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“If it won't do,” I said, “I could run into town to get something a little smoother for you. Maybe you'd like some Canadian Club or some twelve-year-old Scotch. I could run into town and be back in less than an hour. Maybe you'd like me to bring back a couple of fried chickens and a sack of buttered rolls.” This was my old self talking, the hothead. But I didn't feel mad at him, and was just being mouthy out of habit.

“No need to do that,” he said, as if my offer had been made in seriousness. He took a long pull off my pint. “This snake piss is just fine by me, son.” He raised the bottle to the sunlight again, squinted through it.

I wandered down the ditch again to the place where Daddy died.
There was nothing there to suggest a recent dead man had blocked the current. Everything was as it always was. The water surged, the quick water bugs skated up and down, inspecting brown clumps of algae along the banks; underwater weeds waved like slim snakes whose tails had been staked to the mud. I looked for the thistle he'd grabbed on to. I guess he thought that he was going to save himself from drowning by hanging on to its root, not realizing that the killing flood was
inside
his head. But there were many roots along the bank and none of them seemed more special than any other.

Something silver glinted at me. It was a coin. I picked it out of the slime and polished it against my pants. It was a silver dollar, a real one. It could have been his. He carried a few of the old cartwheels around with him for luck. The heft and gleam of the old solid silver coin choked me up.

I walked back to the old man. He had stuffed his bindle under his head for a pillow and had dozed off. I uncapped the pint and finished it, then flipped it into the weeds. It hit a rock and popped. The old man grunted and his eyes snapped open. He let out a barking snort, and his black eyes darted around him fiercely, like the eyes of a burrow animal caught in a daylight trap. Then, remembering where he was, he calmed down.

“You got something for me?” he asked. He pushed himself up to a sitting position. It was a struggle for him.

“Not any more,” I said. I sat down next to him. Then, from behind us, a deep groan cut loose. It sounded like siding being pried off an old barn with a crowbar. We both turned to look at whatever had complained so mightily.

It was Miss Milky, up in the trailer, venting her misery. I'd forgotten about her. Horseflies were biting her. Her red eyes peered sadly out at us through the bars. The corners of her eyes were swollen, giving her a Chinese look.

With no warning at all, a snapping hail fell on us. Only it wasn't hail. It was a moving cloud of thirteen-year locusts. They darkened the air and they covered us. The noise was like static on the radio, miles of static across the bug-peppered sky, static that could drown out all important talk and idle music, no matter how powerful the station.

The old man's face was covered with the bugs and he was saying something
to me, but I couldn't make out what it was. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. When it opened, he'd have to brush away the locusts from his lips. They were like ordinary grasshoppers, only smaller, and they had big red eyes that seemed to glow with their own hellish light. Then, as fast as they had come, they were gone, scattered back into the fields. A few hopped here and there, but the main cloud had broken up.

I just sat there, brushing at the lingering feel of them on my skin and trying to readjust myself to uncluttered air, but my ears were still crackling with their racket.

The old man pulled at my sleeve, breaking me out of my daydream or trance. “You got something for me?” he asked.

I felt blue. Worse than blue. Sick. I felt incurable—ridden with the pointlessness of just about everything you could name. The farm struck me as a pointless wonder, and I found the idea depressing and fearsome. Pointless bugs lay waiting in the fields for the pointless crops as the pointless days and seasons ran on and on into the pointless forever.

“Shit,” I said.

“I'll take that worthless cow off your hands, then,” said the old man. “She's done for. All you have to do is look at her.”

“No shit,” I said.

He didn't seem so old or so wrecked to me now. He was younger and bigger, somehow, as if all his clocks had started spinning backwards, triggered by the locust cloud. He stood up. He looked thick across the shoulders like he'd done hard work all his life and could still do it. He showed me his right hand and it was yellow with hard calluses. His beady black eyes were quick and lively in their shallow sockets. The blue lump on his forehead glinted in the sun. It seemed deliberately polished, as if it were an ornament. He took a little silver bell out of his pocket and rang it for no reason at all.

