it, you just go and get it, and I know where.”
She was right. That’s what he wanted. He even forgot to ask her how it could be that she lived in a hovel and knew where there was money, but then there she was, and she was right, he wanted it, so the soldier forgot to ask about that, and about why the witch’s hovel sagged to the side and why she wore a witch’s rags, and if she had any sons who’d gone off to war, and he forgot about the pot, about what might be stewing and steaming in it, something awful, something good to eat or know. His mind cleared of everything except the idea of money.
“Tie this rope around your waist,” said the witch. “Hop down this black hole into this deep hollow tree. You’ll be tethered to me. Don’t be frightened of what you’ll see. Ha! You’ve seen worse than this. You’ll see some dogs. Wink at the first dog, blink at the next dog, and for the third, squeeze your eyes shut, and wait to see. You will find a little leather purse in the earth down there, and all I ask is you bring it to me. If you don’t, I won’t pull you up, and then you’ll have something to be frightened of.”
A Tinderbox is a little box that sparks to make fire. Like for lighting things.
So he wound the rope around his waist and the witch took the loose end. Then he hopped down into the hollow tree and fell deep into it and also underground. Smack! his feet hit the earth, and everything around him was so dark that he couldn’t see anything. In the dark, he thought of the little dog, so stupid for lurching at the end of his leash. He thought of the little girl, and recognized the terrible whirl of ideas that had surged across his mind when he saw her: to hack her to pieces, to feed her soup and rock her to sleep, to gobble her up for himself, to dress her properly. He put his hands to the rope around his waist because he was having trouble breathing and felt like it was choking him from the gut up, but soon his eyes adjusted to the light. He could see the twisty shadows of the inner wood of the tree, all tunneled with wormholes and mud wasps making convex mazes all around him in the walls, but he couldn’t tell a groove from a bulge. It wasn’t only his eyes adjusting, though; the light was changing, too, and he stepped toward where it pushed at him through the darkness. The light expanded its reach, the space expanded with it, and soon he could see a whole inner chamber lit with a hundred burning lights.
This reminded him of something, this chamber, with passages leading off. Then he remembered: he remembered tearing open a man’s belly with his sword in battle, and then seeing himself as if within the man’s stomach, looking from that chamber down the man’s bright bowels, which simultaneously lay beating on the ground before them both. And as if brought on by this thought, an enormous blue dog appeared, guarding a golden chest filled with money.
The dog had eyes as big as snow globes, sparkling and swimming with watery light, but the witch was right, the soldier had been through a lot, and very little fazed him. He didn’t even need to think about her instructions; it was as if she were there with him, as if he could feel her through the rope. You need to cut those apron strings and find your way in the world! That’s what people had said to him when they passed him chopping wood for his mother’s hovel, that was one thing he’d thought when he enlisted, and that was what was on his mind, not the witch, when he winked at the enormous dog, and the dog lay down and tilted his head to the side and let the snow settle, an Eiffel Tower reflected in one eye, a Golden Pyramid glowing from the depths of the other, and let the soldier open the chest and fill his pockets with promissory notes.
This was disappointing. Promissory notes. Would he have to impersonate people in order to collect? Would he spend his life journeying from one debtor to the next, shaking people down in a sharkskin suit? It sounded like a job, not magic, but at least this was a path with money at many branching ends of it. The soldier looked at the affable dog. “You got me,” he said, but stuffed his pockets anyway. The dog shook his head and the snow globes snowed and then snow settled in heaps on the Statue of Liberty and the Great Wall of China seen from afar. Then the vast lids lowered, and the cavern darkened again.
