by Jan Carson
Speaking from the side of her mouth, utilizing to the best of her ability the limited movement afforded by the full weight of Malcolm Orange’s shoulder, she addressed the elderly man, wriggling atop her, ‘This isn’t what it looks like, sir. There’s a really good explanation for all of this.’
Soren James Blue need not have worried, for Cunningham Holt had been blind as a bat since the age of six, when an unfortunate incident with a Fourth of July firework left him with two painted marbles in lieu of real eyes.
– Chapter Six –
Cunningham Holt
Cunningham Holt was just getting used to his eyes when they upped and left him; right first, followed, some three violent seconds later, by the left.
The left eye was never found. The right eye popped clean out of the socket – removing a small section of eyelid in the process – and was located hanging by the thinnest wire of nerve from the tip of his nose. Mr Holt, who’d seen more than his fair share of farmyard horrors – severed limbs, bull-gored boys and two-headed lambs – calmly scooped the errant eyeball into an egg cup and commanded his son to hold his own eye, ‘steady as you can’, all the way to the local doctor’s house.
Though it was rare for the Holts to agree on anything more complex than the day after Christmas, the whole family worked together to save young Cunningham’s sight. Mr Holt drove like the devil himself, making town in less than half an hour. Mrs Holt – a strong believer in the preserving power of saline – salted the eyeball until it looked like a piece of boiled candy, while Cunningham’s older sisters, Valentine and Sharon, did their part by staying home to lead a torch-lit, and ultimately futile, search for the absent left.
Despite the best efforts of the entire Holt family it was immediately apparent that the remaining eye could not be saved. By the time Cunningham arrived at the doctor’s door the right eye was already beginning to turn green around the edges.
The town doctor, a kindly-faced man who peddled home brew and butterscotch from the back door of his surgery, was far from encouraging. ‘Take young Cunningham to the tent revivalists,’ he suggested, washing his hands as he passed the buck back to God. ‘That’s my best advice, folks. Take him to the charismatics and get them to pray for a miracle. There’s no medical hope for the child, but those colored folk can do strange things with the Holy Ghost. I’ll tidy him up of course, pop some marbles in so he don’t look so misshapen and give him a dose of something for the pain, but he won’t ever see again in this life.’
For many weeks thereafter Cunningham Holt, swathed nose to crown like a shrunken Punjabi, was transported to every tent revival within a three county radius. Accompanied by either his mother or one of her three formidable sisters, he found himself unceremoniously hauled up for healing at the end of every meeting. Oftentimes the offer of a Holy Ghost miracle was only made available to born again believers and so young Cunningham was coerced into getting saved on half a dozen separate occasions, only narrowly avoiding the possibility of baptism by claiming an extreme allergy to river water.
During these unfortunate outings all manner of righteous humiliation was visited upon the boy, most often in full view of the entire cackling congregation. Twice he found himself anointed with a stinking paste of spit and mud, twice he was knocked to his knees, once there were snakes and, on each and every occasion, manifold hysterics and hollering. Though his body shook, responding to a bipartisan mix of divine intervention and human prodding, though his heart raced and the Holy
Ghost was said to be shimmering like a pillar of fire over his head so he pissed himself from sheer, undiluted fear of the Lord, Cunningham’s marble eyes remained stubbornly unchanged.
Eventually, when every two-bit revivalist had been proven incapable and even the preacher who claimed to raise the dead had refused contact for fear of his reputation, Mrs Holt put her foot down and pronounced her son an agnostic.
‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ she announced to the entire Holt family, ‘and if the Lord don’t see fit to giving back a six-year-old child’s eyes then I figure I’m just about done with religion, and Cunningham too and all the littl’uns. Papa, you can make your own mind up about all that Jesus stuff. You’re big enough and dumb enough to decide for yourself, but don’t be expecting us to go to no church services with you.’
The matter was closed. Cunningham Holt would be blind for the rest of his mortal days. God was to be blamed in part. His own father confessed his partiality, having been directly responsible for the explosion; whilst the remaining portion of blame was delegated to an unnamed Mexican lad who had, on the third of July, unwittingly swapped a crate-load of faulty fireworks for a bag of the Holts’ finest potatoes and a small side of salted beef.
In place of eyes the six-year-old Cunningham found himself ill-blessed with a pair of meaty gashes. For one full year his eye sockets were tender to the touch and prone to inopportune weeping, bursting forth like a Holy Mary statue at the first mention of beauty. Later the sockets were stretched to host a seasonal rotation of hand-painted marbles. Cunningham Holt was suddenly afforded the pleasure of changing his eye color daily; matching his pupils to his ankle socks, to the kaleidoscopic spectrum of the Kentucky skyline or the smallest whims of his imagination. Though the very idea of color was fast slipping from his memory, he almost always favored the original blues. On somber occasions and the Fourth of July, however, he was known to insist upon gray eyes. ‘I want people to know I’m feeling serious inside,’ he confessed. ‘And also a little bit sad.’
