When Owen Carrington came through the inner office door that April morning with the gun pointed straight at her heart, Calli had to wonder what she’d let herself in for. The tiny moccasins with hand-sewn beads that he laid down next to the gun on his genteel oak desk unnerved her even more, filling her with unnamable despair.

Calli couldn’t look at Jay—her intended—sitting calm and steady at her side, reaching to touch the pliant deerskin of the baby shoes. Feeling herself getting hysterical (intended—what an awful word, self satisfied and smug), she kept her eyes fixed resolutely on her grandmother’s fussy old lawyer with white pencil moustache and navy blue bow tie. He made a valiant effort to conceal his moue of distaste as he made sure the little pearl-handled revolver was aimed only at the fax machine, before unburdening himself of the bug-stained mosquito netting which held the final pieces of Calli’s inheritance. Relieved, he dusted off his pudgy hands with a plaid hankie, and sat down.

“It’s all been kept with us since Cressida got back from Belize in the 70s,” he told Calli. Presumably in some shadowy corner of the lawyers’ offices, upstairs in one of the historic adobes in downtown Monterey that she had always liked so much, windows stippled by big-leaf maple leaves and copper beech.

The bulk of Cressida’s estate had gone to her sons Hector and Nestor when she died just after Thanksgiving a year ago, since Calli had been taken care of when she needed it—after her parents’ death when she was three, until she’d graduated from college and got a job on the peninsula, surprisingly well-paid, as a wildlife ecologist, coordinating ornithological field studies. Most recently raptors, hawks and burrowing owls.

“What you’ve been left,” Owen explained (with no suggestion that he found any of this bizarre), “is Cressida’s cedar hope chest, with its contents—to be handed over after your engagement was announced. Hector—your uncle Hector, her executor—advised me last week that it’s time. Congratulations are in order, to you both.”

Jay smiled at Calli, and tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away, emotions turbulent and her precarious resolve undone.

“Cressida’s things were taken out and kept here in the safe when the chest went to your mother—in the late 80s, don’t I remember? And then after Helen’s untimely passing it came back, and got stored in the vault again with some of her possessions in it.”

Hope chest? Calli considered the concept, appalled, her jaw clenching and inner feminist howling derisively at the idea. Her 2019 sensibilities were offended by being landed with this outdated, demeaning tradition. No matter that her spunky grandmother had set the custom on its head, in her best lady steamroller fashion. The catalog of Cressida’s provisions for marriage back in the 1950s, which Owen read from a hand-written page without so much as a raised eyebrow, after fanning out the items on the desk, was manifestly different from the average bride’s.

The pearl-handled pocket revolver with strangely lovely engraving on the nickel barrel. A handful of Carson City Liberty gold coins, acquired (never mind how; the family had declined to ask) by Cressida’s maternal grandfather, identified in an old photograph with other miners as Ahwahnee Alf. A small clay glyph of the Ancient Maya Vision Serpent, and a figurine of the jaguar goddess of midwifery and medicine, Ixchel, brought back from one of her trips to the Yucatán. The pair of well-worn baby moccasins, soft butter-white deerskin with beads and leather ties. A strip of shaggy red bark from the gumbo-limbo tree, which could be boiled for healing measles, sunburn, insect bites, or exposure to poisonwood, and was supposedly of the same species as frankincense and myrrh, the gifts to the Christ Child. Small paper packets labeled Gale of Wind Weed, “for gallstones, kidney stones, and typhoid fever”; and Love Vine, “aphrodisiac.” And the mosquito netting—so much more practical than any bridal veil.

“What a fantastic memoir of a fascinating life,” Jay said. He’d known Cressida only in her later, less eccentric years, running a riding stable in Portola Valley until a few years after her husband died.

Calli was silent, though, speechless, as she had been all during her childhood and adolescence in the shadow of her grandmother’s dramatic passions and pursuits. Feeling much of the time smaller than life, as Cressida had been much larger.

“All useful things she knew she’d need in Belize,” the attorney classified the little trove, “when she married Jerome—Jerry—your grandfather—and they moved shortly after from Tikal to Altun Ha.”

