The Home Visit

Flash Fiction: "The Home Visit" published by The Ravens Perch

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What you feel here is how it happened there. The grown son was in the garage tinkering with a car. He pretended not to notice me. The father was at the door to let me inside. He was not smiling. It was hot and a fan stood in the corner whirring. The child sat on the floor beneath the fan and seemed to be enjoying the breeze. We sat down. He offered me water. Or a Coke? He asked. I gave him the introductory information about how I was a child advocate appointed by the court and he nodded. We both knew he knew why I was there. The child came closer to listen. She had a soft plastic toy in her hand, something too young for her. I asked to see where she sleeps. There were boys’ voices I could hear in the back of the house. He gestured with his entire arm toward the side of the house and remained seated. I took the little girl’s hand and she led the way. The boys were shouting louder now, in a way that let me know they knew I was there. One tossed a frisbee from the top bunk of a bed through the doorway and into the hall. It almost hit me. The taller one jumped down and seemed to hiss, and the shorter one hid behind the door. Then the showing off ruckus began again and for a moment I was enraptured by their capture of my attention. Then the girl tugged on my hand, and I peeked in the boys’ room which was clean, orderly even, as boys continued shouting, playful but aggressive too, only pretending I was not there. I felt afraid to enter their room and instead followed the tugging child to a small room across the hall. It had a little bed, a doll, a bear. The boys’ noise increased and it was hard to hear the girl. She was trying to say something but was whispering. I leaned closer and she looked away. “Take me with you”, she pleaded with her little voice. “Take me home.”

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Mississippi Goddam

"Mississippi Goddam" was published in Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University, in its special issue “A Sense of Place,” Spring 2022.

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In Spring 1927, when Sol Bryson was seventeen, the sky opened up, thunder cracked and the rains poured all the water from heaven into the Ohio River, the Allegheny, the Wabash, the Tennessee, all the tributaries that emptied into the Mississippi as it ran narrow in the Delta, and mud channels pushed back, creating one moving monster of water and all that it carried with it—houses and trees, bodies and parts of all those things and more.  Sol heard the cries and saw the red mud rising like the terror inside him. The water was rising so fast that their cotton field was becoming just a spit of land surrounded by water, a long finger pointing east.  They all ran from it, they had to.

“We go now and we go on foot!” Virgil shouted.  Nobody knows how to swim, he thought, but the wagon will just slow us down. “Leave everything,” he called to Lizzie who had climbed onto the horse that was slowly sinking into the mud.  

While the others rushed to join the lines of people heading east away from the rising tide, carrying whatever they could, Sol ran directly for the shed and jumped up for the highest nail where he’d hidden his slide whistle from his father.  He’d made it himself from an old bicycle pump, fashioning it on a picture he’d seen in a magazine.  Someday he would play the slide in his own band, but his father thought the slide was nonsense and talk of a band was even worse.  He thought singing should be confined to church.

Sol felt the river seeping into his shoes. The floorboards were turning red.  It was coming to get him!  He stuck the slide whistle into his shirt and splashed his way out.  The water soaked his legs, the slosh and grit of it, the sweat of it in the swelter of day, the cold and chill of it at night.  Added to that was everyone’s abiding terror that the white people might do anything at all in their panic.  They were never safe when white people were scared.

He spied his mother and grabbed her hand to calm the panic expanding inside him, higher in his body with a faster heartbeat, each time it rose.  “Sol-o-mon!” Lizzie sang out, tugging his arm to pull him to one side of her with Virgil on the other. “Stay close. That beast is fast and it is deep.”  

They joined the line with the others, holding onto each other, trudging the flat land east, away from the river with its creeping, rising tide, slipping on mud banks, climbing levees, whatever high ground they could find, and always watching where the birds flew to follow and rest with them on a roof or in a treetop.  Stories passed among them about black men in Greenville being taken at gunpoint to the levees, forced to dig, to pile sand, to be back enslaved to the white man’s will, shot dead if they refused, drowned if they faltered, and to survive if they were lucky. 

Sol was silent.  His heartbeat began to slow to an even rhythm, from knowing his mother was there.  He didn’t have to be touching her or even see her to feel her presence.  He’d learned from an early age, even when he was left alone in the shade, lying in an old crate stuffed with cotton while Lizzie was pumping at the washboard or spreading cotton sheets across clotheslines.   He could hear her breathing hard and it comforted him.  He could smell the sweat of her body, the bite of milk that had soured on her apron.  His tongue would begin to suck his cheeks and his lips would quiver just from her nearness.  Sol learned to whimper instead of crying out for his mother.  He knew early in his life that she would always come to him.  If not at once when he wanted her to, then eventually.  As a young boy, Sol never minded his mother kissing him, even in front of other boys who would scrunch their noses and turn away, mocking him.  Lizzie’s hands were as big as a man’s, but they were hands that had never struck him.  As Sol grew into a man he began to appreciate his mother’s beauty hiding in all that Mississippi dirt and sweat.  When she relaxed in the evening under a tree or dressed herself for church, he felt a stiff, reliable kind of pride-- her face framed by a straw hat, her teeth large and strong, her arms smooth and her step steady.  Who wouldn’t love a mother like that? he thought.  I’ll find me a wife just like Lizzie.

On that first day Solomon, Lizzie and Virgil clung to each other like mud on shoe bottoms.  Linked together through their arms and hands, the three of them were like one silky machine humming along with the others.  Virgil led the singing with his enormous voice, but first he said those special words to everybody:  “I dedicate this song to my son, Solomon.” And then everybody sang into the night air.

Walk together children

Don't you get weary

Walk together children 

Don't you get weary

Oh, talk together children

Don't you get weary

There's a great camp meeting in the promised land

 Sol Later they liked to brag about how they outwalked the Mississippi, how they found dry land and kind, generous people along the way who offered a cup of clean water, or a roasted potato, maybe a dry place to sleep.   They were even happy then, when Lizzie shaded her eyes with her hand, pointing to the thin line of pink along the horizon at sunset—“God’s paintbrush,” she said reverently, and Sol searched for anything that would burn so they could have a fire.  Then Virgil’s enormous voice filled the air as night drew closer, and Sol felt the comfort, singing along quietly under his breath.

There was a time, before Sol’s voice changed to a man’s, father and son used to harmonize.  Virgil was the bass and Sol was the tenor then. Then Sol’s voice began to change, at first cracking and unable to find its steady course, then settling into a baritone, until finally, as the boy reached his late teens, it fell into the bass range.  No longer did Virgil want to sing with Sol since their sounds were no longer unique or harmonious.  Virgil said they sounded like two pigs in heat.  Once Sol tried to fake a higher voice just so Virgil would sing with him.  He missed his father’s attention.  There was nothing he wished for more than to sing as they had.  Virgil said that Sol sounded like a weasel in heat.  Sol walked away from his father’s taunting with a bitterness and blame that spoiled the harmonious sweetness they had shared.  And a competition ensued with tense, unwritten rules.  One never sang when the other was singing.  One never admired or praised the other for their singing.  They never spoke of it.   The competition included both singing and Lizzie. 

Many days later Sol, Virgil and Lizzie found their way to her family—the Moores—where, farm outside of Starkville, at last they could rest.  Maybe they would stay there or maybe they would go on up to New Albany where Virgil’s people, the Brysons, lived.  One thing for sure, they knew they were not returning to the Delta.

Lizzie’s family stayed on the farm--Sol’s grandfather, Dick (everybody called him Granddaddy) and grandmother Emma (everybody called her Big Mama), plus his aunties—Mollie, Lelia and Lucy--all except the oldest, Julia, who had disappeared the previous year.   Nobody knew where she was.  They had stopped looking, stopped asking.  

Dick Moore had fought with the Union Colored Troops during the Civil War, and still, sixty years later, visitors respectfully referred to him as Corporal.  He carried himself like a soldier, straight- backed and grim.  He didn’t say much but he didn’t have to--he had made much of his life, and everyone could see that.  After the war,  in January 1868, Emma Parham had married Dick Moore on a warm day, years after they had met when Dick escaped the Alabama planation during the war that ripped open the land, the people, everything, after the old man in Washington emancipated them, and after Dick fled to the Union Army and enlisted for two and a half years, mustering in at Corinth in 1863 and mustering out at Baton Rouge on the last day of 1865.  Eventually Dick and Emma harnessed a mule and rode for days to Starkville where Dick claimed the acres Lincoln had promised freedmen for their service to the Union.

It was beautiful, rolling farmland.   There was a creek full of sunfish at the bottom of a hill, and there were six houses—a larger cabin that Granddaddy and Big Mama lived in and five identical small ones, all in a row, leading downhill to the creek.  The cabin sat across from a straight row of daughters’ houses and a bit up the hill from them, “so we can keep an eye on you,” Dick had said when he finished the last one.  He’d built them one by one in the girls’ age order, with Julia’s first, then Lizzie’s, and so on.  “That way,” he told Emma at the time, “maybe they’ll stay.”

There was one called “Lizzie’s House,” where Lizzie and Virgil and Sol stayed, two rooms and a front porch with a view of the woodland, the ducks, the sunset. To Sol, Granddaddy meant safety and Big Mama meant plenty.  Pale rhododendrons and bright azaleas bloomed wild, bits of cotton floated through the warm air, and even the mosquitoes were kind and left him alone. To Sol this place was a bit of heaven.  Big Mama kept chickens, so he could have an egg every day if he wanted one, and he and Lizzie could bake cornbread together.  Granddaddy gave the blessing at every meal, just like a pastor, which he was not. 

On that first morning home, even though each sister had her own little house, they all came to Big Mama’s kitchen to eat.  Lizzie was up early with her mother, rolling out the dough and patting the biscuits.  Soon the cousins, Ernest, Suda and Corene pushed open the screen door, letting it slam, and busying themselves with pumping water, clattering pans, passing biscuits and eggs.  Uncle J.D. and aunties Lelia and Lucy were there, too, all the females in aprons, all the males in denim, all hands washed as Big Mama required at her table.  The men announced they were hungry and Suda could not find her doll and Corene needed someone to tie her bow.  

Lizzie laughed at the sudden and unfamiliar commotion, the warmth of her family rising inside her like liquid.  She wiped her hands to embrace them one by one, to look each one in the eye, as it was her way to do.  She tied Corene’s bow and sat at the long oak table.

“Been way too long,” J.D. started.

“Brother, yes,” she said, whispering, “Anybody heard from Julia?”

The two younger sisters shook their heads and rolled their eyes to let Lizzie know there was more to the story than could be told at the table.

