One of Us. A short story by John Fante

  

John Fante was a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. He is best known for his semi-autobiographical novel Ask the Dust (1939) about the life of Arturo Bandini, a struggling writer in Depression-era Los Angeles,  widely considered to be the great Los Angeles novel.

My mother had carried the last of the supper plates into the kitchen when the doorbell rang. All of us rose like a congregation and rushed to answer the call. Mike reached the door first. He threw it open and we pushed our noses against the screen. There stood a uniformed boy with his cap in his hand and a telegram at the bottom of it.

“Telegram for Maria Toscana,” he said.

“Telegram, Papa!” Mike shouted. “Somebody’s dead! Somebody’s dead!”

A telegram came to our house only when one of our family passed away. It had happened three times in the lives of us kids. Those three times were the death of my grandfather, of my grandmother, and then the death of my uncle. Once, though, a telegram came to our house by mistake. We found it under the door when we came home late one night. We were all greatly surprised, for it contained birthday greetings to a lady named Elsie, whom none of us knew. But the most astonishing thing about that telegram was that it was not a death notice. Until then it did not occur to us that a telegram might have other uses.

When my father heard Mike shouting, he dropped his napkin and pushed back his chair. We at the door pranced up and down in excitement. In a paralysis of anxiety, Mother stood in the kitchen. My father walked with an important air to the door, and, like a man who had spent his whole life signing for telegrams, he signed for this one. We watched him tear open the yellow envelope so that the paper would separate enough for his heavy fingers to reach the message inside. He frowned at us and walked to the center of the living room, under the chandelier. He held the message high, almost over his head. Even jumping, we kids could not put our eyes upon it, and my little brother Tony, who was a shrimp and too little to read anyhow, climbed up the side of my father as if the man were a tree, and my father shook himself and Tony fell to the floor.

“Who died?” we asked. “Who died?”

“Down, down,” my father said, like one speaking to leaping puppies. “Quiet, there. Down, down.”

Squinting his eyes, he folded the ominous yellow paper and returned to his place at the table. We trailed after him. He told us to go away, but we swarmed around his shoulders, and Tony climbed the chair rungs and burrowed his fingers into his shirt at the collar. My mother stood in the kitchen door biting her lips. Worry crushed her face. Her hands turned round and round like kittens under her checkered apron.

Breathlessly we waited. Breathlessly we tried to guess whom the sad news might concern. We hoped it wasn’t our aunt Louise, because she always sent us such wonderful Christmas presents. We didn’t mind if it was our aunt Teresa, though, because what good was she around Christmas time? No good whatever. All we ever got from her was a greeting card, and we knew it cost only a penny because that was the very kind our mother bought. If she was dead she deserved it for being so stingy.

Father shook himself from us. Emphatically he told us to go back to our places. My mother quietly took her seat. She held her small worried face between spread fingers like a woman gathering strength for an ordeal. She had many brothers and sisters whom she had not seen since girlhood, for she had married when yet very young. We could see that my father’s mind was reaching here and there to find the quickest and best way of releasing the sad shock when at length my mother was ready to receive it. She raised her face and looked at him with eyes opened all the way.

“Who, Guido?” she asked. “Who is it?”

“Clito,” he said. “Your sister Carlotta’s boy.”

“Dead?”

“Killed. He was run over. He’s dead.”

For many silent moments my mother sat like a statue in gingham. Then she lifted her face to that place she believed contained life eternal. Her lips were distended as in a kiss of farewell. Her eyes were too grieving to stay open.

“I know his little soul is beautiful in the sight of God,” she whispered.

He was our cousin, the only child of Uncle Frank and Aunt Carlotta, my mother’s oldest sister. They lived in Denver, thirty miles south of our small town. Clito was but a day older than our Mike, second in age among us kids. Clito and Mike were born in the same Denver hospital ten years before. They were brought to life by the same physician, and—wonderful thing!—the two boys were remarkably similar in face and form. Among the many members of our scattered clan they were always referred to as the Twins, for they were inseparable when our family lived among the Italians of North Denver three years before, and, though they often quarreled, there seemed a deeper kinship between them than between Mike and me, or between Mike and Tony. But, three years before our family had moved from Denver to the small town in the mountains, and Mike had not seen his cousin since then.

 

These were the reasons why, in the silence after my father had spoken, my mother stared so passionately, so possessively at Mike, her eyes slowly beginning to float. Mike felt her gaze. He was yet too young to realize the tragic significance of Clito’s death, but he felt my mother’s eyes upon him, as if to draw him into them, and he fidgeted nervously, glancing at my father for clarity and sustenance. My mother pushed back her chair and went into the bedroom. We heard her lie down, and then we heard her sobbing.

“I bet Clito’s in Heaven,” Mike said. “I bet he didn’t have to stop off in Purgatory.”

“Sure,” my father said. “He was a good boy. He went right straight to Heaven.”

My mother called down from the bedroom.

“Mike,” she called, “come here to Mamma.”

He didn’t want to leave the table. But he looked at my father, who nodded, and then he got up and went hesitantly away. We heard my mother draw him beside her upon the bed, and we heard the wet, violent kissing of his face and neck. We heard the wild sound of smacking lips and my mother’s possessive moans.

“But it ain’t me,” Mike was saying. “See! I’m not dead.”

Thank God! Thank Almighty God!”

After my father left the table, the telegram lay open at his place, one corner of it in the salad bowl, the yellow paper drawing salad oil into itself like a blotter. We kids dove for it. I got it first and held it above me, out of reach of my tiptoed sister Clara’s clawing fingers. I climbed up on my father’s chair and held the paper almost to the ceiling. My sister climbed right up on the chair beside me. Over my head I read the message while she hung on and my little brother Tony tugged at my pants in an effort to dethrone me.

“Let me read it!” he shouted.

“You little fool!” Clara said. “You can’t read yet! You’re not even in school.”

“Yes, I can too! You don’t know everything, so there!”

The message read: “Clito struck by truck while riding bicycle. Died this afternoon four o’clock. Funeral Sunday three o’clock.”

