By: K. Harvey
I am sitting at the kitchen table smoking like Steinbeck in the picture on the back cover of the book you read this summer. Your father plays with matches on the floor. It doesn't matter the color of the linoleum. I know you like to think it is green. So it's green. He is making rockets, wrapping the match heads with tin foil on the end of a paperclip and heating them until the match inside the foil bursts and it flies over the floor. He uses two matches for every rocket. Already there is a pile of burnt matches between his knees. The floor needs sweeping. I roll another cigarette and spill some of the tobacco. It is a nuisance, rolling them myself. My hands don't like small things, but I always acquire little hobbies, I always have. I won't smoke the cigarette, but I'll keep it for later. Now it is only something while I watch your father play. Perhaps soon he will bring out his soldiers. Then, perhaps, he will pester me for war stories, of which I have none. I enjoy watching his battles, and his conception and awe of bravery. He is colder than any soldier ever was. He has a great imagination. Maybe I'll roll enough cigarettes for tomorrow too. He doesn't smile enough when one rocket goes farther than all the rest. He's going to get through that whole book of matches.
There are pines on our property. There are also the pines you've seen in the cemetery. There are pines everywhere here. It is not as bad as you imagine, growing up in a tar-paper house. We did not build the house, but we feel a kind of compassion for the pines, as if we had something to do with them.
We love the pines and the river and we love to fish. Sometimes fishing is all we want and all we ever wanted. The straightness of the pines and the fishing line in the running water and the pole wishing to be straight. It is all very lonely. When you spend your day with animals like cows it is good to be lonely in the afternoon. Cow are very stupid. It is difficult to be a woman to your grandpa, and not a cow. It is difficult, but it is something I take pride in. I know it is difficult for you too to not be an animal, like a kitten. But there is no taking pride in things fishing. We are sitting on the bank with our lures in the river and hoping nothing bites. If we do catch a fish we get upset for a moment and your grandpa gets smoke in his eye from his cigarette and he squints in that awful way. Your father is playing and asking us why we don't keep the fish and why we don't fish down stream where they catch the big trout while he chases a frog that he won't catch because he slips on the bank and also because he is too gentle and doesn't want to crush it. What do you want me to say, that I wish I could paint it all? The fishing poles and the lunch and your grandpa's face and our son with the frog?
On the coffee mug in the armoire is my picture with a fish. But your father has told you already that it's a fake. 'Ruth jumps at biggest fish in Jump River,' it says, but we took the picture on a lake. The mug was a present for Mother's Day. I have always enjoyed the newspaper pointilism, my face made up of so many not-so-tiny dots, all gray, as the dots of cities on a map make a state, or as certain dots and where they are make your sky. My hair in the picture is just as you imagine, brown like your sister's, but not like your wife's. Not like your mother's. It is the hair of a fisherwoman, of a farmer's wife, of a woman who is like the sister of the cows. If that explains it.
Your father said today that the word 'loneliness' looks like 'lions.' He had been reading about some mountains in Germany. I am painting another watercolor of bluebirds. He says they don't look like birds at all. I say they don't have to. If two things that are not the same, like lonely and lions, look the same, why can't two things that are the same look different? He says but how will people know that they are bluebirds? I say that I know they are bluebirds, and maybe I'll tell them, but maybe I won't. That seemed to upset him more than I intended. But I understand it all now, after. You are like him, you know. Like loneliness and lions. Like bluebirds.
I have painted a lot of the things we live with. That's how I love them. The painting of the bluebirds is in your bathroom. The first one I made, in which I made them look like bluebirds. I don't like that painting, but it made a good gift. And a portrait of your sister when she was a child. I was a child and she was a child, I painted so childishly then. That was when everything was so round and pink, before we developed corners in our faces and around our eyes. The corners you remember. We went fishing once in the moonlight and I thought how like the moon. How lonely almost as if it were yawning in the night after eating, and its lines were in it. We caught nothing. We had not brought bait, so I drew in my line and took out my earring and baited my hook with one of my pearl earrings. I had your grandpa tie the knot and I cast it back into the running water. We fished for hours until the early morning and when we went home the sun was rising pale purple and yellow and the tar-paper house was so quiet. There was a nibble at the line that night, but nothing else. Before we left your grandpa untied the pearl from the line and dropped it into the grass. We searched together for an hour and could not find it. We had meant to get home before sunrise, but he would not give up, even looking on the bank of the river so that his socks were wet. But to please him and to tease him that week at a picnic I wore the other pearl earring and a fishing lure in my other ear. He took my picture, but we lost that too.
I have always acquired little hobbies. I bought a Nikon camera a few years ago. I was in the barn on the day your father shot a pencil over the barn with a cannon made of metal piping and a firecracker. I had the camera in the barn, taking a picture of the cow I stabbed with the hay fork. The light was good and the four red marks in the thick black and white hide looked good through the lens. In my opinion red is the only color that comes through in black and white. I was trying to take the picture so I wouldn't forget, like you with the pigeon, and how you never wanted to forget. It was just my temper, I hadn't been drinking when I did it, and I wanted to remember that. Then perhaps I wouldn't drink, or go that far, but even for the photograph the god damn cow wouldn't get into the light, so I never got the picture. But when I heard your father shout and the pencil on the barn roof, I took the camera outside. Your father was standing by the barn in the weeds studying the cannon like a scientist, like a little boy, with that seriousness in children you sometimes look at as if it explains the good in the world. I took the picture, but I think I lost it.
We had macaroni and cheese for dinner. Your father cooked. There was a cut up hot dog in it, thank God for small favors. I was exhausted from the office. We are going to sell the farm soon and I don't like the buyers. I think she is planning to cut down our pines. Your father is holding the dog by its tongue and laughing. It looks as if the dog is trying to eat its own tongue. He reminds me of his father when he laughs. Especially when he laughs. Like a lion yawning after a meal, the tongue and the teeth just unwhite enough and the lines in his jaws and the corners of his eyes. These are the things I wish I could paint, but I am so tired. And I don't have the time anymore.
I am wearing a blue scarf over my hair. I am sitting at the picnic table with the other women. Some are standing and meddling with the food. Your father leans over my lap, talking and looking with his hands. Your grandpa is standing in the green grass and everything behind him looks yellow. He is standing like an old man. When he walks and sways the sun washes out the lens and he looks like some sort of golden cactus. It is how I would paint a lion's mane. He is laughing and nothing comes through the camera lens clearer than the lines on his jaw and his red flannel shirt. Not even my bright green eyes that notice and look away, but they are not the round dumb eyes of a cow. I have always smiled like the old great Hollywood women smile. Then I turn away. Your grandpa loves the camera and smiles at it holding the football and he throws the football rolling on the ground and a little girl runs after it. Now that he was older his worries are over. Mine were just beginning.
You saw the video of that picnic at a birthday party. How old is your father's uncle now? Eighty? Does he still fish in his pond in Missouri? You see, time has no sting to us now. We lie just as you imagine us, under the ground with our strong thin hands joined across two separate graves in the lonely part of the cemetery. The American flags over the graves mean nothing to us now, though your grandpa was a soldier, in the way that they mean little to you, because you were not. We were one of the host of German farmer's families settled in the Northern logging towns, in the towns which, at last, you think, will come to you, and yet have ended already before your time. And where did they end? It is not enough to know where we ended. Perhaps it was your father when he became a minister, cultivating hearts instead of fields, and not frustrated by cows but by people. But that is not it either. I will not say that God is a modern painter, but it is like that. It does not look like what it is. Mostly it does not look like anything, and that's where we get fooled. I felt the same when your grandpa died. But we know better now. The fish can tell you what's in the river before you cross it. And the pines can tell you too, when you cut them down. That there is nothing in the river, except that it runs up against the pines and keeps on running past the fish. On the other side is another pole, and another line, and a pearl for a lure. Perhaps that's too vague. I don't mean to say that it's another life just like the one on earth. I mean to say just the opposite. But how can I describe the way the river looks when it stops?
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Butternut
By: K. Harvey
He looked at the blot on the brick wall that resembled a girl with yellow hair. She was smiling, as young girls do, half shyly. Her face was thin, it was almost skeletal like a corpse, like a dead woman, but with the yellow hair of a very young girl and the shy, inviting smile. He looked at the blot on the brick wall as the sky was becoming dark.
His father owned the funeral home in town. He had seen bodies. He had seen them in their coffins at night with the lids propped like traps. He had seen them naked on the prep table. He had seen them with terminal erections, when the blood rushes to the male genitalia after death. He was not afraid of bodies. ‘You got to go sometime,’ the old men said. He believed them. The blot made him think of the girl he wanted. She was a girl he would not be afraid of. He did not know any girls like her, but she was a girl who smiled half-shyly.
He walked away from the brick wall, away from the public library, down Second Street to Main Street. He turned right and walked in and out of the magic circles in orange on the sidewalk squares from intermittent streetlamps above. They had just come on when the sky went dark. He had missed them coming on. He remembered a painting he had seen called ‘The Magic Circle.’ Its was of a dark Spanish girl with black hair. Her feet were bare. She was surrounded by a circle she'd drawn in the sand, standing in it with a cauldron and a fire with a pillar of smoke rising. She was gorgeous and dangerous, but with the same inviting look. He remembered that the circle in the sand was incomplete, that the space between him and the girl in the painting was open. But all around she was protected by the magic circle from the demons she conjured, from the toad and the black crows and Death as a skull half buried in the sand. He did not believe in demons. He had seen bodies. They were kept from decomposing for a little while by chemicals.
He reached the Butternut Diner on Main Street near the center of town and pushed the greasy oak door aside. The door was as old as the building, which was almost as old as the town. It had been a feed store, now it was a diner. The small space was populated every night by men who did not love their wives but were not drunks and did not go to the bars. They went to the Butternut Diner instead. Their farmers’ hands had worn the oak door smooth and left green discoloration on its grain, like the first night the lake freezes in winter. Wake up one morning and it’s out there, in the middle of the lake, beautiful and dangerous. These men went to the diner until it was cold enough to sit in their ice fishing shacks on Big Butternut Lake staring into a circle in the ice.
