Night Soul and Other Stories (14 page)

But succeeded suddenly this time by my mother’s voice, the way the cello gives itself over to the winds, for she was singing way inside that house, and I wondered if Rob was there, her bosom buddy—could I have missed the cutting sound of his tires in the driveway coming to keep her company? I looked up at Liz’s father—his name was Whelan—who had turned toward the door hearing the singer now. Was this why he had come, though I had never heard her do just this?

Women—I thought of her as women for the first time I believe—had a bodily distance from us that we are to accept; hence, to be importantly apart from: which gives you the distance to understand them and what they and you have to lose.

The woman listening to me laughs vulgarly.

Or, to bear this after all bodily reasoning still further, that this Vermont man (though Vermonters are more intelligent, my father had said) could not tell a cello from a violin because he was not from the city; and so he did things more slowly and painstakingly; that my father did not change the oil in our car himself like this man flat on his back; that city people
controlled
large things they did not need to understand.

I thought I did Liz’s father an injustice. But what?

Or that we were having a visitor from a foreign country today though he was American, and that the man with me in this tool shed had had a flag July 4th which would have been fun to fly, that they had a cousin whose son had come home wounded
and
sick—one was like a cut, the other was like a disease inside: country people sent more men to the war than city people because country people could
do
things but the things they could do kept them from seeing that the war was, according to my father and mother and their friends, wrong; and this morning Liz’s father (though he said, Don’t tell her I was
looking
for her, he squinched up his nose in a friendly look) had really come to see or scout out my mother whom he hardly knew, or the place, because my father was not here. Though now he asked if I was going over to Montpelier with my father, burn some cloth (it sticks in my hearing much more than Whelan’s ugly, interesting face)—and I said my dad had already gone—Oh, Liz’s father
knew
that—and it wasn’t Montpelier, it was into town. “Oh, we know all about that too,” said my visitor, as if I were a free citizen—he was a builder, a local contractor, and there were some who disagreed with him about the war but not about flag burning, and my father was taking the briefest time out from a heavy schedule of rallies and raising money. He had been written up.

Yet this man, for some reason in my tool shed, was the father of Liz whose mother mine could
never
be. I leaned back on my heels and held up my boat, turned it over, ran my finger all over it, and I know the man with the much-too-pink face and positively golden pale crewcut said, “Taking justice into your own hands.” “Wartime,” I said. “How’d you know it was a boat?” I said.

“Keel.”

I said I had some work to do. I meant Still to do. “Varnishing, sanding,” I said.

“You just do your work,” said the man. He was not favorably disposed toward my father and was said to include him among flag burners. “You like to go fishing?” he said. I said we had fished the brook. He knew I meant with Liz. I bore down on my hunk of maple, which was how I suddenly saw it. “We go over t’the lake one night, got the outboard.” Liz’s father meant they would take me. I wondered how many in the boat. Liz’s older sister Naomi who was fourteen who I was sometimes preoccupied with. The mother…My country neighbors who knew all about my father having a little brush with another car in the covered bridge the other night that was not his fault.

My mother Claire’s elbow and shoulder bending across for the far A string, her wrist, the station of her knees, the amber-varnished belly of the cello inside which was a spruce patch she’d had me feel with my fingers—I witness her though I’m not there—and who cares about these little things that come with an entire day and night in one long blink of someone’s eyelids, these signs of Nothing? (
I’m
no musician!) but I have a reason to recall because the cellist broke off playing and for a second, as I stopped too at my woodwork (called that by my great-uncle who wrote me letters on USCG stationery) nothing came next. Yet now without missing a beat she was
singing
, but with no real, no fleshly severing from the long-drawn pressure across the string which hadn’t reached the end of the bow but passed it on to her voice. Funny or something, except it wasn’t—I heard it on my knees like sound meant for me, or someone. Mexican or what my dad called “south-of-the-border,” her song was inviting—not like the deep and aggravated solo I could hum that she’d been practicing so you couldn’t tell if the patient practicer were going back to get it right or Bach had written it like that. But now that I heard it, both voices against the presence of Liz’s father’s slightly threatening presence, I think the Mexican-sounding serenade was a lot like the Bach—who am I to say?—the way Caribbean Spanish from the Korean grocery or on the taxi radio follows syllable upon syllable so steadily, Liz’s father with me in my tool shed, then gone. Had I been rude? Yet having latched my door and turning the whaleboat over and over, I knew I could have approached my mother even with company if I had thought fit, my mother and her way of speaking.

