All together, the cemetery is an amateur affair. The stones of the wall are untidy and precarious. Some section of it is forever eroding, the stones sliding past each other to fan out across the little slope the cemetery tops like a wave collapsing across the shore. No matter the weather, the slate doesn’t seem to retain heat and I imagine they were pulled this way—cold and sharp—out of the side of the mountain by my great-grandmother, perhaps her mother, and stacked on a sledge to be trundled through the forest.
Inside the gate, which often comes loose to swing and clang against its moorings, are the graves. Four of them are marked by tidy stone mounds, their neatness striking when compared to the wall. Someone, many someones over the years, has taken the time to build these solid and then to maintain them, but why? It’s all just rock after all, and what lies beneath another kind of rock: the hollows of the skull just like the pocks in a boulder when a pebble has been caught and rattled around by centuries of water and ice; the teeth, loose by now, I assume, scattered like chips flaked from the spearhead being turned and turned in someone’s hand.
Yet, there is a difference between a wall and a grave. An even bigger difference between the four graves that were here before me—each marked by a stone that says Mother and above that stern pronouncement, as time passed and children were born, shallower etchings that proclaim one Great-great-grand, one Great-grand, one Grand, and the last still simply and starkly alone—and the fifth that I laid with my own hands and marked with only a wavering, poorly carved, T.
All this to tell you who is not here, Ingrid: the menfolk. Which should tell you all you need to know about who is still hanging around, about the whistling in the eves when there isn’t any wind, about the handprints on the banisters and the flour laid in mounded lines at the tops of all the stairs.
Thingy and I used to entertain each other at night by recounting the long, grim tale of Emily Murten (Poor Emily, Maid Murten, The Weeping Woman, as she was called among other things) who was said to have died of sorrow after being spurned by her handsome young lover to whom, oh folly of youth!, she had given herself on the chilly and austere plank floor behind the raised pulpit of the First Presbyterian, one of the oldest churches in town and, conveniently, the only one with its original bell in its original white clapboard steeple which Emily now assiduously haunted.
“Spread out before man and god,” Thingy said, pinching me under the sheet. “And all because she couldn’t keep her legs shut, just couldn’t wait for a little taste.”
Thingy loved Emily, loved the whole story: the creak of the floorboards beneath her lover’s knees, his breath on her neck, in her ear, the blood she had to mop up behind her. (“You can still see the stain,” Thingy said. “Indelible.”) Then the way the boy refused to see her, how stiff his face was as he looked past her, and how frail she became, how thin, almost transparent. Finally, she died and her bewildered parents buried her on the very same ground that had harbored her venial sin (“In the church,” Thingy said, “Can you imagine? All those empty seats.”) only to find she would not rest easy but came back the next full moon—white and gauzy in her winding shroud—to batter herself against the bell like a giant moth and lean out from the steeple’s cupola, weeping a warm rainstorm on whoever happened to be beneath her.
“They say if you if you get any of her tears on your skin it will stain you forever,” Thingy said. “Spots as red as blood.” She held up her slender hands for us to consider, turning them back and forth in the dim yellow light from my own kitchen that was leaking down the slope and through her bedroom window. It was a warm night but we still piled together in the center of her bed under both a sheet and the pillowy comforter. When one or the other of us shifted our weight or fluffed the sheets to stir up a little breeze, I could smell the stale exhalations of our bodies, but still there were no ghosts in Thingy’s room. And none haunting the steeple, though Thingy swore she had seen her once, Poor Emily, and had even, she showed me a strawberry birthmark on the back of her calf, been marked by her tears as she turned to run.
“What I don’t get,” Thingy said, “is why she just didn’t give the guy a blow job. Surely, you don’t have to hang around in a church for all eternity for sucking a little dick.”
But what Thingy really didn’t understand is that there’s no such thing as punishment. Only eternity, only the wind and the rain, the rock face and the burrowing root. Once we are made into a form we cannot unmake it and to be buried, even to be scattered through the forest, rendered by the harrowing teeth of dogs, is nothing but a blink in the body’s long, unwavering gaze.
