Eushaw
Eushaw has been watching the bird. He has been watching it circle overhead and dive on its narrow, silver beak, pausing here on a wooden bough, a gray lintel of roof. When it stops in the air its suspension is phenomenal. The figure is nearly fantastic. But it is only a titmouse. A tiny thing with slender bones and a heart that beats too fast.
When it falls from the sky it strikes the ground with a padded thump. At first I think the sun is to blame. The light merciless in its excess, the bird too frail for such uncovering. Eushaw leans forward on his palms. He lifts his bottom, which is blue cotton stuck with burrs and dry grass. Pressing his hands into the ground he hovers over the titmouse, listens for heart or breath. The field where he sits is flat save for one bald elevation at the distal edge by the road, where the mailbox stands. It is afternoon. It is a quiet day. And the field is viciously filled with Eushaw’s own involuntary life-sounds. He leans away, ashamed for this, then lifts onto the balls of his feet and begins to cry.
I step out from the porch, from where I’ve been watching, and walk to him, kneel beside him rocking on his heels. He reaches to touch the bird and I tell him don’t. There are germs, I want to say, bacteria that breeds on the skin, but I say nothing. Instead I watch with Eushaw as the bird stiffens and turns less the shape of life and more the shape of its image. The sun throws itself between the fine white feathers that crown its head.
Eushaw does not watch the bird but the ground beyond the bird, where some seeds are scattered. He has no sense of his strangeness on this stretch of cropless land, no knowledge of how his tiny bent form excites a desperate tenderness in me.
What eventually draws my eyes from Eushaw is my sense of you. When I look to the porch your hands are in your pockets and I must consider you standing there. Because your watching me complicates my watching Eushaw. Complicates Eushaw’s watching the ground. I look at you and realize we are netted like this, in a vigil of the same moment.
In the evening you and I sit at the kitchen table. I call Eushaw’s mother, Mad, and explain the bird. Eushaw and Mad are our neighbors. Their house is across the field, on the other side of the road. Eushaw is not our own but I ration softness and fear like he is. I rap my fingers on the table, choosing my words. You pull orange juice from the fridge and pour yourself a glass.
When I hang up, your hands hold gentle at my throat and your mouth is at my ear. Citrus hangs on your breath, and another odor, metallic and chemical. You kiss me below my jaw and take the receiver from my hand. Now you are kneeling on the ground, kissing each knee.
Arabella, you say between my legs.
No, I say.
Joleen, you try. Nolyn, Rainer, Pavel, Olen, Sofi, Eero, Alina.
You are earnest about the whole business. You think if you speak to between my legs something will turn itself on. I know this talk from other talk because your face goes grave when you’re down at my knees. Your eyebrows knit with sincerity. Last week when a meal turned violent in my stomach you lifted your head, brightened, eyes urgent like a child’s.
We’ve been trying, you and me. Been trying for a couple months, still within a frame of time in which trying isn’t work, or trying can be confused with the regular going on of things, but even the regular going on of things is a kind of labor.
I run my hand through your hair. You kiss my thighs, my hips. You say more names but a name has yet to find me, to burrow deep and cancel out the other names. I dislike Olen. I hate Eero. You press your head to my stomach, listening for signs.
In the middle of the night you pluck at the sheets. You are deep in a dream, toeing along some seafloor or watching a couple yell at the pharmacy, but I can’t sleep. My body is too awake in the heat. I kick one leg over the cover, then the other, then kick the sheet off us both entirely. The heat that keeps me up is the same heat that drives you deeper into dreaming. I beat my legs and you do not move. I cough and nothing. I get out of bed so that I can stand in the bathroom, plant my bare feet on the cool tile. By some trick of cold, I’ve learned, I can get to sleep.
Sitting on the toilet, feet pressed archless to green tile, I wait for piss. Our bathroom is constructed in such a way that when I sit on the toilet I can lay one hand on the edge of the tub and the other on the sink. What I mean is it’s constructed poorly.
