Blood Secret

by Kathryn Lasky

  There was something special about this dinner. Jerry could tell just by the way Constanza ate, handled her fork, and shook out her napkin on her lap. Yes, a cloth napkin. At the other meals they had always had paper ones. But even if Jerry had had a voice, she would not have known the words to use to ask the questions. There seemed to be at the very heart of this dinner something so mysterious, so elusive as to defy words. It was more than a mystery, really. It seemed as if it might be a web of some sort that could ensnare them. There was something almost ritualistic in the way Constanza lifted the wineglass to her mouth. Ritualistic and at the same time mechanical.

  They were wrapped in silence. The shadows began to gather in the corners of the room. There was tranquility, a peacefulness that was deep as the dirt, deep as silence. They watched the color drain from the sky outside. The sun had set perhaps twenty minutes before. The mountains had turned a cold purple, the clouds above a steely gray.

  “The trapdoor spiders come out now,” Constanza said suddenly. “If we go out we might see one. They hunt in the twilight.” Constanza began to get up. Was she going out to see spiders or get dessert? Jerry got up and followed her aunt into the cook yard. As they passed by the hornos, she could still feel their heat, despite the chilliness of the evening.

  “Ah, there’s one now. See!” Constanza pointed down. Then, folding herself like one of those collapsible beach chairs, she crouched close to the ground. Her knees made sharp points under the fabric of her dress. “See what cunning little builders they are.” She pointed at a piece of earth the size of a postage stamp that had begun to jiggle. “That’s the trapdoor. It’s made of silk and mud. Even the hinges are made of silk. And sometimes there is a second trapdoor farther down in the burrow. The burrows are lined with silk as well. Clever?” Constanza looked up, her eyes bright with this small marvel. “And you know, here in the cook yard they always seem to build their little traps within about two feet of a horno.” The smell from the last batch of flatbread was still lingering in the yard. A little burrow lined with silk and filled with the scent of baking bread, very comfortable, Jerry thought.

  Constanza looked directly into Jerry’s eyes as the two knelt watching the spider pry open the lid. “Yes, a nice situation for a spider.”

  “I hope they never get into your bread.” Jerry spoke softly. The words simply slipped out. Constanza’s hand began to tremble. They looked at each other.

  “Oh, I never worry about that. I don’t think they’d like the yeast, at least not the kind I use for the flatbread.” Constanza turned her head away and looked at the ground as if searching for another spider or trapdoor.

  I hope they never get into your bread…. I hope they never get into your bread…. The sound of her voice speaking continued to hum softly in Jerry’s ears. As they sat down again at the table, the memory of her voice hovered in the room as well. She saw the words now hiding in dark corners, crawling into cracks.

  “I was thinking about your sewing project for school,” Constanza said. “I think in the root cellar there’s an old sewing machine someplace. It’s really old, not electric but with a treadle.” Jerry looked up, her eyes questioning. “You know, the kind you have to work with your foot, pumping the foot piece back and forth.”

  Jerry nodded. It sounded good to her. The machines in school went so fast. She always felt as if she were on a horse that might run away any minute.

  “You can go down there. Take a flashlight, though, because there is only one lightbulb hanging from a cord. I don’t think the machine is that heavy. With Sinta’s help you could get it up here, or Father Hernandez usually comes over on Saturday to collect the Communion host for mass. He comes early, though, because I bake that first thing. He could help you. Sometimes he sends Sister Evangelina and she’s no use at all.”

  Constanza did not elaborate. And Jerry had no idea what “no use” meant from the point of view of a ninety-four-and-a-half-year-old lady who got up at three thirty in the morning seven days a week to bake bread.

  Jerry helped Constanza finish cleaning up, and then Constanza began her usual pre-bedtime ritual of laying the wood in the hornos. More words pressed against Jerry’s lips, but they would not come out. She wanted to say, “I’ll do it myself. I can do it by myself. I’ve helped you all this week. I know exactly how to lay the wood for the fire. I know which ovens are slow, which fast, in which ones you must pack the wood more densely, which looser. I can do this all by myself, old lady. I want to help you.” But none of these words came out.

