I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

  They made good, proved up. Came to this.

  To this!

  THE GIRLS DRIBBLED dirt on each other’s faces, dirt on each other’s necks. A marsh hawk glided above them, drawn to the flapping of a sleeve. The wind lifted their hair and dropped it. The hawk swooped, seized something small, a vole, a shrew, carried it off in its talons. It was a sign, but the girls did not know of what.

  They knew snow would shore up in the shelterbelt, in the caragana and the olive trees, the whistling Lombardi poplar. Shut-away days; a gnawing wind.

  A day would come the wind would quit and cold would make jewels of the snow. That would be the day, come around again, that Franny’s mother had walked to the river, climbed the wide dappled sycamore tree, and on the rope her boy had swung from, summers when the water was warm, let herself down to die.

  Let me die, she prayed, before him.

  THE GIRLS PULLED apart their old Barbies, and hung their heads in the trees.

  They painted each other’s toenails. They took turns with each other’s hair.

  “Do you want to look like you, or me?” they asked.

  They looked like sisters. They could look, with effort, like twins, as their mothers had before them. They could dream the same dream, they swore it.

  They turned cartwheels. They walked on their hands under-water, months when the water was warm.

  They knew birdsongs: chickadee dee dee. Who cooks, who cooks, who cooks for you? They knew one hawk from another, and how a marsh hawk’s head, in flight, tips down.

  They knew Sitting Bull was murdered. Crazy Horse was murdered. He was Curly, the years he was young.

  Would that they had lived when Crazy Horse lived! They would have been a sweetness to him, little fierce Ogallala wives.

  DARK SETTLED ON the plain and, with it, the nightly thimble of dew. Franny’s goat appeared—she was a milk goat—she had been her brother’s goat—her teats were leaking. Her brother used to lie down under the goat and squirt milk onto his tongue.

  Now the goat went where Franny went, as with the little lamb of the song. It stood above the girls in the wheat field.

  “She needs milking.”

  “I’d say.”

  “Poppy’s hungry,” Franny said, “he must be. What if he’s bumping around in the barn?”

  “He’ll dream that horsey dream again. And then he’ll thrash you.”

  So they stayed. Or: and yet they stayed.

  They dribbled dirt on each other’s bellies, spelling out the names they were given. They spelled out the names of the animals they had lost since their brothers went to war—Bonky and Marmalade, the old tom Hopsalot.

  The mother cat, they lost to the weasel—easy pickings. The weasel was fearless, the girls knew, a great hunter, a great mouser. It killed for fun.

  Their brothers killed because they had to—like their fathers and the fathers before them. Except they liked it. The girls could swear their brothers liked it—the hat, at least, and buttons, the snappy, glistening shoes. They couldn’t stop swiping dust from their shoes.

  Never mind that the town nearly shut down to watch them rocket off in the hotrod. Forget the women, their swallowed pitiful tremolo; forget the goofy bump of a hug their poppies tried to give them, to see them off, g’luck, son: the boys were swiping at their goddamn shoes.

  Shoes in a shine you saw yourself in.

  When you were a little boy, their mothers kept saying, until something in the saying snagged them, sent them off into the barn among the horses to sob until another mother brought them back.

  It’s hard, honey. But you’ve got to.

  And the kids, the littler ones, whipped each other with Twizzlers; and the men drank Pabst from sweating cans; and the goat stood up on the table and drank from the good glass punch bowl.

  The day lasted—hot and blue. The horses whinnied in the barn. A mother set out a sprinkler the littler kids bumbled through. August, and the hoppers had come, and the wheat was ripe in the fields.

  At last the boys set out. Saying, Love you, Mother. Quit now. Mother, mind the goddamn shoes.

  YOU COULDN’T PREDICT it: the weasel would kill every chicken in the chicken coop. Partridge, it killed, once a coyote. It killed the mother cat and left the kittens alive for the girls to save and mother.

