THE SOUND THAT CLOUDS MAKE

by Lones Seiber - 1st place KWG Award for Fiction, 2008

“His children are far from safety; they will be crushed at the gate without a defender.”
Job 5:4

My older brother Jason called from Carson Springs last night.
“Mary? Uncle Curtis died yesterday,” he said, not bothering to tell me who it was; in the fourteen years I’ve been gone, it’s only the second time he’s called; the first was to tell me that Papa had died; although I lived only a couple of hours away, I didn’t return for the funeral. Jason tried calling collect, as he did the first time, but I wouldn’t accept the charge. He is not someone I care to hear from, but what choice do I have? He’s still my brother, the only family I have left. Momma died when I was a baby.

“It’s 2 A.M. and I’m drunk again,” someone sings from my car radio. Dave Matthews, whoever that is. I’m on my way to St. Mary’s Health and Rehabilitation, that large cluster of yellow buildings out by the Holston River, the ones with the red tile roofs, sort of festive looking, Spanish looking, even, where I’ve worked for over ten years as a nurse. They can call it what they want, but it’s still a nursing home, and those inside: the sick, the crippled, the simple-minded, and those who for other reasons can’t be turned out, all of whom I think of as my patients, are now called residents.
I push scan, trying to find something familiar, and yawn, having slept fitfully following Jason’s call. Outside the radio, it’s almost 5 A.M. in a slumbering world of Fazoli’s, Kawasaki, and Pizza Hut. Now and then I’ll meet another car, someone inside squinting against the splash of light, and the only other people I’ve seen are inside a Waffle House: the cook, wearing a paper hat that looks like a boat, and a red-headed waitress in a starched, tan uniform leaning on the counter, both staring out at the night and smoking. I stop for a coffee to go.


When the waitress sees me climb from the car, she smiles and fills a Styrofoam cup.
“My angel of mercy,” she says as she pops a top on. “Large with double cream.”
“I need it this morning,” I say as I pay and leave a fifty-cent tip. “Thanks.”
“How’s the family?” she says.
“Everyone’s fine.”
“Bring them around sometime. I’d like to meet them?”
“I will.”
“Have a good one, darling,” she calls to my back.
The only other customer, a withered, old man, wearing a brimmed hat, straddles a swivel stool down by the restrooms, hands wrapped around a cup, elbows resting on an opened newspaper.

The news about Uncle Curtis neither shocked nor saddened me. He’s someone I would never mourn. I was ten or so when he started coming around our house at night. When I’d hear his beat-up old Plymouth crunching the gravel outside, I knew what was about to happen. I’d pull the covers up over my head, but it never did any good. He’d bring a case of beer inside, and I’d hear him and Papa laughing and the cans popping for a long time in the front room, but then, when Papa stopped laughing, Uncle Curtis would open the door to our room, slowly, and then make his way over to my bed, like a ghost, the floor creaking eerily under his socked feet. Sometimes, I’d have fallen asleep, which made it worse, like awakening to a nightmare.
“It’s God’s will,” he’d whisper, unsnapping his overalls, his breath wet and warm, smelling like something diseased, and tug the nightie up around my neck with one hand, the other covering my mouth. I’d hear Jason moaning and grunting in his bed each time after Uncle Curtis left, but after a while, that wasn’t enough for him either.
I had dreams back then, about how things would be better for me someday: a husband whose success and good looks would make everyone envy my good fortune.

