| main | ongoing | archive | private |
- We love each other well enough still that there is a melancholy to our correspondence. Unable now to gain an apology from my father, we apologize to each other, though we keep to small regrets. We are sorry for missing birthdays, for forgetting to call, for not getting around to the visit we absolutely must, sometime or the other, plan.
- I remember the shape & size of my body & Lowell's as we sat there in the car, my bird legs & bony knees, Lowell's dark blue jeans, his too-large feet, the forward curve of his shoulders that made his plaid shirt, w/ dark blue & purple bands, fold in just below his ribs. And my father, his body pressed deep into the black seat, his arms thick, his face creased, his wire glasses pressing against his temples.
- It is our physical presence there, our solid weight in that car, that has stayed w/ me, as though it was only then, when the causeway collapsed, that I began to untangle myself from my father & brother. It was as if my own shape had emerged out what was not Lowell & was not my father & was not, because of her absence, Catherine.
- In truth, I can't even talk to Lowell about it now. He has acquired family, friends, & career w/ such swift & pleasant ease that I wonder how he managed to avoid what I have not: the sense that the world cannot be put right, that its spinning will forever be wobbly & uneven.
- See here, Meredith, these photographs protest when I slip them from the folds of Lowell's letters, it is not so difficult after all, is it? - Well, it is. Like my father & my grandfather -- or at least this is how I understand them -- I am saddled w/ the secret compulsion of considering, as one poet put it, the odd morphology of regret, its brittle bone & skin, its peculiar shape.
- We make sense of the world, some philosopher once said, only through its rearrangement, through a constant shift in perspective coupled w/ a slight movement of this or that here & there & then here again. In that manner, in the imperfections such movements reveal, the truth becomes apparent.
- Unable to meet each other on equal terms, they chose not to meet at all but to orbit around each other like two separate planets of entirely different composition.
- Her dress smelled of chlorine bleach, I remember.
- ...cemetery was a rundown place, full of overgrown weeds & an iron fence that sagged in spots as if too many people had climbed over it, though who knows why anyone would.
- ...his black leather shoes worn down so much that I was sure the soles of his feet went straight through to the ground.
- Even though it was November, the air was summer damp & salty, and we had the windows down. The three of us were crowded in the front seat because the back seat was piled high with our clothes...
- He looked at me & frowned. "You're a smart girl, Meredith," he said, as though that were cause for regret.
- ...and a coffee factory you could smell long before you saw it.
- I'm in North Carolina, 5 states away from you, looking out of what was my own childhood's window, facing south across the pond to your Grandfather Reynolds's old alfalfa & barley fields, which are now lying fallow. A nearly full moon & a hundred stars are in the pond tonight, and something is making the water ripple. The stars jump from one spot to the next, and the moon gets folded over & then straightened out again. Sometimes I think there's nothing so important as letting your heart wander across a beautiful view.
- But sometimes(...) he would smile & pull me into his arms. Once he even said, "You're an angel child," whispering it into my ear when he held me, like it was a secret he'd just uncovered. You should have heard how his voice shook with sorrow, though.
- But it was you, dear Meredith, I kept my eyes on as the car rolled back & jerked to a stop before your father turned on the engine & headed off. I've told you a thousand times that there is no child so sweet as you, and I'm sorry for what I saw in your face w/ that last look. I saw the fright that had made your face was white as bleached cotton. That was a child, I told myself, who needed her mother to tell her some story of what a beautiful place this world can be, how there is such a thing as love.
- You were so sleepy by the end that I wouldn't even know if you were still awake when I stood in the doorway & told you that I loved you as much as anyone, as much as the stars & sky & everything else in the universe.
- What I see about this photograph now, something I can't remember ever noticing before, is all the bumps & bruises on your legs. It's not that they're frightful looking; they're typical for any 6-year-old. But looking at them now makes me remember how much tending you needed -- not because you were fragile but because you were not. You didn't seem to have much of a sense for danger, and you bore every injury in virtual silence, like it was something you deserved.
- Well, after the 3 of you drove off down the street, I went to the front door & stepped out onto the porch. The air was sticky, and I felt my nightgown stretch across my body. I could feel it tugging on my breasts & hips & bottom with every breath. I crossed my arms & shivered, but I stood there feeling huge & awkward, like there was no way my lungs could get enough air into my body. I was sure I was going to suffocate. (-) I won't forget my whole life the feeling of being a woman left by her husband & children. In one way that morning seems like years ago, even though it's been less than a week, but in another way all I have to do is shut my eyes for a moment & I'm standing again on the porch, looking at the clothes scattered across the lawn. How is it that this came to be my fate, a woman w/ more mother in her than most who lost her two children & her husband in the time it takes to pack up a car...?
