Saga ⁓ the island carved in wood: Teide rising from the sea inside a ring of glyphs

Episode 21

Una

The Cebolla sisters' finca, on the terraces above Querencia. Late October, 2041 ⁓ onion-planting season.

Welcome to Nivaria. Slow news from a quiet island. This is Caitlyn Meeks. Thanks for being here.

The errand was onions.

Linnea wrote it on a scrap of seed-packet paper, one word, and handed it over anyway, because a list is a contract and her daughter was thirteen. Two sacks of onion sets ⁓ the little dried starter bulbs you tuck into the ground in autumn, each one a down payment on a whole onion ⁓ from the sisters above the old water channel. In trade, two jars of tomato preserves and a paper twist of chard seed. Say thank you. Come straight home.

"And Saga." Her mother held the door of the jar cupboard the way other people held eye contact. "Do not come home with an animal."

"When have I ever."

"Helvete," said Linnea, which in that kitchen was a complete sentence, and went back to her seedlings.

The path to the sisters' place went up through the laurel forest along the old water channel, stone troughs furred green, the fog doing its slow work overhead, dripping the trees onto the moss one coin at a time. Sirius walked ahead with his tail conducting nothing in particular. It was late October, which on the wet side of the island is not a dying season at all. It is the season the ground wakes up and asks what you've brought it. Everyone with terraces was planting onions that week, and the whole mountain smelled faintly of turned soil and rain that hadn't decided yet.

Saga heard the finca before she saw it. Most farms announce themselves with a dog. This one announced itself with a bell, one bright note high up and to the left, where no bell had any business being, and then a voice, formal as a courtroom, addressing the sky.

"Don Perenquén. Tenga usted la bondad de bajar de la muralla."

Saga came around the last turn of the channel and stopped.

The gate stood open. Beyond it the yard was a working argument between order and joy: onion terraces dropping away neat as sheet music, and between Saga and the terraces a courtyard where everything else in the world was happening at once. Hens conducting a census under a fig tree. Cats on every surface that would hold a cat, and two surfaces that wouldn't. Crates, ladders, a bedsheet on a line with wax melting in a pot beneath it, a wheelbarrow parked with its handles down like a resting animal. And on top of the boundary wall, where the fog began, stood a goat.

He was brown and white and entirely at his ease, three meters up on stones a cat would have thought twice about, bell at his throat, gazing down into the neighboring terrace with the calm of a lawyer who has read the deed and found the loophole. Below him stood a small round woman, built close to the ground the way good bread is, standing with her hands folded at her waist like a procession of one. Her gray hair was pinned up in a bun you could have set a level on, and from her apron pocket peeked a small roll of white lace, which Saga took for a handkerchief and which was not a handkerchief. She was addressing the goat as usted.

"Le espera su desayuno," she said. Your breakfast awaits you. "Le espera también la señorita." The young lady awaits you also.

From somewhere below the wall, in the neighbor's terrace, another bell answered. A different note, lower and sweeter. The goat on the wall closed his eyes as if the sound were weather.

"Hold this," said a voice at Saga's elbow.

A second sister stood on the fourth rung of a ladder against the courtyard wall, wire in her teeth, and she was not looking at Saga, and she was already handing her a duck. The duck settled into Saga's arms with the sigh of a professional, tucked her head, and appeared to sleep. This sister was knotted and brown as cordwood, sleeves rolled past the elbow, with a flat carpenter's pencil riding behind one ear ⁓ sharpened, ready, and, as Saga would learn over the course of one wedding, never used ⁓ and her boots did not match, one black, one brown, because pairs wear out at different speeds and Angustias was not sentimental about pairs. She went back up the ladder and back to the wire, and as she worked she spoke, very softly, to no one.

"She ties the wire. The wire does not want to be tied." A pause, a grunt, a twist. "She persuades it. The crowd is silent."

There was no crowd. There was Saga, a duck, a dog, eleven cats, and the fog. Saga looked at Sirius. Sirius looked back with the expression he kept for churches and thunderstorms, and sat down, carefully, in the exact center of everything.

