WHAT BROKEN WATER BRINGS TO BOILING by Quintan Ana Wikswo
There had been no warning – there is never any warning. The earth was salted with frost, for it was winter, and it smelled as such. Until he came into the house, and then it smelled of summer, of late summer when nothing is fresh any longer.
Maw’s face took on a sheen. The bones fought past the muscles and skin to stand on the outside of her face, replacing her flesh with skull. Two hollows for eyes staring out in something like a corpse’s half-smile of shocked pleasure – unexpected. Maw was a thing of beauty and grace unadorned. This was the day of reunion. They wheeled the stretcher off the back: Lafayette. But then, unexpected, he stood and walked. Walked towards the three women. Tried to mount the stairs and could not. He crumpled. The twins ran down to help him up. His bones seemed soft, he had turned back to clay, his suit a fibrous thing stinking of cigarettes and softened skin.
Where did the thought come from – for it came to all of the women simultaneously: over the agony of years, the twins and their mother had told themselves, silently and individually, that something like the river, death, or catastrophe had restrained him. But in his awful softened state, bones so logged with weakness, the women realized he had known, all along, where they had been. He’d known they needed him, and wanted him, and dreamed of him with love and longing and an enduring merciful despair.
He had known how to come back, hadn’t he, all along, and yet hadn’t returned until now. But not because they needed him. It was a thought none of them cared to utter, and a question none of them needed to have answered.
The death’s head of Maw seemed mounted with a nail above the door. It barred the door for an instant and then a weird smile of pleasure granted the gurney access and Lafayette was borne aloft into the white house. She had stood aside to let him pass, and the twins followed along behind before the door closed upon them all.
There was nothing to say. Dogs barked. After the moon came out it went away again. When he had arrived it had been afternoon. And shortly thereafter the moon had been three quarters full, and then all of a sudden there it was, filling up with its white lunar sap, poised, half-tipped, getting ready to drip out over them into a milk-fed dawn.
Whitey and Sweet Marie had worked through the night with Maw their mother, talking little. Only once had the death’s head spoken a word: bloodsick.
So he had needed them and he had returned.
Them bitches sent him back, the driver had said before departing, and Sweet Marie had covered her mouth, but too late, for she had already vomited into the lilac bushes. The dogs had gone over to investigate.
CIGARETTES AND A RING, A SHINY RING, MAYBE WHITE GOLD, MAYBE A DIAMOND
The whores hadn’t given him up easy to the disease. Before they called the driver, before they packed his bags, before they took on the investigations to find his wife, his two grown girls, before all that the Gulf Girls had washed Lafayette in a deep aluminum basin, boiled him, with his knees up nearly to his chin. They have two kinds of soap for bugs: sweet soap, and bug soap. They used the bug soap first and it hurts. Inside the soap are rough bits like bark and sand, and it smells of gasoline, turpentine, and lye. It burned, made Lafayette feel like his cock was a match, as though one more rub and it might erupt, engulfed with flame and ash. After the bug soap the water is a murky black, brackish, and the Girls helped him up so one of them could take a turn.
Lafayette shivered with the wet and they wrapped him for a moment before using the sweet soap, which sometimes makes him cry when he is tired because the water is clean and nearly clear, and the Girls’ fingers slickened with soap as they dart around his balls and back behind, gentle, and since they’re making fragrant amends for the injustice, their sweetness always reminded him of the few bad things that have happened to him in the house: a tobacco man’s climactic thumbs pressed down so hard against his windpipe that he felt it give a bit and crack; the fright of a scarlet stream of blood that poured from his haunches unexpected; the last night of his favorite girl who screamed and screamed, stopped speaking, then took pills; all these and a gut drawn sickness bring themselves to the bath hoping to get washed away. And so sometimes Lafayette cries when it comes time for the sweet soap because he knows its sweetness won’t hold against the black tar that smothers, or against the sticky sludge that clings.
IT LIVES INSIDE A CANDLE BECAUSE IT UNDERSTANDS THE NEEDS OF HEAT
It was morning. Lafayette was in a white nightgown. Maw and the twins were burning lemon oil in the bedroom to cover the stink. Later, Whitey sat with her father. The other two went outside at the cast iron cauldron, boiling the second set of sheets. Bugs kept crawling. It seemed like all sorts of bugs were everywhere, traveling fast in their headless shells. Whitey snapped them between her fingernails. She was going to shave his head – thick handfuls of white and grey and red hair, great hanks like weaving yarn, skeins of it. The razor a flat-bladed affair attached to a long white bone handle. She kept it sharp. She wore an apron of thick, tight-woven cloth over her lap to hold the hair, the piles of red hair shot with grey – it seemed to be full of movement, of passion and lice and vitality. It wouldn’t come off his head – it was tough as sinew. He cried and laughed and touched her arm at crucial moments – the blade slipped above his ears. There was blood dripping on the pillow. Drops of red-licorice liquid suspended in his brows and eyelashes. He didn’t notice. The blood ran down the deep grooves along his nostrils. Whitey poured witch hazel on the wounds and blotted them.
