Crow Jazz Read online

  She’s telling me everything means everything, or maybe nothing, Grace thought while she watched birds play hide-and-seek on the infinite screen upstairs, fluffy clouds shaped like her mother’s hair, now a lamb, now cantering horses.

  She watched mother eagles circle the fields, teaching their young to hunt, to gouge out the eyes of newborn lambs and eat them, what her father called “contemptible snacks.”

  “Kids need dreamtime,” her mother insisted when teachers complained about Grace. Grace TV didn’t work on blackboards or lined exercise books, but classroom windows were her silver screens. Grace stared for hours and hours, watched flowers open up in movie time, watched snow make beds where angels lie down and frozen branches blossom.

  “Grace is an anomaly, a witness, the essential nones-sential invisible in mutable sutras,” her fluffy-headed hippy mother explained. The teachers thought Grace’s mother should go back to the city she came from and seek help, but Grace thought her mother was special; she understood the beholding.

  “You are an uber ewe,” Grace said, trying out a new concept, best of the best, snuggling into the soft sweater her mother had spun and knit from clouds of carded wool, combing her mother’s tangled wild-woman hair with her fingers, the reason, she said, little girls should not put their fingers in electrical outlets. Grace has not done that. Her hair is straight and auburn like her dad’s.

  “She’s a woolgatherer,” her mother apologized to her father when he was annoyed after an eagle stole a newborn lamb from the pasture where Grace had been sent to watch over the flock.

  Why did her father call her mother “My Old Lady”?

  “He doesn’t get us,” she told Grace.

  That was an aha moment, although Grace didn’t realise it until later, when her mother hopped aboard a different cloud and vanished.

  Then and now, Grace visits her mother under the willow that weeps like men who can’t understand why on Earth their wives would leave them, especially for another woman, where her father buried his AWOL wife’s shoes and her purse. What was he thinking, she wonders, that the woman he loved imperfectly would not get far without them?

  Ombre, she thinks today, years later, AD, for storm clouds, the black sheep, growers of dark wool and typeface, black on white, ominous script. Now the air smells different. She shifts and closes her eyes. Patterns of light flicker on her lids, herding floaters off the main stage to her mother’s things buried under the sorrow tree.

  Zap. Zap. Zap. She feels the current, mother to daughter, husband to wife, wife to wife. She understands about electricity, AC/DC, alternating currents. Power shocks. Power failures. Her world is divided in similar ways, everything by halves, Up where her mother wandered into a binary cloud and fell down to Earth, and Down, to After Deaf, nothing to do with religion, miracles, nothing to do with Jesus the time marker, just her way of being, before he turned off the sound.

  What happens first, she wonders, do married people stop listening or does one of them simply turn down the volume?

  After her mother drifted away, she grew up, left the farm and found a room in the city, in Chinatown, where she scavenged for images and materials for the small (amuse-bouche?) paintings and collages she sold in street markets and the co-op gallery.

  Before Silence, she framed Him with her fingers. She was sketching on the patio at The Ocean Garden, dreaming her way through a pot of Moonlight on the Grove and a plate of fortune cookies when he found her, “Do you mind if I sit here?” Click, her hands went up, made the frame, and her aperture stalled—Northern Chinese, long nose, slender fingers and soft voice. Photogenic.

  Magic will transform your life, she read as he pulled up a chair. He talked. She listened. He said he was a magician, and she blinked and read her fortune again.

  The human body is an electrical grid, he said, taking her hand, squeezing the little pad between thumb and first finger. She felt a jolt from her groin to her brain, and she couldn’t let go because he was pulling her way past the let go threshold. Later he observed that he was action, she was reaction, Yin and yang. Perfect. Just like electricity, one electrode jumping to or on another.

  He massaged and relaxed her fingers, especially the web parts from the time before, when she was a fish that swam right up to him, sudden love.

  Are you hungry, he asked? He whispered in her ear, and he knew what to say, the menu: shrimp balls, wo wonton, pork buns, green peas with garlic prawns, ginger beef, eight jewel duck with crispy skin, cod with black bean sauce, in Mandarin and English.

