Animal Caller

Sidney Stevens

Arta wheels her mother into the musty house. Lena’s body slumps as though bones and tissue have given way in a mudslide. Her stick-figure shoulders are even gaunter than a year ago when Arta last visited. To be expected — after all, Lena is eighty-seven and has just undergone surgery for a hip fracture. But Arta finds her mother’s aging no less distasteful, a bodily function like vomiting or passing gas that’s best carried out in private.

The dogs bark in the distance — probably in the cottage with Dale. How she loved to play there as a child in the quiet coziness of the old stone springhouse, a smaller version of the main farmhouse, once used to keep milk and butter cool. How she adored exploring the rambling property, then a ramshackle farm that Lena and husband No. 3 bought dog cheap when Arta was five. Before she began to feel trapped in Lena’s messy realm.

“Doctor said to take your meds first thing… I’ll get water.” Arta parks Lena in her bedroom and heads to the kitchen. Cockroaches dart across the worn soapstone counters as she flicks on the light. It all looks the same; exposed wood beams and a walk-in stone fireplace that she and Lena used to pretend was a magic portal to far-off lands filled with magnificent beasts while they cooked. Until Arta began to suspect around age eight that her mother maybe wasn’t pretending and actually believed it was true.

 “How do you stand it?” she hollers, marching back to Lena’s room. “Damn roaches everywhere.”

“I don’t seem to mind,” Lena says weakly. Arta pushes a pill into her mouth and presses the glass to her lips. Water dribbles down Lena’s chin.

“I think you should come home with me.” She dabs at Lena’s mouth with a tissue and releases it by a corner into the trash can. “Just while you recover. Jack’s all for it.”

Lena stares into her lap, strands of long white hair falling around her face. She reveals nothing. Arta has never fully infiltrated her mother’s baffling and mysterious silences.

“I’ll hire a day nurse while Jack and I are at work. We’ll have dinners together and go for walks in Central Park on weekends.”

“I … I’d just be in the way.”

“Mom, I can’t keep running to Pennsylvania every time you need help. I have a company to run.”

 “Dale’s here with me.”

 “God, you’ve been divorced twenty years.”

“He’s still my best friend.”

Arta rolls her head from side to side, uncoiling tension. An old trick. Time to start a to-do list. Goal number one: Provide Lena the best care available during her recovery and thereafter. It’s what you do.

 Arta’s phone buzzes; she presses it to her ear. “Yes, I promised a list of CEO recruits to Alcon by Thursday.” She paces, trying to keep her voice calm: there’s just so much going on, almost more than she can handle. Across the yard dogs stampede toward the house, banging against the front door in thunderous unison. “Yes, new blood — we need to wow them. Leo, you’re a lifesaver.”

Arta slides her phone into her blazer pocket. “God, the wolf pack’s arrived.”

“They’re just excited.”

Arta hurries out to open the front door, phone buzzing again. “Yes, I’ll be back Tuesday.” Dogs burst in, flattening her against the wall. “Damn it,” she groans, shoving them, one by one, toward Lena’s room. “No, not you, Leo. Sorry.” She follows, batting away the stink of warm dog breath like cobwebs. “I’ve gotta run, but thank you, Leo.”

The dogs have absorbed Lena, a single, ravenous organism, multiple tongues licking her face, hands, neck, anything they can reach, every muscle, every tail, in motion. The two smallest dogs — Arta forgets their names — leap into Lena’s lap.

“My god, five dogs now.”

“Branson brought home the new one.”

“Didn’t some bum give you Branson?”

“My plumber was dumping him at a shelter. I couldn’t allow it.”

“Right,” Arta says, squashing away the sudden sense that she’s the one being devoured by dogs, ancient and decaying like Lena. No time for nonsense. She brushes pet hair from the bedspread to sit. She’ll never be like her mother, that’s for damn sure.

“You and I’ll head to New York on Tuesday, and then we’ll talk about whether you can come back here.”

Lena’s form recedes, slow but unmistakable shrinkage like the tide ebbing from shore.

Arta types a quick note to herself: “Call realtor. Marketing idea: Perfect Poconos vacation home for sale. Charming fieldstone farmhouse with fifteen acres of private gardens and meadowland surrounded by pristine state forest land.”

