The barrowfields, p.10
The Barrowfields, page 10
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“It’s not you I’m worried about.”
We parked on Main Street about three hundred yards from the edge of the Barrowfields. There were more cars in town than I ever remembered seeing and people were standing about in small, frigid clusters, breathing into their hands and rocking on their feet to stay warm.
I was ready to leap out of the car and storm the Barrowfields, but Father didn’t move. He just sat there staring into nothing as the wheels turned in his mind. This went on for at least two full minutes. His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I imagined that he was recalling the entirety of the text of the forbidden book. Somewhere in his brain he knew every word of it. He could do that. I’d seen him do it. I was sure he was envisioning what was going to happen; what his strategy was going to be; how he was going to convince the huddled masses. I was thinking, There he is. There’s my father. He’s got this.
He closed his eyes and said, “You’re not going with me. Do you understand? Stay here and don’t get out of this car. Stay here or there’s going to be hell to pay.” Maybe this was the deal he’d made with Mother. The finality with which this message was delivered made it clear that arguing would be of no benefit. “Do you understand?” he asked again. I told him I understood. He buttoned his coat up to his neck and went off into the night.
I watched as he walked out of the streetlights and in the unlit direction of the Barrowfields. When he was a good distance away, I made my way after him. Unsure of which way to go, I walked instinctively toward the faint sound of voices and the suffused glow that lay almost beyond the limits of my vision. The black moss covering the ground which looked so smooth and even from a distance was actually coarse and tangled and unyielding. I stumbled and went down hard on the frostbitten ground. I knew a seldom-used path wound through the Barrowfields, but I’d not managed to find it.
I finally came upon a wide circle of people, men and women, orbiting a hidden nucleus of activity. An unhelpful luminescence resulted from the interplay of a few flashlights. I couldn’t find Father so I pushed my way through the crowd until I could see what all the people had come to see: a pyre of sticks and branches constructed around a great wooden spool used to hold telephone wire. Atop the pyre was a makeshift platform, and propped upright on the platform as high as a man’s head was a single hardcover copy of As I Lay Dying.
The onlookers surrounding this meager assemblage of wood were hardly festive. The mood was more akin to what you’d see at an Old Buckram funeral. The people gathered there were solemn and unsure and I saw eyes skeptical and afraid. Father had told me about the hangings in Old Buckram, and how the last man hanged in front of the courthouse was in 1907—“not all that long ago,” as Father put it. I sensed that this morbidly inquisitive crowd would be of the same state of mind if, instead of a book burning, someone was going to be hanged on this night.
Maynard and another man arrived out of the darkness with two more armloads of wood. A thin, deliberate man in gas-station overalls came in just behind them. He was carrying a large red container of fuel, its sides gummed with oil and sawdust. Someone called out, “Put the light over here,” and then Maynard began dousing the pyre with fuel as though dispensing holy water onto an unwilling congregation. I frantically scanned the faces but couldn’t find Father.
Maynard straightened his frock and shouted to the crowd. “Quiet down, now! Quiet down. Can y’all hear me back there? Quiet down, now.” His worm of a tongue was flicking around the corners of his open mouth. It was his moment. “Okay, okay. Listen up—” Here in the now-quiet space he allowed the time and the quiet just to sit for a minute. Then he said, “Y’all all know why we’re here.”
Someone called out, “Why are we here, Maynard?” and a few people laughed. The man who had carried the fuel lit an oil-soaked rag affixed to the end of a metal pole. He stabbed the pole into the ground and wisps of burning fabric left the torch and floated down and around the mossy stump where Maynard’s foot was habitually, metronomically, pumping away at an imaginary pedalboard. In this new light I saw the pastors of Old Buckram’s several churches standing gloomily in a line. If Maynard was the judge, this was the jury.
Maynard resumed: “This is not a joke, y’all. This is serious. Now I know there’re two sides to this”—a pause, and then with the spurious crescendo well known to, and perhaps invented by, religious orators—“but I know what side I’m on!”
“Amen,” said someone standing beside me. Another hearty amen came from the far side of the circle. Another voice said, “Tell it, brother.” Two ladies near me began to whisper their own disparate prayers that crisscrossed and wound around each other like two snakes climbing the same tree.
