Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (23 page)

“Pity should begin at home,” Crusoe said, enisled as utterly as Emma was. Sometimes Emma tried to feel sorry for herself, but she scarcely had a self left or the energy available or what she thought was a good reason. Yes, she had barely made a mark on the world, her life was a waste, and she’d had little enjoyment;
but on balance she had to admit she’d rather have read the word
boobs
than have them. A moose comes out of the woods and stands in the middle of the road. When the bus stops, it approaches to sniff the hot hood. “Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house …” Well, there were so many things she hadn’t seen, a moose included, but she had envisioned that large heavy head sniffing the hot hood of the bus, there on that forest-enclosed road, at night, and understood the deep dignity in all things. “All things,” she knew, embraced Emma Bishop’s homely bare body standing in the middle of her room. Antlerless … boobless … with hairless pubes …

Her Iowa summers were long and hot and dusty and full of flies. Ants and flies … In the early days, before unconcern had become endemic, her mother had insisted that the dinner table wear a white linenlike cover. Even dime-store glasses gleamed, cheap white plates shone, and tinny silverware glittered when they sat on the starchy bleached cloth amid their puddles of light blue shadow and pale gray curves. But through the ill-fit and punctured screens the flies came not in clouds but in whining streams. At breakfast it wasn’t so bad. One or two or three had to be waved away from the oatmeal. Maybe, though, that’s when Emma’s aversion to food began. Flies. Raisins for the oats, her father said, waving his spoon. Sugar brings them. They love sweets, her mother said. They did seem to, and crumbs, on which they tried to stand.

These weren’t manure breeders and the curse of cattle, but common bluebottles, persistent and numerous in the peaceful sunshine. Emma would have to shake the cloth from the back porch before they’d fly. They seemed to like sugar, salt, bread crumbs, cereal, leavings of any kind, jam, and Emma learned to
loathe them, their soft buzz and their small walk, their numbers and their fearless greed.

The deep dignity in all things—phoo—not in flies, not in roaches, not in fathers, not in dandelion greens.

“Nature is what we see—the hill—the afternoon—squirrel—eclipse—the bumble bee—nay—nature is heaven.” Not a word about flies. There was a song about a fly, and that rhyme about the old woman who swallowed one, who knew why, but Emma could not recollect ever reading a poem about or even including a fly. Miss Moore wrote about horses, skunks, lizards, but not about flies. Emily D’s little list included the bobolink, the sea, thunder, the cricket, but left out ants, mosquitos, and of course flies. Good reason. Because she wanted to say that Nature was Heaven, was Harmony. Poetry, Emma would have to admit, later, recalling all those flies, poetry was sometimes blather. Her noble resolutions would also falter in front of the phenomenon of the fly. How could she honor anything that would lay its eggs in a wound? They carried diseases with more regularity than the postman mail, and they lived on leavings, on carrion, horse droppings, dirt. Like sparrows and pigeons. Phoo indeed.

Hadn’t she lived on leavings too?

The mantis would close her forelegs like a pocketknife and eat a wasp a fly a lacewing in a trice. She’d rise up to frighten the wasp to a standstill, giving it her triangulating stare, and then strike so swiftly her claws could be scarcely seen, nails on all sides, the hug of the iron maiden.

Nature was rats and mice, briars and insect bites, cow plop and poisonous plants, chickens with severed heads and minute red ants swarming over a stump soaked in blood. It was the bodies of swatted flies collected in a paper bag.

The swatter, an efficient instrument, was made of clothes-hanger wire and window screen trimmed with a narrow band of cloth which bore the name of a hardware store. Emma became
an expert, finally, at something. Sometimes she would hit them while they were still in the air and knock them into the wall, where she’d smack their slightly stunned selves into mush. Even so, they were clever little devils and could sense the swatter’s approach, even though it was designed to pass without a wake or any sound through the air. They knew a blow was coming and would almost always be taking off when the screen broke their wings.

