‘I have never asked you, actually—.’ Henry embraced a pile of thick brown parcel paper that had just been shoved into his arms. ‘— about your name.’
‘Mine?’ Al’s eyes that were perpetually half-lidded, as if he’d just woken up, or the sun had always been too bright for him. He stared at Henry as if a strange smell had been put in front of him, and ran his palm across his shirt, marking it with dirt.
‘Yes. Is it short for anything?’
‘Well,’ The man scratched his head and paused, as if no one had ever asked him this before, and he was sure no one would again. ‘Albert. But my mum called me that, and only when I was bein’ a right old pain.’ He smiled at another memory. ‘My dad always called me Al, come to think of it.’
‘It was my mother that called me by a shorter name., she’d always liked Henry. My father called me Hironimus.’
‘I thought your name was Henry.’
‘That’s my shorter name.’
‘Oh, that’s right. You told me you had a big long name but god, that’s a hard one to say. Do ya mind that I say Hank ?’
And maybe Henry didn’t after all, he thought. Maybe Al had asked Henry for help because he knew he was good for something, and although he probably thought of him as the immigrant with the pretty, sad, wife and the tearaway blond girl, maybe this was a way that they fit him onto the page of their lives, in faint pencil script; this could be the way he would be understood if only for a short while.
Henry looped rough twine under his elbow and back toward and across his palm to make an oval, again and again and again until he could put it all over his shoulder. ‘Albert, I don’t mind.’
Al caught the joke and laughed, clapping him on the back. ‘Let’s get a beer.’ And the two men walked off, the oval shape of sweat soaking through the backs of their shirts.
‘Mama?’ Slava grabbed at her hip and embraced her. ‘Walk with me when I'm on your leg, that’s funny, I like when you do that.’
‘Oh, kitten, you’re too heavy and I have to prepare dinner. Ask your father.’
‘He’s working outside. He doesn’t like me bothering him and messing things, he says. I get in trouble.’ Her bright blue eyes were apologetic. She wondered if he resented the image of his daughter,
sometimes: the blonde child with silvery blue eyes that looked nothing like him, or his wife. They were dark and she was light. She represented something unknown to him.
‘Mama?’
‘Yes?’
‘I love you.’
She looked down at the now tall, bright thing at her side, and returned to the carrots.
The house was quiet because Henry had left, as he usually did after dinner. The sky that night had turned dark unusually early, and Julia was busy sitting with Slava, whispering the flourishing ends of a fairy tale.
His solitary ritual began the same way each night: around nine o’clock, he’d check his shirt pocket, feeling for the soft packet of cigarettes, and then roll up the sleeves of his shirt as he walked out the screen door to the small square of land out front a stone's throw away from the cane fields. The wooden and glass structure was only as high as he was tall, and it had been there when they first arrived at the house. It was abandoned and had overgrown, dehydrated weeds, but it was just enough to house something all his own. What would you use this for, Julia had asked. Orchids, he had replied, and then began a small collection that he retrieved from a florist in Stratford, who in turn had traveled to Fiji to procure them from an orchid farm.
Tonight, his hands hovered tender and large over their thin skeletons; lips and spurs never attaching to the soot on his fingertips, his eyes languid and worshipful over each curve. A chipped tumbler held the dregs of his vodka and balanced timidly on the edge of a short wooden stool beside him. He’d thrown that stool across the room in a fit of anger a few months ago and had tried to repair the legs, but he hadn’t done it very well, so it wobbled.
‘You have yet to fix that,’ Julia pointed out, leaning against the frame. She had been watching him for a while now, and he hadn’t noticed.
‘Yes, I'm aware.’
‘Okay, well,’ she stopped, wanting to say something else of purpose. ‘What’s the use in a broken thing?’
His jaw went rigid. He looked up at Julia and plucked the back of his shirt, moon shapes of sweat marking his armpits. ‘I’ll fix it, I'm aware.’ He prodded it with his hand. ‘It’s still useful.’
