AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD by Renée Branum
”For affliction does not come from the dust, Nor does trouble spring from the ground;
Yet man is born into trouble, As the sparks fly upward.”
– Job 5:6‑7
When the seizure hit, it moved through him like a wind that only Randy could hear, or feel on his face. He stood up from the kitchen table, and seemed to cock his head, dog-like, before the trembling swept through his body.
I said his name as a question, just as I used to stand alone at the kitchen sink on late afternoons and rasp out, “Randy?” when I’d hear the front door open and shut real quick and tidy. “That you, Randy?” even though there was no one else it could possibly be.
But the seizure was too quick for me. It already stood between us, walling him off, and he crumpled to the floor before I could even set down the plate I was holding: pre-sliced cheese and summer sausage arranged in layers like scales on fish. It was the Fourth of July, and from somewhere up the road came a little gunpowder crackle, followed by a pop, and then the air went dead for a second before I snatched up the phone and called for an ambulance.
He’d pulled the red-white-and-blue paper tablecloth off when he fell, and it was over him like a cape, as if he was trying to hide himself. The saltshaker was halved along its seam, and the air conditioner worried the spilt salt into miniature dunes.
He hit hard when he fell, and there was a little blood. I wrapped the phone cord tight around my thumb and watched his blood catch in the teeth of the tile where it had chipped away into the shape of a crescent moon – a blue Cheshire grin just where his head hit. I tried to keep the 911 operator on the line because suddenly I was afraid to be alone with him.
“It’s a white house,” I told her. “A ways back from the road.”
“Have you checked his pulse?” she said.
And I hung up, unable to tell this stranger I couldn’t remember how to touch my own son.
When I was brave enough, I touched his face, said his name again, got a cloth for his head and tucked it beneath like a little pillow. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to check his pulse. My hand hovering above his wrist began to blur with shaking, and to calm myself I thought of winter, how I used to scoop snow straight from the windowsill into a bourbon glass. The barn cats slept in the warmest rooms, the radiator vibrating dust into the air, and the old farmhouse filled with flecks of blond pollen left over from summer. Randy’d come in with the mail, set it down on the piano. With snow in the folds of his clothes, he’d make me think of the shepherds on the night of Christ’s birth, reeking of livestock but still holy, and with his very first beard on his chin. Not always happy back then, not every day, but peaceful at least.
Another firecracker, kids whooping, and the dog started to bark himself crazy. I could hear him pulling against his chain as if to strangle himself, and calling to him, “Shut up, Wyatt,” felt ugly. My voice was too loud, my chest vibrating as if it couldn’t hold the sound. The chain snapped, and the dog ran into the kitchen, still barking to wake the dead and trailing the severed chain. He sniffed at Randy and tasted the blood on his forehead with a long, primal tongue. I grabbed him by the collar. “Wyatt, you piece of shit!” my voice pitched to shatter. And in the distance, I heard the first notes of the siren. It swelled across the fields, and the space it filled felt measureless. The sound seemed to grow ceaselessly but never draw near, like some last days’ trumpeting.
* * *
In the hospital, he was a stranger. His face drawn into itself, and his tongue slack in his mouth. I sat in the waiting room with my sister, and her voice lit, birdlike, upon phrases like “clogged arteries” and “blood vessel walls,” thinking she was shedding some light. She’d been a nurse for thirty years before her retirement, but her knowledge of the body seemed fable-like now, some hand-me-down legend that was being retold and reshaped in the telling.
“Come on, Daisy. I want to hear it from the doctor, not you.”
“You don’t want to hear it from anyone,” she said.
The waiting room had American flag buntings draped and gathered around the window frames, and I thought this was somehow wrong. This room shouldn’t be touched by holidays, by color and celebration – just four beige walls and the blank-field watercolors with murky hay bales. Those little end tables with their pastel lampshades and marbled tissue box covers.
The doctor told us that Randy’d had a stroke, and Daisy leaned toward me to say in my ear, “Young people can have strokes too,” as if she were a high school science teacher.
“Shut up, Daisy,” I said, and she looked toward the doctor, embarrassed.
I thought Randy would look small in his bed, fragile, but instead he seemed massive. His stomach swelled beneath the sheet and his large shoulders stretched taut the fabric of his hospital gown. He drooled out of the corner of his mouth and the whole left side of his body sagged – his eyelid and the skin over his cheekbones, his lips loosening – as if the flesh were about to slide off. I tried to picture him as a little boy, but the images now had a limp to them, one side sagging.
All the photos of Randy as a kid are gone. Possibly there are a few packed into a shoebox in my ex‑husband’s trailer in Arizona. But all the rest burned up in that fire eight years ago that took everything. And all I wanted in that hospital room was some sort of proof. I wanted to hold a yearbook photo next to his wilting face, just to say, Yes, you see? It’s still him. Because I couldn’t quite believe it yet.
Then the sheet moved and Daisy touched his face.
Daisy drove me home, and her air conditioning wasn’t working, so we sweated our way down side streets with the windows rolled down. The dips in the road wavered behind bands of heat that swelled and crackled like radio waves made visible.
“Have you called Rick yet?” Her voice was shy, a worried whine beneath the air coming in through the open window.
“No, and I don’t plan to,” I said.
“I think he deserves to know that his son is,” she paused, “not well.”
“This has got nothing to do with him,” I said, switching the radio on like a teenager to show that the conversation was over.
Daisy kept both her hands on the wheel, and I saw her forehead beading and streaming, but she didn’t move to wipe the sweat away. She was always saying that bad things happen in twos and threes, that one catastrophe will link itself to another, and so maybe she was afraid that if she moved or blinked, she’d lose control of the car and we’d find ourselves in a ditch. I felt somehow grateful for her superstition; it was familiar.
“You okay?” I said to her.
“Am I okay? Are you – ”
“I mean: to drive. Are you okay to drive?”
“I’m doing all right so far, right?”
“Your hands are shaking.”
“They’re not.”
“Fine.”
We passed the gravel drive that led out to the place the old farmhouse had stood before the fire, the house Daisy and I grew up in, and where Randy and I had lived for twenty-five years, and I felt the strangeness of not turning there. Something in me tensed, my foot automatically groping for the brake.
That old route home was still awake in me – each familiar movement that had always ended in homecoming. It felt like an equation, carefully worked out and memorized. The town drew back and the long spread of fields opened like an innocent unbuttoning, a mother undressing her child. Then every tree and window and mailbox, each curve and pothole, was before you, then behind you. The whole process of getting home was like breathing on an old map. And there was a sense of rightness in the final turning off of the engine, the key inside the lock, the dim interior with its smell that disappeared within seconds of returning because it had already faded back into something too close to be recognized.
I wanted Daisy to turn around. I wanted to drive out to that patch of burnt earth, as if I half expected the farmhouse might be where it always had been. That I could climb the porch steps, enter the hall, hear Randy open the refrigerator door and whistle while he reached for a jar of pickles. But the car brushed past, so easily – that bend straightening to show cows clustered in a cleft of raw earth.
“Almost home,” Daisy said, as if to remind me.
* * *
As we passed the place where the house used to stand, we came to the elbow curve where the trees hide the road and the broken guard rail juts down to meet the blacktop. It was there, on a night more than twenty summers distant, that a drunk couple overturned their car, and walked the quarter-mile up the drive to my doorstep.
