"That"s true," said the dogstar man. And he went on unchaining them. They were lining up, letting him slip the harnesses over them, taking their old places. Hermes first, then Finn McCool and Melville in the second spot, then Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, and in the last position, Eleanor Roosevelt and John Kennedy.
"If you"re dead, how are you going to take your dogs?"
"Easy," said the dogstar man. "They can cross over. Didn"t you know that? Didn"t they teach you anything?"
The dogsled was leaning against the back of the house, and he pulled it down, hitched the dogs to it, and took his place on the back runners. He beckoned me over.
"For you," he said. "I don"t need this where I"m going."
And he dropped the whistle my father had made into my hand.
Prism Tree.
TONY DANIEL.
F.
ARTHER NORTH-Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia-the mountains are big. Big, big wrinkles in the land-skin of America, caused by a huge traffic accident a few million years ago-when Eurasia took a wrong turn at the equator and smashed into North America. But the wrinkle tapers out, grows narrower and smaller as it winds south. In northern Alabama, there are no more mountains-just foothills. That is where my grandfather lived, in the country, about five miles from the town of Newell, population: almost fifty, if you count the suburbs.
Grandaddy lived on his farm. Before him, it had been his father"s. His great grandfather had settled the land under the old homestead act.
On hot weekends, when the temperature climbed to the upper nineties, and the Birmingham air was full of the sweat and humid breath of a million people, my family would go over to the country, as we called it, to see Grandaddy and to dig our toes into the cool Randolf County sod. Well, it was my sister and I who did the toe digging.
First thing when we got there, we"d race through the big cornfield down the hill from the cabin. Each of us took a separate row so that we would only catch fleeting glimpses of one another through a green curtain of corn fronds; neither one would know who"d won until we burst from the other end and collapsed at the windbreak"s edge. Kim was two years older than I, and she usually won when I was a kid. After I hit p.u.b.erty, I began to come out first more often, though I sometimes suspect that Kim, beginning to discover the secrets of the Southern woman-the strategic loss of battles to win wars-would let me win.
After the traditional race, we would go to the creek for a swim. Well, not really a swim, because the creek was four feet at its deepest. We waded and splashed, mostly. There was a rock that the creek fell over, must have been six feet long-and sloped at an angle just right for sliding down. Green algae covered it, slick as fish skin. You couldn"t stand on it; your feet would fly from under you, and your head crack hard against its deceptive soft covering. But you could sit at the top, push off, then shoot down the rock, watching the water pool below getting bigger. And you"re in, and the water is so cold at first you can barely breathe.
If you wanted to, you could float on down the creek into the Tub. The creek water had carved out a channel through a big rock, a channel in the shape of a bathtub, but about ten feet long and two feet deep. The creek bustled through the constriction at twice its normal speed. Kim and I would bring our knees up until we were tight b.a.l.l.s, buoyant. We careened down the Tub, b.u.mping into the sides like those toy ducks you see at carnivals.
Then we would put on our clothes and go bother the cows. Grandaddy"s cows would spook at anything, so the game was to sneak up on them and pet them. Kim would go and move the cows in a certain direction. I"d be in the gra.s.s, on my stomach. Cows can only see in black and white and are too stupid to notice something that"s not moving much. I"d have to wait until the cows were almost trampling me, then I"d jump up, run at them, and pet whichever one I could get my hands on. Kim was always the cow driver. Like I said, she is a smart woman.
Then we"d go back to join the old folks, laughing as we walked over the rocky pasture. Mother would"ve cooked lunch, usually pork chops and collards. She always did because Grandaddy wasn"t a good cook and ate the same things day after day since my grandmother died. Mom is a schoolteacher, and Grandaddy, like a kid resigned to his fate, let her make him dinner. "Dinner," by the way, is what they call lunch in Randolf County.
There were the pork chops for meat, collards from Grandaddy"s garden, green and steaming, black-eyed peas and corn bread. That corn bread could not be duplicated. Grandaddy took a portion of his corn crop every year to a miller over the state line in Georgia. The miller-Mr. Hodges seems like the right name-had a stone grinding wheel turned by the falling water of Rocky Creek. I think it was from the miller that Grandaddy got the idea for a waterwheel.
