Susannah Walker

Love Song to the Boy in the Photograph

He is a little boy, stiff and serious in his black suit. But what most of the mourners don’t know is that he is always that serious. Even in shorts, barefoot, running through the sunny small yard in the back of his house, he is serious, brow scowling, mouth tight.

His natural expression fits this occasion perfectly. The death of his aunt. She was the one who raised him mostly, after his mother left. Because it’s a funeral most of the black-clad mourners do not know that the gravity shown is his real expression and therefore would not try to find the reason for his severity. Ah yes, the mourners, those women in black lace veils as they are accustomed to do in Catholic countries, filing past the casket and then to the row of his family of four (not five) sitting and waiting for the respects, the clasped hands, the murmured apologies and sympathies that sometimes, more often than not, have that tinge of judgment, that metallic edge of steel and iron. She shouldn’t have been out alone so late. A single woman? At her age too? Well, she did take care of those children like her own. Such a shame about the mother. Yes, but of course the aunt was the father’s sister, you know. People don’t do those things for free.

The little boy listens, listens to the hum of voices, the drone of the Ave Marias and Our Fathers. He keeps his indecipherable eyes fixed forward, his eyebrows knotted. He kicks his feet against the chair. Inside his suit his back is sweating, the cloth is polyester, uncomfortable. He allows his cheek to be kissed by the women with the handkerchiefs, accepts a prayer card for St. Lucia that is pressed into his hand. His mind is not spinning. The body in the casket does not frighten him. Before the service he stood next to the pink-lined box with his father’s hand heavy as bricks on his shoulder. He looked down at his aunt’s face. She was not there, it seemed to him. Her make-up looked thicker on her cheeks and on her eyes, but he didn’t truly see his aunt and he felt nothing. He had heard his brother tell a friend that his aunt had been stabbed, cut up like a piece of meat, were his brother’s exact words. He had noticed the way his brother seemed to enjoy telling the story, even pretended to be sad and shed a couple false tears. His brother wasn’t sad. And besides, any cuts on his aunt had been covered up by her clothes. She was wearing a purple dress.

His father sat in the wooden chair two seats away from him, accepting the offered words of comfort mechanically. The little boy watched him stealthily. He could just see his father’s sharp jaw and mustache if he cast his eyes to the side. His father’s reaction when the police came to the door about his aunt was muted. Stabbed? Are you sure it’s her? Where is she now? Do I have to pay to get the body out? Practical. Business. His father was a businessman, he had many clubs and restaurants scattered around the city, some with rooms in the back that locked from the outside, some with ladies who would pinch the little boy’s cheeks and leave the perfume smell on his face. The boy had watched from behind the kitchen door as his father sagged against the table, ran his hands roughly over his face, pulled his fingers through his hair until it was standing up raggedly. Then his father straightened and turned and saw him. The rage that covered his face was instantaneous, like blood spilling from a head wound. You better make yourself scarce, son. Get out of my sight. The list ticked through the boy’s head as he noted the reddening of his father’s face, the tightening of his fists, the swelling of his chest. The anger that seemed to twist his face into something like a demon. The boy obeyed, feeling nothing, retreating from the kitchen backward to the room he shared with his brother, backing away as you would from an approaching lion. His heart pounded a little, but in his brain, in his mind, he said, I feel nothing.

His sister was the only one with any softness left. It seemed sometimes to the boy that his mother had taken all the soft things with her when she left their tiny country, so that even pillows felt wooden against his cheek, blankets scratchy, hugs from his grandmother like being pressed to a rough wall. Somehow, though, his sister had guarded a little of their mother’s softness, for herself, kept a small part of softness tucked away, deep inside, so that she could bring out her supply, shining pearly white, golden-hued, and help herself to it, like she was eating a piece of chocolate cake, or unwrap it like a birthday gift, so that it seemed to the boy that their mother’s voice was singing, the notes filling the house as she did the washing, or her warm hand was smoothing his hair back from his forehead as he lay watching the shadows and trying to sleep. The little boy savored this, snatched the softness out of the air, wrapped his hands around it, but it never lasted. So he followed his sister around, and if she was feeling generous, she would dole out a little to him, ruffle his hair, pick him up and carry him like a baby. But mostly she kept it for herself, to get through mealtimes, when it fell to her to cook, to serve, to clear the table. To wash the dishes every night. Their aunt worked nights, so as the other female, it was her duty. Her father preferred for her to sit at the table until he was done eating, even if everyone else was finished, so she could begin her last chore. 

