Living at the End of Time

by John Hanson Mitchell

  He and I had hiked along the tractor road beside the woods with the corn field on our right and the river below us. It was here, or at least not far from here, that I had discovered a family of fox kits wrestling at the edge of the corn the summer I was ten. They were so deeply engaged in fighting, so intent on getting a better bite at the neck of a sibling, that they did not notice me standing there, my heart pounding. When I got back to the house I told John, who listened in his steady way, nodding, but said nothing. He paced himself; he took his time; he watched things.

  There was something almost scriptural about his journal keeping. He recorded the passage of the natural world as if he were its manager, as if failure to do so would mean the dissolution of his universe. The journal was meticulous, filled with wind direction, temperature, and minute accounts of bird nests, insect hatchings, and the tonality of calling frogs. There was not a word there about personal pain. But rereading his journals fifteen years after his death, I saw intimations of his demise written there. He was feeling more toward the end, or he was allowing himself to feel.

  Uncommon birds had moved in the winter before he died, northern species that in ordinary winters would not have come so far south. Huge flocks of redpolls had been seen gleaning the tree tops at the woods’ edge. There were fast-moving flights of winter finches, crossbills, and grosbeaks, and tiny packs of whispering siskins. The robins stayed north in inordinate numbers, the juncos were abundant everywhere, and out on the river the great arcs of swans and geese rose and settled like dreamscape architecture. “The winter is charged,” he wrote with unusual eloquence, “the seasons turned upside down.”

  By February of that year he was speculating about the curious winter. Some of the older people said that it was a bad year down at Pea Island on the Outer Banks, that food was scarce, and so the waterfowl had stayed north. They said food was also scarce in Canada and New England. There were deep freezes that year on the mainland and a dearth of pine cones. The world was bleak, ironbound, but the sea and the bays and the rivers mellowed the peninsula. The rye stayed green in the fields, the woods were open, and the swamps were dank and smelled of skunk cabbage.

  Uncharacteristically he began reminiscing with his friends. He also took to wandering. Betsy, his housekeeper, said later that he was rising earlier than usual, leaving the house in the pitch dark. He would spend whole days in the field, binoculars on his chest, his eternal notebook in the loose pockets of his jacket. Once or twice he did not appear for dinner. Betsy heard him come in around ten.

  John had served in two world wars; he was very young in the first one and had had a nasty time in the trenches, according to local gossip—something about a cave-in and buried men, voices from the mud. In the second war he was a doctor with the medical corps in Europe, and later in India. I know only one thing about his time in India. One night as he was returning to his encampment through a forested area, a tiger jumped onto the hood of his jeep and remained there, staring at him through the windshield, the full moon gleaming in its eyes.

  It was the only story he would tell from his war years.

  “What happened after that?” we always asked, even though we had heard the story many times before.

  “He glared at me. Pale green eyes in the white light of the moon. And then, slowly, and don’t ask me why, I stood up in the open jeep, one leg on the seat, and I looked at him over the windscreen. I could smell meat on his breath and muddy paws.”

  “And then?” we would ask. We always had to push for the ending.

  “And then he raised himself up slowly, ever so slowly, he leaned forward . . .”

  We nodded enthusiastically.

  “And then, sniffing, he touched my nose with his. Actually touched my nose, as a dog would.”

  The song sparrows and the fox sparrows came back early that spring. The skunk cabbage and the false hellebore unfolded early in the swamps, and the winter finches lingered on so that they mixed with the returning flocks of sparrows, robins, and blackbirds. There was almost too much activity to record in his journals. He would walk the fields along the woods’ edge listening to the gabbling and the whistles, the chirps and the fluttering of the birds.

  It was early in March that year that I had taken my last walk with him. We left his house on one of those freakish early spring days. The air was almost palpable with moisture and life, the water smell filling every dip and low spot in the fields and woods, and the sun angling through the ground mists as through cathedral windows. We found the body of a freshly killed wood duck near a wooded swamp. It was in full plumage, and it seemed a shame to me that such a thing of beauty should perish in such a hopeful season. I said as much.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “This is a good day to die.”

  We walked on for a while in silence, toward the river where the flocks were gathering again.

  “The Sioux used to say that before they would go into battle,” he said. “I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense, to simply decide to die on some good day.”

  In his youth he used to hunt, but he quit when he came back from the first war. They said he would sometimes go down to the blind alone with a dog and a gun, but he would always return empty-handed.

  “I’m waiting for the perfect moment,” he would argue.

  When he came back from the second war, he didn’t even bother to make the trip to the blind. He moved to New York, worked at a city hospital, and then retired early.

  By the middle of the month the spring migration was in full force, but the winter finches had still not left, and the flocks of geese and swans had stayed late into the season. That spring in front of the drug store in the town where the old men gathered, they commented on it. Some said the world had gone dry beyond the peninsula. An old black man who lived behind the ice house began walking the streets ranting at people, as he sometimes did. “It’s the red moon,” he shouted at passersby. “The striped moon.”

