The Annie Dillard Reader by Annie Dillard

  Obenchain understood his own reasons, however, and Obenchain believed himself. He was unpredictable, he was perhaps drunk, or having a spell of nervous excitement, or cold-out crazy; he was perhaps acting on someone else’s orders—but for all that, he was not kidding; he was earnest. Clare had seen his meager eyebrows draw together in a bulge under his hat brim, from the effort of explaining; he saw the incongruous, imploring smile. Clare’s life had become important to Obenchain. And so, even while he lay in bed that first night, Clare began the process of believing him. Who was he not to believe Obenchain, when Obenchain believed himself? People do what they believe they will do. If a man believes he will plant peonies, Clare thought, then he will probably plant peonies, and he will not if he does not believe. If a man believes that your death fits his plans, however obscure, then your death fits his plans, however obscure, and he is the one with the gun. Clare could try to kill him first, or he could take his family and leave, or he could try to get him locked up. For how long? What would Obenchain do? When?

  In the high school shop, Obenchain would do anything. Once he shouted suddenly, addressing the class. He knew what power turned the big saws; he knew the limits of cold chisels, the ontology of gases, the secrets of numbers on the rule. The sweat on his white forehead shone in the basement windows’ light. People swindled him, he confided to Clare, whispering; they tried to take advantage of his honesty. His mind was quick and his hands were sure. One-fifth of Clare’s students failed manual training; Obenchain led the class. Sometimes he wandered away, wounded, when Clare was talking to him. He loomed over the schoolboys, head and shoulders. He quit his first term of algebra; he could not stick it. Clare found him once in the hall standing still, with his jaws open like a seal. His lips stretched down like the lips on a cedar mask. His pants were wet; his eyes were wide and astonished; his skin was red and wet with tears.

  Obenchain mastered his nervous weakness, Clare knew, more every year. His vehemence took on the force of coherence, the force of a large and balanced battery of ideas aimed at a single point. He possessed skills. Once at the livery stable Clare had seen Obenchain pinch the eyelid of a skittery horse, to hold it still for haltering; he seemed to have the eyelid by his fingernails. The tormenting trick worked; the horse held its very breath. Obenchain was erratic, but his wrath and distrust were steady. Most people were afraid of him. Respectable families multiplied in the town, and the south-side roughs and criminals—hoboes and cardsharks, old buffalo hunters, train robbers, bounty hunters, deserters, and murderers—had diminished in numbers and notice, while ordinary hermits abounded. People said that Obenchain could read Greek. They said he was a genius who would make the town famous. They said a falling tree had cracked his head when he was a boy on the island, and one of its branches jabbed into his brain. They said he ate cloudberries, which are poisonous; they said he ate soap. They said he swam in the bay at night trailing eelgrass, and lay stark naked on the rocks. They said he had a hand in tying the Chinese fellow under the old wharf at low tide. People said every sort of thing.

  Clare was looking at the window beside the bed; it revealed nothing and reflected nothing, for the sky and house were dark. June, he wanted to think: June with her deep-arched eyes, and limp Mabel, and his straddle-legged mother, carrying on in the house without him, as if he were late forever, and they were holding dinner. For a moment he saw June and Mabel stiff and blurred and bewildered. He could not, however, keep them in mind. If he died now, his life would have been a brief, passing thing like a hard shower. If he died later, having done more, it would be no different.

  Clare liked “to keep abreast,” he said, “of what is afoot.” Just knowing all the news was a job. Every day things happened. Today he had raced through a full day; he always did. He knew he blazed with health and abounded in the goodwill of men. He was what his mother called a crackerjack, and all possibility. He lived at gale force; he moved between activities at railway speed; he had to. Everybody did. The town of Whatcom was “a comer,” as people said. Its new high school was “a hummer.” Now, as streamers of colored fog began to advance on the black clearness of Clare’s thoughts, he found he could not recollect why he had been so all-fired busy all these years, congratulating himself, like everyone else; no wonder people were so astonished to die.

