While the Sand Shifts - Tom Barr
My grandmother believed in magic. I don't mean the hocus pocus wizardry stuff. Hers was a more homespun variety in that she claimed to be able to see things that weren't there. She was the only grandparent I had left and Dad always called her an old witch, even though she was his own mother. When I asked Mom if that was true, she said he was just biased. I didn't know what biased meant then but that didn't really matter because Dad went to live with somebody else. I was a few weeks short of eleven years old when that happened.
A lot of things changed for us then. First, Mom and I moved to a smaller house in a neighboring community. Second, she got a job. She took it so I could attend a private school near my grandmother's house. I'd go to Gran's after school and Mom would pick me up when her shift finished.
There'd been an argument about the school a few days before Dad left but I don't believe that's why he went. They must have been talking about what was to happen to me because Mom suddenly shouted that she would rather die than send me to any public school in Boston. Dad shouted back “In that case you can pay the goddamn fees yourself.”
My grandmother was tall and gaunt. Dad didn't look anything like her. She wore her hair in a bun and had half-frame spectacles and a face that looked so serious I didn't dare to call her Gran until it had gotten used to smiling.
That happened when she caught me with my fingers crossed. I did that to make my dad come knocking at her door. She said that he hadn't shown his face there since his father died and she reckoned he wasn't about to start now. Then she hugged me a lot and we became friends.
My fatherless weeks became months then years and I found I'd traveled from fifth through eighth grades almost without tears. A few months before I was fifteen, Mom transferred me to a Catholic high school. It was for boys only and I didn't really like that but Mom said, “It will concentrate that mind of yours on what matters.” She started working extra shifts.
One December afternoon during my first term there, I was standing at my grandmother's living room window, gazing outside. It was a half-holiday, for something like the founder's birthday. I was daydreaming as usual and jumped through my skin a little when I heard Gran speaking about an inch behind my ears.
“If you could look through this window into the sands of time,” she said in a dreamy, faraway sort of voice. “Back to the days when my own father was young, you'd see a fine sailing ship. Four high masts packed with white sails crisping with the wind.”
She took an old hourglass from the dresser behind her and placed it on the windowsill so the sand trickled from the upper to the lower glass. Then she rummaged through a drawer and drew out a silver dollar, blackened with age. She placed it in my palm.
“Hold this tightly,” she said. “And while the sand shifts, feel the silver's power. Watch for those sails and maybe you will see.”
Mom always told me to take these stories with a pinch of salt. She didn't explain what I should do with the salt but eventually I realized that what she meant was that I shouldn't believe everything my grandmother told me. Well I didn't believe everything , like when Gran said my dad would never come back. But mostly I wanted to believe her. And even when I didn't I'd pretend that I did.
So I let my eyes grow heavy and allowed her words to swim around in my head. I imagined the window changing from its two big sheets of glass into many panes. I counted them: sixteen in all. And beyond the house, the intervening streets were gone, and in the harbor we now overlooked, a harbor bare of the mark of today, I saw a tall ship riding low in the water, and a small boat, a pinnace, carrying men ashore.
The pinnace tied up to a quay and the men disembarked. One, taller than the rest, with a great mat of tawny beard, walked up a long cobbled roadway towards the house. On his shoulder he carried a canvas bag, and as he got closer I heard him singing a song I knew: Farewell Spanish ladies.
My grandmother's face became radiant as his footsteps clicked outside her door and her mouth opened in anticipation as the great round handle began to turn, its latch groaning against its catch until it was free.
But when the door was finally open, there was no sea-captain waiting, no cobblestones to be seen, only the block-paved driveway that had been there when I arrived. And on it stood my mother's silver Beetle.
“Hi you two,” she said as she sailed into the room with a flurry of coat and skirts. “I swapped my shift and left early. It's threatening snow.”
As she hugged goodbyes, my grandmother whispered into my ear. “You saw. Didn't you?” As I nodded, her smile reached inside me, warming me against the chill that was sweeping in from outside.
The sky was yellow as we drove off and long before we reached home, the snowfall had begun, a few flakes at first then a thickening into large, regular ones that made it difficult to see our way.
On the journey, I thought about the man with the beard. ‘When my own father was young' Gran had said, and this man wasn't young. I figured she must have meant when he was a boy of my age, for she knew I could only see with such a boy's eyes and mind. If that was so, then the man must be her grandfather. That would make the ship right too, for clippers would have been gone by the time her father became a man.
