Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [34]
When she set out for home, Gretel took some of the witch's cooking pots and a basket of food that would only go to mold if she left it behind. She could not carry more because her hands still ached from the flames she had braved at the end. When her brother fell into the oven, she had tried to pull him out. With no more thought to her own safety than a loyal dog protecting its master, she had leaned against the poker-hot opening of the stove and reached into the fire. But the searing pain, the breathless heat, brought her to her senses. She pulled back and watched in horror as Hansel rushed to his make-believe mother, as he picked up the flaming husk that had been the witch. As the skin ran like melting wax from his arms, he crumpled to the oven floor and raised his hands above his head as if surrendering to the roaring tongues that devoured him, bit by bit.
The thorny brambles had dissolved as soon as the witch died, and Gretel now made her way easily back into the woods through which she and Hansel had wandered before the old woman had trapped them. As she walked, the girl found ivy and chickweed to make poultices for her hands and for the bright red scar that crossed her waist where she'd leaned against the stove. Though she had no idea how far or which direction she and her brother had traveled, she was not afraid. Each night her angel leaned over her dreams, kissed her burning hands, and whispered the way to take next morning. By the time she reached her father's house, spring was coming on; tender shoots curled out of the ground, and birds flew once more in packs so thick they peppered the sky.
The old man, for old he suddenly seemed, was outside chopping wood as Gretel came up the rise toward the cottage. When he saw her, he dropped his ax and went mad with joy. "Gret, Gret!" he called, folding her to him, making the pots she carried clank and clatter. "You are home. You have come home at last!"
When she shrank back, peering toward the dark cottage, he shook his head. "You have naught to fear, child," he told her. "Your stepdame fetched poison berries from a fair on St. Joseph's Day. They gave me a fearsome bellyache, but they stole the life clean out of her."
"She is dead, then?" Gretel had seen enough death of late; the news gave her little joy.
"Ay," her father told her, linking his arm through hers, leaning on her as he had never done before she left. "But let us talk of pleasant stuff. There be time enough for sorrow." He led her to the door of the house, then looked behind her, toward the rise she had just climbed. "Say where your brother is and when he will join us here."
The time for sorrow came sooner than he must have hoped. For Gretel told him how brother and sister had found the witch's house but only one of them had left it behind. She told him about her angel, and how it had saved her from the fire that killed both the old crone and Hansel. It was clear, though, from the way her father listened to the tale, the way he held his head in his hands, that he did not believe her.
"I tried to save him, Da. Truly, I did." But when Gretel held up her hands as proof, she saw how her angel's kisses had healed them, how they looked as white and smooth as if she had worn gloves along her rough and tangled way.
Father's eyes, the way they fell from hers, told her what he thought. "Hunger can drive God's love from our hearts," he said. "It can