His older sister, Valentine, whose job it was to place the correct marbles in his hand each morning, turned slowly mean on the guilt of her own perfect vision. Taking her resentment out on Cunningham she would, from time to time, slip him a blue and a brown marble, a pair of cat’s eye or a milk-white gaming marble just for the delight of making him look like a moron (As a grown-up lady she would deeply regret her own actions and make several stilted attempts at confession before leaving a deathbed letter outlining these and other childhood indiscretions, long-forgotten.)
Cunningham Holt grew thin on the absence of pictures. He grew upwards and inwards – taller at twelve than any kid in the county – but failed to fatten up. By the age of sixteen he was six feet and eight inches high, yet painfully slight and capable of squeezing himself, with little effort, through the inside of an unstringed tennis racquet. Cunningham’s mother, an intuitive lady who boasted quarter-strength Sioux blood, assumed her son absolutely empty inside. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she whispered to Cunningham as he fussed over his protruding ribs. ‘You’ve nothing to thicken yourself up with. It’s memories and thoughts that mark the difference between a man and a skeleton, and you’ve only got six years’ worth of things to consider.’
Her musings proved cold comfort to Cunningham Holt who, just one decade after July Fourth, was already running out of things to consider.
He passed most of his teenage years in a purpose-built shed, reclining in pitch darkness. ‘For what,’ he argued adamantly, ‘was the point in wasting electric light on a blind man?’ Close friends and family, friends of the family, and sometimes neighbors, were permitted to enter each day between the hours of two and five. They traveled many miles, often on foot, to visit with Cunningham. Most counted it Christian duty to do their bit for the tragic. Having exhausted the usual round of orphans and widows they’d finally arrive, well-intentioned, on the Holts’ doorstep. They brought with them small jars, scrapbooks, shoeboxes and occasional crates containing sights for Cunningham’s collection. Venturing into the shed, Magi-like, they presented their gifts to the boy and took great pains to describe, with collared accuracy, the peculiar attributes of each sight.
Some sights had been collected for their beauty. Thus, sea shells, oil paintings and porcelain dolls found their way on to the racks of Cunningham’s shed where they shared precious shelf space with jars of dog shit, broken bottles and formaldehyde mice, each selected for the offensive nature of its appearance. Cunn
ingham Holt, painfully aware that his own library of visual memories was extremely limited, relied upon this ragtag collection of other people’s sights to keep his senses sharp and excited.
Each evening, before bed, he would ask his mother not for a bedtime story or blessing but rather a lengthy description of one of these specimens. By the time he arrived at his eighteenth birthday the collection had expanded to fill two subsequent sheds and was now rife with sights Cunningham could no longer stretch to imagine. Having never had the opportunity to experience for himself a toaster oven, a sticking plaster or, perhaps most pertinently, a television set, Cunningham was forced to rely on his six short years of memory to conjure up appropriate comparisons. Thus a toaster oven, though painstakingly and repeatedly described by Cousin Herb from South Dakota, was filed away in the recesses of Cunningham’s mind as an object roughly comparable to a self-heating mailbox. Meanwhile, a sticking plaster appeared to be a cross between envelope glue and a pair of his mother’s nylons.
The television set proved impossible for Cunningham to imagine, even when parked in front of its screen with the volume set to high.
Had he been given prior warning Cunningham Holt might have taken the trouble to catalogue a range of suitable visual memories; the sort of sights which would keep him smiling through the proceeding seven decades. Naked ladies, technological advances and the cut of his own face, adult now and peppered with coarse stubble, were right at the top of this wish list. However, Cunningham’s final seeing memory remained, for now and all time, the somewhat disappointing sight of his father’s backside, exploding glutinously from his weekend britches as he bent to light firework fuses. Other memories were childish in the extreme: scarecrows, candy apples and the back of his mother’s meeting hat, bobbing along to the Sunday hymns.
Cunningham Holt struggled to contemplate the rest of his life with only six short years’ worth of references to play with. (Two of these years, he noted with grim realism, had been wasted in a state of blank infancy.)
On the Fourth of July, 1938, Cunningham was nineteen years old and purposefully ignorant of the situation simmering in mainland Europe. Closer to home, cataclysmic change was also about to descend upon the Holt household. Blissfully unaware of how the day would progress, Cunningham woke at the normal hour, consumed for breakfast his usual bowl of porridge and prunes, sat for three hours in one chair and two in another, before proceeding to shed number three where he planned to greet the day’s visitors. (July Fourth had for the previous thirteen years gone uncelebrated in the Holt household. The only indicator that this particular Monday was to be marked beyond all ordinary Mondays was Cunningham’s choice of dove gray marbles.)
At 2pm on the dot Cunningham Holt lowered his backside into his normal seat and shoved the shed door open with the toe of his boot. Knowing full well the ridiculous regard with which most Americans held July Fourth and the celebrations currently unfolding in backyards and picnic fields all across Kentucky, Cunningham was fully prepared to receive no visitors beyond his immediate family.
However, the open door revealed a single visitor waiting with eager intent on the steps of his shed. After clearing her throat somewhat theatrically, announcing her presence not only to Cunningham but also two curious chickens and the sheepdogs who lived between the sheds, she stepped inside and stood on the little red rug immediately in front of his feet.
