Horsehair and Mustard

Okay so, the Mustard Festival in Urnäsch. I know how that sounds. A whole festival, an entire hall, dedicated to mustard. But you haven't lived until you've stood in a giant wooden festival hall with two hundred people, little paper spoons, and forty kinds of mustard lined up on long tables like it's a wine tasting. It's a whole thing. The alphorn players do their thing on the stage, the sound rolls around the rafters, and everybody eats bread with yellow smears on it and pretends to have a view.

I was there alone, which is normal for me. I'm Gwen, I'm twenty-five, I drive a forklift for the logistics company out by the depot, and I've been happily single for three years now. Happily. I chose it. After my fling at twenty-two went nowhere, I just sort of decided people were more trouble than they were worth, and honestly the forklift never argues with me.

So there I was at one of the long wooden tables, working my way through a smoked mustard that tasted like a campfire had a baby with a horseradish, when a shadow fell over my paper cup.

"Gwen? No way!"

I looked up and my brain did that thing where it loads a face from years ago and tries to paste it onto the man in front of me. The face worked anyway. Douglas. Wide shoulders now, jaw like the rest of the family, but same crooked grin.

"Douglas! Oh my god, sit down, sit down!"

He dropped onto the bench across from me, all six-foot-something of him folding himself under a festival table built for people who eat bread for a living. Which, fair, we all do.

"I didn't know you were back in Urnäsch," I said, pushing my little mustard spoons toward him like a gracious hostess, which I was not.

"Three weeks now," he said, grabbing a spoon and dunking it in something dark. "Steel erector now. There's work on the new warehouse near Herisau, so I'm up here living with my folks until I find a flat."

"Steel erector. Last I heard you were fixing bikes in St. Gallen."

"That was a hundred years ago. I did the course, now I clip beams together eighty meters up and my mum hates it." He licked mustard off his thumb, then remembered the bread basket existed and tore off a hunk. "What about you? Still at the depot?"

"Still at the depot. Forklift. Ten tons of pallets, all mine."

"Do you still talk to it?"

"I don't talk to it," I said. "It talks to me. It beeps when it's upset."

He laughed, that same big laugh he had on the early bus, the one that made the driver glance in the mirror and wait. The alphorns wheezed through some slow tune overhead and the hall smelled like mustard and wood smoke and about four hundred people's winter coats.

"So," he said, pointing a bread hunk at me. "Who did you come with?"

"Nobody. Came alone. It's my festival. I go every year."

"Every year? I didn't even know this existed until my mum put a flyer on the fridge."

"She put a flyer on the fridge and you came? On your own?"

"On my own," he admitted. "I've been back three weeks and my social circle is my parents and a guy named Urs who also clips beams. Urs is sixty-one. Great guy. Doesn't go to mustard festivals."

"So you saw a flyer and thought, mustard, that's for me?"

"I thought, that's for my mum. And then she didn't want to come because it's cold, so I ate the ticket." He shrugged those enormous shrugs. "Also I live alone and if I don't leave the house on purpose I'll just rewatch the same four movies forever."

"Same," I said, before I could stop myself. "I mean, not the movies part. Well, also the movies part. But yes. Alone. Three years now, my own flat, my own kettle, nobody leaving dishes in my sink."

"Nobody leaving dishes in your sink," he repeated, dreamy. "That sounds like a holiday."

"Hey, it has downsides."

"Name one."

I stuffed bread in my mouth to buy time. He waited, grinning, because Douglas always knew when you were stalling.

"Okay, the downside is you have to carry everything yourself," I said finally. "Like if you buy a wardrobe. Or if you're sick. Or if you want someone to taste the weird mustard and tell you if it's poisonous."

"Hand it over." He took the smoked one, dunked, chewed, and his eyebrows did a little dance. "Not poisonous. Tastes like a bonfire, though. Who makes mustard that tastes like a bonfire?"

"A visionary. Try the one next to it, the cherry one, it's insane."

We worked through the row like that. He'd dunk, I'd dunk, we'd argue. He thought the horseradish one was too aggressive. I told him that was the entire point of horseradish. He said a condiment shouldn't fight back. I said a condiment that fights back is the only honest condiment at this table. Somewhere in there the alphorns finished their set and a yodel club took the stage, and the hall got louder and warmer and more crowded, elbows everywhere.

"Do you want to get out of the scrum?" he asked, leaning in so I could hear him over the accordions. "I saw a back porch when I came in. Nobody was on it."

"An escape route? Yes please. I've been headbutted by three coat sleeves in the last hour."

We gathered our cups and a fresh pile of bread and threaded through the crowd. The back porch was this long wooden balcony running along the side of the hall, basically empty because everyone with sense was inside where the free samples were. There was a bench, and over the railing somebody had draped a hand-woven blanket, the old horsehair kind with the stripes, except this one had a scatter of moth holes along one edge like it had survived a war.

"Horsehair," Douglas said, running a finger over it. "My grandmother had one of these. It itches but it's warm."

"That blanket has seen things," I said. "Look at those holes. Moths ate well that year."

