Peter Markus: We Make Mud

Look there at our father. Our father, see over there, he is digging, with his shovel, down into mud. He is, with this mud-crusted shovel, lifting the mud from over there where he is standing, hunched over, and he, our father, he is dumping the mud out, into a hump-mudded pile, here in this other not so muddy place, up here on this hill that is uphill from where the river is, up here where there is this grass up here that is trying to cover up the dirt that us brothers and now our father too — we like to take dirt and make dirt turn to mud. When us brothers ask our father, What is he doing, what our father says to this is, he says, he is working. Working? we say. We say this with our eyes. Work, no, work: work was back when our father used to have a work to go to, back when the black-metaled mill that now sits shipwrecked on the river’s shore, so dark and silent, back when it wasn’t so dark and silent, back when blast-furnace fire and smoking smokestack smoke used to make us brothers raise our eyes up to look up at the sky. But now that place where our father used to work, it is a shipwrecked ship with no treasures left inside it. Sons, our father says this to us. I’m making mud, he says. I’m taking mud, he tells us, and I’m making, with this mud, I am making, out of mud, a house for us to call our own. A mud house, our father calls it. A mud house where mud, it’ll be okay for us to walk inside this house with mud caked on the bottoms of our boots. That sounds like a good place to us, us brothers, we say this to our father. And so, us brothers, being the good boys that we are, we drop down onto our hands and knees, down in the mud, and we get to work. We start at the bottom and make our way up. But a house, a house made out of mud, a mud house: this we do not make. Us brothers, what we make, from the mud, we make Girl. We make Girl’s knees especially muddy. Girl’s knees, they make us want to stay forever kneeling. It’s when Girl stands up from the mud that’s sticking to the skins of our muddy boy hands, it’s then that we can see that Girl, she is naked. Brother is the brother of us brothers who is making Girl’s nakedness seem like not such a good thing for Girl to be. So what if she’s naked? That’s what I’ve got to say to this. We’re all naked underneath our clothes. But maybe, Brother says, maybe she’s cold. Maybe she wants some clothes. Are you cold? I go and ask Girl. Would you like some clothes to put on top of your girl body? Girl doesn’t say yes or no to this. She just stands there being naked. Brother turns though and runs away and when he comes back he has in his arms an armful of girl clothes. Where did you get those? I say this to Brother. Our mother’s closet is what Brother says to this. I give Brother this look. There is this look that us brothers, we have this look between us brothers. It’s the kind of a look that actually hurts the eyes of the brother who is doing the looking. Imagine that look. Where else was I supposed to look? Brother says. I don’t know where or what to say to this, and so I don’t say anything. I take back looking that look. Then I take hold of Brother’s hand. I take out of Brother’s hands this dress — it’s a dress with yellow flowers on it: it is a dress that I cannot picture our mother ever wearing it, this dress — and then we slip, we tug, we pull, we fight, we struggle, we twist, we rip, this dress down over the top of Girl’s head. Oh, even so, Girl is still beautiful. Girl’s beauty — it shines — the beauty of mud, it is shining, from beneath our mother’s flowery clothes.

