“Blood, Swamps, and Mennonites”
Excerpt from Like A Redwood Seed — Stronger Than the Flames, by Fia Sylvan
Lacking money and food, it wasn’t long before we became really hungry. My stomach grumbled, tempers flared, everything made worse by the relentless rain and mosquitoes that plagued us whenever we stepped out the door. A ravening beast once again taking up residence in my belly, fiery stabs of pain as if being clawed from the inside by a trapped raccoon, reminding me of my hungry days living on Buffalo’s streets the previous spring.
My mind wandered during the day, recalling the warm, dry, cozy log cabin I’d had to myself for the previous winter in Montana, and all the delicious food we’d had.
Why did I come back here? This is so dumb.
Then one of my sisters would run to me, wrap their little arms around my neck, and press their small faces against mine, wanting to show me something, or tell me something, and I remembered why.
“This really sucks. I don’t see how we can survive here. What was Mom thinking?” I asked Cormac as we wearily trudged the five miles to town to call a tow truck, per Mom’s orders.
“Well, I think the original plan was for Dad to be here and build a log cabin big enough for everyone.” Cormac scratched at the hundreds of welts that covered his brown face — gifts from the horrid little swamp vampires — and kicked rocks along the road with his oversize rubber boots, soles held together with duct tape.
“She had to know Willie was never going to do that. He doesn’t know how to cut down a tree or even build a regular house, let alone a log cabin, and even if he did, he never wanted to live in the wilderness.” I shook my head, frustrated beyond words by the continued poor decisions of our parents and the staggering lack of ability to think two steps ahead.
“Look, there’s the payphone.” Cormac pointed, and I placed the call.
A few days later, the tow truck arrived and removed the ancient blue van from its muddy entombment. Mom drove into town to see if she could get food from a food pantry, but returned empty-handed. Most of them had certain days a month that were available and all but one of them required proof of residency in the local town or county, which we didn’t have.
We subsisted on the popcorn and peanut butter we had brought with us, supplemented by whatever Sara, Maria, and I could forage (Mom knew little about wild edibles, nor was she willing to wade through brush and swamp looking for any). We gathered nettles, leeks, chickweed, wild violets, berries, and dandelion greens, most of which were palatable when cooked, some palatable raw as a salad.
My brothers made fishing poles out of willow branches and hooks out of paperclips, and spent hours trying (with little success) to catch fish for dinner. Mom was able to supplement our diet once in a while with the occasional food from the food pantry that didn’t have a residence requirement. Mostly it was more popcorn and peanut butter, sometimes rice.
Once, Mom came back with a frozen turkey.
The little kids danced around in excitement at the first prospect of an actual meal in a month. Mom said she had a migraine and went inside the cabin to take a nap.
“How are we going to cook this?” I eyed the frozen turkey, bemused, surveying our haphazard camp.
“All will be revealed,” Cormac said, smug, grinning at me, as he picked up a slender green sapling pole he’d cut earlier in the day.
Clearly he had a plan, and didn’t want to explain it to his impatient and skeptical older sister. That phase was his favorite, and most singularly irritating, thing to say to me when I asked him to explain something. Rolling my eyes at him, I folded my arms across my chest.
“Explain please. We don’t have time for your reveal. We’ll starve.” Impatiently, I tapped my foot on the ground and crossed my arms over my chest.
Malik, beside me, also glared at Cormac — being hungry, in constant pain from his hand, and quicker to anger than either of us.
“Fine, fine. I think we can roast it on a spit. See, this pole is heavy enough to hold the weight, and it’s green, so it shouldn’t burn too easily.” He sighed, rolling his eyes at us, and held up the fresh-skinned sapling pole to point at the fire.
“Okay, I don’t have a better idea. Let’s try it. We’ll need some really sturdy braces to hold up the heavy turkey… tripods?” I thought ahead, scratching absentmindedly at the swollen, itchy welts covering my skin. “We’ll need the girls’ help to pull this off before it gets dark, “I mused.
Malik went to get our sisters from the cabin where they hid from the ravening mosquitoes as much as they could — all of them (and us) looked poxed, covered in oozing welts from bites on top of bites.
My sisters Sara, Maria, and little Aria set to building up the fire, splitting kindling, and gathering firewood. Cormac finished the spit and directed Malik and me in his plan of building notched poles, beaten into the ground to support the heavy bird. An hour later, we had a frozen turkey on a spit over a blazing fire.
Mom came out to see what we were up to. “Looks good, kids. Nice job,” she said, approaching the fire to toss a stick in. “Ooohh, these mosquitoes are just awful.” She covered her face with her head covering and went back inside.
We took turns turning the bird every hour and tending the fire, playing with it to figure out how hot it needed to be to cook inside and out. At first it burned on the outside, still frozen inside. After hours of trial and error and hours of turning the bird, taking the spit down and checking to see if it had cooked through, the juices finally ran clear, and we fell upon the blackened bird as a voracious horde of locusts, filling our shrunken bellies for the first time in weeks.
