True lay in her bed in a vapor of smells, all hers. Coming from every opening, riding fluids of every consistency, insistent on getting out. There were odors from her bowels and from her bladder, odors from her mouth, her nose, her skin, even odors she hadn’t happened upon since her rag days, all of them in a rush. Her body was letting go of the past.
She was a wet tangle of clothes on a larger frenzy of wet clothes that served as a mattress on her broken, sunken bed, the very bed in the very room in which her mother had labored her to odors and fluids of a different promise. The seepage must have started soon after she fell into slumber for she distinctly remembered squatting over her slop pot to do her nightly business before getting into bed and feeling so good that she’d emptied herself of so much. She’d long ago given up racing to her privy when the urge to empty rushed through her system. Too often on her way out of the house her body got ahead of her intentions and what she hoped to aim into the black hole out back trickled, seeped, spurted or gushed down the stairs, on the parlor’s braided rug, in the kitchen, sometimes she left a trail running through the entire house, sometimes without her even realizing it. To remedy: she placed a bowl in every room, two in her bedroom (one of those was her washbasin), and when her body’s immediacy came to call she had the answer for it handy. These bowls had saved her butt more than once, although she had to admit that in the past week or two, the immediacy had stepped up its insistence, and more than once she’d had to let go before she could even reach the nearest one. She felt the dampness all around her, some of it wriggled through her fingers like custard. Had she actually used the bowl last night, she wondered, or did she only dream it? Her thoughts, these days, like her insides, were loosening themselves and escaping her body. If she had only dreamt it, dear God that meant her body was going its own way in defiance of her also departing mind, and if that was the case, what was the point of making it to the day after today?
The odors and the fluids were mystery enough, but there was also a noise that she couldn’t put her finger on. She’d only first been aware of it when she woke to her body’s pre-dawn surprise, but as soon as she was awake and disgusted by herself, she was awake and disturbed by the indistinguishable sound, the slow over and over of it, a tap, syncopated as water dripping, only echoless.
Was it coming from close by or far away? She couldn’t see anything in the dark and the sun wouldn’t be up for hours. Outside on the roof? Inside of her head? The front door? A pot on the stove? A loose shutter? A stray thought? It was something coming from someplace, that tap, and if she didn’t get up to find it she would surely go mad. If only it was a knock and not a tap. A knock wears its good shoes and its Sabbath face. A knock is a braggart who yells out, I’m here! You can confront a knock right away; make it state its business and go. But a tap is more of a child’s game: it giggles, Come find me! A tap was something Threesie Lope would bedevil her with. That Threesie, she said to the vapor-filled darkness, always needing to unsettle me just to make the wind blow! The sound of her own voice was almost as unsettling as the tap. She hadn’t uttered a word in days, not even to herself, not so much as git! to the raccoons that’d made a home in her pantry. Hearing her voice now it sounded so unimpressive—the smells were stronger; the tap was stronger.
Listening all morning and half the afternoon and finally she’d had enough. She gripped the headrail of her bed and pulled her wet self to her side; it was more of a struggle to force her legs over the edge and pull her wet self from there to sitting. She caught her breath, her feet didn’t feel the grit on the floorboards yet, she inhaled her own musk deep and pushed herself off the bed to feel the floor at last, she felt a squish under her left foot (had she missed both bowl and bed?) and from stooping, slowly stretched herself out like a crumpled piece of paper unfolding to straightening out her creases as much as she could. In the time it took her to unfold out of bed and stand, apes had walked erect faster.
Tap.
Her hands were aching more than usual but she drew her wet cardigan as tight as her four good fingers and the one remaining button would allow, even though the hole she married it to was three holes too low. At least she was out of bed. There was a reason for her to get out of bed today, if only she could recall it; the days when she had a reason grew fewer and fewer. She searched the room for the reason but it must have been off playing the same hiding game with the noise. She pushed a wild branch of her gray nest to the crown of her head and secured it with a laundry pin she’d fumbled for and found next to the pruning shears on the bedside table, and tired as she was she resolved to go downstairs and find the noise and give it breakfast and maybe then it would be on its way. She nudged aside the night’s unused soil bowl with a bare blue foot and followed an ancient path out the doorway that hadn’t had a door on it since Cozy’s drinking days, and as she descended the stairs in the dark she let the treads guide her squeak by squeak.
Tap.
The sound was all around her in the air. A right turn at the bottom of the S-curved run where the last tread was worn to a lopsided frown, through the narrow path in the clutter in the dining room with its dangling distraction in the center over the table, and into the kitchen, she followed the sound and the sound followed her like two clouds of dust in a foot race.
Maybe she was just hearing things because she hadn’t slept for years, not real deep sleep, not really. Real deep sleep for True was the only store in town worth shopping at, and it stopped doing business with her long ago. Every day now she felt tired and she looked tired and she moved tired and she ate tired and she saw tired and she certainly smelled tired and now she heard tired, too. There was no way to tell anymore if the fatigue that chewed through her walls and moved into her body like the raccoons did in her pantry was due to a lack of proper slumber or an excess of years. Her spine this morning couldn’t remember its purpose for the day any better than she could, and searching for an answer it curled her torso into a question mark, which asked her the most basic question of all: why are you still alive?
