Cold November slush and mud coated his calves as Walter tore up and down the back hills. Some of the runners were coming back to him now. He ran in a blind fury, dumb and animal like and unconscious of his pain, tearing in air as he flew by the other boys one by one by one slowly and slowly in the dark dunsplattered woods. Leaves of brilliant autumnal pastels tore underfoot, his spikes tearing into the earth and flicking the loose wet gravel back and up his pulsing calf and into the eyes of the boys behind him. He came to a final incline and then a long flat, and in the flat the long line of runners ahead of him and behind him stretched across the gray light and drizzle and to the bridge over the Henry Hudson Parkway beyond. Redfaced, deep in oxygen debt, his mania heightened. There were still too many people. There were still so many people. Cross country racing as he understood it was the gradual tortured process of attaining independence and solitude. Yet there had been so many that had started so fast the first mile, and he had forced that unnatural patience (so lauded by books and coaches and even certified by logic yet still unnatural) to govern and contain his early strides.
Countless hours comprised each step, ten sunburnt summer miles behind each breath, dashing over concrete and trail and track envisioning each time these very dark and damp forest corridors, these very winding quadburning hallows, a hundred pushups for every second spent on an incline, a year's worth of early nights and broken toenails and missed dates and appointments and assignments, all, so he believed right then, for roughly fifteen minutes spent on the bitter edge of sanity in a park in New York City.
He crossed the parkway and made the right hand turn down the long and steep hill and sidled up along the brush and the trees and sprinted down with the momentum of the hill. He demanded room be made for oxygen in compartments that had long since ceased to have room to spare. In a rush the other boys slipped behind him one by one by one, and then yet more came into view, as in a race car game that endlessly invents faster opponents as the skill of the driver augments. Deeply into his lungs Walter heaved the frosty latefall air. The roar of the crowd came from ahead as the runners were expelled from the woods and onto Van Cortland Park's legendary finishing straight.
The cinder path arced around the fields, the banners of the finish only just visible in the moiling fog and drizzle. The fans and coaches and other athletes lined the path and Walter hugged the turn so tightly that some of the spectators issued in irrelevant sibilance warnings to back away. And still he passed them, one by one by one. Tall boys, loping boys, struggling boys, muscular boys, suspiring needy breaths and approaching and shying from their threshold, crumbling at the sight of the homestretch, the deceivingly distant finish. And the line of them still vanished into the fog, ten at least, probably closer to twenty, some dying and some only just striking, and some like Walter manic and crazed in the eye like a rabid dog gathering itself for a final display of frothy viciousness before death.
Though his conscious mind made no logical connections, though he did not for even a second consider that the world of his childhood, the emotions that had fueled his youthful passions, were powering this very hysteria, there was nonetheless evident in his every step the desperation of someone who has spent more than he can afford to not win back on a single task.
He began to tighten, his legs like glue hardening and contracting, the rapid turnover of his steps limber and athletic in the cold slushy cinders beginning to fade and diminish and slow as he breached his oxygen capacity. And then it was a different boy who came alongside him and sidled past him, equally irreverent and equally manic, and went on to the next boy ahead with the same calculated indifference. And it was Walter who slipped now, slowing into anonymity, straining futilely and watching without recompense a few more go by him, before the timestopping agonies of the penultimate steps passed and the finish line relieved his furor.
The gray day swam in his vision; someone put his hands on the bony shoulders of the boy in front of him, and soon he felt grimy paws on his own shoulders, and as if in some perverse congo line they traipsed together through the finishing chute. Walter dry heaved to the side, felt his stomach convulse again and retched out dry notair into the latefall bitterness. A card was placed in his hand that had the number 16 scrawled across it in black marker.
Without knowing what he was doing he exchanged frozen halfembraces with the other anonymities that had finished before him, after him, that happened to moil in nausea or an endorphin-crazed affability in his general vicinity. Coach came up to him and shook his hand.
That's not too bad, he said. Not too bad at all.
Walter dry heaved again and cursed. Coach shook his head and slapped his shoulder and started to walk away.
I've never lost a race that bad in my life, Walter said.
Coach turned, his form blurry in the postrace haze and the mist and the runners passing between them vomiting on the grass and stumbling and limping their recoveries about.
Well, he said, turning briefly and nodding to the wounded, Neither have they.
Coach moved on. Walter put his hands on his slushfroze kneecaps, felt the hot blood boiling in his legs beneath his numbed fingers. His neck joined other necks, dozens of other necks, spines supine to the sky, spitting or bleeding or cussing violently to the tundra, searching in that frantic state of heightened and unreasonable emotion for some answer, some reassurance, some mitigation to the raw truth all too evident in that massed collection of bodies, that unfamiliar postrace company.
