by River Jordan
“It’s gettin’ dark,” Trice says.
“Yep.”
“Looks like those dahlias could use some water. I’ll get them in the morning.”
“Well, then, while you’re at it, check those tomato plants for weevils, Mr. Daffin said the other day his were ate up with ’em.”
“All right.”
They are still swinging and rocking when Billy pulls up in the front yard.
“Hey, don’t you bring that dog up in here.” Magnus is saying it like she always does, but as usual it’s too late. Sonny Boy is out of the truck, down to the ground sniffing around.
“He ain’t gonna chase no cats, Magnus.”
General puts out his claws, stiffens his fur, growls low under his breath.
“Tell General that before he claws me to death.”
Magnus spits again through her fingers. She is aiming for the dog but falls an inch short of the target.
“Whatcha up to, Trice?”
“You’re lookin’ at it.” Trice is running her fingers through her hair; she is thinking about eclipses. She is picturing the one that she saw when she was little. How Kate had told her not to watch it or she would go blind.
“You up for taking a short ride?”
“What for?”
“I got something at the house that I want to show you.”
“Can’t it wait till morning?”
Magnus snorts under her breath. “Oh get up and go on. You ain’t doing nothin’.”
Trice is hard to get moving, but once she does, it’s as if all the lazy energy in the world comes out in one spurt. Then she can’t be still. If Magnus let it, this would drive her crazy. She wants Billy to get that hound dog out of here because all the cats have run up the trees and under the house, where he is nosing and sniffing. She can just picture them under there, crouched down, furred-up, shaking, ready to run or to fight to the last breath. She has tried to explain this to Billy to no end. It’s not that the dog will hurt the cats, it’s that they think he will and that’s enough for her. They are at home minding their own business. On top of this, she knows in an hour or two Trice will get wound up (for no apparent reason), and she will begin to talk to her about whatever foolish book she is reading and follow her around, try to get her to sit down and listen to her talk about Mr. Einstein like he were still alive as if she doesn’t have better things to do with herself with Wheel of Fortune coming on. Trice has been known to wander in and start reading right in the middle of a spin and that’s just about a sin. Not quite, but just about. Magnus starts mulling over what exact types of sins there are that may not be listed in the Bible. She is thinking if she was God, she’d make everybody sit down and be quiet during Wheel of Fortune.
“Trice, I need to get going if you’re coming.”
“All right, all right,” Trice says and gets up, releasing a tense ball of orange named Stella to the ground. Magnus names the cats. Trice buries them. Heavy work for her graceful hands, the very same ones that can go shooting off into the clouds and across the horizon when she needs to express her latest passion, but those dancer hands can grasp a shovel and hit the solid dirt with an iron will. Those hands will not back down. When the problem meets Trice, the outcome is really very simple, Trice wins. It is an unsuspecting advantage. One we might just be counting on.
Friday, 5:57 P.M.
Nehemiah is sitting at the kitchen table, holding a cup of coffee in both hands. He is staring into the cup so intensely that his eyes reflect back in the dark pool. He is still staring when Billy pulls up, still staring when he hears voices spilling up the porch steps. The screen door opens and Billy and Trice make their way into the house as Billy calls out, “Nehemiah?”
Finally he hears “Back here” in response. From the hallway the only thing evident is Billy’s bulk on all sides, but when he steps into the kitchen there is Trice behind him in a white T-shirt, a blue jacket, and jeans. The sight of her brings him an unexpected comfort.
“Well now,” she says, puts her hands in her back jeans pockets, leans against the kitchen doorframe.
“Yeah, I seem to have that effect on people.”
“You look like your old self.” Trice says, and I look from Nehemiah to Trice and back to Nehemiah. I write down electric current squared.
Nehemiah opens his palms, looks at the empty skin. “We need to talk, Trice. We need to go over your dream again.”
Billy walks to the counter, pours a cup of coffee. Gets the milk and sugar out. “Trice, you want coffee?”
