from the tyranny of stratigraphy
It was an obituary really. In that it signified and notified of a fragment of a life. A piece of time, a sensation, that was an only-once-worn suit of clothes. That sort of a part, a piece, of a life isn’t meant to be lived forever. It can’t be. If he’d tried to live it out, hung on to it, it would surely have died just the same. There is no such thing as forever. That he didn’t know. And only when that short and lost piece of a life was viewed from the largest of human perspectives, which the time and meanderings of a lifetime can provide, was it seen to be what it had been. It was the celebration of that transitory, aborted life, in that letter, which kept him fingering it, like a talisman in his pocket, until it couldn’t be held in one piece any longer. And then he placed it away behind some things until the damp had started at it. Then a black mange, like ink, spread across it from the seed of a few black specks. Then it was gone. It began like this.
April 4, 1938
Dearest Father:
Sir, I am very good, well and happy here. I have certainly seen a few things. My new residence is up on the mountain above the small town of Boulder, Utah. Our mail continues to be packed in and out by mule over a small reef and several canyons that separate us from all of society. Then our mail goes by auto to Green River, where is located the nearest town with scheduled train service. I suppose that a train line lies closer in Arizona. But that country is a world away because of the terrain lying between. Having made a short story long. I tell you this because it may be a good long stretch before this letter is received.
He could barely see her. Her and the horse, both, were not much to see, just a lean dark spot moving along the ridge against that funny sky. The sun was somewhere behind her. But the sky was clouds and the sun showed just as a hazy brightness, with the canyon rim and her and the horse as a black-gray silhouette in front of it.
They were in Coyote Gulch. All of those canyons down along that river are called gulches or washes. Gulch and wash are not good words for them because they are among the most wonderful canyons of the Colorado Plateau. The rock all around them is a dry, barren Navajo Sandstone. This is a rock of time-frozen ochre dunes, with pockets of sand and catch tanks of water here and there. It is difficult to imagine a bleaker configuration of the land. But the canyons, those they call the gulches and washes, that run through that country are sweet Edens. They are long and twisty, green and dank Edens along rivers and creeks, cut hundreds and a thousand feet below the low folds of the surface of the old sandstone. In those canyons are pastures of aster, lone cottonwoods as big as houses, stone arches and bridges, small ruins, and rock-lined grottos with seeps of fresh cold water and moss and watercress and columbine.
The canyons are passages. No-one could make a home and live out a life inside one of them because there is only adequate nourishment at any given spot for a short time. So survival and movement are one and the same. The old ones lived that way. Moving through. Not stopping for long. Never expecting any permanence. The water that flows there, it can dry up or choke to form a deep pond and then fall to beneath it; and there are long stretches of slippery ripples. But there can be a miracle around any corner.
Further, I am sorry to have kept both yourself and Mother uninformed. I have been here now for over one year. It is very warm here for it being only the beginning of spring. I have met a man named Oxford and work for him. I don’t do for my living what you would like or what you would see as proper work for a fellow of my station. I help in running cattle across a lonely stretch of miserable country. In the Spring we take them to low ground in a number of sections along the river. In summer we take them out and up into aerie ranges. In the fall we return them to this small stead where I spend a good deal of my time.
The Oxford homestead is not a pleasant sort of home. Mother would be most disconcerted. It is the country all around that I find to be of great and full worth. This land, out of doors, I find to be my real home here. The landscape is truly desolate and shows no potential for hospitality or settlement as you would like to see all things settled. In moving the animals we follow secret hollows that lead through the rock and keep us and the beasts always within touch of water and vegetation. My true home is my roll of canvas and lamb’s wool beneath the moon and stars.
However, now I write from my cot in the barn of the Oxford place. Father would laugh to see it and hear it called a barn. We are set upon the side of a mountain, which is more a steep ridge angling up to a large plateau – so large I have yet to see the other side of it. I take leave tomorrow and
with luck will reach my destination in two weeks time. It is my second trial at going in this year. We attempted this too early and were driven back by a large storm with loss of three head of cattle.
