The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  FROM THE “LETTERS TO THE EDITOR” OF THE PARADISE VALLEY Daily Transcript:

  July 6, 1927

  Dear Sirs:

  Our fate has been sealed with the passage of the Paradise River Acts. Although we have been left up in the air as to when we must leave our beloved valley, and what parts of the valley we must leave, and how we shall be compensated for the loss of our land, our homes, our livelihoods, and everything we hold dear—leave we surely must. But we need not leave yet.

  Already, many residents have requested real estate appraisals from the field offices of the Commission. Many, in fact, have left the valley; at the last Nipmuck town meeting, it was reported that 200 residents had already departed, and that those remaining were finding the tax burden intolerable. Twoof the summer camps in Pomeroy have closed. The Merriweather School and the Sweet Hill Hotel have shut their doors. Stores are leaving all of our valley towns.

  Can we not maintain at least some semblance of dignity, some shadow of our former lives? The Commission assures us that it will be some years before the start of serious construction, and many more years before construction is complete. By leaving now, by collapsing and admitting defeat, we only aid and abet the destructive plans of our occupiers. Should we not stay here as long as we can, and live what remains of our cherished lives here as fully and richly as we can? Each family that leaves now tears a permanent hole in the web of our community life. No new neighbors will come to replace those lost: we are the last people who will live here, and we must band together. Let us leave only when we must. Let us leave together, at the end—not piecemeal, in panic and terror, at the beginning.

  Frank B. Auberon, Sr.

  Pomeroy

  Part III The Country of the Young

  17

  HENRY AND BRENDAN DROVE EAST ALONG THE FINGER LAKES, past brick buildings with flat roofs, white churches, stone Masonic Halls, gas stations, red lights, convenience stores. Brendan drank the sights in eagerly. The towns looked much as they had in 1954, when he’d traveled by bus from Rhode Island to Coreopsis, but the spaces in between the towns had changed. Low-roofed shopping centers and garden stores dotted what had once been stretches of field.

  They passed an old woman in Waterloo scattering bread to some pigeons, and a row of swallows perched on the telephone wires in Cayuga. The sun caused complex patterns of shadow on a yard in La Fayette. In Cazenovia, a dog with brown eyes caught sight of Bongo and chased the van wildly for a while. Henry was silent, his face hidden in the shadow of his Red Wings cap. Look, Brendan wanted to say. Here. Look at all this. But instead he let Henry drive unmolested.

  The van broke down south of Herkimer, within sight of another small town. There was a noise, first, which pulled Brendan’s eyes from the window; then there was smoke. Then Henry said, “Damn—the fan belt,” and then, “Hell. The power steering just went.” While Brendan watched, helpless but interested, Henry wrestled the van to the side of the road and then coaxed it into the parking lot of a service station next to a church.

  Brendan let out his breath, aware only then that he’d been holding it. “Lucky for us,” he said.

  “Lucky?”

  “That it happened here.”

  Henry shook his head, and when he hopped out of the van, it appeared that they were not so lucky after all. Quarter past six on a Saturday night—the station had just closed and there was no one around except for a boy with a lazy eye and a gap between his front teeth. Brendan opened his window as Henry approached the boy.

  “Nope,” Brendan heard the boy say. “Can’t help you. All the mechanics are gone.”

  “Is there someone I can call?” Henry asked.

  “The other stations are all closed. Everyone’s gone home. I guess you’ll have to wait until Monday.”

  “Monday? What are we supposed to do until then?” Henry laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder and eased him toward the van. “Look at this,” he said as he opened the side door. Brendan smiled down at the boy and said hello.

  “This is my uncle,” Henry told the boy. “He’s eighty. He’s sick. Can’t you just look under the hood?”

  Brendan did what he could to help. He let his hands curl into claws and his head loll forward against his brace. He wiped his smile away and let his mouth fall open, trying to look eighty, ninety, on his last legs. The boy was visibly impressed. Behind him, Henry shook his head and smiled.

  “Wouldn’t do any good for me to look.” The boy stepped back and almost bumped into Henry. “I just pump gas. But there’s this guy my brother knows—he has a tow truck of his own. Maybe we could give him a call.”

  “Let’s do that,” Henry said.

