by Jan Carson
‘The sheds have sunk.’
‘What?’
‘The sheds have sunk.’
‘It’s not possible. Sheds don’t sink. They catch fire or blow away in tornadoes. They don’t sink.’
‘Believe me Cunningham, the sheds have sunk overnight. It must be more marshy out there than we thought.’
‘All three of them?’
‘Gone.’
‘And my collection?’
‘Gone. I’m so sorry, Cunningham. I wish there was something I could do to bring them back.’
Cunningham Holt, devastated by the realization that the earth would choose to conspire against him in such dramatic fashion – suddenly, overnight, and with no previous warning, not even a slightly mushy patch of field – pressed his face into the pillow and howled like a newborn baby. Thirteen years of his life had been swallowed up without permission. It felt just like Fourth of July all over again.
No one ever told Cunningham Holt the terrible truth behind his sinking sheds. His elder sister Valentine, who had always been the meaner of the two, confessed all in a posthumous letter but as this letter, for necessity’s sake, had been read aloud to Cunningham by his youngest sister, Sharon, who could not help but see the best in everyone, all mention of the conspiracy was intentionally censored out.
Truth be told Mr Holt, under his daughter-in-law’s direction, had dismantled all three sheds during the night and dispatched both the structures themselves and their contents to the back field where they’d formed the basis of an enormous fifteen-foot bonfire. Folks two counties over, intrigued by the ungodly orange glow now illuminating the Kentucky horizon, presumed yet another incident at the state asylum. Double-barring their back-doors against the possibility of an escapee, they fell asleep with loaded shotguns and pickaxes tucked beneath their bed frames.
After two days the bonfire burnt itself out and though Cunningham queried after the prevailing smoky scent and the fine flecks of ash which coated everything, even his morning coffee, in a sulphuric powder, he was never to know the truth behind the bonfire. ‘It was a tree,’ his father explained, adding his own particular thread to the fine web of lies Claire had already begun. ‘You know, the big oak in the corner of the back field? It got struck by lightning last night and there was nothing to do but let it burn.’ Cunningham Holt was suspicious, knowing full well that this particular oak had been sacrificed for last Christmas’s firewood, but said nothing, for he’d had no reason to doubt his father.
By the beginning of the following week all that remained of Cunningham’s collection was a charred spot in the cornfield, approximately the size and shape of a family sedan. Though Mr Holt continued to till the corner of his cornfield annually, to water it and spread liberal amounts of the purest fertilizer, thick as frosting, over its topsoil, nothing ever grew in this particular corner of the field again. Each subsequent year of ungrowth added to the weight of guilt Mr Holt was already shouldering. He was an honest man, Lutheran to the back teeth, and this was the only intentional lie he could recall telling. Though he repented nightly, asking God to forgive his trespasses, particularly the one about the sheds, the stress of it drove him to a premature death at the age of forty-six, from complications attached to the removal of an ingrown toenail. On his deathbed, turned crazy by almost ten years of guilt, he asked to be buried upside down in the corner of the back field. Thereafter, the charred patch suddenly
burst into life, sprouting grass and corn and all manner of unctuous, creeping wildflowers.
On the day of the sinking Cunningham Holt lingered under the bed sheets for the entire morning, allowing the disconcerting news to settle into the spare room wallpaper. He rose around lunchtime and, still wearing carpet slippers and bathrobe, demanded a tour of the empty space recently occupied by his sheds. Claire guided him down the steps and then watched from the front porch as her husband, on hands and knees, meticulously poked and prodded his way round fifty square foot of field. Not once during the four and a half hours which it took for Cunningham to reassure his own sense of loss did Claire experience even the smallest sliver of regret. Duplicity was a necessary evil when it came to keeping blind husbands keen and Claire was capable of duplicity on a scale seldom seen in rural Kentucky.
‘Darling,’ she yelled when the rest of the family assembled for their nightly helping of fried chicken and corn, ‘it’s getting dark out. Why don’t you come in for dinner?’
Her words went unacknowledged by Cunningham Holt who, flat on his face in the starchy grass, was rediscovering a religion long lost. All through the night he pressed his cheek to the ground and prayed earnestly for a genuine miracle.
