Church Cay, the conclusion

Part 12

For a week or so after Frank died, I had one dream over and over again. I would be in a house with immaculate white walls and miles and miles of thick blue carpet. There was furniture, but I could never remember what it looked like. I was wandering this very large house looking for something, I don’t know what, but I knew that if I was to find it, it would have to be inside one of these rooms because outside of every window was the densest green jungle I had ever seen. I woke up one morning after the dream, and something finally occurred to me. It struck me that, in his whole life, Frank had never seen the ocean. Emily was almost eight, and she had never seen one either.

The following month, as soon as Emily’s school let out, we went to Baraterre. Touring around the island the day we arrived, I showed her the sites that represented the beginning of my life. Fat Billy’s was now run by a small Vietnamese woman, and the sight of her made me miss Fat Billy, even though I had never once met him since the age of eleven months. He was a part of that other time that should have just been history to me, but I was always confusing history with memory.

I hired a boat to take us to Church Cay for the day. As Emily and I scrambled up the bluff to the plateau, I watched the boatman reclining with a cigarette in his boat, watching us. “Your father built the shill church, heh?” he had asked me, amused. I wondered if he felt enough ridicule to try to scare us by leaving us stranded. I supposed that my mother had wondered that every day she was here, and she might have sometimes felt the same derision toward my father.

The church was just as I had pictured it at the high end of the island. All its paint had worn off or had been bleached away in the sun, and its bare wood was as gray and tufted as the fur of an animal. It felt like a doll house. Emily tugged on the iron handle of the front door, and the whole structure shook. She pouted and then turned her back on it, running off to explore the ruins of the older houses. I was relieved to have her playing away from the cliff. I stood near the front of the church myself and looked down for the first time at the trench a hundred feet below. Beneath the small crests on the water’s surface, the smoothness of the patch of dark blue surprised me. I knew there was a very old church down there. I pictured its pews, its hymnals, someone’s forgotten Sunday hat. But they had been completely absorbed in the uniformity of that field of blue. Emily hummed happily as she sat braiding leaves next to a grave marker, and it seemed inevitable that the cemetery and all of its contents would be consumed by the trench too. The dead were headed for oblivion, and that made me happy for them. They were in their own vortex, waiting to be dropped out into a strange land for the last time. I decided that I loved the underscaled building that stood before me, the shill church, for its ridiculous appropriateness at being so empty.

Emily was so content playing there that I put off our leaving until I heard the boatman call up to us. On the way back to Baraterre, she sat with one arm around my waist and the other outstretched, her hand cupped to catch the wind. Every few minutes she rushed her hand to her open mouth. She was tasting the air, doing the exact same thing I had taught Jeff to do as a baby on our long Sunday morning car rides to the church where our father would be preaching.

Twelve years have passed since that summer, and now I live in Baraterre. When the men told me that my father’s church had fallen into the ocean, they said that so much of the cliff had eroded that the edge now broke inland right up to the boundary of the old cemetery. I imagine that in a few years, the ancient coffins might come spewing out of the hillside to find their way down onto the rocks below, or if they are lucky, slide right into the trench. The scant human remains will spiral back down to the crude depths of life’s origins, the sea.

This is the story of my life, and I am back where I began. Make something out of it if you can. My story, that is.

The End

Church Cay, part 11

Part 11

A nurse brought restraints while another injected him with a sedative, and I pleaded with them to let him shout as much as he wanted, but they told me there was no use. They said that reliving some childhood incident was a sure sign that a person’s brain was dying.

Frank was calm after that except for a couple of times that he murmured meaningless phrases. When I felt sure that there would not be another outburst, I decided that it was time for Emily to say good-bye to her father. On that day, I brushed his hair and shaved him. I uncurled his fists myself and laid his hands on top of the covers. His hands were so thin that his wedding ring slipped easily over his knuckle, and I removed it so it wouldn’t get lost in the sheets.

Outside his door, I decided to tell Emily that he might say things or move suddenly and she should not be scared of him, or that he might not show that he knew she was there at all. But she needed to tell him that she loved him, I explained, because he should hear it from her before he died. Then I told her, say anything you want to him, Sweetheart, because he just wants to know you’ll remember him.

