I know autumn by heart.
She did and he knew how.
She knew how all things fall—out of windows, birds before bats—she knew falls, autumns—the flutter of faces to the ground like leaves to be plucked up by virgins and woven into dresses. Thing was with Maggie, she could no longer countenance or endure the brutality of such a season, of such a world for such a season. She begged him to hit her. She tried to smash her frames to pieces—but autumn wouldn’t let her.
Why? There are those subscribed to melancholies who love autumn by gothic default and/or obligation. Then there are those who love autumn by necessity for it is the road to winter and all its delights. Maggie Mechaine loved it because it made her swoon, it brought to her lips and cheeks a certain ruddy sexuality that one usually associates with spring, the time when all things are fucky. It made her alive—not its smell, or the crispness of the air—she could care less about these things—no, it was autumn’s momentum to something past everything else, that it represented a moment where death had no dominion and thus the future was powerless; a moment where birth was moot and thus the past was powerless. It was a third thing. It was simply right now.
Too, it might have been thus with Maggie Mechaine because she was born in the autumn. Or perhaps it was what Silver testified to as, “She was autumn people”, whatever that meant. Or maybe it was just as simple as the idea that, infinitely whole in her madnesses and furies, Maggie Mechaine was an autumn in-and-of-herself: as large as life and twice as natural, a momentum to something past everything else, falling to pieces. This was, he thought, the only way one could explain foxes-in-laps, her oracular powers (he bet she knew where the leafs—she never called them leaves, because nothing ever really does—would land before they turned the color of her hair), and the faces pressed between the pages of her book. She’d collected faces instead of leaves or flowers. She was the point at which the event-to-come ricocheted back at the moment of its birth: she was an autumn in-and-of-herself.
“Fall’s a time when you can be sure of one thing.”
“Death,” he easily-wrong filled in the blank, writing in the air with an invisible pencil.
Her lips pursed as if hadn’t she just told him it had nothing to do with it? “Nooooo. More like bein’ born again or knowin’ that you will be. Like love. It always comes back n’ gets born again. It never falls out of a tree, hits its head and gives up the ghost.” She hugged herself since she was autumn. It embraced her back.
He watched this and wondered wasn’t that spring—‘rebirth’?— and fought the urge to fold her up against him like a season herself, one scented with pot and fox, so he could trap her there, make her never end. And ‘like love’? How could she ever love him again after all the times he—
She was autumn people. All the barrow boys loved her. They’d take bones out the troughs and arrange ‘em into hearts on the paths they knew she took when she went down to the river to wash the swords.
Did she blush or become furious when she saw them? That made no difference to him. He saw himself look over at her. He could see heaviness yet heavens in her hands as she prepared her foghorn. He’d once wondered, in those moments of frailty that wish us to test the boundaries of others’ brittleness out of succor, what it’d feel like to snap one of her fingers, break the bone. Not out of malice, but because it was just one of the many, many things that he’d never know about his wife. He watched these fingers with a hunger for several minutes before he realized she was staring back at him and waiting for something—waiting for him to say something.
He wouldn’t, so she went on instead, speaking in that way that he never quite heard or noticed until now, far after the fact, “Fall reminds us to keep in the thick of battle, not to fall behind the march with death, not to stray too far ahead, all alone. We gotta be where we are, not stare through other people’s eyes and mirrors. That’s why I love fall: it helps me not to forget that we die someday but it also helps me not to forget that everything returns to where it was, maybe with a different face, maybe in a different place, but it does come back.”
Why, then, had she wished to flee their city to live in a place without fall and falls? He could almost hear her saying, I will become the slow trickle of red on the white, white earth. That was easy for him to say: he’d picked up all her leaves once already. Except she hadn’t left, had she? She’d been right there with him all along, just like she said. Nothing ever really dies, especially when you press it like leafs, flowers, and faces between the pages of a story, put it in Weatherhead where it can live, be safe and horrible, be fall and fell.
