Category: Fiction

by Marni Asplund Campbell

My father’s heart is strong and scarred, bound in spots by
thread, a delicate patchwork of veiny fabrics. I imagine, when
I talk to him on the telephone, his physical presence. I can hear
his breathing in the brief pauses before he answers a question-
a necessary affectation, no doubt, after years of playing the
law professor, gently withholding wisdom like a tweed-coated
Socrates. He always signals the end of the conversation with a
heartier tone, “Well, we love you Marni,” and it is at this
moment when I think I can hear his heartbeat-slow, deliberate,
like his golf game, or the way he plays “Laura” on the piano.
It was my lullaby, as he nursed me through cold Edmonton
nights, his first pink daughter, a rhythm of protection, quiet
reassurance.

While he was a bishop for ten years, his heart must have
absorbed the shocks of a hundred lives’ worth of infidelity,
drunken, angry hatred and poisonous despair- absorbed them
well on the outside, never showing the pain that threatened to
burst its walls, like Milton’s cannon, with the combined combustion
of saltpeter and sorrow. A father for twice as long, it must
have torn and bled with each scrape and sin. He taught me once
how to skip, step-hop, step-hop, in front of our house. An
uncommon moment for a man, tall legs moving to a child’s double
rhythms. But I tripped when I tried, and fell on my nose, making
it bleed. He carried me to the bathroom, and cried, just a few
small tears that got lost in my hair. I was secretly thrilled with
the glamor of the injury and impressed by his emotion.

His father’s heart was no less strong, but grew fat on Alberta
beef and fried bread. It sent him signals, tiny bursts of hot
semaphore-stop, slow down – but they were silenced by ignorance
and a glass of bicarbonate of soda. A heart as wide as the prairies,
but still one day in the church cloakroom by the chapel, it
stopped. Just stopped. In a glorious seizure it ceased and settled,
my grandfather falling on the floor by the dripping winter boots.
Dad, still in college, bore the loss. But his heart also bore the
hereditary weaknesses- the too-tender empathy that made it
shudder at pain and ugliness, the fierce integrity that made it
tremble at avarice, that luscious longing for meat and gravy. At
the end of his meal, Dad would go to the cupboard for a piece
of soft white bread, and slowly sop up the last of his gravy, winking
at his pleasure. And that germ of weakness that pulsed
through his veins spoke to him one day. Stop. Slow down. He
called the ambulance himself and waited for it in front of his
office.

I told my little sister when she came home from kindergarten,
“Emily, Dad had a heart attack today.” I don’t remember how I
knew. Was there a note on the fridge, by the picture of Mark in
Brazil? Did Mom call? Emily sat on my lap and cried silently,
like a woman.

Dad spent a month in the hospital, waiting for the slow revelations
that could chart the waste of flesh, the hardenings and
softenings of chambers and tissues. The worst test, said Dad, was
the angiogram. You were conscious so that you could cough and
make the muscle jump for a more lively picture, and it was more
painful than the attack, like having fire shot into your veins. And
there, in the basement of the Hotel Dieu hospital, lit up like a
crazy neon roadmap, was the impasse, the heart-plug, the 45 years’
worth of saturated fats and silent anxiety. It was a quadruple
block, and needed to be removed.

The night before his surgery, we all went to the hospital and
sat in a room at the end of the cardiac wing. Beautiful-
surrounded by windows, on the eleventh floor, where we could
see miles of Lake Ontario, dull grey and silver. It must have been
January, because it wasn’t quite frozen . From that height, the
waves looked like a relief map, the continent of Europe in
motion. We sang some hymns-we’d never really done much with
Family Home Evening, but this seemed an appropriate time to
approximate the form – and each one of us said something about
Dad. But the miracle came when he, like Abraham, silenced us
with his presence, and told us simple stories about his love and
gratitude for his children, his wife. We have no promise of a
painless life, he said, or even the presence of beauty to temper
the suffering. All we know is that it is good to love. Then we
prayed, kneeling by the windows, and left. I slept with my
mother that night. She couldn’t stand to be alone with the extra
pillows and the telephone.

I also stayed with her during the surgery, when I wasn’t in
school-10 hours that I remember in small bursts. Friends brought
sandwiches, jello, ice cream. Mom ate nothing. Another family
was waiting for their father in surgery, and at midnight a nurse
came to tell them that he had died. And I learned then that
death was nothing, really nothing, and that was the awful, leering
injustice of it. Just a word and an absence -he is no more.
Mom and I cried like it was for us, and we were alone.

Another friend came – she took me to the cafeteria; Mom was
immovable as a sphinx, convinced that her vigilance would speed
the miracle. When we came back the nurse had been there. The
doctor had asked if we wanted a priest-the operation done, Dad’s
heart, romantic little organ, insulted by the thoughtless vivisection
of the scalpel, refused to beat again. I found a quarter, called
my father’s bishopric counselors. As moments crystallize into
permanence, they acquire unnatural dimensions. This one seems to
me now gigantic, the time drawing out like Einstein’s light-speed
clock, aging more agonizingly than the bean I planted in Primary.
They came and washed and anointed their hands, then his head,
surrounded by green nurses and the surgeons, with the ghastly
chest exposed, ribcage casually set aside like kindling. His heart
began to beat. I asked him later if he’d had a near-death
experience, and he said, “No Marni, just a damned painful one.”

