The Falls of the Wyona

by David Brendan Hopes

  Dadlez was a good man. He was generally up to the small challenges our town threw at him. He brought drunks safely home, negotiated truces between stores and teenaged shoplifters, rooted crazy old loonies out of their shacks in the coves without firing a shot. Part of the job was to have an opinion about everyone who might cross his path, and his opinion about Clarence was that he was a lost soul. The boys who protected him, his clutch of friends, would leave one day, would go to college or have families, and he would be lost still. Of course he would kill himself, either now, foreseeing it, or when the full despair of his lostness finally dawned on him. Watching the firemen drag his body out of the gorge, Dadlez had come to the conclusion that he had thrown himself there. Like Andy had said, he didn’t look at anything else. Whether he was sorry or not was less important than retaining authority before his constituency. The smirk never left his face.

  I think Andy intended to punch the son of a bitch until Dad came up out of the crowd like a big bass from under his stump in the river. Dad turned his back on Dadlez and pulled Andy, and then me, against his chest. Then he motioned to Marcus and Louie, bringing them over and crushing them against himself—and us—in an indiscriminate manner, as though he were the father of the whole world. He said, “Let’s go home.”

  Dadlez said, “I don’t think anybody is going anywhere until I get the details of what your boy just said. You don’t contradict an official police report and then waltz right off without—”

  We waltzed right off even as the chief was forbidding it. Dadlez didn’t deserve that, but it felt so good.

  Andy was shaken and exhausted when we got home. Mom would have, in times past, put him to bed, but I did it this time, Dad and me in the room settling him down and waiting for him to go to sleep. It seemed a man’s thing, a thing of war and valor. When Andy eased into dreamland, I called Sherry to tell her the whole story. It would not be finished until I told her. I could see Mom smiling from the kitchen while we talked. I turned to face the wall so Mom wouldn’t see the hard-on Sherry’s voice gave me over the mile of wire.

  Sherry said, “You boys. You never leave each other. You come back for the lost one. It’s like a movie—”

  “Well . . . we just . . .”

  “No, no. A very good movie. The best I’ve ever seen.”

  Though it’s not quite true, I tell everybody that was the moment I decided whom I was going to marry. I didn’t exactly tell her, but I think she knew. I was so babbling and inarticulate I could hardly have meant anything else.

  VIII

  Tilden was known among us as “Mr. Christmas” because of his child-like attentiveness to every nuance of the holidays, continuing long after he officially ceased to be a child. He was the first to have those strings of tree lights that looked like flames, or the tips of kindergarten pencils. If one of the bulbs burned out, the whole string went dark, so most of our Christmas trees would have negative spaces where we had been too idle to seek for the faulty link—but not Tilden’s tree. It blazed and twinkled, for he would find the dead bulb like a terrier finding a rat in the basement. My dad’s store supplied all this stuff, so I knew the details of how much of Tilden’s yard work money he spent on magical Christmases. Those lights burned hot. Most of us dealt with that by turning them off every so often, but Tilden found reflectors made of aluminum, that made each bulb look like the Bethlehem star, beamy and many-colored. You’d sweat in the room with the tree, but you wouldn’t worry the whole thing would go up in smoke. The town had not been electrified for that long, and Tilden’s ease with the electric part of Christmas made him a welcome guest up and down the streets, helping to find shorts and dead bulbs, explaining how things worked, helping to set up the tree so it wouldn’t burst into flames the first time the switch was flipped. Under his own tree he set little villages made of chips from the wood pile, a metropolis of pioneers in tiny log cabins, through which lights shone as if each had an enchanted fireplace of a different color. Toy animals were placed about to indicate farms and pets and, I suppose, the kind of outdoor zoo that would have obtained in Jesus’s day. The lead army men he had gotten from his uncle stood about guarding things in their funny WWI hats. There was a pond made of a mirror laid amid cotton batting (which was snow) and on that mirror floated plastic swans. It was a little queer—of course we told him so—but it was also pretty wonderful. I hope we told him that, too. There were no big department stores in our town, and Dad’s Santa in the hardware store window and the crèches in front of a couple of the churches were all the inspiration he had. It was a miracle, if you thought about it.

