WERE The TULIPS TULIPS

Kissy moves back to Tallee.

The faded green country house, now my house, looked ill, and when I was inside, only my purse in hand, I turned the lock and sealed away my midrise life, the past anew. The ridge of the roof sagged toward the middle like an old cat’s back, it was March 1993. I passed through the kitchen door, then over the raised threshold of the mudroom, the scullery, then both doors of the caddycorner bathroom, up the stairs three flights, then through the panel on levers in the ceiling, then into another higher room—the half floor over the attic you could only sit in. In the upper attic the light bled through the gable louvers, sunlight that traveled all this way to rest inside my eyes like golden kernels falling into turned soil. I had to set the hours and days down somewhere, I had to throw them one-by-one over a fence. I, Kissy, in a bumbling land, RESIGN all I have and hoped to have, the crouching, weeping bride the mountain was, her arched back the peak, and the spilling lace the plateaus. I quit.

You may believe an onset of madness is what you work up to—save your change and buy—but it comes on without symptom, just the way you throw out your back picking up a penny, or crouched, greeting a yellow lab—a thin stem is suddenly cut inside and you’re lying totally still, wishing to rise from your own compost. As for the cockroaches in the house, I will not kill a single one because I refuse to become their god…they have their own god for that! The first night I slept in a crib of pink insulation for bedding with trusses on either side for gates.

Next morning in the kitchen I ate lightly from what was left in the house, crackers over an open jar of peanut butter,—just for the whiff while I chewed—plain green bean, lemon ice, simple thinning treats. When I fall into dust at last, dead, and shatter in warmly waiting soil, a grower fallen into her moonchrome furrows,—who might cut down the stalks of whatever may burst from my butthonholes and prep for whose upcoming feast? Were the tulips tulips? Were the tulips Kissy too?      

After breakfast I went back up a flight and opened a door I hadn’t opened since I was a child, a triangular door beneath the second staircase of three. My father had cut it from a partial sheet of plywood the roofer had abandoned when the new roof was laid on years before. To measure the opening, he crouched in the stall as I pressed the square of standing plywood to the jamb; when I’d butted it perfectly against the high leg of the triangle where the hinges would cling, my father held the penlight not in his teeth—between his molars and cheek like a cigar—in the darkness of the stall, and traced the outline of the jamb in pencil. Dad helped me prop it on a chair, he handsawed the sheath along the penciling and we painted the outside face green. Then, paint all tacked, he drilled a fingerhole with his largest bit and swiveled it in the berth to widen it past the circumference of his finger. Then I was in the stall, holding the door up with my whole small hand through the fingerhole and lifted it off the floor for swing clearance, high enough to clear an unshod toe. Dad wood-shimmed the jamb and screwed on the hinges, he checked the bubble for level and said Come on out and see. I swung the door and nearly collapsed when I saw the hinge-side slanting just so—we have all of us an inborn aptitude for determining objects for level, or just a hair away and my sense was too fine. I started to heave my chest up and down and sob, my father asked What is it, Kiss?! He drummed his temples with his palms and windmilled his tongue. I pointed to the plywood askew. From a knee he said You did it just right. It’s the goddamn floor that’s slanted! Dad was laughing painfully, soundlessly, then stood up and slammed the door so hard with both hands I thought the door would rip off. The door was pinched against the floor because the house had leaned and leans. Sap now squeezed through the ceiling from the full chestnut trunks laid for floor trusses.

I’m partial to the doomed and its parcel runners. I was a stable girl when I was young and paid to ride a few times a week. The owner of the stable, Mr. Jerry, saw me riding once and told me after Kissy you watch your head—don’t bump it on the moon when you clear those jumps! While I rode I often thought of these fields and fences all in flames—the last crop of the last season—the shrieking horses, not riders but twitching fire in the saddles. Mr. Jerry spoke as though I were much younger than I was, squatting down to eye level. Now I understand you’re apprehensive about the world expiring! Do you really think whatever took the trouble to build all this from pure charity would allow Its talking toddies to make hell of everything? Or destroy it himself! He tugged a little on my too-slack riding trousers and I’ll say now as then my clothes never fit properly.

