Like Shining from Shook Foil
By: Christian Teresi
Tags: Short Story, Literature, Fiction

Image from Mark Abercrombie.

Say the bones are saved with the help of thousands of hands. From deep furrows of callused dirt, and the folded scuffle of dactyl-roots — the rummage that grips what others forsake. What goes away never stays away and returns just as the day turns a rabbit out from the thicket. From beneath the silt and soil — the amniotic muck — the souls of things arrive grimy and breathing.

Out of the darkness in the field — that distant hollow flanked by dusk — where there should only have been corn, a birch caught the breeze and quickened with the gusts.

Where the clearing hand had stopped — where the farmer said enough of what I need — the remaining stand held on from where they’d seen their group pared back.

Start with a path worn by walking, then horses, then cut and fit for a road, then some structures (clapboard mostly). Where squatters were they stayed and built.

# # #

When the road was still rut and dirt, and no neighbor was near, a farmer built a house, a barn, cleared more land, planted some crops. A boy paused to jump and pull at birch branches. Say the seeds move with the help of thousands of hands.

When the farmer’s family was gone the townspeople speculated. They offended a higher spirit. They got what they deserved. It’s just a damn shame.

The house was untouched. Everything in its place. The lever on the pump rested half-cocked. Wood waited to be seasoned and stacked. A half set of mail-order china in the cabinet. The girls’ clothes folded in dressers.

A boy paused, but came looking to play with Emily. From the porch he called, once, twice. He pulled a chair holding the pantry door and found the dog. He took a step into the living room. The floor was stained red to brown in a long uneven swath.

Relatives came and took what could be. The girls’ clothes for cousins. The china for an aunt. The wood stove and a pair of Holsteins auctioned. A boy kept the dog, To ease what he’d seen.

Years of this build and tear down. Say never anything resembling a church, though not much is needed to sing a hymn or kneel and pray.

# # #

Reading on the porch steps all afternoon is a prayer; and plowing the fields — sweat is some kind of providence. When you’re thirsty dishwater is as good as holywater — it is a certain belief.

A turning, a winding on a particularly dangerous stretch of Berkshire backroad. She smiles, points to some birch trees, Do you think they feel pain? Down through the drift they drive in the mind-set of the maple-man as bloodletter. The trees stand in pale bottom nakedness, their yellow pants swept around their ankles.

Early September. Some boys from town dared each other to go in. The rooms emptied. The water turned off at the well. The boys threw stones through windows. Weeds were tall where firewood had been strewn in the yard. The cats turned feral. Corn massed in the field then rotted where it rose. Mice multiplied.

Margaret and Emily played in the kitchen while their father planted lilac bushes. One for each side of the porch steps. One for each of them. They could hear the shovel piling dirt in soft falls. Emily went through the picture book and stopped to point at the duck-billed platypus and elephant as proof. The priest may never talk about it, but God is an awfully funny guy.

# # #

Say the bones are forgotten; the birch now whiter than fog over the field that was always a field even when what grew was from no discernable hand.

When the field was a home of birch on just this spot. And hence? A team of oxen? A John Deere engine? An ax thwack?

Just a damn shame, for something to be put away, that it’s not yours unless you’ve broken it, until it’s lost its novelty, its newness.

The warranty seems to have been thrown out with the box, but that’s simply the cost of business with handshakes.

# # #

Margaret said anyone would be funny if they had an infinite sense of humor, and infinite laughter, and an infinite audience. If she was infinite, Margaret hesitated, maybe Thomas Boyle would like her. Emily made a face at the mention of the Boyle boy, but was curious.

Not the platypus, not the boy, nothing seemed as funny to Emily as the drawing of icebergs. What nonsense, a piece of ice the size of a house and built in the middle of nowhere for no reason.

The sisters agreed, it was hard to distinguish between when God is laughing with you and when God is laughing at you. Emily wanted to ask her father, but Margaret said she shouldn’t. God may be funny, but when you ever hear him laugh? Daddy wouldn’t know anyway.

Where the road left the one-bar, one-store, one-school towns, there was smooth asphalt for people who had to get through without stopping. Do you wonder if they care to know anything different? Within the keepings of brevity they go by a dirty child playing on the side of the road.

That first winter snow edged through broken windows and drifted down the entranceway from room to room. Room to room, white as bone that sits in a corner all day then rises suddenly and shifts as if an unmerciful tantrum. From one storm a few birch trees fell from the weight, and in the spring remained uncleared in the field.

# # #

The bones that hold skin in place are no lovelier than sinews that root and grasp mud and stones — anything really — placed here or there for no particular reason.

For what is a brick but a big toe? What is a floor but walking?

Say the paradigm of heaven is nonsense. God gets around; he even sleeps with the ugly ones.

