I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

  He saw a condor dead, a few alive, rising, the sky immaculate. He saw gauchos in flimsy slippers standing on their horses in the blue. A lamb in a box. A spoonbill.

  A mobile home, Hawk thinks. Ridiculous.

  One night he sets fire to the withering grass, standing in the dark with a garden hose poked through the chain link fence.

  She lived for years like this, sequestered, he cannot begin to grasp why. His mother was waiting; she ironed bedsheets; she was polishing the stove. She raked the grass each day as if it mattered—ugly little patch the dog pissed in—until the morning she tripped and fell in her kitchen and called out and no one came. A stain spread where she lay on her buckled floor with her small dog chewing her hand. The radio played, the singing, the talk, and in pencil in meticulous letters she composed a list for herself: New broom. Ammonia. Bicarbonate. Bobby pins. Chicken.

  Hawk sets to work trying to lift the stain from the place his mother fell. Ammonia—his eyes are streaming, and his hands, his hands are from another animal, huge, like paws, like slabs, torn from the rock he built with. He has worn his fingerprints off and his thumbnails are gone and the skin is thready and raw.

  The stain comes back by morning. Always as something new. It comes back in the shape of a toaster. A pony. The shape of a sleeping dog. Hawk crouches above it, scouring, gloomy and consumed. At last, he thinks. Still it comes back. Now as a dress she favored. Now as fire. Feather. Mendicant. Broom.

  SWIM FOR THE LITTLE ONE FIRST

  How nice you could come to visit. See our home, how we live, how the leaves sweep down. The fields green still.

  We turned our clocks back. I brought squash in, tossed a sheet across the withering vines. We’re to expect a frost once the wind quits, wind from the north, flurries. A chance.

  We’ll move the rabbits in in the morning, light the stove. Chicory in your coffee, honey how you like. On the radio the news.

  Dark falls and the wind comes up and leaves flock out of the trees. I tug windows shut and yet, inside, doors keep sailing open. Leaves shore up in the kitchen. The floorboards buckle and heave.

  These old houses. Every wall leans toward the south, toward you, your modest hills, your clemencies of weather.

  It can’t be easy. It is a distance. Our stairs are steep and narrow. You will never make it up them; you would never make it down. We would have to keep you, as eccentrics keep their reptiles, captive in a tub.

  We have the dog you gave us. We have reasonable jobs in town. Sick pool, personal time. Time to travel. I took a lover from the tropical regions once who washed my feet in the sand. Children loved him. He owned a shirt he never wore. He danced, with keening grace, with my Isabel, who has lived so far to be five.

  YOUR ROOM IS freshly painted. Your bed is your bed you slept in in Kentucky when you were a boy. The sheets are the sheets Mother monogrammed when she took your name when you married.

  If you need anything, if you are up in the night. There is the wingback chair to sleep in. Whiskey in the pantry. Pecan cake in the breadbox—your father’s favorite, the cake your mother made you.

  Our house is yours, naturally.

  You need only ask.

  I am awake in the night in the yellow room at the top of the narrow stairs. Tap your cane on the stairs—I’m sure to hear it.

  WE KEEP OUR boy with us in our bed. Our boy looks like your boy, like my brother. We gave him your name you gave my brother, the name your mother gave you. He is the third Frederick, a grandson at last. Papa, we named him for you.

  My lover’s name was Artemio.

  “Quieres tomar mi leche?” he used to ask.

  He danced beautifully, in keeping with the custom of his people. Isabel bent her back across his arm and dragged her hair through the sand.

  My brother was Frederick the second.

  He skied out of an avalanche that caught you—we’ve told the story a thousand times. Your ski swung around and put a gash in your leg and, by this wound, Freddy tracked you. He skied you out of that chute on his back. You were knocked out; you waked in the hospital.

  Remembered nothing. You remember nothing of it now. It can’t have happened, you insist, even now.

  He was weak, your boy, he wasn’t like you.

  The second Frederick.

  WE SHOULD HAVE named our boy Jack. Jack the first, Jack the only.

  Manuel, we should have named him, Carlito. Gordito—little fat boy.

  You should have said, Freddy, thank you.

  Instead you said, It can’t have been you.

