I parked at a graveled turnabout. A few years back the highway department had replaced the old cable-and-girder bridge, built in Tom Hardin’s prime, with a new bridge, a stark two-lane concrete structure. We took a few steps onto it. I walked to the railing and tried to look over.
—I can’t see the river. The railings are too high.
—Progress. Must be safer to build it that way.
—Or cheaper.
We returned to the car. I drove us down a side road, a gravel road that led to the old cable-and-girder bridge. We climbed from the car. I took my cane from the trunk.
—You’ll help me with this box.
He picked it up, then searched the brush until he found a long branch to use as a walking stick—his step had taken on a gimp in the last week or so. He tried to break the stick over his thigh, but the wood was too thick, or perhaps he had lost his strength. In the end he broke it by smacking it against the ground.
We struck off, Raphael humming a tune, whose words we’d both learned from Tice Flaherty.
She walked through the corn leading down to the river,
Her hair shone like gold in the hot morning sun.
She took all the love that a poor man could give her
And left him to die like a fox on the run.
We walked a slow quarter of a mile, past the rotting stumps of two huge white oaks, until we came to the old bridge. The highway department had removed the planking from the middle of the bridge, leaving a framework of rusted cables and girders. A sycamore sapling shot through gaps in the bridge flooring. The riverbank was strewn with household trash—a bent and dented galvanized tub, broken bottles, a refrigerator door, the tube (somehow unbroken) from a television set, watching from the mud like the eye of God.
We walked a few steps onto the old bridge, until we could look down at this flowing green, the living artery of the land. I leaned on my cane. Raphael set the strongbox on the planks, leaned on one of the rusting bridge supports. I pointed to a mossy wall downstream.
—That’s what’s left of the foundation of what they called the Perlite mill. When I first came to Strang Knob there were still some buildings here, but those are all gone now.
—Mother never much liked coming here. I think it reminded her too much of what her family had lost.
—Well, the Perlites never had as much as they claimed or thought.
—Mother always talked about a whole town they owned and ran out here.
—So she saw fit to tell me.
We stood for a long while without talking. The water slurped and gurgled around the bridge pilings. Downstream a flash of red slipped through the brush lining the banks. Raphael pointed with his stick, but the fox was gone.
—Tom Hardin told me long ago that the fields around Perlite Ford had the best fox trapping in the county. But then they built this bridge and the foxes disappeared.
—With the new concrete bridge farther upstream maybe the foxes are coming back.
I bent and worked the combination lock, to open the strongbox.
—What’s in there?
I lifted the box, retrieved one photograph, then held the box out and turned it over. The silver-framed photograph of my mother in her rented wedding dress dropped and sank like a stone, but the other one hundred and fifty-four unframed pictures fluttered like leaves, caught in the breeze that blows just above the river’s surface. It bore them a few feet aloft before settling them on the eddying water. They floated along, circling like paper boats, following the living current as it traversed the river from left to right and back. I watched them round the bend, out of sight, bound for the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream, Europe.
—What was that about?
I handed him the photograph I’d held back.
—I want you to have this one.
He looked it over carefully.
—I ought to know these people.
—You ought. They’re your grandparents—Rose Ella’s parents. This is their wedding picture, taken by my father, if Rose Ella is to be believed. I see no reason to doubt her.
—But they’re not dressed for a wedding.
—They’re dressed in the best they own, if that’s what you’re wondering.
He peered at it a second longer, then laughed.
—You mean—
—It’s your picture now. It means what you want it to mean.
He studied it awhile, holding it to the spring sunlight.
—What about the fancy green dress from the Chicago mail-order house?
I shrugged.
He looked at it long and hard, then closed his eyes and dropped it through the bridge planks. It fluttered to the river and followed its companions downstream.
—Now why did you do that?
—Well, you dumped the whole damned box.
—I had my reasons. What I want to know is your reasons.
—I don’t know. I like the story of my grandmother ordering that fancy mail-order dress for a single hour’s wear, then sending it back.
He took up his walking stick; I took up the strongbox, now empty.
—Your mother and father. Out of their love came you and all your brothers and sisters. This is the chain of being, that breaks and reforms and continues itself in ways of its own devising. I am a dead end—I have no issue; I have nothing to pass on.
—We have nothing to pass on.
—Except our love.
—How can you know this?
—Because I have been loved, and in love.
—My father loves you. You know that.
—What makes you think that?
—Do you know how many women he’s ever allowed in his shop? Much less invited in.
—I’ve never been one to wait for an engraved invitation.
—Well, sure. But you should hear the jealousy in his voice when he asks me about you. There’s no other word for it.
—Jealousy?
—“What do you do over there anyway?” He asked me that one day.
I turned and walked toward the car, into the field. —None of your damned business, is what I hope you said.
—Have you told him that you love him?
With a child’s accuracy he let fly that arrow; and I twisted and broke it off in place, by saying nothing.
Foolish old woman! What was there to say? A few words, and I said none of them.
