from Wide Like an Eagle's Wings

Nona Caspers

Manny teetered on top of the weathered wooden cable spool in her yard, trying to see what Senator John F. Kennedy would see if he visited her family's farm on his campaign tour. Beyond their paint-peeled barn and aluminum tractor shed with the unhinged door was their clumpy cow pasture, littered with thistles and dry milkweed pods wobbling in a dangerous sheet of unexpected September heat. Burning, burning. Uncomfortable, inhospitable.
Jilly's baby doll head stuck upright from a cow pie, its plastic crest of hair straining out of the manure. Would a four-year-old do this deliberately?
Manny lifted her chin and unfocused her eyes from the particular shapes of things to let in a general view of the county's green and yellow pastures, field after field that eventually blended into a flat, pea-soup horizon.
Senator Kennedy would use the word emerald. Manny, secretary of the JFK campaign at Saint Theresa's Elementary, pictured his entourage of reporters with their yellow note pads pressed to their chests, pencils behind their ears, black cameras slung from their necks. She pictured the Senator on a platform in their gravel driveway with his sister, Eunice Shriver, Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy, and Pierre Salinger. His left hand in his back pocket, his right hand pointing beyond their pasture to the emerald horizon, Senator Kennedy would use the word brilliant. She stopped rolling, put her left hand on her back pocket, lifted her chin, and pointed.
To what?
Manny looked down at her T-shirt hand-painted with JFK's head across the chest, a gift especially for the campaign staff from Sister Oliver, and her orange and green plaid shorts. It was a pathetic, laundry-day combination. The shirt was stained from strawberry milk--she had soaked it over night but JFK's face had turned rosy like Santa Claus'. Her shorts were cut-offs from pants she'd been forced to sew last year in fifth grade home economics class. After erroneously placing the side seams up the back--how was she to know?--she had thrown the pants in the kitchen trash bin, but her mother had fished them out. Now every few steps Manny tugged the plaid fabric out of the crack of her butt. "What does it matter?" her older sister Helen had said this morning. "The eye of the nation is not upon you."
The spool wheels were pressing ruts into their lawn. A sparrow with a rubber band in its mouth hopped into a rut and trotted behind her. "Caw Caw Caw," she called out, her voice fading into the heat. Some noise drifted out from the spruce trees behind the tractor shed--Jilly and her friends? Dogs? FBI? KGB? She pictured square-headed men in beige trench coats and suede gloves milling through the boughs, foraging in the spruce needles on the ground with the toes of their black polished shoes, furtively stepping over the rusted wheelbarrow and barbed chicken wire.
This morning Shawn had made fun of her in the barn. Oh say can you see. By the tractor shed's light, what so proudly we haul, from the milk tank each morning.
She heard rustling from the spruce trees, a squeaking? Maybe it was Charly, her dog, whining from the heat. Or Morty, the neighbor's dog, an ugly beige mutt that had never got hit by a car. Manny's dogs had had their heads sliced off by trains, hind legs mashed under tractor wheels--was that justice? But old ugly Morty was lying up against their house in the shade, chewing off ticks, and Charly had followed Shawn and Jesse down to the river to check on their silver death traps. Bloody Republicans.
Watch it, she thought. Sister Oliver had told her to watch her attitude toward her citizen brothers.
Manny tipped the spool onto its flat end, the wood grey and cracked. She climbed onto it and took three deep yoga breaths through her throat. She was learning yoga from a book that had been mistakenly placed in the American History section at the school library: Yogic Practices for Westerners. She dropped into a warrior pose, fiercely lunging a sword into Mr. Richard Millhouse Nixon's black heart. She breathed what the book called the "spirit of life," the spirit that Sister Oliver said was the "great unifier of citizens across the land." Citizens from Juno Alaska to Tallahassee Florida were breathing in and out with Manny Hinnencamp. John F. Kennedy was breathing in and out. He was interested in oneness of all, unity, democracy. Did she really believe this? Manny stood on her toes and reached both arms to the sky, then dropped from the waist like a willow.
Posing made her feel like nations lived inside of her. She was more than herself--she was oneness, she was democracy. Manny Hinnencamp was interested in the mutability of the individual, the relationship between citizenry and shape. Her mother, who was in the basement doing laundry with Helen, was shaped like Idaho because her hips had spread from having babies. She used to be shaped like Minnesota, like Manny whose hips shot straight down from her waist. At twelve, Manny was trunkish and flat chested, with long legs and big feet like Mrs. Kennedy. Last Sunday she had spent one hour in front of the bathroom mirror trying to square her mouth like Mrs. Kennedy's. This was supposed to be a beautiful mouth, but on Manny it looked as crude and mawkish as a vomit mouth.
Now from the spruce erupted odd, high chirping sounds. She climbed down from the wooden spool. The grass was dry, crisp. With her toes curled she walked on the sides of her feet bowlegged across the lawn toward the shed. She hopped across the hot gravel to the fence, sat on the top rung and swung her legs over. As she entered the spruce trees, shadows fluttered over her arms, and then the shade deepened. The hair on her forearms stood up, ruddy goose bumps springing around the hairs like villages in a forest.
