Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Maggie, on her last day, had the same ripening look on her face. It was, he guessed later, different to know precisely when you’re going to die and how—to have that end-all, be-all completely in your control—and this must’ve made her happy, the same way she’d fidget-finger over images of those jumpers that September, trying to see their faces. They knew, she always said, in a way all the others that day didn’t: there is a bliss and contentment in organizing your own demise. She moved through that day, the curator who hears the distant thump of war approaching, moving through the talking museum, gathering up all her masterpieces.

  She was boxing up all her jigsaw puzzles. In her great need to be dead, she must’ve come to terms with the fact that nothing could go with her, especially the unsolved. This was not true, but neither of them would know that until they reunited in Weatherhead with fugitive, furtive suspicions sniffing about each other’s heels. She stared for a long time at the painting of the Lady of Shalott that Silver had given her. Her fingers fiddled at her throat while she did this.

  “Are you okay? Why are you taking all your puzzles apart,” asked the He-of-Then who knew better but wouldn’t. “Need some company?” He wondered at the impudent serenity drawn on her face. Not a storm in sight.

  Then she was outside. Standing perfectly still, Maggie studied the clouds from their backyard. They were so indistinct, she used to say, an orchard smeared in paint on the sole of the sky. This made him remind her of her clouds-as-flowers. She smiled curiously. She’d forgotten about that old story, an old sort of poetry to the tune of the life of Maggie Mechaine, more evidence than truth. She began laughing—quietly at first, a sighing, soughing sound, the uncomprehending move of winds between graves—but then she broke daffy and, elevated onto her tiptoes in the snow, she doubled forward with a violent pitch, laughing her socks off, holding her sides. She’d finally gotten the big joke, maybe.

  “Oh,” she gasped, trying to catch her breath, “shit!” She’d forgotten something. She seized his hand and together they tore inside. They made love again, red-as-naked, heavy-tongued jeers at the rest of fate, her white shaking belly fought against his darker one—she didn’t even know she was dead yet—then, they collapsed in a heap together and she put on what she’d forgotten. This was the only movie she ever watched more than once. Why, he asked? “Because they’re all on a journey that no one wants to be on but they go along anyway. ‘Cause they have to.” She pointed at the screen. “Clark is—“

  “God?”

  She nodded, rough. Yep. “The only one who’s excited.”

  That night, the night before he drove his truck into her, they went out to eat. They were hollowed out, eyes and loins n’ all, by the furies of Saint Fuck. He stared across the table at her. It was as if nothing were to happen, had ever happened. She shook the paper open as a magician might. She only read the newspaper for three things: Miss Manners, the crossword, and, when they lived back East, to check up on the Pirates. She folded the paper and set it aside, Miss Manners read. For Christmas one year, he’d gotten her a Miss Manners reader. “Regimented courtesy,” the daffish, matronly, bookstore woman had called it.

  “Ain’t it funny how half of life on Earth dies if it gets taken out of the dirt and we, when we die, we go in the dirt.”

  “Funny ha-ha?”

  She wouldn’t say. She was already halfway to Weatherhead even then and had been asked nothing in return for her passage. Did Maggie speak of the approach of death? “I always thought it’d be like—I dunno—something more comfortable, maybe.” Or was she talking about life? “Or something familiar. It’s just like hitting a pitch like you’d throw to me—I’d never know how to hit it—not for a while. I never knew you. See, I get to choose when and where I do everything that I do. Even when and where I die. I know the pitcher. Its equivalent to death. No one tells me.”

  With only air between them, the sucking breaths that their long shadows exchanged, these patches hidden under the light were still making love, she told him what she wanted him to do. She’d drawn a coupla maps—

  He left the table. In the corner stall, he crossed himself secretly, for the first time in years. Tears-as-rain beat against his face. She was as calm as carrying your shoes by the sea.

  He sat back down across from her. “I got tickets to the World Series for you—for your birthday.” Her thirtieth birthday was that year.

  She burst into tears so violent they had to leave. “Too late.”

