The Cave Painter & The Woodcutter (4 page)

I started working on drawings for a new series of prints when I first saw pictures of the skull from Teshik-Tash. A child, a Neanderthal, nine or so years old. Boy or girl, we can't be certain, except I think of him as a boy, the little Neanderthal boy. There's something so compelling: seventy thousand years ago, a child lived for nine years. Here is the evidence.

I'd always been interested in them because they weren't us, Neanderthals, they weren't quite human. Did they have a language, worship gods? Why did they disappear? Was it climate? Was it us? Genocide, cannibalism? Or did we simply breed with them until they were no more?

His skull is a jigsaw puzzle; it had been broken into a hundred pieces by the weight of time. He would've had a big nose, they all had big noses. The Neanderthal brow and weak chin.

And both upper and lower teeth that had not yet erupted. They seem so hopeful, those teeth, invisible when the boy was living. Waiting, unaware beneath the surface. An unfulfilled promise.

I start filling sketchbooks with drawings. Not sure where I'm going with them, I'm trying to understand the ache that he makes inside of me, the little Neanderthal boy.

Then, surprise, surprise, Elaine called. “Would you and Peter like to come and look after the girls?” Ryan was at a church retreat and she wanted to see her father, who wasn't well.

Pete says he can't do it. “My agent's breathing down my neck.”

“You are a martyr to deadlines.”

“I am. I'm a martyr to martyrdom.”

I hadn't said anything, but I was so looking forward to the day when that damn martyr book would finally be in its editor's hands. Jewish martyrs, Christian martyrs, Muslim martyrs. You're so obsessed with them, and it's all important and fascinating, God knows, but they just depressed the hell out of me. Sana'a Mehaidli, the teenage suicide bomber, driving her car full of TNT into a convoy of Israeli soldiers. Seventeen and beautiful and idealistic—“the Bride of the South”—sacrificing herself and in so doing making everything worse for absolutely everybody.

“So you can't come and play with the M&Ms.”

Oh, but if only you had.

I'm exotic to Maggie and Martha, I know that, and I'm not freakish, the way I think I used to be to their mother. They like hearing stories about their father. I'm careful in what I say. I know there are things about the way we lived when he was growing up that Ryan would not want them to know about yet.

They love the silver necklace Simon made for me, with Ryan's baby teeth for pearls.

They laugh when I tell them the wrong words that their father used to sing to “Stormy Weather.” And we all go, (
sings
) “Booze and grizzles everywhere, stormy weather.”

Maggie says, “Grammy, how old are you?”

“That's rude,” says Martha.

“No, it's not, really. She's just curious,” I say. “When you were born, I was fifty-four years old. So how old am I now?”

They can't believe I'm so old.

We've been making marks in the dirt with sticks. I draw two lines, a little one, a foot long, another about seven feet. “The little line is how long you've been living,” I say, “and the big line is me.” (
indicates this on the floor
) “This is when I was born, this is when I went to school, this is when your father was born, this is when your great-grampy died, this is when I met Pete, and this is when Martha was born, and Maggie.”

“How long will they be?” Maggie asks. “The lines?”

“No one can tell,” I say.

We paint with fingerpaints, we make collages. We laugh, and they ask so many questions.

Martha says, “Are you in the computer?”

“Google me.”

But they don't use Google, they have a Christian search engine, and, of course, there's no reference to me on it whatsoever.

I figure out a way to bypass the filters Ryan and Elaine have set up. We look at the slideshow on my gallery's website.

Martha goes, “Why do you draw teeth so much?”

I tell her I think they're beautiful, and they last so long. “Like bones,” I say. “Our teeth are the part of our skeletons that we can see.”

“Euw,” she goes, shivers and giggles.

I tell them I like fossils because I'm an old fossil myself. That we are the living fossils of our ancestors. I tell them that scientists can study old teeth and figure out what people used to eat, how they used to live.

Maggie asks me if teeth and bones can tell scientists the skeletons' names.