Along with the flower bed which spanned the length of the eastwardly fence, garden boxes in the backyard were overgrown. My father used to weed them with a large gas chainsaw. Mother had seen to the bluebells just before she and dad both died; revival was imminent all around. At first I drank days and worried about the flowers and bushes but did not approach them. On 19 April 1993, I found the switch to the flood lights hidden behind a hanging shovel in the mudroom, and having no immediate neighbors, I began to weed the beds and pour soil and re-stake the small timber partitions in the nighttime with the yard completely illuminated. I peeled all the old shutters off the siding and closed them. I could live on what was left after a re-mortgage, for 36 years, the lawyer explained, given my spend-shy manner. I’d have to find a place to put all those years. All said, I could sleep days and trawl the bars in the evenings and garden later, in an artificial morning, and retreat through my doors as the sun breached the farside of the mountain. At first, straightening the yard up, I felt I might leap each length of fencing on each side at once.  

I started with azaleas spaced a yard apart. When grown, the bushes would form a screen along the south of the house, so-arranged to conceal the plain decay, the pebbling of the stacked stone foundation. I then drove a stake in the center of the yard and tied a five-yard length of polymer rope to the stake and the other to my left belt loop and walked in a perfect circle like a chained animal, demarcating the circumference with white spray paint hissing just behind. I dug along the white line and planted wild sage. By early May, between the first and third hours of the morning, men accumulated most nights on my front and side porch like hungry cats: here they all came. In fact, all had watched the in the bright lights as I planted neat rows of young tulip from the depot open latest. I drilled holes in waffle fencing and screwed it through the dutchlap of the house, I laid the ivy pots at the base and started each by twisting the waxy wire onto the plastic diagonals.

Late summer at sunrise I stood the ladder against the one-story bumpout porch, climbed up, pulled the ladder up onto the roof and reset its footings, stood it against the gutterline of the second story, and climbed that. Coasters belonging to all these leering men touched on the bartop in fraternity and friendship, yet as they encountered one another at my property, men were often thrown or shoved off my porches. At last standing on the crown of the chimney, perhaps thirty feet up, I looked down at the men in lonesome wallows, then toward the almost electric blazes of the garden and thought Tear it all up Kissy. It’s the work itself, the dirty devotion, that will save you. The scrub pine along the western fence, a spiral of chrysanthemum, waves of queen-of-sweden rippling from the Northwest corner. Rip it all out, Kissy, or die.  I let the men find their way off my property, then climbed down to the secondstory portico, wherefrom I saw the last of the men in a red Crows giveaway jersey—somebody I knew a touch, Darvin—dancing piggily, drunkenly up the cellar stairs. He ran, ran and disintegrated into darkness like a flaregun discharge.

You can’t be added or subtracted is what I’ve gotten to: Should we enter into Nothingness, just as wading into another Pacific, it would absorb us and alter itself in doing so, us having been added. If Nothing were nothing Nothing could not change because It would become Something, a not-Nothing with positive qualities, something distinct from what It was before. So we cannot altogether vanish. No, the soul is ever-new. there is no Nothingness and we cannot die, only, the charge leaves the fleash and the flesh settles into heaps and sounds.

My first man in town, Cad Beaven—one I’d missed the night before—sat up in the yard that late summer morning while I was tearing the yard up and said Hey Miss Kissy I’ll watch the mountain shine with you.  I’d swapped them out year-to-year for some time and deftly turned their foaming chins from the tap to the grape juic chalice: I get them cleanly and jumping, jumping, sweating from the pews. You find them on the bus like huge lost children or apologetic, utter biglings: most just are until they’re steered some place or die.

Cad had trouble with Hella and I couldn’t turn him away from using stars for stepping stones across the broad black creek. Slobs are my flock. Let us now praise the slob, for a slob is merely a saint sitting down and leaning way back. Trees to a carpenter, the stock. I smoked some that night and turned to Cad and his nose, brow, lips, etc. were sliding this and that way like eggs in a tottered pan. I usually come to them but not so with Cad. It took a certain self-mastery to smoke whatever the boyfriend smoked and wean off it alongside those partaking, Holiness pimps the pimp. Usually I’d sit with whatever possessed the boyfriend, but with Cad I took to the poison, poison grown in a tophet garden, and couldn’t sweat it out. Wring me, Lord, of the juices we have drunk from YOUR stones. You know the sherpas die too on hired climbs, professional chaperones—cumbered, frozen in the crisscrossing ropes, and they know every stone, pitch, icesheet, and crook on the mountain. Conversely, I’d never smoked Hella before.