He pushed the door aside and heard the familiar sound of the silver bell on the fishing line above the door. No one looked up. He did not look around. He went to the small table in the corner and sat with his back to the wall. Except for the white plastic ashtray, the table was empty. He leaned back from it, letting his butt slide forward to the edge of the chair, and pulled a box of Camels from the waistline of his jeans. His parents didn’t know he smoked. He kept the box there because it was invisible under his shirt. Soon she would come with his coffee. He came to the Butternut for the coffee, which masked the smell of tobacco on his breath. He lit a cigarette and felt the rise in his blood.
She came. Her seductive movements were unmanned by the haste of her waitressing. The black name tag was pinned over her left breast and it caught the light from the slow ceiling fan. Carlotta. He read it as she came over to him. She did not take the notebook from her apron.
“Eggs and sausage and hashbrowns?” She asked. Her accent was restrained, or reserved, and her fingernails were blood red as she set a gray porcelain mug on the table and filled it with coffee.
He smoked, and said, “Not tonight. Just hashbrowns tonight. And toast.”
“Wheat?”
He nodded, “Thanks. And some water please.”
She moved to the bar and he watched her shape, marked by the black apron tie and the pale pink skirt and the black everything else except for the skin of her calves. She was not more than twenty. Her eyes were dark, and her lashes were daubed with mascara like a burnt forest. She came with the water. She looked at him with her fingers on the glass on the table. He looked back. He had seen bodies.
They conversed in a friendly way, passing the time which she did not let on that she had. As he answered her he could hear her smiling. The sound came smoothly through her nose, above her lips which turned and stretched and rounded syllables dropped like hailstones on his senses. Her lips wet themselves on her teeth as her accent perverted the air that passed between them. Soberly he was drifting towards panic. The sweat beneath his hairline cooled in the mellow ceiling fans. He was bouncing his cigarette continually on the plastic ashtray, watching it. He wasn't saying much. A shudder took the muscles that surrounded the pounding organs in his chest and he knew she could hear it in his voice. She could hear it with her ears withheld behind black hair, full black hair which smelled when she pushed it away from the tree line of lashes. She leaned against the table, the fingertips of one hand spread on the wood tracing a circle, or a cage with the palm of her slender hand as a roof and the beating of her pulse in her wrist a continuous music. Her hand was like a tiny cathedral with pipe organ fingers. He had seen dead bodies, but hers was living, and he was afraid of this even more than dying because death would not laugh at him.
He had told her that he wrote poetry. “Oh,” she said, “that's nice. And what do you write about?”
“Anything, I guess. Whatever I’m thinking about.”
“About girls, then?” She smiled, a soft sound through her nose. Then she said, “Could you write one about me?”
“A poem?”
“Would you?”
“You mean now?”
“Why not.”
“I could, I guess.”
“Well will you? And then when you’re done you can read it to me. I think I will like that.”
He nodded.
“I am off at eleven. So you have until then. Do you need a pen?” She handed him the pen from her apron. “See you at eleven.”
It was forty minutes away. He lit another cigarette and wrote on a napkin. At first the pen made holes in the napkin.
“No no, not here, not here,” she said when they stood outside the Butternut on the deserted street in the yellow light from the windows of the diner, him with the napkin in his hand and her hand was tightly in her pocket and the other touched the color on her lips. “Let's walk to the lake.”
It was only about a half mile from the diner on the edge of town. On the west shore of Big Butternut, where the main road out of town passed close to the water, were three public docks. Two were simple platforms stretching into the water on either side of the boat landing, resting on a pair of algae coated tires at their ends. The third was new, built by a local church out of redwood planking and floating on buoys that were fixed to the lake floor by chains. This dock extended ten feet past the other two and was in the shape of a cross. It had railings all around it. A light with a green shade was fixed at its end. It would be deserted at this time of night and in this season.
As they walked together they shivered. The first snow had all but melted in the persistent sun of early winter and a breeze carried to their mouths the clarity of the night. The air was empty. He held the napkin in his fist in his pocket as they walked. They reached the dock and their footfall on the empty boards and the swish of water beneath them distracted him. He counted every step to the edge of the dock, to the green light at the end of the dock. They looked together at the lake in the moonlight. He stood near the light. She was in his shadow.
“Now,” she said, and sighed and leaned against the railing of the dock, “now you can read it to me.”
“'Darker than void, she is more black than non-existing.
She is turning back against the movement of the bull.
A foreign crowd is shouting,
Tongues she doesn’t understand,
Sung like chaos ringing in the star-arena.
The bull comes forward in a rush.
No hush moves the crowd,
And she must turn more deeply than The Earth
It seems: to right and left, her chin and breast...'”
His hands turned and wrinkled the napkin, as if to hold it in a better light. He saw the breath of her warm smile drift in frost in the clear air. She waited for him to continue. Her breath was green catching the light. He hated the poem. He hated it as though it were laughing at him, and not her.
“'...Redeem the beauty of theft;
Twists and turns that outmarch rhythm,
Outshine stars with raven bars
As her hair paints black the million crowd
And, blind, they throw their roses at their target
Flirting alone in the dirt of the stadium.
She loves and leaves when the bull is dead.
Loves, carries off its gory head,
Its body pouring red into the dust and roses.'”
She stood with her face bent towards the water, as if she would reach her hands in and splash it over her eyes and cheeks. As if to wash the green off. “I think I understand. The bull is a lover? It is a good poem. But not about me. I think it is not about me. I thought it would be sweeter.”
“It doesn’t mean anything really. Sorry.”
“No, but who is the bull? And the crowd? It is very dark sounding.”
“I don’t know. I guess I think Spain is romantic. That’s what I thought about when I thought about you.”
“No. Not Spain. I was right that the bull is a lover, but there is only one body in the arena, loving itself, right? And they throw roses. You don’t know much about Spain. My mama was born there, but she came here when she was four. She doesn't remember it very much.”
“I just thought it up because it sounded cool, I guess. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Carlotta turned away from him as if she were very angry. She exhaled sharply into the air like she was cursing. “Means nothing,” she said, “’Cool’ means nothing. Only ‘cool’ means nothing.”
“You asked me to write it,” he said, irritated.
“Yes I did, to write a poem about me and to be sweet. But you had to catch me, like a fish. With a little silver hook. You have to be so smart and make your little hole, your little circle in the ice instead of swimming. I see them here, they catch the fish and put them back in. I can be poetic too. Now you know, I am poetic too. But no, it's my own fault. We should go home now. And I'll see you all the time at the Butternut and it won't be bad, okay. It won't be bad like that.”
She was almost crying. Crying at his poetry. 'my witch,’ he thought of her, ‘my little witch.’ He thought it to see what it was like to think it. He moved out away from the green light towards her, leaning out of the circle of light towards his shadow on her. He touched her coat. He heard her feel him touch her.
But at the moment his fingers touched the wool coat, felt the sting of the tiny wool fibers, or at the moment the thought of her dark lips, her dark eyes and tongue, her hips and back and her dark fingernails, was it then that the sound came from the lake like the swish of the water under the dock but it was not under the dock. It was in the water and then on the shore. They turned and saw a figure, curled, balled, dripping green water silhouetted and catching the light from the dock. In the shadows of the shore white fingers were in the freezing mud gripping. A heaving chest blew clouds into the light of the streetlamp and scraped on the back of the man’s dry throat. The dry throat, and every wet sound that it mingled in, stopped his heart, and his hand from pulling Carlotta’s neck to himself. He stopped and forgot about it. Then they walked on the dock back to the shore, tip-toeing, and they walked in and out of the circles from the streetlamps, watching over their shoulders the stranger who had crawled from the freezing lake and now sat huddled in the mud waiting for the warmth to move and save himself. They got back to town and separated. They both heard the noise of the ambulance, but they were far apart by then. Someone had found the man. The man hadn't seen them leave. He had been trying to stay alive.
He ran trembling to the public library, where he knew his parents would not drive by, and lit a cigarette. He felt his body reacting while his mind convinced itself of amazing calm and blamelessness. But the thing he had conjured was in him. She would not forget. She was maybe laughing even now. She might laugh at him later, but without smiling, refilling his coffee in the Butternut Diner. He hated the poem. He finished his cigarette and took a piece of gum from his pocket. He rubbed and sugar and the spearmint smell from the wrapper into his fingers. He remembered how when he was young he threw butternuts and even hours later he could smell their smell on his hands when he tried to sleep and it kept him awake. But then he would throw butternuts until he could not find any more because of the snow.
He looked at the blot on the brick wall that resembled a girl with yellow hair. She was smiling, as young girls do, half shyly. Her face was thin, it was almost skeletal like a corpse, like a dead woman, but with the yellow hair of a very young girl and the shy, inviting smile. He looked at the blot on the brick wall as the sky was becoming dark.
His father owned the funeral home in town. He had seen bodies. He had seen them in their coffins at night with the lids propped like traps. He had seen them naked on the prep table. He had seen them with terminal erections, when the blood rushes to the male genitalia after death. He was not afraid of bodies. ‘You got to go sometime,’ the old men said. He believed them. The blot made him think of the girl he wanted. She was a girl he would not be afraid of. He did not know any girls like her, but she was a girl who smiled half-shyly.
He walked away from the brick wall, away from the public library, down Second Street to Main Street. He turned right and walked in and out of the magic circles in orange on the sidewalk squares from intermittent streetlamps above. They had just come on when the sky went dark. He had missed them coming on. He remembered a painting he had seen called ‘The Magic Circle.’ Its was of a dark Spanish girl with black hair. Her feet were bare. She was surrounded by a circle she'd drawn in the sand, standing in it with a cauldron and a fire with a pillar of smoke rising. She was gorgeous and dangerous, but with the same inviting look. He remembered that the circle in the sand was incomplete, that the space between him and the girl in the painting was open. But all around she was protected by the magic circle from the demons she conjured, from the toad and the black crows and Death as a skull half buried in the sand. He did not believe in demons. He had seen bodies. They were kept from decomposing for a little while by chemicals.
He reached the Butternut Diner on Main Street near the center of town and pushed the greasy oak door aside. The door was as old as the building, which was almost as old as the town. It had been a feed store, now it was a diner. The small space was populated every night by men who did not love their wives but were not drunks and did not go to the bars. They went to the Butternut Diner instead. Their farmers’ hands had worn the oak door smooth and left green discoloration on its grain, like the first night the lake freezes in winter. Wake up one morning and it’s out there, in the middle of the lake, beautiful and dangerous. These men went to the diner until it was cold enough to sit in their ice fishing shacks on Big Butternut Lake staring into a circle in the ice.
