October 3, 2001 Murmur Lee Harp’s Last Will and Testament, Handwritten in Baroque Cursive Script on a Yellow Legal Pad in Purple Ink and Notarized by Lashandra P. Pacetti
The wind whips through my house, spins my mermaid mobile round and round. Papers fly. Dust bunnies hop. Light shifts, nearly moans. Gillian Welch wails “Orphan Girl” from the sanctity of my boom box. Her high-wire voice splits me in two, makes me shake, makes me want to testify, makes me fear that I bear no secrets.
As the world dances, I sit, fractured by song, barefoot on my front porch, my hair blown asunder, mourning Katrina Klein’s death. Three years ago today. Three years. Yet the pain and disbelief are as fluid and startling as when we bore witness to her last breath. Iris Haven changed forever when Katrina died. She had not been here very long, but her soul understood. It recognized the ancient ghosts who clattered among the palms and magnolias and oaks and jasmine. Perhaps she had grown too close to them. And that’s why they took her. Everyone who met Katrina wanted to claim her for their own. I know one true thing today: My sorrow over her passing will never list, nor will Zachary’s.
So here I am, wandering through my life, Katrina’s life, and my dead daughter’s life, hoping Zach is okay despite the sadness of this anniversary. Incense burns and swirls. I have set the turtle skull on the porch, facing east, the horizon, the sea, and maybe heaven. This morning, I discovered a dead blue jay by my back door. I buried it under the magnolia and rang my brass lady bell as I circled the trunk three times. I’m not sure why I did this, except that ritual in the face of death and remembrance is a universal have-to-do. I knew there would be bird death today, for they are unknowing messengers, flitting between various scrims of existence. Maybe the jay was Katrina’s way of telling me, Remember me well, Murmur Lee. Remember me on this wild day.
Surrounded by scent and memory, I watch surfers glide across cobalt waves. They are, for the most part, towheaded boys striped in slick black wet suits. As they ride the swells, they curve their bodies to match the shape of the waves, and when they swim out past the breakers on their boards, their arms stroking the air and ocean with athletic glee, I wish I was underneath them, a buoyant arrow gliding over the water with the confidence of a smug and happy shark.
And also, there is this: Selfishly, instead of staying focused on Katrina, I am compelled to ruminate over, of all things, my last will and testament. But perhaps this should not come as a surprise. One of the awful aspects of having someone your own age die is that it pinpricks the ego, pushing us into the fleeting recognition that mortality is not reserved for the old and infirm.
Don’t misunderstand. I suffer no serious ailments. Albeit, there’s a tune or two in this life I’m wise to avoid, but other than that, I have no reason to doubt the vigor and stamina of my physical self. My mood is simply a manifestation of sorrow and practicality. Forty is just a handful of years around the corner. In two weeks, I will have outlived my mother. Never thought I’d see the day. And Katrina was two years younger than I. So a bit of planning is in order.
And let us be delightfully honest. Always in life, there are scores to settle. Good scores and bad. And what better way to grab the last word for all of eternity than by making your wishes known in a legally binding document? How fabulous to have this last will and testament read aloud, a public airing. Oh yes. And both friend and foe will recognize in these words, penned by a healthy woman who had no intention of dying, venial acts of gracious revenge.
Charlee Mudd. Ms. Charleston Rowena Mudd, to be official. I name you executoress. I trust you will follow the spirit and intent of this document without adding any undo flourishes that others might inspire.
Firstly, to my ex-husband, Erik Nathanson, father of my child, I bequeath to you Daisy Blue, my 1992 Dodge pickup, which, as of this moment, sports 97,336 hard-earned miles. It is my sincere hope that my dear truck will inspire you for once in your life to get those pretty manicured hands dirty. Also, this is what I do not bequeath to you: any portion of the air our child once breathed. I am not a bitter woman. Just practical. You don’t deserve a single particle of her, no matter how tenuous or spectral the connection might be. The fact that I leave you something at all is a sign that I have (a) successfully purged your negative energy from my personal and spiritual life—it took years of tear spilling and potion rubbing to get to this point, but hey!—and (b) forgiven your treatment of our daughter and me, although I will never absolve you of the consequences.
