I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like Read online

  “Oh, you’re that little Gibson boy with buckeyes in his britches.”

  “Momma,” I say, “it’s Orbit.”

  But who am I to tell her? Who am I to Momma? What am I to say?

  For luck, I shook a buckeye down to clatter from our buckeye tree. She put it in her mouth.

  Our dog is Bingo. We gave Bingo Bingo. Bingo is a dog’s name. We took Jane away.

  So is it Jane’s or Bingo’s tail we worry in our pockets?—broken, ropy, gyplet tail Daddy cut away. So maybe it is Daddy’s. But it is in our pockets.

  Our goosenecked goose is Gander. If Gander is our Christmas goose, will we take his name away? And will it still be Christmas? Will Daddy come to carve the goose when she is dead who took his name and, with it, died away?

  Sometimes I cannot hold my breath for Momma’s long not-breathing. I keep her sheet snugged under her. One Mississippi, I count. Two, three Mississippi. Four.

  Outside is the garden.

  My bike is in the garden.

  I hold my breath between our breaths so she will not stop breathing. But sometimes I breathe. I cannot keep from breathing.

  There is the lean-to. There are birds to clean. There is the light to think of. Already the day is so long past the coins sun-dropped through the leaves of the trees of the locusts calling Phaaaraoh, past jarflies and dragonflies that stitch the air above our lake, our house shadow flung as far and wide as both our yard and garden.

  Still there is no sign of my sister.

  But surely she will come.

  Cissie will want to be the one when Momma wakes up screaming, and Momma wakes up screaming—What time is it? Oh, let me up! I have got to get into that kitchen.

  But there is only sun time here, and the fickle moon in the trees at night, and months that pass from things that bloom and rot in our dark garden.

  There are wonder beans now. There are turtles.

  UPON A TIME the times we did not sleep, Daddy shunt the hall at night to lock us in our room at night when we were not sleeping. There is no lock to lock now. Now is the door and the hall and the door any boy can follow.

  You can see our house at night. We leave the porch light on at night. You can see it burning.

  Once Daddy came to our room at night when I was afraid of the dark at night, of the night sounds and the dogs at night and in the woods the cows at night, though days I saw them feeding. Then I did not sleep with Oscar then. Then Cissie’s bed was one bed and my bed another. I did not sleep with Bingo. Then Bingo slept on the floor of our room, before she slept at the head of my bed, before the two-dollar truck would run, before she got my pillow. Now it is Bingo’s pillow. Now it is Bingo’s tail for me to finger in my pocket.

  I am not a scaredy.

  Only but to shoo the flies a boy would need to look at her. I am small to bathe her or try to keep her eating.

  But I am not a scaredy.

  I am like my daddy.

  My bike is in the garden. My lamp is in the breadbox. My straw, my shreddy shoes.

  And I am in the garden now, my feet are in my shoes. Whooey.

  Cornstalks left and splinted peas, the scrabbly path that splits our yard, oh fast, our moon, the window left, our porch light left on burning late for Daddy not to come, or to come when I am hiding, sly as sly Geronimo, a scrap of a boy in the tree limbs hung with copperheads and gawking cranes that ghost across our lake at night.

  Nights!

  Oh, the tree frogs!

  What boy was I to be afraid ever of the tree frogs? Ever of the blat and twang, the rasp and scraw and cruck of things—the warbling, the mournful, the leaves of the trees fallen all sunken to a churchly calm to keep me up with Daddy?

  I kept up with Daddy. Daddy creaked like trees.

  Daddy smelled like creosote slathered on our wooden shed, our leaning fence, our barn my bike thrums and rattles past—a swift bank, a cock-kneed swoop he showed me. House and barn and creek bed gone, turtles gone, a moon, a stunt to make my momma gasp to get down to Daddy, to hold her breath for Daddy—no hangdog on the fence we built to fence the bending hill we built the barn to squat on.

  No spotty clerk, my daddy, not a man to cobble shoes.

  Did he not know the names of things to call the nightly sounds by? By cricket, by screech owl, by croaker?

