Paint the Earth

Ever since she was little, without any of the hazy vagueness of de ja vú, Melody Bright “saw things” – saw them in color, smelled them. Sometimes, she saw details like collar buttons; others, she saw raw - and bone. She tried to tell her mother.

During sixth grade, Melody’s favorite teacher, Mrs. Percival Pinch died on the floor in their classroom. But that summer, crying alone on the playground, Melody saw Mrs. Pinch standing in front of the monkey bars. And right through Mrs. Pinch’s chest, she saw a lone Killdeer perched on top of same monkey bars. Mrs. Pinch always made Melody feel safe. But in front of the monkey bars, Mrs. Pinch had been holding up the palm of her left hand, warning Melody to stop crying or to not come closer, Melody couldn’t tell.

Melody had wanted just one more hug from Mrs. Pinch. That’s all. To know she wasn’t forgotten. The big strawberry carbuncle on Mrs. Pinch’s face, right under her left eye, had made some of the first-graders afraid. But Melody always looked right past the strawberry and into the heat of the kindness of her teacher’s eyes. Who was in there? Where had she come from? Melody never learned where Mrs. Pinch went.

                                *

Her husband William having died now too, Melody Bright stood alone, sweating in the hot sun on top of the concrete retaining wall that perimetered their house. The thick, back-filled bulkhead lifted her home above their nearly sea-level landscape. Solid as a ship’s hull, the steel re-enforced cement barrier stood about three feet high, lifting their house’s foundation above a wild, clamoring sea of dry beach grass, fluffy myrtle and red-barked salal, shore pines – foot-lit by deep-red rosa rugosa.

Melody’d just cut one of the three over-grown tops off the big pine standing north of the house. She’d done it herself – one-handed - with a cheesy little band-bladed gardener’s saw. With a block and tackle, she’d hoisted the top of their big, twenty-four-foot extension ladder up alongside the thick pine and rigged safety lines, plus a “chicken string,” William used to call it. After she’d felled the forty-foot tree top, she’d chicken-stringed the heavy butt of the pine top slowly to the ground and it was lying now, paralleled alongside the retaining wall, big as a whale. 

Sweat poured out of Melody. She stood on top of their retaining wall in triumph – but for only a minute or so, before she saw.

Bill’d started the whole tree-taming thing same year the freak wind slapped across Oregon the dry, hot fall of 2020; the gusts left, seemed like, half the State in forest fire – from Juntura over east in the Owyhee region all the way west to Mapleton and Philomath. Big fires - especially on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains just west of Sisters.

Freak wind day, Melody and Bill had been trailer camping way over east at Page Springs just south of Burns. They visited the 14,000-year-old, lake-shore human habitation site at Paisley. Nobody knew who had lived there. When the lake-shore climate had changed thousands of years later, the fish all died. No lake now. And the climate was changing again. But the changes wouldn’t take as long this time. At Paisley, like she was afraid would happen, where an interpretive sign told them the lake shore had been, Melody told Bill she could see three short, scrawny people huddled under a rock out-cropping. With a chortle, he wanted to know how the people looked. She shivered in the hot sun and hugged herself and muttered, “Hungry.”

But the hot, tinder Fall of 2020, camped just south of Burns at Page Springs their fourth day out, they felt a strange, smoke-thick wind puff up from the west. The flat, sage landscape disappeared. Looking up from his lap-top, another camper said he was managing eighteen fire-fighting crews. He said he worked for the U.S. Forest Service. He showed Bill and Melody the on-line Oregon Fire Map; there were little fire icons all across the State. Page Springs; that was where Melody first heard the term “defensible space.” The USFS man said there would be no more Summers – just “fire seasons.” Bill and Melody stayed put a few more days and listened to the sketchy news. The smoke got worse.

As they drove back west along Highway 20, toward the coast, the smoke in Bend burned their eyes. They worried what was going on ahead of them at home in Waldport, the town’s watershed crowded up against the Siuslaw National Forest. Nobody in Bend seemed to know for sure where the fires were. It was freaky. The thick, disorienting smoke was unnerving. For all they knew, heading back west, they were driving directly at the fire. Bill stopped and bought a new chain saw.

In Waldport, people said the smoke had been so thick the sky was orange. With anxiety in their voices, they said it was ominous. Bill said, “Phooey on tsunamis. Tsunamis are only a probably. Forest Fire is a for-sure. Somebody will screw up and the beach grass will get going and then the north wind we get every Summer will push the fire into our trees.”

 Right away, Bill got to work taming their trees around the house. Bill got killed falling out of the big, sinewy pine Melody had just vanquished her very own self.