I found a stool for her to stand on, and when she did, she leaned over Frank’s face and said matter-of-factly and rather loudly, “I love you, Daddy—I love you.” After that she rubbed noses with him and kissed him on the mouth, and then she sat down on the stool and took his hand. She sat like that, telling him what her days had been like recently and about her pals from next door. When she ran out of stories about her playmates, she laid her cheek on his hand and sat without making a sound until it was time for us to go home.

Frank died one morning before I got to his room. I asked for a few minutes alone with him, and the nurse sympathetically obliged me. When she left the room, I felt behind Frank’s neck for the ties of his hospital gown and then pulled it down so I could touch his bare shoulders and chest. Frank had the most beautiful shoulders, and they were always soft-skinned and white because, no matter how hot it got, he wore a T-shirt in the sun. I laid my hand on the side of his neck until the skin was quite warm, and then I kissed the place where my hand had been.

The Day of the Locomotive

I am a steam punk. I like things that are big and loud and, where appropriate, Victorian. I have paid good money to get into tractor pulls, and when I didn’t have the money, I watched through chinks in the wall. In the days before airports were warzones, I’d stand in the bed of my pickup truck at the business end of Lindbergh Field and imagine I could stroke the bellies of ascending planes. I like machines that are clumsy and elegant at the same time. Hulking behemoths as delicate as a Swiss watch. Metal and oily exhaust. Bellicose, quarrelsome, cantankerous, and precise.

As I drove home from work yesterday, almost to my exit, I saw a train stopped on the tracks paralleling the freeway. This isn’t unusual since my neighborhood has a lay-by for passing trains. But there were people and police cars hanging around the locomotive, and at first glance I was afraid there had been a horrible accident. There was something weird about the engine, smoke curling away from the top—my god, it was a steam engine. Not only that (by now I was off the freeway, heading for the frontage road) it was a steam engine pulling a train of 22 vintage Pullman passenger cars.

Apparently a group of private railcar owners was having its annual gathering in LA. They chartered an antique steam engine to take them daytripping from Union Station to San Diego, and the Pullmans were parking in our siding for the day. The locomotive was soon detached from the train and before I could get parked and down to the siding, it motored off South to an Amtrak station to be picked up by a diesel engine that would take it back north of its own passenger cars in the lay-by. That was the beginning of its four hour odyssey to and from a turntable, prepping it for its return trip to LA.

I summoned my husband and kids at about the first half-hour mark, and the wait for the steam engine to return was excruciating. I really thought nothing could be worth the effort it was taking to stave off fatal boredom. I worried what the kids would think when it was all over and they had spent their whole Sunday on a weedy dirt bank. I apologized to my husband for no reason.

Then it came. It came backing down the track with the two diesel engines that power-assisted amenities like lights and AC for the passengers. At last it slid into the coupling of the last Pullman car. It was ferocious and complicated and enormous, but it could move an inch at a time.

I won’t try to describe it. (Its wheels were 80 inches in diameter.) I don’t have to tell you if it was worth it. At this point either you’re with me or you aren’t. The steam engine stayed in our humble siding for the next hour while the Pullmans’ combined crews got the passenger cars powered up. I could have let my eyes wander its surface of glossy geometry and grainy curves for the entire time, but my son insisted that we stay poised at a distance down the track that would allow us to see the massive pistons and wheels at speed when the train finally left. (Good call.)

It was an amazing day. Something I couldn’t have planned and would never have committed to even if I could have planned it. There were instances when the anticipation and awe I felt toward that locomotive must have been identical to what someone would have felt a hundred years earlier the first time a steam engine came into their world. I think yesterday was no different than a day at the beach—a full day spent in anticipation of something looming just beyond the horizon (it was always supposed to be here any minute), and when the thing arrived, kind of like the way it feels to look at the ocean, it brought a raging stillness.

Church Cay, part 10

Part 10

When Emily was seven, Frank had a massive brain hemorrhage. By that time, Grandfather had passed away, and we were living in his old house down the road from Frank’s parents. But on this evening, Emily and I were fixing dinner with Frank’s mom in her kitchen when the men came in for the day. Frank said that he had a bad headache and wanted to lie down upstairs in his old room. At dinner time, I looked for Emily to send her upstairs to get her daddy, but she had run outside to play with a neighbor’s child. I found Frank lying strangely unconscious, clearly not just asleep, curled up on his side. He had vomited on the pillow next to him.

