Silk Roads, and: Interior

Silk Roads

Such a quiet act, the needle penetrating cloth. Loops of thread in coral, pink, fuchsia, teal, turquoise, forest green, lime green, mustard, lemon yellow, royal purple, brown, and black. The design dotted in crisp dark blue on the linen. A butterfly, a road.

The Great Silk Road. Overland. But by the time my great-grandfather set off mid-nineteenth century to find more silk for Macclesfield’s mills in Cheshire, he traveled by sea. The story goes he sailed up the Yangtze to ask the Chinese to trade. But how far upriver and on what sort of boat?

All from a worm, the caterpillar of a moth. Larvae of raspy crickets, silverfish, wasps, mayflies, leafhoppers, lacewings, and thrips produce silk, too, though not of good quality. Not used for textiles. And not for embroidery. Glossy three-ply filaments satin-stitching, chain-stitching leaves, wings, ridges in a winding path.

The prow of a ship cutting through water, the spray of droplets glistening in the light. A steel needle pricking the gaps between the woven linen threads, the needle emerging from underneath, poked back up again to the surface.

I don’t know what Great-Grandfather offered to trade for the silk, only that the Chinese told him to go back where he came from. But overnight a typhoon ripped the current, flattened the willows onshore. In the morning, tribal elders boarded the battered ship, said they’d trade with this blue-eyed foreigner, the spirits had willed it.

The pupas are dipped in boiling water or pierced with a needle and killed. Then the cocoon is unraveled as a continuous thread.

How a boat knifes its way through a current, lifting ripples, a wake. I want to slice through this story, unspool its lengths. Great-Grandfather didn’t speak Mandarin. Who translated? Who traveled with him? Did trackers drag the ship through shallows, narrows of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges, hauling that weight? And who paid whom for what?

Some embroideries are never finished. And even while careful to keep the underside tidy, to avoid messy knots and threads, it’s hard to see a pattern on the back of the cloth, where the colors, even while shimmering, tangle.

Interior

Those Phoenix dust storms in the forties: a solid wall, brown mass careening toward us, as Mom screamed, “Close the windows, close the windows!” and we raced around the house, frantically turning handles. Even so, after, a layer of dirt blurring the lines of every shelf and counter, every table, every cushion. Every book. The bathroom basin.

Where Granny on her visit helped me brush my teeth. Brisk little strokes around and around, up to the attic, she trilled, then to the nursery, down more stairs to the parlor, the drawing room, and, finally, all the way to the cellar. Rooms I’d never known existed.

What dust can do to the lungs—those fragile, spongy organs filled with alveoli, minuscule air sacs. Particles constrict the passages, cause dust pneumonia, the Brown Plague. Or asthma. A struggle to breathe. These tiny spaces, miniature rooms within the duplex of the lungs.

Four rooms: two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room in that house. Smoke thickening the air. My father’s five packs a day, my mother’s half-dozen cigarettes with drinks before their dinner, when they talked and we were not to. In our cots in our room, strict seven o’clock bedtime for my sister and me, no talking, no questions.

In my father’s house are many mansions, I’d heard that Jesus said, but after Granny’s visit, my own little mouth held polished hallways leading to rooms with windows glistening to moist lawns, a robin’s-egg-blue sky. No dust. Or smoke. No need to open the rattling, rusted screen door to leave a choking house.