Imaginary Playmate

by Brett Rutherford

It was my secret place
away from bath-time and spanking,
away from Grandfather’s grizzled hugs,
from the cries of the baby brother,
away from heat and brambles,
blackberry barb and poison ivy —
a cool-air haven
where the acrid fumes
of coke-oven smoke
never intruded:
the “spring-house,”
a covered well, actually,
a cobwebbed shed
of cool-sweated pump and pipes.

Here I could sit
behind its plank door,
imagining another door,
flat on the concrete,
that opened downward
to a treasure cave,
a city of runaways,
a subterranean launch-pad
for moon rockets.

One day a man was there,
crouching inside
beneath a straw hat,
a shoulder pack,
more frightened of me,
it seemed, than I of him.

I sat beside him
on the cold stone lip
of the gurgling well.
His whispered words
were barely louder
than the distant coal trucks,
the chirring cicadas.
His name was Eric, 

a young man, yet
bigger than my father.
He asked about my mother,
my teacher, the friends
I would see again
in second grade in the fall.
“Too bad your mother is married,”
he said. “She’s pretty.
I watched her from the road.”

Two weeks he hid there,
sleeping all morning.
I brought him cookies.
He taught me games.
Once, I touched
the soft blond beard
that glazed his cheekbones.
I could tell him anything.

Soap opera organ
rose to a frenzy
on the oval-windowed
new television
as someone yelled:
“Kidnapped!
Our son has been kidnapped!”

What’s kidnap? I ask my mother.
She, ironing, from the other room:
That’s when they steal a child
and then ask for money.

I thought it might be fun
to be kidnapped.
I might even get to keep
some of the money.

Just watch out for strange cars,
my mother warned.

One day I mentioned Eric
at the dinner table.
“That’s all he talks about,”
my mother explained.
“That’s his friend,
his imaginary playmate.”
My father grew angry.
They shouted
as I read comics in my bedroom.

One day, my father took me
to a roadside tavern.
He sat in the back
with his band leader,
played an illegal
slot machine.
They worked on “Stardust”
together, his clarinet
and Tony’s trumpet.

A strange man came in,
saw me alone,
gave me a nickel
to buy potato chips.

As my father returned,
I asked my new friend,
“Can I have another nickel?”
My father exploded,
shouted at the stranger:
“No one gives my kid money!”

The stranger left hurriedly.

Why did he go? Strangers seemed

kinder to me than parents.
I thought about kidnapped children,
sweets and sodas everywhere,
fresh bread from the oven,
mountains of comic books,

a long wait for the ransom,
maybe never.

At home, the spring-house was locked.
My mother doled out dinner:
government surplus beef
and slices of cheese
off a long square loaf.
Some nights we ate bread
and gravy and radishes.

I stayed indoors all summer.
Sometimes at night
I thought I saw someone
cross from the poplars,
to the spring-house, then back again,
a lanky form darting
from shadow to shadow.

I sleepwalked many nights,
awaking against the locked
front door. On other nights
I dreamt my own door
at the back of the closet.
I opened it, to another door,
and yet another, until sleep
vacuumed me to darkness.

I never mentioned Eric again.

Years later I heard
of the men who slept
in the nearby foothills,
setting up camp
in the abandoned ovens —
draft dodgers avoiding
the Korean War call-up.

Years after that I suddenly
remembered him again —
his soft tenor voice in the shadow,
the friend to whom I said,

“Would you kidnap me someday?
I’ll never tell . . . I promise.”

The Old Brick House at Carpentertown

by Brett Rutherford

Only a few memories define it
now that it is gone, gone
to the last brick, a place
where two roads meet
in a bramble of scrub trees
and blackberries wild:

Never turn on the lights
in the dining room:
if you flick the switch
you smell smoke
and hear a crackling sound
somewhere behind
the peeling wallpaper.

Never go down those steps
to the cellar. The rats
are there, and they own it.

Tap water is only
for taking a bath.
It is not safe to drink;
the well is poisoned
by the slow seep
of wet ash-piles
from the glowing coke-ovens.

Never go up
to the slanted attic whose one
sole window throws light
one hour a day
on the head and shoulders
of a nameless Greek.

Do not eat the dog's
worm medicine,
even if it looks like
M&Ms.

