RESURRECTION
Stories for the Living and Dead
by
Bernard Fancher
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 by Bernard Fancher
Cover image by Arezou Dasta, used with kind permission
All rights reserved
This ebook is licensed for distribution by Smashwords, and its contents may not be otherwise reproduced or disseminated without the author’s permission.
The following stories are fiction, though scattered among them are characters and situations derived from a realm that was once indisputably real.
Table of Contents
A Reflection on Incomprehensible Mercy and Grace
Somebody Always Comes When You Call
What Does It Matter, What Does It Mean?
***
Clarissa Lemke (her maiden name) emerged from a 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 the reassuring sound of her resumed breathing, feeling the repetitive gentle tremor of her own faulty heart. Finally, a tentative rap of knuckles upon a wavy pane of glass announced a presence from the other side, and the voice of a man she had not heard in near eighty years – a presence resurrected from her childhood – called in softly to her through the window: Never fear! ‘Tis only I, Pieter Dunker!
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, now 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 have easily reached out her arms and touched something. Likely he would have never known. But he had previously warned her in a severe voice not to do it, explaining only that to do so would be dangerous. Yet more than injury or death, 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 as well in this altered state of consciousness, 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 had always thought. Just as energy derived from matter, so did matter derive from energy. That was the essence of the Big Bang, her son 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 son or any other aspect of 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 drywall 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 necessary to maintain before attempting the riskier challenge of standing. Finally stepping sideways across the bare wood floor, she stepped a little too far. Losing her balance, she found it necessary to grab hold of the side of the piano, and sat heavily, yet thankfully, on the wide sturdy bench set before it. For a moment, she felt only embarrassment, but after a moment more, regaining her composure, she felt a sudden compulsion to play a piece from her senior recital, a tune she hadn’t thought of in years.
The name of the piece was Clair 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, both for her own pleasure and that of her unseen audience. But then the reverie gave way to the mere physical realm as her long-since-deceased husband ran up from the pink peonies at the front of the house and burst 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 from that day her father had paused in his transit from this world to the next in order to hear 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. Striking the singular note, she listened to it fade in the silence. Then, taking a deep breath, she watched with detached interest and new wonder as her hands repositioned and, as if by a will of their own, commenced playing the music 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 of fabric 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 in the crowd, I heard a woman half-whisper the news: “Rick just got word: John’s in a coma, and 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 and plotted some vague revenge until the teacher made him return them the next day, but then, almost predictably, we became inseparable 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 below, and occasionally startling them (to our delight when we did) with our disembodied voices.
During the course of our play John would suddenly announce, “I need to go get some Kix,” and, just that quickly starting for home, drop abruptly to the ground. I never knew quite what to make of these sudden desertions and would look somewhat disconsolately at my pitch-stained hands after he’d gone, trying to decide whether to keep climbing or head for the jar of Getzol cleaner that waited by the porcelain sink in a dark and recessed corner of our family’s 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 me and John and maybe one or more of his brothers 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 my house, John told me his father always carried a hundred dollar bill in his wallet. The statement amazes me even to this day. He might as well have told me they were millionaires. I remember my own dad coming home one night after driving the bus to a basketball game, standing in the center of the living room, happily announcing he’d made an extra ten bucks. I couldn’t imagine even that amount as 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 the village 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 flaming 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 status of the tri-county news.
Just beyond the far corner of our block, the former tile and sluice-manufacturing plant stood in those days overlooking the railroad tracks and the backyards of houses situated even further below. The closed plant 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; consequently, beyond the merely inconvenient knowledge that we weren’t to go near it, there was practically nothing to keep us away. 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 as well seemed irresistible, tempting us deeper. As it was, we ventured in only a few dozen feet, climbing a vertical wood chute that led straight up two stories from where we could jump off an open perch, or at least dare each other to do so.
I honestly don’t recall which of us accepted the challenge first. I like to think it was me, as I was older by half a year. A daunting divide separated us from a large mound of leftover sand just below. 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.
