Do You Know the Church Hymn?

There was a little brown pony once, but I didn't know what to name it. That was one of the things that Mother had bought us before she died. The pony was not really a pony, of course, but a full-sized gelding boy horse, but we got him when he was a colt and tussled up by birth so that the nap of his hair was funny--too much on the sides, furred on the top. He was so frail.

Her handkerchief would flutter out the window on a breeze and at the end of it, her hand, looking like to flutter as well. And she would cry: Howard! You are a loved, loved boy! And my legs were like to young trees rooting in the dirt.

I remember when she died there was a little, little teacup balanced on her chest, yellow, with beads of bright gold paint, so little that you wondered if you'd better move it, in case she breathed and then it toppled. But it didn't. She looked at me with her black head there on that pillow and that teacup balanced on her chest atop the crinny gown which was so thin. She closed her eyes and she knotted her hands below the teacup, and she said My son, do you know the church hymn? And she began to hum it, me watching that cup that brittly resting on her sternum like a conch. And I thought to fill it with tea, for it was so still.

How Dark the Sky

Maude slapped the dough with the flat of her palm, picked up a bit more flour, dusted the air, grasped the fleshy greyness and dropped it onto the counter. Then she put her hands on her hips and looked out the kitchen window. Why I have to do everything myself, I do not know, she said under her breath as if the house had not been empty of men since morning. It was four o'clock now. Four o'clock and she was only kneading the bread. Four o'clock, and no tidy motor buzzing cutting the lawn with her husband sitting atop of it like any God-fearing country man. How was she going to cook the dinner? Maude dusted off her hands, shaking her head and pulling at her eyebrows. She gave the dough a tidy slap and walked across the kitchen, drawing off her apron to hang on the wood peg by the door. She grasped the chipped banister and walked up her hallway stairs slapping her palms against each other. Maude was not some nagging cow, and if her husband brought her home a bundle of field mint, as he always did when he had been shirking, well, he could just set it on the porch and have it with his dinner. She raised the wooden sash.

Henryyyyy, she shouted. Her voice pealed over the shushing yellow wheat fields. Henryyyyy. Wiiiiilt! With her head out in the sky she could feel the gathering evening on the sides of her neck and the backs of her hands. The air felt wet, and the flat gold land seemed to cut the distance into two shifting bolts of cloth, bright yellow and shining, murkish grey. A bullfrog chirruped down at the creek, under the stand of crack willows and osiers, and then another bullfrog, and then all of the bullfrogs chimed roundly together. Maude kept her head out of the window, feeling the plangent weight and moisture like palms on her cheeks. Heyy-en! The bullfrogs clangored. She picked her palms up off the sill and looked at them. They were caked with chips of white paint. 

 

Maude pulled her head in the window and looked at her bedroom. She had made the bed, and she had dusted and straightened all of the picture frames that day before she went to go get the new auracana's eggs from the coop. The doily made for her by her mother was resting on the back of the yellow chair that she sat in when she had some time to read. Her husband's fancy boots were propped up on the hope chest, where she had set them. He would be wearing his gaiters today, and his overalls. His flannel would be red. Or was it the blue one? She couldn't recall. I can't recall, she said, although I dressed the man, and she faced again to the window.

Maude leaned with her arms preceding her over the sill, slapping off the flecks of paint. They stuck to her skin stubbornly. With her head and shoulders pressing toward the sky, Maude felt like she was leaning into the bottom of a lake. The air hung like a mud veil over the fields, and though she strained her eyes for a grain of color that would mean a tractor or a hired boy from town, she could see nothing. She brought her head back into the room, then turned her body away from the window without shifting her gaze. She pulled her hands in from the thick air and put them in her pockets. Then she turned her head and strode back into the hall.

She reached up with both hands to the china bead on the end of the string to the attic stair, and pulled it. The stair unfolded like an accordion, and she used one hand to pick up the hem of her skirt and the other to steady herself on the upper steps as she climbed. The steps groaned with her weight, the bottom board striking the wood of the hallway floor with a clud. Maude hunched through the four-foot door that her father had put into the attic wall in case of floods and stepped onto the rooftop.

Her house looked small from here, the guttered borders of the roof not seeming to stretch more than ten feet in any direction. The wheat fields spread all around, magnificently yellow, and the sky lowered beyond, surrounding and dim. Which wall was her bedroom window? She craned her neck over the gutters and could not place herself among the distant spaces of her home. The ringing of the bullfrogs gained in pitch and the rushing of the crack willows joined that of the crops under a wind that lifted Maude's skirt and made her bend to press it to her knees. The shingles of the roof radiated heat that warmed her legs. In the distance, she saw the sheets of yellow and grey blur as the sky fell to water and the water fell to the field. It is about to rain and I am on the damn rooftop looking for you, Henry, she said. 

