During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase

  Still there remained beside our posture of confidence phantoms of dread like the hangover of a bad dream or the premonition of a bad day. The house seemed alive with the conflict; we could hear the walls settling and the floorboards creaking beneath the carpet as we walked. Aunt Rachel packed up Rossie’s clothes and he went to stay with his other grandmother, who lived in some other town—bad dreams were keeping him awake for hours every night.

  Then Neil came to the farm. When he first went into her room and saw Aunt Grace sitting in the armchair by the window, the white embroidered birds on her dress blazing silver, the dress loose on her form, he went to her, fell on his knees beside her, put his head into her lap and cried. Sobbed out loud. We weren’t there to see, but we heard Aunt Libby telling Gram. We couldn’t imagine his emotion and it seemed almost unbecoming, as if a perfect stranger were trying to imitate real grief. And we were afraid, as if his coming would make everything worse.

  “It’s late in the day for tears,” Gram said.

  Aunt Rachel answered, “Seventy times seven.” Since we were all studying the Bible, living and breathing Scripture, we knew that that meant the length and breadth of forgiveness.

  Gram flared that she didn’t need to hear it. “I’m sick and tired of sermons. When I was a girl I memorized practically the entire Gospel. Christian Scientists don’t have a monopoly on the Bible, no matter how high and mighty they think they are. From what I’ve heard, she wasn’t no saint neither, Leader or not. There are some who say she wasn’t no better than a heathen herself, married more than once. Vain.”

  “Well, Momma,” Aunt Rachel said, after a few moments of quiet, plainly offended but not running scared, “I guess we have a lot in common, then.” Because Aunt Rachel was soon to marry Tom Buck, who was waiting for his divorce, and he would be her second husband; and vanity—these women knew about that, laughed about it, but couldn’t hide it.

  Then she told Gram, “I think I feel sorriest for him,” meaning Neil. Was that because he loved Aunt Grace the most and had sobbed in her arms? Was that because she had loved him but didn’t anymore? We didn’t know. Neither did Gram, because her face wasn’t even angry but was overcome by a vacant astonishment. Maybe he was the black sheep returned to the flock, the one who required a radical forgiveness.

  The day before Neil was going back to his office, Aunt Grace thought she was strong enough to walk a little with us. We had found a special place by the old orchard, up from the duck pond, and we wanted her to see it. They walked very slowly down the drive, Aunt Grace leaning against Neil. Because of Aunt Grace, we didn’t go into the ravine but crossed through the meadow, where Grandad’s haywagon still sagged, one wheel missing. Neil was very tender toward Aunt Grace, toward us too, a way he’d never been before; we’d heard Gram say that maybe some of the smartness had been knocked out of him. We felt included, as though we shared in the change in him, shared a lover’s attentions. Observing him, slim and blond, his blue eyes, which could be so wild, now sobered, we felt in him the miracle we expected, the resurrection of forgotten love.

  “See this. And this,” we called to them. Nothing mattered now except ourselves, running among the flowers and grass, crossing shale ledges, beneath us the dark ravine with its flickers of leafy light, these ways we’d gone countless times and could always go when we wanted to, the paths gouged through our own flesh. Neil and Aunt Grace wound steadily up the gentle incline, leaned together. We came close and seemed to ourselves to impart, like watchful spirits, strength and reassurance.

  So at last when they were lying together in the reedy wind-bent grasses, thin under the oaks, Aunt Grace rested her head on Neil’s shoulder. The oak leaves rippled and the grass too in the touch of breeze that blew continually over this high place above the cooler ravine, its weather entirely its own. We wanted to lie around them, to be done with everything.

  But then Anne said, “No, let’s go down.” We went after her, into the ravine where the vines hung from the tops of trees, and we caught them and swung out over the brook, working up the nerve to let go and sail to the other side. We moved rocks and built a dam to pool the water, planned how deep it would be and how secretive.

  Katie stopped then and said, “I’m going back.”

  “You can’t,” Anne yelled at her. “You haven’t finished your part. We aren’t through.”

