Shadows & Tall Trees 7

by Michael Kelly

  “I can smell the rot in you. It hurts, it’s started to hurt a lot more, hasn’t it, and you want it gone. But we never give the bottle right away. We give you root soup. That’s so you can get strong and think about what you want to do. And you want to write in your little book, don’t you ever?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “What if you could write a whole book everybody would love, love, love?” At this she throws her arms wide above her head and closes them in a clap. “Something that everybody would remember forever and always?”

  “I—” His vision is fuzzing around the edges again. “What is your name?”

  “Willa. It’s one of my favorites. You know, you can win that pluster you want so bad.”

  “Pluster?”

  “That prize your sister won. I like her words too. There’s some root in them.”

  Dear Christ, she means Pulitzer. She’s reading his mind. Movement catches his eye through the window. The others are outside, chasing and wrestling and turning cartwheels. He can just see one of the women hanging from the massive oak at the far left of his angle of vision, using her legs to swing herself in large arcs. Things that should shatter their brittle bones to cornmeal. A tree that seems to flourish like nothing here does.

  “Please bring the bottle to me, would you?” he says, and turns away. A great clenching in his gut stops him just inside the short hallway. He doubles over and coughs hard enough to bloom red stars in his eyes. His throat burns. Yellowish tissue streaks across the floor, ropy like the pith of a clementine.

  He takes an extra moment to scrutinize the main room. Half an era has passed since his arrival, a neglected stink of time, the curtains disintegrating and spotted black around the windows. The chairs and sofas heavy with dust and discoloration. On the mildewed table is a charcoal smear where the apple sat long ago. I am the youngest thing here, the poet thinks, and retires to his room.

  5. IN THE SHAKING LIGHT

  But the words come again, in a lush verdant spillage that is nearly an agony to him, though far sweeter than the creeping blight of the cancer and its brood of metastases. He nearly feels regret, that he’s come here to die and given himself the will to go on. But he refuses the regret and the will at the same time and listens to just the words that fall from him. One poem is finished and the next has four stanzas that hum in the little bedroom.

  The age that has infected the house does not reach here, and his surroundings cuddle him. There comes a firmness to his joints, knitted around the pain. His writing hand hardly cramps. He pauses to watch the leaves stir on the hale oak outside his window, now absent of the elderly guests as evening lowers its slip. Somewhere the sun drips away.

  Yes, he does feel that he could write a book here. A collection of at least thirty elegies to the things he has seen, and to Daniel, or at least to the ideal of him, soaked in the kerosene of HIV and his own illness. Was Daniel his one love? It is a difficult thing to turn away from, yet it was so long ago. These could be an old man’s pangs. An old man’s predictable hindsight.

  He begins to get hungry again, truly ravenous in that younger way, and stands. From below the house, shrieks rise with him. Corddry thinks of a dial tone, the overlaying of registers. Amplified, threaded with animal wetness, the sounds make his sinuses compress. His hand falls on the doorknob, the cold brass-plated metal shocking his skin. And as everything seems to be paired in the tremble of these moments, he hears a hand fall on the other end of the knob.

  “Stay with us,” a voice says through the hollow wood, naked and congested. One of the men. “Take care of us. Be the light here.”

  “I’m dying,” he says. “Please, that’s all I need to take care of.”

  “Not yet,” the voice says, stretching the words. “Come down to the root cellar. We won’t hurt you. You’ll see. You can make poems about it. And, okay, the bottle of nectar is down there, if you really do want it.”

  Footsteps stomp away and Corddry follows them. The whole of the main room has now gone the spoiled black of a tumor. The ancient man is already far ahead of the old man, loping on all fours like a rabbit, back legs driving him forward into the kitchen. The poet attempts a burst of speed, braces himself for a coughing fit that doesn’t quite come. The kitchen is coated in decay, the streaks of Willa’s blood years ago becoming part of the cracked linoleum. A door hangs open in the back, exposing a downward sloping darkness.

