The boy was nine that winter and the sheep were his job. A dozen ewes in a pen below the house, a wire fence, a hundred yards of open snow, and then the trees. Everyone else on the road had sold their sheep the year his father was in high school. His late grandmother had cherished hers. His father and the two hands had the cattle, which were further out and more trouble, and the boy had the sheep and the two big white dogs that slept in the pen with them.
School let out the week before Christmas and town was an hour each way, so for three weeks the only people on the little ranch were his parents and the two hands, but he made his own fun. He taught the younger dog to fetch his mama’s slipper out of the mudroom and leave it in the yard. He moved the fencing pliers. Not far, and never to the same place twice, and the hand who owned them lost a quarter hour to every job that week and blamed the other hand. There was a handheld radio in the kitchen and one in the barn and one in each truck, and he learned that if he keyed his mic while one of the hands was in the middle of a sentence, the man would say it again, and then again, and then utter a word the boy was not allowed to say, and the boy snickered. By New Year’s he had schemed through the house and the bunkhouse and the barn, and standing next to the fence line at dusk he had an idea.
Most nights something up in the high country would start, a long way off, and the older dog would answer it, and the boy had practiced the sound himself, under his breath and then not, until he could do it well enough that she turned her head. If he stood at the fence with his back to the house, and cupped his hands, and gave it to the trees, both dogs came off the snow at once and hit the wire, roaring at the trees. Then the yard light came on and the kitchen door banged and three men crossed the snow at a run with rifles, and one of them was his father. They walked the fence. They shone lights into the trees. They asked him where it had been, and he answered them innocently, with his hands in his pockets, and pointed at the trees.
He did it five times in January. The fourth time the hands didn’t bother getting up. The fifth time his father came alone, in his boots and his coat over his long underwear, and walked the fence without a light, and looked at the boy a while before he went back in.
The dogs hit the wire in February on a night with no moon, and kept at it, and nobody came out. The boy heard them from his bed. He heard his father hear them, the bedsprings, the stillness after, and then nothing, and he lay there, and went back to sleep.
In the morning two ewes were missing. Inside the fence there were tracks in the snow, a dog’s tracks, bigger than either dog’s, and they came in from the trees and went back out to them, and there was blood in the two places where a ewe had gone down and been dragged. His father stood over the tracks a long time.
Wolf.
Gentle Wolves
A little girl in a red hood is sent through the wood with a cake and a pot of butter for her grandmother, who is ill. The wolf has not eaten in three days. He meets her on the path and would take her right then and there, but there are woodcutters within earshot, so he walks along beside her instead and asks her, pleasantly, where she is going.
She tells him. She tells him her grandmother is ill, and that the house is beyond the mill, the first one in the village, and he says he will go and see her too, he by this road and she by that, and they will see who gets there first. He runs. She has all afternoon, and there are nuts to gather, and butterflies, and she picks flowers until her hands are full.
He knocks first. Who’s there. Your grandchild, he says, imitating the girl’s voice, with a cake and a little pot of butter, and the old woman tells him to come in. He eats her in a moment, and shuts the door, and gets into her bed, and pulls the covers up, and waits. The girl knocks with the flowers still in her hand. Who’s there, he says, in the best grandmother’s voice he has, and the girl hears the big voice and thinks her grandmother has a cold, and he tells her to come in. Put the cake on the bread bin, he says from under the covers, and come and lie with me. She undresses and gets in beside him, and is surprised at how her grandmother looks in her nightclothes, and says so, one thing at a time. What great arms you have. The better to hug you, my dear. What great teeth you have. He eats her.
Charles Perrault was a man of the French court, clerk to the king’s finance minister for twenty years and a member of the Academy. In 1697 he published a book of nursery tales, and under each one he put a moral in verse. This is the one under hers:
The Wolf, I say, for Wolves too sure there are
Of every sort, and every character.
