Songs for the Deaf Read online

  He’s got a plan to send the wife and daughter away, says the cloud reader. He could do that no matter the sex.

  The risk is too great. People already suspect the truth. To him, only a son would justify the trouble. People will recognize that, and they’ll accept the lie in the interest of filling a void. You know how these towns work.

  Too well, I’m afraid.

  If you keep silent, he’ll choose the sure thing. Just to be rid of the trouble. But if you could tell him something. Tell him it’s a boy. You’d be preventing a mortal sin.

  The cloud reader looks out the window. It’s as if the world has grown old and its eyesight dimmed. Look for yourself, he says. There’s nothing to say.

  Just say what he wants to hear. All of this mess would clear up and you’d be on your way unmolested. I’d see to it.

  Why don’t you tell him?

  I’m afraid, in a matter like this, it’s you he’d trust.

  The cloud reader laughs to hear it. What a thing for a preacher to admit! It makes him more kindly disposed. But of course he can’t do it. Not to save himself some trouble; not even to save a life.

  The preacher is pulling on one sideburn, and the cloud reader can see he has a struggle of his own. His prayers have failed. His sermons have failed. The pages of his book, with row upon row of crisp black signs, hold no more certainty for him than the billows and blurred margins of clouds.

  The cloud reader says nothing more. He lies back on his cot with his hands behind his head and stares out the barred window. The fog has a flickering quality, the sunlight discovering its weaknesses. While it swirled before, now the fluttering curtains of it travel slowly in one direction. Perhaps that means it will soon clear up. Perhaps it means nothing.

  The preacher stares at the floor for several minutes, then draws his feet in and stands. He motions for the deputy to let him out.

  That night the air grows colder and the fog moves into his cell, into his breath. Only his chest is warm with pain, something digging its nails into his lungs, announcing its claim with a seductive whisper—that nothing matters now, that nothing ever has. Even the strength of his convictions will soon fall into that growing blackness in his chest. And then he’ll have resisted for nothing.

  He shivers from time to time, but the mattress has grown more comfortable, the silence less stable. There are moments when he thinks he sees pinpricks of light through his bars. He blinks and they’re gone. Did he only imagine the breathy shush of the fog, its bodiless stream changing course?

  Out of it at last grows a sound more distinct, edges forming as it moves closer. Halting steps. A pause. The whisper of clothes. Her form a single shade blacker than night.

  He stands up, thankful for the small release of energy, and steps to the window. When the darkness falters, he sees the layers of clothes, the shawl. The slight lift of her belly, released from its corset. She sets a bag down at her feet and raises her chin to the window.

  It’s as if she’s understood everything; if he can’t continue, she’ll walk his steps for him, a companion after the fact. Isn’t that the next best thing?

  You’re a brave girl, he tells her. But you shouldn’t delay. There’ll be light soon.

  I’m giving thanks where it’s due, she says, her clear voice a chime in the fog.

  I’ve done nothing, he says.

  Sometimes isn’t that enough?

  He smiles in the darkness. He’s been right about her all along. She saw him and knew; she’s different from the rest. Where will you go? he asks her.

  I have an aunt in Minnesota. By the time my father finds out, it will be too late.

  It’s far, he says. You may not make it before the snow.

  I’ll take my chances. She draws a deep breath and rests one hand on her belly. She reaches for her bag but changes her mind. Will you tell me... she begins. What do you see in the clouds that others don’t?

  A child’s question. He’s never been asked it. The others only want answers to their needs and are too frightened or distracted to know more.

  We all have our paths to conviction, he says, and lets it go at that.

  At least now I know which way to go, she says.

  He nods, though she might not have seen it.

  If he’d followed another track, if the whims of his decisions had turned his eyes to earth like the rest of humanity, she would not be traveling alone. Knowing it is enough. He can take solace now in the possibilities of the past, a thousand unlived lives in a bag drawn tight at the top. His life is more than the one he’s lived.

  He reaches into his pocket and takes the last of the money he received from the townspeople. You’ll need this, he says.

