Eli the Good (27 page)

A
nd so now I am grown. I stand on the ridge above our house, and little has changed to the naked eye. My mother and Stella still share a garden patch. The clothesline is still there, the screen porch. The snowball bush that held me and Edie like a flowery womb. The river that will never change, going about its business as usual, but filled with fewer swimmers now. The road has been widened and blacktopped. The bicycles are showy and have painted flames on their bars. And the children don’t ride as much as they once did. I doubt there are any silent little boys who sit in the roots of this beech tree anymore. The woods is a lost place to them all, a fact that grieves me.

I am also grieved that my own child has not known this place as I did. She is only ten — the same age I was during the summer of 1976 — but all the years of her life she has known nothing but New York City, a noble place in its own right but one that doesn’t possess trees half so noble as the ones of my childhood. And now she is a child living through a war. Perhaps she is not fully aware of this yet, but a part of her is. She eyes gleaming airplanes with suspicion. The little plastic army men she likes to play with are colored a yellowish brown instead of the green ones I always had. The cheap tanks that come in the packs are camouflaged for the desert instead of the jungle. Maybe she doesn’t remember what it was like to be evacuated from our apartment on Fourteenth Street or the way the ash piled up and people wore masks when they walked the streets and how my parents begged me to come home and how I wouldn’t because that would have felt like defeat to me. But a part of her knows this. It has become a part of her history. I have raised my daughter in the city that knows this new war all too well, the city that saw pumping towers of smoke drifting out over the harbor for three days, smoke that is now replaced by twin beams of blue light when the anniversary of tragedy rolls around. This is my daughter’s history now.

I have come home to Refuge for a new part of that history. Daddy has passed away.

He has died of a heart attack. Not suicide, not the effects of Agent Orange, nothing like that. But my mother still believes the war killed him. “All that in his mind,” she said when I first saw her. “It was too much for his heart.” I don’t know whether this is true, but I know that he carried the war around all the time. In his heart, surely. But also in his back, in his feet. The war was always there, in the lines of his face, in his voice, in everything. War seeped in and never let go.

When Josie called and told me that our father was dead, I was alone in my apartment in New York City. After I told her I’d be home and said good-bye, I dropped the phone to the floor. I didn’t really notice when it crashed onto the tile and broke, the batteries skittering across the room. I stood at my bedroom window, looking out onto the brick wall that had been my view for the past ten years. There was nothing but the brick. But just over that wall was the purpling sky above the harbor, where night was fixing to spread tight and black. The gloaming.

The next thing I knew, we were on the quiet train: me, my daughter, and Nell. The train dropped below the harbor — all that churning, gray water — and the sounds became heightened, every clank and screech of metal, every long, hollow expanse of darkness made audible. Then we were out again, the train surging forward one car at a time until it gained momentum again, and before I even realized it, we were at the airport and then on the plane. The windows were pocked by specks of rain that tapped like gravels against the glass. The beads of water wouldn’t allow me to see out as we left New York on that stormy night of high summer.

I was glad; I didn’t want to see.

As the plane took off, I held my daughter’s little hand and closed my eyes for a short prayer, as I always did when I flew. This time, though, I didn’t open them for a long while, drifting off into some grievous place between sleep and awareness.

I haven’t been comfortable flying since 2001, when the world shifted and became off-kilter, blurring everything. But I was less terrified this time. My mind was too full of my father and of the summer I first truly knew him, back when I first saw the war inching its way beneath his skin, behind his eyes.

And I also saw that a person never does know anything, really, until they have lost someone they love completely.

When I was a child, I had thought that life was as simple as black and white. But all at once, sitting on that plane, I knew that we are a people forever caught up in grayness.

Despite the circumstances, I am glad to be home.

I will see Edie for the first time in more than two years, back when she came to New York and I realized that I had never really gotten over her existence. We had walked the streets of Manhattan for hours while she hugged herself against the cold, pulling her topcoat tightly about herself and studying all the faces we passed, saying how beautiful everyone was here. I had shown her all the missing persons posters that still hung in the windows of Saint Vincent’s Hospital. Many of them already had yellowed or faded from only a year of sunlight.

