by Robert Hill
Knock.
The sound confused her now. Here was Kennesaw, that knock was his, so whose knock was it? She didn’t want her confusion in the same room as Kennesaw; he had always looked to her for wisdom after all, so she guffed to keep her guest from guessing. That’s just porcupines, she said in a mad rush of breath, looking first out the south-facing parlor oriel, then under the davenport. What a damn bother they are at our years! she remarked. She asked the woodstove, How many is it now, Kennesaw? but a woodstove never reveals its age. Such a bashful one, she said, and kicked a small striped tuft of fur that had desiccated itself on her parlor’s braided rug who knows when. Let’s see, True said. I’m older than apple cider and your mother was a butter churn and the winter Grunts Pond caught on fire there were only six days when laundry needed ironing, so that means you must be at least as old as your first pair of overalls and I was a mere slip of a girl when you fumbled to button those straps for the first time, so that makes you at least ten to fifteen miles shorter than me, give or take a postage stamp. The woodstove having become a stack of fruit crates said neither nay nor yay, which was all the silence True needed to know her calculations were somewhere in the barn if not directly in the corncrib. It’s all pennies and pins, she said, with a laugh that didn’t want to be funny, aren’t they such a drawer full of nonsense? Birthdays? You’ve lost weight, Kennesaw, she said to the candlestick lamp, stop hovering and sit down and quit your tomfoolery. She lowered her own bony hips to the stack of egg crates in front of the davenport, the crates having retained their wooden form while the davenport and its springs and horsehair stuffing had exploded the worn velvet fabric from within. Good thing there were as many old, soiled clothes piled on it as on her bed to soften things, or a sitter wouldn’t be able to stand it. She braced her descent with a hand on a mound of pinecones in a skillet and informed her guest, This upholstery is Mother’s favorite. By the way, I didn’t bake an ice wagon. Who needs ants?
Knock.
The sound was as persistent as a leaking roof but she didn’t want Kennesaw to think she was hearing noises because he’d be sure to tell Loma Soyle who’d tell her sister Petie who’d tell Jubilee Aspetuck who’d tell Frainey who’d tell Chippewa who’d tell that Herkimer Minton who’d tell Luddy who’d tell Mawz, and if Mawz Engersol heard that she was a girl as unsound as the sound around her was unseen, he wouldn’t come to her house tonight to take her to the dance and if she didn’t dance with him tonight she’d just die!
Gone from True’s day-to-day now was her impending one hundred years, her numb left hand, history as she lived it, and the word tomorrow. Gone was the stone she had made of her youthful fancy, pulverized back to its volcanic state of forming, pliable once again to her desires. In place of it all was Kennesaw taking up her time in the parlor when she should be upstairs prettying her girlish self for the arrival of the boy of her dreams.
The tap was back now. She hadn’t noticed it gone until its return where it united with the knock. It must have gone out to run an errand when she wasn’t listening.
The tap, the knock, Kennesaw—how impatient she was with them all. She waited a polite span of time for Kennesaw to grow bored with their visit and offer his fare-thee-wells and leave, but when the firebox neither cleared his throat nor slapped his hand on the davenport’s arm, when the only sound in the room was from the wind riffling the decayed last shreds of a lace curtain that hung over the open parlor oriel like a veil torn from a bride, True groped the musty air for a final say on the subject, not that she could recall what subject was in the air.
Knock.
Tap.
There are fewer stars in the skies over New Eden than there were when I was a girl, she said to the portrait of her great-great-grandfather, Remedial Bliss, the first of the Remedials, although the man with the bloodshot nose was too preoccupied with a bow saw and a cluster of rhubarb to take a whack at the subject. Have you noticed that, Kennesaw? Have you ever tried to count them, one by one? She was looking up at her parlor ceiling now with its water stains and buckled plaster and millions of crackled paint peelings that had been there since before there was a before—the thousands hanging on and the thousands that had already let go. From the sunlight filtering in through the oriel window the tips of the peelings caught intermittent flashes, so that even during the day her parlor made a night of it.