We sat on the bench, cups on the railing between us, and out past the parking field the light was starting to go orange behind the hills. Then the wind picked up, and I saw it coming up the valley, that dry yellowish haze the fields kick up some evenings in late summer. A dust wall, rolling slow.

"Uh oh," I said. "That's a dust storm. It'll sandblast us in about ten minutes."

"Should we go in?"

"In there? With the accordions and the elbows?" I tore the last bread hunk in half and handed him his share. "I'd rather eat sand."

"Fair." He ate his half, watching the dust roll in. "You know what's weird? We used to sit together every day for years. The early bus to town. And then one day you just weren't there anymore, and I never actually found out what happened to you. People said Zurich, people said Appenzell, somebody insisted you'd joined a circus."

"I am not circus material and everyone knows it. I stayed, I did the warehouse job, I got the flat, and that's sort of it. Time went by like a delivery schedule."

"And the boyfriend situation?"

"Deserted for three years. Dusty, you could say." I nodded at the storm coming up the valley. "Like that. What about you?"

"Two years with a woman named Katja, back when I was twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four. It was good. Then she got a job in Zurich and I got a job in the air and we just, wound down. She's married now, I hear. Happy for her, honestly."

"So we're both alone."

"Looks like it." He held out his cup and I clinked it with mine, the little paper ones, the least romantic toast vessels ever invented. "To being alone together."

The first grains of dust hit the porch just then, hissing against the boards, and the light went all bronze and grainy like the whole valley had been put through a filter. I pulled the horsehair blanket off the railing and split it between us, and it did itch, and it was warm, and I remember thinking, this is nice, this is just nice, don't make it a thing, Gwen.

Then Douglas went quiet in that way he used to go quiet on the bus right before he said something that got us both in trouble, and he turned toward me, and my heart did the thing. You know the thing.

"So," he said. "Is there a version of tonight where I offer you a ride home and it's not just a ride home?"

I looked at him over my paper cup. The dust was really coming down now, gold and thick, and the alphorns had started up again inside, muffled through the wall like a heartbeat in a neighbor's apartment.

"Depends," I said. "How good a driver are you?"

He grinned. "Good enough to get you home in one piece. Also, I noticed your little car isn't in the parking field. Shop again?"

"The shop again, yes. Third time this year with that clutch. I swear the garage owner and I are basically engaged at this point." I blew a bit of dust off my cup. "So how would you get me home? You walked here?"

"I have Urs's truck tonight. Long story, involves his wife and a llama haircut, don't ask. Point is, I have a truck and a whole evening with nothing to do with it."

"Urs, the sixty-one-year-old with the opinions about bolts?"

"Urs, the sixty-one-year-old with opinions about everything, yes. He's lending me the truck because I fixed his trailer hitch and he felt bad that I still live with my parents the way a teenager who failed at moving out would. Which, for the record, I did not fail at, the flat fell through."

"Sure it did." I drained the last of my cup. "Fine, you've got a deal. But fair warning, my road is the one with the potholes the council pretends don't exist."

"Gwen, I clip beams together eighty meters up for a living. I think I can handle potholes."

Inside, the yodel club hit their big finish and the hall applauded like an avalanche. We gathered our jackets and went out the side door, past the coat rack, out into that thick bronze air. The dust had really arrived by then. It wasn't mean, just everywhere, a dry gold fog rolling up the valley with the sun sinking into it, and the whole world went the color of strong coffee with too much milk.

"Okay, wow," Douglas said, stopping on the porch steps. "That's actually beautiful. It's literally dirt and it's beautiful."

"That's Appenzell for you. Even the weather has a personality."

We went back onto the porch because the storm was at its best from there, slamming against the boards and hissing past the railing. The bench was still free. The horsehair blanket was still hanging there, moth holes and all, looking patient.

Douglas took it off the railing before I could and shook it out once, gently, like it might complain. Then he came around behind me and laid it over my shoulders, tucking one corner under my arm.

"It itches," I warned him.

"It's supposed to. That's the charm." He sat back down beside me, close, closer than before, close enough that I could feel warmth off his arm through the itch. "Better?"

"Warmer, yes. Itchier, also yes," I pulled the blanket tighter anyway. "How's your mom doing with the job? Still hating it?"

"Still hating it. Every Sunday she asks when I'm going to get a proper trade, and every Sunday I tell her the proper trade pays for her Sunday roast, and then she changes the subject to whether I've met anyone. Three weeks back in the village and I'm already the disappointing one again."

"Three weeks and you're already going to festivals alone. That's commitment."

"I was going to say something about how I'm not alone anymore this evening, but it sounded smooth in my head and out loud it would come out embarrassing."

"Say it anyway. I collect embarrassing things."

He laughed and looked back out at the storm. The sun was a red smear behind the dust wall now, and the last light caught every grain in the air so it looked like the valley was full of slow golden bees. Down in the parking field, someone's car alarm went off and gave up.

"Here's my embarrassing thing, then," he said. "Years I sat next to you on that bus. Years. And I used to time my jokes for right when we hit the potholes on your road, because you'd laugh and bump against my shoulder and then pretend you hadn't."

I stared at him. "That was on purpose?"

"Every single pothole. There are eleven