The man had done all he could. It had been decades since he first found shelter in the cave a short walk from the edge of Yorktown village. The natural formation of rock led inside under an overhanging cliff that wrapped in on itself from the verdant hill above like a cleft, upper lip. Submersed in its cool, unchanging dark, he did not emerge. To some, he was a simple recluse. To most, he was a filthy pest.
At times, he was revered in whispers after dark. He was more than a homeless man. He preserved the meaning of the cave. The eldest townies occasionally glanced into the opaque black of its mouth. They would return home, and rock on the porch for days through the mild winters of Virginia to tell unending tales of the solitary, eccentric man and the invisible home he kept.
In bygone days when war came to them, the cave was a refuge for noncombatants who endured the worst amid food shortages and rampant violence, followed by moral corruptions in its wake. It was a hallowed ground of ancestral suffering, where raped prepubescents and childless widows sat together and mourned before reentering society. They crept out into the sunlight maimed and traumatized to paralysis, weakened more and more with each empty, distant rumble of cannon fire.
“Human dignity is lost when working men compete for the most inflated chests, and desire medals of cold-blooded victory,” one grandpa told some children, who swallowed the hard kernels of wisdom from the war stories over watermelon and corn in the balmy air. “Before ever crossing no man’s land, they were defeated by the idea of heroic death.”
Susan was a flower for the picking. She ran away one midnight to greet the caveman. She did not know his name, but had heard of him for as long as she could remember. Dinners began at the table with her father praying for him, “Praise him, the meekest among us”. He had a mystic lure. She clasped her hands at the edge of her bed every night wondering how he lived and who he was. One night, she could not sleep. The seasonal winds whipped against the clapboard exterior of her family home. There were cannon blasts and rifles ablaze in the fields, muffled by distance.
After a fervent devotion, her eyes streamed tears onto her taut, prim bedding. She imagined the caveman’s face lonesome. She wanted to introduce herself before womanhood, while her innocence was still believable.
Her bedroom window opened with surprising ease. Her two younger brothers were asleep and did not stir. They dreamt away the humdrum domesticities of their daily lives. Her father had built the house so that the children’s bedroom was by a thick growth of brambles, to discourage escape. And thieving only increased with every hour as wartime rationing worsened.
Susan was undaunted. A slight prick caught her arm and let the tiniest stream of blood as she passed with a smile into the gusty air. Impassioned by her fright and naivety, she wrapped her nightgown in the thick, heavy woolen coat that her father kept by the shed. A thrill coursed through her. She marched confidently along the shorefront to the carriage road leading out of the village.
The windows of the town were sparsely lit with candlesticks low for the scarcities of wax and oil. It seemed unusually dark under the cloudy winds of the moonless night. There was a thin fog on the sea horizon, and a lighthouse flickered in the sound. The sea had never looked so perfectly black, she thought, feeling an unbearable mix of excitement and worry. She wondered what her father would say, if her brothers would be proud of her bravery. In the moment when her mother occurred to her, she saw the gaping maw of the path before her. It was like a wall of sooty brick. After the last house in the village all was unseen. She had never walked so far alone. It was only a few feet to enter the overgrown forest, where a narrower path led to tobacco fields, and to the battlefronts.
The coastal land transformed abruptly to ascending cliffs covered in vines and sloping trees that were bent from the sheer weight of gravity along the steep overgrowth. She once met Jacob, one of the sons of the family who lived in the last house, at a village fair. He was bragging to his friends at the center of a rowdy gang.
Jacob said he bested the caveman with a slice of his mother’s pie and a knack for pickpocketing. He showed a beheaded frog, saying he stole it from the fabled hermit. He told of how the gnarled man attended to a glowing red-hot, boiling cauldron overflowing with hair, and filled with bones, insects, beaks, snouts, tails and the foot of a human infant. And he was drooling while stirring the pot, and had slimy jars all around, caked in smears of putrid stains from the excess of his carnivorous concoctions.
“The man is a warlock,” said Jacob, through his browned and sugar-stuck teeth.
His words seethed with the spittle of a boy greedy for attention.
“I’ve seen him skin alive the bodies of the recently deceased. He is a grave robber, and wartime has made him rich and fat with the ingredients for his potions and tricks. My own mum tells me to keep my wits about me in the night, to sleep with one eye open and never to submit to feelings of temptation, as he fishes sleepwalkers into his bed, wooing women and children with the softest fur and feathers cleaned from catch about his thicket.”
