I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

  I stood under him. His foot crossed under his other foot like the feet of Christ in pictures. He sort of turned in the wind. I thought to hit him. I was wearing my pleated skirt.

  I sat a long while at the window up there with Freddy at my back and looked out. A few apples hung in the trees still where the limbs were too weak to climb. The trees were young still. We had to go to our knees to mow under them.

  That became my job, a boy’s job. The sky heaped up behind me. The storms came in from the west in that house over the fruitful hills.

  HEAR THAT?

  My husband laughs in his sleep. He wakes himself up laughing.

  Otherwise you can forget he is here.

  ONCE A COWBIRD flapped out of the chimney in your room. Its wing was broken. A cowboy bird, Freddy called it.

  It’s funny what you remember, funny what you forget.

  Once a bear came and ate the bees—left the honey, ate the bees. Pulled the bird feeders down, drunk on windfall apples.

  I GET OUT of bed with the baby and carry him across the room. He nearly glows, looking up at me, his face so plump and pale.

  My husband has left his shoes in the middle of the room. It has been raining and his shoes are muddy.

  He goes on laughing. The owl starts up in the orchard. The leather splits and the toes turn up. He doesn’t sound like any man I know.

  Count your blessings, Mother always said: he doesn’t wake himself up screaming. He is a happy drunk; he dreams funny dreams; you can forget he is even here.

  THAT OWL. WE have barn owls, horned owls, eagles. Owl is a funny word.

  That’s a barn owl, calling across the field. I leave our ladder stood up in the tree the owl likes and, nights I can’t sleep, climb toward him. He holds himself very still.

  If he has flown, I won’t know, you can’t hear them. I could knock right into him. Sometimes my knees give out. It is unnerving: to be seen so clearly by something you can scarcely see.

  PACHEW, PACHEW, PACHEW, you said, and aimed your cane at my children.

  FREDDY WAS BAREFOOT; his feet were muddy. One foot went over the other as if to stand in the air on himself.

  After my brother died, a redtail attacked you. You were riding your spotted mare, who threw you. The hawk went after your eyes.

  You had a redtail stuffed and the head of a moose. A turkey, a small bear. You had hooves of elk made into ashtrays with a skinny fringe of hide. You had a pair of geese hollowed out and stuffed, lifting off, friends for life. A gift to yourself on your birthday.

  Your boy killed himself on your birthday. This is punishment enough for many lifetimes. For this, you don’t need me.

  I’LL MAKE A fresh cake. Corn pudding, how you like, and collards. I’ll soak a ham. Maybe I’ll polish your shoes the way I used to.

  We’ll sing a pleasing song—your wife and I, and Isabel. That’s the trick: sing a pleasing song. Dress yourself up pretty.

  Let me know what you hope for for your birthday, Papa, something small, a watch, a wallet. Soap on a rope—the old standby. A gleaming golden cane.

  Only ask for it.

  If there is anything you want—someone will get it for you.

  My daughter will. Your wife will, or I will. Somebody always has.

  MATRIMONIAL

  Driving west to be married, you broke out in hives. We blamed it on the shirt I had bought you—stiff, never washed. That night we ate rib eyes in a dusty arroyo and dug a hole in a cliff with a spoon. Lighted a fire to burn sage in. The hives reddened and spread. You couldn’t sleep for itching. We gave up sleeping. I stood behind you. Together we made a shadow of one body, four arms, thrown against the cliff from the moon. Raptor. Two-headed worm. And went at each other until sunup: What if, what if, what if?

  PUT ON YOUR CROWDED BODY

  It is hot. It is hot and I can scarcely breathe and you cannot quite see me. I am standing beneath the stairs in sunlight. It is afternoon. You have been gone a long time. Years, even. You could be my brother—you favor him. My lover. You favor him. Everything we did together we could have done together in a week. Instead I saw you by addition, by love unspent, by remembering somebody other. Of you I had little to remember—your mighty arms, the bird moving over the muscle. You smelled of wood, of feathers. For a moment now, the briefest glimpse. I stood beneath the stairs. Frightful.

