When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

  "Dedkal" I shouted, and my shouting woke me. I opened my eyes. I must have been sleeping there for a while. It was still dark, but there was light at the edge of the hills. Benci was standing at the foot of the tree, saying, "Lucas." I sat up. "Lucas," he said again. I looked down at him. And I knew, sure as I'd ever known anything, that Great-grandfather's soul had left his body, had slipped through the cracks of the house.

  I could see by the way that Benci was looking up at me, lost right there in the place where he'd grown up, his own farm, that he had a dead father now too.

  Chapter 25

  From staying at Slats's house, it had gotten so I knew just about every sound that came out of the Plate Glass. The machines switching on early in the morning. The rhythm of the factory doors opening and slamming shut at different times of the day. The ping the straps on the trucks made after they'd slid a sheet into place.

  I'd started to think that the second something went wrong with a piece of glass, I could hear it. It seemed like I could hear the beginning of the break and each sound that followed—the fissures opening the sheet; the shards hitting the concrete floor; the long-handled broom they used to gather the glass, getting pushed across the floor.

  In the days after Great-grandfather died, I kept wondering if, when we died, could we feel every part of us loosening and falling like that? Had Great-grandfather felt all the steps he took going away from us? Did he know it the second that something started to go wrong in him? Had my father known when something started to go bad in the fireshot? Would I know when it happened to my mother? To Slats? Would I know when it happened to me?

  Great-grandfather died in his sleep. Slats would be telling me about something else altogether and then she would just stop and look at me and say, "He died in his sleep." When she had to call friends of the family, she said to each of them, a few times a piece, "He died in his sleep."

  She turned to me after one of these phone calls and said, "Why do I feel so terrible? What's wrong with me? He had a long life. What else did I want for him? To see actual angels come and carry him into the sky?" She shook her head.

  I didn't have a suit to wear to the funeral. Slats had to borrow a shirt with a collar and a jacket for me from one of her brother's grandsons. The jacket was too big and the shirt was too small. It didn't make sense. I put my big hooded coat on over it anyway.

  Slats wore her nicest shoes. The nail was sticking out of the heel of one of them. She asked me to fix it, but I couldn't move around in that shirt, and I said no.

  She tried taking me up to the front of the church to sit next to her and the great-aunts and great-uncles, but I didn't want to sit anywhere near the priests; they were the ones who'd carried Great-grandfather's death into his house and left it there.

  The service started. I went and sat next to Eli. "What are they supposed to be like, those tollhouses you were telling me about?" I said.

  He shrugged. "I don't know anyone to come back from them. Ha."

  The lady in front of us turned around. "Shhh," she said.

  I whispered. "I told you I was no farmer. I couldn't do anything to help that farm. It's like how you were supposed to be a magician, but you couldn't do it."

  "I am supposed to be magician?"

  "That's what he said, Great-grandfather. Your dad was some kind of famous sorcerer, and he tried to make you one, but you were lousy."

  "Famous for magic? My father? I don't think so. Maybe for crazy. How can he be famous? He makes only one trick. Always the same. No variety."

  "What was that?"

  "You won't believe, but people would give him money to write wishes on small papers."

  The lady in front of us turned around and shushed us again. "What kind of wishes?" I said.

  "People say to him what they are wanting. Then on papers he writes first who he is, his name, then his father's name, his father's father's name, to make known who he is. Then he explains what it is that customer needs. You want for something or not for something. He would write this. Then he takes paper and buries it in ground. He tells them putting them in the ground makes the wish happen. But he says to me that he must put them in ground because they are so much nonsense, people want things only that they can't have, impossible things. They should feel shame."

  "What did they ask for?"

  "To have someone that is not in love with you to love you. Someone who is dead to not be dead."

  It was getting hot in the church, or maybe I was wearing too many clothes. The candles were hot. They were burning too many candles. Up ahead, I could hear Slats walking around, her wrong shoe with the nail sticking out. Click, quiet, click, quiet.

  "Did it work?" I said.

