I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

Daddy done run out of luck. We supposed he drowned in the dirty river when they found his old brown boots. But Daddy ain’t been drowning, only getting fat.

  “Where you been, Daddy?” I say through the screen.

  He looks to me like some old boy I never knew in school.

  “Oh, here and yonder. Best let me in.”

  But do you think I budge?

  “What you been doing, Daddy?”

  He gives a little shrug like plenty.

  “Watching the grasshoppers spit. Come on.”

  Momma sits bolt up in back of me, spewing lynch-pinned to the flagpole and fourteen million dollars. She is Queen of Nonsense now, and that gives her the right.

  “She ain’t saying nothing, Daddy. Don’t mean a thing. What can I do for you?”

  He says, “I just come to set for a bit.”

  I say, “Unh-huh, Daddy. Ain’t no reason to live in hell and have to wind up there, too. Why don’t you just get along?”

  He is nothing but a shadow against the screen, and from where I stand, flies disappear in him.

  “You had your chance, old man. Momma’s got a thing with God now.”

  IT IS ALL I can do to keep my hands from myself. Jimmy shuffled up, kind of hanging his head, making a ghost on the screen. I’ve seen it happen, I knew it was come.

  “Jimmy,” I say, “how them bananas?”

  He says, “I had me a dream. I was looking for you. I was down yonder on the blacktop ridge, hollering every way from Sunday. You wasn’t hearing a thing. You was down in the long valley in a little old house with a white light. You was all prettied up and your lips were red and you was just setting, looking at me, not seeing a thing, not listening.”

  Ought to be something for a girl to say, but my mouth refuses me.

  He says, “Come on, child. I can’t dawdle around. I got me a life to live.”

  “Uh huh,” I say. “Tell me about it, lover boy.”

  “TELL ME WHAT it’s like,” Momma says to me. “Tell me what it feels like to feel like a queen.”

  “Momma,” I say, “Kiwanis makes six hundred and twenty-eight pounds of banana pudding every year, and every year those boys come up from down the road a piece and to go to pissing in the yellow vat. It feels a little like that, I guess—like everybody’s happy to have you, but you got some secret stinking inside.”

  Any time she finds sleep, Momma goes to smiling and kissing the air. I’ve got a notion she looks like me, practicing love in the glass. Am I doing this right? Do I look okay?

  I been making ready since long back when, but—Momma, she can still turn me inside out. When she came up last night from some crazy spell, she took hold of my face like she ain’t laid eyes maybe for years on me.

  “Oh, my beloved child. I thought I was living forever in that green, tumbling place.”

  It was like I’d never seen her before, like she was the light of another world.

  “Here,” she said. “Put your hand here.”

  I rested my hand on her belly—my hand pressed under Momma’s hand. “I’m all of me gone from here. Feel?” she said. “Do you feel it?”

  “Listen,” she said. “Don’t matter nohow. It’s God does the things that ever get done. God made them boys piss in the pudding, ain’t nothing to do with you.”

  FATHER, FORGIVE.

  If I ever flew, it would feel like this, like the earth is just something long gone. I got a big heart and can hold my breath and when I go deep in this dirty river, my whole body disappears. I feel the water wanting me. I know it’s a sin, but I open my legs. I shout Jimmy’s name so it turns to music by the time that it finds air.

  Oh, ain’t it a shame, my sweet, sweet Jimmy. I could have loved you good.

  FATHER, FORGIVE.

  I lie in the woods in the heat for the train. The thing gets growing inside me, up in my gut, around and around my secret parts. It has a life of its own, and surely the hunger of a hundred horses. It is a thing of the flesh, child of the Devil, who split my momma’s pretty lips and spilt himself in her. Surely now is the time for prayer.

  Dear God, sweet God, pray God.

  What’s my momma ever done to you? You listen to me. Ain’t no kind of life you’re lending her. I got the skirling sound of a train come smack between my ears. It goes, Take me. Take me, it goes. Take me, take me, take me, take me.

  Do I have to do all your filthy work?

  Have you spent up all your amazing grace?

  You think I know better, but you got me wrong—I ain’t afraid of you. You can have this no-count soul to keep.

