Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “You know,” she had said, “I believe we are all given at least one moment in our lives when the world reveals itself to us, in all its workings. We comprehend everything at once, and then forget almost all of it a second later, because none of us could hold it all in our heads. But we are changed afterward,” shaking her head, “in a most profound way.”

  “Has this ever happened to you?” Reverend Bauxite had said.

  “Oh, yes.” Eyes sliding upward to meet his. “Hundreds of times.”

  For Reverend Bauxite, it had happened only once, not long after the death of his father, though he could not say that was what had caused it. Nothing he could see or comprehend had caused it. He was in the backyard of the house he had rented, and the yard ended at a line of trees, the fringe of a thick wood. The clouds above an exercise in stillness against a deep blue. Then the sunlight changed, and the clouds began to move, twisting against a graying sky. The wind made him look up, and he saw, for an instant, a movement among the trees. They were parting, in concert, as though they were a door opening, and though there was darkness beyond, he knew something was stepping through. Then the door closed, and the trees thrashed in the gathering wind as trees do, and it began to rain. He did not understand what he had seen, but he stopped being a bricklayer and instead became a priest. Read for orders under an Episcopalian minister with a shock of curly white hair, uneven glasses. Was ordained by the bishop in a ceremony by the Susquehanna’s shores, with no walls to protect him. As if to warn him that he would have to build his church like that, wherever he went.

  He had such conviction in his first years of ministry. Spoke as if through a golden horn, his voice wide and strong, enough to fill the old church he took up in Harrisburg. He had found it half-abandoned, stripped of all that was not stone. He hauled in metal chairs, a card table for an altar. His confidence his pulpit. Put out a sign on the church step for services every morning. Attracted first just the curious, but soon the devout. People who swayed when they sang. Eyes closed or lifted to the roof. Hands out, raised, clapping. His first extended families, the withering elders sitting on the aisle, the married ones standing without shifting from foot to foot. Backs straight when they knelt. The younger ones chasing the kids along the walls where the stations of the cross used to be. It’s disrespectful for them to play in church, a clucking parishioner said. Not if you think God has a sense of humor, Reverend Bauxite said, and loves his children. He said it so fast, so gentle, so firm. Still filled with what he had seen before the storm.

  He marveled at that now. The vision had to fade with time, he knew that. Knew, too, that when it did, the real work of his faith could begin, to believe when he could not see. But he had not counted on the war testing him so much. Making him ask the questions that he had seen kill the faith in others. The war could kill the faith in him, too, if he was not strong or careful enough. He could feel it fluttering within him sometimes, a bird in a cage of knives. Its own blood on its face and wings. Let me go. He shook his head. No.

  His hands over the fire were warm in the mist, and he squinted into the coals. Finished the prayer for Sunny Jim, but refused to pray for himself. Did not believe in doing himself any kindnesses.

  Down the bridge, under the bent green sign for Halifax, a man in a brown jacket fiddled with the latch on a wooden viola case. It was his cousin’s. Her talent had been obvious early. She watched a guitar player from her stroller, her fingers shadowing the shapes his made. A song within a week of getting her first instrument. By the age of eleven she played it for hours a day, with an emotional surety that most adults never feel. She could get it within minutes of starting to play, a direct line to somewhere else.

  The war came upon her without warning. The man found her apartment in Hagerstown unblemished, but her not in it. Her viola lying on the kitchen table, next to a cutting board, a half-peeled onion. The case on the floor beneath it. He took the viola, left the rest, and headed north, where she must have gone, he thought. There was nothing left in the south for her. The cities burned, the families scattered. Better to go where it was cooler now, even if the rain never seemed to stop.

  He kept the viola no more than a few feet from him. It was the thing he valued most in this world, as if he was tied to one end of its strings, his cousin to the other. He had this idea that he was going to find her and give it to her. Already worked out what he would say: You forgot something. Holding the case out. She would laugh, almost without a doubt. Know better than to ask where the rest of the family was. Push him like she did when they were kids, and their parents, their aunts and uncles, their blind grandfather, were all there. But he had not found her yet.

