Revenge17 min read
The Madwoman's Umbrella
ButterPicks15 views
I remember the first time I saw Eri Sanders standing by the riverbank, long before the villagers started calling her "the madwoman."
"Look at her," someone whispered when we were children, and we laughed as kids do. "Her hair's like straw."
"She's still waiting," another voice said, softer. "For who knows what."
I was small, then. Eri wore a patched blue dress and carried a broken umbrella that had been mended a dozen times with thread and hope. She stood in the rain and waited like someone who had a promise tied to the weather.
There are things a village remembers and things it chooses to forget. We remembered how Hiro Kuznetsov ran into the collapsing slope the year the flood came. We remembered how he pushed people out of the way and then reached out for an old woman who couldn't walk; we remembered the mud and how his hands were clutching at air when the ground swallowed him. We remembered his face the day they said he did not come back.
Eri never let go of that day. She would take the umbrella and walk down to the place where the river had eaten the road. She would stand there, rain or shine, and call softly, "Hiro? Hiro, are you there?"
"She's mad," women would say when they passed her on the lane. "Poor thing."
"Don't stare," the men said. "It isn't good for the children."
For a while people fed her. A pot of soup left at her doorway. A piece of flatbread slid under the eaves. She would smile like a child and say, "Thank you," and then, careful as a cat, keep half the food to put away. "Hiro might be hungry," she would say. "If he comes back I must have food for him."
"How sweet," a neighbor would murmur, wiping her hands.
But we are a small place and small places hold big secrets like stones. Some men among us were not kind. The old bachelors who liked the feel of their own power saw Eri's soft eyes and the way rain made her skin shine and began to bring her gifts with strings attached.
"Come here," one would say, smiling with his mouth but not with his eyes. "You want a cake? Come on, let me hold you."
Eri, trusting and hungry, would smile back and let them. "Just a little," she would say. "For Hiro." She always hid half.
No one stopped them at first. The women, suspicious of scandal, began to keep away. "If we help her, the men will wolf us," they said. "She tempts them."
So Eri was left with the men who came with empty promises and sticky hands.
I was small then, never much more than a thin boy in our school uniform. My parents gave me pocket money. I saved my own bread and, when I could, slipped a bun to Eri.
"You don't have to," she'd say, but her eyes shone. "You feed me more than anyone else."
After a while she began to look for me. She found me on my way home from school and waited with her umbrella, face turned up like someone listening for a footstep.
"Don't come near me," I told her once, because the kids at school had started to call me names. "You make me a joke."
She just gave a small laugh and took my hand. "Little husband," she said, which made the children laugh harder.
"Stop!" I told her another day, in the market, when a girl I liked was there. "Stop calling me that. Get away, you're making me look like a fool."
"You don't mean that," she said, and when I shoved her she fell backward. She did not look angry—only surprised. She picked herself up and, whispering, shoved the broken umbrella into my hand.
"Take it," she said. "Keep it dry."
I remember the girl I liked walking away. Her hand left my sleeve like the end of a story.
That night I threw up in the river because of the shame and the longing. I had been cruel and because of it I could not sleep.
The next time it rained, Eri did not come to pick me up.
The storm that came swept down the mountain like a horse that had lost its rider. Rain was a curtain. I thought she had found shelter.
She did not find shelter.
They found her in the mud. She had fallen along the path where the soil had given way. When they pulled her out she had marks over her throat and fingernails broken in the dirt. My stomach went numb. I cried, a sound that made my mother angry at first. "What have you done?" she said, but later she was quiet in her room, and I knew she was praying.
At the funeral people said we were poor and couldn't buy a proper coffin. They pooled money and bought a plain box. No one wanted to be one of the pallbearers. "It's bad luck," someone said.
I pushed past them. "I will carry her," I said.
My mother slapped me hard enough that snowflakes of pain burst across my cheeks. "What do you mean, carry? She's a disgrace!" she said. But her voice went thin at the end. "If you do this, we must be careful. No crying. Quiet."
There is a custom—an old, bitter thing—that when someone dies suddenly, they must be carried in the middle of the night, quietly. The dead will not be angered by noise or then their spirit will follow. They called it the night-sending. At midnight the men walked, a small group, carrying the coffin under the lean moon. A flute one of the older men carried made a thin sound to warn others to stay indoors.
I held the small framed photograph of Eri and I tried to remember her smile. I thought of the times she had opened the umbrella and waited in the rain, and of the time I had shoved her into the dirt.
