She is leaning over him, her eyes bulging, her eyebrows forming half-moon arcs above his own. “Let go,” she whispers. “You have earned your death.”
Who could have imagined this happening to him, to anybody? He has seen many deaths and still this is true. He shakes his head as best he can. No, no.
She holds up a small brass-cornered chest, its leather straps dangling. “I’ve come to take your heart,” she says. He raises his eyebrows. “I’m taking your heart,” she repeats.
“Take my heart,” he says aloud. “Crazy old maid, friend and lover, mother of sorrows, angel of death.” As he speaks he breathes, as he breathes he coughs, as he coughs his lungs rack and swell until his chest bursts and his breastbone splits cleanly down the middle—he is splitting wood, plunging an ax into a thick straight poplar log that divides neatly into halves, a few splinters, a gush of blood from the wood’s pale yellow heart—he is gutting deer, the swift sharp stroke he learned from his father and that his father learned from the father before him and on back to whenever there were knives to wield, whenever there were fathers to teach, and the quick spurt of blood, and his thought when first he made this cut, years ago: Who might have imagined that a single animal, any animal holds this much blood? He is covered with his own blood, until he smells his flesh burning and the blood stops and his chest opens wider of its own accord and lifting itself from his chest his heart, ringed with thorns and encircled in flame and rising to hover above his dissected chest, until Miss Camilla holds out her strongbox and he yields his heart into her quavery hands, that guide it into this casket of gold, ciborium of leather and brass.
His chest knits itself together. The pain is as transcendent as ever, but he breathes easier now that his swollen heart is not crowding his fluid-filled lungs, now that his heart is in safekeeping, away from these doctors, this hospital, away even from his blood family. He knows what she will do: She will take his heart and place it in the woodshop stove, which she will fire using the badly glued block of wood from which he was to learn, or teach, and all of him that is of any count will rise to the clouds to join all that has gone before, and when the stove has cooled she will shovel the ashes into her strongbox and drop the whole from the Perlite Ford Bridge, so that they may join all that remains behind. This is right and just, a fitting and proper end for the joy and grief, evanescence and futility of human endeavor.
Miss Camilla Speaks
[1992]
In my mother’s time only traveling photographers brought picture taking to the countryside. Once a year they’d come through, take their pictures, and leave, not to return until a year later. Sitting for one of them, placing money in his hands was like teaching or farming, making art or having children, a gesture of faith in the continuity of things—in this case, that the pictureman would return the following spring with the developed prints.
But the pictureman who worked Strang Knob in the fall and winter of 1913 did not return. He came through once, stayed long enough to photograph the town and all its men, women, and children, and to lure my mother to Chicago, where they were engaged, then married, then had me, their single child.
In the absence of any better story, this has had to do.
For Rose Ella and Tom Hardin there was this: They bound themselves to each other and it was a hurtful binding, hurtful at times for them and hurtful at times to live next door to. In my years as their neighbor I never heard them raise their voices at each other but there were times when I felt the strain—times when that house wanted to break apart and send its lives flying to the cardinal corners of the earth. Love like a slip knot—the harder they strained at it, the tighter it bound them one to another, until at the end there was no more or less than this, the knowing that in the face of all that trial and trouble they had been loyal to each other, and from that loyalty the next generation took its footing.
Surely a lifetime of loyalty is as good as any other human virtue—I tell myself this often.
And this is what my self asks in return: Should I have yielded to myself—should I have yielded to Tom Hardin on that High Bridge, the first time he made love to me, the second time he made love to me? For love is what it was, however it might not have been what I pictured in my dreams. Now I understand that, too late. Which is better, to keep one’s self-respect or to act? In the end I was left with only pride, the devil’s virtue.
I knew, of course, what Tom Hardin wanted, on our first drive to High Bridge. On that drive I thought of nothing else. I was a plowed field waiting for seed; he was a better man to plant it than most. It was easy for Tom Hardin, it would have been easy for me on that bridge, to forget about Strang Knob—a half-day’s hard drive distant in a time when people stayed close to home.
On that first drive I refused him because of fear—mostly for my job, a little for my soul. I understood then, standing on High Bridge, that he was looking elsewhere for love because being a man, he had elsewhere to look. I had nowhere to look, and so it was easy for me to see the love this man was overlooking.
And I knew my place—I felt it on my skin like dirt, I tasted it bitter as dirt. We would return to Strang Knob and Tom Hardin would be forgiven by the women, envied by the men, and I would have done what they knew I was going to do before they laid eyes on me, before they’d even heard of me. The city woman, come to the country with her city airs, and not here a year before she’s in the pants of her next-door neighbor’s husband.
After that first trip to High Bridge I closed off, once and for all, any possibility of desire. In this I saw no choice—this was a matter of survival, if I were to stay in this small town, and I had nowhere else to go and no wish to go anywhere else. To permit desire in my life when it had no way of coming to fruition was to court scandal and disaster.
So I willed some part of myself to desiccation, watched and listened, smelled and tasted (no touch—this I had willed into submission) as it curled and dried and withered into a bitter kernel I mistook for dead.
