Enon by Paul Harding
He declaims, “Dear children, our righteous root has yielded fruit again! So long as our ground is good and the thorns do not choke it, the root shall not cease such yield, but each year become pregnant again with sweet bounty.”
Two elderly women who have stopped on their way to the Tea House and stand behind the children gasp a little at this reference to pregnancy. They and a number of other especially prim souls in the village find Benjamin Conant’s speeches impious. Perhaps it is because they associate grapes with paganism. But because he is such a civic treasure, they merely tut-tut and continue to listen.
When he has finished his invocation, Benjamin Conant invites the children to approach one by one, the littlest first, please, if they would like a cold, sugary, luscious grape. The children manage to order themselves and behave despite their excitement, and everyone who wants one receives a piece of the fruit after a brisk little ritual wherein the child asks, “May I have a grape, Mr. Conant?” and he answers, “Of course you may, my dear child,” and solemnly but with great pleasure selects a grape, unscrews it with a single twist of his callused hand, turns, and presents it to the boy or girl with a slight bow. The child says, “Thank you, Mr. Conant,” and bows or curtsies, according to custom, and returns to the general congregation.
The skins of the grapes are dark and too thick for most of the children to bite through, and taste bitter anyway. So each grape is peeled and the tannic skins tossed into a wheelbarrow to be carted off into Conant’s back meadow, to rot in what the children all find a mesmerizing and horrific wasp-covered pile. Before the older girls peel and eat their own grapes, they help the younger children peel theirs. The girl I think of as Kate peels the little boy’s grape. He takes the slick globe and bites at it. The blinding sun catches some of the grapes hanging from the spit and illuminates them with a dark green light beneath their purple skins. The children spit the pips into a pile. Some of the older boys start to see who can spit them farthest into the street, but Benjamin Conant puts a stop to that, insisting that spitting of any sort besmirches the village. The little boy with the girl I think of as Kate drops his grape. He gasps and picks it up. Half of the fruit is covered in grit. The other half is still clean and sweet, until the boy turns it around in his gunky hands to inspect it. He tries a bite, spits, and sobs. Kate turns to him and scolds him a little. She hands him the rest of her grape. I take a step toward the girl and the picture begins to flare out, like a sheet of photographic paper bathed too long in developer. The conscious thought of being on the couch with the washcloth on my face pierces the dream, and the image of the girl and boy and the grapes and Main Street, Enon, July 1890, bursts into white and disappears in the solvents of mere waking.
12.
I PUSHED DEEPER INTO THE SHADE, FURTHER TOWARD THE BORDER between this life and what lies outside it, and became something closer and closer to a corpse myself. My hair was thin, my bones stuck out, and my skin stretched across my skull. I needed to be careful and not step over the boundary, because the thought that her own death caused her father’s suicide would be too awful for my daughter to bear. And I did not want the word I craved to hear from Kate when I met her there in the murk—murk to me, as a living person, trespassing in realms that might well prove to be brimming with a nutritious light not visible to our own, colloquial eyes—when I finally reached her on my tether concocted from the strongest medicines; when I might have only a split second before being yanked back up and landed into the bay of an ambulance or a hospital bed, at the surface of the waking world; I did not want the possibly single word she uttered to be No. I found myself weeping many times at the prospect of my daughter’s face cresting for a moment out of the gloom, looking directly into my eyes and smiling, and saying, in the half girl’s, half woman’s voice that I practiced every day to remember, Yes.
