monday muddlings: the foolish and the weak

Fiction Monday! Just under the wire of my usual deadline …

The Foolish and the Weak

Five pairs of shoes plus one littered the foyer of the remodeled plantation house. Somewhere a crow cawed. The ceiling creaked as Mary walked around upstairs. He stood in the entry to the dinning room, smoking a pipe.

“It seems a very silly thing to be,” said the young girl of about thirteen, who sat at the dinning room table and nibbled intently on a piece of toast.

“What?” he asked, absentminded, sending a plume of smoke around his face, which was turned away from her.

“Why would anyone ever want to be one? Won’t you just be sad and annoyed with the world all the time? Or worse, won’t you go around pretending that you have it all figured out when you really don’t know anything at all?”

She gasped in horror and raised the octave of her voice, frightening herself by what she then asked. “Or worse than that, will you be so proud that you don’t know anything at all that you’ll be insufferable all the time and no one shall ever want to love you and children will hate it when you come around because you will ruin all the best stories?”

She clutched the half-eaten toast fiercely in her hands, the way a priest held the broken wafer, her eyes in a squint. She was not one for hyperbole and had not, in the young man’s memory, embellished even the dullest of stories in her short and sober life.

He laughed.

A gentler laugh than she expected and far more present. She had thought he had left her for the place in his head again. He turned to face her and balanced his pipe delicately in his right hand. He took note of how she held the toast. “You’ve spent too much time listening to Mother.”

“You haven’t spent enough!” she interjected defensively, then studied the table.

She resented the cruelty of her age: too intelligent to be considered a mere child and yet too young to be trusted to care for herself. Not that she would ever get the luxury of true freedom, even when she was older. Their parents had tried the great modern experiment of child independence once before. It had produced the pipe smoking, would-be philosopher.

This was the shame of the family.

Not him, per se, but the experiment itself. If they had never succumb to the burden of humanism and modernity, they would have perhaps preserved him from the fiendish lust for knowledge he had been seduced by.

But everything was different then. The first war had made everyone think that the bucket that time dripped into drop after drop was finally full.

When the sun kept rising and setting, it surprised everyone. Maybe the world was new. Maybe the new world needed a new kind of human.

But Martha, who took a bite of her toast, keeping it firmly clasped in her two delicate hands, was different than he was. She knew it and so did he. Her soul was too big for her body. The only places she ever fit were the places that seemed to blur the line between the two worlds. But there was no explaining that to anyone, least of all their parents. She didn’t have the vocabulary and English was so impoverished to begin with. She hid it, resigning to be a literalist around them. It was easier.

Only he knew better.

“Wireless this morning said that they liberated another camp yesterday.” The pipe was back in his mouth. He puffed it gently, for her amusement.

She lowered the breakfast Eucharist from her mouth and studied him carefully through the smoke rising around his face like incense before the altar. “Because we dropped the bomb?” she asked. “Was that the magic? Pushing against the deep magic? Enough people die that enough other people have to live? God tips the scale to one side?”

“God is an invention of man.”

“So is magic,” she replied, “But that doesn’t stop it from being true. It’s true because something deeper is true. Magic can only work if deep magic exists.”

Her vocabulary was failing her.

She was disappointed by how smug he was when he looked at her; he forgot their age difference too often. He expected her to be able to argue the way his friends did at university when they would sit around the bar, drink whiskey, and debate the nature of being and nothingness. Everything, every conversation, was always veiled in smoke.

She stopped looking at him and turned her gaze to the window. Outside the world was being laid raw by the sun. The fields were amber with death and what wind there ever was on these days, even the faintest whisper, was enough to snap the brittle stalks of the fields and bend them over like a suffering servant under the lash. If only she could run. Even to be bent over like those dead stalks would be better than the unbearable pleasantness of their dinning room in the grip of unforgiving summer in their house standing somewhere off at the end of the world.

“When the priest rang the bells on Sunday, I cried.” She didn’t look at him when she said it, but kept her gaze set on the bareness of the world outside. “How is it that He could be here? Even now? We don’t need Him here. We need Him there. We need Him over there with those people. They were His once, weren’t they? Surely that still matters. It must mean something. It has to mean something. One camp? What’s one camp?”

He took the pipe from his mouth and studied the ceiling. It rumbled softly when Mary crossed it. She would have finished stripping the room upstairs of all the linens and anything that would still smell of death. The body was gone, but the smell still lingered.

Such a tiny body, such a potent smell.

Sickness had a substance about it, palpable in a way that none of them had been prepared to stomach. The suddenness was alarming. He had last seen John at Christmas. He had balanced the small boy on his knee, taught him how to punch his hands, and even let him land a few on his chin. When the wire reached him, he left immediately. On the train he read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and by the time he stepped from it, greeted by the stoic gaze of his Father, who then crumpled into the arms of his estranged son before he could even speak the words, the son had become an atheist.

Reflecting on it, though it had only been a few days previous, he wasn’t sure when it had happened. There had been times before. It surely was the result of many thoughts and a few drunken conversations. But the specific moment he was converted he could not lay a finger on. Somewhere, crossing some unknown stretch of dead field robbed of breath by the all-seeing sun, God became figment. He became a philosopher.

Distinct categories that could not blend. So he told himself, at least. And so he had told her.

All solid things torn asunder and a fire set to them, a burnt offering as meaningful as pipe smoke, nothing more.

“It’s just a bit of fiction,” he said. “You shouldn’t get so troubled by it. Cry for John. John was real.”

