by Wenke, John;
“Get some sleep!”
Click.
Who could sleep?
I sat on the futon that doubled as my bed. I was a prisoner in Loni’s study, her den of genealogical research, a cave of archival exhumation. I looked around. At the large oak desk, she worked with Xeroxed piles of telephone listings from all municipalities in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the New England states. She wrote letters of inquiry to people with our various family names. In a metal file cabinet, she kept reams of old letters, all dutifully catalogued and summarized. What was she going to do with this stuff? I guess the same thing somebody might do with a beer can collection—keep it until he finds somebody who wants to look at it.
Occasionally, on my visits, I wanted to look at it, though I could only take so much. The dead have their weight, a heavy soaked compress. These old letters—hundred-year-old letters—sagged with the mass of defunct personality. There were all those details, desires, and dreams that had nowhere to go. Everybody referred to in them was dead. It didn’t bother Loni. Among the dead, she thrived. The living were a different story. I bothered her.
My biggest crime was my refusal, over three marriages, to try for a male heir, a name bearer into oblivion. But if you knew anything about my wives—number one, a booking agent for nightclub comedians; number two, a famous-faced no-name seductress on a popular coffee commercial; number three (the divorce decree now a little more money, Maalox, and mayhem away), an aerobics instructor who had danced in the back row of a Denise Austin workout video—if you knew my wives (and me!), you’d appreciate how we did the human race a favor. They were all non-procreative types, all purely present, ahistorical, connoisseurs of state-of-the-art (non-surgical) birth control procedures, thoroughly schooled in the uses and abuses of that inventory of foams, gels, plugs, patches, and pills. Loni couldn’t fathom it; she was a throwback who had gone to the last limit of reproductive technology. To Loni, we lived before ourselves and we should live after—in the smattering of genes, in the resonance of a name, in the intricacies of story.
In her forays into the past, she had investigated our father’s branch, tracked it—no, us—from Mansfield, Ohio back to Mansfield, Connecticut in the 1850s and then through Boston, losing the thread—for now—with Francis Higginson’s arrival at Massachusetts Bay on the Arbella in 1630, the year of the Puritan Great Migration. Our mother’s family posed the more daunting task. Loni’s work had only taken her back four generations. She was currently stalled out with our great, great maternal grandfather Thomas Durning, a twelve-year-old immigrant who arrived in New York in 1878. Ten years later, he managed to get a mortgage on a fifty-acre farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. No one knew the Irish county he came from. Apparently, he refused to say, staking his life not on the stale old world but the fresh new one. All Loni knew about Thomas’s wife, Mary, was her maiden name—Hanratty—and that they met (their daughter—my great grandmother—recalled in a letter to her granddaughter—my mother) in Harrington, Delaware, where Mary taught school. In her busy future, Loni had all these trips to take—Ireland, England, Delaware—and all these pasts to connect through lines of nomenclature and dates, hoping to give the past a connect-the-dots presence, to transfix the amorphous slither-slick of lost time into a legible chart and then into a good story.
In my mildly woozy state, I was unnerved by her littered desk, its poltergeist spew of papers, file folders, index cards. It got me in a cube-rattling parody of escape. I stalked the room and looked out the window. Cars everywhere. I was hoping all the Mrs. Fanshaws would leave, so I could come out. I went back and forth, window to door with time again slowing down, the minutes not moving, my life suspended in a frozen solution.
I stopped pacing and stared ahead. The walls were much more prisoner friendly. They were a museum of restored photographs, images under glass. Many were familiar—my eighteen-year-old mother posing in 1943 with four boys trying to be men, baby faces in Air Force uniforms. I knew that the two boys in the middle—I don’t know their names, so I won’t make them up—were shot down in separate places, one over Italy, the other above the Pacific. The hum of many motors is ruptured by a booming crash and a blizzard of smoke and then death—real death (theirs, others)—comes sometime during more blasts, farther falls, and emphatic crashes. The gravitational pull flurried my stomach and nudged me toward other frames. Eight years later, my mother and father sit side by side in a honeymoon rowboat. Her lacy, black curly hair crushes my father’s shoulder. He wears a tie, a blazer, and a tentative smile, as if not quite composed, unready for the Eye, maybe unsettled about sex—they were virgins, I’m sure—and not quite prepared for the pressing weight of happiness: happiness in the form, some twelve months later, of me, my father’s heir, and five years after that, of Loni. I found myself in many of the photos, my child-self, but these did not interest me as much as the stranger faces staring from stark, somber fields of gray and white. Most of these relatively unknown people were related to me. That young woman alive in the bubble dress under the bonnet and holding the parasol stands caught like one of Monet’s plump aristocrats. She is my father’s maternal grandmother, Martha Whitney. But suddenly, years later, ten years before I was born, she is lying in a box, swaddled in satin, hands tangled with rosary beads, dead at seventy-two from an arrested heart achieved in the depths of sleep. Somebody took a picture.
