Texts for Translation
2009:
Rebecca Jan Lane
Mother Tongue
(Родной язык)
Тексты для 2011
перевода
Галерея
Переводы-
победители
Home
Texts for 2011
Picture Gallery
UpJohn Award
Winning
Translations
Contact
Fire
Damn, that was one beautiful fire. The ways the red- orange flames skipped, danced and slid across the building, taking everything in its path, hungry and desperately relentless, how it enveloped everything it touched, chairs, tables, even the already black upright piano, swallowing everything into itself. It was spellbinding. I breathed deeply in the cold winter air, and sucked in some of the smoke that rose above me. I held it in, like taking a long practiced drag, before I slowly exhaled it out into itself again. Thanksgiving had passed. The trees waved their naked arms against a charcoal sky. In the midst of the deep hibernation, I felt myself begin to wake.My hand started to slip around the gas can; I had forgotten I was still holding it. I put it down on the frozen ground and wiped the sharp metal handle with the edge of my shirt. I had only a few more minutes here before I had to leave. Fifteen minutes at the most. In ten minutes, Sara Parker, our neighbor up the hill, would be out walking her dogs. Either she or her dogs were like clockwork. She would be in her bright orange jacket (it was, after all, hunting season and this was a rural community). All three cocker lab mixes would strain at their retractable leashes, until they got to a place remote enough to be let loose in the field. Here they would run among the sheared corn stalks, bark at opossums and inevitably dart down to the edge of the field. Sara would follow them, wondering what in hell they could be barking at now, only to see the old Butler farmstead entirely engulfed in flames. That’s when she would call 911. And because it is a small town and everyone knows everyone, all Sara would have to say would be, “The Butler Farm on 207,” and the fire trucks would come flying with their red lights flashing and siren screaming.
Well, almost as soon as she said that. The fire trucks would stand empty and anxious until the firemen actually got to the fire hall. It is a volunteer service, and I was counting on the time delay. The fire fighters would suit up in their gear, and someone would be in the driver’s seat, helmet in place, yelling at the slow-pokes to, “Hurry the hell up already!” Then they would be on their way.
Perhaps en route, while riding the fluorescent yellow vehicular monstrosity, some of the men would think to themselves about the times they went to the Butler pumpkin patch for their Halloween jack-o-lanterns, or when Old Pop Butler let them hunt for deer back towards the last hundred acres of pine trees that bordered the beaver dam. Maybe they’d remember the beautiful chestnut horses they had ridden or the ancient apple orchards laden with deep plum colored apples; while you waited, Edith Butler might send an apple through the apple polisher, until it shone, with never a bruise in the pearly inner flesh. Regardless, they’d all be thinking it a damn shame to see the old place go up. A damn shame.
Never mind that my last name is Butler, or how I felt about having to start the fire, and watch what had been my family’s birthright go up in black smoke. Never mind any of it. It had to be done.
I sighed, watched it burn down some more, and counted the fire bugs that flipped up from the debris and singed against the gray November sky. Like a snowfall in reverse. There were fifty two of them. Fifty two backwards snowflakes, floating up and warming everything they touched.
November is a month of mediocrity. There is no striving for excellence like we do in September just before school, or resurgence of motivation like New Years. In Pennsylvania, November is gray, dark, depressing, cold and overcast. There is no hope. It’s all about just making it to the next day, and then the next day, all without getting caught in some trap, or falling through the ice of some not quite frozen over lake or pond. It’s about endurance, cutthroat survival, and downright perseverance. And in the middle of this bleakness, hopelessness, in the very midst of our darkest hours, we give thanks. Some things never make sense.
The house in front of me was collapsing. The roof was bowing and sagging with the weight of the fire love, and from inside I heard a crash of something like plates. I peered into the darkness and saw the kitchen had finally gone under. I sighed, thinking of my grandmother’s dishes, white with gold edging brought from England in a cedar chest, each wrapped individually in scarlet flannel. They made it through three generations, but not through me…..
