A Beautiful Truth (15 page)

Jonathan made himself small.

Podo did favours for everyone, and they naturally turned to him whenever they wanted something that they couldn’t get on
their own. They turned to him or feared him whenever there was a dispute.

Fights broke out involving everyone sometimes. It was impossible to know how they had started unless it was a watermelon being thrown down to them by someone on the roof. Podo chose no sides. He fought until fighting stopped, smacking goons and pounding backs in the middle of the rolling krieg. Podo helped the ones on the bottom, the ones whom no one helped, and everyone needed help sometimes. And when he bit and tried to hurt, he hurt everyone. And the feeling that lasted for not very long was that fighting shouldn’t happen. Another short-lived feeling was that no one was to blame. The feeling that lasted longest was that Podo hurt everyone and thus hurt no one, because the pain that is truly longest is the one that comes from knowing that someone else was preferred and protected before you.

Tired Podo.

Fifi and Magda had new ones of their own in the cold white room and never saw them again. Days and dreams are light and colours and some of them disappear.

Then Magda had one which people called Bootie: that Bootie.

Mama felt slow and the World seemed slightly tilted. She got fat and felt like her belly would touch the ground when she walked.

There were new high stones to climb in the World, and Mama climbed them. She wanted help but wanted to be on her own. She felt a need to be away from others and wished she was in her bedroom.

She climbed to the highest stone and felt sick, and the melon, nuts and scallions which she ate that morning burst up from within and spilled out on her arm and the stones.

She descended one level and held on to the highest stone with one hand, leaning for support.

She felt pressure in her rosé. She closed her eyes and hid the World and the movements inside started hurting so much she kept silent instead of screaming and could not be alone enough.

She stayed standing on two legs and put her long fingers inside her rosé to relieve the pressure. It was warm and wet and she withdrew her fingers and licked them. She reached back and put her hand inside herself again and felt a tickle of warmth between her fingers.

She sat.

She thought.

She stood up again.

She put her hand inside again, deeper, and she moved around, got down on threes, stood up again with her fingers inside and felt something tighten and release.

Something poured out and soaked her arm.

She got down on all fours and felt nothing.

The pain returned and she sat with her back against the stone and rested. She felt as though she was dropping to the arms of untrustworthy yeks. She put a hand across her belly and liked the weight of it, watched her arm rise and fall through a contraction.

She held a hand outside her rosé. She squeezed around the outside, then held her hand beneath it, expecting something.

She felt tight inside and made a noise that unsettled the World. Fifi had been watching her for a while and walked towards the stones when she heard the yekel noise. Fifi climbed up some of the stones and watched Mama, who turned on her side and looked at Fifi and some of the pressure receded for a moment when she could see the face of her friend.

Then it came back. Mama moved around in silent agony and Fifi felt sad but had no pictures and watched like the innocent
watch a thing they cannot expect. Fifi’s new ones came out in the cold white room and she was always made to sleep.

Mama put her hand under her rosé and Fifi watched it open. It closed and opened and closed and opened and dirty fruit was emerging.

Then the fruit was a tiny goon with a face and in a hot wet rush a body came out and Mama caught it in her hand.

Mama hauled the body onto her belly and hugged it. A yellow string was attached and was wrapped around her tiny chest. Mama unravelled some of it.

Fifi looked at the lek all over the stones and the new one on Mama’s belly.

Mama felt a memory in her rosé and something else came out, which she caught in her hand and brought directly to her mouth. She ate some of it while the new one lay on her belly.

Fifi looked at the placenta and held out her hand for a piece but Mama kept it and ate.

She licked the red from her hands.

The new one was still on her belly.

Mama bit the yellow string, ate some of it, and the cincture was undone from the new one’s chest. Mama removed it and put her lips to her tiny lips and snut and sucked out the salt and the new one became more lively. Mama hugged her and she pleeped tiny grief and Mama made noises quiet and soft and rarely made. She kept sucking and licking the salt and red spit from this vivid apparition and felt stunned and short of breath.

