Marie stepped out of her husband’s truck and looked at the place that had once been her mother’s house. She felt sleepy even though she was used to waking up early and driving a distance before her day began. Maybe it was the sadness. The fact that her mother and father were safe had buffered her emotions, held her safe against despair. But at what cost? Her father was dying. His oxygen did not drift into his lungs with natural ease, but was funneled there through tubes – a precise air-condition system. And still he smoked the cigarettes that were weakening him. Two packs a day. Marlboro. Their physical presence hurt Marie, so much so that on her last visit she had swiped his pack. She had called her daughters, away at college, to tell them about her act, “Now I have a memento of what is killing my father.”
The apartment Marie had rented for her parents was close to the hospital, but small. There was no room for the antique beds and dressers and bureaus and the grand piano that had taken eight men to carry. These items had been the angels of her mother’s life, and they had remained in The House in The Country – guarding the life that her mother would someday return to alone. Marie heard the door of the news van slam shut and the soft crunch of the driveway gravel beneath the reporter’s high-heels.
She hadn’t wanted to let the reporters come, but her mother had taken them in with her arms that stretched out and raked in anyone who would listen.
Of course, Edna told the young woman at the community center, Just follow us back home.
Marie had thought the bathroom trip to the community center would be easy, fast, a break from the bottomless pile of life that they would sift through the rest of the day. But once there her mother had met old friends that she hadn’t visited in months, distant relatives (unavoidable), and warm doughnuts and rich smelling coffee. Gradually, Marie had realized that this news of destruction and survival was also precious to her mother. All of the times before the tornadoes had gone this way or that; divergent from the small, scattered town. And then it had hovered, had stayed, had visited with them and sucked away all signs of life. Most of these signs replaceable, but some of them were the breaths within bodies and the connections between tissue and mind. Her mother needed to gather this news as much as she needed to gather the daguerreotypes of her great-great-grandfather who came over from England. Maybe her mother needed this news even more.
Okay, let’s set-up over here. Get a picture of this tree in the frame. The reporter guided the cameraman around the tricky paths of debris.
Oh my lord, thought Marie, it’s finally happened. My family is going to be one of those on the six o’clock news. Describing how their house has been obliterated. Sunken eyes and a mountain-pile of boards and clothes on the ground. She fumed over the thought that no one would be able to separate her family from the mass of faces that appeared every spring and fall on television in the south. How would anyone know they hadn’t lived in a trailer? But then maybe it didn’t matter. Or maybe it mattered only to her mother. Thank goodness her mother still had all her teeth; or at least, a bridge that took the place of those she had lost.
Edna ran her tongue over the backs of her teeth, wondering what to say to the reporters once the camera looked at her. They all felt the same on the back, even the replacement teeth that connected to a bridge that lived in the top of her mouth like a child’s retainer. Edna watched her husband shuffling around the debris like a lost child, not really doing anything useful. Just shuffling. That was her private nickname for him – The Shuffler. It was in the way he moved from room to room, and occasionally onto the porch to smoke a cigarette. His stomach had grown larger over the past few years of his illness. She remembered how the first grandchildren had asked him if he was going to have a baby – noting the similarity between their mothers’ bodies and their grandfather’s. He would laugh and tell them that there was a watermelon growing in his tummy; that he had eaten a watermelon seed and that was why it was there. The younger grandchildren did not ask about a baby in their grandfather’s tummy. For it was quite obvious that if anyone was in there, it was not a baby, but a young child their own age.
Ok. Are you ready Mrs. Reed?
Edna nodded her head, and smiled at her daughter. Marie was afraid, of course. Afraid her mother would look foolish or just plain emotional. But Edna knew she was a lady. She knew that her blood came from England and Ireland and faraway places she would never visit. Her teeth might be missing, but their absence was covered and her tongue tapped against them like a stick to test their sturdiness.
Ok.
She looked away from Marie and into the dark circle and began her story. The blessings and the taking away. The friend that walked beside her and sent a she-bear into her forest to rip the centurion trees from the earth.
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