  “You aren’t the boss. Bossy, bossy. I hate you anyway. You aren’t my mother,” and Katie went scrambling up the hill.

  Anne jumped off the vine she was straddling and lunged forward to leap on Katie, dragging her to the ground. We could hear the sound of Anne’s slaps, over and over. “What I say, what I say,” she was growling as we worked to haul her off. She lost her balance then on the hillside, and toppled over. Katie lay on the dirt and leaves, crumpled up and playing dead. When Anne stood up she looked like Gram, her face set like a blank painted totem. There was a trickle of blood from her lip.

  We’d forgotten Anne was like that. Forgotten we were all like that. Changing and horrible. We could have torn out our eyes. And Katie: she had gone out into the yard and told Rossie and his friends that Anne had her period, that she had become a woman. We’d stood with them below the window, laughing and calling up dirty stuff at Anne, shaming her for what she couldn’t help. Later we were ashamed. Aunt Grace had heard Anne pounding Katie that time after she’d caught her. “I’ll kill her.” Anne was fierce. “Someday I will, too.” Aunt Grace had stopped her with a word. But that time she didn’t punish her for fighting. Instead she took Anne into her room. Through the closed door we could hear Anne sobbing while Aunt Grace talked in a low careful tone. Later Aunt Grace came out, and before the door closed again we saw Anne lying on the bed with a pillow over her head. “It’s a pity she’s so young,” Aunt Grace said to Aunt Libby, though what we saw in her eyes made us think that something extraordinary had happened to all of us. As now, following Anne and Katie up the hill again, we were feeling uneasy, even about the love that was in us, because of the hate.

  Down below us, in the ravine, the quick light flamed, while steadily we rose into the bright noon, onto the plain of flowery grass. Aunt Grace and Neil lay as before, their eyes closed, the oak tree behind them as straight as a marker. If we didn’t wake them, they might sleep and never wake. We needed them to get up. We braided a chain of chicory flowers and when Aunt Grace opened her eyes, hearing us, we wound it around her neck and hair and Neil sat up and cupped a blade of grass in his palm and blew over it like a whistle. Going back, we danced around them, trying cartwheels. But Aunt Grace could no longer walk, she was so exhausted, and Neil had to carry her the rest of the way and up to her room. The burden of her life settled over us again, its weight keeping everything in place. We stayed in the kitchen with Gram and Aunt Rachel.

  “Maybe she would have been better off to have stayed with him this year,” Aunt Rachel mused. “Since they did get the house.”

  “And maybe you won’t have the sense you was born with if you live to be a hundred.” Gram sounded angry although she was crying.

  Neil left to go back to his job in Illinois. Aunt Elinor was leaving the next day for New York. She had a visitor from the old days when she had tried to be an actress. Pearl, her friend, had made it, Aunt Elinor told us, unlike herself who had grown weary of show business and had instead gone into the world of everyday business. Pearl went into the parlor to sing while Aunt Elinor played the piano. All the doors were left open so Aunt Grace could hear, because her walk in the woods with Neil had seemed to use up what extra strength she had gained and now she left her room only to be helped to the bathroom. Still she looked very peaceful and content listening from her bed, dressed in a powdery blue gown which Neil had bought her.

  We stayed in the living room while Pearl sang in the parlor. We wanted to laugh. She had a powerful soprano which must have broken glass more than once, something we’d heard Uncle Dan say about Aunt Elinor, and we were watching the branches of the living room chandelier. Aun
t Elinor was very upright and serious over the keys, frowning into the score in her nearsighted way, but when Katie slid out of the recliner in a fit of suppressed giggling, Aunt Elinor gave her an unerring frown without missing a note. We got control of ourselves by ignoring each other and looking out the window, so that the music became part of the sun-warmed landscape which undulated with those same rhythms and passions we had seen move over Pearl’s white breast as it lay exposed above her rather low-cut dress. After several classical numbers, long after our impulse to clown had been subdued, then obliterated, Pearl said to Aunt Elinor, who had led us in prolonged applause, “Do sing something for us yourself.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” Aunt Elinor said, blushing and even lowering the lid over the keys. “It’s been years.”

