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Lois Schlegel
has published fiction in Margin Magical Realism and The West Wind Review. Her story, “The Gate” was nominated for a
Push Cart Prize in 2004. She holds an
MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University LA and teaches at Southern
Oregon University’s Extended Campus Program.
Waiting Like Wheat
Lois Schlegel
Katherine
George saved his plans for forty
years. I found them in the closet when I
packed boxes for the Salvation Army - yellowed graph paper, tightly rolled and
tied with a brown shoelace.
He was always saving things. I remember him a month or two after he
retired, standing over the kitchen trash unlacing his worn out oxfords,
stuffing the laces in his pocket and then dumping the shoes in with the evening
paper and the tins we’d opened for supper.
I watched him draw out the design for the
small waterfall, and Koi pond, the first summer in
our own place. Sitting at the kitchen
table after dinner, George smoked a cigar and I kicked off my shoes, propping
my feet up on the extra chair. I was
pregnant with Bobby and he back-stroked inside me
whenever I grew still. I reached for
George’s hand, pulling it away from the drawing to cup my stomach. Bobby swam, undulating my flesh the way a fish disturbs quiet
water.
George smiled, but his eyes stayed
sad. “It’s a lively one,” he said moving
his hand back to the drawing.
“Will our pond be like the ones you
saw?” I asked,
looking at the paper spread across the yellow Formica.
“Close as we can get,” he said.
George didn’t like to talk about his time in
the Pacific. Two years he was gone. I waited. Seems like I’ve
spent my whole life waiting.
“Waiting like the wheat.”
Mamma use to say.
I never knew what she meant until I’d been married a few years, ‘til
George went away and came back changed, ‘til the baby was born, ‘til my life
shrunk down small and circular. Now it
seems like I’ve spent my whole life waiting, surrounded by wheat fields, flat,
dusty wheat spreading out around our small town like an ocean surrounds an
island.
And its waiting
too. Waiting for the rain, waiting to shoot towards the sky with growth and
love ripping through its stalks, waiting to ripen, to turn golden, to stand
tall and full in the summer heat. Waiting to die. To
be cut down when it’s perfect, chopped and threshed and then stored in the
dark.
Once, when George felt like talking, he
told me the sea is like wheat, the way it surrounds you, making you feel small
and isolated.
That didn’t seem right to me though.
Water is full of possibility; what the
waves could bring you, where you could swim to or sail to, or the creatures you
might see if you dove down deep. Here
nothing’s like that, just the same even rows growing and being cut down and
growing again in a monotonous cycle.
The morning after George drew plans for
the pond, he got out early to dig. I
watched him from the kitchen window, blonde hair lit up by the sun, his face
and bare chest flushed, red plaid shirt hanging limp on a fence post.
By lunch the hole was nearly done. The dug-out dirt he piled on one side shaping
it into a small hill.
“The waterfall,” he said when I brought
out a BLT and soup on a tray. He pointed to the pile of rock and clods.
That evening, George and I sat on the edge
of the hole, our feet dangling into the jagged opening. We leaned into each
other and he patted my leg, then left his hand there,
warm and heavy and smelling of earth.
“Wait ‘til you hear the sound and see the
colors,” he said. “That’s the best -
when you listen to the water falling over the rocks and see those fish flashing
around, so bright…” His voice drifted
off.
“I can’t wait,” I said, stroking his dirty
fingers.
“Let’s go inside,” George said, jumping to
his feet, grabbing my arm, pulling me up with him.
As he lifted me, I felt a pop, and a briny trickle of water begin on the inside of my
thigh. It ran down my leg under my skirt,
warm and slow, sliding like a tear does down your cheek.
A breeze from the fields outside our fence
moved the willow tree and cooled the wetness between my legs. George’s shirt fluttered. Then, after a moment’s stillness, water
poured out of me in a hot wave of blood and salt, cutting rivulets down the
side of the hole at my feet. I wanted to look down, to see the first water in
our pond. My water.
But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that
shirt, red and sharp against the dullness all around it.
George was dead six months before I looked
at his drawings of the pond again. I
spread them out on the bed using his worn moccasin slippers, one on each side,
to hold back the curling paper.
It was an elegant design, drawn to scale
with his signature in the corner like an artist, something he’d never done on any of
the drawings he did sitting at his desk year after year at Howard and Billings
Engineering.
It had two pools, with a cascade in
between and a waterfall above. A shallow
shelf ran along the edges of the larger pool.
“For plants,” George said when he showed me the plans. “The fish need them to hide in.”
I put his slippers back in the closet,
rolled up the brittle paper and went out back and stomped down the weeds grown
up around the edges of the hole. In the bottom, mud-pie tins and rusted
wheel-less toy cars lay half hidden under dirt.
Bobby and the neighbor kids use to play here, wearing down the pile and
softening the jagged sides with their bottoms.
Somehow the pond never got finished. It was
still just a hole and a pile of dirt. George did dig it back out a few times
and bought a pump when they auctioned Ray Fielder’s farm. But it’s been stored in the garage dripping
oil on the floor ever since.
The spring Bobby left, the house was
quiet, not empty. He was gone, but his low draft number was a presence in every
room. When we came back from driving
Bobby to the bus station, George went outside to mow the back yard, knocking
down the tall rain-fed grass.
I washed dishes, looking out the window
but not really seeing anything, my hands in soapy water.
Suddenly, George cut the engine. The
silence woke me. I watched him walk to the edge of the pond and stand there.
Still. Head bent, shoulders curved forward.
After a long time, he shook himself, shook off whatever held him there,
started the engine and finished cutting the grass.
