Shoulder the Sky (15 page)

Next, my mother picked me up and sat me down with her in the backyard hammock and we swung back and forth in a warm morning breeze.

A few days later may father ran over the hammer in the yard with the lawn mower and it wrecked the blade. He wanted to know how in blazes the hammer ended up in the grass, and my mother said it was her fault but she didn't tell the whole story.

Guilt is a powerful educational tool and I dared not kill a thing after that. I hadn't really thought snail shells had living things inside, I suppose, so I didn't know what else might be alive. I stopped throwing stones, for example. And I had come to the even odder conclusion that dust was alive. I had a lot of dust under my bed and nobody had ever cleaned up under there that I knew of
so I thought of all that dust as alive and growing under my bed. My mother was in my room once and said, “Martin, you sure have a lot of dust under your bed. We'll have to do something about that.”

I was proud of the dust and went on living in harmony with it there in my room. As far as I know, no one ever did vacuum it up or anything and I slept peacefully at night feeling that I was protecting that small kingdom of living, if not sentient, dust.

I don't think my mother knew about my thoughts on dust. She didn't fully forgive me for snail smashing until later that summer while I was playing with my trucks, driving to Kansas, Utah, and on to Mongolia, when she saw a mosquito biting me on the cheek. I had trained myself not to swat bugs that were biting me. It was quite a discipline but I would let bugs bite if it was in their nature. So this one mosquito got quite a bellyful of my youthful blood as I held my breath and waited for it to fly off. My mother saw this and finally came towards me as the blood-bloated mosquito flew away of its own accord. She looked in my eyes and understood what I was thinking.

I received an honorary hug and a kiss on my bloody cheek.

Down the street from us was a kind of park — just a field, really, owned by the town — where tall grasses grew. In the centre of the field was a large oak tree. Teenagers sat under the tree at night, smoked dope and did other things that I can only guess at. In the daytime, the tree pretty much had the field to itself.

My mother would do paintings of the tree but each painting was different and she always added things like mountains or huge swooping birds or turned the one tree into a jungle. She carried an easel and canvas and a palette of watercolours, sometimes acrylics — and sometimes those paints made from egg yolks and pigment known as tempera — to the middle of the field where she went into a kind of trancelike state as she painted one tree into an entire imaginary world of beauty. On occasion, I would go hang out with my mother and study ants or spiders while she painted.

Why I climbed the tree that particular day, I don't know, but I had spent much of my summer at ground level with trucks and ants and things of the earth. Some enterprising youth before me had nailed a couple of small boards onto the back of the tree — on the side my mother could not see. I found myself climbing up into that old oak tree and feeling very brave and intelligent. One branch led to the next until I was high up into the lofty places that a tree can take a boy. There were birds
and green leaves blocking the sun and it was an altogether satisfying place to be.

My mother was probably looking straight at the tree while I climbed, but the leafy arms of oak blocked me from view. I found a comfortable branch, positioned myself, and sat. I began to talk to the tree — that seemed like the appropriate thing to do — telling the tree it was my friend and that if it wanted to, I could drive it in my truck to Norway or South Carolina or wherever it wanted to go.

But the tree did not want to go anywhere. It had a jovial old man kind of personality — cheerful, tolerant, and enduring. It swished the leaves at the end of its branches and seemed inclined to be my friend for the day.

And then I looked down.

The tree had somehow tricked me and taken me way up into the sky. Even though I had climbed what seemed an easy ladder of natural branches, there appeared to be no way down from these lofty heights. When the wind blew, the leaves opened up and I could see my mother, painting away at her easel. I could tell that she had been sitting in the sun too long and was starting to turn a little red. I called out, but it seemed like my voice was swallowed up by the leafy canopy and I wondered why the tree had tricked me into such a dangerous situation.

I was paralyzed with fear over the height and I decided I could not attempt descent. I yelled for help several times until my mother was awakened from her artistic swoon and came searching for the disembodied voice of her son.

The rescue was not easy for her as she hugged me to her with one strong arm, moving us downward from branch to branch as we found our way back to earth. I remember her breathing — shallow and rapid and finally followed by a great heave of relief when she set me down into the grass. But I do not remember any words.

When I saw the painting for the first time, I saw a tree that seemed to be illuminated from within. In the background were buildings — pagodas and strange Oriental architecture — and in the foreground was a river with women along the banks and water the colour of dark tea.

The day the men arrived with chainsaws to cut down the tree, my mother was on hand to protest. She had a sign and she shouted at the men, but it was the tail-end of her futile battle to save the tree. My father, somewhat sheepishly, added his voice to what my mother had to say, but the starting of three chainsaws at once drowned it out. The field was to be turned into several ballfields for little league baseball. Most everyone in the town thought baseball was more important than one old oak tree.

A photograph of my mother had been in the paper showing her arguing with the mayor and a man in a hard hat. She garnered a reputation as a tree hugger and a crazy woman and she wore that reputation as if it was the uniform of a small ambitious army of one.

