Everything You See

by Dan Belanger

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

During the last days since the migrant family and the young black couple paid her a visit, Edith had not been able to stop thinking about the black woman, her smile, the way she looked at her after the others had returned to the forest. She couldn’t stop seeing her brown eyes everywhere she looked. It was as if everything in the world was looking back at her through those brown eyes. Then one day she appeared, walking slowly across the lawn to where Edith stood pruning her Azaleas.

“Hello again,” she said softly. “Remember me? I don’t think we met proper. My name is Corina Crawford. How about you?”

“What are you doing here?” Edith scowled. “Where is your man?”

“My man? What you mean Robert?” Corina laughed. “I’m always with Robert. I like to slip away into a dream when I can. We don’t sleep here, but every once in a while, we do dream.”

“You don’t sleep, but you dream?” Edith asked. “You on drugs?”

“No,” Corina replied wistfully. “I mean sleep is not possible in our current state. Me and Robert, we’re bound together, but sometimes we dream apart. Robert has his dreams, and I have mine. I must have come to see you in my dream because I haven’t spoken to another woman since I got here. A woman needs to talk to a woman every once in a while, and, well, even here, even in this circumstance, I am a woman!”

“Yes, I can see that you’re a woman,” Edith judged. “But you’re black.”

“Who says the dead can’t see?” Corina remarked.

“What do you mean by that?” Edith demanded.

“Never mind,” Corina replied. “I don’t want to upset you. You’ll figure it out on your own eventually.”

“I don’t have anything of any worth,” Edith said.

“No, you don’t!” Corina agreed. “but that’s okay. I don’t want nothing. I just want to get to know you better.”

“What do you mean you want to get to know me better?” Edith scoffed indignantly. “You don’t know me at all.”

“Yes, I do,” Corina said. “I know, for one, that you hate black people.”

“How do you know that?” Edith sneered. “You psychic?”

“Don’t have to be psychic to see what’s right in front of you,” Corina replied.

“If I look angry it’s because you came onto my land,” Edith explained.

“I don’t see anger. I see hate. Fear and hate,” Corina commented. “But that’s all I see. There must be more to you than fear and hate, but to know what, I’ll have to get to know you better.”

“That will never happen,” Edith insisted.

“But aren’t you lonely out here on your own?” asked Corina. “Robert and me, we’re happy together, but we get lonely for company sometimes, too.”

“What are you doing in these woods?” Edith asked. “It’s easy to see you’re not from around here.”

“I’m not,” Corina admitted. “I’m not sure how I ended up here either. I remember the sickness. Most of the world went on quarantine. Most people worked from home. People like me, we had to go out to work. I was a checkout clerk at Shop Rite. When the fever took hold, I couldn’t get out of bed, so I had to stay home. All I could do was sleep and dream.

“I dreamt I was falling through tree shadows. I hit my head hard when I landed. ‘Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!’ I heard voices of my mother and my little sister Noreen calling from far away. I tried, but I couldn’t answer.

“Finally, I stood up, brushing dead leaves off me. That was when I saw that I was in your forest. I thought I was all alone until I started walking. I began then to see others walking alone. Most of them were black and brown people, but there were a few whites, and Asians too.

“Everyone looked so lost. After a while I saw some started into walking together. I saw my father for a minute. I just got a glimpse of him stumbling behind trees, holding onto his throat. His face was covered in blood from the beating the cops gave him one night walking home from the market with a quart of milk. He was still carrying the milk bottle that cracked open, and spilled out, mixing with his blood in a trail of white and red. He looked at me sad, then staggered off, disappeared into the deep forest.

“I saw my grandmother, who’d been a servant to a rich white man until she was raped and killed by that man. She was crying when she saw me, but kept walking on past. After a while, I saw she met up with her father, a slave who’d been lynched by a group of white men when he tried to escape. They walked away together into the deep forest.

“It seemed like I’d been walking for years before I found Robert. We were so happy to see each other, and to be with each other, we no longer cared we were lost. We just kept walking. Finally, we ran into a man who spoke to us. It was the first time any of them spoke. ‘Hola,’ he said. We told him hello. He asked who we were so we told him and asked him the same. ‘I am your God,’ he said, ‘and you are mine.’ When we asked him what he meant, he said, ‘We’re all God here.’

“He asked us to come with him. We walked down to a hollow where he introduced us to his wife, Marta, his three young daughters, Flora, Carmen and Maria and his son, a small boy named Juan. He told us they were his family. He explained they’d died together of the virus in a detention camp on the Mexican border. He invited us to join them. We been traveling together ever since. Only from time to time, we all need to dream in our own separate way.”

