February
15, 2001
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Rick Cook, Mt. Clemens, Michigan
-- The Pianist (displayed below)
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Maryellen
Brady-Kropp of Silverdale, Washington --
Pearl of Wisdom.
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Third, Margaret Mears, Peoria,
Arizona, The Music Teacher.
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Fourth, Joel B.
Thomas, Tallahassee, Florida, Byway of Forever.
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Fifth,
Sharon Helberg, British Columbia, Sparks.
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Sixth,
Diane Riley, Surrey, B.C., Dining Abroad.
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Seventh,
Sharon Helberg, British Columbia, A Painter’s
Shoes.
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Eighth, Margaret Mears, Peoria,
Arizona, The Doll Suitcase.
FIRST PLACE SHORT
STORY
The Pianist
By Rick Cook
Mt. Clemens, Michigan
Over the years, an insignificant
but steady trickle of water, Lillard’s Creek,
ate twists and turns into the red Virginia clay
as deftly as a dredging machine. Forever (when
measured by the boy’s memory)
a miniature canyon had snaked through the spotty
sagebrush pasture below his grandparents’ home,
and whenever he wished, he could disappear into
the anonymity and cool of this timeless and narrow
and winding and boy-sized gorge.
However trivial
his other claims, he was master of this small measure
of land and water, and as
lord of the creek, the boy could make whatever
use he wanted of the meandering ripples; a cornucopia
of bubbling possibilities. Nothing and no one could
upset his plans – so long as he stayed at
the creek, and this morning he sneaked quietly
into the ravine and squatted on the water’s
sandy edge. He looked vulnerable today, more lad
than lord.
Quietly, the boy slid his hand beneath
the shallow trickle and pried up one side of a
submerged and
water-worn rock. The quarry was crawdads. His design
was not to catch the tiny shellfish, just to find
them, a mental exercise as much as a physical one.
Lillard’s
Creek was clear as a window pane today, and the
boy craned to see under the leaning
stone, knowing to look from the upriver side. Mud
and debris from the movement of the rock obscured
any chance of a downriver view, and he worked his
way toward the head of the creek, always to the
clearer water. The hunt took his mind off of, well, “it.” As
each tiny brown crayfish heaved its tail and flashed
backwards to disappear again, the boy smiled. When
he chased crawdads, his problem was obscured as
certainly as the downriver side of an upturned
rock.
He could forget it in the garden,
too. Behind his house, and bending up the hill
at a forty-five
degree angle, Grampaw’s manicured “vegetable
patch” was a landscape in various shades
of leafy green on a canvas of red Virginia soil. “A
blessing for the eyes and the belly,” Grammaw
said, and a great place for a boy to get lost in
his freedom. There were places to hide and critters
to chase, critters who lived there, and others
just passing through.
Today the boy chanced on a
regular tenant, a mean one. Two inches long and
brown and fuzzy, the boy
thought he had a friendly little long-nosed field
mouse, and he meant to take it home and keep it
in a box. He squealed in surprise and pain when
the tiny animal clamped onto his thumb and held
fast with vicious little teeth. He tried to shake
it off and ran in a panicked and screaming search
for Grampaw, his furry appendage bouncing along
for the ride. By the time Grampaw pried open the
animal’s jaws with his pocket knife, the
boy had changed his mind about any future relationship.
As
the little animal disappeared into the grass, the
boy squeezed his bleeding thumb and recalled
a past admonition. “I know it wasn’t
his fault, Grampaw. He was just trying to protect
himself.”
“No, boy,” Grampaw said,
raising his eyebrows, “that
was a shrew, the meanest animal alive, and he was
trying to eat you.” The old man chuckled. “Starting
with your thumb.”
The boy did not think about
it the whole time his thumb was being eaten by
the shrew.
But at night. Nights were fearsome.
He saw her flying, arms flailing and flapping like
a wounded
bird. She rose delicately and frightfully above
the heads of the reaching men and passed through
the familiar confines of the church and out the
front door. Had she flown away? Maybe, because
he had not seen her since. One minute she was playing
the piano, and the next she was fluttering through
the church, wailing and making pitiful and frightful
sounds. A group of church men hurried along under
her, trying to grab her and pull her back to the
floor, but she was not to be caught. They all went
out the front door at the same time, but the men
came back and she did not. They were quiet and
shaking their heads, looking worried and afraid.
Evidently, the men had never seen a woman fly before.
*
* * * *
The dreary and hot dogdays of late
August lived up to their advance billing this summer,
and little
relief could be found in the sweltering and oppressive
lack of real weather. A full breath of fresh moving
air was an infrequent exception to the norm, and
the dogdays simmered on. The magnificent Blue Ridge
mountains faded into an unbroken horizon of perpetually
cloudless sky and shimmered out of focus behind
wriggling rays of rising heat. There was a dry
smell to the land, and Northern Virginians agreed
that a good stout storm was needed.
The dead air
produced a feverish and oxygen-poor staleness which
covered the homes in Flint Hill
like an opaque but heavy quilt, and the white clapboard
house of James and Ruth Allen baked with the rest
of them. Adding to Ruth’s meteorological
misery was the scorching heat of a pine-log fire,
as it popped and whispered and hissed inside the
reddening metal of her wood-burning cook stove.
The kitchen was itself an oven, but there was cooking
to be done, and Ruth did it; she always did it,
fair weather or foul, and this dog of a day would
be no exception.
