The Pillow
It was in the heart of Winter, and because I was myself as yet but six, my Great-Grandmother, dubbed 'Great Gran" by my generation, was yet alive. She seemed to me as crowned with white, as full of years as the trees outside were full of snow all on their bony limbs. We sat facing one another before the fire as we had on cold nights since I knew not when; she telling tales of the strange lands, peoples and deeds of the sort all children love best; tales of the place from which she'd come, a place that seemed to me made of snow. She told these tales to the rapt young me in the slow, clipped English she'd learned late in life, with many a foreign word falling into the tales from her ancient, cracked lips; words my parents couldn't understand, but which my young mind snapped right up, not imagining them to be foreign.She rocked, enormous to me in her creaking chair before me, back and forth. I sat crosslegged there upon her hearth, my tender young bottom settled cosily on a great old black pillow which she always dropped at just the right spot for me, before she bade me sit for the Winter ceremony of taletelling.
It had been another night of wolves and wizards, of Baba Yaga's Hut on its' scary chicken legs, and I could feel myself dropping down towards the pure sweet sleep of childhood. Knowing her tellings had had the effect my parents had sent me in to her for, she stopped midtale, leaned back, and smiled.
But then, instead of calling for them to come gather me up and carry me off to my dreams, she brought me back sharp awake with a loud rap of her pipe against the arm of her chair. She surged towards me with a creak of straining wood, looming above me so close I could see tiny reflections of myself looking back from her shining black eyes.
She had then that special air about her that all children recognize as meaning we were about to become conspirators, sharers of some great and magical secret.She gave a little clucking laugh. The fire sighed and shifted, the wind howled like hungry wolves outside, and in what seemed to me like the Voice of Forever, she began.
"Yoo are th' seventh child, yoo gnaow.," she intoned.
True, six siblings had warmed the pillow before me.
"And yoo are also neer yoor seventh year."
This too was so, though "neer" to her was the great gulf of several months to me.
"Seventh child of a seventh child," she further observed, sighing out the words in such a way that a voice inside my head quickly whispered, "Here is a mystery."
I knew, vaguely, that my father too was a seventh child, but I'd not yet lived long enough to have met all his siblings, which to my child's reckoning made them mostly myth. She continued.
"Yoo sit upon a magik ting, a Dream Pilloaw from Old Country.How old she be, nobody gnaow; maybe is even Baba Yaga's own."
At this I made to jump aside in fear, but she smiled and pushed me down again with her giant's wrinkled hand.
"Grant one Wish she will; but only to a seventh child of a seventh child, and only in theer seventh yeer of life.That why I telll you this naow. Take pilloaw from this night for yoors to dream on. Dream good dreams, for to choose a Wish. When Best Wish find yoo, sew picture of on pilloaw, then sleep on again. Then Wish come."
She sat back and began refilling her pipe, clearly certain of the truth of her pronouncements.
My tiny head was fit to burst with questions, but before the first of them could leap from my lips she swooped down over me like an eagle on a mouse and began again, speaking swiftly, like a guilty soul before Authority comes.
"This yoo do before yoor seven yeer is over. Is my gift to you before I go. Yoo will gnoaw Best Wish when It find yoo."
Then her hand shot out and gripped my little arm with surprising strength.
"Careful - " she whispered, "Baba send the Bad Wishes too."
She was deadly serious.
Then, as if on cue, the door opened and my parents to swoop me up and bear me off to bed. Great-Gran nodded gently to me and I picked up the pillow by one of its tassels as they lifted me up. My Mother made to take it from me, but Great-Gran stopped her, saying, "Let child have th' pilloaw. I give. Will sleep better."
"Good Night, Good Child," she bade me, taking up her pipe to light it again.
"Good Night, Great-Gran," I bid her sleepily, and was carried off to bed.
Well, what child doesn't want Wishes? I kept the pillow on my bed thereafter, and often laid my head upon it to sleep. I came to love it, though it was not like other pillows made for sleeping on. It was a little rough, and dusty, and dented from many a child's restless bottom. It was utterly black, black like night in a coal mine, unfaded through all its years. The tassels at its corners were threadbare and a weak yellow, but one could tell they had once been golden. Unremarkable, really. A blank slate.
Yet it had a smell, a scent like no other, that could only be perceived when I lay my head upon it, and this it was, I'm sure, that brought the dreams.
I could not have said so then, but it had within it the scent of all the life and death that trod the floor of some vast and trackless forest: mushrooms and mist, flowers and blood, sun, rain, snow and loneliness. The perfume, Great-Gran would've said, of "Moist Mother Earth".
When I slept with my nose in this pillow, dreams came of the great Taiga Forest, where the trees roll on like a green ocean; of running with wolves on a hunt, of men with Asian faces who rode horses whose silver fastenings flashed like starlight, of many mythic creatures from Great-Grand's tales. The dreams were full of beauty, and sometimes, too, of terror. There were Snow Queens in the Taiga; there were also redeyed Things that watched and waited in the shadows to snatch the unwary soul. Baba Yaga sends the Bad Things too.
