I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

  When I go to the barn, I hopscotch not to step in the shoes he used to wear that serve to mark the path now between the house and the barn. She is sleeping in the barn with the horses, he thinks.

  He will catch her there one day soon.

  ONE DAY A stack of letters tied with a string will arrive for me from you. It will be a day like the movies. Let it please come soon.

  SHE WROTE: IS it true where you are that water appears and you walk and it goes away? I would like to see that.

  I would like to see a place where no roads go and wind takes your footprints away. The hills move in the wind. They are nothing but sand. Nothing holds them. I would like to see what grows there. I would like to see what lives.

  I see no one but the animals and Poppy, and Poppy’s shirts and shoes, and Poppy’s trail he has worn going barefoot to milk the cow in the barn. His feet are cracked and bleeding. I rub salve on them that is for the horses’ hooves but they are foul to smell or look at.

  Poppy could walk on coals, he thinks.

  My feet are too awful soft, he thinks. He says, The river of fire on the great divide—how will I ever cross it?

  “I will have to cross it with you,” he says. “I will carry you on my head.”

  He crosses to the barn and comes back with a dribble of milk in his bucket and his feet are red and raw.

  “Don’t they hurt you?” I ask him.

  He can’t feel them. He only feels that the dog lies on them, he says, so he says, “Bring me this, bring me that.”

  But, Brother, I am sorry to tell you. That dog is dead going on a year now and buried behind the barn.

  Poppy’s shoes disappear in the snow every night. He shakes out the snow in the morning and sets them back on the path for Mother. He says Mother has her nose to go by, too, by the bloody seep his feet leave fresh in the sun in the fresh fall between the house and the barn.

  He hears her singing in the barn, he says. But when he comes near, she is quiet.

  He says, “When I was a boy we went quiet to the pond in our socks so the frogs wouldn’t quit. But they quit,” he says, “they always.”

  YOU OUGHT TO quit, too, and come home, Brother. You are hiding in your shiny shoes, Poppy says. He says you should never have gone.

  He says, “Widow, we say, and widower. But what is the name for the mother of the boy who gets himself killed in a war? What is the name for the father?”

  God willing, you will come back home. You will ride in your hat with the high-shine bill with the pissy old men from the rest of the wars, and the widows will throw you roses, and you will think always: Thank me.

  I would thank you always, Brother. I would thank you to come straight home.

  WE HEAR THAT Earl is dead and Dr. Gene’s boy and Looks At The Stars from the rez. Carol Ann came home from the corner store, who can neither speak nor hear. She sits in a big chair shaking.

  Maggie’s brother is killed; we have heard it. I am here and cannot go to her, but I know the word has come. She wears her hair over her face now. Her poppy makes her go to school.

  She still walks by our house and waves, Brother, on her way to school. She left a cricket for me from under her bed and a note that said your Suzie. Your Suzie is going with an eastern boy, so I pushed tacks into the doll of her and buried her in the barn.

  This is the news I know of, Brother. Poppy says you can’t hide from it all.

  You can run, he says, but it always.

  Poppy says you put a noose around Mother’s neck and ran away off to the war.

  POPPY POUNDS AGAINST the windows. He shakes his fists at the trees. He is like something in a cage with the door standing wide with the cold and the snow streaming in.

  Send word.

  She wrote: I would like to see sun so hot and soft it looks to melt out of the sky. Camels, I would like to see, with rubies hanging down from their halters. The camels kneel in the sand. The sky is burning. The sand is the color of my skin that you sent, so hot you cannot walk across it.

  POPPY SITS ON my feet in the night, Brother. He is small but I cannot get him off me.

  He hums a song our mother sang to us when I was asleep or pretended to be and she carried me over the field.

  By God, he says, I got you.

  He touches the iron to my heel. I cannot get him off me.

  I try to slap at him. Poppy smells of the barn. I scratch at him. It is like scratching at a fence post, Brother.

  But for the dog that lies on our poppy’s feet, he cannot feel a damn thing, he said so, from the brisket down.

