The Butterfly (La Mariposa) (1982) | Jesus Sanchez Uribe

Le Streghe

I.

The gardens here are vast and overwhelming. We are growing tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, and spaghetti squash. We are torturing eggplant and strawberries, keeping them alive just enough to suffer, yellow, in the sun. Only the weeds are truly thriving.

I take photos of the weeds and run them through a plant identification app on my phone. The app gets it right about thirty percent of the time. I am as much of a novice as an adult gardener can be, but even I know that this leafy green thing growing up between the cracks in the Granite State is not a Mexican Luffa Sponge gourd or a Saguaro cactus. I have questions, and the app is a poor teacher. 

Mostly what I want to know is: will this kill me? Or is it some kind of miracle herb, the purest form of medicine? 

I check the app and then consult my wildcrafting books. I have several. One of them has a list of poisonous look-alikes for every edible species. I check the plants compulsively, but I can never be sure if the one I’m holding is the poison or the cure. 

I hate this about myself. If I didn’t buy it at the grocery store, I don’t trust it.

I don’t want my children to end up this way: thirty-four years old and too nervous to eat a blueberry fresh off a bush because there is no sign there saying, go ahead, eat it, THESE ARE DEFINITELY BLUEBERRIES. 

It’s more than that, though. I don’t want to disappoint them: Le streghe. I can feel their blood running hotly in my veins. They keep me company in the garden; I can smell their perfume wafting from the grape vines, hear their whispers in the scrape of the wide green leaves.

I wish they would speak just a little bit louder.

II.

Back in Sicily, my grandfather, Giacamo, was a tree grafter. 

Tree grafting is a curious thing. My grandfather could make lemons grow from an orange tree and apples from a pear tree. To an inexperienced grower like me it seems almost like magic, but it isn’t. It’s a fusion of science and art, a natural phenomenon, but natural nonetheless, and therefore completely different from what Giacamo’s mother-in-law Sara did for a living. 

That was real magic.

III.

Sara was a witch. A strega. At least, that’s what we call her here in the States. Someone called her that once in front of my Zio Nino and I’m telling you, I’ve never seen him get so angry ever before or since. Blasfemo! He’d hissed through gritted teeth. My grandmother was not a witch — she was a saint! 

To be fair, maybe she wasn’t a witch. All I know for sure is that Sara could heal people with plants and magic—that’s how she made her living. The people in the town would go to her to cure their headaches and their stomachaches and their warts, etc. The cure for a headache was to balance a bowl of water on top of the head and light a candle in it. For a stomachache, a tea made from lemon peels and bay leaves, and a clockwise abdominal massage with olive oil. There were certain prayers involved. I don’t know what she did for the warts. 

I never met my great grandmother, but I grew up hearing stories about her. I was an anxious kid and therefore prone to frequent crippling stomachaches, and my mother, who isn’t Italian, would make me tea with lemon peels and bay leaves and massage my belly in a clockwise motion with olive oil from the grocery store. She didn’t know the prayers though, so it didn’t always help. She also didn’t have the hair for it. 

Sara’s magic came from a dreadlock that grew at the back of her head. She couldn’t brush it or cut it off or she would lose the power to heal. I’m not sure how she knew the two things were correlated, except that her grandmother must have told her. She had also had a magic dreadlock. It’s apparently an inherited trait. When I was a little girl, every morning I would feel the back of my head to see if a dreadlock had formed there during the night. It usually hadn’t, but if there was ever even a hint of one my mother would untangle it aggressively with her fingers and a paddle brush, mumbling under her breath about how my hair always looked like a giant rat’s nest. 

This is the reason why I don’t have magic powers.

All superstition aside, it is believed by the whole family that the magic was a gift from God. During the Great War when everyone on the island was starving, Sara would still heal anyone who came to her, even if they couldn’t pay. Then she would pray at night for the Lord to provide. In the morning, she would open a drawer and there would be money inside. Later, when even money could no longer get you something to eat because there was nothing left on the shelves, when she opened the drawer in the morning it would have pasta in it. Manna from heaven but make it Italian. 

