Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  I remember counting those steps, trying—with my limited tongue-bitten motor skills—to keep the cool tray level. I hoped I had not underfilled the glass. (That was also cause for “a send-back,” as I’d pitifully titled it.) This drink was not even gin, which might have explained a lot. Just Ice water.

  I picture that.

  I see how different a mother I have been toward mine. A slob, you say? But at least an imaginative, passionate one. I had three children; their father left; but I stayed put. And stayed, and stayed. I offered them every scrap of my belief and much faith I couldn’t even claim yet. Much of it I simply faked, of course. But I offered them all that, on a tray, a silver oval one. The very one Cait would give to the poor. Fact is, all along, it was hers. Hers to give.

  I’VE BROUGHT A secret tucked into my new suitcase. (Look, as modern as a rocket, this model has its own built-in wheels, a feature new to a stay-at-home like me.) I’ve brought, along with Elizabeth Bishop’s collected poems, three clean school notebooks, blank ones, secretly lifted from Caitlin’s room. Maybe I should warn the Atlantic Monthly? I believe I feel another lyric poem coming on.

  Latest irregular French verb? My newest favorite: Fleurir—to adorn with flowers; to flourish.

  I adorn with flowers,

  We adorn with flowers,

  She is adorned . . .

  AS I CHAUFFEURED her to school just yesterday, both of us sat big-eyed, over-aware this trek would be the last of something.

  We ran into a huge electrical storm. Street corners suddenly flooded, I pulled over, punched our emergency blinkers. Cait fell silent beside me. She hoisted that veteran pink backpack against her front, making it both her doll and breastplate. She did look young, hunched there under the silver sound of rain.

  My daughter suddenly acts afraid to be alone with me. I can take anything except my kids’ seeming scared of me. That’s too much my own history. A high-pitched mosquito whine, the sound peculiar to women stuck in small spaces with other women determinedly incompatible.

  At home, before Africa, when Cait, eleven, used to hear my unlight footsteps moving down the hall toward her, she’d bark into her phone, “Reek. It has hips and it’s com-in!” I must’ve said this sort of thing about my mom. But this is me, just Jean! Cleanly if no longer stylish.

  Parked along The River Road overlooking a rushing cataract. Our vehicle blinking alarmist yellow, we sit out this gale’s first seven minutes. I’m nervous to even risk my own voice. Bound to irritate her, since its timbre and pleading can piss me off pretty good. We watch evergreen needles drop, whole branches fly. The road is picturesque with mansions and near-misses, their lampposts lit against this gale. Pine bark keeps seasoning our snapping wipers. Spruce needles coat the hood. I finally resort to our one common language, poetry. Part of an Emily Dickinson I taught her at age eight:

  “I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody, too?”

  “In your dreams,” she snaps.

  I assure her that I’m leaving tomorrow. “Cait, coast’ll be clear. Good for us both. But I would like to offer you a little something, hon. Here and now. I chose the piece from Mother’s old Book of Common—”

  “Not my funeral prayer! —Oh no. How big of a ghoul are you, Jean? Whenever I think I’ve got to the bottom, there’s always one act more. Her command-performance curtain call. Command coming from her! Mom, you’re too good for this. No hard feelings, but spare me . . . ?”

  “Chose it from Mother’s old blue Book of Common Prayer. I worried that, onstage, especially after Stan’s amazing music, I’d feel too grief-stricken to let out one peep. I have terrible stage fright, Cait. But, living the life I have here, I’ve never let you see or know that. Bake cookies enough, they’ll let you dodge the podium. Yes, I found the prayer listed under For the Death of a Child. I condensed it then practiced at my big mirror once I got your brothers bunk-bedded for the night. With you dead, they were so terrified, they’d stay completely silent, Caitkin . . . for days. Sleeping in one bunk. Imagine them . . . still! They love you so much as do I, so much, too. Before I fetched them home from school, I would sometimes drive out to a farm lake I’d found and just park there, practicing my li’l final part aloud. Made me feel closer to you.”