- As one whose own body was wrecked at an early age, your father should understand that substance doesn't reside in the body but somewhere else, somewhere where you can't just peel back a few layers of skin & muscle and take a look. It's harder than that.
- Old farmers like my father can pick up a handful of dirt, let it run through their fingers, and believe they're watching their own souls. Politicians, I guess, hear their own voice, and it sounds to them like a choir of angels. What have I got to compare w/ that? I had the notion of being a wife & mother, of feeling like the smallest of my children's triumphs was a clarion call proclaiming peace & justice in the world. I had the love of a man to make me feel my body & spirit were heavenly blessed.
- My own father is sitting outside out back waiting for the very same explanation. I can see the smoke from his cigarette drifting up to this window, curling itself into circles that float out toward the fields & disappear. He's let me go 3 days w/ little more than a few broken sentences as to why I'm here. I'll kiss him goodnight & tell him we'll talk tomorrow.
- I didn't mind stepping through that water. It was always cold, and the algae wrapped around my toes like friendly little fish.
- ...a body opened up before him. I wondered how it was any person gained such trust that a patient would lie down & allow his body to be treated so. I had also wondered when I was a little girl about these patients' souls. My grandfather had told me that our souls were encased in our bodies like a dove imprisoned in a dungeon, and I imagined my father in the middle of an operation having to reach out w/ a bloody hand to snatch a soul that had suddenly escape & gently place it back inside, behind the bars of ribs, near the patient's heart.
- What I saw instead was my father's exhaustion, the tired smile he wore in the evenings...
- ...Cathy fixing dinner & darting into the living room from time to time w/ stories she'd managed to find in her own day.
- ...or Lowell caught in some fierce expression of impatience, his jaw set tight, his mouth pinched closed, his eyes glaring. It was an expression I recognized from my father's face.
- I was struck not just by how good these photographs were but by the fact that my father had thought to take them.
- ...that some pleasant memory had taken hold of him -- something recent, like the last time he had held one of Lowell's children in his arms & watched the child laugh, or the time I arrived for the weekend bearing 5 pounds of fresh strawberries I'd bought on the way at a roadside stand & my father and I had sat on the porch for nearly an hour slicing off the stems, laughing at the juice running down our arms, w/ bees hovering around us so that we constantly had to fan them away. The sweet scent filled us both w/ an unexpected happiness, which somehow consumed, for a while at least, the wary regard that usually marked our conversations.
- I would look back at these people as we turned the corner, and I would actually pray for an angel to come down & scoop them up, give them a good place to sleep & some food to eat, take their pain away by wrapping them in holy robes. I wanted to believe that my wish was simply a Christian one, but I knew that it was not. I was afraid of their torn, dirty clothes & their smelly bodies & their awful black-toothed grins. I was afraid because when they spoke to me, I could never understand their mumbling, the slurred & somehow foreign speech. And I was afraid of the jerking motions they made at me when I walked past them, motions that were probably just an effort to wave hello but felt to me like secret threats. I prayed for them to be better in every way because I just wanted them to disappear.
- I still do not know how my father understood his obligation, whether his charity was truly a Christian one or, like my summoning of angels, the result of some unacknowledged fear. Did he worry that if he turned away these patients, there would be no others? Or did he feel, as I had been taught to feel in my catechism class, that God's eyes were constantly trained on him, that a giant, invisible hand was raised in the air above his head, forever poised to strike him down & render a verdict on his life?
- Despite all these words, despite the story I am desperate to tell, I am uncomfortable holding & turning my father's life in my hands for inspection as though it were so much wet clay for my shaping. (4)
- Once you have given in to silence, it's sometimes nearly impossible to get yourself to break it...
- I hadn't been thinking about Catherine except in the way you keep something you're supposed to remember in one side of your mind, waiting until you've made room for it up front by clearing out whatever else it was you've been thinking...