He pushed the door aside and heard the familiar sound of the silver bell on the fishing line above the door. No one looked up. He did not look around. He went to the small table in the corner and sat with his back to the wall. Except for the white plastic ashtray, the table was empty. He leaned back from it, letting his butt slide forward to the edge of the chair, and pulled a box of Camels from the waistline of his jeans. His parents didn’t know he smoked. He kept the box there because it was invisible under his shirt. Soon she would come with his coffee. He came to the Butternut for the coffee, which masked the smell of tobacco on his breath. He lit a cigarette and felt the rise in his blood.
She came. Her seductive movements were unmanned by the haste of her waitressing. The black name tag was pinned over her left breast and it caught the light from the slow ceiling fan. Carlotta. He read it as she came over to him. She did not take the notebook from her apron.
“Eggs and sausage and hashbrowns?” She asked. Her accent was restrained, or reserved, and her fingernails were blood red as she set a gray porcelain mug on the table and filled it with coffee.
He smoked, and said, “Not tonight. Just hashbrowns tonight. And toast.”
“Wheat?”
He nodded, “Thanks. And some water please.”
She moved to the bar and he watched her shape, marked by the black apron tie and the pale pink skirt and the black everything else except for the skin of her calves. She was not more than twenty. Her eyes were dark, and her lashes were daubed with mascara like a burnt forest. She came with the water. She looked at him with her fingers on the glass on the table. He looked back. He had seen bodies.
They conversed in a friendly way, passing the time which she did not let on that she had. As he answered her he could hear her smiling. The sound came smoothly through her nose, above her lips which turned and stretched and rounded syllables dropped like hailstones on his senses. Her lips wet themselves on her teeth as her accent perverted the air that passed between them. Soberly he was drifting towards panic. The sweat beneath his hairline cooled in the mellow ceiling fans. He was bouncing his cigarette continually on the plastic ashtray, watching it. He wasn't saying much. A shudder took the muscles that surrounded the pounding organs in his chest and he knew she could hear it in his voice. She could hear it with her ears withheld behind black hair, full black hair which smelled when she pushed it away from the tree line of lashes. She leaned against the table, the fingertips of one hand spread on the wood tracing a circle, or a cage with the palm of her slender hand as a roof and the beating of her pulse in her wrist a continuous music. Her hand was like a tiny cathedral with pipe organ fingers. He had seen dead bodies, but hers was living, and he was afraid of this even more than dying because death would not laugh at him.
He had told her that he wrote poetry. “Oh,” she said, “that's nice. And what do you write about?”
“Anything, I guess. Whatever I’m thinking about.”
“About girls, then?” She smiled, a soft sound through her nose. Then she said, “Could you write one about me?”
“A poem?”
“Would you?”
“You mean now?”
“Why not.”
“I could, I guess.”
“Well will you? And then when you’re done you can read it to me. I think I will like that.”
He nodded.
“I am off at eleven. So you have until then. Do you need a pen?” She handed him the pen from her apron. “See you at eleven.”
It was forty minutes away. He lit another cigarette and wrote on a napkin. At first the pen made holes in the napkin.
“No no, not here, not here,” she said when they stood outside the Butternut on the deserted street in the yellow light from the windows of the diner, him with the napkin in his hand and her hand was tightly in her pocket and the other touched the color on her lips. “Let's walk to the lake.”
It was only about a half mile from the diner on the edge of town. On the west shore of Big Butternut, where the main road out of town passed close to the water, were three public docks. Two were simple platforms stretching into the water on either side of the boat landing, resting on a pair of algae coated tires at their ends. The third was new, built by a local church out of redwood planking and floating on buoys that were fixed to the lake floor by chains. This dock extended ten feet past the other two and was in the shape of a cross. It had railings all around it. A light with a green shade was fixed at its end. It would be deserted at this time of night and in this season.
As they walked together they shivered. The first snow had all but melted in the persistent sun of early winter and a breeze carried to their mouths the clarity of the night. The air was empty. He held the napkin in his fist in his pocket as they walked. They reached the dock and their footfall on the empty boards and the swish of water beneath them distracted him. He counted every step to the edge of the dock, to the green light at the end of the dock. They looked together at the lake in the moonlight. He stood near the light. She was in his shadow.
“Now,” she said, and sighed and leaned against the railing of the dock, “now you can read it to me.”
“'Darker than void, she is more black than non-existing.
She is turning back against the movement of the bull.
A foreign crowd is shouting,
Tongues she doesn’t understand,
Sung like chaos ringing in the star-arena.
The bull comes forward in a rush.
No hush moves the crowd,
And she must turn more deeply than The Earth
It seems: to right and left, her chin and breast...'”
His hands turned and wrinkled the napkin, as if to hold it in a better light. He saw the breath of her warm smile drift in frost in the clear air. She waited for him to continue. Her breath was green catching the light. He hated the poem. He hated it as though it were laughing at him, and not her.
“'...Redeem the beauty of theft;
Twists and turns that outmarch rhythm,
Outshine stars with raven bars
As her hair paints black the million crowd
And, blind, they throw their roses at their target
Flirting alone in the dirt of the stadium.
She loves and leaves when the bull is dead.
Loves, carries off its gory head,
Its body pouring red into the dust and roses.'”
She stood with her face bent towards the water, as if she would reach her hands in and splash it over her eyes and cheeks. As if to wash the green off. “I think I understand. The bull is a lover? It is a good poem. But not about me. I think it is not about me. I thought it would be sweeter.”
“It doesn’t mean anything really. Sorry.”
“No, but who is the bull? And the crowd? It is very dark sounding.”
“I don’t know. I guess I think Spain is romantic. That’s what I thought about when I thought about you.”
“No. Not Spain. I was right that the bull is a lover, but there is only one body in the arena, loving itself, right? And they throw roses. You don’t know much about Spain. My mama was born there, but she came here when she was four. She doesn't remember it very much.”
“I just thought it up because it sounded cool, I guess. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Carlotta turned away from him as if she were very angry. She exhaled sharply into the air like she was cursing. “Means nothing,” she said, “’Cool’ means nothing. Only ‘cool’ means nothing.”
“You asked me to write it,” he said, irritated.
“Yes I did, to write a poem about me and to be sweet. But you had to catch me, like a fish. With a little silver hook. You have to be so smart and make your little hole, your little circle in the ice instead of swimming. I see them here, they catch the fish and put them back in. I can be poetic too. Now you know, I am poetic too. But no, it's my own fault. We should go home now. And I'll see you all the time at the Butternut and it won't be bad, okay. It won't be bad like that.”
She was almost crying. Crying at his poetry. 'my witch,’ he thought of her, ‘my little witch.’ He thought it to see what it was like to think it. He moved out away from the green light towards her, leaning out of the circle of light towards his shadow on her. He touched her coat. He heard her feel him touch her.
But at the moment his fingers touched the wool coat, felt the sting of the tiny wool fibers, or at the moment the thought of her dark lips, her dark eyes and tongue, her hips and back and her dark fingernails, was it then that the sound came from the lake like the swish of the water under the dock but it was not under the dock. It was in the water and then on the shore. They turned and saw a figure, curled, balled, dripping green water silhouetted and catching the light from the dock. In the shadows of the shore white fingers were in the freezing mud gripping. A heaving chest blew clouds into the light of the streetlamp and scraped on the back of the man’s dry throat. The dry throat, and every wet sound that it mingled in, stopped his heart, and his hand from pulling Carlotta’s neck to himself. He stopped and forgot about it. Then they walked on the dock back to the shore, tip-toeing, and they walked in and out of the circles from the streetlamps, watching over their shoulders the stranger who had crawled from the freezing lake and now sat huddled in the mud waiting for the warmth to move and save himself. They got back to town and separated. They both heard the noise of the ambulance, but they were far apart by then. Someone had found the man. The man hadn't seen them leave. He had been trying to stay alive.
He ran trembling to the public library, where he knew his parents would not drive by, and lit a cigarette. He felt his body reacting while his mind convinced itself of amazing calm and blamelessness. But the thing he had conjured was in him. She would not forget. She was maybe laughing even now. She might laugh at him later, but without smiling, refilling his coffee in the Butternut Diner. He hated the poem. He finished his cigarette and took a piece of gum from his pocket. He rubbed and sugar and the spearmint smell from the wrapper into his fingers. He remembered how when he was young he threw butternuts and even hours later he could smell their smell on his hands when he tried to sleep and it kept him awake. But then he would throw butternuts until he could not find any more because of the snow.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
An Eden of Bland Repose
By: K. Jan Harvey
“Beloved! amid the earnest woes
That crowd around my earthly path—
(Drear path, alas! where grows
Not even one lonely rose)—
My soul at least a solace hath
In dreams of thee, and therein knows
An Eden of bland repose.”
“To F—” E.A. Poe
He saw the old .22 rifle that was old when the man who carried it now carried it as a young boy with it ready at his hip and his eyes thirsty in the tall field grass. Now he was old and a young boy watched him and the rifle. The boy cut his new eyes on the petite black circle at the end of the slender barrel where the oil-rainbow metal turned in to where the bullet would come out invisible. To play with a weapon and to kill with a toy. That was the .22 rifle, in his eyes. But it carried a grizzled and inhuman power that was caught up in its years of use and those who used it. Every bullet had been different, every distance of every shot, every breath of him who squeezed the butt against his shoulder, the barrel in his hand, the stock on his cheek, the trigger... The same gun. It meant that the world had not begun with this boy, and the world would not end with him. He was a bullet. He thought this because of Sunday School and the talks of Heaven and Hell. There was the end of life, and after that another end. But after that, nothing. Or nothing more, and it made him nervous at times. He had felt this anticipation as he followed the old .22 rifle out into the barn yard.
With a feed sack in his hand, he waited for the man to come out of the chicken coop. The feed sack in his hand was empty. It folded against his leg and over one of his shoes.
He came out of the chicken coop with a brown hen under his arm. One of the smaller ones. He held it the way he’d learned to hold them when he was a boy, so they huddled into his side between his rib and his hip and stared and didn’t beat their wings. He carried it out this way. It looked like a small beating heart. It was nervous but it didn’t look around. She just waited for it coming with her eyes open.