  “Look, uh, shouldn’t I have veto-power considering I am, like, alive again? For a dead child? I am not dead, nor a child. I should get a say here. Look, I understand some of what you went through, do. I never should have blocked your number. I’m totally down with that. But I didn’t know that horrible man would trick us. And I really do honor you as the intelligent woman you are, basically. I mean, I didn’t get this bright by accident. It’s not all Dad. But, hey, it’s my funeral . . .”

  “It was. —Caitlin J. Mulray? this rain’s now got some hail in it. See? You can either listen to my prayer for you, or maybe hike to school, young lady. I’ve never asked for much. It’s just I want you to know. Want somebody to . . .”

  “Know what?” she clamps hands over her ears. Her voice rises over deafness self-induced: “Mother, I’m sure your prayer’s a comfort, the language of it. But, what, do you want credit ’cause you still can memorize? Okay, cred given. You know how much fun it is not to hear you briefly? Admit you think I’m an overachiever. (My scores actually bear out I’m right on schedule.) But why must you almost make that mean you’re underachieving? Look, I’m just in high school. Basically we’re the same and stuck with it. That’s what drives you mad. And, swear to God, it’s not my fault. —But, honestly, Momma Jean, nobody should have to hear their own funeral! Pleeeease don’t make me hear mine! Terrible luck for the person. Anyway what do you keep needing? Can’t we just sit here in the storm and make like two girlfriends marveling at nature ‘red in tooth and claw’?”

  “Tennyson!” I nail her poetry reference but hate even sounding a bit competitive. (Is it all Double Jeopardy with you, Jean?)

  So we simply wait it out. Two females, one car, souls too local staring straight ahead, avoiding the electrocuting sight of one another. Hail, some the size of hominy, pills up past green glass. This day has turned the saturated blue of my daughter’s Saint Joan eyes. I ask then, “Before I leave tomorrow, will you, could you bless me?” She keeps ears covered and, from the look of her, it seems, eyes shut, she’s holding her breath, too. That old trick.

  Sitting there, I guessed I’d chosen my public prayer not just for Caitlin Mulray. It was likely for all the bright troubled kids I forever imagine guarding. (Including that least-encouraged of my advanced placement children, the very young Jean.)

  OUR ENGINES KEEP gunning. But, will you look? we’re actually landing. Oh, smell that brine. New ions, fresh fish. With us closer to the Gulf Stream, seabirds do look whiter than the mainland’s. Still, this means my being banished to an island, right? Unpublished for years. No book club membership at all. But look, would you mind? Would it bore you if, while striding ashore in my new boots here, I finally do quote it? Could never make her hear.

  Of course, now I’ve asked, I feel the usual stage fright. But, hey, there is no stage. This is at least my own moment, right? Who’s here to even laugh? At some prayer for a dead child? And, after all, I do mean what I say. Momma Jean always means it.

  O MERCIFUL FATHER, whose face the angels of thy little ones do always behold in heaven. Grant us to believe that this, thy child, has been taken into the safe keeping of eternal love. Give children an abundant entrance into thy kingdom. And so conform our lives to their innocency that, at length, they shall hunger or thirst no more. The Lamb in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and God shall wipe away all tears.

  DECOY

  For Paul Taylor

  BOOK ONE

  B.C.

  Night comes down so hard around my little boat. At last one oar strikes the floating trophy. I’ve hunted this since dusk. It has been tangled in a nest of reeds offshore. Blind, I finally reach for it two-handed. How easily and wet it comes to me. The carving, smoothed, is cold as silver. Darkness helps me fee
l both sides’ engraving.

  With this small idol in my lap, I am free to paddle anywhere, to simply drift. Sunset’s many reds have dyed themselves one black. Over water, over me, stars brighten till they each have fur. Now my boat will likely swerve beyond the shoreline’s homey docks. Current soon enough should pull me out to sea. Oh, I know the odds.

  But, with this onboard—hand-carved to represent me—I feel tallied.

  Described, I can risk everything.

  I am at last a man accompanied.

  OUR HOUSES STILL looked beautiful to us.

  Everybody here, black and white, inherited a little something. Right away we’d reinvest.

  Many bright people—born in Falls, NC—left home early. Elsewhere they do get famous faster. Still, we’d brag, “Sat behind me in third grade. Borrowed notebook paper, daily.” The world press prefers such city celebrities. But, even now, I think the Lord is quickest to forgive us local souls.

