When I was a child, my parish paid a sculptor a great deal of money to carve a dying tree into a statue of the Virgin Mary. “God simply shows the artist what was waiting in the wood the whole time,” the pastor said, wisely paraphrasing Michelangelo.
I wondered then what it was like for the Virgin Mary to be inside of a tree for so long, or how she felt before it had grown big enough to fit her body. I wondered what the world would be like, now that she had gotten out.
Once while traveling through the deep valley south of here, I saw a man sitting on the edge of an overgrown orchard, slicing one of its pomegranates with great delicacy and concentration. There were mounds of pomegranates all around him, all cut perfectly in two, all untasted but for the flies buzzing noisomely around them in great numbers. The arils, scattered in pulpy mounds across the dirt, gleamed in a way that reminded me of both rubies and fresh wounds.
“Friend,” I said, “Whatever are you doing?”
Up close, I could see that he had a curious technique. He removed neither the crown nor the bottom (as any seasoned eater of pomegranates would) but made a single, shallow cut all the way around the rind before gently prising the fruit open like an oyster.
“Searching.” said the man. He was young, but worry and weather had worked silver into his black hair and seamed his face with fine lines. He did not look up at me.
We waited in silence for some time, I in the dust of the road and he in the flyblown edge of the orchard. I was in no hurry to reach my destination and feeling terribly nosy. Finally, he threw his latest pomegranate aside and wiped its juices off on the hem of his shirt.
“My grandmother lived in the village that stood here long ago,” he said. “She said that once a season, a single, miraculous pomegranate grew in this orchard. She said that it contained an unformed child, curled up in the rind like an infant in the womb. Most died, mangled by a careless knife. A terrible omen. But some…”
The man rubbed each of his swollen knuckles. “Wealthy donors sometimes take in children left to the church on the other side of the valley.” His palms were calloused and stained deep red. “We are not wealthy.”
He rose and walked into the orchard proper, crushing fruit underfoot. “You’ll want to be past here before dark,” he said. “The old village is not safe at night.”
Some years later, when passing through the town that overlooked that valley, I gave a half loaf of bread to a young beggar with the most striking eyes—the color of pomegranates in their season.
