God's Fool (4 page)

A still, hot night. I remember passing Stoneman’s place, looking well tended and neat even in the dark, the light from a pair of lanterns drawing stripes in the dark where the tobacco sheds were—Stoneman and his sons fixing racks, likely as not. Gideon and Mary were out on their porch. From the road we could barely make out the paleness of his light-colored suit and her dress, rocking together in the dark like two spirits playing at being human. We had hardly passed the entrance to their drive when Gideon’s voice came out of the dark. I had thought he might let it go this time, given the lateness of the hour, but Gideon, more than most, had an appreciation for the materials from which children build their worlds.

“Hark, who goes there?” he called. “Friend or foe?”

“Friends,” came a chorus of voices from the back of the wagon.

“What name do ye go by?”

“Bunker.”

“The Bunkers of Mount Airy? Of the court of Gideon the Wise?”

“The same.”

“Then greetings, Bunkers all. Greetings, Bunkers large and small. May luck be with you on your journey.”

“May we pass?” called the happy voices at our backs, though we hadn’t slowed and were, in fact, now well past the house.

“Pass on,” came the reply, followed by a few inaudible words and Mary’s low laugh. And then again, more quietly this time, as though speaking to himself, “Pass on, my friends.”

A huge, swollen moon, round as a slice of orange, had risen over the drying corn to the east. We rode on through the hot air smelling of field and horse and honeysuckle, James still holding the reins, Patrick, two years younger, asleep against his father’s arm.

“This one always was a sleeper,” said Eng. Slipping his arm around him, he let him tilt into the jerk and shift of the wagon, then pulled him, floppy as a shirt, onto his lap. “Get his legs.”

Boys’ bare feet in August: soft and dry as cowskin; each pad a small shell, thumbnail-hard. A few strands of clover stuck out from between the small toes of his right foot as though hoping to take root there. I looked at him sleeping, his mouth open and his head tilted back across his father’s leg, his left arm dangling loose to the floorboards.

“Wish I could sleep like that,” said Eng.

“You do,” I said.

Eng smiled. “Tired?” he said, turning to James.

“No, sir.”

“Think you can take us all the way home?”

“I know I can.”

Eng nodded. “All right, then.” And then, to me: “Can you get that end?” and together, working from either side, we began fixing Patrick’s
misbuttoned shirt. A moment of peace—unbidden, unexpected, fragile as a scent.

At one point in our journey, hearing the children call, we looked back over our shoulders. A wagon-thick wall of dust, like a castle battlement, rose behind us, unspooling with every turn of the wheels. We built it as we went along, separating cornfield from cornfield, neighbor from neighbor, farm from farm. A strange and ghostly sight: though made of air, it seemed so substantial I half expected it to be there still when, a fortnight later, we made the journey back.

Eventually, of course, the dust settled as dust always will, or a breeze from some new quarter simply erased it like a dream. Our real world, I remember thinking—our days and deeds, our pasture walls—are as like to the gods; on certain nights you could almost fancy you could hear them laughing as they passed in their celestial wagons.

Dust to the gods, perhaps, but not to us. As we turned at the crossroads and the house came into view—the twin lights in the parlor windows looking so fragile against the dark mass of the oaks—I was reminded, again, that nothing had changed. Though my own grief was fresh that summer, it was small compared to his. I had hardly had a chance to know Samuel, after all. Rosalyn, on the other hand, had been nearly two—had made a space for herself in his and Sallie’s hearts. Though it had been nearly two years, I could see he still berated himself for having left her that morning with a girl he’d bought only a month before. I could tell by how quiet he became as we approached the farm, sinking deeper into himself with every dust-softened clop of the horses’ hooves as though grief were a place rather than a sickness—an unrelenting cramp in the heart.

I know now that my brother’s return to the church began that cold, blue morning in ’52 when the earth rang like an anvil and Rosalyn toddled into the fire, that the sheer unspeakableness of that horror (the way her little back had lifted off with the poultice like the skin on a pot of boiled milk) had hurled him headlong into the arms of God and away from me who would never, after all, have taken her away from him, and
who mourned her more than any Heavenly Father ever could. But justice had nothing to do with it. No, like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the events of that morning could just as well have cast him the other way.