“Might as well, I have the feeling it’s gonna be a very long night. And it wasn’t as much a dream, Nehemiah, as an awakening.”
Now they are where they are meant to be. Circled. Listening. Touching the very fringes of the truth. I want to shout, to encourage them, to say, “Yes, yes, now you’re moving. Hurry. Hurry.” But that’s not my job. My fingers stay wrapped around the liquid, my eyes focused on the fire.
Nehemiah is contemplating how much to say, which stories to tell and which ones to hold at bay. He decides one piece will connect to the other. There will be no telling without all the details.
Billy figures they need a starting point. Figures he should be good for something, so he offers to break the ice. “Nehemiah, why don’t you tell Trice about you knocking me down to get right back in that bed today and sleep like you were a dead man.”
“Trice, have you ever heard a chiming clock down at the diner?” Nehemiah ignores Billy’s prompting, tries to assimilate. To figure everything out. And hopes, so very much, that he is not trapped all alone in some strange hallucinogenic psychosis. He thinks if anyone is going to be in the river of strange with him, it will be Trice.
“No.” She narrows her eyes, says in a hushed voice, “but I am hearing one right now.”
Nehemiah and Billy freeze their positions, hold their breath, strain to hear the chimes.
“Guys, I’m just kidding.”
“Look here, Trice, I am serious, and I came down here on the hem of your dream, so the best thing you can do is help me out here.”
Oh, just look at those righteous ruffled feathers. A man holding doing the right thing out before him like a martyr’s trophy.
“Look, excuse me if I get a kick out of the possibility, just the slight possibility, that I’m not the only one swimming in the river of strange.”
Nehemiah raises his brows. “Did I just say that?”
“What?” This comes from Billy and Trice both.
“The river of strange, did I just say that aloud?”
“All right, Nehemiah, let’s start with the clock then.” Billy is trying to corral their words. “Let’s talk about the clock, because I wasn’t really gonna bring it up. I guess you figured out that there ain’t no chiming clock in the diner. Never has been.”
I wish I could tell you that they were making sense. That they were finally getting somewhere. That the clock I always hear was on their side, in their favor. But they are struggling so hard to make sense of things that they are missing the things that make sense. They are looking in the hard-to-reach places when they should be looking at what’s right before them. Right before them at the center of the table. Right where it’s always been. But they don’t see it.
Nehemiah tries to build logical bricks, tries his very best to lay the skills of Washington, the skills he has worked so long to perfect, on the table. To dissect the problem and develop a program, a plan to get to the other side. He is still trying to do this when Billy gets up and rummages through the refrigerator. (His stomach is always the first to growl.) He pulls bologna, mayonnaise, cheese from the refrigerator and puts a loaf of white bread on the table. It’s a self-serve dinner. Trice picks up potato chips from the kitchen counter, opens them, and walks around with her hand inside the bag. Before the night is over, she will eat them all. Nehemiah will eat nothing.
Billy wants to voice that he’s just along for the ride, but what he really wants to say is that he sure is concerned about his brot
her acting peculiar. He is used to the peculiar antics of Trice. Everything from a cat sleeping on the motor and her knowing it before the car cranks to showing up saying, we got to drive over to Troy and pick up somebody from the bus station right now. Never mind what he was fixin’ to do. Never mind that she doesn’t know who or why or what for. But off he goes to satisfy her every whim, again, and lo and behold if Joshua Johnson wasn’t standing there fresh out of boot camp and ready to surprise his momma but had forgotten all about how he was gonna get from the bus station in Troy to Shibboleth except to walk it out. (Boot camp had done him some good but in some ways he was still the same old Joshua. Nothing another decade wouldn’t fix.) Billy had just looked at Trice (who never rubbed it in when she was right) and shook his head and said, “Hey, boy, you looking for a ride home?”
So all the antics of Trice were buried under his skin until they had become, well, just about normal for her. But with Nehemiah, well there was just that one great episode (and even now he can see Nehemiah walking through the flames carrying Blister in his arms). But besides that time, Nehemiah had been as normal as a life can seem to be. He is beginning to wonder if bringing Nehemiah down here was such a good idea.
