What you have heard is what the townspeople and the farmers in the valley have cobbled together as an imperfect expression of the truth because there are matters in every mystery that cannot be put to words. There is so much to tell you. Where do you want me to begin they would say and then fall silent as if the beginning of all things is silence as impenetrable as a thicket in the dark. Were they ever discovered in their mad dancing through the forest? They ask what you mean by mad. You define it. The uncontrollable drive to do something that is out of the ordinary defies the mundane conventions of how one should live one’s life.

  And one old woman, not the one who saw the angel, but her last surviving friend, pulls down the shoulder of her blouse and shows you a scar that tells you an oak tree, the tree of the Almighty, tried to hold her back and its twig cut into her flesh as she attempted to break free. Nature loves us too much to see our love wasted on mere passion she says and then crosses herself and mumbles a prayer under her breath.

  There is so much people want to know about Baptiste. Possessions and dispossessions. The town became synonymous with the idea of mass hysteria. The falling of souls down dark wells that could easily have been filled with the tears, the drinking water that inexplicably became salty one night when one of the maidens who had encountered the angels in the meadow as the sun set on a June evening long ago, and the unanswered question of why they did not return from the woods until dawn meant the town acquired an occult aura. One maiden was found in the highest branches of an oak, naked as the sunlight and held aloft as high as the tree could reach to show the Almighty what joy and passion look like. The church claimed the town was full of a madness that drove the young to dance on that hot evening when the blacksmith’s forge overflowed its embers and the sky tried to melt the lead filigree cross atop the church of St. John the Baptiste. Everyone blamed the visitation of the angel.

  Pure, virginal, young girls had seen it, larger than the fluttering insects illuminated in the setting sun, spinning vertically and rising from the wildflowers where the dance made the young lose control of their feet and they trampled the fairest blossoms that could have been a bridal bouquet in the fairest season of their lives. And what had the angel told them to do? The being spun and began to dance and held out her arms to the young and old alike and begged them to join in.

  The old woman looks up from her prayers and tells you that something always ruins the perfect moment within a person’s grasp. Is time ever better one moment than another? People are being born. Their mothers are screaming in agony. People are dying. The Lord’s kindness quiets their pleas and agonizing gasps for breath. Others are simply sitting at their tables, sharpening their knives of hulling wild strawberries the little green angels have guarded like the hearts of lovers, and having sorted the small, hard ones and the unripe green ones into a dish they will toss to the swine, realize how fragile the heart is when it can no longer control itself.

  Ask Angelique when the dancing stopped. She shrugs. She had no answer. Legend has it that everyone in Baptiste still dances. Word had come down from Heaven that everyone in the town had to dance. The command came from the Blessed John the Baptiste himself and he chose the isolated town named for him as the place where dancing would become part of a person’s life. Dancing, the angel said, perhaps quoting the Baptiste, would save the world and prepare for the kingdom.

  And when everyone danced they felt the kingdom inside them. They felt their limbs being lifted, the bodies weightless and spinning as the glowing May flies the meadows at sunset, and he told them that when he had been in the desert he had danced. He had shed his rags and fragments of skins taken from the creatures who thirsted and died of thirst and danced so that the more he danced the less he thirsted and the locust that tasted of honey and manna came and sat upon his sweating arms and leaped into his open mouth that way prophecy leaps onto the tongue of a prophet.

  The sun scorched him on the day it refused to fall from the sky until he was consumed by utter exhaustion from his dance. The long day’s light licked his face. Locust fell from the sky and he gathered them up as he danced. And every year, on that day, the townspeople and the farmers in the valley must dance to celebrate the light on the one day it refuses to fall from the sky.

  The angel the Baptiste sent from on high summoned the young girls and they danced into the heart of the town and the farmers at the market and the tradespeople on the cobbles joined in. They danced through the streets. Pulled by an inexplicable force, they danced all the way to the next village until they reached the sea, and everywhere they went people dropped what they were doing and danced. Mothers picked up their children and men on horses who had come to collect taxes began prancing on their mounts. And it spread. And the day lasted forever. And no one could stop though many dropped from exhaustion, some from thirst though they were given water and resumed their steps, and even those on their deathbeds rose and joined in until all the world or as much of the world as they could imagine as they danced had joined in.

  You look at Angelique and ask if she ever read Plato. He speaks of dancing as the one heavenly art that could be practiced on Earth. You tell her it puts the body in balance and makes the heart and head follow where the music leads it. Plato believed that dancing was the way a persona pursued perfection in their minds and bodies, and she nods and says Plato must be very wise and that he probably danced as well. And then she tells you she never learned to read. Not even now? Now that she is old? She has the time.

  No, she says, she spends every moment when she is not tending to her house, spinning in the yard as she hangs her laundry to dry or while she bakes her own bread and the heat from the oven makes her leap back as she opens the door and dances away from the loaves.