IX.

The rains arrived that September, storm after storm pulling across the sky, though by that late date their only purpose seemed to be to wash away the cinders. “The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust,” my brother had observed at the height of our troubles. I anticipated a new verse shortly.

We continued to make our regular pilgrimage to Gideon’s porch, the air suddenly sharp and cidery with fall. I recall one night in particular—deep and blue and beautiful. Stoneman’s pond lay still and dark as water in a bucket. As we passed I saw a single ring spread against the deepening sky, reminding me for some reason of an evening in Scotland when, cramped and sore from the road, we had persuaded the driver, an old man with a small, dangling mole on the side of his neck that I kept wanting to pluck, to stop the carriage so that we might stretch our legs. We had stepped out onto a rough country lane, somewhere outside Edinburgh. There had been a pond there. And an evening star. And another fall coming on. My God, how young we had been then. And how very fast the wheel did turn.

I remember that Gideon, whose literary tastes tended to the ponderous if not downright inscrutable, had been reading a novel by a man named Melville, whose descriptions of his own amorous adventures in the South Seas a few years earlier had caused such a fuss and set the Reverend
Seward and his brethren to clucking and fluffing their feathers. The new novel, I gathered now, was not nearly as amusing. No caressing breezes. No Marquesan maidens climbing naked up the chains, their jet-black tresses dripping with brine. Mr. Melville had apparently traded debauchery for Descartes, the lovely Fayaway’s charms for Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, and produced a tome whose sheer weight gladdened the good doctor’s heart.

He had been thinking, he said, about a passage in which the author described the dead as setting forth from this world like travelers reduced to a single carpetbag, free of all their worldly possessions. He paused, taking his time. I can still see him leaning over without uncrossing his legs, opening the tobacco pouch lying by his side, carefully stuffing the bowl of his pipe. He placed the stem between his teeth. “What would you put in that carpetbag?” he said, tilting the lamp glass with one hand, with the other holding a splinter to the flame. “If you had one thing, one memory, to take into the afterlife—assuming, for a moment, there is one—what would it be?”

An absurd, two-o’clock-in-the-morning kind of question. Only humans, I thought, would torment themselves with choices that would never be asked of them. And yet, for whatever reason, the memory that flew into my mind was not, as I would have expected, of some still and blazing moment from childhood before the cholera came to Meklong, or of Sophia’s face that February evening we walked past the snow-covered walls and gabled ends of Montparnasse, but of Christopher as a child, that April afternoon by the stream.

It had been a late spring. The hills, where they showed through the trees, looked furred, soft as a pelt. We could see him peering down into the water where the crawdads gusted up and back in small puffs of silt, the tea-clear current breaking into bubbles around his legs. To the right, on the gently tilting bank, Sallie and Addy were laying out a picnic in the shade.

“Now that’s something we haven’t seen in a while,” my brother said at one point, pointing downstream with the stem of his pipe. A veritable flurry of orange butterflies was coming down the stream alley—
dipping, floating, doubling back. Here and there one would pass through an invisible ray of light coming through the leaves and flare into color.

Eng chuckled. “You’d almost think they were coming for him,” he said. I glanced at Christopher, who was no more than three at the time. The boy had seen them coming, and had stretched out his arms as though he were a tree. I remember I felt a pang, anticipating his disappointment, aware that the world doesn’t come when we wish it. And then a butterfly settled on his arm. Another on his shoulder. A third on his head. They were all over him, tipping this way and that, climbing awkwardly up his arms. I remember one sat contentedly on the white tip of his ear, fanning slowly like a living flower. A smile of such happiness was on his face that I was struck with the thought that the boy had been born lucky.

I would take the look on his face, I remember thinking, to remind me of all I’d loved.