From the field above me, I heard the dogs barking. They were ahead of schedule. Shit. I checked my watch. 8:26pm. Sara must have an early morning. That or there were no good repeats on TV. I heard the fire alarm scream from the town below. And she has her cell phone. Of course. Shit.
I zipped up my coat and headed off into the back field. The farmer still hadn’t taken the corn from this field yet, and the stalks stood tall, white and whispering. As I walked back into the field, I heard another collapse, another crash of things being destroyed, things I loved. Things that were me. Or had been me.
I had grown up in that house. My family, and our friends had gathered there for fifty, maybe sixty years. It was home. And when I was little, it was full of magic and wonder. Mysteries lay behind each door. Even if it was only a broom closet, there was no broom closet like the ones there.
But slowly, like what happens with most people as they grow up, I saw the truth. The reality. They become grown up, regardless how much they struggle against it. And when you’re grown up, you see things that you didn’t see before. For me it was the dissolution of my family…..
Fissures in the family tree started appearing. Siblings splintered against each other. At one point, the hatred descended into harassing voice mails and someone even breaking into the family home and taking those things they felt entitled to. No one pressed charges . After all, it was family. And you don’t do that to family. You just let it go.
At the same time my grandfather, the back bone of the family died. With him, died the spirit of the house. The majestic, magical, mysterious house became unwieldy and clumsy. The gardens were over grown. Instead of the joy that once echoed through the hallways, haunting memories of what had be filled the house like cobwebs. It stood as a shrine in some ways to a way of life that had been beautiful and blessed. But the way of life was gone, and it looked out of place. And somehow, like a girl at a dance wearing an out of style dress, it seemed awkwardly aware.
I moved into the house, to protect it, as a guardian and to try to breathe life back into it. I lived there in that house with the ghosts eras past, who existed in every corner of the house and who failed more so at conversation.
When I say ghosts, I mean ghosts in both ways. There were the echoing memories that resonated in my mind. And then there were the ghosts of my ancestors who decided to linger longer than their earthly time allowed. It was no wonder that my grandfather died talking to his brother who passed on ten years ago.
At first it was comforting, being surrounded by those I had known and loved. Their familiar faces and presences came and went through the house as they had always done. My grandmother Isabella cooked dinner the same way she had done for twenty years. Great Uncle Brookeson was out in the barn tending to the leather harness and tack for the horses. There was never an alone moment. Even in the dead of night, their presence, the presences of my ancestors’ unseen, was just like having neighbors in an apartment building with walls too thin.
I grew accustomed to them, the ghosts of my forebears. They moved around me, they stood in doorways and glowered when I did something they disapproved of. They never told me exactly what they disapproved of, or what I should have done instead. The Butlers believed in a stiff upper lip and the silent treatment. The day I decided to not plant the pumpkin patch, the same patch that hadn’t produced enough pumpkins to pay for the seeds, I was met at the kitchen table by no less than six gray, milky white transparent ghosts. Some I didn’t even recognize except for the Butler family resemblance. I had long ago taken their pictures off the wall. There was no need for a rogue gallery as it used to be called, when the rogues are ‘living’ side by side you all the time. That was another decision that dealt me an undead guilt trip.
I tried to leave. I applied for schools in other states. I took jobs hours away that would realistically be impossible for me to get there. But each time, the doors were locked, and I would be fired. I was relegated to live in the house, on the family farm, alone but not alone at the same time. It’s enough to start anyone down a path of madness. Of course you should stay here, they seemed to say. We need you here. There has to be a Butler here. It’s your turn.
The same sentiments were echoed, only out loud, by my living family. Words like divorce, foreclosure, duty, all started showing up in conversation more and more. And as my living family nodded, I couldn’t help but see the dead nodding in accordance. They stood behind my parents, my siblings, like a grey painted veil that scrimmed the scenery. It was my turn. They were all too busy to take their turn, too important, what with a doctor, a nurse, a stay at home father, and a slew of aunts and uncles who didn’t care. The farm had to be attended to, and I was the only logical choice. Any argument I had prepared was instant parried aside. Without my presence there, they would be forced to sell, subdivide into a housing development. You don’t want that do you? They all asked it, the dead and alive alike.