My rifle. I love that gun. I have aimed her at rattlesnakes, rats, shadows, unwanted solicitors, and old boyfriends who came calling at just the wrong time. She has never let me down. Lest anyone forget, she was given to me on my wedding day by Grandfather Harp. So you, Lucinda, my youngest, meanest, most talented, and much-beloved friend and neighbor (You don’t fool me. I know you proclaimed yourself a pacifist and joined the Mennonite church just to piss me off), the rifle is yours. Be good to her. Keep her cleaned and oiled, and she will see you through many a scrape, nonviolent and otherwise.
I hereby donate all of my books—with some exclusions, which I will note below—to the St. Johns County Homeless Shelter. Mind food is just as important as slopping down a bowl of watery soup. (Charlee, call the shelter to arrange for a pickup. No need you hauling all those boxes down the stairs.)
My literary exclusions are twofold. First, I want my Zora Neale Hurston collection to go to some deserving child who needs a healthy infusion of hope in her life. So, Charlee, go see Pastor Smith at the AME in Lincolnville and tell him I said that nothing builds hope like reading good literature and that I want the books to be given to a child of his choosing.
Literary exclusion number two: the guidebooks. An Identification Guide to the Trees of North Florida (also all my other wildlife guides: reptiles, birds, butterflies, mushrooms, shells, the whole shebang). The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Dream Interpretation. A Lucky Lou Guide to Hiking the Pacific Northwest. A Guide to Better Health and Fitness. How to Become a Millionaire: An Easy-to-Understand Guide. An Easy-to-Understand Guide to Self-Hypnosis. An Easy-to-Understand Guide to Self-Esteem. And my personal favorite, Sex Is Fun! A Johnson & Johnson Guide to Sexual Freedom. I’ve got tons more, but I don’t feel like writing down all the titles. So, Charlee, just do this: If a book has the word guide in the title, give it to Father Diaz. You know how he’s always saying, with that round pious face of his, that he’s simply a lowly guide leading his flock to salvation? Well, once I’m gone, he’ll be able to lead them toward any number of other things, including botany, metaphysics, travel, fitness, financial freedom, hypnosis, self-esteem, and good sex. What will they need Jesus for?
All my music—Bach, Mahler, Verdi, Vivaldi, Coltrane, Monk, Davis, Hendrix, Muddy Waters, Tampa Red, Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Isaac Hayes, Memphis Minnie, the Allman Brothers, Yo-Yo Ma, Portishead, all of it, even the Dixie Chicks—just divide it among yourselves. And if anything is left over, give the CDs to the music department at the junior high.
I don’t believe there will be a soul privy to this last will and testament who doesn’t know (some of you actually remember) that after Blossom died, I went to the shore in an attempt to walk away my grief. And as I stumbled and fell and stumbled some more, I gathered every talisman I came upon—anything the ocean tossed my way—convinced as I am that earth objects contain their own power, their own constellation of tears and remembrances. So all of these sacred trinkets, once I’ve gone over to the other side to be reunited with my baby girl, will be burned with my body. The talismans and I, we shall become ash. Together. And you will spread our mingled dust on the beach in front of my house while the trade winds sing. I offer this partial list of said relics, humble though they may be (Charlee, forgive me, for this recitation is incomplete): seashells, dolphin vertebrae, bird skulls, petrified blowfish, starfish, sand dollars, mermaid purses, sea urchins, sea whips, sea sponges, coral, coquina rock, the turtle skull, the gator skull, the raccoon paws, p
lus all those bits of glass—bountiful in color: red, green, blue, white, pink—each polished to a fine satiny sheen by the ocean waves and tossed onto shore before the sea could grind them back into sand.
Desdemona. You know I can’t leave her up to the Fates. I want to be welcomed by my people, not shunned, when I drift their way. So beautiful Desdemona, the woman who kept her ship safe on the high seas until finally a hellish storm rolled her onto our island, the rainbow-skirted figurehead who was discovered by my great-great-grandfather Harp the morning of his wife’s death and daughter’s birth—what shall I do with her? I have no blood relatives to speak of. And even if I did, good old Desi stays put. She belongs in Iris Haven. Therefore, I offer this solution, with the admonition that even in death, I will be watching: I bequeath Desdemona to the citizens of Iris Haven, to be preserved in perpetuity, displayed on holidays and good-weather weekends, giving newcomers, visitors, babies (I’m hoping we get a few of those out here) the chance to marvel over her, to ask questions about how she came to rest here. In this way, see, the old stories—the family legends, the breath of pure spirit—will never die.