 

She turned back to the roof door and a red speck in the distance caught her eye, moving towards the house under the blackness of the falling sky. The bead of color gained in size and she stepped unsteadily over the shingles, straining to see it more clearly. It had a white head, and hands, and then it was her son, bounding over the wheat field where he was never supposed to go, wearing her husband's red flannel and his own green rubber galoshes. Ma! he shouted as he ran. Ma! Ma! Ma! The ringing of the bullfrogs drowned his voice. 

Wilt! Maude shouted. You stop running!, but he kept bounding through the high sheaves, a path of broken stalks flattening behind him like a road. She saw his face now, strained, white, shining with sweat. His eyes jittered wildly, like the eyes of a colt that she had once seen whose mother had been shot for a lame leg right in front of him, the farmer an ignorant man who had only dealt before with stupid cows. She put her hand to her heart and clutched the fabric there.  

Wilt! she cried again, and he heard her this time and stopped dead at the border of the field and the green lawn and looked up at her, his white chest heaving and slick under her husband's shirt, his face stricken and blank, and the rain reaching the boundaries of the house hushed the bullfrogs and the noise of the trees as she fell to her knees at the edge of the roof.

The Mailman

      “What the fuck, dude. What the fuck, dude.”

       The mailman's hand hung off the back of the chair, fat and papery like a wadded slice of bread. Robby, twisted against the wall, was mouthing the inside of his wrist, his eyes wet and wide.

       I watched Carl take the edge of the kitchen curtain between his thumb and forefinger. He brought it to his face, rubbing the fabric with his hand as if testing the feel of a shirt, then turned it over and sniffed it. The curtain was yellow, plaid with green swirls like bloated teardrops at the corners. It was brown on the side hanging over the sink. The counter was piled with garbage. The place smelled like banana peels. Glossy white kitchen paint met that of the brown living room wall in a precise line. 

       “What'd you do, Carl?” Carl dropped the curtain and squatted on the carpet where the linoleum ended, combing the pile with his fingers stiff. His hand made a tearing sound as it passed. Chunks of lint collected like filthy cotton at his feet. 

       Robby took his hand from his mouth and pushed himself up, staring at Carl as he dragged the lint from the ground. Rob's face looked swollen and pink, like when we were all kids and he was being a wimp on a sleepover. He swallowed a couple of times before he spoke. “Yeah. What the—what the fuck, dude? What the fuck d'you do that for?” Carl's eyes rose from the carpet and trained themselves on Robby, his hand trolling the ground rhythmically. His face was slack.

       “Carl. Where'd you get him?” I took a step toward him and he looked up at me. His teeth glinted like gristle in the dark of his mouth. A shaft of sunlight from the window hit his eye and made it gleam yellow, like the wing of a butterfly. I could see his throat working under the soft, ridged pink skin.

       He coughed. “What?” he said, and smiled, blinking. 

       “Aw, fuck.” Robby moaned in the corner.

       I walked to the mailman and looked at him. He was older than he'd looked from the door. His face was chalky, his cheeks crossed with red capillaries and the pig-bristle of a day-old beard. His eyelids were shut and satiny. The wool of his pants was frayed at the seams; there was a hole in the place where the zipper met the crotch. He wore black cotton gloves. One of his knee socks was drooping on his white calf, and underneath it was an industrial-looking black garter. I put my finger underneath his nose. I felt a wet draft like someone blowing through a straw and I pulled my hand away, wiping it on my pants. “He's not dead.” I said.

       “Oh, thank Christ! Then we can leave him be and get the fuck out of here!” yelled Robby, climbing to his feet. I looked out the kitchen window. The mailman's truck sat in his driveway, cheerful and white. A fat woman in a pink housedress was standing on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips, watching her terrier take a shit on the mailman's front lawn.

       “Robby,” I muttered, “Shut the fuck up or we're all going to jail.” Robby put one hand back over his eyes and with the other smacked the wall, sinking towards it and whimpering curses.

       “We'll put him in that torn up old mattress,” Carl said quietly. He was staring at the pile of fluff he'd made. He flicked the wads with the tips of his fingers. “Just slit it open and put him right inside.”

