The Onion Farmer's Daughter

One Soul and Two Bellies

She is always coming back to me in dreams, the onion farmer's daughter with the dark hair like tangled reeds in a pond at dusk. She weaves in and out of my night-time wanderings, a shadow in white, her skin almost as pale, well, like an onion. She is beautiful in a gothic sort of way and always light on her feet. She must have been lovely when she was alive.

There is one soul that flits between Kathryn's and my belly all summer long – this onion farmer's daughter's soul, as if uncertain of where to land. It is not like that dove Noah sent out after the flood and there was one place to land. She has two peaks to choose between – two round white bellies, bursting with babies.

I sat eating my salad, grateful for the greens, as grateful had I been Rapunzel's mother. Shell was a Wiccan witch, but her greens held no charm. I was attracted by the skulls on the fencepost, an obvious reference to Baba Yaga. She was only ravenous in her lust for life – to rend things from the soil – to wrest babies from wombs and to twist people back into living, no matter how painful.

You see, I was not truly living when I encountered Shell, not living at all – merely ambulating through. It's damn painful to live and that's the truth, but the wild joy – like honeysuckle rambling up the fence is sure worth-it. The scratch of that metaphorical itch.

All summer, my husband and I would dig up change for the grocery store. At Shell's every week, I feasted on salad and good lean meat. She took me in and fed me and wrenched me toward living and out of the shadow-world I'd been inhabiting.

Percy's Mournful Banjo

His music has a way of creeping into the hollows like ivy with hands reaching. Percy makes banjo music sound mournful. He'd never play it too near the school, only in the wilds, a half-hour walk away on the narrow path. It is the saddest banjo I ever heard played.

His long white fingers move over the pearl inlaid arm, matte white on glossy white. It's a fine instrument fashioned by some country person with a bit of money, enough to have a son educated in the city. I wonder about the parents he never speaks of. I never talk of mother or Big Dad. There isn't much to say, except they live a hundred and seven miles to the north and west where the flat lands turn into hills that wear a sad blue cast in the evenings.

The girls say the woods are haunted, but it is probably the echo of Percy's Banjo. They would be horrified to see him now with his dark pants' legs rolled up and his pale tater feet in the water like some country man. They would be even more aghast to see him with me, who could never wash the stain of country life from her, having been brought to school by her mother in a simple rough-spun muslin dress, little better than a sack, save for a blue silk ribbon that was my mother's pride to have stitched to it.

No one saw Percy arrive at the school. He showed up one day in English class, a tall angular youth of twenty-five with fierce ringlets of red hair framing his Botticelli face. All the girls loved him and assumed him the son of some great Southern family, such a languid pale poetic man. I thought his face was rather too pinched, too infantile for a man, but still I fell in love with him.

He laid a white flower on my breast suddenly. So lost in thought was I, that I didn't hear his playing cease, nor notice that the light was failing in the east.

3/1999

Geppetto

In the town of Carini, there once dwelt a man, named Geppetto, who had the good fortune of being the most talented marionette maker in the world. He had dwelt in the same house all of his life, as had his father before him, his grandfather, and so on: the bricks were crumbling and the floor was dusty, but it was still home to him. This dwelling also served as his place of business, which was not an uncommon practice at that time. Upon entering the front room, you would have seen countless shelves lining the walls, on which sat puppets, staring out with their glass, or painted eyes, like so many silent, malformed children. His specialty were grotesques -- contorted figurines, with bent backs, twisted mouths, and incredibly long noses. These puppets, which everyone so loved, were merely an artistic rendering of his own physique.

Many people called him Geppeto of the Long Arm, on account of his deformity. Squashed at birth by his mother’s death convulsions, his spine had curved sideways like a tree bending away from poisonous sea air. His right arm hung down, almost to his knees, and the fingers on it were large, rough, and clumsy; but his left hand was smooth and refined with delicate childlike fingers. His face possessed an equine quality that would have been tragic had he not been a showman, whose intent was to make people laugh. Truly mean people -- every town has them -- dubbed him ‘donkey head’ and called him this to his face. Geppetto had already made fun of his own ugliness, so the bullies never got any satisfaction from their taunts and in fact ended up being the butt of his jokes.

