As in:

There were other fish in the tank, besides the Angelfish on the floor, but they were also dying because Carl, on his knees, had smashed his right hand through the glass and bled heavily into what remained of the water. We later learned from the police report that he had used his hunting knife to slash his left wrist first, before delivering his punch to the aquarium.

Years later I worked as a beat reporter in Portland and there is nothing like a police report to make you appreciate the sad emptiness of human tragedies. There is a grim attentiveness to the physical evidence, and so little about the psychological and emotional distress behind the violence and the unfathomable cruelties at hand. You can be haunted by a police report.

Before killing himself, Carl had folded Marjorie’s jeans, her coffee-colored shirt, and her denim jacket and piled them neatly on a wooden chair. Marjorie was blank with shock when we entered but began to cry when Leslie and I wrapped a blanket around her. She didn’t speak for a week. She was 12.

From the story Angelfish

As in:

The tragedy that left its mark on our youth was delivered by Carl, our stepfather. Mother met him at a church social on a Saturday before an Easter Sunday.

Leslie and Marjorie and I remember the church social two weeks later because we remember the change in her, a new ivory blouse and lavender skirt, a voice less beaten by her long afternoons and her struggles with diabetes.

As for Carl, it was no trouble getting used to him. He had worked for Union Pacific most of his life and he told stem-winding stories about the railroad that rivaled many of Beth’s stories about her early days as a prospector, panning for gold in the Wallowas. He taught me how to shoot a rifle. He took me fishing for steelhead and sturgeon.

From the story Angelfish

As in:

When I come downstairs hoping to sample Leslie’s cornbread I find the two of them on the porch, so deep in conversation that they barely notice me.

Leslie’s hands are combing a shoebox filled with family photographs, many of them of our grandmother, most in the garden, but some too in the kitchen, and several at the Wallowa County Courthouse where she frequently led field trips.

My favorite is one that Leslie took of Beth when Leslie was 14 and Beth in her mid-sixties. In the picture Beth is riding a bicycle on a dirt road not far from the house. She is laughing, using one hand to steer the bike and the other to keep her wide-brimmed, straw hat from blowing off her head in the general direction of Pendleton.

As Leslie inspects the photographs she is talking and smiling gently but still there are tears lowering themselves, as if on ropes, down her cheeks.

I can only hope when I’m gone that my granddaughters will look back at my life half as fondly. Mostly I’m grateful to know that Beth knew how much she was beloved and relied upon. I don’t know for sure what becomes of a passing soul, but I want to think there’s something eternal in the love that emanated from and was reflected back upon our grandmother. I want to believe it hums through the cosmos, like the residual static hiss of the Big Bang itself.

Leslie hands Marjorie some of her favorite photos and Marjorie files them on her lap. To free another hand, Marjorie grinds her cigarette into a flower box brimming with marigolds.

Leslie’s cat, Mrs. Barrow, looks up at me and releases a silent cry, like a bubble, from her mouth.

Next story segment, Swordtails

From the story Angelfish

As in:

Nothing in our mother’s life had nearly prepared her for coming home that evening. Our father’s death on an icy highway eight years earlier had shaken her, but she had resolved it to be God’s will. She also explained her marriage to Carl as a manifestation of God’s will.

As I sat alone in the gloaming, waiting for the headlights of her car to appear, I remember thinking that God was cruel. I felt nauseous. Beth found me staring into my lap. I couldn’t speak.

“Comfort your sisters,” she said.

We couldn’t live in the house after that. It is a part of the wound that is part of the silence, that is also part of the bond among Beth, and Marjorie, and Leslie and me.

Beth was determined that we would break and bleed no more than necessary. For the necessary she brought canvas and oils for Marjorie, who still paints beautifully when she paints. I recall an opaque convalescence—mercifully aided by the onset of spring—that lasted months until the day Marjorie asked Beth why she didn’t sing in her garden like she used to. Forthwith, Beth resolved to sing again. She chased our disappointments and sadness away as if with a stick, and when she grew tired we would then take turns impersonating her.

“Where is it written that we give up, Mrs. Harper?” we would chime. And she would smile. It was her smile that healed us, and set us free.

Next story segment, Spatula.