“He’s still real,” she murmured, turning her gaze from the window back to him. Martha placed her hands firmly on the table and inspected his face through the smoke. “Even now He could raise him back up. You used to know that. That used to mean something to you.”

“Words. Sentiment. Trite things that we throw around. God’s will.” At this he laughed, taking the pipe from his mouth and letting smoke curl up around him. “What an awful thing to say to someone. God willed the death of your child. Praise him!”

“Stop it!” she interjected, taking her right hand and smacking the table in annoyance. “You know very well it’s not like that. Of course that’s an awful thing to say. That’s why good Christians don’t say it.”

“But they think it.”

“But not that way.”

“How else? How else do you explain it, Martha?” He looked at her with a kind of haunted anger. Perhaps it was appall. How could she, of all people, think that way? He took his pipe and frustratingly deposited it on the credenza. “One brother dead. Martha, explain it to me, then. Give me your great theophany. Explain the good god.”

“I don’t know what that means!” she shouted, tears welling up in her eyes. Martha blinked rapidly and two drops of anguish slid from her cheeks onto the remnant of the broken and abandoned toast on her plate.

He had forgotten her age. He always forgot her age.

“Evil, Martha. Explain your good god and this whole damn world.”

“I can’t,” she sobbed, pushing herself back from the table. She made to get up but then remained seated, staring into her lap. Her lips trembled violently, searching for the words that she had not yet learned that would be able to explain.

If only she had the words.

“I don’t think about it,” she at last resolved. “It doesn’t bother me.”

Looking up, she saw his face was awash with anger.

She persisted. “Can’t you understand me? It’s not the question I ask. It’s the silence, Thomas, it’s the silence that I can’t bare. He is here when He should be there. And I don’t know why He won’t just go.”

“Because,” he bellowed, “he never was.”

Martha could hear no more. She stumbled up from her chair and hastily moved to pass him. He attempted to catch her, thinking it for her own good, but by chance she swung at him in her distress and caused him to bump against the credenza, the pipe slipping off and overturning onto the front of his left hand. He swore violently and threw the burning tobacco off him onto the floor. It singed the rug.

Upstairs, Mary had heard the altercation and was crossing the hall above them, reaching the top of the stairs in time to see Martha slip on a shoe then fling the front door open with a resounding bang and stumble through it out into the heat.

Martha was running. Or at least what she only knew to be running. She staggered down the front steps off the porch and fled off the path into the dead field. The sun immediately began to imprint her flesh with a vengeful sweltering, but being consumed by it was inexplicably liberating. The stalks bent low and crunched as she ran forward, into the wild abandon of the world that was as far as she could see and as far as she knew only more dead field.

The sower’s crop had come up full but there was no more water.

Just the sower. No water. And no asking for water expecting a reply.

She hadn’t made it very far.

He and Mary stood on the porch and watched her. They should have gone after her, but there didn’t seem to be much point. It would be over soon enough anyway. Martha would learn. She was a smart girl but she was too big for the world her god had made for her. They saw her small form bobbing up and down in the stalks and then, at last, no longer saw her head. Mary shook her head, tears forming in her eyes as she gasped about the cruelty that God had visited on their family.

He didn’t bother to correct her.

Martha beat her fists against the wooden form of her left leg. She was beyond crying. Her body could not bring itself to try and balance on the natural and the artificial anymore, so she had toppled like the fool she thought she must surely be. Again and again she beat her fists against the wood and her soul screamed with the depth of a child’s vengeance for the disillusionment of the world.

Why the silence? Why would He not go?

The heat eventually overwhelmed her and she collapsed in exhaustion. She heard the approach of footsteps in the grass. Somewhere a crow cawed. He picked her up and cradled her.

He smelled of smoke and grief.

She buried her head in his neck and relished the sensation of his hand on her right leg. It was more real to her then than the ringing bells, but it wasn’t as substantive as the silence.

In the house, he laid her down in the front living room while Mary went to bring rags soaked in cool water. The wireless had been left on. More news from the front. Another camp liberated.

Martha stirred slightly and opened her eyes. “It’s to explain the silence, isn’t it?”

“What?” He asked, somewhat startled.

“It’s to explain the silence.” She repeated, this time not as a question. “I understand it now. You need to explain it. You can’t just live with it. It’s like a part of you would be missing.” A small smile. “And you only know what it is to be whole. That’s not the blessing you think it is.”

He rose up from the chair he had sat down in and crossed over to her side. He knelt there and kissed her cheek. “You’re plenty whole,” he whispered, “Plenty whole.”

But she had drifted off into sleep from the exhaustion of the heat and the effort to run. He had thought it would have taught her something but she remained unchanged. He felt a sudden urge to strike her sleeping form, but then recoiled in horror at himself. He stood and walked back to his chair, sitting quietly down in it, looking out the window above the couch where Martha slept.

The sun continued its slow movement across the sky. He was tempted to stare at it until he became blind.

“Clouds in the east.” Mary was standing in the threshold, holding cool, damp cloths. “Maybe rain by tonight.”

He studied his left hand, running his right gently over it and wincing slightly. “Makes the soil better for digging graves.” He bit his lower lip, holding back the emotion that had suddenly thrust a knife into his side. “All we ever do now is dig graves.”

He bent over and sobbed into his knees.

Mary turned slowly from him and laid the damp cloths on Martha’s head.

Martha stirred slightly, opened her eyes for a small moment, seemed to recognize something, then drifted off to sleep, a smile on her lips.

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.