Everyday, his tiny shop was packed with loud, tramping children and occasionally, a father. The mothers, due to their grand bustles and absurdly tall coiffures, were forced to wait outside, their children ferrying puppets out to them for inspection, approval, and, if all went well, money. He had barred women not from some intrinsic hatred of females, but after witnessing two ladies come to blows after their dresses had become entangled. Before they had released themselves, they had destroyed a whole shelf of his finest work.

His creations were not only the province of the town’s wealthy residents; he often gave puppets to poor children who lingered outside his shop, not daring to enter; those who would still be there after closing time, peering forlornly in at the windows. They thanked him by running his errands, sweeping his walkway and performing impromptu puppet shows for his amusement.

Every week or so, he entertained at the house of one of the town’s wealthier residents. As a youth he had learned the lesson: that children are the cruelest creatures and he learned how to play on this to his own ends, by letting the children poke his hump and step on his toes. He’d make them laugh with a dance, because they always wanted more than the puppet show. He became their overgrown marionette and thus, his fame continued to grow. Entertain the children and the parents would be grateful to have peace and quiet -- to not deal with their vicious offspring.

Geppetto was not so ugly that he did not once have a beautiful young woman. He had captivated her through his hunch-backed waddling dance, so much that she lay down laughing and let him have her. It was under a linden tree and she reeked of sour fruit, her dark skin stained purple by the juice of the grapes. He remembers it well, set apart from all his other days -- the sun had set, cutting a swath of fire against the horizon. It was a sweet cool evening and the grass was wet, staining his trousers. He had been a virgin and later, she had cursed him for his clumsiness, causing him to flee into the shadows, not wishing her to see him cry. He had just experienced something so perfect, so whole, and he could not understand why she had not felt it also. It had been as if he became one with the yellow leafed tree under which they lay, as if he had felt the rise of its sap, and had also felt the grass stretching, the sun in the heavens falling to the other side of the earth.

He had tried to woo the grape-stomper again for the thrill of the feeling he had experienced but she only laughed at him and after a few months she no longer could be found walking along the road in her purple skirts. One day, long after he had resigned himself to loneliness, there appeared a baby on his doorstep, wrapped in an old flour sack. Early in the morning he had received this surprise and was forced to close his business for the day. He reached down with his long right arm, scooping up the little creature, which was wrinkled like a sausage. He brought it in and, laying it on the table, proceeded to unwrap the rough swaddling. A little boy lay before him, a quiet infant, staring at him with eyes as blue as the deep ocean. Whenever he had seen babies, they had their mouths open in complaint, a horrible wail to disturb the peace of adults and he wondered why this one was so silent and still.

At a loss for what to do for his tiny guest, he sat there staring at it until it drifted off into slumber. He watched its little fists uncurl and its eyelids shut and felt a warm twinge in his heart that he suspected might be love. When Magda his washer -woman, arrived to pick up his dirty linens, she scolded him for his inhuman treatment of the infant, who was left to lie naked on the cold table. With a hand on her ample hip, she waggled a finger at him in mock chastisement. She was obviously having great fun with this—the fact that ugly Geppetto was a father – that some woman had let that misshapen bear between the legs. In truth, although she mocked him, she truly liked Gepetto and offered to help find him a wet nurse. He had suggested feeding Pinnochio, for that is what he named his son, some dinner, but she humorously assured him that babies did not eat goat stew or gnaw on crusts of bread, because they had no teeth -- lifting the baby’s upper lip to illustrate her point. “See, all gums! This young fellow needs a woman’s teat to grow strong and healthy!”

As the child grew, Geppetto experienced those feelings related to fatherhood. He felt anxiety when illness descended and felt his heart leap at the laughter of the boy. It was a joy how young Pinnochio would sit by his side on the workbench, watching intently as he constructed his marionettes. An even greater moment was, when, at the age of six, the boy began to make his own crude puppets and perform little shows for his father.

The only thing marring this complete contentment was the fact that the boy had an incredibly long nose. The lad was beautiful in all other respects with his fine dark eyes, soft olive skin and wavy dark hair. Still that nose jutted straight out of his face like some ugly rocky protuberance from a gentle green hillock.

