Voice Lessons: Tale of Breaking Free

Voice Lessons

Tales of Breaking Free

Catherine Holm

North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

St. Cloud, Minnesota

Copyright © 2014 Catherine Holm

Print ISBN 978-0-87839-747-1

eBook ISBN 978-0-87839-986-4

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First Edition: March 2014

Author Photo: Deborah Sussex Photography

Published by

North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

P.O. Box 451

St. Cloud, MN 56302

Dedication

To C, with thanks and love for your constant and steadfast support.

Acknowledgments

So Great and Big was originally published in Talking Stick, Volume 20.

Ferry Woman was originally published in Talking Stick, Volume 22.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

So Great and Big

Finding Mother

Mrs. M

La Neveria

Voice Lessons

Walmart Greeter

Freeing His Voice at Last

Demeanor

The Arms of Witches

Gringo Child

Those Hills

The Bone Whisperer

Hunt

Mountain Song

What I Can’t Remember: Memoir

Ferry Woman

So Great and Big

I met you, Burly, the night we both served food at the Union Gospel Mission. I put instant potatoes onto small plastic trays, two ice cream scoops each. You put one scoop each of a pasta-rich casserole into another compartment on the brown trays. Cheap food for expendable people.

You and I, Burly, are those people. We were drunk on the cold sidewalks of Duluth until we both ended up in the Mission, where the front door didn’t close and leaked in winter air off the big lake. Mattresses and threadbare sheets were stacked high in the lobby, donated from hotels that went out of business or redecorated.

An ancient piano sat on the north wall of the dining room with a peeling picture of Jesus above it. Jesus wore a white tunic and had his hands raised in supplication. I met you first, Burly, as you stared at that picture.

Your face sagged but your eyes danced. You had a dirty beard and long blond-gray uncombed hair.

You pointed at Jesus. He saved me, you said.

I pushed my hair out of my face and turned toward the kitchen, hoping you’d take the hint. We had to get to work.

But you, Burly, weren’t leaving that picture of Jesus. I always wondered at people like you. Even if Jesus was God’s son, he was never enough for me. I needed a stretching landscape, sunsets that never ended, the easy warm slide into drunkenness that took all my dreams and made them great. So great and big.

I may have looked like a fat old woman, beaten down by life, but I had big dreams. I dreamt them every night, in the women’s section of the Mission, when I was lucky enough to get a bed. I tossed around on someone’s lumpy discarded mattress, pulled the thin sheets and blanket over me, and fell into broken sleep. And started to dream. I’d seen you in a dream, Burly, before I met you. But I’d seen many people in my dreams. Pete, who ran the Mission. Nathan, who came in and played hymns on the old piano, while silent drunks and the homeless ate noodles and mashed potatoes.

Come on, I said to you.

You pulled yourself away from the Jesus on the wall. I stared back at the Jesus and saw his eyes follow us.

So there we were, standing so close our hips touched, in the cramped kitchen quarters, arranging ice cream scoops of food on trays. Pete was working the stove and oven, mixing up more casseroles, covering them with foil, sliding them into dark, dirty ovens, spraying dirty trays with a water nozzle. There was going to be a big crowd—it was raw and nasty out with icy snow like knife darts, cold wind, a hopeless sky. People would die that night.

I got big dreams, I told you. I was wearing green fleecy stretch pants, but the fleece was thin. You wore old jeans, barely held up on your skinny hips with a funny-looking woman’s belt.

Never had much use for dreams, you said, and you looked at the trays and food rather than at me.

I heard chording coming from the piano—Nathan was playing old hymns to the empty dining room. How great Thou art . . . Nathan sang, off-key with his playing but loud and full of force. Nathan hunched over the piano, wearing old camo pants and a tan hooded sweatshirt, the only clothes I ever saw him wear. The sweatshirt was stretched taut by Nathan’s barrel chest.

Can’t you hear how them chords could be better? I said. I couldn’t play a thing—no piano, no guitar—but I was always able to hear how a song could be better. Ain’t those the most boring chords you ever heard in your life? My belly was straining against my waistband. Nathan banged the chords too hard, in the wrong rhythms.

