Alex first met Thoreau in the person of his father. One of his earliest memories (though he was not sure if he actually remembered this, or if it was merely the accumulation of recollections laying around the house, like dust in the corners) was of the Manuscript edition of Thoreau's works scaled grandly atop his rock maple dresser. His father would, from time to time as Alex lay in his cradle speaking in tongues, read from the Journals, or from the strident economics of Walden, or about the shimmering river in the Week. And according to testimony (though again this was hard to make real), when Alex first rose up in his crib, he faced the morning sun and laughed. His father nodded approvingly and said that it showed the beneficent influence of Thoreau's words, but Alex's mother said it was more likely that Alex's diaper was wet. That didn't matter, Alex's father replied, the stars and the bowels move together.
Alex got to know just enough of his father to realize there was much left to learn about the man. Alex's father died on the eve of the Great War, when Alex was eight. Shadows took up residence in the house -- Alex's mother was a ship without an anchor. He clearly remembered going into his father's study and sitting cradled by the supple leather of the huge chair at his father's desk. Around him was the slow combustion of his father's books, each cautiously placed. Their order mocked his tentative eight-year old grip on the world, and for a horrible instant he felt himself fall through the leather of the chair into a thorough abyss where his father's face, once creased by laughter and girdled with a beard, slowly and agonizingly shed its flesh until the skull gleamed its evaporated ivory. Alex screamed until he was back in his father's study, the spring sunlight thick off the sheen of the desk, the books still orderly, the air cool and calm. Alex swung quickly out of the chair, and as he moved he saw on the desk an open book, the book his father must have been reading when they discovered him, bolt upright, dead in his study. Alex skimmed the page, his heart still battering his ribs, and his eyes lit on an underlined passage: "I perceive that we partially die ourselves, through sympathy, at the death of each of our friends or near relatives." His father's voice, stout yet edged with compassion and civility, skirled through Alex's head like a flute through an apse of pines, and his heart stilled. Then, in a gesture he only half-understood, he closed the book, all the while peering at the dust in the sun.
After the interment, after Alex's mother retreated, he found himself more and more alone. He spent more time outside the house, often getting up at dawn and rambling through the meadows and fields until the sunset ignited the dusk, when he would return, grimed and steady. And when he had washed and eaten a spare supper, while his mother sewed or sat in the wing chair and stared at the dark panes of glass, he would sit at his father's desk in a pool of saffron light and furiously write in a ledger the events of his day. Page after page night after night branched with his script. Occasionally his mother's silhouette, enclosed by the dark walnut of the doorframe, would ask what it was he wrote about, and he would answer, politely but tersely, about the things he found and the thoughts he had, no more volunteered or offered.
He could not seem to get enough of the woods and fields. Seasons passed. His mother unfurled from grief and took up life again, and he, adding on time and breadth and strength, also unfurled like the clef of a fiddlehead fern. They talked only infrequently, evolving a cryptic language that spoke more than it said, and it was understood that she would not interfere with his travels. Outwardly he was like any other twelve-year old boy. He made friends, played their games, argued with them about America's presence in the war, followed the battles in the newspapers. Yet even they, like his mother, sensed a hardness in him -- a portion of him fallow and rocky -- that wouldn't yield to normal cultivation. He joined no clubs at school, sought no honors, courted no one, and while his friends liked him well enough, it was not warm or encouraging. After school, when the games were done, he would head out for his walk, taking any handy bearing, and some of his schoolmates would watch his slight figure dwindle down the road or over the crest of a low hill. They wondered -- mildly curious -- what he was looking for, then turned to go their own ways.
