I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

  None but a shoaty eye to show and nary a tooth nor tongue in him!

  A marvel! A wonder! An amazement to behold!

  Come on, boy! Move on, miss. Come back, boy, he is smooth back here—I will let you touch him.

  Yes, but, mister, can you tell me this? Tell me how old Clem is. I want to know how old he is. Is he as old as that turtle is, come flippered from the selfsame sea which he has got a glass trough of which we can see him swim in? Is he that old, your Clem? Is he?

  Oh, move on. Will ye git on, boy. Go win yerself some gewgaws for your sister at the fair.

  HERE IS WHAT I figure—a quarter and two nickels which I will have to part with once to see Clem at the fair. Before, a peek inside my pail would set you back a nickel, but then was when I went the last with Daddy to the fair.

  I have seven quarters. Now if I charge a penny, five times is a nickel, so for five times two times, I can see Clem seven times for every ten lids seven times I lift up at the fair.

  I put my hand against my throat so I can feel me say it—Clem, Clem.

  Buhl Parson’s boy. Old Buhl Parson’s boy. Clem.

  But by and by, we are bumping past where the road forks for the fair.

  I knock my knuckles against the window. The one fellow rides with his head hung back to show the whiskey slugs he takes that his long throat moves to swallow.

  “Righto,” he says. “Okey doke. Hold yer horses, Slim.”

  The truck shoots out underneath me. Broken jacks and rusty cans, headless screws and sockets sail, skipping the ribby bed of the truck. I am flopped back, paddling for a hold to grab. I find my feet to stand up, and duck the limbs of roadside trees.

  We are going faster.

  And we are getting farther.

  So I have got to figure: tarsals and metatarsals, greensticks, spirals. Tibia, fibula, femur. There are two hundred and some-odd bones in the human body. Of these, I have broken eleven legs, thirteen arms, twenty-two toes and fingers.

  I spy string to make a splint with and slip it in my pocket. But then I see my pail. I see the fellow driving us, still driving us with his elbow bent to stick out his side window. So I figure. I turn my boy’s back on them so they can’t see me tip my pail, so they cannot see Oscar, so it is just my pail they see I swing outside the window of the one who goes shew.

  “Shew,” he goes. “Shew, boy.”

  I let my pail swing in at him, closer every time it takes for him to guess ahead and back again, back to the lucky fib it has come to me I told him. Cottonmouths, I told him. We are proof of it—slung wheel-locked in a dusty skid I tip my cap at the finish of.

  “I thank you, sir. And you, sir.”

  I hop down in my shiny shoes, with my turtle worked to the seat of my pants, to march—oh, slippery whelp!—the short piece to the overshot tin trumpet’s call to the fair.

  OH, BUHL’S BOY. Buhl Parson’s boy.

  So now I have my bucket. I have my yellow house I know, set back from a road I know, and if I walk to the back of the house, I see the rope, the pulley, the open mouth of thick pipe set in the drilled ground.

  At the bottom of the pipe is a bucket.

  I cannot see it. But I can say that it is filled.

  The bucket Orbit leaves in the back of the truck, since I have said so, is empty. It is lidded. But—that drunken night or another, on some parched curve or another, on some hardscrabble county road—suppose that the bucket tips over. Suppose it is found tipped over.

  THERE IS A story I have often heard told in Tuscaloosa.

  There was a boy in a fishing boat on the lake near Tuscaloosa.

  I am not so sure it was August. It may be later, toward winter, the breeding season, when the nests are seen to rise in the lake and the eggs, it is said, of the cottonmouths are moving deep in their bodies. Onlookers on the banks of the lake claim the boy fell from the fishing boat. The boat was narrow, they say, not a deep boat, not a boat you would find to be hard to rock and, rocking, to get tipped over.

  They dragged the lake there.

