by Silas House
My mother is down there, too, most likely with Shelby on her lap. Or maybe leaning on her elbow beside Shelby as she helps her draw a picture. She was inconsolable until Shelby came, and my daughter has stuck close by ever since, sensing that if she moves too far away, her grandmother will become a ghost of herself again, a grief-stricken shell that Shelby does not recognize.
And I know that Josie is not far either, probably somewhere down there at the house complaining about something. She never left Refuge. Both she and Edie made the choice to stay, the choice I have considered many times over the years. Josie finally found a man whom she couldn’t control and married him and now they live out on the lake in a glass-fronted house. He plays the guitar for her while she lies back and relaxes after a long day of teaching history at the high school.
Josie has remained friends with Charles Asher, and I’m glad for this. He is a part of our family more than he would have been had he become my brother-in-law. He never married, maybe because he never completely got over Josie, but maybe because he’s not the marrying kind. I’ve never asked him, and I figure when he’s ready for me to know, he’ll tell me. He runs his father’s hardware store and held off as long as he could before closing down the drive-in. He is still a good man, one of the best I have ever known, and the last person I know who writes me long, handwritten letters instead of e-mails. It is strange to know that my sister’s teenage boyfriend has become my closest male friend in our adulthood. He had stayed close to my father also, and has been with my mother ever since it happened, so he is down there, too.
So everyone I love the most is in that house of mourning. And the gloaming is moving around me, and I stand by this beech tree and prepare for my father’s funeral. The loss of him is too much to bear, and I have come to my old beech tree to seek solace. I was always able to find it here.
I keep turning over in my mind all the things I should have said to my father, all the little moments of connection I let pass by. I am thinking of the night — my thirtieth birthday — he sat down and talked for hours about Vietnam, his blunt-tipped fingers pointing out details in the photographs. I wonder if he knew how much I respected him.
I think of the day Nell and I marched in the silent protest against this new war. The whole time, I was wondering what my father would think if he saw us on the news, if he found out that I was a war protester now. If he had mentioned it to me, I would have told him that I marched for him, for all of us. To make sure the protest was done with balance, to show that we had all learned a lesson about speaking out with compassion for everyone involved. As we walked hand in hand down Seventh Avenue, I saw my father’s face in the windows of each building we passed, smelled home in the breeze that billowed across the avenue from the Hudson.
My whole life I have been haunted not only by what my father went through in Vietnam, but also by what he went through when he returned. I feel the need to honor him, and the best way to do that is by standing up for what I believe in, just as he did.
I try, and fail, to push away the guilt of having left Refuge, thinking of how much more time I could have had with him if I had only stayed here. Why I left, I don’t know. I have never found a place of more beautiful night sounds, have never found a place where I so completely belonged despite being different. I recall Nell saying to me that she came back to see all of us that summer but also came back to see the trees, that you never forget the trees of your childhood, and that — more important — they never forget you. She was right.
The beech tree says its old, true mantra: I am here. And this is a balm. But for the first time, the tree does more. Because it comforts me by reminding me of the last day of that summer back in 1976, when Daddy found me in this place I had thought was my own secret place, not knowing that it was his, too.
I sat in the roots of the beech, leaning back against the trunk, letting its coolness sink into my skin. No matter how hot the air, the tree was always cool, as if pulling up the dampness its roots tapped into far below the earth. This beech was solid, unmovable.
That’s where I chose to spend my last hours of true summer, the day before school started back. After Nell had gone, after Edie and I had played in the creek until our feet were wrinkled from the water, after I had situated my notebook paper into my new three-ring binder and held my pencils up to my face to draw in their school scent, I had climbed the ridge up to my tree.
I had brought along my composition book and was trying to write down anything about this summer that I hadn’t already gotten on paper. I sat studying about everything that had happened in the past three months, and before I knew it, I curled up there in that familiar place with the call of jays above me and went to sleep. There was no better place to nap than there, no place where the world smelled so new and safe. My mother would have fainted if she had known I liked to sleep there, where snakes crawled on the ridge. I had seen them myself. But I never thought about the snakes much. I figured if I didn’t bother them, they’d leave me alone, too. Apparently I was right, since I had never had a waking encounter with one. Most things are like that: just trying to get by in the world until you mess with them.
I lay my head in the crook of one of the roots and imagined the little fox — grown now, by summer’s end — watching me, considering the way we had both changed. Mine was a bluish-gray sleep. For a time I was still conscious of the birdcall over me like a murmuring quilt, the way the wind breathed through the beech leaves, the little cracks and pops that a forest gives off if you listen closely enough. But then I was plunged into a thick, black sleep.
That’s how I was when my father approached, going for his evening walk.
I wonder how he saw me in that moment when he came up the ridge to the secret tree he had known all of his life, ever since he was a boy. Was he surprised that I had made this my secret place, too? Did he wonder how we had gone so long without crossing paths here, since he had visited the beech often since returning from Vietnam?