The soldier felt disoriented, annoyed, betrayed. He felt a rise of panic in the dark. He moved his hand to tug the rope, ready to get up there and give the witch a piece of his mind, but the room began to brighten, this time from the bottom up in sharp fanning shafts as from beneath a rising airplane shade, and there before him loomed an even more enormous dog, and bluer, this one grouchily awakening from a nap, yawning and stretching, great shoulder blades shifting like mountains through time, with eyes as big as the capitol dome, magic beaming from beneath the lids as they rose, as the light rose. This dog was so enormous his head pressed the top of the chamber, which even so must have grown to accommodate him and his eyes, and the soldier shook minutely in his boots. His mind went blank, and by luck, or the divine, he blinked.
This dog guarded jewels the soldier knew he’d have to hock, but still, they were beautiful to look at, calling to the whole histories of the many cultures they came from, dangling golden icons, some inscribed with poetry and the names of families and families of ancestors in uncountable languages and symbologies. Bracelets and brooches, watches and cuff links, remnants of happy humans behind them, fine times, worth passed down, desire fulfilled. The things that people wanted and created or received.
He dumped the notes and heaped his neck and arms with jewelry. He piled it on, all these pieces so designed and discrete, made for a person to shine through. Something about the weight against his naked neck, and gravity pulling his limbs to the earth — he started to feel grand, to sense what it might be like to have all this, everyone’s heirlooms. Each piece blotted out another and they all felt the same, strands from so many lives, and at least for the moment the soldier felt that any one of the lives could have been his.
What had he been hoping to find at the end of the road? His mother’s arms, his mother dead?
Dog three. Eyes as big as planets, one ringed with rings, and one with a great red spot floating gaseously in it. Hallucinatory expansive light, light filled with fire and ghosts. Light so fragmented and strobing the soldier squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath too, in terror, mind spasming with several horrors: a childhood memory (being poked with sticks), a war memory (being poked with swords), an image of that little girl in her blackened rainbow frock and what he was doing that he wanted to do, a blue three-headed dog coming upon his wickedness and tearing him to pieces, stealing the girl to safety, the girl on the back of the blue dog holding the white dog with its ruff in her lap, both of them glancing over their shoulders and receding, watching them recede, spying his limbs strewn in the trees of the forest around him, these ideas and many more, until he was just as frightened of the world behind his eyes as he was of the monster before him, and only because of this equity did he open them to the dog who lay placid as an ocean seen from space, fierce but distant, and entirely content without him.
He feels very full of himself because of the money, so he hacks the witch to pieces with his sword and takes the Tinderbox without really thinking anything of it.
And this chest held cash, in large bills for saving, in small bills for handy spending, and what this suggested was endless possibility anchored in safety, and this time when the sun went behind the eyes of the greatest and most awesome blue dog of all, the soldier nestled in the arms of an economic system yet to collapse, sleepy and warm in the dark of the beating chamber. In the womby light he dumped the jewels and lined his boots and cap with bills, stuffed his pockets in a stupor. Then he tugged the cord.
The witch hollered down: “Get that purse!” and he swept his eyes about until he found, in the dog’s afterglow, a limp black leather sack with a drawstring mouth, which he snatched as his feet left the ground. Up, up he went, waist-first, empty as a hollow tree. There he stood on the road in the forest, eye to eye with the witch, adjusting to the light, and nicely. There he stood feeling his money, gripping the wrinkled pouch in his fist. “This is what you want?” the soldier said.
“Yes, and give it to me. You have everything,” said the witch.
“Do you know my mother?” the soldier asked the witch. He peered at her eyes, which were the eyes of a rat — who knows — perhaps they were really the eyes of squirming rats that the witch had carved out and taken for her own. Who knew if she’d ever had her own eyes. Who knew what was behind them, if she’d lost them or had them taken from her by her own mother. “I was on my way to find her,” said the soldier, holding the purse so she could see it, letting a threatening skepticism control his voice, “when, what do you know, I met you.”
Then he goes into town, where he gains respectability, spends lavishly, and eventually has nothing but the Tinderbox left, which he finally notices. He strikes it, to light a candle stub, thinking about a princess that the king and queen have locked away, a bit of light in the darkness of a box. He’s heard rumors of her beauty: more glinting
