The Solace of Leaving Early (4 page)

*

The Primordial and Consequent Natures of God were necessary steps toward the place he really wanted to go with this sermon, which was the concept of pure possibility. “Think of it,” he wrote in his old-fashioned, rural-Ohio script, “at the outset of every moment of concrescence, there is, in the Primordial mind of God, all the pure possibilities for the outcome of that occasion, moment by moment, day by day, for every actual thing: you, me, the dogs, the government, geraniums. And all God desires is beauty and goodness, the harmonious resolution of contrasts. We are happiest, I believe, and God is certainly happiest, when we allow ourselves to fall into beauty. God is luring us there, even now, breath by breath.” That wasn’t what he really wanted to say. What he was aiming for was nostalgia, heartache, homesickness. Or stranger yet, the heart’s desire to return to someplace it had never been. He thought of his own bizarre tendency to long for other lives; just a few days ago, on the four-lane highway between Hopwood and Haddington, he’d been passed by a decrepit, fumy old Cavalier, packed with people. It was an Hispanic family, the father driving and smoking, the mother looking out the window with a wistful expression on her face. There must have been four children in the backseat, and two more between their parents, and for just a moment, Amos couldn’t swallow, so dearly did he wish to be one of them. This is madness, he had thought, shaking his head. Who would choose such a life, a life free, as it were, of choices? Who would want to be one of six impoverished children living in a foreign and hostile place, squashed into a car with no room to move? And who on earth would want to be those parents? Amos did, and it wasn’t the first time. Certain houses caused the same wave of longing—the look of a particular curtain in an upstairs window, or a bike left on the lawn—and some movies did it, too. Why? he wanted to ask his congregants. “Why does this happen to us? Because we have abandoned an infinite number and variety of pure possibilities, and perhaps they live alongside the choices we did make, immortalized in the cosmic memory. Perhaps there are unknown lives walking alongside ours, those paths we didn’t take, and we reach for them, we ache for them, and don’t know why. We have, none of us, lived our lives as we ought to have, and maybe that’s a good, working definition of sin. God doesn’t care, the angels don’t care, no one is mad at us for our failures. But what agony, to know our better selves, the life we might have lived is there, just out of reach!”

Amos put down his pen, took off his glasses, pressed his eyes. No, no, it was all wrong. Possibility, infinity, beauty—none of those words were right. He was begging for recognition, he was asking his congregation to tell him they were with him, that they understood this particular knot because it is the problem of the world, but he knew he couldn’t ask this way. Using Whitehead was too academic, too circuitous. What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of your ruin?

*

But he didn’t ask. In bed that night, unable to sleep, Amos went over his schedule for the next day: breakfast at the hospital with the Waltzes. Premarital counseling with Joannie Johnson and Jim Cross, seventeen and eighteen years old, respectively, and pregnant, collectively. A quiet lunch at home. An emergency meeting with Beulah Baker on the care and raising of two little girls. The thought of Beulah made him clench one of his fists with apprehension. Alice and her husband, Jack, had attended his church, and Amos had counseled them together and separately, and he imagined, wide awake, his eyes shining against the shadows, the pure possibilities for what he might have said or done, where he went wrong. A chasm, this one. He remembered everything about Alice—the clarity was suffocating. She had blond hair on her arms, and she was able to sit perfectly still for long periods of time, so still that she appeared to be absent. But she wasn’t absent. She was unfathomed, deep and bright. A smile like the northern lights, and gone.

He would rely, finally, on Scripture to begin his sermon, as he usually did. Most people (even in Haddington) believed in the authority of a sacred text, regardless of how corrupt or inappropriate it turned out to be.
Come, let us reason together,
he would say. It was as good a place as any to begin.

Chapter 4

HOW DID SHE DIE?

“I started early, and took my dog,” Langston quoted to Germane as they headed out for their Sunday morning ramble. Germane’s intense civility, as a dog, came about in part, Langston believed, because of his early and repetitious exposure to Emily Dickinson. Other poets had done him no harm, but Emily seemed to understand the metaphorical relationship between women and dogs in a way that elevated Germane’s status beyond the literal, and thus, Langston concluded, he behaved more like the Platonic ideal. He exhibited more Dogness.

