by Eugen Bacon
Secretly, Salem continued her fantasies, dreaming not just of escape but of white gold and blonde bracelets and dark knee-hugger boots, everything Pastor Ike would never tolerate his daughter wearing. But for all her fancies, she was still wrapped like a nun at the local IGA shop, nurturing runaway thoughts in a stifling hot room. No wonder her mood was not right when T-Mo happened.
• • •
She processed a pack of cigarettes at the cash register and looked up to announce the cost, and her heart went soft. He stood before her, looked at her with a careless smile that cracked something inside. A sense of imminence grabbed her in so ruthless a fashion it rendered her immobile.
“Your curls,” his gaze touched her hair. “Soft as the feathers of a baby bird.” That tied her tongue too. He might have touched it, her hair, or perhaps only his words touched it. He at once captured her with his impetuous nature and pulverized any restraint she might have shown, so much that the beat of her heart sped to insanity.
He glanced at the barcode reader and slipped a note from his pocket. So hypnotized was she when he moved away from the queue, she rose from her stool to follow him with her eyes. Follow him where? Away from it all, the IGA, her parents, to a place filled with radiance.
How much for a dozen? A female voice severed her entrancement and Salem turned to face her, eyes astonished still. A dozen, the woman said. How much? Salem lifted the bar of soap. “Was the price not on the shelf?” she said. She sat back on the stool, looked one more time for her man but he was gone. She turned the bar of soap until she found a barcode. Beep! the reader. “Three dollars twenty for a dozen,” she said. Her hands were shaking.
Two hours later she signed off the till. She was in desolation still at not having spoken a word, not a single croak, to the man whose gaze touched. He was waiting for her at the car park opposite the IGA entrance. His gaze more than touched; it fondled.
At once she brightened. “Y-you?” The longer she looked at him the more perfect he grew.
He pointed at a crimson sign on a snowy background at the top of the IGA door. It read: Milk is Available Here.
“That true?” he said. She nodded, held helpless in his gaze. “That’s true anywhere. They have to proclaim it?”
She liked him. She liked him very much.
He spread his hand, gave her that winning smile that coursed rapture through her veins. He held a careless jacket across his shoulder. His eyes indicated a soft-top parked in a slot. Its bare metal gleam dazzled her eyes. “Care for a spin?”
“Holy moly,” she said in wonderment. He felt right. She didn’t need to be someone else.
“First girl I ever heard say holy moly like that,” he said. “You say jeepers creepers too?”
Her mother was a preacher’s wife, she blurted, the first thing that came to her head. Her father was, well, a preacher! She giggled nervously.
“Is he, now? How about that? A preacher’s daughter. Get in the car.” She paused. He shifted his foot. “Would you care for a spin with me?” he said.
“Okay.”
His smile was musical as a lark. It penetrated. His palm lightly brushed her waist. When he tightened her seat belt, his hands lingered. A flood of warmth climbed to her cheeks and Salem yielded to a longing to fill the space between them with words.
She lived in a custom-built house of basic detail, on the generosity of the faithful. Pastor Ike could never spend on tiles for a new bathroom. No music no radio no TV: just Bible hour after dinner, she babbled. He never swore, either; the only time he did was when a visiting preacher from a nearby parish floated to him the idea of a Jazz Society for the youth of East Point to keep their hands from bedevilment. Even then (she glanced at her hands) Pastor Ike’s swearing fell short of “f” or “s” words and he said “drummer” in place of “bugger.” She spoke and spoke until he pulled the car to the side of a road and silenced her with his lips.
The kiss was as delicious as it was troubling. It filled her with a cavalcade of emotions, bands and bands of them. And she felt something new. Freedom. This man who made the sky resemble a crystal ceiling, who turned the ground at her feet to a fairy tale, he brought her freedom.
But that was no surprise, she later thought after their unchaperoned date. There was something magical about a man who walked through doors . . . who traveled between worlds. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. So on a whim, the first daring whim in her life, she presented a man to her father with intention and announced her plan.
