Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  “But I could make somethin’ new outta the old one, that’s a pam-palimpsest, somethin’ easier than all those scientific names. So I went back—I hid that ruined book under my bed and said I lost it—my mom had to buy a new one for the library. I wasn’t allowed to bring any books home for like a month or two after that. But I had another way. I got one of my mom’s books, a big book of flowers, ‘cause you know how much she loved plantin’ stuff all over the place. Only handwork she ever did. So I took that book of my mom’s up there on that hill. I remember that day ‘cause a those big, fall clouds, you know the ones, late in the day when you ain’t sure if summer’s really gone or not? All those reds and whatnot makin’ everything down below look all rusty, like the world’s a big, ol’ rusty machine that ain’t no good to anybody anyhow anymore. Hm? Why that? ‘Cause it’s easier to tell flowers apart. So, one Sunday—we never went to church—I sat up there all day, and I went cloud after cloud after cloud,” the tip of her finger daubed at her palm, counting, “an’ I’d find a flower for it, simple names with shapes that I thought were kinda the same—dahlias for the big, puffy cumulonimbus ones; salvias the high, skinny ones; camellias all stacked up on top of each other—well, you get the idea. I wasn’t so much changin’ the meanin’ of them, of things—I was more like makin’ it all metaphor. Like a story turns itself inside out and becomes somethin’ other than what you think it is. Symbols. Clouds-into-flowers was the same thing. That’s what my brother called it. I showed it to them, my new book about flowers. I cut out all the pictures from my mom’s book and glued them over the pictures of clouds in the weather book. So I made a new book. Clouds-as-flowers. Ha. Dumb, right? I never liked stickin’ to one meanin’ of anything if I could make it easier to understand. “ She bent back, stared out the window, exposed her throat to him. “Some clouds were—are like gladiolus, snowdrops—“ she said softly, “Clouds as flowers on the grave of the sky.” Her neck flushed red. He didn’t hear her with anything except his ears, which is never, ever enough. He looked down at her thighs-as-prayers, at the pulpit between them with its scarlet cover. Hardly not a virgin, he reckoned her. Her head was so far back he could barely distinguish the lumen of her eyes from the sky outside, so close had he drawn to her. She didn’t flinch. “When I moved to the city to take over the framin’ store, I kept all those views I had up on those hills, all those clouds-as-flowers. But, you come to the city after bein’ spoiled silly by skies like those ones back home, skies full of flowers, and here it’s all cut off from you by all these giant buildings.” She pointed smoke at his chest without thinking. “I’d like it if maybe they’d all go away,” she made a circle with her fire, “’cept the windows, so we have other things beside our eyes to look through and then, yeah, I could see that sky again like I did up on those hills where I turned clouds into flowers.” She was quiet for a moment before she went on, “An’ we’d stand up there and look at our shadows—never seen ‘em that long. My brothers were always taller, but still—“

  Tell him the flowers.

  “No, now,” she laughed, “I don’t remember all of them. I lost that book I made up there, lost it somewhere along the way. I just—sorry, I told you I was no good at speakin’. I have another way to tell.”

  He didn’t hear this last or didn’t care to. That one, he pointed.

  She squinted, stood, turned, and leaned out the window. She was short, but she had high hips. He stood, too, and took her by these hips. “I dunno. Not everything’s a rose, right?” She studied the cloud in question. “Some big bushy flower. That’s a once and future raincloud.”

  Some big bushy flower.

  “Begonias?” She blushed from her nape down to her buttocks as he touched her here and there. “There were a lot of flowers to remember. As many as the clouds.”

  Everything was a rose. She bled like the same virgin over and over again every time they tried to make love. When was your first time, they’d ask each other. Just now, she’d say, and he would, too, just for the effect on her smoke-choked heart though, of course, she knew better, knew exactly what kind of brute he was. She even mapped it out for him: “Lies are the eighth sea,” she said when he called her out as a liar for saying she couldn’t speak and pinning her wrists to her sides, “the one just for drownin’ only.” She had an uncanny inflection that one hardly noticed mostly because she was so quiet. Not shy, just untroubled by the need for conversation. Withdrawn but withdrawn without, not within.