We worked our way back to the road. I took his arm and pointed with my cane. A fox (the fox we’d seen at the bridge?) was slipping along the ditch, not more than a few yards in front of us. The moment I pointed she broke from a curious amble (how long had she been watching us?) into a full run across the fields.
And Raphael took out after, throwing his walking stick into the ditch and breaking into a headlong, heedless run across the sassafras shoots already taking root among the stubble of last year’s corn—at this distance I smelled the pungence of their bent and broken twigs. I saw the fox pause, look back, laugh (but they always look as if they’re laughing), and disappear down a hole. Raphael threw his hands in the air and gave an exultant cry. I heard his cry, and saw him fall to the earth.
I poled to his side as fast as I could. Death, I know it’s coming soon, and I tell myself I’m not afraid, I’ve seen it all and what I haven’t seen, what difference can it make to me? I wanted nothing more for Raphael and for me than that we might die suddenly, out there in the blinding polar light. I told myself all this and yet I crossed that field afraid. And then I was at his side and he was lying facedown, laughing into the dirt. He raised himself on his arms and tried to pull his legs under him to stand but fell once, then a second time. I held out my hand. He brushed it away, tried to stand again. Watching, I remembered my mother, Tom Hardin, all these people acting brave in the face of our collective bewilderment, whistling in the dark, and it struck me that it is surely as hard—a different kind of hard, but just as hard—to watch the dying of someone you love as it is to come yourself to deat
h.
Raphael fell a third time. I stuck out my hand.
—I don’t want—
—Shut up, dear child, and take my hand, or we’ll be here until we’re buzzard meat.
I braced myself and helped him struggle to his feet, then I brushed his face and pants and scraped mud and manure from his shoes with a twig. He watched all this in the bemused and distant way that had come upon him in that last week.
—So you tell me, he said. I asked you first. Why did you throw those pictures away?
—It was my way of forgiving. I am forgiving the town, by allowing it to keep its stories.
We started back to the car, the two of us helping each other. Raphael spoke through his shortness of breath.
—I liked those stories. I liked listening to them change and grow. I heard them for almost forty years and at first I liked them better than the truth and then I realized that they were the truth.
He bent to kiss my cheek. His lips were warm and moist against my skin—not at all like my own lips, cool and cracked with age. For all his dying, he was a young man.
—Raphael. Have you forgiven your father?
His reply came from some historical place, out of time and intuition. —Have you forgiven him?
I gave no answer.
Should I have sent Raphael then and there to Tom Hardin? Probably. But I, a woman with secrets, was pleased to be entrusted with his. I took him in as a mother might take in a prodigal son, or as a woman might take in an old lover, with whom there was no heat but only afterglow. Sitting with Raphael while he opened his veins to hope—surely this was more familiar than lovemaking; this was as intimate as love itself.
But not love itself, because it came too easily for me. This is what I’d been searching for across those years: love without pain, or risk, or loss. Now that my lovers are gone, now that Tom Hardin and Raphael are dead, I understand this. It was not love I’d been searching for; it was power—the power to make him, them, the world ask to be forgiven, ask me for my forgiveness. Which I would then deny. Only now do I understand this—that forgiveness must come from within.
On our way home Raphael asked that we drive down the side roads and lanes of his childhood: along the river, past the red-brick church where Tom Hardin and Rose Ella had married, past the distillery (now closed) where so many Hardins had worked, past the empty lot where once had stood the peeling clapboard house where his parents had first lived, where Raphael himself had been born.
Raphael cleared his throat to speak.
—I never knew what I had until they were gone, all my friends, my mother, even Clark. But that’s an old story.
—They aren’t gone. They’re here with you.
We rode in silence. We touched, then drew back—the nearness of our deaths could not change this. But unspeaking, we acknowledged the ways in which we were bound to each other by ties that were strong as blood: student and teacher, neighbor and friend; not bloody ties, but ties of love. Looking back at that afternoon drive through springtime, I understand it as a moment of grace, the third of three such moments in my life: my first trip to High Bridge; my second trip to High Bridge; my last drive with Raphael. In one way all these moments were alike—each was partly seized and mostly lost. Now, after father and son are dead, I am torn—between remorse that these moments were so short, and gratefulness that they happened at all.
And what is a moment of grace? I lived by guarding my heart—I saw no other choice—but in every long life moments come when our guard is lowered and what we are given is a moment of grace, a chance to forgive.
The first time Tom Hardin kissed me on High Bridge, it was easier to turn him away. He was a married man, I was a woman protecting a secret, marinating in a bitterness of my own making. A plain woman with no means about me but my wits and precious little chance to use those, I had plenty of reasons to be bitter, and my creating the bitterness on which I thrived gave me a reason to live, a way to stay alive. Then almost forty years passed and I saw what became of a block of wood under his hands—I had dreamed of myself as that block of wood, stiff and sharp-cornered, taken under his lathe and transformed into something supple and smooth and round.
