Whisper (13 page)

The next day, Djala again held my arm with one hand and the rifle as a cane with the other. We hobbled down the street, following the roaring truck, to the store where I was to purchase more milk for the yogurt culture and more eggs for breakfast. I didn't have the money, Djala did, and even if they had given it to me, I wouldn't have known how to use it. Were three big coins a lot for a loaf of bread or a little?

We joined students on their way to school, mothers on their way to various chores and men on their way to work. As we hobbled along, many said hello to Djala, but they acted as if I were nothing more than a crutch. I had been nervous around Belen in the morning, but he'd looked over my left shoulder and told me about the items I needed to purchase at the store.

“The bread,” he said. “Today.”

I had never been in a store before. We entered through a door that had thick metal bars running from the top to the ground. Inside, a woman stood behind a counter and tapped loudly on a machine in front of her. She watched us as we walked beside shelves full of foods in boxes, foods in packages, foods in cans. I had never heard of half of these foods. What was chili? What were energy drinks and fruit roll-ups? We shuffled to an enormous refrigerator with jugs of milk, eggs and cheese lining its shelves. Such plenty and choice in one place. There was a shelf with packaged loaves of bread, which Djala pointed out to me, but she said in a low voice, “Don't eat that crap—nothing to it. Your mother's bread had taste and texture. Bake something with substance, not this tasteless garbage.”

At the counter we placed our items next to the machine, and the woman punched in numbers and told us what we owed. Djala handed over the money while I looked at the sign on the wall.

SWINC Market
.

Djala took my arm, I took the sack, and we hobbled home again. I did not go to the creek but stayed home, determined to bake this bread.

I fumbled with the ingredients, first adding too much water, which made the dough sticky, and then adding more flour, which made the dough too crumbly. It was after an hour of kneading and fiddling that I deciphered the note in the margin:
Add a touch of oil
. When I did this, the dough became smooth like baby skin beneath my hands.

I set the dough in a patch of sun on the front porch. Then I scrubbed the refrigerator, pulling out rotten potatoes, moldy sour cream, limp lettuce and four packages of bacon that were slick with age.
SWINC
, it said on the refrigerator door.
SWINC
, it said on the front of the stove. I wondered what this word meant and why it seemed to be the emblem of this town.

The dough was supposed to rise for about an hour and a half. Between removing moldy food from the refrigerator and wiping the insides of the cupboards in the kitchen, I checked on the dough. It wasn't rising. I didn't understand what I had done wrong. I reread the directions again and again. I had done everything I was supposed to do—everything. I had warmed the water, added the yogurt culture and allowed it to foam with a bit of sugar, but the dough sat heavy and solid in the bowl.

After reading the book yet again, I found a small passage, an insignificant detail in miniature print under the picture of a perfect loaf of bread.
Make sure the dough is allowed to rise
in an area without a breeze.

I stood on the front stoop, glanced at Djala snoring on her porch and removed my veil. Wind cooled the sweat on my forehead and lifted the hair from around my face. I brought the dough into the house, shaped it into two thick loaves and put them in the oven, even though I knew they would bake hard and dense.

The house did smell like bread when Belen walked in later that afternoon, but when I pulled the loaves from the oven and set them on top of the stove, I felt my cheeks turn red beneath the veil. With my hands covered by towels, I tipped the pans upside down and felt the hard impact of the loaves of bread hitting the stove top with a
thunk
. I sliced through the dense mass and laid the pieces out. They were as solid and impenetrable as one of Jeremia's wood sculptures. Belen walked back outside.

Nine

That night I sat on the ground outside the lean-to, the patchy straggles of grass poking through to my skin. I tucked the violin under my chin and began to play. I let a new song trickle from me in low, slow notes. The violin sang of my missed life, of my failed bread, of my loneliness. I became so engrossed in the song that I failed to hear the sound of footsteps, and I didn't notice the heat emanating from the body until the man stood right in front of me and nudged my knee with his boot. The shock of the touch ended my song, the finishing note harsh. I held my breath.

