Jay Lake - Green

Finally it came to me that I was crying for the girl I could have been. The woman I would never be. My path was bent, perhaps beyond repair. Regardless, I must locate Papa and Endurance and see what could be made right. I was aware my father would not know me, though I’d avoided considering that until now.

I only hoped I could know him.

It took some while for me to reach calm. Finally I stood, dusted off my trousers, and headed down the hill. The river looped not far from the base of the escarpment-I was not yet any decent judge of distance then, but even to my untrained eye it was close-and a crossroads there, which would take me somewhere near home.

If I could not find it, I would ask. If I could not ask, I would walk, quartering these fields until Papa’s hut was before me.

Of course, I could not just make my way back. Federo had not been able to give me specific directions. I did not know my father’s name. He was just “Papa” to me. So I walked toward the little cluster of huts where the roads met.

The river was a flat, dark presence by the time I got there. The sun’s climb toward the zenith had stolen his silver, and paid the land back with heat. My canvas shirt would soon be a punishment, but I had nothing else to wear except the belled silk, and that would not be enough for simple modesty.

A thin-muzzled white dog, a mangy bitch red and gray with dust, slunk out from the first mud-brick hut to investigate me. She growled once, but I stared close into her eyes and spoke some of the simple words Mistress Balnea had taught me, from the language all dogs know in their blood and bone. With a whimper, the bitch sat and began to scratch at fleas, though her eyes tracked me as close as any prey.

Children played in the middle of the pathetic town. They were bandy-legged, with potbellies and slack jaws. Their skins were much darker than mine from the burning of the sun. I could see the dents of ribs upon their thin chests.

Had I been like this? What had Federo seen in me?

I wanted to ask after Papa’s fields, but there was no way to make a question. A woman with her belled silk wrapped around her stepped to the empty doorway of another hut to stare at me. She had a wide jaw, and was not so dark as the children, but matched them for her gauntness.

They have little here, except recent famine, I thought. The fields beyond the village were flooded, small green shoots poking above the water. The previous harvest must have failed. It could happen with too little water or too much. Rice cultivation was one of the few topics I had found in Mistress Danae’s books that had any bearing on my lost home.

Lost no more, I reminded myself.

I kept walking, giving her a single nod. She did not return it, but stared me out of her little village and onto the road beyond. I headed right, back toward the north, on an instinct that counted as little more than a whim. The dust clouded with each fall of my sailor’s boots. The sun pressed down upon my head as I had remembered it doing all those years ago. Except then, it had been my friend, my constant companion, while now I could feel by the warming of the right side of my face that it had become my enemy.

Had I really set out carrying no water? What a fool I was.

I walked, looking for side paths. Brick piles were scattered here and there along the way toward the river. When a man stepped out of one, stretching to his feet, I realized these were huts. Had Papa’s been so low?

We’d had a gatepost, and plantain trees nearby with a rich stand of bougainvilleas. These were just wretched hovels amid open fields of rice. I looked ahead at a tree line. My heart raced.

There?

Keeping myself from running, I followed the road. It seemed right. I was getting close.

After passing the shadow of some struggling palms, I looked toward the next array of paddies. They were little different from the last. My heart was a stone.

Eventually I sought out directions. A man with a hoe, wearing only a grubby dhoti, worked in the ditch by the road near the shadow of a familiar baobab tree. I knew I was close.

“Please, sir,” I said.

He stopped swinging his tool-a spiked club, really-and stared at me without answering.

“I am looking for a farm. A man of middle years, with a white ox named Endurance.”

The farmer shrugged and went back to cutting mud. I knew he would use it to shore one of the paddy ditches. I kept walking, asked my question twice more before a man with a cart filled with short straw pointed onward. “Endurance, hmm?” he said. “Fifth walkway on the right. You are wanting Pinarjee’s place, perhaps.”

Pinarjee! A name. I nearly cried, instead pressing my hands together, and I bowed. “Thank you, sir.”

“Get on, boy, to whatever work it is you are missing.”

“Of course, sir.”

Counting carefully, I found the fifth walkway. I trembled as I stepped onto it. A stand of plantains rose ahead of me close by a pair of tumbledown huts. A ragged row of stumps showed where my bougainvilleas might once have grown. Cut for firewood?

I walked slowly, my pace dragging more with every step. A crude fence enclosed the huts. I’d remembered the gatepost being almost as tall as Federo, but this was a little gnarled thing that looked as if it had been assembled by a dull-witted child.

Then I heard the clop of a wooden bell. Endurance appeared from behind the huts, rising to his feet from where he had been sitting. He stared at me. My pace quickened; my eyes filled once more. The ox snuffled once, twice, then shook his head. The bell echoed again and again.

Did he know me, even now, after these years? Memory was a pain sharp as any knife.

A woman stepped out of the hut and stared as well. She was thin, dark, and wore only a length of grubby linen wrapped twice around her and then over her shoulder.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

I stopped. Endurance whuffled. Taking a deep breath to fight off the quaver in my voice, I said, “I am my father’s daughter, finally come home again.”

She approached and took my chin in her hand to turn my face. “Pinar’s daughter died with her mother, as a small child. But yes

… you have his look.”

That was the moment when I should have turned and retraced my steps. That was the moment when I should have left the memory of my home as it was. That was the moment when my papa’s love was still whole.

Like a fool, twice a fool, I stood my ground. “Endurance knows me. The ox remembers.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “That old bag of bones? He goes to slaughter next week.” Then she shouted, “ Pinar! Come out here now.”

My father emerged from his hut, shaking, tired, to stare blank-eyed at me as if he’d never seen me before in my life. I saw his face, wanted to run to hug him, but his wife’s hand was tight upon my arm as my heart collapsed. Endurance continued to shake his head, ears flapping and his breath huffing as his bell tolled.

The ox had not meant to welcome me home. He had meant to warn me away.

That afternoon, I stood calf-deep in a paddy pulling weeds. The ox was sleeping once more behind the hut that had been his stall in earlier years. Papa-Pinarjee-slept as well. Only his wife was out with me. Shar, her name was.

“If this is your house, then you’ll work for your keep like everyone else,” she said fiercely.

“Why does he not know me?”

Shar chopped with her hoe, breaking clods and tearing up some of the small waxy plants we were removing. I waited for her to answer, but she kept working. So I worked, too.

Finally she said, “He does not recognize much anymore. Sometimes he cries out for Mira.” She looked at me sidelong. “His mother, that was.”

“I remember Grandmother,” I said softly.