A Cup of Normal (18 page)

This dark, yet hopeful story was written in response to articles I had read about modern-day slavery and generational indentured service. It made me angry to think that in our current world, slavery and suffering still exists. I put that anger into words here.

MENDERS

There are certain things that can’t be done
unless the mind is shut off and the body is left to its own accord. Things that if I think about them even a little too much, will make me realize what I have done, and what it makes me. Boiling a baby is one of those things.

The fire beneath the copper pot smokes. I smell of salt, steam and wood in our close, damp work room. The other menders who weave and spin thread for the lord are in the room, quiet, working, waiting for me to drop the birthing cocoon into the pot. I want my mate, Bind, to be here, but then I remember why he is not.

Follow touches my shoulder, her fingers as dry as old wool. “Soon, Favor,” she says.

The fire at my feet is growing hot, and I can smell the burnt-hair singe of my skirts.

Spin’s needles scrape and click in the shadows, knotting old thread into cloth. Beyond that sound, I hear Work, steady, efficient, as he bends to the loom near the darkening window.

Only Bind is not here.

I look at my baby in my hands, wrapped in its cocoon, not yet breathing. The thread that pours from my fingertip and connects to the cocoon is gold in the late light, and will be silver in the dawn. I make the last loop of thread around my baby’s head to finish the cocoon. The pulse of my life flows to my child, once, just once, in both greeting and farewell. Then I lift my baby over the pot. I drop the baby into the water. The string between us snaps.

I can’t see anything after that. The first time, I couldn’t look away. I saw the cocoon bob, turn in the boiling water. Watched as Follow stirred the pot, her old arms strong and steady on the long handled paddle. Saw Spin insert her needles into the cocoon, gently prying the strands apart, discarding the baby in search of the real treasure, the threads of the cocoon, which she caught first on one needle, then on a slender stick, turning, until the thread pulled around itself, the stick growing fat with my baby’s death.

There will be enough thread that I can rest from birthing for a week. One cocoon each week fills our lord’s pockets with coin, and the lands beyond with the finest fabric ever made: birthing fabric, soft and strong as silk and steel.

“Rest now, Favor.” Follow touches my arm again and brings me back into the now. I am standing with my back turned to the pot. I don’t hear the roll of the water, don’t hear Spin’s needles click like pebbles against the side of the pot, don’t hear Work stride out of the room. I don’t imagine my baby’s eyes looking up for me.

The lord doesn’t allow a birthing ceremony for our children. No sweet honey to grace a baby’s lips, no prayers to bless its soul. But he does want to know when the cocoon is in the pot.

I walk to the small console set in the wall by the door and press my hand against the glass pad. The pad is cool, then warms with the hum of electricity as it takes information from me. I know the lord will now trigger sensors in the pot to weigh and measure the cocoon while it bobs in the water. He will know exactly how much thread it will yield.

It takes all my strength and Follow’s hand beneath my elbow to walk through the wooden blind that separates our sleeping chamber from the work room. I fall onto my cot, feeling thin enough the light of the sun could pour through me and I’d give no shadow. There is no blanket to cover me, but Follow’s hand strokes my arm, her fingers strong enough they could dig through me and sew me together at my core if I needed.

I wish Bind were here.

“Honey and blessings,” Follow says. “No birthing tomorrow, Favor, no plucking or spinning. Tomorrow’s for mending. Mending you’ll do. Mending you’ll be.”

Old words. Words that held us, kept us, made us.

I absorb the words, and let them remake what I have undone in myself. I listen to Follow and absorb her strength and begin to think again, to know. But deep within me there is a hollowness growing. Something is not the way it used to be. Change is coming, and change is only another word for pain.

In the night, when Follow and Spin have gone to their own cots and Work has left to serve the lord, I lie awake. The hollow feeling of change is growing. I can taste it in the air, can smell it in the sweet vines that release pollen for the night moths.

I hear babies crying in the wind. I do not sleep.

Morning comes on hot and quick. Like a snap of fingers, darkness is gone and the burning heat of the sun steals away the cool air. We are at the end of summer, the last of the heat. Soon the rains will fall.

