Out in the country…
“Junior leaves for school in a week, Mama…”
Mama smiled and bobbed her head at the jade plant on the windowsill. A step up from the living room, Junior sat on stool at the kitchen counter and blandly turned a page without looking up. Pssssschhh, sliding in the unresponsive quiet. Paper on paper like a rustling leaf.
“Mama…” Mother said in the over amplified voice with the lame Mama trailing off, “Mama… you want some banana…?”
Mama stared mutely at the opposite wall, through the head of Aunt Marla sitting on the sofa with pursed lips and arranging the papers before the social worker came.
“Mama… you haven’t eaten in three days…” as Mother held half the peeled banana to Mama’s taut mouth. The glossy smile had finished a few seconds earlier with the lips sliding back over the teeth.
“Mama…”
“Mama…”
“Mama…”
Mama again and the face locked stern and rigid and the arm jerked up to mash the banana in a crisped claw of bone in the current of vibrating static ramming through the clenched teeth grrrrrrrrrrrrr ayuss-ayuss-ayuss-ayuss-ayuss-AYUSS as the limbs quivered out like spindles of agitation at Mother who was stepping back to let the demons run their course. While it was finishing, Aunt Marla chuckled.
“Ho ho hohhhhh! Mama didn’t like that too much, did sheh’?”
“No,” Mother smiled.
Grandma shook her spread hands at the ceiling in eerie rapture until the wave of serenity swept over her face and the arms laid down in her lap and Grandma was still again. As Mother cleaned banana off Grandma’s hand with a paper towel (she had to coax her to open it first), Aunt Marla asked her something about health insurance.
Aunt Marla stayed with Mama for hours on end now. She was older than Mother and had found two nieces and another lady to help her “sit” with Mama. But a substitute ran her school bus. Uncle Louis, who lived one minute up the road, had come to the house yesterday for the first time in months and told her he was “highly concerned” with Mama’s condition. Aunt Marla told him to shove it up his ass. Her voice rambled and chuckled and kicked. It spoke in tongues at church. It was always tired when Junior greeted her on the phone and went to find Mother, who was currently leaning against the wall and staring out the window.
The region was in a three month drought. The trees had succumbed and began Fall weeks in advance. Oranges, golds, and crimsons of their incandescent leaves burnished in a sunlight that oozed from diaphanous haze veiling the sky.
Idly Junior had glanced up a few moments earlier to watch the commotion. Still watching now, he was filled with a subtle unease. “Don’t catch her eyes,” he thought. “Don’t catch her eyes.” They were stone-gray and Medusa cold and empty Lord knows what would happen if he looked into their severe and loving and piercing and placid and all disoriented gaze. But wait- the eyes were not like stone. The familiar strength and stability of stone had eroded. Hmmm yes now they were just dust and nothing else and Junior returned to the page of his book to dive beneath the surfaces of its black and white rivers of word but he was not able. Instead he heard the old woman as she rheumed under her breath cryptic whispers and flowing fragments of the past.
Fragments of her mind as well. Things had only turned this bad a month ago.
Sometimes they went on like this for years.
Even a long time.
“Wonder how long until she’s dead?” he mused curiously, the same way gamblers put odds on baseball games. Ten years ago, he thought laughing, he would have cried himself to sleep. He did once.
“Mommy…”
“What are you doing up?”
“Whu-whu-what if Grama dies?”
“Don’t worry sweetie, Grama won’t die for a long time. Now run to bed.”
The candor of an eight-year old!
But to a child, an hour is eternity and the end of a long time is day that will never come. Grama was someone immutable and constant. The sharp nails attached to bony mill-worker’s fingers could jab holes through any problem, the puffy, dyed-brown hair was an indomitable sand storm that would scour the greatest tempest into obscurity. She could fix the bicycle and tie shoes. She had Band-Aids. Ah, surely, she had raised five children, outlived her husband, managed the land, defied cancer for weeks in a hospital with calm, steel pipe eyes. The etched, angular lineaments of her face had weathered a test of time. Junior spent the night less. Junior rode with Mother less. Junior spoke to Grama less. Junior began to unwittingly take for granted her very presence until Grama became Grandma, an ordinary fixture of everyday life. There could have been all sorts of other reasons too… maybe it was a generation gap, or maybe he grew up too fast…
Or maybe he just didn’t care, Junior bristled with a callous snarl, and brought his tangent reverie to a screeching halt. Junior possessed empathy, but this was ridiculous. Here was a doddering old lady, gone three quarters out of her mind. Was there any reason to feel guilt? What did she mean to him? He did not know her. He wanted to read. And his eyes did not move, fixed on the same word and thinking of the way things were as a small blister browned on the paper. No, he didn’t care, and he knew most of his friends weren’t bothered about theirs either. Long before Grandma’s brains began to rot out, the organ that compelled some unlucky few to mope sullenly in the halls, absentee for days, read tearful memoriam in speech class, and -with the more pious individuals- dress in black for the week had atrophied and died inside him, leaving behind the dark socket of triumphant emptiness. He had no feeling there- he was not weak like them! “Ha!”
