This New and Poisonous Air (19 page)

He decided to take the rug with the pigs downstairs so Bird could have a look. Certain objects still triggered reactions, though most of the time, she couldn’t even remember his name. He, who’d been her satellite. Even as a child, sitting on a pillow by her loom, he’d been fascinated by the rhythmic clatter and the way the shuttle cleanly pulled weft thread across the warp. His grandmother had rocked gently while she worked, glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, hair in an ashen knot. He remembered thinking that Bird was releasing the rug, that the loom was a kind of wooden bridge between her inside and her outside, a dangerous bridge that only Bird was clever enough to cross, pulling rugs behind her.

At thirty, Aubrey was nothing more than Bird’s hireling, and the loom was just another object he had to dust because she didn’t trust the maid. His mother had left him with Bird when he was seven, fastening the top button on his shirt and telling him that maybe he could be a rug maker one day too. He’d been generally pleased by his abandonment because it had rid him of his mother’s irrational rants, her chains of cigarettes, her garish friends. She lived in Florida on the stipend Bird provided and called herself everything from a mystic to a documentary filmmaker. Once, she’d set out to make a movie about people who were trying to locate the world’s navel in central Florida. The navel, the searchers claimed, was the site at which the Earth’s umbilical had once been tethered to the Godhead. To touch the navel was to see the shape of Him, the outline of a body freshly moved from a bed. They never found the navel, of course, and his mother never cut her film. The shape of God, she told
Aubrey, was curiously similar to a hole the project had left in her bank account.

The sound of the rug bumping down the two flights of stairs must have drawn Bird’s attention because when Aubrey arrived on the landing, she waited below, one hand clutching at a green costume necklace. He made a note to have another talk with the day nurse when she returned from lunch—to tell her that Bird wasn’t some doll. He had no idea where the nurse found such awful things. Maybe she even brought them from home.

Bird was braced against the polished newel post, and there was something of an old sea captain in her widelegged stance, though the only ocean in the foyer was her own mind—deep and corrosive, full of ruinous salt. Her white hair was frayed, uncombed, hanging almost to her shoulders.

“Could you move, Bird?” he asked, prickling at the whine in his own voice. “Please?”

In response, she pulled at the green necklace until it looked like it might break. Aubrey made himself as small as possible, pushing the rug against the railing in an attempt not to knock Bird down as he squeezed past. He allowed the heavy roll to fall on top of Bird’s own foyer rug that was intentionally broken into a pile of unfinished fibers. Stanley First had been horrified to see the art there for everyone to walk on. Bird, in the old days, would have been pleased, saying, “If it doesn’t provide a service, then we can’t rightly call it a rug, can we?”

“I found this in the attic,” Aubrey said, speaking slowly. “The man from the museum didn’t see it. I was thinking it was one of yours. But then it doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever made. Will you look?” He used his foot to unroll the rug, and the pigs appeared one by one on their road. The gables of the ruined farmhouse
pricked the rotten sky. With uncharacteristic suddenness she came forward to stand on the corded road like one the pigs, another soldier in their prehistoric army. He put his hand on her hard shoulder. “Just look. Tell me if you made it.”

She stared at the pigs and whispered, “Fucking old thing.” The new vocabulary that had emerged from the forest of plaques and tangles still disturbed him. Bird had rarely cursed in her other life.

“I found it under some boxes,” he repeated. “Stanley First didn’t see it.”

“The mole rat?” she asked.

“That’s him,” he said. “When did you make the rug, Bird?”

She touched the closest pig with one slippered foot. “Maybe I didn’t make this one. I’m not the only rug maker in the world, you know.”

“Who did make it then?” Aubrey asked.

She raised her faint eyebrow. “I don’t know, Thomas,” she said. “Some things are better left alone, aren’t they?” Even before she finished the sentence, she looked as though she realized her error but didn’t know how to correct it.

“It’s Aubrey,” he said. “You always told me I looked like your brother. Sharp features, remember? It’s all right.”

“Thomas is dead,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Fucking Thomas.”