I can see from the shabby window of this small tin tenement that things are superbly dry in that country now, so dry as to show no sign of life from this distance whatsoever. It is easy to look out across that austere land and pity any soul who finds a way out of a canyon and can not find their way back down to the nourishing bottom.
He’d been riding back and forth, down in the gulch, at the water, looking up. He figured that she must have gone up and out somehow to the rim because he couldn’t see any way that she could have ridden further down stream without leaving some tracks along the thin beaches that appeared on one side or the other, with each turn of the canyon. He looked up just then, when the sun broke out suddenly and then it was covered again; and something, her belt buckle or the tiny knob of silver on the edge of a bridle, reflected the sun down to him and he could make out her and the horse and saw that they were moving.
“Oh Jesus,” he said softly and he rode slow and parallel with her. She moving along the rim line and him moving along the bottom. He was tugging the two loaded mules behind him. He had ridden this country often for two years now, but didn’t know of a way out of the canyon where she’d gone.
“It must have been the horse that knew the way,” he mumbled slowly to himself.
He’d never seen a girl anything like her before. She’d only gotten on a horse for the first time a couple or three months before. Down at Clairmont’ s. They’d let her ride a pony and she took to it and was riding, hell she was galloping, a full morgan bareback inside a week. She must have let this old horse, Pearly, take her up and out. He could never trust a horse that way, all of the way. Pearly was a very tall and wide quarter horse that was a sheening sort of glistening white with off-white patches. Pearly was in her last summer; but the horse didn’t know.
It was September and Kenton figured that it would be good to let the old horse get out and into good country one last time. With autumn coming and the blast from Oxford’s shotgun sure to ring by November. Kenton had that kind of soft heart then. Pearly was a sure horse, Kenton figured, and Kenton was serious to know the girl.
So when the new girl came to his table and asked about his breakfast, “I’ll be riding down coyote gulch this weekend,” he said in a sudden and nervous way.
“You want to come with me? I can take you full to the river. I know some real nice spots.”
He watched then. Her thinking and pulling the pencil out from behind her ear and touching it to the pad in her other hand and putting it back again.
She saying, “You bet.” Her smiling just a little as she turned away from him with a skip in her step. Then her turning on her heel and asking, “must we spend the night, Saturday night?” He looked away from her, embarrassed and considering a proper response and hearing her say in a straight strong voice. “That’s OK. I want to see the river. Let’s make it a full weekend. What do I care about things folks around here might say. I’ll be gone soon enough with winter and all.”
She was unusual. He’d never seen or heard of anything like her. She seemed to fit, automatically and perfectly. Although she was new she’d fallen into doing all of the things that he’d spent two years looking into doing since he’d come to that strangest part of the country. She never seemed to be planning anything. She’d just suddenly be doing it.
Once he overheard her say that she thought the town was about done and she was interested in moving on. She wouldn’t say where she intended to go and he was sure she was thinking of simply leaving and determining the next step as it developed. To him, the way he’d been raised, life was always a plan in the works. He moved in jolts and starts. Planning, accomplishing, resting, planning.
She was fluid. She moved through her days like a mist at the bottom of the canyons, filling voids, slipping mysteriously into a hollow here or a cavern there. Suddenly disappearing. Miraculously sharply shining down to him from the long ridge above him.
Please pass this note on to Mother.
I am in the employ of this Mr. Robert Oxford who came to this country by way of Missouri only twenty years prior to my coming. His arrival here was through Salt Lake City and he was brought to this land by dictate from there. He operates a ranch of the present size of a few hundred cattle. I work with four others: the brothers Roger and Gardner Cone, Michael Dunleavy and Richard Milhouse. All are originally of these parts but from the northern extent of the State where the Salt Lake lies and the large cities, barracks, and governmental offices are located. All are grand fellows. Richard and Gardner are veterans of the Great War and are well-trained in matters of horsemanship, delegation and leadership. They are all, including Mr. Oxford, members belonging of the faith which is prevalent here. I do not participate in these services because of course, I remain of our own church.
