“One day, the brothers watched as their mother rubbed her belly and corn spilled out into a basket, and then she rubbed her armpits and beans poured forth. The boys snickered and snorted and turned away. A mother shouldn’t keep having a body after her children are born. The boys began to sharpen their sticks, because this was a witch, and it was their duty to do away with her. She knew it, the mother, before she even saw them making spears. Her skin knew it. When your child is going to kill you, the blood in your body has a different feel.
“When the troop came at her in the early morning with their spear-points, she looked at their eyes, which were the color of turquoise because they were made of that stone, that’s where the stone comes from, and the mother said, ‘After you’re done, drag my body in eight circles around the house. Where my blood spills, corn and beans will grow.’ Even then she wanted to take care of them. Even then, she was a mother.
“The boys took the woman by the hand and walked her outside where the day was white with sun. They laid her down, made a small pillow for her head from corn husks, and she was proud of them and thankful. They raised their stakes gleefully. They believed in the rightness of their motions. They had never felt more loved, and they never would. They felt the resistance of their mother’s body under the sharp wood, and they pressed against it. It was hot and the blood was free and thick.
“It was hard work, killing the only woman in the world with pine spears, and it only got hotter as they worked. By the time she was gone and the boys put their spears down, they could not believe how quiet it was, they could not believe how quickly the flies came. They were too tired to drag the body of their mother around the house in eight circles and went around only twice. They found shade and they lay in it, spread out so as not to touch each other, so as not to get into the heat of another brother, and they slept for three days straight.”
Her brothers fell asleep to this story, but Cricket was sleepless. She knew they had not killed their parents—a thing like that is something you don’t have a question about. Being abandoned felt like being abandoned. It was plain and sad and she would almost rather have been at fault.
—
In the morning there was a dead fawn in the backyard.
The animal had cooled and looked sleepish and peaceful. She showed no visible wounds, and the children felt that they would have been able to tell if she had died afraid. Fear was a mark you did not lose.
“Sweet fawn, poor fawn,” they chanted. All of them had thought about dying in the days since they had been abandoned. There was no one to protect them from any of the many dangers of the world: poison, robbers, floods, hurricanes, famines, disease. This small animal felt like a sign of what was to come. The fawn might have lived a few days alone in the wooded corners of the city, finding food and shelter. It might have been her will that went first, or perhaps she had simply grown too hungry. Maybe she had watched the children and decided to trust them but came a few feet short of their tent. Cricket wished she had not slept so soundly. She should have heard the fawn and coaxed it close with sugar water. She would have nursed it back to health.
The children kept waiting for the fawn’s mother to appear at the fenceline. Mothers, in general, seemed to be scarce.
Cricket thought of her homework assignment about the buffalo. She thought of all the things a resourceful person could make out of a dead animal. She looked at the hooves and tried to see small cups. She looked at the two stubs of horns, still fuzzy, and tried to see something that could be carved into jewelry. She wanted to bring these things to Miss Nolan. Cricket went inside and found a sharp knife. She knelt beside the spotted fawn and willed her hand to make a cut at the spine’s ridge. It was harder than she would have thought and there was blood right away. The boys were shocked into stillness. The fawn jerked under Cricket’s knife and the skin separated as she went, but when she tried to peel it from the body, Will threw up and Cricket was grateful for a reason to stop. She wished she could uncut the cut. Now the fawn was dead and undone too.
“We at least have to thank her for her service,” she said. “We at least have to bury her.”
Cricket carried the body to the edge of the yard and settled it in the ferns. While Cricket took her clothes off and washed the blood from her own skin, which she could not help but imagine now as a sliceable surface, the boys ran madly around the yard picking flowers. They invoked whatever gods and saints and angels they could remember from their lessons. Michael, Jesus, Christopher, Moses, Odin, Poseidon. They chanted while they put their good, young bodies to work. They added dirt until the fawn was a hill and then decorated the hill with flowers.
“The soil here will be very rich,” Cricket said. She was still naked and the boys decided to take their clothes off too. The ceremony immediately felt more important.
“We should grow corn and beans,” said Will, thinking of Cricket’s story. Inside they ravaged the cabinets, hunting for plantables. The children had no time for neatness. This was a ceremony. Nothing was more important than this. They found popcorn in one jar and Will poured it into the waiting hands of his sister like it was precious gold. All over the floor, beads of corn tinked and escaped under the lip of the sink, behind the chairs, beneath the table. The children walked outside with their cupped hands, slowly, slowly, transporting a little bit of life out to the dead. They poured the seeds over the fawn and pressed them into her soil.
“Grow,” they said. “Grow, grow.”
* * *
WHEN EDGAR AWOKE ON DECK he reached for his glasses, but they were not on his chest where he had put them. He sat up. His glasses were not anywhere around him. He looked at the ocean and knew. He imagined his glasses slipping silently into the sea. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit.” The world, without his bottle-thick lenses, was all smudge and smear. Glory woke up and looked at him. “Morning, handsome,” she said.
“I lost my glasses,” he told her.
