RESURRECTION

Stories for the Living and Dead

by

Bernard Fancher

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 by Bernard Fancher

All rights reserved

Smashwords License Statement:

This ebook is licensed by Smashwords, and may not otherwise be reproduced or

disseminated without the author’s permission.

The stories that follow are fiction.

***

Table of Contents

Resurrection

A Reflection on Incomprehensible Mercy and Grace

If Superman Can, So Can I

Between This Earth and Sky

A Thousand Words

A Last Hunt

The Long Way

Leon the Lionheart

Kim’s Story

Somebody Always Comes When You Call

That Morning of Blue Sky

The Old Foote House

The Playground

What Does It Matter, What Does It Mean?

***

Resurrection

Clarissa Lemke emerged from her dream as if from a great depth, as if ascending

through a body of water. But strangely, after reaching the surface, her eyes remained

closed. She lay vulnerable and prone on her back in a place she did not initially know,

listening to her breath, feeling the repetitive tremor of her own faulty heart. Finally, a

tentative rap of knuckles upon a wavy glass pane alerted her to a presence from the other

side, and the voice of a man she had not heard in eighty years—a voice resurrected from

her childhood—called in to her softly through the window: Never fear! ‘Tis only I, Piet

Dinker!

It was then Clarissa realized she had in some way been transported back to the

farmhouse where she’d been born and lived out her earliest days. Again summoned to

rise by the hired man, she lay still, holding her breath. She waited to hear the back door

open, to detect the sound of hard footfalls going from the back porch through the

mudroom into the kitchen, where the old farmhand Pieter would start the cooking stove

fire, unless her own mama had already beaten him to it.

Somehow, Clarissa next discovered herself on a stool in the cramped electricity-

generating house below the last of the mill falls. Sitting now between two hulking pieces

of whirring machinery, she watched her father who, with his back turned to her, seemed a

mere shadow against an indefinite horizon of blue-tinted window. Because he wasn’t

looking, she could easily have reached her arms out and touched something. Likely he

would never have known. But he had warned her in a severe voice not to do it, explaining

only that to do so would be dangerous. Yet more than injury or dying, she feared the

implication of her father’s wrath, his predictable reaction were he to discover her in an

act of disobedience; so she kept her hands close to her sides as the deadly machinery

whirred and hummed about her.

Looking intently at this revisited world, though her eyes in fact remained closed,

she witnessed a blue spark of pent power; her nose detected a pungent follow-on odor of

pure ozone. Closing her eyes, she clenched her arms tight to her side and sat straighter.

At last, finally, she felt her father pick her up and take her to the back window where

together they looked down on the released current of roiled water flowing, recomposing

itself, in a narrow channel leading directly out from beneath where they stood.

E=mc2

She understood vaguely how energy could be derived from matter. A stick of

dynamite, a pound of plutonium, could be made to explode. But what she had never

considered before hearing her son’s explanation was how the equation could be turned

around to mean the opposite of what she thought. Just as energy derived from matter, so

did matter derive from energy. That was the essence of the Big Bang, her son had said. In

essence: God, as pure energy, had created all that we know.

But the experience of revisiting her childhood left her momentarily unwilling to

consider her life as an adult. She wished, childishly she knew, only to reside in the small

electric house with her father. She did not want to confront the fact he had died, or that

she’d grown old in the interim—older now than he ever was. But how else to explain the

inescapable fact she had married and given birth—not only to a son but two daughters?

The daughters had moved away, but the son still came to visit, once a week, every

Thursday, when he could.

Suddenly, still thinking of her son, she awoke with a start, wondering what day it

was currently. She reoriented herself, realizing she had fallen fast asleep in the living

room. Looking straight up, she noticed dimples in the ceiling, still unpainted after all

these years. The realization of all that time gone suddenly depressed her. Deciding to rise,

she turned and pushed with one hand beneath her while simultaneously pulling herself up

with the other. In so doing, she managed to dislodge the loose-woven afghan from its

display position at the back of the couch. After lifting and replacing the afghan, she put

both feet squarely on the floor and sat up straight to summon that preliminary state of

equilibrium she found it necessary to maintain before attempting the riskier challenge of

standing. Finally stepping sideways across the bare wood floor, loosing her balance, she

stepped a little too far. Finding it necessary to grab hold of the side of the piano, she sat

heavily, yet thankfully, on the wide sturdy bench set before it. For a moment, she felt

embarrassment, but after a moment more, regaining her composure, she began to play a

piece from her senior recital, a tune she hadn’t thought of in years.

The name of the piece was Clare de Lune, and even all this time later she still

knew it by heart. Her fingers moved effortlessly over the keyboard. She closed her eyes

and entered a mesmerized state whereby the music seemed at once both the cause and

result of her joy.

Half a century before, overcome with an intense and uncontainable feeling of

happiness for a close friend about to give birth, she had played the same tune with the

near exact same result. With verve and force her hands and fingers flew upon the piano!

Improvising, adding frills and fancy grace-notes, they seemed possessed of a power and

will she could merely direct and not entirely control.

In that agitated and happy state, she detected the simulacrum of another presence,

and played ever more forcefully, happily succumbing to the music, for her own pleasure

and that of her new audience. But then suddenly the reverie gave way to mere physical

reality as her long-since-deceased husband ran up from the pink peonies and in through

the side door, gasping and breathless to deliver the sad news from downtown that her

dear papa’s heart had failed.

Clarissa believed her father had paused in his transit from this world to the next in

order to listen to her perform one last time at the piano. And believing it so, thinking it

once more, she put her hands in her lap and bowed her head. A single tear fell off the tip

of her nose onto the middle C ivory. Opening her eyes, she pensively touched the wet key

with a forefinger. Playing the singular note, she listened to it fade in the silence. Then,

taking a deep breath, she watched with detached interest and wonder as her hands

repositioned, and by a will of their own commenced to play the sonata to completion.

***

A Reflection on Incomprehensible Mercy and Grace

It’s strange how one moment life can seem as it always has been, and the next be

all changed. I’m thinking of a calm summer evening quite a long time ago now when,

while walking my parents’ sheltie, MacDuff, I encountered a crowd in the village

ballpark assembled to watch a balloon launch. Slowly the purple pool lying limp on the

grass blossomed and rose, staggeringly as if drunk. While the grownups stood watching

the children ran shrieking each time the play monster growled and breathed hot indigo

light. MacDuff joined in to protect them, barking at the dangling tethers. But then the

mood changed all at once when the older brother of a boyhood friend ran sprinting from

the field, and as she walked away I heard a woman half-whisper the news: “Rick just got

word John’s in a coma. They don’t expect him to live.”

I had not seen him in years, though there was a time when we were thicker than

thieves. It’s funny to say that now, considering my first memory of John is of him

stealing a pack of ‘Go Fish’ cards from me in second grade. I sulked until the teacher

made him return them the next day but then, predictably, we became chums and built a

tree house in the Norway spruce outside my parents’ bedroom window. All that summer,

hidden by concealing boughs, we commanded the world, calling out to passersby on the

sidewalk and startling them (to our delight when we did) with our disembodied voices.

During the course of a day John would invariably announce, “I need to get some

kicks,” and drop abruptly to the ground, starting for home. I never knew quite what to

make of these sudden desertions and would look somewhat disconsolately at my pitch-

stained hands, trying to decide whether to keep climbing or head for the jar of Getzol

cleaner that waited by the porcelain sink in a darkened corner of the back room.

I think we were jealous of one another, in different ways. John’s father was tall,

thin, tanned, and, in my memory at least, always immaculately, if casually, dressed. He

seemed perpetually ready to go either golfing or out to dinner. Sometimes he would come

from work and without changing his clothes have a game of catch with us in the shadows

of their back yard, throwing dispassionately to each of us in turn, saying nothing. The

sound of the ball smacking our gloved hands was our early instruction in rhythm and

grace, and the utility of unspoken communion. Even then I think we subconsciously

knew a game of catch sometimes substitutes for words when fathers don’t know what to

say to their sons.

Once, while we stood beneath the crabapple at the front of our house, John told

me his father always carried a hundred dollar bill in his wallet. The statement amazes me

to this day. He might as well have told me they were millionaires. I remember my dad

coming home one night after driving the bus to a basketball game, standing in the living

room, happily announcing he’d made an extra ten bucks. I couldn’t imagine even that

amount as mere pocket money—let alone a hundred.

John’s father was the oldest son of C. J. Winchip & Sons, supplier of petroleum

products for the north southern tier. The tanker trucks that came and went from his

business had to sharply bend and come nearly to a standstill, momentarily exposing their

vulnerable bellies to disaster as they negotiated the hillside turn immediately above town

center. One day, it seemed inevitable to me, another truck would come barreling down

the road at just the wrong moment at too great a speed and engulf the downtown in a

conflagration. But no such disaster ever occurred and C. J. Winchip & Sons uneventfully

embroidered the shoulder blades of our town’s Little League Tigers for years after, never

once making it to first page of the tri-county news.

Just beyond the far corner of our block in those days the closed concrete sluice

plant stood, overlooking the tracks and the backyards of houses even further below. It

was a dangerous, looming, off-limits place, and we knew it. But inasmuch as our summer

days consisted of unsupervised hours we eventually ended up there, irrepressibly drawn

by the danger. We obsessed on the possibility of dying, not knowing then what it meant,

and beyond the merely inconvenient knowledge that we weren’t to go near it, there was

nothing to keep us from the abandoned plant; the open loading dock door beckoned like a

mineshaft. Maybe if we had been told there were rattlers inside we would have stayed

clear. Or maybe the lure of that danger would have tempted us in deeper. As it was we

ventured only as far as the vertical wood chute that led straight up two stories to an

opening from where we could jump, or at least dare each other to do so.

I honestly don’t recall which one of us first accepted the challenge. I like to think

it was me, as I was the older by half a year. A daunting divide separated us from landing

in a large mound of leftover sand. Initially, the distance loomed greater than the allure of

the jump and somewhat cancelled it out, yet the distance was not nearly as troublesome

as the suggestion you were chicken to go.

So, I jumped. My feet kicked out from the ledge they had left, and for a

suspended moment I was free, flying, until the world caught and dropped me to my

knees. But I was unhurt and knew then I was indestructible, all the rest of that summer.

John just as carelessly played to the fates after that, knowing he was indestructible too.

But sometimes, in seeming deference to mortality, he would pause—standing mid-stride

on a crumbling foundation wall, perhaps—and, contravening all our brazen assurance,

soberly tell me: Remember… I want red roses for my funeral.

There isn’t much more to tell about our childhood together beyond a few further

details that wouldn’t merit inclusion, except they’re interesting to me. Every autumn dad

would buy a bushel basket each of Cortland and McIntosh apples and John would always

take one on his way out our back door. The last year his family lived in the small house

up the street he got a Superman costume that I don’t remember him ever actually

wearing. His older sister held a Halloween party for the neighborhood kids that same

year, turning off the lights, telling the tale of The Tell-Tale Heart so convincingly it

scared the bunch of us witless. I also witnessed John and his younger brother Flip, in

what may have been their final cooperative act in that house, tumbling together through

the picture window that separated their dining room and porch. It seemed they were

always going at one another, so it seemed odd a couple of years later when Flip told me,

after I’d punched my own brother and sent him home crying, that brothers shouldn’t

fight.

But boys will be boys, whether they are brothers or not. It came to a point where

John and I fought so much it eventually destroyed whatever had bound us together. We

were in the end too volatile for one another. Even sledding became an unfriendly contest

to see who could come closest to disaster, pulling up on one runner while attempting to

scrape the bark of a tree with the other. Once, misjudging, I collided full on and was

saved only because my boot caught at the back of my Radio Flyer. The vicious laughter

coming from the top of the hill echoed a week later when—after he called me Fannyfart

and I called him Winshit—John declared his family owned Crandall’s Hill and I was to

get off it and never come back. Yet, despite our mutual aggressions, which seemed so

immediate then, the memory that stands clearest for me now concerns a quiet half hour

we spent in the attic of that big house on the hill, sitting in a block of sunlight

illuminating the floating dust, as we tried to unravel the mystery of water’s being both

hydrogen and oxygen combining in a way we couldn’t even dimly comprehend.

Years later, my mom told me a story about how she had once lived in that house

on the hill as a young girl and how one day, when everyone else was gone, her oldest

sister Anita had built a fire entirely of kindling that burned so intensely the flue turned

cherry red in the wall. Fearing the house was on fire, my mother fled down the hill with

her doll carriage in tow. There is also the story she relates of passing the house she would

live in years later, looking up to see the widow Foote, dressed all in black, sweeping the

back roof with a broom. I’m drawn to consider the strange and reciprocal nature of these

stories, and the continuity they imply. There seems to me to be an element of the

ineluctable about them. They tell me something of where I came from and point, in some

way, towards the place I have always been heading. They give some indication of who

and what and why I am. So, recognizing these retellings as a means of determining and

divulging some truth, I go back to the very beginnings of my association with the house I

would grow up in. I can still feel myself slipping on the wet flagstone walk as I came for

the first time to the side porch and feel the scary anticipation of entering into our new

home, where I found my grandfather (my father’s father, who never talked in my

presence) standing on a stepladder in the cold dining room as he worked to remove the

old pipes that had frozen over winter. Years later, listening to my mom relating stories as

she put away dishes in the kitchen, I thought about all the elegant cast iron radiators that

were removed, busted up, and left piled by the drive, and asked what had happened.

“Sierra let the house freeze when he left,” said my mother, rising up on her toes to put a

bowl away. “While we were waiting for our loan, Winchip made a better offer. The

radiators and the plumbing meant nothing to them because they planned to put in oil heat

anyway.” Closing the cupboard, lowering her heels back to the floor, she added, with a

hard glance, “I think Sierra did it on purpose, hoping to get us to back out.”

In some ways I think John and I never had a chance. The covetousness and

suspicion that began our relationship, and was to eventually destroy it, seems now to have

been imbedded in the genetic code of our friendship. I am sure neither of us could have

done anything other than what we did, which was to exist for a time as two boys growing

up together in a small town. Maybe that is enough.

The last time I saw John he came walking diagonally across the road to where I

sat taping the dash of the Sprite I was preparing to paint. We had not seen each other in

years and to this day I wonder about that, and why I hadn’t even missed him. The vague

notion that he’d gone away to military school pops into my head, but otherwise I can’t

account for the gap in our contact other than to offer the most mundane explanation—or,

simply, he’d gone his way and I’d gone mine. At any rate, that day he crossed the road to

see me it was as though we had never met. He stood for a moment and looked at what I

was doing then reached for the oil gauge, tracing the silver rim with his finger. “If you

smear Vaseline around your gauges,” he said helpfully, “you won’t have to tape them.”

And that was the entirety of our interaction, almost. There was no ‘How have you been?

What have you been up to?’ Just, “If you smear Vaseline around your gauges, you won’t

have to tape them.” It was as though our childhood together had never occurred.

The memorial service was held in the parlor of the Kopler-Williams Funeral

Home, where folding chairs were set up to accommodate the fifty or so people attending.

Before the final invocation John’s oldest sister and his younger brother, Phillip, each

stood to give their dedications. But it was a nephew who made us all laugh, revealing a

recognizable playfulness in the adult I’d never known, by relating his Uncle John’s

counsel concerning which branch of the military to join. “Go with the Marines,” he had

advised him with a wink. “They have the best uniforms.”

At the graveside ceremony I met acquaintances I’d known and not seen in years,

boys who had ‘joined up’ out of high school and were now grown men. They wore dark

suits and had shaved so severely the skin where their sideburns might have been shined.

We all shook hands and briefly talked of old times, though I detected between them a

bond that excluded anyone who had not served. And that experience excluded me.

A small canopy covered the open grave and the metal apparatus that would lower

the casket. Everyone crowded close to hear the priest say his few final words reminding

us that we should feel not sorrow but joy, knowing the body and spirit of the departed

was now tendered to the incomprehensible mercy and grace of our beneficent Lord

Savior, amen. And then came the twenty-one gun salute, the initial salvo making most

everyone jump, but a little less each succeeding time until there was finally only silence

and, far off, the bugle blowing taps. Only when the ceremony was over did it all become

suddenly real for me, seeing the tears in the eyes of John’s two youngest nieces as they

turned away and started back for the cars.

As I walked up the street from my parents’ to attend the after-interment gathering

of family and friends at the house on the hill, I felt the new dress shoes too tight on my

feet and a tie wrapped too snug at my neck as I remembered fondly the carefree days of

barefooted, bare-chested freedom, and afternoons spent with a friend squishing soft road

bubbles with our fingers and toes, entertaining no concern beyond cleaning the tar off

before supper.

I met a young woman at the post-funeral party—a young woman who, when she

learned of my early association with John, smiled warmly and said, “I bet you have some

stories to tell.” Later, when we’d both had a few beers, she accompanied me into the trees

behind the house. We sat down together on a log and I recounted the time my brother and

Flip started the woods around us on fire and how my mom knew when he came running

through the back door as the siren began to sound, that both events were integrally linked.

My mother said she had never before or since seen anyone as white as my brother that

day. The young woman smiled at my story, though it wasn’t, perhaps, what she had

anticipated. Neither of us said anything more until, seeing my gaze drift towards her

breasts, she asked if I wanted to touch them. And then without waiting for an answer, she

slipped the straps of her dress off her shoulders.

Just the other day, I stopped by my parents’ and noticed our old tree house was

gone. It had been there up until only a few days before and I can’t help but wonder at the

strange conjunction of events, and the possibility of intercession. How else to explain the

disappearance of those rotting boards, just now, after all these years?

And so I think it’s strange how things sometimes happen, how circumstances

transpire, how events unfold—how one moment life can appear as it always has been,

and the next be all changed. This evening before dark I got a call from my brother Jeff.

The conversation started innocuously enough with, “Hi. How are you? What’s up?” and

devolved into a revelation that Lois Wilt had just phoned. At first I understood my

brother to mean she still wanted the display case we had discussed my building a year

ago—a conversation which I, to my sudden embarrassment, had completely forgotten.

But that wasn’t the reason for the phone call at all, as I discovered after a slight pause as

my brother cleared his throat. “She said Duane Newhouse is in a coma. They don’t know

what the problem is, exactly. Some kind of virus, maybe, but it doesn’t look good.” And

so I learn about another friend from my past.

It is almost too much. It’s not pathos, though one surely feels a tragic sense of

things at such times. Rather, it’s more a strangely felt affirmation I feel as I hang up the

phone. I go outside and consider: Here I am, in the middle of writing about another lost

friend, trying to find an ending when this ending comes, supplied courtesy of… another’s

ill luck? Suddenly I feel chastened, embarrassed. I go outside and stand in the driveway

looking east across the valley to the opposite ridge, and know in that instant of intensity

and focus how extremely, extremely lucky I am. I look at the distant trees. I see their

individual shapes and shadows. The sun is down, the world is saying good night, and

yet… here I am, still bathed in light.

I take the dogs up the hill, walking the roadside to the surveyors’ stake delineating

the edge of my neighbor’s property a quarter mile away. Before turning to head back, the

dogs overshoot the mark and then rush about-face to overtake me again. They run ahead,

but I look around me and walk even slower, lingering in the twilight, listening to the birds

singing their bedtime songs.

I stoop to pick up a discarded can at the side of the road and when I straighten

and look down past the rocks to the pond below, I see a lone swallow sweeping across the

reflecting surface amid clouds and sky illuminated by the now distant, mute sunlight.

And then I see another swallow flying in perfect tandem with its corporeal other, veering

close and then away, connecting but not touching, and I know then with a transcendent,

calm certainty that I am looking at heaven.

***

If Superman Can, So Can I

Give yourself to love

If love is what you’re after

Open up your heart

To all Life’s tears and laughter

(from a song on the radio)

Naturally enough, as kids influenced by The Adventures of Superman, we wanted

to emulate the Man of Steel by fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. Being

more powerful than a mighty locomotive or faster than a speeding bullet were abilities to

seduce any all-American boy, but being able to leap tall buildings with a single bound—

being able to fly—was the most desirable ability of all. We also understood the

importance of cloaking such powers in secrecy, so when my friend John received a

Superman costume for his eighth birthday and didn’t wear it I suspected he was merely

protecting his identity. Anyone in a similar position would be expected to conform his

behavior to the example of Clark Kent.

I remember being extremely impressed by the opening of one episode depicting

Mole Men climbing from their nether world, ascending at night through the world’s

deepest oil well casing. In a recurring nightmare I saw myself captured, taken

underground, imprisoned forever. Finally, yet not entirely logically, I persuaded myself

that in order to avoid such a fate I must somehow learn how to fly.

A week before Halloween, believing in the magic of words, convinced the right

one would send me soaring, I climbed the trellis at the back of the house and stood

perched on the edge of the garage roof like a fledgling, before calling out Geronimo and

jumping, a stunt (my mother called it) which resulted in my badly spraining my right

ankle. On Halloween night I was left hobbling house to house trick or treating while John

fairly flew about the neighborhood in his newly-revealed costume, cape fluttering

capriciously behind him.

Afterwards, his sister Karen recited by candlelight The Tell-Tale Heart before

sending my younger brother and me home in the dark. A week later, John and his older

brother began a fight in their dining room that ended with both of them going together

through the big picture window, landing unhurt on the front porch. That same fall, my

brother put his left hand through a broken window and a shard of glass fell, slicing

between the tendons of his wrist.

I never knew until later that cutting between the tendons and not across them is

the proper way to commit suicide. I only knew at the time that my brother had nearly bled

to death while I watched. Although these events triggered in me a first intimation of

mortality, I couldn’t imagine actually dying. And despite failing to discover the secret of

flying, I still climbed without fear to the tops of the spruce trees next to our house. But

then one day my brother fell from our tree house and landed upside down on a low

branch, breaking the same wrist he had cut the year before and I thought of Icarus.

I thought of Pandora as well after Karen told us of Hope being left in the box. But

what filled my thoughts most that year after the snow melted was baseball, and making

Little League, and improving my fielding. John’s father must have had the same thoughts

because he would come home after work and stand, still dressed in his good clothes,

under the willow in the back yard of that first house just up the street and play catch,

alternately throwing the ball to John and me. He always had a kind of distracted, dreamy

look on his face, as if he wasn’t really paying attention, as if maybe he was remembering

what it was like to be a boy, with nothing more to worry about than whether or not he

would catch a fly ball when it counted.

In theory, a game of baseball can last forever, its duration determined not by the

passage of time but by the events it contains. It is like a memory in that regard, or life

itself, which will endure as long as conditions allow.

My life memory is still in the early innings. John’s mom brings us out a round

glass pitcher of red Kool-Aid with a smiley face on the side. She places it, tinkling with

ice, on a table in the shade of the willow tree where droplets of condensation form and

slide down the outside.

“That’s cool,” says John, wiping the fogged glass with a finger and pressing it

against my forearm for me to feel. Later, he says the same thing again as we dig,

releasing a stream of loose sand from the bank where the driveway concludes at the back

of the yard. I have a momentary vision of the entire woods collapsing above us.

“So cool I think I’m going to shiver.” My brother laughs at his own joke. Putting

both arms flat to his sides, he begins to quake as if freezing. He repeats the same gesture

after John goes in for lunch, when Mrs. Barney calls to us from her front porch across the

side yard where we have gone to play in the little creek coming out of the woods.

“You boys get away from that sewer pipe,” she calls, flailing an arm. “Go on

now, or I’ll tell Mister Bumbledumbledum!”

For a second we stand in awe, for heretofore Mister Bumbledumbledum was our

secret bogeyman. As far as we knew, he inhabited only our own private world. The

possibility he might be a real presence left us momentarily stunned and slightly giddy.

Eventually I realized she must have overheard us taunting one another as we

passed between her house and the narrow clapboard garage with the tip-up door barely

wide enough to admit the robin’s-egg blue and white 1957 Bel Air coupe, whose rotting

hooded headlamp Mrs. Barney asked me a decade later to patch with sheet metal and

Bondo, so it could pass inspection one more time.

The philosopher Heraclites tells us we can’t enter the same stream twice. And yet

what is memory for, except to do exactly that? But death always wins in the end, and

time’s relentless flow pushes us forward until eventually we pass over, perhaps to drink

from the waters of Lethe and forget we ever lived—if the ancients are to be believed.

Persephone, consigned at the end of each year to the underworld, reappears in

spring accompanied by birdsong, damp earth, and flowers. Hers is perhaps my favorite

story, encompassing the myth of rebirth and renewal. I envision her emerging in a

flowing white robe and long wavy blonde hair. Her Botticelli grace and quiet demeanor

win me over even now. Having read all about her as a boy, I imagined if ever we met it

would be love at first sight, forever.

By comparison, John’s oldest sibling, Candy, had short black hair and an

outgoing manner. Though rarely appearing in actuality, in my memory she appears in a

white puffy blouse and black breeches that conform tapering to each leg, ending in little

side slits below the knees. Her calves and ankles, left bare, seem no more interesting than

her feet, until she walks to a waiting Mustang on pink sneakers or pointy black shoes.

When she left home for good, she left also the horse in the little barn her father

built after buying the house on Crandall’s Hill, the same house my mother also lived in

for a season as a girl. The attic is well lit by opposing gable windows, from one of which,

my mother once attempted to climb on a knotted succession of men’s neckties, until her

sister Althea grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back in. I stand at the base of the hill

now and wonder at the childlike impulse to step out at such a height. It seems as much a

matter of faith as innocence, such as only a child could possess. I shake my head now at

this foolish impulse to try and test the insubstantial air.

For a short season we stepped substantially into that house and out again, going

about the environs, following trails that ran alongside ravines in the near woods; we

explored and played, fought and made up. One day, I sat in a trap set imperceptibly at the

mouth of a foxhole. Another day, my brother and John’s younger brother started a fire

that threatened those same woods. Running home through the back yard, he passed our

mother who said his complexion had turned white as the sheet she was hanging at the

moment the siren began to wail, announcing his offense to the entire world.

Guilty by relation, temporarily banished from the woods, John and I set out for

the opposite direction, descending the road going steep and straight down the far side of

the hill, crossing to the abandoned kiln and tile factory warehouse set back on a bluff

overlooking the very edge of the village and a long cornfield.

“If Superman can,” said John, “so can I.” He stood silhouetted by daylight in an

upper opening of the warehouse, looking down at a pile of sand twenty feet below. I

stood behind him, aware of the sudden influx of photons exposing the long-darkened

beams and wood chutes around us. A powdery hint of chalk or lime dust lifted lightly off

the plank floor, mixing old odors with the incoming fresh air. I had my doubts, but

couldn’t directly state them.

“Superman’s dead. Haven’t you heard?”

In that briefly careless moment, I replaced reverence with cynical judgment,

transforming the death of George Reeves’ from tragedy to farce. John laughed quietly in

appreciation as he waited, standing poised to do what we both knew he eventually would.

Looking back over his shoulder to give one last instruction before leaping, he said: “Just

remember I like red roses. If you love me, put a dozen on my grave.”

The words became the mantra of our summer. Whether playing among abandoned

tiles or standing poised on the foundation remains of a destroyed lumberyard down the

street, they preceded every daredevil challenge we attempted. Before crossing over the

narrow cinderblock wall between a concrete depth on one side and the precipitous drop to

a disused canal and railroad bed on the other, in turn we contemplated destruction while

beseeching fond remembrance with flowers.

Eventually though, as boys of a certain age will, we ended up fighting, clenching

on the grass while our bodies exuded the evanescent odor of play. One winter day John

ordered me off his hill forever, but not until challenging me first to see which of us could

sled closest to the big maple tree at the bottom of the steep slope below the his house.

Leaning away, lifting a runner at the last possible moment, I tried to skim lightly

the tree trunk in passing. But I misjudged and was saved from the full force of the impact

when a boot caught on the rear edge of my Flyer. If not for that intervention I might have

predeceased John, who died during last century’s last summer from an inexplicable brain

trauma, after languishing in a coma for years.

A preacher on the radio said we shouldn’t come to God’s table just to pick and

choose what we want, but to fully participate in the feast that is offered. I guess that is

right, although I’m not quite sure what it means. I’ve always thought God wants us to

have the desires of our heart. On the other hand, we don’t always know what we want or

what’s best.

Macduff succumbed in the spring of the same year John died. Towards the last,

mostly blind, he aimlessly walked the shop floor, the steady click of toenails on wood

attesting to his searching unease.

He dropped through a hole in the shop floor, surprising us both, and lay

momentarily stunned on a pile of sawdust and straw in the milking parlor below. When a

month later I found him lying in a paroxysm of affliction under the blooming lilac behind

my parents’ garage, we knew it was time to let him go.

The lady vet instructed me to hold him still, one more time. As Duff stood

uneasily on the stainless steel cabinet I rubbed his ears and spoke soft reassuring words

while she pinched a fold at the back of his neck, injecting a clear liquid sedative. He

breathed easily, comforted, and sat down, not suspecting a thing even as the second

syringe of pink solution put him down.

I buried him on the farm that was still largely a mystery to him, laying him down

in a black plastic bag next to a stump between two remaining flowering cherry trees

where daffodils now bloom. Every year the flowers remind me he is there. Eventually

they reminded me I had one more thing left to do.

After the interment, I met and talked with the honor guard, every one of them

boys known to John and myself growing up. I thought how strange we should all now be

grown and gathered together again for such an occasion. Later as I walked up the street

that had linked our early lives, I thought of John. It was a warm summer day; the bubbles

rising up from the pavement reminded me of all the times we spent popping them with

our bare toes and thumbs, returning home to clean up in the backroom porcelain sink with

soap made from the pumice of dead volcanoes, after first liquefying the tar with now

extinct Getzol.

Memories cascading, I recalled John selecting from the golden apples of our

youth, a basket of which seemed always there for the taking, set before the raised

bluestone hearth of the fireplace in that same backroom. As I walked past the small house

with the large porch window through which he and his older brother had long ago

crashed, I marveled again at such reckless ardor and such seeming invulnerability.

Crossing through the cool of the stream descending from the woods, I remembered

kneeling and imbibing of the restorative fountain shooting out of the earth from a water

main break. Yearning for those innocent days before innocence ended with banishment

from the hill I once more ascended, I turned up the long driveway lined by late model

cars and trucks to reach the high house where, separated by eras, both my mother and

childhood friend had once lived. An overflow of vehicles continued down the road as it

curved towards the long descent on the other side of the hill, at the bottom of which,

across a passing side street, a narrow piece of level ground once held a tile factory

accessible now only through memory.

