He was right about the fork, no one ever found out about it. After a while even I forgot it was there. Hetcher did, too, I think.
That night Grandpa got up many times. I saw him go to the bathroom, fill a glass with water, drink it, fill it again, and carry it back to his room. “My throat is parched,” he said to me vacantly when we bumped into each other in the hall at
5:00 A.M
. “I’m parched,” he said, tottering back to bed.
Grandpa did not get out of bed until late, almost eleven o’clock the next day, which was very unusual for him. Grandma paced outside the room worried.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, when he finally appeared. “Are you feeling all right? Are you sick?”
“I had to finish my dream,” he said.
By the time he was dressed, Mom and Dad had arrived. They looked happy, in love, like newlyweds. They held hands under the table and looked at us curiously, as if they had no children yet, only dreams of them.
“Oh, what beautiful children!” my mother said, as if we were someone else’s.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, kissing her, not knowing what else to say. “Hi, Daddy.”
My grandfather walked in, hugged my mother, and sat down.
“I had a dream,” he said, like a child who had never had one before. “I saw-mountains,” he said, “pitch-black mountains. I never saw mountains like this before. And on these mountains there were people who could call water from the sky at will.” My grandmother gave out a sort of groan.
“Black, black mountains.”
“The Black Hills?” my mother said. “The sacred land of the Indians?”
“The Indians?” he cried. “Yes, that must be it! Those people were Indians! Of course. Where are these Black Hills?”
“South Dakota,” she said. It sounded beautiful when she said it: South Dakota—like a song.
My grandfather took my grandmother’s hand. “I must do this,” he said, “for the children.”
She knew him well enough to know there was no stopping him. It was already too late. He had started off alone in the middle of last night while she slept. “South Dakota,” he said. He was already halfway there, she knew, as he stood up and walked to the desk where the maps were kept.
My grandfather, whose Indian name turned out to be “Dreams of Rain,” not only learned that meteorological secret but manv other things as well. He went to the Black Hills over and over in his last five years and he told us everything.
“‘Moves on Water’ is Father’s Indian name,” he told us one day. “‘Brave Ghost’ is the name for your mother.”
As soon as a person died, messengers were sent to summon faraway relatives. Widows or widowers singed or cut their hair and with sharp objects made long, deep gashes in their skin. Grief stricken, they would wail for days and beat their breasts with stones and pestles.
Often the ghost lingers near the place it died and for one year attempts to lure-away the people it loved in life.
On a day Grandma was to be out the entire afternoon, Grandpa, in a serious mood, led us into his bedroom.
“Listen carefully,” he said. “This is important. Watch carefully.” From under his bed he took out a shoebox. In it were three plastic bags.
“This is black cornmeal,” he said, lifting the first bag up. “After my death, pour some out into your left hand, pass it around your head four times, and cast it away. This makes the road dark. It will prevent dream visits by the spirit. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Yes, Grandpa,” we said together.
“Good. The white cornmeal comes next,” he said, and he pointed to the second bag. “Take the white cornmeal in the right hand and sprinkle it, saying, ‘May you offer us your good wishes. May we be safe. May our days be fulfilled.’” Fletcher wrote it down. “This,” Grandpa said, “ensures the proper relation between the living and the dead. Now,” his voice grew softer, “on the fourth morning after my death, leave the windows and doors open so that my spirit can leave the house for good. There,” he said, pointing to the third bag—pine resin incense. “Burn this on the fourth day.”
“Be nice to Grandpa,” Fletcher said, walking into the room where my father stood conducting his imaginary orchestra, “because he is going to die soon.”
We walked in silence, the particular silence of midsummer. Father began to hum finally. Fletcher and I pointed to peacocks in cages, to raccoons and other small animals at the wildlife center. We scattered in the tall grasses. We followed Father into the woods, we breathed deeply as we saw him do. We held his hands; he said nothing.
We walked a long time—in fields, through flowers, in heat. The afternoon seemed slow and languid, when quite suddenly Father, who was so tall, bent down and in one motion, like a giraffe eating food from the earth’s floor, plucked a large, flat leaf from the ground, moved by some unknown force down and back up again.