“No,” I say, “but wouldn't it be wonderful if they could?”

Then I tell them that drawing old bones, using them to make marks on a page, is my way of studying them.

Martha says, “What do you want to learn when you study them, Grammy?”

She can be so serious.

“I guess I'm trying to understand what it means to be human.”

And then I tell them about the little Neanderthal boy. We look at pictures of his skull, we go through my sketchbook. There's a small map of Teshik-Tash.

“Where's that?”

“It's near Afghanistan. Where the war is.”

Maggie wants to know how long a line would it be, back to when he was alive.

“If we pace it out like we did in the park, it would be a very long line.” I use the calculator in the computer, “A seventy-thousand-year line would be thirteen miles long.”

Maggie says, “What's that?”

It takes Martha no time, she's so bright, no calculator for her, “That's twenty kilometres,” she says.

Elaine comes home just before bedtime. She's nicer to me than she's ever been. “It was good to get away and see Dad,” she says, and thanks me. I call home to say I'm having a good time. There's no answer. “A martyr to martyrdom.”

A shift, a cold, dark sky.

Then, when I get home the next day, when I get home, your desk looks like you've just left it. The computer is on, but it's gone to sleep. The message light on the phone is blinking. A pile of papers, a stack of books, the picture of Sana'a Mehaidli, “the Bride of the South,” tacked to the wall.

“Pete?”

A sandwich on the kitchen counter. You've made it and left it sitting on the breadboard. Ham and mayonnaise are beside it. There's the smell of very stale coffee cooked in the coffee maker. Like something Mom would do. Forgetting she made it.

“Pete?” I go all through the place.

Wouldn't you have left me a note? I'm thinking, “Where's the note? You knew when I was coming.”

The blinking light on the phone.

“Where are you?”

I went out into the evening yard.

Why didn't I see you there before? Lying there.

I knew that you weren't playing a joke, but for one ridiculous moment I thought that if I acted like you were, then maybe you might be—“Hey, lazybones.”

But you don't move. Lying over there on the grass behind the house.

The doctor said you'd been lying there since the day before. A massive coronary.

Your last moment alive, what was it?

Maybe the phone was ringing and you were on your way to go and answer.

Maybe you were thinking, “That coffee must be ready now, I'll just go and pour myself a—”

Maybe you were—

Maybe—

But then you stop.

You fall.

You're lying there.

And the sun still rolls across the sky, and the stars appear and turn above you, and you're here and so peaceful-looking, but you're not here, you're not in this body I've loved for fifteen years. I touch the little mole beside your lip. You're gone.

A shift. She's isolated, lost in a small, dark place.

There's the ambulance and the autopsy and the doctor and the funeral director and Ryan seems upset because the memorial will be in the gallery.

“But Peter was Jewish.”

“Yeah,” I say, “and an atheist.”

Then the memorial, and my friends are great, my colleagues from Open Studio, the folks at the gallery.

“Do you want some music?” they'd asked me. “Maybe you want a song?”

“Yes,” I tell them, “Peggy Lee. I want to hear Peggy Lee sing ‘Mr. Wonderful.'”

Ryan comes with Elaine, but not my granddaughters, Pete's little M&Ms, they're sent off to Elaine's sister's, Miss Prissy Pants, and then… then it's over.

And, oh Pete, I don't even believe it. It's not that I can't accept it, I don't believe it. I have these moments—where's Pete?—as if you'd gone out and should have been back by now.

Your clothes are still hanging in the closet, still folded in your dresser drawers—all I've managed to do is look through the pockets of the coat on the back of the kitchen chair. Your keys, a couple of dollars change, a little smooth stone that you picked up somewhere on a walk. I've had it with me ever since.

I went to see Mom.

“How do I know you?” she says.

“I'm your daughter. Dianne.”

“I had a daughter?”

She's sounding frightened, she's so easily confused and upset. She'll start crying. “Would you like a chocolate?” I say. “I brought you some nice chocolates.”