  He unlatched the case and took the viola out. The fog settled on the surface, made the wood sweat. He tightened the hair on the bow a little too much, drew it across the damp strings. The metal, the horsehair, did not like the weather and scratched in protest. But he had heard all the songs she had played in the house a hundred thousand times. Just before dinner, on weekend mornings. Some very late nights, when he came stumbling home trying not to be too drunk. The tunes were humming in his head now, and her with them. He could almost get them into his fingers. The sound he made was unclean, but the melodies were simple and clear enough. He kept the viola out for longer than he should have, but he could not help himself. Every note brought her back to him.

  * * *

  I MET THE MAN with the viola first, after he had left the Carthage, after Towanda. I was in my third house since Charleston by then, for we are always moving now. I saw him coming through the cloudy window of the kitchen, lit two candles, and put them on the sill so he would know someone was there, for all the houses around me were dark, everyone else gone. I fed him three eggs, boiled in water with a little salt. A little rice. Made him some tea, a few ancient bags that I strained the flavor from, sweetened with a spoon of honey. He leaned back in a rickety chair, took off his shoes, and put his legs up on the wooden table. So happy to rest them. He was the first person to tell me about Reverend Bauxite, a little about Sunny Jim. About the ship. How it was a sanctuary, a temporary shelter. Their camp on the road to Canterbury, their villa in the hills during the plague months. The place where they celebrated their survival. For him, it lasted until Towanda, and then left him at the edge of the storm. He knew so little, but it was enough for me to begin, to find everyone else—everyone I could—so that we might not be lost to you. For things are ending now, ending as none of us thought they could. But I have the people I met, the things they told me. I know them all. I have not seen the viola player since he left my house, cannot remember his face. But in an instant, I can recall his speech, its languid meter, half-chuckles for punctuation. His voice, what he said, remains, and it is here, all of those voices are here, in what I am telling you. If in the beginning there was the word, then perhaps, with humility at the smallness of our powers, in words a small part of us can return.

  * * *

  THE DARKNESS WAS ALMOST complete when a sound came over the water. A long note from a horn, steady and strong. Turning upward at the end, asking a question. The note rolled along the valley, over the broken bridge, through the wound in the ridge. Then it came through the fog, a hallucination of a ship, a drawing of one, done by an artist slipping into schizophrenia. Every plank a different color, bearing pieces of language, fractured words, the edges of letters skittering across its wooden skin. A dozen half-remembered monikers fighting to baptize the ship, but the real name, Carthage, painted in bright yellow letters. Sunny Jim would learn later how the wood was taken—from a dozen ships on the verge of sinking, from buildings before the flames. The two smokestacks stolen from two different factories before they collapsed on themselves. The paddle wheel from the last mill in Pennsylvania. The faces and animals carved along the rails, framing portholes, running all the way up the three masts, were the likenesses of living creatures the ship’s crew had seen, seen and then climbed up the side of the ship with paint and chisels to replicate. The Cartha
ge was a vessel, all right, a book with half its pages torn out, but the ones left were enough to piece together a history, a history always returning. The spark of a new city amid the ruins of an old one. They say you could see it in the warp of the floorboards, hear it in the creaking stairs. Smell it in the fat burning from the lanterns in the hallway, the grease from the galley. Feel it in the way the boat rocked on the waves. You could not take a step, open your eyes, without knowing how it all was falling, and rising, too.

  The horn sounded again, chased by a sweeping cacophony of bells. A string of lanterns fired all along the rails, and the people on the Clarks Ferry Bridge crowded at the southern edge above them to watch it, shout, wave it down. Take us. Take us from this place. The boat seemed to swell as it approached, bulge at the bow. Too big to be there. The crew, dozens of them, swarmed the deck, busy with ropes and hooks. Long ladders. The people on the bridge jumped and yelled, panicking their animals in their cages, as the boat disappeared beneath the bridge and they saw only the tops of the naked masts passing by, the mouths of the stacks. Then, with a single shout, the crew threw their ropes from the rails, the hooks skittering and sparking across the bridge’s pavement. Finding cracks, warps, bends. The ropes all went taut and the ship shuddered, groaned to a stop. Moved back into the gap until the deck was there, thirty feet below. Then the crew brought ladders to cross the distance, ladders and spiral staircases, up which four officers climbed, smiling.

