How the Days of Love and Diphtheria (3 page)

How the boy woke, lost in the shadow of the old farmer, the white stubble, the manure dried overalls. The oak cane he held, gnarled and hooked. How he had no eyes but gaping caverns and the voice of the woman behind guided the cane against the boy's throat. “Higher, Pa, now to the right, yes, exactly.” How the kitten growled and hissed. “Let me see your feet,” the old farmer murmured, and how he stooped uncertain, his mouth open and there the bloody gums, the few teeth green and jutting, and how he moaned “ah, ah, ah” while his wretched hands stroked the air, while the woman's voice guided him, and how the old farmer stripped the boy of his tennis shoes. How the old mother wept, “I always knew, I always knew.” Her red faded house dress, her ancient skin like crumpled paper. How the old farmer said, “Lord if you can give this boy life again then won't you return to me the sight you stole.” How they asked, “Do you remember us, Son?” and “Have you returned of your own volition?” and how the boy knew enough to say “Yes.” How the boy soon ate porridge and bacon, crisped and greasy, while the kitten drank a saucer of milk, store bought from a plastic jug, and how the old mother said, “All the animals … it happened not so long after you—nothing takes around here since,” while the father sat smoking a pipe on the front porch. How the boy nodded and ate and later the kitten on his lap, purring and warm, milk clinging yet to her whiskers and mouth. How the mother said, “you always did have the touch. Dreamed you'd raise animals or doctor them.” How the boy went to the porch while the kitten slept on the sofa, the farmer's corncob pipe, the blue smoke wafting in corkscrews. Before them the dirt and browned crab grass, the long off road and puffs of dust as cars sped along. How the father asked, “You remember much from that time?” and how the boy said, “No, not much at all,” and how the father seemed to weigh this before returning, “Tell me at least about them flames down there.”

How in those days certain fathers—

How the mother held before him an album of black and white photographs, fastened with browned tape, and how she talked to him as if he knew the moment they were taken. How the old mother and father called him Anderson and now he slept in what they said was his childhood bedroom. How models of zeppelins and airplanes swung suspended from the ceiling and how, piled throughout the room, the glossy magazines picturing famous aviators, Lindberg in goggles posing on the wing, Lindberg in a convertible, waving as confetti scattered like fireworks, Lindberg shaking hands with Hitler. How quiet these nights and how sound the kitten slept against the boy's feet. How the mother showed him photographs of the three of them watching parades along Main Street in their Sunday finest. Father and Anderson cutting lumber. How she showed him his own face pale and unmoving like a wax work, resting in a casket. “You remember?” she asked. “You were right there” and she gestured to the pantry. She kissed him, her breath of onions, her enormous bosom, soft as down pillows. “I never believed it was over,” the old mother said and the boy nodded. “Me neither,” he finally replied.

How in those days Fathers spoke languages nobody understood. In those days Fathers built homes in hillsides with boards and rocks and shovels. How they lived within the cool earth, eating sourdough and the women bulged pregnant in the glow of the hearth. The man gestured to what was once and he said, When all their family died choking, those fathers cleansed the hillsides. These fathers, lost and hopeless, raved in their dead tongue, confused and vibrating against the grasslands they set afire
.

How the father listened from the shadows of the porch. How the boy woke in the night to the father feeling his feet as if he were searching them. His half opened mouth. The raised hackles of the kitten.

When a balding man in a shirt and tie arrived in a tan Packard. Distant clouds of dust and how the boy prayed it was you, come finally to obliterate these long ago infections. How the boy watched from the front porch and in the tall grasses the kitten chased butterflies. The man stood on the steps shaking his head, his red and purple neck, his sunken eyes. “Do you remember me?” the man said to the boy and the boy knew enough to say, “Of course I do.” How the man and the boy sat drinking something like rusty water from a flask. Later the man said, “I miss the adventures we had. You know? Yes, we had some wild times.” How from his pocket the man produced a photograph of two boys, fishing, crew cuts and short pants. How long a man holds the figure of a child within his mind. “I've been married a thousand years now,” the man said. “I've had children. Two. I've seen them born and grown and one dead and one may as well be. In all these years I've seen a great something of the world. But not a day goes by I don't wish we were back there, in that world we left behind.”

