Riverine (25 page)

I believe I fear actual silence—the far edge of quietude. In Annie Dillard’s essay “Total Eclipse,” she describes leaving the site of an eclipse viewing before it is over because the experience is too all-consuming. She plunges into a meditation on existence, barely emerging before the eclipse’s shadow sweeps her under and away for good: “It is now that the temptation is strongest to leave these regions. We have seen enough; let’s go. Why burn our hands any more than we have to? But two years have passed; the price of gold had risen. I return to the same buried alluvial beds and pick through the strata again.” Silence strikes me as a kind of total eclipse, and this lawn of Frost’s may be just as risky. It could overtake me if I let it. Pure silence, pure freedom, would somehow reveal me to myself too starkly, too soon. The lighting would be wrong, the picture unsettling, distorted further than I expected in every direction. I want only to see a little bit more at a time, to mine very carefully through the layers of sediment below my feet. To lose water by drops and not by gushes. To fly and return. I want some sense of clarity about the buried alluvial beds, to hold as precious goods the names of its materials, to walk across them and experience the malleability of the middle, before it’s pressed so hard from above and below that it metalizes.

Vermont’s degenerates were identified by the state’s foremost eugenicist, Professor Henry Perkins, who later became president of the American Eugenics Society. For three years, and at the exact time that Frost’s school was established, Perkins would help identify “degenerates” in the state unscientifically—taking people’s reputations within their communities as proof. Among them were the poor, the mentally disabled, the incarcerated, and people of Abenaki and French-Canadian descent. He charted individual families’ mental failings and misfortunes on circular charts, modified from the kind used in documenting animal pedigree. He notched and lined segments of “immorality, crime, and incompetence … propagated through sexual reproduction.” Perkins kept an incriminating file of “English Corruptions of French Names” to root them out. See the strength of words in the hands of a man with power.

Whoever we were before does not matter so much here. We bow to green knolls now. We are mountain high. We find ourselves ankle deep in streams, lost in make-believe, and choking on milkweed. We look into corners for the light from which we’ll craft a day, or the next line. But even as we frolic on this mountain—I can’t believe we played baseball earlier—we write ourselves backward in time. My friend revisits headlines about the collapsing coal industry from his journalism days in the Rust Belt, committed to saving Americans from themselves; I dredge my riverbed for silt, look at maps that show how the water and land have changed, and write fiction about a boy and girl who grew up side by side along a riverbank that is barely fiction. We pick at our respective terrains for something usable, gathering retrospective meaning where there once was none. Headlines offer little reason, I suggest to my friend. They reek of a senseless world. But I still know the black shape of smoke, I tell him, and how it huddles over a small town. How it can follow you anywhere, if you believe in symbolism. I left the Midwest, and I could leave my whole life, too, if only he’d ask. But if I check his pocket for the question, I won’t find it. We don’t live that bravely.

There was a group of people who were neither Vermont’s degenerates nor its ideal. Via a eugenic duality, Perkins noted, there existed in some lineages both “social individuals … those apparently law abiding, self-supporting and doing some useful work” and “asocial individuals … those who displayed the familiar repertoire of pathologies.” My family would have fallen here, neither the elite nor the useless. But I fear that Perkins was alluding to race.

Frost, the man, Robert. Bob. He wasn’t on Perkins’s list. He was white and educated, privileged and productive. He was less gentle than this land, but then, the land is a liar and keeps our secrets. I have buried mine in its soil. I have screamed into gathering storms. I have set things on fire. Bits of paper. Photographs. Frost was flawed, like all of us, and a fire starter, too, Elder says. I find that unimpressive; most everything can burn. Most everything contradicts.