In its place, Junior was unaware of a tiny pilot light. It was a blue slow-burn, which now sputtered and glowed more than was usual.
Maybe they were the lucky few. “How could they be?” he countered. A thin wisp of gray began to snake up from the brown spot.
After all, who had lost more?
The valves had been turned and were hissing like snakes…
He glanced up. Good grief, it was so irritating just to watch her sit there like a doll with the same vapid, brain dead look insolently plastered on her face every minute. She was supposed to be able to speak intelligibly, change her clothes, and not swear her daughters and grandchildren to hell. Idealistically -and this was an amusing thought- idealistically, she was supposed to die in her sleep, very cleanly, very conveniently, like a candle flame snuffing out at the end of its wick. This was not very clean or very convenient, thought Junior. This was a mess. It was frustrating alone simply to hear about the situation from Mother, or listening as she tried to talk to Grandma on the phone every night. Not anymore: this latter was another thing that had changed. Grandma used to be in her right mind- there were many things she used to be. She could be idiosyncratically nagging and ornery. Like most old people, a predisposition towards absent-mindedness. Eccentric. And she was always pleasant to the grandchildren and she cooked well too and she shuffled around the kitchen in cream colored loafers with flat soles as they watched the evening news. If there were leftovers, she scooped them into a tin pan and threw them to the dogs. She marched up the steps of the church house every Sunday like a saint, and he had never seen her do anything wrong. Grama kept Junior while Mother worked, every day until he was three. Once, when he was eight, he visited her in the hospital and the gray eyes had the level reassurance he had not forgotten, since it was the only time he could ever remember her being sick.
And sometimes, Junior looked back on Grandma with a vague admiration. She was a classy lady, he had even decided once, and it disgusted him most of all knowing this behavior was not her style at all. In fact she would hate this and looking at her today he wanted to lunge off the counter and throttle her by her asinine neck screaming hoarse in her ear as hard as he could until she would just snap out of it-
The house was peaceful as the little chain wavered back and forth beneath the blades of the ceiling fan and the valves were hissing like snakes…
-the doctor, the insurance, the sitters, the papers, the social workers, the nursing homes, the drugs that did not work. Two daughters who wanted Mama back. Three brothers who didn’t give a rat’s ass. A life as it slid from the body, disappearing slowly out the door and into the wind. A little boy. The everything that changed.
And for one moment, Junior wanted to destroy everything.
A pause before he relaxed again and found his mouth was dry. As Junior disconnectedly rose from the stool and stepped to the sink for a glass of water, he shot an impulsive glare at the stove at the end of the room, where she used to cook biscuits on Easter Sunday.
Behind him, the flame lapped on the book like soft wind.
Mother and Aunt Marla did not know what the red, suffuse glow twitching in the corner of their eyes was. They still did not know as…
…a massive fireball lit up the sides of their faces and mushroomed into the kitchen ceiling with a billowing gush. Insane linoleum melted as Junior stumbled back from the fire and glanced behind to catch himself on the sink and saw the ceramic frog by the faucet with its black eyes and the gaping mouth where the pink sponge was then and-
“BRAAAAAAM!”
-The little frog exploded into blackened shards over the hole smoking like a volcanic crater of stainless-steel and he looked away to the plastic flowers on the kitchen table fuming down to a molten amoebae there were holes and scorch mark coronas on the refrigerator door-
And Junior had laser eyes!
“BRAAAAAAM!”
Screaming and shuffling papers and git up Mama git up a steel screen door firecracker bang as Junior stood stunned and left the rare-new fury unclipped like the wings of a flaming bird; a massive conflagration inside roared, fumes emitting themselves as the dry-heave respiration of lurid feverish air, synchronized to the rhythm of tachycardiac magma; as it churned through his veins, a boy’s will had returned from the grave! “I’ll cremate this house and fill its basement with ash,” he vowed, sailing through the disintegrating skeleton of the kitchen table and his feet skimming an inch from the floor and past the flaming stove and into the bedroom and BRAAAAAAM he torched the four–post bed: without knowing why.
