Baptism for the Dead

by Libbie Hawker

  Before we returned to Temple Square I made a stack of sandwiches: white bread, peanut butter and jelly, all put back into the bread bag and secured with a knot to keep ants away. When I reached into the bag to pull one out a smear of peanut butter tracked along the back of my hand. I licked my hand clean and watched X at his easel. From this angle I couldn’t see what he painted, but I could see the jump of a muscle in his arm as he made a repeated, rapid dart at his watercolor paper, tap tap tap. I had the feeling of lifting, drifting, bisecting into two people as I chewed my sandwich. Rebecca used to watch him paint, surely. How could she not? X would not miss me when I got on the bus. I was a standin, Rebecca the Sequel. And he was not X but Adam, and Adam was gone, would never come again. What a destructive, idiot fool I had been.

  People stopped. I learned over the course of our brief travels that nothing draws gawkers like X’s easel. An artist at work is a summoning bell. Hikers and travelers, sight-seers and true believers all dipped and fell into his lone orbit, circled him casually, passed behind his back and glanced over his shoulder before wandering on a few steps, turning as if a thought had just occurred to them, returning to stand still just at the edge of his vision. Once they were rooted in place he always smiled slightly and nodded, then returned to his paper and brushes. His watchers stood rapt for minutes at a time, then drifted away with an air of having been graced – calmed, enlightened, connected somehow to the artist though X had done nothing more than acknowledge them in a friendly, if distracted, way. Sometimes the watchers struck up conversation. X engaged peripherally – friendly still, but focused on his work. They wanted to tell him stories. “My aunt paints,” they’d say, eager to share something with X, eager to know that he and they were of a kind.

  To witness an act of creation rouses a primal kinship. Who has not felt the desire to stand against a cool cave wall and press to its face a hand red with ocher, red with heart’s blood? My palm tingles for want of stone beneath it. Who has not wanted to make and to tell the world, I made this – I made this – this is what I saw, this is what I know; this is the hasty moment of a single life, a moment I chose above all others to exalt, to show you, whoever you are; to carry on for me when I am nothing, not even a name – but this is what I knew, and this is what I made.

  **

  My aunt paints. X was sweet as could be to the people who stopped to engage him but when we were alone he often rolled his eyes over the things they would say. “Your aunt,” he said to me, addressing his long-gone admirers, “paints crap.” Your aunt paints nauseating cabin scenes without any sense of distance or atmosphere. Your aunt paints miserable still-lifes with the vase of flowers smack in the center of the canvas, with straight white paint for the petals, no tint of color, no understanding of how light works, how colorful white is, how the colors fool the eye into seeing white amid a garish pale rainbow of reflections. No understanding of the delicate coolness of violet shadow beneath leaves. X studied this stuff with the fervor of a priest. X felt the throb of light and shade as a sob of worship in his throat. He licked the bristles of his brushes to keep them well shaped, and the taste of them on his tongue was as holy as sacrament bread.

  I understood his outrage. Couldn’t these passers-by see that he was more than a casual hobbyist? Didn’t his discipline show? If he could make no better impression on the world than to summon images of Aunt Matilda and her rancid chalk-white still-lifes, then what was all this work and worship for?

  But I was more forgiving of the painting aunts. They were casual, perhaps even silly in their understanding of beauty, and their attempts to render it were novice and unaware. But their devotion was not insincere, and their need to make and to pass along their making was as real and as urgent as any master’s.

  One day, somewhere between Chimney Rock and the Wyoming border, along a stretch of highway flanked on one side by twelve oxen in scenic pasture, the figure of an old man at a French easel dissolved in reverse through the road dust and the dimness of distance. He stood knee-deep in weeds across a wide ditch slashed with the shoots of wild asparagus. His arms were browned from years of painting in the sun. An old fedora obscured his eyes. X pressed the button to lower the passenger window. “My aunt paints!” he yelled as we sped past. The man did not look up from his easel. I imagined that he heard in X’s shout some acknowledgment of kinship, the artist’s handshake. Or perhaps he heard nothing above the vibration of the road.