After dinner, Grandaddy and I would go riding trees. I rode them, of course, and Grandaddy watched, giving me fine pointers on my technique. My father said Grandaddy rode trees until I was young, until arthritis and brittle bones forced him to stop. I would"ve loved to see my grandfather, a fifty-year-old man, his hair beginning to take on the smoky grayness which is all I have ever known it to be, come cascading down, hanging for all he was worth onto the top of a young hickory. There is nothing like riding trees-no amus.e.m.e.nt-park ride, no sport. There is nothing more physically taxing, for those few minutes you are inching your way to the tree"s very top. Then the descent down the empty air, and if you"re lucky, you"ve picked just the right tree and it sets your feet onto the ground as gently as cat"s breath on the hand.
Then my family would leave. We all loaded up into the Fairmont station wagon and drove away, leaving a billowing cloud of dust, with the tires crackling on the dirt driveway like distant thunder.
But during my teenage years, in the summer, I would stay behind to help Grandaddy tend the land. We lived in the log cabin that his father built by the creek. Grandaddy had attached a waterwheel to it and that was where his electricity came from. He didn"t pay Alabama Power one cent. The waterwheel was the overshot type, and in order to get the head he needed to turn it fast enough, Grandaddy cut a ditch from two hundred feet up the creek to bring faster, higher water to the flume.
I fed the cows and drove the tractor, plowing fields, bush-hogging, for many summers; I always came back to Birmingham with a farmer"s tan. At night, Grandaddy and I would read, or talk.
He told me about growing up, wandering the newly turned fields looking for arrowheads, swimming in the creek, shooting down the Tub just like me. When he told me about his first meeting with Betty, my grandmother, his eyes would fix on the wall, as if he were concentrating on seeing in his mind every detail, every texture of her. But the image must have been blurry, because he always gazed through tearing eyes.
They had met when he was eighteen, she was twenty. He was squirrel hunting up the creek, in the woods one farm over from his land, when he saw the fattest squirrel in Randolf County sitting on a tree limb not twenty feet from him. What was better (and stranger), the animal did not move, even though Grandaddy was pretty certain it had seen him. Grandaddy fell to one knee, took careful aim. Slowly, with a fluid motion, he pulled the trigger-something hit him. His shot flew wild, too wild for even the wide scatter of pellets to harm the squirrel.
"What"s got into you, trying to shoot my squirrel! I ought to take that shotgun and wrap it around your neck."
Grandaddy looked up to see a young lady with blond hair and a paint-stained smock leaning over him. The music of the creek and the woods filled the air. And he was in love. They were married a year later, in the First Baptist Church.
I never knew my grandmother, but I felt her presence all about the cabin. Her paintings were on the walls, paintings of birds, snakes, squirrels, trees-and at least twenty studies of the creek, in this light or that, near the Tub, the sliding rock. I got my schooling in engineering at Auburn, but I got my draftsman"s hand from my grandmother.
The best of my grandmother"s works-so good that it made the others look like crude paint-by-numbers landscapes, though they"re actually quite nice, almost professional-was a tapestry she had woven over a summer, three years after she and Grandaddy were married, when she was expecting my father. Grandaddy called this tapestry a wall rug, and he gave to it a whole wall of the cabin. It was a windbreak, he said, keeping out drafts, keeping us warm or cool, depending on the season.
The tapestry was of a huge old tree-the big oak tree directly above the cabin. My grandfather told me that he and my grandmother used to climb that hill, taking the easy way through the cornfield, on afternoons after the work was mostly done. They would look out over the farm.
"Betty called it her patchwork quilt," my grandfather told me. "The way the fields and woods fit together, with the creek threading through them."
And behind the tree in the tapestry was that patchwork of forms, a little close and out of perspective-or maybe that is just the way my grandmother saw the land, gathered together for warmth like a bundled-up quilt. The cabin was just to the left of the tree trunk, a small box in the distance, with a single thread of smoke curling out of the chimney. I never noticed until my grandfather pointed it out one day, but if you looked really closely, you could see that the smoke-thread was a twisted braid of my grandmother"s blond hair, looking more like sunlight streaming from the cabin than wood smoke.
The tree in the tapestry was depicted in the moment of being struck by lightning. There was a twisted cut down its trunk, in the same shape as the black scar on the tree on the hill. The tapestry was just a picture of lightning striking a big oak-nothing unusual, nothing special.
But beneath the tree, running out of the trunk"s base in meandering rivulets, was a rainbow of separate colors. That"s why Kim and I called the old oak the Prism Tree. The light from a woven, wool-white lightning strike jagged down through the tangled branches, into the tapestry tree"s trunk, then seemed to channel through the tree and emerge below it, split into a spectrum perfectly describing the makeup of the emotions the tree evoked, just as a spectroscopic chart will tell you what a star is made of. But there was no a.n.a.lysis here, no formulaic layout. Instead, my grandmother had put a fugue of color into the yarn, the heart of tree, lightning storm and the earth below. The tapestry was made completely of wool (except for that strand of hair) dyed from local plants my grandmother had collected to extract their colors.