She watched as a tin-framed lamp cast a tall silhouette of his bent frame against the glass panels of the greenhouse.
‘How long will you be?’
‘Does it matter?’ The corner of his mouth flattened into his cheek. ‘To you, I mean. Does it matter?’ He leaned on his knee and waited, examining her face. It was plain and drawn, and he imagined what she had accomplished this evening: he imagined that she had quietly swept the floor after dinner, he imagined that she had wiped the back of her wet hands on the front panel of her skirt, and smoothed her hair back off of the neck that he had touched so often. He imagined her to be the girl he’d seen, that one day when he’d projected a future memory of her, as all men and women do. He looked at her now and felt a sour taste sat at the back of his throat. So much had changed, though he loved her still, but his anger hovered faintly above him like a moving cloud, following him, setting the rains on him when he thought of the past. He lit another cigarette and turned back.
Julia rubbed her palm with the opposite thumb, watching the shadows battle the creamy yellow lamplight. ‘Things matter, yes.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Maybe, only to me.’ They both kept a polite distance from the other. Politeness was survival.
He stood up, misting a petal— it was the darkest red, the color of clotted blood— watching as the water settled and veiled.
Julia pursed her lips at his silence.
’I'm going to bed.’ Julia looked up and felt the heaviness of the air. The farmlands were peaceful and deserted. She turned on her heel, her skirts kicking at the back of her knee as she walked into the night.
Not long after, as he closed the glass door behind him and the lamplight had flickered its end, he drew on the last of his cigarette. He stood in the dark, feeling the air change direction; beneath the layers of his skin, underneath his clothes, he felt it. He speculated, as he sometimes did when he saw the house from this distance (a dark, small thing lit from within) he wasn’t sure he could have been anything in particular in his life, but he could survive it, survive all of it, and wasn’t that the point? Love wasn’t the thing that he could understand. Perseverance was. And maybe within perseverance is a commitment to loving someone.
He stepped forward, taking a quick look back at the orchids, protected in their small, dark space, and walked towards the house. His footsteps heavy in his battered and torn boots, he finished the last of his cigarette, the embers dying in the ground as he crushed out the final spark. The winds picked up momentum, and he only vaguely noticed the glass shudder in response to the increasing winds.
She thought she was dreaming, when the howling started. It wasn’t even dawn yet, and Julia sat bolt upright in bed, quickly realizing that she was definitely not dreaming. The wind was whipping around the house, slamming against the shutters, forcing the trees to bend and huddle and beg. The family had weathered wet season successfully before, but this was different. It was angry and inhospitable and relentless in its pursuit to destroy. She ran into the kitchen and tried to switch on a radio. Static. She checked the phone line. Dead. Henry was still asleep. She debated waking him as it was so early. So, she went back to bed and prayed for it to stop.
It didn’t.
5:45am. Something hit the house, it sounded like a piece of wood. Then on the other side, a cracking sound. More wind, higher pitched sounds and moaning, like an animal dying. She got out of bed again, and this time Henry started to stir. She padded to the kitchen and looked out the window. Sheets and sheets of grey, horizontal rain, the sky threateningly dark and furious. �
��Henry!’ She hissed as she ran back into their room. ‘HENRY!’
‘What, what is it? Why are you panicking?’
‘There’s a storm out there, it’s bad. I don’t know what’s happening.’
He ran out with her to the window. ‘Ahh God damn it, the fields will be flooded soon.’ He ran back to get dressed in anything he could find. ‘Check the animals!’ he shouted back.
Julia threw on a coat and boots and opened the door carefully, forcing her way outside. The winds were extraordinary; She felt like she could be lifted off so easily, her arms and legs tethered to nothing and everything all at once. She made it outside, clutching the side of the house as the winds howled, running against the rains and into the pens to check on the cows and chickens. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called, shrieked, shouted, and waited for sounds of reply. She kept walking, each footstep lifting off before she could plant it. And then she found them all, huddled together, matted chocolate and white hides, lying in a corner of the pen lamenting. The goats in the next pen, bleating their distress, a strange dog howling underneath the house, cats mewing their discontent, their protection in the form of something that could very easily kill them. She didn’t know what to do, and she watched them helpless. She needed Henry to guide her.
