by Paul Harding
How can I not wonder what it would be like to sit in that cold silver water, that cold stone water up to my chin, the tangled marsh grass at the level of my eyes, sit in the still water, in the still air, bright day behind me lighting the face of everything under the dark millstone cloud lid in front of me, watching the storm coming from the north? There is my father whispering in my ear, Be still, still, still. And yet you change everything. What was the marsh like, waiting for the storm before you came and kneeled in the water? It was like nothing. Watch after you leave the water, now cold and regretful, miles from home, certain of the belt on your backside, the cold shoulder, the extra chores; watch. Watch the water heal itself of your presence-not to repair injury but to offer itself again should you care to risk another strapping, because instead of the sky being dark and the trees and stones bright, the next time the sky will be bright but the world gloomy. Or there will be rain with no wind. Or wind and sun. Or a starry sky laced with clouds that look like cotton thread. You could not do better if you passed a thousand acts of Congress.
0, Senator, drop your trousers! Loosen your cravat! Eschew your spats and step into that shallow, teeming world of mayflies and dragonflies and frogs' eyes staring eye-to-eye with your own, and the silty bottom. Cease your filibuster against the world God gave you. Enough of your clamor, your embarrassing tendencies, your crooking of paths in the name of straightness. Enough of your calling ruin upon the Moor and the Hindoo, the Zulu and the Hun. None of it gains you a jot. Behold, and be a genius! At a breath, I shall disperse your world, your monuments of metal, your monuments of stone and your brightly striped rags. They will scatter like so many pins and skittles. I shall tire myself more quenching a candle in its sconce. Phew! There: you are gone.
I should say that the sermons my father gave on Sundays were bland and vague. Parishioners regularly drifted off to sleep sitting up in their pews and it was common to hear snoring coming from this or that corner of the room. My father's voice droned on about the importance of every little creature in the field, enumerating practically every crawling, swimming, flying beast he could and reiterating that it, too, was as important as any other of God's creations. And consider the rats in the grain, he would say. And the barking crows, and the squirrels collecting nuts. Are they, too, not God's creatures? And the foraging raccoon.
There was no correspondence between these inept speeches with the passionate, even obsessive writing he did up beneath the pitched roof. It seemed, in fact, that the more time my father spent in his study composing, the worse his sermons became, until they were practically no more than incoherent mumbling, in the midst of which, here and there, if one was actually listening, you could pick out the name of the odd prophet or the citation of a psalm or chapter or verse. The people of the town had little patience for mumbling, and what they at first must have taken as perhaps an especially indirect intelligence, one perhaps even given to constructing his sermons as parables in emulation of Christ, they soon got fed up with and began to complain about first in discreet letters, then directly to my father on the way out of church. My father responded to this criticism with genuine surprise, as if shocked that what must have really been on his mind had not been included in his sermon. My goodness, Mrs. Greenleaf, he would say, I am so sorry the sermon was not to your liking. The path is narrow. I must have wavered, he would say, and look confused. This was the first sign that he had in some way become unhitched from our world and was already beginning to drift away.
Finally, the situation became so alarming to the congregation (after a particularly baffling Sunday-morning service, during which my father at one point clearly mentioned something about the devil being finally not so bad after all) that the parishioners demanded a special meeting to address their new minister's deteriorating condition. On the Wednesday morning he was to meet with the deacons and the congregation, my mother practically had to dress him herself. He was pale and unshaven and seemed like a child. My mother saw him and cried, What are you doing? We have to go to the church for your meeting. Good Lord, good Lord. Throughout my father's deterioration, my mother had kept her thoughts to herself. She cooked and ironed and kept his house and must have trusted at first that my father was in some sort of a slump, that his weak sermons and increased time working on them must be part of a natural ebb and flow in any minister's career. Perhaps she even believed that he was going through a kind of healthy crisis of belief, one from which her husband would emerge with his faith refreshed and his convictions stronger than ever. Whatever she thought, she never spoke a word about it.
When my mother finally succeeded in getting my father shaved and into his clothes and off to the church, she ordered me to stay home from school and tend the house and be home when they returned. After they left, I sat at the kitchen table with my history book open to the chapter I was studying on Napoleon. There was a painting of him on a white horse and one of him leading a charge with his sword drawn and pointed toward an unseen enemy. I could not concentrate on the text. I worried about my father. Throughout his illness (that is the word that now, for the first time, came to my mind, and it shocked me and suddenly made me frightened), he had remained kind and remote toward me, as he had always been, but I had lately noticed him looking at me with a sort of wistfulness, as if he were not looking at me, but at a drawing or photograph of me, as if he were remembering me.
