Pinkie's Promise

Note: This story contains a scene of accidental death. It describes cruelty toward animals. It includes a letter written from the perspective of a combatant in wartime, describing some of the difficult things he has witnessed there.

The goldfinches arrived sparkling upon the landing the same day that Ernesto returned, alone, bearing his news like a rucksack full of stones, weighing down each doleful step in a cloud of San Luis dust.

I noticed the goldfinches through the kitchen window, gathering upon the cement outside the door, and fluttering about in the cold spring light. The cold often persists in the Valley well into April. I pulled on my stocking cap and mittens as I watched the charm through the glass, splashing black and yellow against the tall, unmitigated blue.

The kitchen, as though in melancholy anticipation of Ernesto’s return, was unusually quiet and empty and dark this morning. Mother worried over the porridge, chopping fresh almonds with a sort of forceful efficiency, putting trouble aside, rolling her cleaver through each short, neat row, splitting them in half and then barking the handle against the roughhewn chopping block. Scraping the next line from their pile - bark, scrape, tap, roll - the almonds cracking like knuckles beneath her forceful blade.

I stepped out to collect the firewood, opening the door carefully because I didn’t wish to disturb the goldfinches. A smattering of brightly chattering birds rose from their sunning, jostling those already dancing in the bright above them, while others alighted on the warm concrete.

The air here in New England wears the weather like a mournful obligation, going some way toward explaining our heavy cultural obsession with a processional past. In San Luis the air is lighter than a charm of finches, so careless of  Tartar’s mood that on a cold and sunny day, like this one, standing on the landing outside the kitchen door, where I was protected from the wind blowing down from the Mountain by the big berm covering the root cellar, the sun was warming my face and my chest, and I was smiling along with the joyful finches, while Groucho our mustachioed barn cat stood shivering in the shade and the cold breeze at the fence line, just a few steps away. Groucho was waiting for some rodent, believing herself safe in the shadow of the woodpile, to make one small, wrong move, her betraying tail sparking for an instant in the brilliant sun, her last, wuthering act before Groucho struck her, shuddering with surprise, into sheol.

It was San Luis bright that morning - the sort of bright that happens when a tall sun, in a sky that has been cloudless for so long that you can’t really quite recall what a cloud feels like, finds herself reflected back by every surface under her gaze - by all those worn out hard rocks sticking halfway from the hard baked earth, by the sticky yellow gumweed, and also by their sweet sticky smell, and by the yellow of the old water pump, and also by its greasy good diesel burn, by the white stucco of the dairy barn, reflected back by every splashing rapid and eddying current in the Rio Grande, by a little girl’s sun hat swallowed up by the muddying deluge and by the white curtains billowing in a kitchen window, held open with an old cookbook. Bright that is reflected by a thousand thousand shiny eyes plugged into brown-green sun-shot grasshoppers, their gleaming hot exoskeletons mechanically ambulating through the dried-up brush, reflecting off the neighbor’s tin roof, and the great blinking eyes of their ruminants. It is a bright so bright that even sharp river noises, and certain parts of speech (especially vowels) and sometimes whole words, if they are short, demotic Saxon verbs, like ‘go’ or ‘yip’ or ‘shit’ are reflected back at the sun, while other sounds, and other, more effete words, are dehydrated in the tall oven, or sizzled into meaninglessness, like a filliping grasshopper, impaled on a pin, mechanical legs kicking maniacally for a moment before some sick kid holds the magnifying glass above him, and he is incinerated.

The tall bright isn’t a mood, per se, so much as an attitude - mistakenly applied, by outsiders, to Tartar, but more accurately attributable to Echidna. It is typical of the place that true power hides in the very bright transparent atmosphere which has quite literally baked itself into the civic consciousness. It is here that the phrase ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’ sent down its first dull, dry and scrubby roots (it is not easy to take root in this unforgiving, shallow soil). You will find no municipal books, no so-called open meetings, no courthouse records, more quaintly transparent than those of San Luis.