“They’re letting them age naturally,” Edie had said, putting her finger on the window. “That seems right.”

We had ridden out to Ellis Island together on the coldest day of the year, and I had given her my gloves because she hadn’t brought any. For a brief moment when we passed the Statue of Liberty, she had looked at my face too long, her eyes more revealing than she intended. We stood that way a minute, and then she leaned on the metal railing and peered back out at the harbor, the silence an understood thing between us. We were freezing, but the sky and the water were both gray and beautiful, and all I kept thinking was that she was the only person who had ever truly known me, who could read my mind.

We have not seen each other since then.

I haven’t brought my daughter’s mother because our marriage is over. It only lasted three years, because my wife and I didn’t know each other at all. I am blessed that it ended on good terms. We are clichés, the divorced parents who are able to get along. We both attend Shelby’s birthday parties, live within walking distance of each other, talk the way we did when we first met at Vanderbilt. I have even had lunch with her new boyfriend, a lawyer from California who seems like a good man, despite being slightly annoying.

When I see Edie this time, I will see her with new eyes. Who knows what all will happen, for life too has a way of taking up residence, of doing its own thing. I feel as if Edie is already down there at the house, too. Perhaps she is sitting on the screen porch, and any second she will rise and sway out to the steps she knows better than her own, peer up at the woods with her eyes trying to find me among the leaves that are glowing green with the remnants of the heavy rain. A late-summer rain makes the woods turn electric, lighting up the leaves and setting the secret world of the woods into activity. After a good rain, the ants are out and about, salvaging their goods. Deer and foxes venture out to drink from the little freshets that burst out of the mountain. As I look down at the house, the woods are alive with dripping music all around me.

I’m betting that Nell is down there on the screen porch, but no longer smoking. Just like she promised, Nell did not die at the end of that summer. She lost both her breasts to a surgeon’s knife, but she lived. She chose life and went on living, raising all manners of hell during the last presidential election, marching in the pink-ribboned protest for better research. We have flown from New York together, taken the long quiet ride from the airport together, entertained by my daughter. I can’t see her from up here, but I know she is there. I imagine she is reading one of her thick books and slowly trying to forgive herself for anything that was left unsaid between her and my father.

My mother is down there, too, most likely with Shelby on her lap. Or maybe leaning on her elbow beside Shelby as she helps her draw a picture. She was inconsolable until Shelby came, and my daughter has stuck close by ever since, sensing that if she moves too far away, her grandmother will become a ghost of herself again, a grief-stricken shell that Shelby does not recognize.

And I know that Josie is not far either, probably somewhere down there at the house complaining about something. She never left Refuge. Both she and Edie made the choice to stay, the choice I have considered many times over the years. Josie finally found a man whom she couldn’t control and married him and now they live out on the lake in a glass-fronted house. He plays the guitar for her while she lies back and relaxes after a long day of teaching history at the high school.

Josie has remained friends with Charles Asher, and I’m glad for this. He is a part of our family more than he would have been had he become my brother-in-law. He never married, maybe because he never completely got over Josie, but maybe because he’s not the marrying kind. I’ve never asked him, and I figure when he’s ready for me to know, he’ll tell me. He runs his father’s hardware store and held off as long as he could before closing down the drive-in. He is still a good man, one of the best I have ever known, and the last person I know who writes me long, handwritten letters instead of e-mails. It is strange to know that my sister’s teenage boyfriend has become my closest male friend in our adulthood. He had stayed close to my father also, and has been with my mother ever since it happened, so he is down there, too.

So everyone I love the most is in that house of mourning. And the gloaming is moving around me, and I stand by this beech tree and prepare for my father’s funeral. The loss of him is too much to bear, and I have come to my old beech tree to seek solace. I was always able to find it here.