“Now, I haven’t read this book,” said Maynard.
“You haven’t read it?” Father said incredulously. He had appeared out of nowhere next to Maynard, whose expression of surprise was so great that I thought his eyeballs might tumble out of his head.
“You haven’t read it?” Father said again, this time with a little more effort. He was still feeling the effects of his alcohol and was having trouble getting his words out.
“No,” said Maynard through his parted teeth. “I haven’t read it, and I’m not goin’ to.” Then to the assembly, he called out, “But I know what’s in it!”
If the crowd had been ambivalent before, it had now chosen a side. At Maynard’s words a cheer went up, and as the cheer subsided a lady’s voice was heard saying, “Ain’t no point in reading that nonsense!”
Father cleared his throat and said, “If I may, if I may,” and turned now to address the gathering. His first words took a long time to come to him. At the end of an age, he said, “Listen, folks. It just doesn’t make any sense to do what Mr. Houck is proposing.” His words were uncertain and I could hear the slightest tremor in his voice. “This book,” he continued, “the one you’re all here to see burned, it’s not a bad book. It’s really not. It was written by a man you’re all familiar with and for good reason. He’s a great writer. He’s one of the most important American writers who’s ever lived, and we should all be proud of that in the same way that we’re proud of Mark Twain, and John Steinbeck, and Emily Dickinson.” You could see his eyes searching the faces in the crowd and trying to come up with names they might have heard of, and finding very few. Sensing he was gaining little traction, he buried his hands in his coat pockets and began again. “In 1949, the man who wrote this book was given the Nobel Prize for literature, and that’s an extraordinary honor, I can assure you.” No one appeared to be impressed by this fact. Someone directed a flashlight at his face and held it there, and Father blinked and looked away. “Look—I’m not asking you to take my word for it, and, in fact, you shouldn’t take somebody else’s word for it. That’s the whole point of this. You shouldn’t let someone else tell you what you can and cannot read.”
A man from the crowd called out, “Well that’s exactly what you’re doin’.”
“No, no it’s not,” said Father. “I’m not telling you that you have to read this book—that I’m going to make you read it. I’m saying you ought to be the one to decide whether you’re going to read it. Not Maynard Houck. Not Ephegene Ester. Maynard says he hasn’t even read this book, and I wonder how many of you who are here to condemn it have read it.” I was glad he didn’t ask for a show of hands. “I’ll tell you that I’ve read it,” he said, “and I’ll admit it’s not my favorite book, but before you go to setting books on fire, you should at least open them and see for yourselves—”
The onlookers had begun to stir and murmur and it gave the appearance that Father was rambling. His alcohol was more visible now in his speech and I think to them he had the persuasiveness of the town drunk. A dirt clod was launched and it struck Father hard in the middle of his chest, sending dirt flying up into his face. Another one passed through the air like a bat but missed its mark. Someone called out, “Henry, go home.” This was said with sympathy, but not with hate.
After getting the dirt out of his eyes, Father turned toward the woodpile for the first time and saw the book sitting there, waiting patiently to be consumed. He began to smile. Another clod hit him hard on the back and disintegrated. A horrible anger was settling on me, and I was at that very moment plotting to find and kill the people who were launching these attacks. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t have spit if my life depended on it.
“Wait,” Father said, “hold on. Hold on, people. Maynard, I have a question.”
“What is it, Henry.”
“You’ve only got one copy?” Father tried hard to conceal his amusement. He wasn’t laughing, but I could tell from his expression that, for some reason, he found this to be of unparalleled hilarity. “In this whole county, there’s only one copy of this book?” No one else thought this was funny and people shifted about uncomfortably.
“Get out of here, Henry,” said Maynard, having lost all patience. He didn’t enjoy being ridiculed. “You’re not going to stop us.”
“Yes, I am, Maynard,” said Father, and just like that, on his prodigiously long legs he scrambled unevenly to the top of the unlit pyre. Having seized the book, he steadied himself on the makeshift platform as if he were a drunken sailor manning a masthead and looking for the North Star. People gasped and someone said, “What in the world?”
