THERE BEING FEW BABIES BORN that September, Alyce and the midwife spent their days making soap and brewing cider and wine. The first occupation stank up the air for miles around, what with goose grease and mutton fat boiling away in the kettle, so that Roger Mustard in the manor fields and the miller at his wheel near the river sniffed the air and said, “Someone be making soap today.”
The second task would lay perfume on the air and gladden noses near and far. Alyce was greatly relieved when enough soap was made to wash all the linen in England, and brewing could begin.
First they cooked parsnips with sugar and spices and yeast and poured this into casks, where the fermeriting mixture sang loud and sweet as it turned into wine. And the same they did with turnips.
Then Alyce, with baskets tied to each end of a pole, walked with the cat to the abbey gardens to gather fallen fruit. There, lying on the ground as if scattered by God just for Alyce, were apples, red and yellow, large and small, sweet and tart, firm and juicy. She tried a few, but unable to say whether she liked best the crisp, white-fleshed Cackagees, the small, sour Foxwhelps, or the mellow, sweet Rusticoats and Rubystripes, she tried a
few more. The cat, not finding that apples were good to eat, batted the small ones across the yard, imagining they had ears and tails and other parts that made things worth chasing.
Returning to the village late in the day, with her baskets and belly full of apples, Alyce cut through the manor field, near where the villagers had dug a pit for the quarrying of gravel. From inside the pit came the cries of some fearsome thing—a beast or a witch or a demon—so she crossed herself and hurried her steps.
The demon was calling, “Come here to me, here to me.” Alyce ran faster.
Then stopped. The demon sounded mighty like Will, the boy with red hair who used to torment her and now did not so much.
“Are you demon or redheaded lout?” she called. “Alyce, be that you?” came the response from the pit.
Cautiously she crept to the edge and looked over. It was redheaded lout, and with him his cow.
“Alyce, you must help me. Tansy has fallen into the pit and I cannot get her to climb out, for she is about to have her calf and will not move. Come and help me.”
“I am no midwife for cows, Will Russet,” she called. “She needs your help, Alyce, and so do I.”
“Indeed I am no midwife at all, Will Russet, and I do not know what to do.”
“Come over and I will tell you. This is Tansy’s first calf but not mine.” At that Tansy called out, low and mournful and full of pain and fright.
Alyce could not bear to leave her like that, so she put down her baskets of apples and slid into the pit.
Will grinned at her. “Good for you, Alyce. Here, hold her head. Keep her quiet. Sing something soft.”
“I do not know any singing, Will Russet.”
“Croon a song without words, then. Just make sweet noises.”
So Alyce did, although none would have called them sweet but she and
the boy and the cow. And perhaps the cat, who lay above, where Alyce had left him, carefully licking the soft pink pads of his feet.
“Hold her, Alyce. Rub her head and belly. If we can but calm her, God will tell her and the calf what to do.”
Alyce sang and rubbed, calling the cow Sweetheart and Good Old Girl as she heard Will do, and the boy pushed and pulled and worked as hard as the cow. Several times they near gave up, but Alyce always found one more song or one more rub inside her, and Will loved Tansy like she was his babe and not his cow, and so the tired pair kept on.
Finally, as day darkened into evening, there came the feet of a calf. Then more feet. And more. “Twins, Alyce!” cried Will. “You have brought me great luck, for Tansy be having twins!”
So she was, and soon two slippery, shiny, brand-new calves were lying in the dirt of the pit, and Tansy was licking and nuzzling them gently.
Once Alyce and Will took the calves upon their shoulders and scrambled from the pit, so too did Tansy, not willing to stay alone in that hard, dark, and calfless place. Like a holy procession they returned to the village, the boy and the girl and the newborn twins and the cow and the cat.
Will, so happy with twice the bounty he expected from Tansy, made sure to tell everyone of his luck and of the great help Alyce had been to him, and Alyce felt her skin prickling with delight, although she got in a muck of
trouble for being so long about apple gathering and then losing the baskets as well as the fruit, for in the excitement of the twin calves they were forgotten and left behind and never seen again.
As September turned to October and October to November, through all those days, Alyce grew in knowledge and skills. The midwife, busy with her own importance, did not notice. Alyce, grown accustomed to herself, did not notice. But the villagers noticed, and as October turned to November and the ghosts walked on All Hallows’ Eve, they began to ask
her how and why and what can I. Sometimes for her help or advice someone would pay her a ribbon or an egg or a loaf of cheese or bread, which she
always gave to the midwife, as if Alyce herself were just the midwife’s hand or arm, doing the work and receiving the pay but taking no credit for the task.
One morning as they sat under the old oak tree eating their breakfast bread, Alyce told the cat again about the birth of Tansy’s twins. “All shiny they were, and sticky to touch. I did not even know them, but I loved them so much.” This sounded to her like a song, so she made singing sounds as she had that day in the gravel pit, and then sang her words to the tune:
All shiny they were, And sticky to touch.
I did not even know them, But I loved them so much.
And so it was that Alyce learned about singing and making songs. Her song brightened the cold gray day so that a cowbird thought it was spring and began to sing in the old oak tree.
