The Catskills Sleeper

Once upon a time, Rip had been a happy man. Or so it had seemed to others as he strolled around the village. An unburdened soul, ready with a helping hand, and always there to while away an afternoon over beer and laughter and talk of summers past. The children on the village green would throng about him and beg him to invent new games, which he did. Women at their washing would peer from behind a billowing sheet and ask him to pass them another from the basket, which he did, and men in the tavern would raise a glass and ask him to sit, which he did. However all was not what it seemed on the surface, for Rip hid his heart well.

When Rip arrived in the village, a tattered hat upon his head and his trousers torn and raggedy, young Lotte had been down by the river some way upstream, scrubbing her petticoats on a rounded rock jutting into the water. She had been crying, as she worked, and so did not hear his approach at first. Gradually, she became aware of that warning tingle about the ears that tells all creatures they are being watched, and by the time she looked up, it was too late to hide her tears, or the stained cloth in her hands.

Now, Lotte was a keen minded girl, but a girl none the less. Her mother had died in childbirth and Lotte had grown up at the knees of an aging father who read her stories, until she could read them herself, and talked to her of science and history as he leant on her arm on his morning walk. She had taught herself to cook and to clean, and how to grow potatoes and beans, but had never played at her mother’s feet and listened to women talk, or had her hair made pretty or her toes tickled, or even her hand held, except to borrow her strength. Lotte had gone to school and learnt to sew and to sit up straight, but she had made only passing friendships, and now had time for none, as she nursed her father in his dwindling health. Other girls her age began courting, and the boys they had played with in the school yard had overnight become young men, full of bravado and jostling for attention. But not, it seemed, for her attention. She was only Lotte, and though in her imaginings she had hoped one day to be a scientist or a doctor, the rest of the village was more worldly, and saw only a servant to a reclusive father; a maid, and likely to remain so.

Though she didn’t show it, Lotte’s invisibility wounded her deeply. She would often join the others for a picnic or a game on the green, but her company was never sought and only missed when there was no one to bring bread and cheese at four o’clock. It was a lonely life for a girl so full of hopes for herself, and though she bore it with dignity, she despaired of ever being truly accepted in the face of the indifference she faced. Perhaps it was this indifference to her which made Ansen Bakker think he could do to her whatever he wanted. Tall and muscular, Ansen came from a wealthy family of five brothers, and could have had any girl in the village, if he had patience enough to wed her first. But he had outgrown obedience and was yet to grow into patience, and one evening, when the weather was hot and families had left doors propped open to allow the cool night air in, Ansen watched Lotte’s narrow back disappear into her house, a basket of clean linen propped on her swaying hip, and decided to follow.

Lotte had read enough of her father’s books to well understand the risks she now faced, and she knew enough of the world to foresee what might befall her as an unmarried mother, if the worst came to pass. She was also well aware of the consequences of levelling accusations at Ansen Bakker. And so when she saw Rip, standing in the shade of a tree, watching her at her work, she wondered whether this unkempt vagabond may just be her salvation.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, breaking the silent appraisal each had been giving the other. Rip nodded, but didn’t move from his tree. “Wait here” ordered Lotte, and folding her petticoat over itself, she walked quickly away in the direction of the village.

Rip waited, grateful for the offer of food, but expecting no less. In his thirty years, he had come to trust that whatever he needed would come to him, one way or another. And when that flow of food, beer or money was interrupted by angry men, shouting for the law, Rip was accustomed to cutting his losses and disappearing into the forest cloaked mountains in search of another town or village where his easy manner and helping hands would quickly win him friends, for a while. Not for the first time, however, Rip had miscalculated his chances, and word of his exploits had been heard in each of the last three villages he had been run out of. He did not have high hopes for a comfortable bed any time soon, but still, he trusted that the Lord would see to it he did not starve.

And so Lotte and Rip found in one another a potential solution to their predicaments. Lotte kept Rip fed, but also hidden, for the three weeks it took her to be quite sure she was with child, and Rip, never one to question the Lord’s plan for him when it involved a dry bed and a ready supply of food, let those weeks pass without wondering too much what Lotte was about. Until one day, shielded from view by the slatted wooden wall of Lotte’s father’s little barn, Lotte appeared before him, naked, and staring him straight in the eye.

