Fathoms (Collected Writings)

by Jack Cady

  He pulled straight across the bridge to block all five lanes. Pandemonium.

  The cops would come. The getaway was important. He had to hurry. He climbed down and locked the cab. Maybe someone would leave a car and attack him. No one did. “Sheep,” he told the rapidly lengthening line of cars, “Lemmings.” He raised the hood to the accompaniment of crying horns and took the distributor cap. He threw it and the key into the bay. The two miles of bridge were nearly full. Cars turning around, trying to go back. Dinged fenders. Hollering. He looked at the truck. It was a beautiful truck. It was a beautiful bridge. They looked good together.

  He checked his watch. Four-thirty. Going home time.

  He stepped to the pedestrian walk to stroll from the bridge. A breeze caught his hair and he smiled in the din of horns. Far out on the bay a white glint of afternoon sun came from a billowing sail. The sea. The hills.

  He wondered what his wife would do. As he walked beside the magnificent view, in triumphant parade before the salutation of horns, he found himself framing arguments that would persuade her to leave with him.

  The Curious Candy Store

  Cities are not supposed to have alcoves, but Placid City does. The Curious Candy Store still stands two blocks from our old grade school, and the school itself stands in what amounts to an alcove. When any of us return we feel that we step across time. Traffic buzzes everywhere, until we cross the centerline of Maple Street and our feet find the inner curb.

  In this place it might as well be 1930, or 1910. Victorian houses stand newly painted. Outside one house a bronze deer ornaments a huge lawn behind wrought iron fences. Summer breezes lay light fingers on mown grass, and the breezes touch ornamental stained glass windows as if everything here were kissing cousins.

  At the Curious Candy Store the old woman who always ran the place stands still behind the counter. By anybody’s reckoning, she must be a hundred and thirty years old by now. That isn’t right, but unless time itself is playing games we know it’s the truth.

  Children still enter, and they emerge with licorice whips, jawbreakers, lemon drops, stick candy, and occasionally a balloon. I remember the magic of childhood, and remotely recall the day I left the candy store with my own balloon. The balloon was red and bouncy in a breeze that danced fancy figures around the grade school. The day was filled with autumn light.

  A red balloon. No child was ever given more than one, and for reasons we did not understand red was a little scary. Green was good, and blue might be, sometimes. I think we feared—even if we did not look over our shoulders—the yellow ones and the white ones. We were hopeful with orange. Who, after all, remembers their fears at age six? Older and tougher kids on the playground always yelled about gray and black balloons, but in our day no one ever saw one.

  But those days of my childhood, before World War II, were not so complicated as days are now. It was still easy to recognize magic during the long summers and autumns. Many families did not even have radios, and televisions were unknown. Since it was the time of the Great Depression children had few toys. We played ‘make believe’. So much of our play came from our own imaginations that it was no surprise if a balloon talked to you in a tinkling voice.

  “Dum hiddly dee-dum, play as you grow. Red is so chancy, it’s scary, you know?”

  I am an old man now, visiting an old neighborhood, and watching children pass. The Curious Candy Store sells bubble gum and baseball cards and malted milk balls.

  “It’s color, it’s color, it’s color, you see. Play always with color, oh hum diddle dee.”

  Most of the balloons popped, of course. A few of them got loose and went tumbling into blue sky. Even fewer made it to home or school, where they either burst or slowly deflated.

  I grew and became an artist, never an easy task. Color and light and depth ran through my dreams. There were years and years of struggle, and yes, the color red is chancy. Color itself—or rather playing with color—can lead you through divorces and booze and decades of rejection. At the end lies great success, but one travels a badly cobbled road.

  Some led vanilla lives, those who received the white balloons. They grew and married and loved and worked and had children. Nothing really bad ever happened to them, and perhaps they were luckiest of all. Blue was considered good, sometimes, and blue balloons slipped from the fingers of future teachers and politicians. Green showed the way to actors and gardeners. Orange produced musicians, businessmen, interior decorators. We all grew and left the neighborhood, but some return.