“Let me have her,” he said.

“You want Miss Milky?” I asked. I felt weak and childish. Maybe I was drunk. My scalp itched and I scratched it hard. He rang his little silver bell again. I wanted to have it, but he put it back into his pocket. Then he knelt down and opened his bindle. He took out a paper sack.

I looked inside. It was packed with seeds of some kind. I ran my fingers
through them and did not feel foolish. I heard a helicopter putt-putting in the distance. In defense of what I did, let me say this much: I knew Miss Milky was done for. Doc Nevers would have told me to kill her. I don't think she was even good for hamburger. Old cow meat can sometimes make good hamburger, but Miss Milky looked wormy and lean. And I wouldn't have trusted her bones for soup. The poison that had wasted her flesh and ruined her udder had probably settled in her marrow.

And so I unloaded my dying cow. He took out his silver bell again and tied it to a piece of string. He tied the string around Miss Milky's neck. Then he led her away. She was docile and easy, as though this was exactly the way things were supposed to turn out.

My throat was dry. I felt too tired to move. I watched their slow progress down the path that ran along the ditch. They got smaller and smaller in the field until, against a dark hedge of box elders, they disappeared. I strained to see after them, but it was as if the earth had given them refuge, swallowing them into its deep, loamy, composting interior. The only sign that they still existed in the world was the tinkling of the silver bell he had tied around Miss Milky's neck. It was a pure sound, naked on the air.

Then a breeze opened a gap in the box elders and a long blade of sunlight pierced through them, illuminating and magnifying the old man and his cow, as if the air between us had formed itself into a giant lens. The breeze let up and the box elders shut off the sun again, and I couldn't see anything but a dense quiltwork of black and green shadows out of which a raven big as an eagle flapped. It cawed in raucous good humor as it veered over my head.

————

I went on into town anyway, cow or no cow, and hit some bars. I met a girl from the East in the Hobble who thought I was a cowboy and I didn't try to correct her mistaken impression, for it proved to be a free pass to good times.

When I got home, Mama had company. She was dressed up in her beet juice gown, and her face was powdered white. Her dark lips looked like a wine stain in snow. But her clear blue eyes were direct and calm. There was no distraction in them.

“Hi boy,” said the visitor. It was Big Pete Parley. He was wearing a blue suit, new boots, a gray felt Stetson. He had a toothy grin on his fat red face.

I looked at Mama. “What's
he
want?” I asked.

“Mr. Parley is going to help us, Jackie,” she said.

“What's going on, Mama?” I asked. Something was wrong. I could feel it but I couldn't see it. It was Mama, the way she was carrying herself maybe, or the look in her eyes and her whitened skin. Maybe she had gone all the way insane. She went over to Parley and sat next to him on the davenport. She had slit her gown and it fell away from her thigh, revealing the veiny flesh.

“We're going to be married,” she said. “Pete's tired of being a widower. He wants a warm bed.”

As if to confirm it was no fantasy dreamed up by her senile mind, Big Pete slipped his meaty hand into the slit dress and squeezed her thigh. He clicked his teeth and winked at me.

“Pete knows how to operate a farm,” said Mama. “And you do not, Jackie.” She didn't intend for it to sound mean or critical. It was just a statement of the way things were. I couldn't argue with her.

I went into the kitchen. Mama followed me in. I opened a beer. “I don't mean to hurt your feelings, Jackie,” she said.

“He's scheming to get our land,” I said. “He owns half the county, but it isn't enough.”

“No,” she said. “I'm the one who's scheming. I'm scheming for my boy who does not grasp the rudiments of the world.”

I had the sack of seeds with me. I realized that I'd been rattling them nervously.

“What do you have there?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Seeds,” I said.

“Seeds? What seeds? Who gave you seeds? Where'd you get them?”

I thought it best not to mention where I'd gotten them. “Big Pete Parley doesn't want to marry
you
,” I said. It was a mean thing to say, and I wanted to say it.