My grandmother died of cancer, slowly and painfully, and Grandaddy buried her on that hill, facing her grave so that she"d have the same view as she"d depicted in the tapestry. He never said much about her, but there was no doubt he missed her. We shared the cabin"s main room those summer evenings, and sometimes I"d hear him wake up, shuffle around in his bed as though something were wrong, out of place. He"d speak her name, quiet and sweet, like the low end of a flute"s scale. Then, after a moment, he"d say it again, this time a whisper, full of loss and longing. When I woke in the mornings before him (which was not often), I"d see him crowded to one side of the bed, just in case, past all hope, his Betty should come back and want a place to lie down beside him.
So I was there that summer afternoon the power man came.
The white sedan pulled up in front of the house, the gravel crackling and firing under the wheels like damp firecrackers reluctantly exploding. Dust from the road rose like smoke from those firecrackers and caked the side of the car from the bottom of the door up the side, almost obscuring the decal just under the window. The decal said Alabama Power Company. I wondered what the man was doing out here-Grandaddy had discontinued his power service years ago.
"Howdy, son," said the tall, red-faced man who stepped out of the car. "I"m looking for John Dearburn."
I had come back to the house to use the bathroom and was about to head back out to the cornfield.
"Grandaddy"s out walking the cornfield," I said. "Want me to go get him?"
"I"d appreciate it," said the man, not quite meeting my eyes.
Something was wrong with the man, I thought, as I ran to get Grandaddy. Tree shadows of the windbreak flickered over me. The man was slumped like he"d been punched in the stomach. Corn shadows of the field flickered around me. "Grandaddy!"
"Hiram Funderburg," the man said. He said it while Grandaddy was still too far away for him to extend his hand. "Need to talk to you about something, Mr. Dearburn."
My grandfather asked the man inside the cabin.
I did not follow them. Instead, I sat outside and watched the water-wheel turning-whizzing around like an out-of-breath courier trying to deliver a message to an impatient general, water flying from it like a spray of sweat. What message could a creek be carrying? But that little creek is powerful, I thought. It must carry hundreds, even thousands of gallons an hour.
The wheel turned like the spindle on my grandmother"s old spinning wheel. I pictured it turning out pieces of land like her spinning wheel turned out strands of yarn. The waterwheel wasn"t saying anything, I decided. It was making. I guess I was thinking like an engineer even back then. After a while, I lost myself in the sparkle and turn of the wheel.
The man came out. He did not have the punched look anymore. In fact, he was standing taller, much taller. Grandaddy, who followed behind him, now looked like he"d been pummeled, beaten up. The man got into the company car, wordlessly, and drove away. The cattle, which had been standing on the road, separated to let him pa.s.s, then moved back together, as blades of gra.s.s will move when a snake pa.s.ses through.
Grandaddy stood straight and still while the man drove away. After the car went around the bend in the drive, out of sight, the strength seemed to flow out of Grandaddy. For a moment, he slumped, almost stumbled off the porch. Then he caught himself, kept himself under control. But I could see him trembling.
"Reed, they"re going to build a dam," Grandaddy said to me. "Down on the Tallapoosa River. Be a big lake forming. It"ll take a few years, but it"ll reach up the creek here, fill our little valley. This place will be underwater. They want me to sell out, Reed, to leave my home."
He turned from me, looked out over the fields and windbreaks, over the land. He clenched his hands into fists, which hung at his sides. He worked his nails into his palms.
"Ah, boy, what am I going to do?"
We went to the lawyer"s office in Anniston that afternoon, Grandaddy wearing his only suit; it was from the fifties, narrow and nondescript. Mr. Dowell, the lawyer, had helped my grandfather with the legalities having to do with my grandmother"s death, and, like all country folk, Grandaddy always came back to someone who"d done a good job for him. Mr. Dowell was not hopeful, and filled the air with talk. Talk I now would recognize, of eminent domain of the state, of the individual sacrificing for the common good, of the above-market price Alabama Power was willing to pay. But I was a boy still, and listened only with my heart.
"Oh, they offered me more than my land is worth, by any lights," Grandaddy said at one point. Then I remember the pause, the silence, which even the verbose Mr. Dowell did not seek to fill. A silence of memories, desires, hopes for the future. Of someday pa.s.sing those hopes on to Kim and me. And behind it all, pervading the silence like the smell of fallen leaves fills the autumn air, was the knowledge that this was where his Betty was buried, on top of the little hill behind the cabin, where she used to sit and paint. That grave would be sunken, flooded, washed away without a trace, and only the slap of waves fifty feet above it as a marker.