  The kittens were toothless still and tiny; weepy-eyed; their ribs showed. The girls fed them out of an eyedropper—milk warm from the goat, from the cow.

  Maggie rolled onto a kitten and crushed it where it had crept into her bed. The hens blinded another. Franny carried the rest in the sling of her shirt until the close of school.

  The girls walked home together, bumping hips, the kittens mewling. “Show you something,” Franny said.

  They stood in Franny’s kitchen. Franny dipped her fingers in a pitcher of milk and bunched Maggie’s shirt beneath her chin. Franny’s head swam. Her mouth went dry.

  She went by feel, not watching, and dabbed the milk at Maggie’s breast. She held a kitten to her, let it root and mew. Their breasts had puffed up—just enough, and the buds were like satin, and the kittens latched softly on.

  THEIR MOTHERS HAD been girls together; the girls were little mothers together. Their clothes smelled of the barn, of the animals fed, of the milk goat freshly feasted on whatever trash it could find. The goat followed the girls to school one day and stood in the playground bleating.

  Hicks, they were called, and lesbo cows. You stink of cow. Bet she stuck her arm in a cow before school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other lesbo licked it.

  The girls kept to themselves at school.

  They kept a box of crickets in their lockers at school to remind them of the time that would have to pass before they would meet again. They dropped a cricket in a shoe or a pocket, to sing the little song it harbored—the weakening hurry hurry it sang, slow in the cold, in the sinking grass, sounding the song of its kin.

  “How long is the life of a cricket?” they asked.

  “Not very, not very, not very.”

  THE MARSH HAWK came back.

  A star burned out.

  Maggie heard it, the star hissed as it fell; it whimpered. No: “That’s the goat, silly—” Franny’s milk goat was squatting in the dirt to pee.

  The goat had lived twice as long as it should have, eating snuff and the hoppers of August.

  The goat stamped its feet. It wheezed at the girls.

  “We should go.”

  “I should write to Billy.”

  “The chickens need fed.”

  Still they lay there. “Go away, go away.”

  “Go to Bismarck?”

  “Go home.”

  “He’ll thrash me with that stupid rodeo belt he won when he was a boy,” Franny said.

  “Your poppy was never a boy,” Maggie said.

  “Boys,” Franny said. “Good God.”

  THE GOAT FOLLOWED them, butting them, home.

  It was the tinging of the bell around the neck of the goat that waked Franny’s father from his dream. He was dreaming his dream of horses, the one from when he was a boy. Except now the dream happens in a corn palace; now when the horse comes at him, he has a whole corn room to move.

  Except he can’t: his boots are filled with quarters.

  He was a boy on a dare, a greenhorn creeping into a stall. An only boy, a mother’s prize—a boy whose claim to courage was the mangling, once, of frogs. He was terrified of horses. He was terrified of frogs.

  He crept in from the sun and the stall was dark. The other boy, a neighbor boy, slid the lock to and watched him over the wooden door.

  The horse came at him. It wheeled, reared, struck him. It had a blaze of white that veered wildly over its whitened eye.

  This, some half a dozen decades ago.

  Still, night upon night he waked shouting, not knowing where he was. He was alone, he remembered, crippled up, an old man dropped into sleep in his boots in a dead dry cou
ntry.

  He rose, shuffled into the kitchen. It was night yet, he saw, for the stars were out, the moon was smoothly passing.

  He called out, “Franny.”

  He was a boy, else a dog, or a man, newly loved. He was not himself, waked from a dream, seeing his daughter in the lemony kitchen. He saw instead his wife—a girl. Franny, Franny. There she was.

  She was turned from him, her rope of hair. She smelled of the dirt of the fields, the shit of cattle and horses.

  She would wait for him. She would come to be his wife. After the war, years ago, she would come to be his wife. She would wait for the war to be over, as she had, as she would, then as now.

  She was turned from him, at her chores.

  “Whosoever shall,” he mumbled, “whosoever shall—” but he had lost the words that follow.

  He stood behind her with his hands on her belly. Franny’s father had the hands of a milker. His fingers curled, he couldn’t straighten them.

