Ila and the Piñon Tree

Alone on the western side of a hill above her village, Ila, keeper of the tales, plucked a piñon nut from the branch of the ancient mother tree. She started to drop it into the small cotton bag hanging at her side, but paused. Something about this nut was different. It was larger maybe. Maybe stronger.

With each sound or aroma on the air currents, with each odd refraction of light or out-of-the-ordinary shadow, with each reverberation of the soil, images come and the mother tree records them.

The record was a fine place to find stories. The sun was descending, but it was still several minutes away from touching the sea. There was time.

She looked about, searching the scant brush on the hill for bits of inquisitive boys. The particular bend of an elbow, or perhaps the sheen of a knee reflecting sunlight.

When she was certain nobody was watching, she squeezed the hull between the second knuckles of her index and middle fingers.

It snapped crisply and fell away. She allowed the halves of the hull to fall and placed the nut precisely in the tiny hollow just behind the tip of her tongue. There it lay as she quietly intoned thanks to the sun for its life-giving rays and to the mother tree for all the stories she’d stored.

She closed her eyes and imagined the woody flavor leeching from nut to tongue, carrying with it the stories the mother tree had seen over the ages.

Great distant storms. They lashed the land with life-giving water, hardships to be endured but balanced with succor and calm.

Ships and fishing boats rolling in from the sea. Only routine comings and goings.

The coming of men afoot and on horseback. Alone and in bands, from the north and the south. From the east. Still, only passages, save one interruption when four had come and only three rode on.

For a moment she paused, focusing on the interruption.

Four men rode in from the north. They paused to peer at the sea from the height of the only cliff on the shore. A single rocky outcropping.

Two remained on horseback, but the other two dismounted.

Of those, one came too near the edge of the cliff. A sudden gust of wind came up and he turned away, but his left foot, clad in a leather boot on wet rocks, slipped

He spun and reached, then screamed as he fell. The other was not close enough.

After a time and quiet discussion, the others rode away to the south. A task awaited them there, and his death was only another lesson.

Ila searched the distant shore with her gaze. She found the outcropping some distance to the south and muttered a silent prayer for the soul of the one lost.

She closed her eyes again, lay her head back, and returned to the overview.

The passage of carriages and wagons. Distant ships, sailing south, sailing north, seemingly teetering on the horizon. Nothing of value there.

And eventually the great iron rails.

She rocked her head forward, opened her eyes.

In the distance lay a single pair of rails, a lesser-gauge train track snaking across the desert. Farther, just beyond the southern edge of her vision, the rails will cross a trestle over a deep perennially dry wash.

The trains. There the nut vibrated.

She rocked her head forward, eyed the rails. At their breadth, they shimmered pink and silver in the softening western light. They stretched away to the north and pointedly disappeared beyond a rise. They stretched away to the south and faded into a single line, then nothing.

Having set the scene in her mind, she closed her eyes again. She adjusted the nut, bade the memory come.

The mother tree could not sense details as far away as the track even at its closest point, but she recorded what she could: the rumbling past in the morning, the rumbling back in the evening, the thoughts and emotions strong enough to ride the rumbling all the way to the roots. Only one time, in all her three hundred and twelve years, two had rumbled together.

Ila frowned. That couldn’t be right. There was only the one set of tracks.

The piñon nut still snug in the hollow, she elevated her tongue to the roof of her mouth for a moment, nudging the nut slightly to one side, slightly back, and another half-turn until it was positioned perfectly to seep the story of the two trains merging.

She shuddered at the initial sensations emanating from the nut.

The rumblings were great. Loud. Louder still. She longed to be a more intimate witness.

The mother tree obliged.

The piñon nut tingled on Ila’s tongue. An invitation to visit the memory.

She hesitated, but it was only a nut, balanced on her tongue.

It tingled again, and she released herself.

There was a flowing, constrained and diminished but straight, of a single purpose, as water seeping through rock. Ila thought of the spring that appeared in the its place on the side of the hill in the late winter. She would know how the water felt, and more. There was the train and other minds. Not merely a seeping along the face of a cliff.

There were grains of sand, bits of rock, the occasional root—through all of that she flowed like a spirit. It must be how a spirit flows.

And up into the air inside the train. The fifth car, though how she recognized it she could not know.

There in the seventh seat back on the right side, the one to whom she was attached. A man slept beside her peacefully. The left side of his head lay against the back of the seat back, his forehead against the window.

The woman—Maria. Maria Escobedo de Salas—glanced at him, smiled, thought of his mother. And returned to her book.

They were traveling south to see his mother.

Soothed by the rhythms of the gently rocking train, Maria returned to her book of tales. She read to the end of a page, then glanced out the window at the semi-arid landscape.

A smile curled one corner of her mouth.