Though Rip was, indeed a petty thief and an idle man, he was tender hearted and fell easily into love, and once she had taken him into her arms, it did not take Lotte long to push his growing affection for her into an infatuated adoration. One month after they had first appraised one another as strangers on the river bank, the pair hatched a plan to marry. First, Lotte introduced Rip to her father, who was past caring who his daughter walked out with. Then, Lotte and Rip began to take one arm each on her father’s now very short morning walks, and the three of them sat together on the bench facing the street, letting people know that Rip was an old friend of the family, until the village made space in its fabric for this friendly, gregarious newcomer. And then they were married, well before Lotte began to show, and not long after Ansen Bakker married the prettiest girl in the village.

So Lotte’s daughter, when she was born screaming and ruddy on a cool morning just as the wild strawberries were flowering, appeared as legitimate as Ansen’s son, born just three months after. They called her Beatrix Eva Van Winkle, and at first Lotte and Rip doted on her with hearts full of love. Their attachment to one another, however, was wearing thin. Rip was, as ever, feckless and idle, and though his better nature shone in his kindness and care for all who crossed his path, he brought home not one penny for his family, only the rabbits and wild turkeys he shot in the woods on his long, rambling hunting trips. Lotte, took Beatrix with her to clean and watch the children of wealthier families. She sold pies and preserves to women who would sooner chat than bake, and took in laundry for those who did not have the spine for it. At the end of the day, Lotte would finish her work, exhaustion weighing heavily on her shoulders, and turn at last to her own household. And at the end of each day, Lotte would look in despair at the unwashed dishes and unswept floors, the unironed laundry and the unweeded vegetable garden, and she would weep at the fate that had befallen her.

Once she had finished weeping, Lotte would take up her broom and set out to look for Rip, finding him, more often than not, laughing loudly with a glass of amber beer in his hand. Lotte, her dignity waning with each passing moon, began by chiding him, progressed to ordering him home, and finally proceeded to beating him about the shoulders with the broom until he left the public house, roars of laughter following the pair out of the door and half way home.

The thing about fighting in a marriage, however, is that once a person has beaten the other once, and not found it on the whole disagreeable, they are more than likely going to do it again. Before winter was half done, Lotte was not only beating Rip out of the pub, but again once their own door shut behind them. She beat him with the broom when the sweeping was not done, with a hoe when the weeds poked above the soil, and with an iron when the clean laundry lay in damp crinkles in the basket. Lotte beat Rip when Beatrix cried too much, when there was not enough wood for the fire, and when the women in the post office turned away from her when she came in. Rip, knowing in his heart that he deserved no less, did not raise a hand against her, or so much as protest, but instead apologised for the way God made him, and promised to do better.

But Rip did not do better, for though his heart was heavy, he hid his bruises and each day, though his intentions were good, he found he could not pass by the children and refuse them a game, or turn his eyes from a neighbour in need of a hand, any more than he could resist an outstretched beer to ease his pain. This went on for some time, until one Tuesday, Lotte broke her broom handle across Rip’s knees. Incensed, she flew to her feet and locked and bolted the door, taking the key and placing it in the pocket of her apron. Rip did not make any move to leave, however, but lay where he had fallen, a sickening moan humming beneath the wails of Beatrix, whose tiny fingers, sticky with bright, red blood, were wrapped into her father’s hair.

Rip did not get up at all that night, and Lotte, at last frightened by what she had done, took the baby and huddled in her bed, thinking, while her husband fell silent on the cold, unswept floor of the kitchen. In the morning, when she found Rip still alive and her floor irrevocably stained with darkness, Lotte already had a plan. She was a hard worker, and strong as a consequence, but lifting a grown man with two broken knees and dazed, vacant eyes from the floor to the bed was a feat beyond her. Instead, Lotte dragged Rip, who groaned and cried as they went, into the pantry. Her father, knowing the value of preserved food during long winters and uncertain harvests, had had the house built with a large indoor pantry, cool and dark year round and it was in there that she lay Rip on a straw mattress, with one blanket, and closed the door. Three times daily she took him water, holding the cup to his lips and cursing him for letting it dribble from the corners of his mouth, and three times daily she fed him corn porridge or broth, at whatever temperature it happened to be.