  Tilden’s Electric Wonderland is part of what materializes when I summon up Christmas. But what lingers most deeply is the perception of a single perfect Christmas, made from fragments of recollections cast over a period of ten or more years. There was but one Christmas, unfolding in a particular way we fashioned and enforced for ourselves over the whole of our boyhoods. The family tree must be decorated in a certain way, and you remembered from year to year what that way was. This bulb went here; that bulb went there. Variation was forgetfulness. Forgetfulness was the opening act of a sadness that grew through the years and would not be cured. We knew these things without being told. It was Yule, whose enchantments struck deeper even than the Nativity Story. You went to church. You sang the carols. You knew they were intimations of something vast and silent, something that needed to dwell in the mountains and the singing gorge of the Wyona, and could never quite come to town.

  Christmas Eve was for families, and church. So the day before, or the day before that, we had our own ceremony, which seemed to have been ordained. Nobody that I remember organized a moment of it. Maybe we copied it off Andy’s circle, or Dad’s, or maybe it was a discovery of us ourselves. We peregrinated, like Magi, from house to house, taking in the food and the peculiarities of the family Christmases, as we took in the peculiarities of one another throughout the year.

  We started at Vince’s. We presented this to one another as a courtesy, and never spoke aloud the actual reason, which was that Mrs. Silvano typically hit the sauce around 7, and if we wanted her company at any level of consciousness, we had to have been there and gone. Unlike the other mothers, Mrs. Silvano did not bake, but she organized the store-bought cookies in artful ways, in concentric circles on the round plates (alternating dark and pale if that’s what came out of the box) and in interesting ranks and files on the square ones, replacing one of the proper shade when one got devoured. Sometimes there would be bologna cut with cookie cutters in the shapes of stars and snowmen. These you could fold over onto a cracker or just put into your mouth whole. This was her understanding of proper hostessing, and we took it that way, admiring her skills and attentiveness from behind the rims of our glasses of orange punch. She had been Homecoming Queen in her time. We understood. Vince was allowed to call his mother a lush in moments of frustration, but we, never.

  Coach was not present for these events. Sometimes he was upstairs—walking around on the wooden floors gave him away—but often his car would be gone and Mrs. Silvano would say he went to get something she needed, but whatever she needed must have been in Knoxville, for he didn’t come back. Coach didn’t spell “Christmas” to us, so it was all right. Getting together with the guys must have seemed pretty homo to him.

  Tilden was next, and he’d be beside himself with excitement. We wouldn’t be through the door yet, and he’d be showing us his newest gadget or setup, how he made his electric train go around and around the multicolored cabins, over the looking-glass lake, among the lead giraffes and doughboys and whatnot. He would have baked the cookies. He would have made the really amazingly good date bread that you could spread with oleo and jam from his mother’s plum trees. His mom would be there to hand him things he needed, but it was his show. Tilden was a happy kid—a life without drama, so far as I could see—and I think his happiness spread from the Christmases he lit up as though he himself were the Christ Child. There he was, his red crew cut
lit by the blazing tree lights, chomping on his own cookies, smiling, smiling. That boy was a mystery with all the doors open. I knew him better than anyone else in the world, and yet I didn’t know him. He was clever that way.

  My house was last because Mom was the best cook, and we had bunk beds in case things evolved into a sleepover. We gave our buddies our gifts when we got to my house, little things we’d made or bought at my dad’s store, Dad conspiring in it by making me go do something else if one of my friends walked in, so it would all be a surprise. One year Vince gave me a flashlight. One year Tilden gave me one of his lead animals, a bison really too hefty for the scene under the tree, that holds down papers on my desk to this day. One year my mom took an art class down in Asheville (that’s a whole other story) and I got her to teach me what she learned enough that when I took photos at the Falls, I could come back and color the prints with watercolors so they looked like faded and pastel versions of the real thing.