  WHAT BEGINS WITH BIRD

  I start the bulbs in the window the day she flies in from Mississippi. I stand them up in the bowls of gravel I scraped with a spoon from the driveway—hours ago, when the ground still showed. Now the yard is a blank of snow. The crocuses are buried and broken.

  The bulbs have gone spongy or peeling and split from sitting in paper sacks too long. I should have planted them in October, picked a hole in the pebbly ground. But back then I had things to do yet, things I could do, and I can’t now. So I force hyacinth on the sill.

  I sit among the brocade chairs and wait for the smallest changes: his lazy eye to open, a sound at the name in my mouth. We have named the boy after the city we succumbed to marriage in, in a storm as freaky as this one: wind from the north for Easter, our sky a pink velour. Our trees are as black as shadows of trees, pressed flat in this light and moaning.

  Reno, Reno, Reno—without thinking, when we thought of his name, what a trial they are, those Rs. Weno, we know. But we didn’t know it then.

  My sister will call the boy something else, no doubt, as soon as she has seen him, not sweet pea, nor pumpkin (I do), but by her weekly sweetheart’s name, or somebody lost or dead. They die off early, turn up their toes in babbling sleep, down where my sister lives. She will arrive with photographs, mangled faces, folded into her pockets.

  Or it could be the snow has stopped her, turned her back for home. We call it that, all of us: home: it is a family habit, this turning away, a lie we began her lifetime ago, gathered over her, immobile: a lump, for months, in her crib.

  My sister lives in an institution. The place is built in the dusky bottomland of the Mississippi River, among stands of trifling hardwoods overrun by the South’s Great Vine. Even in winter the trees bow their heads to that gray roving appetite, a great hunger—acres consumed by the pestilence of kudzu.

  Nothing grows as quickly here. The ivy is slow and civil. Our trees bend their heads for hours, a week, then toss off their burdens of snow. This can’t last. A day of melt and the goose will be back to jab at the grassy patches.

  Only the rabbit, in the surprise of cold, keeps to her routine: brazen creature, fixed as stone at the foot of the leaky birdbath. Frost has split the concrete bowl, parted the fluted column. These rotten New England winters. But everything else is calm: our one raccoon, the fat goose in our yard most mornings.

  I tap at the glass. Not a flutter. Even the rabbit won’t scare. She will keep to her place at the birdbath while night comes and day again, waiting—who can say for what? Instructions, I suppose, a murmur, a nudge, from her sack of eggs.

  Small as he is my boy trumpets, stiffens his back a little. These are my instructions. But there is nothing I know to do for him, nothing to do but cluck and drift and wait here for my sister. We pass such liquid, unmoored days, no sleep, and only outside the seeping beech, the rising snow to mark time by.

  Love, love. I want nothing.

  My boy draws up again inside me, nights, small body rocked shut, sweet thrill—to feel him pitch and tumble. The sea at night is yellow cream, a tongue from the waking shore.

  Too soon—to be asked to speak, to rise and walk. They are slow, my tribe, by habit, to come (it is a birth, after all, not a funeral)—but even so this is too soon for me. I am still jerking awake at night and dressing for the hospital: the chalky, sudden sky, the gray road, salted, gritty, slush hissing from our wheels.

  Still bleeding, the stuff dropping from me in great gobs.

  I say none of this. What use? We are found out. There is no saying no to my sister. I hear her grinding her teeth o
ver the phone, heels dug in, and her father, ours, our father has bought her the ticket to come. So we ready. I start the bulbs in the window—something more to watch for; I buy wrapped chocolate eggs. My turn—it has been decided, and there is no getting loose from my father, either, even from afar.

  He calls ahead to say to me, “They say she’s been funny lately.”

  “Funny?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We move on to weather because this is also our habit; I am given the nationwide report before he asks about my son.

  “Our Mr. Sun,” I say, when he has embellished the heat in the Middle West with stories of rotting bodies, the elderly done in by stroke in the tenements of Chicago. This is when he seems to remember—that he ought to ask, to have already asked. We are both quiet, quietly breathing, and then my father plunges ahead.

  “So how’s the baby? Baby okay?” he says.