  Every night, Mabel centered herself on her feather bed to sleep, and never extended a finger or toe, for she believed herself to be surrounded by sharks and black death. She was right. She was surrounded by sharks and black death. He used to know that too, when he was a boy, but it had slipped his mind.

  II

  Spring came to Puget Sound and to the Nooksack plain and the mountains. The earth rolled belly-up to the light, and the light battered it. Clare Fishburn was still alive, was still walking abroad in the daylight where everything changes, and holding tight to the nights as they rolled.

  Spring came to the northern coast, and the daylight widened. Daylight stuck a wedge into darkness and split it open like a log. Winter was lost and irretrievable before Clare caught up with it. He had thought the seasons were longer. He had thought he was younger. Now things were unhinged and floating away. Every day, people moved from their houses. Every hour, the sea ducks of winter vanished from the water, the harlequin ducks and the brant. The trees were going. All winter Clare had learned his own trees’ hard branches, how they grew and twigged: the lilac bush by the porch with the sky behind it, the alder saplings, the cottonwood in the yard. Now those dark lines were vanishing into leaf and disappearing before his eyes. The strong roads softened under his bicycle tires. Through the parlor window he saw the snow on the ridge diminish and disappear.

  Every day was a day in which Clare expected to die. When he woke one Sunday morning in the last week of March, he regarded his sleeping wife gravely. Her head lay lightly on the mattress and smoothly, flush, as a clam rests on its shell. There was perfection and composure in her small face. He admired the supple and irrigated quality of her skin; it took a shine to the coming day. Light masses shone on her cheek and brow, and passed subtly to shadow in the soft, expressive hollow over her eyes. He had looked at June’s face so often, for so long, that he half believed it was his own face.

  He was aware that common wisdom counseled that love was a malady that blinded lovers’ eyes like acid. Love’s skewed sight made hard features appear harmonious, and sinners appear saints, and cowards appear heroes. Clare was by no means an original thinker, but on this one point he had recently reached an opposing view: that lovers alone see what is real. When he courted June he thought it a privilege to wash dishes with her in river sand. He thought it a privilege to hold her cutaway coat, to look at Mount Baker from her side; he thought it a privilege to hear her family’s stories over tea and watch her eyebrows rise and fall. Now, he knew it was.

  At breakfast Clare considered his mother. She was perky in the mornings, as if the day might offer her something. She had been just twenty when she and Clare’s father had crossed the plains in a wagon train from Illinois. Now she was shrinking perceptibly, and her skin was softening for death. Her dark skirt was shiny at the seat; her bun of white hair was no bigger than a button. Her skull was starting to show, yellow, through her forehead. He could not remember how she looked when she was young. She was strong, too, and able; she could split a cedar shake bolt with a tenpenny nail. It was a trick everyone had seen. He had not done right by her, and now there was nothing he could do. He could let her talk to him more.

  His mother believed, Clare thought, that dead people left here for somewhere else. She would be happy to leave plates. Now he would die first. He would go and prepare a place for her, if there were places to be had. If there were places to be had, he would set a table for her, and bid her sit and eat. But there would be no tables, and no plates, and strictly nothing to eat. It was hard to imagine a place without any sort of plates.

  He looked at his own chipped plate. He had eaten his breakfast and was not dead yet. A month ago he h
ad decided not to think any further about being poisoned at home. Obenchain had talked about killing Clare specifically, as though pinpointing him alone in the mobs of the living demanded a precision that attracted him. He would not want to risk killing June, or Ada, or Mabel, by mistake. Or would he? Would he take them all by some neighbor’s doctored pie? Obenchain would do anything. But of thinking of poison there was no end. Everything tasted good.

  He felt under his jacket for his sidearm, a new double-action Colt Lightning. June saw the movement, and caught his eye. He touched her, covering her hand with his, but she rose then and slipped away to the kitchen. Was he too sentimental for her? He carried his plate to the sink, following her, and laid his hand over the waist of her basque. She turned to him, confused, and took his plate. He saw her embarrassed frown.