About twenty feet from an open area covered with long, yellow spruce needles, Manny crouched and held her knees. Her sister Jilly and Viki Schmerlinger were kneeling on each side of Quinn Tuttle, their weird ten-year-old neighbor from across the river. Quinn had pulled off his shirt and was sitting with his arms spread wide like wings. His bare skinny chest glowed like a mushroom. "Feeding time," he said. His voice, which was usually high and airy like a girl's--not like Manny's but like other girls'--came out half squawk. Then he stretched out his arms even further as he lay back ceremoniously, arching his neck and shutting his eyes. Jilly and Viki tucked their hands into their armpits and began flapping chaotically, short sputtery flaps close to their sides, as if their wing muscles were too tight or as if their elbows were attached to their sides by a short string.
Quinn looked like he was being sacrificed, like the girls were going to cut his throat. Jilly and Vicki pursed their mouths, chirping softer and softer, until the chirps were squeaks. They stopped flapping and put their mouths on Quinn's nipples.
What in the hell? Manny thought. She had never seen anything like this sight. She covered one eye and looked again, as if she could rearrange the picture. Quinn let out a moan and Manny looked up into the spruce tree boughs as if she could see the sound drifting out of the top branches. She looked down between her knees at the yellow needles. She picked up a needle and poked it into her forearm. What in the world would John F. Kennedy say to this?
Out of the spruce trees, over the fence, across the gravel driveway she plodded. A splinter from the fence was burning in the side of her foot. She limped down the driveway and turned onto the pasture road toward the corn field. She plunged her foot up to her ankle into a pile of black dirt. Tucking her other leg against her thigh she tightened her buttocks and breathed in, out, posing as a corn stalk, the dirt cooling the splintered spot. The glow of Quinn's skinny pale chest grew over her mind--that's just how it seemed; it started as a normal size and then magnified until her whole mind filled with a pale flatness and two brown penny nipples.
The thought of Jilly putting her mouth there made Manny feel sick way down inside--worse than sick, it made her feel separate from society and she hated that feeling. Who in the world did things like that? Manny had never done that. But she had done other things. She had pooped under a tree and watched the dog eat it. But not since Sister Oliver had nominated her, and the sixth grade had voted her in, as secretary of the campaign, not since she was interested in developing oneness of all and being a good citizen.
Quinn did not understand that he was a member of society. He was the only student at Saint Theresa's who had refused to register to vote in the school election. On Wednesday during the campaign rally he had climbed into the auditorium rafters and in the middle of Sister Oliver's speech had swung across the stage on the gymnastic rope. Friday morning he had run through the halls shouting the pledge of allegience backwards.
Manny held her breath to listen for sounds from the human body. Nothing.
She recited the first amendment. Then she recited the second.
Something in the dirt tickled against her shin. An angle worm crawled up out of the hole, bunching like an accordion then lengthening out. It was scrawny and grey instead of swollen and pink. Her father was worried because the soil was dehydrated and suffering from malnutrition this year. Droopy crops. The cows were giving less milk and they were eating game and potatoes, game and potatoes. Instead of buying her a winter coat her mother was sewing Manny a midi-coat with gold buttons. Manny tried to feel compassion for the worm--the book had said all beings mattered--but it was so hard to believe that worms mattered.
Jilly stood in front of her on the pasture road in her thigh-length blue and white checkered muu-muu, sewn by their mother, with the navy blue ribbon trimming the short puffed sleeves and neckline. She stood as if her neck were too weak to hold her head up, embarrassing and pathetic. Now she was staring at Manny with that cow face, probably because Quinn had gone down to the river and now Jilly wanted Manny to bring her down to the river like she usually did on Sundays when they had nothing else to do.
"Don't look so innocent," Manny said. "Did your playmate go back home?"
Her sister stared, the hem of her muu-muu caught in the elastic band of her panties. "Let's go to the river, Manny."
"Did you take your panties down?"
Her sister put her little finger up her nose and wiped it on her thigh. She shook her head.
"Good. Don't ever take your panties down." There, she had given her some advice. "What were you doing in the trees?"
"We were baby eagles."
"Oh, God. Listen. Eagles don't do what you were doing. They fly off cliffs and feed worms and insects to their babies. Eagles are the national symbol, don't denigrate them."
Jilly shrugged--who did she get that from? Jesse? Shawn? She hopped on one foot and then the other and then she dropped to the grassy spot and rifled through the grass for four-leaf clovers. In their bedroom Jilly had a Children's Bible full of pressed four-leaf clovers, or of three-leaf clovers with a fourth leaf taped on; they were always showing up in between their bed covers, in the underwear drawer, in Manny's Social Studies book. Most recently she had found a homemade four-leaf clover in her scrap book on JFK and in her Secretary notebook of the minutes to the campaign meetings.
"Luck, luck, luck. You only care about being lucky." Manny put her left hand on her back pocket and pointed at Jilly. "Today is different, you know. No, you don't. You are lucky to be a citizen of the United States." She didn't know what she was saying. Her mother had said she was speaking garbage; her father said she was spinning around with crap in her pants. Somebody else's words were in her mouth and when they came out a great distance grew between the inside of herself and the outside. Manny the Secretary of the JKF campaign, Manny the member of a nation. She took a deep yoga breath, but the nation had slipped out of her: she couldn't see a nation, she couldn't smell a nation, she couldn't hear a nation. What was a nation?
"Come on," she said to Jilly. "Let's go down to the river."