Jewelweed (27 page)

“Is something wrong?” asked the hermit.

“What is that?” asked August, backing away. “What is that?”

“In the war we caught this enemy soldier—pulled him out of a dug-in. We tortured him for most of an afternoon, and as near as I can remember he looked just like that before he died. It's one of the things I can't forget. It haunts me. So in my spare time I carve my memories, paint them as
realistically as I can, and burn them on a stone altar in the woods. It helps free me from them.”

Milton flew back into August's pocket.

August turned his attention to the other carving, the finished one. It was a man with muscles like thick cables in his neck and arms, blue eyes, a square jaw, and a faraway, heroic expression.

“You want to know about him too?” asked the hermit.

August nodded.

“He was the leader of one of our units—bravest man I ever met. He risked his life again and again to save those under his command. Many men owe their lives to him, and I'm one of them. He was dedicated to serving his country, loyal to his superiors, and he did everything expected of him.”

“You're going to burn him too?” August asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to be like him.”

“What's wrong with that?”

The hermit set the brush in the can and put his head in his hands. Then he looked up at August. “I shouldn't have let you see these carvings,” he said. “I'm sorry. It was a mistake. In many countries boys your age are forced into armies, trained like other soldiers, and expected to swim in the same bloody slime as the older men. But that doesn't excuse it. I shouldn't have shown you.”

“Tell me why you're burning the figure of the man you admired.”

“You won't understand.”

“I don't like people saying that to me, Mr. Mortal. Just tell me why you want to burn him and let me worry about understanding it.”

“These two memories—these two human truths—are the same. This one,” he said, pointing at the hero, “contains the other one. When you have one, you get the other. To be rid of one, you must also get rid of the other.”

“I don't understand,” said August.

“I told you.”

August turned away and his face hardened. “Most people think you're crazy,” he said.

“That's useful.”

“How?”

“It keeps people away.”

“Can I come over when you burn that one?” August asked, pointing at the carving of the screaming man.

“Why?”

“I'm afraid it will haunt me too, and I would like to see it burn.”

“You're welcome to come, but I'm burning both of them at the same time. So if you don't want to see the other one burn, don't come.”

“I'll come,” August said. “Can I bring my friend Ivan?”

“How old is he?”

“He's about my age. What difference does it make?”

“I can't get along with adults for very long,” he said. “If they've never experienced combat I despise them for what they don't know. And if they were in combat I resent them for what we know together. For some reason younger people like you escape my prejudices.”

“So Ivan can come?” asked August, unable to look away from the carving.

“Can you vouch for him, August?”

“I can,” he replied. “When should we come?”

“In three weeks—on the next full moon.”

“What time?”

“Ten o'clock. Can you get out that late?”

“I will.”

“Then I'll wait for you.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Mortal, but did the Wild Boy see these carvings?”

“Yes. The child walked over and touched them.”

“He touched them?”

“Put a hand on them.”

“What else did he do?”

“The child backed away and looked at the statue again—just like you did. Then touched it again, with both hands.”

“Which statue?”

“This one.”

“How about the other carving?”

“No, not the other one.”

“And you think he understands them?” asked August.

“In truth, I do. I've been carving and burning these war memories for many years, and these are the last of them. Every time, the child has come and watched.”

“You mean the Wild Boy will be there?”

“I expect so.”

Then the hermit jerked up his hand in a warning manner. He turned his head to the side and listened, his eyes flashing in the lamplight.

“Someone's coming,” he whispered, and passed quickly to the window. A rifle leaned against the wall beside it.

“Who is it?” asked August.

“Shhhhhhhhh.”
The hermit stared out the window, his right hand on the rifle. Then he left the rifle leaning against the wall, crept quickly back to August, and whispered, “Look, I don't want anyone to know you're here. Go into that room there, stay out of sight. Can you do that?”

August hurried through a thick doorway and into what he assumed was the room where the hermit slept.

It was really dark inside, and filled with many things. There were shelves of drying herbs, wooden boxes, a bureau, trunks, and leather. He pressed against the wall to the side of the doorway.

The front door opened with a root-ripping sound, and the hermit stepped outside.

After a short time August began to relax.

Beside the bed stood a little table—another wooden box with two sides cut out. On top of it were five or six dried wildflowers, with a purple thread tied around the stems. He picked them up. They still had green in the stalks.

August tried to be patient, but a desire to explore the rest of the hut soon overcame him. He wanted to look inside the other room, where the Wild Boy had slept, and he walked carefully away from the bed and toward the closed door, going the long way around the screaming statue. And then through the window he saw his father standing in the melon field beside the hermit, talking. They seemed to know each other, and a few times it even looked as if they were laughing. The exchange concluded with Jacob handing him a plastic bag, then shaking his hand and leaving.

August headed back to the bedroom.

“Sorry for the interruption,” the hermit said, coming inside. “It's odd, August. Several months go by when no one visits. Then today, one right after the other. Are you sure I can't get you something to drink? Are you hungry?”

“No, thank you, Mr. Mortal. I should be getting home. Is it still all right for Ivan and me to come back on the twenty-second of July?”

