“Patience is a victory, son. Wait and you’ll win.”
Henry grew up into a fine-looking boy, with a thick
shock of
black hair. When he would come visit me, I’d remind him to keep his
temper,
repeating the spell-that-wasn’t-a-spell whenever his father’s ill
temper flared
up in him. It was a struggle his whole childhood – more often than not,
he
forgot my advice and ended up rolling in the dust with a boy twice his
size
who’d dared insult Henry’s ma. She and I did our best to teach him to
hold his
temper, and over time he got a little better. It still flared up more
often
than I thought fitting, but we considered it a victory if he went a
month
without swinging his fists.
Henry married Mary, another of my godchildren, and they got right to work on making a life for themselves. He’d turned out to be quite a good blacksmith, but our little village wasn’t big enough for two, so he kissed his wife goodbye and headed to Shady Bend, a nearby town, to set up a shop.
Not long after his horse disappeerd in the woods,
Mary found
out she was pregnant. Henry’s ma and I were overjoyed, and sent word to
Shady
Bend to let Henry know. We got a letter back that read simply, “Who’s
this
Henry? Our blacksmith’s name is Robert.”
Henry hadn’t ever arrived in Shady Bend. Mary and his ma were devastated, thinking that he must have gotten waylaid by bandits on his journey. Mary’s child grew inside her, and she and Henry’s ma held on to hope that the babe would bring them some comfort.
When
the boy was born, he was the spitting
image of Henry.
Mary named him George, after Henry’s father, and he grew up hearing
tales of
his father’s goodness and virtue, and his patience. Sure, that was a
bit of a
lie, but Mary wanted to teach George not to let his temper rule. She
did a good
job, and Henry’s ma and I watched happily as little George grew up to
be a
fine, tall young man.
One day, I was sitting in the town square with Mary when George, who was about twenty, came up to us with a strange look on his face. He kissed his mother on both cheeks, like he always did, then shuffled his feet uncomfortably.
“What’s wrong, Georgie?” Mary asked, pulling her
towering
son to sit by her side.
He shrugged. “One of the boys was sayin’ that Da was a drunk and a fighter.”
Mary’s soft voice got louder. “Your da wasn’t a
drunk,
Georgie, never. His da, sure, but not yours.”
He smiled sadly at her. “A fighter, then.”
She and I were quiet. Then I broke in. “George, son,
your
father had a bad temper, like his da. But he always tried to control
it. Henry
always told himself, ‘Patience is a victory. Wait and you’ll win’.” I
patted
George’s hand. “Now, he forgot sometimes, and got in a brawl or two,
but the
important thing is, he always tried to keep his temper. And you must,
too.”
Just as I finished sayin’ that, a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair strode out of the woods, a sword in his hand and a broad smile on his face. Mary gaped, and I reached for the small dagger I always keep in my boot, just in case. Then Mary picked up her heavy skirts and ran towards the man, shouting, “Henry! My Henry!”
I tried to hold George at my side, but he was a good
head or
two taller, and had no trouble following his mother to greet the man.
Mary
beckoned me over, and as I got closer, I saw that the man was Henry
after all,
much aged and scarred up.
He laughed, was what made me sure. Henry’d always had a lovely laugh and smile, and they hadn’t changed at all. “Oh, godmother,” he chuckled, “you’ll never believe what I have to tell you.”
It turned out that he had, in fact, been waylaid by
bandits
on his way to Shady Bend, and been forced to shoe their horses and mend
their
swords for the next twenty years. After having escaped at last, he’d
come up
close to the square only to see a handsome youth kiss Mary’s cheek.
Rage had
boiled up inside him, and he’d drawn his sword to attack, when my
oft-repeated
words came to his mind.
“Patience is a victory. Wait and you’ll win.” He
laughed as
he repeated the phrase to us all. “So I waited, and I watched, and I
listened
to you two tell this boy about his father, about me. Then I
understood.” He
turned to Mary. “I am so sorry, love, that I wasn’t here to see him
grow up
into such a fine young man.” George blushed at this, and then I
couldn’t see
much more through my tears. Henry won, after all.
This was probably the hardest story of all for me to
write. Where
female-focused stories are often easy to "de-magic," most of the boy
stories involve far too many fairy princes and magical spells. This
story was
completely new to me, but I liked that it represented a sort of
moral-based
fairy tale: the moral of this story is to be patient and control your
temper.
The original story involves a princess who abandons her life to marry a
man;
the man then goes to be a merchant and sends money home to his family,
but by
the time he returns, his son has grown up and, as in my retelling, the
man
almost attacks the son thinking that the wife has cheated. I added in
the bits
about the father's temper, because I thought that would emphasize the
original
story's moral, as well as making him a realistic character. I also
changed the
wife into a normal woman instead of a princess to better fit with the
setting
I've been using. I wanted to tell a story with a male godchild, and I
really
fell for this story when I was reading it. It’s been a difficult task
to write
these fairy tales with no fairies while keeping the setting and tone
consistent, and this is the story in which I struggled the most.
Bibliography
Lang, Andrew. "He Wins Who Waits."
Olive Fairy Book,
1907. Originally Contes Armeniens, par. Frederic Macler.
Image Information: Hiding Boy. Web Source: Flickr.