Once upon a time, there was a little river village surrounded by a forest. And in that forest, there lived an old woodsman.
Because he lived alone, he had no sense of how smelly, rough, repulsive, contemptuous, wide-eyed, wild-haired, weathered, and coarse of manner, language, and being he had become. But the villagers knew. So when the woodsman made his monthly trip into town to trade pelts, meat, and firewood for provisions, the villagers kept their distance. The woodsman liked that arrangement just fine.
Thirty years he’d lived in a ramshackle cabin in the woods. The town had not changed a speck in all that time. So when a new store with a colorful sign had suddenly sprouted overnight in the market square, it caught the woodsman’s eye.
“BeWeavers: We Weave What You Want While You Wait.”
He went into the shop. A little bell tinkled to signal his entry. He stood there under the weight of his shouldered pelts, still stinking of dirty sweat and cured hide and wet fur and matted hair. He looked around the shop, finding himself surrounded by a riot of color bundled up in skeins of yarn and bolts of fabric.
An old woman shuffled up to the counter.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Weave me a wife,” the woodsman said without pause.
Now, the weaver did not know the woodsman, but she was old enough to know his type. She had woven many a thing for many a man such as him over the years. Never a wife, however. That was new. But she had never turned down a customer. A paying customer, that is.
“Very well,” she said. “And how will you be paying?”
The woodsman dropped his bundle of stinking pelts on the clean, rug-covered shop floor in answer. The weaver’s eyebrow twitched.
“Come back in a month,” she said.
The woodsman grunted and left the way he’d come in.
Now, the weaver set to work immediately, not with her hands, not yet, but with her mind. The woodsman wanted a wife, that was plain, but it was the weaver’s job to give her customers what they needed more so than what they wanted. And also what they paid for. So, with that in mind, the weaver began to create the woodsman’s yarn wife.
She could have woven her hair out of smooth silk the color of spun gold; instead, she chose a fuzzy, straw-colored mohair yarn instead.
She could have given the yarn wife blue gem eyes, of sapphire, or topaz, or tourmaline; instead she chose flat, black button eyes instead.
She could have built the yarn wife’s body from velvety smooth chenille, the pale color of fresh milk; instead, she chose a scratchy, hardy wool yarn with a color that ran from ruddy to rosy brown.
She could have woven her hands and feet from a delicate lace weight yarn so they might never know a day’s labor or a heavy burden; instead, she chose hemp for the hands to make them rough and hardy, and burlap for her feet, sturdy and rugged.
She could have given the yarn wife cotton lips of sunrise pink, soft of voice and soft of touch; so she did. This concession, and this alone, she made for the woodsman.
When the weaver was done, she dressed the yarn wife in linen from head to toe: cap to shawl, frock to socks.
The woodsman arrived on the appointed day. He had not changed his clothes, nor combed his hair, nor tidied his beard, nor washed his face, nor brushed his teeth. And yet he still managed to look down his nose at the yarn wife.
“This is what I paid for,” he said matter-of-factly.
“It is,” the old weaver said.
The yarn wife stood next to her creator on sand-filled feet that gave her some stability. She was not shapely nor statuesque, she did not exude a dancer’s grace nor a curvy, store window mannequin’s physique. She was as squat as the old woodsman himself, a head shorter and nearly as broad. She was what the woodsman had paid for. Not what he wanted, but what he needed.
Without a word, the woodsman lifted his yarn wife up and slung her over one shoulder. He made for his cabin without so much as a look back at the weaver or the village.
None save the woodsman had ever laid eyes on the cabin. It had been constructed not without some skill but certainly without artistry. It was a brutal thing composed of rough hewn logs notched together at the corners, the gaps between daubed in with clay and earth. But its chimney stood straight, its one window had sturdy shutters, and its solitary door was hung level, plumb, and square.
The yarn wife did not see the cabin on her first arrival there. Not because she had button eyes, but because she was still over the woodsman’s shoulder, looking back the way they’d come.
Inside the cabin, the woodsman flopped his yarn wife down upon the worn seat of a straight-backed wooden chair. He stirred the coals in the hearth and took a bit of kindling with which to light his oil lamp. And by the dim light of this sooty lamp, the woodsman looked at his yarn wife properly for the first time.
“Built like an upside-down turnip,” he muttered. He pulled off his yarn wife’s cap and hung it on a greasy peg above the hearth. He saw that her fuzzy, straw-colored hair had been done up in a bun and pinned. He pulled the pins out. The yarn wife’s hair fell to her waist.
The woodsman sighed.
“As exciting as a turnip, too,” he said. He gave a great sigh, shook his head, then closed up the cabin for the evening. He went to bed as he always did: alone.
In the morning, the woodsman rose to find his yarn wife right where he’d left her. She sat slumped against the back of the straight-backed chair, her unpinned hair still down to her waist.
The woodsman readied himself for his day. He gathered his axe, his pistol, his boots and gloves and kit. Before he left, he said to his yarn wife, “Have supper ready upon my return. Tis a wife’s duty, after all.”
