The Death of All Things Seen (25 page)

She wanted to die in the solitude and isolation of a single love, in proximity of the roar of a fire and a view of the lake in the natural light of the season. She reached for his face. Her hands, near the end, a collection of sticks, like kindling, brittle and dry, the swan of her neck giving in a sudden keel and slump of gathering sleep when a minute before she had been talking, so he was made ready for a coming sleep that would not end.

In the day, to appease and remind her of their past, he would sometimes play the fool and dress in the early Elmer Fudd cap he wore on arrival in Grandshire, which Ursula said made the men laugh so hard behind his back, they pissed themselves, but it was a hat that made her yearn for him so much more because there was so much improvement needed about him, and innocence, too, and yet a depth of great knowledge and compassion.

He was the opposite of Frank Grey Eyes in so many ways – the one going, the other coming. She had found them both here at the edge of nothingness. How was she so lucky?

To the antecedent history of the newly discovered Basque, Nate added a history preserved in the Viking Sagas, the banishment of Eric the Red, a fierce and flaxen-headed warrior, who, along with his followers discovered Greenland. His son, Leif Erikson, pushing ever west, arrived eventually into the far reach of the north, making settlement briefly in a new-found-land, where a grape particular to the land grew. He called the place of new discovery, Vineland.

And somewhere into that mix, in the trawl of stories and interests, he came upon the feat in an open boat of a Celtic monastic named Brendan, who might or might not have reached the Americas.

Ursula said Brendan was a name she would have chosen for a boy. In her native way, she pronounced it Bring Dawn, so its essence was unlocked and understood better. A name meant something. She could unlock a history, a hidden meaning, in the way there were men who spent a life cracking open rocks, discovering a great and distant past.

In the approach of death, all she wanted to hear was the consoling voice of Nate. The business was sold with this in mind when her sickness was apparent and how it would end. She did not want to die with the phone ringing, with someone wanting something of her, checking on a backorder, or making complaint, someone demanding a refund. With her death, so would go much of his life. He was at ease with it.

Ursula eventually slipped from life in his arms in an absence felt more than anything ever gained.

T
HOMAS
STRAIT
’
S
DAUGHTER
, Lee-Ann, was all rural good looks with three kids under twelve who had taken nothing from her figure and filled her just right. She got out of the front seat while the bus was stopped, presumably at the mild reproach of her father as she got into the back of the car.

Thomas Strait quietly advanced with a dignity and hitch to his step of someone who had marched in military formation. He raised his hand as he walked toward Norman, beaming a smile, his face unshaven. He had on a medical orderly’s smock, of a pale blue starched material, stiff as cardboard, his hair, a steel grey and thinning, combed off his forehead.

Thomas Strait drove a first generation Saturn, a car Norman immediately recognized, and commented on for a conversation opener. There were no formal introductions. Norman remembered what he called the ballyhoo of patriotic commercials, a factory somewhere south, if he rightly remembered, free of the shenanigans of the UAW. He talked a mile a minute, the Saturn, a company his father had touted as part of the rebirth of the American automobile on the right side of organized labor this time, though, in the end, for all the soft pitch, for all the happy employees smiling and waving, for all the American flags, it didn’t make a damn difference because the cars were crap and cheaply made.

Thomas said, ‘You remember Saturn. I’ll be damned if you are not enlightened! God knows we need every good idea that’s out there. The Saturn, I’ll be damned if you don’t remember it just so.’

There was the preacher in his voice and issues of salvation never far from his mind. Thomas took Norman’s box, set it in the trunk then he went round his side of the car.

Norman got in. All the warning lights on the dash were lit.

Lee-Ann was piled into the back of the car with her three kids, all shoulder-to-shoulder. Her knees showed, her dress pulled around her thighs showing the white of her panties. She wore no wedding ring. These boys were single-parented. It was self-evident. They had that watchful, wary look of protectors.

For lack of anything to say, Norman commented how well mannered they were, which led to the eldest punching the middle one. The youngest, Sherwood, had his eyes locked on Norman.

Thomas said quit it to the two older kids. He looked in the rear-view mirror.

‘Sherwood, you have something to show Mr Price?’