Knock.
Tap.
She shook her head free of the sounds but what she really loosed were stars, and as her head bobbled a large flake of paint fell out, and, riding the flake as one might a shooting nova down the blueish white of her neck and onto the frayed grays of her cardigan was a mud-dark potato bug, its long legs frantic to grab hold of anything not transitory. I used to try to fit all the stars in my saltshaker, all those stars, all those damn stars, but they gave me gas, True confessed to her guest. As the words were coming out so, too, were the sounds again, and again, and again, knock-tap, knock-tap, the syncopated dripping water dripping faster. She was growing frayed as her cardigan, eager to push the whole stray branch of the day away with a wave of an arthritic fist.
Surely the accumulated wonder of her musings had distracted Kennesaw and rendered him speechless, for once again she heard nothing from him, and hearing nothing, was gratified because she was tiring at a gallop and had nothing more to add. She decided now was the moment to pour the tea, maybe he’d leave after she did, so she reached for the slop bowl atop the Good Book that lately made a better cuspidor than a doorstop and tipped it in a tremulous arc, letting the pale yellow fluid splash onto her lap and down her legs and puddle on the dirty braided rug, where it took its time to seep in and left a wide ring of wet. Her head was still in the stars, and quite a few stars were still on her head. She asked her guest to remind her what he took in his long johns. She was working so hard to keep herself focused and keep the noises at bay. On the count of knock, tap, shrug, True reached a trembling hand inside of her cardigan and removed a withered flap and told the bookcase it could pour its own damn paint. Drink up!
Knock.
Tap.
The knock was overpowering, the tap the last straw. The two sounds had fused together like a shot and echo—knocking-tapping, knocking-tapping—coming at her as a wide flank firing, knock-tapping, knock-tapping, knock-tapping, and the force of the hits was great enough to blast this present imagined moment from her consciousness and land her smack down into the one she had waited her whole life to begin.
It was on a summer breeze that True floated like an airborne ribbon from the parlor through the foyer back to the cluttered dining room and into her dream. Her young man, Mawz Engersol, had stepped through the breakfront and was waiting for her in the air over the trash-topped table; nothing else on the ceiling tantalized her with visions of the life she’d have ahead as much as the single incandescent bulb that was hanging by a twig of wires from above like it was the last lone apple on a tree that would yield no more. True circled the table in a skip-to-my-Lou, she dipped her eyes and fluttered lashes she no longer grew, she pinched the hems of a skirt only Mawz could have seen and twirled amid the chaos with increasing breathlessness keeping time, the knock and tap in her chest forced her to stop, and she swooned and the room swirled on, and smelling sweet jack-in-the-pulpit over her own foul air she smiled a girl’s most important smile at the suitor who smit her, and smoothed a pink velvet memory with a numbed, gnarled fist, and looking that unlit bulb in its long-ago disconnected eyes she uttered the answer that would have lit up her life:
Oh Mawz, she said, her words halting and breathy as forward they looked to their end, you most certainly, may have, this dance.
22. Knotsy
Between the fullness of youth and the frailty of old age stretched a breadth of years full of aimless wandering. We were told that in this time joys and sadnesses would come at us as gently as spring rains and as savage as winter howlers, sometimes out of season in their volleys, but always one in succession of another. We were told we would wea
ther them one at a time with no sense of the next one on its way, believing this one is the great one, the love, the laugh, the start of something new, or that one with its grief and throbbing loss is the one we won’t outlive. They would come at us, these highs and lows, when we were in our highs or lows, and we must find the strength to face them one on one, one after another, and we must live them as they come, and outlive them as they go, and get through them and to the other side as well as we can, for these years can last far longer than a body can stand them. But stand them is what we are born for.
