A Place Of Light Read online

  MARY BUCCI BUSH

  A PLACE OF LIGHT

  PICAS SERIES 56

  GUERNICA

  Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

  2007

  CONTENTS

  Cure

  Outlaws

  Difficult Passage

  A Place of Light

  Bread

  Muskrat

  Emergency

  Rude Awakening

  Losing Willy Gleason

  Hunters

  Glass

  Underground Railroad

  In gratitude to my two teachers,

  George P. Elliott and Raymond Carver

  CURE

  We did not have the carp tail, but we did have the skull of a mole and the brown clay. If we could get the carp by supper, then leave the tail to dry, in the morning our mother would be sitting up and she would be all right. The mole we took away from the cat. The clay we got from swimming where the houses are being built, where they are digging the cellars. The only place for carp is the canal.

  Great-aunt Maria strained tea wearing one black glove. She had the wad of parsley stuck up one nostril, part of it starting to fall out. It was the special parsley, that grew wild, the kind that kept away disease. She is the one who told us about the carp, the mole, and the clay.

  Our father cried when the doctor left, hiding his face, and quiet so we would not know. Our mother was never sick before, never. But now it was the fifth day that she lay in bed, with the doctor coming almost every day and Great-aunt Maria coming to make tea and say prayers and cook for us. They would not let my brother and me in there, and they did not tell us anything except “Quiet” and “Go outside and play” and “You, girl, watch your brother.” But when we saw father crying we decided she was going to die. Then Great-aunt Maria said she could make a poultice, but father said, “There will be no voodoo in this house. We believe in doctors in this house.”

  So Maria would say her prayers in those words we could not understand while she made tea or washed dishes or cooked for us. When father was gone she would say, “All your mama needs is the Cure. Carp mole clay.” But she did not talk looking at us. She talked into pots and cups so that we could hear her but so that she was not telling us.

  She told the pots and cups exactly how to make it, where to get the things, and when to get them. She told the pots and cups when our father was not there, and we heard her and looked at each other. And Father would come in and say, “Good Christ, Maria, it’s the middle of August, take off that glove.” Or he would look at her and say, “Some day you are going to take a deep breath and suffocate on that weed.” And she would make tea or wash dishes or cook for us, saying her prayers, without looking at anyone.

  Now our father did not care anymore where we were because all he did was sit with her and wait for the doctor and tell Maria to take off her glove. We took our poles, and my brother took the knife from the kitchen. When Maria’s back was turned I got the matches from the stove.

  I was bigger, so I pedaled and he sat on the handlebars and we both held the poles. We hid the bike under the bushes and walked down Main Street. In front of the diner is the best place. We found four or five butts between the street and curb, most of them almost too short to hold, and my brother found a piece of cigar with a plastic holder and the teeth marks on it. Then Meltzer yelled “You Kids” from the front of his store and we ran around the corner. We passed the A & P and headed back down to the canal.

  We used the knife to dig under the elderberry bush where it was damp, but the worms were all skinny and little. Then we dug down near the water where the bank had caved in and you could touch the water but there was nothing there. So we had to use the skinny ones. Nobody else was fishing except way down on the bridge there was one kid with a pole. We watched him pull on his line and lean over and sit down and wait and pull again. When it broke he left.

  Then we took them out and I hit a match on a stone and lit us both up. “How’s yours?” I asked.

  “Pretty good,” he said.

  I told him, “You’re going to share that cigar with me.”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said.

  “It’s my bike,” I told him.

  We smoked and waited for some bites. He said, “You think we are going to be like the Allen kids?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. I could see he was scared.

  “There’s four of them,” he said. “And only their father takes care of them. He cooks, too.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He got a bite. His worm was gone, so he put a new one on. I was getting hot, and my T-shirt was sticking to me. I put my hand under the shirt and stretched the cloth with my fist, to pull the shirt away from my chest. He looked at me.

  “You are too getting them,” he said. “You said you wasn’t getting them, but you are.”