When Sara was very old, it became time for her to retire from healing. With a pair of sharp scissors, she cut the dreadlock from the nape of her neck and put it away in a small metal box. Sara tried to give the box of hair to her daughter Vincenza, but Giacamo wouldn’t hear of it. He had witnessed the endless stream of visitors his mother-in-law had received at all hours of the day and night, and he didn’t want that going on at his house. As a fellow introvert, I don’t blame him. But as a child with stomach issues, I was not pleased that my nonno had forbidden my nonna to accept the gift. 

And what happened to the dreadlock? No one can tell me. Whether it was given to someone outside of the family, or lost, or kept hidden somewhere and forgotten about, that story did not survive the death of two generations and the passage of time. But I’d like to believe that the dreadlock is still out there somewhere. Human hair has an extremely long shelf life.

IV.

In college I took a class called Myths, Rituals and Festivals, and one of the things we learned about was the sweeping persecution of witches in Europe in the 1500s. My professor said the old ways of herbalism and faith healing were eradicated at that time thanks to the mass killings and hysteria that took hold across the continent. 

I learned not everything they teach you in school is true.

V.

I was texting with my sister Jackie recently and I mentioned that I’d been thinking about some of the more supernatural things that were said to have happened to (or because of) certain members of our family. Jackie lives in Manhattan near the top of a very tall building. I do not mention anything about the weeds I am growing to Jackie. 

This is how the conversation went:

Me: Do you remember the story about nonna Sara and the magic pasta drawer?

J: YES

J: And the house with the cats

Me: What cats?

J: idk something about cats. Zio Nino was telling it once?

J: and he started crying?

Me: How did it go?

J: Idk you’d have to ask Jamie

J: He was there

J: U kno nonna’s dread lock?

J: That’s like actually really

J: True

J: I inherited the dread lock gene, so I believe it now. Every morning my hair is a DISASTER

Me: Yeah, but can you HEAL

J: I’m Still waiting for the psychic powers

J: I wish I had gotten JUST the healing, not the dread

J: But I got just dread no healing

Me: Damn

J: Ya

VI.

I was there at the time that Zio Nino cried while he was telling us a story, but I don’t remember it being anything to do with cats. The story I remember was about his grandfather, and the time he was resurrected from the dead.

Zio Nino was named after his grandfather. In Sicily there are a lot of people walking around with the same exact names. Someone told me once this is because when it comes to land and property, the government doesn’t care whether you are the father, the son, or the grandson—as long as your name is on it, it’s yours. So instead of going through the hassle of deeding over your estate, you just give your progeny your exact name and it’s all taken care of. The thing I don’t get about that is how they know which Nino Bronia it all belongs to. Between the cousins and the grandchildren and the great grandchildren I can count seven of them, and I know I’m probably missing someone.

The story in question was told in June. Zio had flown in from Sicily to enjoy the relative coolness of a New England summer. He and a few of the American cousins were over at my parents’ summer home on Cape Cod, and someone had asked Zio to tell a story. A few of us there couldn’t understand as well as the others but my cousin Jamie agreed to translate, so Zio Nino sat down at the table with us and started talking. 

He told us that by the time he was a teenager his Nonno Nino was already getting up there in age and had gotten to the point where he could no longer shave himself, so every Sunday Zio Nino would do it for him. He would lather up the brush and go to work, and when he was finished with the shave, just before he wiped his nonno’s face clean, he would take the brush and playfully tap it on the end of his nose and say, boop! And every time he did it the old Nino would get a good laugh out of it, and the young Nino would laugh with him. Then he would wipe the shaving cream off his grandfather’s nose and go about his day.

This ritual continued weekly until Zio Nino turned eighteen and went away to serve in the army. With his grandson gone and no one to shave him, Nonno Nino grew a long, thick beard, which was uncomfortable in the island’s withering heat and not something you usually see in Sicily (almost everyone there is clean-shaven, except the women). This bothered Zio Nino to think about, and every time he took leave the first thing he always did was go straight to his nonno’s house to give him a shave. And every time, he would always boop his grandfather’s nose with the brush, and the two would laugh together.