I suppose a girl always harbours a peculiar love for her father,
a subtle fascination with his tallness and inherent opposition to
her substance, but this is not really going to be about Dad. For
I learned, during the hours in the waiting room, when we sat
holding hands just for warmth and the reassurance of vitality,
during the weeks after, when she lost twenty pounds, and let me
drive the car, even though I was still fifteen, when she finally ate
with me, a whole strawberry pie with cream between the two of us,
that my mother was a woman, enigmatic. Not a monolith of power,
dictating piano practice and clean the bathrooms, but a wife and
lover, who knew much more intimately than I the rhythm of my
father’s life, the rhythm of my own creation. Her frantic energy
was an expedient counterpoint to his soft sureness, the two bound
endlessly together by mysterious ties of blood and bone. And last
week, as I lay on a paper-covered table in the Health Center, I
heard a new rhythm, an insistent swish-swish twice the speed of
my own, transferred through jelly smeared on my stomach and
a tiny microphone. It filled the room with a mystical presence,
stronger, it seemed, than my own life, more lovely than my
husband’s eyes as he smiled.

by Stephenie Swindle Clark

Redbank’s porch faces my porch, and I have seen him tumble-
rumble the twenty-two steps that lead off of it. It was the summer
I learned to drive and I was like I always was, sitting in the yellow
chair with a hat and some water. It was sunshine and a radio on
upper dial stations. A radio that played all June, all July, all
August, blown in from somewhere. And for this radio, the sun,
my yellow chair and water, Redbank’s spill passed easily. And I
helped him up. I shook him. I said, “Can you hear me? What do
I look like?” I said, “Your knees, your chin and this by your ribs –
what is it that goes on in your head?” And I took my back-pocket
comb and combed. I tied his shoes. I said, ”All this smells of dirt
clods being thrown against the sidewalk- to scare away animals
and small children-kerwangy!” Just like that. Redbank was eight.

My father, John Joseph, when he was tired and mad, in bed
watching game shows, I bargained. “John Joseph, what do you
want with that despicable green-thingy Volkswagen? You don’t drive
it like I’d like to drive it,” I said. “Give it and I’ll clean your house.
I’ll pick tomatoes – all summer, I tell you. And then you hand
over the keys with no backstabbing, no wishy-washy, John Joseph.”
“Razor-backed, blood-gushing daggers,” he said. “You do this
to me. But the keys I’ll give you. You’re a Virginia deal maker.”
“Damn, damn, I’ll make sure you can see it when you smile
in that kitchen floor, my twinkling floor.”
So I swept. I mopped. I made Vienna sausages into French stew.
I sorted laundry. I made piles for boys’ and mens’. Underwear I
kicked into the corner. And I pre-spotted. I folded, pressed,
steamed, groceried, fed the baby and kept him away from
the garbage cans. “Tasty, tasty,” I would tell him when I took the
butter wrappers from his mouth. I set his Star Wars playpen in
the kitchen there by me. I would put him there and he would
murmur and be pleased at how he could adjust his legs, his
arms, spit at his toys.
The pretend bay windows in our kitchen went from floor to
ceiling. They showed our porch, our garden, our fence . And then,
Redbank’s garden and Redbank’s porch. For the first three weeks
of summer Redbank sat, like a sailor, in white underwear, and
watched me from his porch while I shook the kitchen rugs, swept
and hefted, stood with my hands across my waist; I would carry
things from room to room and stop to rest and think and look
at the baby with my hands at my waist. Before napping, the baby
would stand and whirl holding fiercely, so fiercely to the edge
of his pen.

John Joseph handed over the keys when he really did see his
face in the linoleum. “I got my driver’s license,” I told him. And
he sucked air through the hole he had drilled in his thumbnail.
He looked at my twinkling floor. “Here’s ten bucks,” he said.
“Good one.” And I got in my car and drove. I drove everywhere.
I went through high school and college and I said, “You want
a ride? Do you?” I was a good driver. And I am still. I drive like
fire. And today I say, “Yeah, I’ll give you a ride,” and I say, “I’m
with child. Yes, I am.” And I shake my body like hollandaise and
Jello. I smack my gut and say, “It’s St. Santa right here in your
own living room. What do you want? What do you want?” And
then I laugh into my hands. I’m twenty-seven and it’s November.
As you would expect, there’s very little snow.

When I’ve closed the store and called my ever-vigilant-
doctor-man Matheson, been to the cleaners and fed the cats,
I sit down to make a list. I have baby things in one column,
food in another. Sweet day, I love a good grocery trip. I have the
crib and the blankets. I have the big things. What I’ll get is
the sterile soap and a soft brush for head scrubbing. Q-tips and
the pointy funnel thing to clear the nose for cold and flu season.
Diapers. Powder. I’ll get it all. My breasts, like cotton candy, are
achy-achy.

I move my cart into the aisle flow and follow two women I
know. Cosmetics, dairy, baking, household items, meat. One is
Reba Jules and the other Jerilyn Wokler, and they are silk. Silky,
silky, high-waisted control-tops. I reach down deep inside me-
past my gullet- and glide with them as best I can.
Reba says to Jerilyn, ‘Jerilyn, attractive pants make the woman.”
”I’ll say,” says Jerilyn. “I had that woman make them-
Joe Silver’s mother, I had her make them for me.”
“Tailored,” says Reba.
”I’ll say,” says Jerilyn.

