John Paul Cacioppo

All I Can Offer You Are Complications

1: The Blue-Eyed Father of the Brown-Eyed Girl

1421 A.D.

Samuel sat outside during the birth, stranded in between unnecessary thinking and necessary errands, while the midwife, Iva, took care of the last of his family. The rest of the town didn’t come up to bother him while this happened, aside from the occasional visit from Anton, who came questioning how much longer until Iva would come home to make him and his children a meal. Both men knew that Anton was the town’s messenger, one of the few men that Samuel wouldn’t push away, but they went through the routine, nonetheless. It was better for Samuel that it be Anton, rather than a dozen curious housewives poking their heads in, and it was better for Anton to listen, since those same housewives would dutifully set his life into misery if he didn’t do what he was told.

Throughout the day, Samuel gave the same response to Anton about waiting, and he watched the man bumble down the mountain and whistle without care. It wasn’t until Anton’s own children had been tucked into bed and the town’s lamplights lowered to a glimmer that there was a sign of something different. Iva announced the final push just as Anton climbed up the hill on the housewives’ orders, so it was Anton who saw Samuel leap in his skin. And it was Anton who stayed there with Samuel until that precious daughter was born.

The moment Samuel held her, she cried in his arms. He didn’t know what he could’ve done wrong and couldn’t understand that it had nothing to do with him. Her mother, exhausted from the birth, did not speak, as he nestled the young girl in his arms, trying his best to comfort this unfamiliar body, but when he gave in, placed the baby back into her mother’s arms, and left the hut – the cries that his wife made rose above those of her daughter. As their lives continued together, Samuel and his wife would never speak of this moment, or of any of the other times Samuel pulled away from this baby and her mother. His daughter will cry in between the folds of her bedspread while she grows, but she will never know that her father, Samuel, was the reason why.

Her mother’s crying quieted on the night of the birth, once Samuel had stepped outside and found himself alone. Anton must have already gone down to the mountain, Samuel thought. The implications of having left his wife and daughter in the hut was far from his mind, as lamplights flickered across the town, spreading out farther along with the news. Hushed joy ran through the air, which left Samuel no choice but to turn his head in the other direction to the caves. The softening murmurs of his wife and daughter bound him to the doorway, but the darkness of the forest was what he looked towards in this desolate place.

The caves he was be thinking about, will be the ones where he would later die many years later, after he learned of his first grandchild’s accident in the woods. This grandchild would have only been aged nine, and Samuel would be convinced that his curse caused the troubles that beset his first daughter’s family. It would not be his plan to kill himself that night, only to kill the evil inside him. His own death will be collateral; it will be done promptly, in winter, deep in the caves where no one but he could explore. The whole thing will be called an accident on the surface, yet there will be doubts. Most questions would remain unanswered, and even when his bones are found centuries later, it would be impossible for any person of that day to decipher how he had plunged the blade into his stomach.

But he didn’t consider any measure like this when he stared up at the moon on the night of his daughter’s birth, shaking at the thought that he’d cursed her innocent little body. Instead, he comforted himself with the song that had haunted him for most of his life until that point. It’s a song best paired with sweat and weary bones – both of which he currently had after the birth, despite having done nothing more than sit and wait. Before that night, he’d never understood how one person could grow so tired from nothing. His grandfather had always been that way, and now Samuel understood him a little bit better.

Somehow, it was only ever on Sundays when they rested and did little, that his grandfather complained about his back or the weather or the rattling of their cart or the fact that Samuel had been the reason that they had to leave their old home in the first place. When the two of them traveled or worked, the old man had a gleam about him, as if he were somehow coming back to life. Samuel would try to replicate it for the rest of his own life, and after his daughter’s birth he’d tell himself that he accomplished it, despite the hot pain wrenching down his back. This pain would be something he’d become used to and what he considered to be a part of his work, a part of all work. He would tell himself it was a good thing, even when it sent him home, distant and silently enraged. This particular pain was familiar, unlike the kind of pain that came over him on the night of his daughter’s birth. This was yet another reason why he worried that he’d passed on something evil to his daughter.

On this night, the pain was stiff and clustered and gathered in the center of him. Samuel arched his back like a footbridge and treated his whole body like stone, while his head remained upturned, and his eyes searched out to the moonlight for some guidance on what he should do. He wondered if life would be better for his daughter without him present. It would be the only time he ever thought this, but the thought stained him, nonetheless. Despite the rest of his life having been devoted to his family, it would all be far away, working in the mountains when his children played and always in another room when they spoke.

Listening would never be his issue. Details like his first daughter’s favorite trail being the loop around the withered willow tree, or the fact that she only ever stared at the white flowers which grew at the edge of the southern caves – these moments never eluded him when he lived. It was always the hurt in her eyes when he huffed at her news with a bent back or a dismissive wave… that was always what he’d missed because of the leaping worry in his chest and throat – the same one that rose in him when she cried in his arms on the night of her birth (the same one he’d carried when his mother had cried after the death of another sibling that drank the contaminated water, which his family considered a curse – the curse of Samuel).

Samuel convinced himself that this leaping worry was a symptom of the evils inside him, trying to break out. It was only ever the scars on his body that held them at bay, and he reminded himself of that nearly every day. His grandfather had tried to cleanse him of his scrupulous preconditions. The old man’s hand didn’t fix him, but it held his evils back and that much he was grateful for. This would remain true for the rest of his life, as his family would grow into a family of five, with three children made. There will be no exception to his gratitude towards his grandfather, but there will be a night when that exception could have begun.

It will be when his youngest holds onto his finger at 3 years old and doesn’t let go. This simple act will make him cry in the river that evening, and it will pull him into an embrace with his wife that very night. She will wonder what had gotten into Samuel, and Samuel will hope to himself that she’d try to question him just like she had before. But his wife would have learned her lesson and remained silent, avoiding his temper as if it were a valiant mission. So, Samuel would do what he’d always done and enter the caves.

The way he would enter them that night would be eerily similar to the way he walked back into the little hut on the night his first child had been born. It will be quiet, and the curtain would have been pulled open to illuminate his loved ones with moonlight. They’d be asleep, and he’d gasp at the fruit of his loins. His wife wouldn’t hear this. On the night of the birth, he rejoin his family and lay down, unnoticed, on a pile of hay, but on the night he left for the caves, he’d exit their home and lay down on the rocky surface of the caves, unnoticed by any animal in the night. In the same way that he promised himself that he’d run away, while laying in hay, he’d promise himself not to let the evil inside of him win on his night inside that cave. And just in the same way that he whispered his eldest daughter’s name, Anastázia, on the night of her birth, like a departing song; he would whisper the names of all three of his children inside of that cave like a mantra of protection. It would be in this way that he’d fall asleep on both nights, and it would be with those names in his mind that he woke up the next morning.

On both of these days, after both events, he would get up drowsy, tired, and convinced that whatever he was the night before, was an aberration to be forgotten. He’d smile with that knowledge, and his family would grow large and loud and overall happy while he was alive.

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