Auntie Mina, if she had been alive to hear the story, would have said that I was brave to do what I did. Brave—like my mother, though I never knew her. But Auntie Mina was always saying how brave my mother was. Every morning of my childhood, while Auntie braided my hair in front of the mirror in the bedroom—the old, dark mirror that showed everything a little wavy and tinged with a brownish-red—she would tell me how brave my mother was for just going on, just for living her life, day after day, after what happened. And so I’m sure that Auntie would have thought me brave, as well.
Uncle Hessin saw things differently. He said once that the only brave thing for my mother to do would have been to spit in the King’s eye. But Auntie Mina said that my mother was a too much of a lady to spit. As for me, Uncle Hessin would have said that I was just a woman, and therefore I was only following nature’s directive. And while that’s actually closer to the truth, that’s not exactly it, either. I did what I did not because of bravery, but because I didn’t want to be sad anymore.
Someday my own children will hear the story, and maybe they’ll think their mother was brave. And I’ll be happy if they think this, and I will not tell them otherwise.
My name is Lexana. When I was born, I was the fattest baby in Finmik Town. According to Auntie, the midwife who delivered me said I was fattest baby she had ever seen, in all the port towns and fishing villages of the eastern coast. And so, of course, my father was very proud.
My father was a fisherman, back in Belnang. He and my mother came to Finmik Town before I was born, because they’d heard about the size and the abundance of the fish in that place, and they hoped they might become rich on account of my father’s great skill at catching fish.
It’s true, what they say, that most fishermen’s daughters grow up to be the wives of fishermen. But for my father—and I’ll say this with confidence even though I never knew him—fishing wasn’t about tradition, or the love of the sea. It was about enticing treasure from below.
My father caught glittering, fat bristlefish from the sea in his net. Later, they would use this against him, this talent of his to collect things below the surface, where other people couldn’t see. But Auntie Mina said there was no magic in it. My father simply thought of the fish swimming into his net, and later, when he pulled his net up from the sea, lo-and-behold, the big fish were in there.
I don’t remember my parents. From the time I was very young, I lived in Belnang, in the house of Auntie Mina and Uncle Hessin, my father’s brother. From Auntie, I learned about my father’s fortune with the sea, and then his misfortune with the king, and my mother’s bravery after it all. From Uncle Hessin, I learned that that’s how the world works, and so I should look out for myself.
Auntie Mina’s house had a narrow shelf above the doorway with small clay statues. There was a frog and en eel and a fish and a walrus and a woman with a five-pointed crown. I wanted to take these down and play with them, but Auntie said no. These statues were not toys, she said. They were the spirits of the deep waters, and we were not to disrespect them in her house. I was young when she told me this, and I was frightened by it, and after that, whenever I passed underneath the shelf, I would look up at the spirits, and I wondered if they were good or bad.
Then I got older, and I stopped looking at them. Uncle Hessin never mentioned them.
Auntie Mina’s house had three floors, with long hallways and lots of rooms with locking doors, which she rented out to boarders. As soon as I was old enough to start earning my keep, she set me washing and cooking and cleaning. The work was hard, and the boarders were rude, but I didn’t complain for two reasons. First, Auntie Mina and Uncle Hessin worked hard, too. And second, I didn’t want to end up like my mother.
Auntie Mina said that in the beginning, before I went to live with her, she used to rent her rooms only to what she called quality people. But then our family’s reputation suffered. And so by the time I went to live with her she was renting mostly to sailors, who came to Belnang’s port to buy and barter, and to miners, who came down from the mountains bringing uncut gems and precious metals to sell in the market. The sailors were foreigners, unshaven, rough and vulgar. The miners were rough men, too, and grubby, and their hands were never clean, even after repeated washings with the soap and the scrubbing brushes I brought them. But the important difference was that the sailors were hired men, paid to transport and sell the goods of others, while the miners were the owners of the goods they brought to barter.
Ashor was a miner, and he boarded with Auntie Mina when he came to town. And yes, if you want to hear me say it, he was grubby, and he had the dirt of the mountain under his fingernails. But he wasn’t rude, like the other men. Ashor was tall and strong, and handsome too, and even Auntie thought so. And he was funny and charming—or at least he tried to be, which counts. He would stay in the dining room after the other men left, and he would help me pile up the dirty plates on my tray.
