STUFF

I’ve waited too long. It’s nine in the morning, but the heat is already climbing. It’s too late now for my usual walk in Eaton Canyon. On a day like this, the snakes will be out, weaving their sinuous paths on top of the silty trails. My daily exercise will need to take another form. I decide to ride my bike the one mile to Jean’s house to pick up her Silver Anvil.

The Silver Anvil is an award given annually for outstanding performance by the Public Relations Society of America. Jean was awarded hers in the 1960’s. The award itself is about ten inches tall, shaped like an anvil and weighs upwards of eight pounds. Why I feel this must be shipped to Syracuse University where Jean’s life and papers are archived, is beyond me. An over-scrupulous sense of duty has always weighed on me. And now it is in my backpack.

The last time I rode my bike to Jean’s was the day she died, four months ago. Peggy had called to say the hospice doctor had told her Jean was going fast, though at ninety-three and bedridden for a decade, it had hardly been a rush. But I rushed to see her one more time. I listened to her rasping, rattling breath. I told her I loved her. My car had been acting up so I left after a while and took my ailing Volkswagen in for a new battery. The dealership had brought me home.

My phone was ringing when I walked through the door. Jean had died. I hopped on my only available transportation and rode my bike to her house. Peggy, Jean’s caregivers and I waited quietly for the mortuary people and then the hospice worker, who flushed all of Jean’s drugs down the toilet. I mourned the morphine. As the attendants

wheeled Jean’s body out on a gurney, Peggy noted that Jean always said she’d have to be taken from her charming cottage, her home of forty-four years, “feet first.” She left with one possession: a small plush skunk she’d named Percy, that never left her side. He had even been x-rayed with her once in the hospital. When it came time for us all to leave, my bike had a flat and I walked it home.

I’ve now spent four months pouring through Jean’s “stuff”. As Peggy and I break down the house, I find myself accumulating things I’d never thought about before. What was I doing? Did I need eight more water glasses? Five red candles? A brass bottle opener shaped like a squirrel?

Things we keep out of remembrance we often forget. They molder in our attics and garages. The crocheted linen table runners, the jade cats, the twisted strands of costume pearls, the dove gray three-quarter length gloves, the scarab rings, the silk shawls, the coasters from the Dordogne.

And the paper. An ego-driven imperative pushes some of us to write it all down to save. “Because the flesh can’t stay, we pass the words along,” Eric Jong said her Poem to Keats. As Jean’s literary executor, I’d spent four months marinating in paper.

I began with her office drawers and file cabinets. As a poet, essayist, columnist, editor, teacher and lecturer, Jean had a prodigious amount of paper. She maintained a voluminous correspondence and kept carbon copies of her letters. Pages scotch-taped together half a century ago fell apart in my hands. The yellowed tape was crystallized like mica and crumbled in shards through my fingers.

For weeks I worked alone in the quiet of her house. “This house feeds me,” she’d said many times. Her peaceful haven, surrounded by trees and a shaded garden, nourished me as well. The redwood house with its wide front porch was filled with things that pleased the eye and touch. Stones collected from the river in Big Sur, art, calligraphy, jade figurines of cats, brass bells and candlesticks, silver and turquoise combs that pinned up her waist-length hair. There was jewelry of all kinds, handkerchiefs, gloves, silk slips, classic shoes, a mink stole. Paintings, many of them very old, were lorded over by a large oil portrait of her father at four. There were mirrors and mahogany bureaus. A mezuzah graced her front door. Jean sipped from all religions “as needed” and drank in any parts that quenched her spiritual fires. Cartoons, many of Snoopy, adorned her walls along with photos clipped from magazines and newspapers of animals, especially cats. A large poster of Koko with her kitten hung on the bedroom door. The ashes of Jean’s last cat, Mrs. Pennington, rested in a small “cremains” box at the top of a bookcase. Photos of poets, writers, statesmen, lovers, philosophers, ministers and mystics were thumb tacked in her study next to family photos. A picture of Jean at three playing with blocks showed her apparently spelling out the word “Zen.” There were cupboards of LP’s of symphonic music along with poets such as Dylan Thomas and Auden reading their work. There were walls, and walls, and walls of books. You could look through her house for weeks and keep unraveling the story of her life, as if following an eternal skein.

Our interest in buried treasure, stockpiling the past, keeping mementos, and establishing value for art, all seems rooted in our longing for safety. Hoarding stuff, as a

homeless person pushing a shopping cart loaded with things that could be useful someday, seems more like the basis of success for storage companies and eBay. Even things that help us understand who we are bore us eventually, and we look to someone else’s objets, something new to fill that hungry place inside that is forever emptying itself. We appropriate patina and wear it as our own.

After Jean’s death, Peggy made a trip up the coast to Cambria with a friend. She marveled at the antique shops they perused. Most were full of the same stuff we had been crating up at Jean’s.

Stuff acquires and looses meaning. After we look at the same painting, statue, nut dish or vase for thirty years, we often no longer see it. We’re lucky when we see it differently, or better. If the way light falls on a painting of a four-year-old boy from long ago continues to refresh us, we’re glad. His golden curls devour and surpass time. We become sojourners, and not merely trespassers to the past.

Jean’s last name was Burden. I strapped the weighted backpack across my shoulders and headed home.

 

“Who wrote this crap?”

