Sitee
From a scenario by and with the assistance of Ben Lawrence.
Dedicated to Pentti Linkola.
I woke up this morning with the sun in my eyes — the day of the festival! A fresh morning dawns on the green, dewy grass and the cow bells ring through the hills. The hay lies drying in the fields after yesterday’s harvest; Ælfred reckons it won’t rain for another two, three days, so we can leave it out to dry for a while before we rake it into the big stacks. I step out of our house into the yard; chickens mill around my feet and I toss them a handful of grain from the barrel near the door. The day is fresh and calm; the sun warms the earth.
We didn’t always live like this — my parents’ parents’ parents came to this land from somewhere else, but they forgot everything about where they came from. Or they didn’t want to remember. I know (Henrik whispers it to me after dark when he thinks our parents are asleep below us) that they weren’t farmers — they came to this land because there wasn’t enough farming where they stayed, and they wanted to live “freely.” Henrik also has been known to say (I don’t know where he heard it) that they lived in a place where there weren’t very many farmers; that they had tools bigger and better than ours that made it so that not very many people had to farm; that most people didn’t even know where their food came from, because it was all brought to them where they were in something called “sitee.” I’m not sure what that last word is: it’s something Henrik whispers below his breath at the height of his stories. I don’t know where my brother learned to tell a story so well, but I wish he’d tell ones that didn’t make our parents mad.
I meet Henrik on the way to the barn; he’s already milked the cows and is carrying the buckets of warm milk back to the house where Margaret will make butter and, later, cheese. I look forward to the sweet, sharp yogurt. I meet Henirk in the shade of the enormous oak tree by the side of our house; it was planted by our great-grandparents and is the biggest single thing I’ve ever seen.
- Excited for the festival today?
- Of course!
I can hardly contain my excitement for the equinox festival; I’ve been counting the days until the town gathers and shares in the beginning of the harvest. My family contributes a goat to be slaughtered. We don’t often get to eat meat, much less freshly butchered, so my mouth waters already from imagining the smell of the goatflesh on a spit over the large bonfire in the town center. We live a little out from the village, but we’ll walk in later today, leading our goat; it’ll be the first time since the solstice festival I’ll see my friend Arthur, and his sister Gwendolyn would blush when she saw Henrik, who had gotten strong from using a scythe during the harvest.
As I reflect Henrik, continues back to the house with his buckets across his shoulder. The yoke was made from one piece of wood by my father’s father before Henrik was born and fits his shoulders as though carved for them. The buckets swing beside him as he trudges back towards the little house, a pile of logs filled in with clay and mud. Smoke rises from the hole in the center of the dry grass roof and I know my mother has already begun baking the bread for today.
I make it to the barn and step into the cool open space. The dirt on the ground and the shadowed rafters above. My father is sharpening knives for the butchering next week.
— Can you refill this pail? I take the pail my mother made and refill it from the well in the yard. As I walk back into the barn, water spills on my feet and my toes grip the wet earth. My father’s sharpening of the knives is even and smooth, like music. I think of the songs and dances of next week’s fair. I ought to ask Arthur to dance, since Henrik will be too shy to ask Gwendolyn.
I hand the filled bucket to my father and wander off into the dark. He stoops down over his knives and flicks the edge with his thumb before moving onto the next one. He splashes a handful of water on the whetstone and leans into a fresh knife.
The back of the barn has a store room (and I know that I probably should be doing something, but nobody’s told me to do anything, so I’ll take the chance to wander around) full of old tools. Decayed threshers and rusted saw blades hang from hooks; cobwebs crowd out the tools. I squeeze my way through the dried wood and deteriorating metal, just out of curiosity. It’s nice to be alone back here, and you never know what you’ll find. There isn’t much space where I can be myself besides this little museum of lost memories. My father only started letting me come back here this summer, because when I was younger he was afraid that I’d cut myself on the blades and Ælfred always warned that a cut with a rusty blade could be deadly. But now I’m old and trusted enough to go back into this little forgotten world of old tools, and I’ve taken every spare moment I can grasp to explore it.
I don’t know what all the things are: besides recognizable tools for farming, there are other, even older things. I suppose that they must have come from my great-grandparents’ home in sitee, but I can’t guess what they are. Metal boxes and weird ropes, or strings, made of material like perfectly smooth leather. At some of their ends are little pieces of metal in funny shapes; I ammuse myself by trying to figure out which ropes fit together: some of them match holes on the boxes, and some connect to one another end to end. One of the pieces is an oblong box, about the size of my forearm, made of some hard material and has holes for several ropes to connect to it; one rope leads out of the end of the box with an end that matches the holes on the box. I connect the tail back to its body and wonder why anyone would make such a thing.
Today (maybe made bold by the holiday) I decide to pry open one of the boxes — I haven’t opened any of them before because I never had enough time uninterrupted. But everyone’s geting ready for the festival (my father’s still out there sharpening knives, and nobody has called me to do anything), so I have a chance. I pick a small box, one that seems easy to open. There’s a whole row of nearly identical boxes covered with an odd transparent skin; they’re about a finger thick, two hand’s breadths wide and three tall. When I shake it, I can hear something inside. There’s so much dust on them that I can’t imagine their having been opened since my great-grandparents put them here.
