The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering

by Jeffrey Rotter

  From the summit I could look out over the island. The roof of the hut surfaced through the fog. A magic rope climbed out of the chimney pipe into the low sky. Warmth and companionship waited inside, soon as I filled the water drum.

  Sure enough the salt dome was blotched with blue, frozen carbuncles. I lanced one with the Heat Poke and it slipped from my grasp into a simmering pot. I dipped in my ladle and drank. Burnt matches was what it smelled like, but clear and sweet on the tongue.

  Pop met me at the door and together we rolled the heavy drum inside. My brother put up the sled while Mae dried, oiled, and broke down the Poke. I brought a mug of Terry’s elixir to Sylvia’s bunk. She wrinkled her nose. Her eyes cracked open. “Get that shit out of my face before I bite you.”

  Faron came in from the cold and stuck his frozen hands inside her sleep sack. Sylvia shrieked and fell off her bunk into my arms.

  I was proud to see Pop boil the breakfast porridge in my spring water. We ate big bowls of mush with strips of dried rabbit, and the grown-ups finished off the last of the coffee. Umma slept in, her face to the wall. When I was done, I scraped the bottom of the porridge pot into my bowl and brought it to her bunk.

  “Leave her,” said Pop. “Your mother just needs the rest is all. You know how travel takes it out of her.” I did not know. The farthest we had ever gone was Sparkle Town to Miamy.

  Umma had been looking at a bright future in textiles before Pop stepped onto her father’s cutting-room floor. If she’d stayed put, she could expect to manage the sewing room in a few years’ time. That noisy narrow hall would be her own chiefdom. There would be minor thrills and mishaps. A new girl would need to learn how to wind a bobbin, how to keep a straight seam, how to guide the muslin over a throat plate just so. She would have to handle crying jags, of course. Some girls would keep secret boyfriends and not be entirely honest with her, but she would give them a cup of tea and let them sob until the whistle blew. Every year she would note less and less the mocking chatter of the machines, the steady march of needle arms, until one day their noise would fill her head and she would hear nothing else. It happened sooner or later to all the girls in the sewing room. Her father would put her on bed rest till the chatter faded and she could return to work.

  Umma had something to look forward to. Then along came Pop. Young, thick-armed, hair long and brightened by the Floriday sun. He called it his “Fire Mane,” and the seamstresses whispered about how nice it would feel to braid it. They said the new boy smelled of oranges. He had slept in the groves, after all, and fed on nothing but fruit.

  Mainly Umma couldn’t believe how preposterously big he was—bigger than her father. Coylan Howard hated Pop on sight but needed the muscle. On his way from the warehouse to the cutting table, Pop always found an excuse to wheel his unwinding truck through the sewing room. He was in the late stages of a kindly patch, polite and eager to help. When Umma complained about her job at the mill, he told her she didn’t have to. He wrote those words for her on a slip of pattern paper that she could pull from her apron pocket whenever she felt a need.

  One afternoon a bully old cutter switched the tags on Pop’s bolts just to see if the big friendly boy had a temper. While the daughter of Coylan Howard watched, Pop went at the cutter with a pair of pinking shears. That was it; she was in love. She didn’t have to, and that is why Umma ran away with Pop.

  * * *

  Every morning on Melville Island it was someone else’s job to fetch water in Terry’s makeshift space suit. Pop kept Umma out of the rotation for two weeks. Give her time, he begged Terry. “She’ll come around.”

  I told Sylvia and Faron about the salt dome, and we all agreed to keep it secret from the grown-ups. Pop and Mae worked it out somehow, but poor Bill Reade showed no talent for divining. When he banged into camp with an empty water drum, Faron made sure to greet him at the door with a kind word.

  The rest of each waking day we devoted to natural inquiry. A paper journal was provided and in it we made observations on local flora and fauna, of which there were two, moss and geese. We measured precipitation, tides, and wind speeds in knots. After dinner we radioed our findings back to the empty Launch Control at Cape Cannibal. Practice.

  Weeks passed and Umma scarcely left the hut. At last Terry informed Pop that she would have to go out, next morning. He expected her to participate. If she couldn’t make it in Canaday, Europa would kill her.

