Mr. Fox (30 page)

The woman settled in a chair and watched the fox sort through scraps of paper. She was holding her breath. She believed—she didn’t know what she believed. It could not be. The fox looked lean and crazed. In her mind she ran through a list of concoctions that might do something for the beast. . . .

Words began to spread at her feet.

The fox looked up at her and panted. He curled his tail around his leg in an apprehensive
L.

The woman raised her hand and let it fall. “Hello,” she said aloud. She couldn’t see clearly. All these tears. She brushed them away.

He was very intent as she spoke. She answered three times, to be clear. “I’ll try. Tell me what you need.”

Quickly, remembering the afternoon at the farmhouse, she added, “I can’t help you die.”

The fox shuffled scraps of paper, chose two.

He chose three more.

He thumped his paw on the last two words, his eyes on hers. Change me. Change me.

“Change you how?”

He’d had to tear the word “fox” from the dictionary. It was tiny.

“No,” the woman said slowly. “No, I don’t think I can do that. I haven’t the skill.”

The fox lay down and closed his eyes. This lull, after all his striving, was enormous. It was like pain. The woman fell down beside him—her pity made her do it. The woman and the fox faced each other, nose to nose. Then he stood, nudged her aside, chose more words.

The fox applied himself to living as the woman lived. He ate at the table with her, and slept alongside her in her bed, and scrabbled around with soap in the stream. He read voraciously. He read more than she did. And as more words came to him, he told her of the hunt, of the horses and the hounds behind, and sometimes there were falcons, like a rain of beaks and claws. The woman listened, and as she listened, she realised that she was hearing him—that he was saying words instead of showing her. She made no remark, and treated it as normal. She asked him which would he rather be, if he could change—a horse, a bird, or a hound? None of those, he said. At night he suffered himself to be held, a thing that was unthinkable in the first days of their acquaintance, even when he had been very badly hurt. He had less and less trouble sleeping upright each night. Together they built a bigger hut, and a bigger bed. She saw that his claws had become thin and brittle—they were more like fingernails. Very long nails, it was true, but they weren’t claws anymore.

 

 

But what teeth he had. So:

The pleasure of biting. Or letting him. And afterwards the feel of a long, wet tongue light against the hot wound.

The different ways:

One medicine-making day, as they carried fresh water back to her hut in wooden buckets, he asked her, “How old are we?”

And she answered, “I have forgotten.”

She put down her bucket and tried to count years on her fingers. He watched until she gave up, then put his arms about her—he stood a head higher than she did.

“What’s so funny?” she asked him.

And he said, “Nothing.”

I almost forgot to mention another fox I know of—a very wicked fox indeed. But you are tired of hearing about foxes now, so I won’t go on.

Thank you:

And thanks to Amy, Vito, Jess, Denise, and everyone at Hedgebrook, including & especially my amazing fellow fellows, Neela, Robin, Tina, and Katy, who listened to the first few pages of
Mr. F
.

When I first started thinking about Bluebeard, I read and watched every interpretation I could find—all of them valuable, but some sank in especially deep: Marina Warner’s
From the Beast to the Blonde
, Margaret Atwood’s essay “Fitcher’s Bird,” and Anne Sexton’s
Transformations
. These were wise and excellent guides.