It’s our mother’s dress, the dress that us brothers slipped and tugged up and over the top of Girl’s head, that night when we made Girl, made her out of the mud, made her up from the mud, us brothers, down by the river, down on our hands and knees, down in the river made mud — it is that same dress that is the dress that us brothers, we see it floating, a floating dead fish of a dress, floating down our dirty river, and Girl, Girl whose flowey dress this dress is, is nowhere to be found by it, or inside it, or nowhere even near it, this dress. Where’s Girl? is what us brothers, the both of us, we want to know this. Where Girl is, this is one thing, Brother says. But what she is wearing, that is another thing too. What do you think Girl is wearing? I say to Brother. Not our mother’s dress, Brother says back. Good, I tell him. I never did like it on her. It never did, I say, fit. It never did fit on Girl, Brother asks, or are you talking about on our mother? Both, I say to this. So do you think she’s found another dress? Brother says. I think, I say back, that Girl is back to being the way that we made her. You mean she’s back to being naked, then? Brother says. Yes, Brother, on this, Brother has got his mind set: his head, it is a head that is stuck in that naked girl kind of mud. So I say to Brother what Brother has heard me say more than twice before. I remind him that, we are all of us made naked under our clothes. This time, him hearing this, it gets Brother thinking: not about Girl being naked. What it gets Brother thinking about is our mother. You mean even our mother is naked underneath her clothes? Brother asks. Then Brother shoots me this look that, us brothers, we have these looks between us, and what this look says is, we don’t want to think about that. I nod with my head and can’t help it when my face makes one of those I’ve-just-bitten-into-something-that-tastes-really-awful kind of faces when I tell him: yes, Brother, even our mother is naked underneath her mother clothes. And then, the both of us brothers, we start up running as if we’re running to run away from that naked mother kind of a place. But what we are really doing is we are running to that other made out of mud place where we think that Girl is most likely to be hiding out: upriver not too far, up where the mill sits in the mud like a shipwrecked ship that one day had run itself aground and then it didn’t know where else for it to go. So it stayed. And men, men like our father, men who wear sun-yellow hard hats and carry rusty-steeled lunchbuckets packed with ham and cheese sandwiches, these men, they started filing, one by one, into the insides of this shipwreck of a ship and then they kept on coming in until smoke started funneling out through its smokestacked top and coke oven fires were iron ore stoked inside its black-metalled belly, and after a while coils of shining steel were being made on the inside of this place that had, once upon a time ago, it was a ship that had lost itself at sea. It is here, then, in the shadow of this, this ship, this mill where metal used to be made, this is where us brothers, that night, not too long ago, this is where we dropped down onto our hands and knees, down in the mud, and we made Girl. Here, out of river and dirt, us brothers, we made mud. We made Girl. In the mud, out of the mud, Girl was made naked. Even in the dark-of-night night, Girl’s made-out-of-mud body shined, it shined like a thing brand new, it shined with the shine of the never-before-seen. Us brothers, our eyes, you should’ve seen our muddy boy eyes. Our eyes, brother: they became moons, that night. Then lighthouses. Then they became hands that taught us that to touch a thing so beautiful you can only touch it once. Twice, touch it twice, and its beauty will banish you with its beauty. Brother, Brother’s eyes, his were the muddy hands that did not know how just to look: not touch. We gotta get Girl dressed was what Brother said, because Brother knew what his right hand was wanting to reach up and do. She’s cold, Brother said. But no, it was not cold, that night. That night, the mud was hot to our boy touches: it was this melty thing melting in our muddy boy hands. But Brother’s head, his boy head was now set on getting Girl dressed. So Brother left and when he came back he was holding in his arms an arm full of girl clothes. Where’d you get those? is what I wanted to be told. So what Brother told me was, From our mother’s closet. Our mother’s closet? I did not even have to say it, those three words. What I did was I gave Brother another one of those looks that us brothers had between us: it was the kind of a look that actually hurt the face of the brother who was doing this looking. Imagine that look. But where else was I supposed to look? was what Brother had to say. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to say to this. So, I took back that look. But you, look right now. Look away from looking at us brothers, and look to the river, look so that you can see the dress that is now slowly floating down the river away. This dress is yellow. No, that’s not right: this dress is a kind of blue. It is brown. It is the color the water is. It is a fish — it is a fish that has forgotten how to swim: it is a fish floating across a muddy river sky. Now, it is a kite now. Now, it is a star. No, now, what this is is, it is a dress with no one inside it. It is blowing, it is floating, it is going away. The wind, the river, it is taking it away from us brothers who are down here by the river trying to get us a look. If it looks like there is a girl inside of this dress: look closer. There is no girl there inside it. This dress, it is just a dress, it is girl-less. But Girl. You know: Girl. Girl is another story. Us brothers, we know where to go to go see Girl. Girl is