Meeks

by Julia Holmes

  My mother had told me a few secrets about the past, about the place from which she had come, stories that she used to whisper to me and to me alone, “And in those days, long ago, in the place whence we came . . .” she used to say. I pocketed the card guiltily, my face hot.

  * * * *

  Ben

  He had found his mother standing in the front hall of the old house holding a postcard, the front door hanging open; the expression on her face seemed to cast the whole house in a dangerous, alien light. Ben waited, frightened. On the postcard, he could see the rolling white surf and leaning trees of foreign shores. “Your father's not coming home,” she said.

  One morning that spring, his mother woke him before dawn and told him to pack.

  "We're going to find your father,” she said cheerfully and tousled his hair. “We're going to one of the islands, right to the edge of the sea!"

  "Is he there?” Ben felt sick with terror and hope. He could smell the cakes cooling in the baker's window; he could hear the long blast of the ferry's horn.

  "We better hurry. Pack your things, Ben."

  His mother stood stiffly at the railing on the ferry, peering into the water where the bow sliced it into wakes.

  "Is it far away?” asked Ben, but his mother didn't seem to hear him. He watched her carefully, or watched the seabirds hover over the blue-gray water, eyeing the shadows of their victims sliding obliviously. Ben watched them, or he watched the lavender horizon, the widening band of the atmosphere over their destination. The whole azure: happiness assured! His father would be standing on the beach, or ankle deep in the surf. Ben! My dear! I see you got my postcard.

  Ben and his mother walked across a crooked gangway onto shore, the unfamiliar tufts of orange and pale-green flower, the shoreline nests of frothing water. They passed through an open archway into the lobby of the whitewashed hotel. They had walked up a thousand steps, possibly ten thousand, and his mother had dragged a suitcase up the steps behind her, leaving Ben to drag the other, though he was a small boy. Their arms were trembling when they arrived at the front desk. Men soaked in salt water dripped through the lobby, holding sardines bound through the gills on rounds of twine. “That's dinner,” said the smiling woman behind the desk. Ben stood on the veranda and looked out over the water while his mother negotiated, the sharp white waves threshing the surface of the sea.

  Ben and his mother unpacked, rested confusedly on the salt-stale cushions of the tourist chairs. Ben put on his bathing suit and waited on the steps.

  "Go ahead,” she said, “but be careful."

  Ben ran down the beach and into the water; a powerful wave rolled over him, pinning him to the sand, sucking him seaward. He crawled out of the water and collapsed on the crust of dry, white sand; behind him were the charred remains of former beach fires, ash dusted the pale sand. He smelled the narrow, speckled fish cooking, spiked on sharpened sticks stabbed deep into the sand beside small fires, blazes of yellow-orange flower. Beached jellyfish were thick lenses upon the sand. His mother brought him a mango; he peeled away the skin inexpertly; he bit into the sweet sherbet-colored fruit; he scraped the hard pit with his teeth. He buried the pit in the sand and rinsed his hands in the seawater. He followed the paranoid, supercilious crabs from wet rock to wet rock. He stared down the long, narrow, speckled fish that gathered in the tidal pools when the tide went out, the fish all facing forward dourly like parishioners in the cool cathedral space between the jetty rocks.

  Local boys ran out of the water holding octopuses away from their bodies, octopus arms clinging to boy arms with fleshy, sucking cups; boys walked out of the water with spears or nets, catching their breath, silver water pouring from their dark, thick hair. They hauled their catches to the hotel porch, where cooks gutted and cleaned the fish while the boys rested in the heat, plucking fruit from the trees that lined the grassy alleys between the houses. Ben looked on enviously. His fear was boyish; the fearlessness of other boys looked holy. The boys crashed back into the water to hunt.

  Ben went into the hotel, searching for his mother. He walked through the dining room, past hotel guests squeezing lemon wedges over their grilled fish. He checked their room; everything seemed sad—sad towels, sad bags, sad shoes—after the bright, windy crowds on the beach. He found her on the veranda and stretched out beside her on a wicker couch, resting his head in her lap, and fell asleep listening to waves. He woke to the sound of his mother arguing with a man from the hotel.