- ...and I shot past him & out to the car, my father pronouncing my name so slowly that I was past the porch, out in the sunlight, before he finished
- That the four red lines running from beneath his chin to his collarbone, which Catherine, in some silent rage, had left there w/ her fingernails, had caused such shock in Lowell & me that we could barely look at him until, 2 weeks later, the lines had receded into his neck like footprints disguised by the gradual accumulation of earth & leaves
- he wanted to be an architect when he grew up, but his buildings really weren't very accomplished; the walls of his houses usually tilted, the windows were uneven, everything looked as if it might tumble down any minute
- they were just watching me, Lowell w/ his hands in his pockets, my father w/ his feet turned out to the side the way he had to do to keep himself balanced. they looked as though they'd been watching me for a while, studying me, and I felt embarrassed, as if I'd been caught doing something I knew I wasn't supposed to be doing
- Your father's the type of man, and maybe most are, who will feel a sickness coming over him, a bad cold or some kind of bug, and for a day or two he'll act all brave & mighty, continuing on w/ his work like a true martyr, saying he won't let a cold or a flu bug stop him, no ma'am. Of course, those two days he's reminding you over & over how bad he feels, how much it is he's managing to endure. And then the third day or so, it knocks him flat & he crawls into bed like the smallest child, unable to stand to so much as fetch himself a drink of water. (-) You know what women do, Meredith? If you don't know already, you'll learn. What women do is find the time for being sick in the blank spaces of their lives, in between caring for their husbands & children, in between all their other worries & concerns. And they don't talk about it like men do, either. (...it's) for the same reason most women don't say. We've got a notion of our life's fortune, both good & bad, as something private, as something belonging only to ourselves & our family. It's the hardest thing in the world to step outside that circle & confess to the troubles swarming there like one million angry wasps.
- ...my guess is it's a debt he believes he owes for his father's decision that his son would be a white man, as pure & white as the statues he made -- a decision that would have caught in his mother's throat & would have been reason enough, if she hadn't left already, for the woman to pack up her bags & disappear exactly as your father has done. (-) There's a difference, of course. Your father took his children with him. His own mother left him behind. Maybe he was destined to repeat his mother's act, the way an old smudged line of dirt can reappear on a window each time the sun sets, but he'd learned through his own pain at least half of a lesson. Why he didn't learn the other half -- that leaving is a terrible solution for all concerned -- I don't understand.
- How is it, I wonder, that suffering does all it can to make poets of every one of us, stirring up a kind of speech we never thought we'd utter, like we're all Shakespeare's King Lear standing in the middle of the storm or, for that matter, a man like your grandfather weeping in a statue garden? That may not be how my words read, but it's certainly how I feel, like the sky is falling all around me & all I can do is send out to you this faint message, which in the end is no louder than the beating of my own heart.
- My friends were holding a party for me at the Carolina Coffee Shop, one of those places w/ dark wood booths you'd go to late at night for a secret conversation w/ some boy you though was heaven itself but your parents never liked.
- Well, I hadn't realized until that moment that the reason I was leaving was not only because I wanted to be in New Orleans, which seemed like the best city in the whole world, it was also because I wanted to get as far away as I could from boys like Skinny, who for a while I thought I loved but didn't. I knew I didn't because whenever I was w/ him I felt like there would never be anything extraordinary about the world. The dirt roads & tobacco fields & houses & even the moon & stars only looked like what they were & not like part of some grand design for my life, if that makes sense. (-) What I wanted as much as a different world to see was a different way of seeing it. I wanted the world & everything in it to lean toward me & take me in. That's the feeling most people get from their hometowns, like there's a welcome embrace offered by this or that familiar place, a restaurant or a barber shop or whole neighborhood where they've learned every inch of the terrain, where they don't ever have to look at themselves because they're part of things as much as any hundred-year-old tree. (-) But I didn't feel that way. I felt like I needed a whole different landscape, a different quality of light, other questions to ask myself in the dark at night when I tried to fall asleep. I think that fact goes a long way in explaining how easy it was for me, so young, to (leave).
- ...and I suspect my face will eventually find its own shape again or maybe someone else's
- but as I was driving back home that night I looked in the rearview mirror over & over, trying to grab hold of a face that I just knew would soon be gone, replaced by some other
- well, as I looked down from the rearview mirror my eyes caught a light shining in an old tobacco-curing shed. The boards were all rotten & curled up in spots. The light was coming from a mercury lamp on the farmhouse up the hill. Inside the shed I saw a woman & a man locked in an embrace, their arms stretched out as if they were dancing. I could tell, just from the slope of their shoulders, that they weren't young but old.
- No matter how old anyone is, Meredith, it never gets easy to accept even the slightest amount of tenderness from your own father. It will give you more comfort than you can imagine, but if will never, not in a million years, be easy, not for you & not for him. I don't know why exactly that is. Nobody does, I imagine. But no matter what's said, there's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands & weave into a cloth that feels like love itself. It's another thing, though, to hold up that cloth for inspection, and the best I could manage at that moment was to nod & keep looking at the road.
- you ask a man to speak of love, and it's like his tongue has been cut off
- ...taking in one mouthful after another, and the water is seeping in through my eyes like they're two bathtub drains & under my fingernails until I can feel them peeling right off, which is what they did
- the nurse just stood there like her shoes had been nailed to the floor
- most people don't understand how little the law means when you've just heard Gabriel's trumpet...