  She was already gone when he woke up. And that was it. He quietly got dressed and picked up his keys where she’d left them on the table by the door.

  Just before he’d fallen asleep, she, as natural, curled naked around him and told him a story about a road by the sea. “The sky,” she whispered when she was finished, “and the sun is usually outside the window.”

  She leapt inside and kicked midnight to the side.

  ⧜

  We drown, but merely wet our lips on the ocean.

  We hang, but merely brush off the tickle on our throats.

  We poison ourselves, but merely cough at the bitterness.

  We fire, but merely wince at the muzzle-flash.

  We drive over, but merely begin another journey.

  Dark stares came from her perch. His coarse, hoarse words hadn’t stopped her bleeding. In the hollows of darkness, all he could see was her forehead and the long bridge of her nose.

  (45 Down) I am the Bare Wall Behind the Mirror.

  She was, honest-to-god, a red tornado that morning, that morning after Weatherhead fell into madness.

  A tornado, he explained, as now he knew how, is the most joyous of winds: the winds that rip and rape the land. It is an Ekman plus.

  She stood, one foot up on a dirt rise in the place where the grove once stood, arms crossed. A swatch of red down her side completed her, blood from the sweet-knife. She’d stripped the faces off her dress, leaving a ragged white slip jagged around her legs. The faces had been nailed to the posts of a fence that stretched across the far end of where the grove had once stood. Their mouths and eyes opened and closed in the wind, the worst of many horrors he’d seen in this place. She’d turned them to face Weatherhead. Her dusty coat she’d lain across his on this same fence. Framed by the distant oranges of burning Weatherhead, she looked back at him where he sat on his knees, exhausted and conquered. Ekk-man? Who is the Ekk Man?

  He ignored her and continued. Despite all you know, he told the ruler of Weatherhead, for now he was desperate, Valentine’s Day was his dead-wife’s favorite holiday. She had never been one to disparage it as commercialized waste. No, she saw it as the grandest of days, the day to nourish one’s empty lap, to rent graffiti for the backs of bites—simply, it was the day Love was for sale, Love was for hire. Valentine’s Day was, for Maggie Mechaine, Mercenaries’ Day.

  Her ears pricked up at this term, but a frown still buttoned the base of her face. Valley tines—is that a tuning fork in yonder hills—

  You know the word. She shook her head. You must know it, he insisted, to give it a different meaning, for without the original meaning there can be nothing for the new word to differ from. He was almost shouting at her now, straining against the rope binding his hands behind his back. It is the alchemy-poetry of Weatherhead, the winds-in-the-bees. So: the weather begins a shaking awake sense of vibration in one’s blood and bones that you may follow out through your arms and legs and tongue, to your fingers, toes, and lips. It can shake loose a scarecrow—this made her smile—or rustle the skirts of a beautiful overlady—she liked this word—or change a girl raised by the country into a tyrant mother-of-the-city. Really you should have stayed where you were. But the meanings of things are never weather-resistant.

  Sound Weatherhead logic, her shrug agreed. A riot broke out atop a distant building. A burst of gunfire, screams, and laughter reached their ears. They both ignored it.

  If she wanted to be in the thick of battle ‘til time’s end, if she’d once begged him to hit her to
prove he loved her, if she’d once cried out to be spat upon—or was that Summer, not Fall?—she’d gotten it. With her plain ol’ country charm and wicked-witch, bow-shaped smiles, she watched him speak through the mirror she rode through the air on, now leaning against a boulder nearby, as she spat glances over its top edge at her far-off crumbling city and, anxious, she listened to him as he continued, pacing back and forth, hand pressed to the wound on her side, aware of blood.

