Where I Found Rachel Joyce

Fruit trees stud the long, narrow yard in a sort of zigzag pattern, goal stabs of some long forgotten game, nourished by the rot of mallets, wickets and wooden balls, left in hast for cake and ice cream, branched now and rooted.

She sits beneath a young and budding plumb, drawn to herself as if the day were chilled and her limbs a shawl, hair gathered like a careless June wind in combs of tortoise shell.   

‘He did not want to die,’ she says of her late father, turning her gaze then down and away to where a clutch of plump hens, white and golden and speckled grey, rake and prattle over their findings. 

‘And we did not want him to die, as well.’ 

   

He would be a buzzard, if made to choose from the birds. Flight to them seemed such a lazy task, relished, as if their mass on the ground made them forget of their ability, and each time they caught the warm upward drafts, tipping and circling into near oblivion, was the first, a marvel of joy. 

On Cold Fingers and the Death of Jay

Despite gloves, in the woodshed the cold found its way to his fingertips, the pain flaring like the dull blow of a hammer to each. 

     There was dry beneath the green, seasoned, and he hurried to dig for it at the back of the shed where the rick was lowest, wishing again that he hadn’t buried the better burning wood last fall beneath the new. 

     Mindful of the rise he had created picking through this way, the towered end of a rick nearly his own height, held upright, surely, by a single split he could remove at any time and bring the whole of it down on him, he remembered Old Jay, as he often did when the chance of death by suffocation arose. 

     He cupped his gloved hands, exhaled moist warmth from his lungs into the hole of the pocket they made, flexed his fingers. 

     Jay had always stood at the back of the little church his parents took him to as a child. He couldn’t sit. Jay's skeleton had grown faster than his skin, his father once told him, when he had asked why Jay would never come join them in the pews.
     Inside, the bones of Jay’s spine had been crushed in their struggle against the unyielding, ungrowing, tissue that bound them. In lieu of bones, beneath his suit jacket, Jay wore a brace of steel ribs attached to a steel backbone cinched and held into position by black leather straps, stainless and polished buckles.
     If he were to take the brace off, his father had told him, Jay would collapse, something like an accordion. The air would be forced from his lungs and unable to fill them again, Jay would soon die. 

     Jay did suffocate to death. Nothing to do with his brace, however. Too proud to take money from the State, Jay worked the brick plant down by the river, a custodian of sorts. 

     Several times, as a boy, his father had driven him by the plant. He'd always marveled at the enormous hive-like brick dome, in which, he was told, was kept dry a mountain of red clay dust, waiting to be transformed by water and fire into building materials.
     It was this mountain that fell upon Jay. Collapsed. And despite his armor, his brace, drove the wind from his lungs, and like the hand of God, squeezed the life from Jay's wrongly-grown and permanently upright body. 

     Having filled the wheelbarrow with wood, he blew again into the cup of his hands. He closed back the shed’s doors, took up the work-polished handles and turned the barrow toward the house. His fingers ached and in his walking, he heard the collapse of the precarious rick in the shed behind him, saw Jay again at the rear of the church, standing safely as the promises of God poured down, mountainous, around him.

   

The Sweetest Little Thing

He did not doubt that the cigarette had some sway in his seeing the little dog as a tumor, some sort of cancer, growing from the man’s arm. 

Its enormous, black and weepy eyes, bulging from the rolls of its overfed blonde body, the snarl of its pink and opened mouth. Not much of a leap, with the cigarette trailing smoke so near to its head.

Midway up the parking aisle, grocery list in hand, he had heard the dog, yapping. As always, he slowed to scan the car-filled lot, thinking he’d find a perked ear face pressed against nose printed glass, warning barks escaping like frightened birds through windows left cracked for ventilation. 

Instead, he found the dog leaning, paws and all, out of the opened driver’s side window of a vehicle approaching almost immediately behind him. 

