Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

Gob was lonely for the first time in his life, and hoped being near Tomo’s body would rid him of this new feeling. He sat on a wooden chair near the flat rock in the orchard where they had sometimes laid out their dinner, and that now was Tomo’s headstone. Gob felt no less lonely for sitting there, but though it made him sad to sit and consider how his brother’s body lay beneath the ground suffering the abuse of worms, there was no place else he felt comfortable. He held in his fist the letter Tomo had written but not mailed out of Secessia, which he’d read and reread, torn up and reassembled with paste and thread, buried and retrieved.

The family was kind to him, each in their own way, after Tomo’s body came back from the war, escorted by a pair of soldiers who told that a generous Rebel general had arranged for the body to return to Homer. Anna fussed over Gob’s wound; it was she who saved him from death. Children died from such terrible bone breaks. She set the leg and bound it up with all sorts of sweet-smelling herbs. Gob, drunk on her medicines, had a sudden fear she was making him delicious for cooking. “Mama,” he cried out, “is she going to eat me up?”

Tennie came out to the grave, bearing a sunflower, which she laid against the stone. She told him Tomo was not in the Summerland. None of her spirit friends there knew him. But that did not mean he wouldn’t go there eventually, and pass from there to the living earth with great ease. “My dear child,” she said, “there is no death.” Gob said nothing. He did not believe her.

“What are you doing here?” Utica wanted to know when she came out to visit him. It was night. Gob had been all day in the orchard. “Do you think he’ll come out of the grave if you sit here and stare? Do you think he’ll come down from Heaven? Well, he won’t.” Utica was a doubter when she was sober. Drunk, she was susceptible to rage against such opinions as were held by most of her family. “A body don’t return from where he’s gone, my little friend.” She’d had a beau, a cooper in Brandon, where Claflins were less infamous, but cholera had killed him, and he had not returned to her when she pleaded, alone or with her sisters. “You are a dreary, moping thing,” she said. “They die. What do you want to do? Spend all the rest of your days here? Do you want to crawl into the grave with him? You make me nervous. Do you realize how you make me nervous?” Utica nudged Gob from his chair and said, “A gentleman always makes room for a lady.” Without complaint Gob sat on a nearby stump. Utica passed him her glass of whiskey.

The glass was chipped, so Gob cut his lip as he drank, but found the taste of blood and whiskey pleasant. Utica pulled a bottle out of her dress and drank with him. “How your mama would shriek if she saw you with whiskey!” she said, and then tittered. She got up and walked away, but soon returned with a veil. She stood on the chair with the veil over her head, waving her bottle and reciting all the female lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She stepped down and twirled around the grave, looking ghostly and magical. Gob watched his aunt spin and shout, but said nothing, and when she finished and bowed, he did not applaud. Her swirling white veil reminded him of Alanis Bell, who never came to visit him at Tomo’s grave.

“Dreary boy,” Utica said, but not without some affection, and she refilled his glass before she walked off into the trees, idly waving the veil behind her. Gob drank his whiskey and then cupped his hand before his mouth to smell it on his breath, thinking of his father.

The whiskey put into his head the seemingly excellent idea of kneeling on his brother’s grave and digging in the dirt. He was not sure if he was digging to rescue Tomo from the grave or to make a home in it for himself. He grabbed fistfuls of dirt with his left hand and threw them over his shoulder. With his right he dug with the glass. He had only made a shallow Gob-shaped depression when he grew tired, but he lay down in that and pressed his eyes against the fresh earth. It smelled of old apples. Something that might have been a piece of turkey bone pressed against his cheek. Something else brushed against his neck, crawled along his skin for a few inches, and then turned away. All he saw was darkness. When he sat by the grave and closed his eyes, he sometimes got the feeling that Tomo was standing behind him, reaching out a hand to touch his shoulder, but every time Gob turned around there was only empty space. Now as he nestled atop the grave there was not even that feeling, but he pleaded anyway for Tomo to step out of the darkness before his eyes. Darkness could hide anything. Why wouldn’t it hide his brother? Doors could conceal anything. He had opened and closed his bedroom door at the house, hoping each time to find Tomo on the other side. Once it had revealed his mama, who had creeped upstairs to try and reconcile with him. He shut the door in her face.

He imagined Tomo staring up at him now with his one good dead eye. It was dried and rheumy when Gob peeped under the coffin lid at the funeral, shriveled like a very old grape. Gob stared back, conjuring Tomo’s supine dead image, coloring him with an additional two weeks of decay. If he kept digging, he would eventually be able to reach out his hand to touch the dead flesh. It was just the few feet of earth and a few inches of wood separating them. Or it was just a few feet of earth and whatever walls God might throw up between the living and the dead. But if the earth would yield to a human hand, why not those other walls? “I will bring you back,” Gob swore to his brother, speaking into the dirt so he soiled his tongue and his teeth. And not just as a spirit like their lying mama said she saw. He would somehow bring his brother back into living flesh. He would find a way to do that, because his brother would do the same for him, and because he was to blame for Tomo’s death — he felt sure Tomo would not have been killed if he’d gone with him. This was Gob’s conviction: that he had killed his brother with his fear as surely as the Rebel had with his bullet. The prospect of living a life without Tomo was no less impossible than the prospect of somehow turning him from a rotten horror to a warm living boy, and if fate had determined that he must do one or the other, he would much prefer to do the latter. “I will bring you back,” he said again, and the words were a great comfort to him, because he could only reconcile himself to his brother’s death by thinking it temporary. Feeling at peace, Gob snuggled deeper into the dirt, and listened as a gust of wind came into the orchard, shaking the trees and knocking fruit to the ground. There was another noise — he could hear it if he listened very, very hard, a noise like a giant softly breathing, or like the ocean, which he remembered from his distant childhood in San Francisco. The noise rose and fell, lulling him to sleep.

Gob’s ignorance necessitated a teacher, but who could teach him how to defeat death? He thought of Miss Maggs, simply because she was a teacher, but he was sure she could only teach him how to be bitter and ugly and how to be a bad shot with a book. His mama might have been a candidate if she hadn’t been such a shameless liar. He did not trust her any longer, and if she could not even bring Tomo’s spirit to talk to him how could she put life back in his flesh? For the same reason, Aunt Tennie was not suitable. Utica had no knowledge he needed. Grandpa Buck was not stupid, but Gob needed no instruction on how to cheat people. Uncle Malden was as dumb as he was smelly. Grandma Anna had only small power, and anything he might learn from her he could learn from her teacher. So Gob turned on his heel, away from Homer town, and he walked through the orchard and up the high hill, then into the woods beyond that, up into the highest hills where the Urfeist lived. It was a simple decision; there was only one person in his whole world from whom he had any hope of even beginning to learn what he must. But, though it seemed simple and right to take the trip into the highest hills, he felt dizzy and weak and cowardly as he shuffled along under the dark trees. He knew very well what the Urfeist took from the children he captured. Weighed against his brother’s life, it seemed a small thing. And it made great sense to him that he should have to do something fearful to undo the consequences of his fear.