Where The Bull Was Kept

HUDDLED INSIDE HER UNCLE’S hunting coat, on his dark bed, Clare listened to a little wind slipping through some unfamiliar Italian trees. She heard the rushing of a stream. In the rafters, night thoughts roosted. She tried to concentrate on just the whispers of air as they played through twigs and leaves, pretending this could be a new discipline, identifying growing things not just by leaf and bract and stem but by the sounds they made as the wind played through.

Then the moon reached in and said, Hush now little Clare. Your mother’s name was Selene, another name for the moon. You will never be an orphan, Chiara, because your mother will always be shining down on you.

On nights when she couldn’t sleep, he used to comfort her with these words.

To the sound of the stream, Clare began drifting back and back to the true place, the good place, and darkness gave way to the full rich green of a coastal morning rising, where a man and a little girl were heading to a stream full of cutthroat, the man carrying his own rod and the girl’s new one as he helped her through the fence into the field where the bull was staked, below the folly of a west coast farmhouse with an Italian tower. The bull was raising its head, shaking its chain. The man said, “Stand tall; show him that you are not afraid.”

“Are you afraid?”

“I would be. But he’s staked, Chiara.”

They were playing hooky from a long list of chores. In his pocket were two hard buns with slabs of cheese, and in his other pocket was Volume One of Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria. They had only just started on these travels, which he would take her on whenever they managed to escape for the next brief years, Volume One illustrating the map of a city with its ancient gates and streets and ruins and the cemetery that held tombs like small brilliant houses, and such paintings on the walls. All this was described in a way so grownup that Clare let a lot of it flow over her. Bit by bit the pictures formed. Her uncle said they would go there together.

This was the prelude. Now, to inhabit the crucial moment that exploded some days later, to be truly there, she needed to summon up the smell of burning sun on clay, the glitter of Oregon grape against the cliff that dropped from the farmhouse to the field. And then little Chiara, digging, digging — in danger and hot young jealousy and fury — into that steep cracked wall of clay.

If she is quick — but has left enough clues — he will come and find her.

It turns out she is nothing in that house. He doesn’t care that she did the drawing of the foxgloves just for him. She signed the drawing with the tiny upright fork shape he’d explained made a k sound in the Etruscan alphabet, “as in your name, Chiara,” signed it with the symbol only he would understand, to show how she absorbed everything he said. But he had left her picture on the table where her aunt could come and crumple it and throw it on the fire. Now Clare has the butcher knife and she is carving a place to disappear.

“Oh, what our Etruscans could have done with this cliff face, Chiara,” he’d said when they came back across the field the week before, his face lighting up in that way that made her feel peculiar power. “We’ll pretend the cliff is limestone, shall we? Its location would have been ideal for our Etruscan friends to carve tombs.” Excited now, pointing out how the horseshoe shape of the cliff brought it into perfect view of the house above. “That is the essential element for an Etruscan city of the dead — in view of the habitation of the living.”

What a strange activity for a child.

“Shall we carve the entrance of a rock-tomb, like the drawing I showed you?” Dark hair falling in his face as he set down the fishing gear. What child wouldn’t enjoy feeling singled out, special? What child wouldn’t delight in taking turns with his fish knife to carve an elaborate house-front into clay, then being hoisted onto his shoulders so she could cut stick figures on the triangle shape above the columns? But as she’d wriggled down and begun to hollow out a true entrance between the columns, he’d grabbed her back, scolded her. Yes the Etruscans had carved tombs deep into the living rock, but this was only clay. It would be dangerous to burrow in there.

In deeper now, when it turns out she isn’t special after all. Burrow deeper still! The hot sun baking the outer clay, the blood roiling through her brain as she carves her way to darkness, hacking out great reckless chunks with the stolen butcher knife.

Eventually she hears him calling. So what? She will live here. In the night she will bring blankets, a camp stove, food.

When she feels the down-rush of dusty earth, it is too late to call out or do anything but curl up like a snail and wonder, almost triumphant, if perhaps she will not be found till centuries later. Will she be fossilized by then, the clay turned to limestone at last, her curled body too?

What she smells next is his fear. Sharp as a knife it cuts a channel ahead of him, the stink of it. She keeps her eyes closed after he gets her free. He collapses to his knees outside, crushing her tightly to him, saying, “Jesus Jesus Jesus.” Her hand creeps to his armpit. She breathes his fear from her fingers, and the smell of love and almost-death. There will never be anything, ever, to match that moment.