My mouse sits with me on the patio this morning just like before surgery. Her miniature whiskers quiver in the July sunshine. I’m reminded of the line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “And a mouse is a miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.”

On my lap, Mimo, my ginger-colored tabby named for my favorite cocktail, a mimosa, opens a drowsy green eye and closes it again, unstirred by the creature's presence. I, on the other hand, am oddly moved, as always, by her intelligent gaze taking me in. One creature beholding another in awe.

Arta pushes open the side door, bearing a loaded tray of eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee. My mouse retreats into the shadows.

“Eat up,” Arta says, depositing it onto the patio table and wheeling me over, organized as always. It’s far more than my poor appetite will allow, but I don’t say so. The presentation is perfect, as always, complete with a single yellow rose from my garden and faded linen napkin she unearthed from the back of some drawer.

She gives a perfunctory pat on my arm. Her long fingers, manicured nails painted icy mauve, remain lightly and impartially there, attempting to convey compassion as if I’m a stranger she’s obliged to care for. We watch silently as my silkie hens scour the yard for breakfast, strutting their profusion of ornamental feathers over every inch of ground like a fluffy search-and-rescue squad. Beyond is my wildflower garden of native zinnias, black-eyed Susans, and purple coneflower sloping down to the meadow.

“Please eat something, Mom.” Arta pushes the tray closer and glances at her phone.

I imagine us talking as we did before she boarded up her soul.

The dogs charge off after a squirrel, barking up a ruckus. Squawking hens scatter. Arta nearly loses hold of her phone.

“Never a dull moment,” she mumbles. Frown lines deepen around her mouth. I hear what she means.

I've been alone for twenty years now, since Dale and I split. Without a man maybe, but never lonely. Until recently.

Dale was the steadiest of my four husbands, rock solid despite our age disparity. He was the one who insisted we renovate this eighteenth-century farmhouse and nourish its quiet rooms, that we try to bring life back to this land. He put in more windows to give me sunlight and trained sweet blue morning glories to twine through my trellises. He converted the barn into my print-making studio. I loved him for his care, and still do, but my twenty years on him eventually resulted in divergent needs. Such glorious release from his ever-hovering ownership of my time.

I've never longed for close company again. Until now. This is a new kind of loneliness; not like nearly fifty years ago when Arta was six and Thom — my husband after Lorik — left for Vietnam. Lorik was Arta’s dad. We stayed together for four years before his scent, once so enthralling, stagnated and I knew love had passed. Still, we lasted two years longer than Ennis, my first husband, who couldn’t abide my lack of domesticity, which never burgeoned into sumptuous dinners, clean shirts, and babies as he hoped.

The point is loneliness was temporary then, easily relieved in other beds, dissipated in other arms. There was time back then for loneliness to run its natural course, for new beginnings.  Which is how I found my way to Dale when he answered my ad for a handyman just as Thom’s letters from Vietnam were drying up.

This time, loneliness seems as permanent as the pain in my bones that no amount of warmth or ointment can soothe. What time is left at my age for new beginnings, for an unhurried dance with a new soul? I need something different now, some cache of tender comfort, as yet unknown, to fill my remaining days with meaning.

“Ugh,” Arta sighs as a text arrives. “They’re lost without me at work.” She types furiously. Mimo leaps from my lap and slinks away. Arta’s phone buzzes. “Hi, Sweetie….Can I call you back? Perfect!” She smiles and continues typing. “That was Jack … probably on his way to Chicago.”

 “Never a dull moment,” I say before I can stifle the words. Two butterflies — one ivory and one buttery yellow — swirl before me in a dance that I recognize as pure beauty, just for me.

“Jack and I like to stay focused, accomplish things,” Arta says, lips tight. She rises. “Well, I’m off to clean — maybe get your kitchen properly scrubbed.”

Perhaps I should live with her. Even with Dale nearby, my thoughts often bend sideways now, unable to focus on what needs tending. The winters go on too long, blanched, frigid moonscapes that make me forget there are colors. In summer my spirit no longer lifts to the light in rhythm with the plants. Even time in my studio no longer assuages isolation. Some days my hands ache too much to turn the handle of my etching press. I fear the thoughts I have there, whispers from a place I don't want to know yet.