‘Heavenly Father, Lord God Jesus,’ he muttered, ill-equipped with the rhetoric of religion, ‘if thou hast raised from the dead, on several occasions and counting, couldst thou also see fit to raise from the miry clay one of my sheds, or two if it’s not too much bother?
‘And if thou shouldst see fit to raise from the miry clay one of my sheds,’ he continued late into the night, when the rest of the family were long gone to bed and dreaming, ‘couldst thou see fit to raise the second shed particularly? You know, the one with the stuffed animals?’
The Lord God kept frustratingly quiet, holding both his tongue and his resurrection hand all the way through the early hours until Cunningham Holt, almost spent with yearning, finally cried out, ‘Lord God, Holy Jesus, I have hast enough of thee all over again. First thou taketh away my eyes, then thou cometh back for the sheds. Thou really ought to go ahead and give me something for a change. Amen.’
That afternoon Cunningham Holt gathered his collection of painted marbles in the toe of an old wool sock, took his wife in hand and set out for Brooklyn, New York. For the second time in twenty years he spurned the Lord’s advances and converted to agnosticism. Though he didn’t know it at the time, he was never to set foot on Kentucky soil again.
New York swallowed Cunningham whole. As he made his daily, nicotine-charged pilgrimage from the front stoop to the bodega on the corner he felt like Jonah searching for an emergency exit. He walked deliberately, counting the individual sidewalk tiles – one to seventy, there and back – all the time struggling against the walls of pressure which seemed to rush against his rib cage, viciously and with preternatural force. The city was an ever-constricting vice and Cunningham Holt struggled not to suffocate every time he stepped outside.
The Kentucky of his childhood had been an enormous kingdom strung together with empty, unambiguous fields and the vague hope of an occasional tree. Prior to the advent of July Fourth, 1919, Cunningham Holt had known by name only a half dozen individuals outside his own immediate family. He prided himself on small-time living, relishing the detail afforded by a limited number of human variables. The Sunday school picnic, organized annually by the local Baptist congregation, remained the largest gathering he’d ever been party to. Even then, with the possibility of some two hundred individuals to play with, the five-year-old Cunningham had favored, over new friends and neighbors, the company of an elderly Jack Russell and a platter of homemade deviled eggs. With no composite memory to fall back on, he struggled to believe in something as large and loud as New York City.
Cunningham Holt began to picture himself buried alive in an underground city. His New York was a tunneled kingdom; a moleish world of condensed living where rich and poor, old and creeping young were thrown one upon the other like sweet onions peering from a pickle jar. While the city thrilled like a liquored kid and the tower blocks rose to clasp hands sixteen storys above his head, while the tall buildings shook and the sidewalks trembled with the chumbling surge of each passing streetcar, he felt only blind isolation and the absence of sunlight like an old friend, recently deceased.
Each day the noise wore Cunningham a little thinner round the edges until he began to see himself as a slice of greaseproof paper, transparent against the light. The city waged war on his eardrums beginning with his first waking thought and stretching long past midn
ight when the never-ending din would finally settle as a toothache migraine in the space behind his eyes. Accidental fireworks aside, New York was the loudest thing Cunningham Holt had ever heard. The skittling thunder of city living formed walls and bridges around his every waking moment. Each raised-voice conversation, each siren, scream, screech-brake stop and unloosed hydrant, bursting forth with gassy enthusiasm, formed another brick in the thick wall which conspired to keep him claustrophobic and lonely in the third-floor apartment he refused to call home.
‘What sort of a hell have you dragged us to?’ he asked his new wife as they lay awake on their very first evening, clamoring between the police sirens and the impossible August heat. Cunningham stretched out stark naked on the sheets, having sweltered his way though all three of his decent undershirts. The unborn baby, which had recently swollen to the size of a clenched grapefruit, was taking liberties with his mother’s innards and Claire, having grown tired of trekking down the hall to use the third floor’s only working bathroom, had spent the better part of the day retching into a mop bucket beside the bed. The smell of sweat and vomit dripped from the ceiling; homely scents, mingling sickeningly with the exotic stench of spice and coconut milk emanating from the Indian family on the floor below.
