Authors: Barbara Kingsolver
Yet on most days he was like any broad-shouldered lad you’d ever known, with his manners and a sweet laugh. So fine for speaking, you asked him things just to hear what words he’d pick out in answer, for they’d be not the ones you expected. His face was pretty as a girl’s, especially around the eyes. He had delicate hands despite the kitchen work, what people call “piano hands,” though Mrs. Bittle had a piano and he didn’t play a note.
Miss McKellar was sweet on him I believe, but all her offers to press his collars got her hands upon nothing but his shirts, so far as I know. Reg Borden was overly curious about his failure to serve. Reginald’s own excuse was a glass eye. And Mr. Judd, of course too old. That poor man remained confused about which war was presently on the go. They needled Mr. Shepherd about not serving, and a foreigner in the house was something they frowned on behind his back, but Mrs. Bittle maintained he was not the bad type of foreigner, Jap or Italian. Germans she was queasy on, they ought to be bad she said, but of course they owned the hardware downtown, and no one saying you couldn’t buy a ten-penny nail. In all, the men and Mrs. Bittle liked the cooking, and that swayed them.
They did press him on the lack of a fiancée, given his youth and vigor. Mr. Borden would raise this at supper, to Mr. Shepherd’s mortification. I defended against the charge. I had been unwed all but one year of my life entire, and I informed the gentleman I could see the advantages. Miss McKellar had her theories: a broken heart or a girl back in Old Mexico. All we really knew of this young man was that he had a prior life in that country, and cooking was his talent, second only to making himself unseen.
To earn pocket money he taught Spanish lessons at the Asheville Teachers College, an establishment of good reputation where I also worked, up until the war. I was secretary to the administrator and recommended Mr. Shepherd to her as a person of decent character, which was all I knew. Spanish was a less
fashionable language than French, so he only came to teach two days each week. He made no impression on the office staff.
His third talent was well hidden. For three years we all resided in the same house, passed in the upstairs hallway to use the bath, sat in matched parlor chairs on Monday evenings to hear
The Voice of Firestone
over NBC. And we never once saw him draw ink into a fountain pen. If he owned a typewriter I never heard it, and it’s not a sound that gets past my ear. I know a Royal from a Smith-Corona from the next room. He wrote nothing in those years. This I know, for he later told me. He was dispirited of his past and stopped keeping the journals after everything was lost.
He’d brought up from Mexico a crate for a painting given him by Mrs. Kahlo, but hadn’t opened it. That might seem strange to others. Not to me. He wasn’t susceptible to suspense the way most are. If you gave him a package and said, Don’t open that till Christmas, he wouldn’t shake it. Something in his nature just did not expect good things in store. He set the crate in his wardrobe closet, leaving Mrs. Bittle to run the duster around it on her weekly rounds. There was no use in any of us having paintings. Mrs. Bittle wouldn’t let us pound any nails. All pictures in the house were hers, the deceased Mr. Bittle fond of landscapes. So Mr. Shepherd’s sat in the dark. I have asked him if he thought much about it. He said if ever he did, he pictured something alive in the crate, and once out, he dreaded he wouldn’t have the heart to shut it back in the dark.
At the end of ’43 he moved to his own house. A great event. Miss McKellar and I hung up crepe paper in the parlor and pooled our stamps to get him a set of sheets. What had happened prior, to make this possible, was that Mr. Shepherd got called up to do a war job. No, he never saw gunfire. He had the safest war job of the war, he said, which was: to oversee moving many shipments of famous pictures from the museum in Washington, D.C., to the Biltmore House. The Axis powers were having no
end of amusement sinking ships and firing upon our coasts. Safety of our national treasures was the concern.
Mr. Shepherd was unsure how Uncle Sam had found him out for the task. When he’d applied at the Teachers College and was asked about previous employments, he listed “Consignment Marshal, moving art pieces to museums.” He thought it more reputable than “cook” and a decent cause for traveling from Mexico. (He feared they’d think him a bandit.) Some way the word passed. The War Board knew everything about us in those days. The officers called up the galleries in New York and were surely impressed to learn his association with Mr. and Mrs. Rivera, highly famous. So Shepherd was their man. It took months to see it all through. They kept him on with the CPS for the duration but he rarely had to travel far, nor to any place more dangerous than a room of naked statues.
