Future Home of the Living God(35)

“Cedar.”

His face changes and he slides down my body until he’s kneeling on the floor with his face pressed against my belly. He looks up at me, the light warm on his bones. His eyes are full of darkness.

“Will you marry me?”



September 6

So that’s how your father and I decide to get married. Phil is going back to the church today in order to forge papers and signatures, seals and credentials. Our priest is helping lots of people, he says. He’ll create a marriage certificate for the two of us and Phil will bring it to the picnic along with the title to my house and whatever papers we can concoct to make the two of us seem as one. I’ll be gone, of course, on a church retreat of some kind. Phil’s got a social smoothness that he’s developed in his work—that will help a lot. I think he’ll somehow convince the neighborhood association that he’s legit, or that we are. As for getting married, I know it sounds cut-and-dried, as though we decided out of expediency, but that’s not how it felt.

Looking into the dense and noisy green out in back of the house, during the day, I think of how physically happy Phil and I can be. And when that happens I close my eyes and listen to the roar and clatter of the world as it rushes by. We are rushing too. The wind is whipping past us. We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

*

Dear Cedar,

Writing by return mail. The Nagamojig are gone now. Ingiiwiindamowaananig. According to your mom, Kateri Tekakwitha appeared in a cloud of mist exactly two weeks ago today. It is true that she appeared to Jeff “Skeeters” Monroe, in his cups and after an unusually grievous monetary loss. But as he is reliable otherwise, on the tribal council (hysterical laughter), she contends that his version of the event is credible.

Skeeters says that a beautiful Native girl, traditionally dressed, gradually emerged from a cloudy ball and stood balanced on the point of her boulder. She jumped down in a swirl of buckskin and stood on the grass. On her face there was no beatific smile but a steely frown. She stared at him, for a long time he says. Her hair was brown, her eyes were brown, her skin a light gold. She said, “All of you are nothing but a bunch of idiots.”

Jeff was the first one to sober up and quit gambling, and since him there has been a wave of sobriety vows. Where she stood on the grass, just under her feet, two crosses were scorched into the sod.

Of course, there were those who visited the site and then bet big the next day, believing she’d improved their luck. I don’t know where all this gambling money is going anymore. We’re losing track of things. I’m trying to persuade the council to keep closer tabs on the casino revenue and take back our land but there is sort of a runaway what-the-hell feeling here. Yet even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made (Poe). The world out-Herods Herod. The gigantic clock of ebony with brazen lungs, whose music made the giddiest grow pale, has struck.

So that’s the big excitement. There have been round-the-clock vigils.

Sweetie’s vigiling right now. People often hallucinate during times of stress. Still, I think your saint is right.



September 7

I have spent the day meticulously constructing a secret food cache in the basement. I have my tool bucket and my drill. The basement wall/foundation is cinder block, two thick, except for one unexpected place that an electrician showed to me way back when he displayed the old grounded wires for the former owner’s computer room. There is another little crawl space beneath the foundation of the back porch. If I pry two blocks loose, I can slide in sealed plastic containers and cans, then replace the blocks. I have already put the cigarettes in there, but I need to enlarge the opening. I spend the afternoon chipping at the mortar and slowly I succeed in removing the blocks. A normal-sized person might actually fit inside this truly hideous and claustrophobic little space. Not me though. I’m the size of what in medieval times they used to call a hogshead barrel. I’m so heavy and round, now, that I find myself wishing that I could be moved around on casters.

You have eyebrows, eyelashes, even a little hair. Your footprints and fingerprints are legible now and the complex components of your eyes have formed even though you will not open your lids for a couple of weeks. Sight is the last sense to develop. The nerve connections in your hands are still perfecting themselves. Your brain, the big question mark, has been making 5000 neurons every minute ever since you were four weeks old. Every nerve cell can make 10,000 connections. All along, the neurons have been steadily migrating to their destinations. I guess they just know where to go from the moment they are formed. They travel in waves, millions every day, moving along glial pathways. You’ve got all of your neurons now, billions and billions, and with every second two million new connections are made between them, more connections than stars in the sky.

While I am down in the cellar, thinking these things, working on the stash, fitting the blocks back into the wall, I hear a woman scream. Then maddened rough barking from a deep-chested dog. The ripsaw shriek seems to come from the trees and yard out back. The barking too. I rush upstairs and I see, out the back window, not a woman but an enormous, powerful sand-colored blur. The animal bounds through the air toward a shocked-looking chocolate Lab, which disappears in its embrace. The thing—some kind of great cat, all muscle and powerful guile—tears long front fangs into and chokes down the bleeding haunches of the dog right there, and then drags the dog’s head and torso up into the big oak tree. It secures the carcass in the crotch of a couple of branches and then stretches itself along another branch.