  He places his foot on the first step, and finds the next easier, a burden slipping away from him like a yoke. His skin prickles and tastes the cool air. The poet smells a sharp green stench, rich living earth. He thinks of candles in the shaking light. Hears the shrieks of the women, in stereo, the same huffing breaths before the next. The light gives him a gesture; it waves him down and onto the dirt floor of the cellar, his vision clouding with pinpricks as it did before. He feels himself changing into something, but still inimitably himself.

  The cellar squats beyond the rush of time rotting the main house. It holds nothing within it but the six old guests—residents—Children, let’s call them what they somehow are, he thinks—and three great twining roots. Earthen walls lined with flickering sconces, and the vast knotted appendages thick as the poet’s legs reaching through the top of the easternmost side toward the fallen sun. Down to the three women, who lie on their backs with legs spread. Corddry cannot quite bring himself to look away, instead sees the men crouched before the parted apertures, each with a root draped over his shoulder as they receive the blood-slicked infants into their primed arms.

  It is not seeing the roots inserted between the women’s legs that causes Corddry to turn, his gut heaving with nothing but a film of soup to bring up through his throat. It is the choreography of it. He hangs his head and hears the screams continue, a thread of high thin wails joining them, that dial tone again. A moment after he realizes he has lain, or fallen, down upon the packed dirt of the floor, he opens his eyes to three more babies emerging, he sees the men gray as ash or as the roots of the monolithic oak of this house. Their arms crack open and their faces split, crumbling into shaved bark as they stagger toward the wall and try to insert themselves into the soil. The second of each set of twins falls to the ground between its mothers’ legs. The mothers are silenced. Alone the six new creatures mewl on.

  6. THE RINGS OF A TREE

  “You’ll be our light now.” A dirt-filled voice, and somewhere else, the sharp reeds of keening infants. A pressure on his shoulder, coiled under his armpit and across his chest. Daylight comes strong through the window. In it the poet sees a blur of woman bending over him with tendrils of leafless vines where her iron-white hair was. Brown acorns in eye sockets, or a fever dream. Teeth to shred through his breastbone in a moment. Where is the good death? He is back in the narrow bedroom, the empty walls, a membrane of glare coating his vision. No bottle on the bedside table.

  “Everything you ever read is here with you,” Willa says, and covers the crowded teeth behind a mossy hand. “Everything that ever touched you. Write your book. Dying’s here but you won’t like how we really are.” The corners of her mouth smile and she laughs and looks away. There is no blood on the floor to draw in now, but she is no longer shy. “Sorry to say there wasn’t ever a bottle you could drink to die. Mr. Hessel, he lies for us about that, even though there’s a root of truth down in it. But just for you, I named one of us Daniel. I do like your poems.”

  Corddry lifts himself onto his elbows, squeezes clarity back into his eyes so that he can see the woman whose face has aged beyond years. Faint circles echo out from her nose, concentric—The rings of a tree, the poet thinks, and says, “Daniel?”

  “These old bodies are going now into the roots,” she says. “We feed the tree and you feed us and we feed the tree. And start again. That’s how we flower and rot with age right off the vine. That’s how we go on, until one day we might stick and get to grow up slow. I think I wouldn’t mind not being a child.”

  “Please, why can’t you just leave
me alone?” The poet feels a thickening in his gut, a knot of hunger, an alien tightness as though everything is sewn up properly inside of him. But his head is full of daylight. It is so soft and tired.

  “You found your words, didn’t you, and it’s made your sap sweet. You’ll suckle us babes, bit by bit, until we’re grown again, and we’ll grow full with child again. Or until your sap is too polluted. Someone else will come looking for a good death.” She moves toward the door and Corddry watches her break apart. Pieces of skin flake like veins of bark. Topsoil spills in a powder from the crevices as she staggers out of the room.

