From memories of his own childhood and Wade’s, Hutch had to assume that the child liked the sight of so many trees—what child doesn’t dream of the perfect concealment, the invisible ambush, the cave with two exits? But when he asked whether Raven liked the idea of hiding out here, he got no answer but a shake of the small head. By then they’d reached the first stoplight and could see the chapel tower beyond them. Hutch pointed. “We’re headed there.”
The boy turned back to his mother and laughed. “Looks like a big old funny church, see?”
Ivory smiled; Hutch saw it in the rearview mirror. “It’s a big church, baby. You know what I told you?”
“To hush up and sit.”
“And you promised me?”
Raven said “I know it.”
“You know it what?” Ivory said.
“I know it, yes, Mother.”
In the rest of the three-minute drive through campus, none of them said another word, though the boy pointed silently to tree after tree—enormous cedars, pines and huge water oaks. On the air, his finger would trace a whole outline—trunk, branches and leaves—then start another.
Hutch couldn’t help thinking the boy was hunting some trace of the sleeping giant who dreams this world and its contents, and he nearly asked. But then he knew If I’m wrong, it’ll be too big a disappointment; so he drove on in silence.
Only then when he’d stopped in front of the great wide limestone steps to the chapel did he look back and meet Ivory’s face. “My wife hasn’t seen Wade’s letter, the one you sent me. I haven’t found the right time to tell her yet.”
Ivory registered the fact serenely. “That’s entirely your business.” Then she and Raven waited in place, still as soldiers, till Hutch came around and opened their doors.
2
HUTCH and Ann had planned the memorial service days ago; and early this morning, Hutch had come in and checked on the flowers and programs. But as he walked in now, twenty minutes early with Ivory and Raven, and felt the chill of the steep gray walls, it seemed as foreign a place as the pole. What are we doing here, in so much peace? And who are we kidding?—Wade Mayfield died in agony.
Ann was standing in a corner of the narthex. As Hutch and the Bondurants moved toward the final steps and the long nave, she joined them quietly and met both visitors. Then she looked to Hutch. “Strawson and Emily are here, down front. I told them we’d join them.”
Ivory had stepped slightly back from the Mayfields. She meant to signal she’d follow them in and sit some distance behind the family.
But Ann touched Ivory’s arm. “Please sit with me.”
Hutch said “Yes, with us by all means.”
So—Raven with Hutchins, and Ivory with Ann—they climbed the tall steps, entered the towering aisle lit only by the flaring reds and blues of the stained glass, which swarmed with blared-eye faces of prophets, saints and (at the peak of the huge altar window) the terrible bearded head of God aimed at all watchers.
Raven’s eyes followed the rising vaults to the pale height of what was, after all, an upturned stone boat the length of a warship. Even a child could see the likeness, a long keel overturned.
Beached or abandoned?—Hutch often wondered; but now he silently led them past rows of maybe eighty friends and strangers to the very front where Straw and Emily sat in a shaft of brown light.
Straw stood in place, hugged Ann and Hutch and sat again after bowing to Ivory.
Beyond him, Emily smiled faintly and bowed. Despite her severe dark dress and small hat, her thin plain look seemed to Hutch like a hint that the actual country might never quite vanish—the fields and thickets and patient faces prepared to last till time relents in the speed of its pace or lifts its hand for a run of days unmarked by pain.
All of them sat but Raven. With the slow deliberation of an old man, he got to his knees on the cold stone floor, folded his hands beneath his chin, shut his eyes and seemed to pray.
If it was a new idea for the boy, Ivory gave no sign, though when he finally sat beside her, she circled his shoulders and gathered him inward. For a moment he entirely surrendered to her, and that left him seeming younger than he was—a precociously well-dressed six-year-old. But then Ivory kissed the wiry close-clipped crown of his skull and set him free.
From that moment on, Raven sat with the grave self-esteem of a bronze head from Benin or Delphi, unconsciously giving the color and line of his unmarred face to all who were lucky enough to see him.