“That story about the fox,” her brother said, “that was true. I actually knew the guy who found her. I’d sent him down from the city and let him hunt off my parents’ land. Did she ever tell you about the time she tried to get a jigsaw puzzle high?” He didn’t think he’d ever heard his brother-in-law laugh before now, post-sister. And where was the younger brother no one ever spoke of? The sister had been dead for a month and not-a-word.
He listened patiently to the story (he’d seen her try this multiple times) and while he did he thought again of autumn and how Maggie Mechaine had been robbed of it. Or had she? Maybe she had carried it with her to the very end. She must’ve been, by his reckoning, half-leaf by the age of 30 anyhow. Maybe that’s what had given her the power to scatter-die, only to be gathered up and born again into something else. Who would’ve thought it’d be in Weatherhead? She hated to travel, so much so that he’d been surprised when she wanted to flee to Alaska, but by then she just couldn’t take it anymore and autumn’s armor had begun to rust, perhaps. Yes, she hated to travel.
“My daddy used to say to us that it was better to eat shit at home than eat gold lost somewhere else.”
“Could you shit gold, though, after that, maybe?”
This brought giggles. They lay on their backs with their eyes taking aim at the sky and making the clouds tear slowly apart under the fusillade of their stares. She’d been asking him about his war, his brief stints of travel around the country, in Europe. She didn’t often ask him about his life, his time in the army, or anything really, anything other than what was happening around them just then. In this way she lived in the moment, the present was a bouquet she kept tightly pressed between her breasts, so she could take big, deep, gulping breaths out of it. Once it wilted she’d let it dangle from her fingers for a few moments, trail it in the dust, let it slip to the ground before she took up another one. She didn’t disdain the past or memory, he thought, she just liked where she was. But she hated where she was, he caught himself. Didn’t she?
“Why put it like that—‘do I ever just want to escape somewhere’,” she called to him lazily across the grass. He feared it would be more ghosts and such. He stared at their boat between his feet, then at Maggie. She had the pilfered Lite-Brite on her stomach and she was making a daisy-dazed map with the yellow and red pegs. “Man, I don’t know where I’d go. I’m fine where I am. Need an escape?” She raised her head a little and stared at his question. “Escape from what?”
This surprised him not a little. Five years they’d been together now and he knew her well enough to know that Maggie Mechaine was the baroness of the dodge, the flight ‘cause there was this kind of little sliver of darkness or sadness or something that he caught glimpses of from time to time which eventually lead to him strong-arming her into her one and only encounter with the mindful arts. Oh, they call it science. He’d see it in the way she haunted her card table full of puzzles, the way her scoliosis-free spine, the source of all her movements would ridgeback through her t-shirt with sighs invisible to the ear; the way she dug her nails into pencils; the different pitches of her laughter when high—they betrayed a dependence on the filthy airs for joy.
Didn’t she want to flee? He thought of her by that point as such a troubled self that the eminence and imminence of a Way Out could only but appeal to her, right?
“I’m fine where I am,” she repeated,
settling down in the grass, “Oh, I’d prolly have to make up a new place if I did go, place ta wait and wait for everybody else to catch up to me.” Like you, she didn’t need to say.
“That’s funny to hear coming from someone who’d rather play ball in a cage than on a field. You don’t strike me as so ‘born free’.” He spread his hands out as he sang.
She didn’t look up, just stared at the massacre in the sky. “Funny ha-ha or funny weird?”
“Funny both. Neither. I dunno.” He swore under his breath at her. She eroded his patience with her claim to peace.
“You’re right!” She steam-rollered several times until she bumped into him. She climbed on top of him and marveled at the gush of jingly wish-coins out of his pocket. “It is kinda funny.” Leave-leaf stuck in the back of her hair and she smelled like dirt and she tasted like the sound of a rake combing autumn’s hair: sort of gold and red all at once—honey and blood.
⧜
He left her back there, though, the dark part of her.