Alex wondered as well. He knew the precise location of the wild flower beds, certain trees, freshets that leaped from mossy holes, birds' nests, animal dens. Where he walked seemed so much a part of himself that he felt, though he didn't understand it, as if he were walking across a territory as familiar, yet as full of mystery, as his own heart and ribs and lungs. He noted everything. He watched, scarcely a foot away, while a mud-turtle buried her eggs. He shinnied up trees to watch the progress of chicks, learned to catch fish with his hands, conversed with woodchucks. And he dutifully recorded it in his ledger, driven by some need to get it all down as accurately as possible. He walked, he scavenged, he sat in the moonlight while he inhaled the smell of sweet clover, he turned over rocks, he read the script on tree bark -- but none of it yielded. The linchpin he needed escaped him.
One night, in the chill of early November, his mother heard Alex come through the back door. She had been worried, and waited with a released heart for him to see her. Instead, he went straight to the study and closed the door, a signal to be left alone. An hour later Alex came out and, still without a word, clomped upstairs to bed. She stood at the foot of the stairs and listened to him washing, the thunk of his boots as they hit the floor, the squeal of the bedsprings as he eased into bed.
She went into the study -- the light was still on. The ledger, like wounded bird, lay open. She had never looked into his words before, an agreement unvoiced yet binding. She stood a little off and gazed at the jerky script that littered the page. Then, straightening her dress, she walked to the desk, laid the last written page flat. She skimmed the sharp description, invited by the words, and for a moment she imagined the keen sting of wild peppermint in the air. She read on, saw that it was more of the same, and prepared to close the book.
She came to the last sentences, and as she read them her heart tightened and her eyes clouded. "I found today," the words spoke, "what I had been looking for all this time, and now I am not sure if I am glad. Today I finally understood what I had been searching for -- my father's face. And I understood too that it was all around me all the time. He lives every time I go walking across the land. I am my father. That is all I understand."
She left the book as she had found it, doused the lights, and made her way upstairs through the darkness.
He had arrived at Harvard cleaned, he believed, of all his childishness. His father's school. The train ride here had been a clear prose that Alex had written with the pen of his own being. There he had been, moving freely toward a destiny of his choice, unclasped by parents, toward some congress with all the possibilities of the world.
Sour memory now. He crossed the street to the Yard. Lights breached the coming twilight, and the frowning brick softened. This was a time when there was no time. He felt suspended, floating, even as he clomped noisily on the boards set on the paths in anticipation of the snow. It was time for high table at Lowell House. Cambridge at dusk was a city of spires brindled with electric light. Above he heard the wind weaving in the chimney pots of Grays and Matthews and the muffled living sounds of the uncoined freshmen behind their rimed windows. He saw himself in every room, his every face shadowed by the plane of light as he pressed against the glass to see out, to see through. He passed out of the Yard, headed for the river.
It had not always been this way. He recalled clearly his first day as he hauled his trunk up three flights to his room at the top of Wigglesworth, how his entryway and every entryway in the Yard boiled over with parents and porters, and how the sun battered everything with festive heat. He'd even liked his roommates at first, even though they treated him, as good Exeter grads, with that expansive gentility just shy of rudeness. One of them had had a flask of gin. They'd shared it, sitting on the trunks, their collars limp with sweat, not bothering to wipe off the flask's mouth, and for that moment he felt Eden around him, sharing liquor with people who, for now, pretended to like him, as they sat on the shores of the greatest school in the world.
But soon he drifted away from them, they being more interested in exploring the dens of Boston than Plato's cave. He stuck to his books because, in a real sense, they stuck to him. He had always been a child of words. Soon they started calling him The Monk -- he drifted farther away. The dust of the library riddled his veins.
His cloister was Widener. He searched. He attempted to make sense of all the facts, suppositions, premises, constants, relativities that sieved through him and clouded his mind. He wanted knowledge, and he felt lost in the forest, without guidance and harried by his curious thirst and the sentinel face of his father.
The year ended, but by then Alex had been infected by his intellect. Inside him meaning and purpose and doubt and fear sold his peace of mind on the block every day. He plunged into a summer factory job turning out parts for telephones. In the evenings he went where the workers went and let their gossip and complaining clean him out. He tried not to think, afraid of failing. As the next year started his bookshelves at Lowell House filled and filled with names: Russell, Whitehead, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley. He juggled his own hot heart, unable to drop it and die, unable to hold it without pain.