“Do you have a spare pair?”
Edgar had never lost his glasses. The only time they were not on his face they were on the bedside table, safe. Edgar shook his head.
He got up, not wanting to admit how compromised he was. He cooked oatmeal but his eyes made things harder. He had to put his face directly over the drawer to find a big spoon. His feet were hungry for the old paths of his familiar house.
Glory sat down at the table, the slip of a silk robe hardly bothering to cover her.
She had plenty of pretty, even if Edgar could hardly see it. He was ashamed to tell her how blind he was. As if this woman would have to watch him turn decrepit and old right now, today. Their trip was a moment plucked out of real life, a moment in which two young-enough bodies tried to pretend that the future and the past did not exist, that there was nothing else but pleasure on the surface of the earth. Edgar did not speak during breakfast. Glory was a blur of skin, hair, the dark holes of eyes. Finally he said, “I really can’t see.”
“Shitty,” she said. “Do you want to smoke?” she said, taking a little green bud out of her metal cigarette case.
It was not the first thought, but it was not the last either, the thought that God had done this, taken the world away as punishment. Edgar did not say this out loud in case Glory was already thinking it. She worried something around her neck, the vague shape of her hand at her collarbone. He leaned close to see it: a gold cross on a chain. It was as if it had grown on Glory’s skin, seeded by uncertainty.
“Have you always had that?” Edgar asked.
“It was a gift from my husband or my father, I can’t remember which,” she said.
Men, landbound and restless for her return. Edgar wished it would go away again, leave them symbol-less and quiet.
“You don’t believe, do you?”
“It’s just jewelry,” she said, lighting a match.
Edgar did not want Glory so close to him. She smelled like dried sweat and her
breath was smoke-stale. “Maybe I should take a nap,” he told her. He went below and curled in his bunk, which smelled of wet wool. It was dark and warm and too small and he tried to sleep but couldn’t. Edgar picked at a knot in the wood.
Fern came into his head. Her fingers, which had cooled him out of so many fevers. She who knew to bring hot lemon-water first, then cold juice, then a pot of boiling water with torn mint leaves and a towel for him to drape over his head to catch the steam. She who brought saltwater to gargle, lozenges to suck, pillows with fresh cases. She whom he had loved hardest when things were worst and when they were best.
Once, when Cricket was sick with a cough, Fern had gone into her room to help her back to sleep and come back to bed weeping. Edgar had panicked, sure that something was very wrong with his daughter.
“She’s okay,” Fern had said. “She’s going to be okay.” Somewhere in Africa people were dying of an incurable contagious disease and Fern admitted to Edgar that she had understood, holding her feverish girl in her arms, that she would take care of her daughter even if it meant that she herself would get sick and die. “And there’s no question. Just none,” she had said.
Edgar had not known if he would sacrifice himself. He felt terrible that he might hope to live beyond. He also thought that before the children were born Fern would have crawled in beside a sick Edgar and held a frozen washcloth on his forehead, prepared to die a few days after he did. Edgar remembered getting sick when the boys were two, a bad flu, and Fern had stood at the doorway, blown him a kiss. She had no longer been able to afford to infect herself. She had paid for every comfort—cold watermelon, cashmere socks, good books—and had delivered them on a tray, then scrubbed her hands and arms up to the elbow. Every part of her had been in his room except her body.
And his own mother? He tried to remember being cared for by her, but Mary took care of details and not people. For a party, she would sacrifice her own health and sanity. For sickness, she sent a nurse.
When Edgar’s cousin had died of a stroke at twenty-eight, Mary never once went to the hospital, but she did seek out every friend he had ever made, every girl he had ever kissed, every teacher and coach, and when they all gathered for the funeral she had filled the room with fifty bouquets of white roses, platters and platters of roast turkey, pastas, sweating piles of vegetables, little mushroom pastries that waiters passed incessantly around, forcing everyone to take another and another. There were mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese and a cream soup that was pale, mint green and went entirely uneaten. There were vegetable salads and fruit salads and seven different kinds of bread and pats of cold butter molded to look like daisies.
Edgar’s mother had set the roomful of people to the work of closure, that untrue moment. She watched the boy’s parents, her brother and sister-in-law, to see if the cure was working. Edgar’s mother’s makeup was right all day, no streaks, no smudges. The guests ate and ate and all of them cried when people stood to remember the dead boy. All except Mary. And in the morning, his mother had baked a breakfast cake, poured fresh juice from a frosted pitcher and sat down beneath the hum of a violin concerto to scrub clean the silver that had touched the lips of the grieving.
Edgar opened his eyes to the unfocus of the world and closed them again. Opened, closed. “I am basically blind,” he said. He had never thought this before, his eyesight so fixable in the modern world. He couldn’t see detail in anything more than a few inches from his face, and he was in the middle of the ocean. Edgar’s heart sped up and he did not have enough air and he wanted to sit but couldn’t in the tight space of the bunk. He jumped out, clambered upstairs and, dizzy, lay down on the deck of his boat.