Then Raphael Hardin arrived and changed, or at least fractured, all that. I was a ray of light traveling toward darkness, and high time, or so I thought; he was a prism that I struck along the way, a young man dying.
And then came my second trip to High Bridge with Tom Hardin, and my second refusal. Why did I say no then?
A young man dying; his father dying; an old maid schoolteacher who lives next door, dying. The two men who have brought this woman as close to love as she will come in this life; the woman who tried, in her pale way, to bring these men together.
The winter after Rose Ella died, Raphael Hardin came to stay with his father. He came from the airport straight to my house, his ticket still jutting from his pocket, his suitcase in the backseat of a rented car. He looked older than when I’d seen him last—his hair had lost its sheen, his skin was dry, stretched across his cheeks, translucent—in the sharp winter light I could see veins branching under the thin flesh of his temple. His hand was cool to the touch. He was thinner—thin.
He’d come to me to ask this favor. He would be visiting Tom Hardin for the winter, maybe longer. He wanted a place to come daily to take his medicine, where he would not disturb his father.
—Of course.
—This medicine is complicated—needles, tubes, an hour or more each day.
—The kitchen door is never locked.
—You won’t mention this to Tom Hardin.
—Whatever you wish.
I have heard all the stories of their parents’ and grandparents’ picture takings. They have taken care that I, the pictureman’s daughter, should know them.
This is Rose Ella’s story, which she told me for the first time when Tom Hardin went to hunt deer in upstate Wisconsin and left her pregnant with Raphael and through her own foolishness stuck without money for food, when she came to me in that ridiculous red coat and I fed her and her family for two weeks without once asking why.
She told me this story when Tom Hardin was hunting in Wisconsin; she told it many
times later. Women are not supposed to need or want to get away from their husbands or their children. Women are not supposed to be left by their husbands—women who are left by their husbands (for however short a time) must be doing something wrong. And so at such times, like most Strang Knob wives, like most wives, Rose Ella went looking for someone to put down by way of saving herself, and I, the pictureman’s old-maid daughter, was the easiest of targets; easier even than the dead.
She carried this story framed and matted in her heart, to trot out for display for my benefit on those days when Tom Hardin disappeared, or Tom Hardin got drunk, or when she was just plain worn out by so many children and their incessant needs and wants.
—My folks rode a half day down from the hills for no reason other than to sit for your father’s camera. They dressed up and rode down from the hills and then turned around and rode back—couldn’t afford a hotel, they’d put all their money into your father’s stretched-out hand.
(It’s that stretched-out hand that got to her—every time she said those words she’d give her head an angry little shake.)
—Mother wanted no part of her wedding day but the forgetting. They’d got married in pouring rain in some half-built log church with a half-drunk priest they never saw again. It was the picture she wanted, for remembering. She searched out the best dress you could come by in these parts to wear for that picture, ordered it from a catalogue, come all the way from Chicago. Watered silk—green to match her eyes—handmade lace at the throat and sleeves. She carried it down all the way from the hills and fixed her hair and pinned a magnolia blossom at her ear, to hear my mother talk about it you’d think she’d done all this yesterday.
Somewhere around the watered silk dress my patience always wore thin.
—My father never talked much about his life before he came to take pictures under Strang Knob, I’d say, taking care to sound casual, not to show too much interest. —What did your mother have to say about him?
But Rose Ella waved away my question—she was not interested in the pictureman except to visit his sins on me, his child.
—You should have seen my mother’s eyes when she talked about that lace! (Or the petticoat imported from New Orleans, or the dark green leather boots with the buttons up the side, or the carnelian brooch at the throat.)—To buy a dress like that would have been no different than taking bread from her child’s mouth, she with one child in hand and another loaf of bread in the oven, and already all the family money gone. So she ordered that dress on installment and wore it that day and mailed it back soon as your father took the picture. Didn’t even carry it back up the hill, what was the point of taking the chance she’d give it a tear or a spot? She told me she still carried a little shame for ordering that dress knowing she was going to send it back two seconds after the shutter’s click. “The only lie I ever told,” my mother said to me more than once, “for the sake of a picture neither you nor I nor anybody else ever got to see.”
By this point she’d have vented her pique, and with timing and luck I could intercept her before she launched into speculation on the shiftlessness of a photographer who would take money in his stretched-out hand and then flat-out disappear.
—More coffee? I’d ask.—Or something with a little more kick?
This is the story that I have told the women of Strang Knob:
My mother followed her pictureman to Chicago, where he acknowledged his mistake in leaving her behind and took her as his lawful wife. A year later my birth cemented their union. An only child, I devoted myself to my parents, who devoted themselves to each other. As I was approaching my forties each passed to a quiet death, my mother dying a few months after my father, as befitted a woman so deeply in love. “Photographs?” I ask, when the women of Strang Knob asked after their parents’ or grandparents’ pictures. “My father never took a photograph after he married, that I know of. And any pictures he took beforehand—why, they must have been destroyed, or lost.”
As for me, I returned to Strang Knob (if “return” may be used to describe moving to a place where I had never lived, that I knew only through my mother’s memories). “The city is not a pleasant place to live these days for a single woman,” I said when I came back, and they nodded. “I wanted to bury my mother in her hometown,” I said, and they nodded, happy to believe the evidence I offered that things are better here than anywhere else on earth.
