The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  A boy standing in the door of a bakery held up two loaves. “Miss! With raisins!” She looked to her left; the crowd of people had grown thicker, and the bearded man was gone. Above her a banner snapped across the band of blue sky between the apartments. A man was yelling at a woman in the street, and she had one hand pressed against his neck, gently, pleading. Two men in thick robes walked past them with their arms around each other’s waists; one was laughing, but the other stared at the couple and looked as if he might say something. Another man carrying a pile of scrolls caromed through the crowd; he had no time. Someone grabbed her wrist, and she fought free of it.

  “Prisca,” he said, and it was him—she wasn’t lost, only slow. “You’ve got to keep hold of my arm.”

  They were nearing the forum, but her legs were tired and her throat was dry and she wanted to stop where the toys were sold. Through the street sounds—boxes being unloaded and money changing hands and speeches on war—she heard the high, thin thread of song. She squeezed the bearded man’s arm.

  “Slaves,” he said. “Do you want to see?”

  The market was behind the moneylender’s: a widening where three streets converged, room enough for a coffle of men and women fresh from the empire’s edges to be looped together with rope, sheened with oil, offered to passersby. They stood so close together; surely some of them had made friends.

  It was a young woman who was singing, in the back of the phalanx, her head tilted up. She too could’ve been a ghost of Annia Regilla. The words—or were they just sounds—fell over themselves roundly, had soft endings, and an image sprung up of a hilly country, green valleys and colder than Rome, where young women dabbled their feet in streams and plucked heavy golden fruit from vines that climbed the hills like embroidery. The gods said this was all right, the cost of war. Even old Anna had come from somewhere.

  A fully dressed man, with a belly that ballooned over his belt and shaky stick legs, called out prices and waved a pointer across the front line of glossy chests. “Fresh from the north,” he said, “with the courage of wolves. Natural blond hair. Finest of their race.”

  Her own bearded man had approached one of the slaves at the corner of the formation and was trying out different tongues. The slave shook his head, said a few words. The bearded man shook his head.

  “Interested?” The auctioneer sidled up to them, looking tired. His face was stuck with the hungry smile of the salesman. “A discount for two.”

  “They don’t seem to be Gallic.”

  “Gallic, Moesian, they’re subjects of the Empire now. Can tell you everything you want to know of the battles. Stoke a fire in the hearth, settle back for a tale. It’ll impress your guests too.”

  “How do you communicate with them? I’d love to inquire—”

  He held up his pointer, which Prisca now saw had a small hook on one end, like the rod used to guide elephants in parades. “Like to try?” And his laugh was also weary.

  She reached for the bearded man’s hand, but he wouldn’t look at her, was scanning the faces of the slaves. The auctioneer turned to another who’d stopped to look. She heard the bearded man whisper “Khristos? Yehoshua?” But his words were as meaningless as anyone else’s.

  As they moved past the phalanx, Prisca looked back through the crowd of Romans, delicate Greeks, the Moors and their crowns, an Egyptian bargaining with a matron, but the strangeness of the slave’s face was like the afterimage of a bonfire on the inside of her eyes. Sometimes, though it hardly made sense, to be a victim was to be good.

  “You come home empty-handed, it’ll be your empty stomachs.”

  “I’ve never—”

  “No pretending; you left me alone for four days once, went off with Tiberius and a half-dozen rods, and what was in your pouch when you came back?”

  “Oh, that’s—”

  “Lavender.”

  Her father paused, one finger idly in his beard. “Well.”

  “Tied in bundles like you were a schoolgirl,” her mother said. “Food isn’t a game now.”

  Behind her father, Prisca squeezed his waist, eager to be down by the stream where the willows flopped their hair at just the right tilt to obscure all signs of their house, and the neighbors’ houses, and the stretches of overplowed fields, and the white height of Rome. The river carried things away. When she was bluish or mad and the boys were hogging the pond, she’d shuffle through the high grass, put her feelings on the gray water, and watch them whirl off.