“I hear you’re planning a wedding,” she said to Lelia, who was about ten years her younger.  “Make it like mine, Lelia.  You were just a kid, probably don’t remember when Virgil and I were hitched.”

“Tell us,” said Lelia, “tell us.”  She had both girls’ attention and J.D. was listening too.

“Well, it’s not that it was such a big wedding.  More that it was true love—meant to be,” she began and the girls swooned.  “We met here in Starkville when Virgil was laying tracks and cross ties.”

“Pounding spikes and hammering the timbers, Virgil used to brag,” said her sister, Lucy.  “I remember that like it was yesterday.”

“Well, Big Mama invited the whole railroad crew to supper after church one Sunday to meet her daughters.”  At the sound of her name, Big Mama came to the table, a bowl on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand, and they turned their eyes to watch her.

“And Virgil, he liked Emma and Mollie and Lizzie, but Lizzie was the one we wanted married next,” said Big Mama.  “Uh huh.  She was fourteen already.”  Big Mama nodded and nobody said a word.  “And Virgil knew there was an order to such things,” she added, catching each listener’s eye and turning her back.   Lizzie broke the silence.

“Solomon was born the next year,” she explained.

“And you never had another child after that?” asked Corene, and J.D. felt mortified by the question.  He cleared his throat to change the subject when Lizzie responded.

“The Lord never saw His way to making that happen,” Lizzie said.  “Or maybe it’s on account of my “woman problems.”  And she didn’t tell it to them, but she had to agree with her husband who had told her he always wondered if there was something wrong with his seed, and if God was punishing him for spilling it in too many wrong places.  As God-fearing a man as he was, he had his weakness—women.  The screen door slammed shut and Virgil came inside.

“Morning, everybody,” he said, cheerful as a chipmunk.  The girls replied all around and Big Mama bought Virgil a cup of coffee.  Big Mama was a dark-skinned woman with hair straighter than the others, on account of some Chickasaw blood, she said, and she pulled it back and tied it in the back to keep it from falling into her face and their food.

“Thank you, M’am,” he said, smiling, bringing the hot, black liquid and its sweet steam right under his nose.

“I was trying to remember,” began J.D.  “When was it you all left here for the Delta anyway?” Lizzie waited for Virgil to reply because he had been the one who wanted to get away from her family, especially from the tension between him and her parents.  

“Well, it was when Solomon was old enough to do his share,” said Virgil in a light voice, not wanting to complain about the backbreaking work they’d done in those hot, buzzy fields, plowing and planting cotton in one season, chopping the next, and picking the last.   “I didn’t mind the work.  Honed the edge of my hoe splinter thin and iron strong,” he said proudly. Yep.  One year, in my rush to get the most cotton bolls into the machine, I lost three fingers,” he said, holding up his right hand.  They all knew the story—the whizzing saws inside the cotton gin.  How he was unable to pick cotton that fall, so Lizzie and Sol picked his share and their own, too. 

When the Moore sisters began to fight, the fighting infested the others, too.   “The girls are at it again,” Big Mama said, “and only a week since Lizzie’s been back.” “Every time a new man comes onto this land, Mollie starts.   It’s a shame.” 

Over the years Lizzie had gotten used to the fact that Virgil was a pretty man and women liked him.  He wasn’t a big man or a fancy man, but he was a charmer with a dimple in one cheek and an easy smile.  His eyes had a way of talking that his mouth lacked.  So this time Lizzie didn’t say a word to him, but when she saw Mollie leaning into him, making herself and her little house open to Virgil, she warned her younger sister.

“You stay away from him. I’ll kill you, I will.” 

“I’ll kill you, I will,” Mollie taunted back. 

Something in Sol liked to hear his mother fight like that, to see a fire explode in her, make her not just his mama, but something more.  Silently he took her side, but he didn’t believe she’d kill anybody--why, her heart was so big she had trouble wringing the necks of chickens when it needed doing.  

At night Sol fell asleep on the floor beside his parents, where he could feel their silent coldness.  He was used to feelings coming and going, crossing like trains on the tracks.  But when he woke in the night and his daddy’s side of the bed was empty, and he saw a lamp in Mollie’s window and his mama sliding a shotgun underneath the bed, then Sol knew then that this bit of heaven was ending and they would have to move on.  

He got up to use the outhouse. Low sounds came from the cabin window of Mollie’s house.   On his way back he could hear his father and his aunt talking. Sol tiptoed to the spot beneath the window to listen.  He heard his father say to Mollie, “Well, the boy never could carry a tune anyway.”  Sol didn’t cry or whimper, but ran back to Lizzie’s house.

The next morning Sol grabbed an apron and boiled coffee, adding a beaten egg and crushed shells to the grounds to make it smooth.  Virgil sat at the table devouring blackberry jam and biscuits like he’d swallowed so much Mississippi dirt that he needed something sweet to go with it.   Sol saw Granddaddy coming from the bedroom and he poured a steaming cup of coffee for him, too.   Granddaddy dropped a metal strongbox on the table right by where Sol stood.  It looked like something he might have salvaged from a Confederate garrison during the war.  Inside was a roll of ten dollar bills the size of Big Mama’s fist.  Granddaddy counted out some of the money slowly, like he knew just how much things cost.

“Here you go, little man,” he said, putting a pile of bills in the pocket of Sol’s apron.  “It’s time you began taking care of your mama.”  Virgil glanced at the roll of bills.  “Now, “ Granddaddy continued, “you go to town and get two tickets on the Illinois Central so you and your Mama can ride all the way to New Albany.”  He stared at Virgil who did not look up from his plate.   “Your daddy here,” he nodded at Virgil, “looks like he’s got more energy than one man needs.  Why he can just walk to New Albany. The road will do him good.”  Sol knew that Virgil had heard what Dick said, but he also knew his father would not react to being shamed in front of his own son.  Maybe he’d walk to New Albany and maybe he wouldn’t, thought Sol, but he wouldn’t let them know.  That’s for sure.

That night Virgil visited Mollie’s cabin again and the whole farm knew it, what with the windows open and Mollie singing Bessie Smith and Virgil backing up a chord in bass harmony—announcing their dirty stuff for everybody to hear.Sol saw Lizzie softly close the door to her house up the hill and he felt that sharp cut in his gut again.   “You hurting my mama!” he cried outside of Mollie’s house.  He knew he couldn’t out-fight the man, but maybe he could out-sing him.   He started with the “St. Louis Blues.”

The door to Mollie’s cabin popped open and Virgil appeared on the porch, pulling his suspenders up around his small shoulders and scanning the yard.  He stepped down to the grass and circled the cabin, slowly, deliberately, looking for Solomon.  Leila and Lucy raced to get Lizzie and they all three hurried to the big porch to where Dick and Big Mama were sitting in their rocking chairs.  

“I’m gonna go stop those two now,” Dick said reaching forward for the railing to pull himself up.   His body teetered as he rose.  

“No, Daddy!” shouted Lizzie. “This is something Solomon’s going to do for himself at last.”  Her words surprised them.

Unlike his usual pattern of repenting to the Lord and of begging Lizzie for forgiveness, Virgil returned to Mollie’s cabin and closed the door without a sound.  Soon the kerosene lamp glowed in the window behind the curtains.  Then the singing began.  The family listened in the dark as Mollie’s high notes and Virgil’s low notes strained to be heard, then turned to full-throated tones that seemed to rumble down the hill past Lizzie’s house.  Sol was in the yard, still circling, then standing still, putting all of his life into his voice, deep and dark, he sang “I hate to see that evening sun go down,” like he was the one making it go down against his own will, and the other voices soon faded and Sol’s was the only one in the night.  That was when he reached inside his shirt between the buttons that Lizzie had sewed on the front, wrapped his fingers around the slide whistle and pulled it out into the air.  He wet the reed that he had shaved thin until it fit perfectly into the mouthpiece at the top of the tube.  He brought clean saliva from the back of his throat, let it fall lazily in whatever pattern it made, and wet his lips inside and out, pulling the reed through them over and over until it was just the right mix of soft and stiff.  Then he began to blow into the whistle, softly at first, until he had the slide arm in place;  then he filled his chest with air and softened his wet mouth again, blowing with all might so the sound would carry back to the Delta.  He pulled the whistle’s slide slowly so that its taunting would rise and fall in a mocking rebuke, announcing to the world that his father was a mean-talking, hypocritical SOB.  Sol did not have to say a disrespectful word.   The shadows fell over him and slipped past Leila’s house into the foundation of Lucy’s house at the bottom.  Julia’s house stood empty at the top of the hill.  Mollie’s shadow stood by the window to her cabin as she closed the windows and Sol’s last clear note sounded in the damp Mississippi air.   It wasn’t long before the farm was so silent that only the crickets and the frogs had anything to say.

In the cooling night air, Sol turned toward his mother’s house.  There was a kerosene lamp shining in the window but the wick was burning low.  Could Lizzie be asleep? he wondered.  He needed her strong arms around him and climbed the two wooden steps to the little porch.  He was worried about entering the house.  How would his mother feel about his shaming his father?  He was her husband and she was  a loyal wife, after all.  Afraid to know and afraid not to know, he sat on the old bench and leaned back against the house.  There was no pleasure in this victory, if it was a victory, and he could only find that out from Lizzie.  He got up and tiptoed to the door.  He turned the knob and stepped inside.  He looked around.  Was she there?  He went to the table to turn up the lamp.  His pallet was tidy on the floor.  His parents’ bed covers were messy and nobody was there.  He looked out the window—maybe she was out there looking for him—but there was not a sound or a sight to be had.  Just dark and quiet.  He could not sense Lizzie anywhere and he began to panic.  Had his father killed her?  Taken her away?  There were no big hands to hold his, no arms to comfort, no approving kiss.  Sol was too old to cry and too tired to go searching for her, but he would not stay in that place of No Lizzie.  He ran outside, slamming the door, cracking the night’s silence as he went. 

In the morning, when Big Mama stepped out in the damp grass and growing light, she thanked the Lord for the day He’d given them.  She found her grandson leaning against the outhouse, humming to himself.  Solomon’s a man now, she thought. That little boy is gone, dammit, he’s a goddam man.   

“Come on now,” she said gently and brought him in.  

Granddaddy was only partially dressed, still in the long johns he wore year round.  He was pulling up his overalls when Sol stepped inside the cabin and sat at the table. “Well, young man,” Granddaddy said.  “You sure gave your Daddy your own brand of a what for.” He looked up at his smirking grandson. 