George was different when he came home
from
There was before he went and after, simple
as that. I still loved him, but it was
like loving another man. Not like loving
the George I grew up with, the one who talked, a lot, about our future, our
children, the way things would be, the way he would make them.
He wasn’t the George who woke me up in the
middle of the night, woke me up and turned on the light just to look into my
eyes. “Still blue as the ocean,” he’d
say and kiss my eyelids.
He wasn’t that George. He was a quieter, darker George, who woke in
the middle of the night and left me sleeping, my eyes closed tight, to go
outside on the porch and smoke until the sky turned pink at its edges and Matt
Parker’s rooster crowed up the sun.
A year since he passed. Spring is greening up the edges of the road
with new grass. Bobby’s come to help me
clear out the garage. He wants some of
his Dad’s tools and will haul the rest out to the driveway for a tag sale.
We work well together; me pointing, him
lifting, him brushing down the high cobwebs from the walls with a push broom,
and me sweeping the dirt and dead moths into piles.
“What about this Ma?” Bobby says looking at the pump, crated in an
apple box and shoved into a corner.
“I guess it needs to go,” I say.
Bobby squats to lift the box, hoists it to
his shoulder and walks toward the driveway.
A sticky, dust covered oil stain coats the floor where the pump sat.
Cobwebs are thick on the walls. I move
in to sweep, brushing the webs onto my broom, collecting them cotton-candy-like
on its bristles. As I clear them away, I
see a cigar box wedged between the now exposed wall-studs.
I pick it up. It’s thick with dust too and spiders have
woven nests along the opening, sealing it shut with gauzy fibers. I wipe it with the tail of my blouse, then open it. Inside,
layers of tissue paper are on top. Under the layers, pictures, a letter, a
smooth stone. I pick up the first
photo. There, in grainy black and white,
is our pond, the same pools and waterfall in George’s drawing, but alive. Beside the water, a young woman stands
shielding her face from the sun, her kimono sleeve hiding part of her
face.
“What yuh got there Ma?”
Bobby says coming up behind me.
“Just some old receipts and things,” I
say, tucking the box under my arm and heading for the kitchen door. “You ‘bout ready for some lunch?”
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
“Okay then, I’ll fix us a bite. You know Bobby, I think I changed my mind on
that pump, bring it on back in will you?”
Later when Bobby had packed his pick up
and given me a sweaty hug, I unfolded the letter. It was written in a young
hand, on translucent paper that felt as fragile and dry as moth-wing.
Dear Father,
Since my twelve
year come mother said I write to thank you.
Thank you American
dollars you send. Thank
you books.
I read Moby
Dick. It long. Why chase whale? You come here and tell me.
Respectfully,
Samuel G. Miyamoto
After I found the box, I read about Koi in the Encyclopedia Britannica, the one we bought right
after Bobby was born, “It’s a near guarantee he’ll go to university…” the
salesmen said. “You do want him
educated?” George and I looked at each
other. The look we passed was full. Full of what we still believed, that we could
create our child’s future, guide him, make him, that
we were shaping clay.
I pulled the heavy J and K volume from
the shelf. The top was dusty, gold edges
faded from the steady sun shining on it through the south window.
Seems they grow only as big as the size of
the pond where they live, their bodies somehow knowing the extent of their
captivity. So a fish designed by nature
to be as long as a man’s arm may be stunted into a half-sized version.
I felt the crisp edges of the pages
between my fingers. The words were black and orderly across them, lining up in
a way that made sense, a march of nouns and verbs and punctuation that told me
something, just as yesterday, I thought my life had. Now, the letters blurred and danced. Incomprehensible.
I tore the first page out before I knew
what I was doing. It came out easily,
simply, the paper frail, barely there at all.
I tore out another page, another, until a pile of words lay at my feet,
a pile of truth, no longer mine.
I started sleeping on George’s side of the
bed. The mattress still holds the shape
of his body and when I press my face into it I can smell him, even through the
clean sheet, a sweet odor; part sweat, part after shave, part love making, part
turning away, part misunderstanding, part death. I breathe him in, lay in his remnants, in
the curve and odor of a man I thought I knew.
The pond came to me the first night
breathing in George, that first night when I lay down and cried into his smell.
In that place between, where sleep and knowing come together in a strange
swirl, I cried, then dreamed, then woke and cried some more.
The water is soft and warm in my dream. I
reach deep down into the pond, my whole arm wet with the smell. Or is it
George’s smell? Koi-fish
brush against my wrist, water plants float on the surface pulsing with the
thrash of the waterfall.
My fingers brush the bottom; cool muck,
remnants of dead fish and wasted food, winter die-off. I slip through to the hard edge below, grab
it and with one quick motion turn the pool inside out, the way I turned a
thousand of George’s shirts damp from the wash.
I snap the pond free of wrinkles.
I smooth it. Hang it. Around me
fish swim, water shimmers with the sun slanting through and the sounds of my
world are far away, only vibration now, only a slight ripple.
I’ve slept late, past the dawn, past the
summer sun slanting in my window from the eastern horizon, past the sound of
Parker’s combine rumbling through the fields cutting the spring wheat.
I’ve heard that sound a hundred mornings
before, the low hum of the engine, metal barking. We would rise to find nothing but felled
stalks and blowing chaff, the distant mountains more visible against the
morning sky and everything open and exposed and vulnerable, tender, a new
wound.
When George was in high school and again
during his summers home from college, he cut wheat
too. All the able bodied men here have
ridden a combine at least once or twice in their lives, helping to bring in the
harvest for a relative or a neighbor.
