The barrowfields, p.11
The Barrowfields, page 11
On a quiet November day after the funeral, Father left and did not return.
Summer in Old Buckram the year of his leaving had been biblically dry. The mountain wells had gone empty and the flat black stones in the bottom of Abbadon Creek had become like bone, but the fall had come with a steady pouring rain that, day after day, refused to end. Abbadon Creek again overflowed its banks with cold, turbid water, and fog lay heavy in every dark corner of the hills. The tops of the mountains were hidden behind clouds that never moved.
The day: November 16, 1985. A Saturday. Rain-sodden, black, with night coming early. Mother had gone to Asheville to visit an ailing friend, leaving Father and me at home to look after Threnody. She and I had spent the morning at the far end of the library telling stories and reading a Tolkien book we’d begun the night before. Growing tired, she went into her room for a nap and I left the house and drove out to the Blue Ridge Parkway to destroy or embrace an expanding sense of anxiety that had begun to work at the edges of my brain like a stitching awl.
When I turned sixteen I’d been given an old Scout 800A to use as an automobile. The Scout, which by literary cross reference my father referred to as the Arthur Radley, was kind of like a dog you love dearly that is mean to everyone else. It was the greatest car in the world, but it sounded and smelled like a badly maintained biplane using the wrong kind of fuel. I drove with the heat on and the windows down, and Zeppelin’s Presence album at auditory levels considered dangerous by most god-fearing people.
As a rule, after the leaves change colors in October and fall from the trees, tourists no longer see any beauty in the parkway and the road is deserted to a point that is surprising. You can drive to an overlook and have it all to yourself. This day was to be just such a day. The world belonged to me—at least this isolated part of it.
The road was wet and clouds the color of coal smoke were set low against the sky. The absence of other vehicles on the road gave me comfort and aching distress. I stopped at the overlook for Elk Mountain but couldn’t see ten feet out into the fog, so I tried another one with the same results. Being utterly alone, I sat on the tailgate and read for a while and took furtive sips from Father’s flask that I’d stolen from his desk that morning. After two hours of this and having become exhausted by my loneliness, I roared home in the gloom to old Ben Hennom.
I could see as I drove across the ridge opposite the house that no lights were on. It appeared that no one was home. I looked back at the road and Threnody came into my headlights and I had to slam on the brakes and slide into the ditch not to run her over. She was pale white with dark circles under her eyes as if she had died that day. She was walking down the road in the falling rain. I got out of the car and she fell sobbing into my arms.
“Did you see him?” she cried, her whole body shaking with the cold. “Did you see him?”
“Did I see who?”
“Father! Did you see him?” She was hysterical.
“No, I didn’t see him. Was I supposed to? Where is he?”
Her shirt was wet and covered in dirt. The palms of her hands and her elbows were dirty and bleeding.
“I fell coming down the hill,” she said through her sobs. Her jeans were torn and her knees were bleeding through the fabric. “I was looking for him and I fell. He said he was going for a walk, but he never came back. That was hours ago.”
“We’ll find him,” I said. “I promise we’ll find him.”
I carried her around and put her in the car and sped the rest of the way home and up the hill between the sickly trees that lined the long driveway.
“Is Mother home yet? Threnody, what happened with Father?” She buried her face in her hands and wept.
I told her to wait in the car and ran into the house. The front door was standing open, but there was nothing but emptiness inside. I ran through the house and up the staircase to Father’s study, screaming his name until I began to suffocate with terror. His desk when I came upon it—was different. I stopped and stared, trying to understand what it was that had changed. I could think of nothing other than my unmistakable sense that he no longer occupied that place and had no intention of coming back. A single sheet of paper lay upon the floor: the title page from his book. It contained handwritten words in Latin I did not know, god damn him. Some part of me knew he was gone and that he would never come back.
One year and nine months later. Mother stood looking out the kitchen window and watched me walk to the car. It was packed for my trip to college. I kept my back to her so she couldn’t see me crying. Upstairs, Threnody lay face-down on her bed and refused to turn on the light or open the curtains. She wouldn’t tell me goodbye. I told her I’d come back often to see her and she said, “No, you won’t. You’ll never come back.”
“You’ll see me all the time,” I said. “And when I can’t see you, I’ll write to you and I’ll call you every single day. I’ll probably come home at least once a month. And when I can’t come home, if I’ve got an exam or something, I’ll fly you up to see me and you can walk around campus and go to all my classes with me, if you want to.” I knew every word of this was an improbability but hoped it wasn’t. “This won’t change anything,” I said.
Without turning over, she said into her pillow: “Who’s going to read to me now, and who’s going to sing me to sleep? And who’s going to play the piano so I can sing? Mother can’t play the piano.” The last book we had been reading—The Witch of Blackbird Pond—sat on her night table. We had tried to finish it before I had to leave, but several chapters remained.
