He Knows That The Taste Is Such

The third morning of spring, everyone in Mercado gathers in the dusty square, waiting for the Groveman to come for what he’s owed. The tinkling of a hundred bells announces the darkly attired Groveman’s arrival. Arcadio, a man of twenty springs, can’t help but gawk at him with his shoulder-length spill of dark ringlets. Few in Mercado speak of the Groveman willingly, and never do they acknowledge his beauty. Spurs clink from his pointed boots, and tiny silver bells chime from the fringe of his wide, black sombrero. His merest movements occasion delicate music. His handcart is empty of fruit, while the wagon that accompanies him, drawn by an eyeless, wooly beast of six cloven hooves, is laden with the bodies of townsfolk winter stole—the best fertilizer for the grove.

“Now then,” the Groveman says, his voice music too. “Where is this year’s seed? Who has been dealt the horned snake?”

Everyone is silent when Arcadio lifts his left arm, peels back his sleeve, and reveals the horned serpent—a desiccated thing neither dead nor alive—coiled around his wrist. Everyone except his Mama.

“No! It’s not him! Last night, there were no horns on his snake.”

“And yet,” the Groveman says. That’s all.

Mama collapses into sobbing, while Papa stares through Arcadio, uncomprehending. People look at Arcadio with pity or gratitude, while others mutter.

“Where’s the beltmaker boy?” the miller whispers.

“It was Weston, he had the horned snake, I saw it,” the blacksmith hisses.

“It’s me,” Arcadio says. “I’m the seed.”

The Groveman smiles down on him. “Are you now?”

Now Arcadio walks with the Groveman. Mercado is a dream warbling on the sunset horizon. The snake is gone; unraveled from his wrist and crumbled to dust at a touch of the Groveman’s black moleskin glove. No wire or rope or chain binds him to the Groveman, and yet he walks in his shadow through the desert, while the beast and wagon trundle alongside.

“Why did you protect him when he betrayed you?” the Groveman asks.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Arcadio says. “Your horned snake was dealt me.”

“Snakes slither where they will, but I never lose their track.”

When his glove cups Arcadio’s chin and their eyes lock, Arcadio credits the stories ascribing the Groveman powers of clairvoyance. “Why don’t you tell me what really happened, Arcadio?”

†

The Groveman came two days before, as always on the first day of spring, when the last frost melts from the roofs. He came with his handcart full of succulent fruit—skull-sized, with green, waxy rinds guarding sweet custard pitted with black seeds. Arcadio and Weston held hands by the town fence and watched him arrive with the sunrise.

“Why do we put up with him?” Weston asked. “Why every year do we let him have his way? For some fruit?”

“It’s always been so.”

“But should it be?”

He was always in awe of Weston. No one else in Mercado ever questioned the ways of the world, or the town’s tradition. They’d first made love the spring before, when both were sticky with pulp and juice. With a winter spent together they were practically husbands.

“We have no choice. We’d starve without his fruit each year.”

“Then why not take it for ourselves?”

Arcadio had no answer.

For all his bold talk, Weston went with Arcadio to claim his fruit, like everyone else. The youngest children were always the first and most enthusiastic to flock to the Groveman’s cart. They tore their allotted fruit and buried their faces in the pulp as badland dogs do with carrion. Older children and adults ate with more contemplation, conserving the seeds from which smaller trees might be grown, though these trees would produce an inferior, seedless fruit. But those past their fortieth spring—who could no longer be taken as a seed—ate like the children, with abandon.

At night, the Groveman’s bells sang as he set his dried snakes on every doorstep. Morning came and Arcadio found a hornless snake. His relief lasted only as long as it took to find Weston in the beltmaker’s workshop. Weston who held a snake with two curved horns on its head. Only Arcadio cried. Weston kept his eyes dry, his voice steady, saying he’d never go with the Groveman.

Three springs back, Harry the fence-painter got the horned snake and ran into the desert, only to be dragged back by a hunting party who delivered him to the Groveman.

“I’m not going to run. I’m going to kill the Groveman,” Weston said. His blue eyes glistened with a terrible conviction, and no argument Arcadio offered could dissuade him. And so it was that Arcadio agreed to help. Weston showed him the tools of his trade—knives for flensing hides, sharp awls that could make holes in leather or gouge eyes.

They sealed their pact with a strong liquor Weston had distilled from pinecones and fruit rinds. After only a few sips, Arcadio’s head swam, and he wondered how he’d kill the Groveman with his vision blurred and his limbs numb.

When he awoke, Weston was gone, and Arcadio’s snake had been replaced by Weston’s horned serpent.

†

“And still you protected him,” the Groveman says.

They are almost at the grove. Arcadio can see the trees, darker twists of wood set against the evening sky.

“Because I love him.”

“Even now?”

“Tell me something. Would it have worked? Could we have killed you?”

The Groveman’s bells laugh as he shrugs his head. “I am flesh, like anyone else.”

The eyeless beast lows, a sound Arcadio feels in his gut, as they enter the grove. The trees are as tall as they are hideous. Their bark is like oily pitch, and they project at sharp, vertiginous slants from blasted earth heaped with the bones of generations of Mercado’s dead. From the trunks, smaller boughs spear out. The seeds of each spring—the sacrifices—hang skewered from these boughs. From them— their bodies retaining their shapes even as they become wooden like the trees—the next years’ crop of fruit is already budding.

“Will it hurt, when I’m seeded?”

“I’m sure it does for the chosen. You have a different purpose.” He points to the smallest of the trees, from which a familiar shape, shriveled and covered in the oily tar, hangs skewered through his heart. Weston still moves, but the motions are so sluggish it seems more the stubborn memory of life than life itself.

The blue eyes are still open, stark against the tarry sheen of his new skin. Arcadio reaches to ease the lids shut.

The Groveman stands beside him. “No one escapes this, whether chosen as a seed or not. Not the young, nor the old, nor we Grovemen, nor our chosen apprentices, Arcadio. Look up at the trees.”

He gazes up and sees his fate in the twisted semblances knotted in the bark. The trunks are their bodies, the boughs their limbs. And the faces—if these are masks of death, then most of the Grovemen died screaming.

The Groveman holds out a tool, something like a gaff, to Arcadio. “Let’s begin with the newest start. We’ll need to drain the excess sap, or the fruit will sour.”

© 2022 Jonathan Louis Duckworth

About the Author

Jonathan Louis Duckworth is a completely normal, entirely human person with the right number of heads and everything. He received his MFA from Florida International University. His speculative fiction work appears in Pseudopod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Southwest Review, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. He is a PhD student at University of North Texas where he serves as the interviews editor at American Literary Review, and he is also an active HWA member.