The barrowfields, p.33
The Barrowfields, page 33
“No. I don’t know what he said. How could I know that?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. No, I was sure I didn’t want to know.
“He told me you’d take care of me,” she said.
“He said I’d take care of you?”
“Yes, that’s what he said.”
“What about Mother?”
“You’re missing the point.”
“What is the point? Bird—of course I’ll take care of you.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice breaking; her voice anguished. She choked on the words. “Listen! He said you would take care of me. You.”
Threnody brought her eyes to mine and waited for me to understand. I noticed her hands gathering and twisting and shredding her paper napkin in her lap. Slowly a light grew in my mind and I allowed myself to realize—
“That day he said that?” I repeated stupidly. So he’d left it to me.
“The day. Before you almost ran over me—”
“No, Bird, I didn’t know. I don’t know what to say. I didn’t know—”
“I guess there’s nothing to say. You could say you’re sorry. That’s one thing you could say. Because obviously you haven’t, and I’ve been in one place and you’ve been off traveling all over, going on trips without me, apparently without a single thought for what I was doing—”
“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t. And I am sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry. But, Bird—that’s what I’m trying to do now.”
“No, you’re not,” she said. “No, you’re not. You’re probably going to spend three hours with me to make yourself feel better and then you’re going to drop me off with Mother again and I won’t see you for three more months, and then you’ll probably head back to the beach with Story and you guys’ll get married and get a house and have kids and then where the fuck will I be.” She was shouting and the world was spinning and my stomach dropped with an acute sense of forgotten responsibility, as though on a walk I’d turned my head for a moment’s distraction and lost my only child, directionless, in a multiplying field of wheat, never to find her again.
“Why do you think I went to the beach with Story?”
“Don’t you remember calling me drunk that night? After you went down there and her father tried to kill you and she went to her boyfriend’s house and you were alone?”
I had, in fact, forgotten that I’d called her, and now the agony of the whole event—of Story’s horrible discovery, of the singular, oppressive loneliness I’d felt when she’d left me there in Lot’s Folly with people I didn’t know and didn’t care to know; of the long starless, moonless, planetless nighttime drive back to Old Buckram beneath an empty close sky that stayed empty mile after mile and grew more lonely each time I looked up hopelessly for stars that weren’t there and culminated with me standing hungry and exhausted and bloodcaked in the driveway of the vulture house with a broken nose as an invisible sunrise died behind a wall of fog and smoke and gloom; add to this the numbing, red bleeding depth of hell’s own sorrow that would come with knowing she’d gone to see him in her time of greatest need and the thought that I might have lost her and lost her again—all of this came instantly back to me magnified, and I closed my eyes with the pain. Threnody, I know, saw my eyes close and knew the pain wasn’t for her. I was making her point.
She said, “Will you take me home now?”
“I asked you to come to the mountains to stay for a while. Will you at least do that?”
“You think I want to go back to Old Buckram? Why would I ever in a million years want to do that?” She was scornful and hurt.
“No,” I said, “I’m sure you don’t. But we can go anywhere. I’ll take you anywhere you want. Just tell me. You and me. Where do you want to go?”
She thought about it and said, “I’ve never really known.”
—
She sat back and crossed her arms and stared out into the street. Minutes passed and she looked at everything that could be seen except for me. The two beer-drinking painters were gone, but I hadn’t seen them leave.
“Bird—”
She didn’t respond.
“Bird, look at me.”
She began to cry. I’d broken her heart. Life had broken her heart. All of it had. Maddy—Father—me. It wasn’t fair.
“It’s over now, Bird. I’m here now. We don’t have to go back.”
“I knew something bad was going to happen,” she said, still crying and covering her face with her hands, talking through them.
“Stop it. It’s okay—”
“I didn’t know where you were, or where Mother was. We were upstairs and I was reading and he was working in his office and I went in and asked what he was doing and watched him write something I didn’t understand on a piece of paper and then he sat down and kissed me, and he cried and held my face and said he was sorry and that you would take care of me—I didn’t understand any of it.”
“I’m so sorry.”
I held her hand while she cried and her whole body shook and I felt again that I’d failed her. The waitress came by and asked if we wanted to order but then went back inside. I moved to the chair next to Threnody and put my arm around her.
“I hate him for leaving,” she said. “I hate him for leaving me. He didn’t have to do that. And I hate him for the fact that I have no idea who he was for my entire childhood. I didn’t know him at all. He left me with nothing except for ten thousand books and a thousand questions and nightmare memories of him floating around the house like some kind of ghost.”
“He didn’t want to leave us.”
“Yes, he did. He must have. That’s what happened.”
“That’s in effect what happened, but that’s not what he intended by it.”
“I don’t know how else to explain it.”
She dried her eyes with her napkin and tried to turn off all the emotion, to seal off that part of her that would never heal, but I knew more tears would fall as soon as she was alone again.
“He was hurting, too,” I said. “He hurt worse than any of us.”
I involuntarily recalled the Latin words I’d forgotten and had tried so hard to forget. To myself, I said, “Consummatum est.”
“What?”
