I spell my last name with a lowercase w, but I’m the only one who knows that a lowercase w is a rejection of winter, an acknowledgment of what winter really is and how it can kill.
“What do you mean?” the old man said. He gazed at me with his head nearly horizontal. “You said that she lives with you.”
“What I mean is that the entire story I just told you is a lie,” I said.
The old man took a drink of coffee, which he drank only after it was almost cold. He looked at me. I looked at him. Words hung in the air between us, heavy and dark. We sat that way until Tamar drove up and honked her secret Tamar honk, two shorts and an extralong: beep-beep, beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
I dreamed about the old man that night. It was silent. Lights flickered. People I didn’t know were coming through the woods from far away bringing lights that were lanterns, lanterns for the old man.
I woke up and thought, I may not be a metalworker but I can still make lanterns. I could bring lanterns for the old man. Why not? I went down to the closet in the kitchen where we hang the can bag. It’s a plastic Jewell’s Grocery bag and we throw tin cans into it. It was the middle of the night. I didn’t want to wake Tamar so I used the flashlight that I keep under my bed in case of emergency. But the bag came tumbling down and all the cans spilled and Tamar came rushing down the stairs holding her baseball bat with both hands.
“What the hell’s going on, Clara?”
“I was getting a snack,” I lied. “Then I bumped into the closet and all the cans spilled.”
She thunked her baseball bat on the floor a few times.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Pick up this mess and go back to bed,” she said. “You’ve got school tomorrow and your chickens to feed beforehand.”
I picked them all up. Next morning after Tamar was gone, before the bus came, and after I fed my chickens I cleaned out the biggest cans, the ones that Italian plum tomatoes come in. Plum tomato cans don’t need much washing. A swish or two and they’re done. No grease, that’s why.
I was determined to make lanterns for the old man. It was a semifixation. That’s what Tamar would have called it, had she known about my desire.
“Another semifixation on the part of my daughter,” she would have said.
Tamar often talks that way, as if someone else is in the kitchen. In real life Tamar puts on and scrapes off huge orange flower decals on Dairylea milk trucks on an as-needed basis. Decals are always needed, though, so Tamar’s job is fulltime. She leans extension ladders against the sides of the milk tank trucks and climbs up to the top and scrapes and peels all day long. In winter she scrapes and peels inside a giant semi-heated milk truck garage in Utica. They assign Tamar to the decal work because she doesn’t mind heights. She’s fearless. She’s known for it. The JP job is a sideline. Speeding, drunk driving, boundary disputes: these are the usual cases. The oldest Miller boy, for growing marijuana in the middle of his father’s biggest cornfield.
Once in a while there’s a wedding.
The old man used to make lanterns when he was a child, in his country that he would not tell me the name of because he said it didn’t exist anymore. I am older than the old man was when he learned the art of metalworking. If he could do it, so can I, I thought.
It was hard work, puncturing the sides of those tomato cans. The church key didn’t want to do a good job. A few of the cans buckled under the pressure. I strung twine through the holes to hang the lanterns by. After school I bought some burgundy-colored votive candles at Jewell’s from the reject bin.
“Burgundy votive candles,” Mr. Jewell said. “An unusual item for an unusual girl.”
He smiled at me.
“And what do you plan to do with these burgundy votive candles?” he asked. “Or is that a secret?”
“Secret.”
“I thought as much. Would you care for a Persian, Miss Winter?”
I could hear the capital W in the way he said my name. No one but me knows it’s lowercase. He reached for the box of Persians that he and his friend Spooner Hughes were eating from. “Fresh,” he said. “Made them myself.”
“Thank you.”
The secret to a good Persian doughnut is extra glaze. Also, they double the amount of cinnamon. Mr. Jewell told me that once.
I hung the plum tomato can lanterns in the old man’s weeping willow tree. It’s hard to hang can lanterns in a weeping willow. The branches bend. With a scratching sound, they scrape across the top of hard shiny snow, old snow, the kind of snow you find in the middle of a cold snap in March. I had to choose the thickest branches of the weeping willow; otherwise the lanterns dragged the branches down too far and made the tree look sad.
It was going to be a surprise for the old man. I knew he wasn’t in the trailer because I had stood on the cinder block outside the little window by the built-in bed and seen that he was not there. Also, I had jumped up and down at the curved end of the trailer and seen that he was not sitting in his tiny curved-wall kitchen.
Each can that I hung I put a lighted burgundy votive candle into. I didn’t hang them too high. I was only eleven. I wasn’t that tall.
The can lanterns swung in the branches of the weeping willow tree.
The neighbor lady from the greenish trailer three trailers down from the old man’s opened her door. She had a scarf tied around her head. She was leaning out her door with slippers on. I could see her mouth moving but I closed my ears to the sound of her voice. Then she came out with a pair of big boots on. They were not tied. They were men’s.
The sound of the neighbor lady’s voice seeped in anyway.
“Miss? What, may I ask, are you doing?”
“It’s a surprise for the old man.”
“You mean George?”
You could hear that she didn’t know his real name. Georg.
“Old tomato cans hung in his tree?” she said. “That’s your surprise?”