I think it stimulates the woman I’m telling this to (it stopped her in the middle of a sentence she had to give it some thought, this natural relay from string to voice not missing a beat by someone inside a house unseen by me working
out
side—though inside my own
tool
shed). “I see, you sort of take off from one to the other—she was playing and suddenly she saw you—” “It wasn’t me she saw,” I said, “if it was anyone,” for the woman was almost flirting with me like a palmist, while I had been in the first place
reminded
of the cello-voice by something in
her
story.

“Your sister—she liked camp?” inquired the woman listening to me. Not especially.

Launched by its own lightness, my model my old boat for a second got fusilaged and decked kayak-like like smart materials responding to emergency signals, earthquake or ticking bomb, yet a second later wasn’t a boat any more. Varnished mellow under the layers of inland silence in which that person on vacation would make music: and so did the one bird out at that late morning hour extract such comfortable hollowness and morality from a tree trunk. It makes the tree a building, me inside coated with a mold of intrigue, boy inertia, flesh, hearing historically again and again a car on the ground, my dad an hour ago departing (as if he’d taken something)—the need for a plan.

But when she left off playing to sing and her hooded voice more true than the cello reached me, bending over my fingerprint gouges, boat-carver feeling the wood’s commanding depth that as there was less and less of it seemed less and less shallow, she was singing in the late-morning stillness crowded with small sounds in fact or the inner hum of that summertime day of 1966 to
him
—my
father
I felt—in my shoulders, at the root of my tongue, or literally my heart wanted it so—though he had gone to town. And Rob might be there with her visiting. In my palms I was making more than a boat. I think now, What could be more than a boat or more than me? I felt what I was making must be more than a boat. Or must turn into more. I was stuck, and responsible, and doomed, but excellent, no more than I deserved.

Sliding in behind the wheel, my father had said out the window, “The boat, now.” I didn’t know if it was a boat or what it was, I said, in despair. “You don’t?” my dad said; “well, if it’s something else, stay open, you owe it to yourself.” “I’ll keep
it
open,” it came to me to say, meaning the work I was finishing, and wondered if it was an open solution I was thinking about.

He knew how to look at me: that’s fairly stupid, his mystery look had said, or that’s incredible or dumb, you’re a fool—not a kid, a fool—I must have found in the wide thin lips of a rich face—or that’s a genius remark, go your way. How could you owe a thing to yourself? was in my mind to ask him. But I was the tooled, eight-to-five genius of the place and of departure; darkly separate and free and you’re free to kill me if you think I need it.

My father had had to show up at the town office that morning to explain a car-on-car meeting three nights ago in the covered bridge: you had to laugh seeing them disappear—one set of headlights off maybe (probably), the approach on one side straight, on the other looped like a hairpin—the collision muffled and comic stars shooting out of the bridge the middle of the night: which car had entered first? But the other driver was someone we knew well. I saw two cars disappear at opposite ends into the bridge and heard the rest, the overall, large structural impact in my mind. My dad hadn’t let me come along this morning, I had rested my elbow on the roof, it was nothing. Maybe it was being at his side. He thanked me, I was taking responsibility, he said, practically twelve and looked fourteen. It was only the town office, but they had a jail cell in the basement with a bunk. Car window rolled down to speak to me, “Should have seen the other guy,” my dad said, flipped the key: ignition, confirmation, blast-off Going Into Town.