They skate and they roll-a figure eight without thinking.
And me, my stomach’s on the tile. I’m loafing. I’m dilly-dallying.
But they go. They race forward, their heads touching, and I
watch them move. They stop at the cranberry juice and reach for
quarts. They move on to the peas. And they are thin. Reba is
thin. Jerilyn is thin. Their hair minds them. They met in college.
They walk Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in purple tights. I’ve
seen them.
I take my purse and throw it sliding to their feet. It hits Reba’s
heel, spins ninety degrees, and I shuffle off to Buffalo.
“Sorry,” I say and heave over. I put my bottom in their faces.
I get up and I’m breathing hard. My face is red. I’m puffing.
They breathe in like small mosquitoes.
I offer my hand, “Hello, Reba, Jerilyn. Won’t you stop by my
anti-Indian and African store. We’re changing our look. And,”
I circle my hand at my stomach, “Babyloo will want to get a look
at you each.”
“Hello,” they say.
“Hi, Susan, how are you?” says Jerilyn.
“Here I am,” I say.
“Well we were just talking about you, talking about your
wonderful store. We love your store. We think it’s a wonderful
store.”
“Yes we do,” says Reba. “It is.”
“Stop by,” I say. “We’ll talk. There’s a place in the mall that
delivers Mexican. We could eat. You could see my baby.”
“Yes,” says Jerilyn.
“Any day now?” says Reba.
“I’m going to keep a crib in the back. You’ll be able to come
back and see. I’ll have everything I need, back there as well as
at home. Two sets.”
“Two sets,” says Jerilyn.
“We look forward to seeing you,” says Reba.
“Goodbye,” I say and they move away. They take their carts
and go, and I watch their hips. I watch and I wish for their well-
shaped forearms, Reba’s switchy trumpet skin, their good noses- I
think and think about the line of their noses.

I’m taking sacks from the trunk to the cement to the kitchen.
The cats are walking the counters like tigers. I put away the baby
and grocery things and the cats start dancing. “Ole,” I say and
they fight. They love each other. They turn circles on the counter,
off the counter, down the stairs if I had any. They tip the garbage
can and drink from the faucets-very mincingly as though they
had just done their hair, gloves on their hands and a light colored
dress.

I know that Redbank came off his porch a morning the baby
would not nap. He walked down the twenty-two steps, through
his garden, our garden, and sat across from me on the porch. I
had come out to see if the sun and the radio would make the
baby sleep. Redbank poked at his eye and I jiggled the baby. He
pinched his nose and he honked it. I kept with my jiggling.
He said, “Hi, baby.” And he did not look at me. “Hi, baby,” he
said and let the baby grip at his fingers and eat them. “This is
a cute baby,” he said to my chair, my hat, my glass of water.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” he said and got off his chair. He went back to his porch
and sat there and called, “Hi, baby. Hi,” until the baby finally
slept and I rolled him up and went inside. The radio played till
dark.
To go to bed and be warm is to have one cat on my chest, the
other on my stomach. If the baby starts to jostle, the stomach
cat sits up. And it’s the beacon of all truth. The covers swoosh
down from his ears and head and he sits still – except his ears –
to feel the baby beneath his feet. His ears crane and stretch. We
all listen. We are all so tired.
November-it is cold again, suddenly now-21st, 1982. The
baby comes in one week. l put my letters to answer in my second
white desk drawer. When I open the drawer to find hidden
things and only find letters, I know it’s time to write back. But
not today I can tell you. Peter called. He thought I had had the
baby. “Not yet,” I told him. “Not nine months yet.”
“You feeling okay?” he said.
“I’m feeling okay. You called-and it’s nice.”
“I am nice. Are you big?”
“I’m fat.”
“How do you feel?”
“I’m tired. I’m bloated. My prenatal blush has lit the sofa on
fire. I lounge in flames. Surely blisters any time now.”
“Whiney, whiney. I didn’t think you’d have it, this live baby.”
I blew into the phone.
And he listened.
I wrap a scarf around my head, a coat around my stomach.
Peter opens the door and I smell fish . He takes my coat and grips
his hands around my stomach. He makes a pumping iron face
and keeps gripping. “You could really whack someone with this.
Ever jostle in a crowd?”
“No, I only cut loose with cats. We turn out every last light
and dance it in the dark.”
“Rock ‘n’ roll?” he says.
“Swing-time, big band,” I say.
He turns and hangs my coat and scarf on a sculptured metal
tree. I flick the tree with a fingernail and listen to it ring.
“Need help with your housekeeping?” I say. “I know all about
it.”
“Dead wrong,” he says. “I am completely hard-water-deposit
free. Bathroom and kitchen.”
“I’m going to look,” I say.
“And, Susan,” he says, “What do you know about this baby?”
He walks into the kitchen to look into pots.
I sink into the couch and look at my knees. “What are we eating
besides fish?” I yell.

Peter has dogs. They come in to see me, but I don’t quite reach
their heads, caught as I am in the groovy couch. They walk over
and climb on a furry bean bag, standing and looking at me until
the bag sinks to their liking. The decor hasn’t been changed since
August ’73. Because it was me who painted the super graphics
on July 4th. Me who said everything felt like orange, brown,
and rust. Me who papered the east wall in a forest mural
( the imagination of water and rocks and trees and humming
things) and chose the toe-snuggling wool rug toss. We wished
only for the possibility of an E PA approved wood-burning stove.
Peter clinkaty-clink-clinks in the kitchen and I say, “Here
poochie poochie.” I pat my legs. “Here-come here and see me.”
It was that early afternoon time of day that Redbank fell down
the stairs and I try to tell Peter. “He was gleaming in his
underwear,” I yell into the kitchen. “He was waving. He said,
‘Where have you got that baby?’ ” And then he went; he
spilled, tumbled, split right open and greeted each step with a
forced, broken breathlessness. Oohwee, I was scared.
Peter comes in with TV trays. He comes in with the food and
the dogs start bouncing and grinning. “Skipper, Mack-sit,” he
tells them. And they sit. They have tight little chests and proud
little heads. Peter says, “How ’bout those 49ers?” And we both
sit right up and eat.