“Get down from there, Henry,” said Maynard, clicking his teeth. “There’s an ordinance in place now. That book’s illegal here.”
“There’s no ordinance and it’s not illegal,” said Father.
“You wait and see.” Maynard was pacing now and slavering from the sides of his mouth with increasing agitation. “And after I burn this one,” he said, “I’m going to come to your house and get yourn.”
My father sparked into a rage like I’d never seen before. His black coat moved on the wind like a storm cloud, and he rose up and shouted, “If you want to see something burn, Maynard, you come to my house and try to take my books!”
Maynard upended the torch and threw it onto the pyre, and an explosion of fire lit the heavens. I screamed and charged into the fray but was trampled to the ground by the stampede that followed. For a moment, all I could see was Father in the center of this empyreal furnace, still clutching the book, shielding his face from the flames. I had the sensation that I was suffocating.
And then it was over. Father jumped from the pyre and landed a few feet away, mostly unscathed, the forbidden book still in his hand. A fire truck had been positioned in town at the ready, and as soon as its emergency lights were turned on in response to the inferno, the witnesses to the burning, not wanting to be implicated, dissipated into the darkness. I don’t know what happened to Maynard, but he and the other pastors were nowhere to be seen.
When I got to Father, he was on his hands and knees, trying to breathe. I fell down beside him in a fit of uncontrolled hysterics and tried to drag him away from the fire, now already dwindling and smoking heavily on account of the wet, green wood that had been improvidently used as fuel. I pulled him up onto a stump and held him under his arms until his coughing stopped. I was crying and the two of us were alone together, sorrowfully, on the Barrowfields.
As you might expect, this misadventure did little to resolve my father’s melancholia. He felt a great humiliation because of it, and his sense of isolation only increased. Our dinners in the following weeks were perfunctory and silent. Afterward I would read and sing in whispers to Threnody until sleep came and charioted her away. I would then venture downstairs to sit at the piano and play in the encircling dark by flickering candle while Father drank himself into oblivion. We did this night after night, waiting for the spell to break; waiting for the pall of depression to lift with the coming of a bright new morning.
But the bright new morning never came. Instead, nature, so often cruel or damnably indifferent, brought my parents a new child. Mother had been pregnant at Maddy’s funeral but told no one, not even Father. The news, when it came, was bittersweet.
After Threnody was born, they had not intended to have more children, so the pregnancy was something of a surprise. Indeed, the baby was a shock to both of them. Father pretended, very briefly, to be overjoyed. Then their new daughter came prematurely and was as pale blue as an early morning sky. After a time in the hospital she was diagnosed with a form of cancer that even the strongest of children rarely survive. The expression I heard my parents say with hollowed black eyes and clenched teeth was “sooner than later.”
Yet defying all grim statistics and expectations, she lived to see her first birthday and then her second—an emaciated, frail little girl, but darling, with a ponytail tied in daffodil ribbons that she loved. We began to allow ourselves a vagrant hope that, despite what we’d been told, one day she’d grow up and be fine. We said, “She’s tough. She’s going to surprise us all. Watch—she’ll outlive every one of us.”
When she was home from the hospital, Father sat with her in her room day and night and held her, and rocked her in his arms, and told her silly animal stories that made her laugh—a sprinting giraffe with legs of different lengths that, at the start of each race, would go off in every direction at once; a daddy longlegs that would ride about on the head of his companion, a talking golden retriever, the two of them finding unlikely adventures together. There is nothing in this life more extraordinary or more precious than a laughing child.
On nice mornings Mother carried her down to the barn and out into the field through the buttercups and dandelions so she could see the horses and pet their cold noses through the fence. After a few precarious trips around the pasture in front of Mother on the saddle (never faster than a walk), she came to love the horses as much as Mother did. We bought her every toy horse we could find in three counties, and in no time at all she had accumulated at least a hundred of all shapes and sizes. Some were little and would fit in the palm of her hand or in the pocket of her dress. Others were larger, with manes and tails that she would brush until the hair fell out. Her love of horses was, I think, just something in life she could cling to. Something tangible in the realm of the living that would lend meaning to an otherwise inexplicable existence. That was the part of her that was fighting to hang on. It was an expression of her courage.
