Each and All by John Kuti
Chapter 15
In the morning Ian woke with the sunrise and he could see Amanda standing outside, framed in wisteria blue. If an oil had been infused from lilacs and the color had been poured out over the bay, there couldn’t have been anything as deep or as lovely, until a moment later when the reflected sepia in the sky came up out of the oil as the sun rose on the island rocks and they shimmered in the glow of the new light.
The silent voice within Amanda kept repeating, you, you, you. Night and day. She hadn’t slept.
Ironically, it was that day the Luna moth cocoons came to life. Megan saw a little white thumb wrapped in green crawl out of its hard little cocoon and its red stick arms begin to immediately move it away, searching with its forearms, constantly reaching out, grabbing for something invisible, reaching, constantly reaching. And when it finally came to one of the sticks lying in the box, it immediately began to crawl to the top, until it was hanging upside down. Only then was it still. Megan watched with her mother as the green wings unfolded and the little white thumb opened to become lime green velvet trimmed in gold, four inches across, with beautiful swallow tails, it’s beautiful black and gold markings making it look for all the world like it had tiny facsimiles of Tundra’s eyes.
Megan told Amanda at breakfast what she’d seen. She went home to tell Laura that it was already happening, so the two of them watched the metamorphosis happen for them. It was all such perfect timing.
Amanda wanted an excuse to call Bridget Brown. The moth was her excuse.
Tom had told Amanda that he had left Miss Brown his cell phone so Amanda could call her if she needed to hear about Tom’s time with her. Amanda needed to call. She wanted to call. She was so glad Tom had thought of that consideration for Bridget Brown.
When Bridget Brown finally answered the phone, Amanda told her about the Luna moth and then asked her what she knew about the hope chest of the heart. Amanda discovered she knew a great deal indeed.
Later that day, mothers and daughters took a walk to the Walnut Woods where the moths were released.
A few days later was a hot dry day when everyone had worked very hard setting up the stage for the Canada Day concert and picnic that was the highlight of the summer at the farm. It was the weekend the foster families came to stay, when school was finally out.
The stage was set in the meadow behind the garages where the hay had already been cut and the great round bales grouped on their sides together, a plywood floor bolted together on top of them. Long wooden poles secured an awning that would shelter the players from the sun.
It was a lot less work for the family than preparing for the ice races had been, because the food was going to be supplied by two commercial chip trucks that parked in the field and fed people all day long. Some people brought picnics, some ate fast food, and it was the only day of the year at the farm when people could celebrate with beer and wine. Sharon had made very clear from the beginning that strangers and friends were all welcome, but if anyone got visibly drunk they would never be allowed to come back. The picnic usually drew two to three thousand people. Local bands and singers always came, as well as the New Year’s Eve jazz band from Montreal. It was a great party to launch the summer holidays.
After the stage was set, Tranh asked Tom if he might want to bring Amanda and Megan to see his telescope that night. The conditions were perfect and he thought they might enjoy seeing the universe from his perspective. Tom was delighted with the idea. Something inside him longed to see something that felt infinite again.
Megan and Amanda were game. It was a way to be with Tom without having to think about each other and their strange relationships. They were living in time like time was measured in baseball, where the game would be over when the last one was out. It was like the kind of time there was in musical chairs with three players and only two seats left, and no one knew when the music would stop.
It was after eleven when they drove down the lane way to Tranh’s house, and Amanda and Megan were stunned at the glittering geodesic dome glowing in the dark, set on a hill in the middle of a great open field. Tom explained how the house rotated three hundred and sixty degrees so that Tranh could follow the stars with his telescope.
Tranh met them at his door and welcomed them warmly, and Amanda and Megan were amazed at the big open room that looked out through banks of windows onto black fields. Tranh had everyone sit, and he brought them tea, and offered sweet cakes that both girls gladly accepted. Tranh was alone because his wife and children had gone to sleep knowing his guests would only be engaged with his astronomical equipment.
Tom broke the ice by telling Amanda and Megan that Tranh spent most nights trying to find Near Earth Objects, asteroids that crossed the orbit of the Earth. Asteroid movies that showed the fictional Armageddon that would follow such a sudden impact were all the rage, and Megan was shocked to realize they were based on reality.
“You mean an asteroid could hit the Earth and destroy everything like it did the dinosaurs?” she asked Tranh.
“It could and it will, if we don’t have a great deal of warning and figure out some way to stop it, and change its direction before it strikes.” he answered simply.
“But what are the odds. The last one was millions and millions of years ago.” Amanda pointed out.
When Tranh told them the last one of significance was at the turn-of-the-century, and that it flattened hundreds of miles of trees in Siberia and had been felt thousands of miles away, it didn’t feel like it was such a remote possibility.
“That one was probably a ten meters in size and vaporized before it struck the Earth. There are probably 2000 objects a half kilometer or bigger crossing near the earth’s orbit. We know about maybe two hundred. We find maybe a dozen more every year. I’m one of maybe twenty people on Earth looking for them.” Tranh explained.
“What would happen if one hit?” Amanda asked nervously.
“If an asteroid bigger than half a kilometer struck North America, every city in the Western Hemisphere would be flattened by the shock wave, every building, every house destroyed. The dust thrown into the atmosphere would darken the sun for months and all the plants would die and all the animals would die after them. The billions of people who lived on the Earth would be reduced to perhaps a few tens of thousands who had access to some kind of life support systems and could live on canned goods for a few years. If an asteroid a mile in diameter hit the Pacific Ocean, the tidal wave would crest the Rocky Mountains.”
The silence before the idea of such an unspeakable disaster was overwhelming. Even Tom did not know the things Tranh was telling them. He never talked about the details of his work. Tom always thought it was just a hobby.
“We could all die tomorrow.” Megan said finally.
“Life as we know it could be over, yes.” Tranh replied.
“Well, that’s cheered me up.” Amanda answered.
“Really.” Megan agreed.
“It sure puts your own problems in perspective.” Tom added.
And that’s exactly what it did. It was hard to imagine that every moment of life sat in the balance of an astronomical event that was actually inevitable. The very thought that mankind’s extinction was not only inevitable but might even be immanent, was breathtaking in its simple enormity.
“So who wants to go up and see if we can catch a glimpse of our approaching doom?”
“I’m game.” said Amanda.
“Me too, I guess.” Megan added weakly.
Tranh took them up to the second floor to the round center room in the apex of the house, and showed them the room that was filled with desks and cabinets, computers and photo displays around the platform that held the huge DMF sixteen inch Cassegrain telescope mounted on the platform beneath the two foot wide slit in the roof that opened the room to the night sky. Rotating the house and rotating his two telescopes on their axes meant Tranh could see most of the sky whenever he chose. T
Amanda and Megan had expected a little telescope like the ones for sale in camera stores. They had not expected to find one with a barrel they couldn’t even put their arms around. As it was with everything the Van Fleet’s did, looking for the end of the world was done first-class. Tranh gave a short explanation of how he tracked asteroids, but the young visitors were drawn to the big telescope.
Tranh powered up the scope, locked the ephemeris star location and verified it before he set his coordinates. His visitors could then stand under the huge telescope and look into the viewing piece above them. Before the night was done their necks would all be sore.
Tranh used pictures from the Hubel Observatory to show the universe to his guests through a telescopic zoom out from the Earth. The Moon with its craters and mountains was stunning in its ghostly detail. They looked at Mars and Jupiter and Saturn and their classical offspring, Triton and Io and Calista and Europa. They moved beyond the solar system to Nebula and Galaxies that were stunningly beautiful spirals and globular clusters. To know that all the stars they could see with the naked eye was just a thimble in the ocean of stars brought a new, simple overwhelming perspective. The universe was so vast and beautiful that time slipped away as Tranh led them, hitchhiking on his wonder over time’s own infinite face. Tranh set the stage and turned the polished mirror’s face to single seconds of Infinity, pin holes in the universe that let them look at the features of a majesty beyond any believing.
It was strange how the silence of the universe infected everyone and made them quiet and reverent, almost the way the Walnut forest did. It was the great stillness of what they were seeing, and the inescapable feeling of standing on a spec of a planet, on a speck of a galaxy, a fly spec in the stable of existence that made them feel that strange quiet reverence, a reverence they could feel standing as infinitesimal presences among them.
What they didn’t feel was what Tranh felt. He felt existence as a pulse: photons of light, white, day, dark, night, color, time, space, sight, electrons, protons, particles, waves, all as a pulse. What was and what would never be: one and zero: yes and no: God and grains of sand. It was all a pulse, beating time.
All they knew was that all they were seeing quickened the pulse in their veins. The scale of existence, the scale of beauty, the scale of life found a perspective none of the young people had ever known existed. The river of stars moved over the still water of the heart and sank into it with awe and wonder and loveliness.
When Megan said that she had no idea that the universe was so incredible, Tranh said that what was incredible to him was that all they could see, all the biggest telescopes would ever see, only showed perhaps ten percent of the matter in the universe, that ninety, perhaps ninety nine percent, of the universe was made of a dark matter that no one had even been able to find.
“And don’t get me started on dark energy. The universe is accelerating from a force no one can yet even imagine.” he explained to uncomprehending faces. He smiled.
The wonder remained as the three visitors drove home on the long, winding road leading to their home all three of them feeling the power of a force none of them had imagined.
And then Eugene died.
As Tom drove down the lane of the farm, the headlights glowing between the long serpentine stone walls, Sharon was lying asleep next to Eugene as she had every night since he had his last crisis. The violent shudder that shook the bed woke her, and she saw Eugene shaking in sudden convulsive spasms.
Sharon, her heart beating wildly was used to seeing Eugene almost rigid, but she froze when she saw the agonizing shudder suddenly coursing through his arms and legs. The look in his eyes was panic, like someone slipping away, slipping down a steel roof and clawing with his arms and his legs to hang on to anything, but the force of gravity and momentum was irresistible and there was nothing to stop his fall into free space. Time suspended. He wasn’t choking, but there was a strange rasping noise coming out of his lungs as he looked into Sharon’s eyes and she was shaking just like him, paralyzed almost completely, not knowing what she should do.
Slowly, tenderly she gathered him into her arms and held him to her breasts and told him to hang on, and tenderly told him it would pass. And it did pass, from sudden searing muscle seizures and cramps, to a shiver, to a trembling like a Luna moth hanging upside down from a twig pumping its wings full of life. Sharon was crying as she looked in his eyes and they looked like they were about to explode from his head. Black, black, black, and enormous, the blue bands of his eyes were gone. She was sure she was seeing the most excruciating pain that could silently be conveyed. The eyes she loved were gone. The gentleness, the tenderness, the sweetness and humor were gone. The muscles of his face were tightened in the same frozen impassiveness, but his eyes just grew and grew, and Sharon knew, she knew it was happening. He was dying and she started to sob and tell him it was all right, that no one on the Earth had ever known more love. She told him she loved him. She told him all his children worshiped his heart. His only reply was the gurgling in his throat, and his lips pursing and pursing as if he was a newborn again, desperate to suckle. And the last thing Eugene heard on this Earth was the sound of his wife’s heart beating wildly, pounding inside her chest.
Sharon never knew if the pain and horror of his dying was greater than the horror of his death. His black eyes, dilated in terror, stunned the feeling from her heart for days after, haunted her memories always. She never described it to anyone. No one ever knew he had looked so afraid.
When his eyes rolled back and the black became white, Sharon screamed and the scream was strangled in her tears as she held him to her and she just cried and cried.
When she looked up to the tap on the sliding glass door, she saw Tom standing there, his forehead crushed against the glass. He was crying uncontrollably just like she was.
When Tom was finally able to look up through his tears, he saw his mother had put his father back on the pillow. She was disconnecting the respirator, and as he watched, she went to get a comb to straighten his hair.