  The moon, a full one, was rising now. The trapdoor spiders had finished their nighttime patrols, and the occasional bat swooped through the darkness. Jerry and Constanza laid the wood in the last of the earth ovens. Then, as every night, Constanza gave a mighty yawn and stretched, first putting her hands to the small of her back and then reaching upward and yawning again. Her arms were extremely long, and tonight as she reached her hands into the dusky purple black of the night she seemed to have flattened into a one-dimensional shape, an odd, rangy figure printed against the rising moon. She flicked a hip one way, then the other, to get the cricks out. Next she did a funny little jig to kick the kinks out of her legs. She could have been one of the stick-figure pictures chipped in the sandstone walls of the desert. With her spidery limbs locked in some antic posture, she appeared not quite human but instead some rowdy creature from a long-ago Indian story. Maybe she was the ghost of Kokopelli, the humpbacked flute player.

  They walked into the house. “’Night,” Constanza said softly. She had left the flashlight out on the counter if Jerry wanted to look for the sewing machine. It was just past eight, too early to go to bed unless one got up at three thirty in the morning. Jerry did a little bit of homework at the kitchen table, then yawned and went to her bedroom. She stretched out on her bed and began to read the assignment for English class. It was Romeo and Juliet. Boy, was the nurse stupid. They were going to have to write a composition on Romeo and Juliet. Maybe she would write how if it weren’t for the stupid nurse, Romeo and Juliet might have survived. Of course then there would be no tragedy. Maybe Shakespeare could have written it as a comedy. Romeo, Juliet, and Tubby the Stupid Nurse. The teacher said they should come up with their own ideas. Her eyes grew heavy. She fell asleep in her clothes on the bed.

  There were the little hinges. Silken hinges in her throat, way way in the back. And then the slight muddy taste as the little door started to jiggle. They felt no bigger than grains of sand, but she could feel each one of their eight tiny feet as it crawled up her throat and across her tongue. The hinges squeaked and the trapdoor slammed. Silence.

  Jerry woke up, her heart beating wildly. She sat straight up on her bed and slammed her fist against her mouth. It was so real. She couldn’t believe it. It had felt so real. She put her other hand to her neck. She closed her eyes and could actually imagine perfectly the trapdoor in the very back of her throat. It had been an awful feeling. She could feel a pulse in her neck throbbing. She got up to get a glass of water. The moon had risen and its light streamed through the window. It was as if she were standing in a silver pool. She was wide awake. There would be no going back to sleep.

  Chapter 5

  THE CELLAR DOOR creaked as she opened it, and once more Jerry thought of those hinges of silken thread and touched her throat. There were probably zillions of spiders in the cellar. She swung the flashlight around. Its beam was weak. She could almost feel the light leaking out of it. So she pressed the button to flick it off and stood on the cellar steps. And that was when she noticed that the darkness did not look like darkness. It was the color of tea and slightly luminous, as if a flame flickered behind it. Amber-colored tea. The flashlight had made everything a flat, lifeless white, but as Jerry stood there it seemed that this amber air almost began to glow. It must be that this cellar was carved out of the red New Mexican earth. It suddenly struck Jerry that it was very possible that the foundations of Constanza’s house could in fact be the remnants of some sandstone
slabs. Maybe one wall had, in another time thousands of years ago, been a cliff. She didn’t know much about geology, but she knew that things could shift. Mountains could slide, cliffs tumble; the crust of the earth could even crack open and leave canyons. So where her aunt’s house now stood, well, in another time there could have been another landscape, almost another world.

  Standing at the top of the steps, she realized that it even smelled like earth and stone. As her eyes adjusted, she could pick out shapes. The shapes seemed to swell up, disembodied like spirits searching for something to attach themselves to and become real objects. She crept down another three steps. Her head bumped softly against a low-hanging lightbulb, but she had no desire to turn it on. Her eyes were sorting things out. She caught her breath as a humpback shape rose in the amber mist of dust and air. But then she almost laughed when she realized it was a bicycle upside-down and askew, sprawled across the top of an ancient bathtub, also upside-down with its claw feet pawing the air. A mouse ran fearlessly across the dirt floor as if it knew exactly what it was doing and where it was going. And near where it had disappeared, Jerry’s eyes, now completely accustomed to the dark, spotted a spiderweb. Its filaments looked like sheer gold in the amber light, and a large beetle was snagged and bound in silk in its middle. She stared at the web, transfixed, and wondered where the spider was.

