Sweet Things, page 12
Our pump behind the kitchen still worked. My grandfather had sunk it deep, she said, after the original well ran dry, Wash the skeins clean after fulling required lots of water. What fascinated me was how she could spin the wool into beautiful threads. She had a spinning wheel that she worked with her foot. Once she had enough thread to fill a bobbin, she would dye it.
Her hands would turn orange or blue or red and she would hold them up to me in an attempt to scare me, but she would sit down, look at me sadly and say, “Nothing scares you does it. You always have that same studying look on your face.”
One day a man came up the lane. I wondered if he was my father, but when my mother saw him her shoulders sank in disappointment. He knocked on the door. She invited him in. But as the air flowed out to him, he leaned over the porch rail and was sick to his stomach. And when men from town took me away, saying she wasn’t a fit mother, I wanted to cry but couldn’t manage a tear. Instead, my thoughts wove together until I was certain I had become a story set to the music of my mother’s loom.
Chupacabra
“You must not tell them stories like that,” Fran scolded. “The children were up all night. They were terrified. Molly threw up from the terror of what you told her. They sobbed and sobbed, and you never rose to go and look at them. I had to rock them both in my arms until four a.m. just to make them settle down. Even this morning while you were still asleep when you should have been busy looking after them, they were asking me if it was real and it was going to come for them. Then they found one of the stray dogs dead, badly dead, at the end of the garden. Anything could have killed the dog. A coyote, a bear.”
“Mrs. Paterson. We do not have bears in this part of Mexico, so it could not have been a bear.”
“Whatever. Maybe it was run over by a tractor.”
“Mrs. Paterson, I did not hear a tractor last night.”
“Whatever. What would possess you to tell the children of the Chupacabra?”
Esmeralda smiled. “Mrs. Paterson, every child needs a nightmare or they would not grow up. Besides, nightmares are real. They are telling us the truth about the world.”
“There is no truth in nightmares. And why should the children need a nightmare, at this age, especially? Nightmares catch up with everyone. They are the trials of the day that become the ordeals of the night. You don’t really believe such creatures are real?”
“Our way of honoring life is to share our fears whether it is the Day of the Dead or the Chupacabra. I shared the Chupacabra with them because they said they’d never seen dead people. I told them that after the Chupacabra had eaten the goats in the Sanchez’ grove next door, and maybe a wild dog or two and the fence around their yard, it would come for them. I told them about its spiny arms, its long fingers with claws at the end, how its eyes glowed like light passing through jewels, and how it made the eyes of its victim’s glow with the same light. That’s how it finds those it wants in the dark to tear them apart. It follows the corridors of light through their eyes.”
Mrs. Paterson was silent and turned to look out the dining room window onto a cluster of orange trees in the yard. The sun was casting threads of light through the trees just before it disappeared behind the ridges of the Sierra Madres.
Hiring Esmeralda had been her husband’s idea. When they moved to Mexico, he had told his wife she needed leisure time, that servants, nannies were affordable. He had told her that with the time he’d be spending at the shale fields she would feel lonely in a new country. She could spend her days and even her evenings working on her novel about a family that grew up in northern Alberta. Esmeralda was supposed to be a solution to so many problems.
“Esmeralda, I can’t have you telling horrible stories to the children. Cody and Molly are too young for that kind of nonsense. You have frightened them, not just last night, but night after night.”
“I tell you, Mrs. Paterson, every child needs s nightmare. It makes them grow up. It makes them understand the world.”
“And what do you understand about it, Esmeralda? I don’t want you telling my children that life is a nightmare. I want them to believe that the world is what they make it and that it is not a box of horrors. I am afraid that you will have to seek other employment. Please pack your things tonight and leave in the morning.”
Esmeralda simply nodded and began to leave the room. “How can I prove to you that every child needs a nightmare? Nightmares, after all, are simply the reality of life revealing itself before we can learn to live with the truth.”
Mrs. Paterson said nothing as the nanny left.
The house was silent except for the sound of crickets outside the bedroom window. A large moth buzzed at the window screen, and finding itself frustrated, flew away into the darkness. The children were asleep. It was their first night unbroken by dreams in weeks. But Mrs. Paterson could not sleep.
From the other end of the house, she heard a pained scream from Esmeralda’s room. Putting on her gown as her husband turned on the light, she could hear the children crying and then screaming. They, too, had been awoken by the nanny’s shriek. Mrs. Paterson ran the length of the corridor to the servant’s room and switched on the light. A goat-footed thing with horns, the size of a wild pero was climbing out the window. It turned and looked at her. She realized that the children were already in the room, standing beside her. As the creature mounted the sill, it turned and smiled, and threw a glance to Esmeralda, who was lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood.
Cody hid his face in his mother’s gown, but Molly approached the body on the floor, pointed, and turned to her mother.
“Do you see, Mommy? I can grow up now.”
Sleep Walking
When he told them about his habit of sleepwalking when he was young, Michael’s friends asked if he’d had a troubled childhood. There had to be a trigger for getting up in the middle of the night with his eyes wide-open though staring straight ahead and telling his parents he had to find the sea. His mother had caught him just in time at the top of the basement stairs.
