Authors: Paul Harding
“Okay, okay. I guess that’s a good point. Just try to go easy on the tykes, all right?” Kate picked at the muffin I’d brought her. She rubbed her fingertips together to get the crumbs off and wiped her hand on the side of her tennis skirt.
“Sure, Dad.”
“What’s up for the rest of the day? Want to go for a walk in the sanctuary or go over to Gull Harbor and look for sea glass?” I knew she wouldn’t want to do either of those things, but I hoped that she’d still like that I’d asked her.
“Carrie and I are going to the beach.”
“Who’s giving you a ride?”
“We’re going on our bikes.”
“Wait. Did you ask Mom about this or anything yet?”
“No. It’s okay. We’ll be safe.”
“Ah, no. Sorry, kid. But no. I don’t like the idea of you riding around the lake there and down Grapevine. It’s too winding.”
“But
Dad. You
did it! You used to do it when you were
younger
! Come on. That’s not fair. Why not?”
I wanted to tell her that I didn’t care if it was fair, or if it was thoughtful or mean or capricious or bad parenting or anything. I wanted to tell her,
Because I just don’t want you to, and I’m the parent and that’s why not
. Instead, I closed my eyes and frowned and feigned an exhausted sigh and said okay, she could go.
“But be careful, especially around the lake and along the shore road,” I said.
“
Especially
there, Dad,” she said. I stood up to go and she grabbed her racket and a bucket of balls.
“Home by six,” I said.
“Seven,” she said, and kissed me on the ear.
“Not a minute later. I’ll make you guys dinner.”
“Get corn.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Dad.”
T
HERE WAS A HEAT
wave in July. I had no working air conditioners, only two fans, one a large, dust-caked window fan and the other a small, plastic desk fan. I put the window fan on the floor near the couch and the desk fan on the coffee table by my head. Frankie had come through with all of the
drugs I’d asked him for the week before, and I was set up for a while.
I drank a glass of grapefruit juice mixed with the extraction from four pills and lay on the couch in my boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, with a rolled-up washcloth soaked in cold water across my forehead. A book about Enon’s history lay on the floor near the couch, so I picked it up and leafed through it. There was a photograph of Main Street in July 1890, taken from the middle of the road, facing east, with the caption “Beating the heat with Conant’s grapes.” The elms on either side of the road look parched and papery. The photo is overexposed and light floods out much of the detail that would otherwise be visible. A single white house sits behind the trees, on the apparent verge of evaporating into pure light. Two children stand hand in hand across the street, on the right. One is a small boy wearing short pants and suspenders and a wide-brimmed straw hat. The other is an older girl in a plain white cotton dress, black socks, and ankle-high leather shoes. They are nearly swallowed in the light.
I closed my eyes and imagined what it must have been like standing in the center of the road, directly in the sunlight and heat, which was so intense that it seemed like liquid, difficult to breathe in and out, scalding, nearly asphyxiating. The boy and girl are both looking at me standing in the middle of the road, and the boy, young as he is, perhaps four or five, is wondering in a straightforward, practical way why I am standing out in the middle of the road, where it’s so hot. The girl wonders the same thing but with a twinge of suspicion
about me that the young boy is too young to have. Her suspicion does not frighten her, but it makes her cautious and curious at the same time. The unpaved road is smooth and dusty in the heat. The dust seems nearly to hover just above the ground, in a sheer plane, and twists up into dervishes when a molten gust of air coils down the road, and spins off out of the frame, into the backyard behind the house, and dies somewhere among the hot red pines and oaks. I am aware that there’s a good chance that the children will disappear, that the photograph itself will dissolve if I try to approach them. Some kind of boundary exists, one familiar from dreams. The girl is Kate, but not quite Kate. She is obviously who I want to approach and have turn into Kate, but not deliberately, not by an act of my will, but by hers or some other, external accord, because whomever we most want to meet in our dreams always vanishes the moment we intentionally try to preserve her. I stand in the wide, open middle of the blazing road, suspended. If I take a step closer, the boy and the girl I want to be Kate will evaporate in the heat. If I turn away, the entire picture will give way. It seems that the best I can hope for is the preservation of my desire for the girl to be Kate, which is not quite but very nearly as painful as her not being there at all. Just as I feel a kind of prevenient, atomic ripple approaching the threshold of my awareness, which will scatter this fragile notion and replace it with, say, a coarse, literal thought about the washcloth on my forehead, the girl speaks.
