Margaret Hermes

It was strange to return to this place of childhood, which I remembered darkly.  It had seemed to me back then that everyone was always hungry, always suspicious.  People wore too many clothes and still they could never get warm.  Everything was heavy — the coats, the shoes, the sky, the hearts.  The old country was sculpted this way, too, in the memory of my parents and my sisters:  a cold, dark, empty place that could not be filled.

The only son, I had been awarded the melancholy commission of representing the family at my grandmama’s funeral, while she had been charged with forestalling death until my arrival.  Though she had failed by four full days, I found the town of my birth and her death not somber at all but vivid and lively.

A bright intensity could be heard in the entreaties of shopkeepers, even a keenness to the whistling of the knife sharpener as though he knew the secret of honing more than metal blades.  The voices of children, rising and falling in triumph and defeat, the song of the white-kerchiefed girl who sold bunches of watercress in the street like violets — there was always something to hold one fast, something that made it hard to turn away.

They had delayed the burial until my coming, filling the coffin with pine needles and sealing it when the body of the old woman began to ripen.  I had not seen my grandmama since I was nine and I felt cheated of seeing her, alive or dead, again.  I knew my parents would be disappointed when they learned of this omission and perhaps even blame me for the time it takes to cross an ocean.  I was lamenting such injustice to my aunt who hushed me.  Look over there, she said, at Anna.  She is the spitting image of your grandmama.  When you go home, you tell your parents that your eyes rested peacefully on your grandmother’s face.  It will be the truth, as much as there is truth in anything.

My eyes settled willingly on my cousin Anna’s face.  I had not realized my grandmama was so beautiful.  Her eyes were as dark as pitch, her mouth a crimson wound in bronzed flesh.  Heavy umber hair tumbled down her back in a swirling tumult that ended just above her pinched waist.  I never wanted to look away and now my aunt had given me leave to indulge my yearning.  I decided to extend my visit.

At first only my eyes were filled with Anna.  Then my nose greedily drew her scent into me.  Even the smell of her sweat as we labored side by side in the field was as perfume.  Hungry for the sound of her voice, my ears slyly caught each exchange between Anna and the villagers.  And at last in my dreams my other senses had their way.  At night, when all slept, I knew the sweet, melony taste and touch of her.

In the late afternoons my cousin Anna and her brother Bruno would set out, he on a bicycle pushing a cart before it and she walking along beside him.  The cart held the root vegetables that were the family’s chief source of income.  The whole family farmed the vegetables but only Bruno and Anna delivered them.

Others sold the same fare but could not command the same price.  It was said that Bruno’s fine shoulders curried favor with cooks and wives while Anna turned the heads of the innkeeper and shop owners, the men of property.  But it was not just the handsome appearance of the brother and sister that made their produce appear more handsome — the pair had devised a strategy for selling the family’s crops.  As Bruno pedaled slowly, Anna would strut by his side, wielding a small, sharp knife with one hand upon a vegetable held firmly in the other.  All who bought from them and paid their price received a vegetable sculpture created by Anna’s nimble fingers.

As she walked she might fashion a trembling rabbit from a turnip or a clever squirrel out of a beet.  Small children and grown men alike had been seen to clap their hands in delight at Anna’s artistry.  It wasn’t just the novelty of her work but that her craft was so cunning.  I wondered if any of her root sculptures were ever eaten as I could not conceive of the wings of her butterfly being torn apart by teeth or the head of her warbling nightingale cruelly bitten off.  I imagined Anna’s creatures living on unscathed until they became too shriveled to grace a table or amuse a child.

Day after day I walked some distance behind the cart and bicycle; others walked nearer, craning their necks to glimpse the newest woodland creature as it emerged.  I marveled at Anna’s ability to control the knife as she moved along over dirt or cobblestones.  Even once when she lost her footing and slipped to the rough pavement, the mountain goat she had been carving remained unharmed.  As she rose, she held up the whittled potato for all to see and applaud.  So fierce was the expression, so fine the nostrils that it seemed a failing of Anna’s that the tiny creature could not bleat.

I was to leave soon.  A letter had come from Amerika questioning my prolonged absence and reminding me of my responsibilities.  I approached Bruno and asked if by doing myself a favor I might do a favor for him as well.  Bruno gestured for me to continue.  I suggested that he might take the next afternoon and do whatever he pleased while I would take his cart and bicycle and accompany Anna on their customary rounds.

He said he could see the benefit to himself but what was in it for me?  A ride, I told him and that seemed to satisfy his limited curiosity.

When we set out, Anna posed no questions to me.  Her curiosity was even less than Bruno’s or else she understood me without asking.  At any rate, my presence seemed not to distract her.  Even when I spoke to her, she seldom replied.  I could see she was not angry but that she only spoke when necessary, using words sparingly, as though there existed a finite number of them in her keeping.  So I was all the more mindful of her sudden breaking of the silence when she asked me if it was true that I would be leaving the village soon.  I acknowledged that it was my duty to depart very soon on the overland part of my journey, that if I delayed much longer my boat ticket would expire.  Filling my chest with dignity, I explained I was needed to help in our small button factory where we sliced mother-of-pearl into shimmering discs to adorn ladies’ dresses.  Anna stood still and said is it also true your Amerika boasts highways leading away from every village while my poor country has only rivers?  Proudly, I described the land of gleaming automobiles and the yawning, smooth boulevards that accommodate them.  Fingering the wooden buttons on her middy, she asked if there would be room for her small person on the big boat that was to carry me away.  I was amazed at the question.  Could she be in earnest?  What must it signify?  Did it mean she loved me?