The man had hammered on my door with some metal bit of wreckage – a scorched pipe he’d picked up as if to remind himself of his mission. It was three in the morning. His wife had walked through the laundry hanging on the line and it caught some of her blood, the faint pink shape of head and elbow never completely washing out of my bedsheets. And always after, I slept on the fading smear of her.
The woman sat down on the front step of our porch as if she belonged there. She lit a cigarette, leaning back on the heels of her hands, her shoulders naked and scratched. I watched her from between the gray slats of blinds.
At first, I wouldn’t open the door. I talked to them from behind it, feeling childish. When I finally unlocked it, standing in the doorway in my new blue nightgown, I saw what kind of night it was – the moon crowing its light onto the fresh dew on the cornstalks, the air grown flimsy like moist silk. There were a few late fireflies, hovering in a daze as if sleepwalking among the corn. The dog whined, his yips growing more frequent and closer together as though something might break loose, explode in a final flurry of light falling like snow – the world ending with a hiss, like the pop of fireworks thinning into crackling streams. Everything seemed desperate, and utterly unaware of its desperation.
The drunk woman sitting on the top step was bleeding from her nose and had a gash along her forearm. She took the hem of my nightgown between two bloody fingers and started speaking nonsense, almost laughing,
“Look at you! Pretty. Right, John? Shit. Like a magazine cover . . . You should sell Mary Kay or something, sweetheart. I mean, I’d buy from you. I’d say, ‘God. I wanna look like her.’ Here’s the thing though, honey: we need to use your telephone. We didn’t scare you – just need to make one call. Then we’ll get off your porch, right John? Get back to where we belong. We won’t hurt nothing, I swear. Okay, honey? Just wanna get outta here . . . She’s so pretty, ain’t she John?”
The man was looking at the metal pipe guiltily as if finally understanding that I could’ve mistaken it for a weapon. He let it fall into the garden. I could smell their wreckage a quarter-mile distant; the stink of burning had followed them while they’d walked along the winding Highway 3. And I smelled the smoke from her cigarette as she sat with the hem of my nightgown in her hand, fingering it with absent reverence as if she thought I was Jesus Christ himself, with some healing power to offer.
I showed John where the phone was, brought the woman a cloth and a Ziploc full of ice, but she seemed to not recognize the items when I handed them to her, hefting the cold bag in her hand as if deciding what it was for. I dabbed at her nose with the cloth and she tipped her head back like a child, then lost interest, pushing my hand away so she could put her cigarette to her lips.
“Can I have one of those?” I asked her, and she made room for me on the top step while John’s voice drifted out to us from the hall, making promises into the receiver: “No, man. If you come get us, I’ll give you the record player. I swear to God.”
She lit a cigarette for me, holding it in her mouth, drawing on the lit match in her hand, breathing a little puff as if testing for mistakes, then handing me the cig. The saliva on the tip tasted like whiskey and makeup and the salty iron of blood that ran down from her nose and, in this light, was the same color as her lipstick.
We smoked together, our breath hovering inside the night’s shallow haze. I wanted to love her without knowing her, this bleeding stranger. I wanted to brush her hair and bandage her arm and hold a bag full of ice over her face. I wanted to live in the halo her drunk innocence was casting around us, the cigarette never burning out, the ice never melting, the fireflies pausing in their drift, permanently lit.
My son came downstairs just then, awakened by John yelling into the phone and the dog barking his warning. And I realized with that familiar guilt that for a moment, I’d forgotten him.
“Go back to bed, little buddy. I’ll be up in a minute. We’ll sing a song, ’kay?” I said distractedly.
“No,” Randy said. “No! What’s going on? Who is that? Who’s that lady?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know who she was. So I just told him John was in the hall using the phone because there’d been an accident.
Randy saw the blood on the woman’s face and began to cry, his mouth opening to show the gaps his baby teeth had left, his gums freshly bare. I sat on the step watching the spaces in his mouth, frozen for an instant, as if I’d drifted into Randy’s nightmare and become sluggish with horror. The stranger’s face was turned toward him, blood crusting around her lips like she’d been eating something freshly killed. She sprang up, shedding a warm booze smell as she moved, arms outstretched toward Randy.
“Now, now baby. Hush now, little one. There, there, nothing to cry about. Everyone is okay, baby. Your mama’s okay. John’s okay. Darlene’s okay. And you’re okay, little man. Aren’t you?”
She swept toward him, and he backed away, watching the ring of blood around her mouth. I still couldn’t move, something in me shrinking. Randy let out a scream, the little dark gaps showing horribly.
“Mama!”
Darlene stopped, stood still, put her arms down by her side. Randy crumbled, and finally I went to him, scooped him up with a “Oh for heaven’s sakes,” and carried him to the foot of the stairs where I set him down again.
“You’re a big boy now, kiddo. And there’s nothing to be afraid of. Now get yourself back to bed.”
He wiped his cheeks with the backs of his hands, still sniffling and looking up at my face, which must’ve seemed shadowy and distant above him. It was cruel, making him climb the dark stairs alone. I think I’d felt a flicker of something reckless sharing the step, the cigarette, with that stranger, the night fragrant with newness. I’d wanted to keep ahold of it for as long as I could, knowing how brief and rare it was. I tried to grant myself some kind of forgiveness as I watched Randy make his way up the stairs in his little plaid bathrobe that made him look like a miniature old man.
After the stroke, whenever I thought of his wilted skin, and the blood in a circle around his head when he fell, it half-erased the memory of his little face turned up to mine, the toothless gaps showing as he cried. In the hospital, when he first came to, he tried to speak but it was all gibberish, his own private language. It terrified me.
“I feel like I don’t know him anymore,” I told my sister as we pulled into my driveway. I wished I hadn’t said it. It was like it gave her power over me.
“Don’t be a bitch,” she said. “He’s still your son.”
* * *
When Randy came back home, he’d sit at the kitchen table, his wheelchair pulled up close so that the tabletop divided his stomach into two bulges, above and below. The Fourth of July centerpiece of fake red-white-and-blue carnations in a wicker basket sat there until the end of August, when the cleaning girl started coming. She came twice a week to clean and help me with Randy. The girl was young, and she didn’t speak to Randy, although he tried to talk to her, his mouth full of tongue. I told her what to do if he had one of the seizures that were growing more common, and her lip curled in fear.
“I’ve never heard of a twenty-eight-year-old man having a stroke,” she said to me.
“Well, it happens,” I told her angrily.
I could tell she was frightened by this, thinking: It could happen to me, so I added, “It’s pretty rare.”
He liked for us to push him up to the piano. We’d each lift one of his hairy arms and let it rest on the keys. A dull twang, the piano gone out of tune. We’d leave his hands there until all the sound vibrated out of the strings, and Randy would grin on one side of his face, a silver thread of saliva dripping toward the yellowed keys. I asked the girl if she knew how to play.
“‘Chopsticks’,” she said. “That’s all I remember.”
“Did you have lessons?” All of his sheet music was in a shoebox in my bedroom. I didn’t like to see it laying around, all those notes crowded together like tiny one-legged insects, climbing and breeding, one on top of another – the ledger lines like cobwebs.
“Yeah,” she said, popping her chewing gum. “I had lessons, like, ten years ago.”
“Were they expensive?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. My parents paid for ’em.”
A waste. An obvious waste. We wheeled Randy onto the front porch, and I’d sit with him, a magazine face down across my knees and the radio arguing with itself in the kitchen.
A pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses came by one evening as we sat together, a man and a woman, and I offered them each a cigarette. I liked watching them refuse, the man putting his hands up, palms out as if to say, “I don’t want any trouble” and then watching me blow the smoke over the glinting fields as if I were performing a magic trick. They tried not to stare at Randy; he looked at them sideways and gurgled. The man put his foot up on the steps and asked me if I knew what the Bible really teaches.
“What are you two doing all the way out here?” I asked, squinting toward the nearest town. They looked at each other as if they didn’t know how to answer that question and then asked me if I was aware that we were living in “the last days.” The sun was setting above the ridge where the fields dipped back into a copse of trees, and there was a late high haze where the air was still warm, making the shades of lavender waver and bleed. There were birds on the power lines bordering the road, and I watched them drift into flight vaguely, like balloons full of helium coming untied.
I thought of the straggling heat of this past summer when lightning would set the fields ablaze from time to time. Farmers would throw down their wet sacks and bend in half to beat the flames back into the soil. There were news stories on the radio of earthquakes breaking things apart and the hurricanes around the gulf, whole universes distant, difficult to fathom in the face of our own natural disasters. I remembered listening to a story about a tornado that killed eight little boys in a summer camp in Iowa, and of course it seemed believable that the world must be ending. It’s been ending since it began. I thought of the warmth of Randy’s blood as I sopped it up in a dishtowel, on my hands and knees, and how brittle the smiling tiles seemed, and the shape the blood made when it was outside of him. Ma’am, are you aware that we’re living in the End Times?
“Yes,” I said to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, taking a long drag that made me cough. “Yes, I believe that.”
They seemed pleased, their nods tidy, their smiles neat and controlled. They were dressed to make people think of Sunday mornings, the man buttoned into a blue pin-stripe, his tie flecked with grey and red, and she wore a soft cotton dress; the flowers on the fabric seemed blurred, as if seen through rain, pink and grey like the flesh of a salmon. My eyes watched the smears of flowers, settled on her stomach, where I thought I saw the faintest swelling beneath. She might have followed my eyes, let her hand rest there and rubbed a little the way that children do when they’ve eaten something good.
They stood with the light of the field falling behind them, a brightness gathering in their hair. Her hair was the color of new pennies. I wondered if she would carry that color into old age. The young man felt in his back pocket, pulled out a pamphlet and handed it to me. It showed a mountain landscape, a young couple sitting in a field of poppies, while moose and wolves seemed to mingle peacefully behind them. In the foreground were baskets full of pumpkins, apples. A caption read: “All Suffering SOON TO END!”
Looking at the picture, I felt truly weary. I stared at it, felt the Witnesses waiting for something, for me to look up, to say, “Please, I want to hear more.” Randy made a noise, something urgent in the back of his throat, a pleading. I held the pamphlet out so he could see it, so he could see what happiness looks like. His noise didn’t stop, it grew, rising upward as if the image of the couple in their field had made him think of a song. The Witnesses seemed uncertain, waiting for Randy’s song to end, trying to make their softly attentive faces register patience, compassion.
I started to talk over him, not waiting for the noise to subside, almost shouting to be heard, “There’s a dragon at the end, am I right? And a lake of fire? I want to hear about the different-colored horses, the lamb with eyes beneath his wings. I’m listening.”
The sweat of my hands had made the thin paper of the pamphlet moisten and bubble. I looked down at the moose touching noses with the wolf, the pumpkins glistening, and it all struck me as so absurd that I started to laugh a little, an eerie little chuckle. Randy echoed, the left side of his face trying to lift into laughter, but struggling against the dead muscles. The couple seemed to be waiting, politely, for us to stop, their hands clasped in front of them. I suddenly felt ashamed; here were these people trying to offer hope and we were laughing at it.
“Hush now,” I snapped at Randy.
I met their eyes again, and everyone was solemn. Randy kept very still. They passed me a Bible and told me how the world at its ending is like a woman in labor, quoting scripture frantically, their faces lighting up as they spoke about the apocalypse. They wanted these things to hurry up and happen, for Christ to come in his armor, to “restore.”
“But the point,” the man said, “is that God offers second chances, up until the very end. But once Christ comes with his sword, there’ll be no more second chances.”
“You have to acknowledge your failings and seek forgiveness,” the woman said, her hand hovering above my knee, not quite touching. She seemed to tremble, very gently. “Once you’ve repented, God wipes all the past wrongs away. They’re forgotten.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” I said. “You can’t just say you’re sorry and start over.”
“That’s how God’s grace works,” the man said. “Saying you’re sorry is the first step toward salvation.”
“Salvation.” I wanted to hear the word in my own mouth. My eyes drifted back to the picture. It didn’t look silly anymore. Their idea of paradise made sense – somewhere peaceful and full of good light, the wolves coming to lick your hands, apples falling softly from their branches.
They had more to say, but I told them I was tired.
“Maybe you can come back another time,” I said. “And we can talk more then.”
I don’t know what made me say it. I liked their fresh and eager faces. I liked the smell coming from the woman’s hair like clean earth.
They assured me they’d be back, and waved in a vague and friendly way as they walked to their car. I put the Bible in Randy’s lap after they left, open to one of the scriptures we’d read with the Witnesses:
1 Thessalonians 5:3 “For when they say ‘Peace and safety!’ then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape.”
When they were gone I felt sorry that they had given their names and that I had told them mine without saying, “This is Randy. This is my son.”
* * *
When the cleaning girl came the following morning, she glanced at the pamphlet on the kitchen table, said nothing. She was tidying and seemed to hesitate, wondering if she should throw it away, or put it atop the microwave with the unopened bills.
“Just leave it,” I said, watching her.
It took both of us to lift him each morning from his bed to his wheelchair. His weight was immense between us, an arm draped across each shoulder, and feeling his head roll toward mine. He often left a patch of moisture against my neck that I did not wipe away, let it dry in the dim air of the kitchen while I did dishes.
The cleaning girl was nineteen, wore her hair long as I had at that age, and once when we lowered Randy into his wheelchair, he batted at the swing of her braid, like a huge clumsy cat. She pulled back, fidgeting with the braid with one hand, looking at me as if expecting an apology.
“He likes your hair,” I said lamely. This, I remembered, is how new mothers speak about their babies.
“He thinks you’re pretty,” I added because I knew it would make her uncomfortable, and I was angry just then, resented our need of her. I resented all the intimacy she shared with us – this stranger who buttoned his pajama top, wiped his chin. She was always wandering the perimeters of the room, forcing dust to take to the air with the vague brush of a cloth while I sponged his chest, the suds clinging to his thick hair. I would look over at her and she’d avert her eyes while I pulled down his pants to clean the limp curl of his penis.
It was always dark in the house, keeping the curtains drawn, the lamps switched off. After we moved him into the wheelchair, she would make coffee, and I would feed Randy applesauce, scrambled eggs, white bread dipped in smoke-colored gravy.
One morning, as we struggled with the sag of his body while neither acknowledged his reek, he grabbed at her long ponytail to steady himself, her head jerking back before he dropped into his chair.
“Why not just leave him in bed,” she asked. She rubbed at her scalp, huffing.
I wanted to slap her across the face, but said only, “Because that would be cruel,” then realizing, as I said it, that many things are cruel and we do them anyway. Because I still want to think of him as my son. This is why we wheel him from room to room, tuck the bib deep in his collar when he sits at the table, dress him in his favorite t‑shirts, images spread across his wide chest of running wolves and guitars and women astride motorcycles, hair blowing parallel with the road.
“Either wear your hair in a bun tomorrow,” I said sharply, “or cut it off.”
I remembered Randy’s little baby fist caught in a tangle, reaching up from the changing table, and laughing in the midst of pain, as I shouted “Darn it, Randy!” while separating us.
The next day she wore a handkerchief that covered her whole head.
“You look older,” I said.
“I feel older,” she said, and that may’ve been the closest we got to friendship.
* * *
He was a good boy, always. Only once did he come home drunk, and once brought a girl over for dinner that I hated. She was permed and spray-tanned, kept referring to her and me as “us gals” whenever Randy left the room, and her perfume made it impossible to taste the roast I’d prepared. Afterward, when I told Randy openly I didn’t like her, he grinned and said, “Just give it time.” But I never saw her again after that.
His jobs would take him away from home for weeks, sometimes even months at a time – construction work or towboat crews, trucking. Often he’d come home with something for me, just a small thing – a silk scarf with all the faces of the presidents on it, a pair of beaded moccasins, salt n’ pepper shakers showing a tiny Grand Canyon meticulously painted. This went on until he wrecked his shoulder at a worksite three years ago, started collecting compensation. That was around the time the house burned.
Each time he came home, he looked a little more like his father – getting thicker around the waist, his chin loosely doubled, the layers of fat solidifying around him. A part of me was vaguely worried that, like his father, one time while driving his truck across country, he’d find some girl that he wouldn’t want to leave again. But, I knew, this would be normal for a young man. I waited, and he always came back home. I think now that he worried about leaving me for good, because I’d already been left once before. We didn’t speak about his father. That absence wasn’t an absence anymore, he’d been gone so long. But we were united by that long-ago act of desertion, knitted closely through the years by circumstances neither of us had chosen, the shape of our family solidifying into mother and son and no one else.
When Randy was home, I would cook. In the high heat of summer, I would let him smoke indoors. We’d sit in the kitchen playing cards and drinking sweet tea, cutting thick slices of braunschweiger and smoked Swiss that we’d layer on fresh-baked bread with mustard from the Amish store. In the winter, we’d scoop snow from the windowsill and pour root beer over it, sometimes whiskey, crisp and sparkling brown. We played poker, rummy, blackjack, using candies in gold wrappers to place bets. Once he called us “two fatties,” laying down his hand across the table, just a pair of threes, laughing: “Two fatties with bad luck.” He played piano, and I never sang until he asked me to, finally sitting on the bench beside him, never for the space of more than two songs, and we’d sing something rich and mournful, the kind of melancholy that is all the sweeter because it’s not your own. He had a good voice that continued to deepen each year. I still sounded like a shy schoolgirl when I sang, the voice small, as if pleading to go unnoticed.
I thought this was enough. That motherhood was no more than maintaining a home in the son’s absence, setting food in front of him when he returned. This was all I offered. Randy never complained.
The only time he ever came home drunk was several months after he’d injured his shoulder. As soon as he won the court case, he bought himself a motorcycle, and that night he’d driven it into town to play pool with some of his old high school buddies. I heard the motorcycle in the drive throwing up gravel, the tires skidding, and the pinging of the rocks as they fell against the house. He came in, his body slack with alcohol, shoulders slid forward beneath his jacket, pulling off his helmet to show the fever in his cheeks, the hair clinging in stripes across his forehead.
“Come in here, Randy.” He was a teenager again. No, that’s not true. He’d always been such a good boy. He was his father, lazily defiant, filling the whole doorway as if blocking me in. It was late. I’d fallen asleep reading and now awake I felt ready to punish him, punish him for staying so long.
“Where have you been?”
“Playing pool.” He leaned against the doorjamb, lazily clicking his lighter on and off, the flame brightening the sheen of sweat on his chin.
“Where?”
“At Gabby’s. Why?” He took a step toward me, seemed to flounder and steadied himself by putting his hand on an end table. He tried to cover up his stumbling by picking up the little bronze clock that sat there, examining it, and saying casually, “It’s not even that late.”
“You reek of booze, Randy. I can smell you from here. Is this how it’s gonna be from now on?”
“How what’s gonna be?”
I remember searching his face for something and losing track of what it was. He was, I realized, always new each time, each time he came through the door. A different son. Holding him in my arms as a baby, pulling back the blanket to look at his face and not finding any resemblance to myself, to his father. He was something separate.
“You’re drunk.”
“So what? You’re acting like I’m twelve years old or something.”
I stood up, a paperback sliding from my lap. The thud of it fell between us. I moved toward him.
“I’m ashamed of you,” I said. Hearing the word neat and flat on the tongue like a wafer, looking him in the face. This was the first time I’d said it, but I’d never said I was proud of him either. I don’t know if anyone ever said that to him.
He stood there, swaying slightly, his face opening a little to my words, then closing up again, narrowing. His cheeks went rosy, polished with sweat. He swallowed, and I wondered if he was keeping himself from vomiting, trying to maintain the balance of his insides.
I was thinking of his motorcycle in the drive, thinking about how easy it would have been to drift from the road, smack the guardrail, the metal ripping the denim of his jeans as if it were butter, and the flesh parting beneath. His body taking to the air. I thought of the drunk couple that night so many years ago. I felt their recklessness standing before me again. I felt jealous and slighted. I wanted to reach up, cup the flesh of his face between my palms, press gently then harder, forming it into something else. I wanted to touch him. How long had it been? He wasn’t speaking, or seeking any escape from me, and so I kept going.
“Nothing to say for yourself. Not a word, huh? Coming home drunk to look me in the face and drool like an idiot. I can’t even look at you. You’re turning into your father.”
I had never said any of this before to Randy. I turned away from him in shame. He reached for me, clumsily grabbed the fabric of my favorite blue nightgown, jerked me back around to face him. His breath was a raw, grainy heat – sheaves of wheat being incinerated. He held the fattest part of my arm firmly, and I think there were bruises afterward, the size and color of dimes where his fingers gripped.
“Because I had a few drinks, suddenly I’m Dad? Why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you, huh? What are you afraid of? That I’m gonna leave you here and you’ll have nobody but Aunt Daisy bringing over table scraps every few weeks? There is no contract that says I have to come back. There is nothing keeping me here.”
He was still holding the clock in his other hand and he suddenly let go of me, and pitched the clock through the front window. The pane shattered inward, the pieces skittering toward us over the floorboards. Bits of glass still clung to the frame like jagged teeth, the smaller crunch as they loosened and fell continued while Randy spoke:
“I hate it here,” he said, a note of pleading behind the rage. “I hate this fucking house. I always have.”
“Then why do you keep coming back?” I said, a little fleck of my spittle landing on his upper lip.
He looked at his empty hand, the place where the clock had been a moment before. Then his arm dropped like dead weight.
“Someone has to,” he said, and I blinked at him blankly.
“Because if I didn’t, you’d have no one,” he barked, his face close to mine. There was a long pause as we both just stood there, the glass crunching faintly as he shifted his weight. Then very quietly, his voice light and vibrating, he said, “Because you’re my mother.”
* * *
In early September, I woke one morning to the sound of hands cricketing on the piano keys, an empty clacking where most of the strings had rotted away, a sound like toothless gums chewing. We’d moved the piano out onto the front porch to make more room in the living room for Randy’s hospital bed. And afterward, the rain would get in, the sound growing damp, eerie, like a piece of underwater wreckage dredged up. And the spiders built their nests, so that bumping against the keys would send swarms of tiny bodies scurrying, like the crowded notes on Randy’s sheet music come to life.
We let these things go to waste, with so much still left over.
But sometimes late at night, the trio of high school kids who’d follow the railroad tracks with their paper bags shaped like whiskey bottles would climb up on my porch, drawn from the road by the bulk of the piano. They’d try to push a tune from the keys – a series of chords, sweetly mildewed with notes missing, probably “Chopsticks.” I’d hear them from my bed. I think they thought the house was abandoned, and I never did anything to dispel this myth. It certainly looked empty now, even up close, the rickety sinking of the roof above the porch, and the peeling paint that curled like dead leaves along the soggy, driftwood-colored siding.
On that September morning, I woke to the sound of those damn kids trying to coax “Heart and Soul” from the rotting keys, and I was suddenly angry, throwing the covers off, and almost wrenching the screen door from its frame. I wanted them to know that we’re here, that they can’t just crawl up onto my porch with their caterwauling and pretend that Randy and I don’t exist. We’re still here, goddammit. But standing in the doorway watching the gravel drive spit curls of dust toward the first lilac sprigs of dawn, I saw that no one was there. I watched something dark scurry beneath the porch – a rat maybe, who’d been nibbling at the moist wood of the stripped bare piano keys. The rat made me even more angry than the thought of the teenagers had, and I turned back into the house, feeling alone.
The morning was still dark along the edges, and the living room was gray with a spreading half-light, milky between the blinds. I stood, and there was a silence so heavy that I snapped my fingers beside my ears, just to hear a noise. It was the sort of quiet that follows the whir of the air conditioner after it goes off, or a refrigerator’s hum – sounds that, through routine, get disguised as silence. I stood awhile, finally understanding what the absence meant, the sound that was missing. I couldn’t hear Randy’s breathing.
I crossed the living room toward him, feeling a fear finally shift that had been there a long time, unnoticed, stranded in my chest like some long-dead tree tipping over. I stood over Randy, and looking down I saw that his eyes were open, dust or sleep in his lashes. He lay on his back staring up at the ceiling, and my pulse quickened in my ears, but I said nothing. I put my hand on his chest and I thought I felt him shiver, but he still didn’t blink. And I waited, and his face sharpened as my eyes adjusted to the faint light, and I prayed only that his eyelids would flutter downward and open again. I took a breath, as if to show him how.
I just let my hand rest there, on the coolness of his pajama shirt, as if I were trying to impart power or blessing, but it was only because I was afraid to move. I saw that the buttons were done all the way up to his chin, and it seemed so unnatural, obvious that he hadn’t dressed himself. He never wore pajamas before his stroke, and this was the sort of childish touch that we, his caregivers, had added because it seemed necessary. A man no longer had the freedom to sleep naked when he couldn’t dress himself.
My hand moved, shaking, to unfasten that top button – the fabric pulling away to show a ringlet of chest hair at the hollow of his throat. And then my hand slid across to the side of his neck where his pulse should be, and the silence of his flesh seemed to add to his massive weight, his body pressing upward beneath the sheet. And I felt the gathering weight of all those past silences when we seemed to move through and around one another without speaking – those times before his accident when our paths might cross walking from one end of the house to the other.
I thought of him as a child, laying on his stomach beneath the kitchen table with an ink pen. And even before he’d learned how to read or write, he’d spend hours filling blank notebooks with page after page of long squiggly lines, holding the pen awkwardly. And when I asked him what he was writing he said, “songs” and that was all. I asked him to sing me one, but he just shook his little head and passed me the notebook. My eyes followed the squiggles, and I wanted to find something there, but there was nothing.
I stood over him for a long time, and finally I moved a hand to brush his hair back from his forehead. “Randy,” I said, as if trying gently to wake him. I shook him, but his eyes stayed empty. “Randy?” but the name didn’t seem to fit him anymore.
* * *
Up to that day, Randy had layers of seizures. They began to come in pairs. His eyes grew glassy and vacant, and he didn’t respond when we spoke to him or placed his hands on the little Casio keyboard Daisy had bought him to replace the moldy piano. What had he ever really wanted? I was ashamed that I hadn’t known him well enough to answer that. But I kept trying to offer things he used to love – Butterfingers and Heath bars from the gas station, a baseball cap with an image of Big Foot proudly striding, a Tanya Tucker album sleeve with lyrics printed that his eyes can no longer make out: “Two Sparrows in a Hurricane.” As if these things could save him.
The doctor had said that we should begin to prepare ourselves. And I thought about what that meant – it meant I should gather my strength against his absence. And so I began to imagine the spaces he used to fill, empty again – like when he used to be gone for months at a time, working on the river or a construction site. I told Daisy that I didn’t want him buried in a graveyard among strangers. So Daisy’s husband, Tom, got a permit from the county courthouse to bury him on the land behind the house, where a narrow pasture cuts back, and where Randy quietly dug a grave when the last dog passed away. Daisy and her husband came to stay with me the night before the burial. For company, they said.
On the morning that we buried him, the insects were full of voice, the orange lilies raging like the fire that took the house, burning away first the kitchen then bringing down the balcony. We buried him wrapped in a blue blanket to guard against the damp. Inside the stark ash-blonde coffin that my brother-in‑law had built, he looked almost newborn – a pastel and watery-pale Christ child in the manger with baby-blue blanket tucked in meticulously around the soft swellings of his body. It was Daisy who pulled back the cloth to look at his face one last time.
My brother-in‑law was quick with the spade, the earth already coming down as soon as the crude coffin touched the raw soil. He’d rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and his soft brown hair darkened with sweat as we watched him work in silence. He’d been awake before any of us, making the hole. That day I’d been pulled rough from sleep – no air, as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. I was crying, knowing Daisy and her husband were both awake to hear me. She was already pulling up my weeds, and sweeping the front porch, and carrying the coffeepot up and down the hallway. I’d heard the sound her bathrobe made when she shrugged it on. No grief was ever kept a secret in our house – never shared, only ignored. It had always been this way.
Standing over his body swaddled in blue, I could hear a train keening, spread thin between the hills, the air suddenly thick with the sound as with birdsong, blackbirds and water thrushes. The train whistle grew in my chest, heavy and rattling, a wail that I couldn’t give voice to. I merely stood remote, with my hands clasped behind my back, feeling that train go through me.
The sun was this wash of warmth on my neck, my pores opening to it. I would not look up from the hole where he was, but neither was I looking into it; my eyes lingering at the rim.
I heard the sound of tires on the gravel coming up the long drive, and Daisy and Tom were looking in that direction, shading their eyes, Daisy moving to stand beside me and say in a low tone, “Did you invite anyone else?”
There was a moment when I thought that somehow, impossibly, it was Randy’s father – that, even though I hadn’t spoken to him in eleven years, even though there were thousands of miles between us, he knew, had sensed, when his firstborn son was gone; knew and made the journey. But this, of course, was foolishness.
The car pulled up to the house, and I watched as two figures got out – a man and a woman. They were shading their eyes too, and not coming any nearer, as if they could see the grief coming off of us like waves of heat above the blacktop. We, all of us, just stood like that, staring back and forth beneath the little visors we made with the palms of our hands, a small triangle of shadow erasing our eyes. I recognized them, finally, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses that had come a couple of weeks ago to tell us about the End.
Daisy said, “Do you know them?”
I told her who they were, and Tom jogged over to them. His mouth moved as he spoke calmly and seriously, all the worry of death something to be dealt with patiently, with a measured gesture that cleared the strangeness of it from the air. The dirt had crusted over the knees of his nice trousers, and I knew Daisy would brush them afterward, fold them neatly over a hanger before driving them to the dry cleaner’s, who would have no idea of the source of the stain, of the grave dug in Sunday clothes.
I watched Tom explaining that my son had died. The woman’s hand moved from her forehead to cover her mouth in that classic pose of shock and horror. She shook her head, the copper hair falling forward. She looked like a high school drama teacher trying to demonstrate for her class “receiving bad news.” I allowed myself to hate her for a second, as if there was only so much grief to go round, and this unexpected stranger was sopping it up, taking a little for herself. The man was looking at his feet, and he looked very young from that distance. He couldn’t be much older than Randy.
They started to get back into their car, and I broke from Daisy, her grip lingering on my arm as if pleading with me.
“Wait,” I said, and they hovered, half in and half out of their car.
“I read the pamphlet,” I told them. “The one about suffering.”
They stood, shielded from me by the open car doors.
“We’re very sorry for your loss,” the woman said, her voice steady and soft.
“His name was Randy,” I said. “He was a good boy.”
I waited for them to speak, and the silence seemed long.
“We’ll pray for Randy,” the man said, finally. And something in me came loose then, crowding forward, breathing itself awake – a defeat so whole it felt like it belonged to more than one life. And it did: mine and his.
“I don’t want you to pray for him,” I said, moving a step closer. “Your prayers don’t mean anything to me. I just want you to look around you. What do you think is happening here?”
Daisy came up beside me, laid a hand on my arm. I pulled away. She moved closer, again touched my elbow. I felt I could never escape her touch. I looked at her. “Don’t touch me,” I said, and her hand dropped.
“You were right,” I said to the Witnesses. “The end came and the second chances are over. Just like you said. That’s what’s happening.” My mouth went dry and I thought I’d been struck blind, the light too strong, blurring and swallowing sight.
“And I knew, I knew it was coming and still I didn’t tell him.”
They were silent. I couldn’t see them. I wanted them to understand, and so I tried again.
“I never told him. That I was proud . . .”
It felt like I was choking. They looked at one another, as if each sought permission to speak from the other. Finally the man said, “God forgives. He only wants you to ask.”
“I don’t want God’s forgiveness!” I shrieked. “I want my son’s.”
I knelt, the gravel sinking into the flesh of my knees. Daisy knelt with me. I was whimpering. The woman was saying that God’s thoughts were not our thoughts, that we can’t comprehend His ways, but Daisy interrupted her to say, “You need to leave.”
Before the car doors shut almost in unison, I could hear Tom saying in polite tones, “She’s very upset right now. Maybe it’s best if you left.” Then something quiet from them. “ . . . We’ll be praying . . .”
I heard the sound of the gravel moving. They were trying hard not to drive away too quickly, and I thought of Randy coming home on his motorcycle, thought of all I couldn’t take back, and I hid my face in my sister’s body while Tom went back to the spade, and the dirt moved, the earth closing up again with a grainy, breathless sound.
* * *
I’d forgotten to tell the cleaning girl not to come anymore, so she showed up one final time, standing in the doorway, shifting her weight back and forth. I told her that Randy was gone. She chewed her gum and said she was very sorry. She asked if I needed anything, and I briefly imagined sitting down vacantly at the kitchen table while she shuffled over the tiles, making coffee, peripheral to my grief.
But in the end, I didn’t invite her inside. I said only, “No, I’m all right. You go on home.” And she left.
After the cleaning girl didn’t come anymore, the afternoons were filled with this constant hunger, electric in the stomach, and elsewhere – an itch for motion in the soles of the feet, a hand closing into a fist then opening again. I thought of hair itching for the scissors, growing too long for itself, pleading to be cut free. Before the mirror, I avoided my eyes, twisted gray strands into something small, forgettable at the nape of the neck. We are too much for ourselves – the body spreading out, seeking its end, the mind retreating until we remember that prick of fear that began with darkness. Once sight was introduced at our beginning, darkness was fearful ever after.
I thought of the crust forming at the corners of his eyes that I would wipe away, wipe each morning with the corner of a damp cloth. As a child he had ear infections, the white crust climbing up toward the hairline, a lichen tightening the scalp. He would scratch and sob as I pulled his hand down, flakes scattering beneath his nails, and spreading a cream that smelled of nothing. The crust itself held all the smells of a child’s body – that dampish scent of the skin that forms over a cup of warm milk. In the mornings, he left bits of himself on his pillow, the air full of him, mingling with dust motes and cat hair in the light falling sideways through the upstairs windows.
I wish we had talked to one another. It was as if I’d become so used to his infant silence that I never sought to replace it, not in all our years of proximity. I remember being so aware of his breathing, always loud even before the stroke, the air coming up from the lungs audible as he sat alone on the loveseat, the pages of a motorcycle magazine rustling beneath his fingers. There used to be a long, steady warmth that came from the part of the room where he was. It made me think of walking into a stable, and you can sense the horses in their stalls, the swish of long hairs shifting, the sound of their breath moving through the velvet of their nostrils – their nickering so gentle and knowing. This is what Randy was for me – this presence that drifted in and out of the room, soft and animal. And just as the horses are a part of the stable itself, defining the space with the gentlest movement, so I realize, I thought of Randy’s body as a part of the house.
He was like the floors responding to my step, my voice would reach for him, “I’ve just opened a tin of peaches,” and he’d move to stand in the doorway, the creak of him coming back.
“I know. I heard the can opener.”
“Like a cat,” I’d say, taking down the little glass dish that was reserved only for things of that color: halved peaches, mandarin oranges in syrup thick as motor-oil, apricot preserves, pickled carrots, persimmons brought new from the tree, the skin puckering back from the flesh. This glint of dying sunlight, edible, through crystal, represented an occasion, a moment to be shared, just as cake and candles represents a birthday. And I knew Randy was grateful for these moments without him saying so. I knew he respected that the crystal dish had its use. But after the farmhouse burned, things no longer had designated uses. There was a foreignness to every item, the new house so vacant that at first I imagined I could always see my breath, a little cold cloud, even in summer, and the hills rolling back from the fields like frozen waves.
I never felt at home again after the house burned; I never felt that warmth in the chest as you draw back into the space that belongs to you. And Randy’s presence in the rooms had a different feeling – something heavy, the sounds making me stiffen and tense. He smelled like a stranger, a new cologne, something coming from beneath his arms, sour and dense. I didn’t open tins of peaches for him anymore.
I never really knew him – not as a child in his little bathrobe, not as a teen full of some sweet residue of heartbreak that I saw bubbling faintly, amber-colored, then hardening like sweetgum. Then, not as an adult either, when he found his silence. It followed him wherever he went, retreating only when the piano opened up to him, retold its cravings and worries beneath the soft meat of his fingers. Then finally, the silence overtook him completely, so full and fierce that it swallowed him whole until he was lost inside it – big and slow and floundering, his hands limp on the keys but maybe still hearing some tiny voice within that said, “God gives grace to the humble.”
He extended that humble grace to me, and I failed to recognize it. I failed a thousand times. The world assumes that every woman is somehow equipped to be a mother. That God has given each a love for the spoiled-milk smell of her child’s skin. But if this is true, why did my hands pull back from the flakes of skin, his hands reaching for me with the crust beneath his fingernails. Why did I never ask, “Who and what do you want to be, Randy?”
He wanted to play piano. He wanted to ride motorcycles. He wanted to grow old, I think. And in the end, he had none of these.
* * *
In recent dreams, Randy makes a beautiful ghost. Last night I saw him crying on the window seat with his face glossy like an oil painting. The air around him was ripening into a glow, bluish and slick like a kerosene lantern, and fragrant, his teenage smell of orange rind and cheap tobacco. “Sweetheart,” I said, my hand in his hair. “Sweetheart.”
I awoke hungry, my knuckles aching. I thought I heard the piano; sometimes those drunk kids still come up on the porch to play it. But it was just the wind chimes outside the kitchen window, creaking and clanking with rust starting inside the long metal pipes.
And when my dream of Randy had snuffed itself out, with my hand separating the strands of his hair, I lay in bed listening to a sudden screaming chorus of frantic adults combing the fields behind the house for a lost little girl. She’d probably wandered off in her sleep again; it was not the first time this had happened, with the parents and neighbors shouting shrill, one after the other, to fill in the gaps between the half-second-long silences. They sounded like coyotes, the pitch building as the little girl’s name was repeated in a chaotic rhythm, desperate and pleading. The arcs of flashlights moved through the curving mist and the beams drew insects but no lost children. I fell asleep again to their frenzied cries, and in my mind saw the tiny body of a drowned child just before dropping off to sleep again. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll ask Daisy if they found her. But I forgot to ask when she came in the morning to bring me fresh bread and preserves, tomatoes from her garden and a bag of birdseed.
When she came, I was sitting on the porch swing smoking a cigarette that tasted like the fermenting air – a flavor of rust and rotting wood and faintly of the gunpowder of detonated firecrackers. I could hear them popping, tiny crisp pavement explosions a half-mile off, almost like the distant cracking of knuckles.
“What’s that noise?” Daisy asked, halfway up the steps, the plastic bag she carried shushing against her thigh.
“Firecrackers,” I said. “Some kids been setting ’em off all morning.”
“What do you think they’re celebrating?”
“Probably nothing. Just being kids.”
She went into the house, and I didn’t follow her.
I sat and smoked, listening and thinking of the time Randy’s father brought home a box of fireworks he’d got at the state line, driving across the river into Missouri where it’s legal to buy and sell them. The evening was dewy and fragile, and he set them in a row in the back yard beneath the trees. He was drunk and bent in half, his arms swinging as he lit them, and they exploded in arching lines, fountains of sparks that settled in the upper branches of the trees and illuminated them, their leaves like the tissue of paper lanterns, the skeletal limbs drenched in lightning. There were blue and green peonies and spiraling horsetails and white rings and long-burning yellow diadems, all ripping the trees to shreds with the glowing sparks and tattered leaves settling on the roof and littering the backyard. Randy hid his face in my clothes, and the smoke was drifting, a thin grey veil over the ragged trees, a haze that painted everything out-of‑focus. I don’t remember being angry. But I watched Randy’s father through the murk, bent in half, laughing wildly, a pungent, hysterical cackle like the ear-splitting shriek of the fireworks. The house didn’t burn that night, and it was then that I stopped believing the house could burn; we’d sidestepped disaster so deftly. But I was wrong.
I could hear Daisy clattering around inside the kitchen, the gentle music of her swearing to herself when she dropped a jar of preserves on the floor. It had rained the night before, and the roads still shimmered, glossed with damp leaves. I sat very still, breathing smoke, and the screen door creaked. Daisy came out to say, “Don’t you light another one of those. Breakfast is almost ready.”
“Daisy,” I said then, a sudden need welling like dew. “Would you let me borrow your car?”
“What for? Did I forget to bring something?”
“No, I just wanna go for a drive.”
She looked at her hands, worrying with her nail at a patch of dry skin. “Where you driving to?”
“Nowhere. I just think it’d be kinda nice.”
“You’re driving out to see the house, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t really have a destination in mind.”
“But there’s nothing out there, Lydie. Nothing to see.”
Mosquitoes bred in potholes as flecks of light scattered over the driveway like breadcrumbs. I watched the flecks widen and shift on the backs of frayed leaves.
“There could be something,” I said, shrugging.
* * *
That afternoon, I took to the road shyly, as if afraid it had forgotten me. My hands on the wheel were weak and shivery. I followed the road that runs parallel to the railroad tracks where the bracken has thickened over time, the berries nodding, secretive. Deer hovered among the ferns where the underbrush reeked of lake water and moss and sunlight going stale on the undersides of leaves.
I drove to the place where the house burned down. Turning up the drive where, on that day, Randy and I stood for hours, drenched with sweat and dizzy with a gray, throbbing smoke-blindness. The house fell while roosters crowed. We watched the paint on the mailbox peeling back in filthy, bubbling curls while firemen tried to drown the flames. The dog barked and strained against the length of rope that Randy held, his yips crisp and measured as the ticking of a clock. And with my hand on Randy’s shoulder (his shoulder was always within reach no matter how tall he grew), I waited in my faded blue nightgown for the final sound, the beams and walls falling charred and silent. At the time, I kept trying to go back, turn my mind to some memory of the fields naked without the flames, of Randy’s chubby face looking over the back of the sofa. But the fire burned an afterimage that swallowed sight, and something rose with the ash, shuttered in all that heat and punctuated breathing – the way a house breathes when it is being erased.
Coming over the hill in Daisy’s car, I could see the black patch with grass growing up through the charred timbers – weeds in a rim around the rot where woodlice swarmed and quarried. The trees behind and the distant hills seemed beaten back, and the air was stagnant as it is in marshes and graveyards. There were long, gaunt tracks in the earth where moles had burrowed.
I remember Randy’s father once coming from the fields with a tiny dead mole in his hand. He held it out for Randy to touch. The mole with its pink claws folded was almost grinning, its nose like an eye that would not stay closed. I thought of the darkness of its sunken furrows and upward curving tunnels beneath us, its small unseeing face, its moist, velvet blindness made permanent. Randy felt its little silken body with a finger – touching death on the cheek, and I think Randy was crying. He was very young.
In the clearing, the moles still kept away from the dead patch where the house stood, and I too kept my distance, watching the shapes the blackened wreckage made against the landscape. I realized I was trembling. I couldn’t remember if I’d trembled on the day of the fire, like Moses before the burning bush, when God spoke with a voice like thundering water: “Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”
I wasn’t wearing any shoes on that morning. I was barefoot in my nightgown – my feet raw against the gravel of the drive. It had been a savage, voiceless moment – waking to fire from deep sleep, to find it nuzzling and twining up the wallpaper. Everything receded away, foreign, unknowable. I saw the clock by my bedside and the remnants of a half-eaten apple on my dresser and I didn’t know where I was. Randy was calling my name from down the hall. He was not calling, “Mother!” He was calling my name. Smoke filled my mouth like a dry cloth, and I pulled down the mirror on the north wall as I felt for the door.
The house seemed weightless as it burnt, a fluttering eyelid. I was hungry as I watched the still-lit cinders, thinking of the pit of my stomach as a blank face, blank canvas – the sheets of laundry on the line, singed by the hot breath the house exhaled when it collapsed, and smeared with the rough hands of the smoke. I felt like a tunnel, a chimney for the billowing heat and smoke. Randy reached for my hand but it was limp in his grasp.
I asked one of the firemen if he could tell me how it had started.
“It looks like it started in the kitchen. Stove probably. You must’ve left a burner on before you went to bed.”
And that’s all he said about it, swishing water in his mouth and spitting it between his boots. Something in me shifted when he moved back toward the truck, and I turned to Randy, my eyes tired from watching the flames.
“What do you know about this?” my voice becoming a hiss.
“I don’t know. You make tea almost every night. Maybe you forgot to switch the stove off. It happens all the time.”
His voice was toneless and empty, and there was a mildness in his face, as if he were watching the sun come up rather than our home being destroyed.
“I know you know how it started,” I said. I was watching the side of his face while his eyes never left the flames.
“It was an accident,” he said, the flesh of his neck quivering as he spoke.
“No. There are no accidents.”
He turned toward me. “That sounds like an accusation, Mother,” he said. I noticed a small, faint scar at the corner of his mouth and couldn’t remember how he got it.
“Call it what you want, Randall. But right now I want you to tell me why this happened.”
“How can I know that, Mother? I am not God.”
“Randy, do you think this is some sort of justice? Are you trying to punish me for something?”
“What are you saying? Do you think I did this? On purpose? You think I burnt our house down?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know you anymore.”
“That is insane. You are fucking insane.”
Randy turned away, but there was nowhere for him to go. He started walking down the drive toward the highway.
“Where are you going?” I followed four steps behind.
“Do you even know what you’re saying anymore?” he cried, over his shoulder.
I caught up to him, grabbing a handful of t‑shirt, pulling him back; the heat coming off the house could be felt even here.
“What do you want from me?” he yelled, his mouth wide and dark. His face had taken on the color of the flames, and the smoke had made his eyes water. He was rubbing his face with his hands, watching me. I was silent.
“What do you want me to say?” he pleaded.
“I don’t want you to say anything.”
And in the end there was no speech. Only the dead weight of his hands on the piano.
* * *
The house where I was born, where Daisy and Randy too were born, sent up its ash, and I watched it burn until there was nothing. I stood rooted like Lot’s wife, a pillar of salt turning back to watch Sodom in flames. I watched the house changing shape, the heat squeezing like a fist closing, the roof buckling, the siding breaking out in boils, the thunder of beams falling inward like the noise of the fireworks hissing and fracturing the trees. I remember every new shape the house took as it fell and how the sky changed color. The smell was so familiar, as if I’d lived this fire a thousand times in a thousand dreams, and this was merely the last time.
At the end – only a skeleton, the framework, a faint outline traced in charcoal pencil, flames still lapping at the foundations in a weakening grip. And the firemen stood with their hats pushed back, drinking water from bottles, and winding up the hose like a huge fishing line. And I shivered in my nightgown, the moon a faint grin over the crowns of hills, the wood huddled together, a steaming black bundle with the embers glowing from the kindling like scores of hard, smoldering eyes, unrecognizable. The insects prattled in the brush, and fireflies rose like the last sparks flying upward.
As I stood motionless in the dawning silence, after watching the house destroy itself, piece by piece, I heard Randy behind me whispering to Daisy: “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” and I remembered how he’d hid his face when his father set off all the fireworks.
* * *
Today I stood as I had then, facing the blemish where my house used to stand, and I thought: yes, he was right. The house was beautiful as it burned. I remembered the heat on my face, holding my body in place and Randy stooping a little with an ear turned toward the burning as if listening for music.
I moved toward the wreckage, lifting a bit of earth sewn with ash and sifting it in my hands. I wanted to gather all the things that are left: bits of broken china, pieces of pipe and brick, coat hangers mangled into twists of barbed wire. I’ve done this before, many times, searching for something, some token. Perhaps the little bronze clock. I stooped and dirtied my hands.
Guilty and breathless, I thought maybe I could be heard here. I knelt in the rubble and lifted my face to the lowering clouds. I didn’t know who or what could hear me, but I breathed the words up. They left me like smoke. I longed for any kind of forgiveness, the smallest sprout starting where the house had been, a rent in the clouds, the light of dusk catching the curve of something – the coiled mattress springs of the bed he had slept in for many years. This felt like enough, for now.
Empty with hunger, I finally turned away, driving home with the road leaping and a train throwing itself headlong down the tracks alongside me. The coyotes yipped their worship of a fresh and clammy moon as nightfall reared up to swallow the light. The rush of the sweating evening surrounded me, and I felt that I was seeing myself reflected in heaven’s depthless lake, the stars hidden and blind. And I felt that I would never sleep again.
* * *
In the beginning, Randy’s father and I waited for trains together. We’d sit by the tracks, they’d pass, and afterward, we’d move homeward through the darkness with the porchlight glinting in the distance like a beacon. We’d drift back toward the trailer park, coming through the ugly glade strewn with empty beer bottles, mattresses exploding their lice and tufts of bedding, all covered over with a gangrene lichen of bile and semen spoiling in the shade. On long past nights, frantic couples had dragged the mattresses down from the junkyard a half mile away, then let them rot there, to come back again and again with the young nightowls hatching and, in their first moments, smelling the stink of new sin.
It was there, by afternoon light, Randy’s father and I waited for trains. On the afternoon I’m thinking of, he had asked me what I thought we’d look like when we were old, while the black and orange caterpillars were migrating across the clearing, down the embankment to touch the railroad tracks – black metal grimed with tarnish, and the backs of the caterpillars leered with yellow eyes. Someday, I thought, as moths, they’ll come back to this place, grey wings like sinister flower petals, drained and ashy, moving like eyelids in sleep above the semen-soaked mattresses, where the moon reached its clean fingers that wouldn’t fit through the leaves.
That summer, the caterpillars had hatched in their massive, screened nests, moving down the trees and up from the lakes, an exodus of thousands. The ground was wriggling with them, the bristling hair of their thin hides, and you couldn’t walk without stepping on them, bright innards exploding over the sidewalk in tiny fat lines. The guts, once outside, were exactly the size and shape of the creatures, like an army of caterpillars turned inside out. I thought: Be fruitful and multiply; I thought of them as one of the ten plagues of Egypt – the caterpillars dying beneath our feet with a sound like overripe fruit being crushed.
While the caterpillars moved, we listened in the clearing for warning of the train’s approaching passage.
“There must be thousands,” I said, watching them crawl, disgusted.
“Doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said flippantly, as if I had been speaking another language, a string of untranslatable sounds, guttural. He sat on a bucket turned upside down, while I sat on the stone with the tree growing over it, the trunk forming a backrest like a primitive throne.
We always left before there was any inkling of darkness, when the afternoon turned like wine changing shade in the light. But that day, by some weird magic, we saw the train before we heard it, its bulk appearing suddenly before us, moving slow and soundless. We listened for the heavy sound of its movements but they were muffled, as if a throaty groan struggled behind a gag. We watched it move, the coal cars like the silent, rhythm-less caterpillars in slinking migration. We waited for the train to end, realizing that the afternoon had snapped off, night reaching up, moths skitting away from the eyes of silenced birds. In the fresh and sudden darkness, I spoke, my voice moving with the train in the same hushed thunder, telling him that I was pregnant.
“What?” he said, lines of fear on his face.
I told him again.
He stood up, knocking the bucket over, and underneath appeared the tiny, perfect skeleton of a dead rodent. The sight of it filled us both with fear. He was already running, leaving me beside the tracks, where soon the ghosts would come, along with the deviants, the drunkards, the desperate couples dragging their mattresses through the gaps in the forest where no deed could be overheard. I followed, calling after him, and lost a shoe in the dusk. We floundered, my one bare foot bleeding, and finally emerged dewy and cobwebbed, watching mild kitchen lights flutter where the trees thinned, coming home cowardly and bright-eyed.
Renée Branum’s stories have appeared in Blackbird, The Long Story, The Georgia Review, and Tampa Review.