One Long River of Song

by Brian Doyle

  The Deceased

  I measure the body with a ruler. The deceased is eight inches long and five inches wide if we count arm-span. There’s not much in the way of arm-span. Mostly the arms are hands. The hands look eerily like baseball gloves. The teeth are tiny but populous and adamant. The tail is stubbish and not a tail you would boast about if you were in a pub and the talk turned to boasting about tails. It’s more of a fleshy rudder than a tail. The eyes are small and black and open. I look in vain for ears. The nose is epic and tremendous and clearly what the face was designed to carry much like a ship carries a prow. I refrain from trying to ascertain gender, out of respect for the dignity of the deceased.

  The deceased is, I believe, Scapanus townsendii, the Townsend’s mole, native to this region, found everywhere from swampland to small mountains; but as soon as I read the parade of Latin labels by which it is classified, and wade through discussions of its economic impact on farm and pasture and garden, and its former commercial value (coats and muffs and waistcoats made of mole fur were once popular, partly because mole fur has no “grain,” as do other animal pelts), I begin to ponder the minimal substance of our labels and commentary on this and all other of our neighbors, and I wonder about this particular individual, and the flavor and tenor and yearning of this one life, and long I stand over its sprawled body, leaning on the shovel by which it will soon be returned unto the earth that was its home and heart.

  With sincere respect for Mr. John Townsend of Philadelphia, who wandered thoroughly in the forests and mountains of the West, paying such close attention to the beings therein that he is credited with “discovering” plovers and swifts and warblers and thrashers and squirrels and bats and voles and chipmunks and this one tribe of mole, and who died young, merely forty-one, having slowly and unwittingly poisoned himself with the arsenic he used in preserving the animals he killed so as to study them more closely, I wonder what this particular mole at my feet called itself, or was called; how was it addressed, or thought of, or perceived, by its fellows? Was it a father, a grandfather, a great-great-grandfather? It is thought that this tribe of mole generally resides in home territories the size of a baseball field, and defends home court with remarkable ferocity, and that its children are generally born as spring begins, and that the children mature rapidly, and leave home as soon as they can, so that the family cavern, which is lined with a deep soft dense blanket of grass, and is accessible by as many as eleven tunnels running in every direction, is empty by the end of spring, and I stand here with the shovel thinking of the parents, proud of their progeny, but now bereft of their spirited company, and now alone in their echoing nest, busying themselves with quotidian duty; and soon this will be me, trying not to call our children every day, trying to celebrate their independence, trying not to wallow in memory.

  This tribe of mole is thought to be largely solitary, I read, and I want to laugh and weep, as we are all largely solitary, and spend whole lifetimes digging tunnels toward each other, do we not? And sometimes we connect, thrilled and confused, sure and unsure at once, for a time, before the family cavern empties, or one among us does not come home at all, and faintly far away we hear the sound of the shovel.

  I should toss the body over the fence, into the thicket, as food for the many, such being the language of life, but I think of how we feel when we are tucked tight in bed, inside the cocoon of the blankets, wrapped and rapt, and I wonder if moles love the grip of earth that way, love the press and dense of it, its inarguable weight, the blind swim through the dark, would love finally to dissolve in it; and I bury the body.

  Eating Dirt

  I have a small daughter and two smaller sons, twins. They are all three in our minuscule garden at the moment, my sons eating dirt as fast as they can get it off the planet and down their gullets. They are two years old, they were seized with dirt-fever an instant ago, and as admirably direct and forceful young men, quick to act, true sons of the West, they are going to eat some dirt, boy, and you’d better step aside.

  My daughter and I step aside.

  The boys are eating so much dirt so fast that much of it is missing their maws and sliding muddily down their chicken chests.…I watch a handful as it travels. It’s rich brown stuff, almost black, crumbly. In a moment I will pull the boy over and issue a ticket, but right now I watch with interest as he inserts the dirt, chews meditatively, emits a wriggling worm, stares at it—and eats it, too.