The job gave him means to set a payment on a two-story bungalow on Montford Avenue that had stood empty for years. It was close by the stop he took for the in-town bus to the library and he’d often taken little walks up that street, for it had a cemetery up at the end and a mental hospital with nice grounds. The empty house struck him in particular. He thought it had an aching look about it, and for that reason chose it. Up until then he’d felt underfoot in every house he ever lived in. Peace and quiet was his only wish.
Soon after moving, he pried the nails off the crate from Mrs. Kahlo to see his gift. Pandora’s box you might say now, given everything that happened. The canvas itself was only some sketch she had snatched up from her bin, to carry out her plan. The gift was around the painting. There were the two crates, one inside the other, and the space between not stuffed with straw but paper, all the notebooks and typed pages taken from his room in Mexico after the murder. Hundreds of crumpled pages in all, needing to be smoothed and sorted out. But mostly all there.
Unbeknownst, Mr. Shepherd had been writing a book for years. He believed it had gone up in ash. But Mrs. Kahlo made the police not to destroy it. She was a powerful person evidently. Then hid the pages this way, not telling the author himself what he carried. Was it a trick on her friend, or did she only want to keep him safe? I can’t say. But she was first to see what the world soon would, after he’d fixed it up, filled in the missing parts, written and rewritten and stewed over it until he could stew no more. In due time it came to the Stratford and Sons publishing house in New York. That was
Vassals of Majesty
. It came out in ’45, before Christmas. That part is common knowledge, or ought to be.
So he was right about something alive in the crate, wanting out. Mrs. Kahlo did that for him. He’d about given up on life as a whole, going away on a train to the next world. If he didn’t take one other thing, she wanted him carrying his words.
—
VB
October 8, 1943
Asheville, North Carolina
Gringolandia
Dear Frida,
What you have done is a miracle. But how can any thanks be enough? Just words, brought here and heaped at your feet like a pile of cold mice with gnawed ears fetched in by a cat. You have restored a life. You will see.
This morning a white cat appeared here on the back step, and it seemed you must have sent her too. She didn’t cry but stood quietly, as if waiting for a well-known outcome. The wind tugged fingers through the creature’s coat, trying to unbutton the shaggy garment and pull it off. Think of how you would paint this cat: with her insides exposed, the delicate rib cage curved like a ring’s setting around a bloody gem of carnivorous love. This is how she seemed. When the door opened just a crack she slipped in, curling immediately on the hearth, declaring with her eyes: “Ha, you thought I was helpless! I own you now.” Of course she is Frida.
But her name will be Chispa. She is a muse, the spark you once accused me of having, now glowing quietly on this hearth. Otherwise the house is still, keeping secrets. The floors are made of the long, narrow hearts of trees brought down from mountain slopes, the chimneys are stones rolled round as biscuits in the Swannanoa River. The windows have interlaced panes like the ones in your father’s house, cracked here and there but holding.
The mitered oak doorsills are like deep wooden picture frames, each holding a perfect view of the next room, where walls are touched with light, and life could be waiting. The grain of the wood tells a story of years in the mountains, all the rains and droughts leading to the beginning of my life, when these trees were felled. The house was built the same year as my birth.
So we’re well-matched companions, sheltering roof and solitary soul, crouched in a domestic forest of elms and maples. The other houses along this leafy street are also bungalows with gabled roofs and trussed eaves, an architecture that is here known as Arts and Crafts. It’s the opposite in every way from Diego’s beloved Functionalismo, nothing modern or shocking. Probably you would both find it boring. But now your mind’s eye can see your old friend where he lives: making tamales in a kitchen of his own, with shining white tiles and green-painted trim. Picture him in stocking feet padding happily through golden rooms where bookcases reside directly in the walls, and amber lamps hang on chains from the ceiling. Then, picture him upstairs with your treasure glowing before his eyes, as in a storybook when the child lifts the lid of the magical trunk.
It is a good place, Carolina, built of mountains and river valleys. Did you receive the postcard? The tall buildings you see in it are full of banks and bakeries, the usual things. But look carefully at the background of the picture: mountains. They stand behind every view, like a mother offering a blanket in which to wrap everyday life and shelter it from useless dreads. In June they are walls of white rhododendron blossom. In autumn the forests set themselves aflame with color. Even winter has its icy charms. This you will refuse to believe. But you might like the changeable nature of this place, and its people, who have the modesty of Mexican villagers. The backyards here are divided by slim wire fences like tiny farm fields, and the women tending them shout across fence lines, “hollowing” they call it, to
comment on the weather. They pin dungarees to clotheslines and speak in a dialect that sounds like the plays of Shakespeare. It isn’t the Gringolandia you remember. You might not find it as despicable as New York.
