It Will End with Us

IT WILL END WITH US

COPYRIGHT © 2014
Sam Savage

COVER AND BOOK DESIGN
by Linda Koutsky

COVER PHOTOGRAPH
© William Baldwin

AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH
© Nancy Marshall

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION

Savage, Sam, 1940–

It will end with us / Sam Savage. — First edition.

pages cm

ISBN
978-1-56689-380-0 (
EBOOK
)

I. Title.

PS
3619.A8418 2014

813’.6—
DC
23

2014010613

TO NORA, ONE MORE TIME

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked
.

—
LEWIS CARROLL

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

—
T. S. ELIOT

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Funder Acknowledgments

About the Author

I
wasn’t going to begin again, having stopped, apparently, and started up again, foolishly, too many times already, attempting to write about my family and Spring Hope and myself there with them and later there without them.

Writing a few pages and giving up.

Between one stopping and another starting there was always an interlude, filled in its first part by regret at having stopped and in its second part by excitement at starting again, finally, and I tried to
write about that too once, or maybe twice, I don’t remember, a tragicomic tale of my endeavors to write that other thing, this one to be titled
Pendulum
.

Or
Oscillation
, to avoid associations with Poe.

And wrote several more pages that I filed away with the rest.

Rejecting the temptation to lay them out on the floor and scribble all over them with a big red crayon, the way I used to scribble over my drawings when I was a child and they refused to look the way I wanted.

Scribbled them out, crumpled them into little balls, then threw myself down on the carpet and screamed.

My mother would say, “Do you think Matisse lay on the carpet and screamed when he was your age?”

I have sparrows on my window ledge this morning. I don’t have a hairbrush.

I don’t know who lives at Spring Hope now.

I have never liked Poe.

Truth is, despite my many failures and despite what I told myself, I have never actually stopped searching. In some deep recess of mind, in my heart of hearts—a phrase my mother loved—I never abandoned all hope.

As people once had to in the Dante poem, supposedly, before entering hell, of which I could recite the first lines from memory, I believe, in Italian, when I was quite small.

“Now Eve will recite the first lines of
The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri,” my mother said, I imagine.
The objects of my pursuit were figments, mental images, and phantasms. I would refer to these figments, etc., as Mama, Papa, my mother, my father, our mother, my brothers, Spring Hope, the dog Gracie, the coal bin, the chinaberry tree by the tractor barn, and so forth, talking about them in the same unreflective way that I speak today of this room, this desk, Maria, Lester, and so forth.

They are figments now, I mean.

Searching
is not really the word for what I do, have been doing for a long time, since I know where they are, where the images and memories of my mother and so forth are, and can’t search for them, properly speaking, there, meaning in my head or mind or whatever, soul even, where they lie very quiet, lost or buried in the darkness there or in the brightness, though it is the right word for my attempts to find the hairbrush.

One would not say, for example, while breathing into the mouth of a person who has drowned and is not at all breathing that one is searching for life there.

I wanted to breathe life back into the memories that had drowned there, in the darkness of the mind, as I said, or soul.

Resuscitate
is the word for that, for what I tried to do many times over the years, and stopped, and finally almost lost hope of ever doing successfully, as I said.

I remember aiming a jet of water from a garden hose into a hole at the base of a large oak tree and being surprised when a toad hopped out.

I remember a woman we called Miss Henrietta, who was extremely tall and thin, seated in a very small chair reading to us at school, and wishing I was home.

I remember Thornton dropping a tick into the mouth of a pitcher plant and saying, “Look, now it’s digesting it,” but the tick was just swimming around.

I remember my hair full of dirt and twigs. I remember my father telling me to bathe. I remember that I wouldn’t change my clothes. I remember listening to Wagner on my record player as loud as I could make it go.

The hairbrush I used to have has disappeared mysteriously. Maria thinks it fell off the window ledge into the bushes.

There is always birdseed on the window ledge. I said to her, “Do you think I would put my brush in the birdseed?”

Maria is forty-seven years old and believes in magic. She has believed in magic since she was a
child, when her mother saw the Virgin standing on the roof of a church.

It was a Mexican church, of course.

I say “of course” because Mexico is a thoroughly magical place, Thornton and Silvia discovered when they traveled there.

I personally have never traveled to Mexico.

Connecticut is the most distant place I have traveled to. My mother traveled to Boston, New York, and Chicago. My father traveled to Brazil and Argentina. Thornton has traveled to England, Japan, and the Philippines, at least, in addition to Mexico. I can’t imagine where Edward might have traveled to by now, if he has traveled at all.

First Edward, then Thornton, then me.

I remember a big square high-ceilinged box of a house, dim and almost cool on hot afternoons when the louvered shutters were pulled over the windows, and ice cold in winter when the only heat was from coal grates in the fireplaces, and that had been white once but displayed vastly more gray weathered wood than paint all the time I lived there.

I remember as a young girl saying to myself, “I am Eve Annette Trezevant Taggart of Spring Hope,” half pretending I was an old-world aristocrat, and then looking around, embarrassed, fearing I had spoken it aloud.

Even now—especially now, I suppose—I can be sitting quietly, unaware that I am even thinking at all, and suddenly I’ll hear my own voice so loud it makes me jump.

Other times, Maria will look over at me and ask, “What did you say?” and I’ll know that I was muttering.

I remember my mother at her desk writing and muttering to herself also.

For a long time I thought that just being here, the physical distance from Spring Hope, would allow me to resuscitate Papa and my brothers and my mother and her famous notebooks and all the dogs and Spring Hope itself, the entire past just as it was, lying apparently lifeless in the darkness within, in the damp and fog, so to speak, as I also pictured it sometimes.

Even though there is very little solitude here. Maria is here much of the day, or Lester is here, even when I don’t need him. Sometimes they are both here, all three of us in a row on the sofa watching television.

And there is also the fear that once started, I won’t be able to stop.

My mother’s name was Iris.

That being the name both of a woman who was born in the first part of the twentieth century in South Carolina, in the southern portion of the United States, and lived and died in the so-called real world, and of a phantasm of no fixed or definite shape that draws and clusters to itself a host of other images like filings to a magnet. This phantasm was born with the first opening of my mind onto the world and will die with me, finally.

Wild irises called blue flags bloomed every spring in the ditches that lined both sides of the narrow rutted lane that ran in from the highway to the house, and in the boggy places in the woods, and along the edges of the dikes, but I don’t know if they were the reason she was named Iris, though she was born at Spring Hope in April.

I remember my father, in canvas jacket and rubber boots, coming through the door of the house with an armful of blue flags for her birthday.

She once told me that the blue parts of her eyes were called irises because they were the color of the flowers and that the same parts of my brown eyes were called mushrooms.

Before the blue flags I remember the red sorrel that we called sour grass, that grew in abandoned fields and that we chewed on for the tangy sour flavor.

Which is the second-oldest memory I have of any kind of taste.

The oldest, I believe, being the taste of a penny when I was two.

Even today, if I hear someone say that something or other possesses a metallic taste, I notice on my tongue the flavor of a penny.

That flavor being another of the memory-items, so to speak, that cling to the figment of my mother and my mother’s finger reaching into my mouth to extract the penny.

Later a great many of my memories are of words. I remember, for example, the first time I heard the words
menstrual cramps
, though I don’t remember the first time I had menstrual cramps.

I have an image of Mama’s dresser and my child-self seated on a satin-covered stool in front of it while Mama brushes my hair. The fabric on the stool is decorated with red, blue, and yellow tropical birds and is frayed around the edges, I can see.