Ghost Dance (14 page)

“Don’t cry,” said Sonia. “Your face will run.”

Sonia thought my mother was wonderful. She loved coming to my house; particularly, she loved the lack of rules and regulations because her own mother had such a strange set of them.

Sonia was not allowed to leave the dinner table until she finished everything on her plate—not such an unusual rule in itself until you considered what had to be eaten. Barely disguised, it often turned out to be the brains of calves or the kidneys of sheep or some other unidentified hearts or lungs. Sweetbreads, tripe, tongue; venison, rabbits, oxtails, pigeons every night another surprise.

Another rule was that on weekends, no matter what the weather, Sonia would be sent outside to play and could not come in until it was time for the dubious dinner to be served. We wondered what it was that Sonia’s mother was doing during that time that she did not want Sonia to see. Frequently we would spy on her but never found her doing anything too unusual. We hoped she might be burning letters in the kitchen or whispering American secrets on the telephone in Russian or inviting lovers with fur hats in, but she’d always be doing something fairly routine like polishing the figurines or scrubbing the floor to classical music or sautéing some mystery meat. While we had the Osbournes and hmily Tilset and the rest, I was relieved not to have the kinds of ghosts Sonia must have had. Though she never spoke of them, there must have been silent herds of sheep and deer, heartless and vacant eyed, roaming through her house; huge empty-headed cows must have nudged her in her sleep, breathing their terrible breaths, looking for their brains, their lost lungs.

As we blended the mud and clay and applied it to Sonia’s wide forehead and high cheekbones, her pretty ears and long neck, I felt better, as if my mother were sending me a message through the earth.

We walked through town proudly in our masks and did not cower when the local boys laughed or bow our heads when the women whispered and clicked their tongues. The undercurrent of ill-willed gossip that flowed through the center of our small town would easily have been enough to drown people less preoccupied than Sonia and I. Unlike my parents, w e did care w hat other people thought about us, but we could not hear what they whispered, so absorbed were we in our own complicated lives. Perhaps we shut them out on purpose; too fragile to hear what they really said, perhaps we magnified the sounds of the wind in the trees and the birds and the lake and the cars. If we did in fact do that, it was a good idea, and Sonia and I were far smarter than I ever thought. I have seen so many people hurt by the closed-mindedness of others that I know now it is best not to take too seriously the opinions of those you do not love or cannot ever imagine loving—finally, a point of view of my own.

After an hour we washed our faces by the lake, watching the mud and clay brown the water with its swirls and swirls.

“You are so beautiful!” Sonia gasped, looking at my new face. She touched my cheek, my hair, my smooth neck, breathlessly.

“So are you!” I cried. “You should see!”

We looked into the lake at our own reflections. Fish swam under our faces and seaweed tangled in our hair.

“We are so beautiful,” we said, transfixed by our dazzling images. “We are so lovely!” we cried, thrilled simply to look into water and see ourselves.

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress
him
with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I could hear her from the hallway already beginning one of our favorite poems:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of the bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

She sat on the edge of my bed and began to sing. It was barely a song at all, it was more a whisper, a prayer.

“Well, I come from Alabama,” she smiled, “with my banjo on my knee.” She sang it slowly, quietly. “And I’m bound for Louisiana, my true love for to see.”

“Sing,” she said, “come on. Well, it rained all night the day I left, the weather was bone dry. The sun so hot I froze to death, Susannah, don’t you cry.”

She pressed me close to her. Her voice grew softer and sweeter, and she lingered on each word. “I said, oh, Vanessa, now don’t you cry for me, ‘cause I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.”

Years before the drought that would follow his death, my grandfather began his search for water.

“The sun rises every day in the East,” he said. “It travels across the sky. It’s a hot, fiery ball.”

“Yes, Grandpa,” we said. He looked at us and just shrugged his shoulders. He found himself saying odd things often these days. His life was moving in mysterious directions, there was no doubt about it, and he seemed as perplexed as Grandma by his behavior.

“You went into town yesterday, Angelo Turin,” my grandmother said, “and the day before that, too. I know you better than that. Now w hat’s going on?”

It was true—he had gone into town four times in one week; Fletcher and I had gone with him. And the strange thing was that we never
did
anything w hen we were in town, just followed the curve of the business district, then came home, the same way we had gone. It was not until much later that we realized it was the pond’s pale oval that he had needed to pass again and again.

Other things, inexplicable at first, caused Grandma to worry. He began washing the dishes—the breakfast dishes, the dishes at lunch, the dinner dishes—each day prolonging the task and after a while taking clean dishes from the cabinets and washing them, too. His hands floated for hours under water, like a child with bath toys.

“Grandpa, let’s go to town,” I’d say. I did not like to see him do this. It reminded me of the days my mother stood curved like a great bird over the sink for hours and washed everything she could find in her singular fight against germs. “Let’s go to town,” I pleaded.

My grandfather began taking long baths, his whole day now filled with water. In between dishes and the bath we drove into town and began stopping at the pond to dangle our feet in the water. This continued, until one day, while we sat at the lake’s edge, it finally occurred to him. Waves of horror passed through his body; he stood up and, looking into the water, said, “There will be a terrible, terrible drought.” This was it, the farmer’s nightmare. His whole life’s concern surfaced finally with these words, “There w ill be no more water, there will be a terrible drought.” It was the fear he had held in check for nearly seventy years; in Italy as a little boy, then as a young man, his whole life, it had been the same fear. But he could not hold it back any longer. It flooded his system.