And as more and more necks joined the fray, as the exit from the triage swelled steadily with the bodies of the countless hundreds yet incoming, there did seem to move within that rolling fog and mist the palpable presence of a generation of kindred spirits, their dreams held still in that same warground soil which had seen their undoing. For it is a truth universal among runners that each must one day run the race that tells them they are more than they thought they were, and each must run the race which tells them they are not (and never will be) what had they dreamed they could become. And though these wraiths knew better than to laugh, they did grin slightly, knowing, perhaps, what was to come to those who had the serenity to take wisdom from the brutality of finishing less than best.
Song of the Day: My Body is a Cage by Arcade Fire
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Magic City Blues
A cold wind was gusting up the street and gathering scattered Billings refuse, whipping between the buildings with a sibilant fury. It was the kind of cold you feel in your lungs, the kind that hurts to touch directly. The kind that gangrene will take, if you let it.
The old Crow Indian was staring unblinkingly into the gusts and the trash which they carried. Scarred face and ratted old gray hair worn by and callused to the brutality in that air, air which settled like a glaucoma in the shivering bodies outside McCormick's Cafe. With curved and mangled fingers the old Indian shakily lit a cigarette and huffed in, then spoke without introduction.
My greatgrandfather was a chief on the Crow reservation, he said, nodding. Yes mhmm. He was there on through 1910.
When he spoke his words sounded ancient and seemed to age him older still. His eyes were pale razors, blue and sharp and exacting, focusing for a few moments on each of us in an almost rote fashion. They were not so much accusatory as guilting, as if in an effort to invoke some truth that in a just world should have been self evident and which he was disappointed he had to explain.
See that rock over there, he nodded his head to the formation jutting out from the Rimrocks which girded the city. That is called Suicide Rock. When the Europeans came and gave the Crow smallpox, they would leap from that rock to their deaths, rather than suffer out their disease.
While he spoke the old shopkeep had come out from McCormick's and stood with balded head and frowning face at the fringe of the group. Something in the Crow's tone or his confrontational disposition was an affront to the shopkeep and perhaps even to the group. Heads turned away from the emotion of his words and the gravity of their implication. Some kind of fear lurks above any sentiment too real; this Crow was no exception.
Javier, the shopkeep said curtly, Vamonos. Que no son bienvenidos. You know you can't be here.
Yeah yeah, Javier grumbled, and turned stiffly away. He waved one of his mangled claws broadly at the group watching before turning and limping away down the road.
Sorry about Javier, said the shopkeep. I've caught him dealing meth on this very doorstep. He always comes when he sees new faces.
It's alright, I said quickly.
We left in the opposite direction. The freezing wind gusted up the long industrial Billings streets, seeming to push out or to freeze out whatever it encountered, succeeding only in veneering everything with a crisp iciness, the sort of iciness that could slice flesh to the bone when the thermometer read (as it did on that morning) negative ten. As we walked back to the trucks I looked up to the Rimrocks and pictured the diseased Indians pitching off the edge in endless droves, killed as much by the killing virus as by the piles of bodies that lured and beckoned with promises of an oblivion that knew no Lewis and knew no Clark, a vacuum unimbued by settlers or settler thoughts, a sanctuary of nothingness from the heretical debauchery which swept through land and man alike. And for a moment through the bitter grayness it was as though something wraithlike in the ancient bluffs seemed to demand justice, as clearly as that grizzled and drugtorn shadow of a man spending the coin of his lifeforces lurking about coffee shops and alleyways. A gust of wind shivered down the trashblown streets again and I huddled my shoulders into that wicked air. It is times like these that I am glad to have left my jacket at home.
The old Crow Indian was staring unblinkingly into the gusts and the trash which they carried. Scarred face and ratted old gray hair worn by and callused to the brutality in that air, air which settled like a glaucoma in the shivering bodies outside McCormick's Cafe. With curved and mangled fingers the old Indian shakily lit a cigarette and huffed in, then spoke without introduction.
My greatgrandfather was a chief on the Crow reservation, he said, nodding. Yes mhmm. He was there on through 1910.
When he spoke his words sounded ancient and seemed to age him older still. His eyes were pale razors, blue and sharp and exacting, focusing for a few moments on each of us in an almost rote fashion. They were not so much accusatory as guilting, as if in an effort to invoke some truth that in a just world should have been self evident and which he was disappointed he had to explain.
See that rock over there, he nodded his head to the formation jutting out from the Rimrocks which girded the city. That is called Suicide Rock. When the Europeans came and gave the Crow smallpox, they would leap from that rock to their deaths, rather than suffer out their disease.