“These grapes are as big as apples.” I notice for the first time that she and the boy are standing in front of a yard to
another house. The house is invisible, but I see that the near corner of a grape arbor is discernible beneath the canopy of elm behind the children. The details of the boy’s and the girl’s figures are mostly blurry, but now I see that each is holding what looks like a large, translucent, deeply colored purple apple. The girl holds her piece of fruit out, as if to give me a better look.
“It’s a grape,” she says. “I always think they should be heavier, like apples, but they’re not.”
Although I cannot see them, I can feel, almost as a pressure inside my chest, the weight of fist-sized grapes clustered on stems as thick as ropes in bunches the size of bodies hanging from the vines in the arbor. It must take a buck knife to cut them off and wheelbarrows to move them. When the grapes are ripe, Benjamin Conant, the man who owns the house and the arbor, and two of his neighbors, Jonah Fisk and William Dodge—Joe and Bill—harvest them. Benjamin sets a stepladder under the arbor and wriggles up into the vines. He cuts the clusters free with a whetted knife. The largest weigh close to sixty pounds. Joe and Bill stand beneath the grapes, holding between them a small, round mattress filled with goose down that Benjamin devised and sewed himself. When Benjamin cuts a stem, the cluster begins to sink. As it does, Joe and Bill position the mattress so that the cluster will lower onto it like an infant laid in a crib.
Just before he makes the final pull of the knife, Benjamin says, “Hup,” which signals the coming weight of the fruit. He draws the blade back and the grapes tear free from the vine and are delivered onto the pillowy mattress.
The men at either end of the mattress each bark out a terse, “Yep,” and spend a moment adjusting it to make sure the grapes are properly bedded. As he does every year during the hottest months, Benjamin has the men take the clusters of ripe grapes to an underground stone bunker in his backyard, in the coolness of which he has stored half a dozen one-hundred-pound blocks of ice, cut from Enon Lake the previous winter, in piles of sawdust. He has the men lay clusters of grapes over the blocks of ice and chills them for two days. Then he has the men bring the grapes out to his front yard, where most of the children and younger people of the village have gathered. The men hang the clusters of cold, nearly frozen grapes, spitwise, in the crooks of two upright poles. Benjamin Conant then makes a brief, explicitly religious speech.
He declaims, “Dear children, our righteous root has yielded fruit again! So long as our ground is good and the thorns do not choke it, the root shall not cease such yield, but each year become pregnant again with sweet bounty.”
Two elderly women who have stopped on their way to the Tea House and stand behind the children gasp a little at this reference to pregnancy. They and a number of other especially prim souls in the village find Benjamin Conant’s speeches impious. Perhaps it is because they associate grapes with paganism. But because he is such a civic treasure, they merely tut-tut and continue to listen.
When he has finished his invocation, Benjamin Conant invites the children to approach one by one, the littlest first, please, if they would like a cold, sugary, luscious grape. The children manage to order themselves and behave despite
their excitement, and everyone who wants one receives a piece of the fruit after a brisk little ritual wherein the child asks, “May I have a grape, Mr. Conant?” and he answers, “Of course you may, my dear child,” and solemnly but with great pleasure selects a grape, unscrews it with a single twist of his callused hand, turns, and presents it to the boy or girl with a slight bow. The child says, “Thank you, Mr. Conant,” and bows or curtsies, according to custom, and returns to the general congregation.
The skins of the grapes are dark and too thick for most of the children to bite through, and taste bitter anyway. So each grape is peeled and the tannic skins tossed into a wheelbarrow to be carted off into Conant’s back meadow, to rot in what the children all find a mesmerizing and horrific wasp-covered pile. Before the older girls peel and eat their own grapes, they help the younger children peel theirs. The girl I think of as Kate peels the little boy’s grape. He takes the slick globe and bites at it. The blinding sun catches some of the grapes hanging from the spit and illuminates them with a dark green light beneath their purple skins. The children spit the pips into a pile. Some of the older boys start to see who can spit them farthest into the street, but Benjamin Conant puts a stop to that, insisting that spitting of any sort besmirches the village. The little boy with the girl I think of as Kate drops his grape. He gasps and picks it up. Half of the fruit is covered in grit. The other half is still clean and sweet, until the boy turns it around in his gunky hands to inspect it. He tries a bite, spits, and sobs. Kate turns to him and scolds him a little. She hands him the rest of her grape. I take a step toward the girl and the picture begins to flare out, like a sheet
of photographic paper bathed too long in developer. The conscious thought of being on the couch with the washcloth on my face pierces the dream, and the image of the girl and boy and the grapes and Main Street, Enon, July 1890, bursts into white and disappears in the solvents of mere waking.
