The Other (29 page)

It got worse when I remembered that a cave is probably the most ancient of crypts. Jesus was entombed in one. So, after a while, I put down another mat and skidded my burden to the base of the ladder. I tilted John William upright in the slow, careful way you might raise a heavy log onto its end, laid him against my chest, and climbed rungs facing outward until, with a lot of grunting, and using one foot at the last to keep him balanced, I had John William propped against the rungs below me. It would be easy to see something darkly comic in all of this unless you were there to witness my haplessness and renewed crying. Then I hauled him to the lip of his cave on the sluggish conveyor of his handmade ladder. It was like hauling a large fish onto a dock. It was taxing, crude, low-tech, and within my means. Still, I didn’t want to drag him over the hard limestone edge, and had to fumble again while the ladder fell to the right, to get all of him into his cave without a complete collapse of dignity. When I had him in far enough, I said his name again, and then I dragged him under his cedar banners, among the things he’d collected—teeth, bones, feathers, antlers—and amid his tools, clothes, books, cassettes, and so forth. As they used to say on television, he would need all these things for his journey to the happy hunting grounds.

It was a rough night for me. I lit all the candles I could find, and tried not to panic about sitting with a dead body in a cave, which was hard at 3 a.m. As I understand it from
The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
which my son urged on me about a year ago, and which I read so we could talk about it, the period of passage from one life to the next is forty-nine days. But I didn’t know this then. I’d heard of spirits hovering in a room, of the soul leaving the body in the form of vapor, of the dead close by but unable to communicate, and of the efficacy of prayer in the presence of a corpse, but I wasn’t much on prayer and couldn’t bring myself to say one with sincerity. I knew a little about wakes from listening to Cavanaughs and Countrymans on the subject—how the body is laid out and washed, and how a crucifix is set against the breast and a rosary placed between the fingers. I’d heard about the hanging of sheets, the keening and crying, the whiskey, stout, clay pipes, snuff, tobacco, and wine, the stopping of clocks and the turning of mirrors toward the walls, the twenty-four hours of visits, the kneeling and praying before the corpse, and the party in one room and the dead person in another, though always attended. And I was also aware of the Bean Sidhe—the Banshee—who, my mother once said, was an old woman who stood in front of a house a few hours before someone inside was to die. You would know her by her long red hair. She’d be pulling a comb through it. It would cover her face. And you would also know her by her unearthly wail. Consider yourself lucky to hear it, said my mother, because the person about to pass never does.

So I sat with the dead. I’ve heard there are monks who do this regularly, who sit in bone yards, cemeteries, or crypts, in order to make friends with eternity. I don’t know about this. I’m not sure I could break bread with the reaper. So that was a long watch for someone like me. After a while, without prayers to say or anything to do except feel scared, I started reading from John William’s books of poems, silently at first, and then aloud.

I read until it got light. It surprised me that Kinnell’s
Book of Nightmares
sounded, at the end, like something from
One Thousand Poems from the Chinese:

Sancho Fergus! Don’t cry!

Or else, cry.

On the body,

on the blued flesh, when it is

laid out, see if you can find

the one flea which is laughing.

I’m reminded now that I’m asked to read a poem each year, on Thanksgiving, to the Countrymans. This comes after the spate of toasts we make to every dead Countryman we can remember, which we all know is partly an excuse to drink more than we should. That’s not a good reason to invoke the dead, but there’s a primal satisfaction in saying their names while reeling a little and indulging, one more time, our private apprehension, our lonely thoughts of being snuffed, like them. At any rate, I almost always choose something Irish, because fine words about the hard dirt of the old country still have an appeal to the Countrymans, especially after all those toasts, or at least that’s my theory…. “Mullahinsa, Drummeril, Black Shanco—/Wherever I turn I see / In the stony grey soil of Monaghan / Dead loves that were born for me.” Something of that ilk, and then we eat, as if an Irish poem was a dinner blessing.