Then one day the army gave Zio Nino news that his grandfather had passed, and he was granted a weekend to go home to bury him. By the time Zio Nino arrived in Sicily, Nonno Nino had been dead for a day or two and was lying in state on the dining room table, as was the custom. It had been a while since Zio Nino had been home to see him, and the old man was sporting a long, thick beard. As a parting gift to a grandfather he loved, Zio decided that he would shave the old man one last time.

My cousins and I hung on to Zio’s words as he described that final shave. First, he tucked the towel under his grandfather’s chin as usual, so the shaving cream wouldn’t get on his burial clothes. Then he set to work gently running the straight razor along his nonno’s still, cool cheek, and rinsing it off in a bowl of warm water. When he was done, he wiped his grandfather’s face clean with the towel. Then he stood there, frozen, holding the brush in his hand.

We watched in horror as tears welled up in Zio’s eyes. 

I didn’t know if I should do the boop or if I should not do the boop! He said, his voice cracking with emotion. I just stood there for a few minutes, crying. Finally, I made my decision. I took the soapy brush and tapped it on the old man’s nose for the last time — boop!

I know what happened next must have been true because of the way my sobbing uncle was clearly still traumatized by it six decades later. When the brush hit his nose, Nonno Nino’s eyes flew open and he let out a big laugh, loud enough for everyone in the house to hear. 

Then he closed his eyes, and he didn’t open them again.

VII.

I feel very fortunate to have been born into a culture that allows for miracles and magic to happen in real life. I know not everyone is so blessed. I could have been born half English instead of half Sicilian. I’m not entirely sure, but I think when someone dies in England, they pretty much always stay dead.

But to a Sicilian, even death has magic to it. Sometimes it happens the regular way, sometimes not. True beauty lies in leaving the door open to every possibility.

A few years ago, I was at my Zio Pino’s house for dinner. There was a big crowd there as usual, all of us related in one way or another. We had just finished a large, carb-centric dinner, and the men and my sister Michela were settling in to play a round of Briscola when somebody mentioned that Franco Marino had just passed away.

Franco Marino who? cried Zio Pino, who apparently was hearing the news for the first time.

The plumber.

You’re kidding! Which one? The father or the son?

The father, God rest him.

Mannaggia! I don’t believe it! I was just talking to him the other day! 

Zio Pino picked up his cell phone and started dialing.

Who are you calling?

I’m calling Franco!

Which one?

Franco the plumber!

You’re calling the dead guy?

By this time the phone was ringing. Zio put it on speaker.

My cousin Jamie was laughing. He said to his father, you know he’s not going to pick up the phone. You know that, right?

Everyone got very quiet. We listened to the phone ring. It was a very suspenseful moment.

Then a man’s voice boomed over the line: Ciao, Pino!

The room exploded into a cacophony of screams and laughter. Eh, Franco! Zio Pino yelled over the noise. You’re not dead!

What? Franco yelled back.

You’re alive! Zio Pino said. They tried to tell me that you died.

Ah, no. It’s not me that’s dead.

That’s good! That’s very good. 

He paused. 

Who died, then?

Franco the mason.

Porco cane. Which one? The father or the son?

VIII.

My mother sent me an email recently. The subject line said: Nonna Was Right. When I opened it, there was nothing but a link to click. The link took me to an article titled The Science Behind the Amazing Healing Properties of Bay Leaves. I wrote back to my mother:

Me: Re: Nonna Was Right

I wonder how she could have known. Science hadn’t even been invented yet (haha)

Mom: Re: Re: Nonna Was Right

Idk! How does anyone really know anything?

Me: Re: Re: Re: Nonna Was Right

Sometimes I feel like I could learn, but books and Wikipedia don’t feel like enough. I need someone there to hold my hand, to tell me for sure if it’s right or wrong. That’s the way it used to be, but now, we know everything and nothing all at the same time. Who can I ask to teach me? Who is still alive that knows?

But my mother stopped replying after that.

IX.

I am tasting my mother’s words more often these days, moving my lips around them in surprise as I spit them from my mouth. In the morning when I yank the bristle brush through my eldest daughter’s matted hair, I tell her that if she doesn’t stop screaming the neighbors will think she’s being murdered. I think of how many times my mother said those words to me and maneuvered the brush just a little bit gentler. I don’t think about magic as I’m untangling my daughter’s dreadlock. I am too busy thinking about my own mother, and what I am going to make for breakfast, and how the weeds in the garden are getting so bad they’re starting to crowd out the sad, stunted rows of rapini. I am so busy thinking about these things that I almost don’t notice my younger daughter slipping out of the bathroom before I can give her the same treatment I am giving her sister. 

