Departing as Air

By Allen Wier

Departing as Air chronicles the memories of Jessie, now old and widowed, as she nears the end of her life and looks back on her two marriages, her emotional breakdown and recovery, and her ultimate acceptance--and celebration--of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: Feb 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781945814273

Allen Wier

Allen Wier was born in Texas and grew up in Texas, Mexico, and Louisiana. Wier has published two collections of short stories: Late Night, Early Morning (available in October 2017) and Things About to Disappear and four novels: Tehano,A Place for Outlaws, Departing as Air, and Blanco. He's edited an anthology, Walking on Water and other stories, and co-edited Voicelust, a collection of essays ‘on style in contemporary fiction.’ Recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he was voted into the Fellowship and has served as the Fellowship’s Vice Chancellor and Chancellor. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters, and he has been awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. His fiction, essays, and reviews appear in such publications as The Southern Review, Five Points, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and the New York Times. He was named Travel Writer of the Year (1994) by the Alabama Bureau of Travel. He’s taught at Longwood College, Carnegie-Mellon Univ., Hollins College, the Univ. of Texas, Florida International Univ., and the Univ. of Alabama. He taught in the Univ. of New Orleans’ low-residency MFA program’s Edinburgh Workshop in Scotland, he was Visiting Eminent Scholar at the Univ. of Alabama Huntsville, and he has several times been on the faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Professor emeritus at the Univ. of Tennessee where he held the Hodges’ Chair for Distinguished Teaching and where graduate students in the English Department voted Wier the “most outstanding professor in the classroom,” he is currently the Watkins endowed visiting writer at Murray State University in Kentucky. Allen Wier lives with his artist wife, Donnie, overlooking Lake Guntersville in North Alabama. More information is available at his website: http://allenwierfiction.com/

Book preview

THE WINDOW

EASE DOWN THE HALL to Jessie’s room. Down the hall, dark except for the light that shines like glass on the linoleum runner, a bright line, a strip of shine down the hall to her room where the bright runner pools into the shape of her bay window. Jessie sits here. Here is her shadow in the window shape of sun on the floor. Solid as gold run into ingot, her hard shape tucked between the wings of her chair, neck bent at the nape, leaning like the window, like the old house, leaning like someone listening, inclining an ear, her dark shape in the window shape of light. Here where time runs days into weeks, weeks unravel, run like colors in the wash and drain away, Jessie sits. She sits here now and listens to the running of her heart, a gurgling engine, the steady sound of a stream. She sits and remembers all of it, lives it again.

Ease down the hall and you hear the rattlings of age. The floor creaks, the hall rocks and sways like an old Pullman car and, as they do when a train passes by her bay window, crystal glasses in the glass-door cabinet dance against one another, the jiggling and giggling of some silly, slowed-down dance at a party years ago where Jessie sat in a pastel dress and a widebrimmed hat.

Stop and stretch your arms like a tight-rope walker’s arms, put your palms flat against the walls. Feel rather than hear the barely audible vibrations of framed photographs. Frozen, you are in a black-and-white still shot, framed and centered in the hall like an image in an old box camera. Jessie will not notice you among the other faces watching from behind the glass. Stand back and watch her pass.

Time was Jessie woke with a dust rag in her hand and moved about her house like a dog, her nose in every corner. Now when she stands up too fast she has a blue-black underwater sensation and sees the hall reversed, a photograph negative, the bright light on the floor and the glass in the picture frames as black as inside her head, the dark hall ice white and bright. Now when she stands in the middle of the hall it sways like a wooden swinging bridge.

Across a gorge. In Mexico. Years ago. With Camel in a house that leaned out over a river. Years and years ago. Jessie lay awake all night hearing water run under the bed, seeing shining fish in the moonlit movements of the sheet, billows, gathers, and twists, as she swam in the bed.

Slowly now, she turns around, lifting one soft-shoed foot. She puts it on her knee and slowly spins on one stiff leg like a turnstile. She can’t remember where she’s headed. Slowly she spins like the blue ballerina on the lid of a jewelry box Camel gave her. Or music box. She remembers winding something up. She jerks at first, but still turns, turns on one toe, a scene from a play, some folk dance. Or a painting in a book, a colored plate, plate no. 22 in small, gray curlycue. A thick, slick page in a heavy, costly book put on a polished table, a faint ring on the cover making the only light that doesn’t shine. Or a sculpture in a museum in Mexico City, a brass figure spinning on one leg so polished the brass reflects circles of light as fine and sharp as woodgrain, but cold to touch and smoother than a tree.

She takes Camel’s picture off the wall, her fingerprints on both his cheeks, and stares back toward her chair. Where the dark hall opens into her room the glare is not so bad. Moving her slow legs without bending her knees, moving like someone waist-deep in water, her elbows extended like wings, her hands patting up and down against the air, Camel’s picture in one hand like a fan or the moving flap of an airplane wing, she heads back toward her chair. A brick, tight in a green knit bootie, keeps the hall door against the wall.

She reaches for the doorknob.

The doorknob jiggles from the other side of the door. In the bathroom, in Mexico City. Camel is trying to get her out. Her pink knee on the floor covers a black tile, part of a white tile. There is water on the floor. The tip of Camel’s screwdriver flicks through the keyhole, disappears, comes quickly through again, jerks dark like a snake’s tongue. She starts crying. The pipes are gold; one pipe is hot and one is cold. The tile floor is cold.

Camel said she locked herself in over and over again. Repeating herself, the water on the floor, the mirror over the sink, the mirror on the back of the door, seeing herself in the mirror seeing herself in the mirror, over and over, like the blond-haired girl under the umbrella on the box of salt, salt pouring like the rain from the box under her arm, and, there, under her arm, the blond-haired girl under the umbrella on the box of salt. Over and over again. She only remembers one time. Camel said she made up the gold pipes, but Jessie remembers them anyway.

Releasing the doorknob, Jessie moves for her chair. How long she takes to cross the room she doesn’t know. She may stop in a slow slide on the wooden floor and wiggle her toes inside her shoes or stare at the beveled glass window, dip her fingers in the colored stripes of light that cross her chest like a sash, or stare at the sharp chunks of colored glass mortared in the top of the stone wall around the house in Mexico City, or listen to the rain splattering onto the wide leaves of banana trees outside a window, or watch Camel, gardenias floating all around him, smile up at her from the bright blue swimming pool at Fortín de las Flores. How long she takes to cross the shadow of window frame and chair and the softness of the small hooked rug with almost no pattern left, she has no idea. The floor from hall door to chair, she knows, is seventy-three narrow strips of wood—thirty-one dark strips, twenty light strips, twenty-two medium, neither-dark-nor-light strips. Jessie is like a turtle crossing a highway, taking her time, seeing things along the way, close-up.

Getting there she reaches across to hold her chair arm, her thumbnail in the nick Camel cut before he went out like a porch light at night, everyone turning in, leaving her standing alone, awake in the dark. Standing at her chair she turns around again, looks across the room, sees the hall, looks back where she’s come from. Standing there she is like a turtle on its back, time is less important than sitting pretty, being there. For a minute, or what seems like a minute, she stands in time, breathing, watching rain run down the humped back of their white Plymouth parked always on a hill so they could start it by popping the clutch as they coasted down. It is still light outside when Jessie lifts her arm off the chair arm and lets herself fall. A long space between a pier and water, air under her arms, her room the blue color of blur, then the soft cough the cushion makes, her chair rocking once before she gets her feet firm.

Jessie’s chair is a rocker on a swivel, the rocking and swiveling parts hidden by fabric, like her, her rocking and swiveling parts hidden by skin. She sits here, in her maroon chair, and watches for runs in her stockings, all day rocking, running times together, Texas and Mexico, still things and moving things, all her stories, her endings and her beginnings. She holds Camel’s picture in her lap, the glass over his face reflects the light from the window, reflects her face, her eyes in his.

She squints through the twigs her eyelashes are into the twigs and leaves of the live-oak tree scratching against the window. Tiny worms transparent as line drawings in a biology book jerk up and down in her vision like something swimming on a glass slide seen through the dark tunnel of a microscope. The microscope is like memory, brings things close and magnifies, makes visible motions she might miss. The jerking worms remind her of the design on a silk blouse she once wore but can’t remember where. The blouse, she thinks, looked like a silk handkerchief swirled with phlegm. The jerking worms crawl the limbs of the live-oak tree. Cataracts glaze the corners of her view. Some days it seems she is looking through a window that is icing up, staring through scar tissue, pockmarks from stitches cutting her pictures into puzzles. Some days she can’t see through her eyes so she looks back into them, the back side of her pupils like mirrors, black behind the silver.

Deep black as Camel’s hair the first time she saw him. Dark as Camel’s head bent over a packing box of fern and gladioli in the dim afternoon light of the wholesale flower market. Remembering his smile, the flash of his teeth, remembering the time she rode the train to meet him in Mexico City, the first time. She had never been that far alone before. She had never been out of the country.

In the window her reflected hands move with a motion all their own, undirected, move with moves all Camel’s, shape his shapes. The smooth railing of his shoulder, the curve of his arm, swell of muscle Jessie holds in the air above her lap. Camel’s arm is the loveliest limb in the live-oak tree.

She slept in an upper berth, a brown metal cylinder high against the wall where it met the ceiling, hanging like a dirt dobber’s nest, a cocoon, a dark growth beneath an arm, a bomb beneath a wing. The curved bottom of the berth dropped open. Jessie crawled inside and pulled it shut behind her. Inside, in the total darkness, she heard the words of the conductor as he padded down the aisle during the night.

Es la medianoche. It is midnight.

She was a secret inside the berth, like a fuse, like the explosive loaded inside the bomb. Through the night, through the mountains, rumbling dangerously in her dreams like nitro in a barrel, she slept.

Son las tres y cuarto. It is 3:15.

In the morning the berth opened like a bomb bay, and she rolled gently out, her night mission safely over.

All day she rode through high mountain passes and thought about the man she was going to see. She thought about him and the life she was going to have with him, thought about what kind of life they would have all the time she was gliding down between peaks of mountains where dark men in white shirts planted corn in clouds. She thought about the days and years ahead as the train eased slowly through the crowded city and finally into the station where the coaches butted pneumatically with a hiss of air and a cloud of steam against the end of the track like a horizontal line painted up to the edge of a mural at the Palace of Fine Arts where Camel would take her, like the worms that bounce now, years later, against the clouded edge of her vision.

Jessie sits here now and remembers the life she imagined that day as she rode a train into Mexico.

¿A dónde va usted? Where are you going? ¿De dónde es usted? Where are you from?

She gets things out of order, sees Vern Hoppe staring at her over the held, trembling rim of a glass of amber whiskey before she sees Marlin’s round shadow move like a storm cloud over her bare skin and the white, fitted sheet from the stack Mae had left two feet high in the linen closet.

She gets behind herself and sees Camel’s daddy up to his elbows in black dirt and peat working in his greenhouse long before Jessie was born.

She starts in the past and moves backward even more, sees Camel that first time in Marlin’s market and the sun and shadow through the window dapple Camel’s face and then become smoke and bright bullets through the turret of a B-29 where Camel teaches a soldier to become a gunner for the war.

There are days, weeks, whole months she loses, then recalls moment by moment. She doesn’t care, either way, that’s what it’s like.

Está cerca. Está muy cerca. It is near. It is very near. Está lejos. Está muy lejos. It is far. It is very far.

Jessie sits in her chair, nearly as wide as a Pullman seat, and looks through the window.

THE VIEW

HE’S GOOD FOR LOVE.

Mrs. DeBlanc told Jessie, When you go to the flower market go across to the church—not Santa Veracruz, that’s on the other side of the market—go to the church of San Juan de Dios and light a candle there for Camel. Here’s an offering from me too, at the painting of San Antonio de Padua. He’s good for love.

The coins were heavy in her hand; the peso notes were beautiful, with different colors for different denominations, two colors to a bill.

Later Camel would tell her, You should have gone to the San Juan Market to see flowers. They have more flowers than the Flower Market. The Flower Market is mainly for funeral wreaths.

Jessie had never seen so many funeral wreaths.

¿Flores para los muertos?

"No. No, gracias."

Everywhere hands moved over laps spread with flowers, hands reached for string and rolls of ribbon, hands wrapped and wove stems and glass balls, hands darted, tied, and tucked tiny birds into gladiolus blooms. A man lifted bundles of blue glass balls from a cardboard box, the balls like clusters of grapes. As he separated them they clinked lightly against one another like Mexican coins in Jessie’s pocket.

The wreaths lay like old tires in leaning stacks. Some were so large Jessie could have stepped through them. A man held a finished wreath up in the air, orange gladiolus blooms rose like low flames in a circle, a burning hoop held up in a circus tent.

Camel had told her there were places in Mexico where the dead were buried standing up, and she pictured the large wreaths thrown around sinking bodies like life preservers, or like the ring toss at a county fair—toss a ringer and win a stuffed monkey.

People worked in stalls down both sides of the big market. Several young women were together in one stall, an old man and an old woman together in the next; here and there a person alone quietly sorted flowers or arranged finished wreaths.

Then Jessie saw Camel, his back to her, bent over a long table where he was unpacking cut flowers. She knew the curve of that back and the spread of those shoulders. The steady, sure movement of those arms in and out of the long boxes was Camel’s, and she went over and without thought put her hand out and touched the small of his back.

His movement stopped the instant she touched him; his head tilted down and turned toward her.

In the second before she saw his face she saw a curved scar, like a grimace along his neck, white against his dark skin, and she knew it was not Camel.

The man stared at her and she stared back. The man’s eyes were onyx black like Camel’s, but where Camel’s dark eyes pulled her inward like water giving way to weight, these eyes were hard and flat, impenetrable, the round heads of nails.

Jessie could say nothing. She forgot her few Spanish words, even Perdón. She turned and hurried out of the market. The man followed her, his eyes unchanging but his lips twisting into a wide grin, his hands down against his thighs, fingers snapping. He made little clucking noises in his throat, calling chickens or geese. Jessie ran and the man stayed close behind her, his arms stiff at his sides, fingers snapping, throat clucking, his body stiff from the waist up, tilted back at an angle, his legs moving rapidly forward.

He did not follow her into the church.

She looked for the huge paintings Mrs. DeBlanc had told her about but saw only statues. One, a saint she guessed, was a woman with long hair, stretched up on her toes, reaching up and out with one arm, her other arm held close in front of her chest, that hand clutching the front of her robes as she looked back over her shoulder. She too, was running from someone. The index finger of the saint’s outstretched hand was missing, broken off, making it look as if she were shaking a fist up at the heavens, at the pattern of colored tiles on the vaulted ceiling.

Jessie followed the line of the ceiling down to the rows of pews on the far side of the sanctuary and she saw the scar on the man’s neck. He scooted from a pew to kneel down and cross himself. He turned and grinned at her. Still on his knees he moved his hands up and down in the air between them, shaping a woman’s body. He cupped imaginary breasts, slid open palms almost together at a narrow waist, scooped invisible hips into his hands and stopped, gripping the backs of firm, naked, invented thighs. Then he stood and winked at Jessie. She hurried to the back of the church and stepped into one of two lines of people waiting before the confessional.

An old woman in a dark blue dress, a shawl of dark lace over her head, came up and stood behind Jessie in line. She reached for Jessie and Jessie stepped aside, tried to avoid the old woman’s arms. The frayed edge of the woman’s shawl where it touched Jessie’s wrist felt like spider web.

No, Señorita, no. Perdón, por favor, the old woman said, and again she reached for Jessie, a length of the dark shawl in her hand as if she wanted to wipe and dust Jessie with a cleaning rag. The woman reached with the cloth for Jessie’s neck as if she wanted to strangle her or to drape the shawl like a shroud over Jessie’s head.

"The covered head, Señorita."

The man’s voice cut Jessie. His words ran together like the long scar on his neck to make a cruel sound that echoed in the huge church.

La cabeza, he said, tapping his head and rolling his eyes, the gesture: someone is crazy.

He stood right behind the old woman. He was taller by a head and stared over the woman right at Jessie. He winked again. He lifted his shirt tail, showed his bare stomach, traced circles on his skin with his fingers and squeezed until he made a red mark on his stomach.

The old woman draped the end of her shawl over Jessie’s head. For a moment they stood close together, their heads covered with the same cloth, two strangers huddled under an awning to escape a sudden storm. Jessie’s scalp tingled. The shadow of the shawl tilted down the woman’s ancient, wrinkled face as she dropped her chin against her chest, reaching down into the folds of her dress for a brown scarf she, like a magician, pulled from her side. In one motion, a magician still, she whipped the shawl she was sharing with Jessie from her head and slipped the scarf on, letting the shawl fall, doubled now over Jessie’s blond hair. The woman seemed to Jessie to give a slight bow. She smiled, patted Jessie on the arm, her fingers damp and warm.

¿Confesión? The man was still grinning, his eyes still hard. He laughed deep in his chest. He reached both arms out toward Jessie, his palms up so that he embraced the old woman between them and she slapped his hands down, turned and hissed at him. Jessie felt the old woman’s damp hand on her arm again, giving her a push toward the confessional booth.

His leg going out sideways in a scissor-step, an exaggerated dance step, the man crossed suddenly into the other line. He was now in line for the other side of the confessional. A priest in the middle chamber listened to sins from both sides.

Jessie pulled the wooden door closed behind her and lowered herself to a kneeling pad before a wrought-iron grate. At knee-level a dim, white bulb the shape of a Christmas tree light glowed behind a curved, tin plate which hushed the light, throwing