Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Okay, so it's been a while. Instead of talking at you, I'll give you a story. I think it's the best one I've ever written, which isn't saying a whole lot.
Archaeology
She lived two houses down. There was a baker in between, his shop in the front, his house in the back. He used to give me extra cookies for my dog, and he baked my mother’s wedding cake, and my sister’s.
I never knew her husband, he was long gone since I could remember. We never saw her son, he lived over in Mississippi someplace, no ne ever asked after him. I knew that our pond had been dragged once, by the sheriffs, for her husband’s body.
When we drove past her house, I would watch my mother’s eyes slide off the road and settle on it. I think she wanted to see her, out on her porch, pulling weeds in her yard, but we never did. I think she wanted some signs, some clues, to confirm whatever she thought had happened. My mother thought she would make a good detective.
I watched my mother’s eyes for years before I asked her why, before I pressed for details, wanting to assemble things for myself. In the meantime I sometimes dragged our pond, too, with a net I found rusting in our barn. What came up were handfuls of tadpoles, thin-shelled crawfish, thick black beetles. Rotting leaves.
We never talked to the people on our street. We had been zoned commercial, we watched as they moved or died and their houses were taken over by accountants and machine shops. We never met these people, either, and I think it was my mother’s idea, like most things. She had grown up in this town, left and come back with three children and no husband. She didn’t like to meet people she remembered. She had been wild and pretty before, and she wasn’t so much anymore.
Years later, in a sudden fit, my mother made me walk over to that house, to the new family that had moved in. Her house. I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to knock on that door, walk in and smell her smell still lingering in the walls, see the marks on the carpet where her furniture had sat for years, see any stains in the carpet or the tile of the kitchen that might be all that was left of her husband.
I cried. I said, “No, you go, I’m just a kid,” but my mother didn’t listen. She was sending me as a scout for her, to investigate that house and these new people. She made me go, and I wonder if the lady who answered the door noticed my swollen red face, the catch in my voice from crying so hard.
They turned out to be bad, anyway. Their daughter taught my brother to light matches, they had to call the police all the time to settle family arguments. I never had to go over there again.
The sheriffs had combed through our woods, dragged the bottom of our shallow pond. They need not have bothered, it dries up in the winter. They searched our barn, which even then had not held horses for years, only a tractor that was once red, then faded to pink. They had looked for him all over the place before they put up a headstone in the cemetery down the street. There was no date of death, just the year he stopped coming home. There is nothing under that stone.
I learned to crawl through barbed wire fences without cutting myself. You have to find a weak point, a place where the wires have gone slack. Hod it between your fingers, between the barbs. Suck in your breath and swing your leg high, your body low, and before you know it, you’re through. Don’t trust the places where the wire is down entirely. Put your foot wrong and your whole leg will sink through, you’ll cut yourself into ribbons, long curling slices of yourself all over the place. I have the scars of experience, because I never would walk around to the end of the fence. I had to go through.
Behind our house was a gravel road, barely big enough for two children walking side by side, but it still had a name, Eighth Place. Deep tracks cut into the woods off of the road, and I had a catalogue of the things that swam into view along these tracks, the deep ruts of four wheelers and dirt bikes, the things you could find if you looked hard enough through the thick green.
First there was the fir tree, which was perfect in winter, glazed with ice. Then the huge truck tire half-covered by dirt and weeds, almost a part of the ground again. And then there were the foundations.
I cannot imagine that those were once houses, with whole families held inside. The cement squares were only as big as my bedroom, and the houses that used to be on top, “Fire,” my mother told me when I asked. There were little things scattered around, and then I thought they must have been part of those houses, a half-rotted mattress showing it’s rusted springs, part of a toilet, a tricycle, a broken pot. But these must have been other people’s trash.
Farther along is a nice, flat place, the creek that feeds and empties the pond running down in the bottom of the gentle slope. There are huge rocks back there, and the ropes my brother and I used to swing around on still tied to the stunted trees, now swollen with years of rain. The hum of the back of the grocery store drowns out the sound of the mosquitos. Cross the creek, and there is her back fence.
She used to hang her clothes out on the line, old lady clothes, polyester pants in pastel colors with elastic waists, printed shirts with ties at the neck. Aprons.
She had the only backyard with kudzu covering it that I have ever seen. It was a heavy green curtain in the summer, a tangle of brittle brown wire in winter. It strangled the grass underneath it. My mother used to lift that curtain and hide under it, when she was still wild but not yet pretty.
