One Long River of Song

by Brian Doyle

  We Did

  Did we punch and hammer and jab each other as children, thrashing and rambling, a large family in a small house filled with brothers and one older sister with bony fists and no reluctance to use them?

  We did.

  Did we use implements like long whippy maple branches and Mom’s bamboo garden poles and Dad’s old sagging tennis rackets and redolent pieces of oozy lumber stolen from the new house going up down the block and brick chips and sharp-edged asbestos shingles torn off the garage roof as ammunition and weaponry with which to battle and joust with brothers and occasionally the Murphy boys next door, each one burlier and angrier and Irisher than the next?

  We did.

  Did we occasionally use snowballs, meticulously packed as tight as possible and then placed carefully in the freezer for days, as stony ammunition despite the cold hard fact that said snowballs should have been registered with the United Nations, especially when one of us saved a few until June and hammered the Murphy boys in the most lopsided and glorious victory of all time on our street?

  We did.

  Did our mother actually say more than once, You’ll put your eye out! until finally we bought individual glass eyes at a yard sale from an ophthalmologist and faked a terrific raucous brawl so that our mother came running only to find her sons roaring about their lost eyes, which were bouncing and rolling freely on the linoleum floor, which caused our blessed mother to shriek, which caused our calm muscular father to come running, which caused his sons to spend many hours in penitential labor and the mastermind to go to confession?

  We did.

  Did we play football so hard in the yard that more than once a helmet went flying and more than once a finger was broken and one time tempers flared such that a picket from the old red fence was used for assault and battery?

  We did.

  Did we play basketball so intently and furiously that a nose was broken and eyeglasses were broken and teeth were chipped and skin was abraded and fouls were delivered with violent intent, which was repaid in full in the fullness of time?

  We did.

  Did we many times wrestle our oldest and tallest brother to the ground, often using our youngest brother as a missile aimed at his feet to knock him off balance, and once the tree was toppled, jump upon him with cheerful violent alacrity, and pile on with as much emphasis as humanly possible, sometimes leaping off the couch to cannonball down upon him, while ignoring the plaintive murmur of our youngest brother trapped at the bottom of the pile, mewling like a kitten?

  We did.

  Did we occasionally reach or lunge across the table during meals to commit crimes upon the bodies of our brothers, even though Dad had said, and he meant it, too, that the next boy who reached across the table would lose a finger?

  We did.

  We did all these things and more, and you would think the accumulated violence would have bred dislike or bitterness or vengeful urges, but I report with amazement that it did not. Yes, the trundle of years and the fading of memory are at play. Yes, we are all much older and slower and have lost the language of pummel and lash. Yes, we have all witnessed and endured pain and loss in such doses that the wounds of our brotherly years seem minor now compared to the larger darkness.

  But there is something else here. Maybe, in some strange way I don’t understand, we used our hands to say the things we didn’t have the words to say. That is what I have tried to do with my hands and my words this morning, brothers. Remember the crash of bodies, and the grapple in the grass, and the laughing pile on the rug, for that was the thrum of our love.

  So let us now arise, and haul our youngest brother out from the bottom of the pile by his thin flailing legs, and restore him to a semblance of his usual shape, and proceed to the dinner table, chaffing and shouldering, and it will always be this moment somehow, brothers, just before we eat, just before the tide of time rises, in the instant of silence just before Dad says grace.

  The Sea

  We were perhaps eight and ten, my brother and I, both invited to a house by the ocean, and that first night, after lots of hullabaloo, we were ladled into old summer camp cots that hadn’t been used since Lincoln’s time, and I remember, as if it was just last week, that we both felt something grim in the sea for the first time—a cold careless mastery, maybe. I still can’t articulate this very well. We lay there listening to the infinitesimally tiny increase in wavelet volume as the tide came in, rustling acres of mussel shells and old boats and horseshoe crabs and the pots that jailed uncountable families of lobsters, and the scents sliding through the windows were loud, dense, lurid, something to smell gingerly and back away from. I was scared more than I would ever admit to my brother. We had been to the beach two million times, sure, but those were brilliant days, an ocean to taunt, not one that smelled like all deaths that ever were, marinated for a billion years and then sent smiling into canals and inlets. Low tide, people say, my god, what a stench, but to me it was more entrancing than I will ever be able to explain; it was sex and death and time, and every far corner of the planet, the liquors of all the lives that are and were, something ancient beyond any explanations, something that had always been there before even the uncountable lives that filled it now, something bigger than land, the biggest idea there is that you can touch or be drowned in, the biggest thing that’s real, that’s right here, that we can’t dismiss or explain, or lie about. I never did forget that night. I was frightened and fascinated in about the same proportions. In a lot of ways we never did leave the ocean as a species, as shy naked mammals. It still sloshes around in our innermost rooms. You know exactly what I’m saying. You have stood there too, staring at it for reasons you can’t explain. I believe that love is our greatest and hardest work.

  Catch

  One time when I was young, a thousand years ago, I decided to play baseball for the Catholic league team, even though I was terrified of the tiny rocky ball and did not at all understand the supposedly pastoral allure of the sport, which seemed painfully slow and jerky to me, and rather selfish to boot; as far as I could tell the pitcher surrendered the ball only with the greatest reluctance, after pondering the matter grimly for a long time and shaking his head testily at the catcher; and then when he did finally take leave of the ball he did so with unseemly petulance, flinging it angrily at the batter or the catcher or the umpire, hitting one or another of these poor unfortunates at every turn. Meanwhile the fielders fiddled with their private parts, or shouted fervid nonsensical things, or spat copiously into the dust, or pounded their mitts angrily, as if their poor cowhide gloves had done anything but idly gape as the pitcher seethed on the mound and fielders scratched their private parts and the umpire made inarticulate hooting sounds when the ball hit the backstop or batter or catcher or even the umpire hiding behind the catcher to provide a smaller target for the furious pitcher. All in all the game seemed peculiar to me, but several of my friends had decided to play, so I decided to play too.

  Because I had never played before, my father pointed out to me that being generally unsure of baseball’s regulations and what he called the rhythm and geometry of the game was a substantive drawback, and he offered to have a catch, so that I could understand the basic transaction of the sport, as he said, which is the exchange of the ball; everyone talks about hitting, he said, but hitters do not actually hit much or effectively, and even when they do manage to interrupt the ball before it hits the backstop or umpire, often it goes awry, which is called a fouled or vulgar ball, or it is hit directly at the fielders, who are expected to promptly defend themselves; so that learning to snare and share the ball is crucial, just as in your beloved basketball, although in baseball the actual ball is tiny and granitic, because the game is descended from cricket, which also has a tiny hard ball, probably because the English are a parsimonious and masochistic race, and actually enjoy affliction, which is a sin, and one reason their savage empire collapsed.

  This was and is how my dad talks, which has provided end
less education over the years; it was a great shock for us to discover, in late childhood, that other dads did not talk with this bemused sidelong imaginative twist, so that you would be entertained and epiphanated, as my sister once said, all at once, on any subject from empires to umpires and back again.

  So out we went into the street for a catch, a remarkable fact for a number of reasons: my dad and I had never had a catch, neither of us had ever held or thrown a baseball, neither of us had ever worn cattle-skin hand guards, and the prospect was so amazing that all my brothers came out to see this also, and this flood of brothers was savory bait for the rest of the kids on the block, so that very soon there were dozens of children in the street gaping at Mister Doyle! with a baseball glove! on one hand and a baseball! in the other.

  I should pause to explain again how unthinkable this was at that time on that street. The other dads in our neighborhood would occasionally lumber off their porches and trot heavily into the street and toss baseballs and footballs, wearing ragged sweatshirts and Old Man Pants and second-best shoes, but our dad had never set foot in the street between the tight rows of cars, and the very idea of him jumping off the porch and trotting into the street was beyond human imagination. Our dad was a tall dignified man of fifty who wore a fedora and an excellent topcoat when he strode briskly to the train along the sidewalk every morning on his way into the city to work as a journalist. He was erudite and witty and literary. He had read everything and wrote for magazines and was avuncular and wise and the kind of dad you turned to for quiet advice, the kind of dad whose most terrifying remark to his children was Could I have a word with you? He was not at all the kind of dad who leapt off the porch and trotted out into the street wearing a ragged sweatshirt, which is not to say that our dad was unathletic, or unfamiliar with brawn and sport and violence; he had been a college tennis player, then a sergeant and then lieutenant in the United States Army in not one but two wars, and he had at least once used his fists in anger, and he was well over six feet tall, and in the rare moments he was furious he had a grim glare that could peel paint. But those moments were so rare that they had become faint legends of long ago, now imperfectly remembered.

  Then one spring afternoon he did step into the street, wearing a baseball glove he had found somewhere, and he did rear back and throw a baseball to me, and forty years later I can still see him as clear as if it was yesterday, standing tall and relaxed in the street, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his burly arm cocked to throw me the ball, dozens of children crowding as close as they could get to the street without actually being in it, to see no kidding Mister Doyle! throwing a baseball to Brian.

  I cannot remember the number of successful exchanges of the tiny and granitic ball, signed by Ed Kranepool of the New York Mets; I believe it passed between us three or four times; let us say three, the number of aspects of God in the ancient religious tradition of our family. But on the fourth attempt, me being a boy with dense spectacles, awed by the weight of an unthinkable moment and murmuring crowd, I lost track of the ball as it left my father’s hand. The ball hit me at what I remember as terrific velocity, in the right eye, and down I went, gibbering.

  When my brothers and I tell this story now we concentrate on my subsequent incredible black eye (something of a misnomer, for blue and green and yellow were also involved), and on the miraculous fact that shards of glass did not pierce my eye and turn me into a larval cyclopean essayist, and on the way our dad went from a standing start thirty feet away to my side in an eighth of a second, and on how that early mishap proved all too predictive of my misadventures in baseball, in which I ended up a pitcher who hit the backstop or the batter or the umpire more than the catcher. But I have always preferred to celebrate the moment before the mishap, not the mishap itself. Mishaps are normal, but moments accompanied by children pouring out of their houses and crowding together along the curb to witness something they had never seen and would never see again are quiet miracles. A moment like that ought to be resurrected regularly, sung for the gift it is. When I do so, I have discovered, time dissolves, the past is present, and my dad is fifty again, and tall and bemused in the middle of the street between the tight rows of cars, and he rears back to whip the ball to me, and it’s always hanging there, fresh from his hand, stunning.

  The Meteorites

  The summer I was eighteen, hardly more than a child myself, I found myself ministering to a mob of boys, age four to six, who ran like deer, cried like infants, fought like cats, and cursed like stevedores. My first day as their camp counselor was utter chaos, in part because the boys were all wearing their names pinned to their chests on fluttering paper, and the papers flew off in the brisk early summer wind, and the pins stuck the boys, and they stuck each other with the pins, etc. But things settled down over the next few days, and we became easy with one another, as easy as a coltish and dreamy teenager can be with a gaggle of boys mere months, in some cases, from toddlerhood.

  There was David, who hardly spoke, and Daniel, who spoke for him and who wept when he soiled himself once, too frightened to tell me his pressing need. David told me about it, quietly, touching me on the shoulder, whispering, Counselor, Danny needs you. Daniel, five years old, was the first child I ever wiped clean, and I believe now that when we stood together in a sweltering dirty toilet on a July morning many years ago, Daniel sobbing compulsively as I washed him with a moist cloth, that we were engaged in a gentle sacrament: Daniel learning that he must confess to be cleansed, me understanding dimly that my silence with this weeping child was the first wise word I had ever spoken.

  There was Anthony, a tough even then; and there were his running mates, brothers who guarded their real names and went by Tom and Tim; and there was Lucius, a long lock of a boy, closed for repairs all that summer, unwilling to be touched, first to lash out. There was Miguel, age four physically, age fourteen emotionally, who fell in love with the ethereally lovely teenage girl who ran the arts-and-crafts room. Miguel came to me one rainy morning and asked, Counselor, can you give me away? I conducted negotiations, traded him, and saw him only occasionally the rest of the summer, usually trailing in the scented wake of his love, sucked along in her sweet eddy like a lifeboat trailing an exquisitely beautiful ocean liner. Although once, late in the afternoon, just as the buses were pulling away in pairs from the parking lot, I saw Miguel, alone, sitting in a front passenger seat, buckled in, hunched, sobbing; and for a moment, for all his eerie bravura, he was a baby again, frightened and bereft. I was not man enough myself then to go to him, and I drove away and left him in tears.

  A sin: not my first, not my last.

  There were Seth and Saul and Milton, who arrived together every morning in a large car driven by a silent man in a uniform, the boys spilling out of the car with gym bags intertwined like forest vines, the three of them inseparably tangled, yet apparently incapable of affection. They argued all day long in their shrill birdy voices, argued about balls and lanyards and swim trunks, about towels and mothers and thermos jugs, about sneakers and small gluey houses made of ice-cream sticks, argued all the way back to the elm tree where they waited late in the day for their driver, who never once opened his mouth, but drove up silently in the humming car, parked, emerged slowly from the front seat (unfolding himself in stages like an enormous jackknife), ushered the boys into the back seat (their thin sharp voices hammering away at each other like the jabs of featherweights), closed the back door (the camp air suddenly relieved of the shivered fragments of their tiny angers), plopped back into the front seat (the fat dark leather cushions exhaling sharply with a pneumatic hiss), and drove away (the long dark car dervishing the leaves of summer in its wake).

  These then were the Meteorites, ten strong before we traded Miguel, nine strong on good days, that is to say the days when David’s mother let him come to camp. She worried that he was autistic, which he was not, just quiet to the point of monastic silence, except when it came to jelly orgies, during which he howled as madly as his fellows
as the jelly was cornered, slain, and gobbled raw. None of the Meteorites ate anything but jelly, sopping, dripping, quivering plates of it, attacked swiftly with white plastic spoons, the spoons clicking metronomically against their teeth, the vast cacophonous lunchroom filled to bursting with small sweating children shrieking and gulping down jelly as fast as they could get the shrieks out and the jelly in. In my first days in the jelly maelstrom, I raged at the boys as loudly as they howled at me; but by the end of the summer, I had learned to sit quietly and watch the waves of sound crash on the gooey tables, slide halfway up the long windows, and slowly recede.

  Although I was by title a camp counselor, there was no camp at the camp, which was actually a vast estate owned by the town and rented out in the summer to an organization that offered the summer day-camp experience to children from three counties for six different fee scales, the lowest just manageable for poor and the highest enough to buy a car. The estate house itself was enormous, labyrinthine, falling apart, very nearly a castle in its huge architectural inexplicability. Its unkempt grounds sprawled for many acres of fields, forests, and glades. Beneath the honeycombed house ran a small-gauge railroad that the childless owner had built for his nieces and nephews: it consisted of three cars, each as big as a sofa, and an ingeniously laid track that slipped in and out of the house and hill like a sinuous animal. The cars and track were, of course, expressly forbidden to campers and counselors alike, and so, in the way of all things forbidden, they were mesmerizingly alluring and were filled every evening with counselors in various states of undress and inebriation.