I won’t mention its contents here. Yes, I took Hella and felt a colossal gear budge and shriek in the center of the earth as it turned, I heard a cascade of finely ground rust hissing off the iron teeth, and felt a window opened in the back of the head which the red dust blew through, each gear then rotating wetly. Really, you’re looking in drawers for bandages or simply lying down, the heart may shrink suddenly into a sweet black raisin: The soul dilated around the prick like a red sealing lips. there was a year of this. Cad could always afford to replenish his vein because he himself concocted the solution, sold it around Tallee, and keepsafed a fair stock for personal disposal. I’d trade the heavenly reward of school bus full of saints for another minute on it but my vocation is pushing through doors and digging up flowers, so I kept walking.

Since I was up all night gardening anyway Cad asked me to deliver his wares to clientele around Tallee while he wallowed in his midnights. Early autumn of 93, I carried a lunchbag to Coach Vinty’s house, which was leased by a Mr. Callen who lived elsewhere. Callen came for the bell—a terrace of coarse reddish curls overgrew the band of his cap—another insect of empire, what else? No furniture inside—a goat would complain—hardly a floor, which opened in places to the grass beneath. The cabinet doors were always open so anybody who came by looking for anything except Sillings and silence—a silence somehow armed, like a latent gas loomed in the air, urging the air to catch fire—could leave. While I was there, Callen did his jumpingjacks and Coach Vinty prepped the Hella, he asked himself along when Vinty was wetting the 5/8th socket-mouthpiece drilled into a small fishbowl. Callen went to Coach Vinty in the kitchen on high-kicking knees, with spinning arms.

You won’t whimsically happen upon a splendid fountain or an aromatic candle-seller in Tallee, but I had a washer/dryer and Callen sat cross-legged on a chair in his underpants until the uniform had cycled through, watching intently to protect it from enemy hands. Callen thought somebody would steal it and put it on and kill somebody wearing it just to defame the club. Additionally, he would not wait naked in front of Cad and myself. Callen wouldn’t even entertain a sermon or talking-to, telling me in a raised voice while the dryer was running that Jesus was an absolute heretic against heaven and Rome and Tallee. Mascot of civilization for two millennia, for what? What was happened besides plastic-chrome-everything? Shove your pulpit! When it was dry, he removed his underpants and put on the uniform, sans underwear, and sat for another cycle, awaiting the solitary article in the load. The belt he insisted on washing scraped and clanged. As the second cycle buzzed in conclusion, Callen stood and dislodged Cad from behind the hot water heater where he’d slunk in a warmly throbbing void. Callee undressed entirely behind the hot water heater, put on his underwear and dressed again in full.

In late 93 Cad died on Hella and at least a few others died shortly after for lack of Hella. There were funeral hymns in place of carols that Christmas. The man left no notes or recipes so no one could take up the trade. He died without a pupil like the old silhouette cutters or pee-laundresses, with no living file for his teachings. Any man who dies without conveying his own professional motions has his masterhood revoked at death; he dies a student, his master the last master. I mean Jesus people were turning over attics for a fallen drop.

After Cad had passed I wished all day somebody would rush into my home and embrace and lift me up too quickly, having misjudged the almost covert thinness beneath my old riding coat. Kissy! It’s You! The only good One. Walk with Me into the mountains, I’ve made up a bed for You.

That second summer living in the house, in 94, I passed through seven doors between the garden and the chair I stood on barefoot, in a nightgown and a diaper of mother’s, crouching with my back to the slat boards in the upper attic room. I had the martingale thrown over the still-barked attic joist, I’d measured all the chairs for height to time the perfect drop through the door in the floor. I slipped a two-by across through my nighty sleeves, cruciformly across my shoulders, wrists hanging over, but couldn’t figure a way to rig my wrists with strapping to the ends (otherwise they would hang plaintively by my sides). No, I decided after a quarter-hour of squirming and engineering, I’d require a helper for my own night of nails.

Still squatting on the chair I heard whooping from outside: shorn and absolute noise furnished to me like a fleet of small craft sailing through the air. I peeked through the gable vent and men were walking along the western fence which lined the road, there were seven of them, I heard yeahs and yups, the low moon the lit tunnel the men called out wandering from. A man went over the fence, turning himself on his behind and the six others crouched and stepped through. Two men swung the doors of an outbuilding a couple hundred yards from the house and they all went in. I heard a hitch take and a grumble among them, a giggle shushed, the rider mower engine then caught and whirred. They all walked along the mower as it pulled down the ramp into the grass, several jumped in the little trailer.

Goddamn me if I’ll abide a joyrider to use up the last gasoline my father ever poured. (Also: they might see or even cut me down in time.) I had had to wriggle the noose with my chin to get it fastened properly, but I slipped my head out and jerked my body sideways from the hips so the plank would slide through my sleeves, down to the floor. They were all looking up toward me. I stepped down and walked to the window and pushed the gable vent off and looked. A man in a white uniform floated whitely across the hill, the rest followed just as a procession of linens across a clothesline. I ran outside through the seven doors and the men were gone.  