  “I am not,” I said, and I sat up straight and pulled at the shirt to make them go away.

  “They’re big, too,” he said.

  “Shut up, ass,” I told him.

  Then we smoked the cigar.

  We stayed a long time getting nibbles, losing our worms, and we finished all the butts.

  “What we going to do if we don’t catch one?” my brother asked.

  “We’ll get one,” I told him. Then I said, “You stay here and watch my pole.”

  “We gotta go home pretty soon,” he said. “And we don’t have a carp. If we don’t get one –”

  I stood there looking at him and I couldn’t tell what brown was from the sun and what brown was from the dirt. I knew he was going to cry.

  “If we don’t get one,” he said.

  “Shut up,” I told him. “Shut up and watch the poles or we won’t catch anything.”

  I put the knife in the waist of my pants and walked along the bank, careful not to step on twigs or make a sound, making my face go hard because I was White Falcon, the warrior, I was strong and I did not care about anything. I was looking for a place to dig worms. I passed a tangled piece of line and a half-rotted sunfish, an old Coke bottle, a branch stuck in the ground to hold a pole.

  Then I saw him down near the other bridge, the shape I knew that was Ed Otts. I kept walking because I was not afraid of anything. He put his bag down and looked at me. He coughed and spit into the canal. Then I was near him and I saw there were two fish on the ground behind him and his pole, too, was on the ground. One of the fish was a carp.

  I ran back to my brother and told him, “Old Man Otts is down by the other bridge catching carp.” We grabbed our poles and the skinny worms we had put on the burdock leaf, and we took off.

  We went as close to him as we dared and we put our lines in. He kept coughing and spitting and we could tell he was looking at us. I sat up straight and stretched the shirt away from my body.

  After a while he said, “What you kids fishing for?”

  “Carp,” I told him, watching my line.

  We fished for a while. I pulled in a sunfish. “We gotta go,” my brother said to me with that crying sound. We kept fishing with old Ed Otts watching us.

  “I got a carp right here,” Ed Otts told us. “Going to throw it back in.”

  We stopped fishing and looked at him. “We’ll take that carp if you don’t want it,” I told him.

  He looked down toward the other bridge. “What you want with a carp,” he said.

  “We’re going to eat it,” I told him.

  He looked at me a long time, then at my brother, then back at me. “I can see you ain’t no niggers,” he said. “You must be wops if you planning to eat carp.”

  We didn’t say anything.

  He picked up his pole and played with the hook that was stuck in the handle. Then he put it down. “Th
at ain’t my carp anyways,” he said. “Somebody else left that carcass here. Take it if you want.”

  We stood up. I went behind Ed Otts and bent over to get the fish. It was a big one, and I saw that it had been dead some time. “It’s rotten,” I said. “It stinks.” Then I felt him close behind me, and I turned quick, jumping away from his hand. I looked at him. His eyes were wet and pushed into his face. When he opened his mouth I saw that broken tooth.

  I kept moving away. “Get the poles,” I told my brother. I picked up my own pole and reeled it in.

  “I can’t,” he said, with that crying sound. “It’s caught.” He was tugging at his line, and then he was fighting it.

  “I got something,” he said.

  “Snap your line,” I told him. “Reel in.”

  “It’s a big one,” he said, jerking his pole, reeling the line.

  He pulled the fish in, and I grabbed at it. He held his pole while I held the fish with the line in its mouth.

  Then we both started walking away fast, with Old Man Otts watching. I could still feel the place on my back where he touched me. He coughed and spit and called to us. “Big girl like you oughta wear a bra,” he said. Then we ran.

  When we got back to the bike we dropped the poles and the fish. “It’s a carp,” my brother said. The fish was big and shiny. It worked its mouth, and twisted its tail as it flopped on the grass. I put my foot on its side to hold it still and tried to get the hook out. But the hook was deep in the fish’s throat. I worked at it while the fish stared and gasped and tried to twist away. Blood trickled from its mouth.

