Gob's Grief

by Chris Adrian

  Walt watched through the door while Pickie ran speedily up and down ladders, flipping switches, closing connections, activating batteries, while Dr. Fie stoked up engines all over the room, while Gob’s wife went around spinning up cranks and adjusting knobs. Gob held up his own hand before his face and stared into it. Walt tried to imagine the aftermath of this night. Not, he was sure, the abolition of death. For all that Gob was strange and wonderful, despite all the extraordinary things he’d shown Walt during their strange evenings, he knew no one could make that happen. Sparks might light up the Manhattan sky like fireworks, the whole house might fall down and leave them miraculously untouched, a whale might be driven to swim through the Narrows and throw itself on the shore of the Battery, but when dawn came the next day, the dead would still be dead. Hank might finally be silent, and Walt would leave this place and not think of Gob ever again. Maybe that would be the great miracle, that Walt would be true to his nonexistent Camerado but finally not suffer for his faith.

  “Now!” said Gob, and Hank said, Goodbye, Walt. Unnatural light flooded the gatehouse, and a great noise started up in the air all around him—a cranking, grinding, coughing machine noise that settled into a giant breathing noise like that noise of the sea. Magic images danced all around Walt—the faces of boys and men cast on the floor, and dead bodies, torn by bullets and shells, shimmering on the glass walls. He looked down at his chest and saw a picture there—a row of bodies laid out along a fence.

  Goodbye, Hank said again, very sad, and Walt thought of how he’d sat with him as he died. Hank’s eyes had darted fearfully in his head, and he had clutched Walt’s arm with great strength despite the morphine Dr. Woodhull had given him to soothe his last hours. He’d not said goodbye, then, just “No,” over and over again until he couldn’t get the breath out to make the word, but still his mouth formed it silently, “No.” “Goodbye, my dear,” Walt had said, giving him a rich, desperate kiss on his lips.

  Walt stiffened in his iron-and-glass chair because a terrible pain filled his head, as if the hat spikes had suddenly been thrust into his troubled brain. The pain moved out down his neck, through his chest and arms, his belly and loins and legs. He let out a hoarse scream, and wished he had run harder and farther from this place, wished he’d run right off the island and kept on going south till he reached the very tip of Florida, because it seemed he would have to run very far away to be safe from this immense agony. He screamed again and again, then called out to Gob, who was standing just beyond the crystal door with light in his hand. Walt cried out to him, but the pain only got worse. Walt spoke again, much softer, and then again, so soft he wasn’t even sure if he made a noise.

  “Help me,” Walt said.

  IT WAS TIME TO RUN OFF TO THE WAR: THEY’D BEEN MARKING off their growth against a crooked doorjamb, and very recently had reached a notch representing a height Tomo figured suitable for soldier boys. Tomo thought they could pass for fifteen, and if they couldn’t fight they could at least be company musicians. They both had bugles, though Gob was not so fine a bugler as Tomo. Gob knew the calls, but they came out like the bleating of an anxious sheep. It would do, Tomo said of Gob’s playing. It was Tomo’s firm belief that the whole army was desperate for musicians.

  Tomo dragged Gob from their bed, a square of ticking stuffed with dried corn husks. They slept on it with one blanket and no pillow but each other’s back. Gob said, “Don’t get rough. I’m rising.” But he lay there a few moments more.

  “I’ll kick you,” said Tomo. Gob rose to his knees, then to his feet. He’d gone to sleep in his clothes; he had only to put on his shoes to be ready. Tomo had procured new Jefferson bootees for them the previous summer and put them aside for this night.

  Gob stood on the bed. “Goodbye room,” he said, taking in one last look at the place he and Tomo had lived almost all their life. It was a small room, not more than three times larger than their bed. The rough pine floor yielded splinters endlessly. The ceiling was stained with candle smoke. “Goodbye bed,” said Gob. “Goodbye books.” They did not have many books, but Gob loved them all. He ran from the bed, knelt by a little stack of books that leaned against the far wall, near the wardrobe, and picked one up.

  “We got no room for books,” said Tomo, standing by the open window, though Gob knew he had Hardee’s Tactics crammed in his own bag in the orchard.