With that he left and went about his day’s work.
When he returned, his cheeks and nose red from the cold as much as exertion, he found his yarn wife right where he’d left her. The hearth was cold, its fire dead, its pot empty.
The woodsman grunted and set about his usual evening preparations. A bowl of stew for one, a pipe for one, a bed for one.
He did not notice that his worn and threadbare potholders had been mended, or that his yarn wife’s hair now only reached her elbows.
When he awoke the next day, he prepared the same as he always did, except this time he took his winter weather gear. He left his dirty clothes on a table in front of his yarn wife.
“Have these cleaned and mended upon my return. Tis a wife’s duty, after all.”
With that he left and went about his day’s work.
When he returned, the night’s chill followed him into the cabin. When he shut the door, it held the cold at bay. His dirty, torn gear was in the same state that he’d left it in that morning.
He grunted, gathered up the gear, and tossed it angrily into a far, dark corner. He made ready for his evening meal, pipe, and bed in a huff.
The woodsman did not notice that a new rug blocked the wintry draft beneath the door and provided a soft place to rest his weary feet, or that his yarn wife’s hair now only reached her shoulders.
The woodsman awoke the next morning to a fresh snowfall. Before he left to go about his day’s work, he said to his yarn wife, “You’ll warm my bed tonight upon my return. Tis a wife’s duty, after all.”
But the woodsman did not return. Not that night, not in the small hours, and not at dawn. If he had, he would have found his thick, winter blanket mended and patched, but he did not. He would have found his yarn wife’s hair now only reaching to just below her ears, but he did not.
When the woodsman burst in through the cabin door at mid-morning, his face was the color of milk left overlong in the churn. His clothes were soaked through and armored in frost. His strength was all but gone, save the little he had to stagger to his bed.
He noticed his yarn wife still in the chair where he’d left her.
“Useless,” he grumbled. He put a rough hand on the back of the chair and shoved. Both he and his yarn wife tumbled to the rough, cold floor.
The woodsman didn’t remember much after that, only feverish glimpses, brief periods of dreamlike wakefulness.
Once, he saw the hearth blazing bright. Another time, he saw his frozen clothes hung up to dry, steaming in the heat from the fire. And in yet another, he felt a wooden spoon against his teeth as he was gently fed warm broth.
When he finally woke with a clear head, he felt a warm, unfamiliar weight draped over him. He pulled back the covers to find his winter blanket, mended and patched, and placed over him.
Over them.
For when the woodsman turned beneath the blanket, he saw his yarn wife there on the bed beside him.
“Your hair,” he said, noticing for the first time how short it had grown, “and your hands,” he said, noticing that parts of the hemp yarn were scorched and burnt black. “What happened to you?” he asked.
It was the first time he’d asked her a question. The first time he’d asked any woman a question in recent memory. And it was the first time he heard his yarn wife speak.
“An accident,” she said, voice as soft as the pink cotton yarn of her lips suggested. “I got too close to the fire.”
“You can speak!” said the woodsman.
“Of course I can,” said the yarn wife.
“Well why haven’t you spoken before now?”
“You never asked.”
The woodsman was stunned into silence. But now that communication had been established, his yarn wife had questions of her own.
“What happened to you out there?”
The woodsman thought back over his last clear memories.
“I was hauling logs back in my sledge when it got caught on something in the snow. I stopped to free it. I remember hearing a gunshot, and then a huge drift of snow fell on me from the tree above. Might have been a limb, too, I don’t know. But when I came to, I was half-frozen under a crust of ice in the middle of the night. I had to wait until dawn’s thaw to dig my way out. After that … well … I don’t rightly know.”
“I took care of you,” the yarn wife said in her soft voice. “It was in stoking the fire in the hearth that I burned my hands. Luckily, the pot holders let me warm your broth in the pot, the rug kept the worst of the cold drafts out, and the mended blanket kept you warm until I could nurse you back to health.”
“You did all that?” the woodsman asked. “For me?”
“You are my husband, and I was made for you,” said the yarn wife. “And it was my pleasure to be able to fix the things that needed fixing and mend the things that needed mending, even if it cost me something dear.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” the woodsman said, half to himself, half to his yarn wife. “I’m … sorry that I hadn’t noticed. Not your hair, not your hands, not the things in this old cabin that you have given new life.”
“But you did notice,” the yarn wife said, smiling, “eventually.”
The woodsman laughed at that. And his laugh gave way to a cough.
“Hush,” said the yarn wife, “you are still recovering. Let me bring you some more broth. Then I can warm myself by the hearth and join you again in bed. It’s still early evening and you need your rest.”
The woodsman did not resist. The fact was that he had never had anyone else tending to him. The fact was that it felt good.
“Okay,” he said. “But in the morning, I will repay your kindnesses. Each and every one.”