“Father, you have met T-Mo,” she said. “I am going to marry him.”
They stood in the space between the back door of the main house and Salem’s servant house. Pastor Ike eyed the male beside his daughter, took in the ripe plum color of his sleeveless t-shirt that carried bold white words on its breast, words that said: Hearts & Beds. Where was the mystery in those words? The intrigue? T-Mo had done bugger all, drummer drummer, to try and impress a possible father-in-law. Pastor Ike looked at Salem without indifference. Then he looked at the way the brazen boy or man stood, reckless, how he held his head, how a strange curiosity spread in his eyes. How the dazzle in his rainbow smile made his looks fetching despite dinosaur skin.
Might have been the hearts or beds, not the sleevelessness of his t-shirt, or was it T-Mo’s unabashed smile? Whatever it was, it immediately squandered any goodwill Pastor Ike might have had. Gator skin or not, that alien buffoon standing with hair as yet uncombed beside his daughter . . . Pastor Ike had one question.
“This T-Mo,” he said, speaking to his daughter. “Does he have a second name?”
Salem stood with tumultuous heart, looking at her father who directed words at her without removing his gaze from T-Mo.
“I am sure he does, Father . . .”
In the deadly silence that followed, Pastor Ike unmasked his hitherto somber countenance to disclose a vulnerability to fury. He purpled and a furious pulse pumped on his neck. It calmed, the pulse, and ceased being noticeable, as did the florid hue on Pastor Ike’s face. Pageant fled into the house. She had looked and felt desperate at the boldness of her daughter; now perhaps she would hide her joyless face under the kitchen sink and clasp dismay in her trembling hands.
“And you are going to marry him?” There was no rebuke in Ike’s voice.
“Yes, Father.”
Ike’s preacher face acquired calm, not sag, and with no more erosion of control than that which he had already displayed, with no dislike or hatred in it, he said, “You are both strangers to me. Get out of my house.”
• 4 •
Calm words, but they knocked two people out of the house. Not a grand or gracious house, just a sturdy two-bed custom-built that was no longer home to Salem.
That night, that same one of the homelessness, the soft-top shot through the road. Headed for a place where power lines dissolved and there were just shrubs and space. Headed past trees that hugged their leaves tight and stood tall like closed umbrellas. Sometimes shorter ones took their space and spread wide like amethyst curtains in the horizon below a blackening sky.
T-Mo drove and drove, floored the car’s accelerator as if they were going to the end of the world. He gazed at Salem sat beside him in the car, and she cast him eyes so full of personal appeal he could restrain himself no longer. The car slid to a halt beside a road sign that said No Left Turn. Or was it No Through Road? Salem couldn’t tell, half blinded by tears. This felt like the most tragic turning point in her life, not the liberty she had so yearned for—for which she had almost been ready to fight or die.
“Why are you crying?” he asked.
She shook her head, knuckled a tear away.
“Don’t know why you are crying?”
She nodded, knuckled another tear. But more came. Endless tears that splashed down her face and she did not have enough knuckles for them all. Hadn’t she herself accepted the risk, and t
he goodness it offered?
“Look at me.”
She looked, turned her mind over and over, questioning. It came back at her with every reason why this man—who possessed her thoughts, whose touch on her body brought starlight to her skin, made it look as if sprinkled with diamond dust—was better than home.
She remembered how the dinosaur on his skin smiled to put butter in her knees. How when he vanished, gone from her view, a distant voice in feral wind, she felt lost. Then a swift darkness and he would be there. Right there facing her. Not content to travel through time, he was time itself. She felt found.
She remembered how despite the ghosts that haunted his face, when she timidly smiled he completed the laughter for them both with something deep, wholesome. How husk filled his voice when he said something plain, words as simple as “Care for a spin?” How her heart rattled so loud at the sound of that husk she thought the whole world would dance from the composition of it.
