by Carole Maso
My grandfather, whose Indian name turned out to be “Dreams of Rain,” not only learned that meteorological secret but manv other things as well. He went to the Black Hills over and over in his last five years and he told us everything.
“‘Moves on Water’ is Father’s Indian name,” he told us one day. “‘Brave Ghost’ is the name for your mother.”
As soon as a person died, messengers were sent to summon faraway relatives. Widows or widowers singed or cut their hair and with sharp objects made long, deep gashes in their skin. Grief stricken, they would wail for days and beat their breasts with stones and pestles.
Often the ghost lingers near the place it died and for one year attempts to lure-away the people it loved in life.
On a day Grandma was to be out the entire afternoon, Grandpa, in a serious mood, led us into his bedroom.
“Listen carefully,” he said. “This is important. Watch carefully.” From under his bed he took out a shoebox. In it were three plastic bags.
“This is black cornmeal,” he said, lifting the first bag up. “After my death, pour some out into your left hand, pass it around your head four times, and cast it away. This makes the road dark. It will prevent dream visits by the spirit. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Yes, Grandpa,” we said together.
“Good. The white cornmeal comes next,” he said, and he pointed to the second bag. “Take the white cornmeal in the right hand and sprinkle it, saying, ‘May you offer us your good wishes. May we be safe. May our days be fulfilled.’” Fletcher wrote it down. “This,” Grandpa said, “ensures the proper relation between the living and the dead. Now,” his voice grew softer, “on the fourth morning after my death, leave the windows and doors open so that my spirit can leave the house for good. There,” he said, pointing to the third bag—pine resin incense. “Burn this on the fourth day.”
“Be nice to Grandpa,” Fletcher said, walking into the room where my father stood conducting his imaginary orchestra, “because he is going to die soon.”
We walked in silence, the particular silence of midsummer. Father began to hum finally. Fletcher and I pointed to peacocks in cages, to raccoons and other small animals at the wildlife center. We scattered in the tall grasses. We followed Father into the woods, we breathed deeply as we saw him do. We held his hands; he said nothing.
We walked a long time—in fields, through flowers, in heat. The afternoon seemed slow and languid, when quite suddenly Father, who was so tall, bent down and in one motion, like a giraffe eating food from the earth’s floor, plucked a large, flat leaf from the ground, moved by some unknown force down and back up again.
“See this?” he said, looking at the leaf, shaking his head and laughing. “Children, look at this.”
We looked at the giant leaf I had no idea w hat Father might say He plucked another from the ground, then another, and knelt down next to us, his long arms scooping us up.
“These are the leaves!” he said. “These leaves. Back in Italy when I was a little boy, my grandmother used to dip these in egg and flour and fry them!” and he turned them over in their imaginary batter. “Oh, they were quite delicious.” He smiled.
“It’s been a long time now,” he said, gathering a few more leaves; we, too, picked them. “When she cooked them up that way they tasted just like veal.” He smiled a great smile; the memory warmed him and the warmth spilled onto us.
This was one of the happiest days of my life: clutching his hand, holding close the story of how his grandmother, who had never lived before this day, changed simple leaves for a young boy into veal.
“The way you hold your knife,” he sings, “the way we danced till three—the way you changed my life!” his voice rises and his heart swells. “No, no, they can’t take that away from me.
“No, they can’t take that away from me.”
“In New Orleans there is Mardi Gras—sweet smoke and Negroes and bourbon in the streets.”
“And jazz music,” Lucv savs.
It’s so exciting. The two girls giggle. Red lights and smoke and saxophones all night long.
“Old age finally killed Charlie,” my grandfather said, rubbing the ground’s brown belly. “One hundred and thirty years,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s a long time to live.
“Natural causes, they said, killed him.” My grandfather stood up. “Heart failure—kidney failure—failure failure.”
“Don’t forget the soul,” we whispered to him.
