The barrowfields, p.15
The Barrowfields, page 15
He came reluctantly back and stood over me, the toes of our feet touching. “Why would you say that to me?”
“Why would I say what to you?”
“That you want to be a writer.”
“I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I meant it.”
He studied my face, trying to divine the intent behind my words. He leaned over me in a great long arc, his immense black coat buoyed by the wind and spread out behind him like the wings of a bird. “I’ve never told you this before, but I raised you to be a writer,” he said. “I thought maybe one day you would be. All those books I read to you. All those stories. You don’t even remember, do you? But I see now in light of—me—that’s not going to happen….
“You didn’t mean it,” he said acerbically. “I know you didn’t mean it.”
“I’m sorry.” I realized I’d hurt him more than I had intended. He just kept shaking his head. His disappointment wouldn’t leave him.
“You—” he started. “I thought—” More head shaking.
“You thought what?”
“I thought maybe you of all people would understand.” He turned and walked away from me, and in a great rushing of wind the crows rove into the air above our heads and followed him across the field.
—
For years I only knew of one brief passage that he wrote after Maddy died. A window onto his grief:
People say “passed away” when they mean someone died. They might say “She passed away one year ago today,” when they mean that minus one orbital period around the sun her exhausted heart shuddered to a stop and the molecules of her last-drawn breath dispersed soundlessly into the room. Spirit, espirit, esperit, spiritus, spirare, breathe. Saying “passed away” is softer than saying that someone died. Reassuringly, they might say “she’s in a better place.” Or “Lord willin’, she’s gone to find her family on the streets of heaven.” “She’s better off,” they’ll say, and everyone will nod solemnly and a man will pick at his teeth with a toothpick he’s had in his shirt pocket for four days. To themselves, and to the dead, they say “Rest in Peace.”
Isn’t it true that the first time you talk about someone whose waking time on earth has ended, out of habit you mistakenly use the present tense, because that’s what you’ve grown accustomed to doing all someone’s life. It’s hard not to want to say, “She’s a good mother to her children.” You might do this once, but then your brain catches with a hollow jolt, and something tells you that language knows the truth and the truth is that she’s gone. Then comes the preterit. “She is—she was—a good mother to her children,” you might say. “She cared for her family.” “She loved the church people and would talk all day long if you’d let her.” I think of all those moments unphotographed and unrecorded, now lost to everyone for all of time. What record is there of her life? She’s contained within me now.
We realize, though, because we must, that remembrance is finite. It crosses only so many generations before it fades to indistinction. One man remembers his father and perhaps his grandfather and the detail of the lives that were lived. But it’s harder to see further back in time. I know the name of my great-grandfather, but our living time did not intersect. We did not walk the earth at the same time. Thus to me he’s a photograph; a story I heard my grandfather tell. He’s not a life I remember. And my children may not know him at all, unless by chance they can find him in a book. In time, he will be forgotten entirely, just as we all will with enough revolutions of the earth around the slowly expiring sun.
Each fragile heart now beating will one day stop. I look at my children, I feel their hearts within their chests, so gentle and quick. I know they will not go on forever. I cannot bear to consider it—
We are little more than one tree’s growth of leaves in a hillside forest. We will enjoy our brief moment in the sun, only to fall away with all the others to make way for the next bright young generation.
—
So you see.
—
The fall after graduation I started law school in Chapel Hill. It was not home, but it brought me closer to home, and my heart ached as I returned again to the Old North State.
Charles Young, my father’s former law partner, owned a little house on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill close to campus and he allowed me to rent it while I was there. I had used him for a reference on my application, and when he learned that I might be going to school in Chapel Hill, he didn’t renew the lease of his previous tenant and kept the house unrented for several months just in case I might need or want it. In return he asked only that I allow him and a few friends to tailgate there during football and basketball season when he was in town for a game. This worked out well because for every home game on a weekend the house and yard were full of people, every one of them wearing Carolina blue, and all were drinking good beer and cooking good food. The parties started early and lasted late. Even for night games, there was always one guy and his wife who you could count on to show up by nine in the morning to get the pig cooker going. It was always a hell of a good time and I picked up a lot of spare tickets.
I did well in my first year of law school and I discounted the possibility that it was because many of the professors knew me or knew of me through my father. Even though the subject of the law wasn’t of any particular interest to me, it was challenging and demanded hours of daily reading and researching and pondering. I had heard my father talk about much of it in my years growing up, so arcane concepts such as future interests or even the deeply obscure “rule in Shelley’s case”—loved by law professors and mystifying to students—were not entirely unknown to me and my limited familiarity lent itself to some amount of success.
I quickly formed a study group with two young men named J. P. and Tyler. They were both exceedingly bright and wonderfully odd in their own respective ways. J. P., who insisted on a space between J and P “for obvious logical reasons,” was from Savannah and came from a family made obscenely wealthy when Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. went public in 1985. J. P.’s father was a big player in Gulfstream from its earliest beginnings, and after the company’s acquisition by Chrysler it was reckoned that no one in the family for several generations to come would have to hold meaningful employment. J. P. nevertheless had received a world-class undergraduate education at Princeton and would talk Bernoulli’s principle with you until you passed out from exhaustion. When I asked him why he decided to go to law school, he said, “I’m really not sure.” His real life’s ambition was to be a writer, which sadly I knew something about. He read mostly science fiction and prior to law school had two or three short stories published in pretty impressive sci-fi journals.
