Myths of the Living
Two Stories
by
Joseph Kenyon
© 2016 by Joseph Kenyon
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Follow Joseph Kenyon on Facebook and Goodreads
Website: josephkenyonlit.com
Published in the United States of America
The Birth of Apollo
The first memory Emma recalled was the sound of the tires on the bridge over the old railroad right-of-way. Thumpety…thump…thump…thump-thump. The sound was the same entering or leaving Pierred’eau. ROSEmary ate a LAMB chop, her father would sing to the rhythm of the wheels. Sometimes it was Harriet and a hot dog. Once it was Darius and Kibbee, but her mother said it was pronounced KIB-ba, and since they were crossing Pierred’eau into Holloway, Emma remembered settling into the backseat with her own mind while her parents argued the point, before moving on to less-connected, more feral grievances.
But that was a long time ago.
The last time she thought of the sound on the bridge was the year before when Lars Archer wrote in the HP Gazette that the rhythm reminded him of a corpse bouncing around in an oversized casket. The line got a lot of play in Holloway, not only for its semi-literary quality, a rarity in the Gazette, but also for its subtle but snide commentary on the circumstances of the two interlocked villages. Holloway and Pierred’eau shared police, fire, and EMT services, in a state that didn’t allow for civic divorce, but the common ground ended there. Holloway was all artisanal and rooted wealth; it featured stone-bordered farmlands and woods with walking paths all surrounding a village filled with boutiques, art galleries, two performance theaters, and tasteful restaurants. Pierred’eau, on the other hand, featured decay and ruin. Those who didn’t want to be seen lived among those no one wanted to see: the criminals, the hooked, the runaways, the ones who fell or climbed through the cracks.
All these years later, Emma still felt that leaving Pierred’eau was like tunneling out of the underground into the light and open air. She didn’t know how she felt about going back, except that the phrase “going back” seemed such a strange way to think about a place only a mile from where she lived. But the gap between the two villages was so vast, the intercourse so rare, that the right-of-way might as well have been an ocean.
Her phone propped up inside one of the console cup holders buzzed, and Jeff’s number popped onto the screen.
“This is all your fault,” Emma said.
“I know it is. I just couldn’t think of anyone else. I mean, I realize since you opened the shop you haven’t, you know…”
“Midwifed. Delivered a baby. I’ll be fine.”
“You understand this isn’t an easy one.”
“I’ll be fine. How are things out on 36?”
“Carnage. I’ve never seen anything like it. The tanker didn’t just jackknife, it slid on its own oil spill and cars were stopped in the other lane for the construction. The truck swept down the road crushing and mangling two lanes full of traffic. Then, it caught fire. Every EMT and fireman in the county is here. That’s why, I want you to know—“
“I’m on my own. Got it.”
“Call though, Em, please, if things are too dicey. I’ll get someone to come over there.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, and get back to what you were doing.”
“Promise you’ll call?”
“Promise.”
Once Emma turned the car onto Island Avenue, she slowed, trying to pick out 247 among the uniform chaff of the neighborhood. This never was a picket-and-split-rail-fence sort of place, but the neat, well-tended yards she remembered as a kid had been swapped out for moss and weeds and tilted fence posts that sent what fencing remained weaving along the sidewalk, slopping onto the concrete here, the yard there. What she did recognize was the crown of the apple tree, its arthritic branches scratching at the gray October sky. There wasn’t a fork in that tree that she hadn’t sat in as a kid. Then her father, who was, at best, a recreational hunter, bagged the only deer he ever shot in his life and hung it from the tree for two days until he could get it butchered. Emma had looked out at the tree from various windows inside the house. The carcass was thin from the gutting, the head bent at a strange angle, the eyes open and staring into nothingness. Those eyes and the strange way the body would swing in a stiff breeze had stayed with her all these years. She was happy when the butchers came to take it away, but she never climbed that tree again. The outline of the deer in her mind became as much an impediment as the real carcass hanging from the branch.
