Body and Bread

by Nan Cuba

  Sam had overheard some girls at a football game giggling about Terezie. Apparently, her mother picked her up afternoons, kept her home on weekends. She was kept on a short leash. Except, she got a little on the side. According to the talk at school, Terezie was sneaking out with the band teacher.

  “I know your sister,” Sam said, his hands sliding into his back pockets, respectful. “Serious.”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Smart, though.”

  Cyril shrugged then shaded his eyes.

  “I been meaning to ask,” Sam said, picking up what looked like a piece of granite, specks flickering, “what’d happen if some guy called her? She go out?” He whipped the rock toward the tangled field of hidden animals.

  “Depends on who’s calling.”

  Sam wondered what that meant but wouldn’t ask. Not yet.

  As Cyril ambled toward the fence, his hat’s weave cast striped shadows across his shoulder. Climbing, he called, “Over here.”

  Sam followed until they reached a stand of trees and brush.

  “Remember this?”

  Sam didn’t.

  “Last summer. The owl. This is where he flew.”

  Was Sam supposed to remember something from a year ago? “Oak?”

  Cyril’s eyes kept steady, a silent note.

  “The tree,” Sam said irritably, “here. Looks like oak.”

  Cyril pointed, “Wild primrose. My father makes pipes out of the briar roots.”

  “No way. What’s that?”

  “Hackberry,” Cyril said, pointing, “mesquite, wild plum, and beodarck; over there, buffle, blue stem, and coastal bermuda.”

  Sam tried to memorize the names, noting the leaf and stem shapes, the textures, heights of grasses. The rotting stumps and broken limbs smelled dusty, the wildflowers spicy. He remembered Otis fertilizing with banana peels, splayed like starfish underneath topsoil. Then he spotted a green apple among flickering leaves, noticed seed heads on the grains. His nose itched, dripped.

  “The creek’s dry here, but my father left this place for quail and other animals.” Pushing aside mesquite limbs, he stepped forward.

  They found a spider web four feet wide and nine feet high. A dragonfly and a moth wriggled. The spider, six inches long, black with yellow stripes, crept upward.

  “Wonder where the male is,” Cyril said. “Their sex is really violent.”

  “Yeah?” Sam stepped back. “How?”

  A whistle came from the left. Cyril answered in a duplicated skirl. “A meadowlark. You interested in birds?”

  Sam started to say something funny about peckers, but he couldn’t. Cyril, he knew, got up at five every morning, liked his parents. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.

  “I do imitations on a violin. It’s rough, but…”

  The Cervenka farmhouse smelled strange. The odor came from garlic stalks set in drug store vases—Sam would later learn that Mrs. Cervenka added the cloves to everything from okra to catfish batter—and a pot of orange peels boiling on the stove. The family used garlic and orange water for home remedies— domácí úlevy Cyril later told him—to ensure a strong heart and relieve rheumatism. Sam knew what his mother would think of the air the Cervenkas breathed: unacceptable.

  Cyril walked through the living room, and Sam followed. A sofa had a pillow and a folded army blanket stacked at the far end. Next to a pie safe stood a Victrola with a radio, doilies covering the top of its water-stained cabinet, and “The Czech Melody Hour,” he’d later learn, tuned in most Sunday afternoons. Books on rocks and wildflowers, opera and symphony records, biographies from Truman to Caruso, and children’s novels like Green Mansions, The Sugar Creek Gang series, and Roy Rogers and The Rimrod Renegades crammed an unpainted shelf that extended around the top of the room

  Sam didn’t usually notice furnishings, but when he thought of his home’s chintz and marble, he longed to sprawl in a chair, to look.

  Two paintings hung above the Victrola—bluebirds painted by Cyril, a still life of fruit by Terezie—their unembarrassed sentiment comforting. A tinted photograph of a stocky couple—grandparents, Antonín and Johanna, Cyril said—hung next to a doorway. “Howdy,” he called into the kitchen.

  Terezie stood across the room, slicing cucumbers on a cutting board at the tile counter. She wore a blouse and knee-length slacks. Great ass, Sam thought. The Chambers stove was metal-knob locomotion, a pinnacle of heat. “I brought somebody,” Cyril said to his mother as she lifted a pot’s lid then stuck in her finger.

