No Word for the Sea. Diane Glancy

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      The next morning, we pulled the motorboat from the water for the winter. Then we went out in the rowboat. The water did not cry. What were those thought that visited me? Where did they come from?

      I had been a map maker, but it was a map of history. As I talked to Solome, I felt the currents of words. I could handle language. It was the water over which I rowed back toward the land. But the language I knew now started with something other and continued to change with words from other places, until it had become a new language of images, slippages and memories. My life felt like a card-table with collapsible legs. The legs were not locked in place. What if my illness would clip the table and it would fall, taking my life with it, and therefore Solome’s? There were wars and rumors of war. Economic instability in the stock market. Wildfires. Drought. Heat. Storms. How fragile life was.

      As we closed the cabin for the winter, I heard the wind high in the trees, especially the old, tall tree by the cabin next door. I felt a chill in the air. A dampness. I told Solome I thought it could snow before we returned to St. Paul. But it was the coming storm inside me.

      Solome Savard

      Stephen was talking to someone. Solome could hear it, and he knew she heard it, and he covered what he was saying.

      “There’s someone here. I can feel it.” She thought he said.

      When Stephen could speak about his forgetfulness, and his feelings about his forgetfulness, which wasn’t often, he waited until they were at some event at the college, then said to Solome, “I know him— His name is hard to remember— He’s looking at me. I have to say something.”

      But Solome didn’t always know all his college associates, especially the new ones. She couldn’t always help, though she tried as quickly as she could to learn the names. She had Jan send her a list of faculty and their photos.

      “Just speak like you know him,” she would say.

      But to speak would let the man know Stephen didn’t know him. “I have the feeling I’m only part here,” he said to Solome under his breath.

      Solome waited for him to talk more about his forgetfulness. She looked at him in the car.

      “My world is small each day I feel it smaller,” Stephen finally said.

      She wondered if he knew he’d even said it.

      Maybe some Alzheimer’s patients didn’t know what was happening to them. But Stephen would, Solome thought. Whatever was ahead, they would face it with dignity.

      Stephen Savard

      The history I had studied was rearranging its chronological order. To me, all the pictures in the house were crooked on the walls. I mentioned it to Solome, but she said they looked straight to her. The whole nation of myself was a history turned down like a radio.

      I crossed swollen rivers, the wilderness, the buffalo herds, the Indians encampments. At last, I stood in the cul-de-sac, the houses circling like Conestogas.

      Solome Savard

      It snowed more that winter than it had in a long time. Solome heard the neighbors shoveling as she read the newspaper. She heard the yard man with his snow blower on their walk. She heard the snow plow late at night. Each morning, she called her mother and then Soos to see how they were doing. The snow took on a new meaning for Solome. It was the term, white out, she heard on the news. It described road conditions in a snow storm. Solome knew part of the world was being erased before Stephen too. How could she bring it back?

      She was still awake one night when she heard Mark come in. She knew the familiar noise of his car. She thought she heard another voice. Probably a friend. Sometimes Mark tired of the noise in the dormitory at the college and came back to his room. They would want breakfast late in the morning.

      There were great piles of snow in the street. Some of it they hauled off in trucks and dumped in the Mississippi River at night. Solome thought of the Christmas cards she had to send. The shopping she had to do. The party at the college to host. She had to send invitations to the smaller Christmas party they would have at their house for close colleagues and friends. She thought of the preparation she had to do for it. There was the Faculty Wives Club Christmas luncheon. The Historical Society luncheon. The party for her Discussion Group. A dinner at the house of the president of Cobson College. Other parties to which they were invited. Solome went over her shopping list again for gifts for the children and grandchild. Finally she slept.

      The next morning, Stephen stood at the front window. He was leaving. Slowly leaving. He knew it, and so did she. Where was the language for that?

      Stephen Savard

      Solome and I sat with Soos and the baby, Susan, at the Christmas program. The church was filled with poinsettias and candles, the smell of fir and cedar. Soos hoped that Brian would meet us after work. She hoped he would attend church with her, or want Susan raised in church, or find help for their marriage. But Brian didn’t come. I watched the program with Solome and Soos. The children were shepherds, angels, Mary, Joseph, the animals. The sheep were in white dresses. One lamb had a cap with ears. One said, baa, and when everyone laughed, decided not to say it again. Caesar Augustus had decided to take a census. Joseph had to go to Bethlehem. Mary went with him. The children didn’t know what to do. They all had Alzheimer’s, I thought. One child was crying. Now his father was coming for him, picking him up, carrying him up the aisle.

      My thoughts came back to the sanctuary when the children were leaving— the angels with their cardboard wings and halos, the sheep and a lamb, the cows and a donkey in a brown jumper with a tail. Where had I been in my thoughts? Was I also in a recessional?

      Some of our friends told us they’d noticed our absence in the Sunday school class we’d attended for years.

      “Where have you been?” They asked. “We’ve missed you in the Fidelis class.”

      “I’m going to another class.” Solome said. “I am examining my Christianity— the heat has been turned up.”

      Solome Savard

      The Christmas season was busy with parties. Gretchen came home from school for three days. She spent most of the time e-mailing or on the phone with Dennis who lived in Connecticut and didn’t come with her. Soos and Brian seemed happy. Solome’s mother was cheerful. Things were hopeful.

      The bleakness of January hit after the holidays. Solome fell into the sub-zero weather. She sat in the chair and imagined she sat in a room in which there was nothing. That’s the way she felt. She rarely thought about herself as a person without Stephen and the children. When she did, it was a snow-covered field without any tracks. Solome’s volunteer job at the Historical Society was not a consideration. Two days a week. Nothing that demanded much of her. And if it did, she could let go.

      Solome was too tired to go to the Monday night Bible study after Christmas. She wanted the nothingness of her thoughts a while longer. But nothing did not stay nothing. Something always began to form. A fallen hair. Dust from the air. They settled on the floor. Were drawn to each other. They formed a gray fuzz which was the beginning. More dust from the air settled on the floor. It came up in the air from the furnace. It sifted down through the ceiling and in through the insulation and the windows. She used her hand as a broom. She was on her knees on the floor. She swept the fuzz as though her hand was a broom. She swept the holy, living dust mites.

      Stephen Savard

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