All of Us (31 page)

never had to see them or talk to them again. You took a glass of

wine. I smoked a cigarette. That domestic sign mingling with

the covetous reek that hung like a vapor near the cast-iron stove.

What an evening! you said, or I said. We never spoke of it after that.

It was as if something shameful had occurred.

Deep in the night, still awake as the house sailed west, tracking

the moon, we came together in the dark like knives, like wild

animals, fiercely, drawing blood even—something we referred to

next morning as “love-making.” We didn’t tell each other of our

dreams. How could we? But once in the night, awake, I heard the

house creak, almost a sigh, then creak again. Settling, I think

it’s called.

“I have a foreboding.… I’m oppressed

by a strange, dark foreboding. As though

the loss of a loved one awaited me.”

    
“Are you married, Doctor? You have a family!”

    
“Not a soul. I’m alone, I haven’t even any

friends. Tell me, madam, do you believe in forebodings?”

    
“Oh, yes, I do.”

I go to sleep on one beach,

wake up on another.

Boat all fitted out,

tugging against its rope.

There are terrible nights with thunder, lightning, rain, and

wind, such as are called among the people “sparrow nights.”

There has been one such night in my personal life.…

I woke up after midnight and leaped suddenly out of bed.

It seemed to me for some reason that I was just immediately

going to die. Why did it seem so? I had no sensation

in my body that suggested my immediate death, but my soul

was oppressed with terror, as though I had suddenly seen

a vast menacing glow of fire.

I rapidly struck a light, drank some water straight out of

the decanter, then hurried to the open window.

The weather outside was magnificent.

There was a smell of hay and some other

very sweet scent. I could see the spikes of the fence,

the gaunt, drowsy trees by the window, the road,

the dark streak of woodland,

there was a serene, very bright moon in the sky and not a single

cloud, perfect stillness, not one

leaf stirring. I felt that everything was looking at me and

waiting for me to die.… My spine was

cold; it seemed to be drawn

inwards, and I felt as though death

were coming upon me stealthily from behind.…

When he came to my house months ago to measure

my walls for bookcases, Jim Sears didn’t look like a man

who’d lose his only child to the high waters

of the Elwha River. He was bushy-haired, confident,

cracking his knuckles, alive with energy, as we

discussed tiers, and brackets, and this oak stain

compared to that. But it’s a small town, this town,

a small world here. Six months later, after the bookcases

have been built, delivered and installed, Jim’s

father, a Mr Howard Sears, who is “covering for his son”

comes to paint our house. He tells me—when I ask, more

out of small-town courtesy than anything, “How’s Jim?” —

that his son lost Jim Jr in the river last spring.

Jim blames himself. “He can’t get over it,

neither,” Mr Sears adds. “Maybe he’s gone on to lose

his mind a little too,” he adds, pulling on the bill

of his Sherwin-Williams cap.

    Jim had to stand and watch as the helicopter

grappled with, then lifted, his son’s body from the river

with tongs. “They used like a big pair of kitchen tongs

for it, if you can imagine. Attached to a cable. But God always

takes the sweetest ones, don’t He?” Mr Sears says. He has

His own mysterious purposes.” “What do
you
think about it?”

I want to know. “I don’t want to think,” he says. “We

can’t ask or question His ways. It’s not for us to know.

I just know He taken him home now, the little one.”

He goes on to tell me Jim Sr’s wife took him to thirteen foreign

countries in Europe in hopes it’d help him get over it. But

it didn’t. He couldn’t. “Mission unaccomplished,” Howard says.

Jim’s come down with Parkinson’s disease. What next?

He’s home from Europe now, but still blames himself

for sending Jim Jr back to the car that morning to look for

that thermos of lemonade. They didn’t need any lemonade

that day! Lord, lord, what was he thinking of, Jim Sr has said

a hundred—no, a thousand—times now, and to anyone who will

still listen. If only he hadn’t made lemonade in the first

place that morning! What could he have been thinking about?

Further, if they hadn’t shopped the night before at Safeway, and

if that bin of yellowy lemons hadn’t stood next to where they

kept the oranges, apples, grapefruit and bananas.

That’s what Jim Sr had really wanted to buy, some oranges

and apples, not lemons for lemonade, forget lemons, he hated

lemons—at least now he did—but Jim Jr, he liked lemonade,

always had. He wanted lemonade.

“Let’s look at it this way,” Jim Sr would say, “those lemons

had to come from someplace, didn’t they? The Imperial Valley,

probably, or else over near Sacramento, they raise lemons

there, right?” They had to be planted and irrigated and

watched over and then pitched into sacks by field workers and

weighed and then dumped into boxes and shipped by rail or

truck to this god-forsaken place where a man can’t do anything

but lose his children! Those boxes would’ve been off-loaded

from the truck by boys not much older than Jim Jr himself.

Then they had to be uncrated and poured all yellow and

lemony-smelling out of their crates by those boys, and washed

and sprayed by some kid who was still living, walking around town,

living and breathing, big as you please. Then they were carried

into the store and placed in that bin under that eye-catching sign

that said Have You Had Fresh Lemonade Lately? As Jim Sr’s

reckoning went, it harks all the way back to first causes, back to

the first lemon cultivated on earth. If there hadn’t been any lemons

on earth, and there hadn’t been any Safeway store, well, Jim would

still have his son, right? And Howard Sears would still have his

grandson, sure. You see, there were a lot of people involved

in this tragedy. There were the farmers and the pickers of lemons,

the truck drivers, the big Safeway store.… Jim Sr, too, he was ready

to assume his share of responsibility, of course. He was the most

guilty of all. But he was still in his nosedive, Howard Sears

told me. Still, he had to pull out of this somehow and go on.