  As one, the people on the bridge ran for them, shouting entreaties, throwing coins. The officers put up their hands, began to reassure them. There is enough room for everyone. But the people had lost too much already to believe them. Reverend Bauxite put his shoulders to use, cut through the pressing crowd, holding the envelope over his head, fluttering it in his hand. The second mate, with an old trumpet horn for an ear, cocked her apparatus at the rattling paper. Pointed at Bauxite, beckoned with one finger. In the commotion around her, she closed her eyes, ran the envelope under her nose. Was transported, for a full seven seconds, to the printing press she’d run before the war. When everything depended on the arrangement of type, so that letters flowed together into words without impediment, arms joining arms, legs wrapping around legs, until no limbs were left behind, and a sentence could save the world.

  She moved the letter from her nose with a flourish, stepped aside with a bow. “Captain Mendoza will want to see you,” she said. “Before you even take a room. She knew Aline once, too, you know.”

  “Aline?” Sunny Jim said. “My wife? Have you seen her?”

  “You’re her husband?” the second mate said. “No, I haven’t seen her.” You poor man, she thought. She will never leave you.

  * * *

  ON THE DECK OF the Carthage, the crew were lighting more lanterns and candles. Animals everywhere, horses, camels. A cow and three ponies suspended in the air in harnesses, screaming. A troop of monkeys occupying the bow. A llama, easing itself into slumber even as the humans clambered around it, shouting, hauling trunks across the wood. The roofs of the forecastle and the pilothouse were lined with brass birdcages, swaying. The birds in them a parade of luminous plumage, cracked talons. Ceding the evening to the bats swarming around the ship’s masts. Below decks, a buzz of voices, as though a band was tuning. Fervent applause. Shouting, too loud, carrying the promise of violence. But Sunny Jim asked only where the captain was, followed the gesturing hands to the forecastle. Knocked on a door studded with dried guano.

  “Go away.”

  “This is Aline’s husband. I have a letter—”

  The door opened and the captain’s head peered out.

  “You?” she said. “You’re Aline’s husband?”

  “Yes I am.”

  Was, my friend, she wanted to say, but then saw it was no use.

  “Come in.”

  The room much darker than they expected, crowded with furniture. A giant oak wardrobe. A stack of wooden chairs. Bolts of floral-print fabric leaning against a dresser missing all its knobs but one. A Victrola playing “Mal Hombre.” A red carpet, woven medallions at the threshold. Paths forking away from them, forking again. All around a forest of curls and snarls. “It’s a Sufi motif,” Captain Mendoza was saying. “The paths to becoming one with Allah. The moment it happens, here.” Her foot on the other end of the carpet. “This joining with Allah is also the point where the self is destroyed. It’s like that with mystics everywhere, I think. Transcendence and dissolution, always the same thing.”

  Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, Reverend Bauxite thought, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

  The captain laughed, and Sunny Jim heard a familiar thing in it. A tone, a rhythm, shared with Aline.

  “I want to thank you for getting us on board,” he said.

  “It was the least I could do,” the captain said. “I held Aline in the highest regard, sir. How far are you going?”

  “Binghamton.”

  “What’s there?”

  “The road to Lisle. Our boy’s there. Mine and Aline’s.”

  “I see.” She gave him and Reverend Bauxite a look, a trace of his wife in it again.

  “She never mentioned you,” Sunny Jim said.

  “It was before your time.” She laughed again, held out her hand. His fingers curled around hers, the grip dry and tight. Like vines that take years to choke a tree. Harder than she expected, to look at him. And the skins of their palms shared an understanding of whom they both had touched. A memory lying along the nerves, though the cells on the surface had been shed and replaced years ago.

