How the Days of Love and Diphtheria

by Robert Kloss

  How the son sometimes stood on the hillside. His blue naked flesh. How in the evenings the son watched them from the yard. How they all seemed through the lighted windows. How the son made no gesture but to stand beneath the glow of the always burning house. How the boy locked the windows and propped chairs against the doors.

  How the father told the boy, “Their son died from diphtheria. His mother found him, blue and wheezing. He was still alive when she arranged him in the casket but the boy was dead when the father arrived home, the white lace, his calm blue face. When she said the word he dragged the mother from the house. She’d gone mad, yelling in a language nobody understood. How the long trail of gasoline caught and spread. How it has burned ever since.”

  The man gestured to the razed pines, the scorched stumps. I believe in how easily a forest burns, he said.

  These boys, boys whose names the boy could not recall, these dozens of boys and how they crowded into the boy’s room, these boys with long tangled hair, boys with yellow teeth verging on green, boys smelling of fuel oil, of perspiration, of some rank earth, boys with switchblades unsnapped and glinting, boys with black eyes, with blood-shot eyes, these boys with fluids and how they dripped, yellow and red and translucent, these boys and how they piled over each other, how they giggled and sneered, how the boys crowded into the boy’s room tingling all throughout with the longing to grope, to pull and suck and stab the boy atop or alongside or nearby. How the heat of the boys made the other boys dizzy, how they smoked cigarettes and snuck whisky and how the room filled with blue smoke and how they laughed at the mewing of kittens inside the wall, how these boys thumped at the wall with their knuckles, their knives, how these boys wanted to hunt and murder what lived within, how these boys glowed and grew rigid and purple in the light of the burning house.

  How the son watched from the hillside. His bruised throat. How he stood in the center of the cinder yard with calm dead eyes. How one morning the boy woke, and there, the son, dangling from the ledge outside his window. His blue murderous fingers.

  How the mother lost her slender figure, how she resembled a pear, save her sags and folds, which seemed more the melting and collapsing of a large candle, how the dirt did not wash free from underneath, the smell of black and decay, and the walls always lost under dripping tar. Now how the father was too drunk on malt liquor and fuel oil to command the woman to scrub and how the woman was too fat to climb the stepladder, too immense and putrid to stretch her arms over her shoulders, too weak under the layers to scrub. Trapped along the walls, a thousand, thousand flies writhing and buzzing in the tar. How the woman slept now for the fumes of the tar of the always burning house. How her figure bulged on the sofa. How her wheezing trembled the house. How the father slept for his drink or stumbled up the stairs and how he sometimes lost himself along the banister and there he lay howling and moaning through the night. How the boys in their wild masses stampeded over him, how they stole his cigarettes, the last of his cashed disability check, how the boys bought firecrackers and lighters, how they exploded these on the lawn, the glow within the glow. How the father loomed at the boy’s room and the stillness of a hundred boys within. How he slumped against the malevolence of children. How his lips, sodden for the boys within the room, the musk of the boys, the stale heat of the boys. How the father missed the trembling of youthful flesh within his arms, none since this wretched family he built, these black walls, this wife who bulged and wheezed, this house he grew from the timber and soot, this house under the light of the house burning, trapped always under this illumination.

  The man gestured to the skies, Under the shadow of our aircraft, he said, a schoolyard of children became a river of tar.

  How the father leaned in the boy’s bedroom doorway and in his arms, a folded pair of exterminator clothes, dusty and crisp with mold. How the boy’s room was empty save for the boy, the scents and stains, the mounds of translucent fibers. The father’s mouth scarcely moved when he spoke and how his words seemed the words of something less than human, some yawning piece of earth, some dying sludge. “You want to play catch?” the father said. “You old idiot,” the boy said. How the father lurched into the room and how the boy shoved him off, how the father pitched over, flailing. How the father struck his face on the boy’s desk. How the father watched the boy from the floor, his face a sheet of blackish blood. “Too big to play with your old Dad huh,” the father said. “You’re not as big as you think you are.” How the two swaddled their hands in white socks for lack of gloves and now in the basement how the walls sweltered and dripped, how the sound of hands wrapped in socks thumping against warm meat, how white socks clotted black with blood, how the father swung wild for the boy’s face and how the boy mashed in the father’s throat, his stomach, his kidneys. How the father wheezed and vomited. How the father buckled. How the boy was too quick and the father too drunk. How when the pain was gone the boy took the socks off and so too did the father. How the coal dust and soot filled the father’s throat and how he fell to his knees, wheezing and dripping blood, saliva, mucus. How his face smeared violet. How the old man moaned and wept and how the boy left his father there, blind with blood.