He fought back more tears as he slid open the door and went to his mother and she came into his arms like a waif and held him so hard, that he was actually having to struggle to breathe.
“He was just so beautiful.” Tom whispered into his mother’s ear.
“I know.” she replied.
Talking had put them both on the hard ground of grief and they stopped crying.
Sharon asked him to go to her bedroom and bring Eugene’s burial suit. He did that.
Alone with Eugene, she looked to his body and saw the stillness that was beyond any pain. His body was a cocoon, a transparent chrysalis, and the peace of death filled the room like dry flowers. Only Sharon knew the pain and suffering Eugene had endured through the last two years of his life. The cramps, the weakness, the slow suffocation, and the screaming pain where the muscles let go of their nerves had been a silent torture that he tried to keep from everyone. Sharon knew, without having been told, and the end was almost beautiful in that way, like the silence at the end of a great Symphony.
When Tom got back, he was shocked that the laser printer to his father’s computer was going a mile a minute. Eugene had told Sharon that when he died, he had a last message for his family and the name of the file to open. While she was waiting for Tom to return, she decided she needed very much to hear his last words. She had no idea that the computer file would print for over an hour, going through three pauses to replace paper.
It was to the rattle of his last torrent of words that his whole family assembled after Tom and his mother had dressed him.
She told Tom she would do it herself, but he asked to be there and help.
Eugene’s tear-away pajamas came away, leavin
Dressing him into the suit that would have fit him when he was fourteen years old was poignant in the extreme. It was strange to Tom that the act of touching his father’s warm skin as it cooled, touched an emotion Tom never would’ve imagine he would feel. It was an absolutely pure sense of privilege. Buttoning the crisp shirt, sliding his father’s arms into the suit that felt like cool skin, was charged with finality and the precious power of the senses to make each moment transcendent.
When Eugene was finally formally dressed, it was the polished shoes on his feet that Tom had watched his mother slip in place that seemed to him was the strangest thing about what they had just done. Polished shoes, white sheets, fore-shortened death. Sharon’s trembling fingers, tying Eugene’s shoe laces, touched Tom’s heart as if he could feel her fingers actually moving over it.
When his brothers and sisters were awakened and had gathered around Eugene’s dead body, Sharon’s suggestion to her frightened young children that they might want to hold their father’s hand one last time broke the rigid shock inside them, and one by one they came and touched him. Some of them said goodbye, some of them said they loved him, and some couldn’t say anything at all.
Finally, Sharon said that they could stay with their father if they wished, but she had to make phone calls to their other brothers and sisters.
When Sharon left, Tom left as well, walking the long lane under the same stars he had been looking at, close-up, a little while before, and the heavy shock and loss changed in his heart. The feeling that his heart was being filled with hot lead evaporated like dew as he walked past the fireflies that burned for love, each and all, in hundreds and thousands, and by the time he got to the beach and saw the house boat, it was as if his heart had been filled with pure, elemental hydrogen, burning as it collapsed in on itself. It was the fusion of love for his father that released that energy. The beauty and the enormity of the universe and all its blazing power, with all its dark matter and all its dark energy felt like nothing compared to what he felt for his father, for the life Eugene had lived and shared, for all the love he had nurtured and created. Tom had never felt more alive.
Inside the house boat, Tom slid open the Walnut pocket door and saw Amanda asleep in the glow of the night light beside her bed, so still and young and lovely, all of her life ahead of her. He tapped softly on the wood with his knuckles. He had to do it again before she opened her eyes.
She sat up instantly, in total surprise, and she whispered to him, “What are you doing here?”
She was stunned that his shining eyes could hold such terrible news.
“My dad just died. I thought I should tell you and your mom.”
Amanda didn’t reply, and she almost thought it was some kind of sick joke because he was speaking as if he was telling her he had just lost a hubcap from his car.
And then she knew it was true. There was a strange stillness and a strange dark energy in his body that sent a shiver through her as her mind flashed to Eugene, to imagine his blue eyes closed forever and, when her lip started trembling, Tom came and held her and she cried just like it was her own father who had just died.
Tom held her for a long time and it felt very strange because it was as if he was comforting her for her loss, and Amanda was secretly ashamed that finally it wasn’t grief she felt rising inside her, but desire. That was the moment Amanda knew she was healed. When she finally stopped crying, it was because Tom was holding her and it felt so safe, and she had missed it so much, and it was the cruel pain of desire that made it so hard for her to catch her breath.
“I think we should tell your mother.” Tom whispered.
“I know.” she whispered, and she let him go and got up, and then the two of them opened the pocket door on the other side of the bedroom and saw Laura sleeping, and they paused and stood there watching her, so sorry to break such peace with such pain. Amanda was terrified to see it.
Amanda went and sat by her mother and took her hand and Laura woke immediately.
Surprised to see Tom standing there, surprised to feel Amanda’s trembling hand, she almost didn’t understand when Amanda said softly, “Mr. Van Fleet just died.”
The words finally formed in the dark and Laura knew.
She said, “Oh,.. oh.. oh.” as her voice trailed away into her heart in the descending scale of loss. “Thank you. I think I want to be alone for a little while.” she asked, after a long, cold silence.
She didn’t cry. Her only apparent grief was the little sigh she gave as Amanda kissed her forehead and got up and left her. Laura looked into Tom’s eyes and didn’t say a word and Amanda saw it and was disappointed her mother didn’t acknowledge his loss. Tom understood.
They slid closed the wall to Laura’s bedroom and Amanda pulled off her nightgown and proceeded to get dressed while Tom watched, thinking he should be embarrassed to be watching her naked, feeling ashamed for the desire splashing into his heart. He was pleased she was coming with him and hadn’t even thought it might be necessary to ask.
The first gray smoke of the morning light that had fallen on Laura after she woke was now quickly turning the black earth to gray. The fireflies had stopped flaring. Amanda told Tom she couldn’t imagine his grief.
“I don’t really feel bad. That’s probably going to come later. I don’t know why, but it feels like it did when we were looking through Tranh’s telescope.”
Amanda said she understood, but she didn’t.
Amanda asked Tom if he wanted to sit and talk before they went back to the farmhouse and he told her he didn’t really wanted talk, but he’d like to sit with her for a while and watch the sunrise. He didn’t want to go back to the practical reality of death. He wanted to feel it as he felt it then. Amanda agreed and they found a place to sit on the sand and they sat, side-by-side, and he took her hand, and they watched the sun light the earth before it appeared, rising red and silent over the water at the end of Haystack Island. The feel of the sun touched them like warm breath.
When the sun had risen above the horizon, Tom got up and led Amanda away.
They walked past the turn to the cabins and Tom didn’t say anything about waking Megan and Ann Marie, and Amanda wondered if he had gone there first. He hadn’t even considered waking them with the news. He knew intuitively that the first news of death went to those who were loved.
Tom was surprised the sunroom where his father had died was empty. The house seemed strangely silent. They found the whole family in the music room, sitting and standing, Eugene in his coffin, at the end of the room. Rosie and Tranh and Sarah were there and had helped carry Eugene and his coffin through the house.
Eugene’s coffin had been made from Walnut from the Walnut Wood. Rosie had made it eighteen months before and it had waited, covered in the wood shop since then. It was made in the simple oblong shape the way coffins were made in the nineteenth century. The difference and the beauty were in the details, for the planks, joined at the flair where Eugene’s shoulders rested, were made with wide dove tailed joints. The heavy wooden handles and hinges set off the glow of the cherry-black wood. The lid was a single piece of Walnut with the family tree and its many trunks chip-carved into the wood on both sides. It was simplicity and elegance, the polished beauty of thought and love.
Eugene lay at rest looking dead.
Rosie had been at his mother’s side within twenty minutes and the rest of the family had waited in the music room while he brought the coffin and Eugene was placed inside. Only then was the family called, and the children carried their father to where he would wait for the hours before the doctor came and signed the death certificate, and the hearse came to take him to the crematorium. Jonas was there from the West early in the afternoon. Lucy, Wayne and Charles where there within hours. Christa was the only one who didn’t come home immediately. Everyo
Amanda stood beside Eugene’s body and felt so sorry she hadn’t known him all her life. She had never even heard his voice. They had never even shared a conversation, but, as strangers, they had undeniably loved one another. Everybody knew it. Amanda thought about her mother and what part she had in that love. She stood beside Tom, feeling like she was sinking into wet sand. Amanda dared to touch Eugene’s hand and lift it into her own, feeling the silky cool skin, the soft bones, the lightness free of his pain. If someone watching had known how her heart felt, they would have known it was like holding his hand.
Before the end of the day, all of the Van Fleet children and their partners, except Christa, had been there and said goodbye to their father. It was done in the hour of silence before Sharon went with Eugene in the hearse, taking him to become ashes, to become the billion year old carbon he always was. Eugene’s mother had been brought in to say goodbye to her son and she knew immediately what she was seeing. Sharon had to hold her by the shoulders as she took her to her son, and Eugene’s mother gave a cry like a bird and walked like a doll as she faced a death she had never imagined. The cry she gave as she stared in horror at her son was unforgettable. The look on her face was the first appropriate emotion she had displayed in months. She broke from Sharon and fled, and stayed in her room for three days. No one was able to persuade her to leave it until Sharon convinced her to put on her best dress to greet all the people coming for the picnic.
Eugene had thought out much of the aftermath of his passing except that one.
He left Sharon a detailed list of things she should do immediately upon his passing: people to be called, things to be done, things to be gathered, as well as instructions for his funeral.
The monument company was called and was there the next day with the huge portable compressor, the mason working on the lichen covered traveler stone that would be Eugene’s death marker.
The biggest task was copying and collating all the printed pages from his last file. Eugene had left Sharon and each of his children printed extensions of the journals he kept by hand all their years on the farm. He had recorded the moments, the precious memories that lingered in every day, every ordinary day since he was unable to speak. The printed pages would accompany the actual journals in Eugene’s own handwriting. His children would have his memory of them, memories they had already lost to the momentum of life. They found what was lost in time preserved in their father’s attention and love.
With each bundle of his memories of each of them, he had included a single page, an essay, a eulogy from the dead to the living, the description of how Eugene saw each of them, the beautiful things that were never said, that never rose above the roar of the same momentum of life that took away its little moments. Eugene said to his living children the things that were usually appropriate to say over the dead. It was the things living people never heard said about themselves by those who loved them the most.
The last thing Eugene left each of the children was the final two letters between Arthur and Laura Lee. Eugene had introduced the circumstances that had led to Arthur and Laura Lee’s death. He described the circumstances that had led to him reading their two last letters at their Memorial service. He could not have done anything to deflect the grief of his children any better than to transfer it to two fictional characters they all loved. Knowing the circumstances and feeling the loss of Arthur and Laura Lee, was almost more heart rending than losing Eugene. It came as a total shock, and he knew it would be like that. He wanted to teach them that death and grief and loss belonged to each of them separately and all of them collectively, that death connected as much as it separated lives. It was a part of feeling more than being.
It was afternoon before Laura came up to the house with David. Ian had driven up from Toronto with Alan the moment Amanda had phoned. He paid his respects to Sharon and the children and was surprised Laura had not yet appeared. Before he went to the boathouse, Sharon gave him Eugene’s journals to Laura, and the printed pages, and Laura’s living eulogy, and the last story of Arthur and Laura Lee.
When Ian found Laura, she was working on the last story for her book, sitting in a sun dress in the afternoon heat, David strangely still, sitting in a chair beside her. Ian had to bend over to kiss Laura, then kissed her hand tenderly, in real sympathy.
“Eugene left you these things.” Ian said as he handed her all the paper. There were a dozen spiral notebooks as well as the printed pages. She took it and put it all aside.
