Chapter 5: Salt

My brother came down to the cellar at noon with a pail of whey.

It was the first honest look he had given me in five years.

He set the pail on the flags and checked the stairs behind him.

Then he crossed the room in three strides and held on to me so hard that my ribs creaked.

"You stupid cow," Aritz said into my hair. "You stupid, stupid cow."

"You grew," I said.

"You came back," he said.

"I know."

"He'll kill you," Aritz said. "Beñat. He'll put you under the elm and I'll have to stand there with a stick."

"He hasn't said my name yet," I said. "He's waiting for something."

Aritz stepped back and wiped his face with the heel of his hand.

He was twenty and he had our father's temper, and he was trying very hard to hold it.

"I whistled for you at dawn," he said. "I had to know it was you."

"You nearly got me caught. Beñat told me last night I walked down the mountain whistling."

"I told him that. It was the only way to explain why a warden stared at you." He swallowed. "He believed it."

"Aritz," I said.

"What?"

"The salt."

He went quiet.

"Every month for five years, a sack at the border stone," I said.

"Salt, flour, lamp oil. We thought it was Txomin's cousins."

"It was me."

"Why?" I said.

"Because you were over there," he said simply. "And so were the others."

He looked at the floor.

"Eleven houses of them, over the stone, and the whole valley says they sailed."

I did not tell him how often I had slept with my hand on one of those sacks.

"There's more," he said. "Come here."

He pulled the lid off a cheese tub in the corner and reached into the whey.

When he drew his arm out he had a bronze cowbell in his fist, small and green with age, with a leather strap.

I knew it.

It had hung by the Larrondo door when I was a girl.

"Beñat keeps them in a trunk in his barn," Aritz said.

"Every bell from every house he put out. The Cut takes the bell and the braid. Everyone thinks the bells were melted."

"They weren't," I said.

"He likes to count them. He's a miser."

My brother's mouth twisted.

"I took the Larrondo bell this morning. I've sent nine over the stone in the salt sacks. There is one more in the trunk."

"You sent bells," I said.

"A house without its bell isn't a house," Aritz said. "Someone had to give them back."

I took the bell out of his hand and held it.

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