by Louise Hawes
and thoughtless, I am swept by someone
else’s needs. I believe in the door that leads
nowhere, the empty glass, the dummy book.
If someone points up a painted hill, I look.
Secondhand words fill my heart, but my
body knows them as mine. A will-less toy
boat carried by the wind, what have I
truly seen? Who have I really been?
In the end, I’m nothing you can speak of,
a sort of go-between, a messenger of love.
A Mighty Fall
When poetry class came around again, I looked forward to a double helping of Rufus Baylor. Because yes, our poet said I was more than welcome to come for morning pages even on the day of Naughty Kids School. Although I should have been used to seeing those two desks side by side, it still gave me an adrenaline rush, a pinch-me-this-can’t-be-real thrill each time I rang the Hendricks’ hideous symphonic doorbell and saw our shared writing space waiting.
“Have you had breakfast?” Rufus met me at the door with Carmen and a plate of cookies. “Remember madeleines?”
“Memory cookies?”
He glanced at the tray. “Yep. I talked the bakery into whipping up a batch.” He smiled at me over the indecently heaped plateful of pastries. “I go through a box a week at home, even without company.”
“I can’t wait to taste them,” I told him. I reached down to stroke Carmen, who sort of took me for granted now, even arched her head under my hand. “Rufus?”
“Yes?”
“I have something to tell you.” I remembered how long it had taken me to work up to “sorry,” and I didn’t want it to be so long before “thank you.” “It’s about my father. Shepherd?”
“I remember your father. He’s extremely hard to forget.” Rufus carried the cookies to the table in front of the couch. Our coffee mugs were already waiting for us there.
“And extremely different.” I sat across from him on a plum-colored wing chair, studied him as I sipped. “Because of you.”
His smile broadened, those spring-blue eyes lit. “Is that good?”
“It’s amazing. He stands up for me now. He talks to me about stuff besides work.” (Hard as it was to believe, Shepherd had even called me at home the day before to give me the name of his friend at the lumberyard, to ask awkwardly, “So how’s everything else going?”)
“He’s doing what he’s always wanted to, Sarah.”
“Really?”
Rufus nodded. “Sometimes a person does the wrong thing. And it can be years before he gets a chance to do the right one.”
I thought about the cowboy pajamas. About Shepherd pawing through the sale rack, his eye caught by lassoes and mustangs.
“If he gets a chance at all.” Rufus looked sadder, more serious. Were we still talking about Shepherd?
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” I told him. “My father is not the same since you talked to him.” I wanted that smile back. “Thanks.”
“I didn’t change, he did.” Rufus took a cookie, dipped it in his coffee. “But you’re welcome.”
My first madeleine was not my last. They weren’t fussy cookies, even though they looked dainty and elegant. They were not too sweet, soft enough to crumble in your mouth, but strong enough to stand up to the coffee bath I gave them after I watched Rufus. Maybe it was the cookies or maybe it was because we were going to have class later that afternoon; but the two of us did a lot more talking and remembering that morning than we did writing. In fact, I ended up telling Rufus more than almost anyone else knew about me.
I learned a lot about him, too. Because, just like in class, he never asked me any questions he wasn’t willing to answer himself. So our memories and families and wishes got all jumbled together, nuzzling each other the way friends’ lives do. And I don’t mean history, facts, dates. I mean worst nightmares, favorite colors, first time we hated someone, last time we were jealous, what we were afraid of but made ourselves do. What always, always made us laugh, what made us cry. I almost wished Fry could hear us, could listen to the way we circled around each other, coming closer and closer, safer and safer. I knew, you see, if my boyfriend could have eavesdropped on Rufus and me that morning, he would have been forced to take back every last mean remark, every crude joke he’d ever made about young girls and dirty old men. We’d nearly run out of cookies when Rufus mentioned his children. “That beach towel?” He pulled a photo frame from behind one of the coffee table vases and handed it to me. Inside the frame was a picture of a little boy on the beach. “It was my youngest son’s first purchase.”
