by Will Walton
I followed Pastor Daisy outside into a courtyard with a brick path. A fountain, some benches, some trellises with vines. The sunlight blurred every edge. Every object had a soul looming out from its margins. I had to squint my eyes.
“We have these really—really—lovely plants back here! Just right beyond the daphne!—called ‘ecstatic puff-ball’—have you heard of them?”
“I haven’t,” I said. “I don’t really know plants that well.”
“Well, then you’ll be—pleased—you see. The puff-ball is quite animal, really.” We paused next to a bed of dark soil, from which the puff-balls sprouted like soft white pinecones from their bed.
“See, they look sentient, don’t they?” Pastor Daisy lowered the pot. “They’re like cannibals—ah!” She nudged the clay pot with her heel, and the abiah root whistled out. After two weeks of no watering, it was practically powder. We stood there watching.
“What happens next?”
“The puff-ball overtakes it—it begins to ingest it. See, the ‘ecstatic puff-ball’ feeds on decay.”
“And that happens … now?”
“It is happening now, yes.”
“And we’ll see it?”
“See—what?”
“It ingest?”
“Oh—no, that takes a while. Really, the process is its own sort of decay. But it’s fascinating. Shh!—be very quiet, and you’ll hear it.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Do you hear—it—can you hear—it—the chewing?” She made a delighted and repulsed noise.
“I can’t hear it.”
I was jealous.
“Well, after all,” she said, “you’re only sixteen.”
“See—if it really was, as you say it was—a ‘one-time deal,’ Avery, I’m not too concerned.
“It’s just that—you absolutely know what a slippery slope drinking as a means of coping is.”
There were two books on her desk: one called Called Back and the other called Are We Almost There? They were a bit conservative for her taste, she said.
Then she pulled out some old Guideposts for Kids that told “true” stories of children in peril.
“And in this story”—she showed me—“an angel saves a little girl from getting hacked to death by an axe murderer!”
“First it’s a drink here, a drink there. Because you’re sad, or you’re stressed, maybe, occasionally—but then something big happens:
“You know, you lose a parent, God forbid, or a friend.
“You find you have then, well—not to sugarcoat it—a whole slew of bad days, right in a row, one after the other.
“And so, we have the choice, you know—we make a decision. Do I disappear? It sounds tempting. Or do I make it a practice to stay present, you know?
“Talk to people, talk to God, listen for God—
“Your grandmother—”
“She’s not my grandmother.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Not technically.”
“Well, she tells me you’re a writer.”
“Yeah.”
“That makes it hard.
“Hearing voices all the time.”
“Voices?”
“Well, in the sense that when you read something, you take in a voice. When you write something, you produce a voice. Voices in, voices out—I deliver a sermon every week. I write constantly. It’s exhausting. Even when I’m writing a sermon!—sometimes it’s hard to remember that God is like—within me.
“Just like God is within you.
“It’s like, from the moment we are born, our first thought is—‘Okay, everything is out there, so I have to go get it,’ you know?
“My mom is out there, and she has food, and I need food to survive, et cetera, et cetera—
“But when it comes to God, Avery—and listening—you have to plant both of your feet on the floor—”
She stomped her black shoes out from behind her desk.
“You have to be present. You have to be alive!”
But what about remembering? Was there God in memory too? I didn’t ask—I didn’t even really know to wonder yet.
The placard on her desk said Pastor Daisy, but it was sort of a fake placard, made from construction paper, Magic Marker, and glitter. I think a child must have made it.
She had a poster of Mount Vesuvius on her wall.
I asked her if she or anyone she loved had ever struggled with addiction issues. “Oh, sweetheart,” she replied. “That’s all of us.”
On her desk beside her computer, there was a stack of envelopes, many of them halved, and other scraps of paper. I asked if I could borrow a scrap to leave her a note.
She seemed begrudging, like she needed all of them. I said I didn’t have to, it was fine. “Oh, just go for it,” she said. And that’s when I left her a small poem:
“I’m living inside today’s bright edges / God, supposedly, lives there too / Sometimes God manspreads, and I complain / I say, ‘I only want to learn to love you.’ ”
After the church visit, Babs and I went to a crowded bookstore. Nobody was in the poetry section. A good selection, though: Anne and Sylvia and John, Eileen, and Allen. I saw Rita Dove, who I was starting next, her book called Mother Love.
When a bookseller walked over with a stack of new books, and I asked if she had any recommendations for books by contemporary queer poets, she nearly dropped her stack.
“Literally, it’s like I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to ask me that.”
A stack of seven became a stack of eight. Became a stack of nine, easily.
Babs came over. “Find anything?”
“Um—” The answer was yes. She saw the stack. Crush by Richard Siken, The New Testament by Jericho Brown, Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, The Devastation by Melissa Buzzeo, [Insert] Boy by Danez Smith, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys by D. A. Powell, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay, and Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway by Ed Pavlic—I thought Pal might like that one, since he liked Donny Hathaway.
