I tried to tell Mom. But you’re the only one who listens to me. Even the officers who came to our house to interview me about the break-in had already made up their minds about the incident. Mom burst into tears long before I got to the part about eating Baby Bear’s porridge.
“Breaking and entering,” she wailed. “No one in our family has ever been fingerprinted.”
“Except for your brother Phil when he lifted seventeen hams from the University refrigerator as a fraternity prank,” Dad said.
Mom glared at him, and then went right on giving me a hard time. “The court was lenient. You will be nineteen before I let you out of your room again, young lady.”
I was almost glad to close the door and open this book.
Really. I’m not bad. I’m precocious. That’s a big word Dad uses because he’s a university professor. It means I’m comfortable practically anywhere. Mostly places that embarrass Mom half to death. Dad says I’m smart for ten, but Mom says I’m too smart for my britches, which doesn’t make sense since underwear doesn’t win intelligence awards. I tried to talk to Dad about it. All he said was to steer clear of Mom when she has that glazed-over look.
But, as far as the three bears are concerned, the cottage door was slightly open. Open! All I meant to do was close it for them after I saw them leave. All the little critters of the forest could barge in: snakes, foxes, wasps, spiders. I mean, look at what a spider did to Little Miss Muffet down the street. Then this wonderful smell came to me, and I had to find out what it was.
Then yesterday at breakfast Mom brought up the subject of my house arrest. Again. I tried to calm her. “I was trying to save the bears from harm. At first. But the smell of that sweetened porridge drew me inside as fast as fire to a struck match.”
That’s when Mom really lost it and went on and on about how I should have eaten my onion, parsnip, and spinach omelet that morning, the one she had made so carefully from vegetables from the garden she tended all by herself. No help from anyone in this house.
I glared at my plate of bland squash and tofu. “I’d rather eat live spiders.”
Dad rolled his eyes. So, I knew I had to respond quickly before Mom exploded.
“You don’t have to go to any trouble. I’ll have a bowl of chocolate and marshmallow puff cereal.”
Dad got up and grabbed his briefcase. “I need to go to the University now. And, by the way, I’m taking a sabbatical. At the South Pole. To study single-cell life forms.”
“But, Dear,” Mom whimpered.
“Before I go, let me grab the newspaper article about Goldy. Maybe a box of that chocolate cereal.”
It’s okay, Dear Diary. Dad came back. He said he could never leave me. But funny, he didn’t say one word about Mom.
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. –Ursula K. Le Guin, author (21 Oct 1929-2018)
AUNT MARTY’S MAGIC COINS
My great aunt, Marty Pestil, was a natural at tending to the dead. She got bodies ready for the all-night watch when folk gathered tomake sure no bugs, dogs, or ghosts could get to the ripe-for-decaying flesh. I helped my aunt since I didn’t have no other place to go. My aunt took me in when my mama started talking to wallpaper flowers. Papa had walked off before I was born.
I never got schooling, but not many people did in mountain-tucked Gray Valley, Kentucky during the early 1920’s. We picked up a common-sense kind of learning. Aunt Marty taught me her trade. She said living and dying fit together the way bare-treed winter followed full-blossomed summer.
Almost everybody agreed, but some folk thought Aunt Marty turned the winter dying part into a show.
Men took care of the departed men and boys. The man who took care of the dead in Gray Valley looked like his grim job. He wagged his finger so hard at my aunt it about blurred his whole arm.
“You act like you was bigger’n God—it just ain’t right. Pretending you can step off into the afterlife with the dead.”
My aunt stared him down. She didn’t argue. “Our job is to open the next world. When the silver coins fall off the eyes of dead folk, their souls got to be ready for the hereafter. Ain’t no more I can say about it.”
He backed off, groaning, like there ain’t no sense talking to a crazy lady. It wasn’t ‘til later I learned he got picked accidental-like to prepare the dead and hated every second of it.
Aunt Marty said the folks that set themselves for eternal damnation didn’t want to go, and Aunt Marty had to say somebody from the underworld would come for them anyway, so they may as well scat before the rotting set in, and their souls smelled, too. Besides, St. Peter listened to a good story. Usually, they ran for that last chance.
I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I got to be known as Lost Lacy. Hank Ross was my only friend. Hank helped my aunt and me with our truck garden. His papa owned the General Store. The Ross family didn’t care that Aunty Marty talked to floating souls.
Sometimes Hank and me would cook together. Ithought of him as my connection to the earth and sun, to breathing, to the smell of boiling turnips and hot sliced pork.
“I like when you don’t have your hair pulled so tight on the top of your head like it’s caught in a trap,” Hank said. “Relax once in a while.”
I shrugged. “It don’t make sense to hoe, pull weeds, or move bodies with hair in the way.”