The vehicle was that sort of grey-blue sedan that one immediately recognizes as ‘American Made’, if not by the fact that you cannot recall its being manufactured, then simply by its four doors and mass. The kind of vehicle that will slow shark about a parking lot for hours, propelled by the most minimal use of its dull witted muscle, searching for that nearest spot, that next opened handicap space in which to come to rest, motor idling thickly as one passenger stays behind, waiting for the other's return, a prescription filled.

The driver’s arm was cocked out of the sedan’s opened window, and in the crook of it, lay the dog, semi-contained and barking angrily with no apparent intent or direction. Holding between his fingers a newly lit cigarette, the driver had somehow managed to bring the smoking hand around the fat little dog so that the cigarette hung now beside the yapping dog’s left ear.

It looked like an open wound, the seep of its eyes, wet black stains beneath its blue glossed eyes, the grey-pink flesh of its snarled gums. The driver, the passenger, oblivious to the dog, searched for an opened place to park. 

‘How adorable,’ he heard the voice of some passerby say, two girls who had spotted the cancerous dog. 

‘Just the sweetest little thing.’
   
     The sweetest little thing. 

'Sorry Annie'

At times the lush green, the waterfalls, the black volcanic soil would find its way into his mind. Someone would say, ‘We just got back from Hawaii,’ as if they had driven into town for groceries, and he would think it possible again, almost necessary, that he go to visit the Islands.
    But then his mind would slowly populate the lush green, the volcanic cliffs from whose fractured edges water spouted crystalline, rainbows hung in the mist of its decent. Pale and newly burned Midwesterners, his parents, the sound of their honest fascination somehow cutting through the roar of the water’s leap, persistent as the dim clatter of some newly loosened item in an otherwise silent car ride.
     He would envision in terror the flight, calculate costs, feel the fine crush of coral in everything that he ate, every towel with which he dried, smell that sick-sweet smell of ocean, sun block and bug spray, and always the eyes of locals in passing, filled with distrust, unwant.
     It was nice, he’d admit that, those first few moments when he imagined dipping backpack laden into the density of some semi-rain forest, snakeless, Mount Kila something or other in the offset, poking its dormant head up out of leaves as large as car hoods. A hop skip and a jump, his father said once, of the trip over. Close your eyes and you’ll be there in no time. His father had gone to Pearl Harbor, showed him pictures of the Arizona in her ocean grave. He’d forgotten about that. God, the ghosts. The place had to be swarming with them. Swarming. 

On Grass

He woke up obsessed with grass. Perhaps not an obsession, but rather a thought bobbing in the distance, that he would see and then not see when it sank behind the roll of his morning routine. He saw it again when he sat down to the quiet of his Journal. Grass, he wrote. And the word had seemed oddly green on the page. He saw himself a boy, low in the thick of a lawn grown high between weekend cuttings, parting the blades and searching for beetles and the continued march of ants having left the sidewalk. The shoots are pale where they enter the earth, moist and littered with an odd fuzz of something like bits of string. It makes him think of ferns, the floor of a forest, and he imagines the ants he has yet to find, how they see the grass, like the towering redwood trees he has seen in magazines, beside which even automobiles appear themselves like ants. And beneath the stars, he sees the redwood trees like ants and wonders what beyond that is larger still. He scratches at the earth. His nails fill with the black of it. Would grass grow there, he wonders, and green fire bursts from his fingertips. He lays on his back, closes his eyes. He itches. The sun is better than any blanket he can remember, and he has known many wonderful blankets. The grass grows taller in the space between his arms and body, between the V of his legs, alongside his ears. Taller and taller until he is lost like a coin in its height, a penknife. At his back, roots grow, pale and searching for purchase. He is dirt, pierced by blades of grass, like a man dropped onto a bed of nails. And then, it is Saturday. He hears the whir of the mower. Sees his father’s long strides and in the air, smells all that is summer and what is best of a boy.