  “It won’t come out,” I said. “He swallowed the hook.” I took the knife from my pants.

  “No,” my brother said. “It’s my last hook.” Then he tried.

  “Leave it,” I told him. “It won’t come.”

  “I think I’ve got it,” he said.

  The fish was wild.

  “We have to go,” I told my brother.

  “Cut its tail off,” he told me. “When it’s dead I can get the hook out. It’s almost out.”

  I watched the fish. “I can’t if he’s alive,” I said. The fish wriggled under my brother’s foot. “Let me try again,” I told him.

  I sat on the ground and held the fish through the gills, its body pressed between my knees. I worked my fingers into its mouth and moved the hook until I felt something crunching. I swallowed the blood taste in my own mouth, and kept at the hook until it was free.

  I let the fish go and it lay on the grass breathing air, its eyes wide. “We need an ax for the tail,” I told my brother. “This knife’s no good. We gotta take it home and ax it.”

  “How we gonna get it home?” he asked.

  When I told him, he said no. Then we stood there looking at the fish. We couldn’t leave the poles behind. It would take too long for one of us to walk with it. It was getting late.

  “Because I need more room because I’m pedaling,” I told him again. “And besides, your shirt’s longer.”

  “Okay,” he finally said.

  So he tucked his shirt in and we put the fish inside his shirt. Then the fish moved and he put his hand to the shirt, and his face was sick. He sat on the handlebars and we both held the poles while I rode him home.

  We went right to the shed and we put the fish on the wooden bench. Then I got the ax. But the fish still wasn’t dead. It worked its mouth and flipped and then lay still until it jerked again, gasping, its eyes open wide.

  “Does it hurt him?” my brother asked.

  “They don’t feel anything,” I told him.

  “He acts like it hurts,” my brother said.

  I squeezed the ax handle. “We should have taken that dead one,” I said.

  We waited for the fish to die.

  “Should we kill it?” my brother asked. “Should we cut off its tail now?”

  “I think it’s dead,” I told him. I lifted the ax. The fish flipped over, suddenly, and it fell off the bench, into the dark below. We heard it knock against the paint cans.

  We dropped to our knees and looked for the fish, pushing aside rusted coffee cans full of nails, a shovel blade, and pieces of two-by-fours. It was dark, and we couldn’t see or hear the fish. We felt with our hands, but touched only the cold floor, the dirt and cobwebs, scraps of wood and nails.

  “I don’t hear it anymore,” my brother said.

  “Quiet,” I told him.

  We listened.

  “We need a flashlight,” I said. “It’s too dark.”

  “Maybe it’s dead now,” he whispered.

  We heard the fish move again, far underneath the bench, against the cans and junk.

  “We have to get a light,” I told him. We waited. There were no other sounds. “He’s dead,” I told my brother. “Let’s get the flashlight.”

  We left the fish and went into the house.

  Doc Rouse was there. We could hear his voice in where our mother was, talking to Father. Great-aunt Maria stirred our supper on the stove with one black glove, saying her prayers. She did not look at us.

  Then Father and the doctor came out and the doctor was saying it was the shot that finally did it. I looked at the cupboard, wondering what kind of shot, because he used both kinds. But then there was always that third kind, too, like Uncle Rem and the cow he took out in the field. They wouldn’t, I thought, and I looked at my brother and he looked at me, and we did not know what it was the shot did.

  “I thought at first,” the doctor said, “those tablets would do the trick.”

  Maria was saying her prayers.

  “With something like this,” he said, “you never know. You just have to keep trying and hope something works. Be thankful.”

  Father was wiping the hair from his forehead, looking down at the linoleum, looking like he just got out of bed. “I am,” he said. “Yes. I am.” He sounded like he was talking in his sleep.

  The doctor put his hand on Father’s shoulder. “I’ll stop by in the morning and give her another shot. She’ll be up and dancing in no time.” He nodded at Father and slapped him there on his shoulder.