Geppetto tried to comfort his son in this matter, although he did not understand why it bothered the boy so much, his unfortunate nose. He said, “Boy, look at me, your father. Aren’t you lucky you do not have a back shaped like mine? Look, at this long, ill-formed arm! Your arms are perfect and your hands so neatly made by God. My skin is pockmarked and creased like land plagued many long years by drought. Yours is smooth and rosy. My face is twisted like a piece of driftwood found bobbing in the surf. Yours is a pleasant oval, the ideal of all painters. Why do you fuss about the small matter of a nose?”

He had tried to teach the boy to make fun of his nose, to play the part of the clown. “If you laugh at yourself and make others laugh it is better than just them laughing at you.” He thought the boy could pretend to be a long beaked bird, pecking at the dirt with his nose and he’d worked out several witty jokes for Pinnochio to say when teased about his nose. Still the boy was quiet, always accusing his tormentors with tear-filled eyes and, because of this dignity he would often run home with dark bruises on his face and the jagged cuts of sharp rocks in his back.

Although like his father he became a fine marionette maker, all his puppets possessed a soft, sad quality, as if unhappy with the state of their existence – at the ends of those strings pulled unnaturally by the whims of some unseen being. None of them had the comedic traits of his father’s popular creations. Sometimes adults, seeking to acquire something unique to look at, bought one of Pinnochio’s suffering marionettes, but the children always grabbed at Geppetto’s grotesques -- puppets capable of taking much abuse and laughing it away like Geppetto their creator.

While other children were noisily playing outside, he remained hidden indoors, pretending to be on a glorious campaign with the great Puppet General Barba, the ironically beardless, or he would court the attentions of the fair Lady Esperanza, Esperanza of the dove-white skin and silken hair. His father had told him that some poor girl had sold her auburn locks so Esperanza could be so lovely. Pinnochio had suspected the real reason was the squawking infant in the skinny girl’s arms. Still he did not dwell on such unpleasant realities because he was the Puppet King, the arbitrator of puppet disputes, the dispenser of justice: he was their god, their creator. Pinnochio held court every day and let them entertain him with their loves and heroic deeds. He never touched the grotesques and left them completely out of his puppet parties, referring to them as ‘peasants.’

The boy loved the outdoors and there, as with his puppet friends, he felt great freedom. The trees didn’t care if his nose was long and knobby, perhaps because bark is rough and craggy and the water soothed him the same as it caressed any human being, whether saint, or murderer. So he often stole out of his father’s house and went into the woods, especially when the great dark firs were garlanded by mist. Sometimes he ran at break neck speed down to the rock quarry where there was a deep swimming hole – obsidian sparkling in the sunshine. He’d dive from off the highest rock, plummeting to the cold depths below, colder than the mountain snows and upon emerging the day no longer hot to him.

One afternoon Pinnochio failed to tell his father the whole truth: you could say it was a lie of sorts, this omission. He’d told his papa that he was going out to buy paste for the marionettes, which in fact he was; still, possessing a unique self-knowledge for his age, he knew he could not resist visiting the quarry. For the day was scorching hot, the kind of day when all one sees on the horizon appears to quiver, as if made of wax – the world takes on a sad dusty hue. So after purchasing the paste, he walked to the quarry in the blistering heat. It was late afternoon, the workers having already trudged off for home, and he thought he would be quite alone -- able to enjoy the descending sun, after having plunged himself in the cool dark waters.

It was not to be, this peace which the boy so craved, for other boys had come and were raucously playing on the rocks. Still he dared come and sit silently – for after all this was his quarry: the water had accepted him into itself, as he was certain it had never accepted anyone else’s skin. The boys began to taunt Pinnochio concerning the size of his nose and, because he did not answer them, they pushed him off the rock on which he was sitting.

They had never intended to kill and could never have imagined that pushing him would have caused him to hit the rocks instead of the chilly water. Having never slain anyone before, they stood there looking down upon the broken body below them, their mouths wide open in surprise. The group leader, every group has one, finally mustered enough courage to say: “That teaches him!” Then they all ran home kicking up dust in their wake: they ran home to mothers who baked good, sweet bread and fathers who were boring and tired from their day’s labor. Some of them would later lie to themselves -- that they had murdered the ugly boy deliberately and thus they had become men that day. Only one or two of the boys regretted their crime and prayed to God for forgiveness each morning when they awoke.