  "My husband was a casualty of the war. And his widow and his son are entitled to be here."

  "No, madam. It is not the same thing."

  "My husband—the boy's father—was lost to the war."

  "Madam, it was not at the hands of the Enemy."

  "Where is this famous Enemy of yours?"

  "Madam?"

  Ben and his mother packed hastily, boarded the ferry, and stood on the deck, looking toward home. He heard the motor's drone, caught the nauseating smell of burning oil as swells lifted the chugging motor out of the water and made it cough black smoke, the cabin door swinging open and slamming shut, the gray marbleizing lift of the current, the white, foamy lift unevening the ship. The empty horizon unreachable and bland, tilting in the rough water. Ben clung to the railing, feeling sick. He glared at the ferry captain who was smoking and daydreaming in his cramped glass booth, rolling them into wave after wave.

  "Mother?"

  "Not now, Ben."

  * * * *

  Meeks

  The gun seemed to be biting or stinging me in the ribs, perhaps because it could detect a change in my heart: I was in love with this world again. I stopped in the shade of a river tree and peered carefully into my coat—there it was, the same as ever, sleeping in its corner.

  I went to see my mother, who, naturally, remains underground. Nonetheless, I told her my wonderful news. Mother, I whispered, you are hearing the voice of Captain Meeks. Not your son, Meeks, but the Captain himself. Mother, I'm in the play.

  I held my breath—perhaps I was waiting, however unconsciously, for some kind of reply. Then again, I suspect my mother had always known this day would come. My head was aching—I tried pointlessly to loosen the police hat's grip with my fingertips. I had never spent an Independence Day without her. We used to sit together on our favorite rock, well removed from the crowds, and wait for the Lovers Play to begin.

  This is all real, I would say to her, and I would point to the flat rock upon which we were sitting, and to the ivy at our feet. That, I said, pointing to the stage, is not. Mother smiled at my observation; the play commenced. She sat on the flat rock; I stood behind her on my toes, straining to see over the audience, steadying myself by placing my hands on her shoulders. Workers sat in the branches of the great tree and managed the theatrical ropes, lowering the curtain, setting counterfeit storms in motion, lifting actors off their feet so they could appear to ascend or to suddenly drop. I watched a pair of brothers arguing on a high branch, one grabbing at the rope the other was holding, the other shushing his brother furiously. I laughed at this ancillary and unofficial bit of comedy taking place above the main action. Hearing me laugh, my mother reached back and took one of my hands so that she could press it against her cheek.

  On the stage sat a pair of lovers; an ancient estate loomed behind them. I was a boy, and I was with my mother, and some actors were enacting a play in the park. I sighed with contentment. A thin and silvery veil fell behind the lovers, as if the enormous house had been cast backward into a fog. The lovers leaned in close but were startled apart again by the distant pops of hunting rifles, and the screen shot back up into the trees, and the house in the background suddenly loomed large—the father charged from the wings, storming across the stage.

  I buried my face in my mother's thick, dark hair and covered my ears. Of course, I knew things would turn out well for the lovers even then, but the certainty of the outcome seemed to have no bearing on my fear as I waited for the lovers to be united in the final scene,
in the glow of a wedding feast, and, concurrently, all of the new marriages of all the couples in the audience were solemnized. Happiness engineered to function on a massive scale. Who could doubt the genius of the Captain?

  The sets were cleared; people milled about, entertaining themselves with fresh critiques of the familiar tale. They spread blankets out on the grass and lay about in their sweaters, and new wives fed new husbands figs, and fathers sawed salami discs for children to gnaw, and the workers, too, lay about in large numbers, chatting quietly to one another or sleeping in the gentle autumnal sunshine. Mother and I watched contentedly from our rock.

  The crowd reassembled for the Founders Play. Couples huddled together against the chill in the air and watched the stage intently. I sat very still in my mother's lap, and even the birds fell into penitent and tense silence as they watched.

