Crow Jazz Page 6

  She’s left the door open for home invaders, rats, squirrels, predators. This is new style: the open door, welcome. She’s been waiting in the locked house for the next thing to happen, the assumption being she’d always get to ride in the bitch position behind a dark rider. All her life she’s avoided surprises, but maybe there’s a good one around the next corner or reaching out of a crack in the pavement.

  She’s in her pyjamas. Without thinking, even of putting on shoes or a sweater, she slips through the relaxed portal into moonlight, fearful to fearless. Found in translation; what does it mean when stars hanging like lamps in the sky wait for sunrise that happens, then disappears, either over the horizon or into the eternal greyness of days turning on and off like electric lights?

  Dreaming through fog, clouds on the ground, running with sex feelings sharing the same primal space, she trips on a root, grabs at crumbling bark, moss, dirt, drops her glasses, pulls herself up, takes a breath and squints back at the house, the open door and the unblinking second-floor bedroom windows, three pairs of animal eyes, all feral, hungry, the odd triplet: Father, Mother, Daughter, beaming light on the grass and beyond.

  Who switches on the lights in their bedrooms when no one is home? Not her mother. Not her father, who sent her typewritten letters from prison, then disappeared.

  She’s in the woods on all fours; sniffing hands caked with dirt, hoping she won’t step on her specs. How to translate dirt, terroir, into mushroom, wine, words that feed a soul insatiably hungry, hoping to open the doors to unexpected surprises, or familiar reassurance, rooms filled with old furniture and new prospects: food she has never tasted, views she could possibly replicate if she could just get it right?

  On the other side of the door, the subconscious, Magritte’s reversible dream, a surreal life, the dream translated, life turned inside out. She could be a sleepwalker, bumping into familiar things in the dark, sometimes her parents one after the other, never quite understanding what or why.

  Isn’t that a mother’s job, orchestrating sound walks into real life outside the submersible womb? Her own was no spirit guide, never took her by the hand and led her while simultaneously reciting family recipes for shortbread and chutney and the thou-shalt-nots: shalt not cross her eyes or leave her shoes unlaced, protect Daddy when he translates crystal caves into scary moments, and after exile, sends surrogates to peer in her window at night, tapping on the glass with filthy fingernails.

  It’s a staring game, eyes glittering in the forest, windows staring into the darkness, her parents playing chicken in court. Then, she took off her glasses so she wouldn’t have to have eye contact with either one of them.

  Now she looks up and sees them, caught on a branch, gleaming in the moonlight. She puts them back on. Focus. Unfocus. Her crystal balls. She got her bad eyesight from someone who typed with his nose on the keyboard, lost his way in the house at night, was pulled to her light like a deranged moth with pockets full of articulate crystals. “Choose your story: snowflake, sugar, pillar of salt.”

  So she chose, and he mapped the plot with his magic fingers, touch-typing.

  She actually feels safer outdoors. These woods filled with the dark shapes of evergreen and branches with spiderwebs waiting to trap her are not nearly as scary as the shadows in the house, arrested typing, footsteps on the stairs, her unlocking simply defiance: of herself, of memory, a dead man walking.

  While her eyes adjust to her glasses, she glances around and sees, what is it called, pareidolia, familiar faces all around her. Face actually, her father’s visage carved in every tree trunk, his mouth open wide, a scream. She’s not afraid. They are in the same lonely club, tapping keys, listening for the great design that will lift them up.

  A little night music, the sound of her bare feet in the damp forest floor, the sound of moonlight forcing itself through cracks in leaves that catch tears from heaven.

  She buried her dog here, on the edge, where the wild rhododendrons and blackberries seeded themselves. Soleil, her golden lab, daughter of Luna who led her mother to the infant buried in the woods, died of a heart attack the night of the Storm this February. The dog went out to pee and never came back. It was snowing, and she waited in the house, never thinking the worst had happened. Soleil had scratched at the door. She wanted out. Trees were falling. Shakes flew off the roof.

  The young bitch died of a heart attack, and when she went to look for her in the first light of morning, she only had to follow her cat’s footprints. When she got there, the cat, Diablo, black as night, was keening, licking Soleil’s ears.