George loved it though, said he would follow his father and farm for a
living if Pop wasn’t so set on him going to college.
“You’ll be the first to get educated, but
not the last in this here family,” Pop always said, slapping his son on the
back.
I’m glad he didn’t live to see Bobby
grown, working as a hand and drinking away most week ends.
Some days when George was harvesting, I’d
pack supper and ride my bicycle to meet him where the long mown rows met the
county road. He’d pull me up to his high
seat on the tractor and we’d kiss hello under the stained canvas umbrella
shading him from the crackling July heat.
His lips were salty, dry, tasting like the wind and he smelled of diesel
and the wide way of things out in the fields.
I sat on the tool box as we drove away
from the road, the metal jangling beneath me.
I’d turn, half way down the row and watch the plant stalks falling from
the thresher behind us. We rumbled farther and farther away from the bike I
left leaning against a telephone pole, its slender wheels grew smaller and
smaller in the growing distance, until they were nearly invisible.
We had a gully we liked, one of the few
running along the edges of the vast, flat wheat fields. It was a deep ravine cut into the earth from
seasonal run off. In summer it was mostly a dry creek bed with a few damp spots
and small stranded pools here and there amongst the
George would park the combine and we’d
hike down to the cool waiting for us in the trees. I’d spread out supper on one of Mamma’s
embroidered table cloth. Usually fried
chicken, potato salad or slaw, and a few late strawberries from the patch we
kept behind the main garden.
After we ate, we would both lay back on
the musty ground with tight bellies, our fingers entwined, our eyes on the
shifting shapes the trees made against the sky as an afternoon breeze stirred
up their tops.
Times like this George would talk about
the house we’d have and how he’d build all our furniture and plant an orchard
in the back yard. How we’d raise our children to be the best in the world. How
we’d get married soon and everything good would start and just keep getting
better.
“I’ll just march in one day and tell them
we’re getting married,” he said. “Maybe
at church, I’ll just stand up one Sunday after Pastor Paul stops talking and
just yell out…I love Kate and I’ve touched her titties.”
That always made me laugh, when he said it
like that. Then, George would brush away
the strands of hair flying across my face, catching in my lashes and the
corners of my mouth. He’d brush them
away and hold my hair back with his calloused hands and kiss me.
I waited, saved myself ‘til our wedding
night, just like Mamma told me. But those days in the gull, laughing and
kissing and touching, with our backs pressed into the wet ground, were more
like making love than anything since.
Dear Samuel,
You don’t know me, but we both knew your
father, George Irwin.
It is my sad duty to inform you that your
father passed away a year ago. He died
easily, without much pain, the doctors said.
His heart just gave out, seized up and wouldn’t start again no matter
what they tried.
I am sorry I wasn’t able to contact you
until now. To tell the truth, I did not
know about you and your mother ‘til finding your letters and photos recently. It came as quite a shock, as you can
imagine.
At any rate, I thought you might like to
have these photographs and the drawings George made of the pond in one of the
pictures.
We planned to build one like it. But that was a long time ago when we were
younger and still full of energy. I
guess we were always just too busy to get to it, so we ended up with nothing
but an oversized mud puddle in our back yard, nothing like the beautiful pond
in the picture. What a blessing it must
be to have such beauty in your life.
If you like, write to me of your welfare
and tell me about your mother. We also
have a son, Bobby, just a bit older than you I believe. It would be so nice if the two of you could
meet someday, you are brothers after all.
Very Truly Yours,
Kathryn Irwin
Samuel
My world is women, grandmother, auntie. Many old women on our street.
When I leave for school in morning they
bow. Mrs. Ishikari
looks up from sorting vegetables and nods. Mrs.Wakasa
at her table of fish leans into a bloody hunk of tuna. Mrs.Yono stops
sweeping her steps. She bows with broom beside her like funny dance partner,
its head bobbing and swaying.
There are no men.
Kamikazi.
Hara-kiri.
Some smashed into American ships with
their planes, some plunged knives into their own bellies, some faded into
ghosts that kill themselves over and over again each day.
I walk to the bus stop in cold air. The
sun is still rising. It has not yet
heated the stones of our street. Loud
stalls of food and flowers are bright against shadows. By afternoon when I have finished classes and
walk home, all is brilliant and reflective. Color fades from the eggplant and
fish skins leaving nothing but shape, nothing but memory of color.
Grandmother waits for me. A bowl of rice with a bit of eel is
ready. She watches me eat and then
whisks my bowl away the moment I finish my last bite. She pours tea and sits with me, sipping from
the enamel cup and smoothing her hair like I am a gentleman in her garden
rather than her grandson in our small, shabby, upstairs apartment.
I never saw grandmother’s garden. But it is as real as the street outside to
me.
I can see its old walls, careful paths,
smooth stones, water flashing and moving in the pond, fish, painfully bright
against silver, green and grey. Mother
painted picture for me a hundred times as she held my hand in the dark.
“Some day we’ll have a garden again, a
pond, fish,” she’d say, as she knelt beside my childhood pallet, smoothing the
blanket into place. I saw the edge of
her face, pale and sharp against the illuminated rice-paper door behind her.
“Tell me how you met father there.”
“It is late. You must sleep,” she’d
whisper back.
“Please mother.” I held her hand tighter. “I promise to go right to sleep after…please...” I let my eyes beg her then, the way I guessed
father’s did.
She said I had his eyes, round and pale, but mine in a Japanese
face.
She’d sigh then and settle herself beside
me, take a breath, smooth my blanket once more and tell.
It was
festival day, so I was trying hard to be good for Grandmother. We woke early to
make cakes and arrange flowers for the shrine in the garden. We worked very hard sweeping paths and
scrubbing steps to make everything ready.