My mouse inches closer again. Black, shining eyes search mine with empathy. For just a moment I feel blessed to exist together in this magical realm called life. I remember I am loved, even in loneliness.

Arta picks her way through tall, wet grass toward Dale working by the cottage. “It’s been awhile,” she says. His arms open, but she remains just out of reach, offering a hand instead.

“What a morning,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck underneath long, gray hair. “Mama snake and her babies — fifteen of them — set up shop under my bed… Finally got them released in the woods.”

“My god,” Arta gasps. She steps back, scanning the forest for signs of life, then gradually returns to the disrepair around them, which has escalated since she was last here: an untidy pile of mud-crusted stones beside the cottage, a dilapidated row of empty wooden bird feeders along the far garden, rotting logs strewn alongside Lena’s studio, flower beds choked with vines.

“This is Lena’s world, don’t forget.” Dale smiles a rare smile, barely perceptible if you don’t know him. “Sure not the same without her here.”

You had to hand it to Dale: His marriage to Lena might be over, but he never abandoned her or fell out of favor like the others. That includes, of course, Arta’s father, whom she hasn’t seen enough to assess either his merits or failings, and is happy to keep it that way.

“We have to talk,” she says, hesitating. Best to just say it and get this done. “I’m taking Mom to New York — she needs full-time care. Can you fix up the place to sell? You can stay until then.”

 He studies her without a discernible reaction. Is he upset? Offended? She’s never been able to read Dale. “Your mom’s about the best person I know,” he says finally. “Has a kind of magic — a wild heart. Never seen anything like it.”

Typical Dale non sequitur. Never quite on mark with the situation at hand. Arta refrains from saying what never seems to get said: Lena has magic alright: the magic of attracting strays and misfits into her life — animals and humans alike. That includes him, a man who dropped out of college to “follow his bliss” as an “artisan” carpenter. He and Lena barely scraped together enough to keep Arta and themselves in food and clothing.

“Does Lena agree to this?”

“She doesn’t have a choice.”

“I know you mean well…”

“Dale, can you resuscitate this place in a month?” Arta checks her phone. “By August 7?” She takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. So many people depending on her, so many responsibilities, back home and here. Where will Dale go after this? Is she right to take Lena away? Should she slow down? Thank god for Jack, his willingness to accommodate her family burden. Her good sense in choosing him.

“Of course we’ll pay you.”

“Sure Artie.”

 She clenches against the nickname. “I’ll print a list of tasks in order of priority.” She makes a mental note to ask later if he’ll take the dogs and cat, too. “I’m sorry, Dale,” she adds, struggling against the tug of old melancholy she thought was long exterminated. A day at a time, that’s how it’s done. Organization and willpower. After that, it’s no longer her problem. 

I study Arta wandering through my studio taking inventory of my prints — a commander inspecting her troops. She runs a hand through perfectly bobbed hair, shining darkly as it was thirty years ago, impeccably dressed, as always, in a plum-colored silk blouse and slim-fit white jeans. Her slender hips still swing with the toying indifference of a pretty girl. But at fifty-four, the old sauciness has recast itself as imperiousness. Only her earrings, made of large silver beads and hunks of lapis, belie the fact that she is my daughter, that vibrant child who loved to dance in the snow and daydreamed of gypsies.

Prints are everywhere. Hung on every inch of wall space, piled on chairs and benches, stacked in barn stalls. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands. All sizes. Framed. Unframed. I see it suddenly through her eyes — this giant mess.

She forces a smile. "Have you considered an art sale?”

“I still sell prints at the gallery in town.”

She observes me, arms crossed. I struggle to imagine myself in one of her five bedrooms, each white-carpeted, dustless and airless like unvisited mausoleums, adorned with tasteful, generic art, living without plants, without asymmetry.

“I remember that gallery,” she says. “Still hanging on…amazing.” Without much joy I realize I'm lucky to have her, this woman for whom colors and time are no longer spun with infinite possibilities but instead are unrelenting reminders that everything fades and hours waste away without something to show for the moments spent living.

