The squirrel wanted Rosemary to understand that while they were free, the quality of that freedom depended utterly on circumstances. Rosemary tried to give the squirrel the impression that this was elementary reasoning, but the truth was that she could not grasp the meaning of it. Then the squirrel said, ‘The tree remains the tree no matter what I think about it,’ and Rosemary awoke. ‘Stop pretending your mother is dead. It hurts her terribly. Be dutiful and loving toward her,’ said the squirrel. And Rosemary awoke a second time.”
White spaces, in the time and confines of the minds of the storyteller and story hearer, were made irregularly and infrequently.
“Our mill was not merely a legendary worker’s paradise; in fact it was famous for its looms — or rather, more precisely, for an innovation in the design of the looms’ flying shuttles: they had lead tips and were ten times as durable as the all-wood shuttles, whose tips cracked and splintered and fell to pieces under the stress of the new high speeds with unacceptable frequency. But before we could get to a loom, we would have to spend several years—‘the best years of our lives,’ I liked to say, making Rosemary laugh — on the drums, working the ‘jumbo exotic carders,’ as they were technically known. There were eleven drums of varying sizes connected by belts: the big central drum was called ‘the swift’ and ran clockwise; two drums about half the size of the swift, ‘the doffer’ and ‘the fancy,’ were high and low at the back of the swift, running counterclockwise. There was a little ‘stripper’ between the fancy and the doffer, and above and below the feeding tray, which was in front of course, where the cotton fibers entered the carder, at tit level, were two little drums called ‘nippers,’ with a little stripper on top of the top nipper. Going up over the swift were four medium-sized drums, two pairs of strippers and ‘workers.’ In the back, below the doffer, was the fly comb, tit level, where the cotton fibers left the carder, again at tit level. I stress this point of the description because we could never let our arms hang, they were always raised from the shoulder and spread. This was a job considered especially suitable, for an unknown or undeclared reason, for little girls, teamed, as often as possible, with their mothers. Rosemary’s ‘mother’ was a devious and secretive harridan who hated Rosemary, and hated me too, again for an unknown or undeclared reason. Confronted with the truth, as she had been at the well by the witches, that harridan was Rosemary’s actual, biological mother, Rosemary would hold up her hand and slowly shake her head: she was a distant relative who had hated Rosemary’s parents because of their interest in unionism, and feared they had passed this interest on to a little girl who clearly had troublemaking on her mind anyway, and for whom she had an unpleasant but unavoidable responsibility. But whatever the cause of the hatred and the nature of the relationship, there was one constant in the acting out of it, and it required two actors and a long-forgotten understanding of who had started it. Rosemary, despite the fact that we were living out the best years of our lives in a worker’s paradise, was deeply disturbed by the monotony and sensory assault of her job — it’s hard for most people nowadays to imagine a child of six or eight or sixteen on the edge of nervous collapse, but not me.”