  The two of them vanished inside a darkened building, and when they returned Henry looked relieved. “Just wait here,” Brendan heard the boy say. “Jackson’ll be along—he’ll take care of you. I gotta go.”

  He ran his hand through his long blond hair, and his eyes disappeared as the strands rose and separated and then fell back against his face. He snapped his neck with a gesture Brendan hadn’t been able to make in years, which parted the curtain of hair and revealed his eyes again. Then he drove off in a low red car with enormous tires.

  “Strange kid,” Henry said, and Brendan turned to him.

  “What’s going on?”

  Henry climbed back into the van. “We wait, I guess. This guy said he’d come tow us to his shop—he’s got a garage of his own, way out in the woods somewhere.”

  Twenty minutes later Jackson appeared. His hands were grimy and his teeth were bad; he poked under the hood and said, “I can’t fix this here. Have to bring you back to my place. That all right?”

  “Fine,” Henry said wearily.

  Henry rode in the truck with Jackson, but Brendan and Bongo stayed in the van, which was tilted up and suspended by a tow bar. Jackson blocked the wheels of Brendan’s chair with the box Henry had taken from Kitty’s house, and he promised to drive slowly. For miles, out of town and along a quiet road that ran beside a river and then rose up into wooded hills and turned to dirt, Brendan watched the world pass by on a mysterious slant. Bongo barked beside him, excited and confused.

  It might feel like this when I die, Brendan thought. His soul might float above the earth, dipping and tilting so that things were skewed from their natural positions. He’d felt like a ghost for months already, parts of his body shutting down one by one until, as the pie he’d tried to eat earlier had reminded him, nothing was working but his head. The tumors inside him had grown until his throat closed like a door when he tried to swallow. He couldn’t feel his legs at all; his hands and arms were his only intermittently. His lungs felt as solid as cheese—when he breathed, the air seemed to stop somewhere in his throat. He was solidifying, turning to stone, the organs and tubes that had once been hollow silting up. Sometimes it hurt, but mostly it didn’t; he often felt better, in an odd way, than he had in years. His joints, which had once stabbed him with shooting pains, felt as if they’d been packed in sand. His stomach, once a sack of fire, was calm. He was only his head, only his eyes and ears—the wedge of sky that flew by his window was as soft and gold as the skin of an apricot. Letting go wouldn’t be hard at all, he thought. The deadness would creep from his chest to his head and then his soul would slip out of his mouth. His brother’s soul might have slipped away just that easily.

  The inside of the old gray Plymouth rings with Frank junior’s laughter. Margaret has just finished telling him a joke she heard at the dance, and Frankie says, “Olsen told you that?” and then reaches down to clasp the hand she has rested on his thigh. The rain pounds down on the roof of the car but inside they are warm and safe: finally, after all this time, almost at peace with their new lives. “We’ll go for a picnic tomorrow,” Frankie says. “Take the kids someplace nice.” And they are busy planning what they’ll bring when they come to the last curve on Boughten Hill. Frank turns the wheel easily, casually, but nothing happens; something in the steering mechanism has chosen this minu
te to break. They sail off the road without a pause and the wedges of night sky fly past their windows in the seconds before they meet the ground. Margaret is wearing a white dress and Frankie still has hold of her hand.

  “Frankie,” Brendan said out loud. The van made a broad circle and then stopped.

  Henry let Bongo out and tied him to a tree, and Jackson lowered Brendan’s chair. They were in a clearing, Brendan saw, a rough oval of dirt and grass surrounded by tangled trees. In the clearing sat a crumbling garage made of whitewashed bricks, an assortment of broken cars and trucks, a huge stack of wood, and a mound of trash. Off to one side, some tattered lawn chairs surrounded a ring of stones capped with a metal grill.

  “You all right, old man?” asked Jackson.

  “I’m fine,” Brendan said. “I enjoyed the ride.”

  They never felt it, he told himself. They were flying, and then it was over. He focused his eyes on Jackson’s left hand and noticed a circle of white on his fourth finger, where a ring had once been. Dusk was closing in on the clearing and the trees were full of birds. An owl shrieked in the distance and then was still.

  “It’s nice of you to rescue us,” Brendan said.