After the fish, after the brussel sprouts and bread, there is
four-layered gelatin parfait with fruit cocktail accents.
“You know, Redbank wasn’t really even hurt,” I say.
“Is that a fact?” he says.
“You know, my dog . . . ” I say.
“I don’t remember a dog,” he says.
“That little thing loved me. I used to take him up the canyon
and walk.”
“If you take these dogs and walk-if you scratch Skipper and
scratch Mack-they’ll follow you hell-near anywhere,” he says.
“I took mine up mostly in fall. The sun was still warm. I wore
shorts and a tank and the car keys around my neck.”
“The dog died, huh?”
“No, he drowned,” I say.
“Drowned?” he says. “I never take my dogs near water;’ he says.
“There was water all over the canyon. He loved it. I didn’t
worry. He came back with a wet chest and jumped for the radio
antenna. I had a green flag on it.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Well,” he says. He scrubs Mack and Skipper
down the back and over the stomach, spanks their bottoms. He
takes our TV trays and plates all at once. A magician. He turns
the music on.
I get my coat myself.
“What a time we’ve had today;’ he says. “Come again and
again.”
“I think so;’ I say. ‘TH come and walk your dogs. I’ll come with
Babyloo in a backpack and we’ll go up the canyon and find
water- a pool with a pleasant clearness.”
“Pollution,” he says.
“Pleasant clearness,” I say. I say, “The dogs will strut up and
down its banks for the pleasure of seeing their fine muscles swivel
and wrap each bone. They are fine dogs and for all their time
spent admiring the lines of their back and stomach I will have
fallen asleep nursing Babyloo. I will wake up to a splash-one
dog ankle-deep and the other giving me a hello from the bank.
And before I know where or what, their heels will fly up and
they will whir to bottom, stirring up this and that, and the pool
will no longer be clear with the stroked back of the bristly pooch
and the caressed whitish pooch stuck so very well to the bottom.”
Peter has me by the wrists, palms up. He’s cocking his head.
But he’s listening.
“But,” I say, “it is only that I will bring them back with wet
chests. I would throw Babyloo in and they would swim back up
from the bottom and drag the baby by the knees and ankles
carefully to shore. They would come to me for praise and I would
give it.”
Peter drops my wrists. He pushes me. He opens the door and
walks outside.
The baby will come, I know. Late maybe, but it really will. It’ll
come and I’ll know insides are ripping, are falling apart. I’ll think:
I’m bleeding and count each knocking fist. This baby will want
my life for sure thing. It will want my days and my nights, my
bedsheets, my shoes and my socks. And I’ll give them. It can have
them. I’ll give them. I am falling down stairs. My cats flip through
a quiet apartment. We are all so tired.
I wash the baby’s head with the sterile soap and soft brush.
No more cradle crap. I touch Q-tips to its ears and nose. I sack
it in a sleeper and cover it with a striped blanket. It sleeps just
fine. The cats jump and perch on either edge of the crib. They
hang their bodies low. They wave their paws. They hold still and
they fix their eyes on what I have made. I pick up my cats by the
scruff of their necks.

by Paul Rawlins

I first learned about woodshedding in Vancouver.
I tell people sometimes that I did studio work while I was in
B.C. What I did was rough framing: tacking together two-by-four
skeletons, screwing heavy sheets of gypsum board to naked frames
and standing them as walls. But I did this in a studio.
The studio was in Raphael’s backyard. He was converting an
old garage. The outside was weathered brown paint and splinters.
The inside was grey-white walls dotted with the black heads of
drywall screws.
“We’re calling it the Woodshed,” Raphael told me.
“I like it;’ I said.
“Do you know what it means to woodshed? “
I shook my head.
“When you lock yourself away with a difficult piece and work
it through note by note, that’s called woodshedding.”
“So you’ll woodshed in the Woodshed.”
Raphael seemed pleased that I’d understood.
After I learned the word, “woodshed” popped up all over. It
was like when I learned “crest” in the fourth grade, and then later
the same day I came across the word in my library book. I don’t
know if I’m looking for a word because I’ve just learned it or if
fate is running strong, and I’ve learned some new word to deal
with life to come.
I woodshedded learning a tune by Paul Gilbert when he and
Billy Sheehan were in Mr. Big. I worked for three days on eighteen
measures of Gilbert’s solo, living on cheese sandwiches. I didn’t
collect my mail, and when I quit, the garbage stunk, and the
neighbor kids were wading in the swamp the sprinklers made in
the backyard.
“It’s a four track studio, good for rehearsal, good for demos,”
Raphael told me. “Big albums you need a twenty-four track studio.
Only so much you’ll be able to do in the Woodshed.”