  In any case, he went on painting.

  **

  A cluster of tourists gathered near X, but instead of the usual scene of quiet satisfaction an air of disbelief fairly crackled around his easel. A middle-aged woman and man leaned their heads together to whisper. The woman’s hand moved up and down in an emphatic gesture. A young mother took two of her children by the hands and hauled them away. A third boy trailed after her, turning as he walked to shuffle backward, to take in a final look at the man painting in Temple Square. On other faces I saw tense lips, frowns, glances side-eye. I stood, stretched the tension from my legs, and approached the crowd, quietly, hands in pockets, blending in.

  “...not very respectful, that’s all I’m saying.” Tail end of the whispering woman’s conversation.

  From the edge of the crowd I found a clear view of X’s easel, and what I saw transfixed me. It is hard to explain why. It was, after all, merely a painting of the temple. But it was not. Though the structure itself was recognizable, the edges were blurred, great clouds of pigment and water bleeding across the page, bleeding into the sky. Where the hard-line edge of stone wall should have been, the paint fanned in tendrils fine as feather-fur, fingers spread and desperate against the gaudy pale colors of a white that was not white. The more I stared at the paper the more I saw how wrong it was. The walls were too tall, the garden below too flat and dull. Crenelations as sharp as smiles tore at too-bright sky. The steeples leaned toward one another as if to repudiate absolutely the watchers at X’s easel, even the painter himself; and above them an angular dark slash hung suspended in blue, Moroni dispossessed of his spire or a blind bird in flight.

  X raised a brush and laid it against the paper. The surface lifted minutely in response to his touch, gleamed wet and eager; for a heartbeat nothing happened, and the crowd could not look away for the awfulness of waiting. Then a bead of blue dropped from the bristles, ran down the wall of the temple, streaking it, a long hot track of sharp sky weeping onto the stern, garish stone, trailing all the way to the earth.

  Shrugs in the crowd. Heads shaking, confusion and even sadness written plain on faces. It was not that X had painted a terrible portrait of the temple. He was no Aunt Matilda. The image was strange and unlovely, but his skill was evident – the paint had gone where he’d willed it, done just what he commanded. And that was the point. He had made the temple into something the tourists did not recognize, or something they recognized too well – something bent and flawed, something indistinct, something that could be turned by any hand into any shape desired; something that could be rendered and obscured; something that was, ultimately, no more firm than water. X had not put a single mark wrong; this distortion was deliberate, and its frankness offended.

  One young man with a trim haircut and a clean shave, smiling, tried to dispel the crowd’s tension with humor. He said to X, “I don’t know, man. I don’t see it.” A few grateful chuckles. X grinned. He did not look up from his painting.

  “I think it’s pretty.” This came from a girl standing near her mother. I had not noticed her until she spoke. She had glossy brown hair pulled back with a headband that sparkled in the sun. Her eyebrows were thick and dark, but they did not look out of place on her sharp-boned face. She was perhaps just old enough to know what is truly pretty and what is not, and not yet old enough to do anything about it. Her arms folded below her small breasts. When she spoke, her mother turned red and clicked her tongue in disapproval, but the girl ignored the mother.

  My eyes lifted from the painting to the temple beyond it, and i
n the warmth of the sun I allowed my eyes to lose focus. I squinted; the walls darkened and stretched, blurred around the edges. The surety of stone dissipated. There was no stone at all, only white light in a blue sky, only a pillar of cloud that might have blown away on any chance wind. I squinted harder, until my eyelids trembled, and stoic Moroni lifted from his spire and floated into the air, broke into a ragged shape, a reflection of leaves in water. When my eyes closed the dark side of my eyelids glowed with golden light. I said to myself, It’s pretty.

  I was not going to the bus station. Not today or any day.

  5.

  So X is an artist, a sly changer of forms, a transmogrifier of temples. That’s where he fits into the world. He and the man on the side of the road with the easel and the fedora, he and all the painting aunts.

  Where did I fit? What was my place in...not in Creation, but in this world of systems and order, of habitats and towns, a world where things fall apart in the end? I was not Rebecca; that much I did know. I had no idea whether X knew it.