       “He's not dead,” I repeated. “He's still breathing.” I looked out the window again. “Somebody might come home soon.”

       “Nobody's coming home,” said Carl, and rubbed his eyes. He looked at me. “Are you blind? He lives alone.” His eyes in the gold of his face glowed surreally, the color of dust motes. In the dark room he looked like a lit match, like some wild and glowing animal. He brushed the fluff at his feet into a neat mound, then stood up. His body left the ray of sunlight, darkened. “We'll kill him.”

       Robby's face screwed up. His hand waved in the air in front of him feebly, his other hand pawing at his hair, his eyes, his mouth. “Oh, come on, Carl. I don't want to.” He put his face against the wall. He turned to me suddenly, his hands out, palms up at me. “Danny, I don't want to. Do you want to? I don't want to, man. You can't let him make me. Don't let him—” 

       I popped Robby one before I even knew what I was doing. I felt the heavy hand descend, the iron fist of concrete and white marble, the dense, clamping hand, crimping my eyes, filling the spaces under my jaw, pressing my shoulders down and then exploding up, through my bones, through my fist, and when I hit Robby's face I felt no impact, just watched his head whip back and hit the wall with a smack. An instant later his hands flew up and hid his mouth, his skin white against the red blear spreading from his nose. He held his face and looked at me silently. I turned back to Carl. 

       “How'd you get him out?”

       “I used a rag.”

       “Where is it?”

       He laughed and pulled a wrinkled white rag out of his shirt pocket, waving it around like a hanky, his brows raised. I smelled the refrigerant smell of the chloroform.

       “Were you wearing gloves?”

       “Of course. This shit gives you sores.” He leaned against the kitchen sink, tilting his head back as he folded the rag in a square and tucked it back inside his pocket. 

       “Where'd you put them?”

       He smiled with one corner of his mouth at me and leaned back on his arms, tapping the tiles of the counter with his fingernails. “It doesn't matter. They don't have any of our fingerprints.”

       “He works for the government.” 

       “He's a mailman, Daniel.”

       “You guys can't kill a person. We've never killed a person before,” said Robby from the wall.

       “That's why we're not going to get caught.” Carl kept his eyes on me. I realized I was picking at my fingernails and put my hands in my pockets.

       The mailman snorted and we all jumped. He huffed once or twice, jewels of sweat quaking on the stubble of his upper lip. The hand hanging off the chair jerked itself up and clutched spasmodically at the motheaten crotch. The dark twill chest started heaving in and out like a bellows. A sound came from him like cardboard ripping. He was snoring.

       Carl sighed and looked at his watch. “Let's have a look around,” he said.

       “Carl, man, Carl—”

       “Shut the fuck up, Robby.” He raised his eyebrows at me briskly and strolled to the hall at the back of the living room. “Do what you want, you two little whores.” He cornered the bend into the hall. Robby and I looked at each other.

       “Come on, Robbo. Be a little man.” I walked to him and put my arm over his back. 

       The hall jogged right after the first few steps and it became too dark to see. Robby and I stumbled down the dark passage, groping with our hands out. Carl appeared in a tall blade of light that opened to our left, black against the blue-white radiance of a room. “This way, ladies,” he said smoothly, and disappeared. 

       The whiteness of the room blotted all sight for a moment, and then we were in a bedroom. A peach bedspread loomed in quilted ridges across a four-poster bedframe made of scrolled metal painted white. The headboard rolled in curlicues like a pale gothic mansegate, and the posts were twisted like barber poles. On the wall facing the bed there was a window, and over this was a luminous stained glass picture of a beach scene with a massive gilded frame. Rolling turquoise waves glowed obscenely, and in the upper left corner, a brilliant red sun squatted, top-wide and fat. Black seagulls crawled flylike across a pork-pale, iridescent sky. Through the whole thing you could see faintly the stubbled brown backyard, a rusted swingset, and the clouding top of a brackish arborvitae studded with crows.

       The bathroom was pink, with double sinks shaped like seashells. Vanity lights ringed the mirror, splattered with the foggy skeletons of water droplets and black hairs like little fleas. The floor was strewn with empty toilet rolls and scummy towels. A gold ring was in the wall above each sink, and in both of these a plush, peach hand towel hung folded neatly. On the counter were mounds of tissues, thumbed and brown.
       "Can you believe that good people die while this sack of shit just lives?" I looked at Carl. His face was still impassive, but his hands were clenched. I felt a stinging pain in my own hand and looked down. My thumb was bleeding. I had torn the nail down to its root without noticing. I stuffed my hands into my pockets again.

