Curtains
She had entered a time of stories. But the flesh of stories is not the flesh of touch.
Which way did she go when she walked outside? She wanted to walk away from the sea, away from the port. So she followed the sunlight where it touched the walls of the alleys and the streets. She did not know the names of the streets, the alleys, the lanes or if they had names. Sometimes the sunlight reached a wall or glazed the houses across the valley. Sometimes it fell on the smooth cobble stones. She smiled at the brightness of the sunlight before it touched her. There was a house fronted with a blue arbor, though no vines grew on it. There were glass jars, aluminum buckets and pots, and dried flowers for sale. There was a bicycle with a bent wheel and crooked handlebars chained to one of the posts, and this, too, was for sale.
She went past the house and walked up three flights of stairs. Her eyes moved upward with the street, and near the top of the street, she could see where the houses thinned and a half dozen pine trees grew. She stopped to look back at the house with the blue arbor. There were blue shutters on the house and blue flower boxes attached to the windows. She made a mental note of the house in case she got lost. It was like taking a picture. She did this, too, for the beauty of the house. She hoped it would live among her other pictures of cathedrals, pavilions, places where she had sat until guards asked her to leave. She noticed a cat ahead of her. The cat stood up when Eleanor approached. It was thin and ribby. Its face was lean and scarred and pointed. The cat stretched under the touch of Eleanor’s hand until it laid down again and stretched and curled its legs beneath its body.
It was early enough that most people were asleep. Most of the homes were quiet. She passed one home where she heard a radio playing, but the shutters were closed and she could not hear anyone inside. She liked the sound of the radio. It was pop music. Greek language she thought. How easily music courts us. Her father had played the radio on weekends when he got up before her and her mother. He cooked eggs for himself. He clicked off the radio before he went outside. He sometimes started his truck and rolled down the windows and played 8-tracks. He played country music. Merle Haggard. Marty Robbins. The Oak Ridge Boys. The Statler Brothers. He liked the harmony of the groups, and he liked especially the bass parts sung by the Oak Ridge Boys and the Statler Brothers. That was Richard Sterban for the Oak Ridge Boys and Harold Reid for the Statler Brothers. Her father had a deep bass voice, and he loved to sing along with “Flowers on the Wall,” “Hello Mary Lou,” “Sail Away,” “Ya’ll Come Back Saloon.” Her father had taken her to see the Oak Ridge Boys. That was her first concert ever to attend. She did not remember much about the concert, though she remembered how happy her father had been that day. Her mother also liked to sing, but Eleanor knew her mother only to sing in church. She had a beautiful alto voice, a voice that seemed almost too powerful coming from a woman as seemingly delicate as her mother. Even with her clear skin, a slight nose, and soft hazel eyes, there was nothing remarkable about her mother’s appearance, except perhaps for her hands. Her mother had beautiful hands. Her mother was invisible in every crowd but for when she sang. People wanted to sit near her during church when she sang. They wanted to hear her voice. The old hymns, hymns the entire congregations knew, songs like “Just As I Am,” “In the Garden,” “Rugged Cross,” “Blessed Assurance,” came from her mother’s thin mouth with enough assuredness to nudge the staunchest unbeliever towards the aisle. Eleanor felt this, though she couldn’t sing as well as either of her parents, or at least that’s what her parents might have suggested when they encouraged her to sing with the congregation, to listen for when her voice blended with theirs.
“Can you hear them?” her mother asked her.
“I can hear them, Mama.”
“You should try to make your voice blend with theirs.”
“How do I do that?”
“You listen to your voice and listen to how they sing. Then you put your voice in with theirs until you can hardly hear your own voice. Then you’ll be singing with them. You’ll be singing with everyone, and that will make all of us sing better.”
“How do I put my voice with theirs? You can’t put your voice anywhere.”
“You listen. You listen to your voice and their voices. You listen until we all have one voice, yours and theirs and mine and Daddy’s. One voice.”
She did listen. She sang with the children’s choir, then with the church choir, and later, she sang with her university choir. She loved the sound of her parents singing, and she loved the sound of her father’s bass voice best of all. But she could not understand a word of the Greek music. After she passed the house where the music was playing, the houses were quiet again. The sudden change from music to quiet felt like crossing between curtains.
At the top of the hill she sat down on a bench outside the ruins of a church. She sat in full sunlight. She stretched her arms and rested them at her sides with her palms turned upwards. She tilted her head back and inhaled the air and felt thankful for the sunlight. The road she had been walking continued down the other side of the hill and into another village. There was also a footpath that intersected with the road. It cut across a dusty lot, angling in the direction of the port. She could see that the path went towards the hill above town. She was glad to find the bench. She wanted to go inside the ruins of the church. All that remained of the church was the bell tower. The rest of it had been converted into a house. The yard had been fenced. There was a mule and a horse pawing at a bundle of hay inside the yard. There was a stable that had been constructed from scrap wood and sheets of tin she guessed had blown over from other houses. It worked though. It provided the two animals with enough shade from the sun.
