Storm Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  Often I’ve imagined him sitting, alone, on some iron balcony, large and covered in black, almost blending with the night, except for the white of his face, his hands. On his lap he holds a mirror where he can see the stars—my bloodstream—in the sky. The image is framed in glass. Trapped, touchable. The buzz that fills his mind comes from my brain.

  I did not know the language well enough to ask about him. The villagers seem to accept him as part of the fabric of the town. They even nod and say Bonjour, monsieur to his downcast face. He shuffles on, perhaps not hearing, perhaps not caring. Dogs, however, are disturbed by his presence. They cannot accept this irregularity, this deviation. Each day their furious barking announces his arrival in the streets. He uses his stick in a vain attempt to disperse them. They travel around him in circles, barking and snapping. The mothers among them are particularly avid. Their teats swing as a result of excessive activity.

  And he goes by, surrounded by this crazy chorus and the soft angry drone of his own voice, which I know is cursing both the dogs at his trousers and the street that moves like a slow conveyor belt under his feet. I swear his brain cracks like a whip over his body, just to move it one more inch. And I sit here, behind window glass, my brain sniffing around his ankles.

  By the time I’d been here three months I knew something of his routine. He passed my windows every afternoon at two, returned at three. He was making his way to the monastery at the end of the street for afternoon mass. I moved my chair and desk closer to the window in order to be able to observe him. Now I can sense his arrival without dogs, without bells or wristwatches. His approach and his withdrawal have become more predictable than the daily performance of the sun. I know them as I know my own pulse.

  I remember the first time that I saw him. A large dark cloud had broken at my arrival in this village, my first glimpse of this house. I was leaning from a window in the rain, opening the shutters, when he interrupted my view of the neighbour’s door-yard dahlias. He was a huge, moveable monument aching under an umbrella, a solid block of fear inching down the street. I saw him as an omen—the first view from my windows a large hunchback struggling past old stones, dogs snapping at his heels, his pulpy, white hands clenched. He was entirely absorbed by his journey over paving stones. From where I stood I could have touched him. But I knew he didn’t notice me at all.

  Immediately, I tried to make use of him as a metaphor, to create verses with crippled themes. I could only swallow him, at that point whole, make him part of my own experience. As if he had no other function than to serve as a convenient image flung arbitrarily down on my doorstep. I could neither describe nor determine the extent of his own difficulty, wrote self-conscious lines;

  like a large hunchback

  I carry my pain without grace

  until I knew I had no pain and began, in my own way, to create some.

  As the days grew shorter I began to search my skin for imperfections, focusing for hours at a time on scars and blemishes. When these no longer pleased me I rubbed dirt into the pores on my face and cultivated the black hair under my arms and on my legs. Finding shears housed in the courtyard potting shed I cropped the long hair on my head as close to the scalp as possible. I fasted much, slept little. Dark circles grew under my eyes, lines adorned my cheeks and forehead. Burdened by desire, fatigue, and hunger my body developed a slight stoop. And, at last, to my great satisfaction, I began to limp.

  By the time the village had pulled itself inward for the winter he had become a fact to me: cumbersome, slow-moving, ever present in my thoughts. I whispered the French name “Bossu” in all of our imaginary conversations. Now I spent my days beside the window (his window), even ate my frugal meals there, hoping to perceive a break in the rhythm of his day, an advance at other than the usual time. I was waiting for a meteor; the star that would escape beyond the edge of his mirror, forcing him to turn his head to follow it. Forcing him to turn his face to me.

  One morning I left the comfort of the fire to walk his route around the town, to see the world as he might. Like a child looking for coins another might have lost I kept my eyes down. The curve of each street became the curve of the earth where rivers rushed through gutters towards some magic destination. Brown leaves scraped over cobblestones. Puddles reflected broken pieces of the sky; the clouds, the blue, he’d never actually seen. Eventually I found his voice in the tactile surface of the ground.