He smiled. “Charlie could really tell a story,” my grandfather said. “Oh, yeah, Charlie could really talk. We’d chew the fat all night sometimes.”
I wished that I had had stories to tell my grandfather.
“You know, he’s telling them now somewhere,” he said as we looked down at the dirt. “Maybe in African this time around, who knows?”
Once, before his name was Charlie Jones, West Africa had been his home. Once, before the Fourth of July was his birthday, before the farmer Samuel Jones bought him, he remembered his mother taking the bones from a fish. “Other things, too,” my grandfather said. He remembered stripes, the black-and-white stripes of the zebra, and the heat of the sun, and how fast he could run.
“They were young and strong, Charlie and his brother, and the man on the ship docked in the Liberian port saw that and tricked them with a story about how there were fritter trees on board and lots of syrup.
I never saw any of it again: not my mother, or the zebras…,’ Charlie said, ‘except here, Angelo,’ and he pointed to his head.”
My grandfather tucked the Charlie stories, the stories of riding with the Jesse James gang, the stories of going off with Billy the Kid to get the man w ho killed Garfield, he tucked them all back in his head. The stories seemed shifting and vulnerable, unstable when compared with this burial scene. My grandfather thought of the fluidity of stories and the dead man with his mouth closed. They lowered the coffin into the ground.
“On the day of the Emancipation Proclamation,” Charlie had said, “there was now here to turn.”
The local people had all made death wreaths. The gladiolus pressed their ears to the ground, listening even now for more. And Charlie talked on.
“Here is the time for the sayable,” Rilke writes in the “Ninth Elegy.” “Here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness.”
Jack came on a Monday, unexpectedly, at 9:00 A.M. He was coming to mv apartment now more and more often; we were leaving our hotel little behind. He had never done this though, come early in the morning, early in the week, and when I first heard his voice over the intercom I felt unsure, then frightened, then delighted, all while he climbed the three floors up to me. Such fluctuation in emotion from floor to floor was exhausting. As I opened the door I must have looked tired.
“Wake up, Vanessa! Wake up! Wake up!” he said.
“What are you doing here?” I asked cautiously, as calmly as I could.
“I couldn’t stay away,” he said. “Please.” He looked like a boy on his first date, but it was morning, not evening, and, standing outside my door, he held a bag instead of the more conventional flowers.
“What’s in the bag, Jack?”
“Close your eyes.”
With my eyes closed I pictured him as he looked now standing in front of me, his arms full, a large smile on his face. I thought to myself that this was a new Jack, a different one. I le looked younger today, more robust than I’d ever seen him. I suspected that a woman was involved—he had fallen in love, perhaps he had just come from her, he was being someone new for someone else. He was clear-eyed, the decision had been made: he was going to leave me, the ambivalence was over, no more debating in his head.
“OK,” he said, walking in the door.
I opened my eyes. Out of the bag came croissants and brioches, smoked fish and fruit, champagne. I sighed. He smiled. Today he looked like a man any woman would want to marry, take home to her parents, spend her life with.
“Where did you buy all
this?” The face of the other woman faded. The smells were of fruit and of yeast. The whole apartment seemed safe. I nuzzled up to him.
“I made it all,” he said. “I’ve been planning it for days. I was up all night.”
I looked at Jack, puzzled. I could not predict anything about this man who stood before me with a tray of salmon and pastry, his chest puffed with pride.
“You made it all?”
He nodded.
“But there are little doilies around these fruit tarts.”
“I know,” he smiled. “I bought the doilies.”
“You bouqht the doilies?”
He laughed.
“These crusts are perfect, Jack.”
“I’ve been practicing. Ice water is the key”
“The cheese in this is absolutely—”
“Yes, I know.”
“Everything’s still warm.”
He smiled and opened the champagne. The excess spilled into my mouth.
Who was he? What was he trying to do? He opened the fruit: the kiwi, the pomegranate, the kumquat. They bled on his hands. He lingered the sweet meat, placed it in my mouth.
