Trinity Fields (38 page)

Brice, you old dolt, I think. Vaulting your mama's fence like you were ten years old, sleeping in the back of a car like some vagabond or runaway.
Viernes Santo
, Good Friday, man—penance for the apostate. Your pains are not inappropriate.

Everything seems possible in the morning. The day is before you and you have done nothing as yet to foul your lines, you've uttered nothing regrettable, you've heard nothing you'd rather not have heard. Your senses are coming to focus but are not so sharp as to allow the world without to enter you, pollute your personal environment, convert you into the man you become during the course of the day. I feel indescribable peace alone, awake, in the morning. Sleep has intervened, however subtly, and I'm born new, no matter that the sun has come up to show me for the wearied assayer that I am. The photograph of the two prospectors.

Día de la Cruz
, my Spanish comes back to me. I step out of the car and draw myself up slowly to height. Pilgrims are everywhere. Smoke reaches up past the shadows, rising from where bread and chilies will be baked to offer the visitors today, some of them the very walkers I passed along the road under the stars. They made it, and will be among the first to enter the church, as they'd hoped, to receive the Communion wafer and the wine —
Tomad y corned todos de él, porque esto es mi cuerpo . . . tomad y bebed todos de él, porque este es el cáliz de mi sangre
—as strange a rite as exists, to enact the cannibalization of their Messiah, and afterward be granted the privilege of entry to the small room where the sacred healing dirt is available to each repentant believer. Several women and a man stand before the open wooden gates of the courtyard of the church. The very first of the processioners to arrive.

I begin to wonder, as I have off and on for the past few days, what Kip will look like after all these years, what he will sound like. My stomach grumbles, perhaps responding to all these lariats of smoke rising from ovens in the village. I decide to get coffee and something to eat. I pat my trouser pockets for the keys to the car, find them, and begin to lock the doors. Then I think better of it. Why worry about such matters. I have nothing worth thieving, anyway. Moreover I believe, perhaps naively, that even if I did, there's no one who would want to steal from me. Not here, not this morning.

The strangest letter my mother ever wrote me, back when I was in college, when Kip and Jess and I lived together, opened with the words, “Let me tell you a story. It is a kind of parable. The parable of the cowbird and the hermit crab.”

I resented the letter at the time, but later I learned to prize it for its impossible fusing of directness and obliquity. This is what she wrote.

“There is a species of bird known as the crown-headed cowbird that thrives in the eastern part of the United States, and this bird has developed a most eccentric way of perpetuating itself. Unlike most birds, the cowbird builds no nest in the spring. Instead, it lays its eggs in nests of other birds, and depends on others to hatch and raise its young. The cowbird is neither fastidious about habitat—deciduous woods or conifer, farmland or suburban garden, its preferences are broad—nor particular about who will wind up parenting its young. A yellow warbler will do just as well as a vireo, a spotted thrush as well as a song sparrow. The cowbird lays her egg at dawn. Sometimes she has removed an egg from the nest of the poor host bird the day before, sometimes she throws out the host's own egg the day after. A few birds, the robin and catbird for instance, won't tolerate her frightful and parasitic conduct. Either they'll abandon the nest, or build themselves a new floor of twigs and leaves right over the cowbird egg. Or else they'll simply throw the unwelcome eggs out. But these ladies are the exception. Most of the victims fail to fight back, and rather than incubating, hatching, and feeding their own young, they wind up raising a brood of orphaned cowbirds.

“There is a kind of crab, the hermit crab he is called, who occupies the shells of tulip snails or conches, lives in periwinkles or whelks. The hermit crab comes in many varieties—the long-clawed hermit, the hairy hermit, the star-eyed hermit—but all share this characteristic of moving into somebody else's home and calling it their own. As the hermit crab grows it has to change shells from time to time, and it does so whenever it comes upon a shell it fancies as better than the one it has already appropriated. In it moves and on it goes. Often the hermit is joined by others, the parasitic parasitizing the parasitic. A funny sort of animal called the Snail Fur—pale pink and whitish—has been known to colonize the surface of the hermit crab's shell, and will contentedly go wherever it is taken. The Fur is made up of several kinds of tiny polyps and as it's carried into new waters it can use its stinging cells to get its food. As spongers go, the Snail Fur is a decent companion, and often protects the crab itself from being eaten, by stinging this predator or that and making them wish they'd never got stranded in the same tidal pool as the hermit.