  “Dad, they’re eating the garden!” says my daughter.

  So they are and I’ll stop them, soon. But for this rare minute in life…I feel, inarticulately, that there’s something simple and true going on. Because we all eat dirt. Fruits and vegetables are dirt transformed by light and water. Animals are vigorous dirt, having dined on fruit, vegetables, or other animals who are dirt. Our houses, schools, offices are cupped by dirt and made of wood, stone, and brick—former dirt. Glass is largely melted sand, a kind of clean dirt. Our clothing used to be dirt. Paper was trees was dirt.…We breathe dirt suspended in the air, crunch it between our teeth on spinach leaves…wear it in the lines of our hands and folds of our faces, catch it in…our noses, eyes, ears. We swim in an ocean of regular normal orthodox there-it-sits-under-everything dirt.

  The children tire, sun retreats, in we go to wash the garden off my sons. It swirls down the bath drain, into the river, eventually to the ocean…ends up as silt…sinks to the ocean floor…becomes kelp, razor clams, sea otters…rises, is drawn up into rain, and returns to our garden after its unimaginable vacation.

  My daughter and I discuss these journeys. And when the rain begins we draw a map—which we leave on the back porch—so our dirt will know how to come home to our house.

  “Maybe there are dirt fairies,” says my daughter. “Or maybe dirt can read.”

  Maybe my daughter is right. Consider this essay, made by dirt worked in wondrous ways into bone, blood, protein, water, synaptic electricity, and words. So why couldn’t dirt read and write? Why couldn’t dirt lean against a fence with smaller lovelier dirt in his lap, and watch twin dirt demons devour dirt while the world spins in its miraculous mysterious circles, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, without end?

  The Anchoviad

  My daughter, age 6, sleeps with her bear, also age 6. My son, age 3, sleeps with his basketball and a stuffed tiger, age unknown. My other son, also age 3, sleeps with a can of anchovy fillets—King Oscar brand, caught off Morocco and distributed by the H. J. Nosaki Company in New York.

  He sleeps with the can every night, won’t go to sleep without it under his right cheek. The can is bright red and features a drawing of King Oscar, an avuncular, bearded fellow, apparently a benevolent despot. Every night, after Liam is asleep, I gently delete the can from his grip and examine it. It’s a roll-key can, 56 grams, with “about six fillets (15 g).” Other than the friendly visage of King Oscar, my favorite thing about the can is the word about, a rare corporate concession to ambiguity. I suppose it’s a legal thing, but still it pleases me, for murky reasons.

  I sit there in the dark, holding the anchovies, and ponder other murky things, like: What’s the deal with this boy and his anchovies? How is it that we are drawn to the odd things we love? How did anchovies from Morocco come to be swimming headless under my son’s cheek in Oregon? What do we know about anchovies other than their savory saltiness? What do we really know well about any creature, including most of all ourselves, and how is it that even though we know painfully little about anything, we often manage world-wrenching hubris about our wisdom?

  Consider the six animals in the can. Anchovies are members of the family Engraulidae, which range in size from a Brazilian anchovy the size of your thumbnail to a ravenous New Guinea anchovy as long as your forearm. Anchovies don’t survive in captivity, and they don’t survive long after being netted, either, so we know little about them—but the little we know is riveting:

  — Their hearing is perhaps the sharpest of any marine animal’s, and the frequency they hear be
st is eerily, exactly the frequency of the tailbeats of other fish. Is it with the aid of their unimaginably crisp hearing that they manage to swim in darting collectives that twist as one astonishing creature? We don’t know.

  — Their noses contain a sensory organ that no other creature in the world has. What’s it for? No one knows.

  — Sensory complexes in anchovies’ heads also form dense nets in the cheeks. What do these nets do? A puzzle.

  — Anchovies get their food by dragging their open mouths through the ocean in mammoth schools, but what, exactly, do they eat? Surprise: No one knows.

