József-Sándor Török

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The Chicken Stew

We never eat together. He doesn’t bother with such commonalities, nor is he ever thankful for the dinner and lunch I make, but I assume it’s how my aunt has treated him. When you’re a little girl and your brother is six years older than you, there comes a moment when you’re taught who to be for him, for some sort of a godlike, taller, handsome boy who will become your norm when marrying. Except my aunt. She was never a slave to another man but his brother, my uncle. She never had them longer than a night or two, and even so, they were
but a handful scattered across the years.

“A happy mistake, but still a mistake,” she would call me under her breath, assuming I couldn’t hear her, almost blaming me as she often did for everything – be it the cow kicking up the bucket when she squeezed too hard on her teat or the thread refusing to go through the needle’s eye. She threw herself into the corner of an oak table to free her uterus of her children, but she had fetched me off the street and raised me. At least, that’s what uncle has told me time and time again when I did something to anger him.

It was only after all was done and the earth was heavy on aunt Margo that I realised that I inherited my “childhood home”, albeit slightly different, uglier than I remembered it. Also, an uncle, whom I’ve never in my adult life thought of as a decent man.

The second day after aunt Margo’s funeral, I drive back to the house. When I turn on the lights in the kitchen, something flies frantically from one corner into the other, only to get stupidly caught in the yellowed curtain. A green stink bug that signals the first warm days of spring. I think about crushing it – I have the power necessary to – and then I imagine its taste, how its tiny legs tingle my tongue. Eventually, I set it free through the window. My thumb and index finger smell of something similar to parsley, but sweet. I won’t wash it off, not just yet. The curtain, however, in sickly shades of yellow, greasy and with a lingering stench of cooking oil burnt into it, ends up in a plastic basin in boiling water.

Uncle sees another one and doesn’t waver. As soon as his eyes fall on the stink bug, he sweeps it off the checkered tablecloth and with the tip of his crutch, he pushes hard on its armour until it shatters. He keeps pressing down on it, unnecessarily twisting the crutch’s tip from right to left. I wonder if he has that sort of evil in him, the need to kill something small, or smaller.

“It should’ve been the other way around,” I say, while picking up its mangled remnants. I need to scrape off the floor the shattered carapace. Its fluids remain under my fingernail, and it smells just as sweet as I remember.

‘What?’ he asks, but I only offer a dismissive wave, to which he retires to his room.

The door remains slightly ajar behind him. Each of them was once in pristine condition and painted white, but now they are the colour of bones stripped of meat. Dogs often find bare, sun-dried deer skulls with empty eye sockets or broken cow tibias in the fields, and the doors are just as porous and dry as those bones, chipped and worn. He rests his elbows on his knees, with his gnarled hands clasped in a false prayer and eyes staring at the rug. With his left hand, he brings the pocket of his mottled grey-brown shirt to his nose, and the sweat and grease must have travelled up his nostrils because his other hand grabs the crutch. From the
bottom drawer of his cherrywood wardrobe, he takes out a new shirt and sniffs it. It must smell of naphthalene from the mothballs that got lost amongst the clothes decades ago, long forgotten and now useless.

His skin is a patchwork of spots and scars, pale blue veins and knots, sharp shoulder blades threatening to cut through the whitened skin and a soggy mass of flesh hanging over his belt, jiggling with each movement. The shirt’s tag, the one I bought him for Christmas many years ago, is the colour of the dryad’s saddle growing on dead stumps. The writing on it is no longer discernible. The black ink has faded under the assault of time, and he rips it off. Slipping into it, a smile creases the weathered face, and he becomes my old uncle, the one I knew once. Pity washes over me and I regret all those times I considered ousting him. He slams the door
shut with a thud and his usual anger on his face, having wiped off any traces of a smile. With nothing left for me, I make my way into my room.

Sunlight pours in through the window opened towards the southern horizon, and so towards the back garden, casting elongated shadows across the floor and up on one of the walls that severely requires a layer of limewash. Generations of women have slept in this room, grandmothers and mothers who stained the hemp sheets with blood and later conceived children. They probably prayed for their deaths when the flesh tore.