“But the baby shoes?” Jay wondered, having observed that they weren’t new-born size. He held them on his palm this time, Jay with his four adored nephews and nieces. There was an embarrassed silence in the old-world office. Then Owen (glancing sidelong at Calli as if hoping she’d keep him from it, but not knowing what she knew and she didn’t) answered reluctantly, even his little moustache bristling with pent-up distress.

“Calli’s mother—Helen—was two years old by the time Cressida and Jerry got around to marrying. In Guatemala, before heading to Belize.” All these decades later the attorney still thoroughly disapproved, not least because he’d had a crush on Cressida from seventh grade until her death at eighty-four. Her grandparents had often joked in Calli’s hearing about your other beau and your dashing rival.

“They’d worked on mapping at Tikal together, before joining the team of archaeologists at Altun Ha. The baby shoes had been worn and outgrown by the time they ended in the hope chest. Which some might argue was more of a steamer trunk, really. As your grandmaman—as she liked to call herself, you know—put it to me when she brought it, ‘not the fond imaginings of a sweet, blushing bride, but souvenirs of gloriously consummated adventures.'”

Which the unprepossessing man of law had surely realized from the start he couldn’t hope to share. Poor Owen, Calli thought. And then—again looking not at Jay but with aching tenderness out at the springtime sun, the tracks of last month’s rain imprinted on the window glass, the bright new leaves claiming a branch from a small clutch of autumn hangers-on, their colors all but washed away—poor all of us.

She felt even more dismayed after the trunk itself appeared. The stolid cedar chest that had been safely stored away for almost thirty years had been presented with lawyerly ceremony—Owen actually bowing slightly, reminiscent of a stage magician having just produced a muscular jackrabbit from a hat, as his bemused young paralegal hefted it onto the desk. She’d have to get it home somehow, around the bay and up the coast, over the coastal mountains, to her rented cottage in the hills above Stanford. Hire a mover, maybe Starving Students or a couple of the actual students she’d made friends with in the evening film noir class, since she’d sold her car after Christmas and Jay had just the tiny Smart fortwo.

The thought of having to wedge that unwelcome object into the living space she kept immaculately clear and light depressed her more than she could say, Calli who’d made a tenable religion of letting things go. 

…

She lay awake that night enumerating them. The harmful things gone from her life—clutter, meat, plastic (as much as possible), long showers. And the missing pieces of her heart—bees and butterflies, despite the native flowers Jay had helped her choose and plant. The Carolina parakeet, the golden toad, the slender-billed curlew, the storm petrel, three subspecies of tiger . . . two hundred species every twenty-four hours, the latest statistics had said, their names like an ungiving string of prayer beads slipping through her hands.

Instead of counting sheep, she tried to name as many extinct or endangered species as she could, the growing list of absences, and said out loud the lines from Wendell Berry’s poem that she heard in her head, like many of his elegies for the lovely, doomed world.

we must call all things by name
out of the silence again to be with us,
or die of namelessness. 

Berry was a fellow environmental activist who wrote about the loss so perfectly, the sort of unnamable grief that she’d felt overwhelm her when Cressida’s trove of hopeful things appeared out of a more hopeful era. That unwieldy box with its weight of invalid expectations.

The most obvious, ironically, the marriage that Calli couldn’t go ahead with now. Thank goodness she and Jay hadn’t moved in together yet, that she’d kept putting off setting a date for anything, that he still had his place in Menlo Park.

…

The son of Jay’s teacher friend Toby dumped the chest behind the cottage at Calli’s request, in the wooden alcove where the washer and dryer sat gathering rust, for lack of space inside. The outdoor storage cubbyhole was very wabi-sabi, half concealed by a big sliding wooden door warped by weather over the years, no longer pretending to close.

She asked them to please leave the lid open—encouraging the goblins of the past to go away. To air the wretched hope chest out, fill it with cleansing light, with music from the synagogue next door, with goat song (wild and wanton) from the urban farm just up the hill which tortoises sometimes escaped, coming galumphing through the failing fence and on across her yard, flattening grasses, leaving an impatient trail between the newly planted plum trees off her little patio.