  “Just one more,” said Gob, but he only touched the books, and did not pick one up. He already had a complete works of Shakespeare in his knapsack, the gift of the town schoolmarm, who usually threw fruit at them when they put their heads in her window and looked in on the schoolroom where they were not welcome, but sometimes, if they made her angry enough, threw books. Some of their library came to them by way of Miss Maggs’s furious hand; most came from their mama.

  “Goodbye house,” said Tomo in the birch tree that grew close up against their window, stepping carefully down from branch to branch. Gob followed him slowly, not less nimble but more fearful. “Goodbye mill. Goodbye barn. Goodbye Mr. Split-foot.” Mr. Splitfoot was their grandpa Buck’s Appaloosa. Tomo waved to the barn as they passed it.

  “Goodbye orchard,” Gob said softly as they walked among apple and pear trees that yielded abundant fruit every autumn.

  They walked to a clearing that industrious Tomo had made himself, hacking away to make a little round place among the trees. Their knapsacks were hidden in the clearing, behind a wall they’d built of mud and broken bricks. Scarecrow Confederates—props for games—looked real where they crouched behind the wall. Gob half expected one to issue a dry wooden challenge at them as he approached. Gob helped his brother into his knapsack, then shrugged into his own while Tomo lifted it onto his back.

  “It’s burdensome,” Gob said, not precisely complaining, just noting the fact. In his sack he carried the book; three candles; an extra shirt; two pairs of drawers; wool socks stolen from Buck (their grandma made them with hexes against wetness and cold knitted into the fabric); a pocketknife; a tin plate; a little fork and a big spoon; and a wedge of fatback half the size of his head, wrapped in a piece of waxed paper. A canteen slung from a strap on the sack banged against his chest as he walked. His bugle swung from a strap on the other side.

  “Like it ought to be,” said Tomo. Gob knew his brother’s pack was just as heavy. Tomo was outfitted just like Gob, except he had two pair of their grandma’s magic socks, and a knife upon whose bone handle were carved scenes from the life of Andrew Jackson. He also carried all their money, ten dollars held back last summer from their humbug earnings.

  “Goodbye Anna,” said Tomo. They paused in front of the house. “Goodbye Aunt Tennie. Goodbye Uncle Malden. Goodbye Aunt Utica. Goodbye Mama. And goodbye Buck, God damn you straight to hell.”

  Gob looked at the silent house. Darkness made it look less like a shack, and hid the flaking paint and the sagging rails on the porch. The house sat on a hill above the town. Another hill rose behind the orchard, and beyond that hill rose wooded hills where lived a mad hedge wizard called the Urfeist. It was rumored that he was incredibly ancient and withered, that he was a contemporary of General Washington, that he was an Indian half-breed, or the spawn of an animal. It was known for a fact that he had an appetite for children; those foolish enough to wander into his domain returned with their voices stilled by horror and the littlest fingers of their left hands missing. And it was known that people sometimes went to bargain with him, and received power great or small depending on what they offered up to him, and on the quality of their ambition. Grandma Anna had been to see him. She lacked a finger and had small witch’s power in accord with her petty desire; she wanted one day to ride around in her very own carriage.

  The boys turned away from the house and walked down the east side of the lower hill. They would catch the train where it ran down from Brandon, the next-nearest town. “Goodbye, Mama,” Gob whispered. They had not taken twelve steps when he saw a flash of white darting among a copse of hemlocks at the foot of
the hill. He ran off immediately to investigate.

  “Where are you going?” Tomo called after him. “We got to hurry. We’ll miss the train.”

  Gob stopped and turned around. “I saw a boogly!” he said, and ran again down the hill, tripping in his haste but rolling immediately to his feet and back into his run. Soon he’d entered the deeper dark under the trees. He thought that darting white shape was a spirit. It was his fondest wish to see one. The family business was fortune-telling; every summer they went out in a garish wagon to comfort and fleece those bereaved by the war. Gob and Tomo were frauds. In dim rented rooms they spun out sweet stories for grieving wives, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and lovers. Whatever the loss, they would deny it, whether by claiming it had not happened at all (He is alive!) or else by claiming that the loss was meaningless (The dead are not dead—your beloved is smiling on you from his spirit abode!). But Gob and Tomo had never seen a spirit, or heard spirit music, or moved a planchette except with their mundane fingers.