The porch spanning the front of the house looked less worn then the rest of the place, but it was strewn with fast food containers and a couple of old tires. The picture window had been boarded up with two pieces of weathered plywood. Of all the entropic abuse the house had suffered, that covered window stung her the most. How many times after her mother left did she sit behind that window watching the shadow of her father pace the porch? How many times had she played the game of moving her body as close to his passing shadow without letting it touch any part of her? Without seeing her father or allowing herself to be seen?
She drove on. 504 rose up, an old colonial that would have been a stately house in a bygone era, but it had boarded windows and a porch painted over with graffiti. Cracked stone steps took her up to a partially open front door and into a grand foyer that was, to Emma’s surprise, free of litter and debris. But the cavernous room acted like an echo chamber for the screams raining down from the second floor, and Emma followed them up the curving staircase to the third room off the main hallway.
Farlene McKavery was in worse condition than the house. She was weathered and twentyish, frayed around every edge but trying to keep herself raveled with blue eye shadow and chipped black paint on tiny nails. She knelt on the floor, her knees pressed into a mattress dragged from the metal cot at the other side of the room. Her pale and freckled face was either screwed tight with pain or slack with exhaustion. When she wasn’t wailing, her voice dropped back to a moan that sounded like coffee being ground. Her belly flopped over the elastic of her sweat pants. Either she or someone else had cuffed her hefty arms to a dead steam-heat pipe that ran from the old iron radiator to the ceiling. When Emma saw the handcuffs, she retreated away from the door frame and dialed Jeff.
“Did you know Farlene is handcuffed to a pipe?”
“No, I didn’t.” A burst of background noise came through the phone. “I’ll work on getting someone out there.”
Emma ended the call, composed what she hoped would be a comforting expression on her face, took a breath, and entered the room. “Hello, Farlene. My name is Emma. Jeff Wesleyan sent me to help you. I’m going to start by examining you, and then we’ll go from there. Okay?”
Farlene McKavery replied with a moan that sounded like “Ill.. ee…tha” and mashed her cheek against the pipe.
Emma put on gloves and ran her hands over the curvature of Farlene’s stomach, pressing at different points, getting a feel for where the baby was positioned and the state of Farlene’s body. She moved her hand down to Farlene’s vagina to check the dilation. Not much, which didn’t square. Could there be a blockage? Anything was possible, but still dilation would be occurring. Emma kept up a soothing patter as she made another inspection, but clearly something was wrong that she couldn’t feel. What she needed was a clear view with Farlene up on the cot, but that was impossible as long as the handcuffs had her locked into position.
“I need to get these cuffs off you, Farlene. Where’s the
key?”
“Don’t know,” Farlene McKavery whispered. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she let out another soft moan.
Emma patted her shoulder, then stood and made her way through the other rooms on the floor, knocking on, then opening, each door and flinching at who or what might be waiting inside. She found a slotted bar of metal discarded in the bathroom and back in Farlene’s room, Emma used it to pry off the topmost board covering the windows, letting in a bit of light through the broken glass. Despite the clouds, the temperature had risen into the low eighties, but right now warm, gray air felt preferable to the fetid smell inside the room. She started a systematic search through the few boxes, around the cot, under two or three ripped and dirty tee shirts and finally under the loose flooring itself. No key.
Farlene, who had been quieter since Emma had come into the room, let loose with a howl somewhere between a banshee cry and a primal scream, and when that ended, she began to bang her forehead on the pipe, shouting “Get out! Get out!” Emma shoved her left forearm between the pole and Farlene’s head, using her right arm to hold Farlene back. She talked in a slow, soothing voice, but Farlene kept pounding away, and after six blows, Emma had to remove her arm. Farlene grabbed the pipe with her manacled hands and yelled for Illythia. Finally, she stopped yelling and started bouncing with floor-splitting force on the thin mattress. Emma used the weight of her own body to ease Farlene’s fit, wrapping her arms around the girl’s linebacker shoulders, still talking. “Sh-sh-sh. Easy, there. We’re going to get you out. Hang in there.”
