The Folded Heart

Spider Thmor

Spider Tumor When you first told me about the black silk the body spins out, like a terrible cocoon, I imagined her brain was like a bright field the size of a portable movie screen and that a white cone of light cut through the darkness of a room to strike the blank surface hard with the magnified whiskers and hookworms of dust covering the projector's lens, and even as you explained how one side of your mother's head would be shaved and little XIS and G's inked on her cranium by the radiologist, and, failing that, holes might be drilled and isotopes lowered into her brain to lodge near the mass, even then I thought a spider tumor was something we might blow off the surface of the lens or rub away with our shirttails. But this morning, early to visit you at your mother's house, I reached the door as she opened it, bending for the newspaper. Startled, she clutched her robe and held the folded paper to cover her wigless, rune-etched skull. The sun caught her full on the face and for a moment I saw how beautiful she had always been, girlish almost, a countenance death seemed willing to reveal. Perhaps it was the way the sun filled 39 40 the alcove of the porch that reminded me of years ago when I knocked at the same door and finding it open walked quietly into the room where your father lay on the blue couch. And as if we were suspended in air, he motioned that I sit by him and hear his little wish: a large man who wanted one more time to wade into the cold green water of a lake, tilt back his head and float as light as weeds. I sat and watched him skim his hand across the carpet and twist the nap, like seedpods, with his fingers, before your mother found me and eased me from the room, the way, this morning, she eased me past her own death, through the room with its blue couch, to the kitchen, where you stood wet from a shower, a towel wrapped around your waist and the sunlight spinning a hazy web in your hair. And standing there, you were no one if not your father, or his wish to wade out of the water, out of its mercy and forgiveness, and dispel the weave of death which traps and magnifies us in the past and hides from us the brave though startled gestures that begin each day: the hand that reaches down to pick the paper up, the hand that reaches out to lead us past. For fohn Murphy ...