Queenie
An old man finds happiness in a barn full of memories. A short story.
Arthur stood, staring at the shadowed guts of the old barn, and wound the rag around his bleeding forearm. A four-inch wound from the rusty nail on the barn door had resulted from his hurry to get in.
He ignored the pain, instead he focused on the sagging beam from which Michael, his son, used to swing his ten-year-old frame, in a tarpaulin hammock.
The fading sunlight streamed through the high-up cracks and the unfixed wounds which blighted this once majestic project of his youth.
The timber had been a wedding present from Uncle Charles. The paint, from Aunt Marjorie. Various other nuts and bolts and screws required to turn raw timber into a palace of the practical and poetic, were gifts from other guests at the wedding.
Sarah had named the barn Queenie. And the naming ceremony, which Arthur had laughed at because it was a barn, not a ship, had been a grand affair.
Sarah had acted most royally and, despite her simple daisy-spattered dress, could have passed as a cousin to the Queen of England. She cracked the ridiculously expensive bottle of Bollinger against the barn’s beautiful, freshly painted timber, and Arthur recalled the sound of shattering glass; how it fused with the instant applause. Even now, fifty-two years later, it filled his ears, much louder than a memory.
Fifty-two years was a great deal of time, he supposed. He he felt his wound ache again. As a younger, nervous man, he would have likely run to Sarah to fetch the doctor.
But Sarah was gone, except for the wonderful gifts she had left in his head. And he was no longer interested in doctors. They never had good news. Blast them, he thought.
If he was going to be taken down by blood poisoning, or tetanus, then let Queenie be the culprit. It would be an act of love.
He thought again of the ceremony. Of Sarah. And the pain once again eased. As though the memories were anaesthetic.
The old barn seemed to like his thoughts of its heyday. He could feel it grinning from the inside.
He grinned too.
He moved from his spot, and paced the inner circle of the barn. He knew he would seize up if he didn’t.
The starlings were growing quiet outside, and it did not surprise him to see the streams of sunlight shortening. He was often sad the moonlight did not stream in the same way. He would have loved to see Sarah standing in it. There was so much starlight in her eyes. A moon-child, she would have soaked up the silver light and magnified it, illuminated every farthermost hay bale, and cringing rat. And, for a moment or two, love would be visible as light. Like it always was inside his head.
They had often made love in this barn. Though married, it felt forbidden to cavort in here. Exciting. Perhaps because the owls always looked so shocked and disapproving.
He laughed then, and hearing it made him wonder why he’d uttered that sound. Nobody here but the rodents. And his daughter wouldn’t return for at least another hour.
What time was it?
How long had he been here?
Victoria, for all her protestations, had finally driven away around ten this morning. She’d promised to check on him at lunchtime. Or, perhaps it was a threat. He doubted she’d meant it in either case. She hated leaving the city. As much as he hated going into it.
He began the process of sitting down, on the edge of a stout wooden wheelbarrow. Sturdy but impractical, it had stood there since the day Michael carved it — in between swinging on beams and larking around like only a lad of ten knows how. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to sand down its wheel to make it something of use around the farm, but Michael had never gotten round to that. He had lost interest as soon as it had a shape.
Hard, it was, to think of Michael as a naval officer. As a kid, he’d never liked the feel of shirts all buttoned up to his neck, and never stayed still. He made the farm feel like a small place, the way he’d tear around, like a motorbike, making the noises.
“I’m to say goodbye, old Queenie,” he said suddenly, surprising himself with his own voice. He’d barely uttered a sound since he’d arrived, though his thoughts had been very loud indeed.
“I’m being packed off.”
His eyes fell to a patch where the straw was thin, and he could see bones of wood beneath.
“And you’re to be packed off, too. Or, packed up.”
The wound sharply bit him, as surely as if rodent teeth had attacked from a hidden refuge. Blood spots seeped, and he held it.
