Donald Hall

At the edge of the city the pickerel vomits and dies. The river with its white hair staggers to the sea. My life lay crumpled like a smashed car. Windows barred, ivy, square stone. Lines gather at mouth and at eyes like cracks in a membrane. Eyeballs and tongue spill on the floor in a puddle of yolks and whites. The intact 707 under the clear wave, the sun shining. The playhouse of my grandfather’s mother stands north of the shed: spiders and the dolls’ teacups of dead women. In Ohio the K Mart shrugs; it knows it is going to die. A stone, the closed eye of the dirt. Outside before dawn houses sail up like wrecks from the bottom of the sea. A door clicks; a light opens. If the world is a dream, so is the puffed stomach of Juan, and the rich in Connecticut are dreamers. There are bachelors who live in shacks made of oil cans and broken doors, who stitch their shirts until the cloth disappears under stitches, who collect nails in Ball jars. A trolley car comes out of the elms, the tracks laid through an acre of wheat stubble, slanting downhill. I board it, and cross the field into the new pine.

1. Today they cut down the oak. Strong men climbed with ropes in the brittle tree. The exhaust of a gasoline saw was blue in the branches. The oak had been dead a year. I remember the great sails of its branches rolling out green, a hundred and twenty feet up, and acorns thick on the lawn. Nine cities of squirrels lived in that tree. Yet I was happy that it was coming down. "Let it come down!" I kept saying to myself with a joy that was strange to me. Though the oak was the shade of old summers, I loved the guttural saw. 2. By night a bare trunk stands up fifteen feet and cords of firewood press on the twiggy frozen grass of the yard. One man works every afternoon for a week to cut the trunk gradually down. Bluish stains spread through the wood and make it harder to cut. He says they are the nails of a trapper who dried his pelts on the oak when badgers dug in the lawn. Near the ground he hacks for two days, knuckles scraping the stiff snow. His chain saw breaks three teeth. He cannot make the trunk smooth. He leaves one night after dark. 3. Roots stiffen under the ground and the frozen street, coiled around pipes and wires. The stump is a platform of blond wood in the gray winter. It is nearly level with the snow that covers the little garden around it. It is a door into the underground of old summers, but if I bend down to it, I am lost in crags and buttes of a harsh landscape that goes on forever. When snow melts the wood darkens into the ground; rain and thawed snow move deeply into the stump, backwards along the disused tunnels. 4. The edges of the trunk turn black. In the middle there is a pale overlay, like a wash of chalk on darkness. The desert of the winter has moved inside. I do not step on it now; I am used to it, like a rock, or a bush that does not grow. There is a sailing ship beached in the cove of a small island where the warm water is turquoise. The hulk leans over, full of rain and sand, and shore flowers grow from it. Then it is under full sail in the Atlantic, on a blue day, heading for the island. She has planted sweet alyssum in the holes where the wood was rotten. It grows thick, it bulges like flowers contending from a tight vase. Now the stump sinks downward into its roots with a cargo of rain and white blossoms that last into October.

Between pond and sheepbarn, by maples and watery birches, Rebecca paces a double line of rust in a sandy trench, striding on black creosoted eight-by-eights. In nineteen-forty-three, wartrains skidded tanks, airframes, dynamos, searchlights, and troops to Montreal. She counted cars from the stopped hayrack at the endless crossing: ninety-nine, one hundred; and her grandfather Ben’s voice shaking with rage and oratory told how the mighty Boston and Maine kept the Statehouse in its pocket. Today Rebecca walks a line that vanishes, in solitude bypassed by wars and commerce. She remembers the story of the bunting’d day her great-great-great- grandmother watched the first train roll and smoke from Potter Place to Gale with fireworks, cider, and speeches. Then the long rail drove west, buzzing and humming; the hive of rolling stock extended a thousand-car’d perspective from Ohio to Oregon, where men who left stone farms rode rails toward gold. On this blue day she walks under a high jet’s glint of swooped aluminum pulling its feathery contrail westward. She sees ahead how the jet dies into junk, and highway wastes like railroad. Beside her the old creation retires, hayrack sunk like a rowboat under its fields of hay. She closes her eyes to glimpse the vertical track that rises from the underworld of graves, soul’s ascension connecting dead to unborn, rails that hum with a hymn of continual vanishing where tracks cross. For she opens her eyes to read on a solitary gravestone next to the rails the familiar names of Ruth and Matthew Bott, born in a Norfolk parish, who ventured the immigrant’s passionate Exodus westward to labor on their own land. Here love builds its mortal house, where today’s wind carries a double scent of heaven and cut hay.

