He got out of bed, off-balance, jerking up his legs as if to pull them out of entanglements he couldn't see, his calves so heavy it was as if sand were circulating inside them, put on his bathrobe, went out the door and switched on the hall light, and then, feeling harried by an outside force, turned on all the lights in the kitchen, and in the living room turned on the lamp next to the rocker and sat across from it, just to see. Footsteps were climbing the basement stairs. They padded around the kitchen and then his father appeared in the door. "Chuck," he said. "You're up."
"I couldn't sleep."
"Neither could I.” His father sat in the rocker and swiveled a few times and then stopped with his profile to Charles.
"Is i— i— i— Is i— i— i—" Charles was stuttering so badly he had to cough into his hand; the back of it was covered with a slick platelike area redder than the rest of his skin, which didn't itch or cause any pain, but when he saw it in unguarded moments, as now, as a dermatologist might, it made him wonder about the complexity of his insides. "Is there any booze in this house?" he asked. "Other than that cooking wine that was in the cupboard?"
"I think Laura kept some liquor in that pantry off the kitchen."
Charles went to the pantry, which had stepped shelves that followed the stairwell to the basement below, and found a bottle of Canadian whiskey. "There's some hard stuff here," he called out, and his voice went high. "Do you want some?" In a whisper, he added, "It's a hundred proof."
"Yes. I'll take a little, I guess."
Charles filled two tumblers half full and ran some water into them. He gave a glass to his father and sat across from him and watched as he poured the whiskey down, the whole glass of it at once, as if it were milk. "Phew!" he cried. "I don't know how you can stand to drink that stuff!"
"Most people don't drink it that way. You're supposed to savor it."
"I figure the sooner I get it over with, the better. And the way it goes through me, it'd make just as much sense to pour it directly in the toilet bowl."
Charles couldn't even smile at this. "The strangest thing just happened," he said. "I don't know if I dozed off, or what, but when I woke, it felt like Laura was in the room."
His father moved his shoulders as though to make himself more comfortable and furrows of folds formed in the robe over the mound of his stomach. "Sometimes I feel she's right next to me," he said. "I've felt that with your mother, too."
He reached to the end table where the lamp stood, tipping the rocker forward, and took a half-smoked cigar from the ashtray and got it going until arches of flame stood up from it, his profile glowing with the light, and stared at the empty television set. Charles took another sip of the whiskey and felt that the cooled-down fireplace next to him, where only grainy ashes lay, was a cave leading off the house and out of this moment, a way to go.
"I was thinking of Ginny again," his father said.
"Yes, it's sad about her."
"It is."
The smoke from his motionless cigar rose in a gray line that turned silver-tinged in the light and then was gray again above.
"I suppose I should get to bed," his father said.
"Me, too."
His father laid the burning cigar down in the ashtray and stared ahead, his eyes clear and considering, as if staring the unwanted (to Charles) presence in the face, and seemed absorbed in listening; and Charles studied him and the rising smoke, like a line linking them to a simpler time, he remembered all the other nights in his life when he'd sat up with him, listening to his stories, in the other side of the house in Pettibone, in hotel and motel rooms while they were on vacation, in the little Sanderson house where he and his father lived that year they went back—
"Pardon?" Charles said. He'd dropped into half sleep and now realized his father had spoken.
"My life is like a book," Martin said. He held his hands together at the heels like an opened book. "There is one chapter, there is one story after another. When I met Laura, I told her about your mother and I said that that half of my book was already done. Some parts of it were sad, others were beautiful, I told her, but I didn't regret any of it, and I told her that, too. I spent some good years working on it, as I felt and like to think now. I told her how there might be moments when I wanted to look back at an earlier, happier time, and she understood; she felt the same way about her first husband. If there was a chapter I didn't like, then why look back on it, I thought. Why torture myself over something that's over and done with? It's a simple philosophy, but it's worked for me.
"But now," he said, and raised and lowered his hands as though weighing the book. "Now Laura's gone, your mother's gone, Marie will be going back to school soon, and I won't have Ginny here the way I wanted. Susan and you boys already have lives of your own. All I have to look forward to is retirement. Then I can get a few acres with a house, or a small farm maybe, maybe even in North Dakota. Then again, maybe I wouldn't like it there any more—who can say? All those empty spaces with nothing but a pair of railroad tracks stretched out as straight as a string. None of my friends where they used to live and the country itself changed so, with so many trees and new sloughs and small lakes, you'd hardly recognize the place. Water-fowl everywhere. I stopped in Mahomet a few years ago to look at my old elementary school, and the whole section of town where it used to stand was underwater.
“Not that all the changes everywhere are for the worse, of course. Your mother would be overjoyed that she could sing in the church now. How she wanted to test her voice along with the Mass! How she loved to sing! I remember how your Granddad Neumiller kept going back north every summer toward the end of his life and staying longer each time, but I don't know if he was ever really serious about wanting to live there again, in that cold storage box way at the—
"I've got my retirement to look forward to and the grandchildren you kids will have. I want to watch them grow up. That's enough. The rest of it, all that's happened in the past, all those early years up until now, all of that's done. I have no desire to look back on it again. Maybe a chapter will be added someday that will change all of this. Or maybe it's better to leave it as it stands and let it go from me, as it feels it wants to. And so," he said, and placed his open hands together flat, "I close the book."
Charles felt blankness and dislocation and saw, at the end of the upstairs hall in the Halvorson house in Hyatt, the swirls of coppery brown and rose and bronze and gold and the ordered pigeonholes on the roll-top desk, huge and immovable, imprisoned in its room, and found himself enwrapped in his father's watery-blue and wavering stare, and then his father lifted his hands to apply quotes, and said, "Tomorrow I'll probably wake and say. To Be Continued for Life.' The birds are already singing now. Listen to how many of them there are out there. Oh, let's both of us get back to our beds and try to sleep for a while. We all need some sleep around here. Sleep well. And thank you for being here with me. Sleep well, sleep well."
L’envoi
High here on Hawk's Nest,
No hawks fly tonight;
Songbirds going south or west or east.
Or where sons and daughters
Have gone for good.
Regain this sky,
Winging up over cottonwood crowns and this hill’s
weedy crest
To flutter in mid-flight in front of our eyes.
Barley fields and summer fallow
Far away below Hawk's Nest,
And wheat fields following section lines as straight as
rules.
Land you’ve farmed for forty years, or more.
Or for your life, or for yours and your son's, or for
mine.
Squares of fire in the wind as our only sun goes down
dying in its fiery light,
Hawks have seen the change in it.
Far away below Hawk's Nest.
For all the talks high on Hawk's Nest,
Since cavalry bivouacs and arrow's arcs.
Of hopes for home an
d our nativeness branding us on
our feet, and more.
All that remains here is Hawk's Nest,
This ship of rest, its mast tips red, and Indian lore
No longer lore nor believed in, Lorna, Les,
And this long hour of last light. Lord, and goodbye.
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 64
