Stories. A Fairy, Once

Brightly Colored Burdens, Brian Kershisnik

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread...
The Song of Wandering Aengus
W. B. Yeats

Once I thought I saw a fairy.
No, once I thought what I was looking at was a fairy, and I thought so for really a long time, as time goes. It was this time of year, just the turn from summer to fall when the mountains are rust and red and russet and pumpkin and golden and all the colors in a bonfire but below them, where the people live, only the black walnuts, boxelders and locusts have begun to show the yellow under their green. Xanthophyll, rich and glowing.

It happened because my parents had purchased a bit of real estate, a small rectangle of land mostly covered by a large square red building built of large square red sandstone blocks. It had been, in its time, the town hall, movies had been shown there, boys used to send the skinniest kid down the coal shoot to open the door from the inside so they could play basketball there. I wouldn't have done it for money, a bet, a dare or a threat. That basement is haunted and the coal room is pure evil. Tell you about that sometime. It was first a dance hall, Rebel Hall, built because the powers that be frowned on drinking at the church dances across the street. There used also to be an open-air dance floor in Kanosh, with magical colored lights and a bandstand and a snackbar, but the city tore it down and they only dance once a year now in Kanosh, in the park on the 24th of July. The main floor of the building my parents bought is one big room, two tall stories high, with a pressed tin ceiling and wood floors where the out-of-bounds lines and the painted key are wearing away beneath the basketball standards. Nearly a full court. We used to roller skate there after school in the winter when I was little. We used, sometimes, to sit around at home and talk about how we could live there, someday, build a house for us within the sandstone shell. Some of us were excited by this prospect, some were terrified and some angry; these reactions shifted by turns among as we aged and altered.
I couldn't say, now, what my parents originally, truly, wanted the building for, thought they could use it for, other than for being old and wonderfully cool and holding an almost endless amount of stuff, first just theirs, then, slowly, stuff from everyone in the family, here a little, there a little, you almost never see it come but it grows and grows. Piles and piles of stuff to skate around. An empty building with a tight roof is not conducive to right thinking, not straightforward or clean or simple for people. With enough storage you never have to own up to this table you bought for nearly nothing and which would be worth nearly something if you gave it two weeks of your life in stripping, patching and repairing. Never have to face clothing you were sure to fit into, again, someday. If you were a Mormon (and we were) you could collect food storage but never have to wrap your house around it. What if you could just keep all the things that must have meant something to all the dead people who never coped with their junk before they shed it for good? What if you had so much space, cheap space, that simple geometry was never going to force you to answer to yourself for the load you carried? Well, then you'd have what, over the years, crowded itself into what my family calls The Old Building. Piles, stacks, heaps, mounds, troves, caches, bundles, knots, accumulations, collections, messes. Things don't want to be tossed aside, they want to be kept, counted, told over, petted and planned on. They want to snuggle up against our warm human skin, wrap around our legs and arms, nuzzle where we breathe moist and regular, twine and twist through our thoughts, even if only for a moment now and then. That's enough, that will keep objects from turning to dust, from blowing away, forgotten. Children exploring backlots and outbuildings learn to be careful what they pick up; things come with snags and burrs and claws and hooks. They stick. Turn it over, check for spiders. Remember that journeys of acquisition leave foxtails in your sneakers; you can never get those out.

When I was grown and the painter settled it into his heart that he would not teach or be in other ways sensible, just paint and paint, we bought The Old Building on very easy terms from my mom and dad. The painter cleaned, cleared, scraped and seared the building and bought it to him, to his heart and to his soul. Maybe I'll think about that quest another time, about how so many people had set down things in The Old Building for a moment, only for a moment, and not one of those people wanted anyone, certainly not this painter who wasn't even an actual family member, not a Christensen at all no matter how he pronounced what he called his last name, to tell them it was time to come back on in here and take up this burden again. He persevered, he conquered and dominated and for those pains and all that exposure to hantavirus, the world's best studio he achieved, and of it gained an untold measure of painterly satisfaction. That doesn't come into this story, this story is about a fairy, but it might come into another story, another day. You can come see him in his painted glory, if you like, this Saturday, September 25th, from 1-5 in his briefly open studio. But that information has no place here.