Mama sighed. “It doesn't matter what he wants, Jack. I'm dead anyway.” She took the bag of seeds from me, picked some up, squinted at them.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I said, sarcastically.

She went to the window above the sink and stared out into the dark. Under the folds of her evening gown, I could see the ruined shape of her old body. “Dead, Jack,” she said. “I've been dead for a while now. Maybe you didn't notice.”

“No,” I said. “I didn't.”

“Well, you should have. I went to sleep shortly after your Daddy died and I had a dream. The dream got stronger and stronger as it went on until it was as vivid as real life itself. More vivid. When I woke up I knew that I had died. I also knew that nothing in the world would ever be as real to me as that dream.”

I almost asked her what the dream was about, but I didn't, out of meanness. In the living room Big Pete Parley was whistling impatiently. The davenport was squeaking under his nervous weight.

“So, you see, Jackie,” said Mama. “It doesn't matter if I marry Pete Parley or what his motives are in this matter. You are all that counts now. He will ensure your success in the world.”

“I don't want to be a success, Mama,” I said.

“Well, you have no choice. You cannot gainsay the dead.”

She opened the window and dumped out the sack of seeds. Then Big Pete Parley came into the kitchen. “Let's go for a walk,” he said. “It's too blame hot in this house.”

They left by the kitchen door. I watched them walk across the yard and into the dark, unplanted field. Big Pete had his arm around Mama's shoulder. I wondered if he knew, or cared, that he was marrying a dead woman. Light from the half-moon painted their silhouettes for a while. Then the dark field absorbed them.

————

I went to bed and slept for what might have been days. In my long sleep I had a dream. I was canoeing down a whitewater river that ran sharply uphill. The farther up I got, the rougher the water became. Finally, I had to beach the canoe. I proceeded on foot until I came to a large gray house that had been built in a wilderness forest. The house was empty and quiet. I went in. It was clean and beautifully furnished. Nobody was home. I called out a few times before I understood that silence was a rule. I went
from room to room, going deeper and deeper toward some dark interior place. I understood that I was involved in a search. The longer I searched, the more vivid the dream became.

When I woke up I was stiff and weak. Mama wasn't in the house. I made a pot of coffee and took a cup outside. Under the kitchen window there was a patch of green shoots that had not been there before. “You got something for me?” I said.

A week later that patch of green shoots had grown and spread. They were weeds. The worst kind of weeds I had ever seen. Thick, spiny weeds, with broad green leaves tough as leather. They rolled away from the house, out across the fields, in a viny carpet. Mean, deep-rooted weeds, too mean to uproot by hand. When I tried, I came away with a palm full of cuts.

In another week they were tall as corn. They were fast growers and I could not see where they ended. They covered everything in sight. A smothering blanket of deep green sucked the life out of every other growing thing. They crossed fences, irrigation ditches, and when they reached the trees of a windbreak, they became ropy crawlers that wrapped themselves around trunks and limbs.

When they reached the Parley farm, over which my dead mother now presided, they were attacked by squadrons of helicopters which drenched them in poisons, the best poisons chemical science knew how to brew. But the poisons only seemed to make the weeds grow faster, and after a spraying the new growths were tougher, thornier, and more determined than ever to dominate the land.

Some of the weeds sent up long woody stalks. On top of these stalks were heavy seedpods, fat as melons. The strong stalks pushed the pods high into the air.

The day the pods cracked, a heavy wind came up. The wind raised black clouds of seed in grainy spirals that reached the top of the sky, then scattered them, far and wide, across the entire nation.

Ellen Hunnicutt

“I don't know who tunes the fiddles,” says Sister Theophane.

“Fourteen?” I am only half listening.

“‘They play the Bach Double Concerto but I don't think they can tune their own violins.'” She reads this information from a letter, refolds the page, looks into her coffee cup and finds it empty. One more betrayal.

