by Sam Savage
That was when I was quite small, I am sure. I don’t remember when they stopped having drinks in the evening together or when my father began to come through the door without whistling.
They must have stopped before I could arrange events on a timeline, so to call it, with things starting up and going on for a while and then ceasing at definite points.
Looking at the image I have of them seated side by side in the library, hearing the murmur of their conversation from outside in the hall and the peaceful clinking of the ice, I can see they were happy together.
I remember a buzzer sounding at the rear of Taggart’s Home Furnishings when someone pushed through the front door. I remember wiggling the door back and forth to make the buzzer go on and off and Papa’s angry voice coming from the little room at the far back of the store that he called his office, where he dwelled by day, seated amid the disordered passel of his law books, his business plans, his stocks, his deeds, at a colossal desk beneath the framed photographs of his father and grandfather, who had each striven more or less honestly to turn a dollar into a dollar-five and had each in the long run become more or less prosperous before losing it all and so forcing the next generation to start again from scratch, to emulate what it could not inherit, I was told many times over the years, our father reciting bitterly.
I remember important papers that were not to be fiddled with, a cut-glass ashtray the size of a dinner plate, wet cigar and cigarette butts, a black iron safe on the floor, its ornate gold writing worn nearly away. I remember shelves stacked with business papers tied up in bundles with blue and red ribbons, a row of empty Coke bottles on a windowsill, dead insects among the bottles, a swivel chair that squeaked if you leaned back in it, and how we took turns spinning in the chair.
The time Edward put a cigar butt between his teeth and pretended to write checks. When Thornton tried to pull the cigar out of his mouth, he wouldn’t let go. The cigar broke and Edward spit and little bits of wet cigar flew all over my dress.
I don’t remember what happened after that. Edward was punished, I suppose, but I don’t remember that either.
I do remember that my father smoked cigars at the store and on the porch at home and smoked Chesterfield cigarettes inside the house.
An image of my father arriving in the dining room clasping an extinguished stub of cigar between thumb and forefinger and placing it on the edge of his plate.
I remember the time Edward said he wouldn’t mind if communists killed Papa.
Why do I remember some things and not others?
The fact that Mallarmé holds a cigar in his hand in Manet’s portrait of him, for example.
The fact that Thornton’s bicycle was red. That Sidney Wilson’s pony was named Trigger. That the man who owned the pawnshop was a Jew. That the woman named Ma Cree who walked around town with a croker sack of old clothes was a witch. That there were girlie magazines under the board games in Edward’s bottom drawer. That my dolls were named Clementine, Hephzibah, and Jane-Esmeralda. That my mother named them that. That Clementine would only close one eye when I laid her down. That Thornton called his bicycle the Red Hornet. That Edward could say the Lord’s Prayer in Pig Latin. That he knew sixteen cuss words. That Mr. Belton who ran the jewelry store had a father who had shot himself. That horses sweat but people perspire.
The times I went to the store and my father’s friends were there. They sat on the furniture that was for sale and drank whiskey from dirty glasses. They talked and joked and told hunting stories and gossiped about money and business deals, and the words flew over my head and I paid them no more attention than I did the sound of traffic outside.
The time I saw Mr. Tiller, who was a lawyer, asleep on a sofa, his mouth open, breathing noisily like a walrus, and I was embarrassed for him.
The times I sat with Mr. Colvin in one of the big armchairs. I remember the smell of bay rum and the thick black hair that curled out of the V in his shirt and more black hair on the backs of his hands.
The time he showed Edward how to blow smoke rings and then let Thornton try, but Thornton hadn’t learned how to smoke yet and had a fit of coughing and ran outside.
I remember very tall Mr. Truesdale bending way over and placing his hands on his knees when he talked to me. He had bushy eyebrows and a cloudy walleye and I remember not liking him so close.
The time I asked Mr. Truesdale what he had in his pocket and he said it was a little nigger boy.
The image I have of my father from that time is of a short stocky man in a brown woolen waistcoat. He always wore woolen waistcoats in winter, I am convinced, though none of my other images include a waistcoat of any sort.
A short twisted wound-up man stuffed with coiled springs that were always about to fly loose, I suppose I can say, though I don’t know that from the image.
Wiry is how people would have thought of him then, I imagine.
Obsessed with deals, with making money by his wits, by being smarter than the next guy, is an opinion I formed at some point.
His people were all that way, Mama said. Mercenary was her word for it.
He smoked constantly and cursed under his breath each time he burned a hole in a waistcoat. Rancor ate his heart.
I could not have known that then.
I have a memory, from much later, of Papa and Edward talking at the kitchen table, gossiping about deals, marveling at big deals or clever deals, where somebody was a big winner or a big loser, and my mother saying that those two brought out the worst in each other.
The time I stood in the field back of the house, the tall brown grass white and stiff with frost, and Papa said “Give me your hands” and rubbed them roughly between his two hands, hurting.