  So you remind her that dancing on the feast of St. John Baptiste overtook Europe and even places beyond the continent as early as the Seventh Century, and the church tried to stop it because the will of Heaven was beyond their control and they had to kill what they could not control, and for a while, they succeeded but only until the priests heard the music and saw the crowds unable to stop as he warned the men, women, and children that their souls would be damned to eternal perdition for being possessed by the dance.

  She is very knowing in a mysterious way. You feel as if you are in the presence of a mythic character and want to believe in the magic she possesses and will not reveal to you. You look at her hands. They are those of a maiden though her face is lined. She is not stooped. She moves about her tiny cottage as if she is made of a midsummer breeze wafting through the boughs of a forest and you tell her she looks far younger than her age and she smiles. Then you ask if she would mind sharing her age with you because surely there must be something in the way she lives that keeps her so vital and young, and she tells you she is nine hundred years old.

  Maybe her mind is gone but there are too many details of the dance, the mystery that once possess Europe and made armies lay down their weapons and kings descend from their thrones, and merchant sailors anchor their ships even if there were no harbors in which to tie up and their men danced on the decks. They could not possibly be the same age. The world changes. But she says that they stopped believing in the dance. They stood still when the music commanded them to join in or they went too far away from where the dance began to keep in time and step with the others and they perished.

  So you ask her to dance for you and she nods and picks up the front of her long skirt and begins to step, carefully at first and then more and more lightly until she seems to spin and glow in the late afternoon light the is flowing in the tiny window and casting shadows of the leaded panes on the floor. And as you marvel at her, you join her in the dance and ask, though you are breathless because you never knew you could dance the way she dances and your body aches to understand what it is doing, what the name of the dance is. And she smiles and asks why you hadn’t realized before now the dance is life.

  The Tapestry

  I was stillborn. The day I arrived in this world, the doctor lifted me from my mother’s bed and laid me in a blanket-lined box that had been set aside as my cradle. Instead of swaddling me, he wrapped me in her weaving from head to toe.

  My mother was in very bad shape. I could hear the doctor telling her to hang on, to stop screaming in pain and grief, and nothing could be done for me but he would do his best for her. A woman from a neighboring farm who had been called to help kept getting in the way as the doctor moved around the bed. He yelled at her and told her to sit in the chair where my mother had draped her clothes.

  My father was away in the service. At least that was the story my mother told the doctor and the neighbor. The truth was that she didn’t know. They had been married, but men in my father’s family had a way of wandering off, of disappearing into their desires or their fears or both.

  The last time my mother had seen him, my father had told her he was off to the city to enlist as he boarded a bus. She stood in the middle of a road that few people travel and watched as the vehicle grew smaller until it shrank into a cloud of dust and evaporated behind a rise a half-mile down the way.

  When my mother was finally awake and alert, the doctor said he had to leave. The neighbor woman opened her eyes, blinked, and stared out the bedroom window. She asked my mother if she needed help with the sheets but was told that they would be burned when the strength returned to her. The doctor asked if he could take me away to be looked after, but my mother answered she wanted to hold me for a while. By then I was cold. The doctor warned her that the feel of my body in her arms might frighten her, but she was not afraid. She loved me then and always had. She rocked me close to her chest and sang me “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” That is when I began to dream that everything around me was real because, as she repeated the chorus, “Life is but a dream.”

  She told the doctor I was hers and she would see I was properly looked after.

  Her family had a plot at the crossroads along with several other families. They had intended to build a church there and had gone to the trouble of consecrating the ground for the bodies of their deceased, but the other farmers in that corner of the township were all Methodists and didn’t want anything to do with Presbyterians. The church was never built. The burial grounds, as my mother described it, contained a few headstones from the last century, one or two fading white wooden crosses, a rusting wrought iron cross that one of her uncles had hand-forged for an aunt, and the lone marble tooth of a long-lost cousin whose body had been shipped home from the Great War so he could rest among his kin.

  Each day my mother would tell me stories. She knew I couldn’t understand a word she said.

  “After all, you’re too young to have any appreciation of words,” but I listened intently.

  I wanted to know as much as possible about who I was and who had loved who. That kind of knowledge sustains a person no matter what. As I grew older, I saw a picture of a man on her dresser. My mother picked up the frame and told me he was my daddy. He was probably off to the war although she hadn’t received even a soldier’s postcard from him or a single penny of his pay. Maybe he was in the city working in a munitions factory, or, she said in a whisper, he had become a spy for the Allies and was walking down a German street with his collar turned up in the rain and the brim of his fedora pulled low over his eyes to conceal his identity. The truth was, she said, she just didn’t know.

  Each day, my mother would rise before dawn and stand at her bedroom window and look over the snowy fields and comment on how the wind had shifted and drawn ripple lines and dunes during the night or describe how gusts had painted one side of the fence posts white.

  “The world is full of magic,” she said. “Come spring, I really should do something to start the crops again.”

  The fields have been fallow too long enough, and if the farm is going to be productive she would have to borrow money for seed, perhaps beg the use of a Massey Ferguson from one of the neighbors for a day, if they could spare their tractor, and plow at least one section raise a crop.