Congratulations on your successes there, especially the exhibition at Miss Guggenheim’s. For you to be chosen among the thirty-one most important women painters in the century must make Diego proud, and you, jealous of the other thirty. The man who wrote about you in
Vogue
was an idiot—of course you don’t have inferiority complexes or blood-obsession or anything like that. That man spent fifteen minutes looking at your paintings. Could you drive a car for fifteen minutes, then write a psychological analysis of Henry Ford? All right then, don’t think of it any more.
Have you agreed now to be a Surrealist? Because, as it happens, the French Relief Society intends to sponsor your paintings in their program on surrealism. Do you wonder how this news reached your friend’s ears? Who is the mysterious one now, and how long will he make you burn with suspense? Not very long. Here is the news: your former Shipping Shepherd now holds the same post for the Civilian Corps, a wartime position overseeing movements of art treasures and government-sponsored exhibits. The wage is forty dollars a week, every one of them welcome. So you see it’s only thanks to you: this job, this house. These debts mount, all to you.
The real purpose of this letter is to acknowledge the debt most infinite: for saving my notebooks and papers. Frida, you always said the most important thing about any person is what you don’t know. Likewise, then, the most important part of any story is the missing piece. What you gave me is everything. A self, the simple
yo soy
, I am. I am saved. I drowned, it seemed, and then came the light. Here I am.
I discovered it four days ago. I’ve only now opened the crate,
for the first time. You must have wondered that I said nothing about it in the telegrams from New York. I remember mentioning the painting you gave me, thanking you in some duplicitous way. I’m sorry. You must think I had no curiosity about your gift. If you’ve already sent me to hell, it’s fair enough, but you sent me for the wrong reasons. Disinterest in your work is not my crime; your paintings are thrilling. My faults lie elsewhere.
The truth of what you did, and what I now possess as a result (have possessed for three years without knowing) is slow to dawn. The last three mornings I’ve wakened to sense it arriving like a marvelous visitor coming on the train. I get dressed, I pace. I can’t imagine how you bribed the police. I wonder how much of the manuscript you had time to read, and what you thought of it. But I ask for no more than what you’ve done already. You held faith in me as an artist. Not as a child, or servant, but as your peer. My pulse rushes, to think I will now have to earn that faith.
Here is the first step: I have got myself a typewriter. I own almost nothing else, due to the war shortages. My furniture is a few sad handprints of a foreclosed family: children’s beds stripped of all but the narrow mattresses, an avuncular parlor chair with holes in its elbows. An electric stove, a wooden icebox that goes hungry for ice. (I’m told we’ll get it in winter.) But my lair is the little upstairs room overlooking the street from beneath the gabled eave. My writing table is the bathroom door, taken off its hinges and set across two defunct radio cabinets I found in the alley. (Eviscerated in the last wire-and-copper drive.) And my prize: a typewriter gleaned from the rummage room at the school where I teach Spanish lessons. Probably the last such machine in the city, what with all the old ones melted down for bullets, or else urgently needed in North Africa and the Coral Sea, evidently, along with all sugar, cellulose tape, and ethyl gasoline. My relic lacks only a few of its keys, and
with its help I plan to finish the book whose life you spared. It’s the story we talked about, Cortés in the empire of the Azteca. The scandals of the ancients will be known.
Thank you also for the small stone figurine. I first found him lying on the bank, the day we had our picknick at Teotihuacán, while you napped. Please don’t report my larceny to Dr. Gamio, or to Diego, who might be nationalistic on the subject of stolen art. (It would not bring me favor in my new employment.) This little fellow begged to be taken to a new world, after waiting two thousand years facedown in dirt. You abetted his wish. He sends his gratitude, mingled with mine, from where he now sits on my desk near the window, surveying the surprising scenery of Carolina.
