I work hard in the dormant month of February to remind myself of the warmth and life and light all being stored up in the surrounding woods and earth and animals. But this February I am interrupted by the exit of one life.
I watch, from my bay window, cardinals forage for seed in the brown grass beneath the shepherd’s crook. The brilliant-feathered male pushes the female away. She hops back at a respectful distance, unperturbed, I think. She must know that in just a few months her mate will once again be feeding her in courtship.
When Lenore first comes into the living room to tuck a knitted afghan around my arthritic knees, I don’t see she is crying. Then a small catch of her breath takes me away from the scene outside.
“Ethel called . . . Linda is gone.”
“Gone?”
Lenore backs up without looking behind until she reaches the couch, then falls into it. “A few days ago. Liver disease. She kept it a secret, how bad she was. The funeral’s tomorrow.”
I’ve noticed, in recent years, that the tears on my wife’s good face no longer fall—they meander through the creases, find rest in flat rivulets that begin at her eyes, eyes of a blue no longer intense but soft and comforting.
“Do ya hear me, Donald?” she asks after a silence I know she judges to be too long.
“I hear you.” When my wife gets upset, her brogue grows stronger.
The cardinals fly off in unison when the sudden turn of my head in the window reflection startles them. Or maybe it is Judith, my neighbor to the right, crossing the tree-line of white pines, plastic container in hand.
“Damn it, Lenore, she’s doing it again—taking my seed!”
Judith tilts the tube feeder and gathers the millet and sunflower seed mixture into her container, then takes small, guilty elfin steps back to her property.
The afghan slides to the floor. “I’m calling her this time. She’s emptied half the feeder!”
Lenore sighs, wipes her face first with her fingertips, then with the backs of her hands. “Just let it be, Donald, just let her be.”
I wait by the car for my wife to check the stove and leave the house. The winter sky looks vast, a gray ocean. I reach to the car for ballast—a touch of vertigo for a moment, a feeling of insignificance.
We are becoming used to late-night phone calls and the sad, necessary flurry of funeral preparations. But this time, the death of our friend and neighbor’s daughter, Linda, hits harder. A life not fully lived, both in years and accomplishments, is harder to celebrate.
I can’t help but think about my own daughter, who used to play with Linda in a tree house her father and I erected in the woods between our two properties. If Melissa had just left me now, forever, I would never look at the world as whole again. It would always be a treacherous puzzle, with the most important piece missing. Lenore would feel the same—she had immediately rushed to the phone to call Melissa, ostensibly to tell her the news, but I knew the mother needed to affirm that the daughter hadn’t somehow disappeared, too.
The North Parish church lot is crowded with mourners. We are directed to the last row of seats, handed programs for the service.
“Her ex-husband is giving the eulogy,” Lenore whispers.
I glance at the name she points to, printed in uneven typewriter font. “They divorced, what, ten years ago?”
“He’s over there.”
But I’m looking to my friend, Rowan, in the first row. I hear some heavy words like “pain” and “alcoholism” during the service, and move to escape the church’s old, overactive heaters.
The ground outside is uneven, frost-heaved. The stones that frame the church are large, chiseled granite taken from parish land. They have been hewn into a strong, seemingly sturdy house of worship. I study the dry moss and ochre-tinged lichen that discolors the mortar, which cements the rocks that will outlast all of those they house.
Illustrations by Shelley Fabrizio
Lenore returns from her lunch with that cold, sweet smell of winter air about her. I’m fixing a barley stew for dinner, and it has to bake in the oven for several hours. I ease a knife into a mushroom, slice it in half.
Lenore puts a carrot piece into her mouth and chews carefully. “That was hard. Ethel cried a lot, but I think she needed to.”
“Where did you go?”
“Palmers. We didn’t really eat, but it looked good . . . soup and salad.”
“We’re having stew tonight.”
“Thanks. . . . Donald?”
“Hmmm?”