7

N
INETEENTH
-R
ICHEST
P
ERSON IN
W
ASHINGTON
S
TATE

L
AST EVENING
, J
AMIE AND
I went to a reading that was also a tasting of locally produced foods: cheeses, figs, artisan breads, crostini, an iced tea that tasted strongly like chocolate, and herb-crusted salami. We—the nibbling audience—were introduced by the bookstore manager to a young cheesemaker, who said a few words about the products we were sampling before introducing Erin’s husband, Wiley—Wiley was sponsoring this reading/tasting in his capacity as owner of
eatlocalfoods.com
—who rose to say he felt a little embarrassed about the shameless self-promotion he was anyway engaging in by calling our attention to his business and Web site, dedicated to the marketing of local foods, in the guise of hosting, in Wiley’s term for it, a literary evening. I like Wiley, but I have to add that his midlife crisis took a turn I didn’t anticipate. Shortly before turning forty-nine, Wiley quit his job in human resources at a large insurance company and, after working with some high-school students for a few months on an electric car they wanted to enter in a clean-fuels contest, told Erin he was going to Italy. A marriage counselor said it was significant that Wiley had chosen the scene of Erin’s crack-up for his retreat; at any rate, off Wiley went, ensconcing himself in a villa near Rimini, where, said Erin—after visiting him—he passed his time taking walks, perusing food markets, sitting in churches, and preparing late dinners. When he was done with all of that, he came home and started eatlocalfoods. “We’re doing good work,” Wiley told us, an audience of about fifty, before introducing the author of
Food Made Simple,
“and I’m happy to be part of tonight’s event.”

The author stepped forward. She spoke engagingly, and then took questions on, for example, butter. Afterward, Jamie and I, with plastic cups of the chocolate-tasting iced tea in hand, milled with Erin, who told us that her son, who’d majored in economics at the University of Chicago, was currently in India, where he worked for a nonprofit bank dedicated to rural development via loans to villagers. Her daughter had what a doctor thought was mono. Erin and Wiley were planning a trip to the Canadian Okanagan, which, Erin said, was now “the Napa of the North.” Did we want to go? Did we need a getaway? Were we burned out yet on all the hermit hoopla?

Wiley joined us, carrying, on a small paper plate, four slices of seedless watermelon. He doled them out, and then he used his new nickname for me—Joe Celebrity—as in “So what’s up these days with Joe Celebrity?” This sort of thing has been happening to me for a few months now, and I’ve learned to say things like “Joe who?” For example, Jamie and I went to lunch this afternoon at an Italian restaurant, and our server, who recognizes us because we’ve eaten a lot of meals there recently, insisted, cheerfully, that I should know about a blog in which I was, at this moment, along with the hermit of the Hoh, hotly discussed. “Hermit of the what?” I asked him.

Last weekend, Carol and her husband threw their annual summer “rendezvous,” which is a wine, beer, and barbecue convention for the Countrymans and Weismans. In the past, they’ve sent out comic invitations and served salmon and chicken off their backyard grill, but this year they sent out an Evite instead, and hired a caterer who trailered a cylindrical barbecue into their driveway and set up a buffet—barbecued beans, potato salad, spare- and babyback ribs. Needless to say, we went through a lot of napkins and drank a lot of pale ale and red wine. One of the Weismans had brought along his dog and showed me, on the patio, some tricks it could do before asking me what it was like “for just an average guy to be getting so much coverage.” I moved on. My brother-in-law had installed a Mosquito Magnet at the edge of his patio, an electrical device that, he complained, didn’t work as advertised, and so, wielding a grill lighter, I helped him light citronella candles in clay pots around the yard. “You ought to get a Man Friday,” he said when we were putting the Mosquito Magnet in the garage. Later, I sat on a bench with a cup of pale ale and listened to my cousin and his second wife bicker: “At least one person in this marriage is not an idiot” got said, which prompted me to point out that, strictly speaking, this statement could mean there were no idiots in the marriage at all. My cousin took this as an opportunity to ask me if I wanted to invest in an apartment building.