“I’ll still do all that,” I said. “It’ll just have to be over the phone for a while.”
“That makes a lot of sense. Our phone bill would be ten thousand dollars a month. You’d never be able to afford that.”
“No, I probably won’t,” I said. I rubbed her back, but she shook one good time like a horse trying to free itself of flies, so I stopped. She started to cry, and I cried, too.
“I’m going to be scared here without you,” she said, and how could she not be? The house and all its emptiness were frightening to us both, but for so long we had each other and that was our guard against the baleful maledictions whispered by the vulture house against us in the darkness. Threnody often used pencil and graph paper to design new houses where she and I would live one day, and she had a whole collection of them. We always said that soon we’d be able to leave Old Buckram and get a little house of our own at the beach, one with just a couple of rooms, and we’d sleep in sleeping bags on the floor or string up hammocks on the porch, and we’d find her a school nearby that we could walk to. I told her that’s why I was going away: so I could get a job in order to make money, so that one day we’d be able to get our little house together. I said she could start thinking about what kind of house we’d buy and where it would be and how the house would be arranged. She drew so many little houses. She made so many lists.
The fallacy to this shared delusion, of course, was time. This fantasy we constructed over a period of years with blocks and timbers of increasing legitimacy assumed no passage of time between my departure and my return at the end of my schooling, such that we would pick right back up where we’d left off and move into the little beach house and she’d still be a child of nine years old, which she would not. The reality I recognized but didn’t say was that by the time I’d graduated and made enough money to buy any kind of house, she’d no longer be a child, and the childhood she was going to spend in our house at the beach would have ended. I knew this, and yet I left all the same.
I told her I loved her and gave her a big hug and I could see her turning inward from the world. I pushed away all the tears, but they came back and I couldn’t stop them. She said nothing and I needed to go. I’d put it off too long already. I walked downstairs with my insides torn out.
“It will go by faster than you think.” This was the advice of a family friend. “Enjoy it as much as you can. It’ll be over before you know it, and then you’ll be right back home.” I’m not coming back here, I thought, but this I did not say. This place, with all its bleakness and sorrow, is not for me.
That morning before having the abortive talk with Threnody I’d gotten up early because I couldn’t make myself sleep. It was still dark when I got out of bed. I finished packing a few things and because no one was awake I went outside and walked down in the cool morning to the edge of the terrace to be alone and to think about what the hell I was doing. There’d been no rain, but the long grass was wet and bent over, and the leaves were heavy with dew. I pulled myself up on the rock wall and looked out over the valley to think about what I was leaving and maybe come to terms with all that had happened there. As I sat waiting for the sun to rise and prove to me that another day would in fact arrive, I felt a lonely sense of unpassing time that one can sometimes find in the mountains of Old Buckram. This was an intimation of the peacefulness I hoped one day I might find—but after a moment the emptiness of the forested hills and the seldom-used road winding through them and the barren lay of the Barrowfields crawling west out of the distant town was audible and consuming and left me stricken with grief.
Mother came walking up the hill from the barn and saw me sitting there. A bird feeder that she had hung on the near side of the terrace hadn’t been filled in weeks. When she walked by it she touched its wooden post with a quick expression of remembrance and regret, as if to say, “I know. I haven’t forgotten about you.”
She climbed up on the wall next to me and, sensing my unhappiness with her presence, put her arm around me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, not wanting to talk.
Respecting my silence, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “I saw a downy woodpecker this morning. Cutest thing you’ve ever seen. Have you ever seen one?” Then noticing that a lilac tree she’d planted near the terrace wall had died, she said, “Oh, shoot. I don’t think it was getting enough sunlight. I thought if it can just get tall enough, it will be as happy as it can be. Dang it.” She hopped down from the wall and inspected it for signs of life. “There may be some green in there,” she said. “You just never know. I’ll give it a little more time.”
“You never know,” I said. She came back and leaned against the wall. She had hay in her hair.
“It should be a good day for your drive.”
“I hope so.”
“I don’t want you to worry about us,” she said. “I know that among the many things you’re thinking about, you’re thinking about us and what we’re going to do when you’re gone. We’re going to be fine. We’ve gotten accustomed to it just being us here. Threnody has made some friends at school, and that’ll be good for her. I’ll get her out of the house more. And I’ve decided that I’m going to read all those books I’ve always wanted to read. We’ve got a whole library upstairs—” Her voice broke. She swallowed and began again. “And don’t put too much pressure on yourself. I know how you can be.”
I lied and said, “I won’t. I promise.”
“And promise me you’ll keep playing the piano. You’ve worked too hard to give up on that.”
“I’m going to college—not into the army,” I said.
“Do you know when you’ll come home?”
“I don’t know yet. It’ll be soon. I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to drive it. I may have to fly back.”
