Salvatore Scibona: The End

For here he was on the bridge, sixteen and one half years after the fact, chewing; and also here he was gripping the rail of the bridge ten minutes before the fact, having ridden the streetcar to the end of the line, into this neighborhood he hadn’t happened upon since it was the Germans who had lived here, and soon an unlucky woman with a burlap onion sack on her shoulder would pass behind him and ascend the slow rise of the hill. He wore a tawny ill-pressed linen suit, a knit tie, and bifocals; also, he wore black trousers, a lintless black double-breasted coat, sealskin sleek, on which snow fell. The day was both dates because he could not refrain from calling it both, and if only, for once, he could control the language at his disposal, then the way toward the consummation of his hope would be made plain. The August crowd might sweep him away to the boulevard. But it was also December, an arctic somnolence, the bridge empty but for him and the woman — here she was — trudging behind him, skillfully whistling a Christmas song. The creek purred, deep and black, unfrozen only up its middle. The people one after another collided with him, trying to push him across the bridge — but he gripped the rail and would not succumb, and a vigorous prestorm wind was pressing him the other way, and soon he would be blown apart by the contradiction. The leaves swam in the gale, and the branches twisted. He turned back to the crowd wanting somebody to look at him.

They were all so afraid, the crowd (as he was afraid), unknowing what they were afraid of (as he was unknowing). If he could actually touch the object of his fear he wouldn’t feel fear anymore, he’d feel a fulfillment of knowing. But the fearful could never touch the thing feared. Fear was an arrow pointing at nothing. He rubbed his tongue on the wax paper, collecting the dust of the sugar and the cinnamon.

There was a dream from early youth of being pushed from a high place and falling.

He loitered on the bridge, putting some distance between himself and the woman with the onion sack, letting her pass unlucky and unsuspecting.

He turned and gripped the rail fiercely and looked down at the glittering, summer-green current forty feet below. It was from this waterway here, Elephant Creek, that the neighborhood had taken its name, although physically it was not a creek anymore but a river. Long after it had gotten its name, two other creeks had been diverted into it upstream to drain a swamp that was to become a rail yard, but still you called it a creek and not a river because the name is the soul of the thing and persists long after the thing named has passed away. He considered the name of the fried snack he’d just eaten and the name of the creek, and the coincidence here. Yet there were no elephants to be seen. The word did not need the thing it stood for. The word, being alive, had an instinct for perpetuating itself.

Below him, at the water’s edge, three boys in short pants threw their shoes and socks to the farther bank, waded knee-deep, but then stopped, indecisive, seeing that the water was too deep to wade and the current far too fast for swimming. They were indecisive because they were jealous of their desire to reach the other side, unknowing that the idea was not to cross or to walk over on a bridge, but to descend into and drown.

Only, the descent was sacred, and therefore private, and so he would have to wait for the crowd and its living stink — smoky and sweat sour — to take its leave. You had to approach the house of the woman with the onion sack slowly and alone.

Where had she gone, the girl in the pinafore, with her pink legs? The pinafore was a contradiction that walked around on a girl in a crowd.

It was going to thunderstorm. The creek would turn brown and swell farther up its steep banks. Soon, privately, the water would fill his shoes. And later on somebody would find him downstream and look into his face and ask, Who was this man, what was his name? And they would print the words in the newspaper for others to read and speak.

A picture and a caption. And the caption would lay bare at last his name, age, and address.

That tree with its branches twisting was a Norway maple. No good for tapping for syrup.

He turned again and faced the unperceiving crowd. And the woman with the onion sack — six minutes before the fact, five, four — ascended the hill, whistling.

“My name is,” he said, and spoke his name, haughty and shame-faced, jangling the big ring of keys in front of her face to wake her up. “Alliterative. Funny. Go on, say it.”

He missed his sister. Preserver of artifacts. Kisser of soft, reassuring kisses down the despairing hours. “The clammy clown is clumsy,” she’d used to say when, refilling the lamp, he dribbled kerosene on the rug in the back parlor, where they read at night before bed.

Who would notice him gone that knew his name? Not the coal man. He only came in wintertime. Not the postman. The jeweler collected his bills from a box at the PO. His barber called him, modestly, Chief.

It was so easy to follow her from a distance of half a block and not to expose his plan of action. In fact, he had no plan. Had he intended ahead of time to climb the stoop and to open the door of the tenement, then surely, fatefully, he would have found the door locked. She went in and closed the door behind her. He saw this from the street, waiting, listening to his heart. Then he climbed the stoop, on which salt was splayed, and pumpkin-seed shells, and held the knob of the door and turned it, and the door opened. If it were necessary to any plan that he find her alone in the apartment, then the apartment door once opened would have exposed a room occupied by others. Fate required that he obey the commandments of his heart only as they revealed themselves, emerging one by one, each at the last moment, as a curb, a stray roller skate, reveal themselves to a blind man making his way with a cane. Here is a door. Open it. Here is a stairwell. Climb it. Listen. Someone has clicked on a radio behind that door, right there. So go ahead. Open the door. See what happens. See what you do. There is a woman.

People had long said, and the many books of regional history and toponymy he’d used to own agreed, that the Elephant of the name derived from a circus that had spent the winter upstream from here during the last year of the Civil War. A young cow had trundled onto the ice, nosing her trunk about for liquid water, and had fallen through and drowned. A painting that depicted this event hung in the foyer of the county historical society.

But several years ago he had made a discovery. He had bought a map of the portion of what would become the Ohio Territory that had been deeded to Connecticut by King Charles II in 1662, the last tract of land, as far as he knew, retained as a colony by an individual state; it was known then as New Connecticut or, as it was still sometimes called, the Western Reserve. The date under the compass rose was 1799. On it, a slim black line described a creek approximately one hundred miles west of the settlement at Conneaut, fifteen miles long, emptying into the lake. The note to the right of the creek read La Fonte —a little extra space between the L and the a. His French dictionary told him it meant a “melting; smelting; thaw; mixture of colors, as in painting;” or “the holster of a saddle.” Or else it was someone’s name. A fur trapper perhaps, Canadian, with a trading post on that site.

He held a magnifying glass in his hand. He looked up from the map. “Oh,” he said aloud, “we have misunderstood.”

Forgetting himself a moment, he called to his sister in the parlor. But she was dead, of course. She had been dead for three years. He was always forgetting.