       “Carl,” I said. “This is nothing like a dog.”

       “I know,” he said. “Dogs have dignity.”

       “No. That's not what I mean.”

       He turned and came very near me. He had a sweet smell, like laundry or Coke. He brought his mouth close to my face so that I felt his breath as he spoke. He looked me in the eyes.

       “No, Dan,” he said, “this is not like killing a dog.” Something sweet but unbearably clean. “But it will be easy.” I could see again behind the pearly mouth the white gleam of his teeth, the bubbles of saliva glittering the edge his tongue. “Daniel,” he said. He put his hand on my cheek. “You're right.” He turned away from me and passed through the smudged door frame into the black hall without a word. 

       Robby looked at me in the mirror.

       “Are we really going to do it, Danny?”

       I looked away from him. In the mirror, my own eyes were absurd, pale and round, ridiculously large and unprotected. My hands stuffing my pockets looked like hobo's purses, my wrists above them hairy and white. I was a small, dark goblin, a monster. 

       “For chrissakes, Robby.” I yanked my hands to my eyes and turned from the mirror. I felt as though a wave of sound were coming over me; there was a rushing in my ears that was palpable, like they were being pressed open with cotton. I pressed my palms to my forehead and saw Robby's t-shirt, the red fabric covering the soft flesh of his belly. At his sides, his hands hung like white rags; the pink swells of his fingers bloomed chubby and limp. He was so goddamn helpless. I thought about my dad, how his hands had looked clenching around his face the day my mom died, veined and reddened, like they were carved of something that had been burned by acid, irrevocably damaged. The world was so fucked up. I could feel my face twisting around it. Heat stabbed my eyes. Robby's white hands lifted, floated towards me.

     “Dan—” he said. I snatched at his elbows, strained the hands out of reach. I could feel the weight, something cold, unbearably heavy. It was pressing down on me; I wanted to shake it off, but there was nowhere to go.

Super Mario Brothers

From time to time my brother would get me to play video games. But I was a terrible partner. I flew the battleship through halls of stars while my brothers shrieked help from Star Fox, Star Fox; in Selenitic there was a bookcase, filled with squares of cracked vellum, green leather, each rowed with black hieroglyphs like Hebrew on a corpse's arm. How could one resist such richness, how could one look away? I slumped through ivory patios and wanted to see. My favorite was a room above the crested mud gateway to the hall of Princess Peach. The black walls were noiseless and veloursome; it was an error of code, the material bounding the room jangling with emptiness. My steps clipped delicately and deadened on the lighted picture window, an inverse, rose-soft image of the Peach; there were only twenty paces wall to wall. The Princess held a rose. The noise of the game came in from a great distance. Other people were eating mushrooms, other people were leaping three hundred feet in the air. No one else could enter. I sat under the diffuse blush of the window. The sun came from far off.

Slapstick in Swiss Cheese: This Month's "There Comes A Time" Time; or, Mr. Donuthead, Who's Trying To Kill You?

I got up at 4:30 this morning. Not because I wanted to, or even because I had to. I did it for one reason. One mean old reason, the reason for the season, a reasonless reason, the reason to end all reasons: my back hurt. My goddamn back hurt.

That old waitress war wound, like every fake smile I ever gave turned on its side and stabbing me in the spleen. My back hurt. Like a cracked rib, like a dead dog, like an ice sculpture, like a fishing creel reeling me in. My back hurt. That old lady refrain pressing me tight as an iron maiden. My goddamn back hurt, so I woke up at 4:30. And I went to work.

Christ, you must be saying. Author. Jacqui. Is this going to be one of those complaining blogs? Like the cameraman in that pivotal moment in Wayne's World, you are walking away. Wait! Okay, okay, come on back, I say. Come on back. Things aren't as bad as they seem! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to dump on you. I'll figure something out. Okay? I tuck my hair behind my ears. I smile.


Some days the end of the world is burning a swiss cheese sandwich. This is one of those days. One of those "There Comes A Time" times. There comes a time, I'll say, when your rotten teeth and waitress wound and poor-me-Sally-ness and inability to make grilled cheese all catches up with you. These days you feel melancholy as a bear at the blind edge of winter and you want to dig a hole in the snow because the days are short and dark and full of hunger and it seems about that time. But you're not a bear. You're a human. A gol-darned lily-livered spume of a human, and singing in the shower, although fun, fails to change that peculiar predicament which you find yourself affixed to like a patch on the ass of a bum. You try to find the thread of where things went wrong, but it isn't there. It's all wrong. It's just you.