So, I jumped. My feet kicked out from the ledge they 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, and for all the rest of that summer, I was indestructible. John just as carelessly played to the fates after that, believing 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 assurances, soberly inform me he wanted red roses at his 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 couple bushel baskets of 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 where I first knew him, he got a Superman costume for his birthday. His older sister held a Halloween party for the neighborhood kids that same year, turning off the lights in the house, telling the tale of The Tell-Tale Heart so convincingly it scared the bunch of us witless. I also witnessed John and his older brother Rick, engaged in what may have been their final cooperative act in that house, tumbling together through the picture window that separated the dining room and enclosed porch. It seemed they were always going at one another, so it seemed odd when later John’s younger brother told me, quite sincerely, after I’d punched my own brother in the face 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 it was that 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. Once, misjudging as I pulled up on one runner in the attempt to scrape the bark of a tree with the other, I collided full on at the bottom of the steepest part of the hill directly below the big house John’s family had recently moved into, and was saved only because the top edge of one boot caught on the back edge of my Radio Flyer. The vicious laughter coming from above me echoed a week later when – after he called me Fannyfart and I called him Winshit in retaliation – John suddenly 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 earlier half hour we spent in the attic of that big house on the hill, sitting in a block of suspended sunlight and dust as we tried to unravel the mystery of water’s being both hydrogen and oxygen combined 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 very same house on the hill as a young girl and how one day, when everyone else was away, her oldest sister Anita had built a fire of kindling that burned so intensely the flue going into the wall turned cherry red. 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, the house she presently lives in, and 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 so also point, if one extrapolates correctly, 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 enduring 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 to one knee on the wet flagstone walk approaching the side porch for the first time, and feel the wary anticipation of entering 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 split open over the winter.
Years later, listening to my mom relating connected and disparate stories as she put away dishes in the absurdly small and narrow kitchen, I remembered from that earlier time all the elegant cast iron radiators that were removed, busted up, and left piled by the drive; I asked what had happened.
“Sierra let the house freeze when he left,” my mother calmly replied, rising up on her toes to put a bowl away in the high cupboard over the stove. “While we were waiting for our loan to go through, Winchip made a better offer. The radiators and the plumbing meant nothing to him because he planned to put in oil heat anyway.” Closing the cupboard door, lowering her heels back to the floor, she added with the emphasis of a hard glance, “I think Sierra did it on purpose, hoping we’d withdraw our offer.”
In some ways I think John and I never had a chance. Though there was a time we were close as brothers, the covetousness and suspicion that began our relationship, and was eventually to destroy it, seems to have been inseparably 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—quite simply, he’d gone his way and I’d gone mine. At any rate, that particular day he crossed the road to see me it was as though we had never before met. He stood for a moment and looked at what I was doing then reached forward to touch 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 daring and embattled 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 younger brother each stood to give their eulogies. 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 with a knowing wink. “They have the best uniforms, and get the most attention from the ladies.”
At the graveside ceremony I met acquaintances I’d 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 shined where their sideburns should have been. 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 John’s younger brother 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 somehow 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 supernatural 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 W**t 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 N******* 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, dwindling 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 with a transcendent, calm certainty that I am looking at heaven.
***
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 desired super-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 one day after school the both of us were alone in John’s house watching the first episode of The Adventures of Superman, which depicted Mole Men climbing up from their deep nether world, ascending at night through an abandoned well casing. In a recurring nightmare I found myself subsequently captured and taken underground, possibly to be imprisoned forever. Finally, yet not entirely logically, I persuaded myself that to avoid such a fate I must somehow learn how to fly.
“You will,” my mother confidently assured me.
And so, a week before Halloween, believing in her prediction and the alluring magic of words, convinced the right one would send me soaring, I climbed the trellis at the back of our house and stood perched on the edge of the garage roof like a fledgling; closing my eyes, calling out Geronimo, I then jumped – a stunt (as my mother accurately called it) which resulted in my so badly spraining an ankle that Halloween night found me 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 that crossed the dining room floor and ended with both of them clutching and going together through the big window next to the main entrance door to the house, landing unhurt on the enclosed porch. That same fall, my brother put his left hand through a windowpane he broke while we were rough-housing, just as a hanging 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 stood by and 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, because I was freshly and impressionably in the midst of an immersion in mythology, I thought of Icarus, and then the subterranean princess Persephone, who I had already come to secretly love.
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 out to us 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 yells, flailing an arm, jiggling a flap of loose skin above her elbow. “Go on now, or I’ll have to tell Mister Bumbledumbledum!”
