Peter Everwine

On the morning she became a young widow, my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow, looked up from her work to see a hawk turn her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers. That same moment, halfway around the world in a Minnesota mine, her husband died, buried under a ton of rockfall. She told me this story sixty years ago. I don’t know if it’s true but it ought to be. She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt on Sundays when the acolyte’s silver bell announced the moment of Christ’s miracle, it was the darker mysteries she lived by: shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside, a tapping at the door and nobody there. The moral of the story was plain enough: miracles become a burden and require a priest to explain them. With signs, you only need to keep your wits about you and place your trust in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck and grief are coming your way. And for that —so the story goes—any day will do.

When Mrs. McCausland comes to mind she slips through a small gap in oblivion and walks down her front steps, in her hand a small red velvet pillow she tucks under the head of Old Jim Schreiber, who is lying dead-drunk against the curb of busy Market Street. Then she turns, labors up the steps and is gone . . . A small story. Or rather, the memory of a story I heard as a boy. The witnesses are not to be found, the steps lead nowhere, the pillow has collapsed into a thread of dust . . . Do the dead come back only to remind us they, too, were once among the living, and that the story we make of our lives is a mystery of luminous, but uncertain moments, a shuffle of images we carry toward sleep— Mrs. McCausland with her velvet pillow, Old Jim at peace—a story, like a small clearing in the woods at night, seen from the windows of a passing train.

Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain drummed against our tent, I heard for the first time a loon’s sudden wail drifting across that remote lake— a loneliness like no other, though what I heard as inconsolable may have been only the sound of something untamed and nameless singing itself to the wilderness around it and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father and of good companions gone into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain and the soft lapping of water, and did not know whether it was grief or joy or something other that surged against my heart and held me listening there so long and late.

The girl on the Bullard overpass looks happy to be there, getting soaked in a light rain but waving her hands to the four o'clock freeway traffic in which I'm anything but happy. You might think she's too dumb to come in out of the rain, but rain or shine, it doesn't seem to matter. She's there most every afternoon, as if she does this for a living. Some living, I'd say. Doesn't she ever get bored, or wish someone would stop and say, "Where to?" and her life would change? That's how I'd be, hating the noise, the stink of exhaust, the press of people. I can't imagine what her life is; mine is confused and often fretful. But there's something brave about standing alone in the rain, waving wild semaphores of gladness to impatient passersby too tired or preoccupied to care. Seeing her at her familiar station I suddenly grin like a fool, wave back, and forgive the driver to my right, who is sullen and staring as I pass. I find her in my rear-view mirror, then head for a needed drink and supper. I don't know where she goes, but I hope it's to a place she loves. I hope the rain lets up. I hope she's there tomorrow.

We walked at the edge of the sea, the dog, still young then, running ahead of us. Few people.  Gulls.  A flock of pelicans circled beyond the swells, then closed their wings and dropped head-long into the dazzle of light and sea.  You clapped your hands; the day grew brilliant. Later we sat at a small table with wine and food that tasted of the sea. A perfect day, we said to one another, so that even when the day ended and the lights of houses among the hills came on like a scattering of embers, we watched it leave without regret. That night, easing myself toward sleep, I thought how blindly we stumble ahead with such hope, a light flares briefly—Ah, Happiness! then we turn and go on our way again. But happiness, too, goes on its way, and years from where we were, I lie awake in the dark and suddenly it returns— that day by the sea, that happiness, though it is not the same happiness, not the same darkness.

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields, looking for God knows what. Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing. Something to fill an empty spot. Maybe a luminous angel or a country girl with a secret dark. He came back empty-handed, or so I thought. Now I find them: thistles, goatheads, the barbed weeds all those with hooks or horns the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones those wearing lantern jaws, old ones in beards, leapers in silk leggings, the multiple pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those with juices and saps like the fingers of thieves nation after nation of grasses that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds and grab handholds in whatever lean place. It’s been a good day.

We opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away, in boxes, dresses and shoes, the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests. We gathered and set aside the keepsakes and the good silver and brought up from the coal cellar jars of tomato sauce, peppers, jellied fruit. We dismantled, we took down from the walls, we bundled and carted off and swept clean. Goodbye, goodbye, we said, closing the door behind us, going our separate ways from the house we had emptied, and which, in the coming days, we would fill again and empty and try to fill again.