October 16, 2009
A woman arrives who has eaten rocks. She comes with a story. The neighbors gather round, ghouls in a contest for most ghastly. Their tragic tales ensue. Calamitous disasters of farm and homestead, new equipment misused, some travesty of the gut or groin. Each story must be told, as frequently as possible, each time better than the last, a lugubrious caravan of woe replete with pipers and cooks, prostitutes and peddlers and cobblers and cryers, the wounded with their medics, the journalists and sketch artists, the priests and the potentates and messengers and ironmongers. Tomorrow they will be sicker for it, for this their tricky conjure game.
Despite her apparent tragedy, miracle successes can be orchestrated – savory delight at detail joins house to house in a string along the lane: her fever rose high as heaven, shot right out the glass that bad it was. Took her eyes. Took her hair out. Sure. Why, most of what made her a woman nearly baked up and fried away. Next day, she asks for a bath and a plate of fat back and bellies and for the first time has a singing voice that makes the angels cease their work to hear it.
It’s a jubilee: mint muddled with a wooden spoon, and they take a hammer to a block of ice even with the brown paper wrapper still on it. Take it down to nothing – it’s a great day, a special number day. They cheer the day and the month and the year, find the good book verse for it and run their fingers all over the faces of the words until the block’s all gone and the brown paper sits there empty in the bucket, the skin of some thing left behind. The next day is what they loathe. When everybody wakes and in that first long breath of remembering waits just long enough to realize there’s one less miracle left in the hopper for them, now that the angels stopped to listen and passed on.
An afternoon spent in the village of Appomattox Courthouse, where a hundred years of household stories were eclipsed by the surrender of General Lee to General Grant. It made me wonder what had been their most historic event, before the war ended on their doorsteps? I thought of a woman in one of the houses who had gone into an ecstatic state and eaten rocks, and miraculously survived. That would have been their greatest legend – that would have been their big miracle.