Emma killed many on the kitchen table, sliding the carcasses into a paper sack with the side of the swatter. It occurred to her that there was no word for the crushed corpse of a swatted fly. Her father liked to swing his right hand across the cloth and catch one in his closing fist, a slight smile slowly widening on his face like the circle of a pebble’s plop. Where’s your sack, he’d say, and when Emma held it out he’d shake the body from his palm where it was stuck. Once in a while, with that tiny smile, he’d try to hold his fist to Emma’s ear so she could hear the buzz, but she would leave the room with a short cry of fear, her father’s chuckle following like a fly itself.

After they’d eaten, Emma would clear the dishes away and wait a bit while the flies settled in apparent safety on the crumbed and sugared cloth. Her mother sweetened her tea with a careless spoon. Even the herbals her husband sometimes brewed for her she honeyed up one way or other. The flies would land as softly as soot. They’d walk about boldly on their sticky little feet with their proboscises extended as though requiring a cane. Her father was pleased to explain that flies softened their food with spit so they could suck it up.

Emma liked to get two at once. Each swat would bestir some of the others and they’d whiz in a bothered zigzag for a while before trying to feed again, no lesson learned, the carnage of their comrades of little concern, although a few would remain at work even when a whack fell within a yard of their grazing.

Flies seemed to flock like starlings, but the truth was they had no comrades, no sense of community. Occasionally, a crippled one would buzz and bumble without causing a stir, or a green-bottle arrive in their midst to be met by colossal indifference. Standing across from the center of the table, Emma would slap rapidly at each end in succession while uttering quiet but heartfelt
theres
each time: there and there and there.

Oh she hated the creatures, perhaps because they treated the world as she was treated. It was certainly out of character for Emma to enjoy bloodshed. However, her father approved of her zeal, and her mother didn’t seem to mind, except

for the little red dots their deaths left on the tablecloth. They’d accumulate, those spots, until their presence became quite intolerable to her mother, and she would remind Emma how hard it was to get those spots out, and about the cost of bleach, and how she hated that bag with its countless contents, she felt she heard a rustle from it now and then, it gave her the creeps. Emma wondered what, in her mother, creeps were. Later, when her mother was ill always, and vomiting a lot, Emma thought that perhaps the creeps had won out.

When the fly was flipped from the table into her sack, it would almost always leave that reminder behind, a red speck as bright as the red spider mite though larger by a little. And after the evening meal, Emma would enter a dozen specks and sometimes more into her register.

Where were they coming from? the compost heap? Her father said he saw no evidence of it. Her mother shook her head. Somewhere was there something dead? Her father hadn’t encountered anything, and he walked the land pretty thoroughly. From as far away as the woods? Her mother shook her head. Well, Emma wondered, if the breeding of these flies was a
miracle, God was certainly wasting his gifts. God is giving you something to do, her father said.

There was something in Emma which made her want to keep count, and other things in Emma which were horrified by the thought.

Days drew on, mostly with a monotony which mingled them, so that time seemed not slow, not fast, just not about. And she failed grades and advanced anyway, and grew like a skinny tree to be stared at, and became increasingly useless, as if uselessness were an aim. Why, her father complained, wouldn’t Emma attack those bugs in the garden when she was so murderous about flies. As if he’d failed to notice that Emma had stopped swatting them many months, years, failed grades ago. Things went on in their minds, Emma imagined, out of inertia. Memory was maybe more than a lot of little red dots. The swats were still there, swatting. The paper sack still sat in a kitchen chair like a visitor. And Emma stayed on the page even when all her books were closed. The cloud

The shed got built about the ash stump. Emma could hear the hammering. Built of limbs and logs, it leaned to one side, then another. Had her father any interest in the number of nails he’d hammered while the ash shack was going up? Did he know how long the walk to the mailbox was? how many yards? Without books, Emma couldn’t disappear into them. So she began to make and mail her memory cards, her versified objects, receiving for them a few dollars, and then, with this slim income, to order books of poetry by Elizabeth Bishop from an Iowa City shop. It was a great day when

POEMS

North & South

A Cold Spring

arrived, the title typed on a chartreuse ginkolike leaf lying across the join of two fields, one white for northern snow, she supposed,
the other blue for southern seas. The flap copy was typed, too, and there were warm recommendations from Marianne Moore and Louise Bogan as well as the usual guys. Emma opened the book and saw a poem on a page like treasure in a chest and closed the book again and opened it and closed it many times. She held it in her two hands. Finally, it seemed to open of its own accord. She began “The Monument.” Page 25. Yes, she remembered. Even the brackets [ 25 ]. “Now can you see the monument?” She could. She could see it. “It is of wood built somewhat like a box.” Yes, Emma saw it. Her eyes flew flylike to the yard where the shed stood. It was a revelation.