It was far more likely though, I decided, that I had simply dreamed up images from books I grew up with; tales of tall ships and the sea like Masterman Ready.
In our community, ten miles or so west of Boston, neighbors were busy shoveling snow from their drives. One, Eddy Mulcahan, was halfway through clearing ours. His face shone as he saw Mom get out of her VW and he waved a hand near his ear in a casual salute.
“That's most considerate of you, Eddy,” Mom said, putting on a voice that sounded like she was licking cream.
Eddy was almost as bad. He wouldn't look up at Mom but stared at her feet, at the light suede shoes that were showing dark patches where the snow had seeped inside. I imagined him wishing he could suck them dry.
His face was turning ruddier by the second. Perhaps it was because of the cold or maybe he knew what I was thinking.
“Why, Mrs. Barr,” he said, “it's nothing.”
Mom switched on a smile I hadn't seen in a long while. It was the one she used to have when my dad told her she was the prettiest girl in all the world. She wore it for me once, when my old school awarded me a prize for something, I've forgotten what for. I guess I've forgotten a lot of things.
“Oh, it's something , Eddy,” Mom said.
She still had the smile when we went in the house and it seemed to increase in the warmth there. That evening she baked my favorite choc-chip cookies.
When I went outside next morning the night's snowfall had already been cleared from our drive. On either side, it was piled up as high as my shoulders. It was Saturday, and although the snowplow crews had been out I was glad that Mom didn't have to drive to work today.
“Hey, Jimmy.”
It was Eddy Mulcahan, grinning from the cab of his pickup, parked in the road outside his house, two away from ours.
“Hey, Eddy.”
Eddy got out of his pickup and, kicking snow aside in a way I guessed was meant to look casual, walked over to me.
“Some fall, huh?” he said, nodding at the walls of snow.
“I guess so.”
Eddy's grin widened and he clapped me on the shoulder. It wasn't a hard blow but I recoiled as if it was. My feet slipped and nearly tipped me onto the concrete. Eddy seemed not to notice.
“Your mom in?”
I'd intended to shrug but she was already at the door, gazing with a syrup-sweet smile at the swept driveway.
“Why, Eddy, you've been so busy. You didn't have to…”
I felt sick as I watched her, wanted to wipe that look right off her face.
Eddy sidestepped past me and posted himself in front of her. “I was just wondering, Mrs Barr, if you and Jimmy might like to come sledding.” He cocked a thumb and gestured towards somewhere roughly behind my right ear. “There's a bunch of people having fun out on Mousehold Hill.”
I glared at the back of his neck then gritted teeth and glared at my mother.
“That's a lovely gesture, Eddy,” she said.
In summer, Mousehold Hill is a slope of flowering meadow. From the little river Dibbin that creeps through the valley, there's a gentle grade for fifty yards then it's about one-in-five to the broad plateau on the top, where girls like to sit and make daisy chains. That day, everything was endless white, reflecting the thin winter sun so effectively that the glare almost burned my eyes.
About forty people were there when we arrived. Most had homemade sleds. Eddy had bought a plastic one from Bramald Hardware. He kept giving it a huge shove then landing on it full length and laughing as he scrabbled it along, using his hands and feet for snow paddles.
“Hey, Jimmy, this is something else,” he said as my mother looked on with an idiot grin.
After about a half dozen runs broadside along the hill, Eddy offered me a go.
“I don't know,” I said.
“Go on, Jimmy,” Mom said but she was looking at Eddy as she spoke. Her eyes were passing him signals.
I jumped on Eddy's sled and aimed it downhill. Three or four other boys were level with me as I started, but I was losing them within thirty feet. I tucked my head down but kept one eye on the open stretch of riverbank and my feet ready to brake if I looked like hitting the trees. The runners whistled through the snow and I felt a surge of what I suppose was adrenalin but I told myself it was my grandmother's magic.
There were three skaters on the frozen river, tracing circles as I hurtled towards them. They took no notice of me until it looked as if I was about to join them.
As I dragged both feet in the snow, there were shouts of: “Hey, kid, watch it” and I saw the skaters move aside in a hurry.
The sled might have stopped in time but I got this crazy idea it might be possible to shoot right across the Dibbin and land on the far bank. So I lifted my feet and gave wild banshee whoops as I hurtled towards my take-off point. I guess I must have had a huge grin too. Then suddenly I hit something hard with one of the runners and the sled rose in the air at one side and tipped me off into virgin snow.
