THE FIRST TIME EVER I SAW HER FACE

THE FIRST TIME EVER I SAW HER FACE

The first time ever, throughout a time of quiet discontent. A thickened piece of parchment on top of a pile of similarly sized papers. She lifted the quill pen to etch in her musings. “The List” was the title of her writings and it followed slowly over the next years. Sometimes it was days before she lifted the pen again, and wrote only one word: “cup” or “nail.” She walked to a rectangular box of the same material, bound with wooden spines and brass tacks, and a lock, the key to which she wore on a leather strap around her neck. The objects on the list placed carefully inside.

The pressure of pen separated the fibers and black India Ink spread itself over the groove.

One day she punctured one hole with the “nail,” followed by another and another, and then a soft pink silk ribbon wound its way through the perforations and the other papers became attached. After that, they moved together in and out of the darkness of the box she kept at the foot of her bed.

She lifted the book,  looked inside and repeated: “cup, fork, nail, my real mother and father, Karelia, the Kalevala, blue cloth, Urho, Harpuu.“ None of the words sounded Norwegian, spoken in an ancient tribal sound, a secret language she shared with the paper.

The ink on the cover faded, and the number, not heavy, a tattoo, worn daily folded back as the papers received more ink. The spine, connected the other parts of a whole, moved with the papers, when lifted and placed on a soft blanket of fibers of sheep that “ba-ba-bahahaha’d,” through the open window all summer. The fibers moved with and caught on the pulped dried wood that made the cover and sheets. Privy to the summer sounds, a breeze tickled page edges and lifted them a little as though to read its hidden contents.

The number on top, was not the year the diary came into existence, instead it noted a decade later, not yet in existence. 

ALMA

Her five home birthed children sent off to school, her husband sent to mend a broken fence, her sigh sent off to retrieve imagination, or was it relief? The phrase “surcease of sorrow,” ran around her mind, like a ferret writhing in and out of its tunnels.

Husband, now that was a strange word to her, because he never really “husbanded” anything. He decided Iraq needed him, in a time when military service was not mandatory, in a time when foreign governments in general were suspect, especially in rural America. “God helps those who help themselves.”

“Ah, but we have to keep America safe at home.”

“Bullshit! How does YOU standing in the center of a land filled with IEDs make ME feel safe.” The words were jagged through the hands that held her sobs.

He went anyway, left her with 3 kids and the twins on the way, left her with the farm, left her dealing with the “God Forsaken Town of Valley View.”

“What’s with God?” she wondered as she sat alone in the kitchen. A large faded sheet folded around the ancient gift, that used to have its place in Great Grandmother’s trunk from the “Old Country.” She opened the wrapped browned aged stack of papers held together with a threadbare pink ribbon and tied shut with a slip of leather.   

“Perhaps, Saime’s Diary, has something.” The cover bore a scrawled “1896.”

I SAW YOUR FACE

The piercing cry of a baby filled the small “soddie” as the diary remained at the bottom of the box. The word “Viola” was repeated over and over. The songs Saime sang at night, in the secret language shared on the pages included lullabies, and lilting stories of great men who won their battles through song, of women who carried the harvest, who planted and changed the seasons and brought day and night, and rain and sun to the people. These were the songs heard daily as Saime took out the pen to write again, a living story she recited  to the little Viola.

She told the story of Urho, of when he became lost and was swallowed up by the river. She wrote about the time she sang the river away, only to find him part of the clay and rocks, reborn. She told of his little red shoe, the one that told her where he was. And she wrote it all with the same quill pen and black ink she carried in that box, wrapped tightly in a box of treasures that traveled across the sea and land to find a new home.

The paper wrapped around the pages, a map of a farm, stayed there from the last day of 1896, when Saime placed her story in the bottom of that box. The box sat on a dirt floor at the foot of a bed, in a “soddie”, on a 180-acre plot of land, according to that map attached to another 180 acres, that stayed in Saime’s name.

The box remained, through the bitter cold winters when the house was empty, to the hot summers so hot, it could’ve burst into flames.

A story written on leaves grown brittle and brown, never burned like that.  

ALMA

The small browned aged papers sat on top of a large plat map. Etched on the paper, a kind of plat map of the county, were the words “Saime Jorgensen.” Alma looked past the browned cover with the numbers 1896, and looked more closely at the outline of the boundaries of the property.

Jorgensen, her maiden name: it meant the land deed belonged to one of her relatives. There were over 360 acres involved. She needed to talk to Henry, that fence he repaired was on her land, not the neighbors.

She shook her head. The house was so empty without the children.

I SAW HER FACE

She looked so much like Saime, she could pick up a pen and write her scractch another number on the cover.  

But she looked past the diary to the paper that hid the story for so many years. She didn’t touch the brittle papers. She looked out the window and sighed. She took a big square object with letters in metal and pounded them and made a clanging noise and then a bell rang. A harsh white paper emerged slowly with perfectly formed letters. No pen could do that, make that noise, or print the letters perfectly every time. Could she sing the Kalevala or the story of Urho, or maybe play had the stringed wooden Harpuu, that added another voice to the stories as it played.

She looked like Saime.