The Lacuna

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Hard times are nothing new to me. My father used to say a man can get used to anything except hanging by the neck. I believe that. But Mr. Shepherd could not. He had a well of hopelessness inside him, and it bubbled out to flood his days and his sights for the future if any. He said if readers found him so despicable, he wouldn't trouble them with more books. It was hard to argue, as the trinkle of mail that still came was dreadful. Why does a person spend money on a stamp, to spout bile at a stranger? "Now our boys are going to Korea to be killed and mutilated by the Communists. So if one of them named Harrison Shepherd is starving, that delights me immeasurably."

  He'd been called names before, and borne it. But when a man's words are taken from him and poisoned, it's the same as poisoning the man. He could not speak, for how his own tongue would be fouled. Words were his all. I felt I'd witnessed a murder, just as he'd seen his friend murdered in Mexico. Only this time they left the body living.

  His books weren't banned anymore, just gone. They said he'd defrauded the publisher with the loyalty affidavit, so the advance money had to be returned and the book dropped. Not many options remained to Harrison Shepherd, watching a Moon Man in his living room being one of the few. He said Artie Gold had predicted it. That sometimes you really can see the empire is falling, and Mr. Gold saw it coming, all the green grass of our land killed for good. I said fiddlesticks, grass will grow right up through a sidewalk and the Lord loves what He cannot kill.

  But that was false cheer, I knew better. Nothing was coming up by then, no gumption rising anywhere without a resolution promptly passed to cut it down. The Woman's Club had become a drear business, their sole concern to oppose waywardness: a City Council man or a school history book. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass no good for children, they set a bad example. It's the same everywhere now, look at faces. In the luncheonettes on Charlotte you'll see people lined up with a haint upon them, sore afraid of not being as American as the next one. What's the matter, sir, you look as though you've seen a Communist! The word itself could get a child's mouth washed with soap. It used to be in the Geographics, I learned the word as a child, "Every-Day Life in the Ukraine" and so forth. But the newspapers and magazines have had their mouths washed with soap too. Even today, years after Mr. Shepherd's hearing. It would still proceed just about as it did then. People have no more vinegar in them. You can resign from the Woman's Club, but the world is all, you can't just stop attending.

  Around the first part of May, then, after we'd discussed it, I went and had a talk with Arthur Gold about going to Mexico. Mr. Gold encouraged it. He said the drives were stepping up. Now that they had what they called evidence on Mr. Shepherd from the hearing, it was paperwork and only that, before criminal charges came. With an indictment the federal men would take his passport. Really Mr. Gold was unsure why they hadn't done so already. He said Mr. Shepherd should go now, while he still could.

  I hated to ask it, but inquired whether it would be wise for him just to go on down to Mexico and stay put. Mr. Gold allowed that he and Mr. Shepherd had discussed this already, some time ago. It wouldn't do any good. The federal investigators can pull him right back here, once they have indicted. Mr. Gold said there were many examples. A man escaped from Ellis Island by stowing away on a ship, and they tracked him down all the way to France. They'll go to the ends of the earth to haul back people they've declared unfit to be Americans. It makes no sense. Like hateful letters from people declaring they'll never read Mr. Shepherd's books. Why not leave the book where it is and get on with the day? I didn't see how they could take another pound of flesh from this poor man, when all he'd done in life was work at making others content. Mr. Gold said with due respect, a lot of men without one mean bone in them are currently sitting in Sing Sing prison. And now the Congress was voting to make treason laws bind in cold war as they do in a shooting war. Meaning, some would hang.

  Well, that lit a fire under me. I went on and booked the tickets and made the plans. Mr. Gold advised reserving the tickets under a different name, the film stars do that regularly. Then simply give the right name when you show up. I chose Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross. Mr. Shepherd was tickled with that. He began to take interest. He stopped smoking all the time and went outside more. They opened the swimming pool in Montford after two summers closed for the polio, and he started to go there often. He'd loved swimming as a boy. I would walk to the pool with him sometimes just to sit and watch, for he was changed in the water, shiny as soap, and could hold his breath like I don't know what. I want to say a fish, but that isn't right. He'd go the whole pool, one end to the other not coming up. I asked him about it, and he said his childhood was that exciting: he learned to hold his breath for entertainment.

