Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

One night, the air still heavy with heat and the boys tossing in sleep on the sofa in front of the steel-caged floor fan, the phone rings. It’s a rare enough event in any week, and so startling at this hour that Delia almost sears her scalp with the pressing comb. David answers. “Yes? Who? Operator. Ah! Hello, William.”

She’s on her feet. Her father, who hates the telephone. Who believes the instrument is driving people schizophrenic. Who makes his wife place all his calls. Who doesn’t believe in long distance. She crosses to David in two steps, hand out for the receiver, while her husband lapses into mumbled German. She takes the phone, and far away, tinny in her ear, her father tells her Charlie is dead. Killed in the Pacific. “On a coral atoll.” Her father wanders. “Eniwetok.” As if the name might keep her from screaming. “They were garrisoning the air base.”

“How?” Her voice isn’t hers. Her breath presses, and the smallest thought takes forever. She imagines death from the air, the enemy singling out her brother, his darkness a target against the white sand of paradise.

Her father’s voice waits for a collection that’s more like collapse. “You may not want…”

“Daddy,” she moans.

“They were unloading a gun battery off a ship. A restraining cable broke. The snap caught him…”

She doesn’t stop him, but she doesn’t hear. She races ahead with management. Undo by doing. “Mama. How is Mama?”

“I’ve had to sedate her. She’ll never forgive me.”

“The children?”

“Michael is…proud. He thinks it was combat. The girls don’t understand what it means, yet.”

The girls? The girls don’t? Yet?As she clings to that word understand, she closes down. Blood beats into her face and her eyes break open. Sobs come out of her that couldn’t have been in. She feels David take the phone, make some hurried arrangements, and hang up. Then she’s being comforted, held up by the ghost white arms of this man who’ll never be more to her than almost recognizable, a stranger to her blood, the father of her children.

They go to Philadelphia. All four of them take the train that once smuggled her to New York, hidden from everyone but Charlie. Delia stands in the front of the house, under the tree Char fell out of at eight, the fall that left him with the bent nose and jutting collarbone. Her mother comes out of the house to meet her. She’s falling already, twenty feet before they reach, and Delia must catch her. Nettie Ellen holds her hand to her mouth, stilling a thousand shaking prayers. “He can’t be done yet. Too much more he’s still got to do.”

The doctor stands behind Nettie, blinded by daylight, his hair gone white overnight. They retreat into the house, Dr. Daley propping his wife, Delia holding her little one, and the white man leading his subdued but adventuring oldest boy. Michael is inside, wearing a jacket emblazoned with the Marine Corps insignia that his brother smuggled him from North Carolina. Lucille and Lorene bicker softly on the couch, barely lifting their heads as their sister enters.

Her brother Charlie, stopped forever. No more bitter-laugh letters, no more razz, no more improvised Charcoal show, no more rounds of sounding or toasting, no more fate-dismissing shrug. The new silence of this house closes in on Delia, swallowing all their sound.

There’s no body for a burial. What’s left of Charlie rots on a Pacific atoll. “They won’t send it back,” Dr. Daley tells Delia, out of the others’ earshot. “They’re going to leave him in a sandy hole with a six-inch salt-water table. Shark food. My country. I was here before the Pilgrims, and they won’t send me my boy back.” He points at the gold star Nettie Ellen has mounted in the front window. “They did, however, pay for that.”

That night, they hold a makeshift service. No one but family. The net around them is large and strong. Many have been by already, feeding, helping out, talking and holding quiet. But tonight, there is just kin, the only people that boy never had a choice but to trust. Their grief knows no cure but memory. Each of them has something to recall. Some stories need only two words to play out again in front of all of them. Michael gets his brother’s old sax and shows off the riffs he has stolen just by watching. Dr. Daley sits at the piano, tries a left-hand stride like the ones he used to chide his son for pounding out. For six full bars, he finds the swell. Then, hearing what his fingers want to do, he crumbles.

Mostly, they sing — wide, spectral, full-chorded things, the intervals cutting through generations. Sorrow songs. Songs about abiding and getting away and crossing over. Then the tunes that seem more wedding than funeral, thanking the dead boy for yesterday, for a joy it will kill them to ratify. The family finds their lines, one each, with no one assigning. Even Nettie Ellen, whose speech has shut down, finds the harmonies slated to her, keeping time — the beat of deliverance — with a hand on her thigh. Bound to go. Bound to go. I can’t stay behind.

Jonah sits rapt on his mother’s lap, mouth open, trying to join in. Joey fusses, and David picks him up and carries him outside, into the yard. That’s best, Delia decides. God help her, but it’s easier that way. More Canaan, more comfort, without having to make the perpetual explanations. Without having to look at the color that Charlie used to say was too light for pain.

“Folks will want to come. They’re making a mountain of food.” Nettie Ellen’s barest request to her daughter: Stay a few days. We need to keep together now, sing that boy home. Just stay — the old racial certainty, comfort to be had only here, in the safety of we. All other places betray us. But hearing those wordless words, Delia can’t bear it. Not another day. Belonging crushes her shoulders so she can’t even stand. Run by histories laid down centuries before her own past had the chance to write itself. She’ll suffocate here, in her mother’s dining room, with its scent of wood soap and molasses, work and sacrifice, belief and resignation, and, now, dead children. She needs to fly, back home, back to the project of her family, back to the freedom her nation of four has invented. Get free tonight. Tomorrow is too late.

She starts to tell her mother she must go. But the woman hears her before Delia can speak a word. A low keening tears from Nettie’s throat, a flood of whatever comes before words, whatever thicker thing words are made from. Her mother sobs rhythm, her narrow chest a drum. The river of loss dam-bursts out of her, up from a world Delia knows only in shadow, bits of ground-up ancestry refusing to be shed, a tongue not yet English, older than Carolina, older than the annihilating middle passage of this life that cages them all. Delia’s mother comes through, the way she has never once let herself come through in any church. Comes through to the beginning, and this death is already there.

Then she is in Delia’s arms, the daughter flailing to give comfort. Awful turnaround, nature running backward. Her mother’s mother now. The younger children look on, terrified at this twist. Even William’s face pleads with his daughter to undo what has been done. Her whole family turns toward Delia, searching, until she sees. They’re grieving the death that hasn’t happened yet, alongside the one that has. Five faces beg Delia to reverse the thing she has set in motion. Her mother gasps for breath in her arms. English returns, but thick and low, scrabbling for syllables, cursing her native tongue. “Why did that boy die? All they’ll ever want from us is dying.”

Dr. Daley covers his face with one great fist. His children swing round upon him, and he looks up, horribly visible. He finds some refusal in him that stands in for dignity. He rises to his feet and heads from the room. “Daddy,” Delia calls. “Daddy?” He will not turn.