“Oh, just get them all,” Babs said, and she bought them for me.
($159.32)
In the car, she started crying. “Let’s just take them back to the store, Babs. I’m sure they’ll let us return them.” She said she wanted me to have them; it was important to her, “because I love you, Avery.”
“I love you too, Babs,” I said.
When we got home, Pal asked, “What happened? Everything okay?” I went outside and sat underneath my tree and wrote what was mostly plot summary for the end of the egg poems.
26.
After the appointment at the church, the egg returns to the tree behind its grandparents’ house. The tree has been struck by lightning, and now the poems are all spelled backward.
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
The egg cries at the death, a little, of its poetry.
The tree groans. The egg knows. The trunk sags forward from the root. “The roots aren’t good,” the egg observes.
The egg is not on a slope, and so can’t roll away quite accurately.
The trunk groans. Really whines this time, an apology the egg does not accept. The egg did not ask for this. Barely born, and over with, and without and without, a mother.
Proofless of so much as its favorite poem.
Thanks to nature. “Thanks be to God.”
“Amen.”
The trunk ruptures. It’s a mournful, shrill apology. It echoes in homes up and down the street, and even in the cabin on the cruise ship, where the egg’s grandparents lie, making love.
(Now that I’ve written myself out of characters and out of the poem completely, I think it’s time for Mom to come home, officially.)
(at the house)
(everyone brought vegetarian fo
od)
(even Ditty Boy)
(even Pal’s cousin James)
I will never forget when we were kids, and Pal had that dog with him and how that dog got us into so much trouble one day. Pal’s mama, and it was my aunt, you know, she got after us, man. Because we hadn’t been supposed to go down to that creek. Just that creek right back off there, hind Yonah, in those woods.
We hadn’t been supposed to go back there, and sure we went, and that dog got all wet and muddy—Nicky was his name. We all got back, and Nicky was dripping mud all over the place, and we got sure enough popping. Well, not the dog.
(eating potato salad with a fork)
(notice how I hold the fork differently, like Mom does)
I had this dream the other night, and, um, you know I got that pump house in the yard. I think you’ve seen it.
(Ditty Boy points to me)
Well, he was out there. Pal was. In my dream. Believe it or not, he was out there, and it was like he was looking for something. For something to fix something else; and I just said, “What are you doing out here, huh? You big galoot,” and he just looked up, and he called me by my real name, which he would sometimes do. He said, “Joe Abel,” and then I stepped over, and I … I hugged him.
In the kitchen one morning, Pal’s silver vat was out. He used it in the shop to melt things, normally. Now he had washed it. He whisked eggs in it. It was a superstition. To eat from it the day of a fishing trip.
“Want to ride out to Ditty Boy’s later with me?” he asked as he dunked a piece of white bread.
“Sure,” I said. “But what will we be doing there?”
“Catobble-wm-rn,” he said. “Catalpa worm run.” He turned around. “Oh, you’ll see when we get there.”
Catobble-wm-rn, or “Catalpa Worm Run”: Some dead brush and snapped limbs would
pin upward and scrape the base of the truck as we crunched over them, too
sparse to be woulds [sic], more like a junkyard of timbs [sic]. Pal would wheez the accelerator, and we’d lurch over one. CRUNCH! He was cackling.
There were chickens in the side yard, all happy and proud. They had a big dead tree trunk to hop onto and off of in the middle of their pen if they wanted. They were eyeing me nd [sic] Pal.
Pal undid the padlock and the chain on the gate [sick]. He draped the chain over his arm as he stomped around to swing it open [sick]. “Punch it,” he said, and I punched the accelerator. We were in [sick]. He shut the gate behind us.
[Sick!] [He was sick, Avery!] [Already!] [You could’ve said something!]
The back field wasn’t huge, but there were about a dozen cattle, black-and-white except for one red-colored bull, who Pal said was a new addition. (He said the previous bull had been rotated out, but I didn’t want to think about that because I didn’t want to think about where the bull had been rotated out to.)
And there were a few calves, one sticking its head between a fence board and a strand of wire to watch us. “Here we go,” Pal said, and he marched along the fence to the corner post, where two trees emerged. White grass grew at the roots.
“Catalpa tree,” Pal introduced. He bent a limb down. “Take a look.”
It was bright-leaved with these toothy-looking seedpods. Pal plucked one.
A catalpa worm is actually a caterpillar that blooms into what’s called a hawk moth once it matures.
Pal snatched one up. It would never mature.
He inverted it right before my eyes. I saw the inside of its skin, foam green turned the bright yellow of highlighter liquid.
It stained Pal’s hands as he went, setting the worms on a paper towel inside a plastic Tupperware container, side by side.
“It was either me or the birds,” Pal said. “Trust me.” And when I had a dream, later, about staining a bunch of my sheets bright yellow, I knew what it was about.
I’m sorry it’s untitled.