I let it go from my fingers and it floated zigzagging toward the floor. Clara and Tony fell upon it and instantly it was in shreds, all over the floor. The commotion on the linoleum brought my mother and Mike in a hurry from the bedroom. My mother saw the shredded telegram lying about, and, drying her eyes with the hem of her apron, she said: “I didn’t get to see it. How did he die?”

“He was run over by a bicycle,” I said.

My father was in the front room, reading the paper.

“No,” he corrected. “The boy was run over by a truck.”

“No, he wasn’t,” I said. “He ran into the truck.”

“The truck ran into him.”

 

So, with constant interruptions, we lost all conception of what had actually taken place. Before long I was insisting that our dead Clito had been riding in the truck bed, the bicycle at his side, and that he had fallen out when the machine struck a bump in the road. My father was quite as inaccurate. He said that little Clito had been knocked down and killed by a man riding a bicycle. Now we were guessing recklessly. Even Tony had an interpretation to offer. He insisted that he too had read the telegram, but he said that Clito had been killed by a German aviator who dropped bombs from an airplane. In the confusion nobody had anything more to offer.

Then Clara said: “Maybe you’re all wrong. Maybe he was run over by a motorcycle.”

In despair my mother asked if there was any mention of a funeral.

“Tuesday.”

“Monday.”

“Friday.”

“Wasn’t it Sunday?” Clara asked.

While we quibbled hopelessly, my mother and Mike gathered up the bits of yellow paper and pieced them together on the table.

 

II

 

After supper my mother wouldn’t let Mike go out. The rest of us did, but Mike had to stay in the kitchen with her. He could hear us shouting in the front yard, and he cried and kicked the stove, but my mother was never so firm. Even my father was surprised. When he walked into the kitchen and told her she was crazy and unreasonable, she turned on him, her eyes still crying, and told him to go back to his newspaper and mind his own business. Sucking a toothpick, he stared at the floor, shrugged his shoulders, and then went back to his reading.

“But, Mamma,” Mike said over and over, “I’m not the one that’s dead! See?”

“Thank God. Thank Almighty God.”

That evening Uncle Giuseppe and Aunt Christina came to our house. Aunt Christina was the youngest sister of my mother and Aunt Carlotta. She too had received a telegram. My mother dried her wet, dish-watery hands when she saw Christina enter the front door, and the two women locked bosoms in the dining room and stood there crying. My mother put her nose into Aunt Christina’s shoulder and sobbed, and Aunt Christina sobbed and stroked Mother’s hair.

“Poor Carlotta!” they said. “Poor Carlotta!”

Nobody was watching Mike in the kitchen. He saw his chance and sneaked out the back door. He ran around the house and joined us in the front yard. Our cousins, Aunt Christina’s two kids, had come with her, so the whole bunch of us got up a game of kick-the-can.

My mother forgot about Mike. She and my father and Aunt Christina and Uncle Giuseppe sat in the front room, talking about Clito’s death. The two women sat side by side in rocking chairs. My mother still held her dish towel, and she let her tears splash into it. Aunt Christina cried into a tiny green handkerchief that smelled of carnations. Over and over they said the same thing.

“Poor Carlotta! Poor Carlotta!”

My father and Uncle Giuseppe smoked cigars in silence. Death was the supreme mystery to these people, and the women feverishly resigned themselves to the workings of the Almighty. But the men clung to those ancient platitudes, ancient as the mind of man. Since he was not a son of theirs, the passing of the little boy did not move them noticeably. They were sorry he was dead, but they were sorry only because it was the proper thing to be, so their sorrow was etiquette and not out of their hearts.

“Ah, well,” my father said, “you never know. Everybody has to go some time.”

Uncle Giuseppe’s dark head and screwed-up lips agreed slowly.

“Too bad,” he said. “It’s too bad.”

“But he was so young!” Mother said.

Wistfully my father answered: “Maybe he’s better off.”

“Ah, Guido! How can you say that? How do you suppose his poor mother feels? And poor Frank?”

“A man never thinks what’s in a woman’s heart,” Aunt Christina said. “No, they don’t know. They never will know. Men are so selfish.”

My father and uncle stared at their cigars in dismal confusion.

 

“Well,” my father said, “all I know is we all have to go some time.”

Uncle Giuseppe was trying hard to feel grief. He closed his eyes and said, “No. We never know. Tomorrow, the next day, tonight—next year, next month, we never know.”

“Poor Carlotta,” my mother said.

“Poor woman,” Aunt Christina said.

“Too bad for Frank,” my father said. “He’ll miss the boy.”

Uncle Giuseppe sat in a helpless way, uncomfortable in a straight-back chair. Many times he looked at the ceiling and walls as though he had never seen them before. Then he would examine his cigar, as though that were a curious object too. My father sat more at ease, since this was his house. He sat with his cigar between his teeth, his feet spread stiffly in front of him, his thumbs in his sweat-stained suspenders, his eyes squinting to evade the curl of cigar smoke. He would have liked to say something different on this subject of death, but there was nothing new he could think about.

“The best of us have to die,” he ventured.

“How true that is,” my uncle said.

My Aunt Christina blew her nose many times and then wrung the tip of it until it was as red as a radish. She was a stout woman who tried but never could cross her fat little legs.

“How does Mike feel?” she asked. “He and Clito were such good friends. They loved one another so.”

 

My mother’s eyes opened in fright, and she turned in her chair and looked behind her in a kind of terror.

“Mike!” she called. “Where are you, Mike?”

No response. She twisted her body and peered tensely into the kitchen. She saw no one. Rising, she slipped her fingers into her deep hair and screamed.

“Mike!” she screamed. “Where are you, Mike? Come back to me, Mike!”

My father jumped to his feet as though he had seen a ghost. He took her into his arms.

“Dio!” he panted. “Calm yourself, woman!”

“Find Mike! In God’s name, find Mike!”

Uncle Giuseppe went to the front door, and in the twilight he saw us playing our game beneath the black trees of the front yard. Mike was a little apart from the rest of us, leaning against the biggest tree, partly hidden in its shadows.

“Your mother is calling you,” Uncle Giuseppe said. “Can’t you hear her?”

All he said was: “Aw, what does she want?”