It seemed to me as if my father simply faded away. He became more and more difficult to see. One day, I thought he was sitting in his chair at his desk, writing. To all appearances, he scribbled at a sheet of paper. When I asked him where the bag for apple picking was, he disappeared. I could not tell whether he had been there in the first place or if I had asked my question to some lingering afterimage. He leaked out of the world gradually, though. At first, he seemed merely vague or peripheral. But then he could no longer furnish the proper frame for his clothes. He would ask me a question from behind the box on which I sat shelling peas or peeling potatoes for my mother, and when I answered and received no reply back, I would turn around, to find his hat or belt or a single shoe sitting in the door frame as if placed there by a mischievous child. The end came when we could no longer even see him, but felt him in brief disturbances of shadows or light, or as a slight pressure, as if the space one occupied suddenly had had something more packed into it, or we'd catch some faint scent out of season, such as the snow melting into the wool of his winter coat, but on a blistering August noon, as if the last few times I felt him as another being rather than as a recollection, he had thought to check up on this world at the wrong moment and accidentally stepped from whatever wintry place he was straight into the dog days. And it seems that doing so only confirmed to him his fate to fade away, his being in the wrong place, so that during these startled visits, although I could not see him, I could feel his surprise, his bafflement, the dismay felt in a dream when you suddenly meet the brother you forgot you had or remember the infant you left on the hillside miles away, hours ago, because somehow you were distracted and somehow you came to believe in a different life and your shock at these terrible recollections, these sudden reunions, comes as much from your sorrow at what you have neglected as it does from dismay at how thoroughly and quickly you came to believe in something else. And that other world that you first dreamed is always better if not real, because in it you have not jilted your lover, forsaken your child, turned your back on your brother. The world fell away from my father the way he fell away from us. We became his dream.
Another time, I found him fumbling for an apple in the barrel we kept in the basement. I could just make him out in the gloom. Each time he tried to grab a piece of fruit, it eluded him, or I might say he eluded it, as his grasp was no stronger than a draft of air threading through a crack in a window. He succeeded once, after appearing to concentrate for a moment, in upsetting an apple from its place at the top of the pile, but it merely tumbled down along the backs of the other apples and came to rest against the mouth of the barrel. I
t seemed to me that even if I could pick an apple up with my failing hands, how could I bite it with my dissipating teeth, digest it with my ethereal gut? I realized that this thought was not my own but, rather, my father's, that even his ideas were leaking out of his former self. Hands, teeth, gut, thoughts even, were all simply more or less convenient to human circumstance, and as my father was receding from human circumstance, so, too, were all of these particulars, back to some unknowable froth where they might be reassigned to be stars or belt buckles, lunar dust or railroad spikes. Perhaps they already were all of these things and my father's fading was because he realized this: My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected that he was whittling at my skull-no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels. I looked away and ran back upstairs, skipping the ones that creaked, so that I would not embarrass my father, who had not quite yet turned back from clay into light.
Suppose that my mother helped my father dress on an early April morning. It was dark and windy outside, with flurries of snow swirling down from the sky as if they were chips dropping from chiseled clouds, and the three of us had been indoors together for four days as it rained and blew and the rivers and lakes swelled and spread beyond their banks. Two nights before, we had even seen Old Sabbatis paddling a canoe through the woods behind our house. My father was stooped and could not get his arms through his jacket by himself. And when my mother helped him, the sleeves of his jacket gathered those of his shirt and both rode up to his elbows as he pulled them too far up his arms. His head shook, and in his and my mother's struggles with his coat, his wide-brimmed hat was pushed to an odd angle, so that it looked as if my mother were straining to dress a scarecrow. My mother said to him in a voice that was both vexed and solicitous, Oh, Father, you know you're not supposed to put your hat on until the end. He seemed parched and worked his tongue in his mouth as if he were searching for water.
Suppose that my mother dressed my father in the parlor rather than their bedroom and that this frightened me, seeing, for example, my father's thin, pale legs naked in the room where he consoled widows. The shades in the two windows were drawn and my mother had not lit a lamp, so that they struggled in the thin light entering the room around the borders of the shades. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen, watching them. My father suffered a great indignity and I was helpless to restore him. That he and my mother should wrestle him into his clothes in the dark seemed furtive and awful. And yet, the thought of walking across the room and opening the shades and letting the raw, weak light pour down on them seemed worse, as if the least my father could be granted was that he be allowed to fall apart in the dark.