  We Bible believers—too punctual—were always likeliest to stay. Falls, with thirteen more churches than car dealerships, wants its citizens optimistic if stationary. Was it even our choice? Hadn’t our temperaments decided? Or getting deeded land that, being highly-local, also stayed. If a person doesn’t fight gravity, it wants you right where you have been.

  Our Falls stands thirty miles from other towns. Once renowned for our tobacco auctions, we’ve lived to hear ourselves called “the Smoking Section.” Being a farm-sized city-state, we do take good care of us. We’re rarely unintentionally rude. My smart wife says to say: We still tend to worship our doctors and diagnose our preachers.

  We’ve pledged allegiance to what my young daughter called, “one nation, under God, in the visible.” Quick to smile “Prettiest morning ever!” we hide our doubts through most of each day’s cocktail hour.

  And yet, till right here recently, we hadn’t really known dying meant us.

  AROUND HERE WE’RE kind of funny about our doctors. Since Falls lies below sea level, we like medical heroics of a towering kind. We favor extreme measures to keep us alive. The farther your hometown gets stuck off by itself, the more faith you’ll put into your main medicine man. (If God’s some sort of doctor, must be quite the general practitioner!)

  We figure: if our physician is a man good enough, he’ll keep our deaths at bay a couple extra years. (And if yours played college basketball, stands six-something, won fellowships to Davidson then Yale? Hell, that’s worth at least a six-month bonus!)

  Weekends before the trouble, people entertained. You pretty much had to. House-proud, flirtatious, leading couples took turns. We liked our martinis as dry as possible; we preferred our sex not. Sex here meant mostly married sex—but that was okay.

  Party invitations? answered one day after mailing. And when your son fell off his bike three blocks from home? another adult would dash out, Band-Aid his scrape, phone you reassurance, praising Billy’s coloring and manners. Heaven and Hell must share a pretty violent border. Canyon fires, screaming refugees. But here? At our river’s edge? the Last Judgment seemed other people’s visa problem.

  Falls’ 6,803 souls felt known for generations by both first-and-last names. Our homes, remodeled, looked even better to us. Not quite a heaven? but surely zoned to banish eyesore hell. And folks that left at age eighteen—even ones now well-known artists in New York—you think they’re a bit happier?

  Those of us who stuck by Falls, we sometimes fear we’ve fallen off the big-time honor-roll. And yet, our town—if on certain days a letdown—landed intact, nicely right-side-up beside the still waters. Till right here lately, we who stayed, stayed mostly cozy.

  Between hot-cold extremes, you’ll sometimes get this bonus. The one honeyed crease, sweet river-basin cleavage. The open sesame nuzzle-spot no newcomer ever finds.

  OURS BEING A farm-town, we idolize those experts most hands-on. So when our beloved general practitioner announced he’d finally retire, neighbors threw Doc Roper forty tribute bashes. Roper? the last physician who forgot to send your annual bill. No wonder folks baked “farewell” cakes from scratch. (One was shaped like a bone-saw! That drunk, people ate it anyway.)

  Ask anybody. Falls’ best neighborhood? Riverside. The one guidebook calls it “most desirable.” Finer homes got built along our placid waterway, the River Lithium; it somehow always cheered us, even its mists. We’d lucked out—living in earshot of water’s daily moods, annual duck migrations. And Doc Roper tended our twelve square blocks and more. He was never a licensed surgeon. But lank at seventy, everybody’s family physician still wielded his knife like some artist.

  “New starter cyst back here, Bill. Shall we just get it now?” And Roper—as mild as tall behind you—described how, this Thanksgiving, his Marge would be serving duck, not turkey. Six canvasbacks he’d bagged at sunrise on the Carolina coast. “There,” he touched your shoulder. “Good as new.” And your surgery, affordable, was behind you.