‘Hey,’ she said. Her voice was uppity, east coast: Boston or New York perhaps. Cunningham flipped through his back catalogue of radio memories and struggled to place her geographically. He was absolutely certain they’d never met before.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Claire,’ she said, and in the thirty-six months of their mutual existence Cunningham Holt was never to find out her second name.
‘What did you bring me?’ he asked.
‘Myself,’ she replied, and kicked the shed door closed with the back of her heel.
Four hours later the couple emerged, glowing red and ravenous hungry. They devoured an entire batch of Mrs Holt’s home-baked scones fresh from the stove and were married within the week. Two months later Claire was great with child and fast expanding to fill the guest room bed where the newlywed couple had taken up residence.
Though speculation raged loud around the Holt farm, the details of Cunningham’s seduction went no further than the walls of shed number three. When asked by his father, who’d retained, alongside his agricultural skills, a particularly Lutheran notion of morality, exactly what they’d been doing in a garden shed for four hours with the door closed, Cunningham simply smiled wistfully and said, ‘Using our imaginations.’ In reality Claire had opened his eyes to a world much bigger than specimen jars and shoeboxes. Cunningham Holt was never the same again. His thoughts were no longer limited to six small years and sliding. His empty head quickly became a cavernous frame for crazy pictures and fresh, imagined sights not yet existent in the actual world.
Cunningham Holt, newly inspired by his young bride, became God of a universe where colors, shapes, tones and textures were just waiting to be invented. Within hours his nineteen-year-old mind had made the monumental leap from lamenting his lack of sight to rejoicing in the possibilities offered by an imagination undiluted by the limitations of reality.
Each morning Claire was a brand-new lady, ripe for discovery. ‘Who are you today?’ he would ask as soon as he awoke, rolling towards the sound of her voice.
‘I am a Chinese lady with sin-black hair,’ she would say on Monday.
‘I am a freckle-faced redhead,’ on Tuesday.
‘I’m old enough to be your mother,’ on Wednesday and perversely, on Thursday, ‘I’m fourteen years old and recently run away from home.’
Cunningham Holt’s imagination ran loose and free all over her body, picturing patterns and colors and features stolen from God himself. When she finally claimed, two weeks into their marriage, to be striped all over like a human zebra, he had no problem summoning up the cut of her naked shoulders, criss-crossed black and white.
The remaining members of the Holt family held their tongues for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of Cunningham’s imagination. Though he begged nightly and bargained for an accurate description of his new wife, his mother stalwartly refused to oblige. It was thirteen years since she’d last seen her son so fat or happy. She was wise enough to admit that the image he’d created was ten times more inspiring than the lazy eye and mousy hair which kept Claire plain as a paper plate and, no doubt, hankering after a blind husband.
By the time Claire’s belly had swollen to a point where Cunningham could feel his unborn son beating frantically just below the skin, she was beginning to get itchy feet. Claire was a canny young thing and fully aware that Cunningham’s future devotion depended entirely on the preservation of an illusion. She kept her past – a desperately mediocre tale of middle-class parents and secretarial school – a well-guarded secret and militantly refused to give any clues to her origins. Cunningham correctly suspected his wife to hail from the East and so it came as no big surprise when she suggested they pack their bags and move to Brooklyn, New York.
‘Lord Almighty, woman,’ Cunningham retorted, instigating the first proper argument of their five-month marriage. ‘What on earth will I do in Brooklyn? I’ll be run over by a streetcar. I’ll be mown down in my prime.’
‘Nonsense,’ Claire replied, ‘we’ll get you a seeing eye dog, and a cane.’
‘What will my parents do without me on the farm?’
‘I’d say they’ll manage just fine. You don’t do anything round here except eat and move from one chair to the other all day.’
‘I can’t leave my sheds,’ he said at last, desperate for an excuse to stay somewhere close to the familiar. ‘It’s taken me years to build up the collection. I can’t leave it now.’
And so Claire, who knew a roadblock when she saw one, bribed her in-laws with an antique watch, property of her late grandfather, and the sure-fi
re promise that Cunningham would be happier and closer to a normal nineteen-year-old if he was finally encouraged to leave the family homestead. Armored then with the unequivocal backing and finances of all four Holts, she crossed her fingers and woke Cunningham early on the very next Sunday.
‘Wake up, sweetheart,’ she cried, shaking him violently by the shoulder so one of his marble eyes came loose and rolled across the bedspread. ‘Wake up now. I have something to tell you.’
Bleary-headed, Cunningham Holt rolled towards her voice and caught the faintest whiff of coffee breath. ‘Who are you today, Claire?’ he asked, assuming the dramatics were all part of her daily service. ‘You know it really gets me going when you do the hysterics.’
‘I’m serious, Cunningham. I have terrible news.’
‘Is it the baby?’
‘No it’s not the baby, and before you ask, it’s not your folks. No one’s sick. No one’s died but it is bad news.’
‘Look, honey, just tell me quick. Bad news should be told quick or it just hurts more.’