Weeks passed and Rip, blessed with tendency towards survival that had brought his forefathers to these mountains and allowed them to flourish, began to heal. Lotte continued to tend to her garden, mind the children, clean and launder, though she stopped making preserves or fresh pies, preferring to stay out of the pantry as much as possible. After the first day, the children began to ask Lotte when Rip would be out to play, the women called after her to ask if Rip was well and the men heard from their wives what Lotte had told them: that Rip had gone hunting and had not yet returned. After a two nights, the men organised a search party and set off at day break up the forested slopes in the direction Lotte pointed them in, their guns hanging at their shoulders. They returned as the sun went down, weary and despondent, reporting that they had found no sign of their missing friend, but that a great black bear had come close to one of their party, and had seemed unafraid. They had killed it, and brought its body back to the village in an act of imagined revenge and, though no one said as much, the assumption was made that Rip had perished on the mountain. Each man who had gone into the forest to search began to wear a strip of black fur on the collar of his coat, like a tribe unified by honouring their lost compatriot.

The women began appearing on Lotte’s doorstep with plates of food and sympathetic voices. Lotte put on a black dress and was invited to sit with the other wives and listen to the gossip. Widowhood, it transpired, brought her closer to acceptance than marriage had, and she took to it well. All the while, Rip lay in the dark of the pantry, his blanket pulled about his shoulders and hunger gnawing at his innards, and three times a day, Lotte brought him just enough to keep him from dying, out of the goodness of her heart.

Weeks turned to months, and while Rip’s knees now allowed him to shuffle bent legged from the straw where he slept to the pot he used for a toilet, and the crack in his head closed over, it was becoming evident that his mind would never fully repair. He spoke now, when Lotte came to give him a bit of bread or a piece of apple, but not of hatred or pain. Instead, he asked daily for news of Beatrix. Beatrix was a little past her second birthday when Lotte, running out to chase a straying pig from the vegetable garden, left her alone in the kitchen. It was not the first time, but Beatrix was at an inquisitive age, all peering eyes and reaching limbs, making trouble wherever she went. When Lotte returned, she discovered the pantry door ajar, a wedge of darkness oozing into the kitchen, and Beatrix nowhere to be seen. With her heart in her throat, she threw open the door to the street and looked up and down, squinting into the sun, but saw no sign of her daughter, or of her hobbling, grizzled husband. But she had flown to the wrong place, fearing her discovery more than anything that might happen under her own roof, and there, still in the pantry, sat Beatrix and Rip, the little girl’s soft hand patting at Rip’s knotted beard while he smiled, the first smile in two dark years.

After that, Lotte allowed Beatrix to spend more time with Rip. She told her daughter that the man in the pantry was a lost soul, in need of care, but a secret she must keep lest he be driven away to the mountains to be killed by a bear like her father. The reverence with which her Rip was spoken about throughout the village meant that from a young age, invocation of her father produced wide eyed obedience in Beatrix, and Beatrix kept the secret. But she loved spending time with Rip, and Lotte became complacent, leaving the pantry door unbarred while Beatrix was in there, allowing her to get on with chores about the house without hindrance. For their part, Rip and Beatrix would sit on the straw mattress and tell stories. Rip, whose mind now took a wandering path through the hinterland between reality and make believe, told magical stories of thievery aided by flying carpets, of carriages made from giant pumpkins and of women who had once lived beneath the sea. As Beatrix grew older, they began to construct the tales together. Tales of men who were also frogs, of women so perfect that when she slept, all the world nearby slept with her, and of a man who met a strange little fellow in the mountains, who extended a helping hand and carried the fellow’s barrel through the forest to a clearing, who drank and made merry there, with the fellow and others just like him, and who feel asleep and slept for twenty years, so potent was the contents of that barrel.

