Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

Their embrace above the plain ended once and for all the last vestiges of the misery of the world. They were complete and together, they filled each other to the brink of drowning and then washed away off of each other, tide teasing toes, their entire beings expanding outward together in a perfect, infernal struggle—they became the sky, became those who bathe in dawn at midnight, possessors of an inheritance long abandoned by gods and goddesses who bathed in light and darkness, possessors of the eyes that see beauty in broken things, seeds planted in death, breakers of the dead, breakers of the colossal immobility of sex and strange, breakers of each other.

  At the frame shop, she spent all her time filling frames up with other people’s things, precious things, invocations. She was a jailor, she’d once said. In their extremity now, the violence of their art was set free, unleashed, the frames turned inside out, the story of Weatherhead was but prologue, life but an implosion preceding the white-blind eruption of self-devouring love with which they would conquer the plain.

  He remembered how she was always about to tell him things but it seemed she’d wait too long and the thought would turn into a yawn in the mouth. He’d stand or sit and watch her lips part and close, part and close, her enduring blues wandering about the room before settling on him. Weather is a fickle thing, it bends to all sorts of whims and whimsies—even in her grim sleep of the living she had borne an uncertain face. Now he had set her free, free of the frame of the page. All her faces in those sketches, emotions he had never seen, hers never there, they were hers forevermore.

  No, they had never had a child, never succeeded at anything, really, had been scrounging for all their years together, barely scraping by, never not poor, cheating and lying, melancholy and wasteland—and life had tried to trap her, frame her, torment her with its sadnesses and minor tragedies, but she’d fallen through the frame in the end, hadn’t she? She’d become the art. She was the perfect expression of her dangerous, tenacious will to live and on her own terms, and isn’t that what death is for some? A blood-driven dissidence? The day is a temple to weather. The night is a well for weather.

  Spread aloft and choking the world with their undesperate nudity, they stood slicked in imbriferous drippings and he asked her why she kept frames hanging everywhere still.

  They’re there, she said, looking up and turning around slowly and he stroked her throat, because frames—you can never tell how far away they are. How big they are. They could be anywhere, anyhow. To some people, the empty frames might suggest an intimacy with infinity if placed correctly, remember?

  When it happened, he swallowed at the mention of her death, did all the panes in you break?

  She was quiet for a moment. His fingertips rested on her voice. Her answer was another puzzle. I never would’ve known where you ended and I began if we had had a little baby, she finally answered, we could’ve never been broken.

  He knelt before her and buried his head in her loins, the place for confession, the place where their child would grow. In me, you’d been dead for years. That night you made the suns appear in our house—that night on the boat, on another kind of birthday, when you summoned the sun at midnight—

  He wept then, and she let him for a moment, for he deserved a little woe every now and again, as all lovers do, but then she drew him down where they say and she cradled his head and she read him her sketchbook. She turned a page over. He brushed a finger over it. 51 sketches for the 51 Maggie Mechaines.

  “What windows?” Before she knew it the eye had changed. She never took kindly to it. She was just one of those people. “These’re windows you can’t fall out of, Little Miss Ladders.”

  Oh, this was then again, one last time—

  That smoke and fall of that September, she showed no interest in what had actually happened. All she could think of was the people leaping out of the windows. She watched these clips over and over again. She ignored his blatant racisms and accusations of faithful permanence: his war had spread everywhere, she knew, and the only scars he’d brought back was a faithful adherence to the religion of bland generalization that no desertion could cure, for one would have to abandon the human thickness forever to overcome this affliction. She had done it, though, so it wasn’t impossible.

  But all this hate, it was tonitruone, false thunder that quenched something she could not. She didn’t fault him then for what he now knew was outright racism, for she recognized that we must all be allowed our little hatreds. She never pointed out to him that his best friend, Mal, was black. But Mal had a way with people, he did, that blunted his own otherwise inveterate prejudice.

  It was the last day of that sick September. It was her birthday. His best friend Mal—Right? This was his name? She nodded— and Mal’s girlfriend went out with him and Maggie. He thought the company’d do her some good, but she couldn’t take this girlfriend and her silence. This was the girlfriend of mute and mate who would soon be infected with child, the child she’d abandon with Mal before she vanished into an oblivion shaped like her.

  “I don’t need friends,” Maggie muttered from under her greasy curtain of hair. She sat in a self-fashioned canyon of blankets. “What do you call her? A chink?” She snorted.

  “I don’t think she’s Chinese—“

  “Whatever.”

  Then it was the Fourth of July in Alaska. An All-American Annual.

