T. Boyle - World's End

It was late September, the morning warm and hazy, the light held out to him in a bundle above the treetops. He looked up into the web of branches that fell back from the windshield and saw that the maples had turned, and though it was early yet, he could detect the faint caustic odor of burning leaves on the air. When he’d had his accident, now almost two months ago, he’d stopped shaving, and as he drove, he stroked the patchy stubble that had sprouted beneath his nose and along the plane of his sideburns. He was dressed in white, like a guru or Paschal Lamb, wearing the Nehru shirt and cotton bells Jessica had chosen for his wedding ensemble. His hair, after the fashion of the day, trailed down his neck. He wore the familiar Dingo boots, and for color and good luck both, he’d slipped on a belt that his soulful, sorrowful mother had braided from pink and blue plastic lanyards when she was a girl at summer camp.

He negotiated the hill down from the road without much trouble — he was getting used to the prosthesis in the way he’d got used to his first pair of skates, and he’d been lifting weights to strengthen the long muscles of his thighs for added support. It wasn’t his leg that bothered him, it was his head. The cooking sherry had been a mistake, no doubt about it. As he wound his way down the trail that roughly followed the course of the old road, sidestepping the odd cow pie, he found himself envying Tom Crane, who’d left after two beers, pleading pronubial responsibilities. He paused for a moment in the mist-shrouded meadow that gave on to the creek, thinking Here was the stage, and there the parking lot, then turned and clumped over the footbridge, startling the swallows that nested beneath it. He was going to be married. Here. Here of all places. The choice of it, he understood, hadn’t been so whimsical as he might have led himself to believe.

Walter was climbing the steep trail up from Van Wart Creek, the nervous little tributary known as Blood Creek on his left, Tom Crane’s beehives and the still-burgeoning vegetable patch with its fat zucchini, pumpkins and late tomato on his right, when he ran across the first of the uninvited guests. Her back was to him, the heavy stockings were rolled down over the tops of her shoes and he could see the veins standing out in her legs. He recognized her with the first skip of his heart. She was bent over, searching for something — or no, she was pulling weeds, her knees stiff and her big backside waving in the breeze like a target at the fair. He remembered the day he’d found that target so irresistible and pelted her with dirt clods as she stooped over the tulip bed out front of the house in Verplanck, and he remembered the retribution that had followed when his grandfather came home from his nets and introduced him to the bitter end of an old ship’s halyard. Pulling weeds. It was just like her. He remembered how each hairy taproot or cluster of crabgrass would merit an incantation in the Low Dutch that people had forgotten a century before, as she wished it on the swinish Mrs. Collins across the street or on Nettie Nysen, the witch who’d forced her to disconnect the phone. In the spring, she buried the frozen deadman of a crab — eyestalks and brain — with each new packet of seed. “Gram,” he said, and she whirled around as if he’d startled her.

So what if he had? — he was angry. He thought he was done with all this, thought he’d left the dreams and visions in the hospital or along the road, thought the sacrifice of a foot was enough. But he was wrong.

She was smiling now, fat and glowing with the health of the indiscriminate eater, the woman who’d breakfasted every morning of her life on kippered herring, jelly doughnuts and sugared coffee as thick and black as motor oil. “Walter,” she murmured in her crackling voice, “I just wanted to wish you the best on your wedding day.” And then, with all the finesse of a backyard gossip: “So how’s the foot?”

The foot? Suddenly he wanted to scream at her: Did you have anything to do with that? Did you? But he was staring at the stump of a tree taken down by Jeremy Mohonk on his release from prison in 1946. His grandmother was gone. More history. All at once he felt weary. Nostalgia filled him, wine turned to vinegar, and the birds railed at him from the trees that crowded in on him like a mob. He’d tried to put it all out of his mind, tried to remember that he hated his father and didn’t give a damn where he was, that he had a life and being of his own that transcended that of the abandoned boy, the motherless boy, the boy who’d grown up among strangers. He’d tried to concentrate on Jessica, on the union that would redeem him and make him whole. And now here it was again: more history.

He plodded up the hill and his incorporeal grandmother was whispering in his ear, retelling one of his favorite stories — one he liked better than the betrayal of Minewa or the hoodwinking of Sachoes — the story of his parents’ wedding. What did they wear? he would ask her. What was my mother like? Tell me about the lake.

Your mother was like royalty, she told him. And your father was the handsomest man in the county. An athlete, a prankster, full of jokes and high spirits. He was married in his uniform, with the medals on his chest and the sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder. Your mother was an Alving. Swedish. Her father was Magnus Alving, the architect — he drew up the plans for the free school in the Colony, did you know that? — and her mother was of Dutch descent, an Opdycke. She wore her mother’s gown — peau de soie, trimmed with seed pearls and Madeira lace. Her hair was up and she was wearing white heels like she just stepped out of a fairy tale. They held the ceremony outdoors, on the beach at Kitchawank Lake, though it was late in the year and turning cold, and when the justice said “You may kiss the bride” and your father took your mother in his arms, all the geese around the lake started honking and the fish threw themselves up on shore like pieces of tinfoil. Hesh was best man.

He’d almost reached the top of the hill when another voice began to intrude on his consciousness. He looked up. There before him, pale, bowlegged and naked as a wood sprite, stood Tom Crane. The saint of the forest clutched a bottle of baby shampoo in one hand, and in the other, a towel as stiff as a sheet of cardboard. He was grinning and saying something about getting cold feet, but Walter couldn’t quite make it out, the buzz of his grandmother’s voice murmuring in his ears still. Walter, Walter, she said, her voice dolorous and fading now, don’t blame him. He loved her. He did. It’s just that in his heart … he loved his country … more. …

“Hey, Walter — Van — snap out of it.” The naked saint was two feet from him now, peering into his eyes as if into the far end of a telescope. “You still zonked from last night or what?”

He was. Yes. That was it. He focused on Tom Crane for the first time and saw that the saint’s skinny frame was maculated with boils, blemishes and insect bites. Tom was scratching his beard. His ribs were slats in a fence, his feet so white and long and flat they might have been molded of dough that wouldn’t rise. His lips were moving now and he was saying something about waking up, a dip in the creek and hot coffee and bourbon up at the shack. Walter allowed himself to be led back down the hill, across the footbridge and into the ferns at water’s edge.

The stream was low this time of year, but the saint of the forest, looking to his toilet, had dammed it up under the bridge — the resulting pool was about as deep as a bathtub and three times as wide. Pausing only to wedge his towel in the crotch of a tree, Tom stepped into the pool, exposing the flat pale nates that hadn’t felt the embrace of cotton briefs since his mother had stopped doing his laundry when he went off to Cornell four years earlier. He eased himself into the creek like a mutant water strider, ass first, hooting with the shock of it.