Whisper (12 page)

“He's been on the council for sixteen years and will be there for life. He doesn't fear losing the people's vote now as much as he did before.” Her arms wrapped around the baby strapped to her chest, and she held her face up to the sun. I would never be able to do that, openly lift my face to the sun. Not in this village—not in a public setting.

He thought I would ruin his life. So instead he ruined mine.

Eight

The next day, as I scrubbed the front steps leading to the house, pulled the weeds that grew against the boards and swept the debris into a pile, I watched the passersby in the street. I saw women with children, elders with canes and people my age who looked carefully away down the emptiness of the road, as though it was far more interesting and worthy of their time than I was. But then I saw something that made me stop and drop my handful of weeds onto the cement steps.

A boy a few years younger than me walked by. His eyes were dark, his hair black, and two openings appeared between his nose and his mouth. The lady with the rifle across her knees snored loudly on the porch next door, her head to the side and her toothless mouth wide open.

I followed the boy. He didn't seem to notice my quiet feet plodding along behind his as he walked down the road with one hand in the pocket of his pants. I adjusted the veil over my face, hiding my deformity, while he carelessly showed his to the public. He turned left, followed a narrow path that had been worn hard by constant walking and then continued between two houses, moving away from the creek.

He wound his way through long grasses, which spread behind the houses on the other side of the street for almost half a mile. In these grasses a solitary building made of gray stones stood square and brusque against the blue sky. Wide-open windows permitted the sounds of children to filter out into the air. A large sign on the front said
SWINC Elementary School
. As I walked past, I sneaked a quick glance through the window and saw a man barely older than me standing at the front of the room, writing words on the board and asking the students to recite the words in unison. I did not see David and Mateo, but I assumed they chanted along with the other students.

The grasses swished and sang their rustling song as I followed the boy into the field. A grass snake slithered by my feet, its bright green color a surprise beside the browns of the grasses, like an emerald macaw wrapped in a brown towel. The grasses tickled the undersides of my arms, and as I walked, grasshoppers jumped around me, landing on my shirt. The boy ahead of me walked out of the grasses and to a canopy of trees. To keep up with him, I swished more quickly, cutting the underside of my arms and rattling the grasshoppers into sporadic jumps. He went to the biggest tree, a gnarled oak that grew old and crooked. The trees surrounding the oak on all sides were stunted and dwarfed, while the bushes sprouted a few gray and brown leaves when they should have been covered by green ones.

The boy pulled himself up the tree, stepping onto boards that had been nailed to the trunk, and disappeared through a hole in a wooden platform that had been constructed on the lowest branches. I stood under these branches and looked up. I wanted to follow him, mount those steps and knock on the door to his tree house, but I feared that I would be rejected there as well.

I circled the bottom of the tree, walking around and around, sliding my fingers against the rough bark of its trunk. I considered what I should do—return to Belen's house, where the woman with the rifle snored on the porch next door, and attempt to bake bread, or climb the steps and knock on the wood, willing myself to speak to this boy who lived in the village, not rejected.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

I sucked in my breath so fast, and stepped backward so quickly, that I stumbled over a root and went down, the veil slipping off my head. I looked up at the platform surrounding the tree and saw a face in the opening. It was like looking into a mirror.

Brushing myself off and tying the veil around my neck, I took hold of the boards nailed to the tree and pulled myself up. When I stuck my head through the opening, my eyes took a minute to adjust to the darkness of the tree house. Four boys sat around the small room. Two of them played chess on a board balanced over a bucket, one of them read a book, and the other boy, the one I had followed, crouched in front of me, a wooden recorder in his hands. All of them had deformities. The boy who held the recorder looked like me, the two playing chess looked like reflections of each other, with large purple splotches covering half their faces, and the last boy had crutches that leaned against the wall beside him.

I stepped onto the platform, bending my neck so my head wouldn't hit the roof of the tiny house, and brushed my sweaty palms on my pants. The boys playing chess glanced at me and then went back to their game, the boy reading the book never even looked up, and the boy with the recorder sat down against the wall of the house and grinned so hugely, so unabashedly, even though his face turned into a snarl, that I smiled back.

“Don't get many girls up here,” he said.

He stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them at the ankles. I sat next to him. He fit the recorder into his mouth, his teeth gripping the top of it, and played a breathy tune. His lips did not close over the top of the instrument, so the sound that came out was not clean, but airy and gasping.

“Wish you'd shut up with that thing,” the boy with the book said. “You can't play it.”

“
Can't
is a matter of interpretation,” the boy with the recorder said. “Besides, wouldn't want our visiting musician to think she was the only one with any musical talent.”

One of the chess-playing boys played his knight, took his opponent's bishop and then went back to his former position—legs crossed, elbows on knees, chin in hand.

“Welcome to the hideout of the hideous,” said the boy beside me. “My name is Jafet. The grouch reading the book is Fabio. Nacio and Adan are the ones playing chess. We are the fabulous foursome, and we spend more time here than anywhere else.”

He stuck the recorder back into his mouth and sprayed a spluttery tune. Nacio and Adan both covered their ears, and one of them moved a pawn. Fabio slammed his book on the floor and sighed.

“You can't play that thing. Would you put it away and stop tormenting us? She doesn't want to hear it either.”

I liked them immediately. It was like being home with Eva, Jeremia and Nathanael.

“Hey, we don't want her to see all our faults on the first visit, do we? Where are your manners?”

Fabio picked up his book and tucked it under his arm. He adjusted his crutches and hobbled to the opening in the platform. He dropped his crutches through the opening and then climbed down the tree while holding on to the wooden steps.