I pretend not to see her leave. My ears can only take so much screaming first thing in the morning. Also, she’s three, and sometimes still bites.

Now I understand why my mother always kept my sister’s hair so short.

X.

I send my older daughter to the garden to pick the peas, before they grow too large and become tough and starchy. She is only five and the task is not easy for her because the pods cling stubbornly to the vine. I tell her not to eat anything that she finds outside–not unless I put it into her mouth myself. So, she picks the peas diligently, without tasting them. When she is finished, she comes to the kitchen and hands me the gallon Ziplock, only a quarter full. I’ll go out and finish the rest tomorrow, when it’s not so hot. 

My daughter smiles at me and says, these are the ones I planted. I know it because they smell like my hands. 

I crack open a pod and place one pea directly on her tongue, carefully, like a tender green pill.

XI.

The answer is no one. No one is still alive to show me how to work miracles, or perform healings, or to tell me what fresh oregano looks like, and how much of it should go into a good sauce. All I have left of le streghe are the memories, and those are cloudy at best.

When I was a child, we would visit Sicily once or twice a year and stay in the townhouse where my father grew up in Castellammare del Golfo. The house wasn’t lived in anymore and the shutters were kept closed, so when we arrived, my mother would have to open all the windows to air out the dust. The townhouse had three tiny bedrooms, and when my father was living there, he shared the space with at least eight other people: his five siblings, his parents, and Giacamo’s mother, whose name was Anna. His parents slept in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Anna slept in the downstairs bedroom just off the dining room. My dad and Zio Pino slept together on a pallet in their parents’ closet. I’m not really sure where everyone else slept.

Whenever we stayed in that house, our family of six would all cram together into the two upstairs bedrooms. No one wanted to sleep downstairs in Anna’s room. Maybe it was because of its proximity to the dining room table, where who knows how many bodies had been laid out over the years. It could also have been because the mattress on the bed was literally one hundred years old and was essentially just a fraying cloth bag stuffed with straw and mice. But perhaps the real reason no one wanted to sleep in Anna’s room was because we all knew the story of what had happened in there on the day she died, on that very same mattress.

That is one story that I haven’t forgotten.

Not all witches are good, as everyone knows.

XII.

Even though my nonna Vincenza refused to take possession of her mother’s magic dreadlock, there was no denying that she was still a strega. The woman had an uncanny ability to see and hear things that no one else could; supernatural things that were not of this world. Every morning, she would go for a walk in the garden and talk to God, and God would talk back to her. He would tell her things that she never could have known otherwise. For example, when my mother called to tell Vincenza that she was pregnant with my brother, my nonna answered the phone in tears, saying, Auguri, figlia mia! Apparently earlier that same morning in the garden God had shown my grandmother a vision of a blue-eyed, blonde-haired baby boy, and she had known instantly that it belonged to my father, Vincenzo. Never mind that my brother was born with brown hair and hazel eyes. When my son (Vincenzo’s first, and as of today, only grandson) was born twenty-two years later with eyes like shards of sky and blonde hair curling around his ears, we all said, ah. See. Nonna was right.

That wasn’t all. My nonna was an exceptional seamstress, and one day she decided that she was going to set about making an intricately hand-embroidered sheet set for each of her granddaughters’ hope chests. The problem was that each sheet was so incredibly elaborate that it could take years to finish, and her six children had procreated so abundantly that there was no shortage of granddaughters. Nonna was concerned that she wouldn’t live long enough to make sheets for every girl, so she went to the Lord for advice on the order in which she should make them. Some of her children and granddaughters were not very happy with what He had to say on the subject. Nonna started work on my sheet set when I was seventeen (the year I met my future husband) and began my younger cousin’s set the year after, even though some of her other granddaughters were in their thirties and had long-term boyfriends. Certain people were mad about it, but that didn’t bother Nonna. When God Himself is the one that’s telling you the way things are, then that’s just the way things have to be.

