Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series)

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  III

  “You’ll want to make your peace, Jude.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll want to set your house in order.”

  “And lands.”

  “How do you prefer it, then?”

  “The way I always did,” he says. “No nonsense. Straight up and down.”

  “How do you mean?” Finney asks.

  “You know the one about the millworker. Who’s so dumb his cronies convince him he’s pregnant. He says that isn’t possible, and they bring a doctor into the joke and the doctor examines him and says, yes, Sven, you’re pregnant all right. So he goes home and wags his fingers at his wife and says, from now on none of that fancy who’s-on-top stuff. From now on it’s straight up and down.”

  Finney laughs.

  “Next question,” Judah says.

  “That isn’t what I meant,” his lawyer says.

  “There’s no peace to make,” says Judah. “There’s not any bargaining table. You got me those three testaments and I gave one to Maggie. There’s nothing to sit down around and nothing to draw up or change.”

  Light: the gradual accretion of it, sift in an hourglass weighting the time scale, first the seckel pear tree, then the tamarack then elms ignited, their twig-tips silver in the moon that is diffuse then fused from the east through that cloud bank, there, and then suffusing everything. He sees yellow leaves on the willow, and deadwood that he’s notched but not had time to cut, sees the rooster distending to crow, saw cockfights in the silo they’d cut down to head height and covered over with chicken wire and used for a testing arena, but not with razors on the spurs. Then they moved the better cocks to Hamilton’s old barn and bet on them and tied the razors on. Judah saw blood on the sawdust and cock’s wings and sheets they soiled together, sees dishtowels he had used as tourniquets that time he hemorrhaged, and stumps that had been rooster spurs, both sinew and gristle gone black. The blackness swarms and rises and settles, buzzing, so what he took as guarantee was only the promise, at eight-to-five odds, and with men milling about him impeding the view, that this false dawn is light . . .

  He sets out for the barn. The path is familiar. He has been robbed of his youth. He feels in his shirt pocket for the peanut brittle. He crumbles it with his right hand and pulls a fragment out and licks at his fingers. There is earth on his fingertips also. He coughs and hears the sound as if it were a stranger’s—dim, tinny, high in the throat. He wonders is that what they mean by a death rattle? Ian, holding rattles, had been fierce. He pounded on the high chair’s tray with a sounding cackle, Ian is left-handed, and no Sherbrooke was ever left-handed that Hattie can recall.

  So Judah gauges his steps. Once he ran the mile circuit for kicks. For the joy of it he’d spot Maggie a third of the distance and try to catch her and half the time succeed. She’d be a wheat-colored blur by the sugarhouse, then resolve into component parts at the corncrib, then become all legs and jostling laughter as they shared the finish stretch. She could outrun him, nearly, for the sprint, but he was slow and steady and had the better wind. So he’d catch her as she lay back for him, laughing, head over her shoulder, feet dragging, elbows out.

  The house is behind him. He steps from its shadow. There’s a ring around the moon; it’s two days off from full. He studies his shadow. It moves. He lifts his hand, and the shadow’s elongated hand entices him, and he thinks, Look, I’m a rabbit, look a giraffe, look at the antelope horns.

  “Make me a rhino, Daddy,” Ian said.

  He made a rhinoceros head, and horn.

  “It’s got a little one too, Daddy.”

  He let a knuckle protrude.

  “Make me a unicorn.”

  He rearranged his middle finger.

  “Now make me a rabbit again!”

  His breath is plumes. His feet take root where he stands. At the tideline, standing in sand that the current subtracts then adds to his ankles, watching the water’s pitch and yaw, sinking where he weights the shore while she, Maggie, is a quick glimmer in the surf beyond him, Judah knew just such stability in the middle of giddying motion. The world is a careening thing; the moon and sun are its outriders, and he hunts for solid footing since his balance has gone bad. Time was he’d walk the barn beams, quickest way to cross to the hayloft without even seeing the forty-foot drop; time was he’d top the pines by climbing them, right hand holding the saw.

  “A morning’s constitutional,” Peacock wrote, “should not exceed one mile. That is a sufficient distance for the soul’s repose and the body’s repast to settle and assert itself. The gentleman avoids excessive exercise before and after meals. Provide a one-mile path. In His eyes there can be no distinction twixt the camel and the rich man mounted on the camel’s back, in terms of distance travelled they are of course coequal. For the camel bears the passenger as burden, whereas the Passenger is burdened with the spirit’s apprehension, and the task of guiding his insentient chattel through the endless sands. Lo how elusive proves that promised fount where each might slake his thirst, and where the Weary Traveller might bathe. How myriad are the Phantoms and False Lures. How often do we think ourselves within the Oasis of Grace! We stoop to drink of lambent and sparkling elixirs, wherewith the Soul might cleanse itself and raise the liquid Illusion to our parched and avid lips but find it dust. Dust the dream of surcease, Dust the hope of Merit that it might earn mete reward, Dust the ardor that enkindled this proud pilgrimage, all ashes and dry husks. So might we not need Compasses; might it not be Useful to have the path marked with Flagstones and not, as in the fairy tale, breadcrumbs for vultures to swallow. Should those who go before not leave such signposts for the Quick?”