  “It hasn’t,” we begged her, only then realizing that the summer had passed without her playing and singing for us. It seemed that if only she would, all that was wrong would vanish. “You always sing,” we said, risking her disapproval for putting an adult on the spot, and were supported by Pearl, who said, “I remember when your auntie was on the radio—that Ipana smile.”

  “This is silly,” Aunt Elinor said then, and raised the piano lid. “I’d better play for myself, though. That way I can fake it better.” That made her sound like a real musician. When she began to sing, her face became so soft and lovely with the emotions of the songs it was easy to believe what Aunt Libby had told us, that she had had more suitors in her day than most women dreamed of.

  Nothing was between us and her singing, our hearts as full as hers, lapped by the same waters. She sang all our favorites: “In the Gloaming,” “Annie Laurie,” “The Shores of Minnetonka,” “Who Is Sylvia?” “Deep River.” When she stopped we heard the far fragmentary clapping of Aunt Grace’s hands. Aunt Elinor sent one of us to see if she had a request. We all went.

  “‘Oh, What a Beautiful City!”’ we called down the stairs to her, then we went back into Aunt Grace’s room and sprawled over Gram’s old bed, where the nurse slept at night. Aunt Grace was over by the window in the metal hospital bed. We could hear Aunt Elinor’s every word—Pearl said that our auntie was famed for her perfect diction.

  “Three gates to the North, and three in the South,

  There’s three in the East, and three in the West—

  There’s twelve gates to the city, O Lord.”

  From the high windows, looking out to the west, we could see shafts of sunlight dropping in golden bars against the deep blue of the sky, with the forest line glowing too. But when we turned to show this to Aunt Grace, she had fallen asleep. We tiptoed away. Aunt Elinor looked perfectly happy when we told her how deeply Aunt Grace slept. But we must not fall asleep, she reminded us. We were watchers in the garden. “Pray without ceasing. No one knows the hour.” We promised her that we would. We wanted to. But we knew that it was partly a lie, that we were as flawed as any of the disciples.

  We did the best we could. Aunt Grace went into a period of terrible unrelieved pain. When morphine allowed her some rest, though mostly she refused the drug, it seemed only to make her feel the next seizure more intensely. During the days we were in school, and some nights, Uncle Dan took us over to his mother’s house to sleep. But we resisted; we thought we should be there with Aunt Grace. We had promised. Though we could no longer pray, we could watch. We hunched against her cries, but we were there to listen.

  The little gray-haired nurse was indispensable now and capable in her ministrations, both physical and spiritual. We saw her hardly at all, mostly bringing trays back and forth to the kitchen, but her calm face affirmed that something was being done, whatever possible, and she would answer Aunt Libby, the only one who dared to ask each time, “How is it?” Aunt Libby’s eyes showing a bitter grudging resignation to a superior power. “I think she’s coming closer,” the nurse answered, her smile kindly and spiritual; though she was not secretive, we felt excluded.

  “Closer to what?” Gram would say, spit threading her lips together as if she hadn’t been able to swallow in a long time. “I should have strangled her with my own hands,” she cried out once, one of her outbursts which came seemingly from nowhere and left her momentarily crushed. Aunt Libby just pressed her hand until Gram pulled away and went to the sink to wash the few dishes. In that time, she seldom left the house, but we couldn’t tell from her face what she expected. Uncle Dan said he thought Aunt Grace should be taken to the hospital. Surely they could do something for her—he was a butcher, but so kind-hearted that he had to hire a man to do the actual killing; and it took only one solid blow to fell a steer. He spent most of his time up in the old attic sitting room because, Aunt Libby told us, “He can’t take it.” Gram said it was too late to send Aunt Grace away. “We’ve had screaming over babies being born, screaming over pretty nearly everything that could pain a human. Now this.” She raised up her fist as if with it she only wished she might bring the whole structure down around us.

  Aunt Grace couldn’t eat. Nothing appealed to her, and she wouldn’t try, not even for Aunt May, who came to the house every minute she could spare. At last, when Aunt May succeeded in feeding a few bites to her, a vile black substance rose out of her, and after that no one coaxed her to eat.