A couple of women she knew had gotten rid of their men and were taking a walk on the wild side. But the hot, dry Fall of 2020, when dead Bill left Melody behind! She got in her car and she drove clear way back up north to Tacoma to her old grade school beside Coffin Marsh. In the evening, with a six pack and a bag of chips, she snuck along the border of the swamp like she used to do in grade school and up onto the black-top-paved access road perimetering her old school and the playground and sat down. She never had control over what she “saw.” But this time, she knew who she wanted to see. Mrs. Pinch’s monkey bars were still there. Melody sat down in the quiet and sipped her 6.7% ABV and waited for the sun to set. After dark, the pavement stayed so warm, she didn’t need a blanket. But in the morning, when Melody reached for her bag of chips, something ran out of it and disappeared into the dry grass beside the access road. That’s all that happened. All she saw in the morning light was the pale ghost of the crescent morning moon.

                                                                *

So Melody stood alone on top of her Waldport retaining wall in tree-triumph for just a couple of minutes. That’s all she got. She hadn’t slept good all week. She couldn’t get the saw dust out of her hair or underwear. Her raw hands itched with eczema. Every night, she woke up in the wee hours scratching and aching all over. But one exhausting, slow step at a time, all by herself, she had just beasted the same tree job that had killed Bill.

But what took Melody’s tree triumph away, what kicked her breath suddenly out of her chest was the dead whale. She didn’t want to see it. She didn’t look for it. She was surprised by its mass. She stood on her retaining wall’s cap-stones over-looking where her long, tapering tree top had fallen and now she saw floating in the sunlight, instead of a tree top, the wet, glistening length of a barnacle-blotched whale.  

Reflecting off a thin blade of ocean that sloshed between the lifeless whale and her concrete retaining wall, startlingly hot sun blinded up at her. Like it had started breathing, she felt the retaining wall lift under her feet, then subside to inhale again. The dead whale was chained against a stinking black hull. To shield from the sun’s glare off the ocean, she cupped her hands around her eyes. Arching high above her, the sun-blasted sky merged with a hypnotic, chrome horizon. Another long, passing ocean swell lifted Melody and the lifeless whale together.

A big man was working beside her. She knew him like she thought she knew her name. Again and again, with angry energy, the white-haired, copper-skinned Sandwich Islander jabbed his long-handled flensing blade at the whale’s blubber. Melody saw him chop a small hole through the foot-thick skin and blubber. Somebody shoved the hook of a hoisting tackle through the hole. Starting to peel the whale, Kahuna Apana sliced viciously and muttered, “Is how Apana come to be!” But then, smiling in satisfaction, he added, “Uncle Opoa gonna give-up lotta good, stinky oil dis day.”

Chained to the ship’s starboard side, the whale’s wounded flukes sagged limply at the bow. The sharks hadn’t arrived. The blood-bath hadn’t yet begun. A week earlier, as if the boy were chum bait, in a single leap, a shark big as the whale they had been peeling, had swallowed young William Fuld’s blonde curls right off the outboard flensing stage. Now, the crew refused to walk the stage’s dangling plank.  

Whaler T.B. Lasher of Wellfleet, Massachusetts was a superstition ship. In shining, silken stove-pipe hats, the whaler’s Cape Cod Principals had bellowed and badgered Captain Medrano and so he had bad-luck-sailed for Oregon from the tiny Cape Cod port of Wellfleet on the feast of Candlemas. Pressured, Captain Medrano had ordered Lasher’s Christmas decorations left in the rigging and perfunctorily weighed anchor on the last of the Candlemas flood tide. Months later, Lasher broke her foremast fighting The Horn and they had to put into Montevideo for expensive repairs. Now, Captain Medrano would have to tell William Fuld’s mother the half-truth that her son had been “lost at sea.”

 But Melody knew T.B. Lasher’s voyage had been a greasy one anyhow – a lot of bent harpoons. She remembered Captain Medrano’s cruel face, but also his tenderness when he lied to her mother about her brother William. Standing on top of her retaining wall, she knew that was 1841. But how the hell could she?

            Melody stamped her feet against the top of her retaining wall and slapped her own face.  She told herself to forget Wellfleet. She bagged-it for the day. An hour earlier, before she had ascended her ladder for the last of the cut of the huge pine top, she had put a very tall can of Imperial stout in the zero-degrees compartment of her fridge. Five minutes later, twenty feet up, hugging the top of her ladder, in the ominous moment when she heard the massive pine-top crack and start to break-off, she’d pressed her bare left cheek to the beetle-bitten bark of the tree trunk and hoped and hoped the thick butt of the toppling tree-top wouldn’t spring back and crush her.

Why had Mrs. Pinch held up her hand in warning?  Melody turned away from the whale and the ocean and went in and got her cold can of stout. She sipped. The perfection of the bitterness of a dense, Imperial stout! For reckless good measure, she topped-off her nearly frozen can of stout with eighty-proof Rebel Yell. To hell with T.B. Lasher. She was going to celebrate her tree triumph – Bill-style.

But her whiskey-fortified, nine percent ABV Imperial stout quickly made it impossible for Melody to reason away the whale she knew she had seen beside her retaining wall as certainly as she had seen Mrs. Pinch’s Killdeer, certainly as she had breathed the smothering smoke of the 2020 fires, as certainly as she understood so clearly who the three stunted figures huddled under the desert out-cropping at Paisley were – and that they were grindingly hungry because their lake had dried up.

                                *

Solid Bill can’t pull Melody back this time. She descends alone into the phantasm of who she had been and how she had profited. The tow line, bent to the tail of her harpoon, lays coiled perfectly in its barrell. In the heat of the sun, the salt smell of the ocean is strong. T.B. Lasher a hull-down speck four miles aft now, the deep voices of Melody’s whaleboat-pullers chant their happy chase song.  Not able to see ahead over the curve of the Earth more than about a mile, Melody hasn’t seen her whale’s spout in probably ten minutes, but it’s easy to find the Cape Arago Grays where they feed so close to shore. Racing, the boat pullers sing a song. They bend their backs. They pull for their “lay” – a share of the voyage’s profit. Melody sees the power of the men’s backs and shoulders and legs bend the long oars like straws. With each pull, under her feet, she feels fragile boat number three leap and skim the cold, glassy-smooth Cape Arago ground swells. She hears the slice of the boat’s bow boil the water with each stroke. 

                                                                                                                                                                          *

Now six miles from hull-down Lasher, her chest still heaving from the effort of striking the whale, from the wild ride of being towed by the terrified whale as if boat number three was nothing but a chip, from the fear of being attacked by the surfacing whale, she gapes at the mass of the great, black, gleaming, dying beast. As the Gray exhales its deep-red life in her face, she breathes its stinking breath. She sees the barnacle-mottled whale roll fin-out. With a start, she realizes the vastness of its nurturing life and sees the far edge of her own drawing into sight. The trembling having stopped, the whale just floats - still and limp as a tangled raft of floating brown kelp.  

                                                                                                                                                                         *

All the day, on Lasher’s mid-ships’ deck, the rendering works’ try-pots boil and stink. The grease of boiled whale blubber splashes the cambered deck. Forward, hoisting the Gray’s decapitated head on deck, three men, along with Apana’s massive shoulders shove at the capstan bars. Apana’s beautiful, coppery back glistens with sweat. Slowly up, higher and higher up, dripping, the whale’s head inches into view. Ringed by barnacles like ticks on the face of a dead deer, the whale’s left eye watches Melody. Chill shoots up her spine, tingles across her shoulders.

Jumping to her feet, Melody knocks over her can of stout. She bolts off Lasher’s deck. She snatches her stout back up and rushes inside the house. She can’t breathe. Her chest heaves. In a kind of agony, as if she doesn’t deserve to breath, her hands shiver. She dumps more whiskey into her fizzing can. Through the window to the left of her gas range, she stares out at what remains of the massive pine. She sees clearly now the mess she has made hacking-off the first of the three huge tree tops – in the name of “defensible space.” The ugly pine stump stabs raggedly at the sky. Inches from where she had pressed her bare left cheek, the falling top had torn the tree’s bark in a deep, vertical rip. There were two more tops to be cut. More earth scars.

 And now Melody has killed him, where has uncle Opoa gone? Most likely, Melody knows, Apana’s rapist uncle deserved nothing more now than to live on as one of the big, pale lice she had seen nibbling the open wound on one of her big Gray’s dead flukes. Still more likely, it came to Melody, besides nourishing lice, the giant Gray had willingly fed T.B. Lasher’s stove-pipe-hatted Principals – and receiving her dead son’s lay of the voyage’s profits, the mother of devoured William Fuld besides,

And Captain Medrano also.

And too, the pullers of boat number three when Uncle Opoa’s hot blood sprayed in Melody’s face.

Even the Cape Cod house painters at Wellfleet atop their spindly ladders re-whiting the towns-people’s frail, generations-old cottages,

With paint bought on blind trust that T.B. Lasher’s Oregon hunt

Would be a greasy one.