“That’s what he wrote on his book that you and I couldn’t understand. He wrote Consummatum est.”
“I don’t know what that means. What does that even mean?”
“It means ‘It is finished.’ I came across it one day when I was studying for a Latin test at Wesleyan. I still remember that. I felt like I’d fallen into a well.”
“The book was finished? Is that what he meant? He finished it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Those were the last words of Jesus on the cross before he died, at least in the Latin translation. He said ‘Consummatum est.’ It is finished. Et inclinato capite tradidit spiritum. And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”
Threnody thought about this for a long time. She whispered the words “He gave up his spirit” as if to test how they would sound in her mouth. I took her hand and held it in my hands. We began to share in our pain.
—
After he’d said goodbye to Threnody, I would never in my life see him again—except once on the hill at the top of old Ben Hennom where the lonely tree stood. As Threnody sat in the rain-darkened house and waited for him to return, he was hiking up the mountain to be alone. After searching for him on the Barrowfields and screaming until I’d lost my voice, I went up the mountain the next morning when there was light enough to see and found him hanging from the lonely old tree, its branches full of crows.
I returned to Old Buckram following my time with Threnody, and Story and I spent the better part of a month trying to get the house back into some kind of shape, albeit with little visible success. I realized walking through the house one late-summer afternoon and feeling a lingering sense of something undone that, apart from the murderous oubliette, there remained one room I hadn’t entered since I’d been home again: that small, almost hidden chamber at the corner of the library where Father read and wrote for all those years. Mercifully the door to this room, already half obscured by the geometry of the hallway leading to it, was closed when I arrived, and part of me was content to pretend the room was locked from the inside or simply nonexistent. Within limits, I was happy to leave well enough alone. I tried my best to forget about it and might have succeeded but for the few terrifying nights I was awakened from discomfiting dreams, dreams in which I’d walk weightlessly down that hallway and open the door just to find him sitting in there writing as he always was—except that in my dreams the enigmatic bird that had formerly roosted over Poe’s expressionless visage all those years had found a new perch, inert and immobile, on Father’s slumped shoulder. In those dreams I was always desperate to talk to him, but I could never move past the threshold of the room and he never turned to face me and words never passed between us.
After standing in the narrow hallway for an eternity and thinking of every possible reason not to go in, I tried the handle and the door pushed easily open into the darkened room. I felt for a switch but couldn’t find one, so I waited a moment in the doorway hoping my eyes would adjust and wondering if Father’s hell-ravaged ghost was going to appear and whether the bird would be with him. On the wall to the immediate right of Father’s desk was, I perceived, a faint circle of light coming from a small, round window that had been shuttered in some way. Even though I’d spent a quarter of my life in this room sitting at Father’s feet with a book in my hands, I don’t know that I’d ever noticed it before. I crossed over to it in the cavernous dark and with my hands found a subtle latch that opened a wooden cover. The cover fell open from its hinge to reveal a little rose window with delicate tracery and alternating panes of clear and colored glass. Standing on my toes, I looked out the window over the slate tiles. Far below I could see Story walking among the cone flowers and spiraling lady tresses with a bouquet of flowers in her hand. Along the courtyard’s crumbling walls, yellow dahlias bobbed their gentle heads as she passed by. Farther out, immense black crows sat in the distant field and watched. They had come back. He, of course, had not. I thought, They are waiting for him.
I saw the room in the new light and made my inventory. The desk, I discovered, was the same as he left it. The raven or whatever it was on the wall. Wolfe. Poe. Chopin. A first-edition copy of The Stranger, price-clipped, chipped, and cocked. A signed first edition of Look Homeward, Angel that he prized more than any other book. A first edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination signed by Harry Clarke in blood-red ink. A Bible, King James, black leather cover. Three candles; copious spent wax. A bottle of Hill’s Absinth, empty. Two bottles of vodka, empty. A bottle of Spanish wine, also empty. A book of matches. A lamp, no bulb. Fifty-one journals, handwritten. The title page of an unpublished novel. Consummatum est. Nine years of collected dust and a handful of pictures that must have meant something to him.
I opened The Stranger to read the inscription in my own hand. I turned the page and saw the first line of the book: “Mother died today.” I was beginning to understand.
—
Story and I went back to Charleston on a warm Friday afternoon in September and rented a room with a large second-floor balcony overlooking the Battery and Charleston Harbor. We sat outside in wooden rocking chairs as the warm air lifted her hair off her shoulders and twisted it back and forth and around. In the twilight, we watched the couples move up and down the street as the sound of the harbor waves softened and muted their voices. There was a small table between us on which we had situated a small bowl of strawberries.
I asked Story for a beer, and she reached into the cooler and fished one out that had been soaking in the ice water so long that the label had begun to disintegrate and peel off. She took a long drink before handing it to me. I stared at her in disbelief, as I always did in such circumstances, feigning amazement that she dared to presume I would share something so precious. Without looking at me, she reached over and took my hand. The streetlights had begun to come on, and we heard the sound of horseshoes on the cobblestone street below—a carriage tour of the city.
Just then a beaming Threnody came out onto the porch with a map of the city spread in front of her like a sail and began enumerating all the places she wanted to explore that weekend. First on the list, not surprisingly, was Sullivan’s Island, to see where “The Gold Bug” was written. It was in our blood, I suppose.
I said, “I’m happy you’re here, Bird.”
She said, “I’m happy I’m here, too.”
Sitting there, I tried to bring the moment into reality. I wanted to remember this, but I wanted something more. I wanted to know that I was alive right now. I desperately held on to the moment, moved by the realization that life and this experience were as ephemeral as breath. Perhaps this frozen time was more for them—for Father, for Maddy—than for me.
I looked over at Story as, with amusement, she watched the people go by below us. I followed the path of her gaze down to the street where a young couple walked arm in arm. The young man, full of the moment, looked up at the sky as he walked, trying to make out the first faint stars of the evening.
And then time rolled on.
I worked up the courage one bright October day to visit his grave for the first time since we lowered him into the ground. His headstone was as he wrote it:
HENRY LARVATIS ASTER
A STRANGER TO THIS WORLD,
TIME TOOK NO NOTICE.
NON OMNIS MORIAR
I thought of him there beneath the dying grass, silenced as he was by unrelenting time before he was able to give voice to all that surged and roared chaotically inside him. I imagined briefly that I could be his living eyes and ears; that I could see and hear in his stead on that cool autumn afternoon; to breathe in the wood-smoke from the first fires of the evening; to feel the lonely excitement of nightfall in our timeless town; to taste the honeyed warmth of scotch on my tongue; to know life and the ephemeral joy of all things living, just for a minute, for my father. To allow him to see and feel again, through my eyes and body, the exquisite autumn of October in Old Buckram.
He had left a letter for my mother. It said:
My love—my dear love—my Eleonore. You believed in me all these years when I gave you no reason to believe. You gave your life for me. All the hours you cared for our sweet children; all the hours you waited alone as I sat solitary in my world and wrote. All that time is gone; you gave it to me. I am so terribly sorry. No man has ever so loved a woman as I loved you.
“It broke my heart,” Mother told me later. And by this she meant she had achieved this state as a permanent condition.
I don’t know when he wrote this letter, or what his final day and his final hours must have been like. How hopeless he must have felt; how narrow his life must have become. Thinking that life had dealt him enough pain for a lifetime. Recognizing the absurdity of it all. Having learned all too well the futility of it. Knowing he had hurt others, and himself feeling the knife of this pain because of it. Knowing he had let us down before, and would again.
In my mind, I imagine him getting up that morning knowing what he planned to do. I can see him sitting down at his desk one final time to write this letter, just moments before he kissed Threnody and told her goodbye. Just moments before he took his life’s work, his life’s unremitting toil, and set it aflame.
I found it, my father’s book, that night on the Barrowfields. At the industrial spool, the makeshift pyre, where Maynard had intended to burn Faulkner but almost immolated my father instead. To my eye and to my ear it appeared in the unfamiliar starlight to be blackbirds taking flight at my approach. It was not. The birds were pages from his book caught by the coming wind—burned, blackened, lost.
—
As I sit now, in this shaded bower, it is almost May and the dogwood petals are somehow uniformly scattered throughout the even grass of the courtyard like stars in a green and yellow sky. The birds, with their calls, compete with one another by trilling and chirping and dancing from branch to leafy branch. The wind has quietly stolen the round flowers of this poor Bradford pear, the latter being fortunate to have survived this past winter with all the snow and its sadly divided trunk. A cardinal and a Carolina wren appear to discuss briefly who is to be first into the birdbath and then both fly erratically away. Buller brings me his ball and I throw it as far as I can from a sitting position, just to have him bring it back and drop it on my papers again. He is tireless.
After returning here, I was in the backyard inspecting two tragically unhealthy dogwoods that exhibited several unattractive dead limbs. A neighbor from down the hill who, curiously, has taken to visiting from time to time, a female of substantial age and a similar quotient of opinions, tottered up the hill to see what I was up to.
“I wonder what happened to these trees,” I said rhetorically. “I wonder if the roots were damaged somehow.”
“No,” she said, looking out over the valley. “They just got old. That’s what happens to them when they get old.”
Some of us, I suppose, get to live out our lives like that, slowly dying, sometimes so slowly as to be almost imperceptible to anyone but ourselves. Others are not as fortunate. They fall away into the impossible darkness that is death without the benefit of even so much as a bloom. And yet we all live our lives as if assured of tomorrow.
I am grateful for the support and insight of the following extraordinary people: Chris Clemans, Sarah Bedingfield, Nathan Roberson, Rachel Rokicki, Rebecca Welbourn, Francine Toon, Anna Webber, Anna Jarota, J. Todd Bailey, J. P. Davis, Carrie Ryan, Eric Taylor, Billy and Heidi Royal, Ashley Taylor, all the wonderful folks at Horack Talley, and also my family: Lauren Lewis, Ashley Lewis, Henry Keats and William Kepler, Ray and Devan Vaughn, Lindsay Kahrs and Matthew, Shelly White, Brandi de Jager, Cheryl Lewis, my mother, and Phillip E. Lewis, my father.