An emotion stuck in Sol’s throat and Dick recognized it—the moment before a grown man breaks into tears. The old sofa creaked as Dick leaned against a pillow and pulled his grandson’s body up against his own, holding him firmly in both arms like he did frightened, homesick soldiers during the war.   Sol’s fists opened slowly then and rested gently on the folded quilt that lay across the sofa’s back.  His breathing quickened as hurt rolled down his cheeks in thick lines and fell wet and heavy onto the cloth of Dick’s overalls. 

“Well, well, well,” said Dick, like it was just another day.  Sol looked up at him.  “Unfortunately, you had to be the one to teach your daddy not to take what is not given.  The seventh’s commandment, you know. And the sixth,” he added.  “It’s the Lord’s Word.”  The old man drew a deep breath. “Solomon, where’s that money I gave you for train tickets you so you and your mama can ride to New Albany?  Did your daddy take it from you?”

Sol grinned.  “Oh, no, Granddaddy.  I bought the tickets and buried them in a box by the henhouse.”  

No one ever spoke of the victory Sol had over his father, because Virgil had started it, because two wrongs don’t make a right, because it is a confusing thing to defeat your own father and, strangely, Sol thought, pride is not a part of it.  Sol knew what he liked and arguing was not one of those things.  He’d been shocked by the intensity of what had happened.   He kept quiet about it.  Big Mama brought Sol some buttermilk and they left him on the sofa to sleep. 

Out on the porch of Lizzie’s House, Virgil was whimpering, begging Lizzie for forgiveness.  

“Your pride is hurt,” Lizzie said. “That’s natural.   Solomon out-sung you and you couldn’t enjoy the night the way you’d planned it. “ 

“But darlin’, you know it’s only you.  You and me.  We should take those tickets back home ourselves.  Leave Solomon here.  He likes it here, you can tell.  And the country would be good for him.”  He tried to catch her eye, but Lizzie wasn’t letting him.  She poured the last bit of whiskey she could find into him and let Virgil lie in her lap one more time. 

“I know, honey, I know,” she said, stroking his foolish head, sighing, thinking that they’d run away from one nightmare in the Delta right into another.  

“And it’s a long, long walk to New Albany.  I just don’t think I could walk that far.”  Virgil smiled and settled into her lap, finding his place again, like he always did.

“Oh, it is a long way, isn’t it?” she replied.

Virgil woke to the fading sound of a train whistle, crazy from not being in his own charge, and without his wife and unable to speak.  He thought of Mollie and knew that for Lizzie’s sake, he had deserved what he got.  He forgave himself, but could he ever forgive Solomon?   That day he sought everywhere the comforting heat of the sun on his face while he sipped Big Mama’s sweet tea through a straw.  Days later, Virgil decided to follow the railroad tracks to New Albany instead of taking the road through Tupelo.  The day he left the Moore farm, Mollie stayed out of sight all day, moving aside the curtain on her window only one time to peek.  She had her own shame to work out.   Big Mama and Leila and Lucy were in the kitchen while Dick just kept rocking on the front porch, keeping his eye on Virgil’s back until he saw it disappear up and over the hill.   

Along the way Virgil met hobos in their camps and joined them in a careful, but friendly way, sharing the food Big Mama had packed for the trip, turning his pockets inside out to show himself penniless, not worth robbing.  There were five men and they all seemed to be loners, but they shared their smokes and their campfire.  They took turns keeping watch for wolves and worse while the others slept. In the morning, the men showed Virgil how to hop a freight train, how to judge its speed and measure your own, avoid the railroad guards, stay away from the coupling, find the open door, a steady handle, locate the right-size mound next to the track to take off from.  It involved complicated maneuvers and it took Virgil all of one day and most of the next before he gave up and decided to walk. He laughed.  His farming days were over, he knew.  He would try to get his old railroad job back. He could hardly wait to get home to tell Lizzie and to see his parents.  But he didn’t care if he ever saw Solomon again. 

Over the next few years, as Sol grew into a New Albany Bryson, he stayed out of his father’s way and spent most of his time at the local colored school trying to catch up with what his cousins had already learned.  In the Delta, he’d been unable to attend school most of the time because of crop schedules, and the fearsome distances he’d have had to walk not knowing if white people would bother him, and because his parents couldn’t pay the heating fee that was required by the colored schools in winter.  When he wasn’t doing reading and writing lessons, he sometimes hauled water and peeled vegetables with Lizzie in white people’s kitchens. On Sundays they attended church together at Hall’s Chapel on the corner.  Although Virgil stayed home, Virgil’s father, called Daddy Bob, his brother, called Uncle Henry, his mother, Granny Siller, and all the others gathered outside to walk down the dirt road together, meeting other families along the way, making small talk.  The women and girls in the family committed the sin of pride on Sundays when they adorned their natural beauty in layers of pastel cotton that Granny Siller had dyed herself.  They wrapped soft sashes around their slim waists and tied woven bonnets with ribbons to keep the sun off their faces.  They flirted with Sol who wore a blue suit and sang a solo in the Sunday choir.

Sol liked to brag to his cousins about the juke joints in the Delta, acting like he’d frequented them.  He hadn’t.  Lizzie never would have allowed that kind of devil’s work, but that hadn’t kept Sol from standing outside and listening.  When they all sat around in summer after sunset, if someone else started an evening blues tune or a work song, he’d add his bass to it, and some workhouse song gutteral, “a note or two, here and there, to taste,” he’d say, “the way a good cook adds pepper.”   

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain, ( Uh!)

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain (Uh!)

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain (Uh!)

Tell him I’m gone, tell him I’m gone. 

Virgil never joined the singing, but Lizzie could tell he wanted to.

“Tell that boy to get himself into trade school,” Virgil told Lizzie one day, right in front of Sol, not speaking to him directly.  Sol wasn’t interested in learning a trade.  He had a natural talent he intended to use—his voice, a round tone, smooth as sunflower oil rolling down the throat.  Daddy Bob had bought a radio for the house—they were the first Negroes in New Albany to own one.  The cousins would come over in the evenings to listen to music coming out of Chicago and Harlem.   They danced to Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey’s tunes to get the music out of them and into their limbs, into their feet, but when Paul Robeson’s voice came over the airwaves, everybody stood completely still to let the mood soak deeper inside.  Paul Robeson, Sol thought— football player, Broadway star, the man with the voice, another singer from Harlem.  “That’s what I want,” he said.  That’s where I’ll go.  That’s who I’ll be.”

“Chicago,” they insisted to Sol.  “Not New York.  We know people in Chicago.  We don’t know anybody in Harlem.  Why that’s another country.”  

“Harlem!” Sol smiled.  Everybody could see the stars in his eyes.  “I’ll find Paul Robeson, I’ll sing spirituals.  I’ll be on Broadway like him.”  Sol’s mind was made up and they could respect that—the boy was a man now and everybody knew he had real talent—if he had a chance, he should take it.

Virgil was working out of town the day Sol said goodbye to Mississippi, and the rest of the family, Uncle Henry and the cousins all came to the station to see him off.  They’d seen lots of young men leave New Albany, and the scene was a common one.  A boy might have to travel alone, but no one left without family seeing them off.  They even pooled their money for Sol’s ticket, but they came up short.

“That’s alright,” he said, upbeat.  “It’s enough to get me to Washington, D.C.  Why that’s almost next door to New York.  I’ll find a job and get the rest of the way on my own.  Much obliged.”  

At the platform by the colored car, he turned to face Lizzie.  His mother had worn her Sunday best, even the straw hat he’d once found, cleaned up and given to her one Easter.  There they stood, their arms around each other, their eyes drinking in a long last look.  

Suddenly, Lizzie pushed Sol away.  “You go on now,” she said.  She took a deep breath then and exhaled a hum as strong and long as the train he was about to board.  “You come back,” she sang out to him, but Sol did not hear.

On the train Sol took an aisle seat and looked around at the crowded car that had come up all the way from New Orleans.  By the door at one end of the car he saw a Pullman porter in a dark suit with shiny buttons down the front.  The porter straightened his cap and eyed Sol, approaching him with a broad smile and a crisp ten-dollar bill, folded lengthwise.  He held it between his fingers as if paying for something. He leaned in, whispering to Sol.

“I used to work with your daddy.  He asked me to give this to you.”  

Sol Bryson joined the great migration north, taking a train from Union County, Mississippi and arriving at Union Station, Washington, D.C. where he found a white marble city full of black people--with a respected university, a vibrant community, and a spirit of freedom and insistence that became his own.  Sol rented a room for ten dollars per month at 726 Second Street N. W., and he looked for a job.  Two things he knew for sure--how to cook and how to sing.   Everybody needs to eat, he thought.  And everybody needs a song. 

Author’s Note:  Sol Brtyson was my father-in-law who was blessed with a beautiful baritone voice. The dates, places, and characters in this story are real, but the facts are imagined.  I call this form “family fiction.”

If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful

Nominated for Best of the Net 2020

BLAST, The Missouri Review’s online-only prose anthology, features fiction and nonfiction too lively to be confined between the covers of a print journal. Jacqueline St. Joan’s story “If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful” is infused with rich historical detail drawn from the author’s research into her own family’s history–research that has inspired a collection in process.

———————

Glenties, County Donegal, Ireland 1819 

I pray I’m not breaking the sacred seal of the confessional to tell you that the townspeople think Nancy Boyle is a bit strange—but lovely. Of course, they don’t say so to her face, as she already has pride aplenty and doesn’t need a drop more. The general opinion is that Nancy’s vanity is due to the sad fact that she is an only child, which is her mother’s sorrow—and now that sorrow is turning to shame, what with Nancy being with child, but unmarried. When Richard Moore confessed to me his willingness to wed Nancy Boyle and take her to America, I asked her parents, Peter and Margaret Boyle, and Nancy herself, to meet me at the rectory. And, later, to join Richard Moore in a cup of tea at their house so we could discuss what was to be done. As the town’s only priest, I knew it was my duty, even though this kind of thing should be the Lord’s doing and not mine.

I plan to say little or nothing at our meeting, and I am a bit late, snapping the horse’s reins as we ride through County Donegal, a vast landscape of stubbly fields where stumps and roots from the old forests are scattered here and there. Cloud formations broad as the fields reflect off frosty lakes, run pink to red in the late winter sunsets; and just before evening, all the colors fade like dried blood. The Boyles’ home at Glenties is more than a hovel but less than a farmhouse. Once inside, I feel a bit trapped with curtains of gray rain closing in, and for a moment I long for a sight into the distance, but the few windows are foggy. Before I take a seat, I make the sign of the cross and bless the house.

“May the Good Lord bless the four corners of this house. Bless the door that opens wide to stranger and to kin. And bless them all who come within.”

“Amen,” says Margaret, getting up from her knees, leaning on her husband’s arm.

The house is a thatched, modest place improved largely by Margaret’s sense of organization and her insistence on cleanliness, as well as Nancy’s pencil sketches that adorn one corner. Peter Boyle, in his fresh white shirt, sits with the young couple, Richard and Nancy, lighting his little clay pipe. Margaret, with her unwashed hair pulled back tightly into a bun the size of a biscuit, stays behind her husband. Nancy is silent in what must be her best dress, moss green and modest, around her neck, a tiny cross from St. Patrick’s Day. Richard, in his common linen shirt, waistcoat, and heavy black boots, is telling Peter about Europe where, four year earlier, he fought with the Irish 44th Regiment in the British Army at Waterloo and then joined the occupation of Paris. Peter interrupts Richard and looks my way.

“Something for a rainy weather, Father?” he asks, already starting to pour from the old jug. Recently Peter has become an old man crippled by life. “Will ya take another drop?” Peter asks Richard. Richard squeezes his lips together and shakes his head. Peter leans forward, craning his thick neck toward the window, wiping the glass with his fingers. His face makes a shadowy reflection, the chair rocks, and he fumbles. “Looking for me hound,” he says. “Did ya see her out the door, Father?”

“I didn’t,” I say.

“That dirty dog is not coming into my house,” insists Margaret, sniffing in Nancy’s direction.

Peter looks at Margaret, who refuses to return his gaze. “Well, it looks like rain, so she’d best be coming in.” He strains to stand, and Richard reaches to steady the old man. Don’t bother,” he says, slapping Richard’s hand away, making light of his injury and its unending pain. “Ox got the best of me . . . long time ago now.”

Margaret sits behind her husband with her needles and patches in her lap. She runs her palm across the handiwork and relaxes back into the chair. Her nose is red from a head cold or from crying, or maybe both. She takes a white handkerchief from her dress pocket and blows her nose. Margaret’s political opinions are well known, and she is not at all sure about this Richard Moore. She does not cater to Irishmen who take up arms for the Protestants to fight Catholics—even Catholics who are French.

“Sure and it must be a mortal sin, Father,” she said to me at the rectory when I mentioned Richard Moore as a husband for Nancy. Margaret is old enough to remember when it used to be hunting season for priests in Donegal and the Holy Mass could only be celebrated in hiding. Once, the English arrested her own kin for not paying their taxes and their tithes. “They were screaming for help to us—we were also the helpless—as they carted them away.” Whenever she tells that story, she cries like the child she was when it happened. Margaret cheered with the others when a landlord was shot after evicting a dozen families. She said it did her heart good to know there were those who opposed the tyrants. And she still can speak what was our own Irish tongue, before it was outlawed by the English and forgotten by the people.

Now Nancy—her only surviving child—first raped by a stranger while she was salmon fishing at Lough Anna and now having to make the devil’s choice—bear a child unwed or marry a traitor like Richard Moore. That’s how Margaret sees it. “God forgive me,” she pleaded to me, “but I pray He takes that child back, so I may have my only daughter again, or I’ll raise that baby for her! Who knows where this fellow might take her—India or Canada or some wild place called Ohio?” Margaret does not want Nancy going away at all, especially not so far away. It will be a kind of death for her, another endless ache. Still, she is a practical woman and knows there is a big problem and a task at hand: to nab a good one for Nancy—quick, before her star fades.

Richard Moore sits, wicker chair by wicker chair, next to Nancy Boyle and the glowing fire. He holds out his cup so Peter can pour the whiskey. Maybe the drink will help with the talking. We say what we do know how to say:

Take another drop?
That’s a fine hound ya got out there. 

Oh, it’s not worth a cuckoo’s spittle. 

Richard is a tall man, lean and straight-backed with ruddy skin, sandy hair, and soft, lidded, pleading eyes. He is the kind of man who lives in the future—planning, dreaming, saving today for tomorrow, restrained—like a real man should be. He’s a bit of a snob, bragging to me that he understood the “peasant mentality” and all; but, to be fair, Richard’s had lots of experience with it since his return from the British Army—mean looks, challenges to fistfights, dirty names and curses that follow him on the street. It’s another reason he plans to get away—plus the intoxicating idea of being landed. The look he’s giving Nancy says to me it’s more than land he craves. And not just her beauty, he told me in private, but it’s something else in her that he needs.

“Not the way a drunk needs a drink, Father,” he explained, “or the way a child needs a mother, more like a sinner needs a priest.” We laughed about it then. Still, we all agreed that everybody in the room must consent to a marriage and a voyage to America. Richard knows he has the advantage, given Nancy’s condition, but he senses Nancy’s uncertainty and her mother’s outright disdain.

Nancy pours for her mother and herself from a china teapot—chipped and cracked in several places but repaired and painted with delicate bluebells and catmint. Her long black hair is tied up with hemmed strips of cloth she saved from her mother’s old dresses. Several long wavy strands refuse to be confined.

“Our Nancy brewed that tea from chamomile she picked herself,” Peter says, pausing, pointing up at the tied bunches of dried wild plants suspended from the rafters—nettle leaves, dandelion root, calendula flowers, and thyme. “Not a lazy bone in that girl’s body.” He smiles, then looks away, grimacing. The mention of Nancy’s body causes the embarrassing memory of its condition to rise in all our minds. Margaret blushes, but Nancy does not. It is not clear whether Nancy will accept Richard, but her dark eyes shine when she looks into his. It is a bold step for a young woman—to let a man know she will look that directly and deeply.

Peter is at the window with his cane, acting like he’s checking for weather, but we all know knows he’s hoping to catch sight of the dog. He has a chicken bone in his hand.

“That hound ought to be catching her own birds,” Margaret shouts to Peter, which starts her coughing fit. Nancy turns away from her parents’ squabble and faces the raindrops catching on the windowpane and offering their soothing soft sound.

Richard is nodding too much, talking too fast, as he makes his case to Peter, when it’s Margaret he should be convincing.

“Our sergeant saw the broadsheets outside the American Land Office in London, and he told us all about it,” Richard is saying. “Best financial opportunity in history—lots of land for very little money, rich land with water and forests full of deer and game of all sorts. They are wanting people along the Ohio River.” Now his hands and arms spread open and his eyes include us all. “You only have to put a quarter down and build a small cabin within two years, they give you a loan, and it’s yours, on the installment plan. ‘Land is freedom,’” he quotes the land company brochure. To Richard, America is a giant step away from being an Irish cottier and a tiny step closer to becoming gentry.

“I hear there are savages in Ohio,” Peter comments, leaning forward, placing his elbows on his knees for balance, and getting just that much closer to Richard. He is asking the questions he thinks Nancy must be mulling.

“Savages are everywhere,” Richard responds quietly, “like what happened to Nancy.” Everybody knows it was rape, and as it was a stranger who’d done it, and the officials caught him, too, and jailed him quick. The man rushed to confess like a sinner on Good Friday, so they don’t fault Nancy. Still, there is some unwarranted shame, plus nobody knows what will happen to a bastard child like that, God love him. “But you don’t have to worry,” Richard is explaining, “the Americans have fought off most and made treaties with the others. They’re only selling land where the Indians have moved far away.” He pauses, uncertain whether Peter is convinced. Margaret signals to Nancy to pour her another cup and clears her throat to be heard. She does not look up or speak to anyone in particular.

“God punishes those who take land from the ones it truly belongs to—the ones who had it first,” she says. We know she is talking, not about America, but about Ireland.

“I hear there’s a Petition to the British Parliament for Catholic Emancipation,” Richard says, changing the subject.

“Pray God,” she replies, and we all mutter agreement.

“But there’s lots of Irish in America already, so we’ll stick together,” Richard laughs. “They say that’s why they call it O’Hio.” Peter and I chuckle, as expected, but the joke falls flat. “Plus I’m pretty good with a pistol and a musket,” Richard adds, and thunder cracks. Nancy startles at the mix of it—the thunder, the pistol and the musket. She must want his promise of protection.

Richard is from nearby village of Ardara. He and Nancy were childhood sweethearts of a sort as youngsters in school at St. Brendan’s, and, when I asked her, she said she’s always carried what she called “a feeling” about Richard. She did not say just what the feeling was, and I did not ask. His family is respectable—good Catholics and hard workers; they even own cows, pigs, chickens, and goats. In the early days, before the incident with the ox, Peter cut turf with the Richard’s family for the church when it was being built and mixed the limestone too. Margaret tatted lace for the altar cloths and the curtains. Nancy was only three years old when they buried their firstborn son, taken by brain fever, in a tiny grave behind the church, so St. Brendan’s is a place precious to them. Nancy and Richard grew up, and he went away to war. Now Nancy is a grown woman, not one to fancy a man’s pity, but she must wonder who would marry her. What will happen to her? Will she remain a spinster at her wheel in her parents’ home? So when I told them that Richard asked to visit, to ask for her hand, her father said to her at the rectory out loud and clearly before God, “Nancy, I want ya to have a new and better life. Love him,” he said, “and let him love you.”

Peter opens the subject a bit. “Have ya saved enough money for the down payment and all that?”

“I have, sir. Plus enough for the voyage, and the carriage travel, plus the things we’ll need—a one-room cabin to start,” he adds, looking around their one-room cabin. Richard glances at Nancy, and she smiles, looking excited. “We’ll have to work hard and send crops to market to pay for the installments,” he says. Nancy nods her understanding of the hard labor he is asking of her. “But we’ll get land along the river, so we won’t have far to go to market.”

Peter interrupts. “I’d like ya to have all the money before ya go. If you’re wanting to take our girl all the way to Ohio, you’d best have all of it.” Peter’s words draw Richard’s eyes toward him. “I’m afraid there will be no dowry,” he says plainly. “Crops have been few.”

“And the landlord takes most,” adds Margaret, “and the King just keeps placing more and more debt on us.” She pauses when she sees Peter pour himself yet another one. She’s used to counting them, and lets him know it with a side glance. She brags, “Why, Peter used to make horse collars, but no more now that the English replaced ours with their own.” She told me she wonders what ideas Richard picked up from the English while he was in the Army? She wants him to know that her husband is not lazy. She gets up to put on the kettle, turning her back to the fellow who intends to take her Nancy away, and she reaches for a dishtowel so fresh she must have put it out just before he knocked on the door.

“Of course,” says Richard, pouring himself a small one. “None expected. Not in America. A dowry is an old-fashioned idea anyway. And there’s no rush to sail. We can live in Donegal and save for the rest, if that is your wish.”

Nancy is squirming in what Richard is weaving—I imagine her drawing the line of his profile down the center of a page, a kind of a heart-shaped face, a pouty mouth, always a little bit open, and shining light eyes. But what moves him inside, she wonders? She hungers for real contact, not an imitation of it, and she may be terrified, but she looks completely calm. Richard is a handsome, traveled, God-fearing man with some money in his pocket and big dreams. Nancy has dreams herself—to make a home, of course, but she also dreams—she told me—to cross the ocean and find a new place to be, new lakes and skies to draw with her colored pencils, new earth in which to plant seeds she would take with her to this Ohio. Is Richard the best opportunity in history or just another English speculation? Is she a fool to go with a man whose soul she does not know? Or is she the luckiest girl in the county to have Richard Moore at her parents’ hearth asking for her hand?

Nancy is a dreamer. Oh, she does her work—about half, anyway—and then she appears in the woods with her herb bag or by the river or the lake with her fishing net and the pencils and paper she must have. She scrubs floors at the manor and cleans shit houses for the shillings to buy them. But the pictures Nancy draws can break something open inside you. And Richard has not even seen any of them up close. Margaret silently rearranges the baskets and the pans near the stove. Nancy brings her the old teapot and stands close enough to her mother to listen to the rhythm of her breathing, and I realize that Nancy will be homesick for this old woman.

What will Richard say next, to sign off on this contract? He’s not hearing any objection from Margaret; if she feels one, she is keeping it to herself. And Peter is with him. Anyone can sense that. Richard turns to Nancy, who is moving away from her mother and stepping into the corner where her bonnet hangs on a ten-penny nail. There’s a small statue of the Virgin Mary, and Nancy’s sketches are tacked to the wall.

“Come,” Nancy says, gesturing for Richard to take her outstretched hand, and I can imagine her gesturing to him like that through the years, allowing him to be closer and closer. He draws himself up next to her. Margaret looks pleased. She tries to catch Peter’s eye to share their knowing of what Nancy is doing—she’s putting Richard to the test. They trust that Nancy knows how to get to the heart of the matter. Peter opens the door to let the hound in from the cold. There is a quick, electric scent in the air, and then the door shuts. She’s a skinny brown thing and she smells like a barnyard. The dog goes straight to Richard, sniffing his boots suspiciously. Peter upends his cup of whiskey, then limps to add a chunk of peat to the fire. When he stumbles, Margaret is there to catch his arm. There is a shift of light toward evening. Margaret reaches for candles while sheets of rain drench the fields of Donegal, the lake overflows its banks, and the young salmon hide in murky water under a darkened, colorless sky.

Nancy and Richard stand in front of her three drawings, their backs to her parents. Nancy points to her sketch of Lough Anna. It is a large drawing, the size of a side table, and it is tacked to the wall. It shines in silver shadings with such detail that I swear I can see wrens in the distant trees beyond the water’s edge, the flat hills at a distance, the burly cloudbanks of winter. Richard tilts his head, reading the corner date.

“You drew this recently?”

Nancy nods.

How can this drawing be so beautiful when something so terrible happened to her there? There is no trace of pain in it, but neither is it a pretense; it is more like a place that has held so much for so long that it has incorporated all of that into itself.

Nancy watches Richard’s confused response to her work and points to the second sketch. The thick paper is creamy and rectangular. It is a colored drawing of a faceless soldier. Richard’s eyes widen; obviously, he recognizes himself in it. There are no marching lines of young men in their bright stockings and red coats, no fifes and drums. No, none of that. It shows a lonely man sitting on the ground, his back to a wall, his bare head thick with reddish, matted hair and resting in his hands. Bones on bones, muscles on muscles. Against the wall is a musket, and on the ground, a three-cornered hat and an old rucksack. The soldier is crying; he is crippled by war, but will not let it show, and the artist is kind enough to respect that. Richard takes a sharp breath, and I know what he is remembering. He once described to me his pal, Paddy—how he’d abandoned Paddy on the field to die alone—and he is thinking of the stunned eyes of the French soldier who cried out to God, “Mon Dieu,” when Richard’s saber cut open the boy’s guts. Richard doesn’t look at Nancy, who must know all these things that are broken inside him.

Nancy reaches for the last drawing. She removes the slender nail and places the paper in Richard’s trembling hands. It is another black-and-white pencil sketch of a gray, shimmering graveyard where a little girl stands, looking up at her mother, whose face is soaked with tears and whose thin body is heavy with grief. What could be a worse sight for a child to see? And its weight is doubled by being recalled on the page and now tripled in the seeing of it. A single tear appears in the corner of Richard’s eye. Nancy’s gaze follows the tear as it reaches the peak of his cheekbone and falls onto his boot. She bends down, takes the drop with her finger. She places it on her tongue, and drinks his tear.

***Author’s note:

Richard and Nancy Moore were my great-great-grandparents. This story is part of a collection of short historical fiction I am writing—what I call “family fiction,” as it is based on deep research into my own and my former husband’s ancestry. Richard and Nancy arrived in New York in1825 from New Brunswick, Canada, on the schooner Lady Hunter, accompanying an unnamed girl. With my cousin’s help, we identified and visited the seventy acres in Salineville, Ohio, (about twelve miles west of the Ohio River) that Richard Moore purchased from the US Government as evidenced by a deed signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1831—one year after the Indian Removal Act forced the native people of that area to migrate west of the Mississippi River. Research for this story included a visit to Glenties and Ardara in County Donegal, as well as research in museums, churches, and other historical sites in Ireland. In writing this family fiction, I tried to rely on documented facts, and the rest I had to imagine.

Aisha's Daughters

Finalist, F(r)iction Spring Short Story Contest, 2016

September in the Hindu Kush.  Sides of raw mutton hung like curtains in the vendors’ stalls.  Bare apple trees and gnarled mulberry bushes wound around in their brambled ways.  Fertile ground was sacred in this harsh land, where every tree was spoken for, watered, pruned, and harvested with care.  Scarecrows stood at attention on the piles of stones that separated small farm plots. Crows and jays ruled the days, and owls ruled the nights.

            Chanda Khan, Lia Chee, and I were an unlikely trio to emerge from the Peshawar bus.  I was a teacher trainer with an NGO; Lia, an American journalist, and Chanda, a young woman missing her left nostril.  We traveled without escort--no brother, no father, no son, no husband.

            My sister, Fiza, had found Chanda at the women’s shelter.  When she learned that I had accepted an assignment to Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, she asked if I would take Chanda with me—to get her out of Lahore, where her father or brother might find her and finish the assault they had begun with her face. Against her father’s order, Chanda had gone into the Shahi Mohalla, Lahore’s red light district, to visit a childhood friend--a young dancer who had been teaching Chanda all the classic moves. I remember the urgency in Fiza’s voice, the way her eyes widened as she begged me, “She’s only seventeen, Baji. Please.”

            I was shocked by what had happened to this girl, but I did not like to get involved with these things.  There is misery everywhere.  What can one person do?  But Chanda Khan taught me that love, dancing and storytelling can cause the most cautious person to take risks.

            On the bus to Chitral I met Lia Chee. The last available seat was next to her.  Dressed in khaki trousers and wearing a red bandana tied around her neck, she looked like a Girl Scout. A bulge under her camp shirt suggested she had a fat moneybelt.  Lia talked non-stop all the way to Chitral, while she pressed a navy blue daypack between her knees.           

            “I am Chinese,” Lia had told me when we first introduced ourselves.  “From Singapore,” she said.  But during the ride, I found out that actually she was a Chinese-American from South Carolina.  “Who wants to be American in Taliban country?” she asked.

            In the back of the bus Chanda told Lia the story of the Shahi Mohalla. As I translated for her, she touched her fingertips to the bandage taped to the side of her face. Lia offered to let Chanda stay with her in Chitral at the Hilton, and in exchange, Chanda agreed to let Lia magazine’s publish her story. Over time I found out that Lia and I had more in common than I would have expected.

             We stepped off the bus and into the frosty air of Chitral, a remote town of twenty thousand souls.  Our breath clung to the bus’s windows like whispers of conversations left behind.  We were deep in Pathan country, where local culture defines life across western Pakistan and throughout Afghanistan.  There was an unfamiliar tang in my mouth that I later learned to recognize as gunpowder in the air.  Any excuse—a wedding, a birthday—and gunfire rang through the mountains.  The area had been notorious for arms dealing, supplying guns and missiles to cousins fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.  Everyone wanted automatic rifles stamped “Made in the U.S.A.”  Pistols and Kalashnikovs lay across the counters of the open bazaar, with boxes of shells stacked on the shelves behind the men in their woolen vests and flat hats.  A young boy with an AK-47 stood like a guard next to an open stall.   Guns were as common as bread.

            The men of Chitral lay their blankets on the cold ground for prayers.  The foreheads of the elderly were bruised from a lifetime of praising Allah. Some bought carrots, flour, and milk to carry in plastic shoppers to their mud-brick homes, where they handed the bags to their women.  The men wrapped themselves in woolen shawls and looked up to read the clouds.  At the bus depot Chanda and Lia loaded their parcels and backpacks into the trunk of a taxi, and we agreed to meet at the hotel in three days. 

            Two teachers from the local school met me at the station with their old Toyota and their driver.  They were eager to show me their school—one room with three walls where they offered classes to boys in the morning and to girls in the afternoon. They did not permit boys to attend unless their sisters could as well. When the girls turned ten, and began to observe purdah, the separation of females from public life, they became like puppies waiting, tied up in a courtyard.

The family’s modest wealth and the women’s determination had supported the school for the past three years. I would live in a teacher’s suite—one room and an outhouse-- in their family compound. I intended to stay for a year--if I could endure the strict rural life.

            The next morning I walked with Sabira to meet the other teachers and walk them to the compound. Through the open door of a makeshift madrassah I could see rows of young boys, sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth in their shawls, reciting the Q’ran.

            “They used to be our students, Sabira said.  “But the mullahs object to anything except education in the Q’ran.  Sabira opened her arms to the sky as she mimicked the mullahs.  “‘Geography, history, literature—these tempt young people away from God.’”

            At noon we washed and prayed before sitting outside my room in the sun-baked courtyard. We shared a pot of tea, a bowl of lentils, and bread.  “Everything here starts with the Q’ran,” said Sabira, pulling the bread apart with her fingers and dipping it into the warm lentils.

            It’s almost the Taliban here, I thought.  I was a secular Muslim and at this time--in the mid-1990s—I had never participated in a regular round of ablutions and prayer.  But, as part of the daily routine in Chitral, I became accustomed to it.  Over time, I believe it changed me. 

