2005-06-23 - 9:14 a.m.
It’s strange how one moment life can seem as it always has been, and the next be all changed. I’m thinking of a calm summer evening quite a long time ago now when, while walking my parents’ sheltie, MacDuff, I encountered a crowd in the village ballpark assembled to watch a balloon launch. Slowly the purple pool lying limp on the grass blossomed and rose, staggeringly as if drunk. While the grownups stood watching the children ran shrieking each time the play monster growled and breathed hot indigo light. MacDuff joined in to protect them, barking at the dangling tethers. But then the mood changed all at once when the older brother of a boyhood friend ran sprinting from the field, and as she walked away I heard a woman half-whisper the news: “Rick just got word John’s in a coma. They don’t expect him to live.”
I had not seen him in years, though there was a time when we were thicker than thieves. It’s funny to say that now, considering my first memory of John is of him stealing a pack of ‘Go Fish’ cards from me in second grade. I sulked until the teacher made him return them the next day but then, predictably, we became chums and built a tree house in the Norway spruce outside my parents’ bedroom window. All that summer, hidden by concealing boughs we commanded the world, calling out to passersby on the sidewalk and startling them (to our delight when we did) with our disembodied voices.
During the course of a day John would invariably announce, “I need to get some kicks,” and drop abruptly to the ground, starting for home. I never knew quite what to make of these sudden desertions and would look somewhat disconsolately at my pitch-stained hands, trying to decide whether to keep climbing or head for the jar of Getzol cleaner that waited by the porcelain sink in a darkened corner of the back room.
I think we were jealous of one another, in different ways. John’s father was tall, thin, tanned, and, in my memory at least, always immaculately, if casually, dressed. He seemed perpetually ready to go either golfing or out to dinner. Sometimes he would come from work and without changing his clothes have a game of catch with us in the shadows of their back yard, throwing dispassionately to each of us in turn, saying nothing. The sound of the ball smacking our gloved hands was our early instruction in rhythm and grace, and the utility of unspoken communion. Even then I think we subconsciously knew a game of catch sometimes substitutes for words when fathers don’t know what to say to their sons.
Once, while we stood beneath the crabapple at the front of our house, John told me his father always carried a hundred dollar bill in his wallet. The statement amazes me to this day. He might as well have told me they were millionaires. I remember my dad coming home one night after driving the bus to a basketball game, standing in the living room, happily announcing he’d made an extra ten bucks. I couldn’t imagine even that amount as mere pocket money—let alone a hundred.
John’s father was the oldest son of C. J. Winchip & Sons, supplier of petroleum products for the north southern tier. The tanker trucks that came and went from his business had to sharply bend and come nearly to a standstill, momentarily exposing their vulnerable bellies to disaster as they negotiated the hillside turn immediately above town center. One day, it seemed inevitable to me, another truck would come barreling down the road at just the wrong moment at too great a speed and engulf the downtown in a conflagration. But no such disaster ever occurred and C. J. Winchip & Sons uneventfully embroidered the shoulder blades of our town’s Little League Tigers for years after, never once making it to first page of the tri-county news.
Just beyond the far corner of our block in those days the closed concrete sluice plant stood, overlooking the tracks and the backyards of houses even further below. It was a dangerous, looming, off-limits place, and we knew it. But inasmuch as our summer days consisted of unsupervised hours we eventually ended up there, irrepressibly drawn by the danger. We obsessed on the possibility of dying, not knowing then what it meant, and beyond the merely inconvenient knowledge that we weren’t to go near it, there was nothing to keep us from the abandoned plant; the open loading dock door beckoned like a mineshaft. Maybe if we had been told there were rattlers inside we would have stayed clear. Or maybe the lure of that danger would have tempted us in deeper. As it was we ventured only as far as the vertical wood chute that led straight up two stories to an opening from where we could jump, or at least dare each other to do so.
I honestly don’t recall who took the challenge first. I like to think, since I was half a year older, it was me. A daunting divide separated us from landing in a large mound of leftover sand. Initially, the distance loomed greater than the allure of the jump and somewhat cancelled it out, yet the distance was not nearly as troublesome as the suggestion you were chicken to go.
So, I jumped. My feet kicked out from the ledge they had left, and for a suspended moment I was free, flying, until the world caught and dropped me to my knees. But I was unhurt and knew then I was indestructible, all the rest of that summer. John just as carelessly played to the fates after that, knowing he was indestructible too. But sometimes, in seeming deference to mortality, he would pause—standing mid-stride on a crumbling foundation wall, perhaps—and, contravening all our brazen assurance, soberly tell me: Remember… I want red roses for my funeral.
