The next morning, she had just finished her breakfast, there was a knock at the door.
"Oh – It's you." Her brother, of course, whom else had she expected? "Why are you here?"
"I was just passing by...wanted to see how you get by...very well by the looks of it."
"I wouldn't call that well, but yes, I'm scraping by."
"You could afford to have the roof repaired." He sounded almost reproachful, as if he now felt he had wasted the few copper coins he had grudgingly given her in the past few years.
"The roof? Why, the old hole is still there, but at least it hasn't gotten worse."
„There is no hole anymore", he said angrily. "You're rolling in money, you are, and you didn't tell me!"
"Now, now, don't talk nonsense. I'll show you where the hole is – you must have overlooked it – I have repaired it, after all, makeshift, but still..." She went outside, took some steps away from the house – and stared at the roof. The hole, the big hole that the storm had ripped into the roof – it wasn't there anymore. Vanished. As if it had never been there.
„Why, now, that is…well, I'll be jiggered!" The elf. It had to have been the elf. Maybe he considered it funny. Or he had disliked the ugly, broken roof so much that he had felt the urge ro repair it?
Elves.
"So you want to claim you didn't have the roof repaired?"
"Why, now, with which money? No, how could I afford to pay workers? A husband I haven't had for all those years, to whom I could have told to do it." The boards she had nailed to the roof beams had already been rotten and mouldy, but she hadn't felt up to making another makeshift repair.
"Maybe you have a secret admirer." He laughed aloud at his own joke.
She probably would have laughed herself, if it hadn't been about her. A secret admirer – what a funny thought! Pretty she had never been, with her crooked nose and the countless moles on her face and elsewhere. Not too ugly to get a husband, sure, but it had been she who had thrown herself at the men...and they had taken her, knowing they couldn't do better.
"Why, yes, certainly I must have a secret admirer. I get along."
"I'll be on my way", her brother replied. "If you need something, you know where I live."
"Yes, yes..." She'd rather die than knock at his beautifully decorated front door like a beggar-woman. And she'd rather bite off her tongue than ask his young wife for even just a pound of flour, much less money.
After all, she knew only too well that he only visited her, as he did, to avoid gossip, as gossip there would be if it was known that he didn't take care of his widowed sister, that he let her starve.
Very likely there already was gossip, about her being too stubborn to do what was expected, namely to serve as a nanny for the nieces and nephews that her brother had fathered, much later in his life than she would have deemed appropriate.
When he was gone she started to pull the rest of the turnips out of the soil of her little garden. Her back ached, but it was no use to complain. What had to be done had to be done. Only too soon, the first frost would come, and it wouldn't ask whether the harvest had been brought in.
"Do you like the new roof? My friends helped to repair it."
He again. She probably should be grateful, but felt little inclined to be. He would demand something in return soon enough, and it probably would be a price she wasn't willing to pay. Oh yes, she knew what they said about elves. She had no way of telling what the elf thought in his pretty head, just that she probably wouldn't like it.
"Why, it looks nice. Where did you get the slates?" Probably stolen, from other houses, whose owners would demand them back...
"Bought yesterday."
She nodded slowly. Hopefully, that was true. „What did you pay? I'll give you the money." It was bad enough to have her brother tell her to be grateful for everything he had done for her. She wouldn't suffer to be indebted to an elf.
"It's a gift. You don't have to give me money."
"You didn't ask whether I want a gift. How much?"
He looked at his feet, and quietly told her the price of the cheapest kind of slates. Then he told her, how many slates he had bought. She noticed that he carefully avoided to mention the price and the quality of slates in the same sentence.
Well, it wasn't her fault if he lied. Or not-lied, nevertheless trying to deceive her.
"Good. Wait..." She got up using the little birch tree beside the vegetable patch as a crutch, and walked into the house. The money under her mattress was still there. She counted it...it would be enough.
Outside, the elf stood there as she had left him.
"There." She pressed the coins into his hand.
He stared at them as if they were rubbish. "I am sorry", he murmured, pocketing the money. "Do...do you want me to leave and never return?"
„Why, now…" Again she knelt down beside the vegetable patch. „If you don't have anything better to do with your time than to lounge about here...it's all the same to me."
„Thank you." He shifted uneasily. „I…I have to go now. Er. That's for you". He laid something down beside her. "It's not worth much, though", he explained, then vanished soundlessly, swift as the wind.
She turned to look at his present. It was a bunch of little rose twigs, with rose hips on them, and some yellow leaves. Looked as if he had just ripped it off the trees. Pretty it was, though. Why had he done that? To cheer up a poor old woman? Could elves even feel compassion?
She didn't get rid of him. He would come to her house with a bunch of late wild flowers, or wait for her in the forest with a heap of firewood. The flowers were always mixed with grass, probably he just took a handful of what was there.
Pretty, though, they always were. Like a little slice of meadow.
Not like the meadows she knew, however, but like the meadows she remembered from her childhood, meadows full of magic and mysteries, and hope and rays of sunlight. Which was strange, considering that she knew all the flowers by name.
Maybe it was because an elf had given them to her.
Once, she saw him in the forest, but he didn't notice her. He was picking up twigs, looking at them, then throwing them away again. He had gotten tired of gathering firewood for her, apparently.
She watched him for a while. Fair he was, with his golden hair, almost unreal, and now she remembered how much she had longed to see elves when she had been a child. Ha, she had been cured of that fast enough when she had had that doubtful "pleasure", late in her life. However, she delighted in watching him, now that she knew he didn't notice her. At other times, she now realized, she shied away from looking at him directly. He might seem like a child in many things, but still...there was something about him, something strange and elvish that intimidated her.
He walked slowly, still picking up a twig here, staring at a tree there, without noticing her.
She went about her work as usual, and she had just wrapped the firewood – dry branches and twigs – in a coarse cloth, when she realized that the elf was standing beside her.
"Let me carry that", he said. "You take this." And he gave her a fragile something, constructed of hawthorn twigs with the red fruits still on them, and fern. It was not very much like a bunch of flowers, and looked as if he had put even less effort in it than in his other little presents.
It looked like winter. Like winter and baked apples and cosy fire in the hearth, and ice flowers at the window. And snow in the morning, soft, fluffy snowflakes.
„What do they call you?" he asked when he had placed the new firewood on the staple besides the hut.
She was about to answer when she remembered what they said about elves and names. An elf, the tale went, had limitless power over anyone whose true name was known to him.
"Call me? Why, it is of no use to you to know that, for I don't want to be called, anymore, ever. I have been called and have come running too many times already. I won't do it ever again, so you need not call me."
„No, call you, I need not, that much is true", he replied. "But nice it would have been, nevertheless, to know your name."
And then he was gone.
The wood was real, it always was, she always checked, by burning a little twig from every heap. If it burned, it couldn't be an elvish magic trick, right? No such nonsense as gold that turned into coal as soon as you pocketed it, as it happened in the old tales...maybe they were only tales, after all.