Still, against the heavy wind,
the spoon of cherry wood
no longer moves
the liquid in the pot.
Locked in the lamplight sweat
of the eternal night winter,
the disturbed quiet is quite safe—
suffocates the closed room.
Looking out, all that can be
seen is a knothole in the oak tree.
Gone is the fig, the oyster, the mango,
the red candle—its wick.
Gone is the bean, the blackberry, the carrot,
the parsnip, the horn of the rhinoceros.
The cupboard is both
emptied and latched.
The man in his blister heat
will not come back.
The kitchen is so clean,
everything’s in its nook.
AFTER CECILIA KILLED Herr M, she got back in her car and drove past his old attic apartment where the rape had occurred, slowed the car to a stop for a few seconds, stared at the top floor, then made her way east, down to the lake and turned the gun on herself.
She had wanted to fill the deep pockets of her coat with heavy stones, like Virginia Woolf had done, and then walk into the water and sink down into it. However, because it had been the coldest December in forty years and such weather continued, creating a frigid January, the lake looked like it was made of concrete—secure enough that anyone might be tempted to skate on it and this made her worry that all that would happen if she walked across it was that it would just crack a bit—if that. Added to this was the chance someone might see her, for a full moon now lit the night sky, disturbing the darkness, and if someone saw her they might for the moment feel heroic, stop their car, leap out, and try to save her.
She did consider the small chance that she might be able to find a weak spot in the ice and could stomp on it with her boots and force a split. Then, she would be able to slip herself down into the frigid water and quietly drown. She liked the image of herself doing this. It seemed graceful. But with the gun still in her pocket and her energy maniacally high, without much hesitation about fifteen minutes after the death of Herr M, she decided to put the revolver in her mouth.
The police found two notes in one of her coat pockets—the same pocket that held the broken roll of Life Savers. One was folded over and on the outside read in a flowing, delicate, clearly feminine script, Michael. On the upper inside fold were the words of Kuo-an-shek-yu:
and the effort is over
On the lower half were the words:
I leave you
My love—
All that I own
My poems
Your freedom
c.
The second note was really just a scrap of paper with some fragments of lines from William Wilfred Campbell’s poem, The Winter Lakes:
Never a bud of spring, never a laugh of summer …
But only the silence and white,
The shores that grow chiller and dumber …
Hushed from outward strife …
In the other pocket the police found a bracelet of silver and obsidian placed inside carefully folded blue tissue. They asked everyone in the family about its significance. No one knew.
Cecilia did not understand, nor could I have expected her to, that given what she had just done, her hardest journey had now just begun. She had wanted so much a correction to ease the awful carbuncle of memory she carried with her about Herr M and also about her mother and Karl. She wanted to become more like Anne Frank writing and hiding in that attic from those trying to destroy her and her family, all the time believing in the goodness of people. But Cecilia could not come to believe in such goodness. Because she had been raised a female Slaughter, she was too filled with a devastating emptiness and anger.
Although she will not sleep in the forever growing potter’s field of the fitful, psychopathic evildoers with their ceaseless night terrors, she will be on a path of unrest unlike any other she had known in the life she just left.
She and Herr M will meet again and again in different ways—different forms of perversions based on sex and power—and torment each other over poetic license and its price. Eventually, if she has the strength to turn her back to him, her path will lead to a place of knowledge, forgiveness, and peace.
Herr M, on the other hand, will wander for all time looking unendingly for the perfect conquest. He will do this initially with great determination and zeal, then with an unbearable exhaustion, yet he will not be able to stop. A Sisyphus, of sorts.
He will continue to tell anyone here who will listen his side of the story. His emotions will be most stirred when he speaks of the dog. About how he did nothing wrong with her. How much he cared for her. Cecilia will always take a distant second place in any feelings he has of regret, repeating only, “I did apologize.”
The police notified Celie first because they found her name and number in Cecilia’s wallet on a card as to whom to contact in case of emergency. Upon hearing the news, quite expectedly, she broke apart, and at Cecilia’s funeral she collapsed, for she saw that Adele, indeed, had died and recently, for there was just a wooden grave marker—no plaque yet. However, with better medication and new doctors she recovered within the year.
Joshua and Jeremy and their wives, having fled the country after the murder (this being easy to do since neither union had produced any children and adoption out of the question) to escape the reporters, the gossip, and to find some kind of peace of mind on a tour of Japanese temples, actually learned some things about generosity of spirit. For the first time they truly became Celie’s brothers, and they finally saw her and they helped her.
Here, I cannot but think of Emerson’s words: “Every earnest glance we give to the realities around us, with intent to learn, proceeds from a holy impulse, and is really songs of praise.” And I praise them for this.
When she got better, they gave her money to open up her own shop—The Finest Linens to Dream On. Joyce and Jocelyn frequent it often as do their friends and, of course, all of Celie’s former clients.
Eventually, Celie’s heart did dance—some.
As one might have easily guessed, Michael was inconsolable and filled with self-recriminations about how impotent he had been in not acting promptly—in doing nothing. He grew physically ill, as sometimes the anguished, stunned, and lovesick do. Soon he will die and find mind-peace—never to seek out Cecilia again. The good of heart do eventually come to a state of blessedness.