Going up the side porch, entering the house I had not been inside for an eternal

and infinitesimal interim, I felt submerged in a stream containing both the past and the

present. People I had known well seemed now only vaguely familiar, as were the interior

details of a home I had not visited in thirty years. Yet some part of people and things

remained precisely as before. Encased parchment replicas of the Constitution, the Bill of

Rights, and the Declaration of Independence formed a patriotic triad on a wall of the front

room, just as I remembered. Going back to the kitchen, I filled a plate with chicken and

potato salad and chips and went outside to stand beside an in-ground pool teeming with

splashing, screeching children. Recalling the burned hen house that once stood on the

other side, I began to contemplate the implications of myth until one of John’s female

cousins, learning I was his childhood friend, came to me with a beer and asked for a story

of remembrance.

She wore a white summer dress that nicely complemented her light tan. Her hair

—luxuriantly wavy, strawberry blonde—danced on her bare shoulders. When I told her

the story about sitting in the fox trap, she wanted to go see where it happened, so we left

the pool and went for a walk in search of a still extant hole in the ground. When we

stopped in the woods and she told me her name, I said Persephone instead Stephanie. She

parted her lips in a knowing demure smile, revealing teeth as white as her dress.

That night before falling asleep, I remembered standing behind the complex of

tanks, pipes, scaffolds and ladders comprising the bulk of John’s father’s business while

my father, as president of the sewer, helped another man lift a concrete lid, revealing

buried putrid liquid underneath. While they discussed what to do next, I looked with

uncomfortable interest at a spent condom floating on the gray greasy surface, wondering

who on our street was having sex.

Much later I remembered watching Macduff running and barking at a hot air

balloon as it roared and billowed sideways on the ground. It filled and began rising from

the village park. Children ran about as well, screeching with delight as their parents and

unrelated adults watched it ascend from a more discrete distance. As the tenders let go

their ropes a truck pulled up at the fenced edge of the lot and a man got out and ran across

the green outfield calling out to his older brother the inexplicable news that John had

lapsed into a deep, mindless sleep.

He remains asleep beneath my feet as I tend to a task for too long neglected.

There are, at last, a dozen long-stem red roses lying at the base of the gray stone marker

inscribed with his name and the term of his existence. It seems there has to be more, and

so I recall our final encounter. As I prepped my Sprite’s dashboard for paint, he came

across the road to advise me that a thin smear of Vaseline on the gauges would make it

unnecessary to tape them. That memory spawns another, of our sitting together alone in

his house one youthful afternoon watching the arrival of subterranean-dwelling Mole

Men. Curiously daring to believe, I get on my knees and place an ear to the ground,

listening for some perceptible indication of a viable, survivable world below.

Mixing myth and desire, I become for the moment Orpheus preparing to invoke

the promise of Persephone. But words fail me and I realize there is nothing to hear or say,

nothing to do in the end but to laugh and cry at such folly.

***

Between This Earth and Sky

They are gone.

It is just coming on dark as I stand in the driveway, looking north, my gaze

crossing the gap where the road passes, looking for some sign they might still be here.

The unfinished barn, half open to my side, is empty, as are the fields divided into

segments of paddock and pasture enclosed by thin wire fencing flagged with white

streamers hanging limp in the air. There is no movement, no sound, not even a light on in

the house. And then I recall from yesterday the long, enclosed livestock trailer backed up

to the end of the drive. Suddenly, though I knew then what that trailer presaged, the

world seems far too quiet and still.

I will remember five year old Shelby forever, her hair shining gold in the bright

sun, sitting on the swing and laughing while the dogs played a rough version of tag,

circling and barking at her feet.

I will remember the peacocks, screeching what seemed their death knells into the

abyss of approaching night. I will remember the burro, bellowing unpredictably

whenever she came into heat. I will remember the sheep, which later turned out really to

be goats, grazing placidly against the slowly intensifying green backdrop of spring.

I will remember the horses, especially. The miniature ones in their heyday

numbering perhaps a dozen, and the large ones, fewer but faster, galloping in abandon,

revelling in the apotheosis of dance as they happily moved over the ridge which was, all

too briefly, their playground and stage between this earth and sky.

I will remember the single black angus bull, still too young to be a danger,

standing on the pile of gravel opposite my spring, his gaze bridging the gulf between us,

meeting mine.

And I will remember my very first visitors, the two black dogs who came over

after dark that first night, not knowing I was here, and being startled to find me.

Oh God, I will remember all of that, all of them, for as long as I'm here.

***

A Thousand Words

Somewhere I have a photo showing two brothers entwined and wrestling in the

grass. The boys’ names—Micah and Malachi—suit the black and white rendering of their

play, enhancing a perception of old-fashioned innocence.

The parents were strange people—an assessment largely derived from my

youngest brother, Paul, who was obliged back then to attend Sunday morning church

with the biblical twins. Their mother was a small and dark minor figure passing in my

memory either quickly on foot or driving an old blue Caprice. I met her but once, going

to the back door with news that her youngest son, a different boy, had taken and forged

some of my personal checks. When I suggested that her vapid stare signaled some gross

incomprehension, my brother countered she was likely only thinking: Which closet do I

lock him in this time?

I never met the father, but when he patched a neighbor lady’s roof by applying

tar-soaked strips cut from a burlap bag, she freely credited him with being clever. Later,

one of the boys provided another perspective when the subject of poker came up. “Dad

plays after work sometimes,” he proudly volunteered, “and if he gets behind, he’ll pray:

Lord, don’t let me lose. Help me win back the children’s milk money.” The boy finished

with an exaggerated laugh, seeming eager to portray his father as both secular and funny.

These were the Rowe’s and they lived in an old frame schoolhouse at the far end

of the street intersecting the street directly opposite where I grew up. Back when the

district consolidated, a new yellow-brick building was built facing the other across a

grass playground which afterwards doubled, since by then the old school had nearly

none, as a kind of communal front lawn. I remember a steel fire ladder bolted to the front

clapboards terminating alongside an upstairs window, remaining the only obvious clue to

what the old house had once been. While growing up, that ladder fueled my imagination.

How thrilling I thought it would be to climb down from that window and escape after

dark!

Before the Rowe’s another clan lived there, of which I remember only the oldest

boy, Bugs, and his littlest sister, Dawn. Bugs played on the high school soccer team and

seemed irremediably rough and dangerous. Dawn was much more my speed. And yet,

sporting long yellow-red hair and a perpetually up-turned nose, she appeared to me also

inherently exotic and unapproachable. But one day I did approach as she came up from

downtown sucking a Tootsie Roll Pop pulled through a corner hole in the plastic bag

holding the rest of the suckers. I asked what color she liked and she plucked the white

paper stick from her lips to show a thin shell of translucent red enclosing a chocolate

core. Keeping her lips pursed, holding the sucker’s head an inch from her nose, she asked

what color I liked. When I replied, “Green,” she lifted her nose some more, turning, and

said for being a smarty I could go without.

I went over to their house only once, not to see her, but to check out and admire

the huge slingshot created from nature in the back yard. Bugs had lopped off a small tree

just above the place the trunk bifurcated into a V, adding two strips of inner tubing

connected by a piece of scrounged-up cow leather. But its placement, perched at the

trailing edge of the backyard where the terrain dropped precipitously away, provided the

essential feature. Any of us, even Dawn, might shoot a stone far enough to reach the

creek below.

The cultural critic Susan Sontag once wrote that photographs cannot of

themselves explain anything, although they are inexhaustible invitations to speculation

and fantasy. They are also, obviously, aids to remembrance, though in that capacity they

may eventually—maybe must inevitably—fail. I can’t now tell if the boy I once

befriended—the boy who confided to me about his father’s playing poker for money,

who in embarrassment and disgust brought back the checks his youngest brother (perhaps

only pretending he might cash them) filled in and signed with my name, who eventually

would not even acknowledge me as we passed on opposite sides of the street—I cannot

tell if that boy is one of the two wrestling in my picture. The image won’t tell me, and I

can’t quite figure it out. A decade elapsed between the making of the photo and the

family’s disintegration, another decade and a half from then until now, and not enough—

or too much—information exists for me to make sense of it all. The time of the Minor

Prophets had passed, and the last I knew only a Jack and a Mike and a little David

remained, before disappearing completely.

A picture may be worth a thousand words but it captures only a bit of place in a

mere bit of time, and becomes at its making an artifact imbued with both moment and

mystery. Perhaps it is at once any photograph’s strength and weakness that it requires the

viewer to remember: What is it, where was it, who are they? And withheld certain

knowledge, we are left to ponder. The pair wrestling in the grass are not the same two

boys who paraded a week later in sheets and high pointed hats, causing speculation and

some apprehension as to just what they were up to. Were they imitating the Pontiff, or the

Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan? I don’t know that any picture would help to

determine exactly who they were then.

The old schoolhouse and playground at the end of the street are gone now. I have

thought about going to where the slingshot once stood and taking a picture. But the best I

could do is look away and imagine everything behind me still as it was, and existing.

That which has disappeared, there is no possibility of capturing.

***

A Last Hunt

George turned off of the pavement and felt the change instantly, transmitting up

from the tires through all the complex workings of the truck to his fingers. The steering

wheel danced lightly beneath his grip as he glanced towards the dog, standing now with

his head out, panting into the airstream passing the open window. The long tail flailed

emphatically against the back of the seat between them, signaling, it seemed clear, an

eager awareness of what lay ahead. George had no difficulty believing the dog knew they

were approaching the camp; of all the dogs he had known, Macintosh rated as possibly

the most perceptive. Maybe he wasn’t the smartest—that distinction belonged to Sully,

the blue-eyed border collie, twenty years gone, who George would still swear on a stack

of Bibles to’ve been a whole lot smarter than some people he’d met—but if Mac wasn’t

the smartest dog ever, he sure made up for it in sensitivity and awareness. George had no

trouble believing Mac to be fully cognizant of where they were going, even if—

thankfully—he only could conceive of but half the reason why.

The truck turned again off the dirt road onto an even narrower, one lane drive that

led through a bower of fir trees; again the steering wheel moved on its own beneath

George’s fingers, only now the motions were slower and more languid, the quick

vibrating staccato of stones on hard scrabble or macadam replaced by the gentle

persuasion of parallel lines worn into the soft earth, like a memory. Occasionally, a bare

root jarred the smooth passage, or an extending limb scratched at the sides or top. But for

the most part the truck slid along easily under the soft caresses of the fir limbs that rose as

if on a breeze over the windshield and then, as the truck passed, lowered again just as

easily.

The cabin stood in a clearing, barely an acre in all, but so open with daylight it

seemed expansive. George parked the truck and got out, followed by Mac who waited

and then bound for the earth through the same door. George carried a box full of cans and

boxed foods from the back of the truck to the cabin. Mac wagged his tail, accompanying.

Inside, the cabin smelled stuffy. At the same time the air felt cool relative to the mid-

September afternoon outdoors. Opening the windows and doors, George shooed a wasp

from what remained of last year’s tinder and then built a fire in the potbelly stove for

later. He put the new food away in the cupboards and wiped down the counters, which

were not only uniformly dusty but littered there and about with mouse droppings. Finally,

closing up the cabin, he took an indoor fogger from the kitchen sink cupboard and set it

off to kill or dissuade whatever vermin might be lurking unseen between the floorboards

and rafters.

For the next hour as the fogger did its work and the sun began its long descent

into the western horizon, George and Mac took a long circuitous walk out to Menlo Falls,

going first up the front of Rubicon Ridge and then down the back, finding and following

Willow Spring through fiery deciduous woods to the place where the water pooled

beneath the sudden shale outcropping over which it tumbled and fell. Here dog and

master rested, while playing fetch, the one throwing a stick for the other to swim to and

recover, again and again. Thus they occupied themselves until dusk. And then in twilight,

towards dark, they made their way back to the cabin.

Warmth from a new fire radiated off the stove, filling the cabin. George sat

forward, resting his feet on the little cast iron door he’d earlier swung open, both to

empty the ash pan and increase the draft. Now with the toes of his right foot he nudged

nearly closed the little sliding door that more precisely controlled the draft. The wood

inside the stove continued to crackle and pop and, he knew, shoot off a shower of sparks

into the dark starry sky overhead.

Knowing that was almost enough to make him get up, put on his boots, and go

outside to watch. And yet he did not really fear starting a chimney fire, because anyone

using the stove would know to let the fire burn hot and wide open at the start to burn off

the creosote previously accumulated. At least, that was the theory. And, in the past, it had

always worked. Now as he listened to the roar of the fire continue up the flue pipe, he

wondered if possibly this time he might have made a mistake. But gradually the roaring

lessened and he leaned back and relaxed. Macintosh, exhausted from fetching the stick,

lay sideways on the floor, moving his feet as if still swimming in a dream.

In a pleasant sleep of his own, George dreamed of raking leaves while children

played at his back in the long yard under the low hanging branches of bare trees.

Occasionally, he would lift a small accumulation gathered on the springy tines of his rake

and send them airborne over the heads of the children, who would run and squeal through

them as they floated once more down to earth. But for the most part the children

contented themselves with jumping into one or the other of the large piles growing ever

larger in the yard.

And then for some reason, the excitable dog not only chased but bit one of the

children, opening a reddening wound, splattering blood on the leaves. Immediately, as if

fully cognizant of having done something wrong, Macintosh went and hid in the farthest

leaf piles, digging down into it until disappearing from view.

George understood the dream as a kind of allegory, containing meaning. Before

becoming fully awake, even half-consciously, he realized the images in his dream, at

least anyway the part about the leaves, were no doubt influenced by the previous day’s

walk through the north-country woods. The incident had actually occurred a hundred

miles south of where they were now, where the trees were only just beginning to hint of

the changes ahead.

He got up, washed his face using the hand-pump at the side of the kitchen sink to

draw water from the backyard cistern, and then dressed. As always, Mac waited patiently,

standing beside him while swishing his tail or lying down, his eyes and ears alert to the

first suggestive movement of a diversion or long walk.

George put off the walk as long as possible. In the morning he tidied around the

cabin, inside and out, as the stew he’d started the night before simmered slowly on the

stove. In the afternoon, he took the chain saw from the truck and went with Mac into the

woods to a place where the sunlight filtered through a high canopy of yellow leaves. For

two or three hours he cut fresh ash chunks, splitting them into quarters which he stacked

in little chimney-like piles to dry. By deer hunting time they would be ready to burn, and

just the thought of that future, with his brothers gathered here, gave him a strangely

mixed sensation of longing and dread.

He felt tears run down his cheeks as he stepped off the back porch. The gun in his

hand felt someway foreign and excessively heavy. The dog ran ahead and then stopped,

looking back, entirely expectant yet blissfully unaware of the afternoon’s offering.

George stopped where the woods met an old clearing. In the interval stood a large

cairn of round fieldstones gathered for some purpose lost to understanding, but perfectly

suited for his purpose nonetheless. Taking a folding shovel from his backpack, George

dug on his knees a narrow trench alongside the stones, releasing the coffee-can odor of

fresh earth while digging down through a layer of leaves into the underlying decayed

phloem and soft dirt. When Mac came and lay beside him, he stopped and sat back

against the rocks. He held the gun at his knees as if they were only once more sitting in

wait. A squirrel ran across the branches overhead and Mac sat up in expectation, waiting

for the shot that never came. It was all George could do to keep from crying audibly now;

he placed a hand on Mac’s back, feeling vertebrae beneath the fine auburn hair, and

whispered: I’m sorry.

When he took the plastic bag that contained the cooked hambone from his pack

and unzipped it, Mac lay down in the cool trench as though it had been made for the

purpose; holding the bone with his forepaws, he began happily gnawing away at one

bulbous end. George raised the rifle to the back of the dog’s head and—before he could

persuade himself not to—quickly pulled the trigger.

A little blood, the color nearly too close a match to be noticed, splattered onto the

adjacent leaves.

***

The Long Way

Nearly a mile past the Roger Mills Bridge it occurred to him he was going the

wrong way. Rather than turning left onto the dirt Pond Road going level alongside the

stream, he’d turned right and kept to the paved road, climbing away from the deep green

water in the gorge below the high falls he had only too briefly glimpsed crossing over.

But once over, perhaps drawn that way by the possibility he might one day again park at

the old RG&E access and descend the long grassy path to the water, he’d glanced first to

the old Mills House before taking a quick look sharply left, catching a brief peripheral

blur of red he knew without entirely seeing to be the Beardsley Place sitting to the rear

and well back.

As he moved his head a little that way, he remembered Betty Mills recounting a

story from her girlhood about old Daddy Rood standing astride the water sluice that

powered the ancient mills. But he wondered now if she were mistaken. It seemed more

likely she remembered her father’s recollection as her own, and that passing thought

combined with the fleeting sight of five paired pairs of jeans strung leg-up and stiffly

splayed on parallel lines along the low side of what he mistakenly took to be the old

schoolhouse drew his eyes back until he turned them fully on the next house, beyond the

borderline of the old Mills place and double line of hung laundry. He glanced from the

ground to the sunrise windows looking for an old school-bell hanging tarnished and

attached at a doorframe or standing alone, or contained within a slatted belfry, at the

highest peak. While his gaze moved ever upwards, the car climbed steadily as well,

advancing towards a low wall of neatly laid stone bordering the high side of the next

house, which he rejected as being too sleekly built and well-kept to be the building he

sought. He discovered the mistake one Sunday when he rode his bike to the back door of

the gray-shingled house; before he could knock a pleasant young woman waved through

a window and emerged, first smiling at the question, then gently shaking her head.

He of course knew none of that now, though he would dream of it later. And as in

a dream he forgot each house in turn as he looked to the next; the passing world played

on his windshield like an ever-changing yet still familiar movie. Briefly he considered yet

another, last house, on the hill before this stretch of road, affixed with the Armison name

since before the Civil War, finally rounded and leveled, still curving, as it transitioned

from the nearly defunct community of Mills Mills into high open country.

Beyond that small cluster of dwellings, the land broadened into hayfields. A few

houses yet dotted the landscape, here and there, next among them a white cinderblock

house with a charcoal steel roof that stood off the road to the left a half mile farther up;

up the road a further half mile to the right stood another, seemingly abandoned, house

from which the prevailing westerly wind had worked under the white vinyl siding and

torn if off in wide jagged swaths to reveal the unpainted, dry-rotted clapboards

underneath. But here, on the opposite side of the road, the long view of a last house

standing in Gothic seclusion at the back of a field reminded him of the backdrop to

Christina’s World; in turn he experienced again a brief sense of empathy with the young

woman the painting depicted, remembering how precariously vulnerable he’d felt

sideling along a pitched roof the previous November. Supporting himself with one hand,

clearing leaf clutter from the eaves trough with the clawing fingers of the other, seemed

to him essentially the same pose, if not predicament, presented by Andrew Wyeth in that

troubling picture.

He settled back in the seat, remembering a particularly steep and difficult section

of creek hidden just behind the evocative scene. Blissfully, he’d negotiated the rocky

cascade until halfway down, looking up to see the back view of the house perched at the

edge of a high bank, the scene froze him. Until that moment he’d gone about the day’s

fishing unconcernedly, contentedly lost in his own world, orienting himself only in

relation to the creek flow and stones underneath below him. But encountering a

touchstone to the wider world introduced a vague note of anxiety. The creek water

pushed at him suggestively, seemingly more incessantly; he experienced an uneasy sense

of strangeness and disorientation. At that moment he desired nothing so much as to be

removed from this uncomfortable circumstance of his own making. Miraculously

conveyed atop the bank, he would look down on his position safe from the relentlessly

pushing current which threatened at the merest misstep to sweep him down a curving,

seemingly endless, slippery sluice of white water.

No sooner did he imagine the transition from that cascade than his mind reverted

to another, after which he experienced a different kind of longing, desiring to be near and

not far. A pang of remembrance registered itself low in his solar plexus as he recalled

making the turn for the Mills Mills Bridge and seeing the name LAYLA drawn

longitudinally in bold red letters on the far concrete support wall underneath.

He could not help also recall the day he stopped his bike on the bridge intending

only to look over the thin spreading creek beyond the falls to the gorge and the green

water pooled below. It was then he found himself looking upon the private scene of a girl

climbing the falls hand in hand with a young man—neither of whom, so entranced were

they with one another, detected his presence. Continuing to look, he revised his opinion,

and determined she was no mere unformed girl but rather a shapely and quite desirable

young woman.

From Jordan’s elevated position, her contours seemed more revealed than hidden

by the short cut-off jeans and long-tailed shirt which, partially unbuttoned, afforded a

tantalizing glimpse into the descending cleft of her décolletage. Further, he remembered

her demure smile from an all-too-brief encounter one night at a local bar. And so he

waited, with whetted longing, hoping she might look up and smile again, until she

eventually disappeared, perhaps forever, underneath the bridge deck where he stood.

After waiting a moment more in indecision, he rode off unseen, suddenly aware he was

entirely unsure of his destination.

How many years ago would it be now? He told himself a dozen, wondering if the

truth wasn’t closer to half again as many as he imagined. And yet all this time later, he

still entertained the possibility he might, one day, ride to that very same place on the

bridge and look down to find the young woman—a little older, yes, but also still almost

eagerly compliant—once more climbing the falls, this time alone.

He had no idea what her real name might be, but Layla appealed to him as

implicative of innocence and beauty. He drove past a small sign lettered in yellow

marking the location of an otherwise undetectable foot trail cutting cross-country to the

creek, envisioning a scenario in which he and the young woman found themselves

somehow strolling towards the fishing hole carrying a picnic basket between them.

A line of trees backing the fields on either side of the road marked the location of

the creek as it wound first one way on the left side and then turned and wound towards

the old power dam reservoir tucked away in the gorge on the right. He remembered the

first time parking at the trail marker, realizing he could go either way and hit water.

Effortless discovery had seemed nearly a birthright back then and he wondered how it

was, how it had come to be, he seldom found pleasure anymore in such simple moments

of awareness and benign adventure.

He passed a new place, set back on the left, where not so long ago fire had

blackened an old farmhouse; not so long before that, riding by, he had discovered a

young woman sitting in early sunlight on the side porch steps reading a letter. Of course,

he had fantasized about her as well, and even hoped one day to ride by and perhaps have

her wave back towards him in such a way he would understand, despite how she would

inevitably lean skeptically against the porch post at his approach, that she wished to meet

him too. But fire had intervened in his plans and destroyed them, as surely as it had

altered the plans and dreams of the young woman.

At this moment, passing a low swamp sparsely populated with geese and dead

standing timber, Jordan began to wonder where he was going. Or rather, he knew where

he was going but wondered why he had chosen to go this way. Had he turned left at the

bridge and followed the Pond Road to Lapp Road and merged North onto Route 19, he’d

already be at Eileen’s. Perhaps, he thought, subconsciously he needed time to prepare for

the reunion.

For the briefest time, barely more than a week, they had become nearly lovers,

back when her shop stood directly opposite his on Main Street, Meridian. He felt a thrill

of anticipation remembering her fingers’ light touch through his hair as she parted and cut

it. He could still smell the slightly tingling astringent she applied, roughing the cut before

pulling it back in a smoothing, combing action. Eileen suggested something he hadn’t

before considered: that he should wear his hair pulled back, maybe even tied into a small

ponytail. He’d found the idea at that time merely amusing and told her to put it back the

way he’d worn it coming in—pushed forward and parted a quarter off center on the right

side.

And then, because there was no other customer waiting, they had gone and sat out

on the bench and watched the traffic go by; somehow, within minutes, their hands met

and their fingers entangled. But a week later she left on a trip to Dublin and when she

returned something had changed; eventually Jordan went back to cutting his own hair, as

he had done previously since college.

Now, nearly a decade later, he’d heard something about a divorce and wondered

if maybe… But he refused to let his mind leap that far. Instead, he would go for a haircut

and see first if she even remembered him.

He passed by the Scout Camp and then the small house with the sugar shack and

the fenced garden in between from which another young woman, buxom and blonde,

once stood and watched as he pulled over to rearrange a shifting load of lumber in the

bed of his pickup. At the end of the road, he turned left going away from East Koy down

a dip, emerging at the other side to see the first hint of windmills, newly installed, on the

Eagle ridge beyond Pike. The first few mills stood incomplete and unmoving. But the

road as it curved clear of the woods revealed their full number, which seemed weed-like;

as if overnight they’d risen to dominate the horizon. Jordan wasn’t entirely sure he liked

them; but he didn’t entirely dislike them, either. Their slender three-way propellers

reminded him of the white petals of trilliums arrayed in similarly congested profusion on

shady, secluded hillsides. There was something about them at once beautiful and

malignant, fascinating and repugnant, engendering in him a ridiculous and forbidden

impulse to reach out for and pick them; the impulse remained potent until, descending

again towards the creek, he lost sight of the white slender faux petals in the billowing

canopies of newly leafed shade trees.

The road came to an end, making a T where 19 started its last long climb out of

the broad valley. Across the road an old green clapboard building stood sagging, its

center door and line of windows to each side boarded with plywood. Jordan wondered

idly if it weren’t an old tavern and thought it a shame someone hadn’t intervened to stop

its demise. Coasting down the long ending slope of the hill he passed the highway

department garage on the right with an orange dump truck parked beside it. In quick

succession he encountered, still gliding, a large square umber mansion situated well off

the road on the left, as well assorted colonial-style houses, a Congregational Church, and

a small ground-worn park and Masonic Temple flanked by broad shadowing trees that

abruptly gave way to the wide open, unshaded center of town. Suddenly it seemed to

Jordan the pavement, the sidewalks, the closely-confined glut of glass and clapboard and

block stone storefronts seemed to excessively reflect and focus the glaring sun. For a

second or two he thought he might cross the creek and park in the shade by the civil war

canon but before he made up his mind to do so he caught sight of the triple striped

patriotic helix of a barber shop pole. He pulled in front of Eileen’s shop and parked

perpendicular to the street. Seeing the closed sign hung on the door he initially thought he

would wait, believing it meant she had departed for lunch and would soon return and

reopen. For a moment he let the car idle, considering whether to stay or return later

himself. Finally he decided he could go stand on the bridge and look down into the creek

at the trout he knew would be holding in the shade underneath the elevated road surface.

He got out of the car and looked across the street to an old abandoned cut

limestone building. The glass windows were loosely boarded, in some places broken.

Like a shadow cast across the paint-blistered façade, faint black block lettering revealed

the single succinct, now derelict and nearly forgotten, name. Jordan felt his mouth move

involuntarily, forming “Shattuck’s” as he read it, imprinting the scene on his memory in

lieu of a camera. It was impossible to know what the place might look like the next time

he saw it.

He turned and went to the glaring window front of the barber shop and read the

schedule, ascertaining, only after realizing he had come on a Wednesday that he’d picked

the exact wrong day to come. Wednesday had a red line running past it on both sides,

A.M. and P.M. both. “Oh well,” he sighed, turning again to read the faint façade of the

empty stone building across the street for perhaps the last time, “Oh well.”

He got back in the car and went the other way intending to go home, but driving

so slowly in his enjoyment of the scenery that an impatient man in a sky-blue pickup

truck flicked him off as he passed coming into a curve on a double line. “Oh well,”

Jordan sighed again. He looked out across a field newly plowed, if not planted, and

wondered if it was destined for corn or potatoes. Rounding another curve he saw for a

strobe-like moment dead ahead curled porpoises leaping from the grass, perpetually

suspended, painted on the near end of a low barn. The next curve below the arc of Rose

Hill revealed a geometrical array of white tombstones lit whiter on one side by the sun.

As the car entered deeper into the curve, as it rounded the hill, he could see the markers

were not markers at all, were not made of stone, but short lengths of sewer pipe set in the

ground to protect what looked to be newly planted saplings. But only a little way farther,

reversing his course on another curve, he passed an actual cemetery and a scene of real

tombstones, many of which had been tipped one way or the other by frost or human

malfeasance.

Coming off the rounding base of Rose Hill the road straightened and remained

level as it passed the turn off for Stone Spring, the genesis of Cold Creek which for a

time in its early history had leant its name to the village where it ended. Then briefly the

road ascended once more before dropping, precipitously at first then more gradually. For

the next mile Jordan felt himself to be gliding, descending on a mild slope similar the one

he rode in on entering downtown Pike. Approaching the junction for the road that led

across the creek to Centerville, he looked the other way, taking in the old Storms’ place

now painted and spruced up to a high sheen, so unlike the Addams’ Family gothic house

it had once so much resembled. He still remembered the weekend he stayed with his

boyhood friend Alanson, who had just recently died. He had arrived expecting the

interior to be as drably unkempt as the outside, so was taken by surprise to find it

lavishly, ornately and elegantly appointed in high Victorian style. Oh well, he supposed,

smiling. That just went to show you couldn’t judge a house by its cover.

He braked for the tight ess curve where the creek edged close to the road,

decelerating going in but applying the gas coming out. Letting the car coast again, he

caught a glimpse of the founders’ cemetery on the plateau to the left as he entered Hume

and then, braking even more, he decided almost as he was making the turn to bear right

and pass through the time worn, nearly ruined center, and cross the bridge high over the

creek falling away to the left far below. Starting the upslope of Grindstone Hill he felt the

car slow as if by itself anticipating the turn, but the first driveway had fooled him again as

it had often done before and in compensation he touched the accelerator with the ball of

his foot to nudge the car to the next place before turning.

He saw the Hyundai backed up to the far side of the front steps and waved to the

rising shoulder and arm and head of his old friend Caitlyn withdrawing from the open

back hatch as he pulled up and reversed into the little turn proximate to where the gas

tank with the crank hand pump had once stood, antidotal to the founding of OPEC. He

emerged from the car, letting the door slip off his fingers and close as he heard the

familiar chortle, happy and pleased. “Why, Mister Hanson,” the voice said, inviting him

closer. “I thought maybe that was you, driving up in that fancy new car.”

“It’s hardly new,” he protested, aimlessly looking up through parting branches

towards a frank blueness of sky. “It sure beats walking, though.”

“Hey, come here,” she said, descending the lawn to him. “Give me a hug.”

