Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (13 page)
Read Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories Online
Authors: Elizabeth Hand
Later, after I had kissed Tina goodbye and made plans to see her before she left on her pilgrimage, I went home. The taste of ash was in my mouth, not a bitter or horrible taste at all but warm, pleasantly acrid. When I got home I checked on the children and Robert, the three of them already asleep, then went into the bathroom and lit a series of votive candles in red glasses. I undressed, my clothes powdery with white dust, and took a bath and drank half a bottle of red wine as I soaked in the tub. When I slept that night I
had no dreams that I could recall, no mystic voices or faces greeting
me. But neither did I wake and lie for hours in the dark, haunted by the thought of empty blue air, of silence and the sound of the wind.
—
It is nearly two months now since Cal died. Just this morning I got another postcard from Tina, from Venice this time—a place Cal had never visited, but where the two of them had planned to go on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She loved the city so much she was staying longer than she had planned, after having dropped some of his ashes into the Grand Canal; but she would be leaving within the week, with Tangiers her next stop. She couldn’t wait to see me again, to tell me about all of her adventures: she had seen some amazing things, really unbelievable stuff, and of course she was always looking for Cal, always keeping her eyes and mind opened, so that she would recognize him when they met again.
Here in Maine spring has come earlier than usual, the snow melt deepening the lakes and rivers, the daffodils already starting to bloom even though it’s only the second week of April, far too early for northern New England, the earliest spring I can remember. Outside the earth smells sweet, almost perfumed, bacteria thriving in the warm moist soil and the lake releasing its muddy hyacinth scent.
Last week, a bird appeared at the window where I work. I was hunched over my computer, writing, my back to the glass, when I heard a soft insistent tapping. When I turned I saw a tiny brown bird on the sill outside. As I stared it began to peck at the glass, gently but without stopping, like a thrush cracking a snail on a stone.
“Hello,” I said. I sat and watched it for several minutes, expecting it to fly away, but it did not. I finally turned back to my computer, but the bird remained where it was, still tapping at the window.
“What’re you doing?” I asked it. “Hmm? You want to see me?”
Moving slowly, I opened the window, letting in the cool April air, the faintest whiff of narcissus. To my surprise the bird did not fly away, but instead hopped onto the inside sill. It cocked its head and stared at me; I stared back, then laughed.
“Hey, what’re you doing?” I held my hand out. The bird looked at my finger but would not step onto it. Neither did it fly away. Instead, it turned and began hopping along the sill, stopping to examine the things I have there: an old magic-lantern slide of Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, a photograph of Robert and the children; Cal’s bone, his pastels, the two steel rings from his leather bag, the small reddish curl of braid that Tina had given me the day I drove her to the airport. The bird looked at all of these, then turned and flew back outside.
It comes every day now and stays, watching me. I looked it up in my nature guides, going from one to another until I found the right description: the European wren,
troglodytes troglodytes
, a diminutive brown bird with white bars on its wings and breast, native to western Europe and the British Isles, but not North America. I called my friend Lucy, who writes the wildlife column for our local paper, and asked if she had ever heard of anyone seeing a European wren in Maine before. She had not, and when she posed the question to her readers, none of them had, either.
Still, the bird is here. I researched it online, and in some books of folklore I have, and learned that the European wren is the bird that was the subject of the annual wren hunt, an ancient pre-Christian ritual of death and resurrection, still practiced in obscure parts of Ireland and the Isle of Man. It is a creature known for its cheer and its valor, its bravery suiting a bird of far greater size; and also for its song, which is piercingly sweet and flutelike, carrying for miles on a clear day.
I can attest to this, writing as I do while the bird sits on the sill behind me and watches me work, as it plucks the last strands of Cal’s hair from the braid and flies off to build its nest, somewhere in the rowan tree outside. There it sings, its voice rising and drowning out the songs of redwing blackbirds and chickadees, northern loons and kingfishers and the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard. It sings, day after day after day, and sometimes into the night as well. I never cease to marvel at the sound.