The bouncing ended with Farlene letting go, her cuffed hands going slack, and Emma falling to the floor on the other side of the pipe, her back against the wall, face full of sweat. After the outburst, Farlene returned to quiet moaning, and she brought her head down against the pipe to rest. Emma reached over and used her fingers to push a damp strand of stray hair behind the girl’s ear. A surge of anger and compassion filled her, both directed at this mule-like but loveable girl whose situation Emma felt with frightening clarity. Farlene McKavery’s eyes were open but turned far down inside herself, and unless Emma missed her guess, the girl was staring into singularly loveless waters. Emma moved her hand from the cowlick down to the girl’s cheek and brushed it with the back of her fingertips. It was a gesture she had never used on a patient when she had been a mid-wife. It was a gesture she rarely used on the lovers she had had. It was a gesture as mixed as her feelings, a soft touch with a half-closed fist. Farlene’s eyes remained open, but she put her lips to the back of Emma’s hand. She said “cool” in a soft voice, followed by “Illythia” and went quiet again.
The opening caused by removing the board brought a smothering heat through the window that turned the room to haze. Emma shook her head. The metal she used to pry off the board lay nearby, so she reached out with her foot and slid it closer. This was Pierred’eau after all. The house was empty except for a pregnant girl handcuffed to a pipe, a reminder that at any minute danger could come up the stairs. Farlene stirred, but her body didn’t begin to gather like it did before she screamed or launched into her fit. One by one, sounds dropped away. Emma fixed her eyes on the window but kept the girl in her peripheral vision. Maybe, if she saw the next fit coming, she could ease it without Farlene hurting herself or the baby.
Farlene faced the other way, looking over Emma’s shoulder toward the door. At the rustling sound, Emma turned her head as Farlene opened her eyes wide and called out, “Gabs! Oh, Gabs!” A short, man hesitated at the doorway before entering the room and standing in front of the cot, his hands sliding nervously over his down vest. He stared at Farlene with eyes shifting between love and fear.
“Who are you?” Emma said, keeping her hand on the metal piece but trying not to make the words sound like a challenge.
The man didn’t respond.
“Are you the father?”
Nothing.
“It doesn’t matter, but Farlene needs your help. Somewhere there is a key to these.” Emma lifted Farlene’s hands and turned them so the handcuffs were visible. “If we get the key, we can help her. Do you know where the key is?”
The man didn’t reply.
Emma stood up and took a step toward him. “Just help me get her out of here, will you?”
Gabs said nothing, but Farlene roared, and at the sound of it, Gabs fell down onto the cot, his hands gripping the bedframe. Emma went over to the girl and felt her stomach and dilation again: Much wider this time. She put her hand on Farlene’s head, ready to hold her skull if the girl started bouncing or banging her head against the pipe, but Farlene just kept calling for Illythia between a wrenching set of screams.
“Do you see?” Emma said to Gabs, pointing at the girl. “She’s going to die unless you help me. Please. Tell me who has the key or where it is.”
“Honey, no matter how much you ask, he ain’t talking and he ain’t moving.”
Emma looked toward the door where a tall woman with obsidian-colored skin filled the frame. Her waist bent forward slightly, and her eyes, behind thick glasses, had the cloudy look of age, but Emma could tell that once she had been lean and striking. The woman’s voice was gentle, and she never moved from the doorway, but the sight of her sent Emma’s emotions vacillating between relief and dread. Gabs, however, relaxed his grip on the bed, smiling and nodding at Farlene, who couldn’t see him with her eyes closed, her face swimming in pain. Still, Gabs kept nodding, accompanied by several chortles and hoots.
“Gabs can’t talk,” the woman said.
Farlene turned her head toward the newcomer’s voice, and her face relaxed through the pain. “Illythia!”
“Yes, child. Now, what’s all this nonsense?”
Farlene began to cry. Illythia came into the room and laid a long finger on the handcuffs. “Gabs,” she said, “run around to Bock Austin’s place and get his hacksaw. Be quick.”
Gabs got off the bed and shuffled out the door.
“How’s he going to ask for the saw if he doesn’t talk?” Emma said.
“When you barely recall the ways of a place,” Illythia said, “it’s better not to ask questions.”