She leaned over her stove and into
the whispers of white smoke which leaked from each
of four metal
eyes, and with a long wooden spoon, she orchestrated
steaming pots, including a large black one which
churned with beet greens and bubbled and burped
on a rear burner. She stretched across two other
pots and stirred, lifting draped and dripping green
spoonfuls and pushing them back into new and better
places. She beat the sputtering pot with the side
of her spoon, letting it know who was boss and
daring it not to produce a delicious dinner for
her ever-hungry brood. As its only revenge, the
pot belched steam from the busily boiling water
and pressed an already unbearable interior humidity
even higher. Ruth Allen was sweating, a familiar
summer situation, and without realizing it, she
was gasping like a spent athlete, sucking in what
few molecules of oxygen remained in the overheated
and stifling room. The long narrow kitchen at the
rear of the Allen house was so hot “you could
bake bread just settin’ the dough on the
table.”
Jesse Allen, Ruth’s middle son,
had stopped to check on his youngest child before
leaving for
Winchester and his twice-weekly divinity classes.
He allowed himself a brief scowl at his mother’s
damp and busy back, and the bleached out floral
pattern of her cooking dress. The familiarity of
the dress both comforted and shamed him. Ruth Allen
had worn this same dress and cooked over this same
stove for more than thirty years, for as long as
Jesse could remember. He wondered, however briefly,
why she always wore the same dress when she cooked.
“Jesse, you gotta get off that
midnight shift.”
Ruth Allen’s tone left
no room for compromise and jerked her son back
to the here and now.
“Tell me how,” he said,
a trace of sarcasm in his words, “and I’ll
be happy too.”
“Watch your mouth, Jesse! All
I’m saying is,
it ain’t good for a boy to be separated from
his family like this. It’s 1948. This ain’t
the dark ages. People need family.”
Ruth returned
her attention to the stove and lifted the lid of
another pot. Peering in, she gave a
quick stir to the contents and replaced the cover.
With her left hand she pulled a towel from her
shoulder and mopped perspiration from her face.
“I know, Momma.” Jesse
looked at the floor, embarrassed, and a guilt-ridden
wince wrinkled
his features. “But the doctor says she’ll
be home in a few weeks. She’s doing better.”
Ruth
Allen harrumphed and gave her head a hard shake.
She and Jessie watched as drops of perspiration
sailed through the air. Several landed on the surface
of the stove and sizzled into nothingness; others
spent their energy above the pot of boiling greens,
and disappeared into the noisy bubbles to serve
as extra seasoning. Ruth shrugged and toweled her
face again. At one time or another, everyone in
Flint Hill had tasted Ruth’s saltiness, especially
in food prepared on dogday afternoons.
“Mother don’t leave her
seven children just ’cause
she’s nervous. You think I ain’t never
been nervous? Married to your daddy? I been nervous
lots of times.”
“You saw her, Momma! You were
there! She was shaking like a leaf, flapping her
arms around and making
noises you and me couldn’t make if we tried.” Jesse’s
lip quivered at the memory and again he averted
his gaze to the floor, his voice softening. “When
we had her over our heads and was carrying her
down the aisle and out of the church, it was all
I could do to keep my own self together. That scared
me more than the Germans did in the war. She ain’t
just nervous. She’s got a problem. The doctor
called it a nervous breakdown. And she sure broke
down. That’s a fact.”
Ruth turned and
faced her son. She pointed the wooden spoon at
his face.
“Everybody gets nervous sometimes,
but they don’t
go off and leave their children. Especially when
the father works midnights and ain’t at home
for the kids to sleep in their own beds.” Ruth’s
voice began to rise, and Jesse wished he had stayed
outside to look for David. “Two boys living
with Stanley. Two more with Jimmy Ray. Two more
all the way down in Norfolk living with Danna’s
people.” Ruth shook her head. “And
little David here with me. I don’t mind taking
care of him. You know that. I just think it ain’t
doing him no good not to see his real family. Boy
needs his people.” She turned back to the
beet greens and gave them a frustrated poke with
the spoon. “He don’t do nothing but
wander around like he’s lost. He goes down
to the creek and pokes around looking for crawdads.
He wanders up in the garden. Boy his age should
be playing with other kids and staying at his own
house.” She turned to face Jesse again and
the beginnings of a smile replaced her indignation. “Did
you hear about the shrew that bit him?”
Jesse’s
visage softened. “No. Did he
pick it up?”
Ruth chuckled. “I guess
nobody ever told him not to pick them up. He won’t
pick up another one though, you can bet on that.”
Jesse
grinned. “I guess I should have told
him, ’cause I did the same thing when I was
a kid. Thing bit me on the hand and wouldn’t
let go.”
Ruth laughed in spite of herself. “James
had to pry this one loose with a screwdriver or
something.”
Mother and son laughed briefly,
relieving a built up tension, and Jesse took advantage
of the respite
to go to the kitchen window.
“Hey, Knothead!” he yelled.
Ruth’s
attention returned to the greens. “I
don’t know where he is. Look down the hill
and see if he’s at the creek.”
Jesse
walked out the back door, and Ruth watched him
disappear around the corner. Had she been looking
the other way, she would have seen her grandson
slip from beneath the kitchen tablecloth and quietly
leave the room. She would have noticed his body
language, and she would have thought he looked… beaten,
or old, maybe, and she would have cried when she
saw him. In fact, had she thought about it at all,
she would have told Jesse to look under the table.
David always said it was cooler under there.
Copyright
(c) 2004 for the author, all rights reserved.
