One morning, I woke with a dream that a bat had flown to the side of my head. I pulled it off and put it on the ground. I saw that it was wounded. In my dream, I actually saw the open, bleeding wounds that are drug addiction. The undercurrent of whispered names that unthreaded the structure of a family.
What had I done wrong? Nothing. Nothing. It was Daniel’s fault. He was responsible for his own addiction. There were days when I was tired of children. After I fed them, after we played, after they napped, what was there still to do? Prepare dinner. By then they were restless and fighting. I bathed them, read to them, got them in bed. When I heard their feet on the stairs, I yelled at them to get back in bed. Sometimes I was in tears, as they were. If Frank was at a meeting, or visiting one of the members of the church, or traveling to a conference somewhere, the weight of the whole house was on my shoulders. I sat in the large, overstuffed chair in Frank’s study, too tired to do anything I wanted to do. Upstairs, Winnie and Warren eventually went to sleep, but Daniel must have sat in the darkness before an enormous emptiness that he later filled with drugs. Already, another day with the children was on its way, then another, and another. It was not my fault. I did what I could do. I did more than I could do. I was bored with the routine of housework, but I kept at it. Often, I only wanted my own work, which would have to wait for years and years, or at least until the children were in school, when I could have time in my work shed with my ziggurats, unless Frank insisted I take the women’s Bible study or some other function at the church as the minister’s wife.
—
Daniel never left, and therefore never returned for a visit as Winnie and Warren did. If Daniel returned, it was for an assault. Often, I thought I heard Daniel’s car pass in the night. Often, I thought he slept in his car at the end of the drive. Often, I dreaded him entering the house.
—
Edwin, his daughter, Helen, and her friend, Jake, came for dinner one evening as we had planned. Helen and Winnie had been friends, though Helen was a year older and in a different class in high school. We went to the same church, and they were in the youth group together. Warren was two years younger than Winnie. The children talked of their careers, the demands of city living, of the war, politics, the economy, and other turbulent events in the world. Edwin, Frank, and I listened, amused that we had taken a backseat. They were now the parents, and we were the children. Once in a while, they stopped to ask our opinion—just to be polite, to include others, as they had been taught. Or Frank would interrupt with some information they would consider irrelevant, just to irritate them—just to see how they could recover from his statement and continue their conversation. I glared at him once. Jake had lost his job and was looking again after a short period of dejection. Winnie was worried about her job. Helen and Jake seemed comfortable with their standing at work, “though no one really knows security anymore,” Winnie said. We lived in a tenuous world at best.
That was something Grandma Winifred could have said, though I didn’t tell Winnie.
The men began another conversation. Edwin was listening to Frank’s latest insight into translation. Jake was listening to Warren. Helen and Winnie were talking also, but listening at the same time to the boys and trying to pull them into their own conversation. I was listening to the children’s conversation and noticing a cycle, a circling up or down from a previous comment. They were making ziggurats, though they wouldn’t want that information either. When had I grown so limited in what I could say? But they were unaware of how often they circled up or down from the same place. Maybe they were aware of it also. Helen seemed to pull them away for a moment, but ultimately was unsuccessful. There was something in their pattern of speech that assured them of their place. Even Jake was aware that he was beginning a new beginning. Looking for another job that would take him in a new direction. He had to follow trends. He had to adjust. Be pliable. No, that wasn’t the word. Able to adapt. There, that was the word. His depression was on the mend. Dejection, he corrected Helen.
Helen was in retail at Millworth’s, a high-end department store. She invited Winnie to the city. She could stay in her apartment. They could see plays and visit museums. Winnie decided she would like that. Their acquaintance could be renewed. If old friendships could be revived. That would give Edwin more excuse to stop by when he was in the neighborhood, though we had no neighbors and lived on a road that only went farther into the country. He had to be on his way nowhere to drive by our house. Or taking a convoluted way to town by which he had to turn around or back up for some distance. He would bring news of the girls’ adventures in the city, though Winnie had a cell phone and we often talked.
“What about Helen Harsler?” I asked Winnie when they left. “Do you think she hates her name?”
“Was it an epidemic?”
“What?”
“Naming daughters with the letters that began their last names.”
My Work
My work shed was open to the public—my clay figures for sale. But a car rarely came. I left a billet in the bed-and-breakfast in Fenton. Sometimes several women who had come to a little inn in town for lunch would venture up the road. I think they were puzzled by my work, and they would politely found a way to leave.
I was a maker of clay, I reminded myself. No, the clay was made. I was a maker of clay figures. A maker in clay. I worked for years before I had a showing. But Daniel, in the Old Testament, in exile all his life, still made his prophecies. I felt my clay figures were prophecies. Sometimes I felt my audience was God, despite the self-imposed distance I felt from him.
Actually, I’m afraid of prophecy. It’s a risk. Even more than working with clay. No one paid attention anyway, Frank said. No one understood the underworkings, or the meaning of my ziggurats. That’s another reason working with clay is a kind of prophecy. I could send all kinds of indirect and hidden messages. No one would pay attention. I remembered Frank’s words.
Some days, I worked on formation. Some days, I only wrote about the formation. I’m sure God likes art. He’s the author of it. I recognize what he can do when I see the evening clouds he shapes into ziggurats.
I’ve always suspected heaven is something of an art gallery. A living gallery. A living galaxy in which everything breathes and has voice and moves at will. How would I explain hell when I found it? Little pieces of information fell now and then, even before I was there. It mainly had to do with the darkness of my own despair and the death of our son, Daniel. But I could push it away with a new ziggurat called Lightings.
“I guess you think they pay attention to your translations,” I said.
You would think the anguish would dissipate and the sorrow lessen. But I continued to wound. I like to go back and remember the land, because it is the origin of clay. In those moments, I was not tormented. I liked the winter landscape. The earth was not as covered as it was in summer.
Though I was in my blue period, it was all the browns that held me. The leafless trees. The russet edges of the fields. The dried grasses. Even the sky seemed brown along the horizon with a storm that passed in the north. I think that’s what I’ll miss about the earth when I’m no longer here. I’ll sit under the upper edge of hell, with my little blowhole that lets in cool air, and think about the loveliness I knew on earth.
Hell is the absence of God. The separation from God. I had heard that from Frank all our married life. If I stayed separate from him in this life, he would stay separate from me in the hereafter. It was my choice.
Maybe the browns were calling me out of the blue period several years after Daniel’s death. Wasn’t it time I moved on?
I liked abandoned farmhouses with their gray weathered clapboards open to the air, windows gone, the wide sky invading the boards of the roof. In a few years, the old roof would collapse into the house.
There also was a sign reading “Jesus is Lord” on the side of a shed. I remember thinking, What did that mean? I had come from a non-religious family. Maybe that was my rebellion. I would become a follower of this puzzling