No truth. No sure ground of being. His father's life had been as meaningless as his death. But his guts rebelled against that -- but his guts gave him no answers. He felt betrayed by the power of his own hunger for knowing. He felt the knot at his throat, the unyielding knot of mystery and stupidity and darkness. He had no evidence to keep him continuing -- life -- his life -- deserved no more attention.
The decision, when made, brought him peace, and ironically life became more vibrant for him, more insistent. His senses sharpened, his body surfaced, and the long celibacy crumbled away. He gloried in his sensations even as he felt sorry that he would have to leave them behind, grateful for the truce while it lasted. But it didn't last for long. It soon came round to surrender.
He finally reached the river. The lights in the houses went on like batteries of irregular guns. He felt impervious. He tramped onto Weeks Bridge, finally stopped. The maculate water, littered with fall's slough, slid under the bridge, under his eyes. Alex watched without comprehension. With a jerk he leaped on the parapet and stood ready to launch himself. He stared at the water, searching its face. It waited.
Alex only faintly heard the sound. He looked up. On the river, just barely visible, was a sculler, possibly the last of the season. The sculler's oars sliced long liquid divots out of the autumn sun that skimmed across the river's surface. Alex watched as the thin sliver of shadow grew larger, saw the thin light dance on its braided wake, and the alpenglow stippled the sculler like a butterfly. The body arched and snapped and let out sharp syllabic breaths like shots.
Alex watched. The sculler raced sun. He raced the present tense of his blood, the friction of water, the unloosening skein of his muscles. He raced the possibility of fracture against the coming blackness, raced for the dim lights of the creaking dock that signaled end, that signaled home. The sculler raced night.
Suddenly Alex could sense the gnarling cold of the stone through his shoes, recall the rough grating of the rock on his knees and hands. For an instant the world he'd renounced laved over him, and his body filled with a precious hesitation. On the river the sculler honed the darkness that cut Alex's throat until Alex bled words again. In his mind Alex guided the sculler along, shared his breath through parched throat, thought his thoughts. Safely through under the arch of darkness. Clear the oars now, just enough on either side. Careful not to slam the seat forward -- fight the thighs that ache, these shoulders that knot and crease, this rasped throat whittled to grunts. Hands on sweat-polished handles: Feather! Feather! All is rhythm, all is motion, grace.
Alex jumped off the parapet, ran to the other side of the bridge to see the sculler emerge. No more light was available. Finally, he heard the sculler dock his boat, lift it out of the water, and walk it up to the boathouse where, for an instant, he could see the sculler's silhouette against the framed glow of the door. Then darkness. The floating dock creaked as it swung in the gentle aftermove of the sculler. Alex imagined the waves of that motion washing his feet clean.
Back in Lowell House, back in his narrow room. Spread militantly across the top of his dresser was his father's collection of Thoreau. Alex pulled out Walden and held it tight as he collapsed on his bed and fell into the first impervious sleep he'd had in weeks. In his mind the snow fell and etched the copper beeches in the Yard, the old walls and houses and chimneys, and the sound of it as it fell was a simple flute floating over a pure frozen pond, the sound caught and refracted in the air's web of diamonds.
Light covered the man like skin. It was a morning light, in August, not yet crabbed with heat. The insects had not begun to sizzle yet, the birds griped in the trees. His hair was long, below his wing blades, shot through with grey, tied neatly with a leather thong. The room was bare except for the cushions the man sat on, the walls white, the oak floor dull.
The eyes were open, unblinking, unstaring. The wrinkles around his eyes were like the lines of symmetrical decay on a cloud-chamber photograph. His nose was aquiline, altogether too fleshy, and it arced over a mouth and chin framed by a bristling goatee. Where he was shaved, the skin was leathery but not tough, like chamois. His hands rested on his lap, woven like twin knots of rope, and his legs were moored in the lotus position. He was a man supremely at ease in the August morning, eyes charitably turned inward.