He lay in a coma in the hospital for five weeks. Some days I would find him in the fetal position, his fists clinched like paws and drawn up to his neck, but when the nurses came in to change his bedclothes, they would always help him onto his back and lay his arms beside him so that he looked like he was sleeping. On the seventh day after the hemorrhage, he sprang into violent activity while I was sitting next to his bed. His eyes opened wide, his brown irises razor-thin like a madman’s. He screamed and sobbed as though he were being tortured, or worse, utterly forsaken. He cried out just one word that I could understand, “Mama! Mama!” deepening my horror that he could not perceive anything now but total abandonment.

to be continued

For Scott

Church Cay, part 9

Part 9

We never talked about God, and I was almost sure that Frank was an atheist, even after he told me his grandfather was a priest. If he had ever asked me, I would have told him without hesitating that even if God existed, I would reject Him. But now I don’t think Frank would have agreed with me. He held peacefully onto a belief he never spoke of. I could always tell by the way he moved when he was physically tired from farming that he counted on his strength to come from something beyond his body. I began to imagine what he felt when the fields were waist-high with wheat and my own body was exhausted from the last months of pregnancy. The summer winds made depressions in the bronze grass like giant, restless lovers rolling on a bed of satin sheets. If this invisible force were the hand of God, I thought, running its fingers with so much love through the hair of its only child, I would let it caress my entire being.

My baby Emily reminded me so much of my brother Jeff that I missed him more than ever. She took in the whole prairie with her eyes the way Jeff had as a baby in my eight-year-old arms. She let herself see things that adults don’t believe they can see, believing instead that the thing before them is just too big to be comprehended, so they stop looking. She noticed every bit of movement and pointed at every piece of machinery in the fields, identifying them all as he daddy. Watching her, I imagined myself in my mother’s arms on Baraterre experiencing the ocean. I thought sometimes that I could remember the blue of the ocean even though I knew that was impossible. In that false memory, the prairie must have been my ocean, the golden color of the waves recorded for some reason in its negative, blue.

to be continued

Church Cay, part 8

Part 8

We were married by his widowed grandfather, a retired Episcopal priest, at what had once been his little church in the middle of the vast prairies of North Dakota. We risked a lot traveling that distance to be married at the end of February, given what the weather could have done, but we didn’t want to wait until spring. Frank was particularly concerned that we marry before I started showing, although by the time we got there, his whole family knew that I was pregnant and didn’t seem to mind. I think Frank was worried that I would be embarrassed later by our wedding pictures if I was visibly with child. Frank was like that, the kind of man who would anticipate how other people might hurt themselves, no matter how slightly, and then do everything in his power to save them.

My mother rode with us to North Dakota on the bench seat of Frank’s pickup truck. We gathered in the church on a Thursday morning, the two of us, my mother, Frank’s mother and father, and his little brother. Outside the sky was clear and aquamarine as ribbons of cream-colored light and ochre shadows snaked through the fields of waving winter grasses on a mild breeze, but in his parents’ car on the way to the church, the radio had said it was nine below zero.

“Her hands are like ice!” Frank said as our families stepped to each side, leaving us standing alone before Grandfather’s open book of prayer. He rubbed my hands quickly but gently, and I thought of the glasses he’d washed and dried a hundred times each at the bar and had never broken one. The hand rubbing warmed my whole body, and I felt like I was floating in warm water while my mother’s lace wedding dress began to lose its starch and swirl around me. Frank put his hand firmly on the back of my arm, thinking, he told me later, that I’d looked like I was going to faint.

In a couple of days, we sent my mother home on the bus, but Frank and I had decided by then to stay. I wanted to have our baby there with his family, and there was plenty for him to do to help his dad make the farm ready for the spring planting of wheat.

