Minnie Bruce Pratt

Leaving again. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be grieving. The particulars of place lodged in me, like this room I lived in for eleven days, how I learned the way the sun laid its palm over the side window in the morning, heavy light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.

Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning, that waits like the lobed sassafras leaf just before its dark green turns into red, that waits like the honeybee in the mouth of the purple lobelia. While I wait, I can hear the random clink of one fork against a plate. The woman next door is eating supper alone. She is sixty, perhaps, and for many years has eaten by herself the tomatoes, the corn and okra that she grows in her backyard garden. Her small metallic sound persists, as quiet almost as the windless silence, persists like the steady random click of a redbird cracking a few more seeds before the sun gets too low. She does not hurry, she does not linger. Her younger neighbors think that she is lonely. But I know what sufficiency she may possess. I know what can be gathered from year to year, gathered from what is near to hand, as I do elderberries that bend in damp thickets by the road, gathered and preserved, jars and jars shining in rows of claret red, made at times with help, a friend or a lover, but consumed long after, long after they are gone and I sit alone at the kitchen table. And when I sit in the last heat of Sunday, afternoons on the porch steps in the acid breath of the boxwoods, I also know desolation. The week is over, the coming night will not lift. I am exhausted from making each day. My family, my children live in other states, the women I love in other towns. I would rather be here than with them in the old ways, but when all that’s left of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds, when I get up and come in to fix supper, in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them. In the morning and the evening we are by ourselves, the woman next door and I. Still, we persist. I open the drawer to get out the silverware. She goes to her garden to pull weeds and pick the crookneck squash that turn yellow with late summer. I walk down to the pond in the morning to watch and wait for the blue heron who comes at first light to feed on minnows that swim through her shadow in the water. She stays until the day grows so bright that she cannot endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied. She bows her wings and slowly lifts into flight, grey and slate blue against a paler sky. I know she will come back. I see the light create a russet curve of land on the farther bank, where the wild rice bends heavy and ripe under the first blackbirds. I know she will come back. I see the light curve in the fall and rise of her wing.

Shattered glass in the street at Maryland and 10th: smashed sand glittering on a beach of black asphalt. You can think of it so: or as bits of broken kaleidoscope, or as crystals spilled from the white throat of a geode. You can use metaphor to move the glass as far as possible from the raised hands that threw the bottle for their own reasons of amusement, or despair, or the desire to make a cymbal crash in the ears of midnight sleepers. Or you can use words like your needle, the probe curious in tough heels, your bare feet having walked in risky places. You can work to the surface the irritant, pain, the glass sliver to blink in the light, sharp as a question.

At first she thought the lump in the road was clay thrown up by a trucker’s wheel. Then Beatrice saw the mess of feathers: Six or seven geese stood in the right-of-way, staring at the blood, their black heads rigid above white throats. Unmoved by passing wind or familiar violence, they fixed their gaze on dead flesh and something more, a bird on the wing. It whirled in a thicket of fog that grew up from fields plowed and turned to winter. It joined other spirits exhaled before dawn, creatures that once had crept or flapped or crawled over the land. Beatrice had heard her mother tell of men who passed as spirits. They hid in limestone caves by the river, hooded themselves inside the curved wall, the glistening rock. Then just at dark they appeared, as if they had the power to split the earth open to release them. White-robed, faceless horned heads, they advanced with torches over the water, saying: We are the ghosts of Shiloh and Bull Run fight! Neighbors who watched at the bridge knew each man by his voice or limp or mended boots but said nothing, allowed the marchers to pass on. Then they ran their skinny hounds to hunt other lives down ravines, to save their skins another night from the carrion beetles, spotted with red darker than blood, who wait by the grave for the body’s return to the earth. Some years the men killed scores, treed them in the sweetgums. Watched a man’s face flicker in the purple-black leaves. Then they burned the tree. Smoke from their fires still lay over the land where Beatrice traveled. Out of this cloud the dead of the field spoke to her, voices from the place where some voices never stop: They took my boy down by Sucarnochee Creek. He said, “Gentlemen, what have I done?” They says, “Never mind what you have done. We just want your damned heart.” After they killed him, I built up a little fire and laid out by him all night until the neighbors came in the morning. I was standing there when they killed him, down by Sucarnochee Creek.

On Magnolia Avenue there are no magnolias. Someone bought the house of the one survivor. All morning I heard the chainsaw sever its limbs from root to bud. No more scattered flowers, star city. No pink galaxy. Now the yard is a parking space, one Jeep SUV, one older car. Next door a woman comes out, late afternoon, a child in her arms. She speaks low, as if there’s just the two of them. She says to him, Listen to the little birdies, and he listens to the common sparrows talking in the hedge. He listens as they argue back and forth, their dialect of nature, as the street clatters with commuters taking a shortcut home. She says: Listen. And he turns his head to follow the fugitive motion, the small streaked wings unfolding, folding, the relentless chirp from a tiny blunt beak, the sound almost within reach.

