FAIRLISS REMEMBERED the caterpillar. It wasn’t the time of year for caterpillars. The sun rose late on ice-thorned woods, and geese were living on whatever they could scrape beneath the crust that used to be foliage. Yet there was the caterpillar: spit-pale, plump, descending on a line that was impossible to see and that had neither end nor beginning. It had come out of nowhere, and nowhere was where it was going.
So it was with this woman—this Mary Amalia Saxon. She too had come out of nowhere; she too had a destination that Fairliss could neither name nor imagine. Yet there she was, sitting amid the cozy clatter of the kitchen in borrowed underpinnings and dressing gown, her face a plaid of gashes, her hair a tattered ball on the back of her neck.
She couldn’t remember precisely what happened, she was saying. There had been no reason to commit those final moments to memory: no need to hold them close, as one preserves the sound of a loved one’s last breath. She and her Scurry were on the road, the ancient cut which follows the brook through the woods of the Watchung Hills. Scurry drove, taking care that the horse didn’t outpace the diluted glare of the buggy’s lamps. (Fairliss imagined them bowed against the raw, face-scraping air, pressed by the fatigue that comes from rising before one’s accustomed time.)
It was between first light and sunrise, she said. Despite the hour, the road was well traveled. They were passed or greeted face-on by carts, wagons, buggies, a stagecoach. Nobody rushed. No voice or visage conveyed alarm. It was just another day of rising and dressing and going about one’s business.
Then she was tumbling in water, she said, grabbing breath every time her face escaped the current, which was too strong to let her gain a foothold yet too shallow to drown her outright. Several times she glimpsed a tree. Naked, it was. Silver. Shining. Rising like the Cross on the summit of Golgotha, amid a heap of torn and bloody human limbs. It grew larger, closer, every time she saw it, until she was atop that dreadful pile, Scurry alongside her, holding her up.
As she spoke, she clung to Scurry’s hand, a grip that stretched the flesh across her knuckles. (Fairliss could see the indentation between the bones.) A hurtful grip. But like any good son still too young to separate himself from home yet old enough to see the wisdom in not embarrassing a parent, Scurry made no complaint, but stayed silent, appearing to ruminate within his own borrowed clothes with the mute annoyance of a poked tortoise.
Mary Amalia Saxon watched as the cook, a woman of frank, unwavering eyes, tossed chunks of raw beef into the pot on the hearth. They fell in a pyramid: stacked, red, runny, with creamy flaps of blood-streaked fat. Like the bodies around the naked tree, Fairliss supposed. An image best kept to oneself.
If Mary Amalia Saxon also saw the likeness, she showed nothing. Nor did she acknowledge Fairliss’s observation that the flood could have been the result of a cloudburst miles to the north. Such was known to happen here. There were written accounts by descendants of the Dutch settlers who had ventured into the region before it was lost to the English in 1664.
“No matter,” she said after some moments of disregard for the information. “Mine has been a life of quiet devastation. A series of no-you-can’ts and there’s-no-use-in-tryings stitched together by someone who doesn’t know how to sew. What occurred this morning only followed the design. I’m accustomed to the fit. So too, is my Scurry.”
At the mention of his name Scurry twitched, a motion trapped between a nod and the furtive shrug of a child apologizing for an elder. It was the manifestation of confirmation as well as the ghost of that confirmation.
Time to leave, Fairliss sensed. As the French would say, Il y a beaucoup à faire. There was lots of work to do, and there was no reason to stay. The impromptu guests were dry and warm now. Already the raw meat sizzled in the pot, spitting up the feral scent of charring flesh anointed with salt and a blend of spices known only to the cook, who used whatever was available in whatever quantities she liked. Mary Amalia Saxon and her Scurry would enjoy a hot meal in the desperate search for comfort that accompanies events that break the ordinariness of life: a search that ended, always and inevitably, in anything other than comfort.
--The Tear of the Seam in the Middle of Things, copyright 2021 by Gev Sweeney. Coming this summer.
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