While he spoke the old shopkeep had come out from McCormick's and stood with balded head and frowning face at the fringe of the group. Something in the Crow's tone or his confrontational disposition was an affront to the shopkeep and perhaps even to the group. Heads turned away from the emotion of his words and the gravity of their implication. Some kind of fear lurks above any sentiment too real; this Crow was no exception.
Javier, the shopkeep said curtly, Vamonos. Que no son bienvenidos. You know you can't be here.
Yeah yeah, Javier grumbled, and turned stiffly away. He waved one of his mangled claws broadly at the group watching before turning and limping away down the road.
Sorry about Javier, said the shopkeep. I've caught him dealing meth on this very doorstep. He always comes when he sees new faces.
It's alright, I said quickly.
We left in the opposite direction. The freezing wind gusted up the long industrial Billings streets, seeming to push out or to freeze out whatever it encountered, succeeding only in veneering everything with a crisp iciness, the sort of iciness that could slice flesh to the bone when the thermometer read (as it did on that morning) negative ten. As we walked back to the trucks I looked up to the Rimrocks and pictured the diseased Indians pitching off the edge in endless droves, killed as much by the killing virus as by the piles of bodies that lured and beckoned with promises of an oblivion that knew no Lewis and knew no Clark, a vacuum unimbued by settlers or settler thoughts, a sanctuary of nothingness from the heretical debauchery which swept through land and man alike. And for a moment through the bitter grayness it was as though something wraithlike in the ancient bluffs seemed to demand justice, as clearly as that grizzled and drugtorn shadow of a man spending the coin of his lifeforces lurking about coffee shops and alleyways. A gust of wind shivered down the trashblown streets again and I huddled my shoulders into that wicked air. It is times like these that I am glad to have left my jacket at home.
A Brief Engagement in the Pennsylvania Dutchlands
There is no such thing as virginity...Purity is a negative state.
-Mr. Compson from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
Becky comes out into the dusk. Cornstalks rustle as the sharp wind undulates over the land and into the gravyblue of the sky distant. Goosebumps pimple her chilled body through her dirtstained white dress. A shiny silver ring glimmers on her finger. Dinner sets heavy within her. Night is coming.
She does not walk far from the house. Ten steps down the crusted freeze of the roosterpath tundra the clatter of the dishes fades into the rural silences. About her the stripped bushes and the naked branches of the trees are whipped about into frenzy by the gusts. She does not squint or wince to that tempest. It even seems to caress her. It runs the trajectory of her high cheekbone and sharp jaw. It smoothes the line of her hair back. It writes a healthy ruddy hue upon her olive skin. As though the elements had composed the girl kindly, the dark evidence of their truer natures rattling the windows behind her, scouring over the land to seek unsheltered life and snuff it out. A Fedallah to this as yet unwitting and as yet unprovoked Ahab.
By the edge of the woods where the forest meets the cropfield there is a stump. Mossdecayed, rotting, hard like a block of steel in the winter bone. There she sits crosslegged and without hesitation, the wind blowing back her hair and jetstreaming her jawline and perhaps even forming that self-assured expression of her closed mouth. An expression that seems to doubt its appointed task but not how that task must be done: the bear that is dusklight voyeur to the mountain lion's fresh kill.
She sits there and watches how the gray clouds, in holding the final imprint of the light from the day, in bestowing their swirling gusts with a knifelike chill, wash like turkey gravy over the navy of the young sky. In fusion they seem to say something to her, something of the nature of liminal moments.
Becky had emerged from the womb a lonesome child, made brotherless seventeen years past by that pubescent plight of all thoughtful young country boys who take books too seriously. She did not know about him until she was seven. She made friends with a girl in school who had four older brothers. The other girl told her all about what a brother was. One day, sitting on the old dead stump, Becky asked her mother what she thought a brother was.
Why? her mother asked.
Just cause, Becky said through her braces.
That is not an answer.
Just cause mamma. Everyone says something different about everything.
And that was how Becky found out about her brother Moses. Her brother Moses, hidden from Becky until now, born when her mother was but sixteen, born in a barn on a bed of hay because Becky's father scorned modern medicine, born into the screams and wails of a suburban teen who had thought picking apples would be a romantic job one summer and got a baby in her belly because of it, born into the arms of that very father, preacher of alternative medicine, library bedecked with Kesey and Ginsberg and Whitman and Kerouac but not Flaubert or Goethe, owner of an apple farm and father to a baby from a girl who had once felt, when lost in the woods on a school field trip to Loyalsock State Forest, such a total enervation of spirit and pleasant silence of mind, that she swore to work towards the reattainment of that wildernessborne ecstasy forevermore. It was from such a womb, into such a pair of hands, that the child Moses was born. From such a womb, into such hands.