The Frost homes are empty. They have been for years. They have their secrets, too. Elder says that the small cabin burned up once, some townie kids with nothing to do. It was empty; so were they. So it goes. Now there’s hardly anything left inside—the damage has been cleaned up. And once, the bigger one up higher on the mountain was ravaged by drunken teens. They hawked their bodily fluids onto its aging surfaces and used its furniture for fire. If you could open the chests of these youth for inspection, one by one, and distend their individual charts of misfortune, they too would reveal a study in contradictions—they were the children of doctors and professors. Because of that, I would bet these kids got off easy, which makes me wonder about Corey. If he had been the child of upper-middle-class Dutch parents, would he have ended up in prison? Those early arrests for using marijuana, joyriding, and petty theft very likely would have resulted in a police escort home and a stern warning. Being born on the other side of the river, staying out of the juvenile detention center, might have made a difference.

A line of ants pile grains of dirt near my friend’s shoulder. How I want to smash the hill, a bad habit carried over from a careless childhood, but I don’t because I don’t want to reveal my classless impulse. I don’t want him to think I’m cruel. “Do you know,” I say instead, “that each ant in a colony is tasked with a role from birth, and none are expendable? Each is crucial to the survival of the colony. Even those that die of stupidity are carried home and buried.” Crimes are treated equally in ant society. Lives are treated equally. He smiles at me in reply. The picnic beyond us is being carried away, though we have not eaten. The staff watches us and waits for us to want hamburgers. They think we’ve chosen this life, but it has chosen us. And we are tired of explaining ourselves.

The world is made of bent shapes from this view, on our backs, which is the position designed for telling lies about who we are beyond Robert Frost’s lawn. I decide my friend doesn’t have a mother, and John Elder may have two. My friend is a classic oil portrait and I am a watercolor picture. We could be happy here together, drying out in the sun. It’s hard not to be a poet when you’re sitting on Frost’s lawn, especially when you are one. Together, we look for a line, a stanza, a downbeat, between the maple trees in the little wood near the lawn, because we can’t help it and it’s either that or suck the sap from the cut rings still raw from last season’s tapping. We are that thirsty.

But the trees are not poems, never have been, do not contain poems, never have contained them. They have nothing to say about who we are. They have nothing to say about integrity or rationality or depression or the books our mothers never read. They have nothing to say about what to do next with a life. And then, and then. No. Don’t look into the woods for an answer. The word
tree
is invented. We tell them what they are, not the other way around.

This is not to say that trees are not useful, that we cannot project onto them and see something reflecting back. Nature works on us this way. A walk into the woods can change you. In the
New Yorker
article “Why Walking Helps Us Think,” Ferris Jabr connects the visceral ambling of characters in modernist novels such as
Mrs. Dalloway
and
Ulysses
with a mapped landscape: “Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink.” I liked the idea of bodies moving across the land as common literary ground. The writer notes the way that authors sent their characters on walks to do their thinking and used these excursions as an opportunity to propel plot. “As Mrs. Dalloway walks,” he writes, “she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, ‘making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.’” I liked bodies moving across the land as common human ground, too: every moment a brief collision of past and present; every moment an instance of person and place commingling as their singular future unfolds before them. Every new view an opportunity for growth or altered perception. Ultimately, that was the essence of place to me—an ongoing reconciliation of the past, present, and future. An ongoing negotiation of memory. It was resurrection.

Eugenics was publicly promoted in rural areas of the state through Fittest Family tests at county fairs. The tests were propagandized as evidence that some families could not match up to Vermont’s ideal standard of mental and physical faculties, by which they apparently meant
lineage. Race. Class
. I wonder about the ancestry of the teens who damaged the Frost properties, whether any of their aunts or uncles had been sterilized and how their destructive nature had slipped through, what with all that precaution. Maybe they’d been wait-listed, too. Or maybe they’d been wealthy enough for it not to matter.