Behind the family, a quiet hubbub of others filed in; and then at precisely three o’clock, a friend of Hutch’s from the music department started on the massive organ behind them to play a Siciliana of Handel’s, so effortless and gravely joyful in its winning try at perpetual motion that it seemed yet another guarantee of survival. Who could make such a sound and then die out? When the last notes had died in the echoing space, a short line of witnesses rose one by one and spoke from a lectern at the top of the choir steps.
The first was a high school teacher of Wade’s from Durham Academy, a plump-faced woman in a lace jabot above a yellow suit. She’d single-handedly noted Wade’s skill at design when (as a sophomore) he wrote a term paper on the pattern he saw in the plan of George Eliot’s Silas Marner. In under five minutes now, she managed to summon Wade’s high adolescence with credible force—“a good-hearted looker, dangerously generous with all he owned” and “the most charged boy I’ve known till today; oh I’ve known some magnetos.” She ended with a memory of seeing him walk beyond her one day after graduation, in a shopping mall. He’d worn a new “absolutely blood-red shirt,” and all she’d seen was the back of his head in a crowd of others; but that live sight had come back to her the night of his death, well before she heard the news. When she’d addressed him directly at the end of her memories—“Wade, thank you for a splendid sight”—she was followed by Hutch’s faculty friend who’d helped him most in recent weeks, an eminent Shakespearean.
George Williams stood in his eternal pinstripe seersucker suit and green bow tie. He’d spent more than forty years, in Charlottesville and here, teaching Shakespeare with the tireless vigor of a November cricket or a smart and willing young guide dog. Now he looked straight to Hutch and said “I knew Wade Mayfield all his life and thought it a privilege as each year passed. I know I was not wrong and not misled. Most of you, I trust, share my strong sense of being his debtor for a long time to come. Let me bid him what I see as temporary farewell with this sonnet of Shakespeare’s—number 146.” Then in his crisp unsentimental voice, not looking once to the book in his hand, he recited the brief indelible poem.
“Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead there’s no more dying then.”
In the pause that followed the resonant end, the next speaker—a friend of Ann’s who’d likewise known Wade from his first year—had barely stood when a man strode fast up the center aisle and faced the pews. Hutch had never seen the man; and when Hutch looked to Ann and Ivory, they shook their heads too—plainly a stranger.
A well-dressed stranger, maybe thirty-five, in a well-cut blazer and stiff white trousers that looked like U.S. Navy surplus. But his face was flushed an unnerving purple; and though he faced no one in the pews, his eyes were wild as they scanned the air above all heads. Finally he said “I’m a f
riend of Wade’s from way way back. But I hadn’t seen him for more than five years, and then I saw his obituary in the Durham paper and called the English Department at Duke to find out when this service might be—I knew he wouldn’t go under unwept. I felt like I had one thing to tell that nobody else would—I’ve heard his longtime partner is dead too—so here I am, the first human adult Wade ever slept with after high school. He told me that fact anyhow right off; and even when we parted company later, he never denied it; and I still believe him. He was my first too and the start of my luck—I’m one lucky fool.
“What I know then is the personal truth of a living witness to a life that’s gone. Wade Mayfield was one enjoyable sight in any room or under the sky, by day or night. His skin was as sheer as any good silk. He never stopped laughing when the going got fast; and while I’ve somehow escaped AIDS myself, I know for certain I’ll never love anyone as thoughtful as Wade, or anyone else that can watch you as steady or be gladder to see you just when you feel less respect for yourself than any blind mole; and above all things—” The voice failed a moment and the silence lengthened.
Though Ann had looked to Hutch’s profile from the start of this unexpected splurge, trying to make him hurry it on, Hutch had stayed seated. In the man’s silent falter, Hutch leaned toward Straw and signed Get up, go stop him somehow.
But Straw kept his seat another ten seconds.
