THE DAY STALIN DIED ///Katharine Gregg
It was summer—the French doors were open onto the terrace and the mower droned far then near setting the rhythm of the day that widened in circles from the house. I remember the day-old Times arrived by mail and spread on Grandma’s table, how it shouted the death in black letters and we all stared at the face. But I am wrong. The death occurred in March, the sixth of March when it was cold, snow and school—the year we learned cursive and the solar system and the boys were bullies. On Grandma’s table there was a bowl of zinnias like pinwheels. Sitting in her chair I could read the words, looking at the terrible face with its black mustache, its hair swept back like a movie star. Perhaps he smiled a little, but the eyes were cruel. Perhaps he rode a black stallion wearing a fur hat to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, the part where the little birch tree whirls in a tempest of violins. He’d have a saber too like the Cossacks in the movie at Carrie’s birthday who rode so close we saw their shouting mouths and teeth and ducked behind the seats till the music swept them away. It was summer. Mom wore her flowered dress. Frowning at the face she said he even wanted
to come here, but now he was dead, and no one scolded when we ran barefoot or slammed the screen door, and after lunch we would go swimming while the house breathed its heartbeat over the lawn. Looking at the face I promised every day to read the tiny words that made no pictures I knew of Cossacks--or Peter with the wolf by the tail (and if you listen carefully you can hear the duck quacking in his belly). Looking at the face something shifted; I was different, responsible for understanding the words that meant the big things like death and freedom, that had no pictures. Sitting in grandma’s chair I wasn’t sure I wanted them, just black and white on the page. They had no selves like things you could pick or smell, like the bowl of zinnias, which were themselves— pink and yellow pinwheels and part of the self that was the house, the droning mower, the smell of cut grass, And beyond—the self we were part of that rayed out beyond the fence to the whole world, sweet and green and not death. Which is how I know it was summer and later it would be time and we would go swimming. LITERARY-ARTS 55