  “What do you do?”

  “Woolgathering,” she said without thinking, when she should have said, “I am an artist.” He might have noticed the paint under her fingernails.

  “Woolgathering?”

  “I dream, and then I translate my dreams into little pictures.”

  She ate with him. Even before her left brain went along with the decision to stay, she was already there. One mother-generated Grace factoid is that Grace is like a stray cat; once you have fed her, she’s yours forever. That was a great family joke.

  “Now you’ve got me,” she said, after the magician dipped in the wonton bowl with his soupspoon and slipped a quivery noodle on her tongue.

  “The cod’s eye is a delicacy,” he said when the fish plate arrived. He plucked it out for her, and she saw eagles circling lambs, going for the eyes.

  “Then you eat it,” she said, shivering.

  They opened more fortune cookies, and he read his first: Your dreams will become reality, and she added words her mother taught her, “in bed.”

  Later, in his manbed, only a few doors from her studio couch as it happened, he whispered dessert: lychee nuts, almond cookies, quivering coconut jelly, and a night-blooming lotus opened between her legs as her private lake trembled then shuddered like fragrant petals reaching for the moon.

  So they continued. He practiced his magic tricks, and she moved in, gathered wool and assembled her dreams, cityscapes with clouds, children who looked at clouds and clouds that became animals. Sometimes he surprised her by pulling things from his sleeves, a beautiful scarf or jade earrings. Sometimes he lit flash paper in the dark and startled her out of her sleep.

  Every morning rain or shine, she crawled out the bedroom window and sat on the fire escape to watch the sky, and he passed out cups of jasmine tea. Every evening, he whispered in her ear while she held her phone to her other ear, ordering between moans: ants climbing trees, ma po tofu, moo goo guy pon, bang bang Ji, dragon’s beard candy, ginger ice cream.

  By the time the delivery boy came with their cartons, they would be dressed and waiting at the kitchen table—chopsticks, bowls, tea in order and every hair in place. She also moaned when she ate, always licking her plate, making it laugh.

  It is the adorable things that first become irritating when the bloom is off the rose.

  “Do you have to do that?” he asked, after a while. “You–ll lick the pattern off.” The pattern was bamboo leaves, very pretty, his mother’s china. His mother’s flesh was dissolving in a jar filled with wine at the Chinese cemetery. His father’s too.

  “Earth calling Grace,” he complained, when he caught her gathering, her brush suspended in midair, the paint drying on it. “Earth calling Grace.” Sometimes he said it more than once.

  “Let’s have a child,” she said, and he asked if she would pay attention, if her child might drink turpentine or put its fingers in an electrical socket while she was woolgathering.

  “You can’t just pull babies out of your sleeves,” he told her. “You can’t put them back when you’re having dreamtime.”

  “You could drop a bomb beside Grace when she’s woolgathering,” her father advised her lover when he was visiting, meaning, leave her be; if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. But her lover was not used to this sort of proverb. He came from a Confucian family with homilies about social order.

  Disorder is not sent down by heaven. It is produced by women.

  And fixed by men, o
f course. It was Chinese New Year, their third together, a time of whispering and feasting. They went to Quon Lee’s and bought tins of special New Year’s cookies and fireworks wrapped in colourful papers, and even though the bloom was off the rose, they ordered takeout to celebrate in the usual way.

  She put on her red silk cheongsam and felt how beautifully it fit over the secret child in her slightly swollen belly—so soft, like stroking an animal’s flanks. It was the Year of the Horse. She looked out the window and watched white mares canter across the sky. Then she sat down and imagined them galloping through cloud tunnels to the sun. What is the sound of hooves cantering on air, she wondered? Her secret child, running in circles around her belly, was still as invisible as air; and she was hungrier than ever.

  “Earth calling Grace,” he insisted. The delivery boy rang and rang the doorbell.