  In Rexburg everybody had a place. Everybody had a goal. The goal was the same: attain exaltation: the best afterlife, the White Land in perpetuity. As a woman I would be a wife and a mother and I would raise my children to achieve this goal. But now such a vastness of possibility opened up before me that I was immobilized by variety. Potential futures spread out before me like nets of nerves, each one electrified and tingling.

  We stopped to gas up. I got out of the car and stretched, cracked my spine, sighed with relief. I had been feeling a pinch in my belly all day, and I realized that my period had at last come. Not going to be a mother – not yet, anyway, thank God. I knew I had packed some pads down in the bottom of the old green duffel bag I’d had since I was a kid. While X filled the tank, squinting in the heat, I dug underneath my clothes, rumpling them, searching by feel. My fingers found something hard and small and cold.

  I drew it out, held it up to the sun. It hadn’t seen it since my slumber party days. It was a small silvery ring, scratched and dulled with years, plain band bearing a little badge like the one on Superman’s chest, but green, and instead of an S, these letters in a bold, heroic font: CTR.

  We all had these. I was given mine at girls’ camp, in a campfire ceremony with marshmallows and songs, surrounded by my fellow Beehive girls, our knees and faces gawkish in the firelight. The Laurel girls – the girls in high school, long-haired and beautiful and ripe with a feeling of expected adventure (graduation, marriage) – passed the rings out in a hushed atmosphere of belonging. Now we were part of the group. Now we were really Young Women. I recall slipping my ring onto a finger and staring at those letters. CTR. I would always have the ring to remind me, one of the Laurels intoned, when I was faced with a difficult decision. The ring was all the wisdom I needed.

  Choose The Right.

  I slid the ring onto my finger now, in the station lot sharp with the scent of spilled gasoline. How strange that I should find the ring again, at the moment when I was faced with every possible decision, with an avalanche of possibility, at a moment when the whole world was branching and rebranching, a road map endlessly unfolding.

  “Well?” I asked the ring.

  But Choose The Right was the best advice my past could offer me, and that, as it turned out, was no help at all.

  6.

  Early in the morning the causeway was abandoned. An endless bar of cloud above the Wasatch range trapped the dawn light, threw it back onto the surface of the Great Salt Lake where it glimmered below a reflection of mountains, bright lavender. Space was reversed. There was more water than sky. The mountains were the bruised tips of little fingers, the water too close for comfort. Along the causeway’s narrow rocky shoulders the occasional skinny stand of sage broke the gravel. Above each brush a ripple in the air like a heat shimmer moved. As we drew closer and passed, the mirages revealed themselves as colonies of gnats spinning over the shrubs, voracious blue cyclones. Horned grebes ducked underwater. The dense surface of the lake stilled almost immediately; the grebes resurfaced in my side-view mirror as specks, corks bobbing. The peak of Antelope Island rose in front of us, growing taller and sharper and more varied in color, its featureless dun becoming a multiplicity of patches and striations, ochers, olive-greens, golds, a somber warm umber crown at its ancient apex.

  We reached the island and, in reverence, drove along its eastern side. From this distance the gray suburbs of Salt Lake City lay motionless. Far below the roadway the mountains side dropped to a ragged plain incised by a heavy streak of stunted dark trees and the finer, broken line of an old wire fence, its posts leaning into the grasses. Beyond, long-dried shoreline gave way to the pale wrack of salt flat, shot through with delicate silver cracks, and further still, a breadth of lake water hung heavy with reflected mountains.

  Around a bend in the hill’s side X braked hard. A sudden herd of bison drifted like continents from one side of the road to the other. They were as dark as basalt and as immoveable. We both sensed this, and made no attempt to hurry them. I held tight to X’s hand as, one after another, they passed before us, feet from our bumper, processional, magnificent. One rolled its eye to meet my own – it was as small and gleaming as a ring, rimmed in damp white and red, adorned by a single large diamondwinged fly at its stone-black canthus. Over the quiet whirr of our engine we heard the bison’s breath like a bellows. A foreleg connected to the earth, the fat and muscle along the long, tall shoulder rippled for an instant, and I could swear I felt the vibration of the heavy cloven footstep. Shed hair peeled in swathes from the muscular back. And then the last of them was gone, comically small rump following great head and shoulders over the verge of the road, down the hill to better grazing below, where the breeze would lift off the flies and scatter them away.

