Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  And though I’m not really there, I know what her expression means, this stranger’s, and I’m not having it, not from her or anyone, I don’t want to be awakened from my dream, I’m angry at this woman for interrupting, and George A.’s feet are still tremoring behind the pedals. That means he’s still alive, and how can I leave him when at any moment he could open his eyes and look around him? Why is she insisting that I leave him, doesn’t she understand the basics about family, that you don’t leave a fallen member, ever, especially not your little brother who is there to help you—help me—move my family? And George A. has that serious expression, that look of gritted teeth, and there’s that clear pool of fluid on the seat beside him, I can’t stop looking at it, it’s horrifying to me, though I don’t know why, there’s nothing the least bit horrible about it. Later, I’ll obsess on it and wonder what it could have been, how many different types of fluid do human beings have inside us anyway, but if it was internal fluid from his brain or elsewhere and came out violently and unnaturally, wouldn’t it have been mixed with blood? It isn’t though, the puddle is perfectly clear, like the water at the beach when the wind is from the east, only thicker, thicker than water. And only years later—years, literally—will it occur to me it was probably just saliva, a little pool of it there beside my brother’s head, no more mysterious than the spot of drool you leave on your pillow when you fall asleep. George A. isn’t waking, though, and now the paramedics have arrived and I have to move so they can do their work. The next thing I remember, I climb on the car and start to wrench the driver’s-side door, I pull and pull, but it’s crushed and doesn’t budge, and I hear sirens and a fireman joins me. He’s young and in full gear and has a crowbar, and he goes at it with me, we try to jimmy it together, he doesn’t ask me to leave or try to coax me away, he seems to understand a brother doesn’t leave a brother or blame me that I left mine long ago, no one knows that except George A. and Margaret, and me, of course, I know, but the fireman doesn’t, he seems to believe that I’m doing everything a good brother would and should do. But he can’t budge it either, not even both of us together with the pry bar.

  I don’t remember giving up and getting down from there. I must have, though, and the next part is the part I’m most uncertain of. I don’t know when it came in the sequence or if it even really happened. I’m gazing through the broken windshield at George A.’s hand—not holding it, just ­staring—and I see Pa’s signet on his right ring finger. There’s blood on it, not much, just a little, and his fingertip is missing. It’s somehow been clipped off cleanly in the accident, and this is the only physical damage I remember from the scene.

  Later, after visiting the funeral home, my mother will tell me there was a deep puncture wound in George A.’s head, right at his crown, inches deep and big around as a silver dollar, where some piece of the collapsing moonroof, some stanchion or piece of metal framing drove into his skull and killed him, probably the first time the car rolled. I never see that wound, though, hidden in that pelt-thick hair I envied, all I see is the missing tip of George A.’s finger, and I’m not sure it really happened, and the reason is because at the Valley of the Little Bighorn, Custer’s brother, Tom, died with him in the ambush. Custer, early on, had married a Sioux woman and because of the kinship tie, the Sioux, instead of scalping and mutilating the general the way they did Tom Custer and the other soldiers in the Seventh Regiment, merely clipped his fingertip and took it as a trophy. I can’t be sure if George A. really lost his fingertip or if I read it in a book and lifted it unconsciously, and even knowing that I might have, I can’t say if I did or didn’t. I only know in my mind’s eye I see George A.’s hand so clearly against the Explorer’s pale tan leather, I see Pa’s signet ring, I see the blood, not much of it, I see his missing fingertip. Sometimes I’m so certain that it happened, and then I shake my head and think it probably didn’t. But if it didn’t really happen then why do I remember it? Is it because I was supposed to be with him and die with him the way Tom died with George A. Custer? Or is it because the three-year-old who lives inside me, though I want to kill him off, requires this trophy to finalize his victory? Did it really happen? In the end, I’m not sure it matters, what matters is that in my mind’s eye I see that missing fingertip and must own its meaning as I settle this accounting with my brother. And the crow who lives inside me whispers that maybe it is both things, the highest and the lowest, a last betrayal and a wish to go down with him.

  Nothing from that point is clear. I recall the rescue squad, the ambulance, the flashing lights, the squelch and static on the radios. The fireman standing on the door above the scene has given up the pry bar now and is cutting into metal, throwing sparks, and traffic has slowed in the right lane. People are staring, glad it’s me instead of them, so insensitive and human, just like me if our positions were reversed, only today it’s me. And now the chief takes me aside. He’s younger than I am, though not much. His expression is dour and respectful, and he takes his heavy hat off with both hands and puts it underneath his right arm as he speaks.

  –I’m sorry, Mr. Payne, your brother’s dead.

  He doesn’t say he’s gone, which might allow me to say where?, or that he didn’t make it, which might allow me to say what didn’t he make?, he says the word I have to hear, and though I know already, I’m high in the clouds of a mad hope, or in the underwater kingdom I’m the king and only god of, willing the universe to be as I require it, so that I and all of us can stand it, but it’s not, and this word dead is why it isn’t, and when he speaks it it’s the shotgun blast that finally drops me.