“He died of something called ALS,” Jason said when he called the night before.
“Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” I said.
“Yeah. That’s it. Ever’thing just quit workin’ one by one. He went from a cane to a walker and then to a wheelchair. The last couple of months he couldn’t get out of bed. It was a fuckin’ mess, him shittin’ and pissin’ all over himself. Sometimes his cousin Rachel’d call and I’d go over and help her get him up for his bath. She took care of him toward the end. You remember Rachel?”
“Yes,” I said and switched the phone to the other ear.
“They’d had their differences, but I guess when push come to shove, there wasn’t nobody else to do it, so she had to, her bein’ Christian and all. Folks say she tried to talk him into makin’ peace with the Lord before he died, but he’d already give up on God and preachin’ when he couldn’t walk no more. Claimed that God shoulda looked out for him. I guess I can see his point.” Somewhere on his end I heard a dog bark. “You married?” he asked after a moment.
“Yes, married.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yes. I’m happy. How about you?”
“No,” he said and laughed that annoying, wheezing laugh I remember, like an asthmatic fighting for breath. “Still waiting for the right one to come along,”
But she never would. There had never been that many eligible girls who stayed in
Carson Springs. Most who had anything going for themselves fled as soon as it was legal, and those who didn’t seemed to go from high school to frumpy middle age with no memory of the years in between. Besides, Jason never had much to offer. He’d quit school before I did, but he didn’t have to. He was six feet tall and still riding the school bus. He couldn’t fit in the seats anymore; none of them could. There wasn’t much to do after that. Now and then he’d find a job, saving enough for the down payment on some pickup, driving it for a month or two before grim-faced, out-of-town Hispanics in tight suits came to take it back, but most of the time he spent staying high and huffing gas with his buddies.
“That boy has a whole lot of quit in him,” Shane Wilson told Papa when he fired Jason for laying out of work after only two weeks pumping gas at the BP Station.
“How’s …I forget...what’s your boy called?” Jason asked after a moment and sneezed into the phone.
“Anthony. And he’s fine. He’s playing baseball now. He’ll be going into high school this fall. He’s very bright. Straight A student.”
“Why’d you name him that?”
“I don’t know. Liked the sound of it, I suppose.”
“Then everything turned out okay?” he said followed by a loud click and then a soulless, mechanical voice requesting more coins. After a few seconds of silence, the request was repeated, and then a dial tone buzzed.
“Everything turned out fine,” I said.

We grew up in a community called Ashland, just a stone’s throw from Carson Springs, a forgotten corner where the trailer parks grew. No signs announced it, and it never appeared on any map, sitting out there at the edge of hill country, but the hills weren’t that much either, red and barren, covered with wind-twisted, stubby little trees incapable of offering shade, looking more like fallen clouds. People with means lived on the other side of Carson Springs, over near the river. Ashland had one Baptist church, a gun shop, and hordes of stray cats back then. When Jason was old enough, he used to shoot the cats with an old .22 single-shot, but nobody ever complained. He didn’t bother with burying or taking them off, just left them where they died, their eyes reflecting the sun, their mouths frozen open as if they had been in the middle of something.

“When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below…then you will enter the Kingdom!” a radio preacher rants to an accompanying chorus of “Amen!” in the background. I cut it off and turn into St. Mary’s. I never have a problem finding a parking place, even on Sunday afternoons when most folks should visit. Those annoying salmon colored lights mounted on stanchions around the building, the ones that make everything look jaundiced, are beginning to flicker off as day fans up from the horizon, chasing the stars. Overhead, crossing strings of manmade clouds glow pink from the sun I have yet to see.