  I think time freezes in a few small places around the globe. There’s nothing cosmic about it, and there’s no grand scheme. In spite of what our scientists say, time has a way of doing what it wants.

  Sometimes it wants to be fey. This is surely the way that time hoards up memories. Maybe in Egypt, somewhere, scholars still write on scrolls. Perhaps in China one small section of the Great Wall stands newer than new.

  And so this neighborhood is a place where time collects memories. The balloons contained our futures. I know that now, because of all the things that have happened. Rather, the balloons carried the spirits of who we might become. A lot depended on us.

  However, there is more to it than that. The old woman at the Curious Candy Store still gives balloons. Children pass with grave faces and grave eyes.

  When I entered the store after fifty years away, it seemed smaller. The oak counter was the same, and the gleaming candy jars still stood ranked like soldiers. Kites and kite string were arranged in bins. Party favors and tin whistles, and the little tin crickets, lay in careful arrangement on shelves. Pink and blue packages of birthday candles were stacked beside crepe paper streamers of gold and silver. The ceiling was lower than I remembered, and soft sheens of polished oak and glowing glass stirred childish memories. I felt yearning, and a kind of dazzlement before the sight and smells of candy fish and peppermints.

  Only one thing had changed. There were different candies. Of course, these are different times, and I suppose children are never horrified by candy. There were other things. What I took to be baseball cards were cards of a different kind, men with red staining their beards. Comic books were different, which surely meant that childhood was different.

  “Go away,” the old woman said, as she squinted in dim light and finally seemed to recognize me. “You can’t come back here. Why would you want to?”

  She looked the same. Her white hair was bound in a gypsy scarf, and her long dress was faded purple with carefully ironed pleats. Eyes, brown as the chocolate she sold, were not unkind, only factual. Her hands were nimble, and her face was webbed in wrinkles.

  “You were old when my father was a child,” I said in bewilderment. I felt in the presence of mystery, but maybe the mystery could be solved. “Is there some eternal game you are forced to play?” I asked. “Are you trapped here?” Kindness and concern brought layers of gentleness to my voice.

  “I will be here when your great-grandchildren are old,” she said. Her voice was not angry, only sad. “You should not be here. You grew up and lost your childhood. Will you now insist on losing your childhood memories?”

  “I only inquire.”

  “You inquire in the wrong place,” she told me. “There’s only one future to a customer, and you’ve had yours. Be content.”

  “There are changes here.”

  “I’m a merchant,” she said. “I stock what sells.” She turned away, dismissing me.

  I should have left then. Only a fool would stay. “You are more than a merchant.”

  “You should leave,” she said, “but since you have not . . . ” She rubbed her forehead, just below the line drawn by the scarf. The woman was not unkind, only dispassionate. “I am time incarnate,” she told me. “I am memory. You deal with powerful forces.”

  Memories of childhood surrounded me. Reminders of childhood lay on shelves; jump ropes and balsa model kits. I felt overwhelmed by the magic and play that are never far from a child’s mind. I felt the hope
s and fears of a child—small hopes and fears in adult memory, but they were not small at the time. The memories began to grow.

  “You sell memories,” I said, and pointed to some of the candy and cards. “These are not good memories.”

  “They are the best memories still in stock,” she said curtly. “I didn’t make the world, I only live in it.”

  Later, I would realize that her very curtness was a denial of memories. It denied gentle fingers of wind caressing grass, of my mother’s voice calling me home from play as night fell. Of course, these days, even in this quiet neighborhood, children are no longer allowed to play outside in the gathering dusk.

  “If you can work small miracles, if you can give away spirits of the future, I could hope the children would have better futures.”