Raphael was my brother’s friend growing up. They played
together in garage bands in the 70s, with my brother on drums
and Raphael playing guitar. They made up new bands every school
year and gave them names like “Mother Lode” and “Crankshaft”
and “The Peter Crenshaw Group;’ and they cut school a lot to
practice. I know they hitchhiked from Bend to Boise or Portland,
sometimes even Seattle for concerts. And then my dad would
ground my brother, but he always made it out to play on week-
ends. I can’t remember a Friday or Saturday night he and Raphael
didn’t while I was growing up.
Once I asked Raphael if he had any old guitars. I told him my
mom and dad wouldn’t buy me one. I was seven then, and he
was sixteen. Raphael didn’t have any extra guitars, but he taught
me my first chords on his Strat. I have a picture with Raphael’s
guitar. I have a tough look on my face and a guitar slung down
around my knees. Raphael showed me more chords until he and
my brother left home the next year. “To take it on the road,”
Raphael told me.
My brother was back off the road in three months after he broke
his leg badly in an accident he never would explain. He read me
letters from Raphael. Raphael was floating, sitting in with groups,
looking for a band and a steady gig.
“He’ll make it,” my brother said. “He’s good, he’s so good.”

Raphael hooked up with a Seattle band that started making
a name on the local scene about the time my brother had decided
to try college. My brother quit after his first semester and went
to Seattle to take over for a drummer who’d missed three gigs
because of booze.
“Three strikes,” he told me, ‘I’m up.”
I was eleven when that band broke up with only a demo. When
I was thirteen, both my brother and Raphael got married, and
that ended the next band. My parents let me bus up to hear their
last performance. Raphael wasn’t holding back those last nights;
he was doing all the flashy stuff. He played a nine minute solo
the night I was there that came straight from heaven and the
angels.
Raphael did a classical number at my brother’s wedding, but
after that, I didn’t hear him play live again until almost ten years
later-when I was in Vancouver helping him with the studio.
He was in other bands, and he tried running a club. He was
reproducing tapes when he decided to get “out of the business
and back into rock and roll.”
“So I’m getting out of the business and back into rock and roll.”
That’s what he said the night I pitched up.
I was over halfway to his house when I had called from Tacoma.
“I need a place to hang,” I told him.
“Bring your hammer,” he said.
We sat up in the kitchen when I got there. Anne, Raphael’s
wife, asked about the family, teased me about losing my hair.
She loaded me down with sheets and blankets after we finished
talking.
“Stay as long as you want,” she said. “Raphael can use the cheap
labor.” Raphael gave me a place on the couch downstairs and told
me we’d start in on the studio in the morning whenever I got up.

I heard him play that weekend at the Lamplighter in Gastown.
Raphael was coming up fast in Vancouver. He packed the clubs
he played, and crowds shouted for blues and old rock tunes to
hear him. The older set let him take them back, and the young
ones were caught up in revival.
You had to see Raphael play. He would stand with his feet close
together when he soloed, and you waited to see him lock his knees
and faint. He didn’t close his eyes. He looked down at the stage
in front of him, looking to see if the music was hidden there on
the floor or trying to remember, to hear something faint, way
back in his head. He wrung music from his body and from his
instrument- never coaxed, never faltered.
The band did an old tune for me that night. “Taking Care of
Business,” from the garage days. Raphael called me to the stage
to sing backup, and we had a good time.

I learned about studios when I wasn’t listening to Raphael play.
A studio is a floating room, a room built within a room with no
inner wall touching an outer wall. The drywall can be five, even
six sheets thick, to cut out any noise from outside. A control room
floats in the studio. A studio control room must have no parallel
surfaces, for technical reasons, waves and such things. One wall
is corrugated like sideways Z’s, sections of the ceiling tip and rise,
the windows slant. Like a room in the fun house. You want no
leakage from the outer studio into the control room, so you
double all the walls and doors and windows and plug all the gaps
with acoustic sealant.
The control room is twice removed from the world, adrift in
a sea of quiet, a center with nothing surrounding it, nothing
beyond the lights out in the studio.
I sat up in the studio some nights trying to figure how big a
screwup I was. Thinking how I was supposed to be marrying
a girl named Sadie who’d run off with a friend of hers to L.A.,
and how I wouldn’t go get her. Thinking how I didn’t want the
family janitorial business that had kept me and my brothers in
jeans growing up. Thinking I didn’t like the guilt I felt for not
taking charge, for letting life happen to me. I waited as long
as I could stand for some tragedy or revelation to save me, then
I left school without stopping by the administration building to
withdraw and drove home. Then I left home and headed for
Vancouver.
I liked just working on the studio. I could measure studs, plumb
walls, slit drywall with a utility knife with no one wanting more
of me. I liked building and then sitting with Raphael against
a wall at ten or eleven o’clock at night to look at a day’s work
and talk about the next day’s. Anne would wander out after the
kids were in bed, and we would talk about gigs and old times,
and then I had my couch and a cool night for sleeping with not
even tomorrow to worry about.
It went on that way for a couple of weeks. Me and Raphael,
and the boys in the band over in the afternoons.
I was out picking up chips and sodas when the power saw took
Raphael’s fingers. I came back, and the door to the studio was
open. Byron, Raphael’s bass player, was outside with his head in
his hands. I saw the blood when I went in. I had to sit awhile
before I could drive. Byron was white. He had seen it and been
sick.
Byron and I had to pick up the kids from school. We told
them their daddy was sick but that he would be all right. We
fed them sticky macaroni from a box and let them watch TV until
it was time for bed. Byron went home at eleven with no news
from the hospital. I kept the kitchen light on and fell asleep at
the table sometime in the middle of the morning.