Your astonished and grateful friend,
INSÓLITO
November 2, 1943
Dear Frida,
A glittering shower falls at a slant across my window. Some form of god has come to visit our dark autumn tunnel, like Zeus making himself a beam of light to impregnate Danae. In this case, it is not really glittering light but beech leaves. You’ve never seen anything as dramatic as these American trees, dying their thousand deaths. The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt. The world strips and goes naked, the full year of arboreal effort piling on the sidewalks in flat, damp strata. The earth smells of smoke and rainstorms, calling everything to come back, lie down, submit to a quiet, moldy return to the cradle of origins. This is how we celebrate the Day of the Dead in America: by turning up our collars against the scent of earthworms calling us home.
Mexico rules my kitchen, as you know. The
pan de muerto
is rising there now, filling the house with a yellow scent, reminding me how you shaped yours like skulls sprinkled with sugar. My neighbors wouldn’t care to see such things delivered on a plate. They celebrate the Day of the Dead very strangely here: they make pumpkins into heads with flaming eyes, and the children run about the neighborhood asking for cookies. But these urchins showed up two days early! Now that the cookies are made, the children seem finished with the whole thing. They have smashed the pumpkin-heads to orange gruel on the sidewalks. The cat may have to help eat the
pan de muerto
. In remembering the dead, one more this year: your father. Old Guillermo, how could he not still be there? Walking slowly around your house, blinking his huge eyes as he enters each room, not seeing the furniture but the angles of light on the floor.
Your grief is reasonable, but it’s no good to hear you’re a wreck from head to toe. Tuberculosis of the bones makes me shiver. It’s like the season’s last tomato that sat in a bowl in the kitchen this week, and when taken up to be sliced, collapsed to a limp sac of foul juice—its beautiful plump skin was hiding rot. Frida, you must feel tricked this way by your body. Even your cures sound like diseases, electricity and calcium therapy. But your doctors are good men, especially Dr. E. in San Francisco, who sounds kind. These surgeries are sure to be successful. You will have many more days like this one for remembering, and without number,
abrazos
from your friend,
SÓLI
May 21, 1944
Dear Frida,
This Sunday morning bright images of you keep nudging into my solitary confinement, urging me to write after the long silence. Here is a strange beetle, trapped inside the window near the desk. He bombs his head continually against the glass, distracting the revision of an unwieldy chapter: “The garrison stormed, heads all smashed!” This little bombardier wears a stunning uniform, emerald green with copper-colored linings to his wings, and a respectable proboscis. Words do the thing no justice. You would do better, if you saw it. You could put it in a painting.
And next: every young girl passing by on the sidewalk to catch the Haywood bus, another distraction. They’re all Fridas! Since the weather turned warm they all wear peasant clothes, colorful skirts and blouses with ruffled shoulders. They don’t wear their skirts long as you do because it’s unlawful here, punishable by a fine. I vow it’s true, fabric-conservation order. Not enough uniforms to cover all the boys at the front. The War Production Board announced also last week, no blouse may have more than one ruffle per sleeve. I thought you might like to know that, as you sit somewhere in your thousand ruffles reading this, flashing gold teeth—metal that could be used in some alloy for artillery casings, come to think of it. You can’t come here, you would be confiscated.
Your despair over the war is understandable. I undertake this letter to cheer you with another view of things. The gringos are embracing the antifascist fight with whole hearts, and that surely must be good, even if it’s many years late in the opinion of your friends who first went to fight fascism in Spain. But you should see the Yanks now, swearing unity with people from across borders just as you and Diego used to do, raising your
glasses, singing “The Internationale” while we tried to clear the plates. I keep wondering what Lev would make of these times. He would abhor Roosevelt’s friendly partnership with Marshal Stalin as our two countries lean shoulder-to-shoulder in battle. But wouldn’t he agree with the president, that sacrifice must be made toward the ideal? Our GIs have genuinely rescued the Soviet State, scurrying tons of supplies across the Persian desert to save the starving Russians. And now Stalin’s army returns the favor, beating back Hitler on the Eastern Front. A year ago all seemed lost, the Axis was unstoppable in Europe or the Pacific. Now some say this war could be won.
If so, then the victory will belong to housewives as well as soldiers, because every one here is part of the fight. To you the war is useless destruction, a match played out over the wireless, but here it is the organizing principle of our days. If cloth is in short supply, the girls will wear only one ruffle per sleeve, no more, and no fuss. If the Axis sank eight million tons of warships last year, so be it, these ladies will hand over what appears to be eight million tons of hairpins, let the tresses fall where they may. The neighbor children use rocks to bang old hinges from gates for the metal drives, war brides turn in their silver, grandfathers their bronze-tipped canes. Sacrifice is a sacrament. How we all cheered when Howard Hughes’s new factory turned out a battleship just twenty-four days after laying its keel! This man Hughes drew my mother to her death, years ago when his stunt flight landed in Mexico City. But however I may miss her, I harbor no grudge as I watch him now, welding together the
John Fitch
from pieces of my neighborhood. All as one, with hairpins and paper clips, we vanquish Hirohito and his Mitsubishi warship factory.
