After an hour we washed our faces by the lake, watching the mud and clay brown the water with its swirls and swirls.
“You are so beautiful!” Sonia gasped, looking at my new face. She touched my cheek, my hair, my smooth neck, breathlessly.
“So are you!” I cried. “You should see!”
We looked into the lake at our own reflections. Fish swam under our faces and seaweed tangled in our hair.
“We are so beautiful,” we said, transfixed by our dazzling images. “We are so lovely!” we cried, thrilled simply to look into water and see ourselves.
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I could hear her from the hallway already beginning one of our favorite poems:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of the bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
She sat on the edge of my bed and began to sing. It was barely a song at all, it was more a whisper, a prayer.
“Well, I come from Alabama,” she smiled, “with my banjo on my knee.” She sang it slowly, quietly. “And I’m bound for Louisiana, my true love for to see.”
“Sing,” she said, “come on. Well, it rained all night the day I left, the weather was bone dry. The sun so hot I froze to death, Susannah, don’t you cry.”
She pressed me close to her. Her voice grew softer and sweeter, and she lingered on each word. “I said, oh, Vanessa, now don’t you cry for me, ‘cause I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.”
Years before the drought that would follow his death, my grandfather began his search for water.
“The sun rises every day in the East,” he said. “It travels across the sky. It’s a hot, fiery ball.”
“Yes, Grandpa,” we said. He looked at us and just shrugged his shoulders. He found himself saying odd things often these days. His life was moving in mysterious directions, there was no doubt about it, and he seemed as perplexed as Grandma by his behavior.
“You went into town yesterday, Angelo Turin,” my grandmother said, “and the day before that, too. I know you better than that. Now w hat’s going on?”
It was true — he had gone into town four times in one week; Fletcher and I had gone with him. And the strange thing was that we never did anything w hen we were in town, just followed the curve of the business district, then came home, the same way we had gone. It was not until much later that we realized it was the pond’s pale oval that he had needed to pass again and again.
Other things, inexplicable at first, caused Grandma to worry. He began washing the dishes — the breakfast dishes, the dishes at lunch, the dinner dishes — each day prolonging the task and after a while taking clean dishes from the cabinets and washing them, too. His hands floated for hours under water, like a child with bath toys.
“Grandpa, let’s go to town,” I’d say. I did not like to see him do this. It reminded me of the days my mother stood curved like a great bird over the sink for hours and washed everything she could find in her singular fight against germs. “Let’s go to town,” I pleaded.
My grandfather began taking long baths, his whole day now filled with water. In between dishes and the bath we drove into town and began stopping at the pond to dangle our feet in the water. This continued, until one day, while we sat at the lake’s edge, it finally occurred to him. Waves of horror passed through his body; he stood up and, looking into the water, said, “There will be a terrible, terrible drought.” This was it, the farmer’s nightmare. His whole life’s concern surfaced finally with these words, “There w ill be no more water, there will be a terrible drought.” It was the fear he had held in check for nearly seventy years; in Italy as a little boy, then as a young man, his whole life, it had been the same fear. But he could not hold it back any longer. It flooded his system.
We drove into town and bought notebooks. We were to record everything, the formations of clouds, the behavior of cows and sheep, the rise of pain in my grandmother’s back, anything that related even vaguely to rain. Our lives took on the fluid quality of those who dream the same dream together. Our motions began to mimic each other’s, and where one’s thoughts dropped off another’s began. We worked day after day to find the secret of rain and, as the days passed and we could find no discernible pattern, our bones seemed to fill with a strange, warm water and we grew heavier and heavier with despair.
“It is all a joke,” my grandfather said one day when he could no longer stand the pictures of tortured wheat and dying animals he had in his head. “We are at the mercy of a God who does not really care if our children are thirsty or our crops die.”
“Maria!” he shouted out the window. She was taking in wash from the line. “It is all a whim! We are at the mercy of an indifferent God. It is all a crazy whim!”
“Don’t waste your breath!” she said. “I can’t hear you from here, Angelo.”
“It is all a whim!” he cried, and it was as big a revelation to him as the revelation of the drought itself. He looked at us amazed. “Children,” he said, and the three of us together shouted out the window to Grandma, “It is all a whim! A whim.” And this time with the force of our accumulated exasperation the word “whim” blew out the window and caught itself in the large white sheet my grandmother was taking down from the line. It was the hardest word my sensible grandmother would ever have to hear, and its deceptively light sound twisted around her with the sheet, strangling her, and she screamed and struggled to get free. I ran out to help her, spinning her around and around until she was in my arms. She looked bitterly into the dark house where she could just see the outlines of Grandfather and Fletcher standing by the window.
“I can’t hear myself think anymore with your grandfather yelling his head off. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
He continued his baths, hoping to find the answer through some hypnotic means. “You are becoming a wrinkled old prune from all that water,” she said. “Angelo, please.”
“Fool, idiot, dope,” she would have said to my father or me, had we been looking for the secret of water, but with my grandfather she softened slightly. As the days passed, then the weeks, deep wrinkles of concern pleated her face, her apron, her dress. She kneaded them into the wavy dough. It was the bread we ate.
“Angelo,” my grandmother pleaded. “There is plenty of water. You’re making yourself sick with this.”