“You need to drink.” I am surprised to see Work standing next to my cot. He holds out a tall blue mug and smiles. His face is round, but not soft, each feature: green eyes, hook nose, angled cheeks, square chin, are hard. His shoulders are thick and his hair is pulled back in a fall of brown silk down his back.

“Drink, Favor. You’ve gone too thin now.” His voice is soft.

I think of saying no, but Work is strong and can make me rise even if I don’t want to.

“Have you seen Bind?” I ask as I sit. Work hands me the cup and shakes his head. Work is always at the lord’s call, always at the estate. I hope he would have caught a glimpse of Bind while attending the lord before sunrise.

“Bind is in the cell, I think.”

I shudder at the knowledge — fleeting knowledge Bind has shared with me — of the cell. The cell is empty of the world. No light. No sound. No texture. Nothing to touch. Nothing to learn.

Work sees me shudder and sits at the foot of my cot. His thick fingers lace together. “Bind tried to leave again through the gate, Favor.”

“I know.” I sip the thick, bitter water that will make me whole again, that will make me strong enough to bear another child.

“The lord was enraged.” Work nods, as if approving his choice of words. “He found Bind beyond the gate. Well into the woods. They dragged him back by the hair.”

I sip the water and taste papery bits of Mulberry leaves on my tongue. I try not to show Work my pain.

Work is silent, lets me drink. I wonder why Work has not left me, why he sits on the end of my cot, why he waits. He puts his hand on my foot. I look away from my cup and into his green eyes.

“The lord wants me to mate you, Favor.”

“No,” I say, my voice a whisper of shock. Then stronger, the image of Bind’s death whirling through my mind, “No. Only Bind. Tell the lord, I will only mate Bind. Please,” I reach out for him, touch the hard ropes of his arm and draw back immediately. “Tell him I will not mate you.”

Work is so still, his face so calm and blank, I begin to worry. There is something in his face I should recognize, something I should know. I want to touch him and learn, but he takes his hand from my foot, and leans away.

Work stands. “I will tell him, Favor. I do not know if he will listen.” He turns. His back stiffens and his fingers clench into fists. He touches nothing as he walks out of the room.

I finish the water and go out into the other room. The pot is cold, the fires beneath it dead. Spin and Follow sit close to the windows, already bent to their tasks. Spin’s small hands are filled with wooden bobbins strung with precious threads so incredibly thin they are invisible to even the lords before we bind them together, twist them into strands a hundred thick, that only then the lords regard with wonder and greed.

Follow sits on a stool and pulls a shuttle through a warp and weft, loosely weaving the fabric that the lords will sell, the priceless birthing fabric.

“Should I weave today?” I ask. My own fingers want to be busy, to be filled with forgetting through doing.

Follow looks up at me, her plain face crinkles in thought. I wonder if she touched Work when he left, and understands him better than I.

“Today you mend.” She waves one hand at me, at my empty belly. “Rest and drink. Walk in the shade. Today, even the lord won’t mind.” She holds up one end of the fabric that lays like a river of silver moonlight on the hard wood floor.

“So fine, Favor.” She smiles, proud. “I’ve never seen better.”

It should make me happy, should please me to be serving the lords in such a fine way, but all I can think of is Bind being drug by the hair through the undergrowth of the thick woods, and Work’s strong hands balled into fists.

I murmur a thank you to Follow and walk out onto the estate grounds. The brace of air from the northern sea clears my thoughts, but cannot soothe the tangle of my fears. I need to touch something that does not hurt. I need to learn, to feel something new.

I walk toward the estate, wanting to somehow find Bind in the white marbled halls and grand rooms. The lord may allow me into the hall, but never deeper than that, never into the rooms I have only imaged through Work’s descriptions of them.

Still, I walk toward the estate, the sun warming the top of my head and my back. I begin to feel a little dizzy, and know I should have drunk more than a cup of water. I look up at the estate, glowing white on the slight rise ahead where trees from the deep forest have been brought in and shaped to the lord’s pleasure, offering shade and sweet fragrances near the estate itself. I look up at the glass windows, bright as chips of steel against the blue sky day.