Church Cay, part 7

Part 7

At first I couldn’t understand why Frank would have his eye on me with someone like Dee around, but little by little I observed that men did not look at Dee the way I would have expected them to. She had something wrong with her back that caused her to limp. It didn’t seem to cause her much pain, but I could tell that she had altered all of her clothing to help hide the fact that one hip was a little higher than the other. In spite of her classically beautiful face and perfect hair, she must have looked like damaged goods to the men who came in the bar. I asked Frank once, didn’t he think Dee was beautiful, and he said he didn’t know. He said she was a good waitress, but it just hurt to look at her.

As for me, I tried not to think about the attention I got from the bar customers. The roadhouse had regulars, men and women, but it was so far from town that the majority of the patrons were one-timers, mostly men, truckers and such on their way to somewhere. If I wanted good tips I had to talk nice to them and dress in a manner that would give them a little hope, but hope was all they got. If Frank saw a customer looking at any part of me except my face, the white towel would get cranked down harder and faster into the glasses, and he would tell me to be careful. Under Frank’s watch, Dee and I never had much trouble. After closing and before he did the books each night, Frank would make sure that we got to our cars safely on our way home, in our opposite directions. Soon after that started, I started staying until Frank finished up, and soon after that, I started following him home in my car, but this time he knew I was driving right behind him. He invited me there. I walked in his bedroom. I saw my reflection on the inside of the window as my old self hiding outside, waiting to watch us make love for the first time, and I made Frank pull down the shades.

Church Cay, part 6

Part 6

When I got older, on the other hand, I went to work after school hours in a roadhouse bar. I was sixteen, and I would never let my parents forget that I was born in a room over a bar. I came home late from the roadhouse smelling like smoke and beer, and no matter how quiet I was, my mother said that I always woke up the whole house with that smell. Nobody liked it, but I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t sit in that house at night and listen to my father write his sermons.

The bar belonged to a twenty-seven-year-old guy named Frank, and Frank tended the bar. I knew from the first night I worked there that Frank had a passion for me. The first week I was there, he let me catch him making out his grocery list one night. The last item on the list was “grip.” I asked him what a grip was, and he said a grip was just one more thing he needed to get because he had lost his.

His hands were always moving and his knuckles were always cracked and red from washing glasses. I fell in love watching him dry glasses one night, three fingers twisting a white towel into the bottom of each glass. After work, I pretended to go home, but I went to his house and waited in the dark outside for him to come home from closing up. When he went inside and turned on the lights, I could guess where the bedroom was in the one-story house, and I waited outside the window to see him undress. I had never seen a naked man before, and I knew I loved him, so I thought it would be beautiful. But I remember now how I felt once he was naked as I stood and watched him walking around the room. His body was fine, but seeing him like that wasn’t beautiful, it was awful. I was so ashamed of myself, I had to hold myself with my arms to stop from shaking. As I tried to calm down, I just stood there and concentrated on his white shoulders, thinking I wasn’t so bad if I only looked at him from the waist up. Each muscle cast a faint shadow from the overhead light, and his chest was covered in light swirls of black hair that became so dense over his belly that it obscured his navel. His shoulders were perfectly bare and white, though. Down his arms were gradations of pinker skin, forearms slightly burned from the sun, hands red and chapped from the endless washing of glasses. I let my eyes follow the contour of his arm below his waist, and I was surprised at the appearance of his penis, redder than his hands, in its nest of black hair. There was nothing wrong with it, it just wasn’t what I had imagined. The only one I had seen before that was Jeff’s, and I hadn’t seen his since I stopped bathing him when he turned six.

I never told anyone that I had spied on Frank, not even Dee. Dee was the other waitress in the evenings in the bar. She was closer to Frank’s age, so she wasn’t someone that I could have known from school, but I felt like I had known her all my life. Dee was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. One of her beauty secrets, she said, was to never sweat. She was much slower as a waitress than I was because she would stand for minutes at a time in front of the air conditioner if she felt a drop of perspiration coming on, her supple neck arching back and dry wisps of her long blonde hair streaming from her temples as though she were in freefall.