A huge sound waits, bound in the ice, in the icicle roots, in the buds of snow on fir branches, in the falling silence of snow, glittering in the sun, brilliant as a swarm of gnats, nothing but hovering wings at midday. With the sun comes noise. Tongues of ice break free, fall, shatter, splinter, speak. If I could write the words. Simple, like turning a page, to say Write what happened

The woman across from me looks so familiar, but when I turn, her look glances off. At the last subway stop we rise. I know her, she gives manicures at Vogue Nails. She has held my hands between hers several times. She bows and smiles. There the women wear white smocks like technicians, and plastic tags with their Christian names. Susan. No, not Susan, whose hair is cropped short, who is short and stocky. This older lady does my hands while classical music, often Mozart, plays. People passing by outside are doubled in the wall mirror. Two of everyone walk forward, backward, vanish at the edge of the shop. Susan does pedicures, pumice on my heels as I sit on the stainless-steel throne. She bends over, she kneads my feet in the water like laundry. She pounds my calves with her fists and her cupped palms slap a working beat, p’ansori style. She talks to the others without turning her head, a call in a language shouted hoarse across fields where a swallow flew and flew across the ocean, and then fetched back to Korea a magic gourd seed, back to the farmer’s empty house where the seed flew from its beak to sprout a green vine. When the farmer’s wife cut open the ripe fruit, out spilled seeds of gold. Choi Don Mee writes that some girls in that country crush petals on their nails, at each tip red flowers unfold. Yi Yon-ju writes that some women there, as here, dream of blades, knives, a bowl of blood.

With this rain I am satisfied we will be together in the spring. Seeds of water on my window glass, transparent sprouts and rootlets. In your backyard steady rain through the heavy dirt we dug in, our shovels excavating some history of the tiny garden. Our blades cut through the design of a previous digger: rotting boards, rocks, earthworms big as young snakes; a tarnished spoon, pink champagne foil from a party; a palmful of blue feathers from a dead jay. We dug and planted. We intend to have a history here behind this rented house. Despite the owner there is a secret between us and the ground. In the wet dirt, our fleshy bulbs and the pink cloves of garlic are making nests of roots. The fact of the garden has satisfied me all morning: that we worked side by side, your name round when I spoke it: that my fingers worked in the dirt like rain, the ground like a made bed with its mulch of leaves, orderly, full of possibilities, acts of love not yet performed. Now the water’s slap on my window has made me think of something else, suddenly, what I don’t want to, the way I wake up in the night, think I’ve heard a gun shot. The memory, news story you told me a week ago: the farmers south, far south, El Salvador, afraid to go into their fields. What does their dirt look like? I don’t know. Instead I see that some thing is being planted: U.S. soldiers watching as others bury a dead hand, arm, head, torso. To be afraid to put your hand into the dirt. To be afraid to go look at your ground: that it has been cut like skin, will bulge out like cut muscle: that on a fair day there will be subterranean thunder, then a loud, continuous hiss of blood. I wish I could see only the flowering bulbs voluptuous in the spring. But what is planted is what comes. In the fall, plant stones: in the winter, the ground gapes with stones like teeth. I hold to the plan we thought of: small: full of possibilities against despair: us handing out sheets of paper, thousands, the list of crimes: sharp thin papers delving up something in people in parking lots, shopping malls. What will come of this? Perhaps people to stand with us outside the buildings, to say again: Not in my name. Words adamant as rock, and actions, here, in the coldest months, before soldiers move again in the fields to the south.

She pays attention to the hair, not her fingers, and cuts herself once or twice a day.   Doesn’t notice anymore, just if the blood starts flowing.   Says, Excuse me, to the customer and walks away for a band-aid.   Same spot on the middle finger over and over, raised like a callus.   Also the nicks where she snips between her fingers, the torn webbing.   Also spider veins on her legs now, so ugly, though she sits in a chair for half of each cut, rolls around from side to side.   At night in the winter she sleeps in white cotton gloves, Neosporin on the cuts, vitamin E, then heavy lotion.   All night, for weeks, her white hands lie clothed like those of a young girl going to her first party.   Sleeping alone, she opens and closes her long scissors and the hair falls under her hands.   It’s a good living, kind of like an undertaker, the people keep coming, and the hair, shoulder length, French twist, braids.   Someone has to cut it.   At the end she whisks and talcums my neck.   Only then can I bend and see my hair, how it covers the floor, curls and clippings of brown and silver, how it shines like a field of scythed hay beneath my feet.

1 Imagine a big room of women doing anything, playing cards, having a meeting, the rattle of paper or coffee cups or chairs pushed back, the loud and quiet murmur of their voices, women leaning their heads together. If we leaned in at the door and I said, Those women are mothers,