Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

“Everything,” said Gob, figuring only that would be enough to sustain his oath. The Urfeist laughed. He was rolling something between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. When Gob saw that it was his finger he went over and tried to pluck it away from him, not afraid anymore, just full of anger at the thing and at himself for coming up here. “Give it back!” he said. The Urfeist stood on his chair and dangled the finger just out of Gob’s reach. Gob spit on him. This only cheered him further, so Gob bit him on his tough shin, thinking back to the tough leathery black skin of a turkey he and Tomo had once cooked whole over a fire in the orchard clearing. The Urfeist howled and with his great strength tore Gob away from his leg. The Urfeist raised Gob by his shirt until he looked directly into his eyes.

The Claflin gaze was formidable. Gob and Tomo had played a game of staring over the hedge at Alanis Bell’s mama as she lay taking the sun with her Bible, until she’d get up and flee inside her house, saying, “Those eyes! Those eyes!” But the Urfeist did not flinch. He had one blue eye and one brown, the latter set crazy in his head as if he’d stuck it in there only just lately, a replacement, harvested from some brown-eyed child, for the lost original. Gob did not flinch either. He imagined himself a soldier and thought bullets and bayonet stabs at the thing. Slowly, the Urfeist put him down and then considered him at length. They stood there with their eyes locked together for many minutes before the Urfeist said, “I will teach you,” and then beat Gob savagely with a hickory paddle he had been keeping special against the day when he finally took an apprentice.

Gob took to wearing an old black coat of Malden’s. The family thought he’d put it on in mourning, but in fact he was using the too-long sleeves to hide his hand and his bruises. He thought for sure that his mama or Tennie, with their ostensibly preternatural senses, would detect some change in him. But when he came down out of the hills at dawn, and put on Malden’s coat and waited at the kitchen table until the house began to stir around him, no one remarked that he seemed different. They were busy getting ready to go out on another humbugging junket, the last of the season, which ran in time with the war season. There were supplies to be loaded: a tent under which a person could tell fortunes al fresco; salt pork and hardtack diverted from the Army of the Cumberland; bottles and bottles of their own patent medicine — Miss Tennessee’s Magnetio Elixir. Gob watched the bustle but did nothing to help, and no one scolded him for it. Except for his mother, they were all still indulging him on account of Tomo’s death.

Regardless of the indulgence they afforded him, Gob was beginning to think that his family had already forgotten that Tomo was dead. How they went on with their lives! Not as if nothing had happened, but as if nothing had changed. To Gob his brother’s death was as gross and certain a change in the world as an extra moon hanging in the sky. But the Claflins settled back into their old routine as if death had no power to touch them.

That night in October of 1863, there was a celebration in the yard. All day, Anna had brewed the elixir in a cauldron over an open fire. Tennie ladled it into blue bottles, to which Malden glued labels covered with Tennie’s picture. The elixir was mostly whiskey, added after the mixture had cooked, with a hefty dash of laudanum, and spices to make it less palatable — if it was too delicious nobody would believe it medicinal. When it was bottled, and when they were all drunk (except Gob and his mama), the Claflins celebrated the end of their little labor, and the dawn of their journey, the last before winter came and made the business of slaughter impractical, and the business of humbugging unprofitable.

Buck had his banjo out. He plucked while Tennie and Victoria and Utica and Anna danced round the fire, and when they were tired of dancing they lingered outside. Utica reclined in the dirt, muttering Shakespeare to the embers. Buck sat in the darkness beyond the fire smoking and sipping whiskey while Anna leaned against him and mumbled into his beard. Victoria and Tennie sat in dilapidated rockers on the porch, whispering to each other. They ignored Gob, who stood for a while and watched them, then retreated into the orchard. His mama had become acutely intolerant of his grief, and his unbelief offended her. She had abandoned her attempts at reconciliation, and she was cool to him, lording over him her certain knowledge of life beyond life. Tomo was alive and well in the Summerland; Gob’s mama said it did not behoove a son of hers to lack faith in that certainty. Gob hated her for saying this, and hating her, with the pure, furious hatred of a child, made it much easier to take leave of her and the others. Watching them from the orchard, he was whispering goodbyes again. Goodbye mill pond, goodbye mill, goodbye house. The Urfeist had made departure from Homer a condition of his tutelage. Homer was only his summer retreat — he had stayed too long already. If Gob wanted to learn from him, he would have to accompany him to his winter quarters. They would leave not just because the Urfeist found Ohio intolerable in the winter, but because it was no place for him to teach what Gob needed to learn.

Gob was about to go to the grave again and say his last goodbye to Tomo when he heard laughter at the house. It was just one person laughing, at first — it sounded like Tennie — but then the others joined in, and he could hear his mama’s high, clear laugh floating above the rest. Before Tomo died, Gob hadn’t got mad over every little thing. He did not have Tomo’s temper. But he suffered a flare of temper, that night, as bright and hot as the one that had burned against his mama when she afflicted him with her hideous lie, and against the Urfeist when he taunted him with his own finger. Gob ran back through the orchard, towards the remains of the fire and the dark shapes around it. They were still laughing when he got there. His mama and Tennie had come down from the porch. They were standing with the others near the fire, laughing and holding their bellies. Gob stood before them and raised his arms. In his coat, and in the darkness, he looked like some baleful spirit, but they laughed harder when they saw him. It was likely that they were laughing at some remark of Tennie’s, or some crude joke of Buck’s. It seemed to Gob, though, that they were laughing at him, or worse, at Tomo, or worst of all, at Tomo’s death. He ran towards his mama, stopped just before her, and shoved his wounded hand in front of her face.

“Have you forgotten?” he asked them all. “Have you forgotten already?” His mama stopped laughing and reached out to gather him into her arms, but he ducked away. Before he ran off, he made her a promise. “I am dead,” he told her quietly. “I am dead, and you will never see me again. I’m going to the war.”

It was dramatic and delicious, that pronouncement. It made him feel better as nothing else had. It put an excellent feeling in him, how her proud face fell at his words, how it suddenly filled with hurt, as it ought to have for Tomo.

She followed, but the black coat made him difficult to see. Even with his leg, he escaped her. He ran up to the high hills of the Urfeist, thinking, Goodbye, I hate you! at all of them.

His new teacher was waiting outside the cave. “You’re late,” the Urfeist said, and though he had the paddle in his hand, he did not use it. He sat on a rude cart, among a collection of trunks and crates.

“Have you nothing to bring?” the Urfeist asked. Gob said that he didn’t, but he had filled his pockets with dirt from Tomo’s grave. The Urfeist put out his hand and helped Gob up onto the cart. “Away, Paymon,” he said to his horse. They started off down a path that Gob had not noticed on his previous visit, and he half expected it to close up behind them. Gob looked back at the dark cave mouth until they made a turn and it was lost among the trees. “Your happiness is irrelevant, and may even work against your cause,” the Urfeist said, putting his arm around Gob’s neck. “But I think you will like your new home.”