Come Sunday

by Bradford Morrow

  “Is he going to be okay?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  We ate our pieces of custard pie.

  snake the size of a train

  Gerald

  May 1956

  SEVEN-THIRTY BY the sun’s long shades. The dun mule she let loose from the stables, and out he trotted into the dewy meadow. The chickens she freed from the coop. She spread feed at which they began to peck. She collected eggs. She mucked the stalls and milked the Guernseys. In two heavy pails she brought the steaming milk up to her mother. By walking in steady steps across the lot she never sloshed a drop of milk on to the ground.

  In half an hour her mother finished with purifying the milk in the double boiler and it was time for her to go to work. Uncle had set off early with two men who were surveyors. They were going to the area farthest away from the house, a remote section of land referred to as the pells. No one knew why it was called the pells. They had set out on horseback. Besides their surveying equipment the men carried rifles. Indian squatters sometimes camped along the creek that ran through the pells. This region was not so much open range as it was plateau scrubland and eroded short cliffs.

  Mama Opal told her to shelve Ball jars of mincemeat, preserves, tripe, marmalade, down in the storm cellar. All the jars were carefully labeled and dated by hand. She looked at her mother’s profile caught in the morning sunlight as she untied the apron strings with both hands behind her back. A stray wisp of hair hung down in her face. It was afire in the rays that streamed through the window.

  Her breasts hung fuller in her blouse than Hannah remembered them before. She stood staring at her as she unknotted the white bow. “Did you hear what I said, Hannah?” she said. She hung her apron on a hook. “There’s a mouse that’s got into a sack of meal down there, too. Why don’t you clean that up while you’re at it, okay?” She sat at the kitchen table to tie up the long laces of her boots. “You’re quiet this morning,” she said.

  Her shoulders drew up.

  Mama Opal was hugging her. The girl was shaking; “I’ve got to go to work now,” she said, her words spoken over Hannah’s hair. As she clung to her mother Mr. Johnson’s hands came into her imagination, and she wondered what things they did with her body, under her clothes. Hannah pushed her face into mama Opal’s shoulder. Hannah’s eyes were closed, mouth open for breath. Mama Opal allowed her to hold tight for a few moments, then placed her hands on her shoulders, backed away and squarely faced her.

  “I hate it here,” the girl said.

  The woman pulled her to her again, partly in order that Hannah not be able to see in her face her own confusion.

  “I hate it,” she repeated into the fabric of the blouse; the fustian smelled clean, was crinkly with sun.

  She released the girl. “Hannah, we don’t have any choice. You know that. It won’t always be like this. I’m working saving every penny I earn. You’re just going to have to try a little bit harder.” She was gathering her things for work.

  “I hate Mr. Johnson.”

  She stopped, looked at Hannah. “Mr. Johnson’s a good man.”

  Hannah bit her lip: she knew now that mama Opal knew.

  I hate uncle, too, she said. Or, she thought she had said it. She heard the words, heard them as if they had been spoken, but mama Opal’s response made her wonder whether she had only imagined it.

  “That’s more like it,” mama Opal was saying. “There’s my little lady.”

  I hate uncle and I hate Nicky who had to leave us too

  “Mama loves you too, darling,” and she kissed her on the forehead and went out the door.

  Hannah followed her. The door clapped shut behind them, pulled by the tight spring. At the slap of the wood in its frame Hannah heard the cocks crowing and the mule began to bray, thinking it was about to be fed again. Mama Opal climbed into the car. As she pulled away Hannah raised her arm through force of habit and twisted her hand back and forth on its wrist, waving goodbye. The Chevy faded into the field—gears grinding, as she had trouble with the stick shift—and Hannah let her arm drop to her side.

  The jars of pickled meats and fruit, vegetable preserves, she began to transfer down into the storm cellar. She had to stoop (she’d grown to be taller than her mother since they first arrived—good food, uncle said) to avoid butting her head on the fat, hewn-wood crossbeams that bore the weight of the house overhead. It was cool, and deep-dirt-smelling. Every jar, every tool and utensil, five-gallon barrels of fresh water, extra clothing, blankets, medical kit, benches, tins, lamps and oil, the rifle and magazines of ammunition, steamer trunk—everything was arranged meticulously.