Besides, I traveled from death to death the way a butterfly goes from flower to flower, especially when typhoid or scarlet fever hit. I guess Aunt Marty and me was lucky we never got no bad sickness. Butterflies get to drink nectar—I touched the cold skin of folk that followed both Beelzebub and St. Michael.
No matter how many times Aunt Marty handed me the magic coins and I rubbed them over my fingertips I never felt nothing special in them. They’d been used to close so many eyes. Everybody thought old Miranda Mill had been best friends with the devil. She cursed and stole and some folk even say she got away with killing her own husband.
I could have sworn I saw a body twitch as Aunt Marty talked honest to it, even though it was as hard-cold as a middle-of-February icicle.
Eleanor Case, the old schoolmarm, brought extra lunch-bucket food for the kids that didn’t have nothing. If angels ever wanted to borrow a human body, Miss Case is the one they’d use.
Bodies all just looked dead to me.
Aunt Marty told me I would inherit her gift. I didn’t want it. Maybe the magic coins knew how I felt and that’s why they wouldn’t let me know their secrets.
The strangest experience I had was when Ida Mae’s twin sister, Carrie Mae, died from a seizure caused by a high fever. Ida shook like a thunderstorm had formed inside her and was getting stronger and stronger, until it tore her apart from the inside. Aunt Marty must have noticed, too. Real slow, as if she was trying to soothe an injured bear, she reached over and patted Ida’s arm.
“I got a message for you. And it’s real important. Your sister says that she would have run out into the cold rain to pick apples even if you hadn’t had a hankering for them. She wanted some, too. And the fever—this is the important part—the fever didn’t have nothing to do with getting soaked through.”
Ida’s eyes opened about as wide as her face and she choked, “But how do you know about the apples? I never told.”
“Your sister’s telling you she can’t go to her eternal reward until you know her dying ain’t one-bit your fault.”
Then Ida dropped onto her sister’s body and sobbed. Aunt Marty didn’t stop her until I saw the slightest light, no brighter than a candle flame flicker, pass through Ida and out through the wall.
“But you didn’t send Carrie’s spirit into heaven,” I whispered to Aunt Marty.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Ida Mae done it.”
Ida Mae told her best friend that story. Versions of what happened got spread around the county. My aunt and me turned into either witches or messengers from the Almighty, depending upon the notions of who heard. Some thought we was gods, the kind that shouldn’t be approached ‘til there wasn’t no choice.
I loved my aunt. I would have been an orphan without her. But, the magic coins knew her, not me. Besides, in a month or two I would be sixteen-years-old. And all I saw ahead was more burying.
“Pick you some happiness if I could,” Hank said one spring day as we searched the woods for some poke for a salad.
So, I told him about how I wanted to do something different than travel from one pine box to another. “I wouldn’t mind rendering hog fat over a hot stove all day, if I could work for the living.”
“How about you and me getting married?”
“Ain’t never thought about it.” I looked at the basket of fresh-picked poke, good-for-you in early spring. Poison later in the season.
“I’m mighty crazy about you, and I think we can work together. Maybe even create living folk.” He turned red as a over-ripe tomato.
Hank made sense. Marrying him could change my life. A lot. “Think we should tell Aunt Marty together?”
He looked at me like I was a tadpole that turned into a full-growed frog fast as ice melts in a hot pot. “Should we tell her right now?”
“Yup. No point in waiting. She’d figure us out anyway.”
“Then I think it’s time you knew the secret.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “How do you think Aunt Marty makes them coins magic?”
“I figured she had some kind of special power over them. They don’t look no different.”
“She learned how from my papa. It’s a business we do most folk don’t know about.” He sat on a huge rock at the edge of the trail. “True, you seen these coins when they been put on the eyes of folk to keep them closed, when the time’s come to look inside and see the whole of themselves. Just before they open before eternity. You don’t know how the magic forms before that happens.
“The magic comes from inside a person. You’ve got to care about what you’re doing. A lot. And keep caring All the time. But that ain’t how it ends.”
Hank pulled a coin from his pocket, like the ones Aunt Marty used. Then I put the poke on the rock and let Hank drop the coin into my hand. It warmed immediately. I suddenly felt drawn to Hank’s eyes. Strange how I’d never seen them the same way before. His eyes was the color of a lake at noon when the sun shines. I noticed how his smile seemed to come straight from his soul.
When Hank and I walked into Aunt Marty’s cabin, my aunt wasn’t in her cane rocker, like usual. She lay in bed, her face white as a bleached sheet.
“Ah, you are both here,” she said as if her voice came from far away.
I took her hand, cold as snow.
“Good, you have found your path. I feel it.” She whispered, but her smile filled her face. “One last request. Lacy, you will send me on to my eternal reward. Then you and Hank will live in this house together. Promise?”
