Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (14 page)

We spent the evening of our arrival singing “Up in the Air, Junior Birdman” and “On Top of Old Smokey” after dinner. It was cold that far north, so we sang our camp songs indoors, in a huge cafeteria with a stone fireplace. We slept four to a cabin, where the sheets and blanket were thin and had a chalky smell about them. One of the counselors, Jill, was the younger sister of Conrad’s high school girlfriend. She was like many of my classmates, a white girl from Green Valley, with long caramel-colored hair that she managed quite easily enough all by herself. I wondered if she had asked to have me in her group or if it had just been the luck of the draw.

Waking on the first morning to the bugle cry, I showered in my bathing suit, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that it didn’t make sense to wash only the areas that my bathing suit didn’t
cover. After that, I decided to just wait it out and do a proper job when I got home. The same went for what I still could only refer to as
defecating
, which I couldn’t bring myself to do in the too-public-for-my-liking toilet stalls. A few days into the trip, at breakfast with a friend who was in the same boat as me, shower-wise, Jill said, “You guys haven’t been showering, have you?” When our eyes bulged and we demanded to know who had told her, she looked at us, with her eyes the green and brown of glistening jasper, and smiled. “Oh, I can just tell.”

Our campground sat at the center of more wide-open space than I’d ever before seen, all of it framed by forests of oaks and pines. Each morning, the whole group of us played soccer and red rover in a field. Thick fog hovered out across the horizon while the sun was still low. There were gophers popping up from their tunnels and beavers swimming the river, their oily wet fur glistening in the sun. As the day progressed to a cloudless clear blue, small groups of us were led on hikes up and down mountain trails. At our guide’s instruction, we tasted wild green onions; they grew in bunches and were just as thin as blades of grass, only taller. We crossed running streams stepping rock to rock. I was frightened to near paralysis by things like walking across logs or climbing down steep muddy grades and fell into step in the rear of the pack, hoping to amass the courage while my classmates ahead of me made their way. More than once, my apprehension caused our guide to have to backtrack and help me over whatever small hurdle had gotten the better of me. It was a humiliation, but its sting was still less than the fear I felt at nearly every turn. When my feet got wet and I spent a good part of the day uncomfortably cold, I tried to remind myself that it was nothing short of a miracle that I was there in the first place, nothing shy of an act of God to have been allowed to
throw my sleeping bag in with the rest of my class and ride off into a week of more or less self-supervision. Were my parents worried about me up there on my own?

Two days before our time at Whiskeytown was over, our four teachers and the camp director stood before us in the cafeteria. It was dark out and the fire was crackling, reinvigorating the woodsmoke smell that had seeped into the molecules of my hair, clothes, and unwashed skin.

“We have a very serious announcement to make,” Mr. Samuels said. He was bearded, with ruddy cheeks and a round face, which he just then was keeping perfectly free of expression. “You may already have heard some rumors, but we wanted to be the ones to tell you that one of your classmates, Kenny Moffett, died this morning.”

Mr. Samuels paused a moment to give our gasps and murmurs time to sound out, though for the most part the room remained silent. My thoughts froze and sped up at the same time. Kenny, the boy I sat beside every day in class, bickering with and making mischief? The boy with the dirty fingernails and the freckle-spattered face? I’d barely seen him since we arrived. It was almost as though I’d expected him still to be sitting there in the darkened classroom, waiting beside my empty desk, though of course class, with its chalkboards and corkboards and windows looking out onto the harbor of our schoolyard, now seemed a million miles away. I didn’t know what to think or do, so I sat there willing my ears to listen.

“Kenny had a mild heart condition,” Mr. Samuels continued. He said it like this was knowledge he had had for a long time. “He suffered a heart attack this morning while he and a classmate were out jogging.”