“The twenty-second?”

“That's the next full moon,” August said, showing him his pocket calendar.

“I'll be looking for you.”

August started for the door, stopped, and walked back into the room.

“Forget something?” the hermit asked.

He went over to the smaller carving, which seemed even more horrible up close, almost alive. The places where the new paint had been applied reflected the lamplight. August forced himself to reach out with both hands and touch the statue. An awful shiver moved up his back, but he held his hands against the painted wood for at least two full breaths, and then went outside.

“Good-bye, August,” said the hermit.

B
efore very long Blake could see through both eyes, hear out of both ears, chew without discomfort, and shave without avoiding sensitive areas. The discoloration took a little longer to fade, but the darker calico splotches eventually blended into the surrounding skin tones.

His psychic wounds presented a more complicated challenge. Something was needed in addition to the autonomic remedies provided by dreams, shaking, weeping, hollering, sweating, and vomiting. For true recovery—involution—Blake required satisfactory relations with other creatures over extended periods of time, and lots and lots of rest. And therein lay the problem.

Blake didn't sleep well and his brooding desire for companionship refused to provide any clues about how to find companions. He harbored no insights into how to dress up his need in an acceptable manner. Not out here.

In prison, shared fears, animosities, and frustrations had often provided the assumptions necessary for shared identity. He had friends there, even if they were temporary. There were guys to talk to, other inmates with whom he could complain about the food, make fun of the guards, talk about old times, and imagine what absolutely perfect women might be like.

But out here, assumptions about things in common seemed wildly presumptuous. He simply couldn't allow himself to think he shared anything with anyone else. Too much of what he had come to understand about the compelling ignorance of hatred—and the distress entailed by coming to understand it—had to be kept hidden.

Invariably, when Blake recognized someone he remembered from before, the last eleven years opened up between them like an unbridgeable
ravine. After making eye contact he usually looked away, acknowledging that whatever they might have held in common at one time was now private property.

His father was always there for him, of course. And because of Nate, Blake could sometimes imagine what a reasonably balanced state of mind would be like. He could almost picture a less-haunted edition of himself, sense an inheritance that might come due someday. Because of his father, he had a chance of succeeding in a better world. He knew this because he could feel his father knowing it.

But fathers didn't count as friends.

There were also Winnie and Jacob, of course. They had found a way to bridge the ravine, or at least they were willing to try. They were maybe, theoretically, hypothetically, possibly, perhaps potential friends. But as much as Blake liked Winnie—and he liked her enormously—he had to stay away from her. No better world that he could imagine would ever allow Reverend Winifred Smith Helm and him to be friends. It simply would not happen, and Blake was determined never to act on his impulse to resume the friendship they'd struck up during her visits to the prison. He owed her too much for that. He had vowed that she would never regret those visits, and the only way to ensure this was to stay away from her. He was not going to muck up her life with his own.

And as for Jacob, he was both Blake's employer and married to Winnie. Bosses could sometimes be friendly, Blake thought, but they could never be friends. And single men couldn't really be tight with married men. Different rules applied to married men. Everyone knew that.

Also, Blake occasionally detected a hint of charity in the way Jacob and Winnie related to him. It slipped out unintentionally, in nearly imperceptible expressions of patronizing indulgence. And this type of fond patience differed from the reflective good humor that sometimes characterized how older people related to younger people—the amused detachment of remembering earlier years while witnessing someone else living through them. And Blake could tell the difference.

His hostility to charity had been polished to a dazzling glare. At an early age he could tell from clear across the room if someone saw him as a victim of maternal absence. And by the second grade he had little tolerance for kindheartedness of any sort.

With the first money he made at the shop, Blake repaid Winnie for all the books she'd brought to him—with interest. He still felt morally indebted for the world of refuge the books had provided, but at least he'd dispensed with the monetary obligation.

Thanks to her, Blake's passion for reading had grown exponentially. With books, there weren't the difficulties of up-close relations. All the immediate, personal barriers were gone. Through the ladder of language he could climb into the minds of others.

He reread all the books Winnie had brought him in prison, especially those by Baruch Spinoza. Though separated from him by some four centuries, Blake identified with the solitary lens-grinder. Spinoza had been excommunicated in his early twenties. A branded outcast whose unconventional ideas were widely known, he lived a careful, examined life. When a zealot viciously attacked him once, Spinoza barely escaped with his life. And rather than repairing the hole left in his jacket by the attacker's knife, he wore it that way in order to remind himself that no endeavor was more dangerous than expressing new thoughts. Supported by a few anonymous individuals, he continued to puzzle out the problem of God's everlasting goodness and the enduring presence of evil, until he died from inhaling glass dust.

Sometimes at night, beneath the only burning light in his father's house, Blake's loneliness often gave way to such thought. He walked beside Spinoza along narrow trails of speculation, into the wilderness of thought, searching for that precious living concept that would allow the mute and unconscious wonder of nature to escape the captivity of inert matter and leap into pure conscious bliss. Each night they ventured a little further, as far as Blake could go, and the path grew increasingly hard to follow.