Mrs. Haws works in the garden and the wind brings her voices. She cocks her head to the right like a sparrow, eyes darting upwards, trying to catch the sibilant mumblings of the breeze through the palm fronds and eucalyptus branches. She stands there in her floppy beige hat and her smudged yellow sun dress for a full minute, as stock-still as the array of little plaster trolls, fawns and sleeping Mexicans arranged in a semi-circle in front of her. Sometimes she thinks the voices are addressing the assembly of backyard idols and she is only standing in the way. The shadow of a palm frond falls across her sandaled feet, spiky as the wing of a great ragged vulture. There are terrible flying things in this lovely corner of San Diego but there are also angels just out of sight, in the rank overgrown spaces in the alley, where the bougainvillea spills over the sagging plank fences as if dropped from heaven.
The voices are only part of the atmosphere on these sweet days of exaggerated sun, so different from the Cleveland dreariness Mrs. Haws knew when Henry was still alive and the kids were small. That was before the war and the peace that never was peaceful and the rape of Korea and the crucifixion of Joe McCarthy, poor man. Mrs. Haws’ mind savors this last thought like a tongue flicking at a sore tooth; it makes her turn away from the trolls, put down her watering can and go check the glass jars full of water lying on her front lawn. These jars are supposed to catch sunlight and reflect it painfully into the eyes of stray dogs. There is no firm evidence that this method of dog control works but it ought to work and there have been fewer piles of dog waste on her lawn lately so there is no good reason to stop using the jars. Mrs. Haws wonders if the fluoride in the city tap water might make the reflected light more painful; even though she doesn’t really hate dogs, just mess and chaos, the thought gives her a small pinprick of guilty enjoyment.
Light and water – they are as real and solid as the cement and stucco around her. The wind is firm and capable of carrying a million million chattering voices. It has been years since Mrs. Haws has attended the Swedenborgian church down the street, but the doctrines of the great Christian teacher still shift and recombine in her mind kaleidoscopically. They confirm her certainty that the ethereal is material, solid things are not what they seem and that angels are at war with the creatures that poison our food and water and slip across our lawns at night to leave little calling-cards of corruption.
Mrs. Haws catches herself ruminating, which takes her over the line from vigilance into excess speculation, and she has no time for THAT. She agreed to visit at least five neighbors this afternoon and spread the word about Barry Goldwater’s campaign for president. Joe McCarthy was murdered but Barry is alive and leading the fight with his handsome granite chin set square, a solid man in a dissolving world. She walks over to the blue and white AuH2O sign in her yard and pushes its spikes a little deeper into the dry soil.
The wind is picking up again from the North, scooping up fragments of sound from Mission Valley and blowing them past Mrs. Haws’ good right ear. The glint of one of the water-filled jars catches her eye – it feels like a paper cut, sharp and quick. She catches a string of words blowing by:”howcanyoustandforallthisnonsenssssssse?” The question passes through her and melts back into the air in the heat of the pure, sweet sunshine.