There isn’t much more to tell about our childhood together beyond a few further details that wouldn’t merit inclusion, except they’re interesting to me. Every autumn dad would buy a bushel basket each of Cortland and McIntosh apples and John would always take one on his way out our back door. The last year his family lived in the small house up the street he got a Superman costume that I don’t remember him ever actually wearing. His older sister held a Halloween party for the neighborhood kids that same year, turning off the lights, telling the tale of The Tell-Tale Heart so convincingly it scared the bunch of us witless. I also witnessed John and his younger brother Flip, in what may have been their final cooperative act in that house, tumbling together through the picture window that separated their dining room and porch. It seemed they were always going at one another, so it seemed odd a couple of years later when Flip told me, after I’d punched my own brother and sent him home crying, that brothers shouldn’t fight.
But boys will be boys, whether they are brothers or not. It came to a point where John and I fought so much it eventually destroyed whatever had bound us together. We were in the end too volatile for one another. Even sledding became an unfriendly contest to see who could come closest to disaster, pulling up on one runner while attempting to scrape the bark of a tree with the other. Once, misjudging, I collided full on and was saved only because my boot caught at the back of my Radio Flyer. The vicious laughter coming from the top of the hill echoed a week later when—after he called me Fannyfart and I called him Winshit—John declared his family owned Crandall’s Hill and I was to get off it and never come back. Yet, despite our mutual aggressions, which seemed so immediate then, the memory that stands clearest for me now concerns a quiet half hour we spent in the attic of that big house on the hill, sitting in a block of sunlight illuminating the floating dust, as we tried to unravel the mystery of water’s being both hydrogen and oxygen combining in a way we couldn’t even dimly comprehend.
Years later, my mom told me a story about how she had once lived in that house on the hill as a young girl and how one day, when everyone else was gone, her oldest sister Anita had built a fire entirely of kindling that burned so intensely the flue turned cherry red in the wall. Fearing the house was on fire, my mother fled down the hill with her doll carriage in tow. There is also the story she relates of passing the house she would live in years later, looking up to see the widow Foote, dressed all in black, sweeping the back roof with a broom. I’m drawn to consider the strange and reciprocal nature of these stories, and the continuity they imply. There seems to me to be an element of the ineluctable about them. They tell me something of where I came from and point, in some way, towards the place I have always been heading. They give some indication of who and what and why I am. So, recognizing these retellings as a means of determining and divulging some truth, I go back to the very beginnings of my association with the house I would grow up in. I can still feel myself slipping on the wet flagstone walk as I came for the first time to the side porch and feel the scary anticipation of entering into our new home, where I found my grandfather (my father’s father, who never talked in my presence) standing on a stepladder in the cold dining room as he worked to remove the old pipes that had frozen over winter. Years later, listening to my mom relating stories as she put away dishes in the kitchen, I thought about all the elegant cast iron radiators that were removed, busted up, and left piled by the drive, and asked what had happened. “Sierra let the house freeze when he left,” said my mother, rising up on her toes to put a bowl away. “While we were waiting for our loan, Winchips made a better offer. The radiators and the plumbing meant nothing to them because they planned to put in oil heat anyway.” Closing the cupboard, lowering her heels back to the floor, she added, with a hard glance, “I think Sierra did it on purpose, hoping to get us to back out.”
In some ways I think John and I never had a chance. The covetousness and suspicion that began our relationship, and was to eventually destroy it, seems now to have been imbedded in the genetic code of our friendship. I am sure neither of us could have done anything other than what we did, which was to exist for a time as two boys growing up together in a small town. Maybe that is enough.
The last time I saw John he came walking diagonally across the road to where I sat taping the dash of the Sprite I was preparing to paint. We had not seen each other in years and to this day I wonder about that, and why I hadn’t even missed him. The vague notion that he’d gone away to military school pops into my head, but otherwise I can’t account for the gap in our contact other than to offer the most mundane explanation—or, simply, he’d gone his way and I’d gone mine. At any rate, that day he crossed the road to see me it was as though we had never met. He stood for a moment and looked at what I was doing then reached for the oil gauge, tracing the silver rim with his finger. “If you smear Vaseline around your gauges,” he said helpfully, “you won’t have to tape them.” And that was the entirety of our interaction, almost. There was no ‘How have you been? What have you been up to?’ Just, “If you smear Vaseline around your gauges, you won’t have to tape them.” It was as though our childhood together had never occurred.