Though young, Becky's mother performed her tasks in what most would have called an admirable manner. She married Becky's father immediately and took little Moses for long walks on the apple farm during the day when it was not raining. At night when her husband went into the basement to get high, she would set Moses down between her knees by the fire and read to him parts of her favorite stories. She read to him of Arwen and Aragorn, of O. Henry's Jim and Della, later of Odysseus and Penelope; finely selected bellywarming treatises of fantasy from the world's most vivid imaginariums. When Moses was old enough he read too, of great travels, of adventure, of love and sacrifice and good living. All this his father encouraged, all this his mother adored.
Accordingly, Moses grew into a young man of a precocious idealism, the depths of which his parents could have never imagined. This was not a little helped by his saturation into Judeo-Christian culture. Invocations of guilt infected his high school life daily; altruistic sentiments of sacrifice appealed to him far more than what was normal for a youth his age. Though he publicly spurned all institutionalized dogmatism with the flair of a wartime orator, he took to heart and to practice the ideals to which he was exposed. And his love of literature only burned deeper as he grew. He voraciously read Ernest Hemingway. His favorite was For Whom the Bell Tolls. His least favorite was The Sun Also Rises. When pressed by his teacher, he said that he did not find weakness to be very motivational. Nothing is stopping Brett, Moses said. Nothing is stopping Jake. Even worse, Becky's mother reflected (in telling this story), Moses found it funny when Tom Sawyer says to Huck Finn, when Huck wants to set Jim free by stealing the key to his jail cell, Why, hain’t you ever read any books at all? Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-maidy way as that? Moses had laughed at that part. Moses was Tom. Tom in a later era, an era which charged for such lofty sentimentality a far more lasting price than a single bullet to the leg.
Things could have gone no other way. The first love which idle chance inflicted upon Moses was illfated from the instant of its inception. The girl was Pegeen O'Reilly, a classmate, born of the countryside the same as him, purported to be a lover of books the same as him. She of course had a soft, gentle way about her. Her wide, pale eyes seemed in constant peril of being swallowed by the rushing swells of their own skyblue innocence. He glowed in the attention she turned on him, in their childlike games, in a sweet intimacy with another person which he had never really considered possible. He would meet her by moonlight in the country between their farms, sneaking out his window and dashing over the dark verdure hills, a book of poetry tucked under his arm like a runningback, a note for her tucked deep in the folds of his jacket. The illicit nature of their union, the embers of romantic rebellion in his chest that had, since opening his first book, yearned to be kindled, and coupled with the pastoral beauty of the Pennsylvania Dutchlands, made their seemingly blossoming love a perfect storm of catastrophe.
Moses' lifelong search for an ideal to defend had come to an abrupt halt. Never before had he been so alive. It became his sworn duty to defend at all costs the glimmer he had seen in Pegeen's eyes. He called it the skyblue, in the journal he kept. As if this comparison, this name, described her precious quality better than any photograph, any essay, any other description ever could. A simile is worth a thousand words. What could compare to that sort of sweetness and innocence, other than the endless light azure of the sky on a pleasant day. He knew no better than to wax such mawkish cliches; in fact, that he knew no better was the point. He quickly and effortlessly came to do all of his thinking in such lofty language, saying it aloud and proudly to anyone bold enough to broach the subject of love or lust. His life had become reorganized around this priority, and the weight of commonplace tasks vanished, like dust swept from an object long inert.
In all true stories, Becky's mother said, there is a wrong which cannot be righted. Pegeen came from a rigorously Amish family that sent her away to public school after she was banned from her first for some unnamed blasphemy. Sadly, the precise breed of girl that Moses would swim across oceans for; chaining the cement blocks to his ankles himself, if that's what was necessary.
Pegeen's mother was abusive and unfaithful, her father too pious to do any more than deny the reality that was his fractured family. Time and again Moses confronted them without Pegeen's knowing, and, wielding all the holy righteousness of his literary upbringing, eloquently inspired them to be honest with their daughter. He spoke, in not so many words, of ideas such as carpe diem, and of the power of love, of forgiveness. He told them he thought of them as his family, or something to that effect. He may have even said he cared about anyone who cared about Pegeen. Something in his voice must have been reminiscent of their churchly hours, because the O’Reillys fell irrevocably in love with Moses. When he left the final time, it was with three jars of freshly pressed cider, teary hugs, and insistent promises that things would change.