 

“Go write the type.”

 

“I wish I liked it more.”

 

“By the way, when you were sleeping at your desk this afternoon, you were drooling.”

 

“Should you be wearing sunglasses at your desk?”

 

“This spot sounds like trailer park TV.”

 

“This spot is a thirty-second bleed.“

 

“We had our asses handed to us today on creative.  They at first liked the concepts, but hated the copy.”

 

 

“If you can’t work on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.”

TURNING THE PLANETS AROUND

Love in the Time of Spinal Cord Injury

“Full fathom five thy father lies,

of his bones are coral made,

those were the pearls that were his eyes,

nothing of him that doth fade,

but doth suffer a sea change,

into something rich and strange…”  The Tempest

For Robbie

                                          LUCKY

 

I’m looking at his legs.

Robbie and I are pedaling down the coast from Rincon to the Ventura County Fairgrounds, a 22-mile round trip.  The blue Pacific is to our right.  On the left, a two-mile hillside stretch of yellow daisies tumbles onto the windy bike path.  Soon we will reach the point just before the trestle bridge where we will hop off our bikes and carry them out over the rocky beach to the tide line.  Then we will rest.

His legs.  The calves long and toned with lean muscle.  His thighs, with the quads clearly defined through black Lycra bike shorts.  I like following these legs.

A hundred yards away, Highway 101 hums with traffic.  But we are down close to the surf and that is what we hear. We cycle past RVs parked along the edge of the perimeter road, almost on the beach.  We smell the charcoal lighter fluid and hot dogs.  We eye the portable tables set with bowls of barbecue potato chips. We whiz past kids running full tilt with their kites.  We drink from our water bottles, imagining the salt-rimmed margaritas waiting for us down the road.  Robbie holds his water bottle arm’s length from his head, shooting it in a strong stream into his mouth.  He lets me catch up with him and then sprays water at me, laughing.  It feels cool and reckless and good, though I think for a moment that he’s careless with his water, that he should be saving it for the hard ride back in the headwind.  I will probably have to give him some of mine. 

That’s okay.  I’m the luckiest woman alive.

To be in this place on this day with this man feels lucky.  How many women wheel into a dream of love in their middle years, a love that makes them feel 18 again?  How many 50-year-olds are adored, ravished, excited, joyful, satisfied?  The best part is, I trust it.  I trust that this will be the defining relationship of my life.  This will be the love that saves me, that brings me everything I’ve waited for, everything I’ve earned.  This will be my time.  I feel life pulse in my fingertips.

We reach the spot just before the trestle and set out over the rocks with our bikes.  The beach is wide here and the stones are large.  No one bothers to stumble over them out to the point for a swim.  Robbie and I are in one of our favorite places: an empty beach.  The rocks stop close to the shoreline and we take off our shoes and stretch out on the sand.

            “I can’t believe this day,” I say.

He reaches for my hand and pulls me close enough for a long kiss.  He lies prone, his head resting in the crook of one arm, looking at me with one eye.

            “It’s all good,” he says.  Then he turns over and I see an erection pushing out through his bike shorts. 

            “Do you need some help with that?” I ask.

            “You bet.”

I’m getting better with my hands.

 

CHAPTER 1

           

            “Stupid Goofballs.”

            That is the name of a club with only two official members: Robbie and me.

            It is so named because that’s how we act when we see each other. It describes this crazy love relationship that we’ve gotten into late in our lives.  We are nutty over each other like adolescents, like chimps swinging from vines, impulsive, reckless, whooping it up, as if to say we’ve survived a whole bunch of heartbreak and we’re still strong enough to cut our own meat, so let’s have sex!  We’ve already had marriages and children and careers and all the stuff people call life while they’re on the way to you-know-what.

            Bullet-proof Robbie doesn’t think much about you-know-what.  He’s gone off scuba-diving in Micronesia.  I am at home in LA, eating lunch over the sink.

 

The call comes from the ship Thorfinn at two in the afternoon. 

“It’s Brian.” 

I recognize the voice of Robbie’s son.

 “There’s been an accident.”

My blood shrinks in my veins.

 “We think Dad got the bends.”  There is a beat. 

“He’s paralyzed from the waist down.”

            Stupid goofball.

 

            It has been an unimportant day, a small narrowing of circles as I pack for a two-week vacation with Robbie.  I am to meet him in Honolulu as he makes his way back from a week long scuba diving trip in Truk Lagoon, a tiny spot 1,200 miles from Guam where, toward the end of World War II, the U.S. sank the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Fourth Fleet.  A world famous dive site, Truk has been on Robbie’s map for a long time. 

            When the phone rings, I am standing in my kitchen, checking off my travel list: vitamins, swim suit, sun block, camera, maps of Maui.  It is a featureless March day in Los Angeles, the last day of the month, the day everything changes.

 

Accident report, as recorded by Robbie’s son Brian

 

Friday, 3/31/06

 

1.       At approximately 8:00 AM, dive on Nippo Maru.

2.       Dive to approximately 148’, averaging 37 minutes of bottom time.

3.       Did our stops as per the dive computer; last stop was approximately 15’ for 10 minutes.

4.       Dad gave me the OK sign to surface.  I surfaced at approximately 9:00 AM.

5.       At approximately 9:05 AM, I noticed that Dad was hanging onto the side of the boat while everyone else was coming aboard.  I looked down to him and noticed that his pupils were dilated and that his regulator was out of his mouth. 