  And perhaps it’s now that I look down at my feet and see, as if by magic black and terrible, the Zip disk with the ur-scene, the one that struck me like a flash of lightning in the meadow that concerns two brothers, one white, one black, facing off at gunpoint in a dispute over a woman, and the white brother who has lost her pulls the trigger, the brother kills his brother, and the weapon is a shotgun.

  And now the mountain woman’s handing me her phone.

  –You should call someone, she says.

  Who? I think, and then I step over the guardrail, and it hits me. My mother. His mother . . . Mine . . . Ours . . . His . . . And mine again. My legs are shaking. I try to sit and almost tumble down a two-hundred-foot escarpment, but several pairs of hands reach out and hold me, and I dial her number and she answers.

  –Mom? I say, Mom? I’m so sorry, I have terrible news, there’s been an accident, George A.’s dead, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

  –Oh, David, no, she says, David, is there someone there to help you? Both of us are crying, shouting, and several pairs of hands are holding me, strangers, keeping me from falling . . .

  11

  So, we’ll go no more a-roving

  So late into the night,

  Though the heart be still as loving,

  And the moon be still as bright.

  For the sword outwears its sheath,

  And the soul wears out the breast,

  And the heart must pause to breathe,

  And love itself have rest.

  These lines from Byron—which I speak at George A.’s funeral in Henderson before the assembled hosts at Holy Innocents—now strike me as a sentimental choice, one that commemorates my brother in no specific way.

  I recall his coffin, flower-strewn, a deep gunmetal bronze, the exact shade of the barrels of the Fox, and I remember that Christmas Eve on the back porch at Fair Weather as he stroked them with his cloth. “Don’t get your fingerprints on it,” he said, and the reason this memory returns must be because my fingerprints are all over this, all over George A.’s coffin and his death, and because I can’t own this at the time, even to myself, I fall back on Byron to speak his true but easy lines about the weight and the fatigue of living—something I know I’ve felt and that I expect my brother did, but not the issue here.

  Had I been braver, truer to myself and hi
m, I would have turned to his two young sons sitting stunned in their blue blazers in the second pew and said, I’m sorry for your loss, sorry that because your father came to help me you won’t have him now, sorry that at your games when you look up from the field or from the bench you won’t see his large presence in the bleachers, I’m sorry that you won’t lie with him again in the big bed watching South Park and eating ice cream past your bedtime, laughing with the same crude joy at the same crude jokes, as he smoked and swiped his ashes from the comforter and reached for you from time to time and kissed your heads and smelled your hair.

  And to Bill and Margaret, together there in the same pew after so many years, I wish I’d said, I’m sorry you’ll have to put him in the ground before you go. But neither they nor anybody in the congregation offers blame or absolution, I’m left to find or fail to find these on my own.

  The gleaming hearses wend their slow way with their lights on through the poor black neighborhood behind the church, past shotgun shacks, where a few residents watch the procession pass with dour eyes, past the county jail with the concertina wire gleaming atop its chain-link fence and through the black iron gates into Elmwood Cemetery, with its rolling hills and old sentinel oaks and cedars, where all our people lie, the Roses and the Paynes on common ground. Through the gate, the Rose plot is the first one on the right, and we place George A. beside Nanny and Pa, the first George A., and plant a magnolia at his feet which is an impressive tree today, and Stacy drives us the fifty miles to Hillsborough because I can’t face the interstate, every time an aggressive driver passes on the left I look at him or her and think, Do you know, do you have any notion how thin the margin is, how quickly it can go awry?, but of course they know no more than I knew five days earlier, and three or four months hence I, who know, will drive like them again.

  So we return to the hundred-year-old house we’ve bought in the Historic District with a silver tin roof you can see—or could see then—from the bridge as you cross the Eno River, over the ancestral site of the Occoneechee tribe—the Indian Village, our children call it—and come into our picture-postcard town with its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes and its Greek Revival courthouse with the lead-domed cupola and the English clock with its black face. Our house was originally called the Commercial Club, its most appealing feature the wide surrounding porches where local businessmen once sipped their bourbon and rocked and made their deals. Our postage-stamp-sized backyard is surrounded by a picket fence, and on the west side of the house, preserved by a covenant dating back to 1818, is a public footpath called Cedar Lane, once an allée that ran from the high street one block south to where we live. Four of the original cedar trees remain, two hundred years old now, and cast the house in funerary shade even in the hottest days of summer, and a pair of cardinals nest in them and occasionally we see the male flitting through the dark green canopy, and I’ve come back to the shadowed grove in an ancient sun-drenched land where I began, and the street where we reside is Margaret Lane.

  And the day of the funeral or soon thereafter, Margaret hands me the keys to George A.’s Chevy Blazer, a dark blue 2000 model, which she bought him and which he proudly drove those last few months, washing it religiously and keeping the wheel trim bright. At first I tell her, No, I can’t take it, for the car has, for me, an illegal tinge like the shotgun, like the ice-cream soda.

  –Take it, David, she insists. Your brother would want you to, and I do, I accept because I want the SUV, though I’m by no means sure that George A., even dead, would be pleased to see me at the wheel. I’ll drive the Blazer for eight or nine years until the transmission falls out one day on Churton Street, and by that point the cost of a new transmission is more than the value of the SUV with that new transmission in it, yet I pay the freight in order to hold on to it another year, not quite ready to let it go, for it’s the last thing I have of him, and even after all those years, in the console between the two front seats, George A.’s hairbrush remains where he left it with a few black and silver hairs, and a set of keys on a white plastic key ring courtesy of $ave-Time Lube on S. Stratford in Winston, and four silver keys to doors and locks unknown to me, and a matchbook from an all-girls’ club with a phone number written on the inside flap in George A.’s final shaky hand.

  I return to therapy. After six years in Therapy Central on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—where I fancied I’d begun to gain a bit of erudition—I enter group therapy in Chapel Hill with modest expectations, and within a month, I’ve run afoul of my new cohort. Hardly a session passes without one of the therapists, John or Alice, telling me I’ve “erased” them or someone else around the circle. What does this mean, “erasure”? I’ll be telling a story and someone will chime in, What you did with Stacy in that instance sounds like what your mother or your father used to do to you. I’ll go right on with my story and five minutes later as I’m wrapping up, I’ll say, And you know what suddenly strikes me? I think what I did with Stacy in this instance is what my mother or my father used to do with me, and Alice or John or the offended party will say, I just said that! You erased me! and I’ll say, Did I? Because I don’t recall you saying that. And it isn’t that I’m pretending not to have heard. That crinkly, incineratory sound the computer makes when you empty the recycle bin? Some inward and invisible version of that is going on in me. The library has a dark wing devoted to destroying its own books. It turns out that I, who suffered such wrongs and injuries in childhood as I’ve recorded here, have grown up to become a person who “erases” others who feel wronged and injured by me. Never did I catch a whiff of this in my six years in individual therapy in New York City. Erudite? It turns out I’m a dilettante, a lightweight. And, worse, I’m not erasing hostile or unhelpful comments, I’m erasing helpful ones, insightful ones, the very ones I’m paying money for.

  –You should be thanking us, says Alice. Why aren’t you thanking us?

  I fight them, how I fight them, for a year and a half I fight and go down to defeat, unconditional and bitter.

  And Alice says things like, Of course, it’s easier to tell yourself the story that you want closeness because you’re a good intimacy-wanting person and Stacy doesn’t because she’s a bad intimacy-avoidant person. And as long as you both tell yourselves that version, you can avoid looking at the deeper issues. Is a marriage with no real desire for closeness a marriage you want to stay in? You can always choose that. It’s just better to know the truth and choose instead of lying to yourself and staying passive.

  Every Wednesday, week after week, month after month for eighteen months, they hit me like this. I feel battered underwater, my mouth and nose and eyes full of sand and spindrift. And John glances at me sympathetically, as if to say, Hang in there, and the group moves on to the next person.

  Honestly, I can’t see how it’s helping. Our marriage isn’t getting better, and my drinking’s getting worse. Now when I drink, it’s three triples, sometimes four, eighteen ounces, then I shut myself away downstairs behind closed doors and let my family’s night unfold upstairs without me. And the notion of Pa Rose, the first George A., lying faceup in the foyer on Woodland Road as dinner guests stepped over him to make an exit doesn’t seem far off. In fact, I’m right there with him. Me and old Pa. And one morning somewhere along in here, I wake up hungover, nauseated, sour, wanting someone to drive a stake through my heart, or whatever shriveled vestige remains of one, and I take my 1.75-liter bottle of Burnett’s out and pour it in the backyard on the rosebush. That’s it. Done. I have to be, you see, because I can’t keep doing this, cannot. Nine hours later, at 5 that evening, I’m rolling into the ABC store, North Carolina’s state-owned booze dispensary, and putting another big blue-capped soldier on the counter just like the one I sacrificed that morning. And the clerk, who knows me, gets a certain look, not gloating, but the opposite, circumspect and knowing. Once every six months, say, and later every two or three, then once a month, I pour my vodka out, and sometimes I ma
ke it for two days, sometimes three, a week—even three months once—but inevitably the day comes when I find myself walking down the familiar aisle to the familiar spot on the familiar shelf and putting the big jug on the familiar counter. And I want to stop—the proof of it is pouring out my vodka—but I also want to keep on drinking, and the proof is returning to the store and buying.

  And if the litmus test of successful therapy is meaningful and measurable change, I can’t point to a single one that eventuated from the work I did in New York City, none there and despite the year and a half of Wednesday muggings, none in North Carolina either.

  Or maybe there is one. I’m starting to focus less on Stacy’s sins and errors and taking a harder look at my own in the mirror. The person I see there isn’t as likeable as I once thought, and I recall that old dream from my twenties about the car sunk in the black slough with the body in the backseat and me there as a member of the law enforcement team, watching with the guilty sense I know the murderer. And if everybody in the dream is you, is me, you see, then guess who that is. I knew that once upon a time—how did I forget? I, who so prefer the roles of victim and detective, now must rediscover that I’m the criminal, the murderer, the drunk, the ungrateful husband, the reluctant father, the Angry Guy, the eraser, the hit man. Whole unsuspected continents of transgression are rising to the surface.