I could gather who the classmate had been. Ellis, the kid who resembled Andrew Jackson, was Kenny’s best friend. The two of them were funny together, working up little comic bits worthy of the Marx Brothers or Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, whom they had studied enough to imitate with a fair degree of accuracy, at least for nine-year-olds. (I liked those movies, too, for what it was worth. Conrad and I sometimes watched them together on TV when he visited for the weekend.) Both Kenny and Ellis had older parents, gray-haired mothers with wrinkles like grandmothers and oldman fathers we rarely saw, which might have explained why both boys had such an affinity for black-and-white movies. Whenever Kenny and Ellis performed one of their funny back-and-forths, and just as everyone else’s laughter was dying down, one boy would ask the other who wrote his material. The answer, no matter the joke, was always “Bob Hope,” and every time, it caused the two of them to grin with a private kind of pride.

Mr. Samuels went on to explain that the “accident” hadn’t been anybody’s fault and that Kenny probably hadn’t felt a lot in those final moments. He and the other teachers stood together looking out into what must have seemed, just then, like a sea of some of the youngest, most vulnerable faces in the world. The teachers asked if any of us had questions. They encouraged us to talk about our feelings, “to get things out in the open,” so that nobody had to feel alone in sorting through a classmate’s death.

I didn’t ask anything. And I didn’t cry, the way some of the other campers were beginning to. For a moment, I thought that I should, that it would be the decent thing for Kenny’s class partner to do, but I couldn’t manage it. I felt a strange detachment from myself, unable to feel what such a thing was supposed to feel like. Reality raced back at me. Hadn’t Kenny sat next to me less than a
week ago? Hadn’t we just argued about a broken pencil and about the mess of papers threatening to spill out from his desk? How could he have been in the seat beside me one day, smelling like peanut butter or Now and Laters, and then simply be gone, disappeared, a world away? I wasn’t crying, but I felt for the first time that underneath our show of not liking one another Kenny and I had actually been friends, and it hurt.

Where did death take Kenny? Did he believe, as I did, in God and Heaven, or would death have carried him, out of obligation, somewhere else? (My mother would have wanted me to witness to Kenny, to tell him about Jesus and to behave as an emblem of Christ, but I hadn’t.) What had it felt like, just before he was gone? Did he feel it coming? Had he called out for his mother? What would I do if I knew I was about to be gone? Would I see Jesus there waiting for me, just across a stream like the Baptist hymns say, or would everything have gone dark? And what about the blaze of warm white light people talked about, people like the man and woman I’d once seen on the episode of
The Phil Donahue Show
about near-death experiences? I didn’t let myself think about Kenny’s body lying lifeless in the grass or how it would be transported home to his parents. I didn’t think about whether his desk would still be there beside mine, only empty, when we returned to school. Something that wasn’t any of those things sat upon my mind, making it heavy and dull, sleepy and slow.

On the ride home a few days later, I was aware of not sharing in the same feeling that some of the other campers seemed to share, a feeling that lent them an air of uncomplicated belonging and ease. Some sang camp songs. Others shouted to one another across the bus rows. All week long, those same kids had bathed and used the toilet without shame or anxiety, falling into perfect
step with just about everyone else at Whiskeytown. They’d hiked up and down mountains without getting too worked up about it, and at the end of the week, they’d found perfectly natural ways of talking about what had happened to Kenny, things I’d failed to fit into words or even coherent thoughts. Happy as I was to have run back and forth across the enormous field each morning and for the moments of awe at the beauty and the bounty of nature, I found myself stuck in a place that defied expression. My worries about tumbling into a stream or down a mountain path and about being seen in the shower or sleuthed out in the toilet had rendered me lonely, had sent me scuttling about so much of the time desperate to get things over with and to keep everyone from noticing me, hoping that would help to keep them from noticing all the ways in which I was so starkly different.

Watching the landscape revert to the familiar as we traveled back to Fairfield with one less child in tow, the voice in my mind muttered to itself,
At least I was there
. It was a variation of the mantra with which I’d once heralded the New Year:
Here I am!
At least I wouldn’t be in quite the same position on Monday as the one or two kids who had opted out of camp altogether, deciding instead to spend the week at home.

“How was Vodka Village?” Wanda asked when I walked through our front door.

“Oh, it was fine,” I managed, rushing past her to the bathroom.