  The flight was on the Compania Mexicana de Aviacion. In Mexico City, on the way to the train station, we got caught up in an awful traffic jam. Suitcases between us in the taxicab and the sweat rolling down, for we had to keep the windows closed, the city entire smelled of tear gas. The driver told Mr. Shepherd a riot had been going for days, working men, and police trying to break it up. Mr. Shepherd said good, they've still got fight in them here, and while we sat stuck there he told a story of long ago, his school years in Washington. The homeless veterans making a riot for their war pay. He said it smelled like this. The army used gas and guns against people living in tents, Americans. And those folks still yet bold enough to give it heck, fight back or die trying.

  We took the train to Veracruz, then a bus, and a ferry. Like the sailors with Columbus, I felt we'd soon come to the edge and plop off. Mr. Shepherd said his mother used to complain Isla Pixol was so far from anything, you had to yell three times before Jesus would hear you. That I believed. The hotel in town was old as Moses, its elevator nothing but a cage on a chain. The boy that carried our suitcases into it claimed it was the oldest in all the New World, and I believed that too.

  First off, Mr. Shepherd hired a car to take us out to the old hacienda where he had lived. The old place lay in ruins, but he didn't seem disappointed. He went back many more times, often alone. I found my way around the little town and shopped for trinkets to bring my niece and the babies. One day Mr. Shepherd came back with a man who had supper with us, the two of them slapping one another's shoulders, saying "brother" and "the devil." Each unable to believe the other was still alive. Leandro was his name. There were others in the village, evidently, who remembered the boy with no inkling he now walked the earth as a man of repute, or even as a man.

  All Mr. Shepherd wanted to do was dive in the water. I wanted no part of that, but to hear him tell it, the ocean was heaven and all the fish angels. He had a diving mask he'd bought in town, and needed nothing else, he'd stay out the day entire and come back sunburned. I thought he would grow some gills. More and more he returned to the fishes, leaving the world of people, it seemed. One evening he came to dinner with a calendar and showed me a day he'd circled, some two weeks off. He wanted to stay until then. Well, that meant changing our return, no small thing. I wasn't very pleased. I'd begged time off unpaid from Raye's, and they would be happy to replace me. I asked if he meant to change it again after that. Like a child putting off the bedtime. He said no, that was the day, after the full moon. That meant something to him.

  On our last day, he got himself set to go out to his beach and wanted me to come. I didn't mind sitting on the shore with a book. I'd done so before. But once there, he began to act peculiar. A slew of little boys came by, and he told them in Spanish he'd pay them money to come watch him dive, just to see how long he could stay under. These fellows looked like they'd take his coin to watch him whistle Dixie if that's what he wanted, so off we all did troop down a path through the bushes.

  The place he meant to go diving was a little cove with cliffs behind it and a strip of shore growing smaller by the minute, as the tide came up. The morning was getting on, and he seemed impatient to go in the water. The tide was still low but coming in right fast, eating up that little beach as it came. I won
dered how long he'd expect me to stay there. I don't know what he said before wading in. I paid no heed. Probably I was a little put out with him. I had my book. But after a while I looked out at the water and didn't see him. I waited. Then counted to fifty, then one hundred. I didn't see any way he could have left the cove. And it struck me: he's drowned. Those little boys knew it too, standing in their group, for they were not looking at the water anymore, but at me. They seemed to think it was up to me now, to fix what had gone wrong.

  Did I scream? That isn't my way, so I don't think so. I'm sure I stood up, threw down the book, and moved about. I remember thinking I couldn't go in the water because it would wreck my shoes. So it hadn't soaked in yet, that life had set down here before me a far worse thing than wrecked shoes. Or anything else I'd thus far known. It's true I lost a husband in the flood of the French Broad River in '16, Freddy Brown, and that broke a young girl's heart. But this was worse. My heart had grown older, with more in it to break. I can't put words to that afternoon. He would know words for the feelings I bore, but I only knew the feelings.