  That’s when I began to prepare for him; subtly at first, but later with more determination. Dressed in the stone colours, the earth colours of the street, my clothes oily and spotted and much too large for me, I approach the window daily. Sometimes I pin thorns and twigs and burrs in my sparse hair. Sometimes I paste muddy leaves to my clothes and stomach. I stand in the light that penetrates the glass, ready for his glance. He doesn’t notice me at all.

  Despite this, I live a waking dream of him. His name, “Bossu,” sticks in my throat, its taste on my tongue long into the night. It is the transparent burn left by starbathing on the skin, that black curve of sky, the need for suffocating dark. I want to be the comet that bursts across his brain; the recognition and the fear of his own history.

  The shame of it. Standing here by the window dressed for love, my nails against the glass. And he won’t notice me at all. He is so involved in the terrible suffering of just getting there, his survival ignores my silent call. He simply cannot stop to answer it. No gesture, no transformation can disturb the burden of his flesh as he moves beneath it. Passing me by.

  But later tonight, when I leave the house to move out to the stars, the dogs will be waiting in the darkness, just beyond my doorway.

  Her Golden Curls

  ENVY

  Amy Jefferson had seven different dresses, all with puffed sleeves, each a different pastel shade. She had a dog called Rags who was smaller than most farm dogs and who was allowed to sleep, like a soft round pillow, on the parlour furniture. She had boots made of Spanish leather and four china dolls. When she described her room to me I associated it with birthday cake. There were, she said, pink quilts, satin pillows, muslin curtains and a dressing table trimmed with eyelet lace. And it was her room. She had no brothers or sisters with whom she might have had to share.

  We were both eight years old. The road from her farm to ours was fourteen miles long. A great distance. But not for Amy Jefferson who arrived in her father’s motor car, her lovely dress covered with a fine powder of dust from the road. My mother would run to get the clothes brush for Amy and my sisters would run to the drive to get a better look at the motor car. My father, prouder, would attempt to discuss crops with Amy’s father while he secretly eyed the wealthier man’s glorious machine.

  Amy and I were to play, but it seemed that we never did much of that. Sometimes we fooled around with an incomplete deck of cards that were kept in the kitchen drawer. Occasionally we threw a ball back and forth in the yard. But mostly those afternoons were spent as a kind of inquisition on my part and a kind of confession on hers. I barely gave her time to answer one question before I moved on to the next. Please tell me again about the big doll, the one from France, or Does your bed really have a mauve satin comforter as well as a pink spread? Have you really been to the National Exhibition and did you go there in the motor car? Do you have books with coloured pictures? How many toys do you have that move by themselves? I don’t know whether I loved her or hated her, whether I was pleased or enraged by her answers. I only know that Amy Jefferson and her possessions became a kind of addiction for me. And even though I was angered by my sisters’ accusations (Trevor has a girlfriend), I simply couldn’t get enough.

  It was as though that summer had become Amy Jefferson. When she was not there, the details that made up the fabric of experience seemed to be missing as well. I would pass the days between her visits lying on the grass watching cumulus clouds move across the sky. Even they were connected to Amy Jefferson, assuming the shapes of her worldly goods; satin bows and puffed sleeves, beautiful, unobtai
nable clothing fourteen miles beyond my grasp. Sometimes Amy Jefferson’s satin comforter sailed by or one of her muslin curtains. Once I even thought I saw Rags up there, though at the time I had absolutely no idea what he looked like. Once I thought I saw Amy herself with her long golden hair, stretched out by wind, across the sky.

  Amy Jefferson’s mother was dead; something I found quite horrifying yet vaguely appealing at the same time. This meant that Amy’s home was equipped with a housekeeper whose main function was to look after the motherless little girl (iron her pretty dresses, make her down-filled bed). And, of course, her father doted on her, called her his princess or my little lady. He read to her from all those books with the coloured pictures, and he took her for hundreds of rides in the motor car, even allowing her to honk the alarming horn.

