“I don’t think that was a wise thing to do,” I told my father.
“He’s the most irrational man that ever lived,” he said, spitting water.
Pop Nelson and my father didn’t speak to each other for the next two days.
THE FOLLOWING EVENING WHIT AND I fished alone. Pop had gone to have dinner with a lady friend who owned a feed store in town, and my father was reading inside the house and listening to The Benny Goodman Story—the only jazz album he could find in Pop’s country-and-western-dominated collection. Whit and I fished for some time without catching anything before Whit reeled in a large catfish. He unhooked it and threw it back in the lake. When he recast his rod, I asked him what he thought about my father and Pop Nelson’s behavior.
“Hotheads,” he said.
“Mom always sits them at different ends of the table at Thanksgiving.”
“Samuel is a great thinker. I’ve never seen him get so hot under the turban.” Whit swayed his fishing rod in the breeze. “The question of God is an interesting one. When I was up there I saw this thing, it was like a cloud of jellyfish. I radioed to the Cape and they didn’t know what it was. Glow-things, jellyfish, floating in space. Luminescent, I guess. They were so tiny that they didn’t make any noise when they hit my ship…”
“What’s that got to do with God?”
“Oh, that’s a good one. ‘What’s that got to do with God?’ Perfect.” He reeled in a yard of line. “I saw four earth dips and rises in twenty-four hours. They were about the shortest days I’ve run into. You don’t need to believe in gravity to take a ride in an airplane.”
I nodded but I had no idea what he meant. Now he was talking about Cape Canaveral and the room where astronauts waited before a mission.
“We had this nurse, Delores, and she decorated the room where I spent those last few minutes on Earth. Room S205, inside the hangar. She thought the colors should be relaxing and restful—robin’s-egg blue on the walls and champagne-colored drapes and beige nylon couches. TV, radio, a clock. But you know what I did in there for forty-five minutes?”
“What?”
“Three things: I shaved one last time. I took an epic dump. And I prayed as if my life depended on it. Time stops and God listens in that room.”
Whit caught another catfish. I imagined for a moment that it was the same one he had caught just moments earlier. You couldn’t help being drawn into the dimly lit theater of Whit’s mind; even fish found themselves listening. It was getting dark. The lake was fringed with trees and their shadows lengthened across the sandy shore. Whit put the fish back. I was seventeen and, in a sense, paralyzed about the question of God. I didn’t want to decide whether flashing data-bytes and streaming photons were part of a divine plan, threads in a conspiracy of meaning, or just part of a random cosmos studded with variety.
TO CHURCH POP NELSON WORE his Sunday best: a gray suit worn thin in the elbows and a tie with the U.S. Navy insignia on it. I wore a pair of jeans and a polo shirt. We drove in his red Ford pickup through countryside of pine ridges and old copper mines. Already at ten in the morning it was hot and cloudless. He smoked a thin cigar on the way, and I noticed a stash of beer cans in a cooler behind the front seat. I wondered if he drank beer for breakfast and whether my father realized that he drank in his car. In the last few years, Pop’s drinking had taken a turn. We drove with the windows down, without talking. Pop’s face was bleak in the morning light, a man about to deliver a dreaded apology.
When we got into town we parked behind the St. Ignatius Catholic Church. It was a sandstone building with tall windows and a small bell tower. We were among the first to arrive. Inside, it seemed familiar: the smell of frankincense and candles, the stained-glass depictions of downtrodden saints and rising angels, and, in the corner, an organ ruminating at the hands of a woman in her eighties. As we entered, we dipped our hands in holy water and made the sign of the cross. I noticed Pop looking back at me as I performed the holy gesture. He led me to a pew near the front of the church.
“This is a traditional Catholic church,” he said. “Not like some around here.”