“Go on, Mike,” we said. “Go see what she wants.” For my mother’s screams had stopped our game like an unexpected crash of lightning. Then the screen door was flung open violently, and it banged against the wall that supported it, and my mother dashed wildly from the house. She stooped and lifted Mike like an infant high above her, and, laughing and crying, she kissed him and kissed him and cooed into his throat.

 

“Mamma’s own little boy,” she moaned. “Never leave me. Never, never, never, never leave me.”

“I’m not Clito,” he said. “I’m not the one that’s dead.”

She carried him back to the front room, and they all sat down again, and, though Mike hated it, he had to sit in her lap and be kissed about a million times.

We slept together in the same bed, Mike and I, and very, very late that night—some time after midnight—my mother came to our room and softly slipped between us, but it was still Mike she worried about. And, lying with her back to me, she awakened him by petting him so much. When she went back to her own bed, I had to turn my pillow over because it was so wet from her tears.

 

III

 

Who would go to the funeral? Sunday morning in the kitchen there was a fierce argument between my father and mother on this question. My mother wanted to take Mike with her, but my father wanted her to take me.

“No,” my mother said. “I want Mike to come.”

“What’s the idea?” my father said. “There’s no use making it harder for those people. You know how Carlotta and Frank will feel when they see Mike.”

“Oh,” my mother scoffed, “what on earth are you talking about?”

“I know what I’m talking about,” my father said. “What the devil’s the matter with you women?”

“I said Mike was coming with me,” my mother said. “And he is. If Jimmy wants to come, he can.”

“What about me?” Clara said.

“Nothing doing,” my father said.

“Me and Jimmy and Mike,” Tony said.

My father looked at him contemptuously.

“Pooh!” he said. “And who are you?”

“Aw,” Tony said. He was so little he never could answer that question.

The telegram said the funeral was to be at three o’clock. It was only an hour’s ride on the electric to Denver, but when any of our family went anywhere we had to turn the house upside down. Mother couldn’t find her hairpins and Mike couldn’t find his new necktie. When he did find it in the pantry the mice had eaten a hole in it so he had to wear an old one of my father’s.

Tucking the endless cravat into his waist, he howled: “I don’t like it! Look how big it is! It’s an old man’s tie.”

“Who said it was an old man’s tie?” my father said. “Wear it and keep still.”

 

But my mother wanted him to look nice. She didn’t pay any attention to how I looked, but she wouldn’t let Mike wear that necktie. She made Tony go over to Oliver Holmes’s and borrow a light blue one for Mike, and while I was gone to borrow hairpins from Mrs. Daley she sat on the bed in her petticoat, her hair streaming down and tangling her fingers as she sewed a button on Tony’s coat.

When at last we were ready to go, she couldn’t find her hat. Weary and fretting, she stood in a pile of boxes in the clothes closet, calling everyone to search for her black hat. My father found it clear on the other side of the house, under my sister Clara’s bed, but Clara said she didn’t know how it got there, and that was quite a lie, because Clara is always secretly wearing my mother’s things. When my father pushed the hat over my mother’s lumps of hair, he sighed and said: “Good God, wipe that powder off your neck. You look like you been baking a cake.”

She wet the end of her handkerchief with spittle and dabbed the powder away. Then she grabbed Mike by the wrist and hurried out the door. I ran after them, her purse in my hand, for she had forgotten it.

My father and Clara and Tony stood on the front porch and watched us walk down the street. When we were half a block away, my father whistled to us. We three turned around.

“Hurry up!” he yelled, loud enough for even that deaf old Miss Yates to hear and throw open her window and look out. “Hurry up! You only got five minutes to make the train.”

 

My mother squeezed Mike’s hand and walked as fast as worn heel of her right shoe would permit her, and I could see from the way Mike winced as he scratched his belly that he hated the whole thing and was ready to break into tears.

 

IV

 

We reached the electric on time, and an hour later we arrived at the Denver Union Station. From there we took a yellow street car to Aunt Carlotta and Uncle Frank’s house. As soon as she sat down in the street car, my mother started to cry, so that her eyes were red-rimmed when we got off at Aunt Carlotta’s street. We stopped on the corner a minute while Mother fastened her garter and Mike and I went behind the hedge to wee-wee, and then we started up the street.

There were so many people and automobiles at my aunt’s house that it was the biggest funeral in the history of our family, and there was such an abundance of flowers that some of the bouquets had to be spread on the front porch, and you could smell the funeral as soon as you got off the street car.

We went up the front stairs to the little cloakroom, where dozens of Italians in Sunday suits stood with sad faces peering over the shoulders of one another to the parlor where the bier was placed in the center of the scent-suffocated room, the lid off, the waxen and shining face of Clito’s corpse sleeping in infinite serenity amid the moans and gasps and supplications of black-draped, dark-skinned, choking women who sometimes knelt and sometimes arose first on one knee and then on the other to kiss the rosary-chained, icy hand of the small thin corpse in the gray box with silver-plated handles.

Mike and I saw it all between the legs of the men in the cloakroom as my mother dragged us through the crowd and up the stairs to Aunt Carlotta’s bedroom.

My aunt arose from the bed, and the two sisters fell upon each other and wept helplessly. Aunt Carlotta had wept so much that her face was as raw as a wound. Her arms were around my mother’s neck, the hands hanging loosely, the fingernails gnawed until there were tiny blood tints at the quick. I closed the door, and Mike and I stood watching.

Then we saw Uncle Frank. He was at the window. He did not move when we entered, but stood with his hairy hands in his back pockets. He had seldom spoken to us, but he was gentle and generous, and each year he sent us pajamas for Christmas. We didn’t know much about him, except that he was an electrician. He was a tall man with a thin neck; his spinal column rounded out like a rope beneath his brown skin, so that he always seemed to have a trim haircut. His body was not quivering from sobs, and when we saw the dry-eyed reflection of his thin face in the windowpane it amazed us that he was not shedding tears. We could not understand it.

“Why doesn’t he cry?” Mike whispered. “He’s the papa, isn’t he?”

I think Uncle Frank heard him, for he turned around slowly and skeptically, as one turns to heed the note of a new bird. He saw my mother and me, and then he spied Mike. Instantly his knees seemed to buckle, and he backed against the window and clapped his hand over his mouth. The look of him made my brother shriek, and he grabbed my mother around the waist and hid his face in the small of her back.

