The Wood Wife Read online

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  Five-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, Terri Windling has been a guiding force in imaginative literature for more than a decade. Now with The Wood Wife, a heady, luminous novel filled with passion, mystery, and wonder, Windling takes her place beside such authors as Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, and Patricia A. McKillip as one of modem fantasy’s finest talents.

  The Wood Wife is the story of Maggie Black, who walked out of her life as the wife of a trendy West Coast musician to pursue her dreams. When Maggie’s mentor, prize-winning poet Davis Cooper, died mysteriously in the canyons east of Tucson, he left her his estate, and the mystery of his life—and death.

  Now, in Cooper’s desert home, Maggie begins a remarkable journey of self-discovery that will change her forever. She is astonished by the power of that harsh but beautiful land and intrigued by the uncommon people who call it home—especially by Fox, a man unlike any she has ever known, who understands the desert’s special power.

  As she reads the letters and papers left behind by Cooper and his lover, Anna Naverra—a gifted painter driven mad by the visions she saw—Maggie will come face-to-face with the wild, ancient spirits of that place and undertake a quest to discover their dark, long-hidden secrets.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE WOOD WIFE

  Copyright © 1996 by Terri Windling

  Introduction copyright © 2020 by Delia Sherman

  All rights reserved.

  The author is grateful for the permission to reprint the following works: Excerpt from “Ars Poetica” by Jorge Luis Borges, from Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges; translated from the Spanish by Mildred Vinson Boyers and Harold Morland; © 1964 by Jorge Luis Borges; published 1970 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., by special arrangement with the University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. “Trees” by Michael Hannon, from Ordinary Messengers by Michael Hannon; © 1991, Floating Island Publications, Point Reyes Station, CA. Excerpt from “Rain (Rapa Nul)” by Pablo Neruda, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems; translated from the Spanish by Anthony Kerrigan; © 1970 by Anthony Kerrigan; published 1972 by Dell Publishing Co., Inc., New York, NY. Excerpt from “The Gardens” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive by Mary Oliver; © 1983 by Mary Oliver; published by Little, Brown and Co., Boston, MA. “Evening” by Rainer María Rilke, from The Selected Poetry of Ratner María Rilke; translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell; © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell; published 1982 by Random House, New York, NY.

  Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

  A Tor Essentials Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  120 Broadway

  New York, NY 10271

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor© is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group. LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the first trade paperback edition as follows:

  Windling, Terri.

  The wood wife / by Terri Windling.—First edition.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 978-0-7653-0293-9 (trade paperback)

  1. Poets—Fiction. 2. Biographers—Fiction. 3. Arizona—Fiction. 4. Fantasy fiction—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.I5175 W66 1996

  813’.54—dc23 | 96016113

  ISBN 978-1-250-23755-2 (trade paperback)

  Our books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact your local bookseller or the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].

  First Edition: October 1996

  Second Trade Paperback Edition: January 2021

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  introduction

  by Delia Sherman

  When Maggie Black, the East Coast poet and journalist who conducts us through the first pages of The Wood Wife, arrives in Tucson, she finds it bleak and difficult.

  Everything here had spines or thorns. The sky was too vast; the light was too clear. There was nothing soft or hidden in the land, and it made her feel raw, overexposed, like a photograph left in the sun.

  When I started going to Arizona in the 1990s, my initial reaction to the desert was pretty much the same. Everything looked brown and grey, low, spiky, and absolutely unwelcoming. There seemed to be an unnecessary amount of dust and strip malls and thorny plants. But Terri Windling lived there, and Terri was my partner Ellen Kushner’s best friend and was becoming one of mine, and I loved the dry, warm fall and the sunsets and the conversation, so we kept going back.

  I didn’t know, at first, that Terri was writing a desert book. Terri doesn’t talk about her fiction much—she’s reticent about her stories until they’re complete. This one, I found out later, had been meant to be the final volume of a series of novellas based on Brian Froud’s fairy paintings. When the publisher decided that the time was not yet ripe for stand-alone novellas, Terri’s sketch-draft was free to grow into the subtle, complex novel the desert demanded.

  In the meantime, everything in Terri’s life reflected her love of this beautiful, demanding, uplifting country. The walls of her house were hung with paintings and sketches of the beauty she’d found in what seemed to be a barren land—not landscapes, but soulscapes, alive with spirits of tree and plant, animal and bird. She painted women with branching hair or drooping rabbit’s ears, troops of children with feet like birds and wings hanging in tatters from their shoulders, narrow-faced men with long black hair who reminded me of birds or animals or wind or the occasional desert storms of pelting rain that drummed on the roof of the camper we slept in when we visited. Journey by journey, image by image, they persuaded me that the Sonoran desert was not only beautiful, but very much alive.