“Never explain,” he said. Advice of high quality I have not been able to take. The other car, I imagined its front fender scraped with our “California Cream”—the grille maimed, door wouldn’t open, important leak underneath. My father said we would see. He widened his eyes out of their sockets almost, winked (more like a full facial squint or tic to close his eyes), blew out his cheeks—no problem. “Hey, you’re getting big”—as if he hadn’t been keeping an eye on me, “Haven’t seen you in weeks,” he goofed, he squeezed shut his eyelids and gunned the motor.

My mother had taken a her-side-of-the-family view of this, intrigued only by the chance that my father might get charged, an old story “coming true.”

“A risk of arrest?” asked the woman listening to me.

Only demonstrations.

The sweet song was to her absent husband or me or a friend. I couldn’t make out many words in the melody in this land-embedded, heat-hushed place softly grinding with subconscious insect existence, their soft parts, their hard parts, sharing supposedly with us their sanctuary wild life. It was some wit in the fathom and touch, the string note freeing the voice, I would say now. Though also a specialized risk all over me of my parents, and one
between
them that fixed my fair value alongside that of my currently absent sister—
me
, in the sense that in some way I couldn’t do anything about my existing, a pitch of light understanding between my parents. There was nothing much I needed to
do
—to fail
or
excel. It was all right. A value estimated swiftly—or destined—between
them
, those two intimate aliens; a level I was at, equality—but to what? I had a parent at all times. I took my own advice.

The woman I’m telling this to tells me, “But you did hear a car coming in the driveway.” “I did,” I said, surprised at her, for I could hear across twenty-five or so years the curve, the new tread on the left front of Rob’s old rebuilt 6. “You and those tires, you were a sentry, you were in a war with no one to report to.” The woman looks at her watch.

Maybe it wasn’t words at all sung by the person inside that summertime house, atheist sylph that she was. Singing she made it sound
like
words. How unusual for her, how alone and arrestingly mammal and limited and scented, time-bombish, and for my father, for that was how I’d link the wild, knowing tone, not any arc of performing, just little touches linked by instinct though with a terrible overall form to them, everything happening at once, inexorable to them, so that just before I heard car tires cut the driveway gravel out of nowhere I wondered if he had known how to spirit himself like a Sit-in, a Be-in, into the house a back way—by the field—past the woodpecker tree,
My
way I called it. Or he had never left, he was a residue left in her—as
she
knew how to not make words:

:till, taking a scrap of sandpaper to a still bothersome gouge to see what a finish brought up out of the grain, the old owner’s once coarse, often folded sandpaper, I was aware that she wasn’t singing now. When I had in a flash gotten used to it, like something I might ask for; and thinking what to cut a very small rudder and tiller from unless I went to a sweep oar, I saw maybe not a boat after all, this thing manufactured for many days (off and on) at a time when these lifeboats were being made out of plastic…plastic burning sticks in your throat like liquid metal fumes—and the car turning onto our driveway off the county road part hidden by dull drooping midsummer spruce boughs was of course not my father—and I needed to go in the house and tell “that woman,” as my father called her to me, or tell her music, what I had discovered in the gunwaled hull, in really the bottom, of my boat, until I heard someone or something outside my shed:

:till, hearing only an animal pressure upon the ground outside and, much further away, the house door stick shutting as if it had been left half open for a
while
having not been previously actively slammed by my mother—
or
Rob: and now, like a consequence of my
thinking
, Rob’s practiced, friendly singing voice damped by the house door shutting speaking with such a roundness of understanding more asking than commanding—silly, in even Rob my mentor (who was a nonpracticing minister who didn’t go to church who knew trees, clouds, wind direction, each herbal weed, bored to death with ferns, but “a passion for” local birds—that called our “pileated” woodpecker “sociable” and “frank” and “open, for all his crest”—(knows his shit, my father said)—I must answer what was nearby because I knew this animal pressure upon the ground outside.