STORMS {Stories}

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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 he came down and said he knew where Rua was. I was in a hurry.

"I'm going!"

"Hurry up."

It was one of those frosty mornings in mid-January, when the air is so cold it feels like new. As we got out, the wind pushed the air I was breathing back into my lungs. I followed her along the path into the forest. 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 that I didn't recognize. She stopped and pointed in the direction of a heath.

"It's there," he said.

We separated the heather and there was Rua, our red Setter, with his neck caught in a trap. He looked dead, but I couldn't look away. My mother loosened the clamps and spoke to him. There was blood on the wire. We carried him home and gave him milk, but he couldn't swallow. Beneath 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 was going to find things in my dreams too, she told me that she hoped that would never happen. I didn't ask him why. Even though I was a child, I had known for a long time why they were two words my mother hated.

The tambo was a cold and dark room that my parents had filled with the things they hardly used, from the time before I was born. Yellow paint bulged on the walls and wet tiles glistened on the floor. The flanges hung hardened from the beams; their bites, dusty. The churn was still there, and the smell of sour milk lingered in it; the wood smoothed, but perforated by woodworm, the pallets lost for a long time. 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 chicken escaped; a rusty metal thing that used to shine like a spoon. We put freshly hatched chickens there, picking them up in our hands like yellow petals and releasing them in that heat, down-covered balls with legs always moving, assimilating that heat as our own. Heat keeps us alive. Sometimes those yellow balls fall off, overcome by the cold, their legs like orange arrows pointing downwards. My father's hand discarded them as if they were weeds. My mother would pick them up carefully, inspect those little yellow bodies for any sign of life, and when she didn't discover any, she would say, "My poor chicken," and smile at me as she slid them down the pouring chute.

The milk strainers were there, too, the old gauze hanging in dirty bunches over a frayed strand. And the jars of wild currant jam that smelled like sherry, reduced in the glass with a moss rim. My mother always made more jam than we could eat. We used to make apple jelly: we cut those acidic fruits into quarters and boiled them into pulp, with hearts, seeds and everything; We poured the lumpy fluid into an old pillowcase, tied to each of the legs of an upside-down stool. It dripped, dripped, dripped all night into the canning jar.

I went to the dairy when they sent me; for a jar of varnish, six-inch nails, a bridle for a big-headed mare. The doorknob was too high. I had to stand on a can of creosote to reach it, and the metal I stood on was thin as a leaf. When I went there by my own choice, it was to look in the chest, a large rusty box, a pirate's suitcase as a child. It was so old that if I had hollowed it out and put it in the light, it would have been like looking through a sieve. Inside the chest there was nothing I liked: old books, stuck together by the damp and without illustrations, darkened maps and some prayer books.

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

The chest was as long as I was and half as tall, with a tight lid and no handles. He would have opened it and looked at those things, he would have fiddled with the books with broken spines, with lost 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 had enough of looking at such things, I would have slammed the lid shut, I would have made the metal grind.

The next dream changed everything. My mother dreamed of her mother, dead. Their moans woke me up in the middle of the night. Someone was noisily banging on the kitchen table. I sneaked down 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, persuading her with brandy, pronouncing her name.

Mary, Mary!

The two, who never touched each other, whose fingers let go of the gravy boat before the other grabbed it, were touching each other. I crawled back up and listened, as those loving words turned into something else.

In the morning the telegram arrived. The postman took off his cap and told my mother that he was sorry for the problems she had. My mother rolled the telegram between her fingers like cigarette rolling 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 violet rash and her breasts furrowed by blue veins, which we have washed as if it were paint, came back rigid from the nursing home, in a drawer lined with ruffles, and we put her in the cold of the living room. I got up in the middle of the night and went downstairs to see her when no one was there. A gust caused wax to fall from the lit candle on the sideboard. He knew little about her, except that he wasn't afraid of angry geese or afraid of getting tuberculosis. It could cure all kinds 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 that time she had been sitting there in the dark.

"Nothing," I said.

Neighbors came to accompany us after the funeral, cars piled up on the road. I sat on the legs of strangers. They passed me from one to the other like a bag of tobacco and I drank three large bottles of 7UP.