At the shed, I lifted the trailer from the ball hitch and stood it up on its handcrank unipod stand, I boarded and steered the mower back in. As I entered, I heard a clatter on the shed roof. I ran out to see Coach Vinty, his uniform the brightest white of the men, sliding down between the standing seams of the roof, kipping up his hips to clear the gutter, then landing and rolling beneath the fence into the roadside ditch. From turtled, maybe hurt, he ran up the ditchside and into tall white pines, where an idling bus was. For lack of torque combined with gross tonnage I’d never considered it possible, but the bus burned out with spinning tires—the carpet of dry needles allowed it. A few drunk men leaned on the fence who were unaffiliated with the heist and certainly not in uniform. I shooed them all and went back in.

Eli Frauchy, a Tallee-Jack patron, came calling in July of 94 when he heard continual shrieking from within the house, as he called it, as he stood in the door. A strong low fire tossed behind a face not beset with age, but seemingly sagging, down-drawn from the continual thrust upward into his work, as in the instant the trampoline responds. Each arm and leg on a clean free swing. The world was all a bother to Eli so surprising delights sought him continually when he looked up briefly from his work. A dozen smiling ancestors flashed in toilet bowels. Each little wonder he encountered was an original thrill: wet young rabbits launching blindly from a patch of mint, mail delivered in hard rain, all cats everywhere (he shooed them also, after a moment of intrigue). He was squared off everywhere from his shoulders to his tax returns, apt ward to the vague phobias that other people all made a net of to spoil his designs.

The first night he visited, he spent the evening in the kitchen caulking around the counter. I don’t believe he had morals or any kind although there was a symmetry to him and his life: forever standing up chairs and vases, messes were straightened, washed were all the straydogs. He smirked cutesily when I’d shout a psalm over a powerdrill or recall quite loudly how my brothers would hold me down and lock me in a car trunk, not complaining, just talking, just talking about anything. He waved it away, he waved me away—any little favor for his soul I asked of him was curtly, roundly rebuffed, shrugged away in flip play-rage, and there was such levity in him despite the fury in his work, a skeleton shining fairly through his skin.  When I eventually took him to bed he essentially folded me up with the linens—woman and sheet were part and parcel, ear and elephant, of his processes. Static percolating in the linens, static crackling in my hair.

All he said about himself was he’d been there for the recent Scout jamboree disaster in the news and his troop was crushed by falling poles and a thousand yards of canvas tent. He was disconsolate. He said this while he simmered vinegar in a sauce pan to bleach out the cigarette odor in the house, crouching at the stove in a shortstop pose, ready all the time.

94 was a giddy season at Tallee-Jack’s. I actually heard a man say, a man who steered skids professionally and drank hardest of all, that he would take care of his tab with his signing bonus. Eli said he could play every position equally well, but it seemed to me—an anti-fan really, because games, all games, are bastard worlds with heretical laws outside Creation—that the Major Leagues would have people at the ready to care for facilities and they certainly could afford to wait for baseball to come back when the labor dispute was settled.

After the Baseball Strike I was sitting on a side porch while he painted the columns of the balcony, as Eli explained cheerfully, precisely, how the riggers of fame and circumstance that would raise him into the major leagues: They’ll see how I go about my day like nobody else, how I’ve perfected the way, how the way is a franchise you could sell to anybody with a credit score. The big guys smack the little blind bears on their snouts and lead them around on a singing chain, the  cocked palm following like a shadow. They know just what to do about people.

Scraped paint flakes drifted into his eyes and face, he just puh-puh-puh’d his mouth and waved away the dust settling in his hair and kept to it, kept at the house beneath consignment, asleep in leaning hours. He exclaimed on the porch All those ballpark storage rooms to organize! I don’t even know if he earned a living or lived anywhere officially. I never saw him open his wallet and nothing seemed to bulge from his pockets—no faded square where one rubbed, not Eli. He didn’t drive or explain why not. For months he was here all the time snaking drains or sanding a pregnant wall or mounting stringers. All those old wax toilet rings! he declared. I couldn’t save this man, he had too much going on.