Uncle Frank moistened his lips.

“Oh,” he said, pressing his eyes. “Oh, it’s you, Mike.”

He sat on the bed and panted as he ran his two hands in and out of his hair. Aunt Carlotta saw Mike then, and she spread herself across the bed, her face vibrating in the depths of the pink coverlet. Uncle Frank stroked her shoulder.

“Now, now,” he murmured. “We must be brave, mia moglia.”

But he was not crying, and the more I thought of it the stranger it seemed.

My mother bent down to straighten Mike’s crooked tie.

“Be a good boy,” she said, “and give your Uncle Frank and Aunt Carlotta a big kiss. You too, Jimmy.”

I kissed them, but Mike wouldn’t go near Uncle Frank. “No, no, no!” he screamed. “No, no!”

He followed me when I walked to the window that overlooked the back yard. We looked out upon the hot Sunday afternoon and saw what Uncle Frank had been staring at when we came in. It was the twisted bicycle. It leaned against the ashpit, a bundle of bent and knotted steel. Mike kept looking over his shoulder at Uncle Frank, as if expecting a blow, and when Uncle Frank arose from the bed and came to the window and stood beside us, Mike crept into my arms and began to whimper in fear. Uncle Frank smiled tragically.

 

“Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you, Mike.”

He patted my hair, and even through it I felt the dryness of his hand and how sad it was.

“See?” he said. “Jimmy’s not afraid of his Uncle Frank, are you, Jimmy?”

“No, Uncle Frank. I’m not afraid.”

But Mike cringed from the man’s melancholy hands. Uncle Frank tried very hard to smile, and then of a sudden he drew two half-dollars from his pocket. I took one, but Mike hesitated, looking at my mother on the bed. She nodded. A soft smile broke on the boy’s face, and, sniffing, he accepted the coin and went into Uncle Frank’s arms.

“Little boy Mike,” Uncle Frank said. “Little boy Mike, so like my little boy Clito.” But he was not crying.

He sat Mike upon his lap, and by the time the procession to the graveyard was ready to begin, my brother was deeply devoted to him. They went down the stairs to the parked cars, holding his hand and looking up at his face in curiosity and admiration.

Uncle Frank was the only one who did not cry during the burial. He stood a little back from the head of the grave, my sobbing Aunt Carlotta clinging to him, his eyes closed, his jaw hard. Around the grave the throng hovered, the men with their hats in their hands, the handkerchiefs of the women fluttering in the lifeless afternoon heat, sobs bursting like unseen bubbles, the priest sprinkling holy water, the undertaker standing in professional dignity in the background, the bier sinking slowly, the while my brother and I stood side by side and stared at the black ground appearing as the box descended, our eyes flowing and flowing, our chests hurting, our hearts breaking in terror and first grief as the life of Clito rushed from our memories for the last time, vividly, distressingly; our mother whimpering as she chewed her handkerchief, the straps around the box crackling, the silver pulleys squeaking, the sun brilliant against them, the priest murmuring on and on, men coughing in shame, women wailing, Aunt Carlotta weak and near fainting, clinging to Uncle Frank, and he there with a hard jaw and closed, arid eyes, thinking the thoughts of a father, thinking—God knows what he thought.

Then it was over.

We went back to Aunt Carlotta’s, and we sat in the living room, Aunt Carlotta still weeping and my mother consoling her. Dazed and white, Uncle Frank stood at the window, Mike watching his face.

Mike said: “Don’t you ever cry, Uncle Frank?”

The man only looked down and smiled feebly.

“Well, don’t you?”

“Mike!” my mother said.

“Well, why doesn’t he? Why don’t you, Uncle Frank?”

“Mike!”

“Keep still, Mike,” I said.

“Well, why doesn’t he cry?”

Uncle Frank pressed his temples.

 

“I am crying, Mike,” he said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Mike!”

“Well, he’s not.”

“Shut up, Mike,” I said.

“But you didn’t cry at the graveyard, and everybody else did.”

“Mike!”

“He was the only one who didn’t cry, because I was watching.”

“Mike! You go outside.”

He went out indignantly, and sat in the rocker before the window, his back to Uncle Frank. He began to rock furiously, stiffening his legs with the motion backward. Uncle Frank turned from the window and went outside and bent over Mike’s chair, smiling down at him. Then he spoke. I was watching from the window, but I couldn’t hear what he said. Mike grinned, and the two of them went down the porch steps and on down the street.

“Where are they going?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

A half-hour passed without their return, and my mother and aunt sent me in search of them. I went down the street to the drug-store on the corner, and that was where I found them. They were in an ice-cream booth, Mike drinking a malted milk, sucking it down greedily. Uncle Frank sat across from him, his face cupped in his hands, great tears rolling off his cheeks and falling on the table as he watched Mike sucking down the malted milk

Eli's Bear

My art studio and random photos I've taken

A duck walks into a bar

Toto D’Aquila, Mafia boss in the Bronx

Gianni Gaedin

This young lady does a fine job with this.

 

Photos left over in my camera

Walker Evans

Eugene Atgut

Meanwhile, at a church in Donegal

Arnold Newman

Razor Riley and Paul Kelly’s Fiver Points Gang

The end of Mad Dog Coll, Gangster

Shunzo Ono, Jazzman

 

Carlotta Brianza, Prima Ballerina

 

The most sumptuous ballet, almost “The Ballet”: At its debut in St. Petersburg in 1890 (with the Italian Carlotta Brianza on stage in the role of Aurora). The Sleeping Beauty witnesses the development of an exemplary collaboration between choreographer (Petipa), composer (Tchaikovsky) and the director of the Imperial Theatres Vsevolozhsky, who also created the costumes, to reveal to the eyes of the aristocracy of St. Petersburg the gilded and fabulous grandeur of the court of the Sun King.

Johann Sebastian Bach – Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048: Allegro

 

Jackalope Wives. A short story by Ursula Vernon

The moon came up and the sun went down. The moonbeams went shattering down to the ground and the jackalope wives took off their skins and danced.