Though it plagued her, keeping a simple minded cripple in her pantry, Lotte had, in all other respects, found a life for herself which worked. Her widowhood had propelled her into the orbit of the women at the centre of the village’s social landscape, and over the years her broom wielding and nagging had been largely forgotten about, and what was not forgotten was forgiven, for how hard it must be to have a dead idle husband! While she had long since given up hope of becoming a doctor or a scientist, she drew in a steady income making concoctions to ease stomach pains or soften the skin, which she sold first to the women of her own village, and in time to those who came up and down the river on the promise of her reputation. But as much as her reputation was for skill and kindness to others, at home she was cruel and wicked. If a customer complained, she would sympathise and apologise, and then turn to slap Beatrix for not helping her enough. If she felt a slight against her when the women met to mend and chat together, she would return home and kick her daughter awake to rebuild the fires for the morning, telling her they had not been well enough made. Rip, alone in the pantry, flinched as he heard each slap land on young Beatrix, and in her turn, Beatrix watched her Lotte beating Rip with a cane, and her maturing mind began to wonder at the viciousness running through her mother.

She began to wonder, too, whether her father had truly died on the mountain when she was only a baby. At first, Beatrix had imagined Rip might be her father out of a need for affection and love, had played with the notion in her own secret games, but she began to listen more closely to passing talk of her lost father – how playful he had been, how full of mirth. The glint in his blue eyes, or the strength in his arms. When she heard her best friend’s father reminisce about her his flair for storytelling, Beatrix became certain that Rip was indeed the man the village had mourned as lost, and that her father had been with her every day of her life after all.

Beatrix kept this secret knowledge for herself of course. Children, like dogs, are loyal by necessity, and Beatrix had looked up to Lotte. But had never looked down on Rip as she had been taught to do, and had instead, alongside the brutality running through her life, learnt by example his gentle kindness. But children, unlike dogs, grow up, and as Beatrix, unnoticed by Lotte, entered adolescence with her newfound knowledge, her wariness around her mother turned to disgust. When Beatrix reached womanhood, she hated her mother. Yet even as her peers began to marry, she turned down all suitors and remained at home, for Beatrix loved Rip dearly, and daily worked hard to deflect Lotte’s wrath away from him, even at her own expense. She feared greatly what might befall Rip once she were not there to draw her mother away, once she were not there to sit with him and share stories of talking beasts and men who could turn corn to gold. And yet she longed to step out from the shadow of fear and violence and into the warmth of kindness and love.

On her nineteenth birthday, Lotte gave Beatrix a blue summer shawl and a black eye. Angry that Beatrix had set aside the gift to admire the embroidered handkerchief her friend had wrapped in paper for her, Lotte struck her with the wooden spoon she had set down on the table just a moment before. Beatrix cried out and covered her eye, but Lotte was not sated. Rising to her feet she strode towards the pantry door, collecting her cane along the way. Beatrix, horrified, whimpered her apologies for being so ungrateful and professed to loving the shawl with all her might, but Lotte seemed only to become more enraged by her daughter’s protestations and, casting the cane aside, picked up the saucepan, from above the heat of the stove, and disappeared completely into the darkness.

Beatrix did not listed to Rip’s cries for long. She had grown up hearing yelps, grunts and groans of pain from the pantry, but this raw, unfettered wailing was something she had not heard before. The younger woman moved with quick efficiency, for though kindness was her choice, she was well schooled in how to hurt. Grabbing the heavy rolling pin the women had rolled countless pie crusts with, she flung the pantry door wide, letting in as much light as she needed to judge her strike accurately. She brought the rolling pin down on her mother’s temple as the woman, stood over Rip’s screaming form with the sauce pan in her hand, twisted to see where the light came from.

Lotte fell immediately, and did not rise again. For the second time in her life, Beatrix sat and watched as blood oozed from the head of her parent. It would be a falsehood to say that she did not cry this time, but grief is rarely purely grief, and Beatrix cried only a little for the loss of her mother, and a great deal for the loss of all the things her mother might have been, of all the years she had kept her father’s suffering a secret, but most of all, for the loss of herself, for it is impossible to kill a person without killing a large part of yourself as well. Beatrix went on crying as she helped Rip to his feet and shufflingly led him to lay on Lotte’s bed, and when she drew the curtains to shield his squinting eyes from the light. She went on crying as she tended his burns, and gave him medicine to bring painless sleep, and then she went on crying, alone, as night fell on the deeds that had been done.

