by Noy Holland
MY BED IS the bed for winter. I sleep where it is warm.
I wake backed away to the foot of the bed, our boy grunting and snuffling against me. Else I cannot find him—he has pushed off from me in his sleep as I sleep: he has crept into the cold with George.
George sleeps out in the summer room where we used to sleep before the boy, in the wind and sun, in the trees we liked, the sickly elm, the willow, the branches bent to shade the barn we keep our boy’s things in. He runs the fan for quiet. He makes a tent as boys do of his blankets to read by flashlight in.
Three long walls are windows. He wakes in the cold and trees.
Nights I wake to find George here should he come to me from the summer room, the room the late-summer gold of corn the afternoon our planets crossed, the day I made my harvest. The baby is between us, or I have laid him briefly, near, in the wicker bin beside my bed.
I reach in sleep for him: I reach for the baby. I pet his face, his tender belly. He pulls me to him. I feel his penis stirring softly in its patch of hair.
Boy, my boy.
But what years I have slept. He is weathered. He is bony, bearded, grown.
THEY TOOK HIM off from me, to keep him safe from me, early on, while I drifted.
I came as I drifted to a dazzling sow, a slot chinked in her back for coins. In my back were names I’d forgotten, welted loops and straightaways I could make out with my hand: PRIM SUE, PEPPER, GLORY: the animals when I was a girl.
I’m a dwirl, I’m a dwirl: my boy scamps through the house—in a heartbeat, shall, the brief day gone. Sthla, sthla, mbla, he learns, and swings to his feet in the crib.
I had them roll me in my bed against the window: let me drift. I went willingly, unafraid of the cold, my hospital gown with the stamped-down name lapping against my back. The river whinged and gurgled. I skirted the ice at its weedy bank, a selvage poorly sewn.
The baby kicked in me. He would throw his foot through the cut in me, flail through the ragged mouth.
And then? And then?
Instructions. My father in velveteen robes. Presiding, intent on a girlish descant: how to love and hold your tongue. Above him—no cloud, not a tree for shade—I watched my life, a plains bird, circling. Hello down there. Hello.
My boy appeared on the riverbank. A dull kite snapped in the trees.
The sow would make her way out through the thicket, I knew, a pig-pretty face, glistening, and drag up the stairs on her hooves. It was the way of things, the way they come at you, I heard the coins tinkling in her belly. She would come at me with her snout.
WE STOLE THE bedsheets, a towel, the hospital gown, anything marked we could carry. The fishnet panties, they gave us, and Q-tips to dab his umbilical with, and the bottle with its hooked spout.
We waited the month and then some and by and by George came to me from the summer room in his slippers. He lay the baby in the bin beside the bed. I felt him push at me. He was eating his way back into me. The old story. You want to creep back, creep back, feed at the spangled shore. My stomach fisted. Seized, contracted. I breathed, a pant: the huffing the nurses teach you. The body going on. He kept on, the good George, so patient, so brave, I felt his brain beat in my knees. I felt him tire. I held him to me, the baby crowning, folding apart on his tongue.
SHE CAME ON, the sow, she blapped through the door, rearing. She was tall as a man and grotesquely smooth. Her breasts were a pinkish girl’s.
I lit into her with my umbrella; I beat her about the head. I was blazing, vile, a blinded heat. Still she charged, charged again, rutted at me with her snout.
It took hours of beating to kill her and when I had killed her I hauled her out and threw the bolt on the door.
Still she lived. She clawed at the door and simpered. A cigarette, dear: her last request, her voice a child’s. I softened. I crept the door open.
The sow was swaddled in cellophane and wearing a bridal gown. Her eyes were sockets, sooty, gone—the soupy mass flushed out. Her breasts were lumped and spitting milk. She would never die. She would die at my door forever; she would wait me out.
WE ROCK FOR a time and I lie with my boy and listen to the talk downstairs. The good George. Sister telling of her weekly sweetheart; she has had a belt tooled with his name. And what, George asks, do the two of them like to do?
“Goof around. Eat popcorn. Listen to music,” Sister says.
