I live on the dirty side of town. Spring is so yellow you choke on it, and winter is nothing but a brittle latticework of dust. Most women sweep their porches on Saturday mornings, but by nightfall, a light jacket of dirt has already resettled. If your dress is even a little too long on Sunday morning, you have to pick it up as you pass through the porch. Otherwise, the hem is brown or gray before you can even get to church.
No one knows why either. Some say it has to do with all the trees and animals around here, they blame it on mossy shrubs and rooster droppings. Others think its because this neighborhood is so old. A respectable women, who died a couple decades ago now, started telling her friends that 90% of dust is just sloughed-off skin cells. She never said anything about the shedding of humans, but that’s the way rumors work I guess. Now most people believe this area is dirty because there are so many unsettled ghosts, lingering in the grass, riding on the backs of flies and bees, and lolling across the threads of cobwebs that materialize out of thin air inside their houses.
Mr. Hal Baker was sitting on his porch this morning when I walked by with the Saturday paper and a cup of coffee. He returned my wave, but something felt amiss. Usually Mr. Hal will stand up when a woman passes by, because, “Well its just plain respect, son,” he told my brother once, in a tone that seemed to scold him for even needing to ask why.
If its early in the day, Mr. Hal will make sure you had a good night’s rest, and then ask your opinion on whatever was happening in New York (he subscribed to The Times and seemed to think the whole world was encapsulated in that one city). If you met Mr. Hal sometime in the evening, he’d make sure you hadn’t worked too hard that day and would have a decent dinner. To be honest, Mr. Hal has never seemed very real to me. More like a Saint Nicolas who can’t perform miracles, but still wants peace on earth. So when he didn’t inquire about my sleeping patterns or the news up north, I knew something was bothering him.
Turns out, Mrs. Baker had decided to start her Saturday cleaning two hours early, shoving dust all around the kitchen while he was trying to read his paper, spraying Clorox all over the bathroom while he was trying to comb his hair, then yelling about which rooms he could and could not walk through cause she was sweeping now and wouldn’t have him tracking stuff all through the house before she could even get to the mop.
Mr. Hal tried to stay out of her way, to give her the time and space she seemed to need for cleaning, and so he went out on the porch. A brown thrasher was singing in the tree above. He sat in the rocking chair and had just settled into a rhythmic sway when she exploded through the screen door with her straw broom. ”This time,” he told me, “I decided to just stay put,” which meant he would have to endure her fury about something that she would never understand, something that looked like an anxiety about dirt but had nothing at all to do with dirt.
A strong wind blew back and forth through the porch, so that the loose earth Mrs. Baker was trying to sweep away was thrown right back at her, as if bouncing off an imaginary wall. She glanced over at Mr. Hal in a way that she hoped would lift him from the rocking chair and carry him back into the house. But he knew that she was only humiliated, so he stayed and said nothing.
Her hands tightened around the stick of wood, she swatted at the porch until her back crackled in revolt. But it didn’t help— the wind thickened, as if she was whipping it up like egg whites into meringue. After a while, her arms went limp and she let out a sigh so guttural it sounded more like a grunt. Mr. Hal stood, moved toward the door, but just before entering said, “Don’t you think you’re fighting a hopeless battle?” He didn’t wait for a response, or even look her in her direction, knowing that she wouldn’t want him to. She didn’t.
Moments later, she came back into the house, doing the same thing to her wooden floors that she’d done to the porch, now with the mop instead of a broom, against an oscillating fan instead of the wind. When I walked by their house this morning, Mr. Hal had just come back out to the porch. There was nothing he could say or do for her, but its not like he came into this blindly either. “Her papa gave me fair warning,” he said inside of a long sigh. “He made sure I was there one Saturday morning to see the same cleaning routine seize Mrs. Baker’s mother like a demonic spirit.”
I told him that I was real sorry, that I just couldn’t imagine Mrs. Baker acting that way. She’d always been so warm and charming, doing the most thoughtful things for people. “Oh, she’ll be fine, she’ll be fine,” he assured.
I thought that I should probably get going, I didn’t want to catch Mrs. Baker in a bad moment, and plus, the coffee cup in my hand no longer felt very warm. But before I could excuse myself, Mr. Hal bent forward and looked straight at me. His eyes were all alit and a smile had spread across this face. “After mopping,” he said, “all that’s left to do is shake out the rugs.”
(2008)
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