“Have you checked the wheat?”
When the two men got to the wheat field, she was waiting for them, her fists full of thistles and her mouth curved like a cat’s claw. She wore her old red dress and her dancing shoes, and Moss and Cor noticed two things in the same moment. When they told each other the story later, over whiskey and in low voices, neither man could say which was more frightening: the barn owl digging its talons into her shoulder, or the fact that with that red dress on, they could see how she hadn’t aged a minute since the first night she wore it.
“Come home,” Moss said. “You gotta come home. It’s Esau.” He held out the telegram like it was a half-starved kitten she could nurse back to health.
“I know it’s Esau,” she said. Her voice was a pat of butter melting over fresh-cut bread. “Did they tell you he was a hero? He was surely a hero. Tell me about how he died a hero, Moss.” The barn owl fidgeted on her shoulder, and the dark red of the dress got a little darker where it held tight to her skin.
“Come on home, now,” Cor said. “You gotta help us make the arrangements. It’s only right.”
“Why is it only right?” she asked, and the curl of her smile sharpened.
“Well, it’s—it’s only right,” Moss stammered, looking down at the telegram in his hand. “You gotta help us lay him to rest.” When she didn’t answer, his shoulders dropped. “Please,” he whispered, and his hand rose slowly to his pocket.
Thetis’s eyes tracked the movement. Her smile faded as Moss withdrew his pocket watch. He held it out to her, the chain bright in the sunlight. He hadn’t let tarnish touch it, not since the day he’d stood on her front porch.
“Please,” he said again.
Thetis took a step forward. The men flinched at the sound of her heels digging into the soil. Her eyes glinted with old firelight. “I’ll come home,” she said, her voice as tense a warning as the crest of a cat’s spine. “But not for that. I’ve had enough gifts. I’ve had enough of made things.”
“What, then?” he asked, his voice cracking with the attempt at courage.
Only the thistles were between them, purple and bright, the barbed stems digging deep into the meat of Thetis’s palms. They couldn’t possibly have been the same thistles as the ones that Moss had brought to her so many years before, the gift he’d left on her front porch to declare his intention to trap her.
They couldn’t have been the same ones, and yet Moss’s eyes couldn’t find a difference between these and those.
“Eat them,” Thetis said. Cor started to speak, started to say that enough was enough, but Thetis silenced him with a raised index finger that carried the authority of a mother who has silenced her fair share of excuses from the mouths of children. “Eat them, and I’ll come home with you, Moss. Eat them, and I’ll bury that child for you. I’ll dig his grave with my own two hands.”
Moss took a single thistle from her, the first of the seven in her grip. He raised it to his mouth, looking at her as though he was waiting for her to laugh and say it had been a joke. Her face remained as still as a midwinter river.
The soft purple petals brushed the back of Moss’s tongue, and his teeth closed over the sharpest thorns on the thistle’s bud. He made a sound like the kind of dog he would have called it a mercy to shoot. Saliva began to well between his lips as he chewed, his jaw working once and then twice, slow and reluctant as a person forcing her feet into her first pair of shoes. His mouth went pink with a froth of blood and thistle-milk, and Thetis watched it run down his chin with the same bright interest she’d once brought to the sight of glass beads and copper pennies.
Moss managed to chew four times before he choked on blood and thorns, and with an urgent, visceral coiling of his throat and back, he failed. He spat and gagged and wept. Pulp and petals and blood-tipped barbs fell to the dirt at Thetis’s feet. Moss braced his hands on his knees, his breath coming ragged, his eyes desperate and darting.
“I can’t do it, Thetis,” he said. “Ask for something else.”
Thetis dropped the remaining six thistles between them.
She laid a finger on Moss’s chin, as sweetly as if it were made of crystal, and with terrible patience she lifted it until he was standing upright again. His face was flushed and wet, his shirt stained at the collar with the mess of his weakness. She waited until he was brave enough to look into her eyes. “The only wildness I’ve ever asked of you,” she said, tinting the words with a cruel measure of disappointment.
“Please,” he stammered, his words soft with pain as he tried to speak around the raw, bleeding thing that was his tongue. “You’re Esau’s Momma.”
“Esau’s Momma was a name you made me wear,” she said.
“Haven’t I been kind to you?” His voice carried the same pleading note that it had when he’d asked why Esau couldn’t turn into the kind of boy who would live long.
“Was any of this kindness?” She let his chin go, and she reached down to undo the buckle of one red shoe. “Was any of this for me?”
“You’re still his momma,” Cor growled, making as if to step in strong where Moss had shown himself soft. He went to take her elbow, but the owl turned its great eyes on him and he froze like a mouse running across the snow. He swallowed hard. She loosed the buckle of her other shoe and slid it off her foot. She stood with her bare feet in the earth, curled her toes into the loam.
“I don’t belong to that word anymore. Esau’s dead,” she repeated, the word dead sweet as a promise, and she laid her red dancing shoes on top of the paper in Cor’s hand. One shoe nearly fell, but he caught it before it hit the ground. “And Esau’s Momma is, too.”
And with that, Thetis returned to the field. She walked away from the men who’d caught her. For the rest of their days, they’d remember the sight of her: the soles of her feet pressing into the earth, the triumphant curve of her back, the set of her shoulders. She vanished into the wheat, and she left them behind with nothing more than a torn telegram, a pair of old dancing shoes, and a hearth full of teeth.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
Who is allowed to fight prophecy? Who is allowed to resist fate? Classically, heroes are often permitted to seek escape routes—but Thetis isn’t. In her myth, the gods force her to fulfill the prophecy that leads to the birth, life, and death of her son, Achilles. At the end of the original Thetis myth, the immortal naiad’s story concludes when her son’s story concludes. In writing “Wild to Covet,” I wondered: why doesn’t Thetis get her own story? After the death of Achilles, Thetis surely lived on, but her identity as a mother is the thing we know about her. I chose to explore that dynamic in “Wild to Covet.” This piece is about the way personal identity is subsumed by social expectations of motherhood. It is about the way people disappear under the weight of the label “mother,” and the way that disappearance comes as a relief to those who fear powerful women. Thetis becomes defined by a son she never wanted, imprisoned by a prophecy that those with authority force her to fulfill; she is fettered by motherhood, and the people around her feel safe in the limitations to which they assume she will submit. But in “Wild to Covet,” Thetis has her own narrative in mind. She recognizes the scope of the prophecy that binds her, and she navigates it with agency. She refuses to lose sight of her own story.