6.       His speech was slurred when he was asked if he was OK.  I told Mike, the Dive Master to look at him.  Mike said, “Let’s get him out of the water.”

7.       Mike and others pulled Dad out of the water and onto the boat.  They laid him down. He was still disoriented and slow to respond.  We went back to the Thorfinn.

 

Other words follow about bubbles in the spinal cord, the time difference to Micronesia, how and when to contact each other, hyperbaric decompression chambers, boats and evacuation flights from small islands to larger ones and then on to the Naval hospital in Guam.

            I see the dark stone flecked with umber and gray in my granite counter tops.  There is the window sill, the garden outside still mute from a non-blooming winter of drought.  Two o’clock on a Friday.  The quotidian landmarks of my kitchen: counter, sink, cupboard, clock.  Like a timepiece stopped on the picture-book wall of a childhood story, Dali-esque, or like the clocks stopped after a bomb drops or the power goes out. 

Two o’clock, the sun too high for shadows.  I am land-locked, unable to move.  He is

paralyzed at sea.          

 

 

 

WHAT MEN TELL US

 

 

“You should let me cut your hair.”

 

“You could use a water softener.”

 

“Always put the cold food under the ice in a cooler.”

 

“A water softener will ruin your pipes.”

 

“Someday you’ll have hard things to do, too.”

 

“Use motor oil on your deadbolts when they stick.”

 

“They don’t make parts for that model anymore.”

 

“You should charge more for your work.”

 

“Sprinklers are easy.”

 

“Just ‘right click’ on it and go to ‘properties’”.

 

“High octane gas is bullshit.”

 

“I’m pretty sure that was a meteorite.”

 

“You can’t stay on the trail your whole life.”

 

 

 

 

LENT

 

            We are so penitent.   With our chins resting on the rail of the kneeler, we wait our turns in the darkened church for candles to be crossed at our throats.  We wait for ashes to be formed into smudged crosses on our foreheads by the thumb of the priest.  We are so sorry about everything, about how it all turned out.  We are eight years old.

            Incense hangs heavy near the altar.  The priest is flanked by altar boys our age.  They move back and forth in their flowing robes, blessing every uniformed child, our eyes cast down, our hands pressed together, thumbs locked, fingers pointing toward heaven.  Our favorite statues lord over us, shrouded in purple.  We have to wait now for forty days, the length of time that Christ wandered in the desert, until Easter, when the stone gets rolled away and Jesus comes out all cleaned up wearing white clothes and floats into heaven with little flames coming out of his hands. 

For forty days, we have to give up candy and lying.  We have to be nice to our brothers.  We have to help our mothers.  We have to pray for the poor souls in purgatory.  (It doesn’t occur to us until much later that maybe our mothers are already in purgatory.)  And then there are the babies stuck in limbo, the ones that died before baptism, stained with original sin.

There is a lot for us to worry about.   Mainly, we worry about what it would be like to have thorns pressed into our heads and then get beaten and nailed to a cross. We are told this happened because of us, that this was our fault, even though we weren’t even born yet.  We hadn’t had time to commit a sin, much less an original one. 

We wear our ashes all day.  They are marks of pride and distinction.  They separate us from the Episcopalians our mothers permit us to be friends with since they live next door.  We don’t know any Baptists or Jews because they live in a faithless part of the world that is not redeemed.  Near the Congo.  Or the Bronx.  In fact, we don’t know very much at all except the four gospels, the Ten Commandments, the seven deadly sins, the eight Beatitudes and the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost.  Things we can count on.

 

 

“MICHAEL FROM MOUNTAINS”

“Up over the stars,
Sweet well water and pickling jars –
We’ll lend you the car, we always do
Yes, we always do”
Joni Mitchell

I’ve spent the last hour trying to remember the title of this song.  It was on Joni Mitchell’s first album, “Clouds”, which, like many of her LPs, had a self-painted self-portrait on the jacket cover. We were all Joni Mitchell fans then, with our long hair parted down the middle.  But we were more than fans.  We were Joni Mitchell. We were also Judy Collins and Joan Baez and Buffy St. Marie.  Darcy and I would sit in our USC dorm room, pretty and privileged, playing guitar, wearing black brimmed hats and smoking Tareytons and talking about the war and Ezra Pound and abortion.  We were art and film majors.  We wore wide, ripped bellbottoms and nothing but dirt from the 32nd Street Market on our bare feet. We were smart and lucky and only a few of us had ever faced any real heartache.  We slept with black men, Indians, Dutch, Germans and Jews, but not each other.  That wasn’t as cool then as it is now. We dated Japanese painters and law students who were rabbi’s sons.  “Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning…”

Joni Mitchell came to Bovard Auditorium and stood on the stage alone with her guitar.  Her honey-colored fringed leather shirt was tucked into a matching long leather skirt.  I was there with Wim (as in ‘vim and vigor’) who hailed from the Netherlands and looked a little like Art Garfunkel.  He was an engineering grad student. I liked him because he was European with that great accent and because he lived in a rambling old Victorian nicknamed “Ellis Island”.  The house was full of students from around the world, most of whom did not wear shirt protectors for their pens. Wim was a kindly snore. But he took me to see Joni Mitchell and didn’t openly expect me to have sex with him afterward.  The sign of either a true gentleman or a gentle bore.