He put her on the ground and stepped on her. Now she beat her wings, trying to run with her body, her head pinned down by the edge of the boot and her puffy chest and the two legs that stuck out from it scratching and the wings beating in the dust and on the man’s jeans. The one eye stared at the boot. The black circle came down to it.
He thought ‘an eye for an eye,’ but that was about being fair, and she hadn’t done anything except eat too much, more than the farm could afford. But it was a rule of nature and of animals. ‘An eye for an eye.’ It was a rule about being fair, but people could do more than that. They could be merciful, which was better, or unjust, which was worse. Being fair was in the middle, and the worst of all, he thought. It was the most terrifying. It was getting what one deserved. So he could understand this with the chickens.
The old .22 rifle cracked and it echoed off the barn. She jumped up. The man lifted his boot, but it looked as though she had thrown it off and sprung into the air. She jumped into the clover and the round purple blooms at the bottom of the little hill where the big field began. He looked up into the big field. He saw the intense purple-green plain of crisp alfalfa that cracked under his feet like the sound in your head when you eat cereal, the smell of it as they marched towards the shimmering maples with their coverings of berry bushes and the lightning brightness of the aspen leaves that turned silver-side-up in the wind like winking eyes of fire and the old oak behind it all and greener than the rest. There was the tree fort built back there, but there was the field to cross first. That’s where the talking happened and the wondering about things they didn’t understand like Heaven and Hell and The Quick and The Dead. That was the good part; the getting there and the looking at it. Giving your breath to the vision. But once you were there it was all as it was, and there was only that to do. Going over the field was the real doing, and being distracted by every possible thing. It took a very long time to get there. But they always came to it and sat in the tree fort and tried to see the forest.
More noises were coming from the chicken coop, moving together in circles inside. He came out with another small brown hen. He stepped on her and shot her in the eye the same way. She went down the hill moving like the tiny bubbles in a pot just before it boils. She fell into the deep clover close to the other one. They were concealed by the clover, in little cavities where the purple blooms were not.
He went in again. The boy saw the bright rooster in his arm when he came out the third time. The red on its head and under its beak moved like the parts of him he couldn’t talk about. The rooster struggled, not like the others, not waiting for it coming. The long thin gray and black feathers around its neck puffed out around its twitching head and the yellow eye looked once at each thing and jerked away, so he thought the image in its brain must be like a Picasso painting. It was not as easy for the man to step on the rooster.
His friend, the man’s son, elbowed him and said he thought the rooster would go the farthest. The boy agreed. They waited for it to be shot, and jumped at the crack of the rifle. The rooster sprang up. And it did go the farthest, but only in circles and ended up next to the others in the clover. That was after it sprinted around the yard and turned twice over itself and once came headlong at the boy, but with its head flat and to one side perpendicular to the wet red neck, the head leading it around so it never reached him. The two boys laughed and the man had another one before the rooster had stopped. This one too went into the clover.
The man grew impatient. He was tired. He watched the boys. They laughed and joked, their sacks on the ground, up to their knees in the clover, and their backsides brushing the purple blooms as they pushed the brown and red feathers with sticks. He called them so that they looked up quickly, then trotted back up the hill. He stooped through the door of the chicken coop again.
Then they all cluttered out of the door and the boot came carefully behind them. The man stood with them before him in the yard, brown gray and white too, their eyes jerking in rhythmic staccato and the thin necks bulging and unbulging and fluttering and ceasing to flutter. The heads went up and went down. They moved in a crowd as if giving and taking of each other and receiving and acknowledging and moving on. The man stood in the door pushing bullets into the gun.
The boy lifted his empty sack off the grass. His friend’s eyes were animated and he explained that now they were going to be shot one after another. Willy nilly, he said.
The man aimed the rifle at the first one, with his shoulder and hand and cheek and then the finger of his strong hand squeezing, because he aimed exactly, and the first one fell dead. They didn’t scatter, because the ones on the outside saw open space and turned from it back into the crowd. And the boy could not even see which were killed and which were not; but the man saw down the length of the barrel. The boy was confounded. The man killed them all one after another.
Then it was quiet except for the hens dying and bleeding down into the clover. But the rifle was quiet and he saw a white hen huddled to the earth. Her head didn’t jerk but he saw her eye blink. The white lid caught the sun and was much brighter than the eye. Her wings did not move, but enfolded her body. Her legs were not seen sticking out beneath her. She shivered and sat as she would on an egg. The boy didn’t see the rest of them dying because he saw her alive. He saw her white feathers. He saw her fear, the promise of death in the dying around her. But the empty casings of the .22 bullets lay on the ground. The man let the butt of the old rifle, unpolished and polished again by many hands, drop to the ground and he rested the barrel against his thigh. The boy saw her alive, but she was not. It came to her too, as it had come to the rest. The man’s gun no one escaped. Even as he looked her blinking eye closed more slowly and opened less widely. She leaned forward, to fall, her full breast tilting, towards the grass. As she fell, a surge of blood, purple-red and thick from deep organs, poured from a wound between the feathers covering her breasts, just as spoiled milk is wasted from a pitcher into the grass outside the kitchen door. She rolled once onto her head and spasmed once and then joined completely the others. The boy took his sack as his friend was doing and went about collecting the dead chickens from the clover. The man watched them and felt satisfied. He could see that they saw what was coming with different eyes.
“Beloved! amid the earnest woes
That crowd around my earthly path—
(Drear path, alas! where grows
Not even one lonely rose)—
My soul at least a solace hath
In dreams of thee, and therein knows
An Eden of bland repose.”
“To F—” E.A. Poe
He saw the old .22 rifle that was old when the man who carried it now carried it as a young boy with it ready at his hip and his eyes thirsty in the tall field grass. Now he was old and a young boy watched him and the rifle. The boy cut his new eyes on the petite black circle at the end of the slender barrel where the oil-rainbow metal turned in to where the bullet would come out invisible. To play with a weapon and to kill with a toy. That was the .22 rifle, in his eyes. But it carried a grizzled and inhuman power that was caught up in its years of use and those who used it. Every bullet had been different, every distance of every shot, every breath of him who squeezed the butt against his shoulder, the barrel in his hand, the stock on his cheek, the trigger... The same gun. It meant that the world had not begun with this boy, and the world would not end with him. He was a bullet. He thought this because of Sunday School and the talks of Heaven and Hell. There was the end of life, and after that another end. But after that, nothing. Or nothing more, and it made him nervous at times. He had felt this anticipation as he followed the old .22 rifle out into the barn yard.
With a feed sack in his hand, he waited for the man to come out of the chicken coop. The feed sack in his hand was empty. It folded against his leg and over one of his shoes.
He came out of the chicken coop with a brown hen under his arm. One of the smaller ones. He held it the way he’d learned to hold them when he was a boy, so they huddled into his side between his rib and his hip and stared and didn’t beat their wings. He carried it out this way. It looked like a small beating heart. It was nervous but it didn’t look around. She just waited for it coming with her eyes open.
He put her on the ground and stepped on her. Now she beat her wings, trying to run with her body, her head pinned down by the edge of the boot and her puffy chest and the two legs that stuck out from it scratching and the wings beating in the dust and on the man’s jeans. The one eye stared at the boot. The black circle came down to it.
He thought ‘an eye for an eye,’ but that was about being fair, and she hadn’t done anything except eat too much, more than the farm could afford. But it was a rule of nature and of animals. ‘An eye for an eye.’ It was a rule about being fair, but people could do more than that. They could be merciful, which was better, or unjust, which was worse. Being fair was in the middle, and the worst of all, he thought. It was the most terrifying. It was getting what one deserved. So he could understand this with the chickens.
The old .22 rifle cracked and it echoed off the barn. She jumped up. The man lifted his boot, but it looked as though she had thrown it off and sprung into the air. She jumped into the clover and the round purple blooms at the bottom of the little hill where the big field began. He looked up into the big field. He saw the intense purple-green plain of crisp alfalfa that cracked under his feet like the sound in your head when you eat cereal, the smell of it as they marched towards the shimmering maples with their coverings of berry bushes and the lightning brightness of the aspen leaves that turned silver-side-up in the wind like winking eyes of fire and the old oak behind it all and greener than the rest. There was the tree fort built back there, but there was the field to cross first. That’s where the talking happened and the wondering about things they didn’t understand like Heaven and Hell and The Quick and The Dead. That was the good part; the getting there and the looking at it. Giving your breath to the vision. But once you were there it was all as it was, and there was only that to do. Going over the field was the real doing, and being distracted by every possible thing. It took a very long time to get there. But they always came to it and sat in the tree fort and tried to see the forest.
More noises were coming from the chicken coop, moving together in circles inside. He came out with another small brown hen. He stepped on her and shot her in the eye the same way. She went down the hill moving like the tiny bubbles in a pot just before it boils. She fell into the deep clover close to the other one. They were concealed by the clover, in little cavities where the purple blooms were not.
He went in again. The boy saw the bright rooster in his arm when he came out the third time. The red on its head and under its beak moved like the parts of him he couldn’t talk about. The rooster struggled, not like the others, not waiting for it coming. The long thin gray and black feathers around its neck puffed out around its twitching head and the yellow eye looked once at each thing and jerked away, so he thought the image in its brain must be like a Picasso painting. It was not as easy for the man to step on the rooster.
His friend, the man’s son, elbowed him and said he thought the rooster would go the farthest. The boy agreed. They waited for it to be shot, and jumped at the crack of the rifle. The rooster sprang up. And it did go the farthest, but only in circles and ended up next to the others in the clover. That was after it sprinted around the yard and turned twice over itself and once came headlong at the boy, but with its head flat and to one side perpendicular to the wet red neck, the head leading it around so it never reached him. The two boys laughed and the man had another one before the rooster had stopped. This one too went into the clover.
The man grew impatient. He was tired. He watched the boys. They laughed and joked, their sacks on the ground, up to their knees in the clover, and their backsides brushing the purple blooms as they pushed the brown and red feathers with sticks. He called them so that they looked up quickly, then trotted back up the hill. He stooped through the door of the chicken coop again.
Then they all cluttered out of the door and the boot came carefully behind them. The man stood with them before him in the yard, brown gray and white too, their eyes jerking in rhythmic staccato and the thin necks bulging and unbulging and fluttering and ceasing to flutter. The heads went up and went down. They moved in a crowd as if giving and taking of each other and receiving and acknowledging and moving on. The man stood in the door pushing bullets into the gun.