It was hot
even in the morning, with water in the air, making the light wavy and
thick. I was sticky, my hair falling
down. I wanted to bathe, but there wasn’t time.
A priest was outside the gate banging his drum and grandmother called
for me to open it.
I lifted the
latch and a flood of saffron robes swirled into our garden. The monks reminded me of our fish, bright
spots of color in the midst of so much green; green trees, grass, green moss
growing around the stepping stones, green water.
Then I saw
your father. He was at the end, behind the robes, all of him hidden except his
yellow head bobbing above the dark ones.
He moved closer and I saw he held a small bowl of fruit, the kind they
sell tourists in the marketplace, his tan arms taut and covered with sun-bleached
hairs that sparkled in the humid light. As he passed through the gate, he
stopped and bowed to me, one hand holding the fruit, the other at his
heart.
As we bent
forward, our heads nearly touching, I
could feel his warm breath and smell the incense gathered in his hair. He was sweating too, beads on his forehead
and dripping down his nose.
“If only it
would rain,” he said in terrible Japanese.
“Yes,” I
said, letting my disobedient eyes meet his for a moment, “If only it would.”
That was the place in mother’s story when
I usually closed my eyes. I knew what
came next. I could see it. I could see how the sky opened at that moment, how
rain came pouring down in huge drops that splattered on the dusty ground, made
a million circles on the surface of the pond.
Bobby
There’s always been a big old hole in my
back yard. For as long as I can remember
it’s just been there, an open pit in the middle of the grass, swallowing my
toys and somehow my daddy, though I never saw him go near it.
I remember the way it was down there, the
way the earth gave off a smell an how it changed
depending on mother nature’s temperament.
In spring when weeds and grass grew up tall at the top and all I could
see when I sat on the bottom was sky, it smelled like damp things about to wake
up.
In summer it was dry. My Hot Wheels made clouds as I ran them over
the edge. A puff of dirt kicked up where they landed, filling my nose with
boogers and the smell of too late.
In the Fall. Rain. Leaves from our Big Leaf Maple blew into the
hole. I hid army-men under their
edges. Guns and rocket launchers and
cannons stuck out from under skeleton leaves.
It was a mud pit at the bottom in winter,
made what Mom called my Hot Wheels, army-man, dead-leaf
soup. Sometimes I put on rubbers and
slid down the side. I watched rivers run over the edges digging ravines. I
filled an old tin can in the little waterfalls that fell off the rim and let
the water spill over the top and down my arm.
I’d jump from the edge and splash as hard
and as high as I could, trying to shoot the water out of the hole back into the
air. But all I did was get myself
soaked, the smell of mud and wet wool everywhere, still on me, even after
supper and a bath.
Larry Parker and I liked to sleep at the
bottom of the hole the first summer night it was warm enough for our mom’s to
say yes. All day we built it into half
fort, half bunker, dragging old lumber from his father’s barn to lay across the top and stashing our sleeping bags,
flashlights and rations at the bottom.
At dark, Mom came out to check on us,
looking over the side through the boards.
“You boys all right down there - you need
anything?”
“We’re fine,” Larry and I said back in
unison, both wishing she’d go back into the house and leave us to our
battle.
When she was gone, and it was just us and
the stars shining through the knot holes and cracks, we imagined ourselves
soldiers somewhere in
In the morning, Dad came out early and
started the mower, just to wake us up, I thought. We heard him in the front yard, the motor’s
hum growing louder and then receding and louder again, as he moved away from
the house towards the road and back.
When he finished the front, he pushed the
rattle-trap mower around to the back and yelled at Larry and I to, “Get up,
boys, and clean up this mess. I can’t mow with this godawful
disaster out here,”
We rubbed sleep out of our eyes and popped
our heads up above our wooden roof, feeling the damp morning.
“But it’s too cold,” I said.
Dad just looked at us then and shook his
head. A minute or two later, as we dove
back into our blankets, we heard the screen door slam, the sound of his voice
receding into the house with the same buzzing growl the mower made.
Just like the damn hole has always been
there, Dad’s disappointment has too.
Even now after nearly two years of him gone, I close my eyes and see the
slight shake of his head and the raised eyebrow he saved just for me.
Dad was a hero. Not the kind to swap war
stories, or flaunt his metals. But, he reminded me, just about every day, with
that raised eyebrow, he was one kind of man and I was another.
It wasn’t until Larry brought me my first
stolen beer and we sat at the bottom of the hole guzzling it that I had a
minute of not giving a good god damn what he thought. It was the best feeling in the world, to not
care - to not even know what there was to care about.
Katherine
A woman’s womb is a strange thing. We carry it around with us, leaking blood and
pain most of our lives, but it’s useful for only a brief time. Mine is shrunken and silent now, but I
remember the way it throbbed and weeped, longed for a
purpose.
When I was pregnant with Bobby, my body
full of life, I dreamed of my womb.
Every fear curled up inside it along with the baby, thrashing and
pushing against my insides, trying to get out.
When it was nearly time,
when my uterus was contracting in small weak squeezes, I slept little and what
sleep I had was full of stories. Those
nights, I birthed a monkey, a lizard and then a trout, sleek and shiny and hard
to hold onto. It slid from my arms and
swam away leaving a trail of silver behind it.
I woke with a sense of abandonment I could
never shake, an emptiness that filled me as sure as my son did. George held me
and whispered, “Its okay…that’s alright…”, until he fell asleep again, his
breath in my hair. I lay looking at the
ceiling, watching shadows recede into the corners and the sun light up the
room. Then I got up and made breakfast, my insides still aching.