She wondered if the church had been started and abandoned, ran out of funds or perhaps a family could no longer maintain it. She thought maybe it was old and a ruin, but it was not old. Perhaps it was the presence of the farm that made the church not a ruin. Ruins speak best in isolation. She had once sat beside a ruin in Budapest. The ruin was perched above a walking path near the edge of the city. The structure looked like a prayer station, like those found in the mountains of Italy along the Austrian border. They are single room chambers with narrow, uncovered windows, facing in four directions. Typically there is an image of a Saint hung above the entry door. There is always only one door. Yet there was no Saint above the door in Budapest. She had glanced inside the structure, but she did not enter it. She could see the underside of the station and saw that the floors were rotten. She did not know whether the structure was of historical importance. That same day she had brought with her an apple, slices of red onion, a local sausage and bread to eat. She sat in front of the ruin and ate with the Danube—something like a floating world—before her. None of her people had found their way to such places, places of a ruin, great bodies of water, places of local bread and sausage.
Now she was here—under the Greek sunlight, on a rickety bench, in sight of a church perhaps soon to be another ruin and a mule and a horse chomping on hay. No one saw her. She stood up and took the footpath between the church and the last of the village houses and the pine trees that grew here.
She could smell wild thyme and oregano. She could smell the dust. She had not walked far when she saw a dead cat stretched in a flicker of weeds. Seeing the cat felt sudden and ugly. Its skin had dried and crawled back from the animal’s ribs. The teeth showed, grimaced and contorted. Not a soul to mourn the cat. She kept walking. It is easier to turn the cat into a story. Stories, like images, remove us by degrees from the agony of the dying. Is this not what we have done with our martyrs? We are not present to their violence. We do not witness the amusement of the torturers, their blatant schadenfreude. Who can empathize with the flayed Bartholemew? We have images, sculptures, myths. We see the remains of the apostle’s skin wrapped around his sinewy torso. We see the passivity of onlookers, as they watch the butchers manipulate their blades. Yet his suffering is not ours. It cannot be ours. Dying can be beautiful, but death itself is not. How can either become story, become poetry? A dead cat stretched and dried among the hopelessness of weeds. Its body rent and bony. A bougainvillea grows across the rails of a nearby porch, and someone inside the house prepares coffee.
Where we stand matters.
She continued on the path and reached an intersection bordered by a stone wall and a lane full of broken stones. Workers had begun to re-cobble the lane. She saw their tools and bags of cement mix off to the side. They obviously were not working this morning, and she realized she had forgotten what day it was. She followed the lane uphill. On the other side of the hill and below a couple of hundred meters was the port. She would go there later. She would go there and find a café where she could drink a cold coffee. As she went, the air felt cooler. There was shade along the lane gifted by the wall and tall bushes that grew on the other side of it. There were blossoms on some of the bushes, but she did not know their names. The air smelled of cedar and flowers. Where there was a break in the wall, she could see the sea. She stopped when she came to these breaks and looked out at the sea and felt at ease, though not quite peaceful. There are gifts in the world we cannot see.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
She spoke aloud the last lines from Jane Kenyon’s poem, “Otherwise.” She believed the words. All death and life might be handed back to life.
****
She had been six years old when she and her cousin, Ally, had started their lemonade stand at the camp meetings. They kept the stand going every summer until they were twelve years old. Afterwards, their lives and the lives of their families took difficult turns. She remembered one summer when they had tallied up forty-four dollars and some change in lemonade sales, a fortune. They split the money, and she was excited to buy something, though she no longer remembered what she wanted to buy. Another summer, when they had been nine years old, Ally had worn a white dress whenever they worked the lemonade stand. She was pretty as a flower, Ally was. Her cheeks pinked under the sun, though she burned some, and her mother, Eleanor’s Aunt Thelma, had warned them both about getting sunburned. She herself had worn a one-piece swimsuit, black and striped with sparkly lines of crimson. She wore the swimsuit so she could run away from the lemonade stand anytime she wanted to take a dip in the community pool. She could also practice her new gymnast’s moves. She had started gymnastics, and there was a photograph of her, somewhere, jumping high on a bed and tossing out her arms and legs they way gymnast did. The picture captured her in midflight, hair flying and a big smile and joy. She did not yet know the rarity of joy. They sold cups of lemonade for 50 cents, and for the entirety of camp meeting, folks purchased lemonade from them. A few people paid their 50 cents, but most people gave them a dollar or more. Aunt Thelma’s husband, Ally’s father, Uncle John, he would come along near the end of the day or whenever it was time to move to other activities and give them $5 or more for the rest of their stock and told them not to tell anyone. These were storied days. They were her storied days. Camp meeting. Ally. Aunt Thelma and Uncle John. Her mother and grandmother. The old people and the stories they told. Did they also bring you joy? With all their clumsiness and chatter, with what you learned later about how they were human, with human vices and failures and hurts and regrets and loves taken and lost, did you learn then there are no worlds or people without such stains? You were with them, among them, and you loved them. All those people who you once knew, even those who were cruel, have they not been given to joy? Is this true? Can it be?