The boy lifted his empty sack off the grass. His friend’s eyes were animated and he explained that now they were going to be shot one after another. Willy nilly, he said.
The man aimed the rifle at the first one, with his shoulder and hand and cheek and then the finger of his strong hand squeezing, because he aimed exactly, and the first one fell dead. They didn’t scatter, because the ones on the outside saw open space and turned from it back into the crowd. And the boy could not even see which were killed and which were not; but the man saw down the length of the barrel. The boy was confounded. The man killed them all one after another.
Then it was quiet except for the hens dying and bleeding down into the clover. But the rifle was quiet and he saw a white hen huddled to the earth. Her head didn’t jerk but he saw her eye blink. The white lid caught the sun and was much brighter than the eye. Her wings did not move, but enfolded her body. Her legs were not seen sticking out beneath her. She shivered and sat as she would on an egg. The boy didn’t see the rest of them dying because he saw her alive. He saw her white feathers. He saw her fear, the promise of death in the dying around her. But the empty casings of the .22 bullets lay on the ground. The man let the butt of the old rifle, unpolished and polished again by many hands, drop to the ground and he rested the barrel against his thigh. The boy saw her alive, but she was not. It came to her too, as it had come to the rest. The man’s gun no one escaped. Even as he looked her blinking eye closed more slowly and opened less widely. She leaned forward, to fall, her full breast tilting, towards the grass. As she fell, a surge of blood, purple-red and thick from deep organs, poured from a wound between the feathers covering her breasts, just as spoiled milk is wasted from a pitcher into the grass outside the kitchen door. She rolled once onto her head and spasmed once and then joined completely the others. The boy took his sack as his friend was doing and went about collecting the dead chickens from the clover. The man watched them and felt satisfied. He could see that they saw what was coming with different eyes.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
A Wayward Shot
By: K. Jan Harvey
The day he bought the rifle he took it into the woods to the stand by the creek between Lester Judie’s land and ours. That’s where the trees were cut when Lester lost his property. But we didn’t cut that oak, or the poplars around it, and there’s some nails left in it where the stand used to be. Iron nails grown into the tree, and still visible and unnatural. But the creek dried up. Like he dried up.
He used to say that the stand had been there a hundred years before any man in Fortune knew about it. I don’t know why he thought that, or how he would have known. He came here long after the town was founded. But we all thought we might as well believe him. He used to say a hunter once shot a minister from that stand, because he wouldn’t tell him it was justified to lust for a woman if he did not touch her. These are the lengths of atheism, he would say. So the hunter shot the minister and every year after that his ghost appeared to him as a giant white doe, a symbol of the purity and promise of a woman I suppose, and never let itself get hit by that hunter’s gun. So the hunter went mad and hung himself from the stand. He used to say the white doe saw it happen. And he said when they found his body, bullets were all around in the snow and metallic in the sun, and that there were thirty of them. Thirty bullets. He used to tell us that, and that no one ever climbed down from the stand afterwards without having killed a deer. But never that white doe. He said the stand was blessed, and that the white doe blessed it, because that white doe was holy.
That’s why he took the new rifle up there, to kill that old white holy deer. I think he felt that white doe staring him down. You see, he wasn’t an atheist, and he believed the story. That’s why he did it. Because he wouldn’t have hung himself. But also I think he wanted the same thing we all do. So he climbed up and waited for the white doe. He was watching out over what was then Lester Judie’s land, Lester Sr., because that’s where the young minister had been killed, on his way to a baptism in the creek, he told us. So he waited the rest of the day and on through the bitter night and the morning came on and his hands were cold on the pretty metal barrel of the brand new rifle and his toes numb inside his stiff frozen leather boots and his stomach empty and growling. He said he ate bark to shut it up, and then he began to think and imagine as he chewed and warmed his mind. He felt that if he killed that white doe, then from that day forward, he would never miss. He believed in that. And he’d bring the frost white ear of that deer to his girl in Fortune, as a sign of his provision, and they’d serve that white doe at their wedding supper and dance as the snow fell just before Christmas. It was all a good joke. That’s how he told it.
And of course he did marry Grandma, his girl in Fortune, but it wasn’t quite that way. As he waited out there it started to snow and then it became really cold. The dawn was coming and it was the coldest time of night because all that heat goes out and gets ready to come up all at once with the sun. In that true northern winter cold he felt his eyelids chill each other as they touched when he blinked and he couldn’t even shiver because he was so tired. So he just blinked to keep his eyeballs warm, they were all he would need until the white doe appeared. He wiggled his toes in his boots and straightened his back and felt like a mountain in that tree, stiff and aching. He inhaled the motionless air, he said like drowning in perfectly still water, and he felt it on the hairs in his nose making a tiny popping noise, and he said that’s what that old white holy doe heard to make her head snap up in the falling snow and her ears tip forward and that’s what he saw through the snow from the stand. Only he said it was not a doe at all, but a young fork buck, white as a lamb and bigger than anything in the woods, even at that distance and in all that falling snow. He could see the long muscled neck and the two forks as clear as the lines you draw with your finger on a frosty car window, and he couldn’t see the shape of a face so he knew it was staring right at him in his stand. Staring at him, as he was staring back. And then as he looked he could see that unnatural curving horizontal line that in the woods is only the body of a deer. He said it looked like a ghost in all that snow. And he said he didn’t remember being cold, but he was shivering all right, and the muscles even in his fingers felt tired and hot and they wouldn’t grip. He always said it’s the deer’s life in your hands that makes you feel that way. The deer’s life in the summer under the sun and bounding through tall grass on hidden hills that no man has ever seen and a heat of life that no man in this place has ever known and you hold that for a moment before you decide. Then it goes out of you. It goes out altogether. And you don’t feel sorry, but just one less thing.
He lifted the rifle as a leaf straightens when a bee flies off. He was a good hunter. He had heard that pastor who was killed preach once when he was a boy, when he went with Lester to church. The pastor had preached on Jeremiah, the twelfth chapter, and about a roaring lion in the forest. Now it seemed to him that words and phrases of that sermon started bounding in his mind as he aimed, and the deer didn’t move, but just stared at him, in that calm and awake way that deer look sometimes, through the snow. He ignored all that in his mind and instead thought of dancing on his wedding day with his stomach full. ‘Let me be a lion. No, I will be a lion. I will be a lion in the forest.’
And that’s when it came down. The whole stand came down. He didn’t hear it break, but he was on the ground in the snow. The whole bough had given way, like it was cut off at once with an axe, and he came down with the stand into the snow and broken sticks and the new rifle came down with him. He didn’t have time to let it go in the air and it fell against his finger and fired into the night with a noise so loud, he said, it made the snow stop altogether and the bullet went far off into the woods, without hitting a tree, and dropped beneath all that snow and nothingness and frozen dead meaninglessness of winter. Then his leg hurt and it was broken and even though they waited until spring, he still couldn’t dance at the wedding and she danced instead with Lester Judie and the others that were there. But on that night when the stand fell, he bit his lip as he used to do in his last days when he’d get up out of a chair, and he stood up on that broken leg out of the shattered branches and saw the buck was still there, like nothing he’d ever seen, white like breath and as warm and calm, like a pearly lily dried and pressed in a book, he used to say. And it stared at him.
So he lifted the rifle and fired again. And he always swore there was dirt in the barrel, or snow, because he never missed. But he saw that bullet break a scar in a tree to the left of that white deer’s simple shape. And then it was gone and no one’s ever seen that white stag again and no one rebuilt the stand because of course it wasn’t blessed anymore.
He never let up on telling that story. It was precious to him, but I think it bothered him too. And he always insisted it was absolutely true. And it is true, because the rifle came down to me. It never shot straight and still never will, but it always shoots just to the left, no matter how careful you aim. Not once has it shot straight, except maybe once, when a wayward shot might have hit what I aimed it at.
*
Her name was Emily Ulalume Judie. She was Lester’s youngest daughter by his second wife and my mother always said she was simple and the boys at school all said she was stupid. She didn’t go to school, but the boys told stories. Some said they’d seen her in the soybean field taking off her clothes and dancing and that her father ran them off with his World War II machine gun and then started beating her. But that was a lie, because those boys said a lot of things. Also I knew that Mr. Judie loved Emily Ulalume, very dearly.
Of course the boys made fun of her name, but I always thought it was perfect. And Mr. Judie’s second wife, Beth, kept her maiden name with a hyphen, Judie-Azelle. It just made her name ugly. But the girl’s. Emily Ulalume Judie-Azelle. And she was beautiful. Like the young bride of Solomon.
All this occurred to me later. At the time I was just a boy. I was young and very much afraid of what other people said. Of course, you never really grow out of that, but when you’re young you don’t think about hiding it at all. You just try and try not to be small.
It happened on the day before I moved away, so it wouldn’t have mattered if I had been small. But of course it did. Three years before, I had been given the rifle as a present and I had made good use of it since then. The first thing I shot was a possum, which I figured wouldn’t be blasphemy. Of course, I didn’t believe in all that that my grandpa had said, but since I’d heard his story and saw my mother look over her shoulder from the stove as he told it, I thought it would make me feel better about the whole thing to kill a possum and set the rifle right again. And it did.
I killed lots of things with that rifle, and even two deer. I learned to shoot it well, aiming the crosshairs in the old scratched scope just enough to the right, depending on the distance, to put the bullet where I wanted. I was a very good hunter.
There were four of us that evening. Edgar, Frank, Allan, and myself. They all knew about my rifle and they always wanted me to let them shoot it, but I never did. Of course I didn’t. We were hunting rabbits that evening. It was getting near dusk when we should have been going home and Edgar started talking about ghosts. He was the oldest, and he was often cruel. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I think Frank and Allan were getting scared. He told us about the ghost of an old, old man that lived in shadows and in snow and beneath floorboards, because that’s where he’d been buried, not underground, and he bit off the feet of people who stepped on him so they’d fall and then he’d whisper evil things in their ears until they went crazy.
“No way.” Frank said. “What do you know? Ghosts can’t bite they don’t have any teeth.”
“Yes they do too. Teeth is all they have.” Edgar said. He was walking just behind Frank as the sun started down behind the trees. “That’s how they i.d. dead people. By their teeth. My uncle’s a cop and he told me. And if you mean that they can’t bite things that are physical because they aren’t physical, then how come we can see them?”
“I’ve never seen one.” Frank said.