Each morning I made my way among gangways, elevators, and nurses’ pods to Jane’s room to interrogate the grave helpers who tended her through the night while the ship’s massive engines kept its propellers turning. Week after week, I sat by her bed with black coffee and the Globe. The passengers on this voyage wore masks or cannulae or dangled devices that dripped chemicals into their wrists. I believed that the ship traveled to a harbor of breakfast, work, and love. I wrote: "When the infusions are infused entirely, bone marrow restored and lymphoblasts remitted, I will take my wife, bald as Michael Jordan, back to our dog and day." Today, months later at home, these words turned up on my desk as I listened in case Jane called for help, or spoke in delirium, ready to make the agitated drive to Emergency again for readmission to the huge vessel that heaves water month after month, without leaving port, without moving a knot, without arrival or destination, its great engines pounding.

1.   Baseball, I warrant, is not the whole occupation of the aging boy. Far from it: There are cats and roses; there is her water body. She fills the skin of her legs up, like water; under her blouse, water assembles, swelling lukewarm; her mouth is water, her cheekbones cool water; water flows in her rapid hair. I drink water 2.   from her body as she walks past me to open a screen door, as she bends to weed among herbs, or as she lies beside me at five in the morning in submarine light. Curt Davis threw a submarine ball, terrifying to right-handed batters. Another pleasure, thoroughly underrated, is micturition, which is even 3.   commoner than baseball. It begins by announcing itself more slowly and less urgently than sexual desire, but (confusingly) in the identical place. Ignorant men therefore on occasion confuse beer- drinking with love; but I have discussed adultery elsewhere. We allow this sweet release to commence itself, 4.   addressing a urinal perhaps, perhaps poised over a white toilet with feet spread wide and head tilted back: oh, what’delicious permission! what luxury of letting go! what luxe yellow curve of mildest ecstasy! Granted we may not compare it to poignant and crimson bliss, it is as voluptuous as rain all night long 5.   after baseball in August’s parch. The jade plant’s trunk, as thick as a man’s wrist, urges upward thrusting from packed dirt, with Chinese vigor spreading limbs out that bear heavy leaves—palpable, dark, juicy, green, profound: They suck, the way bleacher fans claim inhabitants of box seats do. The Fourth of July we exhaust stars from sparklers in the late 6.   twilight. We swoop ovals of white-gold flame, making quick signatures against an imploding dark. The five-year-old girl kisses the young dog goodbye and chases the quick erratic kitten. When she returns in a few years as a tall shy girl, she will come back to a dignified spreading cat and a dog ash-gray on the muzzle. Sparklers 7.   expel quickly this night of farewell: If they didn’t burn out, they wouldn’t be beautiful. Kurt, may I hazard an opinion on expansion? Last winter meetings, the major leagues (al- ready meager in ability, scanty in starting pitchers) voted to add two teams. Therefore minor league players will advance all too quickly, 8.   with boys in the bigs who wouldn’t have made double-A forty years ago. Directors of player personnel will search like poets scrambling in old notebooks for unused leftover lines, but when was the last time anyone cut back when he or she could expand? Kurt, I get the notion that you were another who never discarded 9.anything, a keeper from way back. You smoked cigarettes, in inflation- times rolled from chopped-up banknotes, billions inhaled and exhaled as cancerous smoke. When commerce woke, Men was awake. If you smoked a cigar, the cigar band discovered itself glued into collage. Ongoing life became the material of Kurtschwittersball.

"At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy frozen rats for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed your pet boa constrictor" back home in Grosse Pointe, or in Grosse Pointe Park, while the free nation of rats in Detroit emerges from alleys behind pet shops, from cellars and junked cars, and gathers to flow at twilight like a river the color of pavement, and crawls over bedrooms and groceries and through broken school windows to eat the crayon from drawings of rats— and no one in Detroit understands how rats are delicious in Dearborn. If only we could communicate, if only the boa constrictors of Southfield would slither down I-94, turn north on the Lodge Expressway, and head for Eighth Street, to eat out for a change. Instead, tomorrow, a man from Birmingham enters a pet shop in Detroit to buy a frozen German shepherd for six dollars and fifty cents to feed his pet cheetah, guarding the compound at home. Oh, they arrive all day, in their locked cars, buying schoolyards, bridges, buses, churches, and Ethnic Festivals; they buy a frozen Texaco station for eighty-four dollars and fifty cents to feed to an imported London taxi in Huntington Woods; they buy Tiger Stadium, frozen, to feed to the Little League in Grosse Ile. They bring everything home, frozen solid as pig iron, to the six-car garages of Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods, Farmington, Grosse Pointe Farms, Troy, and Grosse Arbor— and they ingest everything, and fall asleep, and lie coiled in the sun, while the city thaws in the stomach and slides to the small intestine, where enzymes break down molecules of protein to amino acids, which enter the cold bloodstream.