“My God, Camilla, why are you saying no now?” At night, when the house is quiet and there is nothing to drown the ghosts’ voices, I hear Tom Hardin pleading, on our second visit to High Bridge. Both times I refused, so as to send him back, first to Rose Ella, later to Raphael—or so I hoped. And on that second trip I said no to punish him—to teach him about all my years spent alone; there was that. But mostly I said no out of fear.
What would it have meant, after all this loveless time, to love a dying man?
This is what it would have meant: forgiveness, learning to forgive. To forgive Tom Hardin for turning away from the love his wife freely offered him, to assume it instead from the woman nearest at hand; to forgive him for being himself. To forgive my own self, for nursing this bitterness in my heart, for seizing my chance after so many years to punish him; for being myself.
“Do you think she forgave me?” This was his question on that second trip to High Bridge. I knew the answer—I had known Rose Ella, had heard her stories across those long summer afternoons and winter evenings when Tom Hardin was running away from love. I had seen Rose Ella do what she had to do—set this aside and move on. An imperfect forgiveness, surely, but forgiveness all the same. An imperfect love, but love nonetheless, of a kind that I (who have held out for perfect love) have never known.
“Do you think she forgave me?” he asked, possibly the first real question of his life, the first time he had opened his heart to the possibility of an answer, and I in my bitterness could not refrain from thrusting in the knife that he’d placed in my hand. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t think she ever did.”
History is memory’s skin, under which pulses the blood and guts of our real lives. Our stories are our way of fashioning a surface with which we can live, that we may present to our neighbors, our friends, our family, our children (especially these last). The truth lies not in the facts of the stories but in the longings that set them in motion. Truth lies in Tice Flaherty’s story of his tee-totaling father, in Rose Ella’s story of her mother’s dress, in my story of my mother’s married life, though it lies not in the facts. Which is more true: The strongbox photograph of my mother in a nightgown on a disheveled bed? Or my end table photograph of her in her rented wedding dress?
What matters are not the facts (disputable at best) but the stories they inspire, and our hearts’ need for creating and preserving these stories to pass on: to me, to them, to you. This is our true act of perfect love. No single person may give to another any part of what she or he believes to be true without also giving love. In this way our stories become our way of lovemaking, our way of creating love.
In the end this will be all that remains. If we are born lucky, it is what we are given to build on; it is all that we may legitimately create. Buildings, roads, fortunes, gravestones disappear, even as our stories accumulate, the humus of human life, to become part of those who follow ten and ten thousand years later, just as some infinitesimally small part of last century’s composting heap returns to nourish today’s garden.
“Maybe this is the definition of death.” This is what Raphael Hardin said to me on that last day, when he was pulling the catheter from his veins. “No single moment—now you see us, now you don’t—but the lifelong slipping from the territories of desire into the territories of memory.”
This is what I learned from those days in Tom Hardin’s workshop, from sitting with Raphael Hardin as we remembered our stories. And now they are both gone, and I live beyond hope and desire; now I live only in memory. It is this, more than the passage of time, that has made me old.
I write now from the stone bench in front of Ittybit Muhlenberg’s tombstone. I am surrounded by black-eyed Susans. The Hardin tombstone stands across the alley, a pointy-headed hunk of Italy set down in this Kentucky country cemete
ry.
I visited them both, first Tom Hardin, then Raphael, as each lay dying in the county hospital, and to each of them I spoke the same words:
—Forgive me.
I said this to each, when each could no longer respond.
—Help me forgive myself.
I think of the last of the great Hardin family gatherings, and of Raphael’s question, nearer to his death than either of us might have known. Will anyone remember him? Will anyone remember me?
Will anyone visit my grave? A former student, maybe, on her way to her mother’s grave. She’ll pass by and happen to look in the right direction at the right time. “I didn’t know old Camilla Perkins had died,” she’ll say. “High time,” her husband will say. “The old bird outstayed her welcome for more years than you’d care to count.”
And how long will the longest of such remembering continue? A few years. As I sit here writing I look up at the procession of faceless names on the tombstones that surround me. What are a few years of remembering?
“Never write anything down that you want to keep secret.” My mother is a lifetime distant and still I hear her voice. She was fond of giving bad advice, but I have lived long enough now to learn that on this point she was right. Over more than eighty years I have seen the ways hidden things come to light, often by means of some letter or note or diary. The writer thinks she is writing only for herself, but this is a nosy world and there are plenty of people who, like cats, have nothing better to do with their time than to concern themselves with others’ affairs. The web of concealment the writer takes an hour to devise they spend weeks considering how to unravel, and in the end they succeed.
And then the writer dies, and her life is considered an open book, through which anyone with time and patience may paw at leisure. I have seen this happen; I have participated in it. I am as nosy as you.
And so you are the discoverer of what I have left behind: my letter to the world that did not write to me, and this badly glued block of wood. And out of the one hundred and fifty-six photographs my father took (if I’m to be believed!) under Strang Knob, the single photograph that I have kept: the portrait of my mother amid disheveled bedclothes, caught at her most beautiful, at the moment when she was more alive than at any other time in her life; caught in the truest moment of her life, that all-at-once moment when desire becomes act, act becomes memory.
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