Auntie warned me to watch myself. She said Ashor wasn’t our kind of people. Which was a silly thing to say, and she knew it, too. Our people were fishermen, not even one half-step above miners. And on top of that, our family, well, we’d already fallen from grace, even among our own. In fact, I remember the exact moment when Auntie changed her mind about Ashor.
I was sitting alone on the porch, mending the sleeve of an old shirt. And Ashor, well—he walked up the porch steps, marched right over to my chair, then knelt down in front of me and took his hand out from behind his back. And I saw that he was holding the biggest diamond I’d ever seen. For a moment, my breath caught in my chest. Then I laughed, and reached out and took the diamond from his hand.
Ashor said he had meant to have it made into a ring, but the jeweler in town was busy. But I could go back with him, to the mountains, where there were a lot of jewelers, he said, and they were all skilled ring-makers. I kissed Ashor on the mouth, and then I hid the diamond in the pocket of my apron. And for the rest of the evening, as I went about my chores, I felt its weight pulling me. When night finally came, I went upstairs to Auntie Mina’s private sleeping room, and I knocked on the door. When I showed her the diamond, her eyes became wide. “Lexana,” she said, “You have to go with him.” Then she told me to remember my parents. What she meant was, That’s a good price for a girl like you.
Four days later, I wore the blue dress of a fisherman’s bride and Auntie braided purple flowers in my hair, because that was the custom for brides in all the villages near the sea. And then the priest came and blessed us in the presence of my aunt and my uncle. So after that, I went to live with Ashor the miner, in the mountains.
And for some time, I was happy there. Our house was filled with all kinds of shiny things that came from the mountain. There were silver plates and jeweled vases and curtains fringed with rubies. And there was jewelry. Oh, I got my ring, but it was too heavy to wear on my hand, and so I put it in a silver box, and instead I wore ten smaller rings on my hands.
But Ashor was almost never home. He worked long, hard hours, sometimes in the low mines and sometimes in the middle mines. And sometimes he had to go to the upper mines, and then I wouldn’t see him for days and nights on end.
In the beginning, I would listen for him, for the sound of footsteps on the gravel walkway outside, or the chimes over the door. Usually, I’d fall asleep waiting. And then suddenly, Ashor would be there, pulling aside the ruby-red curtains around my bed and presenting me with some new gift. Eventually, I learned not to wait. And even though I was alone, mostly all the time, I could bear the loneliness, because it was better than being poor.
Because the most important thing was not to be poor. It was important to have denars, to weigh them in my hand and know the value of the nuggets and rough gemstones that Ashor brought to me, and that I brought to trade in the market. It was my favorite thing, really, to walk alone through the market with a purse filled with coins, which I could trade for whatever vase or candlestick or necklace or silk dress that caught my fancy that day. And that’s mostly what made the loneliness bearable.
Sometimes, I’d buy something too big for me to carry home in my pocket, or too heavy for me to lift onto my shoulders, and then I would hire an ox cart. They were plentiful in the market. The drivers used to congregate in a field at the western edge of the market, waiting for a miner with an especially large yield to come by and hire them. Or sometimes a miner’s wife, like me, with something heavy to bring home.
That’s where I found my friend Mihil—in the field, sitting alone in his cart, leaning over the reins. The first time I asked him how much to bring me and my goods home in the cart, he wanted three denars, but every time after that, he only wanted two.
And for a year minus a day, those were my two favorite things—weighing my denars, and collecting beautiful things. Then something came that I loved better.
A year to the day after I left Auntie Mina’s house and went to live with Ashor, my daughter was born. She was pink and perfect, and the mop of hair on her head was black as pitch. The midwife who delivered her said she was the plumpest baby born that year in all the miners’ villages in those mountains. I named her Yola, meaning “princess” in the old language of the fishermen.
Ashor came home the next day and looked in her cradle. He was proud, and happy. But after that day, he was still away from home most of the time. In fact, I think he was away from home more now, if that were possible.
So I was still alone, even though I had Yola, because being alone with an infant is a special kind of being alone. I often thought about my own mother, in those days after Yola’s birth. I thought, This must be how it was for her too, because in the end, she was alone with me. But as I said, at least I wasn’t poor. My mother, she was poor. I mean, after she was rich, she was poor. Now I’ll tell you what Auntie told me about that.