They danced like young deer pawing the ground, they danced like devils let out of hell for the evening. They swung their hips and pranced and drank their fill of cactus–fruit wine.

They were shy creatures, the jackalope wives, though there was nothing shy about the way they danced. You could go your whole life and see no more of them than the flash of a tail vanishing around the backside of a boulder. If you were lucky, you might catch a whole line of them outlined against the sky, on the top of a bluff, the shadow of horns rising off their brows.

And on the half–moon, when new and full were balanced across the saguaro’s thorns, they’d come down to the desert and dance.

 The young men used to get together and whisper, saying they were gonna catch them a jackalope wife. They’d lay belly down at the edge of the bluff and look down on the fire and the dancing shapes — and they’d go away aching, for all the good it did them.

For the jackalope wives were shy of humans. Their lovers were jackrabbits and antelope bucks, not human men. You couldn’t even get too close or they’d take fright and run away. One minute you’d see them kicking their heels up and hear them laugh, then the music would freeze and they’d all look at you with their eyes wide and their ears upswept.

The next second, they’d snatch up their skins and there’d be nothing left but a dozen skinny she–rabbits running off in all directions, and a campfire left that wouldn’t burn out ’til morning.

It was uncanny, sure, but they never did anybody any harm. Grandma Harken, who lived down past the well, said that the jackalopes were the daughters of the rain and driving them off would bring on the drought. People said they didn’t believe a word of it, but when you live in a desert, you don’t take chances.

When the wild music came through town, a couple of notes skittering on the sand, then people knew the jackalope wives were out. They kept the dogs tied up and their brash sons occupied. The town got into the habit of having a dance that night, to keep the boys firmly fixed on human girls and to drown out the notes of the wild music.

Now, it happened there was a young man in town who had a touch of magic on him. It had come down to him on his mother’s side, as happens now and again, and it was worse than useless.

A little magic is worse than none, for it draws the wrong sort of attention. It gave this young man feverish eyes and made him sullen. His grandmother used to tell him that it was a miracle he hadn’t been drowned as a child, and for her he’d laugh, but not for anyone else.

He was tall and slim and had dark hair and young women found him fascinating.

This sort of thing happens often enough, even with boys as mortal as dirt. There’s always one who learned how to brood early and often, and always girls who think they can heal him.

Eventually the girls learn better. Either the hurts are petty little things and they get tired of whining or the hurt’s so deep and wide that they drown in it. The smart ones heave themselves back to shore and the slower ones wake up married with a husband who lies around and suffers in their direction. It’s part of a dance as old as the jackalopes themselves.

But in this town at this time, the girls hadn’t learned and the boy hadn’t yet worn out his interest. At the dances, he leaned on the wall with his hands in his pockets and his eyes glittering. Other young men eyed him with dislike. He would slip away early, before the dance was ended, and never marked the eyes that followed him and wished that he would stay.

 He himself had one thought and one thought only — to catch a jackalope wife.

They were beautiful creatures, with their long brown legs and their bodies splashed orange by the firelight. They had faces like no mortal woman and they moved like quicksilver and they played music that got down into your bones and thrummed like a sickness.

And there was one — he’d seen her. She danced farther out from the others and her horns were short and sharp as sickles. She was the last one to put on her rabbit skin when the sun came up. Long after the music had stopped, she danced to the rhythm of her own long feet on the sand.

(And now you will ask me about the musicians that played for the jackalope wives. Well, if you can find a place where they’ve been dancing, you might see something like sidewinder tracks in the dust, and more than that I cannot tell you. The desert chews its secrets right down to the bone.)

So the young man with the touch of magic watched the jackalope wife dancing and you know as well as I do what young men dream about. We will be charitable. She danced a little apart from her fellows, as he walked a little apart from his.

Perhaps he thought she might understand him. Perhaps he found her as interesting as the girls found him.

Perhaps we shouldn’t always get what we think we want.

 

And the jackalope wife danced, out past the circle of the music and the firelight, in the light of the fierce desert stars.

Grandma Harken had settled in for the evening with a shawl on her shoulders and a cat on her lap when somebody started hammering on the door.

“Grandma! Grandma! Come quick — open the door — oh god, Grandma, you have to help me —”

She knew that voice just fine. It was her own grandson, her daughter Eva’s boy. Pretty and useless and charming when he set out to be.

She dumped the cat off her lap and stomped to the door. What trouble had the young fool gotten himself into?

“Sweet Saint Anthony,” she muttered, “let him not have gotten some fool girl in a family way. That’s just what we need.”

She flung the door open and there was Eva’s son and there was a girl and for a moment her worst fears were realized.

Then she saw what was huddled in the circle of her grandson’s arms, and her worst fears were stomped flat and replaced by far greater ones.

“Oh Mary,” she said. “Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Oh blessed Saint Anthony, you’ve caught a jackalope wife.”

Her first impulse was to slam the door and lock the sight away.

 Her grandson caught the edge of the door and hauled it open. His knuckles were raw and blistered. “Let me in,” he said. He’d been crying and there was dust on his face, stuck to the tracks of tears. “Let me in, let me in, oh god, Grandma, you have to help me, it’s all gone wrong —”

Grandma took two steps back, while he half–dragged the jackalope into the house. He dropped her down in front of the hearth and grabbed for his grandmother’s hands. “Grandma —”

She ignored him and dropped to her knees. The thing across her hearth was hardly human. “What have you done?” she said. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing!” he said, recoiling.

“Don’t look at that and tell me ‘Nothing!’ What in the name of our lord did you do to that girl?”

He stared down at his blistered hands. “Her skin,” he mumbled. “The rabbit skin. You know.”

“I do indeed,” she said grimly. “Oh yes, I do. What did you do, you damned young fool? Caught up her skin and hid it from her to keep her changing?”

The jackalope wife stirred on the hearth and made a sound between a whimper and a sob.

 “She was waiting for me!” he said. “She knew I was there! I’d been — we’d — I watched her, and she knew I was out there, and she let me get up close — I thought we could talk —”

Grandma Harken clenched one hand into a fist and rested her forehead on it.

“I grabbed the skin — I mean — it was right there — she was watching — I thought she wanted me to have it —”

She turned and looked at him. He sank down in her chair, all his grace gone.