  I told those boys as best I could, to run get some kind of help. A group of men came out from the village and searched the cove. One was the friend, Leandro. Later the police came along too. By nightfall a hundred people must have been in that cove as the tide went out, every hour giving back more beach for the crowd that came to stand on it. It never really went dark, for the moon rose big and full, just as the sun went down. Most of those people were merely curious to see a body, I expect. Yet all went away that night without satisfaction, there was no body. He was just gone.

  I remember parts of that day, not all. I can't say how I came back to the hotel. Police had to search his room for some clue or a note, thinking Mr. Shepherd might have done away with himself on purpose. I knew better, and yet I really didn't. I stood at the door while they turned out suitcases and drawers, and me thinking, "Here it is again, the police ransacking for evidence, and the man they will not find." I spied one peculiar thing--the little stone man he liked to carry in his pocket. He'd left his room tidy, every last thing put away, but that little man was out on the table grinning at me! Or rather it howled, that round mouth open like a hole in the head. It made me want to howl too, and not much does. I could tell it had been set there for a reason, and I was the reason. But what he meant to tell me, I knew not.

  Once back home, I took care of things as best I knew how, which was not very well. I could only think one thing at a time, starting with: get up. Arthur Gold was a great help, also torn up about it, but less surprised. He had done the will, you see. Mr. Shepherd left all to me, his house and proceeds from the books, if any. The cats. The money was no fortune, but more than a widow's mite. Curiously, he had wired some money to a bank in Mexico City, addressed to Mrs. Kahlo. He did that shortly before our trip. He hadn't mentioned it, but I decided it was no great surprise. That lady was ever in need of cash.

  With his legal testament was a letter he'd written to me. It contained certain instructions about his books, and personal things, appreciation for the years. Most of it need not be told here. But he said two things that shocked: first, that we'd had a great love. So he said, in those words. No one had been more important to him. And he said not to grieve. His sole regret was the stain his life and ways had put upon mine, and he wanted me to be shed of all such worry. He said this is the happy ending everyone wanted. Well, I was furious at that. For him to quit on life, and call that happiness.

  I moved into his house, farewell to Mrs. Bittle at last, I won't dwell on that. The part-time at Raye's gave me afternoons free for setting things to rights in his house and answering what mail still came. My first chore was an obituary for the Asheville paper. I can't begin to tell what care I took, keening over each word and many unwritten. I delivered it to the office and spoke with a man, and was barely out the door I expect when he threw it in his ashcan. They ran their own little piece instead. They had no wish to tell what a man has done with his life. That would require honest witness. The simpler thing is to state what he has been called.

  In 1954 came the death of his friend, Mrs. Kahlo. The family must have gone through some upheaval, the usual business of sorting the clutter of the deceased, for they sent a trunk of Mr. Shepherd's things. A young man's clothes many years out of date, a few photographs, and not much else to speak of. But inside the trunk was a letter from Mrs. Kahlo, addressed to me. I thought that very strange. We'd only met the once. But there was my name, so this trunk was not some mere forgotten thing, she'd meant to have it sent to me. She planned that before she died.

  The letter was so peculiar. A drawing of a pyramid sketched out in drab purple and brown, and on its top a yellow eye with lines like rays from the sun. Across the eye she'd written "soli" to mean the sun, I gathered. And scribbled at the top of the page in a hand like a child's: "Violet Brown, Your American friend is dead. Someone else is here." It was in English. But I could no more understand it than the man in the moon.

  The photographs I put away, and the clothes I meant to give the Salvation Army, for who knows what a person will wear if he's cold enough. They would have to be washed first, and it sat for some weeks before I could get around to that. It was only by luck I went through the trouser pockets. That makes my heart race now, for how easily this could have gone another way. But it happened as it did. I found the little notebook.

