Everyone breathed easier at the first signs of spring. Infants died during the winter, as did crops, which left everyone a bit shaken. The least among them hardened their hearts against the pain, and then in good times, they sapped everyone else’s strength. Cruelty and senseless suffering visited upon the community again and again, with no sign of abating- during winter, from lack, and during summer, from anger. The gate of spring brought on hope, cheer, and the potential for something fresh and unsullied by reality; freshly-driven snow, melting into water for the fields.
Even when the losses of the season had been particularly bad, Gayle could not cry. She had hardened her heart, but not as many of their young men did. She did not fight, brandishing a knife to steal food for her family. She did not offer shelter, and then demand rents paid in exchange. She did nothing cruel in service of being kind, nor anything kind in service of being cruel. Nothing big. Nothing momentous. Gayle simply did little things, year after year. She walked half the distance to the river, to help the young men with stronger backs as they brought back water from the river. She told stories to the other women’s children, giving them fantasy as a vehicle so that they might learn important lessons. She tied knots, using ropes to hold together the collapsing structures of a town forgotten by its best and brightest. It was this last kindness- this last cruelty- that everyone remembered.
One of her creations lasted for months before it burned in the spring bonfire. The doll made of hair, rags, rope, and straw had taken three years to make, and it burned in the course of several minutes. Gayle replaced it soon enough. She got to work, stealing scraps that she could sew into the next one. The dolls were powerful. The fate of a community, made to rest on a single object. Objects were unlike people, Gayle knew. Objects had no feelings. Objects could not suffer. Unlike the homeless, made to toil to pay for their shelter, or the desperate, killing to feed their baby siblings, Gayle hurt no one when she punished the dolls. They took the punishment uncomplainingly, and when the larders filled through autumn, her neighbors all thanked her. No one asked how, or why.
Gayle did not know why, or how. The dolls had been a family legacy. Her mother had explained to her the process. She had not told her the cost. Most of these things had a cost, said the stories that Gayle told the wide-eyed children who studied at her knee. Gayle did not believe in the cost- or more importantly, Gayle did not care. If there was a cost, she would pay it. Let the cost fall on her. The dolls would absorb the suffering of a whole world if she asked them, and in turn, she would take theirs.