Haven Kimmel - Something Rising

The clock ticked in the sudden silence, Belle’s pencil scratched out a description or a question or a revelation.

“I’m trying to say it really really irritates me, Cassie, the way you favor him and wait for him and suffer his cruelties, but I understand it perfectly well. I do. If he said to me any day, any hour, that he was coming home, I’d let him come, I’d welcome him home, and so there might be days ahead, they might have already happened, when I act like I hate you because of him, but in fact it’s the other way around.”

Cassie stood, stretched her legs. They’d fallen asleep, sitting on the hard floor. She threw the rest of her sandwich away, then stepped in front of Laura and washed out her milk glass, placing it carefully on the towel. “Good-night,” she said, to no one in particular.

‘“Night,” Belle said.

“Good-night, sweetheart,” Laura said, without looking at her.

In her bed, Cassie lay on her back and looked out the west-facing window; she thought she would never sleep. Her shoulders ached and she wondered if maybe she should get up and try to remember some of the things Uncle Bud had said so she would write them down, but it was no use. They were tangled up now in Laura’s story. When Laura was growing up, Cassie knew, she’d had a religion, she’d gone to Catholic school, and her whole life had been Catholic. Cassie had found a cigar box in the attic years before, filled with cards, prayer cards and funeral cards, Laura must have collected them when she was a girl. There were pictures of Mary, shepherds, guardian angels, guiding children over a rickety bridge. And some of Jesus. Cassie had stolen one of him, for reasons she didn’t understand. He was looking out, looking at her, and his robes were wide open and the inside of his chest exposed. Belle found it in Cassie’s drawer one afternoon, putting laundry away, and had carried it into the kitchen, saying, “Look what I found: the Radioactive Heart of Jesus.” Belle had laughed, she had no use for Catholicism, thinking the Greeks far superior. And Laura had laughed for reasons of her own. But Cassie had snatched the card away and, unable to remember why she’d wanted it at all, buried it in the backyard in a sandwich bag.

Laura had had all those cards and a rosary and a lace cap she wore in church—Cassie couldn’t quite put a structure on what she was thinking—but her daughters had done without. Jimmy had the gods he believed in and no others, and no one could put a name to them or quite work out their powers; sometimes they were kind and sometimes they kicked his ass, is what Jimmy said. But Laura. She had traveled a long distance, a long, long way. Cassie stretched out her legs and raised her arms above her head, comer pockets, then lowered her arms like a snow angel: side rails. And when Laura found herself alone in that motel room, no mother father sister Christ crucified or Blessed Virgin Mary, she had been … Cassie raised and lowered her arms, she felt like the bed was rocking her … Laura hadn’t been completely alone, had she? Belle had been there, just a seed. But Laura hadn’t mentioned that, and Belle, too, had kept her peace. Cassie slept.

In the morning she got up very early and went downstairs, trying hard not to wake anyone. She made lunch, left a note on the kitchen table, got her bike out of the garage, and tested the chain. It was still good. She rode down the King’s Crossing to 300 West, turned right, and headed in to Roseville, then through town to Railroad Street. At Uncle Bud’s she parked her bicycle in the shade and sat down on the rear steps and waited for him to come and open the back door. She took an apple and a sandwich out of her backpack, along with a chocolate milk; she finished them before the sun was fully up. All that day she waited, and when Uncle Bud arrived at three o’clock, she asked him if he’d be willing to give her a set of keys. She told him she was a person he could trust.

Cassie had gathered up Laura’s library books from around the house and matched them against the receipt she’d been given when she checked them out. They were all present and accounted for. She put them in the truck. Belle had given her the grocery list, and she’d put that in her back pocket and gone to Uncle Bud’s to practice for three hours, then over to his ramshackle house on a back street in Roseville. He needed help hanging the kitchen cabinets he’d gotten at an auction. By late afternoon she was headed out of town toward the library in Hopwood.

In the library parking lot she’d gone through the books, removing Laura’s bookmarks, the scraps of paper on which she sometimes made notes, and had come across a whole piece of paper folded in half. This:

1. We dream of rational creatures transcending the stain. Gauze and feathertip , the spill of clean scent like a trumpet bell, a bargain in the confectioner’s market In truth they judge and bruise .

2 Rather than kick it we tried to lift the dead horse He stood for a moment and we prayed he would fall away from us. I remember the place on his belly where the fur was rubbed thin and how when he landed his head hit last and the remaining air in his lungs rutted the grass . O, for a falconer’s voice , To lure this tassel-gentle back again!

It had been handwritten by Laura, with no date and no title, on a light green sheet torn from a stenographer’s pad with the orphaned scraps of paper clinging to the top. Cassie had never held with leaving such scraps, and now, reading the poem, or whatever it was—an idea, a group of sentences—she plucked them off one by one and dropped them on the floor of the truck. Laura and Belle talked about poetry all the time, but Cassie had no particular feelings about it. There was a way in which the obscuring of communication was painful, but the opposite was also true. She had no interest in anyone presenting her with the bleak, unvarnished truth. If Belle were here, Cassie thought, she would try to figure it out a word at a time, and she’d stick with it until she could make some judgment. Belle would take this tack in part because she had nothing better to do, and because the process of analysis struck her as pleasurable. Cassie shook her head at the notion. Belle enjoyed analysis, with the result that she was back at the house with Laura; and Cassie, at sixteen, was the only person in the house with a driver’s license and a vehicle, and the beginnings of tendinitis in her right elbow. She rubbed her elbow, then went inside the library to face the kindness of the librarians. The librarians were always kind.

She had memorized the poem, or whatever it was, and was repeating it to herself as she turned on to 732 East, the Percy Creek Pike. It was a long straight road all the way to the reservoir, and she would travel it for miles, so she sped up. Who were they who judged and bruised? Which rational creatures could transcend the stain, and the stain of what? And when had Laura ever been on a horse? And when had she seen a horse fall? Cassie passed the squat cinder-block building out of which a man with a wooden leg (which he kept displayed at all times; he actually rolled up his pant leg to do so) used to sell produce in the summer. The building had been unused for years. Next to the front door, in emphatic black lettering, someone had painted No CAR WASHING!, as if that were the world’s gravest temptation. Then there was nothing on either side of the road, just trees and fields. Cassie squinted. Far in the distance she could see something in the middle of the road. Heat shimmered upward. Beware the mee-rahj, as Jimmy used to say; a lot of the world looks like one thing but is really something else. When she was fourteen, she and Bud had traveled to Georgia for a big game, a serious money game, with the man who was at that time unbeatable, Lewis Lee. Cassie had played him all night in a cowboy bar (no cowboys in evidence), her fortunes rising and falling, until finally Lewis pulled it out and remained unbeatable, and Cassie and Bud turned around and headed home. She had been driving for hours in the dead of night when she saw a deer standing in the middle of the road (had it been a horse?), standing only a few feet away, standing and staring in that impassive way of the massive thing. Cassie had slammed on the brakes and thrown Bud, even wearing a seat belt, so far forward he had bruised his sternum nd been mad at her for a week. She kept asking, Should I have hit it? And he would say, There was No Damn Deer , and she would say, Yes, but should I have hit it?