Others are known to join the mooching hermit and his furry adjunct. Sometimes you can find a Zebra flatworm sharing the snail shell with the hermit crab. And there's another, the little Say's Porcelain crab, that will work its way into the shell, too, and live right there—cheek to jowl, so to speak—with the larger hermit crab. The hermit is a sloppy eater who shreds his food into bits and pieces, getting some into his mouth but leaving much afloat. And this is why the Say's is there, to snag the leavings for himself. The hermit crab, the Fur, the flatworm, the Say's: they're a veritable ship of fools.

“Masters of leftovers, all these fellows: why do we view them with contempt, not admiration? Isn't it true they're economical, and awfully ingenious? Isn't there even a bit of whimsy, of the black-humor kind perhaps but whimsy nonetheless, that is evidenced in their manners and mores? The chickadee can find itself a hollow in an old tree and there lay its eggs and raise its brood without so much as a how do you do. The little wren does the same and is shy but smug in her self-reliance. The hawk circles until it finds a hapless mouse in the field to bring home to its young for food—it would never consider letting another bird near its chicks, let alone leaving the task of child-rearing to someone else. And shrimp and lobsters can swim along, nestled in their own exoskeleton, proud of their autonomy, triumphant in their godlike wholeness, just a bit superior for having an existence that neither depends upon the kindness of strangers nor forces them to annex the property or products of others in order to make their way through the world.

“But the cowbird and hermit crab can make no such claims. They have other fates to realize. And though the hawk is magnificent in her way, and the lobster is king of what he is about, who is to say their lives are superior to those of the crab and cowbird?

“I wrote this down, son, so that I could answer that question. My answer is, Not I. What's yours?”

She had made her point with as light a touch as she could manage. It was a good try, but just as the cowbird is one with her habits, I seemed to be one with mine.

I think of that letter now as I begin to look, in the morning sunshine, for Kip.

Ariel was born in the earliest hours of the first day of March. Her maternal grandparents had come to New York for the occasion. Aware of my peculiar status there at her birthing, but unable to suppress my real excitement about the event, I behaved in many ways as if I were the child's father.

By then, Jessie and I had developed into some kind of couple, however unconventional and undefined, however unconsummated was our affection, and so I didn't even attempt to disguise my elation about the baby being a girl. —That's what I'd been hoping for all along, I said, shaking the hand of the newborn's grandfather with both my own.

—I'm delighted you're pleased, he offered with a slight smile, rightly convinced that my passion was ingenuous and that at worst his daughter had a good friend in me, even if I was a little touched.

Seeing that response, I wondered, just for a moment, whether Jessica and I should have gone ahead with the idea that all this might be easier if I'd pretended to be her husband, Ariel's father, the whole bit. It had been her proposal, so to speak, a few months before she was due to deliver.

—There'd be a lot less explaining to do, she said.

—Maybe for you, but what happens when Kip comes home?

—You and I—I guess we get divorced.

—I still can't believe you've never told them about Kip.

She tossed her head, —And what precisely was I supposed to tell them?

—That you met this interesting guy, that you're seeing him, that you decided to move in.

—I could never tell them
that
.

—Why not?

—Because I don't want them prying into my life.

—So what's with the pretend marriage? Aren't you contradicting yourself? Here you are keeping them at arm's length about who the father is, but then you want to fake up a marriage to make them feel better.

She said, —It isn't for them, the marriage. It's just another way to keep them from prying. One less question for them to ask.

—There's a point when independence becomes so much work that it turns into a form of slavery.

