Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

I was perfecting my soar and leap every evening as the sky deepened into night. All the daytime machinery of the nearby construction lay still, and the sawing scherzo legs of crickets began their summer repetitions — like the feisty strings in a piece by Philip Glass. The cicadas throbbed and shook with the rattle of tambourines, the peepers trilled — they all came together in a choral way. Sometimes there was the braying of a lone and distant goose. I would head toward the far woodlot, toward a spot where there was bluegrass with an overlay of rye, something that would have made a perfect soccer field. I would run toward that grass and back, feeling the slight takeoff of my wings, a sudden if momentary weightlessness. The reddening sumacs on the other side of the woodlot were fruiting early this year, and I would sometimes run in their direction as well. If Blot barked too excitedly or nipped at my heels or jumped at my wings, I ran him back to the house and would then return to the fields on my own, keeping to the narrow dirt rows between the baby greens and the kale. I ran and banked the turns and ran again, feeling myself float just lightly above the earth.

And then one evening, the air velvety and vibrating with tree frogs, the occasional bass of a courting bull in the pond thickening the song, the sturdy sky an infinitude of summer stars — what wishing! if one wanted to wish; what guiding of ships! if one were steering one! — there they both were: Reynaldo and Robert. I stopped, my skin hot from running. They were standing side by side at the end of the field, Robert with his yoga mat, Reynaldo with his prayer mat. Each had a cell phone and a volume of poems by Rumi. Their stillness, the fact that as apparitions they seemed to recede and keep the same distance from me always no matter how I tried to close it, and that they didn’t say a word before they turned and walked away, melting into the dark, though the sky remained mapped and spangled with constellations, was an omen. Plus they came again the next night in the exact same way, neither vaporous nor cadaverous, but wordless and turning and walking away, this time with a little bruised-up boy who I realized instantly in the way of visions was Gabriel Thornwood-Brink: this made me understand that they were unfindably dead, all of them, and that now the really useful things of life, like stars, would become incomprehensible decoration.

I was not there when the two military officers drove up in their military van to my parents’ door to announce my brother’s death, though years later I met someone who had done that kind of work for a living. “It’s very hard and very weird,” he said. “It was the strangest job I ever had. Although completely draped in duty, it was an exercise of total cluelessness, which, for someone who has spent any time in the military, is saying a lot.”

It was unclear how and why Robert’s death had occurred so suddenly, so soon, so instantaneously — eight weeks of boot camp had been hurried along and they had been shipped quickly overseas, as the all-volunteer army was at the beginning of its being spread too thin. They had only just landed someplace near Helmand Province; they had been there for less than three weeks; there was a BBIED but no QRD, which were all in TK or J-bad along with all the MREs; they were equipped with M4s and stray AKs but even a routine land-mine sweep can go awry. The letter said something different than the person on the phone. In appreciation of our loss a check for twelve thousand dollars came right away, express mail, with Keltjin spelled wrong.

The wailing of my mother is not to be recounted. A summer of having taken to her bed had not strengthened her for his death at all but seemed instead to have cut a groove for the mourning of it. One night she came downstairs simply to shout at my father. “We never should have named him after you! Jews understand that. It’s bad luck! Why did you want that so much?”

“I thought you meant it was bad luck for me!” my father shouted back. “And I didn’t mind that. I didn’t care about some old world hocus-pocus.”

“Well, look at that old world hocus-pocus now!” she cried, then rushed back upstairs. My father hadn’t been there when the officers had come, and he, too, had gone into a state of stunned silence, though he did say heatedly, “I’m going to make some phone calls.” Though I’m not sure he ever made enough to satisfy himself. A demining expedition. An ambushed foot patrol. How about a whack on the head with a backhoe? Fractured by a forklift? The boys stayed too long in the nighttime mountains even as the monkeys screeched their warnings. According to the PL or the CO. A BBIED. There was apparently a brand-new way to die: by cell phone. And there was supposed to have been a quick-recovery deployment by an OEF convoy. But the DU didn’t have the ECDs up and running. No one actually proposed the possibility of Robert’s own fright and ineptitude or of “friendly fire,” but the jumble of alternative explanations raised suspicions. My father, the NOK, was spoken to incessantly in acronyms and gruesome euphemism. “KIA by Talib RPGs,” they said.

“Well, I want a real explanation — ASAP!” my father cried in a voice of heat and ice. “What you mean is that his leg is in a tree somewhere?” Another officer had come to sit in our living room to explain things further.

“Actually,” said this uniformed man, “his leg was obliterated. His hand was in a tree. It was very high up. We had to leave it.”

——

My father did not lie in bed in the mornings the way my mother did, but busied himself in the fields without me. “You should rest,” I said to him.

But he said, “I can’t lie there and just think. It’s too scary to lie there and just think.” Sometimes he spent the days just chopping wood.

My mother covered all the mirrors in the house with pillowcases and scarves. The mirrors in the flowerbeds she covered with sheets.

Robert’s body was flown home to Chicago and from there two men drove it the five hours north to the funeral home in a Hummer, as if here in Dellacrosse even the dead might need the protection of such a vehicle, though the body did require a refrigeration unit and so perhaps this was why. The driver, on greeting my father, gave him my brother’s dog tags, which my father took like they were a fistful of change, in one hand, not looking.

The funeral, at a former Lutheran church Robert himself had never been to — one that was now Unitarian, for people who felt that God should be elected democratically and after a long campaign — seemed dominated by his friends. Chuck Buzlocki. Ken Kornblach. Cooper Dunka. They stood up, gearhead after gearhead, and you had to hand it to them: they had one boring story after another about Gunny, which moved them all to both laughter and tears. We his family sat startled and mute as if we did not know any of them, including the person they were talking about. Yet hadn’t we just seen all these boys at graduation? Listening to them, I realized why Robert’s grades had been so bad.

The minister made only the vaguest mention of God, in terms that made God seem a design and a force but a little indifferent to our fates and therefore unworshippable. Like a railway system. It could get you where you were going, wherever that was. A transit authority! But it wouldn’t counter your own devotion with love. Here and there in the church sanctuary there seemed to be a prayer, but each sat in my ears nonsensically.

Our father who art a heathen

Hollow be thigh name.

Thigh king is dumb

Thigh will is dun

on earth as it is

at birth.

I had nothing against prayer. Those who felt it was wishful muttering perhaps had less to wish for. Religion, I could now see, without a single college course helping me out, was designed for those enduring the death of their sweet children. And when children grew stronger and died less, and were in fact less sweet, religion faded away. When children began to sweeten and die again, it returned.