  The captain grew up in a trailer hitched to a pink pickup under a stand of scrappy maples at the end of a dirt road rutted with tire tracks. It was hard for her to remember it. In the winter, the rain pattered on the metal above her head, like flying dogs landing on the roof. Long rides across dark country to get to her aunt’s house to learn reading and math. In the summer, the trailer walls sweated mildew. Mosquitoes at the screen, pumping their knees. They could smell the blood. Her father worked afternoons in a slanting shack that used to be the ticket booth for a drive-in, fixing tillers, small tractors. The stretch of asphalt in front of the tattered screen strewn with rusting machines being dismembered for parts. Her mother washed the floors of a clinic, around the feet of exhausted doctors who worked with fraying bandages, syringes used for years. They boiled the needles, dipped them in alcohol. Hoped for the best. Her father stood outside the trailer, chewing on the end of a stick. One of these days, he said, we’ll get this pickup moving again. Find some gas and haul our life out of here. But when she left, at the age of sixteen, the truck was still there.

  Between her last walk down the tire tracks and when she met Aline, she remembered even less, though it all changed her, she knew. A cigarette shared on a porch hanging over the river, it must have been in Owego. Somewhere else, Johnson City maybe, she spied a man through a broken window, sitting on a bed, naked but for a paper party hat, playing a purple plastic guitar. A woman in a green robe sitting behind him, back against the wall, drinking coffee from a yellow cup, her other hand tapping out the beat on her knee. Then there was a damp sleeping bag in a cave on the lip of Cayuga Lake, the graffiti from two hundred years of teenagers in love all around her. The railroad tracks running beneath, smelling of greased metal. A black dog barking on the ridge. By the time she met Aline, the miles were in her muscles. Her eyes not quite as wide, her head clearer.

  She was working in a diner in Deposit when Aline walked in. A jacket sewn for a high school sports team long ago, blue and yellow fading together toward a gray pallor. Patches of pink bands sewn into it. Half her head shaved. Light brown work boots. All of her clothes at least fifty years old, smelling like a closet, though the woman beneath did not. They were in Binghamton when the Susquehanna swelled its banks in a heavy monsoon, put half the city underwater up to the second floor. A man fished from his bedroom on Seminary Avenue. Women with canoes full of ripening fruit r
owed among the submerged houses, shouting their prices across the flood. They saw shoes in the water, ankles. The tips of fingers. The city lost five bridges, entire neighborhoods, never got them back. The places where Ukrainians had eaten pierogi in the social hall before the services in the domed wooden church. Where small mob bosses had counted earnings in downtown houses while boys dared each other to walk the sewer pipes suspended over the river like rusting tightropes. Where the bus from New York City had pulled in at three in the morning, and people got on, bound for Ithaca, only an hour away. Why they needed to get there by four, why it could not have waited until six, until nine, was a mystery. It was Binghamton, and there had been shooting sprees, yes, and a sweeping rush through the city as the manufacturing left it, of boards going up over windows, buildings emptied and staying that way. But there had been bakeries, too: Roma, Vestal, cannoli and bread. Arches over the roads into the city, built by unions, fraternal organizations. A night in a club downtown back when there was still snow, and a band full of high-school kids trying to pass for older played loud, ragged reggae to a throbbing throng that shouted for more, until the next group came on and hit them even harder, and kept going after the young players were dead on their feet, loading their gear into their cars, still learning. It was all under the mud now, under the stones. But on a quiet night, when the water and sky and hills between were all moving toward the same color, and we stood on the banks under black branches and waded into the current, we could feel the water talking about it all, the words moving around us, running up through our bones, until the city was in us, the city and all that had come before, even though it was almost gone. Almost.

  The captain fell into awe of the river then. It was the nerve of the land, carrying the memory of the city along with the ghosts of the hundreds of miles of white pines on the Pennsylvania hills. The thick oaks and maples of upstate New York. A forest as big as a country, darkness on its floor at noon. They said they logged it for trade, ship masts and two-by-fours. But you could see the fear behind what they did, the way the giants drank the light while the houses quivered beneath them. They had to kill it, all of it, to chase the fear away, but it would never go. She could still feel it on the roads in the hills, in the towns where people went to bed early, left her standing on the sidewalk in the sudden dark. In the towns, they were afraid, but they could not tell her why. On the river, at least she knew.