Sarah Weck
Milk Teeth
My grandfather once had the privilege of photographing God. The details are hazy. But I know that when he was called upon by the government to do it, he came down with a fever, sudden and strong, and God had to wait. This sent the project’s overseers into a frenzy, and the telephones rang all day in the quiet house. The resulting photo—you’ve seen it, I’m sure—was to be an effort between the government and the church to boost public morale during the war, and people were really putting their backs into it. Officials, preachers, curates. They were all eager to get their hands on the project, even those who didn’t know the first thing about God. It was in those days that art was beginning to have a spider web effect, and everyone wanted to be connected to it by an outer thread. And those who did not care for art or classify photography as such at least wanted to latch on to the sanctity of the event.
My grandmother, who we call Marlena, says she ignored the telephone while she clinked about in the kitchen, steaming milk for her husband’s tea. The phones in that time were low and rhythmic and rare, and she set her pace of work to their music before she finally pulled the cord, favoring the birds chirping at the sill.
All this happened before my father was born. Marlena still lives in the same house and looks out the same back window into the garden to watch for foxes, though now the hair she tucks behind her ears has faded from red to white. I picture her most clearly looking out the window underneath an arbor of copper pots. The pots are the most opulent thing inside the house; Marlena never valued excess.
The garden behind the house is now a protected heritage site, open to the public on weekdays. Signs posted at the entrance forbid visitors from leaving offerings, but they do. The first pomegranate I ever had was left in the center of the yard by a woman in a black shroud. When the guard looked away, she let it tumble from her pocket to the grass. I stained the living room carpet trying to pry it open with my pocket knife. My grandfather walked in and—though he had never been cruel—I was terrified, but he burst out laughing at the sight of the jeweled entrails.
Most people know the photo but not how it came to be; my grandfather never gave an interview about it, though there are many alternate accounts of that day. He didn’t want recognition. It was beside the point, he said. After my father was born he retreated from the media spotlight entirely, never to return. He was reserved and rarely spoke of the photograph, even to his family. In fact I don’t remember him saying much at all; he seemed to speak through his movements, like animals do.
In my memories I see my father and his father and I, floating down a river in thick black tubes, staring at the rippling algae as the sun toasts our bare backs. The river is so cold that my skin disappears, becoming water itself, and my mem- ory offers a sound like trumpets, carrying us onward in the ceaseless current. The trumpets may have been the beginnings of my fever. I remember reaching my hands out of the river, and so did my father and his father and the sun looked like a bright open eye. They must have brought me to the hospital to receive fluids, though I don’t recall how I got from the river to the hospital bed. I do remember waking, Marlena in a chair beside me. As my fever cooled, she told me the story for the first time. He was sick just like you are, she said.
Marlena cared for him. She took great pride in this. He was strong even in weakness; a veteran of the Second World War, he had suffered much worse in combat, his right leg set forever in a limp. This is why he was discharged from the Air Force, though he had tried to argue with his sergeant to stay. A good pilot might have bad legs. But of course he was dismissed, and—though he would rather have died than leave—he was sent home, and the other silent men watched him limp into the maw of a homeward-bound plane.
During his tour it was said he had taken that other famous photograph, the one printed in Life with the group of foreign soldiers crouched around the fire. Their white teeth dancing. Not as many have seen that one—your parents may have. He told the press it wasn’t his work; he had set up the camera and while he went to get an extra roll of film from his tent, another soldier took the photograph. Still he was credited. This was the reason they’d rushed to him for the photograph. Because who else but the one who understood war could understand God?
The letters of entreaty continued. But it seemed nothing could cool him, and his temperature climbed. The doctor suggested calling a priest. Marlena laughed and said she would talk to God herself if it came to it. She prepared bags of ice to place on his neck and chest. As she twisted the tops closed over the sink, a buck with wide and pronged antlers appeared in the backyard, passing the large back windows. This was before the highways had gone up around the town to connect it to the city, and wildlife habitually wandered through. The buck stopped in the center of the yard and stared at her with eyes like dark planets. He dipped his head like he was bowing, then disappeared into the trees.
Soon my grandfather was on his feet again. This was lucky, for God’s people had found his door and come knocking, ready to call God down from the sky. It’s since been overdramatized, but I’ve always pictured the arrival like a piece of paper dropped from above, fluttering down as Marlena said. But maybe it was like an arrow shot from a bow in the clouds. Or God was among the people and suddenly squeezed through the crowd, blazing into view. In any case I know that when it happened, everyone watching drew a collective breath.