My aunt stood still, guarding the ham. "Let's see who's going to want another slice?" he asked, the deadly knife in his hand.

My mother sat looking at the fire and never said a word. Not even when Rua climbed on the sofa and began to lick herself.

Months passed. My mother began to clean the barn, even though we had sold the cows years ago. He went with the brush and the bucket, he scrubbed the mangers, the corridor, and even polished the hubcap that we used to serve frothy milk to the cats. And then he would come back and talk to the statues until lunch. He imagined storms, locked himself under the stairs when he heard wind, put cotton in his ears when the thunder came, hid under the table with Rua.

Once, my father and I, 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 took her home. 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 hay reapers, my beak covered with a page from the Farmer's Journal. Men would suck on straws and look at me, and rudely tell my father that he would soon be of age.

She came to pick me up in the middle of the night, dressed in a red nightgown that I had never seen her before. He got me out of bed, and we went down the dark steps and out into the mowed meadow, past the piles of hay, with our bare feet sticking to seeds. And we went on up the stubble fields, his hand bolted to mine, the back of his nightgown flailing in the wind. And then we reached the top and lay on our backs, looking at the stars, she with her bronze-colored hair and her crazy words, not entirely meaningless, but sensing what we couldn't understand. Just as the dog is the first to hear the car on the road.

He pointed to what he called the saucepan, an arrangement of the stars, and told me how he got there. It was an animal story 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. The 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 drink to get them out of trouble until it rained. All the animals drank to their heart's content, but the pan never dried up. It had a curved handle, and when the rain came, the stars took its shape, and that's what happened. And then I could see her in the sky too.

We were there until dawn, the smell of hay blowing in the wind. She told me about my father, about how he had beaten her for fifteen years because she was not the same as the other women. He taught me the difference between loving someone and having someone liked. He told me that he liked me as little 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 sent around. It was a quiet place. There was nothing, just the wind blowing and the gurgling of the water tank overhead. The hole in the ceiling between the rafters allowed me 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 he was hurting himself, but it was nothing you could see. I asked him if he meant he 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.

Men are coming to the house to look for her. She's under the table. I can't see. I run to the dairy farm, open the chest and look inside. I pull out a prayer book and turn the pages. They are worn and soft like my mother's arm. I open one of the darkened and torn maps, and until I find a place I recognize, I cannot distinguish which is the land and which is the sea. There is an insect wing attached to Norway. I hear them in the next room. I open another book and look for illustrations, but there are none. I get into the chest, I squat down. I hear glass breaking. The sound of what has become my mother's voice grows to a moan. Something falls. I push the tin lid open, let the metal fall on me with a rusty, tense squeak. Everything goes black. It's as if I no longer exist. It's not me sitting on damp books, inside a big, black can. The smell is old and musty like the smell of the bread bin or like the smell of the back of the sideboard when there are cake crumbs left. A smell that is a century old. I remember that rats once gnawed on the incubator grid. They got to where the chickens were and we found pieces of down with legs everywhere and the fleshy parts completely eaten. Other chickens are found terrified, exhausted and hidden among paint cans or rolls of wire, still unable to flee. We pick them up, their yellow bodies throbbing, minimal screams and crazed.

Now I manage the house. The last one who said he was of age received a burn. My mother always said that there was nothing worse than a burn. And he was right. It happens that I don't accept nonsense from anyone. They leave their rubber boots outside and my father leaves the dirty dishes on the drainer. I haven't heard him say that potatoes don't have a well-cooked center. I know how to use the serving spoon to punch. He knows that too. Rua goes 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 say.

"I could never stand the smell of fish," he says. He and his herrings.

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

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

She's good with cards, she cheats on others and takes the money they give them for their expenses each week, and the head nurse has to go to her closet to get it out when my mother is in the bathroom. He doesn't realize it. Money never had any interest for my mother.

I keep going back to the psychiatric hospital. I like the smell of disinfectant in the hallways, the rubber-soled nurses' shoes, the fights over Sunday newspapers. I like that what they talk about is meaningless. What does that say about me? My mother always said that the madness of a family is hereditary 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 mind 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. A little barely. I keep a small part for my own protection. It's like a vaccine. People don't understand, but you have to face the worst possible case to be able to do anything.

 

END