The Weaver Comes Out at Night

His mother whispered her last words to him. She was half way through when they pulled her away, a great wrenching swipe that left heat burns on his hands and his chin where it pressed into her cloak. She was ready to go, bonnet and gloves the color of unripe mulberries.  

His aunt didn’t let him go the next day, had locked him and his cousins inside until night fell and she came back with a drained face and red eyes. 

When he was older he built a cottage on the edge of town, and even though he didn’t want to he made several friends and acquaintances in town and went to church every Sunday, just enough to keep him from going the way of his mother. 

He wove. It was his mother’s trade but it wasn’t the reason they’d hung her. At first the town didn’t approve of him following in her footsteps but when they saw the richness of his offerings at markets, they quickly quelled their clucking tongues and paid handsomely for the luxury. A merchant especially loved his wares and grew rich from selling the designs in other villages. The weaver didn’t mind. He couldn’t leave even if he wanted to. He had to be home by sunset and over the stone wall by the time the clock above the fireplace struck two in the morning. 

He would sit with his back against the mossy boulders and watch for several hours, with a cup of wine, or water when times were lean. Wrapped in his coats and blankets, he watched the frost sparkle on the fallow field, or the fireflies blink, the stars, and the moon. He was especially fond of the moon, the only thing that changed nightly, for even the owls and raccoons seemed to have their routines. 

In his middling years he’d taken to embroidering scarves as well. All of them shades of indigo with the moon in all her many stages. They sold for more than his weaving and earned him a bit of fame at the market.

Every so often a blustering relative of a spinster would come up to him and offer him supper at their house with their sister or cousin or aunt. Most of them he already knew by name or face or both, it was not a large village after all. He would accept the supper politely but decline the offers of courtship. More often than not the woman in question would sigh with relief. They were as happy as he was to remain unwed. After some years the requests ceased. He drifted out of their thoughts, just as he’d hoped, without offending anyone, without crossing anyone’s mind at all really, except when they needed something beautiful for a bridal chest. 

One day while he sat at his loom there was an odd thumping. At first he thought something had fallen out of the loft and bumped around on the floor a few times. But when he got up and looked it kept on, nothing in the house to explain it. 

The door, it had come from the door. Someone was knocking. It had been years since that had happened, when the farmer over the stone wall had lost a cow. No wonder he’d forgotten what it sounded like, 

He opened it and snow swirled inside. A bundle of knit scarves and a drooping hood trundled over the threshold bringing the snow with it. A mitten-ed hand pulled the hood back to reveal bright eyes, dark skin, and pale hair. She sighed in pleasure at the heat and plunked two jars of mulberry preserves on the empty table. 

“It’s all I’ve got. Teach me?”

She was old. Far too old to be an apprentice. And he was too shy to presume to teach anyone. Instead he considered her his helper. As she watched him and practiced she soon became his equal in the craft. She stayed with family in the evening and in the morning walked the hedgerows to his cottage. He would finish washing while maple sticks crackled under the kettle and she made tea from the wild mint leaves in her deep pockets.

No one talked about them. It was known in town that the old weaver was far from a lascivious sort. And the old woman was equally beyond reproach. He knew it was so because he made it his business to eavesdrop on gossip at the market. Survival and all. 

After she left he would get up as always in the dead of night and climb over the stone wall and wait. His bones ached more and more each passing year and he endeavored to have the carpenter build him a small ladder to ease the experience. 

At certain times of the year the sky flashed with falling stars. Excited anticipation filled him, but this was not what he sought. Still, he kept coming every night, even in rain and snow.  

There came a time when the woman told him she wouldn’t be coming back. She had gathered enough money and wanted to move to another village and sell her designs there. She gathered her tools in a basket she’d made herself while the kettle heated, her leaves at the ready. 

They drank their tea quietly and when she pressed her hand against the table to stand up he startled himself. 

“Alice.” That was her name. It felt odd on his tongue. He’d never thought of her with something as abstract as a name before. Mostly when he thought of her he imagined her hands, nobbled and always busy making beautiful things even when they pained her, especially when they pained her.. 

He reached for one of those hands now. The one with the three moles near the thumb. She rolled her wrist in his fingers, the joint creaked and smelled of peppermint oil. The lighter side of her palm revealed itself, a rare sight. It straightened, opened. He ran his fingers down the center of it. Her other hand pressed gently on the side of his face. It was cold but his flush warmed it. 

Their output for the market diminished as their hands and sight began to fail them. But they lived simply enough and have plenty saved between the two of them. 

It was settled that they would keep working as they were able, only simple things. But before that one last large project, something grand. They would hang it up inside the cottage. A memory loop they called it. It would cover each wall, the end of it touching the beginning right above the hearth. Her fat babies playing in the garden smiling and rolling over the earth like golden melons, his mother in her mulberry trappings whispering in his small ear, her mint leaves, loom, needle, shuttle, and comb, her hands, his beard, the moon over the field at night, the bustling market, the way a kiss felt, a simple pattern in rose and vermilion and indigo.

He never stopped waking at night and walking to the field to watch. She would ask where he went and he would tell her the truth, the field beyond the stone wall. 

“One day you’ll tell me what you’re really doing.” She laughed. “Probably meeting with your mistress the moon.” 

“Nothing so salacious, unfortunately.” He put on his boots. “Would you like to come?”

He held out his hand and bowed at the waste to help her over the ladder. She smiled and swatted at him. His back creaked as he straightened and they walked into the field. 

“Has it ever come, what you’re waiting for?”

“Not yet, but the view is nice.”

They spread a blanket over the wet grass. He uncorked a bottle of wine and passed it to her. 

It was late spring and the woods around the field were just starting to liven up with frog song. The bats were out. The moon was waning, only a sliver, giving the limelight over to the stars. 

It wasn’t the time of year for a meteor shower and that’s how he knew it was his mother, gliding east to west through the diamond sky, a stream of glowing embers. The fire dashed itself into the center of the field. 

They ran faster than they had in years, his back and feet protesting with pins and needles. 

When they got there the ground had already cooled it enough that he could hold it in his hand. It was an ordinary looking stone, warm and dark, sparkling here and there with flecks of quartz. 

She folded her hands around his and they held it together between them. 

“She said if I wanted to see her one last time to come out at night. And there was something else, but they took her before she could say.”

“What do you think it was?”

He squeezed their fingers together around the warmth. 

“Don’t be alone.”