  “Thank me if I fix it.” Jackson parked Brendan on the grass near the lawn chairs and towed the van into the garage. Henry followed him, and Brendan watched the clouds of birds gather and swoop and settle down for the night. The light inside the garage glowed yellow against the darkening sky. He could hear the men talking softly, the clang and rattle of tools, the hiss and pop as a car of beer or soda was opened. He lowered his head to his chest and fell asleep thinking about his days in China, where he had been when his brother had died.

  On a bitter winter’s day in 1937, Father Vincent, his abbot in Massachusetts, had gathered the community together to break the news. They’d have a year, Father Vincent explained, no more, before the valley was flooded. They had to disperse; they had to decide, each of them, where they wanted to go. France, Kentucky, California; there were houses all over the world. Snow covered the fields and icicles hung from the roof of the church. Brendan’s companions disappeared one by one as the snow began to melt. The witch hazel down by the pond exploded into silky gold tassels; the crocuses Brendan had planted flowered and the grape hyacinths pushed up their heads. Still he hadn’t made a decision. “Brendan,” Father Vincent said gently. “You have to choose.” When the buds on the dogwoods began to swell, Brendan asked to be sent to China.

  The Chinese foundations were shorthanded, he told his abbot. And he was homeless and in his prime. Where else could he be of more use? He looked out at the beautiful hand-laid walls and imagined them knocked to the ground.

  “China?” Father Vincent had said.

  “China,” he’d replied. He’d said nothing about the sense of betrayal he’d felt when his prayers had failed to fend off the water, nor about his need to put half a world between his failure and himself. He had eschewed linear prayer in favor of a deep and loving contemplation of his surroundings, just as Father Vincent had taught him. Now his surroundings were about to disappear.

  When the cherries and apples flowered, and the rhododendrons and his special azaleas, he packed his small bag and left the abbey. He crossed the United States by train, the Pacific by boat, the rugged hills of Inner Mongolia by foot and mule. The Japanese warships in the harbor startled him, as did the Japanese soldiers waiting on the wharf at Tientsin. The rough buildings of his new abbey, Our Lady of Consolation, startled him too and then pleased him. They were run-down, primitive; he could work on them forever and never fear that someone else might want them. No orchards, no flowers. His brothers were Belgian, Dutch, and French; the novices and postulants were all Chinese. He communicated with them in ragged Latin until he learned to speak Mandarin.

  In the garden behind the refectory he helped raise millet and sorghum, potatoes and cabbage; he grew thin on the coarse food and dreamed of eggs, which were rare. The dormitory, unheated even in winter, was so cold that he slept in two sets of padded jackets and pants beneath his robe. In the hot weather, the mud-brick walls swarmed with lice and ticks. He was homesick, uncomfortable, sometimes frightened, but he told himself that these were the trials he was meant to endure, the tests he was meant to pass. In his heart, buried so deep he never saw it, was the dream that if he surmounted all this, he might return to the Paradise Valley and find his home miraculously restored.

  He’d expected hardships, but he hadn’t expected to find himself in the middle of a war. In Europe, war was a rumor and then it was real. In China, the war that seemed to have gone on forever just went on and on. Sometimes he could hardly keep track of who was fighting whom. The abbey lay between a Japanese garrison and a ridge held by Chinese Communist troops, and there were weeks when columns of one or both advanced and retreated across the valley, so close he could smell the guns. Japanese officers rested in the abbey’s guesthouse after the battles; Communist soldiers demanded money and food and threatened to conscript the young brothers. Wounded soldiers from both sides took refuge in the chapel. He spoke all the time—he had to speak, to tend to the wounded, buy time, buy peace, buy food—and as his silence vanished, so did his ability to pray. Prayer was action, he’d once believed; a group of men gathered together might pray the world right. He prayed for the war to end, and bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor.

  In the Japanese internment camp near the coast, where he and the European monks were taken, he shed the last remnants of his cloistered, contemplative life. The Rules of the Camp for Enemy Nationals supplanted the Rule of his Order; he lived in rooms packed with Protestant missionaries and their families, nuns and monks from other Orders, teachers, customs officers, Russian women, Dutch Lazarists, American businessmen. There was little to eat and no privacy. He kept himself busy nursing the sick and arranging lectures and teaching the children to read, and he tried to convince himself that he honored his vows by serving others. Laborare est orare, he reminded himself. To labor is to pray. At night he stood near an isolated section of fence and tossed the money and jewelry he’d gathered from the inmates up and over and into the hands of Chinese farmers, who tossed back forbidden food. Two dozen plums once arced back to him, one precious piece at a time.