These are the days for harelip prayers.

I tuck my hair behind my ears. I smile.

Come on back.

Maiden Names

Oh mother, when I stand above the water,

On my white face I see your printed cheek.

I smell the betel shell of every daughter,

The currency of newness, rare as teak,

I see the teeth your mother used to crack you,

Whose mouth made holds that bellied you and blacked you,

Whose words were traders' tins to weigh you weak.

Why is my mother's maiden name forgotten?

Who tore your scrivened name to pieces, mother?

When did you take your fingers from the typewriter

and knot them in your lap to bloat and blubber,

to wend and bludgeon fatly through the water,

as, on the mudded bank, your only daughter

burning for an image, gasps and smothers?

The woman part of me was never named

Nor was the woman part of you. We are

Dumb sons without a provenance to claim,

Meek, muted by the keeper's clink and screw.

We cannot write in ink, we cannot mark

The places we have stood, submerged in dark.

How can I know my name, my nameless mother?

How can I be but some bright mirror's shadow?

A hold made sole for likeness, loyalty,

Blind darkness, corded to the absent shoulder

Of any captain, shunted sea to sea,

though rough, the waters hide my own clean cheek?

Daughter, will I brand you so I can speak?

Will rough reels buy my passage, weigh you weak?

Completely Unprepared for Jaguars and Gorillas, Our Intrepid Traveler Forges On; or, Not Enough Bell Peppers To Go Around; or, Eek Ik! An Anthropologist's Nightmares Explained.

There are many fives in my life. Five a.m. alarm clock. Five hours of sleep. Five bus trips daily. Teacher, grade five. At approximately Ray Bradbury's death hour this morning I scrawled five hieroglyphic phrases on the lined paper next to my bed. Kegan. Jaguar. Tried to warn. Didn't listen. Got me. Later, there was a gorilla I couldn't feed: I tried to scrounge for tossed-out vegetables, as one would give a rabbit, but this rabbit was a thousand pound living bludgeon and all I could find was one tray of discarded red and green bell peppers--hardly enough for a jungle animal that, in dire straits, will eat young gazelle. As if bloodthirsty silverbacks were not enough to drive the psychic message home, for some reason the gorilla attracted to him a throng of uncommonly loyal, dumb and adorable dogs who were depending on me utmostly to also sate their carnivore's diet of ground beef and kibble. Awoke in a sweat--five sweats, to be precise.

Spent all day yesterday reading about the Ik. Colin Turnbull's other ethnography that I've read was about the BaMbuti, a Congolese pygmy tribe who act and look like tiny, dark-skinned Groucho Marxes. It was called The Forest People. In it, the tribe sings songs about the goodness of the forest, likes to laugh, and has a taste for the hilarious and slapstick. The Ik are not the BaMbuti. Their book is called The Mountain People. An excerpt:

When the mother finds a spot in which to gather, she loosens the sling and lets the baby to the ground....Then she goes about her business, leaving the child there, almost hoping that some predator will come along and carry it off. This happened once while I was there--once that I know of, anyway--and the mother was delighted. She was rid of the child and no longer had to carry it about and feed it, and still further this meant that a leopard was in the vicinity and would be sleeping the child off and thus be an easy kill. The men set off and found the leopard, which had consumed all of the child except part of the skull; they killed the leopard and cooked it and ate it, child and all.

It's like some bizarre Lewis Carroll rabbit-hole where everything is reversed. The Ik are starving. Uganda and Kenya have made them settle in what used to be their spring lands, and forbidden them from hunting in the surrounding "state parks". Their familial allegiances used to be dictated by traveling groups and gathering groups, rather than by biological nuclear families. Now there's no traveling, and there's no gathering. So there are no allegiances. Since there's not enough food to go around, either, there's absolutely no incentive to do something like nurse your infant, or shelter your elderly mother. The most depressing thing is Turnbull's anthropological conclusion that biological family ties are not part of human nature, since the Ik are human and family seems to mean zilch to them. I might argue that analogs of this same behavior can be seen in any situation of acute stress to the survival of the group, like war. Regardless of theory, I'm dreaming of jaguars eating my skull, starving bloodthirsty gorillas, and generally of being put into situations of great responsibility without the resources to handle them.

There's no suitable pun on which to end this post. Pray for me, readers: the jungle approacheth. And it's five a.m., and time to wake up.