I was still just a baby, not even able to crawl yet. At that time, my father was thinking the fish into the net and my parents were getting rich from it—but only by inches and not by feet, as they say. But my father’s fame spread among the fisherman, from village to village and town to town, until finally the King heard of it. And the King decided he would honor the fishermen who brought honor to his country, and so he held a banquet and invited all the fishermen to attend.
At the banquet the King gave gifts to the fishermen. To my father he gave a bag made of red silk, embroidered with flowery vines and decorated with many tiny gemstones. Auntie Mina said the silk came from Jinnli, far to the east, and the embroidery was done by the Queen’s own maids, and so the bag itself was worth a small fortune, and any family would have been happy to have it. Inside the bag there was a baby’s rattle, made of silver, for me.
As the banquet progressed, the King saw that items began to disappear, one by one, from his table—glittering candlesticks and silver spoons and crystal goblets and knives with red jewels embedded in the handles. The King sulked in his chair, and watched the fishermen suspiciously, until finally his gaze fixed itself on my father, and the bag of red silk. When the banquet ended, the King sent his men to follow my father home. So the King’s men came to our little house by the water, and entered without knocking, which Auntie said frightened me so that I cried and would not stop. They took from my father the bag that was the King’s gift, and they opened it, and inside they found all the items stolen from the King’s table.
My father told Auntie, when she went to see him in the King’s prison, that he couldn’t help it, that when he saw the candlesticks and the spoons and the knives and the goblets and the peppermill, he coveted them all, and he imagined himself carrying them away in the bag. How they ended up in his bag he didn’t know, but my father swore to Auntie Mina that he never touched them.
My father never came home. He lived in the prison for four months, and then he died of the coughing sickness, which was constantly sweeping the prison clean of prisoners in those days. As a girl, growing up in Auntie Mina’s house, I used to try to imagine the scene—my father sick and shivering and left to die alone in the cold prison. But I never could quite bring the image into focus in my mind’s eye. Maybe that was because I never knew my father.
Anyway, my own baby daughter was strong and healthy and plump, and I was happy with her even though, as I said, I was not less alone for having her. But I played with her, as mothers do, and I loved her smile. And it was while playing with her that I realized it—that the whole atrocious truth came to me. And then everything changed.
When my daughter was three months old, I used to hold her on my lap and dangle all kinds of bright things before her eyes—strings of beads, clear ornaments that scattered light into colors, porcelain dolls with red painted lips, my bracelets with their silver charms. But Yola never laughed or smiled or reached for any of these things. Her gaze seemed permanently fixed on something just beyond my hand.
I repeated the experiment day after day, but Yola never seemed to see the objects I held for her, and it terrified me to watch her not see. By the time she was six months old, I knew for sure that my daughter was blind. I thought of Auntie Mina, and I wondered what she would do, and my mind became fixed on something she told me once.
On the day my father died, in the King’s prison, Auntie Mina went to see the soothsayer. The sagging hut was on the edge of the village, and the path leading there was weedy and stank of rotten fish. There were fishermen’s wives who visited the soothsayer every week, gladly paying their ten denars for a chance to know the mysteries locked inside the coming hours and days, and the minds of rivals.
But Auntie wasn’t one of those women, and the soothsayer treated her with deference. The soothsayer told her that my parents took and took, without giving back, and on account of this the spirits that inhabited the deep places were angry. This troubled Auntie because at this point, my mother didn’t have anything to give. She only had me.
Auntie told me never to go to a soothsayer, because they’re of no help. But I know she only said this because she didn’t receive any real help that one timeI decided that I would go anyway, to see the soothsayer, because there was nothing else I could think of doing.
I went during the daytime. I didn’t want Ashor to know about this, and in fact, it wasn’t hard to keep it a secret from him, since he was away working at one of the distant upper mines. I carried Yola in a pack on my back. I went cautiously, picking my way along the stony path that led to the top of a cliff overlooking the village, where the soothsayer lived in a ramshackle one-room house.
The soothsayer had to be the most ancient woman I’d ever seen. Her skin was like wrinkled leather, and she had only a few jagged, crooked teeth in her mouth. She met me at the door, and took the denars I offered her. She held them up and squinted at them in the light. She must have been satisfied, because then she stood back and motioned me into the house.
The windows inside were covered with shabby blankets, which made it dark. The soothsayer put the denars in a clay pot on a sideboard, and then she ordered me to sit on a ratty old rug in the middle of the floor. She sat across from me on the rug. Between us was a shallow bowl of water and some pebbles. The soothsayer took the pebbles and dropped them one by one into the bowl. She was very attentive for a long time, watching the ripples on the surface of the water.