Goat song—appropriate. That was the name the ancient Greeks gave tragedy, she remembered the afternoon the chest arrived. She saw the whole breadth of the tragedy of hope unfold, though typically she focused on the present moment, in studious Zen fashion, not on some subjunctive realm. It was her grandmaman who’d claimed to see—if mostly backwards, as an archaeologist, instead of forwards into the future. The Cressida of myth had been the daughter of a Greek seer. And when her namesake, proudly seventh-generation Californian, had come from the Yucatán back to Monterey, and her twin sons, Hector and Nestor, were old enough not to need all her time, she’d determined that she would write a book on seers throughout history and the world, famous and otherwise. Nostradamus to Joan of Arc (though Joan was more a hearer, really) to visionaries of both sexes in the modern-day Peruvian Andes. And yes, the Ancient Maya Vision Serpent, Calli recalled now, housed for the moment in a storage bin under her bed with the rest of her ill-gotten marriage settlement. Grandfather Jerry had bought Cressida a typewriter, and a little pine table to put it on. A better piece of furniture for sure than the one Calli had inherited from her.

Thinking of myths, modern and ancient, Calli saw the chest was really Pandora’s infamous box. When Pandora unloosed from it all of the world’s evils, only hope remained—”deceptive expectation,” in Hesiod’s version of the cautionary tale. The question was if hope, imprisoned with those various evils, was in fact good for humankind, or was instead just one more curse? Calli, who saw only what was right smack in front of her—but that, sharp as a tack—could see there wasn’t the good kind of hope for anyone or anything, not anymore.

She watched two towhees come to the birdbath and splash with evident joy in the shallow water. She felt her heart open, and break. The towhees visited regularly, along with finches and juncos. Robins and golden-crowned sparrows came as the seasons changed, and every so often a tiny hummingbird darted down humming from the sky. Since she’d started putting seed out, a small flock of pigeons and mourning doves had appeared out of nowhere. She poured fresh water every morning into the basin of the sweet-faced St. Francis from the Carmel Mission shop (“his eye is on the sparrow”), from an old long-necked watering can made beautiful with verdigris. It was all she had in her power to tend or to protect—this tiny pocket of green earth with its feathery denizens, besides her volunteer work, helping with urban tree planting and care, restoring damaged natural habitats, neighborhood creeks.

Sometimes it felt sufficient. But mostly it felt foolish and inadequate. Like every human effort, doomed. The conservationists were proving bird migrations thinning drastically, the news each day listed the inconceivable percentage of species going extinct, bees dying by the half billions, terrible storms and floods and fires everywhere, more lost each time you looked up and took stock.

In light of that, and Calli’s consequent beliefs about the way forward, which was in fact no way at all, Helen’s additions to the cedar chest (noted by Cressida after her daughter’s death and spelled out in the letter left in Owen’s keeping), were terribly sad. Unlike Cressida’s, the adventurer’s, Helen’s hope had been entirely domestic—and had been dashed against the pylon of a freeway overpass one rainy night on the way home from the shower for her second baby. That hurt lived with Calli in her deepest core, was part of her intrinsic pessimism.

Helen had longed for regularity, a large family, a normal family life, after her unsettled childhood. That was reflected in the dozens of intricate children’s huipils put into the hope chest, the colorful striped shawls used to carry babies (rebozos), a diaper bag, cushion covers, a tablecloth—embroidery taught her by the native women in the Central American villages where she’d grown up, the women who’d looked after her when her mother was off bringing to light the Ancient Maya. And then a copy of the Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook, with hopelessly old-fashioned recipes like Chicken Divan with sherry and heavy cream (for company), budget pot roast (for family Sundays), Ham Hodgepodge (for hearty winter suppers), Bread & Butter Pickles (for excess summer cucumbers), banana bread (for sadly neglected bananas).

All of that hope, and what had come of it?

Calli went indoors after the light had gone, and found herself something vegan for supper, a slender book of poetry to verbalize her grief. The next day she’d tell Jay she couldn’t after all go through with it. Couldn’t, in all good conscience, marry him.

…

“I’m so sorry,” she said through tears. “I saw that I would have been compromising my convictions.” Though she was by no means a fierce individual, not like her grandmaman, she had those principles from which she wouldn’t budge. The invasion of the hope chest (not unlike the cunning Trojan Horse) had shown her that she could never lower her guard.

