Sweet things, p.16
Sweet Things, page 16
“Look carefully at her eyes.”
The eyes of the woman were staring but it was impossible to tell at what. They were not looking at the camera. On close inspection, they weren’t looking at anything, not at the child’s face or even at the floor. “She’s been good and dead,” the vendor said. “Likely died in childbirth with that baby.”
Through a magnifying glass, the outline of a wooden brace was just visible behind her temples. The woman must have been lying on the device that locked her head in place. Her hands are not holding the baby as one would with a cupped palm to support the child’s cranium. One is spread upon the child’s swaddling and the other is limp on the blanket of the bed. The child’s eyes are closed.
“Her poor husband. Maybe he was the photographer. In his grief, he probably wanted something to remember her by,” said the vendor. The vendor opened the back of the frame. There were two sets of curls, one brown, the other wispy and fair tied together with small knots of blue ribbon. She asked me if I wanted to hold one of the locks. I shook my head.
“It’s very rare. Victorian hair jewelry and a tintype on a silver plate. I dare say there’s money in the plate at today’s prices if you didn’t want to keep the image and just had it melted down. It would make a nice ring for your missus. Twenty quid. That’s a bargain. You rarely see the eyes that clear.”
No one should have to look into those eyes.
The hand that was not holding the baby was the most troubling aspect of the picture. It looked as if the photographer had just let it go and laid it gently to her side, and the delicate straight fingers appeared as if the man behind the camera would take it up again the moment the plate was exposed.
“What makes you think the photographer was her husband?” I had to ask. There was no reason to believe he was until she pointed to the cardboard backing behind the image where the locks of hair had been laid. There, three stains, as if made by tears, tinted the liner.
“They’re probably salt,” she said. “You can see the way the paper holds them. The marks fade around the edges. Maybe that’s how grief works. It fades around the edges with time.”
I asked the vendor to shut the back. I held the image beneath a magnifying glass and though the first light of day had not yet appeared, I could see by the yellow glow of the streetlamp that the woman in the picture had been weeping. The blur that is often seen in early images of sleeping babies, was not there. The eyelids did not flutter the way newborns’ do when they are asleep.
“I could do fifteen quid. That’s as low as I could go. You look like a discernable gentleman, someone who knows what’s rare and beautiful.”
But I had seen all I could stand. My breath had clouded over the glass of the frame. I felt the misery, the pain, a sense of betrayal in the darkened room. The longer I stared at the image at arm’s length the more I felt the world had no right to take so much from someone, though I know death is a reality of life, that parts of who and what one is going missing with each day. Grief, though, is something one can feel. It is a shared emotion. It is the pain that cannot touch one thing. It lasts long after those who feel it have left this life.
And I could imagine the moment the image was captured. The light slowly creeping through the layers of lenses, touching the silver plate, making the sorrowful magic happen behind one, unblinking eye. Then the brass cover is placed over the lens. The world inside the camera, or perhaps even the photographer’s brain, goes dark and numb, and he is alone in his thoughts and the one person he might have shared them with cannot answer him as he describes what he feels. Then he lifts a long curtain which he has placed over his head. The light that enters the room is cold and unforgiving, grey as if it has had the day sucked out of it. A voice in his mind begs him: “Make them last forever. Make this worth keeping.”
Swimmer (Emerge Literary Journal)
He watched Rank bring her so close to Pigeon Point he could almost see its grey stone back through the gale.
Then the Clara B broke up.
Rank and Harry shouted in the water but their voices soon vanished in the wind. He wondered if his shipmates made it ashore. If they had, they’d be calling for him. He heard nothing. The current was dragging him farther out and tugging to get his slicker off.
He thought he could see the point. He could picture last June’s evening with his friends, the glow of golden light on the procession to the water’s edge for the blessing of the waves. The guys there in black suits, the girls in their chiffon dresses, all descended the rocky slant, careful not to scuff their polished Oxfords or let the ladies twist an ankle as they balanced in their awkward heels. Wind caught their chiffon dresses and moved the crinoline and lacelike a bouquet of blossoms. Each girl, as a traditional rite of passage, took a single flower from her corsage and tossed it on the calmed bay. The sea was so still that evening, the sky cloudless. The flowers floated and bobbed, and each girl said, “I bless these waters for what they give us.”
Anne had worn a yellow gown. It billowed on the wind, and as the breeze wafted it he was reminded of wild lupins that grew along the roads. He hadn’t had the money to take her as his date. She had gone with a trucker’s son. A few weeks later she went away to university where she met a man and became a lawyer’s wife. But he could still picture her, bending to cast her bloom as the gentle waves returned it to her. She was laughing with her date by the arm. The wind mussed his hair and sent it in all directions, and he felt poor.
The next day, he signed on to Rank’s boat.
“She does her job, my Clara B,” Rank told him, adding that if he worked hard he’d someday earn a boat of his own. But the way he saw it, there was no future on the sea. Hauling traps was only a means to an end. By his calculations, three years of back-breaking at the catch would get him to the city where he could learn a trade or attend college. Ann was gone by then, but as the old folksong said, “He would surely find another.”
