A fly sleeps on the field of a green curtain. I sit by my grandmother\u2019s
\nside, and rub her head as if I could comfort her. Ninety-seven years. Her
\neyes stay closed, her mouth open, and she gasps in her blue nightgown \u2212
\npale blue, washed a thousand times. Now her face goes white, and her
\nbreath slows until I think it has stopped; then she gasps again, and pink
\nreturns to her face.
\n Between the roof of her mouth and her tongue, strands of spittle waver
\nas she breathes. Now a nurse shakes her head over my grandmother\u2019s sore
\nmouth, and goes to get a glass of water, a spoon, and a flyswatter. My
\ngrandmother chokes on a spoonful of water and the nurse swats the fly.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
In the Connecticut suburbs where I grew up, and in Ann Arbor, there
\nwere houses with small leaded panes, where Formica shone in the kitchens,
\nand hardwood in closets under paired leather boots. Carpets lay thick un-
\nderfoot in every bedroom, bright, clean, with no dust or hair in them.
\nNothing looked used, in these houses. Forty dollars\u2019 worth of cut flowers
\nleaned from Waterford vases for the Saturday dinner party.
\n Even in the houses like these, the housefly wandered and paused \u2212 and I
\nlistened for the buzz of its wings and its tiny feet, as it struggled among
\ncut flowers and bumped into leaded panes.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
In the afternoon my mother takes over at my grandmother\u2019s side in the
\nPeabody Home, while I go back to the farm. I nap in the room my mother
\nand my grandmother were born in.
\n At night we assemble beside her. Her shallow, rapid breath rasps, and
\nher eyes jerk, and the nurse can find no pulse, as her small strength con-
\ncentrates wholly on half an inch of lung space, and she coughs faintly \u2212
\nquick coughs like fingertips on a ledge. Her daughters stand by the bed,
\nsolemn in the slow evening, in the shallows of after-supper \u2212 Caroline,
\nNan, and Lucy, her eldest daughter, seventy-two, who holds her hand to
\nhelp her die, as twenty years past she did the same thing for my father.
\n Then her breath slows again, as it has done all day. Pink vanishes from
\ncheeks we have kissed so often, and her nostrils quiver. She breathes one
\nmore quick breath. Her mouth twitches sharply, as if she speaks a word
\nwe cannot hear. Her face is fixed, white, her eyes half closed, and the next
\nbreath never comes.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
She lies in a casket covered with gray linen, which my mother and her
\nsisters picked. This is Chadwick\u2019s Funeral Parlor in New London, on the
\nground floor under the I.O.O.F. Her fine hair lies combed on the pillow.
\nHer teeth in, her mouth closed, she looks the way she used to, except that
\nher face is tinted, tanned as if she worked in the fields.
\n The air is so still it has bars. Because I have been thinking about flies,
\nI realize that there are no flies in this room. I imagine a fly wandering in,
\nthrough these dark-curtained windows, to land on my grandmother\u2019s nose.
\n At the Andover graveyard, Astroturf covers the dirt next to the shaft
\ndug for her. Mr. Jones says a prayer beside the open hole. He preached at
\nthe South Danbury Church when my grandmother still played the organ.
\nHe raises his narrow voice, which gives itself over to August and blue air,
\nand tells us that Kate in heaven \u201cwill keep on growing\u2026and grow-
\ning\u2026and growing\u201d \u2212 and he stops abruptly, as if the sky had aban-
\ndoned him, and chose to speak elsewhere through someone else.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
After the burial I walk by myself in the barn where I spent summers
\nnext to my grandfather. I think of them talking in heaven. Her first word
\nis the word her mouth was making when she died.
\n In this tie-up a chaff of flies roiled in the leather air, as my grandfather
\nmilked his Holsteins morning and night, his bald head pressed sweating
\ninto their sides, fat female Harlequins, while their black and white tails
\nswept back and forth, stirring the flies up. His voice spoke pieces he
\nlearned for the Lyceum, and I listened crouched on a three-legged stool,
\nas his hands kept time strp strp with alternate streams of hot milk, the
\nsound softer as milk foamed to the pail\u2019s top.
\n In the tie-up the spiders feasted like emperors. Each April he broomed
\nthe webs out and whitewashed the wood, but spiders and flies came back,
\ngeneration on generation \u2212 like the cattle, mothers and daughters,
\nfor a hundred and fifty years, until my grandfather\u2019s heart flapped in his chest.
\nOne by one the slow Holsteins climbed the ramp into a cattle truck.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
In the kitchen with its bare hardwood floor, my grandmother stood by
\nthe clock\u2019s mirror to braid her hair every morning. She looked out the
\nwindow toward Kearsarge, and said, \u201cMountain\u2019s pretty today,\u201d or, \u201cCan\u2019t
\nsee the mountain too good today.\u201d
\n She fought the flies all summer. She shut the screen door quickly, but
\nflies gathered on canisters, on the clockface, on the range when the fire
\nwas out, on set-tubs, tables, curtains, chairs. Flies buzzed on cooling lard,
\nwhen my grandmother made doughnuts. Flies lit on a drip of jam before
\nshe could wipe it up. Flies whirled over simmering beans, in the steam of
\nmaple syrup.
\n My grandmother fretted, and took good aim with a flyswatter, and hung
\nstrips of flypaper behind the range where nobody would tangle her hair
\nin it.
\n She gave me a penny for every ten I killed. All day with my mesh fly-
\nswatter I patrolled kitchen and dining room, living room, even the dead
\nair of the parlor. Though I killed every fly in the house by bedtime, when
\nmy grandmother washed the hardwood floor, by morning their sons and
\ncousins assembled in the kitchen, like the woodchucks my grandfather
\nshot in the vegetable garden which doubled and returned; or like the deer
\nthat watched for a hundred and fifty years from the brush on Ragged
\nMountain, and when my grandfather died stalked down the mountainside
\nto graze among peas and corn.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
We live in their house with our books and pictures, writing poems under
\nRagged Mountain, gazing each morning at blue Kearsarge.
\n We live in the house left behind; we sleep in the bed where they whis-
\npered together at night. One morning I wake hearing a voice from sleep:
\n\u201cThe blow of the axe resides in the acorn.\u201d
\n I get out of bed and drink cold water in the dark morning from the
\nsink\u2019s dipper at the window under the sparse oak, and a fly wakes buzzing
\nbeside me, cold, and sweeps over set-tubs and range, one of the hundred-
\nthousandth generation.
\n I planned long ago I would live here, somebody\u2019s grandfather.<\/p>\n
-Donald Hall<\/em><\/p>\n\n A fly sleeps on the field of a green curtain. I sit by my grandmother\u2019s side, and rub her head as if I could comfort her. Ninety-seven years. Her eyes stay closed, her mouth open, and she gasps in her blue nightgown \u2212 pale blue, washed a thousand times. Now her face goes white, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2341,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3923"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3923"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4071,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3923\/revisions\/4071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}