“About this awakening,” Billy waves a sandwich, his cheese falling out of the edges of the bread, “stop crunching, Trice, and just tell it.”
“Already told it.” She glares at him as she shoves more chips into her mouth.
“Well, tell it again.”
Trice tries to recapture the pictures and to put words to the images of what she sees. “Black wings,” she says. And the word dark ness. And it occurs to her to use the word eclipse. It occurs to her strongly that this is the right word. The word she has unknowingly been searching for for days. “People are not expecting the eclipse,” she says. “And it isn’t a natural one. Not this one. It is brought in on black wings.” She closes her eyes. “On dark desire.”
“Black wings and dark desire my rear end,” Billy says. “Trice, you been reading too many dang books.”
Now can you imagine the human right-thinking mind trying to fashion sense out of Trice’s description? Can you imagine trying to figure out your purpose in a plan that has no boundary lines? No noticeable rule book? But that is exactly what Nehemiah is struggling with. He is trying to figure it out when all he has to do is remember. Remember. I want to say the word with all my might. But I am willing what isn’t mine to give. I am thinking of the liquid between my fingers, tracing the word remember in the air, but they don’t see the word any more than they see me. It’s not my purpose. I can’t reach them. Not that way.
I am contemplating this, watching their blundering attempts, when suddenly there is a crash outside, the sound of something heavy falling, which brings quizzical eyes all around and a howl from Sonny Boy beneath the porch. The three rise from the table, move down the hallway single-file in quick succession. First Nehemiah, then Trice, then Billy in the rear. A childhood band of three, they marched this way together all their lives before Nehemiah left. Now they march that way again. Have taken up the rhythm of their lives in unison.
They step out onto the porch. There is a slight breeze but not a wind strong enough to push that hard. The moon is hanging, almost but not quite full. The moss on the trees is swaying slightly. Billy reaches back inside the door, flips on the porch light with his right hand, his eyes still fastened in front of him. Beyond the porch railing, leaning against Old Blue, lies a branch of the oak. It is a large branch, not a loose limb dangling but a strong arm of the north face of the tree. Billy says, “Hold on,” and goes to retrieve a flashlight. He returns and the three walk toward the limb now lying partially on the ground, partially against the side of the truck, its smaller limbs falling forlornly into the truck bed. Sonny Boy sits at the foot of the limb, howls as if he is voicing its pain. The flashlight beam runs up and down the branch, around the yard, for a sign of a reason. The light is cast up to the tree, where the white, splintered shoulder is visible, raw and naked.
“That tree have dry rot?” Nehemiah asks. He asks this even though the flashlight tells the story. He can still see the green life pumping.
“Nope.”
Billy runs his hands along the tree branch as if in apology, before he lifts it up with a grunt, pulls it over to the foot of the tree, and gently lowers it to the ground.
It’s Trice then who says, “Why don’t we go back inside and start over?”
And they nod in the solemn darkness as Billy says, “Come on, Sonny, it’s all over now.” But what he senses, what I’m privy to know for certain, is the fact that it has just begun.
They return to their chairs, sit in the same seats, but they’re wearing different faces. If any of them had any lingering doubts that something peculiar was about that was going to be neatly squared away on Nehemiah’s long weekend home, those thoughts are put to rest. They don’t spend time wondering about the tree. They don’t try to figure out if it was a freak streak of lightning or an odd break waiting to happen. They don’t talk about the tree at all. They’re beyond that. They pick up where they left off. At the word eclipse.
Trice asks for a piece of paper and a pen. She begins to write down the words they are saying, to take notes. She doesn’t write their thoughts down in linear arrangement, as in one-two-three, the way that Nehemiah or Billy would. She simply writes the words in loose arrangement. She draws circles around them. Arrows pointing from one to another or tiny interrupted dotted lines from circle to circle. She writes the word clock. The word eclipse. The word path. She writes down dreams. When Nehemiah talks about eating for hours at the diner and how the time had disappeared, she writes the word TIME in big, bold letters, and in another, much smaller space the word memory. And after Nehemiah has told the hardest part for him to tell, the part about the gold dust on his hands, between his fingers, in the curves of the quilt threads, she writes down gold and dust and links them together with a heart, and never once questions the validity of Nehemiah’s story.