I thought that maybe he was the reason that kudzu was so green, her husband, lying under there and feeding it, lying with the snakes that cooled under there in hot weather. Maybe the sheriffs were afraid to look under there, afraid to hear a sharp rattle, feel fangs in their ankles.
“He beat her, so she killed him one night. Then she called up her son, and he came and got the body, and took him and dumped him somewhere.” My mother’s eyes cut over to that house again; she only wanted to talk when she was driving. I want to know where she thinks the son put his father, if he’s somewhere around those charred foundations, the rotting mattress. I think about maybe finding bones out there one day, breaking through the dirt like that tire, bones that have been there so long they seem like they belong. For a while after that, I looked down all the time I was walking, even when I go swimming I look under the surface of the brown lake water, waiting to see part of him, waiting to find him.
When I was eleven she called our house. She had gotten older without our noticing, and she was scared now to be alone, scared of falling without help nearby, breaking something that wouldn’t heal. She didn’t want to leave her house. She wanted me to come and live with her.
My mother told me this and watched my face and laughed. “I already told her that I needed you here. You’re too young anyway, to take care of her all by yourself. She really wanted your sister, but since she’s at college, she asked if she could have you.” My mother stopped smiling and rubbed her forehead. “I suppose she’ll have to go to a nursing home, but she’s afraid. Someone should call her son,” she said, knowing that she wouldn’t be the one to do it.
They were all getting old; the baker would retire once my sister’s cake was done, my grandmother now paid me to get her mail from the box for her. I lay in bed that night and thought about it, counting the triangles in the patterns of glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. She would have to go to a nursing home, and leave her house, and maybe her husband’s bones with it.
A For Sale sign came up in her yard, and then that first bad family moved in and out again. There were others, a whole series of loud crowds of relatives fighting in their yard, making me scared to walk through my woods at night. I thought I could smell beery breath near me, I heard footsteps in the leaves that nearly matched my own, but not quite. Then the chiropractors who moved into the bakery took that house, too, and the police stopped coming, and there are no more cars rusting in the front yard.
Our pond still dries up in the winter. Sometimes, in the muck that’s left behind, I’ll see something long and white and glinting, but it’s only a piece of bleached and twisted wood.
Since I’ve started looking for him, it’s hard to stop.
Archaeology
She lived two houses down. There was a baker in between, his shop in the front, his house in the back. He used to give me extra cookies for my dog, and he baked my mother’s wedding cake, and my sister’s.
I never knew her husband, he was long gone since I could remember. We never saw her son, he lived over in Mississippi someplace, no ne ever asked after him. I knew that our pond had been dragged once, by the sheriffs, for her husband’s body.
When we drove past her house, I would watch my mother’s eyes slide off the road and settle on it. I think she wanted to see her, out on her porch, pulling weeds in her yard, but we never did. I think she wanted some signs, some clues, to confirm whatever she thought had happened. My mother thought she would make a good detective.
I watched my mother’s eyes for years before I asked her why, before I pressed for details, wanting to assemble things for myself. In the meantime I sometimes dragged our pond, too, with a net I found rusting in our barn. What came up were handfuls of tadpoles, thin-shelled crawfish, thick black beetles. Rotting leaves.
We never talked to the people on our street. We had been zoned commercial, we watched as they moved or died and their houses were taken over by accountants and machine shops. We never met these people, either, and I think it was my mother’s idea, like most things. She had grown up in this town, left and come back with three children and no husband. She didn’t like to meet people she remembered. She had been wild and pretty before, and she wasn’t so much anymore.
Years later, in a sudden fit, my mother made me walk over to that house, to the new family that had moved in. Her house. I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to knock on that door, walk in and smell her smell still lingering in the walls, see the marks on the carpet where her furniture had sat for years, see any stains in the carpet or the tile of the kitchen that might be all that was left of her husband.
I cried. I said, “No, you go, I’m just a kid,” but my mother didn’t listen. She was sending me as a scout for her, to investigate that house and these new people. She made me go, and I wonder if the lady who answered the door noticed my swollen red face, the catch in my voice from crying so hard.
They turned out to be bad, anyway. Their daughter taught my brother to light matches, they had to call the police all the time to settle family arguments. I never had to go over there again.
The sheriffs had combed through our woods, dragged the bottom of our shallow pond. They need not have bothered, it dries up in the winter. They searched our barn, which even then had not held horses for years, only a tractor that was once red, then faded to pink. They had looked for him all over the place before they put up a headstone in the cemetery down the street. There was no date of death, just the year he stopped coming home. There is nothing under that stone.
