How the Days of Love and Diphtheria Read online

  How the black and white photos of faces smeared and blurred, faces caught in ghost moments, faces at funerals and covered with bandanas, faces paused at the casket, and before them, the face of the stilled infant, the little boy, the man, swollen and choked to death, the blurred faces of mothers and fathers and their little children, faces wrapped in bandanas and faces swallowed entire by gasmasks.

  Now the boy on the woman’s lawn and how he watched her through a lighted window, firm and large in a cotton nightgown. Now the emptiness of a world gone calm and flat and smokeless. Now the woman in her nightgown. How she yawned and dimmed the bedroom light. Now this lawn and how the only sounds were frogs and crickets, chirping and singing. Now this wide emptiness, this green world, a world of lawns and trees. A world small and helpless. A world you did not build.

  How in those days, row upon row of wheezing infants trussed in white. Nurses who paced and breathed the contaminated air. Nurses who breathed with lungs clotted by the breath of choking infants.

  Now shoeboxes filled with love letters to the blind father, love letters smeared and streaked with new tears, the words blurred into new languages, the true languages of loss and aloneness. The language of moaning. How the photographs of a blurred exotic woman, in kimonos and dresses, smiling alongside the blind father, and how his eyes saw in those days. How he stood proud and young and pale and dressed in khaki, how he leaned on a Harley Davidson against a malt shop window, how she lay swaddled in a heap of blankets, nude. How inky fingerprints smeared across her breasts, within her legs, and how the boy watched from the shadows as the blind man stuffed his hands deep into these heaps, how he read with his fingers and his mouth, how he said “ah ah ah,” with ink smeared lips and tongue. How the man replaced the photos and closed the shoebox lids, how his hands and face, smeared and black-clotted, and how he crept away, the hollow thump of his cane along the walls. How later, when the mother saw his hands and face as he lit his pipe, how her voice became a bruised wilderness, and how she said, “I could have been rich, there were offers. Instead all I got was heartache and dirt.”

  Now the man gestured along the valleys below. The fires he saw and the languages they spoke.

  How the old father stood over the boy while he slept. How the boy’s feet in the mornings were cramped and moist. How he locked the bedroom door and yet each night, the weight of the old blind man, the press of his withered face against the wood, his stiff agitated breaths. How the kitten, locked within, yowled and moaned, her white fur shed and billowing and now everywhere descending. Hereafter how the boy and the kitten slept on a cot in the basement. Now within the moist and mold of the dirt floor. How the kitten slept contented and how the boy searched the language of the webs strung along the beams and pipes, the thin moonlight peeling through the cracked basement windows. The blind old father, silent at the top of the stairs, and how he disturbed none below.

  How the boy crouched on the woman’s lawn. How he threw pebbles at her windows and how pebbles dented her siding, ricocheted off her bedroom window. How the window webbed and bulged into fibers. How the window caved and shattered. How within the open yawning of the broken window the woman sobbed and wept and how this language clotted with the voice of frogs and crickets, the articulation of glass, shattered and falling. How the husband in his bed insisted he heard no sound. How he lay in his white t-shirt with his reading glasses. How he pressed his hands to the window, intact, and the woman witnessed them passed into a world gouged and battered.

  How the boy wandered the dust of the farm and how everywhere, the swirling of weeds and clumps of soil, the distant skulls and ribs. How this farm seemed in photos, thriving with goats, sheep, cows, chickens, horses and now, how the wire pens lay gray and rotten. How the barn was caved and pungent with vacant life. How the mother said nothing would grow but the fields had not been seeded in years, and how the live weeds jutted through the dust, tall and green, weeds and wild flowers burst from the corpse of the field. How the blind father sat smoking on the porch and how he murmured, “Since you… since you left” and how the man worked his mouth as if chewing a cud before he said, “a pestilence like you never seen in your days.” How the boy did not know how the mother found the father,

  his face and hands spattered red and his eyes, wide and milky. The boy did not know, how in his hands, a hatchet and murmuring of the plague and the end, how his eyes stared upward and how the sun bulged and throbbed. How the blackness enfolded from the edges of his cornea. How the father laid murmuring, while in the house, his son wheezed and choked. How in the fields, all the animals lay strewn and bleeding and mewing and dead. How the father lay moaning and blind and how he told his wife to burn the rest.

  How the woman wandered Main Street, her face large and red, her arms and her ankles swollen into fat clumps of meat, how she walked into phone booths and stood fogging the glass, and how she sat humming in trash bins while bees circled. How her husband followed, watching from the edges of buildings, his throat thick, and how when he called her name he could only moan. How he could not breathe, for his wife, her hair wild and streaked now with gray and white, her livid eyes, the shadows of deranged eagles circling above.

  How the mother shook the boy awake, her bone hands and pale face in the gray light. The cat hissing from the boy’s feet. How the mother shook the boy by the shoulders and said, “Who are you?” How she dragged him up the stairs by his ear and how the boy did not struggle. How she pressed his face to the cold glass of the kitchen window and how she said, “You look at that child out there, you look at my son out there and you tell me who you are!” How the boy gazed along the shadows of the ruined yard, the glow of the moon and the barren fields. How the boy wept, “Mama, I don’t know.”

  How the light of a thousand fires along the horizon. How your hooves shook the valley. How jars fell and burst apart on the basement floor. How the kitten lapped at the preserving liquor, the various bladders and hearts.

  Now, within the light you built along the horizon, how the boy hammered pine planks across the doors and how the old parents slept within. How the kitten fled at the thunder of your approach and how for so long we only saw her eyes, yellow and slivered from the shelter of forests and bushes. How the true moment of love is the pain of loss. How your dust and masks and your horses, now skinless, pink and bleeding. How their veins seemed blue maps. How the mother and father moaned and hammered within the house and how you tore free the planks of wood. How you led the old mother and the blind father from the house. How you said, “Your home is not here anymore.” How the lit house slurred the oldest language, how it smiled and heaved with vibrations. How the parents within the dead brown grass wept under the smoldering eye of the heavens. How you rode and circled. How you tossed gasoline onto the white of the house, and soon, ash and embers. How quickly nothingness is born. How you pawed at the soil, dug with spades and knives. How you swooned at the scent of the boy and how the boy hid along the hillside while the kitten wandered the forest, lost and growing within. How the boy followed you and your horses, and then followed the dust clouds in your wake and then followed the bare suggestion of your long trail, because he knew no other. How the toothless sobs of a mother and father wallowed in his wake.

  III.

  You marauded, you sought, you destroyed and you devoured. You burned and you ravaged. Hillsides yawned into ravines under your influence and our oldest prairies vibrated with your voices. You pressed schoolmarms to the yard and little boys fled before your hooves into the soil. In time you flattened all we had ever known. We saw now how rapidly our world had changed and deformed in your wake and how, now, towers and machines and streaks of soot everywhere. How we believed you had invented and destroyed all you could invent and destroy and yet our horizons still trembled with the force of your inventions, with the humming, and how there bloomed a wide glow of colors we never saw before.

  How the daughter, the blurred curve of her figure, who lived once in this room with her father and m
other. How she said, “So often, when I was a little girl, we would wake in the night to horns honking and people pounding on doors, trucks idling in the street below, trucks collecting bodies. How mom and dad wouldn’t let me look out the window, to the bodies piled in the back of the truck, bodies naked and tossed and wrapped into each other. How they told me it was a dream, or storm sirens, but how I knew. I saw in books and newspapers and how we whispered to each other in class, through our bandanas, about where our classmates went, because, every day, two or three were always gone.”

  “I remember—” the boy said and stopped, because he did not remember, because he preferred to caress her shoulder bones, the lines of her neck.

  “And always these boys,” the daughter said, “boys from my classes, boys from the school buses, boys from Sunday school and the grocery store, how these boys were always in the streets kicking rocks and lighting fireworks and firecrackers, how they ran in the dark, hooting and sneering, how our windows widened with their white and red flares, how these boys in their bandanas ran off laughing and shouting—”

  “Do you remember their names?” the boy interrupted. The daughter nodded, and she began to say them all.

  How the boy woke inside a tavern on the outskirts of town. How the beams hung low and the taller men stooped while they drank and smoked. How the air seemed entirely of blue smoke and how even when all other eyes watered the boy’s eyes did not. How the boy washed dishes for room and board and how he lay on his cot in his room above the tavern. How the vacant roads hummed with the vibrations of the cooling earth, of cement cracking and expanding. How the shadows along his ceiling were no longer the shadows of men but simply the world moving and developing on its own.

  In those days you felt good about yourself when you coughed blood into a handkerchief. The ladies gazed at you in new ways. Even healthy boys gnawed their own tongues hoping to make the right impression—

  Now this woman who owned the tavern, crisp and bronzed. How she stripped free of her robe before him and how she stood buxom and white in the chest. How she sun-bathed topless on her front lawn, chest pressed downward. Before her, an upside down paperback novel, Love in the Boudoir, opened to a random page. How the boy watched, lightheaded, as she lay cracking and golden on her beach towel, kicking her feet absently. Her pink painted toenails. How she drank her Bloody Mary through a straw and when she smiled her teeth seemed thick with blood. Her round Hollywood sunglasses and how she spoke to the boy while he washed dishes or swept up after the yellow lights dimmed and the customers shuffled home. “You remind me of my husband,” she told the boy, “God rest his soul. Wherever his soul is.” Later, how she fixed the boy a Bloody Mary and how his head swam as he gulped it. How she said, “Do you believe in such a concept as a soul, Henry?” How the boy smiled and how he could not feel his face. “You don’t mind if I call you Henry, do you? Of course not. How young we were. How free. Live it up while you can, Henry. Once it is gone you can’t get it back. One day you are free and easy and young and the next you’re just a dumpy old woman like me.” How she smiled and waited for the boy to contradict her. How she laughed gaily and said, “You’re too kind, Henry, too kind.”

  How in the days the front page headline contained what house burned or what barn or what city was now razed or being razed. If not the marching of armies then the marching of time, if not the will of God then the hand of roving bands of firebugs. These roving bands and how we knew them by their handkerchiefs, the man said. We knew them by their black hands, their gasoline canisters.

