Shoulder the Sky

by Lesley Choyce

  I don’t think my mother knew about my thoughts on dust. She didn’t fully forgive me for snail smashing until later that summer while I was playing with my trucks, driving to Kansas, Utah, and on to Mongolia, when she saw a mosquito biting me on the cheek. I had trained myself not to swat bugs that were biting me. It was quite a discipline but I would let bugs bite if it was in their nature. So this one mosquito got quite a bellyful of my youthful blood as I held my breath and waited for it to fly off. My mother saw this and finally came towards me as the blood-bloated mosquito flew away of its own accord. She looked in my eyes and understood what I was thinking.

  I received an honorary hug and a kiss on my bloody cheek.

  Down the street from us was a kind of park — just a field, really, owned by the town — where tall grasses grew. In the centre of the field was a large oak tree. Teenagers sat under the tree at night, smoked dope and did other things that I can only guess at. In the daytime, the tree pretty much had the field to itself.

  My mother would do paintings of the tree but each painting was different and she always added things like mountains or huge swooping birds or turned the one tree into a jungle. She carried an easel and canvas and a palette of watercolours, sometimes acrylics — and sometimes those paints made from egg yolks and pigment known as tempera — to the middle of the field where she went into a kind of trancelike state as she painted one tree into an entire imaginary world of beauty. On occasion, I would go hang out with my mother and study ants or spiders while she painted.

  Why I climbed the tree that particular day, I don’t know, but I had spent much of my summer at ground level with trucks and ants and things of the earth. Some enterprising youth before me had nailed a couple of small boards onto the back of the tree — on the side my mother could not see. I found myself climbing up into that old oak tree and feeling very brave and intelligent. One branch led to the next until I was high up into the lofty places that a tree can take a boy. There were birds and green leaves blocking the sun and it was an altogether satisfying place to be.

  My mother was probably looking straight at the tree while I climbed, but the leafy arms of oak blocked me from view. I found a comfortable branch, positioned myself, and sat. I began to talk to the tree — that seemed like the appropriate thing to do — telling the tree it was my friend and that if it wanted to, I could drive it in my truck to Norway or South Carolina or wherever it wanted to go.

  But the tree did not want to go anywhere. It had a jovial old man kind of personality — cheerful, tolerant, and enduring. It swished the leaves at the end of its branches and seemed inclined to be my friend for the day.

  And then I looked down.

  The tree had somehow tricked me and taken me way up into the sky. Even though I had climbed what seemed an easy ladder of natural branches, there appeared to be no way down from these lofty heights. When the wind blew, the leaves opened up and I could see my mother, painting away at her easel. I could tell that she had been sitting in the sun too long and was starting to turn a little red. I called out, but it seemed like my voice was swallowed up by the leafy canopy and I wondered why the tree had tricked me into such a dangerous situation.

  I was paralyzed with fear over the height and I decided I could not attempt descent. I yelled for help several times until my mother was awakened from her artistic swoon and came searching for the disembodied voice of her son.

  The rescue was not easy for her as she hugged me to her with one strong arm, moving us downward from branch to branch as we found our way back to earth. I remember her breathing — shallow and rapid and finally followed by a great heave of relief when she set me down into the grass. But I do not remember any words.

  When I saw the painting for the first time, I saw a tree that seemed to be illuminated from within. In the background were buildings — pagodas and strange Oriental architecture — and in the foreground was a river with women along the banks and water the colour of dark tea.

  The day the men arrived with chainsaws to cut down the tree, my mother was on hand to protest. She had a sign and she shouted at the men, but it was the tail-end of her futile battle to save the tree. My father, somewhat sheepishly, added his voice to what my mother had to say, but the starting of three chainsaws at once drowned it out. The field was to be turned into several ballfields for little league baseball. Most everyone in the town thought baseball was more important than one old oak tree.

  A photograph of my mother had been in the paper showing her arguing with the mayor and a man in a hard hat. She garnered a reputation as a tree hugger and a crazy woman and she wore that reputation as if it was the uniform of a small ambitious army of one.

  I never played baseball on that field, but sometimes in the early morning, before joggers or baseball players would come to the park, my mother would go back to the field, set up her easel, and stare at the spot where the tree used to be. And she’d paint her luminous landscapes, erasing the fences and the billboards and the backstops in favour of a softer, more colourful rendering of another level of reality that continued to live on in my mother’s imagination.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Stuff That May or May Not Be Important

  Friederich Wilhelm Nietzsche thought people acted too much like slaves to the institutions of government and religion. He died in 1900 with only one foot in the twentieth century. He thought there should be certain extraordinary individuals, super-men, who were above the common mass of dopes. These god-like individuals could assert their will and attract others to share the vision and do great things — reshape the world as we know it.