She glanced down, ran her hand along the soft leather seat. She was in a machine. It held her firmly and comfortably in place while the world and time and all its troubles sped past her.

The tales from the book were within her.

She shifted position, returned her attention to the book, turned the page.

She read for a moment, then closed it on one index finger to keep her place.

Tomorrow. A tear welled in one eye. She cocked her head back a bit, made her chin protrude and gritted her teeth, mindful not to do so too hard.

She willed the tear to remain in the inside corner of her eye, and all others to remain in their respective ducts until a more appropriate time. Tomorrow she would endure many things, not the least of which was her mother-in-law’s tongue. There would be ample opportunity for tears.

She crossed herself subconsciously, thought about her mother-in-law.

Dressed all in black as usual, the woman would approach her, reaching with her arms, repelling with her eyes. Seeking a shoulder on which to lay her head and shed crocodile tears, a sad smile plastered across that roadmap of a face.

Maria smiled wanly at her own cruel wit and was only a little sorry for having allowed the thought to escape.

According to stories that were legend in the family, her mother-in-law, in her youth, was a classical beauty. She washed her face each morning in a spring that rose from the earth near the small village where her father was alcalde. Most accounts said she seldom spent much time gazing at her own reflection in the calm surface of the spring.

Some took that to mean she was not narcissistic at all. Others said she was so convinced of her own beauty that she found the perfect mirror of the spring unworthy of her reflection.

Whatever the case, her father enlisted her aid to keep a young captain out of the way of a planned treachery. At the worst, she was to weaken him as only a woman can.

The act was required, and it proved to be her undoing. Afterward, as the captain donned his clothing, a ray of light slanted in through the window. She caught her breath at the captain’s chiseled beauty, and in the intensity of the moment a curious rippling feathered over her face. Another, stronger, surged through her heart.

Something was amiss!

She sprang from the bed to straighten her skirts and blouse. She tore her cloak from the bedpost and fled the room, racing to the spring to see what had happened to her.

She thrust back her hood and bent low over the spring. Her face! Cracks ran from forehead to chin, ear to ear, true and diagonally!

And her belly was stretched noticeably. The captain’s passion was such that he left her with child, and one that would be born in only three months’ time.

That child was Maria’s Pedro.

Ah, the woman. The stories must be lies.

She would grasp Maria’s shoulders firmly, hold her at arm’s length in lieu of a welcoming embrace, and deliver a comment both barbed and dipped in honey and cinnamon.

Maria smiled grimly.

In truth, the woman has no hands at all. They are only the rough, calloused feet of a gargoyle with sharp, thinly disguised claws. They will puncture the soft flesh of my shoulders as she holds me in her vise-like grip.

Sweat beads appeared on Maria’s forehead.

Then her barbed, razor-sharp tongue, having been dipped in honey to ease the delivery and cinnamon to cauterize the wound, will shred the flesh of decency and civility as surely as a meat grinder renders muscle into hamburger. How I despise her!

Something brought a premonition, and she saw angels. She fancied them dancing on the head of a pin.

They flashed this way and that, twirling and slipping from immortality to mortality, Heaven to Earth and back, all in sync with the rhythms of the train.

In a flash of clarity accompanied by a distant scream, she was able to count them. She smiled, though not enough to evoke the sin of pride. She was the only mortal who bore the knowledge of that holy number. A tear came to her eye. She made no effort to stop it.

The scream came again. Louder. She blinked.

Ila knew the scream.

The northbound train wailed, as if the other should step to one side. She imagined the steam streaking from the whistle, laying straight back, hacking at the bend of black smoke before dissolving into it.

The southbound train continued strong, its rhythm rocking insistently.

The northbound sounded its whistle again, louder, and another screeching came.

The southbound lurched as if the wheels locked then turned again, the operator jerked to attention.

Another scream, this one from the woman. Then “Pedro! What’s happening?”

“Eh?” He wagged one hand at the woman, his eyes still closed, his forehead still pressed against the window.

Maria wanted to yell, “Why do you not pay attention?” But she only yelled, “Pedro!” and her right shoulder ached as she shook him hard.

Pedro shifted, and in the woman’s fears, he opened one eye. Again he wagged a hand. “Probably a cow or a deer. Nothing to worry—”

The train lurched again, but hard, with a great grinding noise. The car stopped and heaved upward, Maria thrown forward through Ila from her seat. She screamed again, the sound cut short when she reached the front of the car.

The man’s head bludgeoned the seat in front of him, and Ila—

Quickly opened her eyes.

In the distance, the rails. Glowing pink and silver, but not so brightly. Only the top half of the sun remained in the sky.

To her left, the piñon tree seemed to sag.

* * * * * * *

Author Note: This is yet another magic realism story originally penned by my persona, Gervasio Arrancado. See all of my fiction at my online discount store.