- and you'd think such shame as mine wouldn't carry forward one generation to the next, but it does.
- Maybe I could have said something about how respect & love are two different animals. One is the sort you stand back from and admire. The other you pull close & cling to for your own dear life. Mollie Moore Eagen had no end of respect for her husband, for how he trained his eyes so on his heavenly statues & never let any of the world's dirt touch him. But was that the same as love? Was it?
- well, I could see the look on Mollie Moore's face, and I knew she was imagining seeing those 200 trees all lined up in rows & spilling oranges across the ground like a million golden sunsets one after the next. (-) "oh, I'd like to see an orchard like that someday," she said, gazing out across the water like she'd been blinded by her own imagining.
- ...I said my own silent goodbye by changing what happened that day on the boat to my taking the woman's face in my hands & saying, I'll take you there now, throwing Rigaud out into the water like a too-small-to-eat red snapper, and sailing on down to the man's orchard. There we were, Mollie Moore & Murphy Warrington, not some full-fledged nigger & a white man's wife but just one man and one woman strolling among the orange trees like they were placed there only for our benefit, the branches twining each together the way Mollie Moore & I would twine ourselves beneath them.
- ...I found myself crying like a child & thinking I knew finally what I wanted to tell the woman, what final words I should have said: Murphy Warrington knows about waking dreams, Mollie Moore. He knows because you showed him.
- It's like the criminal who's too much of a chicken-ass coward to return to the scene of his crime but is too proud to let it go at that. He wants someone to know how he's forever changed the shape of the whole goddamn universe by the force of his own will...
- ...and that was the best she could come up w/ and still keep her distance from what she figured was a wrong way of seeing me, as the Eagen family's old black domestic or as the sullen-faced, slope-shouldered nigger who just wouldn't quit the farm no matter Abe Lincoln's four-score announcement that every black man & woman had the unalienable right to just get up and leave and make the best of it come what may
- It wasn't the fall that ruined his leg, I told Miss Catherine. It was the infection that got into the bone.
- ...but I have always been one to see the connection between things, how you can draw a line through a life & watch it take on its shape the same way a child can draw w/ even the shakenest hand from one dot to the next
- instead, I got up & poured us both another drink and said I had my own story to tell. I swear I could feel that story rising up to my throat from down in my intestines, where it had been growing & growing all those years.
- I tried to think then of a lie I could tell, but nothing would come. that's the thing about talking the truth, I think, the thing that makes George Washingtons out of the simplest-minded of men: it grabs hold of you by the collar & gives you no mind for lies any longer, like you've been scrubbed clean.
- ...I was beginning to feel strengthened, as if Mollie Moore had been a heavy tumor I'd carried all those years in my chest & was now finally coughing up.
- I don't know why, but Mr. Eagen was one to shake your hand at the dropping of hat. It's something to think that in my lifetime I touched that white man's hand more than all other white men's combined. There's nothing more to that except when you think of how you can live alongside someone for years & years and not so much as brush your shoulder against theirs. __That's how my own father was, like at some point he'd been sealed inside a glass jar you'd bump your face against if you tried to get too close. I was the same way, I guess, though Mr. Eagen made me feel like I wasn't. He just reached past whatever it was surrounding me & grabbed my hand and shook. I liked the man. I did.__)
- I could search deep in my mind & say it was true the light didn't seem to catch her quite right for a white woman, as if she was forever standing in some shadow...
- The woman made me uncomfortable. Her bony limbs would flail about while she talked & talked, like a child who can't decide what is & isn't important so she goes ahead & tells you everything in a rush of words equal in force to the falling walls of Jericho, so you had to put your hands over your ears just to protect yourself.
- well, Mollie starts in on a rush of words, and I sit there like she's a tornado whipping at my sleeves
- I say that we were all happy, and I mean to include Mollie in that list, for she had blossomed like all those harsh white stares were nothing but pure sunlight. She was most cheerful about having herself a child she could talk away the day to, her husband 10 steps out the back door. One way or the other, though, being a nigger, light or dark, has its price, and Mollie seemed always on the verge of suffering, a half-step ahead of some shadow she didn't see so much as feel. (-) There were times when I thought the problem was just Mollie transplanting herself from North to South, like one of those plants that thrives in the wind & cold but can't stand the heat.