I stepped left and found the three grandfather Thomas Durning photos. In one he is a boy, probably seventeen, wearing puffy black pantaloons and a white open-neck shirt with rolled sleeves. Saddled atop a gray horse, he stares sternly at the Eye, his black hair cropped, his face slashed by a beginner’s mustache. His strangely informal slouch is so unlike the wedding photo. His hair now parts down the middle and his mustache covers like a caterpillar brush. He stands starched within the tight shirt and high-buttoned black suit. A three-inch cravat gags him. My great great grandmother floats fluffy in wedding lace. Her round cherub face sinks behind a veil that tumbles from a stitched, beaded cap. One frame to the left, they assemble in a family pose. Seated on two ends of a wooden bench, Thomas and Mary wear rough but clean clothing, he, a stiff Sunday suit of worsted wool, a white shirt buttoned to his neck, and scuffed boots and she, a homespun calico dress, loosely cut to contain the expansive maternal girth. Thomas has short black hair splashed with gray and a rough, rounded face. It’s the tough-guy look, like Hemingway in Paris. His rigidly composed face seems barely to harness the etched laugh crinkles cut around his eyes and the dark creases cleaving his forehead. His left arm settles around the shoulders of his eldest son, Thomas, an adolescent boy, somber faced, seemingly bored, my great uncle Tom who will die at Flanders during the First World War. His sister, Mary, two years younger, sits hip close to her brother and wears a white cotton dress with a lace-trimmed collar. Great Aunt Mary’s little girl hands are folded, her eyes and mouth fixed in that grim old-photo fright. She will live until 1942, when she will die of pneumonia, the grandmother of our second cousin, Uncle Billy. It’s disturbing to see what this beautiful child has come to. On mother Mary’s lap sits my great grandfather John, a boy of two dressed in a bag-like white gown that seems linen. These rigid poses owe everything to slow shutter speeds and a quaint reverence for representation. But there is John, the universe’s newest scamp, unable to contain himself, the life force let loose, twisting into a hilarious laugh, his little round face a smear of unfocused mirth, a blur on the plate of perfection, the spastic joy of infancy erasing the rigor of slow-baked impressions.
Thomas feels relieved to escape the hot studio. He steps outside into the searing, cloudless day. He sweats with a lilting sense of rectitude. Personally, he doesn’t care if his photograph is ever taken, but Mary wants it and Thomas feels proud—warm—that he is spending the money and giving up this whole July day to a twelve-mile wagon ride, the awful lurching and sweating in these gone-to-church clothes, the children excited and wild
from the open flat-bed ride, tricked into good humor by the promise of ice cream—five portions for twenty-five cents—expensive but worth it. All worth it. The day will remain to be savored.
In a frame, in his later years, he’ll be able to look at the beautiful faces of his children’s youth. Nothing remains of his own hard days, only the memory of hands blistered from cutting bog on their humpy, wasted plot in the sad lands west of Donegal. One day, in the early morning after his drunken father had beaten him, he left a note and walked away. The worthless rat had again dared to strike his sainted mother and Thomas struck back for her. Even now as Thomas pats the flank of Black and strokes the mane of Blue, as he breathes the roused, always settling street-dust and watches the sidewalk throng massing at and passing the entrances to the general store and saloon, as he waits for Mary and the children to return from the wooden outhouse in the alley behind, he still feels the dull dig of guilt for running away, and he still intends to write his mother soon with promises of money and passage to America. He is now getting well ahead of the bank, and with the railroad coming through next spring, he will soon be ahead of the world. Thomas tightens Blue’s buckler and moves to the rail, tugging the cord, sad with the thought that he cannot remember his good mother’s face, disturbed that now, at the age of thirty-two, he is three years older than the shadowy face and empty features that drift beyond memory and focus only in the vaporous flashing of forgotten dreams. Mary is always right: in old age they will love the faces of their little children.
