Hinkypunk
by Alex DiFrancesco
The summer that Susan was eighteen, the stretched, sweaty, distant summer on the marsh, the summer that she pulled me aside to tell me that love knew things that Grandmother and Mother and Father did not, the summer that Susan retreated and collapsed -- that was the summer of the hinkypunk.
I didn’t have the words for it, the first time we saw it. It was a taste in my mouth, the hollow bitterness that settled into the back of my throat after Grandmother let me sip her coffee in the morning, but also somehow the oil-slick feel of butter on corn from the garden that stretched down one side of the property. It was a burst, and then the residue on the air, the smell, the soot.
Grandmother, Jack, and I sat on the porch that jutted off the back of her house and high above the marsh. We sipped sweet tea out of the long, cold glasses that Grandmother always served it to us in. Grandmother and I swung gently on the bench swing that hung from the roof of the porch, and Jack sat near us, all long, gangly legs and jutting elbows, on what looked like a stool hewn by hand from a large tree trunk. His body twisted around, awkward and newly teenaged, as he scratched at mosquito bites that dappled his legs. Inside the house, in our bedrooms, the laundry had piled up for five days. Though I couldn’t hear her, I knew that Susan was inside, her eyes open in the dark, weeping.
“What was it?” I whispered. The burst of yellow and orange and blue and white had flashed into the darkness, then out of it, like a birthday candle in front of an eager child.
“Ignis fatuus,” grandmother said, after holding a sip of the sweet, brown liquid in her mouth like she was chewing it, then swallowing. “Will o’ the wisp. Hinkypunk.”
I traced the last word -- hinkypunk -- in the cursive I was learning on the arm of the bench swing.
“But what is it?” I asked again.
“Gases from the marsh,” Grandmother said. “Lit up like spirits. But really: nothing. Nothing.”
She smoothed the thick tangles of my hair as I had seen her do to Susan earlier, while Susan lay in bed unmoving. Then, Grandmother had whispered, “It’s for the best. You don’t see it now, but it’s for the best.”
*
The morning after the hinkypunk, the Sheriff came. Grandmother didn’t know how to wash her own clothes, to clean her own home. She hadn’t yet begun to look for someone to replace Lorna, who had replaced the woman who came before her, who had replaced the woman who came before her, a steady string all the way back to Grandmother’s childhood in the acres around the marsh.
It was morning when the Sheriff came; Grandmother opened the door a crack with her still in her nightgown on the inside, and begged a moment to pull herself together. We were unaccustomed to her lack of composure, and when she hissed at us to clean the kitchen table and sink quickly, we did. In less than fifteen minutes, she was perched on the seat at the head of the table, clothes perfect, make-up applied, coffee brewing. She commanded Jack to let the Sheriff in. He followed her directions laconically, his face hard at the morning interruption.
I sat on the couch primly, as Grandmother had instructed in a hissed whisper I knew not to disobey. I arranged my skirt around me on the couch cushion while Jack slunk around the corner and back to his room. Lucky, I remember thinking, that he could avoid what I couldn’t then put quite into words -- the pretending to care what adults said while simultaneously minding one’s own business that my age required. He was thirteen then, old enough to get away.
The Sheriff and my grandmother chatted amicably as she poured them both coffee. These were the grandchildren, then, Lanie’s? he asked. He had heard about the ongoing divorce; would Lanie be back down to get them at the end of the summer, would she stay? Hearing my mother Elaine’s nickname from this stranger’s mouth shocked me into the awareness that she had once lived a life full of people who I had never laid eyes on. The narcissism of my childhood had been struck one blow that summer when Mother and Father sent the three of us away to finalize their divorce, and had thus been softened for the one it suffered in that moment. Still, the Sheriff -- this solid, broad shouldered, tan-uniformed man -- called her the name that Grandmother only called her occasionally, in moments of warmth. Had he once, maybe when she was Susan’s age, held her hand? Kissed her? The thoughts piled on top of one another, crowding my head.
Finally, Grandmother put down her coffee cup with a distinct noise that signaled the end of their smalltalk and my idle thoughts.
“Why are you here, George?”
He breathed out. It wasn’t a sigh, not quite. But even I could hear the regret in his words.
“The girl,” he said. “Things aren’t like they used to be.”
Grandmother did not speak for a moment. She stirred her coffee, with the spoon she’d laid down next to it. It didn’t need stirring. When she looked up, her wet blue eyes were a storm.
“Don’t I know it, George.”
“She’s gone,” the Sheriff went on. “No trace. Her mother at the courthouse, the police station, making a stink you can smell a mile away. Last place she was seen was here, working.”
“George, let me ask you -- am I supposed to know where and how every time some child runs off?”
“Grown woman, ma’am,” he said. “Twenty-two years old.”