  He bunched her shirt up, lay his mouth against her neck. Franny twisted away and he followed her as a dog would, or a goat. When she stopped—to dry the dishes, to stir the soup—he came behind her, shuffling in his split-apart boots, and leaned against her back.

  A good girl, strong—she would look after him.

  “Go rest, Poppy. Lie down.”

  He never lay down, night or day anymore. He slept where he could see, should he sleep, holding his head in his hands. He saw the yard, the barn, the path his daughter walked to school. He saw the girls bump at the hip when they walked, as their mothers had before them. They sang in the dark of the haymow, where the light pressed, in bolts of gold, between the boards of the barn.

  They made a joyful noise—singing songs their mothers had sung, in their mothers’ plain, thin voices.

  It was a trick: you couldn’t tell between them. They were elated; they might be grieving. They might be one voice, or four.

  His head was roaring; he couldn’t hear her now. He couldn’t see into the barn.

  If only she would let him see her!

  One last time, he thought. His wife was singing. He would go to her. He tried to stand up. The dog was lying on his feet.

  What was the matter with him? Hadn’t he seen her, a day the sun burned on the snow, lowered into the grave?

  Yet he lived. This was his house yet, his chair. His yet: the sun in the trees, the sinking grass. He had wintered over. He was dying, this much was clear. Yet he lived—an old man in a dead dry country. Widow man, cripple.

  He pressed the great slabs of his hands hard against his ears, not to hear her.

  He stood in the doorway, so to hear her.

  His wife was singing him over to her, hesitating on the great divide.

  FRANNY’S BROTHER FROM the war sent her a shoe worn by a child he had shot (a mistake) a seepage of dust from the desert. Into the toe of the shoe, he had folded this note: Dear little sister lollipop, you will not see me alive again.

  Franny wrote: Poppy sleeps with his boots on. He does not want to die in his socks.

  He doesn’t talk much, but he remembers to go out and milk the cow eleven times a day. He thinks I am Mother or, some days, a girl he has never seen.

  How old was the girl you sent the shoe of to me? What color was her hair?

  I put the shoe in a time capsule.

  The dogs are fine. The kittens’ eyes are open. I learned a new card trick to show you.

  Remember the time in the schoolyard when Mother ran with you with your kite you made on a day of no wind until night fell? I found the kite in Poppy’s closet behind his high-shine shoes. He wears the same boots every day. The soles have come free and they flap when he walks. His sleeves are too long. He is shrinking. Holes are burned through his shirts from smoking.

  He will flame up soon, he says so, and blow the hell away.

  SHE WROTE: I found him lying in the kitchen with a bread sack stuffed up against his face. He had the gas line unhooked that goes to the stove and he had poked the end into the bread sack. It was a colored sack, for Rainbow bread. Sun came yellow through the frost on the window. It was pretty. It was a good day to die, I was thinking. I shouted for him to move. His shirt was off.

  I am sorry to tell you this, Brother. I was only just home from school. Our poppy was lying on the floor in the kitchen. I shouted at him. If I touched him, he would sit up and bite me. It wasn’t so but I thought so.

  I couldn’t touch him but then I did. I thought how I carried the dog that died and the stillborn calf and the foal. I thought of the Sioux at Wounded Knee carrying off their dead, and of the baby Black Elk tells us was nursing from its dead mother. I thought of Mother in her tree we swung from.

  You have got to please come home.

  I pulled the sack off. His skin was warm from the sun. I carried him out to his chair. I could carry him! Poppy is tiny.

  I went, pops poppy lollipop, little sister lollipop, talking to myself.

  His skin is spattered with scars from the embers that fall and burn through his shirts when he smokes. He snatches at the air when he sleeps.

  Maggie and I like to watch him sleep. He looks like a boy catching fireflies like in August when you were here.