The woodsman kept his word. Before they left the cabin, he had his yarn wife put some of the hot coals from the hearth into her pockets so they could keep warm on the journey into town. The woodsman had abandoned the sledge out in the forest, so he carried his yarn wife into town upon his back.
Normally the people of town kept their distance from the old woodsman, but on this day they could not help but stop and stare. Stooped as he was on an ordinary day, beneath piles of brown furs and tan hides, now he stood a little straighter and his burden was much more colorful.
The woodsman paid the staring villagers no mind as he carried his yarn wife into the square and entered the weaver’s store.
“Weaver,” he called out, “my yarn wife needs you.”
The old weaver took her time in coming, but when she did, she shared a smile for the happy couple.
“What seems to be the trouble?” she asked, knowing full well.
The woodsman explained his yarn wife’s sacrifices and the kindness she had shown him, that he was there to repay.
“Supplies,” he said, “so that she might never need suffer in such a way again. And, if it wouldn’t be a bother, I should like you to restore her hair to its comely length, as it was the day you made her.”
The weaver smiled openly now to see such a change wrought upon the hardened old man.
“I’ll tend to your wife while you source your supplies,” the weaver said, reaching out to take the woodsman’s burden from off his back. “Take your time and make sure you have all you need. We won’t be but a moment.”
When the weaver was done and the woodsman had gathered his supplies, the yarn wife stood before them both. She looked as she had on the day she’d been made, her straw-colored, fuzzy hair done up in a bun, and her hemp hands free of blemishes and burns.
The woodsman paid his due.
He hefted his yarn wife upon his back again and made to return to his cabin, this time carrying an armload of yarn, fabric, and cloth, plus tools for weaving, knitting, and sewing.
The old woodsman and his yarn wife had made a colorful sight when entering the market square. Now they made a stranger one still.
But upon leaving the weaver’s shop, none of the villagers looked their way. They were busy watching as the men of the village, some of them old as the hills and others still just boys, boarded wagons and carts that were waiting in a long line facing out of town. Each of them, to a man, had a gun in their hands and a blade at their side.
“What’s all this?” the old woodsman asked the empty air.
From the doorway, the old weaver said, “War. Same as it ever was.”
The woodsman grunted and, together with his yarn wife, made his way home.
For weeks they enjoyed each other’s company. The woodsman learned how to mend and patch his gear. The yarn wife learned how to mend and patch her husband. Before long, everything that needed fixing was fixed. Every material thing, that is. There were still some empty spaces between the woodsman and his yarn wife that needed bridging.
But as they practiced their crafts in the bleak midwinter, more color made its way into the formerly dark and dismal home. Rugs of increasingly ornate patterns covered the floor. Blankets of bright, bold designs warmed their bed. Detailed tapestries depicting scenes from the woodsman’s life as told to his yarn wife now hung from the cabin’s otherwise bare walls.
The woodsman, too, practiced his new skills and dusted off his old ones. Once, he had spent long swaths of his days whittling and shaping the cast-offs of wood from his pile. Now, he found that his hands remembered their old motions. Small wooden animals began to appear on the hearth and on side tables. They were no great works of art, but they made the yarn wife smile her sunrise pink cotton smile. The woodsman found himself making more and more of them as days went by.
On a mild day in the middle of a cold winter, far too early to herald the approach of spring, the woodsman and his yarn wife decided to return to the village and restock their supplies. The woodsman pulled his sledge behind him. It was loaded for bear with as much chopped wood as he could carry. His yarn wife rested atop the pile, watching as the wintry woods glided by.
The market square was much changed upon their arrival. The tavern and general store seemed to still be in business, but many of the other shops and eateries had barred their doors and boarded up their windows. The weaver’s store remained open, and for that, the old woodsman was grateful.
No men or older boys walked the square, for they were off to war. No women went about their shopping or errands, for they were without their men. The only villagers to be found in the square were young children squabbling with each other and trying to convince a skittish dog to play with them.
The woodsman stopped his sledge by the weaver’s and undid his harness.
“Enjoy the fresh air, my love,” he said to his yarn wife. “I won’t be but a moment.”
The woodsman left his yarn wife upon the sledge and went inside to go about his business.
It wasn’t long before the colorful yarn wife drew the attention of the village children. The dog, left blissfully alone and sensing no food was coming his way, scampered off to scavenge in some alleyways.
The children gathered on all sides of the yarn wife as if she was the centerpiece of a May Day fair. They danced around her where she sat in the woodsman’s sledge. They clapped and laughed and sang as if spring had already arrived and the world around them was no longer bleak, cold, and dark.
If they had stayed still and waited their turns, the yarn wife would have mended the holes in the knees of their pants, patched the tears in their threadbare shirts, and lined the soles of their shoes which had worn thin. But before she could do any of these things, they ran off, afraid.
Three soldiers strolled into the market square as if they owned the place, despite not being from this country let alone this village. They looked like cast-offs themselves.