We could not imagine these years when young. Youth is too busy inventing itself to bother with the basics everyone older knows already. We were told from our earliest times that the greatest bulk of our years must be a solitary pursuit, each one of us alone in our own bed, our names spelled out with the last letters, our hearts the last beating organs, because our blood had trickled too thin into a puddle in the middle of town and the puddle at long last was going dry. All around us were the tadpoles of warning born in that withering wet spot—the bodily extras and absences, the eccentricities and melancholia; they sprouted bowlegs and short little arms and hopped about with their admonishments that we must forego all fairy-tale desires, for all we’d give birth to from our loins if we should hop on one another would be frogs. We listened. We were not blind. It was obvious that the inbred Minton sniffer would look more apt were it protruding from the keel of a boat. Or Lopes from loins less polluted might not have come out in a litter so overwrought and underwhelming. But oddnesses like these surely are the low-hanging fruit that suffers because it does not get the sun in all its glory, and we young and hardy would climb to the top of the tree and pick the best and prove the past wrong.
We were of a mind that the old were too old to remember youth bursting through its pants or the yearning one feels for a wooden doll to squirm itself human; and that the older were already of an old world that in its unincandescent, unhydrolic, unpetroleumed way would never understand what youth now knew to do. Each one of us with our urgent business in our hands, or with our skirts up in a tumble and the grasses tickling our ever-mores: we’d climb our nimble way farther up than our elders to the top of the tree and gorge ourselves on the pick of the crop in that glowing sun, and with our stamens put to pistils there would not come a mutant among us. We were young, and that’s what we believed.
In that youthful time of self-invention, we judged our swellings and emissions as the sole of life’s sum. We were the first galleons to cross the oceans and discover this new world of fervent urgency. We could see the distant lands and all the lush new growth where we would put in at the end of our journey, and we could smell the earthy air blowing across the waters to meet us, and in its thrall, we would need no sextant to guide our ships to port. The Cozy Blisses among us shot their cannons across our bows to sink our expeditions before they ever left the shores of Grunts Pond, and we only shook our heads in amused pity at their outdated warnings and old-fashioned weapons. Surely they had forgotten, if they’d ever known at all, the pinch and struggle of skin engorging in tight denim and what it meant to free it and let it run wild where it wanted to run wild. If they’d ever known at all they would not have pointed knuckleless fingers at the epidemic of humps and carbuncles, or preached themselves purple inveighing against the home-grown blight that had obliterated family after family. Had they ever felt what we felt they would not have been so adamantine that we should learn to live with that swelling turning blue, they would recall the twitch and sting and ache and soften to our stiffness and send us seamen off on our white-capped voyage with a robust shanty singing go forth and mutate! But they did not, and we begrudged them for it.
We all of us swollen and alone chose to hold out until the old were no more, and once they were gone we could let go. But we were growing up, we were swelling to our peaks, holding out was getting harder and harder, the sweat of impatience was beading up on the tip of us, we were each of us a Carnival yearning to go the full three-ring circus on every Jubilee; the old were dropping like overripe fruits from untended trees and soon every one of them would be rot and rum and once they were we could open the spigot of our longings. We were so close, and we might have gone all the way, had that flopping flounder Knotsy O’ums not scared every last one of us limp.
Knotsy’s birth was maturity’s first slap in our collective faces that maybe the old folks were on to something. The spoiled fruit of Butte and Columbine’s cousinly loins was born with not enough skin and too many seeds, as pale and permeable as a jellyfish. She was alive as a barnacle is alive, sticking to life more than living it, and while she had most of the right body parts in a few of the correct places that evolution decreed, the functions they performed were throwbacks to that oceanic era just before fish walked on land. To those of us who were but a moonlit night away from our maiden voyages to that new land we thought we were the first to discover, the moonlight shining clear through Knotsy’s filmy flesh like the brightest lighthouse beacon cautioned our ships from anchoring off that shore. The warnings that had taken mis-shape only here and there, on Knotsy were in full mis-formation, and we came as almost one to the understanding that this was what so many generations of cousins on cousins had come to—a weakened, watery fluid with no more life to it than the algae on a still pond; and the likelihood of any two of us bringing forth another one of her was a shallow shoal full of sharp rocks and certain peril. From there on out, almost every bit of urgent business stayed a ship on the water going nowhere.
