Whisper (9 page)

“Don't think you're staying in the house just because you're cooking and cleaning in it. You'll go back to the doghouse tonight.”

I looked down at the pan on the stove. The eggs bubbled gently, the bacon sizzled, and I felt stirring in my chest, as if ants or fleas had crept into my clothing and started to bite. The nibbles fluttered beneath my collarbone, twitched in my cheeks. My face burned and my breath came fast. I flipped the eggs, turned the bacon, opened the cap on the milk. My hands were shaking.

I refused to return to the doghouse—to be chained and kept. That would not happen. I was so angry, I couldn't even cry.

I flipped the food onto their plates and watched them shovel great forkfuls into their mouths. I felt my lips tighten over my teeth. I glowered at them—hungry, angry, imprisoned—trying to control the moisture that threatened to drip from the corners of my mouth.

“Stop staring at us,” Belen said. He put his fork down. “I can't eat with you watching and with that face…”

He stood up, pushed his chair back from the table and marched into another room. David had stopped eating and was watching me. Mateo didn't bother to look up. Belen walked back into the room, the floorboards shaking with his weight, and tossed something over my head.

“You'll wear that from now on.” Belen sat back at the table and focused his eyes on his plate.

The black fabric was soft, and it fell just past my shoulders. The weight of it felt right, the material heavy enough to stay in place, the weave loose enough to see through. It smelled of nutmeg and cumin. It must have been my mother's, a shawl to warm her neck and shoulders rather than hide her face. I should have been enraged, angry that my face had to be covered, that I was so hideous they couldn't eat while my face was visible, but I was not angry. Instead, all that rage leaked out like smoke from beneath the black veil, and I allowed myself to smile. This was my mother's. And now when people stared at me, I could curl my lips into a snarl, I could cry, I could laugh, I could wrinkle my nose and glare. They couldn't see me.

When David and Mateo left for school and Belen left to do his work for the town council, I ate the remains of the breakfast. I didn't remove the veil but rolled up the edge and slipped my fork carefully beneath it. It made me feel hazy, vaporous, as if maybe I didn't really exist and all of this was someone else's life. With my face covered, the world became less substantial, and the life in my head, as I wished it to be, became almost real.

My life might have been despicable right then, but I also walked the path my mother had walked before me. I cleaned the dishes and put them away, I picked up clothes from the floor in the main room, found a cloth and ran it over the meager furniture: a couch, a round table in the middle of the room. Some puzzles and a few books sat on the table. I looked at the books.
Holy Bread: The Art of Bread Making.
I silently thanked Nathanael for teaching me to read, to do math, to study life. I would learn to make the bread. My mother had told me that she loved smoothing and kneading the bread until it became a stretchy, soft dough that would expand into a perfect loaf. She had begun to add nuts, bits of fruit, seeds and wild grains, making the recipes her own and selling the special breads at the grocery store. They'd become dependent on the income from that bread, as it supplemented the limited amount of money Belen received from sitting on the town council.

I cleaned in David and Mateo's room first—made a stack of the dirty clothes, pulled the bedding off their beds, picked up their toys and tossed them onto the shelves made of boards and bricks. When I opened a thin door that covered a miniature room, I sighed and began to pull out the piles of clothes. Why did they need so many clothes? So many shirts, pants, socks. In our camp in the woods, we had received our supplies once a month, ordering new clothes through the messenger twice a year. I owned one set of clothing that fit: a pair of brown pants, a white T-shirt with a faded picture of a large-eared mouse, a black sweater with a hole at the right elbow and a pair of brown shoes. These children had ten pairs of pants each, fifteen shirts, short pants, sweaters and coats. They only had one body each—why did they need so many pieces of clothing?

A mouse had been nibbling on something in the corner, a wad of chewed paper that crumbled like snow when I picked it up. I began to realize the extent of the mess and wondered how long my mother had been gone. Maybe she had died the day she sent the violin. That was weeks ago. And then my father had waited until my birthday to come and get me?

With no looming father, no staring brothers, I could explore as I wished. I found a washbasin behind the house. I looked around me, trying to determine how people washed clothes in this village, and saw a woman walking through the brush of the neighboring backyards to some taller grasses. The forest began just past those taller grasses. Perhaps a creek lay in that direction. I placed the clothes in the washbasin and balanced it against my hip as I'd done for years in our camp. I walked parallel to the woman down a narrow path lined with browning weeds and found myself at a creek where women and children lined the banks. The water was dark—brown and murky. I couldn't see the bottom of the creek. This may have been the same stream that ran through our camp in the woods, but somewhere along the way it had become filthy and rotten, the crayfish so camouflaged by the brown waters that I couldn't see them skittering along the creek bed.

The children and mothers quieted for a minute when they saw me approach, but it didn't take long for the little ones to go back to their play and the mothers to resume their talking. I hesitated before lowering my basket to the filthy water, but the other women scrubbed their clothes in the stream, and the children splashed and played in it, so I settled myself and began the work.

I liked the chatter around me. It reminded me of Eva and Jeremia—of having friends. My throat felt tight and raw. I should have let myself cry—why not? But I didn't cry. Not then, anyway.

