The Silkman

by Michael Cohen

Every May the Silkman visits our village. It is May now. I was out in the field with our ox, but I knew. I heard the high, fast speech of the old women, haunches in the mud, as they discussed his business. I cracked my stick across the back of the ox and its cry sent a flock of birds from the trees.

The Silkman comes from the city. His jeep crosses the muddy roads and lands in the center of our village. The old men circle it. They pull the thin wood pipes from their mouths and whistle.

The Silkman wears dark suits, all of silk, and a felt hat circled by a red stripe, despite the heat. His sweat seems different than ours. Ours is thick, beading on our broad faces like oil drops in the bottom of cooking pans. His runs free as water. When he talks in his city dialect, showing off his full house of teeth, a large ball of sweat collects at the end of his nose. He pulls a silk cloth from his suit, catches the ball, and wipes the folds of his neck while talking with the fathers.

It is not his words they admire. There is money, and he brings the fathers whiskey and cigars. The mothers accept silks, embroidered with dragons and mountain scenes, and perfume. They keep these treasures in a box for awhile, wearing only their mourning clothes.

Sometimes in the fields they will drop their work, wailing and pulling their hair as they rock on the ground. But only for a time. After a month has passed, sometimes less, they wrap the silks across their shoulders before going to the fields to work. Then, the mothers are bright flowers of pink and red in the brown of the field, and the thick smells of bottled flowers that have the bees crazy surround them.

I didn't come home that night. I made my bed from jungle ferns. I coated my face and body with mud for the bugs and lay on my back tracing the moon, waiting for sleep. I heard music from the village. The slender cry of the flute, its notes wound across the space like smoke.

I pictured the young man who played it. His face was beautiful, the skin as smooth as my own. Lines split his face only when he drew deeply to produce a special pitch. Only a few years older than I, he played the flute better than the old men of the village. The men always laughed. His mother had made love to a songbird, they said.

Now, beneath the flute, the drum. Its stretched skin pounded steady, heavy in the air like the heartbeat of the mountain above. I heard the men's singing, full of laughter and the Silkman's whiskey.

I woke to the plump tongue of the ox nuzzling my face. The sun came in sharp splinters through the trees. I sat up, hungry, but my eyes set on the mountain in the distance. On the other side was another village. My father had taken me there once when he went to trade for the small pots they made.

I would walk there with the ox, sell it, and with the money I would run. I'd decided this when I'd first heard the cries of the Silkman's arrival. Last year he had looked at me hard. He'd eyed me like my father eyes a pig, weighing the months till slaughter. I knew this year The Silkman would buy me. I knew this year he would take me in his jeep with the other girls, over the roads and far away to the city.

I combed my hair with my hands, then pulled it over my head and worked it from underneath. I wove it into a long braid that hung to my waist, as my mother had taught me, then coiled it beneath my straw hat. Standing, I could just see and hear the women already at work in the fields. Their bodies swayed in unison to one of the songs they shared while working:

The harvest will be rich as we give ourselves to the ground.

Each plant as tall as a tree

bearing gold instead of grain.

This life is hard, but in the next we may know peace.

We plant seeds and harvest.

We work with the quickness of the dove

and the lightness of the clouds

lost in the snow of mountains.

All but one sang the ancient song. Even from the distance I saw she was in her mourning clothes. Her hair was braided like my own. She faced the ground, her body rocking like a windblown bush, her wails a ragged harmony for the song.

I creeped along the jungle path, concealing myself and the ox from the women's view. Beneath us the ground was like dough; It pulled the ox's hoofs at each step.

I listened to the jungle, sorting the cries of birds and insects, the leaves whisper. I listened for footsteps as I whipped the ox with the stick, hurrying it toward the mountain. The Silkman's voice shouted in my head, like a stick at my own back.

My father waited at the mountain's foot. A cigar poked from his face as he sat still and cross-legged in the path. There was no anger in his eyes when he saw me. He sucked the cigar, smoke streaming from his nose and mouth.

Watching me, he stood up slowly and dusted the dirt from the seat of his pants, pants that were always falling from his skinny bones.

"Your face is dirty. Did you become lost, my daughter?"

I nodded.

"Come. I will show you the way."

He reached for the stick, gently pulling it from my frozen hand. I fell to the ground, covering my head, sure he would strike me for the first time in my life.

"Ai," I cried out when I heard the stick's slap. I felt nothing. Between my fingers I saw him strike the ox again, moving it down the path.

He did not turn to me once as I followed him home.

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