A new letter from Samuel; he’s sent a
picture of himself in cap and gown, standing next to a small stooped woman,
both of them look into the camera without smiles. On the back he wrote “Grandmother and I, June
1970.”
He is coming next month the letter
says. He asks if I will meet him at the
airport or if he should take a taxi.
We’ll meet him. It goes without
saying. But I’ll write to assure him.
I look at the picture again and search for
George in the Asian face, the surprisingly blue, round eyes, the dark straight
hair. I think I see it, a bit around
the jaw and the way his body fills out his clothes.
I lean the picture against a framed one of
George, Bobby and me someone took after dinner one New Years Eve. We’re all three in hats, champagne glasses in
hand. Bobby’s already drunk,
his eyes blank. I’m in the middle,
George on one side, Bobby on the other. We too stare into the camera, not
smiling.
I sat at the bottom of the pond yesterday,
the way Bobby use to when he was little.
Every pair of pants he owned had to be scrubbed with Namptha
to get rid of the stains from his bottom sliding down the side and sitting in
whatever was down there.
The first time he played in the pond he
was about three. I’d gotten him ready for church and told him in no uncertain
terms to stay clean and within earshot.
Then I let him out in the back yard to play and started ironing George’s
shirt, hoping he might join us.
By the time I’d talked George into coming
and we were ready to go, Bobby was gone.
I called out the back door into the wind picking up from the north. I yelled and yelled his name trying to fling
it out further into the yard, but the wind pushed back.
Finally, I had to change out of my heels
and lace up my garden boots to go look for him.
George was beginning to fuss in the kitchen. I heard him pull a chair out scraping it
along the freshly waxed floor, the way I’d asked him not to a hundred times.
Then I heard the flick of his lighter and smelled cigar. Two things I’d asked
him not to do.
My voice was small against the noise but I
kept calling for Bobby leaving his name everywhere; behind the wood pile and in
the tool shed, up the tree I kept telling him not to climb, down by the chicken
coop where he liked to poke a stick at the Bantee
rooster and watch the feathers stand up around his neck.
By now the wheat beyond the fence was
bending sideways. Waves of motion spread through it in currents. I imagined Bobby out there somewhere, his
small arms pushing aside the stalks, his shiny Sunday shoes blazing a
trail.
I turned away from the field and looked
back toward the house. Grey clapboard,
slab patio, corrugated metal roof, grass full of dandelions, rake leaning
against the maple tree since last fall, pond, hole, dirt-pile.
Found him at the bottom, filthy, covered
in mud from the last good rain we’d had and singing at the top of his lungs,
“Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so…”
I stood there with my hands on my hips
looking down at him. “Robert Thomas
Irwin!” I said, “Just what do you think
you’re doing?” He jumped a little when
he heard his name that way and then looked up at me.
“Practicing for Sunday
School, Mamma.” He said, and burst into tears.
“Oh sweet pea.” I
said, and before I knew it I was sliding down the side of the hole to scoop him
up in my arms. His dirty shoes drug
against my dress and his muddy hands took hold of my face.
“I ‘m sorry Mamma, I’m sorry.” He said, his hands on my cheeks, his eyes looking
into mine.
“It’s alright, you monkey shiner.” I said, squeezing him a little. I sat down on the edge of this hole, still
holding him tight, his small arms wrapped around my neck. The wind pushed against us, blowing our hair
out in whisps.
“We can both practice. Okay?”
He leaned back then, wiped away tears with
the back of his fists, leaving muddy streaks across his cheeks.
“Okay.”
We sat there a long time singing, letting
the wind carry our voices out across the wheat.
We sat there until the air was still again and the storm’s first drops
of rain ran down our faces instead of tears.
I remembered all that as I sat at the
bottom of the hole studying the ragged sides and the exposed tree roots
protruding from the dirt. It was warm,
the sky cloudless and I lay back, stretching my legs out, wriggling them into
the soft earth. There’s a dampness down there, the smell of decay and life all mixed
up, one thing feeding the other.
I closed my eyes and saw the sun shining
through my eye lids, felt its heat throbbing across my face. I’m not dead yet, I thought. I’m not cold and stiff at the bottom of a
hole. I’m still alive, still breathing, still warm to
the touch. George might be dead, damn
him, but I’m not.
Bobby
The day Daddy died, Mom came to tell
me. I saw her pull up in the station wagon, they bought right after I was born. It’s a seven-seater, fake wood paneling along the sides, fake leather
upholstery, beat up now. They planned to
fill it with kids I guess, but I was the only one.
Saw her from a couple miles away. I was driving CJ’s truck down the upper
access road. She had a handkerchief covering her hair, a house dress on, bare
feet. Her head was down,
her body leaned hard against the car door.
We’d been stringing barbed wire on the
high end since morning. I was dirty and sweaty from it, so I wiped my face with
the back of my sleeve before I got out of the truck. Funny the things you remember at a time like
that. I still feel that flannel against
my cheek and hear the truck door squeak and slam behind me as I walked across
the driveway to her.
She just stood there looking down. Staring. Even when I
got right up to her she didn’t raise her eyes, didn’t look at me.
“Ma” I said and took hold of both her
hands. “Mom”
I got down on my knees and put my face
between her and the dirt she was staring at.
“Bobby,” she said real soft. “Oh, Bobby”
Then she fell on her knees too and wailed
out a rush of tears. Tears like I’ve
never seen her cry…tears and tears.
We sat there like that for what seemed
like forever. CJ came and went, driving
the truck packed with fencing back to the barn.