  How his face glowed with a long off yellow. How the father said, “I would burn this house and all of you in it, if I had to.”

  How the boy woke, clasping his throat and gasping. How he believed he could not breathe although he was breathing. How he watched his skin in the bathroom mirror for hints of blue. How the boy slept with the medical encyclopedia under his pillow and how he reread the sections on sanitation and vaccination by the dead-son’s night light. How he wandered the house while his parents slept, gauging the strength of his own breathing and listening to the mother’s wheezing on the sofa. The father’s low faint breaths in the basement. How this infection seemed an infection no fire could eradicate.

  In those days, the man said, the city was reduced to rubble and the horses lost their skin for the fires. The horses in those days wandered pink and exposed. In those days men with skin like blackened alligators rode bicycles along ancient obliterated streets. In those days we watched them on the television news, and from our tallest buildings fell confetti and streamers. Our women kissed our men openly on the roads, in celebration.

  When the boy left, the father was asleep in the basement, his face crusted with black blood and flies. When the boy left the mother was asleep on the sofa. Her face and arms lost in immense putrid folds. When the boy left he took only a soft apple and the medical encyclopedia, until the mewing of the kitten inside of his walls became too great. How the boy opened the plaster along the cracks as if pulling open a canvas tent or the skin of a large animal, and there the white pink thing, trembling and mewing in his hands. How he stroked her soft white fur and how she mewed in his hands.

  II.

  The man gestured to the narrow highways, the long stretches of dirt and dead grass. He indicated the bleached white skulls of horses and dogs. He told us of what you had seen and what you had done. The barns you razed to soil and the crops you brought the torches to, the cornfields you popped and, from the midst of the exploding white, how red and gray pheasants ascended, screaming and smoking, their feathers alight. How blood is a sort of copper. The farm mothers you held down and shoved full of red glistening pricks and knives. How they screamed through the rawhide buckles you clenched in their mouths. How a mound of children is inevitable and their smell is the musk of loam. How you marauded the suburbs and left the intestines of fathers and mothers and children coiled on front lawns. How we cannot always breathe. You spelled the names of a thousand ancient writers with the flames and blood of your conquests. You targeted not priests and kings but the blue fumes of mothers and fathers. You sought out the children and how they would grow into something other and you taught them to be no more. How we grew confused and lost by your light. The man gestured to the footprints along the road, those of a boy and those of a cat. The boy who followed your fires along the hillsides
and ravines and the kitten who trotted, faithful and obedient, to the rhythms lost within his wake.

  How the rain pelted the roof and the long off flashing of lights and the kitten asleep on his belly. When the boy woke he woke to the wood smoke you built along the horizon, the hay and dung from barn animals long dead, their fumes mere remembrances trapped within the wood, the lice and rats within the hay the boy and the kitten bedded on. She, sleepy and fat on the mice he cornered and stomped for her. So long now since the boy knew the breathing or words of a creature other than the kitten, other than eagles gliding. How the boy knew by the eagles, the blackness of their skulls, the smoldering of their feathers, if you had passed by. How the kitten mewed when the eagles dove and returned to the gray skies with marmots and mice within their beaks. When the boy woke he stroked the kitten under the chin and the animal purred and stretched. How the boy slept by the rumbling within the kitten’s throat, the crackling and splintering of your long off fires.