“Mmm,” she says, forgetting all about me. “Mmm,” she says, grabbing them, “goody.”

Then your agent left a message about the martyrology book. Then I didn't call her back so she called again.

But I knew that if I went into your room and started going through your things that you'd really be dead. There'd be no possibility of going back.

And I wasn't ready to face the dead.

So I go to stay with my son, I go to be with my granddaughters. We go for walks, I watch them play. I try to draw. The little Neanderthal boy and his mouthful of teeth.

On the third morning, when I get up, the girls are playing next door, where there's a new puppy. Elaine behaves oddly, which is nothing new, then she says that she wants to talk to me about something before they come back. I can tell it's serious because she won't look at me directly.

She starts out by saying that although we disagree on lots of things, I would have to agree that she and Ryan have the right to bring up their girls the way they “see fit.”

“Yes, of course,” I say.

She tells me that she's been doing research for home school, and that she's “uncomfy” with some things that I've been telling the girls.

I'm not sure what she means.

Then she says, “God tells us that the earth is not quite ten thousand years old.”

Oh.

Oh-oh.

I'm thinking, “Holy crap.”

“Now there are scientists who believe that Neanderthals come from the time before Noah's Flood, when certain men lived to be a great age.”

“Like Methuselah?” I say.

“Yes. There are scientists who now believe that what you call Neanderthals were men like Methuselah.”

I don't know what to do. I just sit there.

Then she tells me there's another school of thought, more so-called scientists, who believe the Neanderthals were postdiluvian, they came after the Flood. The Flood that created the holes in the earth where the cavemen lived.

And she's explaining this to me as if I were a misguided heathen and she some kindly, enthusiastic missionary. As if I'll find this all intellectually stimulating.

I'm looking at this woman and thinking, “Why the hell is she my daughter-in-law? Why did my son marry her? What kind of a failure was I as a mother that would allow this to happen? What kind of crap is she teaching my granddaughters?”

“I can't change the way you think,” she says, “but I can tell you what I don't want you saying to my daughters.”

And thank God the girls rush in and end my misery.

I want to call you, I want to call Steph. I want to call Mom before she lost her mind.

Alone in the guest room in the basement, just me and that creepy “Dear Son I have a job for you all you will need are these” poster, I feel more alone than I did before I came.

Ryan comes home from the bank and we have supper. I watch them bow their heads while he says grace and feel set apart from all of them.

I'm sitting there feeling like an atheist spy behind Christian lines.

They put the kids to bed. Elaine turns in early. Ryan and I watch the late news.

But I can't stand it. So, “Ryan,” I say, finally, “what do you want for the girls' futures? University? Careers?”

There's a silence that I end by saying, “Do you plan on keeping them in home school?”

“Mom,” he says, “get to the point.”

I tell him I'm concerned that they're getting a certain amount of misinformation.

“I don't think so,” he says.

There's a horrible pause. And, fool that I am, “Ryan, the world is not ten thousand years old. Methuselah wasn't a Neanderthal.”

“Mom, I don't think we should be having this conversation.”

But I think we have to, and tell him so.

He interrupts me by saying that it's really annoying that I continue to belittle what he believes.

“I do not.”

“You do. You always have. You and Peter and Aunt Steph, you all did.”

I tell him that I don't believe what he believes but that I understand the importance of it, the sense of community that he has at church. “But, Ryan, surely you can't believe that the world is only ten thousand years old. You can't believe that Adam and Eve were historical people.”

Then he says, “I've tolerated your lack of belief because you're my mother and the grandmother of my girls, and they adore you, but I won't have you meddling with our lives. We both know that there are things that we don't talk about. And that's that.”

I want to know why we can't talk about them, and he tells me that I won't like what he has to say.

“Oh, Ryan, come on. I raised you to be as upfront and honest as possible.”

And he looks at me, and he turns off the television, and he says, “You have no idea, do you, how much I hated the way you brought me up? The half-assed way we lived. Hand to mouth, grant to grant, your crazy friends, men like Simon.”