Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

I did it again the next day and he and I didn’t bother to hang the quarters but butchered them together on the board table and cut most into jerky strips. Working fast and easy with no words. They had salt. A twenty gallon barrel they brought with them. We soaked the meat in salt brine in buckets. He didn’t miss a trick, which is a thing I made sure not to tell him.

Funny how you can live a whole life waiting and not know it.

She spoke as she lifted a pile of greens from a bowl of pea pods. We sat at the table, in the shade of the big trees.

Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize that when it’s too late. I know now that I loved him more than anything on earth or off of it. More than God, the one in my Episcopal liturgy.

She snapped the early peas, her hair hanging in her face, the backs of her hands blotched purple with blood. Her fingertips worked gingerly as if sore. They rolled a particularly tough pod back up to the knuckles of thumb and forefinger.

He died calling for me, looking desperately around the ward calling my name. Confused. Very early on, before all the networks went down and my friend Joel the doctor who ran the wing called me. Before we knew what this was. My mother was dying and it was too late to fly back home to New York, too late and I made the decision to stay with her and Dad. Joel said he would cremate Tomas and hold the ashes. I was beyond grateful. It was apparent that my mother would not survive. I would fly home in a week or two and drive upstate and spread his ashes in John’s Brook up in the mountains outside Keene Valley where we spent every weekend we could. I worked for the city in public health so I had weekends, you know, rare for an internist. I was never on call except in a public health emergency and that wasn’t often. We stayed in a white clapboard cottage in the village with a view of Noonmark from the sleeping porch. That’s a little Adirondack mountain that looks like a parody of a mountain, very peaky like the Matterhorn but tiny. The little mountain that could. We climbed it often on Saturdays after sleeping in. Trotted happily up the ledgy trail to a rocky top just out of the stunted firs. And in the long evening we’d take the two single gear bikes up the paved road to a stone pothole with a little sluicing waterfall, the water always freezing, and we’d strip and jump in. This was our ritual while we waited for our lives to truly begin and I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don’t know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tentative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience: This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightly. Those times that can fly. That’s the way it seems now looking back. Like those pleasantly exhausted bike rides up the side of a country highway on a warm evening. To a bridge. To a little rootsnaked trail through heavy maples. Where we padded barefoot upstream to a swimming hole. Even getting poison ivy so badly one weekend I missed two days of work. Seems from here that that was the sweetest time ever vouchsafed to two people. Ever. On earth. While we waited for him to finish his degree, for me to have a child, to do the real work of living.

She looked up. We are fools, you know.

Oh fuck. One fucking thing I do know.

It hurts you? To snap the peas?

She shook her head her hair swinging over the bowl not looking up from under.

It does, doesn’t it?

What is hurt? I get a little sore. More like if your hands get dry and you crack a fingertip.

I watched her hands closely after that. Moving the pods deftly up and down the fingers sometimes switching to the third or fourth finger spreading the pain. Working swiftly without complaint.

Don’t, she said. Don’t watch.

Once in passing she told me that she didn’t expect to live past fifty or fifty five. From what she knew of the damage to organs caused by the fever. She also confessed that in an odd way she was happier here than she’d ever been. Even with all the loss. Happier being whatever that was. Than waiting .

I lost count. Of the days. Maybe it was five, maybe nine. Time expanding like an accordion making wheezy earnest music.

The weather dry and warming. Day after day. The creek a little lower, a little less push, less strength in its roar, the falls diminished, its white lash narrowing as it spilled over the stone lip. The creek like a mood. Less exuberant. I woke sometime in the middle of the night and lay in the hammock, wriggled my foot out of the sleeping bag into the chill and found the rough ground with my bare foot and rocked myself back and forth. And watched the stars swim against their mesh of leaves. Like fish nosing a net.

That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.

Ha. Admit it: you don’t have the slightest idea what you are doing, you never ever did. With all the nets in the world, real or unreal. You swam around in a flashing confused school following the tail of the fish in front. Pretty much. Nibbling at whatever passed, in whatever current you swam into.

Even the love of your life felt like luck, like she might vanish in the finning crowd at any moment. Which she did.

What are you doing?

I don’t know.

Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child’s swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.

He put it to me in simple terms. Came at first light to the hammock with a steaming enamel cup. They’d long since run through coffees and teas, now concocted a brew of roasted pine nuts and Mormon tea which was bitter and smoky, not bad. He sat on the sawed stump I used as a side table. Half nod toward it for permission, moved the Glock, lay it on my pack and sat. Handed me the cup. I sat up, straddled the hanging blanket. Turned up the squelch on my brain, on the running current of images. I’d been dreaming of my house again, this time not in a field but my, our, actual house on its street on the west side of town, two blocks from the lake. But it did not look like our house, it was a low brick bunker with chimneys that I knew was a crematorium, and I was standing outside it confused again wondering where I was supposed to sleep, to feed Jasper.

I suppose I’d heard his footsteps over the creek. I woke from the dream confusion into the compounding loss, into the gentle light, but in a world that is all loss that’s like waking into air from air.

What can a fish know of water? Plenty I guess.

I shut the dream down, took the cup. He didn’t look like he ever slept. I mean none of his features ever blurred. They got sharper in anger but they were always sharp.

In a few weeks if it doesn’t rain, which it won’t, it’ll be time to go.

I sat up straighter.

I told you I would leave anytime. Just say the word.

He shook his head.

You’ve been more than hospitable, I said seriously. I think I’m getting fat.