In the Suicide Mountains Read Free Page A

paid no attention—in those days anyway—if neighbors scoffed at the lack of decorum and convention in his house, for what was it to him? Their horses still needed shoeing, didn’t they, whether or not his wife, for pure pleasure, chopped down timber? They still needed chains made, and plowshares shaped, though his wife in her spare time carved tombstones. His household got increasingly out of hand, at least from his neighbors’ point of view, but the father grinned placidly, sipped hot, flat ale from his dented tin cup, and continued to let things slide. Thus it befell that when Armida was a baby, she got the habit of puttering in the glow of the forge, shoveling in coal or fashioning door-bolts or bending heavy iron in the company of her father, instead of helping her mother in the kitchen where she might have learned woman’s work.
    â€œYou’re a fool, Otto Ott,” the neighbors said, upbraiding her father. “That daughter of yours will grow up headstrong and powerful as an ox in May, and not a man in this world will ever hazard his life by marrying her.”
    â€œGod’s will be done,” said her father with a grin, for Armida was just nine, and it seemed to him no problem.
    â€œPerhaps the neighbors are right, Otto,” her mother sometimes said, for though she was a merry, boisterous person, she had a deep, uncommon mind, and understood things as nobody else did.
    But Armida’s father, who always enjoyed it when her mother opposed him, however casually, would guffaw and feint and get the drop on Armida’s mother and would pin her arm tight-as-a-clam behind her back, and the two of them would wrestle, laughing and puffing and kicking up dirt by the wheelbarrow-load, until her mother sucked in breath and broke her father’s hold and slammed him against the barn’s oak wall and knocked the last gasp of wind out of him. Then they’d laugh and laugh.
    One night when Armida and her father came in from bending iron bars, they found her mother’s two feet sticking straight up like stumps under the wellhouse roof, and her head under the water, and to their horror and terrible sorrow she was dead. The neighbors, though perhaps they meant no harm, could not help feeling that the fault was Armida’s father’s. Had Armida been working in the kitchen, as she should have been, the tragedy, they said, would not have happened.
    Her father’s heart was broken, and his self-confidence as well, and so, after he’d buried Armida’s mother—in a grave he’d dug out of solid rock and covered with a foot-thick iron door—he gave in, to the last detail, to his neighbors’ whims. He married a widow who had distant relatives at the king’s palace, and into her hands he put the training and grooming of Armida.
    Alas that Armida had not died in that well with her mother!
    The step-mother, who had a daughter of her own who happened to be exactly Armida’s age (and whose name was Clarella), was wonderfully gentle and kind to Armida when her father was near; but whenever his back was turned, she was mean as a snake. “Hopeless, hopeless! ” she would hiss, with a look of spiteful glee, for Armida could do nothing right. She made her read books to see what heroines are like and told her to study her step-sister. She showed her paintings and read her poems and gave her exercises.
    In one of the exercises which the step-mother used, trying to make Armida “an aristocrat,” she said, “instead of a staggering, rolling-eyed horse,” it was necessary to carry a book on one’s head. Armida, though pretty as a picture, heaven knows, was so strong that the weight of a book was like the weight of a feather in her hair, so that for the life of her she couldn’t tell where the book was and thus couldn’t balance it. Strange to say, out of love for her father—and because she shared, deep down, his remorseful