As they lay side by side, glistening pink like a pair of uncooked sausages, the argument wilted on their lips, falling victim to the hour and the heat and the incessant hum of the electric light bulb. They made lackluster love on the bedroom floor – for the summer had sapped them of all but the last remaining ounce of energy – and fell asleep with the ice box open. It was the first of many east coast arguments, all of which struggled to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.
Cunningham Holt daily proposed an absolute and immediate move to a more temperate home and yet would find himself, fifty-two years later, unfulfilled and still making the very same argument.
Claire bloomed through the honeymoon years. Her teeth turned fast and tight, flashing their way through a smorgasbord of newborn experiences: foreign folks and fancy foods, concert shows, conversations and the cosmopolitan rush of sidewalk fashion. Her belly grew fat and burst suddenly, shoving an urgent red boy child onto the end of their bed. Without consulting her husband, who had never seen a movie, silent or otherwise, she named their child Chaplin and the boy became as much of a mystery to Cunningham as his mustachioed namesake. Within the year Claire’s head had grown a half inch wider in circumference, swelling to store a hundred sheds worth of grim and glorious sights. (Having hooked a husband incapable of leaving her, Claire quit bothering to indulge him and refused to describe these New York experiences. ‘Use your imagination,’ she snapped when he asked for a blow by blow retelling of the Empire State Building. Cunningham cried a little, discreetly into his sweater sleeve, and pictured a knitting needle, steel grey and tall enough to puncture the cloud line. Later, with guilt and righteous hope, he dreamt of pushing his wife from the topmost pinnacle.)
Claire took a job in the downtown offices of a fashion magazine and in less than a year had wheedled her way upwards from intern to junior clerk and, finally, assistant editor; a role which came with a desk, a chair and the opportunity to screw the editor proper twice a week during lunch breaks. It was partly her editorial skills, perfected many years previously at the Boston Secretarial School for Young Ladies, and partly her ability to keep the editor proper grinning for the entire fifty-minute duration of lunch break, which landed Claire the opportunity to edit a sister magazine in Chicago. Preoccupied at first by the paycheck and the promise of an office window, south-facing, she sunk her fingernails into his naked back and accepted the offer before the editor proper had a chance to withdraw. Only later, as she fixed her make-up in the bathroom mirror, did she consider the dead-weight reality of Cunningham and Chaplin, waiting on her nightly return.
Claire was an ambitious young lady, and having taken the Holt family for the cost of a single to Penn Station and a year’s worth of rent, she had no further use for a dumb hick husband, too blind to bring in a wage. Chicago, she’d heard, was bubbling over with nightclubs and restaurants and elderly men, rich and discerning enough to ignore her plain horse face in favor of the fancy hairdos and frocks she’d been spending her pay packet on. Before the afternoon was out Claire had already decided to leave her husband.
While his wife went out to work, Cunningham Holt stayed home and watched the baby who, for safety’s sake, spent working hours encased in a purpose-built baby cage and was only removed for the occasional diaper change or feed; maneuvers which had taken Cunningham some three unpleasant months to perfect. During the early days of Chaplin’s existence his mother would often come home to find him placidly cooing from his orange box crib, smeared in part in his own shit or milky vomit. ‘For the love of God, Cunningham,’ Claire had yelled at her husband on several occasions, ‘if you’re not sure whether the kid’s clean, stick him in the bath tub for ten minutes. Don’t leave him to rot in his own puke.’
Ultimately it was Cunningham Holt’s fear of neglecting the child which gave Claire an opportunity to put her escape plan into action. Coming home early on a Friday evening in late November she stumbled upon Cunningham perched on the edge of their bed, watching blindly as his son lay, back flat in the bottom of the tin bathtub. Chaplin Holt, well used to the bitter boredom of being ignored, had fallen asleep in the tub, his little chest rising and falling as it broke the surface of the graying bathwater. It was impossible to tell how long he’d been there, minutes perhaps, hours even. Claire leaned over the edge of the tub and tested the temperature of the water. It was lukewarm to the touch. Momentarily possessed by the Devil and all his devilish subplots she stood up, opened her mouth and shrieked like a wildcat.
