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Nutshell Kingdom: The Smell of Autumn
2005
He had a jackhammer voice that he kept in a pendant that he wore around his neck but he hardly ever took it out. It was silver and hung across his breast like a lucky charm and a tease to all us that had heard the voice once or twice. We'd ask him to swing it in the air just so we could get a line or two howling like the wind over our poor heads, but pretty soon he put it away for awhile and took that chain and pendant and locked it up in a box until he gave it to her.
She had a bluebird smile and her hair would be tucked down under the back of my old Army jacket. That she was my girl before she was his doesn't matter to me now. Though I am now thinking of that old jacket that came to smell of her for years on end and remembering the day she gave it back, hands palsied in grief. I remember when she took to wearing the silver jackhammer around her neck.
They took a little house out in the mountains and got to know each other. Wintered it out. She'd give him back his voice when it seemed he needed it; he took from her a fraction of that bluebird smile and together they spread everything around pretty good. I was homeless and so made nice and situated myself in the house a year later and all three of us made a pretty good team, taking turns with the sewing and the cooking and the woodchopping. We'd talk through the night in different combinations and much red wine was spilt on the floor.
I had a career to attend to, so I split for awhile and worked for a newspaper in the city. They got married and bought that old house and had a baby, a little boy. That kid grew up to be a cowboy at the age of three, perfectly dressed in his blue and tan pyjamas with little boots dyed into the feet and an extra-small ten-gallon hat.
We fell out around then when the kid said something to me that hurt my feelings and they just laughed and said it was no big deal. Well, as you can all understand, it was a big deal to me. So between the kid and their laughing, it just hurt too much to stick around and though I know in retrospect that no one meant any pain on anyone else, it was best for me to just pull away and that's what I have done to this very day. Often, when people get lost, it can be close to impossible to find one another again, even with proper addresses and phone numbers.
But I have friends that tell me they're doing all right. He's an electrician and she's in the arts in some way that no one can seem to remember. They throw fantastic parties with jigsaw puzzles on a half-dozen card-tables and everyone gets high waiting for their food to come off the grill and they play some sort of homemade Twister-type game on the dining room floor. The kid has become a genius of some kind on the violin and he plays little sonatas for all the stoned guests before his bedtime.
I'm remembering all this now because I found that old Army jacket in a box of winter clothes. Fall is upon me and I needed to get warmer. In the pocket were a pair of sapphire earrings and a cute little set of reading glasses she used to wear. On the collar was a fabulous scent, but I couldn't tell you if it was the right one. It might have just been the smell of autumn.