I heard the other hands rattling around the bunk house cleaning up for
supper.
“Mom, what is it?” I said when she would finally look at
me.
“He’s gone…Daddy’s gone.” She said then.
“What happened?” I said.
“Heart…attack…” she said her voice
trailing off so I could barely hear the last word, so that the word heart rang in my ears and attack slid away like a whisper.
Then I went away too, went right on out of
there with that word attack… right
there kneeling in the dust, I was gone.
It was like I was dying myself because my whole life flashed in front of
me like they say it will.
I saw myself toddling across the grass in
our backyard trying to walk and falling, pushing myself up and falling again,
pushing up and toddling some more, Dad’s arms waiting for me so far across the
lawn.
I saw Dad pushing me on my first real bike
out on the road in front of the house…running along side. “Pedal harder Bobby…pedal
harder.”
Saw Mom singing to me at night before I
slept, saw her brush the hair out of my face and kiss me…heard his voice as she
closed the door…”You baby him Kate…he’ll never grow up at this rate.”
Pedal harder…
I saw myself in my uniform, first
baseball, then football, then Marines.
”It’ll make a man of you.” He’d said.
Saw myself in
“Your mother and I are proud.”
Pedal harder. Pedal harder.
Saw myself back here, a foreign land
now…nothing feeling right, nothing lining up, nothing making sense. Nothing.
Stop pedaling…just stop…
Samuel
I came, looking for my father. I think I
will see him when I see his house, his wife, and how she moves serving food,
when I see his son and search for my face in his.
Grandmother did not want me to go. She came behind me, when I had the map of the
states spread across the table. Put her hand on my shoulder. I felt the weight of it. Her
silence. Felt her trying to hold me with her small rough fingers.
I straightened my back, tried to shake her
hand away like shaking off a fly, but she rode my shoulder, squeezing a little,
pressing down. Then her hand was gone.
My shoulder warm and damp and prickly, an arm slept on wrong, just waking up.
I heard her in the next room, re-arranging
the altar, lighting a match, incense, shuffling back a few steps. The bow came next, I knew. She held her hands together and bent forward,
the top of her head pointing towards the floor, her eyes coming up to meet
mother’s picture.
From the window of the plane I saw where
my father came from, fields of green and brown spreading in every
direction. I saw the sky, huge and blue.
I saw small islands of buildings, isolated and gray against the earth.
So few people. Not like my village. We squeeze crops up the
sides of mountains and whole families in one room. The only thing wide and open as these fields, is the ocean.
When I step off the plane onto the runway,
I feel the wind here for the first time.
It’s a dusty wind, not damp and salty like home, but dry and sharp and
full of distance.
Katherine waits for me just inside the
airport doors. Bobby stands behind her,
his eyes scanning the way I’ve seen the ghost-men do, still searching for the
enemy.
He squints and sweeps the passengers
walking towards the doors, then taps his mother on the shoulder, pointing me
out.
Last night in my father’s house I slept in
the bed they call bunk and I dreamed of my mother after so long I have
not. She came as she did when I was a
boy to sit next to me while I slept. I
felt her weight press down the blankets, her hand smooth the pillow, touch my
hair. I smelled sweet jasmine she wore
on her wrists and behind her ears. Then
I heard her whisper.
“Yoshiro…”
It is strange to be asleep and dream your
eyes open. It is contradiction somehow
like being in my father’s house. So long
I have seen it in my mind, imagined its rooms and run my fingers across the
smooth stucco walls. Now I see it as it
really is. The imagined, the reality
fused together. I want to close my eyes
again.
So it is in my dream. I hear my mother calling me out of a sleep
within a sleep. She calls the name she
gave me,
“Yoshiro…free boy. Let me see your pale
eyes.”
I look at her through the fringes of my
lashes trying to see her before she knows I am awake. Her Geisha paint is smeared, her lips a blur
of red, eyes soft and asymmetric as if I were looking from under water.
“Yoshiro.”
Her mouth is close now, breath soured
liquor, teeth yellow against the white paint on her face. I roll over, dragging the blanket over my
head, grunting and pulling away.
She leaves her hand on my back for a long
time. I fall back asleep with it there. But when I wake, it and the weight of
her next to me are gone.
That night, after she left me, my mother
swallowed poison. First she bathed
herself, creamed the makeup from her face, ordered her room, then drank a cup
of tea with bitter Hemlock stirred in and lay down.
Next morning, I ran in, bare feet cold on
the tile, wanting to crawl in with her and warm them on her legs. As I stood beside her bed, pale winter sun
shifted and slanted through the window. A branch blew across the glass
scratching the pane and stilting the light.
“Mother” I said reaching out to touch
her.
Her flesh was rigid.
I pulled my hand away. The branch danced across the window,
screeching now with a bigger wind, screeching and dancing, scratching and
refracting the light, then becoming part my howl, part grandmother’s sobs, the
cries that wake me even now so many years later.
Bobby
I heard Sammy crying in his sleep last
night. Poor guy.
Woke me out of a dead drunk. Mamma
insisted I stay over, sleep in my old room on the bottom bunk with Sammy on top
where Larry use to sleep when we weren’t bedding down
out back.
I’d had a few snorts of the sake Sammy
brought and Mamma was scared I wouldn’t make it back to the ranch without
running the truck in the ditch.
Guess he was dreaming. I heard him mumbling first and thrashing
around up top. I thumped the underneath
of him a couple times with my foot and he quieted down, but then long about
sunrise he started in again jabbering away in Japanese.
Kinda makes me
glad I don’t dream anymore.