  “You can live a whole life always searchin’ and lookin’ out for what you lost or what you fear most. Or—you could simply love it.” She looked down in her lap. She was older. This was a different day. It was raining, for one. She looked insignificant, overlooked. On the table in front of her was an empty vase she was using as receptacle for the ash for the joint that she was smoking. Everyone else was milling about the house checking last-minutes.

  He wasn’t sure what to say so he tried something unfamiliar: he said nothing and thus didn’t lie to her.

  She wrote for him, never spoke. It was what she had been doing all along, but she was always too afraid to tell him and he never knew until it was too late. Was Weatherhead the culmination, crafted out of death? A jumble of stories about her? She’d tried to do it without words, but he had ignored her, buried her before her time. Everyone else thought that about her, too, Maggie already buried, written-off, taken away the corporeal Maggie Mechaine and her flesh and bone and roar and fox-custom and reduced her to sadnesses and great and lesser depressions. But she didn’t. She’d never be buried. They’d never get her.

  This was their last day in their old house and there was rain chilly rain on the day. Summer had come and gone. Autumn had been lost in the hills. All Maggie had to say when he said nothing was, “Not really sayin’ goodbye to much, are we?”

  They’d already loaded most of their things into the mouth of the truck that’d move their curse across a continent and then some, so they spent most of the morning cleaning and sidestepping boxes and each other. He went to her just-sold shop to gather up a few boxes of her personal things. Curious and still half-detecting for clues as to her whereabouts the past spring, he’d dug around her effects there, surreptitiously, as she made last-minute checks and prepared to hand over the keys. And what had he found? Three yellowing receipts taken off a register all for the same amount, $33.24. He looked at the date. November 1993. Almost eight years to the day. He put these in his coat as they made to leave her former concern. He never mentioned this to her, though, for it was sacred, made him feel scared, made her seem scarred.

  Scars need wounds, though and he reminded himself then, Maggie had always sworn off of suicide, ‘til that day when all those people fell out of the sky, the biggest mass suicide-by-fall on record, caught for posterity.

  Later, everyone came over one last time. Her niece was there to say goodbye to them. Nearly a woman, she was eleven or twelve, gregarious and sullen. She was losing her resemblance to her aunt, would be prettier, taller. In a conspiratorial hush, the niece told him of nine witches, sisters and brothers all, and their wars against each other over all kinds of arts and philosophies. She was a confusing little woman.

  His sisters had come, too, to the city to say goodbye, for who knew when again? All but the oldest came. His oldest sister had said of Maggie when he told her they were moving to Alaska, “They should’ve burned down the trailer park she oozed out of.”

  “Law of the wall,” Maggie squinted and said in reply when he repeated it for her benefit, but he wasn’t sure what she meant.

  Silver liked to take pictures of people scratching their chins. He remembered the one she took of Maggie that same day they fled to Alaska, she emailed it to him the summer after she died. Maggie’s head up like it was when the truck struck her, her white neck exposed, a come hither to vampires, her long, thin fingers crooked just under the chin itself, almost raking it, clawing out something, words maybe—

  Silver told Maggie about the before and after of
the chin-scratch. Maggie listened softly as they walked around the empty apartment arm-in-arm, aware of her own blood and no one else’s. Had she had enough of the world by then already? Conscious of the intimate workings of the long shadows, had Maggie already begun planning her long, winding journey to Weatherhead? It’d been those falling people, the autumn with people instead of leaves, trees losing their faces, bodies tumbling down, a hundred-n’-some, she told him once, who’d rather not die, burn, be crushed—no one was going to tell them how to die—so they jumped, they leapt out of those burning buildings—did they think, she wondered aloud to Silver as they paced the house, that maybe somebody might catch ‘em? God or somethin’? Suicide, she observed, is the end-all, be-all of power over one’s self. He remembered this muttered conversation because Silver, for once, said nothing, merely watched Maggie’s profile cheat the world at its own game. But Silver looked at him sidelong. Silver knew. Silver was the one who told him Maggie didn’t do the puzzles right. Silver was the one that said that memories don’t fit into a grave the right way, they keeping getting pushed out. Silver told him to write. Silver read to him now.

