Old Cassie watched over us all from the Reynolds Estate. She had all of their money and all of their land. She had their standing, the people afraid of her much the way they had feared the Reynolds family for almost a century. El pueblo call up their best English when they address her, if they dare to address her. But no one called Old Cassie a Reynolds. No, she was something else altogether. Miss Simpson said that people from abroad sometimes came to the island for her help: sick people, really sick people, dying people. And Cassie spoke to them in their own languages; she knew English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, and Patois. She even knew Chinese and Portuguese.
How the foreigners found her, how they found out about her, is anyone’s guess. They say that when the Governor General’s favorite young housekeeper was sick with pneumonia, the fever so high the girl had become delirious, he reluctantly took her to Old Cassie. We have no way of knowing what she did exactly, but she cured the girl of her illness. Even to this day, el pueblo claim this is why the Governor General turns a blind eye to the odd things that happen on the grounds of that old estate. One wonders what the Sisters would have done if one of them were to become sick. Would they have gone to Old Cassie? Would that even be possible?
But they never had reason to go to Cassie. Those women were never sick. Even now, they are never sick. They remind us that cleanliness is next to Godliness. They moved around as if their feet were cautiously floating above the ground beneath those habits. They prayed for our souls and our bodies. They made sure things got done. They listened to us and cared for us. And Cassie? She crushed a whole pepper in the bottom of a glass and added hot water. She drank this the way many of us drink tea or coffee. She sometimes rocked in her chair on the side terrace of the Great House. She gathered her evidence and her information. And was she ever sick? Did she ever need care? Back then, no one could have predicted. What the women did, what they did faithfully, was to pray for her. They lit candles at Santa María Estrella del Mar and prayed to the Madonna. They prayed for the woman who saved their sick children, the woman who helped them give birth, the woman they all believe saw the face of the Devil and lived.
III. The Experiment
There were those who had survived the experiment, and those who had not. Of this, I am certain. This is the one aspect I know to be true, having heard it a number of times. Although there was no name assigned to either category of people, everyone who lived in Silas fell into one of two camps: the ones who had survived the experiment, or the other, the ones who had not yet been subject to the experiment. It had always been this way. No one, I am told, talked about what happened to those who had failed the experiment. No one even used the word “experiment.” That term is my own, invented purely as a way to discuss it.
Three generations lived in the town of Silas, a town shrouded by large overarching trees that brought new meaning to the word “canopy.” Instead of clearing the trees to build their small homes, the people of Silas had built among the trees, the only small clearing made for their central square. There was the lone old man who was almost one hundred years old. No one ever thought to ask the nonagenarian if things had always been this way. It would have been easier to ask him if he had eaten breakfast that morning or if he was fasting for the week. The tourists who stopped on the hill road miles away to look down at Silas through binoculars knew only that this was a town that was unlike any other town in Spain, that there was no road into the town and, conversely, no road out. They could see the small central square and the tops of trees. The houses, small as they were, were not visible from that height and distance, the trees’ branches and leaves interwoven as if by design to keep the town virtually invisible.
The way Leenck told it, Silas was more than a town; it was a character in the story itself. Silas, where the butcher had eaten all the fish in one night, where the people spoke a language that sounded at times like Spanish but was a language those of us who knew Spanish could not really understand, the town where the children all lived in a single large house away from their individual families until the age of sixteen: the tour guides knew none of these things and, instead, made up many one-liners for Silas, one-liners that were recited in a dry, matter-of-fact way that filled the tourists with something like wonder. Busload after busload, made up primarily of people traveling on cruise ships who had chosen an excursion that took them inland away from the port, stopped either on the way in or the way out to stare down at this town that was barely visible and that barely seemed worthy of a mention. Tourists: they seemed to multiply. Tourists kept appearing all over the world to watch and pass judgment on what could be seen or, in this case, what could not be seen. It didn’t matter if the place were a small island in the Caribbean or a small town buried in the woods outside Barcelona. There were tourists and tour guides and the unfortunate people and places they looked upon with a mix of pity and, yes, wonder.
But none of the tour guides referred to the experiment. How could they? I cannot imagine they knew anything about it. Day after day each summer, in early afternoon, the sunlight harsh and unforgiving as it can be at that time of year, the buses with their hordes would stop up on the hillside road to look down at Silas from the lookout point clearly constructed for this purpose and this purpose only. There was no other reason for such a lookout to exist on that country road far from the city. And the children of Silas would disappear from the Square each day about a half hour before the buses arrived. The tourists were never to see the children of Silas. The women of the town made sure of that. They frightened the children with tales of abductions, of this child or another that many years ago had been taken from the town. Like clockwork, they would come out of their houses and rush the children inside when they knew the buses were coming.
