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River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative 7.2 (2006) 116-135



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Teeth in the Wind

We forget that we are history [. . .]. We are not used to associating our private lives with public events. Yet the histories of families cannot be separated from the histories of nations. To divide them is part of our denial.
Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. cobscook bay, maine, 1995

"I'm frightened," said the little girl in the next room.

She was supposed to be sleeping, but a northerly wind rattled the house, a cedar-shingled salt box. The gusts whistled through the seams between the roof and walls. Every so often a branch thumped against my bedroom window.

Annie, the child of a friend and a visitor in my house, called for me again. I went to her room and stood in the doorway.

"I'm afraid," she whispered.

"Why?"

"Because there are ghosts in the wind," she said.

What if there were ghosts riding on the wind? Should I tell her I wasn't sure? How much do you tell a four-year-old, especially one who isn't your child?

"Ghosts can't hang on in a wind like this," I said. "They'll be torn away. Anyway, I'm just in the other room. I'll leave the hall light on."

Annie sat up. "But ghosts are made of wind," she said.

"No sweetheart, they're made of spirit. The wind won't hurt you."

Though I tried to speak with tenderness and authority, I doubted what I said. As if I needed proof of my own uncertainty, a series of recollections [End Page 116] unfurled: the hurricane that splintered houses and scattered their parts so you could no longer tell where one dwelling began and the other ended; a freak May snowstorm that snapped old trees as if they were delicate bones; the thick smoke, hanging above the treetops, of distant forest fires stoked by the wind. I knew the wind causes great damage, but I wanted to believe just then in its potential for something like benevolence or solace. If it had been summer I might have taken Annie outside, picked a dandelion gone to seed, and watched with her as the breeze lifted its feathery spores. I wanted her to hear as I heard, in the groaning bough outside my bedroom, the strains of the first cello. Or understand—as Sir Francis Beaufort understood the poetry and violence of a near gale—that in a wind of thirty-nine to forty-six miles an hour the ocean "heaps up" and "streaks of foam spindrift" form.

I might have told her that for Boreas, the north wind, "It was hard to breathe gently, and sighing was out of the question." The nineteenth-century collector of myths, Thomas Bulfinch, made this observation, and perhaps Annie would have thought of Boreas as the kind of trickster who'd sneak an extra cookie when no one else was watching. Maybe then she could invent her own names for the wind, make up stories about it, and forget about the phantoms she imagined.

Instead I told her that ghosts are made of spirit and that the wind wouldn't hurt her. How arrogant I was. How I wish I'd sat on the edge of the bed and traced the outline of her forehead so she would fall asleep feeling safe. I might say I was unprepared for the responsibility of such a gesture. But as I tucked her in I silently congratulated myself for my choice of words. It was as if I had passed a secret test on what grownups should say to children. I was proud to have invented safety out of thin air, and liked how literal it felt. It didn't occur to me that I was disguising my own apprehension. Nor did I see how I had crossed a threshold into complicity with every adult, including those of my own childhood, who left out not only information, but...

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