This is the secret of charm: helping others believe the stories they tell about themselves and their world.
Before anything else children see the holes in things. My father was the hole in my mother’s life, the thing not talked about, that I took early on as my own. A time came, lost to memory but preserved in the heart, when I noticed that other children had fathers—and they, of course, noticed that I had none.
I asked after him. “Your father left our lives when he was still young,” my mother said. “I barely had time to get to know him myself. That’s all you need to know.” And I, overwhelmed by the thought of such loss, asked no more questions until she was dead and I found the strongbox in her bedroom.
To imagine my father I look in the mirror, subtract my mother, and guess at what’s left. Those high eyebrows—that arching hairline—surely these are his. My mother was quite beautiful, as she saw fit to remind me; she’d hardly have fallen for any but a handsome man. I can suppose that it must have been the combination of their features that was unfortunate.
I never saw him. I own no photographs of him, nor of him and my mother together. If my mother had wanted a picture of them together there was no one in Strang Knob to take it—no doubt he kept the secrets of his equipment to himself (he was a man, after all). Anyway, which of her neighbors might she have asked to trip the shutter without revealing her own secret? After some time (a month? two months? time took longer in those days) he took the train west with his equipment and his negatives and his customers’ money, leaving my mother with a stack of receipts and me in her belly. A few months later she took herself to Chicago, his hometown, where she hoped, I can suppose, to find him.
And then what?
She had a single photograph taken of herself, which I have framed in silver plate and mounted on the end table where anyone sitting on my couch might see it. In it she wears a wedding dress of a style that arrived on the scene somewhat later than one might want for the sake of verisimilitude—floor-length, with a train, veils, pearls, all in white like some John Singer Sargent painting.
She is not the only woman I have known who has fabricated a fairy tale wedding.
The women of Strang Knob have admired the picture—if anyone notices the anachronism they’re too polite to say so. But they ask with studied casualness:
—Where is your father?
—Why, behind the camera. It must have been the last photograph he took.
—Why, of course.
Carefully as I have listened, I hear no shape nor color in their response.
In her lifetime my mother never showed me the strongbox. In one- and two-room apartments she concealed it from me for all my life. Then she died, and I returned from the Little Sisters to find it sitting at the foot of her bed.
Until then I never allowed the thought that I might have family—blood ancestry—except at those times (Father’s Day, Christmas) when the world at large forced the thought to mind. At such times I thought of myself as having sprung from my mother alone. “Parthenogenesis,” I read in a high school biology textbook. “Reproduction, especially among lower animals, in which an unfertilized egg develops into a new individual.” Yes, I thought. I am the drone bee.
Then I found these photographs—a slap in the face; as if an archaeologist were to offer conclusive evidence (a hand-print in stone; Adam’s fossilized rib) of the existence of God. A father whom I had known only in fantasy became a man, a human being in whose hand my mother had once rested her own.
In the strongbox: photographs, taken by my father on his one trip to Strang Knob. How did they arrive
in her possession? How did he locate her so as to send them? Why send these and nothing else? Would a man who would abandon a woman pregnant with his child later mail her the photographs of her townspeople, from whose outstretched hands he’d taken money? Probably. Confession (mea culpa), absolution, penance in a single gesture—a man might see it this way. Perhaps he, a lifelong wanderer, had no understanding of what these photographs must have represented to her and would come to represent for me. In my more generous moments I think this of him. At darker times I think of him as taunting from afar.
The box is compact, a small trunk bound with leather hinges and with brass-plated corners, now tarnished. It’s dated on the outside, a few months before my birth: STRANG KNOB, KENTUCKY, AUGUST 1913–JANUARY 1914. I have examined the photographs carefully, of course; by now, almost forty years under Strang Knob, I can name many of the subjects. I look at a photograph, then I look at the townspeople; I find the bloodlines. Here one family’s unmistakable nasal slope, there another family’s knitted eyebrows. Some faces I know, some I can guess. Most names are simply lost, forgotten even as they stare into the camera’s eye with this calm certainty: I am remembered.
There are one hundred and fifty-six photographs, none marred by so much as a fingerprint. Some of the pictures include more than one person (two, or five, or ten persons frozen in history for the price of one. I wonder how they paid my father—a dime, a quarter collected from every person in the picture? Or did he take these for the sake of his pictureman’s art?). Taken as a whole the box is a sculpture of memory: unlabeled, jumbled willy-nilly, disordered, haunting.
Here is a photograph of Tice Flaherty, who has told me often of his holy parents, the only people in town who thought more of music than of booze and more of God than of either. In the photograph Tice scowls in miniature overalls and sharp-toed cowboy boots, wearing a one-gallon Stetson and with a small wiener of a dog at his side. He is surrounded by older, bearded men; behind them whiskey barrels are stacked at the Strang Knob railroad landing. The men are carrying sledgehammers and axes. It is the first day of local prohibition, and Tice was brought here (so he says, when he tells his particular memory of the pictureman’s visit) by his father to witness and learn from this act of moral fervor.
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