Tap.
The same stray branch of her nest she mashed before she mashed up from her face again and as she did she searched the room with pleading eyes: where was that damned noise coming from? She’d believe anything that might swat the noise from her head. But neither the icebox nor the eggbeater said boo.
A few things grab hold in the dark—the best is fire. For a moment, an ancient tug in True knew to kindle a few twigs in her cooktop, and when she struck the match and the dried sticks ignited, cavemen came alive. She stood among them entranced; staring into the blue-orange-yellow unknown like it was the first flame ever. The moment lasted as long as the stick fire licked, but the flashes shrank to little bubbles of flame then a glow spot then a puff of smoke and it was over, the fire letting go of itself, leaving a trace of woody after-smell, not as stenchy as True’s, and True’s transfixion puffed out itself and she remembered what brought her downstairs to begin with: the tap. Only now, it wasn’t a tap, it was a knock.
Knock.
She had preferred a knock to a tap only a while ago, but now that she had it she could kick herself. One good thing: she could at least tell where this noise came from. The new sound was issuing from the outer door of her front vestibule and as she held her breath and listened, oh Lord, the timbre of it became abstractly familiar. It reminded her of that most annoying howdy-do of a knock that’s the stock in trade of Kennesaw Belvedere. What’s he doing here? she asked a spot over there.
If Kennesaw Belvedere wasn’t her oldest friend AND her cousin AND maybe even her uncle AND possibly her half-brother (it wouldn’t surprise her), AND one of the only living souls left in town, she’d have nothing to do with the man.
Knock.
She listened once with her jaw thrust towards the sound, she squinted and listened twice with her shoulder leading the way, and when she was sure she was sure that this sound was Kennesaw’s damnably familiar howdy-do of a knock and she wasn’t imagining it any more than she wasn’t imagining the tap and was resigned to letting him in, she moved an empty pot onto the snuffed-out flame of her cooktop, and told the kettle to watch it, then made her way out of the kitchen and into the dining room and nudged aside a stack of berry hallocks on the buffet and answered her breakfront.
She told her grandmother’s blue-and-white transferware dishes to come in, and when the dinner plates decorated with old sailing vessels and the quarter inch of dust on them didn’t budge, she said to the rubber boot on the broken chairback on the dining table that she had no use for fools who didn’t know their own mind, and old age was no excuse. C’mon in Kennesaw, she said to an apple basket, hang your hat there, and she chinned to a plant stand on which sat a pot of bent gray stalks. Then pointing a shaky elbow at a raccoon trap she had once mistaken for a slop bowl told her guest to follow her into the privy and bring the tray with the paint and mind the squirrels.
Don’t take all of my time, she said to the grandfather clock in the hallway as she led her mute guest first into the nook beneath the stairs where she paused for a confused moment before the heavy black telephone on the small clamshell shelf (it used to ring two-long for Bliss and three-short for Lope in days long forgotten), then past the front vestibule where no one would be coming to call for hours, then into her front parlor where dust and cobwebs and feed bags and egg crates and half-filled slop bowls warmed in the afternoon sun. Somewhere over her shoulder True said, Sit your ass down in the good chair, and nodded her nest in the direction of the firebox full of brambles.
Knock.
The sound confused her now. Here was Kennesaw, that knock was his, so whose knock was it? She didn’t want her confusion in the same room as Kennesaw; he had always looked to her for wisdom after all, so she guffed to keep her guest from guessing. That’s just porcupines, she said in a mad rush of breath, looking first out the south-facing parlor oriel, then under the davenport. What a damn bother they are at our years! she remarked. She asked the woodstove, How many is it now, Kennesaw? but a woodstove never reveals its age. Such a bashful one, she said, and kicked a small striped tuft of fur that had desiccated itself on her parlor’s braided rug who knows when. Let’s see, True said. I’m older than apple cider and your mother was a butter churn and the winter Grunts Pond caught on fire there were only six days when laundry needed ironing, so that means you must be at least as old as your first pair of overalls and I was a mere slip of a girl when you fumbled to button those straps for the first time, so that makes you at least ten to fifteen miles shorter than me, give or take a postage stamp. The woodstove having become a stack of fruit crates said neither nay nor yay, which was all the silence True needed to know her calculations were somewhere in the barn if not directly in the corncrib. It’s all pennies and pins, she said, with a laugh that didn’t want to be funny, aren’t they such a drawer full of nonsense? Birthdays? You’ve lost weight, Kennesaw, she said to the candlestick lamp, stop hovering and sit down and quit your tomfoolery. She lowered her own bony hips to the stack of egg crates in front of the davenport, the crates having retained their wooden form while the davenport and its springs and horsehair stuffing had exploded the worn velvet fabric from within. Good thing there were as many old, soiled clothes piled on it as on her bed to soften things, or a sitter wouldn’t be able to stand it. She braced her descent with a hand on a mound of pinecones in a skillet and informed her guest, This upholstery is Mother’s favorite. By the way, I didn’t bake an ice wagon. Who needs ants?
Knock.