  Then one day, mercifully, Aunt Libby said, the pain subsided. Then it stopped entirely. There was no explanation for it. We accepted anything. It was a kind of miracle to Aunt Libby, though not the one we’d wanted, and she was grateful for it. Much of her day was spent with Aunt Grace and she worked steadily, hemming and piecing the quilt. Often they were silent, together and at peace, absorbing the tranquillity that came out of the fields and woods which stretched to the far border of Gram’s land. The leaves had already fallen from the trees but winter had held off, and each day the land warmed, the fields the color of sand. Aunt Libby told us she considered those days a privilege—however dearly bought. Never before had she felt so tangibly the actual presence of love in the world, not even when her children were born. And she said it was something you could feel only once in lifetime, because afterwards something in you had been burned away.

  Gram told us we should be getting ready to say goodbye. Goodbye? We stared at her, uncomprehendingly. To speak of leaving seemed a treachery, a mockery of all that we had been through together. We thought of what Aunt Elinor had taught us, that both living and dying are a dream. We were bewildered but we would not say goodbye, not for any of them.

  Thanksgiving passed, unremarked, except that it was Anne’s birthday and Gram remembered that no one had been able to eat that year either. Then one day as Aunt Libby sat with her, Aunt Grace turned her head from the window and said, “Get Neil.”

  Aunt Libby let her head fall forward, not hiding the tears which spilled fast, wetting the quilt. Aunt Grace reached so slowly, Aunt Libby told us later, and her fingers moved in Aunt Libby’s hair. “Elinor too?” Aunt Libby asked when she could.

  Aunt Grace nodded, her eyes closed. She sank into a sleep that had the finality of surrender.

  The calls were made. “And for God’s sake hurry,” Aunt Libby said. Aunt Elinor had declared, “Tell her to hold on. I’m coming.” But nobody told her, because Aunt Grace was in a coma now and when she did open her eyes she was unable to speak, didn’t seem even to hear. Only her eyes, stained black from morphine, seemed alive. She’s still watching, we told each other. And so were we. Then she sank away from us again.

  After dark we were led to her room by the women. Was this the time to say goodbye? “She’s accepted it,” Aunt Libby said. We filed up through the house in the dim light cast from the low-watt bulbs Gram kept in the converted gas wall fixtures. It seemed that we went by candlelight, our unequal heights throwing jagged shadows against the flowing walls. Gram sat by Aunt Grace’s bed on a straight chair, but she did not raise her head when we entered. At the doorway began abruptly the sweetish, thick, terrible odor of the abscess, which mingled with that of the sulfur candle Gram had lit to purify the air. For months
we had known that smell; to smell it was part of our watching. Under the hung picture of the Indian brave, the fireplace glowed with burning coals. We had never seen it used before, but Aunt Grace had requested a fire and they had moved her bed away from the cold dark windows so that when she opened her eyes she could watch the flames. She had mentioned Neil, just his name —and Aunt Libby reminded everyone how Neil had loved a fire.

  When we went in, Aunt Grace seemed to be fully awake. Her lips before, when she had been well, had been bright red, thin and curving. Now they were stained black too and so crusted and shapeless it seemed a hole of nothingness opened there. And her eyes, which had always been brown, were now outraged and empty; they held only the smallest flicker of life, perhaps firelight, perhaps the evidence of salvation.

  We wept as though we were doing as Gram said—saying goodbye. But we didn’t say anything, just stood shaking, without sound, while Aunt Grace in her slurred and distorted voice, her tongue lacerated, tried to ask us about school, our friends, to show her interest. She could scarcely get the words formed and it was as if already we called to each other from separate worlds. Finally Gram raised her head and with one curt nod dismissed us. We leaned down to Aunt Grace, each in turn, and kissed her cheek, our tears sliding off onto her face. She wiped her finger across then, put her finger to her mouth. She seemed to smile and murmured, “Salt.” From the hall we looked back once, but blinded from crying, could not see more than the firelight dashing on the walls. Then we went downstairs together.