  Suit yourself. Do what you will. Tickle me pink.

  I can’t use it.

  Glory be and to the Father, and to the Holy Son. I would let Momma sprawl on the shimmying track.

  You got your doubts.

  I’d say, Go on, go on. Get on with it, Momma. Let’s be done with this thing.

  MUSIC OF THE OLD

  It is dark on the roof and a seagull passes like something that swims in the eye. Cold. He wants a fire he can hold his feet to. Maybe he’ll toss his skateboard in he has carried up through the parking garage, hoping to work off the feeling, drive it out with the speed, the thrill. Like skateboarding down a corkscrew. He feels dizzy, and the shadows keep whispering to him, his mother’s voice, his sister’s, and parked cars slide off without anybody living behind the wheel. The living drink whiskey at the Elks Club, shuffling to the jukebox, but he’s a kid and they won’t let him in. They’ll call the cops on him or his mother. So he listens to the tunes from the rooftop, slow, dull, music of the old and the birds going past. He is hollow-boned himself and feathered and the seagull keeps swooping weirdly, wanting to put out his eyes. He has his toothbrush in his shirtfront pocket. If he had to say why. But he’ll never. He is never going to get old enough to walk into the Elks Club for whiskey. The thought nearly stops him. He will wait for the song to finish. Then he’ll lift off; then he’ll fly.

  INSTRUCTIONS FOR XU YUAN FLYING

  OR

  THE LIFTING FORCE LET GO

  Children must under the custody of adults use. Should choose the option open. No fire ban in areas, the tall building the floor. The airport ten kilometers from flying. Kong Cross wire in the side of the field against Deduction Presses. A person light take up a loop; another ignite the four angle. Wait for the heat enough light has when the lifting force let go. Xu Yuan light rose slowly the sky, do not forget Wishing oh. Xu Yuan light are on the rise, that of the flying cannot a long time fall, and flight not to append the Foreign Body.

  SERENGETI

  They sat at a rectory table, fire in the stone hearth burning. A pilgrim’s feast. Neighbors. Autumn—leaves driven against the house. He put food in his mouth with the food in his mouth he hadn’t chewed enough to swallow.

  “I could go out tomorrow.”

  He leaned into her.

  “I could find somebody next week. A companion, people seek company—to eat with, read the newspaper with, whatever we do, this is natural. Someone to talk to. Poor Beryl can’t do it. Past a certain age, you can’t argue this, women—of course it’s sad. Well, I find it sad.”

  He poured wine for the girl and the firelight, thrown, hissed and shattered in it. The glass was dipped in gold—a golden circle—buoyant, living.

  At last he swallowed; this seemed to hurt him. A tremor kept moving through him and through everything he touched. One shoulder sloped low. Years on the mound. The joy of it.

  “Maybe not everywhere but certainly here,” he went on. “She has me, naturally, but when I go?”

  Shaking, all of him. And the windows shook and wind in the trees and the first bright scraps of snow.

  Halloween. Talk of costumes—the children’s, the grandchildren’s. Someone was going as mulch, somebody else as a stop sign.

  “I’m going as who I used to be,” one of them said.

  THE GIRL TURNED back to him.

  “That
face,” Phillip said, “is not attractive.”

  She had been tearing skin from the fat of her cheek, tatters of it, to swallow. She was sorry. Why was she sorry? Now she was sorry she had said she was sorry.

  “Please,” Phillip said, impatient.

  His wife was three chairs away, laughing. She was absolutely silent when she laughed. Good breeding, she called it, indignant. Her father had brayed like a mule. He had struck her once with a pitchfork—her husband had. For something. A lost key? A broken cup? Unforgiveable. But she forgave him.

  “Poor Beryl. It doesn’t matter that she used to be beautiful or that she’s smart and easy to talk to. Beryl is stuck with me and when I die, Beryl will be stuck alone. That’s the way it is. Who wants her? You reach a certain age and nobody—nobody wants anybody, really.”

  AFTER DINNER THEY gathered at the larger hearth and listened to the wind in the chimney. A deer approached and watched them, standing in the dark field. The first the girl had seen. The deer were dying—a mite of some kind. They fell sick and walked madly in circles.