He heard the outside door open, then close with the sharp chlunk! where it stuck against the jamb. Melita was back. He roused himself, assembling his senses, and listened as she filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove, then the crisp snap of the lighted match, the grunt of the gas as it caught. He even imagined the bitter sulfur in his nose. Already the heat had risen. He unflexed his legs slowly, stood up, and left the room.
Melita was eighteen -- he was sixty-two. Not that the ages mattered, though many people he'd known would be itchy at the situation (and he knew what the itch would be). He got it up often enough to please him. He wasn't sure about Melita -- he didn't care. If she had other lovers (and if he had been her, he would have) that was no problem. He reached the top of the stairs. In the kitchen he could hear the two mugs slapped down onto the counter (his a large earthenware, hers a thick white cafeteria), then the splurge of water. He could see ferns of steam rising upward, weaseling about her head -- all she saw was hot water. Poetry was too placid for her tastes -- taking to the streets was in her voice. The poetry of action, she once said, not words. He didn't care. He didn't want her for an audience, not something captive. He liked her because she hated poetry.
"I know you're standing there, so come join me."
A smile grazed across his mouth, nibbled at the corner, ranged over his lips. His bare feet made no sound on the stairs.
"I'm glad you're back."
She swung the two mugs to the table, then added a cutting board with sliced fruit and cheese. "Did you think I wouldn't?"
He sipped his tea.
She was putting dishes away, her body flying around the small kitchen. For a moment, for the time it took an eyelid to descend and rise, he drank in the marvelous complicity of her movements, his body remembering the shivering delight of coming into her, her breasts like unearthed flower bulbs, nipples rising like the almost-explosion of a bud. Frenetic, she gave him peace. Flippant, she gave him truth.
"I never know what you'll do." He sipped his tea again. "Sit down."
"In a sec. I'm trying to get this sty picked up. Did you know the door still sticks?"
He nodded, ate some cheese.
"How many times have you promised to fix it? You've got all those goddam tools in the basement."
"I'll get to it. The door has been doing that for a long time."
"Superstitious bastard," she said without rancor. She sat down. "Alex, I've got something to tell you. I know you won't agree, but I've made up my mind. It's what I want to do."
"Do what?"
"I'm going to Chicago for the convention."
"Why go at all?"
"To get Humphrey nominated."
"Is he going to be the 'new, improved politician'? Better than the butcher in there now?" He finished his tea, perused the leavings in the mug. "What do you really expect to happen -- conversion on the road?"
She got up, her arms akimbo, and stood over him as if he were a young child. "You've convinced yourself that all true political action comes from revelation inside. You're wrong!"
"Melita." He pointed to her chair and, with just a slight hesitation, she sat down. "We've had this discussion before."
"It's all fine and good for you to sit up there and meditate, but people are starving, workers are getting shit on, and something has to be done."
The steam had gone out of the talk. He knew she was right, and he knew she was wrong as well. What was a person to do? Live as best he could. All his life he had done exactly that, trying to shed as much baggage as possible, trying to simplify himself to where his desires were pure, unmarred. He'd had enough of the world long ago. "Why did you tell me?"
"I thought you'd like to know why I might not be home. Not that you'd notice." She moved her hair off her shoulders so that her face, framed like a madonna's, looked straight into him.
"I'd notice. I'd notice very much."
"Do you need me? I mean, why am I shacking up with some sixty-year old hippie? Am I perverted?"
"To the first and last questions, yes. To the second, I don't know, but then again, I don't know why I'm shacking up with some eighteen-year old wench when I should be a patented grandfather and fearing my retirement. You tell me."
He helped her clean up the breakfast, then they changed for the day's work. There were fences that needed mending around the edges of the alfalfa. She said she'd be leaving in a few days.