Later on there would be others.

She turned the page and read the conclusion. “It is the beginning of a painting,” the poem said, “a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument, and all of wood.” All of ash. “Watch it closely.”

Emma’s father probably didn’t care whether she found out or not. He probably neglected to tell her he was intercepting her mail, whether going in or going out, just because he didn’t care, one way or the other. He simply piled it up—the square envelopes with their cards of sewn- and glued- and inked-on sentiments and emblems, those with a few customer requests, some with simple sums inside them, a bookstore order—higgledy-piggledy on a small oak table in the room he was sleeping in now that his wife was ill and vomitous. That’s where, through an open door, Emma saw her envelopes, looking otherwise innocent and unopened, and said aloud in complete surprise: that’s why I never got my May Sarton.

She did not try to retrieve them. To her, they were dead as flies, leftovers from a past life. They almost puzzled her, they seemed so remote from the suspended condition she was presently in, although not that many weeks had passed, she guessed, since she’d composed her last card: four hard green
pea gravels placed like buttonholes inside a wreath of mottled mahonia leaves, stained as though by iodine and flame. In a kind of waking dream, Emma tottered the hundred and more yards to where the postbox leaned from a tuft of weed at the roadside, and opened it on empty. She held on to the lid as though it might fly up, and stared hard into the empty tin, more interested in the space where the confiscation had taken place than in the so-called contraband. Empty. Its emptiness was shaped from zinc. zzzzzz … in … cckkkk. Emma knew at last something for certain: her father was poisoning her mother.

Well, it was no business of hers.

She closed the mailbox carefully so none of its emptiness would leak out.

Indeed her mother rasped to her rest in a week’s time. Her father rolled her mother in the sheets and then the blanket from her bed and laid her at length, though somewhat folded—well, knees a good ways up—in a wooden footlocker. He poured a lot of mothballs in the crannies. We won’t be needing those, he said, fastening the lid with roofing nails. He slid the locker down the front stairs and lugged the box, cursing because it was heavier than he expected and awkward to carry, to the back of the wagon—lucky the wagon was small-wheeled and low—where he propped one end and lifted the other, then pushed the locker in. He never expected Emma to help. At helping she was hopeless. That’s enough for one day, he said. I got to scout out a good place.

He went inside and washed all the household dishes. Grief, Emma decided, was the only explanation.

The next day she saw her father’s distant figure digging in a far field. He appeared to be digging slowly because he dug for a long time.

Emma’s head was as empty of thoughts as the mailbox. There was no reason to stand or sit or walk.

Got my exercise today, he said.

Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop were both dead. Edith Sitwell too. Elizabeth Bishop just keeled over in her kitchen. Nobody knew. Her poems couldn’t purchase her another hour.

I’ve got to figure how to get her in, her father said. Can’t just roll her over. A fall like that might break the box open. We’ll do it tomorrow.

Her father found an egg, which he had for breakfast. Emma rode in the back of the wagon with the coffin and an ironing board. The tractor dragged the wagon roughly over the ploughed ground. Then reluctantly through the marshy meadow. Smoother movement steadied her horizon. Emma remembered the Randolph Scott movie. Her father had chosen a spot near the trees which appeared to have no distinction. Earth was heaped neatly on both wide sides. Emma looked in the hole. “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear.”

Her father backed the wagon up to an open end of the pit. Then he pried the box up with a crowbar and forced the ironing board under it. He never expected Emma to help. He steadied the box on the board as it slid down the board from the wagon. It was, Emma realized, a mechanical problem. The board then was lowered into the grave, and the box once more sent on its skiddy way. In a cant at the bottom, her father wiggled the board out from beneath the box so at last it lay there, as settled as it was going to get. The zinc-headed nails reflected a little light.