  In The Wood Wife, Terri gives her images voice and movement: they not only are, they act. If the desert is a study in contradictions and interdependencies, where heat and poisonous snakes and flash floods are inseparable from the clarity of the air and the glory of the mountains at sunset, the desert spirits Terri shows us are both beautiful and dangerous, faithful and capricious, inhuman and fascinated by the habits of humanity. Their actions and tastes are mysteries, as incomprehensible to us as ours are to them. Where they live, mystery is everywhere.

  It makes sense, then, that a genuine mystery lies at the center of The Wood Wife. Every page bristles with questions: Why did Davis Cooper leave his house to a woman he had never met? Was he the father of the young man who lives on his property? What drove his painter lover from the desert she loved? How in the world could he have drowned in a dry riverbed?

  As a mystery must, The Wood Wife answers these human questions, satisfying and delighting us in the process. But those answers lead us to more questions, questions that cannot be so easily answered, about myth and the nature of reality and time and love and home and art.

  As a writer, one of the things I have always loved about The Wood Wife is its examination of artists and their relationship with their art, with their muses, with each
other. Each artist she mentions—remembered, present, historical, invented—wrestles with the knowledge that their art is never really going to match their inspiration. I don’t think I’ve ever read a contemporary novel in which artists play such a central role. Maggie is a poet, Davis Cooper is a poet: both try (or give up on trying) to catch the inexpressible in words, trap the universe in type on a page. Cooper’s lover, Anna Naverra, is a painter, as is Maggie’s neighbor Juan. But other characters make it clear that painting and writing, dancing and music are not the only arts that can build a bridge to the spirit world. In Terri’s world, gardening and building, cooking and healing, rescuing wounded animals and living intensely and beautifully are arts as well, with their own skills and frustrations.

  For me, then, The Wood Wife is a book about how fantasy grows out of myth and how myth grows out of the land; how not all mysteries should be explained; how anyone who creates beauty and order is an artist. For others, The Wood Wife might be a different book. Like myth itself—like the desert or the moors or the mountains or the ocean—we see in The Wood Wife what we need and take from it what we can. This book—and Terri’s paintings—have opened my eyes to the possibilities of magic, encouraged me to listen with attention and to be aware of the messages inherent in the scents and textures and tastes of the world. It has informed the way I approach the new places I visit and the way I write about places I know. It has changed other people’s lives. Perhaps it will change yours.

  The Wood Wife is for

  Brian, Wendy, and Toby Froud,

  with love.

  And in memory of Herbert Emil Rasmussen

  (1916–1994), who is greatly missed.

  Who wants to understand the poem

  Must go to the land of poetry.

  —Johann Wolfgang

  von Goethe

  Prologue ❋

  On the night that Davis Cooper died, coyotes came down from the hills to the town in the desert valley below. They came from the Santa Rita Mountains in the south. From the Tucson Mountains in the west. From the Catalinas in the north. From the Rincons, where the sun would rise over the dead man’s body.

  They entered the sleeping city, shadows travelling stealthily through a network of dry riverbeds, slipping through the streets, through parking lots, through drainage tunnels and alleyways. There was one small boy who saw them pass, his nose pressed to the window glass as four, ten, twenty coyotes drifted through suburban yards, headed for some wilder place where the child longed to follow. Later his mother would tell him it was only a dream, and he would believe her.

  The place where the coyotes gathered—by the hundreds, a sea of silver fur beneath a moon like a bright new coin—was not a place that one would easily find on any city map. Davis Cooper had known that place. One other had found it, and returned. Now she ignored the calling song. She shut the window, sat down at her kitchen table, lit another cigarette. She was free now. Free. The word tasted sour. Her heart was as heavy as a stone.

  • • •

  Johnny Foxxe made a camp among the trees at Deer Head Springs, high in the Rincon Mountains. In the city below on the desert floor the spring night had been soft and warm, but here it was sharp, biting through his denim jacket and the flannel shirt beneath. He gathered deadfall for a fire. The wood was dry and lit easily. The smoke streamed upward to the stars and marked his presence, if anyone watched.

  He breathed in familiar mountain smells and bent down at the lip of the springs to taste the sweetness of the water. Deer Head Springs was on a trail so steep that few ever climbed it except the animals who had given it its name: the small, shy desert mule deer, and the elusive white stag whom he’d glimpsed only twice in all his years on the mountain.

  The first time he had seen the stag had been by Red Springs, many years before. The second time had been right here, two months ago, on the day he’d left the mountain. He smiled. Now he was back again. It was several miles by mountain trails to the Red Springs house where he’d been born, but the entire length of the Rincon range was home to Johnny Foxxe. Each time he left it, it summoned him back. He’d never been able to resist its call. No woman, no job, no other ties had ever bound him so securely.

  In several days he would make the long hike to the canyon where the old house stood. But now he had a job to do. His smile vanished. He sat down by the fire and arranged his tools beside him. A copal flute, a deerskin drum. A hunting knife and a sharpening stone. He sat and bided his time until the water trapped the image of the moon. He fed live oak branches into the fire, waiting, preparing himself.