  I, on the other hand, was looked after by several females whose attentions were affectionate but terse. Until Amy, I’d never really felt there was any room for complaint. But now when my mother filled my dresser drawers with drab corduroys and denims or when my oldest sister announced that it was evident that my hair needed cutting, I felt there was an edge of cruelty to their actions and remarks. They seemed to be deliberately shutting me out of Amy’s world: a world of colour and comfort, a world of personal and environmental beauty.

  Amy was a first-class narrator and it wasn’t long before she decided to tell me, in detail, her version of her mother’s death. Old Man Cassidy, she assured me, had stuffed her mother in a garbage pail and had taken her away to die. Who, I asked, was this awful person? Amy explained that Old Man Cassidy was a wizard tramp. No one had ever seen him but he lived up in the hills behind Jeffersons’ farm. He had evil magic powers and for years had envied Amy’s mother’s golden hair. He had killed her, therefore, for no other reason than to steal her blond curls which he now wore on his own head. When asked how she discovered this Amy replied that she just knew, and that was all there was to that. Then she chanted a song, like the kind girls skip to, making the incident vividly clear in my imagination:

  “Old Man Cassidy’s a mean old man

  Stuffed my mother in a garbage can

  Took her to his shack

  And cut off all her hair

  And wrapped her up like garbage

  And threw her down the stairs.”

  It never occurred to me to doubt the existence of such a terrifying individual. The mental image that the story, and subsequent song, conjured up was instant and precise. From that day on my nightmares included a gnarled old man dressed in tattered clothing with golden curls cascading down his back. I had no trouble imagining the hair, since, once a week, I saw some just like it tumbling out from underneath Amy Jefferson’s straw sunhat.

  After three or four visits I persuaded Amy to bring along some of her picture books. In these slender volumes, for the first time, I saw actual representations of the stories I had been told by my mother and sister, stories in which terrible things happened to beautiful women. At best, it appeared that they were made to scrub floors for indefinite periods of time. At worst, they were given poisoned apples to eat so that they would sleep for centuries inside glass coffins, eventually to be rescued by ineffectual, anemic-looking princes. In my imagination I cast Amy in the role of the beautiful women, and myself, if only by reason of my sex, in the role of the princes. Then I envied her more interesting, if more dangerous part.

  By August the first bright green of summer had begun to fade and the earth on our drive was baked hard by the sun. Amy and I picked huge extravagant bouquets of golden rod for my mother, who immediately banished them from the kitchen because of my older sister’s hay fever. My father embarrassed my by suggesting we ride one of the gentle old workhorses when I knew that Amy had a perfectly beautiful pony at home who would make Bessie look clumsy and stupid by comparison. We talked a little more about “Old Man Cassidy,” speculating about what terrible crime he might commit next. Most often, however, we played a game invented by me as a result of the picture books, a game called The Prince and the Beauty. During the course of this entertainment I got to kiss Amy on the lips in order to awaken her from whatever length of poisoned sleep we had previously arranged. Once I suggested that we switch roles, that maybe occasionally I could be the Beauty. Amy quickly squashed that idea. I was a boy, she said, and nobody ever gave poisoned apples to boys. Besides, I didn’t have the golden curls necessary to qualify as a Beauty. She would, however, allow me to be Old Man Cassidy, who was, more often than not, responsible for the evil fruit.

  Near the end of summer, Amy’s weekly visits abruptly stopped. I asked no questions, assuming her absence was the result of some adult decision over which I had no control. Besides, my sisters had spied on one of our extended entertainments, had seen the kissing part, and had given me no peace since. And so, released from the responsibilities of playing both the good and evil male, and the longing for a little girl’s possessions that her presence induced, I was vaguely relieved by Amy’s absence. I reverted to my games with sticks and dust and happily forgot about ribbons and curls. At least for a while.