With her gone the house became an island, and he saw clearly how his land spread out in productive circles from the hearts and hands that inhabited this dwelling. The house garden came due, and he was thankfully busy canning and freezing. He continued to sell milk and eggs as he always did, without the approval of inspectors, to those who brought their own containers. The alfalfa was harvested and bagged by the man down the road, in exchange for eggs and cheese and rabbit meat. The small orchard's fruit sang its aromatic lieder, and he gave the birds their due while he stored the apples in the root cellar and froze the cherries and made jams. At evening, when the kitchen counter groaned with jars and the crows had gone to rook, he sat on the porch and finally let himself wonder about her. He did not want to feel old, and yet he did, and he knew that when she was here, he did not think about being older, he just thought about being alive. And when the sun went full down and the cicadas inhabited the ear, while the ocean of darkness suffered his one light to glow, loneliness frisked him more strongly than it had in quite a long time, just to see what he had on him. Maybe she was right, maybe he'd worked so hard to find peace in himself he'd forgotten about the world out there. He imagined her, headstrong in conversation, in her endless rounds of petitioning. Perhaps she was right.
One day, not long after she left, he went into the city. When he pulled up to the hardware store, across from the public park, he saw a forest of people collected around the statue of Daniel Webster. One young man, jeaned and long-haired, spoke to them through a bullhorn. He parked the truck, locked it, and joined the fringes of the group, but he could only catch a few words when the bullhorn happened to point his way. He moved in closer. Someone handed him a pamphlet. "Stop the War! Stop the Draft!" blistered across the top of the page.
The man's words, tinny and slurred, filled the early morning air. "We have to show our unity in the face of this fascist repression by our government. That is why we've gathered here today, to show the leaders in Washington that they can't take young men and use them like fresh meat. Like Henry David Thoreau said, if a law 'requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.' You've got that written in your pamphlet. Remember it."
Scattered applause fanfared the exchange of the bullhorn to a young girl (he imagined Melita) who spoke about sexism and the military machine, but he scarcely heard her. He skimmed the pamphlet and found the quotation from Thoreau. While the girl's voice droned on mantra-like, he descended through a time he'd long since abandoned.
There had been his first marriage. When graduation had come and he and his classmates had been grudgingly admitted into the community of scholars, he was already headed for a teaching career. He had desperately wanted something authentic to do, some outward sign that what he'd done with his four years, what his father had done for him in the years before that, was the ground for some kind of legitimate life among his fellow human beings. He had needed to believe he was useful.
His first teaching job was in a reform school in rural upstate New York, and though he had been frustrated by the low pay and long hours, he was also secretly pleased by them: they reminded him that he was doing his work out of commitment, as a mission. Then he met Kathleen, a woman six years older, with a daughter, Nicole, and he had been smitten by her age, her maturity. Soon they were engaged -- soon the market crashed.
The bullhorn changed to a black man, a gold earring snapping in the sunlight. "Racism," he began. He had not thought of Kathleen in epochs, only a little more of Nicole. The marriage had never been good. His need for order, for respectability, soon evaporated in the heat of the true responsibilities of being a husband, a father, a worker. He could barely take care of himself, much less nourish two other people. Kathleen demanded attention -- she got indifference. Nicole demanded a father -- she got transience. They divorced in 1932, and he'd never married since. He had always wondered if Kathleen had remarried, had never moved to find out. He still sent Nicole birthday cards, even though now she was close to forty-five. She never replied.
The pamphlet in his hand swam back into focus. The black man was still speaking. He noticed a number of police cruisers around the park, their blue lights strobing palely in the bright morning sun. Mounted police filed through the crowd, ringed the fringes. Thoreau. The linchpin of it all. Even as they married and began to make a life, the shrill flute of that cabin by the pond cut into his veins. What he could not admit to himself then, but which worked at his heart like poison, was that he did not want the marriage and the child and the house and the job, had never wanted them except that he had forced himself to believe that they were the only ways he could be real. What he had truly wanted to do after college, all his life, was what Thoreau had done, purge himself so that he could be free of in order to be free for. So they divorced, both of them totally uncomprehending.
