Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America
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It is the rain that wakes her. It doesn’t succeed until it is coming down in corrugated sheets. She sits up in the metal shed of the rain. It is pounding on the bare skin of her legs, streaming off every angle her body makes as she works the sticks around as if they were ski poles and shoves against them, getting up. It is not the wind she thinks of, just the rain, the soot of the Mesa clouds coming down silver and pewter and lead. Coming down black in the darkness of the southwest. It is like poured lead. She can’t see Carl’s place and on the pavement the rain is little lead balls, or water on the hot cook stove, bouncing.
She stands up; the heavy coat and the long soaked skirt beneath it cling to her. Water is growing in the ditch and she sees it now streaming off the dormer and the eaves of Parsons. The water comes evenly off the roof line and down into the flower bed and down the main, wide steps of the porch. It runs down the sidewalk, cleaning it, clots of mud dissolving, brown in silver. She can hear it splattering near the porch from where the downspout has come off.
The missing downspout makes her think of her uncle’s farm. Rainin’ like a cow pissin’ on flat rock. Her uncle standing at the dining room window looking out at the massive sheets of endless rain, rain pouring, pounding down on his corn crop, drowning it out. It’s the only thing she remembers, him standing there with that phrase and nothing else but the loop of wire and the pliers in his back pocket. She walks in that rain now, heading towards the Parsons’ house as though it were her uncle’s—the time flowing seamlessly together.
Got to get in out of this rain. She is there now, at the porch, studying the grain of the wood where the paint of the front steps has come off. Then they see her. The door opens. The little blonde Parson comes down, a thin wisp of a girl, the littlest of them all on her left side.
“Mom!”
She sees the flared haunches of Mrs. Parson coming at her down the steps and feels her arm behind. They walk her up. The cane and umbrella go down, forgotten. She feels the warm strength of their flesh and the humid warmth of the air still trapped in the Parson house as they go into the front room. Her coat goes off and she feels a blanket. She sees the soft living room sofa chair where she inevitably will sit. Later a chair, brought from the dining room, goes under her feet. She looks at the full, flushed, concerned face of Mrs. Parson who is trying to say something softly, but Mary cannot hear.
She strains, she tries, but it is no use. She sleeps.
Island Home
Mary doesn’t remember when they brought her home. She just traded places. She remembers vaguely the kitchen, the wooden spoon in the oatmeal of her breakfast and her own looking to see if the fire is out. But she does not remember the stairs, the loose rug that always catches on the door, the grandfather clock in the entry way facing the wall clock, always one minute early, looking down from the upstairs hallway where she must have gone.
For she is—here, now—in her own room. Someone has dressed her for bed and settled her into it and gone. Mrs. Parson, no doubt. She can still see the trail of underwear from the middle dresser drawer. She can hear the rain, dripping off her black wool coat in the closet, but outside it is quiet. She looks south out to the street. The window is open a few inches; the trees over at Carl’s place are as quiet as are her own.
She sees that in the last of the light. Even to the west it is settled down into black: black and quiet. There is nothing to do: nothing to do but settle into the soft inundation of the cotton mattress like a cloud. Nothing to do but wait for sleep. Like a dry leaf driven by the wind this way and that, old Mary has returned. It is almost Biblical. She is dry, safe on dry ground in her island home. Only her coat, dripping in the closet, tells of the long journey and the rain.
Is she unsponsored in the hollow of her old bed, her frail form lodged there in the depths, in the exhaustion of her long journey? Or does memory, the warm fabric of memory itself—held beyond conscious awareness—surround her now as she rests in the darkened sanctuary of all that her mother maintained; of all that her father wanted to extend and ultimately left?
Finis
In the darkness Mary wakens. In the darkness almost woolen, gathered around her like a blanket, she can hear his voice. She cannot see the faded curtains or the dark frame of the window, but she can hear the voice. At first she thought it was her confirmation pastor from long ago, but now she knows better. She can hear it quite plainly now.
Her father is talking to her in the darkness. It seems to Mary that he is in another room, a room to the east. And he is calling.
Sometimes she thinks she is with him in church, sitting on his lap as the final hymn is being sung. The communion is over and the old hymn is wafting on the air:
I came to Jesus as I was
Weary, and worn, and sad
I found in him a resting place,
And he has made me glad.
Her father’s voice is there. Yes. She can hear his voice, thinning on the highest notes as it always did until it almost disappears in the larger chorus of voices lifted softly.
But then she wonders if it is voices that she is hearing, or merely the wind?
Whatever it is, it has come for her. It is drawing her forth—inviting her out.
Mary can hear her heart thumping, pounding away beneath the thin crust of her fragile chest. She thinks of the wind: it is like the wind, come again. It pushes her away. The wind is a hand in the middle of her back, shoving her. She thinks of her umbrella, her cane. The wind is probing, unpinning all the protections. The wind is in her heart.
Go on out! She can feel the wind, forcing her to other places. She has known it in many ways in all her years, felt it on her body, heard it at the windows and in the protest of the very timbers of the house. But she has never really been afraid.
The wind simply is. And now, it seems, that it has come for her. Lying there, before the wind, in the midst of the wind strangely in the midst of her, Mary seems to decide. Her mind, her spirit, begin to wander out—searching.
Go on out!
Old Mary knows what she must do. It is an old knowledge: instinctive, primal.
Strange, in the midst of the very last of her breath, old Mary can almost smile.
Old Mary is listening.
THE HAYBINE
The Grass divides as with
a Comb–
A spotted shaft is seen–
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on–
—Emily Dickinson
#986, A Narrow Fellow in the Grass