  It occurs to me to wonder why it is they dragged the lake there. Maybe it is something that must be done, that there is some sort of decree about, nothing you are left any choice about, but I am guessing that someone, some family one, thought it was something that should be done, that someone ought to take it upon himself to have the lake be dragged. And when he had, when the lake was dragged, when the body of the boy was on the bank you see the snakes sun on there, when it was seen there, when people gathered there to see it—the body, the boy it is said to have looked by then to have rolled down a hill as boys do, but that this boy, punctured, spun out of a breeding nest, it is said that the way this boy looked, it was a long hill he had rolled down wound in barbed wire—then was the father, I wonder, was the sister, was whoever it was who had decided for the boy that he ought to be brought out of the lake and seen on the smooth bank there—were they, even then, that father, that sister, were they thinking ahead even then to how it might be told again, and knowing that it would be told again, how the story, the spectacle, the outrageous trick by common blood forevermore recast them?

  Or before then, I wonder, before that, before the body had been seen at all, before the nets, the slow boat, before it was decided to drag the lake—then—even before then—before it occurred to anyone that someone was going to have to decide to have the lake be dragged, or not—I am not saying yes, or no, only that I wonder—no, that I suspect—hope, I hope I am not alone in this, in thinking that in the decision made there was likely to be, apt to have been, some notion—that in the spectacle of the body, in the freak show of the body, was the promise for them, the endurance for them, of some fresh exile, some uneasy glory.

  “CLEM?” CISSIE SAYS. “You saw Clem? And how is Clem, Orbit?”

  I have not got prize one I brought Cissie from the fair. I have not got Oscar, and not my pail I took him in, so now I have to use a pan, which it is just a shallow pan I sneaked out from the kitchen. And the trough is almost empty. In the trough is just a puddle left where the few tadpoles left over swim since Cissie dumped the rest of them, which I will pick up by their tails to count them in the garden. Each by each, I will line them up, snoot to tail in the yellow vein, to fold them into the smooth leaves to bury them out in the garden.

  “How come Bingo isn’t out digging up the garden?”

  “How should I know?” Cissie says. “It isn’t me who took her off and left her at the fair.”

  But I did not leave Bingo. I say, “She did not come.”

  I am at the kitchen sink to fill the pan I thought to try to sneak into the garden.

  “And what if Daddy comes?” Cissie says. “Maybe you think I could borrow your pail to fix him up a chicken.”

  But there will be no pan she needs and there will be no chicken.

  Momma rests her hand on her wrinkled hair like there is a hat to keep there, like there is a wind inside the house only she feels come. But this is not the garden. The night wind does not come. The filly does not hang inside to turn above the snapping reach of stray dogs should they come.

  I know why they come.

  I say it is not for her, but I know why they come.

  We light the lights back burning. I fix back the broken place to be again a broken place so when our Bingo comes home, she can scoot into our yard. I leave the windows open so we hear her in our yard.

  But how will we hear Oscar? Cissie brings our beds from the garden. Our beans are stripped in the garden. So how can we see Oscar coming slowly should he come?

  And Sugar should she come?

  You can see the lights all burning. But still the dogs will come. It is still so hot at night that even with our windows closed we can hear them come.

  So sometimes they are open.

  Sometimes, with our windows closed, you cannot hold your breath enough long enough in Momma’s room to stand the smell to sit there thinking why they come. So sometimes they
are open.

  Sometimes Momma watches me lift the windows open.

  Sure—I know there are dogs out there.

  I know with the windows up that Momma hears the dogs out there fighting for the filly in the yard when dark is come. I lift the windows open. I know dark is come.

  I know should our daddy come, then there will be no talking then of sleeping in the one bed Cissie makes of two beds we sleep in in the pantry near to Momma’s room.

  But there will be the lean-to.

  There will be our broken place our Bingo by and by will find, and there will be our Gander still, honking in our yard.

  Still, Bingo does not come. I thought with the other dogs surely she would come. “Come. Come.”

  They said, Come on, boy. You cain’t see from there. Why, it’s Parson’s boy—old Buhl’s boy. It’s Orbit.

  They put me on the bandbox by the stage, where I could see.

  I know the girl was watching me. I saw she could see me in the tent light there. I could hear the carnies singing Clem out there.

  MAYBE I AM mistaken. It is not unlikely that I am. But I do believe it was August. I am almost sure it was August. It is the order of things I am never quite so sure of myself of. I would say that Orbit went to the fair before we missed Bingo, though, before we went to the lean-to, though—because I remember thinking then, when Orbit had gone to the fair, I remember having to remind myself that it was just so quiet then because my brother had taken our dog with him. Because it was so quiet, you see, and I would have to remind myself that they were going to have to walk, Bingo and my brother—they would have to walk a ways just to get themselves to a place in the road where I know you can hear the fair.

  So it would be a while, I knew. It would take those two some walking, I knew, just to get to the goddamn fair. I knew I ought to get myself to where I didn’t need to remind myself that it was bound to be quiet—that there were just the two of us, that it was going to be quiet a while because it was just going to be me for a while who moved in the house with Mother.

  There was not yet rain then. There was not a sound, I know, of rain coming down on the roof of our house—because it calmed me, that sound, the sound of rain on the tin of our roof, so that now, surely I would be certain now to remember that I had heard it.

  The car for nights we had heard coast by—I didn’t hear it at all. It was only, I think, myself I heard, mostly, I think, my feet I heard on the old boards, walking through the rooms of our house I heard when it was just the two of us, when Bingo and Orbit were gone.

  It is best to keep secrets with the dying, I think.

  It would be our secret.

  I drew the sheet back. I fixed the needle. For weeks, she had begged me for it—to be done with it. And then she stopped begging at all.

  I did not rest much. I was waiting for her. I was waiting for some sort of signal from her. The names Mother had I knew of for things I knew fell away. Still I thought there would be some signal, you see; I thought there would be some way for me that Mother would find of asking me, something I could do or say, so that there would be some way to know, so that there would have been some way to think it wasn’t me who wanted it, that it wasn’t my want at all.

  It was quiet; it would be quiet.

  It was just me with Mother then—no fathers then, no doctors, no dogs in Tuscaloosa.

  I CANNOT SAY how many days it was that the other two were gone. I know that the rain came later. The sound of the geese was later, the lake, the lean-to—I think of these as later. I think sometimes that the quiet then, that whatever it was that happened to us happened without our speaking then—that this is why, now—this is what it is now that makes it so hard for me now to remember what happened, to believe that anything happened.

  But this is silly.

  Orbit was gone, and Bingo was gone, and I was at home with Mother. I stayed by the bed with Mother. I kept the filled syringe in her drawer.

  Before we took them away from her, Mother kept her cigarettes on the nightstand that stood beside her bed for all the nights of all the days I myself could speak of. It was the one thing she seemed to remember, the one thing Mother insisted on—on having one of her hands free to reach across her bedsheets with to pick up one of her cigarettes that we had long since decided she had had enough chances by then to get burned up in bed with, and us in bed with.

  But she would reach for them. She would feel around on her nightstand for them and bring her hand up close to her mouth, with her mouth a rounded shape she made as though she were really smoking, as though she were somebody my age then practicing for smoking. For all the times I sat there and saw Mother reach for a cigarette, still when it was quiet like that, when we were alone in the house like that, I would catch myself thinking that Mother had reached for me.

  There was a restlessness in me. It is hard for me to explain it. The weeks passed, the days. Years pass.

  Years pass.

  There are houses. Favorite dogs have died.

  I cannot explain it.

  A redbird flies at the windowpane. A river turns tail on the sea.

  The shadows made by the pin oak tree pooled on Mother’s bedsheets. She tried to kick them off, to sweep them off with the backs of her hands, to go out. She was always wanting to go out. When the last of the shadows left the room, the sun had dropped over the sea.