Everybody’s heart was broken, right. Even so.

Not long ago Jim Sr’s wife got him started in a little

wood-carving class here in town. Now he’s trying to whittle bears

and seals, owls, eagles, seagulls, anything, but

he can’t stick to any one creature long enough to finish

the job, is Mr Sears’s assessment. The trouble is, Howard Sears

goes on, every time Jim Sr looks up from his lathe, or his

carving knife, he sees his son breaking out of the water downriver,

and rising up—being reeled in, so to speak—beginning to turn and

turn in circles until he was up, way up above the fir trees, tongs

sticking out of his back, and then the copter turning and swinging

upriver, accompanied by the roar and whap-whap of

the chopper blades. Jim Jr passing now over the searchers who

line the bank of the river. His arms are stretched out from his sides,

and drops of water fly out from him. He passes overhead once more,

closer now, and then returns a minute later to be deposited, ever

so gently laid down, directly at the feet of his father. A man

who, having seen everything now—his dead son rise from the river

in the grip of metal pinchers and turn and turn in circles flying

above the tree line—would like nothing more now than

to just die. But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers

sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly

he was given that other lifetime.

It was a glorious morning. The sun was shining brightly and

cleaving with its rays the layers of white snow

still lingering here and there. The snow as it took leave of

the earth glittered with such diamonds that it hurt the eyes

to look, while the young winter corn was hastily thrusting up

its green beside it. The rooks floated with dignity over

the fields. A rook would fly, drop

to earth, and give several hops before standing firmly

on its feet.…

In June, in the Kyborg Castle, in the canton

of Zurich, in the late afternoon, in the room

underneath the chapel, in the dungeon,

the executioner’s block hunches on the floor next

to the Iron Maiden in her iron gown. Her serene features

are engraved with a little noncommittal smile. If

you ever once slipped inside her she closed her spiked

interior on you like a demon, like one

possessed. Embrace—that word on the card next to

the phrase “no escape from.”

    Over in a corner stands the rack, a dreamlike

contrivance that did all it was called on to do, and more,

no questions asked. And if the victim passed out

too soon from pain, as his bones were being broken

one by one, the torturers simply threw a bucket of water

on him and woke him up. Woke him again,

later, if necessary. They were thorough. They knew

what they were doing.

    The bucket is gone, but there’s an old cherrywood

crucifix up on the wall in a corner of the room:

Christ hanging on his cross, of course, what else?

The torturers were human after all, yes? And who

knows—at the last minute their victim might see

the light, some chink of understanding, even acceptance of

his fate might break, might pour into his nearly molten

heart.
Jesu Christo, my Savior.

    I stare at the block. Why not? Why not indeed?

Who hasn’t ever wanted to stick his neck out without fear

of consequence? Who hasn’t wanted to lay his life on the line,

then draw back at the last minute?

Who, secretly, doesn’t lust after every experience?

It’s late. There’s nobody else in the dungeon but us,

she and me, the North Pole and the South. I drop down

to my knees on the stone floor, grasp my hands behind

my back, and lay my head on the block. Inch it forward

into the pulse-filled groove until my throat fits the shallow

depression. I close my eyes, draw a breath. A deep breath.

The air thicker somehow, as if I can almost taste it.

For a moment, calm now, I feel I could almost drift off.

    Wake up, she says, and I do, turn my head over to see

her standing above me with her arms raised. I see the axe too,

the one she pretends to hold, so heavy it’s all she

can do to hold it up over her shoulder. Only kidding,

she says, and lowers her arms, and the idea-of-axe, then

grins. I’m not finished yet, I say. A minute later, when I

do it again, put my head back down on the block, in

the same polished groove, eyes closed, heart racing

a little now, there’s no time for the prayer forming in my

throat. It drops unfinished from my lips as I hear her

sudden movement. Feel flesh against my flesh as the sharp

wedge of her hand comes down unswervingly to the base of

my skull and I tilt, nose over chin into the last

of sight, of whatever sheen or rapture I can grasp to take

with me, wherever I’m bound.

    You can get up now, she says, and

I do. I push myself up off my knees, and I look at her,

neither of us smiling, just shaky

and not ourselves. Then her smile and my arm going

around her hips as we walk into the next corridor

needing the light. And outside then, in the open, needing more.

He said it doesn’t look good

he said it looks bad in fact real bad

he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before

I quit counting them

I said I’m glad I wouldn’t want to know

about any more being there than that

he said are you a religious man do you kneel down

in forest groves and let yourself ask for help

when you come to a waterfall

mist blowing against your face and arms

do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments

I said not yet but I intend to start today

he said I’m real sorry he said

I wish I had some other kind of news to give you

I said Amen and he said something else

I didn’t catch and not knowing what else to do

and not wanting him to have to repeat it

and me to have to fully digest it

I just looked at him

for a minute and he looked back it was then

I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me

something no one else on earth had ever given me

I may even have thanked him habit being so strong