Jeremia stood in front of me. At least, with the veil over my face I could believe that this truly was Jeremia—tall, confident, beautiful and seething.

“Is he alive?” asked Jun, Jeremia's father.

He spit the words at me with lips that were stretched taut and pulled down in the corners. His eyes, black and narrow, glinted at me with flashes of the sun that hung low in the sky. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his pants, and his knuckles bulged under the material in crocodile ridges. He had two whole arms.

“Is he alive?” he said again, lower, slower.

“Yes,” I whispered.

His eyes were so narrow, they became slits as thin as butterfly wings. “When he dies, our shame will be gone.”

The man walked through the weeds toward the creek. As he walked, his shoulders rolled with unreleased anger. I hoped he never saw Jeremia again.

As Jeremia's father walked away, I stood. Sometimes Jeremia watched this village. He would come from our home and observe his family. What if he were here now?

My breath came in quick gasps, and I laid my violin in its case, quickly snapping the latches and leaving it in the lean-to. On feet as silent as snow, I slipped through the grasses, waded across the creek and walked into the stunted trees. Jun tromped through the woods on heavy feet that left cracked sticks, bruised bushes and crushed leaves behind. He was easy to follow, and I did so carefully, keeping trees and undergrowth between us.

He walked north through the trees until I heard a chorus of chattering, squeaking and chirping. We came to a clearing. In the clearing stood a house like the others, with flat boards and an angled metal roof, but the expanse around the house was open, with large patches of green grass broken by sheds. From these sheds came the sound of birds, hundreds and hundreds of birds. I had heard a similar din before from a flock of crows nesting in the top of an oak or from a group of starlings pecking at seeds. The smell around these sheds reminded me of the heavy air in the village, the oppressive reek that hung on me now and saturated my clothes.

Jeremia had never told me about the bird sheds. Jun walked around the house to the back. I saw no one else, so I slunk across the grassy expanse to the first shed and unlatched the door. The sound inside was like a thousand macaw babies clucking and chirping in an enclosed space. Rows and rows of metal cages stretched from one end of the shed to the other and were stacked on top of each other from the dirt floor to just beneath the roof. The smell, when I opened the door, made me turn my head away and press my hand to my nose. Even my eyes stung.

The chickens were kept in cages so small they could barely move, and some of them needed their straw changed so badly it clung to their feathers in clumps. I held my hand to my nose, breathed through my fingers and wished I was wearing my veil. I couldn't imagine anyone doing this to a living creature, to a fellow dweller on this earth, and I thought of Eva's strutting macaw with its jutting head, quick beak and insistent cry. These were proud birds, but there was nothing to be proud of here.

A woman and a man worked in the back of the shed, walking from cage to cage, opening them and removing the eggs. When I saw the workers, I ducked down where they couldn't see me. I looked into the cage nearest me, right into the pebbly eye of a chicken. She made a low, squawking sound deep in her throat and stood to back away from me, but one of her legs was short, stunted, like the wings of the macaw, so the chicken leaned unsteadily to the side and continued her unbroken screech.

“I won't hurt you,” I whispered. “Don't be afraid.”

The bird watched me with one eye, her head cocked to the side, but the squawking stopped. Someday I would return and free these creatures—let them peck and run in the weeds, pulling worms from the ground and reestablishing the natural order of things.

I left the shed. My vision was blurred from the smell and the sight, but I crept around the house to where I had seen Jun disappear. I saw no one now, but as the din from the chickens died, another sound drifted from the forest. I didn't understand this noise any better than I had understood the din of a thousand chickens clucking, but this sound made me tense my shoulders and curl my hands into fists.

I crouched in back of the woodpile behind their house, then ran quickly over the packed dirt to the edge of the trees. Someone had been chopping wood, and the smell of the maple reminded me of Jeremia. The sound continued, a whimpering howl. It came from the trees past the woodpile, and I crept between the trees, hoping whatever it was wouldn't leap at me in fear. A square box, nestled like a squatting trap beneath the trees, housed the animal. The sound, I realized, was not whimpering but panicked breathing. My own breathing matched that of the creature's.