  Her eyes stayed shut. White horses circled the sun, one continuous solar cloud. She heard her lover go downstairs, then up, with paper bags full of sticky rice and singing chicken carolling in his arms.

  “Earth calling Grace,” he shouted one more time, a warning. He gave warnings when she went off with her dreams. Sometimes he’d bang on their wok with a big metal spoon. This time he went foolish. Stupid. Stupid, especially when they knew a woman who was deaf in one ear because a boy lit a firecracker next to her face.

  She heard him strike a match, and then she smelled sulphur.

  “Bang!” the room rocked and filled with smoke.

  She remembers saying, “Those firecrackers were for New Year’s.” What a silly reaction when her ears were bleeding, when he might as well have stuck a chopstick in her ear and driven it right through her brain.

  They both lost their hearing.

  She considered the verb “lost” as if hearing loss was love gone missing, something they might find if they looked hard enough. They looked under the bed, in the phone book, at the clinic. They tried magic, but there were no new ears up his sleeves or inside his top hat, and no enduring love. He was sorry. She was sorry. They took care of one another, although love as they’d known it was forever changed. But it would never be the same.

  There would be no more whispering, no more ordering dinner, no more feather dusting the glorious tchotchkes they’d collected in Chinatown and beyond. She found it hard to remember the sound of his voice. Worse, she began to imagine herself ramming chopsticks in his orifices, in his ears, his nose, his anus, driving them right up and into the source of his magic.

  He never noticed the child, or if he did, he pretended not to know.

  “So long,” she said some weeks later, after she’d packed her paints, her brushes, her sketchbooks, her toothbrush and not much else, and left the red silk cheongsam on the bed with Proverbs 21, verse 9 pinned to the sleeve.

  It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife.

  She moved back to her studio and, shortly after, to the farm. It was too difficult in the city, where crossing the street was dangerous and people asked her if she was deaf or stupid when she read their lips incorrectly, especially the ones attached to their devices. They were the least kind. Who would protect her child from traffic? Who would protect her child from fireworks and people with iPods?

  What was the sound of hooves cantering on air? It was still the Year of the Horse. Time to ride home.

  The big silver screen still hangs over the field where she’s back to her usual, and her father still sings to the rose on her mother’s grave; but now it’s a silent movie, no murmuration of swallows, no rain on leaves, no bees buzzing or hawks squawking and, most of all, no sheep mother and child radar, familial bleating.

  Her father is learning sign language. Grace has been learning to cook lamb short ribs and pineapple upside-down cake, and the rest of her mother’s repertoire, root beer chilled in the well and wildflowers in jars. Every afternoon, she lies on her back and watches the sky while the child sleeps inside her.

  Once, before he cut the hay, her father almost ran over Grace and her unborn child. Then he jumped right off his tractor, held her and wept under the weeping willow, next to the rose where her mother’s purse and her shoes lie buried.

  It’s past solstice time, time for the sheep to mate and for her baby to arrive. She feels the pull and so does the father of her child, who has sent her a box of divinity with a note. It came in today’s mail. I’m learning to cook, and I’ve started with divinity candy. Beat egg whites and pour in sugar and the secret ingredient. Nuts are not optional. She can guess what the secret ingredient might be. She sniffs the candy. It smells familiar. She takes it to the willow tree and eats it, greedily, guiltily because she will not be responding to this overture. It does occur to her to send an egg by return mail. Would it survive? She could wrap it in wool, like an infant. Not.

  Solstice or no solstice, it’s a firmament-troubled day. She’s near her mother, marvelling at how everything changes in a moment: sun to rain, girl to woman, woman to mother. The sky flock is restless. She feels but doesn’t hear the thunder and is so intrigued by dark sheep chasing white sheep across the heavens that she fails to run and hide from the lightning that strikes the sorrow tree and invites her child to come suddenly, painfully, jolts of electricity bursting her water right there, no time to get to the house.

