Poison (3 page)

“The coal does no good. It is only superstition,” said Papa.

“And what is vinegar, Félix? When I’m dead, you sprinkle your vinegar!”

I crept from my hiding place by the door and watched my father stalk down the hill. Rain was falling heavily, but nothing in his walk suggested he was aware of it. He did not hurry, nor did he seek the shelter of any tree. And later that evening, when Dolores tattled that I had been eavesdropping, he hardly took notice of her.

Their next confrontation would come at the worms’ spinning time, when every year my grandfather insisted that only the fumes of fried garlic would stop the worms from eating and cause them to begin to spin. Just as a good smell like that of lavender, and all the other herbs we used to keep the silk house smelling fresh, encouraged the worms’ appetite, so would a greasy, acrid smell put them off their food.

On the appointed day Grandfather would insist that my father fry garlic over each of the silk house’s fires. But Papa wanted to do it scientifically, with quicklime and magnets. Or what about cold air currents to make the worms feel like spinning a warm mantle about themselves? At every possible opportunity my father and grandfather fought.

My grandfather did not own so much land, for we were the poorest branch of the Luarca family and the northern branch. Some of our blood did live in those Andalusian castles of which we only dreamed, but, as Grandfather said, what land he had he did own. We were not tenants like most, and by Castilian measure our land had good soil. Our grove was just big enough that standing at the top of our hill on a bright, windy day, we could watch the shadows of clouds pass over our trees, shading one and then another row of them. The rocks had been cleared away for many years, and the mulberry grove was terraced on a slope that did not descend so precipitously that water, carried up in buckets on yokes, ran down to the bottom before it could soak into the ground. My grandfather raised the silkworms as he had for as many years as he had lived, and he saw no reason to change anything. What he said was true: the family was living
well enough in a time when many went hungry; and he cautioned my father that as God was so good to us, it was a sin to want more than we had.

Nothing good comes from greed, he insisted, and he would recount long tales of ruin resulting from avarice, like that of my mother’s brother, Ernesto, whom I never met, because before I was born he fell into a ravine and died when he forced his donkey to travel on a moonless night and carry him to the market in Epila. There Ernesto had expected to get a lot of money in trade for his plague coins, little circles of lead that he made by heating and pouring the soft metal into a tiny mold with a likeness of Saint Eulalia and the dove that had flown out of her mouth on one side; and on the other, Saint Sebastian, the plague saint. The coins were meant to be carried in a pocket or purse, a little something to buy off the Devil for another year or a day.

“Well, they must have been of some value! At least Ernesto didn’t die of plague!” my papa shouted back at his father from the doorway, heading back down the hill. He always walked out before the end of any argument. Disputes were concluded by means of distance. That is, when the two of them could no longer hear each other, then they stopped arguing. My father’s referring to plague was not purely spiteful. Many of our family had been taken away in the dead carts, seventeen in the last generation, not including those six or seven of them who were babies and christened at the last minute, fever evaporating the holy water of baptism right off their heads.

Opinions over exactly what had befallen my uncle varied. Papa said that his reasoning had grown ever more confused from handling so much of the poisonous lead, and that he had walked off the cliff in a fit. Mama said that it was not insanity but that her brother had had a vision of the Virgin motioning him to step into a coach carved from an immense pearl and pulled by twelve lionesses.

When I asked her how it was that she knew a dead man’s last vision, she gave me a look that made me wish I had remained as safely silent as my sister.

The next day she told me that Ernesto had visited her in her dreams, and not only her but his other sisters as well. He had
told them all the same story. What’s more, it wasn’t just a story; didn’t everyone know that his body was never found? Only the corpse of his crazy donkey was collected from the ravine. Ernesto had gone off with the Virgin.

“But I thought
he
was crazy from the lead,” I said, “not his ass.” And she looked at me again.

In the winter, when temperatures dropped suddenly and water trapped below the pond’s freezing surface made a keening, moaning noise, I told Dolores it was dead Ernesto imprisoned beneath the ice. I frightened her so that she would not walk near the pond but begged Mama to take the long way to market. “What on earth for, in all this snow?” Mama asked, but Dolores only shook her head and held tight to Mama’s hand. “Not by the pond! Not by the pond!” she begged.

