A Hard and Heavy Thing (6 page)

[And once again, my failure to get close to her was my own fault. I said nothing. I held my breath, scared to death of saying the wrong thing, when instead I should have just said something.

This is always how things went. She had tried to make inroads with me, but I had failed to see what she needed. She had shared innumerable poems with me and asked me to look them over, to give her feedback. Literature was our one unique connection. I had read them all, sad confessionals chock full of abstract language and shadowy angst, each verse utterly devoid of any concrete images, but each line crying out for company, each word screaming out her loneliness and frustration.

Utterly intimidated and ultimately apathetic, I had no framework with which to respond. What did I know of her life? What did I know of a parade of ergodic men marching through the halls of her home doing unspeakable things with her mother under the influence of God knows what? What did I know of the leers of her cousin's friends, the comments and gropes and calls of the couch-dwellers and freeloaders who paid her so much attention? What did I know of a life in which my family wouldn't notice if I came home or not, if my bed remained empty and no phone calls were made? The answer is nothing.

Her life apart from us was foreign to me, and thus, her poems were foreign to me. They made me uncomfortable. They made her seem too vulnerable, and I didn't like to see her as vulnerable. I liked the girl she projected—the street-smart punk, the general artist, the mysterious and aloof poet—but I could not grasp the girl she was with all her history and stark reality. And her poems were as unknowable as she was. I was terrified of saying the wrong thing, so I simply said nothing. I said they were great and asked for more. But I never responded. Not really. I never talked to her. I never asked the basic questions that showed I cared, because I was too afraid to sound callous. First, do no harm. Nothing ventured and nothing gained.

And this is why you won. You turned the unknowable into the knowable. By talking. By asking. By listening. Ultimately, by caring. You saw her as more than the angsty girl next door; you saw her for what she was: a complicated, feeling, living, breathing, thinking, independent young woman who just needed a friend. It's why you knew about the specific guy with the ear, whoever that was, and it's why I didn't.]

When Eris turned on the radio after a few minutes, Nick reached out and put his hand on her leg and gave her thigh a gentle squeeze.

“No,” she said. “The guy with the neck.”

They spoke in code riddled with subtext. Levi didn't understand and he didn't dare ask, though he wanted to be the one touching her. He wanted to be the one she leaned against to say, “You saved me.”

[Don't think I didn't/don't recognize that it wasn't exactly fair or selfless—to put it mildly—to begrudge her the comfort that she needed in her state of emotional distress, preferring that she go without comfort rather than get it from my best friend. I only bring all this up to let you know how conflicted I was/am/maybe always will be in your presence, that is, your combined presence.]

After a few moments with Nick's hand on her leg she said, “You and me both, buddy. We got something in common.”

“What's that?” Nick asked.

She patted Nick's hand and then let it linger there. “You're not the only orphan, Annie.”

•••

Uncle Thomas turned in his stool when the door jingled to signal their entrance. He waved with one hand and snuffed out a smoke in an ashtray with the other.

“Well, now that you've got some company, I'm going to head home and get back to work.” He leaned down and gave Oma a chaste kiss on her cheek. He passed Nick and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

As Nick hugged his grandmother and sat next to her, Uncle Thomas stopped in front of Levi and shook his hand firmly. “Long time no see, my boy.”

“Yeah. It's been a while,” Levi mumbled.

“Been going to church with your folks back home then? Here in Bangor? Haven't seen you in La Crosse with Nick.”

[And I have to admit, this type of thing was not an insignificant factor in my latching on so quickly to your idea to sign up and skip town. Small towns = glass houses, and glass houses + everyone is religious = everyone guilt-tripping you all the time about everything.]

Levi looked up and made eye contact. “No,” he said. “Just a busy summer, I guess.”

Uncle Thomas maintained a firm grip, even as Levi tried to move along. He pulled him closer and in a low voice he said, “I heard about your grandpa. Real sorry to hear that. He was a good man. I served him for many years.” His breath reeked of coffee and stale tobacco. “If you need anything, anything at all, you let me know, okay? Even if you just need to talk, drop by anytime, okay?”

Levi pulled his hand away.

“Tell your folks I said hi, will ya?”

“Sure thing.”

“Okay, then Levi. Okay.” He left and the bells on the door rang behind him.

There were no customers. Oma watched the evening news. They all sat in a row next to her.

When she broke the silence, she sounded sad and tired. “You kids have class today?” She kept her eyes on the screen mounted on the wall.

“I don't know,” Nick said.

She turned and put her hand on Nick's cheek, just below where the pale skin below his eyes turned a sickening shade of blue. “What's the other guy look like?”

Oma moved her mouth without opening it, as if she were talking to herself, the way she did sometimes when she got anxious.

After only a few minutes, Nick's grandmother broke the silence again. “Oh, get out of here,” she said. “Let this old woman watch her country fall apart in peace.”

Nick put his hand on her forearm. “I can stay.”

She patted his hand and shook her head. “Scram.”

“Let us take you out to dinner,” Eris said.

She shook her head. “People need a place to go sometimes, and I need to be here for them. This is where I need to be.”

Eris got up and gave her a silent hug. Nick kissed her cheek, and they left. Levi looked over his shoulder at the old woman sitting alone at the bar, staring at the television, twirling her wedding band around her skeletal finger.

•••

Eris dropped them off, but didn't come in.

On the television the president sat at his desk in the Oval Office, his hands folded, his lips pursed and twitchy.

After he had finished speaking, Levi turned toward his room. “I should probably call my parents.” He dialed his Aunt Trudy's from his desk. No one answered. He tried reading, but he found himself repeating sentences. He tossed his book aside and went for a walk through the deserted streets of a world that made no sense.