Their hair was lank and greasy to a man. One wore a cap to keep his long strands tucked behind his ears. Another sported a thin mustache that he must have thought made him look much older but had quite the opposite effect. And the last had a patchwork beard upon his cheeks that had either grown that way or was half-heartedly hacked away at with a dull razor.
The soldiers ignored the fleeing children once they set their eyes upon the yarn wife. They spoke to her in a language she did not understand. Their meaning, however, was all too plain.
Each took a turn boasting, the others laughing. Round and round they went. Then the soldier in the cap reached out quick as a flash. He pinched the yarn wife’s cheek. In a deft move, he pulled her sunrise pink cotton lips from her face and threw them onto the ground.
He said something rude about her stolen lips, her stolen voice, and the others laughed. But they were not done.
The soldier in the cap pulled the yarn wife off the sledge and onto her sand-filled feet. The soldier with the mustache reached for the yarn wife’s arm and tried to tug her away from his companion. The patch-beard soldier ducked between the two and grabbed the yarn wife about the waist.
They tussled a moment, looking as if they’d practiced just such maneuvers in the tavern a night or two. But the yarn wife was no sturdy barmaid. She was but stitch and string.
The yarn wife’s head came off in the arms of the soldier with the cap. He mimed kissing the place where her lips had been.
The yarn wife’s torso separated, her arms now held by the soldier with the mustache. He pressed her to his chest and danced with her in the square.
The yarn wife’s waist and legs came away from her body in the grip of the patchy bearded soldier. He sat down on the sledge and set her legs upon his lap.
The capped soldier broke from his forced kiss and said something to his companions. And that was when a hard thunk hit him in the back of the head. His cap flew off. He went sprawling into the wintry muck, and the yarn wife’s head went tumbling out of his hands.
The other two soldiers turned to face the threat, throwing their own pieces of the yarn wife to the ground. They reached for their weapons. They were too slow.
“Next one gets the sharp side,” the woodsman said, brandishing his axe, the blunt side of which had so recently made its impression on the capped soldier. “The one after gets the mad dog I ‘ave here.” The imposing end of a flintlock pistol, its barrel carved in the shape of a snarling dog, stared down the soldiers with its one hollow eye. “Now git, before I bark.”
The soldiers, who may not have understood his language but certainly understood the meaning, gathered their stunned fellow and bundled him out of the square.
It was when they were gone that the woodsman allowed himself an ugly sob.
“Look what they done to ye,” he said, gathering up the pieces of his yarn wife. He sank to his knees. There in the muck was a bare hint of color. Sunrise pink. He plucked it from the slush and tucked it lovingly into his pocket. “Look what they done!”
The woodsman was ready to kick in the door to the weaver’s, but he did not have to. The weaver stood there in the open doorway, looking down at him where he knelt.
“Look what they did to her!” he bellowed. She was not moved. “Fix her!” he shouted.
“No,” she said.
The woodsman did not have a response for this. He remembered a lesson learned. He remembered to ask politely.
“Will you fix her?”
“No,” the weaver replied. She stared hard, rooting him to the spot. “You will.”
He had been furious at the soldiers, angry at the weaver, but now … he was stunned. He slowly got to his feet with the pieces of his yarn wife cradled in his arms.
“Will you teach me to mend her?” he said, humbled there in the cold, tears near to freezing on his face.
“I will,” the weaver said. She closed the door to her shop behind her. “But not here.” She wrapped her shawl around a traveling bag she’d slung across her body. “They’ll be back, and like as not, we should not be here when they return.”
Now with a purpose, the woodsman carefully laid his yarn wife’s scattered remains in the sledge. The weaver settled in beside her. When she had, the woodsman shouldered his harness and pulled the sledge back to his cabin to set about his life’s most important work.
Now, while the weaver taught the woodsman, the woodsman mended the yarn wife, and the yarn wife came back together, piece by piece. But that was not the only activity in the woods that winter.
The winter war had frozen actual supply lines as well as ideological ones, as wars often do in the dead of winter. This left the villagers without a reliable source of goods and provided soldiers with a crippling surplus of boredom. So although the weaver, the woodsman, and the yarn wife may have been singularly occupied for some weeks, the world outside the little cabin was changing.
“Is she ready?” the woodsman asked the weaver, and not for the first time, but for the last time.
“As she’ll ever be,” the weaver answered. She gave the old man a warm smile. “She’s as pert as she was on the day I weaved her up. Better even, for a husband knows his wife better than I ever could.”
The woodsman couldn’t return the smile. Not yet. Not until his yarn wife had her own smile back.
He tenderly pulled a strand of sunrise pink cotton yarn from a small wooden case. He’d been saving it, protecting it, since the day with the soldiers. With careful movements, he set about the task of bringing her voice back, one stitch at a time.
The weaver sat and watched him work in the bright light of the blazing hearth and the ring of oil lamps all around them. Once or twice she thought she might have to interrupt with a word of the wise, but the old woodsman had mastered all the skills she’d taught him to the best of his ability. It was more than enough.
