A Hundred Mouths

The grease from the bacon wouldn't wash out of the pine table.

Maren scrubbed until her knuckle split against a knot in the wood, a thin bead of red blooming into the pale grain. She didn't wipe it away. She watched it sink, darkening the porous ring where Eli used to lean his elbow while he waited for the kettle to whistle.

The house was too warm. Eli had spent his last autumn sealing the floorboards with resin from the swamp-myrtle down by the bend. He had crawled on his knees for three days, forcing the oil into every gap where the winter wind might crawl. It worked. The draft was gone. The air inside stayed trapped, heavy with the smell of old wool, the iron tang of the woodstove, and the slow rot of apples softening in the cellar.

It was suffocating.

"You're going to put a hole through it," Sarah said. She was sitting by the cold hearth, her fingers moving with a heavy, rhythmic click as she unraveled an old gray sweater. She wasn't knitting; she was just reclaiming the yarn, winding it into an uneven ball that sat between her feet.

Maren dropped the rag into the bucket. The water was lukewarm and gray. "The grease stays. Everything he touched leaves it."

"He was a messy man," Sarah said, her voice flat, devoid of the gentle indulgence people usually gave the dead.

"He wasn't messy," Maren snapped. "He was heavy."

That was the truth of it, the part they didn't put into the songs the village kids were already singing down by the well. The songs made the Gift sound like a breath of wind—a beautiful, silver thing that left a man's skin clean as he dissolved into the soil to save the harvest. They sang about the sweet rain of his giving.

They didn't sing about the three weeks it took for his legs to turn to black tallow while he was still sitting in the armchair, or how the room smelled like an uncleaned gut-bucket because his kidneys had given up their water to the well-head three miles away.

Sarah didn't look up from her yarn. The thread snapped. She didn't knot it; she just held the two frayed ends together between her thumb and forefinger, staring at them until her eyes went glossy.

"The barley's five feet high," Sarah murmured. "In the south field. You can see it from the privy. It’s never been that blue-green before."

"I know."

"Old Man Miller says we’ll have three cuttings this summer. We won't have to kill the heifer."

"I know," Maren said. She stood up, her skirt clinging to her thighs with sweat. "I'm going down to the ditch."

"Don't bring the bucket," Sarah said, her voice dropping into that dark place she'd lived in since the equinox. "I don't want that water in the tea."

The path to the irrigation ditch was lined with wild mustard, their yellow heads so bright they made Maren’s temples throb. The growth was unnatural. The stems were as thick as a man's wrist, turgid with juice. When she stepped on one, it crunched with a wet thud, spraying a bitter, peppery milk onto her ankles.

The ditch itself was six feet wide, cut into the clay by three generations of men who had died of ordinary things—the lung-rot, or a horse’s hoof to the temple.

Now, the water inside it didn't flow so much as it slid. It was grey-white like dishwater, with an oily scum riding the edges. Maren sat on the bank, pulling her skirts up above her knees. She leaned down, dipping her hand into the water. It didn't feel like mountain runoff anymore. It stayed on her skin, thick and stubborn, smelling faintly of the marrow-fat Eli used to grease his boots with.

"Maren."

She didn't turn around. She knew the stride. It was Tomas, Eli’s brother. He smelled of charcoal and cold iron, but beneath that, he smelled like everyone else in the valley did now: like sweet, damp malt from the fields.

He sat down six feet away from her. He didn't offer comfort. Comfort had become an insult in the valley, a kind of lie they couldn't afford because the proof of what they’d bought was sticking to the soles of their shoes.

"The elders want to rename the common pasture," Tomas said. He was looking at his own hands, which were scarred from the forge. "They want to call it Eli’s Rise."

"Tell them no."

"I did. They said it’s for the children. To remember."

Maren pulled her hand out of the ditch and wiped it on the grass, but the grass was too lush, too slick with its own sap to do any good. "The children will remember every time they eat a loaf of bread that doesn't have sand in it. They don't need a sign."

Tomas pulled a pocketknife from his vest and began scraping the soot from under his thumbnail. He didn't look at the water. Nobody looked directly at the water if they could help it, though they all drank it. The mountain spring had gone dry the night Eli went down into the cistern.

"Sarah's unraveling the gray winter coat," Tomas said after a long silence.

"It was his," Maren said.

"I know. I gave him the wool for it when he turned twenty." Tomas closed the knife with a sharp click. "She shouldn't do that. It’s bad luck to re-use a dead man's wool when he went the hard way."

"He didn't go the hard way," Maren said, her voice rising, sharp as broken flint. "He went the stupid way. He went the way that makes us all look like dogs waiting under the table for scraps."

Tomas didn't flinch. "The well was dry, Maren. We had three days of flour left. The children's bellies were starting to swell. You remember Lydia's little boy. He couldn't keep the broth down."

"I remember," she whispered. Her fingers dug into the clay, leaving four deep crescents that immediately filled with that sluggish water. "But he didn't ask me."

"If he asked, you’d have told him to let them starve."

"No," Maren said, turning her head to look him full in the face. "I’d have told him we should all go into the cistern together. If the land wanted us gone, we should have gone. Instead, we’re eating his skin. We're drinking his blood. Every time I make a pot of porridge, I’m boiling him."

Tomas looked away, his jaw tightening until the muscle stood out like a cord. "Don't say that."

"Why? Because it’s true? Look at the clover behind you, Tomas. Go on, look at it."

He didn't move.

"It has five leaves on every stalk," she said, her voice dropping into a low drone. "It’s purple. It looks like the bruises he got on his hips when he couldn't get out of bed anymore. The whole valley is just Eli turned inside out. And we’re digging our heels into him."