I studied the boy in the photo, but he was too far away to pick out much beyond his coppery hair and a huge smile-for-the-camera grin. The towel he stood on looked like one of the big, cheap ones the oceanfront stores still sold: Splashed across its face was a very large Bugs Bunny and a very small Tweety, each wearing sunglasses and carrying a life preserver.
I remembered those other bright-faced kids, the ones patting puppies, playing ball, posing in graduation caps—all the pictures I’d spied on in the cottage. Now, thanks to poetry.com, I’d learned more about them than I wanted to know. I’d discovered that most of them had two dates after their names. One when they were born, and one when they died.
“He said he wanted to buy it himself, so we couldn’t make him share it with his brothers.” Rufus looked at the photo over my shoulder. “He wouldn’t let anyone else near it.”
I tried to change the subject. I asked him about haiku. About Asheville. Even about our homework. But always, he came back to his boys. “I’m a survivor,” he told me at last. “I’ve outlived all three of my sons, a distinction I’d gladly forfeit if those great trampers and talkers could be here with you, instead.”
I thought of the poem he’d written about staying up with a sick child. That child was dead now. Had Rufus changed his mind about God being right?
“I lost my boys when each of them was older than Jesse when she died.” His voice wasn’t sad, just hard, the words like stones. “I suppose there’s some consolation in that.” Rufus closed the box top on the two madeleines neither of us wanted anymore. “I don’t think Jesse could have stood to let her three warriors go.”
This sad story over our empty mugs felt all wrong. I wanted to sweep the crumbs off the table, to go back to talking about poetry. If a word wasn’t right, you could fix it. But if a life broke . . .
I knew how they’d died, you see, those boys of his. I knew from following link after link on a long, winding cyber hunt that took me where I didn’t really want to go. To the car accident that had taken two of their lives; to the cancer that had slowly, cruelly killed the other. I knew all this, and that’s what made it worse. Knowing the end of a story, especially if it’s sad, makes listening to it really hard. Thankfully, Carmen began to complain loudly. I don’t know whether, somewhere in that prima donna brain of hers, that fur-muffled heart, she sensed her human friend’s somber mood, or whether she’d simply gotten tired of being in sight but out of patting range. I do know I was relieved when she leaped onto the couch and insinuated herself under one of Rufus’s big hands.
Now, with a sleepy midmorning light filtering through the juniper and fern pines outside, with Carmen rubbing stubbornly against his hand, Rufus jumped the sad track he’d started down:
“Did you know I proposed to Jesse four times?”
My half-smiling Nella had said no to Rufus Baylor?! That hadn’t been included in any of the websites I’d checked. “Were you famous then?” I asked.
“Nope.” He smiled at something small and far away. “Just full of myself. And she knew it. Three times she had the good sense to turn me down flat.”
It wasn’t as if the suitor Nella had rejected was as old as Rufus, either. I knew how full-throttle gorgeous our poet had been as a young man—and I had a photo to prove it. It was right there in the book I always carried with me now, the one I’d been reading every night before bed.
“You don’t believe me?” Rufus smiled for real now, shook his head. “Flatter than flat, three times in a row. I believe the phrase ‘over my dead body’ figured prominently each time.”
The mood felt lighter. Because I hoped it would stay that way, I jumped up and retrieved my backpack from the coat hook by the door. I must have moved too suddenly, because for the first time in a week, Carmen hissed at me.
I ignored her, grabbed Poems for Sale, and hurried it back to Rufus. “Are you trying to tell me,” I asked him, setting the volume in front of him, opening it to the author photo, “that Nella—I mean Jesse—said no to this?”
Together, we looked at the handsome face staring up at us. Rufus wasn’t really young in the photo, probably in his forties. But those impossible eyes, glancing at us sideways from under ringlets of auburn hair, and a wide, pouting mouth made him look like a movie star. A movie star who only half knew how hot he was.
“I don’t think I fooled Jess for a minute.” Rufus examined his younger self, as if he were a riddle, a puzzle he’d solved long ago. “I think she knew just what she was signing on for—the strutting that passed for confidence, the neediness that passed for love.” He pushed the book away. “But in the end, she signed on, anyway.”