- sometimes I think she grew tired of all the airs she had to put on, constantly making sure everyone understood she was no worse a woman than any other, wearing the proper clothes, making proper conversation, holding her knife & fork & shoulders & feet in the proper manner, the whole time proper just another word for white
- It's true that both of us held each other like we were always one moment from jumping away. (...) All that listening kept me feeling as if I was standing just outside my own body & Mollie's. Even to this day I feel sometimes like I watched it all happen as much as I was the one taking that woman to bed, noticing from a distance the way my hands grabbed her back & shoulders, the way she fell into me like a stone into water
- It was just this morning when I stole again, only the third time in a long life. But the thing that matters is what you steal, not how much.
- I swear, if I'd known this was how things would end up, I wouldn't have waited for God to get me like he did, making that goddamn bridge fall away beneath me like it was only air. I'd have done the job myself instead. (-) It's a worse price to pay to lie here waiting like this, so maybe that's the answer to why I didn't go ahead & drown. (-) Now I'm sick & tired of everything, and mostly myself. The clock on this wall ticks & ticks, but the arms don't move. It feels as though there will never be enough light scraped together to make it morning. Maybe I'll be lucky. Maybe there won't be.
- it's hard to imagine being a tiny baby, so small that someone could hold you in one arm & pull you up against her...
- ...a photograph on the wall of the Order of Charity nuns who ran Hotel Dieu, all of them lined up in rows in their habits as if they were a baseball team posing for a group picture.
- Murphy's body wasn't all swollen the way I'd expected it to be but instead looked thinner than ever, just a ripple under the white blanket, a blue hospital gown hanging off one of his bony shoulders
- Catherine told me I should think of my body as a grand & glorious mystery that I'd get to know better year by year. "There'll be pains," she told me, "and it won't be pleasant. Sometimes you'll think you've been singled out for the worst sort of misery." She held my hand the whole time she spoke, touching my fingertips one by one with her own. "It's a misery not one man in the whole world will understand, though they think they do," she said. "That's a lonely feeling but a blessing, too, you'll find out."
- ...we'd had maids who lived in our house & cared for us. I remembered different things about each one: Nancy's braided hair, the spicy food Corriene prepared that my father said wasn't fit for children, Delrita's loud laugh.
- ...I wondered if it would be Saint Joan. I'd seen one before that my grandfather had done, her long hair splayed across her armored shoulders, her head tilted up toward heaven, the blank gaze on her face somehow suggesting both defiance & resignation
- Once we were out on the highway & moving fast, I turned to look back at Lowell through the tiny window behind me. He was clinging to the mattress, afraid that a bump would send him tumbling out. But he was smiling, his hair blowing across his face, his eyes nearly shut from the force of the wind
- That's the way things went the whole week, with Lowell or me or my father feeling fine one moment & then the next moment not wanting to say a word. It was as if we were all just rusted wheels inside a clock, our edges so worn we were never quite grabbing hold of one another long enough to have things work the way they were supposed to
- ...I knew Lowell missed listening to music most of all. At home he'd spent hours & hours curled up on the living room couch, nodding his head while he played one record after the other & read the back of the album covers
- ...the five fingers as thin & crooked as a dead tree's limbs...
- There is nothing so much as walking through the night to make a child feel grown up, like she's been cast out on her own & has to make the best of it
- __This man had a nice face, really, w/ black hair that he must have put oil in because it was shining from the street lights, a circle of light reflecting off his head. He wasn't limping the way my father did when he walked, but there was something that wasn't right about the way he moved, as if his body couldn't get the motion quite right, one of his feet turned in at an odd angle.
- there were people standing on the street all around us, conversations we had to step through to get past
- I don't know what it is about being afraid that makes you see & remember the smallest things, but I think back to that moment & feel as though I can still see today every detail I noticed -- the precise cracks in the sidewalk, the strange angle of that man's feet & the shape of my own in their pointy black loafers, the warped green shutters on every window, one covered in dark green ivy that didn't seem to be growing up from anywhere.
- I started running but tripped the way women always do in movies, allowing the murderer time to catch up
- I thought of Catherine's mother and the letter she sen't me. "Even for an old woman like me, these are days of grace," she'd written, "with the evening din of locusts, the church bells ringing through the dry air of autumn, the fine smell of cracked mud." She'd said how she would always drag her husband back outside each evening to watch the way the setting sun caught the changing colors of the leaves.
- ...and I'd hear him walking from room to room, his worn slippers scraping the floor. Catherine had said that because of his bad leg, his walk sounded like a waltz. (...) Lowell once said my father sounded to him like a sea captain with a wooden leg, and Catherine had laughed.
- Give your father a choice between chaos and contentment, and he'll choose chaos every time. Maybe that explains just about everything.
