Feb 25, 2025 18 min read

February: Signs

NOTES:

This month I am posting a short story celebrating jazz and romance.

Did anyone ever tell you to, "Maintain?" Maybe not you. But I was told that often enough. This February I'm working to maintain sanity and compassion as I support those working for justice. I am a bit long in the tooth to be in the streets, but I give what I can consistently. Build up your communities, support one another, and never ever stop.

Please give generously to **democracyforward.org**. One of the very best.

SHORT STORY: "Bread of Heaven" by Dan Domench

CHRISTMAS DAY, 1985

Tell you what, I'm dying for a cigarette. I drove around looking for a store, but this is the only place open. I was hoping for a cigarette machine.

Thanks, guy. You got a light? What are you doing? Checking for a cop? I see the No Smoking sign. I consider it a mistake. The place has an upholstered front door, red Naugahyde, diamond pattern, brass tacks.

That means booths, cocktails, a jukebox, glass ashtrays. I can't smoke in here, that door is false advertising. Who's going to complain? You two guys? The bartender? Look at him, hiding at the other end of the bar, reading the newspaper. Sipping a Bloody Mary. It's his continental breakfast. I'm lighting up.

Arrest me, I'm having a smoke. I appreciate you guys left me the best seat. This is where you want to be, back corner of the bar against the wall. No waitress station. You can lean back if you have to, you know what I mean? Wall's right there.

Tell you what. You go to a jazz club? And you can see the stage from the bar. This is where you want to sit. You want the music to come over the heads of the crowd to your ears. Feel the people and the sound. No offense, but this cigarette tastes lousy. This what Santa brought you for Christmas? A carton of discount menthols made out of stems and roots? It's so bad, it's almost good.

I haven't been in here since I was a kid. This place used to have live music, you guys know that? Used to be twice as big with a stage in the back. I snuck in here when I was in high school. There was a guy playing piano made it sound like a horn section. The piano legs were bending. It was Earl Fatha Hines.

Big handsome black man wearing a silver gray suit making his piano dance. I didn't know what I was hearing but I knew it was great. Other jazz bands toured here in the summer. There was a circuit came through here went all the way up to Canada. Let me ask you a question. How come you guys haven't bought me a drink?

You don't like my skirt? My blazer? Maybe I'm not your type, but there's no other type in here. That should count for something. Tell you what, you buy me a Cutty, a double, and I'll tell you a Christmas story. You're not big on Christmas, okay? I'll make it a ghost story. Look at you guys, heads turning. Honest to God, salt of the earth.

This is a few hours ago. I'm exhausted beyond belief. Sitting on the hardwood floor with my back against the wall, next to the fireplace in my family's cabin on the lake. I threw a maple log in the coals and it's hissing. Smoke hazes the room and mixes with the smell of chocolate, vanilla, and caramel-covered apples.

The room is crawling with kids. My nephew Sammy, he's three, climbs over my knee, streaking praline buttercream on my skirt. It's not a cheap skirt, but I'm so tired I don't even care. There are two towers of pink pastry boxes tied with string in front of me, and five open boxes scattered around the room.

Sammy's sister Sarah, she's six, leans on my shoulder, one warm hand on my neck, and the other pushing sponge cake into her mouth. She drips raspberry glaze on my blazer. The blue sunlight coming through the windows is ultraviolet. It is too early for the children to be up. I woke them as I stumbled into the cabin, dragging in the pastry boxes.

Sarah's baby cousin Wyatt is ripping apart a Tarte au Citron, splattering bright yellow lemon cream on his legs. His brothers, they're twins, about seven years old, Augie and Louie. They both have pointy ears like elves. They have a pastry box flattened out between them and chocolate ganache smeared on their lips.

Jill, the preteen, my youngest brother's only child, is hoarding, moving from pink box to pink box, taking two of everything. Two cherry filled croissants, two raisin scones, two sticky buns, two almond tarts, two chocolate truffles, two white cocoa squares. She arranges them in a box. You know what kind of woman she's gonna be. Glass unicorn collections, antique bottles with colored windowsills. I can see it coming.

Thanks for the Cutty. Cheers.

The kids are talking, getting louder and louder, and suddenly a wave of laughter breaks out, rolls through the room, rattles the windows. The kids have a crazy look in their eyes, all this sweet pastry, their aunt Tina, that's me, Tina, glad to meet you guys, sitting on the floor with them. The tree lights flashing on and off, the presents under the tree so close, the pretty packages waiting to be ripped to shreds. My three brothers appear, wearing the same kind of white terrycloth bathrobe. The three wives bought the three husbands the same bathrobe for Christmas.

