by Kent Wascom
At this point Joseph looked to Angel. At this point, in a life spent searching every corner of every human being he encountered for the betrayal he knew to be inevitable, Joseph Woolsack looked to his oldest son. He would have believed nothing, would have torn this house and everything near him apart before he believed it, had he not seen the plain truth in Angel’s face. The face that favored him most of all. And there in the child to whom he had revealed the most of himself, whose similarities he coveted, the betrayal was made manifest. And now he’d struck down the one who told, who sat up now saying, See—See. And he was father to them both, the betrayer and the one who told.
He stood there and could not bring himself to move, though he wanted more than anything something else to strike. Something other than his children. He thought of falling on himself, beating his own face into unrecognizable pulp. Erasing the self that had made them. He thought of the smoke that had risen from his own father’s head, the back of the old man’s skull blown away, as he’d watched from the doorway of his father’s office when he was a boy of eleven.
Angel now so utterly swallowed in nightmare, wanting one word, one glance, to draw him out, to give him a reason not to do what every cornered outraged fiber of him screamed for. He tried to meet his sister’s eyes, wanting her to say something, anything, for him. He looked to her, gave her this chance, and she, like the rest of them, failed him.
Kemper held her mother who’d begun to weep and it was all she could do to contain her as Angel went for Red, moving with a liquid, murderous calm. Her mother clawing at her neck until Kemper shoved her back and ran, drawn to her brothers, who had now reached the place they’d been heading for all their lives. She, hating them both, threw herself into this violence. Catching Angel before he got to Red, snatching his arm as he tried to bat her back. The brother who shared her secrets, who was her light in all this darkness. Kemper, choking his arm as hard as she could, screaming in his face to stop. All of them together now and screaming. But it was her voice and what she said as she fought him that she would remember. Crying out,
—Leave him alone. Leave him—God—leave!
♦ ♦ ♦
Angel Woolsack left his family that night, carrying with him nothing but what he wore, his billfold in his jacket pocket. Weeks later he arrived in Nicaragua, and in León he took a room in one of the familiar questionless places, paid the boy who came to change the pot to deliver a message he’d scrawled on the back of a postcard addressed to Eduard.
I’m here, he wrote. Come find me.
If you’ve ever been bodily hurt, you know what it means to have someone you love come and care for your wounds. The same applies to wounds of the soul. First your reluctance, the shame, and then the warm flood of care and the surrender of your strength. When you are hurt but otherwise whole, there is nothing more comforting than this. Nothing so intimate, that jolts you through with need and pushes the blood low. Another’s hand dabbing and wiping, fingers spread at the base of your back. New wounds that will heal, some vanishing back into skin, and others scarring, joining with the old.
He sat naked before Eduard, watching him wring out the rag in the basin the boy had brought. Saw his eyes take in the sum of his wounds and linger for a moment on the scythe-shaped scar on his left arm.
—Wait, Angel said.
Eduard paused, the only sound the trickle of the rag in his hand.
—I want to tell you how I got this, he said, cupping his hand over the scar.
—You’ve told me, love.
Angel Woolsack, no longer himself, said he hadn’t. Said he’d lied.
—Let me tell you really.
Three
For the next month Isaac made daily trips to Deer Island, most often by boat but there were many other times too, warm mornings, windless nights, bright afternoons, that saw him swim. If the sun was out he wore an old bathing suit, and whenever he pulled himself up onto her dock or walked up the beach to meet her, Kemper would run to him and press her mouth to his chest, sucking the moisture from the fabric of the suit. Other times he packed his clothes in an oilcloth sack and towed them as he swam. So he came to know the worth of his body as she shaped him, claimed him, with her words.
Your shoulders, she would say. Your back. Your legs. Your neck.
Her voice which was many voices, accents, tones—a country unto itself. And she said so much, encompassed him so totally, that all he could say back was, Yours.
At the School of Design he’d been required to study himself, make endless portraits, sketches, sculptures; hours spent staring at what interested him the least in all the world. But when she touched him, when she spoke, it was as though he hadn’t known he had a body until now. She could sense his surprise and the need that went along with it, to be in her presence, to be a body. If not for the fact of her want, she thought, he might happily melt into the water or blow away like the grains of sand on the wind.
And though she wanted him, she needed just as much to be alone. Years later they would meet a diver who told them about how, after coming up from the deepest wrecks, he would have to spend time in an iron chamber before he could breathe real air. When she heard this she realized that was what it had been like: she had to spend time without him those early days or else her blood would have crackled in her veins.
Their hips were bruised, their lips were sore, so that even when they were apart there was the ache of connection. As a girl she’d gone through a phase of pain, when even the lightest touch, a snapping doorknob, a cabinet lip, would make her cry with pain, until one day her father roared that he would have the whole goddamn house padded if she didn’t stop. He never did, and the pains went away as quickly as they’d come, but she felt more and more like the padding of her life had been stripped away and now everything was raw and real.
She woke one night after Isaac had gone, smelling his wet footprints on the tiles in the dark, and she was left with the realization that these were the last times she would wake alone.
