This Earth You'll Come Back To Read online

  Yes I will. Tie your life to mine.

  Was something familiar I saw in your eyes, looking down that deep distance, like something in back of a dream. Part of me is still there looking. Part of a mother remembers and never forgets that. Because in that first gaze I saw you. Saw who you were in a way I have been losing track of ever since. Just those few seconds are all the time I had to see who you were in the essential before you became my child. All a mother has, three or four seconds to get to look at their child as she came originally from wherever she did. Before I said yes, I would help you. Before who you were was mine, my daughter, to be circumscribed by where or what I am or was, what I could or couldn’t do.

  1960-63

  Blanchardville

  Warming up outside finally, hope it holds. You just can’t tell. Plenty of times we’ve shivered outside in a new Easter dress. But it’s early spring and no reason to be unhappy today, little Stephanie lying on the couch and the hyacinths poking out of the ground by the porch steps.

  “Why don’t you take a nap sweetheart? Listen I’ll tell you some rhymes. I’ve never seen a purple cow I never hope to see one, but I can tell you anyhow I’d rather see than be one.”

  “Is it bad to be a purple cow?”

  “Well a course. It’s strange, it’s not right for a cow to be purple.”

  “But what if it is, will somebody kill it?”

  “You go to sleep. It’s just a little rhyme. Here’s a different one. With rings on your fingers and bells on your toes and elephants to ride on wherever she goes.”

  “Is that about me. Am I the ‘she’?”

  “Why sure, it could be.”

  “I’ll ride an elephant?”

  “You never know.”

  “How can you put bells on your toes. How do they stay?”

  “I don’t think it means on the toes, I think gypsies used to have some chains and jewelry they decorated their feet with, and there might be some bells attached. It’s just a story for fun. Take a nap now.”

  She’s asleep. Good.

  It isn’t raining rain you know its raining violets… Wish I didn’t have to use this downstairs room as our bedroom; on display for all to see. The front door, opens right off the living room, no door to close, no privacy. But what are you gonna do? It’s a roof over our heads. Keep this bed made and the clothes picked up. Floral bedspread maybe isn’t the best choice here if I had a solid color that might seem less bedroomish. I dislike these modern polyester fabrics on everything anyway. Mother used to have such beautiful linen bedspreads for summer, embroidered them with daisies, used to stand and iron the linens, Uncle Charlie would move the beds out to the long summer porch, could hear the crickets all night, birds singing in the morning. Oughta get a basket for her to put those blocks in before I step on them again. Damn edges are sharp.

  It isn’t raining rain you know it’s raining violets… . Oh she’s waking up.

  Out of the darkness of the inner bedroom, and into the living room I’m walking toward you as you wake from sleeping on the couch little one, there you looked startled.

  “Hey babe, waking up?”

  “Uh huh.”

  I’m walking out of the shadows; you watch me moving toward you into the light.

  “Momma?”

  “Dear heart.”

  “What was my name?”

  I stop. You watch my brows knit together, grimace. Maybe fever I think. Waking up with it. “What do you mean, your name? You know your name is Stephanie.”

  “I know, I know that,” you say, frustration in your voice.

  “I don’t mean now, I mean my real name, before. Before I was here.”

  Oh I felt a terrible chill like someone sneaking up behind me. I looked around the room, I didn’t know what. I stopped, had to think. I could feel you touching another place but it was not a place I knew. I was spooked, tried to answer.

  “Your name is Stephanie, I named you when you were born out of my stomach. God created you and you’ve been with us these three years. You came from heaven.”

  “I know I mean before…I.”

  “Feel sick?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s have some lunch, how bout some chicken noodle soup.”

  I came into the living room. I flattened my palm against your forehead to check for a fever, but it was cool.

  “But what was my name…” you sit up, searching my face where you see the worry then lie back down and turn your face away toward the back of the couch. The paisley fabric there and the start of something uncertain. My displeasure was new to you, and you were frustrated too, thinking I should know. How could your mother not know such a simple thing as what your name had been originally?

  You felt the edges of the world fold up around you, like a wild pony corralled for the first time. Well, you can’t be in two worlds at once, or at least that’s what I thought at the time. Felt like I needed to hold you here, keep the borders intact, like a rancher mends a fence to keep in his stock, to say here now stay. You only have the name I gave you. Cows are not purple.

  First question you had ever asked me that I couldn’t answer. Still can’t. Eight children before you and not a one of them ever asked me that. Three years old you were and already thinking about someplace else. Was that the first time we parted? You felt alone with your question even then, didn’t you. I know that disappointed you.

  Though I know more now. How the borders around us are arranged like rippling water.

