Too late, Daniel realizes he has made a large, and irrevocable, error.
“Okay,” he says, quietly. “I will.”
ON THE MAIN HIGHWAY, their guns on the rack at the top of the cab, Daniel felt happy in a way that he had not imagined he would when his father came back from the shed that second time with the gun. His father’s dog, Sugar, was sitting in between them, peering eagerly ahead, out the front glass. Sugar went everywhere with his father. It was the usual thing to see his father returning from wherever he went with Sugar racing beside him down the drive. About a mile from home, where the road split and one way went in a loop back to the highway, and the other went to their house, Daniel’s father always let her out of the cab and she’d run the rest of the way home. She could keep up, mostly—when Daniel’s father didn’t tease her and drive too fast. Once, his father had said to Daniel—when Daniel was driving back home with him and Sugar and they’d stopped to let Sugar leap out, and race off, getting a head start on them—“Sometimes, I wish I could let myself out and run around beside myself for a while, I get to feeling so restless. You ever get like that?”
Daniel had said no, because he wasn’t positive that he knew what his father meant, and didn’t want to have to back something up that he’d made a mistake about. He did think he knew what his father was talking about though, and he was surprised because he’d thought that only small boys and not grown-up men felt that way.
Long before they got there, they could already see how packed the Knutsen place was. There were even a couple of police cars and a fire truck lined up along the side of the road so that Daniel’s father had to park some distance away, though not as far as Cheryl and his mother had parked. They walked, from that distance, up to the main drive, where some of the Knutsen boys and a couple of police officers were standing around. Daniel found that, without trying particularly, he could match his father’s stride. They were crunching along on the gravel shoulder, their feet falling in unison, so that the sound they made was like one man walking, instead of a man and a boy.
His father talked to a police officer for a moment, and spelled out his name, which the officer wrote down, then they headed across the field in the direction of the woods. They could see the men at various stages of nearness to the tree line, which was a good mile or so away. Some had started off just minutes before, and so were up close, still large and distinct. He could still hear their voices, some of them. Others were almost to the edge of the woods, about to disappear. The rest were somewhere in between.
While his father had been talking to the sheriff, Daniel saw Cheryl come out of the barn, smoking a cigarette. She was talking to one of the Knutsen boys and looked upset. Everyone looked upset; it shouldn’t have surprised him that Cheryl might too. But it did. He wondered what Cheryl was doing talking to a Knutsen, and then he thought it was interesting that it had never crossed his mind that Cheryl got sad sometimes, or that she knew anybody else besides his mother and him. He tried to catch her eye when she came out of the barn, but she wasn’t looking at him. Her head was bent down into the collar of her big man’s jacket and she looked kind of swallowed up in a way that all of a sudden made Daniel not want to talk to her anymore.
They had started out across the field. At first, Daniel’s father had his hand on Daniel’s shoulder, and then it was off. Sometimes, Daniel’s boots got sucked into the mud where the ground was soft, and then he’d have to stop for a half second to squelch them out, and in that short time he’d fall behind his father and then have to double step to catch back up again. His father didn’t speak to him until they got to the edge of the wood and then he said, “You stick close to me. You’re not worried, are you? You can go on back, you know.” But Daniel shook his head. He wasn’t worried. In fact, he had never felt so free of worry. It was like he had let himself out to run around somewhere. He felt that light, and empty inside, but at the same time as if for the first time he knew exactly who he was—the precise limits of his body—and what to do.
Daniel’s father nodded, and they entered the wood.
For a long time they wandered in what seemed like circles. After a while it occurred to Daniel that they might be lost, but then he didn’t think they were. His mind drifted near the idea and then away, as if it too had begun to wander in circles. He no longer felt light or empty in the way that he had before. He had, he realized—uncomfortable and wet-footed—been returned to his body, and from that position could no longer detect relative distances—or the point at which one thing, like himself, ended or began. His feet had been rubbing for some time against the wet wool of his socks inside his boots, he noticed that now—he would not be surprised if a raw sore had already developed there. It was at the precise moment that he noticed that, that two things happened: the gun, which had until that point felt like an extension of himself, felt suddenly heavy in his hand, and he saw the buffalo.