I keep turning over in my mind all the things I should have said to my father, all the little moments of connection I let pass by. I am thinking of the night — my thirtieth birthday — he sat down and talked for hours about Vietnam, his blunt-tipped fingers pointing out details in the photographs. I wonder if he knew how much I respected him.

I think of the day Nell and I marched in the silent protest against this new war. The whole time, I was wondering what my father would think if he saw us on the news, if he found out that I was a war protester now. If he had mentioned it to me, I would have told him that I marched for him, for all of us. To make sure the protest was done with balance, to show that we had all learned a lesson about speaking out with compassion for everyone involved. As we walked hand in hand down Seventh Avenue, I saw my father’s face in the windows of each building we passed, smelled home in the breeze that billowed across the avenue from the Hudson.

My whole life I have been haunted not only by what my father went through in Vietnam, but also by what he went through when he returned. I feel the need to honor him, and the best way to do that is by standing up for what I believe in, just as he did.

I try, and fail, to push away the guilt of having left Refuge, thinking of how much more time I could have had with him if I had only stayed here. Why I left, I don’t know. I have never found a place of more beautiful night sounds, have never found a place where I so completely belonged despite being different. I recall Nell saying to me that she came back to see all of us that summer but also came back to see the trees, that you never forget the trees of your childhood, and that — more important — they never forget you. She was right.

The beech tree says its old, true mantra:
I am here.
And this is a balm. But for the first time, the tree does more. Because it comforts me by reminding me of the last day of that summer back in 1976, when Daddy found me in this place I had thought was my own secret place, not knowing that it was his, too.

I sat in the roots of the beech, leaning back against the trunk, letting its coolness sink into my skin. No matter how hot the air, the tree was always cool, as if pulling up the dampness its roots tapped into far below the earth. This beech was solid, unmovable.

That’s where I chose to spend my last hours of true summer, the day before school started back. After Nell had gone, after Edie and I had played in the creek until our feet were wrinkled from the water, after I had situated my notebook paper into my new three-ring binder and held my pencils up to my face to draw in their school scent, I had climbed the ridge up to my tree.

I had brought along my composition book and was trying to write down anything about this summer that I hadn’t already gotten on paper. I sat studying about everything that had happened in the past three months, and before I knew it, I curled up there in that familiar place with the call of jays above me and went to sleep. There was no better place to nap than there, no place where the world smelled so new and safe. My mother would have fainted if she had known I liked to sleep there, where snakes crawled on the ridge. I had seen them myself. But I never thought about the snakes much. I figured if I didn’t bother them, they’d leave me alone, too. Apparently I was right, since I had never had a waking encounter with one. Most things are like that: just trying to get by in the world until you mess with them.

I lay my head in the crook of one of the roots and imagined the little fox — grown now, by summer’s end — watching me, considering the way we had both changed. Mine was a bluish-gray sleep. For a time I was still conscious of the birdcall over me like a murmuring quilt, the way the wind breathed through the beech leaves, the little cracks and pops that a forest gives off if you listen closely enough. But then I was plunged into a thick, black sleep.

That’s how I was when my father approached, going for his evening walk.

I wonder how he saw me in that moment when he came up the ridge to the secret tree he had known all of his life, ever since he was a boy. Was he surprised that I had made this my secret place, too? Did he wonder how we had gone so long without crossing paths here, since he had visited the beech often since returning from Vietnam?

He spied on me sleeping, encircled by tree roots, an ant — undetected by me — crawling across my forehead. I like to think that he whispered thanks for me, for this place that he had missed so much when he was gone overseas. I hope he said a little prayer to the woods. And I bet he squatted there near me and watched me sleep for a time, occasionally laughing in the back of his throat at how much I reminded him of himself. I think that he probably found my composition book lying there where it had slid from my lap. Perhaps he started to open it, but glancing at the writing on the front —
The Private Thoughts of Eli Book
— he thought better of it, and pulled his hand away as if it had gotten too close to an open flame.