The oak table is still in here, although possibly not in its former spot, where it used to sit when Aunt Margo taught me to draw foxes. One corner is more scratched and blemished by spots where the lacquer has chipped away, leaving only the bare wood underneath, uneven and rough. Its former glossy sheen is long gone. Even when I was in primary school, it wasn’t that glossy anymore, but by now, it has entirely faded, or rather it was replaced by the same dullness that overtook the entire family. The memory of pain under my fingernail is still there, lingering, forcing hairs to stand on end, the skin like that of a plucked chicken. I couldn’t have been younger than four or five or else I wouldn’t have any recollection of it.

In the early sixties, electricity was scarce, and our home, owned by Aunt Margo’s father, was amongst the handful in a sparsely electrified village. Hags in pews constantly gossiped about it. There was a power outage that lasted almost a week, branches over cables or something like that, and the prospects of drawing by the flickering flames of the oil lamp were thrilling. Aunt Margo would always banish me to the same corner, as if it bore my name and the other three would belong only to the adults, and while my feet dangled off the chair,
the right hand contoured the left. The moistening pencil – its actual name still an unknown to me – had to be dipped in water, or else its colour appeared too faint, so my tongue always had traces of indigo. When my eye fell upon the spot where the walnut lacquer had chipped away, I licked the pencil and filled it.

When all spots were filled, the only reasonable thing to do was to peel more of the lacquer, bits and pieces coming off with a gratifying feeling. And then, a splinter unexpectedly lodged itself under my nail and the first ‘fuck’ escaped me – a story to be told at every family gathering for years to come. It burrowed under it and broke off. Removing it with bare hands was not only impossible, but with each touch, it dug deeper. Aunt Margo resorted to inserting an old, rusty needle and dislodging it. It was well-deserved, the jolts of pain and swelling, and when it finally came out, so did a thin thread of blood.

A second, but this time new, needle made its way under the nail a couple of days later, when pus gathered under it, and so my finger throbbed with pressure and pain. Scratching the marks the underwear’s elastic band leaves on your waist is not even remotely as relieving as when the yellowish pus oozed out and finally relieved the built-up pressure. She squeezed my fingertip and more came out of it – some sort of a liquid intertwined with strands of blood. Just then, the shrill ring of the telephone startled us after nearly a week of silence. Her feet echoed against the floorboards, darting across the room to grasp the receiver. I could’ve tasted that liquid, but the smell convinced me otherwise.

Uncle was rarely, if ever, home those days, to my disappointment – but he telephoned. When he did come, he had to be unaccompanied, adhering to his father’s strict insistences. His girlfriend remained a stranger to my sight, and the first thing I’d learned about her was from my uncle: it was her name, Faith. The second one I’d learned from my grandfather: she was of Caribbean descent. It wasn’t until I grew older that everything started making sense, but by then, it was too late. Uncle had succumbed to his father’s relentless pressure. Questions had to be avoided and silence had to prevail, knowing that his temper flared at the most innocent
questions about Faith.

The men in the family fought bitterly all their lives, yet he is trapped in the home he swore he would never live in, wallowing with unending misery in his father’s bed, in my bed.

As my aunt’s thin, peevish voice echoed through the telephone, the coiled black wire with its lustre dulled by time was absentmindedly turned around a finger. When she indirectly asked whether uncle could stay in my room, a knot tightened in my stomach, but I agreed to let him stay. She took to the grave the reason behind the urgency of his moving back here.

“Only temporarily, until he finds somewhere to live,” she added, as some sort of a consolation. At thirty, I couldn’t care less about my uncle living in my room, in a home I never intended to return to. So much so, it never crossed my mind that he would never seek another place to live in his sixth decade of life. Yet almost thirteen years later, our presence beneath the same roof is a tension that often remains silent.

That same year, after rationing my meals to stretch my budget and taking on more jobs on the weekends, I bought my first car, a second-hand, seven-year-old car. I did it with full knowledge. The slightly faded paint and the rust that had begun to eat away along the roofline, and the shrill cry one of the windows made when being rolled down weren’t surprises, neither were they impediments. Such minor defects were only justified, as the car was already beginning to show its age; after all, it was from 1982, and that’s all I could afford back then. The driver’s seat, its grey striped cushion, had been burned in multiple places. Where the ash fell, it revealed the foam padding in circles and, for many, many weeks, the smell of cigarettes imbued in the upholstery persisted, even after being rubbed with baking soda several times and regardless of how many tree-shaped fresheners I hung on the sun-burnt rearview mirror.