Like many young men and women raised in anything approximating American middleclass society, Moses had done very little of what could accurately be called real living. He had an inherent and instinctual belief in the goodness of the human race and had been exposed to nothing to lead him to believe the contrary. Anyone could do anything. He had found his flower, skyblue-eyed with dimples beside her smile. Faith was required, and Moses practiced constant faith. He idolized, in a near apotheosis of admiration, Franny Glass and her Jesus Prayer. He believed that anything done with a good intention was holy beyond conception. He did not believe the quote about the composition of the path to hell; in fact, he openly scorned all competing dogma. To say he was blinded would be severe and perhaps melodramatic, yet the point remained that all logic and reason that fell outside of the spectrum that was the five feet and two inches that comprised the form of little Pegeen O'Reilly, was blurred out into irrelevance.
What came next was absolutely inevitable, as unstoppable as the monthly rains or the winter freeze or the occasional droughts or the gusts of wind which famously tore across the open pastures of that country. It happened one frigid November night, when he found her trembling on the bank of the hill that was their meeting spot. He knew instantly something was horribly wrong. Her chin rested between her folded knees and she was staring off to the starless night and the sweeping skies and the darkened country that had been her family's for generations. She did not turn into his arms when he held her. He sat down, caressed her cheek, kissed her forehead, his blood boiling and his stomach flipping over and his heart slamming hard against his ribcage like a trapped lion. When she finally turned to him he saw: her shirt stained pink with blood, tears and sweat running down her cheeks. A purple welt swelled beside her eye, which was bloodshot. Her lip was fattened, cut deeply in separate places. Crimson rushed from a gash on her cheek and ran down her neck. His whole body shook and she told him not to go.
It was her? he asked.
It was both, she said, taking his hand in her own.
But he did. And the last time he ever saw Pegeen was when he glanced back up the slope to her crumpled form, her eyes only dimly ruminating his stumbling egression through the folds of her dirtied garments, his own eyes a shade of possessed entirely not his own. He ran the mile to the house with that unholy power vested in him, that power reserved for all those damned to the crueler fates of his kind, that power of such immense evil that it can only be unearthed from a starting velocity of such great good. He went and punched holes in the walls of their house and smashed his forehead against the windowpanes until they broke and ripped the doors to all the rooms off their hinges. He was not an animal, not yet, anyway; he was merely stripped of any of that loose effluent material that makes a man a man. There was no one home. He sprinted back to the top of the hill. Pegeen was gone.
A trail of blood led into the cornfields. It was there that he mired for the next twelve hours, through the night, into the day, until he had searched every row and the woods beyond the rows and the riverbanks and dusty fields beyond that. When the police came around noontime he told them everything, and they took him home.
Pegeen did not turn up that week. Moses spent each night camped by her house. He lasted three more weeks until he leapt off a cliff in a nearby valley, there to perish amidst the glittering quartzfreckled shallows of the Susquehanna River.
Her mother said that Moses would sometimes talk about Pegeen, in those last days. She knew nothing to do but to listen. Declaring love, he said, was like playing a fatal round of poker. You threw all you held within you on the betting table: the light of your insoul, the strength and courage and power of your convictions, the holy unassailable love around which you organized your life. You threw it carelessly, unknowingly. You let it slip gladly, sure that all your chips would be returned to you tenfold. To gain anything worth gaining you had to risk everything, this was a freely admitted preconception. Seemingly you were without a choice. And when you lost you were left with nothing. You not only did not gain the girl but you did not gain back your chips. Your idealism, your passion. She took a bit of it, perhaps; even the most unrequited of loves flatter the rejecter in some way. Yet most of it slipped away into nothingness, that black pit of vapidity where all crushed faith was sucked away to forevermore, until it was recycled in cruder form to a child some years on who must live through that same excruciation again, should he be cursed with the sworn enemies of the tranquilized contentment that moved our world: passion, thoughtfulness, imagination.
Out on the stump she sits, statue in the wind with brown hair billowing like a maestro's curtain sweeping dramatically into the night. On her finger glints the shiny silver ring, numbed now and made red by the cold. All those days me, Becky, spent running into the wind and all those days you, wind, spent running into me. And all that shaping of me done by you that happened in my face and my skin and the muscles in my legs yes but shaping that went on deeper too. She kneels down into the hardened tundra by the stump and begins to pry at its holdings. Stiff and cracked clumps come away, the keratin of her short fingernails bending as she digs in. After a few minutes of prying she loses all feeling in her hands. And is it even such an absurd thought to think that natural beauty comes from the wind, from the sky, from the elements of the earth? Are not the genetics of our forefathers, passed down to them from their forefathers, passed down to them from the first mean scrap of an atom in some cosmic explosion at the dawn of time, the same thing as that very wind? She breaks through the surface and chunks of the earth began to come up in her hands. Chunks of black hard earth with pebbles and frayed gray arrows of dead roots molten against the frozen masses like specimens interred in amber. Is what comprises and what fuels the wind any different from that which comprises and fuels our cells? When the hole is deeper than her elbow she drops the shiny silver ring into the hole and refills it with dirt and returns up the rooster path to the house.