She ran back to see him surveying the damage on one outside of the house, soaked through, there was an honesty in his face that she recognized from long ago. ‘I’m going in, the animals seem to be fine, but even if they weren’t, there’s nothing we can do.’
‘Okay, go in. Make sure Slava’s room is secure.’
‘How?’
‘Just... I don’t know! Take things off shelves, get her on the ground, just go!’ Henry ran to herd the animals to somewhere safe and disappeared from view.
7:30am. Slava had been up for an hour already, the wind coming in through the rooms with unrelenting force. ‘Mama! Papa!’ She was sat in the middle of the room, by the door, shaking, huddling under blankets as Julia ran in. ‘What’s happening?!’
‘Wet season… just more wet than usual I guess,’ Julia joked feebly and walked towards her. And just then, a loud cracking sound interrupted her, and she veered to the window and saw a tree split in half as if by an otherworldly force and fall to the ground. Henry. She ran back outside, shouting for him, her voice suffocated by the winds, every breath drawn out of her. She finally heard him faintly, and saw him in the driving rain, a small body moving across, eerily bright. She stood resolutely, gripping the side of the door, letting the wind whip her hair, the weight of her dress increasing as the hem absorbed millions of drops of warm rain.
‘Mama? What’s happening?’ Slava sat huddled under their blankets still.
‘It’s fine, Papa is sorting it out. It’s fine.’ She turned back into the house, and then heard him clattering up the steps. He pushed through the door, breathless.
‘Jesus Christ, it’s bad out there. It’s as if the world has been stamped flat.’ A crack then silenced them all, louder this time, and it came from the left side of the house, as if the sky had imploded. Then a howl against the window, pushing in. She looked over at him and saw him reach for her. ‘Julia, down. Get down!’ And not a moment after he reached her, she crouched over Slava and he embraced them both, a pile on the floor, just as the window cracked in half and shattered completely, sending shards of wet glass and pouring rain into the middle of the room. They waited. Slava was crying.
‘Shhhh…. shhhhh,’ Julia whispered. ‘Stay quiet.’ Just then, another aggressive gust of wind bellowed through the other window, crossing through the center of the house and lifting it up, an invisible hand unlatching the entire house and setting it back down like a toy onto the earth.
‘Uhm’, Slava whimpered, her nails digging into Julia’s arm.
‘It’ll pass, Slava. Be patient.’
It took until late that afternoon for the winds to stop and the rains to slow, and it was only then, when people were safe to venture delicately out of their houses, that the devastation began to surface. It was oddly peaceful. Julia and Henry stood outside the house, speechless at how much flooding there was. The first two steps leading up to their house were submerged. The sugar cane drooped inches from the ground. There was no electricity for miles. It was a wasteland.
‘How am I supposed to fix this?’ He sat down on the top step, lighting a cigarette. ‘How the hell am I supposed to see past this? This?’ He waved his hand at the scene in front of him.
He walked down the stairs, stopping at the second one, his toes hitting the water. He stood, looking down, trapped for the time being by his own country. He understood the feeling. He looked across, to his left. He’d hoped against hope that the greenhouse would be intact. Julia joined him, and placed her arm through his, and they scanned the land: thin panes of glass and pieces of metal lying like a battered corpse on the ground. Pieces of pottery lay strewn across the ground like confetti, and underneath all of it, black-purple petals crushed underneath. The mixture of soil and the perfume of the crushed flowers on the flat earth combined to create a metallic, iron-rich fragrance; if it was a funeral, he would have wept.