  “Naww,” she said irritably, glancing at Sam. She replaced the lid and whistled, cradling her hand in her apron. “Just how did that thing got so hot? Tell me that.” Her house shoes, strapped to her feet with rubber bands, slapped linoleum as she crossed to the Formica table. She slumped, sighing, into a metal chair.

  Terezie reached into a cabinet for a bowl, set it down, and scooped in cucumbers, slices plunking.

  “I’m showing him something,” Cyril said.

  “You the oldest one?” his mother asked Sam. He’d met her before, of course, and, along with his family, called her by her first name, Albina, a habit suddenly uncomfortable.

  Cyril walked away as Sam answered, “No, ma’am. I’m second; Kurt came first.” Behind her, Easter, Mother’s Day, and birthday cards papered a wall, with a plastic framed print of “The Last Supper” in the center.

  More of Albina’s questions followed: “You boys, you mow that whole yard?” “Your grandma’s big in some church; that is which one?” “Your father, he grows his own strawberries?” She confused the usual inflections yet enunciated precisely, the locals’ sloppy slurs clipped, distinct.

  “Leave him alone, Ma,” Terezie said as she moved a pitcher and pastry tray in the refrigerator, then added the bowl of cucumbers. “Sam’s got better things to do.” When she closed the door, her blouse tightened across well-developed breasts. “Right?”

  “Hey, Terezie,” Sam said, imagining her—supple, forbidden—cupped in his hand.

  “Sam,” Cyril called, “back here.”

  Sam excused himself and, in a room off the living room, he found a bed with a swirl of sheets and a patchwork quilt. A Louisville Slugger, fielder’s mitt, leather basketball, cork-handled spinning rod, and gray tackle box were spread across a dresser and two window ledges. A bathroom sink stood incongruously next to the open cedar closet. Cyril sat on a padded bench next to an upright piano.

  He made Sam drag a bow across a screeching violin—spruce, carved and glued by his father, Josef—then he played what sounded like an exotic bird insane asylum. Terezie and Albina joined them.

  “We come to hear you boys to play the duet,” Albina said, this time with no discomfort. Exactly Sam’s height, she stared straight at him. “My favorite, ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me.’” She whistled perfectly pitched notes.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Sam said, raising his hands as though blocking a blow, feigning surrender. “I can’t play.”

  “Aw sure, is an easy one,” Albina said, motioning Cyril to let her sit, her fingers then moving over the piano’s middle keys. “Rock of ages…” she sang.

  Terezie handed the boys poppy seed kolaches, their aroma: sugar, yeast. She shrugged, an acknowledgment of her mother’s nudging.

  Cyril set his kolache on top of the piano then worked his bow again, following the odd rhythms of his mother’s playing.

  “You don’t like music?” Albina asked Sam. “Is speech of your heart.”

  “Oh, yes ma’am. I just never learned.”

  “You draw, maybe, work with your hands?”

  “Ma,” Terezie cried, “please.”

  “So what you do at school?”

  “Get in trouble mostly,” Sam said. They talked about his year playing baseball, his dislike of sciences except for chemistry, his interest in Russian—only one semester offered—and Dostoyevsky.

  “He’s smart, Ma,” Terezie said. “Not like the others.” Instead of Chanel No. 5 and face powder, sh
e smelled like grass clippings, cinnamon. Her hair was straight with crimped ends, yeasty from beer rinse. Occasionally her voice squeaked with cynicism. “Všecko má konec—Everything has an end,” she said when Sam described the baseball coach explaining why he couldn’t play anymore. “Ale jitrnice má dva—but a sausage has two,” she added, anchoring curls behind an ear.

  “Mr. Blazek, he could teach you,” Albina said, and for a moment, Sam couldn’t figure why she’d mentioned the band teacher. “He show Terezie good how to play important, Smetana, Dvořák, but also music for singing.” As she guided Terezie onto the bench—”Now, one time round, ‘Clementine,’”—Sam hoped Albina hadn’t been lied to, that his friends had been wrong about Terezie.

  He stumbled over words but sang along, corny songs he somehow knew. After “Clementine” they whined “Fraulein,” and while Cyril’s violin chirped, they remembered two verses of “The Tennessee Waltz.” As Terezie stroked the keys, her fingers nimble, mechanized, her brogan tapping the pedal, she never looked at her hands, but watched for eye contact, head rocking. Her mother sat on one side, and Cyril stood on the other. They swatted their thighs, swaying with the rhythms.