  We moved on.

  Larks called from the dry slopes beside the road. X stopped the car. A thin trail of packed dust the color of bone ran up the hillside between clumps of mullein. We took that trail. The larks perched atop the mullein stalks; they swayed in the slight breeze; they took turns shouting their proclamations. The island’s flank stirred and sighed with the sound of wind. Upslope, a tiny long-legged owl skittered onto the trail, stopped to examine us, stretched one leg and one wing together in a display of nonchalance, then disappeared into the brush. When we reached the place where he had paused I saw how his little scribe-talons had scratched indiscernible hieroglyphs into the dust of the trail.

  We climbed for a good twenty minutes or more. The trail led us to a pile of decaying boulders at the crest of a hill, dark with grains of lichen. X and I clambered atop them. Just as he pulled me to my feet to stand beside him a commotion erupted on the far side of the boulders, a loud rattle of pebbles, a crack and pop of stone on stone, and the receding heartbeat of hooves against earth. A tawny blur veered past us, white-orange-black. Before we could even jump in fright the pronghorn was gone, bolting down the hill beside the trail. X laughed, put his arm around me, warm. He smelled of dust and sweat and larks in the sun.

  “Poor guy,” he said. “We ruined his hiding spot.”

  Near our car the pronghorn slowed to a dignified walk. Its tail flicked above a scornful white rump. It crossed the road and, like the bison, descended out of sight, making for more private ranges below.

  “I thought they lived in herds. This one is all on its own. Do you think it’s sick?”

  “Nah. You saw how it ran.” X shaded his eyes, gazed down across the road as if he might still see the pronghorn. “He’s just a loner.”

  An especially strong gust blew down from the mountain’s peak. It rocked me on my feet, rocked me against X’s body. The larks quieted for a moment, intent on clinging to their swaying perches.

  “You know, I had convinced myself to leave the night before last. I thought I’d get on a bus and go back to Rexburg. Yesterday – that’s when I planned to do it, right after you finished painting in Temple Square.”

  “Why?” X didn’t sound surprise
d, only curious. So it didn’t matter to him after all whether I stayed or left. I was, in the end, only the ghost of Rebecca, just as I had thought.

  He read the concern on my face; he rushed to soothe it. “I’m glad you stayed. But I figured you would. I only want to know why you thought of going back.”

  “You’re not surprised that I even considered it, though. How did you know?”

  “I admit I’ve never done anything like it before, but I figured it can’t be easy to leave a marriage. Even a sham marriage. It’s got to be even harder to leave a religion. I used to smoke.” His hand, involuntarily, made a gesture, knuckles out, fingers extended toward his face, as if he held the sketched line of a cigarette, as if he held the idea of one. Old habits die hard. “It was hell to quit. The compulsion for just one drag – the need for it, right in the pit of my stomach, like being slugged – pow – the anxiety I felt without it – I can’t explain. There were days when I knew it was crazy to think of picking up a cigarette or even going near somebody who was smoking, but my whole body wanted to anyway. And my mind – I was so unsettled all the time. I remember not being able to rest or think straight because all I could think about was how good a smoke would taste right then. You can understand rationally that a thing will destroy you, but there’s a force inside you that will drive you back to it all the same.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe that’s what I was feeling. All I know for sure is that I felt like...” But I didn’t know what I felt. I didn’t know what I thought. Since we arrived in Utah I had not examined my feelings. Like an animal I had only sensed the discomfort, the threat, and wanted to flee back to whatever safety I might find in familiarity. Run back to your herd, lone creature. There is safety in numbers. “I felt guilty. A good woman gets married, and takes care of her husband, and has children, and takes care of them too. I felt I’d shirked my duties, I guess. I felt I needed to get back to being good.”