Raising Rapunzel

Posted by Jeff on August 3, 2009 under Fiction, Humor |

Once upon a time there was an old woman. She lived alone in a house surrounded by a beautiful garden. This woman was feared and hated by people for miles around for she knew witchcraft, which is how her vegetables grew so mightily. She often wept because her talents made her so unpopular with the townsfolk. Even her own neighbors, who she often saw admiring her garden, were afraid to speak to her.

One day, the woman went out to tend to her garden and she noticed that some of her radishes, which were the finest radishes for miles around, were missing. It seemed, even, that there were fewer and fewer radishes each day. Certain that it was the work of the rabbits and other beasts who entered her garden by night; she sat up to wait for them, that she might hex them.

The woman waited as the moon rose on her pretty garden and eventually there was much rustling by her radish patch. She sprung up to trap the creatures in a spell and was heartily surprised to find one of her neighbors rooting around in her garden.

“How dare you!” She cried. “How dare you climb into my garden and attempt to take my radishes like a common thief! For this a great evil will befall you!”

At this the man grew very pale and his voice leaked out in an appallingly high-pitched whine.

“Please,” he begged, “I have done this out of necessity! My wife became enthralled by these radishes and had to have one. After that, one would not do and she needed still more. Eventually her desire grew so strong that she says she will die if she does not have even more radishes!”

The old woman frowned, for this seemed to be a ridiculous claim. She felt no warmth towards the young couple. They had long wished for a child, the old woman knew, but so far their effort had been for naught. She knew they were most intent on their task for the sound alone had kept the old woman up nights.

“Very well! You make take as many radishes as you please, on one condition: you must give me the child your wife brings into the world. I shall raise it and all shall be good with it.” She was certain that the extremity of the request would send the young man fleeing back over her garden wall.

“I agree.” The man said, and with that he gathered armfuls of radishes and returned to his home. The woman stood dumbfounded in her garden at the idea of a man bartering his first-born for a small heap of vegetables.

The old woman went into her house and sat upon an old worn rocking chair. A cat came and rubbed itself against her legs.

“A most peculiar thing has happened, Grimsby,” she said, bending down to pick the cat up. “Our wretched neighbors have agreed to give me their first-born child. I suppose a part of me hoped that that foolish man would accept my offer, and so he has. I hope it’s a girl. I always wanted a daughter, you know, but no one was interested in marrying me because of my Craft. I’ll raise her properly and she shall be a beautiful and obedient young lady. She most certainly won’t be the kind of person who trades away her progeny for something such as radishes.” The cat said nothing but instead simply blinked slowly at her, as cats are wont to do.

—

The next spring the old woman felt a tingling excitement run down her spine and she knew that her neighbors’ child had been born. As silent as a shadow and as quickly as the wind, the woman stood in their kitchen. She looked down upon the child being held by her birth mother. It was a beautiful baby, blue of eye and with a few golden curls already covering her head. Before the couple could say a word the woman took the baby and saw it was a girl. “I shall name her Rapunzel,” she said softly. And then she and the child disappeared in a whiff of smoke.

Back in her own home the woman tended to her new daughter. “You are safe with me,” she told the baby, “because I will care for you tenderly and with love. I have named you Rapunzel, after my own mother, who was kind, and wise, and good natured. You will do her name proud.”

—

As the years went on, Rapunzel grew, much to the old woman’s chagrin, to be a good deal like her birth parents. She was rude, simpleminded, and extremely willful. She was also very beautiful which, as the old woman had noted among others when she herself was younger, was not a rare combination of traits. Once, when the child was six, the woman returned to her neighbors and offered to return their daughter to them. They refused, as they had both found careers and said they frankly didn’t have the time to care for the child. The woman had returned to her house feeing pity for the girl and ashamed of herself for trying to abandon a girl unwanted by even her own parents. For years the child slunk around the house, complaining and refusing to do her chores. Furthermore, the girl would seldom care for her hair, which had grown twice as long as she was tall, and it would drag dust all over the woman’s floors. To make matters even more unbearable the girl would incessantly ask for money.

“If you want money you shall have to earn it!” The old woman cried one day when the girl was fifteen. “At your age I was working from dawn to dusk for Mistress Kinworth, who often gave me a ha’penny every month. Better still, she is the one who taught me the Craft.”

“I do not want to learn the Craft!” The girl whined. “I want to go out with other girls my age! You didn’t even let me go to Cicely’s party last week and everyone else was there!”

“Spiteful child! That girl is common as muck and I know for a fact she had several young men at that party. Her parents should be ashamed!”

“Of course there were boys there! I like boys you horrible old crone! I have even spent some time getting to know Atherol Crowley! And he wound up spending most of the party with that cow Wilona!” Realizing what she said, Rapunzel clapped her hands over her mouth, but it was too late. The old woman went pale.

“Why you hateful little girl! How dare you consort with men like some common trollop! You shall learn a lesson, and no mistake!” And so the old woman decided that Rapunzel would spend her days locked in a tower. It was very tall and had but one window far at the top. The tower also lacked a doorway, making it the most secure, if not poorly designed, building in all the land. Once Rapunzel was inexplicably moved in, the old woman stood before her.

“I will now return to my home where I can tend to my garden. I will come every three days to bring you food. When you hear me cry ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair’ you shall do so that I may climb up and feed you.” Rapunzel wept bitterly as the woman climbed down the girl’s hair to the ground far below. At the bottom she enchanted some thorny shrubs to guard the base of the tower.

And so for weeks this arrangement continued. The woman hoped that the isolation would make the girl a bit more introspective and more grateful for what she had. Every three days the woman would return and cry “Rapunzel Rapunzel let down your hair!” and climb up the gleaming locks. After several months of this the woman entered the tower to find the girl in oddly high spirits. When pressed, the girl refused to offer an explanation and the woman was forced to leave unsatisfied. The next visit the woman noticed the same thing, only this time the girl’s clothes were wrinkled and askew. Again the girl had no explanation and the woman left. The very next time, as the woman tried to catch her breath after the long climb, Rapunzel asked “Why is it that you find the climb so difficult when my love can scale the tower so easily?” Very suddenly the girl went pale and shut her mouth tightly.

“I should have known, you wretched girl! No matter what I do you find some way to disgrace yourself. I shall be forced to teach this young man how to treat a lady!” And so the woman cut off Rapunzel’s flowing hair and banished the girl from the tower. Then she waited. Soon enough she heard a man cry “Rapunzel Rapunzel let down your hair!” and she tossed the end of the severed braid to the ground. When the man climbed through the window the woman pounced upon him.

“You ought be ashamed of yourself! I judge you to be at least six-and-twenty and here you are climbing towers to have your way with a slip of a girl no more than sixteen? Well, you terrible predator, I have caught you! And Rapunzel is gone! I have banished her far from here and you shall never see her again. Upon hearing this, the prince, for he was a prince, threw himself from the tower in a fit of anguish. The woman felt this was terribly melodramatic and moved to the window to see what sort of mess he had made over the ground below. She spied him crawling from the thorn bushes clutching his eyes and then running into the woods.

And so the woman decided to spend the rest of her days in the tower herself. She installed some window boxes where she could grow radishes to eat. She often sat, tending to them and looking out at the woods. She never left the tower again; content to be separated from, as she put it, “horrible people and bloody stupid children.”

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