“I have.” Edgar said.
“No way. No you haven’t. You’re making that up.” Frank said.
Then Edgar stumbled and he yelled, a short sudden burst of noise into the dusk. Frank’s body jerked rigid and he jumped a few steps forward quickly, weaving like a rabbit runs. But he stopped and turned around when he heard Edgar laughing on the ground.
“It’s saying something to me.” Edgar said. Laughing. “It’s saying—it’s saying Frank’s mom’s a whore.”
Frank went over to him and kicked him hard. I had to break them up because Allan just stood there quiet, but first I put the rifle on the ground. It took a while to break them up too, because Edgar’s glasses had come off and he was mad about that. They weren’t broken, but he said they were cold from the snow. When I looked up I saw Allan hadn’t even been watching. He was looking out across the field towards where the stand used to be, where the big oak is in a clump of poplars. The sun was just behind the horizon now, and it was that time in the early night when you can watch it getting darker and darker, but you always miss when it goes black.
“Quiet.” Allan said. He pointed. His shoulders shook a little.
We all looked and Edgar pushed his glasses on. Across the field on top of a small rise in the ground and outlined against the black trees was a white shape, moving. It was not moving one way or another, unless it was coming towards us, because it only seemed to sway back and forth slightly. It was small and indistinct. Just a shape, but unnatural against the trees.
“It’s a ghost.” Allan said. I watched the breath come out of his mouth as he whispered. He was really afraid. Not the fear of being embarrassed by someone older than you, but real fear. I’d never seen it before. He started shaking, more than you would from being cold. Then I was afraid because he was, like you would be if a faithful dog curled up under the bed while a robber took your life away.
“It’s not a ghost, jerk, it’s better than that. It’s that old white buck.” Edgar said. He had heard the story. Everybody had. “Look, see, that’s where the stand was. In the oak. Only it’s your land now—” he touched my shoulder with the back of his hand and he said my name, “—you can shoot it.”
“No.” I said. “We can’t even see it.”
“Yes we can. I can.” Edgar said. “C’mon and shoot it. Quick, before it goes.”
“No.” I said.
“Let’s just go back, guys, it’s getting dark.” Frank said.
“No, pussy, we can’t let it go. Shoot it.” Edgar said. His glasses were foggy from his breath. He took them off and wiped them and he said my name again in a loud whisper in my ear.
“My dad says you shouldn’t shoot at something you don’t know what it is.” Frank said.
“Shut up.” Edgar said. He hit the back of Frank’s knit hat. Then he leaned very close to me and he whispered in my ear, so Frank and Allan couldn’t hear him.
“It’s staring,” he said, “isn’t it—” he said my name again, “—staring right at you, just like he said. It’s staring you down. You have to shoot it now. Do it. Don’t be stupid.”
So I knelt down and ran the bolt in the chamber and heard the bullet come up into the rifle. I saw Allan was still shaking, staring. He was still afraid. I tried not to be. Then Frank started to panic.
“No, don’t do it. We’ll get in trouble.” Frank said. “Edgar stop, we have to get back. Please, let’s go. You don’t even know what it is. It could be anything. Let’s go. What if it’s—”
“It’s that deer.” Edgar said. “That white deer.” He whispered. “That buck that no one could kill and it’s staring you down. I’ll tell everyone you couldn’t. That you had the chance and didn’t do it. Or here, why don’t you just let me?” He said.
He touched the rifle and I pulled away. I put it to my shoulder, forcing his hand away with my elbow. I aimed. I put the crosshairs exactly on the white shape. I didn’t want to shoot it, so I aimed right at it. Edgar was kneeling next to me like a father would teach his son how to shoot. Frank was lingering over us making a lot of noise. I put the crosshairs exactly on it.
“Shoot.” He whispered. “Shoot.” I aimed exactly precisely on the shape.
Then Allan sobbed. It was an enormous sound in the silence. A great inhalation of freezing cold air, unnatural and sharp, catching and rasping somewhere in his throat and building towards a hot bubble of tears from his eyes and nose that never came. But the sound just took in all that silence and it was like nothing you’d hear in the woods in winter and in all that snow, and the rifle fired.
I had seen the shape in the crosshairs then. In that moment, I had recognized it. In the heat of my mind I figured it out and knew what it was. It was her. It was Emily Ulalume Judie. A little girl in winter clothes. Emily Ulalume. And I had seen her in the crosshairs of the rifle. She was smiling, like she always smiled because she was simple. Smiling, but not at me. Not at anything. Just smiling, as if from inside.
But when I lowered the rifle from my cheek, feeling it unstick and feeling the extra cold on my cheek where it had been, I couldn’t see the shape anymore. There was no movement, no white shape above the snow, nothing but the black poplars and the big black oak and the black black black northern sky.
I heard Allan stop crying. He probably felt like I did. Deaf and breathless from the noise of the gun and shaking everywhere inside but stiff on the outside and feeling too much cold on our faces. Edgar stood.
“You missed.” Edgar said. “You missed like everyone else. I saw it run back into the trees when you shot. That old white buck got away again.” He turned and started walking away. We all followed him, but my knees felt like they were melting in my snow pants and Edgar got far ahead of us. He kept laughing in the darkness like a ghost might laugh, to scare us. But we just walked like children walk when they’re going to be punished. That’s the length of a person.
But I know I didn’t shoot her. I know now it’s okay. She may have run off behind the rise in the ground or into the trees like Edgar said. I don’t know. I didn’t see. But the rifle always misses and she was exactly in the sight. The rifle always missed, since that day he fell from the stand. I know it missed. Of course I don’t know, because I didn’t see. And I never went back. But some things are unnatural, like heavy weights that somehow don’t sink in the snow. And I think I saw her once, much later, with her father, in Minneapolis.
The day he bought the rifle he took it into the woods to the stand by the creek between Lester Judie’s land and ours. That’s where the trees were cut when Lester lost his property. But we didn’t cut that oak, or the poplars around it, and there’s some nails left in it where the stand used to be. Iron nails grown into the tree, and still visible and unnatural. But the creek dried up. Like he dried up.
He used to say that the stand had been there a hundred years before any man in Fortune knew about it. I don’t know why he thought that, or how he would have known. He came here long after the town was founded. But we all thought we might as well believe him. He used to say a hunter once shot a minister from that stand, because he wouldn’t tell him it was justified to lust for a woman if he did not touch her. These are the lengths of atheism, he would say. So the hunter shot the minister and every year after that his ghost appeared to him as a giant white doe, a symbol of the purity and promise of a woman I suppose, and never let itself get hit by that hunter’s gun. So the hunter went mad and hung himself from the stand. He used to say the white doe saw it happen. And he said when they found his body, bullets were all around in the snow and metallic in the sun, and that there were thirty of them. Thirty bullets. He used to tell us that, and that no one ever climbed down from the stand afterwards without having killed a deer. But never that white doe. He said the stand was blessed, and that the white doe blessed it, because that white doe was holy.
That’s why he took the new rifle up there, to kill that old white holy deer. I think he felt that white doe staring him down. You see, he wasn’t an atheist, and he believed the story. That’s why he did it. Because he wouldn’t have hung himself. But also I think he wanted the same thing we all do. So he climbed up and waited for the white doe. He was watching out over what was then Lester Judie’s land, Lester Sr., because that’s where the young minister had been killed, on his way to a baptism in the creek, he told us. So he waited the rest of the day and on through the bitter night and the morning came on and his hands were cold on the pretty metal barrel of the brand new rifle and his toes numb inside his stiff frozen leather boots and his stomach empty and growling. He said he ate bark to shut it up, and then he began to think and imagine as he chewed and warmed his mind. He felt that if he killed that white doe, then from that day forward, he would never miss. He believed in that. And he’d bring the frost white ear of that deer to his girl in Fortune, as a sign of his provision, and they’d serve that white doe at their wedding supper and dance as the snow fell just before Christmas. It was all a good joke. That’s how he told it.
And of course he did marry Grandma, his girl in Fortune, but it wasn’t quite that way. As he waited out there it started to snow and then it became really cold. The dawn was coming and it was the coldest time of night because all that heat goes out and gets ready to come up all at once with the sun. In that true northern winter cold he felt his eyelids chill each other as they touched when he blinked and he couldn’t even shiver because he was so tired. So he just blinked to keep his eyeballs warm, they were all he would need until the white doe appeared. He wiggled his toes in his boots and straightened his back and felt like a mountain in that tree, stiff and aching. He inhaled the motionless air, he said like drowning in perfectly still water, and he felt it on the hairs in his nose making a tiny popping noise, and he said that’s what that old white holy doe heard to make her head snap up in the falling snow and her ears tip forward and that’s what he saw through the snow from the stand. Only he said it was not a doe at all, but a young fork buck, white as a lamb and bigger than anything in the woods, even at that distance and in all that falling snow. He could see the long muscled neck and the two forks as clear as the lines you draw with your finger on a frosty car window, and he couldn’t see the shape of a face so he knew it was staring right at him in his stand. Staring at him, as he was staring back. And then as he looked he could see that unnatural curving horizontal line that in the woods is only the body of a deer. He said it looked like a ghost in all that snow. And he said he didn’t remember being cold, but he was shivering all right, and the muscles even in his fingers felt tired and hot and they wouldn’t grip. He always said it’s the deer’s life in your hands that makes you feel that way. The deer’s life in the summer under the sun and bounding through tall grass on hidden hills that no man has ever seen and a heat of life that no man in this place has ever known and you hold that for a moment before you decide. Then it goes out of you. It goes out altogether. And you don’t feel sorry, but just one less thing.
He lifted the rifle as a leaf straightens when a bee flies off. He was a good hunter. He had heard that pastor who was killed preach once when he was a boy, when he went with Lester to church. The pastor had preached on Jeremiah, the twelfth chapter, and about a roaring lion in the forest. Now it seemed to him that words and phrases of that sermon started bounding in his mind as he aimed, and the deer didn’t move, but just stared at him, in that calm and awake way that deer look sometimes, through the snow. He ignored all that in his mind and instead thought of dancing on his wedding day with his stomach full. ‘Let me be a lion. No, I will be a lion. I will be a lion in the forest.’