The
fellows at AA, that time I went a few years back, said as long as I’m drinking
I won’t have none. The alcohol twists your brain around so you
just stop. But after hearing old Sammy
toss and turn all night I guess I’m pretty glad I don’t dream no more.
I do lay awake though, waiting for it to
be light again. Sometimes I get up and
pour myself a finger of whiskey to dull the throb behind my eyes and fill the
hole in my stomach. Those guys at AA say
that hole is the size and shape of God and He’s the only thing can fill
it. But I figured out after laying in
the dark enough nights feeling the shape of it, that its more like a hole my
Daddy left behind, almost like he’d shot me with the service revolver he kept
in his bedside drawer.
Most nights, when I first wake up in the
dark, I could swear I was bleeding. I
feel the warmth drip down my sides onto sticky sheets. I feel the air passing
through me like nothing’s there, no flesh, no bone, just the breeze blowing
through, what I figured would happen in
Yeah, I’m lucky I guess. I ain’t wrestling no demons in my
sleep like Sammy-boy.
Katherine
I couldn’t sleep much, so I spent the
night dosing in my chair and listening to the sounds the house makes in the
dark. When the fire in the wood stove dies down boards settle into their cooler
places and the walls shift slightly and sigh as they relax into the floor.
I heard commotion in the boy’s room,
Samuel talking in his sleep and turning over again and again on the top bunk,
the mattress squeaking under him each time he moved. I heard Bobby kicking his bed from down below
in just the way he use to do when Larry Parker spent the night and started
passing gas.
Later, I heard Bobby shuffle to the
kitchen and open the cupboard where I keep the Jim Beam, heard him pour and
drink and quietly, put the bottle back with only the click of the cupboard and
the clink of the glass on the drain board to give him away.
I listened to noises from outside too;
the far away squeak of Parker’s wind mill, cut stalks in the wheat field moving in
the wind. Its
hard to fathom how all those thin, dead remnants of life could make such a big
sound. But when they blow against each other, their dry edges rubbing together,
they swell into waves that ebb and flow like a tide.
Toward morning, cows lowed in their sweet
sleepy way from the barn next door, Samuel cried out again and the rain
finally started in scattered drops that
by daybreak pelted the window and began pounding the wheat stalks into
their winter silence.
At
Bobby came into the kitchen first. His hair was tousled, looking like it did
when he was a little boy just in from playing.
His eyes were tired though, not bright and frank like when he was
little. He rubbed his hand across his
face, scratching his fingers through the days-growth of beard and rubbing the
back of his neck where it was still sun burnt and leathery from a summer out
doors.
“Pancakes or waffles for you?” I asked, after he had settled at the table
with a cup of coffee.
“Ah you know I always favor your waffles
Ma. With some blueberries in?”
“Sure, if you go to the garage and get
them out of the freezer.”
Bobby got up stiffly. He stretched, pushing his arms up over his
head with a yawn and then moved across the kitchen to the door. He opened it and there was Samuel standing on
the back step, his hair wet and his thin coat darkened on the shoulders and
collar from the rain. Bobby tightened
and pulled himself up a bit taller.
The two men stood, one inside, one out,
both leaving and entering blocked as they stared at each other as if deciding
something.
Samuel stepped back a pace letting the
screen door he’d been holding swing sharply towards Bobby’s face, but at the
same time he bowed and said, “Good Morning,
brother.”
“Yeah, morning”, Bobby muttered as he
pushed the door back open, brushed past Samuel, down the breezeway and out to
the garage.
Samuel took off his wet coat and draped it
over a chair to dry. By now I had bacon
frying and the smell of a thousand winter mornings was all around us in my
small kitchen.
“Mmmm” Samuel
said breathing deeply.
“Do you like waffles?” I asked.
“Yes.” Samuel said nodding his head. “They are most delicious.”
When the bacon was crisp and draining on
paper towels, I began washing the pans and bowls I’d used so far. Samuel had been watching me cook but moved
now to stand next to me at the sink. He
held out his hand as I finished soaping the mixing bowl. He rinsed and dried it and set it on the
drain board, then reached out again.
Well trained, I thought.
A flash of movement outside lifted both
our heads at the same moment. Bobby
stood by the pond in just his tee shirt and jeans holding a bag of blue berries
in one hand, smoking a cigarette with the other and staring blankly into the
hole. The cold seemed not to bother him even though his damp shirt clung to his
body and swirls of breath and smoke formed where the warmth from inside him met
the chilled air.
We watched as he took one last long drag
on his cigarette and flicked it into the bottom of the hole. He lifted his head and blew smoke towards the
sky, then kept his face turned upward, letting rain hit his eyelids.
“You finish?” Samuel said as Bobby started
towards the back door.
“The pond? Oh, I
don’t know. Do you think its worth finishing? Its been
nothing but a hole for so long its hard to imagine it being anything else.”
“Yes, worth.” Samuel said, as Bobby came in, plopped the
berries down on the counter and left the room.
Samuel
The sun came out bright in afternoon
making everything shine. Rows of water
drops lined up on the barbed wire fence, iridescent. Small pools everywhere
reflected sky. It was still cold. When I
went back and forth from the car to the kitchen helping Mrs. Irwin bring food
from the grocery store, I watched my breath pushing out in front of me, felt
crisp wind in my ears.
“Do you think you can entertain yourself
for a bit?” Mrs. Irwin asked, when the last of the packages were put away. “I think I need a cat nap.”
“Of course, Mrs. Irwin.” I bowed to her then, a quick, small bow.
“Oh no…don’t do that…nobody should be
bowing to me.” She said.
“Yes, must bow. When bow, I say I see divine spark in you, I
see you good, I see heart.”