“I want you to remember this. Now lay me down to sleep,”
“Now lay me down to sleep…”
But he couldn’t remember the rest.
And BRAAAAAM cutting through the closet doors of clothes she no longer wore, BRAAAAAM two shafts of red pierced the dusty dresser- BRAAAAAAAAAM and by the time he seared the floor where the little boy slept on a pallet of blankets, left a bleeding gash along the wall like menaced graffiti (it cut both windows in half), and lunged out the other door, smoke and flames had begun to pour from its drawers.
In the bathroom, the cast-iron bathtub he kept thinking was there had been replaced a year earlier with demure fiberglass. He bored a hole in it. A smug handrail was planted above the tub. He plowed it through the wall. And just before it ran and dripped into slag, the mirror threw the beams back past his head and the green tiles along the wall shattered into miniature universe of fragment and dust, just like the oval sink when its smooth coldness grace cracked and descended to the floor like milk and eggs and cast itself across the octagons on the floor. Junior floundered helplessly in a scarlet-hysterical galvanized rage. Frightened out of his mind! Aware he was furious in ways he could not even explain, as the burning eyes demolished the medicine cabinet with its old make-up, Q-tips, Band-Aids, polish, ointment, dye; splattered through the fluid window and set fire to the frame, minus curtains discarded several months ago smeared with shit. Inflamed the towels like so much dryer lint. Searched out seven toothbrushes hidden in odd places. Good grief, there were toothbrushes everywhere. He spied a flashlight behind the toilet.
“BRAAAAAAAAAM.”
And one toothbrush still hung expectantly in its holder. Grandma herself brushed little because she had dentures. It was his red toothbrush, left untouched for years.
Junior had never paused to wonder until now.
Surely it was coincidence, but-
Everything stopped.
The flames chattered and spat.
Junior glided out of the burning room backwards and realized with disorienting horror that an unknown something had been thrown away that he could never, ever recover. It was too late. The world of this house; its space-aged, angular furniture of the 1950’s; nosy mothball odor, plastic jewels and spider plants, panel walls the color of molasses, the concrete cat with haunted eyes, brass ornaments and jet black records, opalized glass and candy in the dish, aluminum siding with whitewashed paint, orange flashlights and the primal forest, birthday cards in the roll-top desk, the hot room upstairs that was vast and quiet, the lanky swing set and three tombstones- all of it was moribund before the first flame was lit.
Something snapped into a rustle of cinders.
Yes, an unknown something it truly was. The possibilities were so far distant now that Junior was unable to even speculate what they could have been. All the flowers had turned to plastic.
The house was hot. Junior felt sick, as a pale-mucid sweat covered his body like slime. Sick sick sick, in a neurotic vacuum of hollow, trembling nausea; a curtain of gray dread like rolling smoke.
Something about the lucky few, the weak, diluted sentimentalists whom it appeared had ultimately come out ahead of Junior and the rest, told him that what he had lost was very, very valuable.
So now he understood.
Yet instead of gutting the walls in a renewed explosion of stentorian wrath, Junior stood, deflated and tightly drawn in the same moment, and listened to the house burn.
The fire was growing in intensity. Louder like a stranger breathing heavily in his ear. Some of the flames had squirmed through the walls and were rapidly creeping along the ceiling. The house had filled with tumid smoke. “Those are memories,” he whispered. It was true. Everywhere he turned, there was something that had changed. Reminders of the past transposed themselves on new objects of the present like the ghost-image of an old television set. That which had not been replaced, altered, or tampered with had changed in context and spirit, and that leftover aura of the past hung on the massive dining room table like a spectral film of dust, just before Junior kindled one of the legs and watched thick, heady nostalgia come gushing out of the woodwork-
Relatives: flocking from miles around to sit and eat breakfast since the beginning of time, hear the murmur of a house packed with sweaters, there is the air, saturated with bacon and sonorous with voices of towering aunts and uncles as the oven door hinges with a screech and silverware clinks over scrambled eggs and a faucet spriss, as the cousins chase each other between the legs and through the conversations of the dining room, kitchen room, living room, bursting through the screen door and into the white, giggling and screaming, in the bemused, silent white.
The gatherings had ended three years ago. Junior smashed the china.