IGNATIUS SKYE

Ship’s Cat

By

Barbara Sweeney

“It furthers one to have somewhere to go.”

I Ching

PART ONE

THE VOYAGE OUT

PROLOGUE

Ignatius Skye was away from home.  With his one good eye he peered wearily out at the gently rocking sea from his perch atop the crosstrees, the one piece of wreckage still afloat after the scuttling of the HMS Oracle.  The seas were calm.  Blissful tropical weather prevailed.  Ignatius Skye was one miserable cat.  His misery was both far-reaching and immediate.  His thirst for fresh water had reached an almost unquenchable state.  His longing for his soft woven cushion in the window at Number 4 Tide Street, Boston, crested higher than it ever had before.  This time Ignatius Skye had drifted too far.

In the distance, a speck of action on the blue-green horizon caught his eye.  Four men in a small boat were rowing toward him.  As they pulled closer, Ignatius recognized them as First Mate Ellis Waters, Ship’s Steward Angus Beem and two of the drowned ship’s ten prisoners, released from their irons for the task of rowing the officers out to the wreck.

Ignatius Skye was thirsty.  It had been two days since the Oracle had splintered off this reef he now perilously rocked above.  His black and white fur was matted with salt.  His swollen tongue was no longer able to lick. This is what he got for leaving home.

“Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink,” words he remembered from that long ago place filled his mind.  Would that Waters and Beem rescue him soon.  Waters.  Waters.  The man’s name itself was a cool quenching dream.

“Well, well, look ‘ho we ’ave ‘ere,” Angus Beem called out by way of greeting as the four men pulled up to the desperate cat.

“If it isn’t old Ignatius Skye, harlequin cat with one good eye,” said one of the prisoners who was covered in Tahitian tattoos.

“That’ll be enough,” said Waters who balanced and stood to reach for the cat, so feeble now after two days of torment in the South Pacific sun.  Waters pulled the animal into the dinghy and set before him the small cap from his own flask filled with fresh water.

“Just a little now, to start with,” he said gently.  Ignatius Skye lapped the water as best he could with his parched tongue.  Waters refilled the cap.  The grateful cat drank again and again, and then, unable to go on, he crawled beneath the bench of the boat, curled his paws over his eyes and fell into a fitful sleep.

The men turned then to their task of looking for survivors and salvaging what they could from the wreckage.  The frigate had been their home for eighteen long months.  They were determined that it would not be an omen, a dark welcoming to a watery grave.

BOSTON

1789

CHAPTER 1

The situation at Number 4 Tide Street was upside down.  Deacon Jeffers’ house was topsy-turvy for spring cleaning after the family’s long absence.  They had just returned to their Boston home near Hancock’s Wharf after weathering the last part of the war in the countryside.

“By God, look what they’ve done,” shouted the Deacon to his wife Sally.

“I almost don’t recognize the place,” she replied sadly looking around at torn curtains, broken crockery, dirty furniture and bedding.  But she wasn’t one to mope around troubling herself with the past.  A houseful of children and a parish full of needy friends and neighbors kept Sally pointed forward.

Their home had been commandeered by British officers for the last nine months of the war.  Soldiers had camped in the family’s garden, eaten from their orchard and trod on everything green and growing. The Jeffers’ had been spared what many Boston landowners had come home to: trees cut down and houses stripped of wood panels and furniture, all of which were used for firewood to warm the troops during the freezing Boston winter.  Unlike London, Boston was built from wood, the handiest material around, but also the most volatile.  Fires started from candles, forges, lanterns and careless cooking had ravaged the city on an off for a hundred years.  This past winter had been no different.

“Ginny, would you fetch some water from the well?  We’ll need to start scrubbing if we’re going to bring this place to rights,” said Sally with her youngest child in her arms.

“Yes ma’am,” Ginny nodded and took the bucket, which was resting in the middle of parlor, out to the well and began to pump.

“Now,” whispered Sally conspiratorially to her youngest, “let’s see what’s going on upstairs.”
Upstairs in Deacon Jeffers’ home was more than just ‘up the stairs’.  From the ceiling in the second story of the plain but spacious Yankee clapboard home hung a narrow ladder.  Only the slender Sally Jeffers, her children and her cats were able to climb it comfortably to the space above.

All over Boston Deacon Jeffers’ wife was known as a cat lover.  People brought her kittens and strays.  She always made or found a home for every cat that crossed her threshold.  The ones she found most special, she kept.  For these lucky cats, the attic of Deacon Jeffers’ house was home.

The sloping walls of the gabled roof framed a slanted, cozy space inside.  The heat of the house rose to warm it during the chilly winters months. Dormer windows lit either end, and in the heat of summer, let the cool breezes from the bay blow through.  Sally outfitted the room with old blankets, pieces of fabric and discarded cushions.  Her grandmother’s mahogany sleigh bed, with its corncob mattress piled high with faded quilts, straddled one corner of the room. Two small heirloom trunks held odds bits of family history. A few  pieces of well-worn doll furniture made the place look like a miniature family lived there.  Of course, cats don’t really use beds and dressers and wash bowls.  Or do they?