"Buena fog," Saga tried. "I'm here for the onions. Two sacks. My mother sent ⁓ "

"After the wedding," said the woman on the ladder, to the wire.

"The ⁓ sorry. The what?"

A third sister was standing next to her. Saga would have sworn on the notebook in her pocket that a moment ago that stretch of courtyard held nothing but a wheelbarrow. The third sister was long and gray and quiet as unlit candles, and she wore a man's waistcoat with a great many small pockets, and the pockets were not still ⁓ one ticked, one rustled, and one, high on the left, appeared to be asleep. She was barefoot in October, and her feet were clean, which the mud of that courtyard should not have allowed and had clearly learned not to argue about. She looked at Saga with great kindness, the way you look at something you have decided to keep.

"You'll sign something today," she said, and wandered away toward the bedsheet.

Saga stood very still, holding a duck, while her whole chest lit up like a market at dusk. She had questions the way the fig tree had figs. She got as far as opening her mouth.

A bell rang at the gate. Not a goat bell. A hand bell, rung with intent, the way you ring when you have rung before.

The woman who came through the gate was small and upright and pushing an empty wheelbarrow, and she pushed it the way you push a thing you are tired of pushing. She wore black, the serious kind, and a straw hat, the serious kind, and she parked the wheelbarrow in front of the round sister with the finality of an ambassador presenting papers.

"Remedios," she said. "It is Tuesday."

"Doña Fefa," said Remedios, warmly. "So it is."

"On Sunday he ate one sock from every pair on my line. One. From each. I am an old woman with nine cold feet." Doña Fefa's chin indicated the wall, the goat, the fog, the general structure of the universe. "On Monday he ate the labels off my conservas. Every label. Fifty-one jars, Remedios, and no two alike, and now every breakfast until spring is a surprise. I am seventy-eight. I do not want surprises. I want jam I can see coming."

The goat on the wall, hearing himself discussed, opened his eyes and gently, luxuriously, stretched. The bell below the wall rang again, twice, hopeful.

Remedios reached into her apron pocket, brought out the small roll of white lace, shook it into a collar, and pinned it at her throat. Doña Fefa stopped talking. Even the goat on the wall stood a little straighter.

"There is only one solution," said Remedios, "and you know it."

"A taller wall."

"Una boda."

Saga noticed the word the way you notice a silver spoon in a drawer of wooden ones. Everyone on the mountain said e. E mesa, e gatos, e boda. It was just the word, the way rain was just rain. But Remedios said una and the word came out old and polished, like a coin kept forty years in the same pocket, and Doña Fefa did not laugh at it, and that told Saga more than the wall did.

"A wedding," said Doña Fefa. Her voice did several things at once, and none of them was no.

"He comes over the wall every day," said Remedios. "You bring him back every day. The wheelbarrow is tired. You are tired. He is not tired, and she is not tired, and between them they have more patience than the rest of this mountain put together. You cannot fence that, Fefa. You can only make it official."

"And my socks?"

"Wedding present."

Doña Fefa stood for a while with her hands folded on the wheelbarrow handles. Below the wall, the sweeter bell rang once, softly, the way you ring when you're not asking for anything, just saying you're there.

"The almendero flowers in February," she said at last, which is how some people say yes.

"This afternoon," said Remedios, which is how the sisters said everything.

After that the courtyard picked Saga up like a current. Nobody assigned her anything. Things simply arrived in her hands and stayed until other hands took them: a bowl of melted wax, one end of the bedsheet, a hen, a hammer, the duck again. The sisters moved through the chaos without one collision, and it took Saga half an hour of watching to see the trick of it, which was that there was no trick. When Angustias poured, Remedios's cup was already under the spout. When Milagros reached, the scissors were already traveling toward her hand. They never asked. They never looked. It was less like three women working and more like one woman who happened to be standing in three places.

"Who's the oldest?" Saga asked, because her whole life was asking.

