248 Family poems

1 It was nearly daylight when she gave birth to the child, lying on a quilt he had doubled up for her. He put the child on his left arm and took it out of the room, and she could hear the splashing water. When he came back she asked him where the child was. He replied: “Out there—in the water.” He punched up the fire and returned with an armload of wood and the child, and put the dead child into the fire. She said: “O John, don't!” He did not reply but turned to her and smiled. 2 Late at night, their sow rooted open the door of their cabin, and husband and wife quarreled over driving her out. His wife knocked him down with an iron shovel. He started for his breeches and said, “If I had my knife, I'd cut your throat,” and she ran out the door. He shut the door after her and propped it closed with a stick of wood. When she was found, she was lying on her face, frozen to death. The weather extremely cold and where she lay the snow was about eighteen inches deep. When she left the cabin, she was barefoot and had very little clothing. The way she took led through briers and there were drops of blood on the snow— where the briers had torn her legs from the knees down— and bits of clothing that had been torn off; at one place she had struck her ankle against the end of a log and it bled freely. 3 Mrs. Farborough went into her brother's house, leaving her husband a short distance from it— he was the best man of the neighborhood for strength— and, without speaking to anyone, seized a tin cup. Her sister-in-law said it seemed as if she took a good deal of authority there. Mrs. Farborough replied she took enough to get her things, and would also take her teakettle. Mrs. Eller told her to take them and get out of the house and stay out. Mrs. Farborough did go out but soon returned with a stone— as large as her fist— which she held under her apron, and sat down, remarking that she intended to stay a while just for aggravation. Farborough then approached the house with a stone in each hand and, when near it, sat on a log. After a moment or two, he sprang into the house, the stones still in his hands. At this, his wife threw the stone she held under her apron at her sister-in-law: missed and struck the side of the house near her head. The women clinched and fell to the floor, Mrs. Farborough on top, hitting Mrs. Eller in the face with her fist. Eller went up to Farborough and said: “Brother Martin, take your wife out of here, and I will take care of mine. Let us have no fuss!” And he started forward to part the women, still fighting. Farnborough pushed him back: “God damn you, stand back, or I will kill the last Goddamn one of you!” and lifted his right hand, holding the stone. He turned to look at the women, and Eller shot him in the back with a pistol, just where his suspenders crossed. 4 He and his wife were members of a society known as Knights and Ladies of Honor. The life of each member was insured for two thousand dollars— to go to widow or widower. He had to borrow money to pay his dues and had just been defeated for town marshal; and now his wife was sick. The Knight of Honor was seen in a saloon with a Negro who used to work for him; then the two were seen going into an alley. Here he gave the Negro a quarter and asked him to go to the drugstore and buy a small bottle of strychnine. If the druggist asked the Negro why he wanted it, he was to say to kill wolves on a farm. The Negro asked him what he really wanted it for and he said to poison the dogs belonging to a neighbor where a girl was working whom he wanted to visit at night. The Negro bought him the bottle, and he told the Negro that if questioned about it he must say that he put it in the pocket of his overcoat and left the coat hanging in a saloon, and that the bottle was taken from his pocket by someone. When his wife asked for the quinine she used as a medicine, he went to the mantelpiece where he had placed a package of quinine bought the day before and poured some of the strychnine into a spoonful of cold coffee. She thought the powder had a peculiar look, and tried to dissolve it by stirring it with her finger. He assured her it was quinine bought where he had always bought it; and she drank it.

One girl a full head taller Than the other—into their Sunday dresses. First, the slip, hardly a piece of fabric, Softly stitched and printed with a bud. I’m not their mother, and tangle, then untangle The whole cloth—on backwards, have to grab it Round their necks. But they know how to pull Arms in, a reflex of being dressed, And also, a child’s faith. The mass of stuff That makes the Sunday frocks collapses In my hands and finds its shape, only because They understand the drape of it— These skinny keys to intricate locks. The buttons are a problem For a surgeon. How would she connect These bony valves and stubborn eyelets? The filmy dress revolves in my blind fingers. The slots work one by one. And when they’re put together, Not like puppets or those doll-saints That bring tears to true believers, But living children, somebody’s real daughters, They do become more real. They say, “Stop it!” and “Give it back!” And “I don’t want to!” They’ll kiss A doll’s hard features, whispering, “I’m sorry.” I know just why my mother Used to worry. Your clothes don’t keep You close—it’s nakedness. Clad in my boots and holster, I would roam with my six-gun buddies. We dealt fake death to one another, Fell and rolled in filth and rose, Grimy with wounds, then headed home. But Sunday ... what was that tired explanation Given for wearing clothes that Scratched and shone and weighed like a slow hour? That we should shine—in gratitude. So, I give that explanation, undressing them, And wait for the result. After a day like Sunday, such a long one, When they lie down, half-dead, To be undone, they won’t help me. They cry, “It’s not my fault.”