He found himself passing in front of the church, and he crossed the street to the parsonage where Uncle Thomas lived. He walked up the two steps to the door that entered directly into the study, and he stood there a moment picking juniper berries from the bushes by the door. He knocked once and heard Uncle Thomas's raspy bellow to come in.

The desk inside was broad enough to dominate the room, but it was not a pretentious desk; the immensity of the scratched steel frame, monochromatic legs, and chipped laminate top only served the functional purpose of holding enough books to allow for uninterrupted study, transcription, and translation. The old pastor sat in front of the typewriter with his black tie loosened and the top button of his starched white shirt undone. He crossed his arms over his chest. A burning cigarette sat in the amber glass ashtray next to the typewriter, sending smoke up to the heavens. A Bible sat open on the other side of the typewriter.

Uncle Thomas didn't look up from the paper in the typewriter. “Nicodemus? The one who comes under the cover of night's darkness.”

“Am I interrupting anything?” Levi asked.

Uncle Thomas brought one hand up and rubbed his chin. “Just an old man and his lucubrations,” he said.

The two plush chairs for the visitors who frequently came for counseling—the meek, contrite, and brokenhearted—were more comfortable and lavish than the preacher's own squeaky, fake-leather office chair. Levi took a seat and waited. Uncle Thomas continued staring at his page. He typed a sentence or two in a fury of clicking and then leaned back again.

Levi looked around at the thousands of books. Three of the four walls were themselves bookshelves. The books they held were not arranged alphabetically, but rather, dogmatically. They weren't separated by language, but by doctrine. The books in Greek mingled with the Latin and they brushed spines with the Hebrew. The ancient Aramaic pressed hard against the German, and the English books were there for when the man needed a break. There were, of course, Bibles in all of these languages, and although Levi had learned long ago that the man at the desk knew every word, their spines were broken and worn.

Uncle Thomas once again began typing, but he broke their comfortable silence. “What's on your mind, my boy?”

Levi hesitated. He had been weighed down by his conscience for months, unwilling to believe, yet unwilling to leave. He had come to confess. He had come to bare his unbelieving soul, to explain that he wouldn't be returning to the church. He had come to beg absolution for his apostasy and ask the old man's advice, and if it was denied, to sadly depart anyway. Now, however, he faltered. “I dunno. What's on anyone's mind? It's like I woke up this morning and the world was one way, and then out of nowhere, the world is another way. This is like,” he paused, lit his own smoke, and tried to find the word. “Unprecedented.”

“Ecclesiastes one, verse nine: ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.'”

“So maybe ‘unprecedented' was too strong a word.”

“Indeed,” Uncle Thomas said, still focused on his page.

“So what then? America's under attack, but just another old day under the sun?”

Uncle Thomas rubbed his chin again and still didn't bother to look up at Levi. “Matthew twenty-four, verse six.”

“Which says?” Levi said, already reaching forward to grab the Bible from next to the typewriter.

Uncle Thomas beat him to it. “‘You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.'”

“Convenient. What do you tell the people trapped under the rubble or the family members?”

Uncle Thomas clacked away on the typewriter.

Levi dropped the Bible onto the desk with a thud. “Well?”

“Luke thirteen, verses four and five, ‘Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.'”

“So that's it, huh?”

“Maybe this will get people of this apostatical age to think about God. Has it gotten you to think about God?”

Levi took his chance to say what he had come to say. “I think about God a lot.”

“Good. And what do you think?”

“I think god-awful. I think when things get really awful, people put god in front of it all, and that makes everything worse. God-awful.” It had not come out how Levi had wanted. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to disassociate himself from things he didn't believe without separating himself from those who still believed them.

Uncle Thomas ripped the page out of the typewriter, crumpled it, and threw it into the trashcan under his desk.

Uncle Thomas finally turned and gave Levi his attention, but he changed the subject altogether. “How are your folks doing? Your dad in particular. He holding up okay?”

“They're fine,” Levi said.

“You doing okay? I know you and your grandfather were close.”

“I'll be fine.”

The old man frowned and shook his head. “Blessed are those who mourn.”

Levi threw up his hands in exaggerated exasperation. “Don't you have anything to offer for yourself? Or does it all come out of that book?”

Uncle Thomas turned away again and inserted a new page in the typewriter. He manually turned the platen knob until he had it where he wanted it. “Oh, what do I know? ‘The one thing needful' isn't exactly a reference to my own personal musings.” This is how the man always spoke, how he lived. Everything he said pointed back to the Gospel, and Levi couldn't figure out how to get a real conversation going.

“Sure. Go on back to your typing.” Levi sat there tapping his feet. “I didn't come here for a sermon, you know.”

“Well you haven't been around on Sundays, so I have to give them to you when I can.”

Levi grabbed his pack of smokes from the edge of the desk and shoved them in his pocket. He leaned forward to go. “Forget it. I shouldn't have wasted my time.”

Uncle Thomas turned toward him again. He leaned back and laced his long fingers behind his head. He looked down his nose at Levi for a moment. He didn't bang his fists on the desk or lift his trembling hands up toward the heavens as he thundered his message in the way that Levi had seen him do so many times from the pulpit. He spoke gently, conversationally, as a man talks to his friend.

“I've known you since you were a small boy, Levi. Watched you grow with my nephew since you were knee high to a grasshopper. I've seen you hit your Little League balls and I've seen you scrape your knees. But you're no longer a child.” He reached up and took his glasses off. He chewed on the stem for a moment before twirling them between his thumb and forefinger. “To be honest, I don't know exactly why you came here. But I do know one thing.” He set the glasses on the desk and leaned forward. His mouth turned down and he stared at Levi with pale blue eyes that seemed to somehow cut through him. “You sure as hell didn't come here to shoot the shit about the evening news.”