One Night Two Souls Went Walking
Ellen Cooney
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
Minneapolis
2020
Copyright © 2020 by Ellen Cooney
Cover photograph by Dil, @thevisualiza, on Unsplash
Book design by Rachel Holscher
Author photograph © Greta Rybus
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cooney, Ellen, author.
Title: One night two souls went walking / Ellen Cooney.
Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020002803 | ISBN 9781566895972 (trade paperback)
Classification: LCC PS3553.O5788 O54 2020 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002803
Printed in the United States of America
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To Jo
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Discussion Guide
Funder Acknowledgments
The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press
One Night Two Souls Went Walking
One
Once when I was small I asked my parents, What is a soul?
My father called it a mystery, like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp. He knew I’d been reading stories of Arabian Nights. But what he said could not be true. A soul can’t slip from a body and speak to you and grant wishes, if you rubbed yourself like rubbing a lamp. I had tried, many times.
My mother said that if she had to compare a soul to a character in a story, she’d pick Tinker Bell, the best thing about Peter Pan.
So I began to imagine a fairy inside me, curled up sleeping for most of the time, perhaps on a cushion of my guts, or some pillow of an organ.
“Wake up, Soul,” I would say, but it didn’t matter. I had to accept the fact that it could not be told what to do. I never had a clue when it would remind me it was there, whirring about like crazy, fluttering inside my rib cage, zipping around wherever it wanted to go, because of course it would do that; it had wings.
And it knew about the other thing. Like that was its job.
“The other thing” was what I called it when there was ordinary, everything ordinary, life going on as it does, and then suddenly there’s a something else. I could never describe it to myself, but I could have called it “the thing that doesn’t have words.”
Once I heard a thrush sing in twilight, its notes ascending, its melody like no other, and then I had to feel sorry for flutes, whenever I heard one. Maybe the flutist was a genius of a musician, but my soul had learned a flute is not a bird.
In the waiting room of my dentist, a stranger suddenly smiled, and the light of that face was beautiful, when one second earlier, I thought I was looking at someone ugly and weird.
In stacks of the library where I wandered, where almost no one went, where everything was old and a little beat-up, a ray of sunlight came in, filled with swirling bits of dust, when nothing else was moving, and I saw it wasn’t dust but particles of the spirits of those books, free and out playing around, like no one was watching.
Moments. They were moments. They belonged to the other thing and they could never be broken, as you can break a clock, but not time.
I would say to my soul, “Wide awake! Good job!”
But you can’t believe in fairies forever.
The first time I saw the cathedral, on a drive with my parents, I felt I was looking at a castle. And then bells began pealing.
I could not understand why the car wasn’t stopping so we could go inside. I begged.
Once I sat bedside with a painter who yearned as a child to be taken into the art museum he could see in the distance from a window of his family’s apartment. Their building was in a neighborhood of tenements as far away from the museum, to him, as the other side of the moon. He’d grow up to have work of his own on its walls—but that’s not what he wanted to talk about with his chaplain. He wanted to talk about longing for art when he didn’t yet know what it was, outside of the sketches he secretly made, and how something inside him would leap and get excited when his eyes took in a flash of colors, perhaps in a woman’s dress, or on the shelves of a storefront, cans and bottles and cardboard containers arranged just so. The funny thing was that the painter had no memory of the first time he entered that museum. His soul hadn’t bothered to register the actual event.
He was nearing the end of his life. “I’m putting my soul in order, Reverend, like I never did with my studio,” he told me.
I understood him, exactly, about the museum. But for me and the cathedral, it was different. I remembered.
I knew what a funeral was. My grandfather was being laid to eternal rest.
I had barely known him, even though he was the only one of my grandparents alive beyond my babyhood. He was an often-frowning figure who always seemed covered in shadows, at the far end of the table at big family gatherings, the first to be served, the first to stand up and leave. My parents and sister and brothers always seemed to put up a guard when he was present, which they didn’t do with other people. Apparently he had a temper he was never interested in controlling.
“He’s gone to light,” I was told.
Entering the cathedral, I kept my excitement hidden. At last, at last, at last.
It was as splendid and breathtaking and lavish and solemnly gorgeous as I had hoped: four priests, eight altar servers, a pageant of a procession, the rising and falling of the organ, the incense mingled with all the flowers. In my family’s pew, my parents were mad at my brothers for slouching and kicking each other. They didn’t want to be here.
The altar was shining, all dressed up: embroidered white cloths, gold and silver, multitudes of candles, the biggest white lilies and tulips I’d ever seen.
I was going to find something out about souls! I was going to feel my own, waking up, moving about, in a new, non-baby way!
And once I did, I knew I would never be the same, like losing my baby teeth, and then came that first real one, poking up from my gum to fill the emptiness.
But after a little while in the service, I noticed something. Of everyone on the altar wearing vestments or cassocks, no one was a woman or a girl. I hadn’t noticed that in the procession.