(Luca hands me a mix)
I didn’t want to give you something that had a title like “I’m Sorry” or something dumb like that.
It’s not all death songs, is it?
(I smile)
(he shakes his head)
No, but it contains my first original. I play guitar on it and everything. A song for you. In the future, though, I might need you to write lyrics because that shit is hard.
I remember saying, “Pal! You either got to quit drinking or you got to lose weight!”
(everyone is laughing)
(Mom too)
(I think it’s okay)
(we get to know so little about our parents)
(it occurs to me)
(we only get to know them as our parents)
When Mom got home from High Tides, Low Tides, the first thing she planned to do was get groceries. “Okay, so, to buy,” Mom dictated, like one of us was writing it down, “uhh … bread? Vegetables …”
“Do you want to get more specific with the vegetables?” I grabbed a pen and started writing. She was on to things like “batteries.”
“Mm, just jot off to the side ‘favorite.’ ” She laughed. She pulled her head back from the pantry. “Honestly, I think the only thing we have left to eat here that isn’t expired is the shredded wheat.”
“I hate to break it to you. But that shredded wheat is almost definitely expired.”
She tossed the box aside. “I don’t really want shredded wheat, anyway. Let’s have a real breakfast.”
We chose a new donut shop that had opened downtown. We shouldn’t have. When we got there, they were serving donuts called things like “the cock and balls” in the shape of actual cock and balls.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. She said, “Well, hold on a minute.” She looked at me like, what is wrong with you? “I want a donut.” She was messing with me.
“Mom …”
“New restaurant in town, Avery. We gotta support. Yes,” she said to the guy at the register, “I think I’ll have a voodoo doll, please.”
The voodoo doll came jelly-filled, with frosted facial features and a pretzel stick signifying an erect penis.
“My,” Mom said. She took out the pretzel and lay it on its side.
“Did you ever want a pet?” (I remember this is one of the early conversations we had after she got back.)
“Yes,” I said.
“I would really love a little kitten,” she said.
“Would you still love it when it grew into a cat?”
She laughed. “Mm, maybe. Do you remember when that baby bird died out back? Behind the house?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Remember, we heard something fall, and we went to check. It was that little potted plant we had hanging that Babs gave us and it fell, and there was this little tiny bird inside it, and it was alive.”
“I thought you said it died.”
“Well, it died later. It couldn’t make it on its own, of course. When it did, we buried it.”
“Mom, why are you bringing this up?”
“Okay.” She stopped. And what was really, really weird, we heard the sound of a potted plant drop, in the distance. We looked at each other. “Time really is a construct,” she said. “Everything really is all happening at once.”
We forgot about it for a little while, and somewhere in that span of time, a car door closed and an engine cranked. We missed it. Babs was leaving. We finished emptying the fridge. She was gone, she was gone, she was gone.
She had left him—left us.
(when everyone’s gone)
Let’s get out of here—leave the window up a while. It’s hot in here to me. Does it feel hot to you?
(there is still some light left in the evening)
(we walk around)
(I think she wants to talk about Babs)
(maybe I do too)
(but we don’t)
Let’s do the labyrinth.
At Pal’s house: “Dad? Dad, what happened?” Mom called. And I could hear him behind a door, so
bbing. “Dad, are you okay?”
“Pal?” I stepped into the hallway. White bread slices scattered along the floor. I walked to the garden room. He was in there. He had the door closed.
“Dad, if you don’t open the door, I’m going to break it in just like you did to our back porch that day. Remember?”
It nudged open then. He was posed against the doorframe, looking wobbly, tired, sad, his blue eyes.
Mom and I stepped to either side of him. Vodka smell, like the taste in my mouth the morning after orange drink night. “He’s diabetic you know, so.” Mom’s hands shook as she balanced. “It doesn’t take much. I think I, I might be going to be.” She looked at me. “Sick, Avery. You might have to—”
I took the full weight of him then. “I was in the kitchen,” he started to explain, “making sandwiches. She walked in and just said she was plum leaving me. She didn’t say—”
Mom returned. She put a hand up. She stood perfectly still for a few seconds.
“Okay, I think it passed. I think I’m going to make it.”
Was it the liquor smell that was getting her? We got Pal over to the couch.
I found towels in the bathroom, brought them out just in case. “You don’t have to do this, Ave,” Mom said. “Can you bring us some water?” Pal sagged against the armrest. I brought a whole pitcher and cups. We filled a cup for him, and he drank. And Mom drank a cup, and so did I.
It was so dark in the house, so unusual then. “He needs some good bready food. What would you like to eat, Dad? A turkey sandwich?” He shrugged. His head bobbed. Mom pulled some cash from her pocket.
“Well, what about spaghetti, huh? How does spaghetti sound? Spaghetti sound good? Avery, do we have the stuff for it? Christ, we only need three things.” We didn’t have three things to make spaghetti. Gia knocked on the door with them later. She stood hugging Mom in the doorway for a while. I cleared the room. They sat down together.