And that is what he had been doing all his life, building his Walden so that he could be free of pain and loneliness and the people who produced such things. When his mother died, with no other husband to her name (divorced as well from the world, content with her memories), the house and land reverted to him. He retired there, worked to feed himself, spent long nights alone with his music and notebooks, and gradually accepted his own singleness, the ripeness and danger of his own freedom. Inspector of snowstorms, surveyor of dreams.
He sensed rather than saw the people around him shuffle. Looking up, he was blinded momentarily by the sun. Then he saw the horse patrols moving among the people and heard a bullhorn's voice say "move on" and "forcibly arrested" and "no right to assemble without a permit." All around the park cruisers were tethered to the curbs. Policemen with riot gear phalanxed on the sidewalk. The first man, the one who'd been speaking when he came to the park, shouted into his bullhorn for everyone to stay cool and offer no resistance. A mounted policeman rode by and grabbed the horn -- the man refused to let go and the policeman fell off his horse. Immediately the other patrols surrounded the young man, billyclubs drawn, while the fallen policeman dragged the young man to a waiting wagon. Everyone looked scared, tight and scared.
He walked to the line of policemen and made to go through it. One man dropped his shield in his way.
"I want to leave. My truck is right over there."
"No one leaves."
"Why all the force? Why can't I leave?"
"Move back."
"Why?"
"Get back."
He saw it was more than useless to argue with the face behind the insect-like visor, so he retreated back into the crowd. Behind him some people were chanting, "Hell, no, we won't go." Others took up the cry, their fists punctuating the air. He wended through the crowd to another point, asked permission to leave. By now it was obvious the policemen were nervous and instead of speaking to him, the officer pushed him back with the tip of his riot stick, jabbing it sharply just up under the ribs. He stumbled and fell into a knot of people. He could smell their sweat, a cheap sour smell of fear and excitement. They propped him up roughly and, still with their hands on him, shook their fists at the policemen and shouted "Is that what the fuckin' pigs do now, push old men around?" He could see from the flexing hands of the policemen that it wouldn't be long before they replied in the brash syllables of riot sticks and tear gas. He peered at them, ached to talk with them, reason out this foolishness, to use best what was best inside them. But only crass power stared back, unblinking.
He melded back to the middle of the crowd in a half-delirium, the day suddenly turning ominous and farcial. He knew what was going to happen. Violence unmuzzled, daring rebel and defender of order. If only he could make them see their exclusion. But Melita was right: no philosophy would work here. Already, along the fringes of the crowd, goaded by heat and humidity and nerves sliced thin, clashes erupted, sticks rose and fell with pendulum accuracy. This was wrong, and that word shot through him like needles.
Miraculously he went untouched. All around him he saw heads cracked, arms wrenched, bodies carted off, while others ran for whatever exits they could find. As the vanguard of police swept the park clean, he walked over to a wagon, already crammed with bodies, and asked the officer if he could get in. The officer, puzzled, held the door open for him, and he got in, sat down in the narrow aisle with his hands clasped tightly across his shins, knees up. A few faces he recognized -- most were strangers.
The wagon was stifling, a stew of sweat and bad breath and urine. "Hey, old man, why're you here? This is ain't your war."
"I asked to get in," he replied.
Several people stirred. "Asked?" one black man questioned.
"Yes, asked. Volunteered. My own free will."
"Shit," someone exhaled, "I had to get my head busted."
The back doors of the wagon closed and the gears ground as it waddled away and picked up speed.
"Old man, what's your beef?"
He looked at his questioner, looked as deep as he could in the dim light into his eyes, and from depths he thought he'd long ago sealed off came a rich historical laughter, not scorn or derision, but a freeing laughter, a laughter full of razors and humility. He just laughed and laughed until even those in pain chuckled as best they could, all the way to the stationhouse.
Melita got him out in good time. "What the hell are you doing in jail?"
"Learning. How was Chicago?"
"A bust. In every sense of the word."
"I read about it in the papers."
"You never read the papers."
"You never see me read the papers. I read them."
They found his truck. A few tickets sprouted from the wiper.
"I'm glad to get back home." She said this squarely to him, her long hair behind her shoulders. "Do you really read the papers?"
"Yes."
"What else don't I know about you?"
The ride home was peaceful and courtly.
That dusk he took down one of Thoreau's journals and thumbed through it to a note in the margin, written there by his father. "I am never quite satisfied," it read, "with the meal I offer myself. The effort he made to live must have cost him dearly, contradicting so much of what we are taught, which often amounts to a laziness, a drawing in of resources to save for the dying of the light." The sharp chorus of crows tutored the coming darkness. Melita was sewing. A flute skirled in his head -- the ripples of the sound coiled into a portrait of his father.
I can find very little on the month of March. I've come across a curious saying: A bushel of March dust is worth a King's ransom. It seems the Anglo-Saxons had a sliding scale for the fine of murder according to the rank of the person killed, £10 for a churl, £60 for a king. Dust. I suppose the price differential was thought a great reflection of justice, though it all came to the same dust in the end: the bones of the murdered, the corroded heart of the murderer, the scales of the judge dispensing sentence, the money itself ransomed into its constituent elements in the pockets of a corpse, the earth itself upheaved by the poniards of returning grasses. In the Indo-European, the original form fathers the whole notion of transience. "The dust of snow." The thing that is, signifies the being that is not. I could blather like this for hours. I wonder how much I would be worth.
I have been blathering like this for days now, I suspect even years. These journals are like the ear bent to the train rail, listening, listening, listening for the grinding herald of the thing you've finally wanted to arrive but hasn't yet come. I'm listening, listening, listening to every slip of my tongue for the omen of when that tongue will die. The mother tongue, that over-zealous lump of muscle that spews out so many wasted words until we can appreciate finally the silence for what it, too, says. This silence -- far different from all the other silences I've heard. This one comes like the storm off a bay with a bruised sky flecked by lightning washing over all of us tethered to the shore, and just before the storm batters us, a white seagull slips into our view, and for a moment it sails as brutally perfect as it can, then on out to perch in safety. That is the silence I am facing.
Henry, I must confess, I have never given up the ghost as you did. Melita is here, and I am as married to her as I am to my lungs. There were times when I drank, doped, fornicated as lustily and as often as I could, indulged in the material luxuries of my culture (I admit I hate the taste of Indian corn bread), compromised myself in a thousand intended ways. I am a ripe example for your scorn. But don't charge me too harshly -- I could dig March dust on you if I had to, and we'd sit here like two cackling harridans and chew the moon to rind.
But you wouldn't measure a man by his discipleship. At important times you came to my island in a sealed bottle and gave me a telegram a hundred years old and as immediate as the growth of my fingernails. I have failed, but you kept me from failing worse. I have been the most accepting of Philistines, but you kept some Samson alive in me.
But now, on this last page, with this last ink, I want to confess my greatest failure. They say that when you died you were serene and without desire, that you missed the children. I am not this way. I fear giving up this life since I have put so much into making it fit and habitable. I am filled with a pain of loss so great, as if that seagull had never flown across the darkening sky. What nepenthe do you have for me now? Didn't you once, ever once, feel your bowels wither with the thought of your own absence, that the world will fare just as well without you, as if your presence were of no more concern than the melting snow in a ditch or the dimple of a young man's cheeks as his father praises him? I am not afraid so much of death, whatever that frisk wants, as I am of losing life, of losing the thrill of my senses and good food and the ability to imbibe pain and worry and despair and laughter. I do not want to stop being human. I have had so much fun being one that I'm reluctant to break the habit.
Why should I even ask you? You were good for living -- you're not much good for death. I'll have to fathom this plumb alone. So be it. "Moose" and "Indian" were your supposed last words. I don't know what mine will be. I hope good sense holds my tongue. Goodbye, Henry. Hello Central.