  Their mama, who did see spirits, said that they would see as she did, one day. “When you are men,” she said. “When you are grown up.” Tomo was a doubter—the dead, to his mind, were dead. He would believe in spirits when he saw one for himself, and that would be never. Gob was more inclined to believe. He would hold his mama’s hand and will her power into him when she was in a trance. Always he saw nothing. She’d come back to her senses and kiss him on the head. “Ah, be patient, my little man,” she’d say. But he would rather talk to famous dead personages than be patient. His mama talked with Josephine, with Bonaparte, with an ancient Greek who would not reveal his name. Gob’s imagination was always filling empty air with shining spirit bodies—his three dead aunts, Augustus Caesar, Marie Antoinette bouncing her head like a ball. He knew they were not real, but hoped with a full heart that one day they would be. As he ran past the tree trunks he imagined the spirit he was chasing to be General Jackson, still quite upset after his recent death at Chancellorsville. A hideous warbling noise assaulted Gob’s ears. Restless spirit! he thought. Miserable spirit, to complain so horribly!

  But it wasn’t a spirit. It was a girl, wrapped in a white sheet, with her long blond hair let down so it dragged behind her as she ran among the trees, emitting the peculiar warbling sound. Her name was Alanis Bell. She was their neighbor. She lived at the bottom of the hill, and practiced a forbidden affection for the two boys. If her mama ever caught her talking to them, she got a beating with a splintered ruler.

  “There you are,” she said, running over to Gob. The way her sheet covered her feet, it looked like she was floating. “Where are you going?” Tomo ran up beside Gob, panting and scowling.

  “To the war,” said Tomo. He pulled at Gob to get him going, but Gob pushed his hand away. He thought Alanis Bell was fascinating, though Tomo hated her.

  “To the war?” said Alanis Bell. She put her head back and made the warbling noise again.

  “Hush up!” Tomo said to her. “You’ll get us caught!” But she kept warbling, until Tomo threw a stick at her. It struck her head, and stopped her warbling but did not make her quiet.

  “I was mourning you!” she cried, rubbing her head. “I was mourning you like I mourn for Walter, but now you’ll get no mourning from me!” Walter was her brother, whose death at Shiloh had set her to running in the woods. “Now, I’ll be glad when you die! Go on! Get out of here. Go on and die! Two less Claflins in the world. Every good person will celebrate!”

  “We’re Woodhulls, you goddamned idiot girl,” said Tomo. “Come along, Gob.” They left Alanis Bell cursing them in the hemlocks. They hadn’t walked for five more minutes, though, when Gob stopped.

  “It’s a bad night to go to the war,” he said. “A person shouldn’t start a trip on a full moon.”

  “The light’s best then,” said Tomo. “We better hurry.”

  “It’s a bad thing,” said Gob, “to be cursed at the start of your trip. Let’s go tomorrow.”

  Tomo stopped and turned around to face his brother. “Let’s go tonight,” he said. They had already stayed home on three other nights on account of Gob’s fretting. “Let’s go tonight or let’s not go at all.”

  “Well,” said Gob. But he didn’t move as he was supposed to. The train whistle sounded in the distance.

  “We got to go,” said Tomo.

  “Well,” Gob said again. “We could not go, too.” It was brave of him, to make the suggestion. It was Tomo, five minutes older than he, who had always directed their lives.

  “Not go?” said Tomo, immediately furious. “How could we not go? There’s not a reason in the world not to go.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Gob said for the first time. He’d never said it before, not in so many words, because during all the daydreaming and planning, it had always seemed to him that they would not ever actually do it, and also because he was sure that whatever his brother wanted, he must come to want too. And yet he wanted not to go. He wanted nothing less than to go to the war.

  “Well, why the hell not?” Tomo asked, very quietly, but his voice was full of anger.

  “I just don’t want to,” Gob said simply. Tomo took him by the shoulders and gave him a shake. Gob said, “I’m afraid,” and Tomo shook him again.

  “What’s to be scared of?” Tomo asked him. Did he think that Rebs were to be scared of? Rebs were to kill like a hole was to dig. And didn’t he know that Tomo would kill any Reb that dared bother his brother? While the train got closer, Tomo went on and on. He scolded and cajoled. He called Gob a bad brother and a false friend, he called him a yellow-bellied girl.

  “You’ll run for that train before it’s too late,” Tomo said.