We had almost reached the stream that cuts the road when my foot slipped.
Someone's hand grabbed me. "Careful," a voice breathed.
Then something tugged down on my ankle like a living hook. I fell forward. The mud took my face. I inhaled cold water and coughed.
"Stop," someone hissed.
They shone a small light. On my skin was an imprint like a hand that had claws. It was black against my ankle, deep and wrong.
A hush dropped over the men. "You should not have come," one said quietly. "She doesn't want you to go on."
I thought at first she was angry and refused me the last honor. The old man who had found her body stepped closer and looked at my ankle, face pale. "Don't go on," he said. "You are marked."
They hurried me back to my house. In the morning a strange man arrived. He wore old clothes and carried a bundle. His name was Mark Poulsen. He smelled of smoke and incense.
"I can't help everyone," he said when my father begged, and yet he stayed. He looked at my ankle and looked at the mark as if it were a riddle. "Leave the coffin where it is," he said finally. "Don't leave that night. But you are not out of danger."
"You said this mark means she hates me," I said to him in the kitchen, where the candle was small and the soup was thin.
"I didn't say that. I said spirits act in patterns. But this is odd. She could be angry. She could be protecting you."
"Protecting me?" I laughed, but the sound was the size of a stone. "From who?"
He folded his hands and looked at me like I was a child on the brink of learning how to stand. "There are men who do terrible things. When a man dies with a wrong done to him, he can become thin and sharp and cruel."
"Who would hurt her?" My voice came out like a matchstick. The truth slid out then. "We had people—old men—who... who used her. I pushed her that day in the rain. She might have been in the path. Maybe she fell and someone else..."
"You must not lead anyone to that idea," Mark Poulsen said. "But keep to the house. And tonight at dusk bring three white candles. Sit with them until midnight. If a spirit comes, she may be listening."
I did not trust his words but I listened. My parents feared for their neighbors. My father covered his face each time he met me. My mother bought talismans and put them by the door.
That night dogs barked like a village was being unstitched. Their cries rose and fell with the wind.
I could not sit in the house. I could not breathe. I slipped out the window and went to the grave. I sat on the cold stone and unpacked the bread I had kept for her.
"I am so sorry," I said to the dark mound of earth. "If you want to take me, do it. But don't hurt them."
When I climbed home my parents were awake and furious. "How could you," my mother said, but she took me in her arms and cried. "You are a fool," she said, and handed me a bowl of warm soup.
The next morning the village shook itself into a rumor. A man had hung himself at the entrance to the road where the cameras watched. It was the flutist—the man who had found Eri's body. Finbar Beil. His feet were bound and his tongue out. On his arm was a mark—one like the one on my ankle.
A crowd gathered as though to look at a cloud. Someone called the police. Someone else had the presence of mind to pull the footage. On the screen the man had woken in the night and walked toward the gate, looking as if sleep had dragged him. Then something—hands in the dark—gripped him and dragged him into place. His belt rose as if held by a phantom. He swung, and then no more.
I watched and my insides fell out of order. Who did this? The village did not say much. "It might be the mountain," said the old postman. "It might be accidents."
But an older woman in the crowd said, "He was a bad man. He kept his hands where they didn't belong."
How do you watch a wrong doer get what looks like justice and not feel a strange knot of relief? For me, the knot was tied up with guilt. Because I knew who had been wronged in the dark.
The police poked and prodded. They took the body and said the same polite things they say on television. They said not to spread rumor. They took Eri's body as well and took it to be checked.
Then they returned few days later with the scarest news: Eri had not died of a fall. She had been strangled. Under her nails was a piece of human tissue. On her body were the signs of a fight.
I curled into myself. The truth flayed me. We had feared the wrong man, but the wrong man had more hands than we thought. The man who had found her body had been hiding something.
Mark Poulsen came back and sat with us, quiet as wind.
"This is not the end," he said. "But it explains why she would fight. She wasn't alone that night. Finbar—he had a secret."
"Are you saying he killed her?" I said.
"I am saying this ties him to it," Mark Poulsen said. "And someone has been marking you. That mark is drawn by anger. Eri did not mark you because she wanted to hurt you—she did not want you to be taken. She tried to stop harm from spreading."
Then Mark Poulsen told us something that made my bones hum. "Finbar is not a man who can be left alone. A man who lives like that takes fear with him even after he dies. The law may take the dead away, but a guilty soul finds a way to reach to those tied to him. He will look for a replacement if he believes paying debt will save him."