"And Betty-" Grandaddy"s voice cracked.
"I know, John," said Mr. Dowell, ceasing his explanations, his justifications, leaning forward, wiping his sad face. "There"s just nothing I can do. Nothing. I"m really sorry."
Grandaddy roamed the land for weeks. He did no work, for what was the use? He came back sweaty, caked with corn loam, with a look on his face-I can"t describe that look. Imagine a horse with broken legs staring at you, begging you to get it over with. Or a soldier with shrapnel through an artery, watching his life leak out onto the earth before him, knowing what is happening.
I followed him one day, far behind, and he didn"t see me. He knelt in the cornfield, dug his hand into the dirt and raised the reddish topsoil to his nose. He smelled it. Did he remember learning to plow, back during the Depression, his father"s hands, hard as old hickory, over his own, responding to, guiding the mule? Or was it his first crop, after he"d inherited the land, when the rain had not fallen until it was almost too late, when he thought he would have to go to Anniston or maybe even Birmingham to support my grandmother and my father, when the rain had come and the corn ta.s.seled and he had enough money to buy even an old used tractor?
With a shudder, I felt some of Grandaddy"s years upon my shoulders. I felt old and beaten down, and all I could think was that my kids would never race between the rows of corn because racing was fun. That they would never pant in this country air, on this farm, lying beside the windbreak, looking up into the blue Randolf County sky. They would never know the fall and carry of this creek on this land-only a flat expanse of featureless, dull water, if I ever brought them back to show them where the land had been.
Grandaddy crushed the loam against his face; his shoulders sagged and he did not straighten them, almost as if he were an old fallen log with a permanent depression from some boot crushing into its rotten trunk.
Alabama Power wanted him out by autumn, so they could begin clearing the vegetation from the land in preparation for the coming of the water, even though the water would not be up that far for another year after the dam was built. He had two hundred acres, and the power company was paying him two thousand each, plus the price of the cabin. It was not a bad deal.
He signed the contract in August, while flies buzzed about the heads of Mr. Funderburg, Mr. Dowell and himself. They sat on the front porch of the cabin; Grandaddy had not asked them in.
"There, it"s done," was all he said, then walked back into the cabin, leaving the two men to depart with no farewell. But after that, Grandaddy was seldom in the cabin.
During the days, I saw him walking through the corn, or petting the cows-they never ran from him. Then one day a big truck came and took all the cows away. Sometimes I would see him in the woods, heading upcreek in the direction of where he and his Betty met, carrying a shotgun. He had not killed a squirrel in forty years.
I spent my time keeping things up, keeping the cows fed while they were still in the pasture. The garden was going to rot; I just didn"t have the time to pull all the cuc.u.mbers, the beans, the squash. Anything I did was futile, I knew even then, but there was nothing better to do.
Grandaddy was gone nights, too.
Now, you might be thinking, this will become a ghost story. About how, say, my grandmother came to speak from the waterwheel, to cry for vengeance, or, say, how, magically, my grandfather kept water from coming up his valley, into his land, by a hard dam of a wish that it not do so. Or it will be more mundane, realistic, the story of how grief weighed down a man like a heavy snow in pines, and how he either did or did not spring back up after the thaw came and the land was covered with running water.
Instead, I"m going to tell you the truth.
Because for all the structure I can find in this old universe, the symmetries and happy coincidences, I have not found an ordering, a pattern, into which that summer, the farm, my grandfather, will fit. Oh yes, I am an ordered man, an ordering man now, drawing bridges, highways-yes, even dams-watching the slow, steady gathering of equipment, material, the precise application of force, the hammering of pattern and form, strong and firm as wrought iron, into this flux, this flow, of a world.
We have kaleidoscopes for brains, you and I. Colors spin, bits of gla.s.s and paper shuffle, spin on their axes-and the whole thing is done with mirrors. All for the sake of recognition, reacting to the known, getting by. But what happens when survival is not what it"s all about? When, like a ripple, a quake, realization comes over the mind, not that it will die-for we all sort of suspect this, as time comes on, and the evidence mounts- but that life, living, is running out, that this paper bag life is full of water and the bottom is soggy and about to burst? Will the mind bend in unaccustomed ways? And that summer, did my grandfather and, just for an instant, myself, look around the corner of things, catch a glimpse around the edges of the given like a dentist looking at the backside of your gums with his funny curved mirror? Did my grandfather slip around those edges, as a squirrel will skate around behind a tree, and be wholly gone, yet wholly there? I have no idea. All I can do is tell you what I saw.
