by Daniel Mills
So I read. The bible is the one book allowed me in my condition & I read from Chronicles & Kings & the Minor Prophets ’til my vision is blurred & I cannot see the page before me. Then kneeling by the fire I think of those evenings when once we sang together, the two of us, the holy words in his mouth & in mine.
My faith it is a broken & flapping thing—the faith of a leper, my father has said—but I am not lying when I tell you I have heard the angels & their voices were our own.
The fire is nearly out. The shadows deepen like the snows but I am too cold to sleep. Times like this I sing to you, though I do not think you can hear me.
In the night, sometimes, her arms around me, breath blown soft across my ear. Singing like she did when first she came to me, when this room wasn’t ours but Father’s. I wasn’t to go inside, he said, but I didn’t listen, and the falling man shattered when he struck the floor.
The door slammed back, bruising the wall, and Father’s voice the noise of thunder: a clap of sound, the fragments it makes. The Indian girl’s legs, her bare feet on the floor. Her hands on me, gathering me up and holding fast as we leap from the window and over the mountain to the gully. Those words sung over me as we fly, Rock of Ages. Cleft for me like the cave where she takes me. Then waiting there, hiding, the pain in my head like a man’s long shouting. Killing time. Making gaps in the hours, years. Waiting for her return.
I didn’t see her, not then. But she must have come back at the end of all that heat, swinging low to gather me up and return me to our old bedroom, Mr. Flood’s now, because that’s where I woke in the morning and no one beside me, none to know that I had gone.
This morning’s heat and brown light in the windows. Thaddeus gone to make the fire, his shape in the sheets beside me. The window open so I hear the birds. Smell the wetness in the grass. See steps broken in the dew, going round the garbage-pile. Aaron’s Plough, as we call it, landed there amidst that sea of weeds, the blades all rusted and sharp despite the damp shining from them.
Mr. Flood. He’s coming round the other side now, dressed already, and with such sweat on him. Wearing black clothes, and heavy, like Father wore on Sundays. His coat in the wardrobe. Holes in the sleeves where the moths have been at it.
I watch him, Mr. Flood, walking toward the woods, the dew vanishing under his feet at every step. The air glittering, slicing trails ’cross my vision. Blurring him where he moves with arms swinging, coattails blown back. His long gait carrying him over the mountain and down toward the gully, the cave, and I’m following, floating downstairs to the kitchen.
Thaddeus is there, kneeling before the range, and Sally with her hands white and floured, punching down the day’s bread. Her face turned away, vanishing into the light round her.
She says: “It isn’t like that.”
“Was your idea to send for him.”
“We need the money. You told me as much.”
“Your Mr. Flood needs money too. Reckon he’ll write what he needs to see he gets it.”
Thaddeus spits, straightens. Spots me as I drift toward the door, open on a world lit by whirling sparks, white fires like falling snow, dancing in the tree branches, and Mr. Flood out walking among them.
Thaddeus catches hold of my sleeve.
“There’s things need doing,” he says.
I look over at Sally, but she’s quiet. Not smiling or whistling like she sometimes does, and Thaddeus is angry, too. He holds me by the wrist, his grip tightening so it hurts, and I can’t move past the doorway.
The brightness outside. Getting brighter, though the sun’s still hidden. Inside the tightness gathering at my temples, my eyes, making halos round everything I see. Even Sally, looking like a spirit as she steps forward, closing the door and glaring at Thaddeus. The light around her shimmering like the veil our mother wore.
“Go in the pantry,” Thaddeus says to me. “Fetch out the jam and honey.”
Which I do, stumbling as I walk for the sparks which rise and fall before me. Thaddeus takes no mind, nor Sally, the two of them hissing at each other under their breath as I go up the ladder, near-blind now, feeling my way up the rungs, the jars cool and dusty at my fingertips.
Their voices muffled from the kitchen. Their words, pieces of them.
“Too young,” says Thaddeus. “Don’t remember how he was. What he was like.”
“I know enough.”
“You know nothing.”
Sally whispers, words I don’t catch.