She trembled at his approach round the car. But his musical-as-a-lark smile when he opened her door tossed away her unease, and she melted into his arms. His fingers were tender as mist when he drew her away from her seat, from the car, from . . . anything that kept her from him.
Together, they moved as far as they could from the road, any road. Fifty yards or five thousand, didn’t matter. When at last they stopped, her head felt light but he guided her swoon to the ground. There, on a carpet of ivory hydrangea, he peeled every layer of clothing from her and her shiver was not from chill or a deep, terrible fear but from an overwhelming need to be complete, to be free. She found, in his arms, that she was both: his and free.
It snowed. Snowdrops like blooms gliding from the sky. Moon collapsed into a veil of mist. Darkness, black as octopus ink, rose above the fog, stooped low to spray and swallow it. Salem quavered but T-Mo calmed her unreasoning fear.
Lanterns in his eyes guided her, fingers nudged gently. Hands like wings cradled her, lifted her from the ground, carried her to a place of awakening inside the feet of frost. The wings laid her gently on a dais. Breath soft as summer rain not just raised the temperature of Salem’s skin: it spread her feet, arched her back and took her to the pinnacle of a nameless place. Sing to the mountains. Lift your hearts! Swallowed in a church hymn.
Somewhere outside her sleep, as her head rested on T-Mo’s chest beneath a sky full of murmuring, a sword of lightning across the night sky chased a blast of thunder that rolled like belly laughter. Just then, right there, in the instant lighting of the firmament, Salem saw a clear silhouette a few meters from her feet. It was the puzzle-piece woman with fifty-cent eyes. Head lowered, her feet apart, the woman’s broken eye was smooth and round as when Salem first saw it. As for the gobbling eye—the good one—it keenly filtered, turned inward and wondered.
SILHOUETTE
• 5 •
I was betrothed between chants when a Sayneth priest, immortal, came to bless the new birth in a home at the edge of Bruthen. Unlike the other ten children, I was different, not just for being a girl. Unable to lift my own head in a cot, a baby, eleventh baby, eleventh blessing, I was betrothed. It was an honor. Ma Space in her own quiet way, without doggedness, reminded me when I was older and older. I was betrothed to be the first wife in a plural marriage to a Sayneth priest.
By the time I was old enough to understand, I liked the sound of his name. Novic. N. The sound was nasal. Teeth, lips apart, tongue pushing. The sound vibrated my throat. And he was a Sayneth priest. S, like for snake.
What-am-a-say? Makes a sing-song sound when I say this. What-am-a-say. I liked him. There was not a mutinous streak in my bones, any bone that shaped me, when I found myself a wife at eleven.
Ma Space, she took me from my room, my dear room with its pale moonshine through the window. When the door handle turned and she entered, something about her face told me it was time. I wanted to step on my bed, lift the hand-painted frame of rainbows from the wall behind, lift it and take it with me. The frame was a gift from a midwife the day I was born, Ma Space said, years ago. I had no memory of the midwife, but the story of her gift was a memory, something told. The frame was real. It was the one thing I owned, one thing. Eleventh child—what do you expect? Maybe two things: the room felt like mine. My brothers did not share it. They slept in bunks in a dormitory down in the basement. My room was in the attic and the in-between belonged to Ma Space. But she said no to the rainbows. Ma Space, she said: “We go light, my chile. Everything you need is there.” She took my hand and we stole into dusk like thieves. It didn’t occur to me to wish the boys goodbye. Farewell was unlikely to impress them, and I could not wait to get away from the kings. They liked to think they were monarchs in their grand dormitory with its high walls and bright lights and locked cupboards. Bring me, give me, fetch me, said the kings. Sod off, said the kings. Dash, Kit and Hedge were the worst, such swagger they had. Blaze was the angry one, but he never hit me or showed rage on his face. I remember the day, without provocation or deep resentment, he put an elbow around Tiny’s neck, throat punched him, pressed the boy’s head in the toilet bowl. Gave him a royal flush.