The future could still begin. He could still make it back to shore if he knew he was swimming in the right direction. Tugging at the water, he was certain the shore was close.
He thought his foot struck a rock, something solid submerged beneath him, but when he moved it with his right toe, Harry rose to the surface, still looking at the bottom to see how far out they were.
He pushed Harry away. The cold was eating his bones. He had to give the swim everything he had. Whether the water in his face was sweet rain or sour waves, he fought to return and decided if he made it back to Pigeon Point where the girls had blessed the waters he would never leave the world again.
Sorrow (Panoplyzine)
Their lives together had been difficult – he standing in the sliver of light between the pulled drapes of a hotel room while Sadie or Sally or Sonia lay on the spreaded bed with her torso propped on one arm and one foot still touching the floor with a motion picture pose of seductiveness that would have satisfied the Hayes Act yet was erotic enough to suggest a foretaste of pleasures to come as he set his shirt over the back of a chair and smiled then snarled to imitate a hungry beast as the secretary unclipped her bra letting the straps fall down from her shoulders around her pale upper arms while at home, she, the dutiful housewife, sat on the edge of their bed in their almost antiseptic bedroom with crinoline poodles on the dresser and a mirror turned face down in its tray and wept and stared at the pale blue crucifix nailed to the wall above their curled white French Provincial double bed that was out of fashion the day they bought it and said to herself “we are done for good now,” and realized her entire married life had been a foreshadowing of the hospital room with its robin’s egg blue walls masked by the limp cotton drapes running sadly on their track and falling as tears fall from the weeping angels with blows not intending to hit anything but the heart or land anywhere but just to fall short of feeling real because she could not control the nurses’ voices on the floor’s address system and stop them from announcing a code blue for someone she had long wished to be dead, and closed her eyes, deciding it was not over now and no one could find the love she thought she had known as the afternoon sun slipped behind the darkness of the hospital annex wing, where whatever love she thought remained inside her heart was nowhere to be found and asked nothing more of her to cry for and offered her not a shred of pity or remorse as it called forth called a darkness that wrapped its veil around her and whispered in her ear that she had had enough as the sky she could barely see beyond where the other wing faded from blue to black which is the colour of sorrow when nothing but emptiness remains to cry for.
Calaveras
I felt I had to show up. The party was my idea. I couldn’t let them down. I had to show up for my sixteenth birthday party even though I‘m dead. My parents wanted to keep believing in me. I guess that’s how they express love. They don’t give up easily.
Danny’s not to blame, and I don’t blame his dog.
Danny is still faithful to me, he says. He has pimples, but he doesn’t grieve easily.
He didn’t show up for my funeral. I think he felt ashamed.
His dog ran out in the street when I opened the front door. Not that I blame the dog, although my parents did and told me under no circumstances could the dog come to my party.
The dog loves snowy days. The first snow had fallen in the night. Danny’s dog chases squirrels. The driveway was so icy poochy slid into the street. Right down the slope and into the middle of the road. I think he was surprised. His paws kept working but nothing would grab.
Danny pushed me down the steps and yelled, “Okay, you go get Arnold, and don’t kill yourself in the process.”
But that’s not what killed me.
It was the first of November. I’d painted my face like one of those Mexican skulls. I’d done a good job. I was scarry.
A car swerved to avoid hitting me and hit a tree.
I stuck my head inside the car to see if the woman was okay. She screamed. I felt my face go pale like when everyone yells “Surprise!” and your heart suddenly stops.
Winter (Uproar)
Now that I’m white-haired I don’t hate my mother for naming me for the time of year I was born. She was of that generation who thought it cool to name a kid after a season. I know five Summers, three Autumns, and two Springs, although the latter get wisecracks about being loose. Winter, she insisted, was a strong boy’s name.
She loved to tell me how she had slipped on a patch of black ice – the invisible glare that hides between the pebbles of asphalt, and her doctor told her to be careful and she looked at him and said she could go one better than treading lightly. By the end of the afternoon, I was born.
I’m lucky she didn’t call me dusk. I met a guy by that name and he hated it. He became a father while he was still in high school and the jerks teased him by telling him had had to do this or that. If he refused they said, “Oh, but you wouldn’t let your little sun down.”
Names are cruel things. There was one guy I met at university whose first name was Robert and who called himself Bob. But his last name was Forpels. People would repeat his name though he pretended he didn’t get the joke. When I got out into the business world, I met an investment analyst whose first name was Mayer and his last name was Wiener. You can’t tell me his parents weren’t playing a cruel joke on him.
My mother and I have always been close. She was a single parent. When she wanted to be affectionate she would call me Winnie when I was young, but that stopped before I got to kindergarten. I think she knew the other kids would be mean to me. Then it was Winter, and now that I’m living my own life she calls me Winter which was always what she intended.
