The Affliction

by C. Dale Young

  Leenck watched and listened to his father. And Leenck knew his father watched him but never listened to him. When his father pulled string around the trunk of a tree, Leenck would study exactly how far from the ground the string was tied, would note which side of the tree his father brought the axe to strike. It was easy for Leenck to notice these kinds of things. He had no explanation for why he so easily noticed and understood these things. And when his father stripped down at the end of the day to check himself for splinters, Leenck would do the same.

  “Why do we gather wood from the forest in every direction except the East?”

  “We do not cut down trees from the Dark Forest.”

  “But why? The trees there are huge and could provide a lot more wood.”

  “The Dark Forest cannot be touched, Leenck.”

  “It just seems odd that we ignore the woods to the East.” “It is not for you to question these things but to understand.” It had been a long day in the forest and, to impress his father, Leenck decided to tie a string around his thigh to show his father that he understood how far up a trunk to cut. But there was no string available in the room, so Leenck used a fine metal wire, the type one used to tie through and cut small branches so as not to kill the tree. But the knot was too good of a knot, the wire too tight, and the leg below the knee started to swell. It swelled until it brought tears to Leenck’s eyes. He stood before his father, naked, with his leg swollen and turning a white then a purplish-blue color. His father said almost nothing except that he had, in fact, tied the wire at the right spot for a trunk that matched the thickness of his thigh. Within twenty minutes, Leenck could no longer feel his toes. They had gone from tingly and prickly to numb and then cold. His father was already dressed for the remainder of the evening, but all Leenck could do was put on a shirt. He was afraid to pull up his under shorts or pants because of his leg. And he began to worry. He slumped to the floor while leaning against the wall. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion, his body slowly descending to the gravelly ground, the rough wall scraping his back as he did so.

  Leenck didn’t really know his father well. He had rarely seen him in the years he lived with the children. On holidays, he would sit with his family and listen to the stories. And what he knew of his grandfather was essentially what others knew, that he was a builder, that his father and his father’s father were builders, and that the sons in the family were builders. His grandfather had four sons: his father; his Uncle Pitro; the reviled Ysinck who brought the family shame; and his Uncle Axick, who at five years of age wandered into the Dark Forest never to be seen again. For all Leenck knew, all the men in his family were builders. They must have all possessed the skills for taking wood and making of it the things people in the town needed: cabinets, chairs, tables, bowls, the polished wooden plates used at dinner on the solstices. Leenck thought about this as tears began to run down his face. The leg hurt. It hurt more than he had ever imagined anything could hurt. And his father stood there calmly watching him.

  “You tied it too tight, son.”

  “I didn’t mean to, but...”

  “Can you loosen it at all?”

  “I have, I have tried, but now I can’t move my leg.”

  “You are in pain? Is it terrible?”

  “I can’t feel my toes.”

  “Well, we will have to amputate the leg. There isn’t a thing more we can do.”

  “What?”

  “Chop it off before it gets so bad it takes you.”

  “Chop it off?”

  “Stay here. I will go get the greater axe.”

  Leenck could only do as his father said. He could not have gotten up and walked much less run—the leg now an almost pale-white, the purplish color fading while the leg felt as if it were on fire. It looked, to Leenck, to be almost twice the size of his other leg, but the mind is so good at exaggeration that the leg was only mildly larger than the one he had not tied off. He was lying on the ground with only a shirt on after tying a wire around his leg, just above the knee. And he was embarrassed. Not because he was naked, not even because he had tied the string too tight. He was embarrassed because he knew he had let his father down. In his excitement to show what he had learned, he had done something incredibly stupid. How would he be able to do the experiment with one leg? He would never become a builder now. He knew this. He knew he would disappear like the others who had failed the experiment. Or worse, he would spend the rest of his life never being able to do the experiment, something that seemed unfathomable to Leenck.

  As he thought this through to its end, his father returned. He was carrying the greater axe. He held it by the edge of the handle so that the full weight of the axe hung down perfectly perpendicular to the ground. It didn’t swing because of its weight and the slow methodical way his father moved.

  “Can you slide down on the floor so you are lying flat?” His father leaned the axe against the wall Leenck was leaning against so that out of the corner of his eye he could see the light reflecting from its smooth sharpened surface. “Can you shift yourself forward?”

  Leenck knew he couldn’t but found it difficult to tell his father this fact. It was just another instance in which he felt ashamed, felt as if he were disappointing his father and his father’s expectations. He kept trying to find the right words but found, instead, nothing. It was as if his lips were suddenly tied together with a metal wire or had been sewn shut with catgut.

  “Leenck!” his father shouted, “Can you shift forward enough to lie flat? I need you flat so I can make a clean cut.”

  “No. No, I don’t think I can.”

  His father stepped forward, placed one hand under Leenck’s back, the other on his shoulder, and then both lifted him slightly and moved him forward until he was flat on his back, the heels of his feet pushing the gravelly ground as he went flat. Now there were small mounds of gravel just beyond his feet. His father had only the axe with him, no towels or sheets. Nothing else. And Leenck could feel the gravelly floor beneath his backside. He could see an insect of some kind through the corner of his eye scramble up the leg of a nearby chair. Lying there on the ground, his father looked monstrously tall. Leenck had never noticed how big a man his father was until then. “This is going to hurt, Leenck. But it is necessary. You understand that, right? You will have much less pain in the end. In the long run, you will have much less pain.”

