Babayaga

Oman’s youngest brother, Elon, was a sweet, foolish man. He was the one ready with song and drum when the wine was poured. She would work chores with him and gossip about the family. One day, as they were combing wool for the looms, she gaily chatted and led him down to her trap. “You are so good at this! I think I’ve changed my mind, I agree now with what my husband says.”

“What does my brother say?”

“Oh, you know, how he grumbles and says, ‘Bah, women are a waste of food.’ I say, ‘No, Oman, though I do not mean to dispute you, I say we women are very useful.’ Now, look at you, Elon, you are showing that he is right, you are so much better at even this chore than I am.”

“Well, I am certain you women are better at some tasks.”

“In the towns, perhaps. But not here. We need men for all our tasks. I can help with cooking and the wash, but you only need one woman for that. Too many women would be more useless mouths to feed, right? And even if our neighbors could pay enough for a wife, we get too few visitors looking to strike that kind of a bargain. Why, look how far my husband had to journey to find a woman.”

“Yes, he went a long way and he still got a fat, ugly bride,” Elon said and both laughed.

“Yes,” she said, “I am only good for making him sons.”

“You have given him strong sons.”

“I know. It is good too that those daughters of mine did not live. My husband did the right thing there.”

“Yes, he did,” said Elon. He was about to say some other words, but stopped himself. That was when she knew the truth.

“It is all right, my friend,” said Elga, shaking her head as if it were nothing. “He is a wise man, he is very wise. But tell me, where did he bury them? He never told me.”

Elon was silent for a moment and then he answered her question. “In the river swamp. He buried them down in the reeds of the swamp.”

She nodded and said no more. Then she waited, almost three moons, simmering and stirring her plans in her boiling and turbulent mind. She would wander the muddy wetland trails in the dawn’s bleak mist, amid the shrill, disturbed cries of waking starlings, searching, wild-eyed, for a sign of where her daughters might be buried. She would at times collapse and kneel on the ground, blinded with anger, a grief hot inside her that felt like molten metal. At dusk, after feigning her way through the day, she would return again to the swamp, clawing at the earth for graves she could not find. Night would come and the screaming wind would blow as the tall reeds swayed thick, looming above her like hissing serpents. During these trying days, she kept her face serene at home, and when she went on trips into the village, she was chatty and friendly. The horse trader found her full of idle questions about the roads and trails that ran out of town. When she asked for ways to kill off the squirrels nesting in her lofts that were eating at her grain, a bullman’s wife gave her a recipe for poison.

Finally, the spring moon turned and Oman rode off, his mare topped with goatskins for the new season’s trade. Only hours after he was gone, she went round and invited his brothers to her house for dinner. “I have a seasoned boar that needs roasting.” She put out bulgur stew, sausages, radish, and blackberry wine. As she was setting out the meal, Elga told them that she had woken that morning from a nightmare in which her husband faced terrible trials on his journey. She raised a glass: “We must frighten this bad dream away with a toast to his safe return. All of us. Even my boys must drink this toast for their father’s safe return,” she insisted.

“You’re going to make the little ones drunkards,” teased Elon.

“Ha ha, no, I have mixed some water with the wine, so indulge a superstitious woman; let us drink and shout the devils away.”

They all drank the wine and soon the men were unconscious, their heads heavy on the table. She pulled each one down from his chair and lined them up next to one another on the floor.

She killed her sons first, hammering a long fence nail through each of their hearts. Then, taking an ax, she methodically beheaded each one of her brothers-in-law. Going out to the pens, she drove the livestock into the barn, bolting it shut, and while the goat kids and spring lambs panicked and brayed, she put all the buildings to flame. When she took Elon’s strongest horse and rode off, the mad screaming of the dying livestock burned in her ears.