  His strides were twice as long, so she skipped to keep up. A light mist the night before had left everyone in a good mood; she tried not to question her luck. She’d saved up a particularly good story about the rabbits in the barn and had almost spent it a few nights ago during a pause in the after-dinner banter, but she was glad she refrained—the visiting shipbuilder then spilled the contents of his stomach and there was much to-do over cleaning him up and pretending nothing had happened. The grasshoppers sprang up in shoots of surprise as her father kicked through the tall weeds, and she reached her hands out idly to grab at them. Locusts in summer, elm seeds in fall, snowflakes in winter. Her hands were never big enough to catch what she wanted. Her father swung a bucket that held a net, and two rods sprouted from his other hand. The hooks were somewhere hidden in his robe, sharp enough for perch and eel, too sharp for girls.

  The river was low and the bank was warm. She dug for worms in the dirt beneath the willow, her fingers wormy themselves, burrowing, pretending to be sightless in the loam. She closed her eyes. The coppery taste, the crunch of the tiny shells that had pulled themselves over from the ocean, walking on their shell feet, the springy give of the topsoil and the slick suck of clay beneath—all this was on her tongue. She dug her nails in deeper, tuned them to listen for the whispers of grubs.

  “Hustle it! You want dinner or no?”

  Her fingers paused. Began scrabbling with intent now. One worm, two worms, a fat black beetle she’d find tasty if she were a fish. She covered the soil again like she was readying it for bed. She wondered if the fish in Ostia were scared of such deep water. Surely the drought couldn’t dry up the sea.

  She knew how to do it, but she preferred to let her father teach her again each time. One stab through the center was good, but better was a second stab, perfect was the third, the worm snaked around its multiple impalements, the marriage of the iron and flesh so secure that a greedy fish couldn’t sunder them. If it wanted the worm, by God, it would have the hook too.

  They staked their rods in the sloping bank, and her father tended the lines while Prisca waded out with the net, the water knee-high, her tunic tucked up in her belt. Her bare feet nudged like turtles over the mucky bottom. Toes sifting through sand and sodden leaves, heels collapsing the fragile air-pocket homes of nematodes and river crabs. Her feet were the boldest parts of her. She swung the net idly through the stream, steering clear of the lines, but the glory was in the hook. A fish caught up in her little net was a lazy one, too dumb to know better, while the perch that fell for the well-threaded worm was a noble foe. Struggle was good; passivity was weak. Except when the opposite was true, as in the case, sometimes, of Jesus, and in the case, all the time, of women.

  But she enjoyed being the net-wielder because she could splash in the water and feel the minnows kissing the fine hairs on her legs. If her father fell asleep, which he often did, she could squat down so slowly, just until the river wet her underclothes, and this was a fine and funny feeling. Prisca, princess of the Tiber, Caesar of the crabs, Christ of the fishhook. She slapped the net down on the water fast, spotting something yellow, but it was only sunlight. Her father was trying to slit grass to whistle through; he sounded wheezy. She tugged one of the lines to make the worm dance and clambered back to shore. In the grass she felt itchy and warm, and the sun drew the water from her legs so quickly they nearly puckered. A handful of gnats circled her face.

  “Maybe all the fish are in school,” she said.

  Her father didn’t laugh.r />
  When one of the threads finally twitched, the pole leaning toward the stream as if to listen, she let out a yelp. Leaping up, she turned to her father, whose silence had matured into sleep. Old sleeping men, their time for adventure was up. She’d seen him pull the rod back slowly, working the line over the stones and past the reeds, easing up and giving play, but she was small-armed and didn’t trust herself with such a distance between her hands and the prize. Instead she grasped the line at the top of the pole—the stretched sheepgut waxy and sharp against her palm—and followed it inch by inch toward the water, thrilled by the throbbing energy in the thin line. She pulled it teasingly toward her, let it slip forward. An invisible living beast was on the other end, linked to the life in her own human hand. She squeezed tight, wondering if she could feel its heart pulse.

  Wading into the water this time felt dangerous. It could be a shark, something with terribly sharp teeth; if it was an eel—which would be a coup, quite tasty—she might not have the nerve to grab its slimy length. Fishing isn’t for girls is what her brother said, a refrain he repeated in so many variations it had become a joke. Food isn’t for girls, her mother would laugh. She slid her hands beneath the water, the line twangy, her fingers becoming vague and blurred the closer they got to the hook. Her hands were in Neptune’s province now, and a nymph would have every right to tug her down, to drown her. She glanced back at the shore. The water wasn’t deep; she was already in the middle of the river, and it was only up to her waist. Brave girls didn’t shake quite so much. She began to pull now, impatient. Whoever was on the other end was also a brave girl. One hard jerk and Prisca nearly lost the line, slipping backward on a pile of muck-slick pebbles.

  “Give it up, fish,” she whispered.

  Hand over hand, she yanked it in. She would not be fooled. She hadn’t been given breakfast. The fishy shape grew clearer as it came closer: it wasn’t the small carp she’d hoped for but the long and slithering eel she wasn’t sure she could touch, its tail disappearing in the depths around her feet. She danced backward. It gave a mighty flick and wrenched at her underwater hands, and she tightened her grip and said again, mad now, “Give it up!” She jerked up on the line and pulled it sharply sideways, keeping the eel at a distance, trying to daze it as she hop-skipped across the squishy river bottom back to the bank. It flipped; she twisted. It tried to dive deep; she heaved it up with all the strength in her twelve-year-old muscles. Her hands now red and sore, the wax on the gut line peeling off. She was desperate to call out to her father; she burned with pride at her own silence. It was entirely predictable that he’d sleep through the din of such a mortal splashing fight.

  She reached the bank and scrabbled up it with a single combined fist—two hands wrapped irrevocably around the line—and monkeyish bare feet and a fat river eel like a tail flopping madly behind her, the hook just protruding from its frowning mouth. She pulled it inland, farther than necessary, to the base of the willow, where no amount of thrashing could carry it back to water again. She tied the line to the trunk and searched out a stone and held it over the eel’s head with a painfully beating heart—her heart so loud she wondered whether that would wake her father. Its eye still wet and rolling. Alive, alive. She wasn’t squeamish about death—she’d helped her mother countless times catch chickens, but that was part of an ongoing system she’d merely wandered into. (May Suspiro rest in peace.) This was a live thing, living wildly in the wild, and she had stolen it and now was going to take its living life away. Killing isn’t for girls.

  She knelt down and raised the rock above her head and closed her eyes and brought it down hard on the head of the eel, which—because she’d closed her eyes—had flopped to the side, so the stone landed a glancing blow on its neck, and a shoot of red fish blood spurted on her bare knee. She worked so hard at not screaming that her eyes watered and tears began to fall down her cheeks. The hook was more visible now, its iron rod like a second spine buried in the eel’s throat. She kept her eyes open this time, and the rock hit where it should, just above the eye, the brain now sandwiched between earth and stone, its intricacies flattened. Blood covered the eye like a cataract.

  Prisca was breathing hard, her heart still fast, her throat catching on every inhale. She wiped the tears off her face. She wouldn’t let go of the rock, wet now with her own scared sweat and the fishy musk of river water and blood. Once the final flops had calmed, she leaned closer, gingerly brushing a finger against its scales. She moved to the mouth, pushing her pinky in to open it wider, to feel along the tiny teeth and the slick roof, not so different from her own. The hook felt horrible there. Wrapped in a dead worm, caught in a dead mouth, cold iron. She pulled it out barb first, easing it from the gills, the holes it left disappearing as the eel seemed to heal itself. The worm she scrubbed off on the grass. She shifted back a few inches, scrubbed it on new grass, and repeated this until most of the grass around her had a slight sheen of gore but the hook was clean, and as soon as it was clean, she recognized it as human again. A blacksmith had made it—maybe even her father; he used to dabble at the forge—and the imperfect prick of the barb called to mind the hands that hammered it. She felt a horror of guilt and a small, painful seed of inevitability. What else could I have done? [The child’s first sin. Oh, baby, don’t you work too hard to redeem it.]

  She pocketed the hook, woke her father, refused that night to eat the eel.

  A week passed of leaner meals, too much sun and sitting, the shuttle in one hand, the other hand testing the edge of the fishhook, idly, destructively, its hidden fishy smell making her robes seem somehow dangerous. Servius and his tutor were practicing archery in the courtyard, and each time the arrow struck the hay bale, Prisca’s intestines gave a shiver. She felt their coil, same as the goats’ innards used for guessing the harvest. Her mother’s voice made no sense. The linen they were weaving was stupid; no one needed more linen. The brown bird that used to duck in the window and prance on the wardrobe while they spun would not come inside now, but sat on a poplar branch with its head cocked, finding the whole scene distasteful.

  Prisca’s limbs were filled with ants. Anything would be better than this deadly quiet, her flat bottom stuck to a hot chair, her mother humming that atonal tune. She looked down at her tapping knees. Funny flesh. Her stomach after dinner a gurgle machine, her shins aching after she tried to catch up with her sprinting brother. The sour smell of her toes, the horsey smell of her hair, the way she could sometimes feel her heart beating in the strangest places, like in a vein on her calf or a coin-sized spot behind her ear or her left eyelid—pulse, pulse. Where was the heart stationed, and why did it migrate? Why couldn’t she, like her brother, lift a sheep? [Because I moved your arm muscles into your head and your heart, so you might lift the world instead. A hundred and fifty pounds versus 1.3 x 1025 pounds.] She was unconvinced that the world held mysteries without explanation.

  On the night before the first almond harvest, ignoring her mother’s command (“Prisca, the dishes!”), she shadowed her father and the bearded man and several of their guests after supper, the men reeling stomach-heavy toward the stables. With company they dined well, but the meat wouldn’t last through the fall. She stayed a hundred yards back, padding like a dog. The barn, its cracks shining gold from the lanterns, looked painted. Through a knothole in the boards, she saw them once again kneel, pray. When she pushed into the door, her small weight displacing all that wood chopped down by men, she saw their faces turn to her like sunflowers.

  “I want to listen,” she said, closing the door behind her.

  The men exchanged glances, but her father didn’t say no fast enough, so she sat down behind them, cross-legged, back as straight as an idle fishing pole.

  “Go on,” she said.

  Her father shifted his knees beneath him—how uncomfortable he must be—and compulsively rearranged the folds of his tunic. Jesus, she thought, nodding. Tell me about this man so great that all the nymphs and satyrs and lares and numina and Jup
iter himself crumpled before his might.

  “Sit quiet while I tell you a story,” her father said.

  The details rang the bells of wonder already waiting in her head. A woman impregnated by a god. A young man’s strength tested by the wicked. Souls brought back intact from Hades. A gloriously gory end. And then mortals with their heads bowed, asking for things, waiting for redemption. She was used to asking for things, for waiting indefinitely for nothing.

  “This is not a god for the powerful,” her father added, “but for the weak.”

  Prisca understood. This god turned the downtrodden into despots. Gave swords to those stuck behind the plow all day. Fed five thousand people with two fishes. Yes, listened first to the children, and then to the sparrows.

  “Believers are being hunted. This is why we practice in darkness, you understand?” Her father’s hands gestured toward her, with more intention—more attention—than Prisca was accustomed to. He wanted her to understand. All she had to do was listen. Say yes.

  “I thought this god wasn’t a secret.”

  “He asks us to be patient.”

  “Did he ask, or did you just decide?”

  Her father’s left eye gave a twitch. “Our faith depends now on silence. Tell me you understand.”

  Their faith, or their lives? [Even a child can point to a grown man’s cowardice. Don’t take your finger off his wound.]

  He returned to sugar words, placing a hand on her sandal. “When we die, he blesses us with life that goes on forever. It’s our gift for believing, our reward.”