“You should talk to Rowan. Ethel says he won’t talk to her. She thought maybe, you being a man, and a friend—”
“Oh, hon, what would I say?”
“Don’t say anything. Listen.”
I point to the red cooking wine next to the stove. She hands it to me so I can pour it into the simmering pot.
“What if he doesn’t talk? Doesn’t want to? Sometimes talk makes things worse.”
Lenore puts her fists on her hips, elbows out—as she does when she’s frustrated with me—and shakes her head slowly.
“Donald MacIntyre. Just be a good friend, okay? He’s gonna do some burnin’ tomorrow, you go see him.”
“I’ve got nothing left to burn this season.”
“Then make somethin’ ta burn,” she snaps, as chilly as the evening that’s coming on.
The cozy smell of a wood fire wends its way down from the hill above our land. Pushed by a bone-chilling wind, it enters the cracks around my old, four-paned windows. Lenore comes into the living room a second time, stares at me in an effort to get me moving.
I put down the book I’ve been pretending to read for several hours, unable to concentrate on the gardening tool chapter.
“I’ll go, I’ll go.”
I gear up for the cold, pull on a knit cap, and set out into the backyard to find something to burn.
I find the end-of-winter landscape so unalluring. The cold covers all natural scents, and life contracts into itself, waiting, biding its time. The sounds of animal calls still hold, though: the murder of crows that caw when they see me, their sharp eyes looking to my hands for the whiteness of stale bread; the nattering of alarmed squirrels, amidst creaking limbs; the scream of a red-tailed hawk, and the cacophony of the crows now in pursuit.
Nature, I think, has a temper. Last night it was angry, lashing about. Some old oak branches were thrown to the ground, both black with rot and white with fungus. One lies stuck, like a broken arm, having plunged end first into our lawn. Still, they are not enough to burn.
My eyes fall on the picnic bench sitting patiently under the pines, the trees lacy from the loss of needles. The bench leans to the left, its surface seamed and weathered like silver driftwood. In summertime you’ll see moss growing in cracks, and little red fungus that looks like tiny, haphazard bunches of “lollipop trees,” as Melissa calls them.
Without hesitation, I unlock the tool shed and pull out the axe. I hit hard, taking time to rest during the slow, steady attack.
The red wheelbarrow squeaks through the dry, shrunken undergrowth. I push it over scrub and dormant vines of wild strawberry, sumac, and deadly nightshade. Rowan and I have slowed in our quest to keep the woods between our homes clear of the kinds of small, weedy greenery that impedes progress.His side is especially overgrown since he began summering in Maine—front lawn overtaken by myrtle, rhododendrons, tall grasses, and towering pines. I force the barrow through the trees, aiming for the hot orange light flashing between trunks.
He looks up when I enter the clearing, his eyes hidden behind glasses that reflect his bonfire. The two round, flickering globes hide his expression. He is in a circle of cardboard boxes and green trash bags.
“Smelled the burning, had this old picnic table to get rid of.” I begin to feed the flames with the old cedar axed into three-foot sections. The fire embraces the wood, sucks out what’s left of its life like a vampire, and tosses its ash to the sky. While I say a silent farewell to the bench that once supported my family during picnics, absorbed our beer and lemonade, Rowan carefully, gently, gives the fire what I soon realize are letters—papers of different colors, faded pinks and yellows, colors of our daughters’ youths, those boldly drawn daisies and perfect round dots of the sixties and early seventies decorating some of them. They all burn the same way—corners to center.
He opens one envelope, a plain white one, pulls out the yellow, legal-size paper, and reads to himself. “It’s from me,” he says. “It’s a letter I wrote to her after her divorce, asking her to get help.” He raises his right thumb and forefinger to his glasses, efficiently wipes away the tears gathering in the corners.
“I have to go through all her stuff now. Ethel can’t do it. Her clothes I took down to the Salvation Army. I took her books to the library. But what do I do with these personal things? So much paper… I can’t watch the garbage truck take them away.”