I picked up the hymnbook in front of me; it smelled of old newspapers. I flipped through some pages and recognized the same songs, the same phrases that I’d heard caroled at St. John’s—Glory to the heavens, prevailing peace, Almighty God. The church was half full when the robed priest came out to the altar, but sadly all the Catholic girls must have been away at camp or the 4-H club. The congregation was a clutter of retirees and young families with whiny children. The priest was a tall man with a pointed nose and a perfectly trimmed mustache. He spoke mostly in English, but occasionally intoned in Latin. It was possible that I understood more of the Latin than Pop Nelson, since I’d been forced to learn some basics at school. A Deo lux nostra—Our light comes from God. Ad majorem Dei glorium—To the greater glory of God, the Jesuit motto. Pop’s face was focused; he sat straight-backed, eyes set in concentration. He watched the priest handle the communion bread and wine carefully, unblinking, the way he looked at miniature turrets and patches of sailcloth, the ballasted ship hulls in his basement.
When it came time to kneel and pray he let out an arthritic sigh and lowered himself onto his knees. I knew from Pop’s navy stories that he had a bung knee—not from active duty, but from a first officer named Tripper who launched a baseball into Pop’s right kneecap during an on-leave game. Pop squeezed his eyes shut and tightened his lips. The priest prayed aloud. Sweat appeared on Pop’s forehead. Now I knew why he came: punishment. For what I couldn’t be sure, but I realized that the times that I’d been to confession, I’d failed to take my penance seriously. Twelve Hail Marys and two Our Fathers didn’t seem so much like punishment, more like trivial tasks, shopping errands for a lapsed conscience. For Pop, I could tell it was different. He was convinced that God was taking payoffs.
When church was over, Pop’s mood seemed to lighten. He greeted a few of the other parishioners and became jovial. He joked with an old couple that their new Cadillac was too stylish for them. He led me by the shoulder and introduced me around. People seemed to genuinely like him. They laughed at his quips, waited eagerly for his deadpan jibes.
After church, Pop Nelson took me to lunch at Maxwell’s drugstore—a combined pharmacy and sandwich counter. We sat on tall stools with chrome legs, ordered hot pastrami sandwiches and chocolate malts. The waitress wore a pink blouse with a name tag: Rosalie. She and Pop Nelson made small talk back and forth—about a new restaurant in town and how good their food was. I sat and listened to him describe to Rosalie a steak he’d eaten in a London pub twenty years earlier, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, a steak perfectly seared, so rare that it was a delicate shade of blue in the middle. She giggled, then swallowed. “You’re making me hungry. Stop it!” If only this one gene, the courtesy and small-talk gene, had been passed on to my father, I thought. I left them talking and wandered around the adjacent drugstore. On a high shelf were antique pharmacy items—a mortar and pestle, a rustic beaker, some glass bottles labeled with archaic drug names. The pharmacist was a grim-faced man. This town seemed to be full of them—the sour-faced sons of copper miners. He sat behind a rectangular window on a raised platform, looking like a judge at the bench.
Greeting cards spilled sympathy and consolation in one corner of the store, right next to the foot creams and Band-Aids. When I got bored and Pop Nelson had finished his coffee, we went outside and climbed into his pickup. He rolled his window down and lit a cigar. He insisted that I put my seat belt on, but failed to do the same. He took a beer can from behind his seat and popped it open.
“Churchgoing ain’t so bad, is it?” he said.
“It was all right,” I said.
“Want a beer?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, with sudden bravado. This was a complicated transaction; I knew it even then. I took the beer and drank from it. He patted my shoulder, confident that I could learn to believe, learn to fear. That he was in a carefree m
ood after grimacing on his knees made me wonder whether he was onto something—a kind of weekly redemption that made him a man of light spirits; a man who, after meeting the gaze of the crucified Jesus for an hour, could flirt with waitresses twenty-five years his junior.
The Ford passed through the copper country at a steady clip. We drove with the radio on, drinking beer. Hank Williams’s “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” filled the cabin. I became aware of details. The world moved slowly, as if through a pane of ice. People mowing their lawns, the air thick with grassy fumes. A red bicycle, seemingly unattended, resting upside down on its seat and handlebars by the side of the road, wheels spinning. A dog—a German shepherd—making eye contact as we dashed the bright roadway. The windows open, driving swiftly, wind funneling all around us, the springy warm sound of Hank Williams rising faintly above the roar. It was the hottest day of that summer. Pop Nelson was telling me about the navy.