In those days, the light filtering down from the heavens was different, less oppressive, and God got ready amidst the splendor of plain grass underneath a soft sun in the back garden. She was small and freckled and very polite. My grandfather was not surprised to look older than God, and he was kind to her as he set up his camera. He didn’t hurry either, though he had been instructed to. Her people wanted to rush the completion of the portrait before she grew any older. You see, people are very adamant about preserving moments of youth.
My grandfather passed away a month ago. We had him cremated. I was startled to see the box of ashes and even more so when we tossed the contents out onto the earth. We scattered them on the old farm where my grandfather grew up. The ashes didn’t catch on the wind like I thought they would, didn’t drift gently up and away. They fell just like anything else. The small horse in the lone yard snorted at the ashes, or maybe sighed because we were so wrong to believe the cinders still alive. We stared a while at the ground, then my father and I parted from Marlena and drove back to the city by way of the highway arteries. Before such arteries existed, before God was called down, it was difficult to find my grandparents’ house, but people had plenty of time to map out the way during my grandfather’s illness. The house was just past the lip of a small lake inside the mouth of a forest. The people and animals arrived in cars down the lane or slowly on foot through the trees, the birds in great flocks overhead. Marlena did her best to help the hired patrolmen control the growing crowd. No one was permitted into the backyard, so the earliest arrivals pushed into the house and up against the big windows that looked out onto the garden, elbowing one another in the ribs to get a good look.
The crowd was made up of many different species. A buck—perhaps the same one Marlena had seen days before—pierced someone with his antlers by accident, and he was directed rudely to the back. Those who were afraid of bugs had to contend with a slow and glinting trail of beetles propping themselves up on the windowsill, and the beetles had to contend with the impulsive fingers of government officials trying to flick them away.
Out in the garden, God had so far said nothing. Despite her quietude, there was a hum surrounding the house; an indication of infinite distance, like wide swaths of earth or time. It was—like God—unobtrusive. She hardly moved in her chair, but from far away she looked human enough. Could she bleed? She had a body, they all said afterward; she was real. And so she seemed then to the onlookers to be as animal as any of us.
The crowd spilled out the front door and down the drive past the lake. The patrol men stood sentry in an impenetrable line surrounding the garden with their tall spears. At God’s request they had not brought guns, but itched for someone to get close enough so they could strike. They thought of themselves as angels. This made them foolish in retrospect, as it is said there were archangels among the crowd, quiet and unidentifiable. This has been a point of great debate. Why would such angels allow the crowd to descend into chaos like they did when a group of zealots, realizing they would never get close enough to see God at all, surged forward, knocking down and crushing bodies into the earth? When I was young, visitors to the garden asked this question over and over again, as if instead of a small boy, they thought me a saint or a prophet. I would sit in the grass with my knees drawn up to my chest and they would pour out their souls and their theories. For some, the fact that no one had died in the crowd surge was proof enough of angels, but others shook their heads and remembered the boy who had been paralyzed. The abandonment they called it, the abandonment. My grandfather set up his tripod with careful motions. His house slippers tamping down the wet grass. He was athletic and sinewy, but the sickness had weakened his lungs and he paused now and again to breathe. God did not seem to mind. She said she liked the soft chiming that came from his hands against the pieces of the camera as he loaded the film. She said it was not often that she was able to hear with such clarity the metals of the earth and what man had made of them.
From the window, the crowd saw both their lips move, but the glass was too thick for sound to pass. No one knows what else they said. God leaned toward her photographer and, according to most, the two looked enthralled. Some claim God seemed angry. But people always need something to fear. After that day, my grandfather would only smile and shrug when anyone asked him about it. The only photograph of God ever taken. Or so they claim, he’d say.
I know I have forgotten part of the story, but I don’t know which one. All I have to go on is the feeling that something is escaping me. The same feeling I had in the river, with my father and his father, our tubes stoic and drifting past plastic-choked briars, the unforgiving stones underneath us whispering the end, the end will happen again and again and again. That could be what my grandfather said to God. But now he has passed and so has all the time. Before stepping back to the camera he whispered something in her ear that made her laugh, a great beam of laughter. The sky expanded as the crowd drew a breath. He took the photograph right then, and the flash caught the vast and fleeting altar of her first teeth.