When I saw the fairy outside, around back, it was early days yet, the building stood empty and echoed with possibility and with a gathering of otherwise homeless ghosts.

Hor. Day and night but this is wondrous strange!
Ham. And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet

I was exploring.
The Old Building came with only a strip of land around it, an easement on the east of four or five feet, maybe double that on the west and a bit more along the back. At that time in back, on the south side, there was a great, dried out, disused barn. It belonged to the Turners; their lot fronted Main street, ran east to west and backed The Old Building, which fronts on Center street. I never trespassed in that barn, never a single step, which is marvelous and strange to me now that I am old and turn it over in my mind. I would write, if this were fiction, that the child I was would have overstepped boundaries, would not have felt right and easy without knowing what sort of things and places bordered my things and places. We never did, to my knowledge, not any of the sisters. I find as I review my life I'm deeply, disappointingly law abiding, it shows up again and again, then too the barn was frightening in its own right, old and somber and sad from emptiness. I left it strictly alone. It burned to the ground not so long ago, scared the painter to death, sure it was his studio, and the fire probably would taken his Old Building had its walls and roof been other than metal and stone. Stupid, bored, destructive children alone and filled with possibilities. No surprise there, no plot to speak of, not really.

I was poking around in the quiet late afternoon, just exploring the back strip of land on the first day my dad took me over there with him because now this was ours.
And I saw the fairy and the fairy saw me.
This is what I saw and how it happened.
I came around through the old knotty, bumpy boxelder trees to the quiet tangly back part and there was a bunch of junk there, like there always is behind a place people have used and used. Those back parts are like whirlpools and eddies; flotsam and leaf mold and strange large iron implements and partly burned milled lumber and rolls of fencing and baling wire and maybe a bucket and some weird plastic lids swirl around and just settle there in the rye grass, the cheat grass and the mustard. I was cataloging all those things when I realized a fairy was watching me across the back of an overturned cast iron bathtub. Seeing him (it was a him) more than froze me in place, it nearly dispatched me, deprived me of my breath and will. Both of us stared, very still for a long, long time, as time goes.
The fairy (in my mind at the time I called him an elf; I would have called something smaller, more brightly colored and winged a fairy. I've learned a thing or two since then) had his hands resting on the tub, close to his cheeks and was watching me with the part of his face that showed above the curve where the bottom of the tub would become the side. Just the top half of his face, no mouth or chin. Nose, two eyes, two hands and tiny fingers and he had on a hat, maybe ears and a little hair. He did not seem very happy and he did not move. My heart hit the inside of my chest so hard I thought it would bruise, would split. Real. He was real and he didn't go away or turn into something awful and dumb like the shirt you hung over the back of your chair when you got into bed. He kept his hands on the tub and stared and I stared and my breath burned and cut me because the fairy was real. Real. Can you understand where I was? Where I suddenly found myself? A chipped enamel kettle would have been an epic find, a square-headed nail a treasure, a pretty bit of patterned china a jewel, a chunk of etched and crazed blue or purple glass from a old broken power line insulator a charm and token to keep forever in my private box of lovelies, but instead I had walked into a real fairy. Not an arrowhead or a painted china marble or even a silver dime. A living fairy that could see me, too. Real. Looking at me in the soft, silent golden air of a day in early autumn in a backlot in Kanosh, in America. At ten I grasped the delicate irony, even the gentle indignity of the situation. Not in Cornwall, not in Japan, not in India. Just in the no man's land between Turner's barn and The Old Building. Not even Olde. Just old. American Fairy.

Such an imposition, such an invasion, but I was entitled; I had studied and believed. I lifted my right foot slowly, so slowly it jerked, as slowly as my hair was growing, and he held steady. So I set it down like glass, like a glass foot on a granite world and I was one step closer. He didn't move and he didn't turn into a combination of old ski cap and dried out cowboy boot. He remained what he was, still and watchful. I marshaled all my resources so as not to faint or scream because that would be toweringly stupid, an idiotic thing to do just then and grew six years older while I stepped without breathing, stepped like someone living in a world of honey, like the golden light slanting through the yellow boxelder trees with dust motes all floating silent and calm was really honey and not air, stepped again. He didn't run, he watched. He let me get close, one terrible, heartrending step at a time, just watched me come, dark eyes gleaming. He let me come within a foot of his tub before, between a step and another step he suddenly dissolved into plumbing parts on the bottom of the tub, looking nothing at all like the fairy I had until that moment been, well, hunting. Stalking. Believing and approaching. To claim, to have been right about, even if I could never touch, never tell. Just to know, with joy and such world-filling love but also with proof, to know with my brain rather than the heart that had known from the first moment he looked at me and for the years and years before that. He left me as alone as I will ever be.

I'm not going to hurt you, please don't not be. Unless being made a proof hurts and undoes you.

My children build fairy houses, especially the oldest and the youngest. One fall day the sisters took all the children, little ones and teenagers, to a tiny tributary of the creek in our canyon in Kanosh, to a wonderful bank under weeping trees, gnarled roots and half-buried stones and floating logs and mossy stepping stones and cress (don't eat it, no matter what anyone tells you) and they made a fairy town till it got too dark, ports and piers and islands and mansions and huts and stairs carved into the bank and paths and bridges and oak cups and tiny boats laden with end-of-summer gatherings, so much stuff, so many things. After, we went home to a fairy tea, tiny magical foods (this part was not my part, I'm not so good at this part) and we all made beautiful and frightening masks from the fiercely colored leaves we had collected, piles and mounds and troves of leaves. Those masks hung in bedrooms for years, shouting at us with their bonfire leaf eyebrows and noses. Happy things, just the top parts, no mouths or chins. My middle child asked me only a day or so ago as we walked among the golden trees, "Do you remember the leaf masks we used to make? We never do that anymore," and she sighed with longing for her little-girl days and with frustration at the people we've allowed ourselves to become. The real is that if anyone gathers the leaves and the face forms and the glue, spreads them out on the table, sits down to work, she will blow through headed for her job but she will forbid us to put anything away because she is absolutely making a mask tomorrow when she has hours of homework and dance practice and after that days of leaf mess will go by till we put all the things away and one day, later, she will suddenly say, "Did you guys make masks? Was it fun? I want to see. How come I never get to do anything?" And she will sigh at what her life has become, filled, stacked, piled and knotted with too many things she enjoys. Do you remember the things we used to do? When the real is that we did this, once. No less real, for all that.

My youngest shows me, on every walk, every hike, places. "Ooh, come over here, Mom, come see this place." I know what she means, what she looks for. A place to build a house, sheltered within an already magical, accidentally perfect spot. A place to hold the things she would bring, sticks and rocks and grass, for making houses. A house you buy to yourself, to your soul, to your heart. A Faerie place. It hurts her a little, bruises her heart, the tug of these places while her brother is so far away, too far away to build with her, to send tiny boats laden with gatherings of late summer things from his teensie upstream warehouses to her bitsy mercantile establishment further down and to receive as payment acorn cups or buttons or swirled marbles or the tiny black seeds shaken out of poppy heads.

I wonder if on a day, someday, one day, she, he, I will see a fairy, still and staring from behind a boxelder tree gone yellow in the early fall. Xanthophyll, always there under the green, under the life-giving chlorophyll. Real. Truly. As it is undeniably real, is it also enough? Enough to let be, let go, walk slowly away, glass feet on a granite world, the seen and the unseen which is believed and hoped for living together in an unexpected and accidental place. A home. It was never a question of keeping nature's first green; the leaves are always gold and green, red and orange too, when they can manage it; unhampered, undefined by the little we can see. When they grow old enough, in their dying, as they shed what have been necessary things, they unpack their hearts and we can finally, briefly, admire their flaming fierceness. I'm wanting to believe I can grow old enough to remember, claim, own, the real of what I look at, regardless of the things I cannot see. Without proof, without hurt.

Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.
E. B. White

Please, don't not be.

Noah's photo