The Natural Laws of Good Luck by Ellen Graf

Author:Ellen Graf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala Publications

The Power of Destruction

A PERSON HAS A FORCE FIELD. Things happen there. I noticed that when my husband passed through a room, glass objects that had collected dust on the shelf for years quaked and shattered. Legs fell off chairs, handles dropped off pots, and the china Dalmatian toppled onto the German shepherd and cracked off his hind leg. Maybe the goblet on the shelf had been walking toward the edge since it was used last Thanksgiving. Maybe I didn’t put enough glue in the hole when I made the stool. By the time he had been here about eighteen months, the breaking objects got bigger and of greater significance to daily life. He could break things that were far away and not in line with his intent. One day, while splitting wood, he made an unlucky swing with the iron maul; it struck the plastic wedge askew and sent it spinning end over end through the air. The wedge crashed through the kitchen window forty-five feet away.

One bad week shortly after the Chinese New Year started with the tape player incident. Zhong-hua set it on the trunk of the car and forgot to place it inside before we drove away to teach Tai Chi class. I wasn’t paying attention. Fifteen miles later he remembered the player. We drove back and found the black plastic fragments and colored wires by the bridge where Route 2 crosses the Quaken Kill. Zhong-hua pawed around in the snow and rescued several cassettes of soothing music, the casings all cracked and the ribbons tangled like linguini. He found the two halves of an uncashed check from a student along with a paycheck from the grocery from four months earlier that he had stashed in the tape box. Money dealings in China are almost always in cash, and he could not get in the habit of regarding checks as actual money.

Soon after this, he was loading the woodstove and forced the door closed on a stick of wood with a pointy end, shattering the hundred-dollar fireproof glass. He drove our reconstituted silver spray-painted Nissan pickup to the barn to unload some boards and parked it on the slope, forgetting that the emergency brake didn’t work. When he turned his back, it drove away by itself in reverse, coming to rest a few hundred yards away against a tree in our neighbors’ woodlot. The door fell off. He wired it back on but afterward was obliged to climb in and out the passenger side.

The wind howled and rattled the glass of the old farmhouse windows. A massive ash tree crashed to the ground across the frozen dirt drive. Zhong-hua filled the chainsaw with gas and drove it into the massive trunk. The engine seized, and within the hour the saw was pronounced dead by Earnie, the local chainsaw expert. Zhong-hua had filled it with pure gas and neglected to add the special oil ingredient. He thought the oil additive was optional. He replaced the saw with a cheap electric one, designed for occasional bush trimming in the suburbs.

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