Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (21 page)

The snow sidled out of a gray sky, and fell like ash, that slowly, that lightly, and lay on the cold grass, the limbs of trees, while the woods went hush and her quiet place grew quieter, as peaceful as dust; and soon everything was changed, black trunks became blacker, a dump of leaves disappeared, the roof of the shed was afloat in the air, the pump stuck up out of nowhere and its faint-handled shadow seemed the only thing the snow couldn’t cover.

Emma Bishop had not been born on the farm but in a nearby town where five thousand people found themselves eating and
sleeping and working, meeting and greeting, cooking and cleaning, going up and down, and selling and signing, licensing and opining, because it was the county seat. The farm was in the family. It belonged to Emma’s great-aunt, Winnie, but when she died the farm, already run-down, fell further, and into her father’s stubby unskilled mechanic’s hands. Her father, when her mother met him, repaired tractors. Beneath the nail, his nails were black with green grease. Lo and behold, beyond Emma Bishop’s richest imagining, her parents met, married, coupled, whereupon her mother bore, and brought a baby naked into the world, the way, it would later appear, Emma’s father wanted her. Because the baby was inspected for flaws. No one found any.

Emma’s mother was short slender wan, while her father was broad and flat across the front, knotty too, a pine board kind of person. Emma, contrary to the core, was thin as a scarf and twice as tall, angular to contradict her father’s bunchiness, given to swaying even when standing still, swaying like a tall stalk of corn in a field full of wind. It made her difficult to talk to, to follow her face, especially if you had to look up a little as her parents both did. Emma didn’t have Marianne Moore’s recessive features. Hers resembled Edith Sitwell’s in being craggy.

Nevertheless Marianne Moore saw into things, saw seeds in fruit, and saw how a tendril born of grape would wind itself like hair around a finger, cling to anything; or she would wonder what sort of sap went through the cherry stem to make the cherry red. Emma Bishop practiced by watching a worm walking, how it drew its hind end up into its middle, and then accordioned forward from the front. A rubber band could not do better. Leaving a small moist trail soon a light dry line lost on the limestone.

Her tree, where Emma went to read, was a tree of seed. It
bore them in clumps, in clusters, in clouds. They were tapered like boat paddles. Her tree was very late to leaf, and every year her father would declare the ash had died, and indeed it was nothing but a flourish of sticks until, at last, fresh shoots appeared and the squirrels crept out on its branches to eat the tender stemtips. The ground around her tree would be littered with their leavings. While still small and green, seeds would begin to fall, and her father would say the ash was sick, because the seeds were so immature; but there were crowds, mobs of them left, dangling from every new twig like hands full of fingers. Moore called apple seeds the fruit within the fruit, but here the ash seeds hung in the air without the lure or protection of peel or pulp, just a thin tough husk which turned the color of straw and flew from the tree in the fall like shoutfuls of startled locusts.

The ash sucked all the water from the ground and shaded a wide round circle too where nothing much grew, a few baby ash of course, a weed or two, plantain principally, pushing up from the claygray earth to stand defiantly green between the roots. Its trunk was deeply furrowed, the bark itself barky, as if rain had eroded it. “This is the tree Satan’s snake spoke from,” Emma’s father would say, his tone as certain as gospel. “It is the dirtiest tree on God’s earth.” The risen emblem of a fallen world.

The seeds would settle first, whirling up from the dry ground at a breath, stirred as the air stirred, and encircling the trunk with pods which curved gracefully from an oval head back to a needle-sized point, to lie in warm ochre layers like the tiniest of leaves. Her father cursed the tree as if it were littering a street against the law.

And quite a lot of little branches would break off and break a bit more when they hit the ground, causing her father still more annoyance, because the dead branches of this ash were dead in a thorough and severe way, dried as they were by the sky. Finally
the five-leaflet leaves would begin to fall, the tree’s seeds would come down in bunches, and everyone then knew autumn was over and that the sun always withdrew through the now bare branches, and so did the moon.

Her father said it was a moose maple and not an ash at all. Its wood is spongy, but brittle as briars. Emma protested. It was a green ash. She had made the identification. There was no moose maple in the book. That’s what we call it hereabouts—a box elder, big weed, dirtiest tree. A true ash don’t fall apart like that.

