Dark and Deepest Red(6)
It was a look I’d seen before, when someone wanted a pair my grandfather was making for someone else, the moment of admiring turning into wanting.
But there was something sharp in this man’s eyes. Possessive.
“We’ll expect white ones by the end of the week,” the man said.
My grandfather nodded, showing neither fear nor defiance.
The hollow in my stomach turned hot. A week? For a pair from scratch? With my grandfather’s other commissions, he’d be up every night until his fingers bled.
“And we’ll accept these”—the man plucked the shoes off the table and stuffed them back into their tissue-lined box—“as an apology for the delay.”
Anger roiled in my stomach and rose up into my chest.
The man would take those red shoes, those beautiful red shoes, and demand white ones (how would my grandfather make full-beaded white shoes in a week without his fingers bleeding on the pale satin?) and he wouldn’t even pay for them.
My grandmother took a step forward. “Oh, no, we would never ask you to do that.” Even from behind the door I could catch the mocking in her voice. “We would never expect you to bear the sight of something so offensive to you. Here.” She snatched the shoes from the box. “I’ll save you the bother of carrying them home.”
She slipped a pair of scissors off a work table and, quick as a magic trick, cut the red shoes into pieces.
I had to bite my own hand to keep from gasping.
The pieces fell like confetti between the man’s horrified face and my abuela’s proud glare.
My eyes flicked from the gleam of my grandmother’s scissors to my grandfather’s face. I braced for the pain that would twist his expression. Every cut, every whine of the scissors’ hinges, must have put a crack in his heart.
But wonder opened my grandfather’s eyes as wide as I’d ever seen them. No pain. Only awe, like he’d just fallen deeper in love with my grandmother.
At the sound of the blond man shifting his weight, I ran back upstairs, dodging the creaky places in the wood.
I breathed hard in the dark, and I waited.
After the man was gone, after I heard the shuffling-around noises of my grandparents shutting off lights and going to bed, I snuck back down to the workroom.
I had spent whole afternoons in this room, watching my grandfather’s dark, weathered hands shape the heel of a shoe, or my father guide cloth through the sewing machine. I studied my mother’s calloused fingers stitching patterns and constellations, and my grandmother hunching over her desk, making careful accounts in heavy books that seemed a hundred years old.
I had wanted to be part of my family’s craft since I first filled my palms with glass beads and felt like I was holding the stars. My parents could keep me busy with hours of threading needles and sewing tiny stitches, the things my father said were the first skills he learned.
Even without turning on a light, the workroom seemed stuffed with magic. Dyed satin and velvet spilled from the shelves. Tiny buttons sparkled in their glass jars. The length of beads my mother left on stretches of silver cord glittered like salt crystals. Every-color thread confettied the surfaces. When my mother asked me to help clean up, I pretended I was a bird, gathering up scraps to build a bright nest.
But now I picked up the confetti of candy-red satin and apple-red velvet and blood-red beads.
I wrapped them in crumpled tissue paper, my heart ringing with what I now knew.
I would never let this happen again.
When I grew up, I would never let my family, or myself, be where my grandparents had just been, having to cut our own work into pieces so someone else wouldn’t steal it.
I would never let this happen again.
And I kept those pieces as a reminder. I would find a way to make sure we never had to destroy something of ourselves just to stop other people from taking it.
Strasbourg, 1518
In the dark, all she has are her hands.
She wants to light a candle so badly she feels the ache of it in her fingers. With nothing but the faintest breath of moon outside, the darkness is so thick that Lala’s dress, her hair, her skin feel woven from night. But the sound of iron striking flint would wake her aunt as surely as a thief breaking the cellar door.
Lala pulls back the rushes, wild marjoram woven into the plaited mats to lessen the stale smell, and she unearths a wooden box.
If Tante Dorenia knew what Lala was doing, her glare would be enough to open the ground beneath her. Lala is sixteen now, a woman, old enough to know better than to take such risks.
Lala brushes off the lid, so no dirt will fall inside. It would seem a useless effort to anyone watching, anyone who could see her in the dark, since the box only holds more of the same. A scant handful of earth.
But this earth is worth every field in Alsace.
The sound of weight on the road—a crunching of rock, the give of the ground—startles Lala. Her eyes skim the parchment windows.
Her hands pause in the heart of the wooden box. The thrumming of blood at her throat grows hot. She cannot help the sense of having already been found out.
This box of earth is a sign of all they have hidden. To be caught would mean the loss of their home, their small trade of ink and dye, and far more. Perhaps no one would understand what Lala meant to do with this handful of earth, but that would be all the more dangerous. They would count the hiding of it beneath a rush floor as a sign of unknowable witchcraft.