When the last stitch was in place, the weaver excused herself to leave the married couple to their reunion.
The woodsman asked, “My dear? Are you here with me once more?”
The yarn wife smiled, a sunrise pink smile. Her laughter was like little bells in Christmas garland. The woodsman smiled, too, to see his wife restored. And together they enjoyed the warmth of the fire in winter, the warmth of each other.
Once the yarn wife had been sufficiently nursed back to health and brought up to speed on currents, the woodsman carried her outside to join the weaver. They were off to the village once more in search of supplies. And though it was not so mild a day as the last time they’d ventured out, their spirits were high.
But when they reached the market square, the cold settled into their bones, their hearts, their cores.
The weaver’s shop had burned. No, not just burned, set afire. All of the buildings along the market square had been put to the torch, save for the tavern and the general store.
The weaver spied the weather toe of a small, soot-stained shoe just peeking out from behind the corner of her burned-out shop.
“You there, child, come here,” she called.
A small boy dressed in patchy burlap stepped out. He had ash in his hair and scorch marks all along what passed for a tunic. He did not seem the sort to be setting fires but rather the kind who might have escaped one. And recently at that.
The weaver knelt in the snow while the woodsman and the yarn wife looked on.
“Tell me, child,” the weaver said, draping the boy in her own warm, woolen, and soft shawl, “who did this? Who set the fires?”
The boy was quick to answer but quietly so.
“The soldiers, mum,” he said. Then his eyes went wide. “Those soldiers.”
With that, the boy scampered back the way he’d come. Sure enough, soldiers stumbled out of the tavern, drunken to the point of falling down in the middle of the day.
The woodsman loosened his hatchet in its holster. The weaver stayed his hand.
“Look at the state of them,” the woodsman said. “I can take them.”
“Them, aye,” the weaver said. “And what of those who come next? Those around this corner or that? You just got your wife back. Would you risk her safety so soon?”
A slight pressure on the woodsman’s back, a warmth. His yarn wife agreed with the weaver, even if she wouldn’t come out and say so in front of her.
The woodsman holstered his axe again.
“Come with us,” he said to the weaver. “We’re safer together. Come spring …”
“Come spring, I’ll be setting up shop somewhere else, like I always do,” the weaver said. “But these soldiers will not stop until everything is burned to the ground, and that includes your cabin. Do you have anywhere else to go?”
The woodsman considered this for a while.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Yes, there is a place. There’s room for you, too.”
“No, it is time for me to go my way and you yours,” the weaver said. “I wish you luck. Do not tarry long. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.”
The woodsman and the yarn wife did as the weaver bid them. They took all the trust and care and love they had in the world and put it all into each other. And they did not linger long at the rustic house that had become a home.
Better for them that they did not. Because it wasn’t only a child who had seen them set foot in the market square early that day. And word traveled fast in a small village made smaller by war and unsupervised soldiers.
By the end of that day, the woodsman and his yarn wife were secreted away in one of the old man’s woodland hidey holes. And the cabin he had made with his bare hands was burned to the ground.
The cave did not start out half so cozy as the cabin had become. However, it was safe, it was secure, and it was secret. The woodsman and his yarn wife had multiple ways in and out of the underground abode, like chipmunks with their burrow and its bolt holes.
In time, the cave became a second home to the married couple. The woodsman had kept up his weaving and sewing skills, along with his woodworking techniques, but he had also added foraging to his repertoire. In that manner, he was able to keep his yarn wife well supplied for her colorful creations that decorated the place and offered up some form along with the necessary function.
Time passed, as it always does. And while the cave became as much a home as the cabin had been, the world outside continued changing.
The war ended.
Winter’s end followed soon after.
And with the thaw came the first trip back to the village for the woodsman and his yarn wife since the fires set by the soldiers.
They found the footprint of the place much the same, but little else.
The market square still formed the center of the little village. The tavern and the general store still stood. But all other structures around them were burned-down shells of what they once were: businesses, residences, supply shops, goods and services.
Spring had returned to the village. Prosperity had not. The young soldiers who went off to war months ago had not. The parents and caregivers who gave their last crumb of bread, scrap of cloth, and ember from the fire to their little ones had not.
But the children remained.
And when the woodsman with his great sledge, empty save for his comfortably seated yarn wife, stepped into the market square, it was the children who peeked from the shadows of the destroyed buildings to mark them.
“We’ll find no supplies here,” the woodsman said to his yarn wife, pretending not to see the tiny, dirty faces staring at them from behind charred window frames and broken doors. “But I think we have plenty to sustain us, maybe even some others, eh wife?”
The woodsman gently lifted his yarn wife from the sledge. With his handkerchief, he cleared a spot on what remained of a bench in the square. Then he sat her upon it and busied himself poking among the remains of the village for anything salvageable. As expected, the children soon overcame their fear and approached the yarn wife, a colorful flower in the midst of all that charcoal and ash.