“Mentality of a child,” Grandmother insisted. “Left work midday and never came back, even to finish her cleaning. The place has been a disaster, and you know how hard it is finding someone these days, since all Johnson’s nonsense and all this empowerment.”
“That may well be,” the Sheriff said. “It sounds likely. Girl probably ran off North or West, wanting to be a star or join some movement. But that mother. At the station every day, ma’am. Things aren’t like they used to be.”
The silver ricochet of Grandmother’s spoon off the insides of the coffee mug filled the room. I looked towards the window, then back.
“The mother says she saw Lanie’s oldest with her, ma’am,” the Sheriff said, looking down. “More than once.”
Grandmother’s lips sucked in and her chin jutted out. “Nonsense.”
“It’s just what she says, ma’am,” the Sheriff looked back up under his eyelashes. “Can’t always put stock in that. I asked her, you know, what they’d be doing together. She couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer to that.” He paused. “Where is the oldest now?”
“I think you’d better go,” Grandmother said.
“Of course, ma’am. We both have other things that need to be done,” he said, standing. He picked his hat up off the table, asking Grandmother to give Lanie his best.
*
We’d been raised in a suburb of Boston, far away from my mother’s southern roots, far away from the nickname Lanie and the easy drawl and wet heat of my grandmother’s house. That summer was a shock for all of us, but most of all for Susan. My beautiful, tall, long-limbed sister, Susan. Her wheat-blonde hair thicker and lighter than either Jack’s or mine, just like my father’s, where we’d been given our mother’s limp mouse-brown locks. Susan who couldn’t be told anything she didn’t want to hear. Susan who was eighteen and so beautiful that I’d never known anyone who didn’t fall in love with her at least a little. Susan who spoke what she meant as if the world waited to hear it.
She’d just finished high school. She was ready for a break, a summer with her friends, some time to decide on what came next in life. She had argued with our mother and father about joining the Peace Corps, and going off to college. The impasse reached had been that she would wait a year and think about both, and if she met the man she would marry in that time, then everything was decided anyway. She wouldn’t back down, and I knew that soon she’d be living out the life of one of Kennedy’s young world ambassadors, or studying law. But instead of a summer to think and spend with friends for Susan, we were shipped off to our grandmother’s house as our parents decided things for themselves. Instead, there were the clandestine hands that slipped into each other the moment they suspected no one was looking. There was the electricity I could feel, even so young, so far removed from its sources. Susan fell in love: not with the right man, who my parents hoped she would marry and raise children with, but with Lorna, the woman who cleaned our grandmother’s house.
*
The night that the sheriff came to the house, we saw the hinkypunk again. Years later, I would see a fireblower in a circus, and in that moment, in that tent crushed between the shoulders of the other audience members, I would feel a chill down my spine, uncontrollable and fierce. I would remember all the nights on that high porch above the marsh. I would remember the single spire of flame that lifted up into the sky, then snapped out of existence. The grabbing of air in a woosh, the eating of it, and its combustion in front of me. The warm, mossy smells of the marsh. My brother Jack’s legs dangling over the ledge of the porch, the fire reflected in his dark eyes.
“Grandmother?” I said.
“I told you,” she said. “Happens from time to time. Marsh gasses.”
“Why can’t you just listen?” Jack said. As he’d grown in the last year, so had any remaining sweetness from his boyhood been drained away. He was turning into a man, a strange, alien creature from the boy I had grown up with. All his words were harsh these days, when he spoke at all. Even orders from our grandmother were met with a sullen look -- not so sullen she could be tempted to snap at or slap him, but sullen enough that I always saw.
“But why…” I asked. Jack had picked up an errant stick that had fallen from a tree and onto the porch. He was poking it between the wooden slats of the porch. My voice fell down to a whisper. “...why did they appear just when Lorna disappeared?”
The silence was astounding, broken only by the dry sounds of bark peeling back as Jack’s motions became quicker and more violent. After several minutes of it, Grandmother stood and walked towards the door.
“If you wish to believe superstition rather than fact,” she said as she disappeared into the darkness inside, “then you may sit here and be afraid.”
*
Grandmother’s house at night was a symphony of creaks and cracks, noises she said were, “the old house settling.” If you stepped on a floorboard, its report bounced off the walls; if you inched open a door, it sang its crescent path out for the whole night to hear.
Stepping carefully out of the bathroom, one night that summer, I inched around the loudest floor board and found the cavern of Susan’s open bedroom door. She slept in the room that had once been our mother’s. Jack slept in the room our uncle had once slept in, and I had been given the room with the least steady history -- the guest room.
As I stepped from the hallways into the blackness of Susan’s room, my eyes adjusted. The room felt hot and wet, a combination of the growing thunderstorm and the tears that I could sense Susan was crying in the darkness.