He was about to cut the legs off a flower stand when he noticed the candle, as thick around as his neck and as long as his forearm, white with dead leaves embedded in the wax.
Oh shit, not that candle.
“It’s a little late, but I wanted to give you this for Happy Thirteenth Birthday…”
“Thank you. It’s heavy. What could it be?”
“Oh… jus’ don’t drop it!”
“It’s a candle. Thank you.”
“Well you’re very welcome!”
“Don’t you think you could show a little more appreciation, Junior?”
“Um… thank you very-oops-“
“-THUNK!”
“JUNIOR!”
“Mom, please don’t drive so fast. This is a country road.”
“What the hell is wrong with you.”
“I didn’t mean to drop it. And it was heavy.”
“Bullshit. You didn’t seem too apologetic either. It left a mark on the floor, I’ll bet you twenty dollars you didn’t even notice.”
“I mean, who gives someone a candle for their birthday? It doesn’t even smell! What am I gonna do with a candle?”
“You know what you were? You were an ass. You weren’t even grateful.”
“It’s just a stupid candle. I bet she just dug it up when she found out I was coming.”
“You should be proud you got anything at all. And you know well that she’s just slowing down now. Lemme see that candle.”
“Um… it’s not here.”
“…”
“Mom…?”
“…”
“Mom, you’re going too fast…”
And it probably was not that one because it had no dent, but Junior winced anyway and sliced it in half.
“BRAAAAAAM!”
What could he do?
Oh, there was nothing he could do, Junior echoed with callous disparity as he hurled chairs into picture frames and lit them on fire. Nothing nothing nothing, only finish what he started. He tipped over a bookcase and watched it cascade papers pictures books through the air. He turned a benign stack of records into a smoldering thing of seething plastic. Junior felt weary as he passed out the dining room and back into the kitchen, where the oven whipped dull flames into the ceiling with a monstrous, heaving groan, rushing and choking on the miasma of smoke, thick like black wool and deafening with manic chatter as it churned and circled and shambled moodily back through the bedroom, out the window, into the sky, and slithered to the clouds. Junior had to break the window over the sink to see. Flames engulfed the blackened walls. Plates popped and shattered in charred cabinets. The entire house emanated a titanic moan before the walls of the kitchen shifted with a massive, reverberant crunch. He had left the room upstairs untouched, and it would slam down flat when it was time. But there was little time left, and Junior would not hurry. Even with laser eyes, Junior thought with a desolate resignation, he could only destroy, not create, and was powerless to change anything that was not destined to end soon regardless. Burning down the house would not fix Grandma’s head, atone for the past, or create new memories.
Junior sighed and stepped down to the living room.
One step down in the living room, there was no fire, and Junior could see well because the smoke had been sucked in the opposite direction. The living room… was a wide, rectangular room at the front of the house. There was a sofa, pressed against the left wall and beneath the kitchen counter, piled with old Reader’s Digest, pillows, and at least two Bibles. The rocker was to his right. The jade plant rested on the windowsill near it. Back behind the rocking chair, a washer and a dryer sat in a small alcove, and there was a stack of frayed, hand-woven baskets on the washer, which Junior did not incinerate. A bookcase against the wall adjacent to the washer, facing the rocker and third window, held no books, but was cluttered with photos. Many were of him. The new carpet Junior was standing on was a dense, excoriating low-pile of cornflower blue. It did not match the gold varnish on the panel walls, the couch-color tone of chewed up Reese’s pieces, or the unwieldy, wood brown of the fifty-pound television. The old carpet -it was a shag, Junior mused absently- was the color of Vienna Wienies and deviled eggs. It was fuzzy like a dog and watered Junior’s eyes when he used to pull at it like grass and rub it in his face, and it seemed this new carpet would not burn. There was a recliner next to Junior under the counter as well that faced the television and the windows above it. The television was piled with picture frames, crosses, frosted glass, and unlit candles. The windows looked over the messy fields where there were no more cows or trees. Far, far away, the mountains in the west could be seen through the haze. During this time of the year, as Grama had frequently pointed out, the red sun silhouetted them as it died beneath the horizon.
The house was keening. The air was incandescent like the blazing embers of sunset. Something big collapsed and showered down behind him with a splintering crash. Junior did not notice.
