A Vision of Light by Judith Merkle Riley Read Free Book Online

First the damp rotted the rye, and then the ground froze. A coughing sickness swept through the village and took away the babies and the weak ones, including Granny Agnes. By Shrovetide there was not a soul in the village whose gums did not bleed, and my teeth felt loose in my head.
    But the hardest thing was not the weather. At night I’d lie awake in the loft, listening to the heavy breathing beside me and the sound the oxen made as they shifted in the straw below and wonder, What’s to become of me? Everything was changing and moving in ways I did not understand. Sometimes I was frightened for no reason.
    Then, one icy day, Mother Anne set down her spinning suddenly and got up from the fire. Alone, she walked out beyond the village to the frosty summit of the low hill beyond it, where she stood for a long time, silently, the wind whipping her shabby cloak around her. I followed her from curiosity, and when I approached, she did not curse as usual and send me away, but stood instead, unseeing and unmoving. As I looked at her, I realized that she was weeping silently. The tears seemed to turn to frost on her face, as she wept on and on, without speaking.
    “Mother Anne, Mother Anne, what is wrong?” I caught up with her and questioned her.
    “You don’t care, so why ask?”
    “I do care. Do not weep so, you’ll be sick.”
    “Who cares if I am sick?”
    “Why, everyone cares—we all care.”
    “No one cares. I’m old, and it doesn’t matter.”
    “But you’re no older than you were,” I protested.
    “The last of my teeth has fallen out this winter. All my beauty is gone, and I’m old forever until I die.” I looked at her, not understanding.
    “You don’t understand, do you?” She turned on me fiercely. “You’ve always thought of me as old Mother Anne, the Ugly One. But I was beautiful once. I had pearly teeth and skin as fine and smooth as the petals of a flower, just as you have now. And I had hair like spun gold, too, such as none has ever seen. ‘A river of gold,’ they called it.” The icy wind cut me to the bone. “Now my teeth are all, all gone. ‘One for each child,’ they say. One and many more than that! But I have given them for dead ones. Where is the fairness in that? To give up beauty and love for dead things? Had I ten children living, I would be honored, honored, I say!” The tears had ceased, but her frozen, ice-blue stare looked even more inhuman without them.
    “Oh, someday you’ll understand. Your mother was the lucky one! She died in the glory of her beauty. Her shining hair wrapped her like a great cloak within her shroud. Even dead her face was more lovely than the carving of the Blessed Madonna. ‘Oh, look at her, the beauty, the poor, lovely creature! A saint, a poor saint, who left behind two poor, wee little motherless mites.’ Two hard-hearted, shrewd little mites, I say, for poor ugly Anne to raise and make the best of. And when they do well, who gets the credit? The dead saint, of course! That’s who! Why should it be otherwise? Tell me, tell me, what will you do when you are old and ugly, and no one wants you, not even your children?”
    “But Rob and Will—”
    She turned, interrupting me in a bitter voice, “Rob and Will? They’re the Devil’s own, and someday he’ll come and fetch them. And I, I’ll be always alone until I die.”
    I had never suspected that, simple as she was, she could think this way, that she had seen so many secret thoughts so clearly and yet gone on. I was seized by a sudden sympathy, so deep I could not imagine where it came from.
    “Just come down from this cold place, Mother Anne, and I’ll try to be a good daughter to you. A real daughter.” She nodded blindly and, consumed by her own thoughts, let herself be led down and home again.
    Everything was still when we returned, for father and the boys were out taking counsel with the older men of the village about the first day of planting. The ground was too hard, and it