Church Cay, parts 4 and 5

Part 4

After I was born, my father decided it was time to become a minister, and my parents waited in Baraterre for their first assignment from the Methodist Conference back home. It was a full eleven months before they were placed. Because my parents had come to the Exumas on their own, there was no income from the church, only what was left of their savings. They continued to rent the one-room flat over Fat Billy’s Ball ‘n’ Chain, and that alone is testament to their poverty, because my parents were teetotalers. We survived, ironically, through the grace of Billy, who passed on to us the condiments from the bar each night—a lot of nuts and citrus—and once a week, his brother would just happen to have caught a few extra fish, and the windfall became ours. My mother was never able to tell the story of our Christmas there without crying. Billy brought her a chicken, a precious commodity on Baraterre, on Christmas Eve, saying that his brother had accidentally run over it with his truck. When my mother showed skepticism about the wrapped carcass, Billy assured her that it was freshly dead and that the only trauma it had endured was from the wheel of the truck. My mother thanked him and took it, only realizing after he was gone and she unwrapped it that the headless chicken was otherwise whole. It could not have been hit by a truck and still be so deliciously intact, she knew. It must have been picked out and slaughtered especially for us.

When his assignment arrived, my father thought he was being sent to Colorado to minister to an Indian reservation, and that thrilled him. But since he couldn’t get his hands on any kind of map of the U.S. in Baraterre that was less than forty years old, he couldn’t be sure. There were no Indian reservations in eastern Colorado, though, just little towns like First View and Wild Horse that, if they were going to keep their faith alive in those days, depended on a Methodist circuit rider to drive from church to church preaching all day on Sundays.

He should have been happy, doing the Lord’s work among the already saved, but at the time he had no idea that the Conference was going to forget about us, that all four of us (I soon had a little brother, Jeffrey) would be staying there for the next sixteen years until we dried up like dead leaves, crazy enough to let that great spiraling tendency life has fling us apart.

Part 5

Eastern Colorado is flatter than Kansas. My brother Jeffrey, four years younger than me, seemed to be attracted to the immenseness of it from the day he was born. Whenever we took him outside in the daylight, you could see his little eyes, just barely able to focus, zeroing in on the farthest objects, sometimes the horizon itself. In the summers when it was hot, when he got a little older, we’d often find Jeff lying under the house with one side of his face pressed against the cool ground, staring out across the plain.

Jeff is an opera singer now, a tenor, one of the best in the world, and he is known for reaching into the back rows of the largest opera houses and pulling the hearts right out of the patrons’ chests with his voice. But I think he does it with his eyes. He learned to communicate with big empty spaces as a child.

To be continued…..

Church Cay, part 3

Part 3

My parents shortly learned, while they mulled over their unusual situation from the relative civility of Baraterre, that the church, on its grand bluff, had been visible from half a dozen islands grouped in a curl away from the main archipelago. A hundred years ago, the Christianized inhabitants of those outer cays came to the church for their weddings, their baptisms, to bury their dead in its well-tended cemetery. But when the last missionary died, no one was sent to replace him. So for the ensuing generations, the outer islanders returned to the practice of burying their dead at sea. No one set foot in the church from that time on, but the sight of it across the water gave the disparate islanders a kinship, a common knowledge of something beyond their immediate existence.

My father was not a stupid man, but he was such an innocent one. He could not have failed to see from the geography of the islands and the gaping mouth of the trench just below where he stood that the cay was slowly pulling out from under him as it had pulled out from under the church. But my father would not be deterred from his mission. He did not know what the first church had looked like, nor could he tell much from the wreckage that lay at the bottom of the cliff. It had been down there so long that most of it had floated out to sea as driftwood, and what would not float had become a part of the bottom of the trench. There was no trace left of even a foundation, if one had ever existed.

So my father brought long boards and white paint on an armada of small boats from Baraterre to the island he christened Church Cay. The locals, some loving an eccentric, some fearing a zealot, helped him carry the rough goods and the hand tools to the top of the cliff, but none volunteered nor were they asked to stay and help him. He and my mother cleared out one of the homes to be their base camp, and it was my mother’s responsibility to catch and clean something each day to supplement the canned goods they had brought with them, but she returned to Baraterre when the advanced stage of her pregnancy made it impossible for her to climb out onto the rocks to fish at the shallow end of the island.

All alone, then, my father built a perfect scale replica of a white clapboard New England style church, steeple and all, achieving a height of twenty-three feet. Its exterior was flawless in proportion, but lacked a lot of detail, and the interior was, well, non-existent. The front door was a fake, nailed onto the outside, and the church was hollow, like a cardboard Christmas model for the mantel to be surrounded by angel hair snow.