  "Maybe sometimes. From coincidence." He sat up a little out of the pew to get a look at the coffin. "I don't know," he said, when he sat back down. "Sometimes there's nothing else to do anyways, you might as well make a wish on a small paper. Have to try out something. Better to do that than have all of your wishes caught insides your throat."

  The walls of Great-grandfather's church were covered with ikonas with gold backgrounds. All the painted saints had small mouths because they kept quiet, and large ears because they were good listeners to God's words. They had eyes as big as dishes so they could see fully the works of God.

  I guess they said things about Great-grandfather at the funeral. I only remember the saints staring at me with their gigantic eyes. The works of God, I thought. That's us, we're the works of God. It wasn't the kind of thing I'd ever thought about before. My palms were sweating, all the middle of me was sweating. I unbuttoned my coat and my suit jacket. My shirt was changing colors, the sweat darkening it in patches.

  I turned around to see what was behind me. I saw Jumbo, the other bear wrestler from the Austrian circus. I went and sat next to him. "Ochenzhal? " he said.

  People had been telling us they were sorry all day. I wasn't sure how to answer. "All right then, Jumbo, spasibo," I said.

  I liked Jumbo, after a few minutes, though, I felt like he was so big that he was giving off heat, like a turbine engine, like the machines that poured the glass at the factory. I went back farther, away from him, to the last row in the church, an empty row. I laid down on a kneeler. I thought it'd be cooler by the floor. I looked up at the colored windows. I tried to pray for Marko. They still hadn't gotten him to wake up. I tried to follow along with the prayers, but I couldn't get any words to stay still in my head.

  I heard Slats's wrong shoe getting closer and closer. They were all walking out of the church. I got up and followed them. Outside, I couldn't understand why I was so hot, the warm weather we'd been having was gone and there was snow everyplace again.

  All the people around me were wearing coats and hats and scarves, their breath freezing in the air above them.

  The next time I paid attention to what was happening, we were all inside the house like we always were for Christmas Eve or other parties. The great-aunts in aprons carried things into the house from their cars, or from visitors' cars. There were brightly painted plates and different kinds of food, all over every inch of every table. Everything was the same, except that everyone was wearing black, and they were all dressed nicer than usual. The great-uncles were busting out of their suits, their ties weren't right. And everyone was doing what they usually do at those kinds of parties, except that Benci sat away from everyone in that corner chair, drinking whiskey. Everyone, actually, seemed to be drinking more, and drinking with more of a sense of purpose; more like they were mowing a field than that they were trying to have a party. Everything was just like Christmas Eve except that people were crying and talking in low voices, and except for how Great-grandfather wasn't there to tell us his story about coming to America.

  And everything we ate was the same too, except that when we made the kutya, we didn't put any honey or poppy seeds on it. We ate it plain, because it was a funeral, and that's how you're supposed to eat it at funerals. It sat in my mouth like thick pieces of paper, a
nd I didn't want to swallow it, because if I swallowed it, I thought it would mean that Great-grandfather really was all the way dead and gone away from us. I went outside and spit it in the trough where the cows used to eat.

  I was standing outside by myself, heat coming off my skin. I took off my coat and the borrowed suit jacket and hung them on the antenna of Brown Lu. I walked out toward the fields, where it looked colder; the snow was piled in deeper drifts.

  The sycamore trees were so white that the woods looked like they were made of bones. I walked up past the pear tree. The sky looked like a piece of slate, and low clouds slid across it.

  I guessed that Great-grandfather was up there, or his soul, or whatever of him got to go up, trying to get past his accusers. But, I thought, maybe none of those things happened, maybe you just dropped over into darkness and then into the ground, and then silence, like the men trapped in the Bluebird pit.

  I walked into the woods. Maybe I walked for hours, I don't really know, but the woods got messier, the trees got bigger. A few times I thought I heard someone walking behind me, but then I'd stop walking and find that it was just the noise of the wind working on the trees, or my walking unsettling the leaves.