  My way is quick: the barn, the slough, the hidden field. My way loops through the hidden field, between the vaulting stalks of weeds so near I have to hold my breath—to stoop, unmooned, no smoothened pass, but the sting and smeary green of greening knees to steer by.

  My name is Orbit.

  Joe Pye, milkweed, mullein.

  The lake is low. My bike is old. You can hear it coming.

  In the leaves are cans to kick where I tip my bike down. My lamplight is on. My Dixie straw, my gigging prong, my knack I have among the trees for soggy calculation, my skinny pole, my skiff I have to stand up in to skinny past the trees by night by night-blind navigation.

  I hear such frogs.

  They fall to feeding when I pass them.

  But I do not pole past them. I shine my light across them—long of toe and yellow-eyed and wide mouths to pry open.

  Slow now, and soft to go.

  You have to go so soft as me to catch them in the laps of trees, gawky in your narrow skiff in the lapping shallows. The weak place is the white place that bloats out when they call. They flap and bleed when you gig them.

  I let Bingo taste them. I let Bingo lick my hands when I have slicked my hands at night.

  But I do not croon. I do not pitch and moan to see our Cissie curl her toes underneath our sheets at night when Momma is still singing. And Momma is still singing. Momma is always singing.

  I pry their mouths open.

  I scrape my straw down into them—and breathe.

  THE GREEN-HEADED and the long-legged and the black flies hatched from the spit-gobbed weeds tick by day at our windows. Inside the flies are flies inside and in the frogs flies inside and in our house also and also in Bingo worms inside—hook and whip and ringworm worms and worms left to feed in Bingo’s heart—pale, mute, sluggish, plumping in the bloody rush in the blinding heart dividing.

  Until at last Bingo’s heart tears open. Can.

  Surely it will not tear open.

  Momma will not tear open. The filly did not tear open. I cut the filly with a carving knife to turn above the dogs at night safe from the limb of our tree.

  When Daddy comes home, I will show him. I will show him the broken place where Bingo comes into the yard.

  Bingo is Bingo.

  When Daddy comes, Bingo is Jane.

  Tonight is the light of a greening moon a boy can see to ride by, and else to ride to sea by. Daddy will not come tonight—when Momma is still singing, when Bingo is not Jane.

  My sister’s name is Cissie.

  Our momma’s name is Cissie.

  You can hear us calling. You can see our house at night. We leave the porch light on at night.

  You can see us calling.

  THERE IS THE dirt road, the paved road, the airport.

  Should we walk to the dirt road, we could not hear her screaming. Should we walk to the paved road, we could not see the porch light. But should we walk to the airport?

  If we cannot hear her screaming, if we cannot see the porch light, no porch, we can see no house at night, no dogs to see who run their dreams beside our father’s bed at night now that we are leaving, and we are leaving. The dirt road that starts at the graveyard, or ends, if you wish, at the graveyard, and begins, if you wish, at the paved road, to take us to Oneida, to take us to Tuscaloosa, takes us out in the snow some night to walk the rising tide some night until our hats start floating.

  But that is not our want, we claim.

  After all that we have claimed of it, this seems not the road at all.

  THERE IS A yellow house I know set back from a road I know.

  There is a well
there. From the well comes the sweetest water.

  We have no bucket.

  Shall we assume, then, the well is dry? Shall we say there is no well at all, no yellow house, no mother?

  And if a mother, what shall we say of her?

  That she is pretty?

  That she is quick to dance a Charleston in her rhinestone shoes?

  Very well, then. She was pretty. She was quick to dance a Charleston in her rhinestone shoes.

  Shall we make a claim from on airship high how the road comes to look not a road at all but a rope to knot a loop into to kick a chair out under from, or from yellow porch to pin oak tree to pin a mother’s trappings from—her gold lamé, her taffeta, her brocades flown across the sea or boated in a ribboned box from some shop we have not thought to think of yet in Hong Kong—her girdles, Mother’s hard brassieres, her gowns back-slit with a kitchen knife—greenish, blooded, nylon—children, usurers, thieves—her nylons to pull past our chins at night to steal from our mother’s room at night that we might well be on our way, well down the road I would not claim as clothesline or hangman’s noose, no ribbon to bewitch in a young girl’s hair to flutter by chance in your slowing rush down the old road, or the new road, the dirt road, the paved road, headlong to get to Ohio?