The sound was as persistent as a leaking roof but she didn’t want Kennesaw to think she was hearing noises because he’d be sure to tell Loma Soyle who’d tell her sister Petie who’d tell Jubilee Aspetuck who’d tell Frainey who’d tell Chippewa who’d tell that Herkimer Minton who’d tell Luddy who’d tell Mawz, and if Mawz Engersol heard that she was a girl as unsound as the sound around her was unseen, he wouldn’t come to her house tonight to take her to the dance and if she didn’t dance with him tonight she’d just die!
Gone from True’s day-to-day now was her impending one hundred years, her numb left hand, history as she lived it, and the word tomorrow. Gone was the stone she had made of her youthful fancy, pulverized back to its volcanic state of forming, pliable once again to her desires. In place of it all was Kennesaw taking up her time in the parlor when she should be upstairs prettying her girlish self for the arrival of the boy of her dreams.
The tap was back now. She hadn’t noticed it gone until its return where it united with the knock. It must have gone out to run an errand when she wasn’t listening.
The tap, the knock, Kennesaw—how impatient she was with them all. She waited a polite span of time for Kennesaw to grow bored with their visit and offer his fare-thee-wells and leave, but when the firebox neither cleared his throat nor slapped his hand on the davenport’s arm, when the only sound in the room was from the wind riffling the decayed last shreds of a lace curtain that hung over the open parlor oriel like a veil torn from a bride, True groped the musty air for a final say on the subject, not that she could recall what subject was in the air.
Knock.
Tap.
There are fewer stars in the skies over New Eden than there were when I was a girl, she said to the portrait of her great-great-grandfather, Remedial Bliss, the first of the Remedials, although the man with the bloodshot nose was too preoccupied with a bow saw and a cluster of rhubarb to take a whack at the subject. Have you noticed that, Kennesaw? Have you ever tried to count them, one by one? She was looking up at her parlor ceiling now with its water stains and buckled plaster and millions of crackled paint peelings that had been there since before there was a before—the thousands hanging on and the thousands that had already let go. From the sunlight filtering in through the oriel window the tips of the peelings caught intermittent flashes, so that even during the day her parlor made a night of it.
Knock.
Tap.
She shook her head free of the sounds but what she really loosed were stars, and as her head bobbled a large flake of paint fell out, and, riding the flake as one might a shooting nova down the blueish white of her neck and onto the frayed grays of her cardigan was a mud-dark potato bug, its long legs frantic to grab hold of anything not transitory. I used to try to fit all the stars in my saltshaker, all those stars, all those damn stars, but they gave me gas, True confessed to her guest. As the words were coming out so, too, were the sounds again, and again, and again, knock-tap, knock-tap, the syncopated dripping water dripping faster. She was growing frayed as her cardigan, eager to push the whole stray branch of the day away with a wave of an arthritic fist.
Surely the accumulated wonder of her musings had distracted Kennesaw and rendered him speechless, for once again she heard nothing from him, and hearing nothing, was gratified because she was tiring at a gallop and had nothing more to add. She decided now was the moment to pour the tea, maybe he’d leave after she did, so she reached for the slop bowl atop the Good Book that lately made a better cuspidor than a doorstop and tipped it in a tremulous arc, letting the pale yellow fluid splash onto her lap and down her legs and puddle on the dirty braided rug, where it took its time to seep in and left a wide ring of wet. Her head was still in the stars, and quite a few stars were still on her head. She asked her guest to remind her what he took in his long johns. She was working so hard to keep herself focused and keep the noises at bay. On the count of knock, tap, shrug, True reached a trembling hand inside of her cardigan and removed a withered flap and told the bookcase it could pour its own damn paint. Drink up!
Knock.
Tap.
The knock was overpowering, the tap the last straw. The two sounds had fused together like a shot and echo—knocking-tapping, knocking-tapping—coming at her as a wide flank firing, knock-tapping, knock-tapping, knock-tapping, and the force of the hits was great enough to blast this present imagined moment from her consciousness and land her smack down into the one she had waited her whole life to begin.
It was on a summer breeze that True floated like an airborne ribbon from the parlor through the foyer back to the cluttered dining room and into her dream. Her young man, Mawz Engersol, had stepped through the breakfront and was waiting for her in the air over the trash-topped table; nothing else on the ceiling tantalized her with visions of the life she’d have ahead as much as the single incandescent bulb that was hanging by a twig of wires from above like it was the last lone apple on a tree that would yield no more. True circled the table in a skip-to-my-Lou, she dipped her eyes and fluttered lashes she no longer grew, she pinched the hems of a skirt only Mawz could have seen and twirled amid the chaos with increasing breathlessness keeping time, the knock and tap in her chest forced her to stop, and she swooned and the room swirled on, and smelling sweet jack-in-the-pulpit over her own foul air she smiled a girl’s most important smile at the suitor who smit her, and smoothed a pink velvet memory with a numbed, gnarled fist, and looking that unlit bulb in its long-ago disconnected eyes she uttered the answer that would have lit up her life:
Oh Mawz, she said, her words halting and breathy as forward they looked to their end, you most certainly, may have, this dance.