  SHE WROTE: I would like to see Mother at my age sitting in a tree with Mort Clark with her bare legs hanging down. They let their legs swing. It is summer. He has painted her toenails red. The river is slow and milky and the branch our mother sits on makes a shadow across the water. The shadow grows long and longer until it darkens the other side.

  SHE WROTE: I made my way out to Maggie’s.

  The sky looked like snow but it never did snow so easy you saw my tracks going out and coming back again. We went to the bluffs where we found the cloth, remember, that Crazy Horse once wore? We were keeping the cloth in a time capsule with the things that Maggie’s brother sent and the things you sent to us, too. We mixed the dust of the plains and the desert. We laid a coin someone left for Looking Glass in the heel of that little girl’s shoe. We had a jewel each from each of our mothers. A button we had not sewn on. We had the hooked toe of the badger you shot and forgot to take to keep you and bring you safe back home.

  Maggie said, “Remember we scratched our brothers’ names in the window glass with diamond rings our mothers wore? We should not have done that. We should have buried their diamonds with them. We should have worn our brothers’ clothes every day and kept a black rock in our pockets and a scrap of our brothers’ hair. We sailed a feather down from the rooftop—we should not have done that. We should not have touched the hotrod our brothers set out in. And not the toothbrush. Nor the tin of snuff. Nor the gloves our brothers left in the jockey box, worn through from stacking hay. Our brothers left money in the ashtray we spent. We should have spent it on them. We spent it on ourselves.”

  Maggie lay down in the snow. She made me cover her over with it. I packed snow against her face how she said to until nothing showed or moved. Still she breathed and her breath, the heat of it, melted a place in the snow. And the snow came to ice that held the shape of her face and, when Maggie stood up, it was there. Her face was pressed into the snow. The ice held it.

  And I thought of us, Brother, on the lake that day when we lay on the ice with Mother. The ice made a sound—like a bear, Mother said, like a rocket, busting in from far away.

  We had our faces up. My braid stuck to the ice. We wore mittens. It began to snow while we lay there and we thought of the goose we saw stuck to the ice and the time the car quit in the snowstorm on the highway near to Bismarck and by morning time was buried and we didn’t know was it night or day.

  We lay there. You are happy, it is said, when you are freezing, and begin in the end to cross over.

  The snow twisted down onto our faces, onto our coats and legs. If the ice broke, I thought, or we stuck there, only Poppy would be left to grieve. The snow came down all around us, around you and me and Mother, and we saw in the ice when we stood to leave the darker shapes in the white of the snow that showed us where we lay.

  SHE WROTE: RED Cloud gave up the land, it is said, when the white man found gold in the hills. You couldn’t fight them. There were just too many of them, come flooding across the land.

  So it is that Crazy Horse went quiet. He brooded, walking alone for days. You could walk back-to-back across the buffalo still; the great herds darkened the plains. I would like to have seen that.

  Before the sheep came, and the cow, I would like, before the plow that broke the plains. Looks At The Stars. Sitting Bull. Earl. The grizzlies way out on the prairie. Neither wheat nor wagon nor wire,
I would like. Before Wounded Knee and Bearcoat Miles, before the Crarys and Dahls and Otters. Before the little men from China came to lay the track over the plains, I would like. And the pioneers came. And the prospectors. And the gentlemen from St. Louis, it is said, who shot the great herds by the thousands from the windows of the passing train. For fun, they shot them.

  But, Brother? Remember we had our lassoes, Brother, to lasso the passing train?

  We wore clothes from flaps of leather, and we slept in the bluffs in burlap sacks with feathers in our hair. We smeared our faces red. You were Heavy Runner and, some days, the Great Goose of Doom. We raided our fields for horses. We lassoed Mother, and got her up on the yellow mare, and carried her away.

  CRAZY HORSE FOUGHT and was captured, it is said. It is said that when the soldiers killed him, his people carried him off to hide.

  His blood runs in the fish and the antelope, Brother, in the marsh hawk that dips its head as it flies. In the swallows lifting up without number, it runs, in the east in the brightening sky.

