A Burned-Over District

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 17

  Before her Great Christian Awakening, and while Albert was still only a vague projection of our own egos, Lu and I had once spent an interesting evening over a couple of margaritas, comparing, among other things, the different punishment styles of our parents. The idea, I suppose, was to inoculate ourselves against the kind of parental procedures that we felt had afflicted our psyches with the unnatural gait of foot-bound women. My mother, a victim of the same kind of squeamishness that later doomed my own efforts at classroom control, rarely disciplined her children. She left the task to my father, who employed his very loud voice for routine crowd control and his heavy hand for more serious matters.

  In Lu’s family the situation was reversed: her father was underground most of the time and too exhausted to do much more than slouch in his chair in front of the TV once he’d sluiced off the coal dust in the evenings. Her mother, though, was an enthusiastic practitioner of corporal punishment. Her favorite technique involved escorting the wrongdoer into a grove of scrubby timber near the house and forcing her to choose the switch with which her tender butt would be lashed. This stacking of insult onto injury seemed unfair to her children, and their reluctance often led to long runups of tears and recrimination before the weapon was finally chosen and applied. On one desperate occasion, Lu had categorically refused to make a selection. Her mother gripped the back of her neck, squeezing so hard that tears came to her eyes, and marched her into the trees, where she surrendered abjectly by choosing the first limb that came to hand.

  The image of that little girl with her mother’s ruthless hand clutching the back of her neck – her despair and helpless rage – was what kept coming to mind every time I recalled my final interaction with Mervyn. It was painful enough to watch him go over the cliff; but it was intolerable that I’d been required to give him the final push myself. I kept circling back mentally to Tadich Grant’s gloomy subterranean examination room and wondering how I could have done it. I even felt, on some subconscious level, that since it was inconceivable, maybe I hadn’t actually done it. But thinking back, I could also feel The Hand tightening on the back of my own neck with every day that I’d watched Mervyn getting weaker and sicker and sadder, his expressionless patience becoming more and more of a rebuke, until finally the cosmic switch had started to look like the better alternative. It seemed so unfair; and yet there was clearly no appeal to The Hand. And though in their cases at least I wouldn’t be required to do the squeezing, I knew the same Hand had seized Janet Blythe, and I could even begin to see the deepening impressions of those Fingers on Parnell’s wrinkly neck. I found myself thinking uneasily about the thicket of painkiller bottles on his dresser top.

  Those visions and resentments continued to oppress me for the next few days, and I seized the opportunity to let my habitual negativity and cynicism slip their leash. I was silent and sullen at home, accusatory even, although I knew Lu was as unhappy about Mervyn as I was. At school I was worse. I dropped my veil of disinterested pedagogy and began to express my sarcasm, to both the kids and my fellow teachers, about all the feverish speculation in town surrounding the latest sightings and website postings, making acid comments about the pathetic human will to believe in phantasms, while surrounded by real daily dramas of life and death. The kids responded to my new embittered persona with meek silence, baseball caps sadly bowed over the excessive classwork I assigned. I felt as though my mind itself were curled down in the pout that Albert had been trying to mimic in Janet’s quiet room in Hathwell, and I’m sure my facial expression faithfully mirrored it. My colleagues, however, despite my best efforts to project my disenchantment, continued their vivacious lunchtime theorizing as though I and my gloomy chickpeas didn’t exist.

  I also took the opportunity to indulge my taste for cemeteries. I’ve always liked them, and merely to mention the word brings up a lot of images. For example, the two giant, funereal ravens, hopping with allegorical heaviness across the well tended lawn of the Michigan cemetery where my aunt is buried. In Florence, the one time Lu and I managed to get out of the US, the graveyard of San Miniato, with its sunny, above-ground tombs, little death houses with wrought iron gates hanging askew by a single hinge, crumbling urns, and white statuary of dancing young couples cut off in their prime during some war or other. And on the same trip, an auld Edinburgh graveyard, hidden behind a line of shops up on the castle crag: cracked and soot-blackened stones and rich green grave grass under dripping gray skies, and little Blue Tits hopping and fluttering in the fissures where some of the graves were built into the old stone walls. Not to mention those claustrophobic plots in the old hearts of some of the European cities, with their tombstones crammed together, broken and leaning every which way, as though jumbled over the centuries by the tossings and turnings of the restless dead. I love them all.

