One Long River of Song

by Brian Doyle

  A soldier friend of mine tells me the same thing happens when you are in a fight: that everything’s normal, and then it isn’t, and then it’s normal again, except if there are guys screaming or crumpled and not screaming. You get up cautiously from where you are kneeling, and you look around, and everything’s just like it was a minute ago, coffee and dragonflies and the kids sleeping in, and then you just keep moving. It’s sort of boring, I guess, from a certain perspective.

  The Four Gospels

  The first time I ever entered the tiny subterranean apartment of the woman who would eventually marry me, I was struck by a number of things: her large and not especially friendly dog, who regarded me with understandable suspicion; the lack of any extraneous furniture or appurtenances other than those required by an artist who was also a superb cook; and her one small rickety bookshelf, perched over her bed, so that she could reach up with one hand, while supine, and haul down an inky companion, therein to ramble and plumb.

  Being a writer, I went right to the bookshelf, which was also blessedly away from the grim and gimlet-eyed dog, and examined her collection. There were four books and four books only, although I later discovered she was a ferocious and omnivorous reader; she later explained that her days were so crammed with work and school that if she had a few moments to read at night she counted herself lucky, and these four books were, perhaps, talismans of a sort, touchstones, compass points, lodestars, old friends, necessary and nutritious companions.

  I remember them well, I remember how they leaned on each other there on the incredibly rickety shelf (the whole apartment was like that, and I felt like an unruly giant whose slightest misstep or sneeze would bring tables and shelves crashing to the floor), and I report with a smile that she still owns all four of the books, though now they are surrounded by many other books, for we have been married for nearly thirty years, and our collections long ago merged and mixed and mingled, and now Ellen Gilchrist rubs up against Bernard DeVoto, and Peter Matthiessen shoulders Laurie Colwin, and Annie Dillard is cheek by jowl with Alberto Giacometti, and other interesting pairings like that, making you wonder what riveting conversations are had on the shelves at night, when all is otherwise still until Joseph Conrad begins whispering to Elinor Lipman…

  The four were Willa Cather’s fine Song of the Lark, and Harper Lee’s perfect To Kill a Mockingbird, and David James Duncan’s great headlong Pacific Northwest coming-of-age novel The River Why, and best of all, greatest of all, the glorious hilarious epic sprawling wondrous novel The Horse’s Mouth, by the Irishman Joyce Cary, and that was all, just those four, the three lean and the one thick with Cary’s word-wizardry; and now I look back through the years at that shelf and wonder if those four books did not nearly encapsulate and characterize and explain and draw a collective map to the woman who married me.

  There was a Northwest classic, filled with burling rivers and dense spruce forests and laughter and love and confusion and epiphany and rain; and those are her things, her place, her scent. There was the story of an American woman rising to be a terrific artist, and realizing that she could steer her own life, and not be beholden to a lover or a husband or the harness, however pleasant, of family; and this is her lifelong work and story. There is the story of a bright brave American girl and a beloved stalwart father, who teaches integrity and grace by his very being; and that is her story, and her father. And there is the novel I love above all others, filled with humor and struggle and prickly grace and a yearning to marshal color and shape and paint and canvas in such ways as to sing and celebrate the entire universe and everything in it; and that is her life and work and story, as I have had many occasions to see.

  I am sure she did not choose those four books as a message to such amorous suitors as me; I am sure she did not herself consider that they might collectively say something piercing and eloquent about she who owned them, and gathered them together like a musical quartet on that most rickety of shelves; but it seems to me now that amazingly they did and do speak clearly and penetratingly of she who carried them from one ocean to another, many years ago, and occasionally reached up behind her head with one hand, when she was supine and weary, and hauled down a friend, who spoke to her of character and courage, grace and humor, love and imagination, rain and affection, and so much more. Those are very good books on their own merits, but to me, and I believe to my lovely bride, they will always be great books for other reasons, some of them too subtle for words.

  God

  By purest chance I was out in our street when the kindergarten

  Bus mumbled past going slow and I looked up just as all seven

  Kids on my side of the bus looked at me and I grinned and they

  Lit up and all this crap about God being dead and where is God

  And who owns God and who hears God better than whom is the

  Most egregiously stupid crap imaginable because if you want to

  See God and have God see you and have this mutual perception

  Be completely untrammeled by blather and greed and comment,

  Go stand in the street as the kindergarten bus murmurs past. I’m

  Not kidding and this is not a metaphor. I am completely serious.

  Everyone babbles about God but I saw God this morning just as

  The bus slowed down for the stop at Maple Street. God was six

  Girls and one boy with a bright green and purple stegosaurus hat.

  Of course God would wear a brilliantly colored tall dinosaur hat!

  If you were the Imagination that dreamed up everything that ever

  Was in this blistering perfect terrible world, wouldn’t you wear a

  Hat celebrating some of the wildest most amazing developments?

  V.

