"I know what difference there is," Willi almost said. He almost told his father about his visit to his grandmother a year earlier, the secret he had kept from his parents all that time. But his father, now that he had agreed to letting Willi go to South Dakota, had opened the book in his lap again and was reading. As if everything were settled.
IT WAS ONLY AFTER HE LEARNED
that his father's mother was alive, and met her, that Willi began to think that his first memory was one he couldn't possibly have. Whenever he remembered meeting his grandmother, he was always across from her, looking out of his own eyes. He remembered
her:
her withered hand on the chair arm, the smell of lavender and cleaning fluid and disinfectant in her house, the way her finger came up, pointed to the bird in its cage, the dry and humorless voice that emerged from her moving lips. But when he thought of his first memory, he saw
himself,
at different angles and distances, in different lights. But if he was seeing him self, then which was he in the memory, the one seen or the one seeing?
He began to realize that with all his other memories the memory of the memory itself was traceable. It left a clear track in his mind that he could follow back through the years and know that five years ago he had remembered such a thing, and five years before that. But his first memory had no such continuity. There was a break in his memory of remembering it. He could remember remembering it when he was twelve. Ten. Perhaps nine or eight. But there he lost the trail.
It begins with a child's screaming. It is his own screaming, but he hears it from a distance. He remembers being in the back seat of a car, but what he sees is not what he would have seen: the back of his mother's head, her short, curled hair above the headrest, and the vast reaches of the auto, the dome light far away, and his own fat hands in front of his eyes. Instead, it is all reversed, as if he is somewhere within the dome light, peering out at himself: his red, scrunched face, his taut tongue.
The tires strike the bump of the driveway.
Chunkchunk.
He may have heard this from anywhere. But he remembers his mother's worried face and himself in the backseat behind her, the nubs of his teeth. Is he standing on the car's hood, peering through the windshield?
For no reason at all,
she has told him.
You just started crying for no reason at all. I couldn't get you stopped. So I turned around and took you home. You must have felt something. Children do that sometimes—know when something is wrong.
But Willi can't remember discomfort or unease. How can he remember the sight of his own red face but not remember the feeling that caused that crying?
He also has a mental picture, which surely cannot be a memory, of his father upstairs in a darkened room, on a bed covered with plastic sheeting. On the dresser is a photograph at which his father stares. Then his father glances away, surprised, and sees himself in the mirror across the room, pressing a pistol against his forehead. He sees himself only because the headlights that surprised him shine briefly through the uncurtained windows as the tires bump up into the driveway. His wife and son were not supposed to return for hours. But now the headlights show Willi's father his reflection in the mirror, while for a moment they reflect off the glass of the framed photograph on the dresser in such a way that they block the photograph. For the briefest spasm the photograph is nothing but reflected light, and the unsmiling face of the man behind it, which has stared out of that frame for years—since Willi's father removed it from a bureau drawer and placed it there, in spite of his wife's attempts to remove it (telling her,
Leave the bastard there. I don't want to give him the satisfaction of forgetting
)—that face is for a moment obliterated.
Willi doesn't know of this argument between his mother and father over the photograph, and he doesn't remember how his father went through the house after he and his mother left in the car that night—doing the dishes, folding newspapers in the living room, putting his office in order, straightening the pages of an unfinished article manuscript, looking at what he has written before squaring it on his desk, finally climbing the stairs, shutting off lights behind him. Willi doesn't remember these things, though he has reconstructed them so clearly that what he remembers and what he knows but doesn't remember have mingled to form a coherence that perhaps he cannot trust and that, under the force of examination, turns to dust, an insubstantial architecture that nevertheless bears everything.
His father climbed the stairs, carrying a packet of painter's plastic, which he unfurled over the bed. An unbearable neatness. He went to the bureau and removed a pistol from a drawer. He checked it for cartridges, saw them snuggled inside. Neat. Waiting. Smelling of oil and brass. He closed the chamber, took the pistol to the bed, lay down.