“Everybody at the house is pouring over the things he left them. It seems he’s kept a journal about you through the years he never even saw you. You’ll probably be interested that there is also the story of the last two letters between Arthur and Laura Lee,” Ian explained.
Laura looked at the stack of paper, and she picked the printed pages from on top of the notebooks, paper rustling like the heart moves feelings, rustling the way memory sounds; sibilant and breathless, and then still. When she saw the page on top that was titled simply, ‘We Say Goodbye to Laura.’ her heart fell into the words. She couldn’t resist. He was speaking to her and she couldn’t avoid it. She was terrified about what he would say, even though she knew it would be how he loved her. That was why she was afraid. The fear dissolved as she read.
‘We say goodbye to Laura.’
The Laura I loved is keenly perceptive and deeply intelligent. She’s graceful and gracious and unfailingly honest about what she sees. She’s passionate and ambitious and so much more tender then she’d ever admit, even to herself. She’s funny and fast and translucent like church glass, and secretly frightened, and secretly shy.
She shines in a crowd and loves making an entrance, and she writes like an angel and still doesn’t believe it. She loves with conditions, but the conditions are clear. She loves but is afraid to be loved back. She loves and feels with intensity and expectations she’s always been afraid to reveal. She’s beautiful in ways she doesn’t even imagine. She has touched lives in ways she will never know.
She always tells the truth, eventually, even to herself.
She is a beautiful woman. She was a beautiful young girl. But, for her, being beautiful was always something in other people’s eyes. It was, for her, such a mixed blessing that she never liked considering its cost or its rewards.
She always knew, deep inside, that being beautiful was just a fact of life and that what other people saw was just makeup. She always wished she was as beautiful as others always told her she was and that’s why she always made herself up for others, until she came back to the farm.
Deep in her heart she was always afraid of her beauty. She was afraid it would attract attention and expectations she didn’t believe she could satisfy. Laura wants to be beautiful, but for all the wrong reasons, and all the right ones too, and wants to know she deserves to be loved but won’t admit it.
And the most beautiful thing about Laura is that she never misses a thing. She sees and feels and it’s all true, and that’s why the thing she fears most is looking into herself, and that’s why Laura will be the most beautiful when she’s no longer afraid of who she is.
It was Laura’s private honesty that taught me to see. It taught me to look at her in a way she never dared look at herself. It was how I came to love her and why I always will.
It was knowing how she would listen and how clearly she’d understand that taught me how to be who I am. She was a fact of my life that’s impossible to describe or measure. She taught me to tell myself the truth, and eventually, even to tell it to her. She is someone I was so lucky to love.
Goodbye my love, I can’t describe how much these months meant to me. Take care of Arthur and Laura Lee.’
Laura didn’t cry. She got up and went into the bedroom and came back with the box of blue letters.
“Could you stay with David while I go up to the house?” she asked Ian. Ian nodded in agr
Laura found the whole family gathered in the music room with Eugene. Everyone hushed when they saw her, and Sharon came, and Laura looked in Sharon’s eyes and told her how sorry she was that Eugene was gone. Sharon reached for Laura’s face and leaned over the box of letters, and she embraced Laura, and briefly kissed her on both cheeks.
“We both know.” Sharon answered cryptically.
“If it’s all right, I’d like to put these letters with Eugene. You can take them back when I go. I just want my last memory to be of them together.” Laura asked softly.
Sharon nodded and Laura walked quickly to Eugene where she placed the box of blue letters on the silk beside him. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t, and couldn’t imagine kissing his corpse. She knew he was gone and she was looking at a crust, but seeing the box of letters beside him almost broke through the thin crust of ice she felt beneath her feet.
Everyone was silent as Laura left the room. Like life, like infinite, ordinary, beautiful life. Sharon didn’t touch the letters. No one said anything, even when they were closed inside with Eugene before he was carried outside to the hearse for the ride they would take before they met the fire together.
It was on the ride with Eugene that Sharon looked at Eugene’s last words to her. He had titled them Respect, Thankfulness and Love. He proceeded to describe to her the strength and beauty of her own heart, the strength and beauty that supported them all. He described to her her secret tenderness and vulnerability and described for her the indescribable bond of love between them. He called it the fabric she wove from life and love. The last thing he described was his own love for her, how it completed his being, how it made his own best feelings matter. He reminded her how he believed that memory was immortal and that it made their lives together infinitely precious. ‘You are my other half in every way I can imagine.’ was the last thing he said to her except for saying that he would love her always.
His last words to her were like a sunburst through black clouds. The tears she fought back, sitting next to the stranger beside her, were tears of an overwhelming joy that summed up their lives and their love together. And then she thought about what Eugene might have written to Laura and she knew for the first time, absolutely, that he had belonged to her all along.
While Sharon was reading, her children were also pouring over Eugene’s notebooks. They had all read their living eulogies and Eugene had made each of them feel their own individuality and how precious it was to him, and some of them cried so hard they could barely see the words. Then they all moved to the story of Arthur and Laura Lee’s deaths, and the grief they felt for the love that would never be consummated, never be shared in life, somehow made the sorrow of Eugene’s early death pale in comparison to the loss of Arthur and Laura Lee’s unlived life together. All they could think of was what life might have been for two young fictional people in love. Almost every one of the children quickly realized how that unlived, fictional loss compared to all that had been, all they shared with their father. It was Eugene’s last, best lesson to his children.
The practical realities of feeding everyone and doing dishes and completing the preparations for the holiday picnic soon pulled everyone apart. It was almost like a normal day. That was perhaps the hardest thing to absorb.
Ann Marie and Megan felt very isolated and alone and it was because Eugene had left them nothing. Megan especially felt the overwhelming jealousy for Amanda who had received her own printed pages, her own living eulogy, her own collection of Eugene’s memories, her own copy of Arthur and Laura Lee’s last story, as if she had been one of his children.
Amanda couldn’t imagine how someone she barely knew could have understood her and loved her so well. Her hour reading in the forty watt light of the root cellar was like seeing her portrait for the first time, a portrait done by painter who was unerringly able to capture the human heart.
Before dinner, Amanda used her mother’s cell phone to call Bridget Brown. She had to wait for ten minutes before Miss Brown responded to the buzz of Tom’s phone. Still, Miss Brown wasn’t surprised to hear from Amanda. She had expected her to call again, but what completely surprised her was that she wasn’t calling with the heartache of a troubled romance, but with the heartache of fundamental grief.
She told Miss Brown about the pages she had just read and how they made her see herself as she never had seen herself before. Eugene saw the same strength in her that he saw in Sharon, and he told her so. He saw the same inexhaustible sensitivity that he saw in her mother, and he told her so. He saw her father’s wit and kindness. And he saw something that was hers alone. He saw someone who would never stop changing because she had an enthusiasm for life most people couldn’t even imagine.
Miss Brown told Amanda that she didn’t know the other people very well, and she told Amanda she had never even met Eugene, but she knew from Tom all she had to know about his father, and she was absolutely certain that he was right about her. “It’s not just me who knows how precious you are.” she had told Amanda. She asked about the funeral and when Amanda told her it was on Saturday, Miss Brown decided she had to be there beside Amanda.
It was only then that Miss Brown asked about Amanda’s feelings for Tom, and Amanda said she was fine. Her broken heart was much harder on him than her she had said. “I know what’s there between us.” she said, and Miss Brown told her she was sure that she did.
The last thing they talked about was the cell phone. Miss Brown told Amanda she was so glad Tom had thought to leave her his telephone.
“I’m going to get one for myself, so you can call me whenever you want.” she said.
“I would love that.” Amanda replied.
“I guess missing the last half of twentieth century was enough.” Miss Brown joked.
Laura stayed away from the farmhouse. She wanted to be alone with her grief. As the sun set like a bisected blood orange hanging over the horizon, the sky congealed to its bleeding. It was as if the water in the bay ran with a mix of white and red wine, the rolling waves lapping at the shore like the cool, repetitive sadness Laura felt filling her life.
At the farm, mourning was the same and different for everyone who loved Eugene. Each of them knew and remembered a different Eugene. Each of them felt this presence as part of their own individual being in different ways. Where his love began and ended was impossible to describe or trace or even appreciate. A gesture, a phrase, a feeling, and what each one of them made of them, and how they retained his own nature inside them was a mystery with no end. It was his passion and enthusiasm for life that was the one thing about him that his children all came to again and again.
To Rosie his passion touched the reverence for life. To Tranh it was making order from chaos. To Ian it was the gentleness in his clear blue eyes. To Amanda it was how he never let anything go. To Sharon, Eugene’s passion for life was a sensual wonder. She could have told Amanda so much about how he saw and listened, even though he only occasionally told her the things he never wanted to forget.
‘Scars of beauty.’ he called them and there were some days when he actually seemed to her to be bled dry from his love of life.
Just one of his qualities had become so many things that had grown all around him in such different ways in each of his children, and thinking of the rest of him and what it was inside each of them was like trying to unravel a ball of old jewelry tangled in a box. The only thing common to everyone mourning was the vertigo they felt at the abyss of his absence. Even in death, Eugene took them higher and higher.
Like everyone else, Laura sat and picked at the gold chains of memories in her heart and pulled at the links and jewels and clasps of time. For her, her memories of what they had been when they were young, when their love was a slender thread between two great unknowns, were like old faded photographs of two people with different bodies, different thoughts, different feelings that had belonged to the world in completely d
That night, Laura left Ian and David sleeping, and Amanda quietly awake, and went for a long walk under the stars. In the black stillness of the night, in the black stillness of the sky, and the black stillness of the water was the black stillness in her heart.
The stonecutter had come as he was instructed to do, and he insisted that no one watch him work. On the Cemetery Hill, the truck and compressor sat until the work was done and what the Van Fleet children found when the work was completed was the big traveler stone covered in a canvas tarpaulin, locked with a padlock for which Rosie had been left holding the key. It was all very mysterious.
Sharon had come back with Eugene’s ashes that were held in the Walnut box that Wayne had brought from Toronto. He had done it himself, carving it to look like a piece of the brain rock that made the serpentine fence his father and mother had built over the years. It was about one foot square and the top fitted in place so that it was completely invisible.
Eugene’s ashes in the beautiful walnut urn were placed in the screened Chapel under the Walnut tree so people could come to say goodbye.
Wayne had arranged for the television coverage and radio announcements and the newspaper obituary to tell the world Eugene Van Fleet was dead. It was amazing that the phone began ringing long before any news had been made public. One of the most difficult jobs over the next two days was answering the calls of sympathy. Cars continually came down the lane as Sharon and her children greeted each person and every family with the strength and grace Eugene would have loved. For the Toronto people, it was a stunning example of how a good life could reach so far and so wide.
Ian and Ann Marie and their children tried their best to do the ordinary tasks the Van Fleet family usually did so easily. They made great potfuls of coffee and tea. They thawed cakes and scones from the big freezers. They picked up glasses and empty cups and did the dishes and then started all over again. Ian had insisted that Sharon focus on her visitors. The four friends from Toronto had never worked so hard in their lives, and Sharon and every one of the Van Fleet children thought it was the most touching tribute that they received. Ian had gone to the boathouse to try to get Laura to come to help, but she said she couldn’t face the house and the people. The best thing she could do was watch over David. Ian saw she was right, but he was disappointed that she didn’t or couldn’t share the time of grief with the family of the man who loved her so much.
It was the day after Eugene died that Laura finally read Eugene’s last letters between Arthur and Laura Lee. It would be the story to complete the work she had done, the stories that would show she could write like an angel so everyone would know it, the way Eugene did. It was so strange to read the new letters for the first time on white paper, in Times Roman 10. It was almost like they weren’t real. It was then she really appreciated Eugene’s effort in finding old airmail paper and envelopes to complete the illusion that gave time and imagination a solid place in the world.