  IT WOULD PLEASE me to think you might think of me as a girl you picked up driving once, or thought to pick up driving once, who says, as we ride, nearly nothing.

  That we have met in a dream, you might think.

  That we have eaten pork chops—this would please me. We have left the last bright diamond field, the shrinking glare of hamburger joints, of car lots and Circle Ks, dog tracks and Sears.

  YOU ARE SO pretty.

  Is there nothing I can say to you?

  Is there not a vein you love lashed beneath your mother’s skin she lets you fiddle with your fingers?

  Must you follow with your fingers the broken and the boldened road, the turnpikes, the highways, the lists made of names of towns to go, sitting beside your mother’s bed for the last breath breathed out at the back of the house and gone?

  You may go now.

  But will you come back?

  Will you not come to hear her calling you late from the wide field, from your hay forts and strewn caves—the thin rain, the cities?

  The cities flee from my windows.

  I do not rest much. A run of music, a plain door, in the hard streets the sound of horses sends me on.

  I push on. Sometimes a door opens.

  Sometimes with some man spent in me, Mother comes to me tugging her catheter, the limp, blooded tip of it, out from where I have forced the tube into Mother’s—I want to say—womb.

  Is it possible to be gentle?

  Her skin is a yellow bruise. Mother dents where you touch her.

  I am like her. Each day I am more like her.

  I have her hands, my mother’s mouth, her long, straight body.

  Go fuck yourself, Ohio.

  WE TIED OUR mother by our wrists with scarves and to the bed stalks by our ankles. We had a great stash of morphine, a run of hot nights of a sweetened cast that clotted in our throats. We had gizzards. We grew scales. We had feet.

  We were bottom feeders.

  We were flat out over our lake by night with each a stone to ride by. Our stones grew smooth. They sunned all day. We found it warm to hold them. We eased the stones over the rim of our skiff and the water rose on the flank of our skiff and rose again for my brother. Our skiff nosed up and flattened. Our skiff nosed down and flattened.

  We had chosen each one stone. We held them. It was all we could do to hold them. We tipped, tucked over, dropped ourselves into the water.

  All the moon long, we fell.

  The stones rode against our bodies. We fell past breathing, shapeless things.

  It was pleasing. Our lives grew strangely pleasing.

  We were told the lake had no bottom. It was said the lake had no bottom.

  Our lives grew strangely pleasing.

  Such creatures—whiskered, feeding things, shelled things—we bumped past. We came upon the lake’s dark bottom.

  Did you think we would die of it, Mother?

  EVERYWHERE WAS A bruise on her, and the flecked wounds of our needles. Her bones scraped underneath her skin—we could hear them, when she moved at all, when we helped her turn in bed. We turned her to salve the whitening sores that mouthed out from the weight of her bones, from the weeks, the months, she lay there.

  We brought pretties. We brought her things to smell. We brought our mother bits of things she used to think to speak of. There were smoothed things—leviathan, terrapin, Pawnee. We moved along the silted bottom. Our hearts thrilled in our ears.

  She waked up screaming.

  Orbit waked up screaming.

  The sky stayed the same pale haze.

  Her cookware and cameos, a deck of cards, her cigarette box, needles, nylons, we buried out in the garden. We dragged our beds to the garden. Sometimes we sang.

  We brought slingshots. We had Bingo and kitchen knives, a certain native know-how. The days grew dusty. The fields were tipped with ocher.

  We bound our mother with her bright scarves by her wrists to her bed, by her ankles.

  Our turtles scuffed in the garden. We had shards of pot and bone, rabbit and whistle pig; dogs dug under our broken fence to nose over us in our garden.

  Mother called out.

  Bingo chewed up her slippers. Bingo chewed up a rhinestone shoe Mother used to dance the Charleston in—years back, days back, should you ask her. Ask her would she show us, and Mother would be our scissoring knees, our wild arms on the screen porch, a thumbnail, some harvest, any old green or fish-belly moon it would be our want to ask her.