  Among the species of anchovy are, to the delight of meditative fathers sitting on their sons’ beds in the dark, the buccaneer anchovy (which travels farthest into the open ocean) and the sabretooth anchovy, which has very large teeth and hangs around, understandably, by itself. And I do not even mention the anchovies’ cousin, the wolf herring, which grows to be a yard long and has so many teeth that it has teeth on its tongue.

  Thus the anchovy is fully as mysterious a creature as, well, as this boy sleeping with the fishes. And what, really, do I know irrefutably about my son? Some of his quirks, a bit of his character, his peculiar dietary habits, the lilt of his song, the ache of his sob, where his scars are, the way his hair wants to go, the knock of his knees—and not much else. He is a startling, one-time-only, boneheaded miracle with a sensory complex in his head and heart that I can only guess at and dimly try to savor in the few brilliant moments I have been given to swim with him. He is a sort of anchovy, as are we all; so I sing our collective salty song—the song of fast, mysterious, open-mouthed creatures, traveling with vast schools of our fellows, listening intently, savoring the least of our brethren, and doing our absolute level best to avoid the wolf herring.

  Illuminos

  One child held on to my left pinky finger everywhere we went. Never any other finger and never the right pinky but only the left pinky and never my whole hand. My finger misses her hand this morning. It has been many years since she held my finger. To this day sometimes in the morning when I dress I stare at my left pinky and suddenly I am in the playground, or on the beach, or in a thrumming crowd, and there is a person weighing forty pounds holding on to my left pinky so tightly that I am tacking slightly to port. I miss tacking slightly to port.

  Another child held on to my left trouser leg most of the time but he would, if he deemed it necessary, hold either of my hands, and one time both of my hands, when we were shuffling in the surf, and the water was up to my knees but up to his waist, and I walked along towing him like a small grinning chortling dinghy all the way from the sea cave where we thought there might be sea lions sleeping off a salmon bender to the tide pools where you could find starfish and crabs and anemones and mussels the size of your shoes.

  The third child held hands happily all the time, either hand, any hand, my hands, his mother’s hands, his brother’s hands, his sister’s hands, his friends, aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and teachers, dogs and trees, neighbors and bushes, he would hold hands with any living creature whatsoever, without the slightest trepidation or self-consciousness, and to this day I admire that boy’s open genuine eager unadorned verve. He once held hands with his best friend during an entire soccer game when they were five years old, the two of them running in tandem, or one starting in one direction unbeknownst to the other and down they both went giggling in the sprawl of the grass. It seems to me that angels and bodhisattvas are everywhere available for consultation if only we can see them clear; they are unadorned, and joyous, and patient, and radiant, and luminous, and not disguised or hidden or filtered in any way whatsoever, so that if you see them clearly, which happens occasionally even to the most blinkered and frightened of us, you realize immediately who they are, beings of great and humble illumination dressed in the skins of new and dewy beings, and you realize, with a catch in your throat, that they are your teachers, and they are agents of an unimaginable love, and they are your cousins and companions in awe, and they are miracles and prayers and songs of inexplicable beauty whom no one can explain and no one own or claim or trammel, and that simply to perceive them is to be blessed beyond the reach of language, and that to be the one appointed to tow them along a beach, or a crowd, or home through the brilliant morning from the muddy hilarious peewee soccer game is to be graced beyond measure or understanding; which is what I was, and I am, and I will be, until the day I die, and change form from this one to another, in ways miraculous and mysterious, never to be plumbed by the mind or measures of man.

  II.