And that’s when it came down. The whole stand came down. He didn’t hear it break, but he was on the ground in the snow. The whole bough had given way, like it was cut off at once with an axe, and he came down with the stand into the snow and broken sticks and the new rifle came down with him. He didn’t have time to let it go in the air and it fell against his finger and fired into the night with a noise so loud, he said, it made the snow stop altogether and the bullet went far off into the woods, without hitting a tree, and dropped beneath all that snow and nothingness and frozen dead meaninglessness of winter. Then his leg hurt and it was broken and even though they waited until spring, he still couldn’t dance at the wedding and she danced instead with Lester Judie and the others that were there. But on that night when the stand fell, he bit his lip as he used to do in his last days when he’d get up out of a chair, and he stood up on that broken leg out of the shattered branches and saw the buck was still there, like nothing he’d ever seen, white like breath and as warm and calm, like a pearly lily dried and pressed in a book, he used to say. And it stared at him.
So he lifted the rifle and fired again. And he always swore there was dirt in the barrel, or snow, because he never missed. But he saw that bullet break a scar in a tree to the left of that white deer’s simple shape. And then it was gone and no one’s ever seen that white stag again and no one rebuilt the stand because of course it wasn’t blessed anymore.
He never let up on telling that story. It was precious to him, but I think it bothered him too. And he always insisted it was absolutely true. And it is true, because the rifle came down to me. It never shot straight and still never will, but it always shoots just to the left, no matter how careful you aim. Not once has it shot straight, except maybe once, when a wayward shot might have hit what I aimed it at.
*
Her name was Emily Ulalume Judie. She was Lester’s youngest daughter by his second wife and my mother always said she was simple and the boys at school all said she was stupid. She didn’t go to school, but the boys told stories. Some said they’d seen her in the soybean field taking off her clothes and dancing and that her father ran them off with his World War II machine gun and then started beating her. But that was a lie, because those boys said a lot of things. Also I knew that Mr. Judie loved Emily Ulalume, very dearly.
Of course the boys made fun of her name, but I always thought it was perfect. And Mr. Judie’s second wife, Beth, kept her maiden name with a hyphen, Judie-Azelle. It just made her name ugly. But the girl’s. Emily Ulalume Judie-Azelle. And she was beautiful. Like the young bride of Solomon.
All this occurred to me later. At the time I was just a boy. I was young and very much afraid of what other people said. Of course, you never really grow out of that, but when you’re young you don’t think about hiding it at all. You just try and try not to be small.
It happened on the day before I moved away, so it wouldn’t have mattered if I had been small. But of course it did. Three years before, I had been given the rifle as a present and I had made good use of it since then. The first thing I shot was a possum, which I figured wouldn’t be blasphemy. Of course, I didn’t believe in all that that my grandpa had said, but since I’d heard his story and saw my mother look over her shoulder from the stove as he told it, I thought it would make me feel better about the whole thing to kill a possum and set the rifle right again. And it did.
I killed lots of things with that rifle, and even two deer. I learned to shoot it well, aiming the crosshairs in the old scratched scope just enough to the right, depending on the distance, to put the bullet where I wanted. I was a very good hunter.
There were four of us that evening. Edgar, Frank, Allan, and myself. They all knew about my rifle and they always wanted me to let them shoot it, but I never did. Of course I didn’t. We were hunting rabbits that evening. It was getting near dusk when we should have been going home and Edgar started talking about ghosts. He was the oldest, and he was often cruel. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I think Frank and Allan were getting scared. He told us about the ghost of an old, old man that lived in shadows and in snow and beneath floorboards, because that’s where he’d been buried, not underground, and he bit off the feet of people who stepped on him so they’d fall and then he’d whisper evil things in their ears until they went crazy.
“No way.” Frank said. “What do you know? Ghosts can’t bite they don’t have any teeth.”
“Yes they do too. Teeth is all they have.” Edgar said. He was walking just behind Frank as the sun started down behind the trees. “That’s how they i.d. dead people. By their teeth. My uncle’s a cop and he told me. And if you mean that they can’t bite things that are physical because they aren’t physical, then how come we can see them?”
“I’ve never seen one.” Frank said.
“I have.” Edgar said.
“No way. No you haven’t. You’re making that up.” Frank said.
Then Edgar stumbled and he yelled, a short sudden burst of noise into the dusk. Frank’s body jerked rigid and he jumped a few steps forward quickly, weaving like a rabbit runs. But he stopped and turned around when he heard Edgar laughing on the ground.
“It’s saying something to me.” Edgar said. Laughing. “It’s saying—it’s saying Frank’s mom’s a whore.”
Frank went over to him and kicked him hard. I had to break them up because Allan just stood there quiet, but first I put the rifle on the ground. It took a while to break them up too, because Edgar’s glasses had come off and he was mad about that. They weren’t broken, but he said they were cold from the snow. When I looked up I saw Allan hadn’t even been watching. He was looking out across the field towards where the stand used to be, where the big oak is in a clump of poplars. The sun was just behind the horizon now, and it was that time in the early night when you can watch it getting darker and darker, but you always miss when it goes black.
“Quiet.” Allan said. He pointed. His shoulders shook a little.
We all looked and Edgar pushed his glasses on. Across the field on top of a small rise in the ground and outlined against the black trees was a white shape, moving. It was not moving one way or another, unless it was coming towards us, because it only seemed to sway back and forth slightly. It was small and indistinct. Just a shape, but unnatural against the trees.
“It’s a ghost.” Allan said. I watched the breath come out of his mouth as he whispered. He was really afraid. Not the fear of being embarrassed by someone older than you, but real fear. I’d never seen it before. He started shaking, more than you would from being cold. Then I was afraid because he was, like you would be if a faithful dog curled up under the bed while a robber took your life away.
“It’s not a ghost, jerk, it’s better than that. It’s that old white buck.” Edgar said. He had heard the story. Everybody had. “Look, see, that’s where the stand was. In the oak. Only it’s your land now—” he touched my shoulder with the back of his hand and he said my name, “—you can shoot it.”
“No.” I said. “We can’t even see it.”
“Yes we can. I can.” Edgar said. “C’mon and shoot it. Quick, before it goes.”
“No.” I said.
“Let’s just go back, guys, it’s getting dark.” Frank said.
“No, pussy, we can’t let it go. Shoot it.” Edgar said. His glasses were foggy from his breath. He took them off and wiped them and he said my name again in a loud whisper in my ear.
“My dad says you shouldn’t shoot at something you don’t know what it is.” Frank said.
“Shut up.” Edgar said. He hit the back of Frank’s knit hat. Then he leaned very close to me and he whispered in my ear, so Frank and Allan couldn’t hear him.
“It’s staring,” he said, “isn’t it—” he said my name again, “—staring right at you, just like he said. It’s staring you down. You have to shoot it now. Do it. Don’t be stupid.”
So I knelt down and ran the bolt in the chamber and heard the bullet come up into the rifle. I saw Allan was still shaking, staring. He was still afraid. I tried not to be. Then Frank started to panic.
“No, don’t do it. We’ll get in trouble.” Frank said. “Edgar stop, we have to get back. Please, let’s go. You don’t even know what it is. It could be anything. Let’s go. What if it’s—”
“It’s that deer.” Edgar said. “That white deer.” He whispered. “That buck that no one could kill and it’s staring you down. I’ll tell everyone you couldn’t. That you had the chance and didn’t do it. Or here, why don’t you just let me?” He said.
He touched the rifle and I pulled away. I put it to my shoulder, forcing his hand away with my elbow. I aimed. I put the crosshairs exactly on the white shape. I didn’t want to shoot it, so I aimed right at it. Edgar was kneeling next to me like a father would teach his son how to shoot. Frank was lingering over us making a lot of noise. I put the crosshairs exactly on it.
“Shoot.” He whispered. “Shoot.” I aimed exactly precisely on the shape.
Then Allan sobbed. It was an enormous sound in the silence. A great inhalation of freezing cold air, unnatural and sharp, catching and rasping somewhere in his throat and building towards a hot bubble of tears from his eyes and nose that never came. But the sound just took in all that silence and it was like nothing you’d hear in the woods in winter and in all that snow, and the rifle fired.
I had seen the shape in the crosshairs then. In that moment, I had recognized it. In the heat of my mind I figured it out and knew what it was. It was her. It was Emily Ulalume Judie. A little girl in winter clothes. Emily Ulalume. And I had seen her in the crosshairs of the rifle. She was smiling, like she always smiled because she was simple. Smiling, but not at me. Not at anything. Just smiling, as if from inside.
But when I lowered the rifle from my cheek, feeling it unstick and feeling the extra cold on my cheek where it had been, I couldn’t see the shape anymore. There was no movement, no white shape above the snow, nothing but the black poplars and the big black oak and the black black black northern sky.
I heard Allan stop crying. He probably felt like I did. Deaf and breathless from the noise of the gun and shaking everywhere inside but stiff on the outside and feeling too much cold on our faces. Edgar stood.
“You missed.” Edgar said. “You missed like everyone else. I saw it run back into the trees when you shot. That old white buck got away again.” He turned and started walking away. We all followed him, but my knees felt like they were melting in my snow pants and Edgar got far ahead of us. He kept laughing in the darkness like a ghost might laugh, to scare us. But we just walked like children walk when they’re going to be punished. That’s the length of a person.
But I know I didn’t shoot her. I know now it’s okay. She may have run off behind the rise in the ground or into the trees like Edgar said. I don’t know. I didn’t see. But the rifle always misses and she was exactly in the sight. The rifle always missed, since that day he fell from the stand. I know it missed. Of course I don’t know, because I didn’t see. And I never went back. But some things are unnatural, like heavy weights that somehow don’t sink in the snow. And I think I saw her once, much later, with her father, in Minneapolis.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Adorning
She drapes the fence flaunting neck and legs in that graceful roundness of muscle. Just as a neurotic would coddle an old, dying habit. It is not an embrace, but a grudging leniency, with the back and ribs showing through, and her head twists backwards and behind the arch of her shape, all arranged by nature and gravity and the right amount of time. I see, but I don’t look closely and I keep the rhythm of my steps, with a purpose to sit and begin the book on the bench in the back of the cemetery. My footsteps, which are muted, or exaggerated, by leaves, reverberate on the headstones near the path and my sound returns to me and I begin to feel that someone follows behind. I find the bench and sit. The book is bent from my pocket and the spine has become a ragged arch where the color chips away into the leaves, showing string and flesh-colored glue. The Old Man and the Sea.