When Elder’s lecture ends, no one can stand. Our knees are gummy. Our skulls have cracked open. My brain is hemorrhaging; the acid trip has gone wonky. Make a tree a tree again. Make a bird a bird. We wait for the right words—to say, to write, to omit. To be grasshoppers would be better. Grasshoppers are never asked to explain or decide or grow up or let go. Or to make meaning of the world around them. To control themselves, or conform.
Why did they bring us here?
I wonder. They dip us into water like brushes, and then say, “Paint.” Make any kind of mark on the paper, and we pass the test. None of that will work once we leave.

There are some hard rules to this suspended world—gravity, velocity, thermodynamics, genetic expression. Others are forgettable—promises, contracts, leases, vows. Entire histories came before this mountain, but they seem distant now. My husband, for example, and no one is talking about him. My friend’s girlfriend, whose name I’ve never heard him speak. Real people have been reduced to pronouns, Saussure’s semiotics run amok. My friend tells me he has three cats, and in another life, I could love him for that fact alone. This grass has always been here; before it was called grass, it was still here, existing. It will be here when we leave. We are more mutable than it is.

Before he begins the guided nature walk, which he leads each year after the lecture, Elder invites us to tour the cabin. It is open. It is empty. Go ahead.

The staff roll the last of the picnic away and give us their final fretful glances. Don’t worry, I think. We belong to other, practical people who keep us from starving in our regular lives. Let us have our hunger here until night. When the sky is black we can split the stars and gather the sparks to build a fire. Let’s go inside, I say, once we’re alone.

We shouldn’t, he says.

But we do, and I like how easily he bends for me.

It’s a small place. There are two chairs, a stack of wood and kindling, and a braided rug that once may have been blue. Long planks of untreated flooring creak beneath our feet. The little windows feel bigger from the inside. I like this illusion, how it overtakes my senses. How the world is shrinking outside. It begins with wonder and takes shape.

Degenerate
is also a verb.

I could build him a fire in the tiny stove, and we could sit in front of it in the rockers, holding hands. As if it were ours. As if we did it all the time. As if our imaginary children might return from playing outside at any moment. As if a pie were cooling on the counter. As if his cats would come, any minute now, to lie in our laps for an afternoon nap.

Let me do something, I could say. Let me touch your collarbone. I will get away with eccentricity. It will be expected. My moral backslides will be considered artistic. My degenerate nature,
interesting
. His collarbone will be smooth and firm, so different from the one I am used to touching, which is bonier and jagged, that I will cry. The surprise of him will be too much. The thing signified, severed from the signifier. Twice removed from bone.

He’ll reach for me once I’ve had my fill of semiotics, and gather my hair together in his fist, gently. He’ll hold it there. Well think we hear someone, but well be wrong.

Go ahead, smell it
, I’ll say, tipping my head to his chest.

He’ll bend his head over mine and inhale, still gripping my hair. He’ll snuff me out this way for what I really am: an impostor who languished all day on Robert Frost’s lawn, undetected. This will be somehow more intimate than fucking, which will never happen. We could do the easiest thing: undress. But we won’t. We’ll stand there, in Frost’s house, holding these strange parts of one another as long as we want. We’ll be adorned in a particular sadness, consumed by the ghosts that rise from Frost’s lawn. By the trees that stalk one another into the distance, each forever gaining on the next. By the children who burned this house and trashed the other. By the children who were never born to their degenerate families. We will remember our separate pasts, whatever they are. We will fill in the stories we were never told as we drifted off to sleep. We will cast off the illusion of language itself and all the things we think we have to do. We will seek, instead, the secrets of the land, the parts we tell and retell, the histories omitted, the erasure. We will seek what hangs on after the fog lifts.

Elder never comes back from the woods, and we are the last ones to leave. We walk for a mile, our eyes fixed on the sky to keep it from falling down. A black cloud follows us. It signifies nothing but rain. For the first time, I feel no inclination to be as loud as the incoming storm. I can expand into the silence without fear of eclipse. The path below our feet is only a piece of earth that has been walked on by other feet. It needs no name, only
use
. The forest can keep its trees. The birds can keep their song.