Beneath the Bonfire (3 page)

*   *   *

I raised Samuel with love and fervor, and though he grew up into a boy who appeared in so many ways as his father had in my own childhood, I was comforted at times by his deep blue eyes and dark hair. When Samuel and I went fishing or traipsing through the forest in search of morels or fiddleheads, and I might glance his way, there were times in which I found myself time traveling, back into a past when Bear and I were tightly bonded friends exploring the world together.

Many years after that chainsaw party I attended, we drove by the church on a cold, bright winter solstice afternoon. It was just a lark, a drive through the countryside, with enough time and psychic distance that neither of us cared, I suppose, if we saw Bear or Nancy off in the distance, perhaps pulling their own children on a sled through the December snow. Shelly had said, “I'd like to have a look, one more time.” So the three of us piled into the pickup truck and drove that way, southwest toward the great river. But there was no soir
é
e. The woods all around the church were utterly free of any chainsaw cacophony, and when we passed the church it looked abandoned, a great plank nailed to the two front doors. The white paint of the steeple and chapel were chipping badly and a few of the windowpanes had been broken and were spider-webbed with cracks.

“I wonder where they are,” I said.

“Who?” asked Samuel.

“Some old friends,” said Shelly, though there was no softness to her voice.

“Your mom used to live here,” I said.

Samuel quickly turned his head and stared at Shelly. “That place?” he asked.

“You were almost born in that church,” she said.

“I'm glad I wasn't,” he said, fidgeting on the seat. “It looks haunted.”

Then we drove off, away from the church and the site of all those chainsaw parties, and many years later I would learn that the volunteer fire department had burnt it down to the blackened earth. I had run into one of the volunteer firemen at a wedding, and he described the church in detail to me, saying, “After we lit the fire, it went up quickly, and then you wouldn't believe it, from underneath the place hundreds of snakes came out and half the department ran off. I never seen anything like it.”

“They used to have parties at that church,” I said, “chainsaw parties. That's how I met my wife.”

 

RAINWATER

T
HE OLD MAN
and his grandson sat on the porch swing watching it rain. They swung according to the old man's rhythm; the little boy's feet dangling, his shoelaces untied, still inches off the sinking porch. Water collected in the grooves of the dirt and grass two-track driveway, and toward the barn chickens bobbed their heads and cooed low, high-stepping as they pulled earthworms free from the saturated black soil. A flag drooped heavy on its rusted and listing pole.

“Where's my mom?” the boy asked, not unhappily. He wiped his nose and looked at the old man, who simply stared off, away, blinking his pale blue eyes slowly. “Grandpa?”

The old man scooted his grandson closer, rubbed his towhead with a thick old hand. She was late, a day late, and every number the old man dialed went unanswered. He could not say that she was in danger; she was wild and always had been. She dropped the boy with him on Friday afternoons, like a package. Left him without food or toys and sometimes without extra clothing. What did the old man know about taking care of a child?

So Friday nights he and the boy drove into town, ate supper at the diner beside the railroad tracks, watched passing trains, shared a sundae. Drove to the hardware store and bought die-cast trucks and tractors, little-boy underwear, overalls, thick socks, T-shirts, and sweat shirts. The little boy falling asleep across the bench seat of the old man's pickup truck as they jostled down county roads and toward the fallow farm, where the old man would park, admiring this little boy before lifting him out and carrying him inside, to his own bed, where he lay the boy and pulled the sheets and the gray wool blanket up and over his shoulders and kissed his forehead and touched his little-boy ears and then sat listening to his alarm clock tick and waiting for the sound of his daughter's car to come down the driveway until at last he went to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of cold coffee and wrung his hands and wondered silently how he had failed her.

“Hold on a minute,” the old man said. “Hold still. Be back in a minute.”

“Grandpa,” the boy said tentatively, and the old man recognized the edge of fear in the boy's voice, at the thought of being abandoned for even a second. The boy looked at him balefully.

The old man motioned through the screen door, inside the house. He cleared his throat. “I've got to pee.”