He slides the letter back into its envelope, hesitates for a moment, then drops it into the fire. The flames feed off wood and paper, growing hotter, forcing us back. Fire is so fascinating because it looks alive. It almost speaks to me. Mesmerized, I stare. I hear flames, loud as thunder, screams.
Cautiously, I remember. “I used to live in New York, before my folks moved to Haverhill.” I pause, letting my mind refill with long-buried memories and feelings. “You remember May 6, 1937? Also my birthday. I’d finally gotten that BB gun from Hammond’s storefront window. And I remember it was a gray day, storming over New Jersey. I was out playing with my gun, and suddenly there was this, this silver balloon on the horizon, growing larger and larger. It passes over the Newson farm. I see ribbed sides . . . huge, black and-white swastikas in a red square, flag flying from the tail . . . mooring ropes curving down from its nose. The hum of engines is really loud. It passes overhead, this huge, stately bird. It covers my view of the sky. I take aim . . . Bam!”
“You shot at the Hindenberg?” Rowan is listening, his hands in his front jacket pockets. I bring my arms back down from their frozen, raised position.
“I heard the broadcast on Dad’s Gabriel Heater radio that night. The announcer’s voice broke. Sounds of death and disaster. My disaster. I killed those people, I thought.
. . . I buried my BB gun; lived, years, with my secret. It was only when I got old enough to know a BB couldn’t reach that far that I could accept not being responsible. Can you believe that, though? I really thought I was responsible.”
Rowan’s mouth shows the crack of a smile, like light under a door. He shakes his head. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch.”
I stay with Rowan awhile longer. We empty boxes and bags together, as ceremoniously as possible. The last paper is tossed, and he shakes his head again, slaps me on the back. I hear something released in his laugh, and the sound, like an animal cry, goes up into the trees and gets caught and tossed around in their outreaching, comforting limbs.
Native Prose – The Burnings
I work hard in the dormant month of February to remind myself of the warmth and life and light all being stored up in the surrounding woods and earth and animals. But this February I am interrupted by the exit of one life.
I watch, from my bay window, cardinals forage for seed in the brown grass beneath the shepherd’s crook. The brilliant-feathered male pushes the female away. She hops back at a respectful distance, unperturbed, I think. She must know that in just a few months her mate will once again be feeding her in courtship.
When Lenore first comes into the living room to tuck a knitted afghan around my arthritic knees, I don’t see she is crying. Then a small catch of her breath takes me away from the scene outside.
“Ethel called . . . Linda is gone.”
“Gone?”
Lenore backs up without looking behind until she reaches the couch, then falls into it. “A few days ago. Liver disease. She kept it a secret, how bad she was. The funeral’s tomorrow.”
I’ve noticed, in recent years, that the tears on my wife’s good face no longer fall—they meander through the creases, find rest in flat rivulets that begin at her eyes, eyes of a blue no longer intense but soft and comforting.
“Do ya hear me, Donald?” she asks after a silence I know she judges to be too long.
“I hear you.” When my wife gets upset, her brogue grows stronger.
The cardinals fly off in unison when the sudden turn of my head in the window reflection startles them. Or maybe it is Judith, my neighbor to the right, crossing the tree-line of white pines, plastic container in hand.
“Damn it, Lenore, she’s doing it again—taking my seed!”
Judith tilts the tube feeder and gathers the millet and sunflower seed mixture into her container, then takes small, guilty elfin steps back to her property.
The afghan slides to the floor. “I’m calling her this time. She’s emptied half the feeder!”
Lenore sighs, wipes her face first with her fingertips, then with the backs of her hands. “Just let it be, Donald, just let her be.”
I wait by the car for my wife to check the stove and leave the house. The winter sky looks vast, a gray ocean. I reach to the car for ballast—a touch of vertigo for a moment, a feeling of insignificance.