I crept closer and peered between the slats of the box. When it saw my face, it screamed, snarled and hurled itself at the side of the box. I jumped back.

“Shh,” I said and began to hum.

It was a badger, either hurt or starved. After breathing deeply for a minute, I stood and examined the latch on top of the cage. If I flipped the latch up, allowing the creature to escape, it would leap at me with its claws and teeth, but if it didn't see me, perhaps it would run into the woods. I'd seen badger attacks before, and it was a rare fight when the badger lost. But I couldn't leave it trapped.

With a long stick, I pushed at the latch, knocked it through the hook and then wondered how I would open the door without being seen. The door opened upward, like a hinged roof, and if I stood behind the hinges, perhaps I could flip up the door and hide behind it.

After three attempts, the stick became wedged under the hook and I pulled, lifting the door first an inch and then a bit more. Before I was able to pull the door all the way up, the creature inside threw itself at the opening door, came hurtling out of the cage and stood in front of it, looking me in the eyes. Its mouth foamed, its eyes were crusted and red, its sides heaved, and the fur hung off it as though made for a much larger creature. We looked at each other, that animal and I, and then a gunshot sent me to the ground and the creature to the woods. I held my hands over my ears and squeezed my eyes shut. I didn't open them again until a boot nudged me in the side. When I looked up, I saw a wider, thicker Jeremia with two whole arms and straight hair that hung in his eyes and over his ears.

He said something, and I took my hands away from my ears.

“Two years—that's how long I've been keeping that badger.” The man had pulled up the pants on his right leg and was showing me a round wound that had healed flat and red, the muscle and tissue gone. “Been starving it good and mean so we could turn it loose on a dog and watch it fight. You just lost me a whole lot of…you that girl from the camp in the woods?”

I sat up and then stood, brushing the dirt from my clothes. He'd already seen my face, so I left my veil around my neck and looked at him as hard as he looked at me. I'd never heard of badgers and dogs fighting, but I'd seen a badger scare off a wolf before. Eva and I had watched from the top of a rock, and we'd had to wait half an hour after the fight ended to come down—both of us were shaking so much our teeth chattered. Those creatures had snarled, barked and torn chunks of fur and skin from each other, and Eva and I didn't even know what the fight had been about.

“You live with Jeremia. I'm his big brother, Calen.”

He looked me up and down. I didn't know if I liked this man or not, but his eyes weren't as flat and mean as his father's, and he had a way of wiping his hand under his nose that reminded me of Eva.

“Sometimes I think he watches me.” We both glanced into the trees. “He follows me into the woods. He don't talk to me, but I like the company.” He shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot. His face was different from Jeremia's—there was a softness to his jaw—and there was a curve to his shoulders. I was surprised that he wasn't angrier about the badger. When he looked at me, he glanced away often—to the trees, the ground, the sky.

“You tell him when you see him that I might not be the smartest, but I know when something's not right. Sending him away wasn't right.” He squinted at me when he said this.

“Locking up a badger isn't right,” I said.

“That badger bit me.”

“It's an animal. It shouldn't be punished for behaving like one.”

Calen looked up, as if the darkening sky might help him respond. We stood quietly for a long time and then he looked at me and crossed his arms over his chest.

“But a badger ain't human. This is my gun.”

He smiled then, shyly, like a five-year-old, as he held the rifle out in front of him. That was when I understood who Calen was, why he still lived with his parents even though he had been a man for years. He wasn't married, didn't have children and probably wouldn't. Maybe his father and mother, when they'd seen Jeremia's missing limb at birth, had thought he would be like Calen—simple—or maybe it was acceptable in this town to have deformities as long as they were invisible. Maybe they hadn't understood their child's simplicity until they'd become attached to him and then hadn't been willing to let him go.

Calen wiped his hand under his nose again and began to mumble. His lower lip pushed forward, and he put a hand on his hip. I put my hands on my hips and he copied me, leaning his rifle against his body. What had Jeremia said about this brother? He had tried to track the wolf, followed it for miles, but was too loud and clumsy to ever sneak up on anything.