How within the family photo album, yellowed newspaper clippings were displayed like brittle carcasses. How the boy knew before he read the headlines. How the ink spoke a language he understood deeper than any articulation.
Diphtheria Claims Ten
and below, the smeared faded photograph of a small boy in a casket and the caption reading:
the strangling angel of children lately claimed young Milton Thomas
. How the old mother whispered over his shoulder, “Your neck swelled to the size of a melon. You remember?” How another evening the mother said, “Some nights I can't sleep thinking about how you told me, ‘Mama, I'm gonna die.' But I told you right back ‘no sweet angel, you never will.' I didn't lie, did I?” How the boy wondered why you did not ravage this town, choking and gone blue and swollen in the necks. Where were your fires and knives when this entire world went fat and dying?

The man gestured to what we once knew and explained how fathers raved in the red light of the world obliterated. How in those days to live in the city was to live on the verge of an ever burning world, the fire smote prairies and forestlands of the deranged and widowed
.

How she arrived, a silhouette within the white sun, her hips and wide bosom. Her red lipstick when she stood on the porch, smiling nervously. How she sat on the rocking chair, petting the kitten, and how the kitten purred, flickering her tail. This woman's long scarlet hair and the freckles burst on her arms, along her nose.

How the boy considered the woman's slender hands and long red nails and how he imagined she would wail and mutilate him with those nails during their congress. How the woman believed he was looking at her wedding band. “He's a good man,” she said as if apologizing. “Sturdy as a bull.” How when she finally left she held him close and her figure beneath and her perfume, like an animal musk. How she said, “I always thought it would be you, I always did—” and how the boy knew enough to say, “I did too.” How she wiped at her tears and the mascara running. How she kissed his cheek, the red smear. How her eyes said she would always love this boy she never knew.

How the fires you built became larger than our largest cities. How the boy's face grew hot and cracked open. How his skin seemed the skin of an alligator and how the kitten alone knew him.

How the boy found a shoebox of photographs and how this Anderson, submerged in his casket with hands folded over while blurred relations and friends passed by his side, their faces wrapped and obscured, from the mother to the man who brought slabs of ice to cool the body. How the photos depicted the black smudge of a fly settled on Anderson's nose. How from then on the parlor seemed a void to this boy and how he lay in the spot, his hands crossed against his chest, imagining the feet and legs passing, and how beneath the imitation Persian rug, these wood planks yet stained from the long ago melted ice.

Before the yellow roe sacks, the blackish spatters of blood and heart meat on the rocks, before the slide of the knife into the belly of a strangled animal, how the man said, “We used to come down here all the time, remember?” There the rocky shore, still and strewn corpses of fish and half fish, the too thin arc of their bones, the flies swirling the meat. Now the long off vibrations of grasshoppers, the blue almost limitless water before them. How there were two boats docked and how the man seemed to mull before choosing the larger. How he slit the rope with a pocket knife and soon they drifted with their rods, their container of worms, their cooler of beer. How the sun and the rocking of the boat. How the boy asked, “Why the
Marie?”
and how the man said, “How's that?” and the boy, “Why did you name your boat the
Marie?”
and how after a pause the man said, “It was my mother's name.” How this man slurped rusted water from his flask and smoked Marlboros and how he flicked these over the side, hissing in the blue green. How he filled his flask with pond water and how at his motion the murk seemed clouded with the figures of catfish and pike, shadows moving in the below, gliding easy and malevolent. How the man said, “If I hold you by the ankles, if I promise not to drop y—My god, have you ever seized such a creature, by the lips, the teeth—” How the man said he dreamed himself inside the belly of a fish. “What a relief to feel so young, as if I just got made, and to not remember,” how the man gestured to the world around then he finished, “this.” How this man floats in his sleep, covered in scales, in gills and how he later said, “I know where you been.” How he explained Korea and the men he killed there. The phantom eyes in his dreams, the yellow bloated faces. How the flames seemed more like shadows, and all the dead spoke the same impossible language. “I thought it was Korean at first,” the man said, until his mother swayed amongst, then his father, and from their fat mouths, the same nonsense language as if their teeth were broken and their tongues removed, as if they were filled with the slow humming of a thousand dying bees. Later, they docked the boat and here the man took the boy by the shoulder. How he said, “Would you teach me what they're saying? Only to understand what they want, if they're hurt, if they blame me—” How the
Marie
drifted slow along the edges. How eagles circled, black and wretched.

