Poison Read Online Free PDF Page A

seems surprising to me now that he had not anticipated this, that he had believed he could tear the old trees out of the earth, even though we did not own even one ox. But Papa was crazy with stubborn, willful determination—another Luarca family weakness—and he would prove his father wrong, even in death.
    Without the restraint of Grandfather’s presence, Papa’s nightly musings took on an increasingly feverish character. Even I no longer dreamed aloud with him, for he had ventured into a place of fantasy that I did not want to visit. His dreams of how much silk he would raise, of the bounty it would buy, became more and more unreasonable, so that I worried he had become like one of those rapt fools who set out for the New World, so certain of the mountains of gold that awaited them there, so dead set on their shining future that even as they lay perishing of fever or of a savage’s arrow, still the vision of a city of Incan gold burned before them. El Dorado in his gilded skin, his eyes mad, incendiary orbs of gold, his hair a golden flame, danced and shrieked at them as they writhed. Papa was no different from these men, nor from his father’s father’s father’s father, Victor Luarca, who had left his silkworms to go with Cortés and who had come home in a box in 1527, his journal on his moldered breast. Family legends had it that the last word written in Victor’s account was
gold
, just as one day the last words on my papa’s lips would concern silk.
    Anyone who listened to my father talk understood that he now fancied himself a sort of silk emperor; he controlled all the guilds and the workers and every detail of the great industry—the wash works and dye works and the fashionable colors and patterns, the weavers and their apprentices who labored to set the great looms, every detail down to the last greedy, chewing worm. He shook his head, made a sort of disapproving noisewith his tongue, and as the evening wore on and the fire dimmed, he took to looking fixedly into one corner of our home, to a spot at which he muttered and cursed and occasionally gestured as if in argument. One night I saw his father there.
    “Grandfather!” I said, and I started toward the figure, but he shook his finger at me.
    “No closer, child,” he warned, but he smiled through the smoke wreathing around his head. In a moment he had vanished.
    When the old trees’ roots would not let go of the earth, Papa said that anyway they had polluted the ground to which they clung, and he set to work terracing and tilling a new grove, on land that we owned but had left unused and untenanted. “The bean field,” Grandfather had called it, for each year we intended to cultivate a crop there. But each year the worms and their feeding took all the time and strength we had. In years past, the plot had been leased. In such times as we now found ourselves no one had any money to pay for such things. Everybody was so assured of being caught by the Church in some misdeed—for a crime as small as failing to observe one holy day of obligation—that families clung to whatever coins they possessed, saving them so that they had money for the inevitable fines. If they could pay them immediately, then they would not incur more of them, and they would never end up in one of the prisons of the Inquisition, or so they hoped. For it was said that once the Church took a bite of a man or a woman, once it tasted even one maravedi, its appetite was such that only the whole body, the whole fortune, would satisfy it. So, people saved their coins, no one leased our land, and Papa set to work to reclaim it from the briars and weeds.
    Even in the winter with the ground frozen so that he was forced to chip and chip with his hoe and even then made almost no progress in a day, my father worked without cease until there was a new grove laid out beside the old. He planted the prepared soil with the seedlings that he had bought, paying fifty maravedis for each of them,