I fled Ashland with Anthony barely two weeks old, before he was Anthony. Papa had hired a Black woman to help with the birth, but he wouldn’t allow her to stay the night. It wasn’t supposed to have happened, not as it did anyway, to an unwed sixteen year old, so everybody acted as if nothing unusual had occurred inside our house.
Anthony was a good baby, never whimpered, so he was easy to travel with. I’d dropped out of school before I was showing. I had some money saved, and was able to earn more by babysitting, working the harvests, and waiting cars at the Copper Kettle Drive In.
I walked to downtown that morning, with Anthony bundled in a blanket on one arm, a small suitcase in the other hand, and sat on the steps of Shirl Whitson’s General Store trying to beg a ride out to the junction with State Road 43 to catch the Greyhound. The few people who drifted in were either too busy or headed the other way.
Around nine, Katie and her Uncle Ray pulled up. We had both been juniors when I dropped out, friends in high school, sitting together at lunch, Katie often sharing hers, but outside of school, her uncle and aunt would not allow us to visit.
When she saw me, Katie took the steps in one.
Her Uncle Ray frowned at me and went inside.
“What happened?” she said. “ I was worried.” And then she stared in awe at the bundle in my arms. She folded the blanket back. Her eyes lit up. “Is this yours?” she said almost in a whisper.
“Yes.”
“Can I hold it, is it…?”
“A boy,” I said and handed him over.
She cradled him to her shoulder, lifting his tiny scrunched face away for a look.
“He is simply beautiful. What’s his name?”
“I haven’t thought one up yet.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Trying to find a ride out to the junction.”
Ray came out with a bag tucked in the crook of his arm.
“Why?”
“I’m leaving.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, handing the baby back. “Maybe Uncle Ray can take you,” and then to him: “She needs a ride to the junction.”
“It’s too far out of the way,” he said brusquely, “and we got things to do.”
A man wearing a limp cap came outside, the screen door slamming behind him.
“Shirl said you’s looking for a ride out to the junction,” he said in a loud voice as if he was hard of hearing.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, hop in. I’m heading that way,” he said and stepped off the porch, steadying himself against the rail.
“Good luck,” Katie said. “I’ll pray for you. Please write me.” She ripped a piece off the paper bag he Uncle Ray was holding, scribbled, and handed it to me. ”Promise?”
“Promise.”
I stuffed it in my jeans pocket and climbed in.
“All set?” the man said after I closed the door. A faded, praying-Jesus air freshener dangled from the rear view mirror by a string. His shirt had dark circles under the armpits.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
He drummed the steering wheel with his thumbs and hummed Amazing Grace as we rode out of Carson Springs; I glanced back, watching it fall away, Katie standing by the opened door of her Uncle Ray’s pickup, waving until we turned the corner. I remembered hearing that bad things happen to those who look back, like Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt, so I trained my eyes on the road ahead: heat shimmering just above the blacktop like an unsettled mist; yellow, centerline dashes sliding by hypnotically to the side; power poles, skewed by wind and time, blurring past; now and then grasshoppers splattering into greenish- yellow puddles against the windshield.
Like Uncle Curtis, the man said he was a preacher who couldn’t make a living at it. A lot of them couldn’t back then. Through the week he worked as a farrier. He drove an old, Dodge pickup that was eaten up with rust, the road rushing backwards through a hole between my feet; tools and cans and car parts rattled around the bed. The cab smelled of ointment and burnt motor oil.
“Gonna be a hot one,” he said, and then, while driving with his knees, hooked a tangle of Red Man with his finger and wadded it into his cheek with a thumb. He had a thick mustache and hair curling out of his ears.
When he found out I wasn’t married, he used scripture to lecture me on sin, quoting one passage after another, stopping occasionally to catch his breath, citing chapter and verse for each as he went, but it didn’t seem directed at me personally, and I didn’t take it personally, almost as if he wasn’t lecturing me but someone like me, someone neither of us had ever met, but still, someone we could both pity and wish redemption for.
“Amen!” I said each time he paused to inhale. He seemed pleased.
When we reached the junction, he insisted that we pray. I bowed my head and held Anthony perfectly still, although I could feel something wet and warm against my lap. The man asked God to bless the President, the Governor, the troops overseas, me and Anthony, and just about everybody else he could think of, and then, with a wink and a two-fingered salute, he pulled away leaving me sitting on the suitcase, sweating, with Anthony straddling my knee. Across and a ways down the road, a gang of raw-necked vultures, their wings lifted for balance, as if performing some macabre ballet, ripped at the rotting flesh of a flattened dog, its head twisted around, its mouth opened as if it had just turned to confront the thing that killed it.