Tomas stood up. He looked smaller than he had in the winter, his shoulders curved inward. "The funeral feast is tomorrow. The elders want you to bring the first loaf from the new flour."

"I'll bring the salt," Maren said. "Nothing else."

The kitchen was dark when she got back, but the heat hadn't lifted. Sarah was gone, probably down to the church to help the women scrub the flagstones for the feast. She had left the ball of gray yarn on the table. It had rolled into the puddle of grease Maren had been scrubbing earlier, the fibers soaking up the tallow until the bottom of the ball was dark and heavy.

Maren sat down in Eli’s chair.

It was an ugly thing, made of unpeeled ash that he’d chopped himself before they were married. She reached down and touched the cushion. It still smelled of him—the salt-grease of his neck, the vinegar he used to clean his ears when they got stuffed with sawdust.

She pulled her feet up onto the rung of the chair, curling herself into a small, tight knot.

The house was completely silent, save for the flies. There were too many flies this year. They were large things with green-gold bellies that sat on the windowpanes like heavy beads, bumping against the glass with a dull, wet thwack.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember his face, but she couldn't see it clearly anymore. Every time she tried to shape his nose or the line of his mouth, she saw the barley instead. She saw the long, heavy heads of the grain bending under their own weight, nodding in the south wind.

He had become the landscape, and in doing so, he had vanished from her.

A knock came at the door—soft, hesitant.

Maren didn't move. "It's open."

The door creaked back. It was Martha, the miller’s youngest girl. She was seven, with thin, translucent ears that showed the pink veins inside them. She was carrying a wooden bowl covered with a clean linen cloth.

"My mother sent this," the girl said, staying by the threshold, her toes curling into the wood. "For the morning. She said you shouldn't have to bake."

Maren looked at the bowl. The smell reached her even from six feet away—the sharp, yeast-sour tang of fresh dough rising. It lifted the linen cloth with its own breath.

"What's in it?" Maren asked.

Martha blinked, confused. "It's the first-fruits flour. From the mill by the bridge."

"Take it back."

The girl’s mouth opened slightly. "But my mother said—"

"Take it back, Martha," Maren said, her voice perfectly quiet, perfectly cold. "Tell your mother I have my own flour. Tell her I don't need her charity."

"It's not charity," the child whispered, her eyes filling with that sudden terror children have for women who live alone. "It’s the gift. We're supposed to share the gift."

"The gift is in the dirt," Maren said. She stood up from the ash chair, and the girl took a step back into the sunlight, the bowl trembling in her small hands. "We don't share it. We just eat it until it’s gone. Now get off my porch before I throw the grease-bucket at you."

The girl turned and ran, her small bare feet slapping against the dust of the path. She dropped the bowl by the gate. The cloth came off, and the white dough spilled into the wild mustard, rolling over once and collecting a thick coat of yellow pollen and dry grey dirt.

Maren watched it from the window. She didn't go out to save it. She watched the large, green-bellied flies settle on it, their small black legs sinking into the sweet, sticky surface.

The next morning rose hot and dry, but the valley smelled like a bakery.

By noon, the long tables in the common pasture were groaning under the weight of the harvest. The elders stood at the head, their clean white shirts smelling of woodsmoke.

Maren stood at the edge of the crowd, the small horn spoon of coarse salt heavy in her apron pocket. She hadn't washed her skirt; the gray dirt from the ditch was dried into the hem in stiff, pale streaks.

Old Man Miller raised the knife. The first loaf was the size of a tavern shield, its crust dark and blistered from the brick oven. When the blade bit into it, the steam rose in a thick plume, carrying that deep, malted sweetness across the grass.

A collective sigh went through the crowd—a sound of profound, physical relief.

"To the giver," the elder said, his chin slick with the grease of the morning's roast.

"To the giver," the valley answered.

They cut the slices thick. The first was held out to Maren on a pewter platter. The crust was still steaming, the crumb inside soft and showing the tiny, dark flecks of the millstone.

"Eat, Maren," Tomas whispered behind her. He had a clean handkerchief around his neck, covering his forge-soot. "Take the peace of it."

Maren looked at the bread. She could see the texture of the grain, the perfect yield of it. She didn't reach out.

"I brought the salt," she said, her voice cutting through the soft murmur of the crowd like a cold draft.

She reached into her pocket, pulled out a handful of the gray crystals, and dropped them not onto the bread, but directly into the dust at the elder’s feet.

The elder frowned, but the hunger in the valley was too old, too sharp to be halted by a bitter woman. They passed the platter around her. Maren watched them. She watched the young men tear into the loaves with their fingers. She watched the mothers break off small, soft bits for the babies who had been crying since January.

And then she saw Martha.

The little girl was sitting on a bench, her thin ears pink in the noon sun. She had a wedge of the hot bread in both hands. She didn't hesitate. She bit deep into it, her small teeth tearing the soft white crumb, a line of moisture catching on her chin as she chewed.

Martha looked up, her eyes meeting Maren’s across the clearing. The child didn't look afraid anymore. She looked full. Her cheeks were already flushing with the heat of the food, her small body absorbing the sugar, the starch, the marrow of the man who had died in the dark cistern.

Maren felt the sun strike her neck, hard and dry.

She realized then that there would be no ending to him. He wouldn't stay under the dirt where he belonged, rotting cleanly into memory. He was going to live on in Martha’s teeth. He was going to build the bone in the children's wrists. He was going to be in the marrow of every child born in the valley for fifty years, a quiet, mandatory presence in every kitchen, every bed, every grave.

He had bought their lives, and in doing so, he had made them his museum.

Maren turned her back on the tables and began the long walk up the hill toward the empty house. Behind her, the valley kept chewing, loud and rhythmic, a hundred mouths grinding him into the future.