An Orchard in the Street

by Reginald Gibbons

  Persephonē at Home

  No spices—only salt—and no ice or coolness. The food she has to prepare is dry, stale, gray. The pantry holds mealy flour, dried beans, stale crackers, and hard dried figs that taste of must and sweat. Holes in the dining room floor, big enough for her foot but where she’d better not step, open downward into a deep bottomlessness, absolutely dark. There even Pluto doesn’t go. And in his kitchen sink a stink rises when upstairs any water runs.

  No room without a little smoke in it; and beyond the window curtains there’s only black emptiness outside, through which the less tormented shades come near the house, floating slowly or sometimes hurtling past, eternal strangers to each other but whispering or moaning to be heard, anyway. So she keeps the curtains closed while she’s there; she can scarcely bear to touch them when each year she must move back in, they are so filthy with accumulated smoke and dust and vapor of burning oil.

  The darkness is hot and humid, and in it he works all day, she never asks at what. He doesn’t bathe often and until she can get used to this again she tries to hold her own sleeve—clean at first—over her mouth and nose when she greets him. In bed she must cover her face with the bedclothes in order to fall asleep. The sheets are gray despite all the washings she gives them, and black soot spots the gray. The water she must use for washing and cooking is gray. The air seems gray.

  Her days—sometimes she merely stares at a small candle flame for hours. She must overhear, without wanting to, the sounds from outside the house, where she doesn’t venture: there is no full voice among all the shades, no resonance of sound in their world, and in it something is clicking randomly all the time. Pluto himself, although not a shade at all but godly in his way, with his huge beautiful physique and the exaggerated features of his face, like those of a statue meant to be seen from far below, has an odd voice—not big and also a little high. Repeatedly she washes out her clothes. There is never quite enough light to sew or even cook by, but she must do it anyway. She awaits the passage of days and weeks and months in a realm where each dim hot hour seems a day in itself. Then he comes in suddenly—there are no warning footfalls in a landscape of dusty paths and mists.

  His frustration—although, to describe him, “frustration” suggests too much delicacy—is that it’s not within his power to inflict any torment great enough on those outside the house to make them go away, and that it’s not meant for him to change his rule to the world above. He believes that he loves her, and when she’s away he pines—although, to describe him, “pines” suggests too much feeling. But he cannot rescue her from the conditions of her life with him, which have been set by divine powers of tradition and the generations of gods. He cannot change the half-year of nights when she cries to herself in a wing chair in a dim corner, without a window she would want to look out of. In a way, he is almost happier, or at least less troubled, when she is gone and he can only think about her, during the half-year when she is above again and happy and he is still below, at work ruling and being, without need of rest or change.

  When they are together in bed, sometimes she can remember her excitement at his first attentions to her, although these had been rough and he had come to her in that other world, her world of air and promises; she thought she believed that she needed something of him. But when she decided to refuse him, and her mother agreed that she must, he carried her away by force to keep what he said was already his. Together in the hot darkness—in his house, in the season when she is with him—in bed what they do is mechanical and efficient and quick for each of them.

  Then she gets up and goes to the front room, away from him, and sits in that corner of hers in that chair, which he has joked at her about—her little throne!—and she falls asleep there.

  She does not try to explain to him how she can read his every impulse and thought so easily; he doesn’t realize she is far wiser than he. The darkness of his realm is in part ordained and in part is his concealment of his own nature from himself.

  All the shades are estranged from themselves, he no less than they, even though he’s not at all a shade. Unlike them, he can feel hope—because she must always return. That’s the holy custom. Yet if, in his once-in-a-while tender moments, he would ponder her needs, he cannot see them. Even if he could give her what she wants, he cannot accept why she keeps wanting what she wants.

  It embitters her to know that, in the world above, despite all her life-giving beauty, things were not so different. She was sweet and strong, and her effortless power of germination and blossoming—which she had used then as she uses it now, when she’s there, not here—no one there except her mother had noticed. Not till they lost it for half the year. Or asked themselves what she wanted or felt. Except flowers themselves, she thought, and orchards in fruit, and the golden wild barley. (They asked.) It seemed to her now that no one then had cared a fig about her.

  The fig is an oblong or pear-shaped fruit, pulpy when ripe, and eaten raw or preserved or dried with sugar. Green, red, purple, soft, moist, fresh, cool, sweet.