When the water became still, she said, “Your husband is a thief. He steals things that belong to the spirits that control the deep places. They hate him, the spirits do.”
When she said the word spirits, I thought of the statues over the doorway at Auntie Mina’s house—the eel and the fish and the frog. As if she read my mind, the soothsayer said, “No, fisherman’s daughter. I do not mean water spirits. I mean the spirits of the deep earth, they are the ones that cursed your husband.” “How?” I asked. “What curse did they put on him?”
“He is incapable of taking joy in the objects he steals. But he is also obsessed with them, yeah? Part of the curse is, he’s compelled to spend his life thieving.”
“Part of the curse?”
“Before he is of an age to die, the coughing sickness will come upon him, the sickness of the damp below. You know this sickness, yeah?”
I was a concerned wife, I was. And it grieved me to hear this news. But I reminded myself now that it was for Yola’s sake that I came to see the soothsayer. So I struggled, and kept myself composed, and I said, “What can you tell me about my baby?”
The soothsayer wagged her finger at me. “A curse flows through your blood, too. In the children, it combines.”
“What do you mean, it combines?”
“Your first child, you carry her on your back, she is blind from her birth. You know this already, yeah?”
I nodded curtly, and stood up. I didn’t want to listen to her anymore. I took a step toward the door.
But the soothsayer continued speaking. “Your second child, already in your womb, he will be deaf. Your third will be without arms. Your fourth, without legs. The fifth, he will live for a long time and he will appear healthy, but do not trust him to love you, because he will be without a heart…”
I put my hands over my ears, so I couldn’t hear her, and I ran outside. And I did not stop running, even though I carried my sleeping daughter on my back, and even though the small stones shifted and slid under my feet, I did not stop running. Even though I slid on the path many times, I didn’t fall, and I didn’t slow down until I reached my own door. And my own door—I slammed it shut, and I locked it, and then I pounded on it with both fists.
It’s remarkable, the things a baby will sleep through. I unwrapped my daughter from her bundle, and I placed her in her white crib, underneath her canopy of star-studded curtains.
Uncle Hessin used to say that my mother was genteel. This meant that she thought working hard was something other people did, and when she lost my father—and along with him, his remarkable talent for collecting things—she became poor. But Auntie Mina said that no one in Finmik Town, or in Belnang either, would pay my mother for honest work. No one would have her even as a servant, Auntie said, because she was the wife of the thief who stole from the King’s table.
After my father died, my mother sold everything—piece by piece and item by item—in order to buy food. After a few months, she’d lost all but two things—the house, and me. Then she lost those things, too. She stayed alive for a little while, after that. Auntie Mina said that was bravery.
I never knew my mother, so I can’t say she was like this, or she deserved that. I do know that when I went to live with Auntie Mina, at the age of one year, I was as poor and skinny as a beggar’s child. My only dress was shabby and torn, and my hair was infested with lice. I know this because Uncle Hessin told me.
I tried not to judge my mother. Then I got older, and it became harder not to judge. But I would not be like my mother. I would give back.
I pulled the silken coverlet from my bed and put it in the middle of the floor. Then I went through my house, from room to room, and took all the shiny things, everything that sparkled and glittered—even the rings Ashor gave me—and I piled them up high on the coverlet. Then I wrapped the coverlet over them, and tied the bundle with a belt of silver chain links. Little Yola woke just as I was completing the work. So I tended to her, and after that I put her again in the pack on my back. Then I went in search of Mihil, the ox cart driver that by now I counted as a friend.
When I waved my arm over the great bundle on the floor, and said where I wanted to go and what I intended to do, Mihil raised his eyebrows and scratched his beard. But he didn’t ask why. He thought for a little while, and then he asked me if—with all my denars—I had ever acquired a lantern and a mine sled, because if I didn’t, I should have. I shook my head, no, because I hadn’t thought of these things at all. Well, he said, I needed them, and lucky for me, he had them to lend.
Then we loaded the bundle onto the ox cart, and Mihil drove me and Yola to the lowest mine, because I knew from the long absence of my husband, and the quiet in the village, that the miners were away working in the far, upper mines of the mountains, and they’d likely be gone for many days yet.
