Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [13]
As the bells of St. Nicolai rang the hour and Father started down the road, it occurred to me that he had misplaced the blame for our woes. It was, after all, that musical rat-chaser, not the council, who was the cause of the infestation. For the piper, it seemed, was entirely too good at his job. Three other towns had already hired him, and now all the vermin he'd sent packing had found their way to Hameln! The slithering rodents were everywhere: in cupboards, where they jumped out if you opened the door; in grain bins, where cooks found their droppings mixed with the chaff; and often as not, in nurseries, where they waited until dark to crawl into the cradles and set the babes howling with their nasty bites.
By the time the bells of St. Bonifatius had begun chiming, too, I was already at work. Not on the jewelry chests Father would expect finished by his return, but on a fresh crutch. Until now I had needed a new one only when I grew too tall for the old. To own the truth, I had been proud each time that happened, though Father said the only difference between a crippled child and a crippled man was that the man ate more.
Like stragglers trying to catch up, the bells in the church by the river always rang late, so now as those in our cathedral were finishing their song, the latecomers had just begun theirs. Carving as I listened, I was astonished to find my hands deciding on a new design before the rest of me had any inkling what they were about.
I had chosen a small piece of cherry with a sharp, uneven grain that would make it useless in Father's eyes. But it would do for the armrest of my crutch, and as I worked my carving tool along the grain, I created a jagged range of mountains, like the Weserbergland beyond our town. The sky behind the range I left as smooth and empty as a beggar's plate. Yet by the time both bells had fallen silent, I knew what to carve there: just above the mountains I shaped the egrets from my old crutch. Instead of standing on their long legs in a stream, though, these birds soared toward heaven, their wings beating wedge-shaped Vs into the sky. With such wide, beautiful wings, I thought, who needed legs?
When I was born, Mother hid my twisted leg until after the christening. Which is why I was baptized Emmett, a fine old name that means "hard-working and strong." I have proved to be one but not the other, and although Mother used to say "Better a strong heart than a strong back," Father never agreed. The first thing I remember is learning, much later than most wee ones, to crawl. And the second thing I remember is Father's face as he watched me drag my lame leg after me. Even now, when I catch him looking at me, I know what he sees—a worthless scrap, a waste piece like the blemished poplar he uses where no one will notice, on the bottoms of drawers, the undersides of tables, the tops of chests he will paint over.
While Mother was ill, Father tried to please her by praising my work or—and this always made her smile like a girl at Christmas—saying he thought my bad leg was beginning to straighten and flesh out. But my leg was getting no better than she was. And after she died, one day past Michaelmas last year, he no longer took the trouble to hide his impatience with me. And I no longer had her tender kiss on my head when she bade me good night. Or the sound of her laughter if I added a silly new verse to the songs we used to sing.
Our earliest "concerts" featured a single song, "Backe, backe, Kuchen," "Bake, Bake a Cake." She used to sing that one to me when I was little, as she shaped our griddlecakes by the hearth.