“I see. . .I see. . . .” says the body, ruminative, long abandoned. And all the women that whisk through this house—for all their rustling footsteps and clenched fists pale among their skirts, for all their jangling keys and drifts of hair floating in the dust-light behind them—all these women are cyclic as breath. Rushing in crisp and biting, soughing out warm and wilted and damp.
So, there are these little artifacts: a moldy shoe, five gold rings that seem to retain the warmth of their wearer’s hand. And there is you of course, Ingrid, an inhalation finally come around again. And Jacob, myself, your father Daniel who I am watching right now as he splits stove-lengths next to the hen house. He has taken off his shirt, but sweat is still running in rivulets down the channels of his spine to darken the waistband of his jeans. His back is to me and when he stands with the axe hoisted above his head, poised in the moment before the swing, I resist the urge to tap on the window and call his attention. To stop him before he does something he can’t take back.
When I first came to the house I knew very little, certainly not how to recognize what was right in front of me. Along with my room and board, and, I naively assumed, the eventual room and board of the child I was carrying, Thalia took in hand my educational needs as she saw them. This bore no resemblance to the dutiful memorization I had preformed in school—information scented even now with the slick, plastic tack of textbook illustrations and the whining bite of the ammonia the custodians sprayed on our desks after hours—and nothing, really, to do with any kind of recognizable teaching principle. Instead, Thalia showed me what was there and then what was also there all around it. A typical lesson would go something like this:
Thalia: [pointing to the base of a tree] What is that?
Alice: [tired, hungry, deep in the forest] A flower.
Thalia: [snorting] It’s a redring milkweed. Good for snakebites and bee stings. Poisonous to fleas. Make a broom from its leaves and sweep the floors in case of infestation.
“What shape is it?” Thalia would then ask and I, looking at the woody stalk and top heavy circle of blooms would say something like umbrella shaped, or pincushion shaped, to which Thalia would shake her head and instruct me to close my eyes and look again. After standing this way for some time, I would come to see, guided by Thalia despite the fact that she stood silent and very still, that the plant was actually shaped like a series of overlapping, blade-edged ovals. That this shape extended from the plant itself all the way through the clearing, fading only at the bulwark of a silver, splintering hickory which had fallen a little way up the hill. This shape intersected many other shapes—loose spirals, regimented hexagons, boxes and circles and blooming cones—which echoed from other plants and hidden animals (a newt with a shape like tongues of flame; a cicada deep in its pupate burrow with a shape like stylized cresting waves). And, though these intersecting lines seemed at first like a hopeless tangle they were actually quite distinct and resistant to change.
If one knew how to look they could be manipulated, plucked almost, though the music that made was unruly and often discordant. If one had the right sort of touch, they could be braided, made into signs of calling or signs of warning, portents wholly other than the ones they had first exclaimed. There were words that could be spoken, bits of songs. If this seems fanciful to you, Ingrid, think of the birds. What are they doing if not casting spells? Every morning perched on the lip of
the gutters, in the black locust, at the peak of the henhouse roof; sex spells and safety spells, dangerous wardings.
This is what Thalia taught me: how to never again be alone. Which is also pretty well how she cursed me and, if you think of it a certain way, how I am now cursing you. History is a crowd. Story is a mob. There’s no place on the mountain you can hide from that sort of company, Ingrid. Maybe you should stop listening right now. Plug your ears. Go to sleep.
Thalia taught me other things, of course. How to stock the wood stove so its flame burned low for cooking. How to skin a rabbit and butcher it so as to make the most of its meat. Meanwhile, the winter passed into a damp, mild spring and that itself burned off into the hay-strewn summer. Far away down the mountain side—between us acres of forest and untrustworthy roads, so many vibrating, intersecting lines that a girl who didn’t know how to lay her own thread behind her would surely be snagged and left to dangle—Thingy took her own lessons and learned what she would from them.