I
PUSHED DEEPER INTO THE SHADE, FURTHER TOWARD THE BORDER
between this life and what lies outside it, and became something closer and closer to a corpse myself. My hair was thin, my bones stuck out, and my skin stretched across my skull. I needed to be careful and not step over the boundary, because the thought that her own death caused her father’s suicide would be too awful for my daughter to bear. And I did not want the word I craved to hear from Kate when I met her there in the murk—murk to me, as a living person, trespassing in realms that might well prove to be brimming with a nutritious light not visible to our own, colloquial eyes—when I finally reached her on my tether concocted from the strongest medicines; when I might have only a split second before being yanked back up and landed into the bay of an ambulance or a hospital bed, at the surface of the waking world; I did not want the possibly single word she uttered
to be No. I found myself weeping many times at the prospect of my daughter’s face cresting for a moment out of the gloom, looking directly into my eyes and smiling, and saying, in the half girl’s, half woman’s voice that I practiced every day to remember, Yes.
O
NE MORNING IN LATE
July I woke up and took a cigarette from a pack sitting on a dirty plate on the floor. I swiped around through the litter on the coffee table, trying to find a lighter. I found a box of matches on the floor, under the skirt of the couch. When I held a lit match to the cigarette in my mouth, I saw that my hand looked gray and withered. Some of my fingernails were long and grimy. Others I’d bitten down and spat on the rug. I realized that I must look like a castaway. I hadn’t bathed in a long time. I tried to figure out how long it had been; I couldn’t. The closest I could guess was five weeks. I must have changed my clothes sometime, though, I thought to myself, but I couldn’t recall having done that, either, although I did remember rummaging around in Susan’s closet and finding one of her old belts for my pants, which had gotten too loose to stay up on their own. Susan’s belt looked like it was forty years old, as if she must have bought it at a thrift shop. It was made of white leather and had a big, medallion-like buckle on it, with a fish that looked like it was swimming after its own tail and the word
PISCES
in block letters. The certainty that I looked terrible and the urge to see just how bad struck me at the same time, so I went into the bathroom to inspect myself in the mirror. At some time
in the previous few weeks, I had draped a pillowcase in front of the mirror over the bathroom sink. I had also turned the full-length mirror so that it faced the wall. I think I had covered the mirrors because I had been embarrassed by how I leered at myself when I washed my hands or managed to brush my teeth before passing out late at night after I had taken so many pills or drunk a bottle of cough syrup with the usual whiskey. But that morning I wanted to see my actual appearance. I suppose I had some hope of being frightened into repentance.
I looked distressingly bad. My hair had grown up into a tangled pile that listed off the left of my head. I hadn’t shaved in at least two months and had a sparse, stringy beard on my face and neck. Most upsetting, though, was how thin I had become. At the time of Kate’s death, I’d been trying to lose ten or fifteen pounds because even though I still got plenty of exercise landscaping I guess my metabolism had slowed, and I still ate steak twice a week and pizza and snacks and pretty much anything I felt like, especially late at night after Kate and Susan had gone to bed and I was watching sports or reading. When I looked in the mirror, though, it seemed as if I’d lost fifty pounds or even more. My face looked pale and gaunt, my neck like a bundle of ropes. I was lost in my T-shirt, which had food and drink stains on it and was yellowed at the underarms. When I’d first found Susan’s belt and put it on, I’d thought it might look sort of hip, sort of charmingly disheveled, but it looked ghastly cinching my pants. I resembled someone I’d have expected to find on a park bench, under a Sunday newspaper, sleeping off a bottle of fortified
wine. When I thought that, I felt bad for whatever poor soul had to suffer my comparison with him.