  There was a wagging patch of light on the wall above the sink; the lilac bushes outside the dining room wagged too. The planet wagged on; the man who planted those lilacs was dead. And time, for Clare, had sprung a leak.

  For he was on his way, it seemed; he was a man already exited. To these familiar people in the kitchen, time was a secure globe in which they rode protected from one end of things to the other. June stacked the clean dishes and hung the towel by the stove. Old Ada fetched a tray from the pantry and headed out back toward the cellar. Mabel, now four, sat on the kitchen floor in the peculiar way she liked to sit, with her back straight and her legs pointing every which way, as though they were broken or popped at the hip. Her red braid hung limp on her neck. She was wearing an undershirt and sateen bloomers. She was scratching the cat with a fork. The cat cringed and made no move to leave.

  “Quit your fooling,” Mabel said to the cat. “You make my tail ache.”

  Clare could see the dark at the edge of the plain. He felt a hole in the wall behind him; things rushed out of that hole. He was running low on air. Yesterday he had imagined and seen the long horizon of water and islands begin to tilt and upend. On the low side a gap appeared, and water and islands and houses and all the world’s contents slid into the gap and blew away.

  Possibly everyone now dead considered his own death as a freak accident, a mistake. Some bad luck caused it. Every enterprising man jack of them, and every sunlit vigorous woman and child, too, who had seemed so alive and pleased, was cold as a meat hook, and new chattering people trampled their bones unregarding, and rubbed their hands together and got to work improving their prospects till their own feet slipped and they went under themselves, protesting. Clare no longer felt any flat and bounded horizon encircling him at a distance. Every place was a tilting edge. “And I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside down.” Time was a hook in his mouth. Time was reeling him in jawfirst; it was reeling him in, headlong and breathless, to a shore he had not known was there.

  Now something crashed. Clare saw Mabel fly out of the pantry, crying. She had dropped something. June and Mabel had been carrying armloads of jars past him, he realized. Mabel had just dropped a loaded tray of plum preserves. He saw every glass jar smashed on the pantry floor. Now she had run away. This alarmingly bright and self-sure little Mabel, of whom Clare usually lived in some awe, was crying too hard to help clean up her mess. June and Ada passed Clare and crowded into the pantry carrying rags and a bucket. Clare ordinarily considered Mabel a human marvel, and her accomplishments miraculous. She hung out over the stairs to make an entrance, wagging her stockinged legs like a pendulum. She lettered her name, opened umbrellas, and erupted forth to give precisely articulated opinions on household matters, which startled Clare as much as if the cat had spoken. She possessed a queer, manly chuckle, which arose from her smooth depths at apparent random. If anyone asked her, “How are you?” she replied, looking away, in a stolid, thrillingly low voice, “Good.”

  He found her crying on the parlor sofa, twisted up and half dressed. She was too old and too big to pick up. Clare picked her up.

  He picked her up and bore her from station to station around the parlor. Its dark wallpaper repeated a ribboned bouquet of pale flowers, over and over. Absurdly he pointed Mabel’s face toward each window in turn, as though she were an infant still and might see some bright sight over his shoulder to distract her. He pointed her at the organ, its lacy carved front, its many ivory-ringed plugs. She cried wetly on his neck; he smelled her familiar, sour hair. What had he done with his life? He had been arranging things and putting things to rights, so he could get started.

  Beyond the window’s lace curtain the lilac bush in the yard seemed real enough, and the sky’s gray light seemed handmade for the moment’s heat like any fire. This was, however, a year among years, and him dying early. The whole illumined, moving scene would play on in his absence, would continue to tumble into the future, extending the swath of the lighted and known, moving as a planet moves with its clouds attached, its waves all breaking at once on its thousand shores, and its people walking willfully to market or to home, followed by dogs. He had thought he had more time.

  Clare carried Mabel outside to the porch and toted her around as he did formerly, when the porch was new and so was Mabel. When had she grown so big and heavy? She kept slipping inside her sateen bloomers; he hoisted her up. She hushed her crying. Now, Clare knew, she held herself still so Clare would not notice her and set her down. He noticed her, but he wanted to carry her on the porch a while longer. How had he got to be forty-two? What had he meant to do with those years?