- ...there are times when saying a name is actually enough to cover everything you feel. I've felt that way beginning these letters, as if all my love is contained in just spelling out your name at the top of the page & everything after that isn't really of consequence, as if these words are meant more for my own peace of mind than for yours, which is probably true.
- You don't know how close you are. You're lucky in that respect. Even through all this, though, I want you to know I still believe being a woman is a gift from God. Of course, it's one of those gifts that requires a momentous effort on your part, like a beautiful Oriental chest that arrives in the mail inside a giant cardboard box with the letters ASSEMBLY REQUIRED printed on it in big red letters.
- ...for the sake of some stray-dog thoughts
- That's not right. It was more than that. What it felt like was a happy end to the world, every inch of this earth going up in flames. Instead of lamenting the loss, every person was glad to have it done, all their cares being swept aside in the heat & glow.
- Evelyn, a giant woman w/ painted crescent-shaped eyebrows...
- ...which he didn't expect to ever heal or the burning sensation in his feet that made him feel, he said, like his lower extremities had been inhabited by the devil. Murphy held his hands up to prove how his nearly drowning had cost him his fingernails, and he showed everyone the green-and-black bruises that were still on his wrists from the needles they'd put through his skin
- ...I felt as if I had, the past 2 weeks, simply stood in the street & watched the moon trace a path across the sky, watching one day become the next so that the passage of time now confused me & I felt as thought I had lived this way forever and my life would never be any different. (148-49)
- It really is cold. Every morning now, there's a layer of frost over the fields so that when the sun rises, the light glides right up to the house like it's being poured out of a pot onto a giant pane of glass. (153-54)
- ...and the muscles along his neck were like cords of rope pulled tight. (160)
- He sat there in hangdog silence, looking down at his cup of coffee. (164)
- ...the whole while never placing any of my past sins before me like a dead rat served up on a plate. It's true we faced each other that week 100 times like two brothers aiming to put all past disagreements aside but knowing the whole time s much of the secret heart beating inside the other's chest that we could, w/ a mind to & half the chance, shoot our hands out right through the other's ribs & squeeze the life out like that heart was nothing more than a wide-eyed fish just hooked. (172)
- Mr. Thomas didn't even set about trying to hide the pitiful sadness that had overtaken him so. (172)
- ...and I'd follow his voice until I found him... (172)
- He let some smoke glide out his mouth into the cold air. "And I don't expect you could live on your own for so much as a week w/o falling apart at the seams. We've seen enough of that already, don't you think?" (174)
- But what the nigger's pride does for him is greater than any white man will ever know. The nigger puts his hand out & smiles and shake's the man's hand and says, I appreciate it mightily, sir. The nigger accepts the offer of charity but all the while hangs on, like he's hanging on to the side of a cliff, to the notion that at any moment, and just as quick as snatching an apple pie off a windowsill, he could grab the white man's neck in his hands, feel the pulsing of blood against his fingertips, and put a quick & easy end to him.
- Truth, my own mother liked to tell me, is the words you speak when you've run out of all others, and patience is what you have when you know you've already gone and waited too long. Love, she'd say, stretching out the sound of the word like it had stuck smoothly on her lips and would not let go, is finding a dark corner where you hide every ounce of your pride and never mean to return.
- ...my brief flashes of Mollie Moore, the way she talked her blue streak w/o so much as a pause to catch her breath.
- ...and I damn near shook my head over the sad goings-on and misunderstandings stemming from this world of unholy flesh & blood, but then Mr. Thomas came forth with a laugh that wasn't exactly that but was something different, like it was the sun trying hard to find something bright to shine down on but coming up on absolutely nothing.__
- Would I have loved her still? Would that body being old and stretched with age still feel the same as it had a lifetime before? Yes, it would, I told myself, and I felt near sick again but this time at my own loss, at what I'd missed.
- What else would this sad life, all this black and white mixed up in the man's head, have come to except for that? It should have been of no account, but that wasn't true. I knew it. I knew it more than anything else I'd known my whole life. I knew it from all my thoughts of Mollie Moore. I knew it from more than 40 years of shaking hands w/ and standing next to one Lowell Henry Eagen, his skin as white as all those statues, though by the end covered w/ splotchy red, strawberry-colored patches on his neck & arms and on his back and under his arms; my skin the color of rain-soaked oak wood and, during the heat & sunshine of summer, mud; my hands and the very soles of my feet the pink-gone-to-brown of a horse's belly. How was it I'd lived going on 70 years and could get at nothing more than that, one color compared to another, everything else an awful mystery you knew was there but had no words for and could not in a million years offer so much as a single word of explanation for but knew nonetheless, knew with every ounce of bone & muscle and dark-colored, dark as a moonless night, skin?