You, Burly, looked at me, and your eyes cut into mine. Your face had a firm set, sagginess gone.

Who are you—Liberace? You smashed a scoop of potatoes on a tray and it splatted up, flinging a glop of white stuff on my cheek. You nodded your head and looked back to the food.

There was rustling in the dining room as the Mission’s doors opened and people began to come in. Nathan pounded the chords harder. I had a sudden vision in my mind of the big lake, a few blocks away, rising up, its gray, cold water washing over the city, freezing us all to death like a hard, ice-laden slice of life.

I threw my scoop down and stared at you, who I hardly knew.

Let’s get out of here, I said.

I felt the old drunk feeling swim into my mind, my innards, and oh how it could make me feel so big. I didn’t need the stuff anymore. I could take myself to the place where the drunks take me, without the drink.

I got enough money for a couple bus tickets. We could head west where the sky was big and flat and endless. Where it was warm and open and the world was big enough to hold my dreams.

Nathan ended How Great Thou Art abruptly, not giving the note enough time. It sent me reeling, as if I’d been tossed off a spaceship into the dark. He made it worse and barreled into Silent Night, too fast.

And you, Burly, gave me the strangest look, as if you were looking at a foreign animal. As if you’d never seen me before.

Lady, you said, I don’t even know you. I sure ain’t traipsing ’round the country with you.

An empty tray swam before me, containers waiting to be filled. The tray turned into the gray frozen lake surrounding this city—dark, nebulous, cold, killing. You nudged my tray sharply with a tray you were working on. Slid it across the rough counter. Our hips weren’t touching.

I got Him, you said, looking toward out toward those beseeching eyes over the piano.

That was the night, Burly, the night you and Jesus set me free. Outside, the roads and the snow closed in on me but I walked and I walked. And I could feel the land and earth in front of me opening up, big and wide. And behind me, though I didn’t look, time and roads and buildings all crunched inward, got small, compacted. I didn’t need to look. I knew. Way to the west end of town to the bus depot I walked, wearing a heavy coat I’d swiped from the donation bin at the Mission, too tight across the chest. Those knives of snow were heading toward my heart. I got a mission, Burly. Got a mission and a bus ticket. I’m going where the land is big and great enough to hold dreams, to hold me, to hold my heart.

Finding Mother

Ellie hiked to the end of the portage. In front of her, a swampy lake opened up. Water lapped at her feet at the canoe landing; her breath was visible in the cool fall air. She stepped into the cold October water, and gently flipped the solo canoe off her shoulders and onto the lake surface. Then she eased the pack off her shoulders and into the canoe, climbed in, and began paddling. Her paddle made smooth slicing sounds in the water.

Across the water she could see the channel that led to Gabbro Lake. Rocky shoreline and the boreal forest of birch, pine, and spruce closed in, creating the narrow channel. When she crossed that channel, which she had done many times in the past decades, she always felt as if she was taking tender steps across her heart. She walked across her heart into a new life. Ellie would walk into that place where dreams expanded; where the details of making a camp in the woods mattered more than the demands of life outside the wilderness. Here, Ellie could come close to having peace and expansion fill her—what she needed now.

Gabbro Lake was where Ellie went when she needed to clear her head—Gabbro of the matte black rocks that slid into dark water with their smooth and sloping surfaces. Those rocks would be cold now, too cold to lie on. But Ellie needed their grounding.

She paddled faster, putting distance between her and the in-town memories of her mother. Mother dying, in a nursing home bed.

Ellie would not be there when her mother passed over. She did not want to be there.

She fastened her gaze steadily on the channel, aiming the bow of the canoe straight for its center, steering expertly. Mid-stroke, she reached with her upper hand and brushed brown hair from her eyes. Her hair was becoming peppered with gray. Her mother’s hair had also turned gray at fifty. The older Ellie got, the more she looked like her mother. Ellie and her mother both shared long-boned thinness, straight and lusterless hair, a clipped way