Back on top of the slope again, I watched Eddy rubbing his hands together and winking at my mother before he launched himself downhill.
“I'll show you how it's done, Jimmy,” he said. “Wish me luck, Mrs Barr?”
“Oh, Caroline, please, Eddy,” Mom said.
With his legs pumping like crazy pistons, Eddy gave himself a tremendous flying start and the sled careered away. His head was bobbing. He never tried to brake at all but carried on over the river bank. He didn't make it to the other side.
The sound of breaking ice echoed like a firecracker around the little valley. Mom's hand flew to her mouth. “Oh dear, oh no,” she said. She started to laugh.
Eddy's arms were spinning like a pair of windmills. The rest of him was in the water. The skaters were on the bank, removing their skates. One of them kept giving Eddy the finger. He was scrabbling across the remaining ice as if he didn't trust it to stay intact for one second longer. The tail end of his sled was up in the air, its nose anchored into the riverbed. I'd had my feet sucked into that glutinous Dibbin sludge more than a few times over the summers. It stank like anything.
Instead of letting Eddy take his river-stench home, my mother insisted that he brought it into our house.
“No Eddy,” she said. “I feel responsible for what happened.”
I thought: Why Mom? If he wants to put on a damn fool show that's his problem, not yours.
Then I realized she meant that there was something about her that made Eddy act like that. It was her way of telling him that was okay.
She borrowed his house keys and went to fetch him dry clothes while he used our shower. All I could think of was her running her fingers through Eddy's underpants drawer, picking out stuff she had no business to have her hands on.
She came back with navy-blue chinos, a blue shirt, boots and the other stuff Eddy needed. He half opened the bathroom door and she handed the clothes to him. When Eddy was dressed she sat him by our fireside with a mug of coffee and got our washing machine busy on his dirty clothes. Then she poured herself coffee and sat beside him.
“Eddy,” she said. “You should wear blue more often. It really suits you.”
Eddy preened himself like some prize peacock. Mom stretched back and raised her chest high. Eddy's eyes popped from their sockets. I went to my room and stared out the window. Everything looked dirty now.
Eddy stayed at our house all day and he and my mother were drinking whiskey together when I went to bed.
Something woke me. I'd been dreaming about rats scratching in the attic the way they used to in our old house in Wellesley. So it may have been that or else the noise my mother was making.
Two-thirty-three, said my bedside clock in bright green liquid crystal. I got up and opened my door. Along the corridor a thin shaft of light fanned out from the living room. Mom's groans came from that direction too.
I ghosted towards them. The living room door was a fraction ajar and somewhere behind it Mom was going: “Oh, oh, oh.”
I thought of calling out “Is everything okay?” but decided it might be wiser to peep round the door first.
Mom was on the floor, skirt up over her waist, legs spread apart with their knees up in the air, and Eddy Mulcahan had his face buried between her thighs.
Mom's groans stopped like they'd been sliced through with a razor. She was staring straight at me and her eyes looked as if they wanted to scream. I stepped back and retreated to my room, fast. I felt as if I was on fire.
Nobody, nothing, followed me, not even whispers. I sank my face in my pillows and tried to revive my dream about the rats.
When I woke, a hard rain was spattering my windows. Outside, the snow was turning to slush. I washed and dressed and got myself some cereal. While I was in the kitchen my mother came in. Her face was flushed but there was a hard edge to her lips. She looked as if she'd been up a long time.
“I'd rather you hadn't seen what you did, Jimmy,” she said, “but I'm not going to apologize, no way. Anyway, you shouldn't have been sneaking around the house in the middle of the night.”
“The noise you were making woke me up. I thought you were being murdered or something.” I pulled a face. “It was disgusting.”
“It might not be what your biology books teach but it's what men and women actually do together. It's time you learnt that, Jimmy.”
“But you did it with him. ”
“Why shouldn't I? Your father's been gone a long time, Jimmy.”
I could see she wasn't going to see things my way so I left her and went to check if Eddy was still in the house.
We didn't see him again, not that day, because I'd no sooner decided the house was Mulcahan-free when somebody rang the front doorbell and hammered on the door itself. My mother rushed out from the kitchen.
“Oh, God,” she said when she opened the door.