In June (blooming June, buzzing June, the swollen buboe of summer), Thingy graduated third in our class and I was seven months pregnant. I could see the outline of the baby press against my stomach as it turned inside me and further could see its shape—a pulsing, hammer-struck line—as it radiated out around me. I could see the wind coming down the mountain and what exactly was within the storms it brought. I could see who walked down the stairs when no one walked down the stairs and what stayed at the edge of the forest, curious, lamp-lit eyes huge and round and yellow. I tamped the fire lower for Thalia’s eggs, which she liked soft and almost whole, sliding them one by one down her gullet, and felt the pullet’s pebbled skin for the joint where her bones would separate from her sockets and open her bloody and bare. I swept the floor with a lavender broom and a fescue broom and one made of foxtail. I walked to the hives with a bucket of embers and thrust my arm deep into their cracked, golden cores. I braided a sign at the door and one at the window, a sign on the bedpost and one webbed like cat’s cradle between my own red palms. It was a hot summer, the water steaming up from the earth like breath. At night, though Thalia forbid it, I often went into the forest alone. One day, Thingy drove up the mountain to say goodbye.
When Thingy was pregnant she bloomed like a peony. A big, dozy top, all ruffles, layers and layers of cream and then the shocking pink that was supposed to be internal—for no one’s eyes but yours, Ingrid—but was pushed by the sheer force of her swelling right to the surface. It’s not that she wasn’t beautiful, she was born with beauty between her teeth like a bit, but she was dreadfully exposed. Even in those first few months after she and Daniel moved in, even before she knew herself, it was clear to anyone who really looked that Thingy was flushed with the thin-veined flush of a flower right before it goes to seed.
In contrast, I was pregnant like the hard, horny burl a tree grows around a cleft where some burrowing worm has laid its egg. The tree does this to protect itself, though inadvertently it also protects the insect’s larvae as it twitches and grows. I was pregnant symbiotically, all interiors. But this isn’t really a fair comparison. They were such different times in our lives, after all. I remember that summer so well: the grass high and wet against my shins in the morning; the phoebes skimming the creek for gnats and catbirds tenting their wings to cast a shadow across the crickets and armored pill bugs; a smell like water and crushed greenery hanging in a fog over the meadow; Thalia standing in the side yard, two chickens whose heads bobbled loose at the ends of their snapped necks in her hand, eyes closed and face turned up toward the sun.
I don’t know what Thingy remembered. I never asked her. I was tight as a drum and felt whenever I opened my mouth as if a spotlight would beam out of me. I was preoccupied, I guess I would say. Suddenly, I was a source instead of just a reflection.
Nevertheless, time passed. Many years later I washed the baseboards of the house with a rag and a pail of soapy water.
Here the dust gathers like ash. There’s no explanation for this and yet, without vigilance on my part, the tabletops mist over with grit and the pages of all the books in Daniel’s library are seamed with it as if they are webbed with mold. I wash the baseboards once a week and the dust turns my rag and bucket water black. It gathers along the fine hairs of my arms as I dunk and wring until, by the time I am done, my forearms look lightly furred as if I were stuck in midtransformation: caught forever in the body of a woman that is also the body of some shy black creature with not enough fur to keep it warm. Daniel compares our dust to the ash that falls from the sky along the Ganges, where he traveled when he was in graduate school and writing his dissertation.
“It coats everything, all of your exposed skin, in the creases of your clothes,” he said. “It gets in your eyes, your mouth. Later, you go back to your hotel room—white sheets on the bed and billowing white, gauzy curtains, they were big on that, to denote luxury, I guess—but you’d blow your nose and in the tissue it was black. Coming out of your own body, the ashes of other people’s bodies.” He told me this as we sat together on the porch and watched the forest darkening. Inside, Thingy was listening to one of Thalia’s old records. Something with clarinets that swooped and moaned. I don’t know where Jacob was. He had taken the truck. He had left us.
I can’t remember exactly when this was in the timeline. Was Thingy heavy or slim? Was she roaming through the house in frayed jeans, barefoot on the cool boards, or in the hideous yellow peignoir she adopted during the last months of her pregnancy? Was she inside because she was digging happily through something (Thalia’s records, quart jars full of unassigned buttons she found under the cellar stairs) or because we were outside, her husband and her best friend sitting together at the end of a day?
Night comes quickly into the forest and soon, though a lozenge of light still oozed across the porch railings, the scene before us was pitched into a jumble of silhouettes. Black trunks darker than the black tangle of brush behind them, black leaves shifting black shadow onto the black turf. Something moved quickly through the grass and then held still. The fireflies winked up one by one and drifted around us as if they were all jockeying for a better view.
