Read an Excerpt
Silence & Song
By Melanie Rae Thon The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2015 Melanie Rae Thon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-857-6
CHAPTER 1
vanishings
There are three ascending levels of how one mourns:
with tears ~ that is the lowest ~
with silence ~ that is higher ~
and with song ~ that is the highest.
— Hasidic teaching
1.
My brother kneels in the back of the Chrysler. Leo Derais, eleven years old: he's skipped three grades: this fall he'll start high school.
He's just made the most astonishing discovery, has seen the evidence and understands at last how time moves at different speeds in both directions. (Was that a stone? Is that a rabbit?)
Appears to move.
Quickly now, before the light goes, he wants our father to see what he sees, the earth close to the car ripping backward (skull of a desert fox, bones of a missing child), everything lost, the past shredded and gone (blink of an eye, stuttering heartbeat) while at the same time, in the same world, a ridge of distant mountains unscrolls, quietly revealing itself, advancing slowly forward.
No matter how fast our father drives, the patient line of stone proceeds, always beyond, always ahead of us.
He's trembling now but can't speak. Time does not exist. Time is perception, the endless rearrangement of things in space, the infinite possibilities of their relationships to one another.
A word will shatter thought: skull, stone, star, rabbit: everything here, now, lost and still to come in this moment. There's no reason why he can't remember the future. Even now the light of stars long dead streaks toward him.
Our father, our pilot, delivers us into a night too beautiful to imagine: blue, blue sky, mountains deepening to violet.
Mother unbuttons her blouse to nurse the baby. Joelle, my sister, eleven months old, eight years younger than I am, my father's bewildered surprise, my mother's joyful mystery, Joelle Derais, so radiant strangers stop us on the street and ask to touch or try to talk to her.
If she were alive now, would she be like me, or still be tempting?
I remember her that day at the rest stop: cheeks flushed, lips rosy, the soft swirl of dark curls at the crown of her head (where I kiss, where I smell you), Joelle, my sister, heavy in my arms, heavy in my lungs, the sweet almond scent of you.
I remember the woman who gasped in the bathroom, whose fingers fluttered as she touched Joelle's warm shoulder. My God is that child real? She thought my sister was a doll, perfect porcelain, perfectly painted, someone else's real hair, someone else's silky lashes:
My God how porcelain shatters.
Mother wants to stop in Page, just south of the Utah border, high on this plateau of red rock where a pink neon sign blinks EZ REST and a green one warns DESPERADO'S HIDEAWAY.
Our pilot won't rest; our desperado won't take refuge.
If time does not exist, there must be a place where I can go, where I can find us, where my sister cries and my brother trembles, where bands of rose and gold and turquoise throb at the horizon, where my father turns back, and my mother forgives him. (Somewhere in the night, while I sleep, this happens.)
Forty years. I have these words. I know these numbers. The morning paper my proof: Oil Spilling, Bees Vanishing. Five Illegal Immigrants Found Dead, Problem Bear Relocated.
The headline never says: Invasive Humans Removed from Bear's Natural Habitat.
EZ REST: I almost remember the sign flashing all night, the room that smelled of smoke and ammonia.
No. We didn't turn. The blue Chrysler sped into the blue night while the light of stars streaked toward us.
Forty years. I remember the taste of blood and bone, tongue cut deep, front teeth jagged, the smell of gasoline and smoke, something burning in the distance. My father tried to stand but couldn't stand, tried again and then a third time. He disappeared as smoke and came back as fire. His face flared in orange light.
How can both legs be broken?
Yes, everything here, now, again, always: the blue Chrysler ablaze, our bodies flung in the desert, the rearrangement of things, the infinite possibilities, the light of stars, yes, I have never seen so many stars anywhere, an ocean of sparkling light, stars alive and dead streaking toward us.
The baby was gone, the baby was missing. I remember Mother crawling in the sand, trying to find her, saying her name, Joelle, howling her name into the blue night all around us, leaving Jo – elle vibrating through stone and star forever.
My brother rose up white and naked from his twisted body. He was perfect, so thin and pale I could see right through him. He stooped to scratch the sand with a stick. Later I understood the stick was a bone, one he'd pulled from his body.
So fast, my brother! He drew a lovely looping line crossing and recrossing, no beginning or end, some strange magic: flight of the hawk or snake coiling, a wave of sound inside a stone, breath moving between bodies.
I don't remember the days in the hospital, the nights and days I slept, brain swollen. I remember waking in my bed at home, a deer under the mesquite tree by my window, the shadows of leaves fluttering across her body: a deer in disguise: I heard her breath in my breath, felt warm blood surge through me.
Alive, I was. Even now I believe the deer's blood healed me. Mother played "Clair de Lune" on the piano with her left hand, half a song; the deer breathed in fluttery time, and I breathed with her. Doves sang missing notes, but not the right ones, not Debussy's, some startling rearrangement of sound, every song endlessly new, no matter how many times Mother played them.