Inside her mother sits at champagne with her father and Arthur. They have loosened their belt buckles and crossed their ankles over their knees. They turn to regard the reentrance of the daughter, the bride: dirt smeared back across her darkened windburned cheek, her perennially coiffed plait of hair a bouquet of ruffled feathers, hot red blood soaking through - and in fact obscuring - the black earth writ upon her stiffened fingers.
I have decided to cancel the engagement, Becky says.
Song of the Day: Blackberry Stone by Laura Marling
-Mr. Compson from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
Becky comes out into the dusk. Cornstalks rustle as the sharp wind undulates over the land and into the gravyblue of the sky distant. Goosebumps pimple her chilled body through her dirtstained white dress. A shiny silver ring glimmers on her finger. Dinner sets heavy within her. Night is coming.
She does not walk far from the house. Ten steps down the crusted freeze of the roosterpath tundra the clatter of the dishes fades into the rural silences. About her the stripped bushes and the naked branches of the trees are whipped about into frenzy by the gusts. She does not squint or wince to that tempest. It even seems to caress her. It runs the trajectory of her high cheekbone and sharp jaw. It smoothes the line of her hair back. It writes a healthy ruddy hue upon her olive skin. As though the elements had composed the girl kindly, the dark evidence of their truer natures rattling the windows behind her, scouring over the land to seek unsheltered life and snuff it out. A Fedallah to this as yet unwitting and as yet unprovoked Ahab.
By the edge of the woods where the forest meets the cropfield there is a stump. Mossdecayed, rotting, hard like a block of steel in the winter bone. There she sits crosslegged and without hesitation, the wind blowing back her hair and jetstreaming her jawline and perhaps even forming that self-assured expression of her closed mouth. An expression that seems to doubt its appointed task but not how that task must be done: the bear that is dusklight voyeur to the mountain lion's fresh kill.
She sits there and watches how the gray clouds, in holding the final imprint of the light from the day, in bestowing their swirling gusts with a knifelike chill, wash like turkey gravy over the navy of the young sky. In fusion they seem to say something to her, something of the nature of liminal moments.
Becky had emerged from the womb a lonesome child, made brotherless seventeen years past by that pubescent plight of all thoughtful young country boys who take books too seriously. She did not know about him until she was seven. She made friends with a girl in school who had four older brothers. The other girl told her all about what a brother was. One day, sitting on the old dead stump, Becky asked her mother what she thought a brother was.
Why? her mother asked.
Just cause, Becky said through her braces.
That is not an answer.
Just cause mamma. Everyone says something different about everything.
And that was how Becky found out about her brother Moses. Her brother Moses, hidden from Becky until now, born when her mother was but sixteen, born in a barn on a bed of hay because Becky's father scorned modern medicine, born into the screams and wails of a suburban teen who had thought picking apples would be a romantic job one summer and got a baby in her belly because of it, born into the arms of that very father, preacher of alternative medicine, library bedecked with Kesey and Ginsberg and Whitman and Kerouac but not Flaubert or Goethe, owner of an apple farm and father to a baby from a girl who had once felt, when lost in the woods on a school field trip to Loyalsock State Forest, such a total enervation of spirit and pleasant silence of mind, that she swore to work towards the reattainment of that wildernessborne ecstasy forevermore. It was from such a womb, into such a pair of hands, that the child Moses was born. From such a womb, into such hands.
Though young, Becky's mother performed her tasks in what most would have called an admirable manner. She married Becky's father immediately and took little Moses for long walks on the apple farm during the day when it was not raining. At night when her husband went into the basement to get high, she would set Moses down between her knees by the fire and read to him parts of her favorite stories. She read to him of Arwen and Aragorn, of O. Henry's Jim and Della, later of Odysseus and Penelope; finely selected bellywarming treatises of fantasy from the world's most vivid imaginariums. When Moses was old enough he read too, of great travels, of adventure, of love and sacrifice and good living. All this his father encouraged, all this his mother adored.