It was bigger than he could have imagined, having only seen them from a diminishing distance.
“Shit,” Daniel’s father said when, in another moment, he saw it, too. He grabbed at the hood of Daniel’s jacket and kind of tugged at it. Daniel got down on the ground like it was a movie and they were the ones being shot at. “No, get up,” Daniel’s father hissed at him. “Back up, back up.” He had his gun raised and he was shooing Daniel behind him with one hand. The buffalo did not see them, but was standing looking off into the closely grown wood as if at nothing.
“I got’m, I got’m,” Daniel’s father said, and then the gun went off and the buffalo was gone.
Daniel realized that he had tightly shut his eyes and that was why there had been no progression. One minute he had seen the buffalo looking off into the woods, and then there was no buffalo at all. The trees were so closely grown that it seemed impossible that an animal so large could have squeezed through them and disappeared.
Daniel sensed his father’s disappointment, although neither of them said anything. When the buffalo was gone, Daniel’s father simply took down his gun, wiped off the muzzle, and then turned in the direction that Daniel was, without looking at him. “Come on,” he said. “Which way?” Daniel didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t seen the direction that the buffalo had gone, and then he wasn’t even that sure if they should be running after it or away from it. He pointed straight ahead, and his father took off in the direction that he pointed.
When Daniel and his father got back home that evening they left the rifles on the rack because neither of them wanted to put them away. It would have seemed to be too outright an admission that it was over—that they wouldn’t go looking for buffalo again. The next day they both had work or school, and probably by that time anyway, the police and the fire department would have the situation under control and they wouldn’t need volunteers anymore.
Daniel’s mother was scrubbing the bathroom when they got back in, and didn’t rush up to greet them as he’d thought she might.
“Catch a buffalo?” she said when they got in the door, in a voice that Daniel recognized as one that was capable of starting up a fight between her and his father.
“Nope,” Daniel’s father said.
“Too bad,” Daniel’s mother said.
“Yep, I sure wouldn’t have minded having a buffalo to eat off of all winter, and neither would’ve you and neither would’ve Daniel.”
“Knutsen’s buffalo,” Daniel’s mother corrected him.
“Not if I shot it,” Daniel’s father said. “Not if Daniel here shot it. That was the deal. Anyone could have had himself a buffalo tonight.”
“Too bad,” Daniel’s mother said again, in that voice. “Yep,” Daniel’s father agreed. He gave Daniel a wink, and then wondered aloud what they were having for dinner if it wasn’t anything wild.
Later that evening Daniel went walking down the road toward the direction of the Knutsens’ farm. He wasn’t planning on going as far as that. He wasn’t supposed to be out at all. But his mother and father were both in the back room watching
TV and not paying him any attention, so he’d just slipped out. The night was cool and calm. It was like walking through a picture of another planet. The air was that still—stopped, almost. He felt like he could walk on and on forever in that air, that it would offer no resistance—and that would be the good, and really the only, choice that he could make in his life. But then he thought about his parents. About how worried they would be for him, out there with the buffalo, if they realized he was gone. Reluctantly, he turned and walked back to the house.
But then, when he entered the house, he found that too was good. He found that too had been a fine decision—and he saw very clearly in that moment that he would never know what the right thing would be to do in his life.
WHEN HE IS DRIVING AGAIN, Daniel tries to change the subject. He racks his brain for a subject that might interest Anna, but she is sullen with him now, and refuses to elaborate on any of the answers she supplies to the questions he asks. All her answers come out sounding like he is a fool to have to ask in the first place, as if of course there would be only one answer to that, and everyone would know it but him. Actually, he feels that way.