Everything here is rather balanced, religious, and just. Einstein spoke of a spiritual force at work in the universe and although he did not obsess on it, just went on with his work, he was right.
Once again, Cecily revised her play, about the poet and the critic, now adding how the poet kills the critic and then herself. She sends it to every theater company she can think of, but unknown to her, no one wants any part of it. Never will.
She believes it is her finest work. Maybe it is, but I, too, refuse to read it. Clearly her determination to beat out Cecilia in terms of success did not stop with Cecilia’s death. Instead it grew larger, into a singular obsession as cold as ice determined not to melt.
She even considers killing herself, thinking, “Maybe then I will become famous—after all, didn’t Cecilia become even more so in death?” She thinks and rethinks this possibility as she will when she appears here in an old age and forever waits for fame to arrive.
Deidre wrote a couple of poetry books that were published by a small press—unknown to most. At her insistence, her husband threw a lavish party on the occasion of each publication. At both of the festivities she sat at a large, expensive, intricately carved oak table with long-stemmed yellow roses in a vase next to her—sent to her from herself. Her husband reluctantly hired violinists for quiet background music as she signed the cover page of each book for all her invited friends and relatives. She used a gold trimmed Mont Blanc pen. The hors d’oeuvres served were so delicious everyone commented that there would be no need for dinner.
Clearly Deidre could not find an independent self-path—the one she sought for about a month after the lunch with Cecily. Within a couple of weeks she was already stumbling on it.
After her first book was accepted, a feeling of entitlement and hunger for more attention grew within her like a tumor with an intractable appetite. It has made her spirit bone-thin and continuously famished.
Now, she always dresses in black, never hesitating to tell anyone who will listen, “It’s in memory of Cecilia Slaughter.” Most just roll their eyes when they hear this, silently thinking to themselves, “Oh, please.” After the two published books nothing more will happen for her of a literary nature and she, too, will also begin to wonder if she needs to die so as to become famous.
Sometimes she meets with Cecily at a fancy downtown hotel bar to discuss the merits of artistic suicide and the various possibilities as to how to do it—which tools as Anne Sexton had put it. The two do, in fact, role play, maybe even believe, they are Sexton and Plath competing over the preferred method for a self-inflicted death and like them, they drink too much when they discuss the topic. The waiters watch—ignorant of the literary history the two are trying to recreate—finding them ridiculous, but fun for middle-aged women. They look forward to their return and serving them. They are big tippers.
Deidre, in death, will try to join the Plath-Sexton group—Lowell and Berryman will be there. Needless to say, they will ignore her.
Celine, now left with just too much family pain and loss, has added more men (and women) to her life and more flashy designer clothes to her closet, as well as more of the finest jewelry she can get Aaron and the others to buy her. She has the embalmed look—the stretched pallor—of a too-often-face-lifted bag woman, layered in lots of money. She pays and pays to get what she wants, like her father, and as with him, nothing is ever enough—or ever will be.
The most interesting thought Celine ever had was when she was six and wondered if her baby sister had been accidentally dropped into the wrong family—which she was. Celeste was reborn into another family and renamed Ida after her new mother’s mother. Ida, or Idy, as most people call her, goes through her life with a sometimes cacophonous sound in her head that she cannot place, but with which she has learned to live.
I know the dead cannot influence what happens to the living, but sometimes I cannot help but reflect on the irony of this and wonder—who would not?—if Grandmother Idyth finally took possession of one small thing—the dead baby Celeste, making sure she was given safe passage to another life and a variation of her name. I muse on this, then let it go.
I do not know of the inner workings of everything. I may never. Nor am I sure anyone completely does or should—even Lao Tzu. With this he would agree. Here, it is more about acceptance of what is and what you do thereafter.
As for myself, I have grown tired of the intricacies, intimacies—the interminable detailings—of stories, even my own. I have quit my memory’s mind-search for Wyatt. Suddenly, it became easy, like deciding to uncage a rare bird—free its beauty from my stare—and watch it fly away.
I have little need for things to work out differently than they do. Now, I just look at a situation, see it as it is, without wishing it were otherwise. I am finding that peace that the desperate living and the restless dead long for. Some others here are finding it, too. Who they are or will be, I dwell on less.
However, even here, people do surprise you. Who would have guessed that Great Aunt Eva would suddenly turn toward Adele, see her as her little girl with the dazzling, golden blond curls, her bright young face and dark eyes all sparkle and reach out to her small and lovely and hopeful child.
Eventually my mother passed from her above-the-ground existence and was lowered into the space next to me. I was pleased by the simplicity of her casket—its lack of adornment, its dull finish. I thought it would be ornate, like the one they placed me in, except more so. When I saw it, I was encouraged. Yet, when I turned toward her, she turned away and this is how she has stayed.
I am surprised that I have so little to say about this—a result of the place of peaceful indifference that I am finally able to more fully embrace.
Soon all above-the-ground life intrusions—all fightings, all frettings, all lovings, all hatings, all collectings of material possessions—no matter how luxurious—all gossip, all wrong-spirited hopes, and all convoluted talk will evaporate.
All that will be left, all that will be salvaged, as testimony to the existence of the Slaughter family will be the fragile—and yes—temporal legacy of a few poems.
While they still exist, I hope you will choose to read them.
As I rest.
ceci slaughter