Noy Holland - The Spectacle of the Body

Or before then, I wonder, before that, before the body had been seen at all, before the nets, the slow boat, before it was decided to drag the lake — then — even before then — before it occurred to anyone that someone was going to have to decide to have the lake be dragged, or not — I am not saying yes, or no, only that I wonder — no, that I suspect — hope, I hope I am not alone in this, in thinking that in the decision made there was likely to be, apt to have been, some notion — that in the spectacle of the body, in the freak show of the body, was the promise for them, the endurance for them, of some fresh exile, some uneasy glory.

“Clem?” Cissie says. “You saw Clem? And how is Clem, Orbit?”

I have not got prize one I brought Cissie from the fair. I have not got Oscar, and not my pail I took him in, so now I have to use a pan, which it is just a shallow pan I sneaked out from the kitchen. And the trough is almost empty. In the trough is just a puddle left where the few tadpoles left over swim since Cissie dumped the rest of them, which I will pick up by their tails to count them in the garden. Each by each, I will line them up, snoot to tail in the yellow vein, to fold them into the smooth leaves to bury them out in the garden.

“How come Bingo isn’t out digging up the garden?”

“How should I know?” Cissie says. “It isn’t me who took her off and left her at the fair.”

But I did not leave Bingo. I say, “She didn’t come.”

I am at the kitchen sink to fill the pan I thought to try to sneak into the garden.

“And what if Daddy comes?” Cissie says. “Maybe you think I could borrow your pail to fix him up a chicken.”

But there will be no pan she needs and there will be no chicken.

On Momma’s head, she rests her hand like there is a hat to keep there, like there is a wind inside the house only she feels come. But this is not the garden. The night wind does not come. The filly does not hang inside to turn above the snapping reach of stray dogs should they come.

I know why they come.

I say it is not for her, but I know why they come.

We light the lights back burning. I fix back the broken place to be again a broken place so when our Bingo comes back home, she can duck into our yard. I leave the windows open so we hear her in our yard.

But how will we hear Oscar? Cissie brings our beds from the garden. Our beans are stripped in the garden. So how can we see Oscar coming slowly should he come?

And Sugar should she come?

You can see the lights all burning. But still the dogs will come. It is still so hot at night that even with our windows closed we can hear them come.

So sometimes they are open.

Sometimes, with our windows closed, you cannot hold your breath enough long enough in Momma’s room to stand the smell to sit there thinking why they come. So sometimes they are open.

Sometimes Momma watches me lift the windows open.

Sure — I know there are dogs out there.

I know that, with the windows up, Momma hears the dogs out there fighting for the filly in the yard when dark is come. I lift the windows open. I know dark is come.

I know should our daddy come, then there will be no talking then of sleeping in the one bed Cissie makes of two beds we sleep in in the pantry near to Momma’s room.

But there will be the lean-to.

There will be our broken place our Bingo by and by will find, and there will be our Gander still, honking in our yard.

Still, Bingo does not come. I thought with the other dogs surely she would come. “Come. Come.”

They said, Come on, boy. You cain’t see from there. Why, it’s Parson’s boy — old Buhl’s boy. It’s Orbit.

They put me up on the bandbox by the stage, where I could see.

I know the girl was watching me. I saw she could see me in the tent light there. I could hear the carnies singing Clem out there.

Maybe I am mistaken. It is not unlikely that I am. But I do believe it was August. I am almost sure it was August. It is the order of things I am never quite so sure of myself of. I would say that Orbit went to the fair before we missed Bingo, though, before we went to the lean-to, though — because I remember thinking then, when Orbit had gone to the fair, I remember having to remind myself that it was just so quiet then because my brother had taken our dog with him. Because it was so quiet, you see, and I would have to remind myself that they were going to have to walk, Bingo and my brother — they would have to walk a ways just to get themselves to a place in the road where I know you can hear the fair.

So it would be a while, I knew. It would take those two some walking, I knew, just to get to the goddamn fair. I knew I ought to get myself to where I didn’t need to remind myself that it was bound to be quiet — that there were just the two of us, that it was going to be quiet a while because it was just going to be me for a while who moved in the house with Mother.

There was not yet rain then. There was not a sound, I know, of the rain coming down on the roof of our house — because it calmed me, that sound, the sound of the rain on the tin of our roof, so that now, surely I would be certain now to remember that I had heard it. The car for nights we heard coast by — I didn’t hear it at all. It was only, I think, myself I heard, mostly, I think, my feet I heard on the old boards, walking out and into the rooms of our house I heard when it was just the two of us, when Bingo and Orbit were gone.

It is best to keep secrets with the dying, I think. It would be our secret.

I drew the sheet back. I fixed the needle. For weeks, she had begged me for it — to be done with it. And then she stopped begging at all.

I did not rest much. I was waiting for her. I was waiting for some sort of signal from her. The names Mother had I knew of for things I knew fell away. Still I thought there would be some signal, you see; I thought there would be some way for me that Mother would find of asking me, something I could do or say, so that there would have been some way to think it wasn’t me who wanted it, that it wasn’t my want at all.

It was quiet; it would be quiet.

It was just me with Mother then — no fathers then, no doctors, no dogs in Tuscaloosa.

I cannot say how many days it was that the other two were gone. I know that the rain came later. The sound of the geese was later, the lake, the lean-to — I think of these as later. I think sometimes that the quiet then, that whatever it was that happened to us happened without our speaking then — that this is why, now — this is what it is now that makes it so hard for me now to remember what happened, to believe that anything happened.

But this is silly.

Orbit was gone, and Bingo was gone, and I was at home with Mother. I stayed by the bed with Mother. I kept the filled syringe in her drawer.

Before we took them away from her, Mother kept her cigarettes on the nightstand that stood beside her bed for all the nights of all the days I myself could speak of. It was the one thing she seemed to remember, the one thing Mother insisted on — on having one of her hands free to reach across the bedsheets with to pick up one of her cigarettes that we had long since decided she had had enough chances by then to get burned up in bed with, and us in bed with.

But she would reach for them. She would feel around on her nightstand for them and bring her hand up close to her mouth, with her mouth a rounded shape she made as though she was really smoking, as though she were somebody my age then practicing for smoking. For all the times I sat there and saw Mother reach for a cigarette, still when it was quiet like that when we were alone in the house like that, I would catch myself thinking that Mother had reached for me.