The first letter was from Laura Lee.
Dear Arthur,
Last night I dreamed Eugene Van Fleet gave your eulogy as I sat and listened. He tried to describe who you were. He tried his best but he didn’t even come close, even though he was your best friend.
The dream was like the dreams we share when we move through time, and as I listened to him talk, he missed so much. I knew things about you that he could never even imagine.
There’s a way that love sees that no one knows except two people who were always meant to be together. It’s the way we see when we travel in time. It’s the way our letters always cross. Nobody can describe your heart except me. Nobody knows what I see. No one knows how much I love you and how it feels. No one knows except you, and I never even said it, except that one time. But it doesn’t matter; no one can keep us apart. It doesn’t matter what anyone says or thinks. I’m so scared of what is to come!
We’ll soon be together. We’ll soon have our own life. We’ll dream together side-by-side, forever.
I love you so much. There, I’ve said it again. I hope you can hear me and feel me and touch me the way I will when I dream about you tonight.
Sleep well, as always,
My love forever,
Laura Lee
Laura loved how the letter foreshadowed what she knew would be their deaths. Her imagination took her beyond Eugene Van Fleet reading the letters for Arthur and Laura Lee’s friends and family who didn’t even exist, friends and family who would have been shamed by the love they had never appreciated. She understood why Eugene hadn’t told her how the story of Arthur and Laura Lee would end. She picked up the next page and read.
Dear Laura Lee,
Last night I dreamed Gene gave your eulogy, and he tried his best, but all I could think about was that I was the one who should have been there talking about you. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t let me speak or why they thought I couldn’t do it. If you died, a part of me would die too and I’d want everyone to know that.
I never told anyone except Eugene what I felt when they sent you away to school. I never even told you how it feels to only have your words on paper to hold. If it wasn’t for our dreams, I couldn’t stand it.
Even in last night’s awful dream, I can remember every word Eugene said about you and how he even said that a love like ours happens once in a lifetime.
That was the one really true thing he said. If it was me, I would have wanted everyone to know all the things that would never be, if you died.
I’d want them to know how I’d miss your touch, and your smile, your laugh and the way you run like a girl. I’d want everyone to know how you would’ve held our children and how they would have grown up so beautifully in your eyes. I’d want everyone to know how we would have gotten old together, and how I would’ve loved seeing your wrinkles the way I love your beautiful soft skin. I’d want everyone to know what it felt like to share the same dreams and heartaches and be together through all the things that life brings. I’d want everyone to know how much I love you, and I want you to know that too. I want to say it and say it and say it over and over and over again because I never said it before, like this. I’m saying it now. I hope you can hear me.
Sweet dreams, as always,
I love you so,
Arthur
It was then Laura felt the same thing all the Van Fleet children felt, that it was possible to have a great love in this world. Having written all the stories and been a part of each of their hearts, Laura could feel, like Eugene’s children could feel, that the ordinary facts of life and the ordinary weaknesses of people that most often unravel love, could not touch real passion. Eugene created two ideal lovers and had made them seem perfectly possible and real. He had made the impossible seem possible and even better, he had made a great love seem simple. He had made the aspirations of love an undeniable part of everyone who read the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee. He set them up for the best heartache in life.
Having written the stories, Laura knew she was now part of that same fictional reality.
When she went on to read the circumstances of Arthur and Laura Lee’s deaths, they were actually anticlimactic. After Arthur and Laura Lee had written and posted their letters, they both were consumed with the absolute terror that they would never see each other again. Each of them decided separately to go to the other, to run away and make a life together no matter where, no matter when, no matter how they had to do it.
Laura Lee’s airplane lande
Wrong or right, Laura felt like the cascading crash of an overloaded power grid was collapsing inside her with the demands being made upon her heart. Eugene was gone. She was afraid she was losing her husband and daughter just as they had been found. Her book was all but completed. Everything was over. She felt she had no future. She couldn’t do or say anything to stop it. All she knew was that she would use Eugene’s last story of Arthur and Laura just as he had written it. They would share the author’s credit as it should be. Their names would be linked forever. That was when Laura knew that the title of the book could only be, ‘Arthur Laura Lee and Eugene.’
An imaginary mourning joined to the real one, as Laura felt the strange confusion of separating feelings of two losses that were so much the same. Imaginary people, who had died more than thirty years before, were lost with the same brutal finality as the new, old love of her true lost and found life.
The foster families came the day before the funeral, and it added to the chaos of feelings in the farmhouse. Practically, the extra hands finally relieved Ian and Ann Marie and their daughters from some of the intense work they had assumed.
Megan had tried to comfort Tom, but he was just too busy to respond to her tenderness.
After the family dinner, Tom and Megan were sitting on the front porch with his mother and all her children. Amanda had gone for a walk to the garages to look at her Riviera which had been painted the day before Eugene died. It was the color of wet sand and glowed like butter. She sat inside and turned on the engine and the rumble of the big pistons trembled inside her. She thought about how they had taken the whole car apart and re-assembled it, every part re-conditioned and made shining. She thought about all the time working with her father and Tom and she understood, at last, why none of the Van Fleet children was ever able to part with their first car.
She turned off the engine and felt very much alone. She couldn’t understand why she suddenly felt happy. Her first car, her first love, her first feelings of mature reflection all felt so sweet and small.
When she walked out of the garage she was stunned to see Bridget Brown’s 29 Studebaker parked among all the other cars. Her heart leaped for joy. She found Miss Brown on the porch just greeting Tom’s mother, and being introduced to all her family. Amanda raced through the door and Bridget Brown smiled to see her and Amanda took the tiny woman in her arms and held her like she was all her own. Amanda told her how glad she was that she had come. Miss Brown said she was glad to do it.
“It’s a long way for a lady who’s never been further than Ottawa. But I got up and fed all the animals and then spent an hour in a gas station trying to find back roads I’d be comfortable driving. It was wonderful seeing the world.” Almost no one missed the irony.
Miss Brown declined any food or beverage and she told Amanda, very directly, that what she would like to do, after speaking to Sharon, was see the farm. Amanda immediately volunteered as the tour guide and the two of them left to see the rest of the house. Walking with another stranger who cared for her so much somehow filled Amanda’s heart. It was obvious to Amanda that the desire to see the farm was so the two of them could have some time alone.
When they were finally outside, Amanda showed Bridget the root cellar under the rock garden where she spent her hour alone every weekday. They went inside and sat on the bench in the dim incandescent glow. They were both surprised that they really didn’t have much to say. It was as if Amanda’s silent hours had become a living part of the place.
“I can’t tell you how much easier the next day is going to be because you came.” Amanda said thankfully.
“I don’t know how it can be so, but it feels like you are my family.” Bridget replied.
“I know.” Amanda agreed.
After the tour of the farm, Amanda insisted that Miss Brown stay the night and not go back to be alone in the motel in Picton. It was slightly uncomfortable asking if Miss Brown would mind sharing her double bed, because all the other beds at the farm were taken.
Miss Brown laughed and said that when she was young, it was common for the children to sleep together, a half dozen in a bed, sleeping cross wise. Amanda was thrilled she agreed to stay. In a way, for Amanda, it would be like when she slept with her mother in the cabin not long ago, but this time such a simple intimacy would be beyond any fear.
Bridget Brown met Laura at the boat house and they embraced once again, and Laura told her how touched she was that she had come to support Amanda. Laura thought of Eugene, thinking that he should have had someone like Miss Brown as his mother. She was sorry Eugene would never see the old woman and her daughter together.
Laura went to bed soon after. Bridget Brown and Amanda sat on the porch and listened to the bullfrogs on Haystack Island chanting deeply, feeling like they were the only people in the world, so far from care.
“Were you close to Tom’s father?” Miss Brown asked
“I don’t know why, it felt like I was. I loved how he would see and remember all the little things. Somehow all the little things added up to so much more. Just watching him look at someone was amazing”
“He was like my two Emilys.” Miss Brown replied.
“Except he was a man. His little things had car parts and racing and stuff like that too. One of my favorite things about Mr. Van Fleet was reading the stories about his life in the box on the family tree. I liked to go by and read about him every night before I went home. If you like, I’ll let you read his journal about me, about the things he wanted to remember that I did. It’s so strange; I don’t think anyone loved me for being who I am, like he did.”
“It must be very a difficult feeling, feeling you’re not one of his children when he loved you so much.” Miss Brown answered.
“It is, because I really feel like one of his children. It’s so weird.”
They didn’t have very much more to say. Miss Brown told Amanda she was quite tired and the two of them went to bed. They both laughed like schoolgirls when Miss Brown came out of the bathroom wearing one of Amanda’s short nightgowns.
Before they slept, Amanda took Miss Brown’s hand, and except for its warmth and size, it felt just like Eugene’s.
Feeding everyone in the morning got everyone through the emotional anticipation of Eugene’s funeral. There would be a service in the screened Chapel beneath the Walnut tree, just for the family and the people on the farm.
“I’m going to go up and dig his grave.” Rosie announced at the end of the meal. Tranh asked if he could help and Rosie nodded, and then all the other children said they wanted to be there too. Sharon watched her children leave the table together.
That was how Eugene’s grave was dug by all of his children who were there at the breakfast table. They took turns with the shovel making the four-foot deep hole into which they would let down his ashes. Climbing down into their father’s grave was a strange, spontaneous thing that made them feel like brothers and sisters. Except for Rosie, they all walked back to the farmhouse together, Rosie staying to plant two resplendent climbing rose bushes on either side of the stone that would mark his father and mother’s graves.<
Wayne’s beautiful box, holding Eugene’s ashes, sat on an old simple pine table in the Chapel. Everyone began gathering around it after they got back from the grave.
Laura had brought David to the farmhouse for breakfast to be part of his father’s funeral. No one noticed, when everyone got up from the table that she slipped out of the farmhouse and went back to the boathouse to be alone. When Amanda noticed her mother was missing, she assumed she had gone to get dressed for the Chapel service.
When almost everyone had gathered and Laura still hadn’t arrived, Amanda told her father she would go to check on Laura. Waiting with Miss Brown, Ian let her go, saving the two seats for the rest of his family.
Amanda found her mother sitting on the black willow, still dressed in shorts and a halter top.
The closer Amanda got to her mother, the angrier she became. It was obvious Laura had no intention of going to Eugene’s funeral.
“Why aren’t you dressed?” Amanda demanded.
“I’m not going. I can’t do it. I can’t.” Laura replied in a cold, even tone.
“Get off there!” Amanda insisted and grabbed her mother by the arm and dragged her down to the sand. Laura was shocked. She didn’t fight back, just stood there, looking stunned.
“You are going. You’re going to go in there and put on a dress. Right now!” Amanda insisted, and when her mother just turned her head away, Amanda couldn’t contain her rage.
“He loved you for God’s sake! You were his Laura Lee. You’re Laura Lee to all of them. If you don’t come, you’ll be betraying every feeling anybody has ever had for you in this place. You owe it to Eugene. You owe it to Sharon. You owe it to Tom and, goddamn it, you owe it to me.” Amanda screamed.
“I owe everybody. But don’t you see, I’m bankrupt, broke.” Laura replied softly, evenly, coldly.
“You are going to this funeral, if it kills you. If you don’t do this, I’ll never forgive you.” Amanda said in a voice as cold as her mother’s.
Laura gave in. She gave a sad, heartbroken, “Alright, I’ll go.”
Laura looked into her daughter’s eyes and walked into the boathouse and when she came back, she looked entirely normal, actually beautiful in the makeup she hadn’t worn in many months. They said not one word on the long walk to the Chapel.
The family had gathered for the service exactly as they did every week, except everyone wore their best clothes. Sharon asked Jonas to lead the service and the song he picked was the old traditional ‘Precious Memories’.
