"Burning Pies in Iowa" by Richard Ryal
Kids in stiff clothes knock on the front door for their parents. When I open the door, I face the drooping sun. The light in my face is bright, not warm.
“Margaret.” Their voices fill the glare that blanks my sight. They say my name as if surprised I’m back. The adults’ hands are filled with food for a family that isn’t hungry.
Maddie’s dog runs outside. One of her cats may have dashed back in, weaving between the visitors’ feet. I’m squinting to look down but can’t know for sure.
I gather no eye contact until I’ve unloaded the oversized meals onto any surface I can clear in the kitchen. Each new offering moves another aside. Mother’s chair, between the table and oven, holds a salad on each wide arm and two soup pots stacked in the seat. Other chairs sit deep with different courses around my brother and sister, who bicker while I sort the clean, warm silverware. The cutting board, speckled with parsley, releases aromas, onion and lemon.
Remnants of two tailored shirts, sacrificed for cleaning cloths, wave on the laundry line out the kitchen’s back window. The setting day’s pink elates their dinge. In the front parlor where I slept last night, I noticed the shelves had been undusted for months, so this morning I took a pair of my father’s shirts from their decade of hiding. They’re too big for any of us to wear.
Taking nothing until it takes everything, death must be unlit fuel.
I dry the warm cutlery and dishes and put them away. “When you’re done twiddling those forks, get the salads out,” Maddie says to me in the window’s light near the hallway. “Folks showed up hungry. Don’t know why.” The firefly sun crowns Maddie’s spiraled hair. “We’ll be cleaning up for three days.” Guests in the kitchen pretend not to hear.
I oversee the feasting and the traffic through the parlor and den until my brother and sister handle a few of their social responsibilities. Then I slip upstairs to cry myself out in a walk-in closet. The gray cat uncurls on a shelf of sweaters but ignores me.
I try to do nothing, to drain all the downstairs distractions from my senses so I can start hearing my own thoughts again. Instead, a current wakes and releases from somewhere I never suspected, from a well I haven’t tasted for a long time, it drowns the voice behind my forehead. Its sluggish pulse fills me to the end of every limb. Then a motionless elation, the one that overwhelmed me at the ocean I once saw, it swells a while before subsiding.
I descend the stairs again into Iowa.
Neighbors bring starches and desserts to hold everyone down against the urge in mourning to levitate. The gravity in this food serves everyone in this totter toward winter between the low hills.
Death must be rain, pounding down what it will wash away.
When anyone talks about mom, I nod. No need to listen. It’s a story I know, or just a comment to keep her memory tidy. I thought they would know her better, share something I hadn’t heard.
When I look out at the drying rags, I want to grab them and open the parlor door, no, ax the door, the shelves of the little library, maybe chop the shelves into firewood so the job won’t have to be done again. Those books are harbors for lazy readers, not worth giving away.
The phoenix, I think about that every day now. During the time I came into owning my days, dad once wrote to me, “The phoenix is a stupid bird. It’s time to tell the truth. Think. He’s reduced to ashes by marvelous fire, rises reborn into his standard form. Stupid bird. No miracle in repeating resurrections. Don't wake me again until the phoenix rises as a jellyfish, mosquito or elephant, something more subtle than a familiar spread of feathers.”
I memorized this but still wouldn’t speak to him for another six months. He made a good living teaching philosophies he could not live. Like an astronomer writing about worlds only his telescope can reach, in his sights but not his grasp. An expert in unprovable concepts, great ideas that would never carry his fingerprints. And mother always struggling to fill the canyon between his theories and ordinary life.
Death must be fire, collecting all but the ash.
Death must be an unwitting traitor, doing exactly what’s not wanted.
I look down the hall to the parlor door near the front entrance. Most of all, I want to ax the new couch, it belongs in no parlor, feed whole its bright flower pattern to the fireplace, free the sparks dried in its dismal wood. I feel like a visiting mother, cleaning up where no one else thought to look. Then Maddie, a grown child herself, talks to me like I’m her daughter. But I keep busy.
Between broken conversations in the hall and at the front door, I heat pies in the order they arrive. I scorch one, then the next two, but no one refuses a slice. Metal tines ping against the plates, crack the burnt crust.
Mourners smile at their hosts, bent in question marks over the fact of food.
A poet, professor, and editor, Richard Ryal has worked in marketing and higher education. The beauty of his world still outmuscles his gloom but he stops sometimes for no obvious reason. His recent publications include Notre Dame Review, The South Florida Poetry Journal, and Amphora.