- "I swear I feel sometimes he did such a fine job of storing away all his sorrow that he might as well have packed it in a suitcase & handed it to me. He might as well have said, 'Here, son, take this with you. I've got no use for it.'" (-) "No one's got use for it, Mr. Thomas," I said. "But that don't mean it won't cling to you nonetheless."
- I knew not that it's the very feeling of loss, not what's been lost, that shapes a life. It was true for me, too. I knew it was. It wasn't Mollie Moore I wanted still through all those years, it was getting rid of the feeling that I'd lost her.
- ...this woman that was tending to his pain in all the wrong ways, like she was wrapping dirty bandages across each & every one of Mr. Thomas's wounds...
- but then the wind that had struck me just quit as suddenly as someone shutting off a fan...
- ...I'd feel as cold as if I'd been packed 100 years in ice but fine nevertheless, putting one foot in front of the other, Miss Mollie Moore Eagen finally behind me instead of ahead, feeling hungry & beaten up but looking down at my feet & reminding myself that they were carrying me forward at last.
- ...I didn't see so much as feel the snow begin, pinpricks of ice on my lips & cheeks and eyelids, a quick, surprising chill in my hand when I ran my fingers through my hair
- I had spent more time in the last 2 weeks in Lowell's presence than I could ever remember spending before, but he'd remained as dim to me as a shadow at sunset, his confident swagger among those on Magazine Street somehow unreal & insubstantial. At night, when he locked the door to his room, when he refused to respond to my knocking, I was desperate to know exactly what he was doing, simply to sit there w/ him & share his company.
- How had I not come to now my brother, my twin, any better? I could, if I wanted, call to mind the smallest detail about him: his thick fingers and wide palms, which were, even when he was boy, so much like my father's, so different from my own, or the way his left eye twitched ever so slightly when he wanted to suggest a bemused detachment from whatever was going on. But beyond the sight of him, his presence, what did I know? (-) I thought of how once, when we were carving jack-o-lanterns for Halloween, I'd shown him what I had done. My pumpkin was carved with one eye slightly smaller than the other, the mouth curved up in a thin, almost imperceptible smile. "It's you," I said, and even as he shook his head to deny any resemblance, he gave me that very look.
- ...the snow rising up above the green-stained hem of Saint Francis's robe until he seemed to be walking on top of a cloud, which is where I thought all the saints lived, their robes always bathed in streaks of sunlight & damp with a fine mist.
- My troubles, I thought, were just my father's spilling over to me, like the fancy fountain my grandfather had once made, one bowl standing above another, and that one above another, each wider than the one above to catch the overflowing water
- ...the wind blew so hard against my face that I felt as if I couldn't breathe
- ...his wife had killed herself some years before. (...) what happened to Jack's wife made me afraid of him, as if the pain he'd suffered had somehow left him dangerous, wholly unpredictable & mysterious... (196)
- ...but I'd been seeing in my head again that picture of Lowell and me standing there in that flooded street, looking down at ourselves like our feet had been replaced by the rush of water. What had been the exquisite pleasure there? What was it that made me feel again, just by thinking of it, the warm sun on our heads and necks and shoulders after hours & hours of rain, the cool water on our feet, Lowell's laughter, my own? (-) I missed Lowell, I knew that. I wanted him with me. I wanted at least to know where he was, what he was doing.
- "lies as tall as the Empire Building are certain to fall"
- ...the snow got a little heavier and I could hear the sound of it crunching under the car tires. Besides the noise from the tires and the car's engine, the world had gone quiet & I could her each one of Murphy's raspy breaths, as if the simple act of breathing were difficult for him.
- "You'd be much better off paying attention in this world to what you've got than what you've lost." (-) "Okay," I said, but it seemed to me that if I set about making a list, the things I had wouldn't fill a single page while the things I'd lost would fill a hundred.
- The snow let up, and I looked out the window. I was amazed at how beautiful everything could be. (...) the snow sifting through the needles whenever the wind picked up, the thin branches up top sagging & spilling the snow. (...) He slowed the car down & turned his head from side to side, looking at the rundown houses, the black-tar shingle roofs and tiny lawns, everything turned white from the snow. Sharp St seemed cleaner and brighter than it ever had seemed before...
- All of a sudden Murphy seemed impossibly old to me. None of the children playing in the street would even know who he was. They wouldn't remember my grandfather or my father...
- He said she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. "Like you," my grandfather once said, "your mother was all skin and bones, with a heart and soul containing nothing but a million best wishes for the world."