The war is on every page of every magazine. Even in the advertisements, which strangely don’t encourage buying now, but the opposite. Manufacturers fly the “E” flag to show their
whole production is needed for war use. Buy nothing but war bonds, give your blood to the Red Cross. “Follow doctor’s advice to the letter and keep appointments brief,” my magazine warns, because half our doctors are in the forces, leaving the home-front men with twice as many to care for. Travel for emergencies only. After victory is won, they promise us the world: a new model of radio, automobiles with synthetic rubber tires, things yet unseen by civilian eye. But for now, don’t ask even for a Dot fastener, and good luck finding butter or cheese with your ration stamps. Bacon has vanished from our land. So have new cars, not one this year for civilians, and if you already have one it wears an “A” stamp on its windscreen, for “Almost Empty”–gasoline is rationed. Horse droppings have made a bold comeback on Pack Square. One old cog on my street has roused his Stanley Steamer. He came through yesterday and a neighbor lady fainted, thinking it was an air attack. The new American motto is, “We make do with nothing new,” no wristwatches, new shirts, or bedsheets, it’s about the same plan as the church: endure your suffering to win a golden hereafter.
You would not believe how cheerfully the people accept this deprivation. It makes them feel brave and important. Rich or poor, the banker’s wife and the secretary bring the same ration book to market and leave with the same goods. It isn’t the bourgeois Gringolandia you knew, women throwing parties while homeless men starved outside. Now they all agree with your Rosa Luxemburg, “The highest idealism in the interests of the whole.” Women here consent to strict rations even on food and shoes for their children. The neighbor family has seven boys, named Romulus, Virgil, and the like, running about in cloth shoes and making toys from roadside litter. Yet their mother calls out to me every day, “Mr. Shepherd, is it not a bless-ed morning?” Another neighbor brought me an “apple pie” made from crackers (she fears a bachelor will starve), and explained
how we are to make up our beds: turn the bottom hem to the top every other week to distribute wear and make the sheets last. We can win the war while we sleep!
This way of thinking can be bracing. They view the future as a house they can build with hammers and planks, rather than a ripening fruit that might go rotten due to unexpected natural forces. You warned me not to let Mexican writers make my heart go cold, do you remember? In the hospital. We were speaking of
Los de Abajo
, the scene comparing the revolutionary fight to a rock rolling downhill, moved only by senseless gravity. You said, if I threw a party to cheer myself up, not to invite any writers.
But Americans crave a different story: they believe the rock could roll uphill instead of down. Probably you won’t listen to this, but it’s not such a bad way of thinking. A writer here could finish a whole book without wanting to drink poison. Even the story of Cortés has its invigorating theme of self-made destiny. People are much in the mood these days for soaring hearts and the clash of battle.
Here in the house of my father, as you called this country, I watch carefully, wondering if this might be a home at last. The land of the square deal and the working stiff, said my old dad. So I square up the corners of my desires, and work at pounding keys until my fingers are stiff as wooden splinters. Frida, someone here may want what I can give. See how that pronoun now stands in the lines I write, tall and square-shouldered. I strive for the stout American declarative, so entirely unaccustomed: I am.
My packet of contraband pages has nearly become a book. The old typewriter grinds its metal jaws, the battle is nearly over. Cortés took the city in the end, I’m sorry to say. I was tempted to revise history, give Mexico City back to the Azteca. But without these four hundred years of oppression, what would Diego
paint on his murals? I decided to salvage, mainly for your sakes, the eventual necessity of the Mexican Revolution.
Now I ask your advice. I wonder whether you or Diego may know someone in New York who would look at this poor manuscript, once it has been wrestled to its death. It will need to go somewhere. The mess of papers can’t be kept here much longer, spreading like a pox across the floors, terrifying the cat. I must exercise vigilance, or one book might even become two.
I send affection to you and Diego, and also Perpetua, if she does perpetuate. If you have any news of Natalya and Seva, it would be welcome.
Your friend,
INSÓLITO