I told her I was certain a ticket could be had if there be means of purchase but, alas, I had no such means; my return ticket had been paid for, with great hardship, before I left Amerika.  How much? She stopped walking and looked directly at me.  I named the sum and she looked away.  I pledged I would scrape and pinch until I had saved the money for her passage, no matter if it took me the rest of my life.  As long as all that, she said and sighed.  She shook her head.  It would only take a word from you, I pleaded.  Then I must give you no word more, she returned, tossing her head and setting her chin.

She placed the mouse she had been whittling out of a large radish upon the cart.  With ears alert and tail aloft, it looked so lifelike that passersby offered to purchase the mouse on the spot, but Anna turned their bids away.  The plump innkeeper, whom I had watched watching Anna in the preceding weeks, proposed buying our entire cartload of vegetables if only he might have the mouse as well.  I began to unload the cart but Anna signaled me to halt.  She handed the mouse to the innkeeper, silently refusing to take money in exchange or to sell him any of the load of vegetables.

Looking over the produce, she selected a long-necked parsnip and from it fashioned a deep-throated lily as she walked on, letting the parings fall by the wayside.  Villagers gasped at the delicacy of this new creation.  Anna now chose a rutabaga with firm pale orange flesh and from it slowly carved a chain of magically interlocking flowers, a wreath that when finished was somehow three times larger in circumference than the rude vegetable from which it had come.  People poured out of shops and cottages to see what could cause such excitement.

In the past Anna made only animals.  These were charming to be sure but the flower carvings were something else entirely.  Before, her little creatures looked astonishingly like those made by the hand of God, but these flowers were a blasphemy, for they were, all agreed uneasily, more beautiful than the flowers in God’s domain.

Soon the narrow streets swelled with villagers who followed as Anna marched on, spinning sunlit flowers out of roots that had fattened to ripeness in the cold and dark of the earth.  She took a potato and turned it into a fantastic bloom, part starburst, part peony.  Why had not God thought of that?  She made jaunty tulip buds out of cloddish carrots and petaled roses from layered onions as the tears streamed down her cheeks.

Anna carved as she wordlessly traipsed over the cobblestone path leading to the old stone bridge that traversed the river.  The crowd followed, exclaiming at each new sculpture.  She remained intent, as though she walked alone, as though the cart dogged her steps riderless, like a loyal hound.

The cart was gloriously laden now with its heap of blossoms.  When we reached the bridge, Anna picked up the last turnip and began its transformation into such perfectly waxen white petals that some of the onlookers claimed they could smell the heady scent of the gardenia.  After finishing this final flower, Anna placed it carefully on top of the others and then climbed onto the arch of the bridge.  The crowd jostled and hushed each other, expecting Anna to address them.  I, too, became still.

Without a backward glance, still silent, Anna jumped from the bridge at its highest point, into the swirling waters below.  Many of the witnesses surged onto the bridge, shouting her name, as if to call her back.  The water took her down and held her fast against the pilings until she had renounced her struggle.  Then, like a cork that has been forced down into a bottle, her body popped up to the water’s surface.

She belonged to the river now.  I was embarrassed that I had thought she might belong to me.  For all my watching and dreaming, I never knew the first thing about her.  I pushed the cart up onto the decaying bridge and dropped the gardenia over the side.  The river carried the bloom to her.

One by one, the mourners filed past the cart, each sending a flower down to her mutable grave.  No dark earth would ever hold her.  When the interlaced pale rutabaga flowers were captured by the current, the wreath became perfectly entangled in her long, streaming hair.  As we watched, the fast, jealous river carried her on her bier of blossoms far away, at last, from the village.

I sailed the next week, over the dread water, to the family I had left behind.  They said I was changed.  I could not contradict them.  I brought them the story of missing the passing of my grandmama but being present for that of my cousin whose face was said to be the same.  But how can I tell them I found my cousin Anna’s funeral more vital an occasion than any celebration of life that has come after?

I have never felt as deeply for another woman.  Perhaps that was the fate Anna chose for me because, even so, callow and dull as I was, I could not feel deeply enough.  I care for my wife and my sons and my daughter, who has the dark, drowning eyes of her great-grandmother and her distant cousin, but it is an easy sort of sentiment, as life is easy in this new country of broad, smooth streets and tamed waterways.

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After its debut in Phoebe, “Parings” subsequently appeared in the short story collection Relative Strangers published by Carolina Wren Press. The collection was awarded the Doris Bakwin Book Award and a special second place award in the 2012 Balcones Fiction Prize. 

Margaret Hermes has had stories in recent issues of River Styx, Rockhurst Review Confrontation, Pembroke Magazine, GHLL, and Passages North. Other stories have appeared in many journals such as the Missouri Review, Laurel Review, Sou’wester, and The Literary Review. “Parings” was included in the collection of her short fiction, Relative Strangers (Carolina Wren Press), winner of the Doris Bakwin Book Award and a special second place award in the Balcones Fiction Prize competition.