“See this?” he said, looking at the leaf, shaking his head and laughing. “Children, look at this.”
We looked at the giant leaf I had no idea w hat Father might say He plucked another from the ground, then another, and knelt down next to us, his long arms scooping us up.
“These are the leaves!” he said. “These leaves. Back in Italy when I was a little boy, my grandmother used to dip these in egg and flour and fry them!” and he turned them over in their imaginary batter. “Oh, they were quite delicious.” He smiled.
“It’s been a long time now,” he said, gathering a few more leaves; we, too, picked them. “When she cooked them up that way they tasted just like veal.” He smiled a great smile; the memory warmed him and the warmth spilled onto us.
This was one of the happiest days of my life: clutching his hand, holding close the story of how his grandmother, who had never lived before this day, changed simple leaves for a young boy into veal.
“The way you hold your knife,” he sings, “the way we danced till three—the way you changed my life!” his voice rises and his heart swells. “No, no, they can’t take that away from me.
“No, they can’t take that away from me.”
“In New Orleans there is Mardi Gras—sweet smoke and Negroes and bourbon in the streets.”
“And
jazz
music,” Lucv savs.
It’s so exciting. The two girls giggle. Red lights and smoke and saxophones all night long.
“Old age finally killed Charlie,” my grandfather said, rubbing the ground’s brown belly. “One hundred and thirty years,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s a long time to live.
“Natural causes, they said, killed him.” My grandfather stood up. “Heart failure—kidney failure—failure failure.”
“Don’t forget the soul,” we whispered to him.
He smiled. “Charlie could really tell a story,” my grandfather said. “Oh, yeah, Charlie could really talk. We’d chew the fat all night sometimes.”
I wished that I had had stories to tell my grandfather.
“You know, he’s telling them now somewhere,” he said as we looked down at the dirt. “Maybe in African this time around, who knows?”
Once, before his name was Charlie Jones, West Africa had been his home. Once, before the Fourth of July was his birthday, before the farmer Samuel Jones bought him, he remembered his mother taking the bones from a fish. “Other things, too,” my grandfather said. He remembered stripes, the black-and-white stripes of the zebra, and the heat of the sun, and how fast he could run.
“They were young and strong, Charlie and his brother, and the man on the ship docked in the Liberian port saw that and tricked them with a story about how there were fritter trees on board and lots of syrup.
I never saw any of it again: not my mother, or the zebras…,’ Charlie said, ‘except here, Angelo,’ and he pointed to his head.”
My grandfather tucked the Charlie stories, the stories of riding with the Jesse James gang, the stories of going off with Billy the Kid to get the man w ho killed Garfield, he tucked them all back in his head. The stories seemed shifting and vulnerable, unstable when compared with this burial scene. My grandfather thought of the fluidity of stories and the dead man with his mouth closed. They lowered the coffin into the ground.
“On the day of the Emancipation Proclamation,” Charlie had said, “there was now here to turn.”
The local people had all made death wreaths. The gladiolus pressed their ears to the ground, listening even now for more. And Charlie talked on.
“Here is the time for the sayable,” Rilke writes in the “Ninth Elegy.” “
Here
is its homeland. Speak and bear witness.”
Jack came on a Monday, unexpectedly, at 9:00 A.M. He was coming to mv apartment now more and more often; we were leaving our hotel little behind. He had never done this though, come early in the morning, early in the week, and when I first heard his voice over the intercom I felt unsure, then frightened, then delighted, all while he climbed the three floors up to me. Such fluctuation in emotion from floor to floor was exhausting. As I opened the door I must have looked tired.
“Wake up, Vanessa! Wake up! Wake up!” he said.
“What are you doing here?” I asked cautiously, as calmly as I could.
“I couldn’t stay away,” he said. “Please.” He looked like a boy on his first date, but it was morning, not evening, and, standing outside my door, he held a bag instead of the more conventional flowers.
“What’s in the bag, Jack?”
“Close your eyes.”
