It was a day of magpies. They were everywhere, several dozen of them at least, each choosing his own treetop on which to settle and then without a sound (unusual for magpies) they would swoop down from their respective treetops to convene somewhere on the ground beyond the scope of Noah’s window. He would see them in the sky or their shadows on his wall flying through the air one at a time or in groups of three or four and then gone and then back all day, teasing Noah with their freedom. He noticed the puppy in the fenced garden below also watching the birds and Noah decided he had to figure out a plan, a way to escape and walk to the ocean, run on the beach and watch gulls. Sometime gulls flew with the magpies or fought with them in raucous cries and shrieks, each laying claim to endless sky as high and as far and as wide as Noah’s eye could see.
He needed to get out and he’d get the puppy out as well to be his companion for Noah was tired of loneliness and silence. Together they would go find the ark. It had been blessed and protected by the priest, it could not have been destroyed or stolen, of this he felt certain. Calm now he had the beginning of a plan, the resolve was his beginning and he slept and rested and stored up his strength, dormant for a decade.
The puppy had been a Christmas present to a little boy who had lived next door, at least that is what Noah guessed because the child brought the puppy into the yard adjacent to the home’s yard on Christmas morning to play with him and Noah, watching, saw that there was a bright red ribbon around the puppy’s neck. Noah watched for a while from his window feeling lonely and sad and missing his mother and Corrine’s beignets until someone came to get him. He walked silently to the dining room to share a Christmas noon meal with the other residents who had no relatives to take them home on a day pass.
Sometimes staff members offered to take him to their homes but he had refused to go just as he refused to speak or eat food that did not interest him or play ballgames in the yard. What Noah did was watch. He watched the moon rise at night and fade in the morning. He watched lonely people walk down the street and listened to their footsteps feeling the rhythm of walking. Sometimes he whispered words to himself: Terpsichore, Plumbago, the sound and the feel of the words bringing back images to his mind, memories so vivid they seemed to be happening all over again. He watched the puppy grow bigger and the boy go away with his young single mother and the grandmother tie the playful puppy in the yard, bring him food, bring him water, but never play with him or talk to him or walk him out in the wide world of wonderful smells and sights and sounds.
Noah watched the poor dog pull at his rope and bark hopefully and finally wind down to a whine and a whimper when he realized the tired old grandmother didn’t hear him or didn’t care. All day and half the night, day after day and night after night, Noah’s heart broke for the dog’s loneliness and for his own and then Noah would speak, whispering words of sympathy to the dog and after a while the dog began to watch back, staring at the light in Noah’s window the way Noah stared at the moon, until Noah was told to turn out his light and go to sleep. It seemed then that the dog slept as well and he stopped barking and whining and just watched the window and seemed to hear the whispered words. On the day of the magpies, the dog was ready.
It was easier than Noah thought it would be and a good thing for him that it was, for the story he had concocted in case he ran into any of the nuns on his way out, was not at all credible and he knew it. As it happened he simply walked out the door when the front desk receptionist had taken a brief bathroom break and no one noticed. Later when the floor night nurse had called lights out and Noah’s light was already out, no one noticed that he was missing so used were they to his staying inside his room. He was not discovered to be missing until breakfast and by then Noah and the puppy were both long gone.
Noah took the rope used to tie the puppy to use as a leash but he never really needed it as the puppy whom he now named Cory after the woman he was seeking, stuck close to his heels as they walked all over town. They went first to locate the ark which they found miraculously unmoved from the church lot and even protected from the elements by a large tarp that had been tied down over and around it with great care. The plan was then to go to Corrine’s place but Noah was a middle aged man now unused to the long walks of his youth. He counted on his fingers the birthdays that had passed in the home and realized with astonishment that he was an old man. He was fifty years old now but he didn’t feel it because he had lost a full decade of life experience, all his memories of the home blended into one memory of the monotonous routine. He hoped that his legs would feel better after a good night’s sleep in the open and that he could soon begin once more to explore his world.
Noah untied the ropes that bound the tarp that protected his ark and Cory pulled the ends of the ropes away, helping and endearing himself even more to the man. Inside the ark were posts like tent posts that fit into little pockets sewn into the corners of the tarp. Noah thought that the priest had left this convenient tent for him and was grateful and set it all up with a patience that was partly the sheer joy of making something with his hands again, simple though the task was. He shared the bread he had taken from the home with Cory and they snuggled up together to sleep.
The moon was at its zenith when the old street woman returned to her home and found it invaded by a sleeping man and a dog. Cory was the first to wake and barked protectively over Noah who then woke up fuzzy and not sure where he was or when or who. Confused as he was, Noah recognized the tarot reader who had already been so old when he had first encountered her twenty years earlier it did not seem possible she could have aged even more. She was skin and bone and leathery, a walking artifact of her own history. “I know you” said Noah and “you’d damn well better” she said back and then she asked what he was doing in her shelter.
