The Pomegranate Trees

Youmans 75 Marlene Youmans The Pomegranate Trees "The cells were no longer than a meter by a meter, high-ceilinged, with walls that shimmered with roaches." Carolyn Forche, "Upheaval in El Salvador" The noise of it was interminable. She listened to the sound hanging and hanging in the air. There was a noise behind it, a comforting, hoarse reassurance. There were little rockings all around her, and it was when she thought of the motion of a cradle that she realized: why, this is my own voice, wandering through the air. Then the sound ceased, and there was a vacant space in her chest. In a dream she was licking thefloor because there was water on it, and then she was afraid that the baby's blood was blended with it and she was sick. But the baby had been a long time ago. Afterwards she was burnt and one of the places horrified her because it was alive. When they tore it open she woke and screamed because of the slicing pain of it and because she saw it was alive. Now she could begin to forget. A soft, heavy darkness folded around her, and she could hide from those other things, the things that she wanted to forget. They shone in bewildering flashes, now one, now another. Carefully she wrapped them as she would have wrapped a fistful of knives, swathing them in the velvety dark. The bundle jangled, so she kept on swaddling the heavy nap around it, until the knives were muzzled and silent. Then an empty space stood between where she was and the things she still wanted to remember. There was nothing in the way. She could not cross, or she could only cross a short way. So only one memory kept coming back. In it her feet were cool on the tile floor, and her mother was cutting red and green peppers with a knife. The split peppers glistened with juice. She could see that clearly, and the white hearts studded with seeds, and her mother's hands, quick and sure, splitting the crisp peppers . In the memory she could not see her mother's face, only the black wave of her hair streaked with white and her strong, bent back. She strained to make her mother turn around, turn and reassure her with single 76 the minnesota review firm glance. Where was I in the room, she wondered. She could not remember whether she had been there, working, or whether she had just reached the doorsill and stood watching the others. Her little sisters leaned over the table, their stained fingers busily working above a basket of pomegranates. They had filled one of the huge wooden chopping bowls with seeds. There was perhaps a foot of seeds, an immense shining mound. She imagined plunging her hands into the pile of faceted rubies, cool and slick to the touch. Sometimes the mass of seds frightened her, and she thought of them as many teeth, transparent and packed with blood. She tried to remember picking those pomegranates, but although she imagined stepping into the dusty yard, the trees were old and stunted. The blossoms dropped to the ground as she watched, only a few tiny crowns fastening to the trees. Yet when she walked across the dust and stared up at the trees, the knots burgeoned into rosy balls, and the rind sank inward, hugging the seeds. She put her hand against the slight facets of one, feeling its weight against her palm. It was a way of going away, and she often stayed there, lingering on the threshold of the kitchen or under the pomegranate trees which were powdered with dust. When she came back she could smell the dense smell of filth and feel the slime against her body. She came back only to eat the hunk of meat that was flung into the box. You must keep your strength, her mother had once told her. The words reverberated inside the box, rocking slower, slower, then dissipating at last. The dust in the yard under the pomegranates was hot under the noon sun. When she had first been carried to the small...