Mother you should feel assured that I have no intent of partaking of their religion or any of the infamous practices for which a few of their number are so renowned. There are very few women in the entire region and none about this place. So for myself, because of my spiritual isolation, religious service is now a solitary matter. Roger Cone, the younger of the brothers, and I do discourse frequently on matters of faith. I have yet to persuade him.
He was beginning to get considerably worried. He couldn’t ride to her because he didn’t know how she’d gotten out. The sun was starting to fall behind her. To her it would seem late in the afternoon because the sun would still appear to be up in the sky. But on the river, where he was, and where she should be, the sun was low and slipping behind that enormous wall of the canyon beneath her. He tried to yell up to her, but she kept riding as if she didn’t hear. He came to an old rincon – a place where the stream had, a long time ago, cut out into the rock and back again but was now a high and dry half circle of sparse meadow and sand. He worked his horse gently up across the steep earthen wall which separated the rincon from the stream. He kicked the horse twice, softly, chattering its name and clicking his tongue as it made its way, emerging from a deep pool of the river, across an interwoven section of wet black tree roots. The mules stumbled up behind him, following reluctantly the taught long leads attached to the back of the saddle of the horse. He found a big piece of plush grass with a long sloping field of purple aster along the outside of the curve, against the red sandstone wall. So he tied the mules to a couple of little leaning haggard cottonwood. The mules began to chew on the small branches and the few leaves. He walked his horse over to the aster, hobbled her and pulled off the saddle, the bridle and the blanket.
I have decided, for the time being to remain in this good part of the country. The reasons for this decision are extremely difficult to explain. I know that both mother and yourself have expected me to further my education and take an established position somewhere in the Eastern States. Though I remain true to our faith and am not persuaded in any way by the arguments of those with whom I am spending company now, I have found a source of solace in the wild country here. This is a matter of what I have seen and how, at the very core of my spirit, I have responded to it. There is a spareness, an openness, to the landscape here which is its greatest virtue. When I am out and alone in it, I feel a depth of comfort that I have never felt in a place which you would consider civilized.
He was walking back to the mules with the saddle leaning against the front of his hip with him pulling back on it to keep his balance when he saw the girl starting down. He stopped and craned his neck back and watched her. He was just sixteen when he started with Bob Oxford. He’d had to hold his breath and close his eyes when he first started riding some of these canyon trails. Whenever he was riding, lonely, with nothing more to think about, he watched that first real scene of his new life, over and over again, in his mind. Bob Oxford was up there singing. Bob Oxford called it the Bob Oxford Compendium of Marvelous Song. It was all of the western songs rolled together and changed to fit the last line of one song exactly into the first line of the next and also to include Bob Oxford’s name wherever it might just barely fit. Kenton figured it showed the lonely hours that Bob Oxford must have lived, because only a lonely man could spend that kind of time playing with words.
Then behind Oxford came a string of a half-dozen mules and then Kenton riding the back, needing to vomit, closing his eyes, feeling that new lost feeling of the horse moving underneath him and out of his control. Kenton was looking up past the mules to Mr. Oxford, and then down at the feet of the mule in front of him. He saw the mule’s feet on the right side in front of him just barely holding on to the rock edge of the trail and nothing underneath the trail but the dark shadow of a canyon he couldn’t see through to the bottom of any longer. That shadow had slipped in quickly. And it was rising.
Soon he’d be riding in the dark along that ledge with only the judgment of his horse, this new horse that Bob Oxford had given him that morning, separating him from slipping down into that nothing that he couldn’t see. He closed his eyes again just remembering that first sundown on that first day of that first job. Then Bob Oxford would begin to yodel and the mules started in with him, heeing and hawing, and donkey-singing right along with the yodeling.
Kenton was grinning and then let that picture fade and watched the way the girl just let the horse take her. The first part was an old cattle trail he thought. It wasn’t steep and it curved around to near above him. But then she and Pearly dropped, her leaning way back with the horse bent down, way forward, beneath her. It was a stiff two-hundred foot down the sloping rock surface of an old time-frozen sand dune. He heard the echo of the chatter of the hooves on the rock and saw the girl pulling even further back with the horse so far forward it looked as if it would topple end over end. But they reached a level bench and the horse took that, back again, out of his sight.