We drove into town and bought notebooks. We were to record everything, the formations of clouds, the behavior of cows and sheep, the rise of pain in my grandmother’s back, anything that related even vaguely to rain. Our lives took on the fluid quality of those who dream the same dream together. Our motions began to mimic each other’s, and where one’s thoughts dropped off another’s began. We worked day after day to find the secret of rain and, as the days passed and we could find no discernible pattern, our bones seemed to fill with a strange, warm water and we grew heavier and heavier with despair.

“It is all a joke,” my grandfather said one day when he could no longer stand the pictures of tortured wheat and dying animals he had in his head. “We are at the mercy of a God who does not really care if our children are thirsty or our crops die.”

“Maria!” he shouted out the window. She was taking in wash from the line. “It is all a whim! We are at the mercy of an indifferent God. It is all a crazy whim!”

“Don’t waste your breath!” she said. “I can’t hear you from here, Angelo.”

“It is all a whim!” he cried, and it was as big a revelation to him as the revelation of the drought itself. He looked at us amazed. “Children,” he said, and the three of us together shouted out the window to Grandma, “It is all a whim! A whim.” And this time with the force of our accumulated exasperation the word “whim” blew out the window and caught itself in the large white sheet my grandmother was taking down from the line. It was the hardest word my sensible grandmother would ever have to hear, and its deceptively light sound twisted around her with the sheet, strangling her, and she screamed and struggled to get free. I ran out to help her, spinning her around and around until she was in my arms. She looked bitterly into the dark house where she could just see the outlines of Grandfather and Fletcher standing by the window.

“I can’t hear myself think anymore with your grandfather yelling his head off. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

He continued his baths, hoping to find the answer through some hypnotic means. “You are becoming a wrinkled old prune from all that water,” she said. “Angelo, please.”

“Fool, idiot, dope,” she would have said to my father or me, had we been looking for the secret of water, but with my grandfather she softened slightly. As the days passed, then the weeks, deep wrinkles of concern pleated her face, her apron, her dress. She kneaded them into the wavy dough. It was the bread we ate.

“Angelo,” my grandmother pleaded. “There is plenty of water. You’re making yourself sick with this.”

But my grandfather continued his long walks, listening to the rumble of distant thunder and watching the mad dance of clouds. He would come in drenched, often, having been caught in the middle of a storm. Grandma hated to see him this way, but he always seemed so refreshed afterwards.

“One day you will be thankful,” he said to my father, who was visiting for the weekend. “I am doing this for the children.” He looked at us. He took Fletcher’s hand. “So that one day they will be able to save themselves.” Fletcher nodded and acted like he understood. My father, the skipped-over generation, just watched in silence and looked from my grandfather to my brother and back again to my grandfather. Some key was missing in his blood.

One evening after a solo trip to town, my grandfather came in carrying a large wooden fork. It was called a divining rod.

“It looks like a big slingshot!” Fletcher cried.

“It looks like a wishbone,” I said, dreamily.

“Well, it looks like a piece of junk to me!” my grandmother said. “I’ll be damned if you’re going to go sticking a fork in the ground looking for water we don’t need while this whole place goes to ruin.”

“You don’t stick it in the ground,” my grandfather said softly.

“Angelo,” she said, “try to be a little bit sensible.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said, but already my grandfather had left behind the world of chores.

We walked day after day through the hot summer pointing the fork toward the ground and listening for a vein of water.

“Shh,” he said, “we must be very quiet, it will sound like music.” But we never once found even one chord of water. “There’s something I’m not doing right,” he said. “I don’t have the thoughts right somehow.” He closed his eyes and held the fork tightly.

Then one day, just as he was about to give up, the man who sold him the fork called to say there was going to be a convention. My grandmother took the call.

“I’m going to tell you what that man said on the phone, Angelo, and then I’m going to make a comment of my own, so don’t interrupt me.

“There’s going to be a convention for people like you on the twentieth of August. Now if you go to that convention, I swear, may the children be my witnesses, I’m going to join my sisters in California and you can fend for yourself here.”

“You wouldn’t really—”

“I’m serious. I’ll buy my plane ticket. If you’re going to go crazy, at least have the decency not to make us all watch it. We got enough crazy people in this family already. We don’t need you going on us, too.”

Now that she had started, my grandmother could not seem to stop. Her voice flowed like torrents of water.

“Their own mother goes away for months and months at a time and your son ignores them, sitting in some dark room with the music on. It’s not right, Angelo, it’s not right. These kids need you, old as you may be. Don’t go senile on us now. Something just snapped—after that damned World’s Fair your son insisted we go to. Unsnap it, Angelo. These kids need you.”

My grandfather, standing with the fork in his hand, said nothing.

“I’ll live somewhere where I’m not afraid to look around for fear I’ll see you going crazy and holding that stick.”

“OK,” he said, “everybody up,” and he marched us all out to the garbage shed. “It’s gone now,” he shouted, throwing it in the garbage can. “It’s over. It’s all over now. Are you satisfied, Maria?” he said sadly.

She did not look at him.

“All right, children, you’ve had enough excitement for one day. It’s time for bed,” my grandmother said. “Tomorrow your parents are coming for a visit.” She tucked us in.

“Did you mean what you said to Grandpa?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “even word of it.”

That night Grandpa went to bed early. He was asleep, in fact, before we were. We could hear him from our rooms babbling in some troubled dialect. Hetcher thought, getting out of bed, that he might ease my grandfather’s difficult sleep by slipping out to the shed and retrieving the divining rod that had promised so much. I heard him opening the door of the shed and taking the top oft the garbage can. It was easy to find, right on top. He carried it into the house.

“Didn’t you hear her?” I whispered. “You’re going to send Grandma to California if you’re not careful. Why would you want to do that.?”

“I’m just going to keep it under the bed,” he whispered. “No one will know.”