Accordingly, Moses grew into a young man of a precocious idealism, the depths of which his parents could have never imagined. This was not a little helped by his saturation into Judeo-Christian culture. Invocations of guilt infected his high school life daily; altruistic sentiments of sacrifice appealed to him far more than what was normal for a youth his age. Though he publicly spurned all institutionalized dogmatism with the flair of a wartime orator, he took to heart and to practice the ideals to which he was exposed. And his love of literature only burned deeper as he grew. He voraciously read Ernest Hemingway. His favorite was For Whom the Bell Tolls. His least favorite was The Sun Also Rises. When pressed by his teacher, he said that he did not find weakness to be very motivational. Nothing is stopping Brett, Moses said. Nothing is stopping Jake. Even worse, Becky's mother reflected (in telling this story), Moses found it funny when Tom Sawyer says to Huck Finn, when Huck wants to set Jim free by stealing the key to his jail cell, Why, hain’t you ever read any books at all? Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-maidy way as that? Moses had laughed at that part. Moses was Tom. Tom in a later era, an era which charged for such lofty sentimentality a far more lasting price than a single bullet to the leg.
Things could have gone no other way. The first love which idle chance inflicted upon Moses was illfated from the instant of its inception. The girl was Pegeen O'Reilly, a classmate, born of the countryside the same as him, purported to be a lover of books the same as him. She of course had a soft, gentle way about her. Her wide, pale eyes seemed in constant peril of being swallowed by the rushing swells of their own skyblue innocence. He glowed in the attention she turned on him, in their childlike games, in a sweet intimacy with another person which he had never really considered possible. He would meet her by moonlight in the country between their farms, sneaking out his window and dashing over the dark verdure hills, a book of poetry tucked under his arm like a runningback, a note for her tucked deep in the folds of his jacket. The illicit nature of their union, the embers of romantic rebellion in his chest that had, since opening his first book, yearned to be kindled, and coupled with the pastoral beauty of the Pennsylvania Dutchlands, made their seemingly blossoming love a perfect storm of catastrophe.
Moses' lifelong search for an ideal to defend had come to an abrupt halt. Never before had he been so alive. It became his sworn duty to defend at all costs the glimmer he had seen in Pegeen's eyes. He called it the skyblue, in the journal he kept. As if this comparison, this name, described her precious quality better than any photograph, any essay, any other description ever could. A simile is worth a thousand words. What could compare to that sort of sweetness and innocence, other than the endless light azure of the sky on a pleasant day. He knew no better than to wax such mawkish cliches; in fact, that he knew no better was the point. He quickly and effortlessly came to do all of his thinking in such lofty language, saying it aloud and proudly to anyone bold enough to broach the subject of love or lust. His life had become reorganized around this priority, and the weight of commonplace tasks vanished, like dust swept from an object long inert.
In all true stories, Becky's mother said, there is a wrong which cannot be righted. Pegeen came from a rigorously Amish family that sent her away to public school after she was banned from her first for some unnamed blasphemy. Sadly, the precise breed of girl that Moses would swim across oceans for; chaining the cement blocks to his ankles himself, if that's what was necessary.
Pegeen's mother was abusive and unfaithful, her father too pious to do any more than deny the reality that was his fractured family. Time and again Moses confronted them without Pegeen's knowing, and, wielding all the holy righteousness of his literary upbringing, eloquently inspired them to be honest with their daughter. He spoke, in not so many words, of ideas such as carpe diem, and of the power of love, of forgiveness. He told them he thought of them as his family, or something to that effect. He may have even said he cared about anyone who cared about Pegeen. Something in his voice must have been reminiscent of their churchly hours, because the O’Reillys fell irrevocably in love with Moses. When he left the final time, it was with three jars of freshly pressed cider, teary hugs, and insistent promises that things would change.
Like many young men and women raised in anything approximating American middleclass society, Moses had done very little of what could accurately be called real living. He had an inherent and instinctual belief in the goodness of the human race and had been exposed to nothing to lead him to believe the contrary. Anyone could do anything. He had found his flower, skyblue-eyed with dimples beside her smile. Faith was required, and Moses practiced constant faith. He idolized, in a near apotheosis of admiration, Franny Glass and her Jesus Prayer. He believed that anything done with a good intention was holy beyond conception. He did not believe the quote about the composition of the path to hell; in fact, he openly scorned all competing dogma. To say he was blinded would be severe and perhaps melodramatic, yet the point remained that all logic and reason that fell outside of the spectrum that was the five feet and two inches that comprised the form of little Pegeen O'Reilly, was blurred out into irrelevance.