I did not sleep that night. The house had a smell of burned incense and damp. My mother had made a little tent for me to stay near the grave. "You are too young," she said, but I could not stay away.
Every night at midnight I would sit at Eri's grave. Sometimes she would come out of the ground like a shy moon. She was still cold and translucent, and yet her hands were gentle when she touched my hair.
"Don't be afraid," she said once, and for the first time since the funeral I felt something like being forgiven.
I kept going back. She would sit with me and tell stories about Hiro and about the times she had baked a cake for him and left it by the stream. She would hum and the tune was like rain on a roof. When she smiled it was like the umbrella: small, patched, and enough to shield.
"Why did you save me that night?" I asked her once.
She looked at me and her eyes were dark as a well. "Because you fed me when no one else would," she said. "Because you were my warmth."
"I pushed you," I said, the words cutting. "I told you to stay away. I was cruel."
She nodded. "You were afraid of being laughed at. You are only a child who grew up."
"I hurt you," I said. "I never said I'm sorry the right way."
She laughed—a sound like leaves. "You have said it a hundred times with your eyes," she said. "Now say it with your mouth so your heart can settle."
When the medical report came back, we had proof that the man who died had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The video of his death showed the awful fingers and the floating belt. People watched, and anger tastes different than fear.
Then it happened.
George Alvarado—Finbar's son—was a simple man who kept to himself and drank. The village muttered that the son had lived with his father's shadow. On the day his father died, the villagers said he showed up at the little shop with his hair in his eyes and a look that was not quite sleep and not quite wake.
On the morning that George was found on the gallows at the village gate, the people gathered like witnesses to an old story. He was tied with the same belt. His feet dangled an inch from the earth. His face was slack and pale. On his arm there was the same twisted black mark.
The crowd was a living thing. Some wept. Some took out their phones. Some whispered things I could not say. The police had sealed off the spot but the news traveled. People watched the footage and the photographs and their faces changed like weather.
"Who did this?" a woman shrieked. "He wasn't a good man but he didn't deserve this!"
"They deserved every bit," an old woman muttered. "They thought they were above sin."
There were those who called for justice and those who looked with shame. They pressed their faces to the gate and took pictures. Some spat. Some clapped. I stood at the back because my feet could not move.
There was a camera fixed on the gate as on every exit because men had stolen things before; the footage was taken down to the police station and to the eyes of everyone who wanted to see. What the camera showed was a parade of the uncanny. Karl, the shopkeeper, walked past the gate and then doubled back, as if something touched him. A breeze moved and then something like a shadow reached up. The belt rose like a hand. People called it "an act of vengeance." The footage was passed around with loud commentary.
I felt the crowd like a pressure. Voices rose: "The man's son paid for his father's sins." "It's not us. It's the mountain." "He must have had enemies." "It was wrong what's been done to Eri." "We should have stopped them." "We are complicit."
But the thing that made my throat close was the sound of people taking pictures, the way they had become spectators at a punishment. The elder, who in life had been the judge of people's wrongs, was judged by something older than law. He hung where everyone could see. The son hung because the father's crime could not be left to rot unaccounted. The village, which had turned away while Eri was alive, now craned forward to watch death.
When the crowd parted, some tossed barley and coins in the dirt like blessing and curse mixed together.
"I don't want this," I told Mark Poulsen in the days after. "I didn't ask for this."
"You never asked for it," he said. "But sometimes the world makes its own account book. A person who does wrong will pay one way or another."
I wanted to run away. I wanted to scream at the men who had come and laughed when Eri waited with her umbrella. But the belly of the village had been fed by their silence. People had been afraid to say anything. Now they stood and said nothing but took footage on their cheap phones.
Mark Poulsen and I walked to the field behind the temple. "You must not look for revenge," he said, and his eyes were kind but unbending. "Eri needed peace. She kept you because you were one of the few who gave a piece of bread to a hungry stranger. She did not come to curse. She came to protect."
"From what?" I said. "From men? From Finbar?"
"From men who think themselves safe," he said. "From their has-been law. From the hunger that turns a man cruel."
There is such a thing as the body's memory. When we bury, the soil remembers where the hands were. The village seemed so small and so mean then. I wanted to be different.
Night after night Eri came. Sometimes she would bring her old umbrella and hold it above us like a roof of sorrow.
