|
Antigonish Review # 156
| Elise Moser
|
|
"Chair with Hymnals," a photographic image made
by Margot Metcalfe in 200 year old St. Phillip's Anglican
Church, Moreton's Harbour, Newfoundland.
|
|
The Miniature Breaths
|
Paul was sweet
- so sweet he stank. No one would sit by him or eat with him.
His clothes reeked and stuck together in a rancid clump; his Ma
wouldn't allow them in the pile with the other laundry. The sweat,
the soil, the cowshit she called "honest dirt." She
didn't name Paul's sickly-sweetness, just rucked up her face.
Turned her head.
The yard was almost all dust, just a few blades
of grass struggling upwards. Paul danced out there. He ducked
his head and waved his arms. Shuffled his feet. He mostly went
in circles, weaving around and around until he began to wear a
depression in one spot, the pale shoots of grass long worn away,
their spindly roots torn from the dry earth.
His Ma stood on the porch with Ray and shook her
head. He wadn't like that when I made him, she said. Ray sucked
his teeth. Ma had her hands on her hips and Ray smoked silently
and they just watched for a while. Then Ma went inside and dished
up Paul's supper. Put it out on the porch for him. Stood by and
watched it cool with the day.
Paul danced at dusk. When he commenced it was
still light and when he finished it was that silky dark that still
glows a little bit. He started out there all on his own, twirling
and shuffling and flapping, but then the bees began to fly over.
It was one at a time at first; as the evening came in they accumulated
to a hovering cloud. They kept a respectful distance until he
completed his shuffle in the dust and then he stood still, face
raised to the dimming sky, eyes closed, the ragged neon pink of
the horizon visible behind his neck. He bent his arms at the elbow
and raised his hands toward where the incipient moon could sometimes
be seen, a thin sliver of light against the waning light. As he
stood there the bees settled and clustered on him like minute
black cattle gathered on a chalk plain. He looked peaceful then,
and they crawled all over him, their feet mucking in his sweetness
like children's galoshes in mud. His dinner cold on the porch
railing.
That winter his Ma got sick; by spring she'd died. Ray sold
the big equipment and left. One day even the old dog finally lay
down in the yard, his kidneys sighing to a halt inside his dusty
belly. Paul stayed on his own, doing a little cultivating, hunting
for wild asparagus in the spring. People see him from time to
time, go out there to deliver mail or seed or whatever. After
a while they got to know not to come at dusk, because he'd be
in his trance. But come earlier or later and you can find him
standing calm in the yard, a not-unfriendly expression on his
face. Shirtless, the better to feel the little feet. The miniature
breaths, the tiny vibrations.
|
