STORMS {Story}

 

 

 

My mother dreamed things before they happened, and in her dreams, she found things. I was at the kitchen table cutting a cardboard box to make doors and windows the morning she came downstairs and said she knew where Rua was. She was in a hurry.

-Go!

-Hurry up.

It was one of those frosty mornings in mid-January, when the air is so cold it feels new. As we stepped outside, the wind forced the air I was breathing back into my lungs. I followed her down the path into the woods. A woodcock flew over the trees. Something told me not to speak. My mother knew where I was going. We crossed a ditch and came out into a beet field I didn't recognize. She stopped and pointed in the direction of a heath.

"It's there," he said.

We parted the heather and there was Rua, our Red Setter, his neck caught in a trap. He looked dead, but I couldn't look away. My mother loosened the trap and spoke to him. There was blood on the wire. We carried him home and gave him milk, but he couldn't swallow. Under his coat, his bones were visible, and he slept for three days. On the fourth day, he got up and followed my mother around the house like a shadow. When I asked her if I, too, would find things in my dreams, she told me she hoped that would never happen. I didn't ask her why. Even as a toddler, I'd known for a while that "why" were two words my mother hated.

The dairy farm was a cold, dark room that my parents had filled with things they barely used, from the time before I was born. The yellow paint bulged on the walls, and the damp tiles glistened on the floor. The ties hung stiff from the beams, their bits dusty. The churn was still there, and the smell of sour milk lingered; the wood, smoothed but riddled with woodworm, the paddles long since lost. I don't remember glass in those windows, only rusty bars and the strange applause of the wind blowing through the trees.

Someone pushed the old incubator into the dairy, and a chick escaped; a rusty metal thing that used to shine like a spoon. We placed newly hatched chicks in it, scooping them up in our hands like yellow petals and releasing them into that warmth, down-covered balls with legs always moving, taking in that warmth as our own. Warmth keeps us alive. Sometimes those yellow balls fall, overcome by the cold, their legs like orange arrows pointing down. My father's hand discarded them like weeds. My mother scooped them up carefully, inspecting those little yellow bodies for any signs of life, and when she found none, she would say, "My poor chick," and smile at me as she slid them down the chute.

The milk strainers were there too, the old cheesecloth hanging in dingy bunches on a frayed thread. And the jars of wild currant jam that smelled like sherry, reduced in glass with a mossy rim. My mother always made more jam than we could eat. We used to make apple jelly: we'd cut those sour fruits into quarters and boil them to a pulp, cores, seeds, and all; we'd pour the lumpy fluid into an old pillowcase tied to each leg of an upturned stool. It dripped, dripped, dripped all night into the preserving jar.

I went to the dairy when I was told to; for a jar of varnish, six-inch nails, a bridle for a stubborn mare. The handle was too high. I had to stand on a creosote can to reach it, and the metal I stood on was as thin as a sheet. When I went there of my own volition, it was to look in the chest, a large rusty box, a boy's pirate's suitcase. It was so old that if I had emptied it and held it up to the light, it would have been like looking through a sieve. Inside the chest, there was nothing I liked: old books, stuck together by moisture and without illustrations, darkened maps, and a few prayer books.

"All this belonged to your father's family," my mother told me, using a voice that he was not supposed to hear.

The chest was as long as I was and half as high, with a tight lid and no handles. I would have opened it and looked at those things, fingered the books with their broken spines and missing covers. It was the past; the past was there. I felt that if I could understand its contents, my life would have more meaning. But that never happened. I would have grown weary of looking at those things, slammed the lid shut, made the metal creak.

The next dream changed everything. My mother dreamed of her mother, dead. Her moans woke me in the middle of the night. Someone was banging loudly on the kitchen table. I sneaked downstairs and stood there, staring into the darkness. My mother was curled up on the floor. My father, who never said anything affectionate, spoke to her tenderly, coaxing her with brandy, calling her name.

-Mary, Mayree, ah, Maayree!

The two of them, who never touched, whose fingers dropped the sauceboat before the other could grab it, were touching. I crawled back up and listened as those endearments turned into something else.

In the morning, the telegram arrived. The postman took off his cap and told my mother he was sorry for her troubles. My mother rolled the telegram between her fingers like cigarette paper. My father made the arrangements. Strangers came to the house. A neighbor hit me on the hand when I turned on the radio. My grandmother, the woman with the purple rash and blue veined breasts, which we washed like paint, came back stiff from the nursing home, in a frilled drawer, and we put her in the cold living room. I got up in the middle of the night and went down to check on her when no one was there. A gust of wind caused wax to fall from the lit candle onto the sideboard. I knew little about her, except that she wasn't afraid of angry geese or worried about contracting tuberculosis. She could cure every kind of poultry disease. My mother had grown up surrounded by ducks, chickens, and turkeys. I touched my grandmother's hand. The cold scared me.

"What are you doing?" my mother asked me.

All this time she had been sitting there in the dark.

"Nothing," I told him.

Neighbors came to join us after the funeral, and cars piled up on the road. I sat on strangers' laps. They passed me around like a bag of tobacco, and I downed three large bottles of 7UP.

My aunt stood guarding the ham. "Who's going to want another slice?" she asked, holding the deadly knife.

My mother sat staring into the fire and never said a word. Not even when Rua jumped on the couch and started licking herself.