"Are you going away?" I asked once, when she was still thin and there, when her voice still had a warmth.
She smiled that bright, patient smile. "I have been waiting so long," she said. "Now I can go. But the little husband has to be fed."
"That's ridiculous," I said.
She shoved me with her shoulder. "Stop trying to be clever. The world wants you to be clever but sometimes it needs you to be small and kind."
The days slid. The police were busy with paperwork and rumors and the big city reporters came and asked questions with their polite notepads. The reports said "strange evidence," "possible homicide," "local superstitions," and the village found itself on the map in a way it did not like.
And then, in a night when the wind tasted of iron, the final thing happened.
I had been warned not to ask how Eri had died. Mark Poulsen had said, "If you pry, you will not let them go. Let them have their leave." But I had been a boy and guilt is a stubborn animal. I sought the truth out of a need to punish or to excuse.
"You must not ask," Eri said, a thread of urgency in her voice.
"I have to know," I said.
"You will not change what happened by knowing," she said. "You can only make me stay."
"I will tell them," I whispered. "I will tell the village."
Her face closed like someone folding a letter and putting it in their pocket. "If you take that story and make it a show, it will bind me to this place," she said. "If you make them watch my grief, it will not let me go. Let me go, little husband. Be brave by letting go."
I did not listen. I told the story. I told what I had seen and what I had heard and what I had suspected. People had been listening for a long time. Fingers pointed, eyes widened, and names were whispered. Finbar's past was pulled in pieces from old sacks and laid open like an animal.
At sundown the next day, the village square filled. People who had ignored Eri came to see the fireworks of accusation. I should have stayed away. I did not.
"Why did you say it?" Eri asked me that night when I came to the grave.
"Because I thought it was right," I said. "Because I wanted justice."
"Justice does not always wear a bright face," she said. "Sometimes it wears a cruel one. Be careful."
I did not listen then either.
Later that night, someone in the crowd whispered that George had confessed. He did not confess to the killing—no one could prove such a thing—but he had turned pale and his hands had trembled in public and people murmured that the weight of his father had crushed him.
And then the next morning his son—no—his son did not show up to his stall.
When we found George, he was at the gate, tied. The sun was coming up and the whole village smelled of wet straw and fear. The police said what they had to say. People said what they had to say. Someone from the city called it "a tragic copycat." Someone else called it "poetic justice."
But for me, standing there at the edge of the crowd, it was something like a finale. Voices rose and fell. "Let him hang," someone said. "He must pay." Another said, "This is not for us to do." Children were dragged away by their mothers.
The scene lasted a long time. There was a stretch of silence in which the village learned its own reflection. Some hands reached out as if to pull him down and then withdrew. A few people recorded the face of the hanging man, close enough that later they would show the footage and point at the mouth and say, "See? He deserved it." The old man who had been the first to see Eri's corpse had been done the same way. Now the son had been taken in the same script.
I pushed my way forward against the crowd. "Stop it," I yelled. "This is not justice! Stop!"
"Who are you to tell us?" someone shouted back.
"I loved her!" I said. The words came out like a pistol. "I fed her when no one else would!"
"Then what are you doing here?" an old woman asked.
"I'm trying to save what I can," I told her.
But the people wanted an image to show their repentance. They wanted to point at a body and say, "See? We did right." They wanted closure that death cannot give.
So they stood there and watched and recorded. The cameras did their work. Phones flashed. Some people took pictures of the mark on George's arm and the way the belt had left its shadow. They turned their faces away when the wind moved and the man writhed.
At one point someone started to clap—not in praise but like a wild applause for the end of a terrible play. Then others joined. It sounded like rain on tin. I felt my stomach hollow.
George's face twitched and then stilled. When the police cut him down, it was too late. His mouth hung open in a way that made the children turn their eyes and cry.
"It wasn't us," some said later. "It was the same thing that took his father." Others said, "You did this," and they pointed at me as if naming the candle that had lit a room. There is cruelty in crowds and there is cruelty in silence. Sometimes they look the same.
I will not lie: I felt relief. Part of me wanted that to be the end. I wanted Eri's name to be cleared and to have the men punished. But the way people gawked and recorded and then posted—"Look, justice"—left a cold aftertaste as if we had eaten blood.
After the hanging, Mark Poulsen came to me. "You wanted the truth," he said quietly. "What do you have now?"
"I have their pictures," I said. "And my shame."
He looked at me searingly. "You did not give Eri peace by shouting. But you gave her a chance. She is ready to go."