  “I give the only futures that are available.” She looked through the small front window onto the quiet street, the seemingly quiet neighborhood. “There are no simple futures now. Including what is left of yours.” She paused, watching me, and she was neither kind nor unkind. “Although if you leave your own memories here, maybe I can turn them into some child’s future.”

  I went away quickly. When you are old, memories are what you own.

  But I did not leave quickly enough. These days I remember that I once had memories, and even what they were. A creaking swing on the front porch. A schoolmate practicing piano, and the notes of the piano on a warm evening breeze. I no longer remember how the memories felt. Hope is gone, as is excitement. Love has disappeared, and when I place paint to canvas no spirit rises from the work. It is only paint and canvas.

  And so I sit, an old man, shuddering as I watch children pass. Their balloons carry colors unknown in my time: fluorescents of hot pink, hysteric pastels of beige and turquoise, and not a primary color in the lot.

  There are gray balloons, and there are black. Black balloons dance in the breeze.

  I wonder what the balloons are whispering, and feel the horror of those futures; the only feeling I have left. I watch because, maybe, fashioned from flimsy and from my own lost memories, perhaps a last brightly dancing balloon will pass.

  LAND

  “My grandpa, my drinking grandpa, not the preacher, came to these parts just after the Civil War. The land was taken. He married a widow to get land. She had almost two sections. It’s a good thing, I guess. He would have killed to get land.

  “I like to think of him. Scandalous old rip. He started a little general store down by the crossroads. There’s a town there now. Made a living off the store and a fortune off the land.

  “Caused scandal too. Use to have a little two-horse rig, surrey painted red and white like a circus and ran a matched tandem that never saw a plow. Ran it into town, the horses stepping high and easy, pocking along the road out there which would have been dust in those days. The horses were white, of course, and the leather was deep worked and beautiful, decorated in red. You can see yourself how it would have been, them horses, head high and pulling that dinky little rig.

  “Take it into town, the horses snorting and that rig gleaming like he’d captured the sun. Pull it up in front of the courthouse like an English squire. People flock around. Him blowing and taking on, making like it wasn’t nothing. Then, by and by, he’d disappear and you could bet some family had trouble. Awful good man with the girls, my grandpa was. Awful bold. Painted his fence posts white and gave them red caps of barn paint. Caused about as much scandal as his women.

  “But my dad was different. Loved the land just as much, kind of hated the store and so after while it went down hill. He never took much after grandpa. Steady man. Use to hitch up a team once a month and drive it into town. He’d bring back the news and supplies to sell in the store. I still remember cracker barrels, tub cheese; still remember.

  “And I like to think of my dad, like I like to think of grandpa. But I picture him different, of course. Like to think of that old, old man as a young man, getting up on a clear morning, the taste of morning on his tongue and going out to the barn. Chilly morning maybe, frost hanging out across the fields like fallen fog. Him harnessing his work team to a spring wagon and heading into town.

  “Sun coming up, burning off the frost, and my dad would sit behind that team, maybe not even driving because he owned good horses. Sitting there watching birds rise off a field where somebody had put in wheat. A quiet time. You know, he never questioned. Married, maybe happy, but never had to ask. There was only one thing he could be.

  “Well, I ramble. You want to farm. Get your land and you’ll still need twenty thousand dollars. Don’t believe a man can do with less just starting from scratch. But, it needs more than that. More than that. There’s the feel of things.

  “I kind of see the land sometimes. Like in my head. And I’ve been on this land sixty-seven years. See it. Especially times like now. Crops worked, land lying healthy but resting, and you know it’s healthy because you’ve worked and schemed it all out, what you’ll do.

  “. . . like a crop I had in the early forties. Corn so high in the rich places that you walked through it like a forest. Twelve, fourteen feet tall. No corn like that now. Better yield but not so tall.

  “No, you wait. I’ll get there. You come here with money and a hunger in your eyes. I’ve seen it. Seen it, and men do get impatient. I’m tryin’ to tell you.

