30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 27, The Weaver

There was once an old, old woman. She did not speak, but she was invaluable to her family and her tribe. She lived in the mountains, beyond the reach of modernity where trucks and cars passed. She kept to old ways and old habits, except, of course, for her beloved electric stove - for she could cook and clean like she never had been able before with the contraption. And she wove. That was the way she told her stories. She wove and wove. And each work was a story.
When Violet had a fourth, miracle child, at fifty-two, that went into the baskets. The weave was beautiful, and complicated, made of many different subtle colors. It told of passion and of pain and of the inestimable complications of birth and life.
And when the sky clouded up and it rained for what seemed like months, the dark wool wove together under her fingers into stories of homes lost and cars ruined, paintings and beds molded, and refinding, the good silver jewelry, the love for one another; the baskets and the mats were alive with straining vines.
And always, in the deep evening, with the stars beginning to shine through the veil of day that was being drawn back to reveal the depth of night, she would weave quietly, humming to herself, a different thing. No basket, no mat. A long thing, a thin thing. A box, a large one, with sides of reeds.
They found her the night after the full moon. She looked peaceful and lovely, her eyes were closed. She lay on her bed, at ease. Her feet looked strangely placed, but what does not sometimes look strange about death? The coroner called her official time of death, and they thought that would be the end of it. But Cassia, the store clerk, couldn't let it go. She walked up the mountain, she let herself into the old cottage and she nosed around until she found what she was looking for. The project, the old thing, sides and a bottom. The size of a small woman. And unfinished. The basket told a story - a story perhaps only the old woman could read - but the story was not finished. The weaver had stopped, but in a way the basket told on. Cassia called the police. She reported it a murder, she laid out her evidence, the town stood behind her.
And why? Why? There was little to it; death by poison, culprit unknown. The story was unfinished, with it the basket.
Many years later, an old man came to the town. He was very old, and worn. His eyes were hardly eyes any more. He looked about the town, he asked and he nosed. The basket weaver? She was dead. And her baskets? Gone, gone to the little city museum, where she was held a living - now dead - part of history and of heritage. He walked slowly, achingly to the museum. It opened like an old basement, and smelled of it, from lack of usage. He touched the weavings, he traced his fingers. He put his nose to an old basket, shiny with the oil of her hands. He ran a thumb over the raw edges of the last basket. And then his fingers made odd movements, like a weaver.
They wove and wove. They wove a story of a man, driven mad with frustration and a woman, who would not yield. A man who wanted the woman away, away from the darkness of the forest and the danger of living alone, and a woman who wanted her life and herself. And the hands told of the hatred that built in the pain of the loss, and the fear of the discovery of a relation so unmodern, and the fear of the loss of an inheritance, many years older than either of them. And as his hands moved, rusty at first, but then more sure, he wove in the strands of the basket with another plate of reeds, and they formed, together, a patchwork history. And then he left, and he did not come back. And he did not look back. But his hands were there, in the weaving, and his warmth, and his life.