Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

“Help me,” Walt said.

IT WAS TIME TO RUN OFF TO THE WAR: THEY’D BEEN MARKING off their growth against a crooked doorjamb, and very recently had reached a notch representing a height Tomo figured suitable for soldier boys. Tomo thought they could pass for fifteen, and if they couldn’t fight they could at least be company musicians. They both had bugles, though Gob was not so fine a bugler as Tomo. Gob knew the calls, but they came out like the bleating of an anxious sheep. It would do, Tomo said of Gob’s playing. It was Tomo’s firm belief that the whole army was desperate for musicians.

Tomo dragged Gob from their bed, a square of ticking stuffed with dried corn husks. They slept on it with one blanket and no pillow but each other’s back. Gob said, “Don’t get rough. I’m rising.” But he lay there a few moments more.

“I’ll kick you,” said Tomo. Gob rose to his knees, then to his feet. He’d gone to sleep in his clothes; he had only to put on his shoes to be ready. Tomo had procured new Jefferson bootees for them the previous summer and put them aside for this night.

Gob stood on the bed. “Goodbye room,” he said, taking in one last look at the place he and Tomo had lived almost all their life. It was a small room, not more than three times larger than their bed. The rough pine floor yielded splinters endlessly. The ceiling was stained with candle smoke. “Goodbye bed,” said Gob. “Goodbye books.” They did not have many books, but Gob loved them all. He ran from the bed, knelt by a little stack of books that leaned against the far wall, near the wardrobe, and picked one up.

“We got no room for books,” said Tomo, standing by the open window, though Gob knew he had Hardee’s Tactics crammed in his own bag in the orchard.

“Just one more,” said Gob, but he only touched the books, and did not pick one up. He already had a complete works of Shakespeare in his knapsack, the gift of the town schoolmarm, who usually threw fruit at them when they put their heads in her window and looked in on the schoolroom where they were not welcome, but sometimes, if they made her angry enough, threw books. Some of their library came to them by way of Miss Maggs’s furious hand; most came from their mama.

“Goodbye house,” said Tomo in the birch tree that grew close up against their window, stepping carefully down from branch to branch. Gob followed him slowly, not less nimble but more fearful. “Goodbye mill. Goodbye barn. Goodbye Mr. Split-foot.” Mr. Splitfoot was their grandpa Buck’s Appaloosa. Tomo waved to the barn as they passed it.

“Goodbye orchard,” Gob said softly as they walked among apple and pear trees that yielded abundant fruit every autumn.

They walked to a clearing that industrious Tomo had made himself, hacking away to make a little round place among the trees. Their knapsacks were hidden in the clearing, behind a wall they’d built of mud and broken bricks. Scarecrow Confederates — props for games — looked real where they crouched behind the wall. Gob half expected one to issue a dry wooden challenge at them as he approached. Gob helped his brother into his knapsack, then shrugged into his own while Tomo lifted it onto his back.

“It’s burdensome,” Gob said, not precisely complaining, just noting the fact. In his sack he carried the book; three candles; an extra shirt; two pairs of drawers; wool socks stolen from Buck (their grandma made them with hexes against wetness and cold knitted into the fabric); a pocketknife; a tin plate; a little fork and a big spoon; and a wedge of fatback half the size of his head, wrapped in a piece of waxed paper. A canteen slung from a strap on the sack banged against his chest as he walked. His bugle swung from a strap on the other side.

“Like it ought to be,” said Tomo. Gob knew his brother’s pack was just as heavy. Tomo was outfitted just like Gob, except he had two pair of their grandma’s magic socks, and a knife upon whose bone handle were carved scenes from the life of Andrew Jackson. He also carried all their money, ten dollars held back last summer from their humbug earnings.

“Goodbye Anna,” said Tomo. They paused in front of the house. “Goodbye Aunt Tennie. Goodbye Uncle Malden. Goodbye Aunt Utica. Goodbye Mama. And goodbye Buck, God damn you straight to hell.”

Gob looked at the silent house. Darkness made it look less like a shack, and hid the flaking paint and the sagging rails on the porch. The house sat on a hill above the town. Another hill rose behind the orchard, and beyond that hill rose wooded hills where lived a mad hedge wizard called the Urfeist. It was rumored that he was incredibly ancient and withered, that he was a contemporary of General Washington, that he was an Indian half-breed, or the spawn of an animal. It was known for a fact that he had an appetite for children; those foolish enough to wander into his domain returned with their voices stilled by horror and the littlest fingers of their left hands missing. And it was known that people sometimes went to bargain with him, and received power great or small depending on what they offered up to him, and on the quality of their ambition. Grandma Anna had been to see him. She lacked a finger and had small witch’s power in accord with her petty desire; she wanted one day to ride around in her very own carriage.

The boys turned away from the house and walked down the east side of the lower hill. They would catch the train where it ran down from Brandon, the next-nearest town. “Goodbye, Mama,” Gob whispered. They had not taken twelve steps when he saw a flash of white darting among a copse of hemlocks at the foot of the hill. He ran off immediately to investigate.

“Where are you going?” Tomo called after him. “We got to hurry. We’ll miss the train.”

Gob stopped and turned around. “I saw a boogly!” he said, and ran again down the hill, tripping in his haste but rolling immediately to his feet and back into his run. Soon he’d entered the deeper dark under the trees. He thought that darting white shape was a spirit. It was his fondest wish to see one. The family business was fortune-telling; every summer they went out in a garish wagon to comfort and fleece those bereaved by the war. Gob and Tomo were frauds. In dim rented rooms they spun out sweet stories for grieving wives, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and lovers. Whatever the loss, they would deny it, whether by claiming it had not happened at all (He is alive!) or else by claiming that the loss was meaningless (The dead are not dead — your beloved is smiling on you from his spirit abode!). But Gob and Tomo had never seen a spirit, or heard spirit music, or moved a planchette except with their mundane fingers.

Their mama, who did see spirits, said that they would see as she did, one day. “When you are men,” she said. “When you are grown up.” Tomo was a doubter — the dead, to his mind, were dead. He would believe in spirits when he saw one for himself, and that would be never. Gob was more inclined to believe. He would hold his mama’s hand and will her power into him when she was in a trance. Always he saw nothing. She’d come back to her senses and kiss him on the head. “Ah, be patient, my little man,” she’d say. But he would rather talk to famous dead personages than be patient. His mama talked with Josephine, with Bonaparte, with an ancient Greek who would not reveal his name. Gob’s imagination was always filling empty air with shining spirit bodies — his three dead aunts, Augustus Caesar, Marie Antoinette bouncing her head like a ball. He knew they were not real, but hoped with a full heart that one day they would be. As he ran past the tree trunks he imagined the spirit he was chasing to be General Jackson, still quite upset after his recent death at Chancellorsville. A hideous warbling noise assaulted Gob’s ears. Restless spirit! he thought. Miserable spirit, to complain so horribly!