qarrtsiluni

A cement porch with a vinyl-cushioned metal glider and posts with diagonally cut wood slats for decoration. There are several arborvitae clustered around the porch, green against white paint. The temporal address: 7420 Piedmont Street, Detroit, Michigan.

An indeterminate year. An unknown season.

Cousin Tony is standing behind Sophia who is sitting on the green glider holding the tiny Christmas 1944 baby. Walter is seated beside her. Everyone is just as they had been when they died. Tony has a Marine buzz cut, mud on his camouflage fatigues from some unnamed jungle in Vietnam. And blood. The insignia of his rank did not stop the bullets. Sophia and Walter are wizened apple dolls. She died of a fast-growing cancer and he was killed in a house fire. The baby in Sophia’s withered lap has a blue face because of the umbilical cord that had been wrapped around his neck when he was born dead into a world at war.

Richard Walter is sitting on the cement steps. Doreen Marie is beside him. Brother and sister. He died alone from a stroke or a heart attack, who knows? She died of an overdose of prescription methadone. Each of them is too young to die but they are dead just the same. Like Tony and the baby. Like Sophia and Walter, both in their early seventies. Too soon to say goodbye.

Fred Brown is there by the door, grinning his signature big grin. He is not in the bits and pieces, what was left of him after he was murdered, but the young man he’d been, only a week or so from his seventeenth birthday, just before he is killed. Buried on his birthday like it was a present or a surprise wake someone had given him. He is African-American and some might argue, not a member of this family, on this porch in the Polack working class ghetto where everyone else came from.

Since this is a portrait of my beloved dead, Fred is most definitely among them. He is saying out loud to anyone who will listen, “Christina isn’t white, she’s Polish.” My mother smiles her crooked smile and my dad barks a laugh like he knows a lot more about something but he isn’t telling. Richard and Doreen invite Fred to sit down on the steps with them. The Christmas Baby is happy to be with everyone at last.

The shutter snaps — this is not a digital phone dammit but a real camera — and I shoot picture after picture convinced that the light is exactly right, the moment too good to be true.

Like stepping into the same river twice — not the River Styx but another river — Missouri   Vistula   San  Ganges  Danube  Tigris  Euphrates  Yukon  Orinoco  Amazon  Nile  Mekong Mississippi  Detroit — these beloved dead aren’t easily gathered again.

by Christina Pacosz

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