  She accepts it in her small, gloved fingers. Thank you again, she says, and she picks up her own bag to leave.

  He puts one hand on the iron bar, wet from their breath, and looks for her kind eyes in the darkness.

  Here’s the answer to his pain’s bleak seduction. His life has mattered all along, in more ways than he has let himself know. And it matters now as she carries it away.

  The children seem to know first. They approach his barred window through the thinning fog, call him names and run. Some throw clumps of icy clay that shatter against the bars and spray into his cell. He’s tired now and doesn’t bother to move from his bed or to brush the dirt from his face or clothes. He shuts his eyes but can’t sleep. It’s grown colder with daybreak, and it takes some concentration not to shiver. Then he hears men’s voices gathering in the street. He tries not to discern the words but instead to concentrate on the sound as if it’s a building wind. And it does build. It gains force and direction until the impediments mean nothing. It won’t be long now. The deputy in the next room understands; the cloud reader can hear him pacing. Pausing and pacing. At last the deputy opens a door and leaves.

  The wind diminishes and the street quiets. And then the sound builds rapidly until the door bursts open again. He keeps his eyes closed and listens while they find the key. The cell door opens. They’re cursing him. The pain in his chest seems to rot him from inside. He keeps his mind on the wind. Ages seem to pass before they lay hands on his arms and yank him up. Pairs of hands grip him tightly on each side, and another hand claws his shirt between the shoulder blades and twists, exposing his lower back to the frigid air.

  What are they yelling? He tries now to understand, to pick out a word or two that might anchor him. He can’t. His senses have dulled. The sounds are warm mists on his cheeks and neck. Outside, the fog’s wet motes glow like a billion miniature crystals collecting the faint light. And they move; a space is opening for him.

  Clumps of people brave the cold and gather outside shops and houses as he passes, their steaming faces little concentrations of warmth, losing themselves breath by breath. The men pushing him along wheeze as if they’ve run a great distance. Do any of them struggle with what they’re about to do? Is his public walk part of their own path to conviction? He knows how doubts are resolved in small increments. Can you find a way to take a man from his cell? Can you find a way to lead him through town? To put a rope around his neck? And once you’ve done that, the last step is easy. It has the force of pattern behind it, a swirling wind gathering strength and direction. The paths to conviction are always circular.

  They pass the church, a small but impressive structure with a steeple rising two stories above the sanctuary and two small panels of stained glass in the heavy doors. Only those colored panels show any signs of light.

  Beyond the last building, his escorts angle him through a field to the base of an oak tree. A man with a noose stands waiting. The cloud reader’s wrists are yanked together and tied. He raises his head and assesses the thinning fog, breaking now into soft-edged shapes with faint traces of blue. Even if there’s time, will he still have the strength to see?

  He knows his gift is a fragile blessing, a thing he grasped only in the months long ago after his mother died and his father left. He was fourteen and alone then; the farm was failing. He went out to the field day after day intending to plow, to plant, and day after day he lay in the dirt and weeds and stared into the clouds. Not looking for answers at first. Just staring. Until he began to recognize patterns, familiar shapes and motions. He admired the way they built themselves, seemingly out of nothing, clawing up to overtake the sun. Others like pale daggers thrown at the horizon. Or black banks of night’s angry castoffs, rumbling and spitting over the land. Their smooth skin would boil on hot days, their edges fade as it cooled. They marched together. Or overrode each other at surprising angles. They shrank before his eyes, vanished and reappeared. It all had to mean something, didn’t it?

  The thought made him laugh, there on the dirt on his family’s dying farm. Of course it didn’t have to mean anything. But why couldn’t it? The thin high clouds, cold and faceless, depressed him. The low white puffs gave him hope. There was a connection. Wasn’t that enough?

  Of course not. But what else was? His father had awoken each day long before sunrise and read from his Bible, and when he left, the thick black book was the one thing he took with him, the thing that mattered more than his son.

  He remembered his father in the days after his mother’s death, reading the book day and night, flipping the thin pages, searching for something in the crisp black signs. What had he found? What path through those pages led him to leave his only child and his farm and walk away in the middle of the night? The strength of that conviction was a thing to admire.

  The son would find his own conviction in clouds. He stared harder. It was a joke and not a joke, like everything else he could think of. And then one day the weather turned cold and it was too late to plow and plant and there was no reason to stay. He followed the dried ruts for days until a man
on a wagon stopped him just outside a small town. The man had been looking for a farmhand; did the boy know his farming? No. He was thinking of building a new barn; did the boy know building? No. Well, was he a hard worker and quick learner, at least? Not especially. Won’t be easy for a boy like that to make his way in this world; did he have any kind of useful skill at all? Yes. I’m a reader of clouds.

  The man laughed. He shook his horse’s reins and the horse carried him away, still laughing. The boy went on into town, and when he found no business, he went on to the next, and the next, until the sheer strength of his conviction caused someone to want to know. A tiny scrap of certainty, he learned, was a valuable commodity in an uncertain world. And also a threat.

  Beside the oak’s thick trunk, his head is dipped into the noose. The rough hemp scratches at his Adam’s apple. They’re quieter now. They don’t need the yelling to convince themselves anymore.

  He’s led to a ladder and forced up its steps. Two pairs of hands steady him while the other end of the rope is thrown over a thick branch above.

  He waits. The rope is pulled tight, and he has trouble swallowing. He can hear them breathing.

  A patch of warmth at the top of his head makes him open his eyes and look. The fog has split, and the sky opens above it. It’s the first blue he’s seen in weeks. And there, moving through his narrow line of sight, is a small white cloud, smooth-skinned and frayed at the edge.

  It’s a girl, he thinks.

  A Charmed Life

  His father was a disgraced steamboat pilot with a knack for grounding boats and destroying docks, his mother the thinlipped illegitimate daughter of a beefy prostitute. When the midwife handed him over, she waited six hours in the parlor room to be paid, her queries up the decrepit stairs returned only by the newborn’s trembling squalls. Decades later, old and infirm, she still made the joke she had the rights to him. By then, no one remembered who she was talking about.

  The town never gave him a chance. His father’s reputation would prevent him from getting decent work; his mother’s would prevent him from associating with quality families or courting a decent girl. Broke and restless, he left home at sixteen.

  He took an interest in banjo and hoped to make a living in St. Louis, picking old tunes for bar crowds. But the saloons there weren’t interested in hick banjo players or sentimental hick songs. They preferred half-naked women who could blow a flute while jiggling their breasts—skills he didn’t have.

  He rode a train westward, having heard of fortunes made in San Francisco, but his train got held up outside Ellsworth, Kansas, and he was taken hostage by a band of cutthroats some say was the James Gang. Pleased with their take, the gang’s leader offered him a hundred bucks for his troubles. When he declined, knowing the worth of a thing tainted, the gang leader shot him in the foot for his ingratitude.

  The story of his capture made him a hero in Ellsworth. A judge up for re-election offered him a clerk’s position, saying that a young man with his kind of experience was worth a hundred Harvard grads. He took the job, intending to resume his journey to San Francisco as soon as his foot healed. The foot was treated by a doctor with a reputation for cutting corners to get back to his drinking; the procedure left him with a permanent limp.

  The judge won his first re-election but lost the next, and then it turned out that a man worth a hundred Harvard grads was not even employable to clean livery stalls. He hopped aboard the same westbound train that had once been held up outside Ellsworth. This time the train was held up outside Reno. One of the robbers had been a member of the gang who’d taken him hostage previously. This man recognized him and took him hostage again, for old times’ sake.

  That night, sitting beside a campfire, he made the mistake of telling his captors his life story so far, including the few years he’d spent clerking for the judge in Ellsworth. He’d had some setbacks, he said, but now he was sure he’d find his worth in this world. One of the gang members—a different one—had had a brother sentenced to death by that judge in Ellsworth. The robbers took a vote and decided to kill their hostage. It was clear from his story that they’d get no money anyway if they held him for ransom. They threw a rope over a tree limb, slipped a noose around his neck, and declared themselves agents of divine retribution.

  As it turned out, their drinking skills were much better than their engineering skills. When a couple of them tried to yank him up from the ground, he bent one knee, gagged a bit, and before long had them convinced he was dead. When they released the rope, he let himself go limp and crumple to the dirt. As soon as they returned to the campfire, he stood up in the darkness and left. Who knows what the gang thought the next morning? They were all killed in a shoot-out with the feds.

  As he walked across the Nevada desert rubbing his rope-burnt neck, San Francisco seemed the answer to all his worldly wants. There’d be fresh drinking water. Food, too. And when he’d had his fill of those, there’d be women, whom he’d very much like to know better.

  For several months he wandered generally westward and up into the mountains, occasionally circling back when delirium overcame him. He survived on rodents, hunting at dusk and using his quick feet to step on their tails. His beard grew long, his clothes tattered. His lips swelled and cracked, and dried animal blood spotted his cheeks and nose. This is the condition in which a young widow discovered him one October morning, some six months after the night her husband disappeared and three months after she’d begun calling herself a young widow.

  She found this hairy apparition a fine example of the American Yeti, whom she’d taken to studying in her widowhood. She called it “studying” in her head, but since there were no books on the fabled creature—at least none available to a lone woman in a remote sierra cabin—the studying amounted to hours of thinking—about his appearance, his origins, his eating habits, his mating habits. The latter she’d taken an especial interest in, as flashes of exotic, musty couplings warmed her lonesome hours. The fantasy Other, as she came to think of him, grew hairier and dirtier and less verbal in her thoughts, and when his big, rough hands grabbed her naked hips in dreams, their animal grunts filled her starry nights in chorus.

  So when the stranger walked out of the trees that cool afternoon, naked, stooped, grunting, she did not reach for her gun. She tore open her dress instead.

  At first, she found it merely curious that he could talk; this fact forced her to re-examine her Yeti thought-studies. Then other little things began to bother her, like when she cleaned him up in the cold mountain stream he didn’t look nearly so bestial—only pale and undernourished. When she tried to discourage him from bathing he did it himself anyway, which made his skin almost womanly smooth and his scent almost floral. And when in the glade she displayed her rump for mating in Yeti fashion, he told her, with disturbing intelligibility, that he preferred the bed in the cabin, and wouldn’t she, too, like to get cleaned up a little?

  Her zealous embrace of brutehood had yanked him back to his own neglected humanity. He awoke as if from a dream, remembering his visions of San Francisco and the journey that lay ahead. He told her he was sorry, that it was his fault he’d lost his taste for raw meat and open-air sexual commerce.

  Then what the hell good are you? she wanted to know.

  He didn’t know how to respond. When he left, she set fire to the cabin and roamed the woods naked, preying on small beasts and hunting for a less adulterated specimen of her fantasy Other. One night, she stalked and attacked several pioneer families. Mistaken for a wildcat, she was shot and killed.

  His yearning for San Francisco again pulled him westward. High in the sierras, having yet to stumble upon a wagon trail or footpath, he trekked over sharp terrain. He developed a set of climbing skills that would one day be the envy of freestyle mountaineers everywhere and he began, at the top of each mountain, to challenge himself to climb the tallest peak in sight. In this manner, he zigzagged through the mountains, almost certainly becoming the first man to climb all the high peaks in California in his thickly calloused bare feet.

  There were sightings. Other travelers would look up from the dusty wagon trail and spy a distant, man-shaped figure high on a snowy peak. Two competing superstitions arose among the pioneers: for some, his appearance meant easy times; for others, hard. The easy-timers saw him and forged ahead even against bad weather. The hard-timers turned back and wintered in Reno, or else gave up their journeys altogether. Prayed to and cursed, unaware of his growing status down below, he climbed onward until at last the mountains gave up and he descended into a rich, golden valley.