Some of them mild and gentle-humour’d be,
Of noise and gall, and rancour wholly free;
Who tame, familiar, full of complaisance
Ogle and leer, languish, cajole and glance;
With luring tongues, and language wond’rous sweet,
Follow young ladies as they walk the street,
Ev’n to their very houses, nay, bedside,
And, artful, tho’ their true designs they hide;
Yet ah! these simpering Wolves! Who does not see
Most dangerous of Wolves indeed they be?
- Charles Perrault, Little Red Riding-Hood, in Robert Samber’s translation
In some other enchanted wood, a merchant who has lost his fortune loses his way. He had been rich, with three sons and three daughters, but then the sea took his ships, and so the family moved to a farm and learned to work it. The two elder daughters missed the town and the parties and wept about it. The youngest, who was Beauty, got up at four to cook and clean and sang while she did it. Then word came that one of the ships had made port after all, and the merchant set out to claim it. The elder girls asked him to bring back gowns and ribbons. Beauty asked only for a rose, since none grew on the farm.
When he gets to town the cargo has already been claimed by his creditors, and he starts home as poor as he left, and the snow comes, and he loses the road, and at nightfall he encounters a palace with nobody in it. But there is a fire in the hearth and a supper set out and a tidied bed. In the morning, in a garden that is somehow in flower, there are roses, and he picks one for his daughter who is Beauty. Then the Beast is upon him. The rose will cost him his life, the Beast says, unless one of his daughters will come and live in the palace in his stead, but she must come of her own will. And if none of them will, he has three months to say his goodbyes and come back to die.
Beauty comes, and her sisters, who are glad to be rid of her, rub onions in their eyes so they can shed tears at the gate. At the palace the Beast feeds her, and gives her the run of the house, and every night at supper asks her whether she will be his wife, and every night she says no, and every night he sighs and goes away. Months pass. In a magic mirror she sees her father sick with grief, and asks to go home for a week. The Beast would rather die than grieve her, so he lets her go. At home her sisters have married, one to a handsome man in love with his own face and one to a clever man who sharpens his wit on his wife. When the sisters see Beauty come home in silk they cannot bear it. They show her such kindness, the first she has ever had from them, that she weeps for joy and stays past her week. That is the plan: let the Beast think himself forsaken, and he will eat her.
On the tenth night she dreams the Beast is lying in the garden, dying, and reproaching her. She turns the ring he gave her and is there with him at once. She finds him by the canal, without a pulse, and throws water on him, and knows she cannot live without him, and says so. The palace lights up, and when she turns back the Beast is gone and there is a handsome prince at her feet. A fairy turns the two sisters into statues at the palace gate, to stand and watch Beauty’s happiness until they own their faults. Madame de Beaumont was a governess in London who had left a failed marriage in France, and she published Beauty and the Beast in 1756 as a lesson for the girls in her charge.
A fairy comes to a man and gives him a palace of gold and sapphire, and everything in it, and tells him he may live there as long as he likes. That is, so long as he never says the word “cow.” She does not say why. Another man may marry the king’s daughter and be happy with her forevermore, if he never shows her an onion. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited.
G. K. Chesterton made up the first two and collected the rest. He was a large and cheerful London journalist who argued in public with the best-known rationalists of his day and wrote, for anyone who would read him, on the things men fight about: whether the world is good, whether a man is free, what a nation owes its poor. In 1908 he set his convictions down in a book, and gave the fourth chapter to fairy tales, and said in it that his first and last philosophy, the one he believed with unbroken certainty, he had learned in the nursery, from a nurse. What he found there he named the Doctrine of Conditional Joy: an enormous happiness is offered, and it hangs on one small thing you must not do. The vision always hangs upon a veto, he says, and the true citizen of fairyland obeys a veto he does not understand at all.
The great lesson of Beauty and the Beast, he says on the page before, is that a thing must be loved before it is loveable. And a year later a woman wrote to him in earnest to say that fairy tales ought not to be told to children, even if they are true, because it is cruel to frighten them. He answered in print. Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a Saint George to kill the dragon. The way of looking at life the nursery gave him, he said, the facts had since meekly ratified.
