The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  By the end of summer, people were glancing sideways at one another, trying to figure out whose bad behavior was jinxing the weather. She heard the boys whispering jokes behind the stables. Their blasphemy was too boring to tattle on. Neighbor farmers stopped by to trade rain cures, tweak this prayer or that, but this was no better than tossing bones in the air and hoping they’d all land on end. The rituals weren’t working, or else the rabble of Rome—two miles to the west—was to blame. Her mother said fear was an opportunity for faith. A few itinerant men from the colonies were crossing the countryside, and one had news of a deity that her father took a shine to—he’d always been suspicious of Mithras, the soldiers’ god, the bull-slayer. The man was asked to stay.

  He was her father’s age, with a short streaked beard and ears that folded down from on top, like he was a giant listening for tiny people below. Eyes so dark they’d lost their pupils, which made him seem very kind and willing to hear whatever stories one wanted to share. Prisca had no shortage of stories. He’d sit, droopy ears flopped her way, rubbing the fringe of his cushion until her father shouted at her to leave the teacher alone. The man would give a slow wink and follow her father back into a dark room of the house where little girls were not to go. He knew by now about Crispus, and she thought he approved.

  “When I breathe, my chest gets sharp and hot, like I’ve vomited all inside my heart.”

  “That sounds very truthful,” he said.

  Her mother’s bath had a bright sheet of hammered bronze in which bodies looked loose and liquid. Prisca stood before it, flexing her arm this way and that, pointing her toe so her leg would take on a shape other than columnar. If she twisted her torso and kept her leg straight out, a dip occurred between the plump of her thigh and the slight swell of her calf—this underside of her knee, at such an angle, seemed to her supremely feminine. She hadn’t bathed that day; they were saving the house water for cooking. Her skin was pale around her middle, brownish along her arms and legs, the tan making the hairs there golden. Freckles across her shoulders, a constellation of moles around her chest, one here, one there, each a soft bump to be fiddled with in boredom. Her hip bones jutted out like rock promontories—she skimmed her thumb across them—but they didn’t lend her hips any of the roundness that older women had. She didn’t know what they put over their pelvis bones to hide them, to make them seem like places a man or child would want to rest his head. She saw lots of her own bones in the mirror. If a woman were a sponge, and were thoroughly wrung out, you’d get Prisca. Her mother said she’d fill out, so she kept eating—ate ravenously—and waited for the lamb and artichokes and thick slices of bread to pad the empty spaces around her joints. She was only twelve and had plenty of time.

  Her mother had the stomachaches—Prisca imagined this happened when the dinner snails weren’t dead yet; they slid down the throat with no trouble, for they were afraid and being very still, but when they got to the round room of the belly and sat for a moment, they began inching out again, exploring the puckered pink walls and feeling around for their kin (Snailus, is that you?). So the house was quiet—ancient Anna was hovering over Mother with a washrag and Servius was riding and the spindle had snapped. She could hardly be expected to fix it in this heat. Prisca hid the pieces under a bench and wandered through the peristyle back to her father’s study. His head lolled against the chair, and a book unrolled over his lap, rising and falling like a bob in the water. She climbed onto his table and picked across his pages, catlike, not rustling a sheet, and sat down among them to wait.

  Her father’s face up close: the pores on his cheeks dark with cut hairs. The hairs from his ears unmanaged, spronging. She had a strong desire to deflate his cheeks. From this angle, he had no neck, his chin pillowed on his chest. When she was smaller, she could crawl onto his lap without disturbing his sleep and bounce her ear softly against his belly, listening for her own echo. It made more sense that she’d come from his ample womb.

  “Papa,” she said, still crouched on the desk.

  His face flinched. She tried to imagine the plans he was making with his new companion, the bearded man, to save the crops. She had never been a member of a club.

  “Papa.”

  Below his stomach were gathered his fingers, swollen and knuckleless. They sometimes seemed to be tickling each other, like he was dreaming of picking blackberries. She was almost certain he loved her when she was younger and was nearly undifferentiated from her brother. He’d take them both to the coast to watch the ships skate in. But once she’d asked a girly thing, or had gotten tired too soon, and the trips had continued without her. Now her father said, “Ask your mother,” even when he knew the answer.