  Mama Opal had continued to can preserves and pickle meats at uncle’s insistence, even though there seemed to be more supplies set by down here than there were even upstairs in the cabinets of the kitchen. Back in darkness, walled along an edge by the foundation, was a root cellar fairly bursting with stored vegetables. These uncle rotated by season, removing the spoiled carrots, potatoes, beets, and replacing them with whatever crop was in season. The aged vegetables, the unused, went into the compost heap.

  After she finished storing the jars, she swept up the cornmeal that had been gnawed at by mice. She put the good cornmeal into four one-gallon jars, and set mousetraps. Grain had spilled under the steamer trunk, and Hannah turned to pull it away from the wall by its leather handles, but it was heavy and would not budge. It was locked. She looked around for a key to open it, to remove some of the things inside so she could move it. The key she found on an old square-head nail.

  What she found stacked in tissue inside the trunk was not what she might have expected. Photograph albums. Dozens of them. The mildewy odor reminded her of uncle’s bedroom and reflexively she glanced up the stairs. Two pullets had strayed up to the rectangular opening, curious; they began again to peck. Hannah lifted one of the albums out, and opened it. Inside was a bold signature written in black ink. The surname was the same as uncle’s; mama Opal’s maiden name. Gerald Mann. Dated 1928: Yucatan, where was that? She turned to the first photograph, careful not to break the hinge on the old leather binding, which colored her palms with dust. The silver had begun to come up on the plate.

  In the photograph two men stood side by side, facing the camera. They both were dressed in light-colored clothes, and wore old-style hip boots. In pencil an arrow was pointed at the man on the left and his name was written, lightly, Henry Mercer (and on the back: “H.M. inventor of poured concrete, American original, a fine fellow”). Flanking them were small-statured, dark-skinned men, each of whom held a large heavy knife out at shoulder height in a kind of formal salute. Spread out before this group in the grass were various objects which appeared to be tools, primitive tools, and they were arranged to make a nice display. Everyone was smiling. Behind them Hannah saw blocks of dressed stone that were partly overgrown with vines. Birds and square heads of men ornamented with curlicues for hair and with rough misshapen noses had been carved into the stone. It must’ve been a foreign land; she had never seen such spiky plants before.

  She turned the pages of the album, and there were more photographs of similar scenes. She thought she recognized something familiar about the eyes of one of the men who appeared in many of the plates. It was surely Gerald Mann.

  There were also three books. A squat volume, the size of her hand, cranberry red (the good red) with a green ribbon and the edges of the paper painted like an exotic bird’s plumage. The cloth was frayed, water stains flowered the bottoms of pages. United States with an Excursion into Mexico. Handbook for Travellers, edited by Karl Baedeker, Leipsig, 1893. With maps that folded out.

  The first map was of New York City. Home. The city looked like a flattened, sandy-hued centipede, complete with legs along both sides of the body that stuck out into the water. It was water because it was blue. The legs were numbered. They were docks. Extending back from the centipede head there were—she counted—forty-eight legdocks on one side and on the other, seventy-four.
Its grayish snout was called The Battery, and digestive organs were similar to a trout’s, so that, if one were gutting New York City with one’s pocketknife, midway between gills and tail were stomach, heart, liver, the rest. Broadway was a spinal cord; there was a heart labeled Washington Sq.; stomach, Central Park; a liver, Croton Reservoir.

  Then there was the what was this? xv. Bookes of R Ouidius Naso—what a name—entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding, Gent.—

  “Hannah?”

  She restacked the albums and grabbed the third book off the pile,

  Lucretius. De Rerum Natura, ed. H.A.J. Munro, 1st edition, 1865. This she hid by wrapping it in the burlap sack the mice had chewed through. She stuffed it into the pail of cornmeal sweepings.

  “Here,” she shouted, easing down the vaulted lid of the trunk, locking it.

  “What you doing down in there?” uncle said.

  “Putting up bottles like mama told me.”

  “Well, that’s enough.”

  She came up into the light.

