Noy Holland - The Spectacle of the Body

Outside is the garden.

My bike is in the garden.

I hold my breath between our breaths so she will not stop breathing. But sometimes I breathe. I cannot keep from breathing. There is the lean-to. There are birds to clean. There is the light to think of. Already the day is so long past the coins sun-dropped through the leaves of the trees of the locusts calling Phaaaraoh , past jarflies and dragonflies that stitch the air above our lake, our house shadow flung as far and wide as both our yard and garden.

Still there is no sign of my sister.

But surely she will come.

Cissie will want to be the one when Momma wakes up screaming, and Momma wakes up screaming— What time is it? Oh, let me up! I have got to get into that kitchen!

But there is only sun-time here, and the fickle moon in the trees at night, and the months that pass from the things that bloom and that are rotten in the garden.

There are wonder beans now; there are turtles.

Upon a time the times we did not sleep, Daddy shunt the hall at night to lock us in our room at night when we were not sleeping. There is no lock to lock now. Now is the door and the hall and the door any boy can follow. You can see our house at night. We leave the porch light on at night. You can see it burning. Once Daddy came to our room at night when I was afraid of the dark at night, of the night sounds and the dogs at night and in the woods the cows at night, though days I saw them feeding. Then I did not sleep with Oscar then; then Cissie’s bed was one bed and my bed another. I did not sleep with Bingo. Then Bingo slept on the floor of our room, before she slept at the head of my bed, before the two-dollar truck would run, before she got my pillow. Now it is Bingo’s pillow. Now it is Bingo’s tail for me to finger in my pocket.

I am not a scaredy. Only but to shoo the flies a boy would not need to look at her. I am too small to bathe at her or to try to keep her eating. But I am not a scaredy. I am like my daddy. My bike is in the garden. My lamp is in the bread box. My straw, my shreddy shoes.

And I am in the garden. My bike is in the porch light lying in the garden. My feet are in my shoes. Whooey.

Cornstalks left and splinted peas, the scrabbly path that splits our yard, oh fast, our moon, the window left, our porch light left on burning late for Daddy not to come, or to come when I am hiding, sly as sly Geronimo, snakely in the tree limbs hung with copperheads and squatting cranes that ghost across our lake at night.

Nights!

Oh, the tree frogs!

What boy was I to be afraid ever of the tree frogs? Ever of the blat and twang, the rasp and scraw and cruck of things — the warbling, the mournful, the trees, the leaves fallen all hushened to a churchly calm to keep e up with Daddy? I kept up with Daddy. Daddy creaked like trees. Daddy smelled like creosote slathered on the wooden shed, the leaning fence, the barn my bike thrums and rattles past — a swift bank, a cock-kneed swoop he showed me — house and barn and creekbed gone, turtles gone, a moon, a stunt to make my momma gasp to get down to Daddy, to hold her breath for Daddy — no hangdog on the fence we built to fence the bending hill we built the barn to squat on, no spotty clerk, my daddy, not a man to cobble shoes. Did he not know the names of things to call nightly sounds by? By Cricket, by Screech Owl, by Croaker?

My way is quick: the barn, the slough, the hidden field. My way loops through the hidden field, between the vaulting stalks of weeds so near you have to hold my breath to hold my bike to ride by — to stoop, unmooned, no smoothened pass, but the sting and smeary green of greening knees to steer by.

My name is Orbit.

Joe Pye, Milkweed, Mullen.

The lake is low. My bike is old. You can hear it coming. In the leaves are cans to kick where I have tipped my bike down.

My lamplight is on. My Dixie straw, my gigging prong, my knack I have among the trees for soggy calculation, my skinny pole, my skiff I have to stand up in to skinny by the trees by night by night-blind navigation.

I hear such frogs.

They fall to feeding when I pass them. But I do not pole past them. I shine my light across them — long of toe and yellow-eyed and wide mouths to pry open. Slow now, and soft to go. You have to go so soft as me to catch them in the laps of trees, gawky in your narrow boat in the lapping shallows. The weak place is the white place that bloats out when they call. They flap and bleed when you gig them.

I let Bingo taste them. I let Bingo lick my hands when I have slicked my hands at night. But I do not croon. I do not pitch and moan to see our Cissie curl her toes underneath our sheets at night when Momma is still singing, and Momma is still singing. Momma is always singing.

I pry their mouths open.

I scrape my straw down into them — and breathe.

The green-headed and the long-legged and the blackflies hatched in the spit-gobbed trees tick by day at our windows, Inside the flies are flies inside and in the frogs flies inside and in our house also and in Bingo worms inside — hook and whip and ringworm worms and worms left to feed in Bingo’s heart — pale, mute, sluggish, plumping in the bloody rush in the blinding heart dividing.

We have lakes to swim. We have trees.

The heart, like an egg, a heart, has been known, her heart, like an egg, to break open.

Surely it will not break open.

Momma will not break open. The filly did not break open.

I cut the filly with a carving knife to turn above the dogs at night at safe from the limb of our tree — and when Daddy comes home, I will show him. I will show him the broken place where the animals come into the yard.

Bingo comes into the garden. Bingo is Bingo. But when Daddy comes, Bingo is Jane. But tonight is tonight. Tonight is the light of a greening moon a boy can see to ride by, and else to ride to sea by. Daddy will not come tonight — when Momma is still singing, when Bingo is not Jane.

My sister’s name is Cissie. Our momma’s name is Cissie.

You can hear us calling. You can see our house at night. We leave the porch light on at night.

You can see us calling.

There is the dirt road, the paved road, the airport. Should we walk to the dirt road, we could not hear her screaming. Should we walk to the paved road, we could not see the porch light. But should we walk to the airport?

If we cannot hear her screaming, if we cannot see the porch light, no porch, we can see no house at night, no dogs who run their dreams beside our father’s bed at night now that we are leaving, and we are leaving. The dirt road that starts at the graveyard, or ends, if you wish, at the graveyard, and begins, if you wish, at the paved road, to take us to Oneida, to take us to Tuscaloosa, takes us out in the snow some night to walk the rising tide some night until our hats start floating.

But that is not our want, we claim. After all that we have claimed of it, this seems not the road at all.

Oh, but I dissemble.

There is a yellow house I know set back from a road I know. There is a well there. From the well comes the sweetest water.

We have no bucket. Shall we assume, then, the well is dry? Shall we say there is no well at all, no yellow house, no mother? And if a mother, what shall we say of her — that she is pretty? That she is quick to dance a Charleston in her rhinestone shoes? Very well, then. She was pretty. She was quick to dance a Charleston in her rhinestone shoes.

Shall we make a claim from up on an airship high how the road comes to look not like a road at all but a rope to knot a loop into to kick a chair out under from, or from yellow porch to pin oak tree to pin a mother’s trappings from? — her gold lamé, her taffeta, her brocades flown across the sea or boated in a ribboned box from some shop we have not thought to think of yet in Hong Kong — her girdles, Mother’s hard brassieres, her gowns back-slit with a kitchen knife we hand over to fly by night — greenish, blooded, nylon — usurers, children, thieves — her nylons to pull past our chins at night to steal from our mother’s room at night that we might well be on our way, well down the road I would not claim as clothesline or hangman’s noose, no ribbon to bewitch in a young girl’s hair to flurry by chance in your slowing rush on the old road, or the new road, the dirt road, the paved road, headlong to get to Ohio.