  “You go look at your fields. I know mine. Some land works easier than others. You get a kind of gentle, easy strip down a field, or maybe a whole field that’s like it wants to be turned. Field right beside can be a bastard. Work it up, fertilize, refertilize . . . nothing you do will make that field match the one across the road. Nothing but a road between. Before the road it was all the same.

  “Yes, I know them. Wander through them like my dad used to when he worked the land. Sometimes it’s like he lingered, you know. Old. Old when he died.

  “And my grandpa. He built the barn with my dad helping after the first one burned. Lost most of their feed that year. Animals slaughtered against waste because grandpa wasn’t going to neighbors for feed. Stiff-necked. Proud. I don’t remember him too well.

  “Well, you want to buy and I’m old now. Yes, I admit. You drove all this way to talk. Give an old man a minute more.

  “I see him, you know. Sometimes on the land it’s like I see him, bending down maybe to clear something from a fencerow, or walking past the grove. Remember him young, like when he was teaching me. Full of interest. Full of plans. Coming in tired of a night. Not like later when he was sick . . . he got sick. Kind of took the starch out. Lingered awhile and then he died.

  “I’m kind of sorry you came. I thought . . . well, don’t keep many animals now. When the boys were here. But, there’s no sense in that. Two good boys and both of them gone. One in Bridgeport, the other in Sarasota. Educated boys, but good ones too.

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry you came. I thought I could sell. Thought it all out and said, ‘Yes, you must,’ but I guess I can’t. I’ll give you the name of a fella I know. Hard up. Place run down a little. Maybe he’ll deal. Mister, I’m sorry, I just can’t sell this land.”

  Resurrection

  Take the path behind the Kingdom Hall, the path circling back into blackberry bushes and scrub and trees—where on most mornings gray mist hangs in the tops of young fir and old madrona—and there is a clearing where most evenings a solitary man talks with dead neighbors. His name is Em, he is sixty. He always has a white dog with him. Some folks say he has two.

  Lona-Anne-Marie is the only one who knows all Em’s movements. Lona-Anne-Marie is stove up with eighty years, and with thirty years of doorbelling, and tracts, and waiting the awful coming of a resurrecting God. She lives in a wonderland of faith. The waiting makes her beautiful. She is wrinkled and tiny and clothed in repaired things bought for a quarter at thrift shops. She can walk a little, but mostly she sits in her kitchen and watches the neighborhood. When summer sun is vague in this Pacific Northwest mist, it falls in silverish-yellow pebbles a
cross the roof of Kingdom Hall. It isn’t hard to imagine the Angel Gabriel standing astride the roof. Even we who have our doubts can think him there.

  “The world is getting old and Em is aging,” Lona-AnneMarie explains. “The world is holding up pretty well, all things considered.”

  Behind the Kingdom Hall, and dug in beneath sheltering blackberries, lies a private cemetery. Somebody’s people were buried in vague and unremembered graves: John, another John, Sarah, Esther, Timothy. The whole business sits on a bluff; and, off to the left, deer and raccoon and a black bear inhabit a deep ravine that angles down to the salt water of Puget Sound. Before young trees grew, before blackberries covered them over, those five graves looked eastward at the Sound, like planted sailors pointing boots toward the sea. A homestead once stood where now stands a broken chimney. The people died of illness. Madrona trees seeded. Some of the madrona are seventy or eighty years; hard to tell. Madrona doesn’t grow like other trees. You can’t count the rings.

  Our neighborhood is small. A little block of apartments anchors the head of the street. People move in, then move out. Clunkity cars with mattresses strapped to roofs arrive and leave like aging gypsies. The cars are many-colored, like Joseph’s coat frayed after years in one or another desert. Each time the paper mill hires or fires, people reshuffle. Faces of school children are exchanged for other schoolish faces. Beside the apartments sits Nancy’s prim and puffy house with yellow shutters. The children call her ‘the mean lady’, and children know.