The plastic rustled. A watery sound. He turned to the photograph on top of the bureau and placed the barrel to his head.
Your own pistol,
he said to the photograph.
This is the end of your ugly dream. Of what you tried to make me.
He gathered his breath. He heard linden leaves outside the window. He heard traffic. American rock music from a passing car. And then, muted by the walls of the house, the
chunk
of tires on the driveway, and the room momentarily filled with light. A crying child, a point on a distant road where a car is turned around, the angle of light, the exact moment when he presses the barrel to his forehead—it all forms an equation impossible to calculate.
The black windows: Willi's mother was filled with dread. She slammed on the brakes in the middle of the driveway, and Willi was startled out of his crying. He remembers silence—as if the world were suddenly shut off—then his wail again, louder than before. His mother bolted from the car, took one step toward the house, and was paralyzed. She looked from the dark house to her crying child and could not move toward either.
Then she stumbled back to the car, jerked open the back door, fumbled with the belt holding Willi, hoisted him out.
And heard a shot.
She screamed, lost her hold on him. Willi's head slipped toward the concrete driveway. His mother fell to her knees to get her arms around him and managed to recover him inches from the ground. Willi remembers some of this, but again from the wrong perspective. He doesn't remember the shot and doesn't remember the stars shaking as he lay in his mother's arms, or the world turning upside down as he fell headfirst toward the pavement, or the abrupt jar of being caught, or the underside of his mother's jaw as she ran toward the house, or her tears falling on his face. What he remembers instead—as if he stood on the steps of the house and watched her come up the driveway carrying him—is how she fell to her knees to catch him, the open car door behind them, an insect flickering through the light of a street lamp, brilliant and fleeting, his mother's knee bleeding in two long rivers down her leg as she ran toward the house, and one of her shoes, fallen off, lying on the driveway alone. And how it lamed her. How she ran clumping toward the house, trying to kick the other shoe off, and then burst through the door, clutching her child, calling her husband's name, and started up the stairs and then suddenly stopped, sobbing, unable to go on. She swayed, nearly fell backwards, grasped the banister with one hand to keep from tumbling down. Remembering this, Willi finds that he has somehow migrated, that he sees his mother in that memory from below, her hair swinging around her head as she nearly falls, and his own head hobbling and swaying when she catches herself. His helpless and powerless neck.
Then she heard plastic rustle. She jerked her face upwards. Her husband appeared on the landing above her, holding a pistol at his side, his feet bleeding. He pushed the smell of cordite out of the bedroom with him, pushed it down the stairway. That moment of illumination canceling the past and revealing the present had been enough.
When he thinks of it, Willi doesn't know what he remembers. He remembers his parents talking, though he knows he didn't understand language. And he remembers that they spoke in eerily quiet voices, though he can't remember when he stopped crying, that such whispers could be used.
"You're bleeding," his father says.
His mother looks at her knee, sees two streams of blood running down both sides of her right shinbone, pooling for a moment in the concavities of her ankle, falling to the floor. She wipes her face with the ball of her thumb.
"You too," she says.
Willi's father—in Willi's memory—looks puzzled. He follows her gaze to his feet, widens his eyes in surprise at the lacerations there, the blood soaked into the hallway carpet. He lifts his foot. It glints as he lifts it. Then he removes a long sliver of glass and holds it up. Glass stained with blood, redly transparent. They all look at it—mother, father, and the rememberer, who stands somewhere below them now, though Willi must have been in his mother's arms.
Then Willi's father places the bloodstained glass on the ledge at the top of the stairs. Gently, not to break it. He steps toward his wife, but she retreats downward, keeping herself and her child safe. He understands a new beginning is necessary.
"You're right," he tells her. "I was going to do it. But you came back. The lights from the car." He gestures, helpless.
"I shot that photograph instead," he says. "That's why." He lifts his bleeding foot.
"He would get the last cut in," he says.