  IN SLEEP, MY brother, my boy at my breast, makes his visits, too. He is not himself but I know it is him. He is not the boy who set the house ablaze, not the boy who sawed the heads off snakes and skewered mice with a pitchfork. Freddy stands at the door until morning, waiting to be seen. He sees nothing. He has no eyes, no mouth, no reason he can speak of to be here.

  The trees thrash in the wind. Apples shake loose and drop to the ground—a sound loud enough to wake me.

  PACHEW, YOU SAID, and aimed your cane at my girl.

  YOUR CANE IS wound about with electric tape. The shaft is splintered—you fault the dog. The dog was digging at your peas, how many times? You broke your cane across its back.

  Pachew.

  You will have peas at Christmas and pecans and cabbage in your garden still growing.

  Here, snow will heap past the window sash. The bears hunker down and the rabbits, and the frogs endure the season frozen solid. Ice pries slate from the rooftop. When snow slides off the roof, and ice, all at once, the house thunders, and quakes on its rubble footing. The dog gnaws at the door, and Isabel cries out.

  My girl sleepwalks, so you know. Isabel talks in her sleep. We mustn’t wake her—only follow at her heels quietly until she makes her way back to bed.

  Isabel is likely to walk to the church next door and swing from the rope in the belfry. The bells startle her—but she can’t wake. She is afraid and calls out for me—but she can’t see me, she can’t hear. I have to hold her to keep her from looking for me as though I am nowhere near.

  I AM NEAR, Papa, not to worry. Only tap on the stairs should you need me.

  You have sight in one eye. One leg is shorter. Your joints swell and wear away and you are older of a sudden, eighty soon, tomorrow we’ll mark your birthday.

  Your boy killed himself on your birthday.

  At dinner your wife fell from her chair, asleep. A long way to come and you are tired.

  You don’t sleep well. You ache in the night. Your friends are dying. You wake with your hand thrown over your face not knowing it is you.

  It’s your hand, Papa. You can’t feel it. Your hand lies across your eyes. You can’t move it. It won’t come to you what it is.

  YOU MAY HEAR birds in the chimney in your room. They often catch there. Their feet scratch the flue. No harm.

  You’ll hear the wind scrub the hill we live on.

  You’ll hear me. I sleep lightly, I am up in the night. I am in the room above you, awake when the baby wakes hungry, carrying him across the floor.

  His first curl is on the shelf and his umbilical knot in your room where you are sleeping. I buried his afterbirth in the garden deeper than the dog likes to dig.

  I keep Freddy’s old teeth the tooth fairy left. I keep the lamp Mother made from your ski boot that Freddy dumped the blood you lost out of when he brought you down off the mountain.

  You bled wildly. By the blood from the wound, Freddy found you, by the stains on the snow, the blood pooling in your boot. That was lucky.

  That lamp made Mother feel lucky. Mother drilled a hole through the bottom of your boot and ran a shaft up through it and filled the boot with cement she threaded wire through.

  Funny, what you keep, what keeps at you.

  I keep a feather I found in Freddy’s pocket.

  I keep an acorn I kicked the morning Isabel was born, out walking on the dirt road, my water s
treaming over my knees.

  I keep a satin bow from the attic of the house where we lived when Freddy was alive.

  YOU PAID A bounty on birds when Freddy was alive, on pigeons and the obnoxious grackle; a nickel for every rabbit trapped, a dollar for the brazen weasel who ran across your shoe.

  He killed to please you. Freddy got rich trying to please you. He drowned mice by the dozen in a bucket and a mother raccoon in a wheelbarrow and the last sorry runt of a puppy your bird dog dropped in the barn. The pup wouldn’t amount to much—you had him kill it. Freddy blasted the daubed nests of swallows with their spotted eggs inside.

  You taught him what to kill, what to run off, to save.

  What Freddy killed he put to rest with great ceremony, with flute song, in a common grave, quietly, secretly weeping.

  Spare the songbirds, you taught him, for their pleasing song—the plain and faithful phoebe, the thrush and homely wren. Spare the heron, shoot the goose. Kill the cuckoo bird that hides its eggs for other birds to raise.

