Kerri Sonnenberg
Those Who Leave
We take the kids to the Dairyhäus for ice cream. If Rockton, Illinois possesses a epicenter, this is the place. The drips race the heat of the day down our arms in the same spot where you smoked cigarettes as a high school lunch hour escapee. We were just talking about how a story is told, that it is dependent on the listener. As in, if the kids are listening there is no smoking.
The week before we arrived here for vacation the nearby chemical plant exploded. Its lead, sulfuric acid, and nitrogen shaded the town and points south under a billowing black cloud. Everyone was told to stay indoors. What was sprayed onto the fire is a forever chemical currently in a gray area of being banned. Its slurry made straight for the river. A few days later residents got the all-clear. Folks are already hoping those jobs return.
The high school you were always trying to flee is named for the Winnebago woman the first white settler married. She stayed while the cavalry pushed her kin north and west. This, I suppose, is how a wandering trader becomes a founder. And how this ragged line of street becomes a Founder’s Square. That, and the laying of a few bricks on a fertile ox-bow.
Not so much as a sign in the local forest preserve bearing her name— Hononegah—just a head cheerleader that gets to dress up as an “Indian queen” for the big game. Like the local newspaper, she is light enough to be thrown.
When a town began to form around her and its people ailed, Hononegah used her knowledge of local plants to soothe them. Plantain, infernal blemisher of lawns, will draw venom and foreign bodies out of the skin. Depending on the listener, Plantain might be called White Man’s Foot, owing to its habit of ending up everywhere.
You’re not there when I ask your parents how they met. They are transported in the telling, microcosms of an age. He was playing baseball with a mutual friend, she was baking cookies and waved at him with a spoon, they were dancing to records in a living room just up the street. Not one first time, but many. They speak in a foreshortening of years. They never told me those things, you say.
Biting into the cold head of ice cream sends a shine so deep into my teeth, you would think I was new. But you’ve been showing me this place for three whole dog years and yet somehow this is the first time I see the wild turkeys mingling on the floodplain. Oh, they’re always coming and going, your mom affirms. Did you know, it’s a crime to pick up a single feather even if it falls off while they are passing through your yard? And the woodpecker that eats their house just pecks around last year’s holes they patched with a mixture of putty and cayenne. Between the floods, the droughts and these damned birds it’s awful hard to stay in one doggone place.
At the community pool my daughter and I swim past a bullfrog of a man, a series of tattoos surfacing with his upper back: Mickey Mouse, the Irish flag and something spelled out in Chinese. She whispers excitedly, Do you think he’s Irish like us?
What set of visuals here would also say It’s complicated? Tattoo of a flat tire. Tattoo of blow-in in Ogham. Tattoo of an empty page. Have we totally fucked them up by moving away? you ask when they are out of earshot.
Attempting to register, with each visit, the incremental changes in our aged parents and their aged pets. Of the waddling dog with a dark patch of fur on her side shaped like an apple I wonder, Is her apple getting bigger? The kids say no, it’s actually shrinking because now they can each fit an entire hand over it. Look, I can make her apple disappear.
In the pool, my son, the smallest of us, won’t go in water over his head. He fears it as if he has a history of drowning. His sister and I paddle over to where the signage about the depth is obscured and thrill to hold our breath and put our feet down into feathery nothingness. This river though, we’ve only experienced from the shore. It is always churning with the tree limbs some flood. Not to mention all the leaked what-have-yous of manufacture.
We are living in another country on the condition of perpetual return. Unlike the ancestors of this place. Unlike my forbears who took their ships one way. Meanwhile, swallows overwintered in Ireland this year, forfeiting genetic legacies of migration, choosing stillness over instinct.
Instinct told you in your bright plumage of youth to run from the bricks being thrown. As in many small towns, there is a dearth of ways to represent the male of the species. You ran so far the time zones shunted daylight off into nightfall. The distance seems to grow with each notification of a former classmate lost to addiction syndrome.
And all the news that never reaches us. The closing of another factory. The whereabouts of adult siblings long estranged. All the tornados that missed. Is this news too small?
Your father and I pass leaves of the local paper back and forth. On the front page is a picture of the high school’s art teacher cleaning up his yard with a magnetic rake. It’s the best tool, he claims, for collecting the metal particles in the grass after a chemical plant explodes. Will he make something of them, I wonder, is it merely an exercise in disposal? The particles consist of all the things that burned in that black cloud seen from space and then fell as shards: solid, cooled. The names of the substances don’t make it into the reporting, only that we are safe. The paper reports a similar incident occurred just yesterday in Thailand as if to say, See? These things happen everyplace.
Someday we will stop returning. Someday our migrations will also be stilled by, if not instinct then, necessity. Someday we won’t hear a threatening wind and think freight train. Our kids will find them, all the pictures of us smoking, in the forest backdrops of teen agency, together with its rivers, lawns, pools, classmates, and say See? You never tell us anything.
Kerri Sonnenberg is author of the poetry collection The Mudra (Litmus, 2004). Recent work appears in Peripheries and Abridged. Originally from Illinois, she now resides in Cork, Ireland. Her digital residence is kerrisonnenberg.com.