  Jerry looked for the sewing machine but not very hard. She was reluctant to poke around too much. It was late besides, and Constanza wouldn’t appreciate rattles coming from the cellar at this time of night. But she liked it down here. She liked thinking that this had once been a cliff or the side of a mountain or maybe the bottom of a canyon. She liked the notion that things could shift here—land, shapes, the light itself, and the air. She heard steps overhead in the kitchen. The front door slammed. Surely it couldn’t be time for her aunt to start the fires. The moon was up when she had come down, but now a ribbon of pale golden light slipped through a small, high cellar window carved out of the top of one wall.

  Jerry climbed the stairs and walked into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of juice. The sun was up. The fires were going. When she looked out the window, she saw a tail of dust whirling up from the road. A car was coming. She watched as Constanza took a pinch of dough from a bowl on a plank. She walked over to the oven she had just raked and threw it in. Jerry watched her curiously.

  The car, a battered old station wagon, pulled into the drive. The door opened and an enormous woman in an old-fashioned nun’s habit got out. Her wimple lifted in the early morning breeze and her habit billowed out even more. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains behind her were dwarfed. She was, thought Jerry, a mountain range unto herself. “Sister Evangelina here!” She waved jauntily to Jerry, who stood in the doorway of the kitchen. “Here for the host.” He won’t argue with you, Jerry thought, and grimaced inwardly at her own irreverence. She didn’t mean it, of course. This was when it was good not to talk. Suppose something like that had slipped out? “You must be Jerry. Heard all about you from Padre, and of course your aunt.”

  Constanza was now walking over. “You two meet?”

  “After a fashion.” Sister Evangelina held out her hand to shake. Jerry took it. It was large and tanned and rough. She remembered the calluses of Father Hernandez’s hands.

  “Come on in for some coffee,” Constanza said.

  “Coffee and…” Sister Evangelina’s voice swooped up.

  “Coffee and pastries or whatever I got in there.”

  “There’s a reason I’m this size.” She winked. “But it’s really not gluttony.”

  “It better not be a sin if you’re eating my baked goods,” Constanza said.

  “And if it is, we got a lot of sinners in Albuquerque.”

  Constanza turned to Jerry. “You’re up early this morning for a no-school day.” Jerry nodded and tried to smile. Constanza glanced at her quickly, and in that split second Jerry knew that her aunt knew she had been in the cellar. They sat at the kitchen table. Constanza brought out a basket of blue-corn muffins and a plate of tartlets similar to the ones she had made earlier in the week.

  “You eating these? Or you give them up for Lent?” Constanza began to slide the plate away.

  Jerry started as a plump, dark hand darted out and slapped Constanza’s. “Stop right there, gal.” Jerry’s eyes slid toward her aunt.

  “Well, if you didn’t give up sugar, you must have given up booze,” Constanza said cheerfully. Jerry stole a glance at Sister Evangelina.

  “Constanza de Luna, what I give up or don’t give up for Lent is none of your business.” Jerry turned now and looked at her aunt, waiting for the next retort. It was like watching a tennis game. She had never heard so many consecutive sentences coming from her aunt. Suddenly Sister Evangelina threw her brown hands up into the air and hooted. “Mercy, we’ve shocked the child, Constanza. Bet you’ve never seen your aunt so crabby or talkative?” When Evangelina laughed, her eyes became little slits above her plump cheeks. “You see, this is one of my gifts. I bring out a different side in people.” She fanned her plump fingers in the air.

  “Is that why you were called to be a bride of Christ?”

  Jerry gasped. “Aunt Constanza!” The words exploded this time, not like before when they slipped out so gently. No, the two words burst off her tongue with a rat-a-tat-tat. But this time Aunt Constanza did not tremble. She simply carried on as if nothing special had happened and so did Sister Evangelina.