And then the nights were easier. The dogs stopped their frantic barking at strange hours. The haunted moves around the village quieted down. The marks on men who had been close to the crimes faded. The cameras showed nothing after that final morning, and people closed doors.
Eri came around less often. When she did, she smiled with a softness that was no longer bound to hunger. Once, in the rain, she took my hand and held it.
"Are you angry with me?" she asked.
"I was," I said.
"Do you still love me?" she asked.
I had loved her in my awkward shame and my helpless cruelty. "I always will," I said, because what else could you say to someone who had given you so much without asking?
She laughed. "Then let me go," she said.
On the day she left, it was misty, and the sky had the color of unburnt paper. We went to the graveyard together—she and I and the outline of Hiro Kuznetsov in the photograph on the stone, all three of us in one small place.
"Thank you," she said, and she leaned into the photograph like a person into a coat.
"Will you be all right?" I asked.
She looked at me like you look at someone you know you will miss. "I have been waiting a long time. Now I will go. Take the umbrella."
She pressed her umbrella into my hands. It was heavier with wet and years, the threadbare fabric smelling of rain. "For your shoulders," she said. "So you remember."
"Promise me one thing," I said, though the words sounded like they were worn out.
"Promise you won't make me stay," she said.
I wanted to keep her. I wanted to keep her in that strange warmth of being the only person who had been kind to her. But her eyes were like the sky when it opens. They were honest and far. "Go," I said.
She and Hiro sat together then. They touched each other like two people correcting a long-untied shoelace. For a moment both their faces were bright and full in a way that belonged to the living. They smiled at me. Hiro raised a hand, a small wave of a man who had been kind to someone who loved him beyond reason.
"Goodbye, little husband," Eri said, and then their bodies grew thin like mist over the pond. They were two lamps that flickered out and turned into a blotch of star-stone that melted into the morning.
For a long time I stood by the grave. Then I noticed something on the ground: the umbrella she had used, cracked and patched, lying at my feet. It was empty now of weight and warmth, but it still held her shape.
I picked it up and opened it. It did not keep me dry, not really, but holding it made the world less sharp.
I turned to leave and for the first time in three years the village seemed quieter. The people moved like people who had learned an ugly lesson. Some knelt by the graves of those they had ignored. Some stuffed coins into pots. Others mounted their cameras and pointed them to other places.
I stepped under the broken umbrella and began to walk.
"Do you think she forgave you?" a voice from behind my shoulder asked.
"I think," I said, "she knew I tried, even if clumsily."
The umbrella was of no use for shelter, but it fit my hands. The rain was light. When it touched my face it tasted like the washing away of guilt.
I put the umbrella back into the ground beside the grave. A few raindrops landed on the threadbare fabric and made it shine like something that had done its job.
That umbrella is not much. It has holes and mends and a place where the spokes broke. But when I look at it, I remember a woman who waited in rain for a hero and then waited some more for the small kindnesses. I remember the night dogs screamed and the sky thundered. I remember the way Finbar Beil died and the way his son George Alvarado followed, and the way the village watched as if that would fix everything.
Maybe some things cannot be fixed. Maybe some things can only be honored. I left the umbrella there, leaning against the stone with Hiro Kuznetsov’s picture and Eri Sanders’ name.
When the light shifted, I walked away.
The umbrella kept the little space of the grave as safe as a small thing can be. It sheltered no one and sheltered all. It was like her laugh and like her tears.
I learned that to hold onto anger is to hold to cold, and that some forgiveness is the only warmth left. I kept a memory, not a grudge. I kept a small, ragged umbrella.
Sometimes, at night when the wind is right and the moon is a thin coin, I go back and stand at the graves. The umbrella is there, and sometimes if I close my eyes I feel fingers, not cold but home-like, tuck into my hair. The world hums. The village sleeps.
"Little husband," she would say, smiling even across the seam of worlds.
I have no audience now and no applause. But I have a broken umbrella and a story I was too young to keep. I will carry it like a lantern.
And when people ask, I tell them the truth: that the madwoman was never mad about nothing. She was mad with love and grief. She kept an umbrella because the rain brought back faces. She kept half the bread because she believed someone else might need it. She taught me, in her small way, that the best thing to do in a world full of cold hands is to be warm.
Her umbrella is still at the grave. It keeps a little place dry. I walk under it sometimes, and the rain sounds like a yes.
The End
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