  ·

  You were always coming from somewhere else. Used to write your address in my book with a pencil it changed so often. You told me a story once, I wonder if you recall it. You were with the Buddhists, in your Buddhist period I say, like Picasso’s Blue Period. Ha. You were staying in a little wooden house on a hillside in Darjeeling, India. For a week, every day was just draped in fog and mist, socked in tight. In the floaty gray dawn you would climb the slick switchback curves up the path, following the sound of the chanting monks in the monastery up above. One day, sitting in that monastery your eyes had been closed ten or fifteen minutes, when something changed in the room and you opened them. The fog had lifted, and there, through the windows in front of you were the snowy diamond peaks of the high Himalayas, stretched out blazing like cut glass crystal against the deep blue sky. Gave you vertigo to look it, was just so beautiful and “to think” you said, “that all that beauty had been there all along and you just couldn’t see it.” I think of that now because I can see so much more from here too, as if the fog of life has lifted and I can see to some other horizon, but as far as I can tell I think it’s life too. Just more life. Far as the eye can see.

  ·

  Like I started to say earlier you can trace a lot back to geography. In 1886 there were 6,000 people here in Blanchardville, by 1887, 30,000. All on account of the earth you see. Limestone, Trenton limestone, any geologist will tell you runs in a belt through here north to southwest, it’s about a hundred feet deep and the gas flows through it in underground rivers. Wells were all over this side of town. You could hear the gas gushing out, some said it sounded like Niagara Falls, all that gas blowing like a huge breath out of the mouth of the earth. Could see it too. Even when you cap a well there’s exhaust and they would put a flame to it. Grandpa told me there wasn’t a dark night in this town for ten years when the Cargill Well was blowing. You could see it from miles around, the tower and its constant red flame against the sky. This part of town people walked around all night like it was daylight. Grandma hung the laundry out at midnight, while the boys played football in the streets. Was like God had lit a special lantern just especially for the people of this town, that they should always have light. And they did. Fiat Lux.

  Advertisements in 1890 said “Whoever missed the chance of enriching themselves by investing
in the great cities of Chicago, and St. Paul has another chance with Blanchardville,” which was sure to become “the greatest manufacturing center of a mighty republic.” Course our hopes were a little higher than turned out to be the case, family and town either one. I always hoped you’d write a book before I died, as you were always threatening, but you never did. Well if wishes were horses beggars would ride. But why don’t you, plenty of people do.

  ·

  Still only about 30,000 people here give or take; and damned Republicans most of ’em, but the residents here do feel they’re special. If you drive in from Columbus-way onto South Main looks like you really are somewhere, with all those grand old Victorian mansions lining the streets; towers and turrets carved out of the gas boom riches. Some of those mansions still have the old window glass, with the ripples you know, that your great grandfather blew. Of course there was oil ran under the gas and when one ran out they took the oil is why Hercules Oil made its headquarters here. Still our largest employer and the biggest building on Main Street, what is it five stories high? A pile of yellow brick. Doesn’t look big to you I know, world traveler.

  You must have walked right past my grandpa’s old brick building downtown today, you know where it is there at West Main Cross.

  Well they sandblasted the old stone façade last year and now you can read the Healy name again, but you have to cross the street and stand in front of the courthouse to see it, way at the top. I thought that last flood was gonna take out the whole block.

  Some of those last little downtown businesses just north of the bridge were wiped out, including you’ll remember Fowler’s Diner that Scott Fowler ran, third generation of Fowlers to have that restaurant. Served the best fresh bass from Lake Erie. Well during that flood your crazy sister Becky in Oregon heard the news, oh it was in the New York Times and everything, so she called up your sister Linda here in town.

  Becky said, “Linda I heard about the flood and I’m worried about Mom.”

  “Well what about her Becky?”

  “Is she gonna be OK?”

  “Well she’s gonna be as OK as she’s ever gonna be,” Linda says.

  Becky I guess was worried the flood was going to sweep away the graves.

  She always was a little hysterical, remember I had to lock her in the cellar sometimes I don’t like to admit it but I did. And truth to tell it didn’t hurt her a bit. Well, so I wasn’t swept away, and so what if I had been. Not like I was gonna drown. At any rate there was nothing Linda could have done, was there?

  They say the river here runs east and west, but I say it doesn’t really run at all, it just sort of sits there, looking for trouble. It’s too flat around here to have a good river. I haven’t been out North Main to Pine Street where you all grew up in a long time. Seems like everything’s over here now. Closer to church.

  Anyway I’m glad you got away. Seventeen when you left for San Francisco, 1977. Saved your money from waitressing at that Mexican restaurant on Main. After all that had happened I went along with it. Seemed a better idea than you putting yourself in so much danger again, I thought, since your older sister was there. Wasn’t like I had that much choice in the matter but I wasn’t happy is why I didn’t go with you and Dad up to Toledo that morning. You wore that big denim cowboy hat your friend Stacy had given you. I said “I don’t know why you want to draw attention to yourself like that,” because I had to say something to cover the bitter loss I felt.

  Remember just a few summers ago you were visiting and we were doing the dishes together by the kitchen window that looks out onto the neighbor’s blacktop driveway, when I dried that plate and put it in the cupboard overhead as Mrs. Walsh pulled her car in from work, and I meant the whole of life here when I said “I’m glad you got away.” But maybe now you’re not.