  Leaves struck the glass of the windows and lay, one upon the other, in a fringe around the house. A glassblower’s house. He was talking. She was in love with him but he was married. He had hair like a cherub’s, like a painting of hair. Firelight was on it. His hands—she couldn’t explain it—he caught her watching them as he moved. He had had them insured, he laughed, for thousands. Tens of thousands, even. They meant that much to him.

  THEY DRANK BRANDY and he kissed her in his kitchen, a surprise. Not a word. He turned her to him.

  Now she slipped into the hall where the heat didn’t reach and made her way to his children’s room. His girl was named for a month in summer, his boy for a tree that grew nobly on a continent far away.

  Beryl, the girl thought. A mineral. A pilot flying in darkness over the far Serengeti.

  She lay down with the boy above the covers. You could love children and nobody stopped you. You were allowed. And they were let to love you, too.

  PEOPLE WERE ALREADY putting on coats by the time she came back into the room. She had fallen asleep in the boy’s bed. The deer had come closer and watched her, the girl dreamed, its breath fogging the glass, fever glazing its eyes. A springtime deer, it couldn’t help itself. The spots on its hide still showed.

  She would name her children simple names. Meriwether. Linnaeus. Hidalgo—no.

  Sam. Jack. Jane. Just names. Not the names of stars or places. Not trees.

  So many trees in these hills. She would never leave.

  He studied in Venice. He liked Venetian glass.

  Florence: no.

  Simple. Bob.

  The glassblower’s name was Bob. He kept tabs of acid in a candy tin in a drawer beside his bed. In Scotland once he had fallen asleep, tripping, in a field of passing flowers. A flock of sheep closed in around him. Bob, they said. They said, Bob Bob Bob.

  Dell.

  Rain—no.

  Maybe Wen.

  Beryl will live to be a hundred and marry again, and the glassblower will go off with somebody else, a girl, not this girl, not a farm girl, a plump and sullen Venetian girl, and Phillip will be dead in days. An old man, nimble, in swimming trunks. A Halloween swim, his custom. A last act. A passable dive. The fallen leaves still burning.

  MILK RIVER

  Their fathers had taken to calling them Mother.

  They had brothers in the war; mothers dead. They had lockets of hair in their lockers at school; trouble at school; chores.

  They filled pillow sacks with pole beans. The girls milked and pickled and doctored and cooked and kept the hotrod running they were too young yet to drive. Still, they drove it, nights, on the county roads, the headlights off, throwing back a veil of dust.

  They would marry men from faraway places.

  They would find where Crazy Horse lay. The white man came like water then—Blixruds and Wenderoths, Crarys and Dahls and Otters. Coming, coming, coming. Yellow dust in the Black Hills. Red Cloud, He Dog. Looking Glass and Sitting Bull. The girls had studied them all in school.

  “You’re a pretty smart cookie, for a cookie,” Franny said.

  Hoka hey, she said. Wasichu.

  IN THE DUSK of the month of the sinking grass, the girls lay in the fields where wheat grew. They dribbled dirt on each other’s faces. The dirt was silver, amended, a chemical ash.

  The night was warm. The fields were shorn. Chickadees fattened upon them. The girls lay on their backs against the stubble of wheat, the sheared-off hollow pegs, dispersing their weight as they had been schooled to do when caught on ice that is breaking.

  Crazy Horse had not been crazy, they knew. He was touched. He had been laid to rest, left for the birds. Crazy Horse was near and far. His blood ran in the birds, in the antelope; it ran in the fish of the river. They had found a cloth he wore. They found his tooth in the silt of the river, one summer when the water warmed.

  WHEN THE WATER warmed, the story goes, when their mothers carried the girls in their bellies, two fine feathers, glossy and black, came to them on the wind. Which is to say: their babies would be girls. They would keep to home when the wars began, when their brothers leaned from the windows of the car, tossed out their kisses, and waved. Good boys, gallant, each with a foot in the grave.

  The boys had written for months to their mothers, who were dead. Now the boys wrote to their sisters. They sent treasures to their sisters: a broken shoelace, a dimpled stone. The cellophane wing of a locust. For every boy in their town who had fallen, they sent a pinch of dust. Be good to Poppy, they wrote. Feed the dogs.