  Courthouse

  Once upon a time / there was a little man / who ate little children.

  He had a wife that ate children, too.

  Once a little kid came and got ate up!

  “Gee, I’ve eaten a lot of kids!”

  They made a gate with the bones.

  And the bones got bigger and bigger.

  Some of the bones was so big that nobody jumped over them.

  Only the person that made the bones, and it was God.

  He made the bones littler and littler.

  The man that ate little children, he died.

  The woman died, too.

  The end.

  Your honor, testimony of this sort proves absolutely nothing at all.

  Over and over the little boy drew a snowman. A three-year-old’s unsteady hand holding a colored pencil. Then the hand was four years old. The little boy said, “It has hair in its mouth, it has hair in its mouth.” He stopped saying it after a year, and drew the snowman wordlessly. The teacher’s aid had been arrested and let go. Then arrested again. But when the boy was drawing the snowman, when he was saying, “It has hair in its mouth,” nobody understood. He was not trying to tell them something. He was telling them something. Why didn’t they say they understood?

  Where you wait to be called, first they screen a junior-high-school-level TV slide show recapping a false history of America from revolutionary days to the present, showing cartoons of the judicial branch and finally photos of the modern courthouse, and there’s exuberant rock-and-roll music as background to the loud voice-over. YOU: THE JUROR, says a male military voice. NINETY PERCENT OF ALL JURY TRIALS IN THE WORLD TAKE PLACE IN AMERICA. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO WORK IN THE COURTROOM, WHO YOU WILL SEE: THE JUDGE, THE CLERK, THE COURT REPORTER, THE ATTORNEYS AND LITIGANTS (THE PROSECUTOR SITS NEAREST THE JURY—WITH THE PLAINTIFFS IN A CIVIL CASE), THE WITNESSES, AND YOU, THE JUROR.

  PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO EACH WITNESS WHO TESTIFIES, DO NOT MAKE ANY INVESTIGATIONS OF YOUR OWN INTO THE CASE, THE OPENING STATEMENTS AND FINAL STATEMENTS ARE NOT EVIDENCE, THE JUDGE WILL INSTRUCT YOU CONCERNING RELEVANT POINTS OF THE LAW.

  There will be peremptory dismissal and dismissal for cause, there will be the swearing of the jury, and the jury deliberations, and the verdict, and the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and . . . A CITIZEN, AN HONORABLE MAN OR WOMAN, A JUROR!

  From the Dan Ryan Expressway and the TriState Tollway, from suburbs and all three sides of the lakeside city, into all the courthouses come hundreds of judges. Should they arrive drawn by steeds in carriages with livery? Should trumpets sound? They park their Accords and Navigators, their Cherokees and alphanumerical car models and they set the alarms. In the jury pool waiting room, on the three color TVs, loud game shows and celebrities and then, as the jurors wait, the soap operas come on—people blackmailing each other, abusing each other, killing each other, hating and tormenting and hitting each other with their words or their fists, colo
ring each other various shades of green and purple, modeling their product-placement clothes, they’re shouting and intravenous and wretched and relaxed and good-looking and low-calorie and crying. Waiting, the citizens in the jury pool watch, don’t watch.

  A little hand points, not very precisely, at a person sitting behind a table.

  “I’m making allowances, Judge, as I know you must be, for the fact that the witness is very young. But in fact, Judge, the pointing was very inconclusive, even though my client was looking right at the witness!”

  The other day, when I asked you to tell me a story, and you told me about a man who ate children up, was that really about someone you know?

  No.

  Why did you draw the snowman?

  I didn’t draw a snowman.

  THANK YOU FOR SERVING!

  Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

  Winter Friday

  After I shovel the snow and come back inside, something more needs to be done—like dragging a big black plastic sack through the upstairs rooms, emptying into it each wastebasket, the trash of three lives for a week or so. I am careful and slow about it, so that this little chore will banish the big ones, for now. But I leave the bag lying on the floor and I go into my daughter’s bedroom, into the north morning light from her windows, and while this minute she is at school counting or spelling a first useful word I sit down on her unmade bed and I look out the windows at nothing for a while—the unmoving buildings, houses, and a church, on my white and black block.