  “I wonder what that crop would be?” she asked me, though I had no answer.

  As a spring dawn rose over the far crest of the farthest fence line, she stretched and told me she had to get about her business and added that I would have to be the good boy. I always was. I was quiet and let her get to her loom.

  My mother was a weaver but she never said anything as she worked. The loom was her music. I’d read a Greek myth about Philomela who’d had her tongue cut out by her sister’s husband. The story told how the mute woman sat at her loom and wove her misery into a tapestry she tossed from her prison window, and how the weaving was found by a shepherd who took it to her sister Procne. My mother, as far as I knew, was the only surviving child of her family. If she had a gift there were no sisters to receive it.

  The living room of the farmhouse contained the frame her great grandfather had built just like the ones he’d known in Scotland. Her grandmother and mother had sat at day after day as they wove tweed blankets like the kind I was wrapped in. I could have told her the cloth was scratchy, but then I reconsidered. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and I didn’t want her to think that her work wasn’t justified and worth the time she spent on it.

  ‘Some people write, others paint, some play the piano or compose music,” she said. “Weaving is an art. Don’t let anyone tell you different. It requires knowledge, tradition, and patience. It entails sitting for long stretches of time balancing on a thin bench. But each thread, each line of weft and warp, tells a story. Sometimes, when I miss your father, I rise in the middle of the night and unweave what I have done the day before. I know he won’t return if I finish the tapestry I was making when he left. The other day, I walked to the end of the laneway in my boots. The ground was so muddy and almost ready to plow. A neighbor, the husband of the woman who was here the day you came into the world, stopped and asked if I’d had any word from your father and I told him no. I told him my husband would return when I was ready to finish my tapestry.”

  He nodded and moved on in his car. He said he was headed to town and if he heard anything he’d let me know.

  The clack of the treadles began to play. I wanted to sing to the thrum. I could hear the shuttle shooting across the warp as she pulled the beater toward her and locked the weft into place. She played the loom as if she were an organist in a cathedral. The constant motion and the singing of the machine became my lullaby, and I would drift off to sleep and dream of growing up to be like my father, a wanderer in the vast world, as beads of sweat appeared on my mother’s forehead and she wiped them away with an old linen cloth she kept tucked in the strings of her apron.

  In our part of the county, she was known for her weaving. Most of the men wore scarves she had made. They were long enough to wrap around their necks and tuck into the tops of their barn coats, but short enough so they never trailed an arm that could get caught a thresher. I often saw women in the shawls she wove as they passed our farm on summer nights as they went for strolls in pairs or walked arm locked in arm with their husbands. They would stop, gather the shawls tightly around their throats, and stare at our house. I thought they were paying homage to my mother by stopping and saying something behind their hands, but they would move on. They never approached our door. They walked on with their heads bent as if they were searching for a thought they had dropped on the ground in front of them.

  Some of the neighbors who kept sheep for slaughter would do my mother the kindness of dropping bags of wool on the porch of the house. We never heard the men approach and of the six or seven my mother knew who were shepherds we were never certain which one was the benefactor of fleece. Once or twice, there’d be a note tucked in the top of a burlap sack of freshly sheared curls and it would read, “No use sending the ram to market for its meat when its wool would go to waste.”

  “That was thoughtful of someone,” my mother said.

  By the time five or six years passed, the women no longer stopped at the end of our lane as they stretched their legs on summer nights. Their shawls must have gotten worn out with use because we never saw the women in them. By then, shawls were out of fashion. My father still had not returned from the war even though the war ended two years earlier. My mother said she was certain he had not been killed. She could feel it.

  “He’s going to come home,” she kept telling me. “He’s got a son here although he probably doesn’t know it. And I won’t complete my tapestry“– the work now contained a woven image of our farm, its long lane, and the rising hill behind the farthest fence – “until I know, for certain he is home for good. He has always had a wandering heart.”

  I wanted to ask her when I could start school. She told me she had seen an orange school bus passing along the dirt road at the end of our lane. It was full of children. She could hear them laughing and singing, some shouting. She said they looked as if they were having fun.

  But I didn’t want to burden my mother. By then, the mysterious bags of wool were less frequent, and instead, people left us baskets of asparagus and sometimes strawberries in the early summer and apples in the autumn. People kept their distance.

  If my mother were given a gift of wool, she would first comb out the fleece between two carding combs. The prongs of the combs, she said, were very sharp and I probably shouldn’t touch them. Then she would soak the wool on our front porch in a vat of her urine she saved up. The urine, she explained, would break down the fibers and soften them so they could be spun. There were once people who did nothing but stomp on raw wool in vats of rancid urine. They were fullers. Their work was to break down the bristly bits of the shearings. That is probably why our house had always had a peculiar odor to it and may have been the reason people kept away. Most people left their body water in their outhouses, and many, my mother said, were having indoor toilets installed. In a year or two, she was convinced, if everyone had indoor plumbing, urine would be hard to come by except her own. No one had saved their water for as long as she could remember.