Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“He’s with you?”

“He insisted on staying in a motel. In Ukiah. He said he would only come if you approve. We are still married,” she reminded me. “He’s very old-fashioned that way. Would you mind if he stayed with us? It shouldn’t be very long now.”

I only then realized her plan: she had come back to die. I held her hand in mine, saying it’d be more than okay. “You think I couldn’t benefit from a little female company?” I tried a sort of laugh. “You should hear them whisper about me at the hardware store. I’m the bachelor farmer everyone has questions about.”

Ernest withdrew from classes that quarter to spend more time with his mother on the farm, and so all that fall, as the days grew shorter and the evenings more crisp, we took our meals together as a family outside at a long wooden table set up underneath the thick branches of a huge oak tree. I wouldn’t call it saying grace, but I did start each meal with the same statement: “Let’s be thankful.”

Betty died in bed one morning that winter, surrounded by her son and me, Sergei, and one of the hospice workers who’d stayed with us at the end. Priscilla reappeared not even a month later, after Ernest and I had gone out into the rain and thrown Betty’s ashes across the empty fields that’d return to life the following spring. She, too, had stopped using the name Leveraux (Mockus was more authentic, she believed) and found me through the sauerkraut I sold. She’d seen a jar of it one day at the North Coast Co-op in Arcata, and after picking it up, stopped by the sight of her own name, she’d read the fine print and found an address for Leveraux’s Fine Foods.

When she rang the doorbell, she was wearing a floral-print dress over a pair of blue jeans and had a ring on one of her toes (she wore no shoes). Her nose was pierced in two places, and one of her ears had six or seven silver studs in it. A wildflower was tattooed on the side of her neck, though at first I couldn’t see it clearly because of her dreadlocks; I thought it might be a snake.

I almost fell over. I felt a weakness in the back of my legs, a hole opening up in my chest. I grabbed my arm by the elbow and held it close to my side. “Oh, Priscilla,” I said.

“I’m pregnant.” The words came out like a dare. “Seven months.” Like a threat. “Can I stay?”

I stepped out and fell into her as if for support, wrapping her up in my arms and saying of course, she could stay as long as she wanted and tell me as much as she thought I needed to hear. “We all have secrets. I’m just so happy that you’re home.”

Her daughter was born that spring, when the green peas were beginning to shoot up their runners in the fields. She weighed seven pounds, five ounces, and screamed so loudly you would’ve thought she was auditioning for a spot in the Juilliard School of Music. That first day in the hospital, I told Priscilla she’d better get used to it, and then I stood there silently, watching as she tried to convince her baby to take her breast.

I’ve kept up with the Churchill Diet all these years, with only the occasional slip, and though I can no longer say if I started this as an act of penance or in an effort to rid my system of all the many chemicals that had built up in my bloodstream over the years, I do feel I wouldn’t have begun this book if it weren’t for that one change in my life. I took to writing my memoirs late, in 2009, not long after the U.S. handed over control of the Green Zone to the Iraqi people.*

After dazzling some of his writing instructors at UC Davis, Ernest went on to get an MFA in poetry at the University of Iowa, where his mentors were no less impressed by the absence of verbs in his work. He published his first poetry while there (using the pen name Ernesto Martínez), and is currently serving a Fulbright Fellowship in Ukraine, where he’s working on a new cycle of poems that I’ve been told has something to do with his mother.

Priscilla lives with me in Potter Valley, though she has plans to return to Humboldt County when she can afford it. On those nights when she goes into town to take a class at the community college (she’s training to become a nurse), I watch after my granddaughter, little Michelle Roosevelt Mockus, and sometimes tell her stories I know she can’t understand.

My wife was wearing a cross from the Eastern Orthodox Church when she died, and though I tried to give it to Sergei, he insisted that I take it and wear it as my own. By then, old man Johnson, the World’s Oldest Man, was long gone, taking with him his belief in vanilla soda and cream-filled sponge cake. I didn’t even bother to read of his successor. I felt ready for something new, and so when Sergei pushed Betty’s cross back into my hands, I wore it and soon found reason to seek out the Orthodox church in Santa Rosa, about an hour south of here.

I visited just that one time, spending a few minutes looking at the brightly painted ceilings. Since then, I’ve found myself stopping at the place I first noticed on a drive in to the farmer’s market one Sunday. It is a beautiful old church, built in the German style, sitting up on a hill off to the side of the valley. On closer inspection, I discovered it was a Lutheran church for the deaf. The first time I entered it, I found the service already in progress. The pastor stood facing the congregants, delivering his sermon like a third-base coach. Everyone kept their eyes to the fore, because in this church you could not afford to look away. I sat in the back pew and fell into the silence, occasionally glancing up at the unadorned cross behind the pastor or off to the stained-glass windows at our sides: a fish, the three kings, the blazing star of Bethlehem.

A team of ushers moved through, passing a basket back and forth. Then it was time for communion, with two lines forming in the central aisle. When I reached the front of mine, I found one man ready to offer me the body of Christ and another with a silver chalice filled with the blood. I accepted the wafer into the cup of my hands, then laid it on my tongue and drank from the chalice. I shouldn’t look at this with my old eyes, but no matter how many lives we lead between the cradle and the grave, it is inevitable that one will awkwardly overlap the next. The bread was crisp and without flavor, and it broke down too easily when it came into contact with the wine, which was cloying and overly sweet.

I wish I had the words to explain why I keep coming back.

* I did not wish to see my memoirs repurposed and marketed as fiction, but sadly this was considered the safest way to avoid possible litigation from the manufacturer of “Sweetness #9.” I put up a good fight, you should know, but in the end I was granted only one concession: the right to address the reader in this footnote. I thought it a minor victory, because even if the standard disclaimers— any resemblance to persons, places, or things living or dead is purely coincidental— would have to dirty the copyright page of this “novel,” I could still advise you to study those resemblances very closely. Then the book’s editor read my first go at this footnote, and she wrote to share her excitement with me, saying that rather than help establish the truth, it would only further destabilize it. “‘It self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.’” She was quoting from Wikipedia. “Don’t you see? Metafiction doesn’t let you forget you’re reading fiction — and that’s exactly what your footnote does! I love it!” I, it should go without saying, do not. I find myself boxed in by it. But there is no escape, apparently, so let me simply retreat once more to the body of the text.