Blood surges from the heart and soon returns or doesn't. Forty years. At the Mission one day I watched a man restore the wounds of Jesus, scraping away oil and dirt to paint the openings again, red so red it glowed, wounds so deep blood bloomed violet.
Such love! The painter looked thin as Jesus, scarred too, hurt and hungry. Yes, here, God alive, breath inside a starved brown body. He'd repaired broken thorns and broken fingers; now, as he touched the wounds with his brush, tendons beneath flesh flickered. In a looping line of blue vein, I felt the painter's blood in me pulsing.
So easily the body opens.
Good Samaritan Shot Three Times. The news in the paper today. Hand, thigh, right shoulder. Two fingers lost, clavicle shattered. The wound in the thigh will not stop leaking. Nine pints of blood gone. Nine poured back into you. Is this possible? Who are you now, filled and saved by the blood of strangers?
The shadows of leaves become the shadows of hands, doctors' hands inside my brother's body, stitching artery and bowel, touching the soft secret skin inside the belly, hoping to stop the blood, to bring him back, to reassemble a puzzle of bone, pelvis and rib from splintered fragments.
Good Samaritan, I would give you all my blood, lie down with you inside, as I was once inside my mother.
Love surged as song in the womb, the universe here, whole and perfect: blood and breath, whoosh and murmur, vibration in soft bone, my body alive with sound, every cell shimmering.
I don't remember walking in my sleep, leaving our little house, the sound of my heart, my parents' breathing. I do remember waking in the cold pink light of morning, wearing a thin yellow nightgown, white cotton underpants. Bare feet wet from the cold wet grass of the golf course. I remember a shiny raven walking across the green green, speaking to me in his language: All this waste, all this water. Hohokam, he said. Warning from the past, memory of the future.
I learned I could wake anywhere: under my brother's bed or miles from home, down the arroyo. I don't remember climbing into a neighbor's house, popping the screen with my small fist, slipping inside the open window. I woke in the kitchen, a quart of chocolate milk in my hand, belly too full, carton half empty. A little finch had flown in with me. I left her there, to take the blame, to be a mystery.
I might walk in the desert all night and wake unsafe in my own bed, legs scratched by thorns, feet cut, sheets bloody. I was never afraid. What more could happen? My brother gone, my sister missing. Dreams were not dreams: dreams opened the night so I could enter. I remember a pulse of wind and wing, hundreds of bats flying toward me, parting to let me pass, bodies so close but never touching: the bats made a hole in the night the exact size and shape of my body.
Migrant bats, illegals from Mexico. Saviors, lovers: they look just like us inside, hearts and veins, bowels and kidneys. They cross the border in the dark: unknown, undetected: so small and light you could hide one in each hand, carry twelve in your pockets.
Your cousins!
Days after conception, the embryo of a bat could be the embryo of a human; but now, in the dark, you perceive mysterious differences. Your fingers can hold pen or scalpel, stone or hammer, but theirs have grown long and fine to hold nothing more than skin, a delicate web of wing between them.
Their bodies are perfect. They smell a wild blooming in the night, so tempting it fills their minds, so potent a taste wafting on wind guides them. Long tongues, long noses: they plunge furred faces deep inside the saguaro's white blossoms.
They care nothing for laws or lines, walls or wires. Nectar tastes as sweet on one side as the other. They take all they can. Smugglers, thieves: they rise, faces dusted gold with pollen.
They do not want your blood; they have not come to harm your children.
They want what we want: one sweet life on earth. Who can blame them? Strange angels! They know not what they do flying country to country, flower to flower. By their hunger they offer life, by their theft restore the desert.
Each one, once only! The pollinated blossom of the saguaro closes before noon, will never again open, but in its secret heart, a sweet fruit begins to ripen.
2.
Good Samaritan! Just today, just this morning, I woke before dawn knowing that while we slept something miraculous had happened. Voices too high to hear left my body trembling.
Yes, it's true: I tasted nectar. Down the arroyo, into the canyon, I flew to the place where saguaro had flowered, each blossom wide as my hand; each one so deep those who enter risk drowning.
I have never known such patience. Sixty years to grow one arm, seventy-five to risk blooming. The saguaro might live two hundred years: if lightning does not strike, if fire does not boil and burst it. If humans do not shoot or sever, axe or steal. If tires do not crush. If wind does not topple.
They rise fifteen feet or fifty, tall and straight, three arms lifted high or twenty held in perfect balance. If sun does not scorch, if frost does not wither.
Their roots grow long and shallow, inch by inch, decade to decade, sensing stone as they move, wrapping buried rock to brace them.
They offer their bodies to birds: Harris hawk, Gila woodpecker. Thrasher, flycatcher, elf owl, flicker. A home high in their limbs is safe. A nest inside, dark and cool.
This morning a white-winged dove and red cardinal sat still in a crown of white flowers together, thirty feet above the earth, as if this was their nest, as if by wonder they'd been married.