What is a building but a stand-and-stare with the eyes of windows? What are the joist and collar beams but bones?

Unheard, secure with nonsense, a chanting in tongues. A bone used to beat a drum.

What is the nebula but the knowledge and soul of an unbelievable fairytale?

There are ways of believing that go beyond the senses. Tonight someone is dancing.

# # #

This is not moldering. This is gathered and saved once for the turning, once for returning. A break in the bend of a tree line — a path made to walk.

Margaret sat on the porch steps knitting all afternoon. Emily played with the dog and half-listened to her mother read to her father from a week-old paper. Say what she heard was, The body of the vortex was miles to the southwest, but the winds were enough to lift the eave of the roof.

Emily stopped playing. The winds were enough to lift the eave of the roof and spread an odd shadow across the kitchen floor. The dog pushes his nose at her hand, but she heard, Outside three decades of cottonwoods wretched then snapped as if torn by a giant unseen fist.

Her mother said — the dog half-listened — and what she heard — One child seized a locket from her bedroom; one child gazed at the barnyard full of panic-stricken animals; one child yelled for the dog.

Her mother said, and Emily heard — From across the kitchen floor one stared in denial at her mother; one took her face into her hands silently and cried.

Newspaper got the wood-stove going. The girls help their mother with dinner.

# # #

They whispered in their room long after bedtime. Emily’s mind shuddered when her sister said, God may not even be the name of God.

After Margaret fell asleep the moon hunched sideways through the tops of trees and Emily thought no name was better than another — if she got sick of saying God she would say Hank, or Herb, or Hannah.

The autumnal woods whip by on either side of the road. The fractured light through the branches frames something for her eyes. You see those lilac bushes? There must have been a house there. Lilac doesn’t grow wild like that.

Between the wind and snow the birch trees had to ease what they could and heaped upon one another. They pointed oddly away from where they stood — limbs torn and twisted. The shadow of where they stood was still a shadow for an other. Not birch, but shadow. Not birch, but let them think they’re sleeping in the ether. What they were was limp with faces to the ground — hiding something on the underside — bodies piled without much care.

Not a lullaby. Say a hard-coming fairytale.

# # #

God loves (and loves and loves) even the ugly things. Hank puts on his best shirt. Hannah wears perfume. Tonight they will make a little music. Tonight the floorboards will clap to their dancing.

Herb would rather make a mess than do nothing. He digs a hole, stops, digs another, and another. He goes to the landing, half-listens, shakes himself dry, warms under the eave, becomes bored — returns to the refuse, puddles, and muck.

Nothing is lonelier than someone who loves all the time. Hannah is never weary of the world or tired of teaching.

There is fire in the mind, in the unbroken breath. Have patience, you’ll feel it.

…loves a mess, and loves disorder. Like you, Hank also loves the rain on the roof, and church spires in the distance. Why put limits on love? Sometimes all it takes is the thump of boots on a boarded floor.

Sometimes, the mud split ripe and cleaved into the sole.

# # #

A honeybee’s handiwork elegantly chants in tongues.

Man was formed from the dust of the Earth is what Emily heard the priest say, and she pushed her hands into the soil to see.

If Hannah was going to send her only son to Earth again could he come as a honeybee? Because why not? Mind your own bee’s wax.

At the edge of the cornfield Margaret pulled flowers. Always some soul grimy and breathing. Bloodroot for spring. She smelled their perfume. Emily pictured blood held the flowers in place.

When she heard Emily she went to see, What are you laughing at? Emily smiled, turned her hand over, and let loose her hold so dirt could sift loose and return.

No one believes as anyone else believes. And since the house is forgotten, instead say save the lilac for some child.

# # #

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

The girls’ aunt came to visit when she was almost seven months pregnant. Emily sat silent most of the afternoon cyclically reaching out to touch her stomach. Be patient, you’ll feel it.

So one birch says to another birch. . .

The farmer took on a hand from Douglas who one night killed the family and buried them under the floorboards. Nobody knew why except that he loved and loved one daughter.

He stood over Emily as she slept. He watched her rummage slightly before he broke open her neck with a blade her mother used for digging.

White you are.

# # #

Say in the wilderness — hear voices or hold a deaf ear to the dead.

Early June. Emily walked with the dog on large stones across the low stream. From her mother the girl knew the rocks had been there a long time.

On one side of the bank were birch trees. Fits of sunlight and high grass filled the space between. Among the grass was a whole congregation of flowers. Emily called them grassflowers.

Grassflowers grew in patches. Where they ended was pasture fence. Hank liked to Keep things in. Keep things out. She sat a long time. Distantly, flanked by dusk, the farmhand watched.

Herb liked not to say much, or say nothing.