The words sat oddly in Emma’s ears. She expected the comment to sting but instead, it settled onto the surface of her consciousness lightly, sadly, like a rose laid on a casket being lowered into the grave. She started to respond, but stopped, revising her words in her head so that they sounded inviting, not petulant. “Have we met before, Ms…”
“Jones. Illythia Jones.”
The woman turned away from Farlene and took in Emma. They stood a yard apart and a world away. The unnamed dread that Emma felt earlier grew stronger, overshadowing another unclear memory working its way forward from the back of Emma’s brain. The way Illythia watched her didn’t help. The woman’s serene face never changed, but Emma felt open and vulnerable, as if everything she thought could be read by the old woman. Illythia’s eyes narrowed and downshifted rapidly from collecting data to processing it to understanding.
“You have truly forgotten, haven’t you, child?”
Emma didn’t know what to say.
Farlene screamed.
This was not a wail in the same register as before. Those wails had been agony and fear. This wail came as a warning cry, followed by another. A third wail got cut off by a gurgling in Farlene’s throat, and the two halves of her body began to move in different directions: the top wracked with a choking cough and the bottom bouncing. Emma started another exam, but she didn’t need to go any further than the soaked fabric of Farlene’s sweat pants. Still, she pressed on to check dilation.
“That child is on the move,” Illythia said.
“Yes.”
Illythia began to sing in low tones and stroked Farlene’s hair. Emma managed to pull first one leg of the sweatpants then the other down over Farlene’s ham-like knees and off her legs completely. She reached for her bag to get a baby blanket, when she felt a soft cloth touch her shoulder. Illythia was h
olding out a rust-colored blanket with Egyptian designs running along the borders. Emma laid it on the mattress between Farlene’s knees as a cushion to receive the baby, using her hands to keep Farlene from bringing her knees together, but soon the contractions took care of that. The connecting chain of the handcuffs jangled against the metal as Farlene gripped the pipe with both her hands grunting and yelping while the baby came headfirst and face forward, the shoulders catching and releasing, and then the rest of his body slipping through. Illythia’s song changed as she gathered the baby into the blanket, carefully moving the bundle out of the way of the afterbirth while Emma handled the surgical scissors she took from her bag, cutting and tying the umbilical cord. She was about to suggest that Illythia hand the baby to Farlene, then remembered that Farlene couldn’t hold him. Even without the handcuffs, Farlene was in no condition. Now that the agony had passed, she lay on the floor, offering downy moans and cries to the thin mattress. They stayed within their roles—Illythia singing and swaying the baby, Emma cleaning the area as best she could, and Farlene collapsed—until shuffling came from the staircase, and Gabs reappeared with the hacksaw. Emma took it and began to saw. When the chain broke, Farlene rolled back against the radiator and covered her face in her hands, her moans turning to sighs, and finally to silent sleep. Illythia laid the baby beside his mother.
Emma put down the saw and crossed the room, thumbing her phone to life and tapping Jeff’s number. “Farlene had a boy, but she’s exhausted and probably dehydrated. Not to mention she was blocked for so long there may be damage. Both she and the baby need attention. Should I load her into my car and get her to a hospital? … You’re sure? Because quicker’s better…fine.”
Emma replaced the phone in her pocket and moved toward Farlene, but she thought better of disturbing the girl now that she and the baby were asleep on the mat. She turned her attention to her bag, getting it in order, aware that Illythia and Gabs remained unmoving in the still heat of the room; only she was in motion. The bag being packed, Emma started for the cot, stopped, thought better of sitting down, knowing that she would only bounce up again in a moment, so she rubbed the palm of one hand over the back of the other, looking out the window at the gauzy sky that made everything beyond the room appear to be erased.
“Before the birth,” Emma said, still facing the window, “It seemed like you had something to tell me. What was it?”
Emma heard the woman moving, and when she turned around Illythia had bent down and was reaching out to cradle the baby’s head with her palm. Earlier, Illythia had cut away the elastic cuff and the bottom portion of Farlene’s sweatpants to fashion a baby hat for the boy. Her hand lingered on the fabric covering the tiny skull and then it went to Farlene McKavery’s hair and smoothed it. “There’s no sense in all of us crowding around this mother and child,” she said, and with one more caress of the baby’s head, she straightened up. Gabs stepped aside to let Illythia exit the room, and Emma followed with mixed feelings of trepidation and annoyance. On the way out, she handed the metal to Gabs and told him if Farlene McKavery became distressed to go to the railing and bang on it.