  Then Father looked at us and his face changed like he finally woke up. “Good Christ,” he said. “What the hell’s on you? What is that?”

  From fishing, we told him.

  He grabbed my brother and shook him, saying, “Christ Almighty.”

  “Daddy,” my brother said, and he let go.

  “Couple of little rascals, eh?” the doctor said.

  He left, walking past Maria stirring our supper with one black glove. She looked at me. When our eyes met, her head dropped, like she was going to nod. But she didn’t nod. She just stood there with her head down. Then she turned back to her pot.

  “I should beat the living hell out of both of you,” Father said. But he sat down and put his head in his hands like he would cry again, or else fall asleep. All we could hear was the scrape scrape of Maria stirring our supper and her old voice mumbling those words that we did not understand.

  “Wash up,” he told us. “Wash up and change those goddamn clothes. Then go in there and see your mother.”

  OUTLAWS

  This time her Uncle Jo Jo had a rusty brown station wagon parked in his driveway, the hood up, his toolbox open on the lawn.

  When Josie and her mother pulled in behind the station wagon, Uncle Jo Jo came out of the house. He stood on the top step and raised his coffee mug in the air. “Hey, pardner,” he called out.

  Josie knew she was his favorite. Sometimes after he finished working on a car he’d take her with him on a test run. They’d drive out on the muck roads and he’d shout, “Let her rip,” then hit the gas, and they’d spin off down the road, hooting and throwing up a trail of dust, with Josie steering.

  Josie’s mother drummed her fingers on the dashboard. “Hurry up,” she said. “I’ll be late for work.”

  That wasn’t true, anyway, Josie thought. Her mother cooked the specials at the diner and could go in anytime aroun
d nine she wanted.

  Uncle Jo Jo came down the steps and stood near the station wagon. He grinned at them while Josie’s mother kept her eyes straight ahead. She was always mad at her brother for something. She was mad that he’d disconnected the safety shield at work and had the accident. She was mad that her brother’s wife, Irene, had to support the family – just like she had to. She was mad about the way Cousin Eddie turned out. Most of all, Josie thought, she was mad that Josie and her uncle had so much fun together.

  “I’d be fun, too,” her mother said, “if I had somebody looking after me hand and foot like I was the Dalai Lama. Irene’s a worse fool than he is. Thank God they found each other.”

  Josie gathered her school things and slammed the car door shut. At least she’d be able to spend Teachers’ Conference Day off with Uncle Jo Jo, even if she did have schoolwork to do. Her mother backed out of the driveway. She raised her fingers from the steering wheel as a goodbye, then pulled away.

  Uncle Jo Jo shook his head after her.

  “What’s wrong with the car?” Josie asked him.

  Uncle Jo Jo set his coffee mug down on the fender. “She’s dying of a broken heart,” he said. He sounded a little sad about it.

  “Oh,” Josie said.

  “I’ve reground the cylinders,” he told her. “Now I have to set the timing.”

  She told him about the extra-credit science project she had to turn in the next day if she wanted to pass the fourth grade. “I need twenty leaves in all,” she told him. “So far I’ve got maple, elm, box elder, sumac, cedar, weeping willow, and birch.”

  “That’s plenty,” he said.

  When she didn’t say anything he told her to check the backyard. “There’s lots of trees out there. There’s all kinds of maples. Get more.” He sounded a little annoyed, and she wondered if something was wrong. He went into the garage and came back running an extension cord. Then he went to work without saying anything else.

  The backyard was bordered by tall scraggly shrubs, but she wasn’t sure they counted as trees. Over behind the garden Uncle Jo Jo had started spading up his clump of dwarf fruit trees. Every year the apples and pears grew the size of her little fingernail, then died and fell off. Uncle Jo Jo sprayed them and pruned them and read books on what to do, but they still fell off. Josie wasn’t sure if dwarf fruit trees were like shrubs and wouldn’t count, but she plucked two leaves just the same and put them in her notebook.