“Perhaps they never go out of tune,” I offer. “The Japanese can do anything these days.” I am thinking about gardenias, my very first corsage, how my fingers ached to touch the soft ivory petals.
Any place you touch will turn brown
. This is my mother's voice. The fretful, rising tone is perfectly preserved in my memory, like the fingering pattern for an extended arpeggio that, once learned, lives on forever in the brain cells. “What ever happened to gardenias?” I ask Sister Theophane.

“Opal, please be serious. Success depends on seeing to details. I've spent half my budget on these children, half the budget for the entire series.”

“I'll help you tune,” I say, contrite. “What's fourteen fiddles? Even if you are putting me out of business.”

Sister Theophane rises, takes both our cups for more coffee, hers in the left hand (sugar), mine in the right (black). “You have tenure, Opal.” A gentle reprimand.

In the cafeteria at St. Theresa's College for Women, at four in the afternoon, it is 1949. I am eighteen and nothing has happened yet. It is a trick of the light, pale Chicago sun slanting through the high iron fence, bathing our simple buildings in a certain yellow glow that is inexpressibly sad. In many ways, St. Theresa's exists outside of time; many things have not changed since I was a student here. That is because nuns never wear anything out; and at St. Theresa's nobody vandalizes. Unscarred maple floor, golden oak dining tables, cool pink marble windowsills and, beyond the windows, the small sandstone chapel.

But I am not eighteen, and Sister Theophane in a neat blue dress, professor of music and my boss, thick-waisted and graying above the coffee cups is actually two years younger than I.

“I've decided to offer them ice cream,” Theophane says, heartened by fresh coffee. “Lemonade might make them need the bathroom.”

“They'll probably need the bathroom anyway.”

“Opal, will you please stop it? You aren't helping. You really aren't.”

“I'm sorry. I've just turned fifty. It's made me touchy.”

Theophane considers, decides to say nothing, opens and reads again the letter from her friend, a nun in Indianapolis.

Why are joy and sadness so inextricably mixed? Memory and desire. I have a third-year student who is setting parts of
The Waste Land
to music for women's choir. She rehearses her singers in a basement room where someone is growing an ivy philodendron on a high windowsill. I listen to the voices, study the deep green of leaves spilling over the cool basement wall, and it seems to me there is some important thing I need to know, hidden in the voices of these young women.

One day last week I drove home by St. Luke's Hospital where nuns still wear habits. I paid a dollar to a parking attendant and sat quietly in the lobby of the hospital for an hour to watch the nuns. This recalled for me, oddly, not my childhood among teaching sisters but nuns in old films, moving
across the landscape of faraway countries bringing succor to the needy. I saw a priest who looked like actor Barry Fitzgerald.

An hour later, moving through the glut of Chicago traffic, this experience lost all reality for me. I wondered if I had, indeed, been at St. Luke's. Sometimes this happens to me when I am teaching. I fancy a student will suddenly look at me and discover I am not a teacher at all, but an uncertain young woman like herself, masquerading in a middle-aged body. The two things are not precisely the same.

————

“Fifty,” I say in the dark, moving close to Howie.

“I'm glad you're not fat,” he says against my throat. It is the lopsided compliment too-thin women receive all of their lives. “Jack Webster's wife must be three feet across in the butt.” He strokes my skinny butt gratefully.

“Howie, I need to know something.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think about girls? I want you to tell me.”

“All the time,” he answers promptly. “That's all I think about, naked girls standing in long lines, day and night.”

“Please, I want to know. I'm not young anymore.”

“Neither am I,” says Howie, refusing to play games.

I do this to him almost daily, compulsively.

————

Theophane, my closest friend, is silent across the table. I wonder what her fantasies are, what nuns dream about.

————

Howie is an engineer, of the old school: get the work out. Georgia Tech, class of '51. He does not spend time planning utopias as many of the younger men do. Such things may come. Howie has no objection. But he isn't counting on it.