  “Papa.” She threw a feather at his head. It lilted up and swung in tired arcs down to his knees, where it rested until a strong snort from him blew it off.

  He had last been proud of her when she’d made a joke in Greek; she didn’t tell him she’d learned it from her brother. Anna said men have their own world and it’s half-formed, but to Prisca it seemed that was where things of consequence happened.

  If she called any louder, he would wake and his face would fold into a frown and his eyes for a moment would blink too fast and then he would recognize her and flap his hands and say something like “no child of mine” and she’d be off the desk and out, papers scurrying behind her like leaves, his fat shape rising with the sigh that old people use to tell themselves it’s not their fault they’re tired.

  So she climbed down on padded paws and let the tender balls of her feet carry her in hushes across the tile floor and out into the hot droning of the day. There was no one to wonder what she was thinking.

  The nights started to turn, and still no rain. The sacrifices had dried up like the streams. Prisca was in the kitchen with Anna, desperately bored, a fish in one hand and a knife in the other. The flesh was splayed open, and beneath the glossy muscle were a hundred fine bones, each of which could claw at her parents’ throats if she didn’t catch them all. Looking inside a fish made you believe there was surely water enough in this world. It had come from Ostia, by the beach her father promised to take her to again. When Anna wasn’t looking, she draped the carcass over her hand and put a thumb through the mouth and pretended to be a vengeful worm puppeteer. When Anna was looking, she stopped and practiced her whistling.

  “Get out,” the cook finally said. “Go find a devil your own age.”

  Crispus was alone in the atrium, sitting by the pool, dry now. Her mouth blew out a bird call, but he didn’t stir. Head in hands, elbows on knees. Toes fiddling in their sandals. He seemed to be working out a math problem, or whatever boys thought about.

  “Prisca,” he said when she snuck up beside him—surprise, not pleasure—and her heart did a jig around her chest.

  “I have twenty-seven marbles now,” she said, “and the skull of a frog I found by the pond while I was practicing my jumps.”

  “Jumps don’t need practice.”

  “I expect that’s why mine are so good.”

  “Have you seen Servius?”

  His feet were dark with sun and light with dust. She had so many questions about how his body worked, what made it so superior, why he had all the same features as her brother with none of the grossness. She reached out and pinched his arm.

  “Damn it, Prisca, you’re hard to be nice to.” He stood and spit.

  “I’m not the one mooning in the courtyard, asking stupid questions, like a lost dumb dog.”

  He sighed his older-person sigh, and she was left alone by the pool with the dark spot of his saliva on the tiles glistening up at her like a wink. She refrained from touching it. She wanted to dunk Crispus’s head in the pond and throw a dead fish at him—just her, just the two of them, doing boy things without any other boys. She looked for signs of this communion in her own parents’ marriage, in vain.

  “We went through this with Sabazius.”

  “And that drought broke.”

  “Not til
l half the sheep had died and Anna lost her grandchild and you came back to Isis,” her mother said to her father. “Your sense of causation is daft.”

  “It isn’t about sense.”

  The dry air lifted their voices up to her windowsill. She was supposed to be sleeping; by midafternoon, no one in the house wanted to deal with her. Her mother carried a pile of linens in her arms. Anna had one of her headaches, so her mother would scrub them with dust—a dry wash. Her father was back from the fields, mulling an early harvest. The wheat wouldn’t fatten, but half-ripe wheat would make their stomachs turn. The gods didn’t make the daily choices.

  “You don’t think your fickleness stirs up trouble?”

  “You’ve got your hands over your ears,” he said. But her hands were holding up his laundry. “If you’d listen to him. It’s not just life now, but life forever. The rain is a small thing.”

  “Tell your children. By winter we’ll have nothing.”

  Prisca draped her arms over the sill and waited to feel some kiss of moisture from the sky. After thousands of years, people still couldn’t figure out who pulled the strings. The mystery religions—Mithras, Cybele, Sabazius—held hands with the state’s gods, but famine still came in cycles. War stalked both the believers and the barbarians. Nothing on this dull farm had ever changed. But no one asked her opinion.

