Because That's How Jack Chose It — Chapter 2 — The Countryside
Jack puts you on the map: the countryside, far from everything, the start of everything.
Nobody ever asked. So he never told. Now he tells it — laughing, the only way he'll do it.
Let me put you on the map.
Way up top, in the high country of Bravara, there's a region nobody puts on a postcard. Cracked earth. Punishing sun. Sugarcane on one side, dry scrub on the other, and a dust that gets into everything — the food, your ears, your soul if you let it. It's the kind of place where rain is news. When it falls, everybody stops what they're doing to watch.
That's where I was born.
My parents were poor folk. Really poor — not the pretty-speech kind of humble, the kind that cuts cane all day and comes home with a wrecked body and an almost empty pocket.
And they loved me. I need to make that very clear right up front, because the rest of this story is ugly and I don't want it splashing on them.
They loved me like crazy.
The problem wasn't love. The problem was food.
Dry year after dry year, and one more mouth in a house that already didn't add up. My parents looked at the situation and saw it for what it was: if I stayed, I'd go hungry with them. Maybe worse than hungry.
That's when the aunt and uncle showed up.
I was two years old when they took me.
Two. After that I barely had any contact with my parents. I have no memory of their faces. What I carry isn't quite a memory — it's more of a climate, a temperature. A lap that existed. A woman's voice singing badly off-key, and I swear that voice is my mother's, and that she sang terribly, beautifully so.
It's not much. But it was before I was two and it stuck anyway. That says something about how strong the thing is.
I don't know if they were blood relatives. In that region, "uncle" is any half-distant relative who shows up now and then.