  Nietzsche was also a great lover of sausage. He was a true meat eater, but then that came with the smorgasbord of the fatty German diet. He wrote about greatness and super-individuals after eating a lot of sausage. I don’t know if there is a connection. He thought most of us were a bunch of wimpy nincompoops, although that was not the term he used. Nietzsche had some good ideas, or at least he had a way of getting people to think outside of the box.

  Adolph Hitler was eleven years old the year Nietzsche died. I don’t know much about what Hitler did as a boy. Maybe he played with toy soldiers and had toy military trucks that he pretended to drive to Norway and Africa. I know that Hitler liked flowers, too. He even painted, which seems very odd when you think about it.

  Unfortunately for the world, Hitler read what Nietzsche had to say about the so-called “will to power” and Adolph really liked what he read. He stirred Nietzsche’s notions around with a bunch of other stuff rattling around in his European brain and ended up doing what we all know he did. If Hitler had just been a lazy daydreamer or a plain no-good schmuck who said rude things to people in the beer halls of Munich, things wouldn’t have been so bad for the world. But some people aren’t satisfied to leave things the way they are.

  Emerso

  “What’s this all about?” my father asked after he pulled the van to a stop in front of the mall. The van had a faint orange aura that surprised me because the van itself was forest green.

  My father had a soft yellow halo, but I was starting to wish the weird visual stuff would go away. I was getting a headache.

  “I think we should just leave — the three of us, before it’s too late,” Lilly said.

  My father loosened his tie and sat down on the curb. “I left a meeting with a client. We were discussing demographics. I was explaining that our ideal target was a forty-year-old male who had a high-stress job and worried about money, family, and foot odour in that order. This is what I’m reduced to.”

  “Another good reason to drive to Alaska,” Lilly added.

  My father blinked and looked up at the sky. He seemed truly confused but he was no longer the Invisible Man.

  “I haven’t been helping you kids, I know. All I can do is keep myself going, one meaningless day after the next.”

  “We all miss her,” Lilly said.

  “I keep waiting for one morning to be different,” my dad said. “I keep w
aiting to wake up and feel something less terrible than what it felt like yesterday. But it doesn’t happen.”

  “Let’s just get in he van and drive,” Lilly said.

  “I’m okay with that,” I said. There was this big fog bank forming in the back of my brain. I didn’t know what it was about. The whole scene seemed unreal to me, like I was not here but watching these two people in a movie. I couldn’t quite comprehend why my father was saying he had felt terrible day after day. It never once showed on his empty face each morning.

  “I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” my dad said, and then he looked at me, noticed something about me.

  “You okay, Martin?”

  But Martin was sitting in the audience somewhere. He didn’t have any lines in the script. Martin felt like he didn’t fully understand what they were talking about. Who exactly was it they missed so badly? Who was it that was gone?

  “Martin?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. I was just thinking about something else.”

  “Lilly, I’m a little worried about Martin.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I want to go to Alaska, too. I think it’s the right thing to do.”

  “I’m going to see if Dave can see Martin before we take off. I want to be sure this is the right thing to do.” He pulled out his cellphone and made the call.

  “It’s all set. Dave can see you in fifteen minutes. He said he wanted to talk to you anyway. Let’s go.”

  “Wait,” Lilly said. She looked at me and then at my dad. “Let Martin drive.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Let Martin drive.”

  “He doesn’t know how,” my father said.

  I couldn’t understand why she was doing this.

  Lilly took the keys from my father and handed them to me. “Drive, Martin.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  My father sat in the seat beside me and said, “Put on your seat belt. You too, Lilly.”

  I started the engine and checked the mirrors. Then I drove out of the mall parking lot, heading for Dave’s office. No one in the car said a word or doubted my driving ability. The town looked different from behind the wheel. But I seemed to know how to handle the traffic just fine. I took my time, stopping for yellow lights — overly cautious. I passed the corner where Scott’s brother had dumped his bike, the place Scott had been killed in the accident. I kept my eyes on the road but when I checked the rear-view mirror, there was Lilly, staring at me. We had to drive by our house without stopping and that seemed very surreal — as if some other family lived there, as if everything was normal inside that home. I noticed how overgrown the front yard was with the high grass and weeds in the flower beds. No one said a word and I just kept driving.

  I parked in front of Dave’s home office. I handed the keys to my father but couldn’t begin to explain anything about how I had learned to drive.

  “I think I want to go in by myself,” I said.

  “We’ll wait out here,” my father said. “Lilly and I have some catching up to do.”

  Dave pretended to be casual. “Your father says you are all driving to Alaska. They have grizzly bears up there, you know.”

  “It’s not the grizzly bears I’m afraid of.”

  “Something else?”

  “Well, me, for starters.”

  “Courage imperils life; fear protects it. I got that from somewhere.”

  “I don’t know what I’m protecting.”

  “You are probably trying to protect you. That’s the way it usually works. Look, if this is serious, maybe I need to get you connected with someone with, um, more experience in these things than me.”

  “I’m not letting you off that easy. Besides, I trust you.”

