February Wordsmith's

BURNING APPLIANCES




Our gestures don’t amount to much. A smile here, a nod there. The smile is but the slightest upturn of the lips, or really just a tightening of the facial muscles around the jaws. The nods are the barest of nods except when the nod turns into the resigned head-bow, the chin nearly resting on the top of the sternum.

My grandmother is the one burning appliances. Her smiles are the meagerest, her nods the slightest, but with every slight movement, I can see the light dimming just a bit. It’s a frightening thing.

Burning appliances. It’s a phrase dating back to the early days of NASA. It was used during the development of fighter-bombers, where the trade-off between payload weight and fuel use was the paramount concern. Turn off a few more switches, and save a little more fuel for flight. Burn fewer appliances, and stay aloft long enough to reach the target.

I find myself wishing fewer of us had come. Every grandchild, all the cousins, my three uncles, Mom, Dad, they all came to see. The word went ‘round: come see her. Might be the last time. Everyone said it but me. I wasn’t going to come see her for The Last Time. I’m not willing to concede the game just yet. As far as I am concerned, the ball is still in play.

She was a painter. It is fair to say “was.” She hasn’t lifted a brush in almost thirty years. I loved her paintings, the water-colors and the oils especially, sketches of Georgia swamps and Florida beaches, places she loved. She quit after Grandad described a woodcut of a heron perched on a cypress knee as looking like a child’s drawing of a Christmas gnome. She wasn’t insulted. She just figured she had done enough. Lord knows, she left plenty behind her.

Lord knows.

Her hair is soft and silver; she gave up hairdressing years ago. She never fooled herself or anyone else by trying to go back to her original carrot-orange hue, but instead dyed her hair a dignified white. Now it’s silver-white, the color of the ingot each of the grandkids got for their eighth birthday. Why eighth? I never got around to asking.

As the last of the grandkids filter out, I lean down over the bed again. She smiles at me, and says “They’re wondering who’s going to get the beach house.” I smile and shake my head. “Don’t think I’m not.” The tiny joke resonates the tiniest laugh through her body, a dangerous ripple of current across her frail frame.

A changing of the guard finds me fled to the chapel. Not that I am a praying man; I just had to get away. But as long as I’m here, I pray a pilot’s prayer for her, not conceding it will be the last, not denying it might be.

Come on, Old Man. Switch off some appliances. She’s got a few more miles left in her.

Wordsmiths

SURVEYING THE FLOOD

TOM nearly spoke three times before finally lapsing into silence. Then he lowered his binoculars and said “No, that was the last one.”

The rest of us kept our binoculars raised. The others may have still been scouring the scene, looking for survivors, but I was just hiding. I didn’t want to look anybody in the eye.

We had been at it since before dawn the day before. Not that it made any difference. When we got there, we couldn’t see anything, and once the sun came up, we didn’t know what we were looking for. We had been mustered up to go fight a war in Mexico, which was over by the time we mustered up, and they called us up to help the flood victims because we were there. We didn’t know what to do.

At first we tried to ride out to the survivors. We saw people clinging to logs, to the remains of rooftops, and we figured we could ride out to them, that the water might not be any higher than a horse’s shoulder. The first few times the horses lost their feet under them were tough, but we still managed to make ground. But when the first horse stepped on the first submerged body, that was the end of it. Davey’s horse nearly drowned, trying to walk backwards to the high ground that had become a shoreline. We turned our mounts and lead them as calmly as we could back to dry ground. After that, the horses wouldn’t even face the water without shying away. No amount of coaxing would convince them to countenance the fetid floodwaters.

When the boats finally came, then we started to make something of a difference. We spotted survivors, shouting and pointing the boats to them. We worked through the night, making and lighting torches, measuring out the newly formed shores and surveying them yard by yard. At one point, we talked of starting to recover dead bodies, but before the talk turned to actions, we realized that somebody had already formed parties to fish out the corpses. We were glad of it. Every so often we would come across a pile of them, stacked like sawn lumber, and we didn’t care who it was collecting the bodies—either survivors or prisoners, we reckoned—we were simply glad it wasn’t us.

Tom’s head moved a half an inch to the left and to the right, and then he raised his glassed back to his eyes again, like me, unwilling to countenance the others. I suspected that he, like I, was thinking the same shameful thought. I didn’t want to help anymore. I just hoped the goddamned thing was over.