  He slips from the bed, stands on the memory of strength once in his legs, stops his open mouth from shouting after her about the bottle. He hears her run down the hall toward the cellar. His book is on the bed, the pen clipped to its back cover. Standing there he tries to remember all the poets, their words on death and eager, leaching life. They dim and dissolve. He thinks of Glück and Rilke and Oliver and Dickey. He can nearly grasp a title, “Root-light,” from the last, but there is something else tethered to it, something that has never been to do with him, never had a home with his heart, and he sits back down. Picks up the book and feels the waiting texture of its pages, the pebbled false leather of its covers.

  He hears no newborn cries. The quiet in the house has grown to profundity, so he writes idle words until the words reach out to this profundity and pull the quiet into them. He writes of things seething beneath the dirt. The things are his past and his lovers and the night he stood on a stage and wept from the spotlight and the award placed into his strong unlined hands. In the dark, after the spotlight, a man with a forgotten name twined around him and pushed into him and he cried out.

  But he feels the words leaving him. On the page they are not quite his own. Through the half-open door, the poet sees furniture gleaming with rebirth, the walls clean as though fresh from the sawmill and the carpenter. And down the length of the house, in the kitchen, a door is thrown open and the clatter of footsteps come running with young voices chasing them. The spores break free of their tethers and caterwaul into the main room. The poet leaps forward and slams and locks the door, upon which tiny fists rain with round lisped shouts of “Mister! Mister!” and “Play with us!”

  He says nothing. He writes the words “Root-Light” at the top of a new page and sits there for hours. Three of the children—which one is Willa?—gather outside the window, taking it in turns to sit on the tire swings and keep watch over the poet. The sun is slowly sucked into the west again until the words will no longer come.

  By morning, the fists against the door and the window are heavier. Still the words leave him, and the tastes of his lovers’ skins leave him. He can only narrate himself. The children remain in their patience,

  Already the lisps are fading

  From their pleas and imprecations,

  The gentle promises pulsing in the twins’ hunger,

  the six voices.

  Already the poet feels his blood singing to them, vocal with compulsion

  And sticky with sap.

  He presses the pen, he pushes the black ink around, but the words have left the page.

  THE TRIPLETS

  Harmony Neal

  THEIR MOTHERS HAD BEEN CAREFUL TO conceive the girls under the same blue moon. Kaylee’s mother had heard from her sister-in-law, who had heard from her tennis partner, who had heard from her hairdresser that there was an old Chinese or Japanese or possibly Cherokee legend that girl children conceived under a blue moon would be born exceptionally beautiful. They figured the story unlikely, but what could it hurt? Each woman had seduced her husband in identical red lace teddies under identical suede capes in the barely autumn air on plush microfiber throws put down under the moon in not-quite remote areas in the same municipal park. The tale supposedly went that the perfect conceptions could only be had out of doors, with the woman on top, her body perfectly silhouetted and bathed in the silver light of the knowing moon. Each husband wondered what had come over his wife, and each never suspected that two other men were being simultaneously treated to identical fellatio performed by similar women who had all read the same recycled article in that month’s Cosmo. Each husband culminated in the similar orgasms had by circumcised men, and in that way, three girl children were conceived by three women with similar goals.

  The girls were all born during the first week of June, which the mothers found to be an ideal time for girl children to be born since you could wrap their heads in satin scrunchy bows and not have to worry about too much heat escaping. They crammed their daughters’ feet into tiny strappy sandals and paid $10 apiece each week to keep their toenails polished in the fashionable colors of the season. Crystal’s mother also wanted to do the girls’ fingernails, but their joint pediatrician suggested that since babies put everything in their mouths, including their fingers, this was not a good plan. The same pediatrician didn’t really want the mothers to have the girls’ toenails painted either, for the same reason, but each woman exclaimed no daughter of hers would ever dream of placing a toe in her mouth, regardless of what the writers at Cosmo might suggest on the topic.

  The women hired identical Slavic nannies for the girls, a rare find of triplets, and congratulated each other that though the young women were not unattractive, their dour expressions, unplucked eyebrows, and jeans-and-t-shirts wardrobes would simultaneously make the mothers look better and keep the nannies focused on what mattered, which was the upkeep of the mothers’ children and homes. They hoped the nannies were lesbians, and something about the way they didn’t shave suggested this might be so, though of course, none of the mothers asked and none of the nannies ever said a thing to the mothers that wasn’t the response to a command.