ONE MORNING IN LATE July I woke up and took a cigarette from a pack sitting on a dirty plate on the floor. I swiped around through the litter on the coffee table, trying to find a lighter. I found a box of matches on the floor, under the skirt of the couch. When I held a lit match to the cigarette in my mouth, I saw that my hand looked gray and withered. Some of my fingernails were long and grimy. Others I’d bitten down and spat on the rug. I realized that I must look like a castaway. I hadn’t bathed in a long time. I tried to figure out how long it had been; I couldn’t. The closest I could guess was five weeks. I must have changed my clothes sometime, though, I thought to myself, but I couldn’t recall having done that, either, although I did remember rummaging around in Susan’s closet and finding one of her old belts for my pants, which had gotten too loose to stay up on their own. Susan’s belt looked like it was forty years old, as if she must have bought it at a thrift shop. It was made of white leather and had a big, medallion-like buckle on it, with a fish that looked like it was swimming after its own tail and the word PISCES in block letters. The certainty that I looked terrible and the urge to see just how bad struck me at the same time, so I went into the bathroom to inspect myself in the mirror. At some time in the previous few weeks, I had draped a pillowcase in front of the mirror over the bathroom sink. I had also turned the full-length mirror so that it faced the wall. I think I had covered the mirrors because I had been embarrassed by how I leered at myself when I washed my hands or managed to brush my teeth before passing out late at night after I had taken so many pills or drunk a bottle of cough syrup with the usual whiskey. But that morning I wanted to see my actual appearance. I suppose I had some hope of being frightened into repentance.
I looked distressingly bad. My hair had grown up into a tangled pile that listed off the left of my head. I hadn’t shaved in at least two months and had a sparse, stringy beard on my face and neck. Most upsetting, though, was how thin I had become. At the time of Kate’s death, I’d been trying to lose ten or fifteen pounds because even though I still got plenty of exercise landscaping I guess my metabolism had slowed, and I still ate steak twice a week and pizza and snacks and pretty much anything I felt like, especially late at night after Kate and Susan had gone to bed and I was watching sports or reading. When I looked in the mirror, though, it seemed as if I’d lost fifty pounds or even more. My face looked pale and gaunt, my neck like a bundle of ropes. I was lost in my T-shirt, which had food and drink stains on it and was yellowed at the underarms. When I’d first found Susan’s belt and put it on, I’d thought it might look sort of hip, sort of charmingly disheveled, but it looked ghastly cinching my pants. I resembled someone I’d have expected to find on a park bench, under a Sunday newspaper, sleeping off a bottle of fortified wine. When I thought that, I felt bad for whatever poor soul had to suffer my comparison with him.
THE OBSIDIAN GIRL MOVES through the trees at night. She moves across the fairway of the golf course, near the road, by the stone wall that acts as the hood for the footlights to the stage. She is all but invisible, the girl of black glass, appearing only as a wobbly blur. She is a dark lens. Through her, the dark underpinnings of the world are visible, but they turn whoever might see them to stone, or to ice, or to salt, or to marsh grass. Every night, just before dawn, she climbs down into the hill through a hidden trap door. She sounds like a crystal decanter rolling along the granite seams that lead down to the heart of the hill, where a furnace burns all day and all night and dark, vague men shovel coal into its white-hot mouth. When the girl made of black glass appears, the men lean their shovels against the walls of the chamber and retreat into the shadows. The girl steps in front of the furnace and the heat roars out and over her like a shimmering hurricane. She tilts her head back and holds her hands out at her sides. The heat blasts at her, and the tips of her fingers begin to glow. The outlines of her face and arms and legs begin to buckle and kink. Her legs give at the knees, and the rest of her slides off them and drops in front of them. She remains upright for a moment on the stumps of her legs, but then she topples face-first onto the dirt floor in front of the open furnace. It appears as if she is sinking into the dirt at first, b
There is a sound that no human ear can hear, coming from a place no human eye can see, from deeper within the earth but also from deep in the sky and the water and inside the trees and inside the rocks. The sound is a voice, coming from deep inside the throat of the world. The sound is a note from a register so low that it cannot be heard, but many people throughout the town are disturbed from their sleep by it. It is a note from a song the shape of which is too vast ever to know. It encompasses and sustains all that is human but is not loyal to the human, only to what is latent within the human. It terrifies. The awakened clutch their hearts and gasp and groan and press their hands into their temples. They fuss over their problems and feel in their guts that if they had not been born to trouble they would not have been born at all, and that their troubles are the only sign that they still cast shadows above this earth. The note is a part of great, vaulted cathedrals of chords that keep the universe speeding out from its own genesis. It is sensate, and down in the chamber of the hill it sounds both like weeping and like laughter, and both are at the grief of the glass girl, who throws herself in front of the fires every morning just before dawn and who, to her unending despair, is remade every evening, in a deeper foundry, and evicted from the depths of the hill, back to the surface, where the cool air flowing through the grass cools and sets her glass eyes and her glass brow, her glass brains and her glass heart, and she begins another night as the brittle memories of a man who is the father of a girl she never was.