  I looked forward to sleeping in that morning, but Pop shook me awake. The Reades were asleep, and the hut was dark, but Faron was already zipping his parka. I said, “Where is Umma?”

  Her bunk had been empty when Terry went to rouse her. Her parka and boots hung in the locker. Terry reported with relief that the Bushmaster was safe and sound under his bunk. The heat poke lay in its case by the door. But her canvas bundle was missing, although I did not understand why this mattered. I dressed. Faron took the rifle from Terry and we three filed out into the cold sunset morning.

  The wind was light and spitting snow so fine, I thought it was sand. You could see clear to the salt dome. We walked toward the sun and I tried to imagine it right overhead. I turned the gray sea into Biscane Bay. A flying wedge of geese became pelicans. And the figure that lay on the slope of the salt dome was only a sunbather on a sand dune.

  Pop was halfway there before I began to run.

  Umma wore thermal long johns. The ribbed fabric pressed faint lines in the rime-frosted rock that recorded her final contortions. For a time she’d lain facing the hut, then turned her back to it. One hand she’d wedged for warmth between her thighs. Her right cheek rested on the ice. Broken veins bloomed over her nose and around her mouth. One eye was rimmed in black, open.

  My father was not skilled in restoring life, only in cutting it short. He fell upon his wife as if the very mass of him might stir her blood and set her heart to pumping again. I gathered up the implements that had fallen from her canvas bundle—the syringe, the strap, the glassine envelope emptied of fink—repacked it, and slipped the bundle in my pocket. Pop lifted her off the ground, like a boy holding his puppy run down in the street. He carried Umma back to the hut when the sled would have been easier.

  10.

  For what she did to herself my mother had a cause too dark to tell. She had sorrows enough, as anyone could see. Her fugitive marriage, the father she’d abandoned; a family reduced to caged rabbits kept only for meat. But many endure worse and do not choose such a hateful exit. It must have been bad, whatever pushed her to the top of the salt dome with her plungers and her strap. Some unrevealed horror that swam in her blood. She fed just enough fink into her tubes to kill it off.

  The morning we found Umma heavy snow fell over Melville Island, but a naughty wind never allowed it to land. It took two days for the bush pilot to reach us, during which time Pop did not sleep nor sit still.

  Mae wrapped the body in a bedsheet. Terry and Bill made a casket from the water drum, although it took some cleverness to fold my mother inside. Knees up, head down, Umma was a tight fit. They topped her off with sea ice and pulled the drum by sled to the airstrip. Pop could have done so alone, but out of respect Terry did not ask the big man to lift his wife’s body into the hold of the plane. That job was left to me and Faron.

  We transferred to the cargo jet at Fort Churchill. All the way down to Cape Cannibal my father sat in back holding the water drum steady as the clumsy vessel skipped across the polar jet stream. It did not matter that the drum wasn’t going anywhere. Bill had strapped it to a railing and taped down the lid. Pop rested his head on the side, listening to the melting ice shift around Umma’s body.

  He had lost a fight to bury our mother in the So Caroline peach field where the young couple had enjoyed their last period of unqualified happiness. Terry offered a choice of funeral arrangements: ditch her body over the Atlantic or bury her in the shallows of Broadaxe Creek on Cape Cannibal. My father was sickened by the second option, his lover’s flesh picked apart by crabs, like ladies w
ith plastic tongs at a salad bar. Bill said it would be quicker to open the cargo door and give the barrel a hard shove: we would be too high up to see the splash. But in the end, Pop needed a place to put flowers, so he agreed to lay her to rest in the creek.

  Back at Cannibal Terry stored the water drum in a hydrogen cooling tank at Launch Command. He said it would take a day or so to make the arrangements. Mainly this involved finding the keys to a front loader and buying dress shoes for the ceremony. Nguyen would not contemplate a funeral without decent footwear.

  While Umma awaited her burial, Vansters came and went like carpenter bees. In yellow coveralls men swarmed over the launchpad, shouting to one another on walky-talks, writing on clipboards, and generally ignoring us grieving astronauts. Typical Bosom men, busy-looking and proud. When we were on Melville Island they had raised the Orion capsule, Habitat, and Penguin from the pit and installed them in the nose of an SLS booster rocket. Now, as Faron, Sylvia, and I watched from the bleachers, the vessel made its slow crawl across the tarmac on a pair of flatcars. Rollout, a quarter-mile ride that lasted twelve hours. A hydraulic lift stood the rocket on end, and as huge gantry arms hugged it tight against the tower, Sylvia leaned on my brother. They looked at each other with eagerness, as if a whole new life awaited them.

