Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

She was so over-excited they made her go to bed at five o’clock. Emma wrapped up a hot stove-lid to put at her feet.

“ January 25th. I felt very badly last night and cried a great deal. I thought how mother always used to give me the best of everything because I was the smallest, and I took it not thinking of my sisters. Emma said ‘For mercy’s sake, Lucy, stop crying.’ I explained to her, and she became much softened. She got up and lit the lamp. The lamplight on her face made me cry afresh. She went and woke Flora, who put on her grey wrapper and came in and sat in the rocking-chair. She wanted to make me something, but I said No. The lamp began to smoke. The smoke went right up to the ceiling and smelt very strong and sweet, like rose-geranium. I began to cry and laugh at the same time. Flora and Emma were talking together, but other people seemed to be talking, too, and the voice at the head of the bed.”

A few days later Lucy became very sad. She could neither pray nor do anything around the house. She sat by the window all day long.

In the afternoon she pointed at the road which went off towards the mountains between rows of trees, and said: “Flora, what does it matter where the road goes?”

Emma and Flora were taking apart Emma’s blue silk dress and making a blouse. A moth crawled on the window-pane. Emma said: “Get the swatter, Lucy.”

Lucy got up, then sat down and said again: “What does it matter?”

She got out the scribbler and wrote in it from memory all the stanzas of “Return, O heavenly Dove, return.”

After supper she seemed more cheerful. They were sitting in the kitchen evenings now, because it was warmer. There was no light but one lamp, so the room was quite dark, making the red circles around the stove-lids show.

Lucy suddenly stood up.

“Emma, Emma, Flora. I see God.”

She motioned towards the stove.

God, God sat on the kitchen stove and glowed, burned, filling all the kitchen with a delicious heat and a scent of grease and sweetness.

Lucy was more conscious of his body than his face. His beautiful glowing bulk was rayed like a sunflower. It lit up Flora’s and Emma’s faces on either side of the stove. The stove could not burn him.

“His feet are in hell,” she remarked to her sisters.

After that Lucy was happy for a long time and everything seemed almost the way it had been the winter before, except for Lucy going to the Baptist church and prayer-meeting by herself.

She spoke often of joining. It had happened once or twice that when people had wanted to join the church in the winter a hole had been broken in the ice to make a font. Lucy begged the minister that this might be done for her, but he felt that it was unnecessary in her case.

One had been a farmer, converted from drinking and abusing his wife. He had chopped the ice open himself. One a young man, also a reformed drunkard, since dead.

Flora said: “Oh Lucy, wait till the ice goes out.”

“Yes,” Lucy said in bitterness, “and until my soul is eternally lost.”

She prayed for an early spring.

On the nineteenth of March Flora woke up and heard the annually familiar sound, a dim roaring edged with noises of breaking glass.

“Thank goodness,” she thought. “Now, maybe, Lucy won’t even want to be baptized.”

Everyone had heard the cracking start, off in the hills, and was at the bridge. Lucy, Emma, and Flora went too. The ice buckled up in shining walls fifteen or twenty feet high, fit for heavenly palaces, then moved slowly downstream.

Once in a while a space of dark brown water appeared. This upset Lucy, who had thought of the water she would be baptized in as crystal-clear, or pale blue.

The baptism took place on the twenty-fourth. It was like all the others, and the village was even used to such early ones, although they were usually those of fervent young men.

A few buggies were on the bank, those of the choir, who stood around in coats and hats, holding one hymn-book among three or four people. Most of the witnesses stood on the bridge, staring down. One boy or young man, of course, always dared to spit over the railing.

The water was muddy, very high, with spots of yellow foam. The sky was solid grey cloud, finely folded, over and over. Flora saw the icy roots of a tree reaching into the river, and the snow-banks yellow like the foam.

The minister’s robe, which he wore only on such occasions, billowed until the water pulled it all down. He held a clean, folded handkerchief to put over Lucy’s mouth at the right minute. She wore a robe, too, that made her look taller and thinner.

The choir sang “I am coming, Lord, coming now to Thee,” which they always dragged, and “Shall we gather at the river where bright angel feet have trod?” After the baptism they were to sing something joyful and faster, but the sisters did not remain to hear it.

Lucy went under without a movement, and Flora and Emma thought she’d never come up.

Flora held Emma’s heavy coat all ready to put around her. Rather unconventionally, Emma sat in the buggy, borrowed from Mrs. Captain Green, so as to drive off home as soon as Lucy reached the bank. She held the reins and had to keep herself from taking up the whip in her other hand.

Finally it was over. They put the dripping Lucy in the middle. Her hair had fallen down. Thank goodness they didn’t live far from the river!

The next day she had a bad head-cold. Emma and Flora nursed her for a week and then the cold settled in her chest. She wouldn’t take to bed. The most they could get her to do was to lie on the couch in the kitchen.

One afternoon they thought she had a high fever. Late in the day God came again, into the kitchen. Lucy went towards the stove, screaming.

Emma and Flora pulled her back, but not before she had burned her right hand badly.

That night they got the doctor, but the next night after Lucy died, calling their names as she did so.

The day she was buried was the first pleasant day in April, and the village turned out very well, in spite of the fact that the roads were deep with mud. Jed Leighton gave a beautiful plant he had had sent from the city, a mass of white blooms. Everyone else had cut all their geraniums, red, white and pink.

1937

Once, on one of our large public beaches, a man was appointed to keep the sand free from papers. For this purpose he was given a stick, or staff, with a long, polished wire nail set in the end.

Since he worked only at night, when the beach was deserted, he was also given a lantern to carry.

The rest of his equipment consisted of a big wire basket to burn the papers in, a box of matches for setting fire to them, and a house.

This house was very interesting. It was of wood, with a pitched roof, about 4 by 4 by 6 feet, set on pegs stuck in the sand. There was no window, no door set in the door-frame, and nothing at all inside. There was not even a broom, so that occasionally our friend would get down on his knees and with his hands brush out the sand he had tracked in.

When the wind along the beach became too strong or too cold, or when he was tired, or when he wanted to read, he sat in the house. He either let his legs hang over the door-sill, or doubled them up under him inside.

As a house, it was more like an idea of a “house,” than a real one. It could have stood at either end of a scale of ideas of houses. It could have been a child’s perfect play-house, or an adult’s ideal house — since everything that makes most houses nuisances had been done away with.

It was a shelter, but not for living in, for thinking in. It was, to the ordinary house, what the ceremonial thinking-cap is to the ordinary hat.