“This could be your place like that,” I say.
“Yes,” she says, plucking at a weed stem. Even as she answers, I know I’m pushing a rope. She’ll have to find her own places. I mustn’t assign memories. We sit and visit, and as invariably happens I find myself stowing the moment for all the road time to come. The scaredy-cat part of me wonders if she will do the same. And if so, will the memory warm her or simply sharpen my absence? When we walk back up to the yard, there is a bluebird in the maple tree beside the corncrib. I point it out to Amy and she locates it easily. When pursuing the heat of the sun I must never forget it exists also to illuminate blue birds in brown branches.
Later in the afternoon I find the glass lid of the cold frame smashed. I suspect Fritz the Dog. He was nosing around earlier. Fortunately I have a fair collection of old storm windows, so I gather the broken glass, install a replacement and prop it open again. When I see him lurking in the same spot again later, this time with a chewy dog treat in his jaws, I holler at him and shoo him away. But when the day cools and I go to lower the lid, all the dirt and most of the seedlings have been scraped into a mound in one corner. I realize now he’s been looking for a soft patch of dirt to bury his treasures—I’ll lay odds there’s a dog treat under that mound of dirt. The dog is nowhere to be found, so I can do him no harm, but I am ashamed to say I storm into the house and slam the door and say something very loud and forbidden. I can’t defend my rage, but it is tied to the fact that in the midst of all that has been going on, and all my absences, that little plot of dirt with its sprouts was a tangible manifestation of some careful moments spent with Amy. I don’t care about the stupid plants, but I care about what it meant to kneel down there with my daughter. Later, when I have cooled down some, I go back out and notice the dog missed about six radish sprouts. I lower the lid and figure maybe they’ve got a shot. Then I go for a cool-down walk. Along the south side of the granary, the rhubarb is up. The last time our family gathered, my brother John—a big bearded fellow who spends a lot of time on a bulldozer—said he eats an entire rhubarb stalk every spring just for the involuntary face-scrunch that transports him back to his preschool days. He also reminded me that having heard rhubarb leaves were poisonous, we would feed them to the chickens and then hang around to see what happened, but nothing ever did.
The baby has cried us awake. Fumbling in the dark to fetch her, I note the eastern horizon is a faint charcoal gray.
Early to bed, early to rise has never been my deal. Half of everything I’ve ever written was likely typed past midnight. Not so any longer. Age plays a part, but mostly I think it is a sequela of parenthood. Even before the baby, when it was just Amy, I had begun easing toward the early shift. Writing after supper, I’d take a break to read books with her at bedtime, and find it near impossible to go from that quiet moment back to the desk.
The new sleep pattern has been reinforced by the baby crying at night. After twenty years of going from slumber to blastoff at the first micro-beep of an ambulance or fire pager, I tend to spasm straight up and out of bed at Jane’s least whimper. Anneliese is bemused at the gymnastics, which is to say that while she appreciates my willingness to help (it’s less about helpfulness than doggish conditioning) she could do with more arising and less blastoff. Furthermore, in most cases the baby is looking for the drink I cannot provide, so although I wake to retrieve her, by the time she is nursing I’ve returned to unconsciousness. She howled at 2:00 a.m. and now she’s howling again. I consider the dim seep of light and decide I might as well begin the day. By 10:00 a.m. I’ll be nodding off above the coffee cup, but for now I want to get going.
In soft lamplight I place Jane at her mother’s breast and lean down to kiss them both on the brow. Jane’s cheeks are fattening, and when her eyes open I look for recognition but I still don’t quite see the person in there. I wonder if it’s just me or if mothers attach from the first instant while the man flounders around and waits for the fun stuff, like diaper farts and jibber-jabber. I poke my head in Amy’s room and in the glow of her night-light see her wrapped in a sleeping bag on the floor beside her made bed. She has taken to doing this since the baby came. Still impaired by a developmental psych class I was required to take in college, I momentarily worry that the change may be portentous; then I decide it’s possible the kid just wants to sleep on the floor.
Downstairs, and out the door. Eastward the gray band is lightening, but the sun remains well sunk. Drawing the cool breath of morning into my lungs I think of my father, whom I do not believe has missed a sunrise in some forty years and would be startled to find me up and about at this hour. I still love the dark heart of night when it is possible to believe you have the world to yourself, but I can understand why Dad loves to watch the day come in. And I find I am a little less breathless working from this end of the cycle than I am trying to fight my way through to some sort of bleary-eyed finish at 3:00 a.m. There is the idea that you have a head start.
When I get to my desk I power up the computer and open my e-mail. As the new messages roll in, a simple subject line catches my eye: “Tim.”
The e-mail is from the sister-in-law of a dear friend in England. I double-click it.
Hi Mike,
Some time ago Tim was diagnosed with cancer of the liver and was told that he hadn’t got long to live. He chose not to tell you as he wanted you to remember him as he was.
Tim passed away on 20th April at 3.am, he died as he wanted to without any fuss.
We weren’t sure how to contact you as you are often on the road and thought this was possibly the best way.
Don’t know what else to add at this point, we are sorry we know this will come as a shock Mike, but I know we will talk very soon.
Claire Amy Sylvia and Ronnie.
Aw, Tim, I think. I raise my eyes to the wall directly across from the desk: Tim, in an old photograph framed and hung from a nail. Twenty-three years we were friends. Last time I saw him he was fine. I check the date in the e-mail again. Six hours’ time difference—he would have died last night while I was frittering at the end of day.
When my mother was a child, she had a passel of international pen pals. Over the years the correspondence waned, but she and an English girl named Pat kept in touch into adulthood. In 1984, fresh off my first year of college, I traveled to England and my first stop was at Pat’s house. Pat had two daughters. One of them was dating Tim. We met the night I arrived, went to the local pub together the following evening, and got on like well-worn pals from that time forward.
His given Christian name was Timothy Swift. I always thought this an eminently toff English moniker, but you wouldn’t peg him to it if you saw him in the pub. There was nothing Jeevesy about the boy. He was a resident of Cannock, England, a Midlands lad, born near enough the environs of Birmingham that he carried the working-class Brummie accent (think Ozzie Osbourne with a cold), although how much of his accent was geographical cottonmouth and how much was just Tim is hard to know. Even his friends and relatives frequently found him indecipherably mumbly. I spent enough time in his company over the years that I grew to understand him relatively well, and during his visits to the States I happily served as translator. My advantage lay in the fact that the night we first met, Tim was convalescing from having his four upper front teeth knocked out in a pub parking lot the night previous. From my perspective, his locution only improved thereafter.
We called him Swiftie. He stood maybe five-four, favored Motor-head T-shirts and black socks with his tennie trainers, and wore a rose tattoo on his forearm. The rose was smudgy and prone to bubbling in the sun. The year we met he had just completed the English equivalent of technical college and was working at a factory, building motorcycle frames. This was a great relief to his mother, as a few short years previous he had been a greasy-haired headbanger with no evident prospects of a legal or supportable sort. In the one photograph I ever saw of him from that earlier era, he was devil-eyed and grinning around a remarkably misaligne
d cluster of incisors. In fact, he once confided that although he might have preferred a more professional procedure, having his teeth head-butted to the tarmac was actually a bit of a windfall, as the court instructed the other fellow to purchase Tim a new set that in the end were implants of model quality.
At the desk, still staring at the e-mail, I’m going back, in film-strips and flashes: Tim and I walking home in the dark after the pubs closed, stopping at the bright-lit chippie off Longford Road. Undoing the tight-wrapped packet and eating the sodden fish and potatoes straight from the paper while watching The Young Ones in a room smelling of hot grease and vinegar. In 1989 we wore garbage bags and stood in the rain for hours before finagling our way into Centre Court of Wimbledon under creative pretenses. One moment we were sodden proles, the next we were seated within full view of a duchess. Tim got the better seat, but sadly he was spotted and bounced almost immediately. As the guards escorted him past me, we studiously avoided eye contact as previously agreed and I subsequently enjoyed the entire match. Edberg versus Mayotte, if my memory brackets are accurate. On the way home from Wimbledon well after midnight, Tim’s car broke down on the motorway. A late-arriving tow truck took us deep into the countryside and pulled inside a barn, at which point the furtive mechanic pinpointed a problem with the clutch and named a ransom for repair. With the same easy mumble he would use to request his fifth lager, Tim told the guy to bugger off and drove us home clutchless, his trucker-shifting not impeccable but serviceable, and hours later we lurched through the final traffic circle and herky-jerked to a stop in the driveway at dawn. Another of my visits coincided with the rise of electronic trivia games in the pubs, and our combination of wit—Tim’s in science, engineering, English sport, and culture and mine in fluffy minutiae—did not make us rich, but did regularly enable us to pay for lunch. How solid the pound coins sounded when the machine chugged them into the tray. We road-tripped to Wales and the Lake District, hiking for miles in the rain, sleeping in a damp tent, and stopping to eat in pubs where the patrons switched to Welsh upon our entry. Tim was a serial hobbyist—one year darts, another year winemaking, next year the curry club—with a tendency to immerse himself headlong (learn all the lingo, get all the gear) before abruptly moving on. During his competitive fishing phase I accompanied him to a canal-side tourney where he diddled at the water with an absurdly long pole and used a slingshot to launch maggot clusters across the channel as chum. Another time he joined a sporting clays club and took me on a round, reveling in our rare good shots by adopting the Queen’s English: “Jolly hockeysticks! Bag another grouse, Jeeves!” Oddly enough, when mimicking the Queen, Tim was quite understandable.
One very late night after everyone had been drinking with the exception of square, teetotaling me, I chauffeured Tim’s girlfriend home while Tim trailed behind on a moped he had resurrected from a junk heap. (Whether it is more dangerous to allow a sober-but-right-lane-imprinted Wisconsin rube to navigate the narrow roads and traffic circles of suburban Britain while attempting to shift a dodgy left-handed manual transmission with his nondominant hand at 2:00 a.m. or to yield the wheel to a tipsy native is a conundrum to be parsed another time—we were young and predictably senseless.) Tim had got through some lager, so I kept checking his one wobbly headlight in the rearview mirror. A kilometer from home, I looked up, and the light had disappeared. We circled back. Shortly our own headlights illuminated Tim, placidly pushing the moped along the dark street. As we drew nearer, I could see the bike was bent and badly scratched.
“What happened?” I asked.
Tim looked at me, a little blurry, but wholly unperturbed.
“I f’got t’balance,” he slurred. And then he pushed off into the night.
We circled again, caught up, drove slow beside him, and saw him safely into the house. When we left he was staring into the open fridge, contemplating a sandwich.
The sun is fully up and bright. It is early afternoon in Cannock by now, so I call Tim’s mother Sylvia. It was very hard, she says. He wouldn’t let us contact you because he knew it was going to be bad, and it was. He suffered terribly, she says. Sylvia and I talk a little longer. Then I hang up and try to work. Anneliese’s mother is visiting, and has made breakfast. As she often does when I work mornings, Anneliese comes to my office with a plate. I thank her, and take the food. She looks at me and senses something.
“You OK?”
“I got some bad news…,” I say, and then the choke in my throat turns to tears. When Anneliese and I were married, Swiftie made the trip. Flew transatlantic cattle rate just to land on Thursday and leave on Sunday. The day he arrived, we spent the night in a tiny shack in the middle of forty acres near my beloved New Auburn. The next day we copiloted my old International pickup down here to Fall Creek to prepare for the wedding. The morning of the outdoor ceremony Swiftie helped my father-in-law Grant and me set up the chairs and then take them all down and reset them in the tent when the weather turned to rain. After we finished I headed to the house for a shower, and, looking back, I saw Tim at the edge of the lawn beneath the tent, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and looking out across the sweep of the valley below. His free hand was in his pocket, and he was rocking one knee, the way he always did when he was relaxed and taking something in. How many times I had seen him in that stance, raising and dragging at the cigarette without hurry. He’d keep the knee going and bend at the waist a little, like he was working up a bow, but then in the end he’d just muster a faint smile, his lower lip slightly pouted, his eyes squinting as he raised the cigarette again. This morning when I read that e-mail, the first image that flashed—even before I looked to the photo on the wall—was of Tim on the hill there, quiet, alone, content.
I wonder if he knew.
Experts say the honeybees are disappearing, so it’s nice to see them busy at the bush beside my office door in the early afternoon. I cannot identify the bush—it verges on shrubbery—but on this the day of my friend’s death it is in bloom, the modest yellow blossoms waxy in the sun. Noon has passed, lending the light just enough postmeridian slant so when the bees buzz by, their minuscule shadows trace across the window screen like silhouette radar. It’s a gentle sight, enhancing the sun and easy breeze. The bad news from England has had the immediate effect of compressing the world and time. I’ve kept at my work, but am continually drawn down memory’s kaleidoscope wormhole. Feeling the need to walk in open spaces, I leave the desk and head for the ridge.
Sylvia said Tim came back to his boyhood bedroom to die. I know the room. I can go there in my head. I bunked in the bed there sometimes. I suppose he did it to spare his young daughter Amy and wife Claire. I don’t know. His Amy was a toddler last I saw her. I’m walking and walking, farther and farther back on the property, into a valley not visible from the house. The air is warm. Deep in the trees, the air smells of duff and thaw. I wish he had called me.
He wanted you to remember him as he was, it said in the e-mail. When I spoke with Sylvia this morning, her words were exactly the same: He wanted you to remember him as he was. I think of him in the yard with that cigarette and how much I could read from just the jiggle in his knee, and yet our span of two decades was built on less than a hundred days spent in common company: there are implicit questions of depth. By the end he had become successful in his field, managing international projects for one of the largest engineering firms in the world, but only once did I see him at work; I was caught off guard by the man in the tie and white hard hat. He oversaw a tunneling project beneath the English Channel, and ramrodded another in which slurry was pumped at extremely high pressure into miles and miles of abandoned underground coal mines. Once the pipeline blew and took off a man’s arm. Tim hit the kill switch and grabbed the arm. Another time he got a frantic call from the manager of a high-end car dealership screaming that his slurry was blasting through a hole in the middle of the showroom floor. Tim loved telling that one, but eventually he was promoted to the point where his job amounted to serving as
shock absorber between middle management and the uppermost tiers, and it wore on him. The better the pay, he said, the worse the pressure. He spent most of his days on the phone, translating vituperation. The last time we talked, he said he was going to give it up. He talked about his Amy, and Claire, and how too often the work kept him away from home.
At the far end of the valley I begin the looping climb back, topping out in a patch of popple. And now I’m crying. I wish he had let me know. I wish I could have seen him one more time. The usual selfishness of grief. I am not angry, I am yearning. Overhead the tree trunks fork their dusty white bark into sunlit greenery, the newborn leaves limp and luminescent somewhere just short of chartreuse. A shifting scatter of light plays across my head and shoulders, and I am grateful for the cathedral feel of this place. Grateful that I might grieve in natural sanctuary.
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