Like many towns in the rural Midwest, Haddington seemed most comfortable with two directions, as opposed to the standard four; everything in the town that was not residential lay either east or west on Main Street. Langston and Germane turned right off Chimney Street and onto Main, toward the “downtown.” Haddington had no library, no place to hear live music (with the exception of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, half a mile to the west of town, which was subtitled The Israeli Church and Her Army—no one who attended the tabernacle would reveal the meaning of the name), no bookstore, no restaurant of substance, not even a bar. There was, however, at the west end of town, a little free-standing liquor store that sold cheap beer and grain alcohol mixed with lemonade; a retail outlet called Kountry Kids and Kousins, where one could acquire a wide variety of stuffed rabbits in gingham dresses and wooden little black children for one’s front yard; a convenience store/gas station combination, which also sold a species of Pizza King pizza out of what had formerly been a hydraulic bay; a beauty shop; the Farmers and Mechanics Bank; a rickety building, once the hardware store, where Haddington’s weekly newspaper,
The Crier,
was produced; Lu’s Diner; and a small grocery store wherein all the floors tilted to the west. (Woe to the child who dropped a gumball there.) This comprised the downtown. There were a few more establishments at the east end of Main (a veterinarian, a post office, a junk shop), but they were no different in quality, and if anything, were even less interesting to Langston than Kountry Kids and Kousins, which she had picketed one summer during her undergraduate years for its exceedingly poor taste. Farther east, all the way out of town, was the pesticide plant where her father, Walt Braverman, worked. The plant was called Jo-Gro, after the owner’s wife. The owner took over a series of airplane hangars built on a whim by a survivor of the Second World War, Jed Kelso, who believed he would be able to buy vintage aircraft from the government and open his own tourist attraction. When he died he owned exactly one plane, the crop duster he used on his fields, which Jo-Gro left sitting in front of the plant as an advertisement for its services.

They crossed Main Street and headed north, toward the park. Germane didn’t walk on a leash, so he and Langston were acutely aware of traffic noise, of which there was little. Just after they had safely covered the distance from one side of the street to the other, Langston heard the rumble of a large truck in the distance, and reached down and looped her hand through Germane’s collar. He didn’t chase cars—he didn’t, as far as Langston could tell, misbehave in any way—but she wouldn’t take chances. The truck lumbered up the street, switching laboriously from one gear to another, and she could smell who it was before she even turned and looked. It was Lars Yoder, with a load of pigs headed for auction. As he passed he waved at Langston. She waved back. They had gone to school together, Lars and Langston, and never exchanged a single word. Langston was so confident of this fact that when she met her maker in heaven and was asked: Did you ever exchange a single word with Lars Yoder? she would say, even if her salvation depended upon it, “No, I did not.” And yet he waved every time he saw her. She could only assume that he waved at everyone. The pigs were pushing their noses through the slats in the truck bed, which made Langston so unaccountably sad she thought she would have to sit down on the sidewalk. How is it possible, she thought, that a person can drive a thinking, feeling animal to slaughter and not become less than an animal himself? And what were the pigs searching for, after all, but air and freedom? She considered purchasing a copy of
Charlotte’s Web
for Lars and sending it anonymously through the mail, and at the same time she knew such a gesture would be fruitless. All around her people participated in occupations they neither advocated nor condemned. They simply acted. Her father, for instance, had never expressed any excitement over pesticides, and her mother’s own garden was organic, and yet he drove to work every day and loaded his Jo-Gro truck with toxic chemicals and sprayed them on the fields at various farms, and her mother lived off his paycheck and no one said a word about it. (And this particular irony—her father, her mother, chemicals, money, given the nightmare they had lived through and continued to endure—this one caused Langston’s heart to stutter in its traces, when she was able to think about it at all.) Every time Langston came home she felt this way, both appalled by and curious about the methods her family and fellow townspeople employed to navigate their various discrepancies. The longer she had been away the more obvious their pathologies or blatant fictions seemed, but she found herself unable to speak. She didn’t know what to say.