One tale says the pleasant face may conceal the wolf. The other says the terrible face may conceal the prince. And her actions decide which she meets: the girl in the red hood is eaten for what she told the wolf on the path, and Beauty is married for what she did at the supper table every night.
Real Boys
A woodcarver who lives alone with a cat and a goldfish finishes a puppet, a boy with strings, and before he goes to bed he wishes on a star that it were a real boy. In the night a fairy comes down and gives the puppet life, but not flesh. Whether he becomes a real boy, she tells him, is up to him. Prove yourself brave, truthful and unselfish, and someday you will be. She appoints a cricket to be his conscience, since he has none of his own, and leaves.
He is sent to school in the morning and does not get there. A fox and a cat meet him on the road and sell him to a puppet show, where he is a wonder, a puppet who dances without strings, and where he is locked in a birdcage after the show so that he can be a wonder again tomorrow. The fairy comes. She asks him why he did not go to school, and he tells her a story, and his nose grows with each sentence until a branch sprouts from it and a bird nests in the branch. She lets him out anyway. The fox meets him again on the road, and this time the buyer is a coachman with a wagon full of boys, bound for an island where there is no school and no one to say no. Give a bad boy enough rope, the coachman says, and he will soon make a jackass of himself.
The island has a fun house to smash and a pool hall and cigars and beer, and the puppet’s new friend, a boy called Lampwick, shows him how to use all of it. Then Lampwick’s ears grow long and grey. Then his hands are hooves. He brays, and pleads through the bray, and is a jackass, and the coachman’s men are already crating the donkeys and loading them for the salt mines. The puppet runs with the ears and the tail he has grown and gets off the island by swimming. He reaches home, but nobody is there. The woodcarver went to sea to look for him and was swallowed by a whale. The puppet goes into the sea after him and into the whale, and lights a fire in it, and the whale sneezes them out, and the puppet drowns getting the old man ashore. The old man weeps over him, but the fairy keeps her word, and Pinocchio wakes up a boy.
The story was Carlo Collodi’s, a Florentine journalist who wrote it in installments for a children’s weekly in the 1880s, tried to end it with the puppet hanged from an oak, and was made to go on by the readers. Walt Disney made it a cartoon in 1940 and softened the boy. Collodi’s puppet is a brat from the first page, and grows the whole donkey, and is sold to a circus and lamed and thrown into the sea for his hide before the fish eat the donkey off him; Disney’s is an innocent who is led, and grows only the ears and a tail. In both he becomes a boy by his sacrifice for the old man, in the book by months of hauling water and weaving baskets to feed him, in the film by one night in the sea, and in both it makes him a real boy.
In a London nursery a girl named Wendy is woken one night by a boy looking for his shadow, and sews it back onto his feet for him. He has never had a mother and doesn’t know his age. His name is Peter, and he will not grow up. He teaches her and her brothers to fly, and they follow him to an island where he lives underground with a band of boys who fell out of their perambulators when the nurse was looking the other way and were never claimed, and who want a mother more than anything. Wendy is made theirs. She tells them stories and tucks them in and makes them take their medicine, and their dinners are often make-believe, which is hard on the other boys, because they know the difference and Peter does not. To him make-believe and true were exactly the same thing, and a boy who broke down in the make-believe got rapped on the knuckles.
The island has pirates, and the pirates have a captain with a hook where his hand was; Peter cut it off in a fight and threw it to a crocodile, and the crocodile has followed the captain ever since, wanting the rest of him. It is in no hurry. It swallowed a clock once, and the clock still goes inside it, so that the captain hears it coming through the trees before he sees it, and runs, and it comes on behind him at its own pace. He is the only grown man on the island, and the only one who hears it.
Wendy takes her brothers home, and the lost boys with them, and her mother offers to keep Peter too, and send him to school. He will not have it. No one is going to catch him and make him a man. He is allowed to come for Wendy once a year at spring cleaning, and by the next year he has forgotten the pirate captain, and asks who Captain Hook is, and asks who Tinker Bell is, and forgets to come at all. When he comes at last, Wendy is a woman with a daughter of her own asleep in the bed, and she has to tell him. I am old, Peter. I grew up long ago. You promised not to, he says, and sits down on the floor and sobs, and Wendy, who could once have comforted him so easily, runs out of the room. The sobbing wakes her daughter. The girl sits up in bed, cocking her head. Boy, she says, why are you crying?