The stone cutters found Pinnochio in the early morning -- sprawled naked on the stones, not an inch of skin unbruised. Already a few buzzards were picking out the choice intestines and it looked as if a dog had stolen his liver. They assumed he dove off the rocks and, miscalculating, missed the water as a few youths do each year. With tenderness, they wrapped him in their smocks and bore him to Geppetto, who had sat awake all night driving himself mad with made up fictions of his child’s fate. Would he be murdered by robbers: run over by a carriage: or struck suddenly ill! So was he wracked by terror and hope alternating, that he dared not venture to the outhouse for fear he would miss some sign of Pinnochio’s return or some news of what trouble had befallen him.

When they brought the boy to him, the face showing ghastly white, the eyes rolled back in their sockets, the back of the skull crushed -- matting the lovely dark hair with dried blood, Geppetto felt a weary relief descend. This knowledge that his child was dead meant an end to the torment of worry and a beginning of the certainty of grief, for surely grief was better than gnawing uncertainty that the boy was still suffering. He thanked the stonecutters for their kindness and bade them leave him alone with his sorrow, and they, earning a living by how much stone they cut, left.

With a closed sign upon his door, he was now alone with his son who he laid upon the kitchen table as he had done ten years earlier – only now the body of his son was so much bigger, the legs dangling over the edges. It was awhile, before he had the courage to peel off the blood stained smocks with which the stonecutters had so generously swaddled the boy. “How am I ever to repair this damage!” he complained to the ceiling, as if he were repairing some puppet. All night he labored over the corpse of his son-- draining, picking, suturing, painting. In the dim light before dawn, he saw a beautiful youth stretched before him, whose nose was small, yet aristocratic, whose cheeks were like the juiciest apple and whose eyes were dark and reflective. It was indeed like one of Pinnochio’s more exquisite puppets: it possessed a virtuous humanity: it was as if it had a soul, the soul of his son. He hoisted Pinnochio over his shoulder and then laid him down in some tomb like recess. People in the morning would ask him of his son Pinnochio, having heard something of the boy’s demise, and he would simply reply that, with the services of some unknown priest, he had buried his most precious son. People would feel slighted; because in Carini, funerals were grandly somber events with wailing, food and wine; but they would forgive him: because he was, after all, the best marionette maker in the world -- the one to make them laugh.

He slept then, a gentle peace, that soothed his pinched up body and the rain outside washed clean his grief and told him that it was okay: that all was well. When he awoke he ate dinner and then went back to sleep the night. The next morning he opened his shop, as if nothing unusual had occurred. People brought flowers for Pinnochio and, though they thought it odd this private burial, they forgave him his eccentricity. He even sold one of Pinnochio’s sorrow-eyed puppets and was glad of it.

Over the years, Geppetto grew more stooped, gnarled and twisted: his hair went white as a cloud. Pain stabbed at his fingers, but still he made his marionettes, for without his work he could not live. He even created wounded soldier puppets; because he had seen soldiers returning from the war, men who were maimed, diseased, shell-shocked, and he wanted to portray their grief. Many in town said, “Geppetto is no longer funny! We do not like Geppetto! His puppets are scary!” Still people came to Sicily from all over Europe to buy those strange creations. Wealthy people descended upon the town of Carini for a taste of something real. After all they were not fighting the war and had no need to forget! The old man grew very rich and could have bought himself a mansion in Palermo, but he preferred to stay in his home with the ghosts of his ancestors and that of his son.

People of the town thought him addle-headed, lonely—some said insane. At night when his shop was closed, he’d remove Pinnochio from the closet and, with a tug on the strings, the boy would embrace him calling him, “Great jelly belly!” Geppetto would laugh and cause the boy to ask: “What is for dinner? I am so hungry papa.” He could imitate the slight whining lilt in the boy’s voice; so it was as if Pinnochio was right there talking to him. Despite the paint and varnish, the face had shrunken like a desiccated apple and some of the once luxuriant hair had fallen out. Still being a great puppeteer, he was able to keep the illusion alive for himself -- imitating the lost voice of his son and holding the bloodless painted hand, he was thus never alone.

Lucy Simpson