  How the boy woke, lost in the shadow of the old farmer, the white stubble, the manure dried overalls. The oak cane he held, gnarled and hooked. How he had no eyes but gaping caverns and the voice of the woman behind guided the cane against the boy’s throat. “Higher, Pa, now to the right, yes, exactly.” How the kitten growled and hissed. “Let me see your feet,” the old farmer murmured, and how he stooped uncertain, his mouth open and there the bloody gums, the few teeth green and jutting, and how he moaned “ah, ah, ah” while his wretched hands stroked the air, while the woman’s voice guided him, and how the old farmer stripped the boy of his tennis shoes. How the old mother wept, “I always knew, I always knew.” Her red faded house dress, her ancient skin like crumpled paper. How the old farmer said, “Lord if you can give this boy life again then won’t you return to me the sight you stole.” How they asked, “Do you remember us, Son?” and “Have you returned of your own volition?” and how the boy knew enough to say “Yes.” How the boy soon ate porridge and bacon, crisped and greasy, while the kitten drank a saucer of milk, store bought from a plastic jug, and how the old mother said, “All the animals … it happened not so long after you—nothing takes around here since,” while the father sat smoking a pipe on the front porch. How the boy nodded and ate and later the kitten on his lap, purring and warm, milk clinging yet to her whiskers and mouth. How the mother said, “you always did have the touch. Dreamed you’d raise animals or doctor them.” How the boy went to the porch while the kitten slept on the sofa, the farmer’s corncob pipe, the blue smoke wafting in corkscrews. Before them the dirt and browned crab grass, the long off road and puffs of dust as cars sped along. How the father asked, “You remember much from that time?” and how the boy said, “No, not much at all,” and how the father seemed to weigh this before returning, “Tell me at least about them flames down there.”

  How in those days certain fathers—

  How the mother held before him an album of black and white photographs, fastened with browned tape, and how she talked to him as if he knew the moment they were taken. How the old mother and father called him Anderson and now he slept in what they said was his childhood bedroom. How models of zeppelins and airplanes swung suspended from the ceiling and how, piled throughout the room, the glossy magazines picturing famous aviators, Lindberg in goggles posing on the wing, Lindberg in a convertible, waving as confetti scattered like fireworks, Lindberg shaking hands with Hitler. How quiet these nights and how sound the kitten slept against the boy’s feet. How the mother showed him photographs of the three of them watching parades along Main Street in their Sunday finest. Father and Anderson cutting lumber. How she showed him his own face pale and unmoving like a wax work, resting in a casket. “You remember?” she asked. “You were right there” and she gestured to the pantry. She kissed him, her breath of onions, her enormous bosom, soft as down pillows. “I never believed it was over,” the old mother said and the boy nodded. “Me neither,” he finally replied.

  How in those days Fathers spoke languages nobody understood. In those days Fathers built homes in hillsides with boards and rocks and shovels. How they lived within the cool earth, eating sourdough and the women bulged pregnant in the glow of the hearth. The man gestured to what was once and he said, When all their family died choking, those fathers cleansed the hillsides. These fathers, lost and hopeless, raved in their dead tongue, confused and vibrating against the grasslands they set afire.

  How the father listened from the shadows of the porch. How the boy woke in the night to the father feeling his feet as if he were searching them. His half opened mouth. The raised hackles of the kitten.

  When a balding man in a shirt and tie arrived in a tan Packard. Distant clouds of dust and how the boy prayed it was you, come finally to obliterate these long ago infections. How the boy watched from the front porch and in the tall grasses the kitten chased butterflies. The man stood on the steps shaking his head, his red and purple neck, his sunken eyes. “Do you remember me?” the man said to the boy and the boy knew enough to say, “Of course I do.” How the man and the boy sat drinking something like rusty water from a flask. Later the man said, “I miss the adventures we had. You know? Yes, we had some wild times.” How from his pocket the man produced a photograph of two boys, fishing, crew cuts and short pants. How long a man holds the figure of a child within his mind. “I’ve been married a thousand years now,” the man said. “I’ve had children. Two. I’ve seen them born and grown and one dead and one may as well be. In all these years I’ve seen a great something of the world. But not a day goes by I don’t wish we were back there, in that world we left behind.”

