13
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 1:302
I’VE NEVER BEEN married, though when I was twenty-eight, I was close to it. Got the tux and everything. Even went to the church. She was a lovely girl. Maybe a little too much hair. She was always putting this white cream on her upper lip. I’d walk into the bathroom, and there’d she’d be, snow on the face.
Years after we were to be married, I would hear she died in a car crash in Minnesota. They didn’t find the accident right away. The state was in the middle of a blizzard, and by the time they come upon the car, only its roof was visible. Windshield was in a bad way. They knew she’d been ejected. They shined a flashlight around. Beam, beam, beam. Saw something a few feet out. It was her lips. That was all that was seen. The rest of her was covered by snow.
Snow on the face, and I’ve hated Minnesota ever since.
I don’t know. Maybe I should’ve married her, but when I got to the church, I found myself staring up at its steeple. I didn’t have a ladder, so I had to stand on the outside sill of a window and reach up and grab the gutter. Then I just pulled myself up. I used to be strong like that. They heard my feet walking across the roof, that’s what they said when they all came out of the church to stare up at me. Said they heard a noise and came out to see.
“What are you doing up there?” they asked.
“Fixing the steeple,” I answered.
I didn’t have my tools with me, so I had to improvise. I heard someone down below say I was mad, the way I gripped air and hammered it too. The way I sounded out the sound of steel hitting wood. I had gone temporarily around the bend. Don’t we get to at least once in our lives? To go so mad, we survive what it is we are doing. And what I was doing was jilting the woman who loved me. My God, what I must’ve done to her heart.
I heard someone from below say I had always been good for nothing. I picked up one of my invisible crowbars and flung it his way. He didn’t flinch.
I suppose someone told her I was on the roof. She came running out of the church, white dress and all. I heard her mother saying, “Mary, get back inside. He’s not supposed to see you yet.”
But Mary didn’t care. Mary only ever heard what she wanted to hear. It was her fault we got as far as we did to the church.
One day I said Mary and then I said something else, I know I did, but ended it all with a me. She thought I’d said Marry me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that wasn’t what was said at all. She was just so excited. I thought, hell, this girl really wants to marry me. Why not give it a try? Maybe her love would be enough to paradise the hell. But then I realized, I couldn’t use her like that. Like a shield in the fray. She deserved to marry a man who loved her for all the things she was and not for all the armor she could be.
As she stared up at me that day on the roof, she knew exactly what I was doing up there. I’ll always be grateful for her, how she never asked me to come down like everyone else did. She just took off her veil and told her mother she’d like to stop by Denny’s on the way home. She was hungry, she said.
That was the last I saw of her, her white dress piling up against her body like the snow I never saved her from.
I waited for them all to leave. I cringed when I heard a woman call me a no-good son-of-a-bitch. Even the flower girl flipped me the bird. I threw an invisible hammer at her. She just dropped her chin to her chest and shook her head as she walked away, dragging her feet while the flower petals fell from her hand.
Before I climbed down, I yanked some of the shingles off the steeple, kicked it in the side, and broke the stained glass in its little window. A week later, I’d drive by the steeple and see it was still damaged.
Some people might call me lonely because all I got are pictures of steeples and towers and roofs. I do have the neighbor boy’s photograph, but he’s not mine. Like I said before in Maine, I wouldn’t have done much good with a kid if I had one. I did have a dream once that I had a son. In this dream, I went out to the woods with him and put a gun in his young hands. I woke up at the bang.
“Just a nightmare,” I muttered, reaching for the bottle by the bed. “Just a nightmare.”
Maybe I am lonely. Maybe I do hold onto the pillow at night, maybe I have twisted a bread tie around my ring finger just to see what it feels like to have a meaning there. I think of Elohim during these moments.
Him and his Helen.
Too bad he couldn’t just let go of what she had done to him. After all, it wasn’t the losing of her to the Andrea Doria he’d been destroyed by. It was the losing of her to another. It’s a gasoline betrayal when the romance of your lover becomes a separate energy from you. It lessens your significance as lover. As man.
Spark, spark, hiss, and burn.
I’ve been with many Helens. Their legs around me. My head on their husbands’ pillows.
Sometimes a husband would come home early. I’d hear his tires crunching over the gravel in the drive. She’d throw my clothes at me, tell me to get out. That the window was the best bet. I’d just lie there.
“What are you doing?” She’d try to pull me up. Fear in her whisper, “He’s gonna catch you.”
I could hear his keys in the front door.
“Honey, I’m home,” he’d call, like a sitcom. I could tell his head was down, looking over the mail he’d just brought in. “Honey?” A step creaking on his way up while she yanks on my arm, telling me he has a gun.
“Does he know how to shoot it?”
She’d shriek and look at me with fear like she could already see the blood and all the cleaning up she’d have to do. Blood is hard to wash out, I knew she was thinking, her eyes rolling like washing machines already starting the job.
Only when the doorknob turned with his hand did I grab my clothes and throw them out the window, me jumping after. I’d wait in the yard, thinking he knew. How could he not? How could he not smell me all over her? All over his sheets? His pillow? But the curtains would close and no guns would fire.