Aubrey tried to redirect, “The rug,” he said. “Did you—”

“I don’t know if anyone
made
it,” she said.

“Of course someone did, Bird. It’s here, isn’t it?”

“Some things just arrive. My stomach hurts. Could you make some tea, Aubrey?”

“Do you want help getting back to bed?”

She was too interested in the nub of shadow that protruded from the gable window to look at him. “Where did you say you got it?”

“The attic.”

“Where they found her,” she said.

“What’s that?”

Bird reached for the nub of shadow with her toe but then drew back. “Would you like to hear an old story?”

He nodded, pleased that the rug had indeed been a trigger.

“When I was young, my father kept pigs, and he let me take one out of the pen to keep as my own. A little pink girl. She ate the purple wool my mother spun. Chewed it up. And I was so angry, I chased her around the yard with a rake.”

“Purple wool,” Aubrey said. “That’s charming.”

“My little pink girl was afraid,” she said. “I should have let her have the wool. What did it matter if she ate it?”

“It all turned out fine, I’m sure. It was just a pig.”

Bird pulled the green necklace again. “Not just a pig,” she said. “My little pink girl. The one we took walking in the evening. The one we took up to the attic room when we were secret.”

He was halfway down the corridor that led to the kitchen. “
Who
was secret?”

Bird answered with a question. “Is she coming?”

“The nurse? She’s at lunch. Don’t worry. She won’t be back to bother you for—”

“Not the nurse,” Bird said. “The girl. We used to take the pink girl walking, until I married your grandfather and left the old country for good. I didn’t want to leave, but that was the thing to do. Marry a soldier. Move away. She was broken. Instead of mailing regular letters, she mailed fragments, lists to show that she was broken. Places we’d
gone with the pink girl. The color of my dresses. Things we’d never tried. I burned all the lists in the fireplace before your grandfather could see.”

“Who is this
girl
?” Aubrey said.

Bird’s eyes were like animals peering from holes. “Don’t be stupid, Thomas. I’m talking about Hildred Vorst.”

“I’m not Thomas,” he said.

She kicked at the rug. “You’re Thomas, and you told me that I
should
go with the soldier. That was the only way to stop being confused. But I wasn’t
confused
.” Putting one hand over her face, she made a quiet sound. “Now I’m confused. Oh, now I am. Make the tea, Aubrey. I’m sorry. I really am.”

The hallway felt sharply canted, and Aubrey had to keep one hand on the wall just to reach the kitchen without stumbling. He had never heard of Hildred Vorst, but then again, Bird rarely talked about anyone from Poland who wasn’t a member of her immediate family, and most of her stories usually only served the purpose of embellishing her persona. The new country, America, had always been more significant to her. America was where she’d been freed from Stalin’s Ministry of Arts and Culture. Realism was no longer a requirement, and her rugs could finally open their mouths and scream. On top of that, he had not heard her speak so fluidly in months. The rug had knocked something loose.

Before filling the kettle, he went to the cabinet beneath the telephone and took out the green recipe box where Bird had meticulously catalogued a lifetime of yellowing acquaintances. Flipping through the thick index was like flipping through Bird’s lost memory, and when he came to the V’s, he found a card labeled
H. Vorst
in Bird’s tight script. Under the name were the words
Poland/Deceased
.
No address, no telephone number. He considered taking the card into the foyer to see if it would dislodge any further memories, but then thought better of it. Why should he bring Bird more sadness? Hildred Vorst wasn’t coming. The card answered that question. Instead he picked up the receiver, not thinking too much about what he was about to do. When his mother answer, her voice was slow, “Do you know what time it is, Aubrey?”

“Past noon,” he said.

She cleared her throat.

“I wanted to ask you if you’ve ever heard of anyone named Hildred Vorst.”

“Funny name,” his mother said.

“Right,” Aubrey said. “So you haven’t heard of her?”

“Is she one of Mom’s old lady friends?”

“Apparently Hildred and Bird were—I don’t know—
involved
in Poland.”

His mother coughed. “Involved? How many fruits are growing on our family tree, Aubrey? You all should move down to Florida. We’ve got plenty of—”

“Mother, that isn’t helpful.”