  Gob said, “I’m afraid to die.” He closed his eyes and tried to screw his feet into the ground. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “Will not, either,” said Tomo. He took a few steps away and said, “God damn you, then,” and he ran off. He ran towards the train, and Gob ran away from it. Gob ran past Alanis Bell’s white form, still darting and ululating among the hemlocks. He ran back home, to the birch tree that grew close up against the house. Only when he had climbed the tree to the height of their bedroom did he turn and look for his brother. He could see the smoke from the train hanging like a low cloud against the clear sky, but he couldn’t see the train, and he couldn’t see Tomo. While he was running he had been too afraid to feel regretful, but now he did feel that way. He pounded his fist against his head and cried, but though he felt very bad indeed, there was a strange elation in him. He felt a selfish happiness, a greedy appreciation of safety, there in the tree, and he could not reconcile that feeling with the noise of the train, with Tomo’s receding from him.

  “Wait!” Gob said, thinking he would climb down the tree and run after Tomo. But haste made him clumsy. He fell from the tree, knocked his head against the ground, and bit his tongue. Then he was asleep for a while. Alanis Bell came up the hill to watch him, and she might have stroked his head or said a comforting word to him, but she was disgusted by the way his leg was twisted up at a terrible, unnatural angle, and she left him there. She went back to the little hemlock wood, where she ran and danced under the moon, and sang for her brother.

  For a week Gob was senseless from the blow to his head, and when he woke he was transformed into a creature of regret. Every time he heard the train whistle blowing in the distance he thought how he had abandoned his brother, and been abandoned by his brother, how if he had not been afraid they would still be together. The brotherless days ran miserably one into the next, until Gob woke one night absolutely certain that Tomo had been killed. He tried not to believe it, for fear that his belief might make it so, but though he struggled against the knowledge, it was confirmed at the end of the summer, when Tomo’s body returned to Homer.

  Gob was not supposed to be one of the pathetic, maudlin bereaved. Tears were appropriate for ordinary people, but Claflins were special; the lie of death was undone by their magic senses. His mama scolded
him when he cried for his brother.

  “The dead are not dead,” she said. “Would you cry if Tomo moved to Wyoming? The Summerland is closer than Wyoming.” This did nothing to comfort Gob. Wyoming seemed to him a place incredibly far away. In fact, he was not even sure where it was, and he knew it must be a place peopled exclusively by savages and bears. It was no place he wanted his brother to be. He said so, and his mother put her soft white hand over his mouth and told him again that the dead were not dead, but more alive even than the living. They dwelt happily in the Summerland.

  Gob had cottoned to that notion when he was a child, but Tomo had always hated it. Now Gob hated it too. Now he suspected that the dead were dead, that death was like sleep without dreams, or like being locked in a dark wardrobe where you did not hear or smell or feel or touch, where you did not sleep or wake, where you did not even contemplate the darkness, but you were one with it, and it was a big, horrible nothing.

  He asked his mama if she couldn’t bring Tomo back to visit. Couldn’t she talk to him? She said that she could. They put out all the lights in his room except for a single candle. She grew still and quiet, and then began to sway lightly from side to side. “Mama?” she said. “Is that you walking in the light? Is that you? Is that my brother Gob? How come you look so sad, Gob? Don’t you know I’m a living spirit? Don’t you know I’m walking by your side, and one day you’ll see me just like Mama does, when you’re a man? Don’t you know how it’s true, Gob?”

  Gob thought he would float away from joy and relief, and grabbed at the mattress for purchase. He talked for a little while with Tomo, asking what it was like in the Summerland, if there were other children there, if he was treated nice. But his mama’s answers began to make him suspicious. He was an experienced humbugger, and something seemed to him not right. Was there a message for Alanis Bell? “Yes,” replied his mother, who knew nothing of Tomo’s hatred for the girl. “Tell her I miss my sweet friend.” Gob began to cry then, because he knew his mama was lying to him, because he felt certain in that moment that there was nothing beyond death but the filthy, silent grave. He fell back on the bed and imagined he was falling into a grave himself—he was falling, and he might have fallen forever if a furious rage had not come welling up in him. He opened his eyes and saw his mother peering down at him with concern. “Gob?” she said. “What’s wrong, brother?” He shouted at her, not words, just a howl, and he struck at her face with his fist. He chased her from his room, and when she was gone he pounded on the door he’d slammed behind her, and he howled and howled.