He felt her arms enclose his upper body and felt his enclose hers, squeezing, in

return. “It’s good to see you, you old fart.”

“You too,” he said, releasing. “I was hoping to catch you. I’m just back from the

barber, see?”

He removed his cap and they stood two feet away from one another looking, as if

they were strangers, into each other’s eyes. “I went all the way to Pike to get a haircut,

but I picked the wrong day. So I guess I’ll just have to continue awhile longer being a

hippie.”

“You make a good one, I’d say.”

“Oh yeah, and it’s a heck of a lot easier, especially when it’s windy. All you do is

slick it back.” Laying the tips of four fingers on his forehead, he slid them straight back

to show her. “And you’re all set to go. Speaking of all set to go… It looks like I got here

just in the nick of time.”

“Oh, I’m not actually leaving until tomorrow. But I thought I’d pack and be ready

—for once.”

In simultaneity they regarded the Hyundai, exuding music with all of its windows

and doors open. As they approached closer, Caitlyn bent in through the passenger door

and turned down the volume of the stereo.

“It’s a mix CD that Alison made,” she explained, from inside. Touching the

control panel again, she backed out. “I want you to hear this one song. She sang it at the

funeral.”

“How’s your mother?”

“Oh, she’s doing well enough. But it’s hard, you know. Steve was her last living

sibling. She’s resting, but you can go in and see her. I was going to call you back

yesterday, but we had company and everything was so hectic.”

“That’s all right. That’s why I called. The last thing I want to do is disturb your

mother—or add to the hectic-ness.”

He looked at Caitlyn again and smiled when she did. For the second time he

noticed her face seemed overly puffy and red. “You’ve been in the sun,” he ventured.

“Mowing. Monday morning and most of yesterday afternoon. Maybe I overdid

it?”

“I saw you were at it the day I stopped.”

“When was that?”

“I guess Tuesday?” He recalled the red push mower, parked in the tall grass just

off the driveway where it had ended its swath. Glancing across the yard, he saw the

mower was gone. “The porch light was on, so I figured you wouldn’t be back early.”

“That’s right. We all went to the Glen Iris that evening. Mama had gift certificates

going back three years. We figured it might finally be time to use them.”

The music inside the Hyundai came to an end, replaced by the chiming of the

carillon across town. The sound of the bells, quiet and familiar, dissolved in the air.

“Momma always thinks of Daddy when she hears them,” Caitlyn said. Jordan wanted to

ask what hymn had been playing, for all he could think was, “Our Hope in Ages Past,”

but that wasn’t quite it, either.

“They’re auctioning off the church today,” he said instead, quietly.

Caitlyn looked at him, her eyes alarmed, suddenly tearing.

“No! I thought it was Saturday. Oh gosh. Maybe we should go?”

“I think it’s all over by now. They started at noon, or were supposed to.” He

added nearly mischievously, “Why, did you want to put in a bid?”

“Sure, didn’t you?”

“Half seriously, I considered it. I told Mom I was going to buy it and start my

own church: The Church of the High Holy Rollers. I’d live there tax free and anytime I

needed money I’d simply call together a service and pass the plate.”

“You’re wicked.”

“No. I think the word is cynical.”

“They did have it listed as a single family residence.” Her voice levitated as she

added, “with cathedral ceiling.”

“My understanding is the bell will be removed unless the building remains as a

church. The carillon goes to the Baptists, regardless. But I guess you know that already.”

“I didn’t, but that’s some consolation I guess. Mama will be happy. She’ll still be

able to think of Daddy when it plays.”

“That’s some consolation,” Jordan agreed. He felt again the unspoken meaning.

Bestowed in his friend’s father’s memory, it stood for something they could have only

barely, inadequately, related—had they felt the need to try. “I told Mom as far as I was

concerned the whole thing amounted to one big fat clusterfuck, and if anybody asked me

I was going to say exactly that. What ever happened to the idea of selling the other

church? Of the two, that was the weaker. But suddenly it became this church that had to

be gotten rid of, the quicker the better. At one point they were talking about giving it to

the Short Tract Theatre Group for a dollar. I told Mom if that’s the case why not give it to

the Mennonites instead? At least they would keep the way it was intended. This Bill Blair

guy…” Jordan let the sentence go unfinished, suddenly inarticulate to express his level of

rage and condemnation.

“I know. He met Mama after morning service Sunday before last, all eager to tell

what he knew.”

“Mom told me he stood in the congregation when Pastor Pam, or whatever her

name is, relayed that a group was interested in buying the church to keep as a church. He

challenged her, assuming, I guess, an implied affront to his authority. ‘It isn’t the

Mennonites,’ he said, ‘if that’s who you mean. They already decided they weren’t going

to buy it.’ Well no, not for eighty thousand dollars. But hell, I’d bet they’d be willing to

pay a dollar, and likely the congregation would’ve let it go at that to keep the church as a

church.”

“We’re on the same page, then. I can’t hear the name Bill Blair and not get

angry.”

“I’m more than angry. I don’t know who he is, but I tell you if I did I might just

flatten him to watch him fall. I told Mom he sounds like Burdo Turdo, only half as bright

and twice as destructive.”

Jordan reveled in (and supposed Caitlyn as well secretly thrilled to) the coarse

bastardization of Burdette Wheeler’s given name, for it spoke to what he knew they both

basely felt: a jumbled desire to laugh, cry, lash out and swear. General politeness required

saying Burdette to the man’s face, yet exceptions could be made, not to mention

occasional mistakes. Some people, Jordan among them, still fondly remembered the

Sunday morning a new minister innocently called Burdette “Burd” in full church, which

mildly jangled upon the ears of the devote assembled and evoked an anticipatory hush, as

well a few nervous titters.

They remained quiet a moment, listening to the soft rustle of leaves in the absence

of the carillon’s chiming. Jordan remembered then too, feeling a surge of pride and

satisfaction, how, defying the pastor’s directive (to keep the event from “appearing

funereal”) his mother had nonetheless instructed his father to toll the church bell after the

last service when everyone else had gone in a walking procession led by a lantern

symbolically conveying the essence and spiritual flame from the now defunct church to

the still living other.

Jordan’s mother related later the exchange which, to her, confirmed the rightness,

if not pure righteousness, of the decision. While she waited for his father to lock the

church doors for the final time behind them, an old couple sitting on a porch across the

street called out softly in unison the meaning of not precisely matched words: Thank you,

for surely we’ll never hear that bell again; we will hold precious the last memory of its

ringing. Deciding to keep his own memory held private, Jordan sucked the inside of one

cheek as he cast his eyes down the long sloping descent of the front yard.

“The lawn looks nice,” he said softly, almost sotto voce.

Replying inordinately loudly in both word and action, Caitlyn pulled at the sides

of her pants, telling him “Thank you!” while performing a truncated curtsy. Then she

dropped the hatch door at the back of the Hyundai and moved towards the front. “Let me

show you where I nearly got mired in muck. There is, apparently, a spring in the spring.”

“Separate from the one in back?”

“Yep, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.”

She closed the passenger door and started down the driveway. As they entered the

sloping front yard, Jordan noticed a line of peonies marking where the house had stood

forty years earlier before being moved back when the state built the new bridge, altering

the approach. Jordan remarked how nice the dandelions looked against the new grass and

remembered a pooled profusion of yellow in a green field on the way down from Pike.

“If dandelions were rarer,” Caitlyn posited, “they’d be considered exotics and be

protected and cultivated. Instead they’re considered a nuisance. Go figure.”

“I figure that’s probably right—supply and demand, and all that.”

“Hey then, bright boy, answer me this.” Caitlyn pointed to one that had headed.

“Do these just pop out of the ground like this, or what?”

“Well, not exactly,” Jordan said, squatting to touch the soft white seed head.

“What happens is the petals close up at night and then one day reopen like this. I don’t

know by what process.”

“Let’s say magic, then.”

“Sure,” Jordan agreed, standing, “why not?”

“You always were so smart. Mama says she never talks with you but she learns

something new.”

He tried to aver, saying her mama was only being nice. Looking up through the

pink underside of the flowering crabapple, he found he had reassumed a pose from the

day before. The soft reddish light played on his face and he closed his eyes, listening to

the breeze as he tried to recall the exact sound of the Baltimore oriole.

“It was something like this,” he said, opening his eyes, looking down. He whistled

low and then higher. “No, it was lower.” And he tried again, allowing his shoulders to sag

in the attempt to get the proper first tone. “Anyway, it was something like that. Clear,

beautiful. Like church bells.”

“Don’t mention church bells.”

“I know, sorry.” He looked again through the pink flowering crabapple tree and

pushed down the urge to climb and immerse himself in its sun-warm embrace. He heard

his mind suggest: We could perch up there and wait, even as he resisted the impulse to

say so. Instead he chose something more reasonable. “You know what that little bugger

was doing? He was flitting among the branches eating the apple blossoms.” He paused

briefly to allow them both to appreciate the significance. ‘Eating apple blossoms, can you

imagine?”

“I imagine you can. Anyway,” Caitlyn said, her demeanor becoming more serious

as she looked back up into the high flowering canopy, “I’m not exactly sure what this tree

is. I don’t recall it ever producing crabapples.”

“Well there’s one.” He reached up and pulled off a small hardened fruit. “See, it’s

all shriveled and crabbed. Here, my gift to you.”

“No, that’s all right. You can have it.”

“All right, then. I’ll make crabapple tea. I’ll climb up and gather enough for both

of us.” He fully imagined himself now perched on a limb, extending his tongue, tasting

the soft and sweet essence of blossom. He wondered if, once enclosed, a petal would melt

much like a snowflake into the warmth of his mouth, or if, having grown warm in the

sun, it would impart a soft low heat of its own as it dissolved on his tongue. “Maybe I’ll

crawl along the lawn and gather up petals of dandelion for wine instead.”

“Well you do that, mister. Meanwhile I’ll make mayhem on these little creatures.”

Jordan watched in fascination the genesis of destruction as, reaching up over both their

heads, she broke off a twig and twirled the gray web nest containing maturing tent

caterpillars into a tight fibrous wad, and watched again as the caterpillars spilled and

rolled in the dust-like dirt of the driveway; twisting her sneakered foot, Caitlyn crushed

them under rubber clad toes as she continued to speak. “You remember the time they

took over the entire landscape? I recall one time after church we went to the Red Barn.

They were in all the trees, eating them bare. Mama says she’s surprised I even remember,

but I’d be surprised if you don’t. You do, don’t you?”

“I remember a place we used to go and get broasted chicken. There was a big

glass front to the place which wasn’t much inside except an open area and counter where

we’d order. I think we’d go out back behind the place to wait and eat. I don’t remember

much, really.”

“You remember plenty.”

“I remember you saying something about the spring out back.”

“Come then, smart boy, I’ll show you.”

They went around the high side along the rising bank to the back yard. Water lay

deeply pooled in a line of parallel ruts, feathering out into the tall and exceptionally green

grass. Behind the ruts a red Mustang stood wheel-less, its axles propped up on

cinderblocks. Farther back the old DeSoto that Jordan had helped Caitlyn’s father

dissemble nearly thirty years before lay in a jumble from which a shorn and pitted

bumper reached aimlessly for the sky. The old workshop had fallen down in the interim,

and the aqua-green ’63 Chrysler it had half sheltered was no longer to be found.

“It’s a mess,” Caitlyn sighed. “Every spring the spring floods the yard and

basement. But at least the forget-me-nots look nice.”

She raised a hand towards a vague patch of blue that became more distinct as

Jordan focused.

“Yes, they do look nice,” he said. “Mom always liked forget-me-nots.”

“Oh come on now,” Caitlyn laughed. “You make it sound like she’s already dead

and gone.”

“It’s hard for me too,” she continued, looking away, “because he was my favorite

uncle. Not to take anything away from Uncle Alanson but I think because we were so

alike, we clicked. We really did. Not that I could ever paint or anything, but he

understood my artistic side and encouraged it, in the same way he encouraged Alison’s

singing. Anyway,” she smiled again, looking up. “I wrote something for the funeral.

Would you like to see it?”

“Sure.”

She climbed the steps and went inside, returning with a sheath of papers enclosed

in a clear Mylar binder bent back on itself to reveal a single typed page, entitled: The

Artist. Jordan read the account of an artist too poor to afford to buy paint, who sketched

in charcoal black and white, and sometimes, as he wryly observed, white and black. Then

one day he came upon a crimson tulip and so ached for color to make it come alive he

took a shard of glass and pierced his open palm to supply his palette.

“It’s kind of a parable,” Jordan said, closing the binder, handing it back.

“You understand.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I knew you would. I’m not sure too many did at the funeral. I halfway wanted to

explain, but how do you explain it?”

“You can’t. You can’t say, Hey, don’t you see what happened there, with the

blood coloring the tulip? It’s a metaphor for Crise sake. Well, I guess you wouldn’t take

the Lord’s name in vain, least not under those circumstances.”

“You’re funny—wicked, but funny.”

A buzzing sound coming from some distance beyond the hedgerow of trees across

the road drew their attention and they waited, silent a moment together.

“It sounds like a plane.”

“No, I think it’s a helicopter. There was a bad accident just before noon

somewhere down on Claybed. They had to call in Medevac.”

“I heard the siren blow around eleven-thirty in Wiscoy. That must have been it.”

They sat quiet together on the front steps listening to the sound, looking idly

across the road toward the trees. Jordan couldn’t help but reflect how empty and

unsullied that side of the road seemed absent Georgina’s single wide trailer and the old

shooting range, long toppled, dissolving in the weeds. As if anticipating his thoughts,

Caitlyn raised a hand and pointed a little higher up the hill along that general direction.

“I see a little gray barn,” she began, playing their old childhood game.

“I see what looks to be Georgina’s old shed.”

“Poor old Georgina, she never had much except Fred, and he wasn’t anything to

write home about.”

“Wasn’t he something of a man about town, though? What was her name… the

one just up the road he shared time with… Victoria… Valerie… Veronica…?”

“Viper.”

“No use speaking ill of the dead, right? But I always liked Georgina. What I knew

of her anyway.”

“Georgina was a sweet old girl—more than a little rough, but with a heart soft as

butter. She loved those dogs of hers—too much perhaps. She could hardly feed herself.”

Caitlyn paused, pointing again, and again Jordan lifted his eyes to follow the line

extending off her finger. “You see that electric pole? I can’t be sure I’m remembering this

or just making it up, but I swear they buried a horse or pony or something out there

once.”

“That would make a good story.”

“Yeah, but you’d be the one to write it.”

“It’s your story, not mine.”

“I prefer to write poetry.”

“Poetry is for sissies.”

“Heck yes.”

Jordan laughed, standing, and inverted the grip of his hands on his hips as he

stretched out his back.

“I have to pee,” he announced as a matter of fact, simply, abruptly.

“So do I,” Caitlyn admitted. “But I’ll wait if you want to go inside.”

“No, that’s all right. I’ll just mosey around back of the house if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. Mama won’t either your watering her flowers.”

“Don’t tell her that.”

He heard the door shut as he rounded the corner of the house, hurrying now

against the sudden urgency he felt to find an appropriately secluded place. He climbed

quartering the bank, shielding himself from the road side by standing behind a wild

cherry growing out of the ground in a V-shaped bifurcation. Turning first for the Ingham

spring, realizing he stood in full view of the house situated behind the tumbledown

workshop, he repositioned himself straddling a wide stone on the slope of the bank. He

looked across the plateau at the house above, closed his eyes and waited.

A sense of relief, so intense it became pleasure, overcame him as he watched the

arc of urine fall and spread on the fieldstone. Seeing no hint of red in the flow lent

credence to the possibility the dark red rheumy discharge from the night before amounted

to nothing more than an aberration. He preferred to believe all ailments and illnesses—at

least his anyway—were eventually self-correcting. The nearly year-long cessation of pain

in his solar plexus supported the conclusion. Still, something somewhere internally felt

vaguely amiss; he retained a sneaking suspicion somehow all was not well. Zipping his

pants, he half turned again toward the spring, noticing a succession of stones piled one on

top of the other in decreasing proportion. He recognized the arrangement from reading an

old Boy Scout Field Manual in his youth as the Indian sign for danger.

Back at the front of the house he sat and picked up the Mylar protected sheaf of

papers from the funeral service and read some until Caitlyn returned.

“I feel better, how about you?”

“Somewhat. You didn’t tell me you had Indians about.”

“What nonsense are you talking now?”

“Nothing, I just thought I saw an indication someone had recently paid a visit.

Stones piled one atop the other on the bank side, but maybe that’s from way back.”

“Daddy used to do that. He’d get a kick out of us kid’s finding them and getting

all excited. That is, until Jamie caught on to what the game was.”

“Maybe it’s his ghost still doing it.”

“Maybe instead it’s where Alison and I buried her beloved Madison.”

“I hope that’s not a person.”

“Uhuh,” Caitlyn said, eyeing him with a sideways look. “No, it was her cat. We

arranged the stones after Daddy’s example.”

“Did he ever tell you the story about a huge stone beneath the church?”

“What stone?”

“He told me about it the day I helped him dissemble the DeSoto.”

“I never knew you did.”

“Well, it’s true. And don’t interrupt or you’ll get me off the track. Apparently, as

he told the story, the church didn’t originally have a basement, just a crawl space. So a

bunch of the men from the church got down underneath with shovels to dig one by hand.

You couldn’t get any kind of machine down there and no one thought it very economical

to move the church aside just to move it back again when done, so they left it where it

was and started digging. Everything went fine until they encountered one not so small

problem—a boulder half the size of a…”

Jordan paused and flicked his left hand deftly sideways.

“I imagine nearly half the size of your Hyundai over there. So, you know what

they did?”

Caitlyn sat rapt and waiting, her rosy arms enwrapping still winter-pale knees;

silence held sway and Jordan waited, holding the moment in suspension, until she shook

her head.

“They dug a deeper hole and pushed it in, then poured the floor over the top of it.

Talk about being founded on the rock, huh?”

“You’re making that up!”

“I’m not. It’s God’s honest truth.”

Suddenly the low-level and indistinct buzzing from earlier seemed to rise and

move out of sight to the side and then, still rising, head directly for them. The stood and

looked and saw turning, high over a small clump of trees in the vicinity of the church, a

shiny red First World War-era biplane.

“Would you look at that,” Jordan said. “Watch how it slips sideways against the

wind as it turns, just the same as the old Wright Flyer used to.”

“Well, you should know.”

Jordan lowered his eyes, looking into Caitlyn’s. For a moment he doubted his

memory, discounting his understanding of avionics, of history, of the evidence compiled

in what he’d just seen. Briefly Caitlyn’s smile seemed to mark her as either empathetic or

complicit, accepting the rules of a game they both knew to be structured on the unreal or

maybe, the least complimentary possibility, a somewhat tenuous grasp of reality.

“I mean,” she explained, “you and cousin Alanson were going to build one, right

—a Wright Flyer? So you’d know all about that.”

“Oh,” Jordan replied, exhaling. He looked again to the sky, feeling somehow

relieved. His eyes continued seeking the plane, but like a circling bass it had retreated

back behind the lily pad cover of trees floating at the sky’s blue periphery.

In the half second it took him to recall himself as one of two boys scouting the

steep hill behind the house as a launch point, afterwards sitting down as if flying together

on the back porch step of the house he’d passed only an hour or less earlier, Jordan felt a

sense of loss he could no more grasp than hold onto. He remembered as well Alanson

telling him during the last hour of daylight that same long ago day about the extinction of

the Dodo, which to his young mind seemed then an inexplicably sad, even tragic,

occurrence.

“Poor Alanson,” Caitlyn sighed, her eyes searching the sky as if also expecting

the plane to reappear. “He looked so rough at the end.”

“I thought he was rough in the beginning. And then we got to be friends.” Jordan

allowed a smile to interrupt his recollection before continuing. “One thing I’ll never

forget is the time he lay down in our kitchen and let Snowy climb on him, licking the

back of his head and bare neck. If I closed my eyes and listened now I bet—money—I

could still hear him laughing.”

Jordan felt himself shiver, making an effort to stop the involuntary contractions of

flesh without and muscles within as Caitlyn turned her eyes back again upon him.

“Are you cold?” she asked, deferentially. “Would you like to go in?”

“No, that’s all right. I wouldn’t want to disrupt your mother’s rest.”

“She’d want you, you know, to come in.”

“I know, but still…” They sat silently looking at the uneven but rounding

platform of flagstones on the ground underfoot, both of them seemingly noticing the

same uneven arrangement of stones while waiting for the other to speak. Finally, Jordan

thought he might try to articulate something more felt than thought out.

“You know,” he started quietly. “I was living in Cambridge when your father

died. I felt so alone. I remember walking the streets at night listening to my own footsteps

and humming Mozart. The music so perfectly matched my mood and cadence I half

expect the composer worked the same way. Anyway, I was touched and honored to be

asked to serve as a pall bearer at the funeral. Yet somehow I ended up in the balcony,

taping the service instead. I apologized afterwards to Karen Harper for making her have

to find a replacement at the last minute. I don’t really know to this day what happened. I

had intended to be there. But when it most mattered, I wasn’t.” He stopped, sighed,

remembering the slow moving weight high up in the rope. “Anyway, that’s by way of

saying this next part: The casket went out and I stayed to toll the bell as the church

emptied. Finally it was just me and Nellie Tisdale alone in the balcony and she took my

arm and said to me, very simply: ‘You’re back where you belong.’ I helped her down the

stairs then. Neither of us said another word the rest of the way out. And that was the last

time I saw her.”

“It’s a nice story.”

“But you see I let Nellie down too.”

“How do you mean?”

“With the church closing… She said that’s where I belong. I can’t help thinking

some way it’s my fault.”

“No more yours than mine, or anyone else’s.”

“I don’t know. I feel sometimes as though I’ve let everybody down, myself

especially. I should have been able to buy it, or help those who deserved to.” He paused,

took a breath and confessed. “I lost quite a bit in the market.”

It came as a surprise to hear himself say so. He’d not intended to reveal himself so

abruptly.

“Jordan, how much?”

“Near to a hundred thousand.” His foolishness abruptly revealed, he continued

looking down, head slightly bowed, smiling at the stones on the ground. “I had a plan. If

I’d stuck to it I’d be sitting on close to a million dollars, but I got impatient or greedy or

maybe just stupid for not realizing it was all a rigged game, and I was the sucker.” He

paused, looking ahead towards the road. “I wanted to kill myself when I realized what I’d

done.”

“Oh Jordan, don’t ever…”

“I know. It’s just money. But if it hadn’t been for my dogs…” He picked a twig

off the steps and flicked it twirling towards the sky. “Who knows what I would’ve done

without them. One night it all suddenly hit me and my heart began racing uncontrollably

and for so long, it might’ve been damaged. I got up and down the stairs at least twenty

times that night, every one of them with Chance right by me.”

“He’s a good dog.”

“Yes he is.”

They both looked out towards the road, saying nothing, until using what seemed

her internal voice wondering aloud, Caitlyn asked: “What will you do now?”

“I guess give up this business of writing.”

“Lucy Maud Montgomery didn’t have an easy time of it, either. She worked at the

post office, intercepting her rejection notices before anyone else could see them.”

“What is it about post offices, then? Faulkner worked in one too and used to send

his stuff off with the same attitude of resignation to futility I’ve adopted. Maybe it’s time

to stop this foolishness and get a real job—do what normal people do.”

“But you’re not normal.”

Jordan looked at her looking at him until she continued softly, “I meant that in the

best way.”

Still smiling, he cast his gaze across the road towards the electric pole where the

horse was rumored to be buried.

“I know you did, Cait,” he said softly. “Well at least I’ve been getting a better

class of rejection notice of late. The last, from the editor of Sporting Arts Quarterly, let

me down nice and easy, ending: ‘You write very, very well.’ I thought that was rather

encouraging. Not to mention that it taught me something about using the language in a

very new not to mention very descriptive manner.” He pointed, angling vaguely up the

hill across the street. “Looky there, Maud. Someone across the way has gone dug

themselves a very, very big hole. I very inquisitively wonder what in tarnation for.”

“Maybe,” Caitlin surmised, entering the game by adopting a feminized version of

the faux Southern drawl, “they are affixin’ to bury themselves a very big rock.”

“Or some very, very big animal—like maybe a dead horse?”

He made a move to get up and leave but at the moment of decision a portentous

oncoming rush like a sudden flooding of the creek stopped him. The sound changed into

a languorous rolling production as an elongated yellow truck carrying three large upright

yellow cylinders in back slowly ascended the road. Caitlin saw first what was happening.

“They’re spraying lines,” she said, pointing as he had a moment earlier, but with

more focused precision.

Only then, looking closer, did Jordan detect the arrangement of nozzles at the

back of the truck and the fine yellow cone of mist applying new yellow lines to the road

surface.

“I can see the headline now,” he said: “Al Qaeda Hits Hume with Road Sprayers.”

He waited for Caitlyn, given the opening, to tell the story of her mother’s reaction

the morning of nine-eleven, exasperated to the point of annoyance by the mounting

paranoia and panic encountered in her neighbors. ‘For God’s sake,’ she finally cried out

at the post office. ‘Does anybody here actually think they’ll be attacking Hume next?’

But Caitlyn remained quiet, watching the spray truck crawl up the hill followed

by another, smaller truck, carrying a sign that read: LINE SPRAYING. DO NOT PASS.

Imagining the aberrant lines his leaving might add, he sat back to wait another

few minutes to let the paint dry.

“You are cold,” Caitlyn said, her voice affecting a tone of mild accusation. She

half turned on the step, shifting her gaze from the road to look at him in full once again.

“You sure you don’t want to come in the house?”

“No, it’s okay. I should be going, really.”

He moved to stand, visualizing himself engaged in the preliminary ritual of a

sprinter making ready to run. In his mind he saw himself already bending on one knee,

stretching the opposite leg back before reversing into a mirror image of the same

procedure. But for some reason he stayed quiet, and sitting.

“Mama will be disappointed you didn’t stop to see her.”

“Tell her I’ve been thinking about her, though. I’m sorry about Steve. I didn’t

know him that well, but the last time I saw him he surprised me by recognizing me and

calling me by name.”

“When? And why shouldn’t he? He knew you from a toddler, just like me.”

“I guess you’re right. Maybe I’m surprised because I almost didn’t recognize him,

until I looked and saw that sparkle in his eyes. It was during the reception in the church

basement after your Uncle Lyle’s funeral. He started talking with me just as if we were

long lost friends.”

“That sounds like Uncle Steve. But you know, Lyle wasn’t really my uncle,

though I have to confess I did claim so at work—completely innocently I might add. I felt

so guilty about it later, when I realized what I’d done.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I imagine God will forgive you.”

“I’m not so sure my Administrator would, if she knew.”

“Anyway, that was one of my last times at the church.”

“Oh gosh, church again. I just remembered Wednesday afternoons practicing for

Children’s Choir. You would walk from school and stop along the way to bring chunks

from the town’s salt pile. I remember the taste was so bad it brought tears to my eyes.

And yet each week we would see how long we could endure them, as if it were a test of

honor.”

“I remember. Turned out that stuff had been chemically treated.”

“Jordan, it’s a wonder you didn’t give us all cancer.”

They sat quietly in the afternoon quiet remembering those days, considering the

import, if any, of its being a Wednesday now again as before. Jordan closed his eyes,

seeing the church interior from the vantage of a neophyte singer, standing before the

altar, facing the other way, looking back through the sanctuary and all the parallel, empty

pews. As if raising his eyes to view the scene against his closed eyelids, he remembered

the central chandelier adorned with a multitude of teardrop glass crystals. Lifting his gaze

yet higher, he could see the vaulted tin paneled ceiling. Eventually Jordan brought his

thoughts back and through time, closer to the present, to things as they remained despite

the corrosive influence of years.

He told about riding his bike to the Swiss steak dinner held in the basement of the

church the Thursday after Lyle’s funeral. He couldn’t have known then it would be the

last time he would see the inside of the church. In part he had come hoping to see Glad,

for he had written a story which he gave to her afterwards to read in the sitting room

between the sanctuary and nursery while he waited outside the open side door looking off

towards where the piebald sycamore tree once stood prior to being removed when the

parking lot was paved—back so many years now few people besides himself would

likely recall it. As he waited for Glad to finish he reviewed the Bible story, feeling

useless remorse remembering how as a child he had wanted to climb the tree in imitation

of Zacchaeus but never managed.

Returning to the sitting room, he found Gladys crying; admitting it now made him

feel good to have written something that so moved her, he confessed worrying it might

have been a mistake to disturb such a raw wound until Glad smiled, drying her eyes, and

said Lyle would have been made proud to be so remembered.

“That was the story you read back at the house, after Jim’s bagpipe ceremony?”

“Yes.” Suddenly he felt he’d said too much about that. “Anyway, tell your mother

I’m sorry about her brother.”

“She knows.” Caitlyn paused, looked at him. “Jordan, you’re not going to do

anything?”

“Do anything?”

He looked back at her innocently, pretending he had no idea what she might be

trying to say.

“Naw,” he said finally, giving in. Laughing lightly, he pushed a hand through the

air as if fending away a small bug. “We all die soon enough as it is. There’s not much to

be gained by rushing things.”

He began to hum and then added words to the tune as Caitlyn joined in, singing

softly: Zacchaeus was a wee little man; a wee little man was he…

“Gosh,” she said as they ended. “I haven’t heard that ditty in thirty years. What

made you think of that just now?”

“I don’t know, just remembering the church and the sing-alongs your daddy used

to conduct before Sunday school. Remember how I always raised my hand to request Do

Lord?” Reminiscently, almost in a whisper, he sung: Do Lord, Oh do Lord, Oh do

remember me… “Gosh, I was such a pest.” He laughed quickly and then abruptly became

quiet. “Do you remember the sycamore tree?”

“The one in the parking lot you were always threatening to climb?” Caitlyn

pivoted on the step to half face him. “I never knew how you thought you would do it,

seeing as how the first branch looked to my child’s eyes twenty feet up in the air.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now.” He sighed and shifted his arms and legs, making

ready to go. “In the end, I guess not much of anything does.”

“Jordan?”

“Uhuh?”

“What do you think it’s like… on the other side. I mean, do you believe there’s a

Heaven?”