  “Yes, yes—” he must be, though I wake him as so many mothers do to be certain he is still breathing. He grins in his sleep—these are dreams, I say, and startles. An arm flaps up. The lid of one eye heaves open.

  Dear lump. I could round his pointy head, work the flat patch where he sleeps on it, the notched resilient plates, the bone still spongy as the bulbs I found to force in the gloom this morning. But I don’t; it won’t last; I leave him be.

  I leave the plastic band on his wrist where Nurse Jane wrote my name—how strange, that you cannot at first even pick out your own from all the other babies. Mine has eleven dimples—dimples instead of knuckles and one on each side of his nose; in the fat of his leg is a pucker the color of pencil lead, a stitch drawn deep and tightly and tied off at the bone.

  I knew him in the dark this way. I felt for the stitch in the dark of my room where the big windows looked at the Merrimack, the viscid fenced canal; I watched school children pasting up paper eggs and tousling in the hall and, once, one boy swung his lace-ups up to catch in the branch of a tree. They dropped, and the other boys spat and hooted. I kept it dark inside in my room for him so that when they brought him to me, I knew him by his smell. He smelled of lanolin, clean and old and animal and bitter to me then and now and I knew him then as I do now by the feel of the stitch in his leg, not a stitch, nothing that will heal.

  There is this, and the plastic band I will leave on his wrist until Sister has come and gone, my name, we had not named him yet, and there are too the ways in me to say as I do mine:

  The cut in me, seeping still, the grinning stapled mouth: proof that he has been here, proof that he is gone. Here is where they found him, red and bawling, lifted him plumply out.

  My belly skin a lizard’s, shrunk to shimmering and scale.

  And here—this dimming streak, gray as ash, that marks me thatch to sternum; this line drawn through my navel that darkened as we grew. We grew, we grew.

  I WOULD HAVE carried him in me for years.

  And yet here in my face is the vessel I burst trying to push him out. Too late—by then he had already outgrown me, grown into me, a leggy, dogged stalk of boy left to bolt to seed. He left in my forehead the fine mesh of roots that living things send out, the paths, the swerving abruptions of blood, the friable clump in the floor of a pot, as though I had needed first, to birth him, to tear him from my brain.

  I do not try to hide it. I obscure no proof, no possible claim.

  I am claimed in the old animal way—the tails of my shirts, my thick brassieres, hair and neck and cupping ear: give him air and the spigot is on. All’s well. All the lights green for Reno, his penis a plump blue cone. I roll it in its sheath between my fingers, gap the bloody pinprick he pisses on me through.

  And if he pisses on Sister? She will skrauk like a crow and giggle, wince, and I will be near, watching over, looking out for her as I used to do, as I look out for snow that slides from a roof, and listen—for the strained-rope sound a branch will make before it tears from the head of a tree.

  Who could trust her?

  I am watchful these new days anyway of anything that moves—small dogs, a fat goose, his own father.

  And my sister is always moving, even when she means to sit, or we are, one of us, the rest of us since Mother, we are moving her around. Giving her instructions, keeping her out of the way.

  She has a way of making her absence felt. You know better—you should not have let her go. But she is bored, nervous, sullen. She grows weary, quickly, of family, needs somebody new to love. She comes to you for a visit and next you know she has disappeared. It is a monsoon, or a blizzard; you have made your nest in the desert, earthquakes coming, or it is the year of the romance of slums. Scarcely matters. She will wander out into anything, take up with anyone, drift off with the nearest miscreant to look at his tattoos.

  I am like her in this; I move away. Even an infant finds safety in motion.

  I never settled for years long enough for my father to send her to me, to track me down with news. But he is a good tracker. Give him time, he finds you, elated some: some twister gouged the riverbanks, floods in Tennessee. The dying bees all summer. All preamble, priming, the news delivered first that you can do nothing about. And then, your sister—calling her not by name of course but by title, binding clause. The slippery possessive. Your sister.

  My daughter. Under what condition does he call her that—her, I think, or me?

