Beads of sweat trickle down Emma’s face despite her attempts at trying to stay cool in this insufferable heat. 35 years of southern summers, and you never really do get used to it. The porch swing groans as she shifts her weight in to get both of her feet up into the swing to let her entire body drift languidly. The rusty old chains finally settle into accepting the shifting of weight and then they just creak in time to her shallow rocking. The background song is the cicada screeching its death-destined mating call amidst the backdrop of a metronomic creak of the out-of-balance ceiling fan hanging from the porch roof. It has been hanging there so long that when it is switched off the blades droop downward like a wilting sunflower craving water.
The ice tinkles in the Mason jar in her hand that is serving as a tea glass. The ice of course isn’t long for this world in this midday heat, and it weeps away its finite existence as condensate on the outside of the glass. Emma wipes her brow with the cold glass, promising to honor the life of the frozen water by cooling her sweating and ruddied forehead. Creak creak creak creak, the fan waivers drunkenly on the rod that connects it to the ceiling. She has stared up at it on more than one occasion imagining what it would be like when that rod decided that it had enough of the daily workout and released its hold on the ceiling fan. She imagined that the racket would be astounding. Today, it just wobbled and creaked in protest like it always does, providing not much more than a meager breeze as it sliced through the sponge-thick humid air of a July afternoon. She wishes that she had a pool full of iced tea to jump into, mosquitos and flies be damned.
Her daddy had sat in this same swing, creaking this same swing song so many times that Emma couldn’t help but sit here in the afternoons. It just felt like the right thing to do. Like breathing or blinking your eyes. Five years gone and she still imagined him fussing at her for putting her feet in the swing. She did it anyway if for no other reason than to imagine his mock aggravation. She could smell the earthy tinge of rain in the air. She decided to stand in it if it graced her part of the world. As hot as she was, it would likely sizzle off of her in a puff of steam just like the world would do when the rain finally ended. It’s a funny thing, the rain is a reprieve in heat like this, but you pay for it dearly. Your whole world around you turns into a sweatbox when it stops. Some days it can be hard to breathe after a mid-afternoon shower, but in those fleeting moments when the breeze follows the rain across the sky, it’s like a little slice of heaven on earth, so the rain was always in your prayers.
Emma hadn’t prayed very much since Daddy had died. She felt like she had spent a lifetime’s worth of prayer when she was begging for him not to leave, and she wasn’t sure that she had any more left in her to give. None of them had been the church-going type, harvests don’t care what day of the week it is, and when you were bringing in the tomatoes truckload after truckload, they wouldn’t wait for you to be done with a sermon before they wilted, and the crows that loved to peck holes in them and never eating the whole thing certainly had no patience for waiting around for you to finish your Sunday devotions. So prayer was different than what most people practiced to her and Daddy.
He always said that Prayer could be quiet, and it could be simply appreciating how sweet a strawberry was, or maybe how pretty it was to see the mist in the trees in the morning when the sun was starting to rise. He said it didn’t need words at all to be a prayer. She had always lived her life thinking that was a prettier way of talking to God than being threatened with fire and brimstone by a preacher who went hoarse from hollering at the congregation for an hour. It never felt right to pray because you were scared not to, but it turns out that that’s exactly what Emma did when Daddy got sick.
She has run that night into the ground thinking about it as much as she had. The hurt has gotten a little softer around the edges, but it’s still there like a rusted anvil tied around her ankle that she drags around everywhere with her, making it harder to just exist than it would’ve been if he was still here. Late at night when she was laying in bed, trying to shut her brain up so that she could drift off to sleep, the memory popped up fresh as the day it was made. Daddy had been so sick for weeks. It started with a cough that he just couldn’t seem to shake. Eventually, he could barely put on his overalls let alone make it out of the front door to do the job that warranted such a garment. So he mulled and soured indoors, sick of the thought that his daughter was getting her hands dirty twice over since he wasn’t able to pull his weight.
Emma didn’t mind, she just wanted Daddy to get better, but no matter how many blisters and sunburns she added to her collection that summer, they weren’t enough to save him. The more she worked the more he wilted. There was a time when he came to accept that he wasn’t going to make it. She wouldn’t hear of it until he grabbed her face gently with his spider web-veined and clammy day-past-good, milk-colored hands. “Em, you gotta listen to me darlin’. I need you to listen to me now” and so she did. He told her where he kept his spare money, and how to dicker with Mister Morgan at the corner store in town when he tried to hassle her for more money than she should be willing to pay when it came time to settle the bill for the flour and sugar and whatever other sundries he had always made sure that they had enough of.