The way Leenck explained it, he was sixteen when everything changed. He had just reached the age at which he could move back home with his family. At the home for children, he slept in a room only 8 x 8 feet, a room with no windows that he shared with another boy. Trust me, I remember this all very well because it seemed so completely different from the way I had grown up. Yes, el pueblo on the island watched over the children in general, but nothing they did seemed remotely like what Leenck had described to me. None of the rooms in the children’s house in Silas had windows. The entire building had no windows, and each room’s door locked from the outside. Leenck’s job then, after he had come home, was to gather wood for the stoves and, sometimes, to help his father clean and sharpen the greater axe, a monstrously large axe with a blade so brilliant you could use it as a mirror.
Leenck had watched his father and uncle use the greater axe. It was reserved for the larger trunks of trees, its purpose being to make a clean slice through limbs or trunks for which a lesser axe would have had difficulty. He knew at some point he would learn to use the greater axe, to “wield it” as his father and his Uncle Pitro said. And Leenck understood that at some point he would have to endure the experiment. Endure: the very word his father and uncle used when they brought up the experiment. One or both of them would bring up this feat, but neither would ever say much about it. The experiment was always discussed in this way: endurance. The experiment was a test of endurance. Other than that, Leenck knew very little about it then. He did not know the type of endurance that would be necessary. For all he knew, it would be a physical challenge, a race or feat such as climbing the tallest tree in Silas. But if he had thought more carefully, he would have realized that he had never seen or heard of anything like a race or a challenge to climb a tree. The experiment took place out of sight. And he feared, for good reason, that one was never the same after the experiment.
Leenck’s family knew nothing about life outside of Silas. They didn’t know about money or politics, at least not the kind of politics that went on in the country around them. They talked about the outside world in hushed voices, as if to even discuss anything outside of Silas was to invite the wrath of God. There was no Franco, no Juan Carlos, no regimes or fallen empires. There was
no obsession with the fashions of the wealthy aristocrats, whether of noble family or not. There wasn’t even a strong sense that the country around them was Spain. People in Silas knew there were hunters, butchers, growers, weavers, etc. There was the nonagenarian who gave advice, and the old woman the children knew as the teacher, the woman who presided over the children’s home. People had roles and tasks, both at home and for the town, but little else.
The nonagenarian and the teacher both knew stories and recited them at certain times of the year such as the solstices and after the big harvest. And Leenck figured he would be a builder like his father, one who wielded the greater axe and fashioned wood into objects for others. When he lived with the children, he knew little about his family except for the fact that his family worked as the builders. That is what men in his family did. He had no idea what the women in his family did, though he knew one of the women who cared for the children was a relative of his, an aunt or second cousin. His best friend, a year younger and still living with the children, was a milker; his family kept the cows and made the butter and cheese. But ahead of Leenck back then was the experiment and little else. Despite the fact his mind tried and tried to latch itself to something concrete for the experiment, nothing concrete ever presented itself.
Early one morning, just before sunrise, with only a slight tint of light and a darkish blue in the sky, Leenck claimed he remembered hearing people outside his parents’ home. Leenck wasn’t even completely sure he was awake. As he lay on his cot then with the flimsy woven blanket covering him, he heard a woman’s voice saying something about not being ready. He thought for a minute or so that he was dreaming. It had to have been a dream because that many people would not have been outside so early. The milkers were up that early and, sometimes, a select group of others. But there were many voices, this he remembered, and the sound of people moving about. He heard a woman scream out “No.” It was a gut-wrenching scream filled with an anguish Leenck had never heard before. And he knew then quite certainly it was no dream.
He swung his legs over the side of the cot and ran to the small window in his room at his parents’ house. He saw, moving away from the Square, a group of people slowly making their way past the butcher’s place and the children’s home and toward the eastern edge of the town, toward the Dark Forest, the part of the surrounding forest so dense children were warned not to enter it. Again, he heard the woman scream out “No.” He couldn’t figure out who among the group was screaming. And it occurred to him the woman screaming might well have been off to the side of the group he could see moving then into the Dark Forest. The scream echoed in the Square and off the walls of the tiny houses. All Leenck knew was that he felt nervous, squeamish, and that he had goose bumps along his arms and that the tiny hairs on the back of his neck seemed to be bristling. His stomach grumbled, and he felt nauseated. The nausea would pass, and later, when his parents came back, he knew, without understanding why, that his parents Las and Mencka had been in that group of people herding someone toward the Dark Forest.
“Unexplainable things happen all of the time, Diego,” Leenck would say. “Usually, as time passes, these things grow to seem ordinary. With time, one thinks back and wonders how one could have misunderstood what was clearly such a simple thing.” Even then, I had no real understanding of this story of his. But he would continue on, dutifully, as if the story itself were a wonderful betrayal. It was told with that kind of wink. The bus drivers who stopped to show tourists the town of Silas in the distance; the fact there were no roads in or out of the town; the nonagenarian: all would be understandable at some point in the future. Or so I wanted to believe. Would Leenck ask his father what had happened in the Square that morning? Of course not. Leenck was more afraid of the answer than of asking the question. And buried inside his mind, among his ever-wandering thoughts, Leenck probably knew what had happened that morning. He knew back then he would some day be in the same position, and he hoped his mother would not scream out “No!”
