I took the first one for a sick child. It was crouched at the edge of a hearth in a farmhouse above Vallemora, hunched under a smock and about the height of a milk pail, and from the doorway I read the hump of its back as a boy with a cough. Then it turned. The face was the color of a pressed walnut, creased like something folded and sat on, and the eyes were a bright emerald green, narrowed in the kindly concentration of someone about to fix the floor. The hands come next in any honest inventory. They are large and capable, knobby and black with soot to the wrist, and they do nearly everything: they grip the straw broom, they flick a crooked jar straight, they fling out sideways for balance when the brownie whirls. The nose is long and blunt, and the gray eyebrows rise independently of each other. The mouth is set in the firm line of someone who has seen worse floors and fixed them.
The clothing is burlap, undyed, patched at the elbows and tied at the waist with twine. The feet are bare and dusted gray with ash, which is how the thing is tracked. Small gray prints cross the flagstones from the chimney gap to the pantry, and in the morning the hearth ash lies swept into tight spirals. Families around Lagoa Seca read the spirals the way others read weather. A wide, even spiral means the night went well. A ragged one means something in the kitchen needs doing.
From the twine at its belt hangs a single iron spoon, bent at the neck and polished bright from long use. I could not learn whether the brownie made it, was given it, or took it from some earlier kitchen. The household I stayed with has never seen it set down. The brownie eats porridge, thick and unsweetened, with cream poured on last, and a bowl of this is left on the hearthstone each night. Sugar in the porridge counts as an insult, and so does any gift of new clothes, after which the brownie is said to leave for good.
Isidra Barroso, who keeps the farm at Lagoa Seca and has fed the one in her chimney for thirty winters, wipes the hearth and straightens the pantry jars before bed, and she does it badly on purpose. "Leave it one thing to fix," she says. "A brownie with nothing to mend gets low in spirits, and a low brownie sweeps the same step all night."
- Classification
- House fae, hearth-bound
- Habitat
- Chimney gaps in old farmhouses
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- About 2 ft tall
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Farmhouse kitchens and cellars
- Binomial
- Domovulus fuliginis
- Diet
- Porridge and cream
- Temperament
- Proud, tidy, devoted to the household