Everyone was surprised that by the time the service began there were four or five hundred people gathered all around the Chapel. Cars were streaming down the lane way and parking in the field where the music would be that afternoon. Jonas began to speak and silence fell to his voice.
“When the disciples complained to Jesus that he never gave them any commandments, He said He’d be generous and give them two: Love God with your whole heart and mind and soul and the other one was like it, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’. And we shouldn’t forget how Jesus explained that a neighbor was someone like the Good Samaritan who would always care for those who needed help. Our father was a great Samaritan. He cared for us with an absolute, unconditional love. I think everyone here knows Eugene Van Fleet will never die.”
That was all Jonas said. It would have been more than any of his family ever needed to think about in the next hour of silence.
Laura and Amanda had taken their seats shortly after Jonas spoke. The whole family was stunned to see the crowd gathering outside, until there was a crush of people as far as anyone could see, and they weren’t dressed in casual summer clothes like the crowds that came every other year for the picnic. Almost everyone was properly dressed for a funeral. Looking out of the circular Chapel and seeing faces so sad and respectful was almost overwhelming.
The hour of contemplation was almost over when Christa finally made her way through the crowd. Sharon had talked with Brian Smith, Christa’s psychiatrist, and they agreed it would be best if she only came home on the day of the funeral. Sharon worried about why Christa hadn’t arrived because she had no idea she would be caught in the traffic streaming onto the farm. Christa had actually run the long lane way as her psychiatrist slowly progressed to where the cars were being parked.
She wore a sheen of sweat when she entered the Chapel and Ian got up to give her his chair. But she absolutely ignored everyone, her eyes fixed on the Walnut box that obviously held her father’s ashes.
She seemed to float in a trance straight to it.
“Water is taught by thirst. Love by Memorial mold.” Christa whispered as she lifted the heavy wooden box into her arms and began to cover it with gentle kisses. It was uncomfortable to watch, it was almost like she was kissing her lover’s face, and the look on her face was unforgettable, and lost.
Sharon got up and went to her daughter and tried to take Eugene’s remains away, but Christa only laid her cheek against the top of the dark box, holding it to her breast.
“Her words were from a poem of Emily Dickinson’s.” Bridget Brown whispered to Amanda while everyone waited.
“Christa, honey, come sit with me.” Sharon whispered to her daughter.
Christa slowly put the urn back on the table and when she bent to kiss it again, her long Chestnut hair fell softly around it. It was one last sweet kiss on the cool wood. When she stood up, her eyes were like fire. She spoke to her family.
“Do you remember how he used to let us push him into a snow bank and wash his face until it was so cold and wet? Do you remember how he laughed when the snow tears ran down his face? Do you remember how warm it felt to have such cold hands touching him? Do you know? Do you know? Do you know? Do you know his laughter?” she seemed to be talking to every pair of eyes. Then she focused on her mother. “I want to carry him.”
“You can do that, but come and sit until it’s time.” Sharon said gently to her daughter and took her hand and took her to her own seat.
Jonas waited a few minutes after Sharon took Eugene’s empty seat beside her daughter and then got up and asked everyone to sing Precious Memories once again.
‘Precious memories, how they linger,
How they ever flood my soul.’
When the song was over everyone rose and Christa gathered her father’s ashes into her arms and walked beside her mother as they left the Chapel, as the enormous crowd parted for the family procession to the graveyard. It took almost an hour before the family was gathered at the grave and the multitude of nearly 3000 souls covered the hillside holding the little cemetery. Because the Walnut box was so heavy, Christa finally let her brothers and sisters take it from her breast, and they all took turns carrying their father to his rest.
At the graveside, the Walnut box was placed in the small bronze coffin Wayne had ordered to fit the urn carrying his father’s ashes. The children had decided the night before, at the dinner table, that they each wanted to take down their favorite photo of themselves from the family history on the wall, forever leaving its white space bare. Each took the photo they’d taken down and carried it to the graveside where they would all lie beside Eugene forever. They all put their photos in the box, one by one.
The dark box was closed and Wayne and Tranh let it down into the dark earth.
It was a moment in life and loss that was absolutely real. It was the last time any of them would have the chance to speak directly to their loss. Eugene had understood how important that last chance was. He had asked that his family read or speak something there, before his grave was closed. Wayne had understood there would be a great many people wanting to hear those words, and so he had placed a speaker on a table nearby, and each of the children passed a wireless microphone as they said their last words to their father.
The big knot of grief inside each person had its place among the great grief they all shared among the family, among the multitude. It was as m
“My father was living proof that no matter who you are, you deserve to be loved. I think it’s obvious by the people that are here, his love went so much further than his own family. He always pretended that he was just an ordinary man, but there wasn’t anything ordinary about him. He would never give up. He never stopped waiting. He never stopped loving you, no matter what you did. He taught me the best things about respect and patience I know, and he taught me how to stand up and be proud of who I am. He was just so beautiful, but I guess you people all know that. Thank you all for coming and sharing our loss. It really does make it easier to bear.”
Wayne passed the microphone to Tranh.
“My father made the impractical, practical; the impossible, possible; the emotional understandable, and the very best thing of all, the unlovable, lovable, so incredibly lovable. He taught us all what it really means to be rich. He taught us universal truths are really very simple. Rest in peace, dad.”
Rosie spoke next and he talked the longest and that surprised everyone.
Staring down into the little grave, he told how he had come to be adopted and how angry and lost he was as a boy, and how he was so frightened when he first saw how big Eugene was.
“I thought that life was just learning to protect yourself from someone who was going to hit you. I thought life was just getting ready to strike back.”
Rosie proceeded to tell how Eugene’s gentleness slowly washed away his fear. He told about what a difference it made to how he saw everything and everyone, knowing life could be something beyond anger and fear.
“I couldn’t imagine that it was possible to be someone who would never lift a hand in anger. When I realized my father would have died before he did that, it made me want to be like that too.”
He told how he found peace and tenderness as part of his own heart and how his father had known how to nurture it as no one else had ever done.
“When I understood the softest part of me was the best one, just like it was the best part of him, I think I became who I am.”
It was then Rosie pointed out the climbing roses on either side his father’s head stone.
“The rose you see has had its name formally registered. As long as they grow, as long as it is propagated, this rose will be called, the Eugene and Sharon rose.” He looked in his mother’s eyes.
It was then that he started to cry and passed the microphone.
Sarah, everyone’s teacher, had lost control of her voice. Her breath was as ragged as a leaf in the wind as she told her heart’s deepest feelings.
“He gave us roots. He made us feel loved. He made sure we have a place for all time. He made sure that our own children would know that too. He gave us his heart and he gave us our wonderful mother. He gave us himself without asking for anything. He gave us a place to be ourselves. I love you, daddy. I’m sorry I never told you enough, that’s all.” She passed the microphone to Jonas. He heaved a great sigh as he began.
“It’s almost impossible to think we’ll never see him again. It’s almost impossible because he’s still so alive in every one of us. The reason I think it will always be impossible to feel that he’s gone is because he taught each of us to create this world in our own imaginations. Our father believed that anything you could imagine could happen. He made us all believe that was true. And the funny thing is, the man who gave us the depth of our imaginations, was the only person that I ever felt was completely real. It goes without saying that he was a great father. Only his family knows he was such a good son and brother. Watching him with our mother, there isn’t one in this family who doesn’t know how beautiful a marriage can be.”
“He once told me that he didn’t believe anything died. He said we just changed our point of view. That’s certainly true for all of us gathered here, because his death has changed our point of view. And I think he might have agreed that being born into life was another change in the way we see. He made us appreciate that change in ways none of us will ever be able to describe.”
He passed the wireless microphone to Christa. Everyone wondered how she would respond. The family was decidedly nervous.
“He was a dog’s tail banging on the floor, having a happy dream. I wanted to write a poem, but I didn’t think it was possible to put Eugene in a box of words. Last night, dreaming, words came to me. These are the ones I’m supposed to say.
Look homeward, Angel!
Your eyes are all that’s left
In the poor language of love.
Your eyes in mine, mine in yours
My father, Remember, I loved you
And the entry and the exit wounds,
Each of them, all of them, all.
When one heals, one never heals.
You came to me as I am.
A leaf, a stone, a broken door.
She had barely paid any attention to the microphone in her hand and so only the family heard what she said. Lucy had to take it from her fingers. Lucy said nothing. She simply began to sing in her sweet soprano voice.
“We have been gay
Going our way
Life has been beautiful.
We have been young.
After you’re gone
Life will go on,
Like an old song we have sung.
When I grow too old to dream
I’ll have you to remember.
When I grow too old to dream,
Your love will live in my heart.
So kiss me sweet
And so let us part,
And when I grow too old to dream
That kiss will live in my heart.
And when I grow too old to dream
Your love will live in my heart.”
She blew a kiss into his grave as the song carried out to places only a beautiful voice could reach, and the whole crowd had fallen into the old sweet song as more and more faces dissolved in tears.
She handed the microphone to Tom.
No one understood what Tom did next. He didn’t say anything. He could find no words for his grief and it was in that moment when his heart was pounding with the shame of finding nothing to say that he remembered a movie about wolves he had watched that had been about a man who had adopted a pack of them and learned to be accepted as the alpha male. Tom remembered the man’s wolf howl, and had practiced it a few times when he was alone in the Walnut Wood. He didn’t think twice. The amplified wolf cry slowly rose from his lungs echoing over the multitude, so high and poignant in one rising heartbreakingly pure note that it was almost chilling. The hair rose on the back of Tom’s own neck hearing the cry coming from deep inside him, until the long plaintive note was finally over and there was absolute silence in response.
Amanda and Megan looked at each other in absolute shock. When Tom looked at his mother’s eyes, he knew it was all right.
The younger children followed with their own thoughts and readings.
It was Martha, serious, busy Martha who picked the Whitman poetry that stunned then all.
“I will show you that there is no
Imperfection in the present and can be none in the future.
And I will show you that whatever happens to anybody,
It may be turned to beautiful result,
I will show you that nothing can happen more beautiful then death,
And I will thread that thread through in poems
That time and events are compact,
And that all things in the universe are
Perfect miracles, each as profound as any.”
And she wasn’t done, quoting again from Eugene’s favorite poet.
“Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate death.
Praise’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love--- but praise! Praise! Praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
I think that was how our dad felt about dying.” she added simply.
Christa swooned hearing the words, and her knees gave out, and Sharon and Jonas had to hold her between them until she had the strength to stand once again. That was when Sharon first wept.
She composed herself as the younger children spoke. And when the microphone came to her, everyone was surprised she would find the strength to speak. Her voice breaking as she spoke the words that had burned inside her for so long, the whole crowd seemed to heave a great sigh to her anguish that caught in every throat and every heart.
“O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!
In the air, in the woods, over fields.
Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved!
But my mate is no more, no more with me,
We two together no more!”
Out of the cradle, endless rocking, Sharon tore the heart from the crowd, and her children, and her own breast. There had never been such tears. Even Laura broke down and cried, and that was when Laura saw George Marshall, his face buried in his hands.
It was then that Rosie went to the tarpaulin shrouding the great stone to unsnap the lock and pull away the canvas. Everyone near the grave waited until they could look at the brass plaque affixed to the place the stone Mason had made flat.
When the whole family saw what was written there, they absolutely exploded in laughter...gut-wrenching, tear-running, bend over, belly laughter. Eugene and Sharon’s full names divided the brass Square in two. Eugene’s side read,’ Eugene Arthur Van Fleet, Sept. 14, 1949-June 30th 1999. Underneath the date was a simple sentence, ‘There’s no end to it.’