We both nodded. Aunt Marty’s body shook once and then remained still. We got her lying as peaceful as if she was taking an afternoon nap. Then I dropped an aspirin in a bowl of soda water and wiped her face. Hank waited outside the door while I done the full washing.
When I placed the coins over her eyes to keep them closed, the coins told me what to do. I called to Hank to stand by my side. A wavering light appeared.
“Follow the light. Your mama is waiting.”
The brightness turned around and came back into me.
Hank grabbed my hand and the light jumped into him, too. When I looked at our arms I saw the fresh skin of our youth turn the same sun-gold, and I realized we’d been given power.
We used our magic in the truck garden to grow enough vegetables to feed us, the poorer folk in town, and the young’uns in the orphanage in the valley.
Ida Mae took over for Aunt Marty, and when she got married her husband led the men to their destiny. They knew the secret of the coins, but they didn’t talk out loud to spirits like Aunt Marty did. They talked to them silently, soul to soul.
The magic coins never made our lives perfect, but they made us rich in a peculiar kind of way. As of this telling, Hank and me have been married sixty years. We had five girls and four boys, and each one of our kids had two or three young’uns, and they ain’t stopped growing the family. Our sons and daughters all know how the coins work. They continue to make better whoever they touch, so that nobody knows where the goodness starts or ends.
I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Something called love.
“Generosity is giving more than you can.” – Khalil Gibran
Most of the traffic lights on Main Street still flash yellow as Dad drives my sister, Mom, and me to the hospital this Monday morning. April 6, 1998. There was no need to circle the date on the calendar. We haven’t been able to think about anything else.
Dad offers to stay with me while I get ready for surgery, but I tell him, “I’ll see you in the Recovery Room.” I’d kind of like to be alone right now. Not sure why.
He nods without looking at me.I think he gets it.Dad can be cool. My mom’s got easy-trigger tear ducts.She is going to need Dad more than I will.
After all the preliminaries I shiver in my faded brown gown. It’s designed for mooning between the tied bows. I pull a blanket to my chin and close my eyes, but they refuse to remain closed. They stare at the ceiling. It’s bare, sterile, and covered with pocked tiles. The walls are a dull green, the kind only a Sherlock Holmes would consider remembering. Nothing like my room at home. My entire ceiling is covered with posters: Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals, Globetrotters, Frank Zappa, and The Simpsons. I even have some old Scooby Doo cartoon stuff. Mom doesn’t care for my design plan. She thinks it looks cluttered, like everything else in my room, but she tolerates it.
My dresser is covered with football trophies. In the center is a framed picture of my sister Leah and me on vacation last summer. No girlfriend’s photo. Not yet. Sure, I play sports, so people assume I have dates all the time, but as soon as a female classmate says hi, I lose every bit of saliva in my mouth. I’m useless.
I get up to go to the bathroom—more to move around than any real need. The clock seems to be moving in geological time. My toes touch an icy floor.
My privacy feels invaded as the flush echoes into the hallway. As I wash my hands I frown at my baby-round face and blotchy field of dark freckles. A stranger would never guess I’ve been seventeen for three months now. Funny, though, I never realized how much my eyes look like my sister’s, small and pale, kind of green and kind of blue.
I’m crazy about my younger sister, Leah. No doubt about that. But we’re not that much alike. I’m a redhead, with too many freckles for my face, and she’s so blond and pale she could fade into a sheet. She’s barely twelve and would rather read than anything else. I’m not anti-intellectual, but I prefer to weave and run on the football field.
Mom says I charge through whatever I do as if I had only one chance to grab the ball. I tell her that born leaders act that way. She doesn’t always know when I’m kidding. She should lighten up now and then, but I understand why she’s so worried all the time. My sister is so sick that I lose count of how many times people ask how she is.
Dad worries in a different way than Mom does. He gets sullen and simmers. Then when I’m spending a rainy Saturday watching TV, he asks me what I plan to do with my life. I pretend not to care, but I’m not really that great at anything, and I can’t tell him that. Especially not when he’s in one of his moods. He shakes his head and then goes in to check on my sister. I hear him talking to her about how well she did on her science test after she missed half the term. He talks loud enough that I’d have to be beyond stupid not to know he’s really talking to me.
I barely passed Biology last term. That means a brain surgeon career is out. I could go for history, at least the way Mr. Riley teaches it. He’s an American History buff.
Once he said, “Abe Lincoln didn’t like dressing up. He’d take off his jacket, pull off his boots, and stretch his toes, whether there were visitors at the White House or not. And there is a reason why I’m telling you this.” He unlaced his shoes and slammed them on the desk. “That doesn’t have a thing to do with the founding of Virginia, but these are new shoes and my feet hurt. I figure if Abe can do it, so can I.”