—
In the Lonely House there is a faded framed
Life
magazine article from almost half a century ago, featuring a color photograph of a beautiful woman with close-cropped blonde hair and rather sly grey eyes, wide crimson-lipsticked mouth, a red-and-white striped bateau-neck shirt. The woman is holding a large magnifying lens and examining a very large insect, a plastic scientific model of a common black ant,
Lasius niger
, posed atop a stack of children’s picture books. Each book displays the familiar blocky letters and illustrated image that has been encoded into the dreamtime DNA of generations of children: that of a puzzled-looking, goggle-eyed ant, its antennae slightly askew as though trying, vainly, to tune into the signal from some oh-so-distant station.
Wise Aunt or Wise Ant?
reads the caption beneath the photo.
Blake E. Tun Examines a Friend
.
The woman is the beloved children’s book author and illustrator, Blake Eleanor Tun, known to her friends as Blakie. The books are the six classic
Wise Ant
books, in American and English editions and numerous translations—
Wise Ant
,
Brave Ant
,
Curious Ant
,
Formi Sage
,
Weise Ameise
,
Una Ormiga Visionaria
. In the room behind Blakie, you can just make out the figure of a toddler, out-of-focus as she runs past. You can see the child’s short blonde hair cut in a pageboy, and a tiny hand that the camera records as a mothlike blur. The little girl with the Prince Valiant haircut, identified in the article as Miss Tun’s adopted niece, is actually Blakie’s illegitimate daughter, Ivy Tun. That’s me.
Here in her remote island hidey-hole,
the article begins
, Eleanor Blake Tun brings to life an imaginary world inhabited by millions.
People used to ask Blakie why she lived on Aranbega. Actually, just living on an island wasn’t enough for my mother. The Lonely House stood on an islet in Green Pond, so we lived on an island on an island.
“Why do I live here? Because enchantresses always live on is
lands,” she’d say, and laugh. If she fancied the questioner she might add, “Oh
, you
know. Circe, Calypso, the Lady in the Lake—”
Then she’d give her, or very occasionally him, one of her mocking sideways smiles, lowering her head so that its fringe of yellow hair would fall across her face, hiding her eyes so that only the smile remained.
“The smile on the face of the tiger
,”
Katherine told me once when I was a teenager. “Whenever you saw that smile of hers, you’d know it was only a matter of time.”
“Time till what?” I asked.
But by then her attention had already turned back to my mother: the sun to Katherine’s gnomon, the impossibly beautiful bright thing that we all circled, endlessly.
Anyway, I knew what Blakie’s smile meant. Her affairs were
notorious even on the island. For decades, however, they were care
fully concealed from her readers, most of whom assumed (as they were meant to) that Blake E. Tun was a man—that
Life
magazine article caused quite a stir among those not already in the know. My mother was Blakie to me as to everyone else. When I was nine she announced that she was not my aunt but my mother, and produced a birth certificate from a Boston hospital to prove it.
“No point in lying. It would however be more
convenient
if you continued to call me Blakie.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the sole of her tennis shoe and tossed it over the railing into Green Pond. “But it’s no one’s business who you are. Or who I am in relation to you, for that matter.”
And that was that. My father was not a secret kept from me; he just didn’t matter that much, not in Blakie’s scheme of things. The only thing she ever told me about him was that he was very young.
“Just a boy. Not much older than you are now, Ivy,” which at the time was nineteen. “Just a kid.”
“Never knew what hit him,” agreed my mother’s partner Katherine, as Blakie glared at her from across the room.
It never crossed my mind to doubt my mother, just as it never crossed my mind to hold her accountable for any sort of duplicity she may have practiced, then or later. The simple mad fact was that I adored Blakie. Everyone did. She was lovely and smart and willful and rich, a woman who believed in seduction not argument; when seduction failed, which was rarely, she was not above abduction, of the genteel sort involving copious amounts of liquor and the assistance of one or two attractive friends.
The
Wise Ant
books she had written and illustrated when she was in her twenties. By her thirtieth birthday they had made her a fortune. Blakie had a wise agent named Letitia Thorne and a very wise financial adviser named William Dunlap, both of whom took care that my mother would never have to work again unless she wanted to.