  We ran skunks off. We brought a fox home to save and you shot it.

  He needed toughening, you always said so. Freddy needed a keener eye.

  My brother was pretty; he was beaten in school. He had been born too soon. His lungs were weak. I tried to be your boy—so Freddy wouldn’t have to be your boy. Wouldn’t get to, I think I should say.

  FREDDY SHOT A housecat once, out hunting with you, the first and last time you took him with you.

  “He’s a hazard,” you told Mother.

  And gave her the geese it was her job to pluck and the pheasant and the dove. Birds are stacked top to bottom in your freezer—pinkish, yellow, their feet still on, more birds than you will eat in a lifetime. Mother plucked the birds on the bottom of the stack and stacked on these are the fresher kill, the birds your next wife plucked for you, bright mallards and drakes, their heads loose on their necks, their feathers carried off by the wind.

  MY LOVER CALLED me la flaca, the skinny one.

  I liked the smell of him, and his mighty arms. I like a little how easily he will accomplish nothing.

  He had a scooter we rode around on on sand roads, through tiny towns. He rode me out to see a tribe of monkeys. One stole my necklace. One unlaced my shoes.

  Those monkeys were the greedy kings of that town, the pendejos, the thugs. They chased dogs off. They stole wallets—stole mine—snatched anything loose.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I asked him.

  “To teach you to live, mi flaca, with nothing.”

  HE LIVED IN a lean-to of lashed-together palm fronds. The floor was sand. He had a bucket and a bed. He had a rag he dried my feet with. All night, I could hear the sea.

  All night, certain nights, I knew he would kill me. He had strength he wasn’t using.

  He would scalp me, pretend to be me—my mind blasted clean, ecstatic, swinging my yellow hair.

  HERE IS HOW Freddy went about it: he made a blow dart with straight pins and bamboo and climbed, wheezing, into the hayloft. By dinner, he was hivey, dripping, blotched. He couldn’t eat for sneezing.

  You’ve forgotten this. It wasn’t so, you say. But, Papa, it was.

  For hours Freddy lay in the hayloft waiting for the pigeons you hated, waiting for the kill. I liked to watch him. My brother was patient. I saw a snake go over his neck once. He was good at keeping still.

  Freddy gave me his stuffed dog you hated—dingy and matted—old Snoopy dog. He gave it up to me for your birthday.

  He didn’t need it: he wasn’t a kid anymore. He loved it foolishly. You were sure to take it from him; he took it from himself. The dog’s big head flopped and caved in on itself: stuffing drifted out through its neck.

  It smelled awful, my husband insisted, but to me it smelled like Freddy and the bed that Freddy slept in in the house where Freddy died. And so I kept it.

  I KEEP THE satin bow I meant to give you.

  I keep the shell Artemio gave me.

  He gave me little; I asked little. He wanted money and I gave it to him. I gave him a shirt and shoes.

  He has two shirts now and one flimsy bucket—to wash sand from the feet of his women he brings to his lean-to to bed.

  NOTHING STOPS YOU. You hunt and fish and travel.

  You are buried by an avalanche and your dead boy digs you out.

  You keep moving, marry again, keep your hair, your pornography, it can’t be easy but here you are. Come to visit. Come to see at last your grandbaby, a little man to carry on.

  He is Freddy but not like Freddy—this one is loud and plump and strong. Not a quitter.

  Don’t be a quitter.

  “Where’s my mister?” you say.

  “Where’s my water?”

  Sit tight: here it comes.

  Here comes your boy to save you, digging in from above. You won’t even need to thank him—only lie there. It is all you can do.

  Bleed, and maybe he’ll find you. Breathe. Except the heat from your breath melts the snow against your face. The snow freezes to ice. It makes a mask of ice. That’s what kills you.

  EXCEPT IT DOESN’T.

  You live to be eighty. You could live to be a hundred and eighty, your grandchildren buried, your new wife dead, sitting in a wingback chair.

  Carry on, is your counsel. Don’t be a quitter.

  You stashed food for a year in the basement of our house, taught us to divine for water, to forage for windfall apples under the ice and snow. You taught us the stars to go by and which snakes were safe to catch and how to gut and skin. How to read wind and cloud for weather. How to make an arrow true.