My eyes adjusted to the weak starlight coming in through the window. Susan, my beautiful sister, lay in the bed with her honey-blonde hair a mess of unwashed tangles. She lay flat on her back, and tears rolled, unstoppable, from the corners of her eyes, down the sides of her face, into the seashell curve of her ears, down her neck. She must not have seen or heard me come in. When I slipped my hand into hers on the mattress, something like hope flickered across the black pool of her eyes in the dark.
“It’s me, Suze, it’s me,” I whispered. Just like that, the life went back out of her.
“She wouldn’t do this,” Susan said. “I know she wouldn’t just leave like this.”
“Maybe she’ll come back,” I said, hopeful. It seemed logical that if Susan said Lorna wouldn’t just do this, she wouldn’t.
“I didn’t say that, either,” Susan said, the tears flowing again.
*
With Lorna gone, the dishes piled up. The clothes collected in the hampers. The dust floated in the sunrays and the spiderwebs aggregated in the corners. Grandmother’s house, which had once seemed so sunny and sprawling, revealed itself for what it was -- old, musty, an echochamber of the settling noises that predicted an end that did not seem so far away.
Grandmother began hand lettering signs that requested the aid of a housekeeper. I couldn’t imagine where she’d put them. I couldn’t imagine Grandmother hanging up signs with her phone number on them in the middle of town, in the common spaces. But her past channels for finding help had dried up. It was a summer when the people who would have once worked for her were working for themselves, for liberation. I could not then see that Grandmother’s view was so far from that liberation as to be a form of shackles. She was my grandmother, with her dusty powdered face and her white hair with a bluish tint that she had styled once a week at the salon, with her hard candies and sweet tea and floppy gardening hat that she wore whenever she was outside; I could not then see her for who she was.
One day, after lettering the signs, Grandmother packed them into an envelope, and told me to get ready. Susan, exempt from life in general in her misery, and Jack, exempt because of his age and growing status as what Grandmother called “the man of the house,” were not with us. It was only me and Grandmother who walked the long miles in the hot, dry evening after a day that had been too relentlessly sundrenched to complete our task. It was me who held the envelope with the signs as we walked down the dirt roads and then the paved ones closer to the center of town.
We came into the downtown area after winding through the lazy streets around it, the compact houses that seemed so different from Grandmother’s house, alone on its own acres as it stood. The downtown, crowded closer than even the close, unseemly houses, had a market, and a leather belt and wallet shop, and shoemaker, and community bank, all pressed up against each other with no room, or by the metrics of Grandmother’s sprawling, lonely acres, dignity. I could see Grandmother’s own remove from the intimate space in the stiffness of her spine, and in her Sunday church clothes (though they were beginning to show signs of heat and sweat from the walk).
Downtown was a mess of cars and people, leaning loose against buildings and greeting each other on the street. There was a bustle between shops, now that the heat had abated, a counterfull of people in the ice cream shop. There were signs in windows that advertised all kinds of things -- houses to buy, rooms to rent, jobs that needed to be filled. One said, “Room for let, white tenants in white community.” I recall puzzling over it, thinking that communities must be things built like the brick storefronts around me, a piece at a time, with your pieces chosen carefully. It didn’t seem any more odd to me in the moment, that some were all white, just like some storefronts had all red bricks.
There was a board in the center of town where other signs hung. Grandmother marched me past the ice cream shop and towards it, where she took the envelope from my hands. It was only then that she realized she hadn’t brought pushpins with her. She scanned the board, tsking and murmuring about the lack of them -- each sheet seemed hung by one. She searched for an old one to remove, but finding only current listings, she finally decided that a visit to the hardware store in the corner of one of the crossed roads that marked the center of the downtown was necessary.
We were turning away from the board when we saw that a woman had been standing near us. She had been watching us, hands on her hips. I saw her face and grabbed Grandmother’s hand instinctively -- she had Lorna’s face, and for a moment I saw hatred in her eyes.
“Yes?” Grandmother said. “Can I help you?”
The woman was holding her own sign, and in the silence that followed, I looked at it. It must have cost her money to make, unlike Grandmother’s now embarrassingly hand lettered one. It was shiny and large, with a picture in the middle and machine-printed words underneath. MISSING, it read in big letters. REWARD FOR INFORMATION.
I realized this was Lorna’s mother, not a ghost.
I expected her to slap Grandmother. It was the look in her eyes. So full of rage and righteousness, I found myself thinking that Grandmother deserved to be slapped by this woman. The horridness of what I had walked to town for hit me full force then -- instead of looking for this woman, who had been employed by us, who had disappeared suddenly and without reason -- we were looking to fill a body into her spot, to replace her with another mechanism for keeping the house in order.