  Valley Tine’s Day, he went on, conceding, is a finely-tuned day red and fat with flowers! He looked in desperation at the edgily-lightening clouds above. And my wife, she loved this day. The rituals of the day were different every time. One year it was baseballs with hearts painted on them, hidden inside of Randy—Randy was a device for pitches—no, not those kind!—and this device threw these heart-seams-hards at her. Another year she broke in her own shop and put all the frames in the shapes of hearts all over the walls and pretended it wasn’t her. Another year we went to a movie and somehow she managed to handcuff herself to her chair and pour a box full of rose petals all over herself until it was half-past her shin deep. And—he faltered and frowned and stammered, somehow— I was—removed from the building—and she was left there drowning in uncommon scents.

  The ruler of Weatherhead turned back to him and screwed up her face and laughed roughly, It was you. You did all this for her. You keep saying that she did it, liar. She turned away for a moment but in the mirror he could see an unpleasant tremble about her lips. Why do you say it in a way that sounds like blame, as if you’re blamin’ her for doing those things? You’re afraid to blame yourself? Why blame? No one ever did those things for me—

  He’d heard it: the drawl had slipped back into her harsh speech. It was difficult on Valley Tine’s to tell each other apart, I guess. He frowned. It’s always one of those days when we can’t tell who is who, like everybody’s walking around with a mirror on their face.

  The act of love blends like the thick of a riot out in the street, she nodded at Weatherhead without turning back. I speak often with Love and marvel at their strange, violent ways. Your pitched battles with your dead-wife on this warday you speak of, Valley Tine’s, are sound battles and I wager that their ends were filled with all sorts of joyous noises of rapes-against-stall walls, balled-up menus stuffed into mouths, and or the tracing of white fire down her neck?

  No, it’s not like that. Love—they’re bandits because they steal in and out and of and from. That’s what Love does. They are an act of violence, it is a crime, but not in the way you’re talking about.

  Is that what you did? Steal?

  Maybe not enough, I guess. It’s like this—I dunno, it’s hard to explain. He almost added, ‘never having been in love’, but he was no longer so sure this was true. He had once wanted it to be, this he did know, but crimes aren’t ultimatums against goodness and beauty and love: they’re assurances of it. Why didn’t he commit more crimes with Maggie Mechaine instead of in spite of her? He could cheat, lie, and ignore her—he could do these things to her but he could never be bothered to do these things with her.

  And look how death had rewarded him! With this beast and her wealth of atrocity.

  Suddenly she thrust her hands out in front of him. He looked down at them. There was blood caked there and other things. A mess of string bar-brawled about her knuckles and what-not, tied here and there in disparate, chaotic knots, some fingers bound together, others pulled apart, wound and wound in nets and cat’s cradles and nooses looping here and there, dodging in and out of her palms and the wells between her thumbs and forefingers—

  You’ll have to try harder than that to bind me. She flexed her fingers, bent her wrists, tugged her hands apart and all the strings broke. He noted that her hands were wet, too, as if trailing in water. He’d tried—tried to stop her bleeding with memories, tried to woo her ears with the foot-stamp single long shadow of love-once—but they, his pasts, were still of an uneven quality: would it be the banditry of Love or the scabrous cheer of Hate that undergirded them? Would he, indeed, have to kill her again? Was this what Love had wanted him to do with the sweet-knife? Had Hate given him the engine, Love the throttle? The vicious circle of baiting, unprivate suffering, and his routine public beatings at her hand did not bode well for the ache that he felt in his jaw, his sternum, his fingertips that wanted to drum on the nape of her neck. Her bleeding into the dirt and his by her hand was mere inks for the margins of the illuminated manuscript that was the story of Weatherhead. Blood was blood, on her hand or his, it didn’t matter who was using it as ink: he’d shared one and only final crime with her, the one that’d sent her here. Now he’d have to go it alone, finish the story before they were finished rewriting their lives in a whole new language, the language of Weatherhead. He was only half-right. He was just as much as a translation as she was, a cacophony of the ruins of once-fresh memories thrown up by the crisis of nature we call ‘death’ but he was wit-wise enough now to ken that there was no such thing. March was her empire, yes, she ruled all the things inside and outside the windows, the windows themselves, but she had no domain over that which held them up. No—she’d rejected that, exiled it, eviscerated her city of all that which time carved onto space: weather, sun, and season; now the city itself. If he could but strike her down—maybe Hate was right—there is something passionate in death, something fixed and corporeal—maybe he’d been wrong all along. The sharp and toothful erosions of winds and rains destroyed, only the snow preserved. Dead in winter, shattered, and rebuilt—

  With a ruffled, quiet disturbance putting grind on the side of her jaw, she swept the remains of these strings into her palm and tossed them into the dirt at her feet. If you please, she cleared her throat, would you describe another of these holy-daze?