I heard the great horned owl not yet sleeping, crackle of crow, coyote answering. The dove spoke softly to her companion. So sweet and low, her voice fell flower to earth and rose up through me. The cardinal burned: he spoke in feather and flame, no need for song: red heart ablaze, red wings flashing.
Sun struck saguaros high on the ridge. Gold light glowed through fine needles: every ridge of every pleat, arms and trunks by spines haloed. Soon petals would begin to fall and dry and scatter, but tonight flowers would bloom again in new places, bats would fly, nectar be taken.
3.
Good Samaritan Still Critical. Unconsciously alive, thirty-four hours. Do you dream in flashes of light? In scent, in flower? Do you hear music? Your wife's heart, your daughter's memories?
No wound is too small to kill you. The gilded flicker sometimes digs too deep, severs skeletal rods, leaves the saguaro weak in a thunderstorm. It might survive a torn limb but fall fast to infection that follows.
Sixty years to grow that arm, and this is what happens.
4.
I ask my children to draw something they love or something that scares them. Aisha, Dario, Everett: my students today, misbehaved and misbegotten, born high on crack or addicted to sugar. Adam: locked in a trunk, trapped in a dryer. He has bruises he can't explain: fingerprints on his wrists, rope burns on his ankles. Jamal, Camille, Mikiah: exposed to pesticides and radiation, mercury in the fish, methane in the water. Simone: forgotten in the park one day, befriended by a stranger.
Their teachers bring them to me when they slap themselves or can't stop whirling.
That's Aisha, little dervish, born twelve weeks too soon, shivering and starved, lungs unformed, skin translucent. I didn't like the air; I wanted to live in water. She's spun herself sick and now is quiet: Aisha, coloring spotted fish beneath waves of rocking ocean.
Jamal watches the head of a snake rise from paper. Time opens into light, the sensation of heat on Jamal's face where a slant of sun sparks skin and flickers. The hand that draws, the left hand, is warm too, the paper lit, the snake illuminated. Line by line, Jamal moves into the long tranquility of the snake's body. He works on snake time. Very slowly. Jamal Kadir loves each perfect diamond of the Mojave's back, fangs that fold into the mouth, the sound in his throat as he touches the rattle.
They're unpredictable, my children, besieged by dreams, by tics and tremors. They have impulses they can't control, jolts of grief, memories of the future: a world without bats or bees, a planet without flowers.
They love everyone: Saguaro, Hawk, Hummingbird, Tortoise, a Javelina with wings flying over the desert.
Mikiah makes a black hole, a place so dense and dark it warps space and shreds stars. Black is not black enough: he's swirling blue, green, red, purple. Black holes swallow everything, he says. Even light, even color. He hums as he works, pressing hard on his crayons.
Dario's lost one eye and wears a patch to hide the socket. An accident? Yes, but Dario won't say, a pipe bomb in the street, built and torched by my uncle. Nine years old and dangerous: Dario Zavala, my beautiful boy, skin pocked and scarred by burning metal.
He'll slash you if you stare. Shoot you if you tease him. He shapes his fingers into guns and kills the children on the playground. Today he's sorry. Today Dario draws a tiny box with bars, the window of a cell, his own small face inside it.
I was afraid, and then I wasn't.
Jamal erases his rattlesnake, touching each line again, leaving the ghost of a snake, hot wind, a wave of light, sand rippling.
Good Samaritan, nobody wants to die. Nothing wants to kill. But sometimes the fuse is lit. Or the snake in its terror bites you.
5.
Lewis Rohe, I whisper your name, husband of Claire, father of Daisi, shot three times by a fourteen-year-old boy: Juvenile Confesses.
Dylan McAvee borrowed his mother's car and rolled it down the arroyo. Earlier that day, he snagged her boyfriend's 9mm pistol, wrapped it in a towel, and stashed it under the driver's seat. He didn't have a plan, but he was open to possibilities: Kyle's denim jacket flung on the couch, keys to his truck bulging in the pocket: Kyle and his mother arguing in the bedroom, voices slurred: Should he save her? The names of animals, the parts of bodies: no: a slap, a kiss, the bedroom door kicked shut: please: and then only the sound of the bed hitting the wall over and over: Mother:
Plenty of time for a boy to drift into the dizzy heat of day and slip the gun from Kyle's glove box.
Smooth and small, the gun in the hand, surprisingly heavy: he knew the burn in the back of the throat, powder and dirt, the taste after. Just last week, Dylan watched Kyle Truitt shoot a jackrabbit. Such long ears and big feet, beautiful and fast, the rabbit leaping like an antelope, popping high over rocks and cacti, and then the blast: sound itself enough to kill: the rabbit down but not quiet, panting hard, legs twitching, stomach an open wound, dark jumble of bowel spilling. Kyle pressed the gun into his hand, said, You finish it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Silence & Song by Melanie Rae Thon. Copyright © 2015 Melanie Rae Thon. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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