This time when they gathered, they did not dance. They did not sing and laugh and play. They slowly reached out to touch the hem of the yarn wife’s dress, to see if she was real, to see if she was as soft and unsullied as she appeared, when everything they knew had been hard and burnt and broken, sharp edges and pointy ends.
The woodsman did not speak until he was sure the yarn wife had calmed them all. And when he did, he kept his voice soft and low.
“We have food, little ones,” he said, slowly approaching his sledge to drop off some meager findings. “And blankets and beds, plenty to go around.”
Benefitting him somewhat, the woodsman had also grown quite soft and round during the time with his yarn wife in the cabin and the cave. The winter had left its mark on him, too, as he had much more white throughout his hair and beard and mustache than he used to. So while the oldest of the war orphans gave the old woodsman a cautious look, the little ones flocked to him as easily as they had his yarn wife.
It was tough sledding for the old woodsman as he pulled the sledge with half a dozen children piled in alongside his yarn wife. Hard work, but his heart was fully in it.
When they reached the cave, the woodsman and the yarn wife simply stepped aside and let the children explore, to find the light of the fire, the warmth of the blankets, the comfort of the overstuffed cushions.
The woodsman set about stewing a great pot of wild meats and herbs from their pantry stock. In the warming days to come, he could replenish what they used, maybe even teach the older ones among the children how to do so. But for now, what they needed, what the children needed, was a feast.
As the stew stewed and the children dozed, the yarn wife set about the daunting task of making new clothes for her little guests. Their existing garments were too far gone to try mending them. Cleaning them would likely just cause them to disintegrate.
So the yarn wife, too, used her existing stock of supplies. Perhaps, when she was done, she could teach the basics to the littlest ones among the children. Once they knew the basics, well, it was only a matter of practice, adding new techniques bit by bit, the next stitch following the last.
That first night was the hardest in some ways, the easiest in others. It was the hungriest, coldest, dirtiest, saddest, and loneliest the war orphans had ever been, but also the last time they’d ever be in such a state.
Each day they spent with the white-haired woodsman and his soft-to-the-touch yarn wife, they grew a little fuller, warmer, cleaner, happier, and more trusting. Each day they learned a little more: Foraging and seed-planting, whittling, tending a fire and preparing a stew, the basics of sewing, crocheting, and knitting. The lessons kept them busy as much as they kept them fed, warm, and happy.
Each day the children were with them, the woodsman would venture back into the village in the hopes of finding some of the adults who had returned to rebuild, that perhaps some were looking for their missing children.
More often than not, he found only more war orphans in search of food, clothes, and a home. He began taking either his yarn wife with him to make the orphans feel safe and secure, or, when they were comfortable enough, some of the older children who could speak the language of their peers.
The woodsman and his yarn wife found themselves caring for more children than they had ever imagined. Luckily, the older children among them were more than happy to help out. The cave, which they had expanded both underground and above, until it resembled something between a lodge and a treehouse, was now home to a remarkable family in which each cared for the others and all were welcome.
But space was limited, and the days were growing warmer, sunnier, longer. Together, the woodsman, his yarn wife, and their adopted children came to the same wonderful idea: they would return to town and start anew.
The village had thrived once, it would thrive again. The river still ran. The deer still bounded through the forest, just as the pheasants flitted through the undergrowth and the fish swam in the streams. The old villagers had moved on, but the children remembered. They could start again.
So over the course of the warm months of that year, the boys and girls adopted by the woodsman and the yarn wife began to rebuild.
They tore down the old, burnt structures and mapped out new ones, under supervision, of course. They marked out gardens, plowed fields, dug wells and built docks. They mucked out latrines and taught the little ones how to use the outhouses. They reestablished the market but did away with currency, opting for a bartering system instead. They built lean-tos, then shacks, then community structures with brick firewalls. Once the kilns were up and running, they never stopped.
When a problem arose without a ready solution, the children turned to the old woodsman and his yarn wife. Without fail, the old couple had an answer, a plan, and the children had the ability and the energy and the resources to carry it out. It was such a good partnership that, eventually, the wisdom that had been passed down from the white-haired woodsman and the soft-to-the-touch yarn wife was accumulated in the children themselves, many of them now teenagers and young adults.
In a way, the children were the new villagers, while the woodsman and his yarn wife were as reclusive as ever. The villagers had their own families to care for, their own children to protect. The woodsman and his yarn wife soon found themselves caring only for each other once more.
That suited them fine, if you’d asked them, but the truth was the cave was quite quiet and empty and lonely without their chaotic, disparate, and endlessly noisy family. The children – because the couple would always think of them as children, even if they were now grown – had everything they needed, and their children had everything they needed as well. So what were an old woodsman and his yarn wife to do?
One night, as autumn blustered its way in and teased a cold winter to come, the old couple puzzled out this very question. Each of them came to the same conclusion.