Church Cay, part 2

Part 2

Just after their marriage, my mother and father went in search of a nameless cay in the Exuma archipelago where, they had heard, a few people lived who were badly in need of a sense of community, a connection to the Lord. At that time, and still today, none of the islands northwest of Great Exuma had a name except Baraterre which might as well be a part of Great Exuma it is so close. But the cays beyond it are spread out across the Atlantic like the bones of a great dissected spine and are not considered to be inhabited, but only because no one takes the time to see if they are. Descendants of the ‘Indians’ who lived throughout the Caribbean before the European migration swept most of them up as slaves or killed them with Old World diseases are still living in the Exumas, in some cases only one or two families to a cay, living their lives much as their ancestors did with the exception of two things. One is that the children are all gone. They have commuted to the present, transported off to the main island schools for a better education, and they have not come back home. The other is that those who stayed behind were all converted to Christianity. My father learned of this forgotten flock with their church crumbling into the surf from an obscure reference in National Geographic. He used the magazine as his atlas in seminary as he planned his life as a missionary, but unlike some of his classmates, he was not evangelical; he did not advocate proselytizing Christianity to other religions. So the idea of rebuilding the church on the cay was irresistible to him, serving a gathering of ready saved souls that needed a pulpit placed before it. He convinced my mother, a junior Bible college graduate, to marry him and join him on his crusade.

What they found when they got there was an island that had been abandoned long before the church had shrugged its shoulders and collapsed into the sea. The tiny cay was shaped like a melted slice of cheesecake, the graham cracker crust being a magnificent broad cliff a hundred feet high, the melted-down tip a shallow and treacherous point of submerged rocks. At the base of the cliff, the ocean opened up into a deep blue trench that looked like a bruise when viewed from the top of the ravine left by the landslide that had taken the church. Any boat that arrived at the island had to land midway between the two ends, necessitating a short precipitous climb to the habitable surface. Three small houses still stood in a crescent around the site of the church’s demise, but they were overrun with vegetation.

Church Cay, part 1

Some men who came into Baraterre today tell me that the little church my father built decades ago has fallen off the edge of Church Cay into the sea. A church that had been there before it, built in the eighteenth century, did the same thing a long time ago. The news has started me thinking. We want so desperately to believe that our lives are uplifted lines, like pistons below our feet that we fight to balance on as we are sent soaring, always higher, out of the crude depths of our origins. But they aren’t. Each life is a spiral, a series of concentric revolutions that brings us within arm’s lengths of our past, again and again.

This is the story of my spiraling life, and I’ll try to be brief. Maybe you can make something out of it. My story, that is, up to this point.

I was born on an island in the Exuma chain in the Caribbean. My parents were white missionaries, southerners. I was born about as close to godlessness as I possibly could be, under the circumstances, above a bar in Baraterre called Fat Billy’s Ball ‘n’ Chain. My mother was living there above the bar in a rented room, but my father was on another island by himself building a church with no windows, no doors, and no prospect of a congregation. In other words, a house of God that not even God would set foot in, if he could find a way inside.

In the moment, in the past

I had coffee with my friend Michele this morning. Neither of us grew up here in Southern California, but both of us feel that we are supposed to be here. I think we were talking about clothes when Michele said, "It's always summer here." It is, and, you know, it isn't. You have to really look, but you start to be able to discern the seasons here in ways mostly having to do with the angle of sunlight at noon. I find myself thinking, "In a month it will be twilight at this time of day, not mid-afternoon," and "Where did the middle of July go?"

I told her a little about some stuff that's going on at work, and then I came home and got reflective. My summers used to be defined by design deadlines, my busiest season, preparing to roll out new sets for tours each fall. I had to be super productive. In my own parallel universe, I had both of my babies in summer. Summer is what kids anticipate nine months out of the year.

What I have loved about summers, a visual list--the outer banks of North Carolina

Islay in Scotland


thinking about getting a dog

not gaining weight

reading slutty books or Nancy Drew

not reading Joyce

riding around with my uncle who knows all the good stories

getting the filter removed from my vena cava

the tour de France

reading about the festivals in NME in the aisles of Borders

designing sets for operas.