  1965

  Pine Street. Blanchardville

  You’ve seen they tore down the old grey-shingled house on Pine where you all grew up. Tore it down some years ago, to make a parking lot for the school. It was an ugly house to begin with, and a course we didn’t live there anymore.

  The big maple out front is still there if you want to go look at it, its trunk dividing into those two outstretched arms. The tree has survived as living things often do, longer than the works of man. Tree standing there rooted to where it always was.

  Along with the house they tore down the peony bushes that used to bend over in the rain, so heavy were the white petals on those blossoms, I can smell them yet, a wet white perfume; and on the other side of the garage also torn down was the spindly ash tree where you had a tree house, over a forsythia bush with its early yellow fingers of flowers and other things that grew there as my children did.

  No one now seems to remember how much of the town was full of overgrown gardens with currant bushes and barefoot kids out running around playing baseball and jump-rope and basketball and bicycles, and creating carnivals in the backyard out of piano boxes and cardboard, without all the adult interference that they get now. Now none of the kids even walk out the door. No one walks anywhere, all we have are ugly blacktop parking lots and fat kids, I don’t call that progress.

  I think of that maple tree now and those games of hide and seek that would begin and end at that tree. Summer evenings, you’d start after dinner and go to nine ten o’clock, the whole neighborhood would get involved, some of us parents would sit next door on Cramer’s red brick porch with the roof over it, a Midwestern porch, nice and cool in the summer. Be the two Cramer boys and the Weaver girls from across the street and of course the trashy Stone kids from down the street, Decklers from behind us if their crazy Portuguese mother wasn’t screaming at them, you younger ones, at least a dozen kids give or take.

  “You playing or not.”

  “I’ll play but I’m not counting, I did it last time.”

  “Did not, Kevin counted last night.”

  “Across the street is out of bonds.”

  “Joseph if you’re gonna go inside in the middle of the game then don’t start playing.”

  “Oh he’s little leave him alone.”

  “He’s a spoiled brat.”

  “Look I got firefly rings on every finger.”

  “That’s gross, you’re gonna kill them all.”

  “I like to pull their guts out, see how they keep glowing, and sticky too. Here eat one.”

  “Get away from me.”

  “Come on let’s play.”

  “Carrie you have to count, and your head has to be touching the tree, and eyes closed.”

  “Five ten fifteen twenty twenty-five thirty thirty-five forty forty-five fifty fifty-five sixty sixty-five seventy seventy-five eighty eighty-five ninety ninety-five a’hundred, apples-peaches-pumpkin-pie who’s not ready holler I.”

  Course one of the younger children would always holler I.

  “Hurry up then, five ten fifteen twenty that’s all you get.”

  And off you’d all go into the spaces behind and between the houses, behind the juniper hedges, or into a car parked at the curb or behind the barrel where we burned the trash, behind the tool shed door, between the houses and the pine trees, and under the grape arbor in old man Turner’s yard. The game, you know, is to come out as the seeker is off looking for someone else and run to the tree before they see you. But you never seemed to understand that, and you stayed hidden, listening from under the tendrils in the grape arbor to the crickets thrumming, to your own heart pounding, watching fireflies and the stars overhead, breathing in the smell of rotten fruit, listening to the voices of your friends and their running footsteps in the dark, waiting there in the hidden place wanting to be found or wanting to never be found but to live there by yourself in some other life than the one you had.

  “You didn’t find Stephanie?”

  “Don’t even look for her, she always hi
des somewhere you’ll never find her.”

  “Ollie, Ollie in free, Ollie Ollie in free,” one of the kids would shout and you’d have to come out. But otherwise no one ever found you. Not the places you hid.

  ·

  You’ve been in Ohio longer this summer than you have been since you were seventeen. Wouldn’t you know it, now that I’m gone you have cause to come. It was ever thus. I’m glad you’re getting another degree, somewhere up there by Cleveland where we used to live.

  You didn’t expect that being on your home soil, breathing in the humid Ohio air would make you feel better but it has hasn’t it? Just the feel of the air has been healing to you, not that dry or harsh salt-sea air you have on the coast; we have softer air here, and it’s the air you’re made of. That moist smell of the earth coming out of the cattails along the road, the powdery smell of red sumac, deep set white wooden houses. Houses that seem to sag under the weight of green shadows, and of course the storm’s thunder and lightning, you been watching the storms out your window at night, but don’t go out in that, I don’t know if you remember what lightning can do. Just the sound of a lawnmower in the late afternoon, perfume of the cut green grass mixed with a little gasoline it’s all a comfort. Even the feel of your feet walking on the worn blocks of a limestone sidewalk, the texture of the Ohio earth. Those sidewalks you used to walk on to school and everywhere.

  v

  Must have been your twelfth birthday, you were walking. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get from one place to another now in memory. I no more start thinking of it than it all appears. Maybe memory lives inside our lives like water lives in a stream, as if water could weave together every scene. Now I’m not making any poetic claims, but maybe memory lives its own life. One day I was home and you were at school.