A shock of white hair flashed at the mouth of the cave, lit by a momentary beam of moonlight before fading back into the deep. Susan stepped ahead nervously, and cracked a twig that to her heightened senses felt like a resounding pop in the strange silence of the night. The war must be on break, she thought, and dilating her pupils to the extreme, went closer into the yawning stone that tempted her unshakable curiosity. As from the black void, a hand reached out from the cavernous interior and pulled her inside. The dank walls smelled of a fungal must. Her heart beat to a pitch of feverish enchantment.
His fingers alone felt strong enough to pick her up by the skull. His wide palm stretched over the length of her shawled scalp and tightly braided hair. Her body exuded pure naivety, disarming him. He let go and struck a match. She saw his tired, but powerful eyes, the runnels and furrows of skin that wore his face with age. The low fire grew brighter against the humid, craggy subterranean home. Its warmth held them close. She could smell the cold sea outside. He was missing half a leg and many fingers. One of his eyes remained closed. She did not break her harmless stare. His face was half-burnt. He had scars all over.
“You’re a venturesome gal, aren’t ya?” he said with a surprising clarity, even eloquence, addressing her in a learned accent. “Have some herbal tea before your return home, my dear.”
His accent was thick, a tinge of brogue with a stranger, native element. His hair was thicker and shades darker than anyone of English stock that she had known within the close-knit village round. Everyone at home and all of her neighbors seemed to keep to themselves. If the militias the village had defended and supplied for generations were defeated, they would leave them, unarmed domestics, to a fate worse than the battlefield.
The tea tasted like nothing she had ever had at home. It was sweet, which was rare in days of rationing. She did not talk over his heavy silence. It was comforting. She remembered why she left home, to meet the invisible and unknown, to leave her childhood behind her. She wanted to greet him. He asked her why she had come, but she could not say then. Her thoughts felt too plain.
“What is your name?” she asked quietly.
“I’m Jack, but not from birth. That’s what they called me in the army.”
She began to feel like an adult speaking with him, more so than with her friends and family. It was alleviating, empowering to exchange words with him. He spoke to her intelligently and she responded with respect. Most importantly, she was satisfied with his answers.
She finished her tea and placed the roughly fired ceramic mug by the fire. For a long moment the friendly interactions over a hot, soothing drink and a crackling fire transported her to the warm homes of her extended family, when she would visit relatives and see playmates during the harvest. Her mind drifted to the beloved bonfires of autumn.
The next morning, she woke in her father’s home. But she had an unfamiliar sensation that night. Her brothers looked more disheveled than usual. They had risen well before dawn. Her mother, Rachel, was beaming with pride. Susan’s pelvis was aching. The boys ran off. Blood was on the bed. Her aunts appeared. She smiled at her favorite, Thelma. Her grandmother, Anne, sewed a new shawl.
“My daughter is a woman now. You will bathe in the the spring of St. Josephine,” she said with a soft tone. “How did you scrape your arm? I trust you had not found out about your maturation before dawn and then attempted to wash by the well?”
“The blood frightened me. I couldn’t bring myself to wake you and Papa. I thought, I am old enough so I should resolve the problem on my own. I climbed out from the window to soak along the shore and was caught in the brambles. You should have seen the tide, Ma! It was low, and the moon gleamed bright over the waves. Our village looked so beautiful. Do you forgive me?” she pleaded with a mischievous grin that sent Thelma through the roof with adoration. “Now, when are we going? I am in need of that bath.”
Anne wove the last knit of her ceremonial shawl. They gathered at the doorway. Thelma patted her lightly on the back. They wore protective clogs for the forested, wetland walk through the thorny bush. Arm in arm with Anne, one foot in front of the other, Susan walked off the unfamiliar pains. Her father’s sisters, Jane and Ruth, accompanied.
They neared the cave at the edge of the village and said a quiet prayer before moving up the path where it led to the tobacco fields. The earth quaked as they approached the advancing enemy front. Instead of stamping over pasture, they entered the densest part of the forest. A distinctive patch of shrubbery stood out. Anne knew exactly which branch to lower. She placed a knowing hand on the one that bent easiest for Susan to pass.