Was I to be cold and indifferent? Was I meant to be icy and numb to those around me? I’m not sure if she wanted me to be immune to the suffering of others or my own pain. Winter is the numb season. Just try going outside without gloves in a driving snowstorm or wiping the accumulated snow off the windshield of a car with only bare hands. Winter is the numbness that becomes pain. That’s an oxymoron, but it is true.
I once fell through the ice in a pond near our farmhouse. The first thing I felt was shock. The next feeling was a thousand needles drilling into my skin. The survivors of the Titanic who’d ended up in the icy waters of the North Atlantic described the feeling. The needles were followed by a numbness that was not similar to anesthetic but closer to a kind of loveless despair, an aura about the body that says, “You are forsaken.” I felt hopeless.
When a neighbor pulled me out and carried me, I’d fallen asleep. Sleep, hibernation, a dark and dreamless depth beyond this world, is also associated with winter. But I woke. I woke to the sensation of my mother rubbing my limbs. She wasn’t crying. She was being patient. That’s the only word for it. Patient. She gave me life once and there was a loving assurance in her that I could feel, that told me she could give me life again.
The tough part now is I can’t return the favor. I never married. I dated. I can say that I’ve lived an interesting life. There have been storms. What winter is without storms? There have been moments when I’ve experienced incredible beauty, a sparkling of the fields in sunlight that makes the undulations buried beneath snow so beautiful I have been moved to tears by the sight of diamonds spreading from the fences to the tree lines. In those moments I’ve realized that my mother wanted me to see that wonder, that astonishment, and perhaps she knew that if she named be Frank or Tom I wouldn’t see them because they weren’t reaching out to me because I was part of them.
But she would never admit that. My mother is a pragmatic soul. She is honest. She says whatever is on her mind. I’ve asked her why she gave me my name and every time I get the same answer: “I liked it. Winter always arrives,” she always explained.
“And then?”
“And then spring follows and everything blooms.”
“But not Winter. Did you not see me as a source of life?”
“Winter, I held you in my arms. A person doesn’t get more close to life than that.” She would never come right out and tell me that winter is the time of year when a person has to take the good with the bad. Moments of incredible awe mixed with episodes of sublime frustration. An ice storm where every bough, every weed, and wire is coated in ice and shines with crystal when the sun comes out. And I know about bad weather. The spin-outs. The blizzards on the highway when my knuckles wrap around the steering wheel and they turn white with fear because visibility is down to thirty feet and I expect to hit a skidding truck or a pedestrian who stepped from his car and wandered the road in the wrong direction. Winter is about knowing how to be afraid and how to confront those fears, and even how to steer when the tired refuse to grab the road.
I was pulled over by a policeman during a ride check. He asked why I was all over the road.
“Winter,” I replied.
Then he asked, “What’s your name?”
“Winter,” I replied.
He ordered me to step out of the car. I did, handing him my license. He didn’t look at it.
“I’m winter,” I said.
“No, I know what time of year it is and why you think you were reckless on the road. What’s your name?”
I told him again. He put me in handcuffs and sat me in the back of his cruiser until he sorted things out.
“I can’t sit here in your cruiser,” I said. “My mother is dying in hospital. I’m on the way there to see her now. The doctors tell me she won’t last the afternoon.” I gave him the hospital number and asked him to call. I told him the name of her doctor,
“It really is a matter of life and death that I be there. Please try to understand.”
He eventually decided my story checked out, that my name was my name, and that it had been given to me by a woman who loved me more than life.
“Get snow tires,” he said and drove away.
I arrived just as she was dying on that January afternoon. As I stepped into the hospital elevator, my glasses fogged so all I could see as I walked down the corridor to her room was white, a blindness in which winter masks the truth of what it does to the world and to love. I saw the world through two panes of ice. The drug carts, the orderly wagons, the railing on the wall elderly patients clung to as they tried to exercise the bodies that had slipped into their own uncomfortable state of time that proclaims itself the winter of a person’s life. I felt as if I was walking blindly toward the truth of a love that expires too soon and takes with it a person’s past and the future thaws one dreams of during the months of sleep. As I entered her room, I heard her breathing and it reminded me of the stream that runs through our woodlot. Throughout January it can be heard but not seen beneath the ice.
She opened her eyes and reached out and I held her hand. She asked me to look out the window.
“Isn’t it lovely? So peaceful and so silent. All you see is you.” Then she sighed and closed her eyes and she loosened her grip as my eyes began to melt.
Birth (Crep and Pen)
Three drunks walked in front of a streetcar that Friday night and my wife told me she hated me. I forgave her, of course. I had to. She was having a baby, and that’s never pleasant. What you see on television is a lie. In truth, there is no happy, beaming mother, naked above the white sheets, her birth sweat still clinging to her like the morning dew as she holds her infant in her arms and appears to cry tears of joy. The kid is not a newborn either. He or she is old enough to have auditioned for the part. Those are not tears of joy, at least not the ones I saw. They were tears of frustration, anger, and, of course, pain. The drunks had no business being in the middle of the streetcar tracks.