  If it was snowing when we got to my house, it would be perfect. Nothing could go radically wrong for the whole year after if it was snowing when we got to my house. I think it always was.

  Glen fit right in regarding the Christmas revels. We were a little older, and so the sacred things were no longer so sacred they couldn’t be adapted a little. You had to pass Glen’s house to get from Vince’s to Tilden’s, and we waved as we passed to Glen’s mother and big sister standing on the stoop waving back at us. His father would be inside reading the paper beside a huge floor lamp, the Christmas tree across the room from him. This was right. This was the way it should be. The father should be sitting with the paper. The mother should be watching her boy and his friends pass through the snow onward into darkness. We didn’t go in. The ritual was too set for that. Glen understood. He could fit in in his way, but not in all ways.

  The temptation when the time came was to invite our girlfriends. We thought about it, but in the end we didn’t. We said to one another, “Why would they be interested?” It was all pretty boyish. Sherry was the only of the girlfriends of the time who lasted, and she never batted an eyelid over her exclusion. If she wanted to come she never said so. In married life one learns that women long for their men to have buddies, hobbies, diversions, to go on camping trips and get the hell out of the house now and then. But then we admired them for being able to do without our company even for a couple hours.

  If the three of us owned Christmas, Glen still found a way in. New Year’s was open. That could be his, if he wanted it.

  One New Year’s remains frozen in memory. Glen had come to our houses before Christmas, eating the cookies, talking with the dads and moms who then made their courteous exits. He was the kind of teenager parents like, and would tell you so afterwards, his politeness and good vocabulary and all that. He’d bought us all Bowie knives as presents. This was at once very cool and very odd. Four Bowie knives with shellacked buckhorn handles, exactly alike. I pictured us striding through town with them stuck in our belts. It was not right to ask, “What the hell put this into your head?” but maybe it was his move to be as woodsy as the rest of us presumed ourselves to be. Plus, they were no odder, the Bowie knives weren’t, than other things we’d opened under the twinkling tree through the years. Maybe it was that there were so many, a little arsenal in case some enemy should arise to take the place of the Japs and Krauts.

  “I have another gift,” Glen said.

  Tilden looked around to see if it was under the tree.

  I said, “What? You and Vince finally announcing your engagement?”

  Vince didn’t want to laugh, but finally did. But it was as if Glen hadn’t heard. He continued, “It’s for New Year’s Eve. A little surprise. You gotta promise me New Year’s Eve. All right?”

  Vince said, “I’ll call Lauren Bacall and tell her she’s on her own this year.”

  So we promised Glen New Year’s Eve. He handed the three of us envelopes. We opened them. They turned out to be three parts of a map to the Falls of the Wyona.

  “We’re going to the Falls?”

  “Yeah. The surprise will be there.”

  “It’ll be freezing,” Tilden observed.

  Glen said, “Wear a coat.”

  Glen had drawn the maps himself, and covered the corners with “Hic sunt dracones” and compass roses and things you find on ancient maps. I had the first part. He wanted us to start at the edge of the school grounds, where the long overland path to the gorge actually does start.

  “Can’t we drive?”

  “We’ll drive back. I’ll have a car in the parking lot.”

  So on New Year’s Eve the three of us lined up at the edge of the high school parking lot. That in itself was a dip into nostalgia. It had been a long time since we’d actually hiked to the Falls, and longer still since we hadn’t used the various shortcuts and by-ways learned through the years. We were entering by the gate. We were going the full way. This turned out to be good, for the sights we saw that night were, altered by darkness and winter, the sights we saw the first time we had gone together to the Falls, hesitant, chattering like the children we were, unsure of the way. The swifts gathered in a cave in South America now, and the bats clung to the ceiling asleep. The salamanders dozed under the ice. We were alone, the first souls in a bewintered world, or the last.

  Then into the wilderness.

