“Your grandfather’s dying. We can’t help him anymore.”
Yalda was stunned. “We can’t abandon him!”
Vito said, “Listen to me: we can’t help him, and it’s not safe to stay with him.”
Dario gave no indication that his son’s terrible verdict had reached him through the thicket of his pain and confusion. As Yalda rose to her feet, forcing herself to obey Vito even though she couldn’t bring herself to believe him, a speck of light hovering in the distance ahead of her erupted into painful, blinding brilliance. As she covered her front pair of eyes with her arm, she thought: that was a mite. The mites that had fed from Dario’s skin and stolen his light were burning up, and each tiny blaze was brighter than the sun.
Still half-blind, she stumbled around Dario’s bed toward her father. “We’re leaving the forest?”
“Yes.”
“Should I bring the food?”
“There’s no time.”
Vito leaned down and whispered something to his father, then he stood and led the way out of the clearing. Yalda stole a glance at Dario, then tore herself away. She would not accept that his fate was sealed; she would not say goodbye.
“Close your rear eyes,” Vito told her sternly. “Stay close to me and don’t look back.”
Yalda obeyed. A third burst of light came from the clearing—behind her now, but even the glare reflected from the branches ahead was dazzling. Dark traces lingered on her vision, a second ghostly forest imprinted on the first, complicating everything.
“I don’t understand!” she said. “I thought the light here would make him better!” If she forced her father to remember Doctor Livia’s pronouncement, and tie what they were seeing to that, maybe he’d change his mind and turn back.
“We tried,” Vito said, stricken. “But some things can’t be healed.”
Yalda pushed her way through the branches angrily, relying on touch more than sight; she was barely registering the ongoing flashes, but the afterimages kept building up until she was no longer sure which looming obstacles were real. Even in the depths of his illness, Dario had retained his gruff affection for her. How could she walk away from him?
They emerged from the forest and headed back toward the road. Maybe the mites were actually helping, drawing the poison out of Dario’s body. Dying in his stead. If they stopped to rest, she’d sneak back while Vito was asleep. If Dario had survived, healed by the self-immolating insects, she could carry him out to rejoin his son.
The ground ahead of her brightened unbearably, then a rush of air knocked her flat. She tried to call out, but her tympanum had seized up, leaving her both mute and deaf. She crawled across the weeds; they looked like dead husks, but she couldn’t tell if they’d really been transformed or whether it was her vision that had been stripped bare. She groped around, sure that Vito was close but afraid to lift her gaze to search for him. Then she felt him reach out to her and they held each other tightly.
They stayed there, huddled together on the ground. Her father’s embrace was not enough to make her feel safe, but it was all there was.
Yalda woke to a brightening sky and the sound of insects. Vito was awake, crouched beside her, but he remained silent as she stood to survey the aftermath.
The forest was still standing but the closest part was visibly thinned and damaged, as if a giant had reached down and pummeled it. Some of the low bushes around them were dead. Yalda’s skin was tender as she moved.
“He’s gone,” she said. Dario could not have survived at the center of this destruction—let alone survived being the cause of it.
“Yes.” Vito rose to his feet and put an arm around her to comfort her. “It’s sad that we’ve lost him, but remember that he had a long life. And most men go to the soil, to decay like straw. Only a few go to light.”
“Is that a good thing?” Yalda had seen how much pain he’d been in at the end, but she had nothing with which to compare it.
“It’s good that we left him in time,” Vito said, avoiding her question. “It would not have made him happier to take us with him.”
“No.” Yalda felt her whole body shaking with an involuntary hum of grief. Vito held her until she was still again.
“We should start moving,” he suggested gently. “It would be best if we reached the farm before night.”
Yalda looked back toward the ruined edge of the forest.
“When I get old,” she said, “what will happen to me?”
“Hush,” Vito said. “That’s the way of men. No daughter of mine is going to die.”
2
In the spring following her grandfather’s death, Yalda joined her cousins, her uncle and her father in the harvest for the first time. While Lucia and Lucio dashed around gathering up spills and wheeling the grain carts between the filling points—as Yalda had done the year before—the harvesters themselves marched steadily back and forth between the rows of wheat.