Later the bartender would say to me, you look like you could use a drink. Later after that, he’d say I’d had enough and I’d have to use my fists to say otherwise.
I dated a girl named Andrea once. I could feel her sinking under me into the downy comforter. I asked her if she ever heard of the Andrea Doria. She said no and said for me not to go so fast.
“Gentle, gentle.” She patted my back.
I said, “I’m not a damn dog,” and I came and she went disappointed and rolling off to the side, saying I shouldn’t stay over anymore and not to call again and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble to hand her some fresh sheets from out of the closet on my way out.
I wonder what lovers Sal and Dresden would’ve been if that summer would’ve been hot and nothing else. He would’ve kissed each one of her freckles and moved his hand up her leg. Spark, spark, fire. Orgasm is a many-flamed wonder to the thrusting bodies that in their fond collision makes husbands of boys and wives of girls.
I will say conversation was a long time coming between him and Dresden that summer. They first spoke with their eyes. Every look. Every glance. Every long stare and short one.
He would nail a poem to her oak. They weren’t his work, these poems. They were Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, all the old masters and the old standby lure for lovers everywhere.
He’d hide behind one of the other trees and watch her take the poem down from the nail. She’d bite her lip and tuck her frizzy hair behind her freckled ear as she read, sometimes long enough for me to think he’d given her a whole novel. I suppose she was reading the poem over and over again, finding the parts of it that were less Shakespeare and more Sal.
I climbed her tree with him once. She didn’t know as she leaned back against its trunk, opening her book and circling its words. I think it was Gone with the Wind, but that could just be me going with the wind in my memory.
A few pages in, Sal signaled it was time to press on the bra
nches. We leaned our whole weight in until they swayed. It was hard work, and some of the branches wouldn’t move at all. That’s an old oak for you. Its long, heavy limbs stretched out more than up to the sky. Limbs that were thick, drooping things like wet rope. One branch was heavy enough to flop all the way to the ground, resting on it as if reaching bottom was the most natural growth for a tree branch.
We stuck to the lighter branches in the middle, and to the even lighter and smaller branches of those branches. The higher you moved up into the tree, the smaller the limbs became and therefore the easier it was to move them.
There was no wind that day, so when she felt the movement of the tree above her, she looked up, frightened. Then she saw Sal and her fear melted away. She never even saw me, and I was really putting my back into it, shifting those damn branches just for her. Didn’t even notice. All she saw was Sal.
“What are you doing, you silly boy?” She wrapped her sweater-covered arms around her book and swayed in tune with the branches, her long dress skimming the ground.
“Giving you a breeze on this very hot day.” He lazed over a thick branch and smiled down at her as he used his back foot to stir a small twig, all the while I leaned everything I had into a great big bough. She never once looked over and saw. Instead she laughed at him, one of those laughs that’s more open mouth than sound.
“Well, all right then. I’ll let you get on with it. Silly boy.”
She returned to her book and stayed long after circling the words on its pages. It was as if she couldn’t bear to leave. She would look up at him, saying she was going to have to go soon, that her mother was going to be home. But then she’d lean back against the tree and stay for a while more.
Meanwhile, my arms and legs felt about to break off like the few smaller twigs that had become casualties of my wind. I told Sal I was going home, leaving by walking down the long branch that lay on the ground.
Dresden suddenly turned, surprised to see me. “Where’d you come from?”
“My God. Didn’t you see me? I was half of that wind up there.”
Her shrug was limp, and for that moment I genuinely hated her, maybe because I wanted her to see me as much as she saw Sal. I shook my head and kicked a small gravel past her plastic black flat before heading home. Even at the end of the lane, I could see that tree slowly waving one branch at a time. The only tree in Breathed that day in motion.
Sal stayed long after she went inside. By the time Alvernine pulled up the drive in her Mercedes, he was still there. Alvernine wasn’t the type of woman to look up in the trees.
As night came, Dresden pulled a chair to her front bedroom window so she could sit and watch him move the branches just for her. It was late and she tried desperately to keep her eyes open. Before she knew it, her head was in her hands. Then it was on the windowsill. And then it was on the pillow in her bed. She apologized to him in her sleep.
Even with her asleep and curled up with her back to him, he did not stop. He was up in that tree until the middle of the night, when a real wind came and made his something special into something everywhere.
He crawled home, hunched and sore. All that for just one girl. I asked him why, out of all the girls in the world, why Dresden Delmar?
He winced from his sore limbs as he told about the time he went on a drive.
“I went with my—” He stopped himself, swallowing what he was going to say.
“With who, Sal?”
“With a man and a woman I used to know. The man’s eyes drooped from tiredness. Her eyes drooped for that and more. The two of them together could stunt a chance. Still, the drive looked to be a fine one. The woman even turned on the radio and sang along. I didn’t know she knew any songs. I certainly didn’t know he did. I certainly did not know they could make music together.
“Everything seemed all right. I even think I sang with them. And then the man lost control of the car and we swerved to a stop by the side of the road. Something had punctured the tire, and we didn’t have a spare. The man was angry because it was the woman’s idea to go driving in the first place. It was autumn. She had wanted to see the leaves.
“He kicked the tire, said ‘Goddamn,’ and then punched her. Not the first time. Not the last time. Just another time that would black her eye. The man looked down at his fist, stuffed it into his pocket, and went walking toward the town we’d passed a couple miles back.
“The woman sat down on the ground by the car, her dress her best rag. I sat with her, leaning forward with my arms wrapped around my legs. I could feel her fingers trace the scars on my back under the overalls.”
“Your wing scars?” I felt my own back tightening.
He wiped his hand over his mouth, the way an old man might dust food crumbs.
“As she traced them, she said she was sorry. I traced her eye and its coming bruise and said I was sorry. And there, both sorry, we held each other until the man returned with the night and a spare. He smelled like a barstool. Looked like one too, with his wobbling eyes.
“Her hand shook as she held the flashlight while he changed the tire. He yelled at her to stop shaking the damn light like that, so she handed it to me and I held it still. Though I don’t know how.
“After the tire was changed, we drove the dirt roads, his anger driving off. He pointed out the windows at the leaves. Told her to look at all their yellow and red and orange. She squinted and really tried, but said she couldn’t see them. It was the night’s fault, she said, not his.
“He reached over and she flinched. He said it was okay, he wasn’t going to hurt her, he said. He was just unrolling her window. She still looked nervous as he reached across her lap. He unrolled the window quick and beamed at her. Now you can see, he said with hopeful certainty. But she sighed. It was too dark.
“He looked at the tears slipping down her cheeks. He caught one on the back of his finger. He was sorry about earlier, he said as he looked down at her trembling hands folded on her lap. When it got later, he always got sorry about earlier.
“She said it was all right. The way she always did. He slowed the car and parked off the road. Without a word, he got out and me and the woman watched as the dark of him was swallowed by the dark of the woods.
“When he emerged from those woods, he carried something. Fallen leaves that he spread throughout the car. Over the seats and floor, the dashboard, the woman’s lap, my lap. Then he took the flashlight and shined it on a leaf.
“‘It’s not too dark now, is it? Do you see the leaf, Mother?’ he asked. ‘How yellow it is?’ And she answered, ‘Yes, Father, I see. I see now.’
“They always called each other Mother and Father even though they weren’t that to each other.”
“What’d they call you, Sal?”
He did not answer me. He instead smiled and said, “It was beautiful. All them leaves. All that light. The smile on her face. The relief on his that she still loved him. That he hadn’t smacked it out of her just yet. He kept shining that light and she told me to come up from the backseat, onto her lap.
“From there I saw orange maples, yellow oaks, red elms. When there were no more leaves to see, when we had seen each and every one he had collected, he patted his lap and said to me, ‘Here, prop your feet up here.’ I laid my feet there and he laid his hand on top. It was warm. It was nice. And it stayed there the whole way home.”
“Sal, is this the same man with the rope? The same woman beaten in the kitchen? The same boy with the stool for his father?” I wanted to ask those questions, but I feared the answer.
“You asked me, Fielding, why, out of the whole world, why Dresden Delmar?” He looked off into the distance and squinted as if what he saw there was quite possibly the brightest thing in the world. “It’s because her freckles are scattered like the leaves across the woman’s lap. Her eyes shine like the light in the man’s hand. Her hair is as red as the red leaf we passed between the three of us, like the love we could not simply say.”
14
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… with a pleasing sorcery, could charm
Pain for a while or anguish, and excite
Fallacious hope
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 2:566–568
THE FINALE OF fear is first neared by small labors of bravery. These small labors will eventually lead to the last laboring of the great defeat of the fear altogether. That is the breathing text of hope anyways, that we branch an escape from fear’s trapping circle.
For my mother, her small labor of bravery was learning how to swim. The acoustics of which involved no splashing water, as her swimming was in her fear’s circle and therefore in the house. She was nearing the finale of her fear, and though she was not yet there, Sal was tiring her to the nightmare and introducing her to the dream.
Let it be said that my mother didn’t always live life inside. Before I was born, she went out into the world quite regularly. Soon after I was born, she refused to leave the house without an umbrella. By the time I was one, the umbrella proved not to be enough, and she found herself fleeing the world and its lack of ceiling.
For a number of years, Dad tried to help her conquer her fear. He brought in therapists and read various psychological books himself to better understand. Ultimately, the therapists failed and the answer was not found in any book.
Dad, as well as me and Grand, accepted that she may never leave the house again. It was Sal who did not accept this. He was calling out her world and letting her know it would win a carpenter a prize, but it’d never be a darling of the universe where the stars commit to the real thing.
Every day, he asked her to go outside with him. Every day, she said no, but he was wearing her down with the way he described what she was missing. Simple things like the new bench outside Papa Juniper’s. The Fourth of July parade down Main Lane and its red, white, and blue confetti. The language of the farthest reaching echo shouted in the coal mines, the just-built windmill in the sunflower field outside town, the way the sky looked when standing on the last claim of Breathed land.