“Give it a couple years, killer,” the boy said, adding, in the deeper tone of a conspirator, “Did you tear off anybody’s dick today?” And then he laughed outright. He laughed and laughed and laughed.
And as slow as tai chi, I handed the smoke-smelling receiver to my nana.
DECEMBER 21, 8:55 A.M. EST
Papadaddy Two
Gentle Tweeter,
On another occasion my papadaddy enlisted me as his accomplice as he plundered the not-hatched offspring from beneath the feathery bottoms of domestic poultry. We made the rounds of a ramshackle hut where the chickens were quartered, and ruthlessly stole their future generations. All the while he grilled me: “You ever stop and consider how your ma and pa got themselves so rich so fast?”
My hands burdened with the basket of looted eggs, I merely shrugged.
He pressed his point. “How come every investment they make pays off?” Without waiting for a response, he explained, “Well, Sunshine, when your ma was your age she got herself a guardian angel named Leonard. Regular as clockwork he called her on the telephone.” Talking, he continued to loot nests. “She come to me and said as much. She was just a teenager when she told me her angel gave her the lucky number for a lottery ticket. She asked for me to buy it. Some stranger calling from gosh knows where… what was I to believe? Her ma believed her.”
Unthwarted by my failure to engage, he continued. “Her guardian angel, Leonard, even today he still calls her up. Angels can do that. It don’t matter where in the world she’s at; he finds her. Calls her direct. Calls your pa, too.”
I busied myself by inspecting a particularly speckled eggshell.
“It’s that Leonard,” my Papadaddy Ben insisted. “He’s the one who demanded they send you to us for the summer.”
That detail, Gentle Tweeter, arrested my eleven-year-old attention. I returned his rheumy gaze.
“You’re not supposed to know,” he said. His voice dropped to a whisper. “But you got a big showdown this summer with the forces of evil.”
My eyes must’ve betrayed my confusion.
“You didn’t know, did you, Honey Bun?” His complexion testified to a lifetime of neglected skin care.
No, I did not. A showdown? With evil?
“Well,” he stammered, “now you know.” His gnarled hands foraged in the straw of a nest and brought forth another egg. This new plunder he set in my basket, saying, “It’s best not to worry your little head about it too much.”
DECEMBER 21, 8:57 A.M. EST
Embarking on a Bon Voyage
Gentle Tweeter,
The summer I spent on my nana’s farm upstate offered no end of diversions. Amusement could be found in, for example, shelling peas or shucking corn. A scintillating plethora of cherries offered themselves for the ready pitting. I breathlessly complained that I simply did not know where to begin.
A lurching husk of weathered human skin, her jawline and upper arms replete with flapping wattles, my Nana Minnie stood over her electric stove. She fiddled with the appliance’s complicated heat controls while the lid of a pot vented so much steam that the kitchen air shimmered, as sweltering hot as that of any Turkish hamam. Scads of local fruits had been slaughtered and arrayed about the counter-tops in differing stages of being skinned and dressed, and every work surface felt sticky with the dried blood of their flesh. Peaches, disemboweled of their stones, filled a large crockery bowl. Other fruits, apples, had been dismembered and embalmed in glass jars for their root-cellar interment. The aforementioned steam condensed on the walls, collecting into rivulets. It dripped from the ceiling. Busy amid all this butchery, my nana squinted at her grim labors, and, talking around the cigarette clamped between her pale lips, she told me: “Sweet Pea, darling, you’re underfoot. Go and entertain yourself.”
Entertain myself? My nana must’ve been insane. As nicely as possible, grasping her not-clean apron strings and giving them a tug with my own smooth child’s hand, I said, “Nana, my darling, you might want to get screened for age-related dementia….”
Entertain myself! As if I could possibly use the sticks and dirtied rocks readily available to assemble a television receiver, then construct a distribution network and a local broadcast affiliate, then launch the production companies and stock the pipeline with a season of programming content. Such a venture, I told my nana, undertaken by a preadolescent girl over the course of a single summer, seemed highly not-likely to succeed.
“No,” my Nana Minnie said, tugging her apron free of my stubborn hold. “I mean you ought to read a book.” At this she abandoned her boiling fruity corpses. Nana turned to face me, grasping my shoulders, and ushered me from the kitchen, down a short hallway to the parlor, where bookshelves ranged from floor to ceiling, filling an entire wall. There she bade me choose from among the aged leather-bound tomes.
It must be noted here that I was not yet as passionate a reader as I would soon become. My Swiss school, although appallingly expensive, was largely weighted toward awareness of flashpoint environmental issues and the squelched civil rights of oppressed indigenous peoples. On the basis of these ethical priorities I protested that I couldn’t consider reading books which had been bound in the dead hides of factory-farmed, no doubt highly stressed cows.
My nana merely shrugged her weary, apron-yoked, farm-wife shoulders in response. Saying, “Suit yourself, little missy,” she exited the living room, returning to the dreary pastime of canning tomatoes or pickling field mice. Doing so, she called back to me over one calico shoulder; she warned, “You can read a book or you can beat the rugs. Take your pick.”
Such are my morals that I couldn’t fathom inflicting any form of violence, even upon an insensate floor covering. Nor did I fancy the other forms of stooped, agrarian fieldwork suggested by my nana: another weed pogrom… confiscating more warm ovum from poultry nests… Strictly as a political compromise I chose to select a book. My fingers trailed the dead leather of the various spines. Moby Dick? No, thank you. For once I was thankful for my mother’s famed Greenpeace affiliation. Little Women? Ye gods, too monstrously sexist an option! The Scarlet Letter? House of Mirth? Leaves of Grass? My nana’s shelves sagged, burdened with obscure, long-forgotten titles. Tropic of Cancer? Naked Lunch? Lolita? Fie. Nothing racy here.
Gentle Tweeters, in response to your charges that I’m too precocious for an eleven-year-old, please accept the fact that people do not change over time. The elderly are, in reality, aged tikes. Conversely, the young are juvenile codgers. Granted, we might develop some skills, achieve some profound insights over a lifetime, but by and large who you are at eighty-five is who you were at five. One is either born intelligent or not. The body ages, grows, passes through near-lunatic phases of reproductive frenzy, but you are born and die essentially the same person.
That… that is proof of your deathless soul.
Standing in my nana’s parlor, at last I resolved to shut my eyes. Thus blinded I pirouetted a full three rotations and extended an unseeing hand in the general direction of the shelved library. My fingertips brailled their ribbed bindings, the titles embossed there. The cracked grain of the leather felt soft, even crepey, not unlike the skin of my nana’s calloused hands. After stroking them all, my touch settled on the one I could sense was my destiny. Here was the book which would deliver me from my immediate impoverished circumstances, my long television-deprived days, my Internet-starved boredom. My blind fingers closed around the book and pulled it from among its brothers. I opened my eyes to this new future.