Blakie did not want to work. She wanted to seduce Dunlap’s daughter-in-law, a twenty-two-year-old Dallas socialite named Katherine Mae Moss. The two women eloped to Aranbega, a rocky spine of land some miles off the coast of Maine. There they built a fairytale cottage in the middle of a lake, on a tamarack-and-fern-covered bump of rock not much bigger than the Bambi Airstream trailer they’d driven up from Texas. The cottage had two small bedrooms, a living room and dining nook and wraparound porch overlooking the still, silvery surface of Green Pond. There was a beetle-black cast-iron Crawford woodstove for heat and cooking, kerosene lanterns, and a small red hand-pump in the slate kitchen sink. No electricity; no telephone. Drinking water was pumped up from the lake. Septic and grey water disposal was achieved through an ancient holding tank that was emptied once a year.
They named the cottage The Lonely House, after the tiny house where Wise Ant lived with her friends Grasshopper and Bee.
Here they were visited by Blakie’s friends, artistic sorts from New
York and Boston, several other writers from Maine; and by Katherine’s relatives, a noisy congeries of cattle heiresses, disaffected oil men and Ivy League dropouts, first-wave hippies and draft dodgers, all of whom took turns babysitting me when Blakie took off for Crete or London or Taos in pursuit of some new
amour
. Eventually of course Katherine would find her and bring her home: as a child I imagined my mother engaged in some world-spanning game of hide-and-seek, where Katherine was always It. When the two of them returned to the Lonely House, there would always be a prize for me as well. A rainbow map of California, tie-dyed on a white bedsheet; lizard-skin drums from Angola; a Meerschaum pipe carved in the likeness of Richard Nixon.
“You’ll never have to leave here to see the world, Ivy,” my mother said once, after presenting me with a Maori drawing, on bark, of a stylized honeybee. “It will all come to you, like it all came to me.”
My mother was thirty-seven when I was born, old to be having a baby, and paired in what was then known as a Boston marriage. She and Katherine are still together, two old ladies now living in a
posh assisted-living community near Rockland, no longer scandalizing
anyone. They’ve had their relationship highlighted in an episode of
This American Life
, and my mother is active in local liberal causes, doing benefit readings of
The Vagina Monologues
and signings of
Wise Ant
for the Rockland Domestic Abuse Shelter. Katherine reconciled with her family and inherited a ranch near Goliad, where they still go sometimes in the winter.
The Wise Ant
books are now discussed within the context of mid-century American Lesbian Literature, a fact which annoys my mother no end.
“I wrote those books for
children
,” she cries whenever the topic arises. “They are
children’s books
,” as though someone had confused the color of her mailbox, red rather than black. “For God’s sake.”
Of course Wise Ant will never be anything more than her antly self—wise, brave, curious, kind, noisy, helpful—just as Blakie at eighty-two remains beautiful, maddening, forgetful, curious, brave; though seldom, if ever, quiet. We had words when I converted the Lonely House to solar power—
“You’re spoiling it. It was never
intended
to have electricity—”
Blakie and Katherine were by then well-established in their elegant cottage at Penobscot Fields. I looked at the room around me—Blakie’s study, small but beautifully appointed, with a Gustav Stickley lamp that she’d had rewired by a curator at the Farnsworth, her laptop screen glowing atop a quartersawn oak desk, and Bose speakers and miniature CD console.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll just move in here with you.”
“That’s not the—”
“Blakie. I need electricity to work. The generator’s too noisy,
m
y
customer
s
don’
t
lik
e
it
.
An
d
expensive.
I
hav
e
t
o
work fo
r
a
living—”
“You don’t have to—”
“I
want
to work for a living.” I paused, trying to calm myself. “Look, it’ll be fun—doing the wiring and stuff. I got all these photovoltaic cells, when it’s all set up you’ll see. It’ll be great.”