Uncle’s impassive expression remained unchanged when he saw the car, peering over the fence to see what noise was grating on his nerves, not bothered enough by his nephew’s visit to stride through the wrought gates to greet him. Aunt Margo was moderately happy for me, notwithstanding her customary habit of not showing it.

Slightly lifting my head from the goose feather pillow, I see the car keys on the table – the rooster’s hardened spur I chained to them with a thin copper wire as a trinket dangling off the weathered corner. First is the clattering coming from the garden, through the window overlooking it, its sills only months ago painted white. Then, the words not meant for me.

Pulling the curtains back, I lean out the window. He stands not like a concrete pillar or a poplar but as crouched as a weeping willow, one hand holding the crutch with the other grabbing a handful of twigs and pushing them aside.

The wooden gate grates loudly against the ground, its planks both misaligned and soaked with rain, mostly because the hinges have given up after years of being slammed shut in anger or pulled by the springs. Not even the lemon balm leaf I pick and tear between my fingers can mask the stench of death. Where the trap’s jagged teeth clutched her feet, her skin was stripped away and bone exposed, blood having sipped into the soil beneath.

The T-shirt clings tightly to my skin. Its fabric becomes slightly see-through, and my right nipple’s brownness shows. The other one’s covered with black letters: “Proverbs 3:5.” It just showed up one day in the drawer, and I never asked about its origins. I tuck my nose under its round neck collar, once white. The raffia bag still has traces of flour inside, and some clings to the hairs on my arms when I roll down its edges.

Eventually, the fox is lifted, having pushed the shovel’s blade underneath it, and its heavy carcass slides into the raffia bag. The dark swarm of flies disperses, and the buzzing fades. Going around the house is the only way I can get out into the street and to the river, from the vegetable garden to the chicken yard and through the garden inundated with flowers.

“What’s that?” he asks through the window in the hallway overlooking the front garden and the same wrought gates.

“A fox.”

It is not that far, the river. It only takes following a couple of steps that fishermen made down the dam. Elders bloom with a sweet scent on one side, and black locusts’ branches hang heavy with clusters of white flowers on the other side of the path. The weeping willows shake with a swishing sound similar to the fox slipping out of the bag, followed by a splash. All is intertwined with the chirps and whistles of song thrushes, warblers, and nightingales. The river flows unbothered, carrying God knows how many dead puppies, cows, and people.

In front of his gate, he is examining the streets, the houses lined up on each side, some old with chipped tiles, some abandoned and with bushes hanging over the fences. We used to be friends, Ed and me. We would play hide and seek and with the toys he stole from his cousins, and later, we examined our penises together, as little boys do, with lanterns, hidden in the cellar. His garden is glued to ours. The wire fence, coated in grey, with dried paint drops hanging from it, is near the apricot. In its shade lie the blood stains and the trampled grass. He set the trap. He swung the axe. He threw the fox over the fence. With a palm pressed on his forehead to cast a shadow, he shifts his gaze to the stork’s nest on the electricity pillar, only to lower them to find me. I tilt my head as a passing salutation and hurry inside.

As I return to the house, I can hear the fork clinking against the porcelain plate from the inside. It’s white with a flower of a faded pink in the middle and the brim bearing a golden line. I walk into the kitchen, and he continues eating in a deliberate isolation. Uncle would like to come off as unbothered by my presence, insensible to it, but the furtive glances towards the door tell otherwise, and I sit down across from him. Longer strands of hair are scattered across his jawline, and he has traces of grease from the chicken stew around his lips. Even on his glasses. After Aunt Margo died, he usually cooked for himself, albeit rarely, but this last month, I have taken on the responsibility.

“Do you like it?” I ask, anticipating at best a nod.

“It’s Margo’s recipe.”

“It means you like it.”

“She died a stupid death, you know,” he spits out another bone as a celebration of the first time he mentioned his sister’s death.

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Photo by Will Coates-Gibson, Unsplash, 2020