“I know you hate guns, but what does that have to do with us?” Jay was bewildered, having thought the old-fashioned revolver rather charming, like something in one of the novels he taught to ninth graders—and having, naturally, missed the point.

“Not the gun, Jay—the baby shoes. Those little moccasins you fell in love with right away. You’ve never understood, I know, but I can’t let you rip away your heart. I thought I could, until yesterday morning. I’d let you talk me into believing it was okay—but of course it’s not.”

He didn’t feel, as she did, that it was unconscionable to bring children into this dying world, to bequeath them destruction and suffering of the worst sort. He’d told her he wanted to marry her no matter what; he had his nieces and nephews to love and spoil, “and my students to boss around!” He could live with that, he’d said dozens of times, trying to smooth the frown lines from her brow. But she couldn’t believe him, not deep down.

They’d had the argument before, time and again, but all the hoarded baby things in the hope chest had sent Calli’s moral compass reeling, spinning from true north to all of those vast lost regions in this nineteenth year of the twenty-first century.

“The whole hope chest thing feels like something set in motion by the Jester God—the Ancient Maya deity my grandmother use to tell me about.”

She was talking nonsense, she knew, but talking sense had no effect. Jay couldn’t understand the horror of the jest, by nature seeing the bright side of everything, by occupation teaching kids the once relevant lessons literature offered, like Ray Bradbury’s sand ships, caged flowers, and flame birds with a thousand green ribbons tied to their feet. It was his disposition to be calm and try to calm her, not able to see it was too late for that. There’d be no calm after the storm—just mudslides, further devastation. There was no after, now.

He was gentle and kind and infinitely patient—but not listening. He said they’d talk again, as she hung up.

…

She could always go away, vanish, move where he couldn’t find her and persist in his madness, but that wasn’t what she was all about. Calli was the one who stayed put, while intrigued by migrations. Birds, whales, Basques, trade and genetic flow along the Silk Road. Birds by choice and vocation, but all the rest out of the sense of loss she’d been born into, the knowledge that motion was one more thing that had become unsustainable. Her world was limited, was here and now, and not somewhere beyond (the mas allá of the song Cressida had loved, late in her life, by the Spanish composer). Slow, sedentary creature without wings or sails, or even the tortoises’ determination, she felt no urge to travel—and not just because it had become unethical, selfish, harmful.

She loved where she lived, at the dead end of a pine-hushed lane named for a meeting place of the Algonquin Indians. She loved each precious, doomed moment: the pine shading the clothes hung out to dry (until, last August, it was felled), the hush (until the chainsaws started up again this spring), the quail families flowing up and down the drive like gentle tides (though fewer all the time), the owls coming with the dark like a blessing, her vespers. The small orchard of plum and grafted apple trees, her pear-green pot for cold Spring Cherry tea or Sencha Quince, farmers’ market potatoes roasting for supper with fragrant rosemary or sage.

Everyone in the foothills around had come from other places, yearned always to be elsewhere. The tortoises (from the Mohave Desert, from Sonora) clambered through her yard, envisioning freedom. Uncle Nestor, who taught European history at San Jose State, fancied the winter vines across Arastradero Road looked like the rows of crosses marking the war dead in France—”places like Aubérive, Fricourt, Neuville-St-Vaast,” he wrote under the digital photos he posted in his blog. Wallace Stegner, the author who had lived nearby, among the northern California oaks and eucalyptus, watching towhees and doves, wrote those into his books, but at the same time wrote about Denmark and Morelia and Saskatchewan, siren locations that called him. Millionaires building mansions modeled on Saint-Tropez villas kept menageries with rare African birds. Calli and Jay had seen a meteor falling into the hills behind the cottage one night in December, after the Festival of Lessons and Carols on campus—foreign flame, green and mysterious, come there from vast light years away. Come like the archangel of the Annunciation, Jay said wonderingly, to them.

That had been when Calli first felt she might have to let him go, that having a child was what he wanted more than anything.

…

He reasoned with her now as best he could.

“It seems to me your grandmother didn’t especially want children either. Had no desire for traditions, family life.”

“But she had three, in spite of that. I won’t.”

“It’s fine, Calli. You’ve got a job you really love, good causes to support, and us. . . I can live perfectly contentedly with that.”