“For real?” Jordan sat back again and considered. “I don’t know. If there is, I

doubt it’s anything we can imagine. Or maybe it’s only what we imagine. But I don’t see

any reason to fear the end any more than the beginning. My feelings about it go pretty

much along the line of what Duvall says in that one movie, the Western where he saves

the Chinese ladies.”

“Broken Trail?”

“Yeah, that’s it. There’s that funeral scene, remember? Where he observes our

time here is contained between the two eternities. If you think about it, that’s kind of

reassuring. No one ever expresses fear of what went before, so why should we fear what

comes after?”

He stopped, realizing he had not seriously thought about eternity since

apprehending the concept as a child.

“I don’t know,” Caitlyn sighed. “It all sounds too deep for me.” For a half minute

they stayed silent until she said, “Not to change the subject, but did you get invited to

Jim’s open house Mother’s Day?”

“Not really. I didn’t know anything about it until Mom said something. I wasn’t

going to, but finally she persuaded me I was invited too, although I’m still not quite sure

about that.”

“You had a good time, though?”

“It was okay. Jim said, looking over his shoulder from the sink as I came in the

door, ‘Oh, hi Buddy.’ Now maybe I’m just overly sensitive, but I have a suspicion that if

your name isn’t Buddy and someone calls you that, what they are really saying is they

aren’t your buddy at all. But that isn’t the worst part. The worst part was he kept going on

and on and on about all the improvements he made, and wanted us to ooh and ah over

every little thing. At one point Mom came up and whispered, ‘You know, with a little

work, your house could be such a nice little place.’ I guess she figured to balance the

scales some.”

“I love your mother. But you know, I think that’s part of our parents’ generation’s

sensibility about things. Mama’s the same way.”

“I guess you’re right. Or maybe she was just telling me to get busy.”

During the ensuing silence, in which they each seemed to wait for the other to

speak, Jordan reviewed his friendship with Jim. Acquainted since childhood, they’d

grown up playing at kung fu, karate, jiu jitsu and baseball. They’d hunted and fished

together from early adolescence, and yet Jordan wondered now what it all meant. More

than twenty years ago Jim’s suggestion to Jordan he take up with Jim’s wife so as to take

her off his hands had made them both laugh. In the interval the joke had become

increasingly less funny, even infecting the discourse on their getaway outings. And yet, to

be fair, Jordan had also to take into account that on one of these occasions when Jim

entrusted him to man the boat’s throttle and rudder so as to navigate a wide lazy loop on a

deep and pristine lake, he had stalled the engine, entangling the line with the propeller

and nearly losing the attached array of two dozen or more antique lures. He imagined the

fluttering descent, a shimmering evanescence of ever-retreating precious metals and

jewels, falling away from the light of the world into darkening water. They would have

been lost forever had Jim not reached down past the stern and somehow—mirabile dictu

—caught the end of the cut drag line and retrieved them. That entirely competent act

alone would have been impressive enough, and yet the more impressive part in retrospect

was the fact he neither criticized Jordan for the error at the time nor once mentioned the

incident in all the years since.

In the next moment, a gust of wind blew against the front of the house, catching

under the parasol covering the round plastic table on the deck. As one, they both ran to

save it; Jordan reached up grabbing the reticulating joint at the top of the pole, keeping

the umbrella upright while Caitlyn turned a crank, closing it down like an inverted

flower. In the midst of the crisis Caitlyn’s mother emerged from the front door to say

“Oh, don’t worry about that” before going back in, returning as Jordan stepped off the

deck to say he and Caitlyn could remain, but she needed to go to the post office and store.

“Mama,” Caitlyn said, nearly pleading. “I was going for you. I’ll go with if you

want.”

“I’d rather you stay here with Jordan and talk.” Turning her body to address him

in a manner that seemed intentionally, exaggeratingly direct, she added, “Sir, I’ll make

you a hamburger when I get back.”

Jordan laughed, jutted his chin and spoke his reply, just as intentionally direct.

“I’m staying whether you feed me or not,” he said, affecting a defiant, staring pose,

before smiling to show he was joshing. But the joke seemed to fall rather flat.

For a long moment, no-one spoke; wondering what had gone wrong, Jordan

remembered a story Caitlyn’s mother related about growing up in the same Mills Mills

farmhouse he had, starting his journey, glimpsed as a red blur. As a young girl during

planting time and again during harvest, she often woke to a tap-tap on her bedroom

window as the hired man called out to announce his presence: Never fear, ‘tis I, Paiter

Dunker!

“No,” Jordan said quietly, mending the lapse. “I have to be going.” He glanced

away towards the high end of the house facing the bridge, setting a course by line of

sight. “I’ll stop again tomorrow maybe. But thanks for the invite just the same.”

He and Caitlyn then watched together as, without further comment, her mother

returned to the house and again closed the door.

“I don’t think she has much longer,” Caitlin confessed in a whisper. “And maybe

it’s all for the best. Mama says a person can live too long.”

“I believe that to be true, anymore.”

“Oh Jordan,” she sighed. “I do hope you know I’m your friend.”

He backed away towards the car, saying he knew, saying, “We’ll always be

friends.” Sitting down, he withdrew his legs and closed the door as she called across the

driveway for him not to give up on writing and he put the transmission in gear and waved

through the window, turning away without further answer. As he straightened off the

driveway onto the far lane he glanced behind at the pavement to make sure he’d left no

unintended marks as he crossed over, then quickly lifted his eyes to the rise in the lawn

and the house and Caitlyn waving, reciprocating just before his wave and Caitlyn’s lost

touch with one another in the untended strip of wild trees grown up along the creek side

of the lawn.

Already it seemed improbable he would keep his pledge to return the next day. He

crossed the bridge and passed the post office, slowing with the gradual rise of the

pavement until he eased to a complete stop where the county and the state roads

intersected. For a half second he conflated daydream and reality, remembering petals

falling like snowflakes that morning as he walked up his driveway. He considered turning

left to investigate the old cemetery, ascending a broad grassy footpath under the soft

filtered light of white blossoms. The morning’s white fall of petals put him in mind next

of an occurrence he’d until that moment all but forgotten. One long ago night, as he

walked from school during a snowstorm, a truck pulled over having climbed the first

small hill out of the valley. Anxious to adhere to the route his dispatcher gave him to

follow, the trucker rolled down his window, seeking assurance he’d come the right way.

‘Sure,’ Jordan breezily told him. Through the cascade of flakes tumbling under the

streetlight, he could make out behind the open window no more than a silent, waiting

shadow. ‘But you’re going the long way through Pike. You can get where you’re going,

and would be far better off, if you turned this rig around, turned left at the light, and took

19A north.’

But the driver declined his suggestion and continued on, innocent and ignorant of

the challenges ahead, not least of which would be the sharp curves and high drifts this

side of Pike and the big hill waiting for him on the last long climb out of the valley.

A car passed, leaving the way clear in all directions. As Jordan touched his foot to

the gas pedal he longed to hear the carillon chimes one more time before the final silence

descended upon and stilled his church forever.

‘His church,’ he mused, smiling wistfully at the thought.

Crossing the state road heading towards home, he climbed a steep curve slowing

past a yellow and black sign warning that a deaf child lived in the near vicinity, just

ahead up the hill. He tried to imagine how it would be not to hear the ever-evanescent

sounds of the world. Absent the morning song of the oriole, would he have missed the

beautiful singer’s presence? Missing its presence, would he ever have tilted his head back

in that moment of quiet and solemn wonder? Absent the elemental spark of wonder that

set his mind to imagining, would he have opened his mouth in hope that a petal might,

miraculously, land melting on his tongue? The answer was no and no and again no. It

seemed not to matter that he waited vainly for an outward bestowal of grace; did not its

very possibility impart, even in its temporality, a small absolution?

He imagined himself standing beneath the blossoming tree—once more awaiting

the moment the petal would fall—until a gust of wind jarred the car sideways, ending the

reverie and bringing him back to the present moment. He listened through the open

window once more for the carillon chimes, but heard only the rising hum of the motor

and a modulating breeze in his left ear as the car accelerated, released from its own

weight at the hill’s leveling summit. For a long moment he looked towards the encircling

horizon, advancing his gaze beyond the light green of near fields towards a darker green

rim of far woods. Resting his eyes where the emerald complexity of the newly renewed

earth mixed with the clear simple blue of the sky, he wished somehow to see even farther.

But his inability to detect what lay beyond the horizon subtly suggested life here

might be all we are given. When no countering thought arose to dispute it, he felt

something close to acceptance. While the fingers of his left hand pressed the switch to

raise the near window, he settled back into the welcoming contour of the seat. At last

isolated and insulated, removed from the cold, he felt additionally comforted by the

simple belief that nothing mattered so much as enjoying what remained of the way ahead.

The thought left him newly determined to release all his cares. He needed simply to let

the day’s pent-up consternations go—and accept that the church he had loved and left no

longer was his, or anyone else’s.

****

Leon the Lionheart

This morning, as persistent winter clouds dispensed yet another fine dusting of

snow, I received an unexpected card in the mail from an old and dear friend. On the front

he had drawn a picture of the male Sialia sialis, inside of which he had written, I saw my

first bluebird today, and the first thing that came to mind was Al Gore must be right.

Damn global warming! And he signed it, Love, Leon, but otherwise his communication

remained as minimally revealing and tersely evocative as ever; the envelope supplied not

even a return address to indicate whether he was still being held in confinement.

I remember our first acquaintance as if it were (so the cliché goes,) “only

yesterday.” We were sitting cross-legged (or, at the present-day risk of political

incorrectness: Indian-style) together on the gray tiled floor of our kindergarten room

drawing a picture. To be rigidly accurate, Leon was drawing a picture while I, in

amazement, sat watching. I had already in a quick moment done all that our teacher had

requested and required of us, which was to draw a simple line. Leon, however, thought

the task far too undemanding; therefore, he chose to draw a much more elaborate lion.

I sat silent and watched him. I remember distinctly the large and bulging blue vein

spreading like a dendrite in search of an axon beneath the translucent skin covering his

nearly bare skull. He worked quietly, entirely absorbed, in his drawing while I gaped in

amazement and stared, feeling my jaw muscles tensing involuntarily under the growing

strain of apprehension. I had never seen such a carefree yet willful disobedience before,

and it scared me. And I knew his the disobedience was willful, because he told me.

“They can’t really mean draw a line,” he explained, in the entirely unconcerned

manner I would come to know well. “It must be a test or a trick or something. And

anyway, a lion is much more interesting to behold, don’t you think?”

He looked up and beamed at me such an innocent smile I had to agree. But it

turned out we were both wrong. Leon’s failure to attend to directions had not the

deleterious outcome I had feared—which would have found him spending time in the

dreaded, if imaginary, ‘Thinking Box” situated behind the piano—but neither did it pass

entirely without penalty. From that moment on Leon was marked deficiently different,

and the taint of the evaluation followed him all that year, as well, I contend, the entire rest

of his life.

In second grade he kissed Stephanie Martinez in the cloakroom. In the third grade

I sat beside her entranced with the possibility I might one day find the courage to kiss her

myself as we practiced our cursive letters, and I was glad we were both bluebirds, top

readers, while Leon lagged far behind, marked ignominiously (though the teacher denied

any attempt to project taint) as a blackbird.

In the fourth grade Stephanie left us when her family migrated to a new state,

which might as well have been a new country. But the change allowed Leon and me to

once again become closer and noncompetitive as friends. In that same year he read the

thickest paperback book I’d ever seen, the cover of which showed a diver encased in one

of those old fashioned tethered suits, complete with bronze helmet and hatched front, side

and top portals, descending on a sunken treasure trunk overflowing with gold chains and

coins interspersed with red, blue and green sparkling gems. When I asked him what the

story was about, he coyly replied, “Adults acting badly.” His appetite whetted for exotic

locales, he next picked up a paperback copy of On the Beach at the second hand book

sale held in the small gym. I remember the picture of an amorous couple lying together in

the surf and the skeptical, sidelong look Miss Graves gave the book’s cover as Leon dug

a dime out of his pants pocket to pay for it; somehow, despite the look, I got the

impression she wished she’d gotten to the book first, to spare Leon the imagined

degeneracy contained within its scandalous covers. Meanwhile, I made my own

discovery, a book called The Forgotten Valley about a family that becomes lost in a

faraway place where dinosaurs still ruled the earth. The family survives in no small part

due to the intercession of a slightly strange, if not alien, boy who wears synthetic foot

coverings impervious to wear suggesting he hails from a civilization of far-advanced

technology and knowledge, though the help he imparts is of the most simple and

fundamental kind as he teaches them to, among other things, catch fish with bone hooks

then mold them in wet clay and so bake them to perfection under the coals of an open

campfire.

That summer Leon came to visit at my house and we spent the day, between

discussions of the literary merits of our extracurricular reading, looking at pond scum

through my new microscope. He claimed to see a dinosaur floating in the ether and I

thought he was making fun and said he saw no such thing and we argued strenuously a

bit before, wrinkling his nose and giving me that old goofy smile, he suggested we play a

game wherein he would be the sovereign ruler and I his attending subject. Warming to

the idea, he insisted I call him King Leon, and ordered me go fetch him a sovereign’s

right of milk and cookies. In the kitchen my mother complied silently to my request

before intoning, her voice dropping an ominous half octave: “I detect something a bit off

with your guest, Evan. But he’s your friend, and I hope you can help him.”

When later I visited his house he told me on a walk in the woods after dinner his

father would sometimes, for no reason, beat him. Yet the contention seemed slightly, if

not entirely, preposterous. What I’d seen of the man, lying passed out and snoring in his

undershirt on the couch beforehand, evinced in me little sense of threat, much less

danger. I said nothing, not knowing one way or the other, yet not wishing to bolster a

specious claim. After a few minutes of shared silence both the subject and mood passed

as Leon looked at me, his face brightening once more with a smile as he said: “You ever

hear symphonies in your head?”

It turned out that Leon, or so he again claimed, did hear such things, Beethoven’s

Eroica specifically. Thus we spent the rest of the afternoon pretending—at least I

pretended—to hear all the various music of the spheres echoing in the background of our

collective being, even to the extent that on the way back to my home in his father’s car he

leaned over and whispered, giggling in my ear, “Do you hear the tires humming? I hope

we don’t hit any sharps that would make them b flat.” And then he leaned back and

looked out the window, still smiling.

I’m not entirely embarrassed to say the deft quality of his humor largely evaded

me at the time, though I smiled mildly in response, though in largely uncomprehending

appreciation, and looked away out the opposite side window, thinking I wasn’t sure at all

just what frequency—never mind symphony—my friend was truly attuned to.

By high school we drifted entirely apart, but not before once again arguing. I

don’t even remember what started it or what it was really about except I know for sure

our estrangement this time wasn’t precipitated by a girl. All I remember is he got on

about the Kurds, his face reddening in correlation with his rising anger.

I said finally, attempting to dispel the tension, “What do I care about cheese?” and

he laughed, somewhat derisively I thought, and called me a real dummy. He apologized

then and said he wasn’t really angry at me, but at Nixon—and even more so Kissinger,

whom he called a real no good son-of-a-bitch, spitting out the condemnation with such

venom it shocked me. The words felt like a sudden cold splash of water because I had

never previously heard him so much as swear mildly. I remembered instead the more

typical lunchtime encounter of a few months before—a discussion between him and Rick

Wheeling, the school jock, during which Leon witnessed to him loud enough for half the

cafeteria to hear about the wonder of Jesus’ love and salvation, while Rick—who seemed

not too keen on discussing anything with Leon, much less salvation—leaned back in his

seat and regarded the event occurring before him as if from a great distance.

And then an even stranger thing happened. Soon after graduation Leon joined the

Marines. For quite some time afterward all I knew was he’d successfully completed boot

camp, against all expectation, and gotten assigned to some outpost in Germany. I told

him the last thing before he shipped out I didn’t know who represented the greater threat

to world peace, him or the Germans.

He laughed, of course, but I noticed immediately how light and insincere his

manner then seemed, and I noticed too how he shifted his cap a little more sideways as if

to hide something there. The wary thought flashed through my mind that the man now

standing before me retained little of the innocent and ardent nature of the boy I’d once

known.

The last time I saw him before he was committed, we met by accident at the plate

glass-fronted library entry of his hometown college, my alma mater. I had come to

research a project, while Leon appeared to have come for no other reason than to

serendipitously encounter someone he might once have known. As he did me, I

recognized him immediately, even though he had grown his hair very long and wore it

swept back so that, in combination, his mane and characteristically noble mien gave him

the slightly regal and reserved air of an old time Germanic composer. I said it was good

to see him again, all the while thinking it strange that a man half again as old as the

students on campus should pay a visit on no readily explicable pretext, and no more

apparent purpose than to linger and loiter. With a growing sense of unease, remembering

a mutual friend’s story about his arriving unannounced and uninvited in Kentucky to see

her, I wondered momentarily if he might be furtively pursuing some unsuspecting co-ed.

Rejecting that disquieting thought, I nonetheless sought to limit my liability by excusing

myself from his presence, saying I’d like to stay and chat, but, unfortunately, a

previously-scheduled dinner engagement required my attendance elsewhere.

“Just tell me one thing,” he asked, almost demanding, putting a hand on my

shoulder to stop me.

“What is that, Leon?”

“Did I offend you?”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean, did I ever say or do anything to make you think less of me—or to make

you think I thought less of you?”

“I don’t recall, Leon. No, I can’t say I can think of any such occurrence.”

“Not even when I called that son-of-a bitch Kissinger a son-of-a-bitch?”

I laughed a little, in spite of my suppositions.

“Hell, Leon, he earned that.”

“He sure did. And you know what? He deserved even more. You know what he

said during the Pike Commission? He said, ‘Covert action shouldn’t be confused with

missionary work.’ As if saying that could defend his betrayal and disguise the fact he

used the Kurds, setting them up to be murdered.”

“I know, Leon. I know how that bothered and upset you.” But in fact I knew only

a few bare details, and didn’t read the Pike Committee Report until much later.

“What’s upsetting is the intellectual slovenliness. ‘Covert action isn’t missionary

work,’” he repeated mockingly, “What rot. It isn’t an excuse for moral cowardice and

murder, either. At least it shouldn’t be.”

I didn’t know what to say in response to such blatantly expressed, feeling

conviction and so we stood mutely looking at each other, until, closing my eyes, I

nodded.

“Leon,” I nearly whispered, “I really have to go.”

“Oh, of course,” he said, his manner suddenly complaisant and apologetic.

Stepping aside with a bow of courtesy I could not have imagined a few seconds before,

he swung his extended arm like an opening gate, gesturing me on and outwards to the

double glass doors, and freedom.

“They were, poor souls, at a loss what to do with me.”

Leon smiled at the memory, but my own smile camouflaged my discomfort. I

wanted to tell him no one knew even now quite what to do with him, me no more than

anyone else.

“First I asked the drill master. I asked if he would be so kind as to clarify my

responsibility under the Marine Service Oath to serve and defend the country and

Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Specifically, I asked, what were

those responsibilities, and, even more specifically, where did my loyalties lie should the

President act in a manner I deemed unconstitutional?”

“Yeah, and what did he say?”

“He said who the hell’s going to deem that, me? And then he said that was a

matter well above his pay grade, and I should drop and give him fifty just for making his

head hurt. Then he told me to go ask the lieutenant. So I asked the lieutenant.”

“And what happened?”

“He told me to give him fifty too. And then he sent me to the company gunnery

sergeant.”

“And what did he say?”

“To give him fifty, and he sent me to the company commander.”

“And then what?”

“He told me to sit down. But not before tapping a knuckle on his desk, thinking,

as he considered the question while I stood still at attention saying to myself, ‘Okay,

Leon, now you’ve really done it’ until at last he stopped tapping the desk and smiled and

told me I was either the most persistent little cud he’d ever encountered or the most

stupid, neither one of which being necessarily a disqualifying trait in a Marine. So he told

me to stand at ease and sit. And we talked specific cases.”

“Specific cases like what?” I wasn’t anymore at this point faking my interest, and

Leon seemed eager to continue.

“Well, for starters, he suggested there were all kinds of issues, and taking a stand

on any one of them might have long term unintended consequences we could never

anticipate beforehand. He cited the Buddhist monks immolating themselves and bringing

down their government in South Vietnam back in the early Sixties. In retrospect maybe

that wasn’t the best thing, anymore than our bombing Cambodia. And shooting a captive

gook isn’t maybe the best way to dispense justice. Or maybe the real problem was that

protesting those things had stopped them, but with consequences far, far worse than the

original offenses. His answer seemed reasonably intelligent enough, especially for a

Marine company commander, so I asked him if there was anything in his own career he

wished he’d done differently. You know what he told me?”

“I haven’t any idea, Leon.”

“He said a person would have to be one hell of a fool to look back on his life and

find not a single situation where he mightn’t have made a better decision. It broke his

heart every day knowing he had done some things he wished he hadn’t and hadn’t done

some things he now wished he had. And then he surprised me. ‘When there comes a point

at which you realize you should say no or yes, then you either do or you don’t,’ he said.

‘But in either case, it’s ultimately on you and nobody else. Just you remember that.’”

I waited, expecting more. Finally embarrassed by the silence, I helpfully

suggested the crisis in Honduras might be illustrative.

“Yes,” Leon said, brightening. “You get it. That’s it exactly. The Honduran

Supreme Court and Congress instructed the Army to remove Zelaya, who was attempting

to follow the Chavez model and become President-for-life. But our Democrats are so

stupid. They call it a coup when democracy thwarts would-be totalitarians and works

perfectly as intended.”

“Well, what do you expect? They’re not so different. At heart, they love power

just as much. Most of them would have happily damned the Supreme Court in favor of Al

Gore.”

I spoke in jest, attempting to balance Leon’s seriousness.

“Precisely,” he said, scowling, growing quiet.

Choosing to leave things at that, I shuffled my feet, preparing to go; but then

wanting to end on a good note, I added: “Leon, you were always ideologically

predisposed to being opposed.”

“I am not,” he protested, anger and hurt rising together in his voice. “I’m just no

illiberal leftist lunatic is all.”

“What kind are you, then?”

I smiled broadly after making my joke, but Leon didn’t catch it.

“And I’m no right-wing reactionary.” Now complaisantly, I smiled again while

patting his arm. “But the difference between us, Leon, is that… you’re an

unreconstructed anarchist.”

His demeanor changed appreciably then.

“Sadly it seems so,” he said quietly, looking down.

As he stood smiling wistfully at my shoes, it occurred to me I understood him

both more and less than ever.

That was the last entirely coherent conversation I can remember us having,

although he did add a small parting coda, whispering in a faraway and wistful voice that

George W. Bush never betrayed the Kurds, and that one fact alone should rightly and

forever confound the man’s critics. And then he concluded, with a spark in his eyes like

the Leon of old: “Perhaps that explains why the Dalai Lama loves him so.”

In every of our encounters after that, Leon’s attention either wavered or fixated on

dreams of bluebirds, and repeatedly he required me to remember the summer we camped

out using an appliance box for a shelter—the same box from within which he cut a hole

so as to emerge a free fledgling the next morning. In fact I remember no such thing, but

my impulse has always been, and shall remain so long as I am able, to indulge Leon’s

harmless passions and oblige his benign fantasies. So I told him I remembered his

fledging, and then relayed to him the news that my own bluebirds, just in the prior few

days, had begun building their first nests of the year.

So ended our conversation the last time I saw him. As he looked away I noticed

again on the side of his large shorn head the strange blue vein that long ago first

impressed me. Hidden by his flaxen mane in the interval of our maturing, I thought

briefly its re-emergence signaled premature dotage. But further consideration persuades

me its reappearance may instead indicate a metaphorical stamp of approval. Having

ridden life’s carousel and come full circle, Leon readies to exit in a state of pure identity,

untainted with the drossy excretion of years.

I just called the V.A. hospital to find out what I could discover. The doctors say

his schizophrenia is progressing to the point they can do little but medicate and make him

comfortable. Occasionally, though, he exhibits lucidity; so I persist in the hope some

corner of his mind retains the potential to restore Leon to normal. But in truth, Leon

never exhibited a normal persona. Perhaps that was his special gift.

All moments are points of departure. I think back to the precise time when Leon

drew his lion and so, willingly or not, irremediably chose the path of unconventional

expectation. Realizing now I instinctively knew we would proceed from that place

onwards to diametrically different destinations, I felt for him then, and always after, more

than I could ever say or show.

Enduring one manner of derangement or another he lives on, envisioning his

existence in fantastical ways. But though he may appear in his dreams as a bluebird, I

prefer to see him in mine as the lion he revealed himself to be that first day we met long

ago.

***

Kim’s Story

We met on the playing field behind the boys’ dorm. After that first practice, he

asked, “Will you be my friend?” To cement the bond, he gave me a bracelet made with

leather charms strung on a shoestring.

His name was Kim Nhway. His father, an official in Liberia, entrusted Mr. and

Mrs. Reese with his care. They said it was good Kim had me for a friend.

But Kim wasn’t the player I thought he would be. His start and stop, jerking

approach with the ball attested not to skill but diffidence and insecurity.

En route to our first game, the biggest boy on the bus locked onto Kim’s scalp,

rubbing it with his knuckles, calling him a bonehead. Kim smiled desperately at us as if

to show he got the joke. The name ‘Bonehead’ stuck, of course.

We won only twice that season. In the end, Kim and I barely conversed.

When I wrote the class fortune, fancifully depicting each of our futures, I put

‘Bonehead’ Nhway and his tormentor-turned-missionary companion together in some

remote jungle village, the joke being Kim would be having the other for dinner.

Recently I attended Mr. Reese’s funeral, whereupon I inquired about Kim. Mrs.

Reese told me he was killed in an uprising fifteen years ago.

I think I will ask if she has the father’s mailing address. I would like to tell Mr.

Nhway his son once had a friend here in America, and after all this time he is missed.

***

Somebody Always Comes When You Call

Rounding out from the dark of the hill, the first car to arrive slowed and hesitated

before me, proceeding on by the accident. I slowed even more as I passed too and tried to

get a better sense of what was happening, but the white light emanating from the deep

interior of the ditch registered imperfectly through the fog, slowing my apprehension as

well as my ability to respond. Consequently, it took me another twenty feet to stop

entirely.

Still experiencing uncertainty, I lowered the driver’s window and peered

backwards into the side mirror, still uncertain of the meaning inherent in the wreck’s

steaming aura. Farther down the road the first passerby’s brake lights glowed for a

second intensely, allowing me a moment to consider the vaguely poetic notion that, rather

than continuing separately through the night, we might unite for a larger purpose. But as

the tail lights resumed their more sedate red continuity, I thought then the other driver

would go, even though it seemed we were still trying to gauge one another’s intentions.

Finally I decided that no matter what, letting my car remain vulnerably at a standstill in

the middle of the roadway could not in any case be the best option. And so, fearing the

near ditch darkness, I reversed into the mouth of the driveway separating me from the

wreck.

I left the car running with the headlights casting smoky beams perpendicularly

across the pavement and emerged, not in the normal way of simply opening the door, but

through the driver’s window. Some internal thing had gone awry and no longer

functioned; even A.J. the mechanic had given up after an hour and a half of fiddling with

the stuck latch and getting nowhere. Consequently I could either climb out through the

window or clamber over the console and out the passenger side door. I chose, for the sake

of expediency, if not form, to exit as stock car drivers do, holding onto the roof and

climbing in reverse up and out.

The other driver came near as I stood at the edge of the road looking down at a

large red pickup, glazed with fresh rainwater, wedged on its side in the ditch bottom. The

lower, submerged, headlamp lay smashed and extinguished, its delicate filament exposed

to the flow of spring rain and melt runoff. Meanwhile, the upper, still-intact, lamp

continued illuming the misted air above it, as well, more directly, the stones and bulging

mortar encasing the driveway culvert directly in front. The other driver, a thickset woman

not too much either older or younger than me, came closer and stood silently beside me

and we both looked on and shared what seemed an appropriate moment of mute

condolence and worry. “Is there anybody inside?” she finally asked. I replied, without

turning, “I don’t know. It’s hard to see.”

The contents of the truck’s interior remained a dark mystery inviolably contained

behind an unblemished veil of black glass. I slid from the road edge on my heels and dug

them progressively deeper to keep my legs from continuing beneath the upended

underside of the truck. I experienced a sudden inordinate fear somehow it would register

and inanimate attempt to resettle and right on its wheels, so I stopped the decline short,

feet shy of possible entrapment. Spanning the veering gulf to the cab with my upper body

and arms, I reached for the passenger door and tried to lift it.

“The truck appears to be locked,” I said, turning, hearing my voice, suddenly

intense and loud enough to bridge a distance farther than the barely eight feet between us.

“It seems still to be running.”

“Oh,” said the woman, new concern registering on her face now as she continued

to bend towards the gulf and look down from above.

“It’s hard to tell, what with the water and all.”

My own mention of water at that moment instantly scared me, for until then I

hadn’t considered the possibility of the dike holding my pond might give way and send a

torrential flash flood down the ditch to drown all it contained.

“You don’t have a flashlight, do you?” The woman bent a little more forward, as

if contending with the sound of the stream passing underneath. “You could shine it

through a window and see.”

“No I don’t have a flashlight. Sorry.”

“Neither do I. Well, what about a cell phone?” Again I shook my head, no.

“Okay, well, I have one in the car. Let me go get it.”

While she went back for the phone I climbed out of the ditch, which crumbled and

slid beneath the soles of my feet until eventually they gained enough purchase to allow

me to climb clear. Standing in the drive looking up at the lit house, I wondered if anyone

had yet placed a call for help or if even perhaps the driver of the truck hadn’t somehow

managed to get out of the truck and walk up there to wait in the comfort of somebody

else’s home.

“Here’s the phone.” The woman returned, jarring me from my reverie, holding the

lit keypad facing towards me. “I don’t know where this place is, so do you want to call?”

I took the phone and held it a foot and a half from my face while looking through

the gap between my glasses and eyebrows at a green-lit display of foreign numbers.

“911” said the woman, helpfully.

“I know. I’m just letting my eyes focus.”