He could almost hear her smile. “You always did take after your grandmother, Aubrey. Never a free spirit like me. Both of you would rather cry about the world than live in it.”

He hung up the phone, unsure why he’d made the call in the first place. His mother had never been a problem solver. He thought of Bird’s Poland as the water boiled. She’d told him once that after the war countless bodies had been discovered in houses and fields, not only the bodies of soldiers but of everyday people who’d gotten lost in the terror of the attacks—people who’d starved to death or gone into basements or attics and ended their lives. There weren’t enough coffins to
go around, and rugs became popular as burial vessels. There was an ancient tradition of weavers adorning funerary rugs with cypress trees and open eyes, the cypress for immortality, and the eyes, which often sprouted from the very branches of the trees, a way for the dead to see. “Not that the survivors had time to make special rugs after the war,” Bird told him. “They rolled the bodies into any old rug they could find. A hand-worked rug is sacred—a part of the maker. I think people understood that.”

When Aubrey imagined Bird’s funeral, he pictured her body wrapped in a burial rug. He’d even started to consider the logistics, wondering if there was a code against burying the dead in something other than a coffin. The sharp tips of her black peasant boots would protrude from one end of the rug roll, and the gray curls of her hair would fall from the other. Bird would approve. One final reason a rug could never be called mere art.

Aubrey handed Bird her cup of chamomile, and she stared into its yellow depths for a moment before carefully pouring it onto the narrative rug at her feet. She watched as the stain spread through the sky and trickled down onto the hairy pigs. “Like piss,” Bird said.

“Very much like that, yes,” Aubrey replied, feeling exhausted.

“I haven’t thought about her in years,” Bird said.

“Hildred?” Aubrey said.

She folded her hands around the still warm cup. “How could I have ever forgotten?”

He took a breath. “In the card box, it says that Hildred Vorst passed away, Bird.”

She looked annoyed. “Hildred isn’t dead, Aubrey. She can never die. She went down the road and the pigs followed, you see?”

Aubrey followed the road to the ruined farm and the gabled window where the shadow protruded, as if demanding to be touched.

 

He read to Bird from the same book every night because the doctor said such patterns were healthy. The story was an old romance about a woman stranded; her ship broke apart during a storm. All the handsome sailors who’d traveled with her had drowned, and she was alone in the new city, haunted by the men she’d lost, and through a series of obscure incidents, she arrived at the belief that their spirits had taken possession of inanimate objects in the city. She went from place to place, collecting a candlestick, a compass, a printed scroll—believing that once she had reassembled the crew, they could sail off again.

Bird herself seemed not to hear the story. Instead she stared at the fireplace mantle which had been fitted with carved angels by Aubrey’s grandfather long before Aubrey had been born. Unable to concentrate any longer, he closed the book. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about Hildred?” he said.

She made no reply.

“How could you leave such a big hole? I listened to so many stories.”

She didn’t blink or move. Aubrey looked at Bird like she was already dead. “I know you’re sick and I shouldn’t talk to you like this,” Aubrey said, “but I have to say that was cruel, Bird. Just—I mean, did you ever consider that you were my
friend
too. That you were the only real presence in my life?” He knew his dramatic exit from the parlor would have little effect, but he was no longer able to look at his grandmother. He’d lived his life believing that, though she excluded him intellectually, she
included
him in her emotional life. He’d led himself to believe she wasn’t merely
making use of him, and though she wouldn’t listen to his own stories, he thought she’d told him all of hers.

The yellow stain on the pig rug had dried, and something about the pastoral had changed. He hadn’t counted the pigs earlier, but looking at the rug in the evening light, he felt sure that one was missing. Bird had once explained a similar phenomenon, saying that people who looked at any patterned object for too long could develop a kind of anxiety. “The mind calls for a break,” she said. “If a break can’t be found, the mind creates one. Sometimes when I’ve been working on a rug for hours, I look back at what I’ve done, and it seems to me the whole thing changing, shifting like water before my eyes.”