- I felt as if I were waiting for the sight of something just like she'd seen on the highway, that old couple dancing in the shed somehow telling her that someday her life would be all right. I didn't know what that sight would be for me, but I believed one day it would come. I figured it might be something as simple as what Catherine had described at the start of her first letter, the reflection of 100 stars & the moon in a tiny pond, the stars jumping from one spot to the next, the moon like a gold stone in the center. Just that would be enough to tell me what I wanted to know -- that there was indeed a heaven above me & all my thoughts and feelings, like each sparrow in the air, had been accounted for somehow, each moment of love & of missing my mother and now of missing Catherine would become like those 100 stars, maybe more, so many that they'd cast a beautiful light down across the world.
- "Years ago, Miss Meredith," he told me, "I used to wonder if ever there would be time when I felt all grown up. You understand?" (-) "Yes," I said. (-) "I'm casting a net here," he said, "but my guess is you thought maybe this would be the time for you, like you'd be exchanged one set of clothes for another or found yourself living in what felt like a different skin." (-) "I don't know," I said, though I wondered if this was what I had thought, that the girl who began to read would be gone by the time the reading was done, replaced by someone else who didn't feel the same way anymore about even the slightest thing. (-) "Well, it never does happen," Murphy said, "and I swear it's the damnedest thing. Look at me, so old & shriveled. But if you cut through any part of me, I bet you'd see all the layers, each & every one, just like the oldest tree with the young one still wrapped inside."
- I kept looking straight at Murphy, though, noticing how how his eyes seemed to be floating behind his glasses.
- ...and I thought of another thing Catherine had written, about the story her father had told, how he'd poured the gasoline over those anthills & left the brown circles he'd then claimed had been left by the moon. (-) Catherine's mother had believed him. She'd wanted it to be true. She'd wanted that sight of those brown circles in the green grass to be that one true moment for her, that one moment when the world was stretched out before her in all its great mystery. I wondered if Catherine's father had any idea what he'd ruined.
- Maybe now I was the dangerous child Murphy had claimed me to be, finding joy in my sad life the way you pluck certain feathers off some rare bird to prevent its flying off, spoiling a certain measure of its beauty so that you can continue to observe what remains.
- The church was a Catholic one standing on a corner at the end of the town's main street, which was lined w/ flat-roofed shops and tiny restaurants, an A&P and a car dealership that had a sagging rope of dusty plastic banners stretched out across the clamshell parking lot.
- Except for us, the cemetery was empty. Although it was practically in ruins, there were fresh flowers & other kinds of decorations near many of the graves: a couple of Bibles, a baseball mitt, a rusted can filled w/ nails, even a navy blue shirt propped up against a stone, folded so that you could see the name Andrew stitched into the pocket.
- ...putting my hand on his back, feeling even through his coat the bony ridge of his spine. "Are you okay?" I kept saying.
- ...until the man's foot his his stomach, the black boot disappearing into Murphy's black coat like they'd become the same thing.
- Then the man kicked Murphy again, this time in the back, and again Murphy groaned, a hollow sound like a rush of wind in a rotted tree.
- Somewhere in Louisiana, in some now-abandoned, over-grown Negro cemetery choked w/ weeds & crumbling stone, Murphy's body must have been laid in the ground, buried by the good graces of some Catholic parish. I do believe that.
- I understand better now the distance that lay between Murphy & me, the distance between black and white, but I felt then that I'd had a chance at something with Murphy, some sort of redemption, though I would not have known to call it that.
- I will go back, then, and tell the rest of the story, no matter my reluctance, no matter my desire to be done with it, to think only of the day when I can put my hands on the tiny life swelling within me & believe that it will surely be enough, that there is some sort of certainty in this world, a touch that will always be gentle, one that will always speak of love.
- Now, since my father has died, I'll move to Mandeville, to my grandfather's house. It will be nice, no matter my discomfort, to be near Lowell & his family. (-) More than that, though, I can't help feeling that there's something there for me, something of that house that will help make me whole. I'll tend to my grandfather's garden, plant the roses I've always wanted, sleep in the bed at the back of house so I can look out at night & see my grandfather's statues lit by the moonlight. (-) It's a slight & silly notion maybe, as silly as those miniature statues that I've lined up in the kitchen window, but I tell myself that if I keep tracing a line back through my life, I'll come to a point where there's a sudden, surprising moment of joy, some revelation that takes all my regret & washes it clean, a hallowed light as if from heaven telling me once again to go in peace, or maybe just some subtle sound I recognize & call my own, like the wind through branches or fallen leaves, or even the silence of an early snow. Something. Anything.
sep 6 2020 ∞
sep 6 2020 +
sep 6 2020 +