  How the boy prodded the shadows of cars and bulges of tar in the long, quiet road, how he believed these were the half-consumed bodies of goats and deer. How his—

  In those days we knew our neighbors by the way they coughed, and the names they forgot. How they watched their children, growing and wandering through our yards, their bandanas and gasmasks, loose and heavy.

  How the daughter was slender in ways the mother was not slender. How her long arms were not covered in the same flesh as the mother was covered, clear of ruin, and how she seemed of polished ivory, save for bursts of freckles. Now the boy stood in his apron, watching how the sun lit her neck, the few wisps of hair and how they glowed. How the daughter played tennis in a white skirt and white visor. Her white stockings pulled to the nubs of her knees, and how she waited, pacing and bouncing a tennis ball against the back porch, and how she giggled and waved when her friends arrived in their tennis whites, jammed and piled into the back of a convertible car. How the boy watched in his apron through the fogged glass of the kitchen. How she knew the names of her friends and how she recited these names and how her thin hands moved as she spoke and how he saw them each as the words became skin and hair. The clothing they took on. The sneers. How the boy stood in his apron watching her and how the mother watched the boy as his eyes glazed to something dull and remote.

  How the man said, In those days, these sisters, my mother, and how their dresses caught fire, how we learned that cotton burns as if soaked with gasoline. Yes, how I often found them as if tarred, sprawled in their panties, on front lawns.

  How in the silence of a small town all sounds carry. How the mother found the boy and the daughter on the back steps of the tavern. How this girl and her legs, bare and white, and how natural the boy’s hand seemed on her knee. How she heard him say words like “love” and “diphtheria.” How these words worked, awkward upon his lips, and how the mother knew he had never said them before.

  The man gestured to the forest where the edge of your creation moaned and seethed. There you built the factory to raise our fires and disease.

  How the woman invited the boy into her home for lemonade and fig cookies, the glass half-filled with vodka, and how the boy’s face numbed. How she sat alongside him on the davenport and in her hands, the wedding album. How she flipped through the pages murmuring, “The spitting image.” How young the woman was, in white lace, and the husband, bearded and tall. How they wore black bandanas over their faces while the wedding party wore gasmasks. How the ring bearer and flower girl, in gasmasks, and later in the album, “So many children,” the woman said, of these children in caskets, in lace gowns, their wispy white hairs, eyes open, soft pink lips slightly parted—

  How these hallways and the huddling of children, their blood spattered handkerchiefs, their skin cracked and blackened. How the sky blazed and opened into an enormous eye and those almost dead were lit into nothing. How new colors were born in the flash of the final moment. How this light was the most beautiful light we had ever seen.

  Now the pink granite tombstone and how it was chiseled “Henry Filmount: Beloved Father, Sturdy Husband.” How he died at twenty eight and how they found him naked and bloated and choking in the street. How the girl snapped her gum and said “Daddy, let me clean these weeds for you,” and how she bent over to pull those dandelions clotting the edges of his memorial. How the boy watched her figure, her skirt gathered and un-gathered. How the mother watched the boy as he watched. How she said loudly, “I would like to say some words” and she spoke for some while about the unique and heavenly love she shared with this man, how his disability had hindered them, how, “I knew he was frail from the first moment, doubled-over, coughing blood into a silk handkerchief,” and yet they had persevered, how they built their house and bar with planks of wood and bricks, how their hands bled in the fire light, how they cooked fish over open fires and how they made love—how the daughter groaned and the woman raised her hand before lowering finally and continuing, “But Henry, a woman grows old and lonely. Henry, a woman is not a piece of fruit to wither and get eaten by birds. Henry my darling—” and how she could no longer speak, how the sobs rose and welled and overcame her. How she pressed her face into the boy’s chest and sobbed. How her fingernails dug into his shoulders. How the boy gazed beyond the shoulder of the woman, to those trees lingering along the horizon. How their limbs seemed fled of birds and leaves. How your fires and smoke seemed flared anew, and
how the boy no longer cared. How all the world seemed silent and immune save this aging woman and her tears soaking his apron.

  How the boy and the girl found two headless lambs in the field behind the town, as if laid out as gifts. How the girl screamed and the boy held her close. How small and taut she seemed, fit within his arms and the taste of her neck, her earlobes. How the boy and girl lay on their backs some distance in the field beyond, in the silence of the other, and how they waited, although the girl did not know until the boy sat up and said, “Look!” and how the eyes, yellow and slit, along the tall grasses of the field.

  How the boy gazed out his window rather than sleep. The expanding street and behind him, the girl on his cot, the blurred curve of her figure, and how she lay covered only in the too thin sheets, translucent with fluids. How she said, “I think I had a brother. I remember a brother. I remember mother saying the name Milt. Mother and how she loved Milt, how we found her sobbing and burning photographs in the bathroom sink.” Later, how the daughter said, “I remember this little boy crying. How he was still alive when they put him in the box. How they wanted to know if it fit and how he begged them not to do it. I remember my mother saying he would be all right, how it was only a game.”