Fifi walked back to the others and sat with Magda near the monkey bars.

Mr. Ghoul saw a small brown bird.

Mama slept and when she awoke she gave the new one some kisses and hugs and kept her on her belly. She remembered Fifi and
Magda, how Burke and Bootie ate, but the new one wouldn’t wake up on her belly. Mama got up and carried her like her cat, and climbed down the stones with no strength in her legs. She took her across the grass and sat on her own and wanted no one near her. People stared that night through her plekter bedroom.

Everyone wanted to see.

She touched her with the back of her fingers in the night and she sucked.

Mama stayed in her bedroom for days and people brought her food. No one could come in and she lay her new one on the floor. She lay next to her and stared.

Mama smeared red on the floor. The yellow string dried up.

She lay on her back with the new one on her belly and wriggled and wanted to squeeze. She ground her back and legs into the concrete, looked to the ceiling, tried to wriggle deeper into that memory, this floor, don’t squeeze, those fingers, are true. Softbone body, chest on Mama’s belly.

Nothing ever slept so small and still on an earth so heaving with want and satisfaction.

Montpelier’s golden dome.

Smooth wool against the leg or khaki or cavalry twill. Dry-handed handshakes and echoes of Mike, get it to Mike if you want to get it done. The Senate Chamber was intimate, elegant but modest, and the vessel of his happiest days.

He had won the most votes in every town but two. All the shoe leather and meetings paid off. While Walt and Larry searched for ease in their days, seeking distraction and toying with nature, Mike had come to be known in different towns—a new barn near Goshen; Rotary in Middlebury; in Ripton, years back, he had gained popularity by preventing an eighty-thousand-square-foot box store from arising and choking the land—and everyone came to support him.

He was humbled.

For the land and the people’s wishes he had learned to take down giants. On councils he had stalled applications, using wetlands as obstacles, demanding elaborate and unaffordable sewerage, using utility poles, traffic lights, sidewalks, winter maintenance in such
a powerful combination that most developers went running. Early on, this was sometimes in the common interest of his partnership with Walt and Larry, but that interest never did anything but enrich the state of Vermont.

He had done his work for the towns, and now that he was in the Senate he could focus on higher things.

Every year he attended the Addison County Fair and Field Days, and now that he was senator he had the privilege of serving food in the fairground’s main dining area. He made a point of serving Motts Vermont chicken from the Motts farm eight miles away, with mashed potatoes.

It was such an opportunity to get to know his constituents and their concerns, to touch each other with words, to showcase Vermont’s products and to celebrate the fact that food is more than food, it is communion. When it comes from the right place and is touched by hands that care, it is goodness. It is health, not mere survival. When harvested locally, sustainably, it is giving back to the earth. A chicken with no beak, pumped full of steroids and preservatives, suffering an unholy immolation and travelling by jet and truck to packing plants in the dirty corners of fallen cities—that is not food. That chicken knows no more of what it came from than those who make a living in the theatre.

I know the people who raised this chicken: Robert and Jennifer Motts. They live just up the road.

To know our food is to know ourselves, to know our place on this earth.

On the night before each Fair and Field Day he had a waking dream of himself, a benefactor at the centre of a long table, grateful for his responsibilities and for the gratitude he receives. He saw the smiles and the beautiful little mouths.

Judy came one year while Mike was attending. She said it’s
nice of you to take the time to do this and he said to serve is the highest thing I could do. He smiled and laughed because a laugh commands another’s smile.

She was a very charming woman, a little older now. She had never had the chance to congratulate Mike on his appointment, but he could tell from her behaviour that she was pleased for him.

Mike was wearing an apron and he dared to look long at her.

The centre of the eye is a tunnel through the past to the future.

I think about our ancestors when I do this said Mike.

He offered Judy some chicken.

No thanks.