It was easy to love Jack the cook—the way he fondled the fruit, how small and tender the peach looked in his hand. It was easy to love him—the smell of pears in his hair.
“Some ham?” he asked. I watched him carefully, his expertise at slicing, and fora moment I could picture this Jack with me fora long, long time, this sweet, attentive, undemanding Jack: Jack the pastry chef, Jack the sauce chef. I could imagine traveling with him to exotic lands for ingredients. I could picture him at the cocktail hour feeding me pitted olives from his fingers.
“I want to make things for you, Vanessa,” he said. “I want to keep you warm and safe. I love you, my dumpling, my clam cake, my oyster stew.”
“Oh, ham hocks,” I said, “I love you, too.”
Jack the drama teacher always wore a tweed jacket, had a long scarf wrapped around his neck, and sipped coffee. He taught me how to prepare for each role: how to breathe, how to relax each part of the body; he showed me the exercises to do to limber up. Jack the acting teacher gave me confidence. “There is no role you are incapable of playing, no role too difficult, no role too out of character,” he said, “if you work hard, if you concentrate. Build, in your imagination, the circumstances in which such an action could take place. You can invent anything you have to, anything you want. You can do it all.”
“But there are times I drift away, Jack—come in and out of my part, lose my concentration, become afraid.”
“That’s OK,” he said. “Keep working. Stretch your body and your mind. Get in shape.
“Do what you must to get at the truth, to see what is difficult, to see what you believe you cannot bear to see. There is no substitute for the truth.”
“Don’t miss your train,” my mother whispers. “Please go.”
“There is no substitute for pain,” she said. “There is no way to stay safe.”
I have never been to that white house on the coast of Maine where my mother went so often. She would venture far into that untouchable country for weeks, months sometimes, with hardly a word for those of us who waited. “Do you think we’ll ever get to that white house, Dad?” I’d ask, but he was not listening. I watched him as he painfully composed letters to my missing mother. He put so much effort into them—crossing out, underlining, adding paragraphs, arrows and asterisks everywhere, copying them over and over until they were perfect.
I thought of her there in those vacation tow ns of summer often: those towns of heat and water and bleached wood, the hydrangea bushes bowing their drowsy heads, the bicycles propped against the pale sheds; the striped umbrellas, the fish stands; the moths at the screen. A warm sea breeze blows through her hair. A beach ball forms a lovely arc behind her in the blue sky.
It was harder in winter. In winter she became lost to me. It was harder in winter to see her happy. I did not want to give her up under the hydrangeas or writing on the beach, I wanted her to stay there, but in winter it was different. In winter she probably stayed huddled next to a fire in her huge Icelandic sweater, a white mug of coffee in her hands. It must have been very cold. She was probably lonely way up there.
But I believe in that white house. I believe in those towns of perpetual summer. I believe in you, Camden, Bath, Castine, Wiscasett. I believe in your summer.
The mug turns to white flowers in her hand. The ocean wind warms. She is back in summer though it is December now. She hears the neighbors’ voices far off. The beach ball bounces in the sand. We chase after it, wave to her.
“Is that my sweet pea I see?” she sang out to me through the blossoms and the leaves and the light of the garden. “My hibiscus? My wisteria? My alyssum? My primrose?
“Sweet William, is that you?” she called to Fletcher, and my brother blushed.
“Is that my daffodil?” I chirped back to her through the Queen Anne’s lace she refused to weed out. “Is that my forget-me-not?” I giggled. “My lilac? My bluebell? My mimosa?”
“This mildness will kill us,” Jack says, shaking his head. “This summer haze we are forced to see everything through, even now.
“Jesus, Vanessa,” he laughs. “It will kill us.”