While he watched where she’d been and where he thought she was going, he walked quickly down to the water and across a riffle with his tie-up roper boots sloshing and his feet feeling the cool water and silt creeping in. The girl and the horse stayed lost in the shadow. He picked them out again. Just a black moving form folded into a lighter darkness. She was at the edge of what looked to be a cliff where the bench of stone dissipated into nothing. The horse jumped like a goat and seemed to find almost a set of stairs there. The girls hat blew up with a gust of the evening air and she let go of the saddle horn and pulled her hat back down and then she rode with the horse jumping from spot to spot beneath her, and her arms bent and playing out for balance with her body twisting at the waist. He took off his hat and ran some river water through his hair.
She reached a place where a large slope of sand rose up to the wall of the rincon; then he knew she would make it all right, and so he crossed back over the water and pulled off his boots and set them to dry on a rock beside where he intended to build the fire. He pulled a lantern from one of the mule panniers and a dry match from his hatband. He set the lantern on a rock so that it lit the whole meadow out to the wall beyond his horse.
Next he went about making the fire, then spreading the sleeping tarps and blankets – his a good distance from the fire, hers right up against it – and then, last, he made the kitchen. He was quick in setting it all up because he’d done it nearly every day since late April. He was very proud of this. He could set up a kitchen and a make a good dinner now without hardly thinking about what he was doing. He cut onions, carrots and beef and put them into the black iron pot and onto the fire with first a little oil and then water.
Father, perhaps the best way to explain my current opinions is to draw from your own experience. I have watched you, Sir, in your duties with our choir. I remember an incident, when I was around ten years of age (not so very long ago). You were asked to perform in the Roman Catholic Cathedral with men of many denominations. As I recall, the Cathedral was chosen because of its size and the quality of the building acoustics and organ. You and many others of numerous faiths were chosen because of the depth and quality of the many voices.
I remember a Jew and a black Baptist being present in the choir. I well remember the look of contentment you possessed in the course of that endeavor. Your very face, in those moments, was shaped by faith and grace. Your voice was guided by a pure spirit within. I have found similar contentment here. For all of my life you have instructed me to pursue grace as my highest ambition. You and mother both have taught me that wages and security should be secondary relative to well and moral living and the grace found therein.
I have found this condition of grace in a place which neither of us could have anticipated, which neither of us could have known to have existed. It is, like all acts of true communion, the opposite of the comfort and cynicism that you have so often warned me against.
I ride on the morning and will keep you always in my thoughts.
With all my love:
Your Son, Kenton
“Smells good,” she said, and he startled, almost stepping into the fire. She was leaning forward over the rock with her face beside the lantern. The light from the lantern glistened from spots of moisture on her cheek and played golden in her soft long blond hair. There were a light pink primrose and a big, floppy sunflower in her hat-band. He paused for a moment, not knowing what to say or do. A breeze started and dissipated.
The odor of her sweat, commingled with sage, horse and a crisp scent from the river was only slightly detectable beneath the rising spicy mist from his pot. He nodded at her and spun around to the fire so his back was to her and he stirred the pot.
“What got into you? Thought I’d lost you for certain,” he said. “Only just saw you up there. I’ve been though this canyon a dozen times and never knew of a way out of it right here.”
She walked over to stand opposite him with her legs open and her hands slowly turning in front of the fire.
“Just followed the horse. Let her take me away. The horse knows a few things. I saw a big animal up there. I think it was a cat, a big lion. Just for a flash of a second. It was off and running, but I’m almost sure it was a mountain lion. Kind of magical to see. I’ve heard they are difficult to see. The sun going low was marvelous too. What a wonderful view. The trip down was a little scary though. That’s my philosophy you know. That you’re only going around the once and you might as well fill it up and let it overflow. That you gotta live life full.”
He stooped over his pot and watched her, across the fire, unbuckling her chaps.
“I’ve never seen one,” he said, standing straight then and watching her hands on the large buckle of her chaps. “Not sure I want to, up close, you know.”