“You have to burn it,” mumbled her grandson. He slid down a little further in her chair. “You’re supposed to burn it. Everybody knows. To keep them changing.”

“Yes,” said Grandma Harken, curling her lip. “Yes, that’s the way of it, right enough.” She took the jackalope wife’s shoulders and turned her toward the lamp light.

She was a horror. Her hands were human enough, but she had a jackrabbit’s feet and a jackrabbit’s eyes. They were set too wide apart in a human face, with a cleft lip and long rabbit ears. Her horns were short, sharp spikes on her brow.

The jackalope wife let out another sob and tried to curl back into a ball. There were burnt patches on her arms and legs, a long red weal down her face. The fur across her breasts and belly was singed. She stank of urine and burning hair.

“What did you do?”

“I threw it in the fire,” he said. “You’re supposed to. But she screamed — she wasn’t supposed to scream — nobody said they screamed — and I thought she was dying, and I didn’t want to hurt her — I pulled it back out —”

 He looked up at her with his feverish eyes, that useless, beautiful boy, and said “I didn’t want to hurt her. I thought I was supposed to — I gave her the skin back, she put it on, but then she fell down — it wasn’t supposed to work like that!”

Grandma Harken sat back. She exhaled very slowly. She was calm. She was going to be calm, because otherwise she was going to pick up the fire poker and club her own flesh and blood over the head with it.

And even that might not knock some sense into him. Oh, Eva, Eva, my dear, what a useless son you’ve raised. Who would have thought he had so much ambition in him, to catch a jackalope wife?

“You goddamn stupid fool,” she said. Every word slammed like a shutter in the wind. “Oh, you goddamn stupid fool. If you’re going to catch a jackalope wife, you burn the hide down to ashes and never mind how she screams.”

“But it sounded like it was hurting her!” he shot back. “You weren’t there! She screamed like a dying rabbit!”

“Of course it hurts her!” yelled Grandma. “You think you can have your skin and your freedom burned away in front of you and not scream? Sweet mother Mary, boy, think about what you’re doing! Be cruel or be kind, but don’t be both, because now you’ve made a mess you can’t clean up in a hurry.”

 

She stood up, breathing hard, and looked down at the wreck on her hearth. She could see it now, as clear as if she’d been standing there. The fool boy had been so shocked he’d yanked the burning skin back out. And the jackalope wife had one thought only and pulled on the burning hide —

Oh yes, she could see it clear.

Half gone, at least, if she was any judge. There couldn’t have been more than few scraps of fur left unburnt. He’d waited through at least one scream — or no, that was unkind.

More likely he’d dithered and looked for a stick and didn’t want to grab for it with his bare hands. Though by the look of his hands, he’d done just that in the end.

And the others were long gone by then and couldn’t stop her. There ought to have been one, at least, smart enough to know that you didn’t put on a half–burnt rabbit skin.

“Why does she look like that?” whispered her grandson, huddled into his chair.

“Because she’s trapped betwixt and between. You did that, with your goddamn pity. You should have let it burn. Or better yet, left her alone and never gone out in the desert at all.”

“She was beautiful,” he said. As if it were a reason.

As if it mattered.

As if it had ever mattered.

“Get out,” said Grandma wearily. “Tell your mother to make up a poultice for your hands. You did right at the end, bringing her here, even if you made a mess of the rest, from first to last.”

He scrambled to his feet and ran for the door.

On the threshold, he paused, and looked back. “You — you can fix her, right?”

Grandma let out a high bark, like a bitch–fox, barely a laugh at all. “No. No one can fix this, you stupid boy. This is broken past mending. All I can do is pick up the pieces.”

He ran. The door slammed shut, and left her alone with the wreckage of the jackalope wife.

She treated the burns and they healed. But there was nothing to be done for the shape of the jackalope’s face, or the too–wide eyes, or the horns shaped like a sickle moon.

At first, Grandma worried that the townspeople would see her, and lord knew what would happen then. But the jackalope wife was the color of dust and she still had a wild animal’s stillness. When somebody called, she lay flat in the garden, down among the beans, and nobody saw her at all.

The only person she didn’t hide from was Eva, Grandma’s daughter. There was no chance that she mistook them for each other — Eva was round and plump and comfortable, the way Grandma’s second husband, Eva’s father, had been round and plump and comfortable.

Maybe we smell alike, thought Grandma. It would make sense, I suppose.

Eva’s son didn’t come around at all.

“He thinks you’re mad at him,” said Eva mildly.

“He thinks correctly,” said Grandma.

 She and Eva sat on the porch together, shelling beans, while the jackalope wife limped around the garden. The hairless places weren’t so obvious now, and the faint stripes across her legs might have been dust. If you didn’t look directly at her, she might almost have been human.

“She’s gotten good with the crutch,” said Eva. “I suppose she can’t walk?”

“Not well,” said Grandma. “Her feet weren’t made to stand up like that. She can do it, but it’s a terrible strain.”

“And talk?”

“No,” said Grandma shortly. The jackalope wife had tried, once, and the noises she’d made were so terrible that it had reduced them both to weeping. She hadn’t tried again. “She understands well enough, I suppose.”

The jackalope wife sat down, slowly, in the shadow of the scarlet runner beans. A hummingbird zipped inches from her head, dabbing its bill into the flowers, and the jackalope’s face turned, unsmiling, to follow it.

“He’s not a bad boy, you know,” said Eva, not looking at her mother. “He didn’t mean to do her harm.”

Grandma let out an explosive snort. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! It doesn’t matter what he meant to do. He should have left well enough alone, and if he couldn’t do that, he should have finished what he started.” She scowled down at the beans. They were striped red and white and the pods came apart easily in her gnarled hands. “Better all the way human than this. Better he’d bashed her head in with a rock than this.”

“Better for her, or better for you?” asked Eva, who was only a fool about her son and knew her mother well.

Grandma snorted again. The hummingbird buzzed away. The jackalope wife lay still in the shadows, with only her thin ribs going up and down.

“You could have finished it, too,” said Eva softly. “I’ve seen you kill chickens. She’d probably lay her head on the chopping block if you asked.”