“Are you nervous?”
“About what? No. Not even a little. I’m excited.”
Mother appraised my expression and sagely determined that I was terrified by the uncertainty. “I’ve got a little something for you. Stay right here. Do you want some coffee?”
I told her I’d love some coffee and off she went up to the house and was gone for several minutes. She came back outside with a book and an envelope but no coffee, and climbed back up on the wall and handed me the envelope and told me to open it. It had four hundred and sixty dollars in it, with the last ten dollars consisting of one-dollar bills. “I’m hoping that will cover your gas money going up there, and your books for your first semester, and maybe there’ll be a little left over for a few fun things.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Are you taking your heavy coat?”
“Of course.”
“It’s going to be cold up there.”
“Could it be colder than it is here? I’d be surprised,” I said.
“Did you say goodbye to your sister?”
“I will.”
“She’s going to be fine,” Mother said. Her turn to lie to me.
We sat for a moment in silence and evaluated our respective situations. I’d become restless and wanted to get on the road, no matter what uncertainties it might hold. Mother said, “Look at me for a minute.” I looked at her and saw a resolute determination in her face. As if the words had been carefully rehearsed many times, she said, “I know if your father were here, he’d get a book off the shelf and read you something profound for the occasion, or else he’d just conjure up something from T. S. Eliot out of memory, and it would be perfect.”
“But he’s not here.”
“I know he’s not here. Still, I’ve been trying for two months to find something like that to tell you before you left because that’s what he would do and everything I’ve read just reminds me of him.”
“I’m sorry.”
She held up a book with a tattered travelogue cover and black lettering against the backdrop of an African sky. It was West with the Night by Beryl Markham. “You haven’t read this, have you?” I told her I hadn’t.
“This is one of my all-time favorite books,” she said. “I was reading this when your father and I moved here from Baltimore. At the time, it gave me the courage to come here and the hope to believe that it would be an extraordinary adventure. And after all this it still gives me hope. And I want you to have hope, too, although I can see why you might not.”
“I have hope.”
“If you don’t, it’s okay.”
She opened the book to a place she had marked with a single blade of grass. Inside was a paragraph she’d underlined, probably years before. “Yes,” she said, reading it again before handing me the book, “this is what I wanted you to see.”
The worn pages were dry to my fingers, and delicate like flowers that had been pressed. In the margin next to the underlined passage were the words Remember this written in Mother’s hand. The passage spoke about how to leave a place you have lived all your life, a place where your soul resides and where all your ghosts and demons still persist and will remain for all the years of your life no matter how far away you travel, or how long you are gone. Leave it quickly, was Markham’s counsel. Reading over my shoulder, Mother pointed to these lines: Passed years seem safe ones…while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it.
Closing the book with my hands, Mother said, “Go—this is what you should be doing. We’ll be just fine until you get back.”
My life, and our life together as parent and child, had not been as perhaps she had wanted it to be. And now I would leave this place—these lonely mountains she had come to with a man who had now left her here—and she would remain. And yet she was to begin a new journey of her own. It would not be a journey of distance, but it was nevertheless a leaving and a starting over. For now, on the hill, it would just be the two of them. Life had been rearranged. The quiet of the house would be a different quiet, and the dark of the night more dark, now that the house was more lonely by three.
With a stack of maps on the seat beside me, I set out for Connecticut, to college at Wesleyan, where I’d been fortunate enough to receive a music scholarship. At the beginning of my reluctant journey north, I didn’t even harbor a remote expectation that I’d arrive at my destination. I had no idea what to expect, or even if my laboring mule of an automobile would make it out of the state. Father, despite his perpetual close curiosity of all things minute and mechanical, never demonstrated much proficiency at vehicular maintenance, and it was long odds that my car’s engine, choking and straining under the hood like a piece of rusted farm equipment, had received much competent scrutiny in recent years. Still, I desperately needed to get away. Remembering Mother’s words—clinging to them with a preposterous and ill-founded faith—I told myself the cloud would part as I entered it, but this was not great solace. The whole arcing world on my horizon seemed vast and empty.
Just getting out of the mountains of North Carolina and southern Virginia on narrow ribbons of highway laid over what were once truly wagon and horse trails seemed interminable. I was being gravitationally dragged back into the pit that was Old Buckram. The Arthur Radley, myopically unequipped by the engineers at International Harvester to cope with the up-and-down-again changes in elevation, started to run a little warm, so I stopped to get gas and let it cool somewhere south of Roanoke. While the car was fueling I got out my maps for the tenth time and traced the long route up through Pennsylvania and New York, and honestly to my watering eyes it looked impossible. It had taken me three good hours to get as far as I had. I assumed it would take me twelve more to get to Middletown if my car cooperated, and that wasn’t happening.