  Leenck said nothing in response. The tears had stopped, but now he could feel his heart in his chest in a way he had never appreciated before. His heart jerked and raced so hard he worried it would burst from his chest. His father picked up the axe. “I want you to take a deep breath and hold it. Can you do that?”

  Leenck did as his father said. His heart, beating madly then, seemed even more pronounced as he held his breath. And within seconds, he saw the axe swing high above his father’s head, the arc of it moving above and away from him. And then the arc reversed and he watched as the axe, swift from its own weight and the power of his father’s arms, came down. He heard the loud hatch sound as the axe entered the ground. And he expected to see blood, expected to see his leg rolled onto its side away from his thigh. But when he looked down, he saw the axe in the ground about three inches to the side of his leg. His father’s face was flat. His forehead was smooth. Not a movement could be found near his eyes or mouth. “The leg! You missed!” Leenck cried out.

  “I did not miss. I hit the target exactly.” His father walked over to the door and picked up a machete. He came back toward Leenck and slid the machete under the wire so that only about two inches of it passed under the wire. He gave a quick jab and twist and the wire snapped. When the wire fell on either side of his leg, Leenck realized there was a trickle of blood coming from a small, roughly 1-cm puncture in his thigh above where the wire had been tied, where the point of the machete had quickly entered the meat of his thigh. Leenck could still see the impression of the wire on his thigh, could show exactly where the wire had circled his thigh even m
any years later. The tip of the machete had just punctured the skin, but the small hole bled and bled. “Something to remind you,” his father said.

  It took almost six minutes before Leenck could stand up on his leg. After he got up, he put on his undershorts and pants. He looked at his father, but got no response from him. His face gave nothing to Leenck. It was without feeling or reaction, as it had been throughout the entire terrible episode. And Leenck felt ashamed. He had never before felt such a deep and overwhelming sense of shame. His heart was still not right in his chest. The shame spread from his chest to his face. And he walked out of the room to go help his mother fire the stove. After Leenck left the room, you can almost imagine his father smiling and then mumbling out loud, something like “He is ready.”

  IV. The Fortunate

  Some are good at digging up the past, and some are gifted with the ability to divine the future. Most people live squarely in the present without even the slightest knowledge that all of time coexists, that each era is simply a thin rind circling the current moment. Rosa Blanco was one of those people who lived in the present, but she was always obsessing about the past and worrying about the future. In her small kitchen, she would, sometimes for hours, replay a moment in the past, ten, maybe fifteen, times. Each time, she checked and rechecked what she had said, how she had said it, what she had done. But the old woman who lived a few doors away was a different type of woman. She lived for the future.

  I won’t explain how I came to hear this part of the story. At this point, it is almost irrelevant. But suffice it to say, once you hear it you never forget. You keep it, embellish it, turn it over and over in your head like a cloudy gem you have been asked to examine and appraise. But it starts with Rosa Blanco. It all starts with Rosa Blanco. In many ways, that woman is responsible for everything, the way I see it. I fault her. I fault her for pretty much all of it. But let me explain further. I need to explain further. Rosa Blanco was intent on knowing how the old woman divined the future. She wanted to understand the mechanics of it, the exact ways in which she could open the future up in front of her like an old book. She was certain, quite certain, that the old woman did not use tea leaves or a crystal ball. She had asked her once about tea leaves, and the only response she had gotten was something about water dissolving what power they had.

  The old woman simply never used tea leaves. It wasn’t that she despised vegetable matter, but that she relied on it, relied on it to see things. Threads, she called them. The old woman would take the dried leaves of plants people brought to her and then use them to her own devices. What Rosa Blanco knew, from the slight lilt to the old woman’s voice, was that she was not originally from Mexico or a daughter of Mexico. Rosa Blanco never asked, but she believed, and rightfully so, that the woman had been born in the Caribbean. Her Spanish was not Puerto Rican, but it may have been Dominican. The clipping of the “r” when she spoke Spanish made Rosa Blanco suspicious, but she dared not ask the old woman to tell her from where she had come. To Rosa, that would have been rude. I would not have needed to ask, would have recognized that accent almost immediately. It is, after all, the very same one I hear from my own mouth when I speak Spanish, as rare as that is.

  The first time Rosa Blanco visited the old woman was one of those moments she must have replayed over and over in her head for the rest of her life. Carmen Jiménez, the cashier at the grocery store, told Rosa Blanco how she had visited the old woman, told her that the old woman had looked into her future, and that she told her she would soon be pregnant. A month later, Carmen Jiménez visited her doctor and was told she was with child. Rosa Blanco had heard other stories like this. She had heard, in fact, many stories like this. All of them ended with the old woman’s predictions coming true. And why Rosa Blanco had gone to see the old woman that day, why she let her curiosity rule her mind, was the piece of cloth she crumpled and then smoothed out over and over again in her mind for the rest of her life.