When the first pile of clothes was washed, I returned to the house, hung the clothes to dry on the outside line that ran between my father's house and the neighbor's, where the woman with the gun waved at me and grinned her toothless grin, and then took the next stack to the creek. Many of the other women were gone when I returned. There was one family there, a mother with two wee ones, and she also left after a few minutes. I didn't know if she left because I was there or because her toddler had grown sleepy and cranky.

The sun was high in the sky, beaming its rays onto my head, onto the dark veil that covered me. Usually I welcomed the sun—I didn't even mind the heat, the enclosing warmth of humidity, but because my hair had fallen forward over my shoulders, the veil was sticking to the back of my neck. It became itchy, scratchy and annoying. I glanced up and down the creek, saw that I was the only one there and took off the veil.

I folded it carefully and placed it behind me. I closed my eyes, tilted my face to the sun and felt the touch of a breeze against my sweaty neck. My shoulders were beginning to ache, my hands were raw and sore, my upper back stiff from bending. I turned to my work and pulled out a cream-colored slip—the color of a perfect egg. I stopped for a minute with the material in my hand. The thumping of my heart told me what I had, what treasure I had found, and I stood shakily, clutching the slip to my chest, afraid that it might not be real, that it might disappear.

When the material stayed in my hands, solidifying and becoming permanent, I pulled it away from my body and shook it loose in front of me. It was long and straight, and its smell was wrong—it should have smelled of yeast and cinnamon, but from the depths of the cloth I smelled something dark and decayed. I turned the skirt around, and in the back, right in the center, was an almost perfect maroon-brown sphere. Blood. Dried blood.

No.

I pushed the material down into the water, swirled it back and forth, back and forth again. I rubbed the material between my hands and scrubbed the spot between my knuckles. I didn't even look to see if the spot was gone. I ground and rubbed, twisted and scrubbed, until my arms ached and my shoulders burned. Then I stood and shook out the slip.

I could still see discoloration—a darker patch on the lightness of the material—but now at least I could look at it. I would always know what had been there, but I could pretend it was something else, like a water mark or dirt from a log she had once sat on.

The sound of swishing grass whistled on the wind. I stuffed the slip under the other clothes in the washtub and pulled out a different garment. Guilt tickled my nose, making me sneeze, but I tried to reassure myself that I'd done nothing wrong.

When Belen stepped out of the grasses and stood beside me, I scrubbed the garment in my hands with shaky fingers and with sweat dripping off the end of my nose.

“You didn't bake the bread,” he said.

The article of clothing between my hands softened, but I didn't exchange it for another.

Belen placed his foot against my back. I crouched on the dirt bank over the water, and when he pushed, I stretched out my hand to catch myself. My hand and face felt the cool shock of water—the rest of my body followed. The water was not deep. I stood easily, dripping and sodden, but now fear took the place of guilt, making me shake even more.

The sun shone over Belen's shoulder, turning him into a blackened shape with no discernible face. The clothes had taken me all day to clean.

“Why didn't you bake the bread?” His voice was so low, it sounded like the cough Jeremia's wolf had made in our camp. I put my hand over my eyes to shield them from the sun. When a slight breeze danced over me, the cool creek water tingled on my skin.

“Answer me,” he said.

“I don't know how,” I whispered.

Belen picked up the black veil and threw it at me.

“Put it on. The clothes don't matter,” he said. My stack of clean clothes sat on a large rock. Belen bent low, shoved with both hands and toppled it into the creek. “The bread pays for the stove, for the refrigerator, for the electricity in our home. We could lose these things without the money, do you understand? I want a washing machine next, which the bread should pay for. You will bake the bread,” he said, spit from his lips flying past the edge of the creek and landing on the front of my mother's black veil, “or you will not eat.”

Then he turned and swished back through the grasses along the creek.

I gathered the clothes that he had thrown into the water. I wrung them out once again and wrapped the cream slip around my waist, wet and cool against my skin. In our camp in the woods, we'd never needed money. Although Nathanael had shown us the coins, I'd never taken much interest and didn't remember what the different sizes and metals represented. Nathanael had paid for our supplies by selling Jeremia's sculptures, and we had never considered buying more than the absolute necessities.

I didn't understand why Belen couldn't bake the bread himself. Maybe he didn't know how either. I was still standing in the creek, the clothes in my hands, when a thought nudged me. I tried to push it back, tried to submerge it with my mother's blood, but it popped up again.

Power. If I was to bake the bread and help support the family, I would have power. As I gathered the clothes and balanced the washbasin against my hip, I thought about that. It was Jeremia refusing to split the wood until I brought fresh water for him from the creek. It was Nathanael refusing to tell us stories of the city until we had cleaned the evening dishes. It was Whisper trying to find a place for herself in a different world. Was it such a terrible thing to want a little bit of power?

When I returned to the house and hung up the wet clothes to dry, I noticed a door I hadn't seen before. A lean-to was tilted against the back of the house like an ungainly wooden box. I undid the latch, pulled the door open and peered inside. It was empty except for slivers of wood, mouse droppings and cobwebs. The boards didn't fit together well, but it still offered more shelter than our huts back in the woods. I knew, as I examined the rough shack, how I would use my power.