  I am a fool, Poppy says, to believe any of this. There is no telling where Crazy Horse lies.

  Poppy calls me a fool to write to you and to think you will find your way home. They have already killed you, Brother. This is what Poppy says. Poppy says they will send you back to us and we will have to burn or bury you with your head to the rising sun.

  The ground will have thawed to dig then, Brother. I will help our poppy with you. Poppy says I have to. You can run, he says, but it always. They will send what they can find.

  BLUE ANGELS

  Footage of the macerated body. The airplane crash of decades ago still live on the findable screen. So we find it. Play it again and again. A fuselage in flames. Then the loss of control, the tilt of the wing, the pilot turning earthward. Hoping to bury the nose behind the grandstand. No. Umbrellas for the sun. Glass blown to dust. Bodies torn rags across the sagebrush. Blue angels, faultless in the unblemished sky. Great wide American open.

  SINEW

  The boy makes a shield for himself and paints his face black and makes arrows with the pointed rocks he finds and secures to the good straight sticks he finds with fake sinew his mother brings him from the craft shop. He cuts his father’s suede coat into a loincloth and goes out across the shortgrass prairie. August. The boy white-blond, blonder even than the grasses, his bottom so pale it is luminous, the alabaster haunch of the gods. Does he suspect his mother watches from the window, that the pronghorn sees him coming, that the badger regards him from his den? What can he say, what does he know, of the savage history he enacts, the ancient, exultant longing?

  HOME IMPROVEMENT

  Here it comes. Slow ascent of her father on a ladder she has been told to steady. Girl of twelve. Time to whiten the siding. He had a bucket and a sponge, a yellow glove, his elbow spotty from bleach. Bleach fell against her face, the ladder blackened her hands. Her father grew short, shorter, one of the tricks of perspective. One leg was shorter than the other: no trick to that. Gimpy. And now the ladder, grooved and silver, comes swinging away from the house. Her name in his mouth. Forgive me.

  LUCKIES LIKE US

  On the ninth day, the mother put on her scrubs—not the clothes from home the father had laundered for her but the uniform of her doctordom, the getup of a savior in starched and leafy green. He brought her the soft, loose clothes of the daily, clean, in a shopping bag she never looked in. She scarcely looked at him: she was a doctor, he saw she was occupied, she would look at him when she wanted. Speak to him, he knew, when she wanted. He was to stand until then at the foot of the bed with his hands folded over his zipper.

  The skin had yellowed where the skull had broken and anywhere a tube, his daughter called them straws, anywhere a straw slipped in. He tapped the boy’s foot, which was cold. He took the liberty of drawing the sheet across it, drew the sheet to the boy’s blunt chin. The IV was backing and filling with blood and the boy had blood in his ears, did she know? Had anybody noticed that?

  He turned away from her when he asked it, as though to check something beeping, a blip on the screen—he was grinning, a stupid hopeless grin, he knew, at how ugly she was when she bristled, the little doctor, the tendons flinching above the collar of her scrubs. Her face looked chapped and patchy. The vein that marked the middle of her forehead flared, dependably: she had heard him. He could read in her face what she thought of him. A man, just, a father. A donkey with a hammer and saw.

  She went about her work pushing buttons, fussing with valves she rolled open and shut, nurse’s work, filling in. He backed away from the boy to give her room to move and she moved between him and the bed. Her scrubs made the breezy important sound of somebody in a hurry. The boy whimpered. She let something of a mimicking whimper out, a mother sound he had heard her make in all the days before.

  The news was worse on the ninth day. On the seventh, they unwound and patched the boy’s bowels and stuffed them back in again. On the ninth, his brain was bleeding.

  The mother pulled the sheet to his chin again.

  In a moment she would turn, ask the question. This was not the father’s domain but he could read it: the etiquette of the bedside, the arithmetic of delay. Let him wait. Let the loved one prepare to be grateful.

