Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (28 page)

At night sometimes I’d see Jody leave. He would walk beneath my window, where I learned to watch for him or for my father or for them both. He would walk beneath my window, quietly, along the side of the house, his baseball cap turning toward the kitchen window and, as he passed the back porch, the back door. He’d traipse along the short hillside down to the tracks, then head off for downtown. Maybe my father had given him money. Maybe he’d go out to hit the town, paint it red. He came back one night singing something loud and Irish, an eyes-smiling sort of song, sang all the way up the tracks and on up into the yard. Across the lawns I saw a neighbor’s light come on, old Mrs. Welch’s drapes opening just as he disappeared inside the outdoor basement, her kerchiefed head with rabbit ears twisting in her window — but she wouldn’t be able to see him, not with her light turned on — you had to look outside with your lights off, I knew this, having looked outside so many nights and having seen so much. And there was a fight then between my parents, in their bedroom, my father leaving that room with a flashlight, muttering and going down the stairs, my mother hissing to him from the top of the staircase, and then, beneath my window, finally, the basement door opening, and outside my room, my mother’s feet sweeping into my bedroom, quietly, so as not to wake me, or so she thought (I was lying in my bed by then, barely breathing). She stood in the window where I had so often stood looking down, and she may or may not have seen him step inside that basement. Then the sound, in the night, of two men murmuring, voices, a slap — my mother putting an ear close to the window.

At night sometimes I’d see him leave. I told you that. And that night, very late, pretty near dawn — I could see the morning star already out my window, on the violet horizon — he slunk away from the basement for what would be the last time, not bothering to check the kitchen window as he passed, and headed away from town, once he got to the tracks, instead of downtown for the beer gardens. My father insisted to my mother that she had been hearing things — there had been no singing, he insisted — and that all there was involved in all this was a rabid ’possum. But I saw her the next day talking to Mrs. Welch by her back door, Mrs. Welch pointing over to our basement. Later, I asked my father over breakfast what happened to Jody. Behind his paper he told me he’d never heard that name before, that he had no idea who I meant. The paper did not move; he studied sports figures the rest of the morning; I know because I waited, and when I left the room, I heard the paper fall to the table.

Except for asking my father about him that one time, I kept my knowledge of Jody to myself. My brothers may have come upon him, for all I knew. Sometimes I played with my brothers down in the field of horseweed, as I have said, but often I preferred to be alone and to go exploring. There was what we called back then an old drunk hole down by the railroad tracks below the house, maybe a hundred feet away — a place where drunks could go and sleep off their cheap wine. At the height of summer once, when the honeysuckle vines rioted across the drunkards’ hiding place, covering up nearly everything — the trees there, the broken fence — I journeyed inside the place to study the plant life. I was digging moss up to take back home and plant in the yard, when beside me, from beneath the vines, a sleeping drunk arose and reached for me. I got a good look at the man — old, gray, red-faced — and ran home and told my father (my mother was away just then). He asked me what the man looked like, and I asked him what did he mean. How old was he, my father asked, and I could tell he was thinking of going down there himself, to investigate.

When I was very small, once — once is all I remember of this — my father had me go for a drive with him. He stopped at a store along the road, finally, where a little boy played outside. Two men watched the boy play, one perhaps being the boy’s father. He told me, my father, to stay inside the car but that I should act friendly very soon, to look happy when he talked to the men on the porch and pointed my way, where I would be smiling inside the car. And here is what I could hear him telling them: that I was a lonely little boy who had no boys his age living nearby, and that we drove the countryside looking for playmates for me — a lame story now perhaps, but back then, out in the country, it would fly.

We drove the boy up a dirt road far out in the woods, me and my father. He had packed a lunch for us, sandwiches, soda, candy, wrapped in a paper bag that he grabbed quickly, when the road finally stopped, and he told me to wait for them. From the backseat of the car I watched them, hand in hand, disappear into the dark woods. I waited for what seemed like a long, long time. When they returned, my father was practically dragging the boy, who was crying. My father kept telling him, as he loaded him into the front seat, that it was I who had hurt him — me — that I had come along in the dark woods like an Indian and surprised the boy. He stood up in the seat in front of me and began throwing feeble punches my way, and my father shoved him down into the seat and yelled at him to stop crying. He tossed the bag into the backseat beside me; it was empty, crumpled. We drove the boy back to the country store and then sped away.

He took me to carnivals, too, and would buy me a fistful of tickets and make me ride the rides while he wandered the grounds. He’d meet me at the gates when the tickets were gone. He’d rehearse me on the ride back home, in the car, telling me that he had watched me on every ride, standing alongside the other parents, that he had even ridden the Ferris wheel with me. You can see everything from up there, he’d say. What did we see, I asked. The people, he’d say. Popcorn concessions. Candy apples, cotton candy. I see, I said. It’s important, he said, that you be able to see it. I can, I said. So how was the tilt-a-whirl, he’d say as we whirled into our driveway. It was fun, I said. And where was I, he asked. Right down in front watching, I said, by the man who worked the gears. That’s right, he said. Now tell your mom — and I ran inside the house, eager to tell his stories.

That summer the boy was staying in the basement, I used to wonder what might have happened if my father had gone in there one night and found him gone. Maybe this is why Jody eventually left that plush abode, because he was not available for one of my father’s late-night swims. My father would take out the trash, say — he would bag it up in the kitchen, walk across the tiles and into the doorway of the inner basement, his hands clutching the bag, tightening on it. He’d be driven now, moving faster, out the door of the basement to that little alcove where he’d take the lid off that trash can. Upstairs his kids’d be asleep, he’d think, his wife watching TV — a commercial’d be on, the music drifting out the window to where he’d be standing before the gaping hole of the trash can. He’d let the bag drop, loudly, into the can, announcing to the neighbors that all he was doing was taking out the garbage. And then he’d look around, out there in the night, and walk quietly across the planks into the basement. Hey, he’d call out to the small room there in back. But there’d be nothing there but darkness.

Annie Dillard

 

ANNIE DILLARD
has written eleven books, including
The Maytrees
,
An American Childhood
, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
.

 

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile in water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton — once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?

I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.

Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray’s Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle’s nonchalance. Now, in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp.

This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. There’s a 55 mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks — in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs.

So. I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond’s shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep blue body of sky. The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around — and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.

Weasel! I’d never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard’s; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs’ worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn’t see, any more than you see a window.

The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So.

He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don’t remember what shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel’s brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation, the careening splashdown into real life and the urgent current of instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit with pleadings, but he didn’t return.

Please do not tell me about “approach-avoidance conflicts.” I tell you I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes — but the weasel and I both plugged into another tape simultaneously, for a sweet and shocking time. Can I help it if it was a blank?

What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He won’t say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown.

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular — shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands? — but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.