  The rhododendrons bloomed early this year, bright pink, pinker than usual, nourished by the blood of her dear companion. She’s heard stories like this about the poppies thriving on blood spilled in battlegrounds, Flanders Fields.

  Tonight is the first time she’s penetrated the forest devastation. In the dark, her song line is different, the familiar no longer the map she memorised when she was a child, steps she could have taken blindfolded: here is my arbutus with bear scratches, here is my first fort, and here are the ferns I used to sweep my forts. Here is my loo. Here are my huckleberries. Here are my salmon-berries. Here is my summer kitchen.

  Here is where I hid from my parents.

  Tonight, the trees and bushes frame unfamiliar rooms. Next fall, she will rent a chainsaw, clear the brush and cut up firewood.

  Her father had a passion for firewood. Every year he cut far more than they could burn. His pile might have covered a parking lot. It was his tension relief, one of several, the others being whiskey, typing letters and misplaced affection. He would chop and chop, and people thought it was funny because his day job was surgery, “Get it out of your system,” his friends laughed. “Better to chop up wood than your patients.” He was a neurosurgeon, and he had operated on the Pope to cure his hiccoughs, but skilled as he was with a knife, he could not cut his way out of jail.

  After they took him away, she and her mother kept burning the chopped wood and never attempted to replace it. This new windfall will be the second lot in years, almost a quarter century.

  It might be her imagination or a woodpecker deranged by head banging, pecking insect holes in a tree, but she thinks she hears hammers attacking the dead wood. These are the ghosts she lives with; percussive noises: footsteps in the hall, typewriter keys, woodpeckers, the piano. When she can’t stand it, she wears buds in her ears.

  Now she is almost naked in the shivery night: no shoes, no jacket and no plugs. She does have her glasses, lucky her, hears with her eyes and her ears, maybe a cougar breathing hard, wondering if he should dance with her in the moonlight, perhaps a wild woman heavy with stolen children, or just wind in the leaves.

  When Luna dug up the corpse, she brought it home as she had been trained to do. Luna was a swimmer who would jump into the coldest lake to retrieve a bird, and a digger who regularly unearthed treasure, sometimes carrots from the garden and sometimes candies buried by squirrels. This time it was the little blue non-person no one had noticed growing under man-shirts she’d borrowed from her dad.

  She’d wished it out early, huffed and puffed and jumped on her trampoline, then had violent cramps in the woods, and it came out fast. The slippery thing was dead already, not ready, one of those silences whose trajectory is a tunnel of darkness. She buried it and went into the house in time for dinner, her hem wet with blood and amniotic fluid, her delta aching.

  Days later, she was at the library looking up books on semiotics. Her mother was writing a speech, her left hand dragging ink across the paper. Her father was drinking, typing on his Olivetti in the library, home from one of his covert operations, cutting into the brain of a deranged dictator, getting rid of a tic. Luna, moon dog, delivered the package wrapped in her sweater, dropped it under the dining room table, a little surprise, something for the dysfunctional family dinner.

  Her mother saw it first. She knew right away. It had the giveaway father-and-daughter halo. Ginger. When she came home with her
load of borrowed books, the police were already there.

  “It isn’t what you think,” she said, her famous last words, before they could say what they thought. She has always had the gift, or curse, of premonition.

  So she slammed her door. Shut up.

  Tonight, she feels him close in the woods, his breath in her ear the one sound she can’t block out. She calls it tinnitus, but what does she know? It is just a voice. Voices. She can’t recall her mother’s voice. That was probably because she had so many: the corporate voice, the commanding feminist voice, the good cop voice luring her to the priest, confession, the metal voice that critiqued everything from her table manners to her appearance, the contemptuous voice for her father and the seductive voice on the phone, when she’d caught her touching herself. No. Not caught, startled her while…

  Now, the disingenuous stranger on her answering machine says, “Stop texting. Your mother doesn’t like it.”

  “The Stranger” is a character who apparently appeared out of red smog with a guitar and a knapsack full of fiction.

  Women made her suspicious of women, and her father, sick as he was, the healer, of men, but he also gave her a love of precise language. His voice, she remembers.