  “Hey, Ian, what about this baler?”

  “What about it?”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Give me a hand,” Judah said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just hold this.”

  “I need gloves.”

  “You don’t need gloves.”

  “I do. I’ve got to practice after.”

  “Hold the twine then,” Judah said. “Only hold it while I fix the goddamn feeder.”

  “You said you fixed it yesterday.”

  “It didn’t work. It cuts off short.”

  “Why don’t you get it fixed? Why don’t you get Harry or someone from Allis-Chalmers to fix it?”

  “Screwdriver.”

  “Yes, doctor. Scalpel at your service, doctor.”

  “Not that one.” Judah shook his hair back. “The one with the Phillips head.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The big one. Look at this screw.”

  “Well how was I to see it?” Ian asked. “Under all that grease?”

  “All right.”

  “All you had to say was Phillips head.”

  “All right.”

  “And anyhow it’s raining.” His voice slid an octave again.

  “Hand me them pliers.”

  “Sutures, doctor.”

  “The socket wrench. You don’t know your ass from your elbow.”

  And holding, forcing with his left hand, Judah overpressured with his right and came down hard on his own wrist. The Phillips cut a star shape just between his palm and wristwatch; Judah stood there, bleeding, letting the blood spout and clean itself out, watching his son go white-faced with his white hands full of string.

  Now he shuffles forward and attains the sugarhouse. There he gathers up his things—the newspaper, the match tin, and the can of kerosene. For years he made leaf piles and burned them and inhaled the smoke, and there’d been nothing wrong with that until they called it dangerous, so you had to burn leaves on the quiet, coughing, tying handkerchiefs across your mouth and nose. The smoke was the color of mother-of-pearl, and it had dimension against the blue sky-shell. But you saw that less and less often lately and the smell was strange—boys raked leaves into bags and twisted them and stacked them on the paving now for trucks. It was a waste of compo
st, and Judah figures they burn the leaves in some landfill anyhow. Somewhere he hasn’t been to there’s a leaf-burning pit, and men stand by with asbestos boots and gloves, but there isn’t any danger and they break open bourbon at three; at four they sniff and drink their fill and watch the sky go cloudy with its own opaque sweet-smelling sunset; at five the smoke would be lighter, not darker, than the night air it eddies through, and at six o’clock they’d huddle to the many-layered embers, taking comfort in the color and the perfumed heat.

  “The Preacher calls it vainglory,” Peacock wrote. “And vanity indeed, of all the Large or Venial sins, seems dangerous to him who builds. For Foundations are quicksand, not stone.”

  He wants to be by that landfill. He wants to be where everything is buried, with a group of workers like Hal Boudreau, not talking except with the no-talk that beats back silence, not needing to claim or reclaim. He’d sniff the acrid sour flame and drink the acrid sweet bourbon from a bottle that is everybody’s bottle. Men would pass and raise the liquor and tilt and swallow and pour a final cupful on the flames.

  “Judah, my wild one. The Lion of Judah.”

  Somewhere off in Africa, he’s heard, they have embalmed Haile Selassie. The little emperor he’s named like, half his weight and half his height—Maggie always said it helped your feet to walk in sand; like emery board sand took the dried skin off.

  “What I mean is, what I meant . . .”

  Outside it is colder. He hurries to the center of his woodpile and drops down the paper and matches and kerosene can. There is gray light now, and the kerosene sloshes lightly out of the air hole. He breathes. His inhalations are willful, since his throat is a streambed in August, with the springs dried out. He brings air in like water, sluicing it across his teeth like rock. They salvaged everything these days, so why not salvage teeth? There are landfill operations and operations for hearts and lungs and kidneys; a woman could go to a sperm bank and sleep with some pure stranger in a tube.

  “And therefore,” Peacock prophesied, “there will be stately progress in the Park. I seem to see my grandchildren’s grandchildren curtsy, see them laugh at some Bright pleasantry or knit their brows with concentration at some sportive Feat. We shall build a brown Pagoda in the Chinese vein.”

  Her cheeks would flush; her throat, too, flushed; she could run barefoot, often as not, on ground he’d have to pick his way through, even wearing boots.

  “Let the park be Glade and Bower for the gladding of the wakeful Mind; let there be Enticements such as Benches by the Grotto, and Japanese maples in profusion, since they teach us scale.”

  He continues. Peacock’s grandchild’s grandchildren are Ian and Seth. Ian has been gone for years, and Seth died in the house.

  “Don’t go,” he’d said the final time.

  “We’re leaving,” Ian said.

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “I’ll make my own from now on,” Maggie said. “With your permission, Jude.”

  “And what if I don’t give it?”

  “That’s exactly why we’re leaving.”

  He looked them over. “I’ll miss you.”

  “We’ll miss you too.”

  “So stay. Save everyone the trouble.”

  “I’m eighteen,” Ian said. “I can make up my own mind.”

  “Is that what they taught you in school?”

  “I’ll get the car,” Ian said.