All three sisters pointed, without looking up, each at another. The pointing made a perfect circle. Saga got out the notebook and wrote that down.

The wedding was built out of the farm the way a song is built out of a room. Angustias took Saga up to the top terrace, mismatched boots taking the steps two at a time, to where the onion greens stood in rows, and they cut armfuls and braided them into an arch over a frame of cane, weaving in fig leaves, tagasaste, a rope of carob pods that clacked like soft castanets.

"No wire," said Angustias, on her own side of the arch. "No string. Nothing that isn't food."

"Why not?"

"The guests eat the venue."

She said it the way you say the floor is swept. Saga looked at the arch, gorgeous and green and edible to the last leaf, and understood that she was attending a wedding with a countdown, and got so happy she had to sit down on a crate for a minute.

The braiding took the middle of the day, and the middle of the day slowed down for it. Onion greens smell sharp when you cut them and sweet when you bruise them, and by the second armful Saga's hands smelled like both at once, green and wet and alive, with the wax coming warm off Milagros's thread and the fog moving through the terraces below in no hurry at all. Sirius lay across the path with his tongue out. A cat slept in the finished end of the arch. Nobody talked for a while, and the mountain filled the quiet with dripping laurel and the two bells, above the wall and below it, keeping their distance like the last two dancers before the music starts.

"The duck will object," said Milagros, waxing her thread.

Saga's pencil stopped. "Object to what?"

But Milagros only smiled at the thread, and Saga turned to a clean page, wrote PREDICTIONS at the top, and under it the duck will object, and drew a box beside it, ready to be ticked. She was constitutionally incapable of leaving a mystery alone, and this house was mysteries the way a hive is bees, and she had made a decision that was going to shape her whole afternoon: she would stop asking why and start keeping score.

Remedios found her there with the certificate.

It was brown paper, cut square with what appeared to be pinking shears, ruled in berry ink with lines pressed straight using the handle of a spoon. At the top, in handwriting with actual serifs: ACTA DE MATRIMONIO.

"You are Saga Reyes," said Remedios.

"Yes."

"The one in the book. The last baby in the registry, down in the city. Footprints taken. Papers filed."

"That's what they tell me."

"Then you are the most official person on this mountain," said Remedios, with the satisfaction of a woman slotting the last jar into a crate, "and you will be our testigo. The witness signs. The law likes a witness who exists."

Saga looked at the line marked TESTIGO, and then at her own feet, which had been on file with a government that no longer had a filing cabinet since before she could walk, and felt her footprints become, for the first time in her life, load-bearing.

"You'll sign something today," she said.

"Milagros mentioned it," said Remedios, mildly. "Tea first. Then we dress the bride."

The tea came out in cups that matched nothing, and Remedios handed Saga hers and said "una taza," unhurried, unexplained, the coin passing through the pocket again. Saga drank her tea and watched the fog and privately, in the notebook of her chest, started a page for that word too.

The bride arrived at four, through the gate, on a rope, escorted by Doña Fefa in the same serious black but a different hat, and Saga understood the whole affair better the moment she saw her. Bienmesabe was small and cream-colored and had eyelashes wasted on a goat, and she came up the courtyard with the unbothered sway of a creature who has never once been refused anything, trailed at a respectful distance by the sweeter bell. On the wall above, Perenquén stood up so fast he dropped a mouthful of whatever he was not supposed to be eating.

"She's named for the dessert," said Doña Fefa, before anyone asked. "Almonds and honey. I name the sweet ones after desserts." A pause, while she failed to not look proud. "It worked too well on this one."

Milagros dressed the bride, which is to say she sat in front of her weaving onion flowers into a crown, and the bride tried to eat the crown, and this was not a problem but a fitting. The thread came already waxed off a spool in one waistcoat pocket; a different pocket offered up something small that squeaked, and was gently declined. Milagros simply wove at the speed of eating, a little faster than jaws, a little slower than greed, and what survived the fitting was, by definition, the crown. It sat between Bienmesabe's ears like snow that had chosen her.