What came next was absolutely inevitable, as unstoppable as the monthly rains or the winter freeze or the occasional droughts or the gusts of wind which famously tore across the open pastures of that country. It happened one frigid November night, when he found her trembling on the bank of the hill that was their meeting spot. He knew instantly something was horribly wrong. Her chin rested between her folded knees and she was staring off to the starless night and the sweeping skies and the darkened country that had been her family's for generations. She did not turn into his arms when he held her. He sat down, caressed her cheek, kissed her forehead, his blood boiling and his stomach flipping over and his heart slamming hard against his ribcage like a trapped lion. When she finally turned to him he saw: her shirt stained pink with blood, tears and sweat running down her cheeks. A purple welt swelled beside her eye, which was bloodshot. Her lip was fattened, cut deeply in separate places. Crimson rushed from a gash on her cheek and ran down her neck. His whole body shook and she told him not to go.
It was her? he asked.
It was both, she said, taking his hand in her own.
But he did. And the last time he ever saw Pegeen was when he glanced back up the slope to her crumpled form, her eyes only dimly ruminating his stumbling egression through the folds of her dirtied garments, his own eyes a shade of possessed entirely not his own. He ran the mile to the house with that unholy power vested in him, that power reserved for all those damned to the crueler fates of his kind, that power of such immense evil that it can only be unearthed from a starting velocity of such great good. He went and punched holes in the walls of their house and smashed his forehead against the windowpanes until they broke and ripped the doors to all the rooms off their hinges. He was not an animal, not yet, anyway; he was merely stripped of any of that loose effluent material that makes a man a man. There was no one home. He sprinted back to the top of the hill. Pegeen was gone.
A trail of blood led into the cornfields. It was there that he mired for the next twelve hours, through the night, into the day, until he had searched every row and the woods beyond the rows and the riverbanks and dusty fields beyond that. When the police came around noontime he told them everything, and they took him home.
Pegeen did not turn up that week. Moses spent each night camped by her house. He lasted three more weeks until he leapt off a cliff in a nearby valley, there to perish amidst the glittering quartzfreckled shallows of the Susquehanna River.
Her mother said that Moses would sometimes talk about Pegeen, in those last days. She knew nothing to do but to listen. Declaring love, he said, was like playing a fatal round of poker. You threw all you held within you on the betting table: the light of your insoul, the strength and courage and power of your convictions, the holy unassailable love around which you organized your life. You threw it carelessly, unknowingly. You let it slip gladly, sure that all your chips would be returned to you tenfold. To gain anything worth gaining you had to risk everything, this was a freely admitted preconception. Seemingly you were without a choice. And when you lost you were left with nothing. You not only did not gain the girl but you did not gain back your chips. Your idealism, your passion. She took a bit of it, perhaps; even the most unrequited of loves flatter the rejecter in some way. Yet most of it slipped away into nothingness, that black pit of vapidity where all crushed faith was sucked away to forevermore, until it was recycled in cruder form to a child some years on who must live through that same excruciation again, should he be cursed with the sworn enemies of the tranquilized contentment that moved our world: passion, thoughtfulness, imagination.
Out on the stump she sits, statue in the wind with brown hair billowing like a maestro's curtain sweeping dramatically into the night. On her finger glints the shiny silver ring, numbed now and made red by the cold. All those days me, Becky, spent running into the wind and all those days you, wind, spent running into me. And all that shaping of me done by you that happened in my face and my skin and the muscles in my legs yes but shaping that went on deeper too. She kneels down into the hardened tundra by the stump and begins to pry at its holdings. Stiff and cracked clumps come away, the keratin of her short fingernails bending as she digs in. After a few minutes of prying she loses all feeling in her hands. And is it even such an absurd thought to think that natural beauty comes from the wind, from the sky, from the elements of the earth? Are not the genetics of our forefathers, passed down to them from their forefathers, passed down to them from the first mean scrap of an atom in some cosmic explosion at the dawn of time, the same thing as that very wind? She breaks through the surface and chunks of the earth began to come up in her hands. Chunks of black hard earth with pebbles and frayed gray arrows of dead roots molten against the frozen masses like specimens interred in amber. Is what comprises and what fuels the wind any different from that which comprises and fuels our cells? When the hole is deeper than her elbow she drops the shiny silver ring into the hole and refills it with dirt and returns up the rooster path to the house.
Inside her mother sits at champagne with her father and Arthur. They have loosened their belt buckles and crossed their ankles over their knees. They turn to regard the reentrance of the daughter, the bride: dirt smeared back across her darkened windburned cheek, her perennially coiffed plait of hair a bouquet of ruffled feathers, hot red blood soaking through - and in fact obscuring - the black earth writ upon her stiffened fingers.
I have decided to cancel the engagement, Becky says.
Song of the Day: Blackberry Stone by Laura Marling
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