The Night of the Comet (42 page)

I catch Ben and swing him up off the ground. He giggles and squirms. I help him climb up my back and sit on my shoulders. Miriam reaches up to steady him. “Careful,” she says.

“Oof, you’re getting heavy.” I straighten my glasses and grab Ben’s knees again. My side burns; I’ve twisted a muscle or something during our acrobatics. “You weigh a ton.”

“I weigh fifty-eight pounds.”

“Soon you’ll be carrying me.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“How does it feel to be so tall?” Miriam asks him.

“It feels great.”

“His head in the stars,” I say, and make a few little hops as if I mean to touch his head to the sky.

My father’s still remembered in Terrebonne for being the man who brought out the whole town on the night of the comet. Some people will swear up and down that they saw it. They’ll tell you how the sirens wailed as the lights went out, and how the comet rose like a second moon above the square, so bright they could read their newspapers by it.…

My father doesn’t like to talk about it himself, understandably. But I’ve resolved that one day, when he’s old enough, I’ll tell Ben all about it. In fact, it occurs to me that what I’ve been doing when I come down here to the rear of the yard at night is rehearsing the story that I’ll eventually tell my son—the true version, the one about how, back before he was born, a comet called Kohoutek came tearing through our lives and very nearly destroyed us.

But not now. Not yet. He’s just a kid, for god’s sake. Why frighten a boy with all that? Let him enjoy himself while he can, I say.

I reach up and take his hand and trace the constellations with him. We find the North Star, and from there the outlines of Ursa Minor, Capricorn, Hercules. And is that Perseus? Miriam leans in, sliding an arm around my waist; she wants to see them, too.

I imagine the comet, its fire long gone, just a cinder of icy rock shooting through black empty space. Pluto is billions of miles behind it; the great crystal sphere from which it came is still billions of miles ahead. It can never rest; driven by that powerful, mysterious force we call gravity, it’ll keep circling again and again around its vast elliptical orbit through the planets.

By the million-year clock of the comet, I know, a human lifetime amounts to next to nothing. In the cosmological scale of things, the whole of human history—the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Michelangelo’s art, Beethoven’s music, trains, cars, planes, computers, rocket ships, world wars, atomic bombs, a man on the Moon—everything grand and terrible we’ve ever accomplished—barely registers
as a
pfft
. When Kohoutek passes this way again, we’ll all be long gone. We’ll all be stardust.

But for now, stuck here on our tiny blue-and-white planet, it’s enough to be human. For now, it’s hard to imagine anything much better than this: my wife, my son, and I, standing in the backyard, counting the stars on a mild autumn night, safely tethered to the ground here in our beautiful, our perfect world.

This is a work of fiction. Although most of the scientific and historical details in the story are accurate, I’ve also taken liberties here and there with the facts. There is a Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana, for instance, but there’s no town called Terrebonne. Buckskin Bill’s
Storyland
TV show was broadcast out of Baton Rouge, not New Orleans. In 1973, Comet Kohoutek was visible only in the early morning hours before perihelion—not in the evenings, as it happens in this story.… And so on.

For cometology background, I drew from, among other sources, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s terrific book
Comet
(Random House, 1985) and the breathlessly sensational
The Comet Kohoutek
, by Joseph F. Goodavage (Pinnacle Books, 1973). Many of the more fantastic descriptions of comets and their apparitions are from the book
Comet Lore
, written by Edwin Emerson and published by the Schilling Press, New York, in 1910 to coincide with the arrival of Halley’s Comet that year.

Special thanks to all the good people at Random House who had a hand in this book, especially Jane von Mehren, Kara Cesare, Hannah
Elnan, Caitlin Alexander, Sarah Murphy, Beth Pearson, Marietta Anastassatos, Elizabeth Eno, and Quinne Rogers. Thanks to Amy Ryan, sharp-eyed copy editor. Sincere and limitless thanks to agents Marly Rusoff and Michael Radulescu.

I’m very grateful for the feedback and encouragement I received from readers of early drafts of this book: Joseph DeSalvo, Dana Sachs, Laura Misco, Alan Weiss, Karen McGee, and members of the Tokyo Writers Group. Special thanks to Dr. Martin McHugh at Loyola University, New Orleans, for his astronomical knowledge.

Finally, thank you to the wonderful independent bookstore owners of the South who’ve been such gracious hosts to me and my previous novel.

The Night of the Comet
Letter to My Daughter

G
EORGE
B
ISHOP
is the author of
Letter to My Daughter
and
The Night of the Comet
. He earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he won the Award of Excellence for a collection of stories. He has lived and taught in Slovakia, Turkey, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, India, and Japan. He now lives in New Orleans.

georgebishopjr.com