  I came over the crest of a hill, and when I stopped, everything fell quiet. But then, out of the quiet, came that other sound I'd heard outside the Plate Glass, Great-grandfather's voice, or the sound of his voice, the texture of it, racing around in the trees.

  I had the feeling of him being scattered all around the property, and so I had the feeling he was with me. The wind blew at the dead leaves and old snow. It seemed like things were picking up speed in the sky. The clouds were twisting, gray then black then gray. They churned like sheets holding twisting bodies. I looked down and looked up again, and they changed. The sky was crowded with what Great-grandfather told me was up there—the angels and the devils the Archangel Michael had kicked out of heaven. I touched my eyes to make sure they were open, that I wasn't asleep, because I knew it didn't make sense, but I could see them. They had bodies like men, but terrible teeth, and shining wings that looked like they were made out of hammered metal. Their teeth scratched as they tore into each other.

  I put my head down and kept going. I thought getting some wind on my skin would help me cool down. I broke into a run. Branches were hitting and scratching at me. The trees turned a white so clean I had to squint when I got close to them. I ran until I found a deep drift of snow, and then, I lay down in it.

  Great-grandfather was sitting next to me. Are you going to be living up in that pear tree now, Dedka? I asked him. Sometimes you used to call That One dedushka, "grandfather." Does that mean when it was living, that it was someone's grandfather, your grandfather? I never asked you. I can't imagine you having a grandfather, old as you were when I knew you. But I guess you did.

  Are you a ghost now? An angel? Or just under the ground? Why didn't you tell me what would happen to you? Is it going to be too quiet there, like the bottom of the Bluebird mine? When your soul was twisting up through the air, did you have to fight through those packs of angels and devils? What am I supposed to do now? In all this snow? Nothing's colder than this, can't imagine there being anything colder. No, that's not right, I can imagine something—those sheets I saw at Bedford. Those are colder.

  Then we were walking together, me and him. In front of us there were double wooden doors, a stone wall. He pushed them open, and inside it was the orchard—the orchard of the Slovenian monks. There were the pear trees, the bottles on the branches. Sun was shining off the bottles, the pears were bright inside of them. And there were leaves on the trees, on the hundreds and hundreds of trees. A forest made of glass.

  I don't remember much else from the time I spent wandering through the dark hallways of that fever. Always with me was the feeling of being hot or of freezing. I went back and forth from one to the other without climbing up or down through other temperatures. The sheets seemed to be soaked in mustard plaster, burning my skin, or made of ice. And always, Greatgrandfather was next to me.

  Close to the end of it, I woke up in his house. The room was dark. I sat up. I touched the sheets. They felt regular, not hot or cold, just soft and warm. Slats was asleep on the floor next to the bed, trying to fit all of herself under her coat. Eli was in the room too, sitting in a chair, asleep. He'd been drawing; next to him on the floor were a few sheets of paper, some twigs he'd turned to charcoal.

  Great-grandfather was gone.

  The room was cool, the windows were cracked open. I was in the room where, on Christmas Eve, I'd spotted Zoli splashing gasoline all over the tree. I picked up one of the sheets of Eli's blank paper. I started to write a letter to my mother, to tell her everything that had happened. I didn't get very far. It seemed hopeless to try to explain everything. I crumpled the paper and took another piece. I wrote,

  My name is Lucas Lessar. I'm named after a dead great-uncle who was named after a dead baby. I'm the son of Mirjana and Jimmy Lessar. I'm the grandson of Raisa Jankovic. I live in Banning. I am writing this all down on this piece of paper to ask for the Tot-to to come back to the house here and look after us like Great-grandfather said it used to.

  I folded the paper and put it in my pocket. I went outside. That last stubborn piece of winter seemed to have melted away. I must have been sick and asleep for a long while. I kept my eyes on the ground while I walked. I was afraid to look at the sky. I was afraid I was still in the fever, that this was just another piece of it, and that those angels and devils I'd seen before would still be up there fighting each other. I walked up to the pear tree. I was pretty weak, and it took me a couple of tries to get a foothold on the tree good enough to climb to a place where there was a kind of opening, a hole. I pushed my note inside.

