Body and Bread by Nan Cuba

other animals.” Pushing aside mesquite limbs, he stepped forward.
    They found a spider web four feet wide and nine feet high. A dragonfly and a moth wriggled. The spider, six inches long, black with yellow stripes, crept upward.
    “Wonder where the male is,” Cyril said. “Their sex is really violent.”
    “Yeah?” Sam stepped back. “How?”
    A whistle came from the left. Cyril answered in a duplicated skirl. “A meadowlark. You interested in birds?”
    Sam started to say something funny about peckers, but he couldn’t. Cyril, he knew, got up at five every morning, liked his parents. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.
    “I do imitations on a violin. It’s rough, but…”
    The Cervenka farmhouse smelled strange. The odor came from garlic stalks set in drug store vases—Sam would later learn that Mrs. Cervenka added the cloves to everything from okra to catfish batter—and a pot of orange peels boiling on the stove. The family used garlic and orange water for home remedies— domácí úlevy Cyril later told him—to ensure a strong heart and relieve rheumatism. Sam knew what his mother would think of the air the Cervenkas breathed: unacceptable.
    Cyril walked through the living room, and Sam followed. A sofa had a pillow and a folded army blanket stacked at the far end. Next to a pie safe stood a Victrola with a radio, doilies covering the top of its water-stained cabinet, and “The Czech Melody Hour,” he’d later learn, tuned in most Sunday afternoons. Books on rocks and wildflowers, opera and symphony records, biographies from Truman to Caruso, and children’s novels like Green Mansions, The Sugar Creek Gang series, and Roy Rogers and The Rimrod Renegades crammed an unpainted shelf that extended around the top of the room
    Sam didn’t usually notice furnishings, but when he thought of his home’s chintz and marble, he longed to sprawl in a chair, to look.
    Two paintings hung above the Victrola—bluebirds painted by Cyril, a still life of fruit by Terezie—their unembarrassed sentiment comforting. A tinted photograph of a stocky couple—grandparents, Antonín and Johanna, Cyril said—hung next to a doorway. “Howdy,” he called into the kitchen.
    Terezie stood across the room, slicing cucumbers on a cutting board at the tile counter. She wore a blouse and knee-length slacks. Great ass , Sam thought. The Chambers stove was metal-knob locomotion, a pinnacle of heat. “I brought somebody,” Cyril said to his mother as she lifted a pot’s lid then stuck in her finger.
    “Naww,” she said irritably, glancing at Sam. She replaced the lid and whistled, cradling her hand in her apron. “Just how did that thing got so hot? Tell me that.” Her house shoes, strapped to her feet with rubber bands, slapped linoleum as she crossed to the Formica table. She slumped, sighing, into a metal chair.
    Terezie reached into a cabinet for a bowl, set it down, and scooped in cucumbers, slices plunking.
    “I’m showing him something,” Cyril said.
    “You the oldest one?” his mother asked Sam. He’d met her before, of course, and, along with his family, called her by her first name, Albina, a habit suddenly uncomfortable.
    Cyril walked away as Sam answered, “No, ma’am. I’m second; Kurt came first.” Behind her, Easter, Mother’s Day, and birthday cards papered a wall, with a plastic framed print of “The Last Supper” in the center.
    More of Albina’s questions followed: “You boys, you mow that whole yard?” “Your grandma’s big in some church; that is which one?” “Your father, he grows his own strawberries?” She confused the usual inflections yet enunciated precisely, the locals’ sloppy slurs clipped, distinct.
    “Leave him alone, Ma,” Terezie said as she moved a pitcher and pastry tray in the refrigerator, then added the bowl of cucumbers. “Sam’s got better things to do.” When she closed the door, her blouse tightened across well-developed breasts. “Right?”
    “Hey,