By Leonora Lewis
“Your mother’s breathing has changed. You need to get here.”
I’d expected that call from hospice. I knew it was going to happen.
It still took me by surprise.
“I’m at the dealership. I’ll see if they’re done with my car.”
I hung up to see about my car and my phone rang again.
“I’m sorry. Your mother died.”
Now, I stood there rooted to the spot, staring at mom’s corpse. I took in her scaly bluish skin with pink patches, her black hair sticking out everywhere in clumps, her staring eyes covered with film. Her brows more prominent and her teeth in her open mouth sharper and more pointed.
The strokes shredded her brain and stripped everything away from her. She no longer read. This cut her off from her religious books that had provided comfort over the years. I tried to read to her, until she let me know she didn’t want me reading aloud.
Mom lay facing away from the morning sunlight streaming in through the window. She used to welcome the morning light. All that stopped with the last hospitalization. No more looking out the window at the distant treetops and trying scribble down stories about Grandfather and Grandmother Pine.
I thought. She’s half sitting up with an arm raised. She might as well be stone.
Since Mom had gone into hospice, she might as well have been speaking a foreign language. Her voice had changed, becoming deep, raspy, and hoarse. When she managed to communicate to me, she always brought up the troll wife.
I’d sit by her, while she ran her fingers up and down my arms, sometimes brushing them, patting them, or pinching, with a grin on her face. It was the first time I’d noticed how pointed her teeth were getting.
She saw the look on my face.
“It’s O. K,” she rasped, “When…all that’s left…is troll wife, we make it work. I try not to dis-gust you.”
“Mom, I’m sorry. I never meant the things I said when I had to clean you up.”
“You re-member troll wife. I told you the sto-ry.”
“Many times.”
“Tell me.”
“About the troll wife?”
“Tell me,” She insisted.
Never disappoint an animal, a child, or an old person. I set out to channel my inner Hans Christian Anderson and tell her the story she’d told me many times.
* * *
“Sometime in the early 1700s, there was a handsome young man unlucky in love. Folks said he set his sights too high. Rejected by all the women he wanted; he took it into his head to get rich quick by finding a legendary Viking hoard that everyone said was sunk in the nearby river. All those who searched for it returned empty-handed.
“All that happened was he wasted the day and stubbed his toe on a chunk of the old Troll Stone, which had lain face up for ages where there had been a ford before the bridge.
“Standing on the bridge as night fell the piece of Troll Stone with its one rough cut goggling eye seemed to mock him. Angry, he hurled the Troll Stone into the water below.
‘Who dares throw a rock under my bridge?’ A strange raspy gurgling voice called out.”
“Stu-pid.” Mom rasped. “For-got trolls lived und-er bridges.”
I looked at Mom lying there, her torso and legs were all twisted up. She’d stopped trying to get out of bed and refused rehab after the last stroke.
I told her and told her, “You’re going to get where you can’t straighten them.”
Mom acted like she understood, until nurses tried to straighten her legs and get her out of bed. Then she raised hell, fighting back and screaming. I’d have to pry Mom’s fingers loose one by one from the bedrails, while her high-pitched shrieks hurt my ears. Then she’d curl her webbed fingers around mine, crushing them.
When Mom went to hospice, I gave up hope she would ever get out of bed again.
“The young man turned and run back towards the bank trying to get off the bridge.
“Thump. Thump. Thump.” I did my best impression of the troll’s heavy webbed feet with their long extended middle toe.
Mr. Lo, the hospice house manager, and a trained caregiver, had commented on Mom’s webbed toes with her middle toe being the longest when clipping her toenails, while she dug her sharp fingernails into my hands hard enough to hurt.
“It’s genetic,” I’d said. “Her father, who was half Swedish half Danish had it too.”
Mom stopped screaming and looked right at me. “You don’t. No. Troll. In. You. No troll in your father.”
It was the clearest thing Mom had said in days. I didn’t have webbing between my toes or a long middle toe. That ran in her side of the family, not Dad’s.
“Huge clammy hands with sharp claws seized him from behind.
“When he got his senses back, what sense he had, he found himself staring into the hideous face of a troll looking at him through its goggling yellow eyes. A troll woman, squat as a giant frog with a stubby tail dangling down between her legs from behind.
“He burst into tears. ‘Please, don’t eat me! I won’t look for gold here anymore.’
“‘Stop crying,’ the troll woman said. ‘Or I’ll take a bite out of you and give you a real reason to cry.’
“’Let me go,’ he begged.
“’You don’t want gold?’
“’Can you get it for me?’