Never tell anyone
you have learned to levitate
and do not need to touch
foot to stair-tread
coming down from your bedroom.

Never tell anyone
ever again
about your imaginary
playmate. Just lie
and say you were alone.
Both voices were yours.
Smile mysteriously.

When, late at night,
you press your face
to a window pane
and an escaped blank panther,
paws on the window-sill,
regards you eye-to-eye,
tell no one.

When a great storm
comes, run to the porch
to feel the rain-lash
against your face.
Welcome the lightning.
Imagine yourself as one
of the Lombardy poplars
aching for a thunderbolt.

Carry its many rooms
inside you forever,
haunter of your own
haunted house.

The House by the Coke Ovens

I saw my childhood home only one time between the ages of 13 and last fall: I was 35 and was driven through Scottdale PA hastily and out into the country to find the house by the coke ovens. Here is a revision of the poem I wrote that summer, from a cycle that uses the Native American "God's Eye" and wild berries as recurring motifs.

I wanted to see my childhood home again,

the country house, the demon-haunted

rooms that gave my inner self their imprint.

We drove through Scottdale with its too

many churches, stores boarded up, cold

as an exhausted and empty mine.
         Looking for Carpentertown,

we drove back and forth in the hollow,

passing again and again the barren, black

lot by the edge of the fen. “Stop here,”

I said. “This is the place. The house

stood here. Back there, coke ovens blazed

all night, and there, the trucks

ground by with their tons of coal.”

Of the house that stood here — nothing.

Of the solemn poplars of Lombardy

     that wrote on my window panes — nothing.

Of the stately porch and its swing,

     the apple tree’s promise — nothing.

Of the locked, steep attic and its

     imagined relics  — nothing.

Of the deep, deep cellar with its

     warden rats – nothing.

Of the cool spring house and its poisoned well —

     nothing.

Of the very stone and shape of foundation,

     the lineament of property — nothing.

Am I seeing the future? Is carboned ground

a resonant prophecy of bomb-fall —

is this desolation my past – or a future

of our own time sewn with apocalypse?

(The God’s Eye blinks but cannot answer.)

A neighbor comes to tell us the house 

burned to the ground some fifteen years ago.

The timbers and bricks were trucked away.

Slag dumps drifted, quicksand consumed,

until the foundation itself was buried.

Trees tumbled to ruffian winds.
 

And as for the “quicksand”

I thought I remembered, the local said:

“Oh yes, out there in the middle,

there are bad places. Last spring it got

our grandma: she was in past her knees

when we heard her screaming and pulled her out.”

We walk where the house was,

where it seems dry and safe enough.

Breaking through black-crust earth

the stalks of lichens, brittle, rigid,

stand at attention with lurid caps

of crimson. (The field guide shows them,

and says they are called British Soldiers.)

They rise like the whiskers of a Chthonic god,

eyeless guardians of a plain of night,

a carpet for Gorgons and barefoot Maenads,

dry to the touch, coarse as sandstone.

Only their form suggests the organic.

Concealing the lichens, as forest hides shrubs,

I see a tangled maze of blackberries,

thorns guarding the fruit with jealous teeth.

Although they hang at arm’s length, ripe

for the taking, although the sickly birds

glare down from a chancred tree, no one

will pick this fruit. It too is black —

coal dust, charcoal, coke and obsidian,

a berry hued for the Stygian shores,

for the lips of the dead and the damned.

I played here as a child, amid the thorns

and poison ivy. The earth did not open

to swallow me. Perhaps I am immune,

the one, who remembering, belongs.

There is not much left of the great coke industry,

when the coal was eked from nearby Hecla

and the smouldering coke went to Pittsburgh.

A quarter mile back, the red rust scavenges

the twisted wheel of a coal crusher,

its chute and trestle and engine works gone;

it lays like the useless jaw of a dinosaur.

Open hearth ovens sprout vengeful trees,

vine roots split mortar, firebrick moults clay.

“I lived here many years ago,” I said —

not saying how many. It was thirty —

I was five when this house protected me,

when its terrors wrote themselves upon me.

And so the hungry past steals up behind me,

a lumbering truck full of fossils,

heating my poems to the red fury of ovens,

erasing my life as quickly as I write it.