  Rosa Blanco obsessed about the past. So what possessed her to seek out the future is the aspect of all of this I will never understand. Somewhere inside her, I would wager, she believed the old woman actually made these predictions happen. She would spend every day of her remaining life blaming the old woman for her problems, and yet, she was always thinking about when she could go to visit her, when she could find some time to ask her what was coming, what to expect. Despite all of that longing to know the future, Rosa Blanco only sought out her own future exactly three times. Difficult to believe, but true.

  The old woman came from a blessed family, Rosa Blanco had been told, a family that understood the ways in which herbs and plants worked. Rosa Blanco still wanted to believe that she first went to see the old woman because a crocus plant near her back door had died, suddenly, giving off a terrible odor that lingered long after the dead plant was pulled from the ground and burned. She believed this with all her soul, that she went to her to find out why this had happened. But the past was not what the old woman held in her hands. When Rosa Blanco knocked on Flora Diaz’s door, there was a long pause before she heard the old woman walking to the door. When the old woman opened the door, she looked suspicious. She invited Rosa Blanco in and offered her a seat with a wave of her hand only. She offered her lemon water. And then she told her that she wasn’t ready for her, that she had expected her to come but that she was not ready. Rosa Blanco wanted to feel startled, but didn’t. The old woman went on to say she had been expecting Rosa Blanco to come to her in about two weeks’ time.

  It wasn’t as if the old woman brandished a wand over spilled water and then fell into a trance, her eyes open but glazing over. No, it was nothing like that at all. It was all very scientific. She needed things. She needed the leaves of a plant, and she needed them to be dry, brittle, desiccated. Without the leaves, Flora told her, the ability to see the future clearly would be hindered. And so, when Rosa Blanco asked the old woman if there was anything she needed to tell her, the only response she got was a curt negative. Rosa Blanco had no idea then what to do, so she just sat there and waited to see what the old woman would say. The old woman talked about her family, how her family had been an important family for centuries, how they were the healers, the keepers of the gifts, the ones who tended the plants not for food but to keep the people on her island anchored in time. She rambled on to Rosa Blanco about how at any one time there were at least three women in her family that kept the gifts, kept the gifts alive. Rosa had no idea what the old woman was talking about, but she listened all the while hoping something about her own future would be revealed.

  The old woman went on and on, told her how everything changed when the ghosts arrived on their ships, how they killed off many of the men on the island, raped the women, took the land. It was then she chuckled, a strange little laugh, before stating that these ghost men had no idea the power of the land, the plants that grew from the land, or the women that tended the plants, that no matter how ambitious and sonorous their Spanish language was it would never erase the language and power of the land. Rosa Blanco could not follow what the old woman was saying then, but she continued to listen. She couldn’t help but listen. She felt as if she could not rise from her chair and walk out. The old woman continued, told her that the original ghost men thought that time and successive generations would erase her family’s gifts, but that this never happened. “Every girl born to us carried it!” The old woman laughed some more and then offered Rosa Blanco more lemon water. “Every one of them! Most would never realize the full power of their gifts. But there were always at least three who would …” Rosa Blanco declined the water and finally told the old woman she needed to go home and start cooking dinner. As she stood up from the table, Rosa Blanco saw a wire basket filled with orange-colored peppers.

  “What kind of peppers are those?”

  “They have no name. The Spaniards called them los calientes. The English called them Scotch bonnets. I have a man back home mail me a box of them each week.”

  “P
eppers? But they sell them at the store.”

  “Not those peppers. I crush one each morning into a glass and pour hot water over it. I sip a glass of the infused water every morning. It clears the head, clears the mind and the body, prepares the body...”

  There was no doubt that the old woman, Flora Diaz, was an odd woman. And Rosa Blanco was sure then that she was not from Mexico, not from the country that birthed most of the people in the area, Mexico with its insistent puppy dog love of Spain and all things Spanish, its ignorance of the people who had lived there long before the arrival of the Conquistadores. But before Flora Diaz could say any more about the peppers, the strange breakfast, the clearing of the mind, the old woman said: “Next time, bring me leaves. Pull them from a plant in your yard and set them in the sun to dry. When they are dry and brittle, bring them to me. Then I will be able to tell you what it is you need to know.”

  It took Rosa Blanco two weeks before she returned to see Flora Diaz. In that time she had gone outside and pulled leaves from the crocus plant next to the spot where the dead one had been. She had put them on the sill in the kitchen window to dry. When her husband, Ricardo, had asked her about the leaves drying up and browning on the windowsill above the sink, she lied and told him it was for one of their sons, for Carlitos’ science project. Ricardo was a simple man, and she knew he would never understand why she would want to bring dried leaves to a woman down the street who some were convinced could see the future. It was better that nothing be said about that at all. Rosa Blanco kept very few things from her husband, but she knew he would not approve of this. She knew it wasn’t the leaves that he would disapprove of or the fact the old woman could see the future, it was the need some had to seek out the old woman in order to see their own futures. Ricardo would never understand that.