  They’d thrown a farewell party for him at work a week before they left. Maggie Mechaine saw Summer there one last time. The sight of her with child drove Maggie to teary laughter and they had to leave. “Don’t that just figger,” was all she’d wheeze between galloping guffaws and sobs. He fought off the urge to hit her for she had known a kind of truth: his conquests had been a last attempt to revive his uproarious, grand, fading machoism, a boy continuing his war against women. But he’d lost.

  Everyone was waiting outside. Maggie and Mal made one last pass through the empty home, a poet checking for useful, discarded meanings in earlier edits. On the sidewalk out front, she knelt down in the rain and checked the undersides of two abandoned tables. She’d drawn her hoodie severe around her faces, like a nun. She wouldn’t look at him. Not for the next 4000 miles. On the dashboard of the truck she taped her barometer. The glove-box was full of crossword puzzle collections, marijuana, and pornography.

  Now it was the first day in their lasthouse.

  Across a continent and then some, they’d driven, sleeping in separate beds, separate rooms when they could, barely speaking, Maggie’s face buried in puzzles and he’d seen her going back and reading them as if they were novels but he dared not ask. The only time she wasn’t pouring heavy metal into her ears was when it was her turn to drive. She’d sit there, delicate as time, behind the wheel of their truck, singing under her breath. She almost seemed happy when they broke out across the heaven-lorded Alaskan Highway and the country was fell and vainglorious for all the right reasons. At a popular hot spring some way up through the white country, with its longest shadows and its eastbound underground railroad to Weatherhead, he’d seen her naked for the first time in over a year, for an instant before with a whoop! she slipped out of winter and up to her neck, naked because no one else was there and when she climbed out ice formed in her hair. It was the first time he’d seen her laugh in over a year, too.

  Finally home to the new home that neither of them had ever seen but were both pleasantly surprised by, Maggie was tossing baseballs into the air and hitting them, well, crushing them into the head of the snowman Randy she’d built in their giant backyard, moustache and all. Some of them, the baseballs, still had red, faded hearts visible on them. It was dark and it shouldn’t have been. Neither one of them felt tired. Aghast, almost, but half splendid, she’d tucked herself away into the snow, an unfamiliar element to her, but if she were to fall in it, be scattered across it, and build an empire in winter, she’d need to come to know it, let it be familiar.

  She still had her same shabby old jacket on under his thicker coat. Over her hands were his woolen gloves. These only impeded her swing slightly. He shuddered and shivered nearby, smoking in that plain manner that the momentarily content have. She took a cigarette from him and planted it in the center of her rosy, ice-face. How hale and hearty she looked then, as she spoke of putting a cage in the backyard for herself when the weather turned, if it ever would. Bat over her shoulder, she eyed the bay window looking out on their small parcel of land. She confessed to loving the place. They had never had money. Maggie’s store had been a heretic’s dream, anti-profit and his job had never paid particularly well, always enough, but that was about it. Selling her store had given them for the first time in a decade a nice little cushion with which to begin piecing some kind of life together out here.

  He noticed then something strange as he listened to her speak of poverty and cages, and virgin windows that she hadn’t peered through: he listened to Maggie Mechaine the same way he used to listen to priests in church—that is, with a leaden sort of love, tilting forward as if ear and word were magnets ever-so-slowly drawn together, the meanings of the words dancing along the beam of the mutual appreciation of sermon and flock, of wife and husband—he wanted to draw her close, crush her to him, but like the priest she was unassailable, a tyrant over belief with her way of changing the meanings of things. Listen close, now, he warned himself from Weatherhead, for she reads from the book of faces—

  But this was no day for accusations and confessions. Those were over and done with. For once in as long as he could remember, she seemed pleased, specially attuned. He knew this by the way she put pitches to herself, which she had always disliked.

  The snowman’s head finally crumble-shattered and fell to its like. She stared at it for a long time. “Shit,” she finally said. She noticed him there in the cold again and nodded as if he’d just appeared. Had he found wells about?