  The three daughters also looked very similar, though they had small differences: after all, a truly beautiful woman is unique in her own beauty while hitting the major markers spot on. All three had pale eyes since all three mothers had judiciously only dated men with pale eyes and light hair, and were, of course, married to men with pale eyes and light to medium hair. The mothers hated biology, the way hair normally darkens and loses its luster in adulthood and skin loses its vibrancy and elasticity—unless the necessary precautions are taken, which all of the mothers took with their hair and skin and breasts. Only Lila’s mother had gotten a single stretch mark during her pregnancy, through carelessly neglecting her preventative routine one weekend, but she’d had that corrected within two weeks of Lila leaving the womb.

  The infant girls had intuited what was expected of them by the time they could hold their heads straight on their wobbly necks. They smiled and cooed and cutely patted peoples’ faces when within reach. They accepted the itchiness of lace tights and the pressure of too-tight shoes. They learned to appreciate the stinging pull of hair being yanked and molded and dominated. They giggled, but never guffawed, learning early to always feign delighted surprise, but never be too surprised by anything.

  In this way, they also learned to accept their due of fawning and smiles and compliments that dripped or gushed from adult mouths, like a slow honey or a rushing rapid. They knew their place in the universe, their role, and they were comfortable enough with it, having given little thought to the possibility that there were other places, other roles that girls like them might take, different landscapes and horizons, different shapes of existence.

  There was only one thing the girls did that secretly disappointed their mothers, and that was their refusal to maintain a cold indifference toward their nannies. In public, the girls adopted the appropriate air of the attended to being taken care of by their marginally compensated attendees, but in off-camera moments, when the girls didn’t know their mothers were nearby, the mothers witnessed small demonstrations of tenderness between their daughters and their help. Once, Kaylee’s mother declared she’d even seen a hug between Manya and Kaylee, but Lila and Crystal’s mothers assured Kaylee’s mother that such was impossible since Slavic women were known
to lack anything resembling warmth.

  Naturally, the beautiful daughters were very popular at school and other little girls wanted to sit with them during lunch and breaks and be their reading partners and science buddies, even though as early as kindergarten the girls were known as “the triplets” and no principal had power to separate them into different classrooms and no teacher could likewise split them, no matter her reasons for wanting pairs instead of threes. No one could deny the girls had something of a magical power. Even when their mothers weren’t in the wings, demanding their daughters receive their due, no one wanted to deny the girls anything.

  Their primary caregivers were, of course, their nannies, who lived in small guest bedrooms in the backs of their respective houses on the first floor, out of the way in rooms they were to spend as little time in as possible. Manya, Maryia, and Marusya kept to themselves. They did their jobs, and did them well. They met when they could, understanding the necessity of family in a hostile place full of technicolor people eating technicolor food and living technicolor lives. Had they not elected to each care for one of the triplets, they wouldn’t have been able to see each other at all, but since the girls were in the same dance, art, and manners classes, they saw each other regularly, retreating to back aisles and hallways to speak to each other in low voices in words incomprehensible to those around them.

  Mostly, they saved money and bided their time. Their mistresses did not know much about them, not even which country they came from. They certainly did not understand that these women had chosen their names, abandoning their given names at the border of their homeland. Their mistresses neither knew nor cared that the women came from a land where the death rate had outstripped the birthrate, where hunger and desire were ways of life. They hadn’t even bothered to notice that the women they’d hired were girls themselves.

  The triplets shot up from infants through toddlers through elementary kids through middle school. None of them ever seemed to go through an awkward stage where the proportions of her face or body went a little off. They stayed perfect, perfect, beautiful little creatures. Perhaps they were a bit more reserved when the lights weren’t shining on them than their mothers may have wished. Certainly, their mothers didn’t want banshees for daughters, but the girls never raised their voices, never demanded their own way, never demanded anything.