Angustias brought out the bells.

She had taken them off both goats, which required diplomacy on one side of the wall and a ladder on the other, and she polished them with wood ash until they came up the color of weak sunlight. A goat bell rings one note, its own, all its life ⁓ that is the entire point of a goat bell, so that a farmer standing in fog can tell her animals apart with her eyes shut ⁓ and now Angustias struck each bell with a knuckle and held it to her ear like an egg, naming it.

The groom's: "Fa," she said.

The bride's: "Mi," said Remedios, passing with a tablecloth.

"Both," said Milagros, from inside the crown, which was not an answer to anything anyone had asked.

Angustias struck the two bells together. Both. Fa and mi live one step apart, too close to make a tidy chord and too fond to make a quarrel, and the two notes leaned into each other and shivered, the way the sisters poured tea, and something in Saga's chest did the thing the bells did. She checked her notebook to see whether she had a page for it. She did not. Some things you just have to stand there and be thirteen in front of.

Then Angustias buckled each bell back onto its own goat, for the last afternoon that would ever be true.

The jobs went out at five. The hens were seated on the wall in a row, on grain, which is how you seat hens. The cats were given no job, in recognition of how that always goes, and arranged themselves in the fig tree like ornaments with owners. The duck received a sash of braided onion green and a position in the wedding party that nobody defined, which may have been the mistake, looking back. And Remedios crossed the courtyard to where Sirius sat, gravely observing everything, and addressed him in the register she kept for animals and no one else.

"Don Sirius. Usted es el padrino."

Sirius stood up. Saga watched her dog, who had been solemn since the day he wandered out of nowhere and appointed himself to her childhood, receive the office of best man and grow one size more solemn to hold it. He walked to the foot of the wall, sat beside the groom's ladder, and assumed his post with his tongue in and everything.

"His job," said Remedios to Saga, in the register she kept for people, "is the arch. The groom will try to eat it before the vows. The padrino delays this. Nothing stops it. We do not stop appetite here. We schedule it."

At six Doña Fefa went home and came back with the wheelbarrow, and this time it was not empty. It held all fifty-one jars, the whole blind winter of them, packed in straw like an orphanage of glass, and she parked the wheelbarrow by the long table with a look that dared anyone to make it tender.

"Nobody knows what anything is," she announced. "So nobody can complain about what they get. We will find out together. That is the feast."

"Fefa," said Remedios, and said nothing else, and the two old women looked at each other over the jars in a way that had fifty years in it, and Saga wrote nothing down at all, because some things you don't put in the notebook, you just keep.

Milagros drifted past the table, touched one jar with one finger, and looked at the sky, which was clear to the west, going gold, not a cloud in it.

"One minute of rain," she said. "Sideways. Put nothing on the table that melts."

Saga looked at the gold sky. She looked at her PREDICTIONS page. She drew a second box.

The guests came up the channel path at dusk the way news travels on this island, which is to say without anyone having been told and everyone having heard: the Hidalgo cousins' youngest with a drum, two fishers up from the coast road with a crate that clinked, a grandmother Saga knew from market days who claimed she was passing by, on a dead-end path, at dinnertime, in the fog. The courtyard filled with lanterns and elbows. And on the gatepost, ahead of all of them, first without arriving, sat a black cat with a limp Saga knew, washing one paw, keeping the door like it had been invited before the wedding was thought of, or had thought of it.

The fog came up the terraces to see. The lanterns made rooms out of the dark. And at the appointed hour, which was the hour the sisters appointed by starting, Angustias raised the arch.

It stood at the head of the courtyard, green and braided and clacking gently with carob, and it was the most beautiful thing on the mountain, and everyone present understood it was also dinner. Perenquén came down off the wall for it in two frank hops that made a fisherman whistle. Sirius met him at the bottom and leaned, gently, the way a door leans shut, and the groom accepted the escort of his padrino with the good grace of a man who has already worked out where the buffet is.