Sally and her child climbed the ladder and peaked into the attic.  The brightness of the spring day bloomed at one end.  On the other darkened side, she could see what she’d been hoping for.  Her female cat, Mother Isobel Skye, had just given birth to a litter of kittens.  Sally couldn’t see how many there were just yet, and she didn’t want to disturb the new mother.

“See the babies?”, Sally cooed to her child.

“Go there!”, the youngster demanded.

“Not today”, we can’t bother them today.  But soon, you’ll see.  You will have kittens to play with, and take care of.”

Suddenly from the first floor, Sally heard her husband bellowing.

“Mrs. Jeffers!  Will there be no supper for these children?”

Sally and the child hurried down the ladder and back to the first floor kitchen.

“Shhh,” she cautioned the child.  “Not a word about this for now…”

FANNY PLINTH

…A shadow crossed Isobel’s path causing her to shrink behind the stone corner of a building.  The shadow loomed closer, a person, heavy-set, was swaying from side to side as if burdened with an awful sorrow.  The shadow hung on hard with both hands to a sack tossed over its shoulder.  The contents of the sack were moving.  The shadow was Fanny Plinth.

Isobel took in a sharp breath and made sure not to be seen.  Though all of Boston knew of this strange woman, it seemed none really knew her.  She was a friendless sort who kept to herself and none sought out her company. She kept close to the wharves where she seemed to do business with seamen.  She seldom looked at or spoke to anyone.

Fanny Plinth dressed in cast offs and rags from which she fashioned a hodgepodge woolen cloak. Her boots were bound by scraps cut from a smithy’s discarded leather apron.  A fizzed and tangled mass of dirty brown hair straggled halfway down her back, untamed by a brush or comb or bonnet, like proper Boston women.  Her face was rodent-like, with close-set, pitch-dark eyes and a nose ruined by veins through which too much rum punch had passed.  Her mouth contributed the crowning blow to her face: over-large gums and over-small teeth gave the woman a rat-like countenance.

Isobel watched the ungainly figure lumber down Chart Street.  What burdened her?  What awful thing held her in Boston and yet kept her so far from any human warmth?
“I wonder what’s in the sack?”  Isobel set off to follow.

Fanny moved as if she were struggling with a great weight or worry.  Isobel thought she was trying to pick up the pace, but hurrying seemed difficult for her.  She walked with her head down so as not meet anyone’s eye.  Fanny was deliberate in her route; she knew exactly where she was going.  Isobel crept behind, but not too close.  Through the maze of narrow streets that twisted through Boston, the two wound their way to the harbor and Long Wharf.  A merchant ship was tied port side to the wharf.  It was a large ship, and for this time of day, early evening, bustling with activity.  Men hauled barrels and bundles of all kinds on board.  They shouted, some in good humor, and some in foul. They called to each other to move on, get out of the way or mind their heads.  One man, perhaps he was the Bosun’s mate, stood on the wharf at the bottom of the gang plank.  He was checking things off a list as they came on board.
Fanny approached the man who clearly did not want to give her the time of day.  She kept trying to get his attention and when she finally caught his eye, he gave her the briefest of nods and looked away turning his head as if pointing for her to be off in that direction.  Fanny moved further down the wharf where large sacks of grain stood waiting to be loaded onto the ship.  She huddled close to the sacks, looking much like a sack herself; she blended in perfectly and stood shrouded, almost completely hidden.  She put down her own sack and rested.

Isobel crept closer.  She was careful to keep hidden until she knew what needed to be known.  What was in Fanny’s sack?

“I see you’ve come forth with your share of the bargain Miss Plinth.”

A man’s voice surprised Isobel so that she shrank back into the shadows.

It was the Bosun’s Mate, a scraggly chap up close.  Isobel thought most humans needed a good scrubbing, and this one was no exception.

Fanny made no reply to the man.

“Well, speak up, woman!  Have you brought what we bargained for?”

Fanny gave the man a searing look, causing him to take a step back.  She nudged her sack toward him with her foot.  The sack then moved on its own.  And then the sack meowed.

“How many mousers, woman, speak up!” rasped the man in a hoarse whisper.  He seemed to not want anyone else to hear him.

“See for yourself,” said Fanny.

Isobel’s eyes widened in surprise, and then narrowed in anger when she saw the rough hands of the Bosun’s Mate pick up the sack and open it.

“Take care not to let them out,” she warned.

“These are kittens”, he hissed peering inside.  “Good for nothing.”

“Good for learning the ways of your ship.  They’ll be grown mighty by the time you round the Cape,” said Fanny.  “Now, for my payment.”  She held out her hand.

The Bosun’s Mate handed her a small pouch of coins.

“Spanish silver dollars, I hope.  No Massachusetts coppers,” said Fanny.

“All Spanish silver”, said the Bosun’s Mate.

Fanny bounced the pouch in her hand and then looked inside.

“Seems a fair bit light,” she said suspiciously, taking out a large silver coin and biting down on it, testing the silver with her teeth.

“The rest we’ll make up in oil and with this,” said the Bosun’s Mate in a moist, false-friendly tone as he pulled a package wrapped in large fragrant leaves from inside his waistcoat and handed it to her guardedly.  “Tobacco,” he said, “and sugar,” he added generously.

