by David Payne
–You don’t believe me? You were there, too. That’s how it happened, David, the way it always happens.
–You want to talk sabotage, Stacy? That’s what this feels like.
–Don’t talk to me about sabotage. You’re the expert on that subject. Think what you think. Now what?
Looking back, it seems quite possible that Stacy was surprised, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that trust is broken and I don’t believe her. Whoever’s right, whoever’s wrong, I feel trapped and whether Stacy meant to trap me or it was accidental doesn’t change my feeling, and the part of Ruin Creek I misunderstood about my father is the part it feels to me as if I’m acting out and living now, and the answer to the question of what hurt Bill to make him hurt us, hurt me, is this, this did, it was his furious protest at the qi Margaret was extracting from him and his powerlessness to stop it. Now at length I understand my father. I am him. And the part of Ruin Creek that I got wrong, I’m living.
And when Stacy wrote, her soul dream was of sisters who get pregnant accidentally and flee south to North Carolina and live with sisters and are each other’s helpmeet and raise children responsibly and creatively, and the men and fathers of these children are nonessential and to be included must surrender and appease the women, and now Stacy, with Grace, our toddler, and our unborn baby flees to North Carolina to her mother’s and her sister’s just like the sisters in her film script. The dream she dreamed while writing upstairs in the loft has come to pass now in the real world.
There she goes down the jetway in Albany, and the last thing I see is Grace’s little face looking back at me over Stacy’s shoulder.
Once upon a time we were a family and believed that family love is stronger than time or death except for us it wasn’t, something else was stronger. The dark force—call it extraction, trapping, power, taking from another what the other doesn’t wish to give you—overcame the love between us and became the core transaction in our marriage and led us here wherever here is, wherever we are, and where we are is in the witch’s forest, and Stacy isn’t the witch, no, she’s more like Gretel and I’m Hansel. We’re more like sister and brother than like wife and husband. We’ve wandered in and now the birds have eaten up the breadcrumbs and we’re under an enchantment, I am, and the curious thing is how the trees at the wood’s edge resemble those outside it, and it’s only later, deeper, that the shadows blacken with a different blackness and the birds stop singing and the trees turn gnarled and leafless, and you know you’re lost or I do or might have had I turned to face the specter but I don’t, I’m careful not to, and maybe that refusal of the truth I already know accounts for that tightness in my chest when I’m out there in the woods with Grace whom Stacy has now taken from me.
And what will it take to avoid the specter’s message now? As I’m driving home from the airport, I already know the answer. It’s going to take this place, Vermont, these meadows and this mountain and this house I drew a hundred times before I built it and the oaks and ash and birches and the lilacs at the corners. And I already know I’m going to do it. Even before I call the realtor and set out into the meadows I know I’m saying goodbye and bringing in my firewood for the last time.
I came here to a country that was not my country resolved to live under unfamiliar stars in a ledgy meadow filled with weedy unfamiliar flowers in some way to escape my family, and built the new house and wrote the book to try to understand what happened in the old one where George A. slept beneath me in the bunk beds, and everything I vowed not to repeat I have repeated and everything I came here to escape I re-created in the place I came to to escape it. And I’ve brought or helped to bring a child into this place to be lost with me, with us, and now Stacy and I in our lostness have conceived another, and I don’t know how to leave and don’t want to die here and leave them to find their own way out. And the one thing I’m certain of is that I can’t disappear the way Bill did in the Shenandoah. Right or wrong, whether I should or shouldn’t, I’m going to North Carolina, and when the Mayflower men in the big van are no more feasible than a summer on the Riviera, Margaret tells me, Ask your brother, and I don’t even have to, George A. calls me not an hour later.
IV
2000
Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.