  I knew what it was. I'll say that. I opened the little leather booklet and saw a penciled hand, the boy with his laments about Mother and so forth. Oh, I cried. I felt I'd found my own lost child. I sat and read it through on the bedroom floor where I'd been sorting the clothes. My heart pounding, because of that cave he found under the water. And his business with the moon, learning to wait for a day the tide would help push him through to the other side, without his drowning first. That was him all over. That patient study.

  I read all of it. The happy ending, as he called it. Because that is what he did, right under my nose while I sat reading on the beach. He swam in that cave, to rest with the bones or else come out the other side, and walk himself into life as some other man who is not dead.

  Fight or die was his choice. I know which it was. Mrs. Kahlo would have hidden him when he got that far, and helped him make a new start. She thrived on that kind of thing. He had wired the money. "Someone else is here," she'd written, plain as daylight, and also the name she used to call him, long forgotten. It was his idea to make her send a message, to put me at rest. I feel I know that too.

  I had to get out all his notebooks then, and look again. Three years earlier I'd read most of it through eyes half-shut with grief, then packed it away, forgetting what all I could. Now, out came the box. Papers covered the dining table, a mess like times of yore. With that one little booklet put back in place, it came as a different story. Because of that burrow through rock and water--lacuna, he called it. This time I read with a different heart, understanding the hero would still be standing at journey's end. Or at least, live or die, he'd known of a chance and aimed to take it. What you don't know can't hurt you, they say. Yet it can. So much hangs upon it.

  What I have done with these writings he could have done himself. Set down his life as he chose, for others to read. He began the one chapter, then stopped, claiming he couldn't go forward for want of the booklet that was lost. I could say, "Now it is found, so Mr. Shepherd would want to go on with his story." Which is fiddlesticks, and I know it. He wanted to put his boyhood away and keep still about it. God speaks for the silent man, oh, that I have heard. I've struggled with my conscience, it has cost me dear. It does so still.

  Yet one day I decided to go on with it. I was here in Montford, for he gave me the place and only could have meant for me to live in it. I use a different bedroom to sleep in, of course, and his study room under the gable eave is a place I don't go. But it had to be his own bathroom mirror I faced each morning, the very place where he shaved and answered his Lord and conscience. Now it was a lady lookin
g back from the glass, and one bright morn I told her: Listen here. If God speaks for the man who keeps quiet, then Violet Brown may be His instrument.

  I don't say it was swift or sure. It took considering. Typing up a manuscript, that I can do. His hand was legible, and errors were few. Putting all in order was no easy trick, but no worse than some card files I've seen at the Asheville library. I left nothing out but the things that had no business, a market list or telephone numbers, certain letters. Of his story I have told all, even when it pained me to do it, or passed my understanding. But the question stood everlasting at my shoulder: Was it mine to tell?

  This day the telephone could ring and my heart would squeeze, for the thought it might be him, and the answer no. Even as I am a person of the world, and eight years now gone by since I saw him in it. Years do not erase a bereavement. Mr. Shepherd, where be ye? I could still ask. And here is an answer: in those little books. I always could find him there. So this might be nothing very different from the pining girls singing for lost love on the radio. Maybe I turned to typing it for the pleasure of being his daily helpmeet again. Even if that's so, in the middle of all, the story worked itself ahead of the man. I will say Mr. Shepherd persuaded me, against his own will.

  Not in so many words. I did hope for that, some instruction in his text to guide my hand. Well, my stars, the thing was like the Bible--look hard enough in its pages, and you'll find what you seek. Love your neighbor, or slay him with the jawbone of an ass.

  It's the same herein. He plainly said, Burn these words. He said a mute people will leave behind good stout architecture, and not their squalid lives of trial. Those who come after will be struck by the majesty. He meant to leave behind only the monuments of his books. As he lived and breathed, I saw his wish and I held to that. And then saw the monuments tumble. In this strange, cold time that has settled on us, people did what they could to bury the man and throw everything he'd ever made into the hole they'd dug for him. Like a mummy in Egypt.