Before the entrance to the low mine, Mihil and I removed the bundle from the cart, and with ropes we secured it on top of Mihil’s sled. Now, a mine sled looks like a regular snow sled, but really it’s a low-sitting wagon that moves on hundreds of small, rotating balls instead of wheels, so the miners can push it through the narrow turns in the mine passages. Then Mihil lit the lantern. But before he gave it to me he said, “Let me go with you.”
“No,” I said, taking the lantern. “This is for me to do.”
He said again that he wanted to go with me, but again I told him no. I said the soothsayer warned me that my purpose would fail unless I went alone, only with Yola on my back. This was the first time I mentioned the soothsayer to Mihil, and when I said it, his eyes opened wide, and his mouth shut for good. Now, it wasn’t true that the soothsayer said this to me, but it sounded credible, and it worked.
Then I told Mihil that I hoped he would wait for me outside the mine, at least until it got dark, and he nodded and climbed up onto his cart. Then with Yola on my back, the rope of the sled in one hand, and the lantern in the other, I made my way toward the mine.
The entrance was wide, but once inside, the mine suddenly became narrow, and the way was cool and damp. But it wasn’t dark. There was a kind of diffused half-light inside the mine that illuminated the passageways, so much so that I could have gone without the lantern. I couldn’t tell from what source this light emanated, but wherever my path branched into two or more paths, I followed the greater light, sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right, but always down and down.
I walked for a long time, maneuvering the sled through twists and turns and singing lullabies to my child to keep her from fear. My arms and shoulders were sore and I came to thinking how I made a mistake coming here. Maybe Uncle Hessin was right all along, and spirits had nothing to do with it, and soothsayers had nothing to say. Maybe it was all about labor and ownership—and what was the other thing?—the means of production.
This is what I was thinking when—bam!—there was a loud crack, and the smell of sulfur, and the light, dim until now, flashed to a brilliant bright. I found I was standing at the entrance of a wide, high-ceilinged cave, like a great hall, with no other way out except the way behind me. In the middle of this cave was a large, white globe, glowing brilliantly atop a wide pedestal. Assembled near the globe were figures in various shapes and sizes and postures, as dark as pitch in the light.
After some furious blinking and squinting, my eyes adjusted, and I was able to make the figures out. In the middle of the assembly was a woman wearing a five-pointed crown and a gown so long that it trailed the floor around her feet. In her hand she held a red scepter. She looked exactly like the clay statue of the woman over Auntie Mina’s door, but filled with color. And big—easily my size and half again, and immediately I knew that she was the Queen of the deep places. Next to her, I saw not the eel and the fish from Auntie’s door, but an enormous stag, with antlers like a tree. There was a snake, standing on its end, with its head at my level, looking at me and shaking its head with disapproval, and a great black bear, sitting on the ground like a man, with his arms folded over his chest. And finally there were several gophers, ordinary-looking except that they were dressed like princes and walked about with their hands on their hips, clicking their tongues at me, tsk-tsk.
These creatures were the spirits of the deep earth, and I had come here on purpose to find them. I was afraid, but only a little, because of their appearance, and because of the appalling nature of spirits. But I wasn’t afraid for what they might do to me, since they had already done their worst. So I plucked up my courage, and took a step forward.
“Highness,” I said, because I did not know the proper form of address for the Queen of the deep places, and Highness seemed fitting. I held my arms out toward the great bundle on the sled, in a gesture of grand giving, and I said, “I’ve brought you this.”
With a slight sway of her hips, she stepped forward, and pointed her scepter at the sled. “What,” she said, “is that?”
“It’s your belongings. My husband took it, and I’m bringing it back.”
“That is very little. He took much more than that,” she said, and she motioned around, indicating the great room, and the high ceiling.
If she was suggesting that my husband had hallowed out the entire room, then I wasn’t going to concede her the point. “My husband is just one man. He couldn’t have…”
“Alright. Still,” she said, and she pointed again at the sled. “That is not much.”
“Well, it’s all I have.”
“And for what reason do you bring this here?”
“I bring this to you so that you will remove the curse from my family, Highness.”
“Curse, from your family? Alright, let’s see what you brought to bargain with.” Then she called to the gophers. “Boys!”
Six gophers came forward. One of them produced a small knife from the front pocket of his vest, and cut the rope that held the bundle on the sled. Then working together they dragged the bundle off the sled and to a place near the middle of the room, in the full light of the globe. There they unhooked the belt which fastened the coverlet and pulled open the sides of the bundle.
