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.

From the story Angelfish

As in:

At our grandmother’s funeral, Leslie’s eulogy is a beam of sunshine through rain. There is also an edge to it because there was an edge to Beth.

She loved her neighbors and especially their children. Still, there was what she termed “creative tension” between her and the stubbornly conservative—she would say “hidebound”—political leaders in rural, northeastern Oregon. And that is what Leslie explains, forthrightly, to a gathering that includes more than a few of the principals from past disputes. Henry Stonewalter once complained that the county had hired “Madame Ho Chi Minh” as its director of libraries. Now he sits three rows back, in respectful silence as Leslie talks about Beth bringing Charles Darwin, Dorothy Day, William O. Douglas, Betty Friedan, Bishop Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., blue whales, Mayan astronomers, and Phoenician traders to life in her curricula.

From the story Angelfish

The night after Beth’s funeral is clear and chill and so, by habit, and not because she will be here to harvest from the vines, Leslie covers the tomato seedlings with a thin tarp. She will spend a year or two in Europe, she says, before deciding whether or not to return. She has had three determined suitors of which we are aware and their disappointments are spoken about on bar stools between Umatilla and The Dalles.