You know what I'm saying? That's what I have to deal with. Steve, the oldest, puts his hands in the front pockets of his robe like our dad would, and says in my father's voice, Tina, what are you doing? The children stop eating. They look to me, I say, Uh oh, Auntie Tina is in trouble. My middle brother says, What are they eating?

You guys might know him, Jimmy Crosby. Became a policeman in town after the mill closed. He asks obvious questions no one answers.

You might know my family. I'm Dr. Crosby's daughter. I went to Brooks High. I'm the one who never graduated, ran away from home. The bad girl comes to visit on Christmas. My youngest brother says, Where were you?

There's a concern in his voice that's touching. He's my favorite. The wives appear behind their husbands. Tell you what, I'm gonna make a point here. Point is, I'm looking at my brothers and their wives, and I'm seeing 300 years of French, Native American, Spanish, English, African, Italian, Irish, and whatever else.

Boys and girls falling in love. You have a town and a river with a direct passage to the sea. Ships coming and going for hundreds of years. People are gonna mix. You call yourself whatever you want, but the truth is, your family lives in a river town for three, four generations? My sisters-in-law are probably your cousins.

We’re probably related by marriage. My father called the wives Townies. He never intended for us to live here. He bought the lake cabin for summer vacations and one September my mom wouldn't take us back to Massachusetts and that was that. Dad saw us on weekends and holidays. My mom was from upstate Vermont.

She says she's Scottish, but it was more like Viking. Always making me do stupid stuff to toughen me up. Ever seen a six-year-old girl trying to split wood with a sharp axe? It's not effective wood chopping, but it keeps your interest.

My brother's wives are all right. Good hearted, pretty, with eyes that give nothing away. They locate their kids with one glance, determine their safety, and then watch me. Everyone in the room listens because they know I'll explain why I'm late, tell a story, keep it moving. I say to them, I buried Mitch two days ago. All three wives wince and move toward me to offer sympathy, but I raise my hand and they stop.

I say, Mitch did a lot of hard things in his life, but his dying was the hardest. You don't want to die like Mitch Haven.

Mitch Haven. Guys know who I'm talking about? He was from around here, that's how I met him. I was in New York City at a party and it was a hot night and he heard me talking about swimming in Cat Lake.

He walks over. I thought he was a cop. Tall black guy with his hair cut tight. Little gray in it. Sunglasses with a bad hand he kept down at his side. He asks me what's a country girl doing in the city. Starts naming places from around here. Lady Lake, Brady Quarry, the rope swing at True Park. I'm shocked.

How does this guy know my childhood? I tell him I'm going to secretarial school. He asks me why, and I say to better myself. He says, You get any better, men are gonna drop dead around you.

I was never gorgeous or anything. He was flirting. We talk for a while, and he invites me to join him and his friends. We walk down to the Blue Note.

They seat him at a table near the stage, and everybody knows him. People are coming to the table, buying him drinks and teasing him. I'm thinking, who is this guy? Mitch tells me his dad was a barber in Red Forks. He describes his father's shop and I remember seeing it. Walking by it when we went to Red Forks to the fair.

He tells me his great-great-grandfather was on a slave ship that wrecked in Falmouth. They sued for freedom and won. He really liked that I was from here. I could tell he was a little homesick. We hit it off, you know. Comfortable with each other at the start. We got each other's jokes. The humor from around here.

We had that in common. After that night, Mitch called me every day. Asked me out. Told me he was courting me. His friends loved talking about him. That he came to the city, the way one guy put it, from the buggy woods to play jazz.

He wasn't old enough to drink when he first played his trumpet in the clubs, filling in. He learned fast. He put together a jazz quartet. Young guys had two hits on Emerson Records right before World War II. He went to southern France on a tour for Emerson. He was playing at a resort on the Atlantic when Franco bombed Guernica and attacked other Spanish towns near the border. Refugees were moving north up the coast into France, sleeping on the beaches, hiding in gardens.

There were kids begging for food at the resort. That's what got Mitch involved. He smuggled orphans out of Spain into England in a fishing boat. He did that back and forth for a year. He came back to the States to get a bullet taken out of his stomach, and he lost most of his right hand. That was the end of playing music.

He never told me this. Other people had to tell me. When he got well, he started following jazz bands around, recording them live. He used microphones in new ways, put them all over the room. Ideas he got when he was recording for Emerson. He knew what was good and where to find it. Musicians were fighting to get his recordings, to hear what people were doing in Seattle or Los Angeles or Atlanta or Detroit.

You didn't hear Mitch's sound on the radio shows. Mitch captured the feeling of the music as it was. The new jazz coming up. Musicians talking to each other on stage, pushing each other, the way it was in the small clubs. When the war ended, someone gave him a record cutter. For a few years, he manufactured one record at a time, staying up all night and turning them out.

Sold the records himself, designed the jackets, traveled around the country getting the records out and making more recordings. This was in the early 50s. I bought some of his records downtown to get an idea of what he was doing. I didn't know jazz that well, but I liked what Mitch liked. Music with feeling and some space in it.

Sounds that let the audience breathe before it took them into new places. Finally, Mitch invites me up to his apartment. It's like a warehouse packed with records and tapes. The first thing he did, like a test, he sits me down and plays a recording he made in San Francisco. It was a poet named Kenneth Patchen reading anti-war poems with a jazz trio behind him.

The jazz, moving in and out of the words. Mitch was the one that made them do it. It was the coolest thing I ever heard. Then there was some kissing, that kind of thing. I don't want to get you guys excited on Christmas Day, but he didn't make a big move on me. You know what he did? He leaned back on the couch and asked me to drive him to Ohio.

There was a horn player he wanted to record in Cleveland. I quit school and took off with Mitch into a different life, and it was right where I belonged. Years of reading novels and poetry and dreaming of a new world, and then I was in it for real. The guy he went to see in Ohio kept calling Mitch an old beatnik, but it was a joke.

Mitch didn't call himself anything. He cared about the music, about living in peace, about reading great books, poetry. I met other people like him, musicians and artists. He showed me there were other people like us living on the road. But it wasn't easy. I was scared plenty of times. We took northern routes whenever we could.

I hated Route 66. Stopping for gas with me in the car wasn't always safe. Driving at night, I kept my blonde hair stuffed up in a hat. They were still killing civil rights workers then. There were homes that we stayed in that were safe. We didn't like motels or hotels we didn't know. We slept in the car plenty of times.

But most of the time, it wasn't a problem. Because Mitch had an authority to him. It was like he was protected by something bigger than life. Somewhere on the road, we became lovers. But it didn't matter when. We were lovers before we slept together. I knew he loved me, but I also knew Mitch was not gonna settle down, never.

He lived for the music and the people around it. He was patient with me and nice and polite, but always moving on to the next scene. The next recording. What I remember most about being his woman was trying to sleep in the same bed with him. His body threw off heat like a furnace. Drove me right out of the bed. He had a fire in him.

There wasn't much money. I had to take on other jobs to work for him. That's what you did when you worked for Mitch Haven. You wanted to be part of whatever he was doing, and you helped him any way you could. I don't regret it. Mitch produced 41 albums in his life. All of them good. Some of them breathtaking.

Most would never have happened if not for him. At least six, maybe ten, will be played forever. He was a genius. He'd get angry if he heard me call him that, but he's not around to argue with me, is he? Bad debts drove Mitch out of New York. He set up an office in a small town on the train line outside of Philly.

I stayed in the city, got a job, and sent him money. But between us, we couldn't get him enough to stay on the road to keep recording. Things were changing. Except for a few musicians like Miles or Brubeck. Records did not sell. It was hard times for jazz. It got harder for Mitch to record anyone without a contract and money up front.

Young guys came around with more money and better equipment. For a while I visited Mitch on weekends. I felt like a stranger among his new friends. There was a woman I noticed staying away from me, keeping in the background. There were always women like that around Mitch, but this one bothered me. I visited him less and less.

Time passed. You know how it does. I got the job I still have. I work at a magazine in New York. I do the jazz section, national festivals. I keep track of the schedules. I'd see Mitch every nine months or so if I made the effort. I'd call when I could. Not often. I tell him what I'd seen at the clubs. I'm still going out two, three nights a week.

Even if I wanted, I couldn't stop. I was at my desk last month. Seems like years ago. I got a call from Mitch. He asked if I wouldn't mind coming down to see him. He sounded apologetic about it. My whole body went cold. Something was wrong. I dropped everything and drove there. I went to the office, but it was locked.

Just an empty storefront, no musicians hanging out, drinking coffee, no music playing. I went to his apartment on a side street, and I found him sitting up in a bed in his front room. He looked terrible. I almost burst into tears. I knew he was dying. There was an elderly woman sitting next to him wearing a blue pantsuit and white shoes. A nurse outfit.

I'm gonna tell you what Mitch says first thing. He says to the nurse, my friend Tina here, she won't take my pregnant three-legged cat because she's allergic to cats. She'll put my cat to sleep when I'm dead. Isn't she cruel? The nurse left us and I hear her searching the house, calling Kitty, Kitty, while Mitch and I drink coffee.

Mitch never owned a cat in his life. Mitch's brain is bleeding, but he's still messing with us, doing it to make us feel better. I stayed with him, and his pain got worse, and the drugs didn't help. Mitch called it death by headache. The pain took over, and he stopped talking, concentrated on getting his dying done.

I played his albums for him, Miles, Coltrane, Bird, and some others from his 78 RPM collection. Bix. Holiday. Music gave him peace. It was his way of praying is what it was. Loving the music and the musicians. Tell you what. It was a long month. I was holding his hand when he died.

It was a nice funeral. Not many people. Simple. The way he wanted it. No speeches. You can imagine how I'm feeling. The only airline ticket I can get lands me three hours south of here last night after six. I rent a car and I'm driving up here when I realize I don't have any Christmas gifts for the kids. I see a store open. This is late Christmas Eve.

It's a dump called the Metaphysical Life Shop. I run in and grab junk off the shelves, anything I thought kids might like. Tarot cards, an amulet, a crystal ball, a glass unicorn, healing oil, a witch's cauldron, a dousing stick, and a Ouija board game for the whole family where spirits compete with you for properties and cash. I think. I don't know how it works. I didn't read the instructions. I just wanted to carry something into the cabin with me for the kids.

And this thing happens. I go to a corner gas station to get coffee because I have to drive two more hours. I get back in the rental car, put the coffee in the cup holder.

The store has a speaker in the parking lot, and it's playing Miles, first cut from Kinda Blue. What are the chances you're gonna hear Miles Davis in the night air outside a gas station? Close my eyes to listen, and I fall asleep. I dream I'm at the cabin on the lake. Five years old. I sneak past my mom and dad's room to get to the Christmas presents before anyone else.

I hear them breathing in their sleep. I walk up to the decorated tree. Through the big window behind it, I see the rising sun melting the clouds. The sky is orange and red, and the tinsel is sparkling, and I don't care about the gifts anymore. All I can do is stare at the colors in the clouds, and I have this feeling.

I walk outside the cabin, and I step into the lake. The icy water on my feet. I feel small and big at the same time. I'm reflected in the water, I'm transparent. Part of the sky. I walk forward, water comes up higher and higher. I can't describe it, what is it, this feeling? A guy knocks on my car window and I jump awake.

It's a black kid wearing a navy overcoat. Cable knit sweater, tight hair, dark glasses at night. I check to make sure the door is locked and he says, I need a ride to meet the tow truck. I broke down on the highway.

There's no one else around. It's Christmas Eve and the guy's stuck. I put my cell phone on the seat next to my left leg, ready to call for help and tell him to get in.

He's quiet in the car in the dark and looks straight ahead. I don't have any questions. He doesn't offer any information. I drive him to the interstate and let him off behind a panel truck, a truck you'd see in an old movie. He says, wait. He opens the back of the truck and starts throwing stacks of pastry boxes into my car.

He says, it was for a Christmas party in Boston. I missed the plane, they'll throw it away. And he looks down at the ground and says, ain't nothing for it.

When I say this in the cabin, my youngest brother gasps. He knows. Ain't nothing for it was Mitch's first recording on Emerson. A light melody that turns on you and breaks your heart when Mitch's mournful trumpet solo fades in.

On the freeway in my headlights, I'm looking at Mitch as a young man, home from the war, alone on the road, boxes of books and records in his truck like contraband, letters from orphans in his wallet, how he was before I met him, before others followed him on the road. It's Mitch Haven, the kid. I wanted to talk to him to ask him what I should do next, but he waved me on, keeping his right hand down and to the side like he always did, keeping his hurt out of the light. He waved me back on the road with his left, like saying get going, so I drove away.

In the cabin on the lake, there's a silence. Seems to be the end. I tell them the occult gifts I bought for the kids seem pathetic. Stopped on my way and threw them in a dumpster. The wives move into the room, pick at the pastry, wipe their children's faces, talking like mothers do to children, singing the words.

My brothers watch me, wary. And Steve says, Merry Christmas. And Sammy says, his mouth full of eclair, his four-year-old voice coming through clear, This is what they eat in heaven.

There's nothing left to do but open gifts. I step out for a cigarette and thanks for the smoke and the drink. Happy New Year, all that.

You guys have it made. You can stay here. I have to go back to the cabin to those wonderful kids and my brothers and their wives. I have to go haunt them. Mitch ruined me. He's gone. And I'm still driving the country, chasing jazz. There's nothing in my life but those rare moments when the music works and it lifts me up.

You probably think the kid on the highway was the ghost. You're wrong. When I was a little girl, one Christmas morning, I walked into the lake because I wanted to meet God.

Maybe I did. Maybe I'm not here at all. That's the feeling. Because truth is, the only person I ever loved is gone. I'm alone forever. So the question is, which one of us is really dead?

You guys take care. I'll see myself out. Tell you what, in my story, I'm the ghost.

Audiobook, Kindle, and Paperback available on Amazon. For this book, I am A. A. Artiz.

Thank you always & never ever quit.

dan