“I am not a trading post,” said Fanny indignantly, grabbing the package from the man.  “Am I going roll a barrel of whale oil over the cobbles to my dwelling?  Am I bargaining with a fool?”  Fanny held the package up to her nose and sniffed the sweet scent of newly cured tobacco.

“Fresh from the Virginia colonies,” said the Bosun’s Mate.  “Best to ever rest in the bowl of a pipe.”

Fanny tucked the package under her cloak and handed the pouch of silver back to the man.  She picked up the sack of kittens and made to leave.

“There’ll be cats all over Boston waiting for the chance to sail with The Paladin,” sneered the Bosun’s Mate, tucking the silver coins back into his waistcoat.

“Not like these,” said Fanny and she lumbered off down Long Wharf into the evening fog.
Again Isobel followed, her maternal instincts in full play.  There were questions that needed to be answered before she went home to her own brood. There were kittens in a sack that were meant to have been sold to sea.

It was a gloomy evening, but the air was still.  The tide was low with all its attending smells, rust and decay, brine and pitch, as well as smoke from random fires.  The ships tied into Long Wharf chafed against it, creaking with the slight motion of the tide.  Barnacles and muscles hung from the low reaches of the wood pilings, exposed to the night air.  Gulls, posted here and there looking for scraps, tucked their heads under their wings.  A lamplighter swung his way down King Street.  In some of the neighboring windows, candles were lit.  Isobel knew that Sally would light the lantern that hung from the window at Number 4 Tide Street.  She hurried to keep pace with Fanny Plinth.

Through the streets they wove, turning down alleys which became narrower and narrower the further they got from the center of town.  They headed toward a spot made bright by the glow of a blacksmith’s fire.  Isobel knew the blacksmith as William Smythe, maker of saddlery, stirrups, bridle bits and all sorts of metal hooks and fastenings.

“How goes thee Fanny?” William said as Fanny approached.

“Miserable night made more so by bad business,” replied Fanny as she rounded the corner of the blacksmith’s barn and entered a small, windowless shack.  She shut the crooked door behind her before Isobel could get inside.

As Isobel searched for a way to see into the shack, Fanny lit a candle.  The walls of the shack were so dilapidated that light showed through the large cracks between its rotting planks.  Inside, Isobel spied a small makeshift table, a stool and bedding piled on the floor.  She watched as Fanny gently removed the kittens one by one from their sack.  There were three, one white and other two gray tabbies.  Fanny plunked down on the stool, put her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands.

A small voice came from the darkness in a corner of the shack.

“You didn’t sell them, you didn’t sell them!” cried the voice.

Fanny did not respond but pulled the package of tobacco out from her cloak.  She unrolled the large leaves the length of the table.  She tore off a piece of one leaf.

“Fetch me my pipe to show me your gratitude,” she said.

A young, small-boned boy dressed in a worn Yankee soldier’s uniform that was too big for him emerged from the shadows.  Everything about his appearance was smudged: his face, his hands, his clothing.  His hair was blonde and his feet were bare.

The boy handed Fanny a thin, long-handled pipe with a clay bowl, similar to the pipes men smoked in the taverns.  Fanny rolled and folded the torn tobacco leaf and stuffed it into the bowl of her pipe.  She lifted the lit candle from the table, held it to the pipe and inhaled deeply.

By this time the kittens were crawling all over the boy playfully, batting his face with their paws, sneaking up behind him and jumping on his neck, hanging by their toenails from his shirt.  The boy was delighted with the turn of events that had brought the kittens back to him.

“We have plenty of mice here for them to catch,” he said to Fanny hopefully.

“And that is what they will eat,” she said from the gloom.  “What we shall eat is another matter…”

SETTING SAIL

…The boy carried his sack slung over his shoulder.  No one knew that a small cat named Ignatius Skye was curled up in the bottom of the bag.  Ignatius could only smell the wharf and hear the voices of men, some shouting, some muttering, about getting underway.  Soon he knew that Sally would be putting out the butter for this evening’s meal.  He was anxious to get back to his cushion in the window of Number 4 Tide Street.

From inside the sack, Ignatius could feel the slip and sway of the wharf.  Were they onboard a ship?  A hot thread of panic began inching up his throat. He clawed at the sack.  The boy reached around and grabbed the sack close to his body, stifling Ignatius’ cries to be set free.  Ignatius and the boy bumped down a ladder; the smells changed, intensified as they went below ship.  The boy swung back and forth through a small passageway and then thumped his sack down on a short, narrow berth.  He opened the sack and Ignatius, with his ears pinned back, stuck his head out as far as he could without fainting from fear.  They were definitely on a ship, definitely below deck, and definitely, from the sound of things, and the rolling, surging, forward motion of the vessel, setting sail.  Ignatius sprang from the sack and scrambled down the passageway, through the galley, knocking over a spray of pans in his haste.  Get thee out of my kitchen thy feline pack of fleas! the cook yelled and took after him with a large spoon.  Ignatius jumped onto a barrel and climbed inside a rounded coil of rope.  Got thee! shouted the cook as he slammed a barrel lid down tight on the coil putting Ignatius into almost total darkness.  He was trapped.