Moon and whiskey had both descended a good way that night before the conversation, wandering about like a dog in no hurry from crops to neighbors to politics, stopped, for a moment, on the subject of photography, which Gideon believed—with the passion of the converted—would some day prove as important an invention as the printing press or the steam engine. He had paid a visit to Henninger’s studio on Cooper Street, and had left full of enthusiasm for glass plates and silver iodide. Within a few years, he said, we would all have our own library of photographs, not just of the Taj Mahal or the Egyptian pyramids, but of our parents, our children. Nothing would be too small.

We argued, I recall. I said that I had no use for such tinkering. That I could see the past clearly enough already. That I didn’t need the evidence of my losses hanging on my wall.

Gideon was unconvinced. He said I had a brooding soul, and that brooding, like the mythological snake, not only feeds on itself but grows larger in the process.

“This is your professional opinion?” I remember asking him. Mary
had long since gone to bed. Gideon was leaning back in his chair, one leg over the other, the bottle by his side like a dog waiting to be scratched. It was, he said. He was offering it to me free of charge. I said I supposed that next he’d be wanting to bleed me for my dark humors. He said it would be appropriate, given my scientific views.

“And to replace the loss?” I asked.

He would prescribe a restorative of some kind, he said, carefully pouring us each a fingerful. Something to neutralize the accumulation of bile.

We were silent for a moment. “Science is a wonderful thing, Gideon,” I said.

“It is indeed,” he said. He raised his glass. “To science, my friends. And fate, which Mr. Melville here”—he patted the fat book on the table beside him—“tells us always deals the featuring blow.”

X.

We had emerged, after that long and suffocating season, into a cleansed world, and like travelers who walk into the bruised light after the storm has passed, and who breathe in great lungfuls of air and look about themselves like people recalling, not without tenderness, some small foolishness of their youth, we felt utterly, joyously alive.

Any final tally of happiness in my life would have to include that blessed month. Death, for a time, had been banished from the garden. We were—every one of us—strong and well. Food tasted better than it ever had before, or ever would again. Laughter came easily. We went out into the air every morning like kings, or children, and strode across our land, looking with pleasure at the things our lives had given us. The world came when we whistled and lay at our feet.

Perfection. Even the weather played its part. Following the turn of the season, Nature poured out a stream of sunny, smiling days so still, so deep, so perfectly poised on the sweet edge of sadness, that it seemed as though somewhere, wherever it is that beauty is minted and happiness struck, the workers had discovered an endless supply of gold and, throwing out the baser, cloudier metals, had dedicated themselves to stamping out one shining day after another.

In the mornings the mist stayed on in the bottomlands till late, covering the ponds and the low-lying fields in thick billowy pillows of cloud
from which a bull might emerge like Zeus come to earth to seduce some wide-hipped servant girl, or a flock of geese stream as though pulled along on a string. There were no middle hours; we’d look up from our work and the day would already be leaving. And yet there was no feeling of loss, of things having passed too quickly. To the contrary, the hours felt full and appropriate. There was a silence to those days—the bark of a dog or the lowing of a cow made small by something other than distance—as though the world were waiting, listening for an old lover sure to come.

The harvest, such as it was that Year of Our Temperamental Lord, 1856, was largely in by then. Our fifty acres of corn had brought in hardly a hundred bushels. The Irish and sweet potatoes, cowpeas, and beans had all done poorly, as had the cotton: hardly fourteen bales for the eighty acres we had planted. And yet what ought to have been a ruinous year was hardly that. The bright leaf tobacco saved us. In the Richmond papers that fall, demand and prices were high, as few farmers had had the nerve to try it. Between the tobacco and the livestock, we knew we’d do fine, and maybe considerably better than that.

But it wasn’t just the harvest. Quarrels with neighbors died before the seed could set. Stoneman, his four sons behind him, appeared on our porch for the first time in nine years to ask about the bright leaf we’d planted, listened politely, then cleared his throat and offered us the use of his reaper—the only one to be had in those parts—then nodded once, as though agreeing with himself, again to the four hulking boys waiting hat-to-stomach by the door, and left.