  The dogs, too, had fallen—the one dog mauled in the thresher, another gone by in sleep. The girls’ brothers knew nothing of this; the girls kept the news to themselves. For months, they kept the news of their mothers from the boys: they sent only news of the living, the newly living, the pups and calves and foals.

  They kept—in a coffee can—in a time capsule—every last little thing their brothers sent them. They kept the key to the hotrod there, and a scrap of hair or feather or hide of anything slaughtered or fallen. They kept pictures of girls—goofy mall shots—their brothers had kissed and sworn themselves to.

  If they married, these girls, or rode out to the buttes with boys too young to enlist, too crippled or scared, the sisters would burn their pictures. They would push tacks into the faces of dolls they had named for their brothers’ sweethearts, and bury the dolls in the barn.

  THEIR MOTHERS HAD died days away from one another, days the cold made jewels of the snow. Their mothers had been girls together. They dressed up in the ruffled dresses of the pioneer women before them and rode their ponies sidesaddle through the door of the one-room school. They roped gophers, and shot them through with arrows, and sawed off their tails as an offering to the chiefs they mostly loved. They loved the peaceable chiefs and the savage, the deliriums they could dizzy to when they spun in the remnant tepee rings on the bluffs above the milky river. They gave thanks in the four directions, from which the white horse and the dappled surged, the red horse of the springtime rains, the black of the east loping six by six over the darkening plain. They were girls. They would come to be wives together—too soon. Too late to marry Looking Glass. Too late to marry Mort Clark, wavy-haired golden boy, blasted out of a cloudless sky in the last world war.

  “I’m him,” Franny said, “I’m Mort Clark—” her mother’s love, high school days, a golden boy, she’d seen pictures. Franny rolled across the stubble of wheat and kissed Magdalena without knowing she would on her open mouth.

  “You poor, poor boy,” said Magdalena.

  “Franny,” Franny said, and her throat burned.

  She was Mort Clark speaking to her mother. She was a girl in a field in autumn. She said, “Nothing ever happened to me. Nothing ever will.”

  FRANNY HAD BEEN her mother’s name. There were Blixruds all through that dry country.

  Hoka hey was a greet
ing.

  Wasichu was a name for the buffalo when buffalo were everywhere and next a Sioux name for the white man when like water he came and came.

  It went wheat and wheat and canola now, advancing on the backbone of the Rockies. To the east: the white bluffs where Crazy Horse lay. Their mothers lay beyond that, in the burying ground above the river, with their heads to the rising sun.

  The mothers tapped at their daughters’ windows still. Have you written to your brothers? they wanted to know.

  Blanched the beans? Don’t forget. Mulch the rose.

  The cold, after all, was coming. The girls ought to shove bales of straw against the skirts of their houses now, before the wind grew teeth, before the snow blew. Already the trees were picked clean. The scrub had turned the russet of potatoes.

  THEIR FATHERS HAD taken to calling them Mother; they had taken to their chairs. They slept sitting, holding their heads in their hands. The skin of their hands was dappled, lovely as the bark of the sycamore, as a field of wheat in sun the wind moves the clouds out over.

  The swans, too, were moving; the geese were going, gone. The girls lay in the dark beneath them. They pulled their shirts off.

  “I dreamed,” Maggie said, “of an ocean, and the whales rose up from below me and rolled me across their backs.”

  Their mothers lived still. Which is to say: the girls felt them drawing near. Their mothers stood in the fields and watched them.

  Live, little chicken, they said, live.

  Their mothers sang in the lee of the shelterbelt in the wind that bristled through the caragana.

  Skippy the giant, they reminded, keep away from him. I saw him steal a dollar from his mother once. He crushed a hummingbird, remember, in his hands.

  Their fathers slept with their heads in their hands. They wintered over. They had wintered over since earliest green, through tilling and planting and harvest. They slept in their chairs with their boots on. By God, they would die with their boots on, as their people had before them. Their people had come to this country in wagons, dragging a rope to keep to a straight path across the unbroken plain. Hearty stock, pioneers, blood in every step they were taking.