Fever Forever John Millett

Poverty was the brindle cow we milked for food, (kept on the Town Common) – cream we made, buttered and mixed with a home grown silence; a vegetable garden watered with our weekly bath water saved in the tin bath tub; then rock mulched. Friday nights my sister and I bathed first, the tub brought into the kitchen. Careful “Don’t splash the linoleum”. Already life was wet with the tears our father wept because he could do nothing except dream Ian Idriess dreams of gold, in a desert more silent than the day his heart stopped. We hung him hungry and empty just below the surface of the ground, halfway between heaven and hell, (so we thought, those times), then lowered him below the margin of human needs for the bluebottle flies to eat, a place where nothing cries out, not even the old words we could not afford to sell when he left. The verandah where he dreamed was empty, the nights he borrowed from time, given back – nothing left and he left nothing – poor as suet – poor as gravy and lard – poor as a marrow-bone meal – and him down in a twilight that holds only the dead. My imagination sleeps inside his earth, my name covered by his clay. My childish hands once memorized the contours of his face, now only half remembered.

Those days our time was always a time of innocence, like it or not. One year in our small town many children were infected with Scarlet Fever, death sometimes, often life-long after effects, scars that never heal, the last of winter. Gray frost hunted the pine tree roots, edged the river with thick ice that could hold a child’s weight or a small animal. Old men and women died of pneumonia. There were burials and the rock-still cemetery edged towards boundaries not there - bones yellowing, headstones falling down, covered by soil and forgotten – the names meaningless.

Inevitable my sister and I would contract the disease. Cold hurt our nights of fever; the big double bed, moved into the front parlor, a fire burning day and night. Snow clouds hung in the sky, cut out by the wind’s scissors and strung on thin wires. Bronze rain fell and sometimes, looking out the window, we watched lightning dance on a mountain or a rainbow bend hilltop to hilltop, colours egg yellow, red from the breast of a robin, orange from our apricot tree, green from the back of a rare species of frog inhabiting the region.

Long ago - hard to remember how far back, a candle would come into our room in the night. I saw only its beautiful flame and the hand holding it, nothing else, but I knew it was my grandmother’s hand. Now remembering – it was like a ghost walking past, but friendly in the warmest light, knowing how to care for the generations of that time, keep them holy in a darkness as intense as death.

My pet rabbit lived in a small cage in the back yard and I asked often, when the light and the hand woke me: “Have you fed Bunny warm bran today ?”

“Sssh.”, the usual answer.

“Did he say thank you and ask for more. He always did when I fed him.”

“Go to sleep Boy. I must go now. And don’t wake your sister.” Then I am inside her voice, my name a small syllable next to the other names of those who loved her - my imagination sleeping next to her

And the light and the hand would leave; the door, shut so silently my sister would not hear the latch click nor the wind snore as it crossed out the stars -
a night world where life is written by foxes in the hills, birds stirring in sleep, writhing eels in the river, the flesh of small native carp next to them - and by the stir of sheep on the flats, big gentle cattle under tree branches, grass smells and Hereford dribble.

Mornings she would ask: “Last night did you see the hand that walks ?” -
and I would answer :”Yes. It came to see we were safe. It stayed only a minute then closed the door.”

”What then ?” And I would say: “To go to another house, making sure everyone was warm, everyone slept.”

Afterwards I would reach out and touch the silence it left when the door closed after it; silence the same as the silence hanging over a slow river or a big waterhole when the moon floats on its back, white as the two moons under a black swan’s wings – the same silence when the sun is a gold medallion at mid day. A time when I would dive from a high rock into the middle of the coin reflected sun makes so it splits and shatters, goes shore- wards on ripples created by the dive and continue until the water becomes calm and the coin returns to the centre of the big pool, calm in the quiet haze of noon, placed exactly where it was before I shattered its kingdom.

During those days of illness our grandmother would sit with us and read stories in the quiet voice she kept inside her and often, to this day, I walk in her pale lost world, touch her white hair. Old windows where she lived have turned to pale glass rainbows, those times when her voice was golden and stroked lightning from the sun or the sky itself. Spectrums of light every morning seeming to come from her body. One day I wrapped her love in a parcel, tied it with string, bought stamps and posted it away. I don’t even remember the address to which it was sent; Salvador, Peru, even Africa.

She gathered around her old vases, a powder bowl, a painting showing a Scottish lake and, above the mantle, a lithograph, dusk, a shepherd homebound with his sheep reminding me of Yeats’ lines “softly along the roads of evening….old Nod the shepherd goes’. Always there was a hungry specimen vase with a carnation, a rose and sometimes a lily-of-the-valley and perfume like a morning mist made the house into a garden filled with gentle hands – petals, eyelashes hiding the glare of our poverty.

She was, I knew, the hand that walked, lit by a candle, as when she left our room cold hinges creaked in the night wind when the door was shut. I remember all those small days of honey. She had married at the age of 18. After 3 children her husband left and never returned. Autumns in the wildwoods came and went. She waited but remained alone. I still see her as the colour of the sun and in the imagination, her world, mysterious and wonderful, changes shape daily, remarkable to the new eyes of a boy or a girl climbing through the gauze light surrounding her – always searching for a golden hand holding a candle in the safe and insulated time her life gave, a time coming from the distance in all grandmothers, farther away than the just-out-of-reach time on tomorrows maps and countries never to be discovered.

One day I watched her speak to a red bird and the bird understood what she said. I saw it cross a rope trawled by her voice – that same distance between my own eye and the hand-held candle attached to no body, coming into a room with the night itself, but only for an instant, then closing a door, her footfall in the hallway going down through a past that will never come back.

Now she is an old photograph on the wall of my room, her face careworn with age. If I look long enough a young girl steps down to stand beside me, looking into the future, warming it with her presence.

She built a house small as a fingernail. The old wood shrank into itself and into her, throwing Novembers away and New Years until she died and when the last spade of earth was thrown over her, my hands lay down next to her body and cried until the darkness came.

One day a blue light stole through the room. It was the last day of our illness. The doctor’s monacle had fallen onto my chest when he tapped his fingers over ribcage and stomach and felt my sister’s body the same way. Then we were out onto the snow covered hills, barefoot and brazen as the great bulls our uncles owned and like them we ran, breathless and free down to the flat ground and ran and ran and ran, leaving footprints indented into that white silence the snow left on the river flats to cover the grass.

And sister, you spoke to a red bird as tame and still as a headstone and you went close up to it so you could read what was written in its eye and you took it into your memory, bright crimson and two black eyes - and they also had filled themselves with the two of us. We owned a white snowfield and a red bird for that short time before the melt.

While we were part of this shifting landscape our mother burnt sulfur inside the house to kill the bacteria from our healed bodies. Smoke from the windows, acrid and yellow, carried our dead germs outside, laying them on the snow covered hills.

I still hear storms dance across the darkness of those long weeks and far off thunder. I still see a red bird where no bird is, held in mid air, not attached to anything at all – and my sister calling across the snow, running barefoot towards the yellow smoke coming from our windows and the old house becoming nothing, eaten by the germs of time, gone forever – those days when the wind was lost and nights when stars tortured spaces outside, (fingers of mist on the river) – dawn and grass swaying with diamonds that burn - summers passing, pushing everything aside.

Listening carefully I can hear my sister call out: “I don’t want this day to end. I don’t want it ever to end.” Those times we lived in a perfect circle, its edges never broken, so nothing came in. My sister continued, “Nothing makes sense, but then it’s not supposed to.”

EJ BRADY