I SPENT SO MANY nights sitting in, stealing through, crawling over, and sometimes passing out in, the cemetery, and always behind Kate’s stone, so she’d be spared, that I came to think of it and the hills and the adjacent golf courses as a large, elaborate set, constructed on a rotating stage. The stone wall served as a hood for the footlights, and the putting green was the apron of the stage. The hills were counterweighted with enormous granite boulders and cylindrical lead weights the size of small towers and many tons of magnetic iron and other ballast. They were held in place during the day by brass cogs the size of Ferris wheels, which in turn were held in place by black iron pawls on pinions, deep, deep in the earth. Late at night, levers released from capstans and gears began to turn, and the top-heavy hills upended into their nocturnal arrangements in perfect silence and with such smoothly machined precision that it was almost impossible for the human eye to perceive, even on the brightest night, under the brightest, fullest moon. The hills shifted and recalibrated all night long and only the most alert, vigilant observer, exactly aware of what it was for which he watched, could sometimes sense just the finest tick of a shift in the corner of his eye. When he looked over, he would see nothing. But he would have the distinct feeling that the rise he was looking at was not quite in the same place as the last time he had noticed it. Only he could not quite remember clearly, already, and would doubt himself for a moment, until his attention was diverted again by what appeared to be a new seam in the silhouette of the crown of the hill, and so on, for the rest of the night, as the stars rotated up from beneath one side of the hill, arced over it, and sank back down into the other side, until the whole set finally arrived back at its fully upright, daytime position, in the instant before dawn, and the first light of day crested the hill and the observer would see that the land was as it always had been, and would think how odd it is, the mind’s tricks, and what a strange trance he must have been in to think that the topography moved around at night, and he must really have been half—or more—asleep for much of the night, although he was certain that he had been fully awake the whole time. But after all, he would think as he rose to leave, that is how sleep always does overtake us.
Some early mornings I could almost hear the echo of the last gears of the stage clicking into place as the swoosh of the first sunlight ignited across the fairways and rushed down toward me at the outskirts of the golf course on the near side of the cemetery. I had the feeling of some familiar soul having just fled out of sight, that I had just caught a glimpse of the back of someone’s heel as she dashed offstage. It unsettled me, and I even had the notion that all the dead in the cemetery had just closed their eyes again, as they were compelled to do, but that they were telegraphing their irritation at a breach of address I had committed and at the indignity they felt at so nearly being caught up and about. I dreaded the notion that to the dead being awake was perfectly normal. I even began to feel not so much that the dead disapproved of me nearly catching them about on their own accounts—such a predicament might delight them, even inspire them to mischief—but on the behalf of just one of their members, whose hurried flight they may have even protected by distracting me by tumbling back into their bunks, and their stagy, tight-lidded feigning of sleep. I sometimes had the sense that, in the instant before I caught sight of them, all the winged skulls on the headstones and all the statues of angels throughout the cemetery had had their eyes shut, too, as if their usual, unblinking vigilance over the dead was something from which even they, slate and marble that they were, needed rest, that the dead and the stone carvings on their headboards all rested hardly in peace and in truth led lives more hectic than those of the living.