One finger had been cut off. The doctors sewed it back on and
stitched up two others Raphael had cut badly. He was on pain-
killers when Anne brought him home, and he said crazy things
for three days. Anne told me when he first came to he said he
wanted to die. I stayed away.
He called for Anne one day while she was out and I was in
the kitchen eating bread for lunch. I stood in his doorway. His
left hand was bundled up in a mitten of tape and gauze.
“Is Annie home?” he said.
“She’s gone for groceries,’ I said. “She’ll be back just now.”
I refilled his pitcher with water and asked him if he wanted
anything else.
“Bring up my guitar,” he said.
He looked at the window. I went downstairs to get his guitar.
He had a ’64 Strat right then. Sixty-four was a good year for
Fender Stratocasters, like it was the last good year for Winchesters.
This one felt soft to the touch, sweet and responsive, unforgiving.
I brought it up in the case and laid it on the foot of his bed.
“Take it out,” Raphael said. I laid the guitar on the bed and left.
Anne didn’t hold it against me, taking the guitar to him.
“You know,” she said, “a couple of years ago, I woke up one
night, and Raphael’s hand was doing scales on my arm.”
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Sitting up in bed. He’s got the guitar on his lap, and he’s
looking out the window.”
“He can see the studio.”
“He watches while you’re inside working. He says he wants to
get back to it.”
“He’s not on pills anymore?”
“No more pills,” she said. She asked if I could stay around
awhile.

Raphael spent his days in the studio when he got up and around
again. He did some mixing in the control room while I worked.
I would call him out, and we would conference on how to turn
the next corner or what materials to buy the next trip to the
lumber yard.
He was moody those days. He brought his guitar out from the
house, and it sat in its case in a corner of the control room. He
saw the doctors often. He would come home after and close
himself up in the studio until late. I would talk to Anne at
dinner, and she would tell me that the doctors talked about
damage-nerves, muscles, bone.
I asked her what Raphael was saying, and she said they weren’t
talking about it yet.
I was framing in the second set of control room doors when
the bandages came off and Raphael started spending his days in
the control room with the guitar. He was teaching the little finger
how to move again, teaching all the fingers, teaching the hand.
The strength was gone, and the speed was gone. He couldn’t keep
it up very long. Anne worried, but the doctors said it might be
good therapy. They said it was hard to know just what he would
get back.
The little finger wasn’t moving well and Raphael didn’t have
much feeling in one of the others when I left. He hadn’t played
for a week, but I’d shrugged it off because we’d been busy
painting. I was shoving my loafers in a canvas flight bag when
he told me to take the Strat. He said he would come see me at
the Lamplighter. He said he could still whistle. I told him no.
I said I didn’t want it.
”I’ll pick it up after your gig,’ he said.

Raphael is engineering and producing now. We finished the
studio before I left for home, He’s very good. He could take in
more money, but he’s soft on new bands. He gives them breaks.
He keeps a gun in a drawer below the soundboard. I think
about it, and think that most days he reaches for both. He pulls
down two levers on the board for a fade-out. He thinks about
his own. There’s an imaginary “X” in the middle of a control room
floor. That’s where the sound is perfect. That’s where Raphael sits,
passing out tips to young guitarists on the other side of the glass.
That’s where he assembles sounds now, piece by piece. He can
favor his left hand.
I want to take the ’64 Strat and play the gig at the Lamplighter.
But I can’t go until I am perfect, until I am how I heard Raphael.
School’s still out, and I’m buffing floors nights. Sadie is alone,
still unsure when we talk sometimes by phone. She says L.A.
isn’t Bend, but she’s getting used to it. And Anne has to think
of something to say every night when Raphael comes in from
woodshedding. We are all still new at it.

by Stephenie Swindle Clark

The neighbors-two boys, dark-haired-are hitting the snow with
a stick. Mother in a coat that rises and falls with the noon wind
is no one that they see. Her coat has a red leather collar and cuffs.
Her head is naked. Her gloves are tight. Her high heels match
the coat collar and cuffs- red. She goes to the car and I let my
eyes, my body go with her, wobbling as one must to move
through the frozen footprints from days before. It is a little before
Christmas.
Mother and her boyfriend Ted (“My boyfriend for now,” I have
heard her say on the phone) line up alongside the Buick and
cheese it. “Okay,” I say. I say, “Ready? Ready?” They are ready.
I punch the button on the Polaroid and hold them there in my
eye through the viewfinder. They weren’t ready. But it’s done,
and it’s good enough, I think. It’s done and we are going to
Missouri. Mother, Ted, and me.