We are becoming used to late-night phone calls and the sad, necessary flurry of funeral preparations. But this time, the death of our friend and neighbor’s daughter, Linda, hits harder. A life not fully lived, both in years and accomplishments, is harder to celebrate.
I can’t help but think about my own daughter, who used to play with Linda in a tree house her father and I erected in the woods between our two properties. If Melissa had just left me now, forever, I would never look at the world as whole again. It would always be a treacherous puzzle, with the most important piece missing. Lenore would feel the same—she had immediately rushed to the phone to call Melissa, ostensibly to tell her the news, but I knew the mother needed to affirm that the daughter hadn’t somehow disappeared, too.
The North Parish church lot is crowded with mourners. We are directed to the last row of seats, handed programs for the service.
“Her ex-husband is giving the eulogy,” Lenore whispers.
I glance at the name she points to, printed in uneven typewriter font. “They divorced, what, ten years ago?”
“He’s over there.”
But I’m looking to my friend, Rowan, in the first row. I hear some heavy words like “pain” and “alcoholism” during the service, and move to escape the church’s old, overactive heaters.
The ground outside is uneven, frost-heaved. The stones that frame the church are large, chiseled granite taken from parish land. They have been hewn into a strong, seemingly sturdy house of worship. I study the dry moss and ochre-tinged lichen that discolors the mortar, which cements the rocks that will outlast all of those they house.
Illustrations by Shelley Fabrizio
Lenore returns from her lunch with that cold, sweet smell of winter air about her. I’m fixing a barley stew for dinner, and it has to bake in the oven for several hours. I ease a knife into a mushroom, slice it in half.
Lenore puts a carrot piece into her mouth and chews carefully. “That was hard. Ethel cried a lot, but I think she needed to.”
“Where did you go?”
“Palmers. We didn’t really eat, but it looked good . . . soup and salad.”
“We’re having stew tonight.”
“Thanks. . . . Donald?”
“Hmmm?”
“You should talk to Rowan. Ethel says he won’t talk to her. She thought maybe, you being a man, and a friend—”
“Oh, hon, what would I say?”
“Don’t say anything. Listen.”
I point to the red cooking wine next to the stove. She hands it to me so I can pour it into the simmering pot.
“What if he doesn’t talk? Doesn’t want to? Sometimes talk makes things worse.”
Lenore puts her fists on her hips, elbows out—as she does when she’s frustrated with me—and shakes her head slowly.
“Donald MacIntyre. Just be a good friend, okay? He’s gonna do some burnin’ tomorrow, you go see him.”
“I’ve got nothing left to burn this season.”
“Then make somethin’ ta burn,” she snaps, as chilly as the evening that’s coming on.
The cozy smell of a wood fire wends its way down from the hill above our land. Pushed by a bone-chilling wind, it enters the cracks around my old, four-paned windows. Lenore comes into the living room a second time, stares at me in an effort to get me moving.
I put down the book I’ve been pretending to read for several hours, unable to concentrate on the gardening tool chapter.
“I’ll go, I’ll go.”
I gear up for the cold, pull on a knit cap, and set out into the backyard to find something to burn.
I find the end-of-winter landscape so unalluring. The cold covers all natural scents, and life contracts into itself, waiting, biding its time. The sounds of animal calls still hold, though: the murder of crows that caw when they see me, their sharp eyes looking to my hands for the whiteness of stale bread; the nattering of alarmed squirrels, amidst creaking limbs; the scream of a red-tailed hawk, and the cacophony of the crows now in pursuit.
Nature, I think, has a temper. Last night it was angry, lashing about. Some old oak branches were thrown to the ground, both black with rot and white with fungus. One lies stuck, like a broken arm, having plunged end first into our lawn. Still, they are not enough to burn.
