Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  “You’ve got some of it, too, though maybe not with the same . . . unholy stubbornness.”

  They both laughed a little.

  “It did startle me to see you so down the past couple of weeks. I almost picked up and moved into the cottage in town, in case you needed anything.”

  Annelise tried to imagine that one, with everything else that had gone on. “Well, I came out here. This is better.”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it? Nice and quiet. Just us. I do wish we had some lemonade—we had some at the Independence Day picnic back in town, and I couldn’t get enough. Such a rare thing.” Gloria studied the nails on one of her hands, and Annelise noticed for the first time that they were chewed to the nub. “I just wished you were there with Uncle and me, so that you could have some, too.”

  “That is . . . very kind. I wasn’t in much of a place to appreciate it, unfortunately.”

  “It made me sad to see you in such a state. A girl with your spark. But I do understand, maybe more than you know. I could see some of myself, hovering over that radio with you.” Aunt Gloria looked up from her poor bitten-down nails. “A heroine of mine once disappeared into the ocean, too.”

  “I got my monthly when I was nine years old. Did my mother ever tell you that?”

  “Well, no. No, she didn’t.”

  “I can’t really blame her. She was probably as shocked as I was, in her own way.” Annelise looked out into the dusk, the last light of the sun just a purple striation where the land scribed the sky. Somehow evening had passed into night.

  “Not to mention I hid it for as long as I could. I was scared and confused, though. My mother’s more about plain appearances.”

  “Even that can come from being scared and confused.” Gloria had taken up her fork again. She spoke around a mouthful.

  “That never occurred to me, but I guess you’re right.”

  “Being a grown-up is just as frightful as growing up in the first place, in my experience. Especially once you have young of your own to keep after. How long were you able to hide it? Your moon, I mean.”

  “Four or five times, I guess? I didn’t understand what it was, because nobody had ever talked to me about it, and I was afraid to say anything because of where the blood was coming from.”

  “My land. You must have been anguished.”

  “Terrified I was dying, and that’s the truth. The first time it happened, I pulled the sheet off my bed and hid it in the neighbors’ trash.”

  Gloria clucked her tongue. “Nine years old. Bless your heart.”

  Some detached part of herself considered even in the moment how she could not have predicted such an evening, with such a person as her aunt.

  “What did you do in place of napkins? If you don’t mind me snooping.”

  “Toilet paper. I’d just wad it in my underpants and pretend I had to go to the bathroom a lot.”

  Gloria clucked again.

  “Finally, though, I bled through the back of my dress. First week of the fifth grade. My teacher sent me down to the school nurse and I remember just crying, partially out of shame but also maybe halfway in relief that someone else finally knew and could tell me it was normal. But I was begging her not to tell my mother, for reasons I didn’t even quite get, and she was really, really nice to me about it, but of course she had to. Tell her, I mean.

  “And of course, my mother took me straight to the family doctor. He’s actually still the family doctor, and he seemed older than Methuselah even then.

  “Anyway. That was my first full exam, lying there on my back, trying to reach these stirrups with my short little legs.” That silver reflector, flashing like a moon across a bay, half revealed above the horizon of the gown she’d had to wear. A foreshadowing of what she’d dodged by confession later.

  She didn’t elaborate now, but the wisp of a thatch she’d developed had anguished her right along with the secret spells, and never more so than in that exact moment. The silk on her legs, too, blonde and usually hidden beneath stockings but glinting in the air like electrified filaments, her limbs angled in that punishing light. At least nobody looked beneath her arms.

  “It may not be entirely his fault, or any of his fault even, but I’ve hated that doctor ever since.”

  They’d sent her to the waiting room afterward, with a nurse and a lollipop. What was he telling her mother behind the barrier of the door? She could hear the hushed murmur, hear the urgency even, but the message itself would remain a mystery. She never did unwrap the candy.

  Her aunt was looking at her, she could tell even in the faded light. The moon had risen now, not much more than a crescent over the empty quiet. “Thank you for telling me, Annelise. I hope my sister cooked your favorite dinner, after all that.”

  “Oh. I can’t even remember. I think she was averting her eyes, which I guess would be normal. She brought me a little book, called Marjorie May’s Twelfth Birthday. I’m sure she’d rather it was my twelfth birthday.

  “Otherwise, she gave me a safety razor and some soap. Proper napkins and a harness. As much of a hug as she was capable of, I guess? And that was that.”

  Her father had stayed totally out of it, and she guessed that must be normal too. He did treat her a little differently, from then on.

  “The other girls my age still had a couple of years to go, and I didn’t have older sisters or cousins around. So even once I knew better, I still felt like a bit of a sideshow freak. I was just a little girl, in spite of what my body was doing. Just completely sheltered, completely naive.”

  “I suppose I can relate to that, too.” Gloria shifted in her chair. “I had some troubles myself, around that sort of thing. Not in quite the same way. Is it too cold out here? Or too late? We can go inside, or just call it enough for one night.”

  “No, I’m fine. Really. It’s so good to talk.”

  “You’ve been so honest, and I know it’s hard to be honest, with these secrets we think we’re supposed to carry around.”

