Joanna Ruocco: "The Dwelling" & "Village of Crow-Stepped Gables"

TIMBER 2012

Joanna Ruocco

Joanna Ruocco is a prize-winning American author and co-editor of the fiction journal Birkensnake. In 2013, she received the Pushcart Prize for her story "If the Man Took" and is also winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Ruocco received her MFA at Brown, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver. Her most recent novel is Dan, published by Dorothy, a publishing project. She also serves as assistant professor in creative writing at Wake Forest University.

The Dwelling

Sunken in the bog-hole: an architrave. A yew tree made of glass. A coal seam. A quarry. A stool with three legs. Great cries come from the bog-hole. We sit on a stump in the darkness. It is dark, but a greater darkness comes from the bog-hole. I am diseased in my skin, says the beldame. I gather bog-water in a jar to pour on the bald head of the beldame. Yes, that is soothing, says the beldame. We eat the acorns of the swamp oak. Meat is sweet and acorns are bitter. I have known both, though I am barely born, without purpose in the world, or path. In the pines, there is a dwelling. Where does your heart tend? asks the beldame. The darkness around the stump is now like the darkness that comes from the bog-hole. It is a darkness greater than the other darkness, the darkness that is a property of night, that comes from nowhere. This darkness is greater because it comes from somewhere. It comes from the bog-hole. Great cries rend the air. The beldame speaks in the voice of a sow, a broken-toothed ewe. I weep upon the beldame’s breasts. Yes, that is soothing, says the beldame. The nubs are long and white. In the village of the unclean cloth, says the beldame, my teeth were boiled in my mouth. In the village of the crows, says the beldame, I laid a crooked egg formed from the teeth I had swallowed. In the village of architraves, says the beldame, I dug a hole and found a cask of honey. Honey preserves the flesh, but if the flesh runs with scalls, it must not be preserved. Sunken in the bog-hole: a dwelling. A cluster of grapes. The pines. Fragrant rushes. The girl who lies beneath the bedtick, dreaming. How do we leave the village of the bog-hole? I ask the beldame. The stump is sinking, says the beldame, but shoots are growing from the stump. Yes, that is soothing, I say. The bog-water has darkened our feet. The bog-water has darkened our thighs. The darkness upon us comes from the bog-hole, but the white nubs on the breasts of the beldame, the white nubs rising on the neck and scalp of the beldame, come from the skin of the beldame, where I am sent to dwell.

Village of Crow-Stepped Gables 

Breaking turf in the homefield, Bjartur looks up. He sees a cart in the cleft between mountains, a cart with two wheels and a dog to pull it. Soon he will have milk. The cart carries milk. His sheep having died in the snow, Bjartur hopes for no other milk than this milk, this milk that comes by cart. Bjartur chews a fragrant twig, watching the path. He realizes that he has misperceived. It is not cart and dog approaching, but rather a beldame yoked to a sow. Bjartur enters his croft and sets water to boil. He has learned that when he sights cart and dog in the cleft between mountains, they will attain the homefield in the time it takes to chew a fragrant twig and then to boil water, but today he has not sighted cart and dog. He has sighted beldame and sow. Perhaps they move more quickly on the path through the mountains, or perhaps they move more slowly, or perhaps they move at the same pace but map a slightly different course, a meandering course that takes them off the path and into the bracken, for sows long always to root in obscure places. As for beldames, they too crave obscurity, the obscurity of tangled ways, and they veer when they can into darkness. Instead of sky, they want above the dim solidity of mire and pass when they can beneath thorny bowers, outcroppings of rock, or canopies of linen cloth dipped in dung by bogmen to draw away the gnats. They seek the places where to move on the surface of the earth is very like tunneling below. Bjartur pours mushroom tea in two earthen mugs. He takes the stool with three legs from his croft and positions it on even ground, beneath the birch tree, so that the beldame may rest if she desires. Bjartur has apples but he will not share apples with a sow. He eats through one dark apple leaving only the stem and six seeds in their pith. In this time, the beldame and sow attain the homefield. The beldame’s neck is bent so that the beldame’s head seems to grow from her pelvis. Bjartur unyokes the beldame and helps her to the stool. The beldame cannot straighten her neck; she turns her face to the side to look at Bjartur, but even so, she must see only the fustian pants of Bjartur, between the knees and cuffs of the fustian pants. “Is this the village of the crow-stepped gables?” says the beldame. Bjartur glances about. The meager croft, the rolling turf, the low stonewalls of the enclosure, the scattered birch trees. There are no men, no sheep, no neighboring crofts. In one distance, the mountains with the cleft between. In the other distance, glacier. “It is no such village, hag,” says Bjartur, gravely. “Then you must lead the sow to that village,” says the beldame. “I am diseased in my skin and the yoke pains me. Besides,” says the beldame, “The contagion has come to your homefield. It now spreads through the mosses of your homefield and even the flowers that grow from the moss will exhale contagion from their open throats.”