How the black and white photos of faces smeared and blurred, faces caught in ghost moments, faces at funerals and covered with bandanas, faces paused at the casket, and before them, the face of the stilled infant, the little boy, the man, swollen and choked to death, the blurred faces of mothers and fathers and their little children, faces wrapped in bandanas and faces swallowed entire by gasmasks.

Now the boy on the woman's lawn and how he watched her through a lighted window, firm and large in a cotton nightgown. Now the emptiness of a world gone calm and flat and smokeless. Now the woman in her nightgown. How she yawned and dimmed the bedroom light. Now this lawn and how the only sounds were frogs and crickets, chirping and singing. Now this wide emptiness, this green world, a world of lawns and trees. A world small and helpless. A world you did not build.

How in those days, row upon row of wheezing infants trussed in white. Nurses who paced and breathed the contaminated air. Nurses who breathed with lungs clotted by the breath of choking infants
.

Now shoeboxes filled with love letters to the blind father, love letters smeared and streaked with new tears, the words blurred into new languages, the true languages of loss and aloneness. The language of moaning. How the photographs of a blurred exotic woman, in kimonos and dresses, smiling alongside the blind father, and how his eyes saw in those days. How he stood proud and young and pale and dressed in khaki, how he leaned on a Harley Davidson against a malt shop window, how she lay swaddled in a heap of blankets, nude. How inky fingerprints smeared across her breasts, within her legs, and how the boy watched from the shadows as the blind man stuffed his hands deep into these heaps, how he read with his fingers and his mouth, how he said “ah ah ah,” with ink smeared lips and tongue. How the man replaced the photos and closed the shoebox lids, how his hands and face, smeared and black-clotted, and how he crept away, the hollow thump of his cane along the walls. How later, when the mother saw his hands and face as he lit his pipe, how her voice became a bruised wilderness, and how she said, “I could have been rich, there were offers. Instead all I got was heartache and dirt.”

Now the man gestured along the valleys below. The fires he saw and the languages they spoke
.

How the old father stood over the boy while he slept. How the boy's feet in the mornings were cramped and moist. How he locked the bedroom door and yet each night, the weight of the old blind man, the press of his withered face against the wood, his stiff agitated breaths. How the kitten, locked within, yowled and moaned, her white fur shed and billowing and now everywhere descending. Hereafter how the boy and the kitten slept on a cot in the basement. Now within the moist and mold of the dirt floor. How the kitten slept contented and how the boy searched the language of the webs strung along the beams and pipes, the thin moonlight peeling through the cracked basement windows. The blind old father, silent at the top of the stairs, and how he disturbed none below.

How the boy crouched on the woman's lawn. How he threw pebbles at her windows and how pebbles dented her siding, ricocheted off her bedroom window. How the window webbed and bulged into fibers. How the window caved and shattered. How within the open yawning of the broken window the woman sobbed and wept and how this language clotted with the voice of frogs and crickets, the articulation of glass, shattered and falling. How the husband in his bed insisted he heard no sound. How he lay in his white t-shirt with his reading glasses. How he pressed his hands to the window, intact, and the woman witnessed them passed into a world gouged and battered.

How the boy wandered the dust of the farm and how everywhere, the swirling of weeds and clumps of soil, the distant skulls and ribs. How this farm seemed in photos, thriving with goats, sheep, cows, chickens, horses and now, how the wire pens lay gray and rotten. How the barn was caved and pungent with vacant life. How the mother said nothing would grow but the fields had not been seeded in years, and how the live weeds jutted through the dust, tall and green, weeds and wild flowers burst from the corpse of the field. How the blind father sat smoking on the porch and how he murmured, “Since you… since you left” and how the man worked his mouth as if chewing a cud before he said, “a pestilence like you never seen in your days.” How the boy did not know how the mother found the father,