My winter coat? Take it to the battered-women’s shelter.
The ruby crystal-studded lavaliere made in Czechoslovakia pre–World War II? The one I wore only on New Year’s and my birthday? Edith Piaf, my dear, it’s yours.
My anal thermometer? The same one I used countless times to take my baby’s temperature? The one that, thanks to my sentimental nature, I could never bring myself to toss? Dr. Z, you know I love you. But you also know that you get too hot under the collar over matters of little consequence. So once I’m dead to you in the flesh, you can test my theory on your very own behind (and a cute one it is) anytime the mood strikes.
And, Z, you work too much. So I bequeath to you my boat. Take it downriver, anchor it, shut your eyes, let the past go. You deserve nothing less.
My spell book. Now, this is powerful stuff. It has my recipes for dyeing cloth, making healing soups, plus various prayers and rituals that needle the universe into doing what’s right. I don’t know what to do with it. I’m going to leave that up to you, Charleston.
Salty’s, my venerable old icehouse, where more beer has been consumed than probably anyplace on the planet? Charlee, it’s paid for lock, stock, and barrel. I laid down cash for that joint. Was scared to death, but I did it. So, girlie, you who will soon have a big fat divinity degree, if you are still alive upon the occasion of my demise, the keys are yours. And if you pass before I do, well, Saint Rita, I don’t know what to do.
William Speare, because you and I are lovers and friends of recent vintage, I’m not quite comfortable bequeathing to you any of the tangible evidence of my having walked this earth. So rather than a concrete offering of love and grace, I leave you a directive: Remember us. That’s all. Bless the memory. Because so far, we have been very fine together.
And finally, this ounce of paradise I call home, the house I built with my own hands after you divorced me, Erik, the little palace that rises from its wooded nook behind the dunes, allowing me a respite from which I can look out over the inlet, Iris Haven, and the Atlantic? Charlee, once more, you are my heart. We have gotten into and out of many a scrape together. If you’re reading this, it means I’m dead, you’re not, and the place is yours. How’s that for friendship? A business and a house. I always said I was going to get you to come back home one way or another.
Now, I know I’m supposed to say something about being of sound mind and body. Which I am. I’ve never been saner. My health, other than that old thorn, is tip-top. And while I don’t anticipate an early departure (do we ever?), my mother taught me to be prepared for contingencies. To my great sorrow, I haven’t always heeded her advice. But I am a woman with intimate knowledge regarding the brevity and precocious sadism ofttimes attached to life.
So today, the third of October, 2001, while Gillian sings “I have had friendships, pure and golden,” I take this oath.
Please, don’t anybody mess around. Simply adhere to the words, plain and simple, that I have set forth.
With the breeze and the sky and the songbirds and the darting dragonflies as my witness, I sign respectfully,
Murmur Lee Harp.
A Grocery List, Written in Murmur Lee Harp’s Excessive Cursive Script, Unread, Lost Amid the Cobwebs Behind Her Rusting Refrigerator
Coca-Cola (little bottles)
Budweiser (case)
Rat traps
Candles (white)
Incense (sandalwood)
Pens with purple ink
Hot dogs
Fresh basil
Chips Ahoy! (chunky)
Cigs
Moisturizer
Pink lipstick
Sausage pizza (x-tra cheese)
Water pistol
Doritos
Salsa
Maybe some corn for supper (stop by fruit stand)
Rubbers
Tampax
Toilet paper
What else?
Toothpaste
Murmur Lee Harp
Here, the wind is visible. I watch it with the eyes of the newly born: curious, delighted, free of the yoke of judgment. It swirls and billows. Light threads its way through the wind’s shifting gray tones, weaving images. I have no form, no corporeality, yet I am here: a spirit watching the film of my life, my family’s life. The images waft all about and I feel my soul’s aperture open wider and wider. The light fills me. The wind fills me. The past—which was life—fills me.