Somewhere way back a man was doing this for his family. For his tribe. Sharing the meat that he earned. Not that I earned this, he laughed, although it was an ordeal getting the Motts to sell these chickens at the price I offered.

Salt on the lips, grease on the fingers. What dim light did they work with in cuttings and in caves.

Please at least try these potatoes. Please.

Judy explained that she had to run. She had an hour to herself and wanted to get some cheese for Walt and something sweet for Looee. He loves maple candy in decorative shapes—like a moose or a maple leaf. He sort of talks to it like he’s saying wow you look like that and I can eat you!

A veneer came over Mike’s eyes.

He wanted Judy to linger but he wanted richer talk, or no talk at all. He didn’t want to mention his wife but he wanted to take Judy’s hand and say my wife and I, too, are childless.

Judy bought two of every shirt for Walt—one for Looee and one for Walt. Looee was growing weekly. His arms were now so thick that extra-large Hawaiian shirts were the only ones that fit. Walt
thought I’m from Vermont and a businessman, and he buried his own Hawaiian shirts in a box.

Looee still needed help getting into certain outfits. His fingers couldn’t manage buttons. He was long reluctant to be helped. He strapped on his overalls by himself and spent the summer days bare-chested.

He collected quarters in a jar in his bedroom. He stole tools from the garage whenever he had a chance. Larry brought him Penthouse and Hustler instead of a girlfriend and said those are the real deal as far as fake things go.

Larry found Looee energizing and thought of the days when he ran and kept running and the earth didn’t call him in like it does its rusty products. He told Looee about a plot of land he owned off Highway 7 and said I’m going to build something there someday but I’m not sure what.

And through the summer the afternoons swelled and Looee ate a lot of spaghetti.

The noise in his concrete house was truly painful. When he attacked imaginary enemies or displayed for the women in the magazines it was best not to be around.

He wanted to run like the skinny men in the Olympics. Sebastian Coe. My money’s on Coe said Walt.

Judy watched his shoulders grow, his movements become more manly. An idle glance at his rolling walk brought muted memories of dances and yearning, whispers and surprises, a distant history of romance that passed behind her eyes like a storm drifting miles behind a traveller.

She washed the dishes and thought of a friend of hers with an autistic son: his tantrums and inability, remote connections, and no one understanding how relentlessly hard it was to raise him. Normality makes us human and disease makes us animals. Her
friend said she sometimes felt like the loneliest person in the world, even when—especially when—she was holding her squirming son.

Judy saw Looee’s growing abilities, but was ever aware of his limits. The way he fumbled at small things with his half-intelligent stare; how he used the backs of his fingers more readily than the tips. It was hard not to see him as slow sometimes, and ever since the landscapers laughed at him it was also hard not to see him as most others would see him: a figure of fun; a satire of wisdom. A hairy ape in a shirt looked like a mockery of evolution, or progress retarded.

Judy was lonely like her friend. No society, no chance of normality, no school or achievements or growing relaxation. She couldn’t grow towards adult communion with him or share ideas as others did with normal children.

But she was not as lonely as she would have been if she had never met him.

Judy had seen things through meeting Looee she would never have otherwise seen. She ended up volunteering again at the hospice—no longer because she was yearning for a purpose, as she had a decade earlier.

She told people stories about Looee. She found that the dying have no need for perfection. They liked to hear her stories.

Now, long after the incident with the landscapers, Judy had said it’s best to keep strangers at a distance. She feared he might expect all strangers to make fun of him and that he would have no trust left. She was also afraid of his violence. Since the onset of adolescence she had noticed a defensive posture about him. It had mostly metamorphosed into a swagger now, but she knew it didn’t take much to set him off.

He threw a long tantrum one day when Susan visited and Judy didn’t let him out of his house. He jumped on his bed and
screamed when Susan left, and she and Judy looked at him from outside as if he was a lunatic. Judy said someone looks upset, and left him alone that day.

Walt didn’t want him to get lonely, though. I’m going to go to his place more. I haven’t been doing that enough.