The drum started. Doña Fefa walked the bride up the middle on her rope, and the crowd did the thing crowds do at weddings whatever the species, which is go soft in the knees all together. Bienmesabe swayed up the courtyard in her onion-flower crown, took her place under the arch, turned to face her groom, and ate her first mouthful of venue.

"Begin," said Angustias, to Remedios, in the voice of a woman starting a stopwatch.

Remedios stepped forward. She wore what she had worn all day, plus the lace collar, repinned straight for the occasion, and she wore the two of them together the way judges wear robes. She addressed the couple as ustedes. She spoke fast, with total dignity, the dignity of a woman outrunning an appetite, and the Castilian came out of her crisp and formal and lit from underneath.

"Don Perenquén. Doña Bienmesabe. We are gathered on this mountain, in this fog, before these hens" ⁓ the hens straightened ⁓ "to do the only sensible thing that was ever done about love, which is to stop arguing with it."

The groom reached the arch. Sirius leaned. The groom got a fig leaf anyway. The commentary from the second row was almost inaudible, a race-caller under her breath: "He takes the low corner. The padrino holds the line. Incredible scenes."

"Don Perenquén," said Remedios, accelerating. "¿Quiere usted a esta cabra? ¿La quiere usted en la niebla y en la calima, con etiquetas y sin etiquetas, sobre la muralla y a través de la puerta?"

The groom, hearing his name, answered with the candor of his kind: he took another bite of the church. The crowd ruled it a yes.

"Doña Bienmesabe. ¿Quiere usted a este cabrón?" A beat, while a fisherman sat down on the ground. "Uso técnico," said Remedios, without turning her head, and the beat closed over. The bride blinked her wasted eyelashes and swallowed a carob pod whole, and the crowd ruled that a yes as well, and some of the crowd needed holding up.

"If any creature present objects," said Remedios, because the law is the law, "let it speak now."

The duck objected.

One quack, clear, carrying, from the middle of the wedding party. The courtyard held its breath. Saga's pencil was already moving, ticking the first box, her whole face a lantern.

"Noted," said Remedios.

The duck objected again.

"Overruled. You are here for the bread." Remedios raised her hand toward Angustias, and her voice went up a register, into the part of the ceremony you keep in your best Spanish. "Los cencerros."

The two old women stepped forward, each to her own animal. And the sky, gold all evening, clear to the west, delivered.

The rain came in off the fog sideways, all at once, one minute of it on the nose, fine and cold and completely horizontal, hissing on the lantern glass, drumming the stretched bedsheet like fingers, beading the bride's crown with silver. Every umbrella in the crowd tilted flat without one word of surprise, the whole courtyard leaning together like grass, and only Saga stood with her face in it, checking the sky against her notebook, ticking the second box, mouthing sideways. Nothing on the table melted. There was nothing on the table that could. The rain stopped like a door closing, and the fog stood back, rinsed, and everything the lanterns touched had come up brighter.

Doña Fefa unbuckled the sweet mi from Bienmesabe's collar and held it in both hands. Remedios unbuckled the bright fa from Perenquén's. Then the two women crossed in front of the arch, traded a small nod in the middle, and each buckled the bell she carried onto the other animal ⁓ his note onto the bride, hers onto the groom ⁓ so that from this night on, anyone standing in fog on that hillside would hear each goat and be told the other one's name. They stepped back. Angustias struck the two bells once, knuckle each.

Fa. Mi. Both.

"Dos casas," said Remedios, into the ringing. She let it fade all the way down before she finished, and when she finished she finished quietly, one word, the old coin set down flat on the table at last.

"Ya no. Una."

Under the arch, or under where the arch was going, Perenquén touched his forehead to Bienmesabe's, and the two goats stood still that way, brow to brow in the lantern light, crown to bell, while the bride's jaw kept working thoughtfully on the last of the venue, and the fog let one gap open over the courtyard, and through it, upward and unexplained as ever, the stars stood in their new arrangements and said nothing about it, and the drum came back in, and that was the wedding.