‘My baby!’ she yelled. ‘My poor baby!’ She pitched her voice loud enough to register intent but was, at the same time, careful not to wake the sleeping baby.
‘What’s wrong?’ cried Cunningham Holt who was also dozing, upright on the edge of the bed. (It was often hard for Claire to tell whether her husband was awake or asleep as his eyelids, missing a substantial chunk on the right side, closed only when manually pinched shut.)
‘Chaplin’s gone.’
‘No, he’s not. He’s right there in the bathtub. He was covered in crap so I gave him a wash.’
‘He’s sunk.’
‘Impossible. There’s only half a foot of water in there.’
‘The baby’s sunk. He’s drowned dead, Cunningham, what will we do?’
‘Call for the doctor Claire. The doctor’ll be able to fix him!’
‘It’s too late for the doctor, Cunningham. You let our baby sink.’
While Cunningham Holt sobbed mercilessly into his pillow, cursing the Almighty for yet another untimely sinking, Claire lifted her baby, still sleeping, from the bathtub and wrapped him in one of Cunningham’s old sweaters which had begun to unravel at the elbow.
‘I’m running down to the drugstore to phone the undertaker,’ Claire shouted as she left the apartment, ‘You have to tell them when someone dies or the police get involved.’
Thereafter, she slipped undetected down the back stairs and without a second thought left her six-month-old baby, haphazardly bundled against the November chill, on the steps of the Catholic Mission. (Chaplin Holt would be found half an hour later by a gaggle of middle-aged nuns on their way to early evening Mass. When local enquiries had surfaced no clues as to the little boy’s identity, he was to be renamed Patrick – for several of the nuns were of an Irish disposition – and ushered into the first of three subsequent Catholic orphanages before being placed, quite happily, with a childless couple in the Hamptons who would rechristen him Michael and bring him up as their very own. For the rest of his life Michael would nurture an inexplicable fear of bathtubs, always preferring to shower, or, when a shower was not available, bathe in a supervised context. A series of lovers and wives would be baffled and slightly unnerved by his inability to wash without an audience, assuming latent voy
euristic tendencies. Swimming pools and Jacuzzis would also prove problematic.)
It was with a sinking feeling, akin to a six-month-old baby or garden shed, that Cunningham Holt contemplated the coming years in Brooklyn, New York. With all the darkly yearning of an Old Testament prophet he predicted a future full of loss and solemn sinkings. For God so favored all men aside from Cunningham Holt, it seemed inevitable that everything and everyone he’d ever loved would be snatched from him and drawn into that dark place just below the mortal grasp. The city, he felt sure, would remain, for he hated New York with a devotion rarely seen or settled in the irreligious. Whilst friends and family and all good things were peeled from his possession, New York would prosper on: bridges and buildings and telephone wires stretching Babel-like towards the future sky. On the eve of his twenty-first birthday, with not so much as a cake to mark the passing, Cunningham Holt sat down on his sofa and resigned himself to loss; past, present and apocalyptic.
‘At the current rate of sinking,’ he remarked to himself, onethird of the way down his birthday bottle of Jack, ‘Kentucky state’ll be underwater before my twenty-fifth.’
The loss of his wife came therefore as less of a surprise, than a prophecy fulfilled.
Driven by a rare streak of benevolence, Claire had decided to give Cunningham Holt a month to recover from the death of his son before absconding to Chicago with the remaining two hundred dollars of his family’s money. ‘It would be a sin,’ she told the editor proper, who was eager to have her installed before the New Year, ‘to leave anyone just before Christmas. I’ll stay ’til the twenty-sixth and buy him something nice for Christmas – a new sweater or some carpet slippers – it’ll soften the blow.’
‘Whatever you say, sugar pie,’ replied the editor proper, and presented her with the very same pair of diamond earrings he had already purchased for his wife. ‘An early Christmas present,’ he whispered as he pinned them to her earlobes. ‘Let me take you out on the town to show them off.’