for Emma Grace The day we picked our daughter up from camp, goldenrod lined the road, towheaded scouts bowing on both sides, the parting of macadam as we drove, the fields dry, the sky lacy with clouds. A farmer waved.  A horse shrugged its haughty head. We stopped for corn, just picked, and plums and kale, sampled pies, still warm, and tarts and honeyed bread. Sheets on a line ballooned out like a ship’s sail. Time stopped in those miles before we saw her. For eight days we hadn’t tucked her in or brushed her hair or watched her grow, the week a busy blur of grown-up bliss.  It came anyway, that uprush of fear—because somewhere a child was dead: at a market, a subway, a school, in a lunatic’s bed.

My dear children, do you remember the morning When we climbed into the old Plymouth And drove west straight toward the Pacific? We were all the people there were. We followed Dylan's songs all the way west. It was Seventy; the war was over, almost; And we were driving to the sea. We had closed the farm, tucked in The flap, and were eating the honey Of distance and the word "there." Oh whee, we're gonna fly Down into the easy chair . We sang that Over and over. That's what the early Seventies were like. We weren't afraid. And a hole had opened in the world. We laughed at Las Vegas. There was enough gaiety For all of us, and ahead of us was The ocean. Tomorrow's The day my bride's gonna come . And the war was over, almost.

When he tells the story now he's at the center of it, everyone else in the house falling into the backdrop— my mother, grandmother, an uncle, all dead now—props in our story: father and daughter caught in memory's half-light. I'm too young to recall it, so his story becomes the story: 1969, Hurricane Camille bearing down, the old house shuddering as if it will collapse. Rain pours into every room and he has to keep moving, keep me out of harm's way— a father's first duty: to protect. And so, in the story, he does: I am small in his arms, perhaps even sleeping. Water is rising around us and there is no higher place he can take me than this, memory forged in the storm's eye: a girl clinging to her father. What can I do but this? Let him tell it again and again as if it's always been only us, and that, when it mattered, he was the one who saved me.

Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch, are bickering. The eldest has come home with new truths she can hardly wait to teach. She lectures them: the younger daughters search the sky, elbow each other's ribs, and groan. Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch and blue-sprigged dresses, like a stand of birch saplings whose leaves are going yellow-brown with new truths. They can hardly wait to teach, themselves, to be called "Ma'am," to march high-heeled across the hanging bridge to town. Five daughters. In the slant light on the porch Pomp lowers his paper for a while, to watch the beauties he's begotten with his Ann: these new truths they can hardly wait to teach. The eldest sniffs, "A lady doesn't scratch." The third snorts back, "Knock, knock: nobody home." The fourth concedes, "Well, maybe not in church. . . " Five daughters in the slant light on the porch.

for my mother and father Apparently I’m Mom’s immaculately-conceived Irish-American son, because, Social-Security time come, my Cherokee dad could not prove he’d been born. He could pay taxes, though, financing troops, who’d conquered our land, and could go to jail, the time he had to shoot or die, by a Caucasian attacker’s knife. Eluding recreational killers’ calendar’s enforcers, while hunting my family’s food, I thought what the hunted think, so that I ate, not only meat but the days of wild animals fed by the days of seeds, themselves eating earth’s aeons of lives, fed by the sun, rising and falling, as quail, hurtling through sky, fell, from gun-powder, come— as the First Americans came— from Asia. Explosions in cannon, I have an English name, a German-Chilean-American wife and could live a white life, but, with this hand, with which I write, I dug, my sixteenth summer, a winter’s supply of yams out of hard, battlefield clay, dug for my father’s mother, who— abandoned by her husband—raised, alone, a mixed-blood family and raised—her tongue spading air— ancestors, a winter’s supply or more.

One container of spaghetti sauce Grandma made before she died. Two old pieces of wedding cake you couldn’t pay me to eat. Three snowballs from last winter slightly deformed, no longer fluffy. Four small flounder from the time Grandpa took me deep-sea fishing. Everything coated with a thick white layer of sadness.

