Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

It would have been different, though, when Jean-Patrice first arrived. It would have looked more like it does right now — a tranquil meadow on the edge of a forest within a short hike of a stream. It’s the kind of place that you want to lie down in the middle of and stare up into the sky with your head resting on the grass without thought or worry for this life or the next.

If Laconte had had more time, I’m sure he would have eventually gotten around to securing the fort better. Posts would have been built, a second interior defense would have been constructed, holes for guns and cannons would have been bored through those beautiful stone walls, and I’m sure no one who lived here would have slept so well again.

Stopping here at Fort Laconte was my father’s idea, but I’m certain that it was my mother who made the most of it. She had a way of lingering around objects, of fixing them in her gaze as if she could see into the very atoms of which they were made, and once having done so, come to a definitive answer as to their nature and their history. A couch, a wine glass, or a coffee table was merely the form that an object took — its visible public form, free and open to all. When I was a child my mother would sit in the living room for hours and stare at the furniture. She noticed a room in a way no one I have known since has. There were few things to consider — the green-and-brown-striped couch that my father often slept on, a dark brown reclining armchair that seemed to resemble an old, tired basset hound, complete with wrinkles and folds, and an Impressionist-like painting of what looked to be a wide old boulevard somewhere in Europe in the middle of a storm, which hung opposite the couch, on a wall that got little to no light during the day. These were her companions, and she knew them well. When I came home from school, more often than not I found her there, sitting quietly with her legs curled up underneath her, enmeshed in the silence and comfort of objects that she had neither bought nor chosen for herself. She had theories about who the previous owners of each object may have been, and they would come to her in visions that kept her company in ways both my father and I failed to.

“I think someone very fat used to own this couch,” she said to me once. She ran her hand along the middle cushion. “You see. Look here. See that.” That was how she spoke when excited by an idea — in short, declarative bursts, the tried-and-true pattern of immigrant speech.

“Only a very fat person could make it soft like that.” And she was right, the middle cushion was softer and did sag more than the rest, and if you looked closely, as she asked me to do, there was still the impression of a body sitting on it, or so she led me to believe.

“They must have been very old,” she added, and as a matter not of opinion but of fact, incontrovertible and without doubt.

I noticed afterward that she never sat in the middle of the couch, and that when on occasion a guest or two came to visit, she would wince, almost in pain, to see someone sitting there, particularly if they were heavyset, which most of the older women in our church who came to visit every now and then tended to be. She worried over the poor knees of the ghost of the middle cushion, who for her continued to feel the weight of this world even in death.

And so on the afternoon that my parents arrived at Fort Laconte, while my father slowly circled the fort, stopping carefully to read the historical notices nailed to the posts in the ground, my mother would have lingered around the edges, closer to the forest than to the fort, in order to get a more complete view of the scene before her. She would have searched out a quiet place to sit, somewhere near here, along the back walls, where a few of the stones have fallen, creating what appears to be a little network of benches to sit on. A stone like this one would have been perfect for her. Roughly three feet high with a relatively even, flat top — the lone stray of the broken wall. Someone, not her, of course, must have moved it here to this corner of the meadow. It seems to not belong to the fort at all, an accidental product of nature, sprung out of the ground like an errant tooth breaking through the surface. It’s the perfect place to sit. From here I can see the entire arrangement of the fort: its slightly less than perfect ninety-degree angles, its few remaining walls and the empty spaces where a stable and sleeping quarters were. You can make out the edges of the guard’s booth, and if you had a husband you were trying to hide from, you could see him coming from all sides. If all is quiet, and you strain your ears, you can make out the faint trickle of the spring that runs inside the forest.

Coming here she knew nothing about Fort Laconte — its creation or its bloody demise, which is not to say that she did not sense that something tragic had happened here. As she sat on the stone she tried to imagine what it might have been, running through a catalogue of seismic tragedies that seemed to occur somewhere every day. Her first instinct had been war, and while she knew that to be the proper answer, she indulged herself a bit longer and tried to picture the former inhabitants of Fort Laconte as victims of plague, famine, and then finally a tornado — a natural event that she had witnessed on television for the first time a few weeks ago. There had been flattened houses, uprooted trees lying in the middle of the road, and a few grainy images of a swirling dark gray mass descending from the sky like a finger pointing, in what seemed to be an almost godlike gesture, at what would survive and what would be tossed away. As she watched the footage on the news that evening, she thought she could almost hear the voice of the tornado as it leapt from roof to roof saying, “I’ll take you, and you, and yes, even you.”

She tried to imagine such a tornado descending down on this place hundreds of years ago but the thought failed to inspire. She tried again with a famine and did better. The images came quickly but in the end fell short. The inhabitants of Fort Laconte, as she knew well enough, had all been European, and there was no stretch of her imagination that could allow her to conceive of hungry white faces, not in this day and age, or in any age for that matter. She was certain that even four hundred years ago the world would have conspired to prevent such a sight, and so she shaded in the faces, broadened out the lips and noses, and came up with a picture more suitable for a slow, hunger-pained death.

At this point my mother felt a sudden uptick of emotion and energy brought about by a nice soft breeze, one that shook the leaves hanging above her, sending a flock of black-winged birds fluttering into the air. Or maybe it was just that she had grown tired of sitting on that stone, that her legs and back ached from its rough surface, which pressed into her skin, leaving a lattice of lines engraved on the back of her thighs, and that this was why she stood up, stretched her arms, and headed in the direction of the forest behind her. The reasons for her getting up don’t really matter, at least not in the way they would if this were one of those childhood fairy tales in which the young maiden is called upon to enter the woods, from which she may not ever return. If it was that kind of story there would have to be a voice, something deep and slightly ominous, or the temptation of a miraculous treat, which would serve as the bait to ensnare her into a trap from which only her wits or a prince could save her. In either case, her folly or her greed would serve as her downfall, and anyone hearing the story would understand the lesson clearly: Stick to what you know.