Lola Was There…
Pots and pans, pots and pans.
My name is Esmer. That late afternoon I rode into town. My donkey Dederina, overloaded with pots and pans.
The metal cookware banged and made a loud enough sound so as to announce my arrival. Woman sorted through their kitchen things, planned for replacement and repairs.
No doubt they thought of offering me strong coffee with a bite.
That late afternoon, late November, was painfully cold as the steely wind with single snow crystals coursed down the dirt road. This would be my last trip of the year. Oddly, it seemed to me, that upon entering the village from the fields it suddenly grew colder as I pulled tight about my shoulders my several cloaks. Dederina shivered and bits of blowing snow were caught in the animal’s wild mane.
Upon arriving, as with every place, the stories of this village flooded my memory banks. As if a bankers’ old file drawer opened and from it came all the issues current with the place. All that was done needed to be done and of course the yet to be seen. A familiar face scuttling along the wooden walk, scurrying from the cold.
Old Anna.
What do you have in your hand there? Something held tightly, securely, against your chest. What? Something for me? Or something you’ve taken from the old neighbor just two houses down. You’re much stronger than the aging neighbor. You could easily overcome her physical resistance. Hopefully, though, you did not strike her.
I passed through the small village ten times in a year repairing pots and pans, selling when the old could no longer hold an added screw, could no longer endure yet another pig stew. It was my domain, or perhaps it was my curse that through all the dwellings’ kitchens, large and small, wealthy and dastardly, I learned all the town’s secrets.
This gave me what none other could ever hope to possess. All the secrets. I knew more than the mayor might ever hope to know.
It is a fact that those who know the secrets know the answers through soothing voice and compassionate gaze. Yes, and for whatever reason, many, though not all, women from all over the region believed I could also assuage their innermost hurt.
What they’d expected was never fulfilled and as time passed, it became all the more hopeless. Passing of time stirs up an urgency.
We do not wish to hurt anyone, ever. The peace of men and women that needs to be upheld without fail. Holding back from crossing the line, from grabbing and taking to striking, then grabbing and causing hurt. It’s enough that you are stealing from her.
Shameful as it may be.
Sure, the old lady Lola is a despicable example of a neighbor person. That time she spit at me, then threw her broom at me. You wanted to intervene. No, no, why would you spit at my friend? You belong in the crazy house, woman. She only cackled, didn’t laugh, as that is what normal people do. Her cackle gave her a witch like specter.
Perhaps she was, or is a witch, were it ‘was’ she’d either be dead or she’s left. Neither has happened as far as I know. Until several months before, she still appeared every morning around 5:30 every morning. She rinsed out her cat’s water pan and threw some left-over bread tarts into the blue glass bowl. Two cats appeared from nowhere and enthusiastically ate.
Their tails twitching erratically as if invisible hands attempt to capture the elusive tails and getting away just before they get caught.
Of course, there are no invisible fingers. That’s just what old Lola always said. After her husband passed.
I feel sad for Lola. Once a year, I left a new pot or a frying pan at her back door. I choose not to stay near for fear of having things thrown at me. But a fine pair of legs did that one have. As if on some sort of set pendulum swing, I knew when she’d be looking out for me with that special look in her eyes.
I practiced stealth those days as my vital energy was no longer as it once was. All gone now. Memories have replaced the energy that once was. The old saying that goes, a woman in every burg, on every corner, is mine for the taking. No longer. Now it’s about getting in and out of town unscathed.
No one would remain behind to care for Lola once her family member left. She lived in a rumble tumble shack just meters from the church burial place. The cemetery crammed with brightly colored crosses, mostly small, some of the richer would plant larger crosses as if to say: Look at me you miserable souls, I shall stand out amongst the dead. As if saying, they shall see me before you others and shall ride on that golden chariot before you miserable ones.
One late afternoon, after the priest returned from visiting some of his elderly parishioners in the village, he saw me in the cemetery. Lola was there too, putting flowers on a plot. The brightly and freshly painted cross called attention. Lola had a cement worker plant the cross right next to her long-dead husband Jacobo.
Mostly everyone stopped noticing Lola sitting alongside Jacobo, and her plot. She’d been doing so for twenty years.
Lola had long since ‘acquired’ the next-door plot. More like she was exercising squatter’s rights to shoulder into her dead husband’s plot. Not through any documented purchase, rather more of an invasion. It was her nature, invasion, take no prisoners.
She told me once on another day at the market she’d just acquired a burial plot near the church right next to her husbands. I wondered at what she said, knowing full well Lola had no money.