  Oh, but, Brother, I need to tell you. They got him rushed down in the ambulance, Brother, and Dr. Gene brought him back. So he is back now. They brought him back without his boots on, which I tore up the house to look for. He goes barefoot like an Indian now. His toenails are curved and yellow and the shit from when he milks the cow is stuffed in underneath them. Bring me this, he says, bring me that, I can’t move for the dog lying on me.

  But he can still milk the cow, I told you, elevendy-leven times a day.

  PLEASE YOU SHOULD write to me, Brother, and let me know that you are fine. It is a long time now since word came. The leaves are all down and the snow blows in. The wind gnaws at the house, you remember.

  She wrote: Maggie hardly comes to the house any more. She is too afraid of Poppy.

  I have started skipping school. Poppy wants me here every day now to iron his good shirts. He wants to look nice for the street dance that comes before the rodeo you remember on the Fourth of July.

  Remember the once that bull rider got flipped over the fence into Mother? Poppy remembers. He remembers the float like a pirate ship and the veterans in a cage of barbed wire with their banner that says Thank me. It has been the Fourth of July for a month now.

  Even so, even with me home ironing, Poppy wants to iron, too. Today he left the iron flat on his shirt until it was black and smoking. He irons Mother’s clothes I never moved from their place. He holds the iron to the bottoms of her shoes. This will keep her, he says, from walking.

  He says he will do it to me, too. You better quit, he says.

  I need you, he says. Don’t you ever go away.

  STILL I GO at least to Maggie’s, when the snow is soft to be quiet. It has snowed every night for a week now so in the morning my tracks are gone. I go to Maggie’s and we listen to music very low and she lets me brush her hair. She gives me all the peanuts from her Cracker Jacks.

  We ride out in the hotrod with the lights shut off to the bluffs where the tepee rings are. The rings are gone underneath the snow but we know if we are standing in them. We spin until we fall down and the stars smear wild and blue. The crows are black on the snow. The town sleeps at our feet. I pretend that I am Crazy Horse and Maggie is my pretty, young squaw.

  REMEMBER WE WENT to the Bearpaw that time and all the little trails the Indians made to where Looking Glass fell and the women in the swale dug themselves in with their hands? It was hot and Mother made us walk. The wind came up, it was a hot wind, and we didn’t want to walk. And we saw a deer in the rushes.

  We knew the speech Chief Joseph spoke when they had come so near to the Medicine Line after months of flight and fighting and no help came down from Sitting Bull because the messengers were killed. Mother knew the speech, too
, and we said it: Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad.

  Remember? Looking Glass is dead. Too-Hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. Hear me, my chiefs.

  I cannot remember all of it. It is cold and we have no blankets.

  We stood at the stone with our hands high and the sun burned down on our faces. I felt the wind lift my hair; it was a hot wind. It moved your shirttails. You stood between us.

  And we said, It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find.

  You were between us. We turned away from the sun. And you said, “Yeah, but I’m still going.”

  We watched that dirty poodle, remember, squeeze out a stool at the foot of the stones that stood in the sun where Chief Joseph stood?

  Mother kicked at the poodle. And you said, “Yeah, but I’m still going.”

  And that night all night in Minot, Mother sat in the tub in the hotel and we listened to her cry and cry.

  AND NOW YOU are gone and no word comes and Mother hanged herself in the tree. And now I cannot go to Maggie’s.

  Poppy is like a dog. The snow came on to hide my tracks and I went in the night and quiet and it was quiet yet when I came home and Poppy was in his chair. I slept, and when I waked, the sun was up and he was standing over me. He had the iron in his hands.

  How he knew is we never have Cracker Jacks and he could smell them on my hands, he said, and he said my breath stank of them.

  Poppy sat on my feet and the iron was hot and he touched it to my heel. He touched first the one next the other.

  Now he won’t let me go to school. We are here in this house just the two of us and the snow has come and come. Still he thinks there will be the street dance. He will go there and dance with Mother.

  He has hung a good snap shirt with a bolo tie on every chair in the house now. His high-shine shoes—every one of them is out there in the snow.