Thomas hears them before he sees them spill from behind the building. Then hand in hand with little Mary, holding John to his chest, leading his wife and elder son, he marches down the planked, cluttered walk to the general store. He buys five portions of ice cream. They eat at a wooden table and saunter back along the boards. Black and Blue see them and fidget in their traces. Young Thomas scampers into the flatbed and then the father lifts young Mary, takes John from his mother and hands him up. And then for the first time in years, he lifts Mary’s full mother-weight, swooping her around in a laughing dance. The children squeal and adults whoop. He slumps to catch his breath. With a surge, he grabs her again and swishes her around, and then with a one-two step he climbs the creaking wagon and settles his wife—his great love—mother-weight and all—into the seat. Holding his back and moaning in a show of mock pain, he leaps to the street, unties the reins and leads Black and Blue around. With the children still kicking and laughing, Thomas climbs up, sits down and shakes the horses into motion.
Later that day, Thomas stills feels dreamy. He leaves the fierce light and heat to see why Yellow the mule honks and whines in the barn. He bucks in the stall. Thomas unties the cord and swings the gate. Yellow scrapes and bumps the boards. The hooves skitter among shadows. He sees an oozing bruise on her left hind fetlock. To gain a full view, Thomas leads her by the mane and swings open the barn door. He pats her flank and glances into space. The low light of this golden evening streaks through the maple and illumines a trellised, gossamer threadwork. He pats her hind and settles down, searching for the wound, but he never gets low enough to see. With the speed of a trip hammer, Yellow kicks both feet and bucks. The left hoof grazes his hip but the right one pummels him dead center to his belly. His breath departs in one raspy gust. As Yellow limps and snorts to the stall, Thomas lifts, staggers and falls flat-back down. His arms spread wide and then his body curls. In the doorway dirt, he cannot find voice to call. He writhes and kicks, waiting for the pain to pass. The mouth blood mostly seeps until it gushes and seeps again.
Thomas finds his father and raises a howling cry. He and Mother drag him to bed. Thomas saddles Black and rides for the doctor.
In the bedroom, Dr. Bates leans over, pokes the blue-black distended stomach and backs away.
“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.” He turns toward the window, embarrassed. “By tomorrow, he’ll be dead. Laudanum will make it easy. Otherwise, it’ll be the delirium.”
The very next day, an hour before dawn, Thomas becomes one with the dust that drifts beneath the moon.
The door clicked. I turned. Loni was there. She was holding Thomas. My glass was empty and my head much clearer. Loni smiled. I looked away, toward the window, embarrassed.
“Can I come in?”
I almost said, It’s your room.
“Sure. I’m just looking at the pictures on the wall.” I rattled my cubes. “I was thinking about Great Great Grandfather Thomas Durning and how that mulekick ruptured his spleen and God knows what else. Today, they’d whisk him off, cut him open, take the damn thing out, sew everything up and charge the insurance company forty thousand bucks. It’s awful it had to happen on the day they took the photo. In that letter I read, Mary said how she was worried the picture wouldn’t turn out. It’s why she had one taken of him dead. I suppose it hasn’t turned up.”
“Not yet.” She stepped closer, all the way inside the room, and then walked over. “Here, I want you to hold Thomas.”
I almost said, Okay, but you better get a tub of water. “Sure. I’d be happy to. Love to.”
I took him, a kicking bundle. There was a dab of puke stuck to his chin. He wore a New York Mets one-piece outfit.
“Hey! You have him dressed like a loser.”
Loni smiled. “Dad loved the Mets, even when they were losers.”