The way snaked through overgrowth, by a deer trail, to a clearing. There were wild blackberry bushes and holly trees under a stand of ash, leading to a round of high, lush oaks. A willow was bending over in dead center. Anne sat inside under the hanging branches on a bed of leaves. Her aunts positioned themselves across from one another under the taller, sheltering boughs that dropped acorns in the light wind brushing up against the sturdy trunks. The seaside cliffs of the marine horizon stood against the sea only a short walk from the clearing in the forest. It cultivated introspection, which Susan felt well, and saw in the eyes of her elders. The village back home was suddenly no more than a passing thought, invisible in the fertile backwoods.
Susan followed her mother down another narrower path, carefully brushing back twigs and leaves, moss and spiderwebs. The still morning air dampened and cooled as she climbed over a felled tree, entering deeper into the woods. She was alone. The silence itself listened. She heard the spring. In all of her days playing about the groves, she had never felt it so coolly running through her toes, and now it pulsed like an ocean wave over her body, knee-deep in its icy flow. The clear whirlpools washed past her exposed navel, holding her dress in a knot at her ribs to save the last of her clothing that was well kept in such times when every rag was valued and reused. All work was done to survive the war. Silvery foam spurted about her skin. She ipped her lower half in the stream, and heard her mother’s voice, gently, from behind the leaves.
“The water you sit in runs apart from that which fills our village well. It pours out through a mouth all its own into the ocean. Your body sits within its eternal cycle. It encompasses nature, from the roots of our virgin forests to the wings of our strongest eagle.”
“Do not fear, my daughter, never hesitate for a moment. You are one and the same with every bit of creation. Like the stream that now cleanses you, think of your power. It is unique. You may now think and act for yourself. You are a woman, equal to your aunts, your grandmother and I. We are your body. We love you. When you love your body, and are cleansed by these waters, you show your love to us.”
Her body was numb, but she sat, absorbed in the peace of mind she had, knowing that she was making her mother happy. She based in her contemplative mood. What she felt was as new to her as her secret meeting with the caveman. She drank his tea and woke to another life. The cooling flow relaxed her as she let it run through her legs.
Straightening her back to rise, she slipped. She was flexing her legs, and rocked by a tremor, tumbled headfirst into a shallow puddle over the exposed bedrock. Like thunder after a lightning strike, pulsing booms followed. She held her bruised forehead, and ran to her mother. The women were there, lost to the bliss of her day. They held each other, as their tears fell, fighting audible sobs. Tragedy had come for them at last. Galloping warhorses approached.
Under the warm shade of the summer day, Susan cowered in disbelief. Her father’s pale face flashed into her mind. He was wounded with frustration, wrinkled and confused. They would have to huddle in the forest until nightfall.
Hours passed like days. Mortal fear hung in the air like a man from a tree. Rachel developed a nervous tick, flicking her pointer finger till it bled. Anne bit the inside of her cheek with a vacant stare. They both looked strange, unfamiliar. She could hear skin breaking. She was entranced by the soggy decomposition of leaves and soil on the forest floor. The women prayers in rushed, strained mumbles, like a mad glossolalia. Thelma put her face down into her palms.
“They came,” Thelma kept saying in a daze, half to Susan, half to herself. “Let our people live.”
Her voice trailed off into the emptiness above the round of oaks. Dusk chilled overhead with amassing cloud cover. The light waned. Susan felt abandoned. She did not know what to do, and neither did her elders.
She crouched, and finally sat down before laying out flat to stretch her muscles from her toes to her fingertips on the bare earth. She played with the focus of her eyes, in and out through the spaces where the slow-moving leaves of the treetops were covered in sea fog. Her mother kneeled by her, and placed both of her hands on her to stroke her hair. Her mother pressed her fingers against her cold face. The sun slowly disappeared.
Night came. One by one the women rose from private genuflection. They thought together while listening closely for wayward soldiers in the dense forest. They decided to leave. Thelma led the way as the most limber of the five. They crossed the felled tree, careful not to snap a twig. The enemy soldiers were rumored to be bloodthirsty rapists. The path already crawled with men tasked to march any survivors left from the village to the nearest prison camp.
Jane and Ruth held the front and rear. Susan watched Thelma stop abruptly where tobacco farmers had long ago cut through the coastal forest. At a standstill, for a moment’s pause, Thelma turned to Susan, and then looked at Anne behind her. A rush of blood swept through them all at once as Thelma’s face contorted with shock. She could see it in the sweating, panting, dilated pupils of her sister, Rachel, whose worry had thrown her to the brink of sanity. And then, she pulled back the bundled tangle of knotted branches. The road was clear, and they could hear nothing.
