3:AM Magazine

By Jessica Ruby Radcliffe.

I

Once I lived on a commune made up of around fifteen to thirty households, depending on the season, repopulating a small rural town in the Midwest. We were not on the same wavelength as most of the original inhabitants and they often let us know it, but some of us were friendly with some of them, and the dropout hippie heiress who funded the commune actually owned the whole town, so there we were.

I lived at first in a house that had been built from one of those four room Sears Roebuck mail order house kits that people used to be able to purchase from a catalog. The bundles would arrive by train, lots of bundles all clearly marked, including plans and everything that was needed to build a simple house, or even more bundles and fancy stuff depending on what size house you could afford.

This was a simple little four room house with no plumbing. Its front porch was a concrete slab with a little roof over it, held up by two big turned posts, posts that Willie later painted with trompe l’oeil climbing vines. The property was shaded by an omnipresent three hundred year old oak tree, the biggest, fattest, most wonderful tree for miles around. It had an artesian spring down the hill in back, a cool shady crack where watercress grew and time stood on tiptoe and the opinions of birds took on extra significance.

In the surrounding few miles, every formerly empty house or empty field was filled with the serious or frivolous, musicians and farmers, dirt poor scrapers, Vietnam vets, fortunate heirs, students, politicos, magicians and seekers after stuff on every level.

People built more houses, put up tipis, parked buses, planted crops, made babies, and pretty much got along.

I lived in that little four room house next to the big oak tree. I lived with Lucas, who was almost two years old, and five or six other people. My mother came to visit. She liked to let me sleep in the morning, and she’d take Lucas outside and sit on the edge of the porch, watching him play in the sunshine, keeping him out of the road. It was high summer, when the locusts never stop their song, and silence is an unimaginable thing, and there is so much green green green that you just want to turn green too, and welcome the inevitable.

Faintly, from among the sounds of the early morning woods, half dreaming, I heard a strange “dank-dink-donk” –ing sound over and over at regular intervals. The sound came closer gradually, and with it the noise of slowly moving trucks, and men’s voices.

I put my fingers in my ears and went back to sleep.

My mother sat on the porch hanging on to Lucas, as a curious procession wound slowly past, down that narrow country road. Several vehicles formed a line, with the Willys Jeep at the end. Bosco stood in the Willys, wearing nothing but his overalls, big curly hair flying in all directions, banging on the bottom of an old sauce pan with a big wooden spoon, ultimately commanding the attention of a young buffalo. This orphan buffalo was somehow entranced by the “donk” sound of the spoon hitting the pan, and all the attention and parental guidance from a slowly moving herd of old trucks and skinny half-dressed hippies.

This was the round up, pardner. They were heading home. Everybody waved, and mom and Lucas waved back, “dink dank donk” past the house, and the oak tree, six o’clock in the morning, disappearing down the road.

II

This house was a little house, but it was like the house in your dreams where there is always some extra space that you have never seen before…and more things fit in it than ever could fit.

Herbie came to stay, from somewhere far away, I think. He was dark and slender and Syrian or Greek or something. He had a big black mustache and he was gentle and intelligent and quiet and funny. I think he stayed in Jim’s room. That’s the kind of house it was. It only had four rooms, but I never could figure out where Herbie stayed. Jim sold occult books from a little shop up at the crossroads, next to the gas station and general store.

That fall I went away with a big caravan of buses, fifty vehicles, all made into gypsy houses. Eighteen people slept on our bus, mostly on the floor. There was exactly enough room for everyone to lie down at night.

I got mononucleosis, and Lucas and I went to the city to be near my mother.

In the early spring we came back down to the little town and moved in upstairs at the general store, waiting til it got warm enough to go live outside in the woods. The buffalo died that winter and its skull stood bleaching on a pole outside Seth’s tipi.

I like square buildings, I like to sleep in a corner. I like to make an altar on every wall, four directions max. Above and below are constant, whatever shape house you live in.

They were good people in that house. Larry Lawrence lived there. He’d brought a lot of window pane LSD to sell. This acid was so pure that if you put your hand on the outside of the cardboard box it had been UPS’d in, the light in the room would change. It was so good you could almost see through the box. It was highly molecular.

For the first time in my life I had enough money to give some away. Sarah came up and asked if she could borrow five dollars and I went and got her five dollars and told her, “Don’t ever give it back”. Sarah and her husband had twin boys, and two years later they had another boy born on the twins’ birthday. It was a heady feeling to give that money away, and I really hoped she wouldn’t mind if I gave it to her. That five dollars has come back to me a thousand times. It was obviously one of those serendipitously sound investments.

III

Herbie knew about a scheme where you could breed black widow spiders for the U.S. Government and they would pay you handsomely for your contribution to the whatever-it-was effort. He thought that sounded like a legal, easy way to make money growing something at home, and he was talking about it to anyone who was interested.

He still lived in the little Sears Roebuck house, next to the big oak tree, with a lot of other people, including an odd and beautiful girl named Susan.

Susan had pale skin and long thick dark hair, and a curvy womanly body.  She didn’t always finish her sentences, which didn’t always turn out to be about anything anyway, and it was hard to tell if she really liked you or not. But she was trying very hard to space in, from a very long way away, and she was beautiful, and really those two things combined can make a person perfectly worthwhile.

