The Matador in the Bulrush part six

Gretcha put down her bag of seeds and looked up at me, waiting for my panting rage to soften. “I suppose so. You is right so Lulu…as always.”

Lulu was talking, telling me, “ Sit down Yon…have a few things to talk you to.. if Gretch agrees.”

I sat down then, in a frayed wing back chair that looked like it had never been sat in since Napoleons exile to Elba.

“Yon…you are prisoner of war, just don’t know it be so. Ya see….prisoners of war is not just people behind the barb wire and straw camp beds. They be too… wives, widows, sons and daughters, neighbors and friends, the storekeepers…. nurses…the children…of all the war. Now… words you speak…were mine, somewhere around June, in 1914.  So mad…..like you….I yelled at Gretch so bad. But…I get and got free ya know? Now you….free…anger does that, when your looking to tunnel and escape. Gotta stay low Yon…stay low as long as possible. Soooo…me and Gretch…we fed you camp food, like the prisoners did, hoping it would make you see, get hungry for freedom, and escape. Now…here you are Yon’, Boxing like the dog, biting at freedom. That’s…that’s…good Yon. Sooo…what say now Gretch?”

Gretcha was smiling, sighing , “Ohhh yes Lulu…I can’t go another day eating this cow shit as Yon calls it.  What say….we make a nice plate of peanut butter and those raspberry jars I have hidden? And some homemade tomato soup?  I have a pie…yes…a nice pie of blackberry, good crust I’ve been saving.”

I was stunned. “We have peanut butter?” I was laughing so hard. It felt like the most stupid thing to say after all I had already said.

Gretcha laughed with me then, “Oh yes…hidden and stowed away…for this day. Ya know Yon…Im down to scarecrow weight..and that won’t do…not at all my boy. So lets break for a bit…heat up some goodly bad food, make some cookies and eat ourselves into our older years.” When Gretcha l, and me and Lulu were alone, I apologized. But she wasn’t done and told me a few things I still remember….she said, , “I know yor feelin’bad and sorry Yon…So was I. Still am actually. Yon….you have been angry at life long time…you must be careful that life doesn’t get angry for you. Time has its way Yon….If you live long enough…you will eventually lose some friends…some family. The best you can hope for is be the friend that people lose.’ An hour later we were friends, my mothers, and it was when the cookies were done, when Gretcha was standing in the kitchen with her apron stained and dirty, that you knocked on the door and interrupted the most important night of my life.”

Joshua tilted his glass and let the remaining liquid run the gauntlet of his throat.

“You know….they were painters…artists actually. In the summer they would can their harvest from their greenhouse, but in the winter…my God…the winter. They would paint. They were absolutely sure, that painting by candle light was necessary. I never questioned them. How could I? In that November I watched them both, sitting in the dim light, flicking paint brushes in the dark. They said, more than once, that any colors so created in their dim room, held in promise their newly brightness of day. And I saw…with my own eyes…the color and impact of them, when each day came. Over time…as we settled into our routine and our life…I became amazed at their talent.But…Spring came…that God awful spring. That’s the time when they brought me to music. Sometime around May, LuLu would put on her records, in the evening after painting, when her hands cramped. She would ask me to dance with Gretcha, as she was the dancer and not her, and how she so missed the dances of her younger year. Gretcha would clap and yell at me, “Oh my yon…can you hear it all?...the violins and all those people dancing in Versailles, on the sidewalks, in those big halls? Can you feel it Yon, the waltz…lovers and their jealousies? I love this song Yon, please…dance with me?” And I would….holding her as she hummed the notes of her unrealized history into my ear. We didn’t know it then, but Gretcha was very sick. One day..in June I think…LuLu sat me down to have a talk. “You know Yon…passion is a strange thing. You have to Yon..find a passion…something. Do you know…what a life is …without passion?”

I could only shake my head..

“Its flightless Yon. For these next days…as long as we can go…we have to let Gretcha fly.”

By the beginning of that July, Gretcha was baking cookies ten hours a day. At night she would paint…and in the middle of everything, she would get up and dance. LuLu would clap..and praise her…and Gretcha would sit again…as if it never happened. When it came…those late nights…I would get up and see Lulu..sitting behind Gretcha on her chair, holding her hands as she painted, dipping her wrists and manoeuvring their adjoined hands to dip into the pallet and then up to the canvas. It was such a beautiful…poetic, dance. They..the both of them…worked in some kind of symbiotic move that would have stunned the artistic community. It was truly..the most gorgeous thing I have ever witnessed, watching their hands waltz and dip to the music of them. After where ever I have been, I wish for one more day, where I could hide in the shadows of their candlelight and watch their hands dance. When morning came it would always be shocking to see what they both had created, because what came from their darkness were vibrant, strong splashes of color as you could never witness unless you lived it. All those paintings…..signed by Lulu, because Gretcha never signed hers, now are distributed anonymously throughout Europe’s hospitals and schools.”  Joshua looked away, his eyes becoming glassy, “ Gretcha died that year. LuLu died two weeks before my wedding. And that’s it. I can only hope….you know now the magic I was witness to.”