They wandered through alleys and back streets on their way to the park. Germane ran ahead of her sometimes, but always turned and looked back to make sure Langston could keep up. When they got to the playground she found a stick of the appropriate size and began to throw it; in moments of inner candor Langston was able to admit that there was something in the discourse of “fetch” that Germane did not understand. She picked up the stick. She looked Germane in the eye. She said, with authority, “Fetch!” and threw the stick and Germane tore after it and even skidded on his stomach to catch it, and then threw it in the air and would not return it to her. This happened repeatedly. She ended up having to gather a number of fetchables, and after two years, Langston continued to uphold her end of the conversation and Germane did not.

She primed the pump at the edge of the park and gave Germane a drink. The well water was undoubtedly the retirement community of a thousand different types of parasites, and yet Germane drank it every day and never became ill. Langston hoped he was building up immunities that would see him through a very long life.

After his drink they wandered back toward the downtown, where they made their daily stop at the grocery store. Because of the severe and possibly illegal angle of the floor, the store’s ancient front door didn’t open or close without a fight. She pushed against it for a few seconds without success, and then finally put her hip against the glass and gave it a hard bump.

“Yer gonna go through that glass someday, missy!” Mr. Clarence Burton, the proprietor of the eponymous Grocery Store, said as she walked in. He was standing behind the counter, scratching the top of his bald head with a pencil. Mr. Burton was a stout man who always wore a butcher’s apron that tied at his “waist” and hung down past his knees, although no butchering occurred in his establishment. The closest thing to fresh meat carried there were Dinner Bell sausages. Mr. Burton’s hair, when once he had it, had been something of a phenomenon—it was the color of a ripe cantaloupe and so curly it couldn’t be combed. All that remained of it was a U shape that went from temple to temple, curving around the back of his skull like a long, skinny, orange S.O.S. pad.

Langston pushed the door closed with great effort, and then turned and nodded at him. “Mr. Burton.”

“Miss Braverman. How’s the folks?”

“They’re well. And Mrs. Burton?”

“Ahhhh,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “She’s a tough old heifer.”

“Is she recovering from her hip replacement?”

“I’m a’ tell ya! I wish’t we’d never did it!”

As usual when speaking to Mr. Burton, Langston flinched. “And why would that be?”

“Because used ta I could always know where she’d be! Used ta I could put her in a place and say, ‘Stay right-cheer,’ and she’d not move! And now she’s up as she pleases and movin’ around and what all. I’m a’ have to put a cowbell around her neck so’s I don’t lose her!”

Langston tried to nod pleasantly, but ended up just sighing. She knew as well as anyone that Haddington was no place for feminist militancy (as far as she could tell, the women’s movement was still three decades and four hundred miles away), but for the love of God! A cowbell!

Mr. Burton went back to scratching his head and Langston wandered down the middle aisle toward her favorite section. Germane clicked along behind her. She didn’t know what kept him from sliding westward, but somehow he was able to stay on his feet. They pretended to look interested in the potted meat, bleach, and dry cat food that was the Grocery Store’s stock-in-trade. Langston was trying to work up the nerve to ask Mr. Burton a terrible question, a loathsome inquiry, but found herself unable to form the words. Finally, she picked up the one grand and anomalous product Clarence stocked that she could find nowhere else: Giant Fizzies. Fizzies were two big tablets that looked like Alka-Seltzer and which foamed mightily when dropped in a glass of water. They had an ersatz fruit flavor, but mostly just color. In addition to being delightful, Langston believed they aided one’s digestion, because she always felt better after drinking one.

Mr. Burton rang up her purchase. “That’ll be sixty-seven cents, missy,” he said, as usual. As far as she could tell, Clarence had never told anyone about Langston’s lifelong attachment to the Giant Fizzy.