“The troll woman considered for a moment. ‘I’ll get it, but you have to promise me something.’
“’What is the promise?’ He asked.
“’You must marry me.’
“’With all my heart,’ He figured Trolls were stupid and he’d figure out how to trick her.”
“Troll Men stu-pid. Troll Wo-men smart.” Mom said.
“The troll women slid into the water. She surfaced about ten minutes later dragging a strong box, almost long as a man is tall.
“His skin crawled when the troll woman took his hand in her huge slimy hand with its thick fingers with sticky finger pads and short claws.
“‘Promise yourself to me.’
“The young man’s words stumbled over themselves as he promised himself as husband to the troll woman and she vowed to be his wife.
“Then he discovered he couldn’t lift the box. He couldn’t even drag it. It was too heavy.
“’I’ll carry the treasure for you, husband.’
“The young man agreed, figuring if he took his time walking back to the village and the troll woman was caught out by sun rise, she’d turn to stone.
“Only the troll woman walked at such a pace it was still dark when they reached the village.
“Thinking fast, the young man suggested ‘Maybe we should put the treasure in the church.’
“He pushed at the heavy wooden doors until they groaned open enough for him to slip inside. The troll woman slid the box inside, but when she made to follow, the young man threw all his weight on the doors slamming them shut and dropping the heavy iron bar down inside.
“’Go back to the river, you ugly troll, or turn to stone when morning comes!’ He jeered.
“’Justice!’ the troll woman bawled. ‘Justice. I claim justice from Christian men!’
“The young man rubbed his hands together expecting the villagers to wake up and kill the troll. Instead, he heard the Lutheran Priest speaking asking the men to stand back before asking the troll woman, ‘Who do you say has wronged you?’
“’Him.’
“The priest called out, ‘Come out at once.’
“With bad grace the young man came out keeping the priest between him and the troll woman.
“The troll woman told the priest everything.
“’Did you promise to marry her and exchange vows?’ asked the priest.
“The young man shrugged, ‘It’s not binding. Men don’t marry trolls. The promise doesn’t matter.’
“’All promises matter to God!’ the priest thundered. ‘Hear me now! You will marry her and all present shall be witness.’”
Mom clapped her hands together in glee at this.
“After the wedding, as the bride and her unhappy groom left the church, the first sun’s rays struck them in the doorway.”
I remembered how when I went running to Dad asking if trolls were real. Dad, gone almost twenty years now, explained to my six-year-old self, that someone, generations ago made that story up to explain all those short dark Danes marrying tall blonde Swedes.
“The troll wife’s stubby tail dropped off where it lay on the church threshold still wriggling for a bit the way a lizard’s tail does. When the young man looked again his unwanted troll wife had shrunk, her skin was no longer scaly though she was pale. Her eyes didn’t protrude as much and she had a think head of fine black hair, her best feature. She had become a woman.
“Still, she was no beauty.
“When she spoke, he saw a good set of strong white teeth in her mouth.
“’If you had been honest, I would have become beautiful. Because you tried to trick me, what you see is what you get. Now there is troll blood in your line. When the soul of the last woman of your line takes leave of this world the troll wife will remain.’”
Mom had fallen asleep by the time I finished.
* * *
Even in death, Mom’s head was raised, her eyes and mouth open in one last soundless scream. How many times over the last month had I listened to Mom shouting, “I’m falling! Falling! Stop. Stop! STOP! No. No! NO!
“Can’t we close her eyes?” I asked Mr. Lo, who’d cleaned Mom, changed her diaper, and treated the gaping sore on her tailbone even though she was screaming her head off.
He, bless his heart, stepped forward and bent over, blocking my view.
After a couple of seconds, he stepped back, “No. Can’t do it. I need to call funeral home.”
“Yes. Call the funeral home. I need to start making calls. Letting the family know…” I sank down into the chair by the bedside.
She stopped eating. She talked, but I rarely understood her.
Everything after Mom’s death was a blur. The funeral home people arriving to take her away. Realizing I can’t sit there facing the empty spot where Mom had been, I began to make calls.
* * *
I’ve seen footprints with webbed toes, the middle toe longer, left in the backyard after night rain. I’ve heard rustling in the leaves at night.
Now that I’m retired, I sit up reading, and I leave the back yard light on.
Somehow, we’ll make this work.
Sarah Lewis now writes under the name of Leonora Lewis. Her fiction has appeared in COLP: Feet, Electric Spec, and Epic Echoes. She won first and third prize in the Writers’ Journal August 2011 Poetry Contest. She lives in Texas and is an active member of the Woodlands Writing Guild.
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