*
“I think the boy is ready.”
“Don’t rush him. He’s still so young.”
“I just have that feeling. You understand?”
“Damn it, Las, just because you did it at a young age doesn’t mean he is ready. Our father, were he alive, would not push him. He didn’t push you.”
“The boy is more like me than you think, Pitro. You haven’t seen him use a hatchet or a sentient knife.”
“Yes, but remember he has to be ready. He has to be ready up here.” As he said this, Pitro quickly pointed to his head.
“Is any one of us really ready for it?”
“I was almost twenty-two before I did it. And I am not sure I would have made it out had I gone in any earlier.”
“He is ready. I just know it. He has that look and that way about him.”
“I am not his father. But you should talk to Mencka before you put him up for this.”
“Mencka doesn’t watch him the way I do.”
“Yes, but she is his mother. Mothers know. They know things.”
“Stop worrying. You sound like an old woman yourself.”
“Don’t let pride push you to the point you damage your only son.”
“He is ready. I’m telling you, he is ready. I can feel it.”
“Have you forgotten our brother? Father thought Ysinck was ready. Father learned this lesson the hard way with him ...”
“Ysinck was weak. He was never one of us.”
“He was our brother! He wasn’t weak. He just wasn’t ready.”
“When would he ever have been ready? When he was forty? Fifty? He was thirty years old when he was taken to the cell!”
“He wasn’t thirty. He was twenty-seven, but he was still too young, and Father never forgave himself. He wasn’t ready. Pride. You went to the cell so early, Father thought we all could.”
“Ysinck never had the look. He was always afraid. Afraid of the axe. Afraid of the knife. For God’s sake, he was afraid of the wood!”
“Was he though? Or was he simply not meant to be a builder?”
“Now you really sound like an old woman. We are builders. We are not butchers or weavers or anything else. We are placed here to build. We were born to be builders. Leenck is a builder. He’s one of us. He understands. I swear to you, I can tell.”
“Is he? Is he a builder, or do you want him to be so badly you ...”
“Yes. I know it. I am his father. I can tell.”
“I really hope so, Las. Mencka would never forgive you. Just like Mama never forgave Father.”
“I will speak with her. I will speak with her soon.”
“You have to ...”
“You will see.”
“Leenck is all we have. Between us, there are no other boys in this family. All we have are girls. We have to be sure. One of our brothers did not survive the cell, and our youngest brother disappeared in the Dark Forest when he was a young boy. He was never able to prove himself!”
“I am sure. Of course, I am sure.”
“Leenck is all we have now. Speak with Mencka. See what she thinks about...”
“I will! I will speak with her and see what she thinks. If she just watched the boy working with me, she would know. He is ready. He will survive.”
*
In the east, I was told, roughly two miles into the Dark Forest, buried partially underground, was the cell. The cell was 8 feet x 8 feet, a concrete-walled room with no windows. It had one oil lamp hanging from a wire, hanging from the very center of the ceiling. One oil lamp, probably a hundred years old, hung there giving off a yellowish, old-papery light. There was one small vent at the center of the ceiling to allow smoke to clear the room. There was one iron door with a handle and latch on the outside only, a small path sloping upward to the level ground of the field halfway up its walls. Perfectly square, this room. And in the left-hand corner of this square room, when standing in the doorway looking in, in the left-hand corner near the ceiling was
a small spigot. And below the spigot on the ground, a small bowl, a soup bowl, which caught the rusty-orange water that dripped from the spigot. The water never poured from the spigot, it just dripped. The spigot was placed close to the ceiling so one could not reach it to turn off the water. One drop every twenty or so seconds. When the bowl had some of the rusty-orange liquid in it, chulp. When the bowl was empty, plink. If one removed the bowl from beneath the spigot, plesh. Otherwise, there was no sound in the room. The light did not hum or buzz. There was no bed, no furniture, nothing but the floor and the four walls. And in the center of the room, on the floor directly beneath the oil lamp, a drain with a crosshatched rusted metal grate over it, into which the rusty-orange liquid could be poured or, if the bowl overflowed, the rusty-orange liquid would find by way of gravity. The floor, although it appeared flat, was actually a conical thing. The floor sloped ever so slightly down toward the drain, the angle of slope only visible to the eye when water was poured in one of the corners of the room because the liquid would then slowly make its way toward the center. You could watch the liquid crawl toward the room’s center, toward the drain. The iron door did not touch the ground. There were four inches of space at the bottom, enough for a tray to slide under, or a rat, enough to see the shoes of anyone who stood outside the iron door. It was enough for air to move in and move out. Leenck recalled all of this with what seemed an incredible accuracy.
*
“The axe is an extension of your shoulders and back. Your arm is only a part of the axe’s handle. When held correctly, the axe moves with the body as if a part of the body. Your center is the source of its strength. The swing starts here and moves up the back and through the arm until the axe finds its target. Do you see?”
The Affliction Page 4