Examining, three of the four narrow sides have a thin crack down them, and the fourth is solid. I decide that the fourth side must be hinged, and begin to carefully pry apart the opposide side. The box pops open in my hand. Inside is a little bundle of shiny paper with marks on it (I’ll have to show Ælfred) and a thin disk. I take the disk out; the side facing me has marks like the paper. I turn the disk over and see myself. The light of the room is dim, but I can see that the back of the disk is reflective. Tiny rainbows play across its surface; I’ve never seen anything so shiny except father’s freshly sharpened knives.
— Charlie, time to go! My mother calls me.
I wanted to show my new treasure to Arthur. I looked forward to how his face would light up when he saw something so radically new. I stuffed it under my shirt and I can feel my skin against the weird not-skin material coating the box. Sweat stands out of my pores where the box touches me: I feel that my skin cannot breathe through the substance.
— Coming!
We go to the festival on foot, each of us carrying something to bring. My mother has distributed her loaves of bread between Henrik and me, and my father leads the chosen goat by a string around its neck. My mother carries the knives for the butchering, and Ælfred carries nothing: at his age, he’s earned the right to walk with empty hands. The path to the village from our home is well worn, since we go in once a week for the market. Last week the cattle-rearers walked out to examine out haystacks and dispute over who would get which stack, and how much each farmer needed. My father swelled with pride at their estimation of the quality of his hay.
We get to the village square by the middle of the day, and the fire has already started. People want to celebrate while the sky’s still light, and so they’ve gathered early. We arrive just as the singing begins, and seeing our goat brought for the slaughter, they sing extra joyfully. I see Arthur and his family standing talking nearby and wave. My mother steers Henrik and me to the table where the baked goods have been gathered, and we drop the sacks of her bread down so she can line them up in neat rows next to everyone else’s. Henrik and I walk over to Arthur and Gwendolyn, and the drummer begins to play the first dance song.
— Would you like to dance? Henrik asks Gwendolyn, whose face flushes deep red. She nods, and Henrik leads her by the hand over to the gathering dancers. — Look what I found! I can hardly contain my excitement to show my new discovery to Arthur, who has always appreciated my impractical side. It was back in the tool room of the barn. — What is it? He asks when I show him the box. Does it open? He shakes it and hears the disk inside. We step back to from the crowd beside one of the houses on the village commons, so that prying adults won’t see what we’ve found. — Try and figure it out! I gloat, since I’ve already opened it and know what’s inside. I’m excited to see his reaction to discovering the disk’s shiny surface, and to see how the disk responds to the full sunlight.
Arthur peers at the box from all sides, and finally pries it open the same way that I did, on the side opposite the hinged edge. He holds the opened box in his hand a long while and finally says, with no hint of joy in his voice: — Why did you bring this here? — It’s beautiful! — Do you know what this is? He speaks grimly, flatly. — No, why? — It’s from sitee. So I was right: my great-grandparents did bring it from them when they came to this land. I don’t know why, though, since my parents and Ælfred never mentioned their bringing anything from sitee. They must not have used it at all, then. — But look at the back of the disk! I take it out of the box in his hands and flip it over. The silver surface gleams in the sunlight and rainbows chase one another around and around in its depths. Light scatters everywhere as I turn the disk; I catch sunlight and throw it onto the walls, the ground, back into the sky; light skitters across the surface of the disk in my hand and I’m mesmerized. Arthur snatches the disk out of my hand and snaps it in half. A sharp crack. He picks the box up out of the dirt where he dropped it, puts the pieces of the disk back in the case, and closes it. — Don’t you know those things are dangerous? Ælfred says… — So Ælfred knows what it is? — I don’t know. But he told me that anything I find from sitee should be left where it is: it’s dangerous to take it out.
Thunder. The sky was clear, and now there’s thunder. But it’s not like thunder, because it keeps getting louder. Like it’s getting closer. Birds, panicking, take off from the roofs around us as the ground begins to shake. Arthur and I cover my ears and we run back into the town square. People have begun to look up at the sky, and my mother is looking around wildly. When I see her, I run over to her. She grabs me to her side. Ælfred is pale and nervous, as though he alone knows what is happening.
Shadow. As though a cloud has moved before the sun. Crash, like a building fell from the sky. A giant metal man stands where the house was behind which I showed Arthur the disk. His legs are like tree trunks and he towers over us like the oak my ancestors planted but bigger. I hear clanking and creaking from inside him, and I wonder if these are the people who lived in, or built, sitee.
Fire springs from his hands and surrounds us. The houses leap into flame and smoke rolls in. The tiny bonfire in the middle of the square is a candle amidst the pyres of our buring village. There is no escape: fire surrounds us on all sides. My mother holds me and Henrik close, and I can see Arthur hugging Gwendolyn and glaring at me over her shoulder. Smoke begins to fill my lungs and my eyes swim in their sockets.
Before I faint, I catch a glimpse of a person’s face, not a metal person but a flesh person like me, peering through a little window in the metal man’s chest. I wonder how he got in there, and whether he came from sitee.