  We needed toughening; you meant to toughen us.

  We lit fires with flint how you taught us. Learned our roots and berries. We’d snare rabbits, shoot geese. We’d know mushrooms, cache food. Train a pigeon to carry messages to Mother.

  MOTHER, WE LIVE in a tree house now the phoebes are happy in. We have water. We know a cave very near and kill rabbits. There is plenty here to do.

  CHIPMUNKS EAT AT the walls of our house. A bear rubs its back against the clapboards: that’s how it sounds. But that is only the arborvitae, Papa, pressed against the house by wind. Not to worry.

  Of course you worry. You stop breathing in your sleep. You find your hand across your face. Your wife has to wake to wake you, so spent she falls out of her chair.

  You wake gasping. Your mouth is grainy and dry. Your feet are such a long way from you, bleeding into the snow: not yours.

  They are too old to be yours. You can’t feel them.

  Papa, sleep.

  Let yourself rest. We’ll have a party for you tomorrow, a nice meal. I’ll spend the day in the kitchen.

  Isabel wants to hang streamers for you and have a water slide and balloons. She wants cupcakes and rainbow sprinkles. All her bunnies can come.

  WE WILL TAKE a walk when you wake.

  I’ll show you the fort my Isabel built with apples and yellow leaves. Our apples were sweet and wormy this year; all but the last have dropped from the trees. They lie in the grass, two tiny bites taken from them. Into two soft apples, Isabel pushed two sticks to stake her rabbit by. I’ll have to show you. Her rabbit wears a collar like a cat. She gets him tied up, the apples at his sides, to watch her, you have to watch me, jumping rope in the sun on the church steps, singing jumping songs, singing rabbit.

  FREDDY BROUGHT YOU a bird at a party once. He was blotchy and proud. “Here I got one, Papa.”

  “You dummy,” you called him, it’s true.

  You held the bird by the neck to show the others, the silver pin still in its breast. Everybody had a good laugh at my brother: he’d killed a mourning dove, not a pigeon.

  Freddy whacked that bird against the side of the barn until its insides were coming out.

  Freddy killed every bird he could get to after that, didn’t matter, every beetle and snake and rodent, and brought them to me as a cat does, and with him a
stick to hit him with. Freddy wanted all the wrong things, I knew. I hit him. I did what he asked me. I hit him until we both felt better.

  I HELPED HIM light a fire with his socks. Because he had lost his coat. This was later. You had bought him a new coat and he had lost it and we were afraid of what you would do.

  So we lit a fire in Freddy’s closet. We would say the coat was burned up in the fire. It wasn’t Freddy’s fault. His coat was hanging right where it was supposed to hang. There was a fire, we’d say. We were in the barn, we’d say. We didn’t know the first thing about it.

  HERE IS HOW Freddy went about it: he fed the ladder through the open window.

  It never mattered to Freddy how hard a thing was once he had the idea.

  He used the apple-picking ladder, tapered at the top for going up among the limbs and wider as you went down. He climbed a ladder with the ladder on his back—it would never have made the turn on the stairs.

  I went up there to look for a bow for you for the gift I had gotten for your birthday. I wanted a yellow bow. I wanted paper with purple dots. I have no idea what I meant to give you only how I meant to wrap it.

  There were paintings tacked to the rafters of that house that Freddy and I had painted: volcanoes the lava spat out of, a black and white smiling cow. He painted lightning, pyroclastic flow.

  The sun blazed in the attic windows. Flies knocked against the glass, stupid in the cold that was coming. The cold made a fringe of ice on the pond and the last apples swung in the wind in the trees and rotted in the bent-over grass.

  He had no shoes on. I thought: he has lost them.

  His feet were red from the cold from coming through the grass to feed the apple-picking ladder through the window. He didn’t care how hard. Freddy was stubborn. He had a feather in his hat. He lashed the ladder to his back to use his hands to climb—no way could he have made it up those stairs.

  The geese were moving. The bears were drunk on apples.

  The sun made buttery squares at that hour against the chimney where the ladder had fallen. Freddy kicked the ladder out when the time came. It had rained and his feet were muddy and the sun threw his shadow against the brick.