  Grace is surprised, but calm, alone with her dreaming as usual. Magical thinking will get this life out of her just as it got in. She thinks of her birth canal as a sleeve full of tricks, a silk sleeve filled with fingers and toes stretching and pulling, petals convulsing, opening, flesh-coloured skirts. More lightning. Flash paper. Fireworks, all of it silent. Not a peep from the sky or from her or the willow splitting open, not even the sound of flesh tearing.

  The head has crowned. She’s crossing the let go threshold again, clutched by contrary motion. She pushes, reciting the ingredients for a post-partum menu: savory dumplings, sik foo, bitter soup. What was it they ate the day the child was conceived?

  More thunder, lightning and rain.

  The storm passes. She lies exhausted on her mother’s grave with her baby dangling between her legs, its cord still attached, waiting for the next moment to find them. She and her magic trick are soaked with rain and blood, and she shivers, expelling the afterbirth.

  Grace and the child doze and wake as the sun slowly warms them. Her petite jouissance stretches, brushing her thigh with her fingers. Now she’s a mother, her third eye opening. She watches an eagle emerge from its storm shelter at the top of a tall cedar, and she covers the tiny face, remembering the fish eye quivering between her lover’s chopsticks.

  She doesn’t hear the birds. She doesn’t hear the ewe approach and paw the ground with her hoof. She doesn’t hear the bereft mother rage at the sky that took her lamb. But she does see the eagle vanish, chased away by crows and gulls, raging breath and furious mothers. She undoes the top buttons on her shirt, gathers her slippery child and lifts her to her breast. The baby kneads and gropes with hungry lips and fists, then latches on. Grace is surprised by love. More powerful than lightning or fireworks or lust, the current moves from her nipple to her groin, and she knows it will never let go.

  MOUSE, NOT, A SIXTIES SCOOP

  This is how I got out of jail.

  It happened in jail. After I joined up with the Brotherhood, we built a sweat lodge and got The Man to let us build a shed for carving. Eventually, we got a bighouse, and that was when my luck changed.

  Every year we had two powwows, one in fall and one in spring. At this one powwow, a chief called Running Wolf was the honoured guest. He came in his smudge-face and feathers, and he danced so hard and long for the guys inside, some of the beads fell off his moccasins.

  When that happened, all the inmates got down on their hands and knees and looked in the grass for the green beads, but they were impossible to see. He said beads were wisdom, and wisdom was hard to find. The Chief said that was a new four-legged dance called the find-the-bead dance.
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br />   Running Wolf wanted to honour someone. All the time, I was thinking how I didn’t deserve to be at the powwow and wondering if I had the guts to hang myself or walk into the sea with stones in my pockets. The Chief made a long speech about a brother who gave to others and how he had helped someone in his own family one time. We all wondered who it was—maybe even the warden.

  Just then this raven came flying out of the trees and circled the powwow. He landed at the top of a dead cedar.

  The Chief held up his fan, and he said it was his most cherished possession. He had it in Vietnam and at Wounded Knee. He said the names of all the warriors who danced with it. Then he called my name, and he gave me his fan, two eagle feathers on an elk antler. He told them I saved one of his nephews who got lost on the street, and I didn’t even remember when that happened. I forgot a lot of things when I was drinking, but even when I was most mad at some people, I helped other people.

  Getting the eagle feathers was the second gift that changed my life. I’ve been double blessed. If I ever got lost again, I would let down the Chief and everyone else blessed by that fan. He told me the fan was helping hands and I would fly from then on; and I have.

  The first gift came when I took my name back, and that was thanks to a guy who was in jail who had no friends, no one to fan him with sacred feathers like mine.

  It’s a long story that starts with my real name, Clarence Little Bear Dumont. I got a tall name and a short body, but I wasn’t born like that. I was twenty-four inches long the day I got born, and I weighed almost eleven pounds. The doctor at the clinic said that is beyond the normal limit because my mother had gesta-tional diabetes. Lots of Indians have diabetes these days on account of the white man’s diet. In my job, I teach people to eat properly, the old way.