One day, she says, they will marry. They will have a big house and a horse in the barn and their children will learn to ride early. And dogs, oh, they will have lots of dogs, and too many cats to count or name, and geese and such, and heaps of corn, and her children—mercy, let them, fine, she isn’t going to fuss at them if they want to play tag in the garden.
She has brought me two spores of kudzu to force in the windowlight through the trees. “From home,” Sister says, morning then, the coming melt, hooome—a drawl, a diphthong, our lie. A little something, a little green in our house when the cold has come—from the heart of Mississippi.
Seeping, cloistered bottomland. The spores loosen. Look—they are dropping through the trees.
You would have to burn down the delta to stop it.
And do what—to stop our Sister?
She makes her way in with a sickle, hacking at the matted vine. The spores shake loose—a sack of eggs, a thickish rind, a warty bulb that roots, divides, in the loam where it touches down. They find Sister fallen to sleep in it—in the broad, sweet leaves, the ghosting, the heads of the trees grown over, grown into, disappeared.
Hearsay from Mississippi. We make our few brief visits.
I swear and swear to do better, and Daddy does, and Daddy’s wife, and doesn’t Sister have her vocation meantime, her piece work they give her to do—bagging dirt, sorting screws, packaging tobacco? Tasks for the able of body and mind, for the residents who stir from their chairs.
The boy I remember best doesn’t. “He’s gone by—” this is how Sister will say it when I ask. “He went on by last week.”
He is spindly, pretty, his mouth licked clean, a boy grafted to a shabby chair. He sings, and drives and drives a Matchbox car across snapshots of his family.
HONK AND THE gate glides open. A pond, a rolling green. A hatching of beds for flowers, the crepe myrtle in bloom.
And then they come at you, falling out of the trees for you—flapping arms and twisted, torpid, ruinous mouths.
They flopped themselves onto the hood of my car, shrieking, pleased, hula hula—somebody new, some mother, hawker, hapless holy Joe.
Some stingy sister. I sat at the wheel with my head in a vice while they battered and stroked the windows, my boy not even in me yet, my belly flat and still. And still it seemed to look at them would spread their sickness to me, saddle me with mother-dreams: ears knuckled stubbornly in the column of a boy’s limp neck; hands like melted plastic, paws, paws, repeaters, spit swinging from their mouths.
YES, YES, WE will visit. Make our slow way down.
How better to feel lucky? To list my missed afflictions, his: no blighted limb nor burgeoned lobe, no purple stain: to gloat?
And yet I must know better. Things take their time to show.
Baby okay? Baby okay?
Just ducky.
I HEAR THE piggledy snoot in the loam. Then sleep—in the shallows, in the grievous sweetness of milk on his breath.
Before long they will mount the stairs, George in his boiled slippers, Sister hauling the dog. “Hey! What do you think you are doing, huh? Quit that. Gooood. Hey.”
George is trying, gently, to hush her. It is like trying to hush the wind. “What did I just say to you? You stay. There. Hey. YOU. COME. RIGHT. HERE.”
The baby stirs, and paws against me.
Outside: a growth of fog, a glaze of sleet on the windows.
I sleep again, pretend to, when George eases open the door. I watch him undress in the windows, fast, in the cold of the summer room—a boy with his flashlight
burning, diving for his bed.
I go bed to bed, boy to boy, as I wish to, as I must.
BABY SWEET, SWEET night. Something nibbles, drags its tail through the walls.
They will come to me—days I cannot stop shaking. Burgundy at noon. He is toddling, too young for school, strapped into his seat in the car. I hate you, Mama. My heart hates you. I am driving. To keep him safe from me. Keep him safe from harm.
Sister turns in her bed, the dog nested.
The animals asleep in the barn. Used to be.
Used to be I whinnied. I was a girl who whinnied. Slept out in the field with the broodmares, springtime, foaling time, a stick at my side should the coyotes show, longing for the night’s heroics.
Sister asleep and walking, used to be, water for the rabbits, a pot to scrub, the garbage dragged to the barrel where we burned. Her shoes buried. A stash of food beneath the bed.
My bonnie. My bonnie lies over.
We had a music box for our necklaces. A ballerina beneath the lid. Little cake top, little throwaway, mesmeric, smooth and pink and poorly made. Little glory. A life’s beguilements. She sprang up before the mirror—endlessly, shamelessly spinning.