I was frozen and speechless. I grasped my near empty glass and flicked my finger against its rim, making a clinking sound as I raised it to him, “Heres to them, the witches and ancient ones. Heres to you, the words of a life, a brother and father, and a son. To time spent and never squandered…”

“Here here..”he replied. ‘To all winters of discontent…to this I say….hold back the tide and dance the dance…and once more into the fray.”

We were quiet for a while before he began to gather himself, readying himself to leave.

“Joshua?”

“Hmmm?”, he said as he was beginning to stand up.

“I was there…also..the day you danced for Pinch and Fat Albert.”

He smiled in his way, grabbing his wallet and casually tossing a twenty dollar bill on the table. “I know Smitty. You were the bike boy I followed home; in the dark…just to make sure nothing grabbed you.”

“I thought…I have to say….I thought you were brave…and beautiful.”

He smiled again. Looking down at me as he began to shift and leave. “And now YOU are. My..my….how far their spell is cast. It never ceases to amaze me.” And then…he was gone. Gone. Ive never seen him since. It took me fifteen minutes of sitting alone to realize he had called me by my childhood name.

The next morning, I rose and showered. In the meeting I listened as the questions flew and at the end the papers were signed and the law of men was waxed and sealed, stamped and cemented, in each of our names, whether they had been given or earned. At the end, I scribbled my name across the last of the papers and then handed my companies’ lawyer a document. It was my resignation, the one I had stayed up all night writing. He looked at me, scowling as if the whole idea was as absurd as it seemed. “Why?” he asked.

I chuckled, “I think….its time. I think I’m tired of being on the ground and flightless. I think its time…to fly.”

Two weeks ago I made the trip to see my mother. She still lives in the town I was raised in, and I do my best to see her at least once a month. As I drove down our street there were four boys on bicycles hovering around a parked car. I passed them with my window open, and their high-pitched voices came to me, bringing with it a flood of memories. My mother usually spends her summers on the front porch, knitting the Christmas gifts that too many grandchildren would never use. There are times now, more frequent than not, where her arthritis slows her and I have to sit in front of her holding her bat of wool, so she can dip her needles to and fro as I lead the strands her way. She was there, sitting in her high-back chair as I had expected.

“’About time you got here…I was getting a little worried.’

“Hello mom,,,”…I looked back at the boys from her porch perch. They all looked suddenly, sitting on their bikes, as if they were spring loaded with a very fickle firing pin on their seats. “It seems you have company”

My mother didn’t stop, clicking her needles even faster as she gained her practiced rhythm. “Those boys….they just ride back and forth in front of the house. No trouble makers among them that I can see.”

And then it came to me, and I smiled. “Would you like tea? Red rose or Pine needle?”

“Just regular tea…I don’t have any of that fancy stuff in the house.”

I walked into the kitchen, and was filling the kettle when her voice came from outside, “Oh….you got a package delivered here…came about three days ago. It’s in the living room beside the tv.”

I found it exactly where she said, a small rectangle about two feet wide and three feet high, wrapped in brown paper with only my name and her address in its center. I was still inspecting it, hoping for other markings, when the kettle began to whistle.

I made tea for the both of us, set hers beside her before carrying my own and the package outside. Before I sat down beside her I looked towards the four of them. I raised my arm slowly and pointed, letting my index finger curl and bend in a witches crook.

“What are you doing to them boys?” she giggled.

I laughed, “Just hang on a moment mom. I’m making you famous.” And that was the trigger that shot them forward, in the July owned of their year, and out of the neighborhood. I knew they would be back.

I sat with my mother and opened the package, peeling its paper away carefully to what was inside. It was a painting. In it were two women, standing in a field in overalls and large brimmed hats. Beside them were large baskets of picked corn. Even in its impressionistic wash of detail you could make out that one of the woman was wiping the others brow with her handkerchief. In the background, was a house I remembered, and on either side, the colors spilled daisies, shrubs and yellow grass to an infinite horizon. It was not only amazing in its fire, stunning in its daylight sun, a dance of emotion…it was unsigned.