Charlie Smith

In the rental cottage it comes to me, how the four lives of myself and my brothers crisscross like tracer bullets, and how, from a distance maybe, if you had the right kind of glasses, there might appear to be a target we all were aiming at beyond that black escutcheon of cloud above Santa Rosa Bay as we lie on the deck drinking tequila and beer, our voices growing vague and weary as time passes, until one of us tells a story, more cordial than precise, about climbing to the top of a magnolia tree when he was ten, and falling. The rest of us draw closer around the story as we watch the great flattened cloud raise its triangular wing over the state of Florida. It is night in Florida and, in a moment, one of us will recall the time our father, in a gray suit, climbed the steps of an airliner bound for Paris and never came back. And one, or another, will tell how our mother, more blond and beautiful than ever that spring, said, You must now be soldiers, and screamed and screamed. We will each raise his head and stare for a moment through the lighted gate of the living room window at our wives, who are putting away the last of the supper dishes, speaking among themselves with the easy familiarity of women whose husbands are brothers. And one of us will begin so sing an old song that our father sang before he went away, a song about losing a fair woman in the foggy, foggy dew, and as the late chill rises off the bay we will all remember what we thought as children when we heard him sing of the woman who was not, and never could have been, our mother and of how an emptiness, bigger than an ocean, opened inside us, and one of us will say, I think it is going to rain, and we will get up and go back inside.

This time we are getting drunk on retsina in somebody’s Italian backyard. We are a long way from Georgia and all of us are lonely. I wave my arms and caw like Hadrian after his lover drowned himself. My wife walks by the pond singing a hymn; I think she is leaving me for good. I say, Imagine my heart is huge and has little men walking around inside. They don’t know each other but they’re stuck there eternally and have to get along. One of them starts shouting; he finds a black horse and rides it around in a circle. The others laugh at him. He leaps from the horse and starts to choke the smallest man. Something like a hand starts pumping the heart and the men nearly go crazy from the pressure. —The first olive I picked from a tree was so bitter I nearly threw up. My wife is strolling around this strange landscape full of broken pediments as if she plans to be happy from now on. I think I have to tense it up, act like I’m in control. I don’t think I can do that. In a few hours the sun will rise over my brother’s backyard in south Georgia. He’ll come out and admire the water jewels the night has hung in the kumquat bush. He’ll hear his son say, ‘Mama, it’s too big for me to wear,’ and remember quitting the baseball team thirty years ago and wish again he hadn’t. —I get up and march down to the pond. I start to speak to my wife but then I feel a hand that is about to crush my heart.

This afternoon the park is filled with brides. Among varieties of persuasion the big trees turn back toward the forest. Adventurers gather in side streets. The police are looking hard at the sky. Down at the bay, boys trapped in solitude fish. Girls hike their pants and stare at the wave line, remembering secrets they once held dear. The day offers a ridiculous variation as an excuse for not coming in on time. Wild imaginings take the place of religion. Someone who can't swim offers to cook. We've devised a means for the obstinate children to be fed, she says, but no one understands this. We crave affection, but give only advice. There are walls topped with broken bicycles. Someone makes an obscene offer and this is the best we get all day. Oh don't give in so easily she says, handing over the keys. We climb the blue fire escape. We would like to keep going, skyline climbers, old men remembering their childhood who devise a few illegal experiences no one wants to try. It gets to be more than the officers can take. The park is dusty, dark, yet the children, ignored all day, play on, convinced their dedication releases a magic that changes everything.

I wanted to go to military school and march, I wanted to grow up and be composed and expert with a rifle, with tactics and fighting, to be safe and courageous among men in barracks and on the battlefield. I wanted to see my arms hairy and corded with muscle at the end of rolled up khaki sleeves. I wanted to flex my feet in boots and look down at the the dust of battles dimming the leather surfaces, the blood slick on the rim of the soles. I wanted the smell of gunpowder in my nostrils, the grime on my face, the washed-out hollow love for my comrades found in the foxholes, the sad understanding, the requiems of late afternoons walking away from the burial site with the widow as she cradled the triangulated flag like a plowblade in her arms.

Who knows but that Meriwether Lewis’s lost diaries might turn up yet packed in a can in some cramped ex-midden dug up a thousand years from now, that elegant, exfoliate style continue on up the Missouri, into sadness and disrepute, the suicide in a hotel in Tennessee no more important now than the bundle of grasses my friend made out in the woods yesterday and gave to me after a meeting in which she confessed she’s afraid of everything that’s coming. The past I don’t mind, she said, and laughed as if that was something.