And here was her mother. Her mother. Our housekeeper had a mother, maybe brothers and sisters, a whole life, even beyond the life that I had caught in glimpses, the secret life of romance and forbidden love between her and my sister. Standing there, I began to cry. A child on a dusty hot night, after a dusty long walk, understanding so much more than I could understand, and so much less than was required of some.
The woman looked away from Grandmother, and to me, with something like pity. She walked to the board and hung her sign, walked away.
Even Grandmother seemed to know there was no hanging her hand lettered sign now. She knew it. But she did it anyway. She walked to the hardware store with her spine stock-straight, bought push pins, and placed her sign right next to the one Lorna’s mother had hung. She jabbed the pin in harder, deeper than it had to go, so that not just the pin, but the metal base, embedded in the board.
*
The Sheriff came back a few nights later, and we sat on the the porch. The visit did not hold the air of business. He wore his uniform, but was clearly not on duty.
“I think it’s time to get them back to Boston, ma’am,” he said, sipping Grandmother’s tea. “Things are about to get worse here than a divorce. Best they not be here for it.”
“I do believe they’ll go back when Lanie is ready, and not before,” Grandmother said, finally.
“The eldest, and the boy,” he said. “People are beginning to discuss them.”
“People do talk,” Grandmother said.
They sat in silence. We sat in silence. The hinkypunk exploded into the night, above the marsh.
“Natural,” Grandmother said. “Just a natural thing.”
*
Arrangements were made, nonetheless. We were going back north. Grandmother, after much deliberation, had hired an Irish woman from down the road to keep her house. “White trash,” she’d whispered, when the woman had called and she had spoken to her. She came to work for us a few days later. The woman packed our bags. She cleaned the house. She missed a cobweb, which Grandmother swatted down crankily, muttering about “Irish curtains.”
The night before we were to get on the train, Susan still seeming unlikely to get out of bed to do it, I waited until everyone was asleep. I went down to the marsh. I waited, in the dark, near the odor of the brackish water, near the moss and murk, at the edge, for the hinkypunk. It would not appear on command. I didn’t know if it would ever appear again. I waited and waited. I thought of my languid sister. Of my brother, growing harshly and violently into manhood. I thought of my grandmother. I thought of the missing woman, Lorna.
But the hinkypunk never appeared.
We went back to the north, where things were different. Slowly, the summer faded, for me and for Susan. Jack grew longer, leaner, harsher, fighting boys and bringing home beautiful women, one of whom he married when he was 24. Our grandmother came to the wedding, the first time she had been north that I could recall. She was old and frail, now, eleven years having aged her like twice that amount.
We sat at a family table in an opulent hall. Susan was there, still unmarried, having gone off to college the way she had intended. She lived a life that no one in the family could penetrate, that no one could fathom from our positions. She held us out. I did not wonder why.
“Mother,” our mother said, after dinner, while we all sat together, “don’t you think it’s time to give up that old house on the marsh? Move somewhere simpler? That you can manage alone?”
Grandmother deflected again and again, but when our mother persisted, Grandmother’s hand slammed down on the table.
“Over my dead body will that house be sold,” she said.
The conversation was over.
It did not resume until the groom, my brother Jack, now a fully grown man, so lean and hard and foreign, came to the table.
“My boy,” Grandmother said. She put her hand to the side of his face.
They looked into each other’s eyes for just a moment. Long enough for me to see the fire there, the unspoken between them, jump and disappear like a hinkypunk.
Hinkypunk is one of the many riveting stories from Alex DiFrancesco’s forthcoming collection, Transmutation, out in 2021 from Seven Stories Press.
Building on the success of All City, here is a wry, and at the same time dark and risk-taking, story collection from author (and baker) Alex DiFrancesco that pushes the boundaries of transgender awareness and filial bonds. Here is the hate between 16-year-old Junie, who is transitioning, and their mom’s boyfriend Chad when the family moves into Chad’s house on Lake Erie. And here is the love being tested between Sawyer and his dad, who named his boat after his child and resists changing it from Sara to Sawyer now. There is DiFrancesco’s willingness to enter lands that are violent and comfortless in some of these stories, testing the limits of what it means to be human, sometimes returning stronger and wiser and sometimes not returning at all as their characters surge forward into unknown spaces.
DiFrancesco’s first novel All City (Seven Stories 2019) was praised by Publishers Weekly as a “loving, grieving warning [that] thoughtfully traces the resilience, fragility, and joy of precarious communities in an immediate, compassionate voice.” All City was one of BookRiot‘s “Best Post-Apocalyptic Books of 2019,” Entropy Mag‘s “Best of 2019,” and Largehearted Boy‘s “Favorite Novels of 2019.” It was a finalist for the 2019 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction.