I always loved glaciers as a kid. Some kids get hooked on microbes or chemistry or guns or cars or bicycles or any of a thousand globes of fruit dangling from the tree of knowledge. Me, I liked something about the grinding persistent gravity of these "rivers of ice" (as one National Geographic magazine had put it). I couldn't have put "why" to words when I was eight or nine or ten, but I knew that their frigid blue immensity fed me necessary awe about life in doses I could take - just enough to wow me without saddling me with dread or reverence. It was only later that I knew that these rivers moved me, and moved through me, because they were beautiful, because they were so unlike me, because they were wrapped in an aura of a distance and danger I desperately wanted and, as equally, desperately feared. But when I was young glaciers gave me something to hang my developing hungers on, something on which to focus and practice building an attention to the world.
Perhaps it had something to do with where I lived - northern New Hampshire, just through the notch above the White Mountains. Even now the towns are still small, though people with condo money and condo dreams have begun discovering absentee ownership. Large congloms of buildings have been studding the hillsides, stained a rust or weathered grey, and people who had lived like pioneers even in the twentieth century have been forced, by a rise in the temperature of land prices, to move, ending long sprays of genealogy and encumbering them with a fierce hatred of a modernity they already mistrusted. Of course the tourists come, to Clark's to see the bears, to the Flume and the Basin and the Tramway and the Cog, and their dollars salve a lot of hurt. But it's clear where it's going, "it" being history, money, development, peace of mind, a sense of where the morning really is. If there are human-scale glaciers, moving at a human scale of speed and abrasion, then this is surely one. And the condos are the calved icebergs, bobbing in the ancient seas, their fresh water an insult, their crushed blue the color of decline.
Of course it was not like that when I grew up. My parents owned a house they built, on land they'd paid for, producing most of the food we needed to get us from birth to something else. I don't know if we were an unusual family, though "unusual" covers a lot of ground in the North Country, but we did have some quickenings and rituals peculiar to our tribe. We owned our house. We owned it with "sweat equity," as the realtors like to say, but I'm sure that my father didn't really care about equity or anything like it. He and my mother built the house to get away from urban jobs they hated, from an urban upbringing they believed made them soft and unfit for real life, from systems they believed cut off their circulation as surely as hemp rope tied across their jugulars. And this was in the fifties, before it was fashionable to loathe and defame - though many forget how loathesome the somnolence of Eisenhower was.
They both had had good jobs - my mother had insisted on it before they'd gotten married so that she would never be financially dependent on him. My father worked as an advertising copywriter in Boston -- a job singularly given to insights about short-change and contempt for the public, something at which my father was very good and something for which he felt a wash of self-contempt strong enough to tide him north. As with many copywriters he really wanted to write poetry and thought that living "on and off the land" would break the dam that held back the waters of Thalia and Euterpe. He hadn't counted on sick chickens or potato bugs.
My mother -- well, my mother had always honed herself to an unconventional edge. She had favorite stories she'd tell us about herself, but there were a few which seemed to compass her spirit better than others. One which always struck me, the way the sudden shattering thunder of a new iceberg struck me, concerned the tree stump. At the edge of her parents' property was an enormous rampike of an elm tree. It girthed at about 25 feet, which meant that inside it diametered at five or six feet, and stood as tall as a logger. It had been struck by lightning many years before my mother saw it, and the only reason her father hadn't taken it down completely (he'd had most of the branches and cremated trunk removed) was that the story of the blue flash of lightning and the scarifying crackle of the voltage searing the wood (and the eyeballs of the watchers in the house) made a great story over lemondade on the porch, and he needed the carbonized evidence to provide a proper flourish to the ending. Over the years the insides had melted away, the twisted elm grain punking into sponge, then evaporating into spoors of xylem and phloem. However, the outside, while shedding some bark, remained intact, and a hunk, just about the size of a door for an inquisitive child, fell away, revealing an interior full of matted leaves, earwigs, pill bugs, and sundry other Linnaean beings.
My mother, of course, discovered it at about the age of ten, at the age when she needed someplace between being in the house and playing outside, a kind of foyer where she could hang up some of her thoughts, check her reflection in the mirror of her imagination, and surround herself with something that felt permanent but not a place that would appropriate her. At first her mother, feminine sensibility shocked at the notion of a female child of hers consorting with dirt, told my mother in strict tones to stay away, laving her with sermonettes on cleanliness and the need for the proper in an improper world. It might as well have been rain on a hot skillet. When threat didn't work, her mother, being more sensible than moral (after all, with nine children, she had to make some compromise with the ideal), set limits: no dirt tracked in the house, cleaning up at the pump before meals, nothing valuable taken out for furnishings. And, to complete the revolution from stricture to love, began to hunt up old curtains and rugs and other appointments to help this strange child of hers comfort herself inside a tree.
Because that's exactly what my mother did. After cleaning out the accumulation of trash and organic sediment at the bottom of the stump and filling the remaining hole with sand, she began moving in. Her father, made curious by her desire and somewhat faintly approving of it, though he didn't know why, cut out two windows, which my mother promptly adorned with yellowed fake-lace curtains. An old braid rug covered the floor pretty much from edge to edge, and her father laid down a mess of old oilskin to keep moisture from seeping into it. Various pictures found their resting places there: battered Currier and Ives prints, sepia photos, stereopticon slides, several severed leaves from a Catholic Bible showing Christ with a bleeding heart and fingers raised as if he were bidding at an auction.
One problem was the roof. My father offered to build a trussed, gable-ended, cedar-shaked chapeau for her "house" (which was the only name she ever gave it), but she rejected that as too mundane. She found what she wanted one day at the back of the garage -- a large, pink, slightly mottled (because of mildew) beach umbrella. Her father poked the pole down through the open top of the stump and with a brace secured the pole inside. Now she had light and dryness topped with pink. And according to her the contraption worked, keeping everything dry during a rain storm (her father had fixed up shutters to go over the windows) and cool during a rash of sun.
She spent a good deal of the tenth year of her life in her "house." When winter and sleet and a prying wind finally forced an eviction, she would sometimes stare at the pink top, gently capped by a wimple of snow, through the rime on the kitchen window, etching her name in her warm breath. Her eleventh birthday came in January. By the time spring beckoned to her to return to her house and clean it out, she had, in some inarticulate but undeniable way, grown up, and the house became abandoned for a growing sense of flesh, of mind, of preparations for a future that was as unclear as it was insistent. Her father took the umbrella back in, her mother took back the pictures and rug and curtains, and my mother took her leave.
When thinking of icebergs I think of my mother's "house," both cleavages from a familiar world, both carrying the DNA of where they've been, both melting as they float away. I think that "house" was my mother's first attempt to find a world that measured but did not restrict, something she found, with only minor difficulties, with my father. But it took floating away from her family to do it, a melting of perceptions into sense and idea and imagination that only the open waters can give. I always wanted her to tell me about the house because, with only small amends, such as a change of gender for the protagonist, it became my house and my pink umbrella and my finally slaked thirst for place and possibility. And when I finally had to slough off from her and my father and the house we had extruded from the harsh margin of the North Country and take my own drift, I knew that my story, my "house," would move me in its own currents towards shores I didn't know existed and would probably not know how to pronounce when I arrived.
The water in icebergs is centuries-old; drinking it means ingesting bits of mastodon and extinct insects and the inevitable waste products of humans. It's an interesting prospect, this immediate erasure of history, this localizing of crushing weights of time. I think we all look for this kind of chill nourishment against the back of the throat. Sometimes we find it, and feel the crack of ourselves as we hyphenate and swivel new eyes onto the world. Most times we just get to say say "Ahh, thanks" and hand the glass back, thirst momentarily calmed. And even that is not so bad after all.
Our house in the North Country was a log house -- I want to add "of course," but log houses were a rarity in that part of the state. They were just too damn hard to build. A frame house could be slapped up, with the right help (both qualified and sober), in a couple of weeks, not including time for the foundation, and the interior work could be finished over the winter. That's how most of the natives did it. But my father -- probably moreso than my mother, though she concurred -- was urged along by "authenticity." Country equalled log house, log house equalled old crafts that needing reviving, old crafts equalled honesty, and so on. Since he had given up his job, since he had decided to grow new skin and eyes, he had dived into books about country life, spent long hours at the dining room table with my mother drawing up floor plans and garden plots and budgets. Though I was very young at the time I remember this Yonkers-raised urbanite speaking eloquently, if without a scintilla of experience to back it up, about the virtues of splitting wood and the beauty of eating food grown and killed by your own hands.
If was as if he now believed that city living had been a sin, that somehow writing endorsements for soap and walking with leather-soled shoes on concrete had robbed him of an immediacy of living. I think he felt dead and cheated, in that order, and that moving to the alien planet of the North Country would, in some way yet to be defined, allow him to demand something he believed he never had life itself, which for him meant (and I know this because I am my father's son) that he could finally straighten out all the disjoints of circumstance and accident and not be at their mercy. It was a matter of power for my father -- not hubris, forcing the universe to have meaning, but more like a confab, so that the two of them, the universe and my father, could coax delight and accomplishment out of each other. He just didn't want to be at the mercy, though he didn't mind a challenge and could weather setback with the best of them.
As I said, both my mother and father had had good jobs and had saved a great deal of money, through various investments and the simple act of putting away money every week. My mother had also gotten a small inheritance from the death of her parents, small because when the total assets were split among nine children, one-ninth of a modest comfortable life did not amount to much. But it was something to throw in the hopper. I don't think my mother simply went along with my father -- I think she wanted to go just as much as he did, though for different reasons. My father was trying to find salvation; my mother simply wanted to get back to that sense of place her "house" had given her, a latitude and longitude with walls and pictures and windows framed with invitation.
Now that I think about it, it's clear they were both looking for the same thing, though with different tempos and voltages. Inside both of them moved urges barely modifiable into words, thick layered sediments laid down by the freezing and thawing of family life, dreams, reading, biology, and these urges carried moraine that scored them into the people they were and the people they believed they weren't but wanted to be. What they both wanted was some place where they could know the strata of their lives, take the core samples that would reveal in bands of clear and cloudy deposit who they had been fashioned to be.
And like the good iceberg I split off from them, full of their history but under temperatures of my own and my own pattern of deposition.
The log house. They had bought land which had, opportunely enough, about three acres of tall straight fletched pine trees, or, as my father put it, "an upright house waiting to be laid low." A previous owner of the land had had a penchant for numerology, as well as some kind of Druidic inclination, though for pine trees, not oaks, and he planted pine seedlings at the points of pentagrams he had sketched on the ground. He had died, just as his sketches had been washed away by the rain, leaving a few acres of white pines in almost perfect circles. Standing in the middle of one of these transparent cylinders, a person could, with a few studs, nails, and a good amount of thatch, make a house, the trees themselves already perfectly placed as uprights. What I enjoyed doing was looking straight up into the sometimes blue, sometimes grey, sometimes hybrid sky of the North Country, my vision unimpeded by anything except the fringe of branches forty feet over my head, a fringe that, when I squinted my eyes, was no different than the thick spokes of my eyelashes. And at night in the center of one of those pentagrams I could see into the brisk glint of the stars. The distance their light had to travel made them like ice to me, the universe filled with glaciers of light moving inexorably through the continuum, calving worlds and neutrinos as they sped.
My father wanted to do the house up right, so the summer before the house was actually built my mother, my father, friends of their, some local people he hired, and I tromped into the forest and started cutting. Not one to be wasteful, my father had consulted with the local forester and the co-op extension agent about the best way to harvest the trees, and according to a plan sketched out on a brown grocery bag, with cross-cut saws and axes (my father was becoming an authenticity tyrant, to the dismay and fatigue of those around him), they began to fell trees. We cleared a houselot in the center of the acres, marking with red string and pine wedges where the house was going to sit. We cleared a space for a septic system (my mother insisted on running water; my father was pushing for composting toilets but lost). We knew where the system was going to go because my father had had a local dowser come in to find a well. He'd found water right near where the red string had set off our future kitchen. Sure enough, when the driller came in to set the well (my father conceded this, though he had been hot to try a dug well, dug of course by his own hands), the water had been found, not too far down and without having to go through too much ledge.
The dowser. Of all the magical things that happened that summer, the dowser came closest to something divine, or at least miraculous. He was an old man but vigorous. The paunch he'd grown in his life was solid, like a ripe watermelon, not flabby at all, and his fingers, from working all their lives as wrenches and hooks and binders, were like thick flexible dowels, blunt instruments capable of tying flies. The pattern of his flannel shirt was faded almost to invisibility -- it looked like a piece of cloth under ice. His pants, a pair of manure-brown corduroys whose wale was rubbed to a nubbin, hung under the eave of his belly, held barely up by a tarnished buckle and a nicked leather belt. His feet resided comfortably inside boots whose leather seemed to have reversed its nature, tending back to the original cow in its pied complexion and shit crust.
It was his face, though, that held the most interest for me at that age. His pate was sparsely haired, his face stubbled with silver flecks of beard, his nose round and large like the knob of a dresser, his forehead corrugated. But his eyes were like cream, that is, a risen visible sweetness that seemed, as he looked around, to spread out into the butter of a blue sky or dollop his audience with a schlag of humor. To me it was a face that a glacier would have if it became a human -- full of blue eyes, washboarded by weather, thick and nimble and capable of shaping the land it surveyed.
He had brought a variety of instruments with him, all shaped like a "Y" with arms longer than the stem. Some were made of various woods, others out of plastic tubing. He selected one, seemingly at random, and started walking a circuit which, to me at least, looked drunken. Everyone was standing around watching, but he might as well have been strolling in the woods for all the notice he gave anyone. Soon, to everyone's astonishment, the upside-down Y in his hand, held up in front of him and even with his forehead, began to swivel downward until the stem pointed straight at his feet. He marked the spot. He made several more passes to verify it, found a few more likely spots, which he also marked, and announced that he was done.
Now, my father had been an urbanite all his life, despite a summer's accumulation of pitch and dirt, and he hadn't been north long enough to throw off the urban inclination toward science. He watched the wood swivel apparently of its own accord and while part of his mind admired the man's craft, another part was skeptically saying "That's stupid, and I can't believe I'm spending money on this hokum." So he wanted to try it himself. He couldn't keep the doubt out of his voice and everyone knew that he was challenging the old man. The old man didn't seem to mind - I'm sure he'd corrected many people in his life.
He took my father's hands and fit them around a birch Y. He put them up and told my father to follow him. We all followed, my father walking like some high priest holding aloft a sacred talisman, the rest of us the temple entourage.
We walked for about five hundred yards. We saw the foundation for a house, built out of old massive stones. There was no house, just the stone-lined hole in the ground. It was on my father's property. We had never seen it in our rambles around. He told my father to walk toward the house. My father walked. Nothing happened. He told my father to walk back. Nothing happened. The look on my father's face was curious -- neither skeptical nor fully concentrated. It seemed frightened and indecisive. I wondered what his arms felt like.
The old man selected another direction just slightly to the right of the first one and told my father to walk that. He did. About ten steps in the wand swiveled down as if it had been iron at the North Pole, quick and punctual. He righted the piece of wood and told my father to walk about a hundred feet away and then cross over the same spot. My father did, and the wood fairly burned his flesh as it dove for the ground. My father protested that he hadn't moved anything -- it happened all by itself.
The man took the piece of wood from my father's hand and with the gnarled toe of his boot began kicking away the dirt. An inch down was a rock slab, about the size of a manhole cover. He wedged his thick grappling fingers under the lip and pulled it up. Underneath it was a shaft -- the shaft of an old well. "My grandfather and I put this in almost fifty years ago." He dropped a rock into the darkness and we all heard the loud clear peal of water swallowing stone. My father laughed, amazement buttered over his face with a kind of gratitude laced in for color. From that moment on, he said later with his characteristic overstatement, he knew that the mysterious had more meaning than the verifiable. And though he never quite believed that, he told the story of the dowsing as if it were a story of revelation and redemption, nature coming up and biting him on the ass and telling him to pay attention.
We did get all the trees down that summer, skinned of their bark and stacked to season over the winter, close to one hundred and fifty trees altogether. Over the winter we began to buy supplies and contract out. The following summer the house went up, slowly accruing shape and solidity. We didn't move in until the following summer, where we worked fifteen-hour days patching and roofing and electrifying and plumbing. By the end of September we sat in front of the fireplace made with flat stones culled from river's shallows, eating meat cooked on the cookstove and vegetables evicted from the garden. We all agreed it was the best food we'd ever eaten. We had moved north.
During a North Country winter, it wasn't hard to imagine that I was one of those proto-humans figured in some of the books I had in my room, draped in rough furs and standing in front of a mile-high cerulean wall of ice. In the winter the rhythms of life changed drastically. The ripe plenty of summer, stacked in jars in our kitchen and a cord of wood in the shed and a full tank of oil in the basement, had to last -- there was no second chance during the long lock-up of the winter. In that kind of winter, with winds whittling through the notch and the snow bullying its way up to the door, there was very little space between thought and action. No langourous day-dreaming in the winter, no drug of hot humid air to dissolve in the blood -- keeping body and spirit warm was what life simply was.
We thrived on the test, for the most part -- February and March got long-winded and we were tired by then of the frigid oratory of snow on pine and ice on the eaves. But we all liked the directed sense of being the North Country winter gave us. During the day my mother and father would teach me. I was not sent to school. I was never privy to the fights they fought with school officials to keep me home, but I know there were many and I know it was frowned deeply upon. But they won their own way. Occasionally we would have to suffer the visits of a monitor who came to see what they were teaching me and to give me the standardized tests everyone had to take, which I found absurdly simple to score well on.
It was in studying science and history that I came across glaciers, in that book of the rough-hewn humans gazing with futile eyes at the fist of ice in their faces. I'm not quite sure what resonated in me, though now, given the nudge of therapy and the jumbled contents of my own book of life, I can see how my imagination, still bubbling in the dim stewpot called my brain, grabbed glaciers and their sprung-off icebergs as a way to figure out what my word-hoard couldn't yet give me access to: the sometimes abrasive and careless world of adults, rudenesses and inattentions that perked up from lives built mostly of submerged and airless depths, of layer upon layer of resentments and misses. In back of the gleaming ice-face, underneath the waterline of skilled small-talk and public masque was a weight and a momentum that could, if not checked occasionally by a greenhouse effect or a slight tilting of the earth that changed the address of the sun's arrival (all warmth I came to call love), grind to subjgated blandness all the frivolity and irksome differentness of other people.
They taught me well -- not only the basic skills, but how to think, reason, plan, predict. I learned all the biology I needed from breeched lambs and the hanging guts of rabbits and hogs. My physics came from figuring how the barn would rise for two stories, my math from the monthly accounting from sales of eggs and bread. Since both of my parents worshipped at the shrine of the Great Books, I conversed freely with the ancients and near-ancients. By the time I went to college I had been stuffed full of education, some of it digested, most of it cached in crowded root cellars, from which I would borrow what I needed from time to time.
It was a wonderful life -- even knowing now what I know. To me my parents were the living flesh of happiness. They always gave themselves to me in that way, and I took from their flesh flesh for my own happiness. But they had been skilled icebergs, as I have since become, showing their gleaming turrets of bristling ice-light while dangling below the levels of voice and action tons of doubt and strata of resentment.
When my father died I traveled back north for the wake and funeral. It was September. I was living in Manchester then, in the midst of that city's growing season (money coming in from banking and high-tech). My father had declared for years that he would not be touched by a mortician and made himself and my mother learn how to prepare a body for burial. When I arrived the house was filled with a small crowd -- if nothing else, they had worked hard to cultivate a crop of friends and neighbors (of "community," as may father called it, his way of washing out of his system the anonymity he suffered in Boston). My mother was moving among them, making sure they were all well provisioned. Some of the people there remembered me, though it had been years since I'd seen any of them, and there were moments of counterfeit recognition and welcome, all of us agreeing that at this sad moment we would remember a closeness that hadn't existed for years.
The coffin (built, of course, by his own hands) was in the back storage room -- the guests were in the living room. My mother hugged me warmly, then took me back to see the body. My father hadn't wanted any formal sort of wake, and so people had visited the body as they'd come in, making my father more or less just one of the guests. The town and county officials had been out to protest, but my father had done his law homework and showed them that in New Hampshire he had every right to a home burial, as long as he paid attention to a few environmental considerations, like not having his grave near the well. My mother had handled them adeptly, and a few had stayed for coffee and cake.
I looked down at my father and for a moment went blind -- I couldn't see anything, as if a blizzard had suddenly snuffed out the light in the window. It lasted no more than a breath, or half a breath, but it was complete, and when I looked again at my father I saw my father dead. Not my father as he had been alive, vigorous and peremptory, slyly fascist and engagingly generous, not as I might have looked at him when I first walked into the room full of ceremony and memory. I saw a slab of broken-off stuff, a knurled shaving whittled off. He would go out into the apple orchard, to be sucked up into the spray of blossoms and ballooned into Empires. All the clatter of his restless electricity was gone. His stored carbon would go into other rounds.
Yet as much as I felt comforted by this stretch of realism, as much as my mind was trying to keep from committing the fallacy of believing that what lay in that coffin was my father, I couldn't help but read in the silvered hair and relaxed ridges of his face the full life we had all led. I had never known such fullness as I had known with them. And now -- I kissed him. And then left the room.
Everything had been provided for. They had been waiting for me to visit with my father, and now that I had done that, it was time to move on. Five of my father's closest friends had selected themselves as pallbearers and I was to be the sixth. We closed the lid of the coffin and screwed it down. Then we hoisted it on our shoulders and ferried it from the house to the orchard, trailed by the rest of the people chatting as if this were the last picnic of the season. I smiled at the unpretentiousness of it all, the way the sorrow had become local and interleaved with all the other concerns people had in their lives. We were burying my father; later we would have dinner.
The hole had already been dug in one of the alleys between the trees, the blond pale sand lying on one side, the heavy brown loam on the other. We set the coffin down on three ropes that had been strung out on the grass, then grasped the ropes and side-stepped our way to the grave. We must have looked pretty comic, and several in the crowd smiled as they watched us, but everyone was patient. There was no need for a smooth ritual here, no need for the mortician's choreography.
We lowered the box into the grave, setting it six feet down with an even thump. My father's friends had each taken the time to find a short something to read, and their voices, unpracticed and steady, milled the calm turning air of late September into words. When it came to me I didn't have any trouble thinking of something. I remembered Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of my father's favorites, and I said, almost as if his voice were lacing through my vocal cords, "The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finished canter before coming to standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, 'The work is done.'"
The haft of the shovel felt rough and comforting in my hand, and the grick of the shovel against the dirt and stones had the same comforting weight to it. We worked in silence, oscillating like some six-cylinder steam hoe. It didn't take long to fill the grave and pat smooth the small hillock of dirt over the coffin. The wind and the rains and snow would do their best to erase it down, and in the spring pioneer grass seeds would land on the brown patch and prompt it into green.
Later, when the guests had gone and the sun had set, I sat with my mother in front of the fire. I didn't know what to say but also didn't feel that I had to say anything. She was holding a glass of sherry, its dark ruby glint absorbing the fire's bronze. I wasn't drinking, having learned long ago not to give myself that temptation. I was flushed with the day's activities, my mind in a half-doze, weirdly quiescent, weirdly alive.
She took a sip, then announced, "I'm going to leave here. Do you want the house?" She took another sip.
It didn't quite register with me what she was saying, then it did, then it didn't again. Leave? Why? All of her life was here.
The ruby tilted against her lips, then leveled. "I'm going to move, probably out West. I'm tired of the cold." She paused, as if deciding something, then spoke again. She swirled the blood-red sherry in her glass, thin veils of it creeping up the sides of the glass, then draining down. "I have hated the cold for years. Your father loved it, said it made him learn how to live with the right things in his mind. I always hated it when he talked like that, like a book. I told him it made my bones ache. I want to be warm."
Both of us knew the code words here. It wasn't about cold, at least the physical cold. It wasn't about the warmth of Arizona. For the last five years of their lives the tops of their icebergs had been melting, exposing more and more of what had been just a watery blur underneath. Ancient bruises, harbored defeats -- there had been a lot of them in this life between two people who usually refused to compromise with the world, so many that the intense love they held for each other, through the dark alchemy of intimacy, would sometimes yield an exquisite method of torture, finely tuned to vulnerable parts and exposed nerves.
I knew this because they would call me and use me to unload their diatribes and oaths. Of course, being of the generation I was, I suggested counseling, but they didn't seem interested in resolution. They became enemies because it thrilled them in a way. For so many years they had been "partners," living with a plan (mostly crafted by my father) of how to beat the world's demand for normalcy and convenience. It took them a while (my mother felt it first) to learn that such an intense binding was itself a kind of prison, calling for its own self-effacement, and that loving in such a way would eventually destroy the loving.
So they became enemies to stay together, using an almost inexhaustible fund of knowledge about each other to fashion their salvos and stratagems. It was weird, almost perverse to me to see how the breakdown of their truces gave them the same kind of effervescence they had when they first moved north. In their dislike they found a kind of passion that while on the surface gave the appearance of shredded paper to their lives, secretly fed both their needs for an intense kind of living, a need to live against the abbreviations of life, an intensity that had attracted them in the first place because they believed that so much of the world lived without it or in fear of it.
But like love itself, such hatred has its rhythms, and they found themselves, after a while, inextricably addicted to the attacks and strategies because as they dug deeper into their treasuries for funding, they unearthed reserves that had been locked away for a reason. The deeper the stratum, the earlier its imprisonment from light, the more time it had had to perfect its poisons, and before long they had brought to sight such rarified venoms that words weren't even needed as carriers -- the whole atmosphere they breathed was laced with the stuff.
The last year had been the hardest. They had existed in a limbo between knowing what they knew about their love and knowing what they knew about their hate and finding the hate so present and the love hard to restore. They had also stopped talking to me by then, both realizing I think that they and I were running out of flesh. I never knew if they had managed to reconcile themselves, to come back along the circle to their first understandings and first sheddings of innocence.
I found as I pondered my mother's words and stared at her sherry a desperation rising in me. I didn't know how it had been at the end. Was it possible? Could we wear our original faces again? I stood and walked over to the fire, stirring it with the hooked poker. Sparks like pollen floated upward. I wanted to say that I wanted the house, keep it simple, but I found my words, pulled by an undertow, carried toward my own desperation. I watched the still figure of my mother stare into the fire, her glass full of red flame, and felt both repelled and attracted by her solidity, which seemed to rebuke me at the same time that it promised me a taste of self-sufficiency. I felt as if I didn't know this woman at all, so freed of our lives had she become in her own quiet and resolve.
"Are you all right?" was all I could manage.
"Yes, I'm fine." She looked at me. "What?"
My face, pulled by its own under-skin pressures. "I don't know. I just want to know if you're doing okay."
She sipped. "You always had that look on your face when you wanted to ask a question that was not on the lesson plan." She didn't say "out with it" or anything like that -- she left me my own choice. She would not draw me out, she would leave me the irritation of my own freedom.
"Well, ah, you and Dad -- " There was nothing to do but ask. "What was it like, this past year? I stopped getting phone calls." My throat tightened around the words. "What was it like when he died?"
"Your father died like he did most things, with an edge to his voice and a feeling that the world got in his way just to spite him." Even she heard the judgment in her words and added, "he was greatly inconvenienced, but he bore up well. He hated most how his body was failing him after he'd taken such a long time to keep it intact. He did not go gentle."
"What did you two talk about?"
She must have heard something in my voice because her face softened and the firelight smoothed out its terrain. "You know what we did for the past year? We decided that spoken words, hurtled at the speed of sound, were too dangerous. So we wrote each other letters. Every day. I saved them -- you can read them if you want. We took pains to make the words slow down. We literally composed ourselves, spending hours over a phrase or a word."
She laughed. "By this time he was mostly bedridden, though he still took himself to the toilet and got his own books down from the shelves. To minimize the possibility of actually speaking to each other, we set up an elaborate relay system that would deliver our letters from my desk downstairs to his study upstairs. It was definitely Rube Goldberg!
"At first we would write several letters a day, and they were usually just written continuations of old arguments. The relay would fairly whizz and burn! But that didn't last for long. The discipline of putting pen to paper made us slow down and sometimes we would spend an entire day on one or two pages.
"I had to do this writing, of course, while I had everything else to do. But people helped -- cultivated the garden, helped me can, chopped the wood. I realized how much your father had done around here -- not that I was a slouch, but he had pulled a lot of reins. That had been a bone for a while, his need to control, which he said was just the need to get things done efficiently." She raised her hand and lowered it, as if to say that whatever heat the argument once had was now gone.
"His handwriting got worse as time went on, and he of course got angry at that, pushing it to where sometimes there was a page of scribble just to defy the creeping paralysis. As he got weaker the writing got shorter. I spent most of my time upstairs with him. We would sit in the room and I would write him something. He would write something in response. I would respond to that. And so on. We would write page after page this way, speaking so much in one or two sentences." I could see her eyes, deep glasses of sherry themselves. "Eventually he got too weak to write. We would sit quietly, holding hands. Sometimes he would sleep and I would write to him, most of which I never read back. It was in one of his sleeps that he died. Actually, he woke long enough to look me full in the face, eyes as clear as January sunlight, and say 'No'."
The firelight danced around the room with shadows. She had stopped talking and his final "No" hung in the room over her head. "We came back," she said, draining her glass. "We came around." She rose and knocked the "No" up to the rafters, where it dissolved like a smoke ring. I suddenly noticed how sweet the room smelled with the burning oak. She gave me a hug, quick and sharp, and disappeared up into the darkness of the bedroom.
I found the letters in her study packed in a Delmonte brand canned fruit box. Given their penchant for order, they had dated them, and I looked for the last ones, the ones she wrote to him when he couldn't respond. The one I wanted was near the top, in her usual spiderish handwriting. The desklamp burned over my shoulder.
"I wish I could describe the weather to you, this September you always loved. The apples hang on the trees like weights on a scale and already a frost has touched down. The air would raise you, as it always did. It can't do that now.
"I have had the time to think of what life will be like without you. I've already had practice, in a way -- I write these notes to no one who will write back. We haven't shared words in a long time, and I miss that, miss even your stubborn rasp, the gritch of your pencil across paper. Life without you will be life without you. It's a stark fact I can't change. I imagine things will be unbalanced for a while, like an old steam engine that's lost half its governor. After that, I don't know. The only thing I know is that I don't know what it will be like.
"I don't think I'm scared, of loneliness or anything like that. If I fear anything it will be to miss things about you so much that I will miss my own life. That was one of the risks we took, to see if we could keep our own identity in our shirtpockets yet still wear each other's shirt without ripping the fabric. We made the rounds to every emotion, every possible curse and denial, charm and pleasure. The shirts frayed, sometimes we took them back, but they wore pretty well.
"It's that fullness I don't want to stop feeling. You will not be around to share it with me, but I don't stop needing it simply because you die. There are other ways to get it, and I will. That is how I will keep you alive.
"Willfullness, stubbornness -- the things you accused me of, the things that attracted you in the beginning -- they will feed me until they feed me to the ground. We have had a full life, venom and love, venom because of love. It ends with love."
I could say I spent the next hours going through those letters, but it would be more honest to say that the hours and letters spent me, using me up until my heart pumped nothing but their words. "It ends with love." It was a near miss, I think -- love sustained them both, a floor of granite under the grinding accumulated cold and fire, but scoured and sometimes thinned to the merest blush of solidity by the velocity of their living. If it was love in the end, then it was love spiky, rough-edged, burred, parasitic at times, full of skirmish and triage, capable of great tenderness and gift, deep bruise and anger. It was not what the greeting cards were about, not what the overused Corinthians text at weddings was about. From their letters I could see that at times other things would have been preferable to this abundant provocative love -- solitude, ditch-digging, defamation, living only with cats and dogs. If love sustained them, it did so sometimes against their will; at times it was an overlong guest, an obnoxious relative who insisted on dragging out all the family photos. It was like the sickle cell, which sometimes made them ill but protected them against a worse disease. It was a near miss, I think -- it could have easily turned to the hatred they sometimes felt, whetted them down to dust.
"We came around." My eyes burned. "We came back." My shoulders ached. "It ends with love." It was said that Iceland rises inches each year, springing back from the retreated weight of the Ice Age. Ridges of gravel, called eskers, accumulated because underneath the impenitent diktat of the glacier's mass rivers of melted ice full of stones flowed, got plugged up, deposited their lithic cargo, branched off, and flowed again. The fire had breathed down to embers. I poked at them, threw them another log, and watched the dry wood smoke until, unable to resist, it spit itself into flame and began its light. This continued to be the house I grew up in.
I stayed for a few days, less to make sure that my mother was all right than to recover some of the country's flex in my muscles and lungs. I knew I had to return to Manchester, but I was reluctant to so quickly give up this haven. But that had always been a problem here -- a "retreat" in more ways than one, an attempt to unmake the world by making another one and in the process falling prey to smugness and stunted monarchy. I not only had to return, I needed to return, or else I would forever be fixed in suspended animation, cryogenically waiting for some cure that would never come for the abrasions and confusions of living, of love, of the usual winding up and down of sharing the human world.
My mother did move, for a while, to Arizona, but she came back, complaining that life out there didn't have enough punch. She died many years later. She did not play the good widow and mourn, by loneliness, my father's absence. She was never one for suttee, however mild the form. She had her companions and friends, all of whom came when I buried her next to my father in the orchard. It took a while but I eventually moved into the house and garden and orchard and barn. My own land was springing back. When I could afford the time I hiked, and with each step I put my own weight on the mountains, keen to the ancient blue ancestor who had chiseled its way through here once before. I had less weight and a shorter span but I was trying my best to make an impression.
The apples that fall were full, ballooned with sweetness. The applesauce tasted fine in January. In the spring, the last of the frozen apple pies succumbed. Then the blossoms. The years could be good.