The boat rocked. Beneath him was everything—the depths and depths, the cold blue a mile down and thousands of miles across. He could have rolled quietly off the Ever Land, let his body take water in, sunk or floated, and the sea would have made no sound. The birds would not have changed their pattern. Above him was the vast expanse of pale sky, the entire universe, now just a blue light. Land seemed very, very far away. His form was so small that it might as well not even have existed. Edgar, never seasick in his life, was seasick now. He reached his hands out and grabbed at the wood and what he wanted to find there was grass, leaves, soil. Fern—the earthen thing he wanted to find was Fern. “What have I done?” he said to the blue above and the blue below. There were things he wanted to see again: Cricket performing a dance in the living room, the boys trenching on the beach. All those elements he had gone seeking, all that wide-open, but what he needed was the landscape of his own life. What he felt could not be described as missing—one person wishing to be nearer to another. Instead, Edgar, sea-tossed and gripping the wooden deck with his fingertips to keep from throwing up—understood that his body, his self, was not individual but shared, that to put too much distance between himself and his wife, his children, was to disassemble something whole. He was sightless now, and what would go next if he stayed away? He was just a body, a million tiny mechanisms, any of which could go wrong. Water slapped at the hull of the tiny craft. Edgar could hear Glory washing dishes in the cabin. He imagined full black and then soundlessness too.
Edgar would have done anything to hold Fern’s hands over his closed eyes. Just for the feel of her particular palms. He knelt and then stood and that’s when darkness fell over him.
The next thing Edgar knew he was in the water and Glory was throwing the life preserver in and diving in after him and he was fine, spitting but fine, and he took the ring but pushed the woman away. “Don’t fucking push me, you asshole, you fucking asshole. Were you trying to drown yourself? What the fuck is this? I come out here for a few weeks of fun and you won’t even fuck me anymore and then I have to save your life? I don’t know how to fucking sail. What the fuck am I supposed to do if you die?”
Edgar said, “I didn’t mean to. I think I fell.” He was pale.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, but fuck.”
“It’s time to turn back,” Edgar said, holding on to the ring. He was still dizzy and he still couldn’t see and he still felt cored out.
“Which shore are we closer to?” she asked. “I’m sure they have optometrists in Bermuda.”
“We’re about halfway. But I want to go home.”
Glory would have preferred to keep sailing east. Her skin was thirsty for the pale blue water they had been traveling towards. An unreached island was a special kind of disappointment. “Fine. Can you do it?” It was the question they had both been asking themselves. They were surrounded by many miles of water and the only sailor on board was hardly sighted.
“You’ll have to help,” Edgar said.
They swam to the ladder and pulled themselves up. Glory settled Edgar in a deck chair with water and a sliced apple and bread and butter. He breathed in and he breathed out, and none of it made it less scary to be nearly blind. She smoked. Edgar and Glory floated. They were anchored, unmoving, and far.
—
Edgar began to unfasten and untie. Glory listened to his instructions and did as he asked. He could sail, sailing was known in his body, and he could still see colors and vague shapes, but he felt better knowing that there was one good set of eyes on board. They were a quiet and unaffectionate team. He had wanted sun and distance and she had wanted the knots two bodies can make of each other. Disability was a third party. How quickly the pull could weaken.
—
Though the view was the same, it felt entirely different to travel in the opposite direction. Bermuda receded. The powder sand, the gin-clear water, the tiny satellite islands believed to hold both pirate treasure and the ghosts of the crew that had been killed to haunt that treasure. There was no fantasy ahead of Edgar and Glory. The only unknown was the future, the damage they had done to their own lives.
Edgar did not realize it, but his parents were also sailing, and not far away. Hugh and Mary had wanted the same
thing Edgar did: away. Theirs was a weekend excursion. At the moment that Edgar and Glory turned towards home, Mary was squeezing limes to put into their cocktails. She was marinating the meat they would grill. Hugh was reading a magazine article about the upcoming elections and smoking a cigar. He looked up every few minutes to survey the horizon, to admire the taut mainsail, sweeping them outward.
The two boats might have crossed paths if Edgar and Glory had continued on, if the wind had pushed them a few degrees southwest, if they had caught up to a particular current that a school of striped bass was also riding, if Mary had insisted on an after-lunch swim. It could have happened that Edgar and his parents would have found themselves in the exact same spot on the Atlantic Ocean. Edgar would either have had to explain Glory or hide her, both of which would have made something go flat in him. He would have seen his shirtless father, his neck just beginning to show the sunburn that would keep him awake all night, his legs shimmering with dry salt just as Edgar’s legs were, his hands ready to tie or release or tighten a rope just as Edgar’s hands were, and maybe seeing that would have felt like proof of the thought that had entered Edgar’s mind—that he could take over his father’s life. That it was worth it. He had written his book just like he had said he wanted to and he knew that it was good enough to be published and maybe those things were enough. Maybe the doing was what mattered. He had people to care for. He had a lived life and maybe that was bigger than the imagined one, bigger than the one he led in his head.
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 24