Emma found Illythia standing at the bottom of the staircase, her hand settled on the end of the balustrade in the same way it had just cradled the newborn’s head. Emma went halfway down the steps and stopped.
“I want to know what you were going to tell me.”
“And why is that, child? You’ve forgotten everything, and maybe that’s a blessing, how it must be. There’s so much here to forget, to leave. Why should you want to go back?”
“It’s got nothing to do with forgetting and going back. You talk like you know me. I used to live her, but I don’t remember you.”
Illythia’s laugh was a low rumbling chuckle. “And now you want to be remembering?”
Emma came down the rest of the way until she was standing beside Illythia. The woman was a good head taller than Emma, and now that head was swiveling, taking in the foyer.
“You know, me and two other women, we keep this room clean. It ain’t nothing to look at anymore, like the rest of Pierred’eau, but we do it anyway. This house used to be owned by a grand old couple back in the day. They didn’t have kids, so they entertained everyone else’s. We used to come to parties here as girls, standing with our shoulders straight and trying not to look awkward around the boys dressed in their finest on the other side of the room. Lots of pretty white dresses and dark suits, streamers and cakes and music. That’s what should be remembered.”
“I don’t remember anything about that,” Emma said.
“You wouldn’t. Long before you were born. Your mama would remember, though. You remember your mama?”
“She left when I was eight.”
“You remember your Daddy?”
“Of course! He raised me after Mom left.”
“What do you remember about him after your mama left you?”
Emma described the game she played with his shadow as he paced the porch.
“Tell me about the meals she used to cook. And about the homework she helped you finish. How did she tend to an injury you done to yourself? Or the talks you had? Tell me about those things.”
Emma opened her mouth and closed it again. She cast about in her mind , remembering each of the things Illythia had asked about, but the person cooking, helping, tending, or talking was either Aunt Sal or Uncle Teddy, not her mother.
“Tell me child, when did your daddy die?”
“I…I don’t recall exactly. Sometime later. I remember living with my Aunt and Uncle when my cousin got married, and I was eleven then, so sometime in those three years. But I don’t remember anything about his funeral.”
“Do you remember anything about your daddy and that old apple tree in the backyard?”
“Sure. The deer.”
“The deer?”
Emma recounted the story of the deer her father shot and hung from the apple tree, Illythia kept her eyes moving around the room, as if looking at the present but seeing the past. When Emma finished, the woman had her gaze fixed on a part of the wall that featured a gaping hole. “You remember all that about the buck, do you?”
“Yes. It’s one of those memories that just sticks in your head.”
Illythia shrugged. She let her gaze linger on the hole in the wall. “There are things we tell ourselves and there’s the truth, and sometimes one feels like the other. That’s not a put-down. Lots of people around here tell themselves things until those things become the truth. Sometimes it’s better to let the thing remembered be the truth. I’ve seen strong men break down like little babies when they found out what the truth really was.”
A Siren sounded in the distance, drawing closer. Emma looked up the steps and saw Gabs standing by the railing, looking back into the room like his eyes were stuck there. In one hand was the pipe suspended over the railing.
“You’re people are coming,” Ilythia said. “Best stop chatting and get Farlene ready.”
“I want to know the truth,” Emma said. “If you know something about me that I don’t remember right, I want to know it.
Illythia moved to the stairs and started up.
“Dammit, I want to know!” Emma said.
Illythia stopped on the third tread. She looked up at Gabs, still frozen in the heat.
“The shadow you played with weren’t your daddy’s,” Ilythia said, keeping her eyes on Gabs. “It was me and a couple others watching your place from the evening til the morning while we tried to locate your kin.”
“And why would you do that and not my father?”
“Cause your daddy loved your mama so much. Cause, he didn’t own a gun. Cause he never hunted a single day in his whole life.”
The Myths of Living Page 1