Mother told me, “Nathan, say, ‘I appreciate the sympathy and
kindness you have shown Mother, myself, and Ted on this sad,
sad occasion.’ ” Ted said, “Passed on and we’re sorry for it.”
My brother’s the one. The Tuesday before Missouri, my older
brother-James, seventeen-died straight out. I am fifteen. I play
football. We did the funeral and it was like eating marzipan for
the first time. I had said, out loud, “This is good.” And my friend
said, “Yeah it is, it’s candy. Eat more.” I ate more. My mother
said, “Stand here.” I stood at the casket. I stood there – all night,
with Mother – and people I did not know pressed me against
them and traced my head with cupped palms.
Given twenty-four hours, Mother, Ted, and I sat down and ate
soup. We ate heartily. Ted issued me knowledge on the status of
his built-in-the-U.S.A.-mother-loving Buick. He talked engine.
And it was the best engine. It had shown an inestimable amount
of dignity and self-respect by starting each morning-every
morning-for the whole damn winter. “A sign from God,” I told
him and Mother stretched her arms across the soup. She touched
our shoulders and rested.
“It’s been too long since Jefferson,” she said.
Ted rocked his chair, set it down on all four legs. ‘Jefferson?”
he said.
She said, ”I’ve been away too long. I am missed and Jefferson
City wants me.”
“Missouri?” said Ted.
“Ted,” she said and put her hands, palms up to the ceiling and
sky, “yes.”
I got up in a hurry and cleared the table. I wiped up crumbs
and cleaned the placemats. I put a tablecloth on and replaced the
Santa centerpiece. Ted and Mother sat at the table still. I
did the dishes and set them out in rows to dry. I wiped the stove
off and shined the metal parts. I swept up the floor and that was
it. I walked into the T.V. room. Mother and Ted picked up the
Santa centerpiece and pretended it was walking-rocking the length
of the table. “Look at Santa,” they said.
To go, to find Missouri, Ted drives us. He puts his arms straight
out like baby wings and drives with his chest. ”.Jefferson City,
Missouri. Jefferson City, Missouri,” he says and ruffles his fingertips.
Mother turns her chin at him. He drives with his chest and lays
far enough in to make the horn honk. He honks it like a tune,
a rhythm in his own head, and we wonder what it sounds like
and where it comes from. Mother turns the radio on. Ted changes
the station to bebop and honks in time. He turns the radio even
louder and I am excited. Mother turns herself around and stares
out her window with her chin in her hand. Ted sits up and puts
his hands on the wheel. Mother rounds her back over and pulls
her head down. Her forehead taps the window with every small
stone, every ripple of the road. Ted looks at her and lingers. He
stretches his hand to her. He says to me, “You miss your brother,
Nathan?”
I lean back into my seat and Mother turns from her window.
“My God, Ted.”
“What?” he says. “It wasn’t to hurt.”
“Why not?” she says.
“No problem;• I say.

We stop for lunch at a grocery store and I choose juice and
sliced ham. We walk slow, aisle by aisle, and feel rested. We
talk about Hawaii and James, ice cream and good books, luck.

We walk through the aisles and touch cans, touch each other.
Ted says, “We feel better to be out of the car.” Mother says,
“Guarandamntee it Sir.” ”Amen,” I say.
We drive and find the Jefferson City capitol building. We’re
here all right. The building is huge and it’s ugly. There are yellow
Christmas lights wrapped all down the pillars and a Santa and
sleigh and reindeers on the roof. It looks like all the rest. Ted
and Mother rustle in the front seat. Ted finds Mother’s hand and
they giggle. They are out of the car and up at the hood to find
each other’s hands again. They run for the stairs of the Jefferson
City capitol building and take them in fat leaps – three, four stairs
at a time. They keep laughing and laughing.
At the top they kiss. They hug and kiss, and they are tight
hugs and tight, lippy, movie kisses. I get out and walk around
the car. I walk around the car four times. Mother and Ted look
down at me and I put my hands in my pockets. I press my lips
together. I tip my eyebrows. They come right down from there.
Ted comes off the last capitol step and rubs his hands in circles
on his stomach. He opens his mouth in an ‘ahhh.’ “It is time to
eat,” he says. “Wouldn’t you think?” he says.
At the restaurant called Dino’s, Mother says, “Here I am with
my boys.” She touches each of us like soft-furred mice. We are
seated near the kitchen and decide the chicken-whatever smells
best. They bring it to us hop-to and my mother says, “Easy boys.
Easy.” She orders dessert while the waiter is still standing there
and then pulls a locket from under her jacket, a blouse, and a
blue silk scarf. She points and opens it. “Patrice – my grand-mother;’
she says. “She was mean. At nineteen she had white hair.

Her hair was short as long as it was white. She had white

hair always.” Mother shrugs her shoulders. “She was my grand-
mother.”

I set my fork in my dessert. “Who will have some?” I say.
“Was she courageous?” says Ted. “Patrice was a tall woman,”
Mother says. “She lived alone. I was told I would not have
her height and I believed it. Yet, I would get her legs. Maybe her bust.
I have her good hair.”
“Indeedy,” says Ted.
We leave, each with a mint. We are fat, edgy and warm. Ted
looks all around- to me, the sky, Mother. He gets right into her
face and says, “What’s next? What is it?”
My mother takes her hands from her pockets and sets one,
sets each on Ted’s face and kisses him with her eyes closed
and satisfied. Ted holds still and has his eyes open to her when she’s done.

So she kisses me. I think she thinks I’m three and it’s funny. She
puts her hands back in her pockets and clicks her heels. “Let’s
go home,” she says and walks on ahead.
We leave Jefferson City. We leave Missouri. That night.