With my eyes closed I pictured him as he looked now standing in front of me, his arms full, a large smile on his face. I thought to myself that this was a new Jack, a different one. I le looked younger today, more robust than I’d ever seen him. I suspected that a woman was involved—he had fallen in love, perhaps he had just come from her, he was being someone new for someone else. He was clear-eyed, the decision had been made: he was going to leave me, the ambivalence was over, no more debating in his head.
“OK,” he said, walking in the door.
I opened my eyes. Out of the bag came croissants and brioches, smoked fish and fruit, champagne. I sighed. He smiled. Today he looked like a man any woman would want to marry, take home to her parents, spend her life with.
“Where did you buy all this?” The face of the other woman faded. The smells were of fruit and of yeast. The whole apartment seemed safe. I nuzzled up to him.
“I made it all,” he said. “I’ve been planning it for days. I was up all night.”
I looked at Jack, puzzled. I could not predict anything about this man who stood before me with a tray of salmon and pastry, his chest puffed with pride.
“You
made
it all?”
He nodded.
“But there are little doilies around these fruit tarts.”
“I know,” he smiled. “I bought the doilies.”
“You
bouqht
the doilies?”
He laughed.
“These crusts are perfect, Jack.”
“I’ve been practicing. Ice water is the key”
“The cheese in this is absolutely—”
“Yes, I know.”
“Everything’s still warm.”
He smiled and opened the champagne. The excess spilled into my mouth.
Who was he? What was he trying to do? He opened the fruit: the kiwi, the pomegranate, the kumquat. They bled on his hands. He lingered the sweet meat, placed it in my mouth.
It was easy to love Jack the cook—the way he fondled the fruit, how small and tender the peach looked in his hand. It was easy to love him—the smell of pears in his hair.
“Some ham?” he asked. I watched him carefully, his expertise at slicing, and fora moment I could picture this Jack with me fora long, long time, this sweet, attentive, undemanding Jack: Jack the pastry chef, Jack the sauce chef. I could imagine traveling with him to exotic lands for ingredients. I could picture him at the cocktail hour feeding me pitted olives from his fingers.
“I want to make things for you, Vanessa,” he said. “I want to keep you warm and safe. I love you, my dumpling, my clam cake, my oyster stew.”
“Oh, ham hocks,” I said, “I love you, too.”
Jack the drama teacher always wore a tweed jacket, had a long scarf wrapped around his neck, and sipped coffee. He taught me how to prepare for each role: how to breathe, how to relax each part of the body; he showed me the exercises to do to limber up. Jack the acting teacher gave me confidence. “There is no role you are incapable of playing, no role too difficult, no role too out of character,” he said, “if you work hard, if you concentrate. Build, in your imagination, the circumstances in which such an action could take place. You can invent anything you have to, anything you want. You can do it all.”
“But there are times I drift away, Jack—come in and out of my part, lose my concentration, become afraid.”
“That’s OK,” he said. “Keep working. Stretch your body and your mind. Get in shape.
“Do what you must to get at the truth, to see what is difficult, to see what you believe you cannot bear to see. There is no substitute for the truth.”
“Don’t miss your train,” my mother whispers. “Please go.”
“There is no substitute for pain,” she said. “There is no way to stay safe.”
I have never been to that white house on the coast of Maine where my mother went so often. She would venture far into that untouchable country for weeks, months sometimes, with hardly a word for those of us who waited. “Do you think we’ll ever get to that white house, Dad?” I’d ask, but he was not listening. I watched him as he painfully composed letters to my missing mother. He put so much effort into them—crossing out, underlining, adding paragraphs, arrows and asterisks everywhere, copying them over and over until they were perfect.
I thought of her there in those vacation tow ns of summer often: those towns of heat and water and bleached wood, the hydrangea bushes bowing their drowsy heads, the bicycles propped against the pale sheds; the striped umbrellas, the fish stands; the moths at the screen. A warm sea breeze blows through her hair. A beach ball forms a lovely arc behind her in the blue sky.
It was harder in winter. In winter she became lost to me. It was harder in winter to see her happy. I did not want to give her up under the hydrangeas or writing on the beach, I wanted her to stay there, but in winter it was different. In winter she probably stayed huddled next to a fire in her huge Icelandic sweater, a white mug of coffee in her hands. It must have been very cold. She was probably lonely way up there.