The mysterious, circular fluorescent light was still attached the angled ceiling. It always reminded him of the eye of an octopus or a goat, and he had never seen it blow, he thought with amazement. It must have been very old. He looked straight ahead and studied the front door. The screen door was made out of aluminum. It had a chain that rattled and banged when the screen door was opened. The actual, wooden door was plain, balsa wood thin, and left ajar as usual. At night it was closed and then Grama used to wedge a hard, wooden chair up under the doorknob to keep “the men” out.
The recliner and the sofa were now engulfed in fire. The Reader’s Digest malformed into tremulous black feathers. Little flames licked over the carpet like brush fires. The air currents of the house had changed and began to nudge the wooden door closed, with a haunted lethargy that revealed the small table.
Junior had built the small table all by himself when he was eight years old and gave it to Grama for her birthday. Junior had not actually built the table all by himself because he needed help from Father cutting the wood, but Grama assured him that since he turned the screws and sanded the edges, he had done the most important and difficult part of building the table and that all the credit should belong to him just the same. He had even varnished it, she exclaimed! It had a little top that was two feet square and little peg legs that were three feet long. His eyes followed them up. It was a thin, simple table, and he thought the varnish was hideous.
But on it were perched… the most extraordinary things…
Things with bold, curving wings and beady, black eyes, full of vitality that stopped the world solid, locked into stasis by their all-knowing gaze as they tilted and dove from bowers of snow, cherry blossoms, cones, crouched in rose and holly leaf thorns, lilac in bloom, arched from petunias, impatiens in cry, sharp tails and beaks through gentle leaves that bowed down as softly as others flared hard in refulgent reign: over blades of grass, magnolia petals, hibiscus saucers, talons unrolled from effusions of color; blue, red, pink, yellow, purple, orange: all wry with the dynamic certitude of a life in one moment. Orioles, martins, bluejays, sparrows, robins, finches, hummingbirds; a ceramic aviary; all were collected on a precarious table that was never bumped, even in the grandest fits of delirium and dementia.
Birds.
“Hey! There’s no birds in the birdhouse. Grama what happened to the birds?”
“Well, a snake got to ‘em…”
“The blue eggs are gone!”
“Snakes eat eggs too.”
“What?”
“The birds are-“
“Why did it have to do that? Whu-why didn’t we stop it Grama?”
“Well, I found it this morning and killed it with the hoe and-”
“Ooooooooooooh I wish that snake were worse than dead. I hate that snake. I hate that snake!”
“But the birds couldn’t live forever, Junior! They’ve left someplace better!”
-Junior’s feet left the carpet-
“No! Why couldn’t we do something, Grama? Why?”
“There was nothing we could do. Nothing lasts forever!”
-The balsa wood left its hinges-
“But the birds…”
“It’s alright!”
“The birds…”
“It’s al-”
-The screen door burst open.
“BRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMM!”
With such intensity that the swing set tripped over and the concrete cowered black the limbs trembled and the siding warped the windows flocked out the frames and over the patio like shining doves, to empty flower beds as psychotic glee broke from the house in a screaming arc that dove off the steps, into the yellow yard, careened past the oak tree, around the house, snaking up the driveway in a shower of gravel to Mother and Aunt Marla waiting in the backyard sobbing and waiting as the siren sailing closer wailing as Grandma shook her fervent hands at the sky paling as Junior almost tackled them all as he bolted over, collected her and exploded away in an absurdly spewing fountain of dirt, grass, leaves and gone, soaring like a rocket over the sere fields, desiccate weeds; naked, uncut trees that reached out with fingers, faster, faster, to the mountains and now a blur a chariot of fire as the wind sang in his ears like chorus of angels pushing staccato of fire, solo siren, duet of sorrow back to earth in a mass-panic marching-band of churning oblivion as they hurtled, higher, higher, into the sky as Grandma was shrieking and clawing his face the moment he looked into the eyes that showed everything at once and saw:
His Grandmother.
And that was all.
She was not love or resentment, his Grandma, his Mother’s Mother, or even Grama. She simply was. She was all of them and none, how all colors of light together create white, and all solid hues mix into black.
Condensed, they made a life.
The transient perceptions were like leaves in the wind here. They had always been the same people.
They began to laugh.
The deranged laughter, rising faster and faster, cackling at the past, today, and future. When they knifed through the haze of the bluest clear sky, sounds ricocheted through a world without end. They no longer flew like birds but plummeted faster upwards higher through air like the gravity shrugged and the world inverted, faster and higher- the diamond sun- to the diamond sun: Faster and higher. Faster and higher. Faster and higher, and faster and higher and shouting and screeching and screaming, into the eye of God.