            “The Prophet  (Peace be unto him) lived a simple life, and was gentle to women,” Sabira continued.  She sighed.  “Oh, that he would return to remind these men how to treat women!”

            Tahira was the youngest of the three sisters, bright-eyed and chubby.  She told me about a girl whose father had forbidden her to return to the school. Tahira’s voice split as she spoke.             “She threw herself off the roof of her house and broke her neck,” Tahira recalled, her eyes fixed on a distant point.  “--and the next week another girl did exactly the same thing—died throwing herself off the roof of her house.”           

            “Easy enough for grown men to criticize a young girl—such an easy target,” said Asma, the oldest sister. Her voice was on fire and I recognized the burn.            The conversations of women when they are alone are the same everywhere.  In all the places I have taught-- cities, seashores and deserts, and now in the northern mountains—it’s all the same.  Women’s dissatisfaction is the cough that won’t go away. 

            I saw an old man hobbling through the courtyard gate.  He wore a long white coat and lungi and the Pathan hat.  He had the orange henna beard of a Hajji.  He neither looked at us nor walked near us, as he padded across the courtyard and disappeared into a mud-brick room.  A scraggly red dog slipped in the door behind him.

            “Our grandfather, Aga Ji,” Sabira said, nodding in his direction.  “He does not speak to women outside of the family, so he won’t come over here as long as you are with us.  Nothing personal to you, but he will stay away.  It’s just his way.”

            “But how will that work if we take meals together?” I asked.

            “We eat before or after the men, so it is no problem.  We will hardly notice him come or go. He takes care of it himself.  He waters and prunes a few poplars for one of the landlords, then spends the day at the mosque and the teahouse. He lives in his own world--he and his dog.”

            On Monday it was sunny.  I pulled on my boots and walked along the muddy road to meet Lia and Chanda. I looked up to face Tirich Mir, the baby toe of the northern mountains, the 25,000-foot wall of sheer rock and ice that stood at the gate of the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram, and the Himalayas.  It was awesome to behold, impossible to climb, an enchanted place, as if the mountains were the only beings who knew the way things are and the way they always have been:  the Hindu Kush, ancient Hindu Killer, was The Historian who recorded everything and forgot nothing; the Karakoram Range, black rock, was The Geologist of a petrified future; and, The Philosophers were the Himalayas, the field of snow, where the One Mind abides.   I admit I trembled in their shadow. 

            I knew that Tirich Mir was no protector. Soon it would be October when the mountain would offer no hospitality and the winter winds would blow whiteness around, covering the known world. Twice a week a plane flew to Chitral from Peshawar, the inaccessible city only a thought away from the lost horizon. I heard a falcon shriek and suddenly it swooped down, still high above me in its endless search for rodents and water.

            The Chitral Hilton was surrounded by a brick wall with glass shards embedded along the top.  Fiery red bushes framed a shallow pool where hundreds of floating candles were lit at twilight. Sparrows flew cheerily through the open lobby.   Small groups of businessmen as well as trekkers and guides clustered around the enormous lobby.   Embroidered wall hangings depicted local battles—against the Mongols, against the British, even a new one depicting a snowy mortar attack against Russians.  Elephant blood ran beet red against the untouchable snow of the Khyber Pass. I saw Lia and Chanda sitting on the terrace.  Chanda was wearing a lavender shalwar kameez, the loose pants and overshirts traditionally worn by both men and women in Pakistan. Her gold necklaces gleamed in the sunlight. A string of seed pearls was attached to her hair on one side of her head under a gold-trimmed dupatta.  The other end of the string of pearls was attached to a small bandage where the side of her nose used to be. The bandage was covered with gold glitter.  I was speechless at her transformation from a wounded bird of a girl into this elegant woman. In the glow of her face and the flash of her bangles, Chanda Khan was the acclaimed Pathan beauty revealed.

            I shook my head in disbelief.

            “She has finally found out who she is, and she will be nothing else.  ” said Lia, clearly enjoying my reaction.   “I’m pretty brassy, but I wish I had her pluck.  I mean, look at that girl.”

            Chanda nudged Lia with her elbow.

            “She can’t wait for me to tell you,” Lia announced, laughing. “Chanda got a job!”

            “Dancer!” Chanda said in English.  “No nose!”  She pointed to her bandage.  Chanda and Lia’s laughter infected me, too, and we giggled like schoolgirls.

            “Stop!” Lia pleaded, trying to catch her breath, “I’ll wet my shalwar.”  And we laughed some more.  When we saw the waiter bringing ice cream, we regained our composure.  “It’s too wonderful!  And I get to tell the world her story.” 

            “Tell me first!” I begged.  And while Chanda enjoyed the attention she was attracting from the hotel guests, Lia told me about the previous three days.

            “First, we did a little shopping,” Lia said.  “My magazine, Nature and Nurture, did some extra “nurturing,” shall we say, and bought Chanda several fabulous dance costumes.  Classical.  Tasteful. Perfect for her audition.”

            “Audition?” I asked.

            “Yes.  We took a taxi into the backwaters of Chitral, where the artists hang out—the woodworkers, weavers, potters.  There we found--in Chitral of all places, “Aisha’s Daughters.”   

Named for the Prophet’s youngest wife, a warrior and political leader, Aisha’s Daughters was a traveling theater company, they told me, that was in need of a classical dancer. Mostly young women, and a few men, they performed skits, dances, comedy routines—even puppet shows—all about the relations between men and women—about dowries, street harassment, marriages to the Q’ran, honor killings.  Some women were married, and their husbands worked with them.  The other men pretended to be brothers of the single women, so that no one bothered them.  They planned to stay in Chitral until the snow fell. 

            “Then Chanda will be safe.  She will move with them to Sargodha and on down the valley,” said Lia.  “She danced for them like an angel. Her movements were silkier than the clothes she is wearing.  No ankle bracelets, no razzle-dazzle, no seduction, no rupees in the belt.  Just dancing-- lonely, glorious, solemn, proud.  Really, it broke my heart to watch her.”

            “But what about her--you know,” I said, whispering, tapping my nose.

            “They ate it up!” said Lia.  “They presented the story of her attack, and her sliced nose, as the truth unveiled:  ‘This is what happens behind the veil, behind the metal gates,’ they said.  They encouraged Chanda to dance with her nose just as it is.”  Chanda laughed when Lia stopped talking.  She pulled on my arm.

            “Baji,” she said, adding in English.  “Now Chanda not too nosey!”

            That evening Asma told Aga Ji that he must accompany us to Chanda’s performance.  Aga Ji never looked at me.  He sat in front with the driver who stopped the Toyota at a nondescript metal gate across from the ice factory.  Inside, a tent-like canvas covered the courtyard where twinkling white lights had been strung.  In one corner a few musicians assembled—a tamboura, tabla, and tambourines.  The audience of twenty or thirty men sat cross-legged on blankets, leaving an open circle in the middle for the performers.  Bags of walnuts and dried apples were being passed around.

            “Assalam aleikum,” said the emcee, with a wide smile across his face.  He wore a striped woolen shawl and bright cap.  The crowded mumbled its response, and peace also to you.

 “We have a very special performance tonight,” he continued, “the debut of one of Pakistan’s finest interpretive dancers—Chanda Khan.”

            The lights dimmed.  The emcee disappeared into darkness.  Then slowly the stage lights came up, focused on Chanda’s still body and her outstretched arms.  The sparkles on her nose patch caught the light.  Only her pale eyes lined with thick kohl moved.  They circled the courtyard, stopping briefly to match the gaze of each of us in the audience.  It was not a seductive move, although it drew us in.  Her glances seemed to be the oath of a witness, with a surprising and powerful effect.  It was over in less than a minute, and then the steady rhythm of drum and the tambourine began. Chanda’s movements were lyrical, steady like the strings of the tamboura, as she practiced the most basic moves of a beginner.  She took small steps to each side of her central spot, always returning modestly to that point.  Her glossy, stained lips opened soundlessly as the emcee returned to tell the crowd her tale as she danced.  Chanda hugged another dancer and the friends pantomimed waving goodbye, as Chanda covered her head and face with a gossamer veil and moved into the imaginary street alone.  When a male dancer entered the circle, he pulled Chanda into the shadow.  The crowd gasped.  Then an older dancer appeared at the edge of the circle and Chanda recognized him. 

            “Bapi, Bapi,” she cried out joyously.  “Father, Father, rescue me!”  The audience was relieved as the father approached. 

            “Whore!”  the emcee shouted out in the voice of Chanda’s father.  Instantaneously, the young man bound her arms behind her back.  The father’s blade glinted in the light and sliced the night in front of Chanda’s face.  She fell to the ground as the men ran away and the music stopped.  The sparkly patch wa gone.  A pool of beet red stage blood dripped into her cupped hand.  A man in the audience stood, outraged.

            “Where were the four witnesses?” he shouted, cutting the air with his fist.

            “Yes, the Q’ran demands that there be four pious witnesses to fornication!” said another.

             “There were none,” Chanda said in her own voice.

            The audience was silent as again Chanda looked into each one’s eyes and they knew in their hearts the truth of her courage and the truth of her dance.  I looked behind me to read Aga Ji’s face.  His eyes were wet with tears as he cried silently, shamelessly.

            In winter the pace of Chitral slowed like the pulse of a bear, as all life submitted to the twin fates of climate and altitude. My life became a constant effort to stay warm.  The river froze over quickly, and man-sized blocks of ice littered the riverbanks. I wore home-spun leggings, mittens, and shawls. Snowdrifts blocked the roads. All the woolen layers made me feel lethargic and heavy. I collected snowmelt to place by the kerosene stove for cooking, drinking, and washing. We ate oil and grains, dried fruit, peas and beans, and I began to put on weight. 

            Religious practices gradually became part of my daily routine. 

            “Maybe it’s the altitude getting to my brain, or the long, cold winter,” I told Sabira, “but there is something quite cave-like about isolation in this slow-moving life centered on the core of Islam that means so much.” It was new to me, a quiet, naturally contemplative life. I decided to fast during Ramadan.   I realized that for the first time I was fulfilling four of the Five Pillars—faith in God, daily prayers, fasting during Ramadan, and service to the poor. The only one left was the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca I was obliged to do once, if I was able.  But I was not eager either to join a throng of two million and their patriarchs.

            Aisha’s Daughters decided to stay in Chitral for the winter, and their performances continued in the artists’ quarter. Chanda’s wound healed and her bandage became smaller and smaller until all that remained was a scar and her sparkly patch.  But all winter long the mullahs murmured about Chanda’s dancing.  The city’s prayer beads clicked and clicked their disapproval. 