  “Do you want to tell me, Gloria? You can, if you want. I always could keep a secret. Even when I was nine.”

  Gloria

  I

  And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh:

  and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:

  And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy . . .

  —Acts of the Apostles

  My sister was always the strong one, always the bright fire. Older than me by three years and rather haughtily precocious, I suppose, burning young with questions and convictions, skeptical in Sunday school and even challenging the minister on this point or that.

  The doctrine of predestination against the necessity of free will to personal salvation.

  The age of the earth as calculated through the Scriptures, versus the assertions of the geology we were taught in school. A mere girl then, and told to shush up and worry not over things beyond her ken.

  Papa was a Methodist by heritage, a good man but a docile one, more consumed with his farm in Indiana than his future in eternity. Probably he could have used a few sons, but what he wound up with was a pair of girls. I still don’t know what he actually believed, and I’ve come to understand that probably he did not know himself.

  Mother on the other hand had long volunteered with the Salvation Army, and she raised Victoria and myself to answer that good Christian call. We worked right beside her in poor farms and orphanages, seeing firsthand the rotting fruits of strong drink and gambling and the dissipation of sin.

  There was a distant sense that Jesus would one day return and that we must repent and be saved. And although good works alone were not enough to gain the Kingdom, we understood as well that by one’s own
fruits should a true Christian be known. We were instructed to be pious but also well-mannered, modest but stalwart servants, never raising an eyebrow with so much as an outburst of joy, let alone anything like the fullness of the Spirit.

  The Good Book spoke of such fullness, though. Signs and wonders, and manifestations of the Holy Ghost. The speaking of strange tongues and the healing of the infirm. Though Jesus Himself instructed His disciples to heal the sick, cast out demons, and preach the Kingdom of God, we were encouraged in our staid little church only toward the latter. The age of miracles had passed. Now we occupied an age of faith, as the evidence of things no longer seen.

  And it was true, none of us had ever seen a demon, at least not of the sort Christ cast into a pack of swine. We had seen no cripple made to walk, nor blind man to see.

  I myself suffered mightily from what the doctors termed a twist in my spine. Pain like a tightening chain through my hip and back and shoulder, then on through the taut cords of my neck and finally agony in the region behind my left eye. Pain to make waves of sickness churn and convulse right through me. Pain to blind me with distortions of magnified light and arrays of agonizing color. Mother and sister held back my hair while I retched into a bedpan, or worked liniment into my back and neck. Pressed a cool damp rag to my aggrieved eyes. They prayed for comfort for me, but no one imagined that the bend in my back might actually straighten through supplication to the Spirit alone.

  Victoria on the other hand fairly exuded what was known in those days as pulchritude. She had health and she had beauty, and a way about her in equal measures charming and headstrong, and that had suitors coming around early.

  Probably she needed to slide a bit, as the Lord will sometimes allow. Needed to see the lure of the world for the false glitter it contained and so discover true conviction, in a way bland recited dogma could never match. His ways are indeed mysterious.

  She trotted herself off to more than one dance at the community hall in our little hamlet. When the same hall featured a showing of one of the latest moving pictures, Victoria accepted an invitation to that, too. Mama could not rein her in, so imperious was Victoria’s combined force of threat and will.

  Her name is Mary Pickford. She is the latest sensation.

  I was barely twelve and, I must confess, prey to a burning curiosity. Victoria was so . . . of the world now, positively a-brim with the forbidden knowledge of what lay outside the garden. I wanted to know, and yet I did not want to know.

  I fear Mama does not approve.

  Mama does not approve. Nor will she explain why.

  She says it is a mere hop and a skip from the dance social to Sodom and Gomorrah.

  But how can she know that if she hasn’t experienced anything for herself?

  She had a point, and anyway my curiosity got the better of me. What does Mary Pickford do, in the moving picture?

  Well. It’s a story, of course, so she is pretending to be someone else. Little Red Riding Hood, in this case.

  Can you see the red riding hood? Its color, I mean.

  No, silly. It’s just in the shades of a regular photograph. Like the ones of us on the mantel.

  But does it seem real?

  This she had to consider. Yes, and no. They are real people moving about, but they behave in a dramatic fashion. I suppose they have to, to get the story across, since you can’t hear what they might be saying. Also, the wolf is clearly only a little shepherd dog, and seems a bit puzzled by the whole business. But anyway, it’s somewhat mesmerizing to behold. Mary Pickford does have quite the head of ringlets.

  Why do you suppose they call it a riding hood?

  Again, she had to think. It must have been a horse-riding habit at one time?

  Were there places where girls rode horses? I’d seen men on saddle mounts of course, and farm boys a time or two up on the bare backs of plow horses on a whim, or playing at cowboys or knights, but no girl in her petticoats and skirts would ever dare to be caught astraddle such a creature. The newfangled bicycles could be deadly enough to a young lady’s honor, as I myself had already had the misfortune to discover.

  Victoria’s knowledge extended even here.

  There is a thing called a sidesaddle, you know. For aristocratic ladies to protect their virtue, as they ride about their estates. It’s regarded as quite sophisticated.

  A sidesaddle?

  Yes. Mostly in England, I believe . . .