Norman was half-turned in his seat. He smiled encouragingly. ‘Something to show me?’

Thomas added, ‘In honor of your arrival, Mr Price!’

Sherwood was all giggles and shy at the same time, while Lee-Ann said impatiently, ‘Well, show him then, will you, go on!’

Sherwood said softly, ‘It’s a drawing for you, Mr Price!’

The picture was of a stick figure man and a round-bellied cat that was holding something in its paws that Norman couldn’t quite make out. They were framed, the man and the cat, in a window near the top of what was obviously the Sears Tower.

Thomas Strait ventured, ‘Where you live, Mr Price, right?’ so Norman feigned incredulity and, looking at the kid, said, ‘That’s exactly where I live.’

Thomas interjected. ‘Kenneth told Sherwood all about you being famous, Mr Price, and about Mr Whiskers, your cat, who rides the elevator all day long, pressing all the buttons, and how he opens cans of food with an electric can opener.’ He added parenthetically, ‘That’s how you were able to come visit, Mr Whiskers being self-sufficient and all. Sherwood was concerned about you coming down and the cat not having anything to eat. But you had it figured. Mr Whiskers is no ordinary cat, right, Mr Price?’

Norman played along. ‘Mr Whispers is a whiz with the can opener.’

Sherwood corrected Norman with an exuberant shout. ‘You mean, Mr Whiskers!’

He was giddy with a child’s glee, the car alive with his presence.

Thomas had his eyes again set in the rear-view mirror. ‘That’s Mr Price’s way of testing you.’ He lit a cigarette from the car’s lighter. He handed it back to Lee-Ann, then lit another for himself and said, ‘He got all As, Mr Price!’

The sudden sense of déjà vu struck Norman. He felt himself forming the words and let it happen, despite himself. ‘He’s a regular Little Lord Fauntleroy!’

Lee-Ann blew smoke out the side of her mouth. She nearly choked with laughter when Norman said it. She coughed and coughed some more, and then said, with her eyes still watering, ‘That’s what we’ll call him, Mr Price, “Little Lord Fauntleroy”.’

On second look, Lee-Ann was not the prize she had first appeared. Lines showed around her mouth. She stopped smiling as she met Norman’s eyes. She was aware he was appraising her. She pushed her hair off her forehead. Despite her embarrassment, she rallied and kept on talking for the sake of the kid. ‘I guess it’s big up there, huh, Mr Price? We never got round to getting up to Chicago yet.’

Norman kept looking at her in a quiet appeal that he thought nothing bad of her. He said, ‘Well, now you have no excuses. You’ve a place to stay when you come.’

Lee-Ann smiled. ‘That’s mighty generous,’ while Thomas tempered the offer, erasing the lie of the Sears Tower. ‘At your
other
place, if you might, Mr Price, at your apartment, and not your office at The Sears Tower. We are all sufferers of vertigo.’

Sherwood piped up, ‘What’s vertigo?’

Lee-Ann said, ‘It means we can’t take heights is all.’

A sense emerged that this third child might steer fortune elsewhere in the reach of his inquisitiveness.

*

Thomas Strait had trained as a phlebotomist in the army. He offered this information as a form of credentialing. There was a faint indigo tattoo of a snake around a woman on his thin arm, suggestive of a former life of corruption, drink and sin.

He worked now at the care facility where Kenneth’s mother lived, a ‘small time’ operation, but Medicare and Medicaid were a sure bet, and social security might see a person through a dignified end. He was suddenly more serious.

He had finished his education at a community college and was a certified Nurse’s Assistant. He had read every
Reader’s Digest
going back a decade, read every funny. He could remember names like you wouldn’t believe, names of relatives and cousins and family trees that meant something to the dying. He kept a roll of stamps in his locker, just for the occasion a letter might be sent, if the spirit took a patient, and he had very good penmanship, something that went back to his school days, and it was a wonder what you needed in life, when it was least expected.

While Thomas talked, Sherwood kept his eyes on Norman in the kindest way, smiling all the time. It was a blessing. Norman hoped only the best for the kid.