 “Remember how we used to make up songs about the animals in my prints?”

“Of course,” she says.

So many slow afternoons spent in this studio, her child-warm body pressed against me, intense, dark eyes watching me work, handing me tools, lost in creation. Sunshine still slants through the high windows as it did then. Cicada song fills this space with slow summer joy. Exactly the same. I can still catch the aroma of honeysuckle and pine drifting in on warm breezes.

Arta and I had fun. I’m certain we did. She adored my prints, helped me concoct fanciful rabbits dancing at midnight, silvery toads leaping into star-filled heavens, wolves with golden eyes running through forests of luminous trees. That was back when we raised alpacas and peacocks, and made yogurt and bread together… when we were still in love. Before Arta decided we sprang from separate human species, precluding fellowship.

“I still have that print of the bear and cubs you made me,” she says, as kindly as she’s able. A love offering. “It’s on my office wall… I always get compliments.”

“A good omen — bears.”

“So you’ve said.”

I can hear her impatience. How will she manage me in her world? There was a time when she saw things as I do. I’m certain she did.

“My god!” she exclaims, eyes trained on a skunk in the open doorway, unblinking, unforgiving.

“That’s just Coco.”

“Of course it is.”

“Named for Coco Chanel.”

“I get it. Perfume. Black and white. Skunk. Clever, as always.”

Arta hovers behind me as Coco sidles in and disappears behind an old trunk. “Too bad your luck with men was never as good as with animals."

My reaction surprises me. I want to thrash her until what she’s become bleeds away. How can I explain? My men. Deep, profound loves. Some brief, some lengthy. They were — and are — mine. Full and successful loves. To me. All of them pieces of my soul.

“We’ll pack tomorrow,” Arta says. She recites a rundown of necessary tasks, like a prayer, clearly energized and nourished by the shot of order and direction.

Does life finally come to this, young taking back their old, dismantling their lives, discounting and discarding what displeased them, preparing them to die?

I know. Why do we pretend?

Rage slips into the afternoon sunlight. Peace fills the shadows. I want to lose myself there forever, where comfort flows.

Surely Arta will understand I can't leave. Already, I miss her terribly, my Arta.

Lena’s moans jolt Arta as she steps into the shower. She throws on her floral silk robe — the one Jack gave her last Christmas with matching nightgown — and rushes to the sunporch.

Tears stream down Lena’s crumpled face. “It’s dead,” she cries, her voice barely a whisper.

“What’s dead?”

“The baby wren drowned in my table fountain trying to drink.” Lena’s eyes are holes of grief. “Its mom and dad couldn’t get in to help.”

Arta stares at the tiny clump of soggy feathers cradled in Lena’s hand.

“They built a nest up there.” Lena points a bony finger at the porch rafter. “Came in through a hole in the screen.” Her blue eyes, once so crystalline, are milky in mourning. She looks prehistoric.

“I patched the hole,” Arta says. “I didn’t know.”

Lena presses the dead wren against her heart.

She’s crazy, right? Joey Taglia’s awful whisper floats back from fourth grade. He’d seen it too, Lena in her queenly cape on the school steps wrapping Arta in her arms. She’d insisted on driving Arta to school that day. But instead of staying in her car like other parents she’d jumped out for a better view of geese heading south across the morning sky, dragging Arta with her as she raced to keep them in sight. And before Arta could slip into school, Lena had squeezed her tight and exclaimed: “Keep hold of that goose energy, Sweetie, and soar today.” Loud enough for everyone to hear. Then Lena had fluffed her long auburn hair with a throaty chuckle and sauntered back down the windy street to her car, trailing leaves and dust. Arta never found words to fend off shame. Never in all these years. Shame became habit.

“I’m sorry, Mom.” She means it. “They’ll have more babies outside — I promise.” She smooths Lena’s hair. “Let me finish showering, and I’ll make breakfast.”

Lena’s moans follow Arta into the house, finally subsiding with no one there to listen.  

Arta’s gone to the store before I find words to explain myself. It’s as if I feel what the mama bird must feel, engulfed by desperate loss, as if I couldn’t save my own baby from drowning.