“A very good idea,” the old woodsman said, rosy cheeks warmed against the fire, making his white beard seem all the whiter. “So good in fact, I had it myself!”
His yarn wife laughed, that same light, bell-like laughter from her sunrise pink lips, which were now more of a faded rose but all the prettier for it.
“We can make them, of course, that’s not the issue,” the woodsman pondered out loud. “The trouble is how to deliver them.”
The yarn wife slumped toward her husband and rested against his shoulder.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh!” Now with more emphasis. “Now that is a very good idea! I had not thought of that, would not have in a hundred years, a thousand! But can we do it before year’s end?”
His yarn wife nodded her head toward him. He wrapped one great arm around her shoulders.
“Of course, of course we can,” he said. “Yes, yes, I’m too excited to wait another year!”
And with that shared idea in mind, the old white-bearded woodsman and his winter-warm yarn wife set about their new tasks right away.
The woodsman sharpened his woodworking tools. The yarn wife set out her array of needles and yarn. And by the heat of the fire burning low in the hearth, they went about their cheerful work.
“A bright night, how lucky for us!” the woodsman whispered as he pulled the sledge through the forest. Though they had chosen the longest night of the year to deliver their gifts in secret, the light of the starry sky and the bright moon were reflected on a blanket of new snow.
On the sledge behind him sat his faithful yarn wife. Next to her sat a brass scuttle full to the brim with warm coals to keep the chill away. She rested against a great, bulging sack of her own design, made of red velvet and trimmed in forest green. She had made a matching set of clothes for herself and the woodsman each. He had fussed over it, not wanting to wear it during deliveries for fear of dirtying it. She reminded him that he was not the one in danger of getting dirty.
“I still think I should be the one to do it,” the woodsman grumbled good-naturedly as he stomped ever forward through the forest. “Though how exactly, well, maybe I’ll figure that out next year. Until then, we’ll do it your way.”
Upon stepping out of the forest at the edge of town, they were greeted with a beautiful sight.
Their children, the former war orphans now grown, had rebuilt the market square and the buildings that surrounded it. It was quaint, the buildings themselves not quite square or level or perfect, their walls and roofs connected in a haphazard, zigzagging way, but the effect was stunning just the same.
A miniature village had sprung up seemingly overnight. Snow gathered on the walks and on the roofs, save for the bare patches showing where the heat from the fireplaces within had warmed their homes. In every window, a candle glowed with amber light. All was quiet. All was peaceful.
“Are you ready, my wife?” the woodsman asked. The yarn wife tinkled with the sound of bells.
The woodsman’s work was now at hand. Once they were up on the shared roof over the villagers’ homes, it would be his yarn wife’s turn.
It was with a great deal of effort that the old woodsman hauled up the bulging sack of presents, the coal scuttle and its thick stack of wrapping papers, and finally his yarn wife, the lightest of his burdens.
“Once a year is plenty, I think,” the woodsman said, stretching out his lower back. “Now, shall we begin?”
The woodsman and his yarn wife proceeded as they had planned. He lugged the sack of gifts over one shoulder towards the first gently smoking chimney. She tied up a few hot lumps of coal in the thick paper while the woodsman took the first gifts out of the sack. They were all the same, this first year: a new winter blanket and a wooden candle holder for the adults, a pair of thick woolen socks and a little wooden duck for the bairns.
“After you,” the woodsman said, smile twinkling in the moonlight.
The yarn wife dropped her wrapped coal into the first chimney. They waited to hear the satisfying thunk. They watched to see orange embers spiral up and then the smoke petered out.
“Are you sure?” the woodsman asked. He had suggested simply dropping the packages down the chimney, but his yarn wife rightly pointed out that all their hard work might go up in smoke, leaving no gifts for the villagers save for a sooty mystery in the morning. She had volunteered to deliver them by hand. And so she did.
The woodsman held fast to his yarn wife’s hand as she held fast to the wrapped gifts in the other. She stretched herself, longer and longer, until she was able to place the gifts in front of the hearth. Then the woodsman would pull her back up before the hot coals could burn through the paper and warm the fireplace once more.
“Feeling okay?” the woodsman asked when his yarn wife emerged, sooty and stretched but no worse for wear. “Not overdoing it?”
His yarn wife laughed, a high, clear sound, letting him know all was well and that they had much more to do this night.
And so they did. Rooftop to rooftop, chimney to chimney, the woodsman and his yarn wife delivered their gifts to the villagers. Little by little, the red velvet sack grew smaller and lighter. Little by little, the pace of their efforts picked up, practiced as they were at their manner of delivery. And little by little, the morning’s glow started to show itself in the east, sunrise pink.
“I think we’ve done quite well, you and I,” the woodsman said, huffing and puffing as he helped his yarn wife down off the roof and onto the sledge. “And we very much deserve a rest.”
They made their way home, not knowing how the morning would find the villagers, or how the villagers would find their hearths, now displaying wrapped gifts where the night before there had only been bare stone.