My grandmother's prediction was wrong. My dad had come back. He looked as if he'd been crying.
“How did you…?” Mom said.
“Find your address? Better to ask how the hell Mom knew mine. Can I come in, Carrie?”
Dad didn't wait for an answer but stepped right into the house.
Outside, a scared looking face with dark eyes and pale hair was staring out from the windows of a Lexus parked at the bottom of our drive.
Dad said Gran had collapsed while taking tea with a neighbor, about the time I was falling off Eddy's sled. She'd regained consciousness that night and told the hospital where to find him. It was a long drive, he said but he didn't mention where from. He said Gran talked to him for a good hour then smiled, lay back, and died. I was expecting him to tell me it was at precisely two-thirty-three in the morning but he said it was a few strokes after midnight.
The day after Gran's funeral I was in her living room again, wondering why Dad had asked me to come. I slid the upper sash of her window down and filled my lungs with cold Atlantic air. Outside, motor cruisers strutted past me towards their berths by the Waterfront condos.
My eyes were stinging but the tears were locked in. I was annoyed with Gran for dying on me like that. With all that shitty magic of hers she must have known what was to happen, so why didn't she warn me, teach me how to cope without her? I knew it was wrong to feel like that but I couldn't seem to stop it. Then guilt began to hammer at me and I started blubbing like a kid. I mopped my eyes with my knuckles then hung my hands out to dry over the open sash. I watched the gulls sweeping the bay, guarding the skies. I reckoned they didn't miss much of what was going on. I pictured my tears forming an invisible mist that shimmied past them and spiraled upwards in search of the cloud Gran was floating on. Then she would know that I was sorry.
Dad and I had done the awkward stuff – the hugging and him saying I mustn't think he didn't love me – this from the man who never remembered my birthdays after my tenth and thought Christmas was just a word. When Mom dropped me off there'd been a half-hour's closeness between her and him, a huddled conversation. I heard Mom saying “No, really ?” a dozen times then she'd left for work. “Because I need to earn the money,” she'd snapped when Dad asked her why she couldn't stay too.
He was rubbing his chin, watching me.
“You okay, son?” he said.
“Why did you call Gran an old witch?” I said.
He put on a crumpled face, as if I'd accused him of murder or worse. “It was a joke , Jimmy. She was my mother. I loved her just as much as you love your mom.”
“Do you love my mom?”
Dad looked away. His eyes met Alice's. She was the girl I'd seen in his car. She wasn't the one he'd left us for.
Alice appeared no older than a high school senior. Eighteen, nineteen, so she had four years on me at the most. I fantasized about those girls sometimes – well, quite a lot actually - but I'd never been as close to one as this. I wished we had them at my school.
Alice was at Gran's dresser, fingering the hourglass. She wore a thin cardigan thing and her nipples were standing out. I couldn't stop myself from staring at them. I felt myself getting hard and then Alice looked at me and I knew she could see it. I wished I had a girlfriend like her. I wished I could see Alice naked. I wondered if Dad sank his face between her thighs.
He suddenly turned back to me and I shook my eyes from Alice's nipples. Dad's face carried a hint of surprise.
“Well, well, so my boy's growing up,” he said as I burned. “And the answer to your question, Jimmy, is yes. But not in the way you want. I'm with Alice now.”
Alice was smiling at me as if she wanted my approval. A hard knot of anger twisted in my gut and I walked over to her and snatched the hourglass from her hands.
“That's mine,” I said. “Gran gave it to me.”
I reached for the drawer behind her, expecting her to move aside, but she stayed exactly where she was, so I couldn't fail to touch her breasts. And if it wasn't true I wouldn't have believed it, but she squeezed my dick on the way. I guessed Dad wouldn't hold on to her for long.
I took the silver dollar from the drawer and returned to the window, placed the hourglass on the sill.
“That's not all she gave you, Jimmy.”
Dad was standing at my shoulder the way Gran used to and I hadn't heard him coming either. I slid the dollar into my pocket.
“This house,” Dad said. “She left it to you and me. She didn't make a will but she told me that was what she wanted. Now what are we going to do about it?”
I forgot what he'd said about him and Alice. I had a wild, surging hope that he, Mom and I could all live together here and Mom could be free for ever from Eddy Mulcahan and the six dollars an hour from the diner.
“You see,” Dad said. “Alice is expecting my baby. We need to realize the money from my share of this house.”