Thaddeus doesn’t answer, doesn’t speak, and in that quiet, the light divides itself, shearing down the centre to let the pain spill out, entering me with a roar, with a noise like Father’s voice, or Thaddeus’s, and the wet slap of his fist across Sally’s face.
The jar slips free, smashing on the ground.
Thaddeus rushes in with curses on his lips, eyes rolling and wild. Calling me a fool and worse things, besides, but Sally’s already gone. I hear her on the stairs, hear her running. Thaddeus yelling, too, but I go up after her, not stopping ’til I reach the door of her bedroom.
Closed. Locked and rattling, the steel bolt shot. Her voice comes small through the keyhole, telling me to go away though the darkness swims and thickens in my skull, the roaring louder than before, the storm-din gathering now, breaking—
A door opens down the hall. Two figures step out, a man and a woman.
“I want to be alone,” Sally says.
The thunder pounding at my temples. Making a crash like waves or the noise in the shell Mama had. Father brought it back from Canada where he went. Where he found that statue of a man shot with arrows which he kept upon the nightstand in his room and we weren’t to touch. Because it was fragile, he said. Because it cracked when it fell and scattered down the boards, and Father came running, the thunder following. Throwing shadows ’cross my vision, blackening my view of this day to come.
The two figures drawing closer. “Good morning,” the voice says, and it’s Mr. Bauer, the German. His face unseen for the shadows before me.
“Please,” says Sally.
I throw myself forward, ignoring the Bauers and clattering downstairs as the house fades away, leaving only the quiet which gathers in Mama’s room, with her books and Bibles on the shelf and the stories she used to read us. Her scent on the sheets like trees in the spring all hung with flowers. Clinging to these old bottles, pieces of her jewellery. Glinting amidst the shadows, the curtains drawn, sealing the memories inside.
This one: Mama holding me with my head upon her breast. I hear it, her slow breathing, her voice wandering, the words half-spoken in her sickness.
“You’ll see her again,” she says. “Even if she won’t come at your call, the way the others do. You think she’s gone, I know, but she isn’t far. She’s near as the breath in your chest when it leaves you at last and the Veil is parted. And you’ll see her. Face to face, the Word says, as for the first time. We’ll all be together then, made whole like never before.”
“And Father?”
“He isn’t coming back,” she says. “Not even then, at the end of it all.”
The end of it all. We wait, the three of us, but the end won’t come, and Mama’s gone to her rest beyond the orchard. Thaddeus laid her down beside her children with her face turned toward Rebecca and the babes that lay between them. A brother and sister we never knew. Jeremiah, named for Father, who never cried out nor hollered (so Mama said) and lived less than a fortnight. And Joanna, too, born without the breath in her. Not dead but sleeping, Mama said, and Sally says the same, though there’s no rest, I swear, on days like this.
The heat. The salt-taste of it on my lips, pouring from me as in fever, or the hell Father spoke of when he knelt beside our bedside, the tears rolling down his face. His hands bruised as on that morning when first he put the thunder in my head and set it to roaring or later when he threatened to cut the voices from my mouth. The cords of his neck. The foam on his lips. The blood down his arm where he scored it with a knife to show
us God’s suffering.
He knew about suffering. Thaddeus saw him go downstairs at night when he thought we were asleep. Thaddeus followed, watched him take a branch from the rosebush outside the door. Father stripped away the flowers, Thaddeus said, leaving just the thorns. Then placed his member on the block and struck at it with the branch until the blood ran out of it and he collapsed against the table, sobbing and breathing hard.
The pain worse now. Burning in my brain like storm-light. The sun makes slashes through the curtains, my closed eyelids. Finding me in Mama’s bed where I lay with the sheets pulled up and shaking. Killing the room around me. Sinking me deep inside myself, the weight of it. Pushing me down through the gaps it makes.
November. Branches naked where they overhang the gully. Rotting leaves, snowfall drifting on the air. The quiet in that place between the rocks where Thaddeus takes me, running on ahead. I want to go with him, to hold his hand, but he doesn’t stop, not ’til the walls open into a kind of clearing with the cave at its end where the Indian girl took me. Wind coming through behind us. Rattling the branches. Setting the leaves to skittering.