Perhaps they would have been delighted to know that the villagers and their children cheered and laughed and smiled with disbelief to find the mysterious presents left for each of them. They burst out of their homes in their stocking feet and robes, holding the new presents aloft for neighbors and family members to see. The children ran about in their new socks, lifting their wooden ducks high in a little village flock that brought them all together, the horrors of the war now fading to distant memories.
And it was in that spirit of giving that the villagers took inspiration. Year after year, they started making presents for each other, to give during the solstice. They gave things they had, things they made, things that were needed. Baked things, woven things, whittled things, and more. And with that giving, the community grew, and the village grew with it.
But the woodsman and the yarn wife were not part of that community. Not directly, anyway. They preferred to keep to themselves. They were quite busy, after all. Their first night of gift-giving had been such fun that they wanted to do it again the next year. They wanted to make more toys and trinkets, more clothes and blankets and baubles. It would take them all year, if they were to do it right. And that was fine by them.
As the years went by, the old woodsman and his yarn wife made many things to give away to their now-grown children. And it was those children who, now with grandchildren of their own, knew that the mystery gifts must be coming from their old adoptive parents, secreted out there in the woods. So they asked the little ones to think about gifts they might want, and to write letters letting the old couple in the woods know their wishes and to thank them for being so generous.
So it went that the woodsman and his yarn wife started receiving sacks of mail delivered by one of their adopted sons. He’d leave them on their doorstep. In the early months of the year there were hardly any. By autumn, there seemed to be more letters than leaves left on the trees.
“My word,” the white-bearded woodsman said to his yarn wife. “The village must have grown quite a bit in the … how many years has it been?”
His yarn wife said a number that did not make much sense to the woodsman. But it did explain the sheer volume of letters inquiring about gifts and thanking the pair for their generosity. They answered each and every one of them. Not with a reply in writing but with a handmade toy or a trinket.
A solstice dress for the miller’s daughter. A cuckoo clock for the mayor’s mother. A pair of shoes for the mailman. An array of woolen socks for the fisherman and his many children. On and on.
They saw each request as a challenge and a blessing. And they delivered on each one.
Though the gifts varied in quantity and size, and though the number of requests had ballooned to well more than any other couple could deliver in a single night, somehow they managed. For a time. And then …
It wasn’t the popularity of their solstice gifts that caused them to leave their quaint little home on the outskirts of the village. It was the village itself.
Over time, it had swelled past its borders. It spanned bridges and spread out on both sides of the river. It ventured into the forest, clearing trees and plowing the ground to make way for timber, crops, and homesteads. Its docks turned to wharves, its market square to a vast shopping district, its warm kilns to smoky, billowing chimneys of industry.
It was coming closer to the woodsman and his yarn wife’s place now, bringing with it the march of progress, like soldiers of old marching to war.
This was not a place the woodsman and his yarn wife wished to be anymore.
For some time after the latest solstice, the sacks of mail piled up upon the doorstep of their home. The mailman, in his new shoes, spoke to the miller, his daughter twirling in her new dress outside. The miller spoke to the fisherman, whose red-and-green socks were outside his pants and pulled up to near his knees. The fisherman spoke to the mayor’s wife, as he often did, whether the mayor knew it or not.
When word had spread around town that something had happened to the woodsman and his yarn wife, it was the huntsman who volunteered to solve the mystery. He knew the way better even than the mailman. He had grown up in those woods, been shown the ways of the forest and the river by the old woodsman, even as he himself was teaching his own son the ways of hunting, trapping, and tracking.
When the huntsman and his son arrived at the home of the woodsman and his yarn wife, it was as the mailman had described.
“What do you see?” the huntsman asked.
His son took his time. He knew from experience that his father was asking him to use all of his senses.
He smelled no smoke and saw none from the chimney, hidden though it was among the rocks. He noticed fallen leaves built up upon the top of the mail sacks and on the window sills. He heard no movement nearby, nothing but the distant sound of industry in the village, a sound that reached farther and farther every day.
He relayed all of this to his father.
“What else?” the huntsman asked.
His son began to walk around the grounds. It was then that he saw it: two sets of footprints, one pressed deeply into the snow, the other so light as to barely press down at all. The deep set of prints was in between two straight lines, like runners on a sledge. The shallow prints matched the deeper set, step for step.
They were headed north.
The huntsman laid a hand on his son’s shoulder and gave him a nod, a rare smile. They did not follow the tracks. They relayed what they had found to the villagers. There was naught else to be done. And there was no need to worry. For that winter solstice, each villager – man, woman, and child – still found their presents in front of the hearth.
As for the woodsman and his yarn wife, who can say what became of them. Perhaps they met up with the weaver. Perhaps they found a home in other villages in need of the spirit of giving and the skill of the experienced. Perhaps they retired to a secluded, snowy workshop in which they reveled in each other’s company, tinkering away at their various interests. Perhaps they shared these results with the ever-expanding world around them.
Perhaps they’ll share them with you.