Tyler, on the other hand, grew up in Raleigh and came from slightly more modest beginnings. His father was an electrical engineer who worked for Bell South in Durham his entire career, and his mother was a high-school calculus teacher. Like J. P., he was first and foremost a bona fide nerd who loved intellectual abstraction. He was ambidextrous and could simultaneously work two sides of an equation on a blackboard with a piece of chalk in each hand, which was something I’d never seen done by anyone. I asked him the same question I’d asked J. P.—why he chose to come to law school when he was more suited to be an engineer or a physicist. After giving it some thought he replied, “I really couldn’t tell you. I think I just needed a plan.” I was grateful to have these friends.
We studied a hell of a lot and spent six days a week together, but much of the time we were talking about multifarious and sundry subjects unrelated to law. We prepared class study guides (known in law school as outlines) that were epic in scope and detail and after the three of us did well in our first semester, word got around and everyone wanted copies of them. For the second semester, I sold a guitar and used the money to buy a laptop for typing the outlines in real time as the study sessions progressed, and naturally the usual libidinous filth that comes from a group of bright, bored young men wound up blended into the outlines as I transcribed them contemporaneously with the bawdy utterances themselves. Once, for example, J. P. remarked that he had propped his book on a recalcitrant hard-on in our business-law class and thereby made it move up and down like the tail rudder of a biplane, and that wound up as a quote in the third paragraph of a case brief on piercing the corporate veil. Mostly, though, the spontaneous brilliance of these two men was made manifest in other ways. I can say with confidence, for example, that our real-property outline was the only one in recorded history to use the word lemniscate with respect to an analysis of the rule against perpetuities.
On the first day of our second year, a girl walked into class that I hadn’t seen before. She stood for a moment just inside the doorway while looking for a seat. There was, I perceived, a quiet aspect to her nature—some distant sadness from wounds inflicted long before—but when she turned toward me I saw in her eyes and in her face a knowing brightness and a wondrous depth of intelligence and resolve.
She soon made friends with a nice group of girls in our law school class with whom I was marginally acquainted, but details about her seemed slow to appear. I learned only that she had transferred from a law school in the northeast and had family in Charleston. To my dismay, we were in different class sections and fate had cruelly ordained that we were to have only one class together that met just one day a week. Despite my best efforts, I never had occasion to talk to her except on those rare and exhilarating moments when we would pass each other coming in or out of the building, and these brief and monosyllabic exchanges were unfortunately of no more depth or meaning than what you might have with a stranger crossing the street. I never saw her at the library or out on the weekends. Rumor had it that she spent a lot of time traveling back and forth to Charlotte.
She was nicely tall and slight of frame, with white-blond hair that fell down just past her shoulders. She was quick to laugh, and her laugh was sweet and honest and full. Her every movement and gesture seemed to be evolutionarily and geometrically ideal. From top to toe, Darwin and Euclid could not have conspired to design a being more naturally and mathematically sound. Add to the above a swanlike posture and an athletic elegance, and the result was a beguiling, mesmerizing artistry that made my heart thrash wildly about whenever I saw her.
After study group one Saturday afternoon before exams, J. P., Tyler, and I sat on my front porch and I confided to them my fascination with the girl, who I learned had the curious name of Story. J. P. convulsed with laughter and said I didn’t have a chance. “First of all, she seems way too normal for you. And you don’t even know who she is. Despite appearances, she might be crazy. Do what I do and go for the low-hanging fruit.”
“By low-hanging fruit, he means his own balls,” said Tyler. “That’s the only action he ever gets.”
To Tyler, J. P. said, “Blow me.” To me, he said, “She’ll just break your heart. There’s absolutely no good reason to torture yourself over something you’ll never have. You should just get a dog.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know!” said Tyler. “I could just about see it working with the two of you. You’re both kind of similar in a lot of ways that I can’t exactly articulate.”
“They have the same hair,” said J. P.
“They do,” said Tyler, “except hers is longer.”
“She’s almost as tall as you are,” said J. P. “Y’all would have some tall babies.”
“But,” said Tyler, “listen to me right now. If you’re going to do this, you need to be careful and not fuck it up. Don’t act like an idiot, which we both know you’re capable of doing.”
That night I dreamed about her. She was standing in front of me, her eyes searching my face. Then she kissed me a single time and the full length of her body pressed into mine. I tried to take her hands, but she backed enigmatically away and moved slowly off into a chasm of darkness. I can tell you honestly that this sort of thing can drive a young man completely mad.
I didn’t see her again for what seemed like an eternity. After Christmas break, when it became clear to me that our paths were never going to cross because of our differing class schedules, I tried to put her out of my mind once and for all. Heeding J. P.’s advice, I went to the local animal shelter in search of a dog and was referred to a local dog rescue that had just gotten four dozen puppies from a puppy mill in Reidsville that had been closed down by the police for practices that amounted to animal cruelty. The owners from whom the dogs were taken were well on their way to some maniacal canine eugenics program when someone reported the outfit to animal care and control. All the dogs were living in despicable conditions. The rescue, which had rented a farmhouse on New Hope Church Road, was adopting out the dogs (upon a suitable donation) to decently qualified persons, so I made a donation by check of federal student-loan money and set out into the yard to find a dog.
About twenty of the puppies had red silk ribbons tied around their necks. This signified that the dogs were spoken for. I was at once grateful for this narrowing of the field. One puppy, a little larger than the rest but still skin and bones, sat by himself in a small area enclosed by chicken wire. He had been marked by an orange ribbon. Every now and then he would whimper and cry out to the other dogs and claw at the fence. Most of the time he would just sit and watch. He already had large feet and looked like he was going to be a big dog.
“What’s the deal with this little guy?” I asked.
“He’s a sweetie. But he’s not one we can let you have,” said a kind but fatigued woman of middle age who had spent the better part of the previous two days transporting the dogs in crates from the puppy mill to the farm. “But there are lots more, as you can see.”
“Is there something the matter with him? What’s the orange ribbon mean?”
“We think he had a seizure,” she said. “Maybe two. So we pulled him out to watch him. We can’t give someone a dog that’s going to be an unexpected financial burden.” She explained that some large-breed dogs have seizures and that they require a lot of care and a commensurate amount of medicine and medical attention.
“Do you mind if I sit with him for a minute?” I asked.
“You can,” she said, “but don’t get your hopes up.”
“Does he have a name?”
She leaned over the chicken-wire fence and examined the ribbon. “Yep. Right now he’s number 42.”
I sat down with #42 in the grass and he climbed into my lap and started chewing on my hand with teeth that were sharper than I expected. We sat there together and played for the next three hours, both of us watching with interest all the comings and goings as people arrived to pick out puppies, and as the well-meaning volunteers, almost all of them college-age girls, prepared paperwork and diligently screened applicants. By 5:00 P.M., #42 was asleep in my lap and I was rubbing his back. The kind lady came over to where we were sitting and said, “I hope you didn’t get too attached.”
Right.
“I’ve been sitting here with him for a while and he seems fine,” I said. “I haven’t noticed anything.”
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I want to, but I can’t.”
“Who else is going to take him?”
“I was going to. I can look after him.”
I said, “I bet you have half a dozen dogs already.”
She laughed. “I do. I can’t say no to them. I used to have half a dozen dogs and a husband, but now I just have half a dozen dogs.”
“Well, you don’t need one more, especially if he’s sick. Send him home with me. I’ll take good care of him.” She looked at me for a long time and then gave me a hug.
“Come on, pal,” I said to #42. “You’re going with me.” We got into the car, he in the passenger seat, me in the driver’s seat. Before I had pulled back out onto the highway, he had crawled over into my lap and settled down for a nap, his head resting in the crook of my arm.
We went to the pet store to get his supplies and before I could get a leash on him, he squatted down and peed on the slick tile floor. He was still filthy and I was afraid someone would think I was a bad parent. “I just got him,” I said to people in the store who couldn’t have cared less. “He’s a rescue from a puppy mill. I know, isn’t that awful? We’re going home to give him a good bath.”
We got home and I turned him loose in the backyard. He ran and played and chased sticks I would throw for him and he ate grass and threw it up and explored every part of the yard, finding four or five holes in the fence I hadn’t noticed. I poured out some food for him and he devoured it after flipping over the bowl and spilling the food out onto the ground. He then triumphantly put both his front feet into his water bowl. After a while he joined me at the back steps and crashed down at my feet, panting.
“I already know what I’m going to call you,” I told him. “You will no longer be forced to suffer the indignity of just being a number, #42. You are now officially named Buller.”
He grew quickly, and over the course of a few months he went from being a roly-poly puppy to an animal more reminiscent of a lion cub. He was in fact the tawny color of a lion and he had a broad, powerful chest that became more muscular by the day. I walked him every morning before class and every afternoon when I came home and every night before bed. When I was in class he began eating my possessions, one by one, and sometimes several at a time. He considered my books a delicacy. One day I came home to find that he had utterly destroyed an entire shelf of books—Wordsworth, Yeats, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake. He apparently preferred the romantics. I found torn pages in every room of the house. He must have had a hell of a time. Once he ate a giant hole in my box spring. Another time he ate a hole in an open door.
He quickly picked up every command I could teach him. He would pout every day when I left for school and became suicidally melancholy if I went out for dinner or a beer after class. He would lie with his head in the corner facing away from me and would ignore me when I called him. Every time I went anywhere he wanted to go with me, and of course I took him everywhere I could. He never went anywhere without a toy in his mouth. A friend of mine from school once gave him a plush teddy bear that I was certain he would immediately shred to pieces, but instead, like a canine Sebastian Flyte, he carried it around everywhere and got to be well known on campus for his affection for the bear. When Buller could not accompany me for one reason or another, I’d say, “You have to stay here, buddy,” and he would drop the toy he was carrying at my feet and head to the corner of the room to sulk.