The little boy nodded uncertainly, and the old man went inside, careful not to let the screen door slam. Walked through the sitting room with its ancient TV and grandfather clock and duck paintings and dusty duck decoys and taxidermied deer mounts and tired furniture. Into the bathroom he went, closing the door lightly, and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. Maybe, he thought, she wasn't coming home this time. His urine came haltingly. He stood in front of the mirror afterward and washed his hands, looked at his face: his white hair, the broken blood vessels across his nose and cheekbones, the loose skin beneath his chin like that of a turkey, two days' worth of whiskers. I ought to look better for him, he thought. I have to be strong.

From the porch he heard a little voice: “
Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa
…”

In the kitchen he found a tin cup, then padded back to the boy on the swing, who sat smiling up at him.

“Here,” the old man said, handing the boy the cup.

The boy looked down into the cup. “It's empty.”

“You ever drink rain?”

“No, Mom won't let me go out in the rain.”

“Well, I'm saying that you can.”

“It's okay. I'm not that thirsty.”

“Well, all right then, go get me a cup.”

The boy slid off the swing, approached the edge of the porch, where the stairs descended into overgrown grass and dandelions. He held the cup out. Rain fell off the eaves in big slow measured drops. The old man moved to the swing, watching, with arms crossed. Parenting, he remembered, was all about creating work, jobs, games.

“No, go on out there,” he said. “Go out in the rain now. Get me some fresh stuff. I don't want that runoff from the roof. Go on now. Don't worry 'bout getting wet.”

The boy stepped into the rain, droplets turning the blue cotton of his shirt a color closer to black. The rain began to slick back his hair; he laughed. “It's warm.”

The old man smiled behind a hand. “Go on. Get me some of that fresh rain.”

The boy moved farther away from the porch, a thick shoal of gray clouds slung low overhead. He held the cup out away from him, then over his head.

“Grandpa? What does rain taste like?” the boy called out.

“Clouds, I suppose. Mostly like clouds.”

The boy brought the cup down, glanced inside the little vessel. “Is this enough?”

“Sure, sure it is. Bring it up here. You won't drink, I sure will.”

The boy scrambled up the steps onto the porch, careful not to spill. He passed the cup cleanly to his grandfather, jumped onto the swing, and sat, hands in his lap, looking at his grandfather.

The old man held the cup in his hands for some time, looking at the water there. I don't know that I have ever tasted rain, he thought. He tried to recall some summer afternoon, some spring evening, when, perhaps out walking with his wife in town or on the tractor, or even back in his war time, when he might have opened his mouth for a raindrop to find or held his helmet out like a cup, when his young tongue might have slipped out of his mouth to lick rain-slicked lips. But nothing came to him.

“Grandpa?”

“You take the first sip. Go on. You collected it, you ought to drink it.”

“Really?”

“Sure. It's yours.”

The boy raised the cup to his lips and took a small noisy sip. The old man watched him.

“Well?”

“Good. It tastes good, I guess. You want some, Grandpa?”

“Sure, sure I do. Here, hand that thing here.”

They sat that way, the old man swinging them, his right hand on one of the chains that kept the swing moored to the ceiling of the porch. Now the air smelled of ozone and the rain came harder, more violently. The ground trembled with faraway lightning and there was the guttural sound of thunder. The boy inched closer to his grandfather, collapsing what little distance there remained. The old man placed his hand on the boy's head, the air charged with electricity and their skin almost wet, the hairs on their arms at attention, like two scared cats.

The old man raised the cup to his mouth and sipped. A lightning bolt, blue and hot white, split the sky not a mile away, and the thunder that filled their ears not even a second later seemed impossibly big, made them jump. The air sizzled. The old man imagined his daughter. Was she driving toward them, her windshield wipers frantically casting water toward the yellow center line? Or was she blissed out somewhere, a belt cinched around her pale, skinny arm, eyes half shut, slumped halfway out of a chair and resting on a dirty floor? Or in a motel room with two strangers, sipping her favorite, Southern Comfort, out of clear plastic cups and the tapping and scraping of credit cards making fine white lines on the bedside table? Or someplace much worse: a shallow ditch, a dank basement, the hot dark trunk of a sedan, a Greyhound bus, a hospital—where, where, where?