Months passed. My mother began cleaning the barn, even though we had sold the cows years before. She went with the brush and bucket, scrubbed the mangers, the passageway, and even polished the hubcap we used to serve the frothy milk to the cats. And then she came back and talked to the statues until lunch. She imagined storms, locked herself under the stairs when she heard wind, put cotton in her ears when thunder came, hid under the table with Rua.

Once, my father and I, while baling rye, watched her in the field, calling the cows.

-Chuck! Chuck! Hersey! Chuck! Hersey!

She stood there banging on the zinc bucket to make the imaginary cows come and eat. My father brought her into the house. And that's when my mother started living upstairs.

So, by the time summer came, I was the one carrying the big kettle for the haymowers, the spout plugged with a page from the Farmer's Journal. The men sucked on straws and looked at me, rudely telling my father that I would soon be of age.

She came for me in the middle of the night, dressed in a red nightgown I'd never seen her use before. She pulled me out of bed, we went down the darkened steps, and out onto the mown meadow, past the haystacks, our bare feet sticking to the seeds. And we continued up through the stubble fields, her hand screwed into mine, the back of her nightgown flapping in the wind. And then we reached the top and lay on our backs, watching the stars, she with her bronze hair and her crazy words, not entirely meaningless, but sensing what we couldn't understand. Like the dog who is the first to hear the car on the road.

She pointed to what she called the saucepan, an arrangement of the stars, and told me how she got there. It was an animal tale that took place in the time of Our Lord, in Africa. There was a drought. The ground had turned to dust, and even the riverbeds were dry. Animals roamed Africa looking for something to drink. The sheep lost their wool and the snakes their skins, but a young bear found a saucepan full of water and gave it to everyone to tide them over until the rain came. All the animals drank their fill, but the saucepan never ran dry. It had a curved handle, and when the rain came, the stars took on its shape, and that's what happened. And then I, too, could see it in the sky.

We stayed there until dawn, the smell of hay drifting in on the wind. She told me about my father, about how he'd beaten her for fifteen years because she wasn't like other women. She taught me the difference between loving someone and liking someone. She told me she disliked me just as much as he did because I had the same cruel eyes.

I didn't understand, but that's when I started going to the dairy without being told to. It was a quiet place. There was nothing, just the blowing wind and the gurgling of the water tank above. The hole in the ceiling, between the beams, allowed us to see the dollhouse, the place where my cousins ​​used to take their dolls to bang their heads against the sloping roof.

It was a stormy day the day the truck came to take her away. My father said she was hurting, but it wasn't anything you could see. I asked him if he meant she was bleeding inside.

"Something like that," he said.

I thought of the image of the sacred heart on the stove, the red heart exposed, illuminated by the red lamp that never went out.

The men are coming to the house to look for her. She's under the table. I can't see. I run to the dairy, open the chest, and look inside. I take out a prayer book and turn the pages. They're worn and soft like my mother's arm. I open one of the darkened, torn maps, and until I find a place I recognize, I can't tell which is land and which is sea. There's an insect's wing stuck to Norway. I hear them in the next room. I open another book and look for illustrations, but there are none. I crawl into the chest and squat down. I hear glass breaking. The sound of what had become my mother's voice grows to a moan. Something falls. I push on the tin lid, let the metal fall on top of me with a squeal of rust, tense. Everything goes black. It's as if I no longer exist. It's not me sitting on damp books, inside a big, black tin. The smell is old and musty, like the smell of a bread basket or the smell of the back of a cupboard when there are cake crumbs left. A smell that's a century old. I remember rats once gnawing at the incubator grille. They got to where the chickens were, and we found pieces of down with legs everywhere, the fleshy parts completely eaten away. We found other chickens, terrified, exhausted, and hiding among cans of paint or rolls of wire, still unable to escape. We picked them up, their yellow bodies throbbing, their screams faint and frantic.

Now I run the house. The last person who said they were old enough got burned. My mother always said there was nothing worse than a burn. And she was right. It just so happens that I don't take any crap from anyone. They leave their rubber boots outside, and my father leaves the dirty dishes on the drainer. I haven't heard him say the potatoes aren't cooked through. I know how to use a serving spoon to pound. He knows that too. Rua walks around the house looking for her. I think of him as my mother's shadow, wandering around the house.

I visit her on Sundays, but she doesn't know where she is or who I am.

"It's me, Mom," I tell her.

"I could never stand the smell of fish," she says. "Him and his herring."

-Don't you recognize me? I'm Elena.

"Helen of Troy! Get on your horse!" he says.

She's good at cards, she cheats others and takes the pocket money they're given each week, and the head nurse has to go to her closet to steal it when my mother is in the bathroom. She doesn't notice. Money never held any interest for my mother.

I keep going back to the psychiatric ward. I like the smell of disinfectant in the hallways, the nurses' rubber-soled shoes, the fights over the Sunday papers. I like the fact that what they say doesn't make sense. What does that say about me? My mother always said that madness runs in a family, and I have it on both sides. I live in a house with the man my mother married. I have a dog that almost died, but doesn't care about being alive. When I look in the mirror, my eyes are cruel.

I guess I have my own reasons for coming here. Maybe I need some of what my mother has. Just a little. I keep a small amount for my own protection. It's like a vaccine. People don't understand, but you have to face the worst possible scenario to be capable of everything.

 

END