And it was. The cottage is south-facing: two rows of cells on the roof, a few extra batteries boxed-in under the porch, a few days spent wiring and I was set. I left the bookshelves in the living room, mostly my books now, and a few valuable first editions that I’d talked Blakie into leaving. Eliot’s
Four Quartets
and some Theodore Roethke;
Gormenghast
; a Leonard Baskin volume signed
For Blakie
. One bedroom I kept as my own, with a wide handcrafted oak cupboard bed, cleverly designed to hold clothes beneath and more books all around. At the head of the bed were those I loved best, a set of all six
Wise Ant
books and the five volumes of Walter Burden Fox’s unfinished
Five Windows One Door
sequence.
The other bedroom became my studio. I set up a drafting table and autoclave and light box, a shelf with my ultrasonic cleaner and dri-clave. On the floor was an additional power unit just for my machine and equipment; a tool bench holding soldering guns, needle bars and jigs; a tall stainless steel medicine cabinet with enough disinfectant and bandages and gloves and hemostats to outfit a small clinic; an overhead cabinet with my inks and pencils and acetates. Empty plastic caps await the colored inks that fill the machine’s reservoir. A small sink drains into a special tank that I bring to the Rockland dump once a month, when everyone else brings in their empty paint cans. A bookshelf holds albums filled with pictures of my own work and some art books—Tibetan stuff, pictures from Chauvet Cavern, Japanese woodblock prints.
But no flash sheets; no framed flash art; no fake books. If a customer wants flash, they can go to Rockland or Bangor. I do only my own designs. I’ll work with a customer, if she has a particular
image in mind, or come up with something original if she doesn’t.
But if somebody has her heart set on a prancing unicorn, or Harley
flames, or Mister Natural, or a Grateful Dead logo, I send her elsewhere.
This doesn’t happen much. I don’t advertise. All my business is word of mouth, through friends or established customers, a few people here on Aranbega. But mostly, if someone wants me to do her body work, she
really
has to want me, enough to fork out sixty-five bucks for the round-trip ferry and at least a couple hundred for the tattoo, and three hundred more for the Aranbega Inn if she misses the last ferry, or if her work takes more than a single day. Not to mention the cost of a thick steak dinner afterwards, and getting someone else to drive her home. I don’t let people stay at the Lonely House, unless it’s someone I’ve known for a long time, which usually means someone I was involved with at some point, which usually means she wouldn’t want to stay with me in any case. Sue is an exception, but Sue is seeing someone else now, one of the other occupational therapists from Penobscot Fields, so she doesn’t come over as much as she used to.
That suits me fine. My customers are all women. Most of them are getting a tattoo to celebrate some milestone, usually something like finally breaking with an abusive boyfriend, leaving a bad marriage,
coming to grips with the aftermath of a rape. Breast cancer survi
vors—
I do a lot of breast work—or tattoos to celebrate coming out, or giving
birth. Sometimes anniversaries. I get a lot of emotional baggage dumped in my studio, for hours or days at a time; it always leaves when the customers do, but it pretty much fulfills my need for any kind of emotional connection, which is pretty minimal anyway.
And, truth to tell, it fulfills most of my sexual needs too; at least any baseline desire I have for physical contact. My life is spent with skin: cupping a breast in my hand, pulling the skin taut between my fingers while the needle etches threadlike lines around the aureole, tracing yellow above violet veins, turning zippered scars into coiled serpents, an explosion of butterfly wings, flames or phoenixes rising from a puckered blue-white mound of flesh; or drawing secret maps, a hidden cartography of grottoes and ravines, rivulets and waves lapping at beaches no bigger than the ball of my thumb; the ball of my thumb pressed there, index finger there, tissue film of latex between my flesh and hers, the hushed drone of the machine as it chokes down when the needle first touches skin and the involuntary flinch that comes, no matter how well she’s prepared herself for this, no matter how many times she’s lain just like this, paper towels blotting the film of blood that wells, nearly invisible, beneath the moving needle bar’s tip, music never loud enough to drown out the hum of the machine. Hospital smells of disinfectant, blood, antibacterial ointment, latex.