  We planted the rhinestones two by two with a foot between in the garden. We grew. We were still growing.

  We carved our names in our arms.

  No rain came, no father.

  Orbit stayed out in the garden. I would leave Orbit out in the garden. A house is so dark inside when you have been out in the garden.

  I wore bracelets of leaves, Mother’s gold lamé.

  “Mother,” I said, “it’s me.”

  “If you say so,” she said.

  I said, “We were out in the garden.”

  “I see. And what did you sow?” she said. “I’ve seen no moon to plant by.”

  “No moon, Mother. No motherlight. By twos we planted bright stones to lead us out from the garden.”

  “Stones, child?”

  “Stones, Mother.”

  “And what of your mother, child?”

  “We will dig her a hole in the garden.”

  “And how will you face her, child?”

  “As I do, Mother. With a difference.”

  “Then face her south, then. But will you bind her?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “But you will face her? Will you build for her a simple box that the dirt not burst her eyes?”

  “If you wish, Mother.”

  “Are you certain, child? What wonders the dead accomplish. But the living? Oh, uncalmable, a palsied, mewling sack. To breathe, I am cinched and watered. This is a child’s love, child? Child, you call this love, child? Love?”

  We could see her from the garden. We tied rabbits by loops of string to cornstalks in the garden. We kept Gander. We filled a trough for frogs.

  I held her. It was all I could do to hold her.

  “You are trying to kill your mother,” she said. “Are you trying to kill your mother?”

  UNDERFOOT IS A millet of bone. The road opens out in a graveyard.

  Will you drive on? Have you seen me?

  Do you see that they cut us bone to bone to sort through what might grow in her as we had grown in Mother?

  The wound gapes, leaks bile. Mother cannot swallow. Mother’s veins collapse. For months, the doctors come and go back out into Tuscaloosa.

>   For months I will not lie with her and then one day I lay with her and in the nights thereafter and after a time to lie there, curved into the wound in her, I think to grow in under her, bone by bone, my toothy spine her long wound’s tongue and groove to seal her.

  I think, if ever he comes to her, my father will come to feel me there, if ever my father should touch her—and to feel me I think would please my father as I pleased my father once, my chipped spine my mother’s skin will come to overgrow in her.

  I can make her please him.

  I rouge her cheeks, tease her hair, her slack sex sponge clean.

  He will feel me. Our father cannot but feel me—a bone-hard nub of bone in the soft, in the bowly hot suck and leech and long swim of Mother.

  Get me out of here. Unmother me.

  OH, THE AIRPORTS of Ohio. There are salt bluffs in Ohio, roads to take run slick by rain to drive into my Ohio—these wasted acres walked off, strewn caves, my caverns scraped, stripped mines, ravines.

  I cannot get free of her. She is tongued, gashed; she towers. A door will open. She finds me eating. She finds me lacking. I am in some mall or lobby, some truck stop or Sears, six stone set in some riverbed, she finds me. She finds me on the road some night as like as not in your rig some night where we have maybe swung wide in the gone seas of Ohio.

  Listen, you. You, Einstein. Hum up, boy.

  BUT THERE IS more. There is always more.

  There is yet light enough, and always some motel out here with walls as thin as ice, enough breath: night: talk enough to kick a stone to town.

  Let the sun so top the trees, it sits on a boy’s head like a cap he has long since lost the thought of, thinking pitchfork, MoonPie, tarpaulin, Lipton’s—a boy to count and count again the worn heads of the silver coins singing in his pockets.

  It may be that you know him, knowing enough at all events to conjure a name to call him by when the road from out of the hollow climbs to widen in the shut-down, dead heart of Oneida.

  Or maybe it is not Oneida. Maybe you know some farther town his daddy drove through in a two-dollar truck—to find what, who could guess at?—what would only ever anyway be but a name Orbit guessed at, spelled out—the names with his mother’s knitting needle scrawled across his sister’s skin, Cissie’s back bared and arms, her legs, her girl’s skin given to rash and welt, so that riding back in the back of the truck Orbit could dig down far enough for the names of the towns to welt enough to read the letters plainly.