She lets him descend and touch her and their child. They are strangers, their touching formal and careful, seeking the boundaries of what they have lost, what they have gained. But they hold each other, and a little familiarity returns.
"Why did you come back?"
She looks down at the sleeping baby.
"He wouldn't stop crying," she replies.
"Thank God for that."
They have told Willi he was sleeping. Yet he remembers his father's words.
Of course, he can't remember them.
And neither can he remember—a different kind of impossibility—what he most wants to remember: whether he was crying because he knew, because he felt something terrible happening and so saved his father's life. Or whether it was just chance: teething, the straps of the car seat binding him.
"
EARL?" WILLI CALLED WEAKLY
into the foreign night.
Earl had gone beyond the reach of any voice. But Willi wasn't alone. Because he'd been standing still for so long, cast back into his memories, the horses had settled down, come closer, and Willi felt warm breath against his shoulder. He turned. The diamond-marked horse blew its breath out again, over Willi's face. He breathed that breath in, the condensed grassiness of it. He reached out, and the horse let him touch it. He stroked it. Then the other two crowded close, and he stroked them. The gleaming barbwire stood between them.
"Cages," his grandmother had said, "are everywhere."
And this place was more than odd. No matter what Earl said.
The air was speaking, clicking and stammering. The artesian spring bubbled and gurgled. Willi stared over the bowed heads of the horses at the steam rising off it. He shivered. He drew closer to the horses, to their large warmth. "I will help you somehow," he said. He didn't know how. Didn't even know for sure they needed help. But that hot water springing from the earth, dissipating in vapor, seemed horrible to him. To be caged with that, night and day.
A
FEW WEEKS AFTER HE GRADUATED
from high school, Carson Fielding moved out of his parents' house into the old one. In the two years since his grandfather's death, Carson had walked past the old house every day, on his way to doing something else, but he stopped at the broken steps one late summer evening, bowed his head for a moment, then put his hand on the doorknob, opened the door, and stepped into the empty rooms where only the smells of his grandfather remained: stale cigarette smoke, dirt, sweat.
Carson's grandfather had never resisted cleanliness but had never considered it necessary either. After his death, Marie and Charles had washed the floors, vacuumed the threadbare carpets, unplugged the appliances—and then wondered what the point was and stopped. Carson stood in a cleaner version of the house his grandfather had stepped from the morning he died. The meager furniture stood where Ves had arranged it. Carson had never known a space that so much framed an absence.
The next day he began to carry his few possessions from his room in the new house down the stairs and across the yard into the old one. From the office where she was keeping the ranch's books, Marie watched him go up and down the stairs. When he stopped for a glass of water, she came out of the office and stood in the doorway to the kitchen.
"You're moving into the old house, Carson?"
He tilted his head, drained the water, set the glass soundlessly on the counter, nodded.
"You've talked to your father about this?"
"It's been standin empty for two years. Might as well live in it."
"Your father was going to tear it down. He just never got around to it."
"Tear it down? Grampa built that house."
"There's nothing there, Carson. And it's falling apart."
"Only because no one's keepin it up."
"Some things aren't worth keeping up."
"It ain't a thing."
"It's old, Carson. It was old when we were living in it. Before Lucy and Ves moved back."
"Old's OK with me."
He smiled at her, but Marie wasn't shaken from her serious mood. "I've lived in it," she said. "Your grandfather wasn't an architect. That house is more a windbreak than a house."
But Carson only grinned. "Well, Grampa knew how to break wind."
WHEN HE WAS FOUR YEARS OLD
, Carson left a game his mother had thought he was absorbed in and wandered out the door and across the yard. By the time his mother discovered him gone, he had disappeared behind the barn. She followed her fears—first the road, then the stock pond. By the time she got to the pond, Carson had left off playing at the water's edge and rounded a bend in the draw. Had she known what to look for, she might have seen where his feet had muddied the water and the bent-grass trail going away from the water's edge.