  One neighbor, still loyal to that discredited Dr. Dennis S—, grumbled about the Herald-Traveler’s Roper issue. A whole insert devoted to Doc’s bowing out. “Any man that admired must be holding stuff back.” But what? The Ropers’ river place stood just opposite Janet’s and mine. Our teak decks plateaued at one level these forty years; any secret there must sure be sealed watertight. To date, Doc’s life appeared driven, rangy, civic. That’s why retirement might prove his Waterloo. We worried for him, going forward. And, incidentally, for us here, left behind.

  He’d grown up local but more on Riverside’s raggedy south edge. A few 1940s Colonials but mostly ugly yellow rentals. His handsome parents paid their country club dues with the month-end strain of poor folks tithing. Even before Roper left for scholarships at Davidson before Yale Med School, classmates dubbed him Doc. (What if kids had called him Preacher? Would he then have come clear home to heal our spirits?) He suffered a most ladylike first name: “Marion.” Seeing the boy’s kindness and smarts, pals upgraded him in fifth grade. Boneless Marion became our useful Doc.

  HIS WHOLE LAST duty-month got spoiled by Falls’ champagne and testimonials. Hating full-frontal praise, any overpayment, Roper kept studying the silver buckle of his wristwatch-band. The emcee laughed, “Now chime in, folks. Watch him blush, today-only he’s our sitting duck.”

  Recovered patients toasted him. A wheelchair traffic jam at Lane’s End Rest Home. His Tex-Mex office-cleaning crew brought Roper home-brewed beer and a mariachi band of brothers-in-law. Doc’s Sherlock diagnoses got described but only after many revolting symptoms. Folks recalled how, new to local practice, Roper had accepted barter.

  In those days, he couldn’t bear to turn away country people like my ailing dad and me. Back then Roper looked to be just one more serious Yalie. But his card-playing father, so rarely rich, had taught him what it meant to live on cocktail crackers. The neighbors guessed and fed the boy. Doc always talked easily with black folks who worked tobacco. So, in exchange for services, he started by accepting firewood, motorboat tune-ups for life. Tomatoes left on his new white station wagon’s roof liquefied by noon, ruining the paint job.

  One thing wrong with Doc, there seemed so little “off.” The man gave us admitted sinners insufficient human traction. Not one comic vice, no obsessive hobbies. Wouldn’t time reverse that? Might not leisure do him in? Why stop working anyway? “If you ain’t broke, don’t quit fixing . . . us!” one tipsy lady-partier blurted. Others called his stiffing us a matter of life and death. Silent, I only nodded.

  From my farm-born father, I’d inherited a punk heart and the disease as scary as its name, familial hypercholesterolemia. Your LDL- and HDL-count lives up in the three- and four-hundreds. No “countervailing agent” countervails. Your heart keeps trying to become a mineral. Only neighbor Roper has eased me through three, count them, full-blown attacks. “What will we do without him?” people asked at church and in checkout lines. Me, I could only shrug. Didn’t his sailing straight into the sunset leave my rowboat capsized just offshore? —Still, I had to wish
him well.

  Even so, rule one: Make sure your favorite family doctor is at least a decade-and-a-half your junior.

  OUR NEIGHBORHOOD CURVES along one slow tea-colored tributary. The more feet of waterfront your fine home claims, the more you likely paid. Serious establishments come with narrow beaches (white sand bought by the truckload). Diving platforms float mid-Lithium. The handrails of our docks have cup-rests cut right in. Suitable to hold a dozen friends’ gins and t’s.

  Our major fears, they’ve all been engineered around. Maybe that’s why country people after church drove clear to town to stare across lawns of The River Road. Family money allows a margin of safety. However many inches. What scared us worst? our kids or grandkids drowning. (Neighbors’ sons—undergrads home from Vanderbilt or Sewanee—could still earn three grand a summer improving the breaststrokes of little juniors next door.)

  SHOULDN’T THOSE OF us who’d stayed Falls’ guardians be offered combat pay? Might not the damage done us on-duty be prorated to reflect those risks knowingly assumed? (I once sold insurance.) We stayed home to avoid danger but it had our home addresses. My wife says my four-square face should be stamped PAYS HIS PROPERTY TAXES EARLY. But maybe the harder you avoid a thing, the greater its impact incoming?

  For those now-famous friends who’d abandoned Falls early, what we just survived—without them—might be the only reason we’d still interest them.