My eyes fall on the picnic bench sitting patiently under the pines, the trees lacy from the loss of needles. The bench leans to the left, its surface seamed and weathered like silver driftwood. In summertime you’ll see moss growing in cracks, and little red fungus that looks like tiny, haphazard bunches of “lollipop trees,” as Melissa calls them.
Without hesitation, I unlock the tool shed and pull out the axe. I hit hard, taking time to rest during the slow, steady attack.
The red wheelbarrow squeaks through the dry, shrunken undergrowth. I push it over scrub and dormant vines of wild strawberry, sumac, and deadly nightshade. Rowan and I have slowed in our quest to keep the woods between our homes clear of the kinds of small, weedy greenery that impedes progress.His side is especially overgrown since he began summering in Maine—front lawn overtaken by myrtle, rhododendrons, tall grasses, and towering pines. I force the barrow through the trees, aiming for the hot orange light flashing between trunks.
He looks up when I enter the clearing, his eyes hidden behind glasses that reflect his bonfire. The two round, flickering globes hide his expression. He is in a circle of cardboard boxes and green trash bags.
“Smelled the burning, had this old picnic table to get rid of.” I begin to feed the flames with the old cedar axed into three-foot sections. The fire embraces the wood, sucks out what’s left of its life like a vampire, and tosses its ash to the sky. While I say a silent farewell to the bench that once supported my family during picnics, absorbed our beer and lemonade, Rowan carefully, gently, gives the fire what I soon realize are letters—papers of different colors, faded pinks and yellows, colors of our daughters’ youths, those boldly drawn daisies and perfect round dots of the sixties and early seventies decorating some of them. They all burn the same way—corners to center.
He opens one envelope, a plain white one, pulls out the yellow, legal-size paper, and reads to himself. “It’s from me,” he says. “It’s a letter I wrote to her after her divorce, asking her to get help.” He raises his right thumb and forefinger to his glasses, efficiently wipes away the tears gathering in the corners.
“I have to go through all her stuff now. Ethel can’t do it. Her clothes I took down to the Salvation Army. I took her books to the library. But what do I do with these personal things? So much paper… I can’t watch the garbage truck take them away.”
He slides the letter back into its envelope, hesitates for a moment, then drops it into the fire. The flames feed off wood and paper, growing hotter, forcing us back. Fire is so fascinating because it looks alive. It almost speaks to me. Mesmerized, I stare. I hear flames, loud as thunder, screams.
Cautiously, I remember. “I used to live in New York, before my folks moved to Haverhill.” I pause, letting my mind refill with long-buried memories and feelings. “You remember May 6, 1937? Also my birthday. I’d finally gotten that BB gun from Hammond’s storefront window. And I remember it was a gray day, storming over New Jersey. I was out playing with my gun, and suddenly there was this, this silver balloon on the horizon, growing larger and larger. It passes over the Newson farm. I see ribbed sides . . . huge, black and-white swastikas in a red square, flag flying from the tail . . . mooring ropes curving down from its nose. The hum of engines is really loud. It passes overhead, this huge, stately bird. It covers my view of the sky. I take aim . . . Bam!”
“You shot at the Hindenberg?” Rowan is listening, his hands in his front jacket pockets. I bring my arms back down from their frozen, raised position.
“I heard the broadcast on Dad’s Gabriel Heater radio that night. The announcer’s voice broke. Sounds of death and disaster. My disaster. I killed those people, I thought.
. . . I buried my BB gun; lived, years, with my secret. It was only when I got old enough to know a BB couldn’t reach that far that I could accept not being responsible. Can you believe that, though? I really thought I was responsible.”
Rowan’s mouth shows the crack of a smile, like light under a door. He shakes his head. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch.”
I stay with Rowan awhile longer. We empty boxes and bags together, as ceremoniously as possible. The last paper is tossed, and he shakes his head again, slaps me on the back. I hear something released in his laugh, and the sound, like an animal cry, goes up into the trees and gets caught and tossed around in their outreaching, comforting limbs.