Jay Lake - Green

“You remember nothing!” Her voice was a shriek as she dropped her hoe. “Listen to you. You don’t talk like a woman. Your voice is foreign. Your clothes are foreign. You don’t even walk like a woman!” Shar leaned close, her voice dropping to an angry hiss. “This is not your home. It is mine. Pinar…” She swallowed a sob, then continued. “Pinar, whatever is left of him, is my husband.”

I don’t know what I’d hoped for in coming here. Certainly not a frightened, angry woman living with a man whose spirit had already departed from behind his eyes. The ditches where I’d swum and played were filled with dark water and stinking moss. Insects the size of my hand flitted among the plantains of my memory.

Even Endurance was old.

My heart crumbled. Before Shar, I swallowed my tears, but she must have read it on my face.

“Go back to your city, little foreign girl. Leave us to starve in our own way. This land is not yours.” She spat in the water at my feet. “It never was.”

I found a shard of courage. “Wh-what do you fear?”

She looked at me as if I were stupid.

“I d-do not know,” I said. “I do not know why you are so angry.”

“Because, you fool, you came back. If the village elders believe you are his child, when he dies, all this land will be yours. They will marry you to a likely boy, and I will have nothing.”

All what land, I thought. A pair of rice paddies and a half-rotten stand of plantains? Seen through the eyes of the Stone Coast, it was on the tip of my tongue to ask who would want this. But the answer was clear enough: Shar. The woman who fed and cleaned my father enough that he remained alive even in the grip of whatever madness had claimed him.

Love? Or just inheritance?

Wars had been fought over less, in the history of the Stone Coast.

I understood my mistake then. Everything I cherished in memory had been a lie. If I’d stayed here, I’d have been as fat-bellied and skinny-legged as those children I’d passed. Or already married off, to get my hungry mouth out of the house. I’d spent years behind bluestone walls longing for what had been taken from me.

My captors had been right. Rather, I should have been on my knees thanking the Factor for what he had taken me from.

I reached out to touch her arm, soft as I knew to do it. “I do not want your land, Shar. I thought this was my h-home, but I was very far wrong. Th-thank you for caring for my papa.”

Her eyes filled with tears then. “Go, then. Keep him in your mind however you remember him. Don’t see him the way he is now.”

Shouldering my hoe, which must have been Papa’s when he and Shar had worked the fields together, I walked back to the hut. I knocked muck from the blade, then wiped it with my hand, before setting the tool by the door. My father stared from the shadows within. His eyes glinted as if he were an animal in a cage.

I went to see the ox. Endurance still sat upon the ground. His back was covered with flies. I stood by his neck and hugged him. He whuffled. I could hear his gut rumbling.

“You were my guide all those years,” I whispered in his ear.

He was a beast, too, of course. Though somehow less an animal than Papa, now.

I went back to the door of the hut. My sailcloth bag was there. I had no other possessions except the memories, which were sliding to dust. I squatted on my knees and looked to the darkness within. His gaze locked with mine a moment, then slipped away.

“Papa,” I said. “Pinarjee.”

He twitched, but did not look back at me. Flies buzzed, and the room smelled close of sweat and piss.

“I-I love you.” I didn’t know if that was true. He had sold me, after all. How much love was that? Yet I’d been raised with clean sheets and good food and a life of the mind. What of the petty fears of Shar? I might have been a younger copy of her had I stayed here.

Free, but tied to this land by the terror of having nothing.

I had nothing now. Not even a name.

“Papa. Wh-what did you and Mama call me? What was my name?”

He sniffed once, then reached inside his dhoti to scratch at his groin.

“What was my name?” My voice was rising despite my desire to control myself, to not frighten him. How could I come this far and not even learn this? This was the one fragment of home I could have carried away.

“What was my name!” I screamed.

He screamed back at me with a wordless yawp of terror, then scuttled into the farthest corner of the hut. That gave him little more distance than he already had, but he must have felt safer there. The hot smell of fresh piss flowed around me.

I stepped back and straightened. “I am sorry,” I muttered.

Turning, I was startled to see Shar standing right behind me with her hoe. I slipped sideways away from the swing of her strike before I realized she was not poised to attack me.

“I never knew.” Her voice was ragged, but I could hear the regret. “He spoke only of his mother. Baida told me he’d had a wife and daughter, before.”

“No one ever said my name?” Tears were down my face now.

“Oh, girl, no-”

“Don’t call me that!” I shouted before I realized she had not intended the word as I had heard it.

“You have demons in your head,” she snapped. Her moment of honesty was fled in the face of my anger. “Now go.”

I stood my ground as she hefted her hoe once more. “What did he do with the money?”

“What money?”

“He sold me for a lifetime’s worth of wages.”

With those words, I turned away. That was as evil a curse as I knew to lay upon her. She had given me nothing, nothing. Papa even less. I cried, walking toward the road once more. Home had been my destination all my life, and it was as lost to me as the past itself. There was nothing for me now, not here or anywhere.

My tears led the way. I followed them into the blackness of my heart, walking onward only because there was no point in stopping.

Alternately starving and stealing, I was over a month on the road westward. I knew nothing of how to find food in a stream or a stand of trees, unless it was ripe and hanging for the touch. On that journey, I killed my second living person. He was a bandit intent on raping me. Instead, I took him with a kick to the groin, then slew him with his own knife, before falling to my knees to vomit what little was in my stomach.

Afterwards, I lit two small fires to him and made a speaking in the manner of the Stone Coast. I had nothing good to say of the scruffy dead man except that his mother had probably loved him once, so I commemorated his shade to her. Then I took his stale flatbread and his good sandals and the knife that I had wedged into him and went on my way.

Killing wasn’t easier the second time, even though I’d had cause that no one would dispute. The act was so final. Even now, I cannot look back with anything but sorrow. Nothing was left for forgiveness or vengeance when a person has breathed their last. Papa had been just as dead, but his body had not yet received the message.

I moved on, with no purpose except the habit of walking. Even my bells were forgotten. Eventually, I came to travel three days with a trio of old women who did not say a word for most of that time. They wore pale robes and carried wilted lilies, in honor of the goddess whom I would soon come to serve. They shuffled slowly, but they had food and seemed to know the increasingly busy road. Best of all, they did not try to drive me away when I fell in with them. A few hours later, I flashed my knife at a young man who looked too closely at us. The oldest of the women smiled at me for that. I had no idea then that she was one of the most accomplished killers in this land.

We crested a rise the afternoon of the third day, and there was Kalimpura. It did not look like a city to me. I was used to Copper Downs, first as a place of close walls and distant noises, then as rooftops and sewers, and finally in my last days there, a city of pale stone and slate and copper, squared lines, and narrow windows.