            “In Islamabad women artists are resigning from the theater and taking the veil.  Why not here?” they asked. “The Kalash men and women dance publicly together, and they are kafir, infidels.  What will be next?”

            My youngest brother, Amir, arrived in Chitral on the day that the first impassable snowstorm began. He looked oddly modern in his denim pants and blue sweater.  Amir had collected donations of used computers while in the U.K., and shipped them to us.  He offered to install them at the school. I could hardly wait to see him. It was a double blessing!

            “You know I wouldn’t be here if Abbu had not insisted,” Amir told me impatiently after we climbed into the back seat of the car.  “Computers need a dry, temperate climate for their survival—and, by the way, so do I.”

            “You always were a bit spoiled,” I teased.  

            The only sound in the hushed city was our tires crunching the snow.  On the streets the loudspeakers that hawked blankets and prayers had shut down.  The air was cleared of the stench of diesel.  Wood smoke hovered, then dissolved into the river.  Day and night, the valley wore every shade of white.  All of the city’s sharpness had softened and rounded, except one.

            “There it is, Amir--” I said, as the Toyota crawled along the main street. I hooked my arm into his and hugged while I pointed.  “—Shahi Mosque, its minaret is a needle that pierces this cottony world.  On clear days its blinding light is magnetic.”

            “You are going to the mosque?” he asked.

            “I pray at home now,” I said.  “But just wait.  You’ll see what happens to you here.”

            In spring, the teachers’ father, Syed, returned home from Peshawar where he had been teaching at the university. Nothing gave Sabira, Tahira, and Asma more pleasure than seeing their father happy.

            One day Syed and Amir hauled cedar logs into the compound to build a wall for the school, while Aga Ji directed the work.  The women watched, picking their teeth.

            “Put the wall over there,” Aga Ji insisted, pointing to the opposite side of the courtyard.

            “But, Aga Ji, the school is over here.  We are building a wall for the school,” Syed reminded his confused father.

            “Of course, the school is over there,” he replied, hesitating.   “I knew that.  Well, put it over next to the school’s other three walls, you idiots,” he shouted.  “Why in the world would you put it over here by my room?”  Amir laughed out loud.

            “Do whatever he says, Amir,” I shouted.  “He’s the head man.”  It was always wonderful there when everybody was at home.

            Amir told me about the day that Aga Ji made him an honorary Pathan.  Amir was recovering from the hour he had spent pulling a wagon full of bricks and mud. The clouds were playing a game with their humans, drifting in front of the vanishing, then reappearing, face of the sun. He was chilled from the sunless sky and was putting on his heavy wool coat when he saw Aga Ji approach him.  The old man moved with purpose, muttering and flapping his arms like a chicken.  His red dog ran far ahead, returning to Aga Ji’s side again and again.

            “I must talk to you, young man,” Aga Ji said with authority.  Amir rose from the pile of wires that circled his knees.   “Syed is away for the day, and I am too old.  You are the oldest, so you must take this responsibility for the men of the family. We are Pathan.  If anyone asks for our protection, we must give it--even at the cost of our lives.  And it is our first duty to protect women--even those who are not of our blood.” Amir’s eyes popped open as Aga Ji continued.

“In the coffeehouse they say that the mullahs are discussing Chanda Khan again.  Although they have no witnesses, they say she is a fornicator and they have issued a fatwa, a religious ruling.  The mullahs say to kill her on sight.”

            Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!            God is great!  Prayer is better than sleep!  I heard the muzzein’s morning call as if it were in a dream. As if Abraham were crying at what had to be done.  Each tear broke open like a heavy star exploding in the winter night.

            I pushed open the shuttered window to let in starlight and fresh air, feeling grateful that Allah’s name awakened me again, so I could spend another day loving this difficult world. I wrapped in a heavy shawl, and, for ablutions, I circled my fingertips lightly over the sheet of ice in my washing bowl.  Then, when I bent to unroll my prayer mat, I caught a glimpse of movement in the stillness outside.  One of the animals must have gotten loose! It moved again.

            I lifted the wire latch to my room and walked straight across the courtyard in front of the main house and school.  Directly opposite my room, a mud brick shed housed goats and a few chickens. I saw a child hidden under the feeding trough, huddled in a blanket. Beneath a wool cap, thatched hair fell over his closed eyes.  He gripped a line of rope attached to an old donkey.

            “Assalam aleikum,” I said to them.

            “Waleikum salaam.” A small voice from the darkness. The child did not move.

            “What are you doing here?” I asked in Khowar.  There were more than fourteen languages spoken in the Chitral Valley, and I knew only four.  “Do you attend classes here?” I asked next in Pashto.  Silence.  “Tell me your name, boy,” I demanded in Urdu. I reached under the trough with both arms and pulled the child out. His lips were dry and cracked, and his eyes looked vacant from exhaustion.  “Something to eat?” I asked, motioning toward my mouth with cupped fingers.  “Naan?”  He nodded twice very quickly. “Follow me.  Leave the donkey here,” I instructed, pointing first to the animal and then to the ground.

            “No!” he said in Khowar.  He was clutching the end of the rope with his bare hand. I forced the rope out of his hand and looped it over a broken post.

            “No one will take her from here,” I told him.  The boy unwrapped himself and the covered the donkey with his blanket. When he turned around, even in the dark, I could see the little grin he flashed.  He bolted across the dirt courtyard toward the tiny light from my window.

I heated water on a single-burner stove and prepared two cups for tea. I unwrapped a long loaf of Kandahari naan that I stored in a clean cloth.  I offered some to him, along with a handful of dried apples.  He sniffed the scent of yeast from the cloth and sat cross-legged on the floor next to the wall.  He ate quickly, leaving one small piece of naan and a slice of apple on his knee.

            Where are you from?” I asked him.  “Why are you here?” He said nothing. “How can I help you?”  I knew what I was looking at; I had seen it before.  He was deciding whether to trust me.  He studied my eyes.

             “Allah has sent me. I am running away,” he said.  He spoke so softly I was unsure if I had heard correctly.

            “Running away?”

            “From a landlord in the valley.  I have walked all night to get this far,” he said.  “Don’t send me back there.  I beg of you.”  He turned his head away again, hesitating. “You have a kind face, Madam. Please help us.  My donkey is hungry.”  He took the bit of food he left uneaten and cupped it in his hand.  “Do you have more food for her, too?”

            I gave the child the entire loaf of naan and a small piece of cheese, and he divided it in two.  He folded half of the bread around the cheese and tucked it into his pants pocket.  He mixed the rest of the food with the dried apples in his open hand.  

            “Shukriah, thank you, Madam,” he said, rising, inching toward the door.

            “You come back here after you feed her,” I told him.  I poured water from a plastic jug into small pan.  “Here,” I said, handing it to him.  “Take this, too.”  While the boy fed his donkey, I mumbled my morning prayer as fast as I could.“I can see you want me to be wide awake this morning,” I said to God.  “To solve this little mystery you have put on my doorstep.”

            By the time the door creaked open and the child returned, the day was dawning.  In a beam of light I noticed dark red stains on the boy’s pants and shoes.   He was bleeding!  Red footprints spotted the little rug on the dirt floor.  The boy saw and jumped away.

            “Please forgive me,” he said, bending to wipe the rug with his bare hand.  I turned up the wick on the kerosene lamp and opened the window to get a better look.

            “What happened to you?” I asked.  I led him to the bed and felt his shoulder relax under my hand.  I placed a dhurrie over the bed and laid him down.  His trousers were soaked in blood.  It was a wonder he could walk at all.  I started to pull off the wet clothes.

            “No!  Don’t!” he protested, pushing me away.  He sat against the wall.

            “You asked for my help, young man.  Now let me help you.” I knew not to argue with him.  I waited, and the boy began to sob. “Here, drink this tea,” I said, lowering my voice.  I handed him the chipped cup he left on the floor.  “For now, I am your doctor, so you follow my orders.  You are safe. No one else knows you are here.”

            I pulled down the trousers.  There were no cuts anywhere on his legs or feet, but his underwear was soaked.  He squirmed in a half-hearted effort to get away from me. Carefully I took out my knife and slit open both seams on the underpants. Again the boy pulled away, closing his legs against my efforts.  I tugged on the front piece to pull the fabric out from underneath, and began to wipe the dried blood from his groin. 

            “God help us!” I whispered,  “You’re a girl.  Oh, look how you’ve been torn to pieces!  Who did this to you?  Who?”

            “The landlord,” the girl said, with tears spilling onto her shirt. “But this is nothing.  Will you help my donkey? Go look at what he did to her!”

            O Allah, this child needed you?  Look what you have brought me today! I covered her with goatskin and waited until she was asleep before entering the shed to look more closely at the animal.  It was covered with sores and scars.  Along each ear, V-shaped gouges were sliced out in a rickrack pattern, as a woodworker might do.  Its tail and hooves, too, were cut and wounds oozed with blood and pus.  Whiplashes crossed its haunches.  Its vagina was pulpy and red. The old girl was barely breathing.

            I stood in the courtyard watching the last star fade. There was not much time. What was to be done before they came looking for me, calling me to breakfast? Aga Ji opened the gate for a student who arrived early to prepare the classroom.  

            “I am quite sick today,” I told her.  “Please tell the others that I wish to be alone, and I would be very grateful if you would give some water to the donkey in the shed.  I found it wandering around outside the gate and let it in.” 

            The child must have heard me lie to cover up for her and to get her donkey some help.  She seemed quite cheerful when I returned.  “May I have some more tea?” she asked.  I applied more ointment to her sores with my fingertips and told her that we would have to find a doctor so she could be checked internally. The girl pulled her knees to her chest at the mention of an examination. 

            “Not now, of course,” I reassured her. “But soon.  It’s all right. It’s what women do if they are hurt or having a baby, or. . . “ I had to know, so I suddenly asked her, “Are you pregnant?”

            “I don’t know,” she answered.  “I’ve never had my monthly time.”  I continued to touch her gently.  I could feel her relax again.

            “You really had me fooled,” I said. “Now don’t fool me again.  Tell me what has happened to you.  Tell me everything.  Who are you?”

            Pushing her thick, black hair out of her eyes, she sat up on my bed, and leaned into the corner of the cold concrete walls.  She squirmed as she spoke.  She told me her name was Tasnim Ali Khan.

            “Eleven years old,” she said.  “My family, we are herders—goats, sheep, cows—in the Gur Valley, where we have lived for hundreds of years.  My father owed money to the landlord, and when he could not pay, the landlord asked for me as payment.”  She looked at me as if ashamed.  “But my mother refused,” she stated with a nod.  “But after my mother died, my father gave me to the landlord anyway.” 