He drank the remainder of the rainwater and began rocking them with more vigor. He hugged the child fiercely, felt his own lips meeting the top of the boy's head.

“Come on,” he said, “let's go inside. Get you a hot shower and those clothes in the dryer.”

“Grandpa,” the boy said, “could you taste the clouds?”

The old man looked toward the flooded driveway, held the cup in his hands, so small.

“Grandpa?”

“Come on,” the old man said. “I'm not gonna ask you twice.”

Inside, the old man drew a hot bath, steam warming the small white-tiled bathroom. Behind him, the little boy removed his clothing, then stood on tiptoe and peed into the toilet. When the old man stood and shook his red hand of the hot bathwater, there was his grandson, stark naked, pale and smiling. The old man handed him a new bar of soap.

“When you're done, call me, and I'll bring a warm towel.” The old man averted his eyes. So long since he'd seen another person naked, least of all a child. “I'm gonna throw these clothes in the dryer.”

*   *   *

In the basement, he tossed the ball of wet clothing into the dryer and started the machine. The whitewashed walls of the cellar bled with rainwater, and in the dark corners of the damp room, an unseen cricket sounded slowly. He sighed deeply. More thunder, even closer this time. The single hanging lightbulb flickered. The floorboards above him seemed to shiver. He took the stairs slowly. He could hear the water still running in the bathtub, the little boy talking,
singing
to himself.

The old man walked out to the porch, held his bony shoulders in his hands. He kicked peeling paint off the floorboards with his boots; great chips sloughed off and then went sailing out into the yard. Sat down heavily in the swing, watched his driveway become an ephemeral stream, and waited for his grandson to say his name.

 

SVEN & LILY

S
VEN WAS SEVEN FEET TALL.
He was a beanpole of a guy with a little paunch of a belly and big goofy hair that he was always combing. At bars he stood behind the scrum at the rail and looked at his hair in the mirror behind the bottles and coiffed that kahuna wave of a thing up another four inches on his head. Sven and my wife went to med school, and she was always trying to get us together. To make us buddies, like you do with little kids or maybe dogs, I don't know. You push two things close enough that they become one thing.

Sven was good people, and I didn't know at first if we could be friends. He was smart. Smarter than me by a country mile. He read biographies of the presidents for fun, and had opinions about the Episcopal church and fuel efficiency and even good Southern barbecue. He didn't give you that vibration of a guy who liked to drink or smoke or steal looks at women, either. And he was tall. Sven was close to a foot and a half taller than me. He called me Lily, for Lilliputian. Nobody had ever given me a nickname before Sven; even my wife didn't call me honey or sugar. But when we were at the bar, shooting stick or throwing darts, he wouldn't call me Lily because he didn't want other people to get the idea that
he
thought I was small or deserved a girl's name or whatever. But I started to think of myself as Lily, and if you asked me what my name was at a bar, a few beers into things, I might tell you it was Lily.

We became partners, Sven and I. We looked after each other. Like brothers, but closer too, because most brothers I know aren't half as close as me and Sven were. Sven would go to the wood for you. He was loyal, dependable, I'll say that. The kind of guy you can count on, which seems to me to be a diminishing resource these days. He didn't have much meat on his bones, but he was rangy and he could grab dudes before they got to him. Once he had them, I'd come along with a pool cue or an eight ball and do the rest. But Sven was good people always. He didn't start those things, and I don't mean that we were always mixing things up, because we weren't.

But we would a little.

Sven didn't like to fight. Bad guys found him because he was a giant, and bad guys always want to take a swing at the giant. In the end, we almost always made friends with the bad guys too, Sven throwing his long arms around them like lassos, bringing them in, making them smile.

“See,” he'd say, “that was stupid. Stupid fun. You gotta get me to the floor! You don't fight a tower by climbing up its side. You knock the goddamn tower down with a stick of dynamite! But I tell you this, Spider, I like you! I like your spirit!”