“…in the belly of a boat, you sleep different.” He took a long sip from his can and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. The grain of skin, the stiff white hairs.
“When I retired I couldn’t sleep in a regular bed. Your grandmother bought a tape of ocean noises and played it in the bedroom. I slept on the floor…”
A truck hazed toward us, caught up, floating through the sheen of the road. Limbless tree trunks were strapped to the trailer bed.
“I took a lot of baths. Like a kid—”
The radio crooned: I seen the crabs and the fishes—Doin’ the be-bop-bee
Then the grind and shriek of an engine.
The truck’s grill bore down on us with a placard that read: FREEDOM FIGHTER.
I remember my grandfather saying, “What now, for Pete’s sake?” as if he were talking directly to God, accusation rising in his voice.
I keep going back to those next few seconds, trying to slow down the mind reel. The details flicker, then rise through the murk of memory. There are disembodied sounds, amorphous and looming, like moans from a shipwreck. The explosion of the radiator, the keening wail of steam, the metallic wrench of the pickup chassis. The granular sound of a million shards of glass as Pop Nelson takes flight like an ejected fighter pilot and launches through the windshield. Liquids—human blood, beer, scalding fluid from the exploded radiator—rain down everywhere. The dash, the drink holders, even the levers and dials are covered. I don’t remember the object hitting me in the head. But I remember putting my head slowly to my chest and feeling something cold on the back of my neck. Was I leaning toward my brief death yet? A bracing plunge in the underground river. If so, where was the sense of time compressing into a single moment? Fifteen years later, I sit here in a darkened room of my apartment, watching a family splash around in the motel swimming pool across the street. The kids shriek and dive-bomb and I wonder if we all carry our deaths packaged inside us—the time, the date, the manner—bundled and inert. Maybe what I carried all those years until the accident was not shrewd intelligence or the strange light of genius but the glimmer of my own death. Maybe that was what my parents were really looking at when they stared into my eyes and sensed something extraordinary.
fourteen
In the aftermath of the coma, I saw spoken words and certain sounds as airborne colored shapes. I didn’t tell anyone about this for a while, even when my speech started to return a week after waking up. I spoke a few words at first, then phrases that faltered in the middle, and then complete sentences. My father took this as a cue that I was really back from the dead and decided to tell me that Pop Nelson was no longer with us. We were due to drive back to Wisconsin, where I was booked into a children’s hospital for additional testing and observation. In light of the coma and the head injury, the neurologists were taking extra precautions.
My father took me for my first walk outside before we got on the road. It was still summer, but it felt like fall—an unseasonably cool day. The hospital stood surrounded by woods. The air smelled of smoke; some men in overalls were clearing several acres of scrub and brambles nearby. We walked out past the incinerator, where the walkway became a gravel footpath. I was overwhelmed by the sensations around me—woodlarks calling, the sharpness of wood smoke, the descending cool.
My father said, “We can’t measure things precisely. If we could, Nathan, we could predict the future based on exact knowledge of the present. We’re more interested now in possible outcomes than definite results. Everything is gray.”
His voice trailed behind him as a bright yellow line.
“No,” I said. “It’s not gray.”
He looked at me for a second, then extended a hand toward the woods and the sky, a gesture designed to encompass everything, from chlorophyll to ozone. “The world blurs everything together.”
“Okay,” I said. I’d taken up the habit of saying this whenever a response was expected of me. It became my answer to anything I found confusing.
“Pop is not with us anymore. A lot of different things could have happened during the accident, but what did happen was he died. We buried him at the back of his property near the lake. That’s what he wanted. Everybody dies sooner or later.”
I nodded at my father slowly, giving him permission to go on.
“I thought you should know. He was my father and your grandfather.” He shrugged and folded his arms. “Your mother says I don’t feel my emotions. Women say these sorts of things from time to time. Technically, that’s not true. I loved him in my own way and I’ll miss him.”
“I’ll miss him, too,” I said softly. Something about me, the unaccusing stare, loosened him.