  Doctor John would stay up late at night writing in his journals. Regularly he would leave the house before dawn, return after dark for dinner, and then retire to his study to write. He reveled in the early unfolding of the flowers and the greening of the fields.

  I remember an autograph book my parents had kept since the early forties. House guests and various family members had signed it with comments in little columns set down for autobiographical material. Doctor John had signed it in April 1948. Under a heading marked “Likes” he had written, “Birds, trees, green grass.” And then farther down in the column, separate from the other notations, “A simple life.”

  In New York after the Second World War he had married. She was a society woman who liked the out-of-doors and shocked the local Eastern Shore people with her eccentric style. She loved to cut hay and could often be seen in the fields driving a tractor in her flowered dress. Often she and John would disappear to her family’s hunting camp in the Adirondacks, where they would climb mountains, swim nude, it was rumored, and study nature. She died at an early age and left him without issue.

  By the time he was seventy-five years old he had filled fourteen books of nature notes without telling us anything except that the world was a very orderly place in which birds returned at the appointed season, in which the grass would green up on the same date every year, in which the frogs called from the swamps each in its proper season, in which the turtles laid their eggs, the geese departed or returned, the swans grouped and regrouped, and the natural system functioned in a seemingly eternal cycle.

  “But you didn’t finish the tiger story,” I said to him.

  “It touched my nose,” he continued.

  There was an immense flock of blackbirds in the forest to our left, and when he spoke they rose in a body and began wheeling over the woods, gathering more birds as they circled.

  “It leaned forward and touched my nose and I could feel the dank wetness of it.”

  Out on the river the light went silver for a moment, then turned a warm summer yellow. The swans and gee
se began talking.

  “Then it drew back cautiously. It turned and jumped from the hood and sauntered down the middle of the road away from the jeep. Casually, you understand, no hurry. It cut into the forest and then came back; its head appeared from a thicket beside the jeep. I could see the white whiskers, a face striped like the moon.”

  The blackbirds broke from their gyre and flowed in a curling wave down over the corn field. The song sparrows and the fox sparrows set up a loud chatter as they moved among the trees, and out on the river the great flocks shifted, barking and yelping among themselves. The noise of the land birds suddenly intensified; the geese and swans increased their calling. He noticed. I saw him swing his head quickly. There was a look that I had never seen in his eyes, a hint of fear perhaps. Then he looked at me directly, as directly as he ever had in all my life with him.

  “It spoke to me, you know. Maybe I was under pressure. Maybe I only imagined it, but I’m certain it spoke to me. I can’t forget that. I have lived with it all these years.”

  Under the sweet gum woods there was a sudden rush of wind. The birds went silent. The river opened; the arrow flight of ducks fell; the geese and the swans pumped and backfilled to stillness. A cloud shifted, and out on the river the light flared with silver.

  They buried him in April. He was old, and not many were left to cry at his funeral.

  I put in another garden later that month. While I was digging out a long strip along the west wall, I uncovered an old mouse-gnawed horse bone, the last of the wild white horse that George Case used to ride in the days when the meadow was an orchard. I turned under a load of cow manure that I had got from the farm beyond the west side of the ridge, and then I limed and raked, and when the soil was warm enough, I planted roses and herb borders, snapdragons, cosmos, peonies, stock, and sweet peas. I had it in mind to create a little corner of civilization, a place to take tea on a summer afternoon.

  In contrast to Henry Thoreau, who felt oppressed by the cultivated fields and dooryard gardens of his area, I felt that my small part of the world still needed a little more cultivation. The deep, wild forest, so beloved by Henry, was all around me, threatening to jump into my meadow. The woods were rank and tangled with fallen limbs, dead trees, dark, moist hollows where insects danced in cool shafts of light. I loved the dark, wooded mystery of the ridge, but I felt the need for a middle ground between the chaos of the human industrial community and the wilderness of nature, a place where the refinements rather than the brute economic force of human endeavor could be experienced.

  The garden progressed slowly, as gardens always do in New England in the spring. Cold rains came, a snow flurry or two; the soil was dampened again and unworkable, and I returned to my wood fire to think and read. Spring is such a hopeful season in theory, but in fact it is filled with loss. It is no wonder, as statistics indicate, that more people lose ground and succumb in this season than in any other. In the histories of the people I had known and loved I saw not the rebirth that Henry claimed to experience in spring but the other side of life, which is death. Doctor John died in spring, and so did my father. So did Henry, for that matter.

  Three years before his death, and not long after his retirement, my father signed on as chaplain for a Dutch cruise ship that was headed around the world. Although he was a seasoned traveler, he seems to have worried a great deal about this trip. In mid-Atlantic, on the outbound voyage, he developed an ulcer and had to be hospitalized, and when the ship reached Cannes, he was put ashore and sent to a small French hospital not far from Nice. Somebody had to go and bring him home, and since I had lived for a while in Nice and spoke French, my family sent me, even though I was the youngest.

  It was a curious week for me. I had, for once, the money to rent a room in a decent hotel, but instead stayed with friends in the cheaper district at the back side of the city. At night I would return to some of the old cafes I had known; by day I would take the bus west to the hospital. It was the most pleasant hospital I have ever visited—small, with high ceilings, polished wood floors, and landscaped grounds. My father was in a west-facing ground-floor room with French doors that opened onto a terrace, and as soon as I arrived each day, I would swing open the doors and let the fresh April air of the Mediterranean sweep in. I would spend the day with my father, translating if necessary, talking to him, or sitting in the sun just beyond the door. When he recovered enough to make the flight, I shepherded him to the airport and we flew on to Barcelona, and then across the Atlantic to New York.

  There was some heavy weather on that trip. Just after the noonday meal was served, the plane began to hit rolling pockets of air that roughed us up considerably, and at one point we hit a real downdraft. The bottom seemed to fall out of the sky; the plane dropped straight down for several seconds and then came up with a jerk. I looked over and noticed that my father had stopped eating and was staring straight ahead, his eyes fixed on some singular point in front of him. I asked him if everything was all right, but he couldn’t answer. I noticed that he was gripping the armrests of his seat. I think I was a little surprised that such an experienced traveler should be so terrified, although I realize now that he simply knew more than I; I was too young to be scared.

  Some years earlier, my middle brother, Hugh, the aspiring poet, who had a way of living on the very edge of things, had finally cracked up at college. My father had to bring him home to rest. On the flight back they too hit some heavy weather, and my father had the same reaction. My brother took the opportunity to question my father’s faith. “If you believe,” he said, “you should have nothing to fear.” My father simply stared straight ahead.

  While he was on shipboard he needed a transfusion. A male nurse on the trip, a Dutchman, donated his blood. Three years later my father came down with hepatitis, picked up, the doctors said, from that transfusion. He got sick in midwinter and was hospitalized in March. While he was in the hospital my brothers and I entertained him by reading news stories about China. But then he grew delirious, went into a coma, and, after three days, died. It was the first day of spring. Just before he went into the coma, while I was sitting with him, he had a moment of lucidity and mumbled something about the father and the son. I never knew whether he was talking about family or Christianity.

  Henry seems to have become more comfortable with death by the time he moved to Walden. The theory of the necessity of death for the regeneration of life was in evidence all around him—in the woods, the pond, and the fields. The thawing earth, the melting ice, and the return of the green grass and birds was a strong metaphor for him. It was almost as if he saw the earth as a living thing itself, which, like all living things, would die but was capable of regeneration. While he was living in his cabin at Walden he wrote his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which is, among other things, an extended paean to his beloved brother. The writing of this work seems to have served as expiation for him, and by the time he was at work on the book Walden, the natural rebirth of the cycle of the year was a model for the rebirth of the soul and the continuity of human existence. His passage in Walden on the return of life to the winter landscape is one of the most lyrical in the book. Walker that he was, he must have sensed firsthand the freedom that one experiences in New England after the deep snows melt and a person can finally stretch out in a good stride.

  “The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history,” he wrote in Walden “. . . but living poetry like the leaves of trees, which precede flowers and fruits, not a fossil earth, but a living earth.

  “So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”

  It was perhaps a useful philosophy for a man who would outlive his brother and his older sister, a man who would watch his father die, and who would, in the month of May, at the relatively young age of forty-five, himself die down to the bare root.

  13

  The Sea of Milk

  ONE BRIGHT DAY that spring I went down to see Sanferd B
enson. I found him sitting in the sun in the alcove of his old house, resting between chores. He looked frailer than ever. He had turned ninety-five that spring, was decidedly more fragile, and his eyeglasses, which never were in very good shape, had nearly clouded over; he had wired and taped them together at so many points that it was difficult to say exactly what material they had been constructed of in the first place. It occurred to me that he might be legally blind.

  “Good day to rest,” I said, after the usual reintroductions.

  “I rest more and more now, I’m afraid. I don’t know why exactly. But at my age I suppose one gets tired.”

  He was sitting in an old wooden kitchen chair, and he indicated that I should sit down on a crate in the alcove next to him.

  “I’m not anxious to split any more wood,” he said. “The weather’s so fine, and I wonder if I’ll see another winter.”

  That year he had adopted a little dog, a rounded, black and white thing of indeterminate parentage with a pug nose and a short tail. The dog was devoted to him; she followed him wherever he went and would curl up at his feet whenever we stood talking for any length of time. Now she jumped up on his lap and licked his hand while he rubbed her head.

  We went over a few of the old stories about William Brewster, and then I asked whether, after ninety years of living in the same place, he felt that he had missed anything.

  “Oh my, no,” he said enthusiastically. “There was ever so much going on right here, don’t you know, with Mr. Brewster and his Cambridge friends. And there was always so much work to do and always so much to look at. You know, new birds have been coming to this land here. I saw a beautiful gray one the other day, with a long tail and these black and white bands on its wings. And there’s a little nuthatch with his helmet; and those crested grays, as I call them.”