I never played baseball on that field, but sometimes in the early morning, before joggers or baseball players would come to the park, my mother would go back to the field, set up her easel, and stare at the spot where the tree used to be. And she'd paint her luminous landscapes, erasing the fences and the billboards and the backstops in favour of a softer, more colourful rendering of another level of reality that continued to live on in my mother's imagination.

Stuff That May or May Not Be Important

Friederich Wilhelm Nietzsche thought people acted too much like slaves to the institutions of government and religion. He died in 1900 with only one foot in the twentieth century. He thought there should be certain extraordinary individuals, super-men, who were above the common mass of dopes. These god-like individuals could assert their will and attract others to share the vision and do great things — reshape the world as we know it.

Nietzsche was also a great lover of sausage. He was a true meat eater, but then that came with the smorgasbord of the fatty German diet. He wrote about greatness
and super-individuals after eating a lot of sausage. I don't know if there is a connection. He thought most of us were a bunch of wimpy nincompoops, although that was not the term he used. Nietzsche had some good ideas, or at least he had a way of getting people to think outside of the box.

Adolph Hitler was eleven years old the year Nietzsche died. I don't know much about what Hitler did as a boy. Maybe he played with toy soldiers and had toy military trucks that he pretended to drive to Norway and Africa. I know that Hitler liked flowers, too. He even painted, which seems very odd when you think about it.

Unfortunately for the world, Hitler read what Nietzsche had to say about the so-called “will to power” and Adolph really liked what he read. He stirred Nietzsche's notions around with a bunch of other stuff rattling around in his European brain and ended up doing what we all know he did. If Hitler had just been a lazy daydreamer or a plain no-good schmuck who said rude things to people in the beer halls of Munich, things wouldn't have been so bad for the world. But some people aren't satisfied to leave things the way they are.

Emerso

“What's this all about?” my father asked after he pulled the van to a stop in front of the mall. The van had a faint orange aura that surprised me because the van itself was forest green.

My father had a soft yellow halo, but I was starting to wish the weird visual stuff would go away. I was getting a headache.

“I think we should just leave — the three of us, before it's too late,” Lilly said.

My father loosened his tie and sat down on the curb. “I left a meeting with a client. We were discussing demographics. I was explaining that our ideal target was a forty-year-old male who had a high-stress job and worried about money, family, and foot odour in that order. This is what I'm reduced to.”

“Another good reason to drive to Alaska,” Lilly added.

My father blinked and looked up at the sky. He seemed truly confused but he was no longer the Invisible Man.

“I haven't been helping you kids, I know. All I can do is keep myself going, one meaningless day after the next.”

“We all miss her,” Lilly said.

“I keep waiting for one morning to be different,” my dad said. “I keep waiting to wake up and feel something less terrible than what it felt like yesterday. But it doesn't happen.”

“Let's just get in he van and drive,” Lilly said.

“I'm okay with that,” I said. There was this big fog bank forming in the back of my brain. I didn't know what it was about. The whole scene seemed unreal to me, like I was not here but watching these two people in a movie. I couldn't quite comprehend why my father was saying he had felt terrible day after day. It never once showed on his empty face each morning.

“I don't think it's the right thing to do,” my dad said, and then he looked at me, noticed something about me.

“You okay, Martin?”

But Martin was sitting in the audience somewhere. He didn't have any lines in the script. Martin felt like he didn't fully understand what they were talking about. Who exactly was it they missed so badly? Who was it that was gone?

“Martin?”

“Yeah, I'm okay. I was just thinking about something else.”

“Lilly, I'm a little worried about Martin.”

“Don't worry about me,” I said. “I want to go to Alaska, too. I think it's the right thing to do.”

“I'm going to see if Dave can see Martin before we take off. I want to be sure this is the right thing to do.” He pulled out his cellphone and made the call.

“It's all set. Dave can see you in fifteen minutes. He said he wanted to talk to you anyway. Let's go.”

“Wait,” Lilly said. She looked at me and then at my dad. “Let Martin drive.”

“What?” he asked.

“Let Martin drive.”

“He doesn't know how,” my father said.

I couldn't understand why she was doing this.

Lilly took the keys from my father and handed them to me. “Drive, Martin.”

My father sat in the seat beside me and said, “Put on your seat belt. You too, Lilly.”

I started the engine and checked the mirrors. Then I drove out of the mall parking lot, heading for Dave's office. No one in the car said a word or doubted my driving ability. The town looked different from behind the wheel. But I seemed to know how to handle the traffic just fine. I took my time, stopping for yellow lights — overly cautious. I passed the corner where Scott's brother had dumped his bike, the place Scott had been killed in the accident. I kept my eyes on the road but when I checked the rear-view mirror, there was Lilly, staring at me. We had to drive by our house without stopping and that seemed very surreal — as if some other family lived there, as if everything was normal inside that home. I noticed how overgrown
the front yard was with the high grass and weeds in the flower beds. No one said a word and I just kept driving.