I could ask for a cup of water there. I could say I am confused, turned around in my walking and fatigued from birthing.

And if the lord thinks me confused, too tired to breed again, will he send Work to mate with Follow? Will he be rid of both me and Bind?

No, there is no gain in showing weakness to the lord.

Still, I need water and touching. There is a creek that flows through the southern-most edge of the grounds even in the driest heat of summer. I turn and retrace my steps, walking past the squat brown square of our house. I do not go inside. I do not want to hear the weaving of thread, the clack of wooden bobbins.

My stride grows stronger once I have passed the house and I have an urge to run, to let the burnt grasses rush by beneath my feet, to blindly find a gate in the fence and push through to the other side. To touch every leaf, every tree, every stone, and to learn and know more than any of my kind should know.

I place my fingers against my mouth, then my throat. I am shaking from the wild thought of it, vibrating with the hunger for knowledge. These thoughts are insane and yet I want them. They will get me killed, dragged, locked away in the cell like Bind.

I shake my head and push the wildness away, keeping my eyes on my feet. The creek is near. It will give me some taste of difference, will trickle with water that has touched rocks and hills and far away mountains. I hear the creek’s liquid voice just ahead. And I hear something else — breathing. I look up and see a man on the other side of the fence.

The world seems suddenly to fold the wrong way, as if all the corners no longer match.

I have never seen this man before. He is tall and lean, his hair a shock of white, straying out from beneath a hat. His clothes are as brown as tree bark and fit tightly to his frame. Straps over his shoulder speak of a weight he carries there — a pack — and he has a silver box in one hand, a walking stick in the other. His skin is the lightest brown I have ever seen and creased around his eyes, across his forehead and down his cheeks in such a fascinating way, my fingers itch to touch them, to trace, to know.

He holds very still. Except for his breathing and the blinking of his eyes, I would not know that he was there.

“Hello,” he says. “May I enter this gate?”

He speaks to me and his voice is edged with delicious difference. I feel a warmth grow in me, a need to touch, learn, absorb the knowledge of him.

“Please,” he says. “I am a traveler and mean no harm. Is there shelter I can find here? Is there food?”

I nod, his voice lighting my hunger. I savor the strangeness of his speech, absorb the nuances of a voice unlike the others I have heard since my birth. He does not move, and I realize he is waiting for me to open the gate he stands behind.

I look at the gate, made of wood and iron, no higher than my waist, yet stronger than any wall to keep me in. I have never touched the gates before. That touch, that knowing, is forbidden.

But today I will learn this thing. This one thing: gate.

I reach out and touch the top rail of the gate with my fingertips. It is warm with the day’s heat. It fills me with the knowledge of hinge and latch and swing. I absorb balance, and understand tension of fence and post, strength of post rooted deep in the earth. The knowing is good, but is not enough to ease my hunger.

I push the gate outward and it swings easily, silently. The open space between the fence and the world on the other side is shocking as winter wind. I step back hastily, moving away from the open space, moving away before I fall out into the forest beyond, into a world I both want and fear.

Then the man is there, filling the space, solid, whole. He swings the gate shut behind himself and waits. I look up at him, at the curious humor in his eyes. There is so much I could know if I touched him.

I fold my hands together in front of me and look down at my feet. “Please,” I say, “I will take you to the lord.”

The man makes a sound of such delight, I cannot help but look up at him again. I am caught by his smile, and feel myself returning it.

“Yes,” he says, his pleasure sending joy through me. “I would like to meet the lord of this place.”

We walk, me in front and he behind. His footsteps are heavy, booted. His walking stick taps lightly. We walk up the slight rise. Just ahead is the square of our house.

“What is your name?” he asks me.

“Favor.” I am surprised at the quickness of my answer. Everything within me is clamoring to reveal itself to him. The need to talk to him, to tell, to share my knowledge, this place, my life, is overwhelming. I want him to know all of me, want him to let me know him in return. I have never experienced such a need to spill everything I have known out at a stranger’s feet. But I do not think the lord will approve. I put my teeth against my bottom lip, tucking my words away tight. I walk.