They aren’t far now. In another mile or so, past where the Knutsen farm used to be, they will reach the junction and choose the road to the right. This will lead them to the old place, where Daniel’s mother still lives. Maybe Daniel will tell Anna about how his father used to let Sugar off right there, to run. That, at least, would be something to say.
He wishes that Anna wasn’t in such a rotten mood, it’s putting him in one too. But it’s not her fault. He shouldn’t have made her drive.
What he really wishes is that they—he and his daughter—could arrive at his mother’s house happy and laughing, as if they were the most natural companions in the world—which they were. Which they were supposed to have been. His mother would see, then, that although some things had come to pass that Daniel himself or anyone else could not have foreseen—everything was going on anyway. In another way. Equally good.
Failing that, what Daniel wishes is that at least they were back at the beginning of the drive and Anna was polite to him again.
The junction seems a long while to wait before he says anything again, so he says, “Whatcha thinking about, honey?”
He tries to make his voice sound cheerful and light, as if the question has come out of nowhere and isn’t attached to anything else—even to any anticipation of reply.
Anna says, “Nothing,” and Daniel knows that he has made another mistake. After that he doesn’t say anything for a moment, but then he feels reckless. He feels that maybe he doesn’t even care anymore. He thinks, What the hell, I’m just going to say any old thing, whatever I feel like, and half turns to Anna and says, “I’ve always found that to be difficult.”
Anna ignores him, or perhaps she hasn’t even heard. Daniel keeps going anyway. “I mean I’ve tried,” he says. “It’s not that I haven’t tried. But I just can never quite do it. So, if you can,” he tells her, and by now his words are coming out a little faster and hard. He feels like a fool, and wishes he could just quit talking. Instead he shrugs. “Well,” he says—to wrap up—“I guess that’s pretty cool for you.”
Anna is still ignoring him, but she doesn’t look quite so angry now. Maybe it’s just Daniel’s imagination, but it occurs to him that he may have, now, the smallest of chances, so he tries again. “Are you really thinking of nothing?” he asks, and now he lets a teasing note creep into his voice. If he can get her to laugh before he gets to his mother’s place, then everything will be all right. Eight months ago he could have done it. He remembers that about Anna, certainly. She’d never been good at holding a grudge. She’d get upset, enough to frighten him sometimes, but then—in a moment—she’d be happy again, just like that, as if those small frustrations, which had somehow got so out of hand, had never existed at all.
“I mean really really,” Daniel tries again. He smiles as he says it in her direction—to where she is looking out the window, at the approaching junction. In another second, without turning her head, she will be staring right down the road that they will turn down toward home. That is the way it is when you are travelling, even at a moderate pace, in a moving vehicle. What will she think then? Daniel wonders this but knows, even as he wonders it, that it is something he will never ask.
That is the pace they are travelling at. Daniel gets four words into the distance between the approach and the turn, and then he wonders how many more he can get in before his mother’s house. If the space between here and the house is enough. “I mean right now,” he says. “Are you thinking nothing … now?” He waits. “How about,” and pauses again, “now!” he says, very quickly and loud. Maybe she even jumps a little.
Before she smiles Daniel sees it. “Hey?” he asks. Encouraged. “Hey? Hey?” He says again, and takes a risk, and touches her. He takes a hand off the wheel and gives her a little poke on the shoulder to match his last “hey?”
She sways a little toward the window, but doesn’t pull back from his touch, as he’d been afraid that she might. And she does, she smiles. At first she tries to hide it, but then she shifts in her seat, and tosses her hair over her shoulder to look at him—at Daniel—and then he can see that everything’s all right.
“I didn’t think so,” Daniel says, to answer his own question.
Once they make the turn, leaving what’s left of the Knutsen place behind, the land really does seem to just fall away. It doesn’t drop off, it just extends itself out—just stretches on and off, right out onto blankness. Especially this time of year, when all the colours are so muted and not even really colours at all but just a suggestion of the sort of colour they once had been. It just seems to go on for what, Daniel assumes, is as good as forever.