24
April 1954
The greenhouse hadn’t been rebuilt even a year later, and they were still finding bits of glass and gnarled pieces of steel that had been carried by the winds as far as the trees at the perimeter of the farm. They had gathered much of the carcass of wood and metal from various parts of the farm and had given it to the town to use for scraps. The town itself was still healing, and shops were slowly, delicately, coming to life as if recovering from an illness. The flatlands had been erased, and the farmhouses had been emptied.
None of the animals had survived, so they used what they could from the flesh and buried the rest. Julia wore trousers and a short sleeve shirt today, as she dug in the garden, planting new seeds. Slava was sat in her underwear next to her, the heat of the day on their backs.
‘Mama,’ Slava sunk her tiny hand into the dirt and removed a worm. ‘Do you think Papa is sad?’
‘About what, sweetheart?’ Julia couldn’t face a question about the twins, and she set her teeth in anticipation.’
‘The little ones.’
‘What little ones?’
‘The flowers.’
The greenhouse. ’Oh, you mean the purple flowers?’
‘Yes. Those. He was always in that little house with the little ‘ones’, the little flowers.’
Julia sat back on her calves; her knees folded underneath her. ‘Those were his orchids, yes.’ She looked across at the land that was empty now. ‘He worked hard protecting them.’
‘He loved them.’
Julia smiled at her daughter. ‘He did.’ She looked across at the empty farmhouse. ’He loved them very much.’
‘Will he get more?’
Julia began to dig again, her tears wetting the soil. ‘No, sweetheart. We won’t be getting any more.’ She looked over at Slava. ‘Hey,’ she whispered conspiratorially.
Slava squinted in the sun. ‘Yes, Mama?’
Julia hooked a finger and Slava leaned closer to her. Julia suddenly wrapped her in her arms and nuzzled her neck. And Slava erupted in giggles as the soil sprinkled off of Julia’s hands onto her sunlit hair.
That evening the family had celebrated Henry’s birthday, and Julia remembered what that meant. Her heart freshly ached, as if they’d been gone only minutes, and it was then, after the sticky sweetness of cake had faded and the coffee had been poured and Slava was asleep, that she knew she couldn’t do this anymore. Not here. Not anywhere, really, but having the constant reminder of ghosts that never returned, it was too much for her now. The cyclone had been an ending and a new beginning, yes, but the emptiness was still there. Old memories living in the walls that surrounded her.
Julia leaned over the table and watched him as he sipped his coffee. She knew him well enough now to know that his thoughts wheeled in his head.
‘Henry. What are you
thinking about?’
He put his cup down and it rattled into the saucer. He spun it slowly with a finger. ‘We spent a year rebuilding this farm.’
‘I know. It’s getting better, slowly.’ She wondered where this would go.
Henry stood up. The room where they’d been through so much, the house where they never seemed to stray far from, the pain and the arguments and the memories of love lost and gained; it suddenly occurred to him that he’d grown accustomed to it. He tapped his chest pocket and slowly reached for a cigarette. They had grown accustomed to life as it was, here, reinventing the story in the same spot.
‘I have an idea.’ He snapped his lighter shut, and flicked it open again.
Julia held her breath. She wasn’t sure what he would say all of a sudden and she braced herself as if she would fall into the sea.
‘I don’t think the journey for us ends here.’
Julia slowly let out her breath. ‘You’re talking as if we’re dying.’
He placed his hands in his pockets and walked slowly around the room, a skeptical laugh at his throat. ‘Granite.’
‘What?’
He stopped pacing and faced Julia. ‘You told me once I was made of granite. And you are made of dreams. Rebirth.’
Julia warmed at the memory, but it saddened her. So much had happened since then, and she wasn’t sure she believed it now. ‘Yes, I remember. But what does that mean?’
‘It means that we have to keep going. I don’t think we’re meant to be here.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, most importantly, because there’s literally nothing left here. My work has been rebuilding this farm, and not earning as much money as I could be. We are living off of what we have saved and there won’t be much left unless we change course.’
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