Noreen
Doyle
Egyptology
Nautical Archaeology
Fiction
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Noreen
Doyle
Egyptology
Nautical Archaeology
Fiction
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| FICTION: excerpt About My Fiction Stories in Print Anthologies |
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The Chapter of
the Hawk of Gold Two hundred years have peeled paint, broken shingles and cracked the granite step of the shed that houses the Healy Tompkins Museum. The beams are sound, the floor solid, and most of the glass original. Everything in the museum is in this same state: whole inside, broken only outside. Periodically the Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society make these outsides someone's business. Jenny Alcock feared that it would happen to her someday. Her mother doesn't attend the Historical Society; her father drives for an out-of-town vending company owned by an old French family. Who else at Pithom Independent High School is better suited for the task? Everyone else has their excuses: camp, job, summer school, parents with influence. It is a long, solitary task, and she protests. But even her own mother insists. It will keep Jenny out of trouble. Askew on the wall hang amber-colored panoramics of uniformed men, with names scrawled in what looks like white ink. In one cabinet, a Downeast sailor's ropework valentine beds down beside a carved lacquer cup stand from China. A thin, balding rug from Ghiordes carpets the floor in faded Turkish red and yellow. A Spanish silver candlestick, supplied with a beeswax candle, occupies a George I burl walnut side table. (So the labels say.) The silver is tarnished, and alternating seasons of damp summer heat and dry winter cold have split the walnut veneer. To Jenny such decay is at once opulent and familiar. At home, linoleum peels away from the floorboards, hard water has pitted and stained the stainless steel sink, pink sheets are mended with blue thread. Thumbtacks hold sun-faded Polaroids to a wall. They have no names written on them. No one in Jenny's home (except maybe Jenny, now and then) ever cares about these things. The Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society, however, do worry about dust and tarnish, at least now and then. It is the only tolerable thing about them. Jenny just wishes that they would care for someone other than Healy Tompkins, at least now and then. Healy Tompkins was paper-mill baron and traveler, almost a hundred years ago. He went often to Egypt on business and made pilgrimages to most of the Christian shrines in Jerusalem, of which she finds old photographs in a steamer trunk. One cabinet is devoted to such things as "Sliver of the True Cross" and "Saint Peter's Tympanum." But of all Healy Tompkins's Egyptian travels, this museum holds only one souvenir. The label, pounded out on an old Underwood which cut out all the o's, reads: Hawk Mummy. Late Period. Purchased Cairo, 1889. Covered in dust as thick as gray felt, it feels light, like the paper māche parrot she made in seventh grade. Light as a bird. A wooden mask, once gilded but now mostly bare, encases the head. Jenny pities it, wings all linen-bound, and she always dusts it twice each week. Why had Healy Tompkins returned to Pithom, Maine, of all the places in the world he could have gone? Jenny thinks about this while she wipes the bull's-eye window panes and soon decides that his mill and his bank accounts and his big house must have been enough for him. Those days, however, are long past. The paper mill is a ruin. Why did any Alcock -- once millwrights, now painters and carpenters and truckers -- ever stay? Jenny envies her father and the company truck, his road trips to Portland's shopping centers, its airport, all its people. Each time he went out, she thinks as she props a stereoview of the Wailing Wall on a shelf, it was a little like Healy Tompkins's pilgrimages. Her father has spent a lot of time away lately although Portland is scarcely an hour's drive from Pithom, and last night her parents fought about that. This morning her mother, still in pink curlers and white feathered slippers, followed him out into the dooryard. Was he coming home tonight? Of course, he said, he always came home (although he had not been home the night before last). He was sorry, he was so very sorry, Ellen, Ellen, it was nothing, nothing at all, just one night. Then they kissed, memory of their harsh words swept away by promises and I'm-sorries. Jenny, whom no one balms with promises or I'm-sorries, does not, cannot, forget. Memory of what has happened coats her like dirt. She dusts the hawk -- poor thing -- for the third time this week, wishing that someone, just someone, would do as much for her someday. As the ceiling fan vibrates the overhead light, the hawk winks its black glass eyes. read the rest of the story in Otherworldly Maine
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 Fantasy short story Realms of Fantasy August 1997 illustrated by Janet Aulisio Realms of Fantasy  Otherworldly Maine edited by Noreen Doyle (Down East Books, 2008) Otherworldly Maine home page other excerpts: Ankhtifi the Brave is dying. Callum's Feast The Chapter of Bringing a Boat into Heaven The Chapter of Coming forth by Night The Chapter of the Hawk of Gold The Dovecote The Execration Horizon Shadow of the Pyramid Trading Places |
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