Songs Water Can Make

Blooming Technicolor in otherwise dull gray North American meadows. Snow, hard New England ground, wind ravaged Midwestern plain, its roots seemed to notice nothing.

In 1997 he expresses regret that it has come to this. The proverbial This being the town’s decision to condemn the old eyesore. He expresses also his thanks for the landscaping work three years back. Never seen so many colors out there. So much purple, more purple every year.

The Harts lived on Babbling Street, which invited all sorts of obvious quips. The street’s namesakes are two south bound streams. Running from the reservoir atop Cobble Mountain, flanking Babbling Street for eleven heavily wooded miles, they meet only twice before, at the edge of town, funneling into Arnold’s Pond, depositing a season’s worth of catchable trout every year. Two miles up stream, they cut under the road immediately North and immediately South of the Hart’s house, making their 2 acres the only yard in town to host both streams.

In 1989 Mona is in the dirt. She is shaking dark, clumped soil loose from a plant’s roots. A man’s shadow has spilled down the long sloping lawn. His head is thrown in elongated gray scale onto her forearm. She is detangling the roots like hair, smoothing them over her thigh. The pond is invisible to both of them. The water reflects no light, shrouded by cattails and tall purple flowers that look like explosions, patchworked with lilypads. The man’s hands keep finding things in his pockets but never extract anything. Mona’s daughter is seven and hides on the bank of the stream. A car pulls in the driveway and all three of them stop breathing.

Unlike most other species of plant, it is known by and sold under its botanical name. This until sale is made illegal. It quickly develops common names, varying according to region.

The man sits on the couch and fills the air with himself. He plucks at denim fringe on his shorts, which are splattered with paint. Blue, white, yellow, brown. Vestiges of house exteriors, a kaleidoscoped work history.

Sixteen days she spent with her fingers in their dirt. Mrs. Arnold on a reclining plastic chair covered with a puffy pad. They had someone else come and till the quarter acre behind the pool so when Mona got there the soil was supple, ready. She worked to the rhythm of the water. It was impossible not to hear it.

Nearly perfect circles, the leaves.

Andy lives with her mother in a giant garden. The house is unfit to be built, but is already built. They kneel in the dirt and trade hearsay, going nightly back through a sinking doorway. Mona tells her someday the house will sink into the ground, the roof will bow and give. Andy picks at dirt under her nails at night, eyes on the ceiling.

By 1993 Babbling Street is quiet. It’s like when hair grows. The streams had gotten quiet by degrees until one day a reclined Mrs. Arnold paused mid magazine page-flip, her arm hair suddenly poised.

Mona arranges the tiny pots in rows on top of newspapers, columns run up and down the kitchen table, little soil mouths open for seeds. She pokes a pencil into the packed soil, a quick stab and retract, until she has moved from one side of the table to the other. Andy follows behind, dropping a seed into each tiny plastic tub.

Endlessly they are seeding. Spring after spring the bank recedes; the cattail patches thin. Flying on the breeze or rolling ever slower on the surface of a stream, the seeds find a place to make roots. Roadside on Babbling Street, the fringes of ponds and yards, the banks of the reservoir, even in the soft grass underneath the stretching arthritic apple tree branches, they grow.

They all sit down to dinner; Andy doesn’t eat. Or breathe. He asks about things like her favorite color.

In 1989 the Environmental Safety Commission for Marshlands is digging up truckloads of purple flowers. Their green logo swipes across white pick up trucks that manage to stay clean even on trips up dirt roads in the rain. White truck beds cradle the uprooted mounds, the contraband purple so bright it makes noise.

The woman’s trunk is lined with heavy plastic. She lays the plants in sideways; they are too tall to keep upright. She pays Mona while Mona watches East, the woman West. It is dusk.

Men are driven distracted at the way Mona walks up stairs.

In summer Mona balances the speakers in the living room window facing out. Budweisers poke from foam holders and pass Andy on the swing set at eye level. The grill balanced over the fire periodically hisses at uncooked meat.

Andy’s science teacher is building a tide pool out of colored paper and foam. She is saying, “Delicate ecosystems suffer at the introduction of dominant foreign species.”

The shiny white truck is in the driveway. Mona kneels on the bank of a silent stream. Men force shovels into the dirt, pushing them through resistant roots with tightly laced boots. There is a sound like biting celery.

Mona is on the floor, laughing up at her daughter who begs her to please go to bed. Her skirt is somewhere outside. The space above the fire looks oily or underwater. The faces across it change but are always familiar.

In 1993 men float silently, rods poised, and catch nothing.

The men watch her kneel there, and tell her quietly that warnings will be informal, but warnings there must be. She sinks into the mud by imperceptible degrees, staying like that until the white truck backs from the driveway, a fraction of garden in the bed.

It’s a shame, she is telling Mona, closing her trunk, to treat something so lovely in this way.

In 1995 it is a cold winter. The top of Cobble Mountain is a tundra. The reservoir’s surface is lily padded with ice. A man and Andy are packed like frozen steaks in the back seat, the nose of the car pointed out over the water, the sun dipping under and making morning some place else. Andy’s mouth is too cold to move. After, they sit there and breathe, thaw.

The woman pays Mona, who has to bend to reach the lawn chair. The woman carefully keeps her hands from touching Mona’s still-muddied fingers.

The wood seemed to give in before impact. It just crumbled, eliciting expressions of disbelief that it survived a strong wind.

Andy is a teenager when she says to Mona (whose forehead rests on the table, her shoulders pointed toward her daughter) while smoking one of her cigarettes, “You’re going to get caught.” But Mona doesn’t hear her.

In a breeze, the tiny circular leaves fall like confetti. It spreads, slows waterways, extinguishes certain species of cattail. It quiets Babbling Street to a whisper where there had been a rush. Andy sits on the bank of what used to be a stream, holding ice to her face. The shades of purple vary by climate, but in New England they are a deep indigo.

She brings her head forward, as if on tracks, and up and back. The ceiling is sponge painted and the texture shifts like water at this moment, always, for both of them. The taste like metal, or like cold. Mona is braced against his weight in the bedroom upstairs; Andy is watching the ceiling melt and laughing, inaudibly, to herself.

They don’t speak about it but somehow it is there, replaced, no matter who goes after it, no matter when.

He is holding the cat up above the fire. He is saying to the cat that its last request must come quickly. Mona and Andy both put a palm on their stomachs; they laugh this same way. The cat leaps, pushing off from what looks like air, leaving the man with a deep mean scratch.

Its stem is rigid, almost a square. Like a child drew it, square stem, circles for leaves.

She puts two fingers in the soft divot just beneath her nose but her shirt caught the first drop. He throws his hands in the air and says look who’s had enough. There is one deep red drop on her white shirt, the contrast distinct. Pans catch rain in three rooms, punctuating any passing moment of silence.

She resists at first, but the town is resolute. They express their hatred of even the thought of possibly speaking to the men who run the organization that sends around the white trucks. They absolutely loathe that idea. And so the old eyesore’s eyes are covered in two by fours, nailed in willy nilly, leaving space to peek in. In the ten years between the boards and the bulldozer it hosts twelve adolescent gatherings, all but one featuring a Ouji board and candles. The foundation, that was the thing. Marshland isn’t good for building; it can’t support a foundation, and eventually, everything will sink.