  So I enjoyed validating and deepening my mood by stopping off at the little Mildred cemetery a couple of times after school and staying until the sun dropped below the mountains and it got too cold to stand around picking at my mental scabs. A sentimental but misguided impulse had seduced the town fathers into planting the cemetery on a hill overlooking the valley of the West Rapid. The view from up there was almost as spectacular as the one from Devil’s Table and gave rise to lots of intimations of at least geological immortality. But the desert winds scoured the place relentlessly, and even the best efforts of the chronically underemployed Darren Biltmore, who had been hired a couple of years back by the town council to act as gardener, were not enough to produce much in the way of greenery on the site. There were a few saplings, perpetually bent to the eastward with their leaves blown inside out by the ceaseless wind, and a couple of patches of beleaguered grass. All the rest was bleached gravel, from which the tombstones poked up in severe, utilitarian style, in various degrees of age and weathering. During the summer Darren Biltmore watered this skimpy biome weekly by means of five-gallon cans hauled up in the back of his pickup, while his Boston Bull, Hercules, waddled along behind him, occasionally adding his own pale stream of fluid to the desiccated gravel. The townspeople visited quite regularly to tidy up the graves and add flowers, wisely limiting themselves for the most part to the plastic variety. Even those garish blossoms faded rapidly in the actinic storm of the desert summer.

  Nevertheless, I liked it up there, and I took particular satisfaction in the cemetery’s barren and futile aspect while I brooded grandly about Mervyn’s fate, and the fate of all of us who strive and expire on this rocky sphere. I got out of the rattly Honda and stood for a while admiring the shadows of the uncaring clouds eeling their way across the rounded ridges and hollows of the desert far below, and watching the vast curve of the horizon toward which the wind endlessly hurried, and sulking about all the mortal remains in various stages of dissolution not only in the formal planting of the cemetery but in the whole expanse that lay under my gaze. The billions and billions of intent little organisms that had run out their feverish existences under the sun and then withered and dried up, leaving their woody skeletons to be penetrated by ignorant newcomers, or had met their personal coyotes or owls, or crawled into their burrows one morning to sleep away the sun hours and never reemerged. Mervyn was only one of the more recent of this all-encompassing harvest, of course. Even in the short time since my trip to Tadich Grant’s basement clinic, which had been such a milestone to me and to Mervyn, the toll had continued to mount smoothly and silently without a hitch, the tiny grains of thousands of other lives had trickled through the narrow neck of the present and into history, unnoticed by all us busy humans, except for me.

  The book group provided another convenient arena for my self-pitying antics. I was in the depths of my mental drizzle when we met at Don Swayzee’s comfortable old farmhouse out under the aspens, which in the long hot summer days were a whispering delight but in January were only bare black lightning against the stars. Given Parnell’s somber mood when I’d last seen him, I was surprised to find that Margaret Quitclaim had m
ade good her threat to lure him into the group, though of course he hadn’t had time to read any Homer. “He’s the only one of us who’s actually been in combat,” Margaret reminded the group, “so I’m sure he’ll have useful things to contribute.” “Not really,” grumbled Parnell, who I could see was there only because Margaret was. He was still flaunting an exaggerated limp, apparently not having recovered from the physical woes that had inspired my recent visit, but he’d at least bestirred himself to order up a huge barrow of tiramisu from Antonio at the PetroMall. Its vast aluminum tray dominated Don’s coffee table after dinner, shadowing our discussion like Achilles’ guilty funeral pyre for Patroclus, the night after he skewered Hector.

  I listened sourly while Margaret extolled Homer’s description of the grief of the noble Achilles for his great pal. Achilles’ mourning consisted of flopping Hector’s carcass around in the dust like a rag doll, chopping DOWN half the trees on Mount Ida to build the World’s Biggest Funeral Pyre, chopping UP a dozen hapless Trojan captives and tossing their dismembered bodies onto the World’s Biggest Funeral Pyre along with several innocent horses, pretending he’d never sleep again, refusing to wash off the guts of the dozens of men he’d recently butchered, and lovingly wrapping Patroclus’s corpse in ram fat. In my mind, none of that did any honor to any dead person, or being, although I suppose Mervyn might have enjoyed being wrapped in fat while he was alive.