He spied on me sleeping, encircled by tree roots, an ant — undetected by me — crawling across my forehead. I like to think that he whispered thanks for me, for this place that he had missed so much when he was gone overseas. I hope he said a little prayer to the woods. And I bet he squatted there near me and watched me sleep for a time, occasionally laughing in the back of his throat at how much I reminded him of himself. I think that he probably found my composition book lying there where it had slid from my lap. Perhaps he started to open it, but glancing at the writing on the front — The Private Thoughts of Eli Book — he thought better of it, and pulled his hand away as if it had gotten too close to an open flame.
But when the sky turned crimson at the horizon and the gloaming began to tick closer and closer, he finally reached out and brushed away the ant and ran his hand over the top of my head. “Wake up, buddy,” he whispered. “Wake up.”
I didn’t say anything when I sat up, amazed that he had found my secret place but also realizing in that moment that perhaps this beech tree had been the same one he had spoken of in his letters. Maybe he had been talking about another tree, but I like to think that we had shared this hiding place, that it joined us.
“Hey,” he said, quiet, as if afraid of disturbing the oncoming dusk.
“Is it time for supper?”
He nodded and squatted down. Looked at the forest floor and then studied the sky, took his time in looking at the swaying branches of the beech, the trembling leaves. He was working something around in his mind. I could tell.
I sat on my haunches, too, dusting off my face, where tiny pieces of wood and bits of moss clung to my cheek. I ran my fingers through my hair and discovered two ants.
“There’s no other place I’d rather be than right here,” he said, and his face smoothed out, released the worry and hurt he had carried there for the last few weeks. Then he turned to me. “Everything’s going to be all right, Eli,” he said. His eyes stayed on mine. “I promise you that.”
I believed him. Someho
w, I knew that everything would be all right, and a fist of grief and worry uncurled in my stomach, releasing itself. There was certainty in his words, but also in the curve of his shoulders, in his face. Daddy got up, dusted off the back of his work pants, and put his hand out to help me up. We were silent as we moved down the old path. I held his hand and we eased back down to the house where supper was waiting, where my mother would be standing on the back step waiting for us, where Josie would sweep her black hair out of her eyes to smile at us when we sat at the table, where the world shimmered and leveled, ripe with possibility.
I am indebted to so many good friends and family members who helped to make this book possible. I wish I could name them all, but chief among them were Pamela Duncan, Paul Hiers, Jason Howard, Denton Loving, Sylvia Lynch, and Neela Vaswani, all of whom read the book in its earliest stages. Jason Howard gave me the poem “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great” by Stephen Spender, which inspired the title of this book. I hope you will look it up. Neela Vaswani taught me so much about everything I can never repay her. One of my favorite things about this book is the way it looks at friendship; everyone in this paragraph is a true example of that. I don’t know what I’d do without them.
Larry Brown was the first person to read the first chapter of this book and encouraged me to keep writing. I miss you, bro. Clint McCown published the short story “1976” that was the impetus for this novel, so he was the first one to love the Book Family; thank you. Stephanie Tittle answered botanical questions with wit and grace. Kirby Gann played the guitar one night and inspired a scene. Lee Smith talked me through the hard times, and that’s just one more of the many, many things to thank her for. Lisa Parker’s poetry and spirit were both inspirations. I thank her for showing me the great beating heart of New York City. Glenn Cornett devoted an afternoon to me, graciously and patiently answering all of my questions about post-traumatic stress disorder. My sister, Eleshia Sloan, is a constant light in my life.
A special thanks to my people at Lincoln Memorial University, Spalding University, and the Hindman Settlement School. Keith Semmel and Marianne Worthington gave me ABBA albums and answered questions about the Beatles (and are pretty great friends to boot). My agent, Joy Harris, never lost faith in this character or this book. I thank her and Adam Reed for their hard work. Thanks to Gigi Amateau for her part in all of this. And special thanks to Karen Lotz and Nicole Raymond, who understood and loved Eli as I did. They, like everyone at Candlewick Press, worked hard on this novel, and I owe them.
My daughters, Cheyenne and Olivia, were instrumental in allowing me to go back in time and remember the wonder and sadness a child possesses. I thank them for taking photographs that informed my writing, for laughter that kept me going, and for being the strong, beautiful people they are. I’m so glad they exist.
Thanks to all of the above. In this life, I have loved them all.
SILAS HOUSE is the nationally best-selling author of the award-winning novels Clay’s Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, and The Coal Tattoo.
About Eli the Good, he says, “This book is about the power of friendship and the joy of accepting yourself as you are. It’s also about how people can get through struggles if they have hope and the love of others, and most important, it’s about the fact that we don’t always have to agree with the ones we love. Finally, it is about the way a war lives on in people long after it’s over. Although the book is set in 1976, it’s also about right now. What I like about Eli most is that he’s trying so hard to be a good person, which is what most of us are doing all the time, especially when we are kids.”
Silas House lives in eastern Kentucky with his two daughters and two dogs.