What brings me alive is less than simplicity, is a company of soldiers in shiny blue jackets boiling chickens in the shade by the Erasmus Gate, is the fact that my grandfather died begging for mercy in a hotel in Atlanta, and that my grandmother, in 1910, mourned because her breasts were small. I know four men who paddled the length of the Mississippi in a dugout they hacked and burned out of a beech tree. When anyone mentioned rivers they would look at each other and their eyes would soften with the memory of mists and sand bars, of the grave black brows of river barges. I come from a country as large as Brazil, but all I remember are the wet silver webs of golden jungle spiders netted in the cane. I wake up thinking of my brother, who, on a July morning in 1954, killed a boy without meaning to. And I can tell you that this isn’t true, that my brother didn’t, as he swept back a four iron on the lawn of our house in Sea Island, crack the temple of a boy we had only met the night before. I can say Yes I am lying again, about the boy, about Sea Island, but as you get up to fix another drink I will tell you a story about sleeping in a hay barn in Turkey and of waking in the night, as, one by one, the farm hands stood out of the rank straw to greet us. I want you to know that my life is a ritual lie and that I deserve to be loved anyway. I want you to smile when I tell of the purple hyacinths caught in the gears of the raised bridge over the Chickopee River, I want you to pretend you were there. My sister’s hips were two ax handles wide, she wept that no one would love her, my sister, who waded among yellow poppies and wondered if she were really alive—I want you to wish you had married her, I want you to say Please, why did she leave me, Get her back, O my God, how can I live without her. I’m not even amazed that I want you to say this. Listen, I came downstairs this morning and somebody had filled the house with flowers.

Apprentice morning come easily now, silver with fog and the breakdowns of neighbors: shouts from up hill where the land curls under vines and under the porches of oaks, where even now wintergreen and inkberry shiver forth streamers of new growth, and the green frogs suck at the dew and sing their bent songs. It is easy to hear my own voice in the liquid contraltos of rage, the vents and accusations that feed fires up the hill. It is all human enough, the yelling, capacious and frank, the doors slamming, cries of betrayal. I too have betrayed, lost my place among the condensations of commitment, dallied. I go among friends who say with neither fear nor fury in their voices that they too don’t know what’s next, that from the studied impactment of their lives they have sallied small lines of proposition, made a few calls. Slight affairs shiver and fail; we go for a walk by the rotunda, where, on the perishable lawn, a band plays Dixieland—speaking, not earnestly, but with steady intent, of the play of choices, the simple chance of another future somewhere else, perhaps a house in the hills above L.A., part-time work for the screen, a few avocado trees. For a while it is as if the hazy play of evening light, the splashes of music, the unbundled oaks surrounding the Square, are enough in themselves to sustain, as if mood is itself sustenance, that our struggle to conceive a continuance is of no more moment than the fuchsia and soft yellow clothes of the tourists. Perhaps it is possible to be gentle no matter what, to seek not restraint but surrender entirely, to turn from the snarling reproach not into the keening dismissal of hope but to whatever bright fluttering is next, the bright fluttering of wisteria petals, a felicitous phrase, fingers touching a face. How else to avoid redemption, or its opposite, which we stopped believing in one day in high school, suddenly startled over a steaming lunch tray by the way the fizzed flowers of a stunted mimosa seemed to beg for release? We realized then we could say whatever we wanted, that the world was no more particular than anything else, it too could be out-argued, confused by refusal or lies, that it was no wonder people were stunned by the eloquent permanence of death. So there is permission, not granted but given, as a forsythia at the edge of the walk, having stolen more light than it can contain, trembles, and the echoes of argument fade into a fluttering over the price of butterscotch floats, and we are dazzled by the gouge of perception, as if there was in fact a word we were waiting to hear, not as completion but as synoptic and inevitable entitlement—the drift of some stranger’s conversation, the memory of a thin mist moored temporarily over the garden, that face we saw from the window on the way to St. Albans: beautiful, indifferent, unequivocably doomed.

At a small monastery—or what had been a monastery—outside Obrégon, we stopped; you were suffering the hollow nausea of your first pregnancy, sleeping as best you could through the thousand miles of pines and rocky fields of northern Mexico, so I went ahead through the saddle-colored rooms, past the broken church and the row of empty sheds, where Indian women, according to a sign, once baked the flat bread called sapatos de Maria, to a garden in the back, over the parapet of which I could see the river through some willows: a rinsed bed of sand, dry now in winter. I didn’t want a child, and I was tired of closeness, tired of being kind, so was glad to be alone a while and lay down under a jacaranda tree, and watched through leaves the changing pattern of the sky, which I was tired of too, the scaly, stratospheric winter clouds, edged with light, like the tiny waves you pointed out, reflected on the bottom of a bridge we rowed under in a rented boat, the day you told me of the child—I was tired and slept. It was nearly evening when I woke, two mestizo women hurried talking through the tulip beds, the sky was pale. They’d set small plaques among the plants, naming them, the ornamentals and the fruit. Some, so the writing said, were descendants of the cuttings brought from Spain by monks; intermingled here—Pinot grape with ocotillo, damascena rose—they thrived. I thought of certain tenderness, and forbearance, a man might bring to vines and simple vegetables, cultivated in memory of his home perhaps, in a foreign place; and thought how sometimes what passes on from us has little to do with what we hoped, but nonetheless carries word of who we were and what we found. For a moment then, among the arbors and the flower beds, I did not feel so distant from this time and place, and the edge of my own local fears began to dull. I plucked a sprig—a leaf was all— from a holly bush, and brought it out to you, a little stronger in a portion of myself, a little reconciled, though I couldn’t know then that in a month we would lose the child, and in time you would pass, like a squandered fortune, from my life.