  “Sister Evangelina is used to it,” Constanza said.

  “Oh, my week wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t come over and get insulted by Constanza. She’s the only person around who back talks nuns. It reminds me of how relieved I should be that I never had her in a classroom.”

  “Seeing as I’m twenty years older, that would have been hard.”

  They sat for a few more minutes, and then Constanza went and got the box with the Communion host for Sister Evangelina. They all walked out to the car together. Sister Evangelina stuffed herself behind the wheel. “Are you coming to the church rummage sale, Constanza?”

  “What do I need to do that for?”

  “There’s bound to be some interesting stuff.”

  “I don’t need any more stuff. I’ve been collecting stuff for ninety-four years.” Jerry bit her lip lightly and thought of the root cellar with its old sandstone walls. Ninety-four years seemed like nothing compared to rock time. But it was as if time stopped down there, or was suspended, or maybe just didn’t count for much. Something happened down there. She thought of the mouse. Did it ever come up into the daylight? Or the spider, the invisible spider. If she went back, would the beetle be gone? Eaten? Not escaped. She felt certain that nothing really escaped from the root cellar.

  “Well, then it’s time to get rid of some stuff.”

  Constanza scuffed the toe of her boot in the dirt. “Naw, I don’t think so.”

  “You should see the two of you,” Sister Evangelina said suddenly. “Both of you scratching your heads exactly the same way. Constanza, Jerry’s been here barely a week and is already picking up your bad habits.”

  “Well, maybe I should send her over to you and she’ll get some of your bad habits and pork up.”

  Aunt! The word rumbled Jerry’s head but remained silent.

  “Oh my word!” hooted Sister Evangelina. She started the car and began to back out. There was a screeching sound.

  “Damn. She’s going to grind those gears out. Nuns are the lousiest drivers.”

  “I know what you’re saying, Constanza,” Sister Evangelina yelled from the car. “‘Nuns are lousy drivers.’ Well, as little Miguel Guiterro said to Sister Clara the other day, ‘Up yours.’” She waved gaily out the window as she drove down the driveway.

  Chapter 6

  “MAYBE YOUR FRIEND will help you get that sewing machine up from the cellar,” Constanza said when Sinta came over later that afternoon.

  “You got a sewing machine here?” Sinta said.

&n
bsp; Jerry shrugged and smiled. She wished the words would come again with Sinta.

  “Yes,” Constanza said. “I was telling Jerry, though, that it is an old one. Not electric, just a treadle that you pump.”

  “Let’s get it,” Sinta said.

  Jerry didn’t know what to do. She did not want to go back to the cellar with anybody. It was as if someone else might break its spell. The amber would bleed out of the light. Bicycles would look just like bicycles and tubs like tubs. “Come on.” Sinta gave her shoulder a tap.

  They went down into the cellar with Jerry carrying the flashlight. “Lot of stuff down here,” Sinta said as they reached the last step. “Guess by the time you’re as old as your aunt, you’ve accumulated a lot.”

  Jerry found the sewing machine immediately. She beckoned with her flashlight.

  “Here it is!” Sinta said. “Oh, look, it’s absolutely coated in dust. We should clean it off before we take it upstairs.”

  Jerry panicked. She already thought of the cellar as her place. “No!” The word popped out.

  Sinta looked up. “Jerry, you spoke.” Jerry nodded. Her mouth tried to move around a few words, but no sound came. “One? Two? Is that what you’re saying?” Sinta asked. Jerry nodded. “One or two words, is that what you mean? You’ve spoken a few words?” Jerry nodded again and walked over to where Sinta stood by the machine. It wasn’t that heavy.

  Just before they left the cellar, Jerry turned to look for the spiderweb. It was still there. It looked quite ordinary now, but the beetle was gone.

  Jerry and Sinta took the sewing machine upstairs and directly into the cook yard. Jerry went to get some dust cloths.

  “I think we’re going to need some oil,” Sinta said when Jerry came back. “The wheel is sort of stiff.”