  “This is different,” her father said, his voice low now. “Christ isn’t one of the mysteries.”

  Their panic floated up to her and tasted salty. Her heart was used to going double time.

  In the last dark before morning sometimes she’d wake with a start, imagining it was noon and the sun had died and no one had come to tell her the world was ending. The terror was cold and kept her from falling back asleep, even after she’d put her head out the window and seen how the dew was still on the grass and a single bird was whistling its thin dawn song. So she’d slip through the rooms, across the quiet atrium, past her parents’ bedroom, where their grown-up shapes looked overlarge and strange, out to the pasture and down to the barn, her feet following the worn patches left by hooves. Foot, hoof, foot, hoof; she pranced.

  But on this morning, only one body was in her parents’ bed, and in the stables a man was kneeling amid the animals. She slipped around the door, casting the briefest shadow across the bent shape, like the low sun had blinked. He didn’t stir. His mouth shifted, pattering, but she couldn’t tell what sounds he was trying to make. She sat quietly in the corner by the hay trough and rolled a piece of straw between her fingers. She closed her eyes and let her lips begin to move. Hear me, gods. Give us rain and let Crispus see me win a game of dice. Send Servius a plague of boils. Don’t take away our food just as I’m so hungry for it. When she opened her eyes, her father was looking at her.

  “Were you speaking to Christ?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, because yes was always the easiest answer.

  “You’ve heard our stories. He’s a man, Prisca. He suffered the way we do, and understands.”

  “Understands what?”

  “I can see in your eyes, it’s the children among us who have the most faith.”

  She reached a hand up to her cheek. If there was a message about religion on her face, what did it say? And who was reading it? [Only the blind look for signs in others; don’t pay attention to him. When he’s dying from overdrink in twelve years, he’ll be back to begging Mithras to save his liver. But those cirrhotic scars are my scratches.]

  “He asks for love, not a bull’s head on an altar. He doesn’t tell us to hide in caves but to share his word—he doesn’t believe in secrets. Don’t you want your god without secrets?”

  Love didn’t sound very powerful to her. It was a loose kind of tie, easily said, easily broken. She wasn’t used to his eyes on her; she worried she wasn’t clean enough.

  “Where’s Christ now?” she asked.

  “In heaven, with his father.”

  “They get along?”

  In the growing morning through the warm smell of horse fur, she watched her father stride back to the house from his hiding place, locusts jumping from the grass, and wished she had any feeling at all other than self-pity. Christ, she said to herself, and imagined a boy’s face, but better.

  The pig, who’d been fattening for months on table scraps, had also been digging a secret tunnel under the western corner of the fence—or had he been gnawing away at the posts, the greedy porker—and on the day scheduled for his ritual throat-slitting, which came early because there were no more scraps, he broke free and went squealing down the hill toward Rome, his pink legs scattering. The guests peeled after him: the men ran to form a line by the road to head him off, and the children followed with toy arrows, gleeful at the prospect of battle. The women stayed behind and sharpened the knives.

  Prisca had named him Suspiro, because he was a hog, sus, but also because he had a way of sighing when she’d hold a carrot out and then take it away before his snout could reach. “Wait!” she said. “He got out fair!”

  Her mother carried a basket of wood to the outdoor altar, where garlands of parched laurel made the whole thing look innocent.

  “Ceres let it happen! The gods don’t allow accidents—that’s what you say, isn’t it? Mother!” Everyone walked faster than Prisca.

  “Slow down or you’ll get cramps,” her mother said without turning around.

  At the altar, they had a clear view down the hill; Suspiro was dashing in circles, feinting toward the road then making a run at the woods, where a crowd of boys chased him back with pinecones. She could see his tired ears bouncing. Her mother built the wooden pyre that would soon be set alight, and adjusted the spit higher so the meat wouldn’t burn.

  “And what if I say I won’t eat him? No wonder Ceres won’t send us rain, if we keep giving her pigs and goats and then eating them ourselves.”

  Her mother started back to the house with the empty basket under her arm. A streak of dirt from the wood made a bruise across her robe.