As I load my medicine cart and rattle along the hall toward the patients’ rooms, a constricted voice from above the Styrofoam ceiling orders Doctor Kazmi to call the west nurses’ station. He’s from somewhere else and speaks Pidgin English. All the doctors here are from somewhere else and wear thrift-store suits. I’m not sure how much they know, because they always grin and agree with anything I suggest.
The halls are filled with the odors of urine and bleach, and the ubiquitous sound of a piano and muted French horn playing movie themes no one can name. It’s something I’ve gotten used to, or perhaps anesthetized to, all of it: an empty bed that held someone the day before, someone I’d come to know and care about; even the nonsensical chatter and forlorn cries from minds gone or going bad become anonymous after a while, an indistinguishable part of everything else, like those children with wedge-shaped faces I see on television, holding empty bowls as an 800 number scrolls across the bottom.
“How’s Anthony?” my friend Irene asks.
“It was just kind of stomach virus,” I shrug. “One of those kid things.
“Good,” she says and keeps mopping like she’s sawing a limb. Her hair is twisted into dreadlocks that dangle like ice chains. She goes along always with her shoulders down, her head lowered, like an abused animal anticipating another beating, her body pitched forward as if she might at any moment topple on her face.
Irene keeps the floors in the halls and rooms so shiny you can use them to put your makeup on. That’s her job. Make the floors shine. First impressions. That’s what the administrator says. It seems important.
Although the work is mind numbing, being a scrubwoman is just temporary. That’s what she says. She took a course in cosmetology, and graduated even. Fixing hair. That’s what she was born to do, she says. Or at least that’s what she used to say. The course cost twelve hundred dollars. She said it’s a lot of money, but it’s an investment. She’s still making payments. She’s waiting for a call from the placement lady at the college, and then, piss on this, she says. She says it should come any day. That was all a while back. We used to talk some; she did most of the talking, about what she was going to do. She talked about the white smock she would wear, having her own clients, the tips she could earn. She said she was even checking the classifieds for a house to rent; she would have to move into a bigger place, once she got on her feet, for the business, for her own business eventually, right there in her own house. She offered to do my hair for free once she got set up, said it needed a lot of work. As I say, that was some time back. After a while she stopped talking about it. She never mentions it, and neither do I.

They keep a gentle-natured Irish setter in the facility that is free to wander the halls and enter rooms at will. His name is Sparky. He is a part of the therapy, and it seems to work: his presence brings a smile from most residents. Sometimes he follows me outside during lunch, and we’ll sit under a sugar maple while I stroke his head, his eyes narrowed contentedly, his tongue lolling to the side.
When I was around six, I had a little, mutt terrier I named Grover. I don’t know where he came from. Just walked up to me in the yard one day wagging that tail. He was a good dog. Never got in anybody’s way, and the only time he ever barked was when the cows came too close to the barbed wire on the north side of the house. That’s because they weren’t our cows and he knew it. A smart little dog. He would have had to be, out wandering around like that, but then he went away one day. I called at the back screen door for about a week, putting water and table scraps out for him at night. It would be gone the next morning, but Jason laughed and said it was the possums that got it. Then I had another one, some kind of spaniel mix. Walked up one day just as Grover had. He had long ears but not much of a tail. I called him Boyd, but then he went away, too. There were others that went away, a lot of others it seemed, but I quit naming them after Boyd.

It’s hard on any woman, raising a baby alone, but for me it was even more trying, watching Anthony closely at first for any signs: counting fingers and toes, clapping hands close to his ear, seeing if he could follow my finger with his eyes, things like that, but it wouldn’t have mattered: Anthony died in Knoxville eight months after we left Carson Springs. Something to do with his lungs, a genetic defect, they said.
“He was already dying the moment he was born,” the doctor had said and did his best to console me. “Nothing you could have done. Nothing anyone could have done. Nobody’s fault. Just one of those things that happens, and we don’t understand why.”
The hospital wanted his body, for medical research.
“We don’t see many infants with this condition,” said an older man, with a kind face and gray hair, as delicately as he could. He placed a hand on my shoulder and invited me into his office. “I don’t know what you’re going through; it wouldn’t be truthful to say I do; I can only imagine, but it might save another life. It would be his legacy.”
I didn’t feel right about giving my baby up like that without a decent burial. They promised a memorial service later with his remains cremated and placed in an urn, but it wasn’t the same. It was as if I had become one of those who had betrayed him, too. At first I said no, but they offered me two thousand dollars in addition to paying his medical bills, so I was able to move out of the shelter into a two-room apartment and buy a small-screen television.
I heard somewhere that death comes like a thief in the night. Maybe it’s from The Bible. I can’t remember. I also read in a poem, most of which I’ve since forgotten, that it comes, as it did to Anthony, as something less than a whisper, like the sound that clouds make.