  The old Police Chief climbed the steps. Workers walked in pairs on either side of the cake, carrying lengths of burning rope low over the surface to light the multitude of candles. Then the people began to chant: Meeks! Meeks! Meeks! My mother and I smiled at one another, at the deliciousness of our situation.

  Do you hear that? she said.

  They're calling me!

  You must not go, she said and held me and refused to let go.

  I would pretend to struggle. Finally she would let me stand, and I would point to the platform. Mother, I would say, you must understand that I must go, because the people need me.

  Then she would bury her face in her hands and pretend to weep, and though her weeping (and, may I say, her acting in general) was utterly unconvincing and couldn't have fooled a child, I could never withstand this spectacle, and I would break character immediately to run to her side and pry away her hands in order to see her face and say, Mother, are you really crying?

  Then she would pull me back into her lap, and we would watch the rest of the play together. This is real, said my mother reassuringly, as she pressed my hand against the cool, smooth surface of the rock. And that, she said pointing to the stage, is not. Only then could I relax into enjoyment of the final scene: the Bell Ringer took hold of the rope and yanked it hard, sending the Condemned Man flying through the trap door. The enemy of all our hopes was hanged! Or, I should say, the actors had made it seem so, and the bom, bom, bom of the evening bells rolled over the city in triumph.

  Mother and I would make our way eventually to the heart of the action, where people were cutting greedily into the Independence Day cake, using the knives they had brought from home, and everyone partook of the cake, including Mother and me, and while the other families headed home to boisterous dinners around a centerpiece that was both a page from the history of our world as well as a piece of cake, Mother and I would stay in the park, surrounded by the trampled effects of a massive celebration. Another Independence Day, Mother sighed, as we ghosted past the empty stage or watched the theater workers coil the ropes and begin the sweeping away of the evidence of the day. The remains . . . through which Mother and I wandered in a mother-and-son melancholy that I loved. Though this division from others suited me perfectly when I was a boy, I hated the way in which, invariably, it cut into my mother's mood. The people headed home. Mother and I sat in the park. I ate and ate, while Mother left her cake untouched and watched the workers clear the park.

  * * * *

  Ben

  He kicked away the heavy blankets. Blood had seeped through the outer layer of bandaging around his chest. He tried to think of something nice. He wished his father were alive to witness the beautiful symmetry of their lives. The last day he spent with his father, they had gone to the park. His father said nothing, picked through a box of blue-berries. Ben heard a low pop, then a surge: the long rows of old-fashioned lamps lining the walk were glowing to life. Ben's father stared thoughtfully into the box of blueberries, and handed one to Ben.

  "Do blueberries grow on trees? Do they start as flowers?"

  His father raised a finger to his lips and said, “Shhhh."

  It was early evening in the late summer, and the park lights were glowing like campfires yellow in a fog. Ben placed the blueberry reverently on his tongue, and then crushed it against the roof of his mouth. He remembered the comforting dim glow of fresh lemons on the nearby fruit cart, the spiked fruits from far away, snug in their paper-box compartments like saints’ relics, the green-tinged bananas, as if tinged with green smoke. The pyramids of red, polished apples and the rock-gray potatoes in the crates under the fruit stand: his heaven and earth. How had they all come into this world? These and all the other things he thought of as his. How would he coax them back into existence if he were charged with replicating life, with repeating the signs of creation he had always seen and heard? If this world were destroyed tomorrow, if the Enemy crossed the river at night and laid the universe of his boyhood bare? He wouldn't even know which things to put on the trees, which in the sea, which he would hide underground for the farmers to yank free.

  Ben heard a shoe scuff the floor on the other side of the bedroom door; he heard a truck start laboriously and then idle; he heard the house pipes filling up with water; Ben heard the birds whistling cautiously outside his window.

  A door slammed shut deep inside the house; Ben recognized the sharp outline of a porcelain pitcher on an antique table beneath the bright window. (He loved her! He loved her!)

  The doctor and the young woman's father carried Ben, wrapped in his bedsheets, from the house. It was night; it was cool out; the father kicked the car door shut. Soon the unmistakable sounds of the city were upon them. Ben woke up in the old hospital beneath the low ceiling of the basement ward. Surgeons, Brothers of Mercy, dying men, and, somewhere in the great building, Ben considered, laboring mothers at work on the creation of new Brothers and Sisters. Ben lay in bed and thought about the young woman, alone in the dead quiet of the country estate, every pleasure hobbled, he hoped, by her regret. Why had she let him go?

  One afternoon, the Brothers of Mercy came onto the ward. Ben could smell the acrid bite of their boot polish, the childlike sweetness of their talcum-dusted bodies. One of the doctors pointed at Ben in his hospital bed; he was sitting against his pillow sketching a mango on a notepad the Brothers of Mercy had given him.

  A pair of Brothers stopped by his bed. “You're looking better, old man!” said one. Ben smiled noncommittally. One Brother fished a pair of rumpled dark trousers from a sack; the other Brother threw a gray smock across Ben's chest.

  Ben was wearing the gray smock, sitting by the river in the oblique autumn sun. His pale suit had been shredded by an idiot country doctor obsessed with finding secondary wounds. His beautiful suit destroyed, the suit that had made him him. And he had lost her. How?

  Yellow jackets drifted from the head of a neglected statue by the water. The yellow jackets floated evilly between the rusted spikes of the statue's crown. Her sword was pointed toward the ground; the blade disappeared into the high weeds; her broad, strong hands rested coolly on the massive hilt. She and Ben were looking out over the river, and beyond the river to the open sea! The Brothers of Mercy were watching Ben closely; he dug dutifully in his suit pocket for his lunch, though he had no appetite. He unwrapped one of the stale pastries the doctor had given him. He licked the powdered sugar from the sides. Other men talked, smoked behind the mangy river trees, coursed back and forth through the tree shadows. The Brothers of Mercy watched everything. Yellow jackets descended behind the sharp points of the statue's crown and disappeared; there must be a seasonal nest living in the head of the statue, thought Ben. The unimaginable state of her mind! For the yellow jackets, for her, for him, it was near the end—the days were growing cold and small.

  Ben broke off a small piece of pastry and then bit the piece in half. He wished it were possible to keep things—the granite pinks of the autumn sky, the charred pilings of the collapsed piers, the sugar on his tongue—permanent and vivid without compressing them into memories. He wrapped the pastry in the worn piece of wa
x paper and shoved it deep into his pocket. The strong autumnal sun hit his face; cool air was rushing in from the river.

  "Back on your feet! Move it!” One of the Brothers was poking at Ben's legs with a stick.

  * * * *

  Meeks

  Bedge had instructed me to meet him at the station the day before the big day. As I walked toward the station, I liked to think I was indistinguishable from the many energetic walkers and friendly nodders and other purposeful souls who characterize our city, especially during the holidays. I strode with great purpose, and I bounded up the steps to the police station; I opened the door effortlessly and went inside.

  Bedge took me into the room at the end of the hall—a small, plain room dominated by an enormous table and a few chairs lining the wall. Black jackets had been hung over the backs of several of the empty chairs. Seated in one of the chairs was a diminutive older man with a measuring tape draped around his neck. The little man sat upright, with his hands settled equidistantly on his knees—his whole being seemed to be in a state of careful apprehension. Bedge, he said quickly and stood. I felt that Bedge and I were old friends suddenly in the presence of an awkward and unfortunate outsider.

  This is the tailor, said Bedge—he had ignored the tailor's greeting. He'll fit you for your suit—your costume.

  The tailor approached me, holding his measuring tape out like a net, as if I were some simple creature who could be crept up on and captured. I backed away and glanced at Bedge. I was wary of the tailor and do not, as a rule, enjoy or find easy to tolerate the touch of strangers’ hands upon my body, even upon my clothes. Sensing my dis-ease, Bedge added, it's just the jacket. Your pants are dark enough and will do. (I looked down at my pants—they were almost black with filth.)