Noah heard a squawking sound behind her, a string of curses and questions so fast his ears could not keep up with them. Turned out to be Pedro, Cassandra’s parrot, her companion of several decades, and once she recognized the young man who had asked if there was going to be a woman in his life, the same one who’s life she saved although he did not know it and she would not tell him as it would have been impolite to make him feel obligated, she relaxed and told him her story and the parrot told his, the two interrupting each other so often that Noah was confused about who was who. The woman had some food and shared it with Noah and his puppy who were both hungry again and they made a party of it in the tent, talking until dawn.
The next day, Cassandra and Pedro took Noah into the church to meet the new priest who took seriously his instructions from his predecessor to be a friend to the down and out and homeless of the city. Father Francis did not interfere too much with the lives of his transient parishioners but stood ready to be their safety net. Then Cassandra and Pedro followed Noah and Cory to the old boarding house he’d called home years earlier. He thought about what he would say to Corrine, how to explain this long absence, feeling ashamed now for having left her. But when they arrived at the correct address the place looked different, all spruced up with an open entry hall and a reception desk. And it had a colorful sign advertising itself as a Bed & Breakfast in fancy Victorian calligraphy. The man behind the desk was quite charming and asked what he could do for the little group. Since Noah was speechless, Pedro spoke up to the amusement of the man who called his partner to come and see the brilliant parrot. The two men were from New York, refugees from the world of publishing, who decided they wanted to change their lives and had bought the place from the bank. They knew nothing of Corrine or Alexander and so could not tell Noah that she had died in peace and comfort surrounded by a ragtag crew of tenants who looked to her as to a mother, forming a strange but affectionate little family around her. By the time the bank foreclosed and sold the property to the men from New York, all the tenants had dispersed about the city to seek odd jobs and random companionship where best they could.
Sometimes when no one came by to have their future foretold in the cards,
Cassandra would entertain Pedro and Noah by making up stories about the people who passed by. She was very good at this, having a seemingly endless supply of plots in which to cast these unwitting characters. One day a little boy, about five, came over to Cassandra and it was apparent he had been eavesdropping for he said quite simply:
“Hello lady, my name is Steven and I wish you would make up a story about me.” It was dusk and midsummer so rather late already. Cassandra told him she didn’t need to make up a story about him because she was a seer and could tell him his real story. Then she asked him if his mother always sent him out in the evenings about this time and he said yes she did and that the last time he had not gone back home because the new man his mother was with was drunk and nasty and he was afraid of him. “Happens a lot,” Cassandra said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone of voice and then she did not tell him he had to go back home and she did not call social services or the police. She invited little Steven to live with them in their tent where they had a nifty bed in a canoe as well as the more usual mattresses. Steven was quite excited to sleep in a canoe and he went with them. No one ever came looking for him.
Cassandra often talked in her sleep. It seemed she heard the voices of children and she was trying to get to them, to help them, her babies she called them. This happened before they found Steven but more often afterwards. Steven would wake up then and go to her and stroke her head and call her mama until she fell into a deeper more peaceful sleep, sometimes reaching for and holding the little hand that stroked her hair. And that boy, sweet child that he was, he would sit up half the night to let her hold his hand.
“She wasn’t always nutty as a fruitcake you know,” Pedro whispered one night in Noah’s ear. Cassandra was snoring loudly. The child had slipped his hand from her grasp and slept as though dead. Sometimes when he slept that soundly, they checked to see if he was breathing. Noah had been half asleep himself but he grunted a little in response to Pedro’s invitation to gossip. Once started of course Pedro could handle both sides of any conversation.
“When she first came to town, she was broke and found a job cleaning rooms in a hotel in the Quarter, where I was kept caged in the lobby as a kind of tourist attraction. The managers gave her a little room in the basement and at night when neither one of us could sleep, she would come upstairs and read to me. On her day off she would go to the library and check out as many books as she could carry and she read every word of every page of every book to me. Said she used to read to her children and she missed them. She was just waiting for me to ask so she could talk about it, the sadness of leaving them. I guess her old man was some kind of rich and powerful person in Washington D.C and he didn’t treat her well at all, no, not at all. She didn’t say much about it but you gotta figure it must have been awful for a woman to leave her children behind. You know he was bad because she told me once that she was afraid he would kill them all if she tried to leave with the kids, two daughters turns out, I saw their photos. She still has them hidden away somewhere but doesn’t remember or won’t remember. She tried to call them but he wouldn’t let them come to the phone and once she tried to write to them without letting on where she was. She took a bus all day so she could post those letters from a faraway town. Then the letters came back unopened and stuck in a larger envelope with a note that said they didn’t need her anymore and a photo of the man with a woman looked to be a little older than he was and the two girls, beautiful girls, but eyes so sad it made me cry just to look at that photo, and I’m a bird, so you can imagine what it did to her. The envelope was addressed to the hotel so obviously he knew where she had ended up. That broke her, poor thing, and she started talking crazy soon afterwards. She still read to me, those were the only times she sounded sane, reading words on a page, but just let her try to converse about her own thoughts and the craziness was evident. She started going out a lot too, roaming the streets and sometimes she’d get all dressed up in some fancy clothes she found left in the hotel rooms. Amazing how many people forget things. That was what got her fired actually, accused of stealing an evening dress. Maybe she did, maybe she lied to me about the guests forgetting their clothes because she was ashamed. Anyway, they fired her and she left with her pitiful little bag of salvaged stuff and she thought to open my cage and set me free so I followed my poor crazy lady. The fortune telling was my idea and I think she’s done pretty well with it, all things considered. We’ve lived mostly on the street since then but sometimes someone comes back all excited because some good thing she predicted came true and we get a little bonus, sometimes we even stay in a hotel ourselves, as guests, with room service. If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a hundred times, we’ve got to make the most of the moment whenever we can.”
Noah tried to listen politely to all this but he was so tired and his eyes finally closed. He didn’t wake up until the sun was high and Cassandra and Pedro had gone to Jackson Square to find lonely tourists who wanted to know when love would find them. When they returned Pedro had hustled up a job for Noah at a bar that looked to be boarded up and closed but actually catered to a few neighborhood drunks and the owner said she could use a dishwasher. He didn’t have to come in until noon so he had time to watch the sunrise, go visit the old men on Claiborne Ave. and explore the city.
As winter approached Father Francis invited them all into the church basement where they had responsibilities and made themselves useful. When Steven grew too big to be wandering around the streets on school days it was Father Francis who made arrangements so Steven could go to school while continuing to live at the church with his friends. Once again, Noah had found a safe haven and he embarked upon his new life with contentment and even some joy. His period of loneliness and despair was over and for that he was daily thankful to god in case god really existed, and certainly to that servant of god, Father Francis, but mostly to Cory and Cassandra and Pedro and Steven for being his family. The years went by as they should, punctuated with the predictable variety of seasons and celebrations, and the occasional surprise of unforeseen events sometimes frightening, sometimes marvelous.
As so often happens in life, no sooner had Noah stopped looking for or even thinking about his old friends than Alexander Graham found Noah. He was taking his horse and carriage home for the night after a day of entertaining tourists when he saw a strange little group that caused him to look twice. He recognized Cassandra who had long ago been reading palms in the same parts of town that Alexander told his stories and drove his carriage. He thought he recognized Noah but seeing him out on the street and together with Cassandra, a growing boy and a dog, took him by surprise. When he realized they were not merely a vision he called out to them and offered them a ride which they accepted with excitement. Alexander, with some embarrassment and many apologies, explained to Noah that after Corrine died (“oh you didn’t know? I’m sorry I should have come by to tell you, I’m sorry for that”) he had returned to his birthplace in Kentucky, thinking that he and his old horse were ready for retirement. He had intended to come to the home to say goodbye to Noah but the rodeo cowboy who was going to give him a ride and trailer the horse behind them decided to leave rather suddenly (to avoid some trouble brewing Alexander guessed) and Alexander found himself in a bit of a rush if he wanted the ride. He’d only been back in town, plying his old trade with a new horse for a couple of years and thought often of Noah but, well, one knows how it is, life happens while you are making other plans, time flies when you are having fun and even when you aren’t and so on and so forth. Noah didn’t mind, he was just happy to see Alexander after all these years, what was it? Eight? Nine? Surely not ten? And asked him if he had any new stories of the rich and famous or poor and infamous as he remembered Alexander had often liked to quip. Alexander laughed but did not in fact entertain his friends with new stories. Instead he launched into a series of gloomy speculations about the future of civilization to be brought about by the current obsession with computers and wha
t he called with an unmistakable sneer “virtual reality” whereafter he surmised that our lives were nothing more than a game in some super sized computer . . . . “or perhaps not so super sized but it just seemed so to us because we are really microscopic.” Noah and Cassandra just looked at each other with some disappointment and Steven appeared to be dozing. Alexander’s talk ended as they entered the stable and they parted ways saying perhaps they should meet again for coffee but it seemed to Noah that would not likely happen and his premonition that he’d seen the last of his old friend turned out to be true.
Alexander Graham had enjoyed recreating a part of New Orleans history with his old fashioned horse and carriage but now he felt like he was the anachronism with no place in a new world. This depressing thought was bad for his mood and bad for business and it would not be long before he retired once again, and this time permanently, to that small town in Kentucky, the name he had forgotten to mention. Or maybe he had just made it up and had really just moved (and would again) to another part of town. Noah felt the last vestige of an old life blowing away in the evening breeze and it made him a little sad but he had learned to move on and to cherish his memories more than he regretted his losses.
There had been a rhythm to Noah’s life and he could feel that yet another era had ended and a new one was about to begin. Thinking back on all the places he’d been and what he’d done, he realized he’d never used the ark for its intended purpose and he began to dream again of water rising. Steven was surprised when Noah took his bed out from under him and began to inspect it carefully, checking for leaks, checking its skin and sturdiness, even removing the oars from their storage places on the insides of the canoe and taking it for a few test rides in the river. Steven went with him. Cassandra finally did as well. When the flood did come as Noah always knew it would, he was ready.
2005-2007
An Old New Mexico Widow