She is on the boat with Isaac, reeling in a bluegill, when the shark comes to them. A shadow from deeper water. The shark, sensing the fish suddenly snatched out of its path, had changed course and followed as the bluegill fought against this unknown force, followed the disruption into the shallow waters of the grassflat and now as the fish seems to leap away into the lighted upper water and is gone, in frustration, circles the mystery of the boat.
She says for him to look, but he already is. Both of them are.
When the shark turns, the whole of its back comes above the waterline, skin patterned in stripes like shadows over sand, twice the length of the boat, which, when the crescent tail of the shark strikes the anchor-line, begins to rock.
Isaac crawls toward her, takes the bluegill still hooked to her line and pitches it into the basket with the rest of their catch, never taking his eyes from the shark. And she cannot look away either, even as he takes her hand, mistaking, in the moment, awe for fear. She watches in wonder at being so suddenly and irrevocably reduced—uncentered from the universe.
The shark hasn’t broken its circuit and will not for some time. In the interim she finally turns and looks at Isaac and slides with him down until they are stretched on their sides in the belly of the boat, separated from each other by a breath and by an inch of lapstraked wood from the shark, still circling. They are no longer afraid: they are not hiding but coming closer—to each other and the water and the thing whose passage they feel but cannot see and to whose motion they soon add their own.
When she told him about her brother, the one who was gone, Isaac said the first thing that came to him, something he hoped would help but which fell dead and awkward as soon as it left his tongue.
—No, Kemper said. If he forgave me he would’ve said something. He would’ve written me back. But he just … left … Like I told him to.
—He might, though.
—It’s been four years, Isaac. Four years. No one’s heard from him.
—Still
.
She was quiet for a while, then she asked if Isaac had ever known anybody who was like that.
—A few.
—How did you know?
He thought for a moment. —They didn’t say anything. You just know.
She lay with her back to him, her face faint in the glass of the French doors glazed with the setting sun. Her birthday was not far away, a date normally meaningless, but this birthday, her twenty-first, marked the date when she would come into her shares in the company. In a few days she would go to New Orleans and the offices of Gulf Shipping & Fruit to sign the forms, and this knowledge pushed her further into silence.
—Come on, he said. Let’s go out on the water.
Storms at the end of Kemper’s fingers, trailing the surface of the water otherwise still for miles around. They were in the grassflats, Isaac had the anchor set, and he went to the bow and leaned with her, shadowing her hand as it stirred the water. Their water.
Your water too, however changed it may be. And from where they sat off the eastern tip of Cat Island the air was clear enough that you could see the water darkening in bands toward the horizon, the shadow of the falling slope of the continent, the end of the land which even then drained from its corn-choked heart streams of poison, nitrates flushed downward by the great floodplain, the river, and fed into the Gulf, and which in the days to come would grow to an obscene fertility, reaching its height some ninety years later when the runoff of a vast monoculture and that of a nation of bright green lawns mounded with the waste of well-fed pets all sluiced down concrete gutters to the hemmed and hobbled creeks which feed into the rivers which feed into the Gulf where, offshore, algae breeds, an explosion of hyperlife as diatoms gorge and multiply and die, their minute corpses drifting down through zones of light and shadow, sinking to the black reaches where there is no light but what comes from certain creatures and the beams of stray automatons seeking vents or oil seeps, the pale, husked bodies settling like snow in drifts on the seafloor, and mats of bacteria rimed with veins of sulfur broad as interstate lanes consume what is left of the dead and themselves multiply and die, starving the water of oxygen so that a layer of cooler, denser water runs beneath the flow of life, and any living thing that passes here joins the empire of death, surfacing in great rafts of corpses that sometimes block shipping lanes or wash onto the shores of the states bordering the Gulf, which themselves, like the dead, dense water that lies beneath the sea we imagine to be filled with life, are invisible to the consideration of the country above them: death fed by life fed by the belief that there must be regions into which we pour our poison as we drift thoughtless as lovers in a small boat, focused only on each other, our minds far from what we will not live to see or what is removed from us by distance and time.
Four
On Monday, 3 August 1914, Isaac rode first class with Kemper to New Orleans. The talk on the train was of a storm that had come into the Gulf and, more, of the greater storm sweeping over Europe, the declarations of war falling one after another, until there was only Britain left, and the United States, watching for now. The world as they knew it held a gun to its head. The following Wednesday Kemper would sign the papers for her shares in the family company, and she didn’t want Isaac there for that, though she wouldn’t tell him as much, and besides he’d promised his brother that he would come back to help with a large fountainpiece at the shop, so in the meantime, and with a modicum of intrigue, they got a room at the Grunewald, which they rarely left except in the evenings to eat at half-deserted restaurants, walk the streets, the sparse parks, the levee, and, once, on Tuesday the fourth, to visit the Museum of Art, where she insisted he take her to see the paintings of his entered in the next year’s exhibition. After a while of Kemper badgering the docents and attendants and the curator himself, they were taken down a hallway overgrown with pipefittings to the storage room where the paintings awaiting display were kept. He cut the paintings free of their twine and brown paper bindings and stood back beyond the reach of the light while Kemper held them up one by one to the bulb. Her face was so close to the canvases that she might have been searching for flecks of dust in the brushstrokes, a story in the layering that made up the image itself.