  There Was a Kid Who Was

  and Isn’t But Is

  Times Tables

  Just got a note from my mom in which she tells me

  That my gentle wry witty subtle sister, now resident

  In a monastery, used to rock my cradle with her foot

  While chanting her multiplication tables aloud. How

  I would love to report that I remember every blessed

  Moment of this, how my sister tried to achieve a sort

  Of whispered chant (loud enough to be articulate but

  Soft enough not to wake me), how my mother would

  Forget about us and get absorbed by heated table talk

  About religions and wars and then realize with a start

  That my sister was on her seventeenth run-through of

  Her times tables, how my dad would smile and say O

  Let her rip for another hour and the both of them will

  Be math geniuses. But I don’t remember. Or do I? Now

  That I think about it, I worship rhythm and measure it

  Unconsciously, automatically—I have an extra ear for

  The cadence of crows, the coughing of motors, an owl

  Calling sixteen times to another, who calls back seven:

  And seven times sixteen equals a way to spell out love.

  My Devils

  One time when I was seven years old, my aunt placed her hands upon me and tried to drive out my devils. I was not aware that I had any resident devils and said so, hesitantly, as she was a firm woman. She said, You certainly do have devils, and they are beginning to manifest. I did not know what manifest meant but did not say so. She moved her hands from my head to my shoulders to my chest and then back up to my head again. I wanted to ask where the devils lived and how many there were and what they looked like and did they know Lucifer personally and was he a decent guy who just snapped one day or what, but she was intent and her eyes were closed and she was not a woman to be interrupted while she was working.

  After a while she opened her eyes, and I asked if the devils were gone, and she said, We will see, we will see. Even then I knew that if someone said something twice it meant that they were not sure it was so. I was learning that a lot of times what people meant was not at all what they said. Maybe meant no, and The Lord will provide meant the Lord had not yet provided, and Take your time meant hurry up. It was hard to learn all the languages spoken in our house. There was the loose limber American language that we all spoke, and then there was the riverine sinuous Irish language that the old people spoke when they were angry, and then there was the chittery sparrowish female language that my mother and grandmother and aunts and the neighborhood women spoke, and then there was the raffish chaffing language that other dads spoke to my dad when they came over for cocktail parties, and then there was the high slow language we all spoke when priests were in the house, and then there were the dialects spoken by only one person—for example, my sister, who spoke the haughty languorous language of her many cats, or my youngest brother, Tommy, who spoke Tommy, which only he and my sister could understand. She would often translate for him; apparently he talked mostly about cheese and crayons.

  The rest of that day I went around feeling filled with devils and slightly queasy about it. I figured they must be living in my stomach or lungs, because those were the only places inside me with any air to breathe. I asked my oldest brother
if devils needed air, the way people do, and he made a gesture with his hand that meant Go away right now. Hand gestures were another language in our family, and our mother was the most eloquent speaker of that tongue. If she turned her hand one way it meant Go get my cigarettes. If she turned it another way it meant What you just said is so silly that I am not going to bother to disabuse you of your idiocy. Still other gestures meant Whatever, and In a thousand years it will all be the same, and Take your youngest brother with you and do not attempt to give me lip about it.

  I waited until bedtime to ask my mother about my devils. She was about to make the hand gesture that meant We will talk about this some other time, but then she saw my worried expression, and she stopped and sat down with me, and I explained about my aunt and the laying on of hands. My mother made a few incomprehensible sounds in her throat and then talked about her sister as if she were a tree that we were examining from various angles. Her sweet sister was a wonderfully devout person, she said, and she had the very best of intentions, and she had the truest heart of anyone you could ever meet, and she was more alert to the prevalence of miracles than anyone else my mother knew, and you had to admire the depth of her faith—we should all be as committed and dedicated and passionate as she was—but the fact was that we were not quite as committed as my aunt to the more remote possibilities, such as the laying on of hands to dispel demons. Do you have the slightest idea what I am saying to you? she asked. I said I did not, hesitantly, because I didn’t want her to stop talking so beautifully and entertainingly, and she put her hand on my forehead and said that she loved me, and that it was bedtime, so I’d better hop to it, which I did. As she left, she made a gesture with her hand that meant If you don’t brush your teeth and then try to pretend that you did, I will know you are telling a lie and it will not end well, and she laughed, and I laughed, and I brushed my teeth.