Navy had watched as the boy had gone up the gangway and boarded the ship.  He saw the sack.  He saw the look in the boy’s eyes.  It was the look of someone bound for adventure, that combination of joy and fear.  Navy had his own fear.  He was afraid that Ignatius was included in the boy’s baggage, but he couldn’t be certain.  His plan was to board the ship and find out for himself.  His promise to Isobel to look after her son weighed on Navy’s heart.  I am a cat of all conniption, Navy assured himself, misusing the word ‘conniption’ for ‘conviction’.  But words didn’t matter now.  He knew what he meant and he meant to prevent Ignatius from leaving Boston Harbor.

Navy felt a tug on his shoulder.

“Did you find him?”   Abe scrunched close to Navy’s ear.

“Can’t tell if he’s onboard.”  Navy replied.  “The boy got on with a sack.”

“Not a good sign,” said Abe.  Looking toward the ship, he saw how it was being readied for sail.  He heard orders shouted.  He saw barefoot seamen climb the rigging and hang in readiness from the tall spars.   Abe set off running as fast as he could toward The Monarch and with his largest effort jumped from the wharf and landed, perilously, on the last-most edge of the aft rail.  He was onboard.

Navy stood astonished onshore.  Things were happening fast all around him.  He couldn’t think what to do, so he did nothing.  And before long, what he wished wouldn’t happen, happened. The ship in full sail slung in a slow surge from the harbor, rocking its way  toward the open sea.  Navy stood and stood and the direction didn’t change.  The sky was clear; the outgoing tide was running steady and strong; the breeze was a worthy one from the west.  It was a good day for sailing, auspicious weather for the start of a journey.  Navy watched as The Monarch grew smaller and smaller on the horizon as it pointed out toward Cape Pounds.  Soon the ship was just the size of a small cat, tilting port and starboard toward some unknown shore…

 

 

 

 

 

                                                    HERMAN

 

                                                    an essay by

   

                                                Barbara Sweeney

 

 

            We enter through the pink marble portico and join the long line of people waiting for the seven o’clock dinner seating.  Our party consists of my husband, our two daughters, my husband’s sister, their mother and me.  We are at the Palace Court in San Francisco.  It is Christmas Day, 2000.

            In the foyer, a twelve-foot high, tiered Christmas “cake” constructed from paper sits in a brightly lit glass cabinet.  Each tier is decorated with winter icons: a skater, a child on a sled, wrapped presents and reindeer.  “Herman the German”, the name my husband uses to describe his mother behind her back because of her Teutonic lineage and demeanor, is treating us to this feast and leads us through the foyer to our place in line, her hot pink fringed cape trailing imperiously behind her.  All sorts of people are already in line, some formally dressed, others in jeans.  Following behind her like dutiful ducks, we fall somewhere in between. 

            It’s pretense as usual playing its starring role in another family Holiday Performance.  Recently separated, my still-husband and I are making a show of togetherness for our teenage children and for his family, which presently consists of his sister and mother.  Missing from the picture is his father, who is “no longer with us,” and his sister’s second husband who is serving time as a guest of the State of California for some questionable white-collar misjudgement.  I am busy trying to make mental peace with this tiny, viral in-law brigade when the seating for our meal begins.

We are led by one of many tuxedoed servers to our table at the end of the huge dining room domed by a vaulted glass atrium that soars above us.  A two-story live Christmas tree decorated with oversize fruit hoards the center of the room. A pianist in cut-away tails performs a glissando of “White Christmas”.

I want to sit down and toss back a glass of champagne, but Herman has other plans.  Clutching her pocketbook to her torso, she herds us into a room half the size of a football field where a buffet spectacle awaits.  I abandon the family and walk the expanse alone checking out the myriad possibilities.

The centerpiece of the celebration a table swooning under immense platters and vases filled with a continent’s supply of produce: oranges, apples, crab apples, pears and grapes.  I walk past stations for Japanese, Thai and Chinese food, including a sushi chef assembling dabs of wasabi.  There are banquet tables crowded with pates, cheeses and smoked fish.  There is a raw bar with fresh oysters, clams, curried mussels and a bountiful saffron crab salad.  There are carving stations for barons of beef, hams, legs of lamb, turkeys and assorted stuffings, squashes, potatoes, yams tossed with coconut and currants — and salads.  A dessert station features several Croque en Buche, Buche de Noel, chocolate raspberry tarts, gingerbreads, flans, chocolate and plain crème brulees, pear tarts, apple kuchen, pumpkin pies, decorated cookies and frosted cupcakes.  A treasure chest spills over with red licorice, M&M’s and gumdrops.  There is a crepe station (blueberry and chocolate), a sundae station (vanilla and coffee), omelettes, Eggs Benedict and all kinds of bread.

Best of all is the children’s buffet.  Set down within comfortable reach of people who are only three feet tall are silver chafing dishes laden with the unctuous foods of childhood: macaroni and cheese, French fries, chicken fingers (“Hey, we don’t even have fingers!”), lasagna and more treasure chests brimming with candy.

Cavernous emptiness is the phrase that comes to mind.  Abandoning both good taste and good judgment, I pile plates with smoked white fish, trout and salmon, curried squid, raw oysters, pate, cheese, crackers, roast beef with horseradish sauce, mashed potatoes, coconut yams, brussel sprouts, Chinese spareribs, spring rolls, shrimp, ice cream, maraschino cherries and cream puffs. This requires many trips back to the stadium for re-supply.  I eat it all.  Many plates stack up around me.  I drink many glasses of champagne in between trips.  All of this is frowned upon by Herman.  But I don’t care, because her son and I will soon be divorced and I’m his guest, which separates me from her scorn. 