“He was basically a decent man. Drank too much, didn’t forgive easily. I always felt like he was standing on the opposite side of a bridge from me. He never understood what I did. As a boy, he bought me model airplanes—World War Two bombers. I made them, assembling each piece at a time, using Q-Tips to spread the glue.” He pulled his hands from his pockets, held them poised in front. “Then I would take them in the backyard and drop house bricks on them. I was always more interested in what would happen when they smashed. The sheer force of gravity and acceleration. I wanted to understand why things broke apart the way they did.”
He slowed because I was getting out of breath, and we turned back toward the hospital.
“He always thought that it was disrespectful. Later, even when I had a PhD in physics, he thought I was a godless hoodlum with a high IQ.”
I remembered Pop on his knees in that small-town church, that when he ate out he ordered a bowl of vanilla ice cream at the same time as dinner. But I couldn’t picture him beside me in the car. I could remember eating hot sandwiches and staring at antique pharmacy wares but couldn’t picture his face just before he died. It saddened me not to see his face in my mind. He was my link to the ordinary branch of our family and now he was gone.
We neared the hospital doors where Whit and my mother stood in the wan light of the afternoon. My mother held my red suitcase while Whit gripped the shoe box that housed the spaceship. One of the doctors came out and shook my hand. I waved back at the doctor as we made our way to the parking lot. We reached the Oldsmobile and I heard the metal door handle as my father lifted it. My mother placed the red suitcase in the trunk. My father helped me into my seat and buckled me in back, next to Whit. The car doors closed. Metal on metal. The sound of air being drawn inside. My father turning the key in the ignition.
“I don’t like this,” I said. Heat rose in my stomach and throat, a scalded feeling. I could feel the engine rumble to life, the spin and tension of the fan belt as the instrument panel illuminated a sickly yellow. The small dials, the white needle of the speedometer. I needed out of that car. My father’s hands clung to the steering wheel, the rubber grabbing at his palms. I tried to unfasten my seat belt but my fingers slipped off the buckle. I pulled at the metal latch.
“We’ll be back in Wisconsin before you know it,” my mother said cheerily.
I was burning up. I kicked the back of my father�
�s seat and threw my head against the headrest.
“What exactly is happening?” my father asked.
There was a strange taste in my mouth. Whit put his hand on my shoulders, then grabbed my chin like he was trying to prevent an epileptic from swallowing his tongue.
“Get him out!” my mother said.
“Right,” said Whit. “Come here, chief.” He unbuckled my seat belt and pulled me across the seat toward him, then out the door. As soon as I was clear of the car I took off running for the woods, looking for safety. The air was crisp and bracing. My body came alive. Images flashbulbed through my head—a bright roadway, an old man’s wrist. I leaped over brambles and fallen trees, my chest heaving. I could hear someone behind me, chasing, but I didn’t want to turn around. I scanned the undergrowth and thickets for strongholds and hiding places. The leaves were dry underfoot, cracking like broken glass. The taste of blood was in my mouth and I realized I’d bitten my tongue. I spat a stream of scarlet on the ground. I could see the men in overalls clearing the stands of scrub up ahead, their fires low-set and bluish through the cross-hatching of tree limbs. Then, a hand at the back of my neck; it was light but definitive, the confident grip of a man who’s seen our planet from outer space. I fell to the ground, winded.
“Easy does it, now,” Whit said softly. “Breathe easy. Come on, now.”
He stood over me. My face was flush against the ground. I could smell the dirt, the composting leaves. The grainy montage of the accident roared with new images—Pop Nelson taking his last sip of beer, the truck already upon us, Pop’s broad hand wrapped around the can. My mother and father arrived, their faces aghast. My mother took off her sweater and put it around me. She told my father to go get the doctor. I sat up and looked around. My father set off running toward the building. He fell into a loping jog through the woods—his brown corduroy jacket disappearing now and then in moments of perfect camouflage. Had I ever seen him run before? He returned with a doctor and everyone crouched around me. A light probe shone in my eyes.
The Beautiful Miscellaneous Page 7