  Across the street a young man is coming slowly down the white sidewalk with a snow shovel over his shoulder. He’s wearing only a light coat, there’s a plastic showercap under his navy-blue knit hat, and at a house where the sidewalk hasn’t been cleared he climbs the steps and rings the doorbell and stands waiting, squinting sideways at the wind. Then he says a few words I can’t hear to the storm door that doesn’t open, and he nods his head with the farewell that is a habit he wears as a disguise, and he goes back down the steps and on to the next house. All of this in pantomime, the way I witness it through windows closed against winter and the faint sounds of winter.

  My daughter’s cross-eyed piggy bank is also staring out the window blankly, and in its belly are four dollar bills that came one at a time from her grandmother and which tomorrow she will pull out of the corked mouth-hole. (It’s not like the piggy banks you have to fill before you empty them because to empty them you have to smash them.) Tomorrow she will buy a piece of impeccably small furniture for her warm well-lit dollhouse where no one is troubled in any way and the wind can’t get in.

  Sitting on her bed, looking out, I didn’t see the lame and odd neighbor child, bundled up and not in school and even turned out of the house for a while sometimes, or the blind woman with burn scars or the sick veteran—people who might have walked past stoop-shouldered with what’s happened or keeps happening to them. So much limping is not from physical pain—the pain is gone now, but the leg’s still crooked. The piggy bank and I see only the able young man whose straight back nobody needs.

  When he is finally past where I can see him, it feels like a kind of music has stopped, and it’s more completely quiet than it was, an emptiness more than a stillness, and I get up from the rumpled bed and smooth the covers, slowly and carefully, and take a wadded dollar bill from my pocket and put it into the pig and walk out.

  Harlequin

  About two weeks after Bill died, while I was sleeping I saw that I was at dinner in a restaurant with others. Bill too was at the table. He was dead; but alive again except that his eyes remained tightly closed, and he looked bad. He was animated, he talked a lot, with anger and happiness, and the others seemed amused, and not a person remarked on his coming back. He was dead, though, and his body showed signs of his decaying. The skin of his face was leathery, blotched, peeling. It was a horror, but no one seemed to think his being there was horrible. I tried to understand.

  The next night, he came again—again we were eating at the restaurant. But Bill showed further damage, his skin yellow and stained and his hair reddish and long and dirty, and he talked with even more energy, dominating the conversation (as he hadn’t done when he was alive), and the others again only amused, no one horrified except me. Maybe they don’t see that he’s dead? But I know.

  In the second restaurant scene something happened, I’ve forgotten what it could have been, and Bill, holding his eyes shut very tight, began to talk faster and faster (about what, the dream wouldn’t let me remember), and then in that sudden instantaneous way of dreams we were somewhere else, and Bill turned into other things. Persons, I think. It wasn’t Bill at all. Was it a spirit of which he was an inextinguishable part—and of which others are parts, of which everything is a part? Is everything? In waking life, I don’t believe this.

  This spirit into which he changed was transformed by a power beyond Bill’s own through a hundred shapes in a hundred seconds. (But were they forms of animals or persons or things or beings never known or seen?) We were outside, on a high pleasant grassy slope, with prospects and vistas. When the changes stopped, a kind of tall youthful harlequin was standing where Bill had been—gaily dressed, laughing.

  The harlequin, holding his audience—I alone—bent down to pick up from the perfect grass a tiny sequin of a jewel. Perhaps I was the first to see it glittering in the grass and I asked him what it was. He comes nearer and bends and picks it up. I don’t touch it because it’s so bright, it’s blue-white, I can’t look straight at it, it hurts my eyes. The harlequin picks it up between thumb and forefinger, and smiling he tosses it into the air with a snap of his wrist, upward. It rises, it soars on a long curve up into the sky, growing larger and even brighter and it becomes the sun.

  Near the Spring Branch

  Sometimes I wish the way I see things had not changed so many times and I could still hold to an earlier way that didn’t need something huge to open me up to the thrilling airiness inside that later I would get only when I was where I could see, I could feel, something big—a mountain summit; a canyon under a storm where there might come a roaring flash flood, and I do mean flash; the night sky over the open sea; a huge reading room in a library; a mass grave; a military parade with tanks that shook streets and sidewalks all down the avenues; a whole city abandoned and then ruined by the centuries and by later people who scavenged its stone; a lonely kid who talked to me in a huge empty city square because I was a foreigner and he couldn’t tell anyone he knew what he wanted to tell.