“I’m sorry, Queenie. I know. I’ve fought and fought but… you know, I can’t fight any more. Two wars, old Queen, and I fought my way through them. But then you see the enemy coming, you know? But this old age, it sneaks up on you. Soundless. Wordless. And as it stabs you, it looks at you with cold, dead eyes. Just watches you fall, over and over again, and it still says nothing, and then it moves away like a ghost, satisfied it has you, but… expressing none of it. Time feels nothing, Queenie. Because we feel everything on its behalf. I fell over one too many times, I guess. It’s the doghouse for me, now. As many board games and cups of tea as I need. Or, whatever they have in those places. I’ve avoided em. Didn’t even visit Frank when he was in one on his last stop.”
Wind whistled through the straw, made old chimes in the beams above sing — old broken metal parts of hand tools hooked up to rust. Wood creaked somewhere, like splinters were tongues.
Queenie was speaking.
“I know, I know,” he replied. “Truth be told, I thought about taking that rope down, hooking it over your shoulder and flying to the great beyond. You and me, Queenie, rotting here together. But they’d find me, you know? Cut me down, break you up and we’d still be apart. And I’d be no nearer the secrets you hold.”
Queenie spoke again, this time as the lip of a door, creaking.
“I know you’ll hold on to them. Even if some fool breaks you down to make Christmas ornaments for the flea market. And if they burn you for warmth, I know you’ll take my memories with you into the smoke, up into the sky, right up to the moon.”
He realised his hand was raised, cupping a moon only in his mind. Though it was dark now, so he knew its benevolent eye was the other side of Queenie’s thatched skull, looking down on them both.
Time to move again, he thought, and the creaking of his back announced it was a wise decision. Though it wasn’t half as bad as the pain he was expecting. So, he explored the barn in more detail, at each turn a memory. Each broken thing he found reforming in his mind to the days it was new and useful, either in his once youthful hands or those of Sarah, or the kids.
If a building could harbour evil spirits — like the horror movies all made you believe — then Queenie was proof that good times could also be captured, like scent in a bottle.
An hour passed that he barely noticed. The holes in the barn got darker, that’s all, and at one point silver. Like coins in mud, as if the moon had become so bright its light could not be kept out. And, as he turned over an old carved horse, whittled one June afternoon in 1952, as Michael studied him with the expectancy of Christmas, the moon’s light streamed through the cracks like Arthur had always wanted it too.
It touched his slightly bent frame, and his edges were bright as glass.
Everywhere, the memories assailed his senses, and not only did the pain of the hook nail wound in his arm disappear completely. Older pains left, too. Blood flowed like it knew no obstruction. His heart was smooth like a marching drum, and then mellow like jazz. Its irregular tempo now the result of an overwhelming feeling of joy, not the mad gallop of a labouring carthorse.
His next breath was cool and fulfilling. Strength bloomed in his fingers, in his toes, in his eyebrows, even. And he was standing taller than he had in thirty years.
He looked up at the barn roof and saw how bright it was.
Queenie was speaking again, and this time in waves of sentences, and he heard every word, thought every thought, felt every feeling.
“Queenie,” he breathed. “You glorious old girl.”
He laughed hard because his lungs felt like they could. His ribs felt supple again, like their cartilage was young and pliable, not the dried-out rubber of an old man. He remembered everything.
The scent Queenie had been keeping was unbottled, and he breathed it in like a diver coming to the surface after staying down too long.
The only voice he heard was Queenie’s, even when there was another at the door.
Victoria rattled it against the bolt as she called out his name, more fervently, with every delay. Angrier with every moment. He ignored it.
Victoria’s voice became more frantic than Queenie’s ever was — her voice was soul music, not the scratching sound of an old record.
“Dad, are you in there?”
Arthur smiled at that.
Yes, I am, he thought. Yes, I am. And Queenie doesn’t want me to leave. Because Queenie wants me to live.
A while later, there was another voice, with Victoria, at the door. A bassoon of a voice, carrying some authority. And whatever it was he was saying, it preceded the breaking open of the door.
But Arthur was nowhere to be found.