I nodded off in my rocker but I could still hear Eli going on about really wiping down the concession refrigerators. The sound of my medical bag zipper woke me—he had leveled off my bangs with sanitary scissors while I was out. I raised my head and the columns were dried, smooth as marble, and Eli had moved on to leveling the porch. He fulcrummed a two-by on a quarterwood and lifted a sagging corner and me along with it, shimmying the brick pilings with old woodstain jalousies fallen from the shutters. His hands danced as though his arms ended at the wrists and the wrists were on fire. On a leaf of dry plaster he’d listed in charcoal chalk all he meant to ameliorate in and on the house and posted it on a kitchen wall. I nodded out again. When I woke up Eli was gone. I searched the entirety of the house in case he’d trapped himself in the odd closet with a hit head, or locked himself in the cellar, but once I reached the plasterboard, I saw Side Porch Revival with a line struck through in charcoal, the last item on the list, and didn’t expect him again. When the ball clubs returned from The Strike I looked for his name anywhere in the box score but found naught, no mention of the man anywhere. Perhaps the aftereffects of Hella may have raised him in front of me, fully materialized from my personal compost, like a living odor, and I’d in fact fixed the house up personally; or perhaps all remediations were imagined and it was as it was.

Early autumn of 94 Callen came calling and I strode him later that night in a sweating human straightjacket. He was still lean from trailrunning despite his new drink-along status with the Crows. All I was I was for Callen early on. I didn’t hear anything about his stridently avoiding his family just a few miles from my four acres. We’d crowd in the bar and men would gawk and bat at my pink hair-do but Callen didn’t care if a flirted with other men.

I could even outdrink Callen when we were first a couple. He knew exactly how many calories lurked in the pale amber of each Sillings and we fretted together for some time about this uniform pulling too tight at the waist from all the drinking. The uniform was a loaner, a timeshare, different each time. He said The staff should take its calories from triumphs and they all would be lean, while replaying, running back a disastrous play again and again. He ran all the time in his mind and in the grass. If Coach Vinty let him watch an inning or two from the dugout, Callen jogged in place by the watercooler, announcing which kicked grounders he’d have trapped, which wormburners he’d have beaten out down the line. Coach Vinty even admitted Ten collies couldn’t shag B.P. like Callen, there was barely registered panic in his feet and knees, like that man Taffey, a father of his, A god now in waiting, as he said, to swing and swing again, sending blessings into the bleachers.

Near the end of the Strike season his daughter came looking for him one afternoon from fufu Tallee, she was a fair-looking girl, plainly assembled with the same conduit and brake cable as her father. I brought her inside while Callen was in town buying beer (we always had to let the beer sit for a quarter hour because he ran the case back on his shoulder, riling the suds). I had my hair in a pink dye bag and started to run her off when she asked Is dad here, or if he’d been called up with the rest. I told her No, sweetums. He’s been called down, way down. Not up. There was nothing at all to offer her in the house so she started down the broken stone walk and swung a leg over her bicycle saddle, standing up to her knees in wild grasses. I went back in and peeked through a sidelite to see her look inside Callen’s mailbox, stand the reg flag and turn it back down, then start back out as I was taking off the bag. Callen returned with the beer, wet around the mouth, the box ripped open and a few cans already drunk. I told him his daughter had come by, he asked Which of my little imps? I told him the girl with the eyes like proud jade areolas and…An old ass bicycle. He said Melissa. Melissa—please don’t write her, Kisses. I want to surprise her on Opening Day as I’m standing on the lime, hat-over-heart, for the Anthem. Of course I wrote her and told her about the scourge he and Vinty drove tandem through Tallee and beyond: Two BOY SOLDIERS in a small potato sack hurling elbows—BITING elbows. God and I alike just see two men WILDLY AMISS! Callen’s house had a Crows team calendar on the wall and blue fungo buckets overturned on the carpet for stools. He slept in team towels for covers and stacked more folded team towels for pillows and footrests.

Callen invited me to Thanksgiving of 94 with his baseball relations and I stood there shaking hands with his wife and daughter and it was just the four of us, though Vinty was supposedly in the house someplace. Neither the wife nor the daughter was unpleasant in the least—but the air pressed against me like warm muscle and I could feel the hot otherwordly blood running inside it. My correspondence with Melissa continued long after Callen was out of town, out of sorts, after the Strike ended and threatened to come again. I wanted to have her out to ride horses but thought it improper until the divorce was formalized. I don’t think it ever was. Just before he left for a road series the following Spring, Callen said Eli saw the scout jamboree disaster on the news, it was his first time watching television. He’s never left Tallee.  Eli was real and Callen was jealous, my vocation is nothing if less than a winding chain of miracles.