The woman said, “Oh,” as if to apologize, and I thought how strangely open and

tender we were to each other. Normally, as a former eagle-eyed Boy Scout I would be

embarrassed to admit my poor vision or unpreparedness. But as total strangers, and given

the circumstances in which we had so recently come together, these failings seemed

entirely inconsequential.

A second later I could see well enough to punch out the numbers. I put the phone

to my ear and heard two distant, vaguely dissonant rings.

“911 dispatch.” The man’s voice on the other end abruptly interrupted the

sequence of rings. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

“There is a vehicle in the ditch,” I said, starting, but hearing another voice on the

line, I stopped, not wishing to interfere. Then at almost the same moment I realized I had

only heard my own voice, reverberating back from a loop somewhere inside the circuitry.

“On Wiscoy-Mills Mills Road,” I quickly added, beating the reverb, before quickly

finishing: “Just outside of Wiscoy.”

“That’s Wiscoy Mills Road?”

Given the circumstance, I thought it important to be completely, entirely accurate;

correcting the information just slightly, I repeated, “Wiscoy-Mills Mills Road,” before

adding, “The vehicle’s lying sideways in the ditch and appears to be running. I can’t tell

for sure because there’s water flowing in the ditch underneath it. I tried the door to look

in, but it seems to be locked.” I paused to think of something else it might be useful to

relay. I wanted to hint at the deepness of the ditch, convey some sense of the danger the

swollen pond might at any moment give way creating a sudden immense flood.

“What county is that?” The man seemed perfectly calm and entirely

unappreciative of the danger.

“County?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.

“Yes, please. What county is that?”

“Allegany County,” I said, “just outside of Wiscoy, on Wiscoy-Mills Mills

Road.”

The woman moved close and whispered, “Maybe we can find the house number.”

And with that she moved away towards the rear of the car while I drifted to the center of

the road, towards the opposite side mailbox.

“It’s six, two, eleven” said the woman, finding the number somewhere in the light

reddened darkness behind the car; I repeated the information into the phone, though by

then it seemed not to matter the man on the other end. He wanted to know only one last

thing, my name, after which he said the call had already been put in and someone would

soon be on the way.

I thanked the dispatcher for sending us help and thanked him again before

relinquishing the phone back to the woman, who, immediately on taking it back

proceeded to dial her husband, explaining while shielding the phone with the palm of her

free hand that the call would be “to let him know where his wife is and what’s going on.”

She asked who lived in the house and so I revealed the residents’ surname. “John,” I

heard her say into the phone as she walked away, “I’m here at Phil McLaughlin’s.” I

hadn’t said Phil but felt no need to correct her, deciding it didn’t really matter in this

particular instance whether she named the father or son.

And then another vehicle, a beat-up jeep of some kind, arrived on the scene. It

came up from town and slowed passing the wreck before stopping altogether in the

beams of my headlights. A young, long-necked man popped his head out to get a better

look at the wreck, loudly saying, “That looks like Jason’s truck” before leaving the

vehicle, engine and lights on, parked where it sat.

“You can’t park in the road!” Both the woman and I protested nearly

simultaneously, using nearly identical language. But the young man having embarked

upon a gangly stride towards the ditch, completely ignored us. I stood on the road

shoulder between the wreck and my own car and watched as he slid down the

embankment retracing, and carving more deeply, my heel marks. He tried the door and

found it no more willing to budge than had I. And then he jumped on top and straddled

the cab, his long legs and arms making me think of a giant water strider mounting a

bubble. He pounded a flat palm against the black windshield, peering in, and yelling

desperately through the curved and impenetrable glass: “Jason… Jason… Are you in

there?”

“We’ve already called for help,” I said, thinking he must be at least a little drunk.

“Somebody’s already on the way.”

“Yes,” confirmed the woman. “Somebody’s coming. They always come when

you call, usually sooner rather than later. Now the best thing you could do is move your

vehicle out of the road, and just wait.”

Receiving no answer from inside the truck, the young man sprawled upon it let

the wisdom of the woman’s words penetrate his brain; slowly he climbed off the cab and

came back up out of the ditch. But as he started back towards his jeep, I suddenly became

too impatient and nervous to wait. Already it seemed pushing luck to have stayed;

another vehicle might round the hill and descended upon us at any moment and I feared

the synergistic confusion of lights, cramped quarters, and speed would result in another

collision. So having made the decision to leave, already started for the window of my car,

I lifted a leg up with the assistance of the opposite hand while steadying myself by

holding to where the top of the door met the frame with the other.

“Well,” I called, easing across the windowsill on my bottom, “I’m not waiting

around to get hit.”

My voice angled away from the road towards the treetops as I slid in. Before the

young man could open the door to his vehicle, I had already shifted into gear and started

pulling away.

The road ahead, permeated with fog so thick it entirely obscured the pavement,

soon mercifully ended. I pulled in at the next place up on the left and turned even more

sharply left starting up the easier slope of the driveway. At the top I parked behind the

house and turned the key, shutting the engine, and heard the siren start to wail in the

hamlet of Wiscoy a half mile below, ordinarily a sad and melancholy sound, indicative of

some unknown person’s unknown misfortune. But the siren seemed now this night more

directly representative of hope and help, and the promise implicit in situations beyond

any one person’s control that, to cite the woman who had leant me the phone, somebody

always comes when you call.

The dogs whirled at my feet as we went out together into the darkness, and then

swirled ahead and disappeared into the field before me. The outside world presented itself

as a horizontally bifurcated whole—black earth below an opaque sphere of silver-

shrouded air. Pulsing at the juncture of these two disparate parts, an intermittent red glow

revealed the uppermost location of the steam stack for the electricity- and tomato-

producing co-generation plant set at the edge of a nearly-obscuring bluff in the valley.

Easing off the high middle of the field, drawing nearer the ever more rapidly descending

wooded edge, I saw below the diffused pulsing scarlet effusion of the distant steam stack

a steady enclosing white light containing all the more concentrated red, blue, and white

pulsing lights of emergency vehicles parked fore and aft at the accident on the near side

of the last curve in a dark and downward dark meander of road before it straightened for

the sparse illumination of hooded streetlamps a ways beyond.

Above the accident, the road remained immersed in night trapped by a deeply

carved glacial interstice of terrain. As I moved closer to see, cane prickers grabbed and

momentarily held onto my clothes before reluctantly releasing them with a slight

sensation of tearing. I stood at the farthest edge of the field and looked down through my

remnant of woods on the near bank; lining the far bank two flickering red flares seemed

to float suspended in the dark above the road. Soon a car approached, its headlamps

veiled by the sunken descending curvature of the earth. It came slowly, increasingly

hesitant until stopping entirely in the darkness just below, before cautiously continuing

on at a crawl. Suddenly, the memory of climbing in and out the car window caused me to

touch and test my jacket’s inner breast pocket. Instantly, acutely, I felt bereft at the

possibility of loss. For a long moment I considered walking down the bank to search

among the rescue workers for my wallet, but finally stepped back, retreating, and

returned with the dogs to the house.

“Dad,” I said, pausing to let my voice register. “I just wanted to let you know

there’s been an accident up here, but it didn’t involve me—not directly, anyway.”

In the moment of silence that followed I heard the slight wheeze of his breath and

knew he’d likely come from the living room to answer the phone.

“Oh. Well, I heard something come in on the scanner, but didn’t even realize

you’d left.”

“Anyway, I was early on the scene and stopped to call it in, but didn’t realize until

just a moment ago that I didn’t have my wallet. I’m hoping I didn’t lose it climbing in or

out of the car. Could you check to see if I left it there on the fireplace, maybe, or in the

top drawer of that little stand between the cellar and hallway door?”

“No,” he said, silence predominating momentarily. “I don’t see it on the mantle.”

A soft shuffling sound followed the pronouncement until, a moment later, the wheezing

returned. “Oh here it is, in the top drawer of the stand.”

“Okay, Dad. Thanks.”

“Is that it?”

Pure, breathless silence awaited the answer.

“For now I guess.”

“Good night then.”

“Good night, Dad. Thanks again.”

During the second intermission of an NHL radio broadcast (a game the Sabres

were eventually to lose, 4-3, after leading most of the way) I went out again to stand by

the edge of the field and check on the progress of the accident response team. A hearty

fraternal laughter, which, under the circumstances, seemed both out of place and yet

reassuring, rose from the site of the crash to permeate the otherwise quiet surroundings. I

tried to distinguish jocular life forms amidst the veiling fog and diffused light but the

laughter remained disembodied and derived of impenetrable mystery. Eventually, though,

a solitary form emerged ascending the dark to place new flares alongside the road next

those already or nearly extinguished. Disappearing into the black void below, the form

emerged a few minutes later carrying a lit flare which seemed to slide liquidly and

haltingly along the ground as if tied to the limping foot of a cripple.

A vehicle backed away into the subdued light of the hamlet and then the laughter

gradually quieted as the responders began to disperse. I kept vigil awhile longer

overlooking the scene, standing beside a bluebird house staked to a metal fence pole,

before turning away a last time to go in to bed. Before reaching the back door the dogs

and I encountered fresh rain, which speckled my glasses and lightly stung my cheeks as it

fell, cold and hard. During the night the rain increased and continued. At one point the

storm woke me, erupting with a near jolt of lightning and nearly instantaneous thunder.

Beau thumped his tail on the floor as Chance whimpered and then lightly, almost

imperceptibly, jumped up on the bed where he lay still, as if instantly asleep at my feet.

Eventually I slept again too, awaking in the morning to a sensation of complete wellness,

suffused with ions, feeling totally relaxed and refreshed.

A wide gap beginning at the bottom of my drive narrowed and deepened as it

angled and followed the edge of the road. I placed an empty white propane cylinder as a

warning at the upper edge where the gap angled and met the road, and proceeded to walk

up the hill with the dogs to see whatever other damage had been done, as well as to check

the placement of my warning cylinder from the perspective of oncoming traffic.

There was little evidence of ancillary effects one would have expected elsewhere,

given the damage done to my driveway and on, for another thirty feet or so, farther.

Higher up, a dry rivulet bed cut diagonally across the gravel shoulder, revealing the

sheeting path of road water directed and condensed into the first indication of an eroding

ravine. But other than an excess of water backed up into the descending channel where

the higher pond gathered the fields’ runoff, the indications of flooding remained inclusive

and nearly indistinguishable from an ordinary commingling of late winter showers with

the advent of snow thaw. The thundering of water overflowing the face of the dam and

continuing down through the five falls which gave the hamlet below them its name,

pulsed in the air, the power of the cascade strangely intimate though contained by the

creek a half mile away. The road pavement, drying, revealed a capillary network of small

cracks. And the sunlight falling through an abrupt parting of clouds felt instantly and

exaggeratedly warm. I walked back to the gash in the drive and picked from its eroded

basin a dozen four-foot squared lengths of poplar I’d kept in the barn to stick lumber.

A temporary freshening, having cleared and cleaned the concrete cow pad,

revealed the source of the problem: a subterranean passage covered with old rail ties and

dirt had collapsed under the earth’s weight, blocking the path of the pond overflow

directed along the side of the barn to a culvert under the road. I looked into the sunken

basin where a tangled mass of timbers choked with stones and gravel obstructed the

water, though no longer sufficient to cause it to back up and flood. I remembered the year

ago conversation conducted with the highway supervisor about preemptively digging a

ditch to forestall the event that had now happened. I replayed as well the unsatisfactory

monologue of just that morning, hearing again in my mind the distant change in the ring

tone as the call connected with a recording machine in the highway supervisor’s untended

township garage office.

I walked past the eroded gash in the shoulder while the dogs ran in tandem far

ahead. At the first curve the remains of a flare lay like a discarded snake skin on the road

edge. As I passed others on my way down the reversing S curve it occurred to me their

light, engulfed by the deep angle of the adjoining hill, had remained hidden from my

vantage the evening before. The others on the opposite side had given the road a strange

elevated appearance. Rounding the last curve, I saw the dogs had stopped beyond the site

of the crash; they looked back, waiting, until I called them back. A quick look at where

the truck had lodged revealed at the far side of the ditch the shattered detritus of glass

shards and amber plastic. A gouge extending along the lip of the ditch suggested one

trajectory of extraction; countervailing evidence of tire marks left on the pavement after

executing a hard U-turn suggested just the opposite. But if I hadn’t known of the

accident, this evidence left in its wake would have made no impression on me.

It seemed impossible that the mishap could have resulted in anything as serious as

a loss of life. The laughter from the night before, the paucity of evidence in its aftermath,

argued against it. I turned and walked back up the road, reassured, but still uncertain of

the actual outcome.

Glancing out a kitchen window while preparing lunch, I saw the highway

supervisor’s red pickup drive slowly by and turn into Hill Road below, before returning

just as slowly the way it had come. A couple hours later a red dump truck backed up,

lifted its bed, and disgorged a sliding load of creek gravel out under its swinging tailgate.

Next a yellow ditch digger with a wide bucket attached to a long articulated neck

appeared and reapportioned the load, ending the chore with a deft pushing and smoothing

motion reminiscent of a kitten’s meticulously licking its forepaw.

That night I stood in the kitchen looking out the end of the house at the blinking

red light keeping vigil over the valley. I climbed the stairs and pulled off my shirt in the

dark, initiating a miniature electrical storm that lit a small world contained in my hands,

confined by the fabric. And then I lay in bed listening to the soft splattering impact of

rain on the roof over my recumbent head, feeling no need for prayer as all appeared well,

and would remain so, at least until morning.

One night two weeks later I came upon another accident. I had just left my

parents’ house after watching with my father as the Sabres lost three to two, requiring our

post-season hopes for the team be postponed yet again another year. I stayed and caught

up with the world on the computer afterward so that it was after midnight when I finally

started for home. The road stretched empty and dark before me leaving the village except

for a strange narrow emanation of light protruding halo-like from a dark disc lodged

sideways on the high ditch bank separating lanes. I pulled to the side, stopped, yet left the

lights on and the car to idle, fumbling with the toggle lock release mechanism to open the

door (all the while remembering the last time I’d attempted opening the door while it was

still locked, I’d jammed the mechanism.)

But then I got out and approached a figure who I’d watched struggling as well to

climb free of his car.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

The man stood straight upright, legs planted shoulder-width apart, before taking a

faltering step backwards—a movement I graciously at first attributed to his attempting to

stand on steep sloping ground.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said, staggering. He leaned down and shut the car door,

which extinguished the internal light but did little to diminish the booming music still

originating within.

“Are you alone? Is there anybody else still inside?” I was hoping not to have to

get near enough to find out.

“Nope, it’s just me. Damn.”

He stepped around the car off the bank and as he came near I could smell the

strong odor of alcohol attendant as well. I looked up the bank at the dark house above,

wondering if I should go up and ask to make a call when, mercifully, another vehicle

approached around mine and stopped. I went to the driver’s window which he retracted

halfway; I asked if he had a cell phone.

“No, don’t call.” The wrecked driver suddenly became just as animated as

adamant. “I can’t have the police come. They’ll arrest me.”

I looked at the profile of the man in the car. I noticed he wore a neat Tyrolean hat

and, nearly simultaneously, the woman passenger sitting on the other side.

“Yes,” the man said, “we should call. Otherwise, he could be charged with

leaving the scene of an accident.”

I wasn’t sure whether the words were meant as a response to me or the woman

beside him or, perhaps, as a reconciling attempt at mediation. And then the woman got

out as the accident victim tugged at my arm, asking where it was that I lived.

“I live in Wiscoy,” I said, hoping to reveal in not turning to speak I wished not to

engage him any further.

“No you don’t,” he persisted. “I know you. You live just down the road from

where I do in that house on the corner.” He made a fist and struck it hard against his

chest. “My name’s Corey. You know me! Don’t call the cops, ok? They’ll put me in jail.

I can’t go to jail!”

Repressing the impulse to argue against his erroneous assertion about where I

lived, I stood silent, watching as he began bobbing in the middle of the road. The motion

reminded me of a boxer getting ready to land a first punch, which made me immediately

even more wary. But his rejection of my claim of residency bothered me more and

offended deeply.

The woman came around the front of the vehicle and tugged solicitously at his

arm.

“Come on, Corey,” she said quietly, “let’s get in the car.”

Suddenly agitated all the more, Corey shrugged sideways and broke away and

embarked upon a jumping dancing frenzy before me. I started to back up when suddenly

—as if the scales fell from my eyes—I recognized the woman as the young man’s sister.

(In the same moment, retrospectively I recognized the man driving as, and felt pain for,

the father.) The woman’s arm stretched out towards me as, inexplicably, Corey changed

tack and quickly passed on by her; continuing around the front of the vehicle through the

glare of the lights, he got in on the other side.

“It’s ok,” I nearly whispered, still backing away. “I’ll let you folks handle it

whichever way you think proper.”

“Thank you.” The sister took a step nearer. “We had just gotten his call. I’m

sorry. A minute either way and you mightn’t have got involved.”

For a moment longer her arm remained outstretched, as if she wished to establish

physical contact; the prolonged gesture rekindled my sympathy and, even more

surprisingly, a flicker of repressed longing.

I said goodbye and watched the vehicle turn and loop back on the higher and

lesser used road above the wreck which, disconcertingly to me, still thumped with the

barely contained pulse of what now passed for music.

A quarter mile farther on, a stop sign lay on the shoulder where the town road

merged with the state route passing through. Tire marks revealed the path of the vehicle

that had gouged the grass and snapped the perforated pole at ground level. I tried at first

to lean the sign up against the Dugway Road sign marker, but decided at last, as the safer

option, to lay it alongside before driving on.

A concentrated, interweaving wisp of fog swirled over the juncture below the

subdued red beacon of the co-generation plant projecting continually on and on in the

dark distance. I slowed and made the turn, losing the light behind the stream-cut hill, and

accelerated again towards the quiet, intervening hamlet and home.

***

That Morning of Blue Sky

Caitlin heard the phone just as she exited the milkweed into the back yard, and

knew she would never make it. But when the ringing started again she picked up the

pace, holding the camera against her chest to diminish the awkward imbalance, and half

ran towards the outbuilding studio.

Her mother’s voice seemed at once subdued yet unnaturally urgent. “Are you

watching the news?” she asked and Caitlin, still breathless, laughed a little and said no,

explaining she and Ginger had just come from a walk.

“Why, Mom? What’s going on?”

“Oh dear,” she said. “It’s terrible. A plane has flown into one of the twin towers.”

For a moment neither of them knew how to continue.

“It’s probably nothing, Mom,” Caitlin slipped the strap from her hand and placed

the camera on the workbench. She looked out the east-facing window, as if to discern

events on the horizon. “I’ll bet a Piper Cub got lost in the fog.” It seemed plausible, as

Caitlin remembered the long cloud in the valley that morning when she and Ginger

started their walk. But then realizing the line had gone dead, she became suddenly

unsure. Her mother had never before hung up on her without saying goodbye. Something

must really be wrong.

She could not know that the worst of it would be the silence to come, mornings

she would wake and nights she would fall asleep to a quiet house, and all the afternoons

in between when half open windows would admit the incessant chirring of fall crickets.

Even after watching the south tower go down, she anticipated little of that future

loneliness as she sat on the edge of the bed and looked out across the overgrown meadow

to the woods and a quarter windowpane of perfect blue sky. But though she did not know

the future, she would remember the day, just as it was, for as long as she lived.

She waited with the phone by her side, after trying repeatedly and not getting

through. Of course, the circuits were jammed. Everyone else would be calling now too.

So, she counseled herself, maybe it was best to just wait and try later. He would call if he

could.

She watched the replay of the other plane as it hit—again and again; she couldn’t

help it, transfixed as she was and even curious, to see it enter, completely whole, and then

just disappear. It seemed barely possible that a plane could so easily vanish, as if

absorbed like a single raindrop against the ground.

When the south tower fell, drawing in the curling wake of smoke and rising dust,

the event didn’t seem real. The man reporting on television failed to realize—or maybe

simply could not, in fact, believe what he saw. Who had thought either tower would

actually go down? And, beyond that, who could have guessed the last tower hit would be

the first to go down? Suddenly it was just a matter of time, then, before the other one fell.

Caitlin waited and waited for David to call, to tell her it was all right, that he’d missed his

train or gone out for a paper or… anything. But some part of her already knew better. His

office occupied a space directly behind the smudged point of impact three-quarters of the

way up. In the days to come, that knowledge would be a small comfort.

By mid-afternoon her mother called again, having already decided the best thing

to do would be for them all to meet at Garret’s, saying they should be at this time a

family, together, and Caitlin agreed, suddenly glad to have somewhere to go, something

to do in the next hours. At four, already beginning to reclaim and reorganize time, she

took Ginger on another long walk then petted her goodbye and locked the back door.

Her niece and nephew met her car as she arrived. They called her Aunt Caitlin

and approached shyly, each in turn giving her waist a tight clingy hug. Such deference

made Caitlin feel both at once alien and intimately connected, as if she were a favored

acquaintance come back from a long trip. Even her sister-in-law exhibited

uncharacteristic solicitude, offering to get her a beer after bringing a plate of raw steaks

to the grill. Finally, alone with her brother, Caitlin managed to talk somewhat more easily

about the future, about what she would do, though every now and then, when words no

longer seemed necessary or adequate, they would just listen to the steaks sizzle, or say

again how good they smelled, or watch silently as fat melted off them and fell flaring into

the fire. At one point Garret looked to the sky and noted the absence of contrails. Finally

Caitlin could resist no longer and blurted what she had wanted to say since arriving—that

David might still somehow return. But when her brother merely nodded and said nothing,

her hope seemed absurd.

After eating they stood before the small television in the den and watched a

special briefing from the Pentagon. An old man named Rumsfeld, introduced as the

Secretary of Defense, appeared to Caitlin as somewhat diffident, or ineffectual, or even a

little simple. A reporter asked him what happened. “To the best of our knowledge,” he

explained, “some very bad people took control of some planes and flew them into

buildings.” At that, Caitlin could no longer listen. For the first time all day she lost grip

on her emotions. A wave of frustration and anger and defiance rose unopposed within

her. God damn it, she thought. That’s the best they can do? She remembered the

President’s earlier faltering message and felt a sudden sweeping contempt for them all.

“We need new leaders,” she said dismissively, and turned for the outdoors as tears

welled in her eyes.

***

The Old Foote House

My mother first entered the Foote House, which is what everybody still called it

back then, as a young woman of eighteen or nineteen in order to have a troublesome

molar removed. The dentist, a man named Smith, had some years before moved himself,

his wife, and his practice down from East Aurora at the behest of the widow Lockwood,

whose husband had been the town’s dentist before that. Doc Smith worked out of the

Lockwood House office until one day the widow—a strict Wesleyan—smelled liquor on

his breath and commanded he leave. And so he ended up at the Foote House as did,

eventually, my mother.

The dentist chair stood by a bay window shadowed by three spruce trees lining

that side of the house. My mother may have idly looked out at them, or kept her eyes

closed while she waited for the doctor who, when he finally returned, poked at and

wiggled a wire prod against the offending tooth. “Mmmm, yes,” he murmured.

“Sensitive.” My mother nodded, her eyes closed, as she shivered in dread and some pain.

Five minutes, ten minutes, maybe fifteen minutes passed before the doctor

appeared again and washed his hands, flicking them once before lifting a towel. “Open,”

he instructed, and led with pliers and the plush palm that held them. Mother pushed her

head back into the chair rest as she realized what was happening, attempted to say No,

but the instrument inserted in her mouth wouldn’t let her. Retracting her legs, she

pinioned both knees in an attempt to push the doctor away. But he steadied her forehead

with one firm hand as he pulled at her mouth with the other. He pulled and pulled,

twisting, even harder. The tooth popped from her jaw and the doctor, triumphant, beheld

it as my mother jumped from the chair, pressing the side of her face, probing the void

beneath the cheek with her fingers.

“You didn’t give me anything” she cried. The dentist pursed his lips and frowned

in sudden confusion. Before he could speak, mother shot him a final indignant look and,

turning so fast her skirt flared away from her knees, strode from the office and out the

front door.

“It could have been worse,” I say, helping Mother conclude one of my favorite

stories. Casting a glance past the place where the chair once stood, I see the upturned tips

of a spruce limb nearly touching the center bay window. “At least he got the right tooth.”

“Hah,” says my mother, barely willing to cede old Doc Smith even this small

avowal. She leans back on the bed, settling deeper into her pillow against the spot where

a small partition used to connect with the wall. Briefly, I recall a childhood afternoon

spent pressed against it, taking turns peering at pond water through a microscope with an

otherwise forgotten classmate. That was the day I discovered the mote in my eye, floating

amorphous and transparent like an amoeba only I could see.

“Didn’t there used to be a light overhead?” I ask the question knowing full well

there did—the yellowish convex lens rounding like ribbon candy on the high cracked

ceiling which still exists, unchanged, behind a lower ceiling of thin metal grid and white

panels. My purpose in asking about the light is to elicit something I might not have

known or may have forgotten. Mother reacts involuntarily, looks up from the television

positioned exactly where the dentist’s chair stood.

“I think you’re right. There’s that switch on the wall that doesn’t go to anything.

That may explain it.” She lowers her eyes back to the television set but not even Oprah

seems all that interested in pursuing the current subject. Another woman is telling her

she’s her hero and she never thought she’d ever get to meet her, but now she has and that

means anything is possible and you should follow your dreams. Mother smiles; I can only

guess what she’s thinking.

“He got into politics,” she says, as if telling Oprah. But I know she is talking to

me and means Doc Smith, answering the unasked question of what happened—how he

came to drink and be ruined. “I remember passing by and seeing a couple of his cronies

coming out the back door, hanging off the handrail and grasping for the trellis before

falling flat down on the grass. I don’t know what kind of meetings those were, but…”

She leaves the implications and inferences unstated.

Strangely, improbably, I suddenly remember the handrail, the gentle curvature of

pipe off which those men launched their descent to the lawn; also the trellis, a structure of

wide-spaced white-painted boards connecting the house and garage. As a boy I

sometimes climbed it to ascend into the mulberry tree growing close at the back door.

“Pa never cared any for politics.” My mother’s assertion quickly makes the

connection my own thoughts were more slowly leading me to. Her father had served as

postmaster under the Hoover Administration and lost the position only because he

refused to change party affiliation when Roosevelt took over. Such fidelity for a man

with a wife and seven children to feed in the midst of the Depression reveals a quality of

political correctness unimaginable today. Mother doesn’t mean he didn’t care for politics;

what she means is he perhaps cared too much.

I wait for her to continue the thought, or to segue into another, but Oprah has

reasserted her hold so I direct my own reminiscence, recalling the corked holes drilled for

the chair’s segmented cables which, fished back down through the floor, lay in loose coils

on the basement floor for years and years after. Although I haven’t recently been around

to look, I imagine there are also still fittings—along with the ancient petcocks and gauges

—and pieces of pipe which belonged, most of them, to the antique boiler and

arrangement of cast iron radiators that froze and cracked that pivotal winter the heat was

turned down. It was Sierra’s fault. The man who occupied the house briefly in the

transitional period between Doc Smith’s residency and our own simply packed up with

his family one day and left the house to freeze.

“Stupid man,” Mother says bluntly, when I remind her. “Winchip wanted the

house by then too, and offered more money. He planned to put in an oil furnace anyway,

so he didn’t care. We had no other recourse but to end up paying for all that damage

ourselves.”

In my mind’s eye I can still see the old radiators piled up by the garage. The first

time I ever entered the house I came in through the door off the porch to find my other

grandpa on a step ladder drilling holes in the ceiling with a brace and bit for a new run of

copper pipe.

Neither grandfather, being less than voluble anyway, ever said more than a dozen

words directly to me, although, for a time when he was still able, Pa would stop on his

way to or from downtown and sit on the low radiator in the entry to rest and talk with my

mother.

I never knew what transpired during these moments between them. I wonder if

there was ever a flicker of recognition, either kept secreted away in his mind, or subtly let

out, that his youngest daughter had done well for herself. He never drove a motor vehicle

that I remember, and the house he owned was simple and small for a family as large as

his had been, though perfectly adequate for just him and grandma. In a way I supposed he

was poor and always had been and so later, when I delivered the paper and the price went

up a nickel, I kept the news to myself and covered the difference.

Much later it amazed me to find out my mother had lived as a young girl in the

Crandall House on the hill up the street, the same house that Winchip eventually bought

when he couldn’t get ours. That put things in a strange, and slightly disorienting,

perspective, all the more so because John Winchip and I were childhood friends, and in

our different way jealous of each other. One day—we had just watched his father drive

by—he told me his daddy never went anywhere without carrying a hundred dollar bill in

his wallet. If my father had ten dollars, that would have impressed me.

“Do you want to see something?” The question constituted the most—and, as it

turned out, last—words Grandpa ever directed my way. He pushed down on the arms of

the light brown Barcalounger recliner and rose, shuffling past the formal dining table into

the next room where Grandma lay sleeping. As he disappeared behind the curtain-

covered doorway into the small room containing the player piano, I looked up at the

plaque by the front door and read for maybe the hundredth time: Behold, I come as a thief

in the night.

A minute later Grandpa emerged, holding a cardboard shipping tube capped on

both ends. He slipped off one end and slid out the contents—a large ink drawing which

he spread out on the table, weighting each corner with a column of stacked pennies. I

looked at the figure of what to my fourteen year-old eyes looked to be Lafayette on

horseback, with the image rendered in an elaborate, curly-cue fashion that I instinctively

took to be French. I had never before seen anything like it and have never again since. I

felt entrusted by my grandfather with a great confidence and gazed silently for a long

minute before whispering, “That’s something.” Grandpa didn’t say another word, only

looked at me and winked.

Not long after we were awakened in the middle of the night by a loud persistent

buzzing downstairs. A long-dormant electric device installed by Doc Smith had somehow

gone off on the wall in kitchen. As the rest of us stood beholding the marvel of

resurrection, Father traced the twisting line coming down the wall, disappearing into the

cellar, following the wiring back to its source. A few moments later, silence restored, he

emerged from the cellar and told us to go back to bed.

The next morning Mother got the call that Pa had died in his sleep. I only heard

one side of the conversation, but have no doubt what she meant when she told Aunt

Althea, “I know exactly when it happened.”