J. M. Barrie was a small Scotsman. His elder brother David was killed in a skating accident the day before his fourteenth birthday, and their mother never let the dead boy grow a day older; he stayed thirteen in that house for the rest of her life, while the younger son grew up in it. Barrie wrote Peter Pan as a play in 1904 and as a book in 1911. Disney made the film in 1953.
Consider a waiter in a Paris café, coming to a table in a perfect apron with his tray up on one hand. His movements are a little too quick and a little too precise; he bends toward the customer a little too eagerly; his voice and his eyes are a little too attentive to the order. Watch him for a minute and you see what is off. He is a waiter, and he is also acting the part of one, the way a boy plays at being a soldier, and doing it well. Why would a man act a part he already has? Because a waiter is not a waiter the way a chair is a chair. The chair cannot be anything else. The man could set the tray down and walk out into the street, and he knows it, every minute of the shift, and the performance is how he keeps from knowing it. The customers want a waiter and not a man, and he gives them one.
Jean-Paul Sartre imagined him. He was a Parisian philosopher who did his writing in cafés, and in 1943, with the Germans in the city, he published a very long book called Being and Nothingness about what a man is. His answer was that a man is never simply the thing he is doing, that he is free at every moment to be otherwise, and that most men cannot stand it, and the waiter in the perfect apron is what a man looks like who cannot stand it.
A boy is made by what he does. The puppet who smokes cigars on the island becomes an animal, and the puppet who goes into the sea after the old man becomes a boy. The waiter puts on an apron every morning and plays at being a waiter the way a chair is a chair, which a man cannot be. Peter pretends that a pretend meal will nourish him, but nobody grows up on pretend dinners. He stays a boy, and forgets everyone.
Frozen Hearts
Two sisters live in a castle by a fjord, and the elder was born able to make ice out of the air. They get up in the night to play with it, and she builds a snowman and makes the ballroom a rink, and the little one jumps faster than the elder can lay ice under her feet, and is struck in the head. The trolls heal her and take the memory out. The king shuts the gates, sends the staff away, and puts the sisters in separate rooms, and gives the elder, who is his heir, a pair of gloves. Conceal it, he tells her. Don’t feel it. Don’t let it show. With the gloves on nothing freezes, and nobody knows. She grows up behind a door the little one knocks on for years. The parents put to sea, and the sea keeps them, and the gates stay shut through two funerals.
On the day she is crowned the gates open for one afternoon. At the altar she has to take one glove off, because the orb and the sceptre must be held in a bare hand, but the ice starts under her fingers, so she gets the glove back on before anyone sees. The younger sister meets a prince from another kingdom and is engaged to him by nightfall. The elder tells her she cannot marry a man she met that afternoon, and refuses to bless it. In the quarrel a glove comes off and the room ices over. A visiting duke cries sorcery, and then monster, so the crowd in the courtyard backs away from her, and she runs, across the fjord, which freezes under her, and up the mountain, and there, alone, she sings. The other glove goes into the wind. The crown goes after it. The cold never bothered her anyway. She builds a palace of ice on the peak, a staircase and a chandelier and a door she shuts, and there is nobody to see any of it.
The younger sister climbs to the palace and tells her the kingdom is frozen and asks her to come home. The elder says she cannot, and does not know how, and in her panic the ice goes out of her and catches the younger in the chest, the way it caught her in the head when they were small. The trolls say only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart, and she is carried down the mountain to her prince for a kiss. The prince does not kiss her. He tells her he never loved her. He is the thirteenth son of a king, with no throne coming to him, and he had come to marry one here; the elder sister was the heir and would let nobody near her, so he took the sister who would have him, and he means to have them both dead by nightfall and the kingdom for himself. He puts out the fire and leaves her to freeze, and goes down to the council and tells them the queen has killed her sister, and pronounces the queen a traitor, and goes out onto the ice to carry out the sentence. There, with the elder sister on her knees and his sword raised over her, the younger, nearly gone, puts her body in the way, an act of true love, and turns to ice as the sword comes down. Then she thaws. The kingdom thaws with her. The elder sister’s first order as queen is that the gates stand open and are never closing again.