Little bitch, he smiled. Maybe I wanted them itchy bastards. Maybe I’ve grown to like them.
Pulling up his nightgown she shaved his entire body – long liquid strokes of the blade when and where she could, covering flesh quickly; short jagged strokes when the need was there. She saw his body was so much like her own: she was missing the penis but the rest she had washed herself for years: sturdy thighs, solid ankles, flat kneecaps, broad hips and deep caverns of armpits. Whitey notices more than anyone thinks – is more aware than anyone knows. She understands the necessary rituals of care, for without them things change, things fall apart, they turn rancid and decay. Every morning, the soft faun skin around her nipples lies lustrously revealed, a plump support for the dark dots of her milk ducts. Sheet creases leave grim fissures along their route to her ribs. She watches bodies, even her own.
But in her father there was no end to what had rotted. He was covered with sores. Whitey tried to shave around them; she covered them with mercury salve and bandages. Whitey put a handful of her father’s hair in a jar for her basement apothecary. The rest she threw sizzling into the fire, with a few cups of cedar bristles to cover the stench.
Where is her sister? Where is her mother? She thought she saw her mother’s cadaverous face grinning outside the window and then it too disappeared.
PETTY DESIRES FOR FUEL AND FOOD, PENNIES AND QUARTERS AND HUSBANDS AND LOVE
The driver has gone to Lynchburg and told what he knows: the whores in the Gulf hired him to drive crazy old demented Lafayette home to his old wife – he had the copper pennies, he was too sick, they didn’t want him in their whorehouse, he cried in their barrooms and backrooms all through the night – made the most mournful sounds, then denied it in the morning – hallucinated all through the day, raving, a man worse off than an idiot.
He had no money, could bring in no money, his ragged cries through the night, they hired a driver to take him onwards. And now he was in Lynchburg, and he laughed the kind of laughter the house had never known: three o’clock in the morning and his calls rang out, his feet stomping the floor by his fireplace – Whitey ran in and Lafayette was holding a burning stick of wood, dancing in the firelight, stamping out a jig upon the hardwood floor, naked to the stars.
Whitey put a crown of holly on his head and danced with him, clapping, then as he tired sang songs to quiet him.
HOLDING THE HAND OF HER HUSBAND IN THE GOOD ROW, WHERE ALL THE VERY BEST PEOPLE PRAYED
Maw had thought for some time in the past year that he might come back. She had felt his presence along the roads in her bones. And she surprised herself, after all these years, at the fact that she was excited in a way, didn’t feel the old anger too deeply, didn’t revile or hate him or consider how she would punish him when he finally arrived, no matter what state he was in. And when she saw him and immediately diagnosed his disease – and knew its story, the story of the last twenty years without even having to wait for the town of Lynchburg to come running to tell her – she felt nothing aching but her bones anymore. Maybe they had been what was bothering her all these years.
Who was this stranger, so humbled in her home, so ineffectual? His wedding ring gone, sold for card money, or girls, or flophouse food – had it ever been fastened on his finger? Had he ever lain quietly at her side? Were these the love-light eyes she had gazed into? His thick arms, thick thighs: these had stood next to her by the fireplace beneath the Parisian mirror and taken vows. Maw suddenly gathered up the orange blossom bouquet she had scattered, its blooms all greyed and broken, over the grave of her marriage all those years ago. She unpacked the wedding gown made of lace doilies and tablecloths. The past twenty years in rage and loathing for this man? He was sugared now, to her, somehow, by becoming weak: now that he needed her and she no longer needed him, she might even say she had forgiven him.
Maw hadn’t been required to take him in – the town would have understood had she turned him away, indignant. It would have been as Christian to deny solace to a sinner as it would have been to give succor; moral justification could have been found either way. Surely she should be feeling more anger? No, she had spent her feelings in the preceding twenty years. They had been wasted years, then. No, she had raised two girls, kept the household running, saved lives and ushered others out with a modicum of peace and comfort. Had she not suffered? No more than other people, and now she saw justification in the final years. A circle at last drawn fully until it closed neatly round upon them all. She had decided to take him in and enjoy his dependency on her. After all these years of her needing him, now he would have to be the one to need her. She appreciated the justice in that.
No, when Maw went in to look at the half-blind and utterly insensible husband of hers, she felt long-gone, and the years of caring stripped away. She felt light as thistle, as goose down. He could not hurt her ever again: here he was, at her mercy now, instead of her at his mercy. She had won: he’d had to return in the end.