Everyone who could read the words that was not laughing out loud, thought it a simple and fitting sentiment for a grave marker and were shocked at the laughter. The younger children were almost beside themselves, bent over in tears, howling in comic relief. It took the rest of the morning before everyone in the crowd had had the joke explained.
Tom whispered to Amanda and Megan, “It’s what he used to say every time, he’d fart. There’s no end to it.” They couldn’t help it, because it made them laugh too. It was an incredible release.
Wayne took the microphone from his mother and, still laughing, thanked everyone for coming and invited everyone to stay for the annual picnic. He was sorely tempted to tell about Eugene’s last best joke, but he didn’t. How could he explain an in-joke to three thousand sad people?
Eugene had managed to replace gut-wrenching sadness with gut-wrenching laughter, and it changed the day completely. Even those who didn’t know why the family was laughing, knew something had happened to soothe their terrible pain.
“We’re going to sing every sad song we know.” Wayne had shouted, almost defiantly, to the crowd. Still, everyone waited, whispering about the laughter from the Van Fleet family amplified over the crowd.
In the strange anticlimax that happens before people walk away at a burial, the whole family, the whole crowd, stood waiting for the first person to move away.
No one moved away. Rosie produced a shovel and started to fill in the grave. There was no sound of dirt on a coffin, just the scratch of gravel on gravel. Everyone stopped laughing. Everyone stood and watched Rosie shoveling in his dark suit until Wayne took the shovel away from him and worked until Tranh did the same, and all of the children took their turn closing their father’s grave, until it was just a little square of open dirt.
When it was done, Sharon went to take David by the hand, and David, holding hard to Laura’s, led the family and the crowd from the hillside Cemetery. Sharon was still getting over the light headedness of her laughter. Laura didn’t speak.
Suddenly, Laura pulled her hand from David’s and ran away over the fields, back toward the boathouse and her guilt and her grief.
When she got to the beach, her tears suddenly stopped, and as she walked and looked at Haystack Island, she stopped dead. She stood rooted to the spot in the sand and realized Eugene had been right in the last story, she was the one who should have spoken at his grave side, she was the one who knew who he was. All the beautiful words about how he had touched his family were nothing compared to what she knew and learned about who he really was as a man, and it was then that she knew the best moments of her life had been lying beside a man who could barely move. She hadn’t spoken when he was alive; she hadn’t spoken when he was gone. She hadn’t said anything about all the things she knew as no one else, not even Sharon, could know. She remembered the last months of his life as one precious jewel in her heart, and she remembered the time long ago when they had loved one another and she had turned away.
She could feel herself surrendering to the strange nostalgia for her youth and she decided she wanted to be alone with what was left of Eugene inside her, and swim to where they had made love the first time. She didn’t take off her beautiful sandals or her blue summer dress, she just walked into the warm water and began to swim, and she could feel the fabric clinging around her thighs as her arms pulled the clear water past. She was almost halfway to the Island when she felt the first cramp and it felt like the pain in her heart.
She knew what it was and she knew if she kept going, she might not be able to come back, or it might even take her and she would drown and there would be another gathering, a tiny funeral where no one would be able to say who she was because he was dead. It would be Arthur and Laura Lee’s Memorial service all over again. Drowning felt almost appealing. If there was seeing, she would see Eugene again. To go on, to go back, it was the moment when she would have to decide the rest of her life.
As the cramp in her hamstring began to take hold like a predator seizing its prey, she could feel another seize her other leg, and she fought for herself in the incredible pain and began to fight for a way back toward the boathouse. Screaming, the pain was like nothing she had ever felt in her body, beyond childbirth, beyond love and grief, beyond anything she had ever felt. It was paralyzingly real.
Pulling herself with only her arms, dragging her legs like they were dead meat, she fought back toward the shore, straining and thrashing, and the enormous distance seemed to stretch out in her anguish until her exhaustion and her pain was like the sun and the water burning in her eyes like cold fire. And then, completely exhausted, she knew the decision was no longer hers. She was about to die.
With one great gasp, she slipped under the water and her dress came up all around her arms as she struggled to drag herself back to the surface, and it was only a second before her legs touched bottom and her feet were locked on point from the cramp as they buried themselves in cold softness, like death.
Her weight broke the cramp in one leg, and momentarily reeling in her blue dress, she ran and crawled to get some purchase underwater, stretching for the solid earth, kicking and crawling for some way to get back to the sun and the air. Her dress fell around her and she forced herself up, pulling and thrashing, and suddenly she broke the surface and she could breathe once again. She was like a dying sea creature fighting to survive as she swam in toward the shore, and when she looked down and could see that her feet might be able to touch the sand, she would be able to stand up and face the excruciating pain, and she would live.
When she stood, her feet gave into the pain, but she stood, her head back, her mouth above the water, gasping like a fish in the air. She forced herself ahead, back to the beach, and the pain slowly subsided as she walked like her old plastic doll Barbie doll. Then she just stopped. She stood and just waited until her ragged breath calmed and she could feel the sand slowly pouring over her feet. With only her head and shou
And then, when she was finally safe and free to walk back into life, she found that she couldn’t move. Life was like death. Death was like life. Like life! Like life! Like life! She was completely paralyzed with its total reality. As a daughter, as a mother, as a lover and a wife, she realized how rigid and unexpressed her whole life had been. She realized her parents, her husbands and lovers had been just as locked into themselves as she had been. It was the inescapable fact of life.
And, as she had aged, it had gotten worse, not better. And what was completely heart rending was that it was as true for anyone as it was true for her. It was even true for Eugene. The desire and anguish of youth, wanting so much to be heard and understood, was like a fading sentimental melody in the descending elevator of time. She understood it then, as Eugene’s disease had made her realize it when he had said those terrible words, like life. The words rang in her heart like Cyrano’s bell, pealing with the pain of a love that could never be spoken because of the one disfiguring truth that made life seem to be just like Eugene had looked before he died, wasted and rigid and cold.
Laura decided to walk back to where the water was deeper. She wanted to stand where it was only her mouth and her eyes left above it. That was all she was, anyway. When her neck ached, she moved closer to shore. She watched for an hour, and then another, as people came looking for her. She watched families come down to the beach from the music, to swim and play and be together. Lovers and families scattered along the beach and the wind began to rise and she had to walk closer to shore as the waves started to swell, and she thought it was strange that no one noticed her, but when her torso rose out of the water she was hidden behind the crests of the waves between her and the people on the beach. It was strange how she could see the shoreline and yet no one seemed to be able to see her. Watching, watching, separate and together, she saw the white bodies where they found places of their own. Children connected, grown-ups didn’t. The water drew everyone eventually, and let them go. People were so beautiful and small, like stones, like shells, that had been by the water forever.
She could hear the music playing far over the fields as she just stood there trying not to feel anything but the cool water holding her. She had to fight to stay where she was standing, her dress clinging light and cold, until her body started to shiver as the seventy degree water drained her of her warmth. She stayed where she was, concentrating on the glassy rings that went out as the waves went by her body. And the wind rose like an expectation, until it was like the hot gasp death had knocked from life. Sheets of lightning spread over the sky but no rain fell. It was a dry wind. It was a sky incapable of tears. It was pathetic fallacy for Laura’s grief. She didn’t belong and she knew it as the waves kept pushing her towards shore. The pair of black terns she knew so well turned over her again and again crying, Like! Like! Like!
Laura saw Ian and Ann Marie searching for her again and felt so distant and strange. She wondered if it was how death felt. Her life seemed so far away. When they left and the lightning scared everyone from the beach, she was shivering the way she had at the ice races, and the circles shuddering from her body, drowned in the waves, looked like she felt. She felt her feet push against the sand and she was walking out of the water without even knowing she wanted to do it. Her body in water, her feet in sand, Laura rose from the waves and walked the long slow incline of the beach, feeling gravity return to her body, feeling strangely light and alive, except for her heart. She rose the way she had once risen in Eugene’s eyes, long, long ago. This time, she was the one who was shaking.
At the boat house, she threw off her clothes and threw herself on Amanda’s bed, and she lay there trembling and shaking for a very longtime before it stopped, and Ian found her looking still and naked and lovely.
He had two strangers in tow and he made them wait on the porch when he saw her.
“You’ve been swimming.” he said, “You have to get dressed. You know who’s waiting outside? It’s Arthur and Laura Lee.” he said, excitedly.
Laura just stared at him in shock. If Ian had said he had brought Eugene, risen from his ashes, she couldn’t have been more shocked.
“What are you talking about?” she asked, breathlessly.
.”I’m telling you, it’s Arthur and Laura Lee. Now get dressed.” he replied.
She got up and dressed, and it felt like she was drowning all over again.
Back in the pasture, the mood was electric with the release of joy and grief and music. Almost everyone had changed into light summer clothes wherever they could. It looked like the Van Fleet picnics from other years, except for the numbers. Two huge, open tents had been set up on either side of the stage for the instruments and musicians, and older people who couldn’t take the sun. The little big band that came from Montreal every year had finished playing a set and everyone was ringing from the power of the horns. For the first time, the rules had been suspended and people could sing songs written after their mothers were born.
The first funny moment of the day came when Wayne and Charles and Jonas sang a medley from Staying Alive. They had the disco moves cold.
Tom and Amanda and Lucy sang the old traditional song Jewels that mourned babies who died and were mourned long ago, pouring out all the grief of seeing beloved innocents vanish in death over and over again. Death came early and often then, and when Tom explained to Amanda what the song was about, she came to love it completely. The three young voices singing the old, sad song made the first moment of silence since the nearby grave had been closed. Pain felt right when it was sung.
Tom and Amanda had been introducing Miss Brown to some of the other members of the family she hadn’t met, and they all knew who she was. They brought her back to where Sharon was sitting with Christa, and Tom left the ladies to talk after he introduced his sister.
“Miss Brown, this is my sister Christa. She loves Emily Dickinson too.”
Christa seemed transfixed by Miss Brown. She got up and went to Miss Brown and took her in her arms, embracing her with her whole, volatile heart.
“You’ve come. Thank you so much.” Christa whispered to her.
And when Miss Brown got herself loose from Christa’s arms, she was neither upset or embarrassed.
“You’re so lovely.” Miss Brown said gently.
“You know, don’t you?” Christa replied
“I think I do.” Miss. Brown replied sweetly, matter-of-factly.
“We’re going to be great friends and lovers.” Christa said as she led Miss Brown to a chair beside Amanda, who was looking decidedly nervous.
“So how did you two meet?” Christa asked Amanda.
“I was with Tom and Martha looking for antiques on old farms. We found a barn full of treasures Wayne is still selling off. It’s kind of a legend now.” Amanda replied.
“You miss things when you’re in the shrink factory.” Christa answered.
Christa asked Bridget Brown about her farm and her life and she heard the story of the lady, the recluse, and then Amanda made her tell about her sculptures and quilts and the lady slipper orchids. As Miss Brown talked, Christa became even more enthralled. For the third time in her life, she was falling in love, this time with a woman almost three times her age.
Sharon asked Miss Brown how she could live her life with no one to share it.
“You can share your life with more than just the people living with you. You don’t have to be with someone to share in their life. Sometimes they can even be dead.” Miss Brown answered. Only Christa understood what she meant, or so she thought.
“Her place reminds me of this one.” Amanda told Sharon, “Except Miss Brown doesn’t have so many things going on, so
“I never thought of this place as having many distractions.” Sharon answered.
“It does. It’s all good things, but there are so many people. It’s really good we have to have an hour a day by ourselves.” Christa replied.
“It’s like a little city, not like the country.” Bridget Brown agreed, “If you want to find a very different connection to life, you should come visit me for a while.”
Amanda realized suddenly, that what the farm was to the city, Miss Brown’s place was to the farm. It was beyond all the ambition and the money and the social relationships that whirled around everyone, constantly.