  Eager to change the subject, he obliged, and he was describing Halloween to her when the word ‘hex’ was mentioned. She cut him off with a slashing gesture in the wind before him, leapt to a crouch in front of him.

  Hex! This word I know!

  He brightened. Okay. What is it?

  This is a hex. And she grabbed him roughly by the front of his coat and pressed her lips to his for the very first time ever and forever again. Her breath was a thief’s hand over his face. It’s a glue for the breath and breadth of souls, she hush-tongued into his mouth, it keeps the sounds fine. The maestro stroke. It keeps score. Hexes are a kind of color-o’form.

  One of her generals appeared just then, with a hem and a haw and a toe scrape in the ground. Several others appeared behind him. She shot to her feet and snowfall hardened on the balcony of her brow, nose, chin—

  He studied their surroundings, so changed the were.They were outside the city, in the place where she’d bled into the earth by her holy will to feed Weatherhead, the place of the grove, of the lasthouse. Except now this place was empty, saintless—the house was gone, as was the well that’d been nearby.

  Somehow, last night, they’d made their way out of the slowly spreading autumn begun there in the arena where he’d stabbed her as Weatherhead stood around them, engulfed in all that is fall and fell about her, their would-be ceaseless goddess, their pitches a confusing disillusion reinvoked from the depths and bogs of their throats and loins, all the eyes of Weatherhead on her, leaning there, leaning over her knees in the center of the arena with a knife in her side. Blood! Weakness! In the confusion after he’d bested her, he’d thrown her under his arm and stole her body away, as the citizenry panicked and fell to pieces. Crowds stormed through the streets, invigorated by her apparent defeat by his knife, calling out for and summoning her blood, the dark cellars had spilled forth wines of violence and hatred, centuries of pent-up anger and hostility towards her imperious, bloody rule ended with a crackle, boots-on-lice. Figments tore through the streets with tear- and soot-smeared faces, emerging from the pitch-laden dizzydark with the invisible riches that form part of murder, weal, and rape, weapons in their hands, and he caught glimpses of Sir Burn and the others, bla
ckened and reddened by fuel-soaked rags and fumes, makeshift weapons held aloft, brow-beating the citizens into action.

  Find her! Find her!

  Parts of Weatherhead were on fire, he could see from their vantage point in the grove. It’d taken her blood to free the carefully imprisoned season, to steepen their madnesses. She’d told him this as they back-alleyed and coat-huddle-headed their way to her sanctum, the garage where he’d tended her wound with the past, where Love had found them, and where, in the pitch of night her war council of generals had come for her, to smuggle her out of the city. That was his first inkling that this had all been staged, the false-fall of Weatherhead. The generals had seized him, roughed him up a little while she watched with approval, fingering with a coy playfulness the dagger he’d used to stab her. He’d then been bound at the wrists and marched through the ashen, storm-calloused alleys until they reached a part of the false wall around Weatherhead that he’d never seen before, a door made out of flowers that they’d sank and stepped through, the aromas cloying and almost nauseating, you could hear the petals sough and sigh as you moved into them, like stepping into a monastery made of velvet reek and sex-smudged foreheads bobbing up and down.

  Outside Weatherhead, at the head of the convoy, peering like hell towards heaven, she passed through the leg-high grass with the saintless, levelling city in revolt behind her and then they came to the grove. He recognized the place though it was empty, the house gone; all that was left was just a thick of reddish, dying grass. The plains were burning but not from fire but fall. Happy-as-dagger made her face both softer and harder somehow.