  IT USED TO be we tracked down a new place for her every few months, every year. Our father’s house, the YMCA—disastrous. Some school near here in Boston that packed her off in a blink to the loony bin. A problem of climate, my father decided. These dreary New England winters. The desert was next, saguaros and sun, the sobriety of a mineral landscape. She burned down her apartment, dropped a lighted cigarette into a heap of dirty laundry. That was Phoenix, and she was pregnant, a condition nobody noticed until she was six months along. Then the family engaged, oh, oh—moved in for the crisis. We are a family that loves a good crisis. Birth control? I’d have thought that you . . .

  None of us had bothered.

  Our father found me, enlisted me; it was a time in my life he could find me, when he could call in the troops, as he said. He flew me out to Phoenix first to see if I could persuade her. My father knew of a clinic not far from him, convenient to him, in Atlanta. I was to fly her back over the country to him, to the house we left our boxes in, in the town we had once called home. He had his TripTiks in order. He had his prim new wife. He had mapped out places to show to his wife on the drive to the clinic in Atlanta.

  On the flight west I had my soothing, brief heroic moment, or the thought of one, the big idea. Nothing lasts with me. But for a moment I thought I would take her in, be her good big sister—quick, quick, before Daddy comes. Six months. By then a baby is swallowing; it is opening and closing its eyes. It had begun to hear, to know her voice. It must have turned toward the light as mine did, as I felt him face the sun.

  ANY LIGHT, EVEN this gray gloaming, my boy turns his head to see, though he still sees nearly nothing, no distance, mostly only we keepers, mostly only me.

  She stays put now, my sister; the grounds are fenced and gated.

  Another bellow—raspy and prolonged. I am beginning to know the difference—between hunger, say, and fear. I lift him to me. I am dripping milk. His mouth opens quick as a bird’s.

  My breasts are stiff, prickly, lumped. He is rooting, and then uprooting me—that’s what it feels like. I feel the tug in the wing of my shoulder and in the ball and socket; he is drawing my ribs together, cinching the narrowing slots; he is dragging silt from my bones.

  All’s well. Night soon. Above us, the snow ticks down. No distance. No lapsed horizon bleeding pink beyond the flattened trees.

  Little raccoon, funny monkey. He drinks and drinks and dozes. Yawns, and the trough in his wrinkled palate shows, slender and deep for sucking. A blister fills on his lip again, the skin of his first mouth already shed, the pale strips frayed and loosened.

  Our rabbi
t flickers her ear. A squirrel drops out of the gingko tree at the far gray rim of our yard. Everything in its place; a place for everything. A patch of dirt for the sickly elm, a barn for broken china, rake and nail and rusting plow, a crib he will soon grow into.

  IT IS ALL always too soon for me, the crib in the wings, the coming melt, the year’s slow resurrection. The steadfast family wagon—my sister fetched from the airport—yawing into the drive.

  I lay the boy down in his wicker tub and wheel him away from the door, from the surge of cold when it opens and damp and the squalling of crows in the heads of the trees and the plows groaning out on the highway.

  Ready? I think. Ready? Because it has already begun.

  My sister is out of the car and running at us before George even opens his door, all teeth and arms and flagging hair, a sidelong lurch and stutter. It is motion, the infant’s comfort, mine, which gives her away. When she stops in the doorway and holds out her hands, waiting for me to come to her, nothing seems so wrong. She is pretty, and she has mastered the phony, square-bottomed smile taught in better homes: clean gums, corrected rows of teeth.

  I move to her to see what I already know, cannot—would not—keep from seeing: the tremor, the scars, her bitten lip, the puddles of shadow around her eyes.

  She stamps the snow from her sandals, standing wobbling in the doorway, the cold still streaming in. She hugs me, knocks against my chest. It always feels to me that her heart runs rough, won’t idle, wants to race and quit; it is worse every time I see her and tells more clearly what is to come. They come mildly even now to me: days I cannot stop shaking. Another family habit—inherited, her tremor, worse with age (what isn’t?) among the women in our tribe.

  She keeps holding me so I stand there, stroking her hair, feeling her shudder against me. The first hour or two is an act with us, as with the early weeks of love. Easy enough, early on, to be sweeter than you are, to keep your few good secrets. But give a girl time, weather, meals. Quit closing the shithouse door. Pretty soon, this is me, I am chewing my tongue just to sit in the kitchen and listen to her, to the squalor of her feeding.