“I think Miss Brown knows where she belongs better than any of us ever will.” she said, and the older women had nothing to say. Miss Brown was very proud of her adopted grand daughter.
“I know the simple life can be very beautiful. Perhaps you can describe it for us?” Sharon asked Bridget Brown.
“I think I can. It begins with peace and ends with peace. I wake up in the morning and there is that beautiful quiet, even when the wind is raging outside. You look forward to every moment because you know that it’s as beautiful as anything that’s ever happened before. The bird’s songs in the sunrise and the sound of rain, the jewels when buds burst on the trees, the graceful curve of grasses, the frogs, the flowers and clouds and the sun and the wind and the earth, it’s all I need. Every moment is part of the things you touch. The hard part is not being overwhelmed. I have to stay busy, just like you, so my heart doesn’t fill up so much that it bursts. That’s why you stay so busy, isn’t it?”
“I wish. You may be right. I never thought of that.” Sharon replied, “That was probably only true of my husband. He woke up with peace and fell asleep with it too.”
“He must have been truly wonderful. I’ve never seen such love in one place. I never imagined such love was possible.” Miss Brown answered gently.
“It’s true.” Amanda agreed, and there was a strange, tense moment before she said, “There’s part of me would like to live just like you do, like he did.”
“Me too.” Christa agreed.
“Until this moment, I never thought of such a thing, but I think part of me would like that too.” Sharon said seriously.
“I think you must feel closer to life than any of us can even imagine.” Christa said to Miss Brown.
“You all make it sound so extraordinary. It’s just an ordinary life.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” Amanda said, and everyone laughed.
“Would you like to see my tree house?” Christa asked Miss Brown, I haven’t been inside it in ten years, but I would love to show it to you.”
Sharon saw the connection between her daughter and the old woman and the light in Christa’s eyes that seemed so easy and fresh and new. She hadn’t seen that simple light since Eugene had gotten sick. She was stunned at the simple power of the old woman, and Sharon understood and appreciated real power as few people did. The old woman got up and went with Christa. Christa took her hand like a schoolgirl, but Bridget Brown was the one who looked small and unsteady.
At the boathouse, there probably wasn’t anything in the world that would have reached Laura except the words she heard Ian say. Arthur and Laura Lee, were there, were real.
She dressed quickly and then Ian asked the ordinary looking, middle-aged couple to come in.
“But you’re dead.” Laura said to the strangers. “You don’t even exist.”
The two strangers laughed and the man explained that they were Dale and Betty Charboneaux.”
“We were in the class behind you. I’m Betty McLaughlin. We saw you at the high school reunion.”
Laura didn’t remember either of them.
“We went to school together?”
“I remember you and Eugene sitting in the cafeteria all those years ago, and he looked so in love, it was really quite comical. The look of love.” Betty answered.
“Why are you Arthur and Laura Lee?” Laura asked in confusion.
Dale told her how Eugene would send them letters about once or twice a year after they moved to Scarborough, asking if they would copy them on the old blue air mail stationery he had sent for them to use. He even included a box of old canceled Canadian and French stamps of the proper denomination for them to place on the letters.
“He even sent old pressed flowers to put in between the pages.” Betty added brightly.
“Life is all in the details.” Ian added grinning, overjoyed that Laura was meeting the people who had actually written the letters and spent the time to create the illusion that Laura had made into art.
Laura couldn’t tell Ian or the couple that she was just heart sick at having had her illusions completely destroyed. Part of her, like Eugene’s own family, wanted to believe in Arthur and Laura Lee.
“I don’t know how to say this, but I’m really feeling very sad right now. I’d really like to be alone for awhile.” And the school mates she never knew said they understood completely, and then Laura asked Ian to try to keep people away from the boathouse.
“David can’t come back here, anymore.” she said with cold finality. Ian just looked at her.
Christa took Bridget Brown into the orchard to the tree house in an old Plum tree that was just hanging onto life. A few hard green plums were swelling on the two branches that were still alive. Its days were gone when it would shed a huge circle of blossoms in the spring, when it would shed the green fruit, like baby butternuts, pruning itself of its too heavy burden, when it would shed its ripe fruit late in the summer and wasps would gather in clouds to sip at the sweet nectar of the windfalls.
Black bark had closed around the places where the frame of the tree house had touched its branches. Miss Brown’s eyes directed Christa’s to those places and she told her how she loved the little square board and batten room with the shed roof and the one little window. Christa reached up and opened the door to the little gray wooden room and pulled out a rope ladder and the two of them felt their weight, in good shoes and heels, holding onto old sisal.
Inside, they sat cross-legged looking at one another, youth, beauty and pain opposite age and wisdom and peace. A woman who could count her sexual experiences on one finger of one hand sat opposite a woman who had known countless lovers; a woman withered with age sat across from a young woman of breathtaking beauty; a woman who had only known one place in her life sat opposite a woman who had never been able to find a place in the world. They looked at each other and they both knew that they were the most remarkable of twins.
“You’re the very first person I’ve ever asked to come in here.”
“I’m very honored.” Miss Brown replied.
In the next few moments, the tumblers of pain would fall together and release their absolute lock on Christa’s heart. She could feel it spring open in the old woman’s eyes. Somehow she knew she was staring into the face of her freedom. She simply had to give Miss Brown her heart. And the shackles of pain fell away the moment she realized that her stranger was going to take it.
Miss Brown told Christa that she loved the fragments of Emily Dickinson’s poem that she quoted when she was kissing the Walnut urn. She quoted the whole poem for Christa.
“She’s everything to me.” Bridget confessed. “I sometimes spend two weeks just thinking about one of her poems, and most times I realize, I’m not even beginning to know it.
“You too! I know almost three hundred by heart.” Christa answered.
It was then Christa asked Miss Brown the first of the impossible questions for which she sought answers in the poems she had memorized. She asked the questions in the same direct way that her father had taught her to ask them over the years. Her father’s simple, impossible questions were almost the only structure she had for understanding her life.
‘Tell me about your pain. Tell me what you’re afraid of feeling. Tell me what lonelines
“Tell me about your life.” Christa began. Miss Brown delighted her with her reply.
“To make a prairie takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And reverie.
Reverie alone will do,
If bees are few.”
“Tell me about your life.” Miss Brown asked Christa after she gave her answer.
And Christa thought for a minute and answered
“And then- a Day as huge
As Yesterdays in pairs,
Unrolled its horror in my face-
Until it blocked my eyes-
And Something’s odd - within -
That person that I was-
And this One -do not feel the same -
Could yet be Madness-this?
Both knew the truth for what it was and wasn’t. At first it would be dueling Dickinson quotations. One would begin and the other would answer. They would pause and listen and be silent and remember the poem and find its place in the heart, and then reply with a poem from another drawer where it was kept in the vault of truth and beauty.
“Tell me your philosophy.” Christa asked Bridget.
Finding is the first Act
The second, loss,
Third, Expedition for
The “Golden Fleece”
Fourth, no discovery-
Fifth, no crew-
Finally, no Golden Fleece-
Jason-sham- too.”
The answer took Christa’s breath away. And then it was Miss Brown’s turn to ask questions of the soul. Both felt enormous futility in confronting the enormity of existence because they both knew the passion that went from blank to blank that only lost pilgrims know. They spoke of love,
To wait an Hour - is long -
If love be just beyond -
To wait eternity -is short -
If the love reward the end -
They savored the quotations of the poem about how love was sometimes known with the heart and seldom with the soul and scarcer yet with all of one’s might, and how few loved at all. They both believed that love was anterior to life and posterior to death. They both believed love’s strident, “why” was the little syllable that broke the hugest hearts. They talked about the pain so utter it swallowed substance, covering the Abyss with Trance. They both knew, like Emily, the worthiness of suffering, like the worthiness of death, is ascertained by tasting.
“Tell me your future?” Christa asked, and Bridget Brown replied.
“Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our Luxury!”
It was a pure and simple declaration of love that was so absurd and rash and beautiful they could feel the rush of blank, racing in their hearts. But still, neither of them dared speak the last stanza.
Rowing in Eden -
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor - Tonight
In thee!
A miracle of love and connection happened between them in the spark of a moment, a few brief words, but such words, such a moment. Her time in the mental hospital was nothing compared to that moment. Christa was looking at the person she knew that she might be. In the place where Christa had once dreamed and imagined love and passion in its absolute extreme, she sat and felt it fill her completely at last.
“You lost someone too.” Christa said to Bridget.
“Heart, we will forget him!
You and I tonight!
You may forget the warmth he gave-
I will forget the light!” Christa told Bridget.
“I never lost as much; and but twice,
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God.”
Miss Brown answered solemnly.
“Who was it?” Christa asked.
“My father and my son.” Miss Brown answered.
“Me too.” Christa confessed.
And then Christa told the one terrible secret she had never told another human being, and Miss Brown sat and listened and opened her heart like a flower. Then Bridget Brown told Christa her own secret, the one that no one on the earth knew except her, and the secret was so much more terrible than the one Christa had shared, Christa felt like her heart was falling off a cliff.
Back at the stage, while two hearts were being poetically married like ropes, three were about to be torn apart. Amanda had just come off the stage after singing Running on Empty with a very good local rock and roll band. The roar as she came off was tremendous, the huge crowd stunned with her energy and her incredible pipes. It was the first time she felt good all day. She was grinning as she came up to Tom and Megan who were glaring at each other in obvious rage.
“What’s going on?” Amanda asked.
Megan answered curtly, nervously.
“I just told Tom that what he did by his father’s grave was just too weird.”
“It was weird.” Amanda agreed, “What was all that call of the wild stuff anyway?”
Tom was trying to control his anger as he took the attack from where he hadn’t expected it to come.
“She said a lot more than that. But I think what I did over my own father’s grave was my business not either of yours.”
“Right. But it was still kind of gross. Are you going to do bird calls when your mother dies? Megan pursued thoughtlessly. “People were looking at us like we were supposed to know what all that wolf howling shit was about.”
“I think you must have embarrassed your mother.” Amanda added, and that sent Tom over the edge of rage.
“How the fuck would you know that? How is it any of your business how I face my father’s death? It’s like what I did was all about you. You didn’t ask me to explain what I did because you were embarrassed. You were ashamed of me. That takes a fuck of a nerve for the two of you.” he shouted.
“You have two years to get ready to say something nice about your father at his funeral and you decide to make animal noises.” Amanda shot back.
“Really!” Megan agreed, and then she began a mocking imitation of Tom’s Wolf howl.
“You two are pathetic! My mother understood, even if you two idiots don’t. You wouldn’t know what a wolf really was if one was standing right in front of you. My father was a wolf. If you knew anything about anything that didn’t have a bar code, you know why that’s true.
“Grrrrr...” Megan growled at him.
“Grrrrrr..” Amanda growled too.
“It was weird, admit it.” Megan pressed.
“Really.” Amanda agreed.
“If you really think that, I don’t want to have anything to do with either one of you again. Mall rats!” Tom spat from his cold heart and its pure rage. He stalked away and they watched him moving through the crowd, fighting his way to the Cemetery.
“Did he just break up with us?” Amanda asked Megan.
“I think so.” Megan replied sounding very afraid.” I’m going after him.”
“Why? He’ll calm down.”
“You’re just worried that he’ll take me back and not you. We should never have said all that shit.”
“Right, you’re going to go running after him every time he gets mad. Maybe he likes submissive gestures. He probably thinks he’s a wolf too. Suit yourself.”
“I always do.” Megan shot back as she left.