He flies to Boston (often) to supervise the installation of packaging machinery. In his pockets and in the expensive briefcase I gave him for Christmas he carries calipers, socket wrenches, locking pliers, a set of screwdrivers. Traveling, he is a walking hardware store. When he goes through airport security, he buzzes. Howie always buzzes. In an illogical, ridiculous
way this pleases me. I'm glad I am married to a man who buzzes in airport security.

“Bring me something from Boston,” I say petulantly.

Howie dutifully complies. At the end of the week he returns, bringing me two rolls of Lifesavers and a coffee mug. You can't shop in airports.

I thank him with a thin smile, set the mug on a kitchen shelf, serve dinner with cool, elaborate gestures, making it clear that I have been wounded.

At four in the morning I wake suddenly, gripped with remorse, gut-wrenching terror. Howie sleeping peacefully beside me is fifty-four, could die at any time. He has passed the age where people say, “What a tragedy, so young.” They would say, “Howard Franklin? What did he have?” I slip from bed in the darkness, go to a hall closet and dig out the old air force jacket Howie wore in college, bury my face in it and weep piteously, seeing my husband in his grave and wondering what I should do with the second car. I have never learned to make out an automobile title. I determine to learn at once. This small decision calms me and I am glad Howie has not heard nor seen me. My hands release the jacket and I picture this calm, capable woman I have become: giving directions, signing papers, saying, “What, after all, is death? A change in mode from major to minor, a shift in tempo, a variation on a theme.” All of our children are dead. Why not Howie? Why not me? Such things are easy. That's it, isn't it?

————

My mother never understood why all of our babies died. One two three four five. Like little Indians.

“Darling, people have one miscarriage,” she said, visiting me at the hospital. “Everyone has one miscarriage. It's common.” Somehow this was meant as instruction, like telling me to whip the fudge just until it loses its glossy sheen.

I swam up from a fuzzy sea of contradictions and drugs—scopolamine in those days—and pressed my fingertips against the outline of my uterus, a curious, swollen mass lying just beneath the skin of my abdomen. Then, for the one and only time in my life, I had a vision. I saw my mother going through supermarkets and department stores, making her private survey,
stopping women with plump babies and curly-headed toddlers. All of them told her they had, indeed, had one miscarriage, between babies, probably a deformed fetus and all for the good. And mother, nodding, made check marks on a piece of paper that looked like a birth announcement. Scopolamine works on the mind.

Mother twisted her handkerchief, displayed courage, was admirable. Then bitter, shivery little sobs forced themselves from her throat. Against her will, she cried. Pushed past her limit, by me. Life until that time had been a trick done with mirrors; then the mirrors were snatched away.

This memory is self-serving. I savor the delicious tang of betrayal like rich dessert across my tongue, pity poor Theophane who has not suffered as I have, feel generous toward her because of this.

————

What, after all, is death? I know death the way I know a student composition. “Wait until you hear it!” cries the eager student. But I hear it already, just looking at the score. Epistemology of music notation.

————

After the fifth and final miscarriage, Howie and I lay side by side in the darkness, numb and shaken. “It's going to be all right,” he said protectively, but with a hostile edge to his voice. Someone was to blame. Soon he would find the target for his anger. Any minute now. But he never did. Howie never got revenge. What he got was a promotion.

I got Robert, eleven years old, near-sighted. “Mrs. Franklin?” Robert's mother was an eager, huffy little voice in the telephone. “I understand you used to play violin with the symphony.” When excited, she talked through her nose.

“I don't play any more. I don't teach.”

“Robert isn't doing at all well in the class at school. We want private lessons for him with a skilled person.” She came down hard on “skilled.” Had she already interviewed and rejected a dozen teachers? Robert's mother was formidable. She did all of the right things for the wrong reasons, knew that any violinist who refused to teach her son had to be good. Damned good. “Don't give me an answer today, Mrs. Franklin.” Robert's mother eventually found her true vocation, now sells insurance.