“Oh yes you do, you want to. I can tell by looking at your eyes that you do.”
“I suppose I do.” He spat into the fire in a way he’d seen Oxford spit when he was trying to present himself as the most uncivilized cowboy he could muster. “So you gettin’ on with Pearly?” He squinted as he asked this. Another impersonation of Oxford. He held his tongue against his cheek as if a wad of tobacco was present.
“She’s slow but sure. I love her. I’ve trusted her every bit from the very
beginning and she hasn’t let me down.”
“That horse has been around for a while. This is probably her last year. I hear it is anyway. How about you pull the saddle and blanket and lead her over there in the meadow. And I’ll come in a moment for the bridle and hobble her up.”
“I just came for the hobble,” she said, “the other things are already done.”
“You’re a natural for this,” he said, again with the squint and his tongue pressed against the side of his mouth.
“Thank you,” she replied, smiling and looking over and past him, “look at that moon.”
It was a curious sight. They were in the dark but could see the low light above the canyon rim where daylight lingered and the moon had risen full and only a little brighter than the sky.
“Yes, look at that.”
“I’ll water her too. If you have a bucket.” He pointed with a nod and she pulled a hobble and a canvas bucket from a pannier and walked with those and the lantern down to the river.
He was pinching crushed fennel seed, pepper and salt and pouring homemade raspberry wine into the pot when she passed him again. It was fully dark just then, except for the moon, even over the rim. He followed the yellow lantern light, reflected off her white shirt and then off her shirt and the side of the white horse. As she returned, the stark yellow glow of the lantern separated from the horse and left the horse behind, shining, radiant in the faded blue of the moonlight.
“I’m going to take a quick bath,” she said and then walked past him again to the water. She went beyond a stand of willow to a tiny beach and he tried not to watch the bright yellow lit fragments and shapes of her body through the curtain of short black willow as she removed her clothes and slipped into the stream.
He stepped back from the fire and moved his bedding much further from it and placed a set of the mule panniers between his bedding and hers.
“So tell me your story?” she asked as he handed her a full plate. Her shirt tail hung out over her jeans and her shirt was still wet at the shoulders and in small arcs over her breasts. Two faint splashes of pink, like dilute water-color, shown now and then beneath her damp shirt whenever she leaned her head back as she did each time she swallowed.
She produced a flask of brandy and he took a small swallow with her. “I ran away from boarding school in Massachusetts. Not much of a story.”
“Why? Why did you run away and come here.”
“I don’t know. I was in school doing fine one day and the next I was telephoning my mother from a seedy little hotel in Iowa. I just said that I was going away and that I’d be back when I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. There had always been something missing back east. I’ve only recently tried to figure out what it was.”
“What was it?”
“Oh no. You’d laugh all night if I got into that.”
“Come on tell. I won’t laugh.”
“All right, I think it was grace.”
She started to laugh.
“Grace, you mean like the grace of Jesus or something.”
“Told you I’d get you laughing. I’m not gonna get into it anymore.”
“Come on, I won’t laugh anymore. I promise. You never struck me as bible
thumper though. I must admit I’m a little surprised.”
“By grace I mean the freedom to be me. Not to have to be someone who I’m expected to be.”
“How is that God’s grace?”
“It’s grace, I don’t know what it is for sure. But everywhere else I’ve been in my life someone has anticipated, has expected me to be a certain kind of person, to say certain specific things, to believe certain things. And if I don’t say or believe those things, I disappoint. Here, I can’t disappoint. Normally, under regular circumstances, without you here, there is no-one to care. No-one to say who I am, or who I should be. I can be real. That, to me, is grace. I suppose it might be God’s grace because God made me to be what I am and not what I’m expected by everyone else to be. That’s grace. That make any sense?”
“I don’t know. Sounds kinda like the way I’ve always been. I guess I’ve got natural grace.”
“Yea, I think you do. I really do.”
“So what did you tell you mother.”
“About all this, I wouldn’t … “
“No, not about all this, I mean, about when you telephoned up and said you weren’t goin’ to be the boy she expected anymore.”