  Luna had a baby too. She died in childbirth with seven other pups, but Soleil survived, and she fed her milk in a doll bottle. No one spoke but the dog, who barked when she wanted in and out and when she was hungry, and not so long after, her mother packed her bags and silently left. Her mother’s lawyer sent her the title to the house and notice that money would be put in her bank account at the beginning of every month. A handwritten insert said, “Don’t look for me,” but she did, and that was more or less a dead end that led to the stranger, the voice on the phone. No point sending the dog after her. She would only kick her.

  Her father took his typewriter to prison. Every week, she got a note, always the same, always different. The different part was a list of books she should read, and the semblable was the ending, “I’m sorry.” She read the books, mostly about miracles like parthenogenesis and binary fission, and wondered when and if he would tell her more. What was it like in jail? Did he crawl into someone’s bunk and tell his wonderful stories? Did they let him heal? He was a good healer. She never wrote back, just assumed the connection. Never asked why he did it, because she knew. It was all about crystals, a phenomenon her mother didn’t get. Her mother was an inscrutable crystal, salt in their wound.

  Then the letters stopped. He stopped. Maybe his inappropriate affection curdled. Maybe he was no longer sorry. Maybe he got out and got lost. Maybe his sorrow and loneliness turned into cancer and choked him. Perhaps another prisoner shivved him with an improvised knife—a chopstick or a pencil—or put an eggbeater up his rectum. These things happen in jail, especially to the child abuser; understandable, most prisoners having been abused as children. Maybe he knotted his sheets and pillow slip together and hung himself in his cell, like Hernandez, the sociopath wide end receiver who later turned out to have Spam brain from head bumps.

  It also occurred to her that, if he were alive, he might come back to find her, his cosmic twin. She had nothing to say, no words of forgiveness or recrimination, kept the windows and doors locked. When she graduated from university, the mailman delivered an anonymous gift. It was a necklace with typewriter letters spelling her name.

  She had a stalker at the time, someone with black curly hair who worked at the library and put love letters in the books she borrowed. She assumed it was him. No reason not to. He brought stolen flowers every week, little dandelion and wild lupin posies she found on the doormat.

  She is an anomaly, attracting aberration, a crystal-lographic defect, rogue molecules desiring nothing but symmetry. She answers the dark, thinking out loud, the Bjork lyrics.

  Crystals grow like plants (listen how they grow)

  I’m blinded by the lights (listen how they glow)

  In the core of the earth (listen how they grow)

  She hears them all, the rocks, the diamonds, Bjork in swan feathers at the Oscars, her father’s stories, her mother’s excuses. She and her father were that anomaly, twinned pyrite, their asexual reproduction binary fission energised by the telling of stories, romance, the tickle that scared her, not because of its deviance but because of its overwhelming magnificence.

  How could she tell that to the cops? Cops are blunt, insensitive to the nuance of narrative arc, two anomalies bending the rainbow. How could she tell her mother, who was into man blaming, and impervious to her reasoning?

  The stone forest floor is trembling. She can feel it now, the truth coming out, rock tremours cracking the Earth, crow watching, the tapping noise getting closer. Her father taught her about aboriginal sound walks, sonar navigation, useful when the night sky clouds over. But this is not a dark night. The stars are speaking too, music crackling on wires strung from black hole to black hole. Who to believe? Look up. Look down.

  In that order. She has done it. Looking up, she sees the lamps blinking though cracks in the forest. And a cedar brought down, likely uprooted by the storm that scared her dog to death. And a hole, what little kids call a hidey-hole, just enough room for a child who has been terrified by adult behaviour to curl up and sleep.

  She runs her hand along the peeling, bleeding bark. This could be the bloody crucifix in the resurrection story. If she licks her hand, she will taste blood. She knows what that tastes like. She has eaten her own scabs. She tasted the blood that came out with the child and stained her hem.

  The tree cavity feels and smells like a cave with earth walls. She tries to crawl in, but can’t. It is not big enough for a thirty-nine-year-old woman. There is something hard in there. She digs around the thing and frees it, pulls it out.

