North Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

loom of her own, a fine big one like the widow’s. But she knew that was impossible, that Father would never be able to afford it. Still, Rose was stubborn, and she would not rest until she had found a way to get the Widow Hautzig to let her use her loom.
    When she was nine Rose found out that Widow Hautzig had a weakness for chanterelle mushrooms. So Rose trained her favourite dog, Snurri, to sniff out chanterelles in the forest. After much hard work she struck a deal: in exchange for a weekly basket of chanterelle mushrooms, Widow Hautzig would teach Rose how to work her loom. Though the lessons were short and very disagreeable (often Rose would come home in tears over some gibe of the widow’s), still Rose was a determined pupil, and before long the baskets of chanterelles were being traded for a chance to actually do her own weaving on the loom.
    She could only do this during the very short breaks between Widow Hautzig’s own projects, some of which took a long time to complete. And Rose would have had no time at all on the loom were it not for Widow Hautzig’s rheumatism. When her rheumatism was acting up, the widow would take a long rest, sometimes even as much as a fortnight if it was a particularly bad bout.
    â€œThank God for Widow Hautzig’s rheumatism,” Rose would say every night before bed. Mother once overheard her and scolded her, so Rose was careful to whisper those words to herself from then on.
    Even with Widow Hautzig’s rheumatism, Rose never could weave anything that required more than a few days’ work. Then, one day, as she was trying to discourage Snurri from digging under Widow Hautzig’s storage hut, Rose saw something through a crack in the woodwork of the hut. There were no windows in the hut, but it was not locked, and without asking permission, Rose entered the small building. The inside was cloaked with dust and cobwebs, but Rose barely noticed. Her eyes were riveted by a good-sized loom leaning against the far wall of the hut. The frame listed at a precarious angle; the warp beam and heddle rods were splintered; there appeared to be no crossbeam at all; and a tangle of decayed and unravelled warp thread sprouted from top and bottom, but Rose was not discouraged.
    It took Rose a long time and many baskets of chanterelles to convince Widow Hautzig to let her try her hand at fixing up the broken-down loom, which had been the castoff of an old aunt of the widow’s. In return the widow made Rose clean the filthy old storage hut until it was spotless.
    Rose then cajoled Father and me, as well as Willem, to help her repair the loom. Widow Hautzig offered no assistance, and even insisted that it not be removed from her property. She also complained unceasingly of the small amount of noise we made, hammering and sanding and such.
    I was appalled when Widow Hautzig did not give Rose the loom outright, since she had no use for it herself. What rankled even more was that the nasty woman even continued to demand chanterelle fees for the use of the loom we repaired, and made Rose work in that windowless, unheated hut.
    Nevertheless, I’d never seen Rose so happy as when she could grab a few moments to go off and work on the loom.
    I wrote a poem about Widow Hautzig. It began
    Hautzig the weaver, queen of the dead.
    The strands in her loom dripping with red.
    Lips dry as bone, her hair made of snakes,
    The souls of her victims to Hel she does take.
    Well, maybe I exaggerated. But only a little.

The first thing I made on Widow Hautzig’s loom was a table runner. It had a simple reindeer design in the weave, and I was absurdly proud of it. My next projects were a shawl for Mother and head scarves for my three sisters. Then I made a jacket for Neddy and a pair of breeches for Father.
    The last thing I made on that loom was for me. A cloak. It took me nearly half a year to finish. It was during this time that things went so wrong with the farm.
    Father told me the