Emily sat with her feet in the water. She would slide them in, watched her ankles go orderless, and break at odd angles below the surface. She would pull them back so the light would mend them. The dog sat panting.

# # #

The sky was turning a translucent purple. Hannah spilled wine on a light blue tablecloth. Hank took off his work clothes, and on his back was the sky bruised but healing. Emily was not supposed to be this far from the house. Herb sniffed at the skin of a plum and knew it was all light underneath.

Emily tried to fathom the gift as her mother termed it. Bleeding where it’s not natural. Every month? Emily’s mother worried and wrote to her sister.

Herb can love and be loved…

They rise up and down through the mountains with birds rising and drifting. She realizes she may one day forget all she had said; for there are certain mannerisms and moments, certain turns wound and stretched around, certain stretches of road that carry bones, and every twist is a stitch, every bump rides and holds.

Sulking home, every time Emily looked the sky turned different. Before the wash of pitch — Hank’s hand mired in engine oil — there was a moment of sepia. Hannah forgets to leave the bedroom door open just a crack.

The farmhand remained where it was easy to watch and not be watched.

# # #

Emily turned toward the bend where the path emptied into the field. Once houselights returned to her it would be too late for the farmhand.

In one motion she heard the dog take off through the woods yelping and was spun down hard into the crook of an exposed root.

The farmhand said, shush and shush and it’s okay, and holds his hand over her mouth.

His breath returning to her face. Emily tried to say, Herb, Herb.

The farmhand believed. Emily took off running …where it’s not natural. Hands live with true or false depending on how well they hold.

Say Emily, say, but she could not.

The farmhand believed he was dead, but was not. Still breathing hard, he wondered why he had heard Emily call the dog.

# # #

On the roadside some skid marks, and a pile of glass that used to be a windshield. At every stop sign in a hilltown she leans over and half begs until she is happy. Tell me you love me.

This was different from the other fluids that made her — mottled underwear, noses treading on shirt cuffs; what dabbed her clothes with indelible stains.

Where blood was found unexpectedly was an augury. Nothing like what came from untied shoelaces or a cracked lip. This was the hayloft when the bottom wrung seemed unreachable, and corners propelled themselves beyond dimensions she had known.

Emily wanted her mother, but could not say.

That night, taking the silences into her hands and bringing them back to her chest, she quietly slipped into bed with Margaret. She did what her mother said to do when hurt, One, Two, Three, and swear, but do it quietly so God doesn’t hear you.

Lies live with true or false depending on how well they’re told.

# # #

Hannah thinks Herb only half-listens. Anything you can call lazy to their face and get away with it only half-listens.

The farmhand pulled up the floor and sectioned the parents with an ax, then Margaret. Emily was last. He stroked her hair where it was not matted. He watched her sleeping. This was just another kind of sleeping. These are bones to hold the earth in place.

The boards are put back in place.

Herb loves you more from your hand on his head. Every tree, what’s more, every leaf, every needle, every goddamn piece of trash holds. And love holds.

When light through the window woke him, the farmhand stood from the floor, left open the door to the house, and walked down the road. He looked until the horizon protruded on the edge of a cloud like an arm tattooed with light. The monstrous wealth of sky was purple, and pink, and blue, and the blue of his mother’s apron, and blue, the eye of a calf motionless in the far field after an ice storm — the vein that runs just below the surface — and blue.

Say the ground is woven with bits of root and bone. The ground is woven with the diaphanous swelling of where a birch once was. And loves.

# # #

You and you and you. There were birch trees here, and here, and here. Some branches are torn by a boy pulling.

Hannah sat on Emily’s bed and sang quietly. Not a lullaby. Later her husband asked what took so long. She had a nightmare.

A birch is felled once. And when you take the ax to a cornfield? The birch you’d swing through, but it is there, even after the ax, even after the hollering rot of a stump has been ripped up by chains.

And the stump? A quarter column from ruins? A seat for a table? Some sculpture for a patron?

Birch trees die as birch trees. Stumps as stumps.

People die in houses. They die in railroad yards, barrooms, in hospitals, at an intersection in their best pajamas, and in churches. They die and are never found. They die and are found only after a hotel guest starts to smell something foul.

The sheriff never found the farmhand from Douglas.

# # #

All that we know is not all that is laudable.

Make ugly things sound pretty and they will pass. The twilight hung in the lilac bushes.

The doctor told the sheriff he would not have found it if she wasn’t mutilated. The girl’s only a couple of weeks along.

Sometimes the heart beats wildly (and loves) for nothing, for nonsense. In the name of the Hank, the Herb, and the Holy Hannah.

The kingdom of Heaven resembles a cottonwood seed, is what her father told her. Emily pictured trees made of cotton.

# # #