Disney made the film Frozen in 2013, from a much older story. In that story the woman who makes ice is the villain, and she was the villain in the film too, through draft after draft, until somebody wrote the song on the mountain and the studio rebuilt the picture around the woman singing it.
The older story begins with a mirror. A demon made it, and it shrank everything good that was reflected in it and swelled everything worthless, so that a good thought in a man’s mind came out distorted in the glass. The demon kept a school, and his pupils carried the glass about the world saying that now, for the first time, people could see what the world was really like. They tried to fly it up to heaven to look at the angels, and it slipped, and broke into millions of pieces, and the pieces flew into the world. One as small as a grain of sand in an eye, and the man saw only the worst side of everything for the rest of his life. One in a heart, and the heart froze to a lump of ice.
Two of the pieces come down in a city where a boy and a girl, not brother and sister but as good as, live in attic rooms that face each other across a gutter, close enough to step across, with a rose bush in a box on each roof. One winter evening one of the pieces goes into the boy’s eye and the other into his heart, and he says the roses are ugly, and tears them out, and mocks the grandmother, and takes his sled out to the square. A white sleigh comes, and he hitches his sled to the back of it, and it does not stop at the edge of town. The driver is a tall woman in white furs. She takes him in beside her and kisses him on the forehead, and the kiss is colder than ice and goes through to his heart, and after that he does not feel the cold. She kisses him again, and he has forgotten the girl, and the grandmother, and everything at home. No more kisses, says the Snow Queen, or I should kiss you to death.
The girl goes to find him. She walks out of the city barefoot in the spring and is gone a year, north past the last farms and the last villages, and gives away everything she is carrying, and goes on without her mittens and without her boots, to the end of the world. At the palace the snowflakes come at her alive, and she says the Lord’s Prayer, and her breath in the cold takes the shape of angels, and they go with her to the door.
Inside, in a hall miles long, on a frozen lake the Snow Queen calls the Mirror of Reason, the boy sits blue with cold and does not feel it, dragging flat pieces of ice about to make a word. If he can make it, she has told him, he will be his own master and she will give him the whole world and a new pair of skates. The word is Eternity. He cannot make it. The girl runs to him and holds him and he sits stiff and cold, and she weeps, and the tears fall on his chest and go into his heart and thaw the lump and wash out the glass. She sings the old hymn, roses bloom and cease to be, but we shall the Christ-child see, and he bursts into tears, and the splinter swims out of his eye, and he knows her. The pieces of ice dance for joy and lie down in the shape of the word. They walk home through the spring, hand in hand, and are grown when they get to the grandmother’s door, and she is reading aloud: except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of God.
The Snow Queen was published in Copenhagen in 1844 by Hans Christian Andersen, a cobbler’s son from a small Danish town who had gone to the capital alone at fourteen to be an actor, and failed, and been put through school on charity by men who found him embarrassing. He was tall and awkward and unlucky in love all his life. When he died they took a pouch from his chest with a letter in it, from a woman he had loved forty-five years before.
In the older story the ice in the boy’s heart melted under the girl’s tears. In the film the younger sister’s heart thaws by her own act, and the elder learns from it. She had let it go alone on a mountain, to nobody, and it was not enough. She had to come down and be known, and the gates had to stand open, and never shut again.
In the 2015 film Inside Out, a girl of eleven is taken from Minnesota to San Francisco because her father has a new job there. The house is narrow and dim, and the moving van is late, and the pizza has broccoli on it and nobody at the new school knows her. She smiles and tells her parents she is fine. She is not. Her world is flat and cold. So she runs away. She packs a bag, and gets on a bus bound for Minnesota, but somewhere on that bus the sadness she has been holding down gets through to her, and she gets off, and heads home. Her parents are terrified at the kitchen table, frantic over where their daughter could be. She walks in the door with a face of stone. I know you don’t want me to, she says, but I miss home. I miss Minnesota. You need me to be happy, but I want my old friends, and my hockey team. I want to go home. Please don’t be mad. We’re not mad, her father says. I miss Minnesota too. Her parents embrace her, and she weeps in their arms.