My grandmother’s mind wandered away from her toward the end, but her hands had a memory of their own. She continued to embroider wedding sheets until the end of her life, and when she died there was a set for every granddaughter, except the spinsters.

On the day Anna died, my Nonna witnessed something that no one else could see-- a swarm of demons wrestling the soul from her mother-in-law’s body and carrying it away to hell. She shut the door to the downstairs bedroom so that the children wouldn’t be exposed to such evil, and she sat with Anna and prayed over her as she screamed and thrashed against the hard straw mattress. It was not an easy death. My father can still remember the sound of her screams.

That’s the real reason why no one ever sleeps in the downstairs bedroom.

XIII.

One night when my parents were first married and living in Cambridge just down the street from Harvard University, a homeless man had a seizure on their front steps. My nonna was living with them at the time, and when my father tried to go outside to help, she threw her tiny body in front of the door and forbade him to pass. 

Stay inside! She screamed. The man is possessed! There are demons flying in and out of him!

But my father pushed her and yelled to my mother to call 911. 

Be quiet Ma, he said to my grandmother, who was praying feverishly and making the sign of the cross over and over. This is America. There are no demons here.

XIV.

Whether or not there are demons in America is debatable. Personally, when I look around at the state of things I am inclined to think that there must be plenty, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters more than whether or not they exist is that the people here don’t give as much consideration to demons as the people in the old country tend to do. What may be authentic demonic activity in the States is often explained away by saying, oh, it was just the wind, or the cat, or epilepsy. 

In Sicily it’s just the opposite.

Have I ever told you the story of the man we knew who died of fright? Zio Pino asked us some hours after hanging up the phone with the still-alive Franco Marino.

No, we said. Tell us.

This man we knew in our town got up in the night to get a drink of water. When he got to the kitchen and turned on the light, he saw a twisted, ugly, skinny arm reaching through the mail slot, trying to open his door from the inside. It could have been the arm of a man trying to break into his house, or it could have been the arm of a monster, coming to do something much worse.

There was a short pause as we all considered what the much worse thing could be. 

Then my cousin Jamie asked the real question. Pa, he said, If the guy dropped dead from fright, how do we know what it was he saw that scared him so much?

Wellllllllll, said my uncle. He didn’t exactly drop dead of fright. I didn’t say that. I said he died of fright.

What do you mean?

I mean, it was the fright that killed him. But he didn’t die right away. It took, oh, five, maybe six years.

Everyone around the table burst out laughing. I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. We all thought it was a great joke.

But my uncle didn’t laugh. It’s not funny, he said. It’s true. After seeing what he saw that night, the man was never the same.

XV.

I think that I would like, just once, to see something extraordinary. To hear the voice of God whispering to me, guiding me, telling me what to do. 

But then I think that I would just like to be able to tell the difference between lavender and rosemary. If I could only understand that first, maybe one day I could be sharp enough to discern the voice of God from the sound of the wind in the apple trees, or the soft breath of my son as he sleeps in the crook of my elbow.

But I know I have a lot to learn before that can happen. Even more, perhaps, to unlearn.

Instead, I lay awake thinking about my three-year-old, and the time I caught her sitting in the garden pulling leaf after leaf from the jumble of greenery and stuffing them into her mouth. I dropped my trowel and lunged for her, panic searing my insides, my eyes so wild that I saw her face reflect my fear immediately. 

What are you doing? I screamed. Never, never, never eat anything without asking first! You don’t know what that is you’re eating!

Yes, I do, Mama, my daughter said. It’s peppermint, Mama. It’s good. Here.

She tore off a piece of leaf and placed it in my mouth, her small hands steady, her eyes focused, laying it on my tongue with the deliberate tenderness of someone much older than three, than thirty, than three hundred. 

It was nothing like a pill. It was like communion.

FINE

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KARA QUINN's short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Hobart After Dark, Door Is A Jar, Marrow Magazine, Birthing Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in rural New Hampshire with the love of her life and their three young children. You can connect with her on Twitter or Instagram at @karaqwrites or by visiting her website, www.karaqwrites.com. Kara is represented by Ginger Hutchinson and Adam Chromy of Movable Type Management.

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