The barrowfields, p.14
The Barrowfields, page 14
“I’m so worried about her.”
“Why? She seems fine.”
“She’s not. You were her best friend. You’ve disappeared from her life. She’s had too much of that already.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That makes me feel good.”
“Where are all your things?”
Mother could tell from my look that I wasn’t staying. She got up and walked out of the room. Leonard was singing I have tried in my way to be free.
On Saturday night Threnody and I stayed up after Mother went to bed. As it turned out, Hurricane, or Cane, as he preferred to be called (unsurprisingly), had some good beer in his garage refrigerator and I decided to drink it. Threnody was lying in bed listening to me in the half-dark. I was sitting in a chair I’d pulled in from the living room.
“You might not remember this,” I said, “but Father used to tell us stories that he made up about our distant relatives in the mountains.”
“I kind of remember.”
“They were actually pretty good. He had a whole cast of ridiculous characters, half of which I think he made up as he went along. Gideon was the main character. I used to beg him to tell me Gideon stories.”
“Do you remember any? Who were the other characters besides Gideon?”
“Thinking about it now, it was all kind of odd. Gideon’s wife was, according to Father, an immense woman named Corpulina Porcinus (you have to say it in an Italian accent) who was, for all practical purposes, a giant. She had come to America on a ship called La Cucina, which the shipbuilders literally built around her while she waded in a canal. Then she was transported the rest of the way to Old Buckram by barge and hot-air balloon. I remember him saying that if she’d have been one inch taller, she would’ve been perfectly round.”
“She was a giant?” said Threnody, now showing some interest. She propped herself up on an elbow but was still under the covers.
“Yes, basically. Father said she was frightfully strong (his words), and that she could ‘easily crush even the most recalcitrant of cloves and the most wayward of red peppers.’ ”
“Ha.”
While we sat and talked, I looked around Threnody’s bedroom, except that it wasn’t really hers, as she had said. The style and decorations had been preordained and she hadn’t changed them. It reminded me of a condominium at the beach: stain-resistant carpet; walls of eggshell white; two matching, framed photographs of sand dunes and sea oats on adjacent walls (think Ansel Adams). The comforter on her bed was a generic beechen green, a guest linen of sorts, and not one she would have picked out. She had hung no posters on the walls, and the mirror over the dresser was missing the usual array of happy, silly photographs of friends. There was nothing to indicate to anyone that she was the current inhabitant of the room; that she was anything other than a transient, momentary occupier of the space. No overflowing bookcase; no Mylar-covered books borrowed from Father’s library; no books on her night table with a bookmark showing where we’d last stopped reading.
“So that was Corpulina,” I said. “And let’s see—Gideon had a dog. Its name was Balzac.”
“Balzac?”
“Yeah—after the French writer. But I remember there was some off-color joke behind that one. You can imagine.”
Threnody allowed herself a little amusement and said, “Oh my gosh.”
“And of course you had ol’ Jim Rickey. That was Gideon’s mule. In every story he found a way to be a little drunk, and then he’d run into things and get lost and occasionally he’d pass out.”
“I’m not so sure about ol’ Jim Rickey,” she said. “He sounds autobiographical. Do you remember any of the stories?” And then she sat up and said, “Wait! Are you hungry? Should we go get a snack? Let’s get snacks and come back and you can tell me a Gideon story!” We ran into the kitchen like a herd of elephants and began to open all the cabinets. Threnody got down three bowls and filled them with different varieties of chips and crackers. We had enough to eat for a couple of days. She got a cream soda out of the refrigerator and I got another beer out of the garage and we were ready for story time.
I said, “I remember one specific story about how Gideon’s father found his wife—which presumably would be like your great-great-great-great-great I don’t know how many greats grandmother.”
“Sometimes I pretend I’m not related to the mountain people,” she said. “ ’I’ve been telling people down here that my family is from Pennsylvania.”
“That’s half true, but you still shouldn’t do that. Mountain folks have a hell of a lot of character and ruggedness. It took a lot of determination for those people to survive and scrape out a living for all those years at five thousand feet of elevation. And you won’t meet anyone from anywhere with more common decency and honesty than the folks in Old Buckram. That’s all right there in your bloodline, just like it’s in mine, and you should be proud of it.”
“Whatever. You’re on a tangent. Do you hear the tangent Klaxons? They are sounding. So what about Gideon’s father’s wife?”
“Okay. Apparently Gideon’s father, whose name was Smoke, lived a hell of a long way from town. So he started dating one of the Houck sisters—there were two of them—and he planned to marry her, but the clerk of court printed up the marriage license with the other sister’s name on it.”
“What were their names?”
“Hattie and Alverta.”
“Really?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I just made that part up.”
“Was his name really Smoke?”
“Yes. Actually, that was a nickname. His real name was Barty, but everyone called him Smoke.”
“Okay,” she said.
“So anyway—” I said.
“That’s a pretty cool name,” she said.
“Smoke?”
“Yes. I like it.”
“I have to agree. So Smoke was going to marry Hattie, but the clerk of court printed the marriage license with Alverta’s name on it, so he married Alverta instead.”