  Climbing down, I could feel under my hands, a couple of branches that were still living, maybe coming back for the spring.

  When I got to the stoop of the house, I grabbed the door handle, closed my eyes, and tilted my head back, facing the sky. If those angels were still there, I knew it would mean I was still locked up in the fever after all.

  I opened my eyes. And it was just regular sky, clean and black. The farm was quiet. I looked out over it. While I was sick, it seemed to have shrunk, everything looked smaller, fragile even.

  I let go of the door handle and walked back out into the yard. I leaned over, tore up some grass and some dirt, and put it in my pockets. I tore up some more grass and I put it in my mouth. And then dirt too. I chewed it and swallowed it. I walked back inside.

  Part Three

  Chapter 26

  It used to be that before Christmas Eve dinners Greatgrandfather would throw some of the kutya up to the ceiling and see how much of it would stick. If a lot of it stuck, it meant we'd have a good spring on the farm, but if it fell down in quick clumps, we were in for it. After Great-grandmother passed away and Slats took over the dinner, she did away with all that. She thought it was a useless thing to do and she didn't like cleaning it up afterward.

  The only times I paid attention was when the kutya fell someplace it shouldn't have—dropped onto someone's dress or hair—and I hardly noticed when we stopped doing it altogether. But when I was climbing out of my fever, I wished we had done it at Christmas. It would have been good to have some idea about what was coming. And if it had been a lucky hit at the ceiling, it could have been some assurance to lean on, even if it was something as slight as a smudge of porridge on the ceiling.

  After I was well enough to leave Great-grandfather's house, Slats gave it a cleaning and we locked it up and left. Benci took Valentina to his place so he could look after her. Slats kept me home from school because of how sick I'd been. We stayed all the time in her part of Banning, where I seemed to sleep most of my days away, sometimes on the couch, other times out on the fake grass on her porch. All Slats did was work and read magazines and take my temperature, and talk about Greatgrandfather. We never went to the club, or out to see any of the other great-aunts o
r great-uncles.

  I kept two things with me all the time: Helen's lipstick case with Billy's cigarette tucked inside, and the picture I'd found on my mother's desk that said /and L at county fair on the back. I still couldn't find my father in the picture. While I was wasting away those days sleeping and listening to Slats talk about Great-grandfather, I tried reading the picture like a map. Going over each square of space to see if I could find my father. In the picture, I'm holding the reins like I'm in charge, turned a little to the camera with a royal-looking smile that I must have outgrown.

  Zoli had broken a good number of Marko's ribs and one of those ribs had poked a hole in a lung. He had also crushed his knee and the doctors wanted to put a pin in his leg to hold things together. Marko was knocked out cold for days and days, and when he finally did come to, he had to stay in the hospital for nearly a month. Slats drove out to the hospital to see him, but when she did, I stayed behind at her house.

  "You ought to call the hospital and say hello to him at least," Slats said. But I couldn't get myself to. I was afraid of what he might sound like, broken like he was, or what he might say to me.

  While I'd been sick, Zoli had scraped together enough money to bail himself out of the jail. Slats told me he'd hovered around the farm, driving his car up and down the driveway every once in a while, until she'd called Frank D'Angelo. After that, Mr. D'Angelo took to following Zoli everywhere he went. He wouldn't leave him alone. By the time Slats and I moved back to her house, Mr. D'Angelo had driven him half-crazy.

  The last thing Zoli did before he left town was tear around all the streets of Banning in the Skylark. Something had gone wrong with the muffler or the engine, and it was almost as loud as Bend's truck. We'd only been back to Slats's house for a day when he did it. I was sitting out on her porch swing, half asleep. I could hear his car in the streets behind her house. I knew I should get up and go inside, but I was still feeling weak and doing everything in almost slow-motion, and the next thing I knew—there it was, the Skylark, sliding past the house.