  I could hardly imagine it, particularly in the pall of catastrophe that had hung over me those past few years.

  Was I nine, or ten? No matter, except that it was ahead of Victoria’s turn toward doubt. A boy from town, the mercantile keeper’s son, with a raffish new bicycle, red and gleaming like nothing I’d ever seen. We were in the village with springtime all around, had ridden in with Papa and Mama in the wagon.

  Victoria and I had dollies and teacup settings at home, but nothing more strenuous for play than hoops and sticks, and I was stunned and a little smitten at the speed of this bicycle, its proud owner zipping back and forth on the graded street out front of the mercantile.

  His name was Otto, and Victoria and I made a rapt audience from the boardwalk while Mama did her procuring inside. Neither of us girls had seen a bicycle before, outside of sketches and advertisements in the broadsheets that Papa sometimes brought home. We had gathered even from that limited exposure that in far-off places such as Boston and Philadelphia, ladies and girls had also taken up the invigorating fad.

  Otto’s legs pumped like the treadle on Mama’s sewing machine. He was in my grade at school and pretty boisterous, always climbing a tree or building a slingshot. Once he leaned across his desk and dropped a frog down Flossie Donnelly’s collar and got himself properly thrashed, although he seemed to take it as a matter of course if not actual pride. He made me nervous and I usually tried to avoid him, but now I found that I simply could not peel my eyes away.

  And somewhere in there, I guess I just wanted him to like me. So when he skidded to a stop at the edge of the sidewalk, I was already aware of not wanting, for just this one time, to slump in my sister’s shadow.

  Guess you can tell I had me a birthday.

  Of course she beat me to the quick. Looks like a happy one, too.

  Ain’t she grand?

  Oh, dashing. Faster than a racehorse, I’m sure.

  I knew full well Victoria had never seen a racehorse, but why couldn’t I come up with something to say? True or not?

  She’s an Iver Johnson. Same outfit makes the pistols?

  For once even Victoria seemed stymied.

  Anybody like a ride?

  I certainly would, very much. The words just popped out, with no thought behind them.

  Well, hop on down. Let’s take a whirl.

  And how on God’s green earth do you intend to do that?

  I couldn’t tell whether my sister directed this at me, or at Otto. I didn’t even know whether Otto had it in mind for us to somehow ride together or for me to try it alone, which struck me right in the moment as an even more preposterous notion. Either way, I had to admit, Victoria had a point.

  Otto however was unperturbed, and how on God’s green earth that could be was a whole separate mystery. He plunked a fist on the swale between his hand grips. Easy as pie. You can set right here, even in your skirts. I gave Flossie and Myra a ride apiece yesterday. Works like a charm. So who’s first?

  Part of me knew I should immediately go and ask Mama. But all of me knew, already, exactly what the answer would be.

  Come on, Vicky. Never knew you to be the shy one.

  I remembered Flossie squealing when the frog went down her back, and I remembered a flare of jealousy, too. Not that I wanted a frog down my own dress, but I was nevertheless not a bit surprised to hear that the victim of such had already allowed the offending prankster to pedal her about on his rakish cyc
le. There in my own moment, I certainly would not abide granting bold Victoria the first go-round.

  Quick as a wink I hopped to the street. I’m not shy, either. How do I do it?

  Well, there’s the pioneer spirit. Otto straightened the gleaming device and steadied the handlebar. Just step up on the tire and get yourself acquainted.

  Um, Gloria?

  Already I was clambering, more unsteady than not, but Otto did a good job holding the tire. I managed to get my skirts underneath me and pivoted around to settle onto the swale.

  Gloria.

  Victoria’s eyes were the size of walnuts. She shook her head at me.

  Where do I hold?

  He showed me, right to the inside of his own hand grips, alongside each of my hips.

  You have to keep your legs out straight, away from the wheel.

  Gloria . . .

  This time I didn’t even look at her. Go fast.

  The ride was a little wobbly at first, and I a little precarious in my perch, but in not much more than a moment Otto huffed and pumped his way to a rather thrilling speed and this seemed to smooth things right out. I found I could just sit and hold myself steady and sort of glide, all the way up to the end of the street.

  Gonna turn now . . . keep yer balance . . .

  I remember having my skirts tucked up between my knees to keep them from the spinning tire, remember this pure new fun of motion and balance and I guess daring risk with old devil-may-care Otto, taking me along with him and steering and tilting into a thrilling sweep of a turn that traveled through me like a sweet cold chill, a shiver to the tips of my outstretched toes and the roots of my hair, and I was simply overjoyed at how easy it was to keep perfectly poised even at a tilt on this thin little bar when you had your proper motion and already there we were, coming back straight again, just gliding forward in the other direction with the shop windows and the hitching rails and the rain barrels flying by, and I had just begun to think how I would be able to lift one hand and wave to Victoria—

  Gloria Marie Comstock. YOUNG LADY . . .

  Either Otto faltered at Mama’s rile or I lost my confidence, or both. Whatever the case, my knees definitely lost hold of my skirts. The turn of the wheel snatched the hem and sucked me in a violent instant right off my perch and down hard, astraddle the tire.