IF YOU WAKE her, you wake her screaming. Something you ought to know.
MONTHS PASS, WHOLE seasons pass, my boy caught, clasped to the bed, a clock hand, he turns, searching for me, his mouth pulsing—in the watery murk of a car swung past, the slow sweep, a dappled shade, the great leviathans circling.
Sister is singing, a few odd hollow wavering notes, out on the glistening shore.
I draw the bedsheets back. It is winter yet, I can hear them: the small, furred bodies in the walls.
The wind has risen. Ice crazes in the trees.
I find Sister down the hall in the bathtub, in a dusky wash of grime and blood, sudsing with the dog. She has got the candles burning. The dog whimpers when I open the door.
“Just checking,” I say.
Well and good. Good enough.
“Good night, then,” I say.
“I’m just washing her. She likes it,” Sister says.
“Yes.”
“She likes it. See?”
“Well, good night,” I say.
“Where is Messpot?”
She calls him Messpot. Young’n. Binny. See? I am right here.
I see she has ground out her cigarette on the iridescent rim of our tub.
“He’s asleep,” I say.
“Like a baby. I gave him a soft good-bye.”
The dog lunges, “HEY,” tries to. Sister hauls her down by the collar, water slopping onto the floor.
“It’s late,” I say. “I’m tired.”
“So you won’t sit with me.”
“No.”
“I thought maybe.”
Might have, yes, maybe—in the humming, the distant ward, might have brushed her hair, mothered her, a girl without a mother, laboring in a tub.
I swing the door shut.
SHE TRIED TO lie down. Daddy had her by her hair.
He had her things heaped up in the room Sister claimed in his house by the time we reached there. I was to clear her out, drive her south to Mississippi—withered fields, the cotton picked, the river dropped and chalky. Home.
I packed Sister’s figurines for her, the pale little porcelain boxes she kept, the dingy china dolls, amused, their vacant breakable faces, their broken hands and shoes, their bodies cloth beneath their gowns, flimsy, durable, sewn. Our grandmother’s sorry slippers, I packed, and the bundles of letters a boy had sent, some darling, new for a time, the ones I hadn’t stolen from her that Sister was waiting to open.
A little something, baby. All I’m asking, the boy wrote.
Token, talisman, cake top, stone. Anything small to rub or suck, to hoard, a nut, a buckeye, I packed. A china doll, a Matchbox car: easily lost, renewably dear, something to grieve, lament at last, the breakables, perishables, bloody plugs and silken locks, the rheumy gristled button plucked, the newly born, the newly dead: first and last and only.
Send me a word or something, the boy wrote. José needs a kiss or two.
We kept the windows down—Sister healing, rank in the heat—and her hair, pulled free, was carried upward, out; a great bristly shank of it hovered and plunged above the roof of my car.
A day at the lake, a battlefield. And then the bright gates swung open.
I PULL THE door shut, move away down the hall.
The baby is waking, whimpering—quick! Next the trumpet, a sound like an elephant charging.
I make my way to him. Lie down beside the boy, against him, animal to animal, anyone would do. It is not lost on me, not lastingly: anyone would do. Nurse Jane, Nurse Jane, Nurse Alice.
I am food, heat, a smell to him; a teat in the dark, a plug in his mouth. No matter the claim, no matter what tenderness moves me. He moves to the smell he left on me, the mark he knows me by.
Little monkey. Little brain on a stalk.
How can it be he lives?
He is impossible, embryonic again in the simple dark—doomed, suddenly, mouthy, gilled, unready, misshapen, unmoved.
MY ONE.
Brain in my brain, heart in my heart. A dimpled leg, ten fisted toes.
I did not know mine from another’s.
Yet he thrives, plump, deep in the gorgeous, ruinous lie: nothing lives but that he lives, too. Nothing stirs. Not a wind, no bird in the stippled wood—but that he cries out, that he sees.
Such a world. The sun sails past, warm to the touch. His body tethered, flown.
Now the moon.
What of the sea, the barn adrift? The fallen throbbing stars?
Try crying, cry out: a shade appears, a dolorous tide, darkens the window, swallows the sky. A mothering heat, a shadow bent.
Feed and she will vanish; cry and she appears. Not a rib, not a bang. Only whimper. Small god.