And a great pile of dust fell to the floor in a soft, heavy thump. Dust formed a cloud which hovered in the air around the globe, dampening the light, and a fine layer of dust coated the Queen, the spirits, myself, and I am sure, my daughter, who began fidgeting in the pack on my back.
There were no shiny things in that pile, nothing that sparkled or glittered. There was only dust.
“But… no,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand? It’s our dust. You brought it back to us, and we are glad to have it. Get the buckets, boys!” she said to the gophers. “Measure it up!”
Gophers ran toward the pile of dust, carrying tin pails and little shovels.
“No,” I said. “I brought my clock, with the golden coo-coo. I put it in there myself. And my vases, and all my rings…”
The Queen was watching as the gophers measured the dust—collecting it in buckets from one pile and then depositing it in a second pile. “Yes,” she said, without looking at me. “Well, whatever you thought you had, it was ours, and we are glad you brought it back.”
I was shaking my head furiously. “No, no, something’s wrong.”
A gopher called out, “Eighty-four point seven buckets, all counted.”
The Queen turned to me and said, “Alright, we have taken measurement of your payment. Now, you wanted to ask for something in return.”
The spirits thought I brought them dust, and there was nothing I could do. But they were pleased to have dust, and so I unhooked the pack that I carried on my back, and removed my daughter. I held her in my arms, before the Queen and all the spirits. “This is my child,” I said. “As a result of the curse, she’s blind.”
The Queen reached out to take my daughter. I was reluctant to allow this at first. But then, the Queen cooed and made a comical face, and my daughter –
Well, Yola laughed, and reached her arms out toward the Queen, who took her, and held up over her head. And the Queen made more funny faces, and my daughter laughed some more. “Look at that!” the Queen exclaimed. “There is nothing wrong with this child. She sees perfectly fine.”
“But…” I said. I had no appropriate response. I floated from happiness to surprise to utter incomprehension, and back to happiness.
The Queen handed Yola back to me. “Your child was never blind,” she said. “You were.”
“But the soothsayer… she lied, then.”
“She did not lie. She’s old, and she mixes the inner vision with the outer, and the present with the future. She forgets that other people can’t, well, sort it out on their own.”
“But she said…”
The Queen spoke firmly. “I know what she said, and she did not lie. She was warning you that your children would be, in their own various ways, like yourself. Deficient.”
“Deficient?”
The Queen nodded impatiently. “That’s right. Your children would be unable to determine the proper value of things, or appreciate beauty, or understand other people, or perform valuable work. Or love you, even. You see now? That’s being deficient. As you are deficient, in ways both like and unlike your mother. These things—these curses—they go on for generations with you mortals.” The Queen sighed, as if she had suddenly grown tired of speaking to me. “Are you getting any of this?”
“And my husband?” I asked.
“He’ll become sick.”
“So what do I do?”
The Queen rolled her eyes at me. “Go home and tell him to find another line of work.”
Well, I did go home.
The Queen said the light in the mine passages would last for one hour, no more, and then the mines would go dark. But I made good time, as the sled wasn’t weighed down, and I found my way safely out. Mihil was still sitting in his cart, waiting for me and Yola, because he was a friend.
And this is the bad and the good that happened, after I came back from the mine.
Ashor came home one day later. He had no gemstones, no silver, and no gifts. He was sorry, he said, but hadn’t been to the upper mines, as I thought. He was in Belnang, selling in the port, and he had news to make me sad. “Your Auntie Mina,” he said, and then he said he was sorry again. And I cried, because really, she was a mother to me, for all of my life that I can remember. And I said we had to go to Belnang, all of us together, to pay our respects as was proper, and to give comfort to Uncle Hessin. And I said that I wished I could have told her my story, because she would have thought me brave. And Ashor never asked me what story, and if he noticed the absence of rings and clocks and candlesticks and such, he didn’t ask about those, either. Hhe just held me while I cried some more.
And then he told me of my Auntie’s dying wish.
So now Ashor and I are the keepers of Auntie Mina’s Boarding House, where the sailors and the miners stay, and the occasional “quality people,” as Auntie used to say. Uncle Hessin is too old to work very hard, but he still likes to instruct us—that is, when he’s not busy playing with Yola, who loves silly faces, and the new baby, who loves music.