Challenger

BEFORE DEGREE or meter or mile, my first unit of measurement was the cord: a portion of wood cut for fuel, four by four by eight, or one hundred and twenty-eight cubic feet. Eight cords equaled twenty stacks, six months, the winter buried within the winter. Sometimes the logs were cut too large and we had to split them again, in which case my mother wielded an ax as well as my father. But I was always a gatherer and a stacker. I went out early into the blue-black dawn to collect enough wood for the morning while my mother boiled water for tea and made light of the cold. She knew we would never be warm but that we needed to tend that fire carefully.

A month before she quit drinking, I woke up early and found her passed out on the couch, covered in our cat’s afterbirth. It was mid-autumn, the temperature had fallen below freezing, but the stove was cold. She’d stayed up late finishing a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi red and had slept through Delilah giving birth to five kittens on top of her. By the time I arrived, the runt of the group, a grey calico, was already stiff and cold, already degrading into a corner of the couch. The remaining four curled up against their mother, who curled up against my mother. Sammy, the louche orange tabby who fathered this litter, was nowhere to be found. Typical, my mother would have said, if she were awake.

I stared at her for a long time, mesmerized, then sat on an arm of the couch lightly dusted with cigarette ash, picking at some pills of fuzz and swinging my leg so that it hit the side with a loud thud. The newspaper taped to the window hung from a corner, but I could still see the words Black Monday booming across the page in oversized font, along with a graph whose lines all veered vertiginously downward. The world’s going to hell again was the general consensus of the adults around me.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
—Jack Gilbert

I swung my leg hard, harder, until my mother woke, bleary-eyed and swearing. She threw off the blanket and stood up unsteadily. In the glow of the lamp she hadn’t turned off from the night before, her skin looked truly ghastly: pale and mottled with yesterday’s makeup she hadn’t removed. , she liked to say, . It took her a minute to get her bearings but once she did, she paused for a moment to marvel at the kittens with me. They were mewling and nursing and doing cute kitten stuff. Then she gathered the dead one in her hand and stepped outside to bury she asked before opening the front door, letting in a gust of raw wind, wind that hadn’t yet been domesticated by the day. We clawed at the impenetrable ground with our metal trowels until we dug a hole just deep enough, the size of my mother’s cupped hand, to contain the slight body.