A man steps into a carved booth beside the pews. He pulls the curtain, and kneels in the dark. Behind a lattice there is a priest he cannot see. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. He says how long it has been. Then, out loud, in order, the things he has done: he has been sharp with his wife again, and let her carry the fault for it; he has wanted what his brother has; there is a thing he has not told his wife and does not intend to. Some of it no one alive knows but the two of them now. The priest gives him a penance and absolves him. He says the prayers in a pew at the back, and blesses himself, and goes out into the street lighter than he came in.
In the Latin West, private confession to a priest begins in earnest with a rule set in 1215: once a year at least, every Christian is to do it. At first the confession included deeds: what a man had done. Then what a man had wanted. Then what had crossed his mind unbidden. Then it left the church altogether, and turned up in the doctor’s questions, and on the analyst’s couch, and in the diary, the interview, the form. An ancient Roman would not know what to make of a man who tells a stranger his childhood for an hour a week and pays him for it.
At least, that is the history as it was told in 1976 by a bald and grinning Parisian philosopher named Michel Foucault. He wrote histories of institutions, from the asylum to the clinic to the prison, and argued in each case that the institution makes the kind of person it handles. What he saw in the confessional was a booth where a man is required to produce the truth about himself for someone with the power to absolve him, and a practice that outlived the booth. Western man, he said, has become a confessing animal. What the animal confesses is a true self, in there, hidden, and harmed by the hiding. That belief feels like the oldest thing a person knows about himself. On his account it was manufactured, and the confessional is where.
A warning is a thing a parent puts on a child. The gloves go on the elder sister’s hands with a rhyme, and they are the injury, and by the end they are off and the gates are open and the kingdom is thawed. The same sister, with the gloves still on, tells the younger she cannot marry a man she met that afternoon, and before the week is out his sword is over the queen’s neck on the ice. One warning is the wound and the other is the truth, in one castle, in one winter.
Real Wolves
The pleasant thing that follows a girl home means to eat her. A boy is made by what he does. The warning a parent gives a child is sometimes a wound and sometimes the truth. Those are true. But they are not true the way it is true that stones fall, and water freezes, and the tide comes in. There is no particular wolf the first sentence is about, and it would not be truer if there were, and a man who wants the wolf produced before he will believe in him will be waiting a long time.
A wolf in 1697 and a beast in 1756 and a puppet in 1940 and a boy who would not grow up in 1911 and a queen made of snow in 1844 and a sister who made ice in 2013, and a ranch in the snow with a boy at the fence, and none of it really happened. There was no path and no grandmother and no bread bin. The sea took a merchant’s ships and a woodcarver and a king and queen, yet there was no sea. The boy watching his late grandmother’s sheep never really lived, nor did Aesop’s boy who cried wolf, and in the morning the count was short by two.
There was no little girl in a red hood on that path, and no wolf in that bed who ate her, and the path and the bed are not lies. Stones fall is true of every stone there is. The wolf in the bed is true of no wolf. He is one body given to a thing that keeps happening, so that a child can look straight at it and know it again when she meets it.
Wolves came back to the American West in the 1990s. In the whole of North America since, wolves have killed two people. The tale was wrong about the animal. Perrault, whose moral is about men and not wolves, was right about the thing the animal was showing. The men who put children’s faces on milk cartons in the 1980s taught a generation to fear the stranger, and the stranger was the wrong animal too: a child who is sexually abused is abused, in something like nine cases in ten, by someone she knows and likes and has been told to trust. The case files ratify Perrault’s moral, tame, familiar, full of complaisance. The animal came back and has killed almost nobody. The wolf in the moral never left.