The whole class laughed. I’d like to be cool like Mr. Riley. But I’m not sure I can teach people who don’t want to learn. There are a lot of kids like that at my school. Heck, I wouldn’t want to try to teach somebody like me.
I wonder if Grandpa Myer was a good student. He served in the army in World War II in bomb disposal. I can see him in the old stilted-frame home movies, his khaki uniform turned to gray on the black-and-white film. Of course, when I ask him what it was like when a bomb started ticking, he says, “Courage doesn’t come pure. It comes wrapped up in a lot of very smelly stuff.”
I want to tell him not to talk to me as if I were a six-year-old baby, but Grandpa always asks how I’m doing, no matter how weak Leah may be, so I let it go.
Heroes intrigue me, of all kinds. There was a time I imagined being on the cover of “Sports Illustrated.” I wouldn’t admit it out loud, but I had my front-page pose planned in my parents’ full-length mirror. Last year I dislocated my left knee in a game early in the season. That knee hurt like crazy. Sometimes it still does. Mom doesn’t want me to play at all.
Almost cutting time. My mind has been doing cartwheels. Now my stomach is doing them. Come on, David. It’s not like you are afraid of the dark or anything.
Sometimes Leah likes a night light. Kids her age tell ghost stories with flashlights aimed at their chins. But then Leah has spent a lot of the last few years in the hemodialysis unit. Three days a week in a narrow, blue vinyl chair, with the machines, thick needles, and tubes, her blood thinned with heparin. I sat with her and read stories with her for hours, the smell of insulin and something antiseptic stuck in my nostrils.
I have never understood why my smart sister acts like her C-student brother is the greatest ever. She’s always asking for me. When I tore up my knee that time I didn’t cry much. She cried for me. Last summer I stayed the whole four hours with her when she had dialysis. I got to know the health techs and nurses. They joked and talked with me as much as they did with her. Sometimes Leah’s potassium level would get too high. The doctor would order kayexalate with sorbitol from the pharmacy STAT. That would help, but at other times she needed an extra day of hemodialysis. Then she would cry and I would fume. I know every inch of the dialysis unit, and I’ve learned a lot about kidney disease.
But the fact is, I never got used to the routine.
Yeah, Leah’s special all right. Maybe I’ll make her proud of me for real someday. I’ll tackle my study phobia and get a job in research, at a miracle place where intense studies eliminate kidney disease, make the common cold less common, cancerous tumors antiquated, and bloated fat cells a thing of the past.
Right, what a rich fantasy life you have?
An orangish pink is washing over the darkness outside. I see it through the window. A woman pushing a portable X-ray machine passes my door. Voices in the hall rise: “Hey, Kelly, do you have the med-room keys?” “Lifting help in Room 11.”
Somebody in blue scrubs writes something on my chart. He looks at me and smiles. It’s funny. I know this operation is a big deal but the thing I’m worried about is that first needle stick.
My lab results are on target. Leah is ready. I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be. I slide both hands over the warm trunk of my body and picture the charts the doctor showed me, full-color glossy pictures. He showed me something like a map of what was about to happen. They’re cutting Leah from the front, someplace by the groin; if something goes wrong, they can get back in easily, not something I want to think about. Because they’re cutting me through the back, the doctor told me that I will take longer to recover than Leah will. For the first time, I realize those pictures were flat and superficial, the difference between viewing Italian travelogues and visiting Rome, or checking out pizza ads and taking a good solid bite of double-cheese pepperoni.
I nod to the man in blue scrubs, gulp, and then smile. Mom and Dad are with Leah right now. I’m going to be fine.
Oh well, whatever happens, here’s to you, little sister.
An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.
― Mahatma Gandhi
Men willing to break their own arms
rather than race into fire and death,
war games played without winners.
The news spreads in endless loops
on screens with color but no dimension
while some watchers gasp, yet
others pass a bowl of snacks,
grateful the pain strikes in another
language, continent, time zone.
Human beings willing to reach
beyond a huff or pant. One country
touching another. One person
letting peace stretch beyond a closed
room. We will not let war
cage the world with hate. Or apathy.
Or depression. It will take time, but,
let us discover peace. Together.
“When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.”
― Jess C. Scott, The Intern
Future Life Dancer
Two little girls dance
on an empty open stage.
They twirl exploring dizziness
and laugh as song rhythms repeat.
A man comes and pulls
the older child away while
the smaller one continues
to explore her own feet,
to pat her toes in syncopated
rhythms on the wooden floor
as if she notices her shoes
and their sounds for the first time.
My brow lowers as the
scene continues and I wonder
if I am making judgments based
on fact. To bless all possibilities
I slip by the father and his two
small girls. “You have beautiful
children,” I say, then grin at the
older child. My words are for her.
illustration made from public domain image
terrypetersen 