Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  In the girl’s daydream, the doppelgänger gently awakens the sleeper, dresses her, and brushes her hair.

  Lightly she plants the kiss of death on her neck, and, in a fashion similar to the old woman in Michals’s piece, they are transported with some unearthly velocity toward what looks like a reasonably comfy version of the afterlife.

  The daydreamer awakens, still feeling the freighted, phantasmal kiss on her neck.

  This early artistic preoccupation with mortality might have been expected given my father’s influence and the art and artifacts of death throughout the house, but still I am surprised, going through my old negatives, to find such clear evidence of it so early on. Now I realize that I misspoke in 2003 during the What Remains exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, when I repeatedly asserted that my photographic exploration of death had begun when my first greyhound, Eva, dropped dead. Clearly I hadn’t taken a look at my old contact sheets, where it is abundantly evident. However, Eva’s death definitely revived it, kicking it into high gear.

  She died on Valentine’s Day, 1999, five years to the day after I bought her from a man who had smashed her pelvis by slamming a stall door on her. She was pathetically needy, annoying, and stupid, and I adored her. A graceful creature, despite her injuries, she dropped dead doing what she loved best: running across the hoary fields one early morning at the farm. Larry carried her to the barn and laid her on a plank, where she froze solid.

  Refusing to let anyone move her, I wept noisily and unpredictably, irritating everyone in the family. As I stood next to her rigid body, I grew curious about what would finally become of that head I had stroked, oh, ten thousand times, those paws she had so delicately crossed as she lay by my desk, their rock-hard nails emerging from downy white hairs.

  Was it ghoulish to want to know? Was it maudlin to want to keep her, at least some part of her? Was it disrespectful to watch her intimate decomposition? I put these questions aside, picked up the phone, and called a friend who, bless his heart, didn’t bat an eye at what I was asking him to do.

  When he was done skinning her, he brought her back to me in two parts. He carried her body in a straining black plastic bag. Her skin he hooked by a forefinger over his shoulder, like a jacket carried by a politician seeking the rural vote at a county fair. I hung the pelt in the vestibule closet, where it gave me an enormous stomach lurch each time I went to hang a visitor’s coat.

  The black plastic bag I queasily handed over to Larry. He placed the pink, hairless carcass into a custom-fitted woven steel cage and buried it, marking the spot with a stake. When, months later, I shoveled and brushed aside the fragrant humus as carefully as any field archaeologist, I found what looked like a crude stick drawing of a sleeping dog. Her bones, punctuated by tufts of irreducible hair and small cubes of tofu-like fatty tissue, appeared like a constellation in a black sky. After bagging the larger bones, I reverently picked out the tiny pieces that remained: tailbones, teeth, and claws. Back on the floor in the studio, I reassembled her, head to tail, bone by bone, and set up my camera.

  But neither this exploration of Eva’s decomposition nor even my early Leica pictures mark the start of my fascination with death. Once again, my archival dig in the boxes of my attic revealed a strange truth.

  In a Tupperware container pressed tightly against those “Daddy” and “Evans” boxes under the eaves is a Kodak-yellow X-ray film box from the 1950s, labeled by my father, somewhat deprecatingly with too-obvious quotation marks: Sally’s “Art.”

  Packed inside, the larger papers folded multiple times, are my drawings and paintings from age three to about ten, their dates of execution noted in my father’s unmistakable handwriting. My early work had two dominant themes: horses and death. The horse pictures you’ve seen, generic and uninteresting. But the death drawings are another thing altogether. Strikingly, all of them are of my father. I can only think that they were drawn as an inoculant against the pain of his eventual, inevitable death, certainly not as a wish for it.

  This drawing is from 1958, when I was only seven years old. “That’s you Dad,” it says to the death-eyed, snaggle-toothed corpse.

  Even at that early age, I feared my father’s death almost pathologically.

