Poison by Kathryn Harrison

of my grandfather—four years since we were silk growers and relatively prosperous among the people of Castile—our silk house had stood empty. Papa sat in the same corner where his father had sat, but instead of looking upon the industry of the worms or, like my grandfather, closing his eyes that he might hear in their jaws the sound of rainfall, always so rare where we lived, Papa occupied his hands and eyes with the manufacture of whatever trinkets he could sell at market. Hair combs with each tooth painstakingly carved, and toys for children: wooden tops painted bright colors and balanced so well that on a flat stone they would spin for whole minutes, dolls with dyed hair of wool from the one sheep we kept for that purpose. And a little jointed man strung up between two sticks. When you squeezed the sticks he executed a series of little flips that had his legs folding over his face, a face that Papa had painted so carefully, each eyebrow arched with fear—that emotion perhaps occasioned by the toy figure’s tenuous position in life, forever strung between two tight ropes.
    Or maybe the doll’s face expressed the fear that other faces would not. Not the usual fears that were always with us: of plague, of drought, of poverty, accident, of bad luck and evileyes. No, the greatest fear in those years of my childhood, a fear not spoken, a fear I sensed before I could name, was of Inquisition. For a small town, Quintanapalla received an unequal measure of attention from the Holy Office, undoubtedly an accident of geography, as Quintanapalla lay along the road between Madrid and Burgos, two bastions of the Church, and suffered the constant traffic of Church officials, who were always looking out for another sinner to feed to the insatiable prisons, another mouthful of fines to pour into the holy coffers.
    One spring, two houses—the house of the mason and that of his retired father-in-law—were emptied in the night, their inhabitants collected from their beds. One day they were there, and the next they had disappeared, empty shoes lined up outside their doors. It had long been feared that the mason, flagrant in his refusal to observe holy days of obligation, would attract unwelcome attention, but no one had imagined that his wife, her aged parents and young children would also be taken.
    I walked with my sister past little Antonia’s empty house and I saw her blue shoes there, also empty, and whatever sympathy I had for her was tainted by my desire for those ownerless blue slippers with a bright tapping silver cover on each toe. I stopped to stare, clearly acquisitive, and my sister tried to pull me on down the street.
    “Look there!” I said to frighten her. “There is Antonia standing in her shoes and she is covered in blood and her hair is on fire!”
    Dolores dropped my hand and ran home, and I crept forward and took the little slippers, something no one else in Quintanapalla would have been so brazen as to do. But the street was deserted, and I wanted those shoes. I kept them hidden in the silk house, and I wore them when no one else was around. The lie I had told to frighten Dolores affected me, though. I could not wear the shoes without imagining my own hair catching fire, and eventually I threw them into the pond.
    It was said in those days that children taken into the care of the Holy Office were not sent to asylums but were forced to join the ranks of a children’s crusade. Each year an army of Holy Innocents, as the forcibly rehabilitated little sinners were called,was dispatched south to the Moors in hopes that God would be sufficiently touched by our country’s proselytizing zeal to once again smile on Spain, now generations past her Golden Age of military triumphs and colonial wealth. Well, whether God cared or not for the Innocents’ Saharan fate, the Church’s disposal of them was pragmatic: the children perished and removed the need to feed and clothe them.
    The years after the failure of our worms