But urgent business unaddressed undoes. We were told from our earliest times that the greatest bulk of our years must be a solitary pursuit, and we came as almost one to understand the wisdom of this, but not a one had wise words to offer on what to do with all that urgency that would not abate, wisdom come nothing. We graduated from our youth into our adult years with this unspent urgency pent to implosion, and only on the shores of Grunts Pond or in the tickling grasses on Tumblers’ Ridge did any of us rid ourselves of the urges as a one-man ship of its ballast; but always the urges flooded back in and filled us with their distracting vigor and we would have to rid ourselves again, from fill to rid, fill to rid, nothing coming of our urgency but more urgency—urgency with nowhere to go. Urgency with nowhere to go is life in a suicide cycle.
Urgency had given New Eden years and years and years of life, but that life with us would end. We came as almost one to accept that a ship with too much ballast will at last sink under its un-unloaded weight, and one by almost one we did. The urges that had set sail on the shores of Grunts Pond and in the tickling grasses on Tumblers’ Ridge with no focused port, no shore in sight, only horizon and more horizon on the horizon, swamped us each and almost every. We wandered through our days in motion devoid of purpose, making do with our tasks, our needs, but without plans for making do again until it was time to make do again, repeating our days only because they repeated themselves. And this was how the desires for cousin on cousin as the years began to pass grew fewer and fewer, and with it the need for heart to heart grew less and less, and as urgency subsided to pastime and pastime became part of the past, the fluids we no longer needed dried to crust. There was nowhere to set sail for and no longer a reason. And we almost all of us sank to the murky bottom of life where loneliness doesn’t know what to do with itself.
This is what our middle years were made of: loneliness, stretching out a land bridge from the fullness of youth to the frailty of old age, day after day after day. Each and almost every one of us rode through these years as a barnacle on a hull, sticking to life more than living it, enacting the making do that makes up a life. We had our crops to tend, our chores, our mending, trees to fell and, when we fell, our holes to dig, and we did all of this as best we could as weather and wherewithal allowed. We had our Sunday Sit Downs and our tumblings; the Drells had their walkabouts, the Lopes their nightly howlings. The world around us modernized and moved ahead, and in small ways we let the modern world fill us with its urgency�
��its amps and volts, its rotary dials, the chug-a-lugs that did our farm work for us. But as the modern world around us moved ahead faster and further, we almost all of us in our own time unsuctioned from the hull of that progression. The sagging wires that had been strung from pole to pole down the center of town like a slack stitch through a temporary hem we were not sorry to see removed when the main road was forked at both ends, leaving the stretch in between unneeded. Like the main road through town with no destination up ahead we were unrouted from the voyage that is life, and no illumination stronger than a candle’s cast is needed when there’s nothing much to look for and nowhere to go in the dark.
Some of us were castaways together. Petie Soyle had Loma to light her way through these dark years, and all three Lopes had each other, despite each one’s frequent desire to rid herself of the other two. They were all to each of their siblings a ready presence that would serve the need for simple companionship in the daylight, or be a voice that called back in the dark when the night was too long to go through alone. In sibling-ness these five had a built-in buffer to unrelenting silence, but as they found—as we all found—noise alone was not enough of a comforting touch.
Urgency wants what it wants beyond mere want. And what it wants most of all is more than an echo, more than a shadow, more than the frictive slip of flesh in flesh. It was in our middle years that we came to understand that the distant shore we thought in our youth we would be the first to discover was not in fact urgency’s final destination. That land, out past where we could see ahead on the horizon, was but a barrier island off the coast of the real shore to be landed on—the land beyond the biological, far removed from the urgent, the undiscovered world where exists the deepest urgency of all: to attach one’s lonely fate to another’s. This is the real land bridge of life—the land bridge between birth and eternity.