            I sat down next to her.  Tasnim told me that her father tied her onto the bank of his donkey and delivered her “like a bag of wool,” she said.  Then she told me that this landlord not had a woman in twenty years.  What his body couldn’t do to her, he did with sticks and bottles and anything else he could find. When he was through with her he would send her to the barn to sleep.  He thought it was punishment because it was cold in the barn.  He wanted the bed for himself.  But to her, it was the best part of the day because she could be with her mother’s donkey she named Sheikha. So she made a plan, and when the moon was new, she cut off her hair and put on boys’ clothes, led Sheika out of the barn, and they ran through the woods all night, as fast as they could.  In the morning they saw our gate was open and crawled into the shed to sleep.  I was in awe of the sheer bravery of this child, dumbfounded in the face of it.             “Sleep now,” I said. “We will find a way out of this together.  You, me, and Sheikha.  I promise.”

            Later that same day , Amir knocked on my door to tell me about the fatwa against Chanda. I saw the opportunity and knew exactly what needed to be done.

            “I will go to town now to talk to Chanda,” I said. “She can leave on the morning flight to Peshawar.   If she travels as your wife and wears a full burqa, it should raise no questions.”

            “She can stay with my friends in Islamabad,” Amir said.

            “One thing is very important, Amir--tell no one else.  No one must know how Chanda escaped. Not your friends in Lahore. No one. I will impress on Chanda also how dangerous it would be for all of us if our part in this were known.  It would make it more difficult in the future to help others.  You must understand this, Amir.  Do not even tell Father or Fiza.” 

            “Even Fiza?” he asked.

            “Even Fiza,” I repeated. He nodded like an obedient child.

            “What about Lia?  She knows about the fatwa.”

            “Especially do not tell Lia.  I love her dearly and she loves Chanda, too, and has been so good to her.  But Lia is a journalist, and an American.  Hers is a different world than ours. No, she will figure it out on her own after Chanda has disappeared.  But there is something you can tell Fiza when you reach Lahore.”

            “What’s that?”

            “She will have to get medical help for your son.”

            “My what?”

            “You and your wife have an eleven-year old son who will be traveling with you when you go to Lahore tomorrow.  Don’t ask me anymore about it.  Remember what I said?” she asked him, waiting to see if he had been listening. 

            “Tell no one,” he answered, soundlessly mouthing the words for dramatic effect.

            “My clever boy.”  I laughed and held him tightly.

            That night Amir brought Chanda to my room where no one would see her.  Tasnim insisted on staying in the shed with Sheikha.  The old donkey lay on its side in the dirt, straining to lift her neck barely an inch off the floor when she heard Tasnim cooing to her. 

            “Nan . . . nan . . . nan . . .” Tasnim cried in Khowar for her mother.  She curled up like a cat, and nestled into the warm belly of the donkey.  She laid her head tenderly on Sheikah’s flank.  When I pulled blankets over them, the donkey snorted and the girl sighed.  Soon they were asleep.  I lay down in the straw next to them, winding one blanket around me and folding another one into a makeshift pillow.  Underneath the pillow I slipped a revolver.

            I was restless all night long, waking at the sighing of the wind or the stirring of the goats, until finally I heard the muzzein’s call.  I rubbed the tip of my shawl back and forth against the frozen crust of the donkey’s water until the corner was wet.  Then I wiped my hands, spread the blanket, faced Mecca, and knelt to pray.  Soon the roosters passed the muzzein’s prayers along into the morning. My heart’s dogs shook off the night.  I carried yoghurt, bread and hot milk tea from the house into the shed.  Tasnim was awake, nuzzling Sheikha’s lifeless face.

            “She won’t wake up,” she cried.  She pushed her hands against the animal’s side.

            “She is sleeping with Allah now,” I said, but Tasnim squinted, wriggling her nose her eyes as she spoke.

            “No! She is not!  Not with Allah.  She is sleeping with my mother.”

            When Amir arrived by taxi, I put Tasnim in the backseat next to Chanda who was wearing a blue shuttlecock burqa.  Tasnim wore washed trousers with a fresh kurta on top.  With the felt hat over her short-cropped hair, and a long woven coat, she looked like an eleven-year old boy. I introduced Tasnim as Hamid. They had no need to know their make-believe son was really a girl.  No reason to involve them knowingly in the rescue of Tasnim. Amir had contacted Fiza who would be waiting for them once they reached Lahore.  She would know what to do from there, and she would know not to ask too many questions 

            “You will be safe,” I said.  “Inshallah.  God willing.”

            When we met later for tea, Lia demanded to know where Chanda and Amir were.

            “Who?”  I asked her.

            “Don’t be coy with me—where are they?  I was up with the birds this morning and she was already gone.  I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye.”  I wondered if Lia was dense or only pretending to be dense.  Amir said that Lia knew about the fatwa.  Couldn’t she figure out what happened?

            “Maybe they eloped,” I said.  “Let’s change the subject.”

            “Change the subject!  There is a fatwa against Chanda.  Maybe some zealots kidnapped her,” she added.  The hotel waiter brought us tea and sweetmeats, and we stopped talking until he finished serving.  The silence gave Lia a chance to reflect.  “Now I get it,” she said.  “Amir took Chanda away for her protection.  Otherwise, you’d have your feathers all ruffled. That’s it, isn’t it?  Probably took the morning flight to Peshawar.”

            “My lips are sealed.”

            “You mean you will not confirm nor deny.  I hate that about you,” Lia exploded.  “You always leave me out when something exciting is going on.  You think I can’t be trusted because I’m American, right?  Because I’m not a Muslim. ”  Lia’s frustration was spilling open.  She sat there fuming.  “Now I won’t know how her story ends,” Lia whined.

            “Well, you know two endings that weren’t possible—her being a theater dancer in Chitral, and her being murdered in a fatwa. Isn’t that truth enough?” I asked.

            “OK, I guess,” Lia said, calming down.  “I guess I can work with that.”  She lowered her voice.  “But next time you go on a rescue, can I please come with you?  Just once?”

            “I can’t promise you that.”

            “When do I get to be part of the solution?  I have been writing stories about people like Chanda for years,” Lia continued.  “I want to do something real, to help even one person.”

            “We’ll think of something,” I said, emphasizing the “we.”  That is when I realized that Lia was becoming part of the family, too.  “Don’t leave Pakistan,” I urged her.  “Come with me to Lahore.  I want you to meet my sister and her friends.  If you are serious about working on these issues, they are the people for you to know.”  A big smile spread across her face.

             “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she said.    “Let’s go today.”

            I left Lia at the hotel and walked back to the school in the afternoon brilliance.  I bound my wool shawl securely against the wind, donned my sunglasses, tugged on my work boots, and trekked along the tractor paths.  I passed the bazaar and turned down the road to the school.  The sky was a high blue, crisp and cerulean, a mile above sea level and four miles below the summit of Tirich Mir.  I inhaled the cold air, feeling happiness expanding inside me. By now Amir, Chanda and Tasnim would be leaving Peshawar on the flight to Lahore, and by the end of the day Fiza would take Tasnim to the hospital.  Chanda would dance again.  Amir was home.  The teacher training I had come for was almost done. 

            I passed the entrance to Chitral Gol, the wildlife sanctuary where snow leopards hunt horned goats. A tree sparrow and a whistling thrush sang on the holly oaks on the cliff. In a field of snow-covered rhubarb, a pair of partridges called back and forth in staccato, as if I were a wild cat they were warning other birds.  Crows swarmed as one body, cawing their criticisms wildly.  Who is she?  What is she doing?  Why is she alone?  Where is her husband?

            When I reached out to push open the gate to the enclave, I heard Aga Ji arguing with someone. He sounded very distraught.  I pulled back to watch through the crack between the doors.  A rotund figure in a striped wool shawl was shaking his walking stick at Aga Ji. Two boys I had never seen before appeared to be searching for something.  They entered the rooms around the courtyard despite Aga Ji’s ordering them to keep away.  Suddenly, the man yelled to the boys.  One raced into the driver’s seat of the Jeep, and the other one tripped as he opened the gate.  I hid behind a clump of scrub oak as the Jeep slid through and turned toward town.  I could hear the master’s shouting as they drove away.

            “Baji, Baji,” Aga Ji cried out when he saw me slip in through the gate.  A sheet of tears spread down his scraggly cheeks.  I was shocked to hear his voice.  He had never spoken to me in the six months I had lived there.  I ran to him while he knelt on the ground next to the lean-to, holding a cloth to the head of his shivering, little red dog.

            “Who was that?” I asked.  Aga Ji just shook his head.           

            “Hanum Ali Khan,” he said.  “He’s looking for his wife.  Somehow he thinks we have stolen her! He is going to the police to register kidnapping charges against us.”  His voice cracked.  “Look what he has done.”  Aga Ji opened the cloth to reveal his dog’s ears.  Each one was gouged with a V-shaped mark.  I ran to the shed. The dead donkey’s throat was sliced open, and her hide soaked in a puddle of blood.

            I had to find a way to leave the school compound without being seen.  I telephoned Lia.

            “Want to come on a rescue?” I asked.

            “So soon?  Of course I do, but who?  When?”

            “Me,” I answered. “Now do exactly as I say. And tell no one.”

            “Well, damn, girl.  You’re letting me into the club.”

            Soon Lia arrived at the school by taxi.  She instructed the driver to collect a special package from Tahira—a large tamboura case wrapped in thick blankets.

            “My friend is a musician and I promised to bring this to him,” Lia said to the driver.  Syed lifted one end and the driver tied the other to the roof of his car.  “Drive very slowly,” Lia instructed.  “Don’t damage the merchandise.”

            Inside the case, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply and evenly through a metal tube Aga Ji had bored into the side of the tamboura case.  For the next three days—until the Saturday flight left for Peshawar, I remained in hiding at the Hilton.  Lia did not let waiters or housekeepers into her room.  She ordered room service, or large portions for meals in the dining room and brought the leftovers to me.  We passed the days playing cards, watching TV, checking the Internet, and watching the activity on the street.

            By Saturday, I wore a boyish European style haircut and heavy make up.  I borrowed a pants suit from Lia, dark glasses, and a stylish floppy hat purchased in the gift shop.  I no longer looked like the Pakistani schoolteacher in work boots and a shalwar kameez. I passed by the police station easily on our way to the airport.

            Deep in one pocket, I carried my handgun and in the other, the Q’ran.