As Corina spoke about the migrant family, memories flooded in of Edith’s childhood back on the farm, where many such migrants had worked. Amongst the stream of remembered images there was one that Edith found especially disturbing. It was her father’s face, red with rage as he raised his big white hand, ready to strike her poor mother. Edith was about 7 or 8. She had just gotten back from school. After getting off the school bus, she walked up the little path to the front steps. She stopped on the front porch before going in when she heard her father’s angry voice. She watched her parents quarrel through the kitchen window.

“I seen you with him, Grace,” her father said, “when I was coming in from the fields.”

“He was just looking for work, Jack,” her mother replied. “I gave him something to eat.”

“He was black!” her father cried.

“He was hungry,” said her mother.

“No!” her father exclaimed. “I seen him kiss you!”

“He never kissed me,” her mother said. “You’re crazy!”

Edith would never learn the truth about what really happened because, when her mother ran upstairs to rob her father of the chance to hit her, her father lowered his hand and stomped out the back door. Because it was never spoken of again, Edith forgot all about the incident until that moment.

It was a short time later, she now remembered, that her father started telling the stories about black men attacking white women. It occurred to her, then, that her father’s hatred of black men came from paranoia, and fear of losing his wife.

“That selfish, mean old man made all those stories up!” Edith hissed under her breath.

She rubbed her eyes and the disturbing images disappeared. She saw Corina looking at her, then, in a way that made her uneasy. It made her feel exposed in the same way she felt when Robert looked at her when she pointed a gun at him.

“This garden, this house, this land,” she said defensively, “these are mine. You can dream, but when you wake up, remember that.”

“This garden, this house, this land?” Corina repeated. “All of this is ashes. All of this is blood, blood and ashes.”

“I don’t understand,” said Edith.

“I think you do,” Corina replied.

“But I don’t,” Edith insisted. “I don’t know. It’s been all my life, all my life not knowing.

“I lived my life believing my father’s lies. I kept to myself after the two relationships with men did not work out. I took care of my mother until she died. Then I moved out here alone. I never got the chance to figure out where I fit in the world or who I really am.”

“All right,” Corina replied, “you’ve convinced me. You really don’t know. You don’t know who you are. You don’t know who I am. You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to be human. You’ve lived in a racist society, same as I have. You say that everything you see is yours, but you don’t see anything, because the world you see is not the world. It’s a white lie.”

“Ever since I first saw you,” Edith admitted, “I’ve been imagining I could see everything in the world through your eyes.”

“You can’t see things through my eyes,” Corina huffed. “What you see are your own sins, what you and yours done to me and to black people like me. You can’t see what I see. You can’t feel what I feel. There’s a whole world of me that you’ll never see. You do got ears that seem to be working, though. You can hear my words. You can hear if you let yourself.”

“Yes,” Edith replied, “I hear you.”

“Yes, you were dreaming when you thought you could see through my eyes,” said Corina. “You’re still dreaming. It just so happens, we’re in the same dream.”

It was just at that moment that Robert came walking slowly out of the woods. His face and hands were covered in blood. Corina ran over to him, taking a kerchief out from her jeans pocket, and wiping the blood from Robert’s brow.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I found him,” Robert said.

“Are you all right?” asked Corina.

“It’s not my blood,” said Robert.

“His?” Corina inquired.

“No,” said Robert. “It’s not police blood either.”

“Then whose?” perplexed, Corina asked.

“I found him in a grove of white birch trees,” said Robert. “When he saw me, he started laughing. ‘Why you laughing, officer?’ I asked. He said it was because it was all a big joke to him. He said my life didn’t matter. ‘You can only kill me once,’ I told him. The hate in his eyes started breaking up, then, like a mirror cracking. When the sharp pieces of hate fell away, there was nothing there. There was nothing in his eyes. It wasn’t just a little bit of nothing either. It was all of nothing. It was the whole nothing world. It was all empty.

“Just as I realized this, the trees started to murmur something. I strained to hear the words. ‘We never admit to our sins held here in silence,’ they said, the deep silence of the deep forest. That’s when the trees started bleeding.”

“The trees were bleeding?” Corina asked in disbelief.

“Ya, I know, it sounds messed up,” said Robert, “but that’s what happened. I’m telling you, the blood trickled slow, at first, down the paper white bark of the birches. Then it started dripping from the leaves, the drops building up into a heavy rain, a deluge that soaked both me and the police officer. I started to run and, before I knew it, I was here.”

“I’m glad you made it back,” Corina said calmly.

“Ya, thanks,” Robert replied. “But what are you doing here with her?”

“Teaching,” Corina replied.