Thaddeus drops to his knees and folds his hands together ’cross his face. I sit with him watching, as he bows his head, whispers into his closed fist. He’s praying like Father taught us but his voice is loud and getting louder. Soon he’s near to shouting and his hands fall away so the last words ring out clear over us. Spring Willow.
“You hear?” he says. “Her footsteps in the leaves.”
I shake my head, hearing naught for the hissing of the wind behind us.
“Up there,” he says, pointing. “Up on the rocks.”
And she’s there, the Indian girl, who rescued me from Father’s Room and flew with me over the wall of the gully. Looking just as I remember with her legs long and thin and hair the colour of a raven’s breast and glossy in the same way. It hangs down in her face, tossing with her dance and wafting down a smell like Mama’s perfume.
Apple blossoms. Lilacs. Spring flowers though the snow whirls about her, caught up in the wind she makes. Spinning in place with her arms spread wide, open to the sky. Her weight going from ankle to ankle. Her bare feet slapping the rocks and no wind, no other sound.
She leaps down from the wall. Lights on the cave roof then jumps down behind it. Disappears for a time and comes out dancing, passing from the cave into the stone clearing and leaping and spinning all the while. But she slows in her dancing, the time between each step getting longer ’til she’s standing before me and smiling through the curtains of her hair.
Thaddeus starts talking, then, using words I don’t know. “Indian words,” he says. And the girl replies in the same language, talking for a long time. Thaddeus nods. The girl laughs, a sound like singing, and bows first to Thaddeus, then to me, and then she’s gone, and the quiet, too. The wind starts up again, strong enough to thin the daylight, snowfall riming the stones all round. Thaddeus unbends himself to walk toward the house, ignoring me like he always does and I call after him, telling him to wait. I run after him. Grab hold of his coat and bring us down thrashing, kicking, Thaddeus going limp beneath me. He pushes me off and rolls away onto his back. Looks up past the empty branches, snow coming down.
I ask: “What’d she say? What’d she tell you?”
“Said for you to come see her. If your head pains you. If Father comes at you again. Climb down the gully and make your way down to those rocks. That’s her cave, where she lived when she was alive. Before she was a spirit.”
Thaddeus is quiet for a time, snowfall melting round his mouth. Running down his chin. “She knows all about you, Ambrose,” he says. “And she’ll come running at your call. You just have to say her name.”
“Her name?”
“Spring Willow.”
The words now like a bubble on my lips. Bursting with the breath which comes pouring out behind. Passing from me like the winds in that place and I think maybe I’m dreaming because Sally’s there beside me, seated by the bed in Mama’s chair, with her hand clapped over mine and the sheets spread out between us.
Her voice is soft and soothing like Spring Willow’s was when once she sang to me. And she’s singing too, Sally is, though I don’t know the tune. A song she learned from Mrs. Ambler, maybe, who’s fond of singing, and not just hymns. It’s a story about a girl who goes out gathering rushes and the babe she births and tries to hide.
Oh father, dear father, it’s nothing, said she,
just a little bird that fluttered on my knee.
And I’ll build for it a nest, and warm it on my breast,
so it won’t wake up early in the May morning.
Thunder overtakes me, the roar of that place inside. The pain cinched round and tightening, throbbing where the sunlight strikes my left eye, piercing it, carving out shapes beneath the lids. A man, naked, bristling with arrows. A face made from blood. My blood and his, Father’s. All the rage and hurt it carries. The weight of Sally’s hand on mine. Spring Willow running with me in her arms, making for the gully as the darkness takes form, rising behind us and following after, close as shadows with the mountain looming then falling away—
The pain’s gone. Mama, too, and Sally, but there’s Mr. Flood’s voice in the sitting room. Talking with Mrs. Ambler. She’s telling him about Chogan the brave. About Evening Star, the Indian girl, who only started coming when Thaddeus entered the new Cabinet.
“Last summer,” Mrs. Ambler says. “July the fifteenth.”