Despite her father’s annoyance, Emma would sit upon a smooth bare root, her back against the trunk, surrounded by seeds and leaves, twigs and weeds, and read poetry books. If she’d been a boy, he might have beaten her. She could feel his eye on her, hard as a bird’s. She weathered his rage as the tree weathered the wind. Then one day a branch, broken in a previous storm but caught by other branches, slipped out of their grasp and fell like a spear, stabbing her ankle with such a suddenness she screamed, feeling snake-bit. She saw blood ooze from the wound in astonishment, the stick lying near, stiff and dry, sharp where it had snapped. Emma bawled, not from pain or even shock, but because she’d been betrayed.

Marianne Moore liked to use words like
apteryx
in her poems. Very mannered, her style. Edith Sitwell liked to too. Emma would suddenly say “One fantee wave is grave and tall …” and suddenly sing “The hot muscatelle siesta time fell …” Her mother would hear her with astonishment, for Emma very rarely laughed let alone sang. Even in church she just mouthed.

Now that she hadn’t had to poison her mother or strike her father down in the field with the blade of a shovel, but was so
alone even the chickens unfed had wandered off, she could have sung without surprising anyone, or sworn without shocking her father with unladylike language. She did sing sometimes inside herself. “In the cold cold parlor my mother laid out Arthur …” She didn’t remember any more of that brutally beautiful poem. Words drifted into her eyes. When she was reading, it was always summer under the ash, and words fell softly through her pupils like ash soot pollen dust settling ever so slowly over hours over summer days a season even an entire lifetime that their accumulation was another cover. Solace for the skin.

She bore books out to the tree and made a pile. Her father glared. Why so many? Stick with one. One is plenty. But Emma couldn’t stick to one. She’d begin “When night came, sounding like the growth of trees …” or “In the cold cold parlor …” and she’d feel herself becoming tense, was it her legs folding as if up into her bottom like the worm, and her arms canting outward like the mantis that worried her? Emma had these flyaway eyes, and after a bit she’d skip to another page, or have to drop one book in order to pick up another. Edith would take Emma aback with beauty “sounding like the growth of trees.” Emma’d have to stop, to repeat, to savor, to—in her head—praise, to wonder at the wonder of it, why was that Nova Scotia wake so devastating? not simply because it was being seen by a kid. “His breast was deep and white, cold and caressable.” The way the boxed boy and the stuffed duck went into one another: that was making love the way she imagined it would be if it were properly done. Everyone was entered. No one was under.

A poem like the Nova Scotia poem—brief as it was—would sometimes take her weeks to read, or, rather, weeks to register all its words, and never in their printed order. That ordering would come later. One day, finally, she’d straighten the lines and march them as printed across her gaze. She could not say to her
father when he glared at her, angry she knew because the books, the tree, her intense posture, the searing summer sky, were each an accusation, a reminder of another failure, that the words she read and fled from were all that kept her alive. “The mind is an enchanted thing like the glaze on a katydid-wing …” Words redeemed the world. Imagine! Like the glaze on a katydid-wing, sub … subdivided … sub … by the sun until the nettings were legion … the nettings were legion … Her father really should have kept the grease beneath his nails and never replaced it with plant smutch and field dirt. His world was mechanical, not organic. It was cause followed by effect, not higgledy followed by piggledy and the poke.

Her father’s figure would appear to her, dark and distant, wading through beans. Emma tried to unresent her mother’s failures too. Why hadn’t her mother protested her father’s cruel scrutinies? Even the browbeatings her mother received she endured in silence, though with drooping head. Why had Emma herself stood so still in his stare, less naked later with pubic hair? Skimpy. No fur there. She could have refused. Fled. Cried. She stood in the shed and screamed. She shrieked. She shrilled. But they were in the ground less likely than seeds to volunteer, to rebreed, pop up in a pot or rise from beneath bedclothes sheeted and disheveled, hearing her scream. That’s all she did in the shed. And she went there less and less, needed that silly release less and less. She was even proud she could be so loud, slight and without a chest, weak and out of touch with speech.