Twice Told Books
8 Pearl St.
Fortune, WI -----
is stamped on the first page. I remember the silly painted sign of the used books store. Someone has already told me how the book ends, but I thought I would read it anyway. She had said I should, even after she told me how it ended. Then she arranged the flowers that I had given her, which she would keep, dried, forever with the others.
The bench is cold in autumn. Marble is colder than concrete. Even when the sun seems to be just behind the clouds like a face is behind make-up. I remember how she is very pretty, though perhaps her eyes are too large for her head, but something in her face makes this okay. She always sees the looks I give her, like when she told me how the story ended.
“Everybody knows how it ends. I can’t believe you didn’t read it in high school.” But by then I was looking at her smile, her laugh, staring back at it, looking it in the face.
“I guess we just read other things.”
“Like what?”
“Nobody really reads anything in high school anyway.”
“We did. We had to. Mr. Aldson was so strict. I did really well in his class, though. Anyway, you’re in my way.” She saw my look. “Don’t get mad, I just have to do this now.”
So I sit on the bench in the back of the cemetery, and she is cleaning under the couch with the couch pushed all the way against the wall and the cushions stacked on the chair in the corner and the dishwasher running in her spotless kitchen. I finish the book and set it beside me on the marble. On Polly Flawson’s grave. In Loving Memory, 18-- to 19--. The dedication on the bench reads the same: In Loving Memory. In cursive. But she must have been Ms. Polly Flawson, because her tombstone rests alone in the back of the graveyard with the little bench beside it, between two cedars. We thought of it as having always been there. It was our bench, just a name and a loving memory, but kept secret for us, and Polly too was keeping the secret for us. She likes it in the graveyard. We walked through it, reading the names and talking about ourselves, until it got too cold, and then we would drive and park the car and kiss. Once we parked the car in the back and I read her Portrait of a Lady. It was my favorite poem. I recited as much as I could, then I had to read the rest from the page.
“I love it! That’s so good. What do you think it means?” And I looked at her eyes before looking back at the page. ...the scene arrange itself, as it will seem to do.
“I don’t know. I think he’s cheating with her, but not really, just in conversation. Like ‘carefully caught regrets,’ like they’re cheating only in mind, but still cheating. But I think he’s not committed, obviously. He doesn’t really try to understand her.” She nodded because she wanted to impress me, to look deep. She saw that I was passionate, saw my look. But she looked dishonest. And every time I read the poem I was impressed. Though I’ve forgotten most of the lines now.
“Oh, and my dad pointed out the opening line to me. The line, or lines I guess, from Marlowe. ‘And besides, the wench is dead.’ So she’s dead. It’s not a real relationship. She’s not a real woman.”
“Yeah. I get it.” Then something true from her, “Does he really love her? Do you think he really loves her?”
I could not have responded. So I said, “Well yeah, I think so. But he loves the cheating more, I think. The unreality, I guess. The exchanged fantasies.”
She nodded again. “Yeah, I think he adorns her—adores her I mean.”
I remember we laughed about that. She was usually so careful to saw what she wanted. But then I thought people can wear each other, to impress the world, or themselves. And people can wear each other out. So it made sense, what she said. She knew exactly what she wanted her grave to look like, exactly what it would say about her. She wants a bench, like Polly, but she hates the prosaic cursive and she doesn’t like marble. She wants a concrete bench and she said I should clean it every week and I think she likes lilies though she claims to hate flowers. I never asked her what tree she wanted next to her. I have an image of her enveloped in the twists of roots, which curve in slow and winding lines with her hair in disarray beneath the soil where gravity will not matter and the dirt rests silent on her face as under her eyes when she swims or when it rains on the blush that still rises just beneath the surface of her cheek and neck. I thought of this as I gazed up at the clouds, just covering the light which rose and fell with their rolling and I think of the sea and forget the old man. I remember watching movies with her. We watched them because we liked the scenery in them. I am not ready to return, but I stand. The Old Man and the Sea looks nice on the little bench, so I leave it and walk slowly, my shoes putting jarring life into the leaves. They shuffle through the cemetery—the leaves—but even in summer never go, like the graves and dates and names that begin to sound like poetry. Poems of the graveyard and of history. Which never was because it always is and never ends. And now someone does follow behind, and I am ready to leave.
There is a man who volunteers to manage the cemetery. He walks through the place, along every path, and once a week he disposes of the dead flowers. That’s his job. It can’t be enough for him, or a family. It’s strange that a man works for his family, but is taken away from them by his work, but he must have his family. Every day he returns, or what is he? Perhaps it is better in the graveyard, where a man can’t leave. Then he learns to live, and not to fish by himself for fish that are too big. Today the grave cleaner will have to dispose of a dead deer, and he will follow me to where she died on the fence. Adorning the fence. I see her again, draping it in a leap arrested by the wrought-iron pyramid prongs. These stand in black and staggered order and precision, half rise half fall in unison around the place where the graves are scattered like leaves along every path. And each leaf, like the deer, finds the fence.
The white on her tail is hidden, but when I approach and lean over the sharp wrought-iron prongs, I see the white blot on her neck. It stretches so the hairs separate and are yellow where the under-fur shows through, and her tongue shoves out through her teeth, as if she would just lick the grass on the other side.
Twice Told Books
8 Pearl St.
Fortune, WI -----
is stamped on the first page. I remember the silly painted sign of the used books store. Someone has already told me how the book ends, but I thought I would read it anyway. She had said I should, even after she told me how it ended. Then she arranged the flowers that I had given her, which she would keep, dried, forever with the others.
The bench is cold in autumn. Marble is colder than concrete. Even when the sun seems to be just behind the clouds like a face is behind make-up. I remember how she is very pretty, though perhaps her eyes are too large for her head, but something in her face makes this okay. She always sees the looks I give her, like when she told me how the story ended.
“Everybody knows how it ends. I can’t believe you didn’t read it in high school.” But by then I was looking at her smile, her laugh, staring back at it, looking it in the face.
“I guess we just read other things.”
“Like what?”
“Nobody really reads anything in high school anyway.”
“We did. We had to. Mr. Aldson was so strict. I did really well in his class, though. Anyway, you’re in my way.” She saw my look. “Don’t get mad, I just have to do this now.”
So I sit on the bench in the back of the cemetery, and she is cleaning under the couch with the couch pushed all the way against the wall and the cushions stacked on the chair in the corner and the dishwasher running in her spotless kitchen. I finish the book and set it beside me on the marble. On Polly Flawson’s grave. In Loving Memory, 18-- to 19--. The dedication on the bench reads the same: In Loving Memory. In cursive. But she must have been Ms. Polly Flawson, because her tombstone rests alone in the back of the graveyard with the little bench beside it, between two cedars. We thought of it as having always been there. It was our bench, just a name and a loving memory, but kept secret for us, and Polly too was keeping the secret for us. She likes it in the graveyard. We walked through it, reading the names and talking about ourselves, until it got too cold, and then we would drive and park the car and kiss. Once we parked the car in the back and I read her Portrait of a Lady. It was my favorite poem. I recited as much as I could, then I had to read the rest from the page.
“I love it! That’s so good. What do you think it means?” And I looked at her eyes before looking back at the page. ...the scene arrange itself, as it will seem to do.
“I don’t know. I think he’s cheating with her, but not really, just in conversation. Like ‘carefully caught regrets,’ like they’re cheating only in mind, but still cheating. But I think he’s not committed, obviously. He doesn’t really try to understand her.” She nodded because she wanted to impress me, to look deep. She saw that I was passionate, saw my look. But she looked dishonest. And every time I read the poem I was impressed. Though I’ve forgotten most of the lines now.
“Oh, and my dad pointed out the opening line to me. The line, or lines I guess, from Marlowe. ‘And besides, the wench is dead.’ So she’s dead. It’s not a real relationship. She’s not a real woman.”
“Yeah. I get it.” Then something true from her, “Does he really love her? Do you think he really loves her?”
I could not have responded. So I said, “Well yeah, I think so. But he loves the cheating more, I think. The unreality, I guess. The exchanged fantasies.”
She nodded again. “Yeah, I think he adorns her—adores her I mean.”
I remember we laughed about that. She was usually so careful to saw what she wanted. But then I thought people can wear each other, to impress the world, or themselves. And people can wear each other out. So it made sense, what she said. She knew exactly what she wanted her grave to look like, exactly what it would say about her. She wants a bench, like Polly, but she hates the prosaic cursive and she doesn’t like marble. She wants a concrete bench and she said I should clean it every week and I think she likes lilies though she claims to hate flowers. I never asked her what tree she wanted next to her. I have an image of her enveloped in the twists of roots, which curve in slow and winding lines with her hair in disarray beneath the soil where gravity will not matter and the dirt rests silent on her face as under her eyes when she swims or when it rains on the blush that still rises just beneath the surface of her cheek and neck. I thought of this as I gazed up at the clouds, just covering the light which rose and fell with their rolling and I think of the sea and forget the old man. I remember watching movies with her. We watched them because we liked the scenery in them. I am not ready to return, but I stand. The Old Man and the Sea looks nice on the little bench, so I leave it and walk slowly, my shoes putting jarring life into the leaves. They shuffle through the cemetery—the leaves—but even in summer never go, like the graves and dates and names that begin to sound like poetry. Poems of the graveyard and of history. Which never was because it always is and never ends. And now someone does follow behind, and I am ready to leave.
There is a man who volunteers to manage the cemetery. He walks through the place, along every path, and once a week he disposes of the dead flowers. That’s his job. It can’t be enough for him, or a family. It’s strange that a man works for his family, but is taken away from them by his work, but he must have his family. Every day he returns, or what is he? Perhaps it is better in the graveyard, where a man can’t leave. Then he learns to live, and not to fish by himself for fish that are too big. Today the grave cleaner will have to dispose of a dead deer, and he will follow me to where she died on the fence. Adorning the fence. I see her again, draping it in a leap arrested by the wrought-iron pyramid prongs. These stand in black and staggered order and precision, half rise half fall in unison around the place where the graves are scattered like leaves along every path. And each leaf, like the deer, finds the fence.
The white on her tail is hidden, but when I approach and lean over the sharp wrought-iron prongs, I see the white blot on her neck. It stretches so the hairs separate and are yellow where the under-fur shows through, and her tongue shoves out through her teeth, as if she would just lick the grass on the other side.
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