That night a lot of it came back to me. The wide grassy field surrounded by oaks and pines. And how, once you stepped foot into the forest, it rang with a startling, living presence. The gophers and mountain beavers. The enormous bald eagles and flocks of honking geese, the rushing water of the creeks. I told my family about how challenging it had been to do some things, like crossing
streams by walking across a path of stones or a log balanced between one side and the other, but in the end I’d done what had been asked of me and had been safe. None of the little feats of daring I’d been put up to in the woods had brought me to any harm.

When I told my family about Kenny, it was clear from their faces that they already knew. It helped take my mind off the terrible realness of his dying by imagining that he’d probably been happy when he died, completely unconcerned, just running around in the tall grass with his friend. It helped, too, to decide that he must finally know, if he hadn’t known before, how alike the two of us really were.

I liked what the survivors of near-death experiences, at least the ones I’d seen that time on TV, had to say: that there was a tremendous light, warm and incomprehensibly bright, calling to them without words and that they had raced out of their bodies and down a dark tunnel without fear, eager to be absorbed by the light that summoned. The light was alive, they’d said, and it put their minds or their hearts, whatever was left of them, at peace. The ones who had gotten closest to it before being sent back said it had felt like they were going home.

TOTAL ADVENTURE

O
n Valentine’s Day, Mom picked me up from the school nurse’s office, where I sat begging my upset stomach to settle back down. Then she came home to finish getting ready for her luncheon. Usually when she had company for lunch, she baked a quiche (I’d often be enlisted to grate the cheese and poke holes into the bottom of the crust so it didn’t puff up with air) or assembled a rice pilaf with chicken, slivered almonds, and chopped vegetables. I was too out of sorts to keep track of what her Valentine’s menu was, but I knew she was expecting a visit from Mrs. Nussbaum, another air force wife she’d met years earlier at the Hospitality House. Mrs. Nussbaum was one of my favorite guests because she always arrived with a gift for me, usually books or toys from the Christian bookstore where she worked. Her life was devoted to spreading the word of Christ, and she carried pocket-sized leatherette editions of the New Testament to hand out to the people she met from day to day. Sometimes, she returned her entire paycheck to the bookstore because she’d given away so many Bibles. Mrs. Nussbaum was certain that I already knew Jesus, but as a special Valentine’s gift, she brought me a New International Version Children’s Bible and a heart-shaped box of assorted chocolates. When I thanked her, instead of saying “You’re welcome,” she pinched me on my cheeks a bit too hard and for a few seconds too long, saying what a sweet girl I was.

Mrs. Nussbaum was from England. As a young woman during World War II, she had worked in an ammunitions factory. It was during the war that she met Mr. Nussbaum, an American GI, a very earnest, very animated man whose face, when he was talking about the many wars and disasters across the globe, would take on an expression of exhilaration and anger. For the longest time, I thought Mr. Nussbaum was from England, too; after so many years of living with his wife, he had begun to emulate her British accent. He’d also adopted her faith. He was born a Jew, and Mrs. Nussbaum had grown up a not-very-devout Protestant, but after the war, the two of them had been baptized together as Christians.

What little I knew about Jews came from a book of my mom’s called
The Hiding Place
, about Dutch sisters named Corrie and Betsie ten Boom, who had hidden Jews in their home in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. They were Christians who sought to share God’s love with others. When the ten Booms were discovered by the Nazis and eventually taken to a German concentration camp, they continued to try to spread the word of God with the other prisoners and even with the Nazi guards. It didn’t occur to me until many years later that the subjects in
The Hiding Place
were the Christians and the Nazis and the objects were the Jews. At the time, I was taken with every coincidence—or miracle, as the book described each of them—that prevented the sisters from being killed or separated from one another. During the war, Mrs. Nussbaum had been on the receiving end of a miracle, too, when she traded shifts with a coworker in the ammunitions factory on the very day that the factory was bombed. Such coincidences gave me a giddy, otherworldly feeling, though when I thought about it later, of course I realized that a great many other miracles that might have been performed during the war were not.