  Not yet. He’d looked online a little, but no. He rolled a ball up and down his palm. He’d been so angry when he found these, litter of a Valentine’s long gone. He had thought another fellow had made them for her, had never thought she’d make ‘em for herself ‘cuz he didn’t. She’d never cheat.

  Why, he asked her back, didn’t she follow the weather anymore? Oh, she’d kept her barometer to monitor the rise and fall of the world, but her reams of graph paper had been abandoned some months back, and her eyes were whispers to the ears of the sky—barely palpable, a midnight’s poem that only the dreamer can hear.

  She leaned on her bat. Her breath swolly-frogged out of her lips as she answered between pants. It was because, she told him, because she used to very much feel a part of the clouds and the weather, even just a breeze, a raindrop, all part of the peace of a process that had been driven to pieces on the backs of the eyes of indifferent gods and natures. “I’m not afraid to die. I’ll just go storm somewhere else. That’ll be my adventure story.”

  He didn’t want to read about her death in a story, he said. “If anything ever happened to you, I don’t want to hear it that way. They can send messengers—four of them if they have to and wrestle me to the ground and tell me that way.”

  This made her smile. She nodded again. She went inside and locked herself up in the room she’d claimed. She slept for almost three days straight. When the movers ringed her fort with boxes she didn’t even stir.

  Running from fall had made her weepy-sleepy.

  She was watching a tape of the last World Series, the last one of her abbreviated life, angels vs. giants—it was almost biblical. But she didn’t care.

  It was their last day in their lasthouse. It was the day before the last day of March. Tomorrow was her deathday.

  Why are you showing me these moments, stranger? See how it bleeds. See how I crack. Here and here, on the skin, it wants to let in fall. Look, damn you—where you stabbed me—it still bleeds.

  He could face neither her nor the city. She mustn’t shatter again. I never knew her. She was always, to me, of one weather. There were others—all of them. She changed the meanings of things—

  The other thing was how they always change—but it’s never just once that they change into something else—but under all that, they’re still clouds-as-flowers. This was another first/last day now. Oh god, this w
as the last day she was alive.

  There was a storm of liquid fire cupped under her hand, a sort of vengeful image, one of wrath. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her knuckles pressed into her thigh, never mind what the fingertips smoked. As she did this, his own fingers mediated the war in her spine, trickling and tickling there. Disguised as beasts, disguised as one flaw, one temperature, and an idea as old as man, that is, death, animated by the extension of their rhythms from their sex into a place somewhere outside of time, where their fetters fell. She was a goddess beheaded in her own temple, a vulpine blasphemy, a beast to churches, autumn as nature’s suicide. They buried themselves in each other, a pair of mutually reinforcing crypts. She looked at the game only once more, when that angel hit that three-run homer and cinched the deal.

  She didn’t scream. She laughed.

  When she died or when she came.

  Yes.

  They never found the truck that killed her, did they, that drove into her? She laughed when nothing hit her and she laughed when you put nothing in her.

  He had wanted nothing more than to put a joyous knife in her gut that morning of her last day, suck on the dark parts of her sex and her menace. His long-suffering memory trembled under her long-gone, deadly touch. Her mouth was hot, as it always had been—the seven colds are a myth—and when he surfaced from the kiss and drew in a ragged breath, their sweats eyed each other warily.

  She always fell asleep right away, she always had. Her sleep wasn’t fitful even that last night before she died. She had never been one to lay awake in the darkness thinking doomly things; she did that in the darkness of the days. Did she ever dream? He couldn’t recall her ever telling him a dream except for the last night they spent together.

  She woke again around noon. She had a naked look on her face. He remembered when Maggie’s mother died, Maggie refused to be in the room for the final dice-roll, that last gamble with death, so he’d gone in with Louis, Maggie’s brother. The mother’d had that same exposed look on her face, but not one of shiftiness that signaled anything suspicious, for she was innocent in those last days, but one of expectant nonexistence. The dying woman’s face opened up, a light that was the opposite of thunder seemed to take possession of her features and whatever hardness was there was lost. She didn’t smile up at him. She merely nodded, passing acquaintances, the giant man who’d married her only daughter. He’d watched her die. That was the only time he ever held another man’s hand.