  Uncle ignored her; he gazed down into the mouth of the cellar, hands on hips, thumbs looped into the leather thongs of his suspenders. He descended the narrow steps, crabbing some as he made his way, peered in, closed the inner tin-covered door at the foot, came back up, pulled closed the double doors.

  Then he stared hard at Hannah. He said nothing. Hannah saw his eyes were red as the binding on his brother’s Baedeker—that’s right your brother Gerald the one that’s the ghost

  The pail got heavier in her hand. She looked down at the pail, half expecting it to say something, too, like loosen your grip on my handle little girl, or, get this cornmeal out of my tub or I’ll tell him what else you got in here. Wash me, polish me with the chamois, treat me like I’m silver not tin, hang me on my peg and be careful about my constitution for I easily dent, now get on with it there’s a good girl to make a pail proud.

  Lucretius

  June 1956

  HANNAH’S A-DREAMING. Up in the hayloft. She is conducting a symphony.

  These things, not ripe, and hidden still to others, are read by me. Vesper star, emerald star, shepherd’s star, hardly before the sun has set you twinkle, and all of us that ever lived in the wonder-working earth have watched you in your progress from ships, mountains, plains, and islands. You are a goddess, too, morning star, star of generations that make other generations. Who wards away all the winds. Who the vesper sparrow and sparrow hawk and all the birds of the plains discuss every day from morning to night and without ever getting tired of saying your name and talking all about the many things you have done and can do. And you who are the one all the cattle low for, and horses neigh and jenny and jack bray for, whose light can be seen through any telescope even at noon. All these things of nature copy you they like to pretend they are you just like I like to pretend you’re my sister. You, the one the mystery words were named for: quo magis aeternum da dictis, diva, leporem.

  A ripe black fly buzzed slow and fat in the rafters, creating the only sound in the loft except the regular rustle of paper as she turned the pages of uncle Gerald’s volume of Lucretius. She worked systematically, her imagination burning, reading first the translation, then whispering the Latin with a mystic reverence, and with no idea of whether her pronunciation was correct. It did not matter. Only the resonances of their possibilities mattered. And the process of pronouncing the words. It was all a mysterious incantation. Beautiful things now and then revealed themselves to her: magis aeternum, magic eternity; diva leporem, diving leopard. These conjoined with grant to my speech everlasting charm to lift the charm into real magic, picture-music, the groundworks above which her leaping mind might leap even more—

  For you the dogwood, bunchberry, pipsissewa, creeping buttercup, crocus, ponderosa, milkweed, cattail, cottonwood, sumac. For you the witch hazel that pops like a little bomb, the climbing boneset in the margins of swamps, the sheep laurel of hummocks and knolls, for you the tumbleweed that rolls across the plains windy as the preacher on Sunday mornings, huffing and puffing. For you the blue sparks of the morning glory!

  Hannah had read with horror about the ritual slaying in Aulis of the maiden Iphianassa. The killing knife was wielded by her father as weeping worshipers solemnly looked on, and the spiritual leaders of the town Danai shook their heads yes and spilled their tears on the soil; tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. Hannah could see the smirking acolytes in their schoolboy excitement fondling the sacrificial knives under the folds of their robes, leaning each against the other like young wolves, anxious for the terrible fun to begin. She was reminded, too, of Abraham in the wisdom of his hundred-some years, at Jehovah-Jireh, his sword at Isaac’s throat, the glint of his madman’s eyes, his son dumb with fright, his face pulled into a great frown. Blood always, always the blood stuff. Blood of the lamb, blood of the cross, blood about which uncle spoke with his own book, the black one he read every night by the fire. Hannah’d tried it, but—blood blood blood. Her own book was best. Those other people were crazy and all they cared about was killing.

  For you the rooster’s cockadoodledoo, the piebald mutt’s yipyap, the wasp’s buzz under the eave.