Maw did less doctoring of her other patients with Lafayette in the house. Strangely, she spent little time with him or with anyone else, only occasionally going to sit at his bedside while he slept – no one heard them speak to one another. But gradually the flesh and skin and then the color returned to her face. Her hands softened, and stilled slightly from the constant movement that had always been her trademark. She washed more often in the tub, put her hair in a tidier bun in back, and sometimes sat at her bedroom mirror and braided it long down her back before twisting it up in a great yoke of complex suspension and geometry at the back of her head.
For the first time since when the twins were babies she spoke sweetly to the girls, when she saw them – Sweet Marie mostly a phantom now, and Whitey an industrious torrent of activity. But Maw cooked meals more attentively, and would set her hand lightly on the tops of her daughters’ heads when they were seated, at times going out of her way to do so. Their socks appeared in their drawers, darned.
At supper Sweet Marie asked Maw why she was working less with the patients. I’m a married lady, Maw said, I figure I’ve paid my dues. And her daughter asked her no further questions. After a moment Maw asked her what she thought of polishing the silver and using it for everyday, and Sweet Marie reminded her that she had sold it nearly ten years earlier.
THIS IS THE NOSE HE KISSED AND THEN LEFT; THIS IS THE CHIN HE CUPPED WITH HIS HAND
You’re a fine piece of horsemeat, Lafayette says to Whitey, and I see you’re part of a set. Where’s the other one?
Whitey puts a jar of forced narcissus on his dresser.
I’ll pay you a dollar to take that dress off and dance, Lafayette says to Whitey. Lemme see them sweet duds start to dance.
The coffee gets cold in its cup by the window sill, where she has gone to sit and breathe the cold December air.
When Whitey went to town, she first put Sweet Marie in charge of their father.
Your sister seemed not too interested in my business proposition, but something makes me think you’ll be more my kind of a gal, said Lafayette to Sweet Marie.
Sweet Marie was seated in a rocking chair at the furthest point in the room across from him, her fingernails leaving little red-edged scythes of white along her forearms. She closed her eyes and watched the cascades of white, blue and yellow plummet behind her darkened lids.
Men are willing to pay twice for twins, and twice double for twins as pretty as the two of you. You’re wasting away here – for a whorehouse I can’t say hows I see this place gets much activity. Soon as I’m up on my feet I’ll show you how it’s really done.
When Sweet Marie vomited all over his blankets, nobody could remember having eaten bacon and eggs that morning for breakfast.
Where did the other one go? Lafayette asks Whitey, you bring her to me and I could get you a real fair price for you both. You’re missing out on an opportunity for some big business. Big. That old skull-head woman cutting you beauties out of the kitty?
Whitey tries to explain again that he is home, at home with his own twin daughters.
Daughters. I reckon I got no babies I know about, her father says.
No, I don’t reckon you do, Whitey says, I don’t reckon.
Much less daughters, he says. Baby. He says.
Daughter. She says.
HIS APRICOT LIPS, CRYING IN THE NIGHT FOR HER TO COME TO THEM
Maw put on her hat and gloves and wrapped herself in several layers of thick black wool and walked, invisible, walking away, the miles down the wooded road leading away from the white house. There were lights shining through the branches and brambles, and she knew to which window they each belonged. The air was dry and the frost was rising to freeze the tiny shards of limestone and shale into miniature towers, cracking under her boots. Her weight left no hollow. She followed wheel tracks frozen in the mud until she diverted through the brittle underbrush and dropped into the woods, where the path was thin and black. She climbed the side of the hill, her feet twisting in the loose boots, snapping her way through brittle twigs and feeling the snag of bramble at her legs. There was no reason to hurry. The moon would not care if she arrived or not. She sat on a downed tree and the heat of her body melted a scrim of ice clinging to the wet bark – she laid back and watched the heavens above her. Each star was distinct in the sky, and nothing had changed, nothing had changed from when she had first looked up at them when she was a little girl, they just spun around a bit as the time of year changed. This time next year, everything would be exactly the same. If a tree fell, another would take its place. The birds that were silent now would be singing in the morning, and every morning after. There are moments of reconciliation, of retribution, of returns and reunions. Moments when there is nothing to do but move forward into time, keep pushing into it because what came before and what comes next are equally undesirable.
She had a jar with whiskey in it, and she drank deeply from it while she laid there. There was someone on a different hilltop playing a fiddle and she drank and drank. She knew the branches were full of owls, and that they were all eyes – watching her. And she was all eyes, watching them. And she drank some more. And she poured it over herself and she lit a match and dropped it on her breast and hoped for a second to go up to them, in a small quick ball of fire, but she didn’t. The wool was too thick. She singed and stank, and now was wet and cold. She smashed the bottle against the rocky soil. She hadn’t wanted to die, she had just wanted to burn a little.
Quintan Ana Wikswo has had work in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Mississippi Review, and Confrontation. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.