The little boy liked to wait too, to be next to his sister. One day in particular he remembered he was dawdling, pushing the beans around his plate until he realized he could hear the journey of the food down his father’s throat, realized with a dull alarm that his father’s eyes were smoldering through the thin skin on the boy’s face. With his lowered gaze, the boy saw that the last two knuckles on his father’s hand were turning white from gripping his fork so tightly. So the boy quickly ate the last pieces on his plate. He hoped that by the time his sister cleared his plate his father would be done. So she wouldn’t have to sit there alone and listen to their father rant as he did most days about their mother, that woman, that woman, she left us, she wanted to divorce me, me, the man, no man can be so weak to let a woman divorce him, so she left, you know, she left you, she didn’t care enough about you to take you with or even come back for you, she doesn’t love you, she doesn’t think about you. Better to forget her, that ungrateful woman. That cowardly example of a wife, of a mother. Unbeknownst to himself, the boy shrank farther and farther into his seat with each word, smaller and smaller into himself until he was just a far-off memory of the little boy, until his father jerked his chin with the back of his fork to make him sit up. Then he remembered himself again, remembered the day his mother left before dawn, spilling her tears across his cheek, crushing him against her so he almost couldn’t breathe. That was the first day of nothing, when nothing had begun, had dipped its cold feet into his brain and gradually settled down, leaning back, the nothing sitting in his mind, in its chair made of ice. His mother had wept and turned her crumpled face to his as she shut his door, and he had turned over in his narrow bed and faced the wall. 

To make himself forget, at dinner he looked across the table at his sister and saw that that day, like every day, she was losing a little of her softness. Right then, as he sat staring at her trembling chin and dark wisps of hair escaping from her ponytail, the softness was leaking out of her eyes and down her cheeks. Their father, incensed, backhanded her quick, two times in a row. One two. Stop that. Then their father got up, stormed away from the table. His plate was left sitting there, but empty. His father was a practical man. Food was expensive, especially when you were paying for three kids by yourself because your wife had left and even more now that your ungrateful, worthless sister had gone and gotten herself stabbed and therefore deprived the house of another salary.

And so today, now, at the funeral, the only thought that troubles the little boy in his feel-nothing state, is that perhaps now that his aunt is gone, perhaps his sister would lose her softness for good. Their brother was already lost, he was the oldest after all, and became more and more like their father every day. The boy leans away from his brother. His sister is on the other side of him, her hair in a long braid, her head bowed. She is moving her lips silently. The mourners are likely to think that she is praying for the safe passage of the soul of her departed aunt, but the little boy knows that she is slowly repeating again and again the name of their mother. He starts saying the name along with her, but in his mind so no one can see.

Sometimes his mother calls. She calls and the connection crackles in his ears, her voice loud and raw with weeping. It buzzes and hurts his ears. But he stands with his ear next to the phone, listening to her, because his brother won’t speak to her. His brother merely lets the receiver fall when he recognizes her voice, so his mother is left squawking ungracefully just above the ground, her voice bobbing and whirling out of the small earpiece. The little boy has to run from his room to pick it up, so he can hear her, so she won’t hang up. But usually the feel-nothing takes over and the words clamp their paws onto the sides of his throat and refuse to budge, and while he wants to say that he loves her, that he misses her, that he forgives her, that he knows what his father threatened her with, that he saw his father put his hands around her throat and squeeze, to make her see what would happen if she didn’t leave, he doesn’t say any of those things. Instead he says Yes and No. And I don’t know. And Me too, Mama. And then finally Goodbye.

And that is why many years later, when he is a young and handsome man with dark eyes, his blinding smile contains no joy, not a single drop of gladness, not an ounce of mirth, and his softness is almost all gone, just a little pearly baby tooth buried in a tiny space in his memory, and when he looks at the black and white photograph of his seven-year-old self, he sees the stark face of an old man who has seen life’s nightmare, who asked God for mercy a million times but was left in that same house with his father and his mother an ocean away. And when he looks in the mirror his mind is a slate wiped clean, as bland and smooth as the unfurrowed brow of a sleeping baby.

Susannah Walker is an enrolled citizen of the Waganakising Odawa and a descendant of the Santee Sioux (Dakota) Nation. Susannah grew up in Wisconsin and has lived all over, including three years in Medellin, Colombia. She has poems published in Anthropoid and works in Canada teaching Indigenous Social Work. You can find her on Twitter @iyeskawin.