Edith Sitwell had a lilt. She went ding dong. Did her verses breathe, Emily Dickinson wanted to know. “Safe in their alabaster chambers …” Hoo. “Untouched by morning …” Emma was untouched. No man had ever laid a hand. Hardly her own, but once, curious, experimentally, secretive, ashamed, she felt
herself as she supposed men did, and then withdrew in disbelief. To never again. “The meek members of the resurrection …” Emma stood in the center of herself and slowly turned her attention. There were windows, sills, shades, beyond the windows a world, fields, the silhouettes of firs and oaks, a dark quick bird, and then a wall a corner crack and peel of plaster pattern of leaf and stem and flower, too, counter of hardwood, wooden cabinets, one door ajar, dark as eyebrow, at the glass knob stop the little light left was captured there and the glass knob gleamed and its faint faint shadow, made light now not light’s interruption, touched the soiled unpainted pine.

Mom and dad she never had await their resurrection, according to Emily. Grand go the years … ages … eons … empires … but only the words will arise, will outwear every weakness. Emma knew. That was why she waited for a line. Not an alabaster chamber or a boy’s box—Arthur’s coffin was a little frosted cake—but
Arthur’s coffin
.

That was what the soul was, like the floor of a forest, foot of great tree, earth on which seeds leaves twiglets fell and lay a season for another season, all the eyelighted earheard words piled up there year after year from the first
no
to final
never
.

Her mother died of the chronics, her father of a fell swoop. Emma would become a certain set of words, wed, you might say, finally, and her flat chest with their warty nips placed next to Bishop’s where Moore’s had been. Her mother’s face was closed as a nut, but you might say the same of Emma’s too, who learned, as her mother doubtless had, to conceal her feelings for so long she forgot she had any.

Scream. The shed would seem to shiver with the sound. It was an awful makeshift, built of cast-off wood and some tin. Perhaps it was the tin that trembled. Hummed. Windows were unnecessary. There were parts between boards. A chicken might cluck till it was thwacked. Their bodies rocked on after.
Upon her tree’s stump, the tree of knowledge, blood was bled. She screamed because there was a world which contained such scenes though she also knew there was worse worse worse sorts of wickedness frequent in it.

Conversations, for instance, Emma never had. She didn’t believe she could sustain one now even if the opportunity were offered, but at one time she thought she missed chatter, the sound of talk, laughter, banter, chaff. Her family exchanged grimaces sometimes; there’d be an occasional outburst of complaint; but mostly words were orders, warnings, wishes—stenographed. Emma thought her father often talked to himself. He’d sort of growl, his head would bob or wag, his lips tremble. Her mother had an impressive repertoire of sighs, a few gestures of resignation, frowns and sucked cheeks. No word of praise was ever passed, a grunt of approval perhaps, a nod, and either no shows of affection were allowed, or there was no affection to be displayed.

So Emma talked to the page. It became a kind of paper face and full of paper speech. “The conversations are simple: about food.” “When my mother combs my hair it hurts.” Emma, however, couldn’t speak well about food. She no longer grew it. She couldn’t cook it. She didn’t eat it. And how could she respond to remarks about her hair. Emma unkinked her hair herself. So she at least knew what the pain of hair pulling was and how carrots felt. Wherever you are the whole world is with you. A nice motto. Emma Bishop applied herself. She worked hard, but without success at first. Her life’s small space had no place for stars. A dusty boot, a mixing bowl, a backyard plot. Judge not. Another maxim. But the boot was her father’s where his foot went and was shaped by how he walked; booted because of the
manure, he said, though the pigeons didn’t even shit on Bishop soil. The earth is dirt. That was his judgment of it, hers of him. “Illuminated, solemn.” The fact was, Emma Bishop hated her mother for being weak, for giving in to her husband’s minor tyrannies. Take the flat of the shovel to him when his back is turned. Instead, Emma’s mother turned her own and disappeared into a chore as though on movie horseback. The spoon spun in the bowl like a captured bird.

When snow and cold kept them cooped, each of them managed most marvelously to avoid one another. If she heard her father climbing the front stairs, Emma used the back one. If her mother and father threatened to meet in the upstairs hall, one ducked into a bedroom until the other had passed. Her father would always appear to be preoccupied, his thoughts elsewhere, a posture and a look which discouraged interruption. The three of them really wanted to live alone, and Emma at last had her wish. Each of them hungered for the others’ deaths. Now Emma was fed.