The next few days, he wanted the window open even though it was hot as an oven outside, even when it was dark. He was always freezing. Sitting in the chair by his bedside on those evenings, he would try to chase her away to do something that he insisted she would rather be doing. By his side is where she’d stay planted, she couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. With the harvest brought in and the larders full, she would listen to the rain come and go through his open bedroom window between his pitiful hacking coughs and fitful dreams.
One night when the wind wasn’t still, she could hear the neighbor’s wind chimes on the breeze in the far distance over the din of crickets and frogs singing the evening’s chorus. Daddy had heard them too, and he perked up. More than she had seen him perk up in 2 days. He hadn’t been eating so when he sat up on his elbows in bed and started gazing past her out of the bedroom window, she immediately took keen notice. “Do you hear that darlin’?” He asked her and then pleaded with her for an answer with his uncharacteristically clear eyes. “The wind chimes? Yeah, Daddy, I hear them. Miss Angie hung them on the front porch to try and keep the squirrels out of her bird feeders.” Emma said matter of factly. “No not the…I mean yes the wind chimes, but not just them. The singing. The singing on the breeze.”
Emma’s eyebrows relaxed into disappointment thinking that her father was falling prey to a trick of the ear in a delirious fever dream. She walked to his side and patted him on his cheek. Burning up with fever. “Yeah Daddy, I hear them. Pretty music.” Daddy looked through the glass again, concentrating his brow and craning his ears toward it. “I can’t quite make out what it is they’re saying but it’s beautiful. I wish I could understand them.” Emma pouted her bottom lip out into a smile as she tried to dam the well of tears stinging around the edges of her eyes. “Let’s get a sip of water and lay back down Daddy. I’ll dim the lights and we will let them sing you to sleep.”
Eventually after not too long of a wait he did sleep, and it was a fitful one. She thought that maybe she would go back into town again tomorrow and summon Doctor Chandler, but he had just been out that afternoon and gave her a syrup of codeine to help him sleep. She had given it to him with his water. The doctor had told her that keeping him comfortable was the best that they could hope to do. His lungs were sick and full of fluid and there was no way to get it out. He had told Emma that he was too weak to cough it up, so she should help him rest.
He was mumbling and shuffling incomprehensibly in his sleep and she imagined he wasn’t getting much rest at all. He was incoherent, but occasionally she could make out a “yes” and a “no” between the other vocal grumbles he was letting out. She let the tears fall freely now that he wasn’t there to see her weakness leaking out of her. He would have told her to ‘dry it up, we’ve got work to do’ so any crying she allowed herself to do was in private, and there was plenty of it to let out. When he was awake though? She could turn to a compassionate stone, and so that’s what she did.
The next 3 nights were an almost carbon copy of that one with the wind chimes singing their music through the window in the evening. She suspected that it went on when it was light out as well, but she managed to keep herself busy during those hours. Not from feigned work mind you, but she relished the escape into task and duty when the sun was out to light her way toward obligation. The evenings seemed to crawl by at a slug’s pace. She was on edge because she couldn’t let herself sleep by standing watch and she couldn’t sleep because her mind was on edge and flooded like a river after the rain storm of emotion that was watching Daddy slowly die.
This evening, the last of the three aforementioned, the wind was still but the chimes were still singing in the distance. They had developed a cadence and it was almost musical. Before she realized it had happened, Daddy was back up on his elbows again, but this time he was smiling. He started humming and the wind chimes almost sounded like they were in tune and rhythm of the song. In his gruff and country vernacular, Daddy began to sing:
Fear and grief no more.
Friends are there, waiting now.
He is waiting, too.
See His smile! See His hand!
He will lead me through.
Morning Star lights the way;
Restless dream all done;
Shadows gone, break of day,
Life has just begun.
Every tear wiped away.
As he sang the last line he reached up and wiped a tear from Emma’s face that she had let escape her prison of bottled up emotions. He was still smiling and humming. She jolted her head back to the window again as she could swear that she heard the chimes playing the same hymn. Daddy slowly sunk back into the bed onto the pillow, still grinning and a small tear forming on the corner of his eyes as he closed them. He passed into slumber and for the first time in a while, the sleep came easily and he wasn’t fitful.
Daddy didn’t wake up the next morning. When the coroner came to claim his body, he noted to himself that he was still smiling. He sat down on the edge of the bed, Emma a knot of muscles and pent-up emotion quivering in her station in the rocking chair. The watchtower she had held for months in the corner of Daddy’s room. Mr. Thomas, who had been there when her Mamaw passed and had officiated every funeral that she could remember ever going to cleared his throat and took off his hat. He lowered it to his lap, treating it like an extra hand that he didn’t know what to do with, and finally said. “Reckon you noticed the smile on his face. That’s a gift, Miss Emma. That’s a gift indeed.” Emma darted her eyes in for a quick look at what used to be her father and then back to Mr. Thomas so that she didn’t appear to be rude. “Yessir, he went to sleep wearing it on his face last night. He slept better than he had for a week. I thought he was just sleeping, so I drifted off and…” her voice trailed off. Mr. Thomas relaxed his shoulders and reached out and took her hand. “Miss Emma, that’s a gift from God, to be allowed to smile yourself to heaven. He loved you more than life Miss Emma, there’s no doubt in my mind.” He patted her hand and smiled.
The funeral came and went, but every night Emma sat in the rocking chair in Daddy’s room and listened for the chimes in the window. The first few nights they came as before, just singing their erratic tolling on the breeze, not a coherent song to be found in them. They slowly tapered away by the end of the fifth night and she couldn’t hear them anymore, so she decided to seek her respite in her own bed. Daddy still felt missing like a tooth that isn’t where it should be in your mouth. She still spoke to him, sometimes out loud, sometimes in her head as she tended the garden, milked the cow, or even brushed her hair at night. The years that followed were much the same.
As Emma woke up in the swing, a crick in her neck from being folded into it and hunched over at an awkward angle, she smiled and took a big gulp of once-iced tea. She stretched her legs and just as she was about to stand, the rain began. Slowly at first, pattering its welcome on the hot gravel in the road, but slowly turning up its volume and speed before it looked like it was coming down in translucent gauze sheets from the sky to the ground. She had made a promise before she drifted off to sleep that she was going to stand in it if it came, so in a heartbeat she decided that’s exactly what she was going to do. She had already kicked off her shoes before the impromptu doze, so she walked across the wooden planks of the porch floor to the edge of the stairs. She closed her eyes and took a step forward.
She could hear the pitter-patter of rain bouncing off of her skull and curled her fingers upward as the rain filled her upturned palms. Her cotton blouse and overalls gained weight and started clinging to her against the pull of a newfound gravity. The rain was coming so fast and so hard that it didn’t have time to soak into the parched earth beneath her bare feet. She walked forward with intentionally heavy steps relishing the retort of splashes around her feet. Just like when she was a child. She may never grow out of enjoying the feeling of a displaced puddle under her be it creeks or puddles. She walked down the edge of the old dirt road with no particular destination in mind. That’s when she heard it, among the static rush of rain on every surface it could reach she heard the tinkling bells of the wind chimes coming from the direction of Miss Angie’s house. Miss Angie was a widow and had fallen a few months back and had gone to live with her sister. She had insisted that she be around someone who could take care of her while she was on the mend, so nobody was home. Bad news travels fast, and there are no secrets in a small town.
She decided she might like to have a look at the wind chimes herself. She had been pushing back the memories of Daddy’s death song, but they were right on the front of her mind as she listened to them toll lightly with no rhyme or reason behind the breeze of the rain storm. Making it to the edge of her porch, the chimes were much more audible and she could see them flashing in the light hanging from the eaves at the corner of the porch roof. The sounds that they made were fragile like if you looked at them too hard you’d break their charm. For no particular reason at all, she reached up to the protruding nail hook that they came from, unhooked the chimes while they protested like a startled cat, and started walking back home.
She had made it about halfway back before she looked down and the shiny silver tubes in her hands and wondered what exactly it was that she was doing. She had been compelled to take them, and she did it without hesitating. That wasn’t something that Emma would normally do, but it was an unconscious itch that needed scratching, so scratch she did. The weight of her soggy clothes suddenly came to the forefront of her mind, and she decided that it would be better to go home and get out of them rather than spend another minute longer than she had to wearing them. She walked onto the porch, sat the chimes on the swing, and went inside to change.
After trying off and putting on a fresh pair of slacks and a linen blouse, She came back outside to enjoy the breeze, The rain was still falling, but now it was a slow steady shimmer on the leaves and grass instead of a deluge and it sounded like the world was whispering. She looked at the wind chimes in the swing’s seat and figured she might as well hang them up. She would take them back to Miss Angie when she came back home. She knew she would understand when she mentioned how much her Daddy had loved them. They protested her picking them up again, shuddering clangs as she maneuvered them to a rusty nail that she used to dry the basil from the herb garden when it was in season. They settled into a slow song of contentment in their new place of residence.
Emma sat back down in the chair and thought of Daddy. He had been born with nothing and carved a life out for himself, and a good one. He worked hard all of his life and overcame things that she hadn’t even begun to understand until she had to go through losing him. She never knew her mama, she had only been a baby when she died, but Daddy always kept a picture of her in his old brass pocket watch. He checked the time ten times a day if one, and Emma always suspected that it was really just an excuse to steal a look at the lady that lived inside. He wasn’t a man of many words, so he never talked about her much, but he wore the love on his face when she caught him looking at the picture on some nights. Now she was hearing her Daddy in the wind chimes to the point of stealing them from the neighbor, so she was starting to understand what kind of feelings lived in those moments when a person is alone with their memories.
“Oh Daddy, it’s hard to walk this property without feeling you in every piece of it.” The wind chime let out a singular low lulling toll. “I wish you were still here to see it.” A higher-pitched crystalline chime replied. Emma got that strange hair standing up feeling on her arms as the rain whispered in its death throes across the landscape in the background. The air was still and she could see the steam rising off of the ground now that the rain had slowed. It clung to the ground like a sheet making the whole landscape ephemeral. The ceiling fan creaked coarsely against the grain of an otherwise peaceful setting, so she reached up and pulled the chain to turn it off. The creaking slowed and the fan blades drooped down like they had been deflated. Now she was listening to the rain and the tree frogs only. The wind chimes sang a soft “doe-ray-me”.
As if summoned, the mist in the yard began moving. At first, Emma thought it was a trick of the eye in the twilight of the evening. The mist has always been known to play tricks on a person’s eyes, there have been stories about that very thing from long before she was ever born. The old timers would talk about the cows becoming belligerent when the mist moved in and all sorts of things like that. This felt different. Emma had seen fog before, it was common this time of year. But this was somehow alive, swirling and swimming through the apple trees in the front yard. She craned her neck over the porch banister watching the undulating vapor wisp around the yard, searching for something to collect itself on. It crept toward the porch, slowly climbing the stairs and eventually pooling around her bare feet. It felt cool, like when you opened the door to the ice box at Mr. Morgan’s store to dig a Coke out of its frosty interior.
Emma sat still, not feeling in danger, but her heart was thumping in her chest in response to the impending shadow of water vapor. It curled around her ankle and up her leg, then around the seat next to her in the swing. It could have been intentional or it could just be a bizarre display of nature’s magic. Either way, as the fog settled into a pool at waist level, she looked out over the yard in the darkening evening and she heard the wind chimes begin tinkling in the stillness of the moment, no wind around to animate their singing. At first, it was a chattering of random notes, but slowly they settled into a discernible melody. The melody for ‘Going Home’.
The memories of the night that Daddy had died flooded her mind and fluttered her heart as it all settled into the periphery of her awareness of what was happening. One can wish upon a star and hope for blessings to be granted, but this wasn’t that. Sure Emma had often stopped to talk to him after he had passed, sometimes even thinking that she saw him moving out of the corner of her eye, the unmistakable hulk of a man in overalls navigating around the house. But here, at this moment with the wardrobe of satin clouds hovering around her, a song playing on bells through an undetectable breeze, Emma knew he was there. Every moment from turning off the ceiling fan to the descent of clouds into the yard had to be just perfect for him to be here. She wasn’t full of fear, but her heart swelled with love.
Daddy was a practical man. But there was a spirit to him. She saw it when he gazed at the picture of Mama in his pocket watch and in the look he wore on his face staring at nothing at all while he whittled away at a piece of wood on the back porch. He always had one foot in the unknown, though he’d never admit it. It would be just his style to come singing on the fog to let her know, and she knew that that’s why he was doing it just now. Before she knew it, she was humming along. She closed her eyes and let the melody consume her, the chill of the fog fresh on her goosebump-laden skin.
Emma woke up in the swing, the stars twinkling in the midnight sky as the old wood creaked softly. She had been curled up to preserve her own warmth and stretched out into the cool night air. Her cheeks were sticky with the remnants of salty tears still clinging to them. There was no mist, and Ms. Angie’s wind chimes chattered softly against a huff of a breeze coming out of the east. Had she imagined this evening’s mysteries in a state of dreaming? Her sleep could be fitful with dreams like this from time to time, but this seemed somehow different. There was a hollow pit in her stomach that she didn’t usually wear after she had awakened. It wasn’t dread, it was the old familiar ghost of heartbreak, still holding on to her insides. Grief has a funny way of hanging on when you don’t want it to, never quite letting you forget what it is that you have lost. Testing the waters between her dream world and reality, she cleared her throat and whispered “Daddy?” There was an inflection of a question in the way she said it. This time a little louder and with more authority she squeaked out “Daddy are you there?”
The wind chimes lulled twice as if they were saying ‘hello’ matter-of-factly.