He walked through the mourning thinking he could find the rest of her. He’d done this, though, since he’d arrived, to no avail. Without light and sun, Weatherhead was a dark adapt for eyes the size of a world. Eyes that could find nothing. Mostly.
That morning he thought he saw Mal, saw someone who looked just like him ducking down a side street clutching a bag of what looked like chalk. His heart leap and he gave chase. Mal, his best friend, the object of his jovial prejudice and his fraternalities, Mal, who knew Maggie Mechaine through and through, Mal, who’d have made her a fine husband—black mountain refugee or no, Mal would have answers. He always did when it came to Maggie. Like Silver, he had a peculiar way of knowing her that he himself had never possessed. Mal would have an answer.
“Push her in a puddle if you don’t believe me,” Mal said.
“Do what?” Mal was attempting to commiserate but there was no common misery here. Mal wanted for nothing, but, neither, he was trying to tell his idiotic friend, did he. “Whaddya mean push her in a puddle?”
By way of illustration, Mal pushed her in a puddle. It was a simple matter of putting his palms face-out, at right angles to Maggie’s back, which was right in front of them, and giving her a rough shove. Mal’s girlfriend stared eagle-eyed down at Maggie who was ass-hand-feet sprawled out in water. Mal’s girlfriend never spoke. Maggie was laughing. There were a lot of Maggies radiating out from Maggie Prime in the ripples her disturbance upon the surface caused. They were suddenly both beautiful and terrifying for it looked, for all the world, as if she’d sat right down in the center of a watering eye to bathe in its tears.
“Find what she loves here,” Mal whispered to him.
He was sick of other people telling him how to comprehend his wife. “I know what she loves.”
“Then make her love it more.” Mal reached down and seized Maggie’s wrist, yanked her out of the puddle, kissed her forehead, told her happybirthday and begged her to filth him. She couldn’t stop laughing, refused vengeance, and they went out to eat anyhow with a half-mudded Maggie Mechaine who spent the evening wringing herself out all over the place as she got golden-spun drunk off of a strange sort of amber-hued dust that had angered so many wizards that a good decade’s worth of lightning had been summoned down on its head and turned it, first into glass, then into liquid. This was how Maggie referred to ‘beer’. “Still fuckin’ alive!” she cussy-clinked her glass profanity against Mal’s.
Hardly wounded from her self being pulled out from under her, the conversation eventually turned to death and immortal design. She had the hiccoughs now, too, which rendered her ankles bent inward and her philosophies a’tumble tic. Her teeth chattered with each convulsion of her poor, white throat. “They b-believed that the s-steam ris-rising from a b-body was the soul.”
“Shit does that, too, though,” he pointed out.
“M-m-mine doesn’t,” Maggie crowed. She stared down into her glass and swirled its contents around. “I’d have made a good puddle-jumper.”
Mal smiled. “You’d make a good little airplane? Those’re little airplanes. They use ‘em up in Canada, Alaska instead of taxis.”
“Why not,” she yelled. “Sure would.” She put her squint on him, her husband. “Do you have your gun with you?”
“No—“
“Shoot.”
She was so drunk he found her stark naked when he came home. She’d removed all her clothes for absolutely no reason whatsoever because he’d already spent himself in Summer after Mal and his girlfriend had taken stumble-tucked Maggie home. He’d expected the latter-wife to be in bed but when he’d arrived she was walking down the stairs towards him all naked and what-not and his own punch-fuzz drunkenness made her bleed into each and every one of her movements in succession, a smudge of Maggie Mechaines, trails of Maggie Mechaines, all of her movements stored up until now unleashed in a sodden, muddy torrent.
“Where’re your clothes,” he laughed nervously. He had the muck of the other woman all over his primals and needed to keep this white evolution away from them.
“They got lost. N’ ran away. They were all wet—I dunno why. I tried to make a trail so I wouldn’t get lost comin’ over the stairs—“ He followed her gesture. There were puzzle pieces everywhere, strung and flung about in little rivulets of cardboard throughout their rooms.