—Matthew 26:28
10
So I pick him up in Albany on October 30, 2000, a Monday, and if you haven’t seen George A. in a while, you tend to forget the size of him—almost twice as wide and a third again as high as his fellow travelers in the concourse. Since my wedding five years earlier, he’s put on another thirty pounds and there’s more silver in his hair and in that Fuller Brush mustache of his that makes him look a bit like Bill now, though his expression’s softer, and when he lights his cigarettes the tremor in his hands is more noticeable than I remember. He’s wearing khakis and a nice new shirt, navy blue, long-sleeved, still with horizontal creases from the package—Margaret, I suspect, has been shopping—and a pair of white size-16 Air Jordans, and he comes toward me up the ramp with that slightly floating walk he has, like an astronaut in zero gravity. His grin is little changed, still sweet and shy and sly, and his eyes are still like Margaret’s, dark and deep and warm as a Spaniard’s or a Russian’s, and though the circles under them have blackened, he’s still all there behind them. At forty-two, George A. remains handsome, but he has a slightly ragged look, an unhealthy tinge to his complexion, the effect of years of medication on his liver and his kidneys. And his haircut is a little bit unkempt, like a late-summer garden that’s gone by where the weeds have begun to take it. He looks as though he hasn’t slept that well the night before and maybe for ten or fifteen years previously, which is to say he looks a bit like I do now when I gaze in the mirror, only with that more and better hair I envied.
–Hey, man, good to see you, I say. Put on some weight?
He grins.
–A bit. You?
–Fuck you, asshole.
–Heh heh heh, he says, this smoky, whiskied laugh like an old barroom sage’s.
His old laugh has something new now. I don’t know where he got it, maybe Jupiter or Venus.
Then we shake hands the way we learned as boys and hug and George A. gives me those two back-claps. We throw his bag in the Explorer and set off up the Northway.
On the way home, we stop off at Macaroni’s, the Italian joint in Granville, and eat a garlic pizza, and we sit up awhile that night and discuss the season prospects for the Heels and trade a few Bill stories the way kids trot out their Pokémons and Yu-Gi-Ohs, comparing life point totals for their supervillains and superheroes. George A. goes out on the porch to smoke with the Hellmann’s jar lid as an ashtray, then heads off to bed, and when he gets up in the morning I notice he’s slept in his clothes.
We roll up our sleeves then and go after it, taking that house apart from front to back and top to bottom, from the attic to the crawl space. That’s what the next days mostly are, work, with breaks to shoot the shit, and we keep music playing in the house around us. George A. makes me laugh once, rapping along with Tupac on “Dear Mama,” this big, ungainly white boy throwing signs and I laugh so hard I have to get a glass of water to stop choking.
We quickly fall into our old relation the way we always have after an hour in each other’s presence. In recent years, we just haven’t had that many hours, mainly because I haven’t made them, ruminating on him down in Winston, on Margaret cooking steaks and serving him on a tray in the back room, tucking $10s and $20s in his pocket, while up here I ground my teeth and tried to keep our ship from sinking. Now that we’re together, the tension lifts and I give over with relief and gladness, and a big part of the difference is that George A.’s here to help me, and I’ve been mad and tense with him for so long because he’s needed so much helping. He’s been like a black hole that’s sucked in energy and time and
money and sucked in, finally, our mother, who once upon a time was my mother, too. Losing her is something I thought I was long since over, only in the moonlit realm where we’re three years old forever, I’m not sure you ever really do, or only kinda sorta. Ask Tupac, if you don’t believe me.
And let’s face it, though I’ve invested endless quantities of psychic energy in denial, somewhere deep inside I’ve been mad at him for winning her and mad at her for letting him. And even if I knew the prize is poisoned, I knew it in the high place where the sun shines, but in the low one which is touched by moonlight only, where the three-year-old with the silver six-gun lives and never dies and never can inside us, I’ve resisted reason and resent George A. for devising the genius flank maneuver that brought him complete and total victory on the basis of complete and total losing. The bottom line is, though I know George A.’s sick and try to make allowances, I’ve never been able to put to rest the suspicion that he could have done more, done something, had he wanted to and had Margaret required it of him. But he didn’t, and she didn’t, they made some old agreement common in our family, one I stepped out of trying to be a self-supporting grown-up, and not always succeeding all that brilliantly.
George A.’s not a perfect person, but guess what, I’m not a perfect person either, as I expect you might have noticed. I’m not going to sentimentalize him—if I’m not a hero or a victim in this story, he doesn’t get to be one either—but it isn’t sentiment to say that his last act is an act of generosity. He flies up to help and gives eight days of his life to a brother who has made no secret of his disapproval, and those eight days prove to be George A.’s last ones, though of course neither of us knows it. I’ve been mad at him for years because he’s taken so much and given back so little, but, given the chance, there George A. is beside me with his sleeves rolled up, ready, willing, able.
He helps me take that house apart down to the old photos and turkey feathers and NYC restaurant matchbooks in the bottom of the drawers. Mostly it’s work, like life is, I suppose, which makes you realize, when death casts its clarifying light in retrospect, that the hours spent working are pretty much the same hour over and over and not what you’ll remember. What I remember are the breaks we took, the shit we shot, the evenings and meals we had or made together. He cooks me his Vermouth chicken, and having thought of Margaret cooking steaks and carrying them on trays, I’m surprised by his adroitness in the kitchen.
Despite the twelve- and fourteen-hour days, as the week advances, we fall further and further behind schedule and I’m getting anxious. The clock is ticking on the truck, and extra days cost extra money. The plan has been to pack and leave by lunchtime, Sunday, November 5. I’ve badly underestimated, though, and by Monday morning, November 6, we’re not even close to being finished. If we pack all day, however, we think we can get away by lunchtime Tuesday, November 7.
That night, the sixth, I ask George A. what he’d like for supper and he grins and says he wouldn’t turn down another Macaroni’s garlic pizza. So we drive to Granville, and at the video store, George A. picks out Any Given Sunday, reaching perhaps for some old memory of his glory days at Woodberry when he made eleven tackles and called me in my dorm at Avery, and it seemed not only possible but likely that that would be the first of many victories. Yet neither of us finds the film particularly compelling—too choppy, too much bogus mysticism, all that Indian business . . . But, hey, look who’s talking. Still, we stay up late and do our duty by it, or I do. Toward the end, I remember looking over to see George A. dozing on the sofa, snoring lustily with a sound like big limbs going through a chipper.
The following morning, November 7, I’m at the kitchen counter pouring coffee when George A. emerges from the bedroom with a grin, that one of happy illegality.
–Guess what? George A. says, beaming, blushing, still in last night’s clothes, with his hair flattened on one side and pushed up in a cowlick.
–What?
–I woke up with a boner.
–Do tell, I say, pushing a mug toward him—black, the way he likes it.
–It’s the first time in two years.
–Two years? I say. And then it hits me. What, the medication?
George A. sips and grins and nods, confirming.
–Well, I’m happy for you, bruh, though to be honest, that’s more information than I needed.
–Heh heh heh. Pleased with himself, as I am for him as well, George A. laughs that smoky, whiskied laugh. That laugh really gets me.
Two nights before he dies, then, his animal self returns to pleasure him, like the childhood horse you’ve ridden coming from the pasture to the fence the day before you leave the farm to nuzzle in your pocket for the carrot or the sugar cube, taking leave of you as you are leaving. In retrospect, it’s hard—for me, at least—not to see it as an omen, and there are several from this point, all equally explicable as coincidence. Maybe I need to see what really wasn’t, like Stone with his Indian business. But on the other hand, the fact that such signs and portents are so frequently reported may be because they really are there after all, only they tend to slip beneath the radar, except when death casts its clarifying light in retrospect and makes us look a little harder. I don’t know the answer, and I’m not insisting.
So we tank up on caffeine, roll up our sleeves and set to it once again, and by lunchtime, our new deadline, we aren’t even close to being finished. Nor are we at 3 o’clock, or 4, and now it’s 5 and dusk is falling, dusk is far advanced. Our neighbor, Cathy, is there, and Glenn D. from down the road, all pitching in to get us out of there. And I see George A. on the front porch with the dryer trailing silver metal venting. He’s tipped the hand truck forward and is leaning on the big appliance with his elbows, smoking a Winston, tired but hanging in there. The advancing wall of our possessions has reached the back of the big truck and overspilled. The whole front porch, in fact, is crowded with other indispensables, and I’m in the truck, examining the load, which is absolutely airtight.
–Fuck, guys, I say, this just isn’t going, is it?
They all look at me with dour eyes and don’t reply. The answer’s obvious.
–I guess I’m going to have to get a trailer. Do you think the U-Haul place in Rutland is still open? I check my watch. I guess I’ll call them. Hey, George A., what do you think—are you okay driving one?
This, I think, is how it goes, or pretty close. Funny, though, I don’t recall his answer. It’s probably something like a Sure, why not, maybe a resigned, compliant shrug. I do know he poses no objection. How can he, though, given how I frame the question? And it never occurs to me to wonder, given George A.’s physical impairments—his shaking hands, the black circles underneath his eyes, the floating walk—if he’s capable of driving such a rig. I won’t think of this till years afterward—years, literally. And why won’t I? Is it because George A. drives an SUV himself in Winston and his privileges have never been questioned, much less restricted, because he has, from time to time, accompanied Bill in his wanderings and learned to drive and even back a trailer quite expertly? The real reason, though, boils down to simple self-involvement. I need to get to North Carolina. We’re two days late already. The clock is ticking on the truck and extra days cost extra money. And here’s the point at which my judgment must be questioned.
So dusk is far advanced as I set out for Rutland and come home by dark with the battered dualie like the one Bill hauled through the Shenandoah, another strange coincidence that has a sense of portent to those, like me, inclined to look for it, and things at the end start to circle back and resemble things at the beginning.
So I walk backward down the hallway with my mop like an Indian with a swag of pine, erasing ten years’ worth of tracks laid down by me and Stacy. I put the keys in a Tupperware under the back steps and when I stand, I catch the recently mown meadows’ scent, the summer scent of Joe Pye weed and black-eyed Susans on that warm November evening,
and something inorganic—is it diesel? No, whatever it is it makes me think of gun oil, Hoppe’s 9, what I smelled on the back porch at Jack and Margaret’s house that Christmas, and I’m giving up this place the way I once gave up the shotgun, and though I don’t get this something stabs me and I struggle for the name and call it grief, though perhaps it’s premonition. And when I look in the back of my Explorer, I see the Staffordshire greyhound with the bloody rabbit in its teeth that came to me from Great-aunt Polly and the framed letter my old editor from Houghton wrote me once upon a time and something makes me take them with me. And before we go, I tap on the Explorer’s window. In the greenish backwash of the instruments, George A.’s in there smoking, and when I surprise him his first impulse is to hide the Winston, mine to make some remark about my pristine ashtray.
–Ready? I say instead, managing to suppress it.
–Whenever you are.
–Thanks, George A.
–It’s no big deal.
–No, seriously, man, I tell him. I couldn’t have done this without you. You’re a good brother.
And then he exhales his smoke toward the shotgun seat, and says, “It’s okay, David.”
It concerns me just a bit, in writing this, that you—assuming anyone is out there—may not believe me, that you’ll think I’m succumbing to the temptation to write fiction, for no one else was there, of course, and so no one can gainsay my version. And the reason why I fear it is because what I say to George A. in the meadow upon leaving is what I might have liked to say if I’d had the opportunity to plan it, if I’d known those were the last real words I’d ever speak to him, and if I’d known where we were headed. That whole time has that feeling for me now, as if we knew we only had that time, those eight days to live it, and were determined not to blow it, but of course we didn’t know—or did something in us know it? If I were writing fiction, though, I’d have him say, “You’re a good brother, too, DP, you helped me in the past, so I help you in the present”—that, or any of the other things he might have said that would have been more flattering to my vanity, my need for reciprocity and closure. But George A. doesn’t say those other things. He says, “It’s okay, David.”