  Now and again in my trailer I would start at the sudden hiss of the fire trench snorting out clots of fog. The crew was running test firings, bringing Orion to life out there on the launchpad. In three weeks, on a Tuesday, we would perform our final fit-in and dress rehearsal. As the day approached, Sylvia’s parents vanished for hours inside Launch Command to learn what all those switches and keys could do. Bill acted like the rest of us were too dense to understand, but there wasn’t much to it. In their last days the Astronomers had foreseen the depths of future ignorance. They had automated the works, staging, launch, navigation, and landing. A toggle switch on a power strip, a string of code tapped on a keyboard, and away we’d go. “Plug and play” was the phrase Dr. Padma Ridley used, though it did not seem like my sort of game.

  The big clock in Launch Command had ticked down to 23:08:35:00. Time sat on us. Time compressed us inside a drum and hammered tight the lid. Waiting made us wild, some with eagerness and others with fear.

  * * *

  But before we could go anywhere we had to bury Umma.

  Pop had entered an unprecedented phase, neither kind nor cruel. He stood in our kitchenette trying out shapes with his mouth, but no expression fit a man who had sworn off grief so long ago. After his father was killed and his mother set him loose, Pop said he had forgotten how to cry. He had been left on the occasion of his sweetheart’s suicide with an austere sorrow, the worst kind.

  Pop would snap out of it soon enough, though, and not with a smile on his face.

  I mourned in my own cowardly style. That first night back at Cape Cannibal even Sylvia could not draw me out of the trailer. After bedtime she stood under the bathroom window waiting for me to make my nightly toilet. Faron was brushing his teeth when she scratched at the glass with a palm frond. “Come out, come out,” she sang. “Whoever you are.” She wanted me—I was sure—but I told Faron to go in my place. I would only make Sylvia miserable. He agreed.

  A few hours later I woke to my brother’s heel pounding my spleen. Faron had returned and fallen into a rageful sleep. I tried to hold him down, but my brother was a twist of tendons. He yelled. He thrashed. He threw a fist that nearly knocked out the loft window. I felt him taut all over, grown large with feeling. I knew the imagined enemy on the other end of that blow, but I couldn’t guess how Terry Nguyen would pay for his sins.

  Not wanting a fat lip, I climbed down from the loft and slipped out of the trailer to take a walk. When I reached the moony flats of the launch area, I saw that a second, wider hole had appeared beside the first. It was shallow, only about four feet deep. The bottom was a broad white platform, the roof of the great elevator that had raised Orion to the surface.

  I walked to the original opening, where we had entered the excavation for the first time so many months earlier. Below I saw the steel floor gleam in the moonlight. I eased my legs over the edge and found the top rungs of the ladder, cringing and crawling from one landing to the next until I reached the bottom. A cascade of sand followed me down, and I marveled at how quickly these secrets could be lost again. How easily I might be buried with them. How it might feel to vanish into a fairy tale with the Astronomers, a new chapter in The Lonesome Wanderer.

  I grabbed a hard hat and stepped into the wide hallway, where the GMC truck shone warmly in my headlamp. There in the back lay the space helmet Sylvia had worn the day we met the Reades. I shivered to think of her wearing one for real.

  “Faron?” The voice came from inside the pickup, dampened by the weird acoustics but clear enough.

  “No,” I said. “It’s me. Rowan. What are you doing down here?”

  Sylvia sat up as if startled and I saw a beach towel stretched over her body. “Too hot to sleep in the trailer,” she said. True enough; the pit must have been ten degrees cooler.

  “Your daddy know you’re down here?” I don’t know why I asked. At that moment I hated Bill Reade nearly as much as I did Terry. She plucked at the handle with a bare foot and the passenger door swung open. She was down to underpants, no brassiere, but it wasn’t like Indian River. This was not a provocation. She wrapped the towel around her chest. I sat and she settled her calves across my legs.

  She wanted to know about Umma. Where she’d come from. Who she’d been. I told her the story of Coylan Howard and the textile mill, how Pop smelled of orange zest and nearly pinked a man in half with his shears. How Umma carried me and Faron out of So Caroline to be born in a dog kennel for itinerant farmhands. She laughed at the funny parts and did not laugh at the rest, which is how I knew she understood me, as if she’d heard all my sad ridiculous stories before.

  I slumped against her, pressed myself into the rough terry of her beach towel, feeling warm flesh underneath. She draped an arm over my back. I drew it to me and gave her elbow a peck. And that is how we two slept the precious last hour of night before my mother’s funeral.

  Morning light flooded the cab. My kidney on one side ached and both feet were pins and needles. I kissed Sylvia’s sleeping face and dislodged myself from her arms. The sun streamed in through the shaft of the huge elevator, glowing in the Tyvek tunnel that led to the clean room where the Orion had slept for hundreds of years. The bay was now empty except for the blue pipes of scaffolding scattered about like picked bones. I climbed back to the surface, leaving Sylvia to the long silence of the pit. She is not your mother, Little Sylvia; she is better; Sylvia Reade is the mother of an idea; the idea is you.

  Back at our trailer I was greeted by Faron’s severely combed head. Raked, you might say. The tines left red streaks where he had punished his scalp. His cheeks were scrubbed bright. Even his jumpsuit looked fresh as a restaurant napkin. Instead of flipper-flops he wore the new black brogans. A second pair stood on the draining board. My feet still ache to recall them. Gifts from Nguyen, said my brother, then spit on a toe as if to polish it.

  Pop, he said, had gone to fetch the body from the cooling tank.

  “Umma,” he clarified, as if I had not understood.

  I said I thought the funeral was not until noon.

  He shrugged. “Change of plans.”

  I had always believed Faron’s strength to be inexhaustible. His strength was total and could not give, so he broke. He embraced me, pressed his face into my neck, where I could feel his mouth convulse. My brother was making words, only one of which I could identify.

  “Sorry,” he said. I was certain that he meant to apologize for Zoo Miamy, but there was no need. It was true; we would not be here, and Umma would not be there, had we gone to Vocationals that morning instead of stealing a tour bus. I told him to hush. It was not his fault; I had gone along willingly. There would be plenty more blame to go around when we were done.


  He told me I didn’t understand. “I know how much you love her,” he said. He pushed me off him and patted down his hair.

  I said of course; we both loved Umma very much.

  He took the second pair of brogans from the counter and shoved them hard into my gut.

  “Put your Jesus shoes on, little brother.”

  I was lacing up when the knock came, thin-fisted. Terry’s knocks had come to feel like jabs, dull needles drawing blood. He wore his Bosom Industries yellows, a walky-talk strapped to the hip. Nguyen said he would not come in; there was no time. “Something has come up,” he said, and he didn’t have to explain what.

  * * *

  The first place we looked for Pop was the cooling facility. We felt through the fog to confirm the absence of Umma’s body. Next we tried the Indian River pier, but came up empty again. Faron said he’s running. He’s getting her out of here. “He doesn’t want her final resting hole to be under that rocket.”

  There were two roads off the cape: south past the guard station or north along the beach to the 401 and west over Indian River. The 401 made more sense, Terry said. He urged the Vanster across a culvert and onto a dirt road. Through a screen of high grass we landed on four lanes of blacktop. He stopped and looked at us. To our left the causeway squatted over the marsh grass on cement pilings.

  “You’ll have to take care of this,” he said. “Your father would like to murder me.” Nguyen was actually frightened and showed it.

  Several yards ahead we spotted Pop carrying Umma’s body like it weighed nothing. She was frozen in the tight ball—legs tucked, head down—that she’d made in the water drum. Only her blue feet protruded from the striped bedsheet Mae had wrapped her in. My father’s feet were bare, too, blackened by the warm asphalt. Pop’s Fire Mane, the tassel of hair of which he’d been so heartbreakingly proud, was chopped short. At closer range I saw that Umma’s hair had come loose from its bindings. It dripped filthy icicles. Faron caught Pop by the netting of his jersey. I heard a dynamo whimper as Terry’s Vanster backed away.