I hated to share even a morsel of my mother’s love, hated to see Dolores’s hand in Mama’s, and out of jealousy I was often cruel to my sister. As crazy as she was for weddings, I told Dolores I had had a dream that Papa was ruined and her dowry chest empty, and that the family was forced to give her away to a man with the head of a dog.

“Oh, don’t worry, he did not eat you,” I said to her, and I pulled her hands away from her ears so that she would have to hear me. “But his tongue was long and red and wet and he poked it into your throat!” My stories made Dolores scream, and often she cried until she lost her words, she cried until she could not tattle, and then our mother would look at me with sharp suspicion but with no evidence with which to decide upon a punishment.

Though I had but few years, though I was no taller than the church’s altar rail, people believed whatever I said, and sometimes even my mother was frightened by my tales. When she looked at me, frowning, it was as if she knew my dreams were real, clairvoyant; that much of what I said would come to pass.

Dolores never married a dog, but Papa was ruined; and just as I had imagined it, afterward he slept and slept and slept before he died. Not in the bed I had dreamed for him, however, and never wrapped like a worm in layers of silk. Mama did learn to read, but I had never imagined that she would go away to a
palace to be taught; nor could I have then anticipated the one who would take her place in my desire, and who would educate me in matters beyond reading; or how the ability to interpret the marks on the page might admit me to paradise and then, like fruit from the tree of knowledge, cast me out, far further from happiness than Eve, the mother of us all.

My father’s downfall was his belligerence toward his father. As Grandfather had observed would be the case, their arguments over the silk trees ended only with my grandfather’s death.

By then my grandfather had been installed against his objections in our house. Papa had carried his father, who was too weak to fight him off, down the hill to the bed Papa shared with Mama, carried Grandfather with his money and his Bible, both of which Grandfather insisted Mama fold into the bed linens. He couldn’t read, not his Bible or any other book, but he could count well enough, and he rested his head on the Gospels while he stacked up coins and muttered to himself. “Thirty-four ducados, thirty-five, thirty-six …” He did his calculations when he thought we were not listening. He was so infirm that his legs could no longer support him, and at night he spoke roughly to his feet, telling them how they should obey him the next day and carry him back up the hill.

“I’m not so heavy and I haven’t so much money that you won’t be able to manage it,” he told them. And perhaps he would have been able to climb back up the hill, had he not worn himself out practicing all the night, swinging his thin shanks over the edge of the bed, placing his gnarled toes on the floor, standing with the help of his staff and then falling to the ground. Finally, my mother took his stick and put it away and tucked him in bed so tightly that he might as well have been bound to the pallet. The following night he did not try to stand. Instead, he died.

Papa rolled him over before his body was cold, turned my grandfather so that his face, set forever now in lines of disapproval, was to the wall; and my father began immediately to count the money Grandfather had saved. The coins were warm,
for Grandfather had slept right on top of them, deeming any discomfort worth the solace of intimacy with wealth.

My father made six neat stacks of coins on the table where we ate. He counted them and recounted them; he put aside one stack for taxes and two for the tithe. “A full half to our masters, both earthly and eternal,” he said grudgingly. “And this is what we will live on for the next three years.” He gathered the coins from the remaining stacks into a little leather purse and placed it in Mama’s hands.

That same afternoon he burned the old mulberry trees down, burned them all, those trees that had required so much care and irrigation: in the dry season, hundreds, even thousands, of trips up the hill with heavy buckets of water. Wading through the mud and muck into the shrunken river to scrape each bucket’s lip under the dying trickle of water, trudging back up the hill to pour it over the roots of the trees. My sister and I were too small to carry the water buckets in their yoke, but we would watch Papa and Mama as they struggled with them, and we used to help in whatever way we could, taking on the earliest feeding, when the sun had yet to rise and the picked leaves were cold in their baskets and had to be warmed before the worms would touch them. Dolores and I would set the leaves before the fire Grandfather kept burning, and then the three of us would feed them as Mama and Papa rested in bed a little longer.

Not only had the ceaseless quarrels with his father failed to convince Papa that his idea of planting another kind of tree was foolhardy, but they had made my father more and more stubborn, word by word locking him in a prison of recalcitrance, so that instead of the more cautious plan that he had outlined to my grandfather—that of preserving half the old trees and replacing the other half with the new strain—Papa destroyed the entire grove that his forebears had planted. The night my grandfather died there had been the uncommon celestial conspiracy of a full moon and two planets describing a triangle over the nearby city of Burgos, igniting the cathedral spire like a torch. Along with seven dead frogs in the water pail the previous week,
this augured to my father that a new age was upon the Luarca family. He took this as permission to lose what reason he had.

It was December, the pruned mulberry trees were bare and gray after a dry autumn. Papa walked up and down between the rows of sleeping trees, and he carried a burning pitch and lit them on fire. They caught fast, it was amazing to us, Mama, Dolores and I. We stood in the doorway of our house and looked up the hill at a vision brighter and more festive than any evening celebration for Saint John. The trees blazed up like fireworks against the dark afternoon sky. Later, we learned that Papa had traded one of my grandfather’s coins for enough lamp fuel to leave an oil-soaked rag in the branches of each tree; nothing in nature would ignite so readily. It was on the shortest day of the last month of the year, the solstice, that he set the old trees on fire, and as it was a windy night the fires burned better than they might have otherwise. Walking around and around the perimeter of the grove to be sure that the burning was contained, Papa watched the flaming trees.

They say that when Hernán Cortés arrived in the New World he caused his men, every last one of them—or however many of them had not died of seasickness or sun blisters or fallen overboard or been killed by savages or tropical ailments—to quit their ships, and Cortés ordered those three hundred soldiers to watch as he burned them. They stood on the rock port of Vera Cruz, and the ships, which were good ships and large, took a long time to burn and to sink. By nightfall they were not yet consumed; one mast remained, rising out of the waves like a monument to their leader’s resolve. So they knew, then, that they should either conquer or succumb to the wiles of the savages, for there was no turning back.

In the morning, when Dolores and I came outside, there was nothing but a field of black limbless stumps, some as tall as men, and standing so still, like an army that had been stopped by some evil enchantment. My sister began to weep, and in the cold morning her tears froze. Dolores never looked like a child. Sharp-featured and pinched, there was nothing about her adult face that had yet to announce itself; and even then, as she wiped
fiercely at her tears, a girl of eleven, no more, she had the aspect of a miniature woman, one whose life would offer nothing but hardship.

We watched as Papa chopped the burned trees down to stumps and set about trying to dig up the roots. Of course, they were too strong. He could not clear the old land for the new seedlings.

It seems surprising to me now that he had not anticipated this, that he had believed he could tear the old trees out of the earth, even though we did not own even one ox. But Papa was crazy with stubborn, willful determination—another Luarca family weakness—and he would prove his father wrong, even in death.

Without the restraint of Grandfather’s presence, Papa’s nightly musings took on an increasingly feverish character. Even I no longer dreamed aloud with him, for he had ventured into a place of fantasy that I did not want to visit. His dreams of how much silk he would raise, of the bounty it would buy, became more and more unreasonable, so that I worried he had become like one of those rapt fools who set out for the New World, so certain of the mountains of gold that awaited them there, so dead set on their shining future that even as they lay perishing of fever or of a savage’s arrow, still the vision of a city of Incan gold burned before them. El Dorado in his gilded skin, his eyes mad, incendiary orbs of gold, his hair a golden flame, danced and shrieked at them as they writhed. Papa was no different from these men, nor from his father’s father’s father’s father, Victor Luarca, who had left his silkworms to go with Cortés and who had come home in a box in 1527, his journal on his moldered breast. Family legends had it that the last word written in Victor’s account was
gold
, just as one day the last words on my papa’s lips would concern silk.