Poison Read Online Free PDF

and soon the trees were tall and healthy. So healthy! They grew on nothing, they needed lesswater and, as if enchanted, they blossomed, they budded, they thrived. In three years, they were taller than I.
    My father could not contain his delight. He nearly danced among the new trees, and I believe they gave him even greater pleasure than they might have were they not planted next to his father’s ruined stumps. Well, for a time, anyway.
    My great-great-great—oh, too many generations to count—grandfather was among the first to cultivate silk in Spain. He had sailed the trade routes for as many years as his legs and back remained strong, his balance good, and then he retired from the sea just at the time when silkworms and mulberry trees and the art of making the lustrous fabric had come to Spain from the Orient. This ancestor, Sandoval de Luarca, returned to his home in Castile with crates of mulberry seedlings, and after the trees took root and grew to sufficient size (they are a fast-maturing plant) one spring, now generations past, Sandoval awaited the docking at La Coruña of a ship bearing silkworm eggs from China. The eggs were transported by sea in a small chest kept cool by its proximity to a great block of hewn river ice packed in sawdust. Once in Spain, they traveled by Sandoval’s mule cart, also in the company of ice, not cold enough to freeze the eggs, but just cool enough to prevent them from hatching before their arrival at the lodgings my great-great-and-so-on-grandfather had built for his worms, at which point, having dripped steadily away on the roads to Castile, the carefully packed block of ice had been reduced to a pile of wet sawdust.
    Good silkworm eggs are very expensive. No one buys Chinese eggs any longer, but the worms that spun the first silk in Spain came from eggs transported on the fast-sailing ships that brought other perishables from the Orient, everything kept cool by ice: aphrodisiac ointments made from the hooves of one-horned river horses, ginseng-root cures for dropsy, hot sweet peppers from the province of Hunan, tiny Chinese oranges favored by King Philip I and his court. Sandoval hadn’t any money for the eggs; he obtained them by collecting on a debt of incalculable value.
    At sea, years before, he had saved a man’s life by drawing agreat splinter from his neck and sucking the wound clean with his own lips. “He spat the pus into the ocean!” my grandfather had told me, and from this grateful trader, ever eager to recompense for the miracle of his life returned, Sandoval accepted the silkworm eggs as a gift. Thus, it was by a twist of fate—a stranger’s misfortune and near death—that we became a family of silk growers. Since we were not Moors as most silk growers were, we were not tortured or exiled. But, still, perhaps it is inauspicious for a family’s good fortunes to proceed from any accident, even one that did not prove fatal. Certainly my father later attached significance to the story of Sandoval and the splinter, saying that my ancestor had spat out the pus but swallowed seeds of an ill fortune that would inexorably return; but by then Papa’s reasoning was not what anyone could follow.
    While he waited for the new grove to mature, Papa entered into a partnership with a silk grower named Jorge Encimada. Together they raised an experimental generation of Señor Encimada’s worms, feeding them leaves treated with an extract taken from the shells of the kermes insect that lives on oak and feeds on the sweet flesh of the tree just under the bark. Papa had Dolores and me gather the bugs, and he paid us one maravedi for every ten that we caught. We had to strip off their shells, too, ignoring their scratching kicking legs, and set their little suits to soak in vinegar. Sometimes I would drop one down Dolores’s collar when she was not looking, or into her hair where its legs would tangle, and then she would scream so that Mama came running, half amused, half