For a few seconds, I studied the film star in the book, then turned back to the weathered, craggy face I trusted more. “Did you ever want a little girl?” I asked.
“After three sons?” He looked at me and smiled. “Who wouldn’t?” He looked deeper now, as if he were measuring my eyes. Or my heart. “None of my boys wrote poetry. They loved to walk and climb and bike. But none of them stopped to listen to the world the way you do.”
Somewhere in front of the house, perhaps in the branches of that giant magnolia, a bird called. “Tou-eee, tou-eeee,” it sang. In response, Carmen uttered an immediate and decidedly unfriendly challenge, “Arrhrwhaaaaaaaaaa! Aaarhwhaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!”
Rufus didn’t seem to hear any of it. “And if Jesse and I had made the kind of love that makes for girls”—he took one of my hands in his—“who’s to say she wouldn’t have turned out like Sarah, not Sarai?” I could feel someone’s pulse—mine or his?—jumping between us. “Who’s to say she wouldn’t write splendid poetry? Who’s to say she wouldn’t have a saucy tongue and be the possessor of a stout, unshakable heart?”
He shook his head, not at me but at himself. “By rights, I don’t deserve a second chance.” Then he was looking back at me, taking his hand from mine to touch my cheek. “But here you are.”
I had no more room for feeling sad or sorry or anything but full to the brim. How he looked at me! How he smiled when he did! It wasn’t a father’s smile. Or a boyfriend’s. It was deeper, sweeter. As if we shared that grin between us. As if he started it and I finished it. Which I did, smiling right back at my poet. Yes, he was my poet now, and I knew this sad, sweet moment would stay with me forever. Memories trapped in a lemon drop.
When someone knows who you really are, and likes you, anyway, there’s nothing you can’t tell them. I’m not usually much of a talker, but suddenly, you couldn’t shut me up. I told Rufus about Grandma and Grandpa dying before I was born, and how, because the fuzzy photo Mom showed me looked nothing like her, I’d sometimes complain about my mother to my dead grandmother. But once, when I protested that Grandma would never have been as mean to me as she was, Mom had laughed right out loud. “You’re right,” she told me. “She’d be twice as mean!”
Then, at the risk of dashing any illusions he might have about girls and ruffles, I also told my first-ever adult BFF how I wanted to play Hamlet like Sarah Bernhardt had, and how, after we read Frankenstein in junior high, I started collecting monsters, posing them on my bookcase and window seat, gluing speech bubbles to their mouths, notes that made them roar things like “Homework is for weaklings” or “Don’t forget gym shorts!”
Finally, I told him about banging the pots on the kitchen floor when I was three, and about how no one in my family ever really looked at each other. And because I was on a roll, and because his eyes were such a safe place, I told my poet something I’d never told anyone else: It wasn’t just the pots and pans that made music for me. It was trees and birds, waves and wind, crabs tunneling through the sand. “It’s not a language I understand, exactly,” I explained. “Nothing I can translate. But everything talks, everything there is.”
“That’s what I mean about listening to the world, Sarah,” Rufus told me. “Children and poets know it’s all alive, every part of it.” He found my hand again. “Myself? I can’t play an instrument, and I can’t carry a tune.” He squinted into the sun. “But I hear music whenever people talk. The way animals move in the world, the way leaves fall, that’s my song.”
He sat back now. Far enough to take a picture. Even though it was too bright, even though he had no camera. He looked at me without speaking at first, and then he said, “I’m glad to know there will be someone around to listen to things after I’m gone. I think they need the attention.”
After he was gone? I thought of what Rufus had said last class, how he had more memories behind him than ahead. But I didn’t want to think about some sorrowful day-after-tomorrow. I wanted to talk about here and now, about poems and plays and the summer that was simmering all around us, breaking in through windows and filling us up.
Which, I guess, is what made me ask about the music. Was he ready to play the songs we’d picked out for class? Did he need me to show him about the player one more time? And I suppose it was the music, too loud at first, that upset Carmen, that set her to howling and meowing until we turned it off. Until Rufus tried to soothe her and then decided she might want breakfast.