“It’s a secret. You won’t get the full visual effect until nightfall,” I said. “Then you’ll see.”
She raised her eyebrows. Then she backed into her trailer and shut the door. Finally they were all hung. Where was the old man? He could have walked into Sterns. It was only one-quarter of a mile, which is not a far distance. He could have been doing his shopping at Jewell’s. He went there once a week and always bought the same things: elbow macaroni, spaghetti sauce, three cans of tuna, one quart of milk, canned peaches in heavy syrup, a package of Fig Newtons, two loaves of bread, one container of whipped margarine, and two boxes of frozen peas. That used to last him a week, even with me there on Wednesday nights, eating toast.
Sometimes he put tuna in his spaghetti sauce before he poured it over his bowl of elbow macaroni. I saw him do that on a semiregular basis.
Tamar was at choir practice. The stained-glass windows all lit up. It was pitch dark when I finished tying all the cans into the tree.
Still no old man.
The neighbor lady stuck her head out the door again and watched me for a few minutes. She didn’t say anything. I walked around the trailer park three times. There’s a road that goes around the whole thing. Around and around I went, so my feet wouldn’t freeze. Keep stamping and walking, that’s the way to keep the circulation going. When the feet of the pioneers froze they stripped off their boots and socks and rubbed them with snow in front of a roaring fire. It was extremely painful. The pioneers lost fingers and toes.
Winter kills.
The third time I walked around the trailer park road I came upon the cans in the weeping willow and they looked different. Things change. You think they won’t. You don’t plan on things ever changing, but then you take a walk around a trailer park and you come back around, and things are different. You’ve moved into the future, even a little bit, and things don’t look the same.
I saw that the cans were not lanterns. I did not have the skill of the old man. I could not work with metal; I could not make something beautiful out of a plum tomato can. I had
not yet become the old man’s apprentice. My lanterns were just old tomato cans, stuck in a tree whose branches were too spindly to support them. It took me only a few minutes to cut them all down with the Swiss army knife I carry in case of emergency. When I turned around, there was the old man, watching, standing there with a plastic Jewell’s bag hanging from each hand.
“I brought you a sugar cookie from Jewell’s,” he said. “It’s the kind of sugar cookie I ate when I was a child.”
“In your country that doesn’t exist anymore?” I said.
“That’s right.”
The old man did not say, What were you doing, stringing plum tomato cans in a tree? That was the difference between the old man and Tamar. She would have said, What the hell are you up to now, Clara Winter? She would have said, I have a strange child.
The old man was late that night because he wanted to offer me a treat. He wanted to have a sugar cookie waiting for me when I came to visit him. He didn’t say that, but I could tell. That’s what I believe to be true.
“When we got to Ellis Island, they almost wouldn’t let me in,” the old man said one night after we had become compadres.
“Why not?”
“Retarded. They thought I was retarded.”
“But you weren’t.”
I tried to picture the old man as a kid. A skinny boy body floated into my mind. A skinny boy body with an old man’s face.
“Why would they think you were special ed if you weren’t?”
“My nose,” he said. “I used to draw in the air with my nose. If you look down the corners of your eyes you can see the outline of your nose. Pretend that the end of it is a pen. Draw something in the air.”
“Noses don’t draw,” I said. “Noses can run but they can’t draw. Ha! Get it?”
I tried it. He was right. My nose made a nice invisible line. C, L, A, R, A. I wrote my name in invisible capital letters. Then I wrote my last name: w, i, n, t, e, r.
“I was tracing the outline of the American flag on Ellis Island,” the old man said. “With my nose. That’s why they thought I was retarded.”
“Tell me about your family of origin,” I said.
That’s a term they told us to use in the oral histories. Your family of origin is the one you started out with.
“Georg, who is myself.”
I knew the first time I heard his name to leave the “e” off. It’s one of my skills. Clara Winter, you have an inborn sense of spelling, my fifth-grade teacher told me.
“My parents. Eli, my young brother.”
“Do you have relatives back where you came from?”
“Where I came from does not exist,” the old man said. “It used to be one country. Now it’s another country.”
“But there’s got to be people related to you there.”
“I am the last of my line.”
That was one sentence that I wrote down in its entirety: I am the last of my line. It had the ring of truth.
“Tell me about being an immigrant,” I said to the old man. “Tell me about leaving your country.”
It’s my belief that the old man could be called a pioneer.
“I held the lantern,” the old man said. “That was my job.”
I wrote it down.
“It was dark. I held it pointed in back of me so that my brother Eli could see his way. If I didn’t look at the light from the lantern, the moon was light enough for me. You can’t let your eyes get used to an abundance of light, that’s the trick.”
An abundance of light.
My roll of green adding-machine paper kept spooling out. It didn’t seem to matter to him. That was the secret with the old man: get him talking and keep him going. That was how I discovered the nuances of his life.
“So I got to Ellis Island,” he said.
“And what then?”
You had to keep him talking when he started, otherwise all was lost.
“And then nothing,” he said. “It was all over then, the woods and the lantern and the walking. I lost two toes. They almost didn’t let me in because of the nose-writing. They thought I was retarded.”