I turned back to my window, clasped the silver dollar and relaxed my eyes but Gran's spell wouldn't work. I squeezed my eyes shut and begged her to help. When I opened them again I saw sixteen panes of glass before me and, outside, a tall ship coming into the old harbor. She was festooned with gaily-colored flags, as if she had something to celebrate.
“He'll play fair with you Jimmy,” I heard Gran's voice saying. “Be sure of that. He knows I'm a witch. He knows what I can do.”
The ship was alongside the wharf now; men scurried about, securing lines to the quayside bollards. The tall man with the thicket of beard stepped ashore. He was carrying something that looked like the bellows we used at home. Then I realized they were similar to the uilleann pipes I'd heard at school concerts. Those were quite elaborate but these had just a single pipe.
The man stopped below Gran's window then strapped the bellows beneath an arm and began to pump them. As his fingers danced on the pipe, the sweetest, most enchanting music I had ever heard began to fill the air. It sounded Irish yet not Irish, if you can understand what I mean. And he was gazing up at me.
I felt heavy, as if I was suddenly twice my weight. The man kept weaving that haunting melody, drawing me into it. I thought of the Pied Piper of Hamelin town. Then I saw that he was looking past, not at me and I realized the heaviness was only Gran leaning into me in the way she used to, her arm encircling my shoulder. The piper had come to call her away, to sail with him on that fine ship. I recalled a tale she used to tell me about the Isles of the Blest, a land where no one ages and no one dies. That's where the ship was bound, I thought as Gran left me and the pressure I'd felt on my back was transformed into an unbearable lightness. Somewhere in the breeze gusting across the bay I fancied I heard a fading “Goodbye”.
“Were you listening to me, Jimmy?”
Someone was shaking me. The music had stopped and through the window I could see only present-day things. I turned and saw Dad's face. It seemed to be pleading with me.
“Does Mom know about this?”
“She said it was your decision.”
Something like fear shivered through me. I'd never had a real decision to make.
“I won't cheat you, Jimmy.”
“I know. Gran just told me that.”
Dad smiled at that but his eyes looked more than a little scared. “I thought she might. See, Jimmy, I told you she was an old witch.”
“A good one, though.”
“Yeah, a good old witch.”
The front door rattled and Dad started. Then Mom walked in and he released a long sigh.
Mom seemed breathless. She raised an eyebrow at Dad. He nodded back.
“So what do you think, Jimmy?” Mom said.
What do I think ? I saw Dad, really saw him, for the first time. Memories I'd long suppressed blew into my thoughts like the west wind: Dad smacking me when I was a baby because I cried in the night; Dad locking five-year-old me in the cellar for wetting the bed; Dad hitting Mom in the hall and me jumping onto his back from halfway up the stairs, missing, and knocking myself out. That had saved Mom from the beating. Me too, I suppose. It wasn't long before he left us.
It was hard to equate that man with this one but it came to me that playing the bully and chasing girls half your age were part of the same thing. Eddy Mulcahan might act like a kid but Dad was a serial one. There'd be another girl after Alice, and always another, until the day he found himself with nobody, with nothing at all. But I knew even that would not change him and that I didn't want him back.
If Eddy Mulcahan was what Mom wanted then why shouldn't she have him? At least he was kind, and besotted with her. Maybe he'd grow on me. I wondered how many six-dollars-an-hour my half of Gran's house would cover. Enough, I reckoned, especially if I could persuade Mom to let me enroll at our neighborhood high.
“Well, Jimmy?” Mom said.
“I think it's okay,” I said.
Dad was all smiles. “Let's shake on it,” he said and we did: he, Mom, and I.
Alice hadn't moved from her place at the dresser. I took the hourglass back and stood it in its spot among the dust.
“Thank you,” Alice whispered.
I didn't brush her nipples this time and she didn't touch my dick. I persuaded myself that I'd imagined her doing that before, that it was only my wishful thinking. After all, I'd inherited Gran's imagination, so I had no way of telling if what I saw or heard was ever really true. I wondered if Mom knew about Alice's baby. Either way, I didn't see the kid being a part of my life.
~~~~~~~~~~
Tom Barr is the pseudonym of a widely published writer. His great grandfather was the master of a clipper sailing out of Boston, Massachusetts. Tom himself sails a 22-foot tupperware yacht out of control.