And so there were many dreams, but no Wish stepped forward to announce itself in them.Not that I wanted for Wishes. All children have them by the sackful, and I was no exception. But I knew that there was only one that I might really, magically have granted, and Great-Gran had said that this one must find me.How a Wish might go about doing this I had no idead, but I never doubted she was right. I was still pondering this when my Birthday came with the beginning of Spring.
My Birthday came and went with all its joys and disappointments, and now I knew I'd entered my special Seventh Year. My Mother was much surprised when I asked her to teach me how to sew, but when I persisted she took the time and without too much shedding of my blood I quickly learned to stitch some simple pictures. I wanted to be ready when my Wish found me.
My new hobby should've pleased and amused my parents, but they paid it little mind, for this Spring was different enough that eventually even I, of so little experience, began to feel it. Spring is the time of Beginnings, my body had already told me, but for us it was bringing an Ending. The Winter's cold seemed to hang on us like a dog that won't let go of its bone. the smiles seemed strained, the sun less warm.
As the days lengthened I came to realize what was wrong. The Winter had so chilled Great-Gran that she could no longer warm herself again.She emerged from her room less and less, then finally not at all. She still spoke from her bed and told me tales, but she tired easily and sometimes stopped midsentence, and always she was cold. Her skin, always pale, now was becoming almost transparent, so that I feared she might be turning to glass before me.Her hands, folded atop her mound of blankets, felt like ice each time I pressed them before taking my leave. I was shooed out more and more, and the grownups whispered among themselves more and more, and I found myself wishing, without knowing I was wishing, that I could do something to rid Great-Gran of her terrible chill.
And then, one sweet night in May, my Best Wish came into my head and found me. I was sleeping on the pillow and dreaming of the Firebird.
The Firebird, the mighty Russian bird of fable, whose feathers were of gold so bright that but one of them could light the whole of a dark room; the marvelous creature that could burn itself to ashes, then rise again from them in all of its splendor; this Being appeared in my room and bade me, with a look from its crystal eyes, to mount his back and fly with him to where he wished to go.
So climb on his back I did, and then out the window we went into the black night and we rose and rose until the stars danced around us like sparks in the hearth.Yet being up so high, I grew so cold that even next to him I shivered, feeling as though my very bones had turned to ice and I felt I might break apart.
Feeling me shake so, he laughed, and looking over his shoulder he said inside my head, "Look, and I will show you something."
At that, he turned and dove and I could see the sun below, rushing up to meet us; brighter and brighter and hotter and hotter until I thought to myself, "This then, is surely how the logs must feel in the fire!"
He plunged us right into the sun, and there was nothing but gold light everywhere. I assumed I was no more.
But after a time I felt that I still was. The light cleared away, and I now saw we were flying low over a vast, majestic land, the Taiga, but there was no snow here. Great meadows spread out between the forests, grass green like emeralds, sky blue above like sapphire, and wildflowers everywhere that made a perfume like a symphony.Beneath this scent there was another, as of many homefires burning in the great distance, and all about the air was warm, warm, warm like a kitten in the lap.He set me down in a meadow, turned to me, and his sparkling eyes said, "Remember".
I awoke, and knew at once that my Best Wish had found me.
I crept out to where my Mother kept her sewing things and brought them back to my room and set right to work.
I labored feverishly, fighting not to fall back asleep, but when morning came and Mother knocked on the door to wake me, I found that my head had fallen again onto the pillow. I started, fearful that I'd failed, but saw to my relief that my work, crude though it was, was done.
Later that day we all went in by turns to see Great-Gran. When it came my turn, I brought my pillow along to show her; Mother said she thought it would please her very much to see it, and she cried a little.
Great-Gran was propped up, but didn't look very comfortable. When she saw me with the pillow, though, she smiled, just like always.
"So. Yoor Wish it find yoo, yes?" she asked, a little weakly.
I turned the pillow about and held it up for her to see, uncomfortably aware of the poor job my small hands and smaller skill had done, but she knew what it was.
"Th' Firebird?" she asked, one fuzzy eyebrow rising high.
"Oh, Great-Gran," I said, all in a sudden rush of feeling. "I just want you to be warm again! Let me put him here with you so he can take the cold away!" And, hardly knowing what I was about, I came up close, and lifting up her head, tucked the pillow up behind her. As I did, something bumped against the window. There was a fine Spring breeze up outside, and cherry blossoms were blowing past like snow.
"Ah, child," she sighed to me, smiling like God's oldest angel. "The Best Wish DO find yoo! I go to the Summerlands naow. Is not cold there, not never. Thank Yoo, Good Child."
She pressed me with a warm hand, and, just like that, she died.
Something like the shadow of a wing passed over the wall above the bed; some bird by the window, no doubt.
Now I find myself full of years, and indeed it grows more difficult to stay warm all the time. Perhaps the heat of Youth, like a good fire, leaps at first, then slowly settles to embers as the years steal by. No matter.
I have yet my pillow, which Nurse thinks she indulges me by allowing me to keep. I endulge her by allowing her to think so. It still brings me Mother Earth's perfume, with many fine dreams and memories, and I know that soon, I shall have Her for my blanket.
The ghostly outline of my crude little Firebird lies still upon it, though I've had no visit from him again in all this while. No matter. I know that he will come to me again soon, to bear me off to all I love.
There is a tapping at the window. I feel wonderful, and warm.
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