I heard the crash from where I sat. It happened so fast there was no time to think at all. Only time to put down the player and run into the kitchen. To see a pair of familiar feet sticking out from behind the counter, to find Rufus sprawled on the floor, the cat food can, unopened, halfway across the room.
He looked all wrong there, like someone who was never meant to be horizontal. It was as if I’d come in and found an oak or a sycamore lying in the middle of the kitchen. He was shaking, just a little. But what I noticed most, when I stooped beside him, when I took his hand, was that he was so pale. His face wasn’t white, exactly, but blanched; as if someone had squeezed the color, the juice, out of him. His humor, though, was intact. “Not the most dignified position I’ve ever found myself in,” he told me, looking up, wincing and smiling at the same time.
I put my arm around his great shoulders, and slowly, slowly, like someone who wasn’t sure he remembered how, he sat up. “But I’d say my leg hurts more than my ego.”
“What happened?” I kept my arm around him, afraid that if I let go, he might fall down again.
“A dictionary and phone book do not a ladder make.” He nodded toward the two books, the ones he must have tried to stand on, tumbled together near the cat dish, their pages open to nothing that mattered. “Carmen prefers top-shelf flavors.”
Hearing her name, Mega Cat, frightened away by the noise and the fall, sauntered back into the kitchen and right up to Rufus. Overjoyed to find him so close to hand, she rubbed against him, begging loudly for a pat.
“Can you wiggle your toes?” Who knows why I said that? But it seemed like a question I’d heard a first responder ask in one of those action films Fry loved. So I suppose they were good for something, after all.
Rufus looked at his shoes and I saw him wince again. “No,” he told me. “Not on the foot that hurts.” He leaned back against the sink cabinet, closed his eyes. “This feels like a break.” He shivered. “I’m sorry.”
Rufus was sorry?! It was me who should have been sorry. Sorry for not knowing what to do next. For not being able to muster a more productive response than wringing my hands, princess-style. I took a deep breath, then went back to the living room and slipped a Mexican blanket with tiny, flat-headed sheep running up and down its borders, off the couch.
I wrapped it around him, and then I called Fry. It didn’t matter anymore whether my boyfriend found out about morning pages. It didn’t matter whether he thought Rufus was a dirty old man. What counted now was getting help for my poet, and I knew I could never lift him by myself.
But the prince never got a chance to ride to the rescue. Clearly, he was riding the waves, instead. The phone rang five times and then went to his default message. “Sorry,” his not-very-sorry voice announced. “I’m in the water. Call you back when I’m high and dry.”
So I called 911, instead. And then I called my father. I didn’t get two sentences out before Shepherd told me he’d be right over. And we didn’t wait five minutes before he was. He got there before the ambulance, and I was surprised at how he took charge, how he knew just what to do.
“Rufus.” Shepherd shooed Carmen away, then knelt beside my poet and slipped an arm around his waist. “I’ve seen you looking better.”
I don’t know what it cost him, but Rufus grinned, shook his head. “You’ve only seen me once,” he said.
Shepherd asked me to get a pillow from the couch, ice from the freezer, and a plastic freezer bag (which I found on a shelf in the Hendricks’ neatly organized pantry). Then he went to work: “Lean on me,” he told Rufus. In one deft move, he lifted the older man, cradled like an oversize baby, and laid a pillow under his legs. “It looks like it might be a break,” he agreed with Rufus. “But we’ll let the docs figure that out, huh?”
He filled the Ziploc with ice, wrapped it in a dishcloth, then held it against my poet’s left shin, the place Rufus said hurt every time he breathed or moved. Finally, my father asked me to get a glass of water, and when I brought it, he scooped his hand under Rufus’s head and helped him drink.
I wasn’t much use after that, but I hovered. Just like Carmen, I prowled the perimeter, watching Shepherd’s every move. For one thing, I wanted to make sure Rufus kept talking, kept, I don’t know, breathing. For another, I couldn’t tear myself away from the new, totally improved version of my father I saw in front of me. I remembered all the names Mom had called him over the years—deadbeat, no-good, barbarian, embarrassment—and I couldn’t make a single one of those ugly labels fit the man who’d just raced to Rufus’s rescue.