Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (22 page)

However the habits of a life remained. Emma was haunted by them, and repeatedly found herself behaving as if she might any minute have to strip or encounter her mother like a rat on the cellar steps.

At more than one point, Emma pondered their acts of avoidance. And she concluded that each was afraid of the anger pent up inside like intestinal gas whose release would be an expression of noisy and embarrassingly bad manners. They also supposed that this swampy rage was equally fierce in others, and feared its public presence. With so few satisfactions, the pleasure of violence would be piercing, as if the removal of any player might redeem a dismal past, or create new and liberating opportunities, which of course it wouldn’t … hadn’t … couldn’t …

Occasionally they would have to go to town for various provisions.
The tractor, their only vehicle, and very old, nevertheless purred. Emma and her mother rode in an old hay trailer, most unceremoniously, Emma with her legs dangling from the open end, which made her mother nervous. For these occasions, Emma would wear what her mother called “her frock.” A piece of dirty burlap was thought to be her frock’s protection from the soiled bed of the wagon, so she sat on that. And watched the dust rise languidly behind the wagon’s wheels, and the countryside pass them on both sides like something on a screen. The nearby weeds were white as though floured.

For her birthday—twice—she’d been taken to a movie. The town had a small badly ventilated hall, poor sound, and a cranky projector. Actually, since they couldn’t afford more than one ticket, you’d have to say Emma was sent to the movie. Both times her mother had warned her—both times to Emma’s surprise—“Don’t let anyone feel your knee.” To Emma’s nonplussed face her mother would reply: “It’ll be dark, you see.” Darkness and desire were, for Emma then, forever wed. The films impressed her mightily. Gaudy, exotic, splendid, they didn’t at all resemble her daily life, but they were additional experience nevertheless, and showed that the strange and far away was as inexplicable as the common and nearby. Words on her pages, on the other hand, even when mysteriously conjoined, explained themselves. Moonlight and mist were mute. But a line of verse which described moonlight and mist caught in pasture bushes like lamb’s wool, for instance, offered her understanding. A film might capture the fog as it crawled across the pasture, but there’d be no lamb’s wool clinging to its images.

The movies weren’t her world for another reason. The pictures, the figures, the scenes, the horses, the traffic, passed like a parade. Highways ran into mountains, streams rattled over rocks and fell in foam. Clouds scudded across the sky, and their shadows dappled the ground. The sun set like a glowing stone.
Emma’s well went weeks without a lick of light, and the yard lay motionless under its dust and seeds, disturbed only by an occasional burst of breeze. The mantis waited, head kinked, hard-eyed. Her mother occupied a room as if she were household help. But Randolph Scott was out of sight in a thrice. And all the sounds … the sounds were bright.

All the while she sat in this strange dark room with a few strange dark shapes, none of whom offered to touch her knee, and watched these grainy gaudy imaginary movements, Emma was aware that her father and her mother were out in the town’s drab daylight, their shopping soon completed, waiting for the picture to be over so they could go home. They’d be stared at, their tractor and its wagon watched. As time and the film wore on, Emma became increasingly anxious. If she had any enjoyment from the show, it was soon gone. On the drive home, her mother would cover her sullenness with another coat.

Emma sat shaded from the hot summer sun by her ash—moose maple and went in her head to New Brunswick to board a bus for a brief—in the poem—trip, and view her favorite fog once again. By far her favorite fog. Yet it rendered for her her Iowa snow most perfectly. “Its cold, round crystals form and light and settle …” Here was at last the change: the flat close sky, the large flakes falling more softly than a whisper. Yet the snow would stay to crust and glare and deepen, to capture colors like lilac and violet because of all of the cold in those blues, and repeat them every day like her bread and breakfast oats. Settle in what? “In the white hens’ feathers …” “…  in gray glazed cabbages …” She couldn’t get enough of that. “…  in gray glazed … in gray glazed cabbages …” “on the cabbage roses …” The repetition enchanted her. So she repeated it.

As temporary as dew was, so they said—more meltable than oleo—the snow nevertheless stayed for months, covering the seeds which had lain for months on the hard dry monthslong
ground. Then there’d be mud for months, oozy as oatmeal; whereas Randolph Scott would scoot from frame to frame like a scalded cat. Dew could be counted on to disappear by mid-morning. But you’d never sense when. What sort of change was changeless change—imperceptibly to dry the weeping world’s eye—when Ann Richards rode through outfits faster than Randolph mounted his horse? And when Emma was wounded by her faithless moose maple, the scab formed so slowly it never seemed to.