  “Trust is a big word.”

  “Well, right now I don’t trust myself and I need someone to trust. My family is a little confused and I’m seeing halos around people so I’m gonna trust you to tell me I’m not crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy. What kind of halos?”

  “I can see colour around people. It kind of vibrates or shimmers. Yours is yellow.”

  “Does that mean I’m a coward?”

  “I don’t know what it means. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

  “But we’re not on the Titanic. You are seeing energy fields. Some people can do that. Auras. Might be your eyes playing tricks or might be you really do see them. When did this start?”

  “When I walked out of Burger King.”

  “Something they put on your Whopper?”

  “I didn’t eat anything. But it’s not the auras that bother me. There’s more.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “I drove here. Me. I drove the van. I drove like I’ve been driving for a long time. I didn’t make any mistakes. Dave, I don’t drive. I’ve never driven before. But Lilly somehow knew I could drive.”

  Dave could see that I was scared. And I was scared. There was more to it, but I didn’t know what else there was. I wished I were sitting back in school, bored out of my skull in that usually warm, fuzzy place, listening to a teacher drone on about something I wasn’t interested in.

  “Want me to invite Lilly and your dad in?”

  “No. I think I scared my Dad. Lilly knows something but she isn’t talking.”

  “Martin. Look at it this way for starters. Everyone has been worrying about you because you’ve been acting so normal since...”

  “Since she died?”

  “Yes. Now you have this sort of odd streak going for you and you don’t feel normal, right?”

  “Dave, I know this is the sort of shrink logic you are famous for, but now that I’m not normal, I think I liked it the other way. Because it was safe.”

  “Maybe safe is for losers, Martin. So what’s the worst-case scenario you can think of for the auras and the driving?”

  “I don’t know. I was abducted by aliens and they gave me some kind of extra visual sense and they taught me how to drive for some reason.”

  “Maybe they needed a chauffeur.”

  I heaved a sigh. “I wish it was that simple.”

  “You’re suggesting it is not.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s ask Lilly what she knows.”

  “Not yet. I feel like I have to get it from me first. I’m missing some pieces of the puzzle. Lots of them.

  Can you hypnotize me?”

  “Sure, but aren’t you afraid I’ll make you act like a chicken?”

  “No. I trust you.”

  It was a dark night, frost on the grass, a half moon. I was sitting in my room looking at one of my mother’s landscape paintings. Everything had a glow to it: the clouds, the trees, and the mountains in the background. I couldn’t bring myself to go to bed because I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember what my mother looked like, but it seemed impossible.

  Then my brain seemed to suddenly shut down and when it fired up again, I was driving our van down the street. I was nervous and oversensitive to everything, ready to slam on the brakes if anything surprised me, but I knew where I was going and what I was doing.

  I drove straight there, parked, and walked across the grass. I had forgotten to put on a jacket and I was cold. I could see my breath. There was no wind. No sound except for a few dogs barking somewhere. I wasn’t scared.

  The marble was smooth and cold to the touch and I held my hand on it for a long time, then moved my cheek to it and felt how the cold was transferred. I kneeled down on the grass and cleared the frost from over the grave. I knew where I was and even why I was there. I started talking to her and at first the sound of my own voice scared me.

  No one else was around, although I didn’t seem to care if anyone found me there. I knew it was where I had to be. I didn’t tell her how much I loved her or how much I missed her. I talked about me. I told her about school, about Kathy Bringhurst. I told her about my website, about Darrell still
trying to hack into Microsoft. I told her about what a jerk Jake was.

  And then I started talking about surprise quizzes. Suppose your teacher tells you there’s going to be a surprise quiz on one of the next five days. If you get to day four and it hasn’t happened, then it can’t happen on day five because it’s predictable and, therefore, no surprise. But if three days go by and you know it can’t be day five, then it has to be day four and that’s not a surprise either.

  I think I kept trying to talk to her about something meaningful but I kept yammering about stuff like this. I could focus on the headstone and the ground but couldn’t bring myself to believe my mother was buried here.

  I didn’t cry. After a while, I just started to feel cold. I drove home and went to bed. In the morning I went to school.

  “They’re waiting for me. I should go.”

  “Do you think you should go to Alaska?”

  “Yes. If Lilly and Dad want that, I do too.”

  “Running away?”

  “Sure, why not.”

  “Let your father drive, okay?”

  “I will.”

  “Careful of grizzlies.”

  “That too.”

  “What colour did you say my aura was?”

  “What aura?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Junk

  Herodotus is sometimes referred to as the father of history, which is a pretty grandiose label for anyone, even a Greek. He was probably a believer that if we could understand the past, we could understand the present. Not all of us buy into this theory. I might argue that we only understand the present by understanding the present, but that sounds a heck of a lot like circular reasoning or maybe no reasoning at all. Being Greek means that he must have eaten a lot of olives. Olives, like water, can make you smart, or at least inquisitive.