 

“She probably would,” said Grandma. She looked away from Eva’s weak, wise eyes. “But I’m a damn fool as well.”

Her daughter smiled. “Maybe it runs in families.”

Grandma Harken got up before dawn the next morning and went rummaging around the house.

“Well,” she said. She pulled a dead mouse out of a mousetrap and took a half–dozen cigarettes down from behind the clock. She filled three water bottles and strapped them around her waist. “Well. I suppose we’ve done as much as humans can do, and now it’s up to somebody else.”

She went out into the garden and found the jackalope wife asleep under the stairs. “Come on,” she said. “Wake up.”

The air was cool and gray. The jackalope wife looked at her with doe–dark eyes and didn’t move, and if she were a human, Grandma Harken would have itched to slap her.

 Pay attention! Get mad! Do something!

But she wasn’t human and rabbits freeze when they’re scared past running. So Grandma gritted her teeth and reached down a hand and pulled the jackalope wife up into the pre–dawn dark.

They moved slow, the two of them. Grandma was old and carrying water for two, and the girl was on a crutch. The sun came up and the cicadas burnt the air with their wings.

A coyote watched them from up on the hillside. The jackalope wife looked up at him, recoiled, and Grandma laid a hand on her arm.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I ain’t got the patience for coyotes. They’d maybe fix you up but we’d both be stuck in a tale past telling, and I’m too old for that. Come on.”

They went a little further on, past a wash and a watering hole. There were palo verde trees spreading thin green shade over the water. A javelina looked up at them from the edge and stamped her hooved feet. Her children scraped their tusks together and grunted.

Grandma slid and slithered down the slope to the far side of the water and refilled the water bottles. “Not them either,” she said to the jackalope wife. “They’ll talk the legs off a wooden sheep. We’d both be dead of old age before they’d figured out what time to start.”

The javelina dropped their heads and ignored them as they left the wash behind.

 The sun was overhead and the sky turned turquoise, a color so hard you could bash your knuckles on it. A raven croaked overhead and another one snickered somewhere off to the east.

The jackalope wife paused, leaning on her crutch, and looked up at the wings with longing.

“Oh no,” said Grandma. “I’ve got no patience for riddle games, and in the end they always eat someone’s eyes. Relax, child. We’re nearly there.”

The last stretch was cruelly hard, up the side of a bluff. The sand was soft underfoot and miserably hard for a girl walking with a crutch. Grandma had to half–carry the jackalope wife at the end. She weighed no more than a child, but children are heavy and it took them both a long time.

At the top was a high fractured stone that cast a finger of shadow like the wedge of a sundial. Sand and sky and shadow and stone. Grandma Harken nodded, content.

“It’ll do,” she said. “It’ll do.” She laid the jackalope wife down in the shadow and laid her tools out on the stone. Cigarettes and dead mouse and a scrap of burnt fur from the jackalope’s breast. “It’ll do.”

Then she sat down in the shadow herself and arranged her skirts.

She waited.

The sun went overhead and the level in the water bottle went down. The sun started to sink and the wind hissed and the jackalope wife was asleep or dead.

 

The ravens croaked a conversation to each other, from the branches of a palo verde tree, and whatever one said made the other one laugh.

“Well,” said a voice behind Grandma’s right ear, “lookee what we have here.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”

“Don’t see them out here often,” he said. “Not the right sort of place.” He considered. “Your Saint Anthony, now… him I think I’ve seen. He understood about deserts.”

Grandma’s lips twisted. “Father of Rabbits,” she said sourly. “Wasn’t trying to call you up.”

“Oh, I know.” The Father of Rabbits grinned. “But you know I’ve always had a soft spot for you, Maggie Harken.”

He sat down beside her on his heels. He looked like an old Mexican man, wearing a button–down shirt without any buttons. His hair was silver gray as a rabbit’s fur. Grandma wasn’t fooled for a minute.

“Get lonely down there in your town, Maggie?” he asked. “Did you come out here for a little wild company?”

Grandma Harken leaned over to the jackalope wife and smoothed one long ear back from her face. She looked up at them both with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

“Shit,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Never seen that before.” He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. “What did you do to her, Maggie?”

“I didn’t do a damn thing, except not let her die when I should have.”

 “There’s those would say that was more than enough.” He exhaled another lungful of smoke.

“She put on a half–burnt skin. Don’t suppose you can fix her up?” It cost Grandma a lot of pride to say that, and the Father of Rabbits tipped his chin in acknowledgment.

“Ha! No. If it was loose I could fix it up, maybe, but I couldn’t get it off her now with a knife.” He took another drag on the cigarette. “Now I see why you wanted one of the Patterned People.”

Grandma nodded stiffly.

The Father of Rabbits shook his head. “He might want a life, you know. Piddly little dead mouse might not be enough.”

“Then he can have mine.”

“Ah, Maggie, Maggie…You’d have made a fine rabbit, once. Too many stones in your belly now.” He shook his head regretfully. “Besides, it’s not your life he’s owed.”

“It’s my life he’d be getting. My kin did it, it’s up to me to put it right.” It occurred to her that she should have left Eva a note, telling her to send the fool boy back East, away from the desert.

Well. Too late now. Either she’d raised a fool for a daughter or not, and likely she wouldn’t be around to tell.

“Suppose we’ll find out,” said the Father of Rabbits, and nodded.

 

A man came around the edge of the standing stone. He moved quick then slow and his eyes didn’t blink. He was naked and his skin was covered in painted diamonds.

Grandma Harken bowed to him, because the Patterned People can’t hear speech.

He looked at her and the Father of Rabbits and the jackalope wife. He looked down at the stone in front of him.

The cigarettes he ignored. The mouse he scooped up in two fingers and dropped into his mouth.

Then he crouched there, for a long time. He was so still that it made Grandma’s eyes water, and she had to look away.

“Suppose he does it,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Suppose he sheds that skin right off her. Then what? You’ve got a human left over, not a jackalope wife.”

Grandma stared down at her bony hands. “It’s not so bad, being a human,” she said. “You make do. And it’s got to be better than that.”

She jerked her chin in the direction of the jackalope wife.

“Still meddling, Maggie?” said the Father of Rabbits.

“And what do you call what you’re doing?”