  My journals give evidence of that fear, with Daddy-death nightmares recounted in dense, dream-stupid detail. One such entry, from my summer in San Miguel, Mexico, in 1969, concludes:

  It frightens me: I have drempt [sic] in the past that daddy has died… I must come to realize that it will happen—it must assume the form of the lands, the lives, and of the ideas that he has loved. His death must become an integral part of my father and, thus, my past & future & self.

  Those nightmares vividly depicted a variety of morbid scenarios, but none of them predicted with accuracy the nature of his actual death. However, a look in the yellow X-ray box reveals that, in fact, I had prophesied it eerily in a drawing that I made, according to the note on the back, on February 16, 1958.

  In it, a motley parade of characters (a rabbit, a squirrel, a dog, birds, an angel, and a circus pig with acrobats atop) gathers around the couch where my sleeping father lies. All faces except one are smiling. The one that is not smiling is in a balloon behind the couch, a small figure flanked by two larger ones.

  An “X” floats above her unhappy head. A chorus of cries rises to the heavens, around the apparently weeping cloud: “Wake up. Wake up Daddy. Wake up love.”

  One clear-sighted acrobat observes, “He won’t wake up.”

  Thirty years later, on May 22, 1988, my sleeping father did not wake up, but it took him hours to die. Once he had, we figured out why: as we retraced his last steps, we found that the thirty Seconals he had taken were so old that their glass bottle did not list an expiration date and, never mind that, thirty pills, especially an expired thirty, were barely enough for a fatal dose. Stuck to the bottom of the bottle was one last pill that he must not have been able to choke down. I have it still. It is an incongruously cheerful, almost psychedelic orange.

  That Sunday afternoon, after Ron and my father had said their good-byes, I had driven him back to the Roanoke airport to return to New York. Round-trip, it was a bit more than two hours. When I walked back in the door at Boxerwood, Daddy was deeply asleep on the couch, but not dead.

  Standing helplessly before him, I probably resembled that small figure in the drawing with the down-turned arc of a frown, an “X” of misery, disbelief, and horror floating above my head.

  I knew this was it, and I knew that we were not going to try to save him. My mother showed me a note that Daddy had left. Shakily written on the back of a sheet of his personalized medical prescription notepaper, it was brief and unemotional:

  “Dear ones—family & friends I leave you in ‘peace of mind’ w/ much much love Please do not call First Aid”

  Later we were to find a first effort at this note, written confidently in pen on the same prescription paper but ripped in half.

  There is something strange about the two. I have the clear sense that the first, the one in ink, was written at a different time than the second, perhaps the weekend before when he had originally planned his suicide for the convenience of the family. The second, in a shaky hand and in crayon, for Chrissake, was written, I am quite sure, after he’d swallowed the last bright orange pill, or the last but one.

  Take a look at the picture of him on the couch again: what do we make of that little corner of protruding plastic? It gives evidence of the larger sheet that somebody had thought to put beneath him in case he lost control of his bladder.

  Who did this? It could have been Daddy, so afraid of incontinence, but cynically, I thought: “Mama. She loves that sofa.”

  But when? Was she there when he took the thirty pills and lay down to die? Did she sensibly bustle about, fetching a dry-cleaning bag from a winter coat in the closet, patting it down on the cushions before he stretched out on them for the last time?

  Or did my mother go to the grocery store an
d, when she finished unpacking the groceries, go into the living room and find him? Understanding the situation, did she realize the risk to the couch and shove it under him as he lay dying?

  So many unknowns, and she’s not here to ask.

  However it came about, the couch was protected, and Daddy was dying. But slowly.

  With resignation I pulled up a chair and sat beside him as he lay for the next several hours, his chest barely rising with weak inhalations. My brother Chris and our dear friend KB arrived. We took turns at the chair. I remember some “Hurry up and die” jocularity that now causes me regret. Gin and tonics were served, but still he didn’t die. His respiration was slow and irregular and I grew dizzy as I tried to match my breaths to his. Occasional gaps in his breathing caused the room to go silent, until his depressed membranes feebly inflated again.