He couldn’t think of any trauma.
“Perhaps it was buried,” Janet said to his friends said as they sat around a table in the pub and poured themselves glasses of draught from a jug. “Bad memories get suppressed and they express themselves in all manner of odd ways.”
Janet and Michael were new together but the brevity of their relationship didn’t stop him from moving in with her. He found it comforting to have someone beside him, to wake in the middle of the night and hear her breathing, sighing sometimes, and clutching the blankets to the warmth of her skin. That physical presence assured Michael he wasn’t dreaming and he certainly wasn’t sleepwalking.
Janet’s father had been a psychologist and even though he had dropped dead in the middle of a bank when she was sixteen, she decided she knew enough about traumas and maladies to offer Michael advice on how to cope, if not cure, his bad habit. Michael assured her he hadn’t done “the thing” for years. “Puberty,” he said, “likely altered his brain chemistry.”
Michael got up in the middle of the night to use the washroom. He was standing and going about his business and was certain he had gone back to bed when he dreamed he meant Janet in the kitchen, or at least where the kitchen should have been. But instead of the counters and cupboards, they were standing on an overgrown jungle path. The air was heavy and humid and green. Soft loamy earth felt odd beneath the soles of his feet and with every step, he was certain he was leaving footprints though when he looked at the ground beneath him there were no marks of his presence.
“What shall we do now?” Janet asked? “I came to pick flowers. There are beautiful bougainvillea just down the way, and I saw some pinkish orchids growing beside a hot volcanic stream. We are not allowed to dip our hands or feet in the stream because it is full of poisonous minerals.”
“That’s a shame,” Michael replied. “I’m thirsty. Maybe I can drink from one of the flowers. Some flowers catch and hold the rain that falls early in the morning in a jungle. Maybe that’s why they also call it a rain forest.”
Janet said nothing. She took Michael by the hand and led him to the orchids.
“I want one but the stalk won’t break in my hands. I want to wear an orchid in my hair and take off my clothes and feel as if I am alone with nature even if I am with you.”
Michael bent down and the stalk snapped easily in his fingers. He held up the flower to Janet’s head. “How shall I fasten this to your hair?” he asked.
“Oh, be careful. Be careful. Don’t drop it or the clouds will swallow us,” she said, pleading with him to hold onto the flower. “It is the flower of immortality, the flower of life.”
As he attempted to tie two strands of her long hair around the orchid, the flower slipped from his palms and fell to the ground. Janet screamed. “Look what you have done! All the money in the world can’t save us. The sky will swallow everything.”
With that, the downpour began. Michael felt as if he was standing in a warm shower. Droplets of water wept from his hair to his chin and into the corners of his eyes.
Janet said, “Take off your sleep shirt and shorts. You are all wet and you will sink,” and he did as she asked, and as they faced each other naked in the rain Michael had sensed the rain forest was not a jungle but the backyard behind their apartment. Lights from the parking area illuminated the drops as they chased each other to the ground. Janet was in front of him, shivering in the downpour and he reached out to hold her as he realized they were both naked.
He looked at her head propped against his shoulder. He was awake, or so he thought, and he wanted to ask her what they were doing in the backyard. But Janet sighed. Her eyes were open but she was far away, deep in the abyss of a dream.
“Hold me tighter,” she whispered. “He will never return now that you have lost the flower.”
Sentry
My grandmother’s house was always damp no matter how hot the electric fire in the hearth glowed. She lived so close to the sea I could hear the waves at night. The pillows on the bed were clammy, and if the sheets had been kept in the closet before being put on the bed, my feet felt as if they were sliding into cold water after she turned out the spare room light.
When I lost my job in the city, I came back here. I knew there was nothing here. My grandmother has been dead almost forty years. Nothing looks the same. But there was still a place for me to stay, an old coastal defense concrete pillbox that was supposed to stop the German invasion that never came. It is a shelter though it offers no other amenities. The pillbox is a useful place to hide, a defendable position, and the echo inside the walls when I speak to myself reassures me someone is listening other than the sea.
After the war, no one thought to knock it down. The pillbox became a relic, an artifact of history that soon became an eyesore. When I was a boy playing inside, I had no idea how awful it really was. Me and the other boys defended our island, whatever the cost may be, and by the time the tide went out and we could almost walk across the Channel to France the pillbox was there for us if we felt chilled and wanted to get out of the wind.
The structure remains a local landmark used mostly as a hangout for vagrants, a secluded place for lovers, and a piss bin for boys who go larking in the dunes when they should have been at school. The iron door is long gone, but the hinges still sing because someone took care to keep them oiled and almost rust-free.
The pillbox stinks now.
I went up the High Street to buy a loaf of bread and a can of beer and when I returned I saw a local banker come out followed by a boy who was no more than high school age. Both paused and looked at me, sitting in the dunes and letting the wind muss my hair. The banker looked embarrassed. I simply shrugged as he straightened his suit coat. Then he turned and shouted at me, “Bugger you!” I was concerned he was going to come after me in the same way he’d gone after that boy. The boy didn’t stick around.