“You know you can’t teach a racist,” said Robert, looking at Edith disdainfully.

“Not in life maybe,” said Corina, “but in death everything’s just like the snake’s belly, on a sliding scale. Passing away is the pass that never fails. It evens all.”

“What are you saying?” Edith asked fearfully. “Are you going to kill me?”

“You still don’t understand?” Corina said, shaking her head.

“Passing away is not a way to enlightenment,” said Robert.

“No,” said Corina, “but the path of the deceased is the one of least resistance. You can’t hold onto no racist notions over here. There’s nothing to hold onto in these wilds. There’s no place to hide from the truth.”

“You never stop,” said Robert, with a big sigh.

“No,” said Corina, “I never do.”

“Not even here,” said Robert.

“Especially not here,” said Corina.

“Let’s go,” said Robert, shaking his head.

“All right,” said Corina. “We’ll go for now. But don’t worry, Edith, I’ll be back. I’ll see you in my dreams.”

Corina took Robert’s hand then and walked back into the forest.

Edith felt dizzy. She did not understand how she could have lived her whole life believing her father’s hateful lies. It only now occurred to her that his powerful hatred had caused her to fear him almost as much as she feared black men. And yet she loved him. Love and fear had mixed together in her heart.

When, as a young woman, she tried to find love with the two would-be fathers of the children she never had, she found that they, like her father, could not be trusted. With those back-to-back disappointments, her desire for love was overwhelmed by the fear of the pain that it brought. She told herself, then, that she was better off alone, and fully embraced that lie for the rest of her life.

A soft breeze arose, like the one that blew just before Primrose appeared for the first time, once again reminding Edith of her mother’s gentle touch. It was only then that she became aware of a second lie, one that ran even deeper than the first. It was the urge to please her father that made her tell herself the second lie, that the love she’d craved since she was a young girl could be found in the arms of a man. Finally, now, she understood that only a woman could give her what she truly desired.

Three months passed before Edith had another visitor. Then, one day, Primrose returned, this time holding the hand of her childhood sweetheart, William, a freckle-faced little boy with pea green eyes, and a shock of bright red hair. Sweet William they used to call him due to his adorable personality. Sweet William had died of polio the same year that it took Primrose. They stood at the edge of the garden now, staring at Edith.

“Primrose!” Edith exclaimed, this time not scaring away her sister who smiled back at Edith instead of melting away.

“Yes,” Primrose replied, “it’s me. Me and Sweet William together again.”

“But you can’t be here,” Edith said. “Those others I can understand. They’re in a state of unrest because of what we did to them.”

“What others?” said Corina, who suddenly appeared, just then, standing right next to Edith.

Edith felt her head start to swoon. The world began to spin.

“We don’t have to accept the racism within us,” said Primrose. “We can change.”

Primrose’s pretty face was the last thing Edith saw before passing out.

When Edith awoke, Primrose and Sweet William were gone.

“Where’s Primrose?” Edith asked Corina.

“Her dream ended,” said Corina. “She had to return to the deep woods.”

“Where is your husband?” Edith asked.

“You’re so funny,” said Corina. “Robert’s not my husband. He’s my brother. ‘Straight-A’ Robert, the school lover! He was going to be the first lawyer in the family if he hadn’t been killed by the police before he got a chance to put that Harvard scholarship he got to good use. Of course, I’m just as smart. I just never liked school!”

“What?” Edith said. “But I thought you were a couple.”

“No,” said Corina, “I never married.”

“Me neither,” said Edith. “There were some men, but nothing lasted.”

“No men for me,” said Corina. “If I married, it wouldn’t have been to a man.”

“Why not?” asked Edith.

“They don’t interest me that way,” said Corina. “Besides which, all of that is over now. We only wear the memory of our bodies. Now there is only mind.”

“But I am not dead,” Edith said.

“But you are,” Corina informed her. “How else do you think you can see me? We are all of us dead here.”

“No,” said Edith, “I came to live here many years ago.”

“Did you?” said Corina.

Edith looked around to see that her house was no longer a house but a burnt-out tree trunk, struck by lightning. Her garden was no longer a garden but a meadow in the middle of the forest.

“What’s happening?” she asked in a frightened voice.

“You’re waking up,” said Corina.

“I’m not sure about this,” said Edith.

“I’m not too sure either,” said Corina. “We’re just going to have to see where it goes...”

Corina then offered Edith her hand. Edith took it, and, together, they walked into the woods. A low murmur rose up from the black walnut trees. Then the oaks and maples began to hum. The droning grew louder as an array of ash, birch, elm and pine trees joined the chorus. After a while, it began to sound like the entire forest crying out in one voice that echoed up into the heavens.