Daniel’s dissertation was titled Death Rituals Among Tribal Peoples Newly Settled in Developing Mega-Cities. It had been published by a small university press who had spent a disproportionate amount of their annual budget on a glossy black cover stamped with the outline of a black skull which lurked just behind the embossed letters of the title. Daniel was somewhat embarrassed by this and had stripped the dust jackets off the four or five copies he kept on a shelf in his study (previously the house’s formal front parlor) and folded them in a drawer in his desk. A shaft of light crossed his ear and creased the side of his soft, pink cheek. A firefly dipped close to his head and he held up a finger as he talked as if he expected it to land there.
“In Mali,” said Daniel, “the Dogon tribe will perform elaborate funeral rites for a man who has gone missing, who they presume dead, and if he shows back up again even just a moment after they are finished they will refuse to recognize him, as if he is invisible.” The breeze shifted and the heady odor of the Chinese privet, which had escaped from someone’s garden and grimly colonized the roadside ditches all the way up the mountain, washed over us like a thicker, slower form of air.
“The Merina in Madagascar take bodies out of their tombs and dance and talk with them, show them the recent changes in the area,” Daniel said. “A fallen tree or a flood marker. A new house. A new carburetor in the car.”
Inside, the clarinets came to a more somber understanding of themselves. They mourned like owls. Thingy switched on a lamp in the window and its light, neatly sectioned by the panes of glass, spilled out around me. When I lifted my arm, Daniel was lit up, his arm resting on his knee, his empty hands—neat and clean, the nails trimmed—dangling into the darkness.
“Lotus blossoms,” Daniel said. “Spider tattoos. The crackle of burning grasses. The thwack of a stick breaking the skull.”
>
When I lowered my arm he was hidden again, the shape of any man surrounded by hovering, attendant lights.
Then Jacob came home, I suppose. I seem to remember a wash of headlights spilling across the porch and the sound of a door slamming. Then we went inside to eat whatever it was I made from whatever it was Jacob brought me and sat around the table at our accustomed places: I facing a window, Thingy facing a mirror; Jacob and Daniel facing each other and between us all the long, uneven table that had once been a door.
On some other day, at some other point in time I washed the baseboards on my hands and knees and so crawled down the hallway until I came to Thingy’s door. It was open and directly across from the doorway the brass bed that had once been Thalia’s creaked under its heaped weight of bodies, pillows and rumpled sheets. For someone who had always been slim, Thingy had begun to gain weight very early in her pregnancy and put it on steadily all throughout. At this point, she was close to full term, perhaps at the beginning of her eighth month, and was top heavy and plagued by back aches and varicose veins. She spent much of her time in bed where she had made a kind of nest for herself: the fitted undersheet stripped from the striped mattress and mounded around her, pillows plumped behind her back, trapped between her knees and dimpling under the weight of her plump, flushed arms. Thingy filched sheets from the linen closet on wash day with no regard for their size or pattern which meant all those months Jacob and I slept beneath a shifting array of checks and stripes, faded roses clashing with blue plaid pillowcases, sheets which were often too big and billowed to the floor on either side of our small bed as if we were dolls put carelessly to sleep under an oven mitt or a larger doll’s discarded smock.
Thingy had propped the window open. A spring breeze, damp with exertion, puffed in and out of the room. It was afternoon, the sun slanting down toward the valley, and a panel of bright, white light was flung across the foot of the bed as crisp as paper. I straightened up in the door frame, putting my hands to the small of my own back to work out the kinks, and looked in on her. She was lying on her side, the sheer yellow fabric of that hateful peignoir taut against her belly, and had fallen asleep reading. I remember thinking this was the danger time, when she was asleep, when she couldn’t be misdirected. She had changed so drastically during her pregnancy that she didn’t look like my Thing at all—less the beautiful scullery maid with lentils in her hair and more the head chef cutting lattice for the pie; less the pert sister forcing her way down the throats of the flowers and more the heaving queen, moribund and carefully fed. If she were to sit up and speak to me, for the first time in our lives I didn’t have a clue what she might say.
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