He grinned.

The Patterned Man stood up and nodded to the jackalope wife.

She looked at Grandma, who met her too–wide eyes. “He’ll kill you,” the old woman said. “Or cure you. Or maybe both. You don’t have to do it. This is the bit where you get a choice. But when it’s over, you’ll be all the way something, even if it’s just all the way dead.”

The jackalope wife nodded.

She left the crutch lying on the stones and stood up. Rabbit legs weren’t meant for it, but she walked three steps and the Patterned Man opened his arms and caught her.

He bit her on the forearm, where the thick veins run, and sank his teeth in up to the gums. Grandma cursed.

“Easy now,” said the Father of Rabbits, putting a hand on her shoulder. “He’s one of the Patterned People, and they only know the one way.”

The jackalope wife’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she sagged down onto the stone.

He set her down gently and picked up one of the cigarettes.

Grandma Harken stepped forward. She rolled both her sleeves up to the elbow and offered him her wrists.

The Patterned Man stared at her, unblinking. The ravens laughed to themselves at the bottom of the wash. Then he dipped his head and bowed to Grandma Harken and a rattlesnake as long as a man slithered away into the evening.

She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “He didn’t ask for a life.”

The Father of Rabbits grinned. “Ah, you know. Maybe he wasn’t hungry. Maybe it was enough you made the offer.”

 

“Maybe I’m too old and stringy,” she said.

“Could be that, too.”

The jackalope wife was breathing. Her pulse went fast then slow. Grandma sat down beside her and held her wrist between her own callused palms.

“How long you going to wait?” asked the Father of Rabbits.

“As long as it takes,” she snapped back.

The sun went down while they were waiting. The coyotes sang up the moon. It was half–full, half–new, halfway between one thing and the other.

“She doesn’t have to stay human, you know,” said the Father of Rabbits. He picked up the cigarettes that the Patterned Man had left behind and offered one to Grandma.

“She doesn’t have a jackalope skin anymore.”

He grinned. She could just see his teeth flash white in the dark. “Give her yours.”

“I burned it,” said Grandma Harken, sitting up ramrod straight. “I found where he hid it after he died and I burned it myself. Because I had a new husband and a little bitty baby girl and all I could think about was leaving them both behind and go dance.”

The Father of Rabbits exhaled slowly in the dark.

“It was easier that way,” she said. “You get over what you can’t have faster that you get over what you could. And we shouldn’t always get what we think we want.”

They sat in silence at the top of the bluff. Between Grandma’s hands, the pulse beat steady and strong.

 

“I never did like your first husband much,” said the Father of Rabbits.

“Well,” she said. She lit her cigarette off his. “He taught me how to swear. And the second one was better.”

The jackalope wife stirred and stretched. Something flaked off her in long strands, like burnt scraps of paper, like a snake’s skin shedding away. The wind tugged at them and sent them spinning off the side of the bluff.

From down in the desert, they heard the first notes of a sudden wild music.

“It happens I might have a spare skin,” said the Father of Rabbits. He reached into his pack and pulled out a long gray roll of rabbit skin. The jackalope wife’s eyes went wide and her body shook with longing, but it was human longing and a human body shaking.

“Where’d you get that?” asked Grandma Harken, suspicious.

“Oh, well, you know.” He waved a hand. “Pulled it out of a fire once — must have been forty years ago now. Took some doing to fix it up again, but some people owed me favors. Suppose she might as well have it… Unless you want it?”

He held it out to Grandma Harken.

She took it in her hands and stroked it. It was as soft as it had been fifty years ago. The small sickle horns were hard weights in her hands.

“You were a hell of a dancer,” said the Father of Rabbits.

 

“Still am,” said Grandma Harken, and she flung the jackalope skin over the shoulders of the human jackalope wife.

It went on like it had been made for her, like it was her own. There was a jagged scar down one foreleg where the rattlesnake had bit her. She leapt up and darted away, circled back once and bumped Grandma’s hand with her nose — and then she was bounding down the path from the top of the bluff.

The Father of Rabbits let out a long sigh. “Still are,” he agreed.

“It’s different when you got a choice,” said Grandma Harken.

They shared another cigarette under the standing stone.

Down in the desert, the music played and the jackalope wives danced. And one scarred jackalope went leaping into the circle of firelight and danced like a demon, while the moon laid down across the saguaro’s thorns.

 

“Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day?” by William Shakespeare. Read b...

Al Capone in photo's

Capone handles Ragtime Joe Howard

The bathroom meeting

Capone takes out Peg Leg Lonergan

Happenstance A poem by Rita Dove

Eli the dog

Just a minute Art

Freddi Hubbard, Jazzman

 

Sabrina Brazzo, Prima ballerina

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467: II. Andante

 

This appeared over my house yesterday after a big loud rain storm

 

Maria Callis

 

Our morning ritual....they sit on the bed and breath into my face until I wake up and give them their sticks....pretending I'm chasing them at the end is mandatory as well.

 

Chicken, Duck and Goose eggs

A virtual, creative writing hour with the Portrait Gallery.

 

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-writing-hour-with-the-national-portrait-gallery-tickets-99411309904?aff=odeimcmailchimp&mc_eid=9b57cc94ba&mc_cid=3e26124a84

Join us for a virtual, creative writing hour at the National Portrait Gallery! We've set up a virtual space where writers can create, connect, and draw inspiration from the Portrait Gallery's collection. Bring your own happy hour beverage of choice and write with us. We will provide writing prompts, and you are also welcome to bring your own writing project-in-progress. We will write for about 30 minutes and end each session with a brief discussion or reading.

The Zoom link for the writing hour will be emailed to registered participants 12-24 hours in advance of the program. The email will come from Eventbrite. Please only register for yourself. We will only be allowing participants into the meeting if their name (and email address) is on the registration list.

The Portrait Gallery strives to provide programs that are accessible to all visitors. If you have questions about the accessibility of this program, or if you would like to request real-time captioning (CART), sign language interpretation, or any other accommodations, please contact Vanessa Jones at jonesve@si.edu. Two weeks advance notice is appreciated for requesting accommodations.

In order to register and participate in this program, you must be 18 or older, or be accompanied by a parent/guardian.