  It had snowed a couple of the days since Christmas. The snow turned pink because of the angle of the sun. It had melted in town, but here the snow was sheltered by the trees, which, though bare, shed a coolness around them winter as well as summer. Out of the crusty whiteness poked the skeletons of ironweed and Joe-pye, and deeper in, the ruined towers of the wood lilies, with their seed pods perching on them like winter birds. The actual birds left tiny thready tracks atop the crust, while the foxes and the deer fell through and dug furrows toward their night retreats. It was not that cold, despite Tilden’s fears; soon I was sweating and had to open my jacket.

  Vince said, “Wait.” He plowed through the snow and plucked something off an old apple tree that was the last remnant of a farm that must have stood there generations ago. It was an envelope. On it was written, “Arden.”

  Vince handed the envelope to me. I opened it. Inside was a photo of me as a tiny, tiny boy in a fat snowsuit, so round and warm I could scarcely move. The hand reaching down to steady me ran off the edge of the paper, but I knew it was my mom. I was smiling. I was so, so happy. Maybe I had never been quite that happy since. I felt myself grinning in the gathering twilight.

  Tilden said, “Cool. Move on?” I nodded. We moved on.

  Tilden had the second section of the map, and though we knew the way, we opened it in case there was a message or a surprise. A big circle in orange crayon surrounded a black . . . thing that would have been a mystery to anybody else, but which we recognized instantly as the shelf stone. The shelf stone is a black monolith about twenty feet high, sticking right out of the roots of hemlocks, upon which, chest high when we first entered the woods, but waist high now, is a flat outcrop like a shelf. The resemblance to a pagan altar in a jungle movie was too great to ignore, so we always left something on the shelf—an apple or a candy—for the forest gods, and it was always gone when we passed by again. We made for the shelf stone—it was a little off the path. That part of the woods lay in shadow now, so Vince snapped on his flashlight. Something sat on the shelf. I walked over and turned a piece of paper to the light. The paper said “Tilden.” The paper was held down by something, and when Vince turned the light on it we saw a line of carved animals, a horse and an antelope and a kangaroo, all beautifully wrought out of some heavy blond wood none of us could guess at. Tilden stared at them for a moment while Vince held them in the light. Then he put them in his pocket and we moved on.

  At the point where Tilden’s map failed, I took over the light and Vince looked at his third of the map. “It says we have to turn out the light when we hear the sound of the Falls.”

  I didn’t like that much.
I think we all heard the Falls before we acknowledged it, because it was almost full dark, and we had no light but that. But eventually Vince shrugged, and sighed, and turned out the light. I heard him say under his breath, “That boy—”

  As our eyes adjusted we saw a couple of things. One was that the snow and the clear stars provided enough ambient light to keep us from running into things. The path that Glen had carved with his boots was a deeper blue in the blue-white of the snow field. We could follow it easy. Additionally, there appeared to be a source of light up ahead, different from the stars, less piercing, warmer, golden. When we got a few yards further on we saw that Glen had put candles in paper bags settled into the snow, and those were lighting the way. I touched one of the bags. It wasn’t even hot. The snow must have balanced the heat of the flame. How had Glen known that and we not? Maybe a hundred of these torches set at intervals led us to a grove that we knew quite well—the excellent picnic grove—but that was changed somehow. We entered the grove. At the far end of it a living white pine had been festooned with candles, and the candles were burning. There was barely breeze enough to make them flicker, and Glen had chosen a place—as we often had—sheltered from the weather on all four sides. Glen stood beside the tree. He was difficult to see—all you could see were the little flames and the bit of pine branch nearest to them. He must have known this, so he moved into as much of the light as he could, and said, “Welcome.”

  The shellacked handle of a Bowie knife glittered in his belt.

  My recollection is that one word. “Welcome” was the only one uttered. Glen had provided four logs, and we sat down on them and looked at the tree. Mom and Dad had candles on our tree when I was little. It sent me there. It sent me home. Yes. This was it. This was perfect. It was the best ever. It was the one thing that had yet happened in my life to which I would apply the word “holy.”