Billy says simply, “Momma would like gold dust on her bed.”
Now if only Kate could see their heads bent and determined, could see Billy’s huge hands pawing at the table cloth, pinching it into wrinkles and then flattening it out again. If Twila could see Nehemiah’s big brown eyes thinking their hardest. If Magnus could just peek over Trice’s shoulders and see the pattern she is making, the weaving and the winding, she would recognize something from a long time ago. They all would. But right now, these grown-up children are on their own. The guiding eyes and voices of the past have all gone to bed, or beyond. And there is no one near to guide them into clear air. At least, not yet.
They alternately sigh under their breath. Nehemiah no longer wonders if his coming home to Shibboleth was a wild goose chase. He makes a mental note to call the office in the morning. To ask for a few more days and hope the senator understands. Trice is hoping that Magnus isn’t waiting up near the door, her housecoat bunched up around her knees; she doesn’t want to field the questions. She is too tired. She folds her note paper and slides it into her back pocket.
It’s just before midnight when Nehemiah and Billy drop Trice off at the front door and wait for her to go inside. They are both too tired to talk and too wound up not to.
“Do you remember when Trice first showed up?” Billy asks him, as he watches her opening the door, turning around to raise her hand in the headlights, her lips mouthing, “Good-bye.”
“No.”
“I guess not. You were not quite two. Still,” he puts the truck in reverse, reaches across the seat to look behind him, “it’s the kind of thing that would stick in your mind. Not every day a baby comes to town, you know, by itself.”
“That’s what the stories are for, Billy. To fill in all the unknown spaces.” These are some of the first great words that have come out of Nehemiah’s mouth. The first words that are good medicine. I smile as I write them down. Liquid on Fire.
Nehemiah is quiet for moment. “You
know, now they have all kinds of tests, and computers, and ways to track things. I guess if somebody tried hard enough, they could get to the truth about it. Track something down. I could ask around in Washington.”
“Trice might not want that. She seems content to be who she is. You know?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Nehemiah squints in the dark, looks into the distance down the road. “Hey, turn right and head down Main, will you?”
“What for?”
“Just want to drive around a little. Check some things out.”
And so they do. Billy drives down Main, circles the Heritage Oak, and they both picture the oak tree at home with the severed limb. He drives around the square twice, passing the oak, the Piggly Wiggly, and Kate’s. It’s locked up tight, all lights out. They drive on aimlessly, through the emptied streets. Nehemiah cranks the window down, and the sweet smell of spring gets thicker. The promise of wondrous, blooming things, but peculiarly mixed in is the scent of their already dying before they have begun. It is the smell of flowers in a funeral home, overpoweringly sweet, carrying the scent of death in every seed, on every petal. Occasionally, a dog barks over the transom of the small city streets. Sonny Boy is not inclined to answer. Nehemiah thinks about him in the back. “You want to put that dog up here with us?”
“He’s got a name.”
“I’m just asking.”
Everything appears to be in order. Every sleeping thing. Then something crawls up Nehemiah’s back. Nothing he can put his finger on, but a creeping sensation that climbs up the back of his spine. A low whistle escapes through his teeth.
“What?” Billy asks plain and simple.
“Something’s not right here.” Nehemiah leans forward, peers to the left and to the right out the front windshield. “Something’s changed.”
“Been a long time, Nehemiah, something’s bound to change.”
“Not this kind. This is dark, definitely dark.” Nehemiah has a sudden parched feeling, an I can’t swallow, can’t get enough water feeling. “And it’s coming from somewhere. Actually coming from somewhere.” He looks up and down the streets again, rubs his throat. “Let’s take a ride down to the springs, Billy.”