“I told her I was going west. I told her I wasn’t going to . . . I didn’t tell her where I was and I didn’t know exactly where I was going. That was hard. She started crying. But I knew they’d send someone to get me if I told them where I was.”
“So you did all that to find grace?” she smiled when she said this, careful not to laugh.
“Not to find grace. I didn’t know anything about that then. I just knew it wasn’t right for me then. Does that make any sense. I set out to find who I was.”
“You find him?”
“Yes, you said you wouldn’t laugh.”
“I know and I don’t think you’re silly. I’ve been that way all my life. For girls it is always about men trying to keep girls safe, and safe is just another word for pure. I never was pure. Not ever for a moment. It was simply not one of my qualities. Someway I knew from the day I was born that life was going to be short and too much had to be passed up on if I was going to be pure. So I couldn’t wait to get away. I found something out here. Something full of dirt and sweat.”
Kenton couldn’t look at her and she noticed this. He tried to find something to say to change the subject but couldn’t.
“So your mother still doesn’t know where you are?”
”No, she knows. I tried writing them all through the first year. I wrote long impassioned letters about how I’d found myself out here and that sort of thing. I never mailed them. I threw all but one of them away. Then I finally wrote them just a little note saying where I was and how long I’d been here, and that I was safe. That sort of thing.”
“Why didn’t you send the long letters?”
“They’d have misunderstood. My father is a very sensible practical man. He would have thought I’d turned emotional.”
“So that was that.”
“No, my father came to get me. He came right away. It was a real short meeting.”
“Where’d you meet?”
“It was kind of funny. He showed up at the Oxford place. He brought Sheriff Paisley, or had Sheriff Paisley bring him. I don’t think my father had ever been on a horse before so Paisley loaded him on a wagon and hauled him in on the old Boulder road. Apparently my father was reluctant to get out of the wagon on some of the crossings. So by the time they got up on Pilot’s knob, old fat Paisley was pretty angry with him. I wasn’t there when they arrived. I was setting fence in Oxford’s back pasture.”
“The two of them wandered around and couldn’t find Oxford either. My father wouldn’t let Paisley leave without him and so my father and Paisley both fell asleep in the wagon. So when Oxford came back – I forgot where he was – he found my father wide-awake with Paisley sound asleep next to him. It took both Oxford and my father to wake up the old grump. Then he remembered how angry he was and started sassing my father for not wanting to get out of the wagon. My father isn’t a heavy man, but I can just imagine them trying to get that wagon over some of that road and my father looking down at where he was supposed to stand and just telling Paisley that he wouldn’t do it. So Paisley was grumping at my father and Oxford had started teasing both of them about sleeping in the back of the wagon. That didn’t improve on Paisley’s attitude in the slightest.”
“When I got there it was some part high drama and some parts comedy. My father was furious and took it out on me of course – having no one else around who he could let loose at with any kind of confidence that they wouldn’t kill him. He was in the middle of lecturing at me about my leaving Massachusetts when Oxford came and took him gently by the elbow. He led him away from both Paisley and I. Before that, I’d told my father that I wouldn’t leave and Paisley had said that he couldn’t make me go if I was over fourteen. I’ve since looked that up and have no idea where Paisley came up with it. I think he just made it up on the spot because he was mad at my father or because he was siding with me. Oxford led my father over to the edge overlooking the river. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The Oxford place has a good view down into the whole drainage. It was early summer, and, even then, the rock was dry and everything appeared baked and forsaken down below.”
“I saw Oxford leaning forward with one arm on my fathers shoulder and the other moving fluidly – imitating the course of the river. I’m sure he was showing him where the river ran and the side channels, like this one we’re in. From up there it is hard to figure the course of the river – even if you know it really well. Because it’s so crazy in the way it runs and there are so many false starts and stops of other channels that look from above like they might be something but aren’t.”