Anyway—I’m famous in this mildly taxing way. It hasn’t meant much so far, other than some awkwardness now and then. Other than that, the tone of my life is the same. I’m still, in the main, a burgher with a fly swatter. I still get out of bed at night to look into things when our dog barks. And last night, around three, she barked unrelentingly. It turned out that a raccoon had overturned the worm bin in order to get at the vegetables inside and was eating on the porch with an air of proprietorship. Jamie got up and put the dog in the bathroom. I opened the window and said “Leave,” but the raccoon only looked at Jamie and me, two faces in an open casement, as if we were curiosities, and, not changing pace, ate more. Jamie said, “Do you understand English?” and “I’m talking to you!” but it took me, opening the door and holding a broom, to motivate this raccoon down the stairs. My point is that Jamie and I were up at three this morning, drinking tea in the living room and talking not about the hermit hoopla or what to do with all our money but, no surprise, about our sons, with an emphasis on the younger one, because Jamie is worried about him lately, and has a hard time doing what she and I are supposed to be doing at this stage—namely, backing off. Our younger boy, a tattooed and sun-cured twenty-four-year-old, appears, this summer, to be following in the footsteps of other Countrymans—that is, swinging a hammer and drinking copious hard liquor. Jamie’s concerned about the drinking, of course, but more immediately about our son’s thirty-two-year-old girlfriend, who looks like Nicole Kidman and is from New Zealand—Jamie’s afraid that our son will marry her and move to the Southern Hemisphere. So, at three in the morning, she and I had a familiar discussion: me wondering if we should be worrying about things we can’t control; Jamie wondering if we made mistakes as parents; me with my bromide on “letting go” Jamie saying, “She isn’t right for him” me with “They have to make their own decisions” Jamie asking why he chose someone thirty-two. There was no solution, of course, to the riddle of our son, except talking about him until he didn’t seem like a riddle. Then Jamie went to bed and, with more tea, I climbed to my garret.

It was hard to know what to do so early in the morning, so I read some poems by Han Shan, who lived twelve hundred years ago in a cave in Chekiang Province. A colleague of mine in the English Department gave me the Han Shan after reading, in the paper, about John William—she left it in my box with a Post-it attached saying, “Might be apropos—keep it.” Since then, I’ve read these poems in snippets, feeling irked sometimes, because they’re dissonant in a way that can’t be the translator’s fault but must be part of Han Shan’s intention, just as a Zen master, in answer to the question “I read in the Sutra that all things return to the One, but what does the One return to?” might say, “When I was in the province of Tsing I had a robe made which weighed seven chin.” Anyway, I took up Han Shan around four this morning, before it grew light:

A hermit’s heart is heavy

he mourns the passing years

he looks for roots and mushrooms

he seeks eternal life in vain

his yard is clear the clouds are gone

the woods are bright the moon is full

why doesn’t he go home

the cinnamon trees detain him

And I felt irritated. Because, for me, this so-called hermit hoopla isn’t fun. It isn’t fun because so much has been co-opted—with my participation—and because I remain, in my own mind, unexonerated. That I rolled up John William in a cedar mat and left him in a cave by an uncharted mineral spring seems to me permanently unaccountable. I’ve passed twenty-two years now without putting it to rest, and with an urge to speak about it the whole time. A decade ago, when our sons were young, we took flashlights, candles, and a lot of extra batteries, and went into the Ape Caves near Mount Saint Helens, and while we were down there, sitting in a dank niche and eating sandwiches, I wanted to tell the boys about John William. I also wanted to say something to Pete Jenkins when I saw him at the Mountaineers Club after a slide show on the Andes in ’92—Pete nearly shook my hand off, and greeted me with such overwhelming goodwill that I spilled my punch. Yes, I remembered
Desolation Angels;
yes, I remembered eating a squirrel; yes, I understood, like Pete, that John William had been missing for years and was presumed dead in Mexico. “Out-of-control guy,” Pete summed up, and I agreed.