I had cast Enon’s dead in the vignettes I made up for Kate, but as I became more and more unbalanced, they seemed to act of their own accord. Certainly, it was the drugs and my exhaustion and my sorrow producing these phantasms, but they haunted me nonetheless, and with increasing frequency and vividness. I understood how dire such hallucinations were becoming late one early summer night when I sat down to rest at the edge of one of the putting greens on the Enon Golf Club, near the street. I sat on the grass, put my legs out in front of me, leaned back against the stone wall, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. I opened my eyes and felt suddenly as if I were awaiting the beginning of a performance of some kind. The grass was wet and smelled vegetal for the first time in weeks, not like hay, not like thatch. Wind swelled and ebbed like a surf, and broke against the foliage in the rows of trees running up the hill between the golf course and the cemetery, sizzling through it and rushing across the open fairway in front of me. The green slope of the hill was only just still green, lowering into black. A low, dark, nearly green band of thunderheads, in front of a scrim of solid, lighter gray clouding that held the very last of the day’s light, a suffused luminescence that seemed without source, not even light, not even a sight, receded behind the hill, so swiftly it made the hill appear to loom up above me, ready to topple onto my head. I rubbed the tops of my arms, chilled. The streetlamp in the parking lot of the golf course clubhouse flickered on, halfway up the hill, to my left, behind a break of beech trees, figuring their branches and leaves into a hive of citrine light. Ocean fog poured across fairways from the cemetery, salting everything in a cold mist. Caverns under the hill and granite shelves and the water in the water table vibrated beneath me, voicing an unnerving basso profundo. The wind funneling through the stone walls sounded a strange descant in the hollows. My bones and bowels and breathing slowed and fell into cycle with this dark solfège and I whispered the note “La.”
The heel bones of a pilgrim or cobbler ran across my flanks from beneath, and an arpeggio of ribs, and the smooth curve of someone’s skull.
Places, everyone. Please take your seats. If you please.
The key of the overture is disturbing. I shift on my haunches and shiver at a coldness that has descended across the landscape, and feel a little nauseated. I have a sense that there is something telescopic about this production, as if I am actually on a stage, in the foreground, and not in the audience. The music I hear is not for me but for an audience on the far side of a proscenium, watching me watch for the entrance of other actors deeper in the stage. I put my head between my knees and breathe deeply. My stomach is sou
There is a cavernous open space behind me, stalls and vertically stacked galleries and state boxes filled with rowdy old phantoms and spooky pilgrims, elbowing one another and leaning over and whispering, Look, he doesn’t feel so good now!
Mockery and laughter ripple through the audience, across the orchestra, all the way from the grand circle to the loge to the gods near the cloud ceiling. I look behind me and see only the empty street. This elicits a frank, unabashed guffaw from the hidden spectators, who find my inability to see them hysterical. This is at my expense; their laughter is delight not at how well I play the fool, but at the fact that I am one.
Then the hill does loom up, blotting out everything behind it. It teeters, splits down the middle, like a curtain, and crumples into two heaps on either side of a dim gray pillar glazed in the faintest yellow light and set in relief against a background of sable darkness. Bones rise from the dark earth. There are clavicles and ribs, femurs and tibias, hands and feet. There are claws and great spines as thick as tree trunks that taper into tails, and rings of vertebrae that once encased marrow the size of pot roasts, and heavy garlands made from the gut-strung skulls of tens of thousands of rodents, draped over horses’ skulls that have been fused onto the delicate skeletons of human infants. The riot of interlocking bones turns and forms a towering girandole. I try to concentrate on the writhing, clicking, tapping, grinding, clunking monument, to get a clear view of individual bones, especially skulls, because when I look at it as a whole, it increasingly seems composed of animals that could not possibly have ever existed, and that it is assembling into some horrific machine dedicated to manufacturing my deepest terrors. But then the middle of the machine spirals open like the aperture of a camera shutter, and Kate steps out.