  It is a small dirt-smeared suitcase with a broken handle and rusty hinges, just large enough for a baby or a cat. She has buried dead things in these woods and doesn’t want to open it. Fear or sacrilege? Whatever, she is afraid, so she sits with the coffin box in the moonlight, not quite grieving like mourners who sit up all night with the corpses of their beloved, but like a witness not quite sure of what she’s witnessing.

  Eventually the sun rises as usual, at civic twilight, her most difficult time, the hour between haunted nights and enigmatic mornings. She will either leave the suitcase and return to the house or she will open it up and learn something she may or may not want to know. There might be money inside, thousands or millions of dollars stashed by a mattress millionaire or a bank robber, one of her father’s new friends. Maybe he was the one who clawed her windows at night looking for a safe place to hide, having been assured by his cellmate of her vulnerability to story.

  There is no key, but the latch leaps open when she touches it.

  Inside is a typewriter. She recognises the green Olivetti, its carriage cover replaced by what she recognizes as prison issue, a plastic cover so that contraband could not be hidden there. And what she sees is that the type slugs on the ends of the hammers have been cut out. Like her tongue, she thinks. A large crystal, an amethyst as big as a child’s fist, nestles in the gap. The typewriter is bound with barbed wire, and inside this perverse ribbon, a wound wound, are photos of her, now and then in the garden, and a letter wrapped in a plastic bag.

  It says sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, over and over. Just “sorry,” a word, a sutra, that moves as slowly as a river, her bloodstream, the time apart from herself, whatever that is. Sorry, a wound bound in typewriter ribbon, and healing, a surgeon’s beautiful stitchery, the blessing of moving water, self-absolving rivers anointing the dead and the living. It just keeps on moving, the penultimate vowel almost the end, but the end never comes. Sorry…

  Some keys are missing.

  The letters that spell her name are missing in action. If she waits, still and silent, listening, she might hear the slugs sliding on iridescent carpets of slime, over the forest floor, toward her. They will say her name. And she might answer.

  WOOLGATHERER

/>   Usually, especially on warm afternoons, she falls asleep counting sheep, the drowsy clouds, nuages, such beautiful words for molecules of water suspended in air, nubo in Esperanto, baby shoes about to drop, precipitation, lovely consonants, lovely diction, the beat.

  “Are you deaf or stupid,” is the louche question people keep asking, and she answers, moving her lips but not making a sound, making the louche questioners read, as she must, “I am deaf, and you are thick as fog, thicker than cardboard, deeply, deeply stupid.” Unkind stupid is the worst kind.

  Her sleepy tongue embraces the new inconsonance.

  Woolgathering. Her mother encouraged it, gave her every opportunity to consort with fluff. Grace grew up on a sheep farm. She was the gatherer, the child who went to the henhouse thrumming with berk, berk, berk before breakfast and thrust her hand under cosy hen-breasts to collect the eggs, the one who picked watercress from the stream that ran through the orchard, the wild asparagus that grew beside the river and tasted of tides, and the tufts left behind on thistles and barbed wire fences, wool she used to felt hats for her dolls and for the bush-tit sock hotels she made for avian tenants.

  This was dreamtime with sound: hens, roosters, sheep, wind in the grass, hummingbird wings and rain. She gathered light, framed her projections the way photographers choose their shots, with her fingers, two thumbs and two pointers, a rectangle. Her mother called it Grace TV. “Say Grace,” Mum said at the table, and her hippy siblings, Summer and Forrest, made frames, hummed in funky keys and rolled their eyes while Grace got ready to lick her plate and make it laugh, then tell.

  “Enjoy. Children are starving in Bangladesh,” her mother said, approving of Grace’s hunger, spooning out more as she waited for Grace TV.

  “What’s on today?”

  Grace swallowed her mouthfuls and spun her stories, describing a world always moving like clouds across the sky. Sometimes she spun herself, and the colours ran together: rainbow spit, Technicolor smiles. “Fog is tears held in suspension,” her mother said, while she sewed muslin bags for the spice she put in her stews and their sheep grew back the wool her father had sheared. “‘Cotton’ in German is ‘Baumwolle.’” Grace closed her eyes and saw rows of sad-trees shawled in wool.