I shook my head. Of course not. The moment I said it, I could feel the walls closing in around me. Things would be just as they had always been. Things would be safe, preserved. Just like always.
Then you have to stay. I became the sacrificial lamb, led up to the alter through the house that I loved so much, only to find the doors locked, the windows barred, and the house full of voices that should have been silent.
I disappeared into the scenery of the estate, as if pulled back to the wall by the ivy that clung so steadfastly to the siding. The garden that was once so beautiful and overflowing with roses, and lilies, died, choked out by some weed that I could not keep up with. Slowly I died too.
I argued it out with myself. Of course I should stay here. I tried to convince myself of the logic and the rightness of the decision placing me here. There’s always been a Butler here on the farm. Of course I should do what every other Butler has done - plow, plant and work themselves into the same unforgiving ground they harvest from. The same forsaken soil that bred only rocks and heartache. Of course I should stay here and continue the circle. I no longer recognized my own voice in these matters. I had begun to echo the ideas of those around me, those long dead and gone. What more could I hope for?
So I stayed. I stayed until my nights were filled with terrors, dreams of Sisyphus always pushing the boulder chiseled from Olympus. Except my boulder was the roof that leaked in every storm, regardless the new roof put across it. Or the chickens that didn’t lay and were too tough to eat when butchered.
I walked down the hallway, the darkness of the night outside and the night inside seeped into everything. The carpet was familiar under my feet, the same as it had been for the uncounted nights I had paced the halls. I walked blindly, not looking up. Until I did look up, and I saw it. A face in the front door’s glass, pale, wan, looked back at me. I stopped, caught my breath, and then like a puff of wood smoke, it disappeared before me, getting paler and paler until it blended into nothing. It was not one of the undead that haunted here. At least it wasn’t one that I recognized, although like all the rest there was the Butler resemblance. I shook it off.
The next morning, still unnerved, l I looked in the mirror while i brushed my hair and realized it was no ghost that I saw but myself. It was my own hollow thinned out person staring back at me, all but dead in the glass, except for the barely beating heart. I had all but joined my ancestors on the other side. My vital signs were mere technicalities.
Inwardly I screamed, horrified at what was happening. But then I planned. To say I plotted would be wrong. There was no scheming involved. It was merely a gather my things, put things in order, cancel any sort of magazine subscriptions, because I was going to disappear for a good long while.
When the loose ends, the few that there were, were tidied, my car packed, and shoes tied, i went out to the shed, gathered some gas cans, and started dousing the place. I walked from one room to another, remembering the joys that had been mine in those rooms. I traced the path of my childhood up and down the halls, up and down the stairwell, and finally out to the frozen garden, all the while begging forgiveness from my childhood self. Someday you’ll understand, I whispered to them.
I drew the match across the box strike panel and carefully laid it to them stream of gasoline that i had trailed. Almost instantly it whooshed up into flames and ran back into the house, zig-zagging through the entire building.
It was almost accommodating the way the house burned. It succumbed easily as if it had been waiting for this, waiting for a chance to rest, like I was pulling the cord on some suffering cancer patient.
By the time I reached the upper field, the fire department had arrived. Blazing and brave the fire fighters stormed the house to save whatever was left. But I knew nothing had been left, and there was no chance of survival. At least for the house. In a few moments time, they understood it as well, and came out and watched the fire dance beneath the starry sky.
It’s your turn.
It’s your turn….
I watched too from the top of the field, where no one could see me. I said good bye to my home. Or what had been home. The ghosts circled above like smoky threads, as if taking in one last look before they had to move on. Before we all moved on. When I watched the last of my ancestors dissipate into the starry sky, I hiked out to logging road where my car was, and drove into the cold winter night. And for the first time, I was able to breathe.
Back to Texts
Web Design by Haktar