Yes, Grandaddy was gone nights, too.
He carried no light with him, but knew the lay of the land so well, every rock, every stump, that he really didn"t need one. I tried to follow a eouple of times, but it was very dark-dark like it only gets deep in the country-and I was too scared and too tired. I suspect he visited my grandmother"s grave. I went back to the cabin, tried to sleep. Each night he would finally come in, quietly go to bed. But just before dawn, he"d wake up moaning, and sometimes I"d hear my grandmother"s name. Once he said softly, only to the still air in the cabin, "They"re taking her, Betty. They"re taking her."
Her. The land was a she to Grandaddy. Always had been. But lately, I came to believe, he was having trouble distinguishing the land from my grandmother. Not that he was going senile, becoming confused and dangerous to himself. It was just that the farm was full of her presence. Betty walked here; she painted here. Betty and my grandfather loved here-and here. Maybe he"d always felt this way, thought this way about the land, but kept it from me, my family-not wanted to show what we"d take to be false sentiment and the longings of a sad old man.
But Grandaddy just didn"t care anymore. I remember one day, when I met him coming in from the fields, his boots red as old blood from the Randolf County clay soil.
"Reed," he said, "she"s done with painting the corn today. Fall"s coming and she"s made all the stalks dry and brown. But she"ll be sad about it. She always loved green, new things."
This was not the "she" of "think she"ll need a cover crop of alfalfa this winter," or "we"ll put five more cows on her and see how she takes it." Not the general "she" of the land, the farm. This time it was personal, closer to my grandfather"s heart.
So on the day of the storm, the first week in September, I was not surprised when Grandaddy said "She"s raising a ruckus tonight, mad over something," as if he were commenting on some unfathomable woman thing affecting my grandmother. "We just have to sit tight and let her get over it."
The sky got heavy and dark, like the bottom of a paper bag getting soaked with water. Then, like a soggy paper bag, it all came apart, burst open, and the water fell. It rained all day, and Grandaddy stayed in. He was not crazy, you see, not a madman running raving through storms. Lightning crashed, thunder howling after. It rained creeks, rivers. Outside, the waterwheel was spinning and creaking and throwing off water like a dog shaking himself off after a bath.
Grandaddy sat by the empty fireplace all day long, reading a Zane Grey novel, rocking in my grandmother"s old rocker. He was facing the big old tapestry his Betty wove so long ago. I was sitting at the table, drawing up designs for a treehouse I planned to build when I got back home. School would be starting soon, and my parents would be down to get me the next week.
We stayed there, inside the cabin, all day, not talking much. Grandaddy read, mouthing the words silently, and I scratched away at my plans. You could hardly tell when night fell-the sky outside just grew a little darker.
As night came on, the wind really picked up and lashed rain against the cabin"s window. It was raining less than it had before, but the wind delivered the water with more fury.
I"d grown accustomed to the waterwheel through the day, but suddenly I heard it distinctly, as if there had been a change in pitch to the squeak of it. Lightning strobed, as if G.o.d were taking a Polaroid of the land, like in those snapshot booths at the Woolworth"s. Grandaddy stopped his rocking, lowered his book.
Was there something in that wind, some ordered sound? Or was it everything, the wind, the waterwheel, the s.p.a.ce of silence that followed the roll of thunder? A sifting of the trees through the air that said something, whispered a human word? That called my grandfather"s name? I can"t say. Or, if I"m forced to decide, I will say there was nothing there- only the swish of leaves and the rushing of wind.
"Well, d.a.m.n it, Betty," said Grandaddy, "I"ll come, then, if you want me to."
I sat up in my chair, pushed away my drawings. This was what I"d feared: Grandaddy gone insane, chasing a ghost through the night and me having to look after him.
"There"s n.o.body there, Grandaddy," I said, trying to keep my voice calm like you were supposed to do with crazies.
Grandaddy looked at me with a wry smile. What I"d now recognize as a patronizing look. And-I now believe-he had a perfect right to do so. After all, he was the oldest living male in the family, the Patriarch himself.
"I have decided something, Reed," he said.
"What?"
"Something I have to do."
I was silent for a long time, trying to think what to say. Finally I decided just to ask.
"What?"
The wind picked up.
"Listen; she"s mourning."
"Grandaddy, what are you going to do?"
He got up and went to get his raincoat. I moved to stop him.
"Grandaddy, no."