“See you tomorrow, Fabio. Don't get ambushed,” Jafet yelled through a square window cut into the side of the house. He looked back at me. “He's just jealous because I found you first, and you look like me.”

Jafet resumed his seated position and put the recorder to his lips. I looked through the window and watched as Fabio moved surprisingly fast through the weeds that grew past his waist. He left a trail in the field, one of many that formed a pattern, as though someone had combed the field, leaving a row of parallel paths from one side to the other. The boys playing chess continued to be engrossed in their game, and Jafet played a tune I didn't recognize and could never repeat.

“Why are you guys here?” I whispered.

“'Cause they don't like us out there,” Jafet said, waving his recorder toward the window and the field beyond.

“I mean, why are you allowed to stay?”

“I don't mean to be insulting,” Jafet said while studying the mouse on my T-shirt, “but you're a girl. If you hadn't gone to the camp in the woods, you'd probably be dead. I happen to be an only child, and a boy. Like they were going to kill me.”

The two boys playing chess looked up. The dark patches of maroon pigment made their faces look blotchy, diseased.

“We're twins.”

“Not many twins around.” Their mouths opened and closed at almost the same time.

“But girls, they're not so valuable. They can't sit on the council, they don't have jobs that pay much—all they're good for is reproduction, and right now too many messed-up babies are being born. If the girls come out disfigured, might as well get rid of them.” Jafet tapped his fingers against the floor and hummed a quick tune. He twitched, hummed and tapped constantly.

I thought he was joking or being sarcastic, but I had a hard time reading him. He didn't look me in the eyes, but I didn't know if it was because of my femaleness or because he never looked people in the eyes.

Low chimes, spaced out and eerie like the call of the loon, filtered through the window. Jafet stood and so did the twins.

“Council's adjourned. Time to go.”

My hands became sweaty and a flush crept up my neck into my cheeks. Belen would be home soon, and all I'd accomplished was the washing of a few clothes and the scrubbing of the top step. The yogurt culture still sat on the back of the stove, unused.

Without waiting for an invitation to go first, I climbed down the steps of the tree and began to run through the field. The dried grasses brushed against my skin and I knew I would be itchy later, but I had to get back to Belen's house and hope that my lean-to hadn't been destroyed and the chain reattached to the doghouse. I didn't bother to silence my movement through the field but ran until my breath came from my mouth in rhythmic exhalations and my side began to ache. When I emerged from the grasses behind a house with sunflowers, I gasped and held my chest when someone spoke.

“Not so fast, miss. Thought you could slip away while I was taking a snooze, did you? We'll see what Belen has to say about this.”

Her polka-dot shirt looked so bright and merry next to the browns of the grasses and against her bronzed, craggy skin that she could have been an illusion, a butterfly against a dead field. She stepped closer to me and examined my face.

“Well, you're as ugly as they say. I could barely see you from my place on the porch, but now that you're right up next to me, I can see why they kept you hid. Your mom, you know, said you were beautiful. I knew that weren't true or Belen would've kept you around. Your mom liked everyone, sainted creature that she was, even me.”

Her face was so close to mine now that I could see the color of her eyes. They were green, a faded green with flecks of white. I thought about this woman, holding her rifle across her legs while sitting on her porch, watching my movements and considering when to point her weapon in my direction, and realized that she was probably a bit like the macaw. That mother macaw had screamed and screeched, mourned the loss of her baby like it was her left wing, but she hadn't hurt Eva and never did do more than bluster. Perhaps this woman also made loud noises but little else.

“You ain't gonna cry, are you?”

I shook my head.

“Don't talk much, huh. That's probably smart. Talking always seems to get me into trouble. My husband doesn't even hear me anymore. Don't get yourself a husband, girl, if you don't need one. They're nothing but trouble. If I'da been able to sit on that council myself, I never woulda married him, but women can't do much around here but hold rifles and boss their husbands. Let's get going or Belen is gonna have my hide. Give me your arm.”

The woman grabbed my arm and hobbled along beside me. She used the rifle for a walking stick on the other side. Her flared skirt brushed against my leg as we walked—it sounded like the dry grasses in the field.

We crossed the road and I walked her to the front of her house. She let go of my arm and grabbed the railing. Climbing slowly onto each step, and still using her rifle as a cane, she made her way up to the porch and sat heavily in her rocking chair. She waved her gun in the air and called loudly.

“Over here, Belen. I caught her trying to escape.”

My mouth went dry when I heard Belen's footsteps on the hard dirt of the yard. He stood near me, next to me, but not close.

“Where you been, girl?” he said.

I untied the veil from around my neck and draped it over my head. The fabric softened my view of Djala's porch, blurring the spots on her shirt and turning the world hazy.

“She visited them freaks over at the tree house. She sneaked by me on the way down, but I caught her on the way back.”

Belen grabbed me by the hair and dragged me over the bumpy grass to the back of the house, where he threw me into the lean-to with such force that I tripped and went down hard. I sprawled over the blanket and held my hands over my ears, waiting for the next blow, but instead the light narrowed and disappeared as Belen slammed the door shut.

I stayed on the floor for many minutes, willing myself not to cry, and escaping in my head to a place beside our creek where I liked to sit when I needed to be alone. In that place, the sun shone on my shoulders, the frogs grumped in the reeds by my feet, the dragonflies hovered over the pond, and my balance was restored. As I lay in the lean-to, I willed myself to find that balance, to return to a place that was warm and safe, but it took me many minutes to build that calm. When I finally felt as though I wouldn't cry, scream or bang my fists against the wood slats of my shelter, the sun had disappeared and I had, once again, failed to bake any bread or to please Belen.