*******
The memorial service was held in the parlor of the Kopler-Williams Funeral Home, where folding chairs were set up to accommodate the fifty or so people attending. Before the final invocation John’s oldest sister and his younger brother, Phillip, each stood to give their dedications. But it was a nephew who made us all laugh, revealing a recognizable playfulness in the adult I’d never known, by relating his Uncle John’s counsel concerning which branch of the military to join. “Go with the Marines,” he had advised him with a wink. “They have the best uniforms.”
At the graveside ceremony I met acquaintances I’d known and not seen in years, boys who had ‘joined up’ out of high school and were now grown men. They wore dark suits and had shaved so severely the skin where their sideburns might have been shined. We all shook hands and briefly talked of old times, though I detected between them a bond that excluded anyone who had not served. And that experience excluded me.
A small canopy covered the open grave and the metal apparatus that would lower the casket. Everyone crowded close to hear the priest say his few final words reminding us that we should feel not sorrow but joy, knowing the body and spirit of the departed was now tendered to the incomprehensible mercy and grace of our beneficent Lord Savior, amen. And then came the twenty-one gun salute, the initial salvo making most everyone jump, but a little less each succeeding time until there was finally only silence and, far off, the bugle blowing taps. Only when the ceremony was over did it all become suddenly real for me, seeing the tears in the eyes of John’s two youngest nieces as they turned away and started back for the cars.
As I walked up the street from my parents’ to attend the after-interment gathering of family and friends at the house on the hill, I felt the new dress shoes too tight on my feet and a tie wrapped too snug at my neck as I remembered fondly the carefree days of barefooted, bare-chested freedom, and afternoons spent with a friend squishing soft road bubbles with our fingers and toes, entertaining no concern beyond cleaning the tar off before supper.
I met a young woman at the party who, when she learned of my early association with John, smiled warmly and said, “I bet you have some stories to tell.” Later, when we’d both had a few beers, she accompanied me into the trees behind the house. We sat down together on a log and I recounted the time my brother and Flip started the woods around us on fire and how my mom knew when he came running through the back door as the siren began to sound, that both events were integrally linked. My mother said she had never before or since seen anyone as white as my brother that day. The young woman smiled at my story, though it wasn’t, perhaps, what she had anticipated. Neither of us said anything more until, seeing my gaze drift towards her breasts, she asked if I wanted to touch them. And then without waiting for an answer, she slipped the straps of her dress off her shoulders.
*******
Just the other day, I stopped by my parents’ and noticed our old tree house was gone. It had been there up until only a few days before and I can’t help but wonder at the strange conjunction of events, and the possibility of intercession. How else to explain the disappearance of those rotting boards, just now, after all these years?
*******
It’s strange how things happen, how circumstances transpire, how events unfold—how one moment life can appear as it always has been, and the next be all changed. This evening before dark I got a call from my brother Jeff. The conversation started innocuously enough with, “Hi. How are you? What’s up?” and devolved into a revelation that Lois Wilt had just phoned. At first I understood my brother to mean she still wanted the display case we had discussed my building a year ago—a conversation which I, to my sudden embarrassment, had completely forgotten. But that wasn’t the reason for the phone call at all, as I discovered after a slight pause as my brother cleared his throat. “She said Duane Newhouse is in a coma. They don’t know what the problem is, exactly. Some kind of virus, maybe, but it doesn’t look good.” And so I learn about another friend from my past.
It is almost too much. It’s not pathos, though one surely feels a tragic sense of things at such times. Rather, it’s more a strangely felt affirmation I feel as I hang up the phone. I go outside and consider: Here I am, in the middle of writing about another lost friend, trying to find an ending when this ending comes, supplied courtesy of… another’s ill luck? Suddenly I feel chastened, embarrassed. I go outside and stand in the driveway looking east across the valley to the opposite ridge, and know in that instant of intensity and focus how extremely, extremely lucky I am. I look at the distant trees. I see their individual shapes and shadows. The sun is down, the world is saying good night, and yet… here I am, still bathed in light.
I take the dogs up the hill, walking the roadside to the surveyors’ stake delineating the edge of my neighbor’s property a quarter mile away. Before turning to head back, the dogs overshoot the mark and then rush about-face to overtake me again. They run ahead, but I look around me and walk even slower, lingering in the twilight, listening to the birds singing their bedtime songs.
I stoop to pick up a discarded can at the side of the road and when I straighten and look down past the rocks to the pond below, I see a lone swallow sweeping across the reflecting surface amid clouds and sky illuminated by the now distant, mute sunlight. And then I see another swallow flying in perfect tandem with its corporeal other, veering close and then away, connecting but not touching, and I know then with a transcendent, calm certainty that I am looking at heaven.