“I saw him pointing down all the way to Glenn Canyon where the cattle winter and then he showed him the course of the main river and one after another each of the approaches to the river. At last he was pointing up to the summer pastures. Then I saw my father smiling, just for a second, so I came up to them. Oxford was telling him the differences in the side canyons: Harris, Coyote, Horse, Wolverine. He was saying that one canyon was better when it was wet, another when it was dry. My father looked at me differently after that. He’d gotten to know a part of me that I hardly knew.”
“Then he was smiling a little bit more and told me he expected that I’d be back for Christmas. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t nod. I knew I wouldn’t be going back then. I think I did smile. Then the letters started from my mother. All stories about my relatives and about girls I’d known. She wanted me home. Not to her home necessarily. But a home on that side of the continent, one where she knew, or could reasonably guess, what I was doing every minute of every day. But I knew. I somehow knew, that here was the right place in the country for me right now. I know it probably won’t last. It’s not one of those things which are meant to last.”
Kenton had tried to explain it to his father in the letters he’d never posted. He would hold onto to that one letter for nearly thirty-years as a way to remember. For a long, long time he wanted to remember. He’d kept it in his wallet. Then it found its way to a box in his closet, and then to a place behind some old board games his children had outgrown, in the basement of his third house in Ohio. It was finally ruined.
Kenton didn’t know it, but a day was coming in December, a day that would pass like a rumor which a man couldn’t believe; and when the sun would rise on the following day, it would rise on an entirely different world.
It would be the end of so many things – an end to his brief but wonderful state of grace. Then he’d return east to his parents and then to flight-training in Florida, only never to fly, to never touch the inside of a real cockpit, and to do book work for the duration of the war. He moved things about. He saw to it that wheels and steel and coffee and potatoes were where voices on the telephone needed them to be. He went to school again after the war. He moved to Ohio and worked in a factory where light bulbs were made. He did the same thing there. Moved things about. Kept things running smoothly and easily for forty-three years. It would
be a good life. He would marry a smart and beautiful woman from Pennsylvania and raise one boy and three girls. He’d see the world become very small relative to the world of his youth. He’d come to know the ways to get around in that small world, the ways to accomplish things with handshakes, nuances and whispers. He knew it so well that he could live without fear or uncertainty and with only minimal, inconsequential pain. He’d be safe, never again to be really challenged or changed. Time would pass like smooth water.
He looked up from the fire and she’d set down her plate and fork and was brushing her long, drying hair with her fingers. She was a reverse silhouette now with the fire-light full on her face and a dim diffuse blackness behind her. She told him her history in clipped, shy sentences. He told her excitedly of the things that they’d see in the morning.
“There’s a natural arch just around the next comer, we’ll pass right through a wall of rock. Pass right through it without hardly knowing it.”
He jumped up with his head craning out in an awkward way. It spun part way around and out, casting a wide fearful stare at three corners of the room.
“Christ, it’s all dead. All of it.” His voice grew very loud and his mouth contorted, frozen in a kind of stiff anguish. His face hadn’t been shaved in two days and beneath his open mouth, the skin was raw and purple under the white bristles. There was a tangible pain, a sort of horror, in his blue-gray eyes.
“It’s all dead. Where’s the letter? I need to send that letter,” he said as his head turned fully to her face. The black oval of her face, as large as God, moved gently, almost against his, as she pushed him back into the chair with her stout, weary fingers.
“Mr. Kenton,” she said, shaking him softly as his head then fell limp and he began to breathe deeply and through his nose with his eyes closed. “What is it? Mr. Kenton. What is dead? What letter do ya’ll mean?” she said.
His eyebrows trembled and he breathed in a heavy and quick snort through the nose. Again he opened his eyes and mouth; and he startled. This time without speaking and without much rising. Again he fell limp.
“He say the same thing,” she said to the white girl who was kneeling beside her, “Tain’t no letter. When I come to feed him, he always smiling bright. Then I wakes him and he say the same thing ever’ day. Funny thing, this old man. He must have the same old dream over an tover again at four o’clock ever’ day.”
She looked down at the clumsy thin fingers of the new girl kneeling beside her. “You be careful with that bag honey,” the black woman said. “You be careful with that bag. It plum over-full.”