“Oh…okay.”
She almost whispered.
As she turned away, I saw wetness in
corner of her eye. But she wiped her face with her sleeve as she walked down
the hall to her room, so by the time she reached the door her face was dry and
calm. “See you after my siesta.” She
said and waved.
It was that morning I decided to do
something about the hole in back yard. I
looked at it for long time before it was light.
The sun was just tinting the eastern sky when I went outside to let rain
fall on me. To wash off bad dreams.
I leaned against fence looking at dark
outline of “pond” thinking of stories Bobby told the night before, while we
drank sake. He talked about hole like it
was person, hated and loved. He told how
he played in it when he was boy and drank in it when he was a young man. He told how much the earth down there smelled
like the bunkers they dug in the American war in
I asked him why our Father dug it but
never made a pond, or filled it in. But he just smiled his jagged smile, said,
“You should know…”
I found a shovel leaning against the large
tree like someone just stopped working.
It is not sharp and the earth here is heavy with water. But, I dug the pond out to what seemed like
its original depth and shaped it back into a soft form like the pictures of
Grandmother’s pond. Then I started on
the waterfall, building up steps and a small stream bed.
I didn’t even notice the light fading or
hear the rattle of Bobby’s truck when he drove in. It wasn’t until I felt his eyes on me that I
knew I could turn and see him standing behind me, smoking and squinting into
the sunset. I kept working. I did not look behind.
After many minutes,
I heard his footsteps on the wet ground and smelled his cigarette. He stood on the opposite bank, his arms
folded, hat pulled low over his eyes.
“Just what in the hell do you think you’re
doin’?” He
finally said.
“Should be pond.” I said, not raising my eyes or stopping my
work.
“Well maybe it should, but it ain’t really your place to decide, now is it?”
“My father also.”
I said. “He want finished.”
“Is that so.” Bobby said, his jaw tightening and grinding.
“Yes, so.” I looked up at him then, letting him see my
eyes.
Bobby stood with his fists clenched beside
him, watching me some more.
“I’m askin’ you
to stop.”
I shook my head and kept on digging,
making the final cascade into a narrow channel where the water would gain speed
as it flowed over the edge.
“I said, I’m asking you to stop.” Bobby crossed to my side and stepped in
close. I smelled alcohol and smoke
mingling on his breath, felt heat rising from his body.
I shook my head again and kept moving
earth, shaping it the way I guessed our
father had always wanted to.”
“Goddamn you…I said to stop.”
I felt air blow past my ear, as his first
swing missed. His second jarred my
jaw. I stumbled, then
caught myself. I turned to face
him. His eyes were wide open and
glassy.
“Come on…what’s the matter? You don’t got it in yuh?” Bobby
said. He motioned for me to come and get
him.
“I do not wish to fight.” I said back.
He pushed me then, his hands slammed into
my chest, moving me away from the pond towards the fence. He pushed me again and I felt the cold, wet
boards against my back, the fence give under our weight. Then, we were both on the ground; rolling,
hitting, kicking, embracing, squeezing, writhing, our blood and sweat and
breath pouring out of us in streams, our bodies, like one body, punishing itself.
It was over as quickly as it started. Bobby rolled off of me and I felt us
separate, felt his spirit and mine tease apart again. We lay on our backs, breath fast, hearts beating hard.
The moon was rising. The last of the light from the brilliant afternoon
was fading away, turning into night.
“Do you know how many times I’ve wanted to
kick somebody’s ass over that pond?”
Bobby said when he
could talk again. He turned his head
towards me and grinned, his crooked grin.
“Never thought I’d get to though, now Daddy’s gone...but I guess you’ll
do.”
I turned to look at him. The moon was fully up now, only half of
itself lit, but still bright. The light
hit his face, curving dark shadows under his eyes and along his nose. His eyes were sparkling, the way my father’s
did in the only photograph I have of him.
“You look a lot like the old man.” Bobby said.
“Know that?”
I watched the moon, imagining the other
side of it, the part in darkness. I
tasted the blood still in my mouth, the sweat drying on my forehead.
“Yes.”
I said. “But I was just thinking this about you.”
Katherine
I looked at George’s plans for the pond
again yesterday when I cleaned out the very last of his things from the closet,
the ones I’d been holding onto; his wool overcoat still full of the smell of
his cigars, the jacket he wore to our 40th anniversary party and the
red shirt I remember so clearly from the day Bobby was born. The drawings were on the shelf behind these
things, a bit more fragile than before, the paper graying now.
I unrolled the plans and looked at what he
had drawn nearly 50 years ago. It was a
beautiful plan, so resembling the picture of the pond I found in the
garage. But, his design is not what we
ended up with. Our pond is bigger,
deeper and has two waterfalls where George planned only one. The boys each built a cascade and they are as
different as Bobby and Samuel are. One
loud and fast running, one quieter and more deliberate, one filled with rocks
and sharp edges, one travels over pebbles and moss. Yet in the end, they both fill the pond with
water.
I sit by the pond everyday now that its
spring again. I’ve planted water lilies
and iris that will bloom, I am told, this summer. I’ve filled the pond with fish, Koi, small now, but they will grow quite large and flash
with color. It’s a shame I won’t be here
to see them reach their full size, but I have decided to sell this house. The sign is out front and folks stop by
nearly everyday to look.
“Why would you want to leave this
beautiful place?” They all say, shaking
their heads.
“Its hard to
explain.” I say. “I guess I’m just done
with waiting.”
They nod then, wondering what I mean.
“Let me show you the pond.” I
say. “It’s finally finished.”
The
Chickasaw
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