  He tried to build a life out of what he had at hand. This is our way, Father Vincent had once told him and the other postulants. In this community, with this work, these people, these problems—our vow of stability means that we embrace life as we find it. We accept God’s plan. The abbey where Brendan had made that vow was gone, and he’d been torn from his adopted one, but he tried to see the camp as a new home. Rumors flew through the camp like moths: England was defeated, Russia crushed, Australia conquered by the Japanese. The rumors were so frequent and so often false that he ignored the ones following the first B-29s over the camp. The Japanese were abandoning China, he heard. They were taking the internees back to Japan with them. A Dutchman told him gloomily that they would all be murdered first.

  Brendan was standing with a group of Belgian nuns when they heard about the bombs that had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “There is no city,” whispered the nun who’d heard the news from a guard. “The city is gone.” A few days after that, six American soldiers parachuted into the dry field outside the fence, and then they were free. Just like that, the community Brendan had worked so hard to hold together dissolved. The internees scattered; Brendan and his brothers made their way back to Our Lady of Consolation just in time to see the abbot imprisoned and the community attacked.

  One war was over, but the civil war had just begun and the abbey lay in an area held by Communist troops. Brendan watched the soldiers turn the peasants against the monks. The monks were oppressors, the soldiers said. They had stolen the peasants’ land. Brendan stood in front of an angry crowd and said, “Have we not shared every crop with you? Have we not fed you during famines?” But the peasants, encouraged by the soldiers, took the abbey’s goats and grain and straw mattresses, the sacristy vesse
ls and the firewood. They tore the leather covers off the books. They imprisoned the monks in the chapter room and held trials and meetings, beatings and interrogations. The abbey was gutted; the trials grew more serious. The abbot’s head was crushed with rocks before Brendan’s eyes. On a December day, after Brendan heard a rumor that Nationalist troops were on their way to rescue them, he and his brothers were marched away from the abbey and into the surrounding hills.

  Those were the worst days, the days that had stayed with him for forty years and crippled his joints and burned the holes where his tumors now grew, but when he dreamed it was not so much about the march, or about the huts where they were beaten and starved, but about the slow, perilous journey back to Peking that he and a handful of survivors finally made.

  There were only eleven of them. One night, they never knew how or why, the doors to their huts were opened and then abandoned. Emaciated and tattered and sick, he and his brothers had stepped out, looked at each other, and walked into the night. They hid by day and traveled in darkness, slinking through fields and eating rats and weeds while the abbey—they passed it, they saw the fire—burned to the ground and wolves and bugs ate the unburied bodies of those who had died on the march and been left behind. He saw things on that trip he could never describe; two more of his brothers died. By the time they reached Peking he could no longer talk.

  He remained silent in the hospital there; silent during the endless travels that brought him to Hong Kong; silent during his ocean crossing. Silent on the train across the prairie, to the abbey in Manitoba that had offered to take him in. But there, in those cool, serene buildings where silence was once more expected and blessed, his silence had cracked when he tried to resume his old way of life. Among those gentle, orderly men, he was seized with a need to say what had happened to him.

  He’d spent twelve years in China, thinking he’d never leave, and to end like that, like an animal—it had stripped him of everything. He led men into corners, interrupted them at work and prayer, broke into their meditations. “Listen to me,” he said. “Let me tell you this.” War, famine, pestilence, death. He broke the Rule, again and again; the abbot reprimanded him and still he could not control himself. The silence that had drawn him into his Order now seemed repellent, and when the abbot suggested he transfer to the new foundation in Rhode Island, he went without a fight. He thought he might have something in common with the flood of new postulants there, shell-shocked men returned from the same war in other places, but he found them even more withdrawn than the brothers in Manitoba. Crippled by then, heartbroken, he’d applied for dismissal from the Order and made his way back to what was left of the family he’d abandoned. His brother—his real brother, his blood brother—was already dead.