The Young Knight picked her out of what they’d left of her village, when she was just six. After loading up on as much milk and grain and heirlooms as he could fit on two bags on a horse, the Young Knight had room enough for a wife—but not an entire wife—not yet; and he would not touch her, those first years. He had put the girl on layaway, hauling her across the backcountry of parts of France he soon realized were no longer France.
God had told them, “Go East,” and the Young Knight couldn’t tell you what country the girl came from. Years later, he could only close his eyes and see her little silhouette, shoeless in the mud while he cleaned off his sword in the well, the yellow hay of decimated rooftops, hovering around her like a cloud, as if she’d slept through the entire history of Western Civilization up to now.
He wasn’t going to clean his sword twice, and he couldn’t just leave her there now; that would be a fate worse than stabbing. So he toted the child East when God said, “Go East,” and brought her back West with him when God said, “Go Back,” eight years later and swaddled in a lump on the back of his horse with his loot and with more types of spices than his tongue knew what to do with.
She’d by then learned the art of sitting silent in a tent, tuning out the death, and when he brought her back to his village of birth, she came smelling of saffron and cinnamon and cardamom and blood. And his little village was a different place than what he’d left behind, his mother and three siblings since succumbed to some scourge of God’s Wrath, as if to mock the way he’s wasted his best working years on horseback, all to honor Him. And now he did business with the Jews; it made no financial sense to blame them now. He never even tasted half the spices he’d collected, and only when he held his small wife on the low-set mat of bundled straw, could he remember the smell of cumin, enough to imagine what it might taste like. Baked into a boiled pudding with what was left and still good of a goat that’d sprained its ankles a couple weeks ago and had stopped making milk.
The Knight died before the wife was thirty, and although being His Wife was all she could remember, she embraced his absence. She spread her limbs, her hips, across the fat lot of land she’d inherited. Her kill. Her spoils of a war long passed. God’s payment for her keeping quiet, keeping luggage held together with the weight of her body, dried blood in her hair. Now when God says, “Go West,” or when God says, “Go East,” the woman stands still. She takes in boarders, passing through. She rises to meet the next generation of Young Knights headed East, and for them, she is a vision of thick hips and coarse hands in a haze of rooftop hay.
She knows what it is. What they need. That they’re thirsty. She’s boiling two puddings in a cheesecloth over fire, but she only keeps one mattress.
Genevieve Murdick is a comedian out of Mobile, Alabama. Her work appears in Heavy Feather Review and 433 and her novella, Nice Evening Problems (Chacha Murdick), is available on Amazon. Murdick is also the managing editor for DIRTBAG. Follow her on Instagram @realcitycomedy.
Image: lifeweavings.com
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Heavy Feather Review 