By the shaded road, at the edge of a glade, in open woods, the mayapples rose, their leaves kept in tight fists until the stems reached the height of a boot and a bit, when each fist unfolded slowly to open a double umbrella a foot wide—hundreds of the round leaves soon concealing the forest floor. This was the rate of change Emma understood. Differences appeared after days of gray rain and a softening wind. As predictable as the train though. Then glossy white flowers would show up like tipped cups. Bluebells were bolder and would spread a blue haze over the muckier places. Cowslips her mother called them. But the mayapple’s flower hung from a fork in the stem and well under the plant’s big deep green leaves. Finally a little jaundiced lemon-shaped fruit the size of an egg would form. At her father’s insistence they’d gather a few peck-sized baskets and boil the nubbins into an insipid jellylike spread for bread.

Her father claimed the mayapple was rightly called a mandrake, but the plant didn’t scream when Emma pulled a few from the ground, nor were its roots man-shaped; it grew far from the woodshed, their only gallows, and she doubted it had the power to transform men into beasts. Instead it left some toilsome fruits to enlarge and encumber their larder.

Her father prowled the meadows and woods looking for edibles, herbs and barks he said were medicinal when turned into tea, vegetable dyes her mother would never use. Since these
lands didn’t belong to them, Emma felt uneasy about what she thought was a kind of theft: of nuts and berries, wild grapes and greens. Emma put no stock in her father’s claim to understand nature, because he was at home and happy only around machines. His tractor was his honey.

Nor did her mind change much. It was like a little local museum. The exhibits sat in their cases year after year. Possibly the stuffed squirrel would begin to shed. The portraits continued to be stiff and grim. Until her poetry taught her to pay attention. And then she saw a small shadow—she supposed shame—pass across her father’s face when he looked at her nakedness. Because she was hairing up, she supposed. And found grief beneath her mother’s eye in a wrinkle. A hard blue sun-swept sky became a landscape. Even now, when they were both dead, it was still impossible to go in the shed except to scream, and, through the greater part of her growing up and getting old, from most things she still fled.

Was she screaming for the chickens or the tree?

As slowly as her scab, her father’s resolution formed. The moose had wounded his daughter. It had to come down. After all, he enjoyed the solemn parental right of riddance.

Poets were supposed to know and love nature. “Nature, the gentlest mother is.” Purely urban or industrial poets were suspicious freaks. “Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and the evening commences.” She had taken the knowledge and the love for granted. “Carrots form mandrakes or a ram’s-horn root sometimes.” But then she learned that it was not good to be “a nature poet,” and that descriptions were what girls did, while guys narrated and pondered and plumbed. Ladies looked on. Gentlemen intervened. “Nature is what we see—the hill—the
afternoon—squirrel—eclipse—the bumblebee.” Surely she was seeing herself as a gazer and seeking her salvation in sight. She was seeking to see with a purposeless purity, her intent always to let Being be, and become what it meant to become without worry, want, or meddlesome intervention. If anything were to alter, she must allow it to alter of itself; if anything were to freeze, even new-budded buds, she had to be grateful for that decision; if anything were to die, she’d delight in their death. For all is lawful process.

When Emma had reached such serenity, such selfless unconcern, she would be ready to disappear into her memorial dress, lie down in a sublime line of verse, a line by Elizabeth Bishop. Since she hadn’t the art necessary to express the dehumanized high ground she aspired to, she would have to turn to someone who had that skill, if not such a successfully pursued impersonality. For who had? She

And the tree groaned and crashed with a noise of much paper being angrily wadded, as if God were crumpling the Contract. A cloud stood above the tree like the suggestion of a shroud to mark the spot and evidence the deed.

Miss Moore, in her silly round black hat, looking like the
Monitor
, or was it the
Merrimack
, her hands half-stuffed in a huge muff made of the fur of some poor beast, stared with consummate calm out of her jacket image at Emma. Not a mirror. Not naked but smothered in overcoat except for her pale face and pale throat. No sign of nips the size of dimes, or barely there breasts or bony hips or hair trying to hide itself in shame inside its cleft. A slight smile, calm demeanor, self-possessed. Light is speech, her poem like the camera said. “Free frank impartial sunlight, moonlight, starlight, lighthouse light, are language.” But not firelight, candlelight, lamplight, flickergiven, waver-lovers. The firefly’s spark, but not an ember’s glow, not match flare or flashlight. Stood there. Aren’t lies, deceptions, misgivings,
reluctances, unforthcomings, language? Stood there. Stood there. Could one ever recover?

Chainsaws her father understood. They wore like a watch a little engine.

The Bishops would dodge one another for days. Occasionally, Emma would catch a glimpse of her mother sitting in the kitchen drinking a little medicinal tea her husband had brewed to soothe her sick stomach. From her window she might see the tractor’s burnt orange figure chewing in a far field. She’d imagine cows they never had, stable a horse in their bit of barn, with a little lettuce and a carrot visit her hutch of rabbits, when a paste-white chicken would emerge from between piles of scrap wood and scrap metal as if squeezed from a tube.