Murmur Lee Harp Sees a Moment in the Life of Her Great- Great- Grandfather Oster Harp
Yes, I am watching him as if in a movie.
My great-great-grandfather Harp walks the shoreline, the very same shoreline I wandered for thirty-five years. But the beach in Oster Harp’s time is different. There is more of it, so wide that a plane could land with nary a problem. Not so in my day. At Iris Haven, time manifests as erosion. So while Oster Harp walks on a wide field of sand, I slip along a crescent. One day, there will be nothing: no beach, no dunes, no railroad vine, or coreopsis. The sea will claim my house. The lizards and snakes and bobcat and fox will find higher ground and will have to make due with less land from which to spin the drama of their lives. Iris Haven will become myth. And then what? What will Oster Harp’s life mean once the ocean obliterates the land we lived, loved, and died on? My soul blinks open (it smells of salt and gardenia); the wind sweeps in: I am full of memories.
I watch him trip in the wet sand; he lands on one knee, rubs his shoulder against his cheek, struggles to his feet, stands unsteadily—I think the wind might just knock him flat—and then he begins again. In the viewing, I gain a sense of his heartbeat. It is warm and steady and fully content not to return to the house and the women.
He is a young man—about my age—and other than his fierce blue eyes and a faint dimple in the bull’s-eye of his chin, I look nothing like him. He fidgets as he walks. His thin, strict lips rhumba, staccatolike, as if a lifetime of confessions are banging at the door, desiring to be let out, longing for the freedom that comes with being heard. The thumb of his right hand taps and retaps the pads of his fingertips—index to pinkie, index to pinkie, index to pinkie, Hail Mary, full of grace, the rosary made flesh. He doesn’t fool me. Oster Harp may be a Protestant, but his mother’s Catholicism runs like a neon virus in his veins.
He looks up from the rain-pocked sand and studies the night. The sun is finally beginning its liquid ascent, revealing a horizon I love so well, the one made restless by a wind-whipped sea. Slow-growing swaths of purple and gold cauterize the darkness. Yes, daylight insists on her due.
Oster listens, his head slightly tilted, to the soft sucking sound of the waves lapping near his bare feet and to the wind, which has not stopped howling since early yesterday, and the onset of the big blow. Yes, the wind song clattering over the dunes and through the embattled pin oaks and between the shredded green fringe of palm fronds frightens him because it carrie
s in its whirling folds memories of Orchid in childbirth, memories only three hours old. He wants the wind song to stop. It rattles him the way scorpions rattle the long dark night of our fear. He covers his ears and tries to concentrate on something that bears no weight—last week’s fishing excursion: the sun, the good rum, the fair seas, the decent catch, grouper and triggerfish, and the one that got away.
It’s no use. The memories rush at him: The black women swooping through the candlelight—God’s great birds flying through the shadowy night—ministering to his young wife, who just happens to be my great-great-grandmother. There she is—Orchid Porphyria Harp—her legs spread wide, the mess between her legs opening grotesquely, wet and bloody, the frothing mouth of a wounded animal. I wish I had been there. I would have given her a tincture of yarrow to ease her pain, and before that—at the onset of her second trimester—I would have wrapped her belly in raw silk dyed with the blood of elderberry, so that the baby would have been content to stay in the womb for the whole nine months.
This is what Great-Great-Grandfather Harp cannot accept: Childbirth split her open. And as he watched, pegged to that flickering circle of reflected candlelight on the heart-pine floor, he was fascinated. Transfixed. Appalled. Embarrassed. Outraged. Sickened. Unable to look anywhere else. This is the truth: Not once did he consider stealing a glance at Orchid’s pale, crushed face. Or at her plum-sized fists flamed purple with the effort of gripping that rose-embroidered sham. Or at her small-boned bare feet held wide and aloft by two little black girls. Nor did he consider offering any words of comfort. He was too freaked-out: He was a man witnessing a train wreck; the carnage sickened him, but the passion that burns when life and death collide had hold of him by his everso–Gilded Age testicles.
The Problem with Murmur Lee Page 3