For a second we stand in awe. Heretofore, Mister Bumbledumbledum had been our secret bogeyman. As far as we knew, he inhabited only our private world. The possibility he might be real left us momentarily stunned and slightly giddy.
Eventually, I went back to thinking of Persephone, my still secret and buried love – after determining Mrs. Barney must have simply overheard us taunting one another as we passed between her house and the narrow clapboard-sided garage with the tip-up door barely wide enough to accommodate the egg-blue and white ‘57 Bel Air coupe, whose rotting hooded headlamp she would ask me a full decade later to patch up “just acceptably enough” for it to pass inspection one last 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 to the beyond, perhaps – if the ancients are to be believed – there to drink from the waters of Lethe and forget we ever lived.
The mythic Persephone, consigned to the underworld at the end of each year, 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.
Contrastingly, but just as intriguingly, John’s oldest sibling, Candy, had short black hair and an outgoing, perpetually friendly manner. Though rarely appearing in actuality, in my memory she appears without beckoning in a white puffy blouse and black tapering breeches that conform to each leg, ending in little side slits below the knees. Her calves and ankles, left bare, momentarily arrest my attention shy of her feet, until, as I continue to watch her, she walks to a waiting Mustang, always either on pink low-cut 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 to step out and test the insubstantial air.
For a short season we stepped substantially into and out of that house, going repeatedly 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 the intersecting road at the bottom to explore 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, having already conquered my fear of flight, I replaced reverence with cynical judgment, transforming the death of George Reeves’ from tragedy to farce. John laughed quietly in appreciation as he prepared, standing poised on the cusp of commitment, to do what we both knew he eventually would. Looking back over his shoulder, he theatrically imparted one last instruction before leaping: “Just remember,” he said, winking. “I always adored red roses. If you truly loved me, don’t just come to my funeral, but lay a dozen on my grave.”
The words from that moment 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 from one another fond remembrance with our favorite flowers.
Eventually, as boys of a certain age will, we ended up fighting, tangling in the dirt and grass while our bodies – responding the same to malice as love – exuded still the evanescent odor of innocent play. Then one winter day John ordered me off his hill forever, but not before challenging me to see which of us could drive his sled closest the big maple tree at the base of the steep slope just below the big house he and his family had only recently moved into.
Leaning away, lifting a runner at the last possible moment, I tried to skim the tree trunk lightly in passing. But slightly misjudging, hitting it head-on, I was saved from the full force of the impact only when a boot caught on the rear edge of my Radio Flyer. If not for that chance intervention I might have predeceased John, who died during the last summer of the last century from an inexplicable trauma to his brain, after languishing in a coma for years.
I once heard a preacher on the radio say 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 entirely sure what that 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, taking from a bushel basket set perennially every fall of those years before the raised bluestone fireplace hearth in that same backroom. As I walked past the small house with the large porch window through which he and his brother so long ago crashed and fell, I marveled again at such reckless ardor, such seemingly endless invulnerability. I also recalled the first inkling that we were mortal and bound to perish after all; climbing spruce limbs to a neighbor’s garage roof a week later, we held our breaths as his angry searching brother passed below us on the sidewalk.
Crossing through the cool of the stream descending from the woods, I also remembered kneeling and imbibing of the restorative fountain shooting from the earth out of a water main break. Yearning for those innocent days before innocence ended with banishment from the hill I 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 of Stephanie. And then as she parted her lips in a knowing demure smile, revealing teeth as white as her dress, I felt immediately overcome with attraction, not for a mythic phantasm of return from my youth, but for a tangible woman of my dreams transformed into real flesh and blood.
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.
And so, I imagine him 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, saying a thin smear of Vaseline on the gauges would make it unnecessary to tape them. That memory spawns another, of our sitting one youthful afternoon – alone, together – in the living room of his first house, watching, as we bravely held hands, the emergence of subterranean Mole Men. Wanting to believe, I get down on my knees and place an ear to the ground, listening for some indication of an unknown world below.
Mixing myth and desire, I become for the moment Orpheus, invoking the promise of Persephone. But words fail me and I realize there is nothing to do but laugh and cry at such folly.
***
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, reveling 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 meeting mine, bridging the gulf between us.
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.
***
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 while turning, and said for being such 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.
***
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 could only 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.