  They had had what Maggie called a pied-à-terre in New York City for years. It was on Sutton Place South. She saw the river, she told him, and if he came to visit they could take walks and go to concerts like they used to and she’d arrange for parking so it would be only four hours, door to door. It was a point of principle, he told her, and not practicality; he never again traveled south.

  When Ian started Exeter, Maggie also moved away, leaving Judah in the house. They both came back for Christmas and part of the summer and maybe a birthday or Thanksgiving to make a show of unity. But it had been sham unity and nothing to anticipate or, looking back on, remember as fun. And he had been in part relieved when Ian left for college in their final summer, and Maggie for New York.

  “So this is it,” she’d said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re welcome in the apartment. Whenever.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do.”

  “I’d give you warning,” Judah said. “So you could clear whoever’s in there out.”

  “I wouldn’t require it.”

  “One thing I hate”—he tried to shift his feet but they were rooted, stuck with gum-sap to the Persian carpet.

  “What’s that one thing?”

  “Is other men’s coats in my closet,” he said. “You know.”

  “Yes. I do know about that.”

  “So there’s not a whole lot left to say,” said Judah.

  She made a motion toward him. “You’ve got the address and telephone number. You’ve got Ian’s address and his number. Keep in touch.”

  “Be seeing you.”

  “It’s not fair, Judah, just to let the boy go off like that. Without a word of luck or love or anything.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, it’s Labor Day,” she said. “We’ll have a ton of traffic on the road. We’d better be going.”

  “Good-bye.”

  And so she went off down the steps and into the car and that was all he heard or saw of her for seven years. He sent them checks through Finney for schooling and clothes and vacations, but never for the rent.

  Now he walks into the hay barn and picks out a bale. Time was he’d walk with one in either hand or lend a hand at stacking and not notice when the lunch break came; now a single light-packed bale is overmuch to manage, so he cuts the twine and takes the hay in sections, clump by clump. He carries it assiduously to the stacked locust wood and uses it as chinking where the logs let too much wind in; he spreads himself a pallet in the center of the square. There are burrs and thistles in the hay; there is too much weed for use as anything but bedding, and he is glad for that. He wouldn’t have wanted, he tells himself, to use feed hay for a pallet; it would have been a waste.

  What pure grass they have is timothy, and he calculates which field this cutting comes from. The Shed field had been planted in timothy three years back, and Judah decides it will be time, this spring, to turn it over into corn. He coughs; there is chaff in his throat. He comes across a garter snake, crushed by the baler, and what was likely a chipmunk that is pressed now and extended like a carpet of itself. He hawks and spits.

  (“Judah,” they told him. “We got enough now.”

  “It’s coming on rain.”

  “Maybe just a little bit. No more than a wetting.”

  “Not enough to mention. To say so.”

  “Dinnertime.”

  “Suppertime.”

  “Smoke time. I need me a cigarette.”

  “Jimmy Slocum’s cousin said he seen a camel. Like that old workhorse, Clyde, they called him, only humpbacked and not swaybacked and spavined and maybe three times as big.”

  “Judah. J. P. Sherbrooke. Mr. Jude.”

  “You got a name to match each name they give your wife.”

  “Except maybe vixen and harlot and Abishag the Shunnamite.”)

  His sleep this night was troubled, and his digestion troubles him, and everywhere he aches. “Flesh of my flesh,” he intones. “Betrayal on betrayal.” He likes repeating words for the sense of solidity, and balance; he feels himself a tightrope walker using words as a way now to ward off collapse. He extends both arms. There are spotlights trained on him, and he tries not to lose his focus on the necessary end; the inner ear, however, is the root of balance and he prays that his hearing will hold. “Flesh of my flesh” means sons, though what he planted in her was more a seed than flesh. He pictures his seed clinging to her womb wall like a cockleburr, or swimming, and then it was not “it” but Ian, and then not “it” but Seth, and Seth r
everted.

  “Of the various infirmities,” Peacock wrote, “I hold with those sages who hold loss of Faith the Gravest, since belief in Wrongs is tantamount to the belief that Wrongs shall be redressed. Yet without the latter conviction, Man is but cast ashore as if he were a Castaway upon this Life’s grim Strand, nor can sumptuous food or welcome or a bed of goosedown and Satin be the jot and tittle of True Comfort by Compare. Therefore for every Inward Arch I wish an outward Pillar, and for each circle a square or rectangular Shape. It is necessary in this monotonal Era to provide Relief. When tired with a long day’s wrangling in the dusty offices or glittr’ing Courts of Law, I sometimes for an hour at work’s End seek diversion with fencing; then do I see on the target before me not some dancing bobbin or Image of th’ Adversary, but rather Delirium’s Fancy: my house in Female Shape, its outline dark yet definite, and with one single window lit there on the Second Story’s left-hand passage where reside the Heart. I lunge and pierce it through. There is an Awful Glory in the sight. Long past what we Inheritors have come to Know as the Expulsion, the light of incorruptibility still flickered—and as I lay my foil to rest I seem to see it beckon me, the Devil’s very handiwork tricked up as foxfire. Gleaming.”