There were some of those kind of rural pink and grey Christians who lived in their own community nearby. They made friends with Bosco’s wife by successfully helping to wean her little girl from the breast. That child was difficult, and no doubt it was a kinder and more deeply Christian effort than those good-ish people realized, for creating a situation wherein an exhausted mother can get a full night’s sleep is some fine bread cast upon some excellent waters.

Once they had Bosco’s ear these Christians mentioned their chief concern about what was going on in our little community. Not nude swimming or left wing politics; not fornication, or the rampant use of marijuana.

No, it had to be witchcraft, proven by two obvious cases: one being me in my little room with the pictures on the walls, holed up in there, and then walking around the woods quiet for hours on end.  The other was Herbie who, it was said , kept a room full of black widow spiders.

Bosco assured these good people that they had nothing to worry about and suggested at a community meeting that both Herbie and I might want to keep an eye out for marauding Christians.

IV

One night in the cold early spring I woke up suddenly in the dark upstairs at the general store. The upstairs was quiet and deep asleep. The night was under the trees, out-in-the-woods, no electricity dark, still and empty except for some little breathing sounds and a gentle faint murmur of voices carrying from the room below. I stood like a sleepwalker and found my way to the top of the stairs, probably by the gentle glow of that box of window pane acid. I stopped and put two tiny crystals under my tongue. Slipping silently down the stairs, still half-dreaming, to share who knows what with who knows who, in a curling gentle baroque night meeting.

In the warm fragrant room below, by the light of one candle, Robbie and Ellen were keeping their own vigil and tending a fire in the big wood stove. They greeted me, and I sat quietly in my nightgown in a chair close to the stove, and went back to sleep.

I woke up suddenly again.  They both looked at me, and then they knew, because they were both people who knew things easily, and Ellen looked at me and said, “What have you done?” and I looked at her and she said, “When did you do that?” I smiled a little more, I think, and then no more questions, just the kindness and ease of friendships forged through the eons and momentarily touching in time and space. They made me put on a sweater. At some point Ellen blew out the little candle which had been our only light, “to see,”  she said, “what would happen.” With no light, the only source of illumination was the little red shadows outlining the door of the woodstove. The shadows began to roll and breathe, and soon filled the room, revealing the floating body of a big dark dragon, fifteen feet long, five feet high, circling the woodstove about three feet off the ground. It filled every air space in the room, with its head near me, floating hot and so deeply Saturnine, as to be almost malevolent. Perhaps its heat came from the coldness of its eye. It was mine, though…not bad, not good; it was there for me, maybe a guard or a guide although I got some feeling that I could be sizzled at any moment. It was wonderful and scary and just as I began to get worried, Ellen quietly lit the candle again, and all large unusual beings vanished, and Ellen and Robbie looked at each other and said, “Hmm, that felt kind of strange,” and I  didn’t say anything. When I finally spoke, I said, “I’ve got to pee and there’s too many wild dogs out there, somebody’s got to go with me.”

So Robbie went out in the night with me where the air was cold and clear, and there was a bright wet spring frost on the ground, and there were no dogs. We stopped by the side of the road halfway between the general store and the three hundred year old oak tree. I squatted to pee on a slight rise in the ground, moving my feet apart so they wouldn’t get wet.  It was deep deep night and as quiet as frost and starlight and acres of trees can ever be. I stood up billowing slightly in the old sweater and my white nightgown and a pair of someone’s big green rubber boots. We stood in silence for a long moment.

Then I thought of Susan. Susan who I couldn’t understand.  Susan who wanted to be with us so much, but was so far away in her mind. Susan, dreaming, in the house just down the road by the oak tree.

I looked wild at Robbie. He put his arms around me and I began to cry. I wept hot and pure, from my deepest heart, and when I pulled away I looked into his eyes and they became Any Eyes Will Do, and I looked into his eyes and said, “I love you Susan; I love you, Susan, I love you, Susan,”  through his witness, but all for her, “I love you, Susan.”

V

Susan and Herbie fell in love. No, I think they arose in love. Susan adored him. He adored her. She began to speak in complete sentences. She floated; she was beautiful. He had to get a job and he was responsible. She was pregnant and they got married. They went to live in the city and they took a small apartment on the second floor of an old brownstone. Herbie went out one winter evening to get a quart of milk at the corner store. A man came in to rob the store, and stabbed Herbie with a knife. He died. Herbie died before the baby was born.

We love you, Susan.
We love you, Susan.

VI

Ellen went to Europe with an international drug dealer. Robbie went to jail for three years and then moved to Hawaii. Bosco got rich building  RC aircraft in Humboldt county. Willie played accordion in the Tom Waits band. Seth still has the buffalo skull. Sarah died in a car wreck. Her boys joined the Marines. I went to live in England, and then came back.  Susan disappeared.

Lucas bakes bread and lives in a house with lots of people. I think it’s one of those houses you see in your dreams…the one that has more room than you ever knew, and more things fit in it than ever could fit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jessica Ruby Radcliffe is the child of a Spanish aristocrat and an Irish gypsy. She attended l’ecole duTap Dur worldwide and maintains that her life has not been lived to be described in prose. (Photo by Amzie Adams.)

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, December 21st, 2011.