  “Please stop them, Mother, I mean it.”

  “Did you shell the beans already?”

  “You’re not listening.”

  “I’ll listen when you have something worthwhile to say.”

  Prisca kicked a spray of raw dust at her mother, red dust that floated up in a cloud and landed on nothing, and she ran past the house to where the men had begun their corral. Her brother had laid a hand on Suspiro’s tail, but came away with only hairs.

  She called for him to stop, and then lunged into his side, pushing him to the ground.

  “Get off!” he yelled, jabbing her in the abdomen, which these days was always sore.

  “Let him go!”

  He stood and loped off to the other boys. She ran toward the pig, all paunched and sweating, its tongue shaking with every charge, and the men called at her to stop, she was messing up whatever plan they’d made, but she said “You stop!” and dove for Suspiro, who wasn’t a pet at all—she wasn’t sentimental—but another unwelcome almost-citizen on this stodgy old farm who no one listened to, no one minded, and in her dive she caught a porky hind leg, its hoof waxy and sharp, and Suspiro collapsed in a heap of manic relief, and the men ran for her, and when the pig was swaddled up and bound foot to foot, the crowd marched back up the hill victorious, leaving her muddy and empty-armed in the field. She’d lunged for the wrong thing.

  At dinner, her father told stories from a war he’d never fought in, and the bearded man fasted, and the guests sucked meat from the bones with a zeal that felt filthy, and all the wine was poured for Ceres, may she ever listen out for her daughter and bring her home.

  “Would you care for a trip to Rome?”

  Prisca’s fingers stopped; she let drop the spindle. The day had already gone on too long and she was beginning to think her adolescence was a circle from which, given her limited tools, she wouldn’t be able to escape. The whole house was a tomb. “I have to finish this,” she said.

  The bearded man picked up
the spindle and rewrapped the thread. “Your father thought you might enjoy a change of scenery. If you wouldn’t like to come, I’ll leave you in peace.” Her father.

  The stones on the road to town were large as platters, and Prisca hopped among them, a game of chance. If I don’t step on a single joint . . . The trample of mules and the trok-trok of carriage wheels announced a caravan, carts laden with trunks and leather bags, and a litter carried by eight men, its gauzy curtains wafting like smoke. Prisca kept her head down and her eyes up, the way she did during prayer. The woman looked like Annia Regilla, who lived nearby and was killed when Prisca was seven for being too pretty and playing with boys—that’s what her mother said. Half-reclined on pillows, she seemed to be reading a book; Prisca stared at the pursed mouth and the hand resting like a weak bug on the scroll and the dawn-yellow curls that were piled and braided and twisted until it would be impossible to find the beginning, unless you were the woman’s slave and had wrapped the coils with your own tired fingers. She imagined sticking her dirty thumb deep into the mountain of hair. Like silk, she thought. Like water.

  Soon the tenements grew taller, louder, the quarrels spilling into the street with clanging buckets and the scattered rush of unwatched children. The air here always smelled burnt, as if the meat had been left on too long. An urchin tumbled in front of them and froze. The dirty girl’s tunic was too short; her legs bent inward like her knees were sharing a secret. She pushed Prisca’s shoulder. “Tag,” she said. “You chase.”

  The stone buildings swallowed up all the sunlight and left the narrow streets claustrophobic and chilly until you came to an open square, where it was spit back at you tenfold: the white heat, the glare that crawled up your chin and into your eyes from below, so there was no way to blink it out. Who wouldn’t love the city’s assault, as trusty as summer? [This summer? The one parching your harvest? This city? Children, in their daily buffeting, don’t know of geomorphic time. There’s nothing a human, upon seeing, won’t change. Get up on your toes and spy the grove-topped mausoleum of Augustus, which will turn to ruins; a garden; a sanctuary for political refugees; a tavern; a ring for bullfights; a stage for fireworks; an auditorium with near-perfect acoustics where Toscanini conducted Wagner in the middle of war; a prop for a pick-wielding Mussolini; ruins. Trusty? Only the seven hills, only the nickel core of Hades, only the helium of heaven.]