The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter (3 page)

Though none of this was a cure—neither an ending nor a beginning for her. Only a middle. Like the bowl that was always placed in the center of my parent's highly polished table—mahogany, the same as my father's and my caskets.

That bowl.
Her mind focused on the intricate pattern of it as she sat for hours in the various hotel rooms before her readings—twirling and knotting, then trying to unravel the long strands of her hair. “Not brushing and braiding,” she would anxiously think, as she wrote about things too intricate, too fragile, too beautiful. “
That bowl,”
she would recall, “with its careful, intentional, deep carvings, how easily the dazzling, trapped, decapitated flowers and the elegant glass containing them could fall to the floor while attempting to place it in the perfect spot—the gods eternally looking down, deciding who should be so unexpectedly cut.”

Cecilia was forever there, waiting for its crash, which eventually arrived some years later with the appearance of Herr M …

Only a backward spin

my mangled body threaded

through spokes of the leaden wheel,

seated in the spiked metal

interrogation chair—the agony

from beneath. The crown of my head

shoved into the steel cap, the huge screw

tightened at the top, my pressured skull

drilling my teeth into my jaw, eyes out.

The tongue of confession,

then forgiveness, nowhere to be heard—

screaming, I am

running through the blade

grass. Away from the sun,

his unleashed, slash, god advance,

his rage all ways

disassembling me—

this time, to plant. Now, made

to look up, forever face his gaze

if I am to survive.

c. slaughter

W
HEN
I F
INALLY REACHED
Lao Tzu he smiled a gentle smile and I very much felt his warmth. He opened his arms wide and his answer embraced me. “Nothing,” he calmly replied to my question. After what seemed like a forever pause, because of how agitated I was, he continued by quoting Hui Hai:

When things happen make no response:

Keep your mind from dwelling on anything

whatsoever.

Then, he added, “There is nothing to do with that which
has been
done or for that matter with what is
about
to be done, if you are not the doer. That which has happened, has happened. That which is about to happen, is about to happen.” Again he paused that feeling forever pause, finally saying, “Stay still,” and he shut his eyes. At that moment, I tried not to show my embarrassment—the sudden, acute humiliation I felt—yet I knew he had seen it and could still see it through his quietly closed, translucent lids.

A frantic energy would not stop emanating from me—would not leave me—and I looked away from him so as to shield myself—I hoped—from his sense of me and thought, “If I had just taken some time—a long pause—I could have absorbed it better, and most certainly would not have fled to him in this bone-panic and presented my alarm in a way which revealed that I had learned absolutely nothing.”

I then turned toward him, bowed slowly, and quietly left his presence, yet I continued to feel stupid and terribly unsettled. I
knew
if I had just stopped and considered the
news—considered it with the deep, large world breaths in this place where I
now
exist—I could have been more centered and remembered how those above the ground so often go against a nature that can positively move them forward, if they are not so quick to act. It takes great negative energy to turn behavior against its natural forward flow, snarl it into troubles which then become, at best, bad habits and, at worst, self-mutilations—physical or psycho-logical—or when turned outward, into a catastrophe such as murder.

Once again, the beating on myself began with the self-defeating language, “If I had been a better student all the time of his lessons, I would not be feeling such a discom-bobulation. By now, I should have achieved a much more balanced composure, no matter
what
had happened above the ground.” I was judging myself harshly by the parental standards of my childhood and early adult years and falling short. The building disdain I had for myself, the rush and escalation of these musty, old, sick feelings disoriented me as to where
exactly
I was
—what world was I really inhabiting
?—and caused a vertigo I had not experienced since the minutes before I died.

I had thought my soul in better condition—more shaped by now—and perhaps it was this vanity, this earthly thought-indulgence, this arrogance that inflated and deluded me into thinking too well of myself—of what a
wonderful
student I had been during the time of my tutelage under Lao Tzu—that had done me in. I was clearly too proud. Too proud of myself in death like my father had been of himself in life. My father who lies near to me in blown-up ego pieces, which I fear will never be put together well enough for him to understand the possibilities
of the journeys to be taken here—all the dazzling depths and peaks just waiting to be plumbed, climbed, viewed, and considered.

I presented myself to Lao Tzu in such disarray, I can only imagine his surprise and disappointment. Although another part of me peeks through my more refurbished crevices, knowing he fully accepts whatever behavior I exhibit. Still, I cannot stop obsessing on this misstep. I know all this inane self-measuring, the degrading feelings I have about losing control, are ancient material and, especially now, self-imposed—old baggage I still lug with me that gets in the way of the peace I long for and which so obviously is still out of reach. Here, I remain very much the immigrant. Yes, I think, “Miles to go … ” as Frost put it, but not for sleep, rather for the wisdom found in the serenity of self-acceptance.

Suddenly, I longed for Wyatt—the man who made of me an ecstasy of the flesh. I wanted to forget my deadness—how my father and uncles had ripped my happiness from me and how much I hated them at the time for this and, yes, now
here
in this present moment. I once again became
all flesh need
with its rough, erotic seeds and seediness so as to try to forget everything that had just happened and only inhabit that place of the physical orgasmic surge.

I continued to make excuses for myself upon leaving Lao Tzu—I excused myself for my sudden backward turn to human want and concern, my defense in part being that I am greatly exhausted by
this waiting.
This waiting for my mother. For her arrival. For she who does not arrive. Like the characters and audience in the play
Waiting for Godot,
this waiting seems endless. I have begun to think that she
never will, if for no other reason than she refuses to do so, that she will not let go of the prize that is her life. She will not let go of the physical shell of who she was—Rose, the woman who always won the beauty competition, always took home the crown; Rose, who still believes she
is
that young empress of loveliness in complete control of her domain. In truth, she has become like an old tree—its wood weaker because it is harder and more brittle, no longer able to bend with the wind, its branches no longer exquisite, looking more like clawed tentacles.

She was thirty-three when I was born—an age considered old in those days to have a first child, but she was reluctant to give up her figure, however temporarily. So far, she has lived almost fifty years longer than I. I died at thirty-two—one year short of her age at my birth.

Yet, even now as she lies half paralyzed, she grabs hard with her one good hand to that old life. With her one still strong fist she holds it firmly and thinks, “Why? Why should I leave here—this place that has held me so dear? To go where?” She intuits right. Never again will she reign over such a space.

Here, if she does not enlarge herself, she will inhabit a tight corner in a tiny room of withered spirits who think minute thoughts and whine and wonder to themselves and to each other why no one pays attention to them with all their once earthly gifts of perfect symmetry of face and body, money, fame, or sometimes, earned accomplishments—but only for the low motive of trying to gather more power and attention. They reminisce a lot and moan, “Why is no one interested?” Though I wish I did not, sometimes I, too, still hear their voices.

I know my mother will most likely live in such an enclosure here—a small apartment of the heart—but I still
long for her. I have been without her for what sometimes feels forever and I have missed her, and I admit with what I hope is just a crumb of hubris that perhaps, when she does arrive, I can designate myself to be her guide. Maybe the loft of such a thought is part of the reason she keeps from me. I think Lao Tzu might agree.

Yet, there is another part of me that
is
pleased she is not dead. Losing a mother is quite sad, even for the child who has great ambivalence about her mother,
even
for the child already dead. Among the living I can so easily find her, predict her behavior, even the clothes she chooses to wear, see her in the familiar places she inhabits. I can both decide to find her and to lose her whenever I want to—death is not like that. Choices are not as fluid, the paths we cut for ourselves, whether with hacksaws or pen knives, are filled with innumerable bramble bushes. The Mother Goose lines easily apply—

He jumped into a bramble bush

And scratched out both his eyes.

One must move slowly here for the ways are clogged with thousands of possible thorny directions and thunderous, innumerable voices. It truly is hard to search out and find the delicate bell music. It is as confounding a place as
Wonderland,
with all its ramifications. And, yes, sometimes I still do feel as bewildered as Alice repeatedly begging the Cheshire Cat (Lao Tzu?) for directions.

Also, I fear when she does arrive, she might turn away from me. She could. She is capable of such an act. Turn away for eternity, like Great Aunt Eva did from her daughter Adele. A spirit can harden into a forever disregard—an indifference—or non-forgiveness, no matter
the blood relation and in life, I was not entirely agreeable to my mother.

Clearly, absorbing the fact of Herr M's death and its horrific aftermath shook me from my mother-watch trance and I wanted an easy fix for all my upset. I know I could not have stopped the act, even as I saw it arriving—arriving from so many possible people with overdetermined motives. Too many negative fantasies about him were floating in that atmosphere, threatening his earth-existence. Reasons, however skewed, were piling too high like the snow and ice of this too bitter winter in the lives of my cousins and over the graves of those who loved them. I could feel Aunt Esther, Aunt Lillian, and Aunt Lettie—even in her stiffened, frightened silence—egging their daughters on for their own strange and diverse reasons—for their own unfinished earthly business.

While some are stunned to stillness with true grief or just shocked surprise, others are planning to temporarily flee the country from the family's humiliation, as I rest in my disintegrated silk cloth, which now covers just a few patches of bone. Finally, I have quieted my mind and contemplate Herr M's death and its terrible repercussions—why it became so necessary for others to consider it and consequently make such a fantasy a reality. And I consider his own brutal acts. How the velocity of them led to this violent conclusion. It is true he was not a good person, but I cannot help but wonder if there could have been a better closure. I think of Lao Tzu's words:

That every victory is a funeral:

When you win a war,

You celebrate by mourning.

So I mourn this troubled man, while I try not to be too upset by all that has happened above—try not to be too upset by what has happened to those whom I love. But it is hard.
Very hard.

Queen of me

Queen of my father's family …

c. slaughter

T
HERE IS NOTHING SPECIAL
about the dead weaving the story—their voices being the loom that pulls together what the living can tell only in bits and pieces. In life sometimes I saw myself as the weaver Ariadne who possessed the spun thread that lead Theseus to the center of the labyrinth of her half-brother the Minotaur to slay him and then safely out again. As I have said, I would have liked to have done such things for my family—kill, however metaphorically, “the monster” in some of my relatives. In death, I know all I can offer is our stories. As object lessons? Hardly. But to give them some amount of clarity, yes. Souls still living cannot help but slant, exaggerate, or embellish the facts of their lives. They do not necessarily mean to do this—to sew bias into their words—but they are still too busy, busy living life with all its manifold distractions and misdirected emphases and they do not have access to the full and ongoing adventure. They also depend so much on rumor—on gossip—and that troubles me too, especially when it is about the Slaughter family, both past and present.

Here, no one and no disease can interrupt—stop me short from what I have to say—and that is a good thing for
I can tell you some facts not only about the family above, but about the family beneath.

There are many relatives already where I am now. Aunt Lettie, Cecilia's mother, who mostly prefers to sleep—all sounds to her still have no music, just the march of German soldiers with their black boots slamming onto concrete—and Aunt Esther, Celie's mother, who is shocked by her troubled sister Adele's recent arrival and Adele's—now forever—proximity to her. I felt Esther's agitation even though she is graves away from mine and I understand her concern, for in life Adele was the cause of great misery to both herself and to others. I could hear the twist of their mother, Eva's, bones as she turned away from Adele's, as Eva ultimately turned herself away from this daughter in life.