  He would be one ancestor of Mabel’s grandchildren, at best three strangers away. They would be careless, wretched, ignorant great-grandchildren, badly behaved, who would swing on swings in the bright sunlight of those future days without a care in their cruel, cussed hearts, and who would never have heard mentioned one Clare Fishburn of Whatcom, Washington, who was once a prominent figure in a local way and considered, by some, to have possessed promise, vigor, and enterprise, who might even have attained high office…or who, he concluded to himself, at any rate loved his life and his urgent times with all his strength. He looked down the hill across the vacant lot where Obenchain had stood. The wind blew from the southwest. Loops of Mabel’s hair wrapped against his face. She hid her bare arms in his coat. Cloud parts were leaving the sky. Sea ducks were leaving the water. The morning high tides of winter were gone. Night after night, Orion dived unseen to the west behind the clouds and died young. The wood stems of lilac bush by the door were banging together. Those blunt stems would be gone soon, broken into lilacs. How does a man learn to die when the experts are mum?

  It seemed to Clare this morning that he had consumed his life. He had played false and, perfectly pleased, fell for a sham. He followed the news; he floated like a sea duck with the crowd. The momentum of activity and accumulation lulled him. The Whatcom Bugle Call and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer endorsed it as real, this sheer witless motion and change. The minister, the biggest men in town, the most pious women, and everyone he knew except his mother endorsed it as real; they followed the news. He had gone along. He had burrowed into the whirling scheme of things; he had hitched himself to the high school men, to the growing town and the mighty nation and its sensations, events, and shared opinions. He had lost the fight with vainglory, and the fight with ignorance, for what he now guessed must be the usual reason: he had not known there was a fight on.

  Clare set Mabel down; she idled into the house to dress for church. He felt the blood returning deep in his arms. He paced by the porch rail, looking out. The sea was yellow and swollen. White clouds blew and stretched under the leaden cloud cover. The cottonwood in the front yard looked dried out. He could feel the planet spinning ever faster, and bearing him into the darkness with it, flung. These were the only days. “The harvest is past,” Clare thought, “the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

  There was not time enough to honor all he wanted to honor; it was difficult even to see it. The seasons pitched and heaved a man from rail to rail, from weather side to lee side and back, and a luna
tic hogged the helm. Shall these bones remember?

  It had been three months since Obenchain told Clare he was going to kill him. During January, February, and most of March, Clare had watched his own increasing detachment. Throughout his life before Obenchain’s threat, he awakened some mornings and perceived that things were easy and pleasant, and some mornings, by contrast, he fancied that things were fixed and dreary, and these moods reversed from hour to hour, wherever they started. Now things seemed, for the first time, simply big, all day. He had begun to view his own Lambert Street—the scraped hillside before him, its elaborate houses, its few poplars and cottonwoods—altered into an abstraction and revealed as a piffling accident, as a certain street in a certain town. Whatcom was a town among thousands of towns—the town in which most of his haphazard life had elapsed. His own time was a time among times. This bright year, this new 1893 with its shifting winds and great, specific clouds, this raw-edged winter with its stiff mud and gray seas—this was one year.

  Clare leaned against the cold porch rail. He saw beneath him the lower hill with its houses; he saw the growing business district, and the dull sea spreading beyond it under thick skies. The railroad trestle curved across the bay in a pencil line from south to north. This was his town, and in his way Clare had helped build it, as he had helped break its wilderness as a boy.

  Mabel came out to the porch and twirled dully, like a hanged man, in her new Easter dress—something white and ruffled, with red braid. She had a stiff straw hat pinned flat on her head; someone had blacked her shoes—and she did look an angel. Clare told her she was “the ant’s ankles.” Pleased, she perked up, plucked at her bloomers, and said she was going down the street to display her glory to her cousin Nesta. Clare watched her flit down the steps, her black-stockinged legs apparently boneless.