“Special ed,” I said.
“Retarded.”
“And then what?”
“And then I started work. Metalwork. I am a metalworker.”
That was something I knew. He didn’t know that for two hours on a March night, a girl of eleven had spied on him through a piece of patched glass, had watched him hang lantern after lantern in the trees. I said nothing.
He stirred his coffee until it slopped into his saucer. I spread some more margarine on my one last bite of toast. I didn’t want him to see how thick I was spreading it so I held it beneath the rim of the table. I was getting addicted to thickly spread margarine. There’s something about the taste. It’s cool. It slides around your mouth.
“Did your brother write with his nose, too? Did the Ellis Island guys think he was retarded, too?”
But the old man was done talking. Finis. I could tell. I could always tell, with the old man. He stirred his coffee until it slopped into the saucer, and then I drank my hot chocolate and ate my toast and he waited until his coffee was cold and then he drank it, and then we sat until the clock said I had six minutes. It was time for me to go. Tamar would be driving up to the curb by the Nine Mile Trailer Park sign in exactly six minutes. That’s how long it took her to get from choir practice to the trailer park, including saying good-bye to her friends and starting the car. Tamar is never late.
“Bye,” I said.
He didn’t say good-bye. I knew he wouldn’t. He was in his dark lantern world. I shut the door tight behind me so the snow wouldn’t drift inside and make a tiny pile by his door, like sawdust. Tamar drove up on the dot, eating a miniature ice cream sandwich from the front freezer case at Jewell’s. Even in the dead of winter she loves them. They’re only a quarter each.
Chapter Four
I used to wonder why my chickens turned mean. Lack of sunshine, maybe. The corner of the broken-down barn where Tamar built the pen was dark. No windows. It was a big pen but nothing in it was interesting, not even my old doll-house, the rusty one that the younger Miller boys wrecked years ago when they held their Final Battle of the G.I. Joes.
One day the January after I got the chickens, I went in with the feed and water. It was hard to see at first because the snow was so bright outside, the barn so dark inside. The CJ Wilson chicken was sitting in the dollhouse. Right in the living room where the winning G.I. Joe busted through the floor. He stared at me. He didn’t blink his nasty beady eyes.
See, he was saying to me. This is my house. There are my women.
I looked in the corner and saw the other cock lying dead. Pecked to death by the CJ Wilson chicken. I took the barn shovel and scooped up the carcass, carried it out to the pasture and flung it into the weeds. Then I went back into the house, washed my hands, scraped the bottoms of my boots, and got on the bus when Tiny pulled up to the driveway.
That was the first day that I knew I was in for a long haul with my chickens. Next to the chicken problem, the real CJ Wilson momentarily faded in importance. When he got on the bus there must have been a look on my face because he said not a word, just pointed out the window as Tiny pulled away from his trailer.
“You see that car?” said CJ to the North Sterns boys. “You see it?”
An old white Camaro with rust spots was parked in a snowdrift in CJ’s unplowed driveway.
“Yeah,” said one of the boys.
“That’s mine,” said CJ. “My dad, he’s saving that for me. For when I get my license. He’s going to fix it up and give it to me on my sixteenth birthday.”
The boys nodded.
“It’s a Camaro. He’s saving it for me. Hey, Wipe! Your chicken shit mother got a car for you?”
I said nothing. I never said anything to CJ.
“Didn’t think so,” CJ said.
Occasionally I used to think about writing a fake book report about a boy n
amed, for example, CJ Wilson. In the morning, when the chickens squawked and pecked, when I brought them their food and water in two buckets, with the snow packing down into my boots, I thought about CJ. I thought about the fake book report I could write about CJ, disguising his name to protect the innocent although he isn’t innocent.
But I’ve never written a word.
“My dad used to be a professional wrestler,” CJ said on the bus one day. “His name was Chucky Luck. He had his own show on TV.”
CJ screwed his mouth up and squinted his eyes, punching his arms straight ahead of him like pistons. Grunting like a pig.
“Yeah right!” said one of the boys. “How come I never heard of it?”
“Before you were born, asshole,” said CJ. “He doesn’t do it anymore.”
“Well if it was before I was born Tiny must have seen it. Tiny, you seen it?” asked the boy.
Tiny shoved down another handful of M&Ms and laughed the way he does, which sounds like a cough.
“See?” said CJ. “Tiny’s heard of Chucky Luck.”
All those boys live out on the border of North Sterns. Some times they used to yell to me.
“Come sit by your boyfriend, Clara,” they yelled. “Come sit on CJ’s lap.”
The first time they did that I didn’t get off at my stop. Tiny went right on by when I didn’t come lurching up the aisle to wait by the door. I sank down in my seat and peered over the bottom of the window, watching the boys get off. Each one at his own trailer. The bus dropped off its last passenger, Bonita Rae Farwell, and turned around in Ray Farwell’s rutted pasture-track. Tiny squinted in his rearview mirror. He reached into his M&M bag and tossed down another handful.
“What in the H you doing back there, Clara Winter?”
“I’m sorry, Tiny. I forgot to get off.”
“Well what were you thinking, Clara?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was reading and I missed the stop.”
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