“Clarence,” she began, “do you ever find yourself in need of . . . what I mean to say is, are you ever tempted to take on a . . .”

“Whatcha fixin’ ta ask me there, Langston, because I’ve got to be gettin’ on home to the missus.”

“I’m asking,” she cleared her throat, “if you need any assistance with—”

“Well God love ya! Thanks for askin’, but no, we get along fine. Mrs. Burton is happy to stay on the couch watchin’ her programs while I’m here at the store. But I’m a’ tell her that you asked.”

Langston nodded, humiliated, and walked out of the store into the bright morning.
That’s it!
she thought, stomping down the street.
That’s the end of that particularly hideous road. I’ll tell Mama when she brings it up, because she’s about to bring it up, I can just feel it, that I cannot possibly get a job, I’m not ready to get a job, there is absolutely
no
suitable employment for a person of my education and my temperament in this town. I will even be able to say that I humbled myself once, dear Lord, I all but
maligned
myself, by asking for a job in Clarence Burton’s Leaning Grocery Store!

These thoughts were followed by the encroaching shadows, the dark visages of her former professors and colleagues witnessing her plight in Haddington, hawking crafts in Kountry Kids or serving pie at the diner, and there was no end to the pain of such an encounter, even in imagination. It was the stuff of literature, Langston very well knew, it was
overrepresented
in literature, this failing in increments. She was no Lily Bart, nor even Bartleby. Haddington was a destination no respectable writer would choose as the fate of a character; it lacked the power of the tenement, the beauty of the gothic ruin, the geometry of the heartless city. She wondered if she were about to become one of them: the hog farmers who waved at everyone while driving live animals to slaughter, or broken-hipped Mrs. Burton, absorbed in daytime television, or Alice Baker-Maloney, laid waste. Or even worse, Langston’s own mother.

*

As she approached her house, which was built at the turn of the century and used to be just a white, wood-sided farmhouse like any other in town, but which her father chose to cover with avocado-colored aluminum siding, highlighted with brown shutters, thus causing it to look, from a distance, like a salad going bad, she noticed her father sitting in the wicker glider on the front porch, drinking a cup of coffee and enjoying the fine Sunday weather. He raised his hand in greeting, then patted the seat next to him, inviting her to sit down.

“Morning, Langston.”

“Hi, Daddy.”

He was no Atticus Finch, her father. Painfully shy and hard of hearing, Walt had recently started wearing two little flesh-toned hearing aids that sent Langston into spasms of heartache. She didn’t know why. He was handsome in a hardworking, laconic, salt-and-pepper sort of way. Something about him was even a bit elegant (he would probably disagree); his finely shaped hands and black eyebrows, the straightness of his nose, his wide mouth, added up to make him look different from the other men in town. All Langston’s life he wore essentially the same clothes, first at the grain elevator (gone now), and then at Jo-Gro: a red shirt with blue trim (the sleeve length varied by season), his name sewn over the left pocket, and blue pants. Even after a shower he seemed to retain some of the dust of the shelled corn, and a certain chemical sheen.

“Is Mom still at church?” Langston asked, sitting down.

“She’ll be home directly.”

The glider eek-eeked back and forth on its track. Walt pushed them with his dusty work boots.

“It’s a shame about Alice Baker,” Langston said.

“Sure is.”

They glided.

“You hear how she died?” Walt asked, looking a little to his left, away from Langston, shyly.

“No. I assume some wasting cancer. It seems to be how everyone dies these days.”

“That’s not—”

“I know she’s dead; I don’t feel compelled to know the details. Why explore the nature of her wound? As Mercutio said, ‘It will suffice.’ I paraphrase.”

“Hmmmm.”

“I’ve remembered a lot more about her in the past two days,” Langston said. “Like how she was one of the first girls in our class not to have a dad. I’m sure it’s quite common, now.”

“He died.”

“I remember. We were in the second grade and our teacher said he’d been in an accident. Alice wasn’t at school for a week, and then she came back and I don’t . . . I don’t know what happened after that.”