They were big hands for a man his size, with square palms and short, thick fingers, I remember noticing one day, seeing them on the steering wheel.
My mother explaining that they were peasant hands, saying that everyone in Papa’s family had hands like that, and feet as well. “Wide stump-toed feet with fallen arches, amphibian hands and feet, suited for crawling on soft earth and mud, instruments designed for digging and pawing,” she said much later in front of everyone, pacing and fulminating.
Reciting something she had written out beforehand, we could tell, the times she spoke like that.
I remember always knowing that Mama’s people were superior to Papa’s people.
I remember her taking care to pronounce the o in “Negro.”
The woman in Nina’s House of Beauty where Mama had her hair done said it was a crying shame I hadn’t taken piano, and Mama said, “Well she does have an artist’s hands,” and held up her own hands as proof.
An image of my mother and her sister Alice painting their nails on the porch at Spring Hope while I sit in a rocking chair watching. I am wearing white lace-up shoes, and my feet don’t extend past the edge of the chair. Aunt Alice reaches over to push the rocking chair with a freshly painted hand, her fingers splayed wide, using only the heel of her hand against the back of the chair so as not to smudge her nails.
I remember, another time, sitting at Mama’s dresser painting my nails. When I showed her she laughed and took the polish off with cotton and polish remover and repainted them neatly.
I remember liking the way nail polish smelled.
I have a mental picture of my mother at the desk writing, the very desk I am seated at now, can see her there (here) bent over a notebook, filling a page with jagged blue script. I can see the shapes of the letters, which are angular, nearly cuneiform, as if constructed of tiny matchsticks, but I can’t make out a single word, perhaps because the picture belongs to a time before I could read.
She has a cigarette in her other hand, forgotten in her intense concentration, the column of ash lengthening and falling off.
I am tempted to say that I remember my mother at her escritoire.
I can’t bear the thought that her life might have been different.
I remember “Get out and walk through
the door or be dragged there,” the day I refused to go to school and my father dragged me across the schoolyard.
I remember sitting on a curb, using the hem of my dress to pat the blood off my knee after being dragged, and a colored lady in a big yellow hat bending over me, calling me honeychild.
I remember standing on the kitchen steps and looking out across an overgrown field toward the river glittering and flashing through the winter trees, the sun shining brighter than ever before, the time I was so happy after my mother promised I wouldn’t have to go to school ever again.
I remember “She knows more than her teachers.”
“What you want is to raise her up a misfit,” my father saying.
I remember liking the word misfit.
The times, once a month, that my mother or Edward drove me to Columbia so I could take books out of the university library.
“She is the only person her age allowed to take books out of that library,” my mother saying proudly.
I remember riding down Bull Street and looking out the car window at the long gray wall of the State Asylum, and being aware that there were crazy people on the other side.
Reading poems by Baudelaire and Mallarmé with my mother, looking up the words we didn’t know and writing the English meaning in pencil above the French.
The time we resolved to speak only French together but then had to give it up when we couldn’t agree on how to pronounce it.
French would have been useful, if I had learned it better, had I traveled to foreign countries, as I never doubted when I was small that I would someday, as I am sure I really might have, otherwise.
I first saw the word verdâtre in a poem by Baudelaire. Whistler’s painting of his mother hung on the bedroom wall above the blanket chest we sat on while trying to read poems by Mallarmé, who just happened to be a close friend of Whistler’s, as I mentioned.
A coincidence that makes me want to say something like everything is connected, things hang together, and so forth.
Though I firmly believe that everything is flying apart. Or falling apart. Deteriorating generally.
Though not everywhere equally, or not everywhere obviously.
It sounds funny to say that the little children I see playing in the park are deteriorating, though of course they are actually, if you think about it, deteriorating behind the scenes, so to speak, unbeknownst even to themselves, luckily.
The worm of death is at them, and so forth.
The names Mallarmé, Whistler, Monet, and the rest are left over from when I was a genius.
Passenger pigeons, flight after flight “in countless multitudes” so dense they dimmed the sun, passed overhead continuously for three days, according to Audubon.
The last Carolina parakeet died in the Cincinnati Zoo in the same cage the last passenger pigeon had died in four years earlier, I learned recently, speaking of coincidences.
National Geographic magazine is the saddest thing I have ever read.
An increasingly large portion of my mind is occupied with grim statistics, I have noticed lately.
The fact that 150 million feral and free-ranging domestic cats kill two billion birds every year in the United States, while 100 million or so die in collisions with the window glass of buildings, and so forth, for example.
They see the sky reflected in the glass and fly into it.
You don’t come across all those dead birds at once, of course, in a stack, or all those cats, and that makes it hard to visualize the actual numbers, the 150 million hissing, snarling cats and their mountain of dead birds, Dead Bird Mountain not being a feature on the landscape of Earth.
It is a feature on the landscape of the Planet Dearth, which is a feature on the landscape of my mind.