  When the last breath lightly shuddered from him, his face almost immediately turned a waxen blue-gray and his muscles slackened as he sagged into lifelessness. As I watched, it appeared to me that he shrank by an almost quantifiable amount, seemingly more than the twenty-one grams vanishing at the moment of death (supposedly of the soul) that Dr. Duncan MacDougall had measured in 1907. For a second, his pale, almost ethereal form reminded me of the delicate mantle of the Coleman lantern at our cabin flaming out into a diaphanous blue ash.

  He was facing at that moment whichever of the many death symbols had finally come to him after his fifty years of research—Thanatos, child of night, brother of sleep, and friend of the unhappy, or the Grim Reaper, with his sweeping scythe and galloping white horse, or the dark wing of the gleaming crow. He was at last in the embrace not just of the concept of death, in whose peculiar thrall he had been almost his entire life, but of Death itself.

  I, personally, think it was the crow that fetched him away. He had always jokingly remarked (or at least I took it as a joke) that he expected to be reincarnated as a crow, and for a time he had kept one, Jim Crow, as a family pet.

  In his later years, he had cultivated an enduring relationship with the Boxerwood crows, calling them to him by banging on a large aluminum pan. The sky would appear to darken above him after a few minutes of clangor, and he would then scatter moistened dog kibble to the seething black mass that landed around him. The crows eagerly anticipated this moment each day, and when they came to him they came for both kibble and companionship, pecking at his shoes and pants legs. This gathering—a murder of crows—was not there to take him away, not then, anyway.

  But I think they came back for him.

  Here we are, family and friends, after the memorial walk around the gardens at Boxerwood that served as my father’s public funeral. My mother is holding the box containing his ashes, and we are preparing to place it in the crypt. It’s late afternoon on May 28, the Saturday after his death. I set up the view camera to take a memorial picture. Not so easy with that crowd.

  The kids had changed out of their hot funeral finery and were ready for some play with the water hose. Ron Winston had flown back down and was impeccable as always. The rest of us were tired and sad and ready for a stiff drink. I had time for just one picture, and I asked our friend Hunter if she would push the shutter release once I had pulled the dark slide out and returned to the line-up. With an unconvincing “Say: Cheeze,” she did, my old Goerz Dagor lens allowing a tenth of a second of light to hit the film, and that was that. I replaced the dark slide, we headed to the crypt with the ashes, and two days later I developed the sheet of film.

  As I turned on the light, my eyes popped out on their stalks—what the hell is that wingspread white thing at our feet?

  I have no photographic explanation for it. No mirror was in the grass at the tip of my brother Chris’s sneaker reflecting the sunset, no errant light flashed or exploded and no chemical light, either. Simply inexplicable.

  I am not a particularly credulous person. I don’t believe in pictures of UFOs or the ectoplasm of spirit photography or in the existence of the dancing fairies Sir Arthur Conan Doyle endorsed. But when I look at this picture I come as close as I will ever get to the spiritual.

  I find comforting the notion that the feathered light was the bright soul crow of my father taking flight. The picture captured his getaway, his enskyment, before the earth overtook the physical remains of that irreducibly complex, unknowable man. Now, on occasion, a crow pecks at my studio door until I come to see what’s up. He stands there unafraid, clinging to the vinyl threshold with his strong claws, and cocks his shiny black head, his gleaming eye fixed on mine.

  Postscript

  EXHIBIT A

  EXHIBIT B

  This letter was sent to me by my father just before my seventeenth birthday. Its main text, including salutation and sign-off, comprises just ten words. Each of the ten, however, has a footnote, often a long, chatty, quotation-filled footnote, depending from it. Further footnotes spring from the original footnotes and a bibliography is added for good measure, the whole apparatus swelling the letter to eleven handwritten pages.

