He was brazen and very stupid. “What makes you think you will live through the night?”
Lamphere laughed. It was a slick, ugly sound. “Well, I will have you know that I’ve made some arrangements in the event of my disappearance . . . I keep a safe deposit box at the bank, and now I’ve left the bone that the pig dug up in there, and some other bones too that I found behind the barn. I’ve left a note with them telling people where to look to find more, and named the one who planted them there as well. My family will find it for sure should I go missing. The sheriff might not like me much, but my father used to be a justice of the peace, so he will listen to my mother.”
I planted the cleaver on the table’s worn surface while shock and anger coursed through me. “What do you want, Lamphere?”
“For things to be as they were. I want to move back inside again, and then we can talk about marriage some more.”
“You let that opportunity slip, Ray.”
“Good thing I did or I’d be dead in the ground.”
“You can still end up like that. Don’t think some measly bones can scare me.”
He smiled then—smiled! “You don’t mean that. You’re not stupid.”
“Get out!” I pulled the cleaver loose and lifted it in the air. “Get out or there’ll be no morning for you! I’ll take my chances with the law!”
He did go, but no farther than the barn.
He was a problem then, a big one. I did not like problems at all.
* * *
—
I did not care for my children as I ought to in those days. They often ran wild in the house and tore through the cupboards in search of sweets. I forgot which day of the week it was, and my girls lost days of school. Though I had always taken great pride in their neatness, their clothes were often stained and wrinkled. The troubles with Lamphere seeped into everything and left me in a poor state. I still gathered the children around me at night, though, to tell stories, play games, and share some warmth. Sometimes I fell asleep before they did, as I was so tired of it all.
One of these nights, when Lamphere was still in the barn, Myrtle and Lucy leaned on me as I sat up in the bed, while little Philip, freshly bathed, was sleeping with his head on my chest. He smelled of soap and milk, and his soft cheek was warm against my collarbone. Myrtle draped a quilt over us all with much ceremony.
“Tell about when you were little,” she said when she had settled.
“Something scary!” Lucy shuddered against me with delight.
“Not too scary,” Myrtle argued.
“A fairy tale, then?” I asked.
The girls’ silence was all the answer I needed. “This happened many years ago in Selbu,” I started as I always did. “There was a very strange old man living on a farm. He had a very big head and long arms—and he had been on that farm forever, it seemed. No one knew how old he was.”
“Couldn’t they ask him?” Philip had woken up and lifted his sleepy gaze to meet mine.
“No, they couldn’t, because people didn’t keep track of their age as well as we do now, and besides, this man, whose name was Paul—”
“Like Grandfather,” Myrtle remarked.
“Just that. Well, he wasn’t like other people, this Paul—he was a bit simple. He never worked a day of his life, but he ate like ten men his size. Still the farmer, whose name was Andor, did not show him out, because he thought that Paul was a changeling.”
“Why did he think that?” Lucy’s toes dug into my thigh.
“Because one time, when he was tired of Paul, he meant to strike him, but then he heard a voice that bellowed from the mountain: ‘Take care, Andor, Paul belongs to me!’” The children giggled and squirmed around me.
“As it was, a girl whose name was Mali, who was a daughter on the farm many years before, had stayed alone on the summer farm, high up in the mountains. After she came back, her mother could see that she was with child, but Mali refused to give her the name of the father no matter how much she begged. Then one night, the farmer’s wife woke up to hear footsteps upstairs where poor Mali lay, and in the morning, the girl was gone, but Paul was there, just a baby, all alone.”
“Where did she go?” asked Lucy.
“Wait till the end and maybe you’ll know,” I said, and tousled her hair. “Paul stayed on the farm for years and years, though he could never do anything more useful than carrying an armload of firewood. When he had gotten older than anyone could remember, he suddenly stopped eating one day. No matter what they brought him, he didn’t want any food. The farmer’s wife went to him then and asked him how he could live without, and the changeling answered: ‘Oh, I eat well enough. My mother and father are here every night, and they bring food to me . . .’ The farmer’s wife laughed, and said he couldn’t possibly have parents alive, being as old as he was, but Paul answered: ‘I have both mother and father, and I’m not so very old either.’
“The changeling lived for another two years, with no food or drink but some milk and some water. When he finally withered away and died, the servants said they had seen two people, old and bent, a man and a woman, crossing the yard to the house where he lay, just that very same morning. They figured it was Paul’s parents. They also said that before he died, they could often see lights glimmering in the mountain, but after he died, they never saw it again—and that was the story about the changeling.”
The children lay quiet for a moment, thinking about what they had just heard. Then Lucy said, “What is a changeling, Mama?”
“Well, in this story it was a child half troll and half human, but it usually means a child that the trolls or the hulder people have traded.”
“Traded for what?” Asked Lucy.
“They take a human child and leave one of their own behind. The children left in the cradle are always difficult and ugly. My father used to call me a changeling whenever he was displeased with me.”
“What happens to the children?” asked Myrtle. “The ones they take, I mean.”
“Oh, they go into the mountain to live among the trolls.”
“Aren’t they afraid?”
“They are just babies when they are taken, and grow up with a troll for a mother. They don’t remember anything else.” I suddenly started sweating; the quilt was much too warm. “Perhaps the troll mother loves them just as well as their real mother would—perhaps she even loves them better.”
“I didn’t think trolls could love at all,” Myrtle argued. “In another story you said they have no hearts.”
“Trolls can be cruel, that is true, but never to their children. I think the changelings are lucky to live with the troll mother who gives them good food to eat and nice beds to sleep in. Perhaps their real mothers couldn’t give them that. Perhaps they would have eaten only cold potatoes, herring, and gruel if the troll mother hadn’t taken them away. Trolls are rich, you know.”
“Just like you are, Mama,” said Lucy.
“Yes,” I replied. “Just like me.”
* * *