Working with two hands at once, Yalda plucked the seed cases from the stalks on either side of her, squeezed them until they popped, emptied them into the pouches she’d formed, then dropped the cases on the ground. It wasn’t heavy work, like digging a store-hole, but the sheer repetitiveness of it took its toll. Though she’d toughened the wedge-shaped fingers she’d made to prise open the cases, after a while they started to yield to the pressure and she had to stop and re-form them. And when her arms and hands grew too sore to continue, she had no choice but to extrude a new pair and rest the muscles she’d been using. She was yet to acquire the endurance of a seasoned harvester, but her size alone had its advantages. While her male cousins cycled between two pairs of arms, and Claudia, Aurelia and the men three, by mid-afternoon Yalda was on her fifth pair, with the flesh that had formed the first still tucked away deep in her chest, recuperating.
At the end of each row she emptied her pouches into one of the grain carts that her brother and sister were nudging along the cross-paths, then she turned into the next row to start all over again. Giusto had told her that after the first day her body would refine her posture to make the work easier, but that there was no point in anyone instructing her on how to get there sooner; the adjustment was different for each person, and better achieved through instinct than imitation.
By dusk Yalda was exhausted, but it was satisfying to see how high the yellow grain was piled in the carts. She helped Lucio push one to the central bin that the merchant’s truck had left for them to fill.
“If I join the harvest next year,” Lucio asked her, “who’ll handle the carts?”
“We’ll take turns,” Yalda replied, trying her best to make the guess sound authoritative. Questions were for someone whose opinion was worth seeking: an older cousin, not a sibling. But apparently her size alone, having won her a place in the harvest, had come to mean more than her true age.
Everyone sat leaning against the huge bin as they ate the evening meal. Yalda gazed up at the darkening sky and listened to her father and uncle enthusing about the yield and the quality of the grain, while Aurelia teased Claudio by repeatedly punching him on the arm and then taking his retribution without flinching. Yalda felt peaceful; she still missed Dario, but she knew the good harvest would have pleased him.
Later, as the other children were scrambling into their beds, Yalda spotted one of the grain carts sitting at the end of its row, still full. She thought of calling Lucia to deal with it, but whatever the privileges of her newfound seniority-by-size, she didn’t want to set herself above her own sister. She went to wheel the cart in herself.
When she had brought it to the foot of the ramp leading up to the top of the bin, she paused to straighten the wheels. “I just don’t want to lose a good worker like that!” she heard Giusto complain. They were on opposite sides of the bin, but his voice was clear.
“She’ll still be with us at harvest time,” her father replied.
“A few days a year! And for how many years?”
Vito said, “I promised her mother: if any of the children showed signs that they’d benefit from an education, I’d do my best to send them to school.”
“She never saw this one in the field!” Giusto retorted. “If she’d known what she’d be asking us to give up, I doubt she would have been so insistent.”
Vito was unmoved. “She’d have wanted every one of her children to have the best life they could.”
“I’ll teach her to recite the sagas,” Giusto promised. “That will keep her mind busy.” Yalda recoiled; Dario’s stories had been entertaining, but Giusto could ramble on for half the night, listing the unlikely deeds of a dozen tedious heroes.
“It’s not just about her getting bored with farm work,” Vito said. “She’s never going to find a co-stead hanging around here.”
“Does that matter?” Giusto replied, bemused. “She works as hard as any four children. And it’s not as if she’s your only chance at grandchildren.”
Yalda clomped noisily up the ramp and emptied the cart into the bin; when the sound of falling grain had died away the conversation had come to an end.
By the time Yalda climbed into bed even Aurelia was asleep, too tired for their usual exchange of whispered jokes and taunts before the adults joined them. Yalda lay watching the stars in flight—trailing histories unadorned by bombast and braggadocio, just waiting for her to learn how to decipher them.
The possibility of school was thrilling: it meant walking right into the storehouse of knowledge, the source of all the answers to the questions she struggled with. At school, she could find out how the stars shone, how her flesh changed its shape, how plants knew night from day.