————

“Vibrate slowly,” I said to Robert, “like an owl Who-uh, who-uh, who-uh. After you smooth out the wiggle-waggle, you can speed up.” Nobody had ever said this to Robert before and he didn't mind trying it. He was fascinated with a teacher who wore velvet pants and chain-smoked through the lesson.

“Can I ride in your Porsche?” he asked. At the end of the lesson, his mother handed me a five-dollar bill.

That night at dinner I showed the money to Howie. “I can buy my own cigarettes.” He grinned, then he got up and put brandy in the coffee. I carried the bill folded in my wallet all week, and walked through shops looking at things that cost five dollars.

Incredibly, Robert liked me. He brought me sticks of Dentyne gum and told me jokes.

“To read a signature in sharps,” I said to him “look at the last sharp on the right and go up one.

“Jesus, that's a neat trick,” said Robert, who was just learning to swear.

I laid plans to steal Robert and flee to Australia. I'd call Howie from Brisbane and make him understand. Or maybe Canada. Howie could commute while the litigation dragged out.

Robert, who was ordinary, brought in his wake Clarissa, who was exceptional. Plain, stout, brilliant. Eyes as cool and clever as a leopard's. She was fifteen, and she hated me. Her vibrato was pure, no wiggle-waggle, and she knew it. She knew everything.

“All music imitates the human voice,” I told her.

“I know that,” said Clarissa.

“Sing the music as you play. When you're able to do that, you can just breathe with it. The length of one breath is the basis for all phrasing.”

“I know that,” said Clarissa, a reflex. She was an inch taller than I with powerful arms and hands and the perfect apple skin that plump little girls often carry into adolescence. When she is forty, I thought, she will be a handsome woman. She reminded me of pictures I had seen of Anna Freud. Except for the hatred in her face.

But she came back week after week, often with her lesson memorized. “Your instincts are good,” I said to her. “Trust them. When the wispy little
business starts in your head, don't cut it off. Nurture it.” Her attack was masterly, a thick, brown bite, slightly bitter, understated, theatrical.

I wanted to steal her, run away to Argentina. “You'll like Buenos Aires,” I'd say, and Clarissa would answer, “I know that.”

I received the first phone call from her grandfather. Elderly, Russian-born, he called Leningrad St. Petersburg. He loved the violin the way some men love beautiful women. “The child sounds better. Thank you.”

“She's doing it herself.” Which was true.

“I am now prepared to buy her a better instrument.” He named the amount he was willing to spend.

It caught me off guard. “You can't be serious.” I stammered, gushed, sounded ridiculous. “For that money you could have a Guarnerius.”

A Guarnerius, it seemed, was exactly what he had in mind. “What if she stops practicing?” I asked.

He chuckled. “She won't, and a fiddle is always an investment. I can't lose.” Although he did not play himself, he had already owned a Stradivarius, sold it, now missed it. “I'd rather pay the finder's fee to you, Mrs. Franklin. You know the child best.”

————

“Me,” I told Howie.

“You can do it,” he said. “Why not?”

“When he sees me he'll change his mind.”

But the grandfather came over the following evening, shook my hand, and seemed satisfied. He smoked a cigar and drank Scotch with Howie. As a young student in Germany he had met Clara Schumann, heard her tell the wonderful stories about Brahms. I put it together—Clara, Clarissa. “Mrs. Franklin,” he said, “Clarissa is modeling herself after you. She has purchased a pair of shoes exactly like the ones you are wearing.”

“Clarissa?” It was news to me.

That night I dreamed I telephoned Clara Schumann and asked her to find a fiddle. She was barefoot, offered to trade a fiddle for a pair of shoes. In the dream I spoke fluent German, a language I do not know.

Actually, I called Altman, my own former teacher, retired in San Diego. “Opal!” he cried. “Bring Howie and come to California. We'll eat clams, just like the old days in Chicago. My wife died. Did you know that?”
Altman said, “Zenger's the best. In Cleveland. You call Zenger.” Zenger said he'd talk to St. Louis and get back to me.