When we first moved to this house we spent a lot of time in the bathroom. We were used to cramped city apartments; we missed smallness. It was always me on the toilet and you seated on the lip of the tub, holding my hand like a fistful of pebbles. After flushing we’d lie in the tub together, cool ceramic down our spines, and talk about the future. You wanted green soppy land and our feet baked under sun, bike trips, grassland birds. I wanted an insect drum beat and for this land to stay as it was, always the same roll of joy and loss, the same seasons, same animal smells.
After flushing I crawl back into bed, covers kicked down to the bottom of the mattress. In sleep you clutch at my waist. I fit my body to yours. My back against your chest, my thighs over yours, the knot of your knee to the soft place behind my own. I arch my back to seal the hollow between us.
By late afternoon the following day the sun is still too high. The heat is attentive. The past few summers have all been like this, I think, windless, each one more focused than the last. Heat like a drowning, you call it.
On the porch I turn a bottle cap between my feet and you sit beside me, stripping skin from brittle pears. Two figures walk at the perimeter of our land. At a distance the figures are yellow with some brown, and as they move closer I see the yellow is Eushaw’s shirt, the brown the wide flood of Mad’s trousers. They stop twenty feet from our porch, Eushaw with out-turned feet, his child’s belly thrust forward. Mad calls to us by cupping her hands around her mouth.
In the kitchen you hold Mad’s half-made drink in front of her like a carrot. She follows you and the drink to the cabinet, the fridge, the walk-in where you can’t find the olives.
Pine bark beetles, she says, speaking into your back. They’ve eaten my entire pinyon, down to the root.
Upstairs I show Eushaw a collection of prints. They are illustrations of flora and fauna. Some green bits and flowering bits I’ve pressed between the pages. Eushaw touches a stalk of lavender, gentle with the mauve parts, and I turn a few pages to show him a bird but this bird is not like the other. The other was brown-toned, feverish, alive. This one is blue-gray with a tail sweeping across the page.
This is the beak, I say, and this is the eye. Eushaw does not touch the paper. This is the head and nape, I say. This is where the seeds are swallowed, where the rib cage holds the heart and lungs.
Eushaw follows my pointing with his eyes, his chest rising and falling. I worry he will cry but he does not. We look at birds, each with its neat bank of anatomical terms, until you call us down to eat.
During dinner Eushaw and Mad sit beside one another. Everything is prepared. Everything we need is on the table. Earlier we made a warm spread of shallots, thyme, and mushrooms, a bright fish with pinhole eyes, pickled turnips, silver-skinned potatoes.
Please, eat, you say. Nothing will stay hot.
Mad cuts a large potato for Eushaw, who does not yet understand knives. The acts are unnatural. The holding and spearing, the unit finally halved. I suck on a turnip and listen while Mad tells us about Eushaw’s school performance, about him standing on stage between his classmates, singing a solo. Mad is so proud of Eushaw’s voice. Eushaw is proud too. When he sings to us his mouth opens only slightly for the sound, yet his voice is loud, deeper than expected. We put down forks and knives. Mad begins to sway in her chair. Eushaw’s mouth cracks and quivers, but barely moves. I think this must be the first time I’ve heard a child sing. This is not a language I know.
What language is that, I ask when he’s finished.
Italian, Eushaw says.
You bring the pears, skinned, cut, miraculously changed into a pie. Before cutting yourself a piece you serve everyone else. I lift the braided crust of my own slice to reveal the green-gold display, then find you in a glance. Our looking has come to mean something but I forget exactly what. We have known each other forever, without much effort. You have always been you and I have always been I. But every so often we see each other from too great a distance and what we see is not what we are, what we are having happened years ago, centuries even. While I look at you, Mad tells us that pears come from Western Europe and Northern Africa. That the proper shape is pyriform. That the difference between a pear and an apple is stone cells and that a meaningful jam requires trace amounts of ginger.
I like berry pies best, Eushaw says.
You like all pies, Mad corrects.
After dinner Mad helps me with dishes.
It was the same for me, she says. It’s hard work, careful timing, a sexless thing, really.
I tell her it hasn’t been all that long. She tells me afternoons and yams are lucky.
Mad leans against the countertop beside the sink, holding a shining plate in one hand, her drink in the other. The dark fabric of her trousers shifts stiffly whenever she moves her arms, as if the legs were made of starched paper, the kind that stretches over a lantern’s wire frame.
Eushaw was tiny once, she is saying. Now he is growing. Some weeks he grows in every direction. Sometimes he goes eight or nine weeks without change.
I quiet the faucet and lean against the sink, begin to dry a large pot.
It’s all up to the bones, I say, but I don’t know if this is true. I rub the pot until it shines. Hold it to the light.
I think terrible things, sometimes, Mad says. I am always waiting for some fever, some accident.
I used to have nightmares about earthquakes, I say, tornadoes, wildfire. I once dreamed that every dog dropped dead.
Mad stares at me. I have disappointed her. She is older than I am and does not care for earthquakes. What she wants is to tell me about the world she knows. Things about babies, motherhood, coughs.
Because it all starts with a cough, she begins quietly, recentering the conversation. Everything always starts with a cough. Dry, wet, it doesn’t matter. Any cough will do it. The first time you hear that cough you have to know, a mother always knows.
The pot I’ve just dried is reflective on the inside, bloating the room, pulling my face across silver grain.
The nose is like a weather vane. It’s pointing, you see. Mad lowers her drink and brings her index finger to the tip of her nose.
And the mouth, she says, the mouth is pure information.
Mad returns her hand to her drink and I hate her, I think, even if only for a moment. She is too old for a young child, her hair already gone silver. I hate her for her greed. Her pride. Her belief in yams and coughs. But I envy Mad, too. I don’t want to disappoint her.
Eushaw runs into the kitchen, little chest pumping. He has been watching something on the TV and wants to know if it’s true. I lean forward and peer out of the kitchen, into the living room, where we have a green sofa, a low plant, a charged light running from the TV. Your feet are stacked on the coffee table but I can’t see beyond your knees.
Is it true the King of Epirus had twenty elephants? Eushaw pants. Is it true the King of Epirus had twenty elephants and that the elephants fought the Romans in battle?
It’s true! you shout from the living room.
Eushaw wheezes. He wants to know everything. He hopes the world will unfurl itself in one smooth, continuous feed. He asks Mad and me where the elephants were kept. If they could swim. If they could sweat. If they kissed each other with their trunks or ran very fast. If they triumphed. Where they went and when they were coming back.
He pushes his hair from his face and races back into the living room.
No cough, Mad leans in to say, god willing no cough.
After Mad and Eushaw leave you find me in the kitchen. You’ve been out on the porch, I remember, and I’ve been in here, scraping lime rinds white over a glass of gin. I almost forgot about your being absent and now with you returned I’m painfully aware of this lapse. I loop my arms around you. I want to be held like a child, carried through every room of our house. At this time in the evening—summer, the sun still burning low—the light turns everything heavy, excessive somehow. Even the glasses, I point for you, even the chairs.
You’re drunk, you smile.
I’m not too tired, I respond.
Let’s watch the sunset, you say, and then sling me over your shoulder, carry me out onto the porch bench. You lower yourself and take my nose between your teeth before going inside to make more drinks. I wait on the porch and listen to you moving around in the kitchen.
Beyond our field is brown land and a few crops of green. Heat-seeking things, yellow-eyed crows, patches of orange flowers.
When we first moved here we watched the sunset every night. We got quiet. Retreated inward. We watched the sunset together but separate, reminded of one another only when we accidentally touched hands or the sound of one of us shifting startled some brief awareness.
Have I missed it, you ask, returning with drinks.
No, I say, blinking at a distant crow.
The sky is singed with purple. A chemical sky. The cocktail you hand me is heavy with some grit. Pear, you say, before settling in beside me. Once seated you put your arm across my shoulders and we say little or nothing at all. For a long time we have been simple like this, just watching the sun sink and bleed.
Do you remember when we first moved here, you ask, breaking our silence.
Of course I do, I say.
We watched sunsets, you say, and sat for hours after sundown. Remember? It got late. We got drunk. We went to bed in our house—our house—could you believe it?
I couldn’t, I say, and it’s true. When we first moved to this house every reality was impossible. Moments standing in a door frame were broken by a flush of incredulity. The way I held a dishrag or how you set the table mattered. The tiny embodiments of this new life had seemed suspect in the way all ideas realized are, their fragility signaled by their actuality.
Life in this place, we both knew, intimated the stock city dream of rugged wealth. A dream of vintage bird guides metered around the house, spirals of citrus rind on wooden countertops, a silky haired toddler squinting at choke berries and proudly calling the fruit’s name to a porch-sitting mother. The cliché sometimes rubbed against sincerity and we became lost in the labor of separating one from the other, confused by the demands of our life together.
It will be like that, you say. It will be the same marveling. Wouldn’t that
be nice?
It would, I say, and this isn’t a lie.
How about Sid, you try, or Bram, or Eli, or Henner, or Teo, or Elora, or Mirabelle, or Kirk.
Kir-k, I sound.
Not Kirk, you say, I didn’t mean it.
Long after the sun is down we are still on the porch.
We’ve been making drinks forever, I say, when you return with a fresh batch.
It hasn’t been so long, you say, and look, I’ve added a cherry. You look at me in that lost way. The one that makes me sweet and lonely for you. I tug at your collar. You kiss me on the chin.
Nico, you whisper and the sound is cool, almost feline.
Nico, you repeat, and now the sound alarms me. Or maybe just prompts me. I am drunk. I cannot think.
Let’s go inside, I say.
Okay, you say.
Inside we are each of us pulling the other up the stairs. You are sweet to me, nice on my hand. In the bedroom we fumble to get our clothes off.
I want to get it right, I say, folding my shirt.
It’s not a matter of right, you say, but I fold your shirt, too. I try to fold your belt but the leather will not fold.
Soon your mouth is on me and your hands and I laugh because I remember that to you I am something else. To you I am shapes and I have never thought of myself as shapes; my own shapes formed like so, yours fit against mine. To you my ankle is a weight in your hand, a heaviness I have never known. My approach, too, a different tongue of sound. You laugh when I laugh because you don’t know why I’m laughing. You crawl to me on all fours. I sweep the pillows off the bed.
There are no shadows tonight. No moon in this room. I can’t see you well and I worry I’ll forget what you look like but don’t say this. What I do instead is pull you to me and curl my head to your chest. We are like this. We have always been like this. But after only a few minutes you come loudly and I open my eyes, surprised, unprepared. But what is there to prepare for. This is how it will happen. Your arms drop quick around my neck stroking my hair and touching my face. I draw my muscles inward beneath you, as if the rest were in my control.
I have not touched the bird. Neither have the crows or the ants or the animals that move at night. Wind and dust have rolled the thing onto its side, coated it some, pinned a wing to the earth. When you drive past the bird you move shadow over its shape. You are driving into town to buy the things we need. We are always running low, always calculating our resources and monitoring our attenuation.
I wave from the porch as you drive away. Eushaw is already there at the fence of our field, waving too. He moves his hand at you or at me. It is hard to tell which. He is startling standing there, shovel hands at his sides, waving abandoned. His figure appears superimposed on our land. When he walks toward me he moves without friction.
Standing in front of me now he is a boy, toying idly with the hem of my skirt. He makes a hissing noise, says, That is what a Komodo dragon sounds like, then walks past me onto the porch where I’ve left coffee and a bowl of seeds and the screen door unlatched.
I follow Eushaw into the house. I ask if he enjoyed dinner. He does not answer but points out the open door to where the dust-covered bird lies.
You didn’t move it, he says.
I didn’t move it, I say. Would you like some juice?
Eushaw does not seem surprised that I have left our dead. I try to shock myself with my negligence but the feeling is false, my neglect is not passive. I’ve meant to leave the bird. I’ve wanted Eushaw to see it. Wanted to know how he might handle death.
While I pour Eushaw a glass of juice he begins plans for the funeral. I ask him about other losses he can recall. A feral cat that stayed one week, a goldfish that rose to the surface, a jar of pill bugs forgotten then discovered beneath his bed. He does not look at me when he says this. He bows his long forehead, something genetic and incurable, Mad tells me. Eushaw has had losses, but he has never buried an animal. Until now he has never touched a lifeless thing and felt the shock of cold, the loud coursing of his blood-warmth against nothing.
After Eushaw drinks his juice he and I rifle through drawers, looking for boxes and odd fabrics. We find a tin that once held butter toffees and caramels. We use steel wool and pungent chemicals to rid the tin of stickiness. Then cotton pads and a strip of green satin I have found in the sewing kit. I help Eushaw pin the fabric to the cotton, then press the cotton against the tin with rolled bits of tape.
Eushaw carries the tin out into the yard, holding it on open palms. He stops halfway across our field.
A name, he says, we need to give it a name. I don’t tell him how senseless this is.
Yes, I say, a name. What should we name it?
N, he says. I want to name her N.
The name is useless but I like N. It has appeal, a marginal sum to live up to, easy enough to exceed even in death.
Okay, I say, N.
We walk over to N and Eushaw lifts her delicately using a pair of tongs. The body is more brittle now. Like lifting a corn husk. There are germs that breed on the skin, I inform Eushaw, who nods very seriously.
After he places N in her tin, Eushaw and I seat ourselves on the dirt. Eushaw begins to sing. He sings only the letter of her name, privately then loudly.
I look around at our land. There is no one but Eushaw and me. You, off in town. Mad, playing Kitty Wells in the kitchen, her Kitty Wells the life-beat of her house.
Eushaw’s singing is heartbreaking. He calls to our dead again and again, the name becoming less recognizable, the sound becoming strange and moving. Eushaw holds my hand and sings until the singing ends.
We dig a hole, deeper and wider than necessary, and place N in the ground. We throw dirt over dirt until the tin is lost. Sitting on the ground I watch Eushaw, who is almost expressionless, save for a subtle turn on his mouth. I want to know what he’s feeling so I ask him, What are you feeling, but he is a calm surface. He does not answer. What he does is continue packing dry earth on top of more dry earth. A mound develops but Eushaw continues to smooth and work. He is devastating to watch, his flat hands packing dirt. I shield my eyes and say, Let’s go inside, but still he does not respond.
I try to soothe him, speaking sweetly, but he will not be comforted. I don’t understand his method of grief. I want to use words but I’m not sure what to say so I start telling Eushaw the things I can make.
We have pudding, I say. I can make chocolate or vanilla. Or Jell-O, would you like Jell-O? I can make sandwiches with peanut butter and jam. Sandwiches with ham and tomato. Cut ramp and hardboiled eggs. I can make beans, big broad white ones. Would you like some beans? I can make apples and cheese. Maybe some soft cake. We could make something. We could make something together. I could teach you how to make something.
I move a hand to wipe Eushaw’s hair from his face and realize my fingers are trembling. His skin is cold. He neither flinches nor accepts my touch. He is apart from me, an oddity to me. I can see now, with his hair pulled back, that his face is wet and open, and for a moment I am so happy. To see feeling. To witness hurt amplified. Hurt for this dead bird, this dying land. I am envious, I think, and then, I am cruel. I, too, want to be a raw nerve. I want to be a quick pulse on a ruined planet.