Before it was light, Beatrix dragged Lotte’s body out to the same barn where she had first lain down with Rip nearly twenty years before. Then she set fire to it, and returned to bed to wait. Before long, smoke tinged the air and the shouting began. Men emerged in greying night clothes from houses all across the village, and the fire cart was brought, heavy with sloshing water which could never be enough. Beatrix came out, her blue shawl around her shoulders and joined the shouting, running from place to place, stumbling, falling, holding her eye, but in the end, it was no good, the barn was lost and the men took solace from having at least stopped the fire from spreading. It had been a still, windless night, and the ground outside was damp, which had served Beatrix well. Lotte’s body was found beneath a collapsed beam, and Beatrix wept again, for all to see. Rip lay behind closed curtains and murmured in his sleep.

It took a long time for Rip’s wounds to heal. Nineteen years in the dark confines of the pantry had wasted his muscles and reduced his vigour. But he did heal, with Beatrix dressing his wounds, insisting he walk about the house, and feeding him vegetables from their garden. All the while she took no visitors. People talked, of course, but mourning is a delicate thing, and all can be excused under its guise. In the sanctuary of their home, Beatrix cared for Rip, rebuilding him with love and kindness. It was not uncommon at this time for Rip to enter terrible fits of his body and mind. Shaking and sweating, he would cry out and hold his head, as if to protect it. Afterwards, he would resume as if it were still time for breakfast, though he had not long had his lunch, or pick up in the middle of a tale the two of them had completed some hours before. Occasionally, he would emerge disorientated, asking where he was and who with, so Beatrix thought nothing of it when after one such time he asked where he had been.

“Into the mountains” said Beatrix, returning to a favoured tale, “to hunt for bears. But while you were there, you went with a little man to dance and drink at his party, and you got so drunk that you slept for twenty years”. She stroked his forehead and began to sing.

“Who are you?” asked Rip.

“I am your daughter”, said Beatrix, aloud, for the first time. “And you would never have left me if you had had a choice”. One tired tear slipped from her eye, as they so often did in those days.

“I’m sorry” Rip said, and Beatrix could tell that he meant it.

And so this became the story, of Rip Van Winkle’s missing years. When he was strong enough, Beatrix took him into the street and shouted of his return from the mountains. People came out of their houses to see for themselves if this could be true, but Rip could not stop looking at how similar and yet different this place seemed to his half-remembered dreams. The men clapped him on the back, though gently, for his frailty was evident. The women kissed his cheeks, though gingerly lest they hurt him, and the children, well, the children did not know him at all. Those that had known him could see that the old Rip was changed, and though the tale he told, of carousing in a clearing and a beer so strong he had lost twenty years seemed implausible, there was something in the way he told it that made them wonder if it wasn’t true.

Though Rip’s mind was damaged and his body weakened, his kind heart and gregarious nature shone still, and even after the excitement dwindled, Rip rarely had to pay for his own beer. Instead, he went on telling stories, for whatever audience he had. Stories for quiet, nervous children and stories for naughty ones, stories for men, tired and in need of soothing, and for women yearning for adventure. Stories of magic and stories of love. Rip’s reputation spread again, as it had many years before, but this time the people came to him, to listen as he told his tales. Some even wrote them down and took them home to tell again.

Beatrix, at last, was content. Her father was well and happy, her home was safe and calm, and her prospects were at last her own. She wanted, it seemed, for nothing. And yet, she yearned for a family all of her own, to bathe in affection. She had long felt drawn to Hans Bakker, who she had played with each day of her school life and now walked with each afternoon when the weather was kind. On one such afternoon, Hans asked Beatrix to be his wife, and Beatrix knew that happiness such as this was too great to last.

They did not, I am sorry to say, live happily ever after.