Remedios unpinned the lace collar, rolled it small, and returned it to her apron pocket, which is how the courtyard knew the law was finished and the party had jurisdiction now.

The feast was fifty-one surprises.

The jars went down the long table and every opening was an event, the lid held up, the crowd calling verdicts by lantern light. Higo. Mora. Mojo, the red kind, no, the very red kind, pass the gofio. A dark one that divided the table bitterly between plum and quince until Doña Fefa tasted it and pronounced it both, and would say nothing further. A jar of small onions in vinegar, which got a standing ovation for reasons of theme. And one jar, opened by the fisherman who had needed to sit down earlier, that proved to contain clear water, entire, sealed, preserved.

"Who preserves water?" he asked the table.

"I did," said Doña Fefa. "It was a good year for it."

Somebody down the table called for a spoon; a waistcoat pocket already had one out.

Saga laughed until the duck left her lap in protest. She got out the notebook and then she put it away, because there are nights when the notebook is the wrong instrument, and she was learning to tell them apart, and that is a whole education in one sentence.

It was deep in the party, with the drum unhurried and the grandmothers dancing the slow way and the married couple asleep on their feet against each other by the wall, that Saga noticed Angustias was missing, and then noticed where to. A lantern at the boundary wall. A ladder, going quietly to pieces under a saw, becoming boards. Three stones out of the wall, lifted like teeth, set down soft in the grass. And once, quickly, the carpenter's pencil came down from behind her ear, drew two short lines on the stone where the hinges would sit, and went back up ⁓ its first marks of the day, and its last. By the time the party noticed, it was done: a gap the height of a goat, and hung in it on two leather hinges cut from one old boot, a small gate made of half a ladder, swinging true.

Angustias tested it twice, called it nothing, said it to no one: "She hangs the gate. The wall agrees. Listen to that." The gate swung. The crowd, which was a real one now, was silent.

In the morning, and every morning after, Perenquén would go through it instead of over, because he was a married man now and walls are for bachelors ⁓ but that was tomorrow's news. Tonight the two goats slept where they stood, one crown between them, two bells silent, and the black cat with the limp came down off the gatepost at last, accepted a piece of fish skin from Milagros like rent collected, and vanished into the fog it had come from.

Saga went home late, with permission and a lantern, two sacks of onion sets on her back and a mystery jar riding on top, Sirius pacing the dark beside her, relieved of office. The laurel forest dripped and breathed. And up behind her on the mountain, far and clear the way sound comes off wet slopes at night, she heard it start: two bells, moving. Not together the way one animal wears two bells. Together the way two animals walk one path. Fa, and mi, and both, wandering down some terrace in the dark, in step, in no hurry, going nowhere except alongside.

She stopped on the path and listened for a long time. The fog moved. The bells moved. Sirius sat on her foot.

Then she got out the notebook, in lantern light, and turned to PREDICTIONS, and under the two ticked boxes she wrote a third line, in her best handwriting, and drew its empty box, and the line said: by spring there will be a kid, and the sisters will call it usted.

Her mother was still up, of course, seedlings on the table, marigold sweater, the lamp low.

"Eleven hours," said Linnea. "For onions."

"There was una boda," said Saga.

Linnea looked at her daughter for a while. Whatever she saw ⁓ the onion smell, the wax on her sleeves, the rain still drying in her hair, the whole lit lantern of her face ⁓ it seemed to be a full report.

"Helvete," she said, fondly, and put the kettle on.

Saga set the sacks down and put the mystery jar in the middle of the table, where it caught the lamp and kept its secret.

"What is it?" said her mother.

"Nobody knows. That's breakfast."

And later, in the loft, with Sirius folded into his croissant and the trapdoor already defeated, Saga lay listening to the island: the drip of the laurels, the far dogs, the quiet under everything that the quiet island keeps. Somewhere up the mountain two bells turned over in their sleep. She was nearly gone when she heard herself say it, to nobody, in the dark, in her own voice, trying the weight of the old coin:

"Una."

It fit.

Some words from tonight, for the curious: