Night
Fire
After the benediction that closes Forty Hours services my mother
drives the long miles over St. Joseph’s Road quiet from
her prayers as I am quiet from kneeling which seems hard business.
We begin, idly at first, to watch the far eastern sky where light
flickers. She says, Heat lightning, but as we pass the
night-laden acres, we know it is not. The heavy flashes are from
fire, larger than the bird of lightning. Another kind of destruction
raising its young in the night sky. My mother takes a breath,
Oh god no, accelerates the old Nash. There is a stone egg
in the air in front of me. I watch the sky fill with light the
color of the Angeles rose, and she begins to pray, Oh god,
keep us safe. Don’t let it be—don’t let it be!
There is nothing now but a panicked union as we speed over the
rolling hills, nothing but the distance of this light that whispers,
Your life, your life.
After a mile or two, the fire leans to the south, and then finally,
because the map of our township lives embedded in our brains even
in darkness, we know the fire is too near to be our farm. Our
farm is beyond this fire, and as we cross another mile we wonder,
Weaver’s? Vander Zan’s? Zilenski’s? And
over-taking us, the shrill heartbeat of fire trucks. Then, the
last low hill and there, Zilenski’s cow barn, skeletal in
flames. In bright silhouette, men run, pull calves from the burning
and in the light that always flickers in memory, my mother pulls
over into the ditch, lays her head against the steering wheel
and moans. Oh, I thought it was us. I am, she raises
her head, face twisted, I am so glad. She pounds the steering
wheel with such ferocity that the next day the soft outside part
of her fists are bruised the color of ash.
The Shaping Stone
From my bedroom window, I could see a stone wall to the south
which was beautiful and implacable and shaped some boundary we
had forgotten. It stretched all the way to the road, another country.
Despite its beauty, the wall was in disrepair and sometimes the
men who worked for my father cemented into place the stones that
had fallen out. It never worked for long.
At night I couldn’t see the wall. I looked out the windows
toward the western horizon and watched the distant yard lights
of other farms and the low planes floating north to south over
the lake.
By that time we had practiced hiding under desks at school.
By then I had seen the films of the mushroom cloud.
I will try not to give over to melodrama, but there are no words
for how afraid I became. Something in me had loosened like a stone
coming out of its place. There it came—tumbling into the
bed with me. I believed the low flying planes grew bellies with
bombs. The distant yard light signaled that the next war had begun.
All the black and white photographs burst to life in my dreams
and I twisted in the pleated sheets. I could not even run to my
mother’s bed, not make my unhinged mouth tell her or anyone.
Sometimes melodrama is required.
I waited for the world to explode and die.
In daylight, planes never came to drop their bombs, their low
sound never did signal an end, but the stone that divides one
land from another began to belly itself into other things: school,
deep water, certain foods, backs of closets. I came to depend
on its weight to tell me where to go, what to eat, who to be.
It was my first secret thing, stone from a boundary I carry now
and to the end the story.
His Workshop
I didn’t understand why my mother made me wait in the
car while she talked to Grandma in short sentences next to the
trumpet vine dripping orange fire, or why, when she finally went
into Grandpa’s workshop where he made wooden weather vanes,
the kind you stuck in the ground, she said Stay there,
as though I was the beagle.
I grew tired, sneaked out, followed her.
On the dirt floor, my feet raise mushrooms of dust. Rows of
vanes, flying ducks painted green with ragged tar paper wings,
lean against the slatted walls, all the same as everyday. He leans
into the workbench, holds onto it, rocks forward and back, and
a brown bottle rocks too, and the light is filled with Camel smoke,
butts everywhere in the dust. She stands near him, in tears I
think, though it may be her face in rage, and his back is to me
and a large wet spot trails down his pants. I must have made a
sound for she turns, says, Get out of here. I am so stunned
that she would speak this way to me, I stand still. She looks
back at him, her hands raised, palms up, and then he throws a
misshapen weather vane, not toward her but away, as though hating
it for its uselessness. I know this gesture, the same one she
uses when she’s mad but can’t say anything. She throws
a bowl of beans, torn shirt, dirty cutlery. But she’s not
doing it now, he is, and it cracks against the wall and he turns
and says something that has slipped away, small blue egg lost
in the grasses. She drops her hands, and her face in the light
coming from the high dirty window is filled with the look of broken
shells.
How does that happen to my mother’s face?
And the other thing: how the dust and smoke of that terrible
air make them look as though they are standing in holy light,
like in those old paintings where everything is calm and learned
and sacred while a persimmon glows in the cupboard.