  “To watch Seinfeld after that day is barbaric,” she hissed as she left the room.

  You’re still remembering, she laughed, stop! Look!

  He followed her arm, so close to him as to be his and saw where her finger met the sky, there angels traced fire with their swords. Sunrise. Hadn’t it already been morning? It always would be. I didn’t die. I stood up again. She clutched at his arms and laughed brightly, “Will you stay with me for a little while longer? Because now—I get to sort through you.”

  How so? And the thief in him, having had his way with her screamed up through his throat, Run run run. But he couldn’t wouldn’t shatter, not like she had. All he’d done was forget his face and lose his name somewhere along the track to Weatherhead, or maybe even before that. She was there, too, calm night, a dreaming sea watching over his fall to the plain, a soothing story read to him once to guide him to sleep.

  Don’t worry. With the weathers I’ll remember you. That’s what Weatherhead is. Weather is the blood. I’ll help you find yours now.” She cleared her throat and sang out over the city in her half-lovely voice:

  Her happy lights were ranged around him in a semicircle as if he was sitting for a portrait. He hadn’t left her room or her things as they were. This is a false trope assigned to the bereaved. You, in fact, want nothing more than to be rid of it all, be rid of every reminder that they would never again swing this bat, hog this pillow, smoke this bowl.

  She looked up from the pages she clutched. The sketchbook lay across his lap now. “Bowl?”

  It’s one of the ways we change the meanings of things, he told her. there is a ferocious growth, weed, that strangles dirt and has an empire against other green things, but we take the word for a kind of weather that you breathe in just as you did a moment ago—

  “I breathe in the weather—I never stop—“

  He laughed. Yes. And she asked after her death. Yes. You looked up. I remember the bottom of your chin. I don’t think I’d ever seen it really before that moment. You told me—promised me you wouldn’t look at me—because—

  She knew. She hung her head low and made a bestial sound. She curled up in his lap. She suddenly seemed very small to him.

  “This was a disgusting country, she sobbed, “until you came. Why are you here?”

  “Because—“he pressed his palm against the small of her back, felt the consensus of her vertebrae—“I love you. If I had held your hand— You said—you said ‘if you love me do this one thing for me’. He looked down. So I did.

  “If you’d held my hand then no one would’ve been driving.” They stood and stared. Then, she finished with, We are
all just bad habits.

  “Not even that,” he added. He asked her to read a little more of the story she had started writing, about a knight who fell out of the sky one day. It took a moment to remind him, whose long shadow had slipped off through the distant rains, that it was in fact about him and she watched him pace about the brickcloud defiant and anxious and impatient, rolling the chamber of his pistol this way and that as the blood of the tyranny of the plain and its summons of the singular, despotic, and powerful that came with every fall replaced his blood with something else. He had saved her. Now she him.

  She put her hand over his heart and sang again, I will always want your words on the wind and your brutal mouth against my ear. Lesions and legions of tears had broken free of her eyes. It pained her to see him like this, drowning in the fury that followed death. But as she knew now, the tyrant-fabler called Margaret Mechaine, no soul has ever been able to live in a darkness they made for themselves. They just die. Just die alone. Darknesses made with others, though—

  His throat-slit eyes met hers. It had never ever felt like you woke up out of sleep. Why do I keep thinking that? Did I know you before this place? He would have to leave soon and quick, her thoughts flashed.

  I know. Look.

  She made the sun out of midnight again. This was her spell for him. This was what I was trying in the grove—in our old house. I say old because we have new ones now. Look at Weatherhead. He did. It was white and red in the midnight, resplendent, stretched out on its stomach, slight rises here and there, head leant on overlaid hands, he could see how it laid upon the plain the way she would lay across him and he calmed down for a moment. It was time.

  There is little left to tell. They fled through the city. She was afraid the Law, all the Laws of Weatherhead as embodied in the 51 Principles of the Lady of the Cross Word, would find him there, that turncoat cutthroat, her secret husband, and seize him to feed the prisons of the city. In a pleasant, hidden alley on the edge of town they stood back to back as if they were in a duel and preparing their twenty paces, their last twenty paces before they took a life or had one taken from them. It was as if all the world and angels and flowers and brightnesses were smiling all at once. It was their wedding day in a graveyard.

  He squinted down the sights of his pistol. Is anything more important than love?

  Thumbs in her gunbelt, she laughed, leaning against him, mocking him. Are you asking me?

  No, you asked me that once. In a puzzle. It started with 10 Across. You were answering the clue ‘What is the fuel we’re burning up dying like this?