In October of the year, he counts potatoes dug from the brown field, counting the seed, counting the cellar’s portion out, and bags the rest on the cart’s floor. He packs wool sheared in April, honey in combs, linen, leather tanned from deerhide, and vinegar in a barrel hooped by hand at the forge’s fire. He walks by his ox’s head, ten days to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes, and the bag that carried potatoes, flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose feathers, yarn. When the cart is empty he sells the cart. When the cart is sold he sells the ox, harness and yoke, and walks home, his pockets heavy with the year’s coin for salt and taxes, and at home by fire’s light in November cold stitches new harness for next year’s ox in the barn, and carves the yoke, and saws planks building the cart again.

“Dead people don’t like olives,” I told my partners in eighth grade dancing class, who never listened as we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two. The dead people I often consulted nodded their skulls in unison while I flung my black velvet cape over my shoulders and glowered from deep-set, burning eyes, walking the city streets, alone at fifteen, crazy for cheerleaders and poems. At Hamden High football games, girls in short pleated skirts pranced and kicked, and I longed for their memorable thighs. They were friendly—poets were mascots— but never listened when I told them that dead people didn’t like olives. Instead the poet, wearing his cape, continued to prowl in solitude intoning inscrutable stanzas as halfbacks and tackles made out, Friday nights after football, on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms with magnanimous cheerleaders. But, decades later, when the dead have stopped blathering about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders waiting for hip replacements, while a lascivious, doddering poet, his burning eyes deep-set in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.

August, goldenrod blowing. We walk into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden outside the kitchen. I didn’t know you then. We walk among carved names that go with photographs on top of the piano at the farm: Keneston, Wells, Fowler, Batchelder, Buck. We pause at the new grave of Grace Fenton, my grandfather’s sister. Last summer we called on her at the nursing home, eighty-seven, and nodding in a blue housedress. We cannot find my grandfather’s grave. Back at the house where no one lives, we potter and explore the back chamber where everything comes to rest: spinning wheels, pretty boxes, quilts, bottles, books, albums of postcards. Then with a flashlight we descend firm steps to the root cellar—black, cobwebby, huge, with dirt floors and fieldstone walls, and above the walls, holding the hewn sills of the house, enormous granite foundation stones. Past the empty bins for squash, apples, carrots, and potatoes, we discover the shelves for canning, a few pale pints of tomato left, and—what is this?—syrup, maple syrup in a quart jar, syrup my grandfather made twenty-five years ago for the last time. I remember coming to the farm in March in sugaring time, as a small boy. He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart buckets, dangling from each end of a wooden yoke that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them into a vat in the saphouse where fire burned day and night for a week. Now the saphouse tilts, nearly to the ground, like someone exhausted to the point of death, and next winter when snow piles three feet thick on the roofs of the cold farm, the saphouse will shudder and slide with the snow to the ground. Today we take my grandfather’s last quart of syrup upstairs, holding it gingerly, and we wash off twenty-five years of dirt, and we pull and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff, dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers in, you and I both, and taste the sweetness, you for the first time, the sweetness preserved, of a dead man in the kitchen he left when his body slid like anyone’s into the ground.

Twelve people, most of us strangers, stand in a room in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari from jars. Then two young men, who cooked him, carry him to the table on a large square of plywood: his body striped, like a tiger cat’s, from the basting, his legs long, much longer than a cat’s, and the striped hide as shiny as vinyl. Now I see his head, as he takes his place at the center of the table, his wide pig’s head; and he looks like the javelina that ran in front of the car, in the desert outside Tucson, and I am drawn to him, my brother the pig, with his large ears cocked forward, with his tight snout, with his small ferocious teeth in a jaw propped open by an apple. How bizarre, this raw apple clenched in a cooked face! Then I see his eyes, his eyes cramped shut, his no-eyes, his eyes like X’s in a comic strip, when the character gets knocked out. This afternoon they read directions from a book:The eyeballs must be removed or they will burst during roasting.