  In my cynicism I allowed myself to lose all patience with the Greeks and their silly posturing, and especially with the pompous and self-regarding Achilles, who in my Vietnam-era veteran’s way I’d begun to characterize privately as a douchebag. “Doesn’t it strike you that it’s always all about him,” I complained, glaring at the tiramisu. “The whole story starts with the noble RAGE of the noble Achilles, and then he lounges around in his tent for something like 20 books, sulking because Agamemnon swiped his slave girl and waiting for the Greeks to get carved up so badly that they’ll have to call him in. And when that doesn’t work, or it’s taking a little too long, he sends his so-called best friend out, dressed in HIS armor, to get hacked up by Hector. Am I being a little cynical here to think that he knew exactly what he was doing? That he SENT Patroclus out knowing DAMN WELL that someone was going to see that armor and make a special effort to kill him, and that would bail him out, Achilles, he could fly into his righteous rage, brush off all of Agamemnon’s insults, which if he were actually so noble he would have done in the first place, and go out and be the hero again and butcher a lot of panicky weaklings, which is all he really loves doing anyway, and then show everybody how great he is by kicking Hector’s butt. And after he does all that,” I raged on, “then there’s supposedly all this deep mourning for Patroclus, and the sand soggy with tears and burning up dear old Patroclus on a bonfire made out of all his horses and dogs and enemies and so on, but even THAT is really designed to show us how the noble Achilles’ grief is greater than the grief of other men. I think he’s guilty as hell, frankly, and all the chest-beating and fat-wrapping is just a big show, for everybody to see how sad he is, in case anybody notices that he actually got exactly what he wanted. And what about those funeral games, where they’re all bragging and whining like schoolboys on the playground? What happened to all that inconsolable grief? Meanwhile magnanimous Achilles is giving away all his wealth – like he’s going to need it anyway, since he knows he’s going to get killed pretty soon. And he gives away one of the zillion women that he’s stolen from their husbands that he killed, as a SECOND prize, after a damn tripod, for god’s sake. Really – aren’t we getting a little tired of these guys and their booming egos and their self-absorption?”

  I looked up from the tiramisu to find them all staring at me, including Albert. Even Parnell seemed momentarily tongue-tied. “God damn!” said Don Swayzee, an unlit Marlboro bobbing between his cruel lips, “Take it easy, Houba. It’s only a poem, even if it is an epic poem.”

  “No no, I like to hear some passion!” Margaret was smiling. “He’s completely wrong, of course. Or not completely. Everything you say might be true, Simon, at least in modern psychological terms. But Achilles is completely sincere. He does love Patroclus, and he does feel a great grief, and of course because he’s Achilles his grief is greater than the grief of the rest of them. He’s the great Achilles! It’s not arrogance, he’s required to do things on a bigger scale than everybody else. And furthermore, he feels the shadow of his own death falling over him, too, as you pointed out, which makes him even sadder. He’s had his big orgy of killing, his orgasm, or multiple orgasm really, and now he’s depressed. All this pyre-building and sacrificing and refusing to wash and so on is exactly the way the Greeks expressed their grief. He couldn’t not do it! It was expected by the society, and it probably felt completely right to him, and to everybody else.”

  To break the tension caused by my outburst, Dale Twombly began digging out bricks of the tiramisu with a big spatula and coaxing them onto plates. “I wonder how our funeral rituals are going to look a couple of thousand years from now,” he said.

  “And look what they were sending him off to,” added Lu. “Patroclus, the great warrior, with his high, thin cry, going off to the underworld for eternity. Wouldn’t you be upset?”

  I was upset. I was thinking about Mervyn’s emaciated body, moldering away out there under the ornamental plum. Although in my mind it was at least mildly consoling to think there might be some kind of cat essence to meet me in the underworld, when I got there. What was a high, thin cry to Mervyn? That was about his only vocalization, anyway.

  We ate the tiramisu, and the discussion moved on. We got Patroclus burned up and his bones collected and sealed into an urn (more fat), and all those fools got their prizes for reckless driving and dove-shooting and bare-knuckle boxing.

  “Don’t you think there’s actually a feeling that Achilles has learned something from Patroclus’s death?” whispered Myrtle Bench, shyly scraping up the last monolayer of tiramisu from her plate. “Look at how he sort of mediates the games. He smooths over all the hard feelings and gives away extra prizes to everybody whose feelings might have gotten hurt. Isn’t he sort of admitting that his sulking was really a mistake? And trying to make amends?”

  “Maybe,” I said, but I wasn’t really having any.

  On the way home I felt Lu’s gaze on me from the passenger’s seat. “Should we maybe have done a little more for Mervyn?” she asked. “You were kind of hasty about putting him down out in the back yard. Maybe we should have had a little memorial or something.” I was grateful to her for waiting until after the book group meeting to bring up the subject of Mervyn.

  “I suppose we could have burned his litter box and a couple of those squirrels who were always tormenting him. But it’s all in our heads anyway, isn’t it?” I said. “He’s dead and gone, just the way Janet Blythe is going to be soon. We have to adjust to these losses, that’s all.” Of course I was secretly enjoying my sadness and my bitterness, my trips to the cemetery, and my lonely perch on the jagged promontory of realism, and I wanted everyone to be humbled by my stoicism and embarrassed by their own deluded work-arounds on the subject of death and loss. Of course I intended to relent once I had sufficiently chastised my blind and foolish fellow travelers in this vale of tears. Luckily, events overran my position before I was able to scorch too much earth.