J.B.
by Adam Hirsch
The answer lies right in front of us: in the box, under the sheets, at the top of that one particular closet perpetually passed by, year after year, the one location we have forgotten to look. No matter how many times it has occurred in the past, we somehow arrive back to that very same conundrum: how could we not have known?
Voices, eyes. The mark is upon us all — carry the burden of revelation: the gift of realization and deference for the situation. It is because we are human, brief and tame, that we may choose to forget — or not to forget — these persisting and relentless situations. There are, as well, different paths we may take toward this revelation; paths we walk down, criss-crossing as we fall into maps of who to listen to; where to gather the information; whether the testimony is fact or tale; whether we have unwillingly invented myths that will weave us around back to where we did not even realize we began. Which is why the truth about J.B. Fermor will never come down from that top shelf. Too many people have a say in it.
Some of the letters found paper-clipped to the pages of the five volumes of Peterson’s Field Guides (1961: 6th Edition) are signed by Piper – who is Piper?
Maybe she’s just an idea, a whisper; something in the dust; an intruder; the memory of a headache; a blur in the background of a photograph; the sensation of the time that a harmony may bring about. Anything else is speculation.
Everything, though, is speculation.
She was a love; that much can be known. She was not a love poem, she was love. The letters were written because she had to write: thoughts (and, yes, speculation) were not enough. Yet there were impediments in J.B.’s path to her.
Were J.B. and Almajean married in bliss? For a time, I’m sure. But their tale is truly lost to the silent and merciless tale of time. Their own relationship – /re/la/tion/ship/: the duration and venture of their union – can only be known through their separate re-collections and dialogues. They do not always match; they do not always want to coincide. Even their union itself can be called into question.
The most useful Almajean came to be resulted from her donation of the BOX to the search for J.B: the contents of the box are very real.
Piper — she loved him. (Love!) It came off her tongue as a new sensation – something that she tried to mimic in her letters to him. She wanted to carve the air with it. They fell in love in the leanest sense of the word, condensed; humid; without questioning, without doubting; with each other as the only evidence. They did not have the weight of the past as a leveraged interest on their emotions (at least, not yet).
What we feel means nothing: it is only the actions we take as a result of those feelings that mean anything at all.
She wrote the letters. She started coughing more but didn’t mind it; it was only when the fatigue set in that she became scared. Her real name was Regina but everyone called her Piper because she whistled so well. She whistled to him. They were young. But. Then there was the lettering, the lottery, the picking and the placement; but it did not matter to them: he would come back soon enough; he would come back to her.
Everything is speculation.
She coughed once when they made love; he thought it was his weight on her chest.
She coughed more after he left; she coughed more into little squares of cloth she kept in her pockets that she made from the leftover linen she and her mother bought to make the new pillowcases.
She mailed him the doctor’s slip, but that was much later. He had been gone for over a year, then. She didn’t know what to do. Her father told her to pray, but she did not think that prayer had much to do with it (blood on her pillow; Bible in her drawer). Her father was the minister. Her chest felt damp.
She remembers when she went with her mother to buy the pillowcase linen in Ardmore. Her mother drove them in (her mother taught her father to drive, actually): Interstate 44 came after almost an hour on the dust and gravel roads. Dust covered the black car and the gravel knocked them around, pellets hitting the side and undercarriage – very hot, since her mother refused to open the windows (presumably because of the dust), the black leather seats sticking to her thighs; she pulled her dress with the crimson flower prints down, pulled it down and peeled the leather off to put the thin material between – but when they made it to the highway the blacktop smoothed the ride out and it was only another half hour into town.
She remembers this day because, one week later, she wrote about it to J.B. in the first letter she ever sent airmail, overseas. The kale green stamp; runny post office pen chained to the counter; the crisp envelope resisting as she wrote down the address, every line of his name a conscious stroke; looking at the address she kept in her dress pocket. The clerk took the letter from her.
The clerk took the letter from her, half-smiled, and tossed it into the box with all the other letters that were going to the soldiers’ camps.
Later that day they bought the linen and they made it into the pillowcases, and even had enough left over for a sheet. The pillowcases (and the sheet) she took with her to the hospital; the hospital that was in Guthrie; the hospital only three stories tall; the hospital where she wrote the other seventeen letters (mailed) and thirteen notes (given) to J.B. and subsequently paper-clipped into the pages of his copy of Peterson’s Field Guides for safe keeping.