Lee-Ann, in deference to her father, waited. She was in the process of trawling for a husband. She mentioned it when the opportunity presented itself, the name of a schoolteacher whose house they passed by. Lee-Ann turned her head and looked toward the house. They were out a great distance in fields, heading where, Norman didn’t know, nor did he ask.

Mr Tobias Rash, the schoolteacher in question had lost his wife to breast cancer and had three girls of his own. Lee-Ann sang it in the theme of
The Brady Bunch
, how it might be, if she could swing it. She had three boys of her own. Life could convene and settle like that out here. It was an option and opportunity that might not be passed on.

Norman corrected Lee-Ann. ‘The man in
The Brady Bunch
had the three boys, right, not three girls?’

Lee-Ann responded, ‘And the father, whatever his name, he died of AIDS in real life, right?’ so it might have been an insult, when it wasn’t. It was just a fact.

Thomas Strait interjected and shook his head. ‘She knows every fact not worth knowing. If you can remember facts like that, and school is nothing but facts, then,
ergo
, it should be easy, right?’

The question was directed at Norman.

He said, ‘It’s a matter of aligning your desires with your talents, and then things come pretty easily.’

Lee-Ann held a mouth of smoke. Her eyes widened. ‘You a licensed school counselor, Mr Price? Cause that’s exactly how they all sound. What I always want to ask ’em, if they’re so smart, why are they still in high school?’

Thomas Strait smiled and was given to a natural paternal love. His gums showed. He said, ‘That’s deductive reasoning. That’s a genuine gift.’

There was love and concern in this man who couldn’t keep a set of teeth in his head.

Lee-Ann bent her wrist, her index and thumb opening and closing in a yap, her lips barely moving, ventriloquist-like, repeating what her father had just said. It got the kids to bust out laughing and Thomas Strait, despite himself, bust his gut, and suddenly Norman was trying to catch his breath, caught up in a fit of laughter he had not experienced in a long time.

*

Lee-Ann and the boys were eventually dropped off at a ramshackle house at the end of a dirt drive.

Sherwood came round to the front passenger side.

Norman lowered the window.

Sherwood asked politely, ‘Can you send me a picture of Mr Whiskers opening a can of food for show and tell?’

Norman was at a sudden loss.

Lee-Ann intervened. She crouched next to Sherwood and exhaled a secondhand smoke that was all but criminal. She said, ‘You know how many people would be after Mr Whiskers if his secret powers were revealed? He couldn’t ride that elevator no more. Somebody in China would steal him, and all day he would be made to open cans for the Chinese to figure it out.’

Lee-Ann met Norman’s eyes. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Price?’

Sherwood was going to be called a liar in school if he didn’t bring a picture. He had told the class about Mr Whiskers, but he said with the firm resolution of a child, ‘I can keep a secret for Mr Whiskers. I don’t want the Chinese to get him.’

In that moment there was a cat and the greatest menace in the world, the Chinese.

*

Thomas Strait wanted to show Norman something. They left the car on the rise of a dirt road because of the warning lights and a problem with the oil. They started to walk. There had still been no reference to Kenneth. Norman now accepted that what passed would be determined by Thomas Strait.

Thomas was conversant in literature, specifically Steinbeck. He had sought answers in books, then discovered Steinbeck was more socialist than he liked. He was not reconciled that a man could be overly concerned with this life without forsaking the hereafter. This was his decided belief.

Norman listened quietly. Thomas Strait was an honest man hiding a secret – bottles of booze under his bed. Within him, all the incongruities and inconsistencies of life, damnation and salvation fought it out, and somehow kindness and understanding emerged. He was a man who could give advice because of his foibles, because of his shortcomings.

Thomas Strait had got his schooling because of time served in the military at a community college with just enough communists to make it interesting.

He smiled knowingly as he said it. Sherwood, his grandson, was named after Sherwood Anderson. Thomas had read
Winesburg, Ohio
. What he believed was that a deeper knowledge of all things was not such a liberating gift. It left you, more times than not, alone in the world. He put opinion out there as a matter of guiding principle. He was open to debate, to seeing around an issue.

Thomas Strait was simply establishing a level playing field in the eyes of Norman, without ever overtly announcing his intention. He had that nascent gift and worldly comport of a man who could befriend a stranger in the way so few could in a world gone cold and calculated.