Maybe she does. Even though I don’t believe in ghosts, I’ve seen them. So has my

brother. We used to close the living room doors at night and turn off the lights and feel a

tingle of belief as we watched them appear, rise up the walls and slide across the ceiling,

whenever a car came along the street. I don’t believe in ghosts, but some things make you

wonder. Sometimes I still go down into the basement and trace the remaining wires (the

buzzer itself is long gone) back to the transformer where they now dangle aimlessly in

mid-air. I peer into the workings of that mystery and look for a logical explanation.

Likely it’s just a matter of corrosion or abrasion or any of the limitless other possibilities

chance arranges, given enough time. Still, who can really know?

I don’t. All I know is that there’s a transformer that shouldn’t have worked and

empty bottles still in the crawl space behind the cellar stairs, and a contraption that may

or may not be a portable still left from Doc Smith’s day. Mother remembers back even

farther than that, and occasionally tells of the time as a young girl she scurried past in

fright while the widow Foote, attired in a long black dress, swept the back roof and

cackled down at her like an evil old witch. Even so, despite everything, Mother says the

house she has called home all these years has never—even on the loneliest, darkest night

—given her the creeps. For myself, ghosts or no, I confess to experiencing once or twice

a tingle of belief.

***

The Playground

Like a calm lake lying alongside the creek in the basin below, the new playing

field beckons the dogs. As we turn a brick corner the field it partly replaces comes into

view, extending straight away on a plateau slightly below and beyond the site of the old

Kindergarten playground at the original front of the school, where gray granite lintels—

incised Boys to the left, Girls to the right—once segregated the entrants.

The Boys’ side lies engulfed within a capital expansion extending all the way to

the street; I try to preserve intact the way things were in my mind. Between the entry

doors, where a wall of small steel-framed windows once conveyed outdoor day and night

to a small subterranean gym, three large panels of sealed glass now reveal a ground-level

interior entirely walled up with books. Only the Girls side of the original school-front

remains intact and unchanged, as I remember.

While the dogs urge on towards the creek, I continue resisting their pull,

preferring to stay back and remember the small gym with its sunlit interior. Closing my

eyes I still see the two thick climbing ropes suspended either looped or hanging straight

from the ceiling, their cloth taped ends dangling a foot from the floor. Near the ceiling

along the back wall a phrase gold-plated in serif—Enter to learn, Go forth to serve—

defined our duty even as we heedlessly mounted parallel bars, tumbled on mats, or

scooted across the shellacked floor on square dollies playing a game of crab soccer.

Perchance killed in blood-ball, we would sit on the tiny curtained platform nursing our

welts or move offstage where thick plaster-wrapped pipes emitted white puffs of smoke

when we hit them.

Back then the original school lawn lay enclosed within a large and slightly pitted

black iron pipe connected by stone posts rounded like tombstones. In Kindergarten I once

innocently explored with a forearm where this pipe, dislodged at one end, sheltered a nest

of wasps. Afterwards a janitor filled the end with concrete but the pipe remained

otherwise unaltered. Back then smallest of changes were seemingly desired or deemed

necessary. Years after an entry road cut through and diminished the schoolyard, a small

run of this cast-off iron and stone border survived, standing in quiet reproach (or

remembrance) at the edge of the next dooryard. But now it too is gone and, not

incidentally, so too most of the original expansive front lawn; what survives qualifies as

little more than a vestigial plot which during the most recent capital expansion served

barely adequately as a lot for the field engineer’s and construction worker’s trailers.

The result of their labor reveals itself as I continue past the looming projection

completed twenty years before. I let Beau off the leash and the dogs run immediately for

the descent of the new field lying alongside the creek far below. The full moon, rising

through bare trees, strengthens in the dwindling twilight. I walk up the asphalt drive

running elevated alongside the larger of what used to be two separate yet contiguous

playgrounds.

I look over to my left, entering the new work zone obliquely. My eyes scan the

slightly sunken level ground, lingering where I learned to ride a second-hand Huffy my

father bought, rebuilt, and repainted red and white for my fifth birthday. While he ran

alongside holding onto the very back of the seat in order to keep me from falling, I held

on and pedaled, looking over the white star painted upon the red brushstrokes of the wide

front fender. For a second I imagine again the sound of his footfalls as he ran alongside

holding onto the very back of the seat in order to keep me from tipping; the soles of his

shoes hit against the dirt slit as we come across the center line of the kickball diamond;

his breathing bursts upon my consciousness in quick increasing pants, becoming again all

I hear as we continue and his feet fall again swishing, nearly silenced as he and the

balloon tires run again in the grass. I remember as well all the original equipment of play

specific to that time and place: the wood and steel merry-go-round standing by itself, the

high monkey bars, the four connected stepped chinning bars, the rather small set of

swings, and finally the little and big slide that ended the progression of equipment lining

the edge of a steep jungle-like bank. In later years a chain link fence barred its access,

though where the fence cornered the big slide and paired teeter-totters the earth fell away

just enough to allow a determined boy to slip under. Two more connected chinning bars

followed the fence along its long tangent but a short distance before two more sets of

swings, set parallel to the first, defined an a small open enclosure within the vaster, more

rigid one. A last piece of equipment called the jungle bars, perhaps the most dangerous

and most fun of all the pieces to play on, resembled a geodesic dome constructed of pipes

which we would climb to chase each other around at the top or descend on one of four

equidistant fireman’s poles going down through the middle.

All of it is gone now except for the disintegrating chain-link fence and the

playground. The fence I could do without. I never have cared for such fences even when

new and find myself progressively determined to dislike them the more they age and

deform. Yet it is the playground where we swung and chinned and raced and lunged and

touched and called It that bothers me most; a once grassy place defined by parallel sets of

swings is now a paved parking lot enclosed within a chain link fence of its own.

According to Emerson detail is melancholy, and yet I want to be more specific,

for it is only through the revelation of detail that one conveys experience. The merry-go-

round, for instance, turned on a stamped steel axis surrounded by triangular wood sides

widening down to grip bars and plank seats gliding over the ground. You would hold

onto the bar running until the moment came to hop onto and mount the seat and glide

along, and that seemed a natural and innocent enough pursuit until a girl caught her leg

and broke it somehow, after which the merry-go-round disappeared.

Those were days of awakening awareness to dangers. Periodically the school gave

out, like report cards for us to take home, tabulations of insurance coverage indemnifying

against injury and loss. A lost arm or leg was worth five thousand dollars; a lost eye, ten.

A double loss, logically enough, doubled the compensation. As young students we

studied these figures, perceiving with wonderment if incomplete understanding our lives

valued midway between the loss of one and both eyes.

In second grade a boy with the last name of Storms gave me a long tapered shell.

The day before he had wanted my deck of Old Maid cards, saying “I swear I’ll give them

back.” Innocent as I was then I didn’t want him to swear and so kept the cards until the

next day he brought the shell and we traded.

He told me it was a blank and so I carried it out onto the playground in my pocket

and took it out only once to show a girl hoping to impress her. Immediately she told the

monitor sitting on the bench at the top of the bank by the school entrance and so it was

that I ended up not only losing the shell but sitting in the principal’s office.

The principal was nice enough, listening as I explained how it came to me the

thing he held horizontally between his thumb and forefinger. When I told him it was only

a blank he smiled before putting it away in a desk drawer, explaining “the blank” was in

fact a live round and dangerous. He sent me on my way with no more reprimand than to

say I should be careful, but I immediately became fast friends with the boy named Storms

who gave me the round. When I slept over we threw rocks at a paper wasp nest in a pine

tree and ran, thrilling, later deciding we would build a replica of the Wright flyer and

launch it down a grassy stretch of the high hill where we rested, midway between his

house and the nest we knew the wasps to be rebuilding.

Back at the playground, I stood with a girl nearby the pipe fence at the top of the

grade where the blacktop drive edged the school. Her name was James and she lived in a

place across the river and high up in the hills called Short Tract where a boy had been

killed crossing the road. “Those damn truckers drive too fast,” she told me, using

language learned from her father or possibly her brother who went by the name Jesse, and

seemed wild enough to deserve it. After a bit she turned and called out over the edge of

the playground and seconds later her voice came back out of the valley, the first time I

heard an echo.

On a summer day back when we could still go down over the bank and follow

along narrow dirt trails through the dense underbrush looking for golf balls, I met a boy a

few years older than me working the point of a common nail through the center of a

circular flat stone. He said he meant to put a string of rawhide through and make an

Indian necklace. I never did, but always meant to do the same; years later down by the

river I found a similar stone with a hole already drilled in the middle that someone knew

of such artifacts identified as an Indian net weight.

Finding that stone and remembering it now is an incidental of course. The boy

drilling the stone with a nail to make a necklace was named Hopkins. His father served

our village as mayor, a title less honorific than laden with practical responsibilities. He

had only half an arm on the left side and I remember him with his shirt sleeve pinned up

and using a shovel with the end of the handle tucked under his armpit as he dug.

I forget the boy’s name but everyone called him Hoppy, just like his dad.

He was blonde with good musculature and could swim. I remember because that

summer I was just learning and we were in the same swim class held in a small pool in

the basement of a gymnasium no longer there. It was such a small pool that even though

there was a diving board at the deep end we were forbidden to use it for fear someone’s

head would hit either the ceiling or the pool bottom which rose too little distant at too fast

a slant. The woman who taught us emphasized the importance of using our legs. She said

men and boys always developed their upper bodies yet let their legs go, so consequently I

have always since given my legs extra consideration. (I used to have beautiful legs and

sometimes while in shorts waiting on the playground at the start of gym to be picked for a

game of softball I would find myself consciously admiring them. Unfortunately they now

show their veins a little too much, but all in all still look rather good.)

This past fall a woman I knew as a young girl stopped by not to see me, but to pay

a call on my parents who were in Tennessee visiting my mother’s sister. By chance I

happened to be at the house, surprising us both when I opened the back door. When I

descended the steps in stocking feet to greet her, she laughed and suggested we go inside

and so we stood in the kitchen and talked as I made us both tea. From our shared

childhood we recalled a boy who used to pee his pants and I remembered the time he

splattered a girl who, unfortunate for her, passed too close as he became incontinent

while swinging. (But I shouldn’t laugh; I remember myself in those days ignoring equally

the call to dinner as well as the call of nature, running in only at the moment of being

almost too late, lifting the toilet seat in a sudden desperate necessity of hurry. And until

the age of six I would sometimes, though rarely, still go in my sleep. Now I fear, as the

urge begins again to intrude on my dreams, I might eventually wake to find I have done

so again.)

We are both over fifty, and yet she says I look the same as ever. I think I know

what she means because I can still see in her the girl I liked going all the way back to

grade school. She was twelve when her father died plowing a steep path. As he came to

the top the tractor fell back over him. I heard from my father he died in the Rec Room,

which was a converted church at the base of the hill behind which my own father worked

in the print shop. I remember that mourning for her in music class. Later we sometimes

met at the Rec Room for Boy Scouts and I remember the first time I entered through the

front doors wondering if I might still see somewhere the faded remnant of blood.

She always played first base in our softball games, yet in those years I never

really got to know her. We were always placed in separate classes and so most often

teamed up accordingly on opposing sides. Before the start of ninth grade she and Ellen

Keith—another pleasant and good-looking girl—transferred to the Academy, where I

followed my senior year. Once on a date we stood at the top of the snowy path from

which her father had fallen. Perhaps the thought crossed her mind too as we lingered but

as far as I could tell the place seemed to her no different than any other, so even though I

wanted to say something about it I didn’t.

All ways of telling in some ways run tangential to the intended story, and this

version of things is no different. I apologize. I would be more direct or succinct but if I

were so I would also end apologizing for not telling all I’d intended.

I will say this much directly: I don’t much care for the latest improvements. I

walk under an elevated causeway connecting an old part of the school to the new. Here

the terminology old and new becomes confusing because the ‘old’ is relatively new,

being in fact the gym built to replace the old big gym twenty years ago, while the ‘new’

is a second floor addition to what was originally a low row of school bus garages

converted to classrooms twenty years before that.

The way in is maze-like, twisting and turning between opposing brick sides of the

same convoluted, confused building. I enter under an elevated walkway stepping from

pavement onto grass and follow a narrow pathway to a still open interior, a kind of

sanctum sanctorum I had expected to be closed off forever.

Generally one should resist the tendency towards overt metaphor. Still, things

reveal themselves as they are. The thin tubular steel columns holding up the second floor

added above the old garage are updated versions of the flying buttresses supporting the

great cathedrals of Europe. But the execution leaves an impression of being too cheap

and wanting. The black painted steel already seeps red at the joints and the concrete

column of one, already cracked, appears well on its way to crumbling. And yet still I feel

an aura of soothing separateness from the world, though things are inverted. The outer

bricks of the building around me are the inner walls of a cathedral, and the retained

natural world within the Holy of Holies.

A row of windows on the innermost end wall reveal the corridor within and I try

to walk the hallway back to the rooms of my youth. I envision the location of all but the

sixth grade class, which remains lost to me still though I remember at the back of the

center row—between Jim Morris and me—the exact placement of the glass-covered

incubator box containing six eggs which wiggled and nearly hatched only to expire

overnight in the final hours when a janitor closed the windows, raising the temperature

inside.

I turn and walk out and stand on an asphalt elevation looking over the dark ghost

of the playing fields below. Chance has returned and stayed with me and now waits

patiently at my side while Beau trots towards us in the distance. It seems certain he will

follow our scent to find us, but for some reason he turns away and so I call out, causing

him to make a quizzical turn before turning again. I cup my mouth and repeat the call

louder, but my voice glances off the long sectional walls of the building and confuses

him. He hears my call echoing before him and runs to catch up.

In my mind I run the other way towards the farthest soccer goal where Father tied

off our kites so we could go home to dinner. And just that quickly, I run again to look out

the front door to see my kite still flying high and steady, seemingly forever.

Even in my dreams I cannot find the place. I am like Beau chasing an illusion of

something I once knew for real but can now only imagine in being. I lie in bed piecing

together the remnants of remembrance to no avail. The sixth grade classroom exists in

my mind and in reality, and yet I cannot combine them as one. Instead I dream of the last

softball game when all the girls of my youth stood on the same field with our team at bat;

each player not at the plate stands casually in line, waiting his or her chance to hit. For

some reason we are without our favorite bat, and Michelle Jeffords has gone to retrieve it.

In my sleep I see her return, walking proudly and triumphant, holding the solid black bat

overhead like a trophy. I take it, feel the sublime tapering weight balanced against my

hands and swing for the stars, remembering with both body and soul a stroke practiced

and perfected in the stage-side anteroom adjacent the original small gym of my memory.

I recall Michelle lost her father at an early age too. Before the time of my first

echo the mysteries were already accumulating, though even in that time of relative

innocence the mystery of her father’s choice seemed more enigmatic than most. Christian

Scientist to the last, he died refusing medicine, thinking God alone could or would save

him. Even to my young mind that made little sense, for what manner of scientist rejects

the very fruits of his labors?

And so it is I recall her emerging with the bat triumphant as I drift off to sleep and

dream sometime during the night I am over the far other end of the playground

attempting to kill a poisonous snake. It is a time predating enclosure and we have gone

off the playground looking for golf balls. Lifting a flat stone reveals a multicolored coil

half exposed in the dirt. Only later will I learn a rhyme to assuage or justify fear: Red and

black, friend of Jack; Red and yellow, dangerous fellow. Time flies through the air and in

an instant I am left alone calling out through the fence, waiting, not hearing anything,

until I waken to discern, as the dogs uneasily lift their heads towards our bedside

window, not the echo of my voice but that of a lone coyote responding forlornly in the

winter moonlight.

***

What Does It Matter, What Does It Mean?

Even some forty years later she could still hear their twinned voices announcing

the news in perfect synchronization, as if they really were tied together the way everyone

said. The remaining entirety of Miss Ayers’ second grade class turned around in their

seats as well to see the two girls, Alice and Janie June Hopkins, standing just inside the

open doorway breathlessly awaiting the composite reaction, which, Mama said, may have

been somewhat disappointing since all the rest of them too, whether they remembered it

later that way or not, no doubt first thought—maybe even hoped—the girls meant the

school music teacher and not the President of the United States had been shot. (Here the

story expanded briefly to include Rusty Appleton’s inability to sing This Land Is Your

Land, him being barely able even to read much less sing in proper time. And just why he

had been put into a regular music class in the first place instead of a special ed. class not

any one knew. But everyone made allowance for the arrangement except of course Mr.

Kennedy who, as Mama put it, had a short fuse, so quite predictably and inevitably he

went off, bending down and stomping both feet like a human metronome while the blood

gorged his neck veins and colored his whole head to match, even the small triangle of

scalp deepening through his thin flat-top to the exact same shade of his prickly copper red

hair.)

Grandma Lee then followed with her story, having witnessed the second shooting

live on t.v. the Sunday morning just two days after as Grandpa and Mama and Uncle

Almon returned home from church. She had glanced out the living room window as the

car pulled in the drive and then looked back to the black and white television screen just

in time to see Jack Ruby stepping forward and Oswald closing his eyes while opening his

mouth and the deputy in the white Resistol hat just standing by helpless, equal parts

aghast and surprised.

I full well knew by now after the umpteenth telling the name of the escorting

officer—Detective Leavelle—but kept my piece because saying it would only be

showing off, not reminiscing. I did have something to contribute, however, even if it was

only tangential, because an hour before Nile Montgomery showed up at the back door

wanting to know why he had gone all the way to Five Falls when I was spending my

morning in Meridian instead—which I didn’t have to be told meant he had proceeded

straight from Church up over the hill to Mills Mills, before circling back on the State road

to find me.

“Good question,” I told him, which didn’t answer the question but did cause him

to exhale a small laugh before clamping it off, getting serious.

“I was wondering if I could get a piece of cherry wood,” he said, verging on being

apologetic, adding by way of explanation Mrs. Montgomery wanted to put him to work

making a picture frame for a new painting she’d just completed. So I said, “Let’s not

disappoint her then,” and lifted my barn coat from the hook on the back room east wall,

following but then waiting as he descended the rear steps deliberately stiff-legged and

careful while holding the door jamb with one hand.

“I guess I ain’t no spring chicken anymore,” he said, gathering himself at the

bottom, wobbling once as he put both feet together and straightened, regaining balance

before heading back towards the truck across a thin veil of snow covering the stone walk,

adding fresh boot prints to the ones he’d made coming in.

It wasn’t cold enough that the snow stuck on the paved road; a residue of salt kept

it clear and damp even though the grass in the surrounding yards had begun to fill up all

white and clean. Inside the shop, though, the cold made clouds of our breath, so I left the

door open to let the air mix and went to the stove and started making a fire—crumpling a

full sheet of news, placing it down in the cylindrical belly of the stove, laying in sticks

before opening the ash door and kneeling, peering and pushing a lit match up through the

circular grate, searching for, finding, and finally touching the lit tip to the paper which

sucked in the flame. Once the fire took hold we went out in back where the machines

were and where the entrapped cold made the fluorescent lights flicker, as ever reluctant to

come on. Spreading the step ladder I climbed to the level of wood piled in the rafters

above the table saw, picked out a piece of cherry four inches by whatever length it was

(because I couldn’t see) and pulled it out, placing one end at a slant down to the floor,

guessing it amounted to nine or ten feet as the high end came level with my chin. Eyeing

the board’s length looking for twist and bend and satisfying myself there wasn’t so much

the piece couldn’t be used, I climbed down off the ladder and started the planer, taking

light cuts as much to make the board straight as keep the noise to an acceptable Sunday

morning level.

“What’ll I owe you?” Nile stood wanting to know, back in the front room. The

board sat flat on the workbench, hanging a foot over each end. I stood in the doorway of

the back room half a foot higher than the floor he was on and waved a hand in the air as if

to say nothing because the board was wood from his pile, the rest of which he’d already

said was mine if he never got around to it. Then I said the word Nothing, before adding

the rest, “Besides, you taking it now saves me hauling it later.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

“Sure.”

He nodded his head then and pocketed his wallet, slipping it in the back of his

pants. But he didn’t make any other move after that which meant he might stay awhile so

I went to close the front door now that the fire had took hold and stood on the threshold

looking across the terraced flat where the train had once run. Above the downtown

buildings and the blinking red light immediately below, a slit of white sun lit the space

between two touching clouds spread low on the ridge at the far side of the valley.

“Looks like it might be a nice day,” I said, coming back to hold my hands above

the stove.

“Maybe,” Nile said, “but I’ll bet anything we’re in for a storm.”

“Is that what they’re forecasting?”

“Hell if I know.” He unzipped and removed his blue coat stitched with triangles

like a quilt, and laid it, swinging the bottom out and away, across the freshly planed

board on the workbench. Next he unbuttoned his left cuff and rolled it back once,

offering his wrist for inspection. “Here’s my forecaster, right there. Feel that bump.”

I reached for and lightly touched, feeling little beyond curled hairs and drawn skin

until Nile’s other large hand caught and redirected my fingers onto a bulge of jagged

bone.

“Your fingers are cold,” he said.

“I wonder why,” I said, but he ignored that small insolence as he compressed my

fingers beneath his.

“I got that hooking a gate post with a tractor’s fore tire. Spun the steering wheel

so hard it fractured my wrist. Ever since, whenever a storm’s coming in, I know about it a

half day in advance.”

“That gate post did a number on you.”

“Did a number on the tractor, too. Cost me a month’s wages to fix it and another

month’s to fix me. Taught me to keep a good look out where I was going.”

Nile made no motion to reclaim his coat, so I lifted the top of the stove by the

wound metal handle and looked in on the fire as if to coax it. But anyone who has ever

tried to coax a fire that way knows as well as me it doesn’t do much good. All my

looking accomplished was to release a puff of blue smoke. “I did something similar my

freshman year of college,” I said, again lifting the top of the stove quickly to drop in a

few more sawn sticks. “On my way to Swain one night to meet a girl, and late getting

started, I raced over Snyder Hill in a snowstorm. I let up on the gas at the top to coast but

the plows hadn’t been through and with the road as pure white and untracked as the

surrounding pastures and fields, I knew I was going too fast even before I got in trouble.

About a quarter mile down the other side of the hill the back tires let go and the car

started fishtailing. I looked down at the speedometer needle still doing seventy-five miles

an hour and realized there wasn’t one other thing else I could do but say, Holy, Holy, and

hang on.” I could also have added I was convinced right then and there I was going to

die, but supposed I didn’t have to. “As long as the road remained straight I could steer

like I was sledding, and for another quarter mile or so I managed—thank God nobody

was coming the other way—until the car just slid off the outer edge of a long curve and

the next thing I know it’s flipping sideways, one door open with the light on and me

trying to stay put, pushing away from the steering wheel and burrowing down in the front

seat, watching the windshield forming a spider web in slow-motion as the cracks spread

from the center outwards.”

I could also have added how odd it felt to get out of the car once it had stopped

rolling. It landed upright, with all the lights on both inside and out illuminating the

immediate snow and for awhile I just stood there looking at the surreal scene until

another distant set of lights approached up the road. I turned off the lights and closed the

passenger door and crossed the field to the road where the driver of the truck stopped in

his tracks and let me in, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to encounter

someone in the middle of nowhere and give them a lift home.

“Here.” Nile raised his broken-mended wrist again for me to take it and I did,

feeling for the bulge of roughly melded bone. And again he clamped over mine his hand

and fingers bigger by half and still strong from over a half century of hard farming. But

instead of compressing my touch at the break he twisted his wrist, slipping the topside

past my still uncomprehending fingertips to expose the softer underside with its two

tendons standing taught in the skin with the palm of the attached hand tipped back as if in

supplication to the sky.

“Feel that?”

I wasn’t sure that I did, nor what he meant.

“Tell me I’m still living.”

Then I understood—thought so at least—my fingers comprehending, feeling the

thin throbbing insistence of life under the skin.

“Well, I feel your pulse.”

“Yes.”

“I guess you’re alive, then.”

“Good.” He laughed and pulled back his hand and buttoned the cuff. “There’ll

come a time soon enough when neither of us will be able to.” After a short silence, he

added, “Your fingers are cold.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.” I went back to work on the stove, pulling the ash door lever

up and drawing it, door and all, forward to maximize the airflow.

I hadn’t planned to work this Sunday, did not really plan to work now, but figured

since I was there I might as well make the shop comfortable. Nile might or might not

want to stay but it was sure he’d rather soak up warmth than cold. And maybe he’d tell

another story while he waited for the stove to kick in.

It wouldn’t take long now the way the draft drew the flame up through the wood.

Wide open the draft drew a column of flame two feet into the stove pipe, the fire

thumping and howling as it yearned even higher. I half closed the draft and damped the

pipe a quarter shut. The promise “Warm Morning” cast on the stove’s flat iron top began

to become real as the thin steel stovepipe radiated heat beneath the partly closed damper.

“I need to use the piss hole.” Taking a short step towards the trapdoor cut in the

floor out back, Nile stopped in mid-stride, half turning to inquire, “It still works, don’t

it?”

“Well, it didn’t freeze. Dirt plumbing doesn’t.”

“Sometimes the old ways work best.” Nile went on through the back door,

stepping up onto the higher level of floor. “Never did need a toilet to pee.”

His saying toilet made me remember something I wanted to show him, so while

he peed I went behind the bench and opened the six panel door to the cramped room

containing a toilet and small washbasin, neither of which functioned since the water was

turned off. Above the toilet a glass shelf held an antique cardboard cylinder of Delft

porcelain cleaner and a small box of assorted other items I’d discovered and kept; one in

particular, an old bill book, I was after. Gray with age and speckled darker gray with

spots of mold, held together by two flat staples so corroded the rust darkened the binding

underneath, it held a record of transactions in pencil still perfectly legible forty years

later. I held the bill book flat to my palm in one hand, backed out of the cramped

bathroom and shut the door.

Closed, the book showed only a simple letterhead:

C. Miller & Son

Coal, Cement, Plaster and Drain Tile

Underneath, written freehand in pencil, someone had indicated the period of

business represented within: Oct.9-16, 1963.

Nile said “Kirby Cronk” in a voice of fond recognition when he came back and

took the book and read off the first entry. “Good old Kirby,” he said, remembering. And

then he read what good old Kirby had bought. “Twenty-five pounds Sta-dri. He must

have been keeping cows then. Oh, and look at that phone number.” He held out the pad

facing away to show me, forefinger pointing: 11F.

“Here’s what I want you to see.” I took the pad and flipping the sheets with my

thumb found the entry I wanted. “Here, take a look.”

“Well, glory be. Robert Holloway. October sixteen, nineteen sixty-three. Five and

a half hours Crawler, forty-four dollars. That must’ve been when they moved the house.

Your daddy would remember that. A logging truck come from nineteen on the way to

Rushford took out the old bridge, dropping the trailer and logs into Cold Creek, while the

tractor somehow held to the far bank. That driver sure was some lucky son of a gun”

“I saw a picture once.” I envisioned the creek flowing sedately not two hundred

yards away ending in the river not a mile farther downstream.

“Uhuh,” Nile said, nodding once, continuing. “Anyway, when the state came to

rebuild the bridge they straightened the approach so that any houses on the upside of the

road were moved back. I remember Robert and his dad pouring the new basement floor,

running short on the truck load. Two minutes before five Robert’s dad sent him off to get

a bag of cement—told him not to come home without it, because they had to finish and

float it off before the slab set.”

“Did he? Did they?”

“He did. They did. Bob was back before I had time to finish my pipe.” He handed

the booklet back. “Interesting. Where’d you find that bill pad anyway?”

“Almost directly overhead. I was moving stuff around, making room for some

other stuff and came across a whole cardboard box full of those things. I threw them all

out, except for that one. And actually, I’d forgotten all about it until coming across it

again just the other day as I was boxing stuff up.”

“What made you keep this one in particular?”

“Well,” I said, a little embarrassed. “After I saw the age of them, I started looking

for something from November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three. I thought it would be

interesting to have something connected to that exact day. But there wasn’t anything for

that week or for that matter for November of that year at all, so I took one from the month

prior, to the day.”

“What’s so special about November twenty-second?”

“The Kennedy assassination?”

“Oh,” Nile said, and exhaled a small self-conscious laugh. After a silence, he

added: “That’s not the strangest explanation I ever heard, but it’s damn close.”

What I wanted to say—explain—is there are events I call “stops” because that’s

what happens, time stops when they happen. They are the events which when people hear

about they never forget where they were, what they were doing, or even what the weather

was like. Pearl Harbor was probably the biggest stop for any living person old enough to

remember. But as that number declines, so does the event. Comparatively, the Kennedy

assassination remains widely accessible through the memory of nearly all the older

people I know. So I have latched upon it, upon them, as a link and divisor between the

living and dusty past. I asked Nile (thinking afterwards, too late, I could have asked him

about Pearl Harbor as well) what he was doing when he heard the news and he told me,

somberly, after a second’s hesitation, he didn’t know anything about it until later. That

day he’d gone out after noon to cut tops left over from what the lumber company had

taken from the woods the year before. He was putting in firewood until almost dark and

when he arrived home his Ella let him eat supper in peace before telling him. He said he

must have been the last American to know, and it made him feel a little guilty still.

The fire was getting hot now, all over the stove, radiating enough that you could

back against it and feel your kidneys warm. I went to close the front door, but Nile

stopped me. He pointed at the clock on the wall and asked, “Is that the time?”

“It surely is.”

“That’s a handsome timepiece,” he said, looking at it instead of the time.

“Chestnut is it?”

“Yes it is. I don’t know that the Shakers ever built any quite like it, but they might

have. They often used cherry because the color and grain added interest, so I don’t know

that they would object to using chestnut for the same reason. Anyway, I like it.”

“That’s all that matters.”

“Someday,” I said, hinting at mystery, “I’ll tell you the story behind my finding

that wood.”

“Okay, someday,” he said, and reached for his coat. “But right now I need to go

finish errands before retrieving Mrs. Montgomery from church.” Just as his fingers

touched the fabric of the collar he gathered himself back, half turned. “I wanted to say,

though, remembering Robert reminds me my mother wanted that name, but her own

sister beat her to it. So then she went the opposite way and picked something she

considered exotic, giving me the name of some obscure English stage actor, not

anticipating the doctor would misspell it. So I ended up a little more exotic than

intended.”

“I always thought you were named for the river.”