  • • •

  Dora del Río woke from a deep sleep in the middle of the night. Something was howling outside the bedroom window—a strange, feral, ferocious sound, neither quite human nor animal. She reached for Juan, but he wasn’t there asleep in the bed beside her. She turned on the light. The cats were curled and stretched among the bedclothes. She counted all four. The cats were all right. The dog was snoring on the rug below, but Juan was gone and the bed was cold. The clock read 1:15 in the morning.

  Outside the howling stopped abruptly. She got up, shivering, and reached for her shawl. Through the window, she could see lights on in the barn where Juan had his studio. She stopped to put on dusty boots beneath her long white nightdress, and then she stepped out into the dark and crossed the stable yard.

  The doors to the barn were flung open. Inside, Juan stood in the center of the room, a hunting knife clutched in his hand. Ten years worth of paintings hung in tatters, the frames shattered, the canvases slashed. Clay sculptures littered the room in pieces. Carvings smouldered on the wooden floor, threatening to torch the whole barn.

  Dora stood and stared at him. Then she ran to fetch a bucket. Juan watched, impassive and glassy-eyed, until she doused the flames with water. Then he wrenched the bucket from her hands and struck her, hard, across the jaw. He had never hit his wife before and even in this wild state the action seemed to startle him; he stopped and looked at her, wide-eyed. And then he made that howling sound, an animal sound, a sound of pain, wrenched from deep in the gut.

  He pushed past Dora and out the open door. She fetched another bucket of water and thoroughly drenched the piled wood. Then she dropped the bucket and ran to the door. Juan had already disappeared. The night was quiet. The moon was bright. Blood spattered the cobbled yard. She stopped in the house just long enough to put on a sweater, gloves, and call the dog. Then she snatched a flashlight and went out to follow her husband up the mountainside.

  She sent the dog first and followed after, hoping the dog would follow Juan. The hills sounded strangely quiet now; the birds were still, the coyotes as silent as though they all had disappeared. She climbed for many hours that night, farther and farther up the mountain slope. Her jaw ached where Juan had struck her, a thing he’d vowed he would never do. Dora shivered and she continued to climb, looking for signs of his passage. She saw jackrabbits, a pair of deer, a huge white owl passing overhead, but she did not see any sign of Juan and at last she admitted defeat. She whistled for the dog and circled back toward the house nestled in the hills below. Beyond were the distant lights of the city farther down on the desert floor.

  She found him on the way back home, at the place where Redwater Creek cut through the granite to form deep bathing pools. He was curled up, naked, fast asleep on the flat boulders at the water’s edge. He had marked himself with oil paint: jagged white lines, green snake curves, blue spiral patterns and slashes of red. There was paint in his hair, blood on his chin. He had cut himself above one cheek; any closer and he would have lost the eye.

  She touched him gently. “Juan?” she said.

  He opened his eyes and smiled at her. Then tears began to fall, mixing with blood, oil paint and dirt. “I want to go home,” he whispered to Dora.

  “All right, my love. Here, take my hand.”

  He rose to his feet unsteadily, leaning heavily on her smaller frame. His feet were bare. His legs were bruised. His skin was cold
and his eyes confused. She led him down the steep mountain path, the dog trailing silent behind.

  • • •

  The saguaro cactus were straight and slim, standing ten and twelve feet tall, bathed in the silver moonlight. They clustered on the rocky slope, silent guardians of the low foothills, their arms upraised as if in prayer, or preparation for flight.

  At their feet was Davis Cooper. The dead man lay facedown in the dirt, his body sprawled in the bottom of a dried-out riverbed. The old man’s lungs were filled with water, although no water had run through that wash for forty years. His skin was stained with smears of paint; the fingers of one hand were curled as though he had held on to something tightly—but whatever it had been was gone. Only the poet’s body remained, circled by a single pair of footprints lightly pressed into the ground and soon scattered by the desert wind.

  • • •

  Tomás stared into the fire, aware of the other fire that burned that night several miles away. The flames leapt high into the dark. The mesquite wood burned quick and hot. He could feel a rhythm, a pulse, a drum, sounding deep in the rock below.

  He poured kinnikinnick from a pouch into the scarred palm of one hand, then tossed a mixture of herbs and tobacco into the dancing flames. The voice of the fire spoke to him. And the voice of the wind in the mesquite wood. Of the stone people, and of the water flowing there at the canyon’s heart.

  It has ended, these voices told him. It has ended, and it has just begun.

  Chapter One ❋

  The hills call in a tongue

  only the language-haunted hear,

  and lead us back again

  into the place where we have started.

  —The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

  Nigel came down the street toward her, his face shadowed with annoyance. Her heart, that traitorous organ, still leapt when she saw her ex-husband through the window glass. She knew then why she’d run back to Los Angeles, away from the nice man up north who said he loved her; Nigel was a hard act to follow. He entered the cafe, his irritation and his energy like a cloud that entered with him, changing the weather of the entire room. And reminding her of why she’d once run away from Nigel too.