And if your eyes have been amazed by the bright, and all you can see are light and shadow, if the bright has, in effect, made the sensory world flat, you might miss Echidna’s hidden power, and mistake her pugnacious attitude, which favors action in the extreme. Echidna wants us to laugh out loud, to howl in pain, to behave with irrational cruelty, to slaughter cattle and to beat dogs. She wants us to pull the flailing, flaming limbs from an impaled grasshopper just before they are fully carbonated under her baleful magnified grimace. She wants us to go about our lives, in every moment, fully committed.

If your eyes are amazed by the bright you might miss all of this, and mistake the attitude for a mood, and you might blame it on Tartar. I am not telling you that you are wrong, necessarily, just that it isn’t so. When, in the winter, you foolishly walk on the barely frozen surface of the river, near the shore, and the sun has just slipped below the western horizon, you have discovered the reckless mood of Tartar, the mood of San Luis. But when the ice suddenly cracks beneath you, and you fall into the rushing water so cold that hard, simple Saxon words like ‘freezing’ can’t really do justice to the icy blue delirium you experience as your feet slip on the river rock beneath you, and your head plunges through the icy, sharp, crackling surface, and you breath the full horror of cruel black winter river water rushing into your nose, when your brain screams before you burst back through the slickening surface, and you drag yourself through the cracking crust, grabbing the freezing, taught, tall grasses blowing ice caked in the rising eastern gusts of terrible, sodden, early winter, the way that your muscles begin to ache in your heavy jeans as you pull yourself out, the tears that freeze to your cheeks and lashes as you begin to trudge back from the bend in the river to the house in the bottoms, the way the ice begins to cake onto the hem of your blue jeans and the tops of your soaked, muddy socks, the way you wail piteously in the painful black dark, but mostly the way that Echidna is now excited into action, like a dog that has the scent of blood - you have discovered the attitude of the bright.

The charm comes to the Valley in the cold, bright days of spring to remind those of us in their care of the possibility for joy. Through their brilliant coloration, which has no place in a landscape bleached flat by our imperious San Luis sun, the finches remind us of joy, a bantering coat of brilliant enthusiasm.

They now arose, chattering excitedly about Ernesto, who trudged around the corner of the root cellar, each ponderous step kicking up more San Luis loess, quietly adhering to his tall boots, once shining with a revolutionary polish, now showing the sorrowful usage of pitiable toil, before gladly alighting upon his sloping shoulders, pecking mites out of his matted hair, drinking tears from the corners of his eyes and sweat from his brow, brushing dust from his tall boots with their swiftly charming wings, lifting, in a naive chorus of ornithological idiocy, the stone-filled rucksack draped across his flagging body. It had been nearly two years since Ernesto collected Pinkie, gathering him into his passionate embrace, and taking him away to fight European fascists. Now Ernesto appeared as though by magic in a shimmering aura of goldfinches, and I ran to him in greeting. ‘Neto!’ I cried, and a bright smile crossed his tired visage, golden light flashed in his dark, dusty eyes, I felt the joy coursing through his body as we embraced.

Mother flung the door open behind us, and the finches fluttered forth into the unmitigated blue and the unrelenting bright, atomizing into dozens of brilliant sparks, and it was as though they had never existed.

‘Where is Pinchas?’ Mother demanded, and, like the searingly light and vicissitudinous San Luis atmosphere, which changes her mood from inviting warmth to cold menace as a cloud passes before the early spring sun, so Mother’s tone of fearful desolation drove every other sensation away. I let my arms fall from around his body. As though a stone-filled rucksack had been dropped across his sloping shoulders, I felt Ernesto weighted down upon me, and in swift dread I flung his arms from me, and I stepped back from his failing body. Observing now coldly his defunctive eyes I spied the truth in the deep lines, the lightless depth, the dreary lethargy.

‘Please, Senora, may I come inside?’ Ernesto murmured, and no more need be said, for it was clear to Mother that Pinkie was no more, and she bolted toward Ernesto, the cleaver still in her hand, a snarl escaping her wild lips as she thrust herself forward. As she tripped over her apron and fell toward the hard-packed dirt, her hands extended forward, Ernesto rushed toward her to break her fall. The cleaver, careening toward the earth, sliced through Ernesto’s outstretched right arm, and a grotesque flower blossomed through the brown suede of his fringed coat, the magnificent red boiling forth and racing down the tassels even as he caught Mother in his arms, the bloody cleaver crashing into the hard packed dirt and worn out rocks, the loess, kicked up by the crash, creating specs and islands of earth in the shallow red pool clinging to the blade’s bloody edge. They fell together, and the side of Ernesto’s head cracked smartly against the edge of the concrete stair, his broad brimmed leather hat tumbled to the ground beside him, Mother screaming and beating her fists upon his inert back.

Ernesto came in and out of consciousness after that, bleeding out into the dirt. Before we could find help he died. There was an envelope visible in an inside pocket of his coat. It was addressed to me, and contained the letter Pinkie had entrusted to his care.  

March 7, 1938

Alcaniz, Spain

Joey,

As cold and cruel as Echidna’s dyspeptic moods may be, to live beyond her gaze is far, far worse. There is a cold here which I can only begin to describe for you.

It is a cold that creates its own soundscape - of engines hurtling toward your position in ravening anticipation; of rumbling trucks covered in olive-green tarps transporting young men-at-arms who seem to believe, just as we do, that the great battle must occur right here but who, for whatever reason, have lined up behind opposing battle lines; of hungry, angry dogs, snuffling the perimeter of a farmyard, or a church, or barn, lunging and snarling for our meager, benighted blood; it is a cold that echoes for the briefest moment as the enemy lines us up before a ditch, pulls a luger out from an inner holster within a most marshal trench coat, and squeezes the trigger - a pop, perhaps a snap, a collapse - and then cold silence, soon again rent by the chill of flying machines, seeking us out with machine guns in their turrets and firebombs in their bellies.

But even this cold does not begin to describe the stiffening sickness in this place beyond Echidna’s horizon. This cold, defunctive sickness, which has chilled me until I cannot stop shaking, this sickness that won’t let me feel fully dry, this sickness that has penetrated as an aching then a stabbing pain in my femur, a searing pain in my forehead, a forsaking pain pounding in my temples, a chill pain in my skin - so sensitive that the smallest movement burns bright - this is a cold that can’t exist under Echidna’s gaze, because at a certain point the harridan loses interest, and simply extinguishes the guttering flame she has in any event grown too bored to behold. But here in Alcaniz we exist under different g-ds who have cultivated a different more fecund mood, g-ds who revel in cold suffering.

Joey - I know how unfair it is to send you carking down this diuturnal path. I have always been straight with you, and if this be my last chance I cannot allow it to pass. When you read this letter, I may well have been lost to sheol. I don’t know, even, whether you will ever read this letter, which I am leaving in Neto’s care. Should you never read this or should you yourself perish before, that is alright too. 

You were also created B’Tselem Elohim, and you also will find your own way, and even if your way should end in the same eschatological cold, suffering misery as mine has, that will be ok, too, because there is no meaning in this world g-d left us, beyond that which we imagine for ourselves.

We imagine for ourselves.

I was raised from the fires of Tartar to burn through the hot bright. If you were put on this earth to gather up the sparks of life, to hold them together within your body, to become, in other words, a g-dhead, I am one of those, like so many fireflies blinking into a warm summer night, put here to flash in the hot bright.

My febrile mind always burned with Echidna’s bright, thus I loved so freely and so well, thus g-d packed my short stature and flashing bright life with raw wisdom rather than time to cultivate or burnish his meaning.

And that is why g-d brought you into this world alongside me - you are a geode into whom we fireflies can transmit our bright flashing insights, and where they can gather and grow, and coalesce into something beautifully holistic and meaningful, to become a light, in truth, unto the world. That’s why I have always told you everything I know, why I’ve never held back, even though sometimes what I have shared is beyond your years, or it has scared you or, like now, I have caused you immeasurable pain.

It is because you are a geode, and whether you know it or not, you have the capacity to take it all in, and to protect yourself behind your unremarkable carapace, while the wisdom of the ages gathers itself up within your body, which is a vessel developed by the g-ds to cultivate all of this pain, and flash, and insight and wisdom. 

One day when you have grown quite old (for Joey I believe, despite everything, that you will grow old), you will crack yourself open revealing to the world a brilliantly flashing crystal garden where other people keep their human hearts.

And there will be light.

Love,

Your brother,

Pinkie

PS - When Neto finds you, please greet him with all the kindness of your tender, brilliant heart.