Read Online Nightwork: Stories by Christine Schutt - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Christine Schutt
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winter birds—blood smears in the trees or the blue jays he detested swinging on the onion sacks and pecking at the suet. The snow was dirty; shucks of seed skirted the trees. There were pawprints and footprints and dog’s canary piddle—too many visitors on any one day.
I’m sorry, I get confused.
The snows that filled the wells of ground about my grandfather’s gardens were unmarked and falling in the lights I thoughtlessly left on.
My father was sick and had been sick for as far back as my grandfather could remember.
Imagine what it was like to have a son who said such things!
But what my father said about me! I had heard him before on how it was with me—me, a hole, a gap, a breach, a space, an absence and longing. Empty. Feckless. Stupid.
“Who can ever fill you up?” my father asked.
Then I was using something sharp on him, just to draw a little blood. I was being showy and so was he, my father—he knew about acting. He was smiling while I cut him, so that it must have been the second wife who screamed—not me. Why would I have screamed? My grandfather in the room saw what I was doing.
METROPOLIS
T he things my son may see living with me—the way the windows darken suddenly in our apartment, the night tipping shut, a lid, such things as have happened with me and men—shame me. Somewhere obscured in the obscuring city is his father, we imagine. My son and I stand at what was my window, my room, where now another man sleeps, if he sleeps. But he is gone, too, in these early, strangely inky evenings—rarely blue when we stand at the window, and my son asks, “Where do you think Dad is now?” I do not know the answer to this or to lots of other questions my son might ask me, which may be why my son is angry.
Teachers, mothers, women mostly, tell me my son is angry. They tell me this in the way women do in stories about other boys now pacified and prosperousin the alchemy of growing up. “But these boys were once angry,” they say, prayered hands and lowered heads. The women carry the word angry into talk as with pincers. Bad, bad to be a boy and swinging something he is using as a weapon against a wall.
Should I start at the beginning, then, I wonder, when the rage I felt bleeding on and off for weeks made me needle myself to bleed this child out and try again? I wanted a someone committed to staying. But my son held on; I thought he had to be a girl. The boy’s head lifted to view in his easy birthing, the doctor said, “I think it’s a girl,” and that was what we saw, the doctor, the nurses, the father, me. Before the boy part slipped out, we saw this bright girl mouth pouted for kissing. “Ah,” we said.
The astonishing heat between my legs after my son was gone I remember, me on a gurney in a screened-off pen and calling out for ice.
“Do you have any thoughts?” the teacher asks me when I go to see her about my son. But the rown-leaf color of the desks, the exhausted chalky air, streaked with light as if by candles, the tallowed apprentice quality of objects, crude child maps of the explorers, all catch in my throat like ash.
The dying man who sleeps in what was once my bed sleeps poorly and smokes, listens to the radio. My thoughts are of him and of what my son may hear when the dying man comes home, sanding the floor with his long and heavy feet. Up and down, up and down, past the locked bedroom where my son and I sleep, the dying man moves. He calls out from what was my room, “I am dying. I am dying in this fuckingbedroom.” Night after night, I hear him. Pressed against my son in my son’s bed, I hear the dying man and wonder. Does my son hear, is he really sleeping, and how is it I have let this happen to us—opening the door to men who come in or who do not come in, threatening ruin, slapping money on my bureau, saying, “I am dying,” or “This is all I have,” or “This is all you want.”
The teacher, I imagine, has no troubles with money or with men dying.
I’m sorry, I get confused.
The snows that filled the wells of ground about my grandfather’s gardens were unmarked and falling in the lights I thoughtlessly left on.
My father was sick and had been sick for as far back as my grandfather could remember.
Imagine what it was like to have a son who said such things!
But what my father said about me! I had heard him before on how it was with me—me, a hole, a gap, a breach, a space, an absence and longing. Empty. Feckless. Stupid.
“Who can ever fill you up?” my father asked.
Then I was using something sharp on him, just to draw a little blood. I was being showy and so was he, my father—he knew about acting. He was smiling while I cut him, so that it must have been the second wife who screamed—not me. Why would I have screamed? My grandfather in the room saw what I was doing.
METROPOLIS
T he things my son may see living with me—the way the windows darken suddenly in our apartment, the night tipping shut, a lid, such things as have happened with me and men—shame me. Somewhere obscured in the obscuring city is his father, we imagine. My son and I stand at what was my window, my room, where now another man sleeps, if he sleeps. But he is gone, too, in these early, strangely inky evenings—rarely blue when we stand at the window, and my son asks, “Where do you think Dad is now?” I do not know the answer to this or to lots of other questions my son might ask me, which may be why my son is angry.
Teachers, mothers, women mostly, tell me my son is angry. They tell me this in the way women do in stories about other boys now pacified and prosperousin the alchemy of growing up. “But these boys were once angry,” they say, prayered hands and lowered heads. The women carry the word angry into talk as with pincers. Bad, bad to be a boy and swinging something he is using as a weapon against a wall.
Should I start at the beginning, then, I wonder, when the rage I felt bleeding on and off for weeks made me needle myself to bleed this child out and try again? I wanted a someone committed to staying. But my son held on; I thought he had to be a girl. The boy’s head lifted to view in his easy birthing, the doctor said, “I think it’s a girl,” and that was what we saw, the doctor, the nurses, the father, me. Before the boy part slipped out, we saw this bright girl mouth pouted for kissing. “Ah,” we said.
The astonishing heat between my legs after my son was gone I remember, me on a gurney in a screened-off pen and calling out for ice.
“Do you have any thoughts?” the teacher asks me when I go to see her about my son. But the rown-leaf color of the desks, the exhausted chalky air, streaked with light as if by candles, the tallowed apprentice quality of objects, crude child maps of the explorers, all catch in my throat like ash.
The dying man who sleeps in what was once my bed sleeps poorly and smokes, listens to the radio. My thoughts are of him and of what my son may hear when the dying man comes home, sanding the floor with his long and heavy feet. Up and down, up and down, past the locked bedroom where my son and I sleep, the dying man moves. He calls out from what was my room, “I am dying. I am dying in this fuckingbedroom.” Night after night, I hear him. Pressed against my son in my son’s bed, I hear the dying man and wonder. Does my son hear, is he really sleeping, and how is it I have let this happen to us—opening the door to men who come in or who do not come in, threatening ruin, slapping money on my bureau, saying, “I am dying,” or “This is all I have,” or “This is all you want.”
The teacher, I imagine, has no troubles with money or with men dying.
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