She daubed her spit and drew on his face. “Me a mirror,” she whispered and she knew then, didn’t she, because of the way she frisked him with her hands and nose. “Yer coat’s broken,” she wheezed. She reeked of six kinds of smoke while he reeked of offcunt.
Damn, that sounded Weatherhead. How long had Weatherhead been with them?
⧜
He was brought up short by the quickening of the chase, his chest roaring all hollow up at him and the wind within chafed against the wind without and he stopped, panting, in the street. A disturbing creeping awareness stole over him as he watched this apparition flee. It couldn’t’ve been Mal. No, Weatherhead was becoming a desperate place. Her seizure of the faces had made the townsfolk warier than normal, walking around, pulling at jowls, noses, and chins as if to hold them in place, hold them down for fear of the gravity-ending knives of the ruler of Weatherhead. And the city was growing new ones to replace those taken by her, fetching them out of her, out of him, he thought.
No. Mal would never have come here, no matter how much he could walk all over Maggie Mechaine. Desperate and enormous, he set out to find the only other thing that could help him. He went to find Love. He had come to the part in the red sea story where he’d either drown when it all came crashing back down around him or build a nest in her wet hair forever and ever.
He found Love quartered in a camp of sorts, a makeshift trigger-brothel they’d patched up under a collapsed awning. They’d hung their guns and bandoliers up as curtains. He parted them and stepped through and was greeted with genial backslaps and cuffs by the ruffians.
He exchanged skin about the hands with Frank and whistled a few bars of “Love for Sale” at him. Frank grinned and shook his head. He was flesh that you didn’t realize you had eaten until you looked down at your kill: he made one feel full yet guilty.
He nodded to Rapey. Fuck any more of my old furniture?
Rapey waggled his shaggy, blank head , guffawed, and asked after an apparently promiscuous footrest he’d noticed in a place called Alaska. How alike they were in that moment, he saw, what with their invisible faces and their pioneering milks! Rapey was in a corner talking loudly with the Colored Girl who, never quick to tears but quickened by a cruel capacity for losing solitudes, tossed a sly look in his direction. She was the kind of woman, he thought, who, covered in tattoos, only shows you one at a time, for a nickel each, in a barely-lit room when you’re fourteen. He knew that it was said of her in certain lands of the western marches, Your horse’d die of dry ‘fore you remembered to water it you’d stay by her so long.
As Rapey discursed on the seducing of upholstered in
nocents, she said, Plain green over plain brown and shook her head in disapproval. She took no truck with the violent eroticism of Rapey’s feng shui. Why not just become a carpenter himself, she wondered. She didn’t like furniture. An upturned crate or the simplicity of dirt was sufficient for her.
Mr. Moustache greeted him with a pair of thin smiles and took his hand. They’d check his pitch while he was here, if he didn’t mind much.
Formalities, Mr. Moustache declared with an apologetic shrug.
D sharp minor, Frank announced gloomily when they’d finished.
Same as hers. Even Rapey had gone all suddenly somber on him. He exchanged a concerned snarl with the Colored Girl, his sister.
S’all the same to the sigh o’ da world, Frank murmured, touching a hand to his ear.
Love fell silent. He loved listening to their talk, like a blanket by fireside by trail, banter from a time when roads could still be said to wend and row against hoof and wagon wheel and travel alone was a poor choice for suicide for no one’d see you for miles around, though your coin be spread all across the territory, across the frontier, it’s not as if they’d mouths to tell the tale—one more wayward soul lost on the road to hell. Except now their silences were rushed and heavy and they spoke in tongues so foreign to him as to be soundless.
Mr. Moustache eyed him gravely from above and below and it was clear from the sigh in his eyes that the time had come when all of their charge’s guesses and questions-inside-answers and possibilities and probabilities had come to be too much. But still Love stood silent, waiting for the first askings.
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