  “Naww,” Albina interrupted, scowling. “Your father, home, and his table, it will be empty.” She waved an arm. “Cyril, quick like králík, the barbecue. Naww.” Her house shoes slapped toward the kitchen, while Cyril ran out the back, the screen door slamming.

  Terezie shrugged, and they laughed. She didn’t object when Sam scooted next to her. She even smiled when he took her hand.

  I know the part about them singing is exactly what happened, because Sam told me. “Music,” he said with a convert’s enthusiasm, “is like that kolache I ate so fast, my lips left skid marks. Sweet, but a lot better if you make it last.” We sang in his car after that, thinking we sounded like Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash. “A regular duet,” he’d say. “Sure beats eating solo.”

  Sam practically moved in with the Cervenkas; their foreignness felt like hands pulling him through a door. He learned how to play dominoes and distill wine; he brought back three baby cottontails, round-eyed bundles with translucent skin. They stayed in a shoebox in his closet and he fed them with an eyedropper, but they lived only two days. His newfound attachment to the family was genuine, particularly his interest in Terezie.

  He tried to get his girlfriend and me together, but I usually found an excuse. The last thing I wanted was to watch Sam with her. Finally he scowled, “What’s your problem?” so I agreed to go. Since our cultural options consisted of movies, the Founders’ Day parade, and the annual Lions Club minstrel, seasonal sports dictated social events; fall Friday nights meant Nugent High football. Sam played sandlot games, but in the high school bleachers, he grew restless. He shouted to friends, peered behind us, between the feet of a scowling couple. “Back off!” he yelled at a commotion under our seats.

  “First down,” the announcer bellowed, and the crowd cheered, cowbells clanging.

  “You heard me,” Sam shouted again. He knelt, bumping a man in front, then shoved his arm between the slats. The tail of his starched shirt came untucked.

  Terezie leaned, searching the scene below, then pulled Sam’s sleeve. “Hey,” she said, “don’t.” When her head shook, crimped curls swished.

  Sam shrugged her off, barking, “She was loud and clear, asshole.”

  The band honked “Everything’s Coming up Roses.” People clapped, whistling, while a player unsnapped his helmet’s chinstrap, trotted off the field.

  “Nice move, Chopin,” Terezie said, her eyes stormy. “Please ruin this game for us. Sarah and I waited all week to watch you rag on those people.” She kicked his leg.

  Who’s Chopin? I thought.

  “You, too, buddy,” Sam yelled, giving whomever it was the finger. “Punk,” he grumbled, pleased. People around us glared, mumbling.

  “C’mon,” Terezie said rising, tugging his hand, her right brogan planted on the seat below. “We’re hungry, right, Sarah?”

  While he drove to Crystal’s Cafe—specialty, chicken-fried steak; clientele, seniors—he and Terezie ignored me in the back seat. “Is that a chip I see on that muscley shoulder?” she said, a brow arched. “Let me take care of that.” Brushing him, she batted her lashes.

  “It wasn’t my fault, George,” Sam said.

  She shook her head, mocking.

  “Really. This girl was trying—”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “The hell you say. She was—”

  “She was hoping her boyfriend would kiss her, until Superstud came to the rescue.” She massaged the back of his neck. “So much evil; so little time.”

  Later over steak and fries, they explained their nicknames. “Chopin didn’t copy anybody,” Terezie said. Sam blew a straw wrapper skidding across the Formica. “He had a special sense of touch,” she added, and Sam’s hand disappeared beneath the table.

  Terezie was George Sand, Chopin’s lover.

  Sam later shared a story that Cyril’s father, Joseph, had told him.

  Josef said that when he was a boy, his father, Papa Antonín, was swarmed while he smoked a hive toward a box he’d built for collecting honey. This image of Papa Antonín—bees attacking in black fits amidst swirls of poisonous clouds, with Papa’s eyes glaring from behind checkered wire—was the one Josef saw whenever he thought of his tatínek. “A god, he was, next to them bees,” Sam said, imitating Josef, “their stings, he don’t care. Like when from the old country he first come, the Americans, they say things; they did not understand.” The drama behind this myth established a family ideology extending to Cyril as he wielded a hoe. A dictum as lasting as my grandfather’s inscription in the Pelton Bible, asking that our family be granted “the fortitude to stay the course we have been called to follow.”