He thinks this, and then feels happy that he does. Happy, too, when he realizes he has chosen to stay out here, in this part of the world, when it was not at all certain that that is what he would do. That he has chosen to stay in the Midwest, where a man can think thoughts like the one he has thought, just now, seems to him like the best kind of decision he could have made. He knows that on the East Coast and on the West, there is the imposition, always, of objects on other objects. The sky is interrupted by the hills, the hills by the trees, the trees by more hills, and houses, and so on. But out here, in the middle, it’s possible to find a section of the road to look out at and not see anything for miles. It is possible just to see and see until it gets hazy and you can’t see anymore—and even at that point, at the point where you stop being able to see any longer, it’s not because what’s out there is covered up by anything, it’s just—that’s the limit.
FRENCH LESSONS
Thereupon, the signifier (the third meaning) is not filled; it keeps in a permanent state of depletion (a term from linguistics that designates the empty, all-purpose verbs—for example, the verb faire). We might also say, on the other hand—and this would be quite as true—that this same signifier is not empty (cannot empty itself); it maintains a state of perpetual erethism, desire not finding issue in that spasm of the signified that normally causes the subject to sink voluptuously back into the peace of nominations.
—ROLAND BARTHES
For Sarah
WHEN MARTHA FIRST arrived in Paris—before she met Charlie, and settled down, and her real life began—she stayed with blind old Madame Bernard on the Left Bank, in an old apartment with narrow rooms, which linked themselves like train cars all the way back. Madame took her coffee in bed, and at exactly 8 A.M. Martha would fix it and carry it in, to where Madame, already raised on her pillows, would be reading books in Braille, her fingers skimming the surface of the page, making a whistling noise. If not for the morning coffee, Martha perhaps never would have been hired at all, because that was, very nearly, the extent of her duties for the day. She tidied the place, but more or less of her own accord, and sometimes she wondered if Madame would even notice if she let things go. This was absurd, of course—Madame notice
d everything.
She would get up and dress herself without assistance—often wearing the same chemise that she’d slept in, along with a pair of trousers belonging to the professor (her husband, by then deceased), which she rolled to the knee. Then she listened to Wagner, placing the needle mid-record herself and allowing the aria to play through, at least several times. It was always the same: “Erda’s Warning,” from scene 4 of Das Rheingold. Initially it had agitated Martha to begin every morning in this way, but she grew used to it quickly, and after a while even began to look forward to the ritual. Within a single month she could replay the exact progression of the scene in her head and found herself doing so on occasion—sometimes long after she’d left Madame and Madame’s apartment behind. Which she did, less than a year later. Arriving at Charlie’s smaller, sunnier apartment in the Eleventh, with the French doors (it had seemed, when she’d visited Charlie and fallen in love, that it was for those doors, and not for Paris—or for Charlie—that she’d come), she found her mornings without the Wagner rather quiet.
Madame also insisted, despite Martha’s repeated efforts, on assembling her own meals, which consisted of three long baguette sandwiches, for which Martha purchased the bread each morning. The cheese she bought according to the specific request of Madame from a vendor at the Thursday market who had been described in such unfaultable detail that she’d spotted him immediately, still several stalls away. She’d noticed his hair first, half curly, and then the way that his forehead sloped and completed itself—“à ne pas manquer”—in a long and narrow nose.
Once, at the beginning of her stay, Martha—having helped herself generously to the cheese—replaced it midweek with one from a Saturday market farther along the boulevard. This cheese had looked and smelled, to Martha, just the same, and she had hoped (knowing, truly, nothing then) that it was. Madame Bernard, however, had frowned when opening the package and, with a polite sniff, asked Martha to refrain in the future from les jeux when it came to les fromages. Martha’s French was still so poor that at first she assumed Madame was objecting to her jupes—the short skirts she wore in those days—until she remembered that Madame was blind.
This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories Page 4