And by then the speaker had mastered his throat. “Above all things, Wade had the best eyes south of Fairfax, Virginia—that’s my bailiwick; I’m a student of eyes. Thank you, Wade. You’ve left a hole in the local air, but sleep on for now.” He left the microphone, still nameless and flustered, and fled down the aisle on hard leather heels.
Hutch thought Well, we’re here still. The vaults haven’t cracked and his speech may have been true. God’s heard worse. He looked to Ann.
She was clear-eyed but riled. Still she sketched a smile at the edge of her mouth. This space after all was a vast well of secrets—mostly from young lives, decades of students.
Ivory and both the Stuarts were calm. In the space next to Hutch, Raven’s face still poised on the air, a motionless setting for eyes that surely must match any eyes between here and—where?—surely Fairfax, Virginia if not Long Island or Ultima Thule.
From that point, the service went according to plan. Ann’s friend, whom the stranger had balked, spoke barely audibly about Ann’s early care for Wade—how lovely they’d both been, “madonna and child.”
Then another friend of Ann’s rose, a colleague at the Rape Crisis Center where Ann volunteered two nights a week. She’d met Wade twice at dinner on his last healthy visit home; so she spoke only of his manners and wit, both of which she defined as “rare and delicious.”
The chairman of Hutch’s department spoke briefly, then a junior partner from Wade’s architecture firm (a rabbity man who’d barely known Wade in his healthy days), and then the girl Wade had dated through high school. A painter with a husband and numerous children in Tennessee, she’d never lost touch with Wade through the years; and she ended by saying “Wade saw more things, with his good eyes, than any three artists I’ve ever met.”
Then Strawson rose.
Hutch dreaded the prospect, knowing that these words were bound to cut deepest; but Straw looked sober and in full control as he reached the lectern, so Hutch shut his eyes and braced his mind.
Straw said “I’ve known Wade Mayfield’s father since I was a child myself—he taught me the best part of what I know, if I know anything. Hutch and I spent a lot of time together forty years ago; so when he and Ann finally made their choice and started a child, I asked them if I could stand as one of the godparents once the child arrived. I forced their hand; they couldn’t say No. But being themselves, they said ‘Go to it.’ When it came and was Wade, and they christened him soon, I bit right down on the duty I’d sworn to God to perform. All I knew how to do, though, was show him the Earth the way I’d learned it and try to tell him what seemed like to me the very few laws God means us to heed—laws about decency to everything breathing, which includes the whole planet and the distance beyond.
“I don’t mean to say I set an example that Wade could learn from—I’m a reprobate. Or a renegade, more like a renegade. Anyhow he outstripped me fast. By the age of seven, he knew more about the Earth and animals than any six Cherokee medicine men; and he’d still never done an indecent, thoughtless, mean-spirited thing—excepting the normal lies and jokes involving body functions and his growing parts. That pretty much lasted, the times I saw him, till he left here and moved north to earn his keep. Up there he found out something I’d known forever—that he was not your average boy.
“It suited me fine, I never tried to stop him, I couldn’t have managed if I’d wanted to stop him. He was born ready-set, I’m fairly certain. Which is all the more reason for sadness today, that the power deep in him finally thrust him out in the path of the cruelest plague in six hundred years. I don’t need to tell this smart a crowd the low-down truth—that when people say this curse was sent by Fate to punish a special brand of human, we ought to ask—right back in their teeth—whether they think leukemia is sent to punish the millions of children that die of it everywhere, not to mention God’s exquisite care for the children tortured by the thousand today in the Balkans or the bruised and starving everywhere from Durham to Durban.”
Straw’s voice stopped there; his mind was blank—he hadn’t intended to say that much; anger and fierce devotion to Wade had burned him severely. But he looked to Hutch and recovered his plan. “I’d like to close by recalling a verse from Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter eight.
‘I reckon the agony of this present day is not fit to be compared to the glory which shall be unveiled. For the anxious expectance of all creation eagerly waits for the last unveiling of the sons of God.’
Wade may not have known those words in his life—I doubt he admired the Apostle Paul—and I stand before you as the last man alive who can swear to the future with no trace of doubt, but I’ll make you a fairly confident bet Wade knows those words and their full meaning now.”
As Straw came down and moved to his seat, the organ broke into Bach’s giant fugue “We All Believe in One God.” Like the Handel, Hutchins had picked it himself—not favorites of Wade’s but then Wade was not the one needing strength here. As the massed unanswerable statement rolled through the crowd and onward through the altar window and the baleful eyes of God on high, Hutch told himself in the wake of Straw’s speech We don’t all believe God gives a damn, though. It even seemed urgent that, here this moment, Hutch stand when the fugue had solved its conundrum and state his own sense of where Wade was, if Wade stood the chance of being anywhere more desirable than a funeral urn that was back at the house, barely full of ashes (Ann had resisted his instinct to set them here in their midst). But the fugue compounded Bach’s rock-ribbed conviction through its three-minute claim with such immense power that, when it ended, Hutch could only look down to Raven beside him.
The boy had already looked up to Hutch; and when their eyes met, Raven shook his head as if throwing off water. Then he said “Lord, Lord!” in his grandmother’s voice, having never heard an organ in full cry before.
Hutch smiled at the eyes and touched Raven’s warm hair. “Wait for me,” he said. Then he rose, went forward, faced the crowd—more nearly a crowd than anyone expected—and said “Wade’s mother and I won’t easily forget that you came here on this hot afternoon to back us with your presence and your memories. Surely your generous share in Wade’s death will help tide us through the daunting pictures of his last days that are still fresh with us. Wade, to be sure, is beyond us all. Or so I very fervently hope, though I’m also more than half persuaded that he’s conscious, not of us and our errands but of whatever peace lies still at the hub of actual things. The final piece of music we’ll hear will be the only piece that Wade requested, three weeks before he died, of his mother. It’s the last grea
t song of a band whose records he loved as a baby, early as two or three years old in the early 1960s when Vietnam had us all in despair. By the time the band scattered, Wade was nine years old; and their last song was always his favorite. More than once I’ve watched it move him deeply. May we leave here then to the sound of the Beatles in ‘Let It Be.’”
Hutch had got permission from the dean of the chapel for such an unorthodox conclusion. So the man Hutch had hired from the sound department cued the tape perfectly; and before Hutch even returned to his row, to stand while Ann and the others filed out, the truculent-choirboy voice of Paul McCartney started the song.
Anne’s face, that had hardly met Hutch’s today, turned quickly toward him. Her eyes looked helpless to bear another note.
Hutch knew that she could; he silently mouthed the one word Surely.
She chose to trust him.
As young Raven stood and entered the aisle, his head was strongly affirming the beat of a song as foreign and old to him as the farthest keening monk in Nepal, frozen in snow and adoration.
Hutch reached for the boy’s hand; and they went out together back down the nave through the song’s big jubilant but still sad ending, itself a claim of eventual solace as firm as Bach’s. By the time they reached the steps out to sunlight, what had surprised and moved Hutch most was the sight of Alice Matthews standing beside her old black driver and turning her unblinking eyes toward Hutch. Mait’s splotched white face was also a welcome sight. Then the sunlight took Hutch, and Raven broke loose to run ten yards onward into its power—the force of a guarding or killing hand.
3
IT was just past eight, and dusk was rising, when Hutch and Ann saw the last guest off down the winding drive. Some thirty of them had come straight out from the chapel to the house. They’d stayed indoors for the air conditioning—with drinks, mounds of ham biscuits and artichoke pickle—and all of them had gone on speaking of Wade. But as the glare and heat of the afternoon eventually slid through gold and tan to the indigo of summer night, Wade’s lingering presence likewise dimmed. And when the more watchful guests realized that now they were laughing and weeping toward his back as Wade turned his face away forever and was finally gone, the heart went out of the day at last, and they all started leaving.
The Promise of Rest Page 35