“I wish he had married Hattie.”
“Me, too.”
“So why didn’t he just get them to print a new license?”
“Well, according to the story, it was going to cost a whole dollar more to get a new license printed, but Smoke said he didn’t reckon there was a dollar’s difference between the two of them.” This was the punch line and Threnody laughed on cue.
“Do you think that’s true?”
“Probably not, but I don’t know,” I said.
“Remember when he used to play vampire with us?”
“Yes. I don’t know about you, but that used to scare the shit out of me.”
“The cape might have been a little much.”
“The cape was fine. The coffin, the teeth, and the blood were a little much.”
“Good point,” she said.
She told me she missed him and I thought she might cry. I said, “I know, Bird. I know you do.”
“Do you miss him?”
“I’ll miss him when I forgive him,” I said.
She considered this, and then said, “Do you want to sleep on my floor?”
“I do. I’d like that very much.”
I read to her from her book until I was sure she was asleep, and then I read for a while longer to make sure the silence would not wake her up. I rolled out my sleeping bag and got a pillow off the couch for my head and stole one more of Cane’s good beers out of the garage. I walked around and looked at all of Cane’s books, none of which appeared to have ever been read. Lots of books about World War II. Several coffee-table treatises on art and art technique that he probably thought made him look sophisticated and well rounded. A large collection of religious books. His house was new and immaculate. I could see my reflection in his hardwood floors and appliances.
I finished the beer and stood there in the kitchen for a while, looking at pictures of smiling, clean-cut people I didn’t know on the refrigerator. Pictures from Hawaii. Pictures from Paris. There’s the fucking Eiffel Tower, no shit. That must be Venice. There’s Cane in a seersucker looking very confident standing next to a silver Mercedes that probably cost $90,000. He must be loaded. You might say he had “done it right,” somehow. Everything was neat and in its place. I’m sure his life was like that, too. It was perfect in every way and completely fucking boring.
Without knowing it, I had inherited my father’s nocturnal tendencies. I realized then, thinking about it, that he spent a hell of a lot of time awake when everyone else in his hemisphere was asleep. Now it was my turn. It’s a lonely feeling, being awake when everyone everywhere is safely in the land of Nod. I was empty and my insomniac worms were back, eating at me from the inside. I finally surrendered and tried to sleep. In the morning I awoke before the sun and decided I’d spare everyone the agony of saying goodbye.
After four years of diligent study, I managed to graduate from college with a bachelor of arts in philosophy and absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I couldn’t conceive of a possible career that would suit me or interest me in the slightest. In the midst of all this indecision, and being otherwise unemployable, I applied to law school. I still to this day don’t know why I did it. It was a plan, I suppose, and one that would keep me away from home, wherever that happened to be.
Thinking back, I only remember one conversation with my father about what he thought I might do for a living, and it supplied no insight into my future deliberations whatsoever. It was some time after Maddy died. My grandfather, Helton, had suffered a severe stroke and was residing in a nursing home in Winston-Salem. The building where he was housed, unmistakably reminiscent of a commercial-grade chicken house in architecture, aroma, and exterior appeal, had one impossibly long hallway, the other end of which upon entry was too far away to see in the available lighting.
The windows to the facility were all bolted shut, we were told, for “security reasons.” After a few visits it dawned on me that the latched windows were to prevent some senescent, diapered loon from escaping and wandering half-clothed and delirious through the streets of the city. As we’d walk down this airless corridor to my grandfather’s room, I’d peer into the stagnant darkness of the few open doors and see the cadaverous patients in dying repose, their dysmorphic figures sunk and twisted obscenely under thin, comfortless blankets in heaps of inhuman mortal decay. We’d pass row upon languishing row of low, fetid beds and restless, rolling eyeballs, and mouths made permanently slack by age or wasting disease. Our visits were not joyous occasions.
My grandfather’s eyesight and his memory were all but gone because of the damage to his brain and he didn’t recognize us. His head seemed to sink further and further into his bed and into his pillow to the point that all you could see of him was a yawning, gaping mouth full of large yellow protuberant teeth. We’d just go stand in the room for a while, no one saying anything other than making stark observations of the surroundings. From time to time Father would try a window and remark, “You’d think the Highland Hospital fire would have taught them something”—referring to a psychiatric facility in Asheville that burned down in 1948 and took the lives of eight of its patients who were trapped inside.
Father eventually stopped visiting. Meanwhile, I was doing well in school, and playing basketball, and I was even interested in a couple of girls who, sadly, were not aware of my existence. Father knew none of this. For weeks he thought I was on the math team, and I’m not even sure where this came from because our school didn’t have a math team. He never made it to a single one of my basketball games, despite Mother’s promise that he’d see all of them. There were, of course, other matters that kept him occupied.
One restless Sunday in October we were all at home, Father having decided on this occasion not to make the pointless trip to Winston-Salem. We were sitting in various corners of the Great Room reading different books, which is what we did to escape the persistent, low-grade horror of the vulture house. For all of us to be together like that was unusual in those days. The phone rang and Mother answered it. It was the town sign-maker. He was calling to ask Father a question about punctuation.