On the floor in her room she had a little barn of her own, and a little fence meticulously laid out with all her horses inside it. She and Mother painted a set of green wooden triangles to serve as the trees in the pasture, and she insisted on having real hay from the barn for her horses to eat, which Mother would cut with a knife and bind with rubberbands to make play-size haystacks. She’d whinny and then tip and clack the horses along the ground to make them gallop. Threnody, at that time six years old and in the first grade, helped her name them and wrote the names in a notebook that became covered with stickers and contained rudimentary equine drawings of black and brown.
One night I read a picture book to her as she sat on my lap. She was as light as a feather. I noticed that, as we read along, she began to move her face closer and closer to the book—almost as if she were trying to peer into a nonexistent keyhole in the middle of the page. Becoming concerned, I pointed to a picture and said, “What do you see here?” She pressed her face close to the page and looked with only one eye, then the other. “A butterfly?” There was no butterfly. She was almost blind, or had become so.
That night I was relieved to hear that Mother and Father had become aware of her vision problems long before I did. For her third birthday that year in April she got a pair of glasses, but they were of little practical help. They were heavy and awkward, and came with a little hook that wrapped around each ear that was supposed to keep them from falling off when she walked or looked down. Because they so often fell forward, the oversize lenses were always smudged with her fingerprints. She hated to wear them and I didn’t blame her, but without them she could only pretend to see.
And being unable to see well made everything more complicated. She stumbled often, and her arms and legs were always covered with dark bruises. Over the summer of her third year, however, she seemed to grow stronger and more confident. By the time autumn arrived, she was moving well on her own and had discovered how much fun it was to climb up and down the many staircases in the house.
One rainy morning she awoke before the rest of us. After putting on her glasses and finding that no one else in the house was awake, she made her way out the door and down the hill to the barn. No one saw her go out. No one heard the door close behind her. I imagine she was looking for one of us, but I prefer to think she had just found within herself the stoutheartedness to go visit the horses on her own. Mother was the first to notice she was gone. I walked out to the terrace and looked down far below through the moving fog and saw her at the edge of the pasture. She was balanced on the second board of the fence, a trick she’d learned from Threnody. The horses were gathered around her, nipping lazily at her fingers and hoping for a treat. Relieved, I climbed the stone steps back to the house and yelled to Mother that I’d found her. When a moment later I looked back to where she’d been standing, she was no longer there. Her glasses had fallen, and, unable to see, she had crawled on her hands and knees under the fence to retrieve them. For her, that was when time stopped. Death’s empty consolation was that the fatal act—a careless misstep by a horse; the breaking of her delicate spinal vertebrae as soft as paper—was sudden and without lasting pain.
—
Two days before the service Father and I went for a drive, and for reasons unstated he wanted to go to Avernus to see how many gravesites were left next to Maddy. He seemed to be thinking all the time like he was trying to solve some puzzle that none of the rest of us could see. When we got there we saw a rusted blue Chevrolet pickup truck parked on the hill near the cemetery. A skeletal man with a Habsburg jaw and mossy red hair was there digging in the rain as if he’d been sentenced to do the work. We pulled in at the bottom of the hill where we’d parked for Maddy and walked the dirt road to the cemetery without either of us saying a word, except Father said, “He must be getting ready for another funeral.” We got out to the center of all the graves, old and new, and Father asked me if I knew where we’d buried Maddy because he couldn’t remember. He hadn’t been there since she died. I don’t think he could bear to do it. Distantly I recalled where it was and headed that way, toward a feeling more than a precise location; toward the man throwing dirt, and Father followed me. It was getting dark and we had to lean down and squint to read the headstones and there were more than we thought. We couldn’t find Maddy’s grave anywhere and finally Father asked the man digging if he knew where it was and through a toothless mouth the man said, “Yep—I just saw it. It’s right here.” He slapped a muddied hand on the top of it to indicate. Mother had already called the funeral home and I guess they had sent someone out to go ahead and dig the grave while the weather allowed but Father didn’t know it and we just stood there looking once we realized what we were looking at.
