Sarah A. Hoyt - The Blood Like Wine

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2024-11-23 0 0 25.41KB 11 页 5.9玖币

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The Blood Like Wine

SARAH A. HOYT

==========

He stood by my hotel bed yesterday.

In the cool artificiality of a twenty-first-century hotel suite, with the curtains shut tight against the harsh

light of day, beside the massive, white wardrobe, Francois stood.

He wore his best suit of blue silk—long jacket edged with lace, and tight knee-length breeches that

molded his tall, muscular body. His golden curls fell to his shoulders, and his dark violet eyes were oh so

infinitely sad.

He walked to the bed and opened his lace collar with a gloved finger, revealing the red line where the

guillotine had separated his head from his body.

And he said nothing. Nothing. And yet, I knew all too well what he meant.

He vanished when I sat up. He always vanished. Like cherished smoke, like unreachable paradise, like

longed-for death.

I sat beside the small desk and smoked my mint-laced cigarettes till sunset turned the world outside as

dark as my hotel room.

Then I’d showered, dressed in my fuck-me-red dress, which went with my fuck-me-red painted nails,

and with my blood red high heels, pulled back my straight, golden hair, got into my black sports car and

hit the road.

I’d made contact. I had the address. I would do what Francois wanted.

I always did what Francois wanted. It was all I had left.

==========

We’d met when we were both seventeen. Which is not to say we were the same age. Born in Faubourg

Saint-Antoine, where rats outnumbered people ten to one, where the streets were so narrow and the

houses on either side so high that the sun never touched the shit-layered streets, I’d had no time for

childhood.

But I was one of the lucky ones: I’d survived.

By twelve, I was an orphan. My mother died giving birth to me. My father, a poor cobbler, died of

desperation and tiredness in 1786.

I didn’t know the date then, but I know it now. I didn’t know how to read then, but I know it now.

Look at the gifts death has heaped upon me.

They said that my father died of a fever. All were fevers, then, and it might have been anything at all: a

cold, an un-healed sore, tuberculosis or cancer. All of it then was .a fever—stinking sweat upon the dirty

bedsheets, a struggling voice, breathing that sank slowly, slowly, into a harsh rasp at the throat. Then

nothing.

The neighbor women had looked after my father in his last days, community being the only palliative for

the harsh, grinding poverty of peasant France.

Just before the end, I was admitted to the small, dim room at the back of the house and allowed near the

dank little pile of bedding, where my father lay.

His grey hair had grown all white through his illness, and his face had sunken, the skin drying and

stretching, till it looked like parchment layered over the skull. His aquiline nose looked sharper, and his

dark brown eyes smaller, opaque, lost amid the yellow skin, the white hair, the sharp nose.

He smiled and it was the smile of a skull, his irregular teeth gaping at me as I approached.

The hand that stretched out of the pile of covers and grasped my small, soft hand looked more like a

claw, with long, yellowed nails. And there was the smell of death in the breath that flew past my face as

my father spoke..

“Sylvie,” he said. His eyes were soft, sadly sweet when he looked at me. “Sylvie, my daughter, you are

too beautiful. Marry someone soon. Marry one of our neighbors. Don’t let your beauty lure you outside

your sphere. That beauty can be a curse.”

Uncomprehending, I listened. Uncomprehending, I held his hand.

Though girls little older than I were often married, I had no thought for such a thing. As for leaving the

neighborhood, I dreamt about it every day and every night and prayed upon it to any listening divinity as I

told the beads of my rosary with the other women at my father’s wake.

I knew I was beautiful and looked older than I was. I’d often seen the effect of that beauty in the lingering

glance of passing coachmen, in the appreciative look of merchants in the weekly market.

I dreamt of leaving behind the small, dark streets, the smell of stale smoke and shit, the memory of my

father’s rasping breath sinking lower and lower into nothing.

He was thirty-two when he died. I had no intention of dying young.

==========

Leaving the hotel parking lot, I drove away into darkness.

In the eastern United States, where I had lived for a time, as the sun went down other lights came up:

neon lights of gas stations and drive-throughs, lights that shone on billboards, lights of hotels and motels

and restaurants. All of them shone from the side of the road, turning the night into a continuous sunset and

reminding me of what I could no longer experience.

But out west the sun went down and night came on, like a blanket obliterating all life, all reminders of life.

Driving at night, between Denver and the little town of Goldport nestled up against the Rockies, I saw no

light.

No reminders of lost dawns moved me; no memories of past noons disturbed me. No sharp, aching

mementos of Francois’s golden hair glimmering in the sunlight.

There was nothing in the world, nothing, except the shiny black highway unrolling in the headlights of my

black sports car like a lazy snake, and the loud music drowning out my thoughts.

Here and there, clusters of distant, twinkling lights looked like stars fallen to Earth, like a Christmas tree

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