“And she has kept the ribbon you gave to her?”
“Indeed, she is never seen without it.”
“And it does not appear to you to be in any way ragged or frayed?”
“Of course not. You saw it yourself. It appears as new as on the day I gave it her.”
“But, surely, if she has worn it every day for a year—”
“There is no passing of time in the spirit world, Mr. Flood. No days at all as we understand them. Genesis speaks of the days of the creation, but a day to the Lord is as a century to us. Time enough to light the sun and set it burning. Or are you not a Christian?”
“I was a minister, once, Madam.”
“And yet you possess no belief in the afterlife? The persistence of the soul?”
“Not even that,” he says. “Especially that.”
Then a door closing like sleep coming over me and the day’s well-faded when I wake, the light gone yellow where it’s seeping through the curtains. The house quiet but for Sally’s pacing overhead, walking as she reads. Holding a book in two hands the way she does and going back and forth ’cross the bedroom. The door closed and bolted, I know, just like it always is, as though to keep us out, like when Rebecca was sick and we couldn’t come near.
Standing up now. Swinging round my legs and limping to the basin. I wash my face in the old water, all clouded and stinking. Scrub the skin raw, washing off dreams and memories and watching my face as it changes in the water.
The shadow’s gone from my vision, swallowed by the pain which followed it, and the light outside is dim and getting dimmer. Storm clouds gathering over the mountains, forming blue columns fat with rain, and always the true dark coming on, the voices waking inside me.
Feel them stirring: Chogan, Young Jeremiah. Abijah, our uncle, who was John Turner’s father. But Spring Willow won’t come, not again, and the whole of this house’s emptiness shows in the looking glass of the water. The room behind me. Her absence. My face in the half-light, stained where the sun moves across it, retreating from the storm.
Into the hallway, the sitting room. Close the door and turn round and Mr. Flood’s there. Standing, crossing the room. He meets me by the fireplace. He’s a big man but mild and his eyes are lined and wrinkled, the balls of them well sunk.
I’m scared now, the sweat starting when I think of Thaddeus, what he’ll say. He was angry with me yesterday and again with Sally this morning enough to hit her. He told us not to talk to Mr. Flood, said what might happen. Said he�
��d have to go away.
Mr. Flood asks: “That is your room? I admit I had wondered.”
He talks with the same softness, voice and hands like a child’s, pink and smooth.
“Mama’s room,” I say. “Before she passed.”
He turns red, apologizes. “Sally said you were close.”
“She’s with the spirits now. Her babies. She’s happy.”
“She speaks to you?”
“Through me, sometimes. Maybe tonight you’ll hear.”
“I should like that very much.”
Then pausing to wipe his forehead, his eyes. He looks past me to the fireplace. The ashes inside turning over and over, wind coming down the chimney.
“What can you tell me about your mother?” he asks.
And I tell him, least what I remember. Her warmth, the smell of her. The black dress she always wore, mourning her children in the grave though we were still alive. Their stones past the orchard. She used to visit them, first with Rebecca and later with Sally. Mama’s brother Abijah, who came with his son John, our cousin, who we thought would marry Rebecca.
Mr. Flood says, “I saw Rebecca’s stone, what’s written there.”
“Not dead but sleeping.”
He nods. “The date is inscribed below. March 28th, 1855. You must have been quite young at the time. I’m surprised you can remember her at all.”
“She was sick. She couldn’t leave her room.”
“Your mother?”
“Rebecca.”
“What else can you recall about her?”
“The cold.”
The day we buried her. The ground all cracked and white. John and Thaddeus digging down below the frost and Mama hiding ’neath her veil. John crying and his father Abijah there, praying to his God in heaven. Thaddeus found a slate down the gully and stood it upright over her. John helped pile round the dirt and Mama scratched in those words.
Mr. Flood doesn’t speak, just listens like Mama used to do. Or Spring Willow on those mornings when she came and sat cross-legged in front of us. The light in her hair, the wind shooting through it. The lilac smell drifting up and her head tilted on one side, watching.