On Sundays I help push the cafeteria tables and chairs to one side so that the Black Jesus-jumpers in shiny suits can hold church services. Some of the residents cannot make it on their own, so I guide their wheelchairs down, hold the Broadman hymnals open while they sing off-key, and stay with them until it’s over. Sometimes I’ll listen to the sermons, but most of the time I’ll glance through a newspaper.
One Sunday a preacher recalled the tsunami that had devastated the low and vulnerable nations around the Indian Ocean weeks before, swallowing everything in its angry swell, automobiles, houses, people, even, thousands upon thousands, too many to count. I wondered at the time what could have caused the normally tranquil ocean to turn killer like that. An earthquake out at sea, someone said, something about shifting plates miles beneath the surface. The explanation seemed so undramatic, almost benign, so unfitting an incident to have stopped so many lives.
And then the preacher mentioned the baby boy someone had placed atop a makeshift raft in the confused rush of water. When he was found floating alive several days later, believers worldwide proclaimed the discovery a miracle. The preacher then retold the story of Moses’ birth, reading from the second chapter of Exodus, of his mother placing him upon a raft to escape the fate of other Hebrew babies being slain by Egyptian swords, of his being rescued by the daughter of Pharaoh, the man who had decreed his death.
“The days of miracles have not passed!” the preacher declared of the analogy, his voice trembling, his hands opened toward the ceiling. “Praise God!”
“Praise God!” the fat, Black women in white, starched dresses and lace brimmed hats chanted as they danced awkwardly and banged tambourines over their heads.
“She’ll be here soon,” I told an old man with Parkinson’s palsied hands when he asked about his daughter as I pushed him back to his room, although I hadn’t seen her visit for several months.

A year or so after I left Carson Springs, I called Papa to let him know where I was, to tell him I was okay. I might have been crying, but he would have never noticed. He had me hold on while he located a pencil and read everything back as I went. I was hoping he might ask how I was, or maybe even want me to come home, but when he was sure he had it down right, he said: “Okay,” and hung up. I never talked to him again.

“He had a lot of things wrong with him. Too many to fix. But it was the cancer that got him,” Jason said years ago when he called to tell me. “Lung cancer is what they said, but I don’t see it makes a hell of a lot of difference what kind it was. Seemed like it took him forever. Couldn’t do for himself in the end.” He spit away from the phone. “I stayed with him that night. He was watching some Steve McQueen movie when I went to sleep. The one where he’s driving that Mustang?” he said and waited expectantly.
“I remember.”
“Damn good movie.” He whistled at a vehicle passing in the background. “I’d moved the bed right in front of the television. It stayed on day and night. When I got up that morning, they had something on about a wreck up on 64. I shook him to see what he wanted for breakfast, but he was deader’n fuck.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to fill a dead space.
“He’s buried next to Ma, out there behind the church.”
And then the line went dead after a request for more money.

Room 607 is always my final stop of the day. I close the blinds and turn on a nightlight. The woman there is eighty-five years old. Beside the bed, a picture of her when she was young, perhaps in her thirties. A diminutive woman, a beautiful woman, elegant looking even, with dark hair curling up on her shoulders, a whimsical, mischievous smile, and large eyes reflecting a haunting innocence, an innocence that causes my stomach to coil.
There’s another picture, on the bureau, of the old woman in a wheelchair with a young couple and a child, a little girl smiling shyly with a limp, red bow tied in her hair, standing behind; they’re all smiling.
One day I found her holding the picture at arm’s length.
“Who are those people?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think they’re your family.”
“I’ve never seen them before.” And then she turned to me. “Have I seen them before?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure they’re been here.”
She studies the figures for a long moment and shakes her head.
“If I don’t know them, what good are they?” She handed the picture to me. “Do you have family?”
I looked at the smiling faces, wondering if they were indeed as happy as they seemed
“I never married, but I did have a baby once. A little boy, but he died.” I laid the picture face down on the bureau. “It was a long time ago.”

Sometimes during the day I’ll find her, with a bewildered expression, searching the room, looking into closets, the bathroom, under the bed, between towels in stacks, never knowing what she has lost, only that something has been taken from her.

I have only prayed once in my life: a few moments before Anthony died, I simply said “No.” I’m not really sure if it was indeed a prayer; I could have been answering a question, or telling God that I disagreed. Perhaps He didn’t hear me, or didn’t care, or felt compelled to flex His muscles no matter what. I doubt that I will ever pray again, but if I should, it would be the same plaintive cry of those Hebrew babies, thousands of years ago, paying for a miracle with their lives: “What about me?”

After Anthony died, I got a job at the same hospital cleaning floors from midnight until eight, five days a week. When it came time, I was summoned to the chapel for a brief memorial service, with just me, the chaplain, and the man who had made the arrangements. The room was small, with dim, amber lights, purple curtains hanging in folds from the walls, and a pewter Jesus, dangling from the cross by His wrists, behind the altar. Anthony’s tiny urn sat on a glass plate, waist high, atop a narrow, golden pedestal.
The chaplain quoted from Matthew: “Suffer little children…for of such is the kingdom of heaven,” but it was as if his smile and voice were a veneer, as if neither had evolved from birth.
Following a prayer, the words of which I forgot as soon as they were spoken, he took my hands between his.
“God needed him more than you,” he said as if it should silence all my misgivings. “Rejoice in the Lord.”
I could think of nothing to say.
When I picked up the little urn to leave, it seemed so light that I carried it trapped between my hands, as if it might have floated away.
For months Anthony sat alone on a table in my apartment, but in late July I saw a poster, in the hospital break room, announcing a peace rally a week from the following Saturday night. “The Citizens’ Alliance” intended to launch hundreds of peace candles, which it described as translucent boxes, decorated with Oriental symbols for peace and love, mounted atop tiny rafts and illuminated from inside by candles, into the Tennessee River.
At dusk that Saturday, I went to Sequoyah Hills Park carrying Anthony’s urn wrapped tightly in newspaper. Overhead, a jet thundered, its engines screaming for altitude as it rose from McGhee Tyson Airport. A large group had already gathered around a campfire at the water’s edge. One after another, they greeted me warmly, as if I were someone they already knew. Two people gave speeches, their voices free from anger or contempt, extolling the future and its promise of peace through vigilance. By then it was dark, but it was a murky, unsettled kind of dark; the flat, city lights had eaten most of the stars so that only the brightest penetrated the haze.
Beside the campfire, the peace candles were lit and distributed. I snuffed and removed the candle from mine. Then I unwrapped Anthony’s urn and placed it inside.
“What are you doing, dear?” a woman beside me asked, but not unkindly.
After I explained, she quietly gathered a few others until an intimate ring of faces caught in the flickering lights surrounded me. I kicked my shoes aside and waded into the tepid water, tiny waves lapping my ankles, the others following, forming a circle around me. I set my raft on the water, hesitated for a long moment, but then gently urged it away. The others did the same, their lighted rafts surrounding Anthony like an escort, which then joined ragged clusters of tiny, luminous boxes wobbling in the current, making their way, in what seemed a solemn procession, slowly downstream. People began shaking hands and leaving, but I remained, as did the others in my little group, standing in shallow water up to our knees, and watched the lights fade until there was nothing left to see.