Census by Jesse Ball

Author:Jesse Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-11-03T04:00:00+00:00

The photographs were attached to the wall with small black nails. My wife had a ball-peen hammer and she enjoyed using it for tasks that often deserved a real hammer. I am not even sure what a ball-peen hammer is for, or why she came to own one, but I imagine it was simply the innate oddness of the ball-peen hammer that drew her to it.

I heard the nails going in, one by one that first day. Then on days that followed all through the summer, my wife would be called up to the room to rearrange them, or to take one photograph down and replace it with another. We came to be very familiar with those photographs.

The first series, that ran highest on the wall, at his head height, were of a snow scene. I don’t remember what year it was, though I think the year was written on the back of one or two of them. We had bundled him up in his winter clothes, and taken him sledding. Someone had given us an old fashioned sled—one that didn’t work very well—and we had gone out to the yard to drag him around in it. This was his first real experience with snow—and he thought it marvelous. He climbed out of the sled and rolled back and forth in it, getting snow all over his face and nose. Then he began to cry and then he stopped, for he was happy. He ate some of the snow. He called out to us, some syllable—I guess it was a word for snow. He had a parka on, one with a big hood, and my wife and I took photographs holding him to commemorate the moment. First, one in which she hid behind him, holding him up. This was often her posture, to pretend to be doing something useful, while, in fact, concealing herself.

His expression as I hold him is rootless—he does not know that he is being photographed, and thinks that his mother is standing to have a look at him. But why?

She calls to him; in the next picture he breaks into a smile. I am beaming. What can she have said?

On the wall these two are separated with another where she and he look for something on the sled. From the shadows I think it must be late afternoon—and this leads me to wonder, what did we do all morning as the snow was falling? It is something I have forgotten. A thing was given to me—a marvelous morning with snow falling, a lovely wife and child, an afternoon to come out in the landscape—and I allowed it to pass in such a way that I can no longer feel it. What things did my wife say to me? What observations did I make that I hoped to think on again? All lost—but pointed at like an arrow by the late afternoon shadow cast by the sled in this photograph I no longer possess.

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