  How within the family photo album, yellowed newspaper clippings were displayed like brittle carcasses. How the boy knew before he read the headlines. How the ink spoke a language he understood deeper than any articulation. Diphtheria Claims Ten and below, the smeared faded photograph of a small boy in a casket and the caption reading: the strangling angel of children lately claimed young Milton Thomas. How the old mother whispered over his shoulder, “Your neck swelled to the size of a melon. You remember?” How another evening the mother said, “Some nights I can’t sleep thinking about how you told me, ‘Mama, I’m gonna die.’ But I told you right back ‘no sweet angel, you never will.’ I didn’t lie, did I?” How the boy wondered why you did not ravage this town, choking and gone blue and swollen in the necks. Where were your fires and knives when this entire world went fat and dying?

  The man gestured to what we once knew and explained how fathers raved in the red light of the world obliterated. How in those days to live in the city was to live on the verge of an ever burning world, the fire smote prairies and forestlands of the deranged and widowed.

  How she arrived, a silhouette within the white sun, her hips and wide bosom. Her red lipstick when she stood on the porch, smiling nervously. How she sat on the rocking chair, petting the kitten, and how the kitten purred, flickering her tail. This woman’s long scarlet hair and the freckles burst on her arms, along her nose.

  How the boy considered the woman’s slender hands and long red nails and how he imagined she would wail and mutilate him with those nails during their congress. How the woman believed he was looking at her wedding band. “He’s a good man,” she said as if apologizing. “Sturdy as a bull.” How when she finally left she held him close and her figure beneath and her perfume, like an animal musk. How she said, “I always thought it would be you, I always did—” and how the boy knew enough to say, “I did too.” How she wiped at her tears and the mascara running. How she kissed his cheek, the red smear. How her eyes said she would always love this boy she never knew.

  How the fires you built became larger than our largest cities. How the boy’s face grew hot and cracked open. How his skin seemed the skin of an alligator and how the kitten alone knew him.

  How the boy found a shoebox of photographs and how this Anderson, submerged in his casket with hands folded over while blurred relations and friends passed by his side, their faces wrapped
and obscured, from the mother to the man who brought slabs of ice to cool the body. How the photos depicted the black smudge of a fly settled on Anderson’s nose. How from then on the parlor seemed a void to this boy and how he lay in the spot, his hands crossed against his chest, imagining the feet and legs passing, and how beneath the imitation Persian rug, these wood planks yet stained from the long ago melted ice.

  Before the yellow roe sacks, the blackish spatters of blood and heart meat on the rocks, before the slide of the knife into the belly of a strangled animal, how the man said, “We used to come down here all the time, remember?” There the rocky shore, still and strewn corpses of fish and half fish, the too thin arc of their bones, the flies swirling the meat. Now the long off vibrations of grasshoppers, the blue almost limitless water before them. How there were two boats docked and how the man seemed to mull before choosing the larger. How he slit the rope with a pocket knife and soon they drifted with their rods, their container of worms, their cooler of beer. How the sun and the rocking of the boat. How the boy asked, “Why the Marie?” and how the man said, “How’s that?” and the boy, “Why did you name your boat the Marie?” and how after a pause the man said, “It was my mother’s name.” How this man slurped rusted water from his flask and smoked Marlboros and how he flicked these over the side, hissing in the blue green. How he filled his flask with pond water and how at his motion the murk seemed clouded with the figures of catfish and pike, shadows moving in the below, gliding easy and malevolent. How the man said, “If I hold you by the ankles, if I promise not to drop y—My god, have you ever seized such a creature, by the lips, the teeth—” How the man said he dreamed himself inside the belly of a fish. “What a relief to feel so young, as if I just got made, and to not remember,” how the man gestured to the world around then he finished, “this.” How this man floats in his sleep, covered in scales, in gills and how he later said, “I know where you been.” How he explained Korea and the men he killed there. The phantom eyes in his dreams, the yellow bloated faces. How the flames seemed more like shadows, and all the dead spoke the same impossible language. “I thought it was Korean at first,” the man said, until his mother swayed amongst, then his father, and from their fat mouths, the same nonsense language as if their teeth were broken and their tongues removed, as if they were filled with the slow humming of a thousand dying bees. Later, they docked the boat and here the man took the boy by the shoulder. How he said, “Would you teach me what they’re saying? Only to understand what they want, if they’re hurt, if they blame me—” How the Marie drifted slow along the edges. How eagles circled, black and wretched.