  Then, just when the trees on our lane were beginning to turn, my father received a letter that caused a great stir in the kitchen. When he passed it silently to my mother to read, her eyes opened wide, as if she were greatly surprised. My older sisters gathered round and, having read the contents, fluttered and gasped. Soon they and my mother were busy pulling mixing bowls and baking tins out of the cupboards, while my father explained that the following day we were all to visit the Jeffersons’ farm.

  This, I knew, was to be an important event. A party, no doubt, in Amy’s honour. I could scarcely sit still at the dinner table, squirmed in pure joy for several minutes until I lapsed once again into an attack of raw jealousy. I had never had a party after all, just a cake at supper with my family. And my parents had never been this awestruck by any event related to me. Even later that night, after I had gone to bed, I could hear them muttering Amy’s name in the kitchen, and that of her father, over and over.

  I was not at all surprised to discover that Amy Jefferson’s house was an imposing structure with two porches, one on top of another. The front yard was immense and was bisected by a narrow cement walk edged by two perfectly clipped hedges. These extended to surround most of the lawn, which was itself beautifully mown; Amy Jefferson’s farm was equipped with a machine expressly for that purpose. Rising from the grass was a large oak tree and hanging from that a child’s swing. For Amy Jefferson’s private amusement.

  At the side of the house, beyond the small walls of the hedgerows, a number of women were gathered. They were placing white tablecloths on wooden tables. It was a breezy day, which made their activities difficult, and four women were required to cover one table—two to shake the cloth, brilliant in the sun, out into the wind, two more to catch the flapping corners on the opposite side. Dressed in the long, dark skirts of the period, these women looked like black shadows dancing slow upon the lawn, unfurling white banners, serious and quiet at their task. I envied Amy Jefferson these shadows who were so obviously dedicated to her pleasure.

  We entered the kitchen and deposited there the food that my mother and sisters had spent the previous evening preparing. But the wealth of edibles already there suggested that they need not have bothered. More dark-skirted women drifted silently around the table, moving dishes to make room for the baked goods we had brought. We stood uncomfortably to one side until one of the women, who identified herself as the housekeeper, asked if we would like to see Amy and led us down a long hall, with remarkably polished floors, and into the parlour where a large number of adults were collected in a murmuring crowd.

  Once inside this room my parents shook off their hesitation and seemed to know exactly what to do. They took hold of me, each by one hand, and walked towards the opposite side of the room. I remember looking down, envying Amy Jefferson the colours on her parlour carpet. Then I remember being lifted up by my father to be presented with the white face a
nd still body of Amy herself. She was dressed in pink, her puffed sleeves crushed against the mauve satin of the coffin’s interior, her golden curls motionless against her chest. Her skin looked smooth and hard, like porcelain. She resembled a china doll.

  “Kiss her,” my mother said.

  The afternoon passed like an Indian summer dream. Tens of wagons journeyed out to a cemetery where they put Amy in the ground; satin, puffed sleeves and curls, down into damp and dark. And we returned to the lawn where the dark-skirted ladies tempted me with cakes and said what a nice little boy I was. Cumulus clouds carried the ghosts of Amy’s possessions over the crowd of adult mourners, who murmured and shook their heads and ate all of the food that had covered the kitchen table. Rags appeared and was fed table scraps. Amy’s swing moved back and forth in a warm wind.

  When it was all over and we were about to leave I noticed Amy’s father standing apart from his guests, looking off in the distance towards the woods at the back of his farm. His face was immobile but his eyes were like clenched fists. I suspected that his mind at that moment was filled with the image of an old, old man, dressed in the costume of a tramp, with enough blond curls on his shoulders for two good-sized wigs. I was amazed and relieved by his apparent naivety. For I knew whose sinful longings had sucked the life out of his treasured victim. I presumed that my envy and obsession had weakened and destroyed Amy as surely as any poisoned apple. I turned and was horribly sick as a result of all the sweets I had eaten at the large white table, and the half-hour spent afterwards playing on Amy Jefferson’s private swing.