Emma’s eye would light; it would linger; it would leave. Life too, she was avoiding. There were days she knew the truth and was oppressed by her knowledge. These were days of discouragement, during which, almost as a penance, she would sew odd objects she had carefully collected to squares of china white cardboard, and then inscribe in a calligrapher’s hand a saying or a motto, a bit of buckup or advice about life, which seemed to express the message inherent in her arrangement of button or bead or bright glass with a star shape of glued seeds, dry grass or pressed petal, then, sometimes, hung from a thin chain or lace of leather, a very small brass key, with colored rice to resemble a fall tree, and a length of red silk thread like something slit.

Forget-me-not was a frequent sentiment.

These she would put in little handmade envelopes and leave in the postbox by the road for the postman to mail to the customers who answered her modest ad in
Farm Life
. Emma did not in the least enjoy this activity, which required her to look out for and gather tiny oddities of every tiny kind, to select from her lot those which would prove to be proper companions, envision
their arrangement as if thrusting stems into a vase of flowers, and finally to compose a poem, a maxim, an epigram that suited their unlikely confluence. So on really down days she would do it, on days of rueful truth, which may account for the cruel turns her verses would sometimes take, veering from the saccharine path of moralizing admonitions into the wet depths of the ditch where the lilies and the cattails flourished, just to point out—because she couldn’t help herself, because she had no prospects, no good looks, no pleasures herself—that the pretty was perilous, pleasure a snare, success a delusion, that beneath the bright bloom and attractive fruit grew a poisonous root.

Emma’s sentiment cards were, however, a means to a greater good, for it was with the small sums her sales produced that she purchased her poetry: books by Bishop, Moore, Sitwell, and Dickinson, on order volumes of Elinor Wylie and Louise Bogan, which, she would regularly realize, unaccountably hadn’t come.

She shared grass-of-Parnassus with Elizabeth Bishop because it grew near the bluebell’s sog, and in Nova Scotia too. It was a part of the inherent poetry of names: lady’s slipper, sundew, jack-in-the-pulpit, forget-me-not, goldthread, buttercup, buttonbush, goldenrod, moonshine, honeysuckle, star grass, jewelweed, milkwort, butter-and-eggs, lion’s heart, Solomon’s seal, Venus’s looking-glass, with some names based on likeness, plant character, or human attitude, such as virgin’s bower, crowfoot, Queen Anne’s lace, Quaker lady, wake-robin, love vine, bellwort, moneywort, richweed, moccasin flower, snakemouth, ladies’ tresses, blue curls, lizard’s tail, goosefoot, ragged robin, hairy beardtongue, turtlehead, Dutchman’s-breeches, calico, thimbleweed, and finally bishop’s cap; or because they were critter-connected much as mad-dog was, hog peanut, gopher-berry, goose tansy, butterfly weed, bee balm, moth mullen, cow-wheat, deer vine, fleabane, horseheal, goat’s-rue, dogberry; or were based on location and function and friendliness like
clammy ground cherry, water willow, stone clover, swamp candle, shinleaf, seedbox, eyebright, bedstraw, firewood, stonecrop, Indian physic, heal all, pitcher plant, purple boneset, agueweed, pleurisy root, toothwort, feverfew; or were simply borrowed from their fruiting season like the mayapple, or taken from root or stem or stalk or fruit or bloom or leaf, like arrowhead, spiderwort, seven-angled pipewort, foamflower, liverleaf, shrubby five-finger, bloodroot; while sometimes they gained their name principally through their growth habit, as the staggerbush did, the sidesaddle flower, prostrate tick trefoil, loosestrife, spatterdock, steeplebush, Jacob’s ladder; although often the names served as warnings about a plant’s hostility or shyness the way poison ivy or touch-me-not did, wild sensitive pea, lambkill, adder’s tongue, poison flagroot, tearthumb, king devil, needle-grass, skunk cabbage, chokeberry, scorpion grass, viper’s bugloss, bitter nightshade, and lance-leaved tickseed; or they were meant to be sarcastic and cutting like New Jersey tea, bastard toadflax, false vervain, mouse-eared chickweed, swamp lousewort, monkey flower, corpse plant, pickerelweed, Indiana poke, and the parasitic naked broom rape, or, finally, gall-of-the-earth—few of which Emma knew personally, since her father had made edibility a necessary condition for growth in the family garden, and had stepped upon her nasturtium although she’d argued for its use in salads. But peas, beans, and roots were what he wanted. Salads don’t make or move a muscle, he said. So instead of cultivating or observing weeds and flowers in the field, Emma collected and admired and smelled their names and looked at their pictures in books.