As Amanda watched, she could feel the razor of truth cut into the anger and resentment she felt for Tom that she hadn’t dare admit. She remembered him talking about wolves and how he had made her imagine what it felt like to be one, and she remembered the long mortifying howl. It came too close to her hea
There was nothing like music to express the fathomless complexity of sorrow and loss, nor the joy and connection against which it was measured. Under low clouds, in the brisk wind under the sheet lightning that seemed to take a very long time to pass by, the Van Fleet children sang through the afternoon, picking through the best moments and greatest hits of their life on the farm; being sisters and brothers who had once been lost in the world.
Jonas was on stage with his brothers Wayne and Tranh and Rosie. They had just finished singing an old Mills Brothers song, Under the Apple Tree, and were just beginning the Ink Spots classic, If I Didn’t Care. White and yellow and black, gay and straight, they did the bass baritone and falsetto of the black black Ink Spots, almost perfectly. The crowd went wild.
‘‘Honey Chile! Honey Chile! My Honey Chile!’
When they finished, Jonas looked down and saw half of his heart grinning up at him, clapping and laughing and looking so beautiful he thought he was going to swoon. The only one he ever loved, the one he loved with his life and the better part of his soul, the searing private secret of his inextinguishable passion was standing there in front of him waving hello. He waived back. The sweetest sound in the world in a single word came from his own mouth.
“Maria!”
He stumbled from his stage and she ran to him and she threw herself into his arms, and then he could feel the joy of her settle into her compassion for him.
“I’m so sorry about your dad.” she whispered. “I’m so sorry I missed the service and the burial. The plane connections were terrible. The traffic in Toronto was a nightmare. Are you okay?” Maria asked gently.
Jonas tried explaining what it was like.
“The little hole in the ground, and all my family, all those people around my father’s ashes, it was like, I just can’t describe it.”
“Like the face of God.” Maria offered.
“It was.” Oh, it was.” Jonas agreed, looking as if he had been told an enormous secret, “It was life and death. It was so real. It felt like I was going to explode.” How did you get here?” he asked in shock.
“Your mother sent me a plane ticket and some money. She said your dad asked her to make sure that I could come to be with you.”
“The bugger! This is so great. You’re the one person.....” Jonas replied and he didn’t know if he was fighting back tears that had their source in his father’s heart or tears of his own happiness.
Megan had followed Tom to the graveyard to where he sat on his father’s gravestone with his back to the crowd, his back to his own terrible feelings. Megan was right beside him before he knew she was there. She looked very frightened.
“Are you really breaking up with us?” she asked.
“You don’t understand anything. I want you to leave me alone.” Tom said coldly.
“So you’re thinking about it. It was just something stupid to say.”
“Even if you didn’t understand, how could you think I wouldn’t do the best I could to try to say goodbye to my father?”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Megan replied desperately.
“I have to be able to trust the person I love, absolutely. How could you come at me today, today, like it was just any other day?”
“I’m so sorry. What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m not like your mother.” Megan answered, “I won’t ever be that strong.”
“I know.”
Tom’s answer hit both of them in the face like a slap. They both knew what that meant.
Megan started to cry. “You’re going to choose Amanda, not me.”
Tom didn’t say anything, and just as Megan was daring to hope he would disagree with her or console her, or reassure her about his feelings, he did the last thing she expected. He howled. He howled another high, piercing, heart rending single note, his contorted face looking straight up into the sky. When it was over and he looked back down, another high beautiful contralto howl came rolling up over the fields in reply.
Megan knew instantly, absolutely, what had just happened. Her heart stopped. She had lost. She was lost. Tom and Amanda were mated for life as she had sat there and listened and couldn’t do a thing.
The long wait for Eugene’s death slowly stretched every person on the farm; and the tightening made it possible to reach notes inside that were deeper and higher than anything they had been capable of feeling in their lives. Life vibrated with loss and possibility, numb fingers on frets made such pure vibrations. It was possible then to feel with an intensity that was impossible to sustain. No one knew it was Eugene’s dying that made the day of his funeral so intense, and so beautiful, and so full of life. Death pulled the bow over the strings of the many assembled hearts. As the day wore on and the sky cleared, everyone was getting tired. The energy in the music was no longer enough to hold back all the unspeakable feelings.
Christa was sitting with Miss Brown and Sharon and her psychiatrist Brian Smith, her Smitty. Christa had already explained to him and her mother that she had decided to accept Miss Brown’s invitation and go to stay with her at her farm the next day. Miss Brown made clear to everyone that Christa was welcome to stay as long as she wished. Smitty had made sure Miss Brown understood that Christa still wasn’t always able to control her emotions, that at times her heart was in the very deep end of a pool and she still, sometimes, lost the ability to swim.
“I understand. I understand why that’s so, why you’re worried.” Miss Brown had replied.
“And why would that be?” Smitty asked seriously
“Because her heart is so big, it’s too small.” Bridget Brown answered.
Christa looked at the old woman with such affection and gratitude and respect that Sharon spoke up, saying that she thought it was wonderful idea for Christa to spend some time with Miss Brown. She knew the old woman had power, more power than she even imagined. Sharon trusted power. Smitty was uncomfortable, but agreed to the plan and was very happy to learn Miss Brown had Tom’s cell phone so Christa could call if she needed to talk to him. The unspoken truth was that Smitty was heartbroken at the idea of losing Christa forever.
When the sun was just starting to color the sky, there was strange moment on stage between sets. A middle-aged man in loose blue jean overalls came out on this stage like he owned it. He had long curly white hair and a flowing white beard and looked much older than his graceful movements seemed to say when he went to the standing microphone, waving to the crowd, carrying a tambourine over his shoulder like it was a waiter’s tray. “So who ordered the 3000 beers?” he shouted. He was thin and graceful and seemed to have the ability to pull every pair of eyes straight to him. He held up the tambourine and the whole crowd roared when he pulled it down and looked at it as if he was reading an inscription. It was his Oscar, his Emmy, but even better than that, it was the Nobel Prize for literature. When he spoke everyone listened. Everyone could tell he was drunk.
“Thanks for this! I’d like to thank the Nobel committee.” The crowd roared. His grin and his joy were infectious. Everyone thought it was act.
“I have to admit I’m here on false pretenses.” he continued, “ My work is so much better than I’m capable of doing, I’m sure there will be an investigation, I know that what I’m saying may be held against me later, but I don’t care. It’s true. Just like all the rest of you, I’m a fraud. I didn’t write all those great books.”
“They all came from the mouth of a little bird, no not a Raven, a little white bird, and all I did was take dictation. All those great novels come from the ethos, the muses,’ Hey Mr. Tambourine man play a song for me.’ “
“So I take no credit. I give thanks to no one. All I can do is say to those that loved me too well and not well enough, I salute you! I salute you with the old British army salute, the longest way up and the shortest way down.” And he gave a brisk demonstration, his arm sweeping up through the air and slashing down to his side. The crowd roared again.
“A--ten---shun!!!”
Suddenly he seemed to be overcome with sobriety, holding the Nobel Prize beside him, completely forgotten.
“I’d like to say a few political words. It’s okay. Tut! Tut!” The crowd had groaned when he said the word political.
“I know I’m breaking new ground here, but I want to say a few words for trees.”
The crowd cheered and laughed.
“I come to speak for the innocent, for the silent ones who respond only to the sun and the wind and the cold and the rain and the fury of the storm, the ones who weep in the downpour and suck silently from the earth and create the air that you breathe. Trees! Trees! Who will stand up for the trees?”he shouted. He challenged the crowd and it roared to his challenge, humoring him and hoping the jokes would get better.
“I speak for the Willow whispering, the Aspen trembling, the Oak in heavy snow. I speak for the Pine, the White and the Red and the Black and the Scotch and the Ponderosa.” The crowd cheered at the word Ponderosa.”
“The elegant Spruce, the Maples bleeding with red and yellow, like blood and sunshine, I speak for them. I speak for the Cherry, the Peach and the Plum, the Almond and the Apple and the Quince. I speak for every tree since the tree in Eden, since the cross of Calvary. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?!”
“We cut them down while they’re living and breathing, and cut them with cold steel into piles, into board feet, carving them to our insatiable needs. We cut them for chairs and tables, to make walls and Gallows and pop stands. They die for you every day and you burn them to roast your weenies. You drive a billion nails in their flesh every day. Please! Please! Help me save the trees!”
Everyone was laughing and cheering at the satire. But no one in the crowd knew that he was absolutely serious. He loved trees like other people loved each other. He actually loved them better. He came off the stage and went straight to where Christa was sitting. For some reason, she was mesmerized. Looking like a rail thin Walt Whitman, it was impossible not to see the energy alive in his body. It was an energy that could transform a crowd of strangers into something cohesive and alive, words alone doing what only music usually attempted. He had a performer’s gift that only rose when he was very drunk, but then it was amazing. He was still in the evangelical emotions of his oration when he introduced himself to Christa’s little group.
“I am Jim Joad, migrant worker. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Are you any relation to Tom?” Smitty asked in good humor.
Joad answered seriously
“Ah, yes, my namesake in that second rate book. ‘I’ll be there. I’ll be there. I’ll be there’..... To love and comfort you.” He sang the last phrase. “Please!”
“You must be pleased, winning the Nobel Prize.” Smitty teased, “I don’t think I’m familiar with your work.”
“Like the other Joad, I’m a migrant worker. I follow my soul and I write down what it tells me. I haven’t actually won the Nobel Prize, quite yet. I’m not mentally unbalanced after all. That was just practice, a little pre-Nobel humility.” he said as he slumped down in a seat beside Christa.
They talked about trees and no one quite knew if he was serious, listening to him talk passionately about his passion. The more he talked, the more eloquent was his identification with the silent lungs of the earth, as he called them.
“If you really love trees, and you’d like a walk, I can take you somewhere you’ll never forget as long as you live.” Christa said to Jim Joad. “I was hoping that I’d have a chance to take Miss Brown, if she was up to it.”
“A walk in the sunset, what could be better? You have me intrigued, I must admit” Jim answered.
“I’d like that too. I’m not used to sitting for so long.” Miss Brown agreed.
“Well, let’s go.” Christa said, and the three of them got up and Christa led the way out of the field past the Cemetery to the Walnut Wood.
When they got there the sun was under the branches of the trees on the Western horizon, cardinal red swallowing bands of slate gray and yellow.
They walked down to the pool with the restless, resonant reverence to beauty all three of them knew with an intensity that made them able to almost separate from their bodies, to become someone beyond themselves. The mischievous Jim Joad seemed the most transformed.
The look on his face and the loss of grace in his body made it obvious he was overwhelmed. It was like he was in the presence of the living, breathing divinity, the idea of his soul, a majesty he thought only existed in his imagination.
When they stood by the pool, it was Bridget Brown who spoke first.
“I made a quilt just like this. It could be this very place.” she whispered into the dusk of the forest.
“This is the place that’s meant to be.” Christa whispered back.
Then Christa stepped to a wide flat stone and undressed as the two others watched. She slipped under the black water like it was a black portal of silk.
“It’s fed by a spring. So why are you waiting? Are you ashamed of your bodies?” Christa asked.
It wasn’t shame they were feeling at all. They weren’t ashamed of their bodies; they were stunned by the beauty of hers. The two strangers stood for a moment and then Miss Brown pulled off her dress and her underclothes and stepped naked into the water with Christa. Jim just stood there and it looked like his heart was going to burst. He looked almost stricken. Then he began to undo his overalls, and then he took off his beaten up work shoes and undressed while the two women watched him, and he joined them in the pool. Two tiny eyes watched them from the bank. Seeing was everything then. That was when the three of them felt as one.
When the sun was gone, and the last of the music had died, and instruments were being packed and the crowd had thinned down at last, Laura lay unmoved on her bed and watched the moon bleeding behind thin clouds, and then she heard a distant tap, tapping nearby, and it was then she saw a single Luna moth touching her window, trying to get to her light.