THE MIDWIFE HAD LOST ANOTHER TOOTH, and was hobbling about on her broken ankle, throwing copper pots and cooking spoons about the cottage in her anger at age and teeth and life. “Get out of my sight, Dung Beetle,
before I squash you.” “Alyce.”
“What did you call me?”
“Not you, me. Alyce. My name is Alyce.”
“Alyce!” The midwife snorted like Walter Smith’s great black horse, Toby. “Alyce! You look more like a Toad or a Weasel or a Mudhen than an Alyce.” And as she punctuated each name with another pot thrown in the girl’s direction, Beetle thought to go out.
Out was no punishment. Out was where there were no kettles to stir, no bottles to fill, no smoky cooking fire. Out was where the air was cool, this summer morning, although the sun was warm. Out was where Beetle had spent most of her life.
Out was where the cat was. She wanted to tell him about her new name. Alyce. She had not dared yet say it aloud, but now that she had said it to the midwife, she wanted to tell everyone. “Alyce,” she said to the cat, who rubbed and purred against her ankle. “I have a name now, cat, and you must also, so I can call you to breakfast on cold, foggy mornings. I will say some names, and you tell me when I have found the right one.”
Beetle sat on the dusty ground, legs crossed. The cat sat and stared at her. “Willow?” she asked. “Purslane? Gypsy Moth? Lentil?” The cat just stared.
Beetle stood and walked toward the river, one hand across her belly, the other stuck in her mouth. Beetle was thinking. “Bryony? Millstone?
Fleecy?”
“Gone completely daft, have you, Beetle?” said the miller as he passed. “Alyce,” said Beetle.
“Alyce who? Who Alyce?”
“I am Alyce,” Beetle said. “Not Brat or Dung Beetle or Beetle. Alyce.”
“Bah,” said the miller. “May as well call a rock Alyce. Or a sheep. Alyce.
Bah.”
“Earth Pine?” continued Beetle to the cat. “Dartmoor? Cheesemaker?
Holly? Pork?”
“Who you callin’ Pork, you whiffle-brained dung beetle?” This from the blacksmith’s lardy daughter, Grommet.
“The cat,” Beetle said, “and I am Alyce.”
“You are nitwit,” Grommet Smith replied, and laughed as she waddled away.
Beetle sighed. This business of having a name was harder than it seemed.
A name was of little use if no one would call you by it.
The cat wound himself around Beetle’s ankle and purred. “Columbine?
Cuttlefish?”
“Purr,” the cat responded.
“Clotweed? Shrovetide? Wimble?” “Purr,” the cat responded.
“Horsera—”
“Purr,” the cat demanded. “Purr?” Beetle asked.
“Purr,” the cat responded. And that was that.
While Beetle and Purr walked in the sunshine, waiting for the midwife’s temper to cool enough for them to beg bread and cheese and an onion or two, the villagers brought in the last sheaves from the field and, hay harvest over, sat down to eat and drink and give thanks the rain had held off.
Several of the village boys, with too much ale and too few wits, left the celebration looking for trouble to cause. And they found Beetle.
“Dung Beetle, give me a kiss,” called the boy with red hair.
“Alyce,” whispered Beetle, surrounded by boys and abandoned by the cat.
“She calls you Alyce, Will. Thinks you’re a girl or a fine lady down from the manor. You friends with the dung beetle, Lady Alyce?” The boy with
the broken teeth took another pull from his mug of ale and spat at Will.
Beetle took advantage of Will’s distraction to duck beneath his arm, loop her skirts between her legs, and take off down the road to the river. The
boys were faster, but they were drunk, and Beetle reached the river before they did. She looked for safety. An open field lay to her right. They could catch her there; they were not that drunk. Straight ahead was the river, but she could not swim. No one could. Water was for horses to drink and an occasional quick bath before weddings and such.
A sudden breeze rustled the leaves of a willow, as if it were calling to Beetle. Up she climbed into the branches, treed like a fox, waiting for what would happen next.
Pushing and shoving each other, the boys encircled the tree. “Dung beetle, dung beetle, you must be afeared, so far from your dung,” they chanted. “Come down and we will take you home and lay you softly into the dung heap, deep, deep, deep into the dung heap.”
More ale swigging and chanting and pushing and shoving. Suddenly the boy with red hair lost his footing on the slippery bank and tumbled into the churning river.
“Gorm, Will, get out of there,” said snaggletoothed Jack.
“Can’t,” said Will, spitting water and floundering. “Throw me somethin’ to grab.”
But the water pulled Will under for a moment and the boys, grown sober and scared, knocked one another aside in their attempts to get out of there to a place they could claim they had never left when poor Will’s drowned body was found. So that, when Will surfaced again, still spitting and floundering, no one was there but Beetle in the tree, looking down at him with her eyes great in her white face.
“Beetle, help me. Throw me somethin’.” Beetle shook her head. “I be too scared.”
He disappeared again, and Beetle crept carefully out on an overhanging branch to see where he had gone. Sputtering, up he came, too full of water to call her name or beg for help, only looking at her as his arms slapped the water around him.
Beetle crept farther out on her branch. It dipped toward the river. Very slowly, inch by inch, as the boy struggled not to sink, she crept out until the tip of the branch nearly touched the water.
“Grab it, Will,” she said. And he grabbed it. Slowly, slowly he pulled himself along the branch until, from his pulling and Beetle’s weight, it cracked, and they both fell onto the riverbank.
Will lay there while Beetle watched to see was he alive or was he dead. Then he spat river water all over her skirt and she knew he lived to bedevil her again.
“You didn’t run with the others,” he said. “That were brave, Beetle.” “Naw, I be not brave,” she said. “I near pissed myself. I did it for else
you’d have drowned and gone to Hell, a drunken loudmouth bully like you,
and I would have helped send you there and I could not have that, now, could I?”
“You have pluck, Beetle.” “Alyce.”
“You have pluck, Alyce.”
They looked at each other, pretended they hadn’t, and went home. That night Beetle had a dream. The pope came to the village and called her
Alyce and the king married the midwife and the cat laughed.