out in the river, she is out standing out in the middle of the river, standing with her girl legs spread wide open at the hips so that ships cutting up the river going to places up the river, up beyond our dirty river town, upriver to where there are these city lights shining up there even though, through all the mud and smoke, us brothers, we cannot see them — Girl is standing in such a way, out in the river, so that the river’s muddy water is just barely touching her knees. Girl’s knees are especially muddy. Girl’s knees are knees that when we made them, us brothers — we wanted to remain forever in the mud kneeling. Girl’s knees were that muddy. Look: you can see them now. You can see more than that now. Girl is back now to being just mud. That is to say, Girl is back to being the way that we made her, back to being the way she was made to be: naked, bare, pure: pure mud. Us brothers, when we see Girl standing out in the middle of the river, the all of Girl, the full moon of Girl for all our eyes to see, to see her the way that Girl was meant to be seen — naked, naked, nude, nude — what we do is we run ourselves up to Girl, we are running up through and into the shadow of Girl — the shadow of Girl, it is a muddy cloud that is closing in on top of us brothers: it is a big-mouthed fish teaching us littler fish how to fly — this is us brothers fishing our way up toward that mouth, out and up to where Girl is standing: us brothers, we are stones skipped across the river’s water: this muddy river, it is a road that does not have a name. It does not have a name so, us brothers, we decide to name it. We decide to name it the same way we gave names to every one of those dirty river fish that us brothers used to fish out of this dirty river that runs through this dirty river town. No, we do not call this road Jimmy or John. Jimmy and John is mine and my brother’s names. We call each other Brother. This road, this dirty river, this dirty river road — us brothers — we decide to call it Girl. When we call this road Girl, this dirty river of a road throws out its mud carpet for us brothers to walk across it. Us brothers, we do not walk across it. We run across it. We run and run until we are run out of river, until we are running half the way up the leg that is the muddy leg of Girl. Girl’s mud leg is a ladder that ladders us brothers up, up to where Girl’s head, it has punched a hole into the blue of the sky. We are looking Girl right in the eye now. There is an eye for each of us brothers. Girl’s eyes are on the other side of the sky now. Girl’s eyes are moons. Girl’s eyes are even bigger than that other moon that you all know about, you know, that other moon that you see floating in the sky when you look at night out the window — that moon, you could reach out and hold that other moon in the palm of your hand. That’s how small it is compared to how big Girl’s eyes are when you look at them like this and see into them the way they were meant to be seen, this way up close. What are you doing here? is what us brothers say to Girl when we get beyond this way of looking. We ask this, no, not to find out what is Girl doing standing mud-naked in the middle of the river. We know what she is doing when Girl is doing that. What we want to know is, what is Girl doing with her hands. In her girl hands, Girl is holding what could be a ball of snow — it is that white. It could be, if the light was right, if it was night out instead of day, you might be made to believe that in her hands Girl was holding the moon. Or maybe she is molding the moon back to being full. But believe this when we tell you this, in Girl’s hands, what looks to be a ball of snow, or a moon — it isn’t. What it is is, it is a ball made out of cloud. And Girl, Girl is rolling, she is pinching these white yarny pieces of cloud in between her I’ve-got-a-gun finger and her trigger-of-a-gun thumb. And Girl, she is doing with these linty pieces of gathered-up cloud what our mother used to do back in the whiteness of winter — days when she’d needle us wool sweaters that never did fit us stitched from rolls of itchy yarn. I am making myself a dress is what Girl tells us brothers is what she is doing. Why on earth, is what I am thinking, would Girl want to wear a dress? Girl is perfect just the way she is, with no dress on to cover up her mud. To put a dress on this, on top of this, over this — this would be, in this brother’s eyes, wrong: it would be just plain bad: it would be dumb, dumb, dumb. It would be like if the moon were to one night rise into the night’s sky wearing a black dress on to keep its light from reaching the earth. That too would be dumb. But Girl is not dumb. Girl knows what is good and what is bad. So what I want to know is, What is Girl thinking? What has gotten into Girl’s head? And so this is what I ask her. What, I say, are you thinking? Why would you want to make for yourself a dress? Our mother’s dress: that was Brother’s bad idea. But this, to this, Girl reaches out to me and she takes me up in her hand. She takes me up into her girl hand and then she takes my hand and she tells me to feel. My hand, it reaches out and it touches the part of Girl’s body where Girl has just now told me to feel. This is where Girl’s heart is. I can feel it, the beat of this heart, that made-out-of-mud drum, beating there beneath the mud of Girl’s skin. But Girl’s skin— this, I must tell you this: it is like the river is when the river freezes over. It is that cold: it is ice. And so, when I reach my boy hand up and in to take hold of Girl’s heart, to warm it up, to hold it up close to my own boy heart, this heart that is Girl’s, this heart that is made out of mud, this heart that is shaped like a fish: when I touch it — this heart — it shatters into a billion pieces. Each broken piece becomes a star.