I knew, as did everyone else in the village, that after the kindly Jacobo had died from crushing himself with his ancient grain press, Lola lost her sense of inner compass. It was confirmed when one day she emerged from her small house, half her head shorn of all her hair.
Saint Cristobal had told her to do so.
Her husband always complained of his insufferable wife Lola at the pub. Outside, the smoke-filled place just over the creaky entry hung a wood plank from a metal bar coming out of the wall. When the wind blew, it barely pushed the plank back and forth, the black boar came to life.
Lola’s husband cried in his brew that he swore Lola was slowly poisoning him. That thanks to her, he’d soon be inhabiting his place in the cemetery given him by his wealthy aunt long since passed on.
During a visit I shared brews with him, and he said out of the nothing, Esmer you will take to my wife and fill her, give her that which she may demand of you. Esmer, I already know about you. I ask only this of you. I feel I will not be long here. That damned woman.
Lola never could settle with that she had no such plot awaiting her arrival, or departure depending on one’s perspective. It all comes down to perspective. She grew bitter and would spit and attempt to strike one with her acrid juice. Little joy to be found in Lola, a woman scorned and abandoned as her husband spent as much time as was possible in the Black Boar.
He would lament to anyone sitting not far from him that Lola was a witch and that he married her as payback to her father. The man, his future father-in-law, helped him set up a shoe shop. Jacobo eventually became the best cobbler in the three burgs. In fact, the other two cobblers in the other two towns threw in with Jacobo. The three establishments became the very first business chain.
Lola’s passing was never heralded from the church’s belfry, something about insufficient standing and lack of mental acuity… Strange laws of men. Truly twisted. Twisted as the gnarled vines of long forgotten eighty-year-old grape vines.
The old vines still produce, mind you, the grapes just a bit smaller.
No one could ever name other businesses that had spun off and become a franchise of sorts. Jacobos’ business was a franchise in that he could show his shoes and boots in his former competitor’s shops. The added display of his footwear placed his sales in a much higher placing than all the cobblers in the three-county region.
Still, in later years when Jacobo could and did spend his hours swimming in his brew at the Black Boar, he’d cry that Lola was poisoning him with grief. Just as surely as though she were giving him small, hidden doses of hemlock in his soup. Something that would one day surely plant him six feet under.
Or three feet…
Though the cemetery never seemed to expand in size beyond its original parameters. Its solid, moss-covered walls never moved an inch. It became the understood fact that the cemetery’s reclusive owner figured the way to double load the plots. So where at first you had enough plots for three hundred peacefully resting or tormented souls waiting for the final call to heaven or hell, now there was the space for six hundred.
As one walked in the cemetery for the first time, it surprised them to find many plots had headstones set side by side, touching, impossibly close. These were ones that had two bodies, six feet and then again, three feet under.
It worked just fine. After several years, it was noticed and commented on that the grass and flower plants around the double headstones were much greener and colorful than single plots. The unspoken was that this green abundance was because of the added fertilizer therein.
No one ever complained or said anything. Burying one’s family members in the church cemetery made sense for several reasons. One was closeness. The cemetery was just a short walk from the town, which was a relief to the hard-working people burying lost ones.
The other reason, and maybe even more important, was that the loved one’s being buried had the luxury of closeness to the blessed church. God might reach out a long boney finger from his holy house and bless the dead more so than he would were the dead person buried in the newer cemetery a kilometer from the church.
But it was Lola who seemed to catch on to this idea of double loading a burial plot. After all, it wasn’t until Lola was dead and buried right over the top of her husband did the cemetery owner suddenly light up on that idea. The cemetery owner was aging, and his hands had become arthritic, painfully curled, worm like appendages.
One year, I placed a brand-new pot just between Lola’s and Jacobos headstones. As years passed, the pot had gained earth and bright yellow daffodils had sprung from the rich soil. The pot was of fine metal, its sides as thick as a book. It would be there for countless years to come.
The cemetery’s owner, now thin and hollow-eyed, had doubled his income and of late had been seen driving a brand new, shiny black horse carriage. Sitting alongside him was a most comely woman, much younger, tall and of fine figure whose black hair seemed to go forever. Her mane so long I feared it would catch and entwine around the turning carriage’s wheels. Her name still unknown to most as she was from three towns away.
I’d never occasioned a visit to her house. Someone at the pub told me the cemetery’s owner’s wife was looking to repair some pots and pans. Don’t be led astray.
All I long for is where to rest my head.