I always wanted to believe that someone like my mother would know what she needed and where she could go. But arriving sometimes in Maine and parting the musty curtain, or directing a taxi in Italian to some new address, or stepping onto the pavement and hearing a strange clock toll, she would realize in one terrible moment that she would not be able to stay She was afraid, uncomfortable, and she would be unable to work. Many times she’d turn right around and travel hundreds of miles, thousands of miles, back home.
“It was a foolish idea,” she would say to my father over a dinner it seemed he always had waiting for her. He never knew quite when to expect her, and I think he always hoped in part that she would stay where she had decided to go and in part that she would come home. She was a solitary traveler, her expectations rising high as she left the house, only to have the message reiterated: there are limits, places the architecture of your brain will not permit you to stay, to experience. It was a terrible message, she thought.
“You must have known from the beginning, Michael,” she sighed. My mother trusted my father implicitly and depended on him for advice of all kinds. “It was just another of my crazy schemes. You should have told me; I would have listened.” But she would not have listened, my father knew. He shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter, Christine,” he said, smiling at her. He had let sadness go. He was happy just to see her sitting before him. She was back. He squeezed her hand. She was back.
But she is not back, Jack seems to be saving as he steps into the room. If a pen or a paper knife or a scissors had been handy, I think I would have killed him right there as he smiled and put the newspaper down in front of me.
From the paper I read that “despite the warm temperatures now, meteorologists say this will be the coldest winter in hundreds of years” and for some reason I believe it. “One theory is that volcanic eruptions in Mexico will have a drastic effect on the temperature. And,” it says, “it is a fact that months ago jet streams failed to migrate toward the Arctic and dissipate.
“There is cold water all over the Pacific,” I read to him, “from Japan to Alaska. And this configuration carries certain implications.”
Jack just moans. “I don’t know, Vanessa,” he says. His voice is thick and slow, a mirror of the weather. He puts his enormous hand gently on my neck, then smoothes the hair back from my face. He is sweating. He shakes his head. “Your mildness will kill us,” he whispers in my ear.
From the east came the men with faces and hands the color of snow. The men were ugly. Hair covered their faces and bodies, and when Drinks Water saw them he thought of the hairy water monsters w ho drew swimmers into their mouths by making waves. He worshipped the large boulder for strength. They came riding Sho
on-ka wah-kon, fearful, mysterious dogs—wonderful dogs, fast as the wind. Drinks Water offered a pipe to these men and they let him touch the beautiful clogs. Trust us, they said to Drinks Water and they passed the pipe back and forth.
Drinks Water dreamt with his eyes open as the men sat with him in a circle. Already he could hear the ringing of their axes in his ears. As they inhaled the sacred smoke he saw them building small, gray boxes, and beside those boxes he watched his people die.
The water rushes around the rocks in wild, violent circles. He looks at it with a scientific eye. Here chaos begins, he thinks to himself.
My mother cannot stop walking. She goes from one room of the big house to another, then outside, one state to the next, then across the ocean.
“A body breathes under the earth,” she moans. “Its lungs are filled up with dirt.”
My father talks under his breath. “This is the hardest part,” he says, and he is right—w hen she hears and sees what is not there.
It is not there, he is sure of it and tells her so.
“How can you be so sure, Michael?” she asks over and over, and he says it again with an authority he does not often call up.
“I am sure. Believe me.” And he holds her shoulders and looks into her eyes. This is the worst part, we children think, watching her from a far corner. I wonder to myself whether she w ill ever be well, and Hetcher somehow knows this and puts his hand on my shoulder and whispers, “It will be fine.” I want to know w here his faith comes from, his eves that shine confidence as she begs us to come to her, calling us out from the shadows.
“Mom,” he says, hugging her with the whole of his strength. He is so little still.
“Tell me the weather, Hetcher,” my mother says. But before he can tell her of the cold spell we are in, the temperatures below freezing each day, no sign of a break, she says, “I wish there were tulips here,” and brushes his head. She picks up the phone, books a flight to the Netherlands—then cancels it—books it again.