  The footnotes and bibliography combine whimsicality with scholarship, real sources with bogus ones, in a way that William Osler would have approved, and reveal the pleasure my father took in the genre established by Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary (1911). Indeed, upon revisiting the Devil’s Dictionary, I find that my father borrowed liberally from it. For example, Daddy’s definition of dance, “To leap about expressionless to the sound of tittering music, especially with your arms about someone else’s property,” closely echoes Bierce’s: “To leap about to the sound of tittering music, preferably with your arms about your neighbor’s wife or daughter.”

  One of the non-jokey definitions in my father’s letter deals with love, “the strong yet tender emotion for whatever is considered most worthy of desire in any relation. Any work done or task performed with eager willingness, from the regard one has for the person for whom it is done.…”

  Notice what just happened there: my father slid from a legitimate, dictionary-derived definition of love into a similarly straightforward definition of the phrase “labor of love,” the sort of thing that in a conventional dictionary might appear farther down in the same entry, among the compounds and variations. No comment or explanation is offered for this digression, and the footnote continues as though what’s written relates simply to love. Daddy seems to be completely unaware of folding the “labor of love” into the primary definition of love.

  But is it too much of a stretch (Hermes, who gave his name to hermeneutics, is, after all, the god of interpretation) to suggest that this eliding of love into labor has some psychological significance? Perhaps hard work offered this man an outlet for the strong yet tender emotions that he had difficulty expressing otherwise.

  TRANSLATION

  April 6, 1968

  Dear Sally

  I have already sent your books.

  Love

  Daddy

  Dear From M.E. deere, beloved, precious; as found in

  The cheapest of us is ten groats too dear.

  Or

  My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the dear.

  As used here, dear is merely poetic; but with buy, sell cost, etc., dear is still idiomatic. And between dear and expensive there are differences of nuance that deserve more respect than they get; e.g., an education at Putney at 3600 bucks is expensive but not dear. Needless to elaborate, this statement is subject to severe revision in individual instances.

  Sally as used here probably has no relation to Sâlîi, an old Italian college of priests of Mars, but to mention the latter does have the appearance of erudition. The chief business of the Sâlîi fell in March, when they began a procession thru the city, each of them dressed in an embroidered tunic, a bronze breastplate and a peaked helmet, gird about with a sword, while trumpeters walked in front of them. God, what a sight! At the temples they danced the war-dance, from which they take their name of Salii or “dancers”.

  In abbrev. Sal [L. salt]. Salt; much use
d in chemistry, cooking, and wounds, sometimes apparently with doubtful efficacy as indicated by the words, cum grano salis.

  Sally, n., witticism, squib, quirk, pleasantry. Such as, “Dear quirk.” (Hm, a good idea. Ed.)

  Sally. To rush out, to make a sally (not this Sally!). E.g. They break the truce, and sally out by night. and,

  A sally of youth; a salty of levity. Finally,

  Of all the girls that are so smart

  there’s none like pretty Sally;

  She is the darling of my heart,

  and lives in our alley.

  I: The ninth letter and third vowel of the English alphabet. Ï was first dotted in the fourteenth century. (I have a vague soupcon that this is not germane; let’s try again):

  The nominative case of the pronoun of the first person; the word by which a speaker or writer denotes himself.

  What I am thou canst not be; but what thou art any one of the multitude may be.

  S.T.M. Sagley

  In metaphysics, the conscious, thinking subject; the ego.

  Between you and I, this is a piece of false grammar which, though often heard, is not sanctioned, like its opposite, It’s me, Pupdog!.

  I, like we, is liable to be used with different meanings, for instance:

  Sometimes isolate into the night that my ice hurt, and iota go to an i-dr.

  Gizella Weberzerk-Piffel.

  Have. As here used, the possessor of the object(s) and the performer of the action are not necessarily the same. Dost thou remember King Henry V: