The Cave Painter & The Woodcutter

by Don Hannah

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s near Afghanistan. Where the war is.”

  Maggie wants to know how long a line would it be, back to when he was alive.

  “If we pace it out like we did in the park, it would be a very long line.” I use the calculator in the computer, “A seventy-thousand-year line would be thirteen miles long.”

  Maggie says, “What’s that?”

  It takes Martha no time, she’s so bright, no calculator for her, “That’s twenty kilometres,” she says.

  Elaine comes home just before bedtime. She’s nicer to me than she’s ever been. “It was good to get away and see Dad,” she says, and thanks me. I call home to say I’m having a good time. There’s no answer. “A martyr to martyrdom.”

  A shift, a cold, dark sky.

  Then, when I get home the next day, when I get home, your desk looks like you’ve just left it. The computer is on, but it’s gone to sleep. The message light on the phone is blinking. A pile of papers, a stack of books, the picture of Sana’a Mehaidli, “the Bride of the South,” tacked to the wall.

  “Pete?”

  A sandwich on the kitchen counter. You’ve made it and left it sitting on the breadboard. Ham and mayonnaise are beside it. There’s the smell of very stale coffee cooked in the coffee maker. Like something Mom would do. Forgetting she made it.

  “Pete?” I go all through the place.

  Wouldn’t you have left me a note? I’m thinking, “Where’s the note? You knew when I was coming.”

  The blinking light on the phone.

  “Where are you?”

  I went out into the evening yard.

  Why didn’t I see you there before? Lying there.

  I knew that you weren’t playing a joke, but for one ridiculous moment I thought that if I acted like you were, then maybe you might be—“Hey, lazybones.”

  But you don’t move. Lying over there on the grass behind the house.

  The doctor said you’d been lying there since the day before. A massive coronary.

  Your last moment alive, what was it?

  Maybe the phone was ringing and you were on your way to go and answer.

  Maybe you were thinking, “That coffee must be ready now, I’ll just go and pour myself a—”

  Maybe you were—

  Maybe—

  But then you stop.

  You fall.

  You’re lying there.

  And the sun still rolls across the sky, and the stars appear and turn above you, and you’re here and so peaceful-looking, but you’re not here, you’re not in this body I’ve loved for fifteen years. I touch the little mole beside your lip. You’re gone.

  A shift. She’s isolated, lost in a small, dark place.

  There’s the ambulance and the autopsy and the doctor and the funeral director and Ryan seems upset because the memorial will be in the gallery.

  “But Peter was Jewish.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “and an atheist.”

  Then the memorial, and my friends are great, my colleagues from Open Studio, the folks at the gallery.

  “Do you want some music?” they’d asked me. “Maybe you want a song?”

  “Yes,” I tell them, “Peggy Lee. I want to hear Peggy Lee sing ‘Mr. Wonderful.’”

  Ryan comes with Elaine, but not my granddaughters, Pete’s little M&Ms, they’re sent off to Elaine’s sister’s, Miss Prissy Pants, and then… then it’s over.

  And, oh Pete, I don’t even believe it. It’s not that I can’t accept it, I don’t believe it. I have these moments—where’s Pete?—as if you’d gone out and should have been back by now.

  Your clothes are still hanging in the closet, still folded in your dresser drawers—all I’ve managed to do is look through the pockets of the coat on the back of the kitchen chair. Your keys, a couple of dollars change, a little smooth stone that you picked up somewhere on a walk. I’ve had it with me ever since.

  I went to see Mom.

  “How do I know you?” she says.

  “I’m your daughter. Dianne.”

  “I had a daughter?”

  She’s sounding frightened, she’s so easily confused and upset. She’ll start crying. “Would you like a chocolate?” I say. “I brought you some nice chocolates.”

  “Mmm,” she says, forgetting all about me. “Mmm,” she says, grabbing them, “goody.”

  Then your agent left a message about the martyrology book. Then I didn’t call her back so she called again.

  But I knew that if I went into your room and started going through your things that you’d really be dead. There’d be no possibility of going back.

  And I wasn’t ready to face the dead.

  So I go to stay with my son, I go to be with my granddaughters. We go for walks, I watch them play. I try to draw. The little Neanderthal boy and his mouthful of teeth.

  On the third morning, when I get up, the girls are playing next door, where there’s a new puppy. Elaine behaves oddly, which is nothing new, then she says that she wants to talk to me about something before they come back. I can tell it’s serious because she won’t look at me directly.

  She starts out by saying that although we disagree on lots of things, I would have to agree that she and Ryan have the right to bring up their girls the way they “see fit.”

  “Yes, of course,” I say.

  She tells me that she’s been doing research for home school, and that she’s “uncomfy” with some things that I’ve been telling the girls.

  I’m not sure what she means.

  Then she says, “God tells us that the earth is not quite ten thousand years old.”

  Oh.

  Oh-oh.

  I’m thinking, “Holy crap.”

  “Now there are scientists who believe that Neanderthals come from the time before Noah’s Flood, when certain men lived to be a great age.”

  “Like Methuselah?” I say.

  “Yes. There are scientists who now believe that what you call Neanderthals were men like Methuselah.”

  I don’t know what to do. I just sit there.

  Then she tells me there’s another school of thought, more so-called scientists, who believe the Neanderthals were postdiluvian, they came after the Flood. The Flood that created the holes in the earth where the cavemen lived.

  And she’s explaining this to me as if I were a misguided heathen and she some kindly, enthusiastic missionary. As if I’ll find this all intellectually stimulating.

  I’m looking at this woman and thinking, “Why the hell is she my daughter-in-law? Why did my son marry her? What kind of a failure was I as a mother that would allow this to happen? What kind of crap is she teaching my granddaughters?”

  “I can’t change the way you think,” she says, “but I can tell you what I don’t want you saying to my daughters.”

  And thank God the girls rush in and end my misery.

  I want to call you, I want to call Steph. I want to call Mom before she lost her mind.

  Alone in the guest room in the basement, just me and that creepy “Dear Son I have a job for you all you will need are these” poster, I feel more alone than I did before I came.

  Ryan comes home from the bank and we have supper. I watch them bow their heads while he says grace and feel set apart from all of them.

  I’m sitting there feeling like an atheist spy behind Christian lines.

  They put the kids to bed. Elaine turns in early. Ryan and I watch the late news.

  But I can’t stand it. So, “Ryan,” I say, finally, “what do you want for the girls’ futures? University? Careers?”

  There’s a silence that I end by saying, “Do you plan on keeping them in home school?”

  “Mom,” he says, “get to the point.”

  I tell him I’m concerned t
hat they’re getting a certain amount of misinformation.

  “I don’t think so,” he says.

  There’s a horrible pause. And, fool that I am, “Ryan, the world is not ten thousand years old. Methuselah wasn’t a Neanderthal.”

  “Mom, I don’t think we should be having this conversation.”

  But I think we have to, and tell him so.

  He interrupts me by saying that it’s really annoying that I continue to belittle what he believes.

  “I do not.”

  “You do. You always have. You and Peter and Aunt Steph, you all did.”

  I tell him that I don’t believe what he believes but that I understand the importance of it, the sense of community that he has at church. “But, Ryan, surely you can’t believe that the world is only ten thousand years old. You can’t believe that Adam and Eve were historical people.”

  Then he says, “I’ve tolerated your lack of belief because you’re my mother and the grandmother of my girls, and they adore you, but I won’t have you meddling with our lives. We both know that there are things that we don’t talk about. And that’s that.”

  I want to know why we can’t talk about them, and he tells me that I won’t like what he has to say.

  “Oh, Ryan, come on. I raised you to be as upfront and honest as possible.”

  And he looks at me, and he turns off the television, and he says, “You have no idea, do you, how much I hated the way you brought me up? The half-assed way we lived. Hand to mouth, grant to grant, your crazy friends, men like Simon.”

  “You hated your father?”

  “What kind of father abandons his family and takes off to have sex with other men?”

  “That’s a very cruel thing to say.”

  “But,” he says, “it’s a fact.”

  “We were never partners, your father and me. I was a single mom and he was incredibly supportive.”

  “I was a ‘happy accident.’”

  “Well, you were. Simon used to say you were a ‘hippie accident.’”

  Then Ryan says, “The irresponsibility of it all makes me crazy.”

  “Well I’m sorry. But if we hadn’t been irresponsible that night, you wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

  “I’m sitting here right now,” he said, “because God saved my life.”

  “He saved your life? When did God save your life?”

  And he says, “When He stopped you from having an abortion.”

  I’m so angry, I can’t believe how angry I am. “No,” I say, “I saved your life—if you want to look at it that way.”

  “You wanted Elaine to have an abortion.”

  “I did not. I said that you two should consider all options available before you got married. That’s what I said.”

  And he goes, “Meaning, get an abortion. Meaning, kill your granddaughter. You wanted us to kill Martha.”

  If I’d gotten up at that moment and left the room, what might’ve happened?

  Maybe I wouldn’t have lost them.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I said, “What a little shit you are to say that to me.”

  And after that I know I told him he could fuck right off! Then something containing the words Christian and sanctimonious and narrow-minded. And things got worse from there. Much worse.

  And I am no longer welcome in his house.

  I am no longer a part of my granddaughters’ lives.

  She slams the copper plates onto the floor.

  And you’re useless to me, because you’re dead! But there’s no one else—everyone else seems trivial. Everyone alive seems trivial because we aren’t dead. And life seems so pointless and not worth living at all.

  Was everything that was so wonderful worth all this sadness?

  Was having you so wonderful that it’s worth all the pain of not having you ever again?

  How did this happen? How did I end up here? Abandoned. The atheist hippie dinosaur abandoned. I’ve spent most of my life thinking that we were all moving towards a rational, enlightened future, but instead I’ve ended up all alone in the Middle Ages! Stuck in the Crusades, for chrissakes! Religious fanatics on all sides! Crackpots and zealots that we used to think were the lunatic fringe are now in charge of the world. And not just terrorists, not just fundamentalists, but the presidents and prime ministers of the countries where we live! The people we elect! The people our children marry and become! They all use their God to turn one people against another, turn families against themselves, turn sons against their mothers.

  All those shepherd gods and gods of shepherds, Ra and Mohammed and Jesus and Yahweh, all those gods that go back to the first time someone herded goats in the Fertile Crescent, back and back—past the little stick man at Lascaux, past the first awareness of our grandparents—those gods go back and back to the first bright apes who tried to figure out why day followed night, and summer followed winter, and why oh why, without any rhyme or reason, do the ones we love have to die.

  And I know that this is why people need God, this is why people came up with God, so that there’d be someone to talk to who’s bigger than death, so that there’ll be the comfort of “the Lord works in mysterious ways,” so that times like these when everything is so sad, so unbearably sad, there’s a reason to believe that life is worth living. There’s a future, a reward in death.

  People who ignore history are doomed to forget that human beings invented religion to make sense of the world, but then they let religion replace the world.

  People who ignore history are like my mother, living completely in the present. She has no sense of the past, no sense of the future, she’s a greedy, needy eighty-eight-year-old three-year-old.

  Alice B. Toklas became a Catholic in her old age because she thought that if she belonged to a faith that believed in Heaven, it would be possible to be with Gertrude Stein again.

  And they are together, for us, the ones who are still living. All of you are! Stein and Toklas and Simon and Grammy and Dad and Steph and Eva Hesse. Everyone who ever died. The first person who ever tried to paint a deer on a rock wall.

  And you, Pete. And you. You’re with them now, too.

  And is it because a part of me can’t escape being the little girl who was told that Grammy’s dead and watching over her? The way I imagine you can hear me still?

  Only now, I want you to hear me, and I want to talk to you.

  Why go on living, why go on?

  She waits. There’s no answer.

  Is life worth living? Is it?

  No answer.

  Is my life worth living?

  I’m stuck here in this terrible time when I don’t see how I can get on with my life, this terrible time when all I want is to be with you. To be with the dead.

  But when I cross over into the land of the dead to join you, I’ll just be dead. I want us to be together. But the dead only seem to be together to the living because they’re gone.

  She is in her studio, looking at the scarab pin and the bone on her work table.

  The last thing I want is false comfort. The last thing.

  Why is life worth living?

  She waits. She looks at the pin and the bone.

  Seventy thousand years ago—seventy thousand—a boy lived for nine years. A boy with a head full of teeth ready to erupt. There would’ve been something strange about the look of him because he was not us, he was other. He would’ve had a mother, and there would’ve been a father, and their lives would’ve been rough and hard. What would the world have been to them? The sun moving across the sky? The stars? The herd of deer fording a river? The loss of a boy?

  Where would they look for comfort? What would they do?

  I can’t imagine not making marks on a page, not trying to make sense of the world by making marks on a page. How can you not want to try to understand the w
orld? How can you not?

  Very faintly, in the distance, Peggy Lee is singing “Mr. Wonderful.” The song has already begun. She picks up the scarab pin.

  They’re such inquisitive little things, Maggie and Martha. Our granddaughters. So bright.

  She listens. The music is clearer.

  And they’ll look back on fingerpainting. Collages.

  They’ll grow up, and look back, and…

  There I’ll be.

  She starts pinning the pin to her shirt.

  Here, right here.

  She listens to the singing. The light grows.

  End.

  For Scott

  Foreword

  Some smart critic, way back when, wrote that Don Hannah had the best ear for dialogue in the country. The play being reviewed was Rubber Dolly—the first play Don wrote—and I think I saw it a half-dozen times. Now a quarter century or so later, with his fabulous ears still intact, Don has written his first one-person show. I know he’s been busy writing other plays and novels but I still don’t know why it took him this long to try a monologue. It’s a form that seems like the most obvious and natural fit for a writer with his particular set of skills and this particular story—that pitch-perfect voice, that organic blend of narrative storytelling and real dramatic scenes, the way the past and the present bleed into each other, and all this woven in with a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel.”

  From the moment Ted staggers onto the stage—small, wiry, rough-looking… a bantam—we are with him as he tells his utterly unique story. And a desperate story it is as well. Times up! he announces as he begins and then takes us back, way back through his life, a tragic life that is surely nearing its end out here in this long dark night, in the lonely woods, a million miles from nowhere. You ever feel this bad? Ted asks and then answers for us a moment later—I didn’t think so. But part of what’s miraculous about this play is the range of emotions that Ted’s story is able to provoke within us. It’s everything good drama is meant to be. We are on Ted’s side despite the biggest odds out there. One moment we want to gather him up in our arms and the next moment we want to be done with him forever. It’s a very odd balancing act. Ted’s scattered and rough life, the act of telling it, is also an act of hope. And by the time Ted confesses the simplest and saddest words he’ll ever say—I did that—an even more extraordinary balancing act is taking place; even though our sense of horror is overwhelming, the sense of compassion we have for this character is too strong to abandon him. Is it forgiveness? Perhaps. It’s tricky to try and pin down after the fact. What I felt most keenly at the end of this play is that I didn’t want my time with Ted to be over.