  You could call it Love.

  He snorted, We could just as well call it war.

  My war was to keep you out—keep you alive,” she ducked her chin down and choked off a sob. He turned and touched her cheek with the barrel of his gun and traced a diagonal line down her jaw’s horizon. Wellingwish is yours now. It always was, don’t you see? I know now why you came. You came to save me. The whole time I was ravaging the cities of the plains, afraid one was to be yours. It was. But I was too late, too foolish, too eager to think that you’d merely come to betray me, not save me.”

  They stood, they who had never raised a hand in murder, the innocent lovers with virgin sun broad-siding their cheeks and hair and wondered at once, as one, where the dust comes from that bathes in sunlight the way they did now. It seemed self-fulfilling as they did then at that moment, falling autumns that would never end, never die, tumbling end over end together.

  He looked down at his hands, then took hers and turned them over, staring at the palms. He spat into them and ground the moistness in with his thumbs. This tickled her and she tried to draw away, but he wouldn’t let go. She was whole now, not hole. “No dust to dust,” he told her. “I have put you back together now.”

  “Good. Now—never forget: Weatherhead saved you and you saved me. Just like you said you would.”

  “I won’t forget. Not again.” He helped her undress, pulled her tunic up over her head, watched her shake her hair, her breasts loose. He kissed her heart. She wrapped her arms around his head and said,

  “You’re easier. You’re one piece.”

  They made love one last time in the center of Weatherhead.

  “Where is everyone?” And he shivered like a drowning god in the cold that stole over them just then.

  She was crouching nearby, wiping herself off with a length of cloth. “I don’t need them anymore.” She looked over at him. She had felt it, too, cutaway. “Not right now. I wanted to be alone—not alone, with you. Just you and me,” she blushed. “They’ll be back when I call them.”

  They took to the track leading east outside the walls of the city. Hand in hand they trekked, guns at the ready for this was a dangerous, notorious road. At the ridge separating Weatherhead from the lands nearest the sunrise, they paused. They looked back at Weatherhead. He saw that the windows were still hung, lonely square nooses above the skyline. They look like raindrops from here, she observed softly, so I thought I’d leave them all up so that when you topped the rise here, the first thing you’ll see are these frames and the UnTower and maybe I’ll be up there.” She’d be easy to spot by her hair.

  They looked down into the valley below. From here, if you turned, you could just see the empty spires of Weatherhead on the plain behind you. To the east, in the valley, there was another town. Wellingwish. “That’s yours,” she said. She leant her head to one side, bent her ear to the wind that had sprung up to give her intelligence, and “I have four visitors waiting for me at the door of my ruins, three lords and a lady.”

  He nodded. “Spies sent to abduct you, no less. Tell them ‘hi’.” He looked about. War against this lady-witch would be difficult with her command of the airs and all.

  She would frame the 51, she told him, the 51 weathers. Each week a messenger would come to Wellingwish with the gift of one weather for him and a demand of surrender. Every week for almost a year he must refuse to keep up appearances, “And then we shall be married all over again.”

  He nodded. How had they come to this life, he wondered aloud? She took his hand and led him down the winding path that stretched across the swaying plains towards Wellingwish. She touched her belly where their first child already grew, she knew, though she dared not tell him just yet—let him steal her one night and see for himself the way she had begun to fill a little bit more of the world, then she touched his lips and reminded him to hold up the trains often between Wellingwish and Weatherhead for his coin.

  She brushed her hair out of her eyes. I should like to meet you here often. A tree made out of ash appeared beside the track. Here we can make love and read our futures with tarot. She crouched down and spread out a fan of puzzle books before him. See. I took out all the negative ones. Is that cheating?

  Is any of this? he countered and she smiled. He looked back. He couldn’t see the first city for all the dust the moving trucks were kicking up on the plain. He reached down and picked up a word search and flipped through it. ‘How many ‘fools’ can one find?’ he read the instructions on one page. I like the ones with just one word, don’t you? Then she stood up and made her farewells as he forgot, as he walked on down the gentle slope. He looked back at this strange red woman who’d waylaid him by the track. She reminded him of someone. A knife he’d found once, stabbed into a painting. She seemed dangerous. Talk along the hills and hideouts said she ruled the next city over. He’d sent his four best scoundrels to search her out.

  “I love you,” she called after him, the wind plucked at her hair, the wind plucked at her dress with her hand resting over her storied navel full of daughter, and so did the sun, “and Weatherhead will always be here. You will always—always be welcome in Weatherhead.”

  The End

 

 

 
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