The Wife's Story

 

The Wife's     Story

URSULA K. LEGUIN

        

He was a good husband, a good father. I don’t understand it. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that it

happened. I saw it happen but it isn’t true. It can’t be. He was always gentle. If you’d have seen him

playing with the children, anybody who saw him with the children would have known that there wasn’t

any bad in him, not one mean bone. When I first met him he was still living with his mother, over near

Spring Lake, and I used to see them together, the mother and the sons, and think that any young fellow

that was that nice with his family must be one worth knowing. Then one time when I was walking in the

woods I met him by himself coming back from a hunting trip. He hadn’t got any game at all, not so much

as a field mouse, but he wasn’t cast down about it. He was just larking along enjoying the morning air.

That’s one of the things I first loved about him. He didn’t take things hard, he didn’t grouch and whine

when things didn’t go his way. So we got to talking that day. And I guess things moved right along after

that, because pretty soon he was over here pretty near all the time. And my sister said — see, my

parents had moved out the year before and gone south, leaving us the place — my sister said, kind of

teasing but serious, “Well! If he’s going to be here every day and half the night, I guess there isn’t room

for me!” And she moved out — just down the way. We’ve always been real close, her and me. That’s the

sort of thing doesn’t ever change. I couldn’t ever have got through this bad time without my sis. 

Well, so he come to live here. And all I can say is, it was the happiest year of my life. He was just purely

good to me. A hard worker and never lazy, and so big and fine‐looking. Everybody looked up to him, you

know, young as he was. Lodge Meeting nights, more and more often they had him to lead the singing.

He had such a beautiful voice, and he’d lead off strong, and the others following and joining in, high

voices and low. It brings the shivers on me now to think of it, hearing it, nights when I’d stayed home

from meeting when the children was babies — the singing coming up through the trees there, and the

moonlight, summer nights, the full moon shining. I’ll never hear anything so beautiful. I’ll never know a

joy like that again.

It was the moon, that’s what they say. It’s the moon’s fault, and the blood. It was in his father’s blood. I

never knew his father, and now I wonder what become of him. He was from up Whitewater way, and

had no kin around here. I always thought he went back there, but now I don’t know. There was some

talk about him, tales that come out after what happened to my husband. It’s something runs in the

blood, they say, and it may never come out, but if it does, it’s the change of the moon that does it.

Always it happens in the dark of the moon, when everybody’s home and asleep. Something comes over

the one that’s got the curse in his blood, they say, and he gets up because he can’t sleep, and goes out

into the glaring sun, and goes off all alone — drawn to find those like him. 

And it may be so, because my husband would do that. I’d half rouse and say, “Where you going to?” and

he’d say, “Oh, hunting, be back this evening,” and it wasn’t like him, even his voice was different. But I’d

be so sleepy, and not wanting to wake the kids, and he was so good and responsible, it was no call of

mine to go asking “Why?” and “Where?” and all like that.

So it happened that way maybe three times or four. He’d come back late and worn out, and pretty near

cross for one so sweet‐tempered — not wanting to talk about it.  I figured everybody got to bust out

now and then, and nagging never helped anything.  But it did begin to worry me.  Not so muc that he

went, but that he come back so tired and strange. Even, he smelled strange. It made my hair stand up on

end. I could not endure it and I said, “What is that — those smells on you? All over you!” And he said, “I

don’t know,” real short, and made like he was sleeping. But he went down when he thought I wasn’t

noticing, and washed and washed himself. But those smells stayed in his hair, and in our bed, for days.

And then the awful thing. I don’t find it easy to tell about this. I want to cry when I have to bring it to my

mind. Our youngest, the little one, my baby, she turned from her father. Just overnight. He come in and

she got scared‐looking, stiff, with her eyes wide, and then she begun to cry and try to hide behind me.

She didn’t yet talk plain but she was saying over and over, “Make it go away! Make it go away!”

The look in his eyes; just for one moment, when he heard that. That’s what I don’t want‐ever to

remember. That’s what I can’t forget. The look in his eyes looking at his own child.

I said to the child, “Shame on you, what’s got into you!” — scolding, but keeping her right up close to me

at the same time, because I was frightened too. Frightened to shaking.

He looked away then and said something like, “Guess she just waked up dreaming,” and passed it off

that way. Or tried to. And so did I. And I got real mad with my baby when she kept on acting crazy scared

of her own dad. But she couldn’t help it and I couldn’t change it.

He kept away that whole day. Because he knew, I guess. It was just beginning dark of the moon.

It was hot and close inside, and dark, and we’d all been asleep some while, when something woke me

up. He wasn’t there beside me. I heard a little stir in the passage, when I listened. So I got up, because I

could bear it no longer. I went out into the passage, and it was light there, hard sunlight coming in from

the door. And I saw him standing just outside, in the tall grass by the entrance. His head was hanging.

Presently he sat down, like he felt weary, and looked down at his feet. I held still, inside, and watched —

I didn’t know what for.

And I saw what he saw. I saw the changing. In his feet, it was, first. They got long, each foot got longer,

stretching out, the toes stretching out and the foot getting long, and fleshy, and white. And no hair on

them.

The hair begun to come away all over his body. It was like his hair fried away in the sunlight and was

gone. He was white all over then, like a worm’s skin. And he turned his face. It was changing while I

looked, it got flatter and flatter, the mouth flat and wide, and the teeth grinning flat and dull, and the

nose just a knob of flesh with nostril holes, and the ears gone, and the eyes gone blue — blue, with

white rims around the blue — staring at me out of that flat, soft, white face.

He stood up then on two legs.

I saw him, I had to see him. My own dear love, turned in the hateful one.

I couldn’t move, but as I crouched there in the passage staring out into the day I was trembling and

shaking with a growl that burst out into a crazy awful howling.  A grief howl and a terror howl.  And the

others heard it, even sleeping, and woke up.

It stared and peered, that thing my husband had turned into, and shoved its face up to the entrance of

our house. I was still bound by mortal fear, but behind me the children had waked up, and the baby was

whimpering. The mother anger come into me then, and I snarled and crept forward.

The man thing looked around. It had no gun, like the ones from the man places do. But it picked up a

heavy fallen tree branch in its long white foot, and shoved the end of that down into our house, at me. I

snapped the end of it in my teeth and started to force my way out, because I knew the man would kill

our children if it could. But my sister was already coming. I saw her running at the man with her head

low and her mane high and her eyes yellow as the winter sun. It turned on her and raised up that branch

to hit her. But I come out of the doorway, mad with the mother anger, and the others all were coming

answering my call, the whole pack gathering, there in that blind glare and heat of the sun at noon.

The man looked round at us and yelled out loud, and brandished the branch it held. Then it broke and

ran, heading for the cleared fields and plowlands, down the mountainside. It ran, on two legs, leaping

and weaving, and we followed it.

I was last, because love still bound the anger and the fear in me. I was running when I saw them pull it

down. My sister’s teeth were in its throat. I got there and it was dead. The others were drawing back

from the kill, because of the taste of the blood, and the smell. The younger ones were cowering and

some crying, and my sister rubbed her mouth against her fore legs over and over to get rid of the taste. I

went up close because I thought if the thing was dead the spell, the curse must be done, and my

husband could come back — alive, or even dead, if I could only see him, my true love, in his true form,

beautiful. But only the dead man lay there white and bloody. We drew back and back from it, and

turned and ran back up into the hills, back to the woods of the shadows and the twilight and the blessed

dark.

With affection,

Ruben