Thomas seemed to be gazing into space. He had that baby-face blankness. I held him and went “boo-boo” and made a lot of other silly sounds. I didn’t look at Loni, but I knew she was watching me, the anger gone, slipped somewhere far away, my sins forgiven and not to be discussed, my joke gift nullified but not to be forgotten. I didn’t look up, just made noises into the blankness. It seemed like everyone was here and they were all laughing at me. Mom and Dad, even the assembled generations. Time collapsed. The room seemed fuller than a photo of the unforgotten dead, stuffed with silence, the moment’s latent story, and all those feelings there aren’t any pictures for.
Z-Man and the Christmas Tree
My broom stabbed beneath the bottom shelf and slammed the right corner. When I jerked the handle, out tumbled two silver gum wrappers, a skittering mess of pinto beans, some brown lettuce fringed with black rot, a matted dust-ball two quarters, one nickel, and three pennies. There was a crisp cricket corpse, its burnt-matchstick body crumbled into pieces.
I gathered fifty-eight cents and jiggled it to the register. “Here’s to the profit margin.”
Laura Brown looked up from her spreadsheet. Her green eyes blinked behind gold granny glasses. Straggly gray hair leaked from a purple and white tied-dyed do-rag.
“What’s that?”
“Loose change.” I held it out. “From under the shelves.”
Her thin smile stretched her angular face. “Thanks.”
She tossed the coins into the collection jar on the counter. Nina Aspen, a twelve-year-old cheerleader over on High Street, was in need of a bone marrow transplant. Laura looked at the clock. It was almost one. “I thought you’d be gone by now.”
“I wanted to finish. Do you know where the dustpan got to?”
She shrugged and slid inside her spreadsheet. I looked up and down the shelves. They were lined with paper bags filled with dry-goods, a healthy-for-life load heavy on whole grain breads, lentils, green pasta, brown rice, unbleached organic flour, dried beans, dried fruit, barley, yeast, nuts, and spices.
“Did you take care of the McFarland issue?”
Laura was now flipping through a stack of cards. Mike McFarland, a local plumber, had phoned in his order yesterday, a strictly forbidden thing. At the Willimantic Food Cooperative, you dropped your card off by Monday for Thursday pick-up. Laura usually stood firm, but McFarland was a charter member, who did all her plumbing—labor free, parts at cost. Even a squeaky-clean idealist like Laura had to do special favors.
“No sweat. He can pick up his stuff with everybody else
.”
Tonight, between 4:00 and 8:00 p.m. members would claim their groceries. After finding their alphabetized bags, they’d work their way along the coolers for specialty juices, eggs, and yogurt and then to the freezer for weighed portions of whatever fish Laura had gotten flash-frozen from her old commune pal Spanky Daniel. He ran a big wholesale outfit up in Boston. Beyond the sliding freezers were self-help taps for honey, real maple syrup, and olive oil. My eyes stopped at produce. The dustpan was stuck between an open fifty-pound sack of potatoes and a mound of acorn squash.
The bell jangled. The door whisked open. Lucy was carrying a box the size of a bookshelf speaker.
“Hey!” I shouted. I quickly swept up the dirt.
“I only got a few minutes. I want to show you what I came up with.”
I dumped the dirt and hurried to the front. Lucy had set the box on the counter and was unzipping her purple L.L. Bean down jacket. She plucked the white ball atop her red ski cap. A brownish, bottle-dyed pile of ringlets tumbled to her shoulders. Laura was pulling open the flaps. Behind them the display window was cluttered with twinkling Christmas lights, gnarled bunches of holly, silver bells, and evergreen branches. Between the miniature Hanukkah bush and potted Christmas tree was an electric menorah and one of those multi-colored Kwanzaa candle holders. On a bed of hay lay a manger scene—three goats, two cows, and one horse hunched around the swaddled infant. On the snowy roof of the Palestinian stable was Santa, his sleigh, and reindeer. A few elves were mixed with the shepherds and some brightly colored boxes were piled at the foot of the manger.
“Whew!” Lucy said, rubbing her hands together. “The chill goes right through you.”
Laura was hauling a Styrofoam mold out of the box. She pulled the pieces apart.
“Oh, Lucy! This is beautiful. Daddy’ll love it!”
Laura was holding a cuckoo clock, its little cigar-like weights dangling at the ends of golden chains.