Clothesline

More about Clothesline

My father strung a clothesline across the sea because the yard was too small. He tied one end to the chimney and rowed out with the other. At supper he said he’d found something to tie it to. I asked him what.

“Something solid,” he said.

For thirty years my mother hung the wash there. The sheets went out white and came back smelling of places she’d never been. One smelled of oranges, right down to the hem. Another came back with a tram ticket stuck to it. She kept the ticket in her purse in case she ever found the tram.

After she died, I took in the last of her washing. At the far end of the line hung a red scarf I’d lent her when I was eleven. I’d been making a kite and needed it for the tail. She said I could have it back as soon as it dried.

I pulled. Across the water, a shape lifted out of the sea.

It wore all the things we thought the wind had taken. There was the blue bedspread with the cigarette burn, the good curtains from the front room, and a sock I’d accused my brother of stealing. Draped over its shoulders, the bedspread was wide enough to shade half the town. A white crow perched on its head. It had one eye, black and wet as a button fresh from the wash.

I pulled again. Its throat opened and a stream of red water ran into the sea. The tide brought in two clothespins and a little bar of soap worn thin enough to see through.

“Is that what you tied it to?” I asked my father.

He’d been dead for nine years. I still asked him things when there was nobody around to answer.

The creature put one hand to its throat and untied the scarf. It folded the scarf once, then again, the way my mother used to fold a borrowed thing before giving it back. When it stooped to hand it to me, I saw the empty peg in its other hand. It had been holding on to its end of the line all those years.

I took the scarf. There were still three knots along one edge where I’d started tying it to the kite. I put it around my neck. It was warm, and when I tucked the ends into my coat, one of them left a wet patch over my heart.

Then I went up to the house and untied the line from the chimney. I felt it move through my hands, slowly at first and then so fast I had to let go. The white crow followed it out across the water.

The next morning I washed my father’s old work shirt in the kitchen sink. I spread it on the back of a chair in the sun. By noon the collar was dry. I turned it over so the sun could get at the sleeves.