“Could be I was and Mother just made up a story. Lucky, I guess, she didn’t think

to name me Genesee. I’d have ended up being called Jenny.”

“You’d’ve been better born a girl, then.”

“That might’ve pleased Mother.” He put the back of a hand to his mouth and in a

lower voice added: “Would’ve severely disappointed some of the gals, though.”

“I bet.”

He straightened, looked out the front side window down across town. “They run

north, both rivers. So possibly Mother just figured one’s as good as the other.”

“That’s not the strangest explanation I ever heard,” I said, “but it’ll do in a pinch.”

“It’s the truth as I know it.” He gave me a sideways look of a boy who thinks he’s

just gotten away with a lie.

“That leaves enough leeway,” I said.

“Just enough,” he agreed, reaching again for his coat. Lifting the collar off the

edge of the workbench, pulling the body of it to the air, he turned an arm and shoulder,

putting it on. “Well, I got to be running north too.”

A half hour later I stood on a cherry and ash floor looking out a bay window at the

remnant of a snow monster melted down until it had devolved into an almost transparent

planarian in the side lawn, although the new snow had covered and partly revived it,

restoring some solidity to its form. If we got enough new snow, I thought maybe I’d help

Buddy make another. As I watched he squatted, his rump almost touching the ground,

and collected with a little blue plastic shovel what little snow had fallen that morning and

stuck, dumped it into the companion red bucket, compressing the snow with a wet mitten

before upending a stepped solid. As I watched I followed Grandma’s and Mama’s

conversation too, having started it by asking what they remembered. And when they had

paused long enough for me to enter in I said I had something to show them, and so

opened the little drawer in the enameled stand by the center window, retrieving the little

gray-brown book I’d brought from the shop just that morning. I opened it and looked, and

felt again a strange sensation as I read the description for the last transaction dated

October 16, 1963, billed out to Robert Holloway for a bag of cement at a dollar and a

half, which made me think of the story for that particular day even if it wasn’t the story

I’d first sought, just as Nile had told it.

*****

Mama said she knew something was wrong even before she got back to the car.

Papa said at first she was only imagining things as he slid into the seat behind the steering

wheel beside her, but by the time they passed through the dip in the road and followed the

curve back up, passing by the town sheds, he began feeling it too. First thing when they

got home Mama reached down and grabbed a gloved handful of snow which she pressed

to her forehead and kept there as if suffering a hard fever, even though the snow melt

dripped from her brow all the way to the back door, ruining her makeup and mascara.

Papa rushed to the back door, opened and held it squirming a little as if he were a boy

having to pee and followed her in, their paths diverging at the kitchen table as he headed

one way down the hallway to the upstairs bathroom as Mama went the other way for the

one downstairs, intent only on finding a washcloth and water.

What happened was: Pastor Phillip Wingate experienced a kind of epiphany one

day some four or five months previous while standing in a small private wood filled with

tall slender trees. He explained all, making a confession in some detail before apologizing

to the congregation the next Sunday. The trees were not his but belonged to the farm of

the parishioner who stood with him, Brother Yancey. (Who at this mention of his name,

lifted his head and smiled, either proudly or bravely I’m not sure which.) Together they

lifted their eyes appreciatively to the ceiling as if to the filtering canopy of yellow leaves

the Pastor told of. It seemed only right that they would stop and take notice, he said;

fitting that they should engage in a small moment of silence before commencing rough

work; entirely proper that they might let their bodies and minds engage the warm aura of

light projecting down softly around them. The congregation, drawn into a worshipful and

understanding attitude, thus forgave them.

Later, during the summer as we drank beers under cover of his open garage door,

he told me a different version.

“If I had my twenty-two,” he said Yancey said, “I could get that little bugger.”

The parishioner-farmer raised an arm, extending a long forefinger, and Pastor Phil

readjusted his gaze to the left. With some disappointment he realized his companion

stood transfixed not in transcendent wonder of the wood’s cathedral-like interior, but

with thoughts of dispatching a grey squirrel sitting all but motionless on the long

horizontal branch of a big maple. As if perceiving the danger, the squirrel quivered its

bushy tail, humping it up like the Greek letter Omega.

“Ash will make ash before Thanksgiving,” said the farmer, lowering his arm,

reorienting them both to the task before them. “But looking won’t get the job done. We

need to get cutting and splitting and put the sun and air to work too.” For a few seconds

more he made no overt move and Pastor Phil wondered if he might still be considering

getting his rifle and going after the squirrel. But his companion made no further move in

that direction; it appeared finally he may only have been weighing the wisdom of his

words, awaiting some commendation. Finally he lifted a mud-caked boot up onto an old

stump and bent down. He clinched and retied the laces before removing the boot off the

stump and replacing it with a dirty red chainsaw he’d carried along with a matching red

can from the pickup.

“What would you like me to do?” Pastor Phil asked the question as if asking for

direction, still feeling awkward and out of his element. He watched Yancey filling the

saw, smelt the pungent aroma of the oil and gasoline mix. He saw the gas can tilt

gradually back towards level and the thin flow of liquid infused with yellow leaf-light

slow and then stop, a wet streak darkening one side of the saw.

“Just stand back out of the way.” The other man made a slow pushing motion

with his free hand before stepping alongside the saw giving the pull cord a quick and

ineffectual yank. Pausing and half turning his face without looking up, he added: “It

sounds pretty basic, but you’d be surprised the numbers of people somehow get pinned

under trees.”

So the pastor backed off. He stood in a small clearing on a sunlit patch of yellow

leaf fall and watched. Behind him lay a wide avenue. If a tree should waver off kilter he

could run, away. But Yancey’s cuts were precise and the felling proceeded entirely as

intended. Two cuts on one side excised a small wedge. A single slanting cut to the rear let

the tree tip into and close the wedge as it fell. Yancey seemed more woodsman than

farmer as he pulled the saw from the cut at the exact last moment as the tree wavered.

Stepping away only as it started to lean, he still easily avoided the slight backward kick

caused when the crown hit, compressed, and sprung the tree from the stump. In like

fashion half a dozen trees fell. An outwardly growing circle opened in the leaf canopy,

letting in unfiltered sun and sky. And then Pastor Phil started to work too, using a maul to

split—usually in one pulling swing—he seemed proud of this detail—the chunks the

farmer sliced off the trunks in quick succession.

Sometime in the course of that afternoon it occurred to him that what Yancey had

said about ash making ash related naturally to his calling. He began to suspect the Lord

meant to use the day for imparting instruction. And so when the Lenten Season next came

around he’d long since decided to combine what seemed two fitting and elemental

components—cleansing water and the spent residue of fire—to anoint the members of his

flock. Smudging the sign of the cross on their foreheads he thought to himself “Ashes to

ashes” while intoning the solemn message: Remember, you are dust, and unto dust you

shall return.

Sure knowledge of what happened lay in the future. Meantime, there was plenty

of gossip and speculation. When Papa went downtown to get a second cup of coffee and

a donut and read the paper at the Din Den—Fine food, and fast!—I was there with him

and watched Stod Buttles push back from the round table where some segment of the

local men, and usually the same ones, gathered to convey and catch up on the news. “Any

fool knows,” Buttles said, standing, “you don’t mix wood ash and water and then smear it

on people’s faces.” He put the flat palm of one hand on his full belly and burped into a

fist made with the other as if blowing on an imaginary horn, keeping his mouth mostly

closed for decorum.

“Obviously not any fool,” Papa said. Which got a laugh until he added: “But

anyone but a fool would think a person’s entitled to a mistake now and then.”

That shut down the laughter and most conversation for awhile, and Buttles

himself at that, and though he stood holding his stomach in a pose of expectation, nothing

followed, at least not right there and then. So he just shrugged as if he really made no

never mind and walked out.

Later, though, back at the house Papa said it hurt like hell and even once said idiot

by which, I guessed, he meant Pastor Phil. Mama gave him a quick look of disapproval

but then nodded a little bit as if mostly agreeing.

“It hurt plenty,” is all she said. But dabbing the edge of an ice cube to the welt,

still red and swollen an hour later, lightly tracing the intersecting lines on her forehead

she added: “I know one thing. I’m not going out in public looking like a member of the

Manson family.”

“It looks more like the Mark of the Beast to me,” said Grandma. But everyone

seemed to think it best to just entirely ignore that particular comment.

“Aw, Ma” I said, disappointed

“Don’t Aw Ma me. I’m not going, and that’s final. If you want pancakes I can

make them right here. I don’t see any need to go traveling up into the hills and wait in

line.”

“What’ll I tell Hirsh, then?”

“Tell him he can come and sit here by a nice fire and eat all the pancakes he

wants. And it won’t cost him a cent.”

So I put on my boots and coat. When Buddy saw what was happening he wanted

to go too. Teddy waited lying across the threshold up against the back room door until I

finished slipping Buddy’s boots on and zipping his coat, then he rose at the last moment

and together we went out the back door, descending the steps into a light falling snow.

Overnight, a half foot had accumulated and lay undisturbed on the lawns. A plowed up

ridge, a foot and a half high, lined the road on both sides. The air was crisp and cold, and

the new snow made it feel more like the beginning of winter than the end.

I held Buddy’s gloved hand and he held the leash until we’d turned in by the

remains of the old Pontiac Indian sign which amounted to no more than the concrete base

and a half foot of octagonal metal post. As we passed between the defunct dealership—

now a liquor store—and the Hotel, I let Teddy off the lead and he ran ahead back behind

the old theatre so that he could do his business in the cover of the small grove of pines

separating the little parking lot from the yard next door. Hirsh lived in an upstairs

apartment next to the old theatre, which most everyone still remembered as the theatre

and called the Opera House, even though it hasn’t been a theatre for over thirty years, or

an opera house in over eighty. I opened the back door to Hershel’s place and climbed the

narrow stairs, leaving Buddy and Teddy to wait at the bottom. As I knocked on the white

enameled wood door a second time and stood looking down at Buddy sitting on the

bottom step with his back to me, petting Teddy who sat looking back at me, the embossed

brass knob turned. Next the door moved inwards, and Hershel’s face appeared around the

edge, his eyes blinking as if he’d been sleeping.

“What’s up, Yank?” he said, opening the door wider to let me in.

“I can’t stay.” I nodded towards the bottom of the stairs as if in explanation.

Hershel looked down around the door jamb, saw what I meant.

“I just came by to tell you there’s been a slight change of plan. Instead of going

out to the Maple Tree Inn, Mama wants to make pancakes at home. So come on up and

join us.”

Hershel looked at me and smiled weakly.

“Honestly, I forgot all about that. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to decline your mother’s

kind invitation. I just got word my boy died during the night. Michele’s coming by with

some ham and potato soup and then she’s driving us down to Eldred for the

arrangements.”

“I’m sorry, Hershel.”

“I know.” He smiled again weakly, clasping his hands before letting them fall

once more to his sides. “It’s all right. We knew he didn’t have long.”

That was true. From almost the first day of our acquaintance I’d heard the story of

his son’s lymphoma and it’s rapid, intractable progression. Herschel had just moved into

town and needed a place to store his metal flat-bottom row boat when Beulah, his

landlord who lived downstairs and who knew me from the time my brother and I were

both, as she says, snot-nosed kids, sent him across the street, saying I’d probably have no

objection to letting him keep it in the otherwise unused rear end of the shop. So I made an

extra key for the lock, and that’s how I first learned about his son as we started being

friends.

“You’re coming to the funeral?” He stated the matter as both question and fact.

He wanted me to come, but maybe wasn’t sure I’d be willing or able.

“Of course I’m coming, Hirsh. Just let me know.”

“All right, thanks.”

I went back down the stairs and saw Buddy petting the lump on the side of

Teddy’s face, situated under the right ear at the back of the jaw.

“What’s this, Uncle Jason?” He asked the question still touching the lump, but

looking up.

“That’s an infection, Buddy. I’m not sure why it’s there. But the veterinarian gave

your grandma and grandpa some medicine to make it go away. So maybe next time you

come it won’t be there anymore.”

“Okay,” he said, and petted the lump once more before standing. Outside we met

Michelle and her daughter, Megan, coming in. I took the pot of soup, feeling the heat of it

radiating up into my face, and we stood for a moment talking about how cold it was

getting. Megan looked at Buddy and he looked back at her, the two of them sizing up the

other as possible playmate and friend. In a few seconds I followed Michelle and Megan

back up the stairs, saying behind me, “Buddy, you and Teddy wait for me, okay? I’ll just

be a moment.”

But it was more than a moment, and when I returned they were gone. I felt my

heart clench in my chest as I imagined the worst and called out in panic for both of them,

my voice small against the suddenly heavy sifting snow. And then I heard an even

smaller voice answering from under the pines, “We’re over here, Uncle Jason.”

They were sitting in a little den walled up with snow, concealed and covered in

pine boughs which were in turn coated with thick snow. I pushed in through an opening

between branches and sat down on a blanket spread over the hard packed, slightly

scooped floor and said nothing, waiting for Buddy to tell me what we were doing.

Outside, the snow continued to fall, accumulating almost soundlessly around us.

If you listened you could hear the nearest flakes falling and hitting the branches

overhead, though strangely, at the same time, the snow and pine bough covering filtered

out all the other sounds of the world. The town traffic appeared non-existence. Even the

Hotel seemed quiet and calm.

“This is nice,” I said, whispering conspiratorially.

“Yeah,” Buddy nodded. “This is nice.”

“But we need to go now.”

“I want to wait for the fairies.”

“The fairies?”

“Yes. Fairies live in here.”

“They do?”

Again, Buddy nodded.

“Then shouldn’t we leave so they can have their home back?”

“Oh.”

“Tell you what. Let’s go over to the shop and make a propeller for our airplane,

okay?”

“Okay.”

As easily as that, reminded of the airplane we were making, he moved forward,

following as I backed up. Outside, I stood and watched as he and Teddy emerged

together from under the branches. We walked down the slope of the drive that divided the

old theatre from the house where Hirsh lived and crossed the street to the shop, climbing

the fresh plowed bank where a snowmobile had gone through, leaving a corrugated trail.

Both of us balanced on top like momentary kings of the hill before descending to the

steps on the other side. I found the key in my pocket and slipped it into the lock, turned

the knob, opened the door.

Inside the air was still warm, though the stove was cool enough I could lay a hand

on the top and not feel the necessity to remove it. I lifted the cover and looked inside at

all that remained of that morning’s fire, a small pool of dim coals at the bottom.

“Can I broom?” Seeing the corn broom in the corner by the back room door,

Buddy ran past me to get it.

“That’s a good idea. You can do that while I go out back and find a board to make

the propeller.”

Already I had an idea of what I would use, remembering an otherwise unusable

piece of twisted pine I’d almost cut up for kindling. It lay on top of a stack of boards by

the back wall, sprung so that it wobbled a little on opposing edges.

“This will work perfectly,” I said, going back out to the warm part of the shop.

Laying the board on the bench, I rounded the ends with a pencil and followed with the

saber saw tapering each side towards the center, which I drilled and fitted with a foot

length of three-quarter inch dowel that I glued and wedged tight into place. All that

remained was to find an odd piece of galvanized inch pipe to serve as a bushing and our

propeller would spin like the real thing. I held the propeller horizontally over my head by

the dowel with one hand and twirled it around.

“That’s cool, Uncle Jason.”

“You think it’ll work?”

“Yes. Yes.” Buddy hopped with each yes, so excited he dropped the broom to the

floor at his feet. “Can we go put it on now?”

“Sure, why not?”

“It’s about time you got here.” Stacey stood in the doorway between the back

room and kitchen, holding the door half closed, the fingers of her right hand wrapped

around the open worn edge. She glanced back into the house, into the warm light of the

living space, said, “It’s them,” and continued out, leaving the door open for Buddy who

waited a second more until at the urging of my hand pressing on his back slid on by and I

pushed the door closed behind him. Stacey looked up through spread bangs touching her

eyebrows, her eyes so dark blue they could have been black in the dim light.

“I want to go to your place,” she said. “I’m building a chicken coop and need

some wood.”

“I thought your father was cutting it for you.”

“He was, will be. But he won’t go out in a storm. He says the woods are too wet

now, anyway.”

“So you decided to come bother me instead?”

She smiled. “Yes”

I knew she wanted the pile of lumber saved from taking the shed down at the back

of the drive. In a moment of careless benevolence I’d offered it if she thought she could

use it. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have minded, but I didn’t welcome the idea of going out in a

storm any more than her father did.

“It’s coming down pretty good,” I said, attempting to convey in the words a note

of reluctance. Through the one window in the back room looking out on the back yard I

could see the Japanese crab filtering snow. “This couldn’t wait for another time?”

“Don’t put off for tomorrow…”

“We were just about to have pancakes. You want some?”

“I’ve eaten. And you can wait until you come back.” She paused before adding

somewhat plaintively, “Can’t you?”

“I can always wait. It’s the story of my life.” Still, neither of us made any overt

move, one way or the other, and once again I glanced out the window.

“Look, if you don’t want to help me just say so.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’s really a credible option.”

“It’s all right. I already know better than to depend on a man.”

“That’s fair. Look me up with no warning and expect me to jump and then get all

critical when I don’t act excited.”

“Fine, then.” She made a move for the outside back door, but I put a hand up

against it and blocked her.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. Just give me a minute.”

“I’ll wait for you outside.”

The back door opened and then closed, suctioning the air with it.

Inside, the grill was already smoky with patties of sausage sizzling at the edges of

the grill in the kitchen, and the batter for the pancakes mixed within the minute waited all

bubbly and lumpy, still working and not quite yet ready to be poured from the two quart

spouted measuring container standing on the counter.

“I’m going to help Stacey,” I said. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

“We’re almost ready,” Mama said.

“I know. Don’t wait.”

“What about Herschel?”

“He won’t be coming either. His son died last night or early this morning and he

and Michelle are on their way to make plans.”

“Oh dear, that’s too bad. I hope he’ll let us know when.” She might have said

when or then or them. I wasn’t quite sure. But the context was clear.

“I told him to.”

“You sure you won’t stay? Stacey is welcome to join us, you know.”

“I don’t think she’s all that interested in pancakes.”

“I can’t do more than invite her.”

“I know, Ma.”

“Jay,” she said, stopping me as I turned with nothing more than the

pronouncement of my name. “You live on your own so you don’t need to please me. But

you aren’t married and you don’t need to please her, either.”

“She’d beg to differ, I think.”

“If she spent half the time trying to please you that you do trying to please her I

wouldn’t say a thing.” She cupped three fingers under the tap, catching a small slice of

water which she flicked on the grill, causing droplets to dance and sizzle as she lifted the

two quart container of mix. “Think about it is all I’m saying.”

A lower pitched sizzle of spreading pancakes followed as I turned again and

started away. At the back door I paused, still tempted to stay. But in Stacey’s mind I

knew I’d as much as said I would go which meant I was already committed.

“How come you’re letting me drive?” I asked, getting behind the wheel of her

truck. Ahead of my coming out, Stacey had taken a place in the passenger seat, looking

out the window.

“I don’t like the conditions.”

“You’re a strange one sometimes.”

“Only sometimes?” She turned to me with a slightly concessionary smile.

My stomach grumbled and in response she opened and reached in the glove box

and found a partial roll of cherry life-savers. Reopening the silver wrapper, she held the

pealed end out for me to take one.

“That’s not going to quite do it,” I said.

“I know,” she said, “but it’s better than nothing.”

I reached across my body and hooked the first of the bared candies with my

thumbnail, rolling it into my palm then to my fingertips and presented it on edge to my

lips, sucking it into my mouth. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I felt a little grit on my tongue

and couldn’t help wondering if giving me the first one off the roll was a gesture

calculated for her benefit or mine. Halfway down the hill to the light at the four corners

she asked if I would put on my seat belt, and again for a moment I thought she might be

concerned for my well-being until she said, “If we have an accident, your bouncing

around in the cab isn’t likely to do either of us any good.”

So I stopped and reached for the belt, pulling it across my waist and chest, before

taking off under the blinking red light, pushing the accelerator a little harder than

necessary so the tires slipped a little going into the turn. Stacey gasped and tensed but

didn’t say a word more until we were a mile beyond the town limits on a long stretch

bordered on both sides by flat fields of corn stubble disappearing into the sifting snow.

“I’m sorry if you’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you,” I said. “I just can’t figure you out.”

“I’m sorry you can’t figure me out, then.”

“No you’re not.”

She moved forward as if add something then resettled again in the seat, saying

nothing more until I drove up past the driveway to the first plateau above my barn.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m turning around,” I said, pulling across the opposite side of the road, pointing

the front of the truck towards the open air above the pond below. Backing up over a

culvert leading to fields behind us, I pulled forward onto the road, turning for the way we

had just come. The driveway lay directly ahead curving to the right, ascending.

“Hang on,” I said. “This is the only way to make it up to the top when there’s

snow—unless you’ve got four-wheel drive.”

“I don’t” she said, possibly meaning only “don’t” as she pressed a palm to the

empty seat center. And then we were off the road, going over the ridge of snow lining the

shoulder at the base of the drive, bouncing up and then down and continuing on a curving

ascent under bare limbs ticking the top of the cab three fourths of the way up until we

emerged from beneath them and passed the old apple tree bent back towards the road as if

shying away from the implication inherent in our revealed trajectory setting us on a direct

line to the weeds standing like sticks in the field before us. But at the crest, the driveway

turned all at once sharply right and the truck, with its rear wheels now churning, slid

slowly away from the field and came parallel to the rear of the house.

I intended to cross through the curve going part way towards the hickory in the

back yard and reverse to the pile of boards stacked and covered where the galvanized

shed once stood at the end of the drive, but considering we were lucky to make it up the

hill at all I decided there was no need trying for perfection. I pulled up facing the pile and

shut off the engine and for a moment we sat listening to quiet.

The snow came harder now, in large flakes spreading flat on the windshield

before melting into small jagging trickles. Another time, another place, another girl,

perhaps, I could see us moving together and imagined what that might feel like, her body

tilted and comfortable against mine. That seemed possible, though I couldn’t imagine

beyond it. Not at this time in this place with this girl. But I could be wrong, too, and so I

waited, sitting quietly until I said, impartially, or at least neutrally, not implying any

particular meaning either way, “What do you want to do now?”

“What we came for,” she said in a flat and practical voice, and yet still she made

no movement towards opening the passenger door. But there was no movement my way

either, which left everything pretty much as before, except, we had come for the wood,

and if she objected to anything else it would be as a result of my wishful thinking only.

A black form separated from the shadowed image of the barn partially obscured

behind the shroud of falling snow. As the form moved, it became its own separate thing,

emerging darker and more distinct as it closed. I knew it was Sirius from the first moment

I detected the motion of his approach. He stopped and watched, appraising us, uncertain

and cautious. He sat on his haunches at the near corner of the barn on a little hump

formed in the snow and looked back away over one shoulder towards the place he had

come from, as if waiting for reinforcement, or wanting to return. But we both knew he

would face this confrontation alone, though he couldn’t know who the person who

watched him was or that that person knew Chance was tied up and Beau waited in the

house, probably standing and watching at the back door.

In a second I realized Stacey hesitated only because of the dog. She had seen it

too emerging from out of the snow and waited for me to get out and greet it, preparing

the way for her exit. So I opened the door and stood and clapped my hands and Sirius, at

the first sound of his name, came bounding down the slope of the yard to me.

I let out Beau and climbed to the barn to get Chance off his chain and the three

dogs ran together through the snow in the back yard, Stacey and I watching them before

going to work on the board pile. She put on suede leather gloves as I walked to the

opposite end from the truck, and we lifted the tarp cover, taking with it a half foot of

snow which bellied and then slid off to the other side as we pulled. The pile underneath

stood on a bare patch of ground, the frosted grass yellow and paler than the boards would

have been even new. They were rough two by sixes, ten feet long, and heavy enough that

we took each one singly, with me following her beyond the back of the truck, then

reversing direction as I lifted my end up across the tailgate and joined in pushing hers in.

Once I had to take a metal maul to the stack, hitting it with the flat back of its triangle

head in order to separate the boards which were stuck together with the cold. And by the

time we were done, my fingers ached and I clenched them, blowing into each fist in turn.

Stacey removed her gloves and, pocketing them in her coat, reached for and took my

hands, alternating them with hers. We stood looking down at this union for what must

have been a half minute the warmth of her palms radiating into my fingers.

“We could go inside,” I said.

“And do what?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you don’t know then the answer is no.” She fished the gloves from her jacket

and put them on. She didn’t seem irritated or angry as she paused, raising her nose to the

air. A slight northeast breeze sent the aroma coming from the chimney our way.

“That’s from the cat litter box,” I explained. “I thought it would’ve burned off by

now.” But neither the odor nor the explanation for it seemed to bother Stacey. “It smells

like coffee roasting,” she said, before adding, “I do owe you something for the lumber,

though, just not what you’re after.”

“What do you mean what I’m after?”

“You know very well what I mean, Jason Waters. Come on, let’s walk Chance

back up to the barn and see if we can find a place for your chickens.”

“What chickens?”

“The chickens I’m giving you in exchange for these two by sixes.”

At the sound of his name, Chance came closer and sat looking up at us, wanting to

be petted. Maybe the other dogs played too rough or he had tired of running back and

forth in the snow. Either way, he preferred our company to theirs. Stacey lowered to one

knee and the long lower part of her leg stuck out in the snow behind her as she petted the

top of his head. He closed his eyes, pointing his nose towards the sky.

“You’re a good dog, Chance,” she cooed. Then, tilting her face up at me, she

added, “Remember the day we went and got him?”

“Yes. It wasn’t too much different than this.”

“We drove around, for what, an hour or two before finding the pound?”

“Just so I could take a look at him and decide what to do.”

“Oh Chance,” she said, and in response to the commiseration in her voice his eyes

flickered open and closed. “Was there ever any doubt you were meant to be here?”

She’d come to tell me he was sent away because he’d made a nuisance of himself

hanging around another farm. The young woman who owned him didn’t seem to care one

way or the other what happened to him, but he was a nice dog, and it would be a shame if

he went unclaimed. All I had to do was go take a look and see if I wouldn’t want to take

him.

So we went on a quest which ended up consuming the better part of an afternoon,

since neither of us knew quite where we were going, and were actually on the verge of

giving up and going back when I caught a mere glimpse of hand-painted sign perched on

a little bluff off my side of the road which, once we turned back, led us down a dirt road

to a cinder-block building housing the dogs, with another sign on the door saying the

warden lived in a green house down a half mile farther. He came out in baggy chintz

pants, a quilted blue coat, and a wide-brimmed felt hat like a forest ranger would wear,

and followed us in his pickup, opening the padlock on the plywood door, letting us in.

Each dog resided alone in a cinderblock cell, the cement floor of which was covered by a

thin layer of hay. In total the place held a blue-eyed malamute, a shepherd mix, a terrier

of some kind, and the golden-haired dog we’d come to see. At first I remained unsure I

would take him. He seemed at best half as described, for though the coat was the right

color his stature was too small, the muzzle sharper and more fox-like than retriever.

“I’m supposed to keep them a minimum of three days,” the control officer

explained, “to give the owners time enough to claim them. But I guess I’d rather see one

let go sooner than end up euthanized.”

So he let us take the dog we’d come for, though for a few seconds I still hesitated

and looked at the others, wondering what would become of them now.

On the way back as I sat petting him in the passenger seat, the dog clung to my

leg as if afraid he’d be sent back, at one point peeing on it even though he’d been given

an opportunity to go before leaving. I rationalized the mishap, thinking he was not so

much relieving himself as marking me out of some sense of desperation. We let him out

and he peed again on a telephone pole and then rode the rest of the way with his head

perched on my knee, forelegs clamped to my damp pant leg.

So I couldn’t be too mad even when in response to meeting the other dogs he peed

on a table leg in the kitchen. And whatever anger I did feel dissipated when he slipped off

the piece of red hay-bind the warden had tied on his collar and walked into the night,

leaving me to return alone, holding the ratty twined lead in silent exposition. For half an

hour we thought he was gone. I imagined him walking alone along a dark roadside or

surrounded by coyotes in the woods, but eventually a feeble scratch at the door signaled

us to let him back in. And so I got a second chance too, and that’s when I decided his

name, which seemed increasingly appropriate considering his prior treatment.

I knew for sure only that his coat was dull and frizzy and his nose pink as a

tongue. And someone at some point must have beat him, because whenever I reached for

a stick he would cower as if expecting I’d gone suddenly mad—or at least mad at him.

Even a year later, he would still shift sideways like a shying horse whenever I picked a

stick up to play fetch with the other dogs. But at least now he could approach his dish

without looking back to make sure it was there for him. As a measure of what seems like

appreciation for his new life he stands close whenever he can, and when I get up in the

night he rises too and follows me down the stairs.

Under the barn a section of cinderblock wall intersected with the back wall of the

foundation and made a little enclave where my brother once kept his chickens. Stacey

decided with a little work it would serve to house a new batch. She worried, though,

about weasels and wanted to add two walls of screening and a door to access the chickens

while keeping predators out. I didn’t know about weasels, but I told her the story from the

previous fall encountering a fox in the field behind the house so intent on looking back as

it ran from the dogs that it didn’t see me.

“When it came within twenty yards I raised my hand and went Pow, like I was

firing a gun.”

“What happened then?”

“It jumped seven feet straight up in the air. Most like near scared it to death.”

“You’ll need more than an imaginary gun to keep foxes at bay.”

“That’s what the dogs are for.”

“Please. They’re probably worse than the foxes.”

“Chance wouldn’t harm a solitary feather.”

“It’s not Chance I’m worried about. But Sirius is half wolf I think.”

“No. Shepherd and Rottweiler, near as I can tell.”

“Either way I wouldn’t trust him with my chickens.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” And I told her what happened the day Sean and I

stood in the front yard talking with Nile, who stood with his back to the pig-nut hickory

smoking a pipe that smelled as crisp and clean as autumn itself. All of a sudden two

Rhode Island Red roosters started going at it in the barn, their bodies thumping like a

loose bag of apples as they rolled across the heavy plank floor. Morning sunlight fell

through the bare tree branches, entering the open barn door at a slant, illuminating the

arena of battle. Responding to the sound of struggle, Sirius ran under the branch shadows

as if to tear into the birds; instead, at the last moment he wedged between them and stood

like a wall, separating both roosters until they turned and walked away. At that Nile

pulled the Meerschaum pipe from his mouth. “Gawdamm” he said, blowing a thin stream

of smoke through his teeth, “if that don’t beat all. That dog’s got a soul, or considerable

smidgeon of one.”