D standing for Devoid, Desolate, Dying, D is for Demented, and the low Depressing Drone the planet makes. People on the moon can hear it, I imagine.
A few hundred snow leopards remaining, and so forth.
Ivory-billed woodpeckers, passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, as I mentioned, just to name ones I might actually have seen otherwise, are gone.
Buffalo gone, prairie gone, swamps drained or flooded, coastal marsh vanishing, the elms at Spring Hope dead, chestnuts dead almost everywhere.
Sometimes, waking up on the Planet Dearth, I can still glimpse, blue and beautiful, the true Earth, the planet of Eden, unreachable, infinitely lovely, lost, plunging through space, unguided, blind.
My mind, I want to say, is like a cage full of dead birds.
The time when I was six and somebody spotted a bear in the river swamp, the first bear sighted there in thirty years. Businesses closed all over town so men could go hunt the bear. Papa took us down to where they had laid it out on a concrete slab back of the Amoco station. The fur, streaked with brown mud, was wet and cold when we touched it. They hosed it off at the station and the water ran pink into the street. They propped its mouth open with a stick, and we reached in and touched the teeth.
Mama was crazy about birds.
Chickadees are the least aggressive birds I know.
Along with their magazine the National Audubon Society sends me invitations to travel to places all over the world, even to the Amazon Jungle, with other members to look at birds.
There were more birds, more different kinds of birds, at Spring Hope than there are here.
Waterbirds—egrets, herons, gallinules, kingfishers, rails, ospreys, anhingas, grebes, and the like, ducks of all sorts.
And forest and field birds—owls, hawks, kites, quail, shrikes, cuckoos, killdeer, woodpeckers, whip-poor-wills, and so forth.
Warblers, finches, fly-catchers, thrushes, kinglets, nuthatches, tanagers, towhees, mockingbirds, thrashers, catbirds, vireos, always in the trees and bushes around the house.
Cedar waxwings and blackbirds arrived in great swirling flocks in the fall, crows and grackles thronged the treetops and strutted in the fields.
The many times pileated woodpeckers hammered at the house, digging for grubs of carpenter bees, ripping big pieces from the siding and excavating fist-sized holes in the fascias and the tops of the columns, Verdell or one of my brothers going outside to shout and clap their hands or throw sticks to drive them off.
The bees themselves drilling neat little bullet-sized holes, buzzing furiously, while sending a steady stream of sawdust down past the windows.
The time Mama, looking out the window at a little drizzle of dust, said that one day there would be more hole than house.
I remember strangers showing up at Spring Hope, asking permission to look at birds, and walking out on the dikes with telescopes and cameras, even in December, in cold rain, or in September, in clouds of mosquitoes.
Papa going out to greet them and standing awhile talking, informative, gracious. Seigniorial is how he looked to me then, I think now.
Sitting in the kitchen talking to Maria about the birds at Spring Hope, not talking to her actually in a conversational way, just listing the different kinds of birds I remember there, and being aware that I am boring her silly but going on anyway, while Lester cleans under his fingernails with a tine of his breakfast fork, his eyes puckered.
The realization that I have become a tiresome old person.
The time Verdell built a whole stack of bird feeders out of wood from the chicken house and set them out in a row on the back steps, Mama coming down to look, and later he mounted them on creosote posts that he planted around the yard in such a way that standing at any window in the house we could look out and see birds, and every year or so putting up new ones to replace those that had rotted away.
I remember liking the way creosote smelled. Telephone poles, railroad tracks, and the bridge over Johnson Creek smelled of creosote on the hot days of summer.
If I close my eyes and think of summer, a variety of sounds, pictures, flavors even, floats into consciousness, but I don’t smell anything except creosote and dust.
I have an image of my mother as viewed from the back,
standing at a window with raised binoculars.
And another of her making the rounds of the feeders, adding seed from a metal pail.
The time sleet was ticking at the windowpanes and Mama was outside in Papa’s big canvas jacket.
The time she chased Thornton around the house trying to put her ice-cold hands down his shirt.
Later, when age and illness had accentuated the sharp nose and long delicate neck, she came to look like a bird. Sitting in church with her shoulders hunched up, she looked like a stork.
A cold rainy morning and we were still at breakfast, the time Papa and Verdell came in carrying a bushel basket between them, the dogs pushing through the door behind them, and laid the ducks out on newspaper spread open on the kitchen floor. Papa quizzing the boys, poking each duck in turn with the toe of his boot, drilling them on the names, and hushing me when I tried to answer.
Canvasback. Pintail. Teal. Mallard. Lila shooed the dogs out.
I remember my mother and Lila plucking ducks at a table in the yard, plucking chickens, plucking quail. I remember Lila working smoothly, steadily, with strong big-knuckled hands, and the angry way Mama jerked at the feathers and the tearing sound of the feathers coming off. They fished out livers and hearts with bloody hands and tossed the rest of the innards to the dogs.