Footloose was always outdoors. He was so big, horses would run away if he wanted to ride them. But he didn’t need horses. He was always doing donuts on the ground with a cart he had built, horn helmet on his head.
“He’ll put holes in the lawn, Ma Space,” I said.
“If he put hole in it,” she said, “it not end of the world to fix it.”
“But Ma—”
“Where him? Happy.”
What-am-a-say? I gave up, could not be bothered to protect what Ma Space didn’t need protecting from her boys.
Bluey—mouth like a shriveled apricot—was sometimes kind, until the younger troublemakers Boxer and Donzo came along. One moment, Bluey was a complete stranger at the dinner table beside me. The next, as Ma Space asked the boys, “What dessert you want?” in her absent-minded way, he had scribbled something, pushed the paper toward me, and the scrawl said: “I have lost the will to live.” Another time he glanced at Ma Space’s platter of oat pancakes, said: “This doesn’t look safe.” But he gobbled his whole lot, rolled his tongue around the bowl and then wrote: “Three visits to the toilet, I think I know where this is going.” That is how I knew he too wanted to get away, that Ma Space failed him entirely. But it was Rusty—I liked to think of him as a terrible hollow—who surprised us all when he swung a coat on his shoulder and left to take work in the mines in Lockwood down south. Then he married a girl in Mount Bright up north.
The day she took me, Ma Space, we walked swiftly, furtively, as if toward a secret. We strode into a mist where tussocks of weed caught my toe, but Ma Space urged me forth until we found a waterfront. The span of her silence was a canvas, as was the water surface with its sparkle of moonshine. On occasion, I tugged Ma Space’s elbow but she said nothing, just walked. She was never one for fluffy feather talk. She who had tried to learn me a few things, like how to scrub my brothers’ dorm until it shone like a lantern, and I learnt those things well, she had no last words as she tugged me to the one to whom I was betrothed. I went along without rebellion.
The wind was gasping when we arrived. Perhaps I was exhausted from the walk. We reached a sweep of lawns, curving pathways. Novic was waiting. His lips on my forehead were cold as a mother-in-law’s kiss. Inside his house, a mansion built like a cathedral, its embellishments scaling and branching across three main towers and a rear expanse, I did not regret that lack of rebellion. I gazed at the oval face of the mansion’s front, the gilded tips and pediments at the end of the roofs. The doors and doors, some shut, some ajar, others thrown wide open. There were doors everywhere, walls sparkling like mirrors. Room after room there was exuberance of light and shade, form and intensity. Everything about Novic’s mansion spoke of rhetoric, of theater. I looked at the opulence, at Novic’s achievement, and understood it was mine to own with him, shape w
ith him, first wife in a plural marriage. An honor.
The coupling did not happen straight after we wed. Novic waited.
Every third week in her inobtrusive way Ma Space slipped into the mansion, come to visit. But her intention was distinct. Each time she found moment to put a finger just below my collarbone.
“Stop it, Ma Space.”
“It don’ hurt, my chile.”
In her absent way, she brought random botanicals from home during those visits. One minute she was in the back garden patting soil around baby herbs unstitched from a petticoat where she had sewn them, sprinkling crushed potato water over them and gently massaging their sprouting leaves; next she was poking my collarbone. Resisting was no use.
“Why a petticoat for the herblings?” I sought to distract her.
“Chase away bad luck. No homesick.”
Truly, I never missed home as I knew it. I did not miss my brothers; just my room with its yellow moonshine and my frame of rainbows.
I put to use everything Ma Space had learnt me, like how to put a knotted bag of sand and willow seeds at the bottom of a wooden chest to keep laundered clothes from getting damp in winter. Like how to fade burn taste in stew with a dollop and stir of black bee honey. Like how to fill a hole in the wall with soap and unclog a blocked drain with the right mix of scalding water and vinegar concentrate. But I refused to stoop to her strange ways, like how she never let a black lizard cross her path. If one did, Ma Space recrossed its path three times and spat in the direction its tail had vanished, all to chase away bad luck.
