The Cow, The Cat, The Captain and The Church Mice (Part 2)

 She watched barefoot, in a night gown, as the barn burned.

Though her marriage was strained, her husband took every opportunity to demonstrate sufficiency.  When he shooed her back into the house and dispatched the au pair to cloister his bride, she capitulated to feed his ego.  As he joined the water line and passed buckets, none but her makeshift guardian could see the satisfaction on her face.

As flames climbed the barn walls, her back straightened.  She strained to hear what no one else could hear: the horses, though frightened, were calm; too void of the terror their burning home demanded.  Below the shouting and chaos, she could hear hear the horses, even from the house.  A subliminal signal passed to her, through the flames, from the beasts.  Darkness cloaked them but only she and they watched with hope instead of despair.

They knew more than she because they knew which horse had been stolen.  They saw the horse thief survey the stable before he selected. All of them absorbed the wanderlust in his gaze and wished to be snatched; to be removed from the plenteous fodder, endless brushing and pristine water troughs.  He smelled of fields and musk, of courage and rivers.  Involuntarily, they craned their necks, nostrils flaring, begging to be chosen. 

They watched his choice, a victor among the vanquished, hold his weight like a champion's wreath.  After the tenderness between horse and rider, he dismounted and wordlessly led the unclaimed outside.  His steed waited, and the harras watched, as he set the fire, mounted the victor and plunged into the night.  An all knowing, nonverbal team was left to watch the flames singe the uninformed.  Scurrying, choking, charcoaled men ran in confusion past wiser beasts.

She knew they knew because they were consoled.  Every heart, filled with dread, beat too quickly; every heart except hers and the horses'.  Flames and mammalian inarticulations rendered the inexplicable, understood.  If she could, she would fill in the blanks for her hoofed chatel.  She would tell them that she knew the thief; that arson was tied to an old story; that for the first time in a long time she was satisfied.  Could their watery eyes be brought to see she submitted to her husband's barked orders - this time - to tamp down the tell?  If she joined the fray and pretended to be other that she was, someone would recognize her pretense.  The best thing she could do was remain receptive to her child's well-meaning guardian.  She accepted the cool towels, warm tea and soft words in silent viewing of the catastrophe.

She knew the blaze was the welcome eruption of a thirteen year old volcano.  She was the heiress of landed gentry when she began to teach a migrant worker how to read.  Romance blossomed during the harvest, but by the time the pregnancy was discovered, his clan had moved on.  She embedded her morning sickness into an arranged marriage and carried on in her caste.  Au pairs, wet nurses, gowns and expectations suffocated her.  She longed for what the horses smelled on the arsonist: freedom to roam, earn, suffer and overcome.  During the next harvest, he came back to find her married, with a babe in arms.  One look at the child, and her eyes, and he understood. 

"Mine?"

She nodded through sobs.

Seeing his son, swaddled and plump with servants attending, made him smile.  He'd never known such and was content leaving him with his beloved, to be raised in plenty.  As soon as she saw her firstborn's father however, she knew her people were not enough.  He needed the rough and ready life her lover, her son's father, knew so well.  If he stayed, the child would become the kind of man she had married in desperation: soft, narcissistic and petty.  By contrast, her husband's rival was plain, grizzled and noble.

His family worked a harvest the same year she began retreating into books, painting and horseback riding.  An only child, she was raised by her grandfather.  Plans for generational succession were interrupted by the untimely deaths of his son and daughter-in-law.  Left to raise a granddaughter, he flung adult considerations upon her before she was ready.  She bristled under his paternalistic predestination: an arranged marriage, generous acreage and instructions in his will.  Her garden became a safe haven.

Digging holes and burying seeds provided ends and beginnings.  Unwillingly at first, each seed became her grandfather's antemortem.  In her mind, piece by little piece of him lost control of her until more of him was in the soil than in her life.  Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed, but if it dies, it produces many seeds.  Pawpaw's slow death in her garden gave her courage.  He was still alive but was slowly losing his grip.  Between the first seed she planted and the end of the harvest, an hired hand finished the job.

Their love affair was a few weeks of secrecy, tenderness and sleeplessness.  She taught him how to read and he taught her how to butcher an animal.  Their son was conceived, the harvest ended and by the time the pregnancy was discovered he was gone.  So great was their love that he asked her to join his nomadic tribe.  Her hesitancy was something they both hated.  She clung to the familial estate out of guilt.  Her daintiness would have been misplaced around his campfires.  Ashamed, she hid rather than meet him on the day of their planned elopement.

She hid her face as he held his son for the first time.  Before the pregnancy became apparent, she hastened the arranged marriage and passed one man's child off for another's.   As father and son bonded for the first time, she saw the devastation of her plight.  Trapped by the trappings, tears of regret flowed.  She muffled her sobs at being married to a suspicious, greedy man.  Her trusting and generous lover held their son while she whimpered. Wordlessly, she signed that she was incarcerated and begged him to free their boy.  

"Yours..." she whispered as a servant approached.  Explaining the presence of a hired hand holding the child in the house would be difficult.  With no time to debate, she pushed the baby into the crook of his neck, gesturing toward the door.  Her hands opened as if she were releasing a dove: the baby was the bird and his biological father the bright blue sky.  She watched them leave the way a dandelion stem watches its own fuzzy seeds in the wind.  A mix of horror and hope made her ears burn, her eyes water.  He understood, whispered his devotion and crouched in flight.

He raised their son in migrant camps with the help of extended family.  Never marrying, he never told their son and neither did his people.  There were enough secrets and complications in their tribe; interdependence included holding confidences.  A secret however is like a seed.

Once a seed smells water and sprouts, it can no more return to its previous state than a chick can return to the egg it escaped.  Inclusion in the migrant workers' caravan was an end and a beginning.  His first months were spent in the bejeweled egg of his great-grandfather's estate.  While wondering about his own mother, he saw a peep of chicks, following the hen.

Each baby bird had to peck its way out of an egg.  They knew their mother and understood their history.  Envious, he asked his father questions the chicks stirred within.

Dutifully, musically, rhythmically the birds were a family and a grimalkin watched him watching.  The cat knew what the boy would learn days later.  At play, the boy discovered the moggy crouching, head lurching at an angle.  Calling his feline friend, the cat looked up with two chick feet sticking out of her mouth.  He wanted to defend the bird but the deed was already done.  One more lurch and nothing remained except the, "You called me?" inquiry of the cat.  He felt more vulnerable than the chick; at least the gobbled thing knew its mother.  He knew nothing of his hen.

He had no egg to rediscover and caste was a cat.  Mind-numbing work in cabbage fields, potato fields, pumpkin patches and fruit orchards was his lot.  Sympathy was in short supply among his feast or famine cohort.  When times were good, there was jam and butter but their horse drawn wagons usually passed people eating jam and butter.  Watching the prosperous gobble what laborers gathered, stung.  Misery chased him to books.

Bizarrely, he knew how to read when none around him did: his father taught him.  While his twenty-six letters were learned, stealthy children watched.  Literacy made him a chick; the cruel jealousy of the untutored, a cat.