“How do they know?” thought Susan.
Thelma looked through the bushy overgrowth, poking her head into the open space. She motioned for everyone to come closer. Then she ran off with a light patter, skipping swiftly to the edge of the forest. Susan never witnessed such extraordinary athleticism from her favorite aunt Thelma. Almost as soon as she dashed away she was back.
“No one,” she said, panting.
They were not interested in surviving alone. The village was unguarded, but eerily unpeopled. They would soon see it under a painfully clear, dawn light. Anne was overtired. They tip-toed on the path. The wind picked up in sporadic gusts. Susan saw dark clouds overhead. She could feel the nerves of the woman pulse erratically, she who had always been her refuge was a tangled mess. When she locked eyes with her second aunt Jane, she was ghostly pale, her hair stuck across her hollow cheeks. Hunger hit her like a smack against the inside of her stomach. Thelma spoke quivering through her rapid-fire heart rate. Her pulse visibly rattled her jaw. Her slender figure, which had always been one of her famous lures, looked weak, sickly. She waved for the rest to hurry so as not to remain in plain sight for too long.
They smelled the char of burnt wood, homes and gardens swallowed in flames. Smoke still rose and lingered against the darkening clouds. They came to the end of the path, and hesitated. Thelma went on ahead when the others could not yet. Only Susan followed as Jane and Ruth kept the eldest among them company. Susan and Thelma would never be able to render the sight into words. It would stay with them like a recurring nightmare. They turned back and told the women one unavoidable fact.
They would have to take what chance they had left by hiding in the cave. They stared into the inky abyss horrified. They huddled close together, observing the cleft stone of the cave’s mouth. Jane took half another step toward the beachfront of the village. She trailed behind and could not help herself. An inner compulsion caused her to steal a glance at the sea. The sight burned into the deepest part of her psyche. She was traumatized for life.
It was a man, bent with age, looking back towards her as the dawn light glowed over a crystal glass sea, stroked with blood-red rays that blazed over the horizon. The man then fell. His face was covered in soot, a part of his beard sliced clean off his chin, the stump of his only leg failing to hold him up as he pressed one of his hands to his gut. He looked at her, and sprawled out flat on his face.
Susan remembered him. His glance stunned her. Till her last breath, the thought of him there would move her to tears. The village where she was born went out of focus for her. It became a mirage. She descended into the cave, behind her aunts, mother and grandmother, into the lifeless dark. The others did not notice then how much Susan was changing.
As they went inside, the smell of the burned homes where they once lived dissipated. It was replaced by a soothing aroma. Tea had been left brewing overnight. It was the same herbal concoction that Susan drank with the caveman. Its aromas brought out a child-like feeling in her, a remote happiness that had faded to black since her rite of passage culminated in her confrontation with the war. For an instant, she overcame the wretched gloom that fatigued her heart.
They followed the warmth of the tea’s steam. The involuntary urge to satiate thirst, and with a familiar drink no less, had them on their knees. The air warmed until finally they gasped with jaws frozen open in disbelief. It was Jacob.
As they approached, Jacob wept at the sight of the women before they noticed him under a dim candle at the end of its wick. Jacob led Susan to the store of preserves in the back of the cave. As the elder women went back to tend the pot of tea, Jacob and Susan saw each other. They realized how hungry they were around the smell of the nuts, seeds, berries, herbs that the caveman had kept.
Jacob leaned in to peck Susan on the lips. He then ran away. She stood for a moment, and then walked back to sit with everyone in silence around the low embers under the kettle. They listened to the water simmer. It sounded like every reason to live.
“Did you see him?” asked Anne.
“He was a dream. Oh, he had a handsome face, a great, clean beard and as strong a pair of legs as any on this side of the world. And he wanted me. I was never his, and he was never mine, but we were close at times, to breaking away and making something new together. He did tell me once that he wished we would just take each other and run. Oh, how I wanted that.”
“He’s gone now, though, you see, not before we made it back alive. There will be light again on your face. And Jacob will be here,” she grinned.
Matt A. Hanson is a writer in Istanbul. He produces weekly and monthly features from across Turkey, Europe, the Middle East and the U.S. covering art, books, history, travel, and food. His work with various international newspapers and magazines is translated into Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew and Ladino. He is also an author of poetry and short stories, currently writing a series of historical novels set in Greece.