  He didn’t wait well. He lived by motion—plank and nail, joints cleanly held—rough work, not finish, a wall going up, work you could see you had done.

  She was right: he did not even know the right questions. The building made him weary and sick to be in, the abandoned wings, the weird quiet. The smug, clubby ways of doctors made him sick, and how she tipped her head like a bird. (Now she would ask it.) “What was your—?” (He would slug her if she asked it.) “What was your question again?”

  “I said—” and he asked her again. He saw her start up the little assessment that would tell her what to do, whether to answer or not, check the boy’s ears or not, and he counted time on his fingers. It was a doctor’s assessment, and a wife’s, a guess, and he knew it was half-concluded. It was swift.

  He went through the questions: Had he been—in the past—grateful?

  Was he ready to be grateful again?

  THE FATHER KEPT away when she put on her scrubs—for days at a time, in the house he had built. He kept away with their daughter, playing checkers, eating cheese, sliding on the lids of dog food cans down the hillside in their helmets. He dressed his daughter in flowers and plaids, in dots and the splotched animal pants in vogue with the young that season. She wore cheetah pants in purple, a cheetah hat and mittens, her hat pulled down over her eyes.

  They stayed up late eating popcorn and they slept in their clothes in the mother’s bed where the girl had been, far from the hospital, almost suddenly born. She asked her father to tell her the story.

  “One thing. Tell about your sock I wore for a hat when that stuff was all over, right, that waxy stuff that was bloody was smeared all over my head? And, Papa, you drove,” she said, “and Mama was just quiet. And Henry wasn’t there, right? Henry wasn’t born.”

  She stuffed her mouth with popcorn. She said, “I was in the accident, too, you know.”

  Popcorn shot out of her mouth as she talked. The father held up his hands in front of his face as though to shield it.

  “Don’t,” said the daughter, and hit him, and she hit him again and again.

  THE DAUGHTER SAID, “One thing.”

  She said, “Let’s never go back to that hospital where they use all those whistly carts and stuff and Mama is just sort of wah dee ga and she just never listens? Remember she forgets? Remember that time she said that to me? She said she would fix my hair.”

  She said, “I want to stay home with my pictures.”

  The girl was cutting pictures of flowers out and of women in bikinis from catalogs. She couldn’t wear any bikinis. That was not nice for girls. She pasted the pictures on a page together and X’d out all the girls.

  Her mother hadn’t picked h
er. That was what the daughter told her dolls. Her mother had longer to love her. She had been alive a longer time than Henry and also she was a girl. She was a little mother.

  The daughter had a cut lip that was healing and both of her knees were not bony or loose the way they had used to be. They were puffy and hurt if she walked much but that was not going to make her—they weren’t dashing her down to that hospital to fix her up again.

  She carried her dolls in her underpants—two dolls tucked in at a time in turn so they would not be lonesome and they were all girls. If her babies were ready to plop out, then she would go to the hospital, but they were in her growing still and they were all girls. All God’s little children.

  She said, “Maybe you will die. Maybe God will want you.”

  She could not help it. All God’s little children. She would say so long, good-bye.

  THE DAUGHTER TOLD her teacher, “Henry’s on vacation.”

  It was what she had said of her father, too: “He is taking a vacation from living with us still.”

  Still they had their days together—the ninth, the tenth, a few of the days that came after. The father closed up his house on the windswept farm on the curve of the road his children passed with their mother on the way from school.

  It came again to be the father’s job to ferry his daughter to school. He watched his daughter’s face in the mirror as he drove. She looked sleepy, and puddled in the seat, blinking.

  She said, “You should watch the road.”

  She brought her dolls with her in a clump by the hair, lassoed at the waist with a bolo tie.

  “There you go,” she said, and buckled them in.

  And: “Amn’t I a so good mother to you? I am buckling you right right in.”

  HE TOOK HIS daughter to school and back again and drank in the sun in the afternoon in the house he had been let to live in with them. He sat in the window with the sun on his face and listened for the coughing and spitting of the spigot that would mean the pipes had thawed.