At sixteen he dismisses his mother with contempt. She hears with dread the repulsive wave’s approach and her fifty-year-old body smothers under water. An old man loses half his weight, as if by stealth, but finds in his shed his great-grandfather’s knobbly cane, and hobbles toward youth beside the pond’s swart water. She listens to the dun-colored whippoorwill’s three-beat before dawn, and again when dusk enters the cornfield parched and wanting water. He imagines but cannot bring himself to believe that the dead woman enters his house disguised or that the young rabbi made

The oldest sister, her two hands on the table, about to push herself up, stares with grim determination at the affronting dishes, waiting, it seems, until the middle sister finishes her story, so she can clear them away. Her gaze so tense with purpose she can almost see germs spawning in the mess of white fish flaking from the spines, the smear of egg yolk and the torn rolls disfiguring the china; as if the meal, the moment it is over, the meal she made a point of telling them she shopped for, got up early to prepare, were now inedible, because uneaten. It’s no great comfort either that her brother sitting opposite holds up a flared match over the pipe from which smoke rolls away across the table like a phantom mold in and around the open tub of butter, the gouged block of cream cheese and the coffee cups; so in a moment when she finally does stand she’ll say again, as always, For love or money in my mouth I’d never put such filth, and he’ll say, winking at the middle sister, That’s what she said on her honeymoon. The youngest sister is sitting on the couch behind the table; her face—sheer disengagement, toneless and still—appears to hang suspended beyond the oldest sister’s shoulder, far enough away for no one yet to notice as her legs cross that the ashtray in her lap spills ash over the sunflowers of her housedress. Or that the cigarette between her fingers sags loosely and is dangling while the hand lifts like a puppet’s on a string of smoke. Her death is just three months away. Even though it’s summer (otherwise the brother and middle sister would be home, in Florida), summer and late morning— with sunlight only just now catching on a corner of the window shut behind them, shut against the smog, the steady traffic and the panicked blare and drawn-out whining fade of sirens—the apartment is still quiet, still cool enough, right now, to keep the body in the wavering frail zone of what it needs to be forgotten, so they can sit like this together, with the oldest sister’s sharp eye on the wrecked meal, the brother and sister talking: Listen, she would be saying, listen, Charlie, her elbows on the table, both hands open, the body fashioned to the voice’s weary What can you do? What are ya gonna do? in answer to some story of a cousin’s sudden illness (And he was my age, just like that one day he’s shaving with the toothpaste), or a friend’s death (That one, she didn’t care how sick she got, she always had her hair done), his back pain, her arthritis, or the daughter who won’t diet (And she’d be such a beauty!); after his joke about the nurse, and hers about the bedpan, Listen, they each say, Listen, what are ya gonna do? “The Schmo, he never should’ve married her, for Christ sake, until he told her that he had a problem, that was his first mistake, then he goes throwing away his pills, because he’s happy he doesn’t need them anymore, the schmo, so of course what happens is she wakes up and finds him weeping at the kitchen table, just weeping, he doesn’t know why, he won’t eat, won’t get dressed, says he’s quittin’ his job, you know, nuts, nuts, so naturally she leaves him, the poor schmo, and he’s such a good boy . . . ” All of the harm that’s imperceptibly but surely coming for them (the way the sun burns brick by brick all morning toward the window like a slow fuse)—all of the bad news now is in the body only enough to hold the middle sister’s two hands open, shrug her shoulders in a way they recognize as hers, the way their mother did; as if all trouble were, for now, no heavier than the familiar voice repeating, Listen, Listen it could be worse; So who’s to say?; What was, was; When your number’s up—like old charms woven around each story till they’ve made what happens what was only meant to happen, coherent with fate, fated as family. After the funeral three months from now, they’ll have to listen to the oldest sister tell them they had no business moving away to Florida, and Irene sick as she was. And selfish. She was selfish, that one. After all those years of living with that bum, her husband, may his cheap soul rest in peace, didn’t she deserve a little pleasure? And anyway, what could be done for her? Didn’t the stroke just make it easier for her to sit all day, and smoke, and not care ashes were falling on the couch, the carpet; her bathrobe filthy, filthy? Oh it was terrible— and now they will hear the old unfairnesses, old feuds and resentments come to her voice like consolation, like a mother helping her recite the story of that last bad day— all that smoke, and running in with nothing but the dishtowel to beat down the flames, and Irene, just Irene, just sitting there, the queen of Sheba—What difference did it make since she was there,she was always there, her big sister, to clean up the mess? Only three months, and yet it could be years, or decades, for the sun has only just now caught in the window, and its bright plaque warms the air so gradually that none of them can know it’s warming, or that soon someone, distracted by a faint sheen prickling the skin, will break the story, look up toward the window and, startled by the full glare, check the time. Right now, though, the future is a luxury of instances in which the cigarette, raised halfway to the lips, will go on rising. Nothing bad, right now, can happen here except as news, bad news the brother and sister mull and rehearse, puzzle and fret until it seems the very telling of it is what keeps them safe. And safe, too, the oldest sister, dreaming of all the perishables sealed, wrapped up and hurried back into the fridge’s uncontaminated airlessness, dreaming of how the soapsuds curdle and slide over the dishes in a soothing fury, not minding that it scalds her hands to hold each plate and cup and bowl under the hot, hard jet of water, if it gets them clean.