To be home is snow in chunks and balls everywhere you have
to step. I get out of the car and my legs and head are the target
for the neighbor boys. I walk slowly, evenly, and every snowball
misses me. They scream, “Come out and catch us. Come out and
fight, Nathan Callister.” They are seven and eight. They have a
dog that fetches rocks.
Mother stands looking at the mail, turning her head to the
left and to the right to see what to open first. She has it fanned
across the hallway. Ted is stepping over it and bringing everything
in from the car. Mums from the funeral are arranged on each
of the kitchen counters. A neighbor kept them watered and
plucked, but I think I know why it is they are flowers for a funeral.
We unpack standing in the laundry room. Most everything is
dirty. ”I’ll put these cases away;’ Mother says. ”I’ll go for groceries;

Ted says. I go into the kitchen looking for something salty. I sit
on the couch and watch T.V. and lick my fingers. My mother
comes and sits beside me. She wears green pants, a green shirt.
She has a neck like Cleopatra. We sit deep in the couch together
and tell potato jokes.
Ted honks when he reaches our cul-de-sac. He circles it and
honks three more times. Mother is happy, she says to him, “Ted,
you look good.” And he says, “There’s my baby.” We walk
quickly to meet him, to touch the car. Ted holds my mother’s
hands. He says, “Let’s make a fire in the fireplace and roast
weenies. . “
Ted carries the groceries inside and pulls out three extendable
roasting forks. “Hah, hah,” he says and jabs a weenie on every
fork. Mother holds hers up like a microphone and sings something
about bees and honey. Ted sings back because he knows this one.
They dance with their shoulders, their heads. But not for long.
It is just that one part of the song they can remember. I have
seen them dance around the couch in the T.V. room. They
swung their hips and stamped their feet. They dance best to
Sara Vaughan-“Ooh What-Cha Doin’ To Me”-and though my
mother’s hair is short all over, she brushes it back and laughs and
screams. She is pleased with her. steps and turns. She is pleased
with her laughter. I have stood up and moved with her and it
is the best kind of living I know.
Outside it’s dark and the neighbor boys have made a snowman
by floodlight. They run, elbows locked, and ram their heads into
its body. They land on their backs, elbows still locked, coughing
and screaming-or laughing. You can’t tell. We go through the
full package of weenies, eating some raw and some without buns.
Christmas Eve is tomorrow. Everyone kisses everyone and we go
right to bed.

In the morning Mother comes to my room and runs her hand
through my hair. “Ted’s gone all day,” she says. “If we start right
now we can have this ready for a present.” She has fabric, blue
on one shoulder, green on the other that runs the length of her
back and legs and then spreads onto the floor. “We’ll make a
quilt,” she says. “I have appliques of football helmets and rifles.”
I put slippers on and help her set up the frame. We secure the
fabric and batting and sit down to it. Mother runs her hands out-
ward in fans across the fabric. She tells me, “Your father played football.
You look nothing like him.”
“Do I look like you,” I say.
“Look,” she says. “What do you see?”
“But when you were younger,” I say.
“No,” she says. “Not at all.”
“Nothing?” I say.
“Well, your hair,” and she reaches to me. “You do have good
hair. Like Patrice. Like me.”
Then for that-for that thing-I was rolling myself in neat,
tight circles. I was curling in her lap.
I say to her, “Did you have a boyfriend then?”
“A lot,” she says. “I was sweet.”
My Mother stitches more stitches. She places my hands, my
fingers as they should be. She watches me work and smiles catlike.
And then she lifts her head and tells me-she says, ‘James looked
just like your father. And James knew more about women than
I ever thought right. You’re not like him at all.”
It is Christmas. I can wear James’s clothes I discovered last night.
I find his blue robe and walk to the bathroom. The sun shines
blazing across the toilet and floor. It’s nearly afternoon. I brush

my hair with my fingers and start down the stairs. Ted is
standing by the tree with gold and red foil in waves around his feet.

He’s telling my mother he’s leaving. “I’m leaving,” he says. “You
knew. It’s just a little thing for us.”
Mother pinches her nails into his calf and I sit on the bottom
step.
Ted sits down. He shakes my mother’s thumb. He smiles a
little smile.
She pulls her thumb away and she takes it back.
She says, “Give me my thumb. You telling me. You tell me
like you know, and you don’t. You know too much about any
of it.” She looks up for God, I know, and finds me on the steps,
listening and seeing all of this.
I close my robe around my shins. She’s looking at me hard.
She would pinch my calf if I was there. I look to Ted and I won’t
look back. She comes over and comes down to me. “Look at me,”
she says. I cover my eyes. She pinches my calf. I squeeze my hands
to my face. I hear her get up and I hear her go to the kitchen
and tip each potted mum from the top of her head to the tile
below. Like water flowing. Ted yells at the kitchen, “You get what
you want, Mama.”
I go back upstairs and my robe splits open top to bottom. I
am bare-footed, bare-legged, bare-chested. I walk down the hall
undoing the sash. I fold the robe into a square and set it on my
bed. I go downstairs in boxers, chilly. I walk past Ted. I walk into
the kitchen and she’s standing in the dirt and petals. I say,
“Should I get the garbage?”
She puts her hand on my face. “Should I get the garbage?”
she says. “Should you? Should you? Move.” She flips her shoulders
and pushes by. She walks out the front door and leaves it open.
She goes down to the street sliding and tipping. And she goes
with the face I know best-her neck, her eyes, her cheeks and
lips-it’s beauty. My mother is beautiful. She’s my mother.

I bend over the flowers with a dustpan and brush. Ted comes
in and sets a hand on the counter. He sighs like a dog. I keep
bent over my work. My spine is sharp along my back. I work and
my muscles flutter and grip. Ted comes over to help, but with
a few more sweeps I am finished. I stand beside him and he looks
at me-my bare chest, my hands and legs. I will miss him. I hand
him the brush and the dustpan. “All done,” I say. Ted nods his
head. He says, “Get dressed. We’ll go for a drive. We’ll go by the
lake. I’ll get you a hamburger. We’ll take James’s things to a
shelter, a food bank.”