Fall Mill Town

Note: this piece was originally published in our recent anthology of spiritual writing, Spiritus Oppidum, Vol. 1. Purchase the anthology - and our other offerings - here.

Mari walked up the sidewalk in a gold knit dress and fur coat. Her bare knees were cold. She stuffed her hands inside her pockets and headed toward the sign for the liquor store. The autumn sky had cascaded darkness early over the day, and stars shone above her head, not a ghost of a cloud to be seen. The puff of her breath was visible on the chill air. Below her feet was the sidewalk of an old New England mill town, gray and cracked and dirty. To enter the store she had to step over the legs of a drunken bum sleeping beneath a payphone, passed out sitting down. He looked dusty and matched the sidewalk: gray and cracked and dirty. A little bell jingled as she pulled open the liquor store door.

She went straight over to the counter while the clerk eye-balled her approach, and said “Don’t act like you’ve never seen a dead girl before.”

The clerk grumbled something that ended in “….Halloween, and I don’t got no candy, so what are you in here for?”

“That’s good,” Mari said, “I’ll take a bottle of Southern Comfort and a pack of cigarettes.”

“What’s a pretty thing like you doing asking for liquor like that? You know, smoking gives you wrinkles.”

Mari looked at him, unimpressed. “So?” 

“So,” the clerk continued, “you don’t want to go and ruin your pretty face now, do you?”

“Man, the things I’ve seen, what’s it matter what sees me?”

“You couldn’t a seen much, you’re what, fifteen?”

“I’m twenty-three.”

“Yeah right,” he mumbled, though he didn’t turn her out. 

“Come on,” Mari was determined to con her bottle of liquor. “What’s Janis Joplin without a bottle of Southern Comfort in her fist?”

The clerk, palms pressed against the counter so that he could lean forward to look her over head to foot said, “Wasn’t it Joplin, had that big feather boa in her hair?”

“This is her look from Haight-Ashbury,” she motioned her hand from her shoulder to her hips to make him look longer. She wasn’t a stunner. Like Joplin herself there wasn’t a beauty behind the allure, but it was there all the same and she knew it.

…The little bell jingled as she pushed her way out through the heavy door and again into the cold night, holding a bottle of alcohol in a brown paper bag in her arms.

“Hey,” she said as she kicked the foot of the old man to wake him up. His head bobbed as he tried to lift his chin from his chest, stirring out of a drunken slumber. She sat down beside him, underneath the defunct payphone and light from the neon beer advertisements in the picture glass storefront window. She twisted off the top from her liquor and took a good long swallow. It burned her throat. She shivered a grimace and offered it to the old bum. She looked back at the window above and behind her and saw a handwritten sign that read, “God Bless America, and Cold Beer,” as he took the bagged bottle from her. The drink helped to further awaken him. He looked up at her face, “Hey, I remember you,” he grinned a yellow toothed grin like his bones were all souring. 

“Sure you do, old man,” She took the alcohol from him and took another swig.

“Sure,” he said, “You’re that girl.”

“That really narrows it down.”

The old man waved his hand in front of his face, said “Damn fly,” and shooed it away. “Season’s past for you,” he said to the insect.

“I can feel the flies buzzing all inside my chest because my heart is shit,” Mari said.

“Yeah I believe it,” the old guy said. “I heard a story or two about you, I did. But no, that ain’t flies buzzing in there. That’s the heat of the drink warming you up from the inside out. It doesn’t last long and you’ll need to drink more and you won’t relight from it, only go numb and forget. Why’d you sit down here with me?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” Mari said, and then, “So this story you heard?”

“Oh sure, oh the way they tell it,” he began.

“They who?” she cut him off.

“The trees. They are the loudest in October just before they drop their leaves. They stand there in the fresh fall weather and I listen to them there because in the winter they go quiet.” He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. “That brisk brittle smell of dried leaves,” he said. She shook her head and thought what a crazy old kook he was, talking to the forest, but Mari closed her eyes too, because in that moment the old man looked peaceful and reverent and she knew he must be imagining the smell of the forest and his trees. 

She took a deep breath in and she smelled the once thriving, industrious, now quiet city. She smelled the sewage in the river around which the city grew. Before it was polluted, there was a beautiful and powerful hidden river winding the countryside. It was found. The city was born. The city used up the power from the river, wasted and ruined the river. Then the city died. She smelled the dead city. She smelled cold nighttime air, stale smoke, and copper. And she smelled a harsh odor. Urine? 

She opened her eyes and looked at the old man. Yes urine. An old stain was slightly visible on the leg of his slacks. On the ground beside his legs were a couple of flattened cigarette stubs and a penny. Surely she could not smell the penny. She took another deep breath in. Not copper then, blood. She saw it, dried to his shirt beneath his suit jacket and a bit around his nostril. He’d either recently been punched or staggered and fell and smashed his face on the pavement. He was a bum, wearing an old suit because all men who spent their prime of life in the first half of the last century went about dressed in suits. Blood and piss stained as he was, and ragged and worn, propriety and style clung to him by the barest of threads. He was from a different era. He was a living relic of a decadent age, fading away. One of the shadows of the city. There was something else too, very faintly clinging to him, the smell of sweet sugared cigars. Mari let her focus shift from the details of him, and saw him so that his outline blurred and his features hazed as if she were looking at him through tears, and there she saw him. 

“Yeah, you got me now girl,” he said as he saw recognition light her eyes.

“But, that’s impossible,” she whispered. The memory was full and unique to her soul the way that memories are singular to the minds where they dwell.  It hit her in a sort of fragmented way; a sprawling and gorgeous New England mountain view from the porch of a motel, and sunshine. Cigarette stubs crushed out in a coffee can filled with sand near her sneakers. Heat bugs ticking and a slight stir in the air that moved the leaves of the oaks and carried the scent of the pines. A breeze that brought an old man walking past where she sat outside of the motel room door, trailing an odor of cigars. It hit her in only a handful of seconds and faded away again, but in those seconds she felt completely how alive she’d been back then. She felt all the wonder of her childhood again, in that fleeting moment of thought, and it was bright and beautiful. 

And then it was gone. Her mind despairingly spit her back out onto the sidewalk in front of the packie beside that old man.  He looked the same as she remembered.  He looked like the Sandman. He had a brown face with deep wrinkles and hard-as-stone eyes, tough and tired weather-beaten skin, and an ashy gray beard that framed his chin. The warm sugar smell of a cigar hung on him, and the aloneness of centuries. “Did the trees really tell you about me?” Mari asked him.

“Girl, don’t be a fool. Trees don’t talk. I just get drunk enough sometimes they do. Not speaking exactly, but you know, doing like the trees do when nobodies around to hear them.”

“I’m Mari,” she introduced herself. 

“Murray?”

“Yes, close enough, but not like the boy’s name. It’s spelled m-a-r-i. Just don’t call me Mary.”

“Right, Murray. Glenn.” Rather than shake her hand, he took her bottle and knocked it back.

Mari lit a cigarette. She smoked and watched the traffic from her place on the ground. One car had loud bass. She felt an instant hatred for that car and hoped the red light would change so it could drive away. The radio was so loud it clogged up her ears and buzzed her brain and filled her with disgust. She was angered by how invasive it was. It wasn’t music. Music soared in her heart when she heard it. This just rattled around inside her so much it made her chest feel hollow. The car was arrogant. He wasn’t listening to music so that he could enjoy it. He was listening to music to be seen. It was wrong.  The traffic light turned green. The car drove off and took the noise away with it. The night returned to Mari, and for just a glimpse, when she turned to look at Glen, she felt something like her old self again. She began to wonder why she’d lost that feeling to begin with.

“…left the trees and came to this city to get some peace and quiet again. Less static coming out of people these days,” Glenn had been talking to her but she had missed the first part of what he’d been saying for that awful radio. “More energy coming out of the city itself than the people living here now. The bricks can tell a story. Oh and what a beautiful old story they can sing for you. A lot of hard work happened in those buildings, a lot of ordinary, good old-fashioned sweat.  It was a different time back then, a time of growth in this country, all of it on the rise. Now look around, decrepit. The bricks are sad, a shell to emptiness inside those buildings, whispering what they once were.”

“A lot of those old factories are being renovated into apartments and condos now.”

“Yes I know,” Glenn said with disdain. “Dress up the bones of the city to pretend a place for the new people who appear to be real, but the substance of them is somehow missing. I can hear it in them, they don’t sound like anything.” 

“You sound like an old hermit. Go back to your trees if that’s what you think,” Mari found herself becoming defensive. She didn’t want to be clumped together in the same group as that driver of the car with the loud bass, but through Glenn’s eyes she knew she was. She felt it too, a little empty, just like he said. 

“Passionless people,” he ranted right on. “Empty image,” he grumbled. “The eyes are not the windows to the soul, no. The ears are. The soul is musical. Trees and bricks have more soul. Dirt has more grit. So what are you going to do, girl, sit upon the sidewalk with a beat old man? Naw, little hippie, go your way. Go live. Go be alive again. Go and walk your mark on the world. Carve your path out of the ground, and make it matter. Find your guts out there because you won’t find them sitting here pretending to be some tough kid with this bottle and these cigarettes. Go do something.”

And that was the last thing he said to her. He just got up and left. Walked away from her, headed in a direction that would bring him away from the small city. She stayed where she sat, lit a cigarette, crushed it out. She didn’t want to taste smoke anymore. 

That old dustman didn’t give out sleep and dreams, but wakefulness.