Poison by Kathryn Harrison Page B

Papa hung in the tree all night; he stayed there long after the pig’s lastscreams, too frightened to move even though the wolves grew bored with waiting for him to climb down and wandered off. Papa remained hanging in the tree until his nerves were permanently affected, shriveled, as he described the feeling, by exhaustion and fright. The only relief he got, he said, was from the bottle. His hands shook badly, then, so badly that it took a good deal longer for him to make his toys, and he could not paint such engaging little faces on the dolls and soldiers as before, and so he sold fewer of what had become more difficult to make.
    “Concepción,” he said to Mama, “you could do that. You could take in a foundling or two,” and she looked at him. What he was asking was different from taking in a child as an act of charity. To hire herself out, that would be a shameful thing, possibly. Something that might lower the family and jeopardize her daughters’ chances to marry well. Mama looked at Papa, she said nothing but she let go of his hands and she sat on the bench by the hearth. I knew that she was figuring in her head the few coins she got for eggs and how they disappeared before she ever had enough to buy Dolores or me a pair of shoes. She didn’t answer Papa’s question that night, or for two days more. At supper, on the third night, she set a poor soup on the table and Dolores and I made faces as we dipped our spoons in. We made noises of disappointment, we sighed. She looked at us. “All right, then, Félix,” she said and she nodded at Papa and he looked down at his plate.
    She took in two and then three at a time, she had such abundance, it was like children’s stories of cups that never were emptied, bowls of porridge that overflowed. These are the tales that hungry people favor, of course, but it is not just the twist of my memory, the same that makes childhood hay lofts seem as vast as ballrooms, no, Mama did have a genuine gift as a wet nurse.
    We did not find this ability surprising, for we all knew of Mama’s generative powers. She made us, and gave us suck; and she had given the silkworms their life, too, keeping the eggs safe in the holy warmth bounded by those two warm globes of what, it seems to me now, was love. The silkworm eggs had ridden about where I wished to be, nuzzled as Mama walked, the quiver of her flesh calling the worms to
Awake! Awake!
just asnow her body said to the orphans,
Sleep. Eat. Grow
. Mama had that kind of flesh—and soul; she gave what was needed.
    I was a girl of nine. I had not yet taken my first communion, my portion of the body of Christ, but I was old enough for chores, which I did quickly so as to be done with them. And I was young enough that I yet preferred my mother’s company to that of anyone else. I liked to stay at her side, to watch as she sat with one of the babies by the fire. Sometimes her milk came down so hard that the suckling coughed and pulled away from her nipple, which was dark and lovely and so big that it looked to me like a fruit separate from the rest of her. A fine spray of milk would arc into the light from the fire, and I would see how it fell on the baby’s head or right past the baby and onto the hearthstones, where it evaporated in an instant from the heat, as if it were a magic substance and not one to remain before mortal witness. If I was fast enough I could trace my finger through the steaming drops.
    It was lazy and warm and safe by the fire, the orange light made us as rosy and pretty as ladies in paintings, and the babies’ dark greedy eyes stole sparks from the flames. The milk, too, came into the corners of their little sucking mouths and shone in the light. The babies’ eyes rolled up into their heads in delight as they suckled, and sometimes I wouldn’t be able to stand it, just playing quietly with a doll at my mama’s feet. In mimicry I held the doll to my own flat chest, but then I flung it away and jumped up from the