My mouse is here again on the patio, still and calm as a monk in meditation. So is my doe. I recognize her from last summer. Lovely girl. She and her new fawn move toward me.

I feel like that old farmer Daddy used to know, the "animal caller." Mesmerized creatures — stray pets, wild critters, even insects. Everyone warned Daddy to stand clear of craziness. They were unsettled by the farmer, his special magnetism that had no place in everyday existence. But Daddy got a close look in the old man's eyes one day. “The light of pure grace," is how he put it, so overwhelming he almost wept. After that he suspected the farmer was the happiest person he knew.

 How I always loved that story. Daddy swore I had the gift, too. No denying creatures gravitate my way more than normal, as if my energy calls to them by some method beyond words.

But what if the light of grace Daddy saw in the old farmer wasn't grace at all? What if there’s nothing special about me — no enchanting vibration I exude or spell I cast? What if it’s a misreading of animal intentions — perhaps they come because I feed them or smell earthy or something equally explainable?

Or maybe my gift is born of the abyss? Arta once said I’d’ve been burned as a witch centuries ago. The notion made me snort. I know what I know, trusting my deeper awareness wholeheartedly, certain that animals and I arise from the same glorious source. Divine communion. Beautiful and comforting. Beyond doubt.

But certainty has slipped now with the droop of my spine. My perceptions feel less reliable. I dwell nearer the surface, seeing as others must see, where a mouse is maybe just a simple mouse after all. Sometimes cute, sometimes a nuisance, not really very much at all.

So few humans have chosen to accompany me through life. I grasp this now in ways I failed to comprehend before.

What if creatures only come to the damaged ones — those who don’t navigate well among their own kind? What if that’s really why they arrive — to comfort and protect, full of pity, angels drawn by the woeful force of aberrant souls?

Arta glances out the kitchen window at Lena as she unloads groceries. The grass is mowed and the weeds are mostly gone. Dale has worked hard.

A squirrel sits on its haunches at Lena’s feet. Arta must remind her about rabies. A deer moves cautiously toward her. Arta is unable to pull her eyes away. Why has Lena always been so odd, so different — living alone, in the forest, relentlessly seeking wild and untidy things? So much unexplained, unsaid.

A second deer is there when Arta looks again. The dogs lie at Lena’s feet, encircling her wheelchair like sentries around a throne.

Arta’s phone buzzes. “Hi, Sweetie. Yeah, Jeanne said Mom’s room is ready. Great.” She folds the plastic grocery bags and peers out again. “Hey, Jack, let me call you back.”

She opens the window. “Everything okay, Mom?”

Lena’s head is bowed. A dragonfly perches on her knee. The dogs look up but remain in place.

The deer retreat as Arta approaches. “Mom, almost lunch time.” She gently shakes Lena. Silence.

Arta stands motionless — an unfamiliar sensation. Mesmerized like one of Lena’s creatures, marveling at the gossamer whiteness of her hair. Delicate blue veins snaking across her temples. Skeletal, creative hands clasped in her lap, embraced by the wild.

Lena — gone. It’s unimaginable. A stream of incongruent emotions unfurl through Arta’s mind. Relief that the end was quick — no long months or years of decline. Revulsion at her mother’s withered body, now merely a shell. A sense of buoyant liberation, but also remorse that she and Lena let time run out on re-bonding like she always assumed they would. The unexpected ache of being left behind. The weight of her mother’s mystifying DNA and tangled influence now hers to carry alone. And finally awe. Surprising awe at the gorgeous pure life force that was Lena, the dearness of her. How little she’s really noticed since her heart split away years ago.

The dragonfly lifts on iridescent wings, beating against loss.

This wasn’t the ending Arta planned.

A wind gust sways branches and moves gray clouds overhead, like something with shape and form. Arta feels its push, power against power, pushing hers away.

She drapes Lena’s sweater over thin, lifeless shoulders and wheels her toward the house. The dogs rise together and follow. Arrangements must be made, but Arta lingers a while longer in the moment, hollow and still. Lena has chosen to leave in her own way and time. As always. Beyond Arta’s control.