“You shouldn’t have to, my sweet Jay. I know how much you want children. And though I feel that’s wrong, I could never impose my will on you, or keep you from your joy.”

“You are my joy. We have each other—that’s what counts.”

But she was adamant, determined, breaking both their hearts to bits. She’d never told him that she, too, wanted with every grain of her being to have children with him. There was no point, because there was no question of her doing so.

Better, therefore, not to get married, not to impose her awful laws on somebody she loved so well, and wouldn’t hurt for all the world.

So why was it that she did nothing but hurt him?

…

Dully, needing distraction, Calli looked up the history of the hope chests online. It didn’t surprise her to learn that they were made by the same company that had made chests for ammunition during World War I. For it was war—fighting for hope, fighting against eradication.

“Lane hope chests,” she read, “became ‘the gift that starts a home,’ designed ‘to hold fragile wisps of dreams until those dreams come true.'”

Further, “As part of its ‘Girl Graduate Plan,’ beginning in 1930, the company arranged for local furniture stores to give miniature Lane Sweetheart Cedar Chests, or a certificate good for one, to entire classes of graduating high school girls.”

A decades-long campaign of war, unscrupulous—from 1918 well into the 1980s. Huh? It seemed incredible to her that so many women (twelve million, in one account) bought into hope, as well as into that companion phantom, “happily ever after.”

…

Jay came again, bringing wedges of the almond ricotta Basque cake she loved, a Japanese maple with lacy scarlet leaves, an Indian sandstone pot to plant the little tree in. Weakened again by his goodness, and always loving him no matter what, Calli gave in. Let him set a date again. Drove up with him early one Saturday to look at outdoor wedding venues in Mill Valley and Tomales, and on Sunday down to the Japanese gardens in Saratoga, on the edge of the redwoods.

…

They agreed on a small ceremony at a retreat center under Mt. Tamalpais. But then they fought again; she’d woken plagued with guilt. She broke it off; told him he needed somebody other than her. Somebody not a nihilist. Somebody who could bring something to a marriage besides the doleful pessimism of a seer’s grandchild, the certainty that things were not going to turn out well. Or turn out, period.

He went away, to the desert, to see the superbloom, to take pictures for the online journal he worked for in his spare time. He drove down to the Central Coast, to Indian Canyons, outside Palm Springs.

“It isn’t hopeless,” Jay insisted once more, when he came back. “Think of the millions of seeds in the desert, dormant until rain; in permafrost, germinating after almost 32,000 years. The miracles of Arctic lupine, sacred lotus, Judean date palm. The ancient pollen of red spruce. Pollen grains and spores in prehistoric sediments. Pollen can last essentially forever, in the right conditions—360 million years, we know, give or take a couple.”

“But without bees—it’s still hopeless.” The glass was half empty. Two-thirds. And counting. Calli was so tired of watching the water evaporate.

When Jay had gone, she went out to the patio, lay on her back, amazed by the intricate clouds, the light across the sky. The silhouettes of the old trees, inked on the horizon, the dusk collecting in the dusky hollow where the old grandfather pine had been, there still in memory and heart’s ease.

…

Over the weeks while Calli was in mortal combat with the man she loved, fighting to be given up as a lost cause, and he refused—wooed her again, took her to San Juan Bautista and showed her artichoke fields hazing blue-gray the valley of the San Andreas Fault, read to her from A Complicated Kindness and The Inland Whale, steadily weakened her resolve—some house finches had nested in the upper tray of the hope chest, tucked away in the sturdy cedar room that must have seemed like a palace to them, a cedar palace like King Solomon’s with its sandalwood pillars and carvings of flowers and gourds and cherubim. The sound of the washer and dryer hadn’t fazed them. She’d always thought of finches as happy and clueless, and she loved their lavish, profligate song.

…

But when she looked again another time, they’d gone. Only the little broken nest was left, and two abandoned eggs—frangible, infinitely thin.

A couple of days after that, one of the errant pigeons got trapped in the small bird feeder for songbirds Jay had given her for her birthday in January, having managed to get inside somehow in a frenzy of neck contortions and repeated thrust—greedy for seed, for what was out of reach. Calli gently urged it out again, out of its deadly trap, feeling herself inside there too, boxed in, unable to move any which direction or see her way out. She felt herself one with the hopeless bird, the bird with mad blind expectation that its wanting would be met. She felt a momentary and irrevocable bond between the two of them, a melting of boundaries and differences between woman and bird, a mute but perfect understanding; felt the big scared bird trust her implicitly, the clumsy human who consoled and grieved and finally talked it out into the safety of the open air, explaining softly all the while how it could happen, how it would be best to drop and turn. Transmitting her imperfect knowledge into the pigeon’s watchful and trustful eyes, its palpitating heart.

That evening when she told Jay about the near avian disaster, and how amazingly it had worked out, he said softly, “It’s true, then, that hope is the thing with feathers.”

“Emily Dickinson was right?” She’d never liked the poet’s chirpiness.

“It seems she was.” He often assigned poems of hers to his students.

He tried again to persuade Calli that no harm would come to them, either, in marriage. 

No greater harm, she thought. The world was doomed, there was no question about that.  And yet, and yet . . . . If he meant what he’d said, over and over, about not needing children of his own, not agreeing that she would only bring him heartbreak—why couldn’t she trust him as the pigeon had her, let him coax her out of the lethal impasse she was in? They might then see it through together, and be just a little happy while they could. She felt a quickening of possibility, remembering the pigeon finally letting go.

He had something else to tell her, Jay went on, in equal parts now terrified and hopeful, hesitant, watching her eyes, touching her lips.

“You’ve got to promise not to beat yourself up, first.”

“Okay.” Calli waited for him to go on.

“No, promise. Swear it on something you won’t back down from.” Scared, she looked at everything she was.

“I swear on the mother I’ve always loved but never known.” That felt enormous.

“Okay, then.” Jay closed his eyes briefly, as he did when he was looking for words. “I got a substitute this week, and went to my doctor. I’d arranged . . . such a simple thing, really . . . to have him give me a vasectomy.”

They were on equal footing now, he said. The playing field was level, the responsibility no longer hers. The news over the past few months had convinced him that having children in this age of snowballing calamity would be negligent, wrong. As she’d known all along.

Calli was shocked, sorrowed, the wind knocked out of her by a sudden, terrible doubt—as if by a wing-shot from the rogue revolver thrust into her life. How could she have been so obdurate, so coldly certain what was right? She was no seer, after all, only blindly feeling her way forward like everybody else. But now, humbled and shaken, she’d been challenged by someone who loved her more than she had understood—to live the life there was.

“Oh, Jay,” she said with love, with near unbearable regret, all she could say.

…

Calli borrowed a hand-cart from her office to help with the move into the duplex they’d found near Jay’s current apartment in Menlo Park. She wheeled it into the back yard to retrieve first Saint Francis, and then the chest—thinking she’d drop that off at Goodwill on the way. Inside she found the little finches’ nest, lopsided and ill-made, and the gray, almost iridescent feather of the pigeon she had lulled, the only lullaby she’d ever sing.

So that was what there was to go on with, she told herself, feeling strangely lighter. The memory of songbirds, the memory of the Amherst poet’s line about the thing with feathers Jay had given her. And Wendell Berry’s being comforted by the wood drake and the heron, by coming into the peace of wild things . . . who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief—as she’d been doing too insistently, too long. Jay would take her as she came, the cedar chest she’d bring along with her not empty after all, the airborne pollen and the dancing shadows of the olive trees fallen into it too, before she closed the lid and loaded the old chest into the U-Haul to take to the home they’d have together. Hopeful, now that all hope was gone.

…

credits: Information on Lane Hope chests comes from this fascinating article by Lynn Peril, April/May 2016 BUST Magazine, https://bust.com/feminism/15787-femoribilia-hope-chest.html

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christie Cochrell loves the play of light and time. Her work has been published by Birdland Journal, Catamaran, Orca, Tin House, Cumberland River Review (with a Pushcart Prize nomination), and a variety of others, most recently Mystery Weekly Magazine. Awards include a New Letters Literary Award and the Literal Latté Short Short Contest. Once New Mexico Young Poet of the Year, she now lives by the Pacific in Santa Cruz—too often lured away from her writing by otters, pelicans, and seaside walks.

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