  This was when she had gone out before our father left home. I had heard the bones of her hips crimped against the kitchen counter. She was peeling something, washing. Whatever it was, she put down. She went out.

  She used to let us go with her.

  There were geese those years I know Mother loved, and the pelicans that follow the river. I know Mother loved the river.

  We were walking with her on the levee one day. We were behind her. She reached her hand behind her to stop us. We were to go back. There was something she had left in the oven for us that we were to eat for dinner.

  We listened for her. We left the porch light on. Orbit dropped marbles in an empty can he set inside the door of our room and, from the can, walked a string from our room down the hall to wind around the knob of the door so that when she came back, we heard her.

  There were times we did not hear her. We popped the screen from our window. The tree frogs had started to call. The call grew louder, quickened toward dark. Whippoorwills walked the road until dark, calling themselves out slowly.

  Did you think we would follow, Mother?

  WE LAY ON our beds by the window, our pillows doubled beneath us, to see across the field. Our field was silted. Our potatoes were fists in the ground we tilled—held out, rooting.

  We grew restless.

  We sang.

  A horse and a flea and three blind mice, sitting on a tombstone shooting dice. Horse jumped off, fell on the flea. “Oops!” said the flea. “There’s a horse on me!”

  Boom boom. Boom boom.

  WE NEVER FOLLOWED her to the river. Our father was in his room. We kept on having to remind ourselves that our father was in his room—that we should be quiet, that it would be dark before Mother came back, because it was a ways to the river and back. We would fill a plate for her and leave it to warm in the oven for her so that she would eat some dinner.

  And then this stopped also.

  The fields were burning. It was the time of year our father went out among the other fathers to burn the grass in the fields.

  Our field was burning. We spelled one another at the windowsill. We could smell the grass still burning. The flames were brief, guttering birds.

  We saw her.

  She was growing old.

  We saw the light of her cigarette drop at her feet from our window. Then we did not see her. We did not think we could see her.

  We called out. We thought to call out. Ash rose to our mouths in the field.

  I DID NOT dawdle. Cissie says I dawdled there, but I did not dawdle. It is just a long way there. I came qui
ck.

  I did not have shoes. I did not have Bingo with me going there or coming back, and coming back I came by foot and I did not have shoes. I did not have Oscar, not my pail to bring him in and not my pail to rest on, turned up, tired by the road. And it is such a rough road.

  But I came quick. I came in my sock feet. I had swapped my shoes.

  I swapped them at the tent. Also all my coins I had which I had not yet parted with—I swapped them at the tent.

  My shoes,

  my coins,

  my lidded pail,

  my fishy eggs,

  my chicken necks,

  my stone I kicked for luck from home,

  my store list Cissie gave me—

  lost, and worst of all is Oscar lost, and worse by far is Bingo lost, and also figure tadpoles lost, folded in the yellow leaves since I left through the field.

  There is always Clem there. The Ferris wheel was broken. But there is always Clem there, and the turtle that swims in the tank.

  The tent was flapping. I had on my shoes.

  “First off,” the boy said, “you got to remove them shoes.”

  I took out my coins I had. I took off my shoes.

  They smelled like Daddy. The ticket booth smelled like Daddy. Where I touched my shoes and the ticket booth, I smelled him on my hands.

  I had smelled the roe, too, and the chicken necks when morning came, the morning I went to the fair. My pail was empty. I knelt in my skiff to paddle. I had to paddle with my hands. My hands were rotty. First I had the necks to lob and the bright eggs of the fish to lob where the lake is deep where the catfish swim, so that when I got to the shallows, when I got to the bank of the lake, I could haul my skiff up away from the lake and rinse it out with my empty pail and tip it up so if rain should fall, snakes would not swim in it.

  The catfish had to swim up from the bottom.

  I threw the eggs and the chicken necks as far away from my metal skiff as I could make them go. But I could still see the fish swimming.

  Even the eggs they swam for. The eggs were so small. The snakes came and went for the eggs, but the snakes were small also.