I learned to crawl through barbed wire fences without cutting myself. You have to find a weak point, a place where the wires have gone slack. Hod it between your fingers, between the barbs. Suck in your breath and swing your leg high, your body low, and before you know it, you’re through. Don’t trust the places where the wire is down entirely. Put your foot wrong and your whole leg will sink through, you’ll cut yourself into ribbons, long curling slices of yourself all over the place. I have the scars of experience, because I never would walk around to the end of the fence. I had to go through.
Behind our house was a gravel road, barely big enough for two children walking side by side, but it still had a name, Eighth Place. Deep tracks cut into the woods off of the road, and I had a catalogue of the things that swam into view along these tracks, the deep ruts of four wheelers and dirt bikes, the things you could find if you looked hard enough through the thick green.
First there was the fir tree, which was perfect in winter, glazed with ice. Then the huge truck tire half-covered by dirt and weeds, almost a part of the ground again. And then there were the foundations.
I cannot imagine that those were once houses, with whole families held inside. The cement squares were only as big as my bedroom, and the houses that used to be on top, “Fire,” my mother told me when I asked. There were little things scattered around, and then I thought they must have been part of those houses, a half-rotted mattress showing it’s rusted springs, part of a toilet, a tricycle, a broken pot. But these must have been other people’s trash.
Farther along is a nice, flat place, the creek that feeds and empties the pond running down in the bottom of the gentle slope. There are huge rocks back there, and the ropes my brother and I used to swing around on still tied to the stunted trees, now swollen with years of rain. The hum of the back of the grocery store drowns out the sound of the mosquitos. Cross the creek, and there is her back fence.
She used to hang her clothes out on the line, old lady clothes, polyester pants in pastel colors with elastic waists, printed shirts with ties at the neck. Aprons.
She had the only backyard with kudzu covering it that I have ever seen. It was a heavy green curtain in the summer, a tangle of brittle brown wire in winter. It strangled the grass underneath it. My mother used to lift that curtain and hide under it, when she was still wild but not yet pretty.
I thought that maybe he was the reason that kudzu was so green, her husband, lying under there and feeding it, lying with the snakes that cooled under there in hot weather. Maybe the sheriffs were afraid to look under there, afraid to hear a sharp rattle, feel fangs in their ankles.
“He beat her, so she killed him one night. Then she called up her son, and he came and got the body, and took him and dumped him somewhere.” My mother’s eyes cut over to that house again; she only wanted to talk when she was driving. I want to know where she thinks the son put his father, if he’s somewhere around those charred foundations, the rotting mattress. I think about maybe finding bones out there one day, breaking through the dirt like that tire, bones that have been there so long they seem like they belong. For a while after that, I looked down all the time I was walking, even when I go swimming I look under the surface of the brown lake water, waiting to see part of him, waiting to find him.
When I was eleven she called our house. She had gotten older without our noticing, and she was scared now to be alone, scared of falling without help nearby, breaking something that wouldn’t heal. She didn’t want to leave her house. She wanted me to come and live with her.
My mother told me this and watched my face and laughed. “I already told her that I needed you here. You’re too young anyway, to take care of her all by yourself. She really wanted your sister, but since she’s at college, she asked if she could have you.” My mother stopped smiling and rubbed her forehead. “I suppose she’ll have to go to a nursing home, but she’s afraid. Someone should call her son,” she said, knowing that she wouldn’t be the one to do it.
They were all getting old; the baker would retire once my sister’s cake was done, my grandmother now paid me to get her mail from the box for her. I lay in bed that night and thought about it, counting the triangles in the patterns of glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. She would have to go to a nursing home, and leave her house, and maybe her husband’s bones with it.
A For Sale sign came up in her yard, and then that first bad family moved in and out again. There were others, a whole series of loud crowds of relatives fighting in their yard, making me scared to walk through my woods at night. I thought I could smell beery breath near me, I heard footsteps in the leaves that nearly matched my own, but not quite. Then the chiropractors who moved into the bakery took that house, too, and the police stopped coming, and there are no more cars rusting in the front yard.
Our pond still dries up in the winter. Sometimes, in the muck that’s left behind, I’ll see something long and white and glinting, but it’s only a piece of bleached and twisted wood.
Since I’ve started looking for him, it’s hard to stop.
// posted by Amethyst Vineyard @ 5:42 AM 