Foucault, who called us confessing animals, did not keep that question for the confessional. Ask of any truth who is served by its being believed. The genealogist’s question is never whether the wolf is there. It is who said there was a wolf, and what they got for it. Perrault’s moral is addressed to young ladies, at a court that had its reasons for wanting young ladies to stay on the path, and a warning repeated to every girl for three centuries acquires the look of a law of nature whether or not it was one. Some of the nursery’s wolves were put there because somebody was better off with children afraid of them. The brothers Grimm, collecting in the 1810s, found tales in which a mother wanted her children dead, and from edition to edition she becomes a stepmother, in Snow White and in Hansel and Gretel both, because a murderous mother was not a thing the households buying the book wished to read aloud. And his best case is in the castle by the fjord: a prince with no throne coming to him tells a council that the queen has murdered her sister, and the council believes him, and for two days the whole kingdom has an image of her as a monster, and the image looks like a fact. Two days is long enough to hang a queen.
Some of that is simply true, and the method is worth having. So try it on everything. Every one of these stories has somebody in it doing the telling, and every one of them has an interest. A prince with no throne tells a council the queen has killed her sister, because he wants the throne. A father sews a rhyme into his daughter’s hands because a kingdom cannot have an heir who freezes the furniture. A girl at a dinner table says she is fine because her parents need her to be. A man in an apron gives the customers a waiter because a man would be worse for business. A boy at a fence howls into the trees because it is January and he is bored, and by February the men do not come.
The prince lied, and the queen had killed nobody. The girl said she was fine, and she was not. The man in the apron gave them a waiter, and he was a man the whole time, free to set the tray down and walk out into the street. The rhyme and the gloves held for years, and then her hands froze the furniture anyway. The boy howled at the trees for fun, and the men were right to stop coming, and in February the wolf came out of the trees and took two of the ewes. Every telling has a teller, and the teller has his reasons, and the wolf does not care.
The man who says it is just a story and the man who says it is only ever someone’s story agree on very little, and they agree on this: neither of them believes the wolf is there. One thinks the pattern is noise and the other thinks it is power, and both of them will take the wolf seriously when somebody brings one in from the trees, which is the one thing a fairy tale was never going to do. Fairy tales did not happen, and everyone knows it, and everyone is right. They are also among the truest things we have, and the child who is told one is being handed a piece of the world she cannot yet see, in the only form she can hold, by a person who cannot see it whole either, and who has to decide, at bedtime, which ones to tell her.
The Drain
My family sat down to supper one evening this summer, and my eldest, who is four, asked to say the prayer, which she had not asked to do before but a few times. Then she told us a dream she had. Her mother had already told me she had had it, so I knew what was coming, and let her tell it.
Her mother fell down the drain. She could not save her. Daddy was supposed to.
Nobody read her that. There is no book on the shelf about a mother who goes down a drain. Nor did she quite make this one up. It came to her in dreams, which is where the tales come from too, before anybody has the words for what they are about. People do not fall down drains, and she knows that. But a drain is the thing in the house that takes what you put in it and does not give it back. It took her mother’s ring once, or it could have. She shouts when we pull the plug and her toys are still in the water. The thing she is most afraid of came to her in the night with a body on it. Not I am afraid of losing my mother and that you will not be able to stop it. Instead, a drain, and a mother going down it, and a father who was supposed to come. Once it had a body she could look at it, and once she could look at it she could say it out loud, at the table, after grace, to the one she says was supposed to come.
When I read her the girl in the red hood it will be the one where the wolf eats her, and she will be frightened, and I will let her be, because she is already frightened of the right things and has told me so in the only language she has. She will grow out of fairyland. The dragon will not, because he was never in it. She will meet him on a road with no story around it, and ache, and ask in the dark why she has been forsaken, and what she will have with her is what fairyland told her about dragons, and courage, and suffering, and love.
The boy and the girl in Andersen’s story walk home through the spring and come to their grandmother’s door, and when they go through it they find they are grown. They sit down in their old chairs, a man and a woman, holding hands, and the old woman is reading aloud from the book in her lap. Except ye become as little children. And it is summer.