While he did not begrudge the sign-maker the occasional bit of advice, suffice to say that Father did not enjoy interruptions of any kind. The sign-maker painted a handsome sign with nice, bold lettering, but his linguistic skills were not terribly advanced. There were signs hung all over Old Buckram with misspellings and other wince-inducing errors (GOAT’S FOR SALE / LUMBER ECT. & MORE). He had started calling Father a dozen times a year or more. Mother used to say, “At least he knows what he doesn’t know.”
Father talked briefly to him and then placed the phone down, yanked his coat off a hook, and banged out through the door to the outside. I followed him out and traced his steps through the courtyard and down the hill through the field where the horses were grazing. It was quiet as only quiet can exist in a small mountain town, but a storm was coming and I could feel it on my face. Down the hill toward town, from the direction of the Barrowfields, the ever-present crows took flight, ascended the hill watchfully, and settled in a tree near where we walked.
As we went along I noticed that the black-eyed Susans Mother had planted along the fence had all died. They were just a crowd of dead stalks with black heads. Drooping yellow dahlias spanned the courtyard wall, their heads too heavy for their stems. We walked under the two ancestral oak trees in the field where the crows watched, and the ground below them was hidden beneath a floor of half-eaten, decaying acorns. There were changing colors on the Morning Mountain, but above it the sky was pale and gray as far as I could see. Father and his isolation were bundled in his long black coat, his strides too long for mine.
We sat on the cold ground at the edge of the hill and looked down off the mountain into the rising mist. Father offered me a drink out of an ornate tin flask and then remembered my age. His mind was elsewhere. It was, as usual, not with me. I wondered how he had focused his attention long enough to tie his own shoes; to put on and fasten his pants and belt.
“No, thank you,” I said, feeling a quickening urge to flee and unburden myself of the suffocating pain I had come to acquire only in his presence. At something unseen, the horses bolted into flight and tore off down the hill. In a moment they had circled and returned, throwing their heads about defiantly. “I wonder why they do that,” I said. Without looking up, he said, “I don’t know,” but I’m not sure he had even seen them.
“This—all this—” He drew a hand across the sullen landscape. “All this reminds me somehow of Yeats. See the pond down there, and the quiet of it? In the summer, men are down there fishing and drinking beer. I can see them from my window. Boys and girls swim and splash and chase one another around, and people from town lay down blankets for picnics and put their feet in the water. But now the autumn has come and ended all that, and a stillness lays upon it.” As if summoned to complete the scene just written, the wind came from deep within the woods and left us encircled in a vortex of newly fallen leaves.
“I like Yeats,” I said, not wanting to disappoint this rare poignancy between us, but instantly I felt my response was inadequate and groped for more words just to find agreement with him. I tried but couldn’t find more to say. His silence that followed assured me that my meager contribution was indeed meaningless to him.
And this was how our conversations usually went in the years after his mother died: dreadful quiet punctuated by the occasional brief exchange, followed by more contemplative dreadful quiet. And so we sat. Imagine us as two piles of rock sitting idle on the side of the mountain in this uneven field, the forest behind us issuing forth and calling back the chilling wind. Father brought his coat up around his neck and the crows rocked on the branches above our heads.
“I wish the sun would come out,” I said. “I feel like I haven’t seen it in a while.”
“It’s fine with me if it doesn’t,” said Father. “I keep thinking, involuntarily, that the sun is just a remorseless cosmic furnace that the earth is gradually falling into.”
“It’s up there,” I said, pointing. “We can’t exactly fall into it.”
“It’s a question of perspective,” said Father. “I’ve always thought we looked down into the sun.” Changing the subject, he said, “Do you—have any idea what you want to be when you grow up? I think it’s a good time for us to talk about that.” He forced himself awkwardly into the role of a parent and wavered there uncomfortably. I sensed this and adopted the corresponding persona of a dutiful son contemplating his future.
“I’m trying to decide,” I said, but in fact I hadn’t considered it for a single moment. Life seemed hardly to have begun for me. My days could still be agonizingly slow, and it was hard to see past the next summer. There was a time when all I really wanted to do was to be like him. I wanted to be a writer; maybe a lawyer, too. I wanted to play sweetly sorrowful music by candlelight after everyone else had gone to bed. I wanted to be the solitary man reading at the edge of the Barrowfields. I wanted to be all that he was before the sadness came. But those days had passed, and passed irretrievably.
Thinking of all that had gone wrong—feeling a hateful bitterness inside me from his absence in my life, from my inability to understand him and his indifference to my inability to understand him, I bit my tongue almost through and said with perfect sarcasm, “Sometimes I think I’d like to be a writer.” It was hard for me not to be angry, to be antagonistic toward him, and I meant this sentiment with a lifetime’s burden of sardonic irony.
“Like me,” he said grimly.
“Like you,” I said. “Just like you.”
“That’s how I used to think of myself,” he said. A black cat, not ours, walked along the top of the fence and disappeared into the howling woods. Father stood abruptly, shook out the rest of what was in his flask, and started back to the house. I called after him—“Where are you going?”
