Feet of Clay on a Rainy Day
by Larry Lefkowitz
Harry began walking. First in straight lines. Then in circles. What mattered were his footprints in the moist clay he had carefully made in the middle of a flat portion of the clay pits. He looked over his shoulder as he made them, like a dog. “Damn it,” he said aloud, though no one could hear him unless it was the Indians, “I want people millions of years from now to find my prints and wonder who made ‘em.”
He got the idea from a photo he had seen in a science magazine in the barbershop: a photo of human footprints three million years old. Now he, Harry Clem, had made his. And if they wouldn’t know who Harry Clem was in another million or odd years, they damn well would know his prints.
The thought comforted Harry. He stopped walking, fagged out, breathing heavy like a dog. Helen had said he’d never make anything of himself. But it wouldn’t be Helen’s prints they would find. And he doubted they’d find her knitting needles.
He wouldn’t tell Helen about the prints. She’d think he was nuts. She already did. She wouldn’t know a free spirit if it smacked her in the face. Her ma and pa had been straight-laced, Helen was straight-laced. Harry himself was whisky-laced. That’s good, he thought, whisky-laced. Helen wouldn’t like his joke. “Smart talk,” she would call it.
When Harry returned home, Helen was knitting. Something not yet with form. Harry felt uncomfortable with Helen’s uncompleted forms. He wanted to tear it with his teeth and stomp on it. Helen did not look up from her knitting when he entered, for which he was grateful. Their silences were filled with more meaning than those of monks who had taken the vows of silence. Harry went to the fridge and took out a beer.
When he opened the can, the knitting needles halted for a moment in disapproval before resuming. Harry wanted to shove those needles up her rear end. “Who the hell is the breadwinner around here?” he shouted at her, standing over her, can in hand.
She didn’t answer. “Answer me!” She continued knitting, the clicking of the needles the only sound in the room. “Why can’t you understand? You’re deader than them Indians buried in the mounds out yonder.”
She stopped knitting and glared up at him. Somewhere in the past, she had once confessed, an Indian ancestor lay buried. He had thought it interesting, she did not. For a time he had called her “Pocahontas” in the days when she had been cheerful sometimes. He had meant it as a term of endearment; she took it as a rebuke. For him, that had destroyed the pet name, and he never used it afterwards, even in anger.
A sudden rain came up, drumming against the window pane, drenching the Indian mounds, soaking the clay. He pictured the prints filling up with water. The clay would hold.
A stream crept down the inner side of the window. From the hole he hadn’t gotten around to fixing. Helen had given up reminding him. It was a victory, but also a defeat. She could have done it herself; she could have done a lot of chores, she was strong. Instead she knitted. Only sometimes did the plains winds drown out the sound.
The truth was that he was dying to tell Helen about the footprints, to lord it over her about his “eternal prints,” but she would only shake her head slowly from side to side, as if he was off his rocker. He wouldn’t give her the victory.
He glanced out at the mounds. He glanced back at Helen. What’s another Indian, he thought, chuckling. At his chuckle, the needles hesitated, then continued.
They ate supper in silence. The rain would let up for a few minutes, then come in squalls. Squaws. Harry shook his head and guffawed at the thought. Helen looked at him, then down at her plate. He could see the vein in her forehead throbbing. She was missing all his good ones.
Another wife... Man, he would have her in stitches. Like Betty, down at the grill. Betty was good for a laugh. And probably for other things, too. He hadn’t gotten around to that. Not yet. If anybody could drive him to it, it was Helen. Maybe I’ll tell Betty about the prints. Nah, better not. Women are funny about those things. She might think him nuts. She was part Indian, too, people said. Related to Crazy Horse. He didn’t believe it.
The first thing Harry did each morning was inspect his prints. They would hold. They would last.
The day Harry would never forget — the worst day of his life, worse than the day he wet his pants in fifth grade — was the morning he found the prints effaced. A blow to the gut. Somebody or something was out to get him. To make him nothing. There was no use in doing them again. They would never hold. Whatever had always been out to get him was at work again.
The whole day he sat staring out the window at where the prints had been. And beyond, to the mounds. Silently, in what Helen called “his moods.” He rubbed his stubbled jaw. He looked to where Helen knitted. He looked out at the mounds. He rubbed his jaw, oblivious of the raw mark forming.
* * *
Harry was arrested after his wife’s body was found in the clay pits. He claimed he was innocent. He admitted that he had thought about murdering her but never did it. And yet, how did he explain his footprints in the clay? He had not erased them. “It was almost as if he wanted them to remain for posterity,” mused the detective-sergeant.
Copyright © 2023 by Larry Lefkowitz