I AM EMPTIED out.
Shaken loose, how swiftly—George is coming to me down the hall.
He smells of Naugahyde, of ready food, the distant rude perfumey press and beery lure of airports, of bodies on the move. He drops into bed beside me, emits a gassy sibilant conciliatory whisper.
Then he is on me. The baby jostled awake, watching up, hairy papa, pleased.
I pinch my eyes shut, not to laugh at them, at how they must look to each other, how they look to me. George is wrestling my pilly nightgown free, rolls me, hurried, dogged, gone—but that Sister is screaming: “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING, HEY?”
George stops a beat and we listen: she drags the dog back into the tub.
Two beats, three, another. Sister sings. The dog sputters and coughs. Poor panicked hound, slipped free, hauled back. A dog devoted, briefly loved, gone to the Post Everlasting.
Yes. Tell it, Sister. The gods shine down.
She is a Miracle, soon to be, a gospel girl in ribbons and pearls: a Miracle in Training. Cheerful Helper. Much Improved. Miracle in Training.
George rolls off me: he has remembered—where he is, and who.
Husband, father, suitor, son.
Resolute, a man in need. Thinks: give it a go. Hup, boy.
He takes his time for a time, he is easy, he is breaking softly into me.
I would stop it. Send him off down the hill, Sister in tow and the dog behind and every last goodly neighbor, everyone else who means well, everything else that needs.
Just the one, I want—shoeless, a girl, her tongue cut out—to slip food under our door. Not a peep. Leave me to molt and heal. I have bones again, I’d forgotten—joints—gristle, sinew, glassy balls drifting in their pockets. The lifted blue of my veins recedes. A man-sized thumb in my belly unmoors—a nudge at the hull, a nosing; a ghoulie, a ghostie, a bump in some fattened tube.
Buck up.
George turns me away, not to see, should I weep. “Stay with me.”
Say mine again. Gimmit, do.
The res
t of life before us.
Sit tight. Lie back. Lucky you, you feel it.
I have kept to my chair to feel it—what hook is set, what press desists, what frightened, woozy, ravening love bends its back against us.
“Where are you?” George says. “Stay with me.”
Our boy bats at us, god of us—his blessed farce.
I say, “I am right here.”
Here to please. A girl, a mark, caught again, my wrists cuffed above my head. George is working up to it, working slowly in.
I give in. It is my habit, my dodge.
He had me pinned, this George, another, pricked, Andy Petie Billy Bob, the way into me dry and narrow.
“All your little friends,” he said.
Pig-eyed boy, he smelled of hay.
“It’s a matter of time,” he insisted.
What isn’t?
Soon—a plea, a girl spliced in: virgin girl on a spongy pier, how you? what’s your name? hardly matters, fly right, it’s a phase, call it that, a passage, Christ, what’s it for if not? Little vestibule, shrunken bloody windswept maw and why fuss after all, it will knit, tell her that, little whisperings: sing, why not, something plangent, try, to ease her: the cranes flown south, the murmuring flocks; her name, something sweet, hang the sheet out: his: that’s his flag in my yard, his hand at my mouth, my brash little lollipop of blood, and I am fifteen, the wind in the leaves, the brackish lurid face of the pond, the birds circling. The dead horse gnawing the barn. Girly, look. There there there there. Say mine again, our little sweetnee hushed, hooked on a tit, he swipes at me—and yours and yours, keep your eyes snapped shut, your back to the door, hip hey, little girly, look. All your little friends, girl, look, you think you’re what?—all your life, because it’s nothing, hey, we got babies red ones yellow brown, four of everything they are making, Lord, scissors knife staple string, a nurse in the wings, hup up. The dogs panted, frenzied, dodging him, a boot to the snout, he kept his boots on, shy, he was kind, he meant to be kind, conciliatory, pig-eyed boy, and what? this was what? half your life since, bet, half your silly life ago, and he is going, gentle, cautious, gone—husband, father, suitor, son. Christ, the stink of it, the tedium, the final blind obliterating rut, and the dog cries out, the dog breaks free, hysteric. She would drag the boy out by the scruff of his neck, paw a hole for him in the yard, half a chance; here she comes.