She saw the brushstrokes were not even strokes of whole tone but infinite particles of color. Bursts and waves that fused together the farther she was away.
The larger canvas was of a storm, a waterspout stretched between sea and sky like black spittle in a giant’s mouth; the smaller was a portrait of a woman holding in her lap a platter of fish. Set against what looked to her like fire—like the surface of the sun—the woman was featureless, or maybe it was that the fish she held was so intricately rendered on its platter of china blue, patterned round its rim with marine designs.
—I thought you didn’t paint people.
—I don’t, anymore.
Taking Isaac’s hand she pulled him into her grin.
—Well, she said. If you don’t paint me, don’t paint anyone else.
The two paintings showed, academics would later suggest, a defiance of the subjective, or at least the human, the piscine forms on the rim of the dish hinting at the more abstract style he was beginning to adopt and which he maintained for what would, only years after his death, be called his career. When the paintings Kemper held that day were, as they say, rediscovered, along with the rest of his work in the mid-1960s, their provenance would contain no mention of this event and they were regarded as apprentice work and when brought up at auction fetched unremarkable sums.
They came out from the dim storeroom of the Museum of Art into the marble chill of the lobby and, passing between the milling people and the statues, went hand in hand down the granite steps that opened onto City Park, where they heard that the war in Europe had just begun.
It happened just after they joined a crowd watching acrobats negotiate the sky. A small show sprung up on the grass beside the peristyle. They stood with their heads tipped back, throats bared to the tightrope’s line, which bowed with the weight of the man who walked it, a Hungarian whose name when he was not on the wire was Boldiscar Ujj, the soles of his feet folding over the braid while aerialists on either side cut flips, placing different hats on his head as they passed.
They kept close, drifting in the languages of the crowd, which was, in accordance with the law, made up entirely of persons considered white. As it happened, they thought little of this fact, of the black people on the periphery of their lives, that the world itself had been constructed like a picture garden whose turns showed a vantage meant for you alone. They were not, had it been put to them, indifferent, but they were blind as you might be to what lies beyond your sight. So they cheered with the crowd as the walker advanced to the center of the rope, when suddenly there came rivers of shouting boys with golfball biceps bunched over special editions of the papers; shouting the word that stood in bold type on the front page. The crowd fought for copies, the shape of the word flocking suddenly to Kemper and Isaac’s eyes as all around them papers opened. And to the eye of Boldiscar Ujj on the rope. No net between him and the fluttering black wings of the world war. Unless the promoter insisted otherwise, he preferred to work free. A purveyor of astonishment, he kept walking even as war overtook the crowd and snatched away their awe, and he knew instantly, sure as the sun beat the back of his neck, that there could be no feat to equal this; he would never steal so much breath even if the next step he took was onto open air and he flew.
On the ground all was outcry. Kemper and Isaac, closer now, muttered in each other’s ears, saying everything and nothing, their eyes, like those of all the people on the ground, fixed on the headlines and the details of the German advance into Belgium, so that few if any saw the tightrope walker fall.
In the hotel room, night leaning on the panes, they sat up awake trading roles the way people do when the world shifts on its axis. When the realization comes that everything has changed. For a while he’d be the one who was angry, then the one
who said everything would be all right. All the time, in the back of Kemper’s mind, was the thought of what the next day meant for her. Of the stocks, the shares, her family. Like many children of wealth, she wanted her comfort without being too near the source of it.
—I don’t know why I’m nervous, she said. People would kill for this. People have.
—You’ll be all right?
—I’ll only be here for another day. Then I’ll be right behind you.
When Isaac’s train arrived in Biloxi, talk of the storm had overtaken news of the war, and by the time he was mixing concrete in his brother’s shop, the men there were saying the hurricane was angling their way. Landfall sometime in the next day or so. His brother had heard it from a tug captain, who’d heard it from the weather bureau in New Orleans, and so Isaac left the clouds of stone-dust and went to the pharmacist’s next door and asked to use their telephone. After a long time of questions and switches, the gasp of lines gone dead, he was connected with the front desk of the Grunewald and left a message for Kemper, telling her to stay in New Orleans through the storm. He felt no better after he’d hung up and so asked the counterman for a Western Union form and sent much the same message this way. After he’d handed the slip over and paid for his words, after he’d returned to the shop and the cold smell of quicklime and the sound of grinding stone, he told himself he didn’t need to worry. She would hear, the trains wouldn’t run when the storm was close, and anyway she’d grown up with hurricanes as much as he had. So he comforted himself into the afternoon which saw him boarding the windows of the shop and being driven, in the first rain, to his parents’ house, where he helped his father nail the shutters closed and his mother bring things to the second floor, her eyes following him up the stairs, her tight mouth underscoring some point she was making in her head. Though he’d been living in the studio out back since June, he hadn’t seen them much at all. He saw this reflected in his mother’s face, which had begun to show signs of age.