Jessica gathered her hair with both hands and turned the length of it at the back of her head until it formed an impromptu bun.

—This isn't logical, anyhow, I continued. —You want to keep them from prying by falsely assigning me the role of husband and father but at the same time are afraid they'll pry if you tell them the truth about Kip? I don't get the difference.

—They know how I feel about Vietnam.

—So what?

—So they'll say, what're you doing getting engaged to a pilot who's going off to war, having his baby and all? It won't work, is what they'll say.

Many possible responses to this that came to mind, and I discarded them. I said, —So we're married and Kip comes home. What do you tell them's the reason you and I are getting a divorce?

—Irreconcilable differences, she said.

—Irreconcilable differences. All right. And what kind of alimony do you intend to pay me?

—What alimony.

—A good lawyer has to think ahead in these situations.

—Never mind, the marriage is off.

—So's the divorce.

What quaint, peculiar flirtation, I thought.

—I guess you're right. Just tell them the truth, Jess finally said.

—They're
your
parents, not mine.

—But what do you think?

—I'd rather not think about it anymore.

The parents received the news of Jessica's pregnancy complete with an accurate description of her romance with Kip and a firm recommendation that if peace were to be kept in the family there should be no insults, no sarcasms, no denunciations. If they wanted to be supportive, she would welcome their support. If they found they couldn't in their consciences support what she was doing, then that would be legitimate. Her parents—I think to her surprise—hadn't the least interest in argument or anger.

Ariel Rankin, then. If Jessica considered using Kip's surname, she never mentioned it to me. It seemed to make sense that Ariel would take her mother's name, at least temporarily.

Through the fall, through winter, until we stood at nascent spring, neither Jess nor I had any word from Kip. On one hand, it seemed extraordinary, it seemed unforgivable. On the other, Kip had proceeded only to do nothing more or less than what he indicated by proxy he would do. His telegram must have crossed her letter, and Jessica and I both thought that the only viable explanation for this prolonged silence was that he'd never received her news of the pregnancy. Still, it seemed inconceivable that Kip's mission could be so clandestine and his separation from the outside world so hermetic that he wouldn't be allowed by his superiors, whoever they were, to reply to his fiancée in light of the news he was going to become a father. Even the most obsessively secretive military administrator would see a way clear to allowing a man to respond to such tidings as that, we'd agreed, and back in early October Jessica had written again, and again there had been no reply. I took it upon myself to telephone some armed forces administration office—or should I say offices—in Washington and explained the situation to whoever would hear me, and while each of the people I spoke to was sympathetic and concerned, each with unerring obtuseness passed me along to someone else at one extension or another until I recognized that there was nothing whatsoever to be learned in this bureaucratic labyrinth. Even now, I don't think it was that they were purposely trying to keep us from finding out William Kip Calder's whereabouts; instead, I think it's possible the lower-level functionaries with whom I talked just didn't know the answers to my questions. And long ago I forgave myself for not pushing a little harder. It had occurred to me, of course, that the threat of legal action against them might have prompted some more lively assistance. I knew more than one law professor at school who was hostile toward the military and would have been all too eager to figure out a way to litigate, or at least cause them a little trouble.

But I held back. I was torn in two directions and rather than try to force matters one way or the other I thought it best to let fate seek its own resolve.

What was happening to me was that I was falling deeper in love, and now my love wasn't only for Jessica but for Ariel, too.

Paterfamilias. That had always been a rich word to me. Truth to tell, I found myself infatuated with the idea of family and the creation of this new home.

He started going, he said, and he kept going. And after the crash he found that rather than withdrawing or recoiling, he pushed even harder into his work there. Three- and four-flight days again became the norm for him, more hours above the earth than on it. When he was up in the air he was engaged, his spirits prospered and his intellect was keener than a needle. When he was back on the ground he mostly slept a deep, free sleep—no demons and no dragons. The only American there he felt a kinship with was an older guy who was from the Four Corners area, and also happened to be madder than a March hare.