The banker started to disappear over the dune, but he returned. “You sod! Just try and put your money in my bank. I’ll be waiting for you.”
I couldn’t bother telling him I didn’t have any money. I’d lost it all. I had made a bad tech investment. Then my wife left me…well, not really leave. I walked out one night after telling her I was going to guard the coast.
I left but changed my mind because the train had stopped running. When I came home I found her in bed with her banker. Those bastards are everywhere. They’ll screw you out of house and home all in the name of guarding your money.
But today with the boy and the banker gone, the pillbox is mine again. They didn’t toss my belongings. At least they were respectable on that account.
I could sit in there forever. I could repel an invasion if need be. The problem is, as I said, there was nothing left for the taking. Nothing here. Nothing to see. Go home.
But I will wait, in any case. I am certain the next invasion is coming and am still not convinced it won’t. That’s a bad double negative, but everything compounds: interest, negatives. It gets into a place. It takes the best part of things away. I have a plan but no one to share it with. And what is my plan? Loose lips sink ships. Tankers are passing the coast every day. I don’t want to put them in danger. I can’t trust you, no matter how well you may be listening to my story. So I’m not going to tell anyone.
I spend hours looking through the gun portal. The dawns – they’re always coming up like thunder over China cross the bay, or an arm trying to fit into a jacket. The French have always understood that. La Manche, the sleeve. I see the far coast clearly. Out on the far coast the light gleams and is gone. I see poetry from my digs. It is even painted on the walls, though the meter is off and the ‘it’ or ‘uck’ rhymes are monotonous.
As a sentry I keep watch for planes, flights across the grey sea and its drowning whitecaps, like bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover, tomorrow just you wait and see, and the bomber noses point toward London and snarl through the anger of their engines with mad fury, though the sound of a Spitfire, a long, thin note droning against the sky still carries a tune. If you want, I will sing it for you. I’m certain no one has heard it, at least not as long as I’ve been standing at my post.
It’s a Girl!
Charles and Charlotte Morgan are delighted to announce the birth of their daughter, Megan Antonia Esther, at St. Mary’s Health Centre, the first grandchild for Cynthia Morgan and the late Cecil Morgan, and Esther and Tony Bassingthwaite. Megan will attend Anderson Street Public School until a gun incident in her fifth-grade year after which she will transfer to Saint Ursula’s Girl’s Academy where she will participate in drama and choir while attempting to complete her pre-secondary schooling under the supervision of Principal George Masters who will be charged with molesting Megan’s best friend, Wendy Chisholm. Megan will apply for numerous colleges but will only be accepted into Rockford College because a bout of depression, possibly caused by her educational experiences, will leave her with low grades that will not permit her to enter a better post-secondary university. At Rockford College, Megan will study anthropology but will fall from a second-story window during a dorm party. Charles and Charlotte Morgan will announce further arrangements and details as they become available after a family-members-only service and ask that their privacy be respected during this difficult time. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to St. Mary’s Health Centre Post-Natal Care Unit.
Roar
When men do up the top button on their shirt, the one at the collar, it is either to achieve a farm boy-look or because they are growing old and their necks are showing the crepe of hanging flesh beneath their throats. Whatever the reason, Mike wasn’t himself anymore. His life, he worried, was spent as a sociopath, without showing love to a fellow creature.
Mike hated the elephants. What were they thinking? The big cats were open books. They’d snarl and swipe with the bared claws. They were designed to kill whatever bothered them. Mike could understand that. He could respect rage. But elephants were different.
Elephants came last in his hierarchy of beasts because their patience wasn’t just a mask. It was a rouse. They were as capable of rage and violence as lions and tigers. Mike hated docility and he hated cute things that drew attention from his man-eaters. When they were young and supposedly naïve to cruelties of the world, elephants were stupid things. Corina, the Loxodonta acrobat, claimed Mike misread them. That’s why he beat baby Mitchy with a length of iron pipe. The beating almost killed her precious pet.
By the time the circus was shutting down, Mike had become forgetful about small things such as locking cage doors when he went to have a smoke. In the housing tent, he was cornered by his cats and Mitchy, all grown up, his trunk a pendulum that pointed at the flesh hanging from Mike’s neck.
The Laurel
One summer afternoon when I was ten and bored from living on a farm my father had no idea how to work, I walked into the fields. The weeds were waist-high and burnt blond in the sun. I spread myself beside our dry creek where an old willow wanted to lie down with me and remember the sound water used to make.
That’s when I saw the two. He was blond. A stalk of straw stuck to his ribs. Her hair was brown and flowed behind her as she fled but she tripped on something in the weeds. Then he seized her.
She was screaming “No! No!” over the dry chirps of crickets. I heard him groan and she wept, not as if she were sad but as if a part of her was lost. When she leaped up he grabbed her around the knees and I saw the horror on her face. Her legs were turning to bark, her fingers sprouting leaves, and her torso becoming round and gnarled with knotted eyes staring at the fields.