Stories arose from these years at camp meeting. Like the old people who spoke of fireboxes or grandparents who had moved the camp from the river to the pine barrens, Eleanor found herself in the stories of her generation. One summer Eric Fields caused Forrest Johnson’s horse to explode. Eleanor didn’t see the horse, and Ally didn’t see it either. They heard about what happened. Eric was Uncle John and Aunt Thelma’s adopted son. They had adopted Eric when he was three years old. Eleanor felt another sort of kinship with Eric, though he was ten years older than her. They both had been adopted. They both had been raised by the broader families of their adopted parents. While she had been adopted from the womb of some woman Eleanor would never know—not her name, not her age, not her race, nothing—Eric had been broken by his birth mother. At three years old, he had already lived long enough to be wounded for a lifetime by another human’s neglect. There was no mother who wanted to hold him. And when Uncle John and Aunt Thelma adopted Eric, they embraced him immediately. They gave to him all the good that one human soul can give to another. They loved him. Yet they could see his wounds. They could feel them in the boy’s aloofness, his flinch. He did not like to be touched. As a little boy his body would tighten against the ordinary touch of a loving mother or father. He could touch them, but they could not touch him without explanation, either in words or how they approached him, even when their intention was to care, to comfort, and again to love. Eric was fifteen years old when he exploded the horse. It had been an accident, a terrible, terrible accident. Nothing in him would have harmed an animal. Forrest Johnson’s horse had been grazing in the small acres between his house and the house where the Fields’ family lived. The Fields lived in a two-story timber house that dated back to the turn of the 19th century. The house, at one time, had belonged to Eleanor’s mother, who was Thelma’s first cousin. But to Eleanor, this was always her grandmother’s house. In her mind, the house could never truly belong to anyone else in the family. The Fields shared the pasture with Forrest. Together they kept the land groomed and shared the rights, but it was Forrest who kept the horses. Forrest could no longer ride. He was too old. His body was too brittle. Still he would not let go of keeping a horse. Keeping a horse was what everyone knew about Forrest. He liked to stand with the animal every evening. He liked to brush its coat and mane, as the horse dipped its head into a bucket of oats and fed and snorted with pleasure. Evenings were the glimpse into the heaven that Forrest believed in, all pink and orange over the trees, coloring them nearly every evening with a spark of eternity. The older he got, the more he believed that heaven and its peace were moving closer to the world. He believed, too, that horses, or some of them, were messengers from God. He believed this because when they appeared in his dreams they carried him to a far horizon. Beyond that horizon, yet not a place he could see, was God’s very home. He just knew it. The horses knew it too. Then Eric, that idiot boy Eric, fed his horse an entire box of Apple Jacks cereal. That’s what caused the animal’s stomach to explode. Eric could see the horse getting sick after he fed the animal. He could see it. The horse’s gut swelled and then it went down to the ground and couldn’t get up anymore. Eric got frightened and ran to find Forrest. When they got to the animal, the horse was on its side with offal spilling from its body. Things pale and wormy entered the ground. The box of Apple Jacks had been tossed into a patch of weeds, though Forrest saw the box and he understood what had happened. They stood side-by-side watching the final throws of the horse when a plague of flies descended upon it. That warm country and death drew flies like revenge. Soon enough they had swarmed the horse’s eyes, but Forrest swatted them away and then pulled the horse’s lids down.
The next summer, everyone at camp meeting had heard about the horse and Forrest and Eric and the box of Apple Jacks. They talked about it. Eleanor and Ally were disappointed that the horse had exploded while they had been at camp and no one had told them what had happened. Their mothers hushed them when they tried to talk about it. Eleanor’s mother found no myth in these stories, found no legend in them. She was repulsed by its ugliness, and to talk about it was beneath her people, which is what she felt. In neither pretense nor shame, she was too passive a woman for stories about death, ugliness, the absurdity of the tragedy. Stories for her mother were best when they demonstrated the goodness in people, the simple goodness in people. The only novel she ever bought for Eleanor was Little Women, desiring for Eleanor to cherish most of all the love between sisters, mothers and daughters, between women. Was her mother prudish? Maybe a little. But her prudishness did not come from a squeamish heart.
Because of that summer and what had happened with the horse, Eleanor, more than anyone else, recognized that she had entered a time of stories. The story of Eric and Forrest Johnson and the horse became what lived. She understood this as a child, a remarkable child. What she did not understand or could not yet articulate is that the flesh of stories is not the flesh of touch. Lovers are not lovers when there has been no touch, flesh on flesh, flesh into flesh. There is not one story that will return one second of touch of whom or what we have lost. It is their stories that do not leave us, that did not leave Eleanor. She wondered about this, this connection between story and touch. Maybe love was what joined story with touch. Love like some horizon vanishing between them, within them, harboring story and touch in some deeper reality. Joining them. Bringing them together. Maybe that, but there was no substitute for touch, and Eleanor would come to miss more than she could have imagined the voice of her mother, the touch of her mother’s arms and embrace, her beautiful hands.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
Yes, she thought. Yes. Otherwise.
Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.
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Wonderful writing Damon.
Beautiful