My husband steers his mother through the maze of offerings back to our table where she promptly pronounces everything “lousy”, “tasteless” and “perfectly awful.”  Her sour expression makes me worry that disaster looms within striking distance, that this place, which she chose, doesn’t measure up to her memory of what it once was.   Her tongue-clicking criticism is directed at everything that is not as it should be, as it was when ladies wore gloves, gentlemen opened doors and children were stifled Rockwellian creations folding their hands for grace.  Adolescent girls were especially not seen with blood red lipstick, which is the color our thirteen-year-old daughter has chosen for the evening.  “Can’t you do something about that lipstick?” Herman implores me, managing as usual to verbally hit my daughter and me with one stroke.  “Why don’t you talk to her about it if it bothers you,” the new me replies with a forkful of yam.  My husband tells his mother that the Zoloft she takes is the reason why she can’t taste her food.  She can’t hear him.

On one side of us, a table is occupied by what appears to be a family of gypsies.  Herman can tell they are gypsies because the women are gaudy and bosomy in cheap strapless gowns and they are thoroughly enjoying their meal.  The men all wear tuxes, and one of them, an older man, is palsied.  They seem to like each other. On the other side of us sits a pinched Waspish family with well-behaved young children that include little girls in red velvet dresses eating plates of strawberries and whipped cream.  

How many agitated holidays did we endure with me trying to keep my girls tidy in their red velvet dresses and their table manners under control?  How many dinners were spent trying to telepathically signal that running their young fingers through the candles or building nests in their stuffing was just going to make all of us miserable?  How long did we do this?  A quarter of a century is the phrase that comes to mind.

We take pictures.  Or, rather, our server, Elena, snaps photos of us with our many cameras.  I am included in the pictures, even though I am the “estrangled” wife and Herman may cut me out with scissors later as she does with family members who fall out of favor.  

I want to excuse myself before we get to the check-signing part of the meal.  Once, years ago, after seeing the Kirov ballet perform a darkly uninspired Swan Lake, Herman accused me of stealing one hundred dollars in cash from her purse which I was holding for her so she could manage her cape.  I can’t budge because the gypsies have boxed me in.

Herman pays the tab.  As we leave the building to hail a cab back to our hotel, my future ex-husband slides a piece of red licorice into the pocket of my cashmere coat.  He knows how much I love it.  Later, after all kinds of mix-ups with rooms and who will sleep with whom, I find another stick under my pillow.

 

By Barbara Sweeney

It was the time before euros.  It was the time before color bled from Livy’s life like a fading foreign currency. The stone bench felt smooth to her touch. In the small park not far from Heinrichsgasse, she sat and wondered how long it would take for Frau Solderer to make up her room.  She was dying for a nap.
The flight had been long, fourteen uneventful hours, changing planes in Frankfurt.  Now comfortably wrapped in her cashmere coat on a stone bench in Vienna, Livy looked forward to three days on her own.  No friends, no family, no traveling companions.  Just three days to do as she pleased in a city that kept drawing her back.
The day began to darken, and children playing around her in the park threw leaves at each other.  Their mothers called to give them cups of hot cider from thermoses they’d carried in rucksacks.  In the November twilight, Livy saw that the mothers were friends.  She saw that they would stay late in the park, postponing the children’s dinners in order to keep company with each other.  She wondered about their marriages, if they just could not bear to go home…

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By Barbara Sweeney

You sit down next to a guy on a plane.  It’s early.  He’s handsome.  Costner-esque.  You’re a woman in her fifties who’d just as soon no one noticed since no one does anyway.  And you don’t want to talk to anyone because you said all you had to say to the TSA official at Logan who’d done a cavity search of your luggage which included seventeen red felt lobster hats.
But hey, you’re dressed for First Class.  A kind of uniform required by the airline when flying non-rev, a discount you enjoy because your brother’s a Captain.  You’re kind of classy-looking, actually, with the linen slacks and stiletto boots and the great haircut.  Big hoax, since you’d never pay for First Class on your own.  Big fat lie, since you have no money to speak of but loads of credit cards and a honking mortgage which you re-fi every twenty minutes or so to make ends meet.
The unthinkable happens.
“My name’s Jeremy,” says Costner, leaning over the console, exposing onyx cuff-links on his all-business, crisp white shirt.  Whoa.
You hear a woman’s voice saying your name.  It’s your voice.
Jeremy/Costner repeats your name.  He smiles.
“Sparkling or still?”  Mr. Cordial flight attendant leans in to take your order.
“Just regular, thanks.”  You feel noble when you drink water on airplanes.  Not the coffee you would kill for, the champagne, the Bloody Mary(s), the Coke.  Your scalp pricks with the tiny thrill of veering away from trouble.  Costner is drinking water.
“Are you from Boston,” he asks.  The engines start to whine.
“Just here for family business,” you say with a soupçon of dread.  Was he going to be a talker?  “Big wedding last night in Narragansett.  I’m pretty tired.”
“Well, you look lovely.”
In football, this would be an interception run all the way back for a touchdown.  You feel your estrogen-deprived bones softening.  Melting, actually.  This First Class guy has a pedigree pelt under that shirt…

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