  Nothing comes of nothing. Otherwise what would happen? Apples would bloom in the lilac bush, roses emerge from the butter churn, a mosquito’d be born out of snowflakes, a man from empty air. Neither can things that exist be reduced into nothing, but are changed in time. So that raindrops tumble in the ground and planted crops grow to bear their vegetables, so the trees are heavy with fruit. In this way nature restores itself. Not all bodies are visible. The wind that can carry houses and people sitting at dinner in them and whole towns at a sweep away into its funnel: you can’t see that. You can’t see the racket raised by rain on the tin roof of the stall in the pigsty. Banjo’s thrum, scorching heat, supper smell, river chill, whistle of the dove wing, toothache. You can’t see those. Also unseen is the emptiness where masses move, called the void. The pages of this book wouldn’t turn without the void to turn them in.

  Somebody says that sheep are made up of countless perfect little sheep. And a sheepbone is made of sheepbone seeds. Sheepbone seeds are not visible to our eyes. But they’re there just as sure as “Blue-Tail Fly” frailed fast on Mr. Johnson’s banjo. There as the hornet in your eyes and nose, there as the skeeter bites you through your clothes, there as the gallinipper flies up high, but wusser there yet? well, what? the blue-tail fly, silly.

  The night sky is infinite since it has no boundary. The sky has no boundary since there would have to be something beyond to bind it. But since there is nothing greater than the sum of all things, and since the sum of all things is what is outside the sky, the sky goes out and out forever. And has no boundary. No barbed wire, no post-and-rail.

  For you the slapping waterfall and the sleepy Platte. The sun pillared behind the cloud, and moon’s halo before the frost.

  There is no middle in a universe, no center. Except the point from which we see it.

  There are many middles, and so there is none.

  Hannah held her breath, and concentrated on watching the motes float across the beams of sunlight that fluttered across the air in the loft. Someone was downstairs in the barn.

  It was her mother’s voice calling her.

  There was the sound of someone climbing up the ladder. After a few steps had been mounted this sound stopped. Then, a hollow thud resonated quietly—jumped back to the ground. A door opened, closed. Outside Hannah could hear her name called. Her mother was looking for her; she would soon have to hide her book and sneak back down.

  For you the green ash and red cedar which resist the drought, green for Venus and red for Mars. For you sandbur and cocklebur. The sunflower that tips its yellow head, tail’s a man.

  For you the cirrus that look like mares’ tails, the bigger-than-twenty-moons cumulus in banks over the shadowed peat. For you the dust devil.

  All things are moving. All that moving
is what makes things so as you can touch them. The secret war that rages within an apple core. The hurricane that storms inside a single shaft of buffalo grass, tempest in the honey locust, apocalypse in the mulberry bush. Restlessness of a hand its flesh and its blood and its bones. Falls like the cards of a cardhouse, drops like the row of dominoes from uncle’s dominoes box. First beginnings. A setting into motion by the blow of an atom set into motion by the blow of an atom set into motion by the blow of an atom.

  Johnson

  July 1957

  BELLE STAR FARMS and Equipment. Dearborn, Michigan. Johnson in his suit, rather forlorn-looking, shopping. The insurance money in his pocket. A ferret-faced salesman taking the group of cowboy executives on the grand tour. This gentleman seems to know everything on the subject. He is a real kicker.

  “Prototypes, boys: Wackett punch, Blitz instrument, Greener patent killer, the Bruneau and Baxter masks. Indeed, any of these hammers, humanitarian devices, may render a sheep or young calf insensate for the twenty-thirty seconds required to completion of … procedures. The stunning of pigs, our committee recommended, oughta be insisted on in all cases, and not, as sometimes at present, only practiced in the case of large swine which give trouble or with a view to the avoiding the noise. There is no doubt legislation oughta be forwarded to this end. No animal need suffer before he’s made meat. It is, however, true and undeniable that, even after the stun-hammer is utilized in your modern plant, the animals are by necessity hoisted into the showers before butchery may commence and that this process sometimes stimulates the beast in such a way that he regains his consciousness. The larger kine can on occasion put up quite a fight as you all know, even though they’re hung upside down, as you are aware, by their hind legs. It is my personal conviction—and I cannot substantiate this scientifically, although we have scientists working on the problem even as I speak—the meat must be, shall I say, negatively influenced, qualitatively, by the premonitory consciousness of and consequent struggle against what is about to happen to the beast. The chemical constituents that must be dumped into their circulatory systems cannot in any event have a salutary influence upon the tissues.”