As we walked up the long curve in the drive back towards the house, the dogs ran

head to tail through the snow beside us. When we went inside to warm up, Stacey heated

water for tea while I checked the stove, shaking the grate and filling it with coal, before

leading Chance to the upper barn and putting him back on his chain. He came to me

without complaint or hesitation and sat still as I hooked him back up, so I rubbed his side

and called him a good dog. Remembering the airplane, I proceeded into the barn and

found among some other junk piled in one of the dimly-lit stalls: a steering wheel, a hand

brake lever, and an old steam boiler gauge to trick up our cockpit. I stuffed the loot into a

burlap bag and walked back down the slope to the house.

By the time Stacey and I returned to the truck we found it covered with an inch

and a half of new snow. I brushed off the windshield, smelling the new burning coal,

which made a sulfur odor not at all like roasting coffee. Suddenly I missed the other

smell and thought how easily our reactions to things are formed by context and

perception. Once the windshield was cleared I got back in the truck and clenched my

fingers once before turning the key, starting the truck. Our breaths billowed cloudlike

from our mouths into the confined air, so I rolled down my window so the inside of the

windshield wouldn’t fog and instructed Sirius, who sat watching on the bank, to guard the

house as I backed up. Then I turned down the steep part of the drive, leaving him still

sitting in the snow on the bank between the bare poplar tree and the barn watching us

depart.

I went slow, easing down the angle of descent, feeling the weight of the load

helping the rear wheels dig in, creating purchase while at the same time pushing us

forward and down. But enough snow lay in our path to retard the descent and we made it

to the road without sliding. On the way to the bottom of the hill, little snow wheels

formed on the hood of the truck, rolling towards the windshield and then forward along

the same track. It amused us to watch them reciprocating between forces: pulled by

gravity, pushed by the wind.

“Isn’t that interesting?” Stacey looked at me, smiling.

“Yes, it’s interesting,” I said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

“Me neither.” Her attention reverted to the phenomenon beyond the windshield.

Sitting forward—neck extended, head uptilted slightly—she looked as lovely as a

Botticelli beauty. But then the effect ended as the road leveled and she sat back and

looked away out the passenger side window.

At some point between our coming and going a plow had passed through

throwing snow up against the large maples in front of the last house leaving Wiscoy. On

the side of the trunks exposed to the plow patches of white stuck to the bark a dozen feet

up. A little wider than the truck, the incised path in the snow led to the main road and

across the intersection. Somehow it seemed the safer course so I crossed over and

followed the plowed track south alongside the river.

For no other reason than it was quiet and I thought of something to say, I asked

Stacey what she thought of the Kennedy assassination.

“Which one?” she said, which was a good point, so I said: JFK.

“I was against it.”

Funny girl you are,” I said, and she turned, smiling, as if to tell me she knew it.

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I came across this bill book the other day from a month before it

happened and I’ve been thinking about it, how people must have reacted and all. I’ve

always felt sorry for Marina.”

“Who’s Marina?”

“Marina Oswald?”

“And you feel for her more than, what was her name, Jackie?”

“No, I didn’t say that. But think about it. Here she is, a Russian exiled in America,

totally unequipped to deal with life here. Remember, it’s the height of the cold war.

Under the best of circumstances she would have confronted at least some suspicion.

What’s more, Lee Harvey forbids her to learn English because he doesn’t want to forget

how to speak Russian. And then, to top it all off, he goes out and assassinates the

President. How is that not the most uncaring thing he could do? It’s hard to imagine how

alone and isolated and betrayed she must have felt.”

“I suppose,” Stacey said, looking out her window. “But what does it matter now?”

Apparently the conversation wasn’t one she cared to continue.

“I don’t know what it matters. I don’t know what anything matters. I don’t know

what it means, either, other than Lee Harvey was some rotten piece of work.”

“I’m thinking that was pretty much the consensus even back then.”

“But most people probably think he was just crazy. I don’t think it’s as simple as

that. I think he was as sane as anybody. If anything he understood his condition better

than most, felt driven to be somebody and yet knew he never would be, trapped in his

own mediocrity. I read some of the stuff he wrote once, about life as a Russian worker,

and while it’s not Tolstoy, it’s not the ravings of a lunatic, either. The problem was he

wasn’t a genius or in any way exceptional. Instead of confirming his uniqueness, life in

the Soviet Union only emphasized his ordinariness. He became just another cog in the

machine. That knowledge made things intolerable for him. And so he latched upon the

only means he would ever have of being somebody—by shooting the President.”

“Interesting,” said Stacey, stifling a yawn. She continued to look out the window,

her breath fogging a patch on the glass.

We passed the last farm on the road with a big barn on my side for cows and a

smaller barn with a pasture on Stacey’s where a pair of horses stood feeding. Just beyond

the farm house the road turned at a right angle and then ended back at the main road. A

dwindling trail of snow lay like crumbs showing the path of the plow. I stopped and

turned left, following them. There was still a mile to go to the four corners in town, and

for the first half of it neither of us said anything more.

“It’s a little ironic,” I said, finally. “The acclaim Oswald so desperately wanted

could be found only in America. The land he had spurned for another ended up being his

land of opportunity after all.”

“Nothing is more common than the person who wants to be exceptional.” Stacey

looked at me and smiled. “Don’t ask me who said that, Shakespeare or maybe Freud.”

“You could say he was both.”

“You could say he was self-important punk.”

As we went down between the stone abutments on both sides of the road where

the railroad once crossed over, I let the truck slow of its own accord then shifted into the

next lower gear as we entered Meridian. Turning the opposite way from my destination at

the light, I pulled over in front of the Wesleyan church and left the truck running, pointed

towards the river and Stacey’s destination waiting somewhere in the mounting snowfall

beyond.

“Why?” she said, not objecting, but possibly thankful as she opened the door to

get out.

“Because you aren’t interested in pancakes,” I said. “And you ought to get home.”

I reached into the bed of the truck for the bag of items I’d scavenged from the

barn as Stacey walked around through the swirling beam of the headlamps.

“Thank you,” she said, coming up behind me, and as I turned to search for her

eyes her lips glanced against my left cheek. I put a hand to her shoulders as if I could

hold her still, but she broke away and sat down in the truck. Looking up shyly, her eyes

briefly met mine as she closed the door. Then she put the transmission in gear and

twittered the fingers of her left hand back and forth sideways against the window as she

pulled away. I stood in the road and watched the tail lights converge and grow smaller

and closer together until they eventually disappeared altogether, engulfed by the gloom of

the late falling snow.

At the intersection two men and a young woman stood on the opposite corner and

watched as I crossed the main road carrying the burlap bag over my shoulder. One of the

men let out a whoop and said, “Look. It’s Santee Clause!” The other man said to the

young woman, “He looks cold. I bet you could warm him up.” All three of them laughed

then and I smiled and raised a hand, continuing on.

Walking past the Stardust I heard competing voices closed up inside and one

louder voice distinct from the rest saying, “I didn’t even know!” twice in succession.

Then I heard the crack of a cue ball hitting the other racked balls and the first sounds of a

country and western band tuning up to begin playing. A car passed and went up through

the downtown, making the first part of the hill to the level middle where the railroad once

ran, couldn’t make the steepest part of the hill and spun its wheels on the road, slipping

sideways, finally backing down and turning around with its rear pointing towards where

the depot had once been. As I walked up alongside, the driver rolled down his window

and said, “Why don’t they sand the road when it’s like this?” I shrugged my shoulders

and said, “Maybe they’ve already used all the sand that they had.” The man just shock his

head, rolled up the window, and drove back down towards the blinking red light at the

center of town.

“Someone’s waiting for you.” Mom looked from the magazine spread open on the

table before her and nodded back towards the closed door to the hallway and the living

room beyond. I read, upside down, the title of the article she was reading: If Lincoln Had

Lived.

“I know,” I said. “I got back as soon as I could.” I sat in the chair by the radiator

and removed my boots, setting them on the edge of the mat by the back door and walked

in my socks to the kitchen. Dinner waited on the counter in the space made by one plate

inverted on another like clamshells, enclosing a stack of eight pancakes and two little

round sausage patties placed like mouse ears at ten and two o’clock on the periphery. I

separated the contents, an equal portion to each plate, pretending I was Lee dividing his

forces at the Wilderness.

“The pancakes were good when I made them.” Mom’s voice came through the

kitchen door and around the jamb so clearly she must have lifted and turned her head the

same as she would have while pausing in the midst of preparing a meal to speak with

someone sitting, as she was now, at the dinner table. But she had already likely turned

back to reading when she added, more softly, “Too bad you had to go when you did.”

“They’ll be fine,” I said, over my shoulder, incorporating her same voice-

throwing trick as I pushed the release at the side of the microwave door. I set one of the

plates in, leaving the other for later. I didn’t let on I wasn’t all that hungry because Stacey

had made us each a ham sandwich to go with our tea while I was out in the barn,

searching for parts to finish Buddy’s airplane.

“There’s coffee in the pot,” Mom added, even less audibly than before. “But

you’ll want to warm that up too.”

I set the microwave for thirty seconds and waited and watched the plate inside

turn until the oven dinged and the carousel stopped. The sausage came out sizzling, the

pancakes soft and steaming. The maple syrup in the small cut glass pitcher, warmed up

too, spread out thin and flat, absorbing into the pancakes almost as fast as I poured it.

“How are the roads?” The momentarily turned-up volume of her voice suggested

another pause in Mom’s reading.

“Getting slick,” I said. I pulled open the cutlery drawer at the side of the sink to

get a fork. “A car tried to make the hill while I was coming up from downtown, but

couldn’t manage and had to turn back.”

“I wondered when it started to get dark.”

“It’s not so dark,” I said, remembering how light it had seemed. As if to confirm

the impression, I looked out the kitchen window past the trio of narrow spruce trees

standing on the corner and saw a streetlamp come on. A child playing outside might think

there was still plenty of day left, while a parent looking out might insist it was time to

come in. It was, I decided, all a matter of which side of the window you were on. I

poured a cup of coffee from a cold carafe, warmed it in the microwave, added milk until

it swirled up brown. Holding it in one hand, I picked the warmed plate of pancakes off

the counter with the other. Just then a plow came up Main Street flashing its yellow light

fore and aft against the fronts of all the houses as it went on up towards the end of town. I

stood a moment and watched until the flashing light disappeared then turned and walked

through the open kitchen doorway to the table and sat down, spreading the pancakes apart

in order to eat them one by one.

At first neither of us said another word, but then Mom asked, “How are the dogs,

behaving themselves?” and I nodded my head, taking a first bite off the fork, making a

sound keeping my mouth closed that meant yes.

“Pancakes aren’t ever as good once they’ve gone cold.” Mom took a sip of her

coffee, glanced up. “I should have made up some fresh.”

Maybe they weren’t as good as they would have been hot off the griddle—the

buckwheat toasted caramelized and crepe-like— but they weren’t half bad even so.

“These are fine, Ma.”

But she just shook her head and said, looking back towards the magazine: “You

remind me more of Sean every day.”

I asked what she meant, but Mom just said she might tell me later and I ought to

get outside with Buddy because Sissy would be coming to pick him up within the hour.

Outside, the world was neither night nor day but something in between. The

frozen moon, itself invisible through all the snow suspended overhead, illuminated

objects below it with subtle persistence that radiated back from the snow lying still on the

ground. The harsher back door light hit the corner of the garage and cast a shadow across

the yard where its beam couldn’t go. We worked at the edge of that sharp demarcation,

which fell like a frozen shock wave across the front of the plane. I told Buddy to imagine

we were working on something stopped in time, used a word he didn’t know, so he asked

me what I meant, saying: spended ami-nation, trying to repeat what I’d said. I told him it

was like a bear hibernating, waiting to come out.

Meanwhile, until it did, I said, we could work and not give time another thought.

Earlier in the day we set two old planks through the cockpit, projecting an equidistant

amount on each side. Now all that remained was to add the finishing touches. After

dinner I’d gone into the cellar and scrounged a foot-long piece of galvanized pipe from

an accumulation of junk plumbing under a bay window. Standing with the piece of pipe

in one hand and a flashlight in the other, I surveyed the cellar floor, watching vibrating

spiders react to the light beam. As in the joke, I didn’t know what I wanted, but knew I’d

know when I saw it, and behind the cellar stairs on the seat of an antique desk with a hole

in the corner for an inkwell I finally saw it—a six-pack carton of Pepsi bottles likely

older than I was. Arranged three to a side, stuck in mouth-first at a backward-slant

against the long shark-like snout of the plane, they made a passably realistic arrangement

of exhaust manifold ends, while the piece of old unthreaded pipe, pushed into the nose of

the plane, made a bushing for the shaft of the propeller. With one hand Buddy gripped the

old style brake lever scavenged from my barn; pressed into new service on the cockpit

floor, it stood upright next to his right calf. With the bundled fingertips of his other hand

he touched the antique steam gauge embedded in the dashboard, before taking the

steering wheel I’d pinned in place with a cut-off piece of old broomstick. Then I spun the

propeller and stood back with Teddy in the unblemished snow and watched Buddy sitting

upright in the open cockpit holding the wheel with both hands until the bear roared and

the boards became wings, and he flew.

Later, after everyone else had gone or gone to bed, I asked Mom what she meant

by saying that I reminded her of Sean. I sat on the dining room hearth, which was a

bluestone slab cocked at a forty-five angle to the rest of the room and set knee-high off

the floor as if presciently meant always to be a low auxiliary bench for the table. The

dying embers in the fireplace, though warm at my back, felt more like sunlight than any

more direct consequence of fire. Teddy sat between my legs resting his chin on my thigh

as I lightly thumbed the groove of his forehead. He closed his eyes and would have fallen

asleep were it not for the fact that occasionally I called his name softly, causing his ears

to momentarily stiffen in awareness and anticipation of some further connection between

him and what conversation might follow. He listened and occasionally sighed, possibly as

much from fatigue as contentment, but contentment won out and he never moved or lifted

even an ounce of his head, even when I shifted and rearranged the full weight of both of

us bearing down on the stone hearth through my behind. Except, at one point I brushed

my fingertips against the shaved area behind his right cheek which protruded like a goiter

nearly the size and shape of half a small grapefruit. The hairs growing back like bristle

after being shaved felt prickly and stiff, and touching them, pushing back against the

grain of them as I did, likely registered as a similar sensation or worse on the other end.

With the first backward stroke, Teddy opened his eyes and pulled a little away, until I

lifted my hand from that place and resumed tracing the indent going between his eyes

towards the top of his head.

I was a wound baby, Mama said. At first I heard womb baby, which made a kind

of sense, but still perplexed me because after all aren’t all babies womb babies before

they are born? But there had to be more to it than that so I asked what she meant and after

a long pause she said some women—girls—wound their babies on purpose and then she

held her arms and shivered, thinking of those poor creatures. Could she ever have been

driven to such desperation as to shove a straightened coat hanger up inside her? She

didn’t know, wouldn’t judge. She only knew it would be terrible to lose a baby under any

circumstance, all the more if it was because of something you did. (At this point I said the

procedures are different these days, but Mama just gave me a look as if to say I didn’t

know everything. But she didn’t say that, just sighed and said: “It all amounts to the

same.”) Then she said at the beginning of her last pregnancy—that being the one for me

—she fell while skiing and felt something tear, resulting in a fearful premonition. For a

long time I was such a quiet presence she thought I might be stillborn or at the very least

end up “touched”—meaning not quite right in the head or at the very least mentally not

all there, and so she feared she would lose or had already lost me or that I would turn out

different than I should. Her firstborn, Sissy, was placid too, but in a way that let her know

she was carrying a girl, in the same way, from the kicks in her womb, she knew her

second baby would be a boy. “When I was pregnant for Sean” she said wistfully; she

stopped to remember the time silently for a moment, before going on: “One day feeling

something pressing as if to get out, I looked in the long mirror behind the downstairs

bathroom door and discovered a tiny footprint bulging from my belly. The skin, stretched

so, seemed hardly enough to contain it and as I touched his little toes, feeling them

individually like tiny Braille marks against the tips of my fingers…” She stopped

whatever thought she was having and looked at me, smiling. “You, on the other hand—or

should I say foot?”—she softly laughed, accentuating the joke—“were always so quiet I

really thought a time or two you might be dead. It’s a wound I still carry, feeling guilty

for thinking that, for almost making it happen.”

She smiled again to herself, remembering some other particular or simply

recalling the entirety of the experience from a distance, perhaps relieved, like after a

horror flick ends. I asked how long I remained a question in her mind.

“All the days,” she said, “All the days of your growing. But not entirely in the

way you might think. Sometimes as a child you sulked and didn’t say a word for days.

You had terrible stomach aches, and headaches. One time I heard something pounding

upstairs, went to see, and found you hitting the bedroom wall with your head.”

“I remember some of that.” But what I suddenly remembered after all that time

was sitting in the downstairs bathroom attempting by mental concentration to will out the

pain in my gut and place it in one of the Norway spruces at the side of the house. I made

a gesture with my free hand indicating a place across the table beyond the porch door

where the tree I’d visualized then and imagined now stood, the middle of three such

lining the bank, keeping the yard and the side of the house there in perpetual shadow. But

as soon as I made the motion, I lost confidence in my ability to explain, so instead only

said, “I think I know partly why my stomach hurt so much. I was always eating

something I shouldn’t. One day, out on the side bank, I found a brown fuzzy cocoon and

bit into it, thinking it would taste beautiful, because of the butterfly it contained.”

Mama laughed again softly, touching a palm flat to the table, so as not to disturb

anyone else. “You were a strange child,” she said. “I don’t say that disparagingly to hurt

your feelings. But you were always just a little too self-absorbed and poetic for your own

good.”

We sat quietly, she with one arm resting across the other on top of the table, me

with one hand still on Teddy, stroking his head. For a moment I thought the conversation

was over, until it started again, like a rekindled fire. “That’s why I was always glad you

had Sean for an older brother. He seemed to instinctively know what you needed, being

an entirely normal, ordinary American boy. One day—you weren’t but three or four—the

two of you took turns pushing the front doorbell and running back beyond the flowering

crab to wait on the bank and watch through the entryway window each time as I

answered the door. I’m sure it was great fun, and at first I didn’t mind. But as the

morning wore on I got tired of that game until, a dozen rings later, I yelled down the

hallway: If you don’t lay off that damn doorbell, I’m going to tan your thick hide—only

it wasn’t you or Sean , but the new pastor, Reverend Paisley, coming to pay a call.”

“That’s funny.”

“Oh, it gets better. I invited him in, but he dared come no farther than the top step,

and I can’t say I wonder why. The whole time while he’s introducing himself I’m

wondering what the devil he must think. Then he asks me if I’m any relation to the

Waters of Houghton. I’m so flustered still that when he probes a little more to ask if I

know of an Irene Waters, I say, before I can stop myself: I’m not sure, but the name

sounds familiar.”

“That’s really funny.”

“Oh, it gets even better. The next Sunday we have a meet and greet for the new

pastor after church. I decide there’s nothing else to be done but to act like nothing ever

happened. I march bravely onward, put my hand out and say, as if it’s the first time we’ve

ever come face to face: Reverend Paisley, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Irene Waters.”

“His reaction?”

“Irene, he says, not batting an eye, it’s a pleasure to finally make your

acquaintance. I give the man credit. There’re not many who would have been as subtle.”

The cold outside was starting to come into the house. It crept in through the

windows. I knew because awhile before I had put a hand an inch from the glass in the

porch door and felt it. I considered the cold debating whether to go that door again and

bring in more wood to build up the fire. But I knew any move on my part would set in

motion a whole series of evens that would end with the dissolution of stasis and quiet I

wished to prolong. So I sat still and continued to rub Teddy’s head, waiting to hear what

would come next.

“At first, I was mad at you and Sean. Then I was mad at myself for even thinking

anyone but me deserved it. And eventually I came to understand that Sean was just being

Sean, and that’s exactly what you needed.”

“So you think I turned out okay?”

“I’d have to say. I knew it finally last fall at the Swiss steak dinner when you ran

out and picked up Jane June’s grandson from off the road. I saw it all from the front

sidewalk on the way to the car where your father waited with the engine already on and

idling, listening to some ballgame or other. I came around the front of the church to see J-

June’s daughter crossing the street to talk to that idiot Carson boy pulled up on the

opposite curb because the parking lot was full. And her none the brighter for leaving her

baby boy inside, trusting Jesus to look after him I suppose. He wandered out the side door

to follow her just as you, late as always for dinner, arrived. I couldn’t even say go or stop

or come back, it all happened so fast, either to you or that little boy, before he stepped out

on the pavement—but then you, seeing it too, not believing it maybe until finally you did,

ran to the end of the sidewalk past the jutting corner of the church and snatched up,

carried, and delivered that little boy to his mother’s waiting arms extending too late to do

more than receive the gift you gave her. That’s what I meant when I said earlier you

reminded me of him—Sean, I mean. That’s something he would have done too without

thinking. And I shouldn’t say you wouldn’t have come to that point eventually on your

own, you may well have, though I think you might’ve otherwise hesitated, weighed

chances.”

“I don’t know, Mom. It was just a reaction. Normal for anyone I would think.” It

surprised me she had seen the incident, much less remembered or credited me any for it.

“But you do feel him?” The question suggested and sought confirmation for

something I wasn’t quite sure of, so I just shrugged the outermost part of my shoulder as I

sat canted on the hearth with Teddy’s head on my thigh and continued to listen. “You

know I don’t believe in ghosts, never did—or maybe I do, if you include the Holy Ghost

—but that’s not what I mean, Jay. I’m talking about what your brother started and I think

continues to do—he changed you some way for the better. And I see him in you, whether

you realize it or not. Even a small thing like eating those leftover pancakes is something

your brother would’ve done, without thinking—was a time you wouldn’t have.”

Tears welled in my eyes in response to my mother’s sudden raw faith and

conviction and I turned away to look at the floor. But she paid no heed to me and I

needn’t have worried about betraying myself. Possibly it was only the fatigue of the day

she sought to wipe away, but when I looked up she was pressing the heels of her hands to

her eyes, and continued on in this fashion—mourning or thinking or just resting—for

what seemed a full minute more, until finally she lowered her hands and smiled and rose

from her chair. She walked to the bathroom and flicked the switch that turned both the

inside light on and the little rectangle of red in the wall beside the door jamb. “I just

remembered,” she said, with just the backside of her vertical striped blue and white shirt

showing around the corner. “Teddy didn’t get his dosage of ear drops tonight. Would you

help me with them before you go?”

And so I stood when she came back from the medicine cabinet with the little

white box containing the plastic bottle for Teddy that she slid out against her fingers. I

straddled his body, and with my two hands pressing inwards enclosed and immobilized

his narrow face, using my palms like soft vice jaws trying to hold but not harm him. I

cocked his head first one way and then the other as Mama pulled his ears up,

administering the drops with the long-nosed squeeze bottle, the proboscis flitting in,

pausing, and just as deftly pulling out of each ear like a hummingbird visiting one

trumpet vine flower after another. Teddy sank his rear end all the way to the floor,

pressing his tail flat out behind him, not appreciating or wanting any part of what we

were doing until after we finished, when, exhausted as much as relieved, he rose up and

tried to shake out the drops from his head. But I knelt beside him on the edge of the

braided blue oval rug that covered the middle part of the floor like a long shadow cast

from the table, and rubbed tight circles with my fingers massaging the medicine into his

soft ear canals. Liking that he soon he relaxed, sinking to his belly and then onto his side.

While I continued to touch him, he stretched each set of paired front and back paws to

their farthest limit across the age-polished deep brown, veined-black narrow ash boards at

the rug’s worn frayed periphery. Finally, he closed his eyes, entirely contented and safe

now, and breathed out a long whispering sigh. Ma slipped the thin tube of medicine back

into the narrow white box inscribed with directions in the veterinarian’s clipped, thin-

lined hand, and as she folded the flaps back together she asked, daring him to complain,

“Now Teddy was that so bad?” and he opened his eyes, hearing his name, searching first

her face then mine as my hand rode over the bumpy terrain of his ribs and smoothed

down the long silky hairs of his soft golden coat—but the last words were not directed

towards him but to me as she glanced to the mantel where her grandpa’s Ansonia clock

stopped for good the week after he died. She said before heading upstairs through the

door to the hallway, “I swear, Jay. Your making over him is all of Heaven he could ever

desire, or need.”

The snow continued to fall and covered the roads again as soon as they were

plowed. In town the main roads were bare where the trucks had salted and sanded, but

once beyond the limits the road stretched out pure and smooth, both lanes covered with a

thin layer of unmarked white so opaque the way could only be discerned, and then only

approximately, by the snow banked to both sides. Occasionally I could see a section of

guardrail, but even then the exact location of any one lane was impossible to determine

and the best course was to strive for the middle, hogging both lanes, until another car

coming the other way forced you back over. But I met only one other car the whole three

miles of road between Meridian and the crossover heading one way for the hamlet once

known as Mixville, the other way entering Rossburg. Were it not for the rose-colored

steam vapor rising apparition-like from the co-generation plant ahead in the near

distance, anyone unfamiliar with this part of the world might’ve been excused for

thinking the area had either never been settled or long ago was only to be at some point

subsequently abandoned.

The truck’s rear tires began to slip where the road began to ascend the hill coming

off the first curve, so I pushed the gear shift forward and let off the clutch, trying not to

give the engine more gas than necessary to keep going. Gradually the rise leveled and as

it did I fed the engine more gas, balancing torque and power with the delicate purchase

the rear wheels maintained with the road, so that by the time I passed the Baptist church

the truck was steadily gaining momentum for the s-curves just ahead and the final rise to

the driveway beyond. Out the corner of one eye I saw a fleeting soft glow in the woods to

the left and then the twinned beams of the headlights swung back across the road straight

ahead and illuminated through the still falling snow the dark form of a deer crossing not

fifty feet before me. Near instantaneously, I judged the relative speed and distance

between us and so judged it allowed a safe margin, and let off the gas only a little for the

barest part of a second before pressing my foot down again. And then I was at the turn for

my place, but instead of turning I simply veered to that side and plunged through the

plowed snow-bank feeling the truck bounce and almost bottom-out before entering the

shelter of the lean-to attached along the road side wall of the barn.

I walked out from under the barn and stood at the bottom of the drive before it

started up either of two ways and listened to the coyotes yipping back and forth in the

quiet, one pack behind me, the other up ahead, mouthing off like rival gangs across the

distance over my head. I started up the hill walking in the tire tracks made earlier, going

up under the electric lines I still didn’t trust since the night a windstorm brought them

snapping together with an arc of blue light that fell along with the wire and rolled like

ball lightning across the entire length of the front yard. The next morning all the line

crews were so busy the one come to fix the break didn’t arrive until after dark, piling out

of two trucks that flashed their lights in the road. The men got out in their brown winter

work-suits and yellow hard hats and high black rubber boots and then waited, most of

them standing around the lift truck parked by the road just talking and joking, as one of

them checked the downed line, pointing at it with what looked like a long flashlight,

while another climbed the transformer pole with boots studded on the soles with cleats

which dug in the wood. Just under the transformer he leaned back on a wide strap as he

reached up to it with a pole and hooked the end into a kind of metal fin with a hole in it,

turning off the juice. It was an incredibly cold and clear blue-black night, with all the

stars there ever would be overhead, and it would be twenty below before morning, and

though the men—some of them seeming more like boys than men—had worked from

before sun-up, not one appeared eager to be done or go home. But it was their last job of

the day and they all knew it and were happy, almost giddy, at the prospect.

It wasn’t as cold as that night, it never was when it snowed, but it was almost as

still even though snow had drifted into the tracks made by the truck earlier and in some

places entirely filled them. A dark form sat on the bank made of dirt scooped from the

milk house corner of the barn where Maynard had set up his backhoe to dig out a

drainage ditch for the rainwater that came off the hill and down the backside roof of the

barn. The excavation had only partially succeeded as a diversion and the foundation

continued to crumble, though no longer did water flow into the barn when it rained, not

even during the hardest downpours. The form sat next to the pig-nut hickory and waited,

almost merged against it like a shadow lain upon darkness, doing what I had said, which

was to watch and guard in my absence. I came up almost parallel to where he waited and

saw his tail thumping against the snow in the darkness. Sirius stood then and came near

and followed the rest of the way up the hill back through the tracks he’d punched in the

snow coming down from the upper barn upon my arrival. Farther uphill where he and

Chance had lain listening it may have been anyone driving off the road through the snow,

coming abruptly to rest somewhere below, so he came halfway to see and make sure.

And now that he had, he went up ahead to where Chance waited at the end of his chain

whimpering in apprehension of the coyotes.

I unhooked the chain from the collar, feeling it go from taut to slack in an instant

like a cut rope dropping its load. Let loose Chance made a direct line for the back door of

the house, not even stopping to pee, and waited, dancing on the stoop, throwing his head

back, until I came and opened the door. He went in as Beau came out, the two of them

barely pausing as they passed by each other in the doorway. But I called to Chance to

come out again and he turned and followed me to the slightly raised edge of the yard

overlooking the field to the east. The two other dogs played, rearing and running, as

Chance stood beside me watching the snow fall. Were it a night as clear and dark as the

one I remembered earlier I might have fixed my eyes on the sky a little to one side of

Pleiades, trying to find the lost star. Diffused moonlight shone across the whole sky

through the falling snow, yet even the moon was a rumor. After they peed I opened the

door and let the other dogs in, but Sirius sat remaining in profile on the high bank behind

the house and then raised his nose as if to join in with the coyotes still shrilly yipping on

both sides of the known world. Once long ago he’d called out on his own, straining for

the sky as primeval instinct urged a strange guttural rumbling to well from the deepest

part of him searching some answer. He called out that night to the full moon rising like a

shiny coin on the horizon but now he sat still and waited, perhaps remembering back to

that far gone night when nothing had returned to him from the silence beyond his own

echo, and so finally he let that ancient part of him go and stood from the bank and started

down when I opened the back door for the last time, holding it for him to come in.

***

The End

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