  Sam told Josef’s childhood story one Sunday over chocolate shakes at Dusty’s drive-in; he described the old man sitting on the boxy sofa in his farmhouse, his beefy hands gripping his knees. Sam transported us to the farm at the turn of the century, a world of mules, cows, turkeys; cabbage, lye soap, potatoes rotting in the earth; Josef, his brothers, sisters, parents; and Otis, who worked beside Josef’s father, Papa Antonín. That’s where Otis had learned to fertilize with eggshells and banana peels. As Sam spoke, I knew he envisioned himself at the farm. So did I.

  At first when the hive attacked his father, twelve-year-old Joseph thought it served him right, that Papa had cruelly disturbed the insects, and, as a result, many bees had needlessly died. Even so, the swarm was only a preliminary to the main part of Josef’s story.

  Several months later, at Papa Antonín’s insistence, Josef had nervously driven their team of mules while his father guided the middleplow, busting the winter wheat field. But midway through a turn, a mule bolted. Whether she stumbled first or was bitten by a horsefly, Sam said Josef never knew. Because Josef had been looking at Papa when the beam snapped, he saw the yoke crack, the front piece tossing forward like splintered bone. His father thudded to the ground, the mules’ straps still wrapping his waist. When the tri-cornered blade lodged on its side in front of Papa, Josef told Sam, “I see everything clear.”

  Papa stared but didn’t move. Together, they inspected the arm. The gash, down the outer side, started at the wrist and ended near the elbow, the edges like jigsaw pieces. The blood, Josef said, flowed thick as prune juice, mixing with black earth, staining Papa’s gloves, overalls, jacket. The wound’s interior was slick, meaty as the pork hindquarters Papa hung in the smokehouse, except dirt, wheat shoots, and bone shards speckled the spongy layers.

  Worst of all, Josef remembered, were the broken bones; the forearm bent in the middle at a right angle. The two bottom bone halves jutted through ragged flesh, their outsides white, their insides packed with red jelly marrow. Snapped cords of muscle surrounded the shanks.

  Josef stared at the wound and his father’s face. His own arms hung, clubs; his cheeks stayed cool, dry. Will he die? Josef thought.
Have I killed him? When Papa grunted, trying to sit, Josef squatted, forgetting himself, lifting his hands.

  “The blood,” Papa said, and then, “your shirt,” waving his good arm. Josef tore strips: one to stanch the blood, three to bind the wound, two to make a sling. Papa sat, his face wrinkled, scraped, and gazed at the blotched ground. Reluctant to humble his father, Josef leaned on his thighs as Papa, neck muscles rigid, struggled, stood.

  Papa refused to see a doctor, so Mama tied strips of bacon at the incision’s ends. She pressed cloths coated in heated cornmeal and salt over the leaking wound.

  Months later, Josef dreamed his father died that day in the field, that the blade had cut Papa’s neck. Wandering among bees, Papa became a nature god, stirring clouds, his eyes wild, resolute. That’s when Josef knew that he and Otis should finish busting the field. Otis hadn’t wanted to, but Josef insisted. “A question I am not asking,” he’d said. “I must show this to Papa I can do.” As Josef rounded the end of the second row, yanking and slackening the reins, he made a pledge: This Papa—the one whose devotion to the land crippled him yet he remained—this was the man Josef wanted to be. Like Papa, the land, good and black, always I will work.

  Papa returned to work too soon. Mama’s poultices prevented gangrene from setting in, but his tomato picking and hog feeding kept the bones from growing together. A new joint formed, and sometimes his hand and six inches of arm would flop to the side. Or when the whole arm hung straight, the segment would dangle. The nerve damage left his last two fingers limp against his palm; when the muscles atrophied, the digits froze. Papa compensated, his output about the same, the limb, for him, part of his makeup, his body mangled and transformed.

  I wanted to say that I didn’t like Josef’s story about the wounded arm, that it was too gory, that it reminded me of our mother saying Otis’ fingers had been “permanently bent as though waving.” And I didn’t understand why the old man wouldn’t see a doctor. Sam, though, would think I was scared, so instead, I asked, “Did Cyril and Terezie know their grandfather?”