When he was dressed, my mother pointed my father to the kitchen. They walked together side by side in a sort of half embrace, my mother rubbing his back with one hand and holding one of his hands in the other, guiding him and soothing him, murmuring softly to him, watching his feet to make sure he did not trip over himself. I backed into the kitchen, and when they came through the door, my mother saw me and said, You'll have to make your own breakfast today, Howard, I'm taking Father. My father looked at me and nodded, the way you might when you first meet the acquaintance of a friend on the street. My mother opened the outside door and the light came in and carved every object in the kitchen into an ancient relic. I could not imagine what people had ever done with iron skillets or rolling pins. Through the door, beyond our yard, at the edge of the road, four men stood, all in black coats and black hats, waiting for my mother and my father. They were my father's friends, men from the church. I stood in the doorway and watched my mother and father reach the men, who gathered around them and escorted them to a coach drawn by four horses, which waited for them at a respectable distance and which was driven by a man I did not recognize, who sat hunkered into his coat and scarf to keep out the wind and the snow and the rain, which had begun again. The men helped my father into the coach first and then my mother, a reversal of their usual and ritually observed manners, which seemed to me final and devastating. The driver snapped the reins and the horses lurched and found their footing in the mud, even though they dragged the coach for several yards before its wheels caught and began to turn. The coach and the seven dark hunched figures passed the far corner of the yard into the trees, and that was the last I saw of my father.
The next morning, I went down to the kitchen, where my mother was making pancakes. I sat at my place at the table and noticed there was no setting for my father. I usually sat on his left and my mother, when she sat to dinner (she never sat with us at breakfast), ate across from him at the other end of the table. I said, Where is Dad? My mother paused in her cooking, spatula in one hand, the other holding the handle of the iron skillet wrapped in a dish towel. Howard, she said, Father is gone. The windows in the kitchen all faced west, so they allowed the morning light into the room only as it was reflected from the last clouds receding with the darkness and from the trees at the edge of the woods beyond the yard. It seemed to me that this was a dream of my father's death, a sort of rehearsal for when it really happened, rather than a simple fact of the waking world. It was difficult for me to distinguish the actual from dreaming during that time, because I often had dreams in which my father came into my bedroom to kiss me and cover me up with my blankets, which, restless sleeper that I was, had fallen to the floor. In those dreams, I awoke and, seeing my father, felt an overwhelming sense of how precious he was to me. His having died once, I understood what it would mean to lose him, and now that he had returned I was determined to take better care of him. Dad, I said to him in those dreams, what are you doing here? I'm not gone just yet, he would tell me in a humorous tone that I should have recognized as belonging to a dream, since he had never used it in life, although I had often wished for it. Well, this time we're going to make sure you stay well, I would say, and hug him.
But what, scurrilous babbler? Shall your barren wind slake the flame burning within my own heart? By no means! For mine is the flame that does not consume, and the guff from your bellows shall only fan it, that it burns all the brighter, the hotter, and the more surely.
I decided to try to find my father in the woods. When I walked through the woods, I wore my father's old boots. They were too large, so I had to put on three pairs of socks to make them snug. I carried my lunch in his old wicker creel, slung over my shoulder. I wore his widebrimmed hat. When I walked through the Gaspars' corn patch, I imagined breaking an ear from its stalk, peeling its husk, and finding my father's teeth lining the cob. They were clean and white, but worn like his. Strands of my father's hair encased the teeth instead of corn silk. As I hiked through the woods, I imagined peeling the bark from a birch tree, the outer layers supple, like skin. I would peel until I came to the wood. I would insert the tip of my knife into the wood and force the blade deeper until it touched something hard. I would cut a seam in the wood, prying it open an inch at a time, and find a long bone encased in the middle of the trunk. I imagined pulling flat rocks up from creek beds. I imagined climbing trees and tasting for traces of my father in their sap. This is how I thought of myself, as looking for what he had always called in his sermons the deep and secret yes, an idea I never knew whether was his own or something he had read in his books. I roamed the different places that we had gone together, but soon found myself hiking toward the outlet of Tagg Pond.<
br />
Spring rain made temporary ponds of the deep ruts along the abandoned tote roads. The water was shin-deep and the color of iron cream. Howard had to walk through one sometimes because it extended across the width of the entire road and into the woods. As he waded through, his feet pushed up milky, rust-colored clouds of mud from the bottom, out of which spurted schools of bright green tadpoles disturbed in their rapid and fragile evolutions. The tom-tom tap of a pileated woodpecker sounded from somewhere in the woods, to Howard's left. He thought of leaving the road to find it but decided not to. Grass covered the raised spine of the road where it was not sub merged in the metallic water. Howard walked along this narrow path. The road originally had been more or less straight, but, once abandoned, the woods had shifted it over the years, canting lengths of it to the left or right, skewing it and encircling it above, so that walking down it was like walking through a tunnel. Light filtered down from the sky in various amounts. The branches of maples and oaks and birch leaned across the road toward one another and intertwined and became nearly indistinguishable, their leaves mixed up, apparently sharing common branches, as if, after so many mingled seasons, the trees had grafted into one another and become a single plant that produced the leaves of several species. The light was trapped above Howard's head, glittering and abundant. Very few drops of it made their way through the tangle and into the grass. Howard twice passed places where the light gushed down and pooled over the ground-once where a giant blighted oak tree stood and then farther on, where lightning had split a huge spruce.
