Trowbridge Road: List 3

The sun was shining, and everything was lush and green. The tomatoes were so juicy, they looked like they were going to explode, and the leafy tops of carrots sprang like green fireworks from the ground.

“Let’s look for talismans for spells of safety, and then we’ll bring down the pillow and blanket.”

I found a clay marble, a piece of petrified coal, and a bunch of old glass bottles in various states of disrepair.

Then we arranged the treasures in the spaces between the rocks on the walls around us. The sole of the boot. The railroad nail, the tiny blue medicine bottle, the broken water jug handle—all lined up like talismans on a magician's mantelpiece.

This was where we took care of each other when there was illness, fetching water from the pump, a pyramid of birch logs in the fireplace, warming us even when the winters seemed endless and the larder was low, and the farm was filled with crows at dusk, the sound of their feathery voices in the bare January trees echoing everywhere, their bodies, when we ran to the frosted windows to look, like thousands of black leaves.

We could see the dusky sky through the opening and the bleak shape of winter trees.

It was January and the farm was covered in snow. The fallow cornfields and the trees surrounding us were filled with screeching crows, black bodies shifting from one branch to another.

But they flew away.
Thousands of them together. Darkening the sky.
Whirling and roiling. Flapping away.

“Toby's salami did me in. Call hospice. I'm ready to go.” She held herself and rocked, miserably.

“Only use hot water,” she said. “It needs to be scalding to do any good.”

I could smell the Clorox dancing and hear the sound of water lapping against her skin and the rasp of Mother’s breathing as she scrubbed all the germs away.

It was almost as though I had used a spell of transformation and I was so crazed by exertion that I had duplicated and now there were two June Bugs screaming from the pain of earth beneath my fingernails.

It was not the uncertain cry of disappointment, or the fleeting cry of something new. This was a wail that had built up over months of watching Mother getting worse, and even further back—to the beginnings of disgustingness and disinfection, the diagnosis and disease.

“Oh,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, “just some Necessaries.”

Jenny pantomimed a roundhouse punch.

Jenny poured a swig of something from her hip flask into her Breakfast of Champions. Then she gave me a rueful, lopsided smile and raised her mug.

Then Jenny was covering my mouth with one hand and shushing me, because there were sounds from upstairs, then the thumping of footsteps as Nana Jean and Ziggy came stumbling down the stairs, a tumble of sleepy steps as fast as they could muster, and then they were here in the stairwell, blinking at us, not sure if we were real or a part of their dreams.

After we put some food in our bellies, everything will look less dire.

Did he see our house with brand-new eyes tonight: the parlor with its scalloped chairs and white lace curtains, the study filled with bookshelves and sheet music, the photographs that showed the three of us, a family, posing with our arms around one another.

“Dear Lord,” said Jenny, “we thank thee for these here scrumptious gifts we are about to receive, these super-duper delicious breakfast eggs that our new friend, June Bug Jordan, from down the street, hath made for us.”

Were you there at their wedding? That weird, somber affair?

“You’ve got enough on your mind, without adding my daughter’s revelations to them.”

The wind moved through the living room, stirring the lace curtains like gossamer.

Daddy had called it her artistic temperament. This is why she had the determination to practice one phrase of one movement of one piece over and over again until it was right.

"'Are you sure?” I asked Nana Jean with a quavering voice.

I pushed on his flat blade to chip into the bark, clearing away the skin. I chiseled Letter Opener back and forth until the bark fell away.

Once I had the outline of each letter, I traced inside each groove, pressing the blade over and over again until the cut of each letter was deep, about a quarter of an inch into the flesh.

I used Carrot Scraper’s pointy tip to carve thin, feathery spiderweb lines all around my name, etching radiating waves from each letter to the scarred edge where flesh met bark again.

The entire neighborhood spun into my vortex, the houses and trees and neighbors and cars and dogs on their leashes, and the shops down on Lincoln Street all ripped from their foundations, and everything slurped into my hungry mouth, and I was rising so high above the clouds and growing so gigantic that the earth was just a small blue lozenge that I shoved into my mouth, tucked into the corner of my cheek.

The tiny red dragon cowered between the clouds.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” I said, my heart lurching.

I nodded silently almost imperceptibly.

She made that keening sound that only a grandmother can make, that mixture of happiness and terrible sadness and relief and elation and despair, and she pulled us close to her body and hugged us like she wanted to pull us safe inside.

She made that keening sound that only a grandmother can make, that mixture of happiness and terrible sadness and relief and elation and despair, and she pulled us close to her body and hugged us like she wanted to pull us safe inside.

Inside the kitchenette, there was a little alcove with a scratched-up table and two mismatched wooden chairs, one for Uncle Toby and one for me.