  We Are Better Than We Think

  Clairtonica Street

  Our dad never spoke about his childhood at all when

  We were kids. We would ask him and he would chat

  About this and that and the other thing; we were easy

  To distract, and Dad was gentle and funny and to hear

  Him on any subject was a pleasure. Many years went

  By, and then the sons decided to haul him back to his

  Native Pittsburgh. We were checking genealogy. But

  When we drove up a snowy hill, and found the house

  He had lived in as a child, he burst into tears. We had

  Never seen Dad cry before, none of us. We sat quietly.

  My brothers and our father are big tall guys and there

  Was a sort of long big tall quiet in the van. Very large

  Men being silent is a sound. Good thing no one spoke.

  Any words right then would have been a sort of insult.

  We could talk, afterward, about how our father opened

  The gates and told us everything, all the pain and loss,

  All the ways he created his gentle quiet wry manhood,

  All the wit and dignity and love and patience and guts,

  All the ways his life was a song of grace and gratitude.

  But for now let’s just sit here in the back of the old van.

  Give the man time with his tears. He waited something

  Like seventy years to cry these tears. You have to give

  These tears some space and some respect. In a moment

  He’ll say, gentle as always, that’s my house! my house!,

  But now let’s just sit and revere him from the back seat.

  Dawn and Mary

  Early one morning several teachers and staffers at a Connecticut grade school were in a meeting. The meeting had been underway for about five minutes when they heard a chilling sound in the hallway. (We heard pop-pop-pop, said one of the staffers later.)

  Most of them dove under the table. That is the reasonable thing to do, what they were trained to do, and that is what they did.

  But two of the staffers jumped, or leaped, or lunged out of their chairs and ran toward the sound of bullets. Which word you u
se depends on which news account of that morning you read, but the words all point in the same direction—toward the bullets.

  One of the staffers was the principal. Her name was Dawn. She had two daughters. Her husband had proposed to her five times before she’d finally said yes, and they had been married for ten years. They had a vacation house on a lake. She liked to get down on her knees to paint with the littlest kids in her school.

  The other staffer was a school psychologist named Mary. She had two daughters. She was a football fan. She had been married for more than thirty years. She and her husband had a cabin on a lake. She loved to go to the theater. She was due to retire in one year. She liked to get down on her knees to work in her garden.

  Dawn the principal told the teachers and the staffers to lock the door behind them, and the teachers and the staffers did so after Dawn and Mary ran out into the hall.

  You and I have been in that hallway. We spent seven years of our childhood in that hallway. It’s friendly and echoing, and when someone opens the doors at the end, a wind comes and flutters all the paintings and posters on the walls.

  Dawn and Mary jumped, or leaped, or lunged toward the sound of bullets. Every fiber of their bodies—bodies descended from millions of years of bodies that had leaped away from danger—must have wanted to dive under the table. That’s what they’d been trained to do. That’s how you live to see another day. That’s how you stay alive to paint with the littlest kids and work in the garden and hug your daughters and drive off laughing to your cabin on the lake.

  But they leaped for the door, and Dawn said, Lock the door after us, and they lunged right at the boy with the rifle.

  The next time someone says the word hero to you, you say this:

  There once were two women. One was named Dawn, and the other was named Mary. They both had two daughters. They both loved to kneel down to care for small beings. They leaped from their chairs and ran right at the boy with the rifle, and if we ever forget their names, if we ever forget the wind in that hallway, if we ever forget what they did, if we ever forget that there is something in us beyond sense and reason that snarls at death and runs roaring at it to defend children, if we ever forget that all children are our children, then we are fools who have allowed memory to be murdered too, and what good are we then? What good are we then?

  His Last Game

  We were supposed to be driving to the pharmacy for his prescriptions, but he said just drive around for a while, my prescriptions aren’t going anywhere without me, so we just drove around. We drove around the edges of the college where he had worked and we saw a blue heron in a field of stubble, which is not something you see every day, and we stopped for a while to see if the heron was fishing for mice or snakes, on which we bet a dollar, me taking mice and him taking snakes, but the heron glared at us and refused to work under scrutiny, so we drove on. We drove through the arboretum checking on the groves of ash and oak and willow trees, which were still where they were last time we looked, and then we checked on the wood-duck boxes in the pond, which still seemed sturdy and did not feature ravenous weasels that we noticed, and then we saw a kestrel hanging in the crisp air like a tiny helicopter, but as soon as we bet mouse or snake the kestrel vanished, probably for religious reasons, said my brother, probably a lot of kestrels are adamant that gambling is immoral, but we are just not as informed as we should be about kestrels.

  We drove deeper into the city and I asked him why we were driving this direction, and he said I am looking for something that when I see it you will know what I am looking for, which made me grin, because he knew and I knew that I would indeed know, because we have been brothers for 50 years, and brothers have many languages, some of which are physical, like broken noses and fingers and teeth and punching each other when you want to say I love you but don’t know how to say that right, and some of them are laughter, and some of them are roaring and spitting, and some of them are weeping in the bathroom, and some of them we don’t have words for yet. By now it was almost evening, and just as I turned on the car’s running lights I saw what it was he was looking for, which was a basketball game in a park. I laughed and he laughed and I parked the car. There were six guys on the court and to their credit they were playing full court. Five of the guys looked to be in their twenties, and they were fit and muscled, and one of them wore a porkpie hat. The sixth guy was much older, but he was that kind of older ballplayer who is comfortable with his age and he knew where to be and what not to try. We watched for a while and didn’t say anything but both of us noticed that one of the young guys was not as good as he thought he was, and one was better than he knew he was, and one was flashy but essentially useless, and the guy with the porkpie hat was a worker, setting picks, boxing out, whipping outlet passes, banging the boards not only on defense but on offense, which is much harder. The fifth young guy was one of those guys who ran up and down yelling and waving for the ball, which he never got. This guy was supposed to be covering the older guy but he didn’t bother, and the older guy gently made him pay for his inattention, scoring occasionally on backdoor cuts and shots from the corners on which he was so alone he could have opened a circus and sold tickets, as my brother said. The older man grew visibly weary as we watched, and my brother said he’s got one last basket in him, and I said I bet a dollar it’s a shot from the corner, and my brother said no, he doesn’t even have the gas for that, he’ll snake the kid somehow, you watch, and just then the older man, who was bent over holding the hems of his shorts like he was exhausted, suddenly cut to the basket, caught a bounce pass, and scored, and the game ended, maybe because the park lights didn’t go on even though the streetlight did.

  On the way home my brother and I passed the heron in the field of stubble again, and the heron stopped work again and glared at us until we turned the corner. That is one withering glare, said my brother. That’s a ballplayer glare if ever I saw one. That’s the glare a guy gives another guy when the guy you were supposed to be covering scores on a backdoor cut and you thought your guy was ancient and near death but it turns out he snaked you good and you are an idiot. I know that glare. You owe me a dollar. We better go get my prescriptions. They are not going to do any good but we better get them anyway so they don’t go to waste. One less thing for my family to do afterward. That game was good but the heron was even better. I think the prescriptions are pointless now but we already paid for them so we might as well get them. They’ll just get thrown out if we don’t pick them up. That was a good last game, though. I’ll remember the old guy, sure, but the kid with the hat banging the boards, that was cool. You hardly ever see a guy with a porkpie hat hammering the boards. There’s so much to love, my brother added. All the little things. Remember shooting baskets at night and the only way you could tell if the shot went in was the sound of the net? Remember the time we cut the fingertips off our gloves so we could shoot on icy days and Dad was so angry he lost his voice and he was supposed to give a speech and had to gargle and Mom laughed so hard we thought she was going to pee? Remember that? I remember that. What happens to what I remember? You remember it for me, okay? You remember the way that heron glared at us like he would kick our ass except he was working. And you remember that old man snaking that kid. Stupid kid, you could say, but that’s the obvious thing. The beautiful thing is the little thing that the old guy knew full well he wasn’t going to cut around picks and drift out into the corner again, that would burn his last gallon of gas, not to mention he’d have to hoist up a shot from way out there, so he snakes the kid beautiful, he knows the kid thinks he’s old, and the guy with the hat sees him cut, and gets him the ball on a dime, that’s a beautiful thing because it’s little, and we saw it and we knew what it meant. You remember that for me. You owe me a dollar.

  Memorial Day

  We are at a parade. It is Memorial Day. I am sitting on the curb in front of the church with my brother, reserving our family’s spot. The rest of the family is coming along slowly, our father carrying
the baby, but my brother and I have run ahead because we don’t want to miss a single soldier in uniform or girl twirling a baton or bespectacled beaming cherubic man wearing a fez. We might see an elephant. We will see horses and fire trucks. We will see politicians in convertibles. We will see men older than our dad wearing their Army uniforms. Army is green and the others are blue. Our dad will not walk in the parade wearing his uniform. He declines politely every year when he is asked. He says he no longer has his uniform. He says he does not know where it went, although we think he does know where it went. He says he wore it only because the job had to be done, and now that the war is over, there is no reason to have a uniform. He says uniforms are dangerous statements, if you think about it. He says uniforms can easily confer false authority, and encourage hollow bravado, and augment unfortunate inclinations, and exacerbate violent predilections. This is how he talks. He says uniforms are public pronouncements, like parades, and we should be careful about what we say in public. He says we should be leery of men marching in uniforms. He says no one has more respect for members of the armed forces than he does, but that it would be a better world if no one ever had to take up arms, and that is a fact. He says in his experience it is